I have a confession to make.
I have never liked James Joyce. Now, this may not mean anything to most of the people on the planet, but you see, I'm an English teacher. A teacher who for several years specialized in British Literature. In addition to this, most of the authors and teachers I respect, as well as many of my friends, are Joyce fanatics. A friend of mine invited me three years in a row to a celebration in NYC, where Ulysses would be read aloud in its entirety on Bloomsday. After the third year of lame excuses, I lost not only an opportunity to appreciate Joyce anew, but also my friend, who hasn't communicated with me since. Apparently, this was a rift too deep to bridge.
It's not like I haven't tried. In high school, I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My father recommended it, and every other book he recommended has been ingrained on my psyche like a permanent tattoo. He was an English professor and later a bookstore owner, and supplied the reading list for the entire first half of my life, unfailingly handing me precisely the right book at precisely the right time, diagnosing and prescribing exactly the right medicine for my slowly evolving soul. And so I struggled through every page of Portrait..., certain it would eventually speak to me.
It didn't.
My father and I had quite a few discussions about Joyce's aesthetic theory, but it seemed to me more like something that should have been an essay. I didn't believe Joyce achieved what he was aiming for.
But just about every one of my literary heroes swears he did. T.S. Eliot shaped my youth as clearly as if I were clay in his hands, and he called Ulysses “the most important expression which this present age has found," a “book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."
While still acknowledging my limits, I can say confidently that it's not a lack of intellectual ability that left me cold to Joyce. I am unique among the English majors I know in having loved Paradise Lost. I am comfortable among intellectual heavyweights as well as modern authors who spin their tales like Jackson Pollock flung paint. I have connected to the theater of Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine and Anne Bogart, as well as Joyce's protege, Samuel Becket, who remains one of my favorite playwrights of all time, especially in his obscure mode, as in Krapp's Last Tape and Rockabye.
When I taught British Literature, the other teachers taught Dubliners for the unit on modernism, but I convinced the administration to let me teach Virginia Woolf instead, pleading that women writers were under-represented in the curriculum. While this is true, and while I adore Woolf in nearly every possible way, there was also an element of cowardice in this decision. How can I teach something that leaves me so profoundly cold? Woolf herself called Joyce "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples," and this perhaps explains some part of my devotion to her. I couldn't shake the feeling that Joyce was really weaving the Emperor's New Clothes. But if this was so, why had so many of my heroes been taken in?
Other than Portrait... and sections of Dubliners, however, I haven't read any other works by Joyce. And I have never been one to allow myself to be defeated by anything that it is within my capacity to conquer. And so as a project for my Living Epic class, I have decided to wade once again into the treacherous waters of the enemy. I am going to work my way through one of his masterworks, from beginning to end. The current plan is to work through Finnegan's Wake, since Joseph Campbell speaks so highly of this work, and I may save Ulysses for the next project. However, I want to discover it only on its own merits, so I will not be reading Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake (or any other scholarly works) until after I complete the exploration on my own. If the essence is really there, I should be able to find it unaided and untethered.
Hopefully I won't lose any more friends in the process...
