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...
9 comments:
Here is a comment I got by email:
I think you are setting yourself up for failure. It is like hearing the ocean is a really great place and jumping in the middle of the ocean when a storm is going on. I would suggest Ulysses or Dubliners to give yourself a better idea about him. I made it half way through Finnegan's Wake and it was enjoyable to read in the same way a poem that may not be totally understand or a dream that may not be totally understand can be an interesting experience.
I am looking forward to seeing how this will go. I have a really great book by Joseph Campbell that is Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake if you are interested at any point. My wife felt the same way about Joyce, she is on the fence now and says she has to read Ulysses first before she can say. She liked Dubliners. She wrote a paper after reading only a few pages of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man arguing why she shouldn't have to read it. She thought she shouldn't have to learn about about Irish history, the potato famine, or Roman Catholicism in order to get something out of book. She got an A on the paper.
And another one I got by email:
You are, as they say, The Man! I'd rather burn my first edition of
DeLillo's "Americana" than slog through "Finnegans Wake." I'll
certainly read your blog and roll an occasional Red Bull across the
cafeteria.
Another:
It's a great question. And the "epic" design of your research is really enviable. I want to try it now with Emily Dickinson, my equivalent of yours, when it comes to confessions of English teachers wishing to find a case of the Emperor's New Clothes to explain away failure to join the worshippers. As for my question about Dubliners, your blog says you read it, but when and under what circumstances, and wonder if your conclusions about FW, which is so experimental, will justify conclusions about JJ?
Finally, let me add that I probably think about JJ about once a week at least. While I was running yesterday, for instance. And then just before I read your email, I read something in Slate -- Stanley Fish choosing explications of great sentences (one of them Joyce's ending to The Dead.)
Another:
Please start with Dubliners and use a Reader's Guide which we have. Nobody attacks Joyce successfullly without a teacher and forget about "Finnegan's Wake."
Another:
Never read Finnegan's Wake but have Ulysses...every word. I warn you you can get drawn in to his "sphere" I was fortunate to have had an Irish Catholic room mate in college so she helped me to have some frame of reference. When I was in Dublin I went out to the Martello Tower dedicated to Joyce and saw pages of his manuscripts and how he had worked over the layers of "symbolism, meaning?" I don't know the correct lingo for appropriate descriptions.
Epiphany and soul rot are concepts his where his view has shaped mine. His brother wrote a biography, not the best but gives a flavor.....I was glad I read some of his short stories and poetry as well as Portrait before I tackled Ulysses, I can't imagine starting with Finnegan, but you have obviously read other pieces also. (I read these in 1959, visited the tower in 1976..............he does stick with you!) It took me a long time to peel away a few of the layers to Ulysses Finnegan could be years of work. I can't say I like his work, I just can't forget it or let it go as I have so many others, it still fascinates.
And another:
I love it! I'm in. I don't recall ever having read more than a sentence or two of Joyce and I've always wondered what the big deal was. Being a sciency type I always figured I just didn't get that gene (see I can't get away from the science lingo). We'll see if I can stick it out and read the whole thing.
I read Joyce for the first time in 11th grade - Portrait. My teacher, very influential individual in my education and decisions to pursue English and teaching, was a hippie from Antioch College who had grown up in NYC, gone to Woodstock, smoked a joint with Jimi Hendrix, and was the first vegan I ever met. He read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" at a school assembly on the eve of the Persian Gulf war. And he had a beard!
I loved (and still do) the book for its complexity. Not for the aesthetic theory. That never interested me. I loved the way he described the stages of adolescence, and the way he captured the tension of boyhood and the initial moments of falling in love. The epiphanies are exactly that for me - epiphanies, and I understand them b/c I've had similar experiences (they're rare). The one on the beach is my favorite.
I don't know how much of this is the influence of teachers in HS and college. I read Dubliners in college, in an Irish lit. course, with my wife and my best friend Steve, an Irishman in ancestry and temperment. I learned how to be Irish from Steve and from that book and that class, and we sang Irish rebel songs through all of college. The Czech and the Irish have much in common (colonization, subversion, humor, alcohol), and I have a love for and fascination with Ireland that I hope to culminate with a trip there soon.
I took a class on Joyce from Neil R. Davison, a Joycean, in college. We read Dubliners, Portrait, and slogged through Ulysses. I got through most of Ulysses, and loved the parts I understood. Again, I'm just impressed by the complexities, if nothing else. I don't remember much of it, and would love to take the course again. I didn't mind being walked through it, and I remember particularly enjoying the 1) the prevalence of music in the text, and 2) the fact that you could spend so many hundreds of pages on the minutia of a day (one reason I like McEwan's Saturday). I was also impressed by the detail in the book (the fact that he has the actual horse race results from that day, if I remember correctly). JJ essentially spent 12 years recreating his favorite day (the day he bagged his wife Nora, I think).
Perhaps it's sophomoric, or too simple, but I think I admire the skill and complexity more than anything else. In the same way I admire a great piece of symphonic music - the way the parts work together. Yeah, he was pompous and showed off his language skills and knowledge, though.
I taught Portrait once, and it was strange and hard, b/c the Catholic girls I taught didn't get it, or got it too much (they said the whole anti-Catholic bent of it made sense, and wasn't new; but to them, their version of Catholicism was much different. Friendlier.) When I read it the first time, I happened to sit next to an Irish girl in class, and she would mutter under her breath about how both Joyce and my teacher were idiots who were both going straight to hell.
I teach "Araby" now, in English 9, and I love it and "The Dead" especially (I even like The Dead movie). I don't remember the other stories that well. My favorite moment in "Araby" is the pause between these two lines: "'If I go,' I said, 'I will bring you something.'" and "What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening!" So much is implied in that pause, that break. The 2nd sentence encapsulates 14-year-old love better than almost anything else. I was that boy at that age.
I know very little about Finnegan's Wake. I only know that the first and last sentence are the same (hence the book has no official beginning and end, and it can start and stop anywhere, in a loop), and one prob. should know all the languages Joyce knew to read it. I DO know the song "Finnegan's Wake" (written in America) by heart, and love singing it.
If I were you, I would have chosen Ulysses. An easier opponent to box. At least the Bible is in English.
Another:
Hahaha! I too have always avoided James Joyce -- an English teacher got me all excited to read Portrait, and after suffering through that, I said no more - too many other great things to read (even though some people would say his stuff changed their lives) -- at this point, I am considering looking at Finnegan again -- we shall see, but I love the blog!
Finnegan's Wake (traditional) (with audience participation notes)
Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin Street,
A gentle Irishman mighty odd
He had a brogue both rich and sweet,
An' to rise in the world he carried a hod
You see he'd a sort of a tippler's way
but for the love for the liquor poor Tim was born
To help him on his way each day,
he'd a drop of the craythur every morn
CHORUS
Whack fol the dah now dance to yer partner
round the flure yer trotters shake
Bend an ear to the truth they tell ye,
we had lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake
One morning Tim got rather full,
his head felt heavy which made him shake (audience convulses)
Fell from a ladder and he broke his skull, and
they carried him home his corpse to wake
Rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
and laid him out upon the bed
A bottle of whiskey at his feet
and a barrel of porter at his head
CHORUS
His friends assembled at the wake,
and Widow Finnegan called for lunch (audience yells "LUNCH!)
First she brought in tea and cake,
then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch
Biddy O'Brien began to cry, (audience yells "Boo hoo hoo!)
"Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see,
Tim, auvreem! O, why did you die?",
"Will ye hould your gob?" said Paddy McGee
CHORUS
Then Maggie O'Connor took up the cry,
"O Biddy" says she "you're wrong, I'm sure"
Biddy gave her a belt in the gob
and sent her sprawling on the floor
Then the war did soon engage,
t'was woman to woman and man to man
Shillelagh law was all the rage
and a row and a ruction soon began
CHORUS
Mickey Maloney ducked his head
when a bucket of whiskey flew at him
It missed, and falling on the bed,
the liquor scattered over Tim
Now the spirits new life gave the corpse, my joy!
Tim jumped like a Trojan from the bed
Cryin will ye walup each girl and boy,
t'underin' Jaysus, do ye think I'm dead?"
CHORUS repeat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_k2GG-H_RU
The Dubliners singing the song.
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