Bloomsday at 100: two reflections on James Joyce's legacy

The reason Joyce had to use such an esoteric and opaque style in his final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, is that, as he explained, "one great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot."

Joyce described Finnegans Wake as written "to suit the esthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves, where the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, where the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allergies, its illusions." The "new conscience" that Joyce was forging in the smithy of his soul was not the Catholic rational ordering of life borrowed from Aristotelian or Thomistic principles. For him, the center of gravity was no longer reason or consciousness. Another axis had to be established between consciousness and the unconscious, bridges had to be designed which would allow access to this underground and unexplored world.

Joyce's magisterial work is such a bridge. Ironically, it is a kind of cathedral as well, one that incorporates the whole of humanity, unconscious as well as conscious, nighttime as well as daytime, male as well as female. For Joyce, as for the second-century bishop and martyr St. Irenaeus, the glory of God cannot be other than man and woman fully alive. I said to the Judas Tree speak to me of God, and the Judas Tree burst into Bloom.

Mark Patrick Hederman writes from Glenstal Abbey, Limerick, Ireland. He is the author of The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future (Columba).

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