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Joyce's Visions
Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Phillips, Brian
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James Joyce is literature's crooked genius, a lord of language on a throne with no right legs. Those of us who love his work have grown accustomed to agreeing with his own assessment, confided to Samuel Beckett, that "I can do anything with language I want"; but in fact a great part of the power of language is denied him. Conrad writes that the aim of the novelist is to make us see, but Joyce does not make us see; he does not, with words, startle the mind into vision, into those detonations of perception by which literature rolls its echo of reality over imaginary worlds. Other great writers-Tolstoy, Bellow, Flaubert- seem to look through a clear- seeing inner eye which in Joyce is milkily, filmily sheened. In Tolstoy we have a sense that the work's highest intellectual essence depends on our being made to feel the flakes of mud on the carriage wheel, that the one proceeds from the other, so that what is moving or meaningful in the story literally comes into being through the rendering of the palpable world. Joyce, who never forgets the rude reality of his surroundings, nevertheless grapples toward it through a gray blizzard of intellection. He cannot give it the same thick life or bring it to the same living immediacy.
Reality was not dull to Joyce, however; if anything, it was too vivid to portray. he was born in Dublin in 1882, into a precarious middle-class family whose fortunes sank through the long wreck of his childhood. Family life during his first years was a series of organized demotions, as the respectable Joyces held out as long as they could on credit before removing to yet another slightly dingier address; at last they succumbed to the hopeless and alcohol-soaked poverty that Joyce would depict so movingly in Ulysses. (He wrote movingly about the family's collapse in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, where the children discuss an impending eviction in a private nonsense language: "Becauseboro theboro landboro lordboro willboro putboro usboro outboro.") From this life of shabby material grandeur he was sent to be educated amid the shabby philosophical grandeur of the Jesuits, first at an exclusive boarding school, Clongowes Wood, and finally as a charity student at Belvedere, a day school in Dublin. Fitfully arrogant and painfully sensitive, he was attracted to Newman's prose and the plays of Ibsen; he conceived of himself as a literary genius partly as a means of retaining for himself the sense of superiority that was vanishing from his family. His election to the rank of a great artist also raised him, in his own mind, above any familial, social, or religious obligation. A fervent believer as a boy, he broke with the church as an adolescent, pettishly refusing his mother's dying request that he make his confession and take Communion. (He would dramatize this act in Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus refuses to kneel at his mother's deathbed and is haunted in dreams by her ghost.) "My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity," he wrote to Nora Barnacle, his future wife, in 1904-"home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines."
But his first significant writings, which date from around this time, show how partial and porous his rejection of the church really was, how what he received from religion affected his ability to represent reality in words. These early writings are the "epiphanies," a term Joyce took from liturgy and used to describe moments of secular revelation, when the essence or the "whatness of the thing" became suddenly and radiantly apparent. Both his privateering theft of the religious term and his regard for Aquinian "whatness" show the Jesuits' fiercely unresolved influence; in a draft of Stephen Hero, the aborted first novel that was later transformed into A Portrait, Stephen considers the idea of epiphany in explicitly Aquinian terms:
-You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. . . . First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thingin fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.
The "object" that Stephen refers to could equally be a condition, an attitude, or a relationship. Joyce's epiphanies, many under a page in length, are the fleeting traces of minor telling moments, many taken from the writer's own life. Many record the daily humiliations he felt with such exquisite keenness: a girl gently teases a young man, an aunt mistakes her nephew for a niece. And yet these frail visions of Dublin life are the pinprick originals of much of his later work, not only because he would rework many of them into fuller scenes in Dubliners and the novels, but because they reveal something essential, some wispy signature of mind which would sprawl across all his future books.
