Happy Birthday, James Joyce
   
 
The Personal Weblog of Edward W. Farrell   
 
Happy Birthday, James Joyce Sunday, February 2, 2025
 
Today is James Joyce's birthday. When I was studying literature in my mid-20s Joyce was probably my pre-eminent literary god. His later works have a notorious reputation for obscurity and difficulty, which was part of their attraction back in the day. But another part of their attraction is their Irishness. I'm two generations removed from Ireland and my grandfather taught me to recite folk stories and rhymes from his Irish childhood, so perhaps Joyce's "Irishness" is mostly attractive to the Irish. In any case it's not the schmaltzy, booze-drunk Irish parody found in Hollywood, but the deeply convoluted pain and desire of people bitterly divided over church, English rule, and modernity (much of which was brilliantly captured in that one brief episode of the Christmas dinner in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.)

Here are four brief excerpts from Joyce's work to honor him on his birthday. The first two are from Ulysses, the third from Finnegan's Wake, and the last from his short story The Dead.

From Ulysses:

1) [This is from the so-called "Aeolus" chapter where an Irish professor assails the cloacal obsession of the Romans. This is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black; Joyce was the epitome of cloacal obsession as anyone who's read his letters to Nora Barnacle will know (maybe to their dismay).]

---Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We mustn't be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative.

He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirt cuffs, pausing:

---What is their civilization? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: 'It is meet to be here. Let us build an alter to Jehovah.' The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: 'It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.'


2) [This is the end of Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the last chapter in the book. For those who insist that good writing entails short paragraphs, the entire final chapter of Ulysses is not only one 44 page paragraph, it is one 44 page sentence. Without a full stop. So there.]    

[...] O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes i will Yes

From Finnegan's Wake:

O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don't be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talk-tapes. And don't butt me --- hike! --- when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He's an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil! Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. Wallop it well with your battle and clean it. My wrists are wrusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it! What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under loch and neagh? It was put in the newses what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But toms will till. I know he well. Temp untamed will hist for no man. As you spring so shall you neap. 0, the roughty old rappe! Minxing marrage and making loof.        

An aside on Finnegan's Wake. I first approached this singular work as a cypher to somehow be deciphered. So I began to make extensive notes on the invented words and amazing assortment of puns on every page. But years later I saw in my old copy of the book that my margin notes stopped on page 15 where I'd given up. Truly, it seemed a pointless exercise and a lot of work to what end? But it only occurred to me much later that I'd taken a completely wrong approach to this book. Although it has acquired a reputation for a work strictly within the domain of academics, it is far from strictly an academic book in spirit. Instead, it has the spirit of a tireless genius infant, entirely unfettered by the rules an education imposes. This would seem to belie the actual genesis of the book, composed by an immensely learned adult, a Jesuit no less, over 17 years of hard labor. But with all his labor and skill Joyce was not a sober man. He had a wild mind that could do nothing but endlessly invent and reinvent to a point that left even devoted readers aghast. But there's much of the child in it, as paradoxical as this may seem.

Even as a little kid I've always loved to make up words, and this is the thought that brought me back to Finnegan's Wake. Adults usually find this habit annoying of course but I think it's a good mental exercise for writers who aspire to poetry or lyric prose because it accustoms you to think in sound and rhythm. How else can made-up words be understood? But beyond this, made-up words are inevitably made up from the sounds of a vocabulary we already know, and they can begin to make a weird sort of sense, like those word puzzles that demonstrate that you can easily read a paragraph even when all the vowels have been removed. Your mind fills in the gaps. I eventually re-approached Finnegan's Wake with this in mind, and it finally started to speak to me. But be warned that your mileage may vary.

From The Dead:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.


 
James Joyce, 1904

James Joyce in Dublin, 1904. CP Curran / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
 
 
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