Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on Winter and Death in Ireland)

“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, “The Dead,” in Dubliners (1914)

The end that James Joyce imagined for himself came in winter, but it wasn’t in Ireland, but in Zurich, Switzerland, where he died on this day 75 years ago at age 58. The immediate cause of death was peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer, but he might be said to have been dying by degrees for some time before this, as his days were darkened by10 eye operations, the divided reception given his latest novel, Finnegans Wake, double exile (first from Ireland, then from Nazi-occupied France), his son’s inability to find a stable life and career, and his daughter Lucia’s schizophrenia. 

I wrote that Joyce had been exiled from Ireland, but in the literary sense he never really left. He returned to his homeland obsessively in fiction, from the short stories in Dubliners that put him on the literary map to Finnegans Wake. 

There is, above all, his masterpiece, Ulysses, which tracks the progress of one man, Leopold Bloom, and two other people in his life—wife Molly and possible surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s stand-in)—over the course of 24 hours in Dublin. 

In the geographic and temporal particulars of that fiction, Joyce created an entire universe accessible to all fascinated by the dazzling power of language. There is, for instance, one particular “epiphany” (Joyce's phrase) that occurs to Bloom on the “special affinities…between the moon and woman”:

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”

A prior post I wrote on Dubliners can be found here. You might also be interested in blog posts related to the late Clockwork Orange novelist Anthony Burgess’ appreciation for Joyce, on the Web site of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, here.

Flashback, June 1914: James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ Published

James Joyce didn’t have a reputation for difficulty for readers a century ago this month, only for his publisher. Dubliners, his first foray into fiction, was released this month, but only after seven years of contending with a publisher worried about offending the Roman Catholic Church, real-life originals all too close to their print counterparts, and anyone bothered by his treatment of contemporary mores. To all of these, as he would continue to do through the rest of his life, Joyce refused to bend.

Unlike with Ulysses and, even more so, Finnegans Wake, readers do not need to know much if anything about ancient literature, obscure scraps of Latin, or the like to appreciate Dubliners. This is not to say, however, that Joyce does not make readers work, nor that the text doesn’t present its own challenges. 

Young readers in what can be called post-Catholic Ireland, for instance, might have a difficult time understanding the exalted but problematic nature of the Church early in the 20^th century in their country. In the anthologies where these tales have found honored places, reading them out of their original context means that readers will miss the “links of syllable and image” noted by novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan.

Moreover, though Joyce put virtually everything in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Dubliners, like the early tales of Hemingway, often focuses more on “the thing left out.” In the opening story, “The Sisters,” for example, Old Cotter says of Father Flynn that he “wouldn’t like children of mine…to have too much to say to a man like that.” But the priest’s exact vice is never spelled out.

Ostensibly, the stories in Dubliners progress from childhood to maturity. But one of the words that Joyce uses most commonly is “paralysis,” a condition leading not just to physical but also to intellectual, spiritual and emotional death. The highlight of the collection is, in fact, the sublime novella “The Dead.” There is a movement from “The Sisters” to this story, but it is a circular one. “The Sisters” is written from within the consciousness of a boy who, even if he is some years beyond the events of the tale, still tries to contend with the passing of Fr. Flynn. “The Dead,” while centering on an adult intellectual, deals with a similar dilemma: the attempt to make sense of the death of someone (in this case, the youth that his wife loved before their marriage).

Dubliners was published the same week that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Little if any notice was taken at the time of the work of Joyce, and few copies of the book were sold for a number of years. In time, however—especially with the notorious publication, eight years later, of Ulysses—the essential truth was confirmed of Joyce’s boastful prediction to his timorous publisher: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

For many, though, it is far more than a “nicely polished looking glass.  Novelist Colum (Let the Great World Spin) McCann speaks for them when he proclaims, “For me, James Joyce is the original energy behind all contemporary literature.”