The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday, James Joyce!

Today is the birthday of James Joyce. He was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar.

I didn't read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake until a couple of years ago. The books hit me like a ton of bricks. I had read The Dead in high school - but the books had to wait. I'm glad I waited. I wouldn't have been ready for them back then.

Joyce casts a long shadow, and yes, he sort of has taken over the landscape of literature - EVERYONE must contend with his ghost - but that's the breaks. You can't be a writer and ignore Joyce, in the same way that you can't be a writer (at least not a good writer) and ignore Shakespeare. Ignore the greats at your peril, is basically the message.

I chose one of my favorite Joycean quotes as the tagline to this blog ... and you know what? Even though I look at the quote every day ... it stilll inspires me.

In honor of his birthday, I will post some of my favorite quotes ABOUT James Joyce - said by his fans and fellow writers.

ABOUT JOYCE

-- T. S. Eliot said, after reading Ulysses: "He single-handedly killed the 19th century." (This way pissed Gertrude Stein off, because she was already convinced that SHE had killed the 19th century. hahahahaha)

-- Nora Joyce (Joyce's wife) - after Joyce's death - was asked about which new writers she read. Here is what she said: "Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."

-- James Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake for 17 years or something like that. Nora, looking at the gibberish pages, the ciphers, the codes, said, "Why don't you write books people can read?"

However: Nora always thought that Finnegans Wake - which pretty much the entire world thought was incomprehensible - was his best book. She understood it. She understood the language. Years after his death, she was still pestererd by reporters about James Joyce. And nobody ever asked about Finnegans Wake - which confused her. It was always Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses. She commented once, "What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

I think she might actually be onto something.

-- George Bernard Shaw said, upon reading Ulysses (a book which disturbed him greatly): "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

-- Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson - after reading Ulysses: "Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."

-- Gertrude Stein was very pissy and irritable about Joyce's phenomenal success. Here is what she said about him: "Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day." Joyce was told Stein's comment, and his response was: "I hate intellectual women."

-- TS Eliot said a lot about Ulysses but one of his comments that I really like is: "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." Writers everywhere had the same response.

-- Carl Jung read Ulysses and was so moved and disturbed by it that he wrote Joyce a letter about it. He also wrote extensively on his own about the book. One of his comments about the book: "It's a miserable ritual, a magical procedure. . . a homunculus of the consciousness of the new world -- our world passed away and a new world has arisen."

-- Joseph Campbell said, upon reading Finnegans Wake: "If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake."

-- Here is what Samuel Beckett had to say about the language in Finnegans Wake: "You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself."

-- Ezra Pound, one of Joyce's greatest champions, had this to say about Ulysses: "In a single chapter he discharges all the cliches of the English language like an uninterrupted river."

-- Poet Hart Crane had this to say after reading Ulysses: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

-- Sylvia Beach, book store owner and publisher of Ulysses had this to say about Joyce: "As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore." (Brilliant. That's a genius. Someone who has "never met a bore".)

-- Oliver Gogarty, friend of Joyce, and immortalized in Ulysses, said: "Looking back, there was something uncanny in his certainty, which he had more than any other writer I have ever known, that he would one day be famous. It was more than mere wishful thinking. It governed all his attitudes to his compatriots and accounts for what many referred to as his arrogance. He was never really arrogant, but seemed to have a curious sense of his own powers and wouldn't tolerate anyone who didn't really appreciate his work." (That comment about Joyce's supposed arrogance reminds me of one of my favorite quotes - this one from Bette Davis: "I was thought to be "stuck up". I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.")

-- William Faulkner said: "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."

-- More from TS Eliot: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." Ulysses ROCKED the literary world - and the literary world has yet to recover.

-- John Banville said: "Ulysses is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity, that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval."

-- John Waters, columnist for The Irish Times, wrote: "Ulysses was about Ireland but it was not for Ireland. You could even say that it was against Ireland because Joyce was alienated from, and by, Ireland."

-- The events of June 16, 1904 - and their importance in the Joycean mythology

-- Sylvia Beach: "I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922."

-- James Joyce: "I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people."

-- Letter from James Joyce to Nora on Sept. 16, 1904 - shortly before the two of them fled Ireland together, without getting married: "When I was waiting for you last night I was even more restless. It seemed to me that I was fighting a battle with every religious and social force in Ireland for you and that I had nothing to rely on but myself. There is no life here -- no naturalness or honesty. People live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end they are as far apart as ever ... The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy ... Allow me, dearest Nora, to tell you how much I desire that you should share any happiness that may be mine and to assure you of my great respect for that love of yours which it is my wish to deserve and to answer."

-- Interviewer to Joyce: Whom do you consider the greatest writers in English today?
Joyce: Aside from myself, I don't know.

-- And I hope Jimmy won't mind - but I'll give his wife Nora the last word:

"I don't know whether or not my husband is a genius, but I'm sure of one thing, there is no one like him."

Photograph of James and Nora below.

Happy birthday, dear Jimmy Joyce, murderer of the 19th century!!

Oops - want to include this as well. An essay by Mary Gordon about Joyce's "The Dead". Love it:

Mary Gordon on James Joyce's "The Dead"

It begins with a slap in the face. "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

Well, and did you fall for that one? Literally? Don't you know the difference between literally and figuratively? You're no better than Lily herself, are you? Or perhaps you're not Lily, but the garrulous speaker of the second paragraph, the platitude-spouting fool. "It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance ... Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember ... Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout."

"The Dead" is built around a party, and for most of its duration we, like partygoers, swim in a clamor of voices, not only Gabriel's and the omniscient narrator's. Even Gabriel has many voices. There is the self-conscious Gabriel, the prissy Gabriel, the pompous Gabriel, the affectionate Gabriel, the lustful Gabriel. But many others speak: Miss Ivors, the political nettler; Mr. Browne with his forced jokes; Freddy Malins, who's just a little bit "screwed"; his mother, who tells us everything is "beautiful", including the fish her son-in-law caught in Scotland and had boiled for their dinner by the innkeeper. There is the novelettish voice of such sentences as "Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief," and the society-page gabble of "the acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time." There is Aunt Julia's voice singing "Arrayed for the Bridal" and Bartell D'Arcy's singing "The Lass of Aughrim." There is the voice of Patrick Morkan, Gabriel's grandfather, imitated by Gabriel: the very model of a stuffy twit when his h orse makes a fool of him by walking round and round the statue of the King: "Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? ... Most extraordinary conduct! Can't understand the horse!"

To add to the tumult, Joyce offers us a series of lists, giving us information we have no need of: things that are only there for the pleasure of their naming. Guests are introduced briefly, for the sound of their names: Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Power, Miss Furlong, Miss Daly. There are the secondhand booksellers on the Dublin quays: Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, Webb's and Massey's on Aston's Quay, O'Clohissey's in the by-street. And, most important, the meal spread out before us, like Homer's catalogue of ships. Followed by dessert, the sweetmeats joined together by their jumpy integument of "and's".

This is the hubbub of realims, the buzz and Babel of the nineteenth century. Words, words, words, talk talk talk, and in so many voices, such an abundance that of course there must be misunderstandings and mistakes. "The Dead" is chock full of mistakes, beginning with Gabriel's ill-considered joshing of Lily about her beau, to which she replies, "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." Twice, Aunt Julia misunderstands: she doesn't know what galoshes are and doesn't get Gabriel's reference to the Three Graces. Browne repeated calls Freddy Malins Teddy and embarrasses the young laides by telling the kind of joke they don't like. Errors of tone abound. Gabriel takes the wrong tone in responding to Miss Ivors's political challenge, and he mistakes the pressure of her hand for a conciliatory gesture, when it is really a prelude to her standing on tiptoe to whisper into his ear: "West Briton." Aunt Kate offers an ill-considered criticism of the pope's decision to banish women from choirs in favor of young boys, and she is chastised for doing this in the presence of Mr. Browne, who is of "the other persuasion". A conversation about monks sleeping in their coffin is dropped because it is too "lugubrious". And Freddy is ready to pick a fight in defense of a black opera singer whom no one, in fact, has criticized. "And why couldn't he have a voice too? Is it because he's only a black?"

The mistakes and misunderstandings seem to be smoothed over by Gabriel's speech in praise of his aunts and cousin, whom he compliments for their hospitality, their harmoniousness. There is the bustle of leave-taking, when Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne can't make the cabdriver understand them, and everyone shouts directions from the door, only adding to the confusion. Finally, the cab takes off, and upstairs there is the sound of music.

In the quiet surrounded by music, Gabriel sees his wife standing on the stairs. "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of."

We usually think of mistakes as affairs of language, a by-blow of the very separateness that causes us to wish to communicate with one another. But what Gabriel perceives and tries to create in silence -- a woman who is a symbol -- constitutes the central mistake both of his life and of the story. He assumes that the light in her eyes and the color on her cheeks have to do with him, as he will later assume that she has understood his desire for her and shared it. In his silent creation of Gretta -- a creation brought about without a word from her -- Gabriel has misconstrued the woman he has lived beside. Just as the narrator refers to Gretta only as Mrs. Conroy or Gabriel's wife, Gabriel assumes that Gretta's whole identity is connected to him. It is only after she speaks what is in her heart, after she tells her story, that the vision which both takes in and transcends separateness can occur.

She tells him of a boy she knew as a young girl in the West Country, a boy who died for love of her. Afterward, she sleeps. And in this silence, the silence which comes after true speech, Gabriel is transformed from petty if dutiful pedant to a man of vision.

The process happens in stages. He is dully angry, and this anger rekindles his lust. He is jealous. He is ironic. He feels humiliated, seeing himself as far less than the boy who died for her. When he speaks, his voice is "humble and indifferent," the humility and indifference Joyce thought to be the necessary conditions of the true artist. Then he is terrfied at the "impalpable and vindictive being ... coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." He notes that Gretta's not as young as she used to be and feels disgust for the reality of her body, represented by her petticoat string and the limp upper of her boot.

He thinks of his Aunt Julia's impending death, and this thought, born of benevolence, leads him to understand that to be alive is to be in the process of becoming a shade. Tears fill his eyes, and his blurred physical vision allows him to imagine the dead boy -- a shade, to be sure, but standing near, under a dripping tree. Gabriel loses himself, that distinct and separate self by which he has been able to be named. He is among the dead.

"His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world in itself which these had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling." What a strange word, the word "reared". What does it imply? That the dead have nurtured the world we think of as the real one as parents "rear" a child, feeding it, sheltering it, educating it, until it is ready to leave them?

Gabriel's vision takes him to the graveyard where the boy is buried. The snow is falling. In the extraordinary last paragraph of "The Dead", the word "falling" is repeated seven times: seven, the theologically magic number, the number of the seven deadly sins, the seven moral virtues, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on "the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns," those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Consider the daring of Joyce's final repetitions and reversals: "falling faintly, faintly falling" -- a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.

And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.

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