Awesome: Djuna Barnes’s profile of James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922. It’s a PDF file. Ulysses was published in February, 1922, and was already running into trouble with censorship. It would be over 10 years before the United States (Judge Woolsey presiding) deemed the book to be “not obscene” and would allow Ulysses to come to America. But Barnes’s profile is before that long long fight, although the harbingers of it were already present. This is fascinating stuff. It’s a “portrait of the artist” just on the cusp of the typhoon he had unleashed. It is in this interview that he says one of my favorite quotes from him about Ulysses, and it’s a quote that many people seem to have a problem with, or they assume he is being disingenuous with it:
The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book – or worse they may take it some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.
It’s my view that he is exaggerating to make a point. He is not lying. He is not being mock-naive. He is on the level. It is my view that while Ulysses obviously has some serious moments and takes on serious themes (infidelity, Irish history, Shakespeare, sex, life itself) – it is not at all a “serious” book. It has no ulterior motives. It does not want to SCHOOL you. It really does have no moral. It is not like any other book. Joyce wrote it because he was obsessed by it, and it was the only book he could write at that particular time. He said that again and again. It took him 7 years to write it. There were many moments during that time when he felt like he was drowning, being pulled down by his own book. He said:
The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book– blast it!
So I believe what he says to Barnes. I knew of that quote when I read Ulysses for the first time and it (along with my Dad) helped keep me on track. It took the edge off of this book with the giant reputation. Yes, it has a giant reputation. So does Hamlet. But when you sit down to actually read the thing, you start to feel the nuts and bolts of it, how it works, and instead of being serious and solemn and “important”, it feels, actually, rather ridiculous. In a good way. The whole book is ridiculous. Looking for “what it means” certainly diminishes the book. There is no meaning. If you tell the plot: a young Irishman and a middle-aged cuckolded Jew wander the streets of Dublin for 800 pages, and only meet near the end, and they get drunk and go to a brothel, and then walk home, taking time to stop and urinate in the garden … Oh, and it all takes place on one day … it sounds like nothing. And it IS nothing. The book is not about anything: its story, its narrative, its “events”. It’s about the language. And through the sometimes difficult language (but remember, Joyce said: “with me, the thought is always simple” – and this is 100% true. He is not an abstract man in the SLIGHTEST. He’s Irish. Abstraction is not one of their strong suits), you get the characters, you get the setting, you get the “problems” each one has … but if you see the language as a “barrier” to the “meaning”, you are going to have a problem. As Samuel Beckett wrote about Finnegans Wake (and it applies to Ulysses as well):
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.
Joyce was not concerned with story. He did not create characters. He wrote the people he knew. His protagonist is his alter ego (Stephen Dedalus), and he only wrote books that took place in Ireland. He didn’t INVENT anything. He got the “plot” of Ulysses from the “plot” of Homer’s epic. His concerns were elsewhere. He wanted to attempt to “describe” (not explain, but describe) what it felt like to live. All the sensations, feelings, urges (hunger, bodily functions, sex) – palpitating and pulsing through a human being, at all times, at strange times. You walk down the street on a bright morning and suddenly, out of nowhere, you are dying to fuck someone. The urge passes (unless you have no impulse control), and then you go into a bookstore to browse, and then suddenly, your stomach growls, and you realize, “Huh. Time for a snack.” This is prosaic stuff, people, but nobody had attempted to describe life at this level. Because why would they want to, some critics would ask. That’s a valid point. But it’s somewhat irrelevant. JOYCE wanted to. And as a writer, he only did what he wanted to do. He wished, often, that he could write other types of books – and his wife, looking at one of the pages of Finnegans Wake lying on his desk, asked him, “Why can’t you write books that people would want to read?” Of course, they did want to read them, but her point is also valid. Accessibility is not what Joyce was ever about. Not because he was obnoxious (although he could be that as well, from time to time), and wanted to be “cleverer than you” – but because he only wrote what he felt like writing. And Ulysses was what he felt like writing at the time. Then, 17 years later, came his next book, Finnegans Wake, nothing from him at all in the in-between years. This was a man who followed his own star. It was a lonely existence, certainly, although he found his lifelong companion, and always had his kids around him – but he wasn’t the type of writer who hung out with other writers, reveling in competition and comparing notes. He was solitary.
I loved his comment on Oscar Wilde:
[Oscar Wilde] studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.
Recently we had a conversation here about whether or not Joyce had any opinions on Oscar Wilde. As so often happens, the second I start wondering about things, suddenly answers start coming – answers that were there all along, I just wasn’t looking for them. Like learning a new word and suddenly you start hearing it everywhere.
Djuna Barnes is, of course, a marvelous writer herself, and the piece is not to be missed.
Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses. Prod, prod, prod.
My blog is full of subliminal advertising messages.
Or, uhm, not so subliminal. Gotta work on that.
Awesome, indeed. Thanks, Sheila and Djuna.
Ineluctable modality of the visible!