‘Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’
The final sentence of James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is rightly read as a proclamation. But a proclamation of what sort? There are, at least, two avenues one might pursue, from what my own reading seems to suggest.
The first corresponds to what may be – or what may have been – the standard interpretation advocated by many liberal critics operating either directly within the paradigm of ‘New Criticism’ or complacently under its shadow from about the 1950s, most of whom in the pivotal early days of Joyce scholarship were American – a central fact to bear in mind when approaching the question of their appropriation of this supreme exemplar of the literary modern; a figure of ‘global’ significance, therefore, or at least for those trying to shore up and buttress Western cultural achievement against the menacing threat posed by Eastern communism. This is the view notably offered in Richard Ellmann’s classic biography of Joyce from the 1950s, and partially revised in the 1980s, which has come to inform our basic picture of the artist: as by far the most accomplished scholarly study devoted to his life and works, and it still sells well today as the obvious place for someone to start with an interest in Joyce the man. It is now seriously outdated, however, and really ought to be supplanted; for the picture it provides hardly aligns with contemporary scholarly understandings of Joyce. Ellmann’s version serves a purpose that was never Joyce’s, and which shouldn’t be ours. In his biography, we meet a European man of letters born down by the weight of Ireland, its dogmatic clergy and its philistine people. This was also the view presented to me by my grandfather whenever we visited Dublin and he pointed out the various places and objects associated with Joyce, the spiritual hero he never followed into exile. For it was exile, at least in a romantic, Dantean sense. In a classically liberal move, construed as such in a critical idiom for which sovereign individualism was the guiding principle, Joyce had transcended the nets of country, nationality, history, religion, and language for the cause of individual artistic enterprise – the ultimate cause. Joyce was a striving entrepreneur of selfhood; a pioneering modern genius who, by the strength of his own intellect and perseverance could achieve what others could not, and which most would lack the daring to even attempt. The baggage of old, decrepit Ireland with its rancid scars and archaic delusions did nothing more than hinder his creative flight. Unmoored from it, and from Dublin, he could soar steadily like Daedalus, not fly too close to the sun like Icarus and burn with the intensity of a tragic young romantic. Stephen Dedalus – Joyce’s not-too-subtle alter-ego in A Portrait and Ulysses (1922) – it would seem, had a noble heritage. One he would take joy in desecrating.
This is one view of Joyce, now wavering but residual in our cultural and media spheres. The second interpretation I want to briefly consider here, led by Seamus Deane and succeeding Irish critics operating within historicist and post-colonial frameworks of analysis, signifies something of a paradigm shift, if not a revolt against the liberal-humanist Joyce constructed by American critics during the Cold War. These Irish critics present a Joyce far less averse to the siren-calls of national sentiment; but one who, in fact, found his creative impetus in the bottomless reservoir of Irish communal experience and collective memory, rather than from any perennial spirit of poetic hippocrene. From this Irish rootedness his work cannot be extricated; it is a central interpretative axiom. Joyce was an Irish artist, first and foremost, and one might even go as far as to classify him as the Irish artist in the manner of Shakespeare for England, Dante for Italy, Goethe for Germany, or Virgil for Ancient Rome, more so than Yeats, in managing to capture the essence of Irish experience in a work of epic proportion – Ulysses – thereby bestowing form to an experience that had hitherto gone amorphous, undefined, unarticulated because, by its very historical composition, this experience was inarticulate. It had been rendered incoherent, chaotic, by the dual impositions of British colonisation and capitalistic imperialism and the stultifying weight of Roman Catholicism. Plunging the depts of this incoherence, the unending catastrophe of Irish reality, embracing a history he knew to be inescapable as much as it was intangible, Joyce offers such a defining articulation in a mock-epic modelled off the greatest European epic, Homer’s Odyssey, and which appropriates the language and literary forms of the coloniser to mocking effect. He wrote for Ireland, yes, but he wrote of the Dublin community from which he arose and to which he owed his scintillating creative firmament and his sense of reality and humanity. No other writer can be more precisely located within a specified geographic context. But to say this is merely to scratch the surface; the achievement of Ulysses is to re-create in exhaustive detail the imaginative structure of a microcosm, a small world, a contexture of associations directly accessible to Joyce, and to the Irish he is speaking for, but which bears a much broader resonance. His corpus attests to the importance of community, of local sentiment and feeling, as the first and vital spring of affection and source of imaginative content. Born in the shadow of Irish history and the contorted reality it bequeathed, it was a nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus – and Joyce – could not awaken; there was no escaping the indelible imprint of Irishness. One could either ignore it, follow the example of Shaw and assimilate oneself into the metropolitan culture of the coloniser – while retaining a foreign distinctiveness, the accent, thereby precluding total integration – or embrace the incoherence for the sake of trying to wrest something coherent from it. This latter course was Joyce’s path, to be undertaken overseas, in exile. Although the nets of romantic nationalism, Catholicism, and colonial inertia drove Joyce away, in the knowledge that he would not flourish in Edwardian Dublin, they did not disabuse him of his mission, nor distract his focus. His objective was to delineate an Irish reality for the sake of clarifying said reality; to lend coherence to a manifold cultural system that was apparently impervious to it, all for the sake of community: for it is from this locus of affection that, in the words of Edmund Burke, ‘we proceed in the series … towards a love of our country, and to mankind.’ In this sense we should read Joyce’s injunction to locate the universal in an exacting study of the particular; the human in the quotidian of Dublin.