James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life

Abstract

James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life* MARIANNE McDONALD My title plays on Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with its hero, Stephen Dedalus, named after the Greek artist Daedalus, who created the Labyrinth. The Greek craftsman made wings for himself and his son, Icarus, held together with wax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun; the wax melted and the son drowned in the sea. He was a good symbol for the creator Joyce, who invented a new type of literature that was shot down again and again as he tried to get it published. But Dedalus also is a character in Ulysses, and this is the identity Joyce intended to be his own. Joyce in all his work is conscious of death. We think of “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners, in which priests sleep in coffins to keep them mindful of their end. Stephen in Ulysses “sees corpses rising from their graves like vampires to deprive the living of joy.” But Joyce could be equally resistant to its fascination, as Leopold Bloom, after brooding on his dead son and father, says in Glasnevin Cemetery, “They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm full-blooded life.” Death permeates life for Joyce: bride-bed, childbed, and the bed of death, a necessary cycle, but this realization can make every day an adventure and bring gratitude and love for life out of still life. A portrait can be a still life, something unmoving. While that can be a corpse, it may also be something living—and after so many years there is still life in all of the writing by *Based on a talk given on Bloomsday, 2015, at the University of California, San Diego. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1944), born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin. In the Portrait we learn he was “educated” by the “holy fathers” and regularly beaten. Both his overloaded religious name and education almost guaranteed he would be an atheist. When after his death a Catholic priest offered a religious burial, Joyce’s wife Nora said she couldn’t do that to him. Joyce died in Zurich, having wandered Europe much as Bloom (both Jew and Irishman) wandered Dublin. The parallels between Joyce and his Bloom lie partly in the thirteenth -century legend of the wandering Jew who insulted Jesus on the cross and was cursed to walk the earth until Christ should return. Joyce, for his part, was never devout and could also be insulting about religion—especially Irish Catholicism—as well as people. As a result, most of his works were banned for many years. Wandering, then, for him was a blessing (as he soon tired of most places and most people), not a curse. Ulysses, loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, was aptly a tale of wandering throughout Dublin, but also in the underworld (episode 6, Hades). Joyce continually resurrects the dead in his use of the Greek classics. Here I am reminded of what Bryan Friel in Translations has the schoolmaster, Hugh, say to Lieutenant Yolland, who is working on a map and renaming places from Irish into English (for the people who occupied Ireland for about 800 years): “Wordsworth? . . . no. I’m afraid we’re not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean. We tend to overlook your island.” Yes, the Irish prefer Greece and Greek Literature. The Irish have come to wear their religion lightly. In an interview with an Australian newspaper, an Irish taxi driver, asked how he felt about the same-sex marriage referendum just passed, answered with a straight face, “Oh I approve of it. After all I’ve been having same sex with the wife after thirty years.” Another variation on still life? A funeral—for another example of this sort of levity—can be “funferal,” as in the song Finnegan’s Wake, when it james joyce: portrait and still life 88 describes a hooley or donnybrook (Irish words for brawl)— which ends up reviving the dead Finnegan. Thus the correct name of...