Joyce the Parisian

Abstract

' Trieste - Zurich - Paris , 1914-1921'; 'Paris, 1922-1939'. Anyone who has read Joyce will recognize the famous dates and place names which link the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to a particular context, to circumstances whose importance is not merely anecdotal but, if only to judge from the recurrence of these very names in Joyce's last book, structural. Joyce's exile, recaptured by the three cities which, each in its turn, saw the inception of new developments in the writing of Ulysses , was to end in Paris. Does this make him a 'Parisian'? If we speak of Joyce as a 'Parisian', two images, two contrasting cliches, immediately come to mind: Joyce as part of the Bohemian crowd of the 'Expatriates', the Irish genius adding his own tenor voice to the hoarse chorus of drunken American 'Pilgrims' wandering between Odeonia and the cafes of Montparnasse; or the secretive writer, living only with his family and a small group of devotees, pent up in an ivory tower, completely indifferent to his surroundings, absorbed by the drawn out tour de force of having to finish his universal history before the real apocalypse of the century comes... If both cliches indeed contain an element of truth, I shall try to show first that they correspond to different phases of Joyce's Parisian life, and then, that they misconstrue the very organic relationship he had established with his elected Ithaca. Neither, say, Hemingway's version, nor Arthur Power's, can manage to convey the specific role of Paris for Joyce, who may well be called, as Finnegans Wake coins it, a 'paleoparisien' ( FW 151.9) - that is, first of all, an 'arch-parisian'.