James Joyce: Finnegans Wake (1939)

Edition: Penguin, 1982
Review number: 888


Joyce's final work could well claim to be the most impenetrable twentieth century novel of all. Even in a time when experimental  techniques have flourished, it stands out as a virtually unreadable collection of immensely clever ideas.

In Ulysses, the most difficult section to follow is the scene where Bloom visits the brothel, which is laid out like a bizarre play. It is full of allusions and wordplays, many of them quite obscure. Finnegans Wake basically begins where that scene left off. Few of the  words are actually standard English; most are transformed to have double meanings (at least!). A typical, if simple, example is the word "hiberniating", which is clearly from the context a transformation of hibernating but with the extra letter to make it refer to Ireland (Hibernia being the Latin name for Ireland). It thus has connotations of Ireland as a sleepy backwater, away from the centre of European affairs. This sort of effect must make the novel a proofreader's nightmare.

In Ulysses the desire to concentrate on the clever surface of the prose at the expense of underlying meaning can for the most part be resisted; in Finnegans Wake, where almost every word has two or three meanings which require an effort to untangle, this temptation becomes almost overwhelming. I found that two things which help are to imagine the text being read in an Irish accent (which makes sense of some of the spelling) and to keep the edge of a bookmark under the line being read (to prevent the eye from straying). The novel is very hard work to read, and it is admiration for its cleverness in the manipulation of language which keeps one going. In this way, it is like a particular kind of poetry (The Wasteland being a good example) rather than
other novels.

So what is Finnegans Wake about? Like almost all of Joyce's prose, the setting is Dublin. This is not the real city in the same way it is in The Dubliners or Ulysses, but more a place which is a metaphor for I am not quite sure what - the world, as the centre of a mythic universe, perhaps. (It is clearly an extension of the relation of Dublin geography to the locations of Homer's Odyssey in Ulysses.) Finnegan is a bricklayer who has fallen to his death, and this is linked to the fall in the garden of Eden in the very first sentence of the novel. (This is probably the best known quotation of the whole novel, being printed on Irish bank notes: "Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..." - which is also I presume a reference to Eden Quay on the Liffey near the Abbey Theatre.) Other characters combine archteypal significance with personification of Dublin geography - H.C. Earwicker (Here Comes Everybody) is also Howth Castle and Environs.

In the end, the details of what Finnegans Wake is about are not particularly important. It is a novel which is a celebration of the pleasure of playing with language. Its most obvious precursors are Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky, particularly the latter. There are still writers who enjoy playing with language in this sort of way, mainly for comic effect - Spike Milligan is an example - but in the end the novel perhaps marks a bit of a dead end in modern literature, having taken the idea of the pun as far as it can possibly go.

James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)

Edition: The Bodley Head, 1960
Review number: 864

It is virtually impossible to describe a novel as complex as Ulysses, even if it were fully comprehended. The basic idea is quite simple, to describe the interior life of a man during one particular, not atypical, day in his life. There is much more to it than this, of course; the evocation of Dublin in 1904 - based not just on memory but on exact research; the parody of such things as advertisements, the newspaper society pages and the catechism; the recounting of bodily sensation in unprecedented detail; the relationship with Homer's Odyssey.

I recently heard an interesting fact, that the 1904 day so meticulously created was the date of Joyce's first assignation with the woman he later married. And yet there is really no trace of this in the novel, no reason why this particular day is of more importance to the characters than any other. It is tempting to try to relate events to this fact - the funeral of Patrick Dignam, for example; what was buried on that day in Joyce's life?

One of the discussions in Vonnegut's novel Timequake is about Ulysses, with one participant debunking the idea that there is really any parallel with the Odyssey (the alternative theory offered is that this was just something Joyce said to provoke interest from academics). Things you might count against it might include the character of Molly Bloom, so unlike Homer's faithful Penelope. There is certainly no direct, linear relationship between the book and the poem; an episode in the novel might match an episode in the epic, but the order of episodes is different. (A lot of the Odyssey is actually about Telemachus' search for his father, or consists of Odysseus recounting tales of his adventures. Stephen Daedalus represents Telemachus, as Bloom's son died young.) Though the relationship is not simple, it is definitely there, and Vonnegut is perpetrating his own literary joke. (That is not to say that there are no other structures in the novel; in the catechistic section, the events of the day are linked to a variety of rituals, including the distinctly non-liturgical "ritual of Onan" as well as Catholic church sacrements.) Even if the Homer link is considered established, there are still important questions which it raises. Why did Joyce choose the Odyssey, and what is it that he is using the parallel to say? These questions are closely related, and difficult to answer without considering another - what is the theme of Ulysses?

Joyce's intention was clearly to write something about what a human being is, both physically - just about every part of the body plays a part in the novel - and psychologically, with its groundbreaking use of what later became known as the stream of consciousness style. Of all Greek heroes, Odysseus is the least stereotypically heroic, even if many of the others are flawed in one way or another. He is a liar, a cheat and a thief; he succeeds by using his intelligence rather than his strength (though he is heroically strong, as is shown by the showdown with the suitors, when none of them is able to bend his great bow). The closest parallel here to Bloom is that Bloom writes newspaper advertisements. The plot of the Odyssey is also of technical assistance to Joyce, as its sequence of episodes along a great journey provides scope for a variety of treatments as well as setting.

It may be, then, that Joyce saw Odysseus as close to modern men, and so Bloom is an unheroic version of his mythic counterpart. Of course, it is also true that Bloom's life is epic to himself.

It is all to easy to lose track of the deeper structure of this difficult to read novel. It is so full of clever tricks, of fascinating details, that there is a tendency to admire the surface and stop paying attention to what is going on beneath it. This is particularly the case in sections like the brothel scene and Molly's internal narrative which ends the novel, which are so brilliantly executed that they almost compel concentration on the immediate context rather than the whole story.

Certainly fundamental to an understanding of twentieth century literature, Ulysses is one of the greatest and most difficult to read of all novels.

James Joyce: The Exiles (1918)

Edition: Granada, 1977
Review number: 816

Of all Joyce's mature writing, his only play is probably the least well known. It is also one of his least successful pieces, never having had much success on the stage. Displaying an unusual lack of confidence, it shows its influences strongly.

The Exiles manages to simultaneously be dull enough to seem longer than it is and unsatisfying enough to seem shorter. This is because Joyce gives all the real character to the part of Richard; neither he nor any of the others are interested in understanding anyone except himself. But even with Richard we do not come to understand the motivation behind his encouragement of his wife's potential infidelity, the principal dramatic content of the play; hints are made that it springs from some kind of misogynistic impulse, but that is not really a proper explanation (where did the impulse come from?).

The main model for the style of the play is Ibsen, as refracted through George Bernard Shaw's commentary and William Archer's translations. The introduction in this edition cites An Enemy of the People as a particular model, but I found it quite hard to see parallels between the two plays - especially as politics is extremely important in one and hardly mentioned in the other. The main aspects of the play which are copied from Ibsen are the ways in which characters interact (those these are less successful dramatically) and frankness about controversial issues in home life.

Joyce's preoccupation with the relationship of the Irish to Ireland is muted here, but is the reason for the title; the background event of the play is the Rowan family's return to Ireland from life abroad. Perhaps a drama more reflecting his other concerns as a writer would have drawn out more of his genius; as it is, The Exiles is probably his most disappointing work.

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man (1916)

Edition: Granada, 1977
Review number: 785

The autobiographical elements in this novel perhaps tend to distract the reader from its purpose. As its title implies, it is intended to show something of what it is which makes someone an artist (in this particular case, a poet). The scenes from the life of Stephen Daedalus - the novel is not a continuous narrative but a series of chronologically organised episodes - show a boy who is never part of the world around him, always observing it as a stranger.

The relationship between Stephen and his Catholic faith is a vitally important part of the novel. Like most Irish children of the time, his education was provided by the church, and at one point he seriously considers entering the priesthood. (It is his need to be an outsider which convinces him that he doesn't have a vocation.) A mjor part of the central chapter is taken up by a long talk given by a priest to schoolboys on the subject of hell and its torments, and Stephen's reactions are very revealing of both his character and his background.

The relationship is quite complicated, with Stephen both yearning to be freed from the restrictions of his upbringing and desperate to live the pure life of faith he feels is demanded from him. Neither side is going to have an easy victory and of course internal division is central to Joyce's view of the life of the artist. (He of course spent his life as an Irish author writing about the essence of Irishness while in exile.) Given the Catholic virtual monopoly on education, many boys must have had similar experiences, and I suppose that it is the nature of the artist to be particularly sensitive to it, as Stephen is.

James Joyce: The Dubliners (1914)

Edition: Granada, 1977 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 762

All of Joyce's writing is about Dublin, and the people who live there. It is perhaps most obviously the theme of his only collection of short stories, particularly given their title. Because of the references to people still living in 1904, it took ten years for the stories to be published; this may seem a bit of a strange reason today, as there is nothing really defamatory here. (Characters do make disparaging remarks about Edward VII, in the context of Irish nationalist politics, so this may have been what frightened the publishers.)

The attitude of the stories to the city in which they are set is complex, and generally fairly ambivalent. The various people in them by no means share a single outlook. Generally, though, there is a tension between the attraction of the familiar, that of the truly estimable aspects of the city, and the feeling that it is a place which limits those who live there. Several characters aspire to leave, but then change their minds; or regret not having left in their youth. This latter is what happens in A Little Cloud, in which a journalist meets a friend once again who has lived in London for some years; while on the one hand regretting missing out on his friend's fashionable life, he on the other notices that it has coarsened and vulgarised him.

It is not just Dublin itself which inspires such conflicting emotions. There are relationships in many of the stories which also contain tensions, mainly through husbands and fathers who become violent when drunk. Clearly, Joyce is not the first writer to have attempted to portray this sort of situation, but he does so with a realism that was new and with a mastery of technique which is breathtaking.

The stories in The Dubliners generally concentrate on character and background rather than plot, but they are so well written that even when virtually nothing happens in a story it is still not just interesting but gripping. Like all Joyce's writing, the stories are minutely observed and words are chosen with great care. They are also deliberately arranged, the age of the protagonists gradually increasing through the collection until the final and longest story, The Dead. Of all his great writing, The Dubliners is the most accessible, and forms an ideal starting place for the reader new to Joyce.