James joyce, p.103
James Joyce, page 103
Passing into Silence
In the famous exchange towards the end of A Portrait, just before the book briefly assumes the format of diary entries, Stephen, pressed by Cranly on his absence of belief, retorts, ‘I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether you call it home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as a wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.’77 The interrelationship of the terms of this triad, if not their individual signification, was fluid across Joyce’s life.
Joyce never directly elaborated on ‘silence’ or the reasons for it, consistent, it might be said, with the idea of silence. Passing into silence is aligned with the development of the character of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait, which Joyce wrote in 1907–14. Dedalus was of course a figure in a novel, but the autobiographical resonance is clear. It could be said that Joyce had been an adept of silence from much earlier and that his extra-authorial silence, which may have been contingent and gradual, is not susceptible to precise dating. His veiled Parnellism in University College, while plainly not the same as the silence into which he later passed, was an exercise in political reticence. The period in which he did not practise some form of silence, in his specialised sense of the term, is the relatively short interlude between 1902 and 1912, relating principally to his journalism for the Daily Express in Dublin and Il Piccolo della Sera in Trieste; but the deployment of the term in A Portrait does broadly coincide in time with Joyce’s adoption of a more severe concept of silence, and the beginnings of a codification of a principle of authorial extra-textual silence.
It is hard to sustain the idea that Joyce’s resort to silence was merely an election to devote himself to his fictional writing. It was a choice that was politically consequential and owed something to his alertness to future contingencies, authorial and political. His last Irish political article in Il Piccolo della Sera, ‘L’ombra di Parnell’, was published in May 1912. All his journalism predated his final departure from Dublin on 11 September 1912 after the projected publication of Dubliners by Maunsel had aborted. The non-publication of Dubliners closed out what had been the fluidity and open-endedness of Joyce’s first phase of exile. The end date of Joyce’s journalism might have been extended from 1912 to 1914 when he proposed the publication of his articles in book form to Angelo Fortunato Formiggini were it not for the fact that, remarkably, he did not propose to add anything to bring the collection up to date.
We do not know precisely why he wrote no more articles, but he ceased contributing articles as Irish politics changed phase. The Home Rule crisis that followed the introduction by the Liberal government in April 1912 of the Government of Ireland Bill continued to escalate: on 28 September (‘Ulster Day’) Unionists in the north-east of Ireland signed en masse a Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule. Joyce could not write of Irish affairs with the same confidence as he had from 1904. Intellectually scrupulous, he was not disposed to comment on that which he could not observe and with which he could no longer claim an immediate familiarity. His journalism, conceived initially as a means of asserting and maintaining his closeness to Ireland, came to formalise his distancing. The journalistic nexus was spent. The Great War would shatter the paradigm of the politics of Home Rule after Parnell that Joyce understood intimately. By the time of the 1916 Rising, Joyce was in Zurich.
He strenuously maintained the position of silence in post-war Europe. Thereafter he did not allow himself to be drawn on the issue of politics and seems even privately to have observed a degree of political reticence, even if that reticence had an exasperated communicativeness of its own. As time went on, he found additional grounds to warrant his practice of silence. He did not give interviews or render autobiographical accounts of his life. He was concerned to safeguard the reception of Ulysses from distractions created by expressions of his political opinions. His Dublin journalism, and his journalism and lectures in Trieste, remained almost entirely unknown in his lifetime.
The onset of silence directly affects what can be established about Joyce’s political thinking. For the period 1904–12, Joyce’s correspondence with Stanislaus—frustratingly only Joyce’s side of the correspondence survives—is politically rich for the year before Stanislaus arrived in Trieste, and for Joyce’s period in Rome. His thinking can also be gauged by his Triestine journalism and lectures. For the rest of his life on the European continent, the sources are a good deal thinner. One is left to piece together occasional political comments in his correspondence with what contemporaries recalled of his conversation, and with other odd sources such as Joyce’s observations on Herbert Gorman’s biography, and to correlate these to his work.
Joyce and Irish Independence
A silence enshrouds Joyce’s response to the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Apart from contemporary newspaper reports, Joyce would have heard more of it in time from his friends James Stephens, whose Insurrection in Dublin, published immediately after the Rising, is an important commentary on the event, and Constantine Curran, as well as others.
Joyce was in Paris from July 1920. The month in Ireland was marked by serious rioting in Belfast and Catholics were expelled from the shipyards and engineering works. It was from Paris that Joyce, preoccupied with the completion of Ulysses, read the newspaper reports of the escalating course of the War of Independence. A truce was signed on 9 July, and negotiations for a settlement opened on 11 October 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921. The next day a crowded gathering elaborately choreographed by Joyce took place in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, on the Rue de l’Odéon where extracts from the novel were read in English and French. The eminent French critic Valéry Larbaud made the famous utterance that with the novel that was about to appear, ‘Ireland is making a sensational re-entrance into European high literature.’78
Larbaud did not expressly refer to the Treaty, but later said his lecture was delivered in that context. The making of the connection was almost certainly at Joyce’s insistence. As he finished the writing of Ulysses and devised the publicity to attend its publication, Joyce was not avidly following the daily course of events in Ireland, but he both seized on and was caught off guard by the unanticipated synchrony of the Treaty with a long-planned event to promote the forthcoming publication of Ulysses.
Larbaud said, ‘As an Irishman, James Joyce has not, in actual fact, taken sides in the conflict which, from 1914 to recent times, has pitted Ireland against England. He does not serve any party, and it is possible that his books do not please anyone and that he is equally repudiated by the Nationalists and Unionists.’79 Such a temporally limited statement raised more questions than it professed to answer. It fell far short of the ascription to Joyce of political neutrality that it was taken to mean, as it came to cast a long shadow on how his relationship to Ireland and Irish nationalism was understood internationally.
What Joyce wanted to convey through Larbaud was that he was not a patriotic writer. On the eve of the triumph of the publication of Ulysses, he prompted Larbaud to renew the attacks he had made on the Irish Literary Revival when in University College: ‘[Joyce] does not cut a figure as a militant patriot, and has nothing in common with those writers of the Risorgimento [e.g., the Irish Literary Revival] who were, above all, the servants of a cause and who presented themselves as citizens of an oppressed nation for which they demand independence, and for which they asked the aid of patriots and revolutionaries of all countries.… In short he does not plead.’80 That almost certainly came from Joyce. It was ungenerous: the discontinuity with the Irish literary renaissance, whatever about nineteenth-century Irish patriotic literature, was overstated to the point of travesty. The point Joyce was making was that he had broken with any conventional notion of patriotic writing, that what he wrote about Ireland was unbidden and unbiddable. ‘He does not plead’ is a perfect characterisation of Joyce’s treatment of the Irish political in all that he wrote, and aptly recalled Parnell, for whom pleading was not in his nature.
Larbaud added that ‘it should be mentioned that in writing Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, he did as much as all the heroes of Irish nationalism in gaining the respect of intellectuals from all countries towards Ireland’.81 That is probably not a direct paraphrase of what Joyce said to Larbaud, but it perfectly captures the political ambitiousness of his writing in its Irish aspect. His writing subsisted in parallel to the pursuit of Irish independence, the achievement of which adventitiously coincided with the publication of his novel, but in Larbaud’s address signalled something deeper than temporal coincidence.
What Larbaud declaimed encapsulates Joyce’s contestatory, quasi-competitive relationship to the Irish political as it was conventionally understood. It was Larbaud, or Joyce-Larbaud, who identified the relationship of objective rivalry between Joyce and Irish politicians as well as more complaisant writers and intellectuals in Ireland. For what were they rivals? One could say they were rivals for the occupancy of a terrain of political imagination, but they were also rivals for the possession of a defined historical and cultural heritage. In that contest it could not seriously be argued that Joyce was politically neutral on Irish nationalism or Irish independence (which Larbaud’s carefully crafted formulation fell short of asserting).
Joyce held aloof from the Irish Free State and remained, as he had been born, a citizen of the United Kingdom. There is little to substantiate Richard Ellmann’s assertion that he was ‘briefly exhilarated at the foundation of the Irish Free State’.82 His response to the establishment of the new state was a reprise of his old game of refusing to avow himself a nationalist. Over strenuous objections from Joyce, Nora decided to return to Ireland so that their children could see their grandparents, and set off on 1 April 1922. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Galway had split into pro- and anti-Treaty factions. Pro-Treaty forces entered the Caseys’ boarding house on Nun’s Island, where Nora and her teenage children were staying, to fire at the anti-Treaty IRA combatants, who had taken up position in a store across the street. Nora and her children got the train out of Galway for Dublin the next day. The train left under protection of the Free State army. The IRA were in occupation of the Renmore Barracks half a mile up the line and fired on the train. Nora and Lucia were terrified.83 Joyce in Paris was outraged. While his concern for the safety of his wife and children was understandable, there was a disproportionateness and irascibility to his response, as if he took the shooting from the Renmore barracks as an affront to himself. When Nora in 1935 thought of returning to Galway to see her mother, Joyce wrote to Weaver, ‘The last time, however, that she went there she left that blissful isle lying on the floor of a railway carriage with her two children (and mine) while the natives were firing at one another through the carriage windows.’84 The violence of the Civil War became unreasoningly another justification for his holding aloof from the new state.
Joyce had reason to object to the politics of the new state. The conservative Catholic-nationalist values of post-Parnellite Ireland that he had strenuously contested all his life were largely maintained in independent Ireland, especially in the spheres of censorship and sexual morality, overlain with a thin sheen of Irish language revivalism. The socially hegemonic role of the Catholic Church was unchallenged. The continuities with the values of anti-Parnellite Ireland were symbolised by the appointment of T. M. Healy, Parnell’s leading adversary in the Split, as the first Governor-General. There was a harshness to the Irish Free State that reflected the straitened circumstances of its birth, and the weight of the undertaking of building the institutions of the new state. Yet Joyce did not make these his grounds of objection. He refused to be drawn on the reasons why he declined to endorse or identify himself with the new state, standing on the established fact of his long absence from Ireland, and leaving his writing to speak for itself. That was consistent with his principle of silence, and the logic of exile he had wrought. This was not an evasion: what he had to say about the independent Irish state, which was considerable, he would say in Finnegans Wake.
Ulysses was of course set within the rigid temporal confines of 1904. With Finnegans Wake, which he began writing in 1923, Joyce consummated the conception of his oeuvre as coextensive with Irish statehood. It was to consume his creative energies until its publication in 1939. The first extract from his ‘Work in Progress’ (he carefully withheld the proposed title) was published in the Transatlantic Review in April 1924, and further instalments followed, principally from 1927 in transition in Paris. The response of reviewers and critics was comprehensively negative, if constrained by a certain deference towards the author of Ulysses. Even some of those close to Joyce, such as Weaver, could not conceal their misgivings. He added to the novel the sentence, ‘You’ll have loss of fame from Wimmegame’s fake’.85 Beset by woes, principally relating to his eyesight, for which he had repeated treatment, and the deteriorating psychiatric condition of Lucia, and not free from financial anxieties in spite of the success of Ulysses, Joyce persevered, sustained by Nora, who became his wife in 1931, and by a tight circle of friends.
Joyce’s Political Outlook in the 1920s and 1930s
While the sources on Joyce’s politics are thinner than for earlier periods, the contours of his political outlook in the last two decades of his life are reasonably clear. One has to distinguish his contemporary political outlook from his politics in the broader sense, which—beyond what traces remain of his contemporary opinions—are rendered in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s suspicion of political institutions, governments, and parties grew during and after the Great War. That ran counter to the direction of European left-wing thinking, with its emphasis on the party or the movement, and rendered Joyce’s thinking suspect to doctrinaire Marxists. Broader schools of progressive politics in the 1930s expected affirmative pronouncements from writers which Joyce withheld.86 His objection to teleological thinking, which saw politics in terms of predestined ends, always present in his treatment of Irish nationalism, was maintained if it was not deepened in his treatment of continental and universal politics and history.
Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake in the fraught interval of two world wars. The outfall of the Great War had extended long after the armistice of November 1918. The rise of fascism and Nazism posed the threat of another war. Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933, and Francisco Franco prevailed in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. That provided the miserable political backdrop against which Finnegans Wake was written. Joyce abhorred fascism, and especially despised anti-Semitism. He saw fascism and Nazism as recrudescences of viciously ethnocentric nationalisms, of bellicosity and barbarism, and thus as part of an ancient human cycle to which he responded not quite fatalistically but with a degree of weariness. He did not quite grasp their grotesque novelty and modernity. That assessment was widely shared in the generation who had lived through the Great War. It might be added that the full bureaucratic fury of the Holocaust was not unleashed in Joyce’s lifetime. The Lake Wannsee conference of senior Nazi officials to give effect to the ‘final solution’ of the extermination of the Jewish people took place a year after Joyce’s death. Nonetheless, Hitler had scarcely veiled his genocidal purpose, so that Joyce’s reductive cyclicism, attuned to the war-weariness of his generation, reflects a degree of ideological deafness uncharacteristic of him. It does not invalidate the historical rhythm of Finnegans Wake, but it does prescribe the limits of the cyclical interpretation of human history which it advanced.
Finnegans Wake is a richly, in some ways an extravagantly, Irish text. Its title says as much. As well as invoking the ballad of that name—Tim Finnegan was not dead, and so returns to life at his own wake—the absence of an apostrophe permits it to convey that Finnegans (the Irish) are awake, or may awaken, making a connection to Irish independence. It is a work of multiple aspects, in one of which it is the book of Ireland and Irish independence, taking in a rich sweep of Irish mythology, literature, history, and politics. It is an Irish story or intersecting set of stories which relate to an Irish family. It is mostly written in English, with a particularly Irish quality about it. It is as densely intricate and challenging to most Irish readers as to readers who are not Irish nor steeped in Irish history and culture. Its complexity has a levelling effect between the Irish and non-Irish reader which itself subverts the idea that it is to be read as a work pertaining to Ireland alone.
Finnegans Wake is not—at any level—a merely Irish work. The interweaving of the Irish and the European is one of the imaginative feats of the Wake and is not susceptible to being unstitched. It is a summa, a vast integrative work which encompasses Joyce’s cultural experience, his observations and his thinking, and his reading across the course of a life passed cumulatively far longer in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris than in Dublin, and fertile with cross-references to other histories, cultures, religions, and mythologies. Joyce’s treatment of human beings in communities and states and his exuberant exploration of foundational national narratives are enfolded within an Irish story. He adamantly refused to explain or justify—any more than to instrumentalise—the Wake’s Irish narrative. He was not prepared to explain extra-textually that it aspired to being a universal work that had an Irish frame. He left the work to speak for itself. His strategy of silence had many aspects.
