Introducing James Joyce

Why Joyce?

Note: this section is based in part on passages from my "Dear Colleague" letter, already received by some applicants.

First, the subject. Over sixty years after his death, James Joyce remains, for students of literature, a difficult figure to approach and an awkward one to ignore. On the one hand, he is arguably the most important, and probably the most influential, English-language writer of the last hundred-plus years. In English literature over all, only Shakespeare has received more critical attention. With the proliferation of web sites and e-mail discussion groups added to the journals, symposia, reading circles, and clubs already devoted to his writing, this interest has only become more widespread, reaching out to a worldwide audience. That fact was most recently brought home to me, in Dublin, on June 16, 2004, during the hundredth anniversary of the date on which Joyce's Ulysses is set. Making my way to one of the pubs prominent in that book, I found myself among young people from Italy, Germany, Holland, and Norway, each with a copy of Ulysses translated into his or her native language, joining in a serially multilingual read-through. Nothing (including the location) could have been more Joycean in spirit.

That spirit continues to grow. There is an annual Joyce conference held in Croatia. There is a Joyce journal published in Japan. Next year's International Joyce Symposium will be in Budapest – the first to be held beyond the old Iron Curtain. A Joycean e-mail group to which I belong includes members from New Zealand, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Brazil, and Singapore. No author, in this age of globalization, is more global. For a student or teacher of literature, to miss out on all this is to miss out on something big. On the other hand, many do. Joyce may well be the most guiltily un-read writer in English. Ulysses is the classic example of the bookcase book with the uncracked spine, the book that people buy, put on their shelves, and mean to get to some day. That is understandable. Joyce is difficult. The good news is that he is difficult in a way that, with some help, the order of the material itself makes manageable.

The complexity is generally progressive, as in a course in mathematics or a foreign language. Joyce was fascinated with the phenomenon of organic growth, and one consequence of that fascination was that all of his books come in segments each of which incorporates and extends elements of the segments preceding it, and one consequence of that fact is that the latter segments, having more material to coordinate, tend to get busier, for approximately the same reason that a sixty year-old's life probably takes more sorting out than a twenty year-old's. The same principle applies from one book to the next.

It therefore makes even more sense than usual to go through the texts in their chronological order. It also makes sense to do it as a common enterprise, in a reading group - a class, or in our case, a seminar - in the company of someone who has some previous familiarity with the material, both primary and critical.

Which leads to the subject of the director, a.k.a. myself. I read my first Joyce book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when I was about the age of your students. Like many others, I was struck by its uncanny accuracy, by the way its author remembered what the sensations he was describing were really like, sensations I could confirm because through him I remembered them too. He remembered what it was like to be the kid with glasses. He remembered – no other writer I'd read had – that boys in grade school called one another by their last, not their first, names. He caught, and re-created from the inside out, what injustice felt like to a six-year-old, and how rumors from the world at large – political turmoil, changes in family fortune – filtered into a growing child's consciousness. No one but Dickens had done it as well, and Joyce was freer than Dickens had been to write about, for instance, adolescent lust and religious angst.

A good deal of water has passed under the bridge since then, during which I have pursued different interests, but Joyce continues to preoccupy me, for the same reasons (among some others) that attracted me when I was a teen-ager. My most recent book is called Joyce and Reality (subtitle: The Empirical Strikes Back), and the name is a good indicator of the main line I have pursued through it and through two other books published on Joyce, as well as through many monographs, articles, notes, and conference papers I have published and presented on the same subject. There are all kinds of angles to this author, and we will certainly want to explore a number of them, but, for sure, one continuous goal will be to spot and track each book's engagement with reality, both external (cityscape) and internal (mindscape). A knowledge of Dublin topography will be important - we have plenty of maps and pictures for that - but so will be the capacity to introspect and remember. Joyce is famous for his puzzles, and we will certainly do our best to unpuzzle some of them. But he is also the creator of Leopold Bloom, a human figure about whom readers come to know more than they do about anyone else in fiction, and about whom the hardest single thing to remember is that he never existed.

We will also be tracking the closely related subject of what might called the developmental side of Joyce's work – that fascination with organic growth mentioned earlier. Almost every section of a given Joyce work is in a sense older than the one before, with a style and voice designed to register the change. As a result, the differences between one age and another are a constant theme. Ulysses, for instance, is, among many other things, about what in the sixties we used to call the generation gap – about a young character meeting and coming to terms with a middle-aged character. Given their backgrounds, I would expect the seminar's participants to be especially knowledgeable about this issue.

Joyce's sketch of Leopold Bloom

Although I have certainly enjoyed teaching the nineteen-to-twenty-one year-olds taking my Joyce classes over the years, the fact is that they are nineteen-to-twenty-one year-olds, with the irritating habit of not getting older, while I do. There are certain things about what they are reading that they just have to imagine or take on faith - for instance, what it's like to be thirty-eight, the age of the book's protagonist. It will, I expect, be a different, educational experience to teach people whose ages range, like those of Joyce's characters, across the spectrum of life's stages, if only because their greater fund of experience – having jobs, having families, etc. – should help them to connect with literature in general and with Joyce in particular.