Muggin’s Joyce

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Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Ulysses

sentence. So let us cut quickly to the chase on these newly-restored Widows and before the pc crashes again.

It quickly became apparent that the Wake didn’t merely mash words together randomly into sonorous portmanteau (as those like Lennon who would emulate it tend to do); it scrunched up all histories, ‘all identities that have existed or may exist’ (Here Comes Everybody, Mr Whitman) and most important for this young ignoramus, all literature. This will or perhaps won’t be discussed further in a blog which is or indeed isn’t yet to come. For now and for then the first point to consider was the idea that reading this book would be a richer or at least slightly less confusing experience if some of the many ‘call-backs’ made more sense — ie if the reader first had an experience of the rest of Joyce’s oeuvre, which, if nowt else, would prepare one  gently for the complexity of punnery in this final tome.

So your humble correspondent’s student self went out and splashed some more of the old grant money on a nice hardback copy of Ulysses and Tindall’s more general Reader’s Guide to James Joyce.

Which made it plain that he’d need to read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to get the full back story of some of the characters, most important of which was  perhaps Dublin’s fair city (or as Jim might have put it, ‘far shitty’) itself.

For good measure, copies of Pomes Penyeach, Chamber Music, his only play, Exiles, and even the posthumously published Giacomo Joyce were added to the pile, along with Stuart Gilbert’s guide to Ulysses and the excessively titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress of 1929, a collection of essays and musings by such as Sam Beckett, on the as yet unnamed Wake.

I really should get round to reading some of these one day.

Only kidding! I’ve read them all, some more than once.

No! I’m not a ‘glutton for punishment’, whoever said that. And if you’re still reading this blog, you’re a fine one to talk. I do actually do it for fun. Crazy I may be, but masochistic, no. Books is for entertainment, and some of us just gets us kicks that way. Only rock and roll, but I like it. Great craic (even if you have to be cracked to think so).

So, getting back to the Joycean texts themselves, from the start I’ve discovered a great wordsmith, an amazing economist (Tindall rightly points to the opening sentence of Grace: Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up:), a deeply moving writer (the final passages of The Dead, itself possibly the greatest ever short story, are often held up as a paradigm of great prose, and their elegiac power is echoed at the end of Ulysses and, yes, the Wake) — but also an enigmatic fella. His key technique is that of the ‘epiphany’ — that moment of revelation, borrowed from his Catholic upbringing where it refers to the showing of Christ, the divine made human, to the Magi. But Joyce’s epiphanies are often mysterious and elliptical; a character has a life-changing experience of realisation, but the reader can’t always be certain what it or its significance is, exactly. Now at first this baffled the younger version of your current bloggist, at the same time as being intriguing. With the passage of years, some make more sense (others maybe less), but the air of mystery actually increases their numinous (I love that word, me) effect, a sort of mystical and moving effect, no doubt akin to that felt by religious folk, when they think on the mysteries of their Gods or whatever.

Intrigues and ambiguities become more delicious in themselves.

And all that was well before, half way though Ulysses (and so not on page one), yer man starts friggin’ about with the English language itself.

So, since the only real difficulty the early stuff can really present is the simple case of being Not my kind o’ thing, bejaysus (as I still sadly say about George Eliot), we can get into the nitty-gritty of why Ulysses is great craic in the next episode of this jocoserious Joyce-series. Whenever that happens.

Pasta la Vesta, muchachos.

Uselesslys

Tags

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Ulysses

As far as yer man Joyce is concerned, if in no other ways, I am a jammy bastard.

As a sci-fi and Sherlock geek (as described two weeks ago), I stopped doing Eng. Lit. as a subject at the age of 16, having been exposed mainly to Shakey, Shaw and Wordsworth, with mixed results. Novels, I have little recollection of; there was the brief encounter with Austen, which my teenage self threw aside because I didn’t realise she was taking the piss, but who is now a much-loved and hilarious companion. We must have read more prose, but apart from the compulsory Copperfield, Cider with Rosie and Tarka the Bloody Otter, little has stayed with me. I certainly didn’t get to do English for ‘A’ level, so I never came across Mr Joyce, nor the idea that he was in some way ‘difficult’.

If I had a pound for everyone I’ve heard  say, “I tried reading Ulysses, but I couldn’t get past the first page,” I’d have £17.37 and be wondering where the 37p came from. Given the (relative) clarity of the first chapter, I somehow doubt if any of them have opened the book at all, but if they did it was no doubt in a state of trepidation, defeated before they began. If you approach something convinced you won’t understand it, even ready to affect an inverted pride that you can’t, you is on a hiding to nothing, sunbeam.

The late Sixties and early 70s were a golden time for folks of my vintage and pseudo-intellectual leanings. Not only was University tuition free, but we got a grant to help us support it by excessive drinking (my kid sister and I say that had I been born five years sooner or she five years later, it’s unlikely either of us working class kids would have gone into higher edderkashun). And not only was Radio 3 still reasonably free from dumbing down, but the new tv channel BBC2 showed Bergperson, Kurosawa, Ray and Marx Siblings films, ‘serious’ music and jazz, and stupendously pretentious late night arts programmes. On these things, the ideal distraction from doing homework assignments (thank heaven for that little white dot that the screen was reduced to some time around midnight; without it, no work would ever have got handed in), mini playlets, deep discussions and  avant garde excerpts were presented by men and women in black roll-neck jumpers.

One night a metafictional playlet included a line saying, “that’s what drama is: people meeting and interacting,” which spurred the awkward sod in me to write a play in which none of the three characters ever met, being in an array of boxes, apparently a maze opening onto the stage front. It even got performed by UMIST drama soc and, I was told, taken to Americaland as part of a tour.

But I digress.

I resume: one night a discussion of Irish writing spurred me to ask a housemate, a librarianship strudel from Armagh, who the hell this Joyce chappie might be when he’s at home. An outburst ensued:

“He writes a load of gibberish, totally obscene and blasphemous. His last book even ends in the middle of a focking sentence!”

Well, that meant I had to read the guy. So I started in the middle of that sentence with Finnegans Wake. If you think Ulysses is difficult …

But, I assume, I had the advantage of having no fixed idea of what a book should do or be. To this day story is of little interest, the washing line on which the shirts of ideas, subtext and crap jokes can be hung out. I’d been a fan of Lewis Carroll since childhood, when Alice was the star of one of the two books permanently in the house (the other was my fellow Nottinghamian, Lemuel Gulliver, but the local library kept the volume level topped up). I’d loved the wordplay of Jabberwocky, and later, though never a fan of the Beatles (the imp of the perverse probably prevents me liking the overpopular on principle), I had read Lennon’s sub-Joycean Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write. and even tried my own teenage hand at wordplayery (yes, among other things; ha ha).

Immediately I loved the music and the humour of the Wake, but was also a wee bit baffled about whether it did ‘mean’ anything. And I realised the fortnight or so I was allowed to keep it from Stretford library was not going to be sufficient to do it justice. To do page one justice, to be fair.

So I went out and bought the Faber hardback (I do prefer my bukks in well-bound hardback form; and William York Tindall’s excellently lucid A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake.

What a way to begin one’s love affair with great literature.

And what a way to break in an overlong blog. With the reassurance of ‘to be continued …’, I shall end this one appropriately in the middle of a focking

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Dork

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Biggles, Dan Dare, Finnegans Wake, G B Shaw, James Joyce, Knight of the Burnin Pestle, Raffles, Sherlock Holmes, Ulysses

I was a bit of a geek at school, me.

Probably hovered around the more colourful parts of what we now call the spectrum. Leaned towards science and maths and all things logical. Not that I was ever likely to wish life was more ordered than it is, but I was less fond than I am now of the pure and beautiful chaos of ‘reality’.

So, as is typical of the young, awkward, male science geek, I read mainly science fiction and a bit of fantasy from my teens through to my university days.

Not that I was impervious to the other stuff. Though the traditional English education is geared to making kids resistant, rather than receptive, to the greatness of Dickens or Wordsworth, and makes yer man Shakespeare, as George Bernard Shaw put it, ‘an instrument of torture for the young’, I could already see something in it. Indeed, I was a keen participant in the school and house plays every year. My Venturewell (in The Knight of the Burning Pestle) is still spoken of in therapy sessions up and down the land, and as for the embarrassment of my performance in The Lady’s Not for Burning, we shall draw a veil over that here. And I was miffed that they never did a Shakespeare while I was there (and all my lines as Spintho in Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion were cut, chiz chiz).

And always drawn to doing a spot of writing (and written to doing a spot of drawing, for that matter). The creative urge was strong in this one, if not the inborn talent or the tenacious nature.  Even in primary school I wrote a play, a spoof crime drama, set in the skool and parodying members of staff and fellow pupils wot were partiklaly wet and soppy and slept with dolies.

In secondary school, I adapted a Sherlock Holmes story for the stage and briefly became the teacher’s pet of a naïve teaching assistant, causing hilarity and teasing (of me and her) in equal measure. So come to think of it,  it wasn’t all scifi, fantasy and horror; in the time when ‘young adult fiction’ was about adults we could aspire to be, rather than our own pathetic, self-regarding angst, there must have been a bit of Biggles and a shedload of Sherlock. Although the rôle  model whose lifestyle I aspired to most was not Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, certainly not Roy of the Rovers and not even the inscrutable detective of Baker Street, but A J Raffles, the ‘gentleman thief’, who stole for the sheer joy of outwitting the forces of law and order. Sadly for me (but fortunately for society, I like to tell myself), I never had the guts to pursue that ambition, though colleagues would perhaps say I spent  over a decade robbing banks, by taking their wages under false pretences of actually doing any work. I was fond of quoting Aristotle in saying that the man of genius is doing most when he appears to be doing least; the usual reply was that I must be the smartest and most productive genius ever, as I always appeared to do fuck all.

So all this is now by way of a prelude to next week’s blog about reading James Joyce for sheer fun and entertainment, like what I often do now I am of more mature years (ha and, in a very real sense, ha). The inclination to write on this subject was stimulated by Anjelica Huston’s prog about yer man Jim on BBC two nights ago. Having planned to set my musings down this week, I digressed, as so often I do, and gave more background than could possibly be necessary. So come back or don’t next week to see some enlightening views on Ulysses for the common reader and (maybe the week after) Finnegans Wake for the complete fruitcake.