IT ALWAYS used to worry me that there was a notorious socialite drug-taker named Peggy Hopkins Joyce, as though Antichrist had deliberately sent into the world a vicious degraded dual sneer, onomastic if nothing else, at the two modern writers I revere most. These two, Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce, have a great deal in common. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest; Joyce was reared by the Jesuits. Hopkins became professor of Greek at UCD; Joyce was a student there. Both were employing the English lexis. Both were musicians. Fate carefully decreed that they were not to know each other. Joyce was seven when Hopkins died. Joyce’s style had already evolved into the Babylonish dialect of Ulysses by the time, in 1918, Hopkins’s poems were first published. Joyce seems eventually to have read Hopkins, and there is even a brief passage in Finnegans Wake where he seems to parody him. Nevertheless, in describing him as ‘an English Mallarmé’, he seems to disclose no very strong understanding of his essence – an essence so like his own.
One sees a resemblance of verbal technique at a quite superficial level. Neither writer liked hyphens. The German language, which is cognate with English, gets on well without hyphens. There is a certain visual thrill in forms like Selbstgefälligkeit or Vervollständigung, where the basic elements are jammed together, without benefit of the instant analysis that hyphenisation provides, into what looks like a totally new verbal creation. ‘Beer-hating’ too obviously refers to people who hate beer; ‘beerhating’ means the same and looks like a new word. Hopkins gives us ‘fallowbootfellow’ and Joyce ‘silvamoonlake.’ Both writers loved the Anglo-Saxon element in English and enjoyed exaggerating it. They liked to reorganise the shape of the English sentence into the bizarre and just-about intelligible. ‘Nor yet plod safe shod sound,’ writes Hopkins. Joyce writes: ‘Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and wrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.’ The phrases seem fresh-minted, they sound new.
It is their common concern with music that brings them towards a similarity of verbal technique. Hopkins was a composer. He did not write great music, but he looked forward, even in the 1860s, to such contemporary innovations as microtones. In his song ‘Falling Rain’ he provides the notation for a half-flat – a division of the tone which was far too revolutionary for his contemporary Richard Wagner. Joyce, of course, was a fine tenor: he might have done as well as Count John McCormack if he had paid more attention to the development of his voice. There is in Ulysses a conversation, in Italian, between Stephen Dedalus and his music-teacher which talks of the ‘sacrifizio incruento’ – on the altar of literature – of his budding tenor voice: but the love of song remained with him, and both the great novels are alive with melody.
Both Hopkins and Joyce tried to compose sentences which should have the sonic constitution of a vocal melody. When Hopkins writes ‘Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous… stupendous,’ he is producing a vocal line which has a beat’s rest in it. Joyce deliberately organises his vowels and diphthongs so as to make the reciting voice perform a vocal exercise. ‘He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.’ Needless to say, both writers have to be read aloud. Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges of the danger of tackling his verse with the eye alone. The effect was of a kind of ‘raw nakedness.’ Both are supreme writers for the blind and keen-eared. They have no appeal at all for the tone-deaf.
But Hopkins and Joyce alike found in music something which literature could not easily imitate. Literature is monody, the single line, the voice unaccompanied. Music is capable of multiplicity of lines all proceeding together, the Western glory unvouchsafed to the East. We call this counterpoint. Aldous Huxley, long after the publication of both Ulysses and the collected Hopkins, wrote a novel called Point Counter Point, in which a number of separate plots proceed simultaneously, one having no hierarchical precedence over another. Of course, the reader cannot take these plots simultaneously: he can only, having read the book, have a kind of contrapuntal memory of many things going on at the same time.
Hopkins and Joyce wanted genuine sonic simultaneity, and they could achieve it only by compressing more than one meaning into a single word or phrase. In Hopkins’s sonnet ‘The Windhover’ the word ‘buckle’ resents a forceful ambiguity which is at the root of the strength of the poem. Perceiving the windhover or kestrel in the sky, Fr Hopkins SJ sees in it the beauty of Christ. His heart responds in both a sense of unworthiness and a vast upsurge of love which requires an outlet in spiritual action. ‘Buckle’ conveys the opposed impulses, for it can mean both to fasten (as a belt for military action) and to collapse (as a bicycle wheel). But Hopkins was not yet living in an age which could deliberately remake word so as to convey a double meaning. When he writes ‘treads through, prick-proof, thick, thousands of thorns, thoughts,’ he evidently sees the thorns and thoughts as one thing, but he dare not write ‘thornts.’ That kind of refashioning had to be left to Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
Finnegans Wake is real counterpoint. It represents us all with a technique for saying, or singing, more than one thing at a time. On the very first page we read ‘not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthwers wroth with twone nathanjoe.’ The image is multiple – Swift and Macbeth and the Old Testament all come together. Joyce had played, without success, at making a verbal fugue in the Ormond bar episode of Ulysses; Finnegans Wake is all fugue, and very tough fugue too. But also very diverting, like an endless music hall song.
Both Joyce and Hopkins were Jesuits, and one wonders whether this verbal obsession and urge to innovate are a special inheritance of Jesuit training. Before an answer can be given – and I don’t propose to give it here – one has to relate various things to Jesuitry, such as baroque and the concern with the forceful communication. What was not perhaps specially Jesuitical in both writers was a concern with God’s creation as manifested in uniqueness, oddness even.
Hopkins was much concerned with ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, Joyce with ‘epiphanies’. They meant alike the sudden shining forth of some aspect of truth or reality – invariably out of the commonest events or objects. Such a revelation requires language that is itself new, fresh and startling, yet neither bizarre nor hieratic. The gift of creating such language was granted to both.
The Irish Times, 2 February 1982