From the very beginning of his writing career the work of James Joyce has been read in two different ways and this has resulted in a divergence of reception that he himself was in no small part responsible for. For some readers he was essentially an Irish writer, somebody who had managed to portray life in the capital of the Emerald Isle in particularly interesting ways and whose works could only be understood when situated in the literary context of the Irish Revival. Joyce’s main accomplishment would then be that he had put the “seventh city of Christendom” on the literary map, that he had given voice to a city, a land, and a people that had not yet been depicted by a major writer. This is Joyce as the Irish Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare, the great national poets who in Finnegans Wake have been turned into a single and sufficiently mercantile and European “primed favourite continental poet Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G.” (FW 539 5 – 6). It is clear from this reference and from the resonance of these names that this self-portrait of the writer is not entirely unflattering.
But this view of Joyce’s achievement is not without its problems, first of all the fact that he has quite a few competitors for the title of national poet, even among his contemporaries, two of them with Nobel Prizes during Joyce’s lifetime. And we know that later in life Joyce (correctly) considered William Butler Yeats as the greater poet. A more important problem with the view of Joyce as a writer of Ireland is that in the most successful part of his life he seems to have openly rejected the label. Not only did he hold on to his British passport after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, he also refused to join the Irish Academy that had been founded by the two other national poets, Shaw and Yeats, and of course he spent almost his entire writing career in continental Europe. During his lifetime Joyce never became the national poet, neither of the country under English rule nor of the Free State, because this is an acclamation that can only be made by the citizens of that state or their representatives. Joyce only began to be considered a valuable asset to his native country 40 years after his death. And a final problem: if he acknowledged that he had given voice to something, then it was not to a country, a people or a land, but to “the seventh city of Christendom.” Joyce never showed much interest in or sympathy for the rest of Ireland, with the possible exception of Cork and Galway, two cities with family connections. If Joyce saw himself as an Irish writer it was, as the Finnegans Wake quotation makes clear, in the first place as an Irish writer in a European context.
Despite all of these arguments and under the influence of a postcolonial interpretation of the history of Ireland, the Irish Joyce has been quite prominent in criticism. This is not the place to argue in full with these readings, what I will do instead is present the case for a different view of Joyce’s achievements as a writer. Of course the alternative is not that Joyce was primarily an English or a British writer. He did see his work as part of the general field of literature in English, but Joyce felt that his work belonged to a wider and decidedly European context.
Of course it is also not my intention to deny the fact that Joyce can be read as an Irish writer: critics such as Enda Duffy (1994), Vincent Cheng (1995), Christine van Boheemen-Saaf (1999), and Andrew Gibson (2002) have demonstrated that it is possible to read Joyce’s works in the light of an anti-revisionist Irish variant of postcolonial theory, just as it was once possible to read it in the light of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, or even post-Thomist Catholic philosophy. But this view of Joyce’s writing has very little to do with the way Joyce himself thought of his writing or with the way that his writing was read by his contemporaries, and these are the focus of this essay. The Irish Joyce is the result of an overtly political reading of a writer’s work that may well have implications for academic or real-life politics in the twenty-first century, but that has only tenuous connections to the writer or to his work. James Joyce saw himself explicitly as a European writer; he wrote his major works while living on the European continent, in the context of a general European culture, and this was recognized by representative critics from within that culture.
Joyce always saw literature in a much wider context than a purely Irish one and this attitude is already central to one of the earliest of his writings. In the essay he read for the Literary and Historical Society at University College he began the historical part of his argument with the Greek drama that is the most valuable “this side of the Caucasus” (OCPW 23). Then he moves on to the victory of literature over drama in England with “the Shakespearean clique” that later came to be replaced in its turn by what he calls the New School, writers who were bound (by the inner logic of the “dramatic drama”) to supplant the preceding and obsolescent forms. The stage for this discussion is explicitly international and for Joyce the old school consists of the French Corneille, the Italian Trapassi, and the Spanish Calderón (it is probably a little joke on the young critic’s part that the three have “Peter” as their given names). A casual remark may involve two European artists – “Even the least part of Wagner – his music – is beyond Bellini” (OCPW 24) – and Joyce’s frame of reference throughout is not Irish but openly European. Joyce gives Shakespeare an important role in his history of drama, but most of the members of the New School mentioned are Europeans. Both in his essay on Ibsen for the Fortnightly Review and in “The Day of the Rabblement,” Joyce defends this New School against a hostile audience. It is in the latter text that Joyce most explicitly expresses his European allegiances: he explicitly accuses the directors of the Irish Literary Theatre of breaking their promise to produce European masterpieces in Dublin: the result is that their theater “must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe.” Instead of producing Ibsen, Tolstoy, or Hauptmann, the Irish Literary Theatre “by its surrender to the trolls has cut itself adrift from the line of advancement.” Irish art has no history in drama and this lack of a tradition forces it to find influences elsewhere: all of the examples of the New School are Russian, French, Norwegian, Spanish, German, Italian, Belgian. When Joyce discusses the writers of the Irish Literary Theatre, it is clear that none of them measures up to Joyce’s exacting European standards: although George Moore may once have had a “place of honour among the English novelists,” at present he is “struggling in the backwash of that tide which has advanced from Flaubert through Jakobson to D’Annunzio” (OCPW 50 – 1).
In 1907 Joyce explained the relationship of Ireland to the rest of the world in a lecture at the Trieste Università popolare: the role of his native country in the history of Europe is stressed and the idea of a true-blood Irishness rejected, and Joyce even claims that all those of his countrymen who have some degree of self-respect should leave the country. The speaker disdains the futile appeals to past greatness and closes with the thought that he will not see the day when Erin will be once again the Hellas of the north.
When we read Joyce’s letters or the testimonies of his brother Stanislaus, we can only conclude that Richard Ellmann’s portrait of a Joyce who was extremely critical of Ireland from the very beginning of his career as a writer is not unfair. In fact, this is not essentially different from the similar image in Herbert Gorman’s biography that was corrected by Joyce himself. Gorman speaks of Joyce’s first stay in Paris as a hegira and in his description of the young Joyce in Dublin he consistently stresses the writer’s estrangement from his native culture. As early as 1902, before leaving for Paris, Joyce’s sense of alienation in Ireland is compared to the words of Dumas père in the 1850s:
Oh, gentlemen! you who are engaged in matters of French dramatic art, ponder this seriously. France, with its powers of assimilation, ought not to restrict itself to National Art. She ought to seize upon European Art, cosmopolitan, universal art – bounded in the North by Shakespeare, in the East by Aeschylus, in the South by Calderon and in the West by Corneille. It was thus that Augustus, Charlemagne and Napoleon conceived their Empires (Gorman 1941: 74).
Joyce’s decision to leave Ireland in 1904 is described in no less lofty words:
The desire, like a hot iron, had been prodding him for a long time. His disaffection with Dubliners and Dublin, an aggravation of the spirit troubling him since the autumn of 1902 when his brief wild-goose flight to Paris had given him – despite his poverty – a tantalizing taste of a broader civilization, was now an incurable malady of the mind intensified by nearly all that he saw and heard (Gorman 1941: 123).
It is all too clear to Gorman that Joyce could not possibly stay in Dublin and become a writer. Young Joyce’s disdain for Ireland was matched by his allegiance to “the great world that lay beyond the frontiers of Ireland”: not England, “but Continental Europe, the Europe of Ibsen and Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio and Giacosa and Hauptmann where a man could write without being smothered by religious and social obligations and oppressions” (Gorman 1941: 124 – 5).
It is clear from the contemporary sources and from this authorized biography that Joyce saw himself as part of a European cultural context. It is all too clear from his writings on the subject and from what his friends tell us, that he felt that he had to leave Ireland in order to become and remain a writer, despite the fact that from the beginning he almost exclusively wrote about Dublin. This impression is confirmed when we take a closer look at his work.
In the stories of Dubliners the oppressive atmosphere of the Dublin setting cannot disguise the fact that the protagonists are all attracted by a wider world: one of the reasons why the narrator of “The Sisters” is fascinated by Father Flynn is that the latter has studied in Rome and tells stories about a world beyond Dublin; the boy in the first story of the book dreams of exotic lands (“Persia, I thought”) as do the heroes of “Araby” and “Eveline.” Most of these stories oppose the meanness of present-day Dublin with an alternative that can only be found outside of Ireland: for Little Chandler the exotic is London and Paris. Even the Dublin pub where Chandler meets his old friend is foreign enough to boast waiters who speak French and German. Ignatius Gallaher does not disappoint, he addresses the waiter as “garçon” and “François.” The difference between life in Dublin and the world outside is clearest in “The Dead,” where Joyce finally goes beyond the polemics that had already been explored by George Moore in the stories of The Untilled Field. Gabriel Conroy is quite like the intellectual heroes of Moore’s Irish fiction, culturally sophisticated, with holidays on the Continent and, of course, clothes to match:
—And what are goloshes, Gabriel?
—Goloshes, Julia! exclaimed her sister. Goodness me, don’t you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your … over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?
—Yes, said Mrs Conroy. Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.
—O, on the continent, murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly (D 181).
Like Gabriel Conroy, the hero of Exiles is a European Irishman who has distinctly Continental habits: even back in Dublin Richard Rowan subscribes to Italian newspapers.
Most of the self-portraits of Joyce in his mature work are writers who have returned to Dublin but find it difficult or impossible to remain true to their vocation. Richard Rowan himself blames his exile on the “cold blighted love” of his mother (E 24), but part of his decision to go and stay away has to do with the hardness of heart that Beatrice seems to believe he has inherited from his mother. His son Archie speaks Italian and the father is keenly aware of the lack of local interest in his work (only 37 copies of his book are said to have been sold in Dublin). In that context the position at the university offered to Richard cannot be anything other than a temptation. On the other hand, his friend and supposed ally Robert Hand says that Richard’s Virginia cigars “Europeanize” him and he even claims that the new Ireland can only come into existence if she first becomes European.
In his notes to Exiles, Joyce rather pedantically makes it clear that his play must be read strictly in a European context. Not only does he refer to the inadequacy of Shakespeare and Spinoza’s description of jealousy (preferring the scholastic definition), the change of perspective from the lover to the husband is supported by reference to “the lost pages of Madame Bovary” (E 150), to two contemporary Italian plays, and to an unnamed number of works by the French writer Paul de Kock. Again the stage for this play is not strictly Irish: in the notes Joyce writes, “Europe is weary even of the Scandinavian women (Hedda Gabler, Rebecca Rosmer, Asta Allmers) whom the poetic genius of Ibsen created when the Slav heroines of Dostoievsky and Turgenev were growing stale. On what women will the light of the poet’s mind now shine? Perhaps at last on the Celt” (E 158). The characters and the playwright may be Irish, but the intended audience and the art itself are European.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses, Europe and exile are even more prominently present and although we hardly ever leave Dublin, a Continental exile seems to be always an option, in the former case as the possibility of an escape from the restrictions of Stephen’s youth, in the latter as a horizon, despite the Dublin couleur locale that gives Ulysses so much of its charm. In those chapters of Stephen Hero that have survived the theme is expressed most succinctly: in Chapter XVI Stephen’s isolation in the college could not be more pronounced and the lines are drawn all too clearly. For him, “Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy” (SH 37), and it is on his own that he develops his ideas on art: “ancient art in this context meaning art between the Balkans and the Morea and modern art meaning art anywhere between the Caucasus and the Atlantic except in the sacrosanct region.” Modern art seems to be everywhere in Europe, except in an Ireland where Stephen’s fellow students regard “art as a continental vice” (SH 38). Despite all of this, Stephen knows he is not alone:
Indeed he felt the morning in his blood: he was aware of some movement already proceeding out in Europe. Of this last phrase he was fond for it seemed to him to unroll the measurable world before the feet of the islanders (SH 39).
At the head of the new European movement in literature is Ibsen, who is the modern equivalent of Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe as “the first poet of the Europeans” (SH 46). The battle lines are clearly drawn: according to his fellow students Stephen’s essay for the Literary Society is but “a reproduction of the decadent literary opinions in the exhausted European capitals” (SH 107), a symptom of the modernist decadence that has afflicted all of Europe, except for the Emerald Isle. For young Stephen, as for the Pope, Ireland is but “the afterthought of Europe,” and in the discussion with Madden about learning Irish he argues there is nothing to be gained from a Gaelic and Catholic peasant Ireland that will turn its back on what it calls the “materialism” of the rest of the civilized world. That world is decidedly modern: an urban and secular culture that is not English but part of a wider pan-European and even “Aryan civilization.” When Madden accuses him of despising the Irish peasants because they lack sophistication, Stephen replies that he admires the Irish peasant’s cunning (SH 59). Despite the fact that the novel was never finished, it is clear from what survives of Stephen Hero that Stephen Daedalus, much like the young James Joyce as he appears in his essays and letters, saw his artistic mission as a revolt against the values of the culture he grew up in. His art was not only going to be part of a European modernity, he intended to put Ireland on the literary map and his aesthetic plans are just a part of what he intends to do with his life:
He, at least, though living at the farthest remove from the centre of European culture, marooned on an island in the ocean, though inheriting a will broken by doubt and a soul the steadfastness of whose hate became as weak as water in siren arms, would live his own life according to what he recognised as the voice of a new humanity, active, unafraid and unashamed (SH 199).
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen devotes much less time and space to the discussions about life and art with his family and friends, but the general outline of his relationship with Ireland and with Europe remains the same.
Stephen Dedalus is not quite at home in Ireland and from the beginning of the book he is acutely aware of his precarious position in the culture he has grown up in. His awareness of his own mission is consistently mirrored in the growing distance between his artistic ambitions on the one hand and the values of those around him, family, friends, and teachers, on the other. Continental Europe offers the possibility of a different kind of life and it is especially in his diary at the end of the novel that young Stephen most clearly expresses his disgust with the Celtic Ireland that some of his fellow students dream of, as when he writes about the deep thoughts that were brought back from the west of Ireland by one of his friends or when he mentions the spell of arms and voices, as the arms of roads or of tall ships that “are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth” (P 213). Stephen sees himself as a relative of the foreign voices that will carry him away from Dublin and Ireland.
Although we find out in the first chapter of Ulysses that the young poet’s escape was all too brief, in returning from Paris Stephen has definitely acquired a European aura that is recognized by family and friends. Buck Mulligan has taken over the role of
Stephen’s sparring partner and from the beginning of the book the differences between them are pronounced. Like the other Dublin tempters in Joyce’s work, Mulligan proposes a project of Europeanizing (here Hellenizing) Ireland, but it is clear that Stephen believes Mulligan has more in common with his Oxford friend Haines. Buck complains of Stephen’s “Paris fad” of drinking his tea black, he refers to Stephen’s headgear as a “Latin quarter hat.” Later on in the book professor MacHugh claims that Stephen’s loose tie looks like that of a Paris communard and Myles Crawford hopes that the young writer will follow in the footsteps of none other than Ignatius Gallaher in order to fulfil the ambition to “paralyse Europe as Ignatius Gallaher used to say” (U 7 628).
In the discussions with Mulligan and Haines in the first chapter Stephen is exposed to the different options available to the young Irishmen of his generation but he refuses them all. He will not serve the British Crown, neither will he show allegiance to the Roman Church or the Irish cause. The native option is ironically dismissed when the milkmaid, the real-life representative of the Irish folk, turns out to think that Haines’ Irish is French. Ironically it is the Britisher Haines that seems to be the only person in the room capable of speaking the language of the oppressed. For the three Irishmen present Irish as a language is at best something only for “them that knows,” and more important is the cost of the milk, which the possibly illiterate woman calculates quickly and quite effortlessly.
There is a clear distinction in Joyce’s writing between those who leave Dublin and those who stay behind: even the returned exiles dress and speak differently, eat and drink differently. They wear Latin quarter hats, smoke bandit cigars, drink their coffee black and put lemon in their tea. In the case of Stephen these habits are mirrored by his multi-lingual erudition, which is nowhere more evident than in the monologue intérieur of the “Proteus” chapter. And it is here too that we are given information about Stephen’s brief Continental adventure. The young artist still rejects his native land, probably for the same reasons as in Stephen Hero and A Portrait, but the possibility of an escape (and thus of a genuine artistic career) seems to be no longer available. When he talks with the Dublin journalists and intellectuals in “Aeolus” or “Scylla and Charybdis,” he is keenly aware that he is seen as a promising figure but that unlike his friend Mulligan he does not yet belong to the inner circle of young writers around George Moore, the sole representative in Dublin of the new European literature.
Leopold Bloom represents not just a new character in Joyce’s fiction, but one that, as John McCourt has demonstrated, represents a type of person that belonged more to Trieste than to Dublin. Not only is Bloom l’homme moyen sensuel, as an uncircumcised and non-kosher Jew he is an outsider in any company he finds himself in. Despite the fact that he was born in Ireland and feels Irish, nobody else in the book seems to be willing to accept him as one of their own. When we first meet him, the sunlight in the street makes him dream of an exotic East and one of the first things we learn of him is that his wife is Spanish and that he is fond of olives, lemons, and oranges. Yet in this and the other Bloom chapters there is very little on his mind that distinguishes Bloom from all the other inhabitants of Dublin. His alterity seems to be wholly in the mind of the beholder, just like Bloom thinks of Nannetti: “Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country” (U 7 87 – 8). It does not even seem to occur to him that according to the same logic he himself would not be Irish. In “Aeolus” it is professor McHugh who makes the point that the Irish, with the Jews and Greeks, are a spiritual race that can only stand in opposition to the materialism of the Roman and the British empires: “We are liege subjects of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an imperium, that went under with the fleet at Aegospotami” (U 7 565 – 8). Later on, in “Scylla and Charybdis,” the talk of the Dublin intelligentsia concerns itself almost as much with European writers as it does with the minutiae of Shakespeare research. Despite the fact that all of them seem to be aware that a new generation of Irish writers is ready to make their mark, “Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it” (U 9 309–10).
From what we learn of Bloom’s way of thinking, in his interior monologue, in his discussions with others, and even in his hallucinations in “Circe,” it is clear that he is a socialist and secularist, who will publicly argue against religious and nationalist bigotry, if need be. In a way Bloom, more than Stephen, represents Joyce’s own political and ideological position. As a relative outsider to both the church and the nation, he can comment on both, but from a distance that is unavailable to Stephen. The latter’s position towards Ireland and to its place in Europe does not seem to have changed at all since the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Neither Stephen nor any other narrative instance in the book demonstrates any kind of sympathy with the nationalist or anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by minor characters such as Haines, Deasy, the Citizen, or Skin-the-Goat.
When Stephen does address the issue of his own allegiance to Ireland, he hides behind mockery, as when he tells Bloom that the latter is mistaken in thinking that he must be important because he belongs to “the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short” (U 16 1160–1), whereas perhaps the exact opposite is the case: “But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” (U 16 1164–5). When Bloom fails to understand what he means, Stephen replies, “We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject” (U 16 1171). The young artist has reached the point where Bloom’s socialist and anti-nationalist utopia of universal brotherhood (“Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state,” U 15 1693) is no longer attractive. It is this sense of disenchantment with politics in Stephen that may have given Richard Ellmann and other critics the impression that after the First World War Joyce himself had become noncommittal in political issues. But reading through his correspondence it is impossible to document any change of heart on the crucial issues of religion, aesthetics, or politics.
This is also evident in Finnegans Wake: again Joyce writes about Dublin and once more his hero is not Irish. Both HCE and Shem are foreigners: they dress and eat differently. The latter is even accused of being a farsoonerite: “he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea” (FW 171 5–6). The Shaun-tike narrator claims that the artist figure Shem is everything except genuinely Irish:
an Irish emigrant the wrong way out, sitting on your crookedsixpenny stile, an unfrill-frocked quackfriar, you (will you for the laugh of Scheekspair just help mine with the epithet?) semi-semitic serendipitist, you (thanks, I think that describes you) Europasianised Afferyank! (FW 190 36–191 4)
It is in the figures of Shem and Shaun (Cain and Abel) that Joyce has most clearly pictured the artist figure that we already know from the autobiographical fiction as the counterpart of the mentality of his native land represented by his twin brother Shaun. Shem is like the other autobiographical figures in Joyce’s fiction: he is “self exiled in upon his ego” (FW 184 6–7) and at the end of Book I Chapter 7 he is directly accused by his brother:
a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul (FW 188 13–17).
Like his writer-characters Joyce could only become a writer by a deliberate form of self-exile on the European continent and, when he continued to write about Ireland, it was with the same critical distance as most modernist writers of his generation show their own particular national or social origins. Joyce seems to have started his career as a writer in roughly the same way that he had described in his autobiographical fiction, and we have seen that the idea of what he was doing remained constant in his work until the end of his writing career. But this self-understanding was also very much part of the way he presented his work to the reading public and this is clear from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man onwards when after the final words of the novel about the hero leaving his fatherland we read the triumphant words
Dublin, 1904.
Trieste, 1914. (P 213)
These names and dates mark the successful attempt by the artist as a young man to escape Ireland and to become, after an apprenticeship of ten years, the writer who has become capable of finding a new way to describe the process that has made him a writer in the first place. When we read of Joyce’s efforts to publish his early works, when we follow the negotiations about Dubliners with his Irish publishers, it is obvious that Joyce the writer has exactly the same ideas about his artistic ambitions as Stephen Dedalus. Like the other cosmopolitan writer George Moore in his Irish works The Untilled Field, The Lake, and Hail and Farewell, Joyce seems to have come to the conclusion that it was impossible to be a writer in Ireland. When we look at his reactions to the period of the Troubles and the civil war and to the first two decades of the Free State, we can only conclude that on this important topic he never really changed his mind.
This is also quite clear when we read of Joyce’s life in Trieste, Rome, Zurich, and Paris. Although he continued to be interested in Dublin and the minutiae of life there, he was all too aware that he would never have been able to become a writer if he had not left. So he stayed away. In the 1920s he even developed ideas about Ireland that old Dublin friends such as C. P. Curran found outrageous: when in the summer of 1922 his wife and children had been caught in the crossfire between the IRA and Free State troops in Galway, Joyce insisted on considering the incident an attack against his own person.
More positively, the rejection of Ireland (in this case an objective and subjective genitive) is impossible to understand without the realization that as a writer he felt he belonged to a larger context than that of Ireland. We have already seen that the frame of reference of the young man was a modern movement on a scale that was not only much larger than Ireland but most assuredly also wider than that of English literature. While still in Dublin he was apparently keeping up with the new literatures from Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Norway, and Belgium; in most cases he even read these works in the original language. In Pola, Trieste, and Zurich he kept up this interest in European literature and he continued to read German, Italian, and French contemporary writers. It was only relatively late in his career, in Paris, that he seems to have adopted (or pretended to adopt) the Olympian stance that he did not read contemporary authors, an attitude mirrored in Nora Joyce’s excuse after the war when André Gide asked about the other writers she had met: “Sure, if you’ve been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don’t remember all the little fellows” (JJ 743). In reality Joyce’s relations with other writers in the European cities where he spent most of his life do show that he saw not only his own work but also theirs as part of a context that included the best works by the best writers in all European languages. When he first read Italo Svevo’s novels he told the Italian writer that there were passages in Senilità that even Anatole France could not improve upon (JJ 272).
Joyce saw his work as part of a European context, not as the literature of Ireland or even of what is now sometimes called “literature in English.” This is clear when we look at the care he took in choosing translators in the different European countries (O’Neill 2005) and in helping his work along in all these different national and cultural contexts by advising and sometimes even choosing his own critics, an attitude documented in the case studies collected in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe.
One of the moments when Joyce seems to have been most conscious of the manner in which his work should be presented to the reading public was in the 1920s, when he had just decided to spend his middle years in Paris and not in London, where he was originally headed. Ellmann puts it like this: “He came to Paris to stay a week and remained for twenty years” (JJ 482). Although there may have been other and more practical reasons for his failure to move on to London, it was certainly important to Joyce that he found an unexpected acceptance in a Parisian literary culture that had been carefully prepared for his arrival by Ezra Pound. In his interesting study Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon Joseph Kelly has claimed that beginning in 1914 the American writers Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot managed to turn the basically Irish writer who wrote for an Irish audience into the international writer of modern classic works. It is clear that Pound and Eliot saw Joyce’s work as belonging to the same wider European context that they themselves considered the real playing field of modernist literature, not English or Irish literature. This was true not just for the way in which Joyce’s work should be read but also for how it could be read. In a letter to John Quinn, Pound pointed out that “an Irish catholic with local knowledge has very little advantage over the outsider with good grounding in literature when it comes to understanding The Portrait” (Deming 1970: 113). Against Kelly it should first be admitted that the context that was described in the first part of this essay shows that Joyce by 1914 did not need lessons in European modernism from the two American poets. In its attempt to defend Joyce against American cosmopolitanism, Kelly’s book fails to see Joyce’s work in the context that the author himself chose for his work – and that is a decidedly European one.
In this context Valery Larbaud’s efforts for Joyce’s reputation are crucial. After the war Larbaud had become one of the influential voices of the most modern trends in French literature. His endorsement of Ulysses was just as important to Joyce’s reputation in France as it was on the rest of the European continent, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, and in Ireland. In France it established Joyce, seven years before the translation of Ulysses, as a classic in the modernist and European vein. In his discussion of the French reception Sam Slote has pointed out that virtually “all reviews of Joyce’s work in France in the 1920s and 30s (and many elsewhere) refer to Larbaud’s essay” (Lernout and Van Mierlo 2004: 363). On most of the Continent and especially in those countries where France was considered as the arbiter of literature and culture, the publication of the lecture in Nouvelle revue française (NRF) was usually the first thing that readers heard of Joyce and it was Larbaud’s portrait of the artist as a European modernist that most often established the earliest reception of Joyce’s works in many different countries. Famously, Larbaud stressed that Joyce was Irish in a European and decidedly non-English vein: “He is what we call a pure ‘Milesian’: Irish and Catholic of old stock, from the Ireland that benefits from some affinities with Spain, France, and Italy, but for whom England is a strange land which cannot be made closer even by the commonality of language” and he made the claim that with Joyce’s Ulysses “Ireland made a sensational re-entry into European literature.” As Slote points out, this description of Joyce’s position almost certainly would have been impossible without the author’s own input (Lernout and Van Mierlo 2004; Deming 1970: 363).
The claim for Joyce as a European writer was not without its international impact: the Irish-American literary critic Ernest Boyd, who had published a book on the Irish renaissance, replied in the May 28, 1922, issue of the New York Herald Tribune. First Boyd did not believe that there was any such thing as a European literature and in any case Joyce could only be understood within the compass of “the facts of Ireland’s literary and intellectual evolution” (Deming 1970: 302). Boyd argued that Joyce’s work even refutes the idea that the book could be European: “To claim for this book a European significance simultaneously denied to J. M. Synge and James Stephens is to confess complete ignorance of its genesis, and to invest its content with a mysterious import which the actuality of references would seem to deny” (Deming 1970: 305).
Boyd’s essay (and the controversy that followed) was welcome enough for Joyce, who urged his friend Larbaud to answer the attack with another essay that was published in the Nouvelle revue française in 1925. By that time Boyd had written another article in the New York The World in which he merely repeated his profound disagreement with Larbaud’s démarche which he now described as an attempt to turn Joyce into a “coterie author” (Deming 1970: 321). Without going into detail, this debate was not between a sophisticated French writer and a benighted Irish isolationist: in 1917 Joyce had thanked Boyd for his review of A Portrait in New Ireland and Boyd explained in his essay how difficult it had been to publish a number of positive reviews of that book in the pages of Irish nationalist magazines that were extremely critical of Joyce and of the other writers of the revival. Boyd had been educated in Switzerland and Germany and in a way he did for French literature what Larbaud had done for English writers. He collected and edited the stories of Balzac and Maupassant, translated Anatole France, and wrote introductions for Zola’s Nana and Casanova’s Mémoires.
The terms of the discussion between Larbaud and Boyd clearly demonstrate that the issue of Joyce as an Irish or as a European writer was present at the very beginning of Joyce’s international literary career. His status as a European writer seems to have been equally important to the early English or American critics who do not tire of comparing him with other European writers. Critics hostile to A Portrait and Ulysses claim that he is an Irish Zola, whereas Margaret Anderson compares A Portrait favorably to Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe and to the Danish writer Martin Anderson Nexo’s Pelle the Conqueror (Deming 1970: 118) and Hart Crane finds only Baudelaire to compare with the author of Ulysses (Deming 1970: 124). Although Joyce was an enthusiastic self-promoter from the start, he could not have foreseen that the mostly sexual “scandal of Ulysses” would have an intellectual counterpart with the Larbaud – Boyd discussion, and it was especially the translation of the NRF piece in Eliot’s Criterion that made an impression on critics in Ireland and England. In Nation & Athenaeum John Middleton Murry specifically argued against the notion of Ulysses as part of “high European literature” (Deming 1970: 195), which he rather idiosyncratically defines as “the artistic acknowledgement of and submission to the social tradition of Europe.” Murry sees Joyce as an anarchist whose extreme individualism makes him “the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky,” but his excessive anarchism has made him “socially harmless” (Deming 1970: 196). Murry merely confirms that Joyce belongs to the European literary avant-garde.
That this association was important to Joyce is clear when we look at the ways in which Joyce engineered the reception of his work into the major European countries: Italy, France, Germany. First of all he seems to have made sure that the translations of his work appeared in the right chronology: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before Ulysses. When we look at the way in which his work was read in those European countries that Joyce himself took an interest in, it is clear that despite local differences almost all of the early readers of his work seem to have agreed on the fact that this Irish writer wrote European literature. That even without interference from Joyce local critics could see his work in European terms is demonstrated by the earliest Italian review of A Portrait in the Florentine journal Il Marzocco. Without Joyce’s “help” Diego Angeli read the novel in precisely such terms that seem to have been so welcome to Joyce that he translated the review himself for inclusion in The Egoist. Angeli claimed that as an Irishman Joyce “has found in himself the strength to proclaim himself a citizen of a wider world,” and as a writer, “inheriting the most traditionalist of all European literatures, he has found a way to break free from the tradition of the old English novel and to adopt a new style consonant with a new conception” (Deming 1970: 114). The end of the review even captures some of the tone of the final paragraph of “The Day of the Rabblement”: “We must welcome [James Joyce] with joy. He is one of those rude craftsmen who open paths whereupon many will yet follow. It is the first streaks of the dawn of a new art visible on the horizon. Let us hail it therefore as the herald of a new day” (Deming 1970: 116). At least one Italian critic did not need Joyce himself to come to this conclusion.
Because neither English nor French were widely read or taught in Germany, the real reception of Joyce’s work only began in 1927 with the publication of Ulysses in translation. In his early article in the October 1925 issue of Die literarische Welt, Ernst Robert Curtius (a specialist in French and European literature) began by saying that many considered Ulysses “the Divine Comedy of our age” (Füger 2000: 106) and he ended with the statement:
No matter what one’s final conclusions about Joyce’s work are, it is impossible to deny that as a monumental project it is much superior to the unadventurous and pretentious modernism of much contemporary literature. Its unmistakable greatness can only appear where decades of absorption in the grand traditions of the European spirit are coupled with real originality and tireless artistic labour(Füger 2000: 108).
It is not clear how much Curtius had benefited from Joyce’s direct help (already in 1924 Joyce had given Curtius’ name as a possible German translator of Ulysses), but as a specialist in French literature who in 1919 had published a book on the innovators of French literature, Curtius certainly knew of Larbaud. In the introduction to his essay he mentions that Larbaud’s photo was displayed at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in Paris, which he called “the headquarters of the Joyce community” (106) and in his book Französischer Geist im neuen Europa (1925a) he had written about Joyce’s influence on Larbaud.
For the period immediately after the publication of the German Ulysses, Breon Mitchell has documented the enormous stylistic influence of Ulysses on the work-in-progress of three prominent German modernist writers, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Hans Henny Jahnn’s Perrudja (1929), and Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler (1931 – 2). This success among peers was almost certainly responsible for the surprisingly central role of Joyce in the expressionism debate among German and Soviet Marxists that has been discussed in detail by Robert Weninger in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Whether one rejected Joyce as a bourgeois decadent, like Karl Radek and Georg Lukács, or whether one defended his stylistic innovations, as Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht did, both parties in this debate accepted the Irish writer’s central role in European literature.
We may not agree with Larbaud’s analysis of the central importance of Joyce’s Ulysses in the European literature of his day, but we cannot deny two facts. One is that this view coincided with Joyce’s self-understanding and the other that all over Europe critics and writers read Joyce’s work initially from Larbaud’s perspective. In most cases the acceptance or dismissal of Joyce’s contribution to European literature had more to do with whether one accepted or dismissed the general drift of “modern” (not necessarily modernist) European literature between the two wars.
There is one aspect of Joyce’s work that is too easily overlooked nowadays, both in the increasingly monolingual English-speaking world and in an increasingly bilingual Europe where more and more people speak English as a second language. Joyce was an actively multi-lingual writer whose frame of reference was not just the literature of Ireland and England, but also that of France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway. At least on one level, and no matter what other reasons Joyce may have had for his artistic choices, Finnegans Wake represents an attempt to capture Ireland as a part of Europe in its multi-cultural but also multilingual reality. Ironically it is this aspect of his final work that today makes the book so difficult to read. People like Joyce and Beckett who could read Latin, French, Italian, and German are a dying breed in Ireland, in the United Kingdom, and in the countries on the European continent where only English has survived as a second language. Whereas the interest in English has created a larger market for Joyce’s earlier works, future readers of Finnegans Wake all over Europe will need more and more annotations and translations.
The evidence in his criticism and his theoretical essays, in his literary works and his correspondence, and finally in testimonies of friends and family, demonstrates that Joyce saw himself as part of a European modernist literature. In most European countries his work was read in that context and his novels were rejected or accepted accordingly. The early reception of Joyce’s work in the Irish Free State shows that his major works were rejected precisely for this reason: Joyce was thought to belong to the group of modern writers in Europe. It was only in the 1980s, when Ireland began to transform itself into a modern European state, that Joyce’s work was finally accepted on his own terms. Some writers seem to be too important to belong exclusively to their native country: some of them are forced into exile, like Dante; others leave of their own accord, like Joyce and Beckett. Just as Samuel Beckett is not French, James Joyce is not Irish. Neither of them wanted to be merely Irish and this might be a good time to acknowledge that both of them do belong to that select group of national poets of a Europe that now includes Ireland and the United Kingdom: Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett.
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