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James Joyce: Two Sides to the Matter
| Article
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14429 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
4,821 Words |
| Author
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William M. Chace
William M. Chace is professor of English and assistant provost
at Stanford University. He is the author of Lionel Trilling:
Criticism and Politics (Stanford University Press, 1980) and
The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
(Stanford University Press, 1973). |
Writing in 1906 to the British publisher Grant Richards about the fate of his collection of short stories, Dubliners (unpublished until 1914), James Joyce responded to Richards' fears that the book might be considered libelous or obscene. In stating exactly where he stood, Joyce set forth his plan for the book and also announced his credo:
"My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written... I can see plainly that there are two sides to the matter but unfortunately I can occupy only one of them."
Joyce is here explaining how he will write and how he will negotiate with stupid and timid middlemen. The writing will be a matter of arrangement, the negotiations, a matter of obstinacy. In the first, Joyce will, with "scrupulous meanness," cover much ground, from childhood to maturity. In the second, occupying only one side, he will stay fixed. If this is a contradiction, larger contradictions elsewhere abound in his career; let us cite several.
Joycean Contradictions
·Joyce, one of the most worldly and cosmopolitan of all writers, remained unmistakably Irish. By confining himself to one provincial city, he succeeded in escaping from that city. Nothing in his books takes place outside of Dublin and its environs, yet he is rightly seen as a writer whose technical virtuosity allowed him to transcend the claustrophobia of a particular geography.
·By remaining steadfast to the dictates of literary realism, Joyce transformed that realism. Like Gustave Flaubert before him, he closely controlled and calculated everything going into his books. For Ulysses, the minutes of a single day were measured, as were the steps people in that day would take in getting from point A to point B in Dublin. Temperature, street names, the look and sound of pubs, the names of ships due at the North Wall port of the city, the exact dimensions of a certain real stairwell on a certain real street: All was fitted,
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