In search of James Joyce

Abstract

In searching, we tend to discover what we set out to find. Stumb ling upon a new continent, we may not recognize it. We are likely, in fact, to give it the name of an old one?the one we were looking for in the first place. In mental search, where we are not likely to be con fronted by anything so solid and hard to explain away as a new conti nent, it is even more difficult to discover anything but the original object of our search. Which is why we must be very careful in desig nating that object. The object of my search for James Joyce, it should be said at once, is not the Sunny Jim whose youthful gaiety brightened a peripatetic Dublin household. Nor is it the young man whose air of seedy hau teur annoyed and intimidated the literati of his native city, nor the bitter bank clerk of the Eternal City, the casual but pedantic teacher of languages, the sado-masochistic voyeur, the epistolary copro philiac, the self-centered sponge, or the tender parent. In short, the biographical Joyce (Ellmann's Joyce, if you will) is not the one who interests me here. I acknowledge his relevance and his reality, but I am looking for another, without whom the biographical Joyce would merely be an eccentric and pathetic Irishman, like his father and some of his other relatives. I am looking for Joyce the artist and Joyce the thinker?a kind of super-Joyce, who took his sustenance from the biographical figure but cannot be accounted for or understood by biography alone. The super-self of many a weak and venal artist has given strength and comfort to others which the man's life may seem almost to mock. Art is one of the places where we transcend ourselves and become better than we are. How Joyce's mind worked when he turned it to artistic questions?this is my true subject. My aim is to understand the workings of this mind so as to read Joyce's works with the fullest possible comprehension of meaning and attitude, tone and nuance. My method is not simply to give my own readings of the major works for others to admire and emulate?far from it. Rather I shall look for the roots of Joyce's way of writing in his early literary and critical productions, only partially tracing them through his later works. I shall be concerned to set his early works against their proper intellec tual background, to formulate the problems they raise, to consider the solutions they offer. Ultimately, I hope to generate a view of Joyce's mind and art which will prove useful to all those who, like myself, feel that his work deserves the fullest possible comprehension.

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