Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism

The Portrait depicts the Artist alone; Ulysses presents the Artist seeking Everyman to be atoned; and Finnegans Wake gives "Allmen." That, at least, is a plausible view of the work of James Augustine Joyce. And there is the paradox that gives credence to this view: Joyce was among the most autobiographical of artists and the most impersonal, the most self-obsessed and also the most dramatically universal. There is really no paradox at all: he simply pushed his subjective will so far that it became superfluous to distinguish between subject and object, self and world.

n Electric Sign goes Dark
POLAND, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle's cork.

'Won't you come and play wiz me,' she sang . . . . and 'I just can't make my eyes behave.'
'Higgeldy-Piggeldy,' 'Papa's Wife,' 'Follow Me' were plays.

Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? the news-papers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Twenty years old . . . thirty . . . forty . . .
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France.

A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw . . . legs, torso, head . . . on a hotel bed at The Savoy.

The white chisellings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.

She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.
She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiselling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song.

Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the
North-West, stock-ranchers in the Middle West, mayors of southern cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead.

Thus is Joyce's modern answer to the age-old problem of man's identity in relation to the rest of the universe. If the answers of the past were ultimately different, Joyce has subsumed them into his equation. His particular formations of the mundane and the extraordinary, the dross and the gold are the substance of his art--enormous as human experience, microscopic as the seedcake on Howth. Making the modern world on one day in Dublin into a paradigm of all of everything is Joyce's unique gift, the source of his modernity, and the greatness of his art.

The Middle Ages exploited Antiquity within their own frames, and they were succeeded by a new departure which rediscovered more of Antiquity differently, and was aptly named Renaissance. Ultramodernist Joyce always turned back to the classics, Aristotle, Homer, Ovid; to medieval figures like Augustine, Aquinas, Dante; and later to Giordano Bruno, Nicolas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, or Shakespeare. History, Vico, and Finnegans Wake all say that each impulse of new life is a revival. Some such revivals, like the Irish Renaissance, appeared to Joyce too narrow-mindedly nostalgic. His backward looks were far more radical. If anyone, Joyce was always altering, remodeling times, including his own past. A Portrait puts this into words and style. Dubliners went into Finnegans Wake and Finnegans Wake changed Dubliners for us.