James Joyce

Whether we know it or not, Joyce's court is, like Dante's or Tolstoy's, always in session. The initial and determining act of judgment in his work is the justification of the commonplace. Other writers had labored tediously to portray it, but no one knew what the commonplace really was until Joyce had written. There is nothing like Joyce's commonplace in Tolstoy, where the characters, however humble, live dramatically and instill wisdom or tragedy in each other. Joyce was the first to endow an urban man of no importance with heroic consequence. For a long time his intention was misunderstood: it was assumed he must be writing satire. How else justify so passionate an interest in the lower middle class?

Marxist critics leaped to attack him, and Joyce said gently to his friend Eugene Jolas, "I don't know why they attack me. Nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds." To look into a city was common enough after Zola, but to find Ulysses there was reckless and impudent. It was an idea quite alien, too, to Irish writers of the time. Yeats was aristocratic and demanded distinctions between men; Joyce was all for removing them. Shaw was willing to accept any man so long as he was eloquent, thinking in fits and starts, without Shaw's desire to be emphatic or convincing . . .

Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.

To come to this conclusion Joyce had to see joined what others had held separate: the point of view that life is unspeakable and to be exposed, and the point of view that it is ineffable and to be distilled. Nature may be a horrible document, or a secret revelation; all may be resolvable into brute body, or into mind and mental components. Joyce lived between the antipodes and above them: his brutes show a marvelous capacity for brooding, his pure minds find bodies remorselessly stuck to them. To read Joyce is to see reality rendered without the simplification of conventional divisions.

Richard Ellmann, from the introduction to James Joyce



Commentary: First of all what strikes me about this passage is the remark about Marxist critics defaming Joyce. It seems that Marxist critics have a history of picking on literature as a bourgeois establishment. Just a couple weeks ago it was my luck to discover some thinly-veiled Marxist blogs defaming the present literary luminary James Wood. But that's a small observation and perhaps a hard connection to make.

Ellmann's James Joyce is considered a model biography, second only to Boswell's Life of Johnson. I'm reading them both to gain an understanding of the form. I plan to sit down to write a biography of the celebrated author Richard Stern in the next year, after a series of interviews take place.

But let's get back to the passage. What stirs me about it? Ellmann talks about Joyce's "justification of the commonplace." Why does the commonplace need justification? These questions are open. Because we have come so far from Joyce, it may be difficult to see the pattern of relation. Right now the individual, every individual, is heroic, even God-like. I suggest this attitude by our IPhones and IPods and endless products we arraign ourselves with to show our importance to the world. Today we make ourselves into heroes, whether it is by writing memoirs or by finding communities to stand out in. James Joyce and Modernism, Ellmann might posit were he alive today, is where this attitude of self-heroism begins.

And then, the last part of the passage I have reproduced here is also enlightening. Ellmann writes, "the point of view that life is unspeakable and to be exposed, and the point of view that it is ineffable and to be distilled." I like this even though I'm not fully sure I know what he means by it. He seems to imply that we have a means to express the inexpressible through art. And further, that Joyce portrayed human reality through complex mixtures of mind and body.

That the ordinary is extraordinary is easy enough to understand intellectually, but to truly grasp it is to be arrested in a moment of life and realize beauty, or sadness, or shame, or light, coming out of everything.

Cheers, and don't forget to Stumble me!