BORDER CROSSING: JAMES JOYCE IN MEXICO

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 30, Number 5 (May 2019), p. 5.

Several years ago, I used as the epigraph on the syllabus of my Recent Irish Writing course this wonderful observation by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes: “The English language has always been alive and kicking, and if it ever becomes drowsy, there will always be an Irishman.” I thought of that quotation recently as I read Pedro Páramo, a short novel by another Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo (1918-1986).  My interest in the novel, first published in Spanish in 1955, was piqued in part by my understanding that it may have been influenced by Rulfo’s reading of James Joyce.  Reading Rulfo, I was definitely on the lookout for affinities between Pedro Páramo and Joyce’s “damned monster novel” (as he described it)—Ulysses.

I read the text of Rulfo’s novel before I read Susan Sontag’s Foreword to the translation by Margaret Sayers Peden.  When I did read Sontag, I was struck by how closely her description of the novel’s central concern resonated with the Joycean affinities I had scribbled down in my readerly notetaking: “The novel’s premise—a dead mother sending her son out into the world, a son’s quest for his father—mutates into a multivoiced sojourn in hell.”  As readers of Joyce know, the opening episode of 

Ulysses, “Telemachus,” reintroduces Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Having returned to Dublin from a brief sojourn in Paris to keep vigil at his dying mother’s bedside, Stephen remains conflicted almost a year later by the memory of his mother: “Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.”  Just pages later, the character Haines attempts to engage Stephen in an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.”

Of course, each of these references could be read simply as a common literary motif or trope.  But the further I read in Pedro Páramo the more I was reminded of an admission made by Stephen in “Nestor,” the second episode of Ulysses. Remembering Haines’s casual remark that “It seems history is to blame” for political friction between Ireland and Britain, Stephen explains himself to the officious headmaster of the school where he teaches: “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  As the novel unfolds, the reader discovers that for Stephen—and likewise for his co-protagonist, Leopold Bloom—“history” is not just general (political, economic, social, cultural, and so on) but personal.  Ditto for Juan Preciado, the protagonist of Pedro Páramo.  Late in Rulfo’s novel, the reader recognizes that some of the action channels La Cristiada, the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, as well as the earlier Mexican Revolution of 1910-20.  But much of the novel focuses not on those events but on Juan’s “personal” history relative to his mother, his father, and the lost world—the ghost town—of Comala.  And it is really in Rulfo’s inscription of Juan Preciado’s search for his father that Pedro Páramo resonates most meaningfully with Joyce’s Ulysses.

The theme of “the nightmare of history” permeates Ulysses, but two episodes in particular speak tellingly to Rulfo’s narrative.  The first of these is the sixth episode, “Hades,” in which Leopold Bloom, attending the burial of his friend Paddy Dignam in Glasnevin Cemetery, effectively makes the same descent into the underworld that Odysseus makes in Homer’s The Odyssey, the text that provides Joyce with the elaborate scaffolding for his narrative.  Tracing the route of Dignam’s funeral cortège across Dublin, Joyce invites the alert reader to recognize that the various statues and monuments commemorating Irish political figures that line the city’s thoroughfares—Sir Philip Crampton, William Smith O’Brien, Daniel O’Connell, Sir John Gray, Lord Nelson, Charles Stewart Parnell—represent not just a sampling from “the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture” (a fine phrase Joyce coined in Stephen Hero, a rough draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) but a manifestation of how history—the past, memory of the past—constantly infiltrates the mind and the imagination of the individual.  (In the Homeric parallel, these figures also have their counterparts in The Odyssey.)

Obviously, Joyce continues this conceit within the grounds of the cemetery itself, referring overtly to O’Connell’s grave and Parnell’s grave.  Relative to Rulfo, however, the more significant passages in “Hades” are those describing first the stonecutter’s yard and then Prospect Cemetery that the cortège passes en route to Glasnevin: 

The stonecutter’s yard on the right. . . .  Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing.  Fragments of shapes, hewn.  In white silence: appealing.

The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze.  Dark poplars, rare white forms.  Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.

In her Foreword to Pedro Páramo, Susan Sontag quotes Rulfo as saying that the structure of his novel is “made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time.”  In Leopold Bloom’s case, the public memory associated with the statues and the monuments eventually gives way to his private memory of his father who committed suicide and his son Rudy who died in infancy.  In Juan Preciado’s case, countlessfigures from the past, their names mere whispers, populate the ghost town that his dead father still presides over.

And that brings me to the other episode of Ulysses that I believe informs Pedro Páramo both thematically and structurally: that is the fifteenth episode, “Circe.”  Fortunately for his boundless legion of readers, Joyce shared with three friends—Carlos Linati, Herbert Gorman, and Stuart Gilbert—complementary versions of a schema in which he labels the episode’s “Technic” as “Vision animated to bursting point” or, more simply, “Hallucination.”  Many Joyce scholars agree that the term “phantasmagoria” is also apt to describe the effect of “Circe.”  While Rulfo’s novel does not resemble “Circe” stylistically (Joyce’s text is written on the page in the form of an expressionistic drama, as if intended to be performed on stage), it nonetheless shares with this climactic episode of Ulysses the idea that the individual carries within himself or herself an elaborate personal “nightmare of history” that needs to be awakened from.  No less than the vast cast of characters encountered by Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in “Circe,” the elusive and spectral figures encountered by Juan Preciado in Pedro Páramo represent forces—some in his consciousness, some in his subconscious—that he must engage with, confront, and subdue.

For Stephen Dedalus the awakening from the nightmare is dramatic and emphatic, taking place when, rejecting the phantasmagoric specter of his mother, he declares: “The intellectual imagination!  With me all or not at all.  Non serviam!”  He then punctuates his declaration by smashing a chandelier with his ashplant.  For Bloom the awakening is poignant, coming in his vision of his son as a changeling—a fairy child—fulfilling his father’s dream in an alternative world.  For Juan Preciado, whose return to Comala has led him into the collective unconscious of a community ravaged and then decimated by the sins of his father, the awakening occurs in the last sentence of Pedro Páramo, in his vision of his father brought low by his inability to escape “the nights that filled the darkness with phantoms” of his deplorable past: “He fell to the ground with a thud, and lay there, collapsed like a pile of rocks.”

WHEN IN PARIS . . .

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 7 (July 2010), 14.

A particularly satisfying moment in James Joyce’s Ulysses occurs in the third episode of the novel, when Stephen Dedalus, unhappily sharing living quarters in a Martello tower in Sandycove with the irreverent Buck Mulligan and miserably holding down a teaching position in a private boys’ school in nearby Dalkey, recalls his sojourn in Paris cut short by a summons to his dying mother’s bedside back in Dublin almost a full year earlier: “My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P.C.N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to.” In light of Stephen’s self-inflating assertion at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”—this self-deprecating musing on the bohemian pose he struck in Paris is truly refreshing, as he finally shows a capacity to look at himself with a healthy measure of the irony with which Joyce (the artist as an older man) viewed his quasi-autobiographical character in A Portrait.

I was thinking of that moment, among others in Ulysses, during a recent visit to Paris in which I walked a few miles in the footsteps of both the fictional Stephen Dedalus and the real-life expatriate Joyce himself. Probably the best account of Joyce’s several periods of living in “The City of Light” is Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of Joyce first published in 1959 and revised in 1982. He devotes parts of two early chapters to Joyce’s first two visits to Paris, several weeks in December of 1902 and then a period from January to April of 1903 which ended abruptly when the artist as a young man received a dismaying telegram from his father: “MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.” These visits provided Joyce with the raw material for Stephen’s recollection of his quickly aborted career as a French medical student as well as for Stephen’s obviously inauspicious start as an expatriate artist.

Introducing Joyce’s next extended visit to Paris, which began in July of 1920, Ellmann writes matter-of-factly: “He came to Paris to stay a week and remained for twenty years.” (Between 1904 and 1920, Joyce had lived variously in Pola, Rome, Trieste, and Zurich.) And that is the point where I really began to trace a few of the steps taken by Joyce—in particular the steps he took relative to the publication, in 1922, of what he called his “damned monster novel”: Ulysses. Specifically, I became intrigued by the story of how Ulysses came to be published by a small bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, owned by one Sylvia Beach.

Miss Beach (as Joyce always referred to her) has told the tale herself, with simple elegance, in a memoir titled Shakespeare and Company (1959). American born and bred, Beach opened her English-language bookstore and lending library (supported by patron subscription) in 1919 in a former laundry at 8 rue Dupuytren in the heart of Paris’s Left Bank district. In 1921, she relocated to a larger space nearby at 12 rue de l’Odéon. At that address she became the center of a literary and artistic coterie that included expatriate American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, photographer Man Ray, and pianist-composer George Antheil. (The dynamic within this circle of friends and acquaintances has been engagingly detailed by Noel Riley Fitch in her book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties.) But for Beach herself, the history of her bookstore revolves around her relationship with James Joyce, her literary idol before she met him and the focus of much of her energies after she approached him timidly at a dinner gathering hosted by mutual friends: “Trembling, I asked: ‘Is this the great James Joyce?’ ‘James Joyce,’ he replied. We shook hands; that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw—if you can call that a handshake.”

Beach’s account of her friendship and interaction with Joyce is rich in detail: “Joyce’s voice, with its sweet tones pitched like a tenor’s, charmed me. His enunciation was exceptionally clear. His pronunciation of certain words such as ‘book’ (bōō-k) and ‘look’ (lōō-k) and those beginning with ‘th’ was Irish, and the voice particularly was Irish.” Just as rich is her account of her bold offer to publish Ulysses on the speculation that she would sell a sufficient number of advance subscriptions to book collectors and devoted readers to warrant the printing of 1000 copies of the first edition. William Butler Yeats was foremost among Irish writers to order a copy; George Bernard Shaw declined to do so, concluding a very witty letter by explaining, “I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen.” With its many twists and turns of plot, subplot and counterplot, Beach’s telling of how she managed to see Ulysses into print—months later than promised to her subscribers but still in time for an advance copy to be delivered to Joyce’s flat on the morning of his 40th birthday, February 2, 1922—testifies not only to her determination and her ingenuity but even more to her unflagging belief in James Joyce as literary artist.

For me, then, 12 rue de l’Odéon, the address of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop that Joyce frequented on almost a daily basis in the early 1920s, was an essential site of pilgrimage during my visit to Paris. The site is currently marked by a simple plaque that reads: “En 1922, dans cette maison, Melle Sylvia BEACH publia ‘ULYSSES’ de James JOYCE.” While the façade of the shop has changed dramatically, Joyce himself might be pleased, and amused, that the space is now a women’s clothing shop; after all, in the eighth episode of Ulysses, he has Leopold Bloom dally admiringly before a display of women’s silks in the windows of Brown Thomas on Grafton Street in Dublin: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”

Sylvia Beach managed to maintain the Shakespeare and Company bookshop until 1941, coincidentally the year of Joyce’s death in Zurich, where he had returned at the outbreak of World War II. Ultimately, the shop was forced to close during the German occupation of Paris, with the decisive moment being Beach’s rejection of a German officer’s request to purchase her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which had been published in 1939. Her memoir concludes with the liberation of Paris by American troops and specifically with Ernest Hemingway, “in battle dress, grimy and bloody,” overseeing the elimination of German rooftop snipers from rue de l’Odéon.

And yet Shakespeare and Company lives on in Paris in the name of another bookshop of legendary stature. This one is located on the Left Bank of the Seine almost directly across the river from le Cathédrale de Notre Dame. Owner George Whitman, another American expatriate, opened it as Le Mistral in 1951 but changed the name to honor Sylvia Beach’s memory and legacy after her death in 1962. In large part because of the Joycean association (albeit once-removed), it too has become a place of pilgrimage for literary-minded visitors to Paris. But it also has a unique history and character and charm of its own (including a dozen or so stations where travelers may bed down at night for the price of an hour’s work in the shop). I enjoyed a sojourn in its restful second-floor reading room, reacquainting myself with We’ll to the Woods No More, Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Edouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés, which Joyce credited as the precursor for the narrative technique of “interior monologue” that he employs in much of Ulysses. But that is a story for another time.

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

These musings were the "Gallery Notes" I contributed to a photo exhibit at UMass Boston in November of 2007.

~New work from Dublin photographer Fionán O’Connell~

Harbor Gallery, University of Massachusetts Boston
Curated by Andrea Souza, November 2007

Titling this show IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS, Fionán O’Connell makes a statement at once as bold and as playful as the photographs that we see on exhibit here in the Harbor Gallery. It is a bold statement because, ripped from the headline-punctuated “Aeolus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the phrase locates O’Connell’s work in some sort of relation to the towering figure of Joyce, whose literary inscription of Dublin as it stood on June 16th of 1904 established the benchmark for any and all artistic depictions of the city. As Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen while working on Ulysses, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”

But it is also a playful statement because O’Connell himself displays none of the anxiety of influence—or even of confluence—that such first-generation post Joyce ergo propter Joyce writers as Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett experienced and expressed in their work or that such latter-day writers as Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger have had imposed on them by Joyce-centric readers. Thus while some viewers of O’Connell’s photographs might see them as palimpsests, afterthought images laid over the century-ago streets of Joyce’s etched-in-typeface DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN (another of the Aeolian headlines), O’Connell himself can maintain a blissful obliviousness to Joyce as he goes about his photographic business: the Joycean title of this show is actually the afterthought here, a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness on O’Connell’s part that matches the spirit of the individual photographs that make up the show.

And yet might the show’s title still have a pertinence that runs deeper than the eye-catchy nature of a borrowed headline? After all, is Ulysses not a novel which in large part reminds readers—through Joyce’s concentration on the sensibilities of its three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom—of the myriad ways in which we know the world . . . in which we see the world? In a letter Joyce wrote in 1919 to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, he defended “the various styles” of the novel’s eighteen episodes, explaining: “in the compass of one day to compress all these wanderings and clothe them in the form of this day is for me possible only by such variation which, I beg you to believe, is not capricious.” Set in a newspaper office, the “Aeolus” episode illustrates this point exactly: interrupting the otherwise conventional linear narrative with those boldface headlines—THE CROZIER AND THE PEN, OMNIUM GATHERUM, RAISING THE WIND—Joyce illuminates how the medium of newspaper rhetoric (and layout) operates as both message and massage in our edge-of-consciousness processing of ordinary daily experience.

Fionán O’Connell, too, focuses on how we see the world . . . but not just through a camera viewfinder. Rather, directing his lens to record the “streets broad and narrow” of “Dublin’s fair city” not as touristy postcard panoramas but as one-off curbscapes—peripheral glimpses of crosswalks, shopfronts, doorframes, billboards, architectural cornices—he produces, or reproduces, the effect of a typical Dubliner unselfconsciously registering the undistilled spirit of the city on a typical day. Coincidentally, in Stephen Hero, an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce had his protagonist describe this sort of liminal awareness with regard to the clock of the Ballast Office: “I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.” Not fixated on the epiphanic per se, O’Connell aims more for a photographic image that “shows forth” the metaphysical dimension of some physical detail of the city simply by his capturing that detail, usually nondescript, in an aesthetically pleasing composition.

No less than Joyce, however, whose aesthetic transcribes urban texture into urbane text, O’Connell looks for ways to replicate in his photographs ordinary street-level sensation. One recent development in his vision—an attentiveness to the way that shop windows both reflect and refract not only their own interior displays but also the exterior world of the city—involves, again coincidentally, a Joycean aspect. Often shots of stylishly decked out mannequins, these photos bring to mind specifically that scene in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses when Leopold Bloom, hungering for both food and sex, pauses before a presentation of lingerie in the window of Brown Thomas on Grafton Street: “Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk stockings.” Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen recalls that when composing this scene the author set for himself the challenge of finding not just the Flaubertian mot juste but also “the perfect order of words in the sentence.” Joyce explained the challenge thus: “Seduction appears in my book as women’s silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are ‘Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.’ You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged.”

Ditto for Fionán O’Connell’s expressive “arrangement” of visual detail even in photographs taken seemingly by chance from the ultimate Dubliner’s perspective—the saddle of a moving bicycle. In a note to his show at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC in 1992, O’Connell described this intrinsic dimension of his creative vision:

In Dublin, it rains a lot and the buses are slow and unpredictable. So, from a very young age, the bicycle seemed the best way of getting around. Cycling in the rain used to deter me from taking a camera out at all until I realized how I could incorporate the rain and the bike into my photographs. The showers and constant drizzle did something to color, and so began my long affair with double yellow lines, striped traffic cones, traffic lights, signs, puddles, manholes, and low light blurs.

Clearly, a century removed from “Joyce’s Dublin”—and from Dublin’s Joyce—Fionán O’Connell can stake his own artistic claim in the new “heart of the Hibernian metropolis.”