Joyce For Beginners

Terrance Gordon, Lynsey Hutchinson

• Publisher: For Beginners
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781939994790
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The works of James Joyce are part of the literary canon worldwide—and the need to have his works broken out into palatable pieces, even for the most avid of fans, is known the world over as well. In Joyce For Beginners, W. Terrence Gordon does just that. With the assistance of Lynsey Hutchinson's humorous illustrations throughout, Gordon successfully captures bits and pieces of Joyce's works and reconstructs them in a picturesque way for the reader to visualize the stories. Gordon also examines Joyce's passion for music and how it materializes in his writing. This will be the perfect addition to any Joyce lover's library.

FAQs

Stephen of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man migrated to Ulysses and is clearly recognizable as Joyce himself. But who was Joyce's model for Leopold Bloom?

Ettore Schmitz, a businessman known to Joyce during the years that the Joyce family sojourned in Trieste, was already a writer when he came to enroll in the English classes that Joyce taught at the Berlitz school. Much better known under the pseudonym he took for his published works, Italo Svevo, Schmitz and his wife Livia (yes, she inspired Joyce's description of Anna Livia Plurabelle) befriended the Joyces. Schmitz was one model, likely the primary one, for Leopold Bloom and a rich source from which Joyce drew information about Jewish customs and culture. Joyce read the novel Senilità that Schmitz had published in 1898. (An English translation appeared in 1932 under the title As a Man Grows Older.) Recognizing Schmitz's talent, Joyce encouraged him to continue writing. Schmitz's best known work, La coscienza di Zeno, appeared in 1923 and in English translation as The Confessions of Zeno (1930).

What part does Nora Barnacle play in providing material for Joyce's writings?

It was not until ten years after their Bloomsday date that Joyce started to compile a notebook that would become a resource file for him in writing Exiles. There he recorded many of Nora's associations that would find their way into the character of Bertha Rowan. Her relationship with her husband Richard is marked by the same jealousy that Joyce harbored out of fear that other men desired Nora.

In Ulysses, some of Nora's dreams that Joyce had documented find their way into the text, and extensive notes that he had made of her spoken words come from the mouth of Molly Bloom.

The massive documentation provided by the Joyce notebook eventually published as Scribbledehobble suggests that Nora's words may have provided even more material for Finnegans Wake than for Ulysses.

Which other characters in Ulysses were inspired by persons who Joyce knew?

It is said that during the years that Joyce labored over Ulysses, many of his friends and acquaintances feared that they would find themselves written into the book. Oliver St. John Gogarty likely shared this fear. He was well known to Joyce, though neither counted the other as a good friend, and the strained relationship between them spills over and is writ large in Ulysses, beginning on the first page. The scene that plays out between Stephen and Buck Mulligan takes place in the Martello tower where Joyce and Gogarty did live together for a time. No other character in Ulysses owes as much to a real life person as Buck Mulligan.

Joyce grafted both his animosity toward Gogarty and Stephen's toward Mulligan onto Stephen's father, who snarls: “That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks all over Dublin.”

Here are some of the parallels:

Joyce/Gogarty	Stephen/Mulligan
met at the National Library	meet at the National Library
shared the Sandy Cove	share the Sandy Cove
Martello tower	Martello tower
G's family disapproved of J.	J's family disapproved of G.
G. rescued swimmers	Mulligan rescues swimmers
J. notebook: Gogarty's “plump shaven face”	Ulysses: “stately, plump Buck Mulligan”
G. called J's mother “beastly dead”	Mulligan calls Stephen's mother “beastly dead”

Given their uneasy relationship, it is more than a little surprising to discover that Gogarty was the author of “James Joyce as a Tenor” (in Intimations, 1950), where we read: ”Strange, almost incredible as it may seem now to his admirers, Joyce was more intent on becoming a singer than a writer.”

Given Gogarty's observation, what part does music play in Joyce's writings?

Dubliners and Finnegans Wake share a pattern of continuum and continuity, the former going from local (Dublin) to universal (HCE) and the latter being the Irishness of Joyce's time. The same pattern marks the role of music in all of Joyce's work. The poems of Chamber Music are not simply potential song lyrics but a distinct type of music. From Dubliners onward this becomes more pronounced and subtle, beginning in the story “Clay,” where Maria Donnelly sings Arline's aria from the Michael Balfe opera The Bohemian Girl. In spite of her blunder (she forgets the second verse and sings the first one twice), Maria brings a tear to her brother's eye.

Music dominates the Sirens episode of Ulysses, where seven selections of music and their lyrics relate to the unfolding of the narrative. For the ballad The Croppy Boy, there are no less than twenty-six references in the episode.

The very name Finnegans Wake comes from a popular ballad. Countless musical allusions (by one scholar's count, over a thousand) are integrated into the universal history that unfolds. The third thunder of Finnegans Wake is followed immediately by the musical score of the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly and its thirteen verses.

Like the thunders, the musical references in Joyce have echoes—perhaps the longest spanning Dubliners and Finnegans Wake with lines from Arline's aria in its original form to the puns they inspire in the Wake:

“I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls” becomes:

When you dreamt that you'd wealth in marble arch (FW, 264)

And

“I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls with vassals and cerfs at my side” becomes:

I'll dreamt that I'll dwealth mid warblers' walls when throstles and choughs to my sigh hiehied ... (FW, 449)

Joyce called Finnegans Wake the book of doublends jined, punning on “double ends joined” (by the structure of the book). The second pun is Dublin's giant. Who was this giant?

The protean hero of Finnegans Wake is imagined by Joyce as a sleeping giant in the landscape of Dublin. His head is the Hill of Howth (Howth Castle is named in the first paragraph of the book), his torso is the entire east-west ridge of north Dublin, and his feet are Castleknock Hill and Windmill Hill. With a stretch of the imagination, and disregard for proportions, one of his anatomical features can be found in the Wellington monument in Phoenix Park. Numerous words on the first two pages of Finnegans Wake make it clear that Joyce was inviting readers to make the stretch: solid man, the father of fornicationists, rise you must, tuck up your part inher, upstanded, skyerscape ... and more.

Does Joyce disrespect the traditions of his Jesuit education?

Because Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are such radical departures from any creative writing that could have been considered conventional when they appeared, it is easy to assume that Joyce wanted to s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• BIOGRAPHY
• WHO WERE JOYCE'S FAVORITE READS?
• A MISSING APOSTROPHE
• LANGUAGE LESSONS
• JOYCE AS POET
• DUBLINERS . . .
• A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN . . .
• EXILES
• ULYSSES
• ONE TAKE ON THE WAKE
• STRATEGIES FOR READING JOYCE
• QUOTING JOYCE
• FAQs
• AN ECLECTIC ULYSSES / FINNEGAN ENCYCLOPEDICTIONARY
• About the Author
• About the Illustrator