James Joyce’s Method

The essence of James Joyce’s method was the generation of a language which was simultaineously both obscuring and liberating.

Obscuring

The early notebooks for Finnegan’s Wake show how he would take a realistically described scene and gradually over successive drafts deconstruct and fragment it, obscuring the source stimulus with layers of opacity, allusion and intruded reference. There is a definite narrative drive in Finnegan’s Wake but it is often completely obscured in this way. Some of the evidence from the notebooks indeed suggests a kind of wilful obscuring; a sense that the true subject needed indeed to be veiled or at least approached extremely indirectly.

Since his narrative basically concerns some exquisitely sensitive issues to do with an archetypal family and its most raw and intimate processes - including sexualised relationships, incest, fratricidal conflict, shame and disillusion; it is maybe not surprising that he wished to approach this so indirectly.

In this sense his method can be seen psychologically as the most heavily masked disclosure - at the point of making clear he then side steps down another alley or covers over the real topic with another layer of fracture and displacement. The text can be read as a pattern of compulsive disclosure simultaneously with disguise; extended over years of efforts to explore and portray a truth without making it clear. In this reading, part of the tactic of disguise is the cloaking of the narrative with myth. This family ceases to become a specific family but instead a mythic family containing elements of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, original sin and expulsion from the garden. There is little obviously there in the form of social redemption but there certainly is in terms of something more endless, historical and mythic.

Liberating

That is however a partial reading - there is much more going on in Finnegan’s Wake than this. In addition to the sequential displacement and disguise characterising successive drafts of his text, there is a rather different collage technique that takes on increasing dominance through the 1930s in the composition of Finnegan’s Wake. Here, Joyce records in a sequence of notebooks fragments of speech, things he has read, ideas, notes - and sequentially puts them together in time into a patchwork of fragments combined successively into extended texts.

What he seemed to be doing here was soaking up a very diverse range of language forms, cultural ideas, heard fragments - and in some ways allowing them to generate his text as if he was following their lead. Indeed in the mid 1930’s Joyce had the view that he had created a text-generating machine independent of its author that he could let work autonomously and even hand over to an assistant to save him the trouble. This never happened, but the idea of using a collage technique to integrate found material became increasingly central.

Joyce was not working in a vacuum here of course; many aspects of the culture of the time were working in this way; from the automatic writing of surrealism, to the nascent post modernism of Dada and the collage techniques of cubism. However Joyce’s use of this was particularly ambitious. Although he kept a narrative focus, he allowed the found materials to guide the text in a way that opened up the language to multiple resonances and layers. Although most of this text was used as decontextualised from its origins, it often carried with it flavours, resonances, whiffs of its past which added together into multiple layers of allusion.

These layers of allusion both clog the text and add to the disguising element and its opacity, but they are also liberating elements in the sense that they open up the language space to be multi-potential. This links with the narrative drive towards myth and ends up by opening out the text into a kind of pluri-potential mythic space in which in a way it can stand for all things over all time - and time and space collapse. This is clearly part of Joyce’s intention.

Myth

In the pieces of Finnegan’s Wake that work best, he has created a kind of ur-text in which the basic narrative becomes endlessly referential and meaningful. For instance in the famous Anna Livia Plurabelle episode, the female mythic heroine (goddess) of the book turns from the object of jealous and salacious gossip from washer women on the shore into becoming the essence of a flowing river, integrating with the sounds, smells and sensation of flow through time - until towards the end of the book it is clear that the river is flowing out to the sea……here it takes on a first person consciousnessness in narration as Anna Livia experiences the sense of flowing out into an endless ocean; the beginnings of cold currents, the wind, the waves, the fear of letting go into that endlessness; finally giving into the wide sea, merging with the ocean at the end of the book – which then famously recycles back to the beginning sentence with the sea entering the mouth of the river at Howth Castle.

Night

The sensitive heart of the book - in the night scenes episodes - is the part which is most heavily disguised, distorted, and opaque and in which Joyce approaches the most sensitive areas of children’s experience and the toughest most primitive forces in the family. A lot of the focus is on fraternal conflict, but standing aside watching this is the figure of Issy and the lurking sense here that she was vulnerable to violation. Joyce’s own daughter, Lucia, was very ill with schizophrenia during the composition of the book at this stage, which adds an additional sense of pathos to the construction.

The aesthetic space

So Joyce’s technique both disguises and liberates. It seems to be a process on the one hand of repeated compulsively disguised disclosure, a working through and round the most sensitive areas of family life and potential sin, shame, and violation. On the other hand his accreted text, collaged from found elements bound with multiple illusions across time and culture, lifts the text out of any immediate context and broadens it into a pluri-potential resonant space.

The ingredient that binds these found materials and generates this take off is Joyce’s lyrical genius, where the writing binds and softens the material and makes it take wing. The lyric genius is seen most clearly and effectively in his writing about the maternal archetype where he floats into a kind of oceanic sense of merging and lyrical abandon. His other mode is scatological ironic tough bitty and sarcastic with a kind of edgy humour that feels very Irish. This kind of mode is particularly reserved for description of male characters. There is a third mode that’s simply jokey and playful; the mode that made some people think he was just taking the piss, making fun of everyone who took him seriously. This humour is of course another disguise for the aching and anxious seriousness with which he pursued the project over nearly 20 years.

The legacy for us then is this language space he created. Infinitely complex almost autonomous; only partially in authorial control (at least that’s how it can seem) - so dense and incomprehensible that many gave up and criticised him for becoming ridiculously prolix (for instance Ezra Pound and Stanislaus Joyce). And yet, despite the often incomprehensible surface, if one persists, defocuses, lets the language wash into you, an underlying poetry emerges and sometimes an image suddenly clicks into focus behind the language. When it does this, when the referenced subject is as it were rediscovered behind the language there is an extraordinary sensation in the reader: not only simply that of discovery, of making sense of what seems incomprehensible but also a sense of the utmost vividness as if the discovery of the underlying referent is there in the most vivid colours, but also accompanied by an extraordinary range of reference and resonance extending out laterally. So one is both in the image and in contact with it but also extended at the same time into a endless space of reference. There is nothing quite like this in reading. At these times the language holds one both in contact with the external and simultaneously in contact with some kind of endless psychological common mythic and cultural grounding. This is what I think Joyce was really after - creating a held language that both in a sense keeps reality processed at a distance but also links it horizontally with broader social culture.

This held space is generated by much good art. It is a kind of hovering aesthetic – perhaps close to what Winnicott described as a transitional space between inner and outer. Joyce pioneered the use of radical collage and unusually diverse source material, flirting often with chaos and incomprehension, to hold the maximum referential boundaries. Any kind of rational description of the process such as this fails in the end to replicate the experience of being in this language when it is working well, the lyrical mode of a mind processing the most difficult things; jokey, obscuring, avoiding, procrastinating, diverting and yet gradually approaching, accepting, and mythologizing a core reality. Unlike in therapy - when this is done in the presence of a therapist - he does this while trying to draw us all in with him as common readers; to create as universal a text experience as possible.

One might well say of course that there is an irony that a technique aimed in this way ends up excluding everyone but the most determined fellow explorer! - and thus makes the whole text remain for that reason extremely private. But this was the text experience that Joyce aimed for nevertheless, and what he in the end felt comfortable and satisfied to let out into the broad sea of common culture.

Jonathan Green
September 2011