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| James Joyce (1882-1941) |
The Sunday before last (February 2) was the
birthday of the great Irish novelist James Joyce (born 1882). I’d like to use
the occasion to talk about him, to celebrate him as an example of a certain
kind of writer caught in a certain kind of situation. Joyce is a perfect example of the writer fully
attuned to “the other voice” of his art. The voice that, to echo the words of the
Mexican poet Octavio Paz, is stubbornly and intractably heterodox, whose loves
have always ended in divorce, whose conversions, in apostasy. Joyce is, in fact, the prototype of the modern
artist as apostate. His apostasy, both
literal and symbolic, cultural, political as well as religious, was inseparable
from the integrity of his vision, and the freedom of his art. It led him into self-exile; almost his entire
adult life was spent wandering from one European country to another. He died
and was buried in Zurich on January 13, 1941.
Like all true writers who felt compelled to
revolt, Joyce’s apostasy and self-exile were, ironically, his means of
affirming his essential “Irishness”, of being true to the real heritage of his
race. But his fidelity was totally
unlike that of the blinkered and puritanical nationalists. It was open to life in all its richness and
contradictions, embracing with the human breadth of its art the Irish and the
non-Irish, the local and the universal, the vulgar and the refined, the profane
and the sacred. Joyce had to say No (and
No, in thunder) in order to truly rejoice in the saying of Yes – the great yes
of Molly Bloom as she sits on the chamber-pot at the end of Ulysses. And, to quote one of the
sharpest early commentators on Joyce, he, by means of his art, “proves himself
most truly a Catholic, even if he could only exhibit the Catholic temper by
rejecting the Catholic faith, as he knew it.”
While still a young man, Joyce made himself
the champion in Ireland of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, then an old
man with his last play, When We Dead
Awaken, already behind him. Ibsen’s
hatred of ultra-nationalism, dead conventions and provincialism made him
Joyce’s spiritual relation. It was
typical of Joyce’s countrymen that his passionate championing of the foreign
playwright was considered unpatriotic as well as anti-religious, the latter
really meaning anti the Catholic Church which had the mind of Ireland in its
vice-like grip.
Provincialism, puritanism, religious
fanaticism, and nationalism lost in the fog and bog of sheer Irish
sentimentality – all this had made Joyce’s beloved native city Dublin, that
one-time centre of European learning and culture, a “centre of paralysis.” It was in order to look hard and with the
detachment of estrangement at this “centre of paralysis” that Joyce exiled
himself. Sensitive to the “other voice”,
he knew that his love must end in divorce, his faith in apostasy. But that same
voice heterodox with the heterodoxy of both life and art, led him to the
recovery of true love – or rather a reaffirmation of love enlarged by the human
breadth of his art.
In his greatest work, Ulysses set in Dublin with a “dirty-minded” common man (a Jew too,
not an Irishman) as its true hero, he traces step by earth-bound step his way
though the labyrinth of the city’s provincial streets and alleys towards the
great affirmation. Someone, with Joyce’s
final work Finnegans Wake in mind,
once nicely said of Joyce, “he had the Liffey water in his veins and on his
brain; the river whose name puns so naturally with the water of life.” By
putting and immortalising Dublin on the literary map of the world, the arrogant
“traitor” with nothing but contempt for the noisy patriotic mob became the
greatest celebrant of the native city on which he had turned his back for good.
As Stephen Daedalus, the hero of Joyce’s
autobiographical novel A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, puts it on the eve of his own exile: “The shortest
way to Tara (is) via Holyhead.” (Tara is the ancient seat of the Kings of
Ireland until the 6th Century and here symbolizes the past glory of Irish
civilization; Holyhead, the coastal town in northern Wales, is the landing
point of the ferry from Dublin.
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| Sean O’Faolain |
The writer Sean O’Faolain, a true patriot
(he was for six years a member of the Irish Republican Army) and yet as
unblinkered by sentimentalism as Joyce was, once suggested expatriation or self-exile
as one of the major reasons for the flowering of Anglo-Irish literature early
this century. “The intellectual blood transfusion” resulting from this
tradition of literary expatriation was in part due to the fact that most Irish
writers simply couldn’t forget their bloody country wherever they might have
exiled themselves. O’Faolain gave another reason for that flowering Anglo-Irish
literature which I should perhaps quote here – and that was “the imposition on
Gaelic Ireland of the English language and the example of its masterpieces, the
one offering the Irish writers access to the widest audience and the other
access to a thousand shades of style”. Joyce
himself never had any feeling of guilt in having to use the language of
Ireland’s colonial masters, and he had nothing but scorn for the movement to
revive a dead language like Gaelic.
In invoking James Joyce the self-exiled
apostate as an example, I don’t mean to recommend emigration to those of our
writers who feel they are in situation in this country akin to that of the
Irishman in his. It is Joyce’s fierce fidelity to his vision and his
uncompromising sense of artistic integrity that I mean to stress. Joyce felt the need to exile himself, and his
exile proved to be a fruitful one, yes. But
that doesn’t mean every writer in a situation akin to Joyce’s must necessarily
emigrate if he doesn’t want to die as a writer. It must be remembered that exile can take more
than one form; it doesn’t have to be physical. There is such a thing as internal or spiritual
exile, a form that some noted writers of the world have resorted to.
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| Wong Phui Nam |
In his column Other Cadences (Literary Page, January), Wong Phui Nam raised a
challenging question about emigration. The
question he raised has a special reference to writers who feel that they have
“no place in the new order of things”. The words within quotation marks were
those of the Malacca-born poet Ee Tiang Hong, as seen by his friend and fellow
poet Edwin Thumboo in a poem addressed to him, that occasioned the question
raised by Mr Wong. Without mincing his words, Mr Wong says that “emigration is
an evasion, a lack of will to come to terms with one’s condition”. Though his
interesting reading of Thumboo’s poem is invoked in support of that statement,
the wording makes it sound absolute, which I’m quite sure was not intended by
Mr Wong.
Is emigration – especially that of a writer
– always “an evasion, a lack of will to come to terms with one’s condition”?
The striking case of Joyce alone should make Mr Wong want to qualify his
statement. Mr Wong also believes that Ee’s emigration was a sad one because it
was really a quest for “elusive Edens” that landed him in a desert of the mind.
And Mr Wong here invokes his reading of Thumboo’s poem in support of his
judgement. I too think that there was a certain sadness in Ee’s emigration, but
I’m not sure about the “desert” bit. Ee Tiang Hong’s case is interesting and an
unsentimental discussion of it could generate some insights into the question
raised by Mr Wong is obviously to those English-language non-Bumi writers who feel that they have “no
place in the new order of things”.
Without suggesting that Mr Wong is unaware
of it, I would like to remind non-Bumis
that even a Bumi writer if he can
hear “the other voice” of his art, or if his art is capable of “the other
voice” of his art, or if his art is capable of the “other voice” can feel that
he has “no place in the new order of things” and because of it can face the
temptation of self-exile. In one sense,
the temptation can even be stronger because the Bumi writer of the kind I mean has to suffer from worse
constraints on his creative freedom than the non-Bumi, despite all the talk of his being a member of a privileged
race. For reasons which I don’t have
space to go into here, I believe that physical exile for this Bumi writer could be the death of his
creativity. If James Joyce the defiant apostate
must serve as an example of him, it has to be a symbolic one. His exile must be
internal or spiritual – and if he has the resources and the strength to bear
with that condition and even turn it into a creative blessing, there is no
reason why he can’t rejoice in his “apostasy” – with the Joycean line “silence,
exile and cunning” for a motto – the “silence” here meaning the cunningly
articulate “silence” of art. Whether his rejoicing as expressed in his art can
be shared by his countrymen, whether the “silence” will in fact be a public
one, is of course, another matter.
12 February 1992
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