words by J.A.G. Mabbutt
I have a tattoo of James Joyce on my arm. There, I said it. No shame. No embarrassment. Just me, declaring to the world that I adore James Joyce and his work. Where did such an idea take root? Why would I evidence my fanhood with an inky portrait, forever etched onto my skin? Because, for the sake of emphasising the fact once more, I adore James Joyce. Like the significance of our primeval ancestors’ discovery of fire, Joyce’s novel, The Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist, was handed to me by my A-level English Literature teacher as a parting gift at the end of my time at Sixth Form, forever forking the path of my fate.
Thank you, Mr Morton. You helped put James Joyce on my map and, for that, I am forever grateful. But why has the Dubliner remained in my life? That is the real question. Joyce’s 1916 novel is a text that, in comparison to his later pieces, cuts a more straightforward path. An astounding Künstlerroman about the formative beginnings of an artist, the novel explores the artistic genesis of Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, a character in conflict with the culture and society that surrounds him. For me, it was formative because it dutifully mirrored an authentically internal metamorphosis, where a young man develops without ease, in a partisan environment. When I was introduced to this story, I, like Daedalus, existed upon a precipice where I was unsure of the future. I was expecting to attend university, but despite the excitement that this brought, I found myself weighed down by my conditions and past. For Stephen, establishing his autonomy is a herculean effort. For me, it was also difficult. At the novel’s close, Stephen finds himself unencumbered by his past and its limitations discovering a newfound appreciation for aestheticism. I had made this discovery too. Albeit, years before I had picked the novel up. After experiencing the death of my mother when I was 14, the following years sent me spiralling at school, with both my behaviour and determination plummeting. I, like Stephen, wasn’t sure about myself. Thankfully, art, literature, music, and cinema saved me and helped ignite a long-dormant passion. In reading Joyce’s novel, I found myself in the voice of another. That is why Joyce is immeasurable. If we were to put aside his modernistic writing style, free indirect speech or erasure of boundaries, we would still be able to weigh up a vast fortune of treasures in Joyce’s work. But ultimately, for me, Joyce’s crowning aspect exists in his cultivation of authenticity and normality through his elaborately real settings and crystal-clear characterisation.
Naturally, Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses was the next stop on my route through the Irish writer’s works. And, at the risk of my ego, I’ll be honest: it took me three attempts to read the whole of the novel. At first, I fell victim to Episode 6, 'Hades'. Ironically, the death of my own ability to read the novel coincided with the protagonist’s descent into the morbid topic of death whilst venturing in a funeral carriage. I was felled, not by boredom, but by fatigue. I wasn’t ready yet. I tried again; this time, lucky Episode 13, 'Nausicaa', was my Achilles’ heel. University pressures and the plague of wanting to party in a new city nudged Joyce aside for me for some time. It wasn’t until later that year that I began again. After visiting Dublin and venturing into its labyrinthine streets, I was invigorated to try my hand at Ulysses again. In that city, where the novel itself was set, I took part in a pub crawl that attended to various literary and historical haunts. One of the stops was Davy Byrne's pub (now a pilgrimage point for all those who rejoice in Joyce), where in Episode 8, 'Lestrygonians', the protagonist Leopold Bloom stops to eat a gorgonzola sandwich and drink a glass of wine. To find myself in the pub that I had read about not many months ago was the catalyst for my return to the novel.
Two months later, I had done it. I had read Ulysses, finally. I to this day still believe that in attempting to read it three times, I read it with more appreciation and vigour than I would have done in one lengthy read. I’ve read the novel once again since, as a much older and jaded twenty-something-year-old, and, my goodness, it still stands up. Why? Because Ulysses isn’t a novel about colossal adventures like its namesake Homer’s The Odyssey. And Ulysses isn’t just an impressive badge to wear for someone who likes literature. In truth, its greatness is because Joyce’s fictional world is pieced together by a physical world that you can visit and glued together by an acerbic witticism that is both comical and philosophical. Whereas some readers might enjoy a fantastical world of elfin imagination or Grecian mythology, I found myself illuminated by the reality that Joyce wants his readers to see. Like his first novel, Ulysses is an experiment and, because of that, things aren’t always perfect. But its beauty is found in those imperfections, equally as much as it is in its glories. Sometimes the language is coarse and tailored to Joyce himself, and at other times the roguish narrative flits between events without much cohesion.
But isn’t that life? Isn’t life just as rough as Joyce’s prose? Isn’t life sewn together with vague references to otherwise nonsensical topics? I think so. Joyce isn’t afraid to collide worlds and in the seemingly everyday heroics of Leopold Bloom the shifting light of literary and cultural spheres comes into focus. To this day, I still meditate on the richness of some of Joyce’s lines such as “Let my country die for me” or “Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand,” amongst many others. His wisdom circumnavigates the heights and trenches of everything, whether it be the significance of one’s relationship to their nation or how time’s liquidity lessens our ability to control it. Joyce’s words leave no stone unturned. In reading Joyce’s work, his riches are shared with me, and because of that, the world and its normalness have a different flavour that is both saccharine and at times indigestible.
Like Ulysses, Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners built another layer of fascination upon the glasses-adorned, auburn-moustached Irishman. It would be a challenge to summarise the collection, as it is neither one thing nor another. Instead, Dubliners is a jaunty array of worlds that sometimes entwine and exist shoulder-to-shoulder in the city of Dublin. It is a remarkable body of texts that eke out stories from all walks of life, labouring to give the unknown and unheard a place within Joyce’s portrait of his birth city. Even though Joyce emigrated to Paris and never revisited his homeland, Dubliners burns with the organic minutiae of Ireland in his lifetime, remarkably painting its divisions, its crises, its poverty and wealth, its poetry and history. I read this collection and simmered, savouring its fragmented unity as a parallel to the dysmorphia of Ulysses.
If I were to determine which stories bejewel the collection and act as testaments to its triumph, the story 'Two Gallants' and the closing tale of 'The Dead' animate Joyce’s relevance to the world today. In 'Two Gallants', the microscopic banality of its protagonist Lenehan, who plods about the streets waiting for his con-artist pal Corley, is a slow-burning examination of the streets themselves. In Lenehan’s exploits, Joyce invites us to witness a world that is awash with errors and idiosyncrasies and positions us into the drudgery of everyday exploitation. If you were to read this story and sit idly by, observing the currents of any city as they ebbed and flowed, you’d adopt a perception of the world in motion unlike any other, seeing it as it is.
In 'The Dead', this lengthy ‘short’ story about disappointment and death, Joyce’s genius is untouchable. Via the experiences of Gabriel Conroy, a teacher and book reviewer, Joyce taught me lessons that I struggled to learn from the world itself. In reading it, and re-reading it, the story has embedded itself into my understanding of the world. The closing reflection and symbolic emergence of the snow falling across the graves of the dead, across the entirety of Ireland, bridges away from Gabriel’s sadness and instead reframes our own tendency to become self-obsessed, forcing us to see life as a gift that one day will be returned. The lament of Joyce’s narrative voice when commenting on the blanketing of those who are dead by the seemingly infinite snow is still glued to me: “It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried”. And like Gabriel, I find myself examining things differently in light of the revelations that life has to offer. I love Joyce because he has forced me to face everything with the tenderness that one must employ in a world such as this. His words, though rough and sometimes confusing, have replaced my tendency toward doubtfulness with a benevolence to witness things like others do. He might be but a man, long buried in the loam and silt of Geneva, but he was a giant who brought the universe to his shores and requested it to make sense of him and those like him, rather than the other way around.
I often think that Joyce left Ireland for more than the reasons he provided. I think that he left it because he had had his fill and was more inclined to dig gently and gratuitously into another landscape, a foreign one, where the roots that fed his ideas no longer anchored him down. In that, I too find inspiration to savour the streets that I know, whilst dreaming of the streets that I will one day encounter, pregnant with their nuance and character. Like Leopold Bloom, I endeavour to live each day as a kind of monomythic odyssey, while allowing myself to idle along the way. Joyce’s work hasn’t abandoned me yet, and I don’t think it ever will. But just to be sure, I have his likeness blackened onto my skin, just as his inky words are soldered onto my soul.
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J.A.G Mabbutt is a poet, avid cinephile and writer. He has had both his poetry and writing published with Zimmer Magazine, Film East and Scribbled in the past year. Online you can find his poetry via @jag_poetry on instagram. In his day-to-day life, he is an English teacher based in Leicestershire. He studied at the University of Liverpool, receiving a degree in English Literature and History.