Vicki Mahaffey has been teaching and writing about James Joyce for decades, at the Rosenbach but also at University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And yet she has more to say on the topic. Her new book, The Joyce of Everyday Life (Bucknell University Press), feels like a book Joyce himself might have used as a glossary of sorts to explain his own thinking, his own word choice and word construction, and his own use of symbols—the symbols of everyday life including beds, handwriting, salmon, and love. After all, “everyday life” is a recurring theme in Joyce’s work, and this book offers an intriguing and novel way “in.” Vicki and I had the opportunity to discuss her new book, and our conversation is below.
Kelsey Scouten Bates: Your knowledge of Joyce is profound, and your book reveals not just love for his work, but an understanding (or near-understanding) of what he was trying to accomplish in his writing. Can you tell me about your first experience with Joyce and the reasons you’ve devoted so much of your life’s work to him?
Vicki Mahaffey: My first experience of Joyce was in high school in Houston, Texas. We were assigned A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I knew nothing about Ireland and not much about life, and my teacher didn’t know much more. I was so frustrated! I wrote a paper about how Henry James was infinitely superior to James Joyce, and the teacher gave me an A+ on it.
I didn’t read Joyce again until graduate school, and this time it was Ulysses. I was determined to understand everything, and it took me over a year to read it with all the annotations. But I realized that knowing more didn’t help all that much. It was only when I was writing my book on Joyce that I finally understood that my approach was all wrong, because his books didn’t follow the “rules” of most other works of literature. In fact, he thought that most literature was a “damned lie.” Over time, I learned to read in an entirely new way, the way that he himself read, and I have never wanted to go back. Reading Joyce demands that the reader participate much more actively and autonomously in the process of creating meaning, and the effect of reading anything this way is frighteningly powerful. It’s like having x-ray vision. AND it’s funny!
KSB: You’ve written other books about Joyce, but why did you write this book? In my opinion, it is a useful and fascinating way to understand the symbols so present across his work. Was there something you felt was missing in Joyce scholarship (even taking your own scholarship into consideration)?
VM: Let me begin by saying I couldn’t have written this book without the benefit of other scholarship on Joyce. We have had a grand conversation, full of disagreement and laughter. But the overload of additional information was making it even harder to “climb Mt. Everest,” which is the way many people regard reading Joyce. There is labor involved in learning to read differently, but it doesn’t involve mastering more facts for their own sake. It’s more closely akin to the labor of psychoanalysis, because it involves seeing oneself differently and approaching the function of “stories” more critically. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is helpful for this, because we see Stephen (partially) understand himself through a succession of stories, from fairy tales to Greek heroes to romantic poets. Identity is based on narrative, and those narratives are often invisible to the individual. Joyce multiplied the narratives that help to characterize his protagonists, “framing” their identities with other historical and mythological figures, which has the effect of making them more multi-dimensional. Bloom is mapped not only against Odysseus but also Shakespeare, Charles Bovary, and the wandering Jew, to name only the most obvious. Joyce also diverted attention from the story by giving more attention to individual words.
What was missing in Joyce scholarship, for me, was an appreciation of the ease of reading Joyce, with the caveat that such ease is not superficial; it does not derive from imaginative appropriation. In learning to read as Joyce read, readers develop their own faculties (critical, imaginative, empathetic), and that is a joyful process.
KSB: In the introduction, you mention that some people accuse Joyce of “flaunting his erudition,” and that tracks with the things I’ve heard people say, and what I’ve felt myself, about Joyce. I’ve heard and felt frustration (or even anger) at Joyce from would-be readers because his books seem impenetrable. What is your advice to readers who might not get past the first episode of, say, Ulysses, for this reason? OR, to put the question differently, how should someone prepare to read Joyce?
VM: There’s a favorite story among Joyceans that the more educated a person is, the harder it will be to read Joyce. There is some truth to this, because reading his work requires not expertise or extensive knowledge, but openness, such as the openness of a child. The best way to prepare to read Joyce is to defer the desire for comprehension and even meaning, and instead to sharpen attentiveness to what one sees and hears. One thing that helps readers do this is to listen to a recording of Joyce while reading the words, such as Radio Television Éireann’s wonderful recording of Ulysses. Joyce’s kingdom is not unlike the kingdom of God in the sense that it is hard for a “rich” man to enter it (rich in knowledge), but easy for the little children (Matthew 19:14; 19:23-26). This is something I talk about in relation to Finn MacCool’s taste of salmon of knowledge in Irish myth (in “On Salmon”).
It also helps to read Joyce in a group, because hearing more perspectives generates more openness in all but the most obdurate!
KSB: You have a chapter called “Writing by Hand” that explores the physical act of writing—particularly Joyce’s habit to begin his work with a pen. Whenever we show the Ulysses manuscript at the Rosenbach, Joyce’s handwriting—particularly his margins—is almost always the first thing people notice. Can we talk about Joyce’s handwriting as evidenced in the Ulysses manuscript at the Rosenbach? Why are his margins so wide and slanted? What does it mean?!
VM: As I write this, I’m looking at the facsimile of the Rosenbach manuscript. What’s striking about these words in Joyce’s hand is their uniqueness—unlike type, the way individuals form letters and words with a pen is an extension of their physical being. The slant or drift to the right as the writing proceeds down the page seems to result from the fact that Joyce was right-handed. The wide margins leave room for insertions or changes, although there aren’t very many of those in this particular manuscript (as compared to the proofs, for example). Looking at Joyce’s handwriting brings us back to the moment(s) of composition and revision, serving as a reminder of the physical (as well as mental) labor involved in writing. It brings Joyce to life, as he inserts lines into “Cyclops” such as Lenehan’s quip about Sceptre, the horse who was favored to win the horse race: “Frailty, thy name is Sceptre,” when the echo prepares us to expect “woman.” We can see how Joyce thinks as he elaborates a riff on what the members of the British navy believe in: not God the Father but “rod, the scourger almighty”; he changes “slayer of heaven and earth” to “creator of hell upon earth.” (See Ulysses, 12.1354), and James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, p. 315.
KSB: Related question: have we as a society lost something because we no longer write (primarily) by hand?
VM: Yes, I think so! Writing by hand takes more time and therefore leaves more room for thought. It also calls for recopying or retyping, which allows more opportunities for revision. I often tell students that one important difference between amateur and professional writing lies in the amount and quality of revision required by the latter.
KSB: Your book conveys the idea that reading isn’t just reading, writing isn’t just writing. Reading is eating–or bringing something into one’s body; writing is a physical expectoration—or expelling something out of one’s body. What is the benefit to thinking about reading and writing in this very physical way? How much of this idea is metaphorical for Joyce and how much is literal?
VM: I might prefer the metaphor of expression to expectoration as less off-putting! And to ex-press is to press out.
This is a very interesting question, one that is indebted to Joyce’s early training in Catholicism. What’s involved in seeing communication as embodied has to do with the importance of practicing what we preach, or, to put it another way, not simply paying lip service to our opinions or beliefs but acting upon them with our entire being. It’s indebted to the sacrament of Communion, in which communicants incorporate, or take into their bodies, the body of Jesus, and it’s reinforced in a Catholic morning and evening prayer that God be praised “not only with our lips but in our lives.” Joyce was intensely aware that the act of communion was an allegory of communication, and real communication needs to reach the heart as well as the mind—and be enacted in the world.
KSB: You examine Huck Finn as a precursor or inspiration for Finnegans Wake. But Joyce never actually read it; He had someone else read it for him? Why is that?
VM: Joyce said he never actually read it, and that may be true, but he’s not always reliable about such things. Joyce did read Tom Sawyer, so he knew the character of Huck, and he was interested in Mark Twain as a double. Not only does “Dublin” double as “doublin”, but there’s a Dublin in Georgia and “twain” means two. Joyce was interested in the idea of (Huck) Finn as a double of Finnegan (and Finn MacCool). The plot summary that he asked for together with particular phrases that stood out (for his nephew) would have given him everything he needed even if he hadn’t read the book (or hadn’t read it in a long while).
KSB: It’s interesting to me how Joyce revisits the same subjects over and over again across his work. He is exploring many of the same themes from the perspectives of different characters but also characters that build on (or shape) one another across stories. What do you think that tells us about Joyce as a person?
VM: Joyce once said that a man (sic) had only one book in him, and that if he wrote more than one it was always the same book under different disguises. There may be some truth in that, certainly for Joyce! Joyce was strongly imprinted by the Ireland of his youth and by his family, and his international travels helped him gain perspective on that. His return to similar themes and characters anticipates that of William Faulkner and his relationship to the American South.
KSB: Here is a broad question for you, not necessarily about your book but about Joyce and other “difficult” writers. There seem to be two types of readers in the world: those who put down a book if they can’t get into it in the first few pages or chapters, and those who force their way through it even if they don’t “love” it (or even like it)? Which type of reader are you and what would you advise others to do?
VM: I would pose the question another way: what do you hope to get from books that you read? The so-called classics are books that challenge the status quo in some way, and when they are enshrined as classics their power to overturn conventional thinking is sterilized by their newly “official” and “great” status. So, it doesn’t matter whether you put down a book or whether you push through it; what matters is whether you want to understand the basis of your own reactions and perhaps discuss that with others! It’s very normal to be put off by a challenge, but that challenge may be a more important one than we realize at first. The question for me is how do we rise to a challenge? The way to rise to Joyce’s challenges is with a sense of humor and a capacity to entertain and accept perspectives that are different from the ones we have been relying on.
Joyce gives his readers an unprecedented amount of freedom, including the freedom to walk away. But as Isaac Asimov once said, I think about Fahrenheit 451, “Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.” I agree.
About the author: Vicki Mahaffey, Ph.D. is a professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and the author or editor of several books, including Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions, and States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment. Vicki is a frequent instructor at the Rosenbach and is currently teaching Dubliners.
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