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James Joyce: Barnacle Goose and Lapwing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Maurice Beebe
Maurice Beebe*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Lafayette, Ind.
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Extract

It Is a paradox that James Joyce, exemplar of the artist-as-exile, was one of the most domestic of modern writers—“very much a family man, a devoted husband, a good father, and a loyal son.” For Stephen Dedalus, the artist as young man, the artist as family man would have seemed a contradiction in terms. The true artist, Stephen insisted, must free himself from allegiance to home and family as well as country and church. The paradox is no problem for those critics who, dissociating Joyce from his fictional counterpart, consider Stephen less a portrait than a parody of the artist and his theory of art one that Joyce either never took seriously or eventually rejected. If, however, the testimony of Joyce's brother and others who knew him in Dublin may be accepted, the young Joyce was a good deal like Stephen in situation, manners, and temperament; and the ideas on art and artist which appear in Joyce's early essays and notebooks are virtually the same as those expounded by Stephen. This is not to say that the Joyce who wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses is identical with the Joyce-Stephen presented in the novels. Between the time depicted and the time of writing occurred several events, including his elopement with Nora Barnacle in October 1904, which changed the artist's outlook. Yet, if Joyce looked back on the foibles of his youth with amused detachment and described them with irony, he was ready to admit the relationship between author and hero. “Many writers have written about themselves,” he said to Frank Budgen, “I wonder if any of them has been as candid as I have.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , June 1956, pp. 302 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 Lucie Noel, James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of a Friendship (New York, 1950), p. 12. See also Silvio Benco, “James Joyce in Trieste,” Bookman, ixxn (Dec. 1930), 376; and Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (Garden City, 1947), p. 397.

2 James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London, 1934), p. 52.

3 Ulysses (New York, 1934), p. 7. Subsequent references to the Modern Library editions of Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners are cited in the text.

4 Complete Works, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (London, 1925), i, 177.

5 (New York, 1951), pp. 13–14.

6 Trans. Henry Alden Bunker (Albany, N. Y., 1938), p. 47.

7 The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York, 1948). See also Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949).

8 (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 97–108.

9 There is, of course, an obvious connection between barnacle goose and Nora Barnacle. In addition, Joyce may have chosen the barnacle goose because of the old belief that the barnacle goose is hatched from the goose barnacle: hence, “becomes fish becomes barnacle goose.” See Graves The White Goddess, p. 68.

10 James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York, 1950), p. 29.

11 “The Backgrounds of Ulysses,” Kenyon Rev., xvi (Summer 1954), 386. The Gorman reference is to Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York, 1948), p. 117.

12 William York Tindall, ed. Joyce's Chamber Music (New York, 1954), pp. 87–88.

13 If we assume that Joyce and Nora met on 10 June or 16 June, and that the day of meeting is the key-date, there is a possible explanation for Joyce's setting Ulysses after rather than before the meeting. See A. M. Klein, “The Black Panther (A Study in Technique),” Accent, x (Spring 1950), 154. Klein shows that the Telemachiad section of Ulysses follows the form of a Black Mass ceremony. Joyce chose the nearest appropriate Thursday (the Witches' Sabbath) following the Feast of Corpus Christi, which in 1904 occurred on 2 June. Since 9 June belonged to the Octave of Corpus Christi, during which a Black Mass could not be conducted, Joyce was forced to choose the 16th.

14 Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce and Our Ireland (New York, 1953), pp. 149–150.1 find somewhat revealing the post-wedding photograph of the Joyces which appears in Envoy, v (May 1951), opposite p. 18.

15 Life and the Dream, pp. 388–389.

16 On the autobiographical relevance of “A Painful Case,” see Marvin Magalaner, “Joyce, Nietzsche, and Hauptmann in James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case’,” PMLA, lxviii (March 1953), 95–102.

17 Exiles: A Play in Three Acts, Including Hitherto Unpublished Notes by the Author, Discovered after His Death; and an Introduction by Padraic Colum (New York, 1951), pp. 117–118. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text.

18 “Introduction,” Exiles, pp. 9–10.

19 Hugh Kenner, “The Portrait in Perspective,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York, 1948), p. 172.

20 James Joyce (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), pp. 61–62.

21 Trans. Frances Younghusband (London, 1883), p. 53. See Thomas E. Connolly, The Personal Library of James Joyce, Univ. of Buffalo Stud., xxii (Buffalo, 1955), item 310.