James Joyce; Genius or Madman?

James Joyce the celebrated Irish author, has been hailed as a genius. We know that he suffered serious mental illness and that his daughter had schizophrenia. The density of his work, much of which is indecipherable, begs the question. Was Joyce really a genius or are his works nothing more than the ravings of a mad person?

The lists of the world’s greatest works of fiction invariably contain the book Ulysses written by James Joyce. It is a matter of opinion what books find their way onto this list. Some lists are collections compiled by academics and others by publishers. Despite the number of bodies that compile these lists there is remarkable agreement among them.

Almost all libraries in schools and universities would contain a copy of Joyce’s work and most educated people who read widely would also possess a copy, millions of which exist in the world. However only 880,000 copies of Ulysses have been published in the United States since 1934. The rest have been published in Europe and the United Kingdom.

So although it heads the list of great books, its sales would pale into insignificance compared with The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, yet another book of conundrums and puzzles to solve but at a much lower level.

I have never met a person who has read Ulysses from cover to cover. It is also true that while I come from university educated classes I have a few acquaintances in history or English departments. I have asked those I know and, while most have a copy of the book, few have read it.

While my absence from the field of professional study of literature may be proposed as a reason for being mistaken, my belief is further reinforced by my attendance at a large book conference and lecture during which the speaker asked the audience how many of them had read Ulysses and fewer than five attendants raised their hands.

I asked a sales attendant at a large bookstore how often she received a request from a customer to purchase the book and I was not surprised to hear her answer, “Never”.

Something inexplicable is happening here. How can it be that no one is reading the book that heads the list of the greatest literary works ever published?

This strange phenomenon is not confined to the literary world. It is even more extraordinary in the world of science. Stephen Hawking, as with, Joyce, is listed among the 100 greatest scientists in world history, a famous theoretical physicist who wrote a book called A Brief History of Time, a truly marvelous title. It sold many more copies than Ulysses, some 25 million copies around the world.

This book is difficult to read because of its mathematics and physics despite the author’s stringent efforts to explain it. Of the people who purchased the book it is estimated that, at the most, 5% could read it even though it consists of only 200 pages.

The other problem with the work is that Stephen Hawking didn’t write it. This has been pointed out in several editions of the New York Review of Books.  It was written by his Ph D students. His publishers were aware that if the public knew this, they would not buy the book

It is in the nature of people to admire outstanding success in disabled people, because, quite rightly we are inspired by those who overcome misfortune to achieve greatness.  Stephen Hawking suffered a rare, slow onset, neurological disease named after Lou Gehrig a baseball player who died of it. He shared this diagnosis with Mao Zedong the dictator of China. Normally the disease kills within a short few years, but Hawking had it for over half of his 76-year-old life span.

A valuable lesson is to be learned here that brings us to understand what is happening with Joyce. As Hawking became more and more disabled, losing his ability to speak, operate his wheelchair or even move his hand, the list of his prizes and accolades grew.

His carers were exhibiting him around the world flying him to attend one conference or another in private jets, but he could only contribute with speech that was pre-recorded using an odd, restricted computer-generated language. He was sustained by three shifts of nurses and other attendants including PhD students who were writing his material.  

At the end he presented a disturbing specter of a crumpled wheelchair-bound marionette-like-figure who could barely move his cheeks, the real Hawking having long since disappeared.  In the last few years of his life, he was publishing only popular science books, but it was clear that he was too incapacitated to write these himself and he was being so physically neglected that the police investigated complaints that he was suffering abuse from his carers.

His first wife and family returned in the last period of his life, and he had a measure of peace and decent medical care. Prior to this, no one had the courage to object to this treatment of a poor, very disabled man who needed to spend his last few days being properly cared for and not flying around the world in private jets in order to raise huge amounts of money. Even his first simple wheelchair of the 1960s was sold for over a quarter of a million pounds.

So it is with the myth of James Joyce, the author of the most highly regarded novel in the world so highly regarded that people don’t even have to read it to know this. Such is the nature of received wisdom.

 And if they do read it, what do they find? Most are disappointed. It is very hard to follow so perhaps it is best to simply give up and yield to the experts.  On the other hand, they could be bold, and risk being called illiterate, uneducated Philistines and say that it does not make any sense. On that score, they would be right. it’s not supposed to make any sense.

For a start. it has no plot. What it does have consists of a rather boring person wandering around Dublin for a day trying to face the fact that his wife is having an affair.

This person is supposed to be the living embodiment of the heroic Greek King of Ithica, the man who conceived the Trojan horse and wandered the Mediterranean till he could finally make it home to confront his wife’s suitors. Joyce gave the book the Roman name for Odysseus, Ulysses, but the connection is little more than a story of a wanderer because Bloom bears no resemblance to the Greek king.

Two myths that have arisen from Joyce’s work are that, firstly his character’s wonderings around Dublin are so detailed that if the city were burned down it could be rebuilt from Joyce’s novel. The second is that the “thinking” of the characters also known as “free association” is a revelation about how people think and, how their thoughts wander brilliantly elaborated in Joyce’s novel.

I will give one illustration of this. While Bloom, the central character is waiting at a train station watching the trains come and go he is also thinking about childbirth, the bloody entrance of children into the world and how they come and go and some of them die and so forth. So his mind is charged with these images that enter and depart with the trains in quick succession.

We encounter the idea of free association elsewhere in literature. Sigmund Freud uses it in therapy and patients were supposed to begin with one word to remind them of another until they track back in time to their childhood. This is the strange idea that doing this would reveal memories long lost.

The term is associated with “stream of consciousness” and how our thoughts do not come to us in organized sentences but chopped up with other thoughts, feelings and sensations. Though first coined by Alexander Bain in Senses and the Intellect it was most associated with Wiliam James in his Principles of Psychology 1890.

Besides the use of streams of associated words in unstructured sentences Joyce created portraits of people from words that not only described something but sounded the same or were synonyms. He describes a mangy old man in a pub as being “broad shouldered, deep chested strong limbed, frankeyed, freely freckled long nosed red bearded deep voiced long headed” etc. These are masterful and descriptive but by no means unique to Joyce. Many other authors have used these techniques including Dylan Thomas whose masterpiece Under Milkwood employs this technique to greater effect.

The notion that Joyce’s works reproduce accurately what it is like the think as though he is somehow looking at our brains to mimic how the mind works is nonsensical.

For a start it ignores the five senses and at any one time operating on us are a mass of smells, sounds, sensations, pains, tastes and so forth, let alone memories of what has just happened, plans and obligations that we face in the future all presenting themselves to our consciousness at any one time. Then again there are times when we focus completely on one thing like a flower, the image and smell of which completely occupies us as Proust the author noted when studying a hyacinth for thirty minutes.

This all goes to making up the “genius contest” which human beings feel compelled to hold. Who was the greatest painter, the greatest author, the greatest musician, silly contests adjudicated by unknown people and media outlets who may as well ask us, “Who was the worst artist who ever lived?” The answer to the latter cannot be fathomed, the question becomes meaningless.

So Stephen Hawking is held aloft as the greatest astrophysicist long after he had ceased to speculate about anything and Ulyssess becomes the greatest novel ever written to a generation who have never read it.  One person who did read completely it was Virginia Wolf who described it as “Tosh”.

Those uncertain of the value of this book they find hard to read cannot go past her review of it.

All this is partly driven by mysticism and the idea that hidden in obscure bits of literature are marvelous revelations. This was certainly the case with Joyce’s last work Finnegan’s Wake in which the free association and the stream of consciousness predominate throughout.

The book is comprised of seventeen chapters divided into four parts. It begins with the death of Finnegan who is killed when falls off a ladder while working on a tower. After this, we are uncertain as to whether Finnegan is alive or not because, at one point, he seems revived by whiskey. Characters come and go, crimes are committed but we are not sure of their nature, and cycles of puzzles and wordplay occur throughout while we are treated to the thoughts of Samuel Johnson, Richard 111, and Napoleon.

A group of men led by Gerry Fialka in Venice, California spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake in the hope of deciphering it completely. They failed. It has no meaning. It is a series of cute and whimsical word puzzles often utilizing a language other than English.

The idea that Joyce’s endeavor was to construct a new literary language is absurd because even if this were true, no one else but Joyce could understand it. Furthermore every language needs rules and grammar whereas the point of Finnegans Wake is to circumvent these.

Joyce’s own brother Stanislaus called it either “the work of a psychopath or a huge literary fraud.” Ezra Pound, previously a supporter of Joyce, upon attempting to read it, wrote mocking the author’s word play, “Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherization.” 

Joyce was a conman. The question is, “Was he aware of it?” There seems no doubt that Joyce saw himself as a literary man forging ahead with the great endeavor of throwing off the chains of English colonialism, the Catholic Church, sexual repression, capitalism and, all the forces of oppression that characterized life in early 20th Century Ireland.

There was no money in it. He was sustained till the end of his life by wealthy patrons. His life was wracked with illness including eye disease and mental illness which also destroyed his daughter. At the end he died in the shadow of the Nazi regime that was devouring all of Europe. As for fame, when he died his home country refused to repatriate his remains. Nonetheless, it is clear in reading his work, that he was pulling the literary wool over our collective eyes telling the greatest joke in publishing history, almost no one can read the greatest novel ever written.

James Joyce was neither a genius nor a madman. He was a fraud.