The Internal World of James Joyce

     ‘Thou are become (O worst imprisonment) the dungeon of thyself’ – [Milton]

The photo is of James Joyce, age 6, at Clongowes Jesuit boarding school outside Dublin where he was the youngest student.

I am interested in the fact that Joyce’s parents devastatingly lost their first child a year before he was born. Joyce spoke of being ‘exiled in on himself’ and felt himself an outsider—a feeling common in replacement children. This sense of dislocation is echoed in Portrait of an Artist, where he says about Stephen:
To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer. He saw clearly his own futile isolation. He had not bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, foster child and foster brother.
All his life he suffered from phobias, fears and superstitions:
His fear of dogs and thunder are no secret to us, his fear of madness he both admitted and repudiated, but his fear of aloneness he kept to himself. His family were a bulwark against it and so was drink. His eyes were so weak that long periods of his life were passed in a state of virtual blindness. (O’Brien)
About his writing, Colm Toibin gives the following description:
Joyce was concerned not with some dark vision he had of mankind and our fate in the world but rather with the individual self he named and made in all its particularity and privacy. The self’s deep preoccupations, the isolation of the individual consciousness, which keeps so much concealed, were what he wished to dramatise. The self ready to feel fear or remorse, contempt or disloyalty, bravery or timidity; the self in a cage of solitude or in the grip of grim lust; the self ready to notice everything except that there was no escape from the self, or indeed from the dilapidated city; these were his subjects.

The Artificer.  James Joyce

By  Padraic Colum

The long flight and asylum barely reached—

Asylum, but no refuge from afflictions

That bore on you and left you broken there—

This was the word was brought me:  loneliness

That was small measure of the loneliness

That days and nights was with you, came to me.

Dedalus!  Has your flight ended so?

I looked back to the days of our young manhood,

And saw you with the commons of the town

Crossing the bridge, and you

In odds of wearables, wittily worn,

A yachtsman’s cap to veer you to the seagulls,

Our commons also, but your traffic

Sombre:  to sell your books upon the quay.

And then, with shillings flushed,

To Barney Kiernan’s for the frothy pints,

And talk that went with porter-drinkers there.

But you

Are also Schoolman, and these casual men

Are seen, are viewed, by you in circumstance

Of history, their looks, their words

By you affirmed, will be looked back on,

Will be rehearsed.  Nor they, nor I

Nor any other, will discern in you

The enterprise that you in secrecy

Had framed—to soar, to be the man with wings.

Seán O’Casey

Seán O’Casey was full of admiration for Joyce and particularly for Finnegans Wake, which, he said, led him ‘into many a laugh and into the midst of wonder and wonderland’. But the war started a few months later and they never met. ‘Finnegans Wake is me darlin’, O ‘Casey recorded in 1940: ‘the dream is the world’s nightmare and the clap of thunder is in our ears once more’. Once more, because it echoed the thunderclap of World War I, re-echoed by that thunderclap in Dublin.

image: Leonard Baskin, 1952