The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered

2. Reading Joyce’s Poetry against the Rest of the Canon

2 Reading Joyce’s Poetry against the Rest of the Canon Michael Patrick Gillespie “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” U 9.550–51 I take the epigraph for this essay from the wire that Stephen Dedalus sent to Buck Mulligan at The Ship pub in Lower Abbey Street. Mulligan had been waiting there with Haines, his English visitor, for Stephen to appear, flush with his salary for teaching at Mr. Deasy’s school, to buy them drinks. Reading the telegram aloud to the Dublin cognoscenti, assembled in an office off the Reading Room of the National Library to listen to Stephen recount his Shakespeare theory, Mulligan’s first reaction seems effusive in its appreciation of Stephen’s wit: “O, you peerless mummer! O you priestified Kinchite!” (U 9.554–55). Much later, in Burke’s pub just before closing time, Mulligan, now apparently the worse for drink, assumes a different tone. While using the same extravagant style as before, he disparages both the telegram and the sender: “Mummer’s wire. Cribbed out of Meredith. Jesified, orchidised, polycimical jesuit” (U 14.1485–86).1 Mulligan’svacillatingattitudefitshisself-descriptioninthe“Telemachus” chapter as “Mercurial Malachi” (U 1.518). More significantly, however, at least for the argument of this essay, it evokes what John Paul Riquelme has identified in his 1983 study Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives, in a slightly different context, as the oscillating perspectives of Joyce’s work. Riquelme’s pioneering study applied concepts of reader response theory to highlight alternatives for explications of Joyce’s narratives. 34 · Michael Patrick Gillespie My approach here seeks to build on that concept. It looks at the apparent creative contradictions embodied in comparisons of his prose and poetry and asserts that the clearest understanding of Joyce’s work comes when these oscillations are comprehended simultaneously. The efficacy of sustaining conflicting views becomes more obvious when onelooksatJoyce’svariableresponsestohispoetry.WritingtoStanislauson October 18, 1906, for example, Joyce voices his displeasure with the title of his collected poems even as he signals his mixed feelings for the verse that the book contains: “The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent. I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it” (Letters II, 182). Six months later, in March of 1907, after receiving the proofs for Chamber Music from Elkin Mathews, he again turns to Stanislaus and continues the practice of denigrating the volume and then qualifying his views: “I don’t like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it. However, it is a young man’s book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music” (Letters II, 219). These passages have led any number of critics to the conclusion that, within a relatively short time after its completion, Joyce dismissed Chamber Music as little more than apprentice work. Certainly, when viewed alone, these quotations can leave that impression. However, it is important to contextualize Joyce’s sentiments, for ample biographical evidence demonstrates that he remained attached to these poems, and to ones composed a decade or more later, for the rest of his life.2 Earlier in the March 1907 letter to Stanislaus quoted above, Joyce, who had been working in Rome as a clerk for a bank, had written at some length of the creative and intellectual lethargy he was experiencing: “It is months since I have written a line and even reading tires me. The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take an interest in any subject” (Letters II, 217). A melodramatic self-absorption dominates Joyce’s language, suggesting an individual illdisposed , at that moment, to see any literary effort in a positive light. Nonetheless , even in this state of mind, Joyce cannot ignore the creative impulse, for just a few sentences later, he speaks with some regard of what he has achieved through his poems and of his ambitions for continued productivity : “Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to; not as a doctrine Reading Joyce’s Poetry against the Rest of the Canon · 35 but as the continuation of the expression...