The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered

4. Verse after Verlaine, Rime after Rimbaud: Joyce and the “poisondart” of Chamber Music

4 Verse after Verlaine, Rime after Rimbaud Joyce and the “poisondart” of Chamber Music Marie-Dominique Garnier “But there’s a great poet in you too.” FW 619.31 “A nice bent towards lyric poetry” That Joyce’s poems have been published alongside his “shorter pieces” or in the same volume as Exiles has been a determining factor in their reception or nonreception, to an even greater degree, perhaps, in the age of globalization , when the term “exile” has changed its meaning and lost the intellectual aura it once had. “Exiles” have been replaced by “migrants,” by “refugees,” by “asylum seekers” and “illegal aliens,” terms applied, today, to border-crossing crowds waiting to be processed for admission, or ready to be sent back, once the conditions in the war zone or the pocket of poverty they have fled have improved. Joyce’s early poems have no country to be sent back to and little or no interest in settling anywhere. As poetry, policies of control are not applicable to them. One of the purposes of this essay—which articulates close readings of Joyce’s verse in Chamber Music alongside Verlaine’s “monotone,” to matters of translation, and to what Walter Pater once called “the condition” of music —is to revisit the poems as key-texts, as war zones in themselves and pockets of deliberate poverty—in other words, as experimental bordercrossers , early games in stylistic and linguistic gate-crashing. If Joyce had any truck with the “poètes maudits,” it is in the sense in which, as this essay Verse after Verlaine, Rime after Rimbaud · 79 attempts to show, “maudit,” in French, must also be understood as a preBeckettian term meaning “mal dit,” deliberately “ill-said.” In his introduction to James Joyce’s Poems and Exiles, J.C.C. Mays notes that the poems of Chamber Music have the gift to “turn negative energy, the instigation to be different, into positive pastiche” (xxvi). There seems, however, to be nothing positive about a pastiche, originally a “pasticcio” or mixed macaroni and meat pie. Mays adds: “the mimicry is intense to the point that it liberates the mimic.” What follows attempts to treat, rather, Joyce’s poems as poetry, to resist the temptation to study them from within other generic frames, such as a theatrical performance. One of the guiding assumptions of this essay is that Joyce’s Chamber Music poems experiment with nonrepresentational techniques. One of Joyce’s earliest critical writings addresses the subject of lyricism in conjunction with Shakespeare, once mistaken, he writes, for “a person of secondary importance, a decent devil with a nice bent towards lyric poetry .”1 Joyce’s introduction of the bard, though written in jest, resonates with harmonics that prefigure his own future reception as a lyric poet, as much as with his own self-disparaging comments on his poetic production. While “devil” and “nice” frequently recur in Joyce’s letters in connection to the publication of Chamber Music, “bent” evokes a long associative chain of leaning, oblique, bent, and bending poses and characters throughout the Joyce canon. Although Chamber Music can be—and has been—read as a “nice” textual surface with a less than decent, devilish subtext (Tindall, Chamber Music, 209), the effect of such a reading is to isolate Joyce’s first publication from the rest of the corpus, to which it belongs in more than superficial ways. Much work remains to be done on Joyce’s own “nice bent towards lyric poetry.” Rather than oppose, in a simplistic critical paradigm, the “nice” to the “devilish,” Joyce’s comment on Shakespeare as a lyricist obliquely introduces, in a circuitous fashion, the sense that poetic writing forms an alliance with “bending,” or curbing, and that “there is something unavoidably oblique about literature” (Wood 9). From the evidence of J. F. Byrne’s portrait of James Joyce busy writing verse in his college library, one may infer that Chamber Music was composed at slow speed, painstakingly, by someone who later would turn into an equally slow-paced“arranger”ofprose:“Ashesatbesidemeinthelibrary he would write and write and retouch, it might almost seem interminably, a bit of verse. . . . When he had at last polished his gem to a satisfying degree 80 · Marie-Dominique Garnier of curvature and smoothness, he would write out the finished poem with slow and stylish penmanship.”2 Joyce’s poetic “Chamber” matches to etymological perfection what Byrne has described as...