James Joyce's Painful Case

7. Conclusion: An Occasion of Grace

7 Conclusion An Occasion of Grace Along with Shem the Penman, Mr. James Duffy has the distinction of being Joyce’s only mature celibate intellectual. He is thereby well equipped by his creator to cut through the meshes that trammel the souls of the general run of Dubliners. He is sufficiently endowed with intelligence and feeling to view with detachment his social formation. He is the figure in Dubliners who is least encumbered by a sense of family, national, or religious obligation. He is free to do what he wills. The central social drama in his quiet life is his failed liaison with Mrs. Sinico. It collapsed because whereas he imagined it as a platonic relationship animated by Mozart’s music, she hoped that it could become as intimate as any human one could be: emotional, intellectual, and physical. This is the actualization of an apparently longstanding spiritual crisis of his inner life. For Mr. Duffy there was another, perhaps unconscious, agendum that required his denial of such hopes. The sophisticated technique of Joyce’s story—which this long discussion has attempted to peruse—the “objective correlative” of the labyrinthine ways of Mr. Duffy’s soul, reveals that agendum. To this end, Joyce’s portrait of this character is typically inlaid with literary and cultural allusion so that it is possible for readers to arrange James Duffy’s life retrospectively and thereby uncover the contours of his inner struggle. Abandoning his early clerical aspirations, he has become a dilettante: dabbling in theology, poetry, music, drama, and philosophy. He supports these cultural hobbies through an occupation that does not engage his intellectual capacities or assuage his spiritual yearnings. If we turn, once again, to the works of the philosopher who has been Mr. Duffy’s principal guide through adulthood, Schopenhauer, we may be afforded one final look at that agendum. As he ranges over many topics in World, there is one underlying perspective to which Schopenhauer continually returns and that would have ap- 210 / James Joyce’s Painful Case pealed to James Duffy: his awareness of his own superior gifts and a self-conscious comparison with the manner in which other men of genius expressed theirs. In the chapter in the third book of World, entitled “On Genius,” he identifies the salient quality in the man of genius—in contrast with the man (or woman) of talent—as the capacity, unimpeded by guarded self-interest, to realize full intellectual curiosity and expression. In an extended passage in this essay, he remarks on the particular childlike character of the genius. His discussion (which in some ways anticipates Freud) considers that during the first seven years of life, before the development of the genital system, the brain attains its full extension and mass (161). Among young children one finds the greatest levels of unimpeded desire for information: they have more intellect than will, that is, than inclinations, desire, and passion (162). In childhood, the intellect “eagerly apprehends all phenomena, broods over them and stores them up carefully for the coming time—like the bees, who gather a great deal more honey than they can consume, in anticipation of future need” (162). “Certainly what a man acquires of insight and knowledge up to the age of puberty is, taken as a whole, more than all that he afterwards learns, however learned he may become; for it is the foundation of all human knowledge” (162–63). This hypothesis is best exemplified, in Schopenhauer’s view, by the case of Mozart who throughout his life retained the spontaneity of a child. Citing George Nikolaus von Nissen’s Biographie W.A. Mozart’s (Leipzig 1828), he proposes that “[I]n his heart he nearly became a man, but in all other relations he always remained a child” (163). The exuberance and spontaneity of his music everywhere speaks of his pure, childlike genius. It exemplifies the proposition that every genius is even for this reason a big child, because he is able to look out into the world as into something strange, a play, and therefore with purely objective interest (163). For Mozart, the experience of the world was always as if apprehended for the first time, an epiphany. In the normal course of average lives, the mental aptitude of youth is afterwards lost, and the natural disposition for apprehending, understanding, and learning disappears (164). Unless one can retain into adulthood the childlike capacity for heedless play, one becomes grave, sober, thoroughly composed, and dully reasonable. Most people...