Before Daybreak: "After the Race" and the Origins of Joyce's Art

8: Conclusion

8 Conclusion The wide-ranging approach of this book—embracing all of the salient circumstances bearing upon Joyce’s writing of “After the Race”—may have at first seemed excessive. But as the painstaking method has set forth, it is necessary if one is to make an adequate assessment of its multivalent language and technical experiment. It shows how his characters are composites of his acquaintances and of historical and mythic figures, as well as projections of his personal fears and aspirations on the eve of his exile. It demonstrates, too, how geographical Dublin—the city streets of his own immediate experience—are transmuted into a symbolic landscape, becoming in the process representations of sensuous and spiritual realities. This lengthy unpacking of the moment and the text of “After the Race” has the benefit of revealing the Olympian imagination concealed behind its thin human drama (see appendix for a Swedenborg-inspired schematic summary of our travels). By the same token, it exposes another aspect of the weakness of the story: its heavy dependence on private, local, and transient cultural references. While his other works are similarly dense with local allusion, “After the Race,” for all the brilliance of its inner world, does not succeed as well as they do in transcending the circumstances of its origins and speaking to a readership beyond the shores of Dublin Bay. One Final Turn Too much depends upon the occluded figure of Villona, whose virtual silence implies a melancholy view of the revelry of his boisterous companions . As this book has contended, the artistic precedents for Joyce’s personal identification with this figure are François Villon and Arnold Dolmetsch. It was apparently to Dolmetsch that Joyce owed his introduction to the compositions for lute and voice by John Dowland (whom 268 · Before Daybreak Stephen Dedalus mistakenly takes to be a fellow Dubliner [U 16.1762]). Joyce retained an admiration for Dowland’s composite art throughout his life, as attested by his letter to Harriet Weaver (Letters III: 138, March 5, 1926). Some of his Chamber Music lyrics owe a small debt to the spirit and example of Dowland: in their gentle melancholy, their delicate understatement , and their tonal nuance (Chester Anderson, 140; Russel, 15–19). The third of the preludial poems in this sequence bears witness to the spirit of John Dowland: At that hour when all things have repose, O lonely watcher of the skies, Do you hear the night wind and the sighs Of harps playing unto Love to unclose The pale gates of sunrise? When all things repose do you alone Awake to hear the sweet harps play To Love before him on his way, And the night wind answering in antiphon Till night is overgone? Play on, invisible harps, unto Love, Whose way in heaven is aglow At that hour when soft lights come and go, Soft sweet music in the air above And in the earth below. This nocturnal lyric is more relieved than is Dowland’s wont, expressing not only the desire for wholeness, but a trust in the healing powers of music that, through the lonely night vigil, harmonizes with the transcendental music of the spheres. This mystical figure of the “lonely watcher” is, as we have seen, drawn from the Theosophical lexicon. It designates the figure in every system who is set apart from his fellows so that he may light the way and lead adepts to prepare for the next phase of cosmic development (ETG, s.v. “watcher or silent watcher”). In Joyce’s hands, he is endowed with Dowland’s lute to become a concert of Irish and angelic harps praising universal Love. The arrival of dawn seals the troth between earthly and heavenly harpers, between loves carnal and ideal. Conclusion · 269 It would seem, therefore, that at least in these respects, the silent poetmusician and watcher of the skies in lyric III of Chamber Music (written 1901–3) reappears in “After the Race” under the name “Villona.” Even as it moves away from the spirit of Dowland, this lyric expresses the complex intersection of the many themes dilated on in this study: the relationship between personal and political, aesthetic and spiritual, folk and mythological . Through the dramatic plot of the story, Jimmy Doyle, the ostensible agent in the “world below,” acts as a somnambulist, by contrast with the inner life of the silent bystander Villona and the narrator’s vision...