If someone recommends a novel to you, what’s the first question you ask?
“What’s it about?”
Nothing wrong with that. Still, it’s interesting that we don’t ask first about genre, or about characters, or about setting, or about the time period in which the story unfolds. All of those matters can help us decide whether we will or won’t attempt to read the book that’s being recommended. Some people will read only science fiction, or will never read a Western. Some would never read a story featuring a rock star; others would never consider a book about a politician, or a detective or a spy. An Elizabethan England setting might be a turn-off for some and an absolute requirement for others.
Yet we’ve all been conditioned from infancy to gravitate to plot. What happens next? “What’s it about?”
What fascinates me about James Joyce is that, while coming to understand the plot is important and always extremely helpful, in the end the plot is not what appeals to us most as readers. I find this to be the case regardless of whether we’re considering Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. And so when I’m talking to someone unfamiliar with Joyce about Joyce ― as I often enough am ― and they ask me the inevitable “What’s it about?”, I always find myself struggling for an adequate answer to what is, after all, a quite reasonable question.
What is Ulysses about?
Of course there are some pat answers. Ulysses is about this guy who wanders around Dublin all day doing not much of anything. To a degree Ulysses is a sort of sequel to A Portrait.
My auditor then asks: “Oh, should I read that book first then?”
The answer to that question generally is a shrug. If you like.
“Would it help me understand what’s happening?”
Another shrug. In a way it might.
Why the evasiveness?
Because the plot is not why we recommend Ulysses, or anything else written by Joyce. But how do you explain that to someone who has never found cause to go beyond that question? Someone who can’t conceive of reading a book in which plot is a secondary, or tertiary, or a quaternary, or maybe even a lesser concern?
The first time you read Dubliners or A Portrait you are almost certainly going to focus chiefly on trying to decipher and tease out lines of plot. I had read a few stories from Dubliners in high school and had not been terribly excited about them, and when I was an undergrad in college I was assigned A Portrait to read. I failed to do so. Why? The plot, interesting as it is, did not fire my imagination, and my unchallenged assumption was that I was to read the book for plot. More than two decades would pass before one day, eyeing Ulysses on the shelf (I’d bought it a few years earlier), I decided to give it a try.
I’ve been reading and re-reading and re-re-reading Joyce ever since. And so on.
But not for his plots. For the architecture of his works.
I’ve never encountered anyone else who writes like this. Discovering this business of architecture in Joyce was (and continues to be) a revelation, far more than a simple epiphany. When you make the breakthrough that a book doesn’t have to be about something, then how you think about books changes radically on a deep, fundamental level: in fact, you find yourself fumbling around in unanticipated sub-basements beneath what you had always assumed to be impenetrable, foundational bedrock. Reading Joyce causes you to re-imagine what reading itself means. That is why I admire reading Joyce: not for his plots, but for his architecture.
This too I have found almost impossible to explain to people who are unfamiliar with Joyce. Why? Mostly because it fails to answer the imperturbable and demanding question: “Yes, but what is it about?”
Because I spend so much time writing fiction of my own, I find that my thinking about Joyce is not always concordant with that of academics. Call me an applied Joycean. Running through my mind is always a rumination on how I can put into practice whatever I can learn from Joyce in my own writing. I’m actively looking for clues, for techniques and for methods. Why, from the point of view of someone who writes, did Joyce make textual decision A and not decision B or C? I bear in mind questions like: How did he do that? and Why did he do that? And I also bear in mind something I suspect that academicians sometimes forget, which is that novels don’t spring directly from the minds of their authors as perfect pieces of art. How heavily the act of writing leans upon chance and luck and editing and changing the manuscript, stroking it, sculpting it. When pedagogues and professors attribute so much to Joyce’s genius ― and I do not dispute Joyce’s genius ― I find myself wondering how Joyce managed to load the dice in order to maximize the pay-off. I suspect those professors aren’t always thinking that way, which is the way that a practical writer thinks.
Joyce’s method appears to me to be largely a matter of architecture. But what do I mean by architecture?
Although it’s rarely evident to the new reader of Joyce, his books have grown the way crystals precipitate out from seeds. The seeds are elaborate systems of symbols and iconic emblems. Joyce builds up sophisticated and subtle relationships between recurring, if continually mutating, symbols and emblems in order to produce a three-dimensional lattice with no beginnings and no endings. Already this is unusual, since most writers are focused tightly on the evolution of entropy through time, on orderly beginnings and middles and endings. The story, or the plot, appears to emerge organically from Joyce’s symbolic framework, and not the other way around. It is the architecture that is most compelling, not the story itself. It is almost as if Joyce has discovered a formula for combining fertile symbols out of which plot naturally germinates and differentiates according to ontogenetic necessity. Sussing out such an approach to writing is very exciting to a writer-as-reader who views himself as a student of Joyce’s texts.
Also fascinating about Joyce ― and it may take years before one begins to notice and appreciate this ― is that the extended relationships between and among symbols and emblems protract across all conceivable scales. Each story in Dubliners provides us with a microcosmic example of the process of plot radiating out from symbols and emblems and their colligate linkages. We can see analogous parallels within the chapters of A Portrait too. But also there must be similar intra-connective links between the individual stories of Dubliners which eventually cause us to wonder whether we have read a collection of short stories after all, or instead a kind of more integrated, albeit subtle and strange, novel whose characters happen to be different in each story. We are tempted, and maybe more than tempted, to revise and extend what we mean by the word novel. Although the feel, or the flavor, or the ambiance of every chapter of A Portrait is individualistic (as are constituent stories in a more typical collection of short fiction), this is nevertheless obviously a novel and not “merely” an anthology of short stories. James Joyce keeps us asking strange questions as he toys with our assumptions of how (or whether) and why stories and novels are, by convention, allowed their similarities and differences. The chapters, or episodes, of Ulysses grow so peculiar in their singularity we may begin to doubt that we are still reading a novel at all, or whether Joyce has assembled something akin to a collection of scrolls which all deal, more or less, with the same story; i.e., with what it’s about. By the time we make it to Finnegans Wake, if ever we do, we may discover to our surprise that the same kinds of patterns and connections still exist, only by now they’ve achieved a truly soaring eminence, and we’re confronted with a text that is radically removed from whatever we once naively believed were the constraining limits on books and novels. Finnegans Wake, it seems to me, is built upon the same kind of iterative rules that inform Dubliners, only now they’re more intricately embroidered. Such rules can be discovered, I think, not so that Joyce can be duplicated, but so their implications can be pursued and explored by other writers practicing in their own voices.
All of these books are collections of symbols and emblems bound together at the highest architectural level: Joyce’s entire oeuvre has become recognizable as a single, unified repertoire. There’s only one song Joyce has been singing, and it goes on forever. I can’t speak about the architecture of one book without pondering the interconnections of them all. I am in awe of Joyce, but I’m also always trying to figure out how he achieved the effects he did without simply chalking it all up to genius and slinking away.
How do you enfold these ideas into an answer to the question about what a book is about?
You don’t, of course. Joyce transcends our assumptions of what both writing and reading are, reducing the question itself nearly to absurdity. He shows us just how feeble our imagination has been all along, but he also opens the door to ever-expanding horizons. Joyce’s books are “about” re-conceiving what writing and reading mean. They show us ways of portraying worlds in extreme detail that other books fail to achieve or, for the most part, even attempt to approximate. They demand that we work, but the pay-off is far more vast than we can anticipate.
Is it worth it? If you’re willing to do the work, it’s worth it.
Do the work.
Tagged: James Joyce, writing
