The James Joyce that I admire is that of Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist, the exile, the singer and the prodigious drinker. We were advised not to attempt to write about Ulysses or Finnegans Wake on the C20th Literature course at Lancaster in 1980/81 but that was probably for our own protection rather than from any lack of ambition. The course only put on a lecture on Joyce due to popular demand. But later Joyce, at least, was too dangerous for undergraduates.
The trajectory of Joyce's fiction is that of a stream becoming a river that becomes a flood and then an ocean. Even with Dubliners, it begins with The Sisters, less than 8 pages long, and the stories develop in length and depth before reaching its great consummation in the final pages of The Dead, which itself has grown from ordinary beginnings and through the heart-breaking story of how Gabriel can never compete for Gretta's love with Michael Furey, the young boy who had died for her.
A manuscript in the British Library shows Joyce's dense handwiting pouring out (possibly) Finnegans Wake and then writing across the text in the opposite direction, suggesting a ferocious creativity not only having the work fully formed in his mind but able to get it all down. However, had he lived, it was his intention to return to something more recognizably 'traditional', having taken the adventure as far as it could go. Like Picasso's blue and pink periods, it is not necssearily in the most ground-breaking work that Joyce is best.
Because, for all the complexity and scale of his monumental avant-garde prose, it is in the understatement, the ironic distance, done with such knowing lucidity that Joyce writes the best prose fiction in the language.
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.
and
It was well for her that she had not to attend to the ladies also.
are not ambitious narrative sentences but see the character from the outside in words she would use herself. The Dead continues towards its luminous ending, accumulating power through writing where gentleness is more powerful than muscular, strenuous prose,
He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Because, as well as this immense tenderness, Joyce, in his highbrow diffcultness and grand overall designs, is more than anything a comic writer, thoroughly Irish but expatriate and in Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, character is subtly painted, in its imperfection, its naturalness and, most of all, with sympathy.
One never feels with Joyce that one is being served up a theory, a doctrine or being educated. It is convincingly the life, the songs, the dreams and the jokes that his work is made from. He is, for want of a less portentous phrase, the consummate artist, and prose fiction is unlikely to have anybody quite so good as that again.
