She was an autobiographical writer who incorporated her life experiences into her writing, challenging the conventional notions of what autobiography is. She was interested not only in events and things, but in ideas, which exist in a state or longing, or as facts or intellectual truths.
Review: James Joyce: A Life – Gabrielle Carey (Arden)
Gabrielle’s way is to cut holes in the fabric of standard forms of literary scholarship that allow her to tunnel through to some otherwise inaccessible idea. Because of this, when one reads her last book, James Joyce: A Life , one is conscious that the voice is telling itself as it tells the tale. In doing so, it forces a sharp light through the events and ideas that surround James Joyce, like a beam through a thick fog.
Joyce’s words are so thick that it is difficult to see through them. Many readers are intimidated by this and avoid his work. Carey’s answer is to do away with justification or, at least, the specific type of circumlocution that scholarship demands when it asks for us to cite others who have treaded this path before. She eliminates all footnotes and all works that are cited.
Carey’s scholarship does not invalidate her work. She is an expert on Joyce, and you can trace her references by paying close attention to the names she mentions. This choice is justified because it allows her the opportunity to draw lines that are deeply moving and acutely perceptive.
Gabrielle Carey’s last novel shines a bright light on the events and ideas surrounding James Joyce.
Two lines in particular help us to understand the author of Ulysses and other great works of literature from any era.
First, there is the idea of an accumulating list. It is a listing that opens up and accumulates like the long division exercise that Stephen Daedalus observes on the page of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young man.
Second, the concept of life is that it is not just “a” person but a collective existence, which includes those that you love, those that love you, and the multiple selves that you hide and promote, as well as those that you have influenced, touched and even readers who were born after “life” had passed.
Gabrielle Carey, the reader, is also included in the concept of life. She makes us see the things that delight and hurt her. She is the shadow that organizes everything, a dark shadow whose absence can be felt everywhere.
Read more: Gabrielle Carey was best known for Puberty Blues – but I knew her as a formidable intellectual who mastered the art of living well
Joyce is said to have loved lists and associations.
He continued to be a list-maker as a mature author, and some of his lists lasted for several pages. Finnegans Wake’s list is a humorous self-portrait.
“The wrong shoulder higher than right, an artificial mouth with a natural curl, not a single foot to stand on. A handful of thumbs. A blind stomach.
Carey’s lists, like Joyce’s, are arranged horizontally and vertically. Each item is associated with its own associations.
Carey uses the list in a way that is stylistically clever, and instead of getting lost in endless explanations and qualifications, he works with a deep simplicity. Most paragraphs are devoid of a connecting tissue, which would allow them to be immediately connected to the next or previous section. Each section stands alone and offers new information. We join them intuitively. It is a powerful and clear effect. Carey can cover a lot of material with a book that is only 130 pages long.
The lists change as you progress. Early pages highlight the bright disposition of Joyce’s young character: “At his home, his nickname was Sunny Jim, because of his easy-going, happy disposition.” Later chapters show him to be wracked with physical pain and misery.
Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s famous biographer, said that Samuel Beckett idolized Joyce. He wrote, “Both men were prone to long pauses, and their conversations would be suffused by sadness. Beckett for the world and Joyce for himself.” Carey reveals with clarity that Joyce’s transition from joy to sadness is not due to self-pity but rather a series of problems, including his relationship with his family and his declining health. A biography such as Ellmann’s, which tends to emphasize the triumphal arc of someone like Joyce through his genius from obscurity to astounding achievement and influence, makes one forget the person who lived in the shelter or ruin of that achievement.
Carey has succeeded in making us feel the man’s contingency, his awkwardness and vulnerability. Her story, based on her style and feeling for accumulating events, is less about a genius than someone who has been just a few steps away from abject failure.
Carey shows that, rather than viewing Joyce as a man who was cut off or beyond the world he lived in, he is shown to be supported by others and carries the extra few steps he needs to take to achieve something no one thought possible.
She shows that the women around him were usually those who supported him. His mother, May, Nora Barnacle, the love of his life, and his daughter, Lucia.
Harriet Shaw Weaver, his unwavering supporter, published him and paid him substantial sums of cash to enable him to write. Dora Marsden was the editor of The Egoist magazine, who brought his work to the world. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were convicted for obscenity after publishing “Nausicaa,” an episode from Ulysses. It ruined their financial situation.
Read more: Friday essay: the wonder of Joyce’s Ulysses
It was not only women. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus and his loyal friend Paul Léon, among others, are also there and helping. Carey does not let us forget that without them, he could not have become James Joyce. At times, even often, these helping hands suffered for their service.
Nora Barnacle Joyce in this photo by Berenice Abbot, circa 1926. Wikimedia commons
Carey also allows us to see what may be true for everyone, namely that the James Joyce we celebrate as a person is actually composed of many people who loved him just as much as we do. Finnegans Wake’s protagonist is known by many names, including “Here Comes Everybody”.
Joyce is composed of not only those other writers but also the places in which he was living and writing, as well as the worlds that they contained. This does not diminish the accomplishment we attach to ourselves but rather helps us understand how life is accumulated and spread in different directions.
