From what I have read of him (I never managed to finish a single thing he started, even though setting out to force myself to find out what he was about, rather than to be entertained), and from what I gather from Kenner (A Colder Eye, Knopf, 1983), James Joyce, having been run out of Dublin by the jeers of Dubliners, turned around and spent the rest of his professional life trying to prove to himself just how stupid, illiterate, and little they were, by writing Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, and other works none of which are ever more than potshots from a safe distance at the expense of the Dublin that done him wrong. For that is what they are: an accurate portrayal of slops as merely slops, illiteracy as merely illiteracy, ignorance as merely itself, a detailed, effortful presentation of nothing more than the fact that they are what they are. But Alex Pope and Jack Dryden were able to portray a thing as Itself, and as related to all the rest, in a few sentences, taking out whole careers, classes, and cultures, in single poems, indeed in single metaphors. And creating a Body of Lithrature by going on to riper targets. We are given the feeling, if we know any better, that Mr. Joyce, with his supercilious Jesuit's Bachelor's Degree, found himself insufficient to the problem of dealing with a number of very small middle fingers stuck in the air -- putatively at him (he was so important?) -- a feeling generated by the simple fact that I've had the problem myself, and don't know of a single teacher or better writer who hasn't. But the result was that the raised fingers owned Mr. Joyce in fee for the rest of his life, and he had no knowledge outside the discourse of the fingers and their single act of being stuck in the air at him and whatever he thought he valued, by which to identify them in relation to anything but themselves. So he identified them as themselves. At length.

In doing so, he created a School of "Literature" that still gives an occasional gasp without ever trying to breathe into its whole career the effort he put into a single work. I give him that, who don't have to give it for he earned it: he knew what he wanted to write, and labored long over the writing of it. For Mr. Joyce singlehandedly created a language -- Shanty Irish, Joycean Irish, still copied and parodied occasionally today -- quite as much as Lady Gregory and Billy Yeats created Stage Irish, and by exactly the same means, but where Gregory and Yeats sought to exalt a people beyond their condition by returning them to their once-High-Romantic and probably-literate linguistic roots, and so created an exalting, Romantic language firmly rooted (and unfortunately spelled) in Old High Gaelic, Joyce created a non-language to show the illiterate that they were, by god, illiterate. And students ever since have been trying to match the exaltation that nonlanguage was given by being Published, and especially by its being Fussed Over in courses of English Lithrature. Well, that much is not his fault; but it proves that not only did students miss him entirely in trying to emulate it outside Dublin, teachers were illiterate in offering it as an example of High Art.

For it is not in any sense High Art; it is the verbal equivalent of editorial cartooning, and Joyce deliberated it only to the same extent and purpose that editorial cartooning is deliberated. Unable to describe his subject as an analytical class, he demonstrated (drew) it for us. And it is, as an editorial cartoon always is, not a description of people and a problem, but a caricature of a people and a problem. If what he drew is dearly held to be Too Large a Body of Work to be a mere "cartoon," I submit that the objector is so poorly-educated as to have never heard of a comic book, most of which have run in serial installments (as Joyce's work first did) for decades. And however accurate the facts and analyses presented by a caricature, the lines themselves portray nothing that is real or ever has been. No cat ever looked like Garfield, no man ever looked like Batman, and nobody ever, ever talked like the Blooms except Joyce himself as he was drawing them out, however accurately the words they use portray in the short space of a large book the life history and present condition of some sort of "minds" that think them. Of course, the characters in cartoons behave like real people -- real people at their most extreme, and that is what makes cartoons funny. The Blooms behave like real people, but they behave like real people who don't do anything, when the essence of a cartoon is action or relation of some sort; that is why it has to be drawn. And so Mr. Joyce fails even of being a cartoonist, however sublime he is as a caricaturist. Like other caricatures, his lie on coffee tables to be talked about (they're too big to be put on restaurant walls. Or too small).

But there is something fundamentally subliterate, indeed downright ignorant, about a critique that has no other way to ridicule its subject than to be it, and that to a degree even more ridiculous than the subject itself would ever be caught dead being or trying to be. Indeed, the method backfires on every critic who attempts it, for the subject of the method considers itself superior to its critic in the mere fact of its being emulated by such a considerable effort to such a considerable degree. It is thus no surprise to learn that Joyce did indifferently at an indifferent Bachelor's education, after which he found it necessary to hold himself in exile from Dublin (in Trieste) for the rest of his life, from which great height he cast down Ireland's own mud, as best as he remembered it, back at Ireland. But even a cursory examination reveals that Joyce remembered Ireland's mud, as the permanently-stained by such stuff always do, as being so much deeper than life as to excuse his having let it drown him, which it did. When the Irish rejected Yeats' heroic portrayals of their origins, when they rejected his attempts to give them their own once and future language, at least he had the good sense to use what was left of it to create a world of High Romance to occupy all by himself. And, far from sulking in his Tower, he found it ultimately no drawback that he had to occupy it himself, since, from such a great height, it is possible to see much of what is wrong with the world so left behind, even if High Romance doesn't offer much in the way of practicable solutions.

Joyce doesn't even offer much in the way of practicable observation. Where another writer would, and many did, in addressing exactly the same problem at exactly the same time, give a single character or two occasional speechs in Dublin's gutter tongue, speeches carefully chosen to convey the exact nature of the speaker's illiterate prejudices and their relation to the problem at hand and the world at large, Joyce gives every character exactly the same speech and attitude toward himself and everything else -- including the commentary of the critical narrator, always presumably the author, Joyce, himself. A saying, current at the time in another place, would say he shot himself in the foot.

High Romance always has the advantage of offering itself as a occupiable solution, and that anybody at all can practice it, who is willing to forego the habit of three meals a day and regular hot baths. Joyce, on the other hand, despite already having no surety of meals or water, not only offered no solutions to what he saw as an irreducible problem, i.e., the want of meals, baths, and an intelligible tongue, offered also no place to which to escape: no sane man would, however hard pressed, care to occupy the utterly unrelieved Dublin of the Ulysses or the Wake, nor care even to associate with its characters. Or the memory of its characters. Indeed, his books sell not because we like them, but only because we feel we must be reliably informed as to what the ruckus is all about. And we, informed in but a few pages, close the book, throw it away, and report the ruckus to the next sucker. (Instead of giving him the book, so preventing another sale.) In such a manner are certain Bodies of Literature perpetuated to the unsuspecting generations.

It's time to stop.

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Dr. Hammes is Robert Larson Professor of Poetry at FISHHOOK Academy of Natural Philosophy.

(C)1996 by Dennis M. Hammes. All rights reserved.