* * *
Soon after settling in Trieste, Joyce met the writer Italo Svevo; he thought very highly of Svevo’s novel As a Man Grows Older (Senilità, in Italian), published in 1898. Coincidence or not – the hero of Svevo’s novel is a young clerk, who goes through his only truly important love relationship ravaged by jealousy. The hero wonders whether he met a spiritual goddess or just a frivolous woman. He cannot take his words as a game: if they, pregnant with the glory of spirituality, were addressed at a wrong person, then he himself is a grotesque weirdo. However, unlike Joyce’s, his suspicions turn out to be true. Angiolina is a tart, who follows only her instincts, while the world of words is just the necessary evil for her. Brentani cannot accept the fact that he is not experiencing a great romance. Probably because his entire life is immersed in senility (which gave the novel the title), futility and numbness. The events, which for the first time seriously shook his being, cannot be a farce. For Brentani, jealousy is a kind of mechanism, which is to keep him awake and prevent him from sinking back into an eternal sleep, into levitation without disturbing impulses. On the one hand the jealous worm is eating through the imagined image of a spherical being bathing in celestial energy, but everything Brentani hears and sees is proof of the opposite. On the other hand the jealousy is determined by the object it is fixated upon. And this object is not the true Angiolina, but some dreamed-of image. Brentani is thus playing a game with himself, disturbing his own energetic surface, without ever trying or wanting to enter the true space of a fellow human being. This excited state is not something Brentani is used to; later, he will remember the affair with Angiolina with gratitude, especially when the last atom of desire for any activity in him finally wanes.
Joyce took a step further. He managed – or at least tried – to get very close to the spirit and body of the beloved person. In his story jealousy played a different part than in the novel of his Trieste friend. It was so ferociously eating through the spiritual assumptions about their relationship that the walls finally collapsed. Although this would never have happened if jealousy had not been accompanied and supported by the restless demands of the body. Because of the body the spirit had to yield and change the direction of its volition. The starting assumption, woven into the wedding clothes of their relationship – namely that their souls had been static until then, and would in the future harmoniously move in the same direction together – was too shattered. The sudden decision to open the valves for bodily lust was just the first step in the hunt for reality, an attempt to sink into the newly discovered magma of life, hoping that – in the surge of passion – the remaining awareness might perceive something immense, something, which is much more than the usual, the controlled, but sadly transient. Despite its pathological nature, in Joyce’s case jealousy played a vitalising role. It was a kind of unpleasant lever, which – through pain – opened up Joyce’s intimate communication with the world and probably led him to redemption.
Joyce’s letters to Nora are thus an interesting testimony about a young doubter, whose restless nature and creative ambition drive his eternal search. His letters are interesting also because of the topic, which is often considered politically incorrect. Jealousy is a vile emotion, which a tolerant mind based on consensual trust should not too amply indulge. Let us remember Pushkin or Yesenin and their inspired lyrical heroes who, cheated and betrayed, grab for cold weapons and use them against the traitors or against themselves. Jealousy can be the cause of death, final separation and therefore sacralisation of the love which is no more. Joyce is telling us a different story. Jealousy can be the lever of a dynamic process, the mechanism reflecting the doubts of the mind and yet a desire to break through to the other side of the rigid frames to new, more fertile lands. What destroys can also strengthen. And the sharp blade of final farewell is constantly hanging above the heads of the participants in this stormy adventure.
* * *
When Joyce came to Trieste he brought with him a manuscript, which in the next decade became his first novel –Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. It is the novel about growing up. As if Joyce wanted to compile his own apology while there was still time. The book describes the transformation of the spirit from child-like trust to all-embracing doubt having reservations about everything that is presented as indisputable truth. The concluding vision of Stephen Dedalus is very similar to the self-reflection the vagrant conveys to his beloved. Stephen’s intellectual development has reached the point when he must admit to himself that he has no more attachment to the things that he deemed sacred in his childhood. Confessional religion, fervour for the homeland, family – none of the allegedly self-evident values can anchor his life in a safe harbour. His will be the fate of a restless seafarer.
Let us stress that it took Joyce quite a long time to find the right form for his first novel. The writer was stubbornly poking into the archaeology of his knowledge as if he were afraid he would miss something decisive. The hero’s growing up ends with an elated faith in the power of his creative energy. Whence this enthusiasm in the midst of a mental havoc, whence the faith in the power of spirit, when all the signs were telling that it was his spirit that was driving him away from life with explosions of doubt? How can utter suspicion and euphoric belief coexist so close together? In the novel we read about the events, which in little Stephen arouse early doubts in the power of social institutions and the relations based on them. In this chain, sensuality is given an important place. The up-to-then pure consciousness is pervaded by sensual images. Very soon the boy makes it out with a prostitute. The experience is followed by a period of remorse, but the decision to participate in the world only on the spiritual level does not hold; the boy turns down the invitation to join the Jesuit order. As if the juices of the body pervaded the spirit and opened the door to a life, which is filling up the world on the other side of the membrane of the brain. The transformation is over, the decision to become an artist confirmed; it is time for a great adventure. The letters to Nora, which were written at the same time as the novel, appear to be a love metaphor of literary tectonics. The birth of the language is not the act of spiritual purity; it is smeared by the urges of the body and doubtful hesitation. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, despite its sharpness, does contain a great deal of Jesuit incense; sinful obscenities are wrapped in fog, through which we can sense only their pale contours. The writer’s desperate search for identity culminates in a mighty eruption, in unbridled merry-making, the gigantic Ulysses. Joyce writes an epopee of a usual, fantastic day. Eroticism is no longer concealed behind a safe veil. Joyce simply shatters the prose of his time and turns it into a supreme experiment of imagination. His Eros spills far beyond the love for a woman, everything pulsating around him – bodies, noises, metaphysical debates or sheer blabbering – is the polygon of his unbridled imagination. It is the material evocation into the world of art, into the promise of the transcendental.
Joyce is what he claims to be: a believer in art. And art is not just evoking the world in the sphere of a work of art, but is also a result of cold reflection, of the distance, which dams the flowing lava. Art always reveals those territories that cannot be found either by pure speculation or by fervent hedonism. And this is probably a general rule, Joyce being no exception. The excesses of Ulysses are probably due to the seeming incompatibility between the mighty expansion of imagination and strict formal elements. The split seems enormous, for Joyce is neither just a newly-fledged believer in the body, nor a cold by-stander. It is hard to talk about the autonomy of art, about its independence from various social vocations. Joyce’s art is such a heated, and yet durable pot, that it cannot be framed into the sphere of the discourse, which tries to regulate a society. Its explosiveness is totally evasive. Joyce is a madman, who proclaimed his madness and proved it. His faith in art as a refugee’s only homeland – although pervaded by constant doubts – is amazing. This is one of the reasons why – for a slightly surrealist mind – Joyce and Nora’s love story is a little story about great literature. Love stories mocking the time, which brings nothing good.
Translated by:Lili Potpara