(Images provided by the Good Doctor DWB)

“Let my country die for me.” – James Joyce

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.” – James Joyce

“Shut your eyes and see.” – James Joyce

(Note: We conclude another fine week by our Editor DWB. And for the time being he will be appearing in months to come with full weeks. The offer is open to many of our friends who have published previously with us. So, something to consider–Leila)

This un-mundane but minuscule screed possesses a very specific target audience. It is aimed directly at anyone who has ever lived, is now living, or will ever live who has even the tiniest bit of interest in the Irish author James Joyce, or in creative writing itself as purely an art form.

The greater your interest in HIM (and he is his work) or the greater your interest in creative writing as art, the greater your interest in this missive will be. There is much so-called “creative writing” that is much closer to formulaic hack writing than it is to what we (I) mean when we say “art.” This kind of commercialized-hack-writing-as-creative-writing tends to win things like the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize and even the Nobel Prize – to prove this all you need to do is look backward at the list/s of writers and works which have historically won these so-called prizes; Joyce himself, the greatest fiction writer in English of the twentieth century (by far), never won any major prizes and was never even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Joyce is the greatest fiction writer in English of the twentieth century, which bears repeating. More than this, forced to make a list of the top half-dozen writers of the English language so far in any genre, that list would be: William Shakespeare; Geoffrey Chaucer; John Milton; William Wordsworth; James Joyce; and Jonathan Swift; in that order. Maybe Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe (just ask them in France), Walt Whitman, John Keats, John Donne or William Blake could replace someone in this list. (All such lists are really just a speculative game, of course, except for the first four, which are really a historical fact.)

Spiritual events are the biggest events in our lives. In many ways, somehow unrequited romantic love (including but not limited to the death of the loved one as in Poe) is an unbeatable spiritual event – and by that I especially mean small cap’s romantic love when it is propelled by capital R-and-L Romantic Love, i.e. the kind of love that was also preached and practiced by the British Romantics such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys, all of whom had their profound influences on James Joyce (he once dubbed himself a modern-day synthesis of Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame, and William Blake).

Joyce has been and is one of the biggest spiritual events in my own life so far on a personal level. As such, this screed that is also a missive is also a memoir of a little over 1,300 words, which is around the average length of one of Paul’s letters or many of Hemingway’s best stories.

I started reading Joyce when I was around fifteen years old in the American Midwest. In many ways, I was finished reading Joyce by the time I was around twenty or so, even though I’ve continued to reread him to a greater or lesser extent in every year of the last thirty-nine years. So I absorbed, and even memorized, much of Joyce still during the time/s when my youth made me very, very impressionable.

All young people who have the gift or the penchant for reading or who have a questing soul at all should read and reread some of James Joyce when they are young if they are lucky, specifically the first four stories in his collection Dubliners, which blow The Catcher in the Rye out of the water but are in the same vein and should be read first or beside it, along with Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. If these four Joyce pieces accidentally missed you when you were “young,” but you are still young inside, go to these stories now and your haunting youth will be magically returned to you in all its best, and worst, aspects. The complete realism of these brief yet all-encompassing tales is comforting even as their idealism inspires, or makes the breath quicken.

The rest of this writing will present in brief yet pungent and cogent form what are my own personal favorite things in James Joyce as of right now. His work is endless to meditation so some items shall be, I am sure, accidentally omitted but what is presented here can also be seen as an outline of his most important work from the heart and soul of one loving reader’s perspective.

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DUBLINERS.

The first four stories: “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” “Araby,” and “Eveline.”

“The Boarding House” from the middle of the collection and “The Dead” from the end, and especially the end of “The Dead,” and especially the very last paragraph of this long story or short novella.

“The Dead”: the dramatic, life-altering moments between the MC and his wife in their hotel room around Christmastime will never leave you. The last paragraph of “The Dead” is, hands down, one of the greatest paragraphs ever written in the English language, a fact that has been acknowledged by many long before me and will continue to be acknowledged by many long after “yours truly” has departed this mortal sphere (praise God may it not be for a while, thy will be done). I personally have read this paragraph not hundreds but thousands of times. It is like a sad song I replay over and over when alone in the car, but better.

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A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN.

The title of this book alone has had a massive impact on my entire life at every level I can possibly imagine, an impact so vast it feels beyond Jungian in its depth, oldness, oddness, and neverendingness.

The sea girl on the seaside like a sea bird and Stephen’s limerence-like fascination with the girl, the bird, and the sea. The beautiful longing of it all.

The experimental and experiential opening of this novel which actually captures all of infancy, babyhood, and toddlerhood in less than one page from the kid’s perspective.

The friend with friend notations and conversations that end the book.

The phrase “silence, exile, and cunning” which became one of my own personal credos when I was a teenager and remains so until today, and will be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow after that, too. Among other things, the rebellious spirit of the original rock and roll is contained within this phrase. One of the greatest influences on Bob Dylan ever is and was James Joyce, by Dylan’s own admission.

There is SO MUCH in these literal and metaphorical four words when put together like this that you can literally build an entire life on and around it.

It is more than an impenetrable fence but it is also an impenetrable fence, the only kind that can allow for true growth of the spirit and the personality, the only real possession we can ever possess here on Planet Earth.

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ULYSSES.

The title itself, alone, along with all it implies.

The “friends” episode in the sea tower at the beginning of the book.

Leopold Bloom’s eternal peregrinations.

Stephen and Bloom drunk together in the whorehouse and elsewhere, wandering around.

MOLLY BLOOM, especially her end (“Yes”) in more ways than one.

Marilyn Monroe wanted to make a movie where she played Molly.

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FINNEGANS WAKE.

The title itself.

Finnegans – plural. Wake – verb.

Resurrection, reincarnation, and/or all of the above.

The Irish drinking song where the title comes from: a drunk guy in Chicago falls off a ladder, dies, then springs to life again at his own funeral, leaping out of his own casket and SMILING at all his friends and enemies.

Her name: Anna Livia Plurabelle. And the rivers of life.

His name: H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody.)

Shem the Penman.

The alpha and the omega: the beginning and the end.