[In the essay that follows, Mahaffey discusses the defining characteristics of Joyce's shorter works and examines the relationship between his longer and shorter compositions.]

At first glance, Joyce's shorter works—his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles—seem to bear only the most tenuous relationship to the books for which Joyce has become famous. It is only by an exercise of the imagination that the epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce can even be called ‘works’; Joyce published neither in its original form, choosing instead to loot them for the more ambitious undertakings that followed, and neither received the painstaking polish that Joyce lavished on his more ambitious productions. Only forty of at least seventy-one epiphanies are extant and their relationship to one another had to be reconstructed from manuscript evidence; the sketches that comprise Giacomo Joyce were similarly composed, arranged, and abandoned, but not destroyed. Chamber Music, although published in 1907, was orphaned when Joyce delegated the final arrangement of the poems to his brother Stanislaus. Pomes Penyeach, as the title suggests, is a modest offering of twelve and a tilly poetic ‘fruits’. Only Exiles [E] continued to hold Joyce's interest as an autonomous composition not destined for immediate verbal recycling.

The status of the shorter works as successful, original, or even finished compositions has always been in question; even in more subjective terms, however, they seem to offer few of the rewards of their longer and better known counterparts. First, and most damagingly, they are humourless; what humour may be discerned in them is bitter or ironic, inspired by pained defiance (as in ‘Gas from a Burner’) or jaded cynicism (‘In my time the dunghill was so high’—E 43). Secondly, they are spare, denuded of the variable styles and elaborate contexts that make Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem inexhaustible. Finally, they are easily dismissed as immediately derivative of both Joyce's experiences and his reading.

Although the brevity and earnestness of Joyce's minor pieces put them in opposition to the major ones, the relationship between the shorter and longer productions is much closer when viewed in structural and thematic terms. Chamber Music, the Epiphanies, and Giacomo Joyce are all composed of isolated, artistically rendered moments arranged to form a loose progression; the three acts of Exiles loosely divide thirteen unmarked scenes, each an intimate dialogue between two characters, stitched together by the conventions—both social and theatrical—of entrances and exits. The strategy of producing a longer and more complicated text by stringing together a series of formally self-contained units is essential not only to the design of Dubliners, where the structural building blocks are short stories, but also to the increasingly complex episodic structures of A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In short, the minor works make it much more apparent that Joyce's technique—even in the longer texts—is in large part an imagist one, adapted from poetry to narrative and massively elaborated in the process.

If the shorter texts outline the basic structure of all Joyce's works, they also provide the simplest statement of Joyce's most characteristic themes, which are treated polyphonically in his longer compositions: themes of loss, betrayal, and the interplay of psychological and social experience. Strikingly, all of the shorter works record the experience of some loss: the Epiphanies seem to have been arranged to depict the loss of innocence; Chamber Music plays out the loss of youthful love, a theme picked up and translated into predominantly visual terms in Giacomo Joyce. Many of the poems in Pomes Penyeach echo the theme of lost youth, but the collection also includes more anguished treatments of different kinds of loss: in ‘Tilly’, a figurative loss of limb makes the dead speak; it is the illusion of beauty that is lost in ‘A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight’. The list can be expanded to include loss of sight in ‘Bahnhofstrasse’, loss of life in ‘She Weeps over Rahoon’, loss of faith in ‘Nightpiece’, and loss of peace and security in the nightmarish ‘I Hear an Army’; in the words of another ‘pome’, ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (all is lost). Exiles is the most complicated of Joyce's briefer treatments of attrition, since it probes the loss of spontaneity in life and love, which the action of the play suggests is irreparable.

A less apparent symmetry between the shorter and longer works is in the careful balancing of subjective and objective experience. As Scholes and Kain point out, Joyce designed not one but two kinds of epiphanies—one narrative, one dramatic—and then interwove them into a single sequence.¹ The careful counterpointing of opposite perspectives—those of dream and observation—constitutes Joyce's earliest attempt to compensate for the distortion of ‘parallax’, the term for the inadequacy of a single vantage point that sparks Bloom's curiosity in Ulysses. The main problem with Joyce's characterization of both kinds of experience in the epiphanies is its naïveté: the imagination is always empowering, and outer experience invariably deflating. The narrative epiphanies celebrate the power of the author's mind; the dramatic epiphanies reduce the stature of those around him (WD 4). The epiphanies, like the manuscript novel that succeeded and partly incorporated them, present the nascent artist as an inevitable Hero.

As heroism is increasingly displaced by humour in Joyce's maturer works, his treatment of the relationship between fantasy and drama, desire and reality, also grows more complex.²Giacomo Joyce and Exiles, as narrative and dramatic treatments of problems that would later inform Ulysses, at first seem to constitute a two-phase attempt to represent the pain of betrayal from an internal and external point of view, respectively: that of the artist's mind and that of a more detached spectator. Giacomo Joyce, from such a perspective, resembles the narrative epiphanies in its depiction of the sensitive artist as dreamer, whereas Exiles, like the dramatic epiphanies, presents the artist exposing the imprecision and lack of integrity of those around him.³

The attempt to define Giacomo Joyce [GJ] and Exiles in terms of the similarities and differences between the two kinds of epiphanies works only up to a point, however, since by the end of each text the oppositions between dream and drama, wish-fulfilment and satire, subject and object have begun to break down. Giacomo Joyce cannot sustain its status as pure fantasy; outer circumstances begin to impinge on its enclosed world when the object of Giacomo's gaze enigmatically announces her preference for a lesser man—‘“Because otherwise I could not see you” … Non hunc sed Barabbam!’—and the speaker's imaginative superiority lapses into self-criticism: ‘It will never be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?’ (GJ 16).

Just as the subjective cast of Giacomo Joyce dissipates in the strong light of fact, the objective, even clinical mood of Exiles yields to self-pity and hallucination. The upsurge of irrational forces begins when Richard Rowan suddenly sees the hypocrisy of his high-toned opposition to any union between his friend and the mother of his child. He recognizes and confesses the hidden desire that prompted him to watch and passively abet their growing mutual attraction, as the play relentlessly pursues the treachery buried in the accusation of betrayal:

[I]n the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be. … To be for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame.

(E 70)

Richard admits that his furtive desire to be betrayed was motivated, paradoxically, by pride, since Bertha has consistently used her faithfulness to shame him: ‘She has spoken always of her innocence, as I have spoken always of my guilt, humbling me’ (E 70). And as Richard is driven towards truth, he is also propelled into a nightmarish world of imagination, the world of Giacomo Joyce. Returning from his hour on the strand he tells Beatrice:

There are demons … out there. I heard them jabbering since dawn … The isle is full of voices. Yours also. Otherwise I could not see you, it said. And her voice. But, I assure you, they are all demons. I made the sign of the cross upside down and that silenced them.

(E 98)

Once we see that Giacomo Joyce and Exiles not only represent an opposition between inner and outer reality but also present complementary accounts of how that opposition breaks down, it is only a short step to an appreciation of how the two dovetail into the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses, which is both drama and fantasy, an extravagant celebration of the actor/viewer's superhuman dreams and subhuman instincts, his generous pride and shameful prejudices, and finally into Finnegans Wake [FW].

The shorter works bear a marked resemblance to their longer counterparts in basic theme and structure, but they also reflect Joyce's characteristic readiness to appropriate the styles and voices of other writers. Whereas in his most famous works this appropriative tendency takes the form of parody or emerges through correspondences, in the slighter pieces it has been dismissed as simply derivative, as evidence of the influence exercised upon Joyce by Christian theology, Yeats, the Elizabethans, or Ibsen. All writing, of course, is derivative; the question that presses is whether a work represents a productive or reiterative reading of its sources: does it replicate the most familiar features of its parent texts, or does it reshape our awareness of those texts?

Not only are the shorter works derived (in part) from identifiable sources, but they, in turn, serve as sources themselves; Joyce reinterprets—and re-uses—them as readily as he uses any other material. And just as the dependence of Joyce's shorter works on the writings of his predecessors can easily obscure the extent to which our understanding of those other writings may change in reference to his, the dependence of Joyce's longer experiments on the shorter ones which frequently contribute to them raises a comparable problem of relation: how can we account for the disjunction between what the shorter works lack (humour, complexity, and a self-consciousness that is acutely philosophical rather than painfully self-dramatizing) and what they share with Joyce's other writings (seriatim structure, concern with betrayal, hunger for experience, and the appropriation of other writers' voices)? One solution is to sever any relationship between the slighter works and their famous siblings by asserting that the shorter works, unlike the longer ones, are unsuccessful on their own terms. Such a contention may be true, but its truth is to some extent irrelevant, since it is not purely on their own terms that any of these documents lay claim to our attention; their value stems largely from their incestuous relationship to other writing, their liminal status as threshold productions that mark the interstices between more apparently autonomous experiments. Whatever Joyce's shorter works have to offer they will not offer in isolation; on the other hand, if they are absorbed too completely into the rest of Joyce's writing we lose a vantage point for reinterpreting his other works. Like Joyce's longer texts, the shorter pieces simultaneously depend upon a larger written tradition and strain to break free of that tradition by exceeding it.

The shorter works are most fruitfully approached not only as half-realized versions of Joyce's more ambitious productions, but also as stilled frames in an ongoing process of reading and writing, a process that he parodied, practised and refined throughout a lifetime of experimentation with language. Like the manuscripts, the shorter works provide information indispensable for reconstructing the ‘continuous manuscript’ of Joyce's writing career,⁴ an achievement that is both fluid and discontinuous, fragmented and whole. Unlike the manuscripts, though, which give insight into the arrangement of a published text by tracing the genesis of that arrangement and the false starts that help to define the finished shape, the shorter works preserve contextual as well as textual trials and errors: we see Joyce testing, not only phrases, but variant interpretations of problems like fidelity, combining the perspectives of different authors to create complex backdrops for his own treatments.

The most influential critical treatments of the shorter works show how easy it is to upset the fragile balance between a text's individuality and its applicability to larger contexts. In the case of the Epiphanies, the prose bits to which Joyce gave that name are too often digested into the general concept of ‘epiphany’. In contrast, the critical focus on the poems, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles has tended to be too narrowly biographical or literary. Whether the perspective is telescopic or microscopic, the attitude inclusive or dismissive, what is lost is the depth and flexibility that come from a less consistent, and more Joycean, sense of the continuity and discontinuity of relation.

EPIPHANIES

The main difficulty presented by the Epiphanies lies in the broad application of the word itself, which Joyce used not only to designate the slivers of life that he punctiliously preserved in prose and dialogue from 1900-1903, but also as a metaphor, drawn from classical and Christian myth, for the revelation of the spiritual in the actual. In Greek mythology, epiphany referred to the unexpected manifestation of the divine, and in Greek drama it was used to describe the sudden appearance of a god on stage. Christianity appropriated the term for liturgical purposes to commemorate the day that the Magi brought gifts to the Christ child (which represents the first manifestation of divinity to foreign travellers).

In the manuscript of Stephen Hero, [SH] where the term was first discovered, Joyce uses ‘epiphany’ both to describe his records of moments that blend triviality with significance and to designate the revelatory climax of aesthetic apprehension. He introduces the more local of the two meanings by describing his reaction to a fragment of overheard conversation:

A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

The Young Lady—(drawling discreetly) … O, yes … I was … at the … cha … pel …

The Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) … I … (again inaudibly) … I …

The Young Lady—(softly) … O … but you're … ve … ry … wick … ed …

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

(SH 210-11)

The collection of epiphanies receives further mention in Ulysses, [U] where Stephen thinks to himself, ‘Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara’ (U 3.141-4). Several of Joyce's own epiphanies turned up among his papers and those of his brother Stanislaus, and it is Scholes and Kain's arrangement of these into a sequence based on manuscript evidence that constitutes what we now refer to as the Epiphanies.⁵

In Stephen Hero, after the narrator relates an epiphany and reveals Stephen's determination to collect them, Stephen goes on to explain the idea of epiphany in theoretical terms to Cranly. Epiphany, he argues, is the moment when the spiritual eye is able ‘to adjust its vision to an exact focus’ so as to apprehend ‘the third, the supreme quality of beauty’ in an object, its ‘soul’ or ‘whatness’, which the mind synthesizes from an appreciation of the first two qualities of beauty in the object, its integrity and symmetry:

After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

(SH 213)

When Joyce reworked this portion of Stephen's aesthetic theories for Portrait (P 212-13), he expunged any reference to epiphany, instead describing the moment of aesthetic apprehension as an experience of stasis.⁶ The emphasis of Stephen's aesthetic theory is significantly different in Portrait; the goal of aesthetic apprehension is no longer presented as a semi-religious celebration of the spirit's ability to manifest itself through matter, but as a rare balance of spirit and matter, imagination and observation, an evenness of apprehension illustrated by the commingling of light and darkness in Shelley's image of a ‘fading coal’ (P 213).⁷

In philosophical and religious terms, epiphany represents an idealistic, even platonic belief in the superiority of the spirit, its ability to transcend materiality.⁸ However, as Joyce's brother Stanislaus suggests, Joyce also used epiphany to signify a psychological revelation of repressed or subconscious truth through slips or errors. In his papers, arranged and edited by Richard Ellmann under the title My Brother's Keeper, Stanislaus writes:

Another experimental form which [Joyce's] literary urge took … consisted in the noting of what he called ‘epiphanies’;—manifestations or revelations. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and these notes were in the beginning ironical observations of slips, and little errors and gestures—mere straws in the wind—by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal … The revelation and importance of the subconscious had caught his interest.⁹

According to Stanislaus's account, the epiphanies began as satiric attempts to expose the pretensions of others, and they grew to include brief realizations of unconscious knowledge as it is unexpectedly unlocked by language or dream.

As Joyce matured, he lost the desire to exalt either spirituality or his own authorial privilege, and he increasingly valued more balanced representations of individual with shared realities. The Epiphanies fail to preserve such a balance; although they frequently invite us to entertain two opposed perspectives through puns or dialogue, one is always clearly preferred. In epiphany 32, for example, when Joyce juxtaposes the human race with a horse race, thereby foreshadowing the running puns of Ulysses, the human race clearly suffers by the comparison: ‘[H]uman creatures are swarming in the enclosure, moving backwards and forwards through the thick ooze’. In contrast to the vile human race is the distant, idealized horse race: ‘A beautiful brown horse, with a yellow rider upon him, flashes far away in the sunlight’.

Criticism has tended to favour the concept of epiphany over the prose sketches that bear the same name. Lacking context themselves, the epiphanies have seemed less attractive in their denuded manuscript state than when decked out in the heavy robes of myth, religion, and aesthetics.¹⁰ However, most critics have agreed that the importance of the manuscript epiphanies may be traced to a few of their most marked features: the absence of authorial commentary that also characterizes Joyce's later work; the division of the epiphanies into two types; their structure, a sequential ordering of fragments which has the effect of submerging ‘plot’; the interplay of conscious and subconscious awareness; and their reappearance in the richer contexts of Joyce's subsequent works.¹¹

The epiphanies evoke the desire and fear of discovery, but their exposures are all designed to prove the power and authority of the self over the external world. Chamber Music, as we shall see, transposes the theme of disclosure into a new key, taking it out of the psychological and mythic realm and into a private chamber, where attitudes of eroticism and morbidity are paramount.

THE POETRY

The nature of Joyce's poetic accomplishment may be momentarily pinned down only by a pointed definition of what exactly is meant by ‘poetry’ in the context of his career. If by poetry we mean a composition in verse that manages, paradoxically, to combine richness of applicability with verbal compactness, bridging public and private experience; if we are talking about poems on the order of Yeats's ‘The Tower’ or ‘Among School Children’, Joyce wrote no such poetry, although it could be argued that he realized comparably ‘poetic’ aims in prose. However, Joyce did not restrict himself to prose; his earliest efforts were primarily in verse, and by the end of his career he had written over one hundred poems, parodies, and poetic fragments. What distinguishes Joyce's poetry from that of someone like Yeats is that Joyce never used verse as a comprehensive form; he seldom strives to integrate different levels of meaning in a single metrical stroke. Instead, Joyce uses conventional poetic forms and meters as a way of simplifying emotional experience, whether in the form of a musical lyric, a satirical limerick, or an angry broadside. Versification allowed him to pare away complexity in favour of a simpler emotional and verbal expressiveness.

It is appropriate for a writer as contradictory as Joyce that his greatest poetry never assumes poetic form. Nevertheless, Joyce did write—and publish—two collections of verse, Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927), in addition to two earlier collections that he destroyed, and of which only fragments remain, Moods and Shine and Dark. In addition, he wrote numerous occasional poems, which tend to be comic or satirical—two broadsides, several limericks, regular quatrain poems, and quite a few poems designed to be sung to music.¹² His verses represent a wide variety of moods, from anguished nihilism or stung pride to lyrical wooing, but the range of emotion is not matched by a comparable flexibility in poetic technique. Joyce's verses are deliberately constructed, like everything he wrote, and they do manage to create some unusual local effects, many of which gather around Joyce's use of one particular word to magnetize the meaning of an entire poem, but his poems lack formal complexity or variation. For this reason, several critics have suggested that Joyce's poems are, more accurately, songs.

What differentiates Joyce's poetry most markedly from that of Yeats, and from his own most successful prose, is its paucity of voices and its propensity towards enclosure. Chamber Music might not be an inappropriate title for the majority of Joyce's metrical compositions; even the volume that bears that title is fairly representative of what Joyce achieved—and failed to achieve—in verse.¹³ First of all, there is only one voice in Chamber Music, that of an alternately idealistic and sensual young lover. That voice serenades a conventionally golden-haired young woman who first appears playing the piano in her chamber (ii). The burden of the lover's song is his desire to enter that chamber, which is a room, her heart, and metaphorically, of course, her womb. At first, the enclosed spaces that he longs to enter are depicted as warm and inviting, but after the poem that Joyce identified as the ‘climax’ of the sequence (xiv), those spaces cool and grow shadowy, increasingly representing the darker allure of sleep, and, ultimately, death.

At the outset of the sequence, the lover's desire for his beloved to ‘unclose’ herself to his love emerges by means of the analogies he sets up between his love songs and the music of the night wind, and between his beloved's hidden fire and the dawn. In the first poem, an anthropomorphized Love is wandering (like Yeats's ‘Wandering Aengus’) by the music along the river; in the next poem, it is the young woman's thoughts, eyes and hands ‘That wander as they list’, ‘list’ functioning both as an archaic word meaning ‘inclination’ and as a contraction of ‘listen’. (The woman's frequent attitude of ‘bending’ or ‘leaning’ seems to figure a quite literal inclination, in this case her inclination to listen to the lover's songs and what they portend.) In poem iii, the lover asks her if she has heard the natural and celestial music of ‘the night wind and the sighs / Of harps playing unto Love to unclose / The pale gates of sunrise’. The next poem makes it clear that his music is designed to replicate the music of wind and harps, encouraging her to unclose her gate, at which he is singing. In v the gate is replaced by a window, which he urges her to lean through; in vi he openly expresses his desire to be ‘in that sweet bosom’, which, by the structural similarities that link the two stanzas, is also ‘that heart’ at which he softly ‘knock[s]’. Images of enclosure grow brighter and less confining in successive poems: in vii, ‘the sky's a pale blue cup’; in viii, the ‘chamber’ is a sunny woodland; and in x it is a hollow. In poem xi, the dominant images of enclosure have been reduced in size and domesticated; the constraint of virginity is here represented by the snood that binds her hair and the stays that enclose her ‘girlish bosom’. Picking up on the last word of xi, ‘maidenhood’, xii launches an argument against all ‘hooded’ or cautious counsel, particularly that of the hooded moon and the hooded Capuchin. Finally, in xiii, attention shifts back to the woman's chamber as the lover urges the ‘Wind of spices whose song is ever / Epithalamium’ to ‘come into her little garden / And sing at her window’ (compare Yeats, ‘The Cap and Bells’).

By poems xiv and xv, Love has indeed unclosed the gates of pale sunrise, thereby unlocking the potential for a son to rise; these dawn poems are also celebrations of consummated love. The speaker's love has shifted along the fault of rhyme to become a dove, image of the holy spirit, whom he bids, like the sun, to ‘arise’. Although ‘Eastward the gradual dawn prevails / Where softly-burning fires appear’ (xv), the main impulse of the poems that follow xv is to escape the heat of the sun, whether into the ‘cool and pleasant valley’ of xvi (contrast the hollow of x), the ‘deep cool shadow’ of the dark pine-wood of xx (contrast the green and sunny wood of viii), the prison of interwoven arms in xxii (contrast xi), the mossy nest of her heart (xxiii; contrast vi), the wasted sun and cloud-wrapped vales of xxv (compare vii), or the grave where ‘all love shall sleep’ (xxviii). In xiii, the lover invited ‘The wind of spices’ into his beloved's garden to sing; in sharp contrast, xxix describes ‘Desolate winds that assail with cries / The shadowy garden where love is’. As the lover once knocked at the heart of his beloved, a ‘rogue in red and yellow dress’ is now knocking at a leaving tree (xxxiii) in mocking echo of springtime desire, and in xxxiv, the voice of the winter is at the door, crying to the Macbeth-like dreamer, ‘Sleep no more’. This final poem in the sequence proper (Joyce wrote to G. Molyneux Palmer that xxxv and xxxvi are tailpieces, Letters I 67) is the only one in which voices begin to proliferate, as the voice within the lover's heart clashes with the voice of the winter outside his chamber, one crying ‘Sleep now’, the other forbidding further sleep. Appropriately, the music of the water has been displaced by ‘noise’ in xxxv, and choiring by a monotone. xxxvi is a literal image of nightmare that anticipates Joyce's punning treatment of nightmare in Ulysses and in FW 583.8-9: horses (mares?) come out of the sea—mer—at night, ridden by disdainful charioteers in black armour. The Love of the first poem has been supplanted by war, ‘An army charging upon the land’; the idealized figure of garlanded peace (‘Dark leaves on his hair’) replaced with a multitude of embattled, shouting phantoms shaking in triumph their long, green hair.

The most influential treatments of Chamber Music have all arranged themselves around the linchpin of the title. William York Tindall reflects back on Chamber Music from the perspective of Ulysses, where Bloom thinks of chamber music as the music Molly makes when she urinates in a chamberpot (U 11.979-84). He connects this with the varying stories about how the title was chosen told by Herbert Gorman and Oliver St John Gogarty, both of which involve chamberpots as well, concluding with a strained interpretation of poems vii and xxvi as representations of micturition.¹⁴ Tindall identified urination as one among many dimensions of the title's meaning, suggesting that it was also a sequence about wantonness—Elizabethan ‘chambering’.

Chamber Music sparsely records a seduction and its chilly aftermath, but the main implication of its title is that it explores the musical possibilities of a small enclosed space. Joyce emphasized the musical nature of Chamber Music not only through the title but also by setting one of the poems to music himself (xi), and by encouraging Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer to set others: ‘I hope you may set all of Chamber Music in time. This was indeed partly my idea in writing it. The book is in fact a suite of songs and if I were a musician I suppose I should have set them to music myself’ (Letters I 67). Stress on the music of the poems has recently been offset by Archie K. Loss's attention to its visual spaces—chamber and wood—in the context of Symbolist art, and by Chester Anderson's interest in its rhythmical gestures and rhetorical figures.¹⁵ Such competing perspectives have made it easier to appreciate the economy with which the musical and spatial dimensions of the poems have been integrated. Technically, the stability and smallness of the poems' structure, together with the fact that they are all sung by the same voice, allow Joyce to explore, not the landscapes of Dublin, but a miniaturized interior chamber, which almost imperceptibly transforms itself into an image of the grave (‘We were grave lovers’, xxx). The external landscapes of the poem are all psychological and sexualized extensions of other inner chambers, a technique that Joyce learned from Yeats's The Wind Among the Reeds.

Poetry seems to have remained a slight vessel for Joyce, a vehicle for expressing emotions of isolation, or for preserving isolated moments. As the title suggests, Pomes Penyeach are not worth much individually; they are inexpensive offerings of private moments, one protective and delicate (‘A Flower Given to my Daughter’), another arming the speaker against nostalgia for the simplicity and trust of childhood (‘Simples’), but most agonized or despairing. As Herbert Howarth has suggested, Joyce's poems are the productions of a Henry Flower¹⁶ (although ‘A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight’ could have been written by Virag); they are musical, nostalgic, and markedly sentimental—Siren songs, such as the ones Bloom listens to and ultimately rejects in the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses. Joyce betrays an awareness of the danger of such songs in ‘Simples’, where the speaker prays for an Odyssean sailor's ‘waxen ear / To shield me from her childish croon’; the deficiency of his poems is their power to evoke a ‘Flood’ of nostalgia. Joyce never underestimated the power of simple song to seduce the sense and shipwreck the desire for life, which explains why, perhaps, a song from Pomes Penyeach, ‘Nightpiece’, was once the core of the ‘Tristan and Isolde’ episode of Finnegans Wake.¹⁷ An early draft of the episode began as ironic marginalia that surrounds and eventually subsumes its sentimental center: the romantic, despairing poem of youth.

GIACOMO JOYCE

Like Chamber Music, Giacomo Joyce is a seduction piece. But if the ‘Sirens’ episode provides a context against which the power and danger of Chamber Music can be read, Giacomo Joyce is best read against ‘Nausicaa’, which takes painting rather than music as its technic. And if the danger of the music that seduces is a function of its univocality and its simplicity, Giacomo Joyce—against the background of ‘Nausicaa’—shows that the danger of voyeurism is comparable to the seductive lure of the lyric. As Chamber Music lacks more than one voice, Giacomo Joyce lacks a view from more than one perspective: it is an example of what Joyce would later see as the distortion that results from failing to account for parallax.

Giacomo Joyce is a series of prose sketches formally akin to the narrative epiphanies. A fair-copy manuscript of sixteen pages transcribed onto eight oversized sheets of heavy paper, most probably in the summer of 1914, it is the only one of Joyce's writings to be set in Trieste, which is also where Joyce left it when he moved on to Zurich in 1915 (GJ xv, xi). The story—told through disjointed images rather than successive songs—loosely follows the lines of the story in Chamber Music, with emphasis falling once again on the waxing and waning of love, a waning that in this case seems to have something to do with the appearance of a rival. Unlike Chamber Music, however, Giacomo Joyce does not contain any suggestion that the love affair it chronicles—Joyce's relationship with one of the pupils to whom he taught English in Trieste, Amalia Popper—was ever anything more than an ‘affair of the eye’, and in this respect it anticipates ‘Nausicaa’. However, its divergences from ‘Nausicaa’ are as important as its similarities: ‘Nausicaa’ provides two perspectives, that of the woman as well as the man, to Giacomo's one. Also in sharp contrast are the two accounts of the affair's climax. Unlike ‘Nausicaa’, in which Bloom's encounter with Gerty spends itself in a comically onanistic display of fireworks, Giacomo Joyce ends more bitterly when the object of the artist's gaze announces her preference for another man, for Barabbas (who is probably Popper's fiancé Michele Risolo) over Christ (Joyce) (GJ 16; see Mahaffey, ‘Giacomo Joyce’, p. 406).

What is most notably missing in Giacomo Joyce is the perspective of the woman, a perspective that is so strategically provided in Ulysses.¹⁸ Our first view of her is prefaced by a question—‘Who?’—and she emerges as a montage created by images of a pale face, furs, and quizzing glasses (GJ 1). Typical of the speaker's furtive mode of observing her is the sketch where he looks ‘upward from night and mud’, watching her ‘dressing to go to the play’ (GJ 6). His voyeurism grows more intimate as he pictures himself hooking her black gown, seeing through the opening ‘her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift’. The shift shifts to a ship that ‘slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders’ and reveals her silver fishlike body ‘shimmering with silvery scales’ (GJ 7). She edges more closely towards Gerty MacDowell when, ‘virgin most prudent’, her ‘sudden moving knee’ catches her skirt back and the viewer sees ‘a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly’ (GJ 9).

The animality or floral delicacy of her body is frequently available to the eyes of the beholder, but what is withheld are her thoughts, her anxieties, her dreams. This is even the case in the most bizarre sketch of the sequence, the interpolated dream scene that depicts her attacking him with a cold lust mingled with aggression:

—I am not convinced that such activities of the mind or body can be called unhealthy—

She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars. Voice of wisdom. Say on! O, say again, making me wise! This voice I never heard.

She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.—Jim, love!—

Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!

—Nora!—

(GJ 15)

Paradoxically, her coldness inflames and terrifies Joyce; she is portrayed as a snake whose very kiss injects him with venom, producing a fiery ‘fang’. Here in active desire as elsewhere in passive reserve, she remains objectified.

Unlike Chamber Music, Giacomo Joyce seems to have been composed without any other listener (or viewer) in mind than ‘Giacomo’ himself. Partly because of its intense self-referentiality, the course of the imagined affair is difficult for a reader to trace without the aid of biographical information to flesh out the details, or without a guide to the use of unexpected literary allusions to string together disjointed patches of narrative. As a result, most accounts of Giacomo Joyce focus on biography or allusion, and the political implications of Joyce's project in Giacomo Joyce remain largely unexplored. It is not clear, for example, how Joyce's disturbingly ambivalent treatment of the young Jewish woman in Giacomo Joyce accords with his later presentations of women and Jews in Ulysses. The German graphic artist Paul Wunderlich has interpreted Joyce's interest in his student as erotic desire mingled with prophetic compassion for what would later be done to the Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe.¹⁹Giacomo Joyce plays on the incommensurability of artistic and social power, as well as that of sexual and racial privilege, but it does so in a way that protects Joyce's privilege as a man, a gentile and a writer. In Exiles, as well as in his maturer works, Joyce is quick to recognize such imbalances of power, devising a variety of strategies for drawing attention to them, but in Giacomo Joyce, as in the Epiphanies and Chamber Music, such privileges are protected by the fear of their reversal.

EXILES

Chamber Music and Giacomo Joyce record the passing of a carefully controlled passion, but reflect little or no compassion for the figure they idealize. In contrast, Exiles, like ‘The Dead’, aims at exposing the lack of compassion that precludes relationship. Exiles relentlessly exhumes the self-interest buried in conventions of love and friendship, pursuing its grim and hackneyed discoveries unrelieved by Joyce's characteristic humour. As Padraic Colum asserts in his introduction to the play (reproduced in the Penguin-Viking edition), the revelations of Exiles have a ritualistic decorum: ‘In its structure, Exiles is a series of confessions; the dialogue has the dryness of recitals in the confessional; its end is an act of contrition’ (E 11).

Interestingly, the only production of the play that has been generally acclaimed as successful, that of Harold Pinter at the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1970 (repeated by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in the following year), also stressed the quiet, threateningly conventional seriousness of the play. Bernard Benstock has described the effect: ‘All the lines were read with precise politeness at a slow tempo, with little emotion ever allowed to violate the proprieties; an undertone of quiet menace pervaded throughout, giving a certain shape even to the most “innocent” lines; and no suggestion of Joycean irony was permitted in the interpretation. It was magnificent, but it was not quite Joyce.’²⁰ Benstock questions the authenticity of Pinter's interpretation because it conflicts with the assumption that a Joycean text is necessarily ironic. It has never been clear, however, whether Exiles is ironic, or whether, like the other shorter works, its ironies are earnest ones.

Concerns about the seriousness of Exiles lie behind most critical assessments of the promise or disappointment of the play. Which way the needle of judgement points depends, in large part, on our expectations. And that is fundamentally what the play itself is about: the discovery that betrayal is only meaningful in response to a prior expectation. Joyce's interest in the egotism of expectation and its relation to treachery is even apparent in the political background of the play. Although Richard disclaims any kinship with Archibald Hamilton Rowan (E 45), Richard's son Archie, who represents future possibility, bears his name. Significantly, the historical Rowan's notable distinction was to be labelled a traitor by both the English and the Irish. Both expected him to support their side, but he did not take sides unilaterally: he refused to help Wolfe Tone in his plans for the revolution of 1798 after he saw the Reign of Terror in France, yet when he returned to Ireland in 1803 he supported Catholic emancipation, which brought the wrath of Peele down on him in 1825.²¹

In the play, Joyce's main characters are less aware than Hamilton Rowan of the dependence of ‘treachery’ upon expectation: Robert Hand expects Richard Rowan to be a patriot and a possessive lover; when Richard violates these expectations, Robert subtly accuses him of treachery, of having left his country (and his beloved) ‘in her hour of need’. Similarly, Richard expects Robert to be honest rather than secretive about his desire for Richard's companion Bertha, an expectation which is as arbitrary, in a sense, as Robert's expectation that Richard will fight for his ‘property’. It is Richard, not Robert, who values honesty, and it is Robert, not Richard, who is obsessed with possession; the treachery of both is the assumption that the other should share his own values. Does Bertha desire the freedom that Richard wants for her? Does Richard want to be the proud and scornful iconoclast that Beatrice Justice admires in him? Does Beatrice yearn to be a cold, dead model for an exiled writer's work? Does Bertha want to be the embodiment of Robert's ‘dream of love’?

The possibility of love, or connection, remains shadowy in Exiles because love is only possible when the expectations that strive to shape it are confronted and dissolved. Joyce writes that Richard's jealousy ‘must reveal itself as the very immolation of the pleasure of possession on the altar of love’ (E 114), an attempt that Joyce seems to take very seriously (at times too seriously for optimum dramatic effect). Although the conclusion of the play is clumsily rhetorical (Richard is—for the first time in the play—seeing himself in a dramatic light, which reinforces his egotism), it takes the form it does partly because of its importance in the veiled contexts that inform Joyce's analysis of love in the play: his reading of Nietzsche, Wagner, and their disciple D'Annunzio, in particular.

Much of Joyce's reading centred on the destructiveness of seeking to possess another person in the name of love, of desiring to recreate the loved one in the creator's own image instead of accepting and appreciating the differences that necessarily divide lovers. In The Case of Wagner (which Joyce owned in Trieste), Nietzsche argues that even philosophers misunderstand the nature of love, refusing to see that what we call love is actually mortal hatred between the sexes. He claims that the only conception of love worthy of a philosopher is one that recognizes that people kill what they love by trying to possess it, citing José's destruction of Carmen as an example (see ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, where Stephen uses the same example to illustrate his theory of Shakespeare (U 9.1022-3)). He asserts that people demand a return for loving another person by wanting ‘to possess the other creature’.²² The lover insists on being loved in return, even though the demand results in the ‘death’ of the loved one. In Exiles, Robert yearns for such a ‘death of the spirit’, in sharp contrast to Richard's fear of it. Richard, wielding honesty as the weapon of his will to power, seems to be modelled partly on Nietzsche; Robert, with his equally strong will to illusion, owes many of his most distinctive characteristics to Wagner.²³

The most obvious allusion to Wagner occurs at the beginning of the second act, when Robert moves to the piano to strum out Wolfram's aria in Tannhäuser (E 58). Like Wagner, whom Nietzsche characterized as an ‘old robber’, a ‘seducer on a grand scale’ (Case 42, 39), Robert stealthily tries to seduce Bertha, an attempt that Richard, attentive to the ‘robber’ in Robert's name, likens to the act of a thief in the night (E 61). Both Richard and Nietzsche describe the art of their former associates as the art of lying (Case 35, and E 39, where Richard calls Robert's leading articles lies). Most notably, Robert's ‘dream of love’ for Bertha echoes that of Wagner for Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of Wagner's good friend Otto Wesendonck. Mathilde, like Bertha (and like Nora when Prezioso was wooing her), kept her husband informed of everything that happened between herself and her suitor.²⁴ Like Robert, who puts a pink glass shade on the lamp in his bedroom, telling Bertha, ‘It was for you’ (E 78-9), Wagner gave Mathilde a pink lamp shade in 1858 (Wagner to Wesendonck, p. 18). Robert says to Bertha in Exiles, ‘And that is the truth—a dream? … Bertha! … In all my life only that dream is real. I forget the rest’ (E 106). Similarly, Wagner writes to Liszt in December 1854:

As I never in my life have quaffed the actual delight of love, I mean some day to raise a monument to this most beauteous of all dreams, wherein that love shall glut itself quite royally for once. In my head I've planned a Tristan and Isolde.

(Wagner to Wesendonck, p. li)

In the composition of Exiles, Joyce drew not only on Wagner's life—his dream of love for Mathilde Wesendonck—but also on the opera that expressed that dream. Joyce indicates in his notes that the idealized love of Robert and Bertha is indebted to that of Tristan and Isolde (E 123), a suggestion reinforced by the fact that in the ‘Scribbledehobble’ notebook for Finnegans Wake, Joyce entered notes on Tristan and Isolde under the heading for Exiles.²⁵ The most important (and least successful) import from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is the wound that Mark claims Tristan has given him, which reappears to mar the conclusion of Exiles in the form of Richard's ‘wound of doubt’. In Act ii, when Mark asks Tristan why he has wounded him, Tristan tells him that he cannot truly tell, that what Mark would know can never have an answer (ii: iii), an awareness that Richard already has in Exiles. When Bertha offers to tell Richard what has happened between her and Robert, he replies, ‘I can never know, never in this world’ (E 112; also 102).

The plot of Tristan and Isolde revolves around betrayal, as that of Exiles would later do in its shadow. Isolde accuses Tristan of having betrayed her by carrying her away from Ireland to the land of King Mark (i:iv, i:v); Brangäne betrays her mistress by giving her the love philtre instead of the death potion she requested; Isolde betrays her husband; Tristan betrays his friend and king; Melot betrays his ‘truest’ friend Tristan; Mark accuses Tristan of having betrayed him a second time by dying when Mark has come to ‘prove his perfect trust’ in him. In short, every character accuses every other of treachery, a situation duplicated in Exiles. Bertha accuses Richard of having left her when they were in Rome; Richard accuses Robert of trying to steal Bertha from him craftily and secretly; Robert accuses Richard of having abandoned those who depend on him in their hour of need.

Tristan and Isolde deliberately choose night-time, secrecy, illusion, and death over daylight, openness, truth, and life. As Brangäne warns them, love has put out the ‘light’ of their reason (ii:i), and they persist in living in the darkness of a dream. Tristan's passionate desire for death, illusion, and night is shared by Robert; the gradual dimming of the lights during the scene in Robert's cottage between Robert and Bertha recalls the longing of both Tristan and Isolde for the torch to be extinguished, for the sudden darkness to envelop them, signalling Tristan to come to his beloved. Hatred of light and longing for death are the main themes of the famous love duet in the second act of Wagner's opera (ii:ii). Night is the realm of dreams, and Tristan and Isolde embrace it, insisting that their dreams are the only reality.²⁶

As in Ulysses, where the allusions to Homer criss-cross with references to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Exiles positions itself in relation to not one but two strikingly different authors. If the Wagnerian allusions shadow the relationship between Robert and Bertha, a second pattern of allusion serves to illuminate the relationship between Richard and Beatrice, a pattern which, as Beatrice's name suggests, derives from Dante. For Richard, as for Dante, Beatrice represents the story of his young life, his Vita nuova.²⁷ Aside from Beatrice's name, most of the allusions to the Vita nuova in Exiles are numerological. Dante meets Beatrice when he is nine, he sees her again nine years later, he has a vision of her at the ninth hour of the day, and she dies in June, which is the ninth month of the year by the Syrian calendar, in the year of her century in which the perfect number ten has been completed nine times. Dante's Beatrice dies in June of her twenty-seventh year; Exiles is set in June of Beatrice Justice's twenty-seventh year, and it has been nine years since the departure of Richard and Bertha that so changed all their lives (autobiographically, in June of 1912 it had only been eight years since Joyce left Dublin with Nora). The mysterious union between Bertha, now ‘nine times more beautiful’ (E 86), and Robert takes place at nine o'clock at night (E 83).²⁸

Strikingly, the sensual relationship between Robert and Bertha, like the idealized one that links Richard and Beatrice, has no basis in reality: they are equally delusory. This is what gives the play its power, the gradual realization that there is no essential difference between Dante's Beatrice and Wagner's Isolde, that both are possessed in a way that threatens the life of each. Such a view represents a significant advance upon Joyce's way of thinking in April of 1912, when in answer to an examination question at the University of Padua he set up a weighted contrast between the medieval theologian and the modern journalist. In ‘L'influenza letteraria universale del rinascimento’, Joyce argued that ‘The Renaissance … has put the journalist in the monk's chair: that is to say, has deposed an acute, limited and formal mentality to give the scepter to a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging.’²⁹ In this essay, Joyce illustrates the difference between the theologian and the journalist (whom he would later embody as Richard and Robert) with a comparison between Dante and Wagner, Tristan and Isolde and the Inferno. Joyce expresses a clear preference for Dante, who, he argues, builds the Inferno out of a gradually intensifying idea (the idea of hate), in contrast to Wagner, who expresses the opposite sentiment of love by linking it to sensations of the flesh:

A great modern artist wishing to put the sentiment of love to music reproduces, as far as his art permits, each pulsation, each trembling, the lightest shivering, the lightest sigh; the harmonies intertwine and oppose each other secretly: one loves even as one grows more cruel, suffers when and as much as one enjoys, hate and doubt flash in the lovers' eyes, their bodies become one single flesh. Place Tristan and Isolde next to the Inferno and you will notice how the poet's hate follows its path from abyss to abyss in the wake of an idea that intensifies; and the more intensely the poet consumes himself in the fire of hate, the more violent becomes the art with which the artist communicates his passion. One is the art of the circumstance, the other is ideational.

(Berrone, James Joyce in Padua, pp. 20-1)

Joyce's disdain for an art of the flesh (he goes on to claim that ‘modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul’ (Berrone, p. 21)) is still apparent in Exiles, but it has begun to break down. The ideal figure that once inspired him, as she inspired Dante, is portrayed as cold and dead; as Joyce suggests in the notes, ‘Beatrice's mind is an abandoned cold temple in which hymns have risen heavenward in a distant past but where now a doddering priest offers alone and hopelessly prayers to the Most High’ (E 119). Only Bertha suggests the possibility of life, combining uncommon receptivity with a practical-minded resistance to the desire of others to possess her.³⁰

From a criticism of Wagner's sensuality as it contrasts with the ideality of a writer like Dante, Joyce arrived at a more balanced view of the relationship between ideal and real, partly through the writing of Exiles. Exiles unveils the power of the thinker as comparable to that of the seducer; if Robert has refreshed Bertha's awareness of her loneliness, Richard has confirmed Beatrice's suspicion that she too is isolated. The deadliness of idealization as a more subtle form of possessiveness is brought home in another work that Joyce draws on for Exiles that was itself influenced by the work of both Nietzsche and Wagner, Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel The Triumph of Death.³¹

The Triumph of Death details the mortal struggle between two lovers to possess one another, a struggle that culminates in murder-suicide of the kind Robert romantically longs for in Exiles: ‘I want to end it and have done with it … To end it all—death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea … Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love—the sea, music and death’ (E 35). This is how the lovers die in The Triumph of Death, but the climax is anything but romantic: Giorgio and Ippolita have been listening to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for two days, which transports them into ‘a world of fiction’. He fears that she will enslave him through the power of desire, and he takes her to the edge of the sea: ‘There was a brief but savage struggle, as between two mortal foes who had nourished a secret and implacable hatred in their souls up till that hour’, and they crash ‘down headlong into death, locked in that fierce embrace’ (p. 315).

What Giorgio and Ippolita are struggling over is the power to possess—and to create—one another. From the outset, Giorgio is oppressed by the certainty that he can never possess Ippolita wholly (p. 5); like Gabriel in ‘The Dead’, he is jealous of the very memories that exclude him:

Suddenly a thought will strike me cold: what if I, unwittingly, should have evoked in her memory the ghost of some sensation felt once before, some pale phantom of the days long past? … You become remote, inaccessible; I am left alone in horrible solitude.

(pp. 6-7)

To forestall such infidelity, however inadvertent, he remakes her; as Ippolita meditates, ‘In these two years he has transformed me—made another woman of me; he has given me new senses, a new soul, a new mind. I am his creature, the work of his hands’ (p. 33). (In Exiles, Robert says to Richard of Bertha, ‘She is yours, your work’, E 62.) Later Ippolita repeats to him that she is wholly his creation (p. 119), and he succeeds in feeling ‘the thrill of a creator’: ‘Giorgio had witnessed that transformation, so intoxicating to a lover of intellect—the metamorphosis of the woman he loves to his own image’ (p. 141).

Giorgio's power to create and recreate Ippolita, his ‘thrill’ at creation, is a fantasy of possession. She has sacrificed herself to Giorgio's desire to possess her (p. 188), and he comes to see that he can transform her over and over again at will, into a goddess, an animal, a witch, or a snake: ‘Her form is moulded by my desire, her shadow cast by my thoughts. Her aspects are protean as the dreams of fever’ (p. 229). The narrator warns that ‘his intelligence had reduced his mistress to a mere motive force to his imagination, and stripped her person of all value’ (p. 235) (as Rubek did to Irene in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken), but just at the point of his greatest triumph he discovers his greatest fear: she has an equal power over him. In his imagination, he hears her telling him that she knows the secret of her metamorphoses in his soul, that she knows all the words and the gestures that have the power to transfigure her in his eyes (p. 237). Both now long to destroy the person they cannot possess, and Wagner's opera serves as the prelude to the destructive consummation that both, in different ways, desire.

Although Ibsen also dramatizes the deadliness of power masked as love in When We Dead Awaken, the intensity of Joyce's exploration of the mortal combat between each of the four main characters in Exiles makes sense only in a larger intellectual context that includes Wagner, Nietzsche, and D'Annunzio as well as Ibsen. Moreover, Exiles celebrates what Ibsen could not, the refusal of lovers to be killed by the people who attempt to possess them; as Joyce writes in his notes, Bertha loves the part of Richard that ‘she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence’ (E 118), just as Richard loves and hates the living part of her that is open to experience. The most important aspect of Exiles is its implicit celebration of its characters' refusal to be buried in the snowy avalanche of Ibsen's despairing last play. The alternative to death, however, is acceptance, a hard-won acceptance of human difference that was to usher in Ulysses.

Notes

1. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 3-4. Hereafter referred to as WD.

2. A duality also discussed by John Paul Riquelme in ch. 5 of this volume.

3. I have presented such an argument in ‘Giacomo Joyce’, in Zack Bowen and James C. Carens, eds., A Companion to Joyce Studies (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 393.

4. ‘Continuous manuscript’ is Hans Walter Gabler's term for the successive autograph notations that he uses as the copytext for his edition of Ulysses. See Gabler's Afterword to ‘Ulysses’: A Critical and Synoptic Edition (New York: Garland, 1984), pp. 1894-6.

5. Of the forty extant epiphanies, twenty-two (in Joyce's hand) are housed in the Poetry Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo; transcriptions of these were published by Oscar Silverman as Joyce's Epiphanies (Buffalo: Lockwood Memorial Library, 1956). The twenty-five remaining epiphanies are at Cornell; all but one of these are from Stanislaus Joyce's commonplace book, and the remaining one (concerning Oliver Gogarty) is a rough draft in Joyce's own hand. Seven of the Cornell epiphanies are duplicates of those at Buffalo. When Peter Spielberg discovered that the Buffalo epiphanies have numbers on the versos that go as high as seventy-one, Robert Scholes and Richard Kain responded by ordering all the extant epiphanies into a sequence, which they transcribed and annotated (WD, pp. 3-51). Facsimiles of all of the epiphanies have since been published in Archive 7, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: A Facsimile of Epiphanies, Notes, Manuscripts and Typescripts, ed. Hans Walter Gabler. Shortly, the epiphanies will be available in a new edition together with the poems, the 1904 ‘Portrait’ essay, and Giacomo Joyce; see James Joyce, Poems and Epiphanies, ed. Richard Ellmann and A. Walton Litz, with the assistance of John Ferguson (London: Faber, 1990).

6. Both Hugh Kenner and S. L. Goldberg argued that Joyce's omission represents a deliberate attempt on Joyce's part to weaken Stephen's aesthetic theories (see Dublin's Joyce (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966), ch. 9, and The Classical Temper (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), chs. 2 and 3), which prompted Robert Scholes to contest the meaningfulness of the term epiphany in a controversial article, ‘Joyce and the epiphany: the key to the labyrinth?’ Sewanee Review 72 (1964), 65-77.

7. Morris Beja attempts to get round the difficulty posed by the ‘spiritual’ nature of epiphany by redefining spirituality; see Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971), p. 74.

8. Stephen admits as much in Portrait, when he tells Lynch that for a long time he thought Aquinas' third stage of apprehension signified ‘symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol’, so that the goal of apprehension was ‘the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything’ (P 213).

9. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1958), pp. 134-5.

10. See, for just one example, Florence Walzl, ‘The liturgy of the Epiphany season and the epiphanies of Joyce’, PMLA 80 (1965), 436-50. Even Robert Scholes, who was through the greenness of the concept of epiphany when he transcribed and edited the manuscript epiphanies, asserts that ‘the Epiphanies themselves for the most part bear out Stephen's condemnation of them. They are trivial and supercilious or florid and lugubrious, in the main. Their chief significance is in the use Joyce often made of them in his later works’ (‘Joyce and the epiphany’, p. 73).

11. Morris Beja has found at least thirteen of the extant epiphanies in Stephen Hero, twelve in A Portrait, four in Ulysses, and one in Finnegans Wake. See Beja, ‘Epiphany and the epiphanies’, in Bowen and Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies, pp. 710-13.

12. Several of Joyce's poems are literally songs, among the most interesting of which is ‘Post ulixem scriptum’ (to be sung to the tune of ‘Molly Brannigan’). Most of the extant poems and poetic fragments are available in facsimile in Archive 1, ed. A. Walton Litz, and many are listed in Paul Doyle's bibliographical register of ‘Joyce's miscellaneous verse’ (JJQ 2 (1965), 90-6) and his addenda (JJQ 4 (1967), 71). One of the most influential arguments about the musical nature of Chamber Music is that of Herbert Howarth, ‘Chamber Music and its place in the Joyce canon’, in Thomas F. Staley, ed., James Joyce Today (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 11-27. On the similarity between Chamber Music and Elizabethan songs and airs, see Myra Russel, ‘The Elizabethan connection: the missing score of James Joyce's Chamber Music’, JJQ 18 (1981), 133-45.

13. Chamber Music does however pose uncharacteristic problems of attribution, since Stanislaus Joyce told W. Y. Tindall that both the title and the final arrangement of the poems were his. Joyce's arrangement of the twenty-seven poem sequence is that of the Gilvary manuscript: i, iii, ii, iv, v, viii, vii, ix, xvii, xviii, vi, x, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, xxiii, xxii, xxiv, xvi, xxxi, xxviii, xxix, xxxii, xxx, xxxiii, xxxiv. The arrangement of the Yale manuscript is Stanislaus's: xxi, i, iii, ii, iv, v, viii, vii, ix, xvii, xviii, vi, x, xx, xiii, xi, xiv, xix, xv, xxiii, xxiv, xvi, xxxi, xxii, xxvi, xii, xxvii, xxviii, xxv, xxix, xxxii, xxx, xxiii, xxxiv. See Litz, Archive 1.

14. William York Tindall, ed., Chamber Music by James Joyce (New York: Columbia, 1954), pp. 70-80. For Gorman's story about the title, see his James Joyce (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), p. 116; for Gogarty's, see his Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove (New York: Creative Age Press, 1948), pp. 53-5, 57-60. According to Tindall, Stanislaus denied both stories and recounted a third in a letter to Gorman, arguing that he (Stanislaus) had already chosen the title for the volume by the time the incident took place (Tindall, pp. 72-3).

15. Archie K. Loss, ‘Interior and exterior imagery in the earlier work of Joyce and in Symbolist art’, Journal of Modern Literature 8 (1980), 99-117, and Chester Anderson, ‘Joyce's verses’, in Bowen and Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies, pp. 129-55.

16. See the reference to this article in note 12.

17. See A First Draft Version of ‘Finnegans Wake’, ed. David Hayman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), pp. 210-11.

18. In her excellent discussion of Giacomo Joyce in ‘Shahrazade's Wake; The Arabian Nights and the Narrative Dynamics of Charles Dickens and James Joyce’ (University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, 1988), Henriette Power presents Giacomo Joyce as a power struggle between female physicality and male inscriptions. Power argues that Giacomo's attempt to capture a woman on paper takes the form of an artistic dismemberment, contrasting Giacomo's strategy with that of Bloom in ‘Nausicaa’ (pp. 162-80).

19. Giacomo Joyce, with introduction by Hermann Lenz (Dielsdorf: Mattheiu AG, 1976). The edition of ten lithographs was limited to 125 copies.

20. Bernard Benstock, ‘Exiles’, in Bowen and Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies, pp. 361-2. See also J. W. Lambert's review of the Mermaid production in Drama 100 (Spring 1971), 21-3, and John Spurling's review of the Aldwych production in Plays and Players 19 (December 1971), 44-5, 88; a good overview may be found in John MacNicholas, ‘The stage history of Exiles’, JJQ 19 (1981), 9-26.

21. John MacNicholas, James Joyce's ‘Exiles’: A Textual Companion (New York: Garland, 1979), pp. 197-9.

22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. M. Ludovici, ed. Oscar Levy, viii (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911), p. 4. Hereafter referred to as Case.

23. In ‘Joyce contra Wagner’, John MacNicholas also suggests that Joyce ‘superimposes Wagner upon Robert Hand’ (Comparative Drama 9 (1975), 29).

24. Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, trans. and pref. by William Ashton Ellis, 2nd ed. (1905; rpt. New York: Vienna House, 1972), pp. vi-vii.

25. Thomas E. Connolly, James Joyce's Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), pp. 75-85. See David Hayman's treatment of these notes together with some of the parallels between Exiles and Wagner's opera in ‘Tristan and Isolde in Finnegans Wake: a study of the sources and evolution of a theme’, Comparative Literature Studies, 1 (1964), 95-102.

26. In Exiles, Robert, like Tristan, is associated with darkness, unlike Richard who prefers the light; see Sheldon Brivic, ‘Structure and meaning in Joyce's Exiles’, JJQ 6 (1968), 38-9.

27. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti's illustrated edition of Dante's La vita nuova (Joyce owned the Italian version in Trieste), Rossetti argues that ‘nuova’, which means ‘new’, also connotes youth, which allows him to assert that Dante's Vita nuova is an ‘autobiography or autopsychology of Dante's youth until about his twenty-seventh year’ (The New Life of Dante Alighieri, trans. and illus. by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York: Russell, 1901), p. 25). See also Mahaffey, ‘Giacomo Joyce’, pp. 408-9.

28. In ‘Dante in Joyce's Exiles’, JJQ 18 (1980), 35-44, Mary T. Reynolds asserts that the nine years Richard corresponded with Beatrice, in the light of her inspiration of him, constitute a significant reflection of the Vita nuova.

29. Louis Berrone, James Joyce in Padua (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 21.

30. Ruth Bauerle argues that Bertha is in fact the centre of the play; see ‘Bertha's role in Exiles’, in Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, eds., Women in Joyce (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 108-31.

31. Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Triumph of Death, trans. Georgina Harding (London: Heinemann, 1898).