IS "stuffing" a vulgar word? This was one of the questions at issue as Joyceans chewed over vulgarity at the Baileys James Joyce Summer School in Dublin yesterday.
The interrogator was Dr Timothy Martin, chair of the English department at Rutgers University, New Jersey, whose Joycean vulgarities lecture was a wide ranging survey of many types of indecencies in Joyce's writing.
Dr Martin, the author of Joyce and Wagner A Study of Influence, discussed the tendency of Joyce's vulgar or indecent language, with its emphasis on the grossly physical, to "block access to his genius" for some, including, notably, Virginia Woolf.
Using examples, mainly from Dubliners, Dr Martin outlined how Joyce was also "far more complexly vulgar" in the less pejorative meaning of the word, which derives from the Latin vulgus the common people.
This original meaning applies to the "vulgar tongue" or spoken language used by the ordinary person which Joyce consistently used in his work.
Joyce's love of speech was reflected not only in his careful reporting of idiomatic dialogue but also in his adoption of "low" narrative styles.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, vulgarity took on another shade of meaning, expressing Joyce's interest in writing about the "undistinguished" and plain people of his Dublin youth.
Returning to the pejorative sense of the word, Dr Martin focused on vulgarity which, as a subject in Joyce's fiction, is "a preoccupation of a consciousness that pretends or aspires to gentility a preoccupation, in fact, of characters who are just genteel enough to fear that they might be common and therefore to be highly sensitive to vulgarity whenever they confront it."
Dr Martin pointed to numerous examples of this preoccupation in Dubliners, which he termed "a virtual paradise of pretenders to civility of one sort or another". They included Bob Doran in The Boarding House who was disconcerted to realise that the woman with whom he was involved was a little vulgar sometimes she said I seen and `If I had've known'," and Gabriel in Tide Dead, who invited the company to take seconds of what vulgar people call stuffing".
But while Joyce's work both infused ordinary lite with significance and lent dignity to common people, Dr Martin maintained that because his later writing was so difficult, Joyce didn't actually "divulge" his work, as in give it over to the vulgus or common people.
IN the second morning sessions at Newman House, Prof William Pratt delivered a lecture Joyce's Modern Hells which he dedicated to the UCD organised summer school's late director, Prof Augustine Martin.
Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Pratt is also the author of a book of essays on modern poetry, Singing The Chaos and editor of The Big Ballad Jamboree, a country music novel by Donald Davidson.
Prof Pratt, who is currently working on a book tracing the myth of hell through western literature, said Joyce was a great example of a writer who "transforms the myth of hell from an outer to an inner reality".
Joyce's modern hells, in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, were subjective and psychological, not physical and geographical, he explained. "They are not places but states of mind and Joyce is consistent in making his hell a reflection of the minds of those who envision it."
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the book's vivid hell sermon prompted the young Stephen Dedalus to go through "a sequence of emotions that amounts to a thorough psychological probing of his crisis of conscience". He looked within himself and decided to become an artist rather than a priest.
In Ulysses, which was based on the myth of Ulysses's voyage home from Troy to Ithaca, Leopold Bloom's experience of hell caused him to turn with relief from the world of the dead to the world of the living.
In Ulysses, Joyce created a modern version of hell or Hades which parodied Homer's. Prof Pratt highlighted the ironic parallels between the Hades chapter of Ulysses in which Bloom attends a funeral and Homer's epic in which Ulysses voyages to hell. In contrast to Homer's dark mystery and "epic seriousness" Joyce's chapter contained "abundant graveyard humour," he said.
"The effect of Joyce's consistently ironic contrast between Bloom's journey to the cemetery and Ulysses's voyage to Hades is that his modern Ulysses has become a figure of comic realism, not of epic heroism, and the modern hell has become, not a place beyond the ocean where the living go to commemorate with the dead but a place on earth for the burial of bodies," said Prof Pratt.
