Some of you know that I am just recently back from the 2017 Sylvia Plath Symposium in Belfast, Ireland. I took copious notes, and plan to share them, but as I reviewed and typed them, I was also looking at pictures of Ireland and digging into James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Anyway, it all took me over, and my conference notes have gotten, shall we say, creative. It has become a rather long, experimental piece and I will likely publish it over on my Academia.edu page. When it’s up, I’ll be sure to mention it. We can’t rush greatness. 😉
Dublin, Ireland of course, is James Joyce country. It’s a beautiful world when even the cabbies and bellhops are educated in poetry and fiction and can quote lines from Ulysses off the top of their head. I can’t imagine that happening in America. No, there is a fierce pride for Joyce in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and I had to read deeper for myself. But James Joyce, as you probably know, is no easy task. So I got some help:
As I write this, I’ve been listening nonstop to an old record Plath wrote of listening to on June 12, 1954: It is a meeting of the James Joyce Society, reading Finnegans Wake, that great secular parable of The Fall, the story without a plot, the tunneling through the mountain, with explanations by the famous author and mythologist, Joseph Campbell, and with James Joyce himself reading “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” It’s a wonder to hear these words and voices. As Shakespeare should be seen to be appreciated, Joyce is more easily heard than read.
Plath loved James Joyce, and she knew, as Campbell explained in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (a book Plath also owned and wrote about in letters), that Joyce layered meanings into his work. Yeats did this too. In fact, so many great poets have done it! It is the beauty of metaphor, multiplied. It is making the best use of the least words. It is reaching a person on many levels. THAT, my friends, is a spell. And it appears that James Joyce has reached past the grave seventy-six years later, and captured me too.