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Notes for Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
Don Gifford
20 books13 followersDon Gifford (1919-2000) was Professor of English and American studies at Williams College, Massachusetts.
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September 8, 2024
Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s 1967 classic Notes for Joyce. Sometimes I’ll save the receipt in a book so later I’ll know when I obtained it. In this case the book had been on my shelf since I purchased it at Dunaway Books in St Louis on Halloween 2017.
By irrelevant coincidence, the publication date of my last novel was also on Halloween, exactly four years after that purchase date, and I was busy working on early revisions to that text while I was living in Missouri. More on that in a moment.
Now I’ve always had a good memory: since early childhood I’ve engaged in deliberately committing to memory small, seemingly irrelevant details from life and experience, and rehearsing them over and over until they became fixed. It’s a habit that anyone can practice, I think, but few prefer to do so. It’s a hard enough burden to deal every day with the here-and-now. It’s also surprisingly easy to recover one’s past and to organize one’s recovered memories in chronological order. A great place to start is with old photographs, for example, which provoke a lot of auxiliary and lateral memories. The more of your biography you recover and order, first decade by decade, then year by year, the easier it becomes to add more detail in its proper place and time. Of course it’s also the case that we don’t have true memories but only reconstructions that our organic brains have abstracted into what we call memories, sifted and streamlined and cross-indexed, so the earliest versions of how events occurred are always to be much preferred to later retellings of events. All of this is unavoidably stained by personal bias, of course. And then there’s the whole Rashomon effect by which every observer of any given event experiences it from a unique perspective and in irreconcilable ways. Consideration of such matters causes prudent persons to bracket presumably objective observations within fitting bars of uncertainty. All of which is prelude to saying that, while I don’t know how universal the experience is, I find that as I grow older my relationship to ideas about historical truths, or to what words like “fact” may mean, but also to what they certainly do not mean, keeps changing. For some of us, the scales fall steadily from our eyes as we age, and we take an ever harder, more critical look at the lives lived by those around us who dwell in a world which has become a cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier . . . etc.
Lately I’ve found myself wondering what, if anything, all this life experience means, of taking on culturally acquired “facts” from admittedly random sips from the firehose of world events unfolding, and assembling that hodgepodge into a more-or-less jumbled yet cross-referenced assemblage of memories which determines how we confront the world, and what expectations we form about the world, and how those expectations are so often dashed. That is to say, if we thinking entities are mostly composed of randomly processed exposures to the memes the world feeds us, then what is the point here? Aren’t we all designed by our biological heredity to be propaganda-fed taping and playback systems, programmed to jabber responses in response to certain stimuli based on what books we’ve read and what movies we’ve seen and what music we’ve listened to? One might conclude then that it matters a good deal which books we read, which movies we watch, and which music we listen to, but if that’s true, aren’t we really talking about seeking out a certain brand of purity in our echo chambers of choice?
Folks, what is it we’re doing with our lives? Or what ought we be doing? Or does the word “ought” betray fundamental misunderstanding? Or do those questions have any real meaning in a global, multidimensional-metacartoon landscape that has left Vonnegut and Orwell looking like rank amateurs in the soup well over their heads?
I built up a life over long decades from chaotically assimilated memes plundered from the cultural scrapheap as I lived it. In my novel I sought to document and preserve as many of those memes as I could, and I think the result may inspire some measure of fond recognition by those readers of a certain generation who passed through the same eras of cultural fruitfulness and terror and hostility and greed and noise. Already, however, those lived experiences are opaque to new generations. That doesn't lessen the validity, or the veracity, with which they inflate the text. I lose patience with least-common-denominator fiction which aims for universal understanding as if human lives are orderly start-to-finish affairs. We will always have to struggle to make sense of the forgotten memes which comprised the lives of earlier generations, and I want to encounter those bewildering puzzles in stories and novels. There is great joy in mining a story for its forgotten memes and trying to recover their native brilliance: that is one way of immersing one’s self more fully in the lapping tides of an ever receding past that just-the-“facts”-ma’am journalism can never do.
Which, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, brings me at last back to Notes for Joyce.
This is the first compilation of annotations by Giffford and Seidman, in this case of James Joyce’s books Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not always exciting or epiphanic, nevertheless it is, of course, brilliant, maybe even necessary. The authors lay out for us the memes informing Joyce’s early books written before the Great War. Being very familiar with both books I did not need to read them side by side with Gifford and Seidman, but rather I read Notes for Joyce straight through by itself, start to finish. I admit I never before appreciated the full imprisoning effect of turn of the century Irish Catholicism before delving into page after page of Notes for Joyce. Also, although I’d long since been bemused by those who deny seeing politics in Joyce, Gifford and Seidman expose how his texts are absolutely slathered with and drip the enduring impacts of centuries of political intrigues. Folks, it is precisely for these reasons that Joyce left Ireland corporeally but remained ineluctably bound to it psychically for all his short life.
It is difficult for us today to grasp how Dubliners in particular could have been so feared as a literary property by publishers before it finally emerged into the light of day. A note about the virulent public reaction to the first performance of Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen in1899 at the Irish Literary Theatre (pp 174-5) is illuminating in this regard. The mimetic artistic tradition demanded only a certain kind of mirror to be held up to nature: a mirror which reflected an approved and disinfected storyline of history and current events (which reverberates with disturbing familiarity in our own time). The paralytic divide separating Dublin as Joyce lived it from a fanciful, mythic Dublin others insisted on seeing in artistic portrayals doomed Joyce’s book to a problematical gestation, and probably informs Stephen Dedalus’ famous recasting of Oscar Wilde (ah, another source meme) in Ulysses: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.”
It is the evolution of the psyche of Stephen Dedalus, from very young child to very young adult, that is so strikingly depicted in A Portrait, and already I’ve made a case that this kind of evolution is one of taking on board and trying to make sense of a steady stream of randomly accumulated cultural memes. It is the intersection of the innate properties of Stephen’s mind with these externally originating memes which flowers into a remarkable young man indeed. In the novel the greatest intellectual leap occurs between the last two chapters as Stephen is approaching adulthood, and we can (some of us anyway) think back and remember that our own mental development was not a steady, arithmetic process but a geometric one. It’s unsurprising, then, that the greatest revelation I took from Notes for Joyce involves this final chapter of A Portrait. Having read A Portrait many times, I was still unaware of the depth of Stephen’s literary erudition as unpeeled by Gifford and Seidman: if nothing more, I will probably want to go back and read the last chapter of A Portrait side by side with this part of Notes for Joyce. A Portrait anticipates the subtlety of both the Stephen of Ulysses and of Joyce as a writer at this stage more fully than I had previously recognized.
So yes: if you already appreciate Gifford and Seidman’s masterwork Ulysses Annotated but you don’t have Notes for Joyce, you need to correct that omission.
By irrelevant coincidence, the publication date of my last novel was also on Halloween, exactly four years after that purchase date, and I was busy working on early revisions to that text while I was living in Missouri. More on that in a moment.
Now I’ve always had a good memory: since early childhood I’ve engaged in deliberately committing to memory small, seemingly irrelevant details from life and experience, and rehearsing them over and over until they became fixed. It’s a habit that anyone can practice, I think, but few prefer to do so. It’s a hard enough burden to deal every day with the here-and-now. It’s also surprisingly easy to recover one’s past and to organize one’s recovered memories in chronological order. A great place to start is with old photographs, for example, which provoke a lot of auxiliary and lateral memories. The more of your biography you recover and order, first decade by decade, then year by year, the easier it becomes to add more detail in its proper place and time. Of course it’s also the case that we don’t have true memories but only reconstructions that our organic brains have abstracted into what we call memories, sifted and streamlined and cross-indexed, so the earliest versions of how events occurred are always to be much preferred to later retellings of events. All of this is unavoidably stained by personal bias, of course. And then there’s the whole Rashomon effect by which every observer of any given event experiences it from a unique perspective and in irreconcilable ways. Consideration of such matters causes prudent persons to bracket presumably objective observations within fitting bars of uncertainty. All of which is prelude to saying that, while I don’t know how universal the experience is, I find that as I grow older my relationship to ideas about historical truths, or to what words like “fact” may mean, but also to what they certainly do not mean, keeps changing. For some of us, the scales fall steadily from our eyes as we age, and we take an ever harder, more critical look at the lives lived by those around us who dwell in a world which has become a cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier . . . etc.
Lately I’ve found myself wondering what, if anything, all this life experience means, of taking on culturally acquired “facts” from admittedly random sips from the firehose of world events unfolding, and assembling that hodgepodge into a more-or-less jumbled yet cross-referenced assemblage of memories which determines how we confront the world, and what expectations we form about the world, and how those expectations are so often dashed. That is to say, if we thinking entities are mostly composed of randomly processed exposures to the memes the world feeds us, then what is the point here? Aren’t we all designed by our biological heredity to be propaganda-fed taping and playback systems, programmed to jabber responses in response to certain stimuli based on what books we’ve read and what movies we’ve seen and what music we’ve listened to? One might conclude then that it matters a good deal which books we read, which movies we watch, and which music we listen to, but if that’s true, aren’t we really talking about seeking out a certain brand of purity in our echo chambers of choice?
Folks, what is it we’re doing with our lives? Or what ought we be doing? Or does the word “ought” betray fundamental misunderstanding? Or do those questions have any real meaning in a global, multidimensional-metacartoon landscape that has left Vonnegut and Orwell looking like rank amateurs in the soup well over their heads?
I built up a life over long decades from chaotically assimilated memes plundered from the cultural scrapheap as I lived it. In my novel I sought to document and preserve as many of those memes as I could, and I think the result may inspire some measure of fond recognition by those readers of a certain generation who passed through the same eras of cultural fruitfulness and terror and hostility and greed and noise. Already, however, those lived experiences are opaque to new generations. That doesn't lessen the validity, or the veracity, with which they inflate the text. I lose patience with least-common-denominator fiction which aims for universal understanding as if human lives are orderly start-to-finish affairs. We will always have to struggle to make sense of the forgotten memes which comprised the lives of earlier generations, and I want to encounter those bewildering puzzles in stories and novels. There is great joy in mining a story for its forgotten memes and trying to recover their native brilliance: that is one way of immersing one’s self more fully in the lapping tides of an ever receding past that just-the-“facts”-ma’am journalism can never do.
Which, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, brings me at last back to Notes for Joyce.
This is the first compilation of annotations by Giffford and Seidman, in this case of James Joyce’s books Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not always exciting or epiphanic, nevertheless it is, of course, brilliant, maybe even necessary. The authors lay out for us the memes informing Joyce’s early books written before the Great War. Being very familiar with both books I did not need to read them side by side with Gifford and Seidman, but rather I read Notes for Joyce straight through by itself, start to finish. I admit I never before appreciated the full imprisoning effect of turn of the century Irish Catholicism before delving into page after page of Notes for Joyce. Also, although I’d long since been bemused by those who deny seeing politics in Joyce, Gifford and Seidman expose how his texts are absolutely slathered with and drip the enduring impacts of centuries of political intrigues. Folks, it is precisely for these reasons that Joyce left Ireland corporeally but remained ineluctably bound to it psychically for all his short life.
It is difficult for us today to grasp how Dubliners in particular could have been so feared as a literary property by publishers before it finally emerged into the light of day. A note about the virulent public reaction to the first performance of Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen in1899 at the Irish Literary Theatre (pp 174-5) is illuminating in this regard. The mimetic artistic tradition demanded only a certain kind of mirror to be held up to nature: a mirror which reflected an approved and disinfected storyline of history and current events (which reverberates with disturbing familiarity in our own time). The paralytic divide separating Dublin as Joyce lived it from a fanciful, mythic Dublin others insisted on seeing in artistic portrayals doomed Joyce’s book to a problematical gestation, and probably informs Stephen Dedalus’ famous recasting of Oscar Wilde (ah, another source meme) in Ulysses: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.”
It is the evolution of the psyche of Stephen Dedalus, from very young child to very young adult, that is so strikingly depicted in A Portrait, and already I’ve made a case that this kind of evolution is one of taking on board and trying to make sense of a steady stream of randomly accumulated cultural memes. It is the intersection of the innate properties of Stephen’s mind with these externally originating memes which flowers into a remarkable young man indeed. In the novel the greatest intellectual leap occurs between the last two chapters as Stephen is approaching adulthood, and we can (some of us anyway) think back and remember that our own mental development was not a steady, arithmetic process but a geometric one. It’s unsurprising, then, that the greatest revelation I took from Notes for Joyce involves this final chapter of A Portrait. Having read A Portrait many times, I was still unaware of the depth of Stephen’s literary erudition as unpeeled by Gifford and Seidman: if nothing more, I will probably want to go back and read the last chapter of A Portrait side by side with this part of Notes for Joyce. A Portrait anticipates the subtlety of both the Stephen of Ulysses and of Joyce as a writer at this stage more fully than I had previously recognized.
So yes: if you already appreciate Gifford and Seidman’s masterwork Ulysses Annotated but you don’t have Notes for Joyce, you need to correct that omission.
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