ENG105 - Lecture 7: Joyce and Moore - Irish Modernists

Textual Resources


James Joyce and George Moore are often considered together as the first modernist writings in Ireland, though their claims to that title are widely different.
George Moore introduced modern social and psychological realism into the account of Irish rural life in The Untilled Field (1903), describing life-like Irish characters locked in a depressed regional economy - “a sort of village odyssey”, he called it - subject to the control of their own (Catholic) church and the conservative ethos of their neighbours. He depicted them with religious and (no less importantly) with economic passions; hence some of them are Irish Scrooges while others are would-be saints. All are baffled or disappointed. Overall, Moore, depicted Ireland as a sorry place from which people fled as much to escape an atmosphere of puritanism and social misery as by reason of adventure or ambition.
 James Joyce tells the same story but concentrated instead on the city scene and depicted Dublin as “the centre of paralysis”, populating it with characters who were either victims of social and clerical oppression - essentially the same forces that sap the will of Moore’s characters - or else as bullies complicit in the system of authoritarian repression that stunts the growth of men, women and children in his carefully delineated stories. An atmosphere of “rotten cabbages” hung over his stories, he once said. More significantly, he strove in writing them to capture most exactly the tone and tenor of Irish life by conveying it through the implicit language of the characters.
The stylistic technique that he used was what he called “scrupulous meanness” - a way of pinioning characters with their own language. Behind it lay his conception of the artistic “epiphany” - meaning a process of everyday revelation by which the writer, who is always on the alert for such revelations, the real meaning of words, gestures and even “phases of the mind itself”. he saw the meaning of these things as an involuntary disclosure of the “vulgarity” of the subject - meaning the remoteness of each individual in his city from the stance of independent thought and unsubbornable determination to become him or her self that was his own rule in life.
 Joyce and Moore both cast a critical eye on Irish society but Joyce took the possibilities of literary modernism very much further as regards the question of style (or, more properly, the formal and linguistic character of fiction considered as an experimental genre). Indeed, Moore hardly had an aesthetic programme at all in spite of his insistence on one - or if he had, it was a remnant of fin-de-siècle aestheticism which was more of an encumbrance than a help to him. (Richard Allen Cave has written well on this subject in his 1976 Afterword to Moore's The Lake, 1905 [infra].) Moore wrote what he knew and did so stylishly rather than with any stylistic purpose beyond the rhythm of his own prose - often spare and effective in a characteristically French way. For Joyce, the actual form of fiction was a key to its ability to reveal and make known the real aspect of things. Hence he developed not only the “scrupulous meanness” of Dubliners which captures the moral idiom of the characters themselves, leaving it for the reader to discern the angle from which the writer intends us to view the consequent disclosures - but also (and more famously) the “interior monologue” of Ulysses and the stream of consciousness of Finnegans Wake.
 These latter two inventions ensure Joyce’s standing as the very greatest of the literary modernists for all time.

For purposes of this module, the stories of George Moore in The Untilled Field are included summoned chiefly as a point of comparison with Joyce’s Dubliners. Furthermore, the emphasis of teaching lies firmly on “The Dead”, the last story in that collection.

Here we ask the question, how far is the story related to the Irish narrative tradition? The answer comes back that, in his engagement with the otherworld that Gabriel Conroy partly enters at the conclusion, Joyce identifies himself as a writer with familiar spiritual concerns akin to those of earlier Irish writers.

To some extent it is, in fact, a ghost story - or at least a story that acknowledges a human order which extends beyond the practical scene of living existence into a mythic realm where all identifies are conjoined in a great - and ultimately forgiving - notion of humanity.

In asking whether Joyce’s stories are particularly Irish (and, of course, they are), we are posing questions about methods of narration, types of character and forms of language which bear on the enjoyment of rich detail and oddity common to Irish story-tellers and their audience. Seen in this light, Joyce is very little story-teller and all story-writer.

At the same time, his new departure can be seen as a distinct revision of the traditional Irish-story framework. The sheer realism of his narrative, with its exact and punishing account of the failings of the characters, is something new and essentially modern. As such it is not specifically Irish, or only so in as much as it marks the point at which modern interests and modern methods of narrative were introduced into Irish fiction.

The effect is to down-play the traditionally Irish element in Joyce’s fiction; or, rather, Joyce can now be seen as the writer who, above all others, turned the Irish story out of its traditional reliance on the witty and adept narrator or the comical and ingenious character and Europeanised it, bringing it into line with the story-telling methods of a Flaubert or a Maupassant in terms of both style and content.

By the same token, George Moore quite explicitly took upon himself the task of writing Irish stories in the mode of the Russian story-writer Turgenev - and, more expressly, his famous Tales of a Sportsman - as Moore’s preface the The Lake (1921 Edn.) explicitly reveals.

Some chance words passing between John Eglinton and me as we returned home one evening from Professor Dowden’s were enough. He spoke, or I spoke, of a volume of Irish stories; Tourguéniev’s name was mentioned, and next morning - if not the next morning, certainly not later than a few mornings after I was writing “Homesickness”, while the story of “The Exile” was taking shape in my mind. “The Exile” was followed by a series of four stories, a sort of village odyssey. “A Letter to Rome” is as good as these and as typical of my country. “So on He Fares” is the one that, perhaps, out of the whole volume I like the best, always excepting “The Lake”, which, alas, was not included, but which belongs so strictly to the aforesaid stories that my memory includes it in the volume. (The Lake [1905], 1921 Edition, Preface, p.ix.)

In a short essay - or, rather, deposition - on Dubliners, the great Irish story-writer John McGahern (who died very recently) has written interestingly on the difference between Joyce and Moore. In his view, Moore is merely “candid” while Joyce is a truth-teller. (Moore himself talks with some annoyance of the playwright J. M. Synge as being “raised up against [as] the one man who saw Irish life truly and wrote it candidly.”)

McGahern’s statement is both perspicacious and obscure. He means that Joyce used a method which eliminated the personality of the writer to such an extent that the bare truth of character and situation shine through. Moore cannot resist commenting; he also lends a brogue (or country accent) to his characters which sets them at a definite social level in a way that works better for drama (e.g., Synge) than prose narrative.

All told, The Untilled Field has aged in a way that Dubliners has not, partly because of the superior art of Dubliners but also because the characters and their tales in the former are too little like the universal material of Western experience and Western fiction.

It is something of a wonder that Joyce’s story-collection has come to occupy the very highest place in international esteem - by which I mean that it is one of the books that every English literature student in the UK and the USA is bond to read at some time or another. The reasons are several - among them the fact that Joyce became the foremost prose modernist.

How strange it is, indeed, that British or American readers to whom the numerous topical references which give Dubliners its Irish flavour are as unknown as persons and places in Mongolia should read them as if they described a the inhabitants of a suburb in their own city. And this is ultimately due to the modernity of the writing: place and person are subsumed in an act of understanding that transcends the purely local.

Ironically, therefore, Joyce succeeds in being universal by being most particular - a literary doctrine which he himself consciously espoused when he said of Ulysses that, in writing about Dublin, he wrote about all cities.


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