[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Ellen Howley (Irish Instances) writes about James Joyce, explaining how “the Irish author influenced Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, Maryse Condé, Paule Marshall, Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison.”
James Joyce is undoubtedly an enormous of Irish and European literature, and but, he proved an influential voice for a number of Caribbean writers, who have been in search of to determine what A Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man’s Stephen Dedalus known as: “the uncreated conscience of my race”.
Though Joyce seems by no means to have visited the Caribbean, it’s potential that he was accustomed to not less than one main Caribbean poet throughout his lifetime, Martinique-born Aimé Césaire. Césaire lived in Paris across the similar time as Joyce and each frequented the bookshop run by Sylvia Seaside, Shakespeare and Firm (which revealed the primary version of Ulysses in 1922), within the late Nineteen Thirties. Each writers additionally revealed work in French literary journal, Volontés.
Césaire’s masterpiece, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Pocket book of a return to a homeland), is a long-form poem that, like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is experimental, and meditates on themes that Joyce additionally returned to all through his profession, such because the pull of dwelling and the consequences of colonialism. Césaire, nevertheless, locations specific emphasis on slavery and racism all through this work.
Joyce’s affect may be extra explicitly seen within the subsequent era of Caribbean writers, whose work emerged throughout a growth interval within the Nineteen Fifties that noticed rising overseas curiosity in work from the area.
In 1953, George Lamming, who handed away final month on the age of 94, revealed Within the Fort of My Pores and skin, a coming-of-age novel set in his native Barbados. Instantly British evaluations in contrast the e book to Joyce’s work, with the Instances Literary Complement wryly suggesting, “one is tempted to rename this e book, ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Barbadian’”. Certainly, whereas Lamming, like Césaire, dwells on themes particular to the Caribbean, comparable to labour riots in Barbados in the course of the Nineteen Thirties and the legacy of the transatlantic slave commerce, there’s nonetheless a notable similarity in outlook with Joyce’s Portrait.
A central scene in Fort sees the novel’s protagonist, G., replicate on Barbados’s British schooling system, mirroring Stephen’s dialog with an English priest, throughout which he thinks “the language we’re talking is his earlier than it’s mine”. Like Stephen on the finish of Portrait, G. has begun to put in writing by Fort’s finish and also will go away his island, as a result of, in Trinidad, he says, “the place nobody is aware of me I could possibly strike identification with the opposite individual”. Simply as Stephen mirrors Joyce’s personal exile in Paris, G.’s story aligns carefully with Lamming’s, as he taught in Trinidad earlier than shifting to the UK in 1950.
For Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, Joyce was a key early inspiration. Walcott encountered Joyce’s work whereas in school and commented extra typically on the significance of Irish literature to him in an interview with the Paris Overview: “When the Irish brothers got here to show on the school in St. Lucia, I had been studying loads of Irish literature: I learn Joyce, naturally I knew Yeats, and so forth. I’ve at all times felt some form of intimacy with the Irish poets as a result of one realized that they have been colonials with the identical form of issues that existed within the Caribbean.”
In his poem, Volcano, Walcott, who was additionally an in depth buddy of Irish Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, writes of the will to grow to be “the best reader on this planet” of his literary masters. The poem cements Joyce’s standing in Walcott’s personal literary pantheon although the placing opening picture: “Joyce was afraid of thunder, / however lions roared at his funeral”. For Walcott, the Dubliner isn’t misplaced in “this seaside home on the cliffs” in “the glow of the volcano” – a reference to St Lucia’s energetic volcano, Soufrière – his works resonating throughout the Atlantic in a setting Joyce himself could not even have imagined.
Walcott, nevertheless, did journey to Eire, not less than as soon as bodily in 1989, but additionally in his poetry. The 1990 epic poem, Omeros, is partly modelled on Homer’s Odyssey (Omeros is the Greek title for Homer), and as such additionally recollects the Homeric construction of Ulysses. In E-book 5 of Omeros, the narrator makes an imaginative journey to Eire, in search of out “our age’s Omeros”, the “gaunt / cane-twirling flaneur”, Joyce. Earlier than leaving, he takes a memento within the type of a stone from the Martello Tower, the place Ulysses begins. (Curiously, Heaney admits to possessing the same souvenir in his poem “Shelf Life”: “this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello / Tower”.)
Joyce was additionally necessary for a number of Caribbean girls writers, whose work gained extra prominence from the Eighties onwards. Like Joyce and Césaire earlier than her, Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé lived for a time in Paris and Joyce can clearly be seen in her 1989 novel, Traversée de la Mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove). In direct allusion to Stephen Dedalus’ assertion that “historical past is a nightmare from which I’m making an attempt to awake”, one character describes historical past as his nightmare.
Stephen’s declaration had earlier been tailored by Paule Marshall, an American author of Bajan descent, who typically returned to the Caribbean in her narratives; The protagonist of her 1969 work, The Chosen Place, the Timeless Individuals, remarks: “West Indian historical past … I needed to go away it off. It’s a nightmare, as that Irishman stated, and we haven’t woke up from it but”. Joyce’s rejection of the authority of historic narratives appealed to each writers, who sought to problem colonial and patriarchal energy buildings of their work.
Joyce continues to resonate within the area at present, as seen with Jamaican poet, Lorna Goodison, who, whereas extra overtly influenced by Yeats, wrote of her connections to Eire (her nice grandfather was Irish) in 2018′s Redemption Floor, describing her Irish neighbour, as “a travelling salesman who belonged within the pages of Ulysses”.
Though Joyce’s prominence within the Caribbean is partly as a result of colonially-influenced schooling techniques, his writing is a touchstone for a number of key figures, not just for its attitudes in direction of historical past and imperialism but additionally for its formal and stylistic improvements. Joyce’s work has a vibrant life exterior of Irish, European, and Anglo-American literary contexts and a spotlight to its afterlives within the Caribbean can solely enrich our readings of the unique.
[Ellen Howley is an assistant professor at DCU’s School of English and works primarily on Irish and Caribbean poetry.]
For authentic article, see https://www.irishtimes.com/tradition/books/2022/07/05/james-joyce-in-the-caribbean
[Photo above by Matt Kavanagh: Derek Walcott with Seamus Heaney and Rebecca O’Neill-Doran from Bray, Co Wicklow, at the launch of a series of poetry cards on Dublin’s Dart trains in 1989.]