James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach and Their Literary Context
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JJQ “The Ache of Modernism”: James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach and Their Literary Context Norbert Lennartz University of Vechta wentieth-century poetry is more often than not regarded as a decisive break with traditions connected with earlier times— even as a tabula rasa that, in the wake of Ezra Pound’s impera- T 1 tive, promised to make everything new. When Queen Victoria died in 1901 after an unprecedented sixty-four-year reign, the effect— according to H. G. Wells—was that of a leaden paperweight sud- denly being lifted from cultural life,2 and, consequently, new hitherto dormant ideas, concepts, and genres proliferated. The poet Rupert Brooke was even more emphatic when, in the first of his so-called “War Sonnets” in 1915, he visualized a caesura after the fin-de-siècle lethargy, using the image of an athlete who willingly leaps into the purifying cleanness of war: “Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,/And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,/With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,/To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,/Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.”3 Without mentioning explicitly what was meant by “a world grown old and cold and weary” or from whose clutches God was credited with having saved the new generation, Brooke relied on his readers to understand that his criticism was leveled against the last few decades of the nineteenth century. What was generally known as the “Yellow Nineties,” as represented primarily by Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Thomas Hardy, had, at the beginning of the twentieth century, become notorious for turning Victorian ideas of masculinity and purity into a pseudo-philosophy of decadence, skepticism, and neopagan hedonism.4 Brooke died at too young an age to take into account that, just as he was hailing a new (Fascist-tinged) awakening, writers like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence felt more indebted to Hardy’s notion of “the ache of modernism” than to any other concept of cultural regeneration.5 While modernism as a movement “was cen- trally concerned with the relations between literary form and modes of knowledge or understanding,”6 the Pomes Penyeach are meant to recapture the vague feeling of modernism that the late Victorians referred to when they saw their age in terms of loss, paralysis, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 47, Number 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 197-211. Copyright © for the JJQ, University of Tulsa, 2010. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved. Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 197 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 anguish, and incertitude.7 In the wake of Charles Darwin’s shattering insights into man’s origin, most of the Victorian poets were compelled to visualize the existential void to which they suddenly felt exposed, and they invented images like forsaken gardens (Swinburne) or “deserted, moon-blanched street[s]” (Matthew Arnold),8 which, as expressions of loneliness and disorientation, stood in stark contrast to the Victorians’ self-fashioning as technological pioneers and invet- erate optimists. For the majority of writers, the step into modernity thus became synonymous with a painful initiation into a world bereft of the securities of faith and anthropocentricity. In pretending to offer his poems like a market trader selling apples (po[m]mes), Joyce adopts the role of a malicious vendor who supplies unsuspecting customers with cheap, disillusioned glimpses of modernism’s bleakness. Considered hardly fit for publication by Pound (JJII 591),9 even nowadays, the scanty collection Pomes Penyeach has the reputation of being merely an assortment of private emotions,10 or is thought to be only, as Adriaan van der Weel and Ruud Hisgen suggest, “an odyssey of Joyce’s emotional life.”11 No matter what the biographical component of these poems—Joyce’s relationship with Amalia Popper, sexual dissatisfaction, or the death of his mother (JJII 345)12—the thirteen poems in the collection are a major contribution to a culture of transition in which motifs of late-Victorian pessimism merge with the anxiety of twentieth-century literature and art. Read in terms of narrativity—an approach that Peter Hühn applies to a wide range of poetry excluding Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach13—the poems have a sequential quality and can also be understood as fragments or abor- tive dramatic monologues in which three major themes are constantly reiterated, modified, and reflected from different perspectives: the perpetual threat of death, death-bound youth, and the loss of faith. In this respect, the poems are loosely aligned with Joyce’s narratives from Dubliners to Ulysses while, at the same time, they are very much indebted to the late Victorians’ horror of modernism. I The first two stanzas of the poem “Tilly” give the reader the impression that the sequence is just another typically Georgian evo- cation of a bucolic scene revolving around a shepherd who “drives his beasts above Cabra” (CP 47). From the beginning, however, this rural atmosphere lacks the utopian notion of everlasting spring and subsequently becomes the illusive Irish counterfoil to an indefinite pain from which the speaker of the poem suffers.14 Although he is constantly exposed to the “cold red road” and the hardship of winter, the countryside “[b]oor” has not been deprived of the innocent joy that the warmth of his home and the “brute music” of his cattle prom- 198 Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 198 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM ise (CP 47). In stark contrast to the rustic whose “flowering branch” hints at his strong ties with nature, the lost-generation speaker is characterized by injury and dismemberment when he exclaims that he is afflicted with a wound that bleeds incessantly: “I bleed by the black stream/For my torn bough!” (CP 47).15 As the almost expres- sionistic quality of the introductory poem shows,16 the praise of rural beauty and primitivism, which the Georgians recaptured in their anti-decadent nature poetry, indicates an escapism Joyce feels obliged to deconstruct. Hence, the collection of poems traces a painful process of disillusionment, a multi-voiced song of experience that not only subverts its prelude of Arcadian peace but also reveals that the speaker’s wound, the aching feeling of modernism, is a ubiquitous part of twentieth-century existence. The twelve-line poem “She Weeps Over Rahoon” succinctly shows to what extent the unseen but festering wound affects the relationship between the genders (CP 50). Written six years after “The Dead,” in 1913, it recollects the deadlocked situation at the end of the last story of Dubliners, where Gabriel, shown with a riveted gaze through the window, is compelled to realize in a moment of shattering epiphany that his marital happiness is founded on illusions and that he has always been the odd man out in a love triangle.17 The story ends with the apocalyptic image of Gabriel’s identity “fading out into a grey impalpable world” and of the solid world “dissolving and dwin- dling” in the snow (D 223). In the poem, it is not the snow but the “dark rain” incessantly falling on the cemetery of Rahoon that high- lights the theme of death as complete annihilation (CP 50). Closely connected with this nihilistic view of all-encompassing death is the theme of unrequited love. In contrast to the story, what proves to be vexingly open to conjecture here is the identity of the poem’s speaker. While the German translator Hans Wollschläger assumes that the speaker of the poem changes in the second stanza from a woman to a man addressing his female companion and reminiscing about a dead rival,18 it can also be argued that the poem is entirely the monologue of a woman whose mind is haunted by her “dark lover” in the grave (CP 50).19 In “The Dead,” the phantom of Michael Furey is conjured forth by a tune, whereas, here, it seems to be the monotony of the rain that reanimates the dead lover’s voice in the woman’s mind and thus makes him an audible revenant without hope of finding rest. Persistently calling his former beloved from the realm of the dead, his enticing voice from the past not only attempts to draw her into non-existence but, by dominating her imagination and gaining ascendancy in the love triangle, tries to eclipse her present lover in the same way that Gabriel is supplanted by the unseen presence of his rival from the “vague world” (D 220): 199 Complete_Issue_47_2.indb 199 4/29/2011 2:29:30 PM James Joyce Quarterly 47.2 2010 Love, hear thou How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling, Ever unanswered and the dark rain falling, Then as now. Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold As his sad heart has lain Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould And muttering rain. (CP 50) In his story, Joyce weaves a complex web of images in which a caretaker’s daughter in a gaunt, skeleton-like house,20 a ghostly street lamp, a silent hotel, and an oppressively yellow light make up a topography of menace. In his poems, though, he conjures an atmo- sphere of decline and darkness with a few suggestive composites: unregenerative “dark rain,” “moongrey nettles,” and “black mould.” Next to the imagery, the sound patterns and rhymes of “falling” and “calling” strongly remind the reader of Hardy’s 1912 poem “The Voice” in which, although the genders are reversed, there is also a focus on a cemetery scene where a mourning individual is haunted by the voice of his dead lover.21 In the first line of the subsequent poem, “Tutto È Sciolto,” where Joyce refers to a “birdless heaven,” he cumulatively creates a locus terribilis in which, on the one hand, indications of death, vacuity, and decomposition abound and, on the other, the Romantic symbolism of birds as mediators between heaven and earth has ceased to be of any validity (CP 51).