We Don't Need No Water: Joyce and O'Brien Burning the Roof of High Art

Undergraduate Review Volume 2 Article 16 2006 We Don't Need No Water: Joyce and O'Brien Burning the Roof of High Art Robert J. Cannata Follow this and additional works at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/undergrad_rev Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Cannata, Robert J. (2006). We Don't Need No Water: Joyce and O'Brien Burning the Roof of High Art. Undergraduate Review, 2, 98-101. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/undergrad_rev/vol2/iss1/16 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Copyright © 2006 Robert J. Cannata 98 We Don't Need No Water: Joyce and O'Brien Burning the Roof of High Art BY ROB CANNATA Rob wrote this piece for Dr. Garland Kim- ~"-"anonica[authors - Spenser, Tennyson, Dickens, the like - are mer's Irish Literature I class and presented representative enough of their eras to have become landmarks it at the 2005 National Conference of Un- of their time. The Modernist James Joyce stands in this league, dergraduate Research. Rob recently gradu- ..........r approaching the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens in his fame. ated with a BA in English and intends to Joyce is mostly known as unapproachably dense in his knowledge in writing: pursue his writing, though it often seems a running joke among Joycean scholars is lhat only about twenty of them have to outrun him. actually read Ulysses all the way through. This perception ofJoyce as intellectually challenging has placed him in the category of"high art~ - fodder for the educated elite. But in much of his work. Joyce himself ridicules the concept of~high art,~ mocking the existing artistic value systems of his time and upsetting the very prestige the intellectual community gives him. The later Irish writer Flann O'Brien, who has been placed in a similar category by the postmodern literati, rebels against this same value system by using similar tactics. By juxtaposing the low and high realms of art. Joyce and O'Brien undermine the structure of cultural value imposed by their British overseers. Walter Pater's essay. "Aesthetic Poetry,~ helps to define the Late Victorian classifications of low and high art (Joyce's artistry flourished in the Modern period. but he grew up in a time frame dominated by Late Victorian thought). Pater states of poetry, ult is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date. it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it~ (95). For Pater, poetry builds upon past themes in new contexts. With this he suggests that a reader must be properly versed in past literature before poetry can have significant meaning, and so the poet and reader are bound to the high art canon, only able to refine and perpetuate the spirit of the canon. THE UNIHIIGIIADUATE REVIEW " Matthew Arnold puts other bonds on poetry in his '"The idealistically through Portrait. Steph~n's aesthetic cleanliness Study of Poetry.'" He states that -the best poetry is what isn't echoed by his physical state - we learn early in Ulysses we want; the best poetry wiU be found to have a power of that. in a symbolic rejection of his baptism, Stephen hasn't forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. A bathed in months (Blamires 6). The juxtaposition of physical clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and the strength filth and mental purity could be Joyce's attempt to chip at and jay to be drawn from it, is the most precious benefit.. Stephen's conception of himself. .'" (1535). Again, key words like '"forming'" and '"sustaining'" Stephen's indignation continues in Ulysses. Buck imply an existing value structure that must be built upon and Mulligan, friend and temporary host, playfully criticizes gradually refined until a '"clearer, deeper sense'" of poetics is Stephen's self-importance, which infuriates Stephen. After achieved. To Arnold, artists build in aim of a specific goal: a minor argument. Mulligan ridicules Stephen's dramatic understanding. This understanding must be refined and pensiveness and offense, stating "Don't mope over it all day.. clean, created with an ideal of evaluated aesthetic perfection .I'm in consequent. Give up the moody brooding" (Ulysses 8). in mind. Mulligan also pokes fun at Stephen's high-minded theory on Pater and Arnold preach a structure that Joyce and Shakespeare's Hamlet and the self-imponance of academics O'Brien rebel against, while the Irish writers' works are placed in general: ·,t's quite simple. He proves by algebra that into this same canonical structure. As Irishmen. Joyce and Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he O'Brien were subject to the imposition of this Victorian value himself is the ghost of his own father'" (Ulysses 15). Stephen system through colonization and undermine it by exposing its chimes in his one-word appraisal of Buck at the end of the unrealistic portrayals of truth. culture, and understanding. '"Nestor Episode: '"Usurper'" (Ulysses 18). Buck is an affront Stephen Dedalus is, to Joyce, the typical high art elitist. to his quest for artistic and ultimate understanding ('"Hast When we leave Stephen in A Portrait ofthe Artist as a you,tg thou found me, 0 mine enemy"r [Ulysses 1621). Of course, Mall, he is brimming with idealistic ambition: ·Welcome, when Stephen finally discloses his full theory of Shakespeare o life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of in ~Scylla and Charybdis,~ he is asked: experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated -Do you believe your own theory? conscience of my race'" (Portrait 218). How Stephen, a Jesuit- -No, Stephen said promptly. (Ulysses 175). educated man of letters, can relate to the Irish poor. never Stephen's inability to believe his own intellectual work further mind create their conscience, is not answered. Stephen has unsettles his pursuit of an ultimate aesthetic or truth. created an aesthetic barrier between himself and low Irish Through Stephen, lOYce. is ridiculing the claim of culture. Take his opinion of his father, Simon. As a quiet objective, pure understanding. Compare Stephen's view to witness to Simon and his drunken cronies. Stephen reflects that of TS. Eliot, the quintessential modernist, on athe idea condescendingly, '"His mind seemed older than theirs: it of classicism; or a tendency '"toward an higher and clearer shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control a moon upon a younger eanh...He had known neither the of the emotions by Reason~ (qtd. in Donoghue 21-22). To pleasure ofcompanionship with others nor the vigour of rude Joyce, such clarity is a myth, and (...truncated)