Lessons on Writing I Learned from James Joyce

While the rest of the world may know it's fall because leaves are changing, I know it's fall because I'm teaching Joyce to my AP Literature class (and I have lighted a beloved "leaf" scented candle from Bath & Body Works). Since I'm in the Joyce mood, here are five of my favorite tricks the master stylist used you may want to play with if you're stuck in a rut or want to force more depth into your work.

1. The gnomon (often seen through his use of ellipses). At the start of Dubliners, he introduces the Euclidian term without definition, but it's a term/technique he'll use throughout the rest of that work and others. The gnomon is the shaded piece of the sundial. It's the missing piece that defines everything. The moment one person says "I love you" for the first time, and then ...

Joyce really understood how what is not said may be far more powerful than what is said, and uses ellipses to force the reader to...

2. Recurring motifs. While most writers will riff off a few motifs running throughout a work, Joyce composes symphonies. Each time a motif is brought back, a new layer of depth/complexity is added, and with so many motifs running simultaneously with their own arcs throughout a work (In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there are probably hundreds from birds, to Priests, to Romantic poets, to the color green, to...) the symphony is constructed and subtle complexity is achieved. 

3. Euphony. The final passage of "The Dead" in Dubliners might be the most beautiful one ever written (if you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and read it!), and so much of that beauty is derived from its long vowel and repeated soft consonants. It's not just that it sounds pretty that matters, though, it's the placement. The story "The Dead" is a condemnation of Ireland's full political paralysis and what better way to leave the reader than to have been lulled to sleep himself. At the end of the second chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the euphony takes on a different purpose. After a first establishing shot of a garden in the chapter, and a number of references to anticipating a falling away of innocence, the end of the chapter happens when protagonist is losing his virginity to a prostitute and the passage becomes engulfed with the soft s's not unlike the hiss of a snake. Brilliant, Joyce, so brilliant to drive home the final blow of a garden of Eden allusion with such temptingly euphonious hissing.

4. Perspective/voice. In the collection of short stories Joyce uses to talk about Dublin's gradual loss of power, he begins in first person and after a selling out scene, he uses third person, removing the voice of the person and putting it in the hands of another. In his loose autobiography, Joyce uses a third-person that grows with the protagonist as though he's suggesting that there is no "all knowing" voice outside of oneself. He ends with diary entries once the character establishes his own "voice."

5. Structure. In Ulysses, Joyce overlays the structure/plot of The Odyssey/Ulysses onto an ordinary man on an ordinary day in Dublin. Brilliant. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he uses a chiasmus structure (ABCCBA) alluding to Biblical poetry, but also allowing for commentary on growth each time a scene is mirrored and a chance to put silence in the center to suggest that silence is the ultimate mirror. Such a cool perspective on an auto-biography. In Dubliners, he takes unconnected stories of average Dubliners to show the gradual loss of power/hope of the city--talking about political strategy via an ordinary domestic abuse victim (Eveline)--brilliant. Finnegan's Wake, too, in its re-telling of all the other stories in various forms driving home the repeated motif idea of our lives as a series of stories we're constantly re-telling/revising as we go. He's a master. End of story. 

A Few of James Joyce's Tips for Writing and Art

Around a hundred years ago, nerdy and pretentious little James Joyce read Aquinas and Aristotle then penned some of the most intriguing definitions for what art should be, and I think it’s worth remembering a few of his key points.

Static vs. Kinetic: Joyce asserts that pornographic art moves the reader in a kinetic fashion by pushing only one emotion or idea the way that porn has a single clear reaction in mind.  On the other hand static art, the finer art, pulls the reader in several directions so that he is tethered from so many places he cannot move. The dark and the light. The joy and the pain. The humor and the sadness. The infinitely brilliant and the infinitely stupid. While writers are constantly encouraged to make an audience FEEL, the best writers don’t limit that feeling to a single emotion. Is your work only a fun work? Sad work? What could you do to tease out other sentiments?

Great art has Aquinas’s principles: Wholeness, harmony, and radiance.

Wholeness: “The work should be selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which it is not.” Essentially, are you writing to a trend? Could the work stand alone or does it require a movement to support it?

Harmony: “You apprehend it as a complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of their parts and their sum, harmonious.” Does your work have subplots/smaller character arcs working individually whose rhythms/peaks are timed to enhance the key driving force? Does the setting work both individually and enhance the tenor of the piece? Do all of those pieces feel cohesive?

Radiance: “You see that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing.” This one is by far the toughest. Is your work really unique? Could it have been written by anyone else? And, more importantly, does that shine? I have no other questions to ask for this one, but as Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book Outliers that it will take about ten thousand hours of practice to create what Joyce might call “radiance.”