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James Joyce as Berlinian
fox is discussed in
Therivel's GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity.
Maître Renard
James Joyce
The above is the title of chapter 10 of volume 1 of
William A. Therivel's The GAM/DP Theory of Personality
and Creativity (G stands for genetic
endowment, A for assistances of youth, M
for misfortunes of youth, DP for division of
power, UP for unity of power). For an introduction
to the GAM part of the theory click "Introduction
to GAM"; for an introduction to the DP
part click on "Introduction
to DP".
In this website, the reader is also offered a shortcut:
The GAM/DP Synopsis
and an expanded version, The GAM/DP
Summary of volumes 1 through 4.
Hereafter are excerpts of chapter 10:
Joyce the Berlinian Fox
As reported in chapter
9, James Joyce was listed by Isaiah Berlin among his
examples of the fox personality who knows many things,
as opposed to the hedgehog personality who knows one
big thing. Also, table 4 of chapter 9 lists those GAM
challenged personalities who are Berlinian foxes, among
these the alchemists, the critical jesters, and
the brewers. Joyce was all three: an alchemist
shaped by the misfortune of father failure, a critical
jester shaped by the misfortune of the downfall of family
socio-economic status, and a brewer shaped by the misfortune
of father-mother incompatibility. One can, therefore,
expect him to be a fox per excellence: a maître
renard.
As Berlinian fox, "Joyce
is reputed to have said that were Dublin destroyed it
could be re-created brick by brick from his novel. An
exaggeration on three counts; some streets and shops
aren't mentioned; the author occasionally made mistakes;
and in many instances Joyce maliciously contoured the
cityscape to get even with enemies. . . [His Ulysses
[is in] itself an encyclopedia, street directory, dialect
dictionary, census, pub guide, ordonnance survey, and
vade mecum bound up in blue and white paper" (Kidd,
1988, p. 32). Admittedly, some streets and shops were
left out, yet nobody but a first class fox would have
described so many. Admittedly, Joyce made mistakes,
but that, too, corresponds to the fox personality. It
is the hedgehog who would rather die than make a mistake.
| Critics
complain that in Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake Joyce was willing to use any detail at
all, that it did not matter to him what his materials
were, that he would include even the slamming of
a door or a sneeze. But this is precisely the point.
If everything in the world is interrelated, if the
patterns comprehend all of us and all that occurs,
everything that exists, then any detail will serve;
there is significance in everything if you know
how to discover and reveal it. (French, 1993, pp.
267-8). |
Such foxian gifts were
his quite early, already when the critic William Archer
remarked that in the play A Brilliant Career
by the 18-year-old Joyce its author shows "a gift
of easy, natural, yet effective dialogue, and a certain
sense of scenic picturesqueness, but crowds his canvas
with so many figures that Shakespeare himself could
not differentiate between them. . . [In turn, Joyce's
brother Stanislaus] thought that many of the minor characters
were real because he recognized in them portraits of
mutual acquaintances" (Davies, 1975/1982, p. 52).
In his autobiographical
novel a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we read
about Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalus and that "there
was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set
out for the ends of the earth. On! On! His heart seemed
to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall
upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and
show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?"
(1917/1977, p. 155)
Alchemist from Father Failure
The reader will remember,
from chapter 3, the specific impact on personality (with
high GxA) of the misfortune of father failure. In the
case of James Joyce:
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In June 1891 [Joyce at nine] his father lost
his position as Collector of Rates in Dublin and
decided that he could no long afford to keep his
son in Clongowes. This decision marked a significant
phase in the family's gradual but uninterrupted
descent into the inferno of Dublin's poverty.
Throughout his school years Joyce was a victim
of his family's failing fortunes, and he never
forgot the degradation and shame in which his
family position involved him. (Schutte, 1968,
p.2)
Stanislaus, when writing his memoirs, compiles
a list of nine addresses gone through in about
eleven years. The threats of landlords and creditors
increased in stridency. . . The Joyces, who began
their removals career with two vans and a float,
ended it needing only a hand cart. (Davies, 1982,
pp. 21, 25)
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As discussed, one of
the characteristics of the alchemist personality is
an expertise in converting into artistic gold everything
they touch, even their "failed relations."
Such a quality is evident in Joyce:
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life of an artist, but particularly that of Joyce,
differs from the lives of other persons in that
its events are becoming artistic sources even as
they command his present attention. Instead of allowing
each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into
imprecise memory, he shapes again the experiences
which have shaped him. He is at once the captive
and the liberator. In turn the process of reshaping
experience b becomes a part of his life, another
of its recurrent events like rising or sleeping.
(Ellmann, 1982, p. 3) |
Critical Jester from the Pains of SES Downfall
The father may or may
not be responsible for the family's SES downfall, yet
soon society will be seen as the enemy: the new unfriendly
neighbor, the impatient landlord, the pitiless pawnbroker,
the insulting grocer refusing further credit, the persecuting
new schoolmates, the now-indifferent teachers. Gradually
society will be seen as being without heart and soul,
ruled by the god of money. The answer will be a basic
grudge and a biting humor, the only defense possible
in this case. Our youth will become a critical-jester,
unable to dives a major plan for change, as the reformer,
but expert in denouncing faults and failures: "There's
many a true word spoken in jest"; "Castigat
ridendo mores" (He corrects customs by laughing
at them). He will become a jester whose business is
not really to amuse but to hit like a partisan engaged
in guerilla warfare. His must be the rapid attack, under
disguise, behind the enemy lines. His humor is a searching
light in his inspection of man's ignorance, foolishness
and cruelty, and a weapon for defense and attack. His
humor is a vitriolic social criticism of his time. He
understands and identifies with the oppressed, the partisan
and the clown. His view of love and sex focuses rapidly
on exploitation of man by man, on falsity, on hypocrisy.
The draftsman and master satirist George Grosz was a
critical jester, and accordingly his autobiography is
entitles A small yes and a big no, and one of
his collections of satirical drawings is entitled Ecce
homo.
James Joyce suffered of
the misfortune of SES downfall and became, also, a critical
jester:
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the years that followed, the Joyce family sank deeper
and deeper into poverty. Ten children survived infancy,
and they became accustomed to conditions of increasing
sordidness, subject to visits from debt collectors,
having household goods frequently in pawn, and often
moving to another house, leaving the rent and tradesmen's
bills unpaid. (Atherton, 1978, p. 279) |
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