Citario. Derived from the Latin citāre (to quote) plus the suffix -ārium (repository), similar to bestiary. A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as those by Erasmus) and 19th-century proto-examples, such as Familiar Quotations. This “Citario Joyce” celebrates the 144th anniversary of his birth and the critical, admiring, or controversial murmurings that his figure has aroused over time. Here are judgments, intuitions, outbursts, and readings that have attempted to define the scope of his writing. From bewildered contemporaries to late readers, from hyperbolic praise to weary refutation, this Citario brings together the uneven chorus that accompanies an excessive body of work.
The consecutive and straightforward reading of the four hundred thousand words of Ulysses would require similar monsters. (I will venture nothing about what Finnegans Wake would require: for me, no less inconceivable than C.H. Hinton’s fourth dimension or the Nicene Trinity.) No one is unaware that for unprepared readers, Joyce’s vast novel is indecipherably chaotic. Nor is it unknown that its official interpreter, Stuart Gilbert, has proclaimed that each of the eighteen chapters corresponds to an hour of the day, a bodily organ, an art, a symbol, a color, a literary technique, and one of the adventures of Ulysses, son of Laertes, seed of Zeus. The mere news of these imperceptible and laborious correspondences has been enough for the world to revere the severe construction and classical discipline of the work. Of these deliberate tics, the most praised has been the most insignificant: James Joyce’s contacts with Homer, or (simply) with the senator for the department of Jura, M. Victor Bérard.
Far more admirable, without a doubt, is the multitudinous diversity of styles. Like Shakespeare, like Quevedo, like Goethe, like no other writer, Joyce is less a man of letters than a literature. He is, incredibly, in the span of a single volume. His writing is intense; Goethe’s never was; it is delicate: Quevedo never suspected such a virtue. I (like the rest of the universe) have not read Ulysses, but I happily read and reread certain scenes: the dialogue about Shakespeare, the Walpurgisnacht in the brothel, the questions and answers of the catechism: …They drank in jocoserious silence Epp’s massproduct, the creature cocoa. And on another page: A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winning post, his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars. And on another: Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled.
Abundance and poverty coexisted in Joyce. Lacking the ability to construct (which his gods did not grant him and which he had to compensate for with arduous symmetries and labyrinths), he enjoyed a verbal gift, a happy omnipotence of the word, which it is no exaggeration or inaccuracy to equate with that of Hamlet or Urn Burial… Ulysses (as everyone knows) is the story of a single day, within the perimeter of a single city. In this voluntary limitation, it is legitimate to perceive something more than Aristotelian elegance; it is legitimate to infer that for Joyce, every day was in some way secretly the irreparable Day of Judgment; every place, Hell or Purgatory. (1941)
Jorge Luis Borges
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The everyday life of the world at the time that forms the content of Joyce’s Ulysses is the everyday life taken from the biography of Mr. Leopold Bloom, an everyday life taken from the average environment in the years preceding the war, whose relationship with world history ends in the reading of a newspaper; Mr. Bloom, a somewhat curious and indifferent gentleman of Jewish descent and Catholic religion, leads a relatively comfortable and financially secure life as the owner of an advertising agency in the very provincial city of Dublin, and June 16, 1905, on which we accompany him from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., is just another day in this ordinary life. Bloom’s thoughts are inconsequential, his relationships with his fellow human beings, friends and enemies, are inconsequential, and they too are inconsequential. Molly, the wife of the good-natured Bloom, cheats on him with banal excuses, and she has to cheat on them because that’s how she was born; the citizens of the city are banal, even when here and there an original character emerges; even Bloom’s rival, the intellectual, wayward, night owl student Stephan Dedalus, is banal. And everything that happens during this day is: Mr. Bloom gets up in the morning, makes breakfast for his wife, goes to the office, attends a funeral, goes to a public bath, has a light lunch, returns to his business, has dinner at a restaurant, meets Stephan Dedalus, then goes for a walk, completely alone, on the beach, expresses his erotic desires to a random girl, who listens to him indifferently, and, late at night, meets Dedalus again, ends up in a brothel, and finally, after drinking a cup of terrible coffee in a tavern, goes home, accompanied by Dedalus, where they philosophize for a while until he leaves and Bloom lands in the marital bed.
Sixteen hours of life in 1,200 pages, sixteen hours of life during which the protagonists are tempted, again and again, to leave the scene, because nature demands it.
Hermann Broch
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The symbolism of Ulysses is twofold. According to Valery Larbaud, and as confirmed by those in the know, a complex scheme of symbolic references underlies the entire work: each episode corresponds to a particular science, an art, an organ of the human body, a color, a technique. As an example, Larbaud cites the fourth chapter, which takes place in a newspaper office. According to Larbaud, it corresponds to rhetoric, language, the color red, the technique of enthymeme, etc. It is clear that this scheme is in line with the medieval mentality. It found its literary realization in the theory (and practice) of the multiplicity of meanings (triple, quadruple, septuple) of Scripture; its cultic realization in the liturgy; its plastic realization in cathedral sculptures. Joyce received this symbolism from the Middle Ages at the same time and with the same spiritual attitude with which he received the Aristotelian-Thomistic method of thought.
But in Ulysses there is yet another symbolism: the construction, the action, and the characters of the work correspond to those of the Odyssey.
The two systems of symbols are interwoven with each other and with the plot of the book: the story of what Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom did from 8 a.m. on June 16, 1904, to 3 a.m. on July 17.
To fully understand Ulysses, it is helpful to have a clear idea of how this double symbolism develops.
However, for the first system of symbols, we lack the key: we do not have a system of concordances established with the necessary precision. The key exists, but only the author and a few initiates possess it.
Ernst Robert Curtius
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Joyce as a model of health? At that time, the opinion is too unprecedented to be shared. Unanimously, American publishers refuse to publish Ulysses, which they deem “pornographic.” An unscrupulous London publisher, Samuel Roth, has released a pirated “expurgated” edition to avoid the wrath of the censors and bring it to the public. Harry [Crosby] is delighted to learn that this “scum” is rotting in prison. He likes everything about Joyce. The man as well as the work. When Caresse asks the writer if he enjoys what they do together, he likes the triumphant gleam in his sick eye, “the same triumphant gleam you get when you sleep with the woman you love, or when you bet your shirt on a horse and it gallops after the winner, catches up with it and finally overtakes it as it crosses the finish line.”
One day, while they have been working on Lille Street, in Harry’s strange office-library, Harry helps his distinguished guest down the stairs and asks him if he is superstitious. “Why?” asks Joyce. “You stepped on a skeleton.” Joyce replies that he doesn’t give a damn about the skeleton, but that deaf-mutes do have a strange effect on him. The same goes for two nuns passing each other on the street. Or a man’s hat on a bed. Joyce is fearful. McAlmon has seen him faint at the sight of a black rat, and Sylvia Beach cower, tremble, and howl in the hallway at the sound of thunder, unable to calm down until the storm has passed.
When she goes to Rue de Lille, Caresse has to lock Narcisse up, because Joyce is terrified of black dogs: he says they bit him once when he was a child, that there is a scar hidden under his goatee.
After these sessions, Harry staggers under the effect of the new words and symbols spinning around in his head. “I hope you forgive me for the incoherence of this letter, but I’ve just come from Joyce’s house,” he writes to his mother one day.
Dominique de Saint Pern
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Copenhagen (Denmark): Hotel Turist (Hotel Alexandra)
As soon as he arrived at the modest Turist Hotel on August 18, James Joyce began speaking Danish… He ordered a book from a bookstore to be delivered to the hotel, and the bookseller, recognizing the name of the author of Ulysses, introduced him to the writer Iom Kristensen, who had just entered and had written two articles about Ulysses in 1931. Joyce invited him to his hotel and tried to make a pun in Danish on the expressions at bestille nogel and at bestille enflaske vin (“to do a job” and “to order a bottle of wine”), explaining that these were the two reasons why he was there. He told him how his first seven Danish teachers had misled him, and that only the last one had known how to sob as required by the “weeping language” of a “people of weepers,” those “wild men with sweet voices.”
Hotel Nassau (now defunct)
Joyce was twenty years old when he ran into Yeats on the street. He went up to him, introduced himself, and told him about some prose poems he had just written. Yeats asked him to accompany him to the small lounge of the restaurant he was heading to. After praising the texts, “of an eccentric harmony,” Joyce’s reaction is most surprising: “In fact, I don’t care whether you like what I do or not, because in the end I don’t care. And I don’t really know why I read my stuff to you.” He then sets out his objections to everything Yeats has written… “Why had he committed himself to politics, to folklore, to the historical framework of events and everything else,” Yeats notes, so as not to forget this curious encounter during which, with great patience, he tried to win over his young interlocutor, until the latter stands up and, as he leaves, throws at him: “I am twenty years old. How old are you?“ Yeats told him his age, taking a year off. Joyce sighed: ”I thought so. I met you too late. You are too old.” Yeats was thirty-seven.
Without the slightest resentment, Yeats invited Joyce to dinner at the Nassau Hotel shortly afterwards.
Their friendship did not wane, and upon Yeats’s death, Joyce acknowledged his dazzling imagination and that he had been a better writer than himself, a tribute he paid to no other contemporary.
Nathalie de Saint Phalle
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It was only towards the end of her life that Nora came to understand her husband’s literary fame. She never read his books; with utter disregard for posterity, she tore up many of Joyce’s letters, claiming that they were of no interest to anyone but herself, and that even she had ceased to find them interesting. For Nora, Joyce was not an exceptional literary figure, but an unhappy and tortured child. She was a very practical woman and had no time for “nonsense” such as posing for a family portrait that Joyce wanted to show to the world. “I am nobody,” she insisted. Joyce pleaded with her in vain, pointing out that it was not just for the press, that they had no photograph of the whole family from those years: with Giorgio, his wife, Helen, and little Stephen; that perhaps such an opportunity would never arise again.
Almost in desperation, like a harried theater director before a premiere, Joyce strove to compose the image of a united and happy family, posing the group, focusing attention on the dog, forcing smiles on reluctant lips. But what value could a family portrait have without the matriarch? Joyce pleaded one last time. “No,” Nora repeated.
Completely defeated, Joyce looked away.
Gisèle Freund
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James Joyce has indeed given us a better understanding of the complexity of the problem and the opportunities it offered. Remember that in his first long story, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he does not claim the privilege of omniscience, but rather the so-called “point of view.” The third-person, extradiegetic narrator is situated only within the field of experience and perception of a single character, the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, from early childhood to adolescence. Dedalus and the point of view attached to him evolve and improve together, but the understanding of the people, feelings, and events narrated must necessarily admit the limits of a purely individual approach. The narrator only knows Dedalus—from within and in depth. This is no small thing in this case, but rather a great deal, qualitatively speaking, without a doubt.
In 1914, Joyce finished A Portrait of the Artist and wrote his most significant play, in three acts, Exiles. In the theater, the voice of Joyce the novelist disappears, and therefore no one is known from within. As is well known, the elementary distinction between three channels of presentation dates back at least to Plato’s Republic. The writer chooses to speak either in his own voice, poetically; or through other voices, dramatically; or by combining the two approaches, as in epic poetry. In the latter case, Aristotle explains in Poetics, “either by becoming to some extent another, as Homer does, or as oneself and without changing.” In Exiles, Joyce fully embraces the constituent condition of the dramatic channel and becomes, to a certain extent, others, more precisely, the four main characters: a writer, his wife, and a couple of friends, a man and a woman. Complicated intertwined relationships manifest themselves among the four, and intense discussions ensue. Well, everything happens as if Joyce were taking advantage of the absence of any voice other than that of the characters to highlight the opacity of human beings and their mutual ignorance. Theater offers the opportunity to reproduce and reveal this very basic social mechanism. In theater, the characters are only seen and heard. The audience perceives only the external and visible aspects of each character, their gestures, their posture, their way of walking (Joyce’s text includes numerous stage directions), and of course their tone of voice and their words, which are directed outward, without knowing at all whether these coincide with their intimate thoughts and even, very improbably, their true thoughts.
Claudio Guillén
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For a long time, to increase its dangers, readers of the voluminous Ulysses demanded the brothel scene and the monologues, abandoning the controversy over Hamlet in the Dublin Library, or the beautiful page on color and vitality: “The various colors significant of various degrees of vitality, white, yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar.” A special type of reader was determined to create a special Joyce, seeing him as the elder brother of surrealism, cloaked in the wall of knowledge of all the Romance languages, Greek and Latin, Babelic, impossible, Babylonian, Rabelaisian, the successor to minor symbolists. Today we see that this work was created as all works are created: the adolescent struggle between sex and dogma, the rhythm of the voice, and a certain superficial heterodoxy in search of a central orthodoxy. A new type of reader will immediately claim for Joyce the delight and security of his sources. The Exercises provoking fury, rectifications, read as a manual of rhetoric and as a chorus of disciplinarians. Teaching how to write: “so that a single word is said between one breath and another, and while the time between one breath and another lasts.” Also coming out of the Exercises is the obstinacy in a word, the evocation of “the three binaries of man.” And the angel—not in his praise—but as a blade. The end, judgment and hell, and the sulfur released by the king of the proud, themes from Joyce’s Jesuit adolescence. If Stuart Gilbert has pointed out in Ulysses the parody of the adventures of Odysseus, we can equally point out the reminiscence of Jesuit theology in its most frequently used themes.
José Lezama Lima
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In 1903, when he left Dublin, Joyce married and his two children were born in Trieste. It is understandable why we Triestines have been allowed to love him as if he were a little bit ours. He is also a little Italian. There is a decidedly Italian inclination in Joyce’s culture, perhaps accentuated by the desire—lively in some periods of his life—to feel less English. In Ulysses, when it suits him, he freely uses some Italian turns of phrase that make the English reader, if curious, have to get hold of an Italian dictionary. It is a great honor for my city that some streets in Dublin are lengthened in Ulysses by some of the twists and turns of our old Trieste. Joyce recently wrote to me: If the River Liffey were not swallowed up by the ocean, it would flow into the Grand Canal of Trieste. That lively mind created a link between the two cities. It was easy: Trieste then represented a little Ireland that he could appreciate with more serenity than his own. Recently, the Irish critic Boyd had claimed that Ulysses was nothing more than the product of pre-war Irish thought, to which Valéry Larbaud replied: “Yes, to the extent that he was able to mature it in Trieste.”
In his memory—I like to boast about this—Joyce’s stay in Trieste was very pleasant. Sometimes it is nostalgia. Perhaps that nostalgia gave rise to his famous drama Exiles. Exiles? I asked when I attended its performance by the Stage Society of London. Exiles, those who return to their homeland? And Joyce said to me: But don’t you remember how the prodigal son was received by his brother in his father’s house? It is dangerous to leave one’s homeland, but it is even more dangerous to return, because then your compatriots, if they can, will stab you in the heart.
Italo Svevo
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Good literature permeates certain cities and covers them with a patina of mythology and images that is more resistant to the passage of time than their architecture and history. When I visited Dublin in the mid-1960s, I felt betrayed: that cheerful, friendly city, with its exuberant people who stopped me in the middle of the street to ask where I was from and invite me for a beer, did not resemble the one in Joyce’s books. A friend resigned himself to serving as my guide in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, in those twenty-four eventful hours of Ulysses; the names of the streets, many of the places and addresses had been preserved, and yet it lacked the density, the sordidness, and the gray metaphysics of the Dublin of the novel. Had they ever been the same city?
In truth, they never were. Because Joyce, although he had Flaubert’s obsession with documentation (he who was the personification of unscrupulousness in everything except writing) and took his scrupulous description of his city to such meticulous extremes as to find out by letter, from Trieste and Zurich, what flowers and trees were those on that particular corner… he did not describe the city of his fiction: he invented it. And he did so with such artistry and persuasive force that his city of fantasy, nostalgia, resentment, and (above all) words ends up having, in the memory of his readers, a relevance that surpasses in drama and color the ancient city of flesh and blood—or rather, stone and clay—that served as his model.
Dubliners is the first stage of that duplication. The overwhelming importance of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, literary experiments that revolutionized modern narrative, sometimes makes us forget that this book of short stories, more traditional in style and, at least in appearance, indebted to a naturalistic realism that was already somewhat archaic by the time it was published (1914), is not a minor work, a learning experience, but the first masterpiece Joyce wrote. It is an organic book, not a compilation. Read in one sitting, each story complements and enriches the others, and in the end, the reader has a vision of a compact society that he has explored in its social recesses, in the psychology of its people, in its rites, prejudices, enthusiasms, and discord, and even in its immodest depths.
Mario Vargas Llosa
