Literal analysis of "Who Killed James Joyce?" by Patrick Kavanagh

Introduction

Topic of this poem is the death of James Joyce not in person as the title may allude, but in terms of the writings by Joyce, several of them are named in the poem, namely Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. In the poem, the work of Joyce is personalized and contrasted with the academic word. There might be several reasons for this, first the status of Joyce’s work Ulysses and the reception of Finnegan’s Wake. The methods applied in these titles: stream of consciousness, multi-level puns, and obsessive details. Ulysses was banned for several years in the United States; books were destroyed, burned in the United Kingdom for not being acceptable, for being obscene. Therefore, we can refer to them as rebellious. The University, on the other hand, is the center of acceptable knowledge and science. The more Joyce becomes accepted, the less there is shocking about the parody in Ulysses. The Irish stereotype tells a story of a rebel. If the symbol such as Joyce fades out in the process of institutionalization, he becomes less relevant to the stereotype of Ireland. This perhaps is what Kavanagh meant. The form of the poem by Kavanagh is entertaining by the means of exaggeration, personalization, parody and irony.

Analysis

James Joyce was killed for commentator’s graduation. Since there is not an example of the thesis it refers to, possible scenarios need to be assessed. First, the combination of the academic style with the stream of consciousness is oxymoronic. The first is the unbound, the unrestricted, free style. The other is the formal, argumentative, uninspired and depersonalized scientific construct. Subjecting the first to the second mentioned, the result is crippling when taken too far in means of following the academic guides: styles, ideas asserted from a portfolio of possible explanations, analysis of logical interlinking and all these approaches unnatural to the writings. In the result, it kills the literature it is supposed to assert. Therefore, Joyce is killed as the name has more meaning of the poems than of the person himself.

Moreover, in the second stanza, Kavanagh goes even further in mockery of this attitude, making a connection between the weapon and the master thesis. The line with To slay the mighty Ulysses is interesting in comparison to the original work of Joyce. Because in Ulysses, the persons from normal life are compared to deeds of mighty Ulysses by Homer and here in this poem, again the author of the master thesis is compared to a warrior ridiculously enough by putting several pages of paper in his hands. So it’s not only the comparison of the rebellious nature of the novel to the stasis of academy, it is also the comparison of the pseudo-heroic characters of the novel to the protagonists of this poem as they have equal roles, in first case compared to Ulysses, in second case indirectly compared to warriors, even amplifying the irony by expressive words like slay or mighty.

The Irish government refused to even repatriate the remains of Joyce to Ireland after he died in Switzerland. However, in this poem, he is buried in a broadcast Symposium, to a tuneful encomium. The striking difference also may allude to how Joyce is perceived in the Kavanagh’s era, mainly the gap between Joyce being banned for obscenity and the era of Joyce as a compulsory grammar school reading. Therefore while Joyce died alone with his country refusing to bury him, his novels lived on to be buried by the academic world in a respectable Symposium.

W.R. Rogers is the man who comes after the allegoric burial of Joyce to take over his work and make a career out of the explanatory fillings. This man is basically the representative of the mechanic rape of Joyce, the creation of the public image of the Ulysses and clarification or better be said popularization with all the negative effects such as simplification, projection, false interpretation, associated with it. The stream of consciousness is written for the reader, not for the analyst. The reason is that this type of literature has two main layers. The first layer is the factual (the one that requires some understanding), the second layer is effectual (poetic, the way how one situation is followed by another, the overall feeling the reader receives and that cannot under any circumstances be mediated through a story about the novel itself). So while Kavanagh puts Rogers in the poem as a man who respects Joyce much enough to be given a part in his burial ceremony, it is easily deciphered that he meant the direct opposite from the tone of the poem. (1)

Rogers is depicted the way he presumably tried to look in public: a mercenary. Then he is contrasted with what his role really was, the desecrator – a proof lies in the third stanza where even the difference between the religious convictions is mentioned and the religious convictions in Ireland of the mid-20th century mean the same label as friend or foe in the most cases.

Another pun lies in the following stanza, where Finnegan is killed. The whole name of the novel is Finnegan’s Wake (the funeral ceremony), therefore the pun is evidently hidden in Finnegan being murdered as a literary work which already deals with death in its very own title. The Yale-man is the murderer, again academically obtaining the corpse for the wake, the novel itself. B.Litt (the Bachelor of Literature) and master’s degree are the military decoration to be worn for honor as the result of this “litericide”.

The Trinity College is situated in Dublin, the city where Joyce was born, where he often returned, but where he did not spend most of his life. Strangely enough, Joyce studied at University College and not the Trinity. Reasons for usage of the Trinity are unknown to me, although today many departments are shared and moved between them. Another contrast is in the money and the life of common Irish at the time of Joyce, most of them poor.

The Bloomsday refers to Leopold Bloom, the central character in Ulysses. There is a day called Bloomsday Swelter on June 16th, the day when the novel Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday is similar to Doomsday, which is similar to the Doomsday Book, enforced on the domestic English by Norman invaders, who build fortresses similar to Mortello Towers, which are small forts built by the English after annexation of Ireland named the Act of Union on 1800 under the pretext of defense from the foreign powers enabled the English to stabilize their control over the country. Pilgrimage is a religious voyage and the places in between it is taken represent the peak of the religious sacrament. Choosing the object of an English fort, Kavanagh implicated that not only the Yale-man knows nothing about Joyce, but also that he knows nothing about Ireland itself, despite receiving 2 consecutive degrees from desecration of Joyce’s literature. The cabby’s shelter is the place where the beginning of Ulysses is set, under Loop Line Bridge near the Custom House (2).

Bibliography and sources

1. Unknown. 2007. „Introduction to W.R. Rodgers Papers“ Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Accessed April 4 2011. http://www.proni.gov.uk/introduction__rodgers_papers_d2833.pdf

2. David Pierce, Irish writing in the twentieth century: a reader (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 650.

3. Unknown. 2011. “James Joyce” Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed April 4 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce

4. Tom Brace. 2005. “Lovely Seaside Girls. James Joyce’s Musical Interludes”. The Three Monkeys Online. Accessed 4 April 2011
   http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/als/_lovely_seaside_girls_james_joyce_musical_interludes.html