'Quaker thoughts need not be pious, consolatory or proper or successful. They may be turbulent, disruptive, rude, even alien.' Photo: iStock/Niall_Majury.
‘Quakers are at an advantage when it comes to appreciating this notoriously willful writer.’
James Joyce’s work has been called ‘a demonstration and summation of the entire [Modernist] movement’. But there’s a lot of evidence that he took a close interest in Quakerism, says Jonathan Wooding
Are these the wandering thoughts of an individual in a silent Meeting?:
‘God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.’
Well, no actually. These are the written thoughts of the celebrated author James Joyce, sitting at a desk in a Zürich apartment during world war one, imagining the thoughts that might run through the mind of his fictional anti-hero Stephen Dedalus, during a debate in Dublin’s National Library on the imagined day 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday!). It’s from the ninth episode of his world-turned-upside-down novel Ulysses (1922), an episode that is sometimes referred to as ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.
This kind of writing is often called ‘interior monologue’ or ‘stream of consciousness’, and we can see that it might strike a reader accustomed to silent Meetings as being familiar. There’s the ‘thrown away’, evanescent quality of it all, the sense of unaided ad-libbing, and the uneven, inappropriate tone; the inappropriate content too, perhaps, and the surprising or impulsive train of thought, along with a contrary pull towards definition and meaning, albeit through free association. It’s a concentrated mind, but one which is, also, all over the place, happy to be free of moorings. Isn’t that how, at best, it feels to be in a Quaker Meeting? That infamous, oxymoronic, longed-for combination of babbling voices and, who knows, Pentecostal revelation? The Scylla and the Charybdis of consciousness?
It so happens that there is a Quaker character (of a certain type) right at the start of this episode: ‘Urbane, to comfort them, the Quaker librarian purred: – And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister?’ It’s not exactly a Quaker Meeting that is about to take place, however (and you might say by the end of the episode that it’s more like a midrash session in schul – that wouldn’t be inappropriate either), but there’s every indication that James Joyce has taken a close interest in Quakerism, and was himself a constant companion, of course, to that wordless silence from which his broken sentences miraculously or arbitrarily arise.
Perhaps, then, we could say Quakers are at an advantage when it comes to appreciating the eccentricities of this notoriously willful writer, with his hostility to certainty and his jazzy improvisations on received thought.
The Quaker librarian happens to be a portrait of Thomas William Lyster (1855-1922), the then director of the National Library of Ireland (1895-1920). (Said to be a humorous man, he is the author of the lines ‘Mine the wine of the inner shrine’.) It looks as if James Joyce drew for his knowledge of George Fox from Walt Whitman’s November Boughs, and from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – both are worth looking up.
Here’s Stephen Dedalus, again, appraising our librarian, contrasting him with what he understands of the radical Quaker tradition:
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese.
The same mental processes – casual with grammar and propriety, but combative against passivity and abstraction, and dense with allusion and imagery and comprehension. F L Radford writes in an essay from 1972: ‘The urbane and conciliatory Lyster has abruptly been contrasted with the robust and uncompromising founder of his religious sect.’ True, but what’s exciting is that the writing itself – its register of consciousness – is robust and uncompromising too, is abrupt and alive with contrast. Spirited prose, indeed, and a gift and encouragement – may I suggest? – to those seeking a model of the mind’s behaviour as the silence of the Meeting courses through and around us of a Sunday. Quaker thoughts need not be pious, consolatory or proper or successful. They may be turbulent, disruptive, rude, even alien. As Stephen Dedalus wonders to himself: ‘Courtesy or an inward light?’
More information: ‘“Christfox in leather trews”: The Quaker in the Library in Ulysses’ by F L Radford, English Literary History, can be accessed via http://bit.ly/Christfox
Comments
Thank you, Jonathon.
By gturner on 16th May 2019 - 13:31
Not a very still mind! If life’s too short to stuff a mushroom, it’s also too short to read Ulysses.
By Jedmonds on 17th May 2019 - 8:11
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