Deming - James Joyce. Volume 2: 1928-41

Extract from River Episode from James Joyces Uncompleted Work, Dial, lxxxiv (April 1928), 31822; also appeared as the Preface to Joyces Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928), pp. viixix and in Our Friend James Joyce (1958) by Mary and Padraic Colum, pp. 13943.

Anna Livia Plurabelle is concerned with the flowing of a River. There have gone into it the things that make a peoples inheritance: landscape, myth, and history; there have gone into it, too, what is characteristic of a people: jests and fables. It is epical in its largeness of meaning and its multiplicity of interest. And, to my mind, James Joyces inventions and discoveries as an innovator in literary form are more beautifully shown in it than in any other part of his work.

But although it is epical it is an episode, a part and not a whole. It makes the conclusion of the first part of a work that has not yet been completed.

And so, like a river, it has gone on, and expanded, and gathered volume. It is the same River that Stephen Dedalus of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man looked upon.

[quotes from A Portrait, ch. IV, p. 167, and from p. 216]

So the later prose begins, and at once we are in the water as it bubbles and hurries at its source. The first passage gives us the sight of the River, the second gives us the River as it is seen and heard and felt. The whole of the episode gives us something besides the sight and sound and feeling of water.

It is this range we get in this episode: over and above the sight and sound and feeling of water there is in Anna Livia Plurabelle that range of images and thoughts, those free combinations of words and ideas, that might arise in us, if with a mind inordinately full and on a day singularly happy we watched a river and thought upon a river and travelled along a river from its source to its mouth.

But in this episode the minds range has its boundary: the range is never beyond the river banks nor away from the city towards which the river is making its slow-moving, sometimes hurrying way. Dublin, the city once seventh in Christendom, Dublin that was founded by sea-rovers, Dublin with its worthies, its sojourners, its odd characters, not as they are known to the readers of history-books, but as they live in the minds of some dwellers by the Liffey, is in this episode; Dublin, the Ford of Hurdles, the entrance into the plain of Ireland, the city so easily taken, so uneasily held. And the River itself, less in magnitude than the tributary of a tributary of one of the important rivers, becomes enlarged until it includes hundreds of the worlds rivers. How many rivers have their names woven into the tale of Anna Livia Plurabelle? More than five hundred, I believe.

[quotes from p. 202]

There will be many interpretations of Anna Livia Plurabelleas many as the ideas that might come to one who watched the flowing of the actual river

[the critic adds his own recollections]

I feel in this tale of Anna Livia Plurabelle the mystery of beginnings as it is felt through, as it combines with, a hundred stray, significant, trifling things.

Its author, the most daring of innovators, has decided to be as local as a hedge-poet. James Joyce writes as if it might be taken for granted that his readers know, not only the city he writes about, but its little shops and its little shows, the nick-names that have been given to its near-great, the cant-phrases that have been used on its side-streets. This localness belongs to James Joyces innovations: all his innovations are towards giving us what he writes about in its own atmosphere and with its own proper motion. And only those things which have been encountered day after day in some definite place can be given with their own atmosphere, their own motion.