{"id":14177,"date":"2025-05-27T08:58:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T07:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/?p=14177"},"modified":"2025-05-15T09:09:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T08:09:16","slug":"isi%ec%99%80-%ec%a0%9c%ec%9e%84%ec%8a%a4-%ec%a1%b0%ec%9d%b4%ec%8a%a4-iii-%ea%b4%80%ea%b3%84%ec%97%90-%eb%af%b8%ec%b9%98%eb%8a%94-%ec%98%81%ed%96%a5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/isi-and-james-joyce-influences-iii-relationships\/","title":{"rendered":"ISI\uc640 \uc81c\uc784\uc2a4 \uc870\uc774\uc2a4: \uc601\ud5a5\ub825 III - \uad00\uacc4"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fig. 1. above L-R (photographers unknown): Lucia Joyce, Ostend, 1924; Lucia Joyce, Paris, 1925.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Here at ISI Dublin, we pride ourselves on having \u2014 over and above all of the English Language Schools in Ireland \u2014 a deep and meaningful connection to the Irish writer James Joyce. Not only did Joyce regard the Chapter House adjoining our Meeting House Lane campus as \u201cthe most historic spot in all Dublin,\u201d but he himself was educated at Belvedere College, the prestigious inner-city school that hosts our Summer Camp for Teenagers. Universally acclaimed as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Joyce is most famous for his novel\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>(1922), in which he makes the above, remarkable reference to our Meeting House Lane campus. However, in unearthing Joyce\u2019s influences through this series of blogposts, we would rather not merely focus on\u00a0Ulysses,\u00a0<\/em>as we have done in the past, but extend our academic reach to his early childhood, and from there to that of his own children, in particular his daughter Lucia \u2014 who would become an abiding influence on his last and undisputedly most baffling work,\u00a0Finnegans Wake\u00a0<\/em>(1939).<\/p>\n

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III:I Anna Lucia Joyce . . . the dotter of her father\u2019s eyes<\/em><\/h2>\n

As mentioned in the previous post in this series, ISI and James Joyce: Influences II \u2014 Astraphobia<\/u><\/a>, Lucia Joyce was born in Trieste, Italy, on July 26 1907. She was preceded by a son, Giorgio, and as such was the second of Joyce\u2019s children with lifelong companion, and eventual wife, Nora Barnacle. Fearing blindness at the time, Joyce is alleged to have \u201cnamed the child Lucia Anna after the patron saint of eyes. He was possibly also thinking of Saint Lucia\u2019s role as illuminator and messenger in Dante\u2019s Inferno <\/em>(\u201cLucia\u201d in Italian literally means \u201clight\u201d). The baby was registered erroneously as Anna Lucia. Much later, Joyce would choose the name Anna Livia for the female character in Finnegans Wake<\/em>\u201d (Gabrielle Carey, James Joyce A Life <\/em>[Melbourne and Galway: Arden Press, 2023], 43).<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fig. 2. Berenice Abbott, Portrait of Lucia Joyce, 1926\u20131927, printed 1982, gelatin silver print. .<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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As also mentioned in the previous post in this series<\/u><\/a>, Lucia began training as a professional dancer from a very young age. Hailed as a talented ballerina and choreographer, she studied at several noteworthy academies and worked with some of the most experimental and avant-garde groups in early 20th century Europe. Following a 1928 performance in La Princesse Primitive <\/em>at the Vieux-Colombier theatre, the\u00a0Paris Times<\/em>\u00a0wrote of her: \u201cLucia Joyce is her father’s daughter. She has James Joyce’s enthusiasm, energy, and a not-yet-determined amount of his genius. When she reaches her full capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father\u201d (Carol Schloss [2003]\u00a0Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake<\/em>). In James Joyce A Life <\/em>(2023), Gabrielle Carey relays how \u201c[i]n May 1929, Lucia was a finalist at the first Paris international festival of dance. She wore a shimmering silver fish costume covered in scales that she had designed herself. Afterwards one of the judges noted that the young Irlandaise <\/em>was the only contestant with the potential to be a professional dancer. . . . Lucia\u2019s pursuit of physical expression on stage had mixed family support and by October 1929 she had decided, with Joyce\u2019s approval, to give up dancing as a professional pursuit. . . . This sacrifice of Lucia\u2019s artistic passion appears to be the beginning of her descent into mental instability\u201d (91-93).<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fig. 3. William N. Jennings, notebook page with photograph of lightning (1887); (artist unknown) photograph of Lucia Joyce performing at the first Paris international festival of dance, 1928.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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III.II A Bolt from the Blue . . . Lightning Becomes Lucia<\/h2>\n

Having begun to display neurotic traits from a very young age, Lucia\u2019s unpredictable behaviour reached an apogee in the 1930s: a period of time during which she gave up dancing professionally and became amorously involved with her father\u2019s apprentice, Samuel Beckett \u2014 then junior lecturer in English at the Ecole normal supe\u0301rieure in Paris. In May of 1930, while her parents were away in Zurich, Lucia invited Beckett to dinner in the hope of pressing him \u201cinto some kind of declaration,\u201d but Beckett irmly and unequivocally rejected her, stating that he was only interested in her father and his writing.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fig. 4. Samuel L. Beckett, 1922 (author unknown); In 1989, when Beckett died, his desk having been cleared, the beautiful photograph of Lucia above in a shimmering silver fish costume was found amongst his possessions.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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\u201cLucia reportedly \u2018lapsed into a catatonic state.\u2019 Later she was to comment that the men who came to their home treated her like a[n] \u2018hors d\u2019oeuvre\u2019 (Frank McNally, \u201cHer father\u2019s daughter \u2014 An Irishman\u2019s Diary about the tragic life of Lucia Joyce,\u201d The Irish Times <\/em>[Sat June 16 2018]). For his part, Beckett would later confess to his lover Peggy Guggenheim that he \u201chad no feelings that were human and this is why he had not been able to fall in love with Joyce\u2019s daughter\u201d (Carey, James Joyce A Life<\/em>, 95). Others, amongst Joyce\u2019s biographers, believe \u201cthat when [\u2026] Beckett rejected Lucia’s romantic advances in 1930, it was in part because he thought there was a \u2018strong unfulfilled erotic bond\u2019 between her and her father, . . .\u201d (McNally, \u201cHer father\u2019s daughter). This would certainly tarry with accusations of jealousy later levelled at her mother, Nora, who even Joyce admitted, when pressed, harboured envious feelings towards their daughter (Annabel Abbs, \u201cNora and Lucia Joyce: what sort of mother abandons their daughter?,\u201d The Irish Times <\/em>[Tue July 26 2016]).<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fig. 5. James, Lucia, and Nora Joyce, from the Eug\u00e8ne and Maria Jolas Papers.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Further rejections followed in the same year, and from this unfortunate streak of events, Lucia allegedly emerged a mad, violent, and abject individual. The incident that was to seal her fate, so to speak, occurred on her father\u2019s fiftieth birthday, Candlemas\/Groundhog Day 1932, when Lucia threw a chair at her mother, after which her older brother, Giorgio, admitted her to a psychiatric institute, euphemistically termed a maison de sant\u00e9<\/em> in those days. Tragically, it seems to have been Beckett who was behind the incident: he had been invited to Joyce\u2019s birthday party, not unsurprisingly, but given his recent rejection of her, Lucia felt that this was a personal betrayal, presumably by her mother \u2014 who no doubt handled the party invitations, as was a wife\u2019s wont in those days.<\/p>\n

In any case, between 1932 and 1936, Lucia was in and out of similar maison de sant\u00e9s<\/em>, while her father, against the advice not only of Nora and Giorgio, but of friends, relatives, and numerous doctors, either denied her illness altogether or tottered from cure to cure, then on offer; ultimately to little effect, notwithstanding a huge expenditure of Joyce\u2019s funds \u2014 the extent of which can be garnered from a letter to his benefactor, Harriet Weaver, imploring aid with expenses for the care of Lucia, in which he says: \u201cif you have ruined yourself for me … why will you blame me if I ruin myself for my daughter\u201d (James Joyce [1882-1941] \u2014 Life 3 [1936]<\/em>). In James Joyce A Life <\/em>(111-113), Carey relays:<\/p>\n

Following years of rejecting the suggestion of psychoanalysis for Lucia, in 1934 Joyce finally relented to consulting the famous Swiss doctor, Carl Jung. Jung was Lucia\u2019s twentieth doctor. One of the reasons Joyce had resisted consulting Jung was because of the psychiatrist\u2019s public comments about Ulysses . . . <\/em>Joyce\u2019s response was:<\/p>\n

He seems to have read Ulysses <\/em>from first to last without a smile. The only thing\u00a0 to do in such a case is to change one\u2019s drink.<\/p>\n

A friend remarked that the reason Carl Jung was so rude about Joyce was because Joyce\u2019s name translated into German as freude<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Joyce continued to insist that the problem with Lucia was that she was an innovator who was not yet understood. He commented to a friend:<\/p>\n

People talk of my influence on my daughter but what about her influence on me? . . . She is a fantastic being who speaks a curious abbreviated language of her own . . . I understand it, or most of it.<\/p>\n

It has been hypothesised that this curious language inspired the curious language of Finnegans Wake.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fig. 6. (photographer unknown) James and Lucia Joyce, date unknown.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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III:III . . . Lucia Becomes Lightning<\/em><\/h2>\n

Throughout this period Joyce was writing \u201cWork in Progress,\u201d which would eventually become his last novel, Finnegans Wake \u2014 <\/em>a book many biographers believe was inspired, with both trepidation and elucidation, by Lucia herself . . . Lucia, the dotter of her father\u2019s eyes<\/em>, whose mind was \u201cas clear and as unsparing as the lightning\u201d (Joyce to Harriet weaver Shaw, Letters I<\/em>, 366). As Gabrielle Carey notes in James Joyce A Life <\/em>(116-18):<\/p>\n

Joyce believed his genius had cast a shadow on Lucia\u2019s pysche, concluding:<\/p>\n

Whatever spark of gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and kindled a fire in her brain.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He wrote regularly to his daughter during her incarcerations in various institutions, usually in Italian :<\/p>\n

Cara Lucia:<\/p>\n

I feel more than ever, my poor, dear and good, Lucia, that the long night of your travails is drawing to an end and that the dawn is coming.<\/p>\n

Joyce\u2019s mood in the face of his daughter\u2019s condition belied his words. His friends observed that he seemed to be in complete despair and prone to \u201clachrymose fits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Three-quarters of Joyce\u2019s income was now going to Lucia\u2019s care and he was at risk of financial ruin. When Joyce\u2019s sister in Ireland wrote to him offering lottery tickets as a way of alleviating his financial stress, he responded:<\/p>\n

I am not interested in Irish sweepstake tickets. The only decent people I ever saw at a racecourse were the horses.<\/p>\n

Finnegans Wake <\/em>is often described as a book written in dream language. For a long time the dreaming narrator was believed to be Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Consistent with the madness theme of the Wake<\/em>, the name Earwicker suggests the earwig, an insect which was so named because it was believed it could burrow into the brain of a sleeping person and cause insanity.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of madness, Joyce once commented to his friend, painter and art critic Arthur Power:<\/p>\n

Madness you may call it . . . I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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III:IV . . . The Subtle Border Between Madness And Genius<\/h2>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Fig. 7.Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who treated Lucia Joyce in 1934: Portrait, 1935 (photographer unknown).<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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In 1934, when Jung had been briefly treating Lucia, Joyce asked the Swiss doctor: \u201cDoctor Jung, have you noticed that my daughter seems to be submerged in the same waters as me?\u201d To which Jung responded: \u201cYes, but where you swim, she drowns.\u201d Jung\u2019s intuition that Lucia\u2019s suffering reflected a similar latent disposition in her father was later echoed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who suggested Joyce\u2019s writing was the auxiliary cord that kept him from madness (see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits<\/em> (Paris, Le Seuil, 1966), 531\u2013583).<\/p>\n

Following an increasingly \u201cmad\u201d couple of years in Lucia\u2019s life, in which Joyce persisted in refusing to have her certified, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at Burgh\u00f6lzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich. In 1936, she was removed from home in a straight-jacket to le V\u00e9sinet and declared to be dangerous. Later that year, she was moved to the maison de sant\u00e9<\/em> of Dr. Fran\u00e7ois Achille Delmas at Ivry-sur-Seine, where she would remain until 1951, when she was transferred to St. Andrew\u2019s Hospital in Northampton, England. She died there at the age of 75, in 1982.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fig. 8. A photograph of Lucia Joyce, 1979 (photographer unknown).<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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In an interview, Jung once said that Lucia was Joyce\u2019s \u201canima inspiratrix\u201d (the inspirational female form of his soul): \u201cIf you know anything of my Anima theory,\u201d he is alleged to have said, \u201cJoyce and his daughter are a classical example of it. She was definitely his \u02bbfemme inspiratice,\u02bc\u201d which explains his obstinate reluctance to have her certified (see E. Coleman, \u201cA note on Joyce and Jung,\u201d\u00a0James Joyce Quarterly<\/em>,\u00a01963; 1:11\u201316).<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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III.V . . . Where flash becomes word<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Fig. 9. Clockwise: Georges Bataille, identification card, 1940; James Joyce, passport, 1924; Ren\u00e9 Char (front and centre), World War II (1939-1945) with members of the French Resistance, C\u00e9reste (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence).<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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In the Book of Job<\/em> 36:32, we read: \u201cHe covers His hands with lightning, and commands it to strike the mark.\u201d The subsequent verse adds: \u201cIts noise declares His presence.\u201d This is an uncannily accurate portrayal of the relationship between thunder and lightning for a text that dates to the 6th century BCE, given that much weather-lore dating to the same period \u2014 see, for instance, Anaximander \u2014 suggests lightning is an adjunct to the thunderclap rather than its determining factor. This is a, granted, small but by no means insignificant detail when approaching James Joyce\u2019s Finnegans Wake<\/em>, where the thunderclap, apropos of the thunderword \u2014<\/p>\n

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 announces itself on the very first page, of a work, in which, to quote Finn Fordham, \u201c[o]rigins are notoriously obscure . . . [and] [w]e are unable to understand neither what happened first nor what, in the beginning, was thought, conceived, or made . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

In Fordham\u2019s dazzling \u201cLightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in \u2018Finnegans Wake\u2019\u201d (in James Joyce Quarterly<\/em>, Vol. 39, No. 4 [Summer, 2002]: 655-678; 669), he holds steadfast to the fulminological fact that, as Martin A. Uman relays in Understanding Lightning <\/em>(London: Oak Tree Press, 1971, 44), \u201c[l]ightning causes thunder . . . Thunder is a pressure variation induced in the air by the expansion of each part of the lightning channel due to its initial high pressure.\u201d. His point:<\/p>\n

Lightning seems to reveal everything, a quasi-apprehension of God, as we see through the all-seeing divine glance, but the revelation is all too brief for the eye of reason. Away from the rationalist interpretations that painstakingly unfold Joyce\u2019s crumpled language, \u201clightning\u201d readings are still possible, intuitive, and revelatory. Such readings give insight into the dark work and the dark world and seem, like the best of ideas, to come to one in a flash. Joyce pleads, in the \u201cNightlessons,\u201d for inspiration, for light in the darkness, for the illuminations of genius from his muse, from the light of his own daughter: \u201cBelisha beacon, beckon bright! Usherette, enmesh us! . . . Where flash becomes word\u201d (FW <\/em>267.12-16). He wants to bring light to the place where the inspirational stroke of genius becomes the creative act of writing, where thought becomes language, where Lucia is translated into the text as Issy, \u201cbe-lisha.\u201d . . . The sudden flash of lightning is contingent on the original realization of the fall: it is the flash of light as the eye opens itself on a new day or a new life, signalling a fall into the \u201cvisible-gnosible-edible world\u201d (FW<\/em> 88.06); it is the light that signals the fall of Lucifer, the fall of man . . . The [very] words that precede the first thunderclap in Finnegans Wake <\/em>are \u201c[t]he fall\u201d (FW <\/em>3.15). Through their position, brevity, relative clarity, and unexpectedness, they stand in for the sudden lightning, producing the Babelian rumble that follows. As the words fall and strike the page, they leave a mark, a negative illumination.<\/p>\n

Another remarkable feature of the passage from Job<\/em> above is the imagery evoked in striking the mark<\/em>, as if lightning were, to quote Fordham, \u201cGod\u2019s \u2018bullet\u2019\u201d, \u201chaving a \u2018bolt\u2019 within it\u201d (\u201cLightning Becomes Electra,\u201d 677). While the earliest evidence of the compound noun \u201clightning bolt\u201d dates to the 16th century CE (Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>), ancient people, not knowing that lightning was electricity, believed these material artefacts actually existed and were to be found as \u201cfool\u2019s gold embedded in chalk\u201d or as fragments of fulgurite \u2014 the glassy scar left by lightning when it strikes and melts rock. Thought to be tangible evidence of \u201cGod\u2019s air-to-surface war with the world\u201d (\u201cLightning Becomes Electra,\u201d 677), these lightning bolts were treasured for the protective power they bestowed upon the possessor, based on the erroneous belief that lightning never strikes the same place twice. As such, the possessor of such an amulet could conceivably \u201cward-off\u201d God\u2019s wrath.<\/p>\n

There is another more ameliorative Christian reading of Job\u2019s <\/em>passage above that persists, in which lightning \u201cstrikes the mark\u201d just as God-directed intercessionary prayer does. In this reading, one\u2019s prayers of intercession release the flashing forth of God\u2019s lightning and direct it to strike the specific target of need. In short, according to one Christian website, \u201c[d]uring intercession, God lights upon the person praying and moves them from the natural to the supernatural . . .\u201d through a sudden flash of illumination, clarification, and inspiration in which the thinker\/writer \u2014 otherwise in a tellibly divilcult <\/em>and torporous situation \u2014 becomes \u201ca priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life\u201d (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man <\/em>[London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2000], 240). Both of these readings co-exist in III.3 of Finnegans Wake<\/em>, where, as Fordham relays (\u201cLightning Becomes Electra,\u201d 677), Shaun, as Yawn, possesses a bolt of lightning:<\/p>\n

Suspected by the chief interrogator of harbouring the wicked Shem, Yawn fears the all-seeing glare of the judge. He protests and swears by his \u201cbolt\u201d that he has evidence against it: \u201cNwo, nwo! This bolt in hand be my worder (FW <\/em>483.15-16, JJA<\/em> 62.354). The bolt is his warder, which guards him against being struck, but is also literally his \u201cworder,\u201d a rare word meaning \u201cone [that] puts into words,\u201d according to the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>. Shaun, true to his military inclinations, communicates and defends himself through his weapon. Yet, if this weapon is a pen, \u201cone [that] puts into words,\u201d then he does have \u201cShem the Penman\u201d in hand and, despite his protests, is, in fact, his brother\u2019s keeper.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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III.VI . . . From one brother\u2019s keeper to another, Ren\u00e9 Char and <\/em>Georges Bataille<\/em>\u00a0 <\/em><\/h2>\n

In 1925, Joyce wrote to his benefactor Harriet Weaver stating he had \u201cdeclared war on language and [would] go on jusqu\u2019au bout <\/em>[\u2018until the end\u2019]\u201d (Letters I<\/em> 327). Between 1925 and 1939, however, Joyce twisted his intentions; as Fordham notes (\u201cLightning Becomes Electra,\u201d 667) \u2014 in the Wake<\/em>, we find the war is not on, but rather within, words (\u201c[t]he war is in words\u201d [FW <\/em>1.4]):<\/p>\n

In Joyce\u2019s war of the words, the effects of violent language or of violence against language are harder to quantify than the effects of hurtling matter in wars of the world. Writing, though it may pack a punch, can never predict its immediate effects as one can predict those of a bullet. Writing is a refuge, not from violence or from transformational outcomes, but from predictability. Like lightning, when it begins its journey, writing does not know where it will strike or whether its effects will be devastating or inconsequential.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo write is to research chance,\u201d as Joyce\u2019s Parisian contemporary Georges Bataille once noted. Seeking to further strengthen this analogy, Fordham draws on Thomas Pynchon\u2019s war-time novel Gravity\u2019s Rainbow <\/em>(1973), in which the principle protagonist, one Tyrone Slothrop, is an American soldier working for allied intelligence in London during World War II. Tasked with \u201ctrying to figure out where the V2s [German V-2 rockets] will fall,\u201d Fordham suggests Slothrop \u201cis analogously analysing the unquantifiable and unforeseeable effects of Art and its lightning strikes\u201d (\u201cLightning Becomes Electra,\u201d 668). Not having read this fictional novel by one of Joyce\u2019s so-called \u201cdescendants,\u201d a \u201clightning\u201d reading of his work \u2014 which is not only on all accounts \u201cpossible, intuitive, and revelatory,\u201d but in line with this military setting \u2014 is to be found in Ren\u00e9 Char\u2019s war-time poem \u201cThe Library is on Fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on fact rather than fiction, the library is on fire <\/em>were code words for a parachute drop to the C\u00e9reste maquis of the French resistance during World War II: words which took on a mysterious life of their own when one of the containers from the drop randomly blew-up and set fire to a forest, alerting the Gestapo to the whereabouts of Char\u2019s group. Having barely escaped with their lives, Char \u2014 code name (nom de guerre<\/em>): Capitaine Alexandre \u2014 believed the fire was proof of the power language has to shape and determine our world: \u201c\u2018I believe in the magic and the authority of words,\u2019 he told his superiors in London, insisting the code be changed\u201d (see \u201cEditorial,\u201d to Ren\u00e9 Char, Poems<\/em>, 3.2., Winter 2004). Sceptical, to say the least, about the political and personal motives of most \u201cResistance\u201d poetry, these code words provided the title to a poem Char would not publish until after the war, one in which he addresses the question of his literary origin(s):<\/p>\n

How did writing come to me? Like bird\u2019s down on my window-pane, in winter. Just then there rose in the hearth a struggle of fire-brands, which has, still now, not ended. . .<\/p>\n

Everything in us ought to be a joyous feast when something we haven\u2019t predicted, that we don\u2019t shed any light on, that will speak directly to our heart, comes about. . . .<\/p>\n

Lightning lasts me.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Ren\u00e9 Char, \u201cThe Library is on Fire\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\uadf8\ub9bc 1. \uc704 L-R(\uc0ac\uc9c4\uc791\uac00 \ubbf8\uc0c1): \ub8e8\uc2dc\uc544 \uc870\uc774\uc2a4, \uc624\uc2a4\ud150\ub4dc, 1924; \ub8e8\uc2dc\uc544 \uc870\uc774\uc2a4, \ud30c\ub9ac, 1925. \uc5ec\uae30 ISI \ub354\ube14\ub9b0\uc5d0\uc11c\ub294 \ubb34\uc5c7\ubcf4\ub2e4\ub3c4 \ub2e4\uc74c\uacfc \uac19\uc740 \uc790\ubd80\uc2ec\uc744 \uac00\uc9c0\uace0 \uc788\uc2b5\ub2c8\ub2e4.","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":14179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"%%post_title%%","_seopress_titles_desc":"Explore ISI Dublin's connection to James Joyce and his daughter Lucia's influence on his works. Discover family dynamics, madness, and literary legacy.","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"72","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"both","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":301,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"ISI,ISIDublin,jack o'lantern,halloween","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[{"url":"","title":"","desc":"","thumbnail":"","duration":"","rating":"","view_count":"","tag":""}],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[283,71],"tags":[2565,195],"class_list":["post-14177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-club","category-isi-dublin-blog","tag-english-adult-courses","tag-english-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14177"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14203,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14177\/revisions\/14203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studyinireland.ie\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}