While James Joyce is, to my mind, the greatest Irish writer that ever lived, it could have been all so different. Rather than Joyce the writer, we could have been celebrating Joyce the doctor.
But try as he might, Joyce just couldn’t match the academic prowess of his “friend” Oliver St John Gogarty, aka Buck Mulligan – Joyce failed his medical exams not once, not twice, but three times. But, imagine if he had passed; we could be celebrating a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, to make up for the one he was shamefully denied in literature.
Joyce was never one to downplay his brilliance: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.”
Speaking of his nicely polished looking glass, I invite you to suspend your sensibility and expand your imagination as we go back to the early afternoon of June 16th, 1904, at No 2 Grafton Street, Dublin, Yeates & Son’s, Opticians & Purveyors of Mathematical & Philosophical instruments.
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It was here that Joyce sent his everyday hero Leopold Bloom to test a pair of field glasses (present-day binoculars) during his daily travails in Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses.
“There’s a little clock up there on the roof of the bank to test those glasses by.”
His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides.
“Can’t see it.”
“If you imagine it’s there you can almost see it.”
“Can’t see it.”
Bloom cannot see the clock – he teeters on the brink of the sublime, frozen in the formaldehyde of self-doubt. Joyce’s focus on sight and the use of spectacles, looking glasses and field glasses is revelatory from the medical perspective – he was plagued with ocular problems and endured 11 eye operations during his life, being pretty much blind in one eye and not much better in the other. Joyce himself saw the opportunity for self-effacing humour in his constant suffering – referring to himself as an “international eyesore”.
But here Joyce was exploring both his and our ability to look beyond the purely visible physical world, beyond the “ineluctable modality of the visible”, to explore the complexities of sight beyond sight, of perception, and most importantly imagination, a quality that he displayed in abundance in all of his writing. As Joyce said: “Shut your eyes and see.”
Joyce’s work is packed with references to medicine, sickness and health. Each of the 15 chapters of Ulysses is dedicated to a particular organ of the body. There is a wonderful description of bronchitis in the Nestor Episode with Deasy’s symptoms described as having “breathing hard and swallowing his breath” while “a coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm”.
Medical students don’t fare too well in Ulysses – being referred to by the prostitutes of Nighttown in the Circe Episode as “all prick and no pence” while Molly Bloom memorably states: “Aren’t they thick, never understand what you say even, you’d want to print it up on a big poster for them ... Where does their great intelligence come in, I’d like to know; grey matter they have it all up in their tail if you ask me.” I guess Joyce was getting his own back for his academic failures.
But perhaps what isn’t realised is that Joyce could be considered the literary father of gastroenterology – diseases of the gut and surrounding organs. To support this claim, first made in a scientific journal by Cork physicians Fergus Shanahan and Eamonn Quigley, here’s a short excerpt from the Lestrygonians Episode of Ulysses:
“Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson Street, his tongue brushing his teeth smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach, say. Then with those Röntgen rays searchlight you could ... watch it all the way down, swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the body, changing biliary duct, spleen squirting liver, gastric juice coils of intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the time with his insides entrails on show.”
It would appear from this excerpt that Joyce may also lay claim to be the spiritual father of nano-technology; somewhat ironic given the proximity of CRANN, Trinity College Dublin’s Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures & Nanodevices to Dawson Street.
Joyce of course spent much of his time in exile. Whether it be Trieste, Paris or Zurich (his final resting place), there was much to keep him amused, engaged or agitated, and sometimes all three at the same time. As well as his work, his correspondence was also full of references to things medical and health related, perhaps most memorably when in a letter in 1921 to long term supporter Harriet Weaver he wrote:
“A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum, who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.”
Joyce’s contribution to science and medicine has also resurfaced more recently, shared with me by Kevin Devine, emeritus professor at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics in Trinity. It relates to the work of uber scientist Craig Venter and his team, who controversially created the first example of synthetic life in 2011.
The artificial human-made genetic code that generated this “new life” also included three quotes that were stitched into the synthetic genome – the first two were not that surprising iconoclasts Robert Oppenheimer (creator of the atomic bomb) and Richard Feynman (arguably the most brilliant theoretical physicist ever) but the third quote came from James Joyce – “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life!”
But, as with most things Joycean, there was a sting in the tail. Joyce’s estate expressed their disappointment that Venter did not ask their permission to use the quote. Imagine if this had gone to court, it would have rivalled the original trial that sought to ban the publication of Ulysses. Joyce would certainly have been amused – being as he was, in many eyes, the Einstein of English fiction.
Prof Mark Lawler will be performing his one-man show Doctoring James Joyce in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) at 1pm on Saturday February 15th as part of the Northern Ireland Science Festival and as an event in Queen’s 180, a celebration of QUB’s 180th anniversary. More details at QUB here
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