To Discover the Mode of Life or of Art Whereby My Spirit Could Express Itself in Unfettered Freedom
Past Sara Whitestone
I stood in Portorata Square in Pula, Croatia, the tardily afternoon lord's day shining through the Arc of the Sergii. Today this Roman curvation is still sometimes called the Golden Gate, fifty-fifty though the iron bars that had been gold with aureate were destroyed centuries ago.
Was this gate a way to something, or was it a way from something? How many people had marched through it in triumph since its erection in the starting time century B.C.? How many more had just wandered through by blow?
I hadn't really planned to come to Pula. I had been visiting a friend in Trieste and decided on a whim to take the iii hour jitney ride south, considering I had learned that James Joyce, for a curt time, had lived in Pula, the Istrian metropolis on the Adriatic Body of water.
Joyce hadn't actually planned to come to Pula, either. While however in Dublin, he had worked hard to get an early version of Portrait of the Artist as a Immature Man published. The book was refused because in it Joyce questioned the Catholic Church building and rebelled against many of the mores of Ireland.
The book'southward rejection angered Joyce. Feeling censored, he exiled himself from Ireland, hoping to find a better welcome for his ideas on the continent. Portrait of the Artist as a Beau is a semi-autobiographical work. In information technology, the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, speaks for Joyce in his desire to "notice the mode of life or of art whereby [the] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom."
Through an agent, Joyce had been promised employment educational activity English at the Berlitz Language School in Zurich. But when he and his lover, Nora, arrived in Switzerland, there was no chore. The Berlitz visitor shuttled Joyce and Nora off to Trieste, but when they discovered at that place was no work there, either, the couple pushed on to Pula, where finally, the Berlitz school had an opening.
The yellow edifice where Joyce taught is several stories alpine, shadowing much of the square. A marble plaque on the wall next to the entry says, both in Croat and in English, "In 1904-05 James Joyce, the famous Irish author, taught English in this building."
Joyce'south clients were more often than not Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pula base of operations. Because he was earning picayune more than what he could live on for a sixteen 60 minutes work calendar week, Joyce was unhappy with his situation.
I tin can understand Joyce'southward frustration with the low wages. I also teach English as a Second Linguistic communication (ESL), and even though I concord a full-time position at a small university in Virginia, I am, like so many other ESL instructors, over-worked and underpaid. Merely that is not the worst of information technology. Teaching gets in the fashion of writing. When you spend your time pouring yourself into your students, yous don't accept the energy or inventiveness to focus on your arts and crafts.
Joyce's solution to this was to talk almost his own writing to his students, as well as other subjects he was interested in—politics or the cinema or music. Sometimes he even ended his lessons by singing Irish gaelic songs in his fine tenor. Since conversation is a large function of learning a language, these teaching techniques were justified. But perhaps Joyce's abiding tardiness to the lessons, or his habits of arriving inebriated and staring morosely out the window, reveal the resentment he had toward instruction and its furnishings on what he considered his real piece of work—his writing. In spite of this uneven classroom behavior, Joyce was ever able to continue his clients; and many students subsequently became life-long friends and supporters.
During the few months Joyce was in Pula, the Roman arch that he walked nether every mean solar day didn't seem triumphant. To him the gate was not gilded. In a letter to his aunt Joyce wrote,
I am trying to movement on to Italy as presently equally possible as I detest this Catholic country with its hundred races and thousand languages. . . . Pola is a back-of-God-speed identify—a naval Siberia . . . . Istria is a long boring place wedged into the Adriatic peopled by ignorant Slavs who wear petty red caps and colossal breeches.
While information technology'south clear Joyce disliked Pula, it might not exist entirely the city's mistake. Throughout his life, Joyce was marked by wanderlust—a restlessness of spirit that moved him physically from place to identify, and kept him about constantly in debt. Even when Joyce and Nora were able to relocate to Trieste, their penchant for not paying the rent drove them from flat to flat throughout the metropolis.
Unlike Joyce, I was enjoying my time in Pula. If information technology was an accident that I had come here, information technology had been a fortunate 1. Still, on my own walk through Pula'due south Gilt Gate—truly golden in the light of the setting lord's day—I couldn't quell my own questions. Was I moving toward something or away from something? And then, in frustration, I wondered why writers are prone to this kind of discontent—always wishing we were somewhere else, doing something else?
Is it because nosotros are constantly pushing the limits of convention in our search for the liberty to express ourselves? Writers must be willing to take risks—to stand for our potent convictions or to fight confronting what we no longer trust.
Through his character, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce expressed it this way:
I will tell you what I will and volition not practice. I volition not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I volition try to express myself in some mode of life or art every bit freely equally I tin can and equally wholly as I can . . . . I do not fearfulness to exist alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I accept to leave. And I am non afraid to make a fault, even a great error, a life-long mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, also.
I am not sure that I am ready to make those same proclamations—to have such all-or-nothing risks. Perhaps that total abandon is what made Joyce, and others like him, bang-up writers, and it is fear of mistakes that keeps the rest of us in the aftermath and eddies—good writers, but out of the driving currents.
Just past the arch I made myself comfortable at an umbrellaed table at the coffee bar, Uliks, named in laurels of Joyce's book, Ulysses. Sitting next to me was a bronze statue of Joyce looking out at the plaza. During his fourth dimension in Pula, Joyce wrote at many of the small cafes here. I ordered a cocktail, pulled out my notebook, and tried to slip into the stream of consciousness Joyce had already toyed with in this very identify, while he revised pieces of Portrait of the Creative person as a Boyfriend.
Years later, with Ulysses, Joyce came into his own with this form, having perfected the writing style that scholars call interior monologue. Only with Finnegan'southward Wake, Joyce plowed conventions under completely, and many modern poets and writers who came after him owe the respect of their craft to Joyce's innovations.
Still at the coffee bar, I looked downwards at my own attempt at stream of consciousness, which had eroded into doodling. I gave up and turned my attending to the silent figure sitting adjacent to me.
The statue of Joyce portrays him equally an older man, peradventure in his belatedly forties, similar me. But Joyce, born in Feb of 1882, lived in Pula as a swain from Oct 1904 to March of 1905. I tried to motion-picture show him jubilant his 23rd birthday, about to become a begetter with Nora, and ready to walk through that Roman arch, abroad from Pula and towards Trieste.
Peradventure Joyce was also young to understand that his time in Pula was his real start—that the curvation that he looked at resentfully every day actually represented opportunity. In Pula, Joyce's first teaching job had led to his employment in Trieste. A few of those subsequent Italian clients became Joyce'southward source of fiscal support and creative inspiration for several years to come. Pula was also Joyce's first home outside of Ireland every bit an adult. It was here that he learned to leave his homeland and to cleave to his new life and family, yet somehow to continue to inhabit Ireland in his thoughts and writings. And, maybe virtually importantly, it was here, in Pula where Joyce starting time practiced those unconventional writing forms that later on made him famous.
While Joyce never fully conquered his restlessness and the erratic habits that stemmed from his discontent, with the support of a few generous patrons, he was eventually able to stop educational activity and to devote himself fully to his art in "unfettered freedom."
Joyce may have felt that his stay in Pula was accidental. But that fault served its purpose in readying him for his future.
I finished my cocktail, got up from the java bar, and moved to stand under the arch, enjoying the warmth of the Istrian sun on my back. Endmost my eyes, I envisioned James Joyce, at sunset, walking nether that curvation for the last time. He wouldn't have looked back. If he had, he would have seen that the gate backside him was golden afterwards all.
Source: https://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/james-joyce-and-the-golden-gate-of-pula/
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