JOYCE'S UMBRELLA: THE PATTERN OF CREATED THINGS

Joyce's art returns repeatedly to the question of its own genesis. This creative self-consciousness sometimes manifests itself directly as in such instances as Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory in Portrait and his rumination on the creation of the world around him in episode three of Ulysses. More subtly, Joyce developed in the umbrella a versatile index or pattern or paradigm of his evolving ideas on the nature of creation. A survey of Joyce's umbrella work is therefore relevant to several important issues in Joyce criticism, especially to questions regarding Joyce's own aesthetics and his view of the creative processes of nature, art, and God. Joyce begins at the beginning. But as even the humblest writer learns, to have begun at the beginning is largely an artifact of subsequent, rather than initial, labor. The idea that later writing must echo and ramify elements of earlier writing became a central tenet of Joyce's working aesthetic. He wanted a coherent look, for the sake of unity, surely, but for dynamic effects as well. Words, phrases, situations, and characters become charged with additional meanings. These accumulated energies fire both the artist and his audience and supply the force to sustain areas of intricate or ambiguous significance. Recrossing the same ground became a methodology, a spur to the writer, and a track for the reader. This doubly heuristic procedure shows up in the work, becomes the work. Joyce left clues, conceptual pilcrows, for his reader. And he sought them for himself. Creator and discoverer share a method, if not quite a role. This essay concerns a particular example of Joyce's progressive recognition, his retrospective arrangement, of his beginning. In this essay I will trace the overt occurrences of umbrellas in Joyce's work and the evolution of this particular object from a sign for the entelechy of the soul in Dubliners, through the poetry, prose, and play, to a symbol for