Lucia and Finnegans Wake

Almost all of Lucia’s story, as it survives today, has come to us second hand: from letters her father wrote to her throughout the 1930s, between her first public violent outburst at Joyce’s fiftieth birthday party in 1932 and his death in 1941.

We get piecemeal impressions from veiled comments in the letters of family and friends, who were preoccupied not so much with Lucia’s health but with Joyce’s distress about it, and the impact of that on his ability to finish his final work, Finnegans Wake. We get bits about her from a handful of interviews that relatives gave after Joyce’s death, some newspaper clippings reviewing her short-lived dance career in the 1920s, and some aggravated correspondences between Joyce scholars, the Joyce Estate, family, and friends, who couldn’t agree on how much of Lucia’s story should remain private, to preserve the family’s dignity, and how much is germane to readers of Joyce’s work. As Joan Acocella reports in her provocative New Yorker review of Lucia’s controversial biography by Carol Loeb Shloss:

None of Lucia’s letters survive as original documents. Nor is there any trace of her diaries or poems, or of a novel that she is said to have been writing. In other words, most of the primary sources for an account of Lucia Joyce’s life are missing. ‘This is a story that was not supposed to be told,’ Shloss writes. Therefore she tells it with a vengeance.

Shloss’s biography, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, paints an elaborate (and unbridled) portrait not only of Lucia as Joyce and Nora’s daughter, who was an artistic and intellectual prodigy, especially in her father’s eyes, but also as a sister, cousin, and niece, as a dancer, as an illustrator, wordsmith, and of course mental patient. Shloss recounts details of numerous incidents where Lucia lost her temper or appeared to struggle to integrate herself into social and familial expectations, but she also strongly cautions against reducing Lucia’s story to her ‘madness’—partly because her diagnoses were inconclusive and varied widely, from ‘schizophrenic with pithiatic elements’ to ‘catatonic’ to ‘not lunatic but markedly neurotic’, all the way to ‘There is nothing mentally wrong with her’ and ‘whatever it [is], she [will] soon get over it’; and partly because whatever has gone down in history as a daughter’s fatal flaw could alternatively be explained by the shadow of misogynist stigma that oppressed her all her life.

While Lucia’s brother Giorgio and Joyce’s closest friends, such as Paul Leon, believed Lucia was hindering her father’s health and work (at that point on Finnegans Wake) and were determined to keep her at bay by sending her off abroad, to stay with friends and to mental institutions, Joyce considered her an extension of him, including artistically: ‘Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain,’ Shloss quotes him. Her mind he considered ‘as clear and as unsparing as lightning. She is a fantastic being, speaking a curious abbreviated language of her own.’ Joyce and Nora even considered her to be ‘clairvoyant’ and recounted the evidence they’d witnessed in letters to incredulous friends.

Lucia’s image, words, creativity, and relationship with her family and lovers famously appear in Finnegans Wake. We find coded references to Lucia’s name throughout the book, for example when the story’s archetypal daughter character, Issy, appears as a brightly lit, weeping, tinkling little raincloud called Nuvoluccia. The special idiom that Issy speaks, a kind of baby talk related to Jonathan Swift’s ‘little language’, was one that Joyce and Lucia also shared between them—chiefly in Italian, no less.

There is a mystical, transcendental quality to Lucia: both as a historical figure and as the imprint of a literary character in the Wake. Her absence from much of the historical record radiates within her presence in the Wake as a sprightly, enigmatic, mischievous, and magical mix of water and light, which disperses kaleidoscopic rays of rainbow into the atmosphere and across dimensions. She cannot be ‘grasped’ any more than lightning, a rainbow, a cloud, or Joyce’s cryptic multilingual puns could be, but she is vivacious and palpable through the fabric of the story, even when she isn’t explicitly speaking.

Issy appears as a weeping, weeing, giggling, gurgling toddler, jealously competing with her elder twin brothers, Shem and Shaun, for her mother’s (Annia Livia Plurabelle or ALP) attention one moment, then transforms into a flirtatious, salacious temptress the next (e.g. through the lens of the Celtic legend of Tristan and Iseult). Her flirtations and desires don’t discriminate by gender or age (indeed, neither did Lucia herself, as she loved both men and women; in fact, her most serious romantic relationship might have been with Myrsine Moschos, Sylvia Beach’s assistant in Shakespeare & Company). She embodies Jonathan Swift’s affairs with two much younger women who shared the same name: Esther van Homrigh (‘Vanessa’), 22 years his junior, and Esther Johnson (‘Stella’), whom he had met when she was still a child. The ‘little language’ Swift used in his love letters to Stella confusingly conflates with the little language Joyce and Lucia shared in their letters, and in the Wake this appears in the form of Issy’s unique idiom that resembles baby talk but tends to convey ‘nighttime’ content, including incest, rape, and consensual but boundary-pushing sexual play between adults that upturns the rules of social, and indeed literary, decorum.

Pause for thought

Now it’s your turn. Let us know your thoughts about this article in the comments below. You might want to use the following question as a prompt:

• How does the fictional lens of Issy affect your perception of Lucia? And how does Lucia’s story influence your reading of Issy as a character?