Réflexion || Letters to Nora (1909)
"The letters of longing written by a man who wanted nothing more than to be home."
Following a night of shared laughter during which time, as I recall, laughter was the medicine that set the soul on its course, I found in the flamboyant palms of the devoted writer something utterly outlandish. However, peevish these letters did appear, I have not come to this setting intending to chastise Joyce for his sexual desires, rather, I have come back to these letters because they are a unique feat, exposing the debonair pen’s plaything as the man who was but a mortal with oozing desires, as all others.
“Yet now, night, secret sinful night, has come down again on the world, and I am alone again writing to you and your letter is again folded before me on the table. Do not ask me to go to bed, dear.”
After I wrote my reflective piece on Franz Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” (1909), I recalled Joyce’s love letters. This recollection inspired the reflection that will mark a new chapter in my writing; something particular to the need I fester toward finding humanity in the poised pen & dangling cuticle over the faded letters of the typewriter.
Joyce proved to be the first of such experiences, & I feel we must return to the start. This sentiment cannot necessarily be named, but, having read any one of my reviews, one might conclude that I have many thoughts, not all of which make their way to print.
In nonfictional texts, the reader is granted a sultry pearl to roll over their tongue, passing it from their mouth to that of the next reader with whom they wish to share the experience. What makes this desire so potent is the everlasting bemusement of the word used to describe the climax & destiny of the Odyssey without end.
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Joyce’s letters to his delightful lover, Nora, may be approached with caution. I cannot hide that, although I am a mature adult one who has gallivanted the wide world of adulthood for several years at the time in which this is being written, the brutal forwardness of Joyce’s language gave me pause—it made me blush & laugh as I have seldom laughed before.
In modern society, one notes the flamboyant need for readers to be described as varied, diverse in their pursuits, & acknowledged as better for reading anything, no matter the content. The debate is rampant with gruelling discourse with one party naming the erotic-leaning-reader as empty-headed & moronic, while the latter is too drowned in sewer waste to think to bother about anyone else.
In all my years of reading—great big books, niche philosophies, galvanizing theological studies, anthropologic excavations of the specifies, & tiny books with questions about God & the value of tangible words, through to poems & romantic prose that linger in the mind like the image of the setting sun—never have I ever read erotic fiction.
My meeting with Joyce as he was as a young man, the portrait of which is littered in all the best bookstores around my city, left me feeling comfort in the revelation that he was just like any other depraved erotically motivated individual; eager to find pleasure in love & destined to appreciate the soft touch of joint limbs.
My many years of reading theories & plots set to enhance my mental capabilities revealed to me the very nature of a person’s inner essence, one that notes that to be literary does not necessarily denounce, prevent, or exclude one’s propensity—one’s ability—to draw forth on the power one holds when manipulating words, to perform the greatest good known between mankind.
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I suppose in the debates about the value of erotic books, it is easy to take the side of the prude. I have avoided this style of storytelling because I have absolutely no tolerance for such things in the written word, & yet, I have sought out Joyce’s propensity twice.
Having spent my life reading the books I deemed worthy of my time, the meandering around the point of debasing another reader aggrieves me. Has not the world of the intellectual made clear who is capable of debate & who has but a cave whence no animal might prosper?
The oversimplified approach, where a reader feels it is their right to lay claim to Classic literature, leaves me curious. It seems that these readers have perhaps missed the purpose of critically consuming literature, so busy were they, drowning their faces in the river’s shiny surface.
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Joyce presents Nora with a series of tender sentences, each one intentional, invoking the recollection of their time together & the cautious optimism & raw confidence of the infatuated.
A reader may gladly note that Joyce does not devolve from the status he holds in society & although these letters were written while he was attempting to find a Publisher for “Dubliners” (1914), the image he held of himself was not necessarily different than the one he presented to Nora while he begged her to bring down Heaven’s greatest blessing to his human body.
These twiddling moments pose vital intrigue. Nowhere in the letters does Joyce genuinely regret what he has written. Forgiveness is sought out by Nora in a coy, callously wet way, as Joyce understands his correspondent & she him.
The reader whose self-worth plummets with the critical lens attributed to their favourite fictional work is doomed to fail among their counterparts. For all his wit, Joyce dedicated his skill to rupturing the structure of words in his English language, breaking them down to become the sullen crud that is acclaimed within both “Ulysses” (1920) & “Finnegans Wake” (1939).
Would the beatific reader of today, who boasts of consuming the skin-flakes from their favourite perverse authors, appreciate that these same tender hands might have fondled the nape of a sweaty pulsing neck, longing for it to snap in reverse with the key, noting the unlatching of the Pearly Gates of the Lord’s lair?
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Without hesitation, my unruly laughter in the face of Joyce’s Olfactophilia does not imbue me with a kindly regard for the pornographic fantasizer of the written word. For all their faults, it is my own that keeps me at a distance, waving from across the field.
The nature of these readers troubles me; I am curious about a person whose intentions are purely erotically driven, primarily when they are of the unsavoury kind. In fact, one cannot help but admit the truth; most of these alleged manuscripts of pleasure, those they use to deem themselves readers of calibre, are nothing more than the subtitles as made available on websites for visual pornographic material.
Many have been the moments my innocence, diligently fighting the waves of a career & life wherein it has been dashed, was met once again with the beast in layman’s clothing. Why must the twisted kinks of toes, earlobes, noses, & belly buttons be described to me in such detail?
Here, I found myself wondering what the trouble was & why so many people felt so strongly. I recalled the Irish author himself & his purely joyous appreciation while writing to the woman with whom his fantasies came to life.
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Certainly, Joyce’s letters were not meant for me to read & I suppose unless I acknowledged the underbelly of my person to him, he might be inclined to thrash me like a thief for stealing his secret desires. I cannot be angry at him for this; I, too, would feel wounded had the romantic, sultry letters of my 1909 correspondence come to light for the modern & cruel reader to masticate over their prudish compass. Therefore, judge James Joyce, I cannot.
Surely the research I undertook when naming his specific desires gave me information that I wonder shall ever be used by my writing fingers again, but I digress. As the letters unfold & Joyce expresses something not unlike Coprophilia, & I began to rummage my brain for the timeline of human sexual behaviours.
The culture of Joyce’s letters, pruned by the molten longing of that which has the power to be named, to be written in dripping wet ink onto the warm white pages of crisp bark, frolics in the reader’s throat like Joyce’s inner pulse.
His letters to Nora reveal an honesty about his person that I am inclined to believe we might seldom have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. His fiction is soft & soothing; they have been written with such insightful derision for his society & country that a reader is hardly capable of distancing themselves from that which is contained in Joyce’s brain; the burden of his thoughts & the deftness he possessed to make them tangible.
I feel in a similar state of awe towards Joyce when reading his letters to Nora. Perhaps I would like this reflection to admit nuance towards the throbbing, sensuous, divisive ache felt in the corporeal essence of humanity.
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Within language that is raw like a swelled burn, lavishly tongued by the edge of a tooth; Joyce’s kinky, freakish earnest love for Nora & their afternoon lying in tangles is, in truth, what great novels are written about. The readership of tomes featuring literary dauntlessness has exiled me.
I judge them for their catastrophically stupid behaviour towards others, those who wish, as I do, to read a book & enjoy it. For my lack of willpower in the face of Leviticus & the perturbing pedantry of erotic writing, the community has seen fit to greet me with kindness, which speaks perhaps to the essence they have collected in being one with the material at play.
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Weeds swivel the cake that has grovelled the cavity. Friends, I hold dearly to esteem I haven’t the words to write but within a yearly Christmas card, read literature of the highest botox-induced brow & their eagerness to unriddle queefs has mountainously impacted my ability to analytically consume the world around me, an approach my brain can hardly alter.
Those whom I have met in passing via platforms I will not broach, wonder about words on a page & plots that set the tone as though the story at hand were a pornographic script meant to replicate the immediate tumulus of the pizza delivery man & his empty pizza box.
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Ultimately, I feel that Joyce has met both communities in the middle ground & reminded me of what exists in the human heart: both a casual, ravenous need for exhumed broiling pleasure & the acceptance of the simplistic nature of belief, one that saw him crack open eggs over the stove where his throbbing brain moaned for the words he could not have known for he hadn’t invented them yet.
Joyce’s letters have been settled in a doomed corner of my mind, one that is neither filled with information of immediate necessity, but also flounces around the caravan of an abandoned circus, for the pristine glistening moment when I, too, might reveal the unbridled maw of the parasite under my tongue.
For readers whose appreciation for the callously honest might, like honey, sugar the saltine of their syrup, Joyce’s letters evoke the friendliness of belonging. His tremendous hope that his book would be published & that he might firmly set foot on the path of literary success was never overshadowed or forgotten by his raving lunacy. The reader will note that amidst the worry that accompanies fighting for one’s dream, Joyce has flawlessly included the revelation of success as is found in the eager, clawing, warm & friendly hands of a lover.
C. 💌