“Memento homo upon my bum”: Humor and Self-Satire in Joyce’s “Gas from a Burner”

ანოტაცია

James Joyce was a famously diligent creative writer and, by all accounts, was a man who well understood his own artistic pre-eminence. Yet his poetry—particularly his casual and private verses—often reveals a strong sense of humor about himself and his position as the author of important but difficult prose.

His 1912 poem Gas from a Burner is one of Joyce’s most extended satirical works, notable most particularly for its amusingly dismissive depictions of notable contemporaries, such as William Butler Yeats, George Moore, John Synge, Padraic Colum, and other prominent writers. The poem has usually been studied as a flippant satire on the publishing industry in 1912, and on Joyce’s relations with his publishers and creative colleagues.

Yet Gas from a Burner also offers a complex humorous portrait by implication of Joyce himself (or at least a Joyce persona). This paper proposes to extract Joyce’s implied self-satire from the poem, and to examine the narrative approach by which Joyce simultaneously adopts the persona of a philistine publisher whilst also mocking his colleagues and, this paper suggests, humorously mocking himself.

References:

Bowker, G. (2011) James Joyce. Phoenix.

Burgess, A. (1965) Here Comes Everybody. Faber & Faber.

Byrne, J.F. (1953) Silent Years. Farrar, Straus & Young.

Colum, M. and P. (1958) Our Friend James Joyce. Doubleday.

Curran, C. (1968) James Joyce Remembered. Oxford University Press.

Davies, S. G. (1975) James Joyce—A Portrait of the Artist. Stein & Day.

Doyle, P. A. (1966) A Concordance to the Collected Poems of James Joyce. The Scarecrow Press, 1966.

Ellmann, R. (1982) James Joyce. Oxford University Press.

Fairhall, J. (1993) James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge University Press.

Gogarty, O. St. J. (1950) Intimations. Abelard Press.

Joyce, J. (1991) Poems and Shorter Writings. (R. Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, & J. Wittier-Ferguson, Eds,) Faber & Faber.

Lewis, W. (1957) Time and Western Man. Beacon Press.

Pound, E. (1954) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. (T.S.Eliot, Ed.) New Directions.

Svevo, I. (1969) James Joyce. (S. Joyce, Trans.) New Directions.