Blue Notes: From Joyce to Jarman

Abstract

If we are to believe the biographers, much of Finnegans Wake was composed in a workroom where both Joyce’s phonograph and his neighbours’ carried sounds of Gershwin, Cab Calloway, ‘Mood Indigo’, the ’Vo-de-do-de-o Blues’, Bessie Smith, and from 1925 onwards, the records of Louis Armstrong in that early period when he was backing Ma Rainey. As Ruth Bauerle has ably demonstrated in her excellent volume Picking up Airs, elaborating on information from Richard Ellmann and Brenda Maddox’s biographies of the Joyces, during the 1920s and 30s Joyce had unexpectedly wide exposure to African-American music, to blues, swing, ragtime, spirituals, and early jazz, and he is said to have viewed his work on Finnegans Wake as like a ‘little Negro dance’ performed in a Parisian club (Bauerle 1993, 159). The blues tradition, construed partly as proto-jazz, rapidly became the primary metaphor in the Joycean lexicon for these several American genres, an absorption enhanced by the ready terminology of blueness for describing varieties of melancholy and synaesthesia. The historical connections to be probed here are many.