January 31, 1982

On the Centenary of James Joyce

On Tuesday, whether or not the groundhog sees its shadow, we shall all have occasion to meditate on the long shadow of James Joyce (born Feb. 2, 1882; died Jan. 13, 1941). Writing as we know it is unthinkable without him; imagine physics without Einstein.

It is an almost casual mark of his power that he fixed the image of his native city forever: Dublin on a June day in 1904, with its trams rumbling (rambling? he would have preferred that sound; ''rambling undergroands'' was his phrase for the New York subways he never visited); with its jarveys reining gallantbuttocked mares, its strawhatted blades, loosestockinged esthetes, frequent priests and ambient lunatics: Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, for instance, who carried coat and stick and umbrella under the bright sky and always walked on the street side of the lampposts; also Leopold Bloom, immortal advertisement canvasser.

So cohesive, so particular is that city of the mind, there are tourists every year who expect Dublin to be just like it; but the trams are gone and the streets snarled with motor traffic like any other streets. One by one the landmarks of Joyce's city of words disappear; Yeates and Son, opticians, where Bloom priced the field glasses, recently vanished from 2 Grafton Street, and Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street is a longtime ruin. Its green front door is preserved in a pub called The Bailey, which likes to pretend it is ''The Burton'' of ''Ulysses'' though that was another place entirely and a loathsome dive.

For it is a guarantee of existence, to have been in ''Ulysses.'' Davy Byrne's, across from The Bailey, is in ''Ulysses'' and proud of it, and even flaunts Joyce's ironic phrase ''moral pub.'' Bloom had a Gorgonzola sandwich there, and a glass of Burgundy; you can do the same, though you can't pass the time of day with Davy, long deceased. The clock is still ''five minutes fast.''

Not everyone was flattered. ''I am not a character in 'Ulysses,' ''Richard Best cried, ''I am a living person''; and Oliver St. John Gogarty, phys ician, raconteur and minor poet, would have given much not to be the ''stately, plump Buck Mulligan'' of the book's opening pages, where he walks forever his treadmill of dead witticisms.

Gogarty's revenge was to make up stories about Joyce. The most famous, which he narrated with much circumstance at a BBC microphone in the 1940's, has Joyce on the 40th birthday of W.B. Yeats ascendingstairs to deliver an insult: ''You are too ol d to be influenced by me.'' The tale is ruined if you know that on the date in question Joyce was 1,000 miles away in Trieste.

That was the kind of mistake Joyce didn't make. One secret of ''Ulysses'' is utter cohesion, thousands of details quietly supporting one another. It seemed to him ''stupid'' of George Moore to make a character look up the time of a train that stopped in his suburb at the same minute every day: rather like looking up the time of 11 o'clock mass. Fiction writers, even ''naturalists'' like Moore, had long since fallen into the habit of just such little inattentions. Their work fades in the memory for the same reason that an airplane so casually constructed would never fly, and Joyce took for his patron saint the Greek Dedalus, who is no more mythical than some of the authorized saints and may be thought of as the founder of aeronautical engineering. Joyce first used the pseudonym ''Stephen Daedalus'' just six months after the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk, and spent his life showing how the writer can build as leanly and as tautly and as cunningly as they had, and as triumphantly.

Attention to things as trivial as cotter pins and bicycle spokes is an intellectual mark of those years. Criminals were starting to learn that your very fingerprints could hang you. By 1903 Freud's unravelings of secret intention were taking their departure from silly slips of the tongue, the kind of thing you don't notice if you're following ''the meaning''; Freud was redefining ''meaning.'' And a mysterious fellow who went by the name of Morelli had publicized the ''Morelli Method'' of authenticating paintings by attention not to the main effect but to details a pupil or a forger takes no trouble over: fingernails and earlobes.

Joyce in the same way worked with tireless attention to what had previously been inadvertent. He knows how much change a character is carrying, and in which pocket (Bloom set out on that famous morning with four shillings ninepence). He knows the brand of Bloom's hat, Plasto's. He knows that ''wrote'' for ''write'' is a plausible error in Martha Clifford's typed letter, because i and o are adjacent on the keyboard. And he described an illustration in a piece of junk fiction so precisely there's no difficulty being sure the Yale Library, of all libraries, owns a copy of the very novel Molly Bloom was reading in bed.

That was ''Ruby: A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl,'' and it escaped identification for many decades because Joyce changed its title to ''Ruby: the Pride of the Ring.'' Small alterations like that he was prepared to make, when they had point, and the point here is typical: that if you came upon the Ruby/Ring phrase in isolation you'd not be sure if it pertained to circuses or to jewelry. Ambiguity fascinated Joyce from childhood, and he never tired of devising small illustrations of the extent to which understanding relies on context.

''That was a belt round his pocket,'' thinks 6-year-old Stephen, ''and a belt was also to give a fellow a belt.'' On the first page of a story Joyce wrote at 22, an old man rambles of ''faints and worms,'' in what turn out to be yarns not of death but of the distillery; you may need a big dictionary to learn that ''faints'' are the last yieldings of the mash and ''worms'' are coiled pipes. In another story written the same year, a pious girl losing courage to elope is overwhelmed by ''the black mass of the boat''; Joyce makes nothing special of ''black mass,'' but he does expect us to notice it. It's a phrase any other writer might have scribbled without noticing, and no reader would have noticed it either. Reading Joyce, youdonotice, and you're arrested by a queer unsettling of attention, as you choose between a liturgical context and a spatial.

We make such choices continually, seldom noticing. That was the order of inadvertence that came to preoccupy Joyce more than any other: our sheer blank inattention to how, listening, reading, watching, we manage to gather sense; and our ignorance as to whether the sense we gather is even sensible. His last work, ''Finnegans Wake,'' 17 years in the making, keeps us endlessly suspended amid mysteries and decisions, ''the untireties of a livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming.''

''Untireties'': ''entire,'' ''untired''; ''substrance'': ''substance/ trance'': those are easy. But when a ''livesliving'' enters a ''streamsbecoming'' does it drown? And what of a phrase elsewhere such as ''this sound seemetery'': How does it mediate between ''cemetery'' and the ''seeming'' of living sound/ sight? What, moreover, of ''half a glance of irish frisky''? Is that a roguish look, or is it half a glass of Irish whisky? Are they compatible? ( Probably.)

Less compatible are ''The hundrund and badst pageans of unthowsent and wonst nice.'' Are we to oppose ''badst'' to ''wonst,'' merely last to one-st? Or, more dynamically, best to worst, and cherish the hundred best pages; or join ''badst'' with ''pageans,'' bad and pagan, and note that the ''Book of 1001 Nights'' was not, in any Christian sense, unpagan at all? ''Finnegans Wake'' remains blissfully nondirective.

Yet we think we order and specify when we give names. We must name everything; we have named every pock on the moon. ''Midas Muffler,'' ''Dutch Shoe,'' we called two red rocks on Mars. We name every dog weknow: give them names such as Thomas. By which name we thought we meant what? A doubter? A contemplative? We weren't thinking. Perhaps some poet may meet the dog and judge. Every dog has his day: ''Every talk (wrote Joyce) has his stay.''

Words, words. Playing around? No, it matters. Much of the central Dublin preserved in words in ''Ulysses'' was already gone forever by the time Joyce wrote of it: blown to smithereens at Easter 1916 (''Array! Surrection!'') in consequence of hotheaded patriotic words. A word may explode like an atomic bomb (''the abnihilisation of the etym'') and is virtually sure to explode if conventions of interpretation go awry.

Mankind, it may be, needs a Wake-length (lifelong) course in the vagaries of interpretation, and it is probably true that no one who is preoccupied with ''Finnegans Wake'' has energy left over to be manufacturing bombs.

The mild Douglas Hyde, when he headed the Gaelic League, an organization founded in 1893 to prevent the Irish language from dying out, stipulated repeatedly that none of what they said or did should be put to political purposes; yet all those classrooms devoted to the Gaelic niceties, the broad and slender vowels and eclipsis, spawned phalanxes of fierce patriots, and their study of a language with no words for ''yes'' and ''no'' conduced to a drastic way of saying NO, which was to seize the Post Office and hold it against cannon.

The baby who was born 100 years ago Tuesday had ahead of him a life shaped by wars: World War I, which exiled him from Trieste to Zurich; the Irish Civil War, which polarized former friends and made return to his homeland unthinkable; World War II, which hounded him out of France, back to Zurich, where his bones lie.

Though he saw no ''action,'' he fought on our behalf in the war that finally matters: against nescience, against inadvertence, against the supposition that anything is anything else. Insofar as he could change the world of the mind, he changed it toward order.

We need not be surprised that loud flaccid voices identified him early with indecency and with a greater sin, obscurity. ''Ears have they, and they hear not,'' said a sage whose teachings Joyce had studied early in life. ''In the beginning was the Word,'' wrote the same sage's most subtle disciple, echoing the Genesis phrasing of what was there before the act of creation.

The Jesuit-trained Joyce did not blink at the analogy. If Adam was begotten of the Word, Bloom was made of words; and if the cosmos of ''Finnegans Wake'' is end-to-end riddle, what is to be said of the cosmos in which men with apparatus no more arcane than Wakean semantics are now chasing insensible, unimaginable ''quarks''? - named, so their namer has affirmed, from a word in ''Finnegans Wake.''

Hugh Kenner is the author of ''Dublin's Joyce,'' ''Joyce's Voices'' and many other books.

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