7 - Rome’s Wreck: Joyce’s Baroque

Summary

In a review of Trevor Joyce's first collected poems, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold, I suggested that the poems collected in his early volume Pentahedron (1972) could be seen as

mannerism in the best sense that designates an art tired of the habits of a style that has become commonplace in its very common-sensicality and that forces the limits of style at the risk of excess and artificiality. Mannerism as one recognizes it in Baudelaire, Kafka, Mangan, the early Beckett, all of whom used conventions to burst conventions.

The limits of a newspaper review did not give me space to elaborate that comment, one that might all too easily be misread as implying a negative judgment of the achievement of the poems, given the still prevalent critical assumptions that associate “mannerism” with stylistic artificiality and poetry itself with sincere subjective expression. In the present chapter, I want to explore further this association of Joyce's early work with mannerism and to devote some sustained attention to the singular and important achievement of that early work in its moment, an achievement that has frequently been too easily undervalued in light of the subsequent direction of his work as a whole. I also hope to add to that still inadequately developed judgment some further reflections on what I continue to consider the “baroque” elements of Joyce's work that are as striking now as they were in his early poems. Once again, the colloquial association of that term with over-elaboration or excessive ornamentalism demands a richer specification of the term as I intend it here.

In the first instance, both Mannerism and the Baroque most commonly refer to the stylistic unities of art historical periods and characterize the common traits of various arts in those periods. Mannerism designates the period of the sixteenth century that emerged between the classicism of the Renaissance and the seventeenth-century Baroque. Strongly associated with Michelangelo's late work, as with his imitators, it is characterized by stylistic self-consciousness and by the extreme awareness of the conventions within which its formal elaborations take place. In a certain sense, one might say that Mannerism involves the deliberate exaggeration of the traits of a received style, in this case, those of Renaissance classicism, even to the point of being a criticism of them.