For the love of Joyce

“Even so I was bewitched, partly by the author’s name, and would say it over and over again under my breath. Mouni Sadhu Mouni Sadhu. It became a sort of mantra, but it worked the wrong way round, stirring up my thoughts instead of dissipating them.”

                                                (Cedilla, Adam Mars-Jones, p.4)

Mo Moreland of the Roly Polys. Not Joyce.

 

A vague resemblance to a Roly Poly

            Joyce Over The Road. I never knew her surname, nor did it matter to me. She was simply ‘Joyce’. No other label needed. Well... sometimes ‘Big Joyce’ and, on rare occasion, ‘Big Fat Joyce’, but never by me.  Indeed to say she was fat doesn’t really do justice to the space she occupied, both in my own consciousness and in the wider universe. She was truly enormous, physically and symbolically monolithic. Her cumbrous presence remained a constant fascination throughout my childhood and then beyond. I didn’t know her as such. For years she lived directly opposite my grandparents’ house with her husband Tommy, who was Irish and who my Granddad considered to be mad. This diagnosis was never elaborated upon and the suspicion remains that Tommy was supposed to be mad simply because he was Irish.

Bearing a vague resemblance to Mo Moreland (the one everyone remembers from Les Dawson’s fat girl tap troupe the Roly Polys), Joyce had two distinguishing features beyond her sheer bulk. The first was a pair of spectacles with lenses that magnified her eyes to ludicrous proportions. The second, more pertinent to our inventory of obsession, was a towering peroxide bouffant styled in a perfect beehive. Any one of these attributes would have guaranteed my interest as child, but all three combined sealed her fate indelibly. To this day, even from the grave, Joyce looms large.

Joyce’s superhuman auditory function was legendary, at least as far as my Grandma was concerned. Though insulated by two double glazed bay windows, two front gardens and a fair expanse of suburban tarmac, the mere mention of Joyce’s beguiling appearance was enough to provoke fits of shushing and stage-whispered remonstration. “Shhh! She might hear you!” even became a family catchphrase for a while, often mobilized derisively in the face of an unlikely claim or suggestion. Still, I suppose we can’t be certain that Joyce didn’t sometimes catch our gossip on some improbable breeze and that those spectacles didn’t occasionally magnify the dolorous plop of her tears.

Somehow, though, I very much doubt it.

Joyce-as-situation-comedy

Eventually (eventually? Perhaps I mean immediately...) Joyce became semi-fictionalized by my obsession. I’ve always been enough in touch with the inner cultist to understand that the sacred object can’t but fail to live up to expectations. That inevitable dissatisfaction that I have described or will describe in detail elsewhere and that Mark Gatiss termed ‘anticipointment’. In Joyce’s case it was a matter of access. She was only ever revealed in glimpses: framed from the nose up through the front window; lowered into Tommy’s shit-brown Cortina, arse first, as rapidly as she could manage so as not to be observed; leaning against the bus shelter, arms folded tight under the bosom, an undercranked tracking shot as we sped past in the car. Never enough. Never the whole picture. Nary a hint of what Joyce actually did, day-to-day.

I have a vague impression of her voice, reedy, almost strangulated, Prestonian accent held proudly aloft. But no recollection of her ever talking to me, none of her even acknowledging my existence. Joyce-wise, I remained forever unaddressed. Un-interpellated? Perhaps not, but Joyce remains as much my creation as her own or another’s. Never able to gain access to her sitting room to study her at close quarters (and at length – oh, how I longed to), I forged a new Joyce out of my obsession and the scant source materials available to me. This perhaps begins to make it seem as though I spent hours and hours scribbling away, filling old exercise books and sketchpads with narratives and images of Joyce, like John Waters and the ‘awful cheap girls’ of his schooldays. Joyce-as-low-budget-exploitation-shocker; Joyce-as-fairytale; Joyce-as-middle-of-the-road-midweek-situation-comedy. You Have Been Watching…  Joyce; Joyce; Joyce; with Joyce; and Big Joyce Over The Road as… Joyce.

            In reality, my ongoing production/consumption (conduction? prosumption?) of Joyce was much less tangible and much more insidious. My Joyce was a purely conceptual being, fleeting, generated only by the feedback loop of my obsession. Joyce simultaneously became and instigated a numinous repetition, a mantra-in-being, creating transformation, transforming and thus created. A fixation on the idea of Joyce, on my idea of Joyce, always-already a fixation on the idea of a fixation on the idea of Joyce. Repetition squared, obsession cubed, Joyce infinited. 

(First draft: March 2011)