Another epiphany

On October 8, 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled Dublin for mainland Europe. When Joyce’s father heard the news he allegedly quipped: “Barnacle, Barnacle, well begod she’ll stick to him!”. And so she did. However, their grand romance got off to a rocky start. When the destitute couple arrived in Trieste, Joyce left Nora alone in a public park while he hustled for work as an English teacher. As Brenda Maddox described it in Nora: A biography of Nora Joyce (1988):

Hours passed as she sat, like an unclaimed parcel … If she had not realised it before, she knew then that she was dependent, for every morsel she ate as well as for every word of communication with the strange world around her, on the young man who had asked her to believe in him instead of God.

This foundational episode has been retold several times. In the film Nora (2000), the director Pat Murphy reworked Maddox’s description, but with one embellishment: when Nora (Susan Lynch) angrily tells Joyce (Ewan McGregor) that she wants “to go home”, he curtly reminds her that she no longer has a home, and the pair are sullenly reconciled. Less despairingly, in Nuala O’Connor’s novel Nora: A love story of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce (2021), Nora stoically accepts her situation: “My gut bubbles. ‘It seems we’ll never find our settle-spot.’ I look at him and realise all I can do is trust him, for what choice do I have?”

Mary Morrissy’s fourth novel, Penelope Unbound, takes this incident as its starting point, then posits an alternative universe: what if Nora did not wait for Joyce on the park bench in Trieste, but abandoned him instead? Significantly, in this version the resilient Nora reinvents herself as “Norah with a h”; or, more accurately, she reverts to her pre-Joycean name: “She loved to get those letters, the dear Noras. He’d dropped her H from the start. Said that way she was like a heroine in a Swedish play she’d never heard of. Ibsen, was it? He was forever name-dropping”.

Morrissy herself is fond of name-dropping, and intertextual echoes abound. Norah is rescued in Trieste by Ettore Schmitz – the writer Italo Svevo (1861–1928) – who in real life was Joyce’s devoted friend and student. She becomes the governess to Svevo’s daughter and, while the irony is sweet – it mischievously evokes Joyce, the failed teacher of English – there is something rather unlikely about this narrative arc. (Even less believable is the way that Norah eventually becomes the owner of Finn’s Hotel in Dublin, where she once worked as a chambermaid.) Similarly, within this fanciful alternative reality Joyce becomes a concert singer instead of a writer, and adopts the stage name “Giacomo”. He becomes romantically involved with Amalia Popper (1891–1967) – in real life the first Italian translator of Joyce’s work and the inspiration for his love poem Giacomo Joyce (written in 1914; posthumously published in 1968). Thus, it seems, every writer needs their muse; every muse ultimately finds their writer.

Despite the postmodern deliciousness, this aesthetic strategy limits the novel in several ways. First, the reader will have to be familiar with Joyce’s works to fully appreciate the fantasy, while the secular reader will undoubtedly flounder. Second, these fan-fiction parallels – especially to Dubliners (1914) – sometimes feel forced, with biographical and bibliographical facts constantly shoehorned into the fiction; for example, “When [Amalia] looks up the stairs again, she realizes, stupidly, that Gretta is Nora. Of course! Another epiphany, this one unwanted”. Most of all, though, by so carefully aligning Norah’s new fate with that of her former paramour, the narrative risks binding her to Joyce in a way that tests our credulity. Like her literary avatar Molly Bloom, Norah is both mythic and real, and these textural tensions are never fully resolved. At the end, when Norah and Giacomo finally meet again on June 16, 1915, the novel seems to acknowledge this ontological problem, in a way that is lyrical but improbable: “As she passes, Norah recognizes the hopelessness in Jim’s blind, bleating gaze. But she refuses to look back. She can feel the thin thread of longing unspool between them. As if they had never met, as if they have yet to meet, as if the next time it will be different”.

Keith Hopper teaches on the Writing & Literature Programme at Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. His most recent book is A Door Opening: Sligo and the legacies of partition, 2023, which he co-edited

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