The Iridescent Vision of James Joyce

An “international eyesore, holder of the world amateur record for eye operations.” This is how world-famous author James Joyce described himself in the late 1920s. Joyce’s eyes troubled him for most of his life; he wore glasses as a child, and throughout adulthood, suffered from a range of conditions, including uveitis, glaucoma, and cataracts. He endured severe pain and underwent various forms of treatment, from leeches and cocaine to numerous invasive surgeries. In later life, despite the many medical interventions, Joyce’s eyesight deteriorated significantly, necessitating a whole range of aids to help him write his final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce used multiple magnifying glasses, wrote with charcoal on large sheets of paper, wore a white jacket to reflect the light off of him and onto his page and, when his vision was very low, dictated his words to typists.

Many studies have attempted to diagnose Joyce or played medical detective to pinpoint the exact cause – or causes – of his vision issues and his broader, systemic symptoms (his dental pain, arthritis, and stomach issues). Retrospective ‘Sherlockholmesing,’ as Joyce puts it in Ulysses, can be fun and can lead to intriguing conjectures, such as the theory that all Joyce’s problems were caused by syphilis. But Joyce’s literary engagement with eye disease is equally enthralling. His fascination with vision was, much like his writing, complex and multilayered.

Joyce’s personal experience of glaucoma is evident in his 1918 poem “Bahnhofstrasse” and in his 1939 experimental novel Finnegans Wake. In 1917, while walking down the Bahnhofstrasse boulevard in Zurich, Joyce experienced a severe "eye attack," as he described it. The poem expresses the speaker's anguish with the phrase "eyes that mock me" and "star of pain!" (glaucoma is often translated as “grüner star,” meaning “green star,” in German). In his biography of Joyce, Herbert Gorman states that the sight of “spinning rainbows” around “arc lamps,” on Bahnhofstrasse boulevard, signaled the onset of Joyce’s glaucoma: “Almost immediately he realized that he had that dreaded ailment.”

There is no doubt that Joyce developed an interest in both historical and contemporary accounts of glaucoma. He has made numerous links between his glaucoma, the supposed glaucoma of the famous blind bard Homer, and his penchant for the “glaucous” shade of blue. But did Joyce read ophthalmological papers on the disease? The allusions to glaucoma in Finnegans Wake seem to echo medical literature on the topic, if only by accident. Finnegans Wake is full of “flabberghosted,” spectral spectrums and indistinct, hallucinated “selfcolours,” recalling the glaucoma-induced “spinning rainbows” Joyce perceived on Bahnhofstrasse. He was right: seeing rainbows is a key indicator of glaucoma.

The Irish-born author could well have first read about this symptom in ophthalmologist R. H. Elliot’s 1920 lecture on the diagnosis of glaucoma: rainbows are “best observed when the patient looks from a little distance at a bright light in the dark.” The patient usually perceives at “least two colours,” that is “an inner blue or violet and an outer red; a yellowish band is generally seen between them.” A similar vision is depicted in Finnegans Wake: we have red and orange (“ruby” and “beryl”), yellow and green (“chrysolite” and “jade”), light-to-mid blue (“sapphire” and “jasper”), and deep-bluey purple (“lazul”). This rainbow of colors, or this “skew arch of chrome” as it is described by Joyce, is “floodlit.” So, like in the medical examples, there is a bright light source. A couple of lines earlier, we find references to “darkness” and “gloomerie,” indicating that this colorful vision occurs in the dark.

In his lecture, R. H. Elliot writes that the rainbows seen by glaucoma patients are, in some cases, so “brilliant that every tiny flickering flame in the firelight is iridescent with colors.” The word “iridescent” appears in several late nineteenth and early twentieth century medical texts on glaucoma. In 1890, Treacher Collins, curator of the Moorfields Eye Hospital Museum, published a short study entitled Iridescent Vision in Glaucoma. Joyce uses the portmanteau word “iridecencies” (calling to mind iridescences and indecencies) to describe this multicolored vision.

Earlier on in Finnegans Wake, on a page full of vision-related imagery, Joyce depicts another colorful sight: an “iridescent huecry of down right mean false” – another hallucinated (“mean false”) rainbow. Elsewhere in the book, there is another image that is even closer to glaucoma-induced visions of rainbow rings. A character called Issy perceives dancing rainbow girls through hazy “enameled eyes.” We are told that “the reignbeau’s heavenarches arronged orranged her”: the rainbow girls are arranged around Issy, just as the glaucoma-caused iridescent rings appear around lights. Later on in Finnegans Wake, we have a further incidence of circular rainbows, when another character states: “I’m seeing rayingbogeys rings round me”.

Ulysses, an earlier novel by Joyce, includes allusions to non-normative vision – most overtly, in the character of the ‘blind stripling’. It is here that Joyce draws less upon personal experience and medical texts, and more upon blindness memoirs and advice manuals. Scholars have largely glossed over Joyce’s references to blindness in his composition notebook. But, a recent book chapter of mine explored the thematics of the blind stripling in Ulysses, alongside one of the blindness books mentioned in his notes: Les Aveugles par un Aveugle (The Blind as Seen through Blind Eyes) (1899), by blind writer and activist Maurice de la Sizeranne.

The observations de la Sizeranne makes about his fellow blind man parallel those made by Ulysses’ protagonist Bloom about the blind stripling. Both Bloom and de la Sizeranne discuss the intriguing relationship between color perception and touch, in blind experience, and suggest an additional blind sense: a “kind of sense of volume” involving the “nerves of the face” or the “forehead.” Both authors touch upon issues like multi-sensory perception, employment prospects, and aesthetic enjoyment, reflecting the concerns expressed by real-life blind individuals in 19th- and early-20th-century France.

Joyce’s interest in eye disease, blindness, and other forms of non-normative vision is wonderfully multifaceted; it is, one might say, iridescent. He drew inspiration from his own prismatic vision, as well as the multi-sensory experiences of fellow blind and partially-blind bards. Joyce’s vision of visual disorder is not dark, dull, or monochromatic. He depicts pearlescent, polychromatic forms of perception, reflecting – perhaps on purpose – the originary meaning of the word ‘glaucoma’ (‘gleaming’).

This article first appeared in The New Optometrist.