SOURCE: "The 'Perilous Theme' of Chamber Music," in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 3, Spring, 1964, pp. 19-24.

In the following essay, Moseley discusses allusions to the book of Ezekiel in Joyce's Chamber Music.

One "portrait of the artist" in Finnegans Wake characterizes him as "a sensible ham," who having "with infinite tact in the delicate situation seen the touchy nature of its perilous theme … spat in careful convertedness a musaic dispensation about his hearthstone." Placed alongside a reference to "chamermissies" and the promise, "if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands … a fair chance of actually seeing … the mystery of himsel in furniture," these allusions by the mature Joyce to his earliest work, Chamber Music, seem admissions that his first attempt at turning image into symbol necessarily concealed more than it revealed.

Joyce repeatedly connects his first...