The GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity
by: William A. Therivel, PhD
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-GAM/DP Synopsis
-GAM Introduction
-DP Introduction
-GAM/DP Summary
 
-Mozart and not Salieri
-Personality Families
-Berlin's Hedgehogs & Foxes
-James Joyce - Fox
-Newton's Personality Styles
-Gifted and Talented
-GAM's Marginal Men
-GAM's Heidegger
-GAM's Nietzsche
-GAM's Nathaniel Hawthorne
-German Ethnopsychology
-Japanese Ethnopsychology
-French Ethnopsychology
-Spanish Ethnopsychology
-Chinese Ethnopsychology
-Argentine Ethnopsychology
-Byzantium's Creativity
-Venice's Creativity
-Chaucer's Griselda
-Western Medicine's Origins
-Individual Growth by Thinking GxAxMxDP
 
William A. Therivel
William Therivel
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-High Creativity Unmasked
-Studying Power
-Studying National Characters
-Studying National Creativity
 
Biography of Author

James Joyce as Berlinian fox is discussed in
Therivel's GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity.

Maître Renard James Joyce

The above is the title of chapter 10 of volume 1 of William A. Therivel's The GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity (G stands for genetic endowment, A for assistances of youth, M for misfortunes of youth, DP for division of power, UP for unity of power). For an introduction to the GAM part of the theory click "Introduction to GAM"; for an introduction to the DP part click on "Introduction to DP".
In this website, the reader is also offered a shortcut: The GAM/DP Synopsis and an expanded version, The GAM/DP Summary of volumes 1 through 4.

Hereafter are excerpts of chapter 10:

Joyce the Berlinian Fox
     As reported in chapter 9, James Joyce was listed by Isaiah Berlin among his examples of the fox personality who knows many things, as opposed to the hedgehog personality who knows one big thing. Also, table 4 of chapter 9 lists those GAM challenged personalities who are Berlinian foxes, among these the alchemists, the critical jesters, and the brewers. Joyce was all three: an alchemist shaped by the misfortune of father failure, a critical jester shaped by the misfortune of the downfall of family socio-economic status, and a brewer shaped by the misfortune of father-mother incompatibility. One can, therefore, expect him to be a fox per excellence: a maître renard.
     As Berlinian fox, "Joyce is reputed to have said that were Dublin destroyed it could be re-created brick by brick from his novel. An exaggeration on three counts; some streets and shops aren't mentioned; the author occasionally made mistakes; and in many instances Joyce maliciously contoured the cityscape to get even with enemies. . . [His Ulysses [is in] itself an encyclopedia, street directory, dialect dictionary, census, pub guide, ordonnance survey, and vade mecum bound up in blue and white paper" (Kidd, 1988, p. 32). Admittedly, some streets and shops were left out, yet nobody but a first class fox would have described so many. Admittedly, Joyce made mistakes, but that, too, corresponds to the fox personality. It is the hedgehog who would rather die than make a mistake.

Critics complain that in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce was willing to use any detail at all, that it did not matter to him what his materials were, that he would include even the slamming of a door or a sneeze. But this is precisely the point. If everything in the world is interrelated, if the patterns comprehend all of us and all that occurs, everything that exists, then any detail will serve; there is significance in everything if you know how to discover and reveal it. (French, 1993, pp. 267-8).

     Such foxian gifts were his quite early, already when the critic William Archer remarked that in the play A Brilliant Career by the 18-year-old Joyce its author shows "a gift of easy, natural, yet effective dialogue, and a certain sense of scenic picturesqueness, but crowds his canvas with so many figures that Shakespeare himself could not differentiate between them. . . [In turn, Joyce's brother Stanislaus] thought that many of the minor characters were real because he recognized in them portraits of mutual acquaintances" (Davies, 1975/1982, p. 52).
     In his autobiographical novel a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we read about Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalus and that "there was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! His heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?" (1917/1977, p. 155)

Alchemist from Father Failure
     The reader will remember, from chapter 3, the specific impact on personality (with high GxA) of the misfortune of father failure. In the case of James Joyce:

In June 1891 [Joyce at nine] his father lost his position as Collector of Rates in Dublin and decided that he could no long afford to keep his son in Clongowes. This decision marked a significant phase in the family's gradual but uninterrupted descent into the inferno of Dublin's poverty. Throughout his school years Joyce was a victim of his family's failing fortunes, and he never forgot the degradation and shame in which his family position involved him. (Schutte, 1968, p.2)

Stanislaus, when writing his memoirs, compiles a list of nine addresses gone through in about eleven years. The threats of landlords and creditors increased in stridency. . . The Joyces, who began their removals career with two vans and a float, ended it needing only a hand cart. (Davies, 1982, pp. 21, 25)

     As discussed, one of the characteristics of the alchemist personality is an expertise in converting into artistic gold everything they touch, even their "failed relations." Such a quality is evident in Joyce:

The life of an artist, but particularly that of Joyce, differs from the lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention. Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, he shapes again the experiences which have shaped him. He is at once the captive and the liberator. In turn the process of reshaping experience b becomes a part of his life, another of its recurrent events like rising or sleeping. (Ellmann, 1982, p. 3)

Critical Jester from the Pains of SES Downfall
     The father may or may not be responsible for the family's SES downfall, yet soon society will be seen as the enemy: the new unfriendly neighbor, the impatient landlord, the pitiless pawnbroker, the insulting grocer refusing further credit, the persecuting new schoolmates, the now-indifferent teachers. Gradually society will be seen as being without heart and soul, ruled by the god of money. The answer will be a basic grudge and a biting humor, the only defense possible in this case. Our youth will become a critical-jester, unable to dives a major plan for change, as the reformer, but expert in denouncing faults and failures: "There's many a true word spoken in jest"; "Castigat ridendo mores" (He corrects customs by laughing at them). He will become a jester whose business is not really to amuse but to hit like a partisan engaged in guerilla warfare. His must be the rapid attack, under disguise, behind the enemy lines. His humor is a searching light in his inspection of man's ignorance, foolishness and cruelty, and a weapon for defense and attack. His humor is a vitriolic social criticism of his time. He understands and identifies with the oppressed, the partisan and the clown. His view of love and sex focuses rapidly on exploitation of man by man, on falsity, on hypocrisy. The draftsman and master satirist George Grosz was a critical jester, and accordingly his autobiography is entitles A small yes and a big no, and one of his collections of satirical drawings is entitled Ecce homo.
     James Joyce suffered of the misfortune of SES downfall and became, also, a critical jester:

During the years that followed, the Joyce family sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Ten children survived infancy, and they became accustomed to conditions of increasing sordidness, subject to visits from debt collectors, having household goods frequently in pawn, and often moving to another house, leaving the rent and tradesmen's bills unpaid. (Atherton, 1978, p. 279)
 
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