Society and Self in the Novel: English Institute Essays 1955 9780231890861

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SOCIETY AND SELF I N T H E

NOVEL

Society and Self in the Novel ENGLISH

INSTITUTE

ESSAYS

·

EDITED W I T H A FOREWORD BY Mar\

Columbia

University

1955

Schorer

Press NEW YORK. 1956

© 1956 Columbia University Press, New

Yor\

Published in Great Britain, Canada, India, and Pakistan by Geoffrey Cumberlege:

Oxford University Press

London, Toronto, Bombay, and Karachi Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

56-10370

Acknowledgments

WITH THE CONSENT

of the Supervising Committee of

the English Institute, the following material has appeared in periodicals: Mr. Levin's essay was published in Perspectives USA (Number 16), Mr. Ellmann's in Kenyon Review (Winter, 1956), Mr. Mercier's in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review

(Summer,

1956), and portions of Mr. Schorer's in New Republic (October 31» Ï955)· The quotations from James Joyce's Ulysses that appear in Mr. Mercier's essay are used with the permission of Random House Inc.; the lines from W. B. Yeats's "Baile and Aillinn" are quoted with the permission of The Macmillan Company; and the various verses quoted from 1000 Years of Irish Poetry: The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present, edited by Kathleen Hoagland, copyright 1947 by Devin-Adair Company, are used with the permission of Devin-Adair Company. The passage from T . K . Whipple's essay, "Sinclair Lewis," which appeared in Spokesmen and is here quoted by Mr. Schorer, is used with the permission of Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.

Foreword:

Self and Society

T H E ESSAYS

which make this volume are drawn from

two series of conferences at the fourteenth session of the English Institute—those by Professor Harry Levin and Professor Vivian H . S. Mercier from the conference on "Imitation and Parody," directed by Professor Joseph McG. Bottkol of Mount Holyoke College, and the remaining four comprising that on " T h e Novel and Society," directed by me. Imitation and parody are literary conventions that, being free of generic restrictions, extend far beyond the novel; and yet it is interesting to observe at once that the essays of Mr. Levin and Mr. Mercier, removed from their original context, address themselves now to problems that are hardly less than central to any discussion of the generic character of the novel alone. In the present context Mr. Levin's essay broadens and Mr. Mercier's specifies the basic assumption of those tensions that seem to be the conditions of the dynamics of the novel, operating as they do through all the ramifications of the novelist's art. These essays are appropriate to the whole collection not only because they heighten its coherence but also because they extend its variety.

vili

FOREWORD

Appropriate, certainly, is the opening of any discussion of the novel with Cervantes, however we increase the risk, then, of calling attention to our dying fall in Sinclair Lewis. Yet he, too, serves the whole purpose of an orderly illumination, closes indeed one large orbit of literary history as we move through the novel from Cervantes, where the center of interest lies in the difference between the facts of life and the dreamlike parodies of art, to Sinclair Lewis, where it lies in the difference between the nightmare parody of life itself and a disappearing art, the dream of value. In a damaging essay on John Galsworthy, written when that novelist was regarded rather more seriously than he is today, D . H . Lawrence made a distinction, extreme, that serves through its very extremity to point up the problem of the novel in general and the problem that, tangentially or directly, concerns the essayists who have contributed to this collection. Lawrence's complaint was that the characters in Galsworthy's best-known novel had no private but only public selves, that they had "lost caste as human beings," had "sunk to the level of the social being," their free, subjective lives having been swallowed by their restrictive, objective allegiances to institutions and a merely social morality, to class and cash. It is quite possible that Lawrence has indicated the source of the essential deadness at the center of Galsworthy's work, and yet, thinking more generally, thinking even

of

Lawrence's own novels, we recognize the excess in his position, recognize again that the problem of the novel has always been to distinguish between these two, the self and society, and at the same time to find suitable structures that will present them together. Isolate one from the other and the resulting fiction will

FOREWORD

IX

flow away from the novel into another genre. Isolate the individual consciousness and we will have lyric or informal philosophy; isolate the social being and we will have chronicle or history. T h e novel seems to exist at a point where we can recognize the intersection of the stream of social history and the stream of soul. This intersection gives the form its dialectical field, provides the source of those generic tensions that make it possible at all. The novel, therefore, has always had a generic habit of reaching out to the extremes at either side of it, to history on one side and to poetry on the other. In the last decade in the United States this habit has been heightened. W e have had novels that enjoyed public prominence because of their nearly pure documentary interest, their social sweep and detail, and we have had novels that enjoyed notoriety because of their stylistic peculiarity or refinement, their narrow privacy. The first are apparently motivated by the spirit of social dissent and, while hardly moral, are at least moralistic. The second are motivated by a spirit of social indifference, if not of alienation, and are perhaps only amoral. Novels of the first kind have very small sense of responsibility to form; novels of the second kind have an overwhelming sense of the importance of "writing" as such. So on the one hand we have these great lumps of yeasty dough, nine hundred pages long, all social stuff in fermentation, and, on the other, these airy nothings, psychic vaporings that, while they have clever titles, have no social habitation and no serious fame. In both, the fault, fatal to the form, is that the necessary structural tension has been abandoned. It is only the rare novel today that stands firmly in that middle area from which the finest fiction comes. This, one

X

FOREWORD

reiterates, is the crossroad of sensibility and social history, the point at which the two roads make one square, where each disappears into the other. The division dramatizes the two sides of the cultural crisis in the world that we inhabit. The documentary novel, reaching toward social history, written in a spirit of dissent and wishing to plead for the individual human being, shows us instead only the power of social authority and the greedy thoroughness with which it has swallowed the individual. The evocative novel, reaching toward the condition of poetry, written in a spirit of alienation or of disaffection, demonstrates inversely that the gap between the individual human being and the social circumstances in which he exists has become hazardously wide. This is, of course, only the modern climax represented in minor figures; the history of the novel as a form that develops over four hundred years in major figures presents us with the full form of our cultural history. The essays that follow may be read as markers along that way. Each, of course, has its special interest and emphasis and its own critical color. They were written and presented with no thought of illustrating a history or of combining into a coherence. That, arranged in a rough chronology, they should in fact do just this, is perhaps to validate our generalizations. Don Quixote, parodying the dead dreams and the dying conventions of feudalism, announced the emergence of the modern world, and in doing so it established in their largest terms the poles of novelistic tension: appearance and reality, art and life, "verses and reverses," as Mr. Levin wittily puts it—a dual world in which the visions entertained by the self are at the same time

FOREWORD

xi

the "snakes and toads" of the social facts. In the primitive forms of the novel that followed during the next hundred years, works like Moll Flanders, for example, that are distinctively of the new world rather than of the old, the individual is still buried completely in the first massive dominance of emerging class consciousness. Then, in the novel of the mid-eighteenth century, the two merge and interact, are separable but not in the least at odds, and the art of Jane Austen—as Mr. Craig reminds us—carries this relationship to its point of finest discrimination. In the great mid-nineteenth-century novels, the balance between the claims of the individual and of the social being still holds, but the polarity is greater. In certain novels, where the poetic element is increased, the vision is forced upon the facts. In others, the polarity splits structures in two, as in the discontinuity of Dickens' malign and benign forces, or as, in Middlemarch,

in the distance between

Bulstrode, conventional value at its worst in social hypocrisy, and Dorothea Brooke, individual aspiration and idealism at their highest but most completely divorced (for that reason) both from novelistic action and from social circumstance. Still, in the great novels of the mid-nineteenth century, in France no less than in England, the form encompassed more of society than was possible before or than has been possible since, as the novel made its last genuine attempt to give its individuals their self-knowledge in the midst of, and through, the largest social circumstances. At the end of the century, with such a novelist as Thomas Hardy, a new relationship develops as the social scope narrows down; then the individual interest is seen as actively opposed to the social interest, the tragedy of a girl like Sue Bridehead being the defeat of the individual of malformed dissidence by social près-

xii

FOREWORD

sure. In Conrad, much the same relationship shows itself in the isolation of the individual from the social scene at large, and in James, in the rarity of his social scene, even when it is full of people. By the time of Proust, Mr. Dupee points out, the novel has ceased to be social in the old sense, "a shift has occurred in the relations of the one and the many." Society itself was coming to be conceived of as a dense, all-enveloping medium, a fabric of "collective representations," in Durkheim's phrase, rather than a structure of classes. Proust is perhaps the last great novelist who hopes to represent the whole of his society in the strange reminiscential structure that he developed for his book, but even there, of course, populous as that novel is, much of society in effect vanishes as the values of one class ("the imagination of duchesses") provide the lens through which we observe the whole. Joyce's very subject is the relationship with which we have been concerned, but now the real point is the total separation of the two terms that had formerly created that relationship, so that in his work (as in his life, Mr. Ellmann fascinatingly shows) isolate individuality must be pitted against "collective representations," for this is now the only available strategy whereby a novel can be made. Mr. Mercier, in his impressively detailed account of one of Joyce's habits of parody, indirectly reminds us of a number of important facts about the situation of the novelist, among others, that Joyce's parody of popular Irish culture, in so far as it is satire, is a means of defining the foolish character of the hero's social enemy and that, in so far as it is rhetoric, it is his means of defining his continuing enchantment by that folly : both elements are necessary. So the two ways part. Then there is the choice of Sinclair Lewis,

FOREWORD

Xiii

which shows us the fact, rather more than merely relevant today, that if individual value is omitted from the social conception, novels will suffer and, more importantly, society will cease to be society and become a jungle: in the jungle the novel cannot find its generic terms and degenerates accordingly; in the jungle, likewise, there is no life for the individual man. The other choice is the choice of D. H. Lawrence, perhaps, where again the relationship is clearest because most extreme: the individual struggling to leap beyond the social boundaries entirely, yet always being drawn back into community circumstances because the novel demands it. Or one can go along on this way a little further to such a figure as Virginia Woolf who, in certain works, permits the novel to leave by the door that is opposite the door it first entered—the individual usurping the entire scene, sensibility at once triumphant and undifferentiated, social responsibility at once eliminated and irrelevant. This is the novel as we now have it. If the form sprang into being at a time when social reality could be demonstrated through a parody of art, we face it in a time when social reality itself either provides the materials for parody or is entirely dismissed, and the form disintegrates. Even the author of a foreword need not persist longer than I already have in the Procrustean role. The ultimate value of these essays lies not in any smoothly continuous proof of a hypothesis that their authors did not immediately entertain, but in their particularity and in the sharpness with which they illuminate a half dozen particularities of the novel. Mr. Levin lays down the groundwork of those oppositions out of which the novel, as, in some sense, each of the essays that follows his, proceeds; but

xiv

FOREWORD

perhaps it is more important to observe that having done so, he points out that Don Quixote asks a question, too, before it is finished, as well as states a proposition; the question is whether the ostensible "real" is not in fact more deceptive than the "dream." One answer comes more than four hundred years later when we decide that the documentation of Sinclair Lewis, pursued with all the zeal of the scientist, has omitted at least half of what we know to be ourselves, and therefore, perhaps, all. "May it not be that the images of ourselves created by writers, as Pirandello would urge, are more real than we are?" Mr. Levin asks. Almost as if in direct assent, Mr. Dupee's essay argues that the magnificent reality of Proust's great structure lies in the power of imagination (living by the image), in that power as, for better or for worse, it inhabits Proust himself and his characters and the total work : "By causing them to partake of his own substance," Mr. Dupee has elsewhere said, "the sequestered, the almost immured Marcel Proust rejoins the race." (And Elmer Gantry, that vile buffoon, does he too lie among the sleeping giants in some cave of racial memory?) What is reality? Mr. Craig persuades us of the legerdemain by which novelistic vision can, when it must, bring reality to heel. Mr. Ellmann, pursuing biographical paths, goes further and shows us that an artist will, if necessary, live a dream in order to create a reality. And Mr. Mercier, pursuing the minutiae of rhetoric in the nearly limitless gestures of parody, shows us an artist whose very self, outside society, finally takes on its nearly limitless proportions. We seem still to be dealing with tensions, polarities, oppositions, even though now not with any chronological development of a particular set of them. Society and self are perhaps the basic

FOREWORD

XV

terms of the novel; but then, appearance and reality are the basic terms of all art as, ultimately, they are of all life, and society and self are only specifications, shift as they may in their equivalence to that which appears to be and that which is, of the larger formulation. The novel, with its mundane atmosphere and its open face, leads us with an inevitable guile into the final complexities of experience. As of criticism. Mr. Ellmann, writing of Finnegans

Wake, says, "here all the members of the family seem

principally aspects of Joyce's imaginative life, alternately embracing and rejecting each other, but bound as indissolubly as the cortexes of the brain. He is the wooer and the wooed, the slayer and the slain." This final identification of all tensions suggests not only the reasons for the difficulty of Joyce's last work, but also the rival claims for that work as the greatest of all novels and as no novel at all. Yet who would attempt seriously to anticipate the judgment of history except in some such wonderful ambiguity as this, of which Mr. Mercier reminds us, by Joyce himself: "Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled.

Fuitfiat!"

We shall not venture then to resolve our tensions in a definition of the novel except through the subterfuge of negatives. A novel does not confirm our social beliefs but so fully comprehends the varieties of human complexity that it challenges us to re-examine them. A novel does not reproduce the world of scientific or of sociological fact but presents an imagined world that reveals the limitations of the kind of facts that both science and society continually and relentlessly impress us with. A novel does not give back to us our social experience alone but reveals it within a larger reality in which, if we are brave enough to be both humble

xvi

FOREWORD

and proud, we can see our social experience and ourselves in their proper, diminished perspective at the same time that we can see them in their final enlargement. MARK

Berkeley, California February 22, 1956

SCHORER

Contents

page vii

FOREWORD: SELF AND SOCIETY

by Marli Schorer 3

THE EXAMPLE OF CERVANTES

by Harry Levin 26

THE UNPOETIC COMPROMISE: ON THE RELATION BETWEEN PRIVATE

y

VISION

AND

SOCIAL

ORDER

IN

NINETEENTH-

CENTURY ENGLISH FICTION

by G. Armour Craig MARCEL PROUST AND THE IMAGINATION OF DUCHESSES

by F. W. Dupee 6o

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FRIEND

by Richard Ellmann J*

JAMES JOYCE AND AN IRISH TRADITION

by Vivian H. S. Mercier

XVIU

CONTENTS IIJ

SINCLAIR LEWIS AND THE METHOD OF

HALF-TRUTHS

by Mar\ Schorer 145

SUPERVISING C O M M I T T E E , THE ENGLISH INSTITUTE,

146

CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GUARANTEE FUND,

I f ]

THE PROGRAM,

/50

REGISTRANTS,

I955

1955

1955

I955

SOCIETY

AND

SELF

IN

THE

NOVEL

HARRY LEVIN

The Example of Cervantes

ΤΟ CROWN HIM

with an adjective of his own choosing,

Cervantes continues to be the exemplary novelist. It is a truism, of course, that he set the example for all other novelists to follow. T h e paradox is that, by exemplifying the effects of fantasy on the mind, he pointed the one way for fiction to attain the effect of truth. W e state his achievement somewhat more concretely when we say that he created a new form by criticizing the old forms. Don

Quixote,

in terms of its intention and impact, constituted

an overt act of criticism. Through its many varieties of twosided observation, there runs a single pattern: the pattern of art embarrassed by confrontation with nature. This is the substance of the critical comment that every chapter makes in a differing context. W e can test it by considering the implications of two such passages, taken from familiar and typical episodes, widely separated yet closely related.1 Our first passage occurs in Chapter X X I I of the First Part, 1

With some cross reference to the original Spanish in the interests of semantics,

and a good deal of paraphrase in the interests of condensation, I shall be quoting

4

THE

EXAMPLE

OF

CERVANTES

which is entitled "Of the liberty Don Quixote gave to many wretches, who were a-carrying perforce to a place they desired not." Let us pause for a moment over this heading. It turns into a characteristically dry understatement as soon as we realize that "the place they desired not" was the galleys. But the emphasis falls on the two common nouns in the main clause, "liberty" and "wretches." Libertad!

The very word, which was to reverberate

with such easy sonority for Walt Whitman, carried a poignant overtone for Cervantes. After the famous battle of Lepanto in which he lost the use of his hand, as he never tires of retelling, he had been captured by pirates and sold as a slave, and had perforce spent five long years in Algerian captivity. That enslavement, in a place Cervantes desired not, must have lent special meaning to Don Quixote's gesture of liberation. The tale later told by the Captive—the Spanish Captain enslaved at Algiers who recovers his greatest joy, lost liberty—is highly romanticized; but it hints that the actual truth was stranger than the incidental fiction when it mentions a certain Cervantes ("tal de Saavedra") and the deeds he did—and all to achieve liberty ("y todas por alcanzar libertad," i.xl). Hence the wretches are more to be pitied than scorned; and here the key word, desdichados,

is not so much a term of con-

tempt as an ironic expression of fellow-feeling. It may not be irrelevant to recall that El Desdichado

is also the title Gerard de

Nerval gives to his melancholy sonnet on the romantic hero. A similar ambiguity characterizes the French les misérables or the Cervantes from

the contemporaneous

English

translation

of Thomas

Shelton.

Spelling will be modernized, and parenthetical numbers will refer to any standard text.

THE

EXAMPLE

OF CERVANTES

Russian neshchastnenXi.

5

The undertones of humanitarian sym-

pathy, implied when Don Quixote liberates the convicts, come to the surface when he finally reaches Barcelona, and we are brought face to face with galley-slaves. Again we cannot help thinking of the author—not because his book is, in any sense, autobiographical; but because it is, like most great books, the unique distillation of mature experience. Behind the book stands a soldier of misfortune who had encountered many setbacks on his personal journey to Parnassus. Having tried his one good hand at virtually all the flowery forms of the artificial literature of that baroque period, he had addressed himself to the hazards of the road in the uncongenial guise of tax collector. And again it is of himself that he speaks with rueful humor, when the Priest and the Barber hold their inquisition over the books in Don Quixote's library. Among those which are set aside from the burning is the pastoral romance of Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The Priest mitigates his criticism with a pun : this author is "más versado en desdichas que en versos"—better versed in misfortunes than in verses (i.vi). Don Quixote's ideal of humanistic perfection is to be equally well versed in arms and letters. It might be opined that he fails because his military training has lagged so far behind his literary preparation. Something like the contrary might be maintained about his creator. At all events, after all he had been through, Cervantes would have been the very last man to cherish romantic illusions on the subject of adventure. He was therefore just the man to dramatize a distinction which has since become an axiom, which has indeed become so axiomatic that it might well be called Cervantes's formula. This is nothing more nor less than

6

T H E E X A M P L E OF C E R V A N T E S

a recognition of the difference between verses and reverses, between words and deeds, palabras and hechos—in short, between literary artifice and that real thing which is life itself. But literary artifice is the only means that a writer has at his disposal. How else can he convey his impression of life ? Precisely by discrediting those means, by repudiating that air of bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped. When Pascal observed that true eloquence makes fun of eloquence—"La vraie éloquence se moque de l'éloquence"—he succinctly formulated the principle that could look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar. It remained for La Rochefoucauld to restate the other side of the paradox: some people would never have loved if they had not heard of love. The chapter that sees the convicts liberated is rather exceptional in its direct approach to reality. The preceding chapter has been a more devious and characteristic excursion into the domain of romance. Its theme, which has come to be a byword for the transmuting power of imagination, as well as for Don Quixote's peculiar habit of imposing his obsession upon the world, is the barber's basin he takes for the fabulous helmet of Mambrino, stolen from Rinaldo by Sacripante in the Orlando Furioso. If the recovery of this knightly symbol is effected without undue incident, it is because the barber has no wish to fight; subsequently, when he returns to claim his property, he allows himself to be persuaded that it is really a helmet which has been enchanted to look like a basin. Such is the enchantment Don Quixote invokes to rationalize his defeats and embarrassments. Delusions of grandeur, conveniendy enough, are sustained by phobias of persecution; somehow hostile enchanters always manage to get between him and the fulfillment of his ideals. Cervantes borrowed his

T H E E X A M P L E OF C E R V A N T E S

7

plot from an interlude about a peasant bemused by popular ballads; though that donnée is elaborated through an infinite series of variations, it remains almost repetitiously simple. Each episode is a kind of skit in which the protagonist, attempting to put his heroic ideals into action, is discomfited by realities in the shape of slapstick comedy. Thus deeds, with a vengeance, comment on words; and Cervantes's formula is demonstrated again and again. Afterward there are more words, pleasant discussions, "graciosos razonamientos"—which naturally require the presence of an amusing companion, an interlocutor, a gracioso. The hero of cape-and-sword drama is squired by such a buffoon; the courtier is often burlesqued by the zany who serves him; Don Quixote's servant— like Figaro or Jeeves—is cleverer, in some vital respects, than his master. Much, possibly too much, has already been written on the dualism of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as a symbolic representation of soul and body, past and present, poetry and prose, the inner dilemmas of psychology, or the all-embracing antitheses of metaphysics. We need only remind ourselves in passing that, within this eternal comedy team, Sancho Panza's role is to assert a sense of reality. The incident of the windmills provides him with his usual cue and his classical response. When die knight beholds these machines in the distance, and asks the squire whether he too does not behold those monstrous giants, it is Sancho's function to reply with another question: "What giants?" In his person the challenging voice of empiricism does its best and its worst to refute the aprioristic frame of mind, which has become so closely identified with the Don that we sometimes term it "Quixotry." Now, on the comic stage, Sancho would have the final word.

8

THE

E X A M P L E OF

CERVANTES

In the pictorial vision of Daumier, the pair coexist within the same frame of reference as the bourgeoisie and the caricatured intellectuals. Yet in a book, where words are the only medium, Don Quixote enjoys a decided advantage; the very weakness of his position in life lends strength, as it were, to his position in literature; in the field of action he may encounter discomfiture, but in the verbal sphere he soon resumes his imaginary career. When Sancho is skeptical about the basin and goes on to doubt the rewards of knighthood, the Don simply lapses into his autistic fantasies of wish-fulfillment; and his conversation during the next few pages spins out another romance in miniature. The most elaborate of the many little romances that run through his head and through the novel figures in his argument with the Canon of Toledo at the end of the First Part, and offers Cervantes occasion to develop his theory of the comic epic in prose. The Canon, on his side, is a more erudite humanist than Sancho Panza; but he casts the weight of his learning in favor of what the critics have labeled "probability"; and he pertinendy distinguishes between fictitious and truthful histories (historia imaginada,

historia

verdadera).

Don Quixote's answer is a powerful statement of the appeal of romance. Freud would have diagnosed it as the purest indulgence in the pleasure-principle, the sheerest escape from the realityprinciple. It is the daydream of a golden world of gardens and castles where art improves upon nature, where blandishing damsels await the errant adventurer and every misadventure leads toward a happy ending. It is a heady and concentrated restatement of the ever appealing myth that, in Cervantes's day, incarnated its bland archetype in Amadis of Gaul. Amadis, like

THE

EXAMPLE

OF C E R V A N T E S

9

every true cavalier, was by definition a paragon who surpassed all other cavaliers; his invulnerable prowess was as unparalleled as the peerless beauty of his lady, Oriana, or the perfect faithfulness of his squire, Gandalin. H e was predestined to triumph over an all but endless sequence of rivals and obstacles, and to be united with his heroine in an enchanted chamber which only the bravest and fairest could enter, somewhere out of this world on an uncharted island misleadingly named Terra Firma. Meanwhile the chronicle of his adventures and those of his progeny, prolonged through five generations and twenty-four volumes, furnished the primary source of inspiration for Don Quixote, whose pattern of behavior is—to speak it profanely—a kind of

imitatio Amad'ts. Imitation is the test that Cervantes proposes, knowing full well that when nature imitates art, art reveals its innate artificiality. Literally his hero reenacts episodes from the life cycle of his own hero, as when he assumes the name of Beltenebros and undergoes penance in the Sierra Morena. But since he aspires to combine the virtues of other heroes—the Nine Worthies, the Twelve Paladins, the aggregate muster-roll of knight errantry—he must likewise emulate Ariosto's Orlando. And since Orlando went mad for love of the fair Angelica, Don Quixote must rage in order to prove his devotion to the fair Dulcinea del Toboso. 1 he place name he attaches to his kitchen-maid heroine is less aristocratic than anticlimactic, particularly when it is left to dangle as the refrain of one of the poems addressed to her. T h e process of emulation, dedicated to a whole set of models at once, going through their motions so pedantically and overstating their claims so fanatically, tends to reduce them all to absurdity. Because this tendency is

IO

THE E X A M P L E OF

CERVANTES

deliberate, the prevailing method is that of parody: a marvelous gift, according to Ben Jonson, which makes a work "absurder than it was." But Amadis de Gaula could hardly have been absurder than it was; its innumerable sequels might almost have been parodies; while Don Quixote might be no more than another sequel, if it had no objective vantage-point from which to chart the deviations of its subjective course. Its protagonist sallies forth at the outset, talking to himself— as will be his wont—about the historian who will have the honor of recording the exploits he is about to accomplish (i.ii). With a dizzying shift of the time sense, he looks back from the future upon events which have yet to take place. From first to last the narration is colored by his own self-consciousness. A much later sally is introduced by this mock-heroic sentence: "Scarce had the silver morn given bright Phoebus leave with the ardor of his burning rays to dry the liquid pearls on his golden locks, when Don Quixote, shaking off sloth from his drowsy members, rose up and called Sancho his squire, that still lay snorting (ii-xx)." Here, with the calculated anticlimax of the last word, all the mythological ornamentation sinks into bathos. Actuality, suddenly intervening, restores our perspective to a more firmly grounded base of observation. The highflown monologue becomes a pedestrian dialogue, which in turn restates the dialectical issue of the book. Sancho Panza, the principal dialectician, is quite aware of that variance which makes his fall into a mere hole so utterly different from Don Quixote's exploration of the Cave of Montesinos: "There saw he goodly and pleasant visions and here, I believe, I shall see nothing but snakes and toads ( n J v ) . " The pleasant visions are abstract and remote; the snakes and toads

THE

EXAMPLE

OF CERVANTES

II

are concrete and immediate; the variance is all in the point of view. The psychological contrast is reflected in the stylistic texture from the opening page, where the first paragraph is straight factual exposition, while the second echoes two florid sentences from Don Quixote's reading. Diction shows the increasing influence of Sancho's viewpoint when—amid bouquets of poetic conceit and parades of learned authority, the regular mental context of Don Quixote—Cervantes apologizes for using the homely substantive puercos, and thereby calling a pig a pig. Once this sort of interplay has been established, Don Quixote himself can take the metaphorical step from the sublime to the ridiculous. When Sancho reports that Dulcinea's visage is slightly blemished by a mole, he can respond with an inappropriate amplification— "Though she had a hundred moles as well as that one thou sawest in her, they were not moles but moons and bright stars" —a pretty picture which outdoes even Shakespeare's hyperbolic gibes against the Petrarchan sonneteers (iijc). The gravity of his demeanor is matched by the grandiosity of his rhetoric, a manner of speaking broadly connoted by the rhetorical term prosopopeya. His dead-pan humor would not be humorous were someone else not there to see the joke, to watch the imitation becoming a parody by failing to meet the challenge at hand. As his purple passages are juxtaposed with Sancho's vernacular proverbs, the bookish and sluggish flow of his consciousness is freshened and quickened; flat assertion is rounded out and soliloquy is colloquialized. Cervantes, whose Colloquy of the Dogs we must not forget, was well schooled in those mixed modes of Erasmus and Lucian

12

THE

EXAMPLE

OF

CERVANTES

which—linking the early modern spirit to the late Greco-Roman —seem to express the self-questionings of a traditional culture during an epoch of rapid and far-reaching change. The literature of the Renaissance, which moves from one extreme to the other so readily, is the register of a violent effort to catch up with the expanding conditions of life. With its realization that certain themes are still untreated goes the feeling that certain techniques are becoming outmoded. The needed renewal and the strategic enlargement begin by adapting, experimenting, cross fertilizing, and incidentally producing giants and dwarfs whose incongruous qualities merely bear witness to the overplus of creativity. Extraordinary combinations of language, such as macaronics, waver between Latinity and the vulgar tongues. Poetry, evoking the legendary past, varies its tone from nostalgia to facetiousness. Prose impinges, entirely unaware of its possibilities as an imaginative medium. A transitional sense of disproportion makes itself felt, not only in mannerist painting, but in complementary literary genres: mock epic, which magnifies vulgarity, applying the grand manner to commonplace matters; and travesty, which minimizes greatness, reclothing noble figures in base attire. It will easily be seen, from page to page, how Cervantes ranges between these two reductive extremes. One of his own descriptions of his style, at the beginning of the chapter before us, oscillates from high-sounding (altisonante) to trivial {minima).

This oscil-

lation puzzled Shelton so much that he translated the latter word by one more congruent to the former: "divine" (divina). However, Cervantes encompasses many such disparities, bridging the gap between style and subject by the continual play of his irony. Rabelais could revel in the mélange

des genres, parodying the

THE

E X A M P L E OF CERVANTES

I3

quest for the Holy Grail in the cult of the Holy Bottle. A lesser writer, Robert Greene, could live between two worlds and keep them apart : first-hand journalistic accounts of the London underworld and mannered pastoral romances set in some escapist Arcadia, with very little intermixture of styles. The immeasurable contribution of Cervantes was to broaden the province of prose fiction by bringing both realms together, not in a synthesis perhaps, but in the most durable antithesis that literature has known; by opening a colloquy between the romance and the picaresque, so to speak, between Amad'ts de Gaula and Lazarillo

de

Termes.

Spain, with its strongly marked chiaroscuro of contrasts, social as well as cultural, presented the pertinent matter of fact along with the far-fetched matter of fiction. The first-person narrative of the little beggar, Lazarillo, whose harsh masters taught him to cheat or be cheated, gave Cervantes the fructifying example for an exemplary novel to which Don Quixote refers, and Cortadillo—a

Rinconete

tale endearing to American readers as a Sevil-

lian adumbration of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry

Finn.

Having proceeded discursively, after the fashion of Rocinante, we have come back to our starting point and are ready to set out once again. Our preliminary amble has not been wasted if it has confirmed our awareness of the ' disorderly order" that regulates the imaginary gardens of Cervantes, and that may emerge from the passage to which we now return. After the gang of unfortunates bound for the galleys is released through the officiousness of Don Quixote, he is confounded by reality in the shifty person of their ringleader : a rogue indeed, the authentic picaroon, Ginés de Pasamonte. Ginés, among his other dubious traits, harbors preten-

14

THE

E X A M P L E OF

CERVANTES

sions as a man of letters; to beguile the time in prison, he declares, he has made a book out of the story of his life. This may strengthen the bonds of affinity that connect the present chapter with the life of Cervantes; for we know that the author was imprisoned, through some bureaucratic complication, during the period when he was writing Don Quixote;

and he may be referring to that circum-

stance, with his genius for rising above a situation, when his prologue alludes to "some dark and noisome prison." In any case, Don Quixote is curious about this particular product of incarcerated endeavors. "Is it so good a work?" said Don Quixote. "It is so good," replied Ginés, "that it quite puts down Lazarillo

de Tormes

and as many others as are written or

shall write of that kind: for that which I dare affirm to you is that it treats of true accidents, and those so delightful that no like invention can be compared to them." "And how is the book entitled?" quoth Don Quixote. "It is called," said he, "The Life of Ginés of

Pasamonte."

"And is it yet ended?" said the knight. "How can it be finished," replied he, "my life being not yet ended?" (i.xxii) T o mention a work of fiction in the course of another work of fiction can be a two-edged device. It can show up the book that is mentioned, thereby sharpening the realism of the book that does the mentioning. This is what Ginés does for his own work at the expense of Lazarillo, and what Cervantes is doing for Don Quixote at the expense of Amadts de Gaula, expressly in-

THE

EXAMPLE

OF CERVANTES

I5

vokcd by his own commendatory verses. Conversely, the invidious comparison can glance in the other direction, as in the case of many a derivative academic novel today: the pale reflection of a dream of the shadow of Henry James. But that is unmitigated imitation, and it produces a conventional literature, circumscribing novelists to the point where even their titles must be quotations from other books. The method of Cervantes utilized literary means to break through literary conventions and, in the very process, invented a form substantial and flexible enough to set forth the vicissitudes of modern society. Parody, explicitly criticizing a mode of literature, developed into satire, implicitly criticizing a way of life. Developing out of the debris of feudalism, the novel has waxed and waned with the middle class. Yet in the twentieth century, according to Thomas Mann's contemporary Faust, the arts tend more than ever to parody themselves. The writer's problem, as André Gide has rephrased Cervantes's formula, is still the rivalry between the real world and the representation we make of it—"la rivalité entre le monde réel et la représentation que nous en faisons." It is significant that Gide's most serious novel, which likewise probes the theme of how novels come to be written, is called The Counterfeiters;

and that Mann's last fragment—begun forty

years before and completed only, in the peculiar sense of Ginés, by the author's death—is a reversion to the picaresque cycle, Confessions of Felix Krull. For trickery is inherent, as artists recognize, in their business of dealing with illusion. W e do well then to scrutinize some of their tricks rather closely; and Cervantes is well justified in conveying this caveat, or insight, through the mouth of an incorrigible charlatan. After all, no one can express

l6

T H E E X A M P L E OF

CERVANTES

what is by nature inexpressible. Life itself is infinitely larger than any artistic medium. However, by revealing the limitations of their medium, writers like Cervantes heighten our consciousness of what existence means. The real story of Ginés de Pasamonte, comparatively more real than the imagined Life of Lazarillo

de

Tormes, is bound to be incomplete because life is endless. It lasts forever, as Tolstoy's peasant says before he dies in War

and

Peace. In all sincerity, therefore, we cannot say finis; we can only write "to be continued." And so with Cervantes, like Ginés writing in prison, and breaking off his First Part with a provisory ending and a cautionary moral: Beware of fiction! It is fictitious; that is to say, it is false! Don't let it mislead you! The ironic consequence of his warning was the creation of an archetype, a fictional personage destined to be far more influential than Amadis of Gaul. The remarkable success of the First Part was the precondition of the Second, which is consequently more deliberate in its artistry. By that time, the latter volume announces, the fame of its predecessor has spread so widely that any lean horse would be hailed as Rocinante. The earlier conclusion, in which so little was concluded, clearly invited some continuation. Before Cervantes could take up his own tale again, the interloper who signed himself "Avellaneda" brought out his notorious sequel: an imitation of a parody. Because the impersonation had to be imitative, it could not be organic; it could not live and grow as Cervantes's original would do in his Second Part. The mysterious Avellaneda, when Cervantes finally caught up with him, all but took the place of Amadis as a satirical target, and as a measure of the distance between echoed phrases and lived experiences. Adding insult to injury, he had not only plagiarized; he had also criticized his victim for not keeping his own brain-children

THE

EXAMPLE

OF CERVANTES

V]

in character, and—even more significantly—for introducing Ginés. That scoundrel had shown a comparable ingratitude when he rewarded his liberator with a shower of stones, absconding with Don Quixote's sword and—temporarily—Sancho Panza's ass. But the Second Part arranges a further encounter and, for the knight, an opportune revenge. This involves our second illustration, a rather more extended example which need not be cited at length, since it figures so prominently in the celebrated episode of Master Peter's puppet show. Poetic drama—another genre which Cervantes had practiced with indifferent results—is here reduced to its most elementary level, just as prose fiction was in the instance we have been discussing. The link between these two passages, as we learn from the next chapter, is Maese Pedro himself, who turns out to be none other than Don Quixote's old enemy, Ginés. Always the escape artist, he is now an itinerant showman and more of a dealer in deception than ever. One of his other exhibits happens to be a fortunetelling ape, whose roguish trick is subsequently exposed. Now Cervantes was obviously fond of animals; a dog lover and a master of the beast fable, he satirizes war in a parable about braying asses and courtly love in a serenade of cats; the dramatis personae of his book include a traveling menagerie; but the ape, above all, is the parodistic animal. When che lovelorn Dorothea joins the friendly conspiracy to bring the knight to his senses, she poses as the Infanta Micomica of Micomicón ("Princess Monkey-Monkey of Monkeyland"). Actually a damsel in distress, she acts the part of a damsel in distress; and the make-believe story she recounts to Don Quixote is the parody of a parody, her own story. This monkey-business, if it may be so designated, accelerates to

l8

THE

EXAMPLE

OF

CERVANTES

its climax through a sequence of scenes at the inn. There the incidental stories accumulate, and there the actual personages who tell or figure in them are interrelated through the fiat of romantic coincidence. Viktor Shklovsky has apdy described this meeting place as "a literary inn," though another emphasis would interpret it as a social microcosm. On the one hand, the relationship between letters and arts is the appropriate topic of Don Quixote's discourse; on the other, the crude farce of the wineskins and the stern intervention of the Holy Brotherhood, searching for the importunate busybody who freed the convicts, underline the romance with a touch of reality. The central interpolation is a tale which comes out of the same bag of manuscripts as some of Cervantes's Exemplary

Novels—or so the literary host very plau-

sibly informs his guests. It is the tale of the so-called Curious Impertinent, an almost Proustian study in point of view, wherein Anselmo's universal suspicion functions as a sort of mirroropposite for Don Quixote's ubiquitous credulity. Characterization of the protagonist gains in depth as he passes through the levels of the characters who surround him, in their assumed roles, with their recounted adventures—sometimes tales within tales. As in Chaucer's Canterbury

Tales, the storytellers take on an

extra dimension against the formal backdrop of their stories. The First Part situates these episodes, within the tradition of the frame-story, at an extra remove from the reader. In the Second Part, as the narrator proudly explains, they are unified by the divagations of a single plot. Where the First Part centered upon an inn, which the hero insisted on taking for a castle, the Second Part leads to a long sojourn at a genuine castle, where the conversation is less inspired and the horseplay heavier than

THE

EXAMPLE

OF CERVANTES

I9

at any other juncture o£ the book. Castles in Spain, for nonSpaniards, have proverbially symbolized the veritable fabric of romance. "Castle-building," in the library at Waverley Honour, was the state of mind that engendered the latter-day romances of Sir Walter Scott. The terrain of Don Quixote, the arid region of La Mancha, overlaps Castille, which is quite literally the land of castles. But Cervantes's castle seems to mark an anticlimactic turning point, a release from mental imprisonment, the beginning of an undeception for the knight; while it bewitches the squire, offering him a brief chance to go his own way and to impose the rough justice of the common man on the neighboring dependency of Barataría. Overshadowed by that glimpse of a democratic community, or the disillusioning city of Barcelona just ahead, chivalric entertainment may well pall. Not that the Duke and Duchess have spared any courtesy; they have humored their fantastic guest with such labored vivacity that they are accused of being madder than he; there has been more manipulation and masquerading, more play-acting and practical joking, at the castle than at the inn. The effectiveness of the play-within-the-play lies in making the main drama more convincing: when the king interrupts the players in Hamlet,

we feel that at last we have come to grips

with reality. One way of attaining this effect is to make the theatrical figures unconvincing; and when these are puppets rather than actors, wooden dolls imitating human beings, everything undergoes a reduction of scale; their performance becomes a mode of ridicule, as Bergson has suggested in his essay on laughter. Hence, among the many strategems that Cervantes employs against the romance, none is more sharply conceived nor

20

THE

EXAMPLE

OF

CERVANTES

more skilfully executed than the puppet play. His description of it commences in epic style, with the spectators—Tyrians and Trojans—falling silent, and the youthful reciter appealing to the authority of old French chronicles and Spanish ballads (n-xxvi). T h e setting is a city whose ancient name, Sansueña, suffuses a dreamy atmosphere. T h e plot concerns the Princess Melisendra, imprisoned by the Moors even as Cervantes himself has been, and her knightly rescuer, Gaiféros, who must accomplish his task by fighting the Moors as Cervantes has done—but with a difference, that crucial difference between fantasy and actuality which it is his constant purpose to emphasize. For once Don Quixote has no need to superimpose his fancies; he need only take the presentation literally. As a matter of fact, he starts by criticizing certain details of Moorish local color. Gradually he suspends his disbelief—which has never been too strong—and enters into the spirit of the occasion so actively that, before the others can stop him, he has begun "to rain strokes upon the puppetish Moorism." T h e puppeteer, Ginés alias Pedro, cries: "Hold, Señor Don Quixote, hold! and know that these you hurl down, destroy, and kill, are not real Moors but shapes made of pasteboard." And reality is restored no less abruptly than it is when Alice cries out to the creatures of Wonderland: "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" Pedro-Ginés, the arch-manipulator, the ever versatile illusionist, laments his loss for an operatic moment or two, and then shrewdly reckons it up: so much for Charlemagne split down the middle, so much for Melisendra without a nose, and so on down to the last marivedi, paid in full by Don Quixote in coin of the realm. Such mercenary language contrasts with another aspect of the show: the puppets were

THE E X A M P L E

OF CERVANTES

21

knocked down, we are told, "in less than two credos." This is rather a figure of speech than an article of belief; and the wax candles probably have no ritual significance; yet it is worth remembering that the word retablo,

applied to the puppet show,

signifies primarily an altarpiece. I do not want to place undue stress on symbols which prove so brittle; but we cannot altogether ignore the iconoclasm of Cervantes, since the Inquisition did not. In the next chapter, when the narrator swears to his own veracity as a Catholic Christian, the author himself feels obliged to point out that this protestation comes from an unbelieving Moor (ii.xxvii). Elsewhere he repeatedly warns us that Moors are not to be trusted : they are "cheaters, impostors, and chemists" (n.iii). Cervantes's fictional narrator is one of these elusive infidels: an "Arabical and Manchegan historiographer" named the Cide Hamete Benengeli, who does not appear in the opening pages of the book. Don Quixote completes his first sally, saunters forth again, challenges the Biscayan, and is left sword in air by the break between the seventh and eighth chapters. In a digression, Cervantes tells us that his documentation has run out, and that we might well have been left in suspense forever; again, as in the later colloquy between Don Quixote and Ginés, life is conceived as an unfinished book. Happily, in a bazaar at Toledo, Cervantes has chanced upon an Arabic manuscript which will supply the rest of the story; and from now on the Cide Hamete will be responsible for it, even as Captain Clutterbuck or Jedediah Cleishbotham would be responsible for Scott's narrations, and other pseudonymous narrators for Stendhal's and Manzoni's. Since the author presents himself as editor, assuming

22

T H E E X A M P L E OF C E R V A N T E S

the intervention of a Spanish translator from the Arabic, the text stands at three removes from ourselves, enriched with afterthoughts like a palimpsest. This procedure has the advantages of enabling the author to digress more freely, to blame his source for indiscreet remarks, and to cultivate an air of authenticity. But authenticity is deeply called into question on one problematic occasion, when the whole trend of the book is reversed, turning back from pragmatic demonstration to metaphysical speculation, or—in the more incisive phrase of Americo Castro—from a critique of fiction to a critique of reality. Can men's lives be so sharply differentiated from their dreams, when all is said and done? Can we live without illusion? we are asked. Don Quixote may be right, the rest of us wrong. Many of the philosophers, most of the poets, would take his side. Spanish imagination is not unique in having been fascinated by Calderóni refrain : "La vida es sueño," life is a dream. Even Shakespeare conceded the possibility: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on. . . ." Who are we, in that event, to look down upon puppets imprisoned within the dream-city of Sansueña? May it not be that the images of ourselves created by writers, as Pirandello would urge, are more real than we are? For example, Don Quixote. The chapter that explores such ultimate doubts is admittedly apocryphal; it may be an intermixture of truth and falsehood, as pantomimed by Maese Pedro's ape. We are tempted to believe that Don Quixote's descent into the Cave of Montesinos is a return to the deep well of the past, the unconscious memory of the race, and that the mythical heroes sleeping there personify the ideals he struggled to practice, the ideology of the Golden

THE

E X A M P L E OF CERVANTES

23

Age. Yet the simple and brutal alternative persists that he may have been caught in a lie and have become a party to the general imposture. In the absence of other witnesses, certainty continues to elude us. The best advice Don Quixote can report is the gambler's maxim spoken, curiously enough, by the flower and mirror of chivalry, Durandarte: "Paciencia y barajar," patience and shuffle, go on with the game (n.xxiii). After the underground interview with the dead heroes, the next stage is the fable about the asses, and then the puppetry of Pedro-Ginés; and each successive chapter is a station on the pilgrimage of disenchantment. Disarmed, dismounted, and finally discomfited, the former knight is on his way homeward, when the sight of shepherds rouses his flagging impulses to their last wish-dream. Sancho, of course, has an important part in it: "I'll buy sheep and all things fit for our pastoral vocation; and calling myself by the name of shepherd Quixotiz and thou the shepherd Pansino, we will walk up and down the hills, through woods and meadows, singing and versifying and drinking the liquid crystal of the fountains, sometimes out of the clear springs and then out of the swift-running rivers." (n.lxvii) But Don Quixote has come to the end of his life and, accordingly, of his book. It remained for other books to parody the pastoral romances, as his had parodied the romances of chivalry : notably a French disciple of Cervantes, Charles Sorel, who wrote a novel entitled Anti-Romance,

and subtitled The

Wayward

Shepherd

24

THE

(L'Anti-roman,

EXAMPLE

ou le berger extravagant).

OF

CERVANTES

That would be an-

other story; but perhaps the term "anti-romance" might be usefully borrowed to generalize a major premise of the modern novel, from Fielding, who began as Cervantes's professed imitator by lampooning Richardson, to Jane Austen, who sharpened her acute discriminations on Gothic romances and novels of sensibility: Charming as were all of Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. The time, the place, and the style of Northanger

Abbey

have

little in common with Cervantes; but his protean formula has held, as it has been readjusted to varying situations through the lengthy record of Don Quixote's posthumous adventures. One of the many female Quixotes has been Madame Bovary; one of the many Russian Quixotes has been Prince Myshkin. Heinrich Heine summed up the Romantic Movement as a school of Quixotry when he exclaimed: "Jean-Jacques Rousseau was my Amadis of Gaul!" In a parallel vein, it might be argued that Voltaire's Amadis of Gaul was Leibniz, that Tolstoy's was Napoleon, or Mark Twain's Baedeker. The number of specific instances would seem to indicate some broader principle, such as André Malraux has recently formulated in his illustrated treatise on the creative imagination. His dictum—that every artist begins with pastiche—is highly illuminating, so far as it goes; it has to be qualified only by recognizing that pastiche

implies both ac-

tivities which we have associated and distinguished, imitation

THE

EXAMPLE

OF CERVANTES

25

and parody. T h e novelist must begin by playing the sedulous ape, assimilating the craft of his predecessors; but he does not master his own form until he has somehow exposed and surpassed them, passing from the imitation of art through parody to the imitation of nature.

G. ARMOUR CRAIG

The Unpoetic Compromise: On the Relation between Private Vision and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century

English Fiction

THE HEROINE of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre,

ending

one large episode of her life and about to begin another, stands at the window of her room at Lowood School. She looks out beyond the garden: . . . there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks: it was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits. 1 1 fane Eyre, p. 89. The page numbers cited are those of the Modern Library (1950) reprint; for other works the page numbers cited are as follows: W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Modern Library (1950) reprint; George Eliot, Middlemarch, The World's Classics (1947) reprint; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Modern Library ( 1 9 2 3 ) reprint; Charles Dickens, Bleat^ House, Everyman's Library (1954) reprint; Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Modern Library (•937) reprint; Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Everyman's Library (1946) reprint; Jane Austen, Emma, The World's Classics (1950) reprint.

THE UNPOETIC COMPROMISE

ΐη

Jane Eyre's position and attitude are familiar to readers of nineteenth-century English fiction. W e may recall that Becky Sharp also dreamed of freedom in her room at Miss Pinkerton's Academy: "She had a little room in the garret, where the maids heard her walking and sobbing at night; but it was with rage and not with g r i e f (p. 15). We may remember that Dorothea Brooke, preparing herself for the judicious proposal of Mr. Casaubon, "pondered the vision that had arisen before her of a possible future to which she looked forward with trembling hope" while she "absorbed into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other." Like Jane Eyre and many another heroine, Dorothea is "a nature altogether ardent . . . hemmed in by a social life" which seems "a labyrinth of petty courses"; and like other young seekers, "the thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge" (pp. 22, 24). Much later, Jude Fawley climbs the workmen's ladder to the roof of the barn and sees or thinks he sees the far-off lights of Christminster, and he resolves someday to reach the "city of light" (p. 25). Or there is Esther Summerson, waking on her first morning at Bleak House: she had arrived in darkness, and she looks out her window to see the strange world lurn visible in friendly morning light. " A s tne prospect gradually revealed itself, and disclosed the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep." Esther's vision of "dark places . . . all melted away" is an anticipation of the adventure before her (pp. 84-85).

28

THE

UNPOETIC

COMPROMISE

A large anthology of such passages might be compiled. The beholder of lights, shadows, and distant regions is almost invariably an orphan, is usually a young woman, and is always on the brink of a new social relation. In some of the worst novels as well as in the best, from a high place and in solitude the heroine looks out on the world, and in her vision we see her difference from those around her. Milly Theale, in The

Wings

Of The Dove, is first presented to us in a higher situation and with a wider range of vision than any other heroine can sustain. She looks down on "the kingdoms of the earth" from an Alpine promontory, and we see her there through the eyes of Susan Stringham, who breathlessly debates the alternatives implied by such a view. She concludes that Milly's attitude is a large affirmation: it bespeaks not some "horrible hidden obsession" but "a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had nothing to gain from violence" (pp. 138-39). For Mrs. Stringham, Milly is "the real thing, the romantic life itself" (p. 120) ; and so she must be for the reader, who first encounters her in this Jamesian elaboration of what may almost be called a convention. By her solitary elevation the heroine is distinguished from the world around her. Her difference may be simple hostility or partial acquiescence, or it may be a relation that only pages and pages of dialogue and action can express. But the interest of the reader is in how the difference will turn out. He looks forward to what George Eliot calls "the outcome" of the "nature" set off before him. That our interest in such "outcomes" is of limited importance, we do not readily grant. For most of us, as for Henry James, the novel is "a direct impression of life," and it is difficult to imagine the register of any impression richer or fuller than this. Yet re-

THE

UNPOETIC

COMPROMISE

2Ç

spectable men, beginning perhaps with Plato, have found the preoccupations of the novel-reader dangerously narrow. T h e philosopher T . H . Green in 1862 said, Novel-reading aggravates two of the worst maladies of modern times, self-consciousness and want of reverence. . . . Scarcely understanding what is meant by 'divine indifference' as to the fate of individual existences in the evolution of God's plan, we weary heaven with complaints that we find the world contrary, or that we cannot satisfy ourselves with a theory of life. 2 Such lamentation may well be the occupational disease of the novel-reader, for "divine indifference" towards the fate of the characters before him is just what he cannot attain. And a sense of the contrariness of the world, even of the inadequacy of theories of life, will often be our response to the pages before us. Green goes on to say that the events of a novel cannot be subordinated to "ideas," nor can they be simple "phenomena to excite curiosity." The reader cannot be detached and neutral: if he reads a novel at all, its events must become "misfortunes or blessings to excite sentiment." Green believed that such sentiment dies hard; the habitual reader of novels must come to think "his personal joys and sorrows of interest to angels and men"; the world becomes for him not "a theater for the display of God's glory and the unknown might of man," but "merely an organism for affecting himself with pains and pleasures." "Thus regarded," Green con2 Tie Work.s Of Thomas Hill Green, ed. R. L. Nettleship (3 vols., London, 1 9 1 1 ) , III, 37, 38. The essay is entitled "An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times."

30

THE UNPOETIC

COMPROMISE

dudes, "it must needs lose its claim on his reverence, for it is narrowed to the limits of his own consciousness." 3 With all its negations, this description is not easy to improve. Although it looks at the novel in its unredeemed state of mere literature and sees it as something less than myth or fable, it describes the novel in relation to an interested reader rather than an abstract concept. The novel so considered does indeed describe events as "misfortunes or blessings to excite sentiment," and it cannot but limit the world of its events to the reader's own consciousness. And while it may or may not be true that all novel readers go on reading long after their books have been closed, Green lived at a time when great twenty-part stories were providing thousands with irresistible ways of imagining their own lives, and only the strong-minded man can refuse to see himself as the center of an absorbing tale. But what Green's criticism implies, and the limitation he attacks, is a necessary "this-sidedness" in the world of fiction. T h e most a novel can present to its readers is a social world. Jane Eyre does not see the blue peaks and dream of becoming a mountain-climber, nor is Esther Summerson about to take up the study of optics. The "outcomes" we anticipate will involve their "natures" with others, and as we read of their relations with others, society will emerge for us not as seen from some supra-social position or as adapted to some pre-social end, but as a felt relation—as a relation experienced from within. The novelist's world, however obvious it may be to say so, does not contain the evolution of God's plan or the unknown might of man. As a world discovered while we read, it can be no more than an organism affecting us with known 8

Ibid., pp. 38, 39.

THE UNPOETIC

COMPROMISE

3I

pleasure and pain, and its relations can go no higher than the limits of a single consciousness. Whatever larger purposes he may glimpse in other situations, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good novel must be in want of society. But precisely because their worlds are limited to the grasp of the single consciousness, the novels of the last century yield some surprising observations when we approach them through our interest in the outcome of private visions. They can show us how large the single consciousness must be when it achieves a sense of society, and they can show us the distinctions it must contain if the difference between the dreamer and the world is to be preserved. They can show us, in brief, just how much variety the mere social mind can support. No novel is more relevant to such an approach than Jane Eyre. The success of this work a literary historian must find too good to be true; it is the novel he must have invented if he had not found so many readers captured by it. For no heroine dreams more often or more successfully than the heroine of this strange romance. After she has escaped from the "prison-ground" of Lowood to become governess at Thornfield, Jane's visions enlarge and become more frequent. Often, she tells us, she climbed to the attic of the big house and there "looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line," longing for "a power of vision which might overpass that limit." Whenever she was "restless" in the confines of her womanly duties she went to this high place and there, "safe in the silence and solitude," listened with her "inward ear" to "a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with

32

THE

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all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence" (p. 1 1 6 ) . T h e heroine of this vague inner narrative is of course Jane herself, but as the grammar of these fragments will have indicated, Jane Eyre is also the narrator of that larger history in which these recurring visions constitute an episode of indefinite length. W e begin to suspect that the outcome of this heroine's visions cannot but be in her favor, and our suspicions are soon justified. Jane Eyre moves towards her unnamed goal beyond the skyline by a highly secular version of those "gradations of glory" (p. 60) which Helen Burns believed in beyond this life. T h e first glorious gradation is of course Jane's elevation by her master's proposal of marriage. Mr. Rochester is ardent but candid : " Y o u — you strange—you almost unearthly thing! I love as my

own

flesh. You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are— I entreat to accept me as a husband" (p. 275). Such a consummation Jane properly characterizes as she accepts it : "to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale—a daydream" (p. 280). So f a r the tale told by her imagination has come true, and so far the sentimental reader sighs in an ecstasy of satisfaction. But Jane soon ascends another gradation. On her wedding day it is revealed that Rochester is already married. H e grimly conducts the party back from the church to Thornfield, and there in the very attic where Jane was wont to dream—where indeed sometimes her dreams were interrupted by eerie laughter —shows them the secret of the manor: a grovelling madwoman whom he must keep locked up. It is clear that morally at least Jane has risen a little over her master : she has plotted no bigamy, she is no deceiver. A n d after Rochester's explanations and pro-

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testations of love, she confirms her superiority by refusing to fly with him to the south of France as his mistress. She reflects, it is true, that such a liaison would put her in the social position of Rochester's former mistresses. But it is also true that she refuses his proposal because it is irreligious. In her depression after the discovery of the bestial wife, Jane says, "One idea only still throbbed life-like within me—a remembrance of G o d " (p. 3 2 1 ) . In her infatuation during the courtship, Rochester had come to stand between her and "every thought of religion" : " I could not, in those days, see G o d for his creature: of whom I had made an idol" (p. 297). But now religion is the only resource : " I will keep the law given by G o d ; sanctioned by man," she declares (p. 344), and then runs away from Thornfield. A t the end of her flight Jane is befriended by the Rivers family, but she overwhelmingly returns their kindness when she learns she is their cousin and heiress of their uncle's handsome estate. She shares the inheritance with them and is for the first time in her career equal in money and the power of property to those around her, while the reader takes satisfaction in observing that this reward comes after the exercise of virtue. Yet Jane is not therefore better than all around her, for she owes her power to the righteousness of the brother, St. John Rivers, who is, appropriately, a most devout young clergyman. H e has discovered Jane's name and parentage and has arranged that she should receive the bequest. But her moral stature is sufficient for St. John, for he asks her to marry him and go with him to India as a missionary. A n d with her refusal, or at least her evasion, of this proposal, Jane ascends the next gradation of glory. For St. John's proposal is made from the highest motives. H e

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has judged Jane carefully and finds her sufficient for the duties he asks her to share. " A missionary's wife you must—shall be. . . . I claim you—not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign's service." Of his own role he is certain: " I am the servant of an infallible master . . . my captain is the All-perfect." A n d he is certain of hers: "God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife." When Jane offers to go with him not as his wife but as a sister and fellow-laborer, St. John is even more emphatic : " D o you think God will be satisfied with half an oblation ? Will he accept a mutilated sacrifice?" There can be no compromise: "consider my offer: and do not forget that if you reject it, it is not me you deny, but God" (pp. 437, 438, 442, 446). The full, official, and authentic representative of religion, the embodiment of the power through which Jane has risen above the importuning of Mr. Rochester, has spoken. It is hardly conceivable that our heroine should rise above his claim. But rise she does, when one midnight a little later St. John renews his suit. Jane is wavering: "Religion called—Angels beckoned—God commanded—life rolled together like a scroll. . . ." But in one of the great moments of Victorian literature her struggle suddenly ends. Her heart stands still "to an inexpressible feeling" which rouses her senses "as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor." She hears her name called three times: "Jane! Jane! Jane!" but by a voice that comes from nowhere—"I had heard it—where or whence, for ever impossible to know." But it is a human voice—"a known, loved, well-remembered voice, that of Edward Fairfax Rochester." It speaks "in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently," and Jane

answers

promptly: " I am coming! Wait for me! Oh, I will come," and adds very sensibly, "Where are you?" (pp. 456-58).

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35

T w o consequences of this unearthly conversation must be noticed. One is immediate. St. John, whose condition we can only imagine, is brushed aside. "It was my time to assume ascendancy. My powers were in play and in force." Jane orders him to leave and he obeys at once; he is in fact finished. The origin of the voice cannot be known, but it has demolished the claims of the servant of the All-perfect. The second consequence is more startling. Leaving her cousins, Jane discovers Rochester living in a far-off manor in deep woods. She learns that Thornfield has been burned down, set on fire by the maniac in the attic, and that in trying to save her Rochester has been blinded and has lost his left hand. By Jane's return to him he is almost precisely as astonished as she had been by his proposal of marriage, and they seem at last equals by the reversals of their fortunes. For then, some ten chapters back, just before he had asked her to marry him, Jane had passionately exclaimed against the social difference between them : "If God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you" (p. 274). But now, at the end of the story, these differences have disappeared, for the character of Jane's beauty is at least irrelevant and she is rich. Moreover the moral equality Jane had claimed on the earlier occasion seems fully established now. Then, she had cried: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!" (p. 274). We have seen her assert this fullness of heart in defiance of Rochester's wishes, but now, at their reunion, Rochester seems her equal in this respect also. For he tells her how he has begun "only of late" to see "the hand of God" in his doom. He has begun to experience "remorse, repent-

36

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ance," and has risen so far towards Jane's moral rank that he has even begun to pray. H e proceeds to relate a particularly vehement prayer he offered not four nights since—yes, near midnight on Monday. Alone, weary and desolate, he prayed that he might be taken from the torments of his life. " T h a t I merited all I endured, I acknowledged—that I could scarcely endure more, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my heart's wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words—'Jane! Jane! Jane!' " (pp. 487-88). H e tells further how he heard Jane's reply, and concludes his remarkable recital by offering still another prayer, in which he begs his " R e d e e m e r " to give him strength to lead henceforth a purer life. H e puts out his hand to be led, and we may imagine with what mighty crescendo of some heavenly Victorian Wurlitzer, is taken home by Jane, his "prop and guide." But before they depart, Jane addresses a confidential observation to the only listener who can share it: Reader, it was on Monday night—near midnight—that I too had received the mysterious summons: . . . I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative; but made no disclosure in return. T h e coincidence struck me as too a w f u l and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed (p. 488). But the reason she offers for her silence stands oddly beside Mr. Rochester's account of his repentance and conversion: "If I told anything," she says, " m y tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer; and that mind, yet from its suffering too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural." She ends her address to the reader with a paraphrase of the Virgin's response to the tidings

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37

of the shepherds : " I kept these things then, and pondered them in my heart." T h e final gradation has been achieved; Jane stands alone in glory. Rochester may have risen to the moral level from which she once refused him, but she has overpassed even this peak. T o imagine a different consequence here is to see how impossible it is for Jane to be anyone's equal. W e might rewrite the address to the reader as a confession to Rochester: " I too, O Edward, I too!" Such a disclosure in return ought to produce the happiest union of equals before God, though what kind of God is perhaps hard to say. But that Jane makes no such disclosure, despite the confusion of "gloom" and "shade" with Rochester's new religious state, is the most consistent stroke in the book. Back in the speech before Rochester's proposal of marriage, when Jane protests her moral equality while granting her social inferiority, she winds up her declaration with an explanation of its rhetoric: "I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh:— it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal—as we are" (p. 274). T h a t such an exchange of spiritual addresses should eventually occur in this novel is indeed "too a w f u l and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed." For whatever anyone else may know, Jane Eyre, who is both heroine and narrator, must know better. A n d by her dramatic overwhelming of St. John, Jane has overpassed the religious grounds on which Rochester now claims equality with her. Jane's own "heart," the private morality of her "soul," has carried her higher than the grounds of Rochester's conversion. T h e movement of her vision

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towards realization is so rapacious that no terms are left in which to account for it; certainly there were no terms beyond religion for a writer such as Charlotte Bronte. Her heroine has narrated herself into silence, and the novel must end. In every relationship Jane rises from inferiority to superiority. Her inferiority is expressed again and again as imprisonment; her superiority appears as the narrative confirmation of her Tightness in resisting imprisonment. For resisting the gross attack of John Reed and for asserting an unpalatable version of the Reed family's behavior towards her, Jane is imprisoned in the Red Room at Gateshead. After imprisonment she so far ascends as to dispute Mrs. Reed's account of her to the infamous Mr. Brocklehurst: "You are deceitful," she insists (p. 36). Later she returns to Gateshead, accomplished, successful, and above all right: her version of the Reed children has been borne out, and Mrs. Reed on her deathbed confesses that she has been deceitful, first in not carrying out the wishes of her dead husband with respect to Jane and later in lying to the uncle who has been seeking Jane to leave her his fortune. The night after Rochester's dreadful wife is exposed, Jane dreams of the Red Room, and next day, as Rochester begs her to become his mistress, she feels another kind of imprisonment: "I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals" (p. 342). From this prison she rises on the wings of religious principle only to enter a new one. For when St. John for the last time urges her to be his missionary bride, Jane reports: "My iron shroud contracted round me: persuasion advanced with slow step" (p. 440). Earlier she speaks of St. John's influence on her as a contraction of her "liberty of mind." But her triumph over St. John makes her superior not

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39

only to the version of her nature that he insists on; it also makes her superior to the highest equality anyone can conceive of in this little world of gentlefolk, parsons, governesses, servants, teachers, and manufacturers—equality before the throne of God. The movement of this novel is literally transcendence with a vengeance. It will long since have appeared that this recurring ascent is expressed symbolically, and few novels of the period are so thoroughly articulated in images. The sexual symbols are so frequent and crude that the novel might be subtitled The Red and The Black. The destruction of Rochester's strong hand and volcanic eyes, which has been called, no doubt rightly, a castration symbol,4 is monstrously prepared for in the paraphrase of a passage from the Sermon on the Mount with which Jane decides what she must do after learning that Rochester is married: "No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall, yourself, pluck out your right eye : yourself cut off your right hand : your heart shall be the victim; and you, the priest, to transfix it" (p. 322). The subterranean sadism is all too rich, and the imagery is sometimes so gross that the reader must laugh if he does not close his eyes and skip. Perhaps the grimmest joke in the book is the compliment offered to Jane by both St. John and Rochester : "You delight in sacrifice."5 But these underground horrors are not the subject of Jane Eyre, inevitable though they may be as the vehicle, and relevant 4

Sec Richard Chase, "The Brontes : A Centennial Observance," Kenyon Review, IX (1947), 495; reprinted in William Van O'Connor, Forms Of Modern Fiction (Minneapolis, 1948), p. 108. 5 This is Rochester's version (p. 486). St. John says that in Jane he "recognized a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of sacrifice" (p. 439)·

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as they may be to all we know and infer about the life of its author. They are inevitable because there is no difference between the mind that knows the world of this novel and the mind that seeks to know it in terms of a private vision. In such a structure it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between behavior and motive, and the narrative finally succumbs so completely to the motive that no irony is possible. But the horrors of its real subject are enough, for this novel like any other is about the mind and society, and the action of this novel is the triumph of one mind's version of society. When her story ends Jane has reduced not only the initially overpowering differences of rank; she has reduced to the shape of her own vision the power that, for Charlotte Brontë at least, supports all differences of rank. As he begins his last prayer to his "Redeemer," Rochester tells Jane that when she returned he feared she might not be "real" but might be "silence and annihilation." Perhaps Rochester is the prophet after all. T o eradicate the social difference between an orphan-governess and a gentleman might well involve the convulsion of a supraChristian power. T h e r e can be no doubt, however, that the reduction of the world to the terms of a single vision, no matter how moral its content or how sanctified its motives, is attended by the most dreadful violence. T h e power of the " I " of this novel is secret, undisclosable, absolute. There are no terms to explain its dominance, because no terms can appear which are not under its dominance. T h e violence with which it simplifies the differences

labeled

"inferior,"

"poorer,"

"richer,"

"better,"

or

"higher," the killing and maiming and blinding which are the consequences of its dialectic, tell us as clearly as fiction can that

THE

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4I

even fantasy must subdue a real world. Jane Eyre's vision masters her world, but the price of her mastery is absolute isolation. When she knows her world completely she is out of it by the most rigorous necessity. I know no other work that so effectively demonstrates the demon of the absolute. From this ruinous monolith, however, we may make some useful observations of other nineteenth-century novels. We can look back to the enormous sanity of Jane Austen's Emma, to a heroine who also enjoys some literary visions of the world about her. But the difference between Jane Eyre and Emma is nowhere so clear as in the two sentences in which they are most similar. At the crisis of Emma's career the narrator says: "Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken . . ." (p. 384). It is not a matter of "a coincidence . . . too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed": the terms which have brought about Emma's shattering "coincidence" are the same terms with which she will adjust her vision. Or we can look forward to the pathos which the narrator of Middlemarch finds in the necessary blindness of all our perceptions of others: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" (p. 207). But perhaps the most illuminating comparison may be made between Jane Eyre and Blea\ House, for the latter, though one novel, has two narratives. The first narrative, in the conventional third person, connects for us at the outset the world of London and Chancery with the world of Fashion. The thick fog of the end

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of Michaelmas Term covers both : it reaches from the bored Lady Dedlock to the corrupted ground of a neglected city churchyard. Although no one can penetrate the fog of Chancery and no one can connect the ramifications of the great case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, yet under the fog and darkness connections are constantly made. The impersonal narrator asks: What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, . . . and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard steps? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have nevertheless been very curiously brought together? (p. 202). And in his narrative such questions are answered. Jo the crossingsweeper brings a mysterious lady to see the grave of the nameless law-writer whose hand Lady Dedlock has recognized. Lady Dedlock and the dead man are brought together across great gulfs by the curiosity of Tulkinghorn, the lawyer. A n d Esther Summerson is connected with Lady Dedlock by the curiosity of Mr. Guppy, the sentimental clerk with the authoritarian parent. Even Grandfather Smallweed connects Esther with Lady Dedlock in his curious association with T h e Reverend and Mrs. Chadband. T h e second narrative, that of Esther Summerson, is in the first person, and it opens with the assertion: " I know I am not clever" (p. 13). The connections made in the third-person narrative are incomprehensible to Esther. She cannot understand the stigma

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which is her aunt's sole contribution to her education: "Your mother, Esther, was your disgrace, and you are hers" (p. 16). She is the subject of investigations and concealments described in the third-person narrative, but she is apart from them. But though she is not clever, Esther is good, and by her direct, inarticulate humanity she crosses some gulfs. When Mrs. Pardiggle's bristling inquisition succeeds only in setting up an "iron barrier" between her message of grace and the poor brickmakers of St. Albans, Esther, weeping compassion, shares the sorrows of Jenny, the mistreated mother. When Jo the crossing-sweeper comes in his sickness to the brickmakers', having been "moved on" and "chivvied" by Inspector Bucket, Mr. Chadband, Mrs. Snagsby, and other seekers of connection, Esther cannot know that he is surprised and frightened by her because she resembles the lady he has taken to see the "berryin ground." But she can take Jo to Bleak House and give him medicine and care. She risks disease, as that believer in the harmonious fitness of things, Harold Skimpole, will not. And from Charley, her maid, who nurses Jo and whom she in turn nurses, Esther takes the fever. Its effects change her face. The judicious reader, if he will, may see Esther's disease and disfigurement as an illustration of a large theme first adumbrated in Dombey and Son. There, in a solemn declamation on the origin of evil, Dickens proposes an analogy : "men of science," he says, report that from the "polluted air" of the slums of cities there rise "noxious particles" which if they were visible would appear "lowering in a dense black cloud . . . and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better portions of a town." "But," says the prophetic voice, "if the moral pestilence that rises with them,

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and in the eternal laws of outraged Nature, is inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then we should see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, . . . creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among the pure" (pp. 600-601). Esther's fever of course has its origin in the "polluted air" of the worst part of the city; though the "noxious particles" of its "corruption" are invisible, we can trace their movement. Jo has come from Tom-all-Alone's, the decaying property at issue in the great Chancery suit. And Jo has also come from the pestilential churchyard where Esther's nameless father is buried. The course of the physical pestilence, from the churchyard to Jo to Charley to Esther, is clear. But the "moral pestilence," the "creeping on" of literally "nameless sins" that "blight the innocent," is not so easily discernible. Perhaps the apt illustration is the dwindling away of Richard Carstone, who succumbs to the wasting fever of Chancery. But the causes of Richard's corruption are described in the third-person narrative; only its piteous effects are wept over by Esther. And the blight of Richard of course involves no typhoid or cholera literally rising from the wastelands of the city. There is no necessity, it is true, that the theme announced in Dombey should be expressed in Bleaf{ House. Yet to notice its partial appositeness to the account of Esther's illness is to notice also how removed she is from even the connections and inseparabilities decreed by "outraged Nature." In her illness Esther becomes temporarily blind, and if we read her distress as the outcome of the moral stigma announced by her aunt we shall be puzzled by its aftermath. For the fever so transforms

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her face that no one henceforth can connect her with Lady Dedlock. Indeed, after her illness, Esther meets her long-lost mother at Chesney Wold, and it is difficult to imagine a more selfeffacing response to L a d y Dedlock's revelation: Esther says, " I felt, through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I could never disgrace her by any trace of likeness; so that nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us" (p. 467). Esther's world is impenetrable to those who look for "ties" near or remote. N e x t day, after thinking in vain upon the story her mother has told—"I could not disentangle all that was about me"—Esther meets her friend and fellowward, Ada, for the first time since her transformation. " A h , my angel girl! the old dear look, all love, all kindness, all affection. Nothing else in it—no, nothing, nothing!" (p. 474). Esther is safe in her world of goodness and affection. Between the narrative of Esther and the narrative in which Krook, the parody of the L o r d Chancellor, spontaneously combusts in his rag-and-bottle shop surrounded by secrets he cannot decipher, the gulf is greater than can be bridged by any connection. Dickens has cast Esther's narrative in the past tense; the third-person narrative is all in the present tense. Krook's charred remains are discovered before our eyes; the savor of his decomposition presently fills the neighborhood and mingles with the fog. Esther, moreover, as an independent

narrator,

is never a character in the impersonal narrative: she appears there but once and by report only, when Jo on his deathbed tells Mr. Snagsby that "the lady as wos and yit as warn't the t'other lady" has come to visit him (p. 593). Mr. Jarndyce, who alone

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rivals Esther in goodness, also appears but once in the thirdperson narrative, again virtually by report and at Jo's deathbed. Skimpole, the Pardiggles and Jellybys—all the grotesques of charity and goodwill—appear only in Esther's narrative. She never meets Sir Leicester Dedlock, though early in her narrative she innocently encounters K r o o k , and near the end she is puzzled to see Grandfather Smallweed. It is perhaps irrelevant to systematize the division of roles between the two narratives, and Dickens occasionally attributes to Esther an observation inappropriate for her.' But it is as clear as grammar and structure can make it that the voice of the impersonal narrator cannot appear

in

Esther's narrative, and the converse, I think, holds as well. T h e difference between the two narratives is most nearly removed in the episode of Lady Dedlock's flight. Threatened by T u l k i n g h o r n , who knows her secret, Lady Dedlock disappears. T h e search for her is conducted by Inspector Bucket, who, along with Alan Woodcourt, the doctor, seems to be the new social mind capable of any connection. T h e search is narrated by Esther, to whom the pausing and speeding, the dashing out of London and the doubling back, are bewildering. T h e pursuit ends at the entrance to the churchyard : " a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring; but where I could see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in by filthy houses, with a few dull lights in their windows, and on these walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease." H e r e are the pestilential darkness and miasma kept constantly before us in the third-person narrative. A n d here too, we may expect, is that • C f . Edgar Johnson, Charles Dictent:

New York, 1952), II, 766-67.

His Tragedy and Triumph

(2 vols.,

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47

gradual lifting of the night, that clearing of the prospect, in which Esther takes pleasure as her first morning dawns at Bleak House. Here, if anywhere, in the faintly stirring night, and before her father's grave, Esther will make the great connection. For at the entrance to the cemetery, "drenched in the fearful wet of such a place," is a woman lying. "I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the dead child. She lay there, with one arm around a bar of the iron gate, and seeming to embrace it." Esther thinks the woman is Jenny, the poor brickmaker's wife whose dead child she covered with her own handkerchief. Bucket tries to suggest to her another connection; he tells her that Lady Dedlock changed clothes with Jenny, and that Jenny went on to mislead the pursuers. But Esther cannot understand him: "They changed clothes at the cottage. I could repeat the words in my mind, and I knew what they meant of themselves; but I attached no meaning to.them in any other connexion." She sees Woodcourt restrain Bucket, a look of compassion on his face. "But my understanding for all this was gone." She has seen "a distressed, unsheltered, senseless creature," and goes to her. "I passed on to the gate, and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother cold and dead" (pp. 746-47). Esther, at last, has seen everything. But just here is the end of Chapter 59 of Blea\ House. Chapter 60 begins, "I proceed to other passages of my narrative." And after a sentence or two about the consolation "from the goodness all about me," Esther moves on to the account of her own little Bleak House in the north with Alan Woodcourt, to the hilarious collapse of the great lawsuit, to the sad exit of Richard Carstone, and to the last delicious assurance: "I know that my dearest

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little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that was ever seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me— even supposing—" Some readers may wince at so rosy a sunset, but it is the proper last word for Esther. For it is as clear as the blank space of a chapter division that the great connection is not to be made in her gentle language. A s she approaches the figure on the step, her terms are consistent: " m y understanding for all this was gone"; " I could repeat the words in my mind . . . but I attached no meaning to them in any other connexion." She not only cannot understand the change of clothes and the erratic journey through the night; there are also no words in her narrative to express the meaning of her final discovery. It may be that Esther is herself in a sense "the dead child" and that her recognition of the fallen woman as "the mother of the dead child" is some very fine writing indeed. Yet to say so is to insist by her symbolic death upon the remoteness of Esther from the ties that would bind the severed halves of this enormous book. T h e two narratives are as separate as their grammar, and if the separation is a flaw, it seems to me a flaw which only a great writer could have committed. It is sometimes a sign of genius not to follow ideas to their conclusions, not to bring them all into harmony, 7 and the genius of Dickens here is his recognition that while two narratives are necessary they are not combinable. T h e voice that would articulate both is far on the other side of silence. 7 As observed in a comment on the difference between Engels and Marx: "Marx As Writer," The [London] Times Lilerary Supplement, 8 September

1950, P· 558·

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The sermon on moral and physical pestilence in Dombey

49

and

Son is concluded by an apostrophe: "Oh for a good spirit who would take the housetops off . . . and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes . . . For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising . . . from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining down tremendous social retributions. . . . Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night . . ." (p. 601). However angelic she may be, Esther Summerson has no such dimensions as these. The "bright, blest morning" rises on her own night, not on that of all London and all society. The reader may know in the critical scene that the humid graveyard contains both her father and her mother, but he will have to strain a little to see that Vice and Fever have rained down their retribution here. Lady Dedlock dies of exposure, but whether in necessary compensation for the sins of her youth or in pathetic wastefulness of innocence, we do not know. We know only that Esther is good, is kind, and runs to the figure on the stones precisely because she does not understand. She does not know the world in terms of poverty or vice or degradation; she knows, what the Mrs. Pardiggles and Lord Chancellors do not, only Jenny, the mother of the dead child. The goodness of this " I " cannot engulf the world of House;

Blea\

it cannot dissipate the fog or dry up the pestilence of

the city. On the one hand, spontaneous combustion: the evils of society will explode of themselves if no Angel comes to expose them. This is no doubt a naïve faith, and certainly Dickens has his troubles with it. But on the other hand, goodness, sympathy, love, affection, the satisfactions of the private vision. It is

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their staying on the other hand that is so impressive here. Though he may have hoped for the self-destruction of the institutions he condemned, Dickens was neither so foolish nor so cruel as to conceive of the end of the world in a blood-bath of love and kindness. T h e voice of "outraged Nature" or of the spirit above the housetops must speak in tones louder than those of a not very clever " I . " In Bleaks House

Dickens rejected the

ruthless shape of fantasy for the unpoetic compromise of two parallel and unmeeting narrative lines. It would require the style of Henry James and a heroine as loftily placed as Milly Theale to bring them together. But that is another and a longer story.

F. W. DUPEE

Marcel Proust and the Imagination of Duchesses

THE NOVELIST who writes familiarly of dukes and duchesses has a special burden of proof to discharge. He must persuade us that he really knows his privileged characters, that they are worth knowing, and that they are at once like and unlike ourselves. What he requires, in short, is a knowledge of them in their common human nature as well as in the remarkable forms that human nature may assume when it is combined with uncommon privilege. Proust, it seems to me, excelled at this complex insight; his portraits of the beau monde are vivid with it; he was a master of the double exposure. In no other novelist are there more amazing exhibitions of privileged human nature. A la Recherche du temps perdu, as we know, is something besides a novel of social history. It is essentially a portrait of the artist, a story of how he achieves his vocation, an account of the processes by which his imagination is delivered from its bondage to time and passion. The other characters, however compelling in themselves, are all securely drawn into the orbit of this central preoccupation. They may or may not be artists but they have

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distinct creative endowments, and it is on their use or misuse of these endowments that their several stories turn. T o be human for Proust is above all to have imagination. I use the word in the sense that he appears to have had in mind when, writing to a friend, he described snobbishness as "a wonderful kind of imagination." In A la Recherche

du temps perdu not

only snobbishness but jealousy and other passions are seen as wonderful kinds of imagination. Imagination is as necessary to his characters as generators are to automobiles. The generator converts mechanical into electrical energy, making the horn sound and the headlights shine. Imagination registers our desires and translates them into surprising forms of thought, speech and action. In this respect the men and women of A la Recherche

du

temps perdu are highly specialized. Whether they are duchesses, doctors, or procurers, the energy of desire is magnificently marked in them and so is the energy of mental invention. In actual life, they would probably pass for geniuses. They are geniuses of a sort, even though most of them squander their endowment in a world of delusion. The power of invention is obvious and terrible in the major figures; it is also striking in cases where it is quite unexpected or is thoroughly malapropos —in short, where the effect of it tends to be comic. Such is the case of the very literal-minded Dr. Cottard with his outrageous puns, of Odette de Crécy with her small anxious lies and her brave show of Anglomania; of the elevator boy's sister who expresses her contempt for the poor by defecating on them in some unspecified manner; of the man who says he owns a painting by Rubens and then, when asked if it is signed, insists he cut of! the signature to make the picture fit a frame that was already in his possession.

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Montaigne observed that when the mind is insufficiently occupied "it brings forth many chimeras and fantastic monsters." Montaigne was referring to the intellectual dangers of being alone and idle; Proust finds such dangers in the busiest social life. T h e drawing room breeds its own chimeras. T h e abuse of imgaination, the making it project selfish desire rather than seek out truth, is for Proust a very condition of social intercourse when pursued for its own sake. His worldly characters tend not only to think up monsters but, in doing so, to become monsters. If, therefore, we compare Proust's idea of society with that of the great nineteenth-century novelists we see that a shift has occurred in the relations of the one and the many. Persons of marked imaginative powers were the exceptions in Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert. They were, or supposed themselves to be, the chosen few; and it was just the singularity of their minds and aims that made their adventures worth recording. Lucien de Rubempré, Julien Sorel, E m m a Bovary—each may covet money or power or sexual adventure as other people covet those things; but in doing so each is essentially intent on realizing some idea he has of himself. W e know, moreover, that it is usually from their reading, in romances or heroic memoirs, that they have learned the rôles they propose to play. Each has in some fashion studied his part before embarking on his adventures; their indebtedness to literature makes clear how exceptional their aspirations are. And what are their adventures but a succession of collisions between their adopted rôles and the hard surfaces of the social generality? Such is the impact for Julien Sorel that he can only maintain his idea of himself by finally courting imprisonment and death; while E m m a Bovary sees her dreams succumb gradually to the prevailing materialism—sees them turn, as it were, into

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commodities: sheer sex, mere furniture, poplin by the yard, and unpaid bills. The exceptional souls have taken over society in Proust's conception of it. Money-making, career-making, matchmaking and the other practical enterprises which provided the older novel with its characteristic intrigues are in the background of A la Recherche

du temps perdu. The old struggle for tangible ends has

given place to an all but universal struggle for prestige, and even this value seems precariously subjective, the stuff of ignorant supposition and willful desire. What almost everyone in Proust is intent upon is the projection of the self; this is now the enterprise of the many rather than of the distinguished few. There is, to be sure, the estimable Dr. Cottard who frequents the drawing room to further his career as a society physician ("plus de diagnostic que Potain") ; but it is Cottard's performance in the drawing room that matters. He too is "in society"—is there to shine as he believes such a doctor should shine. His literal mind flowers in its own fashion. He shines by his brusque, probing habits of speech and the painful surgery of his puns. T h e various servants are in society too by reason of their occupations; Françoise, the chief of them, has her vivid ideas of herself; and we recall how brilliantly the haughty "marquise"

of the W.C. in the Champs

Elysées exemplifies the general condition. The seekers of self are many and various in the novel, and so are their ways of representing themselves to the world. Each has a distinct quality of taste, a certain style of life, which he believes to be essential to the winning of prestige. Mme Verdurin has her muscular music-lover's style; the foreign minister Norpois his musty diplomatic clichés and woolly Machiavellianism; Albertine

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her touching athlete's idiom; the young Marquise de Cambremer her determined patter of the person with advanced views on the arts. And though they all think of themselves as very special, even unique, they hasten to make common cause with others of similar style. They band together in protective and aggressive coteries based on the community of ideas. I refer, of course, to those characters who are definitely dans le monde; there are others —the painter Elstir, the narrator's grandmother—who cultivate their distinctive idioms and ideas of themselves in a different spiritual climate. Oriane, duchesse de Guermantes, is not only in the world, she is the world—at least in her own and other people's eyes. Her powers of imagination are limited but they are acute, and she is one of Proust's exemplary characterizations. In a medium where all is flux, she has the distinction of being relatively stable. Despite some vital changes in her nature and position, Mme de Guermantes goes on and on. On one occasion she is entertaining her dinner guests at the expense of an absent woman acquaintance when M. de Guermantes interrupts her. "Gad, Oriane," he explodes, "after all she's a duchess." Mme de Guermantes feels the rebuke and falls silent. Several times in the course of the narrative the Duke thus calls her to order and she falls silent. Considering her usual effrontery, these are significant and somehow poignant moments. Her wit, so dear to her vanity and usually to her husband's, must give way to considerations of rank; and without her wit she is speechless, though never for long. Between her nature and her position there is a contradiction. She rejoices in a critical sensibility which exercises itself on all occasions and all comers. It is her pleasure to administer small

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shocks to the moral complacency of princesses, to take Tolstoy's side against visiting Russian grand dukes. Yet she is a member of a circle which constitutes her medium as water is the medium of fish. Though chafing sometimes at its restrictions, she is unthinkable without it. She may imagine herself to be a free spirit but she is entirely a creature of contingencies. And when she surrenders to her husband it is not because she loves him—there is no affection between them—but because he is the living embodiment of the principle of necessity in her life. Faithless, brutal, stupid, he nevertheless represents the facts of money and rank without which she cannot operate. T o describe the Duke's incarnation of these things, Proust resorts to a comic exaggeration of his own grand manner, including the usual reference to the work of art. "Next to her, heavily seated, was M. de Guermantes, superb and Olympian. T h e sense of his vast riches seemed to be omnipresent in all his members and gave him a peculiar high density, as though he had been melted in a crucible into a human ingot to form this man who was worth so much. . . . I seemed to see that statue of Olympian Zeus which Phidias, they say, made all of gold." Living with such a work of art is naturally uncomfortable for the Duchess but she cannot live without it. For she is like all the Guermantes, and in a sense like all Proust's characters, in that she is possessed of a quality beyond her immediate social needs. There is a purposiveness about her which is in excess of the practical requirements of her position. Her great name, unlimited funds, considerable beauty, and unsullied reputation are enough in themselves to sustain her supreme position in the

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Faubourg Saint-Germain. Yet her special quality of imagination, her idea of herself, demands that she play a rôle enacted by no one else. The Courvoisiers, a family of lay figures which Proust introduces for purposes of comparison with the Guermantes, are content with the actualities of their equally fine position. They are resigned to being what their status calls for, even if it means being rather dull. Oriane de Guermantes must be a wit to boot, must be in fact unique. In this demand she resembles other members of the Guermantes family, all of whom are shown to share a peculiar type of esprit. One of them reads Nietzsche and aspires to be an intellectual. Another has had Bohemian adventures and is engaged in writing her memoirs. The greatest of them, the Baron de Charlus, is driven to elaborate perversities, cruelties, impostures. Primarily he has, along with his genuine endowments, an extravagant sense of his own privileged position. His gifts of mind entitle him, provided he translate them into a vocation, to legitimate privileges as a creative intelligence. With his knowledge of society, his eloquence, his original moral stamina, he might be, say, the Tacitus of his generation. But he fails to realize his artistic gifts; he confuses them with the virtues which supposedly inhere in his social position. In proportion as he fails to get the right kind of recognition, he demands more and more of the wrong kind. His defeatism in wartime, which Proust describes in penetrating detail in the last volume, represents the ultimate effort of his imagination in its political character. Starved for his kind of prestige, Charlus can finally envision the destruction of the nation which denies it to him. And meanwhile his homoerotic fantasies

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have turned frankly self-destructive. Instead of being a Tacitus, he has come to resemble one of Tacitus' malevolent emperors. He is a Nero of the imagination. The Duchess's smaller range causes her to have a fate less drastic than her brother-in-law's. As time goes on, she merely sharpens and dwindles. Her wit, thoroughly charming at a time when it was stimulated by that of her friend Swann, grows coarser, crueler, more animalistic, more showy. We never see her from the inside; she has no private life save by implication. Still, we know her to be suffering more and more from her husband's brutality and from the fatigue of going round and round in her vicious circle. Her own pain leads her to give pain to others: to torment her servants, to forget her dying friends, to hasten their oblivion once they are dead, to dismiss from her mind the thought of death itself. She needs constantly to demonstrate her supposed freedom of spirit by exercising it in novel ways and so begins to consort with the Bohemian circles she had formerly despised. At last, when it is too late, she finds herself virtually outside that Faubourg Saint-Germain which was her natural province and only true arena. If the fish formerly scorned the water, the water now shuns the fish. Yet Mme de Guermantes retains always something of her original grace and gaiety and genius for fashion. She continues to exhibit some of the refinement which is the inalienable privilege of the Guermantes. And so do the other characters retain something of their original energy. A la Recherche du temps perdu is about men and art, and for Proust the world of art is continuous with that of other men. Social intercourse for its own sa\e is vanity, but people in society are distinguished by energy, elo-

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quence, connoisseurship and a high evaluation of themselves. These qualities form a link between them and the mind of the artist. One of the paintings by Elstir, Proust's imaginary great Impressionist, shows the land and the sea partaking of the same substance and composing a reality superior to both. A similar interpénétration of values—social, moral, aesthetic—seems to characterize Proust's general sense of life. Everywhere in the novel, amid all the misery and corruption, there are occasions for beauty, intimations of immortality : Mme de Guermantes's red shoes, the carnations which Odette's horses wear in their blinkers while her coachman wears a matching one in his lapel, the basket of fruit that Swann assembles lovingly from the various shops specializing in the several kinds of fruit—the peach here, the pear there, the grapes someplace else. Lionel Trilling has remarked that a reader of nineteenth-century French novels, with their relentless social criticism, might be tempted to conclude that "society is a fraud." It would be a singularly unwary reader who would conclude as much from Proust's novel.

RICHARD ELLMANN

A Portrait of the Artist as

REVOLUTIONARIES

Friend

fatten on opposition but grow thin

and pale when treated with indulgence. Joyce's ostracism from Dublin lacked, as he was well aware, the moral decisiveness of Dante's exile from Florence in that Joyce kept the keys to the gate. He was neither bidden to leave nor forbidden to return, and he did in fact go back five times. But whenever his relations with his native land seemed in danger of improving, he found a new incident to solidify his intransigence and reaffirm the Tightness of his voluntary exile. He even showed some grand resentment at the possibility of Irish independence on the grounds that it would change the relationship he had so carefully established between himself and his country. "Should I," he asked someone, "wish to alter the conditions that have made me what I a m ? " At first he thought only his soul was in danger in Ireland. Then, when his difficulties over the publication of Dubliners

became so

great, he thought his writing career was being deliberately conspired against. Finally he came to assert that he was physically in danger. This suspicion began when his wife paid a visit to

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Galway in 1922. Civil war had just broken out in the west, and her train was fired on by soldiers. Joyce chose to believe that the bullets were really aimed at him, and afterwards refused to return to Ireland because he said he feared for his life. That Joyce could not have written his books in Ireland is likely enough; but he felt the need for maintaining his intimacy with his country by continually renewing the quarrel with her which prompted his first departure. In his books too his heroes are outcasts in one way or another, and much of their interest lies in why they are cast out and by whom. Are they "self-doomed," as Joyce says of himself in his broadside, "The Holy Office," or are they doomed by society? T o the extent that the hero is himself responsible, he is Faustlike, struggling like Stephen Dedalus or Richard Rowan to achieve a freedom beyond human power. T o the extent that society is responsible he is Christlike, a sacrificial victim whose sufferings torment his tormentors. Joyce was not so masochistic as to identify himself completely with the helpless victim; at the very moment he attacks society most bitterly as his oppressor, he will not completely deny the authorship of his own despair. Like the boy in the ballad of the Jew's daughter, he is immolated,

consenting.

Again he was not so possessed with self as to adopt utterly the part of the anarchic individual. He carefully avoids making his heroes anything but unhappy in their triumphant self-righteousness. Half willing and half forced to be a sufferer, Stephen endows the artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a rather similar mixture of qualities, the total power of a god bored by his own handiwork and the heroic impotence of a Lucifer, smart-

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ing from pain which he has chosen to bear. To be both god and devil is perhaps to be man. In Ulysses the paradoxes ascribed to these forces are the paradoxes of being Joyce: God begets Himself, sends Himself between Himself and others, is put upon by His own fiends. Joyce and Stephen challenge in the same way the forces which they have brought into being. As Stephen says of Shakespeare, "His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer." If the residents of heaven were not androgynous, he says, God would be bawd and cuckold too, arranging for his own humiliation with his own creatures. In his books Joyce represents heroes who seek freedom, which is also exile, voluntarily and by compulsion. The question of ultimate responsibility is raised and then dropped without an answer. Joyce's hero is as lonely as Byron's; consequently Joyce obliterated Stephen's brother, Maurice, from the Portrait after using him tentatively in Stephen Hero, for there must be no adherent, and the home must be a rallying-point of betrayal. A cluster of themes —the sacrilege of Faust, the suffering of Christ, the exile of Dante —reach a focus in the problem of friendship. For if friendship exists, it impugns the quality of exile and of lonely heroism. If the world is not altogether hostile, we may forgive it for having mistreated us, and so be forced into the false position of warriors without adversaries. Joyce allows his hero to sample friendship before discovering its flaws, and then with the theme of broken friendship represents his hero's broken ties with Ireland and the world. The friendship is invariably between men; here Joyce is very much the Dubliner. A curious aspect of Irish life is that relation-

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ships between men seem more vital there than relationships between men and women. It is not easy to know whether this trait is due to a misogynistic bias in Irish Catholicism, or, less impressively, to long hours of pub crawling. Whatever the cause, the trait carries over into the work of Joyce. In his writings there is a succession of important friendships between men, which receive more of his attention than love affairs. He displays a man's world, in which Emma, Gretta, Bertha, Molly, Anna, and Isobel occupy, however fetchingly, only a bed or a kitchen. Frank Budgen describes a number of Joyce's diatribes against women who venture beyond their station. Once he remonstrated with Joyce a little, saying, "But as I remember you in other days, you always fell back upon the fact that woman's flesh was provoking and desirable, whatever else was objectionable about her." Joyce snorted and replied, "Perhaps I did. Now I don't care a damn about their bodies. I am only interested in their clothes." In his books the men, whether lovers or husbands, are almost always away from home, drinking in a pub, talking on the library steps, walking in Phoenix Park or along the strand. Joyce remarked to his friend Ottocaro Weiss, in explanation of his principles of dramaturgy, "When things get slow, bring a woman on the stage." Women appear brilliantly in his work, but they are admitted only on condition that they remain bright accessories to the main struggles. To isolate the male friendships in Joyce's novels does not, of course, give a complete account of the novels; but it does them surprisingly little violence. Each book has a special view of friendship, although later developments are lightly prefigured in the earliest, Stephen Hero. In Stephen Hero Joyce touches upon

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Stephen's amorous interest in Emma Clery, but shows his relation to her as wary and circumspect when it is not merely blunt. The main interest attaches to his friendship with Cranly, which is much more tender and complex. Cranly's alienation from Stephen is the novel's principal dramatic action; three explanations of it are given, none of them wholly satisfactory. Stanislaus Joyce has commented that his brother was baffled by the behavior of Cranly's prototype, J. F. Byrne, and this bafflement may account for the various interpretations of it offered in Stephen Hero. The first reason is suggested to Stephen by his brother Maurice. "Cranly," he says, "wants to become more and more necessary to you until he can have you in his power." Stephen repudiates this analysis, which he contends is based upon a novel conception of friendship. But it is never discredited. The second reason appears on the surface to be an esthetic disagreement, Cranly's cool reception of Stephen's paper on "Drama and Life." The first blood between them is this partial rejection of one of Stephen's literary works. Joyce's own ruptures with good friends often came about in the same way. A chill developed between him and Wyndham Lewis after Time and Western

Man had

criticized Joyce's work, and Joyce had little more to do with Ezra Pound, in spite of all Pound had previously done for Joyce, after Pound expressed his disapproval of the early sections of Finnegans

Wa/^e. Like many authors, Joyce always preferred

to suspect that literary disagreement with him arose from personal causes, not detached intellectual judgment. When Jung wrote his critique of Ulysses, Joyce's comment was, "What does Jung have against me? Why does he dislike me? I haven't even met him."

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Cranly's conflict with Stephen becomes more earnest when he follows his refusal of sympathy for Stephen's paper with a refusal of sympathy for Stephen's detachment toward his dying sister Isobel. Joyce too was capable of showing this utter detachment, and in later life he brought on a quarrel with Paul Léon by remarking casually of Lucia Joyce's mental collapse that it was like a story in Dubliners.

Léon accused him of cerebralizing

tragedy. It may be that Cranly's judgments of Stephen are well founded, but we are never allowed to regard them so. They at once make Stephen suspicious of Cranly's attitude toward him. Joyce writes in a passage unconsciously full of adolescent egotism, "He fancied moreover that he detected in Cranly's attitude towards him a certain hostility, arising out of a thwarted desire to imitate. Cranly was fond of ridiculing Stephen to his bar companions and though this was supposed to be no more than banter Stephen found touches of seriousness in it." He goes on a little pompously, "Stephen refused to close with this trivial falsehood of his friend and continued to share all the secrets of his bosom as if he had not observed any change. He no longer, however, sought his friend's opinion or allowed the sour dissatisfaction of his friend's mood to weigh with him." Like the desire to possess, suggested by Maurice, Stephen's second diagnosis, "the thwarted desire to imitate," is self-engrossed. The third reason is more complicated, for it involves another person. Stephen's beloved Emma Clery walks by the two young men, and when they bow to her she disregards Stephen to bow only to Cranly. To Cranly's question, "Why did she do that?" Stephen replies with a laugh, "An invitation perhaps." He pretends to regard the incident lightly, but sexual rivalry and

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jealousy seem bound to divide the two young men more decisively than the desire of Cranly to dominate or imitate Stephen. One of the main functions of female characters in Joyce is to promote division between male friends. Yet Cranly's liking for Emma is an implied compliment to Stephen's taste in women, and all three reasons, the desire to dominate and emulate and steal away his friend's girl, have in common the fact that it is Cranly who takes the first steps toward enmity, and that all explanations of his behavior are essentially proofs of his dependence upon Stephen. Cranly's feelings are reactions to Stephen's feelings. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the themes introduced in Stephen

Hero

are heightened by the new unifying

theme of artistic development. Friendship too is viewed with greater intensity, its collisions are more serious, and at the end of the book it begins to seem an impossibility. In later life Joyce remarked to Samuel Beckett, "I don't love anyone but my family," in a tone that implied that he did not really li\e anyone but his family either. The Portrait justifies the hero's renunciation of friendship more elaborately than Stephen Hero attempted to do. While Stephen has another important friendship, with Lynch, Cranly remains his chief confidant. He talks to Lynch about esthetics, Lynch's coarse responses providing a ground bass for his tenor, but he talks to Cranly about his secret thoughts. So the resolution of the book's problem, which is what Stephen should do next, comes in a climactic discussion with Cranly. What in Stephen

Hero

was only a suspicion becomes here a

virtual certainty. Stephen asks Cranly to come and talk with him, but Cranly delays. During the delay Emma Clery passes by,

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and again bows across Stephen in response to Cranly's greeting. Stephen is affronted and pounces on this deliberate misdirection of her favor. "Was there not a slight flush on Cranly's cheek?" he asks himself. "Did that explain his friend's listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden intrusions of rude speech with which he had shattered so often Stephen's ardent wayward confessions?" In the subsequent conversation, Cranly suspiciously takes the part of mothers and of women generally; he accuses Stephen of inability to love. It is this conversation which determines Stephen upon departure, for it makes him feel that he cannot hope for friendship: "Away then; it is time to go. . . . His friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he would go. He could not strive against another. He knew his part." But to give Stephen more complete mastery of the situation, Joyce adds an element not present in Stephen

Hero.

This too

occurs in the final conversation. Cranly reminds Stephen that he will be alone, "And you know what that word means? Not only to be separated from all others but to have not even one friend. . . . And not to have any one person . . . who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had." Stephen looks at him and wonders if he has spoken of himself. "Of whom are you speaking?" he asks at last, and receives no answer. The effect of the suggestion is to bring Cranly's emotions even more completely within Stephen's circle of attraction. His attachment to Stephen and to Stephen's girl are presumably related, but Joyce does not labor the relation. In the last pages of the book Stephen writes in his journal of Cranly's growing intimacy with Emma, "Is he the shining light now? If so, I swear it was I who discovered him. . . ." The artist

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discovers his own rival, shapes him even for the task of betraying him. The self-centered character of the Portrait precludes Joyce's enlarging upon Stephen's further relations with Cranly. Stephen dispenses with both love and friendship, reluctantly but with what he considers justification. The contest of love and hate between him and Cranly is irrelevant except in so far as it compels his departure to search for freedom. The only question is how long it will take Stephen to slough off both Cranly and Emma. The Portrait ends in exile for one; Joyce might have ended it with exile for two, with a departure modeled upon his own setting forth with Nora Barnacle in 1904; but he wished Stephen at this stage to find no one to help him. Stephen's selfisolation is heroic but presumptuous, suited, as Stanislaus Joyce says, to his character as Irish Faust. On the other hand, his refusal to strive against another, his endurance of gratuitous deceit, gives him also a Christlike character. Joyce reserved for his play Exiles a saturnalia of the emotions of friendship. By 1914, when he began the play, he had had a series of important experiences with friends which he had not had in 1902, the last year to which his earlier books refer. The first came on his return from Paris in 1903. He had written of sexual exploits in Paris to his friend Vincent Cosgrave, the prototype of Lynch. He did so in contravention of the advice of Cranly's prototype, J. F . Byrne, who thought Cosgrave vicious, and later had his judgment confirmed. When Joyce returned to Dublin, Byrne demanded an explanation for Joyce's having flouted his advice, and when Joyce could not furnish an adequate one Byrne broke off with him. In Ulysses Stephen says of

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Cranly, " H e now will leave me. As I am. All or not at all." Actually they became friends again, but Joyce has Stephen decide that Cranly's protectiveness is an attempt to keep him to himself. A second experience that entered into Exiles occurred in 1909 when Joyce was making a brief visit to Dublin. He called on Cosgrave and to his consternation heard Cosgrave boast that he had seduced Nora Barnacle after her supposed allegiance to Joyce began. Joyce went in despair to Byrne, then living at 7 Eccles Street, and told him what he had just heard. He wrote home to Nora in such agony and with so much recrimination that his distressed wife showed the letters to Stanislaus Joyce. Fortunately Stanislaus was able to prove to his brother that Cosgrave was lying, because five years before Cosgrave had confidentially confessed to Stanislaus at a pub his failure with Nora. If the relationship with Byrne seemed to argue possessiveness, that with Cosgrave led Joyce to see in friendship an aspect of hatred and treachery. The relationship of man and woman is bewilderingly precarious here. When Joyce's faith in Nora was shaken, he appears to have made no attempt to defend her or to heed her defense. (His attitude had not yet attained the sangfroid of Wellington in the first chapter of Finnegans

Wake, who in

another treatment of Joyce's theme, on receiving Napoleon's message—"Fieldgaze they tiny frow [wife]. Hugacting. Nap." —replies "Figtreeyou!") Nora had to be vindicated by someone else, and that one a man; otherwise no vindication would seem to have been possible. Joyce was unhappily quick to suspect treachery in those closest to him. At a word, his friend is a Judas, his wife a Delilah. A third episode occurred in Trieste, when an Italian friend of

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Joyce who was also an admirer of Nora, seemed to Joyce to be as much drawn to himself as to her. Little is known about this relationship, but it is probable that it reinforced his conception of the homosexual undercurrent in friendship. Finally, Joyce paid a visit to Dr. Oliver Gogarty in Dublin in 1912, and from Gogarty's account this ended in mutual hostility. From these four episodes Joyce drew the picture of friendship which appears in Exiles, where your friend is someone who wants to possess you mentally and your wife physically, and longs to prove himself your disciple by betraying you. Joyce focuses attention in the play upon husband rather than upon lover. In the notes to Exiles he attributes to the newly published pages of Madame Bovary (discarded by Flaubert) the current movement in thought which takes more interest in the husband's dilemma than the lover's glamor. But principally the husband-hero was a figure through whom he could keep his own matured persona as the center. In his university days Joyce denounced Othello, and while we do not know the reasons we can guess that he already repudiated the naivete and easy susceptibility of the hero. His own role with Cosgrave was equally undistinguished, but in the play he makes Richard a more powerful antagonist for Robert than Othello is for Iago. The two men watch each other in what Joyce called three cat-and-mouse acts, with Richard's mistress-wife as the prize for the more feline. As always, the hero's motivation cuts two ways. On the primary level Richard desires that his wife share in his own Faustian freedom; he would like, but cannot ask, that her freedom should result in fidelity. On the secondary level he longs to be wronged by her and by his best friend, so as to feel vicariously the thrill of

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adultery. Her infidelity and Robert's will confirm his view of the impossibility of a genuine tie between people; yet in his partial wish for this confirmation he is an accomplice in the infidelity. As for Robert, his motivation is simpler: he wishes to possess Bertha, and also to possess and dominate Richard through the body of his wife. Richard is caught in his two conceptions of himself; as Faust searching freedom he cannot try to control another, as Christ he cannot resist for himself. There is also another element, his love for his wife, to keep him from acting. For Bertha love is not what it is to Richard; rather than the bestowal of freedom, it is the insistence upon bonds. She waits for the sign which he will not give, and encourages Robert less for himself than in the hope of bestirring her husband to express his love. Richard has begotten the situation from which he proceeds to suffer. The winner of the bout is not decided. Joyce asked Paul Suter, a friend in Zurich, whether he thought Bertha was unfaithful to Richard or not, and Suter sensed so much agitation beneath the question that he evaded answering it. Yet there can be no doubt that Robert feels he has lost, and that Richard retains his moral ascendancy. Whatever passes between the bodies of Robert and Bertha, their beings are completely dominated by Richard. "There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master," says Richard to Robert, "the faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him." In Ulysses betrayal serves as a countertheme to the main action, which is the coming together of Bloom and Stephen. When Mulligan takes Stephen's arm, Stephen says to himself, "Cranly's arm. His arm," as if they were equally unreliable. The crime of friend-

ηΐ

P O R T R A I T OF T H E A R T I S T AS

FRIEND

ship in Ulysses, committed by Mulligan, Lynch, and Cranly ( " H e now will leave me"), is the crime of leaving one's friend in the lurch. For this Stephen calls Lynch a Judas and predicts he will hang himself. Incidentally, as if to confirm Joyce's view, Cosgrave did commit suicide in the late nineteen-twenties. The sexual betrayal theme is presented ingeniously in Stephen's description of Shakespeare, with whom both he and Bloom are somewhat identified; Shakespeare, Stephen holds, was betrayed by his brother with his wife, and betrayed with the dark lady of the sonnets by his "dearmylove," that is, by Mr. W . H., for whom he had a homosexual affection. Among all these betrayals of one man by another, the relationship of Bloom and Stephen stands forth in vivid contast. Mulligan suspects that Bloom's interest in Stephen is homosexual, but the suspicion is only malicious. The relationship of the two is not friendly, but paternal and filial. Joyce seems to imply that only within the family, or the pseudo-family, can a solid bond be established. Even this relationship has its sexual content, for Bloom, in his desire to play the role of father with Stephen and to have him for son, is motivated also by jealousy of Blazes Boylan and by a desire to free his wife from Boylan's embraces. Consequently, like Stephen's God and Stephen's Shakespeare, Bloom is bawd and cuckold, showing Stephen a picture of Molly in an alluring costume. It cannot be wholly irrelevant that Joyce himself sent a picture of Nora to Forrest Reid in 1918, shortly before he wrote this episode. Bloom continues his invitation by asking Stephen to give Molly lessons in Italian in exchange for lessons in singing. The relationship with another man is so important to him that it reduces the importance of his relationship with a woman.

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The treatment of Bloom and Stephen finds no parallel in the earlier novels, but it recalls the theme of the story, "The Dead." There the middle-aged husband of Gretta Conroy finds himself unexpectedly bound to his wife's young lover, whom he regards first with jealousy and then with affection. (In the story, however, the lover is dead.) Molly is offered as a pawn not in friendship but in the father-son bond. "Betray me and be my son," Bloom half tells Stephen. Stephen, as usual, ends by committing himself to no one; but Bloom, who has also cast off friendship, is partially at least committed to him and to Molly as father and husband. Joyce perhaps found it easier to picture this triangular relationship in Ulysses because he put so much of himself in both his heroes that he was at once betrayer and betrayed. Moreover, the familial relationship, while not necessarily satisfactory, is at least inevitable. In Finnegans

Wake

Joyce returns

to the family situation, and the book contrasts with an early work like Dubliners,

where most of the relationships are outside the

family, or with the Portrait,

where a break with the family is

essential. It is as if, having sampled all varieties of friendship, and in Ulysses, foster-kinship, Joyce reverts at last to the fundamental and timeless condition of the family. Betrayal continues: in a famous passage every member of the family is revealed to have illicit relations with every other member; H. C. E., for example, has an interest in his daughter as strong as Bloom's interest in his son. Stanislaus Joyce remembered his brother's saying to him, "There are only two permanent things in the world, the love of a mother for her child, and the love of a man for lies." But in later life Stanislaus thought his brother had discovered still another form of love, that of a father for his daughter. In the Portrait the

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hero moved away from his father's family to friends, but every friend betrayed him; and now the hero reverts to the family, this time a family of his own making. In the family betrayal continues, yet here all the members of the family seem principally aspects of Joyce's imaginative life, alternately embracing and rejecting each other, but bound as indissolubly as the cortexes of the brain. He is the wooer and the wooed, the slayer and the slain. The image that Joyce created of his life, and that his biographer Herbert Gorman followed him in consolidating, is heavily suffused with the character of the betrayed man, but neglects the element of desire for betrayal. No one wishes to underestimate the difficulties of writers in Ireland, which have driven so many of them to other countries. The continent of Europe is not the most miserable exchange imaginable, however. But it is characteristic of Joyce's state of mind that things never got better for him. From his talk and from Gorman's biography, one has the impression that his relations with publishers were always execrable; actually Joyce was treated extremely well by publishers from about his thirty-fourth year. In the same way Joyce steadily represented himself as living in poverty, but, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in the early nineteen-twenties, poverty found the Joyces every night at Fouquet's, where Hemingway could afford to go only once a week. Joyce forced himself into bad straits. He grew so accustomed to representing himself as a mild saint surrounded by energetic devils that Stuart Gilbert quite surprised and amused him by pointing out that he was not really in bad circumstances at all, that he was on the contrary quite lucky. Most of the incidents in Joyce's life have to be reconsidered from this point of view. For example, in the famous quarrel in

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75

Zurich involving the English Players, Joyce represented himself as the victim of splenetic British bureaucrats. Actually, he appears to have provoked an unnecessary row quite deliberately, constructing an incident in which he would be aggrieved so he could then protest it. The humorous references to it at the end of the "Circe" episode were the artistic aftermath of his inartistic involvement. Similarly, when Mrs. McCormick abruptly withdrew her patronage from Joyce in Zurich, he fastened the blame upon a young friend of his, and Gorman says in a dark footnote which Joyce wrote for him: Several times during Joyce's career this brusque and unexplained [change o f ] attitude of certain admirers of his has taken place. . . . There is no single explanation so far as these different admirers are concerned that will fit all these cases, but the fact remains that all through his life he seems to have had admiration both in its spiritual and its material form spontaneously and suddenly offered him and subsequently just as suddenly transformed into passive or open hostility. 1 Joyce's suspicions of his young friend were altogether unfounded, but they suggest how essential it was for him to believe that his friends were, at the slightest nudge, his enemies. As in his quarrel with Nora in 1909, his anger at being victimized knew no bounds, although in both cases he was his own victim. There is a certain relish for the violent breaking of friendships; a favorite word in his early work is "sunder." N o doubt in some instances Joyce had cause, but even in these he helped the betrayers along. The image 1

Herbert S. Gorman, James Joyce (New York, 1940), p. 265.

ηβ

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FRIEND

in one of his later poems, of plucking his own heart out and devouring it, is a recurrent pattern in his behavior as in his works. In actual life Joyce's urge to detach himself became itself a passion, so strong that it led him into truculence or into distrust, but in the perverse way of art, his violent renewals of exile through the persons of his friends became a virtue. As soon as he had rejected them as friends, convinced of their propensity to betray him and of his own to be betrayed, he was free to behold them in that clear light which is one of his special contributions to fiction. His characters, except for his heroes, belong to a land which he lords as an absentee. They lack the liberating recourse of art, which enables him to recover a mastery he has dissipated in quarrels; he does not treat them with coldness, but rather with the sympathy of someone who can emerge from their nerveracked sphere, beyond love and lies to detachment and truth. As for the heroes, particularly Bloom and Stephen, while they are not as removed as their creator from attachments, they show some of the same power to withdraw themselves. A certain insouciance and humor in Bloom prevent his taking his wife's adultery altogether to heart, and keep him also from entanglements with Martha Clifford and Gerty MacDowell. The more somber Stephen too, when he propositions Emma Clery in Stephen

Hero,

stipu-

lates that on the morning after their night of love they will say an eternal farewell; in the Portrait,

when he finds a girl who

symbolizes all that he desires, he makes no attempt to know her; and in Ulysses he withdraws also from the proffered friendship with Bloom. The heroes in most novels are drawn into situations; in Joyce's they extricate themselves from them. Joyce told his friend Claud Sykes that, so long as he could write,

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he could live anywhere, in a tub, like Diogenes. Writing was itself a form of exile for him, a source of detachment. When a young man came up to him in Zurich and said, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, "No, it did lots of other things too." Only in writing, which is also departing, is it possible to achieve the purification which comes from a continual rebaptism of the mind.

VIVIAN H. S. MERCIER

James Joyce and an Irish Tradition

Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling: I hardly hear the purlieu cry Or a Tommy talf( as I pass one by Before my thoughts begin to run On F. M'Curdy

Atkinson,

The same that had the wooden leg. . . } Here we have the Irish tradition of parody represented in full career, travestying the lines of a great poet almost as soon as they are published. The time is supposedly 1904, the place the National Library of Ireland; "Baile and Aillinn," the poem parodied, formed part of In the Seven Woods, which Yeats published in 1903. Buck Mulligan's parody follows the brief prologue to the poem line by line: I hardly hear the curlew cry, Nor the grey rush when the wind is high, 1

Ulysses (Hamburg, 1 9 3 5 ) , p. 223.

JOYCE

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79

Before my thoughts begin to run On the heir of Uladh, Buan's son, Baile, who had the honey mouth. . . ? Oliver St. John Gogarty, universally recognized as the original of Buck Mulligan, may not in fact have parodied this particular poem, but friends of Yeats did regularly produce travesties of his work for his and their amusement.8 There is a reference to this practice in his published correspondence. A letter of November 5, 1922, written while the Irish Civil War was still raging, describes a dinner given in his honor at the Dublin Arts Club : At 10.15 · · · somebody threw a bomb outside in the street and the parodist, who was in the middle of a parody of my "Innisfree," did not pause nor did his voice hesitate.4 Joyce depicts Dublin as so saturated in parody that Stephen Dedalus, who rather despises Mulligan's mockery, allows more than one snatch of parody to intrude upon his own reverie. Before going any further, I should like to sketch a definition of parody and to indicate some of the ways in which Joyce uses this device in Ulysses. Joyce's work prior to Ulysses appears to me to contain a great deal of pastiche, such as the poem recited in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" or the juvenile poems by Stephen in A Portrait, but almost no parody. Buck Mulligan's lines, however, constitute parody in the strictest sense, for they bear a very close metrical, verbal, and syntactical resemblance to their original. Parody is always traced to the 2

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London, 1952), p. 459. Conversations with the late Mrs. Kathleen Cruise O'Brien (née Sheehy). * The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1955), p. 692.

3

8o

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TRADITION

Greek rhapsodists, who often interspersed their recitals of Homer with . . . little poems composed of almost the same lines as those they had recited, whose meaning they twisted in order to express something else calculated to amuse the audience.5 Octave Delepierre, whose excellent book on parody I have just quoted, underlines this expressing of "something else" as essential to parody: It is . . . the substitution of a new subject which separates parody from the burlesque or the comic.® As anybody who reads the Yeats lines and their parody to the end can see, not only have the personages been changed, but a passage exalting platonic love has been twisted so as to refer to onanism. Most definitions of parody agree that it need not confine itself to the imitation of a specific passage or even of a specific work. Prose parodies frequently limit themselves to the imitation of an author's characteristic style; such are the parodies of English prose style through the centuries in the hospital ("Oxen of the Sun") episode of Ulysses; some of these even parody the general style of a period rather than that of a particular author. We may go further still and speak of parodying an entire literary or sub-literary genre: Gerty MacDowell's reverie in the "Nausicaa" episode imitates what used to be called the Peg's Paper style in Ireland, after an English publication once popular among 5

Delepierre, La Parodie chez les Grecs, chez les Romains, et chez les modernes (London, 1870), p. 8n. My translation. 9 Ibid., p. 10.

JOYCE

AND A N I R I S H

TRADITION

8l

servant girls. The newspaper headlines in the "Aeolus" episode may also be described as parodies. In the "Cyclops" or pub episode we find parody of such genres as nineteenth-century translations of the Gaelic sagas; accounts of spiritualist seances; newspaper reports (of an execution, a Gaelic Athletic Association meeting, a parliamentary debate, a wedding); an almost apocalyptic description of a religious procession, with copious illustrations from the Latin liturgy and a hilarious excerpt from a Gaelic League journal, purporting to deal with the dog Garryowen's ability to recite Gaelic verse. The supposed translation of "the canine original" runs as follows: The curse of my curses Seven days every day And seven dry

Thursdays

On you, Barney

Kiernan,

Has no sup of water To cool my

courage,

And my guts red After

Lo wry's

roaring lights,7

This parody has so many possible applications that one wavers between the original verse of Synge and the translations of Douglas Hyde, or between Yeats and Lady Gregory in certain of their phases, before finally deciding that the entire Anglo-Irish Literary Revival is their true victim. Before leaving Ulysses we must take note of the type of parody implicit in the book's title. I say "parody" advisedly, for the subject of Ulysses is no longer that of the Odyssey. Even if Bloom 7

Ulysses, p. 324.

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were called Odysseus and all the other characters were allotted their Homeric names, I do not think we could describe Ulysses as a burlesque. In true burlesque Bloom would have to draw the bow of Odysseus while speaking with the accents of Dublin. He would have to undergo shipwreck and all kinds of other physical hardships, or at least some semblance of them. The "tedious brief scene" of Pyramus and Thisbe acted by Bottom and his friends is a good example of the genre. An older Irish contemporary of Joyce's begins a characteristic piece of burlesque thus: "Essex," said Queen Elizabeth, as the two of them sat at breakwhist in the back parlour of Buckingham Palace; "Essex, me haro, I've got a job that I think would suit you. Do you know where Ireland is?" "I'm no great fist at jography," says his Lordship, "but I know the place you mane. Population, three million; exports, emigrants." 8 On the other hand, Ulysses is not a stylistic parody of Homer, as are the Batrachomyomachia

and The Rape of the LocJ{. The

chief formal elements of the Odyssey parodied in Ulysses are the over-all rhythms of search for the father, wandering, and return home, emphasized by the division of the book into three unequal parts, indicated by Roman numerals. No doubt one could say that the personages of the Odyssey are parodied, though "caricatured" would be a more precise term. The plots of individual episodes—plot, of course, constitutes a 8

Prose, Poems and Parodies of Percy French, ed. Mrs. Dc Burgh Daly (Dublin,

1953). P- 174·

JOYCE

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IRISH TRADITION

83

formal clement—are travestied also. It would hardly be stretching the meaning of "parody" too far to describe Ulysses as a thematic and structural parody of the Odyssey. This type of parody has at least one precedent in Irish literature: The Vision of MacConglinne, which I shall discuss later, presents many parallels with the life of Christ, though it makes no recognizable attempt to imitate the language of the Gospels. It may be objected that Ulysses is not a true parody, since it does not expose the work of Homer to even the mildest sort of ridicule, though it belittles modern life by comparison with the heroic past. I disagree. In the light of Finnegans ÌVaf^e we can safely read into Ulysses the implication that Homer's heroes were not quite so heroic as he painted them, and that Penelope, like Molly Bloom, was no better than she should be. Hugh Kenner, in his forthcoming Dublin's Joyce,9 reproduces Joyce's own table of the Homeric correspondences in Ulysses. Twice, Joyce seems to show a knowledge of Bacon's The Wisdom of the Ancients: first, when he equates Proteus with Primal Matter; second, when he has Scylla ("The Rock") symbolize Aristotle and Charybdis ("The Whirlpool") symbolize Plato. Bacon writes of "the Rocks of Distinctions and the Gulfs of Universalities; which two are famous for the Wrack both of Wits and Arts." 1 0 If Joyce did know Bacon's work, he cannot have missed this surprising account of the origin of Pan: 9 Having read this book in typescript and again recently in proof, I must express my general indebtedness to and agreement with Mr. Kenner's assessment of Joyce. 10 Francis Bacon, The Essays . . . with the Wisdom of the Ancients, ed. S. W. Singer (London, 1857), p. 340. For Proteus see pp. 291-93.

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. . . others attribute to him a far different beginning, affirming him to be the common Offspring of Penelope's Suitors, upon a Suspicion that every one of them had to do with her. . . .·» Those who are not convinced should at least consider the possibility that the past as well as the present is being held up to ridicule in Ulysses. I shall have more to say later about the ways in which Joyce uses parody to focus the past upon the present and vice versa. First, however, I want to justify the reference in my title to an Irish tradition of parody. It will be necessary to examine in some detail certain Gaelic works which may be unfamiliar to most readers of Joyce, even though they have been translated into English. I must also discuss briefly several rather more familiar Anglo-Irish parodists, some of whom may have had a direct influence on Joyce. The Vision of MacConglinne, already referred to above, may be the oldest as well as the best major work of parody in Gaelic. Professor Myles Dillon, in a recent book, finds no reason to disagree with the judgment expressed by Kuno Meyer and Wilhelm Wollner in 1892—namely, that the Vision "was composed in the twelfth century . . . the work of a wandering scholar with a grudge against the church. . . . " 1 2 The oldest surviving version is found in the Lebor Brecc, a codex of the late fourteenth century. The Vision tells of a clerical student named Aniér MacConglinne who has abandoned his studies for poetry and become a II 12

Ibid., p. 262. Dillon, Early Irish Literature (Chicago, 1948), p. 143.

JOYCE

scholaris

AND A N I R I S H

TRADITION

85

vagans. Having received the most meager hospitality

at the Abbey of Cork, he recites a satire on the monks. The Abbot sentences him to be crucified, but during the night before his execution MacConglinne has a vision of a land so abounding with food that everything—boats, houses, clothing—is made of it. When the Abbot hears of this vision, he decides that the poet may be able to cure Cathal, king of Munster, of a hunger demon that makes him perpetually ravenous. After various preliminaries, MacConglinne arranges to have the King bound firmly to the wall of the palace. He then prepares a delicious meal and passes tasty morsels before the king's mouth while describing last night's vision of gluttony. Finally the demon leaps out of the king's mouth to get at the food. MacConglinne traps him under an overturned caldron and has the palace evacuated and burned to the ground. The king rewards MacConglinne, who triumphs over the monks. In the words of the late Dr. Robin Flower: The tale . . . is one long parody of the literary methods used by the clerical scholars. At every turn we recognize a motive or a phrase from the theological, the historical, and the grammatical literature. A full commentary on the Vision from this point of view would be little short of a history of the development of literary forms in Ireland. And it is not only the literary tricks of the monks that are held up to mockery. The writer makes sport of the most sacred things, not sparing even the Sacraments and Christ's crucifixion. He jests at relics, at tithes, at ascetic practices, at amulets, at the sermons and private devotions of the monks. . . , 13 13

Flower, The Irish Tradition

(Oxford, 1947), p. 76.

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We must regret that Dr. Flower never found time to provide such a "full commentary" himself. Even a reader who knows the Vision only in translation and has done but litde collateral reading can substantiate some of Dr. Flower's statements. For instance, the beginning of this riotous tale solemnly adheres to a traditional formula: The four things to be asked of every composition must be asked of this composition, viz., place, and person, and time, and cause of invention.14 The ending, too, is a conventional one for saints' lives of other edifying narratives: There are thirty chief virtues attending this tale, and a few of them are enough for an example. The married couple to whom it is related the first night shall not separate without an heir. . . . The new house, in which it is the first tale told, no corpse shall be taken out of it. . . , 1 5 Many of MacConglinne's adventures seem devised intentionally to parody the life of Christ. He is unjustly convicted, scourged, condemned to be crucified, tied to a pillar-stone instead of a pillar. (In the later version of the tale found in Trinity College, Dublin, MS H.3.18, King Cathal plays the role of Pilate; he "said he would not crucify a bard, but the clerics might do it themselves, for it was they that knew the wrong he had 14 Aislinge Meie Conglinne, ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer (London, 1892), p. 2. The translation only is reprinted in Ancient Irish Tales, ed. Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover (New York, 1936), pp. 551-87. 15 Aliti" ge, pp. 1 1 0 - 1 2 .

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87

done." 1 β ) Aniér himself makes the blasphemous comparison, saying,

. . we will go in humility, as our Master, Jesus Christ, went

to His Passion." 1 7 He carries his own cross to the place of execution. When he is finally triumphant, he is permitted to sit always at the King's right hand and is granted the right of intercession —all but one third of it, which is reserved to the men of Ireland. Within its lose framework the Vision

includes several very

specific parodies of literary and liturgical forms, all harping on the food theme. In one, Aniér traces the genealogy of Abbot Manchin up to Adam, as the genealogy of Christ is traced in the third chapter of St. Luke's Gospel: "Bless us, O cleric, famous pillar of learning, Son of honey-bag, son of juice, son of lard . . ." and so on for twenty lines more, up to "Son of bone-nourishing nut-fruit, son of Abel, son of Adam."

18

Elsewhere we find what seems to be a parody of a lorica or "breastplate prayer" for protection, several of which survive from the early Celtic Church : "Off with thee now to the suets and cheeses!" said the phantom. "I will certainly go," said MacConglinne, "and do you put a gospel around me." "It shall be given," said the phantom, "even a gospel of Ibid., p. 149. " Ibid., p. 26. 18 Ibid., pp. 32-4. 18

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four-cornered even dry cheese, and I will put my own paternoster around thee, and neither greed nor hunger can visit him around whom it is put." And he said: "May

smooth juicy bacon protect thee, O

MacCon-

glinne!" . . . "May hard yellow-skinned cream protect thee, O MacConglinne! "May the caldron full of pottage protect thee, O MacConglinne! "May the pan full of pottage protect thee, O MacConglinne!"

19

In similar vein, Austin Clarke, a living Irish poet, makes the king say an act of nwtrition instead of contrition in his verse play, "The Son of Learning," based on the

Vision.20

This kind of blasphemous parody has of course the utmost relevance to Joyce's work, but it was commonplace during the Middle Ages; blasphemy has little charm except in ages of faith, just as we relish most those parodies which ridicule the authors we most admire. The most sacred portions of the Catholic liturgy were the most frequently parodied, so that the Council of Trêves felt obliged to pass the following decree : Item, praecipimus

ut omnes sacerdotes

non permittant

tannos et alios vagos scholares, auí Goliardos super Sanctus et Agnus Dei, in missis,

cantare

Truversus

&c.21

No doubt it was frequently disobeyed. Delepierre mentions the 19 20

21

Ibid., pp. 80-2. The Collected Poems of Austin Clarke (London, 1936), p. 195. Delepierre, La Parodie, p. 54η.

JOYCE

AND AN

IRISH

TRADITION

8ç

great number of parodies of the Mass which still survive, and he quotes a typical one in honor of Bacchus from Harleian MS 913: INCIPIT MISSA DE POTATORIBUS

Introibo ad altare Bacchi. R. Ad eum qui laetificat cor hominis. It continues in the same spirit down to . . . per dominum

nostrum reum Bacchum,

poculat, per omnia pocula

qui bibit et

22

poculorum.

Joyce might well have written the last phrase if he had thought of it. T w o of the changes that he rings on sécula seculorum in Finnegans

Wake—"Insomnia,

somnia somniorum"

(p. 193) and

"from circular circulatio" (p. 427)—can be allowed to stand for all the thousands of such blasphemous parodies in the book. Protestants may take note, for instance, of two parodies of the Lord's Prayer, on pages 530-31 and 536. 23 Since the goliardi were such notorious parodists, they may well have forged more than one saint's life. Professor R. A. S. Macalister says flatly that the "Life of Findchua of Bri-Gobann" in the Book of Lismore, a codex of the late fifteenth century, is a goliardie parody. 24 Father John Ryan, s.j., makes a less sweeping statement. Referring to the hospitality given visiting monks in early Christian Ireland, he writes: 22

Ibid., pp. 39-40. Finnegans Wak^e (New York, 1947). All later quotations are from this edition, but incorporate Joyce's own corrections, as given on pp. 629-43 'he same edition. 24 The Book, of Mac Carthaigh Riabhach (Dublin, 1950), p. xvii. 23

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So common was this feature that it was burlesqued by the imaginative writer of St. Findchua's life. When this abbot was informed that Ronan the Fair, a holy elder of Fir Breg, was on the way to visit him with some companions, he is reported to have exclaimed: "Let a vessel of ale, enough to intoxicate fifty, and food enough for a hundred be given them, and if they deem that insufficient, add more!" 28 Such a piece of exaggeration would not prove anything by itself, since even the account of Findchua's suckling a boy at his right breast is hardly out of keeping with the other saints' lives in the Book of Lismore. But the saint is represented as taking part in seven battles and giving way constantly to the sin of anger; on one occasion his head gets so hot that it burns his tutor's cowl; his lay neighbors describe him as a "slaughterous warrior." In one battle he behaves more like a Celtic war god than a Christian saint: Then the cleric's nature rises against them, so that sparks of blazing fire burst forth out of his teeth. And that fire burnt up the shafts of the spears, and the wrists and forearms of the marauders. . . . 2 e It is comforting to learn that at the end of his days Findchua made a pilgrimage to Rome: . . for he was repentant of the battles which he had fought and the deeds which he had done for friendship and for love of brotherhood." 2 7 25

Irish Monasticism (London, 1 9 3 1 ) , p. 326. Uves of Saints from the Book, of Lismore, ed. and trans. Whidey Stokes (Oxford, 1890), p. 236. 27 Ibid., p. 243. 29

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l£ the "Life of Findchua" is a parody, it missed its mark, for it was obviously taken seriously by the compilers of the Book of Lismore. Nobody who has even the most superficial knowledge of the Gaelic saints' lives will wonder why. Typically, the earliest version of a saint's life is written in Latin and is a sober enough document. Later come the Gaelic versions, in which the Latin life is either ignored or overlaid with a tissue of pagan folklore.28 It will cheer many people to learn that the goliardi

did not

have all the laughers on their side. As Robin Flower has shown, lay learning regained its independence in Ireland about the twelfth century, when the hereditary bardic families once more achieved prominence under the patronage of the native, and even of the Anglo-Norman, aristocracy. Naturally the bards incurred the jealousy of their clerical rivals.29 It is probably to this rivalry that we owe the uproarious parody and burlesque of earlier Druidic pedantry which we find in Imtheacht Tromdàmh

na Tromdhâimhe

or

Guaire, which was edited and translated from the

Book of Lismore almost a century ago by Professor Owen Connellan. He translated the title as The Proceedings

of the

Great

Bardic Institution, but Dr. Flower gives a more accurate version, The Proceedings of the Burdensome

Bardic Company. This satire

studded with parodies and burlesques seems to consist of four different stories; the hero—or rather, victim—of the first is a fili (a poet who is also something of a seer, like the Latin vates) named Dallan Forguill, who belongs to the late sixth or early seventh century. His Amra 29

Choluim

Chille or "Eulogy of St.

See R. A. Stewart Macalister, The Secret Languages of Ireland (Cambridge, Eng., 1937). PP· 64. 67· 28 See Flower, Irish Tradition, pp. 67-93.

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Columba" is a well-known but not well-understood poem, for its language is "very obscure." 3 0 The three remaining stories deal with Dallan Forguill's successor as chief of the poets of Ireland, Seanchan (Senchán) Torpéist. The first of these, in which he and his huge company of poets, students, servants, and womenfolk make extravagant demands upon the hospitality of King Guaire, seems to be the main source of The King's Threshold, a tragedy in which Yeats ignores the satire and takes the side of poet against the king. In the next story Seanchan satirizes the mice that steal his food and the cats who should have killed the mice. A giant cat carries him off, and he is saved only by the intervention of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise. Seanchan does not show the least gratitude to the saint, "for," says he, "I would rather that Guaire would be satirized than that I should live and he not satirized." 3 1 The last story recounts a battle of wits between Seanchan and Marvan (Marbán) the hermit, who has already helped Guaire to meet the harsh demands of the bards. Marvan, champion of Christian learning—and something of an old wizard into the bargain—completely outwits the bards by forcing them to admit that they do not know Τ din Bó Cuailgne, the greatest of the Gaelic sagas. In order to learn it they finally have to summon the hero Fergus from the dead. Dallan Forguill's mission in the first part of the satire is to obtain the magic shield of the king of Oriel for his own patron, H u g h the Fair, king of Brefney. First he tries to win it by compliments; the poem he addresses to the king of Oriel must be either a parody or a burlesque: 30 31

Dillon, Early Irish Literature, p. 172. Transactions of the Ossianic Society, V (Dublin, i860), p. 87.

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" T h a t is a good poem," says the king, "whoever could understand it." " T h a t is true for you," says Dallan, "and whosoever composes a poetic remonstrance, it is he himself who ought to explain it. . . . " 3 2 Inevitably, by the time he has finished we wish he would explain his explanation. Having failed to get what he wants by flattery, Dallán tries satire; the king again replies politely: " W e must confess . . . that we do not know whether that is better or worse than the first poem you composed."

33

T h e bard then proceeds to gloss his own invective. His satire, being unjust, recoils on his own head, in accordance with the laws laid down by the saints of Ireland, and he dies three days later. T h e satires of Seanchan against mice and cats, which cause ten mice to fall dead before him, but merely anger the giant cat Irusan, are true parodies, since the scathing verses usually directed against humans—and widely credited with the power to cause disfigurement or even death—are here directed against insignificant victims. T h e outrageous demands or wishes expressed by Seanchan and his companions are obvious parodies, being long, almost meaningless, and seemingly impossible of fulfillment until Marvan comes to the rescue. In the final story Marvan obtains his choice of whátever music he wishes because he can show his relationship to the arts: ". . . the grandmother of my servant's wife was descended from poets." 32

Ibid., p. 15.

33

Ibid., p. 2 7 .

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"You shall obtain your choice of the arts, though very remote is your connection with them," said Seanchan. . . , 34 From such examples as the Vision of MacConglinne Proceedings

of the Burdensome

Bardic Company

and the

we can learn

what kind of social and cultural situation it is that gives rise to major works of parody, such as Don Quixote or the attacks of Aristophanes upon Euripides and Socrates. Mere intellectual rivalry is not enough; an outmoded literary tradition or one that has yet to establish itself must be seen as the symbol of a rival social group, whether it be a class or a political party. The lay intellectuals—goliardi or bards—lampoon their clerical rivals for social power and prestige; the clerics return the compliment. We find the same efflorescence of parody, and an even greater bitterness, in the attacks on the "Cockney School" of poetry in early nineteenth-century England. Mistrust of and contempt for a new kind of poetry were reinforced by class and political prejudices in the minds of writers for the Quarterly Review,

Black-

wood's, and, later, Fraser's. The same complex of feelings had produced the parodies of The Anti-Jacobin

a little earlier.

Joyce's astonishing outburst of parody results from his fighting a war on two fronts at once. On the one hand, he is fighting the old battle of the wandering scholar against the clergy, who must inevitably tend to dominate intellectual life in a Catholic country. Oh the other hand, he is fighting the battle of philosophy and the humanities as he had learned them from his Jesuit teachers against the science and pseudo-science that capture the allegiance of an untutored man of good will like Leopold Bloom and encourage his native vulgarity. Such an intellectual position s*lbid.,

p. 91.

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as Joyce's may not be entirely self-consistent, but it's a grand place from which to start a fight. A more personal type of rivalry, one which has proved a fruitful source of Gaelic parody down the centuries, finds expression in the poetic contest—or "flyting," to give it its Scots name. Since the exchange of poetic abuse is probably as old as Gaelic poetry itself, there is every likelihood that the Scots exponents of "flyting" adopted the tradition from their Gaelic-speaking contemporaries. From "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie" itself we learn that Walter Kennedy could speak Gaelic. The neatest way of retorting on an opponent in such a verbal battle is obviously to parody his verses. Macalister cites an example from the eighth century. CÚ Cuimne, who died in 742, was attacked in the following quatrain for leaving the seminary and taking a wife: Cú-Cuimne read half the pages Ever written by the sages. At the rest he never fags; He has left it all—for hags. Cu Cuimne replied in a parody or palinode: Cú-Cuimne read half the pages Ever written by the sages: Now the rest with care he'll read Till he is a sage indeed. 35 A thousand years later we find the same tradition still alive in Gaelic-speaking Ireland. John O'Tuomy (Sean Ó Tuama), a 35

Macalister, Secret Languages, p. 127.

φ

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Gaelic poet who kept a publichouse in the city of Limerick until he went bankrupt, advertised his tavern in a poem which James Clarence Mangan afterwards translated. I give the first stanza only: I sell the best brandy and sherry, To make my good customers merry; But at times their finances Run short, as it chances, And then I feel very sad, very!

36

His scapegrace friend Andrew Magrath (Andrias Mac Craith), a hedge schoolmaster and a true wandering scholar, better known than O'Tuomy as a poet, replied in a much longer poem, of which I again give only the first stanza in Mangan's translation: O, Tuomy! you boast yourself handy At selling good ale and bright brandy, But the fact is your liquor Makes everyone sicker, I tell you that, I, your friend Andy. 3 7 These translations of Mangan's are believed to have provided the "limerick," a very old stanza-form, with its modern name.38 I need hardly point out the relevance of the "flyting" tradition to the work of Joyce, who mercilessly parodied his critics in the "Shem" episode (pp. 169-95) of Finnegans 36

Wa\e.

1000 Years of Irish Poetry, cd. Kathleen Hoagland (New York, 1947), p.

186. 37

Ibid., p. 187. See Eric Cross, "The Limerick and Limerick," The Bell, XVIII (Dublin; March, 1953), 6 1 5 - 2 1 . For the two Gaelic poets, see Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland (Dublin, 1925), pp. 2 7 3 - 8 1 . 38

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97

I have no wish to attempt anything like a full history of AngloIrish parody, which is indistinguishable from English parody whenever its victims are the great English poets. William Maginn's best parody, "Don Juan Unread," based on Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited," may stand for all such work. I should like, however, to mention one remarkable squib of Maginn's, on which he lavished all his humor and learning, the " 'Luctus' on the Death of Sir Daniel Donnelly. Late Champion of Ireland" which appeared in Blackwood's for May, 1820. This symposium of mourning for an Irish prizefighter fills 35 pages in Maginn's collected works and includes commemorative poems allegedly by Byron, Wordsworth and others; a Greek elegy; a Latin one; a Hebrew dirge, supposedly by "Jackie" Barrett, the eccentric Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, accompanied by a characteristic letter; and fulsome poems and speeches said to be the work of leading citizens in Maginn's native Cork. 39 Here and elsewhere in Maginn's work we find anticipations of Father Francis Mahony's audacious and sometimes libelous pranks in his Reliques of Father Prout, a series which appeared in Fraser's under Maginn's editorship. I prefer Mahony to Maginn; though perhaps not so versatile, he draws on a far richer personality. Mention of "Father Prout" brings us to a vein of parody which is peculiarly Anglo-Irish. Gaelic as a spoken language was dying out in Ireland as the eighteenth century faded into the nineteenth, but the traditional Irish tunes did not die. New English words were fitted to them, which often bore no relation to the Gaelic. Usually these words were supplied by Anglo-Irishman—including 39

Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Doctor Maginn, ed. Shelton Mackenzie (New York, 1855), II, 47-82. For "Don Juan Unread" see I, 179.

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Goldsmith, it is said—but sometimes they were the work of folk poets. One such ballad, "Castlehyde," by an itinerant heir of the bards from County Cork whose name has not come down to us, inspired a famous parody, "The Groves of Blarney," which in its turn was imitated and parodied ad

nauseam.

The poet of "Castlehyde" admittedly knew more Gaelic than he did English, but those who scoffed at him failed to realize that he was attempting to render the assonantal patterns of Gaelic poetry in English. What seem to be ludicrously bad shots at rhyme are really assonances; in accumulating these, the poet has undoubtedly strained the English language severely. Here is my favorite excerpt: The grand improvements They would a muse you The trees are

drooping

With fruit all

kind;

The bees per/wming The fields with wjwsic, Which yields more beauty T o CastleAy^. 40 "The Groves of Blarney," by Richard Millikin of Cork, while it won its author's bet that he could write something more ridiculous than "Castlehyde," displays little of the skilled vowel harmony of its original. I shall quote here not Millikin's authentic text, but the one given by "Father Prout" in "A Plea for Pilgrimages," his tongue-in-cheek account of the pilgrimage of Sir Walter Scott 40 Hoagland, Irish Poetry, p. 255. I have divided the lines and used italics to emphasize the assonances.

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99

to the Blarney Stone in 1825. Beside it I give an excerpt from what Mahony claimed was the Greek original, an incredibly accurate rendering, as I hope my literal translation will show. H e also offered a French version which avoids all the absurdities of the English and a Latin version which is not up to the usual high standard of Mahony's Latinity. There is even an alleged rendering into Gaelic of one stanza. Mahony later produced an Italian version also. T H E GROVES OF B L A R N E Y

Ή

Ύλη

Βλαρνιχη

I. The Groves of Blarney, They look so charming, Down by the purlings Of sweet silent brooks, All decked by posies That spontaneous grow there, Planted in order In the rocky nooks.

α. l y

Βλαρνια« αϊ

υλαι

Φΐρισται,

καλλιφνλλαι,

Όπου

ριουσι

σίγα

ΤΙητγαι

ψιβνριζονσαι·

Έκοντα Όμως Μίσσοίϊ

ycwrfitvTa

tí

φντΐυθιντα tv

Ε στ* ανθί'

αγκονισσιν πίτρωδισσιν.*1

Literal translation of the Greek: "Of the Blarney the woods, best, with beautiful leaves, where silently flow springs murmuring; spontaneously generated and likewise planted in the middle dells are flowers." The last word in the Greek means "rocky" and agrees with the word for "dells" in the previous line. A prose translation could hardly be more faithful to the original than Mahony's rhymed one is. Mahony wrote at least two imitations of "The Groves of *lTAe Works of Father Prout, ed. Charles Kent (London, 1 8 8 1 ) , pp. 34-35. Greek accents omitted in original.

100

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Blarney" in English; one is entitled "The Attractions of a Fashionable Irish Watering-Place" and sings the praises of a little seaside village near Cork, "The town of Passage." 4 2 Much more famous, however, is "The Shandon Bells." This jeu d'esprit has somehow stumbled into The Oxford Bool^ of English Verse and thence to a terrific New Critical drubbing at the hands of Messrs. Brooks and Warren, 43 thus answering Pope's rhetorical question, "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" In truth "The Shandon Bells" is but a pastiche of a parody; the occasion for its first appearance throws a light on the perverse wit of Francis Mahony. In one of the "Prout Papers" he presented what he alleged to be the French, Latin, and Greek originals of poems by Thomas Moore—who, being a Whig, was a favorite target of Maginn and Mahony. These "originals" were written by Mahony himself with the help of a former pupil, Frank Stack Murphy, who appears as "an obscure Greek poet, called Στακκος Μορφιδης." The article ended with Father Prout's account of how he had sung his own "The Shandon Bells" to Moore—verses which the latter soon plagiarized in "Those Evening Bells," one of the songs in his National

Airs.4*

I have dwelt rather long on Mahony because, like Joyce, he received his entire formal education from the Jesuits. Any remote chance Mahony still had of being ordained a Jesuit priest disappeared when he was forced to resign from the post of Master of Rhetoric at Clongowes Wood College, Joyce's first alma mater, partly as the result of a drunken spree with his students; some Ibid., p. 257. Cleanth Brooks, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York, 1946), pp. 220-24. 44 Works of Father Prout, pp. 83-103. 42

43

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ΙΟΙ

of the blame for this escapade rests with the father of one of them." Mahony's long residence and death on the Continent and his skill in polylingual puns also remind us of Joyce. I cannot prove that Joyce knew of Mahony's connection with Clongowes, but he is mentioned at least once in Finnegans

WaJ{e: "The prouts

who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally" (p. 482). One could not be sure that Father Prout, as well as Marcel Proust and the Latin dissyllable prout, was among those present, were it not that the same paragraph contains a reference to "the bells of scandal." Both Maginn and Edward Vaughan Kenealy—a linguist, but hardly a wit, who translated "Castlehyde" into Greek—were graduates of Trinity College, Dublin, where the undergraduate weekly magazine, T.CD., Hermathena,

is still known for its parodies, as

the faculty publication, is for its Greek and Latin

renderings of English verse. Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, a Fellow of the College and one of the great Latin and Greek scholars of his day, carried on the Maginn tradition admirably. Shortly after being elected to Fellowship in 1868, he founded a magazine named Kottabos, which became world-famous for its parodies and Greek and Latin verses as well as for the original English poetry of Oscar Wilde and others. The best of the work in its scarce volumes was reprinted in an anthology, Echoes from Kottabos.** Tyrrell's own "Herodotus in Dublin ( T h e original added when it is deemed necessary)"

Gree\

is

was a favorite parody, as

45

See ibid., pp. vii-xxxiv.

48

Ed. R. Y. Tyrrell and Sir Edward Sullivan, Bart. (London, 1906).

102

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was R. F . Littledale's " T h e Oxford Solar Myth." The latter, which put forward the view that Max Müller, the philologist and dabbler in comparative mythology, was the sun, had the distinction of being translated into German! The link between Tyrrell and Joyce was of course Gogarty, who was at one time a friend of both. Finally we come to a Trinity graduate whose work as a parodist and author of popular songs was peculiarly dear to James Joyce, as to many other Irishmen of his generation. William Percy French (1854-1922), better known as Percy French, was distinguished for his banjo playing rather than his classical learning while at college. His greatest achievement there was the writing of "Abdullah Bulbul Ameer," now better known to American undergraduates than to Irish ones. A London publisher pirated and copyrighted the song, so that French never earned a penny by it nor even had the satisfaction of being acknowledged as its author. After futile attempts to settle down as a civil engineer, French became first a humorous journalist, then a traveling entertainer singing his own comic songs, giving his own recitations, and doing clever lightning cartoons.47 This Anglo-Irish successor to the medieval gleemen wrote a number of songs to original or traditional Irish tunes, some of which have become so popular that they are often mistaken for anonymous folksongs. " T h e Mountains of Mourne," "Phil the Fluter's Ball," and "Come 47 Chronicles and Poems of Percy French, ed. Mrs. De Burgh Daly (Dublin, 1922), contains a great deal of biographical detail about French, some in his own words.

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Back Paddy Rcilly (to Ballyjamesduff)" arc probably the bestknown. "Phil the Fluter's Ball" bulks almost as large in Finnegans Wa\e as the ballad which gave the book its title. As a matter of fact, the paragraph on p. 6 of Finnegans Wa\e in which the wake of the hod-carrier Tim Finnegan is first described contains at least two detailed allusions to "Phil the Fluter's Ball." First we read, "And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality," which corresponds to the line in the fourth verse of the song, "Then all joined in wid the greatest joviality. . . ." Later comes, "Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O ! " which parodies the opening of the chorus, "With the toot of the flute, And the twiddle of the fiddle, O. . . ." 48 Even in the previous paragraph on p. 6 there is what may be described as an allusion to French's song. Tim when drunk is called "Phill" —". . . wan warning Phill filt tippling full." Wherever one finds a further allusion to "Phil the Fluter," a reference to the hodcarrier's wake is usually not far away. Not counting those on p. 6, I have found at least sixteen allusions to French's ballad in Finnegans Wa\e.*9 I can find no allusion to "The Mountains of Mourne"—which does not prove that there is none—but on p. 485 we read these words: "Come back, baddy wrily, to Bullydamestough! Cum him, buddy rowly, with me!" The following other songs by French are alluded to: "Mick's Hotel (by the Salt Say Water)," p. 50; "Phishlin Phil McHugh," p. 50; "Shlathery's Mounted Fut," 48 Sheet music. "Copyright 1937 by Keith Prowse & Co., Ltd. Published by arrangement with Messrs. Pigott & Co., Ltd., Dublin." " P a g e s 1 2 , 58, 63, 230, 240, 277-78, 297, 3 1 8 - 1 9 , 335, 3 4 1 , 3 5 1 , 363, 444, 491.

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pp. 137, 181, 405; "Arc Yc Right There, Michael?" pp. 66, 296; "Abdullah Bulbul Ameer," p. 355; and "Drumcolliher," pp. 60, 176, 540. The "Drumcolliher" references on p. 540 require special explanation. The song tells of a typical one-horse (and one-store) town: There's only one house in Drumcolliher, For hardware and bacon and tea. . . . 50 None the less, the native of Drumcolliher is proud of it and wouldn't live anywhere else. Hence the travel agent's slogans in four languages on p. 540 of Finnegans Waf^e. The last of these, however, strikes a sinister note: "Vedi Drumcollogher e poi Moonis." You will say that it is merely a variation on "See Naples and die." No doubt—but note the spelling of "Drumcollogher." There is a real town of that name in County Limerick; in 1926, 48 people were burned to death there in a cinema fire.51 In accordance with Joycean punctilio, Percy French is mentioned twice by name in Finnegans Wa\e, once in the first footnote on p. 296 as "Parsee fïrench," and again on p. 495 in the phrase "skirriless ballets in Parsee Franch. . . ." Percy French indeed wrote many ballads, but none of them was scurrilous; the nearest this kindly man ever came to satire was in verses entitled "The Queen's After-Dinner Speech," as supposedly reported by a waiter at the Viceregal Lodge during Queen Victoria's state visit to Ireland in 1900. The references to Maud Gonne and W. B. Yeats should be better known than they are: 50 51

Sheet music. "Copyright 1940 in the U.S.A. by Pigott & Co." Irish Independent (Dublin), Golden Jubilee Edition (Jan. 3, 1 9 5 5 ) , p. 39.

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IO5

"That Maud Gonne," sez she, "Dhressin' in black," sez she, " T o welcome me back," sez she; "Though I don't care," sez she, "What they wear," sez she, "An' all that gammon," sez she, "About me bringin' famine," sez she. "Now Maud 'ill write," sez she, "That I brought the blight," sez she, "Or altered the saysons," sez she, "For some private raysins," sez she, "An' I think there's a slate," sez she, "Off Willie Yeats," sez she. "He should be at home," sez she, "French polishin' a pome," sez she, "An' not writin' letters," sez she, "About his betters," sez she, "Paradin* me crimes," sez she, "In the 'Irish Times'," sez she.52 This verse form, if I may so dignify it, has a long history in AngloIrish humorous writing. French's lines appear to be an imitation of "Looey Philip and Her Grayshus Majesty," by M. J. Barry of Cork, a squib which presumably dates from 1848.53 Barry's verses stem ultimately from the "Dialogue Between Tom Flinter and His Man," quoted in Sir Jonah Barrington's Personal Sketches of His Own Times (otherwise known as his Recollections) : 52 83

Proie, Poems and Parodies of Percy French, p. 56. Cor^ Lyrics, ed. Daniel Casey (Cork, 1857), pp. 148-53.

Ιθ6

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Dick! said he. What? said he. Fetch me my hat, says he; For I will go, says he, To Timahoe says he. . . I could prove that Joyce knew Barrington's book, but I feel sure that it is French's verses he is parodying on pp. 519-20 of Finnegans Wa^e: "He is doing a walk, says she, in the feelmick's park, says he, like a tarrable Turk, says she. . . ." In the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses Stephen's meditations include his own parody of some lines by Percy French: The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't. Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt And I'll tell you the reason why. She always kept things decent in The Hannigan famileye.B5 The original is entitled "Mathew Hanigan's Aunt"; the first four lines of the chorus are almost identical with those above, except where "Mulligan" is substituted for "Hanigan." 5 8 French himself was no mean parodist; note particularly his renderings of nursery rhymes in the styles of various nineteenthcentury English poets. These can be found in Prose, Poems and Parodies of Percy French, a volume still regularly reprinted in 64

Recollections of Jonah Barrington, with an introduction by George Birmingham (Dublin, n.d.), p. 93. 55 Ulysses, p. 46. 56 Prose, Poems and Parodies of Percy Trench, p. 155.

JOYCE

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I07

57

Ireland. It is curious to sec Joyce, the arch-parodist, so frequently parodying a fellow-parodist. What were his motives? A satisfactory answer to that question would tell us a great deal about his choice and treatment of sources for Finnegans Wal(e. In the first place, we must remember that Joyce was still working in the Flaubert tradition, which places a premium on historical accuracy. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the dreamer of Finnegans Wa\e, recapitulates the history of the human race in his Jungian dreams, but he is also a dweller in a particular time and place. He is an Irish middle-class Protestant, aged fifty-odd in or about 1939; so was my late father, who was able to give me many of the words of "Drumcolliher" before I obtained a copy of the sheet music. It would be surprising if H. C. E.'s free association of ideas in dreaming did not contain reminiscences of songs by Percy French, as well as of Moore's Irish Melodies and the Irish Country Songs collected by Herbert Hughes in this century.68 To reinforce my argument on this point, I must stress the fact that Joyce introduces a number of very precise contemporary touches into the barroom scene of Finnegans Wake (pp. 309-82). When the customers pay for their drinks, they do so in the handsome Irish coinage introduced in 1928: 89 "he scooped the hens, hounds and horses, biddy by bunny, with an arc of his covethand . . ." (p. 321). The "bunny" on the threepenny piece is more correctly termed a "hare" on p. 313. On p. 324 the radio announcer prefaces an S.O.S. ("lessonless") message with the words "Rowdiose wodhalooing." The allusions to the noise in the 57

Pages 84-98. See also pp. 64-83 and 1 2 1 - 2 5 . James Joyce: sa vie, son oeuvre, son rayonnement, ed. Bernard Gheerbrant (Paris, 1949). An exhibition catalogue; see Nos. 120, 122. 59 See The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p. 749. 58

Ιθ8

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bar and the Battle of Waterloo are clear enough, but only those who have heard an Irish announcer say "Radio Atha Lúain" (Radio Athlone) in Gaelic will recognize the primary reference; this is an authentic period touch, as announcers now say "Radio Éireann" (Radio Ireland). On p. 325 we have radio commercials, not all of them authentic. I am not sure that Arthur Guinness, Sons and Company ("Art thou gainous sense uncompetite!") or Anne Lynch's Teas ("Anna Lynchya Pourable!") advertised on the Irish radio before 1939, the year in which Finnegans Wake was published, but I do remember that the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes advertised regularly ("Don't forget. I wish auspicable thievesdayte for the stork dyrby."). As for references to De Valera, such as "Devine's Previdence" on the same page, Andrew Cass has collected a number of them and presented his case for the identification of "Shaun" with De Valera in two brilliant articles.60 In the second place, French's songs would naturally form part of the equipment of the ideal reader of Finnegans Wal^e—one who, like Joyce himself, knew both the microcosm and the macrocosm, both twentieth-century Ireland and the wider human world in time and space to which that Ireland—often reluctantly —belongs. The more familiar the underlying jingle, the more extravagantly can Joyce counterpoint his puns against it without the experienced reader's losing the melodic line altogether. Look at the distortions suffered by the three-word phrase "Phil the Fluter" without becoming totally unrecognizable; I have arranged them in the order of their difficulty, not that of their occurrence in the text: 80

"Sprakin Sea Djoytsch," Irish Times (Dublin), April 26, 1947, p. 6; "Childe Horrid's Pilgrimace," Envoy (Dublin, 1 9 5 1 ) , Vol. V, No. 17, pp. 19-30.

J O Y C E AND AN I R I S H TRADITION

IO9

Phil fluther (p. 444) filltheflutered (p. 63) foil the fluter (p. 230) foil the flouter (p. 363) fill the flatter (p. 335) feel the Flucher (p. 58) Finn the Flinter (p. 240) Puhl the Punkah (p. 297) T h a m the Thatcher (p. 318) Pied de Poudre (p. 12) The longer the recognizable quotation parodied, the greater the opportunity it offers for verbal arabesques. Here are some variations on the passage from the chorus or "Phil the Fluter" which I quoted above: for the total of your flouts is not fit to fan his fettle, O! (p. 58) to the tickle of his tube and the twobble of his fable, O. . . . (p· 319) with the sickle of a scygthe but the humour of a hummer, O

(Ρ· 3 4 1 )

T o the tumble of the toss tot the trouble of the swaddled, O. (P· 444) T o go back for a moment to "Pied de Poudre"—why am I confident that this is a reference to "Phil the Fluter"? Let me quote part of the context : . . . hopping round his middle like kippers on a griddle, O, as he lays dormont from the macroborg of Holdhard to the microbirg of Pied de Poudre.

IIO

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T h e citizens of Dublin are hopping round the middle of the sleeping giant—who is Finn MacCool, H. C. E., Finnegan, and the city of Dublin, among other things. The giant's head is Howth Head ("Holdhard"), while his feet lie at the Powder Magazine in Phoenix Park ("Pied de Poudre"). Now, "hopping round his middle like kippers on a griddle, O " is almost a direct quotation from the chorus of "Phil the Fluter's Ball," where the words are "Hopping in the middle like a herrín' on a griddle, O ! " Furthermore, if one reads "Pied de Poudre" with a Dublin pronunciation instead of a Parisian one, it sounds much closer to "Phil the Fluter." It cannot be too often stressed that, as Joyce's own recording shows, the basic language of Finnegans

Wa/^e is

English with a Dublin accent. The quickest way to understand almost any passage is to read it aloud as if it were English. If a passage in roman type seems to be entirely in a foreign language, then the reader must be particularly on guard against a hoax. The reference to "that once grand old elrington bawl" on pp. 55-56, coupled with the parody of Swift's epistolary style which occupies most of p. 413, suggests that Joyce was familiar with F . Elrington Ball's edition of Swift's Correspondence.

If so, he

must have known the language which Swift and the Rev. Thomas Sheridan called "Latino-Anglicus." It looks like Latin, but turns out to be English. Sheridan began his first letter in the new language with the words "De armis ter de an," which mean nothing more than "Dear Mr. Dean." 9 1 So when we find, on p. 91 of Finnegans

Wake, what seems at first sight a passage of

modern Gaelic, ". . . mhuith peisth mhuise as fearra bheura 61

The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. F. Elrington Ball, V (London, 1 9 1 3 ) , p. 73.

JOYCE

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III

muirre hriosmas," we must beware. The rule, "Read aloud as English," does not apply here, but when given a Gaelic pronunciation the words sound very like "with best wishes for a very merry Christmas." In the third place, the songs of Percy French, besides forming part of the culture of H. C. E. and the ideal reader of

Finnegans

Wa\e, also helped to make up the culture of Joyce himself. He could not have parodied them if he had not known them. I deliberately use the word "culture" in its anthropological sense. In recapitulating the history of mankind through the ages Joyce was fully aware that he must represent "culture" in the most inclusive sense of that word. Man's religion, politics, art, science, and technology are all parts of his culture—but so are his dirty jokes, his children's games, and the songs pounded into his head by gleemen or crooners. Everything was grist that came to Joyce's mill; much of it did not come spontaneously, but had to be sought for by Joyce and his band of unpaid researchers; other material, including most of the popular culture he used, was already stored in his memory. We can be sure of this last point, because Joyce's parodies of the Percy French songs often reflect a version which varies considerably from the printed text. Like every other reader of Finnegans

Wake, I am deeply in-

debted to Messrs. Campbell and Robinson's Skeleton Key.*2 They will, I hope, pardon me for regretting that, in their analysis of Joyce's references, they show so much knowledge of Sanskrit and so little of "stage Irish," so much of the Egyptian Boo\ of the Dead and so little of the Irish book of the living. 62

Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Wake (New York, 1944).

Finnegans

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TRADITION

Having explained, at least tentatively, why Joyce parodied so much trivial verse, I must go on to ask a more fundamental question: why parody at all? I have suggested above that much of the parody in Ulysses had a satirical intention, but I cannot detect the same animus in most of Finnegans

Wa\e. A majority

of the critics I have read agree that the latter is by far the mellower book, yet parody is far more integral to its structure than to that of Ulysses. If Joyce wished to fuse past and present into a single work of literature, why did he not quote the great and trivial phrases of the past without parody, as Ezra Pound has done in his Cantos? One answer, of course, is that Joyce was not Pound. Another might be that the Irish mind is innately destructive; though appallingly loosely phrased and impossible to prove, this answer has the merit of being difficult to refute. Even the philosophic systems of Berkeley and Eriugena contain an undeniable element of nihilism. However, I do not think we need discuss this second answer, as the view of history which Joyce was putting forward almost inevitably finds expression in parody. If I were to attempt a philosophy of parody, I might produce merely a parody of philosophy; instead, let me look for help from the philosophers. A reading of Susanne Κ. Langer's chapter on "The Comic Rhythm" in Feeling

and Form

suggests that the

sense of human continuity which Joyce sought to express is basically comic; the moment history is represented as imitating itself, parody is only a step away. The following quotation forms the kernel of Mrs. Langer's argument: What justifies the term "Comedy" is not that the ancient ritual procession, the Comus, honoring the god of that name, was the source of this great art form—for comedy has arisen

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II3

in many parts of the world, where the Greek god with his particular worship was unknown—but that the Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth, eternal life.63 "Eternal life" here of course means eternal life on earth; the Christian view of earthly life is tragic, not comic. Support for the view that there is something inherently comic in the repeat performances of history comes to us from an unexpected quarter: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. . . .The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Who wrote that? Can it have been Joyce himself, who made Stephen Dedalus say, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"? Is not Finnegans

Wa\e the nightmare in

question, weighed down with the tradition of all the dead generations ? Let us read on : The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the 83

Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), p. 3 3 1 . Compare Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (Cambridge, Eng., 1934), and Albert Cook, The Dar^ Voyage and the Golden Mean (Cambridge, Mass., 1949).

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past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes. . . . Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, in turn, 1789 and the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795.64 Joyce would have disagreed with Marx on only one score: he did not believe that men could revolutionize themselves or create something entirely new. Just at the point in Finnegans Wa\e where the cycle of history turns and a new age begins, we read: Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat! (p. 613) Fuit fiat we may interpret as "It was. Let it be." Or "Let what was be." It is, of course, a parody—of God's creating word in Genesis: "Fiat lux ("Let there be light"). Nevertheless, few people would be likely to see the comic possibilities inherent in a cyclic theory of history; most of us would regard the implied futility of human life as pathetic rather than comic. Joyce, had watched his own countrymen "conjure up the spirits of the past to their service," in Marx's words. Sometimes the results had struck him as hilarious, at other times as nauseating. There is a tone of bitterness underlying his parody of the various manifestations of the Gaelic Revival in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses which suggests that he regarded the whole 6 4 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, 1934), p. 13.

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II5

movement as fundamentally anti-intellectual. A similar view was expressed in his early attack on the Irish theatre movement, "The Day of the Rabblement," and we find it in Stephen

Hero

and

A Portrait too. No doubt he was partly right. Still, one who had distilled an esthetic from the teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas ought to have better understood the motives of those who genuinely sought the future in the Gaelic past, as he sought it in the European past. On the other hand, the image of the Gaelic past offered for the young Joyce's admiration was probably not one with which he could very easily identify himself. What sympathy could he feel for those bloodthirsty, unreflecting warriors and kings ? With impatient, intellectually arrogant saints like "fiery Columbanus" ββ he had more affinity, at least in his youth. Such symbols of nonconformity as Bricriu, the mocker of the Cuchulain cycle, and Conan the Bald, who plays the same role in the Finn cycle, seem to have remained unknown to him—at least I cannot trace any allusions to them in his books. Though he was so much more in the true bardic tradition than the minor figures of the AngloIrish Literary Revival, I doubt that he ever became fully aware of this fact. I have no evidence that he knew The Vision of MacConglinne, for instance. Most of his knowledge of the Gaelic past seems to come from secondary sources, often of the most unscholarly kind. This was partly deliberate policy, of course; Earwicker's dream had to contain the sort of history that is made up half of folklore, half of inaccurate recollections of gradeschool history lessons. Finnegans 65

Ulysses, p. 46.

Wa\e is in part a parody of

Il6

JOYCE

AND

AN

IRISH

TRADITION

textbook history, not unlike Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That.™ What remained of Joyce's reference library after his death was pathetically inadequate. Several of its Irish items were compiled for secondary or even primary schools: Dinneen's Smaller Irish-English Dictionary; Fourier D'Albe's English-Irish Dictionary and Phrase-BooP. W. Joyce's Illustrated History of Ireland. There is nothing that could be termed a first-hand source.67 Is it possible for a writer to work in a tradition without being fully aware of it? I believe that it is, and I have tried to prove that Joyce was such a writer. However poor his Irish library and his Gaelic scholarship may have been, they were sufficient for the purposes of one who was, like so many of his countrymen before and after him, a "bawd of parodies." 88 M

Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 and All (London, 1930). e7 James Joyce: sa vie, son oeuvre, son rayonnement. Nos. 366, 376, 391. 68 Finnegans Wal(e, p. 296.

That

MARK SCHORER

Sinclair Lewis and the Method of

LET

us

BEGIN

Half-Truths

with a pair of quotations that are con-

cerned with the conception of the novel as a social instrument. T h e two conceptions are opposed, but the author of each is led by his conception to conclude that because of it the novel is the most important literary form in the modern world, and for the modern world. T h e first is from D. H. Lawrence, and it is, I believe, a unique conception: It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional

secret

places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche.

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The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they arc conventionally

"pure." Then the novel, like gossip,

becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels.1 Lawrence's conception implies a novel that will admit us directly into the life-affirming activities of the integrated consciousness of his own ideal man; a novel that, concerned with the formed individual consciousness, reforms ours; a novel that is not about society or the social character but that is ultimately indispensable to the health of both. We know whose fiction he has in mind; we know, too, with what exasperation he achieved the first term of his exalted ambition, the writing itself, and how impossible it is to achieve the second, the therapy. Our second quotation is a commonplace in the annals of American naturalism, and we could find it, in substance, in any of a dozen writers. Frank Norris will serve. I quote first from his essay, "The Responsibilities of the Novelist," an attack on what he calls "lying novels," novels of sentiment and romance. Today is the day of the novel. In no other day and by no other vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed; and the critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our idiosyncrasy. . . . If the novel . . . is popular it is popular with a reason, a vital, inherent reason; that is to say, it is essential . . . it is an instrument, a tool, a weapon, a vehicle. Public opinion is made no one can say 1

Lady Chatterley's Lover (Florence, 1928), p. 118.

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how, by infinitesimal accretions, by a multitude of minutest elements. Lying novels, surely in this day and age of indiscriminate reading, contribute to this more than all other influences of present-day activity . . . The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is not right that they be exploited and deceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history, false philosophy, false emotions, false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of conduct and of manners. 2 And where do we find the truth-telling novel? In the novel with a "purpose," as it is discussed in the essay of that name. Every novel must do one of three things—it must ( 1 ) tell something, (2) show something, or (3) prove something. Some novels do all three of these. . . . The third, and what we hold to be the best class, proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man. . . . Take this element from fiction, take from it the power and opportunity to prove that injustice, crime and inequality do exist, and what is left ? Just the amusing novels, the novels that entertain. . . . the modern novel . . . may be a flippant paper-covered thing of swords and cloaks, to be carried on a railway journey and to be thrown out the window when read, together with the sucked oranges and peanut shells. Or it may be a great force, that works together 2

"The Responsibilities of the Novelist"

1 9 0 3 ) . PP-

5-"·

and Other Literary Essays (New York,

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with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people, fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree is still growing in the midst of the garden, that undoing follows hard upon righteousness, that the course of Empire is not yet finished, and that the races of men have yet to work out their destiny in those great and terrible movements that crush and grind and rend asunder the pillars of the houses of the nation. 3 It is within this somewhat crude conception of "the novel with a purpose" that we are accustomed to place the novels that brought Sinclair Lewis his fame. Lewis himself was not content to have his work thus located. In a heavily playful refutation of the charge that he was "a raging reformer, an embittered satirist, a realist dreary as cold gravy," he said: I should have thought Brother Lewis was essentially a storyteller—just as naive, excited, unselfconscious as the Arab story-tellers about the caravan fires seven hundred years ago, or as O. Henry in a hotel room on Twenty-third Street furiously turning out tales for dinner and red-ink money. In his stories Lewis does not happen to be amused only by the sea or by midnight encounters on the Avenue, but oftener by the adventure of the soul in religion and patriotism and social climbing. But they are essentially stories just the same. 4 3

"The Novel with a Purpose," ibid., pp. 25-32. From an unpublished "self-portrait," perhaps intended as a publicity release, apparently written in about 1935, among the Lewis papers, Yale University. All quotations from Sinclair Lewis's writings are used here with the permission of Melville H. Cane and Pincus Berner as Executors under the will of Sinclair Lewis, and the quotations from Dodsworth, Main Street, and Elmer Gantry are used with the further permission of the publishers, Harcourt, Brace and Company. 4

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The fact is that the novels we have in mind are not "essentially stories," that the "story" element is secondary and quite feebly managed; and that if they are not quite the "novel with a purpose" as Norris conceived it—motivated by an outraged sense of justice and executed with naturalistic fulness—their impulse is plainly the exposition of social folly. H. L. Mencken, some years after he had ceased to be a well-known literary critic, takes us to the center of Lewis's imaginative uniqueness when, in 1945, he congratulates him on a poor novel called Cass Timberlane, an exposure of the corruptions of marriage in the middle class: I am not going to tell you that "Cass Timberlane" is comparable to "Babbitt" or "Elmer Gantry" (all except the last 30,000 words, which you wrote in a state of liquor), but it seems to me to be the best thing you have done, and by long odds, since "Dodsworth." . . . In brief, a well-planned and well-executed book, with a fine surface. . . . The country swarms with subjects for your future researches. You did the vermin of the Coolidge era, but those of the Roosevelt and post-Roosevelt eras are still open—the rich radical, the bogus expert, the numskull newspaper proprietor (or editor), the career-jobholder, the lady publicist, the crooked (or, more usually, idiotic) labor leader, the press-agent, and so on. This, I believe, is your job, and you have been neglecting it long enough. There are plenty of writers of love stories and Freudian documents, though not many as good at it as you are, but there is only one real anatomist of the American Kultur. I think it stinks, but whether it stinks or not is immaterial. It deserves to be done as you alone can do it.5 5 From an unpublished letter, printed here by permission of August Mencken, literary executor of the late H. L . Mencken.

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The catalogue of social types is the significant item in this letter. Each of these, with its implied section of social life in the United States, could have become a Lewis novel. Some already had. With Lewis, the subject, the social section, always came first; systematic research, sometimes conducted by research assistants and carrying Lewis himself into "the field" like any cultural anthropologist, followed; the story came last, devised to carry home and usually limping under the burden of data. If the result in some ways filled the Norris prescription for a novel of the contemporary social character, it was still by no means a naturalistic product; at the same time, precisely what was "new" in it was what D. H . Lawrence called "dead," and he would have howled in outrage at the complacency with which Lewis asserted that his stories described "the adventure of the soul in religion and patriotism." For in the world of Sinclair Lewis there is no soul, and if a soul were introduced into it, it would die on the instant. The world of Sinclair Lewis rests upon two observations: the standardization of manners in a business culture, and the stultification of morals under middle-class convention. All his critical observations are marshalled in support of these propositions, and his portrait of the middle class rests entirely upon them. The proliferation of detail within these observations gives them an apparent breadth, and his easy familiarity with the manners—in Robert Cantwell's catalogue—of "the small towns and square cities, the real-estate developments and restricted residential areas, the small business men, the country doctors, the religious fakers, the clubwomen, the county officeholders, the village atheists and

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AND H A L F - T R U T H S

I23

single-taxers, the schoolteachers, librarians, the windbags of the lower income groups, the crazy professors and the maddened, hyperthyroid, high-pressure salesmen—the main types of middleclass and lower-middle-class provincial society, conspicuous now because he has identified them so thoroughly" 6 —all this gives his observations an apparent richness and variety; yet in fact it is all there in support of the extremely limited program. Similarly, his world is broken into many social sections—the small town, business ethics, medical science, evangelical religion, marriage, the career woman, professional philanthropy—and this is to name only those that come most immediately to mind; but every section rests, again, on one or both of the two primary principles. This is an extremely narrow and intellectually feeble perspective, but given the particular character of Lewis's achievement, its force paradoxically rests upon its narrowness. For its narrowness projects a very sharply defined image. "Life dehumanized by indifference or enmity to all human values— that is the keynote of both Gopher Prairie and Zenith," wrote T . K . Whipple nearly thirty years ago in what remains one of the very few critical essays on Lewis. ". . . nowhere does this animosity show itself more plainly than in hostility to truth and art. T h e creed of both towns is the philosophy of boosting, a hollow optimism and false cheeriness which leads directly to hypocrisy, as in making believe that business knavery is social service. Toward ideas likely to break this bubble of pretense the people are bitterly opposed; toward new ideas they are lazily contemptuous; β

"Sinclair Lewis," After the Genteel Tradition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1937), p. 1 1 5 .

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toward other ideas they are apathetic . . . . intellectually both are cities of the dead, and in both, the dead are resolved that no one shall live." 7 Dead in the senses as they are in intellect and the affections, these people are horrible ciphers, empty of personality or individual consciousness, rigidly controlled by set social responses; and yet, being dead, together they do not form a society in any real sense, but only a group, a group which at once controls them and protects them from the horrors of their own emptiness. Their group activities, whether as families, as clubs, as friends, are travesties of that human interchange that makes for meaningful social activities: conversation is buffoonery, affection is noise, gaiety is pretense, business is brutal rush, religion is blasphemy. The end result is vacant social types in a nonsocial world. Quite brilliantly T. K. Whipple made and Maxwell Geismar developed the observation that Babbitt is set in Hell: "it is almost a perfectly conceived poetic vision of a perfectly . . . standardized hinterland." 8 Poetic, that is to say, in the sense that it is visionary, not documentary, so that nothing is either a lie or the truth. These are categories that have no relevance. Collecting his massive accumulations of social data with the naturalist's compulsiveness, Lewis creates a visual world and a world of manners that appear to be absolutely solid, absolutely concrete; but all that accumulation of data has from the outset been made to submit so severely to the selective strictures of two highly limited and limiting observations that what emerges in fact is an image and a criticism 7

"Sinclair Lewis," Spokesmen (New York, 1928), pp. 2 1 0 - 1 1 . Geismar, The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1923 ton, 1947), p. 96. 8

(Bos-

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125

of middle-class society and not in the least a representation of it. A fragment blown into the proportions of the whole, it is a fantastic world dominated by monstrous parodies of human nature. Elmer Gantry, in his hypocrisy and self-deception, his brutal cruelty and fearful faith, his shallow optimism and wretched betrayals, his almost automatic identification of salvation and economic success, his loathing of all thought, his hatred of all human difference, his incapacity for any feelings but lust and fear and self-interest: in all this he carries to its extreme Sinclair Lewis's conception of the middle-class character. Both the paradox and the secret of such a creation lie in the fact that, except for the power of observation, the sensibility of the creator has few resources beyond those of the thing created, that Lewis's own intellectual and moral framework, and the framework of feeling, is extremely narrow, hardly wider than the material it contains. And the power of the creation, I would insist, lies in these limitations. The limitations are so apparent that we need do little more than name them. As his conception of middle-class society is fragmentary, so his sense of history is vestigial. The characteristic widening of his shutter over social space does not qualify or alter the narrow social conception: Eight thousand radio-owners listening to Elmer Gantry— A bootlegger in his flat, coat off, exposing his pink silk shirt, his feet up on the table. . . . The house of a smalltown doctor, with the neighbors come in to listen—the drugstore man, his fat wife, the bearded superintendent of schools. . . . Mrs. Sherman Reeves of Royal Ridge, wife of one of the richest young men in Zenith, listening in a black-and-

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gold dressing-gown, while she smoked a cigarette. . . . The captain of a schooner, out on Lake Michigan, hundreds of miles away, listening in his cabin. . . . The wife of a farmer in an Indiana valley, listening while her husband read the Sears-Roebuck catalogue and sniffed. . . .

A retired railway

conductor, very feeble, very religious. . . .

A Catholic priest,

in a hospital, chuckling a little. . . .

A spinster school-teacher,

mad with loneliness, worshiping Dr. Gantry's virile voice. . . . Forty people gathered in a country church too poor to have a pastor. . . .

A stock actor in his dressing-room, fagged

with an all-night rehearsal. All of them listening to the Rev. Dr. Elmer Gantry as he shouted . . . (pp. 399-400). Similarly, the characteristic extensions into time do not enrich the sense of history but merely provide broadly ironic contrasts that are analogically meaningless, both in the drama and in the intellectual framework : So Elmer came, though tardily, to the Great Idea which was to revolutionize his life and bring him eternal and splendid fame. That shabby Corsican artillery lieutenant and author, Bonaparte, first conceiving that he might be the ruler of Europe— Darwin seeing dimly the scheme of evolution—Paolo realizing that all of life was nothing but an irradiation of Francesca —Newton pondering on the falling apple—Paul of Tarsus comprehending that a certain small Jewish sect might be the new religion of the doubting Greeks and Romans—Keats beginning to write "The Eve of St. Agnes"—none of these

S I N C L A I R L E W I S AND H A L F - T R U T H S

\TJ

men, transformed by a Great Idea from mediocrity to genius, was more remarkable than Elmer Gantry of Paris, Kansas, when he beheld the purpose for which the heavenly powers had been training him (p. 409). The characters of this world are aware of no tradition within which their lives are located; behind them lies no history except for the faintly heroic figure of a pioneer whose sacrifice their lives have made meaningless. And if the seat of this deficiency is in the imagination of the author, its result is the captive blankness of their existence, which is a large element in the egregious parody. From an early if not very forcibly held socialist position, Sinclair Lewis, in his best novels, swung round to the antidemocratic views of H. L . Mencken; yet paradoxically, he had no values of his own (not even Mencken's vague Nietzscheanism) except those of the middle-class that both were lampooning. The ambition to find in the East what is not available in the Midwest is always exposed as false; and when "the East" is pushed on to mean Europe, the same evaluation is made. The Midwest is shown as hopelessly narrow, yet somehow it is shown finally as the only sensible place to choose. Aristocrats are suspect if not phoney; workmen tend to become shiftless mongrels; intellectuals and artists are irresponsible bohemians. The picture of middleclass provincialism is framed by a middle-class provincial view. "Russian Jews in London clothes," Lewis writes in Dodsworth, "going to Italian restaurants with Greek waiters and African music." And again, if the deficiency in a sense of tradition and of history is the author's own, it contributes to the force of his image, for it permits his characters no escape. Always excepting

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the figures of Doctors Gottlieb and Arrowsmith, with their dedication to pure science, the dissident figures in Lewis's novels, the critics of this society, are permitted no realizable values toward which they or that society may aspire. The feeblest characters in Main Street, and those most quickly routed, are the discontented. Carol Kennicott's vaporous values arc the equivalent of that deeply sentimental strain in the author that led him as a young man to write in imitation of the early Tennyson and, as a man of over fifty, to say that "he, who has been labeled a 'satirist' and a 'realist,' is actually a romantic medievalist of the most incurable sort." Thus Carol: . . . a volume of Yeats on her knees. . . . Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things—the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold, the woeful incessant chanting . . . (p. 120). Thus the Babbitt who momentarily challenges Zenith does not so much present us with a scale of humane values that we can oppose to the inhumanity of the environment, as he presents us with all the insecurity on which Babbittry, or the environment, rests. The fact that there is never any real opposition of substantial values to "convention," or false values (as there is never any truly individual character to resist the social types), is what makes Lewis's world so blank and limits so drastically his social realism. In Elmer Gantry we do not have even these fitful glimmerings in

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AND H A L F - T R U T H S

I2Ç

the realm of reverie. This is a world of total death, of social monsters without shadow. It is, in my view and on re-reading, the purest Lewis. The publication of Elmer Gantry early in 1927 was not so much a literary event as it was a public scandal, and from the beginning, therefore, excitement took the place of criticism. Preceded by the well-publicized "Strike me dead" episode, it called forth remarks like this from William Allen White: "Sinclair Lewis stood in the pulpit of a Kansas City church last spring and defied God to strike him dead. So far as Sinclair Lewis, the artist, is concerned in the book 'Elmer Gantry,' God took him at his word." Municipal bans extended from Kansas City to Camden; from Boston to Glasgow. Its initial printing of 140,000 copies was probably the largest to that date of any book in history, and the whole emphasis of the promotion campaign was on the size of the enterprise: the book was advertised on billboards; a publicity release from the publishers was headed "What it Means to Manufacture the First Edition of Elmer Gantry," and provided statistics on amounts of paper, thread, glue, board, cloth, and ink, both black and orange—black for the text, orange for the cover. (But then, as Lewis tells us in the novel, "Elmer was ever a lover of quantity.") In April of 1927, in a resolution supporting the Anti-Saloon League of New York State, the Rev. Dr. Otho F. Bartholow declared at the annual session of the New York East Conference, "The Methodist Church is cordially hated, not only by the class represented by Mr. Sinclair Lewis and the rum organizations, but also by every evil organization of every kind whatsoever," while, two weeks later, the graduating class of New

I30

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York University voted Sinclair Lewis its favorite author. A news item in an Ohio newspaper ran as follows: Trouble in the home of Leo Roberts, general manager of the Roberts Coal and Supply Company, began when his wife brought home a copy of "Elmer Gantry" and he burned it as undesirable reading matter, according to Mrs. Roberts at a hearing Wednesday before Judge Bostwick of Probate Court, when Roberts was ordered to a private sanitarium for a short rest, after his wife, Mrs. Margaret Roberts, 1671 Franklin Park South, charged him with lunacy. Literary appraisal seems to have been a quite secondary matter. Yet, if only because the images that Lewis projected came to play such a powerful role in the imagination both of America and of Europe, it is worth our time to analyze the method or lack of method that established them. Leslie Fiedler recently wrote as follows: . . . no one has succeeded since the age of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson in seeing an actual American small town or a living member of the Kiwanis club. The gross pathos of Anderson or the journalistic thinness of Lewis is beside the point; for all of us, the real facts of experience have been replaced by Winesburg, Ohio and by Babbitt; myth or platitude, we have invented nothing to replace them.9 How, then, did he invent them? What props up and holds in place that terrifying buffoon, Elmer Gantry—that "gladiator laughing at the comic distortion of his wounded opponent," as ' " T h e Ant on the Grasshopper," Partisan Review (Summer, 1955), p. 414.

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he sees himself; that "barytone solo turned into portly flesh," as Lewis shows him to us? T h e primary fact in Lewis's method is the absence of conflict between genuine orders of value, and in Elmer Gantry this fact emerges most starkly. In Elmer

Gantry, any drama exists in the immediate victory

of the worst over the weakest (who are the best), or in the conflict of the bad to survive among the worst: all is corrupt. In this extraordinarily full account of every form of religious decay, nothing is missing except all religion and all humanity. As there are no impediments to Elmer's barbarous rise from country boob to influential preacher, so there are no qualifications of the image of barbarity. On the very fringes of the narrative, among his scores of characters, Lewis permits a few shadowy figures of good to appear—Bruno Zechlin and Jim Lefferts, the amiable skeptics who are routed before they are permitted to enter the action; Andrew Pengilly, a humane preacher who asks the most striking question in the novel ("Mr. Gantry, why don't you believe in God?") but who himself no more enters the conflict than his question enters the intellectual context; and finally, Frank Shallard, who does come and go in the story, an honest human being, but one so weak that he presents no challenge to Elmer, serves only to illustrate the ruthlessness of Elmer's power. In the novel, values can be realized only in action, and the action of Elmer Gantry is an entirely one-way affair. This is the inevitable consequence in structure of Lewis's method. Like most of Lewis's novels, Elmer Gantry is a loosely episodic chronicle, which suggests at once that there will be no sustained pressure of plot, no primary conflict about which all the action is organized

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and in which value will achieve a complex definition or in which that dramatization of at least two orders of value that conflict implies will be brought about. The chronicle breaks down into three large parts, each pretty nearly independent of the others. In each event Elmer's progress is colored and in two of them threatened by his relation with a woman, but from each Elmer emerges triumphant. The first part takes us through his Baptist education, his ordination, his first pulpit, and his escape from Lulu; the second takes us through his career as an evangelist with the fantastic Sharon Falconer; the third takes us through his experience of New Thought and his rise in Methodism, together with the decline of his marriage to Cleo and his escape from Hettie, who threatens to bring him to public ruin but who is herself routed as, in the final sentence, Elmer promises that "We shall yet make these United States a moral nation." It should not be supposed that the frank prominence in Elmer Gantry of sexual appetite—a rare enough element in a Lewis novel—or the fact that it several times seems to threaten Elmer's otherwise unimpeded success, in any way provides the kind of dramatized counterpoint on the absence of which we are remarking, or that it in any way serves to introduce an element of human tenderness that qualifies Elmer's brutal nakedness. On the contrary, it is an integral part of his inhumanity and an integral part of the inhumanity of the religious environment within which he exists. Indeed, of all the forms of relationship that the novel presents, the sexual relation is most undilutedly brutish, and it is perhaps the chief element in that animus of revulsion that motivates the creation of this cloacal world and upon which I shall presently comment. Finally, its identification

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with the quality of Elmer's religious activity is made explicit in the climactically phantasmagoric scene in which Sharon capitulates to Elmer before an altar where she associates herself, in a ritual invocation, with all goddesses of fertility. "It is the hour! Blessed Virgin, Mother Hera, Mother Frigga, Mother Ishtar, Mother Isis, dread Mother Astarte of the weaving arms, it is thy priestess, it is she who after the blind centuries and the groping years shall make it known to the world that ye are one, and that in me are ye all revealed, and that in this revelation shall come peace and wisdom universal, the secret of the spheres and the pit of understanding. Y e who have leaned over me and on my lips pressed your immortal fingers, take this my brother to your bosoms, open his eyes, release his pinioned spirit, make him as the gods, that with me he may carry the revelation for which a thousand thousand grievous years the world has panted. . . . " Y e veiled ones and ye bright ones—from caves forgotten, the peaks of the future, the clanging today—join in me, lift up, receive him, dread nameless ones; yea, lift us then, mystery on mystery, sphere above sphere, dominion on dominion, to the very throne! ". . . O mystical rose, O lily most admirable, O wondrous union; O St. Anna, Mother Immaculate, Demeter, Mother Beneficient, Lakshmi, Mother Most Shining; behold, I am his and he is yours and ye are mine!" (pp. 186-87). T h e extravagant absurdity of this scene is underlined by the absence in it of any candid recognition of human need or of

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human fulfillment. The travesty that it makes of both the sexual and the religious experience is of course to be associated with the temper of orgiastic evangelism with which the book is full. Dramatically, however, it must be associated with such an earlier scene, as homely as this one is horrendous, in which a deaf old retired preacher and his wife are going to bed after twenty-seven years of marriage, and the whole of that cxpcrience of twentyseven years is equated with an "old hoss." They were nodding on either side of a radiator unheated for months. "All right, Emmy," piped the ancient. "Say, Papa— Tell me: I've been thinking: If you were just a young man today would you go into the ministry?" "Course I would I What an idea! Most glorious vocation young man could have. Idea! G'night, Emmy!" But as his ancient wife sighingly removed her corsets, she complained, "Don't know as you would or not—if / was married to you—which ain't any too certain, a second time —and if I had anything to say about it!" "Which is certain! Don't be foolish. Course I would." "I don't know. Fifty years I had of it, and I never did get so I wa'n't just mad clear through when the ladies of the church came poking around, criticizing me for every little tidy I put on the chairs, and talking something terrible if I had a bonnet or a shawl that was the least mite tasty. ' 'Twant suitable for a minister's wife.' Drat 'em! And I always did like a bonnet with some nice bright colors. Oh, I've done a

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right smart of thinking about it. You always were a powerful preacher, but's I've told you—" "You have!" "—I never could make out how, if when you were in the pulpit you really knew so much about all these high and mighty and mysterious things, how it was when you got home you never knew enough, and you never could learn enough, to find the hammer or make a nice piece of cornbread or add up a column of figures twice alike or find Oberammergau on the map of Austria!" "Germany, woman! I'm sleepy!" "And all these years of having to pretend to be so good when we were just common folks all the time! Ain't you glad you can just be simple folks now?" "Maybe it is restful. But that's not saying I wouldn't do it over again." The old man ruminated a long while. "I think I would. Anyway, no use discouraging these young people from entering the ministry. Somebody got to preach the gospel truth, ain't they?" "I suppose so. Oh, dear. Fifty years since I married a preacher! And if I could still only be sure about the virgin birth! Now don't you go explaining! Laws, the number of times you've explained! I know it's true—it's in the Bible. If I could only believe it! But— "I would of liked to had you try your hand at politics. If I could of been, just once, to a senator's house, to a banquet or something, just once, in a nice bright red dress with gold slippers, I'd of been willing to go back to alpaca and scrubbing floors and listening to you rehearsing your sermons, out in

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the stable, to that old mare we had for so many years—oh, laws, how long is it she's been dead now? Must be—yes, it's twenty-seven years— "Why is it that it's only in religion that the things you got to believe are agin all experience? Now drat it, don't you go and quote that Ί believe because it is impossible' thing at me again! Believe because it's impossible! Huh! Just like a minister! "Oh, dear, I hope I don't live long enough to lose my faith. Seems like the older I get, the less I'm excited over all these preachers that talk about hell only they never saw it. "Twenty-seven years! And we had that old hoss so long before that. My how she could kick— Busted that buggy—" They were both asleep (pp. 70-71). The two scenes, the extravagantly repulsive and the devastatingly barren, supplement one another; they represent the extremes of the nightmare image of a world that, totally empty of human value, monstrously, and without relief, parodies the reality. If the narrative method of loose chronicle, without sustained dramatic conflict, is the primary means to this end, certain orders of technical detail contribute no less and seem to me entirely consistent with the imagination that is working through the narrative method. It has been complained, for example, that there is a coarsening of Lewis's style in this novel, and that his view of the hinterland threatens to fall into a kind of crackerbarrel stereotype. Both charges are true, but it can be argued that both qualities make possible the kind of effect we are trying to describe. Elmer Gantry is the noisiest novel in Ameri-

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can literature, the most braying, guffawing,

I37

belching

novel that

we have, and it is its prose that sets this uproar going; if we are to have a novel filled with jackasses and jackals, let them, by all means, bray and guffaw. On the same grounds, I would defend the "By crackee, by jiminy" crudities of the physical environment within which this noise goes on, this imbecilic articulateness, only pointing out in addition that Lewis's old ability to invoke a concrete world—the smell of Pullman car dust, the food at a church picnic, the contents of the library of a small Methodist bishop—is still sufficiently in force to cram full the outlines of his stereotypes. One can go further. At each of his three climaxes, Lewis abdicates such sense of the dramatic scene as he may have had and retreats into melodrama: once to an inversion of the farmer's daughter situation, once to a catastrophic fire, finally to a cops-and-robbers treatment of some petty criminals who have attempted to play the badger game on old Elmer. In each situation, through bad timing, through a refusal to develop even a suggestion of suspense, any potential human elements in the situation are sacrificed to the melodramatic stereotype. And yet, out of this very weakness, cumulatively, arises again the whole impression of bare brutality which is, after all, the essential social observation. As the drama is only half realized, so the social observation is only half true, but in its partiality resides such force of which it is capable. Most novels operate through a conflict, dramatized in a plot, of social and individual interest, and the more sustained the pressures of the plot, the more likely is the individual to be forced into a position of new self-awareness, which prominently contains an awareness of his relation to his society. A certain

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dynamic interchange has been at work, and the result is that the historical forces which contain the individual's experience have been personalized in his awareness. What is most characteristic of the novels of Sinclair Lewis, and above all of Elmer Gantry, is the fact that there are no such dynamics of social action, that we are presented with a static, unpersonalized image —and that there lies its horror. Elmer Gantry has perhaps one brief moment of honesty. He has come to Sharon's fantastic home, he is looking out upon the river, he fancies himself in love: "Shen-an-doah!" he crooned. Suddenly he was kneeling at the window, and for the first time since he had forsaken Jim Lefferts and football and joyous ribaldry, his soul was free of all the wickedness which had daubed it—oratorical ambitions, emotional orgasm, dead sayings of dull seers, dogmas, and piety. The golden winding river drew him, the sky uplifted him, and with outflung arms he prayed for deliverance from prayer. "I've found her. Sharon. Oh, I'm not going on with this evangelistic bunk. Trapping idiots into holy monkey-shines! No, by God, I'll be honest! I'll tuck her under my arm and go out and fight. Business. Put it over. Build something big. And laugh, not snivel and shake hands with churchmembers! I'll do it!" (pp. 180-81). Then and there his rebellion against himself ends, and after that he knows nothing of self-recognition. This is about as close to it as he can come:

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"I'll have a good time with those folks," he reflected, in the luxury of a taxicab. "Only, better be careful with old Rigg. He's a shrewd bird, and he's onto me. . . . N o w what do you mean?" indignantly. "What do you mean by 'onto me'? There's nothing to be onto! I refused a drink and a cigar, didn't I? I never cuss except when I lose my temper, do I? I'm leading an absolutely Christian life. A n d I'm bringing a whale of a lot more souls into churches than any of these pussy-footing tin saints that're afraid to laugh and jolly people. 'Onto me' nothing!" (p. 3 1 5 ) . A character so open to self-deception is not in a position to estimate the forces that have made him so: to him, society is given, accepted, used. Elmer Gantry was raised in an important if stultifying American tradition : the protestantism of the hinterland; and Sinclair Lewis gives us a complete and devastating account of it that extends over four pages and from which I now draw fragments, reluctantly omitting Lewis's substantiating body of detail: The church and Sunday School at Elmer's village . . . had nurtured in him a fear of religious machinery which he could never lose. . . . That small pasty-white Baptist church had been the center of all his emotions, aside from hellraising, hunger, sleepiness, and love. And even these emotions were represented in the House of the Lord . . . . the arts and the sentiments and the sentimentalities—they were for Elmer perpetually associated only with the church . . . . all the music which the boy Elmer had ever heard was in

I4O

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church . . . . it provided all his painting and sculpture. . . . From the church came all his profounder philosophy . . . literary inspiration . . . here too the church had guided him. In Bible stories, in the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature. . . . T h e church, the Sunday School, the evangelistic orgy, choir-practise, raising the mortgage, the delights of funerals, the snickers in back pews or in the other room at weddings—they were . . . a mold of manners to Elmer. . . . Sunday School text cards . . . they gave him a taste for gaudy robes, for marble columns and the purple-broidered palaces of kings, which was later to be of value in quickly habituating himself to the more decorative homes of vice. . . . A n d always the three chairs that stood behind the pulpit, the intimidating stiff chairs of yellow plush and carved oak borders, which, he was uneasily sure, were waiting for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. H e had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason (pp. 25-28). A n d having neither decency nor kindness nor reason (as the novel contains no animated examples of these humane virtues), Elmer is necessarily unaware of the history in which he is involved. T h a t history, perhaps no larger than it is beautiful in our tradition, is nevertheless considerable, and Sinclair Lewis was aware of it even if, because he had no alternatives, he could not let his characters become so. ( T h e tradition survives, of course:

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a Madison Avenue patina, extending from Washington, D . C , to Whittier, California, does not alter the motives of cynically opportunistic politicians; it merely moves boorish Elmer into gray flannel and the seat of power.) The whole brutally accurate conception of R. H. Tawney, which coupled business success and salvation, and then, in popular culture, began to pay dividends on the "saved" soul; the obvious connection between the Puritan repressions (I use Lewis's terms, not mine) and the orgiastic outbursts of middle-border evangelism; the Gospel of Service (made in Zenith) becoming the equivalent of the Gospels—all this is in the author's mind as he creates his characters, but the very nature of his creation prohibits it from in any way sharing his knowledge. The result is that the Lewis character cannot separate itself from the Lewis society; and this, in the dynamics of fiction, means that the Lewis character has no character apart from the society in which it is embedded, and that therefore the Lewis society is not a society at all, but a machine. And this is the moral, for criticism as for life today, of Lewis's novels, and especially of this one. "All vital truth," said D. H. Lawrence, "contains the memory of all that for which it is not true." And Frank Norris, that infinitely simpler man, said, "You must be something more than a novelist if you can, something more than just a writer. There must be that nameless sixth sense or sensibility . . . . the thing that does not enter into the work, but that is back of it. . . ." Here these two unlikely companions become campanionable: both are asking for a certain reverberating largeness behind any concretely conceived situation if that situation is to echo back

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into the great caverns of the human condition. This quality, I think, even a partisan could not claim that Sinclair Lewis had. Quite justly, Robert Cantwell described him as one "who thought of his writing, not in terms of its momentary inspirations and the . . . pressure of living that played through him and upon him, but in terms of the accomplishment of a foreknown task"; 1 0 and quite plausibly, Maxwell Geismar wrote that "Just as there is really no sense of vice in Lewis's literary world, there is no true sense of virtue. Just as there is practically no sense of human love in the whole range of Lewis's psychological values, and no sense of real hatred—there is no genuine sense of human freedom." 1 1 Most of this indictment one may allow, but if we are speaking specifically of Elmer Gantry, we would wish to insist on two of the items that these descriptions deny him: "the pressure of living that played through him and upon him," and the "hatred." Elmer

Gantry is a work of almost pure revulsion. It seems

to shudder and to shake with loathing of that which it describes. The very fact that the novelist must create the image of the thing he loathes, in order to express his loathing, points to the peculiar imaginative animus that motivates this novel. We can speculate about its sources: Lewis's own early evangelistic impulse, his dedication to the missionary field now turning in upon itself; the lonely, goofy boy at Oberlin, himself pushing the handles of a handcar (as Elmer Gantry does) to get to a rural Sunday School where, without conspicuous success, he doled out Bible stories; the poor fool of the hinterland at New Haven, 10 11

Cantwell, Genteel Tradition, 117. Geismar, Last of the Provinciali, p. 108.

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who had never been given more by the hinterland than the dubious gift of deriding it, and therefore of having to love it. Perhaps such speculations are not much to the point. The point is only that in no novel does Sinclair Lewis more clearly announce his loathing of the social environment with which he is concerned, and in no novel does he make it more mandatory that we remain within the terrifying limits of that environment. Sinclair Lewis is not unlike Elmer Gantry. The vicious circle in this picture exists, of course, in the fact that Elmer remakes society in precisely the terms that society has already made him. No one can break out; everyone, including the novelist, spins more madly in the mechanical orbit. T h e novelist trapped in his own hallucination of the world as a trap: this seems to be the final observation that we can make. But it is not quite final. Finally, we are left with the hallucination of the novels themselves, with their monstrous images of what we both are and are not, their nearly fabulous counter-icons in our culture. They stand somewhere between the two conceptions of the novel with which we began: they tell us too much of why we are dead and not enough of how we can live to satisfy the prescription either of Lawrence or of Norris, deprived as they are of all that psychic affirmation that would meet the demands of the first, and of most of that social realism that would meet those of the second. But they have—for this very reason—their own quality. If that quality is of the half-truth, and the half-truth has moved back into our way of estimating our society, the judgment falls on us, on our own failure of observation and imagination. If we accept the halftruth for the fact, then the novel is indeed the most important

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literary instrument in and for our world; and we can only lament the inability, not of our novelists to provide the stimulus, but of ourselves to repel it, of our failure, in the sympathetic consciousness, to recoil from it. Elmer Gantry reminds us that we continue to embrace as fervendy as we deny this horror that at least in part we are.

Supervising Committee, the English Institute, 1955

REUBEN A. BROWER ( 1 9 5 5 ) ,

GILES E. DAWSON ( 1 9 5 5 ) ,

Chairman, Harvard

Folger Shakespeare Library

K A T H E R I N E HAYNES CATCH ( 1 9 5 5 ) ,

LEWIS LEARY ( 1 9 5 6 ) ,

RENÉ W E L L E K ( 1 9 5 6 ) ,

Rockjord

EDWIN

τ.

BOWDEN,

College

Yale University Harvard University

HELEN N E I L L MCMASTER ( 1 9 5 7 ) ,

EUGENE M . W A I T H ,

Hunter College

Columbia University

ABBIE FINDLAY POTTS ( 1 9 5 6 ) ,

HARRY LEVIN ( 1 9 5 7 ) ,

University

Sarah Lawrence College

Secretary, Yale University Acting Secretary, Yale University

Contributors to the Guarantee Fund, 7955

WILLIAM

APPLETON

MARY Η. MARSHALL

R. C. BALD

FRANCIS E. M I N E K A

FREDSON T . BOWERS

MARJORIE NICOLSON

REUBEN A. BROWER

JAMES M . OSBORN

JAMES L. CLIFFORD

NORMAN H . PEARSON

CHARLOTTE D'EVELYN

ABBIE F. POTTS

ALAN S. DOWNER

HELEN W . RANDALL

ELIZABETH DREW

DAVID ALLEN ROBERTSON

FRANCES A. FOSTER

BERNARD N . SCHILLING

NORTHROP FRYE

ARTHUR H. SCOUTEN

KATHERINE H. CATCH

GEORGE SHERBURN

CORDON S. HAIGHT

EUGENE M . W A I T H

ATCHESON L. HENCH

RENÉ W E L L E K

CHARLTON J . Κ . H I N M A N

PHILIP E. WHEELWRIGHT

LEWIS LEARY

PHILIP W I L L I A M S

HARRY LEVIN

EDWIN E. WILLOUGHBY

EDWARD L. MCADAM, JR.

W I L L I A M K . W I M S A T T , JR.

HELEN Ν . MCMASTER

MARION W I T T

The Program September 6, through September 10, 1955

Conferences I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TEXTUAL STUDIES IN MODERN AUTHORS

Directed by

N O R M A N HOLMES PEARSON,

Yale University

ι. Conspectus N O R M A N HOLMES PEARSON,

Yale University

2. Yeats COLONEL

RUSSELL

κ.

ALSPACH,

United States Military Acad-

emy 3. Joyce HERBERT CAHOON,

The Pierpont Morgan Library

4. Eliot ROBERT L . BEARE,

Princeton University

148 II.

PROGRAM IMITATION AND PARODY

Directed by

JOSEPH MCC. BOTTKOL,

Mount Holyoke

College

ι. The Example of Cervantes: The Novel as Parody HARRY LEVIN,

Harvard

University

2. Imitation of Received Styles as Satiric Counterpoint in Swift ANDREWS W A N N I N G ,

Bard College

3. Parody: James Joyce and an Irish Tradition VIVÍAN H.

s.

MERCIER,

College of the City of New Yoriç

4. Narcissus and Echo: Imitation and Parody in a Poetic Tradition JOSEPH MCC. BOTTKOL,

Mount Holyoke

College

III. T H E NOVEL AND SOCIETY

Directed by

MARK SCHORER,

University of California,

Berkeley

ι. The Unpoetic Compromise: Private Vision and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction G. ARMOUR CRAIG,

Amherst

College

2. Marcel Proust and the Imagination of Duchesses F.

w.

DUPÉE,

Columbia

University

3. James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as Friend RICHARD E L L M A N N ,

'Northwestern University

4. Sinclair Lewis and the Method of Half-Truths M A R K SCHORER,

University of California,

Berkeley

149

PROGRAM IV. SOUND AND M E A N I N G I N POETRY

Directed by

VICTOR M . H A M M ,

Marquette

University

ι . Structure, Sound and Meaning CRAIG LA DRIÀRE,

The Catholic

University

2. Spenser and Milton: Some Parallels and Contrasts in the Handling of Sound ANTS ORAS,

University of Florida

3. From Linguistics to Poetry HAROLD W H I T E H A L L ,

Indiana

University

4. Prosody and Musical Analysis J O H N HOLLANDER,

Harvard

University

Evening Meetings SEPTEMBER

7

Oral Tradition and Medieval Epic illustrated with recordings and slides from Yugoslavia ALBERT B. LORD,

SEPTEMBER

Harvard

University

9

T h e Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada illustrated with a film, " T h e Stratford Adventure" T O M PATTERSON,

Director of

Planning

Registrants, 7955

Ruth M. Adams, University of Rochester; Geliert Spencer Alleman, Newark College, Rutgers University; R. K. Alspach, United States Military Academy; G. L . Anderson, New York University; Mother Thomas Aquinas, College of New Rochelle; Phyllis Bartlett, Queens College; Robert L . Beare, Princeton University; David W . Becker, Miami University; Alice R. Bensen, Michigan State Normal College; John G. Blair, Brown University; Thomas A. Bledsoe, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Joseph McG. Bottkol, Mount Holyoke College; Edwin Turner Bowden, Yale University; Muriel Bowden, Hunter College; Carroll S. Bowen, Oxford University Press; Brother C. Francis Bowers, De La Salle College; Lawrence Edward Bowling, Texas Technological College; Reverend John Dominic Boyd, Harvard University; Mary Campbell Brill, West Virginia Wesley an College; Cleanth Brooks, Yale University; Richard A. E. Brooks, Vassar College; Reuben A. Brower, Harvard University; Richard Joseph Browne, Yale School of Music; Margaret M. Bryant, Brooklyn College; W . Bryher; Brother Fidelian Burke, Catholic Uni-

REGISTRANTS

I5I

versity; Sister M. Vincentia Burns, Albertus Magnus College; Katherine Burton, Wheaton College. Herbert Cahoon, Pierpont Morgan Library; Grace J. Calder, Hunter College; Kenneth Neill Cameron, Carl H. Pforzheimer Library; Hugh C. G. Chase; John A. Christie, Vassar College; Mother Madeleine Clary, College of New Rochelle; James L. Clifford,

Columbia

University;

Florence

Rosenfeld

Cohen,

Hofstra College; John C. Coleman, University of Virginia; William Bradley Coley, Wesleyan University; Neil Marriott Compton, Sir George Williams College; Allen Blow Cook, United States Naval Academy; Roberta Douglas Cornelius, RandolphMacon Woman's College; Sister Mary Cleophas Costella, Mount Saint Agnes College; G. Armour Craig, Amherst College; Lucille Crighton, Gulf Park College; M. Elizabeth Dawson, Lindenwood College; Sara deFord, Goucher College; Francis X. Degnen, Saint John's College; Robert Dell, Pace College; Rutherford E. Delmage, Saint Lawrence University; Charlotte D'Evelyn, Mount Holyoke College; Ernest Ne vin Dil worth, Lehigh University; Sister Rose Bernard Donna, The College of Saint Rose; Elizabeth Drew, Smith College; E. Catherine Dunn, Catholic University; Frederick Wilcox Dupee, Columbia University; Sister Mary Vera Duvall, Mount Saint Agnes College. Ursula Elizabeth Eder, Vassar College; Lois Ellgner Eliot, Radcliffe College; Scott B. Elledge, Carleton College; Richard Ellmann, Northwestern University; John Jacob Enck, University of Wisconsin; David V. Erdman; Harry Lee Faggett, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University; Thomas Helion Fanning, Hillyer College; Edward Fiess, Brooklyn College; Kimball Flaccus; Edward Garland Fletcher, University of Texas;

152

REGISTRANTS

Frank Cudworth Flint, Dartmouth College; Claude R. Flory, Florida State University; Donald M. Foerster, College of William and Mary; Stephen F . Fogle, University of Florida; George H . Ford, University of Cincinnati; Frances A. Foster, Vassar College; Sister Mary Francis, College of Mount Saint Vincent; John Frederick Frank, Pennsylvania State University Center; Lewis Freed, Purdue University; W . M. Frohock, Wesleyan

Uni-

versity; Northrup Frye, Victoria College, University of Toronto; Paul Fussell, Jr., Rutgers University; Sister Julie Garner, Rosary College; Katherine Haynes Gatch, Hunter College; Elaine Goldman Gill, Columbia University; John J . Gill; Sister M. Cyrille Gill, Rosary College; Douglas Grant, University College, University of Toronto; James Gray, Bishop's University; Elizabeth Alden Green, Mount Holyoke College; Richard Hamilton Green, Princeton University; Richard Leighton Greene, Wesleyan University; Hoosag K . Gregory, Case Institute of Technology. Victor

Michael

Hamm,

Marquette

University;

Alfred

B.

Harbage, Harvard University; Virginia Harlow, DePauw University; Richard Charles Harrier, Colby College; Brice Harris, Pennsylvania State University; Katherine Sumner Harris, Great Neck Adult Education Program; William John Haskins, Northwestern

University;

Ihab

H.

Hassan, Wesleyan

Helmut A. Hatzfeld, Catholic University;

University;

Allen T .

Hazen,

Columbia University; Fred H . Higginson, Kansas State College; Conrad Arthur Hilberry, DePauw University; Frederick Whiley Hilles, Yale University; Norman Norwood Holland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John Hollander, Harvard University; Edward Hubler, Princeton University; Muriel J. Hughes, University of Vermont; Blyden Jackson, Southern University; Sister Mary Joannes; Louis Hening Johnson, Brooklyn College;

REGISTRANTS

I53

Maurice Johnson, University of Pennsylvania; Samuel Frederick Johnson, Columbia University; William Powell Jones, Western Reserve University; Richard Morgan Kain, University of Louisville; Charlotte R. Kesler, Richmond Professional Institute, College of William and Mary; Karl Kiralis, Saint Lawrence University; John P. Kirby, Randolph-Macon

Woman's

College;

Mary Etta Knapp, Western College for W o m e n ; Karl Kroeber, Columbia University; Frank A. Krutzke, Colorado

College;

James Craig L a Drière, Catholic University; Seymour Lainofi, Yeshiva College; Lewis Leary, Columbia University;

Harry

Levin, Harvard University; Thomson Hastings Littlefield, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Albert Bates Lord, Harvard University; George de Forest Lord, Yale University. Marion

K.

Mabey, University of Connecticut,

Waterbury

Branch; George McFadden, Duquesne University; Lorna F . McGuire, Barnard College; Kenneth Mac Leon, Victoria College, University of Toronto; Helen Neill McMaster, Sarah Lawrence College; Courtenay Gentry McWhinney, Columbia University; Mother C. E . Maguire, Newton College of the Sacred Heart; Elizabeth L . Mann, Adelphi College; Sister Elizabeth Marian, College of Mount Saint Vincent; Mary H . Marshall, Syracuse University; Thomas F . Marshall, Kent State University; Dorothy Mateer, College of Wooster; Vivian H . S. Mercier, College of the City of New York; Raymond E . Mizer, DePauw University; Ruth Mohl, Brooklyn College; H . Alan Nelson, Union College; Elizabeth Neyland; Elizabeth Nitchie, Goucher College; Reverend William Thomas Noon, Canisius College; Ants Oras, University of Florida; James M. Osborn, Yale University; Charles A. Owen, Jr.; Alice Parker, Lindenwood College; T o m Patterson, Stratford

Shakespearean

Festival

of

Canada;

Norman

154

REGISTRANTS

Holmes Pearson, Yale University; Harry William Pedicord; Marvin Banks Perry, Jr., Washington and Lee University; John Pick, Marquette University; Henry Popkin, Brandeis University; Abbie Findlay Potts, Rockford College; Joseph Prescott, Wayne University; Robert O. Preyer, Brandeis University; Hereward Thimbleby Price, University of San Francisco; Strother Beeson Purdy; Reverend Charles Joaquin Quirk, Loyola University of the South. Warren Ramsey, University of California, Berkeley; Harry Huntt Ransom, University of Texas; Isabel Elizabeth Rathborne, Hunter College; Sister Mary Raynelda, Madonna College; Allen Walker Read, Columbia University; Sister Mary Robert Reddy, College of Saint Rose; John K. Reeves, Skidmore College; David Allan Robertson, Jr., Barnard College; Carmen Rogers, Florida State University; Brewster Rogerson, Kansas State College; H. Blair Rouse, Mount Union College; Alvan Sherman Ryan, University of Notre Dame; Sister Mary Bride Ryan, Catholic University; Sister Mary Saint Virginia; C. Earle Sanborn, University of Western Ontario; Ernest Emanuel Sandeen, University of Notre Dame; Bernard Nicholas Schilling, University of Rochester; Helene Β. M. Schnabel;

Elizabeth

Winterstein Schneider, Temple University; Samuel Schoenbaum, Northwestern University; Mark Schorer, University of California, Berkeley; Flora Rheta Schreiber, New School for Social Research; Helen M. Scurr, University of Bridgeport; Frank Eugene Seward, Catholic University; Norman Silverstein, Queens College; Myles Slatin, Yale University; Arnold John

Stafford,

Brooklyn College; Edwin Ray Steinberg, Carnegie Institute of Technology; John Keith Stewart, McMicken College, University

REGISTRANTS

of

Cincinnati;

155

John

H . Sutherland,

Colby College;

Ruth

Zabriskie Temple, Brooklyn College; Bryce Thomas, Pace College; Craig Ringwalt Thompson, Lawrence College;

Doris

Stevens Thompson, Russell Sage College; Isadore Traschen, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; S. O. A. Ullmann, University of Minnesota; Howard P. Vincent, Illinois Institute of Technology. Willis

Joseph

Wager,

Boston

University;

Richard

Long

Waidelich, Goucher College; Eugene M. Waith, Yale University; John Waldron, Georgetown University; Andrew Jackson Walker, Georgia Institute of Technology; Lawrence B. Wallis, Mount Holyoke College; Andrews Wanning, Bard College; Walter Weyler Waring, Kalamazoo College; Charlotte Crawford Watkins, Howard University; René Wellek, Yale University; Perry Dickie Westbrook, New York State College for Teachers; James Joseph Wey, University of Detroit; Reverend Norman Thomas Weyand, Loyola University; Charles B. Wheeler, Ohio State University; Mother Elizabeth White, Newton College of the Sacred Heart; Harold Whitehall, Indiana University; J. Edwin Whitesell, University of South Carolina; Anne

Bernardine

Whitmer, Ohio State University; Sara Petty Wilhelm, Muskingum College; Edwin Eliott Willoughby, Folger Shakespeare Library; Kenneth G. Wilson, University of Connecticut; William K . Wimsatt, Jr., Yale University; Eleonor Withington, Queens College; Marion Witt, Hunter College; Samuel K . Workman, Illinois Institute of Technology; Mabel P. Worthington, Temple University; Andrew Howell Wright, Ohio State University.