James Joyce and Modern Literature [1, 1 ed.] 0710090587

Citation preview

JAMES JOYCE & MODERN LITERATURE Contributors William A.Johnsen WilliamTrevor Timothy Wfcbb Christopher Butler Seamus Heaney WJ. McCormack TbmPaulin Jeremy Hawthorn Fredric Jameson Alistair Stead Philip Brockbank Pieter Bekker Edwin Morgan Editors WJ. McCormack Alistair Stead

JAMES JOYCE AND MODERN LITERATURE This collection has its origin in a conference, co¬ ordinated by the editors, and held at the University of Leeds in April 1982 to commemorate the centenary of James Joyce (1882-1941). It brings together thirteen writers from a wide variety of critical traditions to take a fresh look at Joyce and his crucial position not only in English literature but in modem literature as a whole. Comparative views of his work include reflections on his relations to Shakespeare, Blake, MacDiarmid, and the AngloIrish revival, and the collection is distinguished by what Pound called ‘criticism by composition’, the inclusion of original works specially commissioned for this volume-a short story by William Trevor and poems by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. Essays, story and poems all combine to celebrate the major constituents of Joyce’s work - his imagination and comedy, his exuberant use of language, his relation to the history of his country and his age, and his passionate commitment to ‘a more veritably human tradition’.

ISBN 0-7100-9058-7

James Joyce and Modern Literature

JAMES JOYCE AND MODERN LITERATURE Edited by W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead

Routledge & Kegan Paul London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley

First published in 1982 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 39 Store Street,London WC1E 7DD, 9 Park Street,Boston, Mass. 02108, USA, 296 Beaconsfield Parade, Middle Park, Melbourne, 3206, Australia and Broadway House, Newtown Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Ltd, Guildford and London ©Introduction and selection W.J.McCormack and Alistair Stead 1982 © All contributions Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data James Joyce and modern literature Papers of a conference held April 1982 in Leeds under the auspices of the School of English of the University of Leeds. Includes bibliographical references and index

kJZZjTi.

V882’19?1 - Criticism and interpretation Congresses. I McCormack, W.J. II. stead, Alistair. Ill University of Leeds. School of English PR6019.09Z6337 823'.912 ' 81-23364 ISBN 0-7100-9058-7

AACR2

To Lucia Joyce

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction 1 Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism William A.Johnsen 2 Two More Gallants William Trevor 3 'Planetary music': James Joyce and the Romantic example Timothy Webb 4 Joyce and the displaced author Christopher Butler 5 Leaving the Island Seamus Heaney 6 Nightmares of history: James Joyce and the phenomenon of Anglo-Irish literature W. J. McCormack 7 Martello Tom Paulin 8 'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism Jeremy Hawthorn 9 'Ulysses' in history Fredric Jameson 10 Reflections on Eumaeus: Ways of error and glory 'Ulysses' Alistair Stead

Contents

.

11 Joyce and literary tradition: Language living, dead, and resurrected, from Genesis to Guinnesses Philip Brockbank 12 Reading 'Finnegans Wake' Pieter Bekker 13 James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid Edwin Morgan Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors and publishers are grateful to the following for kind permission to quote from their editions of James Joyce's works, which have been used for citation throughout the book: Viking Penguin Inc. for 'Dubliners', copyright © 1967 by the Estate of James Joyce; 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', copyright 1916 by W.B. Huebsch, copyright renewed 1944 by Nora Joyce, © 1964 by the Estate of James Joyce; 'Finnegans Wake’, copyright 1939 by James Joyce, © renewed 1967 by George and Lucia Joyce; Ecce Puer from 'Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses'; reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. The Society of Authors as the Literary Represen¬ tative of the Estate of James Joyce for 'Finnegans Wake', 'Ulysses', 'Dubliners'. 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and Ecce Puer from 'Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses'. Random House Inc. and the Bodley Head Ltd for 'Ulysses'. Jonathan Cape Ltd for 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and 'Dubliners', Faber & Faber Ltd for 'Finnegans Wake' and Ecce Puer from 'Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses'. The editors and publishers are also grateful to the following for kind permission to quote from other copyright material, as follows: A.P. Watt Ltd for quotations from W.B. Yeats, Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation and Easter 1916 from 'Col¬ lected Poems' (1963 edn) and for quotations from W.B. Yeats, 'Purgatory' and 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' from 'Collected Plays' (1963 edn). Faber & Faber Ltd and Random House Inc. for a quotation from W.H. Auden, Spain, from 'The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939' edited by Edward H. Mendelson. Faber & Faber Ltd. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. for quotations from T.S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding' from 'Collected Poems 1909-1962' and for quotations from T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent from 'Selected Essays'. Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe Ltd and Mrs Valda Grieve for quotations from 'The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid: 1920-1976'.

ix

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Pieter Bekker was born in Pretoria in 1944 and educated at the Universities of Witwatersrand and Leeds. He teaches at the Leeds Polytechnic. He has presented papers at Joyce symposia in Dublin, Zurich, and Dubrovnik and is the founder and coeditor of the ’James Joyce Broadsheet'. Philip Brockbank was born in 1922 and educated at the Uni¬ versity of Cambridge. He has taught at the Universities of Saarbriicken, Cambridge and Reading. He founded the Depart¬ ment of English and Related Studies at the University of York in 1963 and has since 1979 been the Director of the Shakes¬ peare Institute, the University of Birmingham. He is the author of 'Marlowe: Dr. Faustus' (1962) and has edited 'Sel¬ ected Poems of Pope' (1964), 'Volpone' (1968) and 'Coriolanus' (1976). He has been the General Editor of the New Mermaid Playwrights series. Christopher Butler was born in 1940 and educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is Student and Tutor in English Literature at Christchurch College. He is the author of 'Number Symbolism' (with Alistair Fowler, 1969), 'Topics in Criticism' (1971) and 'After the Wake: an Essay on the Contem¬ porary Avant-garde' (1980). Jeremy Hawthorn was educated at the University of Leeds. He is the author of 'Identity and Relationship' (1973) and 'Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-consciousness' (1979). He has edited (with John Corner) 'Communication Studies: An Introductory Reader'. He is Professor of English at the Uni¬ versity of Trondheim, Norway. Seamus taught Belfast. (1966), 'North' appears

Heaney was born in County Derry in 1939. He has in various institutions including Queen's University, His volumes of poetry include 'Death of a Naturalist' 'Door Into the Dark' (1969), 'Wintering Out' (1972), (1975) and 'Field Work' (1979). His selected prose in 'Preoccupations' (1980).

xi

Notes on contributors

Fredric Jameson is Professor of French, Yale University. Among his publications are 'Marxism and Form' (1971), 'The Prison-House of Language' (1972), 'Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist' (1979) and 'The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act'

William A. Johnsen teaches English in Michigan State University at East Lansing, Michigan. He has published several articles on modern literature and critical theory and is at present com¬ pleting a book on modernism. Bill McCormack lectures in the School of English, University of Leeds. A graduate of Dublin University (Trinity College) and of the New University of Ulster, his publications include 'A Festschrift for Francis Stuart' (1971), 'Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland' (1980), and editions of novels by Trollope and Le Fanu. Edwin Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920. He was Titular Professor of English at Glasgow University till 1980 and now freelances. His books of poetry include ’The Second Life' (1968), 'Instamatic Poems' (1972), 'From Glasgow to Saturn' (1973), 'The Whittrick Poems' (1973), 'The New Divan' (1977), 'Star Gate' (1979). His 'Collected Poems' is to be published by Carcanet Press. He has written a study of Hugh MacDiarmid (1976), made numerous verse translations and written several opera librettos, most recently for Kenneth Leighton's 'Columba'

Tom Paulin was born in 1949 in Leeds but grew up in Belfast. He has published two volumes of poetry, 'A State of Justice' (1977) and 'The Strange Museum' (1980), and is the author of Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception' (1975). He is a lec¬ turer in English at the University of Nottingham. Alistair Stead was born in Bournemouth in 1938 and attended St Peter's College, Oxford. He has taught English at the Uni¬ versity of Leeds since 1964 and has studied and taught in the United States. He was on the editorial board of New Poets Award (1970-2) and has written on William Godwin, modern American literature and Henry Green. ^revor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, and attended Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. His many books include 'The Old Boys (Hawthornden Prize), 'Angels at the Ritz' (Royal Society ?LL!lerat"r? aWard in 1975) and ’The Children of Dynmouth' (Whitbread Award). In 1977 he was awarded the CBE in recog¬ nition of his services to literature. He has also written many plays for television, radio, and the stage. xii

Notes on contributors

Timothy Webb was born in Dublin in 1942 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Wadham College, Oxford. He is a lecturer at the Department of English and Related Studies at the University of York. He is the author of 'The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation' (1976), 'Shelley: A Voice Not Understood' (1977) and 'English Romantic Hellenism, 17001824' (1982). He is the editor of the 'Keats-Shelley Memorial BuUetin'.

xiii

INTRODUCTION

This collection has its origin in a conference, co-ordinated by the editors, under the auspices of the School of English of the University of Leeds, and held in Leeds in April 1982 to commemorate the centenary of James Joyce (1882-1941). The collection brings together thirteen writers round what is more or less the corpus of James Joyce. Although this may smack of Paddy Dignam's funeral in 'Ulysses' (spot your Man in the Mackintosh), we would prefer to think of it as a 'funferal', as at the riotous Finnegan's wake, for the book has been organised in celebration of the birth rather than the death of Joyce, or, more fittingly, to observe the continual re-birth of one of the greatest English writers of the century. To commemorate Joyce's birthday? A Joyce conference in Leeds? These startled responses to our initiative may have originated, respectively, from the puritan Left and the xenophobic Irish, but they rapidly emerged as uncharacteristic of the Marxist critics and the Irish authors amongst the contributors to the book. For, if 'James Joyce and Modern Literature' has no other distinguishing feature, it can at least claim to have initiated some renewal of interest in Joycean modernism among the New Left and to have stimulated several contemporary Irish writers to a creative response. We are well aware that Leeds has only a tangential relation to either the Joycean oeuvres or Joycean Odysseys. James Joyce never slept here. In 'Finnegans Wake' (p. 576) he does make the tenable distinction 'as different as York from Leeds' (as chalk from cheese) but it is one which, in view of the provenance and associations of several contributors, we would prefer to ignore. The papers that follow box the circle of Joycean criticism, taking in the fruits of that distinctive critical style called forth by 'Finnegans Wake' while at the same time acknowl¬ edging Joyce's place with Shakespeare, Pope, the Romantics, and Beckett. Politically subversive or inalienably Irish though he may have been, Joyce remains at the heart of crucial debates in English literature, in modern literature. There has been no attempt to construct a comprehensive survey of influ¬ ences and traditions, or of transactions with other authors. Nevertheless we take Joyce, 'the intricate and almost infinite Irishman who wove "Ulysses'" as Jorge Luis Borges hails him,[l] to be still at the centre of a vast web of words and concepts, not limitingly provincial or national and far from 1

Introduction

narrow in affiliations, and spinning himself into our immediate and lasting concerns. He is still the inevitable focus for re-consideration of the problems of modernist and post¬ modernist aesthetics and is an exemplary case in Denis Donoghue's 'The Sovereign Ghost* (1976), David Lodge's 'The Modes of Modern Writing' (1977) and Frank Kermode's 'The Genesis of Secrecy' (1979). One specific problem has been couched, all too often, in terms of an antagonism between the tradition and the moment, between values allegedly located in the past and problems en¬ countered in what Eliot rashly called 'the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history'. Two of the contemporary Irish writers contributing to this volume have in their distinctive ways challenged this antagonism as sterile and mechanical. Seamus Heaney, in the opening stanzas of what promises to be a poetic meditation of the greatest range and ambition, casts Joyce as Dante's Virgil but does so with admonitory attention to this earthly purgatory - in choos¬ ing Lough Derg as his location he puts his work into contact with Denis Devlin's (anti?) Jansenist poem of the same name, with O'Faolain's paradigmatic fiction of post-war Ireland ('Lovers of the Lake'), and Patrick Kavanagh's shrewd pietism. Working Joyce's metier, William Trevor turns the short story, not against Joyce or his characters, but towards the organisers of Joyce conferences: nothing could better catch the ambience of our present negotiations between academe and garret. Here it is worth saying that this is not Mr Trevor's first excursion into such richly impure waters, for he pub¬ lished 'In search of Siri' (Siri von Essen, Strindberg's wife) in 'Atlantis' in 1970. We make the point simply to reinforce the direct relation between Irish modernism and its European con¬ text, and not necessarily to discount the English mediation between Joyce and the continent. Tom Paulin's contribution cannot be separated from those of Heaney and Trevor, and yet it addresses the obverse side of the false antagonism we have mentioned. No amount of Practical Criticism can elucidate the historical feeling in 'Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea'. Practical Critics, of course - and here they resemble the Buck himself - are not averse to cogging from the discipline they ostensibly reject. So, Paulin's poems defiantly accept the medium of English poetry; and this is only appropriate in an Irish poet whose birthplace is Leeds. The latter-day reader of Joyce, and of criticism about Joyce, will recognise that in recruiting Philip Brockbank, Christopher Butler, and Timothy Webb we have given an opportunity to a variety of prolific writers who have not yet written of Joyce to do just that on this festive occasion. From the outset it has been our intention that we should encourage such fresh encounters with Joyce rather than sanction a repetition or summary of opinions ground (fine as dust) in

2

Introduction

manufactories of the Joyce industry or the pastoral winnowing machines of a self-regarding Anglo-Irishry. Bill Johnsen's contribution is particularly significant in representing the renewal of interest in Joyce's early work as containing the seed of an efflorescence which as it sported, in some eyes, to a degree grew wild. Edwin Morgan, polyglot poet and translator, cites the later Joyce in his searching and discriminating comparison with Hugh MacDiarmid's political and humanistic ambitions. Any debate between tradition and the moment is false, not per se, but by the effect of a false categorisation of past and present in literary criticism. It is essentially to this problem that Jeremy Hawthorn and Fredric Jameson address themselves in specifically Marxist terms. ’PN Review’ notwithstanding, an explicitly politicised criticism of a right-wing order is not much in evidence today. It is all the more significant, therefore, that the seeming velleities of belles-lettres (and, for that matter, discourse analysis) should be challenged by a concrete and historically grounded criticism. In an entirely non-sectarian way, all the essays tend to make manifest the degree to which the reading of Joyce is, to borrow Dante's all but political terms, an 'action' as well as a 'passion'; [2] all directly or indirectly reflect on the strenuous but richly rewarding attention to the voice, or polyphony rather, of Joycean fiction. These essays happily converge on the major constituents of his imaginative economy, on his oblique but stubborn and deeply imagined relation to the history of his country and his age, on his passionate commitment to 'a more veritably human tradition' ('Stephen Hero', p. 32), on his sane and exuberant comedy, and on the embodiment of that comedy in the grotesque and incredibly vivid compound of sacred and profane languages. The greatest temptation perhaps is to see Joyce merely as supreme artificer and to fail to realise the function of his elaborate contrivings and patternings, to miss the fact that only through dedication to styles (rather than style) can Joyce release and perpetuate the vitality and the humanity. It is too easy to believe that the 'ideal reader' of Joyce closely resembles Chas, that 'highbrow bromide of French nationality' who hangs about the Joycean tale A Wet Night in Beckett's 'More Pricks Than Kicks', who has a 'mind like a tattered concordance' and seems like 'a clockwork Bartlett'. [3] Julia Kristeva's notion of 'intertextuality' and Barthes's conception of the text as 'a tissue of quotations' both seem to invite Chas (Chaos?) into Joyce; but Joyce, the great pillager and transformer of other people's work, is a great misquoter ('quashed quotatoes') and mocks his own devotion to the encyclopedic in the great tradition of learned wit which stretches from Rabelais to Beckett. And it is well to remember that Beckett himself, though he might have dwelt plausibly on the formal inspiration of Joyce's work, was anxious in 1969 to 3

Introduction

acknowledge a moral debt.[4] On our own papers we have no comment to make here, except to record the privilege we have gained by appearing in such company. Acknowledgments of this kind are too frequently taken as ritual, and not taken as a sincere form of veneration. Our neighbour and friend, Pieter Bekker, has been inexhaustible in his resourcefulness and support. John Barnard, Tom Gleave, Geoffrey Hill, and Stewart Sanderson have each provided strategic assistance. The Staff of the School of English, 'too numerous to mention', as the truthful cliche goes, have both academically and secretarially helped us at this stile: here, we must record especially affectionate thanks to Donata Martin and Judith Bates. As our dedication indicates, the muse for whom we worked is the daughter of Memory, Miss Lucia Joyce. W.J. McC. A. J.S. Leeds

NOTES 1

2 3 4

Jorge Luis Borges, Flaubert y su destino ejemplar, 'Discusion' (1932), 'Obras Completas I' (Emece: Buenos Aires, 1966), p. 150. Dante, 'De Vulgari Eloquentia', bk II, ch. VIII. Samuel Beckett, 'More Pricks Than Kicks' (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), pp. 55, 56. 'Joyce had a moral effect on me - he made me realise artistic integrity.' Quoted in Ruby Cohn, 'Back to Beckett' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 14.

4

1 JOYCE’S ‘DUBLINERS’ AND THE FUTILITY OF MODERNISM William A. Johnsen

Yeats says that [Swift] made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself. [1] James Joyce's quarrel with Grant Richards over the publication of 'Dubliners' has been well documented; [2] if the year from April 1906 through the following summer which saw the completion of The Dead became for Joyce a period of increasing frustration, for Joyce critics it plots the circumstances which forced Joyce to defend and finally reconsider his intentions, spelled out in the year-long series of letters to Richards and his brother Stanislaus Joyce. Over a period of two years, 'Dubliners' had grown from a projected series of ten 'epicleti' in August 1904 ('Letters', I, p. 55) through the twelve stories first submitted to Richards in late 1905, to the fourteen-story collection that Joyce began defending against Richards's censures on 26 April 1906 ('Letters', I, pp. 60-1), without essentially altering Joyce's conception of the book's overall pattern. Thus the oft-quoted[3] 5 May 1906 letter to Richards mainly consolidates earlier statements about the shape and motive of 'Dubliners': its style of scrupulous meanness and fourfold division into childhood, adolescence, mature and public life ('Letters', II, p. 134). Most readings of 'Dubliners' count heavily on these letters, but it is not easy to rationalise Joyce's addition, a year after these letters, of a story which replaces Grace to become a new ending to the collection,[ 4 ] written in a style not scrupulously mean. While all readers recognise Gabriel's kinship to earlier Dubliners, there is no real consensus about the meaning of Gabriel's 'journey westward' for 'Dubliners' as a whole. Although many infer the motive for The Dead in Joyce's remorseful remark to Stanislaus (25 September 1906) that he had not reproduced in his stories Ireland's 'ingenous insularity' and 'hospitality ('Letters', II, p. 166), Joyce himself conceded in that same letter that the perverse devil of his literary conscience wouldn't allow him to write in any other way. Yet these letters, followed closely, adumbrate the rethinking of 'Dubliners' enacted in the addition of The Dead. Further, the shift from the attitude embodied in a style of scrupulous meanness, to the attitude worked out in the composition of The Dead, enabled Joyce to begin immediately the revision of 'Stephen Hero' into 'A Portrait' which, one might say, remembering how Pound used 'A Portrait' to 'make' 5

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

Joyce, made Joyce possible for modern art. We might also argue that this is the moment of modernism, when Joyce modernised himself. But the postmodern rejection of the ideology of modernism requires all of us who honour the fine and sensitive work of Yeats, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot and Joyce, to adopt a more critical regard for the modern tradition. Flaubert is the great prototype of self-modernisation. His friends censured his early work as passe romanticism, derivative (the worst sin in nineteenth-century France is to imitate), and urged him to modernise his style with an ironic portrait of a sordid provincial adulteress. Inadvertently, they crystallised Flaubert's critical understanding of the untenable situation of the 'modern' writer, who must remodernise himself over and over again by deconstructing his previous styles. The narrator of 'Madame Bovary' is in a double bind, torn between two opposed choices: to sympathise with Emma's futile romanticism, which is recognised as self-destructive by anyone who has learned the bitter discipline of modernisation, or to regard her ironically, from a distance, and therefore keep companv with those masters of style - Rodolphe, Lheureux, and Hv...iais. [5] As I have argued elsewhere, the great modern writers understood critically the ideology of modernism. [6] In fact, we will come to identify Joyce's earlier style of scrupulous meanness, of satire, as one of two poles of modernism understood as a system of futile oppositions: an interminable process of regressive purifications, alternating with a series of increasingly sentimental and remorseful surrenders to impurity. Dear dirty Dublin. Joyce's writing of The Dead, and the revision of 'Stephen Hero' into 'A Portrait', reveal to us how Joyce, like the other major modern writers, worked his way out of the futility of modernism. On 19 July 1905, Joyce speculated to Stanislaus about what Irish readers would see in his stories: The Dublin papers will object to my stories as to a caricature of Dublin life. Do you think there is any truth in this? At times the spirit directing my pen seems to me so plainly mischievous that I am almost prepared to let the Dublin critics have their way. All these pros and cons I must for the nonce lock up in my bosom. Of course do not think that I consider contemporary Irish writing anything but ill-written, morally obtuse formless caricature. ('Letters', II, p. 99) The word caricature performs a double service in this letter, representing on the one hand the failure of moral and artistic understanding, which becomes a mockery of true morality and art. On the other hand, caricature is one form that the spirit which directs Joyce's pen can take to mock obtuse morality and the formlessness of contemporary Irish writing: a caricature of 6

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

a carffcature. The pros and cons of caricature are locked up for the moment, but this uncertainty about the form and motive of the stories reveals itself throughout Joyce's letters to Grant Richards, beginning later, in 1905. On 15 October 1905 Joyce captiously drew Richards's attention to 'the special odour of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories' ('Letters', II, p. 123), but six months later retreated in the face of Richards's growing alarm to defend a book written 'with considerable care', 'in accordance with what I understand to be the classical tradition of my art' ('Letters', I, p. 60). Thus on 5 May 1906, Joyce carefully defended the organisation, style, and motive of 'Dubliners': My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. ('Letters', II, p. 134) Joyce contrasts the uncompromising discipline of his work with Irish paralysis, and his intention to write a chapter of moral history, with the indifference of the general public. Further, Joyce now defends the sordidness of subject and style as realistic truth: meanness is the character and quality of Dublin life. Yet we can hear reservations in this letter also, which echo more loudly when we hear them repeated in later letters. Every sentence but one is qualified: 'my intention was', 'that city seemed to me', 'I have tried to present,' ’for the most part written' (my underlining). Joyce's higher argument is crossed by reservations throughout his correspondence. On 20 May he emphasised again to Richards the moral commitment behind his diagnosis of Dublin (and, in the next sentence, gave it away): in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step toward the spiritual liberation of my country. Reflect for a moment on the history of the literature of Ireland as it stands at present written in the English language before you condemn this genial illusion of mine which, after all, has at least served me in the office of a candlestick during the writing of the book. ('Letters', I, pp. 62-3) Taken by themselves, each reservation seems proper self-deprecation. Read in sequence, these apparently playful self-mockeries spell out Joyce's unresolved reservations about 7

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

'Dubliners'. On 26 June 1906, Joyce defended once again to Richards the sordidness of the book, but now it is clear that he stresses a self-critical awareness of the narrative technique of Stephen Daedalus, 'author' of The Sisters, Eveline, After the Race, and ironic hero of the autobiographical novel he is writing at the same time: I send you a Dublin paper by this post. It is the leading satirical paper of the Celtic nations, corresponding to Punch or Pasquino. I send it to you that you may see how witty the Irish are as all the world knows. The style of the caricaturist will show you how artistic they are: and you will see for yourself that the Irish are the most spiritual race on the face of the earth. Perhaps this may reconcile you to Dubliners. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass. ('Letters', I, pp. 63-4) Joyce first hoped in October that this odour floated over his stories, but now, eight months later, he pleads innocence by reason of general paralysis of the Irish. He no longer argues that a sordid subject requires a sordid style. The sordidness of Irish life infects the style of the caricaturist as well. Now, Joyce admits the kinship of the narrator to the paralysed citizens of Dublin in general, with the single distinction that he would offer the Irish a good look at themselves in the scrupulously polished looking-glass (the style which he first defended as the agent of moral judgment of the Irish) wherein he has ultimately recognised his own paralysis. Joyce's stories are admittedly imbued with the odour of ashpits, old weeds, and offal because the narrative point of view, the style of 'Dubliners' embodies (even as it tries to purge itself of) the sordidness it depicts. Joyce satirically suggests to Richards that he would better understand 'Dubliners' in relation to Irish satire. We have already looked at Joyce's fear that his pen is directed to caricature. It is likely that The Sisters began as a satire on the story A.E. (Russell) sent to Joyce as a model submission to the 'Irish Homestead': something 'simple ... so as not to shock the readers' ('Letters', II, p. 43). Eveline is probably a satiric warning to Nora, who left Ireland with Joyce less than a month after the story was published. According to Stanislaus's diary, 'Stephen Hero' began as a family exercise in caricature: 'the title, like the book, is satirical'. [7] Elsewhere in the diary, Stanislaus considers satire as an Irish birthright. [8] The author of 'Et tu, Healy' and 'The Holy Office' was steeped in the furious Dean of Satire. It is not, I think, extravagant, to hear behind Joyce's defence of his 8

Joyce’s 'Dubliners’ and the futility of modernism

nicely polished looking-glass for the Irish, Swift's definition of satire as 'a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own'. [9] Swift knew that readers will regard satire as a transparent medium, peering through the surface of the work to identify the satiric content within. Swift manipulates the reader's compulsion to read deeply. Each of his satires allows the reader to regard the work as transparent, to read it for content, only to have the glass suddenly change to a mirror, leaving the reader confronted with his own image, righteous, solemn, disdainful. 'A Modest Proposal' lures the reader into a rational approach to the population problem in Ireland, only to give the reader a good look at himself when the narrator logically concludes in cannibalism. Similarly, 'Gulliver's Travels' persuades the reader to Gulliver's point of view: man is petty (A Voyage to Lilliput), gross (A Voyage to Brobdingnag), foolish (A Voyage to Laputa), and obscene, excremental (A Voyage to the Houyhnhms). Led by Gulliver, the reader is progressively separated from other men, until only the smell of the stable is congenial. Glass becomes mirror: the absurdity of Gulliver reflects to the reader the absurdity of his own disdainful scrupulous regard, which has made him Gulliver's stablemate. It is more than time to turn to the stories themselves. How does the fourteen-story collection recognise the narrator's kinship to the corruption he depicts, and how can this glass become mirror for the reader as well? The 1906 version of 'Dubliners' is an epiphany of a closed environment, a labyrinth without issue. Each character holds himself scrupulously above the crowd only to display, in a sudden revelation, his (or her) disengagement as a more perfect repetition of that sordid paralysis each tries to escape. Fastidious withdrawal, or remorseful attempts to put aside fastidiousness, establish his kinship to all Dubliners living and dead. The narrator, in turn, apparently withdraws in disdain from these victims of spiritual paralysis. In the first three stories, he disdains his own past selves; in the next eleven, he disdains others. As Yeats said of Swift, according to Stanislaus's Dublin diary, he makes a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself. Yet this narrator also reveals a longing to return, to be nearer to paralysis, to look again upon its deadly work. The narrator's sin is his pride in his power of choice; he can put aside his purity, and he can purify himself again. The distance between narrator and subject is fictional: he adopts a style that assumes narrative distance in order to close more safely with every nuance of corruption, to map the distinctive features of the general paralysis of the insane. The first three stories, where first-person narration identifies the narrator as the protagonist, establish the kinship of the narrator with other Dubliners, and prepare the reader to see himself 'seeing' 9

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

in Joyce's looking-glass. The Sisters introduces 'Dubliners' recurrent pattern of ingenious entrapment. The young narrator was coached in the commercial culture of Dublin by Old Cotter. 'When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery' ('Dubliners', p. 10). Father Flynn has seduced the boy from the simple pleasures of childhood and the spectacle of Dublin's commerce by special tutoring in the complexities of the Mass and correct pronunciation of Latin. He encourages the boy to feel that he is intellectually and spiritually set apart from the others. The boy's pro¬ gressively disdainful aloofness from Old Cotter, his aunt and uncle, is chronicled in his shift of pronouns: 'We once found him interesting, but soon grew tired.' Father Flynn's death abruptly returns the boy to the common crowd. He can no longer serve as surrogate altar-boy; now he must remain outside the sanctuary in the street, reading the card announcing Father Flynn's death in the low company of two poor women and a telegram boy. When he accompanies his aunt to view the corpse, he passively submits to the commonplace pieties of the sisters. 'My aunt took me .... Nannie received us_beckoned us .... began to beckon me' ('Dubliners', p. 14). 'We waited respectfully for [Eliza] to break the silence' ('Dubliners', p. 17). 'I declined [crackers] because I thought I would make too much noise eating them' ('Dubliners', p. 15). 'I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then turned quietly to my chair in the corner' ('Dubliners', p. 17). Critics have generally followed Marvin Magalaner's early reading that the boy denies the Church by refusing Eliza's symbolic Mass of cream sherry and crackers; [10] more shrewdly, Edward Brandabur has distinguished Eliza's Mass of conventional experience from Father Flynn's perverse Mass the boy refuses Eliza because he prefers perversity over conventionality.[ 11 ] Yet the boy himself does not recognise the crackers and sherry as ritual Mass - he refuses the crackers because he does not want to call attention to himself. This meal, contrasted with his barely suppressed disdain of Cotter over yesterday's bowl of stirabout, suggests a growing awareness of his own subservience to those in power. The process which transformed the boy from a scornful disdainer of commonness to a model example of the conventional childhood virtues, is illuminated by the boy's vision of Father Flynn lying in state: He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman's mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth

10

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

boots were trodden down all to one side. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin. But no. When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, sol¬ emn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, gray and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a white scanty fur. There was a heavy odour in the room - the flowers. ('Dubliners', p. 14). The boy temporarily escapes the sisters' control in the private world of prayer; his piety is Stephen Daedalus's, fastidious, easily broken by the sordid tide about him. With scrupulous meanness he notes Nannie's commonness. He fancies a conspir¬ ator:' il smile from the priest, confirming his disdain for these trolls, but Father Flynn is the insentient victim of the sisters' oversolicitous care: a corpse with a chalice charitably propped in its hands. This is the crux of the story. The grotesque ministrations to the corpse make apparent a condition which has always existed: the paralytic's enslavement to the patron¬ age of the sisters. The common culture renounced by the boy in the beginning of the story re-enters his narrative with renewed intensity. The sisters reiterate the conventional wisdom of Old Cotter,the uncle and aunt: 'he was too scrupulous always' ('Dubliners' p. 17). This spiritual autopsy of Father Flynn prognosticates the boy's paralysis. His attempt to escape the sordidness of commonplace Dublin by assuming the scrupulous sensibility of Father Flynn has bound him more firmly to the tyranny of the family. The title of the story, and the boy's diminishing role in the story, expresses his concession to those in power: the sisters• In these stories, Dubliners will invariably become confused by elaborate alternatives that lead back to the centre of the maze. Old Cotter and Father Flynn, at first representative of the common mean culture and an escape from that culture, now appear as complementary figures, both performing for and being patronised by the boy's family. The Sisters introduces Joyce's fundamental understanding ot Dublin's social reality: common and elite culture, childhood, adolescence, mature and public life, the living and the dead are victims of Dublin's intricate maze. The alternatives by which Dubliners choose to free themselves are usually dis¬ guised (by inversion) repetitions of the rejected degradation. Dubliners oscillate futilely between two contrary positions, such as the sacred of Father Flynn and the profane of Old Cotter. They try to stand apart, or they try to belong. Like the woven straw cylinder popularly known as a Chinese finger puzzle, Dublin tightens around each citizen's attempt to ex¬ tricate himself. The young narrator

of

An

11

Encounter,

like

Stephen,

is

Joyce's 'Dubliners’ and the futility of modernism

bothered by timidity. A 'reluctant Indian' ('Dubliners', p. 20), he wants to escape from dullness and timidity into a lifestyle 'traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls' ('Dubliners', p. 20). Education has paralysed his impulses toward boyish abandon. 'But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me' ('Dubliners', pp. 20-1). The boy's exchange of restraint and repression for one day's enjoyment of 'the spectacle of Dublin's commerce' is plotted from 'The Union Jack', 'Pluck', 'Halfpenny Marvel', American detective stories, and a 'confused notion' about sailors with green eyes. The girls they encounter are ragged rather than unkempt, fierce, and beautiful; their Wild West Show fails to materialise, but they do meet a pair of bottle-green eyes in the queer old josser. Running away from school, these children encounter a more radical, comprehensive symbol of the discipline of Father Butler: Then he began to talk of school and books. He asked us whether we had read the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton. I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the end he said; -Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now, he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, he is different; he goes in for games. He said he had all Sir Walter Scott's works and all Lord Lytton's works at home and never tired of reading them. Of course, he said, there were some of Lord Lytton's works which boys couldn't read. Mahony asked why boys couldn't read them - a question which agitated and pained me because I was afraid the man would think I was as stupid as Mahony. ('Dubliners', p. 25). The boy deserts the egalitarian world of boyish adventure, where 'differences of culture and constitution were waived' ('Dubliners', p. 20), for the educated, elitist sensibility of the old man, but in either case his life is, like Father Flynn's, crossed. The boy who was 'afraid to seem studious' ('Dubliners', p. 20) in the midst of adventure now, seeking adventure, is lured into studiousness by the old man. Intimations of a perverse melange of homosexuality, fetishism, and sadomasochism under the guise of pedagogical discipline are later expressed by Simon Moonan in 'A Portrait', whose courting of priestly affection and discipline earned him the title of 'McGlade's suck'. An Encounter is the countermovement to The Sisters. In the first story, the boy escapes from the common culture of Dublin into the studious culture of Father Flynn, until he recognises himself more solidly enclosed by dear dirty Dublin. In the

12

Joyce's ’Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

second story a boy of Dublin only to studiousness who, Butler, bears also a

escapes from studiousness into the streets be censured by a more radical form of while performing the office of Father remarkable resemblance to Father Flynn:

He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him. ('Dubliners', p. 27). A man in a suit of greenish black, like Father Flynn's priestly garments with their faded green look, unfolds elaborate mysteries, like Father Flynn, and asks for understanding as Father Flynn wanted to confess to the boy in his dream. The futility of choosing between common and polite culture becomes even more apparent when we remember that the minister. of popular culture, Joe Dillon, was reported to have a vocation for the priesthood, or we peruse the library of the departed priest in Araby; 'The Abbot', 'The Devout Communicant , and 'The Memoirs of Vidocq'. A day of miching only reinforces the repressive power of school, just as Simon Moonan s more serious crime is but another way of being McGlade's suck giving himself to the didactic power of the priest's cool soft white hands. In a closed system, obedience and rebellion are interchangeable alternatives that strengthen tyranny. This encounter makes the boy repent his scrupulousness towards Mahony; as in the first story, the boy finds himself bound again to that which he despised: 'He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent: for in my heart I had always despised him a little' ('Dubliners', p. 28). The boy is trapped; he cannot escape timidity through adventure, nor commonness through culture. Joyce's map for Dublin's social reality continues to unfold; any attempt to escape bondage, whether through an iniquitous abandonment or a catharsis o scrupulous detachment, only draws the bond tighter. The young narrator of Araby lives in a world of brown uninhabited houses, musty isolated rooms, and the crass material world of the marketplace. He rejects the marketplace for a world of Romantic idealism represented for him by Mangan's sister. He promises her a present from Araby, which in turn becomes a means of escaping a world hostile to romance'. 'These noises converged in a single sensation ot life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes' ('Dubliners', p. 31). The romantic world must be isolated from the marketplace and the mocking uncle; the chalice, the mocking uncle, and the boy's aloofness are clear parallels to The Sisters. The boy finds Araby not a place of eastern enchantment, but another marketplace as empty as the house at the blind

13

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

end of North Richmond Street. The shopgirl treats the boy as all adults treat him - dismissively. He is further humiliated by the spectacle of an erotic encounter which disturbingly completes his chivalrous discussion with Mangan's sister (as the queer old josser completes Father Butler's admonitions). The coy shopgirl's encouragement of her suitors confirms the queer old josser's admonishment that 'all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew' ('Dubliners', p. 26). The boy's attempt to escape the sordid emptiness of Dublin has made him a textbook case of Irish paralysis. His romantic yearning for Mangan's sister, which begins near the blind end of North Richmond Street, systematically empties his world of human contact. He seeks out the back drawing room where the priest died or the high cold empty rooms to envision his love. The train to Araby is deserted, Araby itself is nearly empty. The boy sees himself as a 'creature driven and derided by vanity' ('Dubliners', p. 35). Vanitas (emptiness) drives him, then derides him. By means of confused notions, the emptiness of Dublin life betrays itself with a false alternative to its squalor, then derides anyone who attempts to escape its grasp. In the stories following Araby up to The Dead Joyce portrays Dubliners as unable to escape from the lives of futility offered them; neither iniquitous abandonment nor withdrawal can extricate them from the maze of cross-purposes. Jimmy Doyle's cosmopolitanism is the inversion of Eveline's parochialism; Jimmy courts the 'Frank' whom Eveline denies. The adolescent decision to marry profitably (Lenehan) rather than improvidently (Bob Doran) is an idle choice; married (Little Chandler and Farrington) and single (Maria and James Duffy) mature Dubliners are also powerless. Farrington terrorises the family that restrains Little Chandler, James Duffy prudently pursues the chance romantic encounter that Maria in her excitement bungles, to no avail. The underlying kinship of Dublin's commerce to politics (Ivy Day in the Committee Room), the arts (A Mother), and religion (Grace) complete the portrait of a cruel, effective mechanism: the power Dubliners expend attempting escapes energises this paralysing maze. The Irish imagination is tyrannised by futile oppositions; it envisions what it wants by inverting what it despises. Aspirations are easily anticipated, fulfilment is pre-packaged. The oriental bazaar anticipates a boredom with the common marketplace. Father Purdon packages special group retreats for businessmen; thus is a more terrifying version of the marketplace subsidised. Joyce presents the spectacle of Dublin's paralytics in Eveline through Grace 'for the most part' in that style of scrupulous meanness which he explained to Grant Richards. Each Dubliner is measured, dissected, and displayed by a sensibility removing itself above or beyond its handiwork as 14

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism the collection of stories progresses. Each story delivers up, in a moment of catharsis, an epiphany of the sordidness and paralysis of Dublin, transmitted from one dispassionate observer (narrator) to another (reader). Yet we sense also the celibate's excitement at the cleansing effect of catharsis, the ritual purification of satire which authorises him to say 'I am not that' (any longer). The purified narrator of 'Dubliners' feels himself proof against contamination by his superior ironic understanding, which allows him closer to the deadly work of paralysis. Like Father Flynn, he educates the reader in the intricacies of his own patient, curiously exotic scrupulousness the aesthetic pattern of 'Dubliners', a maze of cross-reference which initiates the reader into those terrible ironies which, for example, pass over the head of Eveline: that Mary Margaret Alacoque's promise of harmony in the family hangs above a broken harmonium, or the 'buenos aires' that Eveline might exchange for the odour of 'dusty cretonne'. [12] This is the fetid, overcharged atmosphere of an upper region approachable only through an education in scrupulous meanness. The mundane world is raised, for the initiate, into the corrupt intensity of the ironic smile, the whole world in quotation marks. If these trolls but knew the 'implications' of their own misunderstanding - a pleasant and vicious region indeed. The silence of narrator and reader at the end of Grace is like the silence at the end of The Sisters. We fancy the complicity of the superior ironic understanding, Joyce nodding his head twice or thrice in answer to our ironic smile. 'But no.' Our education in futility is complete although, as Swift's definition of satire suggests, we will see paralysis in everyone else before we see it in our relation to the text. The symmetry of ’Dubliners', the critical awareness of the narrator's implication in the sordidness he depicts, and the art by which the narrator educates and satirises the reader, attests to Joyce's formidable mastery. Yet three months after his eloquent attempt to awaken Richards to the purposes of 'Dubliners', Joyce brought up again to Stanislaus the pros and cons of caricature and mockery locked up for fifteen months. Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty; for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria or Italy. And yet I know how useless these reflections are. For were I to rewrite the book as G.R. suggests 'in another sense' (where the hell does he get the meaningless phrases he uses) I am sure I should find again what you

15

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

call the Holy Ghost sitting in the ink-bottle and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen. And after all Two Gallants - with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare Street and Lenehan - is an Irish landscape. ('Letters', II, p. 166). In these letters Joyce has passed through increasingly powerful cycles of satire and remorse; he regrets ignoring Irish hospitality and Ireland's beauty, but the perverse devil of his literary conscience urges him to offer as his example of landscape the type of Corley and Lenehan's gallantry: 'His harp too, heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master's hands' ('Dubliners', p. 54). Joyce told Stanislaus on 19 July 1905 that 'Dubliners' might become a caricature of a caricature. As he recognised in time how his art itself perfected Irish paralysis, he consented to satire's potential for infinite regression, satirising the satire of a satire by incriminating the reader. Like Father Flynn, Joyce sought to absolve his own paralysis by drawing out the reader's incipient meanness. This present reader, in turn, has tried to work off his own culpability by giving himself up also to satire's regressions. I have attempted to win absolution for the meanness of my commentary by holding up the mirror to my readers. The regressive nature of satire reminds us more than a little of the fashion-madness which bedevils so much of modern commentary, which is often nothing more than a series of successive deconstructions and supercessions of previous readings or metalanguages. Joyce's stories themselves plot the simple binary code of Dublin's mythology, which produces the various motifs, themes, and types educible through new criticism, psychological or archetypal criticism. The repetition of this code, story after story, deconstructs the false substantiality of any two opposed choices as mere places in a system. Yet the structuralism of the narrator is itself deconstructed by satire, and we find ourselves tracing the traces remaining from successive absolutions. We will always want to see the latest critical systems in relation to Joyce's work, but one could argue that the 'fit' testifies less to the efficacy of the method, than to Joyce's understanding of the dynamics of satire, of which successive schools of criticism are often only one of many expressions. However, I am unwilling to perpetuate this joyless science by suggesting that Joyce deconstructs all criticism. The series of satires which I have ascribed to 'Dubliners', moving from analysand to analyst, which I take to be the 'progress' of modernism, is the very image of the debasement of education, wasting the gift of the past, instead of learning from it. The sad misunderstanding between Icarus and Daedalus, which is the very signature of Joyce's thinking, is the futility of 16

Joyce’s ’Dubliners’ and the futility of modernism

The early recognition of the pertinency of this letter, which expresses Joyce’s remorse for the 1906 version of 'Dubliners , is accurate, but has remained unfocused. In this letter Joyce recognised that satire would reappear whenever he attempted to respond more generously to the virtues he now admits in his countrymen. The Dead, so different in style from the earlier stories and ’Stephen Hero', so clearly an anticipation of the style of 'A Portrait', is not simply a more sympathetic portrait of the Irish, 'in another sense' The Dead disintegrates Joyce’s obsession in satire, and frees his mind from his mind's bondage to the futile dynamics of modernism. The Dead is probably the finest short story in our anguage because, after many false starts, it accepts the gift of the past, and truly unites us with all Joyce s countrymen living and^dead-dear

why

Thg

Dead

.g

taken

to

represent

Joyce's

renewal of sympathy with Ireland. From the very beginning of the story, a prose fuller, more supple and periodic than the previous7 stories or 'Stephen Hero’, closer to the style of A Portrait’, invites the reader to join the narrator in a more indulgent look at the Dubliners. The prose mellows as it renders an approximation of its own point of view in Gabriel Conroy: an initial aversion to Irishness which refers to Europe to compose a manner, which then allows condescension and affection for Irish culture. Dear dirty Dublin. Gabriel is a moderately successful Dubliner who has avoided the frustrations of earlier characters to mediate the competing claims of studious and popular culture. He married his sweetheart, despite his mother's objections; he manipulates the proper worldly symbols (galoshes, European cycle tours, journalism) with a studious air and occupation, yet he also sits at the head of the table as the celebrant of Irish hospitality. a in such company, narrator and readerm Marta Cunningham's homely phrase, 'wash the pot together r'Dubliners' o. 163). They have sinned, but they repent and absolve each other of meanness on this day of all days in the year. In a state of Grace, the idees regues, the malapropisms of Dublin life are no longer bracketed in secreto, i 'Freeman's General' (a meanly recorded mistake of Eliza s tor 'Freeman's Journal' - 'Dubliners’, p. 16), but forgvener ^ the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her ( °'ButnnoS ’’ Gabriel's style proves to be a melange rather than a mediation of the various aspects of Dublin life. Dublin invariably fills its citizens with contradictory Gabriel's well-filled shirtfront cannot contain. Gabriel s taiiur strike a series of 'false notes'. Like the boy in An Encounter, we find ourselves 'reluctant' Irishmen, drawn into a sympathy which disappointed or betrayed, is certain to provoke a new attack of satiric withdrawal.

17

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

Gabriel assumes an air of conviviality for the festive dinner, but is unprepared for the savage indignation of Lily, the caretaker's daughter. When he patronises her about her putative young man, she retorts: 'The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you' ('Dubliners', p. 178). The coin Gabriel gives Lily cannot make restitution for the betrayal of Dublin's Corleys; money remains the token of love. Gabriel also suffers in his encounter with Molly Ivors. As with Lily, the alternating pace of sentiment and satire confuses him. Gabriel reserves his gallantry for his wife. He protects her, woos her as the fulfilment of the boy in Araby. Like many of Dublin's educated citizens, Gabriel must overcome his diffidence in the presence of his Lady, which increases at the same pace as his desire. To break their silence, he tells her that Malins returned a borrowed pound, then becomes angry at Malins because of his own indirection. 'Gabriel strove to restrain himself from breaking out in brutal language about the sottish Malins and his pound' ('Dubliners', p. 217). It is clear by now that fastidiousness is produced by self-hatred, hating the other as he hates himself. Gabriel feels that his desire is answered in Gretta's direct acknowledgment of his act of kindness (now poisoned for him by resentment), when she kisses him and says 'You are a very generous person, Gabriel' ('Dubliners', p. 217). But soon Gabriel learns that he is not master of her mood. Just when he thinks he has won her favour, he is made aware of his vanity. The lover that Gretta envisions is Michael Furey, not Gabriel: She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonishment and followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself full length, his broad well-filled shirtfront, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. ('Dubliners', p. 218). Gabriel is surprised by a good look at himself in the cheval-glass. He responds to this mocking mirror by distancing himself 'coldly' and 'ironically' from Gretta, but distance cannot protect him now: Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to 18

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. ('Dubliners', pp. 219-20) Throughout 'Dubliners', irony inevitably deconstructs back into self-hatred. Of all the cruel misrepresentations of affection spawned by self-hatred, the most revealing is Gabriel's assumption that Gretta has been comparing him to Michael Furey. It is more likely that she is remorseful about the horrible consequences of her letter, which lightly wished Michael Furey better health for her return the following summer. If the failure of irony concedes defeat to a rival where no rivalry exists, then the intention of irony must be the vanquishing of a secretly imagined rival without ever admitting rivalry exists. 'He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy' ('Dubliners', p. 219). [13] Here we see, as in all great modern writers, how the local dynamics of futility are affiliated to the futility of modernism. Irony is the technique of modern rivalry, and a defeated rival is necessary to the ironist's sense of superiority. To be defeated, in turn, is to think of oneself as a vanquished rival, to be exposed as a mere imitator or follower. To deny imitation is to deny what Rene Girard identifies as the one instinct essential for culture. [14] In so far as modernism proposes a self-born, self-begotten originality that mocks or vanquishes imitators or rivals, that screens its own imitating, it perverts the Scene of Education, wastes the past, and hands on only a technique for futility. Girard derives narcissism and coquetry from modern emulation. The coquette increases her self-esteem by inciting and frustrating her lover's desire, produced by his imitating and unsuccessfully rivalling her own self-love. If Gretta's letter to Michael Furey was written with design, similar in some way to the coyness of Mangan's sister, or the banter of the girl at the Araby bazaar, the woman we see is no coquette. One feels that she nursed Mrs Conroy through her last illness unresentful towards her primary rival for Gabriel's love. She has learned from Michael Furey what the heart is and what it feels. In spite of the powerful metaphysics of modern emulation, Gabriel learns also. Unlike any earlier 'modern' lover who is vanquished, whose desire is frustrated, Gabriel looks 'unresentfully' ('Dubliners', p. 222) on his wife. Like Richard in 'Mrs Dalloway', he humbly learns how to love his wife by imitating his rival. The power of Michael Furey's love for Gretta, and the intensity of Gretta's feeling of responsibility for Michael Furey, release the virtue of generosity his wife knows is in him. 'Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love' ('Dubliners', p.* 223). The advent of semiology in the modern period, which 19

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

argues that language is a system of arbitrary differences, has one certain and disturbing corollary. If language is a system of arbitrary differences, and culture is to be understood as a system of signs or languages, then culture must be accepted as a system for maintaining ('arbitrating', 'justifying') social differences or, in Edward Said's remarkable analysis, Orientalism. [15] Satire, modernism, likewise speak the language of rivalry, of Difference, and all differences are ultimately produced by sacrificial victimisation and exclusion. [16] In the modern period, sacrificial systems tall apart . Modern literature details the futile oscillation between differentiation recognised as alienation, and remorse for participating in victimisation, sympathy with the victim, as a catastrophic loss of Difference. This is the double bind of modernism, already clearly seen by Flaubert. The real project of modern literature, beyond detailing this catastrophe, is to replace the futile reciprocity of the rivals, who refuse to acknowledge imitation, with a beneficial reciprocity or mediation willing to learn from contemporaries and predecessors as well as teach them, how to imagine into full being a culture that does not exclude anyone. Gabriel's positive reciprocity with his rival prompts his 'journey westward'. The Dead is Joyce's first attempt at imagining a non-sacrificial society. The tone of the last section, balanced between fear of the loss of differences, and the joy of at last merging with Ireland and all its people, urges us unreluctantly to identify with all the living and the dead. Joyce's response to the futility of satire, the futility of modernism, the sad failure of Icarus and Daedalus, is elaborated over the next thirty-two years, but is never clearer nor more touching than 'Ecce Puer' (1932): [17] Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn. Calm in his cradle The living lies. May love and mercy Unclose his eyes! Young life is breathed On the glass; The world that was not Comes to pass. A child is sleeping: An old man gone. O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

20

Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism

NOTES 1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

'The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce', ed. George Harris Healey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 55. See especially Robert Scholes, Some Observations on the Text of 'Dubliners': The Dead, 'Studies in Bibliography' (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, XV, 1962), pp. 191-205; Further Observations on the Text of 'Dubliners', 'Studies in Bibliography' (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, XVII, 1964), pp. 107-22; Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 189-263. See especially Edward Brandabur, 'A Scrupulous Meanness' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). The two stories written before The Dead, Two Gallants and A Little Cloud, which Joyce was especially proud of, were nevertheless tucked behind Grace into a pre-existing order. See my essay, 'Madame Bovary': Romanticism, Modernism, and Bourgeois Style, 'MLN', 94 (1979), pp. 843-9. Toward A Redefinition of Modernism, 'boundary 2', II, 3 (Spring 1974), pp. 539-56; The Sparagmos of Myth is the Naked Lunch of Mode: Modern Literature as the Age of Frye and Borges, 'boundary 2', VIII, 2 (Winter 1980), pp. 297-311. Quoted in Ellmann, 'James Joyce', p. 153. 'The Dublin Diary', pp. 20-1. 'Jonathan Swift. A Selection of his Works', ed. Philip Pinkus (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1965), p. 448. Marvin Magalaner and Richard Kain, 'Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation' (New York: Collier Books, 1956), pp. 84-6. 'A Scrupulous Meanness', p. 39. Pointed out to me by Edward Brandabur some time between 1962-70. 'Of course, do not think that I consider contemporary Irish writing anything but ill-written, morally obtuse formless caricature' ('Letters', II, p. 99; quoted here on p. 6). 'Des Choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde' (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978). 'Orientalism' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). See Rene Girard, 'Violence and the Sacred' (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 'Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses' (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 29.

21

2

TWO MORE GALLANTS William Trevor

You will not, I believe, find either Lenehan or Corley still parading the streets of Dublin but often in the early evening a man called Heffernan may be found raising a glass of Paddy in Toner's public house; and FitzPatrick, on his bicycle, every working day makes the journey across the city, from Ranelagh to the offices of McGibbon, Tait and FitzPatrick, solicitors and commissioners for oaths. It is on his doctor's advice that he employs this mode of transport. It is against the advice of his that Heffernan continues to indulge himself in Toner's. The two men no longer know one another. They do not meet, and in order to avoid a confrontation each has been known to cross the street. Thirty or so years ago, when I first knew Heffernan and FitzPatrick, the relationship was different. The pair were closely attached, Heffernan the mentor, FitzPatrick ready with a laugh. All three of us were students but Heffernan, a Kil¬ kenny man, was different in the sense that he had been a student for as long as anyone could remember. The College porters said they recalled his presence over fifteen years, and though given to exaggeration they may well have been accurate in that: certainly Heffernan was well over thirty, a small, ferrety man, swift to take offence. FitzPatrick was bigger and more amiable. An easy smile perpetually creased the bland ham of his face, causing people to believe, quite incorrectly, that he was stupid. His mousecoloured hair was kept short enough not to require a parting, his eyes reflected so profound a degree of laziness that people occasionally professed surprise to find them open. Heffernan favoured pin-striped suits, FitzPatrick a commodious-, blue blazer. They drank in Kehoe's in Anne Street. 'He is one of those characters', Heffernan said, 'we could do without.' 'Oh, a right old bollocks', agreed FitzPatrick. "'Well, Mr Heffernan,'" he says, '"I see you are still with us."' 'As though you might be dead.' 'If he had his way.' In the snug of Kehoe's they spoke of Heffernan's bete noire the aged Professor Flacks, a man from the North of Ireland. Heffernan, who was supported in his continuing studentship by the legacy left to him for that purpose by an uncle in Kil¬ kenny, adhered to this status quo for reasons that were 22

Two More Gallants

practical: the support from the Kilkenny legacy would cease as soon as he was a student no longer. He kept that tragedy at bay by regularly failing the Littlego examination, a test of proficiency in general studies to which all students were ob¬ liged to submit themselves. '"I see you're still with us,"' he repeated. 'Did you ever hear the beat of that?' 'Sure, Flacks is senile.' 'The mots in the lecture giggle when he says it.' 'Oh, an ignorant bloody crowd.' Heffernan became meditative. Slowly he lit a Sweet Afton. He said: 'A fellow came up to me this morning, a right eejit from Monasterevin. Was I looking for grinds in Littlego Logic? Five shillings an hour.' FitzPatrick laughed. He lifted his glass of stout and drank from it, imposing on his upper lip a moustache of foam which was permitted to remain there. 'A minion of Flacks's.' Heffernan continued. 'A Flacks boy and no mistake, I said to myself.' 'You can tell them a mile off.' "'I know your father," I said to him. "Doesn't he deliver milk?" He went the colour of a sunset. "Avoid conversation with Flacks", I told him. "He drove a wife and two sisters insane.'" 'Did your man say anything?' 'Nothing, only "Cripes".' 'Oh, Flacks is definitely peculiar.' In point of fact, at that time FitzPatrick had never met Professor Flacks. It was his laziness that caused him to con¬ verse in a manner which suggested he had, and it was his laziness also which prevented him from noticing the intensity of Heffernan's grievance. Heffernan hated Professor Flacks with a fervour, but in his vague and unquestioning way Fitz¬ Patrick assumed that the old professor was no more than a passing thorn in his friend's flesh, a nuisance that could be exorcised by means of complaint and abuse. Heffernan's pride did not at that time appear to play a part; and FitzPatrick, who knew his friend as well as anyone did, would not have designated him as a possessor of that quality to an unusual degree. The opposite was rather implied by the nature of his upkeep and his efforts not to succeed in the Littlego exam¬ ination. But pride, since its presence might indeed be ques¬ tioned by these facts, came to its own support; and Heffernan in the end undoubtedly displayed it, by supplying a further set of facts. When the story is told in Dublin today it is never forgotten that it has its roots in Professor Flacks's causing girls to giggle because he repeatedly made a joke at Heffer¬ nan's expense. Employed by the university to instruct in certain aspects of literature. Professor Flacks concentrated his attention on the writings of James Joyce. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Shelley, 23

Two More Gallants

Coleridge, Wilde, Swift, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and many another familiar name were all bundled away in favour of a Joycean scholarship that thirty or so years ago was second to none in Irish university life. Professor Flacks could tell you whom Joyce had described as a terrified YMCA man, and the date of the day on which he had written that his soul was full of decayed ambitions. He spoke knowledgeably of the stale smell of incense, like foul flowerwater; and of flushed eaves and stubble geese. 'Inane bloody show-off,' Heffernan said nastily in Kehoe's. 'You'll see him out, Heff.' 'A bogs like that would last for ever.' Twelve months later, after he and Heffernan had parted company, FitzPatrick repeated all that to me. I didn't know either of them well, but was curious because a notable friend¬ ship had so abruptly come to an end. FitzPatrick, on his own, was inclined to talk to anyone. We sat in College Park, watching the cricket while he en¬ deavoured to remember the order of subsequent events. It was Heffernan who'd had the idea, as naturally it would be, since FitzPatrick still knew Professor Flacks only by repute and had not suffered the sarcasm which Heffernan found so offensive. But FitzPatrick played a vital part in the events which fol¬ lowed because the elderly woman who played the main part of all was a general maid in FitzPatrick's digs. 'Has that one her slates on?' Heffernan enquired one night as they passed her by in the hall. 'Ah, she's only a bit quiet.' 'She has a docile expression all right.' 'She wouldn't damage a fly.' Soon after that Heffernan took to calling in at FitzPatrick's digs in Donnybrook more often than he had in the past. Some¬ times he was there when FitzPatrick arrived back in the even¬ ing, sitting in the kitchen while the elderly maid pricked sausages or cut up bread for the meal that would shortly be served. Mrs Redmond, the landlady, liked to lie down for a while at that time of day so Heffernan and the maid had the kitchen to themselves. But finding him present on several occasions when she came downstairs, Mrs Redmond in passing mentioned the fact to her lodger. FitzPatrick, who didn't him¬ self understand what Heffernan's interest in the general maid was, replied that his friend like to await his return in the kitchen because it was warm. Being an easy-going woman, Mrs Redmond was appeased. 'There's no doubt in my mind at all,' Heffernan stated in Kehoe's, after a few weeks of this behaviour. 'If old Flacks could hear it he'd have a tortoise's pup.' FitzPatrick wagged his head, knowing that an explanation was in the air. Heffernan said: 'She's an interesting old lassie.' He then told FitzPatrick a story which FitzPatrick had 24

Two More Gallants

never heard before. It concerned a man called Corley who had persuaded a maid in a house in Baggot Street to do a small service for him. It concerned, as well, Corley's friend, Lenehan, who was something of a wit. At first FitzPatrick was confused by the story, imagining it to be a couple of fellowstudents whom he couldn't place. 'The pen of Jimmy Joyce,' Heffernan explained. 'That yarn is Flacks's favourite of the lot.' 'Well, I'd say there wasn't much to it. Sure, a skivvy never would.' 'She was gone on Corley.' 'But would she steal for him?' 'You're no romantic, Fitz.' FitzPatrick laughed, agreeable to accepting this opinion. Then, to his astonishment, Heffernan said: 'It's the same skivvy as Mrs Redmond has above in your digs.' FitzPatrick shook his head. He told Heffernan to go on with himself, but Heffernan insisted. 'She told me the full story herself one night I was waiting for you - maybe the first night I ever addressed a word to her. "Come into the kitchen outa the cold, Mr Heffernan," she says. D'you remember the occasion it was? Late after tea, and you didn't turn up at all. She fried me an egg.' ’But holy Christ, man -' 'It was the same night you did well with the nurse from Dundrum.' FitzPatrick guffawed. 'A great girl,' he said. He repeated a few details, but Heffernan didn't seem interested. 'I was told the whole works in the kitchen, like Jimmy Joyce had it out of her when she was still in her teens. A little gold sovereign was what she fecked for your man.' 'But the poor old creature is as honest as the day's long.' 'Oh, she took it all right and she still thinks Corley was top of the bill.' 'But Corley never existed -' 'Of course he did. Wasn't he for ever entertaining that fine little tart with the witticisms of Master Lenehan?' The next thing that happened, according to FitzPatrick, was that a bizarre meeting took place. Heffernan approached Professor Flacks with the information that the model for the ip-used girl in Joyce's story Two Gallants had come to light in a house in Donnybrook. The Professor displayed considerable excitement, and on a night when Mrs Redmond was safely at the pictures he was met by Heffernan at the bus stop and led to the kitchen. , He was a frail man in a tweed suit, not at all as FitzPatrick had imagined him. Mrs Redmond's servant, a woman of about the same age, was slightly deaf and moved slowly due to rheum atism. Heffernan had brought half a pound of figroll biscuits which he arranged on a plate. The old woman poured tea. 25

Two More Gallants

Professor Flacks plied her with questions. He asked them gently, with courtesy and diplomacy, without any hint of the tetchiness described so often by Heffernan. It was a polite occasion in the kitchen, Heffernan handing round the figrolls, the maid appearing to delight in recalling a romance in her past. 'And later you told Mr Joyce about this?' prompted Profes¬ sor Flacks. 'He used come to the house when I worked in North Fred¬ erick Street, sir. A dentist by the name of O'Riordan.' 'Mr Joyce came to get his teeth done?' 'He did, sir.' 'And you'd talk to him in the waiting-room, is that it?' 'I'd be lonesome, sir. I'd open the halldoor when the bell rang and then there'd be a wait for maybe an hour before it'd ring again, sir. I recollect Mr Joyce well, sir.' 'He was interested in your - ah - association with the fellow you mentioned, was he?' 'It was only just after happening, sir. I was turned out of the place in Baggot Street on account of the bit of trouble. I was upset at the time I knew Mr Joyce, sir.' 'That's most understandable.' 'I'd often tell a patient what had happened to me.' 'But you've no hard feelings today? You were badly used by the fellow yet - ' 'Ah, it's long ago now, sir.' Heffernan and FitzPatrick saw the Professor on to a bus, and according to FitzPatrick he was quivering with pleasure. He clambered into a seat, delightedly talking to himself, not noticing when they waved from the pavement. They entered a convenient public house and ordered pints of stout. 'Did you put her up to it?' FitzPatrick enquired. 'The thing about that one, she'd do anything for a scrap of the ready. Didn't you ever notice that about her? She's a right old miser.' It was that that Heffernan had recognised when first he'd paid a visit to Mrs Redmond's kitchen: the old maid was pos¬ sessed of a meanness that had become obsessional with her. She spent no money whatsoever, and was clearly keen to add to what she had gradually accumulated. He had paid her a pound to repeat the story he had instructed her in. 'Didn't she say it well? Oh, top of the bill I'd say she was.' 'You'd be sorry for old Flacks.' 'Oh, the devil take bloody Mister Flacks.' Some months went by. Heffernan no longer visited the kit¬ chen in Donnybrook, and he spoke hardly at all of Professor Flacks. In his lazy way FitzPatrick assumed that the falsehoods which had been perpetrated were the be-all and end-all of the affair, that Heffernan had somehow been satisfied. But then, one summer's afternoon while the two idled in Stephen's Green 26

Two More Gallants

in the hope of picking up girls, Heffernan said: 'There's a thing on we might go to next Friday.' 'What's that?' 'Mister Flacks performing. The Society of the Friends of James Joyce.' It was a public lecture, one of several that were to be de¬ livered during a week devoted by the Society to the life and work of the author who was its raison d'etre. The Society's members came from far afield: from the United States, Ger¬ many, Finland, Italy, Australia, France, England and Turkey. Learned academics mingled with less learned enthusiasts. Mr James Duffy's Chapelizod was visited, and Mr Power's Dublin Castle. Cap el Street and Ely Place were investigated, visits were made to the renowned Martello Tower, to Howth and to Pirn's. Betty Bellezza was mentioned, and Val from Skibbereen. The talk was all Joyce talk. For a lively week Joyce reigned in Dublin. . . On the appointed evening FitzPatrick accompanied his friend to Professor Flacks's lecture, his premonitions suggesting that the occasion was certain to be tedious. He had no idea what Heffernan was up to, and wasn't prepared to devote energy to speculating. With a bit of luck, he hoped, he'd be able to h8VG 3. slGGp •

Before the main event a woman from the University of Wash¬ ington spoke briefly about Joyce's use of misprints; a bearded German read a version of 'The Holy Office' that had only re¬ cently been discovered. Then the tweeded figure of Professor Flacks rose. He sipped at a tumbler of water, and spoke for almost an hour about the model for the servant girl in the story, Two Gallants. His discovery of that same elderly ser¬ vant, now employed in a house in Donnybrook, engendered in his audience a whisper of excitement that remained alive while he spoke, and exploded into applause when he finished. A light flush enlivened the paleness of his face as he sat down. It was, as Heffernan remarked to his dozy companion, the old man's finest hour. It was then that FitzPatrick first became uneasy. The pack¬ ed lecture-hall had accepted as fact all that had been stated, yet none of it was true. Notes had been taken, questions were now being asked. A voice close to where the two students sat exclaimed that this remarkable discovery was worth coming two thousand miles to hear about. Mental pictures of James Joyce in a dentist's waiting-room flashed about the hall. North Fred erick Street would be visited tomorrow, if not tonight. 'I'd only like to ask,' Heffernan shouted above the hubbub, 'if I may, a simple little question.' He was on his feet. He had caught the attention of Professor Flacks, who was smiling be¬ nignly at him. 'I’d only like to enquire’, Heffernan continued, 'if that whole thing couldn't be a lot of boloney.' 'Boloney?' a foreign voice repeated. 'Boloney?' said Professor Flacks. 27

Two More Gallants

The buzz of interest hadn't died down. Nobody was much interested in the questions that were being asked, except the people who were asking them. A woman near to FitzPatrick said it was extraordinarily moving that the ill-used servant girl, who had been so tellingly presented as an off-stage char¬ acter by Joyce, should bear no grudge all these years later. 'What I mean, Professor Flacks,' said Heffernan, 'is I don't think James Joyce ever attended a dentist in North Frederick Street. What I'm suggesting to you, sir, is that the source of your information was only looking for a bit of limelight.' FitzPatrick later described to me the expression that entered Professor Flacks's eyes. 'A lost kind of look,' he said, 'as though someone had poked the living daylights out of him.' The old man stared at Heffernan, frowning, not comprehending at first. His relationship with this student had been quite dif¬ ferent since the night of the visit to Mrs Redmond's kitchen: it had been distinguished by a new friendliness, and what had seemed like mutual respect. 'Professor Flacks and myself,' continued Heffernan, 'heard the old lady together. Only I formed the impression that she was making the entire matter up. I thought, sir, you'd formed that opinion also.' 'Oh but surely now, Mr Heffernan, the woman wouldn't do that.' 'There was never a dentist by the name of O'Riordan that practised in North Frederick Street, sir. That's a fact that can easy be checked.' Heffernan sat down. An uneasy silence gripped the lecturehall. Eyes turned upon Professor Flacks. Weakly, with a hoarseness in his voice, he said: 'But why, Mr Heffernan, would she have made all that up? A woman of that class would hardly have read the story, she'd hardly have known -' 'It's an unfortunate thing, sir,' interrupted Heffernan, standing up again, 'but that old one would do anything for a single pound note. She's of a miserly nature. I think what may have happened,' he went on, his tone changing as he addres¬ sed the assembly, 'is that a student the Professor failed in an examination took a chance to get his own back. Our friend Jas Joyce,' he added, 'would definitely have relished that.' In misery Professor Flacks lifted the tumbler of water to his lips, his eyes cast down. You could sense him thinking, Fitz¬ Patrick reported, that he was a fool and he had been shown to be a fool. You could sense him thinking that he suddenly appeared to be unreliable, asinine and ridiculous. In front of the people who mattered to him most of all he had been ex¬ posed as a fraud he did not feel himself to be. Never again could he hold his head up among the Friends of James Joyce. Within twenty-four hours his students would know what had occurred. An embarrassed shuffling broke out in the lecture-hall. 28

Two More Gallants

People murmured and began to make their way into the aisles. FitzPatrick recalled the occasion in Mrs Redmond's kitchen, the two elderly puppets on the end of Ileffernan's string, the figrolls and the tea. He recalled the maid's voice retailing the story that he, because he knew Heffernan so well, had doubted with each word that was uttered. He felt guilty that he hadn't sought the old man out and told him it wasn't true. He glanced through the throng in the lecture-hall at the lone figure in porridgy tweeds, and unhappily reflected that suici e had been known to follow such wretched disgrace. Outside the lecture-hall he told Heffernan to go to hell when a drink in Anne Street was suggested, a remark for which Heffernan never forgave him. . 'I mean,' FitzPatrick said as we sat in College Park a long time later, 'how could anyone be as petty? When all the poor old fellow ever said to him was I see you're still with us. I made some kind of reply. Professor Flacks had died a natural death a year after the delivery of his lecture on Two Gallants. Earlier in his life he had not, as Heffernan sti claimed, driven a wife and two sisters mad: he'd been an on y child, the obituary said in the 'Irish Times', and a bachelor a his life. It was an awkward kind of obituary, for the galle he'd made had become quite famous and was still fresh in Dub We went on talking about him, FitzPatrick and I, as we watched the cricket in College Park. We spoke of ^is playful sarcasm and how so vehemently it had affected Heffernan s oride. We marvelled over the love that had caused a girl in a story to steal, and over the miserliness that had persuaded an old woman to be party to a trick. FitzPatrick touched upon his own inordinate laziness, finding a place for that also in our cobweb of human frailty.

29

3

‘PLANETARY MUSIC’: JAMES JOYCE AND THE ROMANTIC EXAMPLE Timothy Webb

i In 'Stephen Hero' James Joyce passed judgment on the romantic temper. In a celebrated formulation he described it as insecure, unsatisfied and impatient and its figures as 'blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies'. To such insubstantialities he preferred the products of the classical temper which, by contrast, is 'ever mindful of limitations' and which focuses its attention on 'present things' rather than on the intangible (p.83). This firm preference for the classical over the romantic was never revoked. Many years later Joyce took pains to explain to Arthur Power that romantic flair should not be mistaken for true inspiration. Romanticism was closely associated with a kind of false and evasive idealism which is the ruin of man.fl] Yet, in spite of such condemnations, Joyce was much possessed by some of the major Romantic poets and they played a not inconsiderable part in his imaginative life. If this seems paradoxical or even contradictory, it can be comfortably explained by making a simple distinction between romanticism as Joyce defined it and the Romantics. While Joyce sometimes found fault with the Romantics, it appears that he rarely discovered in their work that kind of softening, untruthful idealism against which he was in revolt. Instead, as his brother tells us, he celebrated the heroism of Blake, whose antagonists were not so different from his own: 'It stirred him deeply that in an age of self-satisfied materialism, Blake dared to assert the all-importance of the imagination and to stake his long life on its affirmation.'[2] Joyce's library included a number of volumes of Romantic poetry. More significantly, perhaps, he possessed three editions of Blake's poems (including those by Yeats and W.M. Rossetti) and two editions of Shelley's poetical works. [3] As we shall see, these hints are richly confirmed by a variety of sources. Byron, too, was important and so perhaps was Wordsworth, though the evidence is far from conclusive. Coleridge and Keats are no more than fleeting presences. Moore, of course, is a special case because Joyce knew him primarily as a writer of songs: in the course of 'Finnegans Wake' he contrives to name every one of the 'Melodies' and its accompanying tune. When Joyce was confined to a clinic in 1924 he learnt by heart 500 lines of Scott's 'Lady of the Lake' 30

Planetary music

('Letters', I, p. 216). Though this might show simply that he thought Scott would be easy to memorise, it seems likely that the choice indicates a certain preference of taste. Minor Romantic poets are quoted or referred to fairly frequently in Joyce's works. The catalogue includes Mrs Hemans, Thomas Campbell as author of 'The Exile of Erin' and 'The Burial of Sir John Moore' and Robert Southey, who is amusingly misquoted by Molly Bloom. These are essentially anthology pieces and indicate no special knowledge. When we turn to the significant influences, we find that Wordsworth has interesting possibilities, though the record is tantalisingly inexplicit. In 1902 Joyce had magisterially proclaimed that 'much of Wordsworth, and almost all ol Baudelaire, is merely literature in verse' ('Critical Writings , p. 75). Yet only three years later Joyce told Stanislaus that in a short history of literature which he had just written he had given 'the highest palms to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley' ('Letters', II, p. 90). In a later postcard he elaborated, but rather cryptically: 'I think Wordsworth of all English men of letters best deserves your word genius . Read his poem to his lost son in "Excursion" I think which begins "Where art thou my beloved son'" ('Letters', II, p. 91). It is a little disturbing that the poem he singles out for praise is, in fact, 'The Affliction of Margaret' and that it is-Margaret not Wordsworth who is lamenting the death of a son. Could this be another example of the Joycean predilection for the biographical interpretation of literature? Or of the Joycean tendency to equate poetry with the expression of emotion which was directly personal? P The following year he reviewed a study of Crabbe and remarked: 'Of course, much of Crabbe s work is duH a undistinguished, and he never had such moments as those which Wordsworth can always plead in answer to his critics f'Critical Writings', pp. 128-9). Joyce's praise of the narrator of the obscure tragedies of the provinces' and the appropriate flatness of Crabbe's style reflects, perhaps, the taste of the author of 'Dubliners'. Yet Joyce has nothing to say about the narrative devices of 'Lyrical Ballads' though the deliberate SSmes of a poem such as 'The Thorn' might have been expected to engage his atttention. None the less, as M H Abrams has pointed out, [4] there may well be unsuspected connections between the Wordsworthian celebration of the commonplace and the Joycean use of the sudden spiritual manifestation' ('Stephen Hero', p. 216), the ep!phany in which 'The soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant' ('Stephen Hero', p. 218). Joyce's critical elevation of Wordsworth coincides with the writing of Stephen Hero and the evolution of his theory of the epiphany; yet, one must also notice that there is in Joyce a sustained concern for supposedly sordid and the vulgar, for the 'significance of trivial things', which not only goes beyond Aquinas but 31

Planetary music

beyond the Wordsworthian break with decorum and his revolutionary reversal of hierarchies. Besides, Joyce’s epiphanies often arise from his ear for cliche, for the revealing inanity of spoken language; both in 'Stephen Hero' and in 'A Portrait' words and gestures are often allowed to betray the spiritual poverty of society. Joyce is often concerned to condemn rather than to redeem. Abrams also suggests that there may be connections between Stephen's culminating 'spots of time' in 'A Portrait' and the Wordsworthian moment. [5] This seems plausible in so far as Stephen's view of the world is moulded to a large extent by his experience of literature, and his moments of ecstasy can be seen as belonging to a visionary tradition of which Wordsworth forms part; but the tradition also includes Blake and Shelley and, closer to Joyce's own time, Walter Pater.

II Much of this is speculation and Wordsworth must remain a shadowy presence in the background. Joyce's significant and demonstrable relation to the Romantic poets is centred on the lives and works of three English poets (Shelley, Byron and Blake), and an Irish poet (James Clarence Mangan) whose melancholy progress exhibited a natural history of Romanticism in an Irish environment. Unfortunately, Mangan cannot be dealt with here but it is worth noticing that, although some of his problems were specifically Irish and others specifically personal, Joyce seems to regard him as an archetypal Romantic poet and suggestively links him in various particulars with Keats, Blake and Shelley. Taken together, the three English poets seem to have provided Joyce not only with examples of what poetic genius could achieve but of the life of the artist and his relations with society. Of the three, Shelley seems to have exercised the least durable influence, if one is to judge from direct references and allusions. From the beginning Joyce seems to have had reservations, of a fairly conventional kind, about Shelley's poetic virtues. One of his earliest essays refers in a rather superior fashion to the dangers of a too prolific imagination; Such a thing ... often affects poets of a high fanciful temper, as Shelley, rendering their poetry vague and misty' ('Critical Writings', p. 21). Shelley's achievement is the subject of a student discussion in 'Stephen Hero' where Stephen shows his knowledge of 'Prometheus Unbound' by quoting one of the lyrical passages but also points out that 'sometimes Shelley does not address the eye' as in the extraordinary 'many a lake-surrounded flute' (pp. 133-5). The Trieste Notebook includes a cryptic statement that Shelley 'spoke his ecstatic verses with an English accent'. [6] In view of what Joyce has 32

Planetary music

to say about the English temperament elsewhere, this seems like a contradiction in terms, a surprising genetic mutation. Whatever the implications of the English accent, Joyce was not completely comfortable with the ecstatic verses of ’Prometheus Unbound'. He once told Frank Budgen that he did not share his admiration for the lyrical dramas: ’No do)Jbt ,1S beauty in "Prometheus Unbound" and "Hellas , but I feel that it's all on the wrong track.' On another occasion he told Budgen that 'Prometheus' was the 'Schwarmerei of a young Jew'. [7] . .. ... .. Perhaps Joyce could never have been in sympathy with the concept of a drama which was lyrical. Yet Budgen also records a revealing detail which suggests that, if Joyce was unhappy with the lack of clear outline in the lyrical dramas, he admired the shorter poems: 'Shelley's "When the lamp is shattered is a poem I often heard him speak, and occasionally he would reinforce "O Love, who bewailest" with the gesture of an upheld, straight stretched hand.'[8] Another fnen 1 remembered that, in the earlier days, 'The indian Serenade was one of his favourite songs. [9] It would seem that Joyce was either unaware of or unimpressed by the political and intellectual content of the poetry and did not interpret its symbolic language with the educated facility of a Yeats. Prometheus is mentioned in the Linati schema for the Cyclops episode of 'Ulysses' but, although Richard Ellmann reea^s this as a clue that there is a connection between the passive resistance of Shelley's hero and Bloom s reaction to the ZS in Barney Kiernan's pub, there is no further evidence to support the case. [10] In accordance with contemporary taste, the Shelley whom Joyce recognised and admired was essentially the inspired singer of yncs The two essays on Mangan pay obnque tributes to this e sion of Shelley. The first discovers that at its best Mangan s poetry 'is tremulous with all the changing harmonies of Shel fey’s verse’ though it is still inferior to Whitman, whom the young Joyce greatly admired ('Critical Writings', p. 79). The second essay records how a cultured audience recognised in Mangan 'an exalted lyrical music and a burning idealism that revealed themselves in rhythms of extraordinary andunpre¬ meditated beauty, to be found, perhaps, nowhere else in the range of English literature except in the inspired songs Shelley' (’Critical Writings', p. 177). Here again through the mediation of his response to Mangan, Joyce reveals that what hf prizes most in Shelley is neither the symbolic universe which Yeats charted with such intuitive sympathy nor the phil osophical subtlety and intellectual animation celebrated by more recent interpreters. The mam emphasis in JoYce ,s response falls unequivocally on the music of the verse, the rhythms extraordinary beauty' which Shelley shares with Mangan. The word 'unpremeditated' is precisely relevant to this image of the Tyrical poPet stace Shelley uses it to describe how the skylark 33

\

Planetary music

pours its full heart ’In profuse strains of unpremeditated art'. Shelley's lyrical powers receive their most resonant acknowledgment in a scene in ’A Portrait’. Stephen’s father has taken him to Cork to auction his remaining property; now he is reminiscing in yet another bar with the friends of his youth: Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. ... His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon. Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth. Wandering companionless ... ? He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectualness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving, (pp. 98-9) Just at the point when Stephen's father is drinking to the memory of the past and exhibiting a nostalgic and compensatory conviviality, Stephen finds himself removed from the warm intimacies of family, of friendship and of a history, trivial and frivolous but shared. The claustrophobia of home and of the provincial city is exchanged for the silence of the infinite spaces. This exchange embodies one of the major structural patterns of 'A Portrait', a novel which explores with great intensity both the restrictive influences of family, church and country and the possibilities of freedom, which include the heroic artifice of Daedalian flight or the Icarian plunge through space. Shelley is particularly suitable for a context such as this because in his own life he represents with almost allegorical appropriateness the rejection of the father; like Stephen Dedalus, he, too, reversed the accepted patterns of chronology so that he 'seemed older' than a father who was less vulnerable to the thorns of life. Yet such a pattern is far from simple: Shelley's lyric imagines the moon 'Among the stars that have a different birth' and implies not a triumphant assertion of independence but a wistful sense of alienation. For Stephen the auctioning of the family property is a rude symbol of dispossession. 'He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother' (p.101): Stephen's proud recognition of his superiority is qualified by the

34

Planetary music

intimations of disinheritance which it shares with Shelley's fragmentary poem. The poem, of course, is dramatic rather than autobiographical yet Joyce gives an indication that Stephen may identify Shelley with his pale and wandering moon. In the corrected text the word 'ineffectual' is balanced by 'ineffectualness'; the allusion is to Matthew Arnold's description of Shelley as a 'beautiful and ineffectual angel' (which is later used in 'Ulysses' (p. 184) to describe the character of Hamlet). The epiphany is a recurring one. After his fall from grace, Stephen imagines himself drifting away from his classroom as part of the 'vast cycle of starry life' and remembers the words of Shelley's poem: 'The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space' (p. 106). And the weariness of Shelley's moon is repeated more than once in a world where 'All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it' (p.168). It is Shelley who provides Joyce with the beautiful phrase to describe that mysterious instant of inspiration when the mind is like a fading coal. Joyce used this phrase on at least four occasions: twice when writing of Mangan ('Critical Writings', pp. 78, 182), once in Stephen's aesthetic discourse in 'A Portrait' (p.217) and once in 'Ulysses' (p. 194). There can be little doubt that the 'Defence of Poetry' is one of the shaping influences on Joyce's early view of art and the artist. Take, for example, this passage from 'Stephen Hero', which is closely paralleled in the first essay on Mangan ('Critical Writings', p. 82): every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.... It is time for [the critics] to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life.... Thus the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation, (p.85) The emphasis here on the value of poetry in a materialistic and scientific age has much in common with Shelley's essay, which also provides the reference to planetary music. Perhaps one should make some allowances for the fact that this is the aesthetic of a 'heaven-ascending essayist', a youthful skylark, rather than of Joyce himself, whose own claims might have been less extravagant and who might have entered a less comprehensive plea for the poet as unacknowledged legislator. 35

Planetary music

Stephen’s 'beauty, the splendour of truth’ comes from Plato by way of Flaubert and is used by Joyce in his own person in the first Mangan essay ('Critical Writings', p. 83). Yet whatever the place of the beautiful and whatever Aquinian justifications it was later to receive, Joyce himself had insisted from the beginning on the primacy of truth and had preferred a single Rembrandt to a gallery full of Van Dycks ('Critical Writings', p. 44). In this respect, as S.L.Goldberg has noticed, the argument of 'Stephen Hero' is closer to the aesthetic of the young Joyce than that of his more poetic counterpart in 'A Portrait': for all the traces of Aquinas in it, Stephen's paper owes far more to Shelley's Defence of Poetry, and it represents a Stephen, and a Joyce, who are Romantics no doubt, but Romantics really trying to meet their central problem - the relation of art and life - and reaching for a solution that will transcend the limitations of Romanticism without rejecting its genuine insights. [ 11] Even if the balance achieved by Stephen does not accord absolutely with Joyce's own position, there is much in the 'Defence of Poetry' with which Joyce would certainly have agreed. Much of his greatest work could be said to produce the effects of poetry so finely enunciated by Shelley: 'It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.'[12] And, while the younger Joyce might have found fault with Shelley's Romantic impatience, the work of the older Joyce bears some interesting affinities to Shelley's formulations. For example, Joyce could never have subscribed unreservedly to Shelley's claim that 'A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one: as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not.'[13] Time and place are the sure foundations of 'Ulysses'. And yet the later chapters, notably Circe and Ithaca, make one question the nature of that reality and the limitations of representational, realistic art. And 'Finnegans Wake', although it is grounded in some respects in the topography of Dublin and environs, could be said to be a book which shows that time and place and number are not. Shelley stood for some indefinable poetic quality which consorted uncomfortably with the concerns of the mundane. An intriguing sentence from the Pola Notebook, which is connected with the composition of 'Stephen Hero', may throw some light on this matter. The sentence reads: 'The editor of the Evening Telegraph will write the Sensitive Plant.'[14] While this might reflect on the ethereal vulnerabilities of Shelley and his unsuitability for everyday life, it seems more likely that it reflects on the sensibilities of Myles Crawford, who features so 36

Planetary music

incoherently in 'Ulysses' and whose paper is selected by Mr Deasy as a suitable medium for his views on foot and mouth. Joyce's sentence seems to insist on the gap between the journalist and the quivering and exotic poet. This was a gap which Shelley with his visionary perception and Yeats with his scorn for the unaristocratic values of the newspaper could never close. Crawford himself or his model may have been beyond redemption yet in later life the world of newspapers such as the 'Evening Telegraph' was to provide for Joyce a rich and firmly realistic basis for his own poetic vision. [15] It would seem that Joyce was constantly adjusting the balance between truth and beauty, between imagination and reality, which he had first seriously investigated with the help of the 'Defence of Poetry'. In finding an appropriate balance both as man and as writer, Joyce turned not only to the 'Defence of Poetry' but to the example of Shelley's life. A revealing example can be found in one of the notes to 'Exiles', where we can see Joyce struggling with problems which are both personal and artistic. The note is dated 13 November 1913 and is headed by the initials 'N.(B)' - that is, Nora Barnacle: Moon: Shelley's grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond she weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin's grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley's is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him. Bodkin died. Kearns died. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me). I live in soul and body. She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must, try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence. Her tears are of worship, Magdalen seeing the arisen Lord in the garden where he had been laid in the tomb. Rome is the strange world and strange life to which Richard brings her. Rahoon her people. (p.167) This remarkable note appears to reflect a struggle for survival against Nora the 'assassin' in which Joyce recognises two possible fates for himself. He can be like Bodkin, the young man whose doomed and passionate love for Nora provided one of the major sources of inspiration for The Dead, where he appears under the less 'homely' guise of Michael Furey, a name 37

Planetary music

which suggests Romantic excesses. Or he can be like Shelley whose remains are buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome but who, in imagery which bears an appropriately Shelleyan colouring, rises from the grave. Here Joyce identifies himself not with the defeated Bodkin but with the resurrected Shelley: 'I live in soul and body' (my emphasis). Joyce then switches from himself to Richard Rowan, his surrogate in this intensely autobiographical play. And Richard in his Shelleyan manifestation triumphs over the female so that her tears are of worship not of commiseration. If Bodkin represents Ireland and the past, Shelley represents the exotic, the wild, the 'strange world and the strange life'. In spite (or perhaps because) of his 'English accent', Shelley incarnates the lure of the unfamiliar, the attraction of exile. Joyce is using him to work out a series of problems which were central both to the play and to his own existence.

Ill If Shelley played a part in forming Joyce's conceptions both of the poet and of the nature of artistic creation, Byron's example also exerted a considerable influence. In Joyce's fictional Dublin Byron seems to represent a popular version of what a poet should be. Bloom made Molly a 'present of lord Byron's poems and the three pairs of gloves' ('Ulysses', p. 664) and, according to her, 'he was very handsome at that time trying to look like lord Byron I said I liked though he was too beautiful for a man' ('Ulysses', p. 664). She recalls that once she 'thought he was a poet like Byron and not an ounce of it in his composition' (p.696). For Chandler in A Little Cloud Byron provides a poetic model but Chandler's desire to make a Byronic break with home is as unrealistic as his poetic ambitions. The Byronic example is more potent for the young Stephen. There is a telling scene in 'A Portrait' when Stephen composes some verses: On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to write: To E- C-. He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron ... by dint of brooding on the incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the tram-men nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts

38

Planetary music

of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. After this the letters L.D.S. were written at the foot of the page and having hidden the book, he went into his mother's bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressing-table, (pp. 72-3) Joyce's description of the manner in which this immature poem shakes itself free of mundane realities such as horses and tram-men is in keeping with his view of lyrical poetry and in direct opposition to the way in which he created the works of his own maturity by focusing with great intensity on precisely such unpoetic details. The unblinkingly self-critical image of Stephen gazing into the mirror presents a narcissistic urge which is often associated both with Byron and with Romantic literature. The author of 'A Portrait' here allows Stephen to betray himself with a refrigerated artistic detachment which indicates how far he has risen above such callow necessities; yet the portrait of Shem in 'Finnegans Wake' presents a view of the artist which no longer claims the inviolability of indifference. Shem, we are told, 'used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself' (p.182); furthermore, in Byronic fashion his view of the world is a projection of himself ('the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, .till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history' (pp. 185-6)). In any case, Byron's example was much more than a pretext for self-contemplation or even self-expression. In 'Stephen Hero' middle-class confusions about Byron and the nature of poetic inspiration provide an index of value to Stephen: 'The burgher notion of the poet Byron in undress pouring out verses just as a city fountain pours out water seemed to him characteristic of most popular judgements on esthetic matters' (p.37). Such grossness forces him to conclude that 'Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy'. In 'A Portrait' we can follow the consequences of this very vividly, not least in a scene where Byron and isolation are directly connected with each other. Stephen's schoolmates engage him in a discussion as to who is the greatest writer; he finds himself saying that 'Tennyson is only a rhymester' while the greatest poet is Byron 'of course'. The other boys mock him by protesting that Byron is 'only a poet for uneducated people' and, with conclusive triumph, that he was 'a heretic and immoral too'. This reminds them that Stephen's class essay had been criticised for heresy. Soon Stephen finds he has been pushed against a barbed wire fence and threatened to admit that 'Byron was no good'; he continues to resist and eventually he escapes (pp.82-4). For all the youthfulness of the 39

►

Planetary music

protagonists, this is a crucial moment in Stephen's career. It is no accident that Byron is the poet with whom Stephen should be associated at this moment of danger: love, poetry, heresy, and consequent separation from the values of the crowd are richly intermingled. In later life, Byron provided further texts for the misunderstood artist. Responding to a review of 'Ecce Puer' (perhaps his best and most heart-felt poem) Joyce writes of 'One English reviewer (probably a Scotch bard after office hours)' ('Letters', I, p. 336). In another letter (I, p. 231) he remarks of an article by Louis Gillet: 'It will act like the Quarterly, savage and tartarly.' The reference is to the short verse which reflects on the death of Keats who (as Byron unsympathetically expressed it in 'Don Juan') had rather weakly allowed himself to be 'snuffed out by an article'. There are numerous references in 'Finnegans Wake' both to Byron and to his works, although these are often hard to disentangle since Byron can be confused with Brian Boru and Childe Harold with a variety of kings. Joyce alludes to Byron's incestuous relations with Augusta Leigh ('like boy run to sibster' (p.465), refers to 'his pillgrimace of Childe Horrid' (p.423), mentions the 'oils of greas' (p.464) and remembers the destruction of Sennacherib when 'th' osirian cumb dumb like the whalf on the fiord' (p.350). If these references do not seem to take us beyond the school anthologies, there is more to come, some of it far from obvious. Most strikingly perhaps there is an extensive parody of 'The Waltz' and what Robert Gleckner has described as 'its halting, hobby-horsical rhythms'. [16] Jaun (?Juan) is addressing the young ladies of St Bride's Academy: Mades of ashens when you flirt spoil the lad but spare his shirt! Lay your lilylike long his shoulder but buck back if he buts bolder and just hep your homely hop and heed no horning but if you've got some brainy notion to raise cancan and rouse commotion I'll be apt to flail that tail for you till it's horning (pp. 436-7). The ambivalence of this posture is indicated in 'the volses of lewd Buylan, for innocence' (p.435), which not only juxtaposes innocence and lewdness but, one must assume, Lord Byron as the speaker supposedly scandalised by a lascivious foreign dance and that most shining suitor, Blazes Boylan. 'The Waltz' provides another detail in the same context which is beautifully apposite to one of the central motifs of 'Finnegans Wake'. Byron's poem is attributed to a country gentleman called Horace Hornem (hence, no doubt, 'horning'): in his preface he refers to his shock and surprise at discovering his wife waltzing with a huge 'hussar-looking gentleman'. He describes how 'with Mrs. Hornem's hand on his shoulder ... they walked about a minute, and then at it again, 40

Planetary music

like two cock-shafers spitted on the same bodkin'. It is therefore probably no accident that Jaun warns against 'that alltoocommon fagbutt habit of frequenting and chumming together with the braces of couples in Mr Tunnelly's hallways (smash it) wriggling with lowcusses and cockchafers and vamps and rodants, with the end to commit acts of interstipital indecency' (pp. 435—6). The cockchafer is not mentioned elsewhere in the book but of course it fits perfectly into the complicated pattern of insects which demonstrates Joyce's 'good smetterling of entymology' (p.417). Another poem of which Joyce makes good use is 'Maid of Athens', which begins 'Maid of Athens, ere we part' and ends 'Zoe mou, sas agapo' ('My life, I love you'). Once at least the Maid of Athens seems to be associated with Anna Livia, when the washerwomen says: 'Then a toss nare scared that lass, so aimai moe, that's agapo' (p.202). Joyce's use of this poem generally seems to involve motifs of love and sexuality but this love is threatened by imminent departure and separation. So 'meed of anthems here we pant' (p.41) includes the sexual theme hinted at in a neighbouring invocation of Shelley's Italian adventures in the word 'epipsychidically' (p.41); but the original and underlying context is unmistakeably one of valediction. We have noticed a similar complex in A Portrait where Stephen's poetic love for E.C. is closely associated with his devotion to Byron and his consequent humiliation and separation from his schoolfriends. Separation, in fact, connects a cluster of passages which are based on Byron's 'Fare Thee Well', especially the opening lines - 'Fare thee well! and if for ever,/ Still for ever, fare thee well'. Jaun's valediction to his sister Issy is obviously based on memories of these lines: 'So for e'er fare thee welt!' (p.454); 'Fare thee well, fairy well!' (p.454); 'Tell Queen's road I am seilling. Farewell, but whenever! Buy!' (p.521). The references grow even denser and more suggestive when Joyce introduces Byron s To Thomas Moore' in which the poet drinks a double health to the author of the 'Melodies', several of whose own poems are also involved in passing: 'Gulp a bulper at parting and the moore the melodest! Farewell but whenever' (p.468). Jaun s departure also recalls Childe Harold's 'Good Night’:'Farewell awhile to her and thee!' (p.469). [17] If the exiled novelist turned to the exiled poet as a master of partings, he was also attracted by the theme of the outlaw and the wanderer. It is difficult to be sure how many references to pilgrimage should be connected specifically with Byron but there can be no doubt about corsairs and giaours, both of whom appear on a number of occasions in a variety ot linguistic disguises. In one instance the corsair is associated with Barbary pirates, with Berbers and with w°lves (the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the told.;). The name corsair obviously generates a number of hairy contexts and hairy puns: Robert Gleckner claims that 'Horrild Hairwire 41

Planetary music

(p.169) includes Childe Harold and 'by virtue of the pun Harold Coarsehair (corsair)'. [18] He might have added that this horrid Harold is also 'bristling, rough, shaggy' in the older, Latinate sense of the word. The Giaour is also a distinctive presence. Joyce creates a marvellous compound in 'jewr' (p.312) which includes giaour (or Christian) and Jew and so combines two archetypal wanderers and outsiders. This theme involves HCE as guilty offender, Shem as writer, Joyce himself and Byron, who also bore a badge of shame as Joyce seems to suggest when he refers to 'lordbeeron brow' (p.563). This leads to a Byronic association of more than usual interest. In his later years Joyce decided to write an opera as a vehicle for his much-admired friend, the tenor John Sullivan. The text which he chose was Byron's 'Cain' which he sent to the composer George Antheil in the belief that it 'could be the basis of a fine libretto ('Letters', I, p.292). Antheil remarked that the second act could not be sung and Joyce agreed that he would have to provide 'some kind of a figured intermezzo' ('Letters', I, p.293). But the first and third acts, if heavily cut, were 'capable of great stage effect'. Joyce then proposes a second tenor for Abel, a baritone for Lucifer and a bass for Adam but he is puzzled by the Angel of the Lord and suggests jokingly 'Perhaps you could borrow the loudspeaker they have in Rouen station'. Some months later he announces that he has found a male soprano for the part and that he has completed his adaptation of Act One. He tells Antheil that this is 'the great opportunity of your career as a composer. A magnificent subject never treated before in opera, the work and name of a great poet ana the most remarkable operatic voice in the world of our time ( Letters , I, p.296). Even this was not enough to convince Antheil who suggested that Joyce should write the libretto himself. But Joyce protested that he 'would never have the bad manners to rewrite the text of a great English poet' and that he was 'quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man'. Antheil was so reluctant that Joyce threatened to hand the project over to Stravinsky ('Letters', III, P • 209). He didn't, apparently, and a later effort to involve Othmar Schoeck was also unsuccessful. [ 19] It seems that Joyce may have been reading 'Don Juan' towards the end of his life since his letters include at least two quotations. [20] Byron's exploitation of cliche, stale language and poetic convention might have been expected to appeal to him as might his acknowledgment of physiological reality, his introduction of trivial particularities and his exploitation of mock-heroic. Yet the evidence shows little connection between the comic invention of 'Don Juan' on the one hand and 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' on the other; the Byron who appealed to Joyce was predominantly a lyric poet and dramatist and a creator of archetypes.

42

Planetary music

IV Of all Romantic poets it was Blake who was the most important for Joyce. Joyce acknowledged Blake as 'the most enlightened of Western poets' and praised him together with Dante as an example of how the poet transmutes the material of everyday life ('Critical Writings', pp.74-5,82). This interest in Blake begins early and runs through Joyce's life at least till the completion of 'Ulysses' and, some would claim, plays a considerable part in 'Finnegans Wake'. [21] This continuing interest and admiration is not unrelated to the fairly striking similarities between the two authors and their work. According to Joyce, 'Blake was not attracted to cultured and refined women'; Joyce's account of his marriage to Catherine Boucher bears some parallels to his own alliance with Nora Barnacle. Joyce and Blake shared with Dante a partiality for introducing their enemies (and sometimes their friends) into the scheme of their epic creations. Both were interested in esoteric symbolism and systems of correspondences (one remembers Stephen Dedalus deciphering 'signatures' on Sandymount strand ('Ulys¬ ses', p.42)). Both writers focus their creative imagination on capital cities which they invoke in minute particularity yet both move from the naming of streets and of districts to universal considerations. Both discover in the seemingly mundane the forms of a glorified humanity, the lineaments of the giant Albion or the signs of Finnegan and Anna Livia. Both develop increasingly complex mythological systems and recognise in the psyche of the individual the archetypal cycle of fall, struggle and rebirth and the patterns of history. Both, in their different ways, acknowledge and celebrate the human body. It seems appropriate, then, if not inevitable, that when Joyce was asked to deliver two lectures at Trieste in 1912 one of his subjects should be William Blake. Specific references to Blake's work are fairly numerous in Joyce though in the case of 'Finnegans Wake' much depends on the eye of the beholder. Robert Gleckner claims an etymological association between Blake and black with the result that for him both black and white are often imbued with Blakean echoes and reverberations. My credulity is stretched by most of this; the same applies, though to a lesser extent, in the case of Los (who may become sol) and even Thel. The Four Zoas can perhaps be identified with a little more confidence. On occasions, Joyce seems to have associated Blake with the processes of writing, printing or engraving: 'With pale blake I write tintingface' (p.563). It is a happy coincidence that Yeats's phrase 'Blake the penman' should blend so beautifully with Sir Charles Young's 'Jim the Penman' and with a technical term for a writer of Holy Scripture. Blake's techniques may also be alluded to, among other things, in 'mirrorhand' (p. 177) and in 'corrosive sublimation' (p. 185), which seems to relate directly to 'The Marriage of Heaven and 43

Planetary music

Hell'. Likewise, the dragon man (p.15) seems to refer to that passage in the 'Marriage' which describes a printing-house in hell where a Dragon-Man is clearing away the rubbish. [22] One of the 'Finnegans Wake' notebooks reads 'Blake and Drago man' which tends to confirm the association and which may open up further connections with the ass or dragoman. [23] Certainly, Blake is not to be found in all the places where his imprint has allegedly been detected yet, even if one applies a restrained policy of interpretation, his presence cannot be ignored either in 'Finnegans Wake' or in 'Ulysses'. Surprisingly, though, there is little in the way of direct reference or allusion either in 'Stephen Hero' or in 'A Portrait': yet Joyce's deepest concerns sometimes have a tendency to conceal themselves in the fertile darkness of creativity. Several dominant trends of thought can be deduced. For example, in the Pola Notebook there is a jotting for 'Stephen Hero' which reads: 'His two interpreters: Blake and Dante Creeping Jesus.'[24] Joyce is here referring to 'The Everlasting Gospel' in which Blake advances a view of Christ which is in aggressive opposition to the conventional image of a humble and submissive Jesus who loves his enemies: If he had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus, He'd have done any thing to please us Gone sneaking into Synagogues And not us'd the Elders & Priests like dogs. But Humble as a Lamb or Ass Obey'd himself to Caiaphas. Blake's Christ asserts a proper pride and a fierce anger against corruption. He is a revolutionary who 'His Seventy Disciples sent/ Against Religion & Government'. This revolution even involves a challenge to the established status of the divinity: 'Thou art a Man, God is no more,/ Thine own Humanity learn to adore...'. Nor does Blake's revised version of Christ observe the conventions of chastity. It is clear that Blake's attacks on false notions of chastity were particularly welcome to the young Joyce: Jim, quoting prophetic couplets of Blake's, which declare that The harvest shall flourish in wintry weather When two virginities meet together. The king and the priest must be tied in a tether, Before two virgins can meet together, used to say that the only two virginities that he could imagine were the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary. [25] Stanislaus notes that Joyce quoted these lines not for literary 44

Planetary music

reasons but 'because he meant them. The priest and the king were both absent from his marriage.' It seems that this Blakean frame of reference was well recognised among the brothers since Stanislaus wrote to James in July 1905 that 'few sons are born as free as yours because the priest and the king are so seldom tied in a tether' ('Letters', II, p.102). These epigrammatic lines of Blake (entitled 'Merlin's Prophecy') may relate thematically to the one overt use of Blake in 'A Portrait', which has puzzled most commentators. Fearing that he will not see E.C. again, Stephen is unable to concentrate on his reading. He reflects: Blake wrote: I wonder if William Bond will die For assuredly he is very ill. Alas, poor William! (p.253). Blake's poem concerns a triangular relationship and the psychological complexities of sexuality. We are told of William: He went to Church in a May morning Attended by Fairies, one, two, and three; But the Angels of Providence drove them away, And he return'd home in Misery. It would seem that by going to church William Bond allows himself to be inhibited by the angels of repression and the received Christian principles of chastity rather than following the persuasions of sexual desire; the result is a breakdown which is ultimately resolved by the generous pity of Mary Green. The Rossetti brothers initiated a biographical interpretation which Joyce may well have encountered (William Bond might perhaps suggest William Blake in spiritual bondage so that 'poor William' might refer to Blake as well as to Bond). However we read the poem, there are interesting links to Joyce's preoccupations elsewhere, notably to the triangle of love. Joyce must have appreciated the honesty of Blake s poem and its admission of sexual concerns; the cutting edge of verses such as 'Merlin's Prophecy' should have appealed to the young writer who believed that contemporary English literature was mostly 'wooden' or 'pompous and hypocritical' ('Critical Writings', p.212). Many years later Joyce made a statement to Arthur Power which helps to illuminate his attitude: When we are living a normal life we are living a conventional one, following a pattern which has been laid out by other people in another generation, an objective pattern imposed on us by the church and state. But a writer must maintain a continual struggle against the

45

Planetary music

objective: that is his function. The eternal qualities are the imagination and the sexual instinct, and the formal life tries to suppress both. [26] Here, as in Blake, sexual liberation and artistic liberation are aspects of the same rebellion against the tyranny of church and state. This rebellion has an interesting connection with the literary uses of the city. Blake was unique among the great Romantic poets in that he did not seek a pastoral alternative ('Hell is a city much like London') but made the city a central presence in his poetry. Joyce, unlike his Irish contemporaries or near-contemporaries such as Yeats, accepted the centrality of the city for the modern writer. And, as a recent critic has suggested, most Victorian writers 'repressed their knowledge of the city, just as they repressed their knowledge of sex': the consequence was 'that the city becomes available as literary material only when a writer escapes the restrictions of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant gentility'. [27] These are hints and guesses. Joyce's interest in and knowledge of Blake is given its most explicit formulation in his lecture which, though it lacks both the original beginning and end, is one of his most significant and substantial pieces of criticism. The Blake lecture helps to explain a number of Joyce's preoccupations and allusions in his creative works, notably in 'Ulysses'. It is important to see this lecture as complementary to the one on Defoe: the choice of a realist and a visionary poet is not accidental and, as Harry Levin pointed out long ago, there is a good case for seeing in 'Ulysses' a blend of both traditions. [28] At least one of Joyce's more interesting interpretations of the poetry is derived from W.M.Rossetti, who read 'The Crystal Cabinet' in terms of 'the phenomenon of gestation'; but most of the detail of Joyce's lecture is based on 'The Real Blake' (1907) by Edwin J. Ellis, Yeats's collaborator in the pioneering edition. Ellis develops at length the extraordinary theory of Yeats that Blake was really an Irishman. Yeats had discovered an Irish lineage for Blake which made him an O'Neill; Ellis recognises in him an Irish head, an Irish temper, sly Irish humour, a 'simple and propitiative Irish manner', [29] and Irish faculty for giving practical advice, and so on. Joyce may have referred to this in the missing pages but the text as we have it pays no specific attention to so crude a racial myth. One very significant exception may be deduced but it is never stated explicitly. This can be found in the eloquent passage where Joyce describes how Blake triumphed over space and time: Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the 46

Planetary music

senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom. To him, each moment shorter than a pulse-beat was equivalent in its duration to six thousand years, because in such an infinitely short instant the work of the poet is conceived and born. To him, all space larger than a red globule of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in a space smaller than a globule of blood we approach eternity, of which our vegetable world is but a shadow. ('Critical Writings', p.222) Joyce is alluding here to those visionary lines from 'Milton' which he had originally quoted in the 1902 essay on Mangan. Such defiance of 'the hurried materialism' which is now fashionable links Blake to a long chain of philosophers culminating in Berkeley's idealism and 'the scepticism that ends with Hume' (p.220). This resistance to materialism might be related to a sceptical tendency specifically associated by Joyce with the Celtic mind: 'All Celtic philosophers seemed to have inclined towards incertitude or scepticism - Hume, Berkeley, Balfour, Bergson’ ('Exiles', p.174). If we are right in making this association, the contrast between Blake and Defoe would be not only a contrast between idealist and realist but between Celt and Anglo-Saxon. The essay on Defoe is emphatic about Defoe's nationality: 'Now ... for the first time the true English soul begins to reveal itself in literature.' 'Robinson Crusoe' is a national epic in appropriately lucid, unlyrical prose: 'The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.' Defoe at the bedside of Duncan Campbell, the visionary, is 'the realist in the presence of the unknown’, that is, 'the Anglo-Saxon... in the presence of the Celt'. [30] Blake's rejection of materialism may be related to some of Stephen's concerns in 'Ulysses', especially his investigations of the nature of reality, of space and of time; these concerns are most evident in the second and third chapters and again in the discussion in the National Library and the phantasmagoria in Nighttown. In the library Stephen is satirically impatient at the expense of John Eglinton and Shelleyan Platonists such as A.E., who believe that 'Art has to reveal ... formless spiritual essences' ('Ulysses', p.185): Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past, (p.186) Again, when Stephen is teaching history, a strongly Blakean frame of reference: 47

his reflections have

Planetary music

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then? (p.30) Here we can see the pull in both directions - the overwhelming and dominant desire to escape from the process of history, on the grounds that it is insufficiently real, and the recognition that in some way history may participate in reality. Stephen finds that the problem is not solved by so apocalyptically impatient a solution as that proposed by Blake: 'What's left us then?' Similarly, Stephen's smashing of the chandelier which recapitulates with variations this vision of the end of time (p.517) results in the gasjet going 'Pwfungg!' and does not succeed in delivering Stephen either from time or from history. The proper balance can only be achieved by the most delicate of adjustments. In many respects, it would seem, Joyce would have endorsed Blake's support of the imagination as against the unimaginative daughters of memory: 'Poetry ... is always a revolt against actuality' while 'history or the denial of reality' 'deceives the whole world' ('Critical Writings', p.81). What is to be avoided is the fatalistic submission to the patterns of history of a Haines ('It seems history is to blame' ('Ulysses', p.27)), of a Deasy ('All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God' ('Ulysses', p.40>) or of a Mangan ('History encloses him so straitly that even his fiery moments do not set him free from it' ('Critical Writings', p.81>). The example of Mangan shows that Celts can be trapped by a belief in history just as much as Anglo-Saxons. Joyce must have recognised that the temptation for the Irish writer to serve the daughters of memory was almost irresistible. Yet if Stephen and Joyce could withstand the pressures of materialism and the tyrannical claims of history, neither could go so far as Blake in rejecting the present and the tangible. 'Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past' Stephen advises himself as he listens to the talk in the National Library: the advice is echoed at the end of Chapter 14 of 'Finnegans Wake', 'Hold to! Now!' (p.473). In the structure of 'Ulysses' Joyce's hold on the here and now is made all the firmer by the presences of Leopold and Molly Bloom who outbalance any inclinations to escape into the void of the divine bosom which Stephen may occasionally experience. Bloom expresses with sensuous appreciation the attractions of the tangible: I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm 48

Planetary music

fullblooded life.

(pp. 116-17)

Molly's concluding monologue is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in memory yet it, too, embodies the tangible and triumphantly demonstrates that the presiding daughters need not be the pallid virgins of unimaginative fable. Such warmblooded lives have more potency than the Blakean globules and the calls of Swedenborg. But if Blake is an idealist, he is essentially and characteristically a clear-headed one. Joyce concedes in his lecture that towards the end of his life the constant strain of voyaging into the unknown and seeing visions blinded his sight so that 'the unknown for which he yearned covered him with the shadows of vast wings' ('Critical Writings', p.215). Yet he believes in Blake's fundamental sanity. Though the photographer and the court stenographer may suspect that he is mad, madness is no more relevant than 'the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police' (p.220). As such formulations might indicate, Blake's philosophical posture is seen as part of a revolution. Joyce calls him 'questo eresiarca anarcoide e visionario' ('that anarchic and visionary heresiarch', p. 216). [31] The editors of 'Critical Writings' translate 'anarcoide' not as 'anarchic' but as 'undisciplined' and so misrepresent a term which is crucial to Joyce's political philosophy. [32] Anarchy and heresy are the two poles of a resistance to the tyranny of external authority over the rights of the individual. We may remember that like his hero, Byron, Stephen is accused of heresy in 'A Portrait' while in 'Ulysses' he is much possessed by thoughts of heresiarchs (the word occurs on pp. 27,44,208 and 483 and several heretics are mentioned by name). 'Finnegans Wake' also includes the th^me of heresy; in particular, Sherri has a 'pelagiarist pen' (p.182) which combines plagiarism and pelagian heresy. [33] In a richly compressed piece of invective he is told that he has been 'condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch’ (p. 188); once again this combines anarchy and heresy while hiresiarch seems to imply Tiresias, the blind bisexual prophet, as well as a lofty leader in heresy. Joyce's insistence on heretical affirmation is not a rhetorical flourish but is central to his understanding of Blake and, by extension, to those figures of the revolutionary artist for which Blake was one of the models. The lecture pointedly distinguishes Blake's heresy from the teaching of 'those most orthodox Church philosophers Francesco Suarez and Juan Mariano de Talavera, almost as Blake reverses the accepted moral categories when he Hiotino-iiiQhPs devils from angels. These two Jesuit theologians

were popularly associaitju and the Gunpowder Plot

wrote 49

'for

the

stupefaction

of

Planetary music

posterity a logical and sinister defence of tyrannicide'; as 'A Portrait' elaborates it, the theologian 'will explain to you in what circumstances you may lawfully kill your king and whether you had better hand him poison in a goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or saddlebow' (p.250). Blake was no lover of kings. Joyce tells us that he refused the position of drawing-master to the royal family but also records that, so as not to offend the king, he simultaneously gave up all his less affluent students. What Ellis awkwardly refers to as 'loyalty to Royalty' might more properly be called a natural delicacy allied to a firm sense of principle. Joyce's main point here is to distinguish between the crude brutality of the leading expositors of Catholic doctrine and the unspoilt humanity of the heretic: The same idealism that possessed and sustained Blake when he hurled his lightning against human evil and misery prevented him from being cruel to the body even of a sinner, the frail curtain of flesh ... that lies on the bed of our desire, (p.216) This seems to suggest that because of his 'primitive goodness of heart' Blake did not subscribe to orthodox conceptions of hell and punishment for sin. In view of what Joyce said elsewhere, it is interesting to note that idealism is here used not to indicate any tendency to escape from pressing and unacceptable realities but to represent a visionary faculty which has profound moral significance. Blake's idealism would countenance neither eternal punishment for sinners nor sudden, violent death for monarchs. 'His spiritual rebellion against the powers of this world was not made of the kind of gunpowder, soluble in water, to which we are more or less accustomed' (p.215).[34] This might be a text for James Joyce himself, particularly with regard to the Fenian tradition, for Leopold Bloom in so far as he is opposed to the use of violence for political ends, and for Stephen Dedalus. Blake's spiritual rebellion informs Stephen's attitudes in 'Ulysses', notably in his encounter with the English soldier Private Carr. The Blakean context is established when Stephen with elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly, proclaims: 'You are my guests. The uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh of Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory' (p.520). This brings together Haines's defence of British behaviour in Ireland (p.27) and Stephen's reflections on the reality of history (p.30). Stephen's feelings towards the usurpers become even more explicit when he 'taps his brow' and says, 'But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king' (p.521). This idea may be traced to the second chapter where Stephen meditates: 'Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their 50

Planetary music

tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned' (p.34). Spiritual and psychological politics such as this play a significant part in Romantic literature, not least in Shelley, but it is Blake who seems to provide the most specifically relevant examples. The combination of priest and king here is Blakean as is the emphasis on inner revolution by which the mind-forged manacles may be removed. (Blake writes in one of his letters of 'The Mind, in which every one is King & Priest in his own House'.)[35] In the ensuing confusion Stephen is reminded of an apocalyptic couplet from Blake which is appropriate to the setting in Nighttown and which also echoes the morning's conversation with Mr Deasy (p.39): The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave old Ireland's windingsheet.

(p.525)

When Private Carr advances to take his brutal and foulmouthed revenge on behalf of his insulted king, Old Gummy Granny thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand: 'Remove him, acushla! At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free' (p.527). This, of course, is Cathleen ni Houlihan and her advice represents precisely that tradition of violent revolution which Stephen has rejected. The scene is particularly interesting because it not only draws on Joyce's own quarrel with the British consulate at Zurich but also, and even more pertinently, on Blake's celebrated encounter with the drunken soldier Scholfield which ended with his trial for treason on a charge of saying 'Damn the King'. If English Blake provided a model for revolution which was spiritual but not physical, he also gave Joyce an opportunity to celebrate the world of unremarkable humanity. One of the most potent passages in the lecture describes Blake's habits of composition: Elemental beings and spirits of dead great men often came to the poet's room at night to speak with him about art and the imagination. Then Blake would leap out of bed, and, seizing his pencil, remain long hours in the cold London night drawing the limbs and lineaments of the visions, while his wife, curled up beside his easy chair, held his hand lovingly and kept quiet so as not to disturb the visionary ecstasy of the seer. When the vision had gone, about daybreak his wife would get back into bed, and Blake, radiant with joy and benevolence, would quickly begin to light the fire and get breakfast for both of them. We are amazed that the symbolic beings Los and Urizen and Vala and Tiriel and Enitharmon and the shades of Milton and Homer came from their ideal world to a poor London room, and no other incense greeted their coming than the smell of Indian tea and eggs fried in lard. Isn't this perhaps the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal spoke 51

Planetary music

through the mouth of the humble? (p..218; translation slightly corrected) This seems to have the true Joycean ring. In fact, it is based on a passage in Ellis which, in turn, comes from the nineteenth-century author J.T. Smith, the historian of 'Nollekens and His Times'. Smith provides the basic narrative outline and mentions that Blake used to light the fire and put on the kettle. [36] Joyce transforms these details into a richly significant portrait of the artist at home. It is characteristic of Joyce that, in his version, Mrs Blake should get back into bed (to be waited on like Molly Bloom, perhaps) and that Blake should make breakfast with Indian tea and eggs fried in lard. Such domestic particularity is very much to the point. We might remember how often Joyce describes the ritual of breakfast, for instance in the cases of Stephen Dedalus and of Shem but most notably and unforgettably in the case of Bloom: On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting the kettle to let water flow in. Having set it to draw, he took off the kettle and crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed hungrily against him.... He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He sprinkled it through his fingers, ringwise, from the chipped eggcup. (p.64) The Blake lecture cannot encompass such affectionate and comprehensive precision yet, for a moment, Joyce's Blake is a close relation of his Leopold Bloom. Joyce is celebrating here not just the humanity of the artist himself but the foundation of mythological visions in the life of the average man. The gods come to a poor London room and the Eternal speaks through the mouth of the humble; the emphasis is on the extraordinary nature of the ordinary, on what Ibsen called 'This beautiful miraculous earth-life' ('Critical Writings', p.83). Yet Blake himself did not write of fried eggs nor of Indian tea. He had, as Joyce noticed, 'great pity for everything that lives and suffers and rejoices in the illusions of the vegetable world, for the fly, the hare, the little chimney sweep, the robin, even for the flea' ('Critical Writings', p.219); but even this sympathetic involvement with the unnoticed and his predilection for minute particulars did not enable him to transcend all the confines of poetic decorum. The domestic detail of Joyce's sentence cannot be matched in Blake's own poetry. Alone among the Romantics,Byron might have offered such |unpoetic' particularities; appropriately enough, it was he who first introduced fried eggs to the epic when in 'Don Juan' he acknowledged the imperatives of breakfast at the expense of 52

Planetary music

romantic love. [37] But Byron's fried eggs are a counterweight to man's tendency towards sublimity whereas Joyce's eggs fried in lard are an essential part of his affirmation both of art and of life. These differences may be emblematic of Joyce's relations with the tradition of Romantic poetry as a whole. The Romantics played a not insignificant part in Joyce's mental life but in the end the Romantic strain had to be balanced by the classical, the ideal by the real, Shelley and Blake by Defoe. Contrary to popular belief, Joyce did not reject the Romantic inheritance; instead, in his own fashion, he tried to blend, accommodate and refashion it in an equation which was more generous and more enduring and which embraced the whole of human life.

NOTES 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

8 9 10

11

Arthur Power, 'Conversations with James Joyce', ed. Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974), p.98. Cf., for a slightly different version, 'Critical Writings', p.74 and 'All his work is permeated by a kind of litotes which is the antithesis of romanticism', Stanislaus Joyce, 'My Brother's Keeper', ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), p.54. Stanislaus Joyce, 'My Brother's Keeper', p.113. Richard Ellmann, 'The Consciousness of Joyce' (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), pp.90ff. For further details of Joyce's reading, see Thomas E.Connolly, 'The Personal Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography' (Buffalo: University of Buffalo, 1955). M.H.Abrams, 'Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature' (New York: Norton, 1971), pp.421-2. M.H.Abrams, 'Natural Supernaturalism', p.529n. Robert Scholes and Richard M.Kain, 'The Workshop of Dedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'" (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p.105. Frank Budgen, 'James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses'", (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp.182,13. Budgen, 'James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses'", p.182. Eugene Sheehy cited in Scholes and Kain, 'The Workshop of Dedalus', p.173. Richard Ellmann, 'Ulysses on the Liffey' (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p.115. Joyce quotes from Shelley's 'The Cenci' in 'Giacomo Joyce'. S.L.Goldberg, 'The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce's "Ulysses'" (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), pp. 58-9. 53

Planetary music

12

13 14 15

16

17

18

19 20 21

’The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley', ed. Roger Ingpen and W.E.Peck (London: Ernest Benn, 1926-30), vii, p.137. 'Complete Works', vii, p.112. Robert Scholes and Richard M.Kain, 'The Workshop of Dedalus', p.91. For Myles Crawford and for Joyce's use of newspapers in the composition of 'Ulysses', see Robert M.Adams, 'Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's "Ulysses'" (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Robert Gleckner, Byron in 'Finnegans Wake', 'Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of "Finnegans Wake'", ed. Jack P.Dalton and Clive Hart (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p.46. I am much indebted to Gleckner for his identification of 'The Waltz' and for many of the details of his argument. Like all students of 'Finnegans Wake' I also owe particular debts to James S.Atherton, 'The Books at the Wake' (London: Faber & Faber, 1959) and to Adaline Glasheen, 'Third Census of "Finnegans Wake": An Index of the Characters and their Roles' (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977). Byron may perhaps have an earlier connection with exile and with parting drinks in 'A Portrait' where Stephen paces backwards and forwards between Byron's pub (which really existed) and Clontarf chapel as he tries to make a crucial decision about his future (p.168). William York Tindall comments: 'The meaning of Byron and pub is apparent. Clontarf, scene of an Irish victory, and the chapel combine nation and religion. Stephen is weighing a choice between poetry and piety, exile and nation, world and Church', ('A Reader's Guide to James Joyce' (London: Thames & Hudson, 1959), p.76). Robert Gleckner, Byron in 'Finnegans Wake', p.49. The corsair is also associated with a curse in 'an accorsaired race' (p.600). Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.681. 'Letters', I, pp.365,400 (references to 'Don Juan', XHI.xlii.I.cxxiii). For early interest in Blake, see 'Stephen Hero', p.37. For later interest and possible influence, see Morton D.Paley, Blake in Nighttown, and Robert F.Gleckner, Joyce and Blake: Notes Toward Defining a Literary Relationship, both in 'A James Joyce Miscellany', Third Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 1962), pp.175-87, 188-225. Further details of Blake allusions in 'Ulysses' can be found in Weldon Thornton, 'Allusions in "Ulysses": An Annotated List' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). For other explorations of the 54

Planetary music

22

23 24

25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32

33 34

35 36

37

relationship between Joyce and Blake, see Northrop Frye, Blake and Joyce, 'James Joyce Review', vi (1957), 39-47; Richard Ellmann, The Backgrounds of 'Ulysses', 'Kenyon Review', xvi (1954), 373. Yeats's phrase comes from 'The Works of William Blake' (London; Bernard Quaritch, 1893), i,p.204. The relevant passages from Blake occur in Plates 14 and 15 (here as elsewhere the text cited is 'The Complete Works of William Blake', ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). Roland McHugh, 'The Sigla of "Finnegans Wake'" (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), p.125 For Pola Notebook, see Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, 'The Workshop of Dedalus', p.72. For Blake, see 'Complete Works', pp.750, 757. For another version of 'Creeping Jesus', see 'God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too, The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus...' ('Complete Works', p.878). Stanislaus Joyce, 'My Brother's Keeper', p.161. Arthur Power, 'Conversations with Joyce', p.74. Robert M.Stange, The Frightened Poets, 'The Victorian City: Images and Realities', ed. H.J.Dyos and M.Wolff (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), ii, pp.479, 481. Harry Levin, 'James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London, Faber & Faber, 2nd edn, 1960), p.30. Edwin J.Ellis, 'The Real Blake: A Portrait Biography' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907), pp.5, 20, 186, 163; see also pp.49, 197, 228. 'Daniel Defoe', ed. and tr. Joseph Prescott (Buffalo: University of Buffalo, 1964), pp.6, 24-5, 19. Italian text from 'Scritti Italiani', ed. Gianfranco Corsim and Giorgio Melchiori (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1979). . „ 4l Dominic Manganiello, 'Joyce's Politics' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), especially pp.67-114 on Joyce's anarchism. Cf. 'Letters', II, p.205 where Ibsen is described as an 'egoareh'. Cf. 'The poet who hurls his lightning against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and crueller tyranny' ('Critical Writings', p.185). 'Complete Works', p.879. See 'Blake Records', ed. G.E.Bentley,Jr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp.474-5; Ellis, 'The Real Blake', p.435. Smith noted that Blake 'always painted, drew, engraved and studied, in the same room where they grilled, boiled, stewed, and slept. 'Don Juan', Il.cxliv.

55

4 JOYCE AND THE DISPLACED AUTHOR Christopher Butler

i The title, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', is ambiguous. The words 'the artist' suggest two things: that they typify, and that they point to the name with which they share a title-page - 'James Joyce'. This double reference, to the world and to the text, is typical of nearly all representations of writers. They figure not simply within their fictive world, but as possible articulators of their own text; and our concern as critics is often enough to reconcile the two functions or to point to an ironic distance between them. However, these critical strategies are not simple ones. For the relationship of the portrait to the enclosing work can be of many kinds, as we can see if we look at some literal portraits of artists and speculate a little on their literary analogues. John Bratby's 'Window, Self-Portrait, Jean and Hands' (1957) depicts, entering from the lower edge, a number of hands holding a paint brush. It would make sense to call these 'Bratby's Hand', and it reminds us that the artist is implicitly present in his work, however omniscient and impersonal he may pretend to be. Thus George Eliot begins 'Adam Bede' by telling us that 'with a drop of ink on the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hay slope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799'. This is not a portrait of the artist but an assertion of her authority: like Bratby, George Eliot reminds us of her medium and the instrument by which she presents her vision. Such interventions are replete with confidence in the realist mode and its relationship to history. Thus George Eliot herself constantly compares her work to the writing of history, partic¬ ularly in Chapter 17, and her judgment has been enthusiast¬ ically endorsed by critics like Leavis. She would not admit, as did Trollope, that she is simply 'making believe', for she would concur with James in asserting that Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime. ... It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth than the historian, and in so doing it deprives him at a stroke of all his standingroom. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer. [1] 56

Joyce and the displaced author

The action of fiction must seem to have the inexorability of history; the novelist cannot admit 'that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best'. [2] My next examples make this admission. Picasso, in a number of pictures, gives a full portrait of the artist and his model, the artist metamorphosed into an old man, with bald head and beard. [3] He is thus displaced from the real artist, but enters into his work, in the act of transforming yet again the model that Picasso has transformed by depicting her, onto a canvas whose surface we cannot see. Similarly metamorphosed, John Fowles puts himself into his 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (1969). Towards the end of the novel, a mysterious stranger (with 'a massively bearded face ... perhaps not quite a gentleman') enters a railway carriage and stares at the novel's hero, Charles. His look goes far beyond Picasso's impassivity: it is 'ruminative, more than a shade disapproving, as if he knew very well what sort of man this was'. [4] Having made his Hitchcockian entrance, he is revealed as the author of the book we are reading by his shift to the use of the first person: In my experience there is only one profession that gives that particular look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and the soliciting. How could I use you? Now what could I do with you?[5] He wonders how he is going to end his book, for he has thus asserted his control over his characters, so much so, as is well known, that he provides the reader with alternative endings to his novel. His refusal of any subservience to history here has multiple ironies, for his book is a factoid one, which mingles fictional with historical characters such as Rossetti. . My next example is Roy Lichtensteinfs fMasterpiece (1962). This painting, like much recent experimental writing, exploits the figure of the artist to secure an ambiguity of reference, both to the world represented within the work, and to the world within which the work figures. In it a girl says to her male companion, 'Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!' They are, it seems, looking at a picture within the picture, thus displacing Brad from Lichtenstein; and yet the ambiguity of 'this painting' brings him back again. This may indeed be a portrait of the artist, with an interlocutor more sympathetic than Lynch or Cranly. John Barth's Life Story is even more ingeniously self-reflexive, as we shall see. It also exploits an ambiguity of reference, between the situation of the narrative and the work we read (as does Butor's 'La Modification'), thus: 'It was perhaps 57

Joyce and the displaced author

inevitable that one afternoon the possibility would occur to the writer of these lines that his own life might be a fiction in which he was the leading or an accessory character,’[6] I wish to argue in what follows that we tend to find these elements reference within the work to the 'real' author, via his not so hidden hand, to the displaced author as character, and ambiguous self-reference - in a sequence of portraits of artists in which Joyce's 'A Portrait' occupies a central position. Considerations of space have limited my examples, but the discussion is nevertheless worthwhile, I think, since it may inter alia help us to meet an attack on the status of the author by those critics who would agree with Foucault, that 'today's writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression. Referring only to itself.'[7] For my examples all express something about the artist's role and his authority within and through his narrative; and, more particularly for my argument, they show the artist as standing in some sort of displaced relationship to his creator. We are, partly, being teased into considering the powers of the 'real' George Eliot or John Fowles or John Barth. All the artists depicted are in some ways like their real counterparts (or the roles we imagine or accept for them) and yet also changed by literary or pictorial convention, so that the creator/narrator may thus be in an ironic relationship to his portrait, as Wayne Booth pointed out with respect to Joyce some time ago. [8]

II The quasi-autobiographical nature of Mann's 'Death in Venice' has long been recognised. In it Mann projects himself in part as an established figure threatened by the rising generation of writers and by the consequences of his own growing aesthetic, his preoccupation with a beauty which may bring with it (it seems) its own homoerotic psychopathology. It is thus centrally concerned from the outset with the theme of the interaction between life and work. But what do we make of the relationship the critic may propose between Aschenbach and Mann? The passage I am concerned with opens by telling us of Aschenbach's ancestry, and describes a number of his works including two which are in an ironic, almost contradictory relationship to Aschenbach as he becomes in Venice: that powerful narrative The Abject, which taught a whole grateful generation that a man can still be capable of moral resolution even after he has plumbed the depths of knowledge; and ... that impassioned discourse on the theme of Mind and Art whose ordered force and antithetic eloquence led serious critics to rank it with Schiller's 58

Joyce and the displaced author

Simple and Sentimental Poetry. [9] As T.J.Reed points out, the works cited are the actual titles of works which Mann planned but did not execute between 1900 and 1910; the account of the creative process further on corresponds to Mann's own; and the characters later cited from Aschenbach's work correspond to those in Mann's own published works. [10] Here then we have a displacement from Mann to Aschenbach which at the least allows us to make a biographic inference that Mann saw Aschenbach's development as a possible one for himself, for his early moral authority can be seen as partly derived from that of Mann. But there is also a narrative voice, that of a 'psychologist and moralist'[11] who intervenes to make a type of comment which makes the text fluctuate in tone between the reporting of purported fact and the essay: For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate influence which shall also be deep and lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of his contemporaries in general. [12] This judgment parallels Stephen's, rejecting the social ideologies of religion, politics, and nationality, which sustain Aschenbach, and yet retaining a Yeatsian ambition 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race ( A Portrait', p.253). Both authors thus make part of the substance of their narratives the social status of the artist, and judge in very different ways their protagonists' withdrawal from those functions. Thus Aschenbach, 'the poet spokesman of all those who labour at the edge of exhaustion ,[13] finally exhausts himself; indeed much of the narrator's commentary may be seen in ironic juxtaposition to Aschenbach s later decline. His comments may be read, not simply as accounts of Aschenbach's fictional works, but also perhaps as 'mise en abyme', as disguised directions as to how we are to read 'Death in Venice': With rage the author here rejects the rejected, casts out the outcast, - and the measure of his fury is the measure of his condemnation of all moral shilly-shallying. Explicitly he refutes the flabby humanitarianism of the phrase: lout comprendre c'est tout pardonner'. [ 14 ] And yet a doubt remains, for as Reed points out, the final death scene is ambivalent, 'because it could be an apotheosis of Aschenbach' (as he rises, as Stephen does, to a .Platonic appreciation of Beauty) 'just as much as the conclusion of m°rTheCrinterest of this interaction 59

between implied narrator

Joyce and the displaced author

and artist [16] stems not simply from the techniques of narrative distance we have described (that of the historian or generalising essayist, for example) but from the fact that the artist’s view in the text may compete with or complement that of the narrator (for example, Lily Briscoe in 'To the Lighthouse', Bernard in 'The Waves', and Miss La Trobe in 'Between the Acts'). Their authority within the text is thus of a special kind, as they may function as surrogates for their own authors, and thus confirm or deny their own texts. This deflection of authority is of course seen in Henry James. He may keep his narrative within the 'register' of a single consciousness, but he lends that consciousness his own subtlety and perplexity. The narrative of 'The Ambassadors' thus has, as Ian Watt pointed out, a 'multidimensional' quality, 'with its continued implication of a community of three minds Strether's, James's and the reader's': and this poses a 'special problem' for in the later novels 'we do not quite know whether the awareness implied in a given passage is the narrator's or that of his character'. [17] This ambiguity may be important in so far as Strether may be thought to be 'redeemed' by taking an aesthetic (novelist's imaginative) attitude, rather than a New Englander's puritanical one towards the events in Paris; and it also allows for an irony, for however playfully James may make him capable of his own analyses of a situation, he keeps him ignorant of an aspect of his plot which has long been apparent to the reader. In many modernist texts, the relationship between narrator and the displaced artist character is more complicated. We have the sense that the acquisition of 'experience' through the nar¬ rative may or may not prepare the hero to write his 'own' book in retrospect. Works like 'A la rechereche du temps perdu', 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', 'La Nausee' and 'La Modification' thus may have an implied recursive form. [18] But such works put 'experience' and 'writing' into a somewhat paradoxical relationship: for the experience that will make the protagonist's text possible has already been described. This paradox is brilliantly and humorously exploited by Philip Roth in 'Portnoy's Complaint', for after Portnoy has revealed the peculiarly Freudian structure of his sexual life in a freewheeling monologue, his analyst interrupts at the end of the book with the promise of the real analysis, which will recapitulate and interpret what we as readers already know: PUNCH LINE So [said the doctor] Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?[19] A gap may thus open up for the reader between the experience of the artist as displaced author and his ability to master the total experience of the text in the way that we do in interpreting it. 60

Joyce and the displaced author

One important symptom of this gap is stylistic variation or uncertainty. Interpreters of 'ironic distance' in the 'Portrait' have thus been correct, I think, in turning away from moral judgments on Stephen as narcissist, or deadly serious, or as cold and priggish, to the immature stylistic features of his text, which follows so closely his state of consciousness, from naivete ('She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried' (p.9)> to sophisticated judgment ('Cranly's speech [was] an echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly by a Wicklow pulpit' (p.200)). Frank O'Connor thus attacked one of the epiphanic climaxes of the 'Portrait' as being 'insufferably self-conscious, as though Walter Pater had taken to business and commercialised his style for the use of schools and colleges'. [20] This kind of criticism catches us out, I think, in two ways. First, we think of modernist styles, possibly falsely, as progressive. Thus the Paterism and Newmanism of Stephen's reflections, and most notoriously, the preciosity of his villanelle,[21 ] seem to be judged by the experimentalism of the opening, and by juxtapository discontinuity of the concluding diary entries. (We never, of course, know what Joyce's own 'natural' style would be; after 'Stephen Hero', one is always ironised by another, as in 'Ulysses'.) If we are thus caught up in a historical perception of writing, then Stephen's styles both perfectly plausibly put him in the past and reveal an inadequacy at times in his mode of perception of the world. On the other hand, and second, there is no denying the emotional effectiveness of all those passages from which we are supposed by the critics to be stylistically detached. Simply to attack them as O'Connor does would seem to put us in the position of readers who could not sympathise with Tom Jones or David Copperfield because they expressed themselves in such an odd way. Indeed it is only by making a complex judgment concerning the intentions of the real author that we can say that Stephen Dedalus, or J. Alfred Prufrock, or Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and many other modernist heroes trapped in the various styles of their own thinking, and hence, implicitly, o their own writing, differ from their predecessors, in that their mode of expression has an element of the parodic. We have to assume that the author intended us to 'secure uptake; on his writing by seeing that the styles of his protagonists are variously unreliable. [22] It is precisely this type of ironic tension that has created so many problems for those critics who have tried to decide how much of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is spoken 'by' Pound. [23] . Joyce's 'Portrait' thus has a crucial position in the development of a distinctively modernist mode of presentation. Indeed it is stylistic parody, rather than any George Eliot like irony of the observer, that henceforth may mark the authors distance from his material. His godlike independence (paring his fingernails) is not simply from the world of his creation

61

Joyce and the displaced author

but from the language which expresses it, and thus also from the consciousness in which such a mode of expression might inhere. Thus Eliot's Prufrock depends upon parodic disguise as self-defence, for as he is put through a 'gamut of possible literary and social styles' including the grand conceits of seventeenth-century verse, the rhetoric of Swinburne, the couplets of Pope, and Shakespearean monologue, we see that he like Pound's Mauberley, is an ironic model of the failed twentieth-century poet, of the writer who is the inheritor of many styles, but for whom none is fully adequate. There is no single dominant language in the poem, so that each style is thrown into ironic relief by the existence of the others.[24] Such parodic conflicts reveal the author's hand, stage-managing his poem, and remind us of the modernist obsession with relativistic modes of perception, which are the special preserve of the artist who can transcend any single point of view, and deflect any direct commitment by semi-quotation. The competition between styles here is not always so uncertain, however, as the example of Proust may remind us. Gilberte lends Marcel a copy of the Goncourt Journal, which he reports in his narrative. It is an account of the Verdurin salon, which portrays it as different from what he thought he knew it to be. Marcel feels that this disparity is proof of his own inadequacy and despairs at first. We find this unconvincing and unnecessary, to the extent that we identify Marcel with Proust. For Proust creates the parody and, what is more, he also pretends that what he thus creates is 'fact' because it has the authority of a pretended real memoirist, Goncourt. But in fact it is fiction, since it describes Proust's fictional characters. Proust by thus allowing a displaced author to enter into his text, shows that he is indeed master of an alternative style which can only seem to disrupt the even flow of his narrative because he has allowed it to. [25] The modernist text, then, when it displaces its authors onto portraits of the artist, and thus allows for a tension between the perceptions and styles of the implied author and of his displaced persona, may be decentred. It solicits the presence of the reader to remedy its real or apparent deficiencies, most spectacularly so in the case of 'Finnegans Wake', where Shem the Penman, the anti-Dedalian forger, is antagonist not only to his own text but to all of Joyce's works. [26] He is asked to reconcile and to motivate (by irony and so on) the disparities between the modes of the text, to arrive at a judgment of Stephen or Mauberley or Shem from what he takes to be Joyce's or Pound's point of view. But this point of view is one which he has constructed; it is peculiarly 62

Joyce and the displaced author

his own. The reader as author thus always hovers behind the text if it reveals stylistic change or uncertainty, that is, once the notion of the single seamless vision devoted to epistemological depth, as in some realist texts and perhaps also in Proust and Virginia Woolf, is put into question. The figure of the author (or the reader's imagining of him, depending on our use of biographical evidence) emerges from the gaps in the style. The question then arises whether the reader's interpretation thus conceived can always be authoritative. For some stylistically diverse texts (like 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake') perhaps do not allow for this reconciliation. Their modes of expression seem to deprive them of any single implicit origin, and hence of the authority of an implied omniscient narrator. It may for example be quite wrong to attempt to reconcile the diverse styles and quotations of 'The Waste Land' within a single implied consciousness, whether it be the displaced author-persona of Tiresias, or even of T.S.Eliot himself, for there seems to be no single plausible point of view that can be imposed on such a text and reconcile all its details. (Our present knowledge of Eliot's state of mind when writing the poem makes it all the more reasonable to deny that there may be a hidden reconciling pattern.) Indeed it has been one of the merits of recent 'deconstructive' criticism, that it has pointed out that not all texts can be or need to be interpreted as unified, either in theme or in point of view. [27]

III The focus of discrepancy may also be found in the tension between the consciousness of the artist and his language. For our portraits of artists also raise the question of the relationship between personal 'vision' and artistic convention. For just before Aschenbach's and Stephen's climactic (and erotic) perceptions, the one leading to an abandonment of vocation in death, the other to its joyful discovery, there lie reflections on language. Mann ironically comments on Aschenbach as 'the Master' who ' in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works ... whose style was set for a model in the schools'. But his final besotted state involves the loss of all this stylistic control: 'his rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.'[28] Stephen on the other hand is on the edge ot finally gaining control over language, though it is significantly not entirely his own,[29] by seeing both the aptitude of poetic language to life and its tendency to autonomy:

63

Joyce and the displaced author

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: - A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? ... No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? ('A Portrait', pp. 170-1) Stephen seems to come here to a point of decision between language as a reflection of the external world and language as the mirror of an inner world of rhythm and individual emotion. These inner states control his attitudes to language to a large degree and they are constantly assimilated to the non-linguistic visual and musical arts, as elsewhere, when he thinks of 'the words, so beautiful and sad, like music' (p.25) or defines lyrical form as 'a rhythmical cry' (p.219). As he walks along a lane, 'His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms' (p.182). His attitude to language as a reflection of the world rather than as a rhythmical embodiment of his emotions (as in his Prufrockian talismanic use of quotation, pp.99 and 180), is much less certain. Thus his question 'How could a woman be a tower of ivory?' (p.37) is only resolved by a poetic transference of the phrase to Eileen's cold white hands and later, 'Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him' (p.64). Indeed like our other protagonists he often projects literature into real life, for example by imagining a house for the Mercedes of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' (pp.64-5). His model throughout is one of vision; the seeing of an image corresponding to an inner state, vaguely ascribed to his senses or his soul; thus he wishes 'to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld' (p.66) and thinks of this in erotic terms wholly appropriate to the ending of Chapter 4, for 'in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured' (p.67). Something like this attempt to transcend language into an image seems indeed to have had its effect on his vision of the girl on the beach: 'Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the long silence of his ecstacy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at their call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life' (p.176). There is 64

Joyce and the displaced author

no reference to language here, or later on in Stephen's visually based aesthetic, in which 'the image ... must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others' (p.218). Thus Stephen, despite his stylistic derivativeness (in the rhythms of Newman as well as the swooning of Pater) assumes throughout that there is no problem with language as such, which is for the expression of the artist's inner self. And his success in this is perpetually implied by the narrator, who makes Stephen's words adequate to reality by incorporating them in his own commentary: 'Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slow drifting clouds, dappled and seaborne' (p.171). This sly insertion of a phrase just after its status has been put in dispute raises a question close to modernist and postmodernist concerns. What is it that shapes reality, consciousness, or 'vision' or the 'soul' in the vague terms in which Stephen conceives them, or language? The former option lies in the tradition from James to Virginia Woolf (who subordinates the questions raised by Bernard the 'phrase maker' to her own vision), where writing is assimilated to seeing (as in the George Eliot example cited at the outset). The latter runs through 'The Waste Land', through 'Finnegans Wake' to postmodern writing, where with a relativism deriving from Saussure and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language, and the specifically literary conventions used by the author may be seen as being in control. This contrast is also found in the antithesis between the idea of language in epiphany as a revelation of the nature of a thing (as still, for example, in Roquentin's perception of the chestnut tree in 'La Nausee) as opposed to the use of the verbal phrase as talisman, so that the text may be a tissue of quotations as in Eliot, whose authority in 'The Waste Land' is dispersed away from him as author to the literary tradition. It is thus, for example, the relative absence of conspicuous quotation in 'Four Quartets that refocuses Eliot's work within the phenomenology of the single consciousness as it grapples with language. The first four sections of each quartet proclaim the successful (or psychologically convincing) resolution of the linguistic problems raised in the fifth sections. The 'whole consort' does indeed 'dance together' under the control of Proustian memory. Conscious reflection rather than 'literature' is thus re-established as a guide to the meaning of experience. Indeed in its implicit mysticism, 'Four Quartets' suggests that psychological experience can even resolve the discursive problems of theology. There is as I have already suggested an antithetical position to this in our sequence of texts portraying displaced authors. For it is customary in much postmodern experimental writing to allow that language or the 'lexical playfield' and its associated literary conventions are now in control; that there

65

Joyce and the displaced author

is no unified ’Cartesian' consciousness for the author, as Stephen and others seem to think, but only a disunified centre of consciousness, traversed by linguistic codes in life and by literary and artistic ones in the creation of art. [30] Thus when the writer tries to record his experience, he finds, as did Roquentin, that it becomes an adventure: 'for the most banal of events to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient to recount it'. [31] But the adventure of writing (ecriture) has its own laws which take the consciousness and its images captive. [32] We find this position reflected in John Barth's 'Life Story' in which the basic problem facing the writer is the grappling with conventions of a purely literary and indeed critical kind. Here an author - 'he' - decides 'this time to tell his tale from start to finish in a conservative, "realistic", unself-conscious way'. [33] But, as we noted earlier, it occurs to him that he himself may be a character in fiction. He is thus both a 'real person' as the implied author of 'these lines' of the text, and a fiction, since he has this as a premise for his fiction and also because, as he 'is writing a fictional account of this conviction', then 'he has indisputably a fictional existence in his account, replicating what he suspects to be his own situation'.[ 34 ] This may seem clear; unfortunately, Barth invents further writers, D, E, F, G, and so on and thus opens up a long regressive series of Chinese boxes within his life story, so that by the time we get to the second paragraph (for I have so far outlined only the opening narrative manoeuvres of the story), we find the perhaps correct observation: What a dreary way to begin a story he said to himself upon reviewing his long introduction. Not only is there no 'ground situation', but the prose style is heavy and somewhat old-fashioned, like an English translation of Thomas Mann. [35] Here we have (quite apart from our doubt about who 'he' may be by now, displaced as he is from Barth by so many letters of the alphabet) that stylistic distantiation we looked at earlier, but one which has become explicit, so that it no longer reflects a parodic distance to be reconciled by the reader, but is wholly the responsibility of the 'author'. This author (or these authors) arc* writing their own commentary, so that the reflexive qualities of the piece become critical ones. The reader is not co-operative author, but theoretical critic, whose interests have to be very different indeed from those of 'his wife and adolescent daughters, who for that matter preferred life to literature and read fiction when at all for entertainment'. [36] Thus the writer in his alphabetised manifestations may wish to write a fiction about 'lithe-limbed Gloria' or to be 'in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some

66

Joyce and the displaced author

piece of avant-garde preciousness’[37] or to produce a fiction containing 'characters to love as well as ditto to despise'[38] and so on, but he is going to resist the temptation. For as long as these critical worries dominate him, he is incapable of doing what all the writers we have discussed so far do, which is to 'eschew overt self-conscious discussion of the narrative process' and to write a story leading to 'an ex¬ citing climax and denouement'. [39] He thus teases and insults the reader (as a 'dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bas¬ tard'[40] and makes his imagined expectations the basis for a story that is never told, while he tortures himself with the fear, like that of Scheherazade, of death as the symbolic end¬ ing of his tale when 'he' as a fictional narrator will cease to exist. He in fact concludes with a sexual pun, which as anticlimactic climax to Life Story equates the end of writing with the act of sex, and curiously parallels in its sly indication of a sexual ending the erotic conclusions to 'Death in Venice and to sections III and IV of 'A Portrait': 'Happy Birthday' said his wife et cetera, kissing his et cetera to obstruct his view of the end of the sentence he was nearing the end of, playfully refusing to be nay-said so that in fact he did at last as did his fictional character end his ending story endless by interruption, cap his pen .[41]

IV I return now to my theoretical motive for discussing Joyce's and other portraits of artists as displaced authors. This is to reply to a position taken recently by a number of critics, in particular by Barthes and Foucault, which is reflected also in the work of Derrida. They attempt to defend a notion of writing, and a new context for its interpretation, which does away with the author, 'for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin, so that all identity is lost'. [42] Once any such prejudice concerning origin is removed, writing can be seen as a self-enclosed system, 'the practice of the symbol itself' in which the author 'enters into his own death' as 'writing begins'. [43] Thus far Barth seems to agree with Barthes. . One motive for thus doing away with the author is, it seems, ideological: Barthes notes that the status of the author has changed through history from that of the impersonal shamanic mediator to the era in which the author has 'prestige as an individual. It is this 'positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the "person" of the author'. [44] He .still L/V/JL ^ -1 histories and so on. Foucault takes the same hne: T reigns’ in

67

Joyce and the displaced author

the authorial function is one of ownership and appropriation, and the prejudice in favour of the author's authority is like that of the Christian exegete in 'trying to prove the value of a text by the author's saintliness'. [45] But it is of course precisely such questions concerning the social and moral status of the artist that are put at issue in all our portraits of artists, from Aschenbach as teacher to Barth and his fear of death. For the writer who dramatises his own role is insisting on his particular relationship to society, at the very least of his readers. Thus the realist who shares objective points of reference upon his world with his readers may attempt to dissolve his role into that of the historian; Aschenbach is seen abdicating from the transparency of his socially acceptable work into an alienation mediated by his own fantasised Hellenic myth, Stephen 'will not serve', Roquentin's writing is part of his 'adieu' to the bourgeois 'salauds' who surround him (and involves renouncing the role of historian), Barth works within the cosy domestic privacy of his own imagination, subject as it is to the rules of the academic market-place, and so on, up to John Fowles's Daniel Martin, whose work as a film script writer shows the equivocal relationship of the author to art and to society in our own time. [46] So a desire to dismiss any concern for the status of the writer because it reflects a capitalist ideology is going to have some difficulty with those texts which explicitly concern themselves with that status. 'Auctorem expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.' One of the problems faced by critics of this kind, is like that faced by Marxists: there are few or not texts which project the state of affairs which they wish to bring about. And, as we shall see, even experimental texts which may seem to offer hope may let them down. The arguments of Barthes and others run contrary to our examples in another way, for in seeing the text as a symbolic practice, they wish to celebrate the triumph of language over consciousness. The author is supposed to disappear when, as Mallarme is so popularly supposed to have done, he grasps 'the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then has been supposed to be its owner', so that 'language speaks, not the author'. [47] There are two main objections to this. The first runs parallel to those we have already made: none of our authors seems willing to make this sacrifice. We saw how their texts dramatise a struggle for the command of language, and the implied lack of it, from unconscious parody (which allows a past author to speak through one) through fluctuations of style, to the partial abdication from responsibility in the use of quotation, to the loss of it in 'dream logic'. So there indeed may be a sense of language speaking rather than the author, but in a context in which we can see that the point of the texts is still to show the attempt to make language adequate to the expression of an inner experience. This was particularly

68

Joyce and the displaced author

the case for Stephen and for Eliot in the 'Four Quartets'. Even Barth seems elaborately to control literary conventions. Part of our judgment upon these portraits seems to involve a decision as to whether our authors succeeded in a task which Barthes suggests is impossible. , My second objection is more radical: it is that Barthes s argument may be misconceived in the first place. For his aim is to attack what one might call the old Cartesian notion of consciousness, central to Mann, early Joyce and early Sartre, for whom the consciousness tries to focus language upon some justifying inner experience. Barthes wishes to do away with this by arguing that there is no such inner. experience to correspond to, that persons are always simply within language, and traversed by its codes: Did he [the writer] wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely. [48] There are two arguments confused together here, the first to do with our conception of consciousness and the other to o with our interpretation of its linguistic products, to which we will come later. The first argument sees the subjectivity of the artist as always and already linguistic, so Stephen really should not have bothered to talk in terms of his soul and o 'vision' and of 'images', and Barth should have realised from the start that the constraints on his writing were always already literary conventions and had nothing to do with the expression of inner fears. These arguments have considerable force After all, Stephen's talk simply exploits an interconnected series of metaphors for inner experience, and we can only grasp what he means from within language. But the deterministic conclusion drawn from these a^™nts, which would purport to make all our talk of conflicti g authority and intention otiose is ™necess>^ For freauent structuralist principle, that the sell is int ers^ib j ective construct formed by cultural systems over which it has no control, is terribly confused. Suppose I am the semaphore man guiding planes in to land. The languag use is entirely determined by forms and conventions; but do I then have no control over it, could I not be Those wishing or intending and thus causing a plane to crasin Those who attack the notion of the speaker, the author or the po t of origin' thus confuse two propositions: (1) all t°U?h2 extent communication exist independently of us, and to that extent, maltp as thev did Stephen, what we are from our address r the universe But (2) "we can still be held responsible tor using them in quite specific ways, and indeed be aware o them* and thus use them creatively and hence with authority as 69

Joyce and the displaced author

do all our authors and their displaced personae. To say with Barthes and others that we are nothing other than our systems of reading and writing is to affirm the first of these propositions and to forget the second. Once we realise this, we are no longer tempted to banish the idea of the text as a message from implied author to reader. However, Barthes has a second line of attack on the author: he wishes to remove him because he limits what we can say in interpretation. 'To give a text an Author', he says, 'is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.'[49] And this, as we have seen in his later work and that of Derrida, is supposed to be undesirable. It cuts off the infinite explicabihty of words through other words. Thus the removal of the author 'utterly transforms' the modern text, so that 'it may be read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent'. [50] I wish to argue that such a position is doomed to failure. The question is really that raised by Humpty Dumpty: 'which is to be master, that's all.' For we can either see texts, as I have done, as areas of competing authority which lead back to the author as origin, and our notions of him, or accept the authority of the critic alone as 'player' with the text. There are good grounds often enough for preferring the former to the latter. For the argument confuses the ideological end of securing a freedom in interpretation for the (ultimately still authoritative) critic, and the actual function of the text in the world as a speech act, which latter notion is essential for certain types of interpretation central to the texts we have discussed. For how, without some notion of the author, can we detect and interpret parody and the use of quotation and irony? Such procedures essentially refer back to a speaker's intention, and the modes of interpretation associated with them cannot be simply legislated away, especially as we have seen that they are essential to the meanings of those texts which ironise their displaced authors. The second objection I wish to urge here to the Barthes/Foucault approach, is that, paradoxically enough in view of its advocacy of the 'free play' of the text, it ignores the fact that examples which might seem to allow for this free play always turn out to express the authority of the author. For even the Tudic'' text itself, as practised by Barth in his 'Funhouse' and by Robbe-Grillet in his novels since 'Projet pour une revolution a New York', perpetually asserts its authority and delimits its meanings by appeal to an implicit author. For they establish artistic modes of expression, and their freedom to contradict earlier realistic modes, as of importance. [51] They place the 'free' artist in a particular social role (an 'aesthetic' one rather than the historical one of the realist) and thus abdicate from one type of authority only to take on another, that of making us experience the linguistic and literary conventions of their own form. The postmodern 70

Joyce and the displaced author

experimental text perpetually demands this sort of interest, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the dialogue in 'Projet' which interrupts the narrative for some of the more banal objections to Robbe-Grillet's methods, for example the objection that the narrative is self-contradictory: 'You say at one time that the suffering girl was naked, and at another that she was wearing a red dress'> to which the reply is that although the narrative may seem to be about the same incident, it is really about a different one. [52] This authority (derived from the author's hidden hand, rearranging all those objects which Bratby would leave in place) is in fact perpetually asserted in this type of text, and particularly by the use of the 'mise en abyme'. Thus, for example, in 'La Jalousie' the protagonists are reading a novel very like the one we are reading. [53] This reflexivity perpetually reminds us of the artistic conventions being exploited by the author, which control our response. Thus even when the not fully determinable text offers to the reader some interpretative freedom, it never makes us absolutely free to play around anywhere we may choose in the language. Like the examples cited earlier, such as 'Mauberley', it controls our interpretative responses by getting us to co-operate with its author's procedures. Thus when Barthes asserts that the 'place' in which the multiplicity of the text is focused is 'the reader, not as. was hitherto said, the author' and that 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author', [54] he is right only if paradoxically enough the reader is willing to take on an authorial function. For those texts in which, as we have seen, the author is displaced, as a character within the fiction, or by reflexive features, or by both together, still legitimately exercise an authoritative control over the reader's responses. Indeed they are historically important for reminding us, not of the author's disappearance but of his varying status, and of the cunning ways in which his hand may be hidden. They may thus record interesting changes in the balance of power between author and reader-critic within the institution of literature, but the portrait of the artist at least will always implicitly look back to its origin, and thus remind us that all uses of language reflect determinable intentions. Some of the most interesting of these, as Joyce in his 'Portrait' reminds us, are indeed artistic ones.

NOTES 1

2 3

Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884) in Morris Shapira, ed. 'Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism' (Harmondsworth, 1968), p.80. Ibid., 80. Cf. , Michel Leiris, The Artist and His Model in R.Pen¬ rose and J.Golding, eds, 'Picasso 1881-1973' (London, 1973), pp.243ff, and especially plates 400, 420, 421. 71

Joyce and the displaced author

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26

John Fowles, 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (London, 1969), pp.387-8. Ibid., p.389. John Barth, 'Lost in the Funhouse' (London, 1968; Harmondsworth, 1972), p.120. Michel Foucault, What is an Author?, in J.V.Harari, ed., 'Textual Strategies' (London, 1980), p.141. Wayne Booth, The Problem of Distance in 'A Portrait of the Artist' in his 'The Rhetoric of Fiction' (Chicago, 1961), pp.323ff. Thomas Mann, 'Death in Venice' (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp.8ff. T.J.Reed, ed., 'Der Tod in Venedig' (Oxford, 1971), pp.159-62. Ibid., p.175. 'Death in Venice', p.ll. Ibid., p.12. Ibid., p.13. T.J.Reed, op.eit., p.44. Cf. Booth, op. cit. , pp.70ff and p.73. The problems of 'Death in Venice' in this respect are far more complicated than I have been able to indicate here; cf. Reed, op.eit., pp.44-51 and his 'Thomas Mann: the Uses of Tradition' (Oxford, 1974), pp.l44ff. Ian Watt, The First Paragraph of 'The Ambassadors' : an 'Explication' in Albert E.Stone, ed., 'The Ambassadors' (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969), pp.78 , 82. On this aspect of 'La Modification', see, e.g., Ann Jefferson, 'The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction' (Cambridge, 1980), pp.l02ff. Philip Roth, 'Portnoy's Complaint' (New York, 1969; London, 1971), p.309. Frank O'Connor, in Chester G.Anderson, ed., 'James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (New York, 1968), p.373. Reprint from his 'The Mirror in the Roadway' (London, 1955). Cf. Robert Scholes in Anderson, op. cit., pp. 469ff. I assume here a 'speech act theory' descending from M.P.Grice, Meaning, 'Philosophical Review' (1966), pp.377-88, elaborated in his 'Logic and Conversation' (unpublished manuscript, 1967), and since refined by John Searle, Marie Louise Pratt and many others. Cf. , e.g., John Espey, 'Ezra Pound's Mauberley' (London, 1955; Berkeley and London, 1974) pp.ISff and passim. Jonathan Raban, 'The Society of the Poem' (London, 1971), p.13. Cf. 'A la recherche du temps perdu', La Pleiade (Paris, 1969), III, pp.708-19. This remark implies an acceptance of the reading given by Margot Norris in her 'The Decentred Universe of 72

Joyce and the displaced author

27

28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53

54

Finnegans Wake* (Baltimore and London, 1976). Colin MacCabe's 'James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word' (London, 1979) exemplifies this tendency, though he seems to think that in 'A Portrait' 'we can locate Joyce’s position in the arrangement of discourses, of the montage' (p.68). He of course doubts that this is possible for 'Ulysses’. ’Death in Venice’, op.cit., p.76. J. S. Atherton in his edition of 'A Portrait' (London, 1964), p.249, identified Stephen's phrase as coming from Hugh Miller's ’The Testimony of the Rocks' (1869). I have tried to describe some of these features in my 'After the Wake' (Oxford, 1980). Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Nausea' (Harmondsworth, 1965), p.bi. This is a common notion in the criticism of the 'nouveau roman': see, e.g., Jean Ricardou, ’Problemes du nouveau roman' (Paris, Seuil, 1967), pp.56ff. John Barth, op.cit., p.120. Ibid., pp.l20ff. Ibid., p.121. Ibid. , p. 121. Ibid., p.123. Ibid. , p. 126. Ibid., p.124. Ibid. , p.130. Ibid p .41. I have put the full stop two spaces away from’ the last word to allow (as in the American editions) for the insertion of two letters by the reader presumably, 'is'. . . Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author in Stephen Heath, ed., 'Image-Music-Text' (London, 1977), p.142. Ibid. Ibid., p.143. Foucault, op.cit., p.148 and P-150London, Cf John Fowles, 'Daniel Martin' (London, 197/ 1978) pp.17ff, 68ff, 94ff, 144ff, 223ff, 289-96, 353ff, 427-32, 450ff and 585ff. Barthes, op.cit., p.143. Ibid., p.146. Ibid. -x irn Ibid., p. 145. Cf. Foucault, op.cit., See, e.g., John Sturrock, 'The French New Novel (Oxford, 1969), pp.4ff and passim. Alain Robbe-Grillet, ’Projet pour une revolution a New York’ (Paris, Minuit, 1970), p.190. The dialogue begins on p.188. Alain Robbe-Grillet, ’Jealousy' (repr nr> 42f Jefferson, op.cit., pp.l93ff, 'Topologie d'une cite fantome' (Paris, terms of the 'mise en abyme'. Barthes, op. cit., p.148. 73

London, 1960), gives a reading of „ 1976) entirely in

5

LEAVING THE ISLAND Seamus Heaney

('Leaving the Island' is envisaged as part of a sequence of poems set on Station Island in Lough Derg in County Donegal. A Pilgrimage to the island, supposedly initiated by Saint Patrick, has been part of the penitential sub-culture of Irish Catholicism for generations.)

Hail Glorious Saint Patrick! The pilgrims in the boat were singing when the throttle opened and spray came gusting and each lazing note

warped as it lifted off in gusts of wind. Close packed, loaded deep, we sang our way across the choppy water, like a band

of starving monks out on the western sea. But we had done with peregrinatio. Lough Derg flowed up, flowed under, back, away

astern and Station Island was a mirage now already as we readied for the land nearing and widening up beyond the bow.

Like a convalescent, I took the hand stretched down from the jetty, sensed again an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

to find the helping hand still gripping mine, scribe-cold and bony, but whether to guide or to be guided I could not be certain

for the tall man in step at my side seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

74

Leaving the Island

Then I knew him in a flash out there on the tarmac among the cars, wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice fluent with the vowels of all rivers came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's.

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite as a steel nib's cursives, quick and clean, and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, 'What I did on my own was done for others but not done with them - and this you have failed to learn. Your obligation

is not discharged by pious exercise. When I refused to take the sacrament I made my life an instrument of grace

so all of you had more abundant life. I was at nobody's service the way you are at theirs - ' and the ashplant

went jerking backwards towards the landing place where the last pilgrims were still hanging about. 'This was a backsliding enterprise.

Get back in harness. The main thing is to write for your own joy in it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don't be so earnest.

Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes. Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

75

Leaving the Island

It was as if I had stepped free into space alone with nothing that I had not known already. Raindrops blew in my face

as I came to: 'Old father, mother's son, there is an entry in Stephen's diary for April the thirteenth, a revelation

set among my stars. That day's my birthday and those words are vagitus in my ears the collect for a new epiphany,

the Feast of the Holy Tundish!' 'Who cares', he said, 'any more? The English language belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires.

a waste of time for somebody your age. That subject people stuff is a cod's game, infantile - like your peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. The way to cement community is the dolphin's way: swim

out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency, echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.' The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

76

6

NIGHTMARES OF HISTORY: JAMES JOYCE AND THE PHENOMENON OF ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE W.J. McCormack The Irish language, Mahaffy said Is a couple of books written clerkly, A dirty word in a song or two 'Matter a damn' says Berkeley.

I In 1898, writing in the magazine 'Outlook', Joseph Conrad observed dryly: 'Life is life, and art is art - and truth is hard to find in either'. [1] His official topic was the sea-fiction of Captain Marryat and Fenimore Cooper, but the real object of this thought was Kipling's notorious line: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.[2] Reading Conrad nowadays we find it easy to assimilate his treatment of imperial expansion and exploitation to a comprehensive criticism of his fiction. 'Heart of Darkness' is a set text in schools and (as Lionel Trilling remarked of 'Ulysses') it has lost its power to disturb. Comparing Conrad and Joyce, we would want - initially at least - to locate their powers of disturbance in different areas - Conrad's in his moral irony, Joyce's in his stylistic disorientation. And yet this is to ignore the history of response to both writers: in 1922 readers knew they were disturbed by a mimesis of masturbation; in 1982 readers know they are not disturbed by imperialism as symbol. Here we should stress the continuity which leads from the novels of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford to the more distinctly experimental canon of modernist fiction. In considering the Irish contribution to modernist literature in English, we have available an all-too-prominent political timetable in the events which led from the demand for Irish home rule within the United Kingdom to the establishment of the Irish Free State. The recent renaissance of interest in Joyce's politics has not, however, been characterised by any inquiry into the dominant political, social, and economic relationships in which and of which he wrote. Among these the role of language as at once the mirror and lamp of social 77

Nightmares of history

I

reality is crucial. In this regard we should stress the essential unity - that is, historical continuity - oL-alL.Joyce's Tiction from 'Dubliners' to ’Finnegans Wake'. A casual glance at pages from each of these books will apparently jeopardise this claim, but only apparently so continuity in a period of revolutionary 'dRhfige and frustration may not be confuse^ wTtft constancy. From Ivy Day in the Committee Room to the dream of Earwicker, Joyce strove to-fmd^forms in which history aridtechnique become a single problem. No doubt a defimtioffTof modernism" centred"” on technique could be conveniently introduced here, but definitions in their exhaustive lengtr have the effect of excluding as often as they include. Rather' than deal in identifying characteristics, I jypuld approach the V process of definition with the problematic relationship between |4ext and world, a feature which is found in diachronic form in uv^*att8nTra%dd relation of past and present manifest in various mechanical concepts of history. Hugh Kenner, writing specifically about 'Ulysses', alludes to fthe enchained determinisms in which Western high thought was immobilizing 1 itself at the century's turn',' but insists on restricting his iirsTgKF to space and physic^. [3] Textual hermeticism and historical discontinuity - these are not so much principles of modernism as they are underlying anxieties. Joyce constantly approaches his task as fictionalist conscious of the dual character of modernist anxiety, and his awareness is heightened by his experience of history as something other than academic facticity. In the preface to 'The Political Unconscious', Fredric Jameson emphasises the virtually transhistorical imperative of dialectical thought, 'Always historicize!'[4] It is not enough merely to place the object in its historical context: the reader, the subject (so to speak) of criticism is also historically placed. The interaction of these historicised objects and subjects is the proper concern of criticism. Conrad and Kipling serve to remind us of thg^ larger perspective in which modernist literature in English has its genesis, crisis in the Empire, commercial exploitation of Africa and Asia^ the arms race in Europe. Joyce's early reading of socialist thinkers should not be seen solely as a personal trait, a sensitive rebel's response to the inadequacies of Irish nationalism. It is intimately part of the emergence of the nexus of political and aesthetic concerns which distinguish the Irish contribution English modernism. As a metropolitan colony within the United Kingdom, Irish society was especially susceptible to the contradictory movements of British domestic and global policy. Joyce's own account of the society in which he wrote is well known. Of 'Dubliners' he said: 'My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis' ('Letters', II, p.134). Conventionally, this analysis is taken as being somehow literally true; Dublin in 1904 was

,

78

Nightmares of history

static, immobile, devoid of the ability to translate intention into action, that is, 'paralysed'. The image was certainly one that appealed to Joyce, for on 7 January 1904 he had concluded the semi-fictional essay 'A Portrait of the Artist' with the declaration: JflTTo these multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity tj but surely engenderable there, he would give the word. Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightning of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracries [sic] are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action. [5] What emerges from this curious manifesto is not so much an impressive politics far from it but our renewed lapprehension of the metaphorical basis of Joyce's idea of society as paralysed. His devotion to Flaubert and the art of mneteentK-cenfury 'France is more than a search for le mot juste, but implicates that French preoccupation with disease, especially socially reprobated disease, as a total metaphor for social reality. [6] The organicist metaphors vvTiicH consfiffTTe Joyces political longing culminate in 'the general paralysis of an insane society', which resounds with the medical shorthand for the terminal stages of severe syphilitic infection - general paralysis of the insane, GPI.[7] The artist portrayed in the essay, however, will give the word by which sexual generation and the birth of a sane society will issue. If the aetiology of this paralysis be considered, we discover that Joyce's theme is sexual excess^ as much as it is sexual decay and impotence, that behind the absence of motion implicit in paralysis, there lies a history of uncontrolled - because unformulated - motion. | The interaction of sexuality and language in Joyce’s fiction is immediately accessible in Eveline, which has a good claim to be representative of his short stories. The story is deliberately divided by a single asterisk into two parts. The first is based on a mental present within which Eveline is indirectly reported to meditate on past events in her life:

1

Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother's sake. ('Dubliners', pp.38-9) The indirect reporting of Eveline's recollection of her father's threat creates a stylistic feature of great opacity. One might 79

Nightmares of history

have expected him to threaten in terms of what he would not do but for her mother's sake. [8] The particular form which Joyce has chosen both emotively intensifies the threat and formally suppresses it, and this is in keeping with Eveline's ultimate inability actively to quit this life with her father. Technically, the crucial feature here is the implication for Joyce's narrative of the different conventions governing spoken language and written language. If we say that, with Joyce, technique has thematic ambitions this is not to suggest some internalising 'fiction-about-fiction' quality; on the contrary, this feature is one of the means by which Joyce draws the reader's attention to the possibilities of revitalised intercourse between language and social reality. One reason for taking Eveline as typical of 'Dubliners' is precisely this feature. From The Sisters to The Dead the characters frequently become engaged in a false consciousness of some crucial moment in tHeir past or conjure deliberately some anticipated moment in the future. Aware of the frailty of their mental present which, paradoxically, binds them with an iron control, they seek to establish their first-person-singular existences more objectively, even if that additional security should take the form of anguish or guilt or pain. In Eveline this development is discernible on two levels: psychologically, the girl hears now in the mental present sounds which remind her of her mother's last night. Stylistically, the reader encounters 'the odour of dusty cretonne', a phrase with which the story has opened. Both levels initiate at this point a process of recursus: as she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being - that life of com¬ monplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly with foolish insistence: - Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun! She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape. ('Dubliners', p.41) Her ultimate topographical immobility - her inability to join Frank on the boat - is counterbalanced by this fluidity of movement on the temporal plane, 'she heard again her mother's voice'. Paralysis at the barrier is the counterpart of an excess of movement between past and present. And within the story this ternary opposition is expressed at a further linguistic level, for Eveline who hears words that are not spoken never speaks. Eveline cannot be said to act: instead she opts. Her opting for the internally known and structured world of her father's house is consistent with the non-emergence of her ego (grammatically her 'I') in the narrative. At a further level it is consistent with the strategy adopted by Mr Duffy in that 80

Nightmares of history

most chilling of the 'Dubliners' stories, A Painful Case: 'He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense' ('Dubliners', p.120). It would be quite feasible at this point to adopt Freud's distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams as a means of analysing the critical and therapeutic function of Joyce's narratives. For, just as Freud takes over the model of a philological hermeneutic in developing the techniques of psychoanalysis - and this at the moment when philology was engaged in its own realignment with 'Celticism' - so Joyce creates within his characterisation dreams of the past ('nightmares of history') of which only the manifest content is immediately intelligible to the characters. The reader's function of course involves the elucidation of a latent meaning according to which the narrative is transformed. By means of a technique introduced by Joyce at a late stage into Aeolus, a newspaper caption provides the title for the story involving Mr Duffy: A Painful Case is the subtitle of a newspaper article fulsomely cited in the narrative. The phrase is of course a journalistic euphemism for suicide, and Duffy's conscious efforts are directed towards consolidating the euphemistic view, towards repressing the latent accusation of his own moral responsibility. In Eveline, the recollection of the heroine's mother's dying words results in their apparent meaninglessness, again involving the repression of a latent meaning. The site of Eveline's traumatic and contradictory opting for escape is the inscrutable recollected phrase, 'Derevaun Seraun'. Considered in relation to a systemic account of the story's language the phrase is strictly meaningless. Brendan O Hehir has written that the words are 'probably gibberish but phonetically like Irish', and proceeds to offer possible original Irish Gaelic words of which these are corruptions. [9] The range of possibilities becomes teasingly wide, but one particular combination would reconstruct the dying mother's words as (with English translations): dearbhan seiran (small) genuine thing, little sea-anemone Here perhaps is a thematically relevant allusion to a creature who, like Eveline, clings to the rocks and will not breast the waves. The distortion of this ur^message might be located at either of two levels, on that of 'the old woman's death-bed confusion, or on that of Eveline's recollection. As with 'he had begun to ... say what he would do to her' the reader has no access to the formal alternative of further information from the past. The narrative method of the stories mimics the dreamer's censorship of his or her dream, but in doing so by means of 81

Nightmares of history

meaningless words draws attention to the act of censorship. The words, as Eveline recollects them, both stimulate and frustrate her wish to escape. 'Meaningless' is a relative term, and the corruption is more specific than a mere phonological inexactitude. Words of one language are recalled within another, a problem which in synchronic terms is solved by translation but which diachronically involves the largest perspective of nineteenth-century Irish history, the displacement of Gaelic by English as the vernacular language. Nor can the insistent New Critic protect 'Derevaun Seraun' from a dialectical relation to history: he can neither integrate the words to a formal analysis nor can he (with any confidence) declare them absolutely meaningless. Officially committed to denying the significance of linguistic change, he is confronted by an enactment of linguistic change at two levels - that of the displacement of one language by another within the story so as briefly to reverse the historical displacement, and that of the corruption of certain words into other words so as to require the elucidation of some latent meaning. The broader historical area in which this feature of Joyce's work should be read may be illuminated by reference to a hitherto unnoticed metaphor in the story. The first paragraph of Eveline reads in its entirety: 'She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired' ('Dubliners', p.37). The significant, neglected word is of course 'invade'; the rest of the paragraph can be seen as muted anticipations of the story's end. The active form of the first verb ('She sat ...') alters after 'invade' to a series of passive and decreasingly concrete forms ('Her head was leaned ...'). The military metaphor operates within the paragraph to initiate stages of Eveline's opting for inaction. Within the story as a whole it is taken up only once, in the second part, when the crowd on the quays is particularised as 'soldiers with brown baggages' (p.42). Rather than conclude that the metaphor has simply been exploited in narrative terms, we should note the dialectical operation of technique and theme in Joyce's fiction, by which means we note also Joyce to be a critical modernist. For the last end of Eveline is a silence which transcends nar¬ rative method: 'He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recog¬ nition' ('Dubliners', p.43). The invasion of the first paragraph marks the commencement of the English language's advance within the narrative of Eveline's reverie, which in turn centres upon a disruption of that advance. Richard Ellmann comments that Joyce's Eveline is a counterpart to 'The Countess Cathleen': accordingly Yeats's play 'had extolled the virtue of selfsacrifice' and Joyce's story 'evokes the counter virtue of 82

Nightmares of history

self-realization'. [10] Though this seems simultaneously to go too far in interpretation and not far enough, we can agree that behind both nominal heroines lies the personification of Ireland as Patient Woman, 'an tsean bhean bhocht'. Yet Eveline's refusal to travel can only be ambiguously related to the troops with brown baggages, for the events of the narrative cannot be elevated to the level of theme if by such a reading we exclude once again the critical function of the therapeutic fiction. If they are departing invaders does Eveline opt for some domestic form of home rule in North Richmond Street; alternatively does she refuse to travel with them and by so refusing acknowledge their continuing power over her is she an abstentionist? While resisting such simplified allegories, we still may remind ourselves that in analysing the imagery of Joyce's fiction we attend positively to the concrete social realities both of the text's historical context and of our own historical condition as readers. For the Marxist critic the phrase 'language and social reality' contains only one redundant word 'and' - though one should not be led on from this observation to any easy synthesis. In the present discussion we are engaged with a crucial element in English modernist literature, the Anglo-Irish Renaissance, and especially with its most problematic figure, James Joyce. I have already complained of the palpably obvious chronology which the politics nf Irish offers in—parallel—to—tiiat_ movement.yce was closer than Yeats or Synge to the social rrealiTIdS—which made Ireland potentially revolutionary in this period nf Eiirnpp°" mnp consequence of this intimacy might be described as Joyce's lack of illusion as to the odds-against chances of revolution in Ireland. A comparison with Yeats in terms of their attitudes to Hitler would be banal; a more profound comparison might focus on the manner in which each responded to the late-nineteenth-century legacy of imperialist formalism conveniently represented here by Kipling. 'The Ballad of East and West', with its initial autonomous self-defining easts and wests, rapidly moves to a fourth line assimilable to Yeats's Blue Shirt melodies:

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! [11] Deplorable sentiment apart, one notes conflict and cancellation as resulting from the unmediated valorisation of east and west. Eveline poses equally unmediated and mutually excluding alternatives: instead of conflict and cancellation, we find paralysis.

83

Nightmares of history

II In 1904 'the death of the Irish language' was already a cliche, and attempts to revive Gaelic were already under way. As a student at the Royal University, Joyce remained unimpressed by the arguments of the Gaelic League though he briefly attended League meetings. Pressure from this quarter is not prominent among the difficulties young Stephen Dedalus encountered. Though Stephen's diary records that he fears the old man with red-rimmed horny eyes who had spoken Gaelic to John Francis Mulrennan, the entry significantly ends, 'no, I mean him no harm' ('A Portrait', p.256). The controversies aroused by the Gaelic League's revivalism produced significantly paradoxical reactions. Thus, two professors in Trinity College sought to show that Gaelic was purely a scholarly concern involving venerable texts rather than contemporary speakers. [12] This relegation of the spoken language necessarily involved the reduction of scholarship and criticism to the level of a mechanical philology, lest 'Celticism' and its attendant politico-racial values take root. The Gaelic League and associated revivalist language movement are significant not solely for some mystical 'volk-ish' quality inherent in the residual vernacular, but as the corollary to the emasculation of English as spoken and written in the metropolitan colony. Of course, related developments affected Victorian England, where genteel speech among the middle classes came increasingly to resemble the conventions of written language. But in Ireland language change took place against the background of that larger transformation - the displacement of Gaelic by English. The historical causes of that larger phenomenon are complex - the penetration of rural Ireland by commerce, the demographic upheaval of the Famine, populist politics and journalism might be relevantly cited. However, if we look for more than a descriptive analysis we should consider if the underlying characteristic of the Gaelic language central to its eclipse is not sexual. High fertility, illegitimacy, early marriages and large families were associated with those southern and western areas in which the 1840s Famine had been most devastating. For the most part, these were also Gaelic-speaking areas. To speak Gaelic was to identify oneself with the stricken, dangerously fecund community, to distance oneself from charity and relief. Moreover, the Gaelic language did not distinguish - and English increasingly did - between polite and coarse registers in describing bodily functions, in swearing, and so forth. (To speak Gaelic was to make explicit aspects of human biology which English was tending to disguise.) Within the United Kingdom, where its political role was anomalous and its economy divergent, Ireland experienced an intense cultural trauma through the medium of linguistic change. Other areas of Britain underwent similar if less intense alterations of 84

Nightmares of history

convention - Thomas Hardy's fiction provides eloquent evidence on this point - but the close bond between moral, economic and linguistic change is distinctively Irish. Nevertheless, this pattern is not uniquely Irish nor is it the result simply of famine: increased fertility in the nineteenth century was common in Europe, and the abandonment of Gaelic necessitated by migration had already commenced prior to 1845. The Famine, however, provided a traumatic account of social and economic change and rendered it interpretable as cultural change. [13] In turn, the cultural significance of the Irish experience is not its uniqueness but precisely the manner in which it impinges upon the development of British society, both domestic and imperial, at the turn of the century. In recent years, the work of Jacques Lacan has emphasised the interaction of language and sexuality in a revitalising of Freud's theories: Irish cultural traumas, as reflected in Joyce's fiction, had manifested such an interaction in the years of Freud's apprenticeship. The mobility engendered by mid-century famine and its consequences contributed signally to the perception of a Catholic middle class in Ireland as a category rather than as a formation. For the most part such 'perceivers' were of course members of a bourgeoisie which had since 1792 sailed under the colours of a 'Protestant ascendancy'. [14] Yeats's Celtic Twilight sought a 'dream of the noble and the beggarman', and thus sought both to acknowledge the immiseration of the nineteenth century and to leap-frog back across the Famine to an era of whiggish hegemony.[ 15] In more specifically linguistic terms, he sought a cultural synthesis under the guise of 'a written speech'. [16] This synthesis longed to exclude the middle classes and urban life, the material which Joyce chose for all his fiction. In 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', he integrates one potent image of rural life by way of Davin's account to Stephen of his encounter with the young woman in the Ballyhoura mountains. The fertility and guilelessness of the woman, as described to him by Davin, prompts Stephen to see her 'as a type of her race and of his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness' ('A Portrait', pp. 186-7). The immediately succeeding pages chart important stages of Stephen's development - his response to the slogan 'Vive l'lrlande', his acknowledgment that 'the Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space', his discussion with the English dean of studies first of Thomistic aesthetics and then of the notorious discriminations of the English language itself, as spoken in England and Drumcondra ('A Portrait', pp. 187-94). In the days immediately prior to his 'flight' Stephen returns in his diary to an image of residual Gaelic Ireland, this time in the form of John Francis Mulrennan's interlocutor rather than the bare-breasted revenant of Davin's recollection. By this 85

Nightmares of history

point Stephen has achieved some solider hold upon the ordinary world, and with it a more relaxed attitude to the rural, recently-Gaelic world reported upon by Mulrennan/Synge. Nevertheless, the aesthete has not been dissolved, though his aestheticism is directed against a specific target, the early poetry of W.B.Yeats: April 6, later. Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world. ('A Portrait', p.255) Together with the parody of Synge Yeats, the recurrent tabulation of attention to the historical moment Furthermore, Joyce's aesthetic (as superficial aestheticism) indicates that of art lies not only in its historical future reception.

and the paraphrasing of dates serves to draw of the novel's climax. distinct from Stephen's the meaning of the work genesis but also in its

Ill Joyce's letters often give the impression of being written by Gerty MacDowell; they hang their little displays of fabric and fabrication on the most tenuous associative line. In this they also reveal their genuine profundity. Writing to his brother Stanislaus in January 1907, he recorded his reaction to Kipling's 'Plain Tales from the Hills': If I knew Ireland as well as R.K. seems to know India I fancy I could write something good. But it is becoming a mist in my brain rapidly. I have the idea of three or four little immortal stories in my head but I am too cold to write them. Besides, where's the good. Ibsen, of course, may have liked that kind of sport [i.e. total absorption in his work regardless of his environment]. But then he never broke with his set. I mean, imagine Roberts or Fay, with an allowance from the Irish Republic moving round Europe with correspondence tied at his heels like a goat's tether and you have H[enrik] I[bsen]. ('Letters', II, p.205) Joyce did not live to see an Irish Republic established. The letter to Stanislaus, however, indicates that as early as 1907 he envisaged no very positive relationship between the author as an old man and any new-born state. In 1922, after the publication of 'Ulysses', he was indeed approached by Desmond Fitzgerald (an Irish Free State government minister) who 86

Nightmares of history

proposed advancing Joyce's name to the Nobel Committee. Of this scheme he was highly sceptical, and in the event Yeats got the government nomination and the prize, Joyce being the first to send a telegram of congratulation. [17] The historical 'gap' between the setting of 'Ulysses' (1904) and its eventual publication (1922) is crossed by the electrical charge of these altered relations between Joyce and his native land. The stor¬ ies of 'Dubliners', like 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', posit a future by means of the placing of the reader in relation to the therapeutic narrative, a future which is in the simplest sense real. 'Ulysses', on the other hand, looks for¬ ward to the present. Joyce's fiction after 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' consists of two historical novels. The point, a crude but necessary one, is clarified if juxtaposed with T.S.Eliot's fam¬ iliar description of the Homeric parallel as a way of ordering 'the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world'. [18] Among critics adhering to versions of Marxism, opinions differ: Theodor Adorno's response to Georg Lukacs's dismissal of Joyce as a decadent is worth recalling in the con¬ text of a discussion of the historical character of his fiction: Even in Joyce's case we do not find the timeless image of man which Lukacs would like to foist on him, but man as the product of history. For all his Irish folklore, Joyce does not invoke a mythology beyond the world he depicts, but instead strives to mythologize it, i.e. to create its essence, whether benign or maleficent, by applying the technique of stylization so despised by the Lukacs of today. One is almost tempted to measure the achievements of mod¬ ernist writing by inquiring whether historical moments are given substance as such within their works, or whether they are diluted into some sort of timelessness. [ 19] Generally speaking,, one welcomes this kind of discrimination, especially Adorno's insistence that 'art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large number of mediating links. Nevertheless, as art it remains the antithesis of that which is the case.'[20] However, 'man as the product of history' is one version of the overwhelming question that Stephen Dedalus asks himself on his visit to Dublin from Paris. In 1908, during his pre-Marxist phase, Lukacs defined a condition of emergent modernism which in his subsequent work he strove to dissolve, sometimes with subtlety, sometimes with other means. 'Every written work', he observed, 'even if it is no more than a consonance of beautiful words, leads us to a great door - through which there is no passage.'[21] As a general principle this urgently needs to be historicised and particularised, first by emphasising its reference to emergent modernism rather than 'every written work', and second by pointing to its status as a description of a condition implicit in 87

Nightmares of history

the modernist aesthetic rather than as an objective account of modernist texts. It is of course cognate with Conrad’s dictum on the elusiveness of truth in either ’Life’ or 'Art' when these are hermetically isolated and hypostacised. The essential qual¬ ity which is jeopardised is that mediated access to history which Joyce's critical method in 'Dubliners' had sought to re¬ establish. In seeking to historicise Joyce's contribution to European modernism we cannot afford to neglect the colonial condition of the society upon which he chose to concentrate, and its potential transformation in the years between 1882 and 1922. In the case of 'Dubliners' and 'A Portrait' the temporal discrepancy between historical setting and composition is min¬ imal, though in the later of these it is perceptibly widening through the agency of the biographical narrative. With 'Ulys¬ ses' the discrepancy achieved structural proportions - '16 June 1904' in 'Ulysses' embodies a function far more significant than 'April 6, later' in 'A Portrait'. In political terms, the transition encompasses the emergence of the Free State and the modifi¬ cation of Ireland's colonial relationship to Britain. Hugh Kenner has likened one interpretation of 'Ulysses' to Laplace's cosmos - 'all chains of action and reaction are folded in, coupled end to end, determined.' Such a cosmos, he adds in a telling metaphor, 'perpetually trembles in its sleep while undergoing no real events'. [22] When we meet Stephen in the opening episode of 'Ulysses' he is 'displeased and sleepy' ('Ulysses', p.9). His night's rest has been disturbed by moans emitted by the dreaming Haines who shortly summarises AngloIrish relations in the phrase 'It seems history is to blame' (p.27). Haines is a Laplacian. Stephen, on the other hand, has a different account to offer, though it is mediated only to the reader by means of the famous monologue interieure: In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat. Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No, mother. Let me be and let me live. ('Ulysses', p.16) The substance of this passage has reached us just five pages earlier: Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving 88

Nightmares of history

off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. ('Ulysses', p.ll) The repetition certainly constitutes one element of Stephen's developing rhythm in the prose, the curve of his emotion. But rhythm here is not simply a matter of musical approximation in verbal form; it has specific conceptual effects also. In addition to the newly introduced liturgical quotation, we are now given an intensified evocation of the ghostly figure, in phrases devoid of finite verbs and hence seeking temporarily to demolish time. When, in Circe, we encounter by way of phantasmagoric stage-direction another variation upon this passage, it is to inaugurate Stephen's apocalyptic reconciliation of Time and Space, the rigid polarities of both his aesthetics and his anxious metaphysics: STEPHEN: Nothung! (He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) ('Ulysses', p.517) Just as the grammatical immediacy of 'Her eyes on me to strike me down' does not mimic a scene in a novel, so the conclusive imagery of Circe records no resolution of Stephen's psychological difficulties - 'Ulysses' is no pseudo-biographical study in realism. These variations on the rhythm of Stephen's nightmare serve, however, to relate other themes in the fiction, and indeed the focus here is central to Joyce's work as a whole: just as 'Let me be and let me live' recalls Stephen's ultimate ability to face the horny-eyed Old Man of the 'Portrait' diary, so the death-bed recalls Eveline's mother and her 'secret \yords'. Joyce had begun to orchestrate a sentence on the theme of the revenant mother as early as 1904: its passage to 1922 is also its passage through the styles of 'Ulysses'. [23] These themes are in essence history and aesthetics which, at the outset, are for Stephen the imposed starting-point and longed-for destination of his search for authenticity. But, as problematic hero, Stephen's most potent characteristic is his recognition of the polar interaction of these values in his particular situation. Dream, the involuntary experience in a subjective present of events which ostensibly occurred in the past, is the dominant metaphor employed in 'Ulysses' to represent this crucial condition. The novel opens with a disagreement between the wakened dreamers, reaches its climax in a stylistic transformation of matter into manner, quantity into quality when the Circe episode adopts the literary equivalent of dream and its analysis. [24] Finally, Molly's soliloquy transforms the monologue interieure (which has 89

Nightmares of history

earlier detained Stephen within his search) into a renewed balance of past and present and future. Yet it is as early as Nestor that Stephen makes explicit, with a grammatical precision we neglect at our peril, the importance of this pervasive metaphor: History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake' ('Ulysses', p.40). Commentators have been casual in referring to Joyce and 'the nightmare of history'. That misquoted phrase contains an ambiguity Stephen is anxious to avoid, though he explores its grammatical base in another context. Meditating on the words 'amor matris' he notes and implies the co-existence of a subjective genitive (the love of a mother for X) and an objective genitive (the love of X for a mother) in the Latin construction. 'The nightmare of history' offers a parallel at least within the different conventions of another language: it may point to a nightmare which history endures (say, the Reign of Terror, Senator McCarthy's ascendancy, or the plagues of Egypt, according to your taste); or it may point to the enduring of history by X in the manner of a nightmare. The distinction is less than absolute, just as history and the life of an individual may not be absolutely distinguished - and here the parallel between Latin and English genitives reveals its limitations. But the form of words which Joyce has Stephen adopt, together with Joyce's obsessional elimination of perverted commas, makes it clear that Stephen refers to the second category. If we recall Stephen's recollected dream, we know that the revenant mother is his dominant image of history, and thus in speaking to Mr Deasy he identifies himself with a particular reading of Irish culture. It is no accident that the Latin phrase on which Stephen effects his distinction of objective and subjective genitives invokes the maternal relationship, and the correlation greatly advances our attempts to historicise Joyce's fiction. Stephen's dream-revenant is implicitly cannibalistic, the vengeance wrought on the author of that aphorism which defined Ireland as 'an old sow that eats her farrow' ('A Portrait', p.208). Immediately before the recollection of his dying mother's secret words, Stephen recalls playing the piano for her; the song he has played is Joyce's setting of a poem by Yeats: A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. ('Ulysses', pp. 15-16) The relationship between the poem in 'The Countess Cathleen' and the decisive action of the titular heroine is contrapuntal: Fergus has been king of Ireland but chose the vocation of poet so as to find peace in the woods; the countess sacrifices her serenity and risks her soul in order to save a starving and

90

Nightmares of history

plundered tenantry - she acts symbolically as mother to her people. Throughout 'Ulysses' Stephen is preoccupied with the larger implications of his mother's death, for his 'nightmare' is located at the scene of her death and his (non-) involvement in it. Stephen, to be sure, is faced with less drastic alternatives than those personified in Yeats's play by Cathleen and Fergus; but, just as he all but concluded his diary in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' with an allusion to Yeatsian nostalgia, so here at the beginning of 'Ulysses' we find his dilemma dramatised by reference to a Yeatsian brooding on 'love's bitter mystery'. At the end of the fourth chapter of 'A Portrait' Stephen had resolved that the artist's mission was 'to recreate life out of life' (p.176). At the beginning of the first chapter of 'Ulysses' he is tempted to the recreation of second-hand art out of art. Fergus's song is significant for Stephen because it may be a point of departure from the world of history, process, and consumption. Yet what it offers is not so much a retreat from life as a conveniently arty teminology for nature - 'the deep wood's woven shade.' Yeats's poem exemplifies in a thoroughly unconscious way Lukacs's diagnosis of art as a great door through which there is no passage. Stephen's introspection, intensified as the revision of the early episode was effected, is a structurally introspective representative of the novel's latent hermetic closure. Traditional accounts of 'Ulysses' have interpreted Stephen's meeting with Bloom as providing, for both men, a renewed access to reality and release from their interior preoccupations. But as Stephen has painstakingly revealed to Deasy, the material of his introspection is history itself: his experience within the novel will involve a comprehensive adjustment of relation both to text and world. These preoccupations are given their head in the third episode when Stephen walks on Sandymount Strand. Characteristically, his meditations on his family, his trip to Paris, his fellow lodgers in the tower, are introduced by a meditation on the nature of art: Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting ^>n nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. ('Ulysses', pp.42-3) The art of this episode, according to Stuart Gilbert's schema, is philology, and the second sentence is 'Signatures of all

91

Nightmares of history

things I am here to read (p.42). The allusion to Jacob Boehme offers a possibility of dynamically rendering nature intelligible to a degree only approximated and mocked by nineteenth-century philology. Stephen in 'A Portrait' had listened silently to Donovan's glib citation of Lessing's aesthetics: now he is led to recall his differentiation of the verbal arts which deal with objects one after another ('nacheinander') in time, and the visual arts which deal with objects next to one another ('nebeneinander') in space. [25] By alluding to Hamlet Stephen translates this distinction into an analogy of movement on two axes - if you walk over a cliff you cease to move on the horizontal axis though you move with increasing rapidity through it, on the vertical axis. 'Nacheinander', we might say, characterises that mechanical order which Kenner calls Laplace's cosmos; 'nebeneinander' the simultaneity of all events in the 'nightmare of history'. In colonial Ireland sequence and simultaneity are rival experiences of history. Stephen's aesthetic meditation has its complement in Bloom's recurring puzzlement by the phenomenon of parallax, by reference to which we explain the apparent displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object caused by an actual change or difference of the position of the observer. [26] The reconciliation of father and son, which critics of the archetype and myth school fondly celebrate, is more properly considered as the effort of Joyce's critical modernism to overcome the urge towards autonomy that characterises so many modernist texts. Strictly speaking, Stephen without Bloom is unthinkable, Bloom without Stephen unthinking; thus the structuralist may read 'Ulysses' as Joyce's effort to bring together the problematic author (Stephen) and the problematic reader (Bloom). But in what sense is such fiction historical? None that Walter Scott would immediately recognise. If the gestation of 'Finnegans Wake' outlasts Scott's entire career as prolific novelist, that of 'Ulysses' more clearly reveals the historical nature of the fiction. To Carlo Linati in September 1920 Joyce declared his attitude to the Greek myth in terms which make the point effectively: 'My intention is to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri' ('Letters', I, pp. 146-7). The contrast here is not between then and now but between Eternity and time, between the metaphysical beyond into which Stephen fears he may walk on Sandymount Strand and the world of historical time to which the movement of the novel restores him. Fifteen years earlier Joyce had conceived his Odyssey as a short story for ’Dubliners’, and its evolution as a long novel had necessarily brought alterations of conception and execution. Kenner has written of the ironic mood which the novel would have had if it had ended with The Wandering Rocks, and written also of the increasing uncertainty and unreliability of the narrators' methods as The Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, The

92

Nightmares of history

Oxen of the Sun, and Circe progressively illustrate. [27] To demonstrate his point Kenner cites the cheating reference to 'Mr Bloom's dental windows' (p.249) which is only cleared up eighty-five pages later with a denial that Leopold is any relative whatever of Bloom the dentist. Such red herrings certainly multiply - how can C.B.O'C.F.T. Farrell frown at the Metropolitan Hall when he halts at Wilde's corner, for the Hall is three-quarters of a mile away on the other side of the river? [28] What has happened is not just that Joyce is extending a naturalist novel (episodes 1-10) in a different mode; the novel comes to acknowledge the historical nature of its attention to 16 June 1904. With reference to Bloom the dentist Kenner observes: True, we can imagine a reader from whom 'Mr Bloom's dental windows' would have instantly invoked the actual Marcus Bloom, dentist, who practised in 1904 at 2 Clare Street: a reader who would have known that vanished, pre-Rebellion Dublin as intimately as do Joyce's Dubliners. But not even in 1922 can there have been many left alive who both commanded such lore and were capable of reading 250 pages into the difficult Ulysses. [29] Professor Kenner's fundamental anti-historicism here takes the form of historical exaggeration: after all, the six years between the Easter Rebellion and the publication of ’Ulysses' had not seen the death of so many Dubliners and potential readers, nor had the Rebellion and its suppression caused the city to 'vanish'. Such sentiment distracts us from a more thoughtful consideration of events occurring between the conception and publication of the novel - among them, massive labour unrest in Dublin, the Rebellion, the murder of Joyce's friend Sheehy-Skeffington, the Great War, the internment of Stanislaus Joyce ip Austria, revolution in Russia and Germany. Across Europe and within Ireland, historical change had rendered 16 June 1904 no longer contemporary. Seen in this light the changing styles of 'Ulysses' do not so much chronicle the events of one specific day as they seek to come to terms with the changing perspectives upon a 'fixed' day which a revolutionary period generated. 'Ulysses' is thus historical in two senses, first in that it takes as its setting a date which is progressively seen as historical; and second, as a stylistic consequence, the process of composition itself is historicised. Both 'Dubliners' and 'A Portrait' posited a future reader whom the texts awaited: Joycean irony and the converitions of Bildungsroman contributed to that perspective. 'Ulysses', on the other hand, is in danger of containing its author and reader. Or to put it in different terms, 'Ulysses' appears all but 'posthumously': in 1922 old Troy of the D.M.P. is virtually an anachronism and the Citizen is on the point of assuming his functions. Joyce's youthful notions (of 7 January 1904) 93

Nightmares of history

concerning the masses in travail and the end of a competitive social order find no fulfilment in the Irish Free State. This local timetable has its European tabulation also in the irresolution of 1918 and the failure of revolution in Germany and the west. To relate modernist literature to the crisis of western society is hardly original: nevertheless we await some dialectically satisfactory account of the disproportionate Irish contribution. Yeats's Anglo-Irish tradition is a classic instance of wisdom after the event, and the Parnellite trauma the symbol (manifest content) rather than the source of cultural energy. A dialectically thorough analysis of the Anglo-Irish Renaissance would take into account the contradictions implicit in the incorporation of a colonial and metropolitan system with the United Kingdom, and relate this feature to the function of sectarian ideologies in Ireland. The Great Famine, with the broader socio-economic pattern of which it is a part, assisted in translating these contradictions into cultural terms, indeed gave occasion to that linguistic disjunction we have noted in homoeopathic form in Eveline. At the aesthetic level such an account of the Anglo-Irish phenomenon would have many tasks, but in the present context we may specify one element. Yeatsian and Joycean paradigms are conveniently summarised in two slogans - the Celtic Twilight, the nightmare of history. These are of course problems to Yeats and Joyce as much as they are programmes, but they illustrate the centrality of the sectarian conflict to the elaboration of Anglo-Irish literature. For Yeats, typical of that self-conceived and self-deceived bourgeois element known as the Protestant Ascendancy, history passively awaited formulation, invention, faith. For Joyce, urban inheritor of an abandoned language, history excelled itself, being prolific, obsessive, intolerable. To see these rival experiences of history in terms of colon and colonise is tempting but grossly so; a more profoundly historical inquiry will reveal their mutual interaction within a larger political strategy. Hence the significance of academic criticism's reluctance to consider Joyce and Yeats together in a fully comparative analysis. The uncritical acceptance of Yeats's rewriting of literary history, like the refusal to acknowledge the metaphorical nature of Joycean ’paralysis', perpetuates convenient myths. The role imposed on Joyce at least as far as his reception is concerned resembles that of the academic portrayal of Gaelic revivalism - he is at once pedant and pornographer, who gave us 'a couple of books written clerkly' and restored a dirty word of two. Similarly, we should note that 'Ulysses"s renowned openness to life is not without its problematic aspect, its contextual limitations, though here too we may take the opportunity to establish a Yeatsian comparison. It is specifically in Hades that Bloom provides us with thoughts that at once qualify any naive acceptance of the novel as celebration and reveal a positive disposition in any 94

Nightmares of history

comparison with Yeats: Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life. ('Ulysses', pp.116-17) The parallel is obvious, the Old Man in 'Purgatory': I saw it fifty years ago Before the thunderbolt had riven it. Green leaves, ripe leaves, leaves thick as butter, Fat, greasy life. [30] The enclosure dreaded and desired by modernist literature is perhaps never so fully and awe-fully enacted as in Yeats's play where the speakers know not their own death. 'Purgatory' as a meditation on Irish history, the Big House, and sectarian mesalliance subversively and persuasively reveals the manner in which those who formulate their history and consciously invest their faith in it are ultimately enclosed in all that they unconsciously exclude and repress. Yeats's 'Purgatory' is Hell, and by a pleasing corollary Joyce's Hades is processive, purgatorial. Bloom, by winding the adage 'The Irishman's house is his coffin' out of his funereal mood, puts both Englishmen and castles in their place; furthermore we note that Bloom returns to his house and to his warm bed. Yet the distinguishing, Joycean mot juste is Bloom's 'yet', a possible continuity of that critical modernism which history called forth and frustrated between 1904 and 1922.

IV \

Where is this continuity to be traced - in latter-day Irish literature written in English or Gaelic, in the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Beckett, in Joyce’s own 'Finnegans Wake’? Beyond these literary texts there lies a vast tract of critical discourse whose existence is scarcely conceivable without the 'Wake' and the earlier Joycean preludes to the 'Wake'. No adequate treatment of even one of these Joycean legacies can be attempted here: instead we may be content with emphasising the continuity which links 'Finnegans Wake' to the earlier work in which Joyce's critical modernism first bravely manifested itself. In discussing the 'Wake' one necessarily discusses its critics for Joyce's compositional method guarantees that every reading of his novel is a critical response and not a passive acceptance. Of course some commentators have striven to reduce their response to the level of a naturalist appreciation: J.B.Lyons, for example, labours sedulously to prove that Irish priests were immune to venereal disease and crowns his 95

Nightmares of history

argument by citing as evidence of Joyce’s softened attitudes to his early environment passage from 'Finnegans Wake':

modified and the following

the cornflowers have been staying [out] at Ballymun, the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown's hedges, twolips have pressed togetherem by sweet Rush, townland of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the redthorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon. ('Finnegans Wake', pp.14-15) To fear and yet practise a literal reading of The Sisters leads Lyons to see this passage as 'vivid with life', a rebuke to those who cling to the stultifying idea of paralysis, and not to see that his example is Joyce's parody of Edgar Quinet's rhapsody on botanical survival and human mortality. [31] Generally speaking, we may regard literalism as the least bothersome of approaches to 'Finnegans Wake'. The static application of the very philology Joyce strove to defeat is more characteristic. Adeline Glasheen, in the preface to 'A Census of Finnegans Wake', insists that 'Joyce did not forsake received religion in order to enslave himself, as most rationalists have done, to received history'. [32] Hence, in her interpretation of 'Finnegans Wake' 'Waterloo and the Resurrection are events of the same order'. [33] From this dubious if seemingly harmless observation Miss Glasheen advances towards the dehistoricising of all Joyce's work. Let us take a sample passage: So This is Dyoublong? Hush! Caution! Echoland! How charmingly exquisite! It reminds you of the outwashed engravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall of his innkempt house. Used they? (I am sure that tiring chabelshoveller with the mujikal chocolate box, Miry Mitchel, is listening) I say, the remains of the outworn gravemure where used to be blurried the Ptollmens of the Incabus. Used we? (He is only pretendant to be stugging at the jubalee harp from the second existed lishener, Fiery Farrelly.) It is well known. ('Finnegans Wake', p.13) In fairness, it should be noted that Miss Glasheen's annotation relies on information from another source, Mrs Christiani's Scandinavian Elements of "Finnegans Wake'". Nevertheless, as the form in which the 'Census' presents its case is itself significant I quote Miss Glasheen verbatim: * Farrelly, Fiery, and Miry Mitchel - Mrs Christiani says: 'Fiery' = French fier, 'proud'; 'Farrelly' = Danish farlig, 'dangerous'; she, therefore, identifies FF with Nicholas Proud (q.v.), and Miry (Russian mir = 'peace') Mitchel 96

Nightmares of history

(q.v.) with St Michael (q.v.). I am sure there is a lot of truth in this explanation. [34] As Nicholas Proud is identified with the Devil (Nicholas = Old Nick = Lucifer = Pride), this reveals Fiery Farrelly and Miry Mitchel to be an eternal opposition of Devil and Archangel, as in Milton (q.v.). Not only does the lexicographical arrangement of information mimic the metaphysical interpretation it implies, it also suppresses the indicative shapes and tones of Joyce's prose. Rhyme (cf. 'miry') tells us to pronounce 'Fiery' as adjectival of English 'fire', and Fiery Farrelly thus begins to sound and look like a plausible Irish name. In the 'Annotations', Roland McHugh glosses it as 'Feardorcha O'Farrelly (fl. 1736>, Ir. poet' and offers no suggestion for Miry Mitchel. [35] He does however interpret 'So This Is Dyoublong?' as an allusion to M.J.MacManus's 'So This Is Dublin' (1927) which derides Joyce. However, 'Hush! Caution! Echoland!' echoes a passage in George Moore's 'A Drama in Muslin' (1886) which, significantly, is set in Dublin in the year of Joyce's birth, 1882: the paragraph parodies characteristic stylistic flourishes of Moore's. [36] If this echo is recognised, it becomes feasible to see in Miry Mitchel a reflection of Susan Langstaff Mitchell (1866-1926) who satirised Moore in verse and who wrote a mock biography of him. [37] As rhyme links Miry and Fiery, Fiery Farrelly might then be treated as an allusion to Agnes O'Farrelly, a Gaelic League enthusiast and sometime professor in University College, Dublin. Both women are gently mocked in Moore's 'Hail and Farewell', thus forming a perfect circle of literary allusion. [38] The result of this exegesis is not as some claim that 'Finnegans Wake' is about Irish literary skirmishes rather than the war in Heaven. It is however salutary if we recognise that the crucial element in reading 'Finnegans Wake' is not the identification of referants but the elucidation and advancement of relationships between various levels of allusion. That Joyce should refer to a novel dealing with 'the moral idea of Dublin in 1882' indicates the degree to which his last great novel conforms to the programme announced to Grant Richards in 1906 - 'to write a chapter of the moral history of my country.' Superficially, the 'Wake' looks unlike 'Dubliners', and yet the technique of forcing the reader to change roles (and become momentarily, a speaker) so as to perceive the relationship between Fiery Farrelly and Miry Mitchel was employed by Joyce as early as 1904 in writing Eveline. Moreover, between 1904 and 1939, Joyce's country had undergone drastic historical adjustments. It had, to be sure, failed to realise the liberation of the masses in travail and it still laboured within the competitive order of western capitalism: nevertheless it had formally inaugurated a revolt against the imperial and colonial system of the great powers - Joyce's interest in African colonialism is manifest in 'Finnegans Wake', and rubs shoulders 97

Nightmares of history

with deft allusions to the fratricidal violence of post-1921 Ireland. [39] 'Finnegans Wake' is necessarily cryptic, obscure and baffling, because its underlying concern is subversive and its tactics those of retrenchment and renewed silence, exile and cunning. Lexicographers and other drudges may seek to tabulate 'Finnegans Wake', but the experience of reading it may more properly suggest a radical reinterpretation of the phenomenon of Anglo-Irish literature within European modernism. 'Finnegans Wake' extends Joyce's critical modernism not in its alleged 'experimentalisin' but in its self-conscious examination of the processes of history and language, history in language. Once again one might emphasise that Joyce's method may employ the rituals of philology but his ends are far removed from such scholasticism: so too his theme in 'Finnegans Wake' is guilt and failure for the very reason that such a rendering manifest is a stage within the process of liberation. The naive programme of release from 'the general paralysis of an insane society' announced in 1904 is itself subjected to a scrutiny of its sexuality in the festive comedy to which 'Finnegans Wake’ looks forward. Speaking at the Third Conference on Irish Politics and Culture at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Professor Joachim Krehayn charted the turning tide of Marxist attitudes towards Joyce. He had been unfairly neglected in the past, and now editions of his works were in progress: Joyce had been reconsidered, and reissued, but in the long run he remained distinctively an Irish author whose relevance in the German Democratic Republic must be limited. As editor of the new edition of 'Dubliners', Krehayn was clearly not speaking from a position of hostility or reluctant approval. [40] His relegation of Joyce as distinctively an Irish writer has a symptomatic value which extends far beyond the frontiers of Germany. And this must stimulate a confession of deep unease on the part of the present writer. For, if Joyce is rescued from the New Critics, the mythologists, and the philologists, and is instead regarded as an exemplary subject of literary history, should one not concede the marginality of the history which he in turn works upon? Certainly, English critics have been notoriously reluctant to commit themselves at length, as if their commentary might constitute some form of trespass in the affairs of a friendly and neighbouring state. Dr Leavis on Joyce scarcely amounts to a slim pamphlet, and much of it repetitious as if the bother of considering a second example were excessive. [41] The same might be said of Raymond Williams, who transfers the apercus of 'The English Novel' (1970) to 'The Country and the City' (1973) almost verbatim. [42] Such embarrassment in confronting Joyce might in itself form the material for an analysis of cultural relations between Britain and Ireland, but for the moment we should concentrate on the immediate issue of Joyce's obsessive exploitation of the minutiae of Irish topography, the arcana of 98

Nightmares of history

local affairs in Dublin, the sounds and smells of Chapelizod, all that an outsider might justifiably complain he cannot master. The issue is but a personalised version of that larger, as yet virgin, project - an examination of the disproportionate Irish contribution to modernist literature in English. In what sense - or, perhaps one should say, to what ends - can Susan L.Mitchell, the Metropolitan Hall, and 'Derevaun Seraun' concern the contemporary reader and writer? An answer could be provided at length, in which the culture of 'secondary' nations is shown to have been crucial in shaping twentieth-century cosmopolitan art - Strindberg's Sweden, Sibelius's Finland, and Picasso's Spain are not the 'great powers' of August 1914. But this indiscriminate listing of small nations and irredentist provinces is really little more than sentimentality. More precisely, one should point to Ireland's early experience of independence and neo-colonialism and the prior history of that status, and to Ireland's late experience of linguistic trauma in the colonial period. This, together with the contradictions of the disunited kingdom ('Finnegans Wake', p.188), provides the crude framework for an analysis in terms of Althusserian 'overdetermination'. Of course, all this is true of Yeats as well as Joyce; as we have seen, the two Irish authors adopted drastically different attitudes towards history, genre, and language. Approaching to Joyce's texts more closely, one might specify a particular feature of Irish colonial experience which is taken up in 'Ulysses' and which is given structural status there. In the prolonged and bitter 'lock-out' of 1913, the leader of the Employers' Federation was William Martin Murphy, a newspaper magnate: in 1916, the same Murphy used his press to insist upon the execution of the socialist James Connolly who was consequently shot seated in a chair. Dublin's underdeveloped industrial sector was well-known, and the absence of genuine workers in 'Ulysses' cause for complaint by primitive Marxists. But the centrality of the press in the organisation of Irish capitalism in the revo¬ lutionary period is at once a sign of industry's undeveloped state and its advanced consciousness, for control of communi¬ cations takes the place of the steel-mills or the manufactories. Joyce's Citizen knows Murphy as 'the Bantry jobber', and Murphy's hostility to Parnell is the cause of his animus. The Aeolus episode, however, transcends the simple attention to the press as topic, and its language achieves the 'ruination of the referential powers of language'. [43] Moreover, Aeolus perfectly demonstrates the historical quality of Joyce's com¬ position for, having published the episode in the 'Little Review' in October 1918, Joyce further expanded it and its catalogue of rhetorical devices and broke it up with sixtythree journalistic captions or headlines. Aeolus opens with trammen's cries, Guinness barrels, and advertisements: communications and consumerism dominate with all their unreal promises of fulfilment. Far from missing the essential features of industrial 99

Nightmares of history

society, 'Ulysses' concentrates upon the most potently symbolic features of life in such a society. The development of language implicit in Joyce's radical revision of Aeolus totally undermines the classic notion of the work of art as an end in itself, the sort of creation the Stephen of 'A Portrait' aspires to. In terms of character, we have seen that the Stephen of 'Ulysses' does not simply achieve a renewed access to reality via Bloom's kitchen. But Joyce's revolutionary practice here distinguishes him drastically from Yeats, and the distinction embraces concepts of history as well as art. In Yeats one finds repeatedly that, within a poem or play, a figure is presented as achieving form by assimilation to some further level of art; thus, in 'Easter 1916' Mac Bride has resigned his part In the casual comedy; [44] But the concluding lines of the poem ritualise names which, by being written out in a verse, are changed utterly. This metaformalism does indeed undergo a sea-change in the later work (where its effects are more ironic), but in 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' its compensatory function is clear. The Old Woman, having prophesied that 'many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked', proceeds to move from prose to verse and with this shift to offer an aesthetic immortality in legend for those who support her cause: They shall They shall They shall The people

be remembered for ever, be alive for ever, be speaking for ever. shall hear them for ever. [45]

Considered in terms of plot, this curtain line of the disguised Countess anticipates the imminent defeat of the rebels - the setting is Killala, 1798. If Yeats's plays reveal the manner in which those who formulate their history and consciously invest their faith in it are ultimately enclosed in all that they unconsciously exclude and repress, then 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' (written on the eve of Yeats's explicit adoption of the ascendancy view of Irish history) lays the ground for this ultimate irony. The play attempts to advance two unrelated and unrelatable perspectives upon history; for the family in the cottage there is all the freedom and unpredictability of the future, the sense of potential and participation; for the lyrical Countess, there is the metadramatic knowledge of history and its closures, the certainty, indeed predetermination of an illusory future. And here we find in Yeats the counter-truth to Stephen's experience of history; for, having observed that colon and colonise are too exclusivist in their implications to describe the formulator and the recipient of history 100

Nightmares of history

respectively - and Stephen is recipient by virtue of his nightmares - we find in Yeats an antithetical statement of the polarity. The Old Woman's song is a significant point of reference and comparison because it too lies behind the passage from ’Finnegans Wake’ we have taken as our focus; the paragraph continues; Lokk for himself and see the old butte new. Dbln. W.K.O.O. Hear? By the mausolime wall. Fimfim fimfim. With a grand funferall. Fumfum fumfum. ’Tis optophone ontophanes. List! Wheatstone's magic Iyer. They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsidischord shall be theirs"

for ollaves. ('Finnegans Wake', p.l3)[46] McHugh's 'Annotations' offer real aid here, for he tells us that Wheatstone invented a box 'shaped like a lyre, into which piano's vibrations passed, & which then appeared to play itself'. [47] In other words, the Aeolian harp in mass-production. The art of Moore and the early Yeats offers illusory compensations for the disappointments which their history imposes. Joyce's critical modernism fully acknowledges the defeat of his idealistic 1904 programme of cultural liberation, yet it proceeds through 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' to interrogate the terms of that defeat and to assume (and so render possible) a future readership. I have spoken of Joyce as offering a possible continuity of that critical modernism which was called forth and frustrated in the years between 1904 and 1922. Continuity, of course, is not simply a matter of futurist extension, and it may be equally valid to look to an earlier moment of literary history for an effective placing of Joyce's achievement. Literary history, it might be emphasised, has no truck with a positivist veneration of an unchanging past but participates actively (through interpretation) in the dynamics of history. Recalling Yeats's shrewd recognition of the Anglo-Irish writers as 'the last romantics' we may therefore justify a comparison of Joyce's generosity and selfishness (as manifest in his methodical accumulation and abandonment of the material we know as 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake') with that least Joycean of English poets, William Wordsworth. 'Wise passiveness in time' is in part a definition of Wordsworth's Christian stoicism, but it also catches the frustrations of a young man whose faith in revolution was (in his view) betrayed. That the great revolution of Joyce's time was Bolshevik rather than bourgeois must be noted, together with the confusedly bourgeois-and-more promptings of the Irish rebellion. Yet while it was never Bolshevik, Joyce's attitude to revolution, as to history, was not permitted to be one of privileged faith. The dialectical transformation of quantity into quality, function into symbol, is seen in essentially romantic 101

Nightmares of history

terms in lines from 'Michael' which quoted in this Joycean context:

may

none

the

less

be

The length of full seven years from time to time He at the building of this Sheep-fold wrought, And left the work unfinished when he died. [48] In the more exposed position of Irish modernism in the age of Russian revolution, Joyce's image of literary conscience, literary conservation cannot be the sheep-fold. In 'Ulysses' we have seen that even in Hell Bloom can assert the dignity of the common man, though in a style which we should progressively read for its limitations. Wordsworthian pastoral, which might be called the formalism of Nature, similarly claims to be the language of men speaking to men. At the conclusion of the second chapter of Book III in 'Finnegans Wake', the narrator provides a superficially similar and attractive vision of natural rhythms re-emerging: Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain. ('Finnegans Wake', p.473) It is true that west and east are here restored to some mutually defining rhythm, and true too that the 'lightbreakfastb ringer' lightly knocks on the head that domesticating myth of 'Ulysses' interpretation whereby Leopold's patriarchal stature is restored in his ordering of breakfast from Molly. But Book III is described by Campbell and Robinson as 'the book of the desired future; not the future really germinating in the nursery upstairs ... but the mirage-tuture of the idealizing daydreams of the half-broken father .[49] That is, read literally, the passage takes the manifest meaning of the dream as its latent meaning. Once again, Joyce obliges the reader of 'Finnegans Wake' to change roles, this time in order to recognise the specific speaker of the words on the page. It is true that the passage is comic, but with this higher recognition its comedy approaches that critical revelation of a festive conclusion which is the end of history. In the first version of the passage Shaun is hailed 'heart & soul you are of Shamrogueshire'[50] and the entire rhetoric here is a parody of 'biedermeier' Free State self-sufficiency, the hermeticism of a deluded protectionism. Joyce's mimicry, in 'Dubliners' as much as in 'Finnegans Wake', mocks a mockery. Thus it draws the reader towards his creation of an order which is not competitive and in which life and art positively define each other.

102

Nightmares of history

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

8

9

Joseph Conrad, Tales of the Sea, ’Notes on Life & Letters' (London: Grant, 1925), p.57. Rudyard Kipling, 'The Ballad of East and West', 'A Choice of Kipling's Verse' made by T.S.Eliot, (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p.lll. Hugh Kenner, 'Ulysses' (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p.149. Fredric Jameson, 'The Political Unconscious' (London: Methuen; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p.9. 'The James Joyce Archive: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; a Facsimile of Epiphanies, Notes, Manuscripts, & Typescripts', ed. Hans Walter Gabler, (New York, London: Garland, 1978), pp.84-5. For an account of this dimension to nineteenth-century French culture see Roger L.Williams 'The Horror of Life' (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). In 'James Joyce; a Student's Guide' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) Matthew Hodgart cites (p.45) an article by Burton A.Waisbren and Florence L.Walzl, Paresis and the Priest: James Joyce's Symbolic Use of Syphilis in The Sisters, 'Annals of Internal Medicine', vol.80 (1974), pp.758-62, in which symptoms are discussed and a diagnosis of tertiary syphilis advanced for Father Flynn. Hodgart makes the casual and yet positive remark that paralysis is a condition 'in which the majority of the human race has always found itself' (p.46) which, if it is too easily universalist, nevertheless acknowledges the symbolic nature of Joyce's fiction. J.B.Lyons in Animadversions on Paralysis as a Symbol in The Sisters ('James Joyce Quarterly', vol.ll, no.3 (1974) pp.257-65) engages in much special pleading on the question of priestly purity, and ignores the question of symbolism. John Garvin's 'James Joyce's Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension' (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1976) has much more sensible things to say on the topic (pp.37-42). I have in mind the idiomatic 'What I wouldn't do but...!' where 'but' serves as a pseudo-negative negating 'not'. The point is discussed further in my paper James Joyce's 'Eveline' and a Problem of Modernism, in the proceedings of the Third Conference on Irish Culture and Society at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (1981), edited by Dorothea Siegmund-Schultze. Brendan O Hehir, 'A Gaelic Lexicon of Finnegans Wake' (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), pp.333-4. See also Johannes Hedberg, Derevaun Seraun - A Joycean Puzzle, 'Moderna Sprach', vol.60 (1966), pp. 109-10; also, James MacKillop, 'Beurla on It'; Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Language, 'Eire/Ireland', 103

Nightmares of history

10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19

vol.XV, no.l (1980), pp.138-48, esp. p.139. Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.170. I refer below to critical silence on the metaphoric 'invade' of Eveline's opening paragraph: it may be useful here to note one critic who has ventured an opinion on its tone. Warren Beek, in 'Joyce's "Dubliners": Substance, Vision and Art' (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969) suggests that 'The word "invade", especially connoting the dusk, suggests a suspended mood without stressing it' (pp. 112-13). Given the American presence in Vietnam at the time Beek was writing, it is only fair to point out that in more recent years academic criticism has provided a less myopic perspective on the interaction of modernist fiction and global politics - Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is central to the structure of 'Apocalypse Now', the film in which Kurtz is presented in full US army regalia. Kipling, op. cit. Ruth Dudley Edwards, 'Patrick Pearse: the Triumph of Failure' (London: Gollancz, 1977), pp.38-41. The professors were Robert Atkinson and John Pentland Mahaffy, the incident occurring in 1899. I take my epigraph from Miss Dudley Edwards (p.39). The principal works on the Famine are R.D.Edwards and T.D.Williams (eds) 'The Great Famine' (Dublin: Brown & Nolan, 1956) and Cecil Woodham-Smith, 'The Great Hunger' (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962). Louis Cullen's 'An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660' (London: Batsford, 1972) very effectively places the crisis in its broader context, but an analysis of the cultural aspects of demographic change is still awaited. In relation to the interaction of language and sexuality, such commentaries as Michael J.F.McCarthy's 'Irish Land and Irish Liberty' (London: Scott, 1911) are highly revealing. In Irish, Peadar O Laoghaire's 'Mo Sgeal Fein' and the diary of Amhlaigh O Suilleabhain provide excellent primary material. I analyse the provenance and subsequent history of the phrase 'protestant ascendancy' in 'Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literature' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, due 1983). W.B.Yeats, 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', 'Collected Poems' (London, Macmillan, 1963), p.369. W.B.Yeats, 'Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation', 'Collected Poems', p.107. Ellmann, op. cit., p.546. T.S.Eliot, 'Ulysses', Order and Myth, 'Selected Prose', ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p.178. 'Aesthetics and Politics: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno' 104

Nightmares of history

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31

(London: New Left Books, 1977), pp.158-9. Ibid., p.159. Georg Lukacs, ’Soul and Form’ trans. Anna Boctock (London: Merlin Press, 1974), p.113. Kenner, op.cit., pp. 149-50. For the 1904 origins see 'The James Joyce Archive: ”A Portrait" etc.', pp.33, 47, 49, 53, 141. Colin MacCabe, 'James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word' (London: Macmillan, 1978), p.128; see also Hugh Kenner, Circe, in 'James Joyce's Ulysses; Critical Essays', ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p.360. See Fritz Senn, Esthetic Theories, 'James Joyce Quarterly', vol.2, no.2 (1965), pp. 134-6. 'OED'; Kenner in 'Ulysses' traces the parallax allusions, pp.5 nil etc. Kenner, 'Ulysses', p.151. Though it is noted by Clive Hart and Leo Knuth ('Topographical Guide to James Joyce's "Ulysses'", Colchester; A Wake Newslitter Press, 1975), to the best of my knowledge no one has previously commented critically on the displacement of the Merrion Hall by the Metropolitan Hall in this passage. Kenner ('Ulysses', p.65) introduces the notion of Clare Street's vanishing in the 1916 Rising, thus seeking to explain the absence of Bloom the dentist in 1922 when readers bought Joyce's novel. Thom's 'Directory' indicates that there may have been two dental Blooms (father and son?) practising at no.2 Clare Street between 1904 and 1916. In 1917, however, a surgeon dentist named Peter Dunne is listed at that address: thus, the dental windows survived the Rising though the inscription on the glass may well have been altered. Considered in terms of criticism rather than socio-biography, the allusion to 'Mr Bloom's dental windows' should be contrasted with 'Mr Lewis Werner's cheerful windows' just ten lines further up the page the bearing of the adjective upon the noun being in the one case literally objective and in the other reflectively subjective. As to Metropolitan Hall, which on the map is in Lower Abbey Street and not round the corner from Clare Street, it was in an area heavily damaged by shelling during the 1916 Rising. However, Thom's lists the building (Metropolitan Building) as standing in 1917 without any mention of damage; strangely, there is no entry in Thom's for 1922. Kenner, 'Ulysses', p.65. W.B.Yeats, 'Purgatory', 'Collected Plays' (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp.681-2. J.B. Lyons, Animadversion on Paralysis as a Symbol in 'The Sisters', 'James Joyce Quarterly', vol.ll, no.3 105

Nightmares of history

32 33 34

35 36

(1974), p.265: I quote the passage from 'Finnegans Wake' verbatim from Lyons's article, indicating with [] his addition to the Faber text. Adeline Glasheen, 'A Census of Finnegans Wake' (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1956), p.vii. Idem. Adeline Glasheen, 'Third Census of Finnegans Wake' (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977), p.90; see also Dounia Bunis Christiani, 'Scandanavian Elements of Finnegans Wake' (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p.92. (Miss Christiani is a mite more tentative in her interpretation than Miss Glasheen acknowledges.) Roland McHugh 'Annotations to Finnegans Wake' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p.13. See George Moore, 'A Drama in Muslin' (London: Walter Scott, 1886), pp. 158-9. I quote from four consecutive paragraphs to convey the texture of Moore's prose and its bearing upon this aspect of 'Finnegans Wake': The weary, the woebegone, the threadbare streets yes, threadbare conveys the moral idea of Dublin in 1882... how infinitely pitiful. Look at the houses! Like crones in borrowed bonnets some are fashionable with flowers in the rotting window frames. We are in a land of echoes and shadows. Lying, mincing, grimacing.... Catholic in name, they curse the Pope for not helping them in their affliction; moralists by tradition, they accept at their parties women who parade their lovers to the town from the top of a tramcar. In Dublin there is baptism in tea and communion in a cutlet. We are in a land of echoes and shadows. Smirking, pretending, grimacing, the poor shades go by, waving a mock English banner over a waxwork show. ... Shadows, echoes, and nothing more. See the girls! How their London fashions sit upon them.

37

38 39

See S.L.Mitchell, 'Aids to the Immortality of Certain Persons in Ireland' (Dublin, London: Maunsell, 1913) and 'George Moore' (Dublin, London: Maunsell, 1916; also reissued by Talbot Press, 1929). If purists argue that 'Finnegans Wake' refers to Miry Mitchel (not Mitchell), it might be pointed out that Miss Mitchell misspells John Mitchel as Mitchell, thus endorsing Joycean variegation see Mitchell's 'George Moore', p.60. George Moore, 'Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale’, ed. Richard Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), pp.587, 644, 748, 751. I am grateful to Dr Pieter Bekker for his comments in 106

Nightmares of history

40

41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50

conversation on African elements in 'Finnegans Wake' and on Joyce's interest in the history of colonialism. Some time around 1909-10 Joyce noted ironically in an address-book: England She is successful with savages, her mind being akin to theirs ('Joyce Archive "Portrait" etc.', p.123) As in so many other areas, Joyce's relation with the primitivist side of modernism is deeply critical. Joachim Krehayn, James Joyce, Nationalautor und Weltliteratur (paper to be published in the proceedings of the Third Conference on Irish Culture and Society at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, 1981, edited by Dorothea Siegmund-Schultze). See, for example, 'The Great Tradition' (1948) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), pp.25-6, and ’The Common Pursuit' (1952) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965, p.284). (Abuse of I.A.Richards is a constant in these allusions to Joyce.) Leavis's most extensive commentary on Joyce was James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 'Scrutiny', vol.2, no.2 (1933), pp.193-201. 'The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), pp.164-8; and 'The Country and the City' (Frogmore: Paladin, n.d.), pp.291-5. Professor Williams has subsequently delivered a lecture at Cambridge on 'Exiles'. Colin MacCabe, op.cit., p.115. W.B.Yeats, 'Easter 1916', 'Collected Poems', p.203. W.B.Yeats, 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' 'Collected Plays', p.86. Emphasis added to parallel the four lines of Yeats's play. Roland McHugh, op.cit., p.13. William Wordsworth, 'Michael, a Pastoral Poem', 'Poetry and Prose' ed. W.M.Merchant (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), p.205. The relationship between English romanticism and Anglo-Irish literature has never been fully explored: Yeats's reading of Shelley and Blake (and, less centrally, Burke) has provided the basis for some provisional inquiries. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), pp.211-12. David Hayman (ed.), 'A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake' (London: Faber & Faber: 1963), p.227.

107

7

MARTELLO Tom Paulin

for Roy and Aisling Foster

Cack-handed, like a stocious mason, Napper Tandy picks at this coast. A brave chiseller, that one, he might be Nestor as general in the army of the revolution. When they captured Rutland Island he supped poteen with the postmaster and rapped out a proclamation dated the first year of liberty. His own officers laid hands on him, rolling Mm back on board the Anacreon, merry and bulky, like a Greek” The same month, another calendar, I tracked Mm to a stone harbour where he slips through the salmon nets and swims out, like a patched seal beyond RoaMnish. A boaster, a daft eejit, but a hard taproot that can't be shifted, he nips back with a springy juvenescence, Ms lips stained with wine, his chest wrapped in a new, freshly dyed tricolour. ***

In an hour of difficulty Barney McLoone rowed a German spy across the Gweebarra; so a line may stretch, in that illusion of causes, from the salmon quay at Lettermacaward to the oifig an phoist on Rutland Island. He drew an IRA pension, got full every night, and took a pick to the living rock below a breezeblock shell thrown up by a visitor from Clogher.

108

Martello

There is a dead vigilance along this coast, a presence that bruises like the word British. You can catch the atmosphere of neglected garrisons, and the rusted aftertaste of bully beef in the dashed surprise of a cement watchtower ruined on a slope of ragweed and bullocks grazing. In the dovegrey Victorian hotel a spooly sways at the bar and says, 'We're nearly a nation now, before the year's out they'll maybe write Emmett's epitaph.' Can you describe history I'd like to know? Isn't it a fiction that pretends to be fact like A Journal of the Plague Year? And the answer that snaps back at me is a winter's afternoon in Dungannon, the gothic barracks where the policemen were signing out their weapons in a stained register, a thick turbid light and that brisk smell of fear as I described the accident and felt guilty guilty for no reason, or cause, I could think of. ***

Shaggy sandstone and wet granite, the usualness of rhododendrons, gravel, and liverish glumped laurels: it's a bad day at Stormont Castle where a twitchy civil servant is writing to a friend in Kew. 'This might be Sir Walter Scotland or even very bad Tennyson it's being stuck in a kitsch barony only escapists would want to enter. Bloody awful it is (or as we code it PRETTY MAUDLING DON'T YOU THINK?) Their accents sound like dustbins being dragged over concrete, though to hear them one'd think that instead of being lumbered with a rotten shower of prize idiots this was God's own acre we're holding can you imagine? Stony..honkers, they are. They're always saying sorry and like, a~s~ih7~nduI5ryou please tell me, like? There' s a rum history to blame an3~ffrs'Tike~this the whole time fucking terrible in fact....' The gravel rails; his nib's on the buzzer. must hatch a snifter. Ciao now, old cock. 109

Martello

Consider a city of disappointed bridges and a crowd at New Year clodding bottles at the Albert Clock (what is it that they want to stop?) There you are taking a slow dander down Donegall Street: you might be going to file your copy or cast a vote that if he knew your editor would call disloyal. Most likely it's a jar you're after and peace from all the linseed captains do to provoke your secret laughter. ***

Action is solid: this one day in March a hijacked saloon smacks a dozen rounds into The Bunch of Grapes and in Desertmartin men in lockram masks and dark glasses dig down through sandy soil to a bristling dump of lumpy kapok, cortex fuse and green jerricans as a meshed landrover at Clady mounts the ramp on the humped bridge into the blinding square while the chief sub hears the pips spitting in his ear and the real Captain Black issues a statement as a corporal draws a vector between Scrabo and Helen's Tower and the dunchered skip of The Clyde Valley slips a short to an invisible quartermaster in The Klondike and a van waits, waits at the corner of Atlantic and Baltic Avenues all to no purpose, yet affecting a cause like a stubbed toe, a cracked axle or a backfiring old banger for these acts must come back as syntax, as grammar and a temporal fiction. ***

110

Martello

Like lead dropping in a shot-tower Clio's voice has no feeling, for it isn't music, this estranged mixture of hindsight and becoming where crowds mass in a spent future wearing unionjack raincoats and raising red-White-and-blue umbrellas. Lymphatic and prickly, like jellyfish crowding in a duskiss tide, their images slop against the eyes; and what dory monsters glup to the surface, each like a plated turd with a pilot-light. See Brookeborough in tinted glasses like an oily magnate, and the long fellah, De Valera, gliding in a black car to express regret at the death of Hitler.

Ill

8

‘ULYSSES’, MODERNISM, AND MARXIST CRITICISM Jeremy Hawthorn

Very soon after its initial publication 'Ulysses' came to perform the unenviable role of whipping-boy for Marxist attacks on modernist literature - a rag to the red bull. Karl Radek singled it out for vituperative attack in a speech given at the 1934 Soviet Writers' Congress in spite of the fact that, unlike 'Dubliners', it had not been translated into Russian, and in spite of the fact that his description of it as a book of 800 pages without stops or commas casts grave doubt upon whether he had actually read it. Joyce himself was rather bemused by this treatment: 'I don't know why they attack me,' he said to Eugene Jolas, 'nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds.'[1] This, ironically, was for his attackers one of the things that was wrong with 'Ulysses'; as Radek put it. A capitalist magnate cannot be presented by the method which Joyce uses in attempting to present his vile hero, Bloom, not because his private life is less trivial than that of Bloom, but because he is an exponent of great world-wide contradictions, because, when he is battling with some rival trust or hatching plots against the Soviet Union, he must not be spied on in the brothel or the bedroom, but must be portrayed on the great arena of world affairs. [2] That this was no merely idiosyncratic view can be seen by comparing it to a complaint made by Ralph Fox in his 'The Novel and the People' (1937) that the modern novelist shied away from the treatment of men such as 'Cecil Rhodes, or Rockefeller, or Krupp'.[3] One of ' Ulysses" s earliest Marxist commentators R.D.Charques, in his 'Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution' (1933) - argued that not only did Joyce follow earlier novelists in restricting himself to 'the narrowest and most intimate kinds of relationships', but in addition to this he also omitted 'the most obvious of the material and impersonal forces of society'. [4] For Charques, this meant that Bloom's odyssey was thus 'deprived of almost all social meaning as well as stinted of ordinary humanity'. [5] What lay behind such criticisms was the belief that if, as Marx had suggested in a famous comment, social being was not determined by consciousness but determined it, [6] then in

112

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

order to understand human consciousness the novelist had to examine it in the context of determining social and historical forces. Beyond this there was what David Craig has described as the 'anti-psychological legacy of Stalinism',[7] the belief that any concern with subjective or inner states would detract from action to change the world and would result in a rash of unproductive navel-gazing on the part of writers and their readers. Georg Lukacs, perhaps the most famous Marxist literary critic and also, perhaps, the most implacably anti-modernist, argued that the job of the artist was to 'penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society'.[8] One presumes that the argument for writing about a capitalist magnate is that here the determining social relationships become visible, so that the artist can simultaneously deal with an individual consciousness and also the hub of a network of determining social relationships. Thus Radek saw 'Ulysses' (as did many other Marxist critics) as a development, in part, of naturalism, in which the artist gave up the task of trying to reveal and understand underlying laws of social development and merely reproduced appearances - even if they were 'inner' appearances: The 'new method', by which naturalism is reduced to clinical observation, and romanticism and symbolism to delirious ravings [has as its basic feature] the conviction that there is nothing big in life - no big events, no big people, no big ideas; and the writer can give a picture of life by just taking 'any given hero on any given day,' and reproducing him with exactitude. A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope - such is Joyce's work. [9] Poor Joyce should have given his characters a rise in salary! This alone, however, might not have done the trick. For many Marxists it was not their income, but their social class that counted against them. Nearly every Marxist account of 'Ulysses' written in the 1930s commented upon the fact that its characters belonged to the petty-bourgeoisie, the class Which, from a Marxist perspective, was most detached from decisive and influential social action, and was thus least able to understand social development. Alick West, in a generally very sympathetic essay on 'Ulysses' in his 'Crisis and Criticism' (1937), drew attention to the fact that the novel contained no industrial workers, no sign of productive activity, and generally no concern with what Marxists refer to as the relations of production: The reality of Joyce's social world is not its production and the conflict in that production; it is numberless acts of

113

’Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

consuming, spending, enjoying of things that are already there. His selection of the social relations to be described is that of the consumer. [ 10] It was the individualism and subjectivism alleged of 'Ulysses' for which it was attacked most severely by Marxist critics. Joyce was accused of having abandoned society and history to look at the isolated individual, and of them having abandoned a concern with the individual in his or her social relationships in order to study inner thoughts and sensations. Radek, as usual, summed up the case for the prosecution most forcefully: Should we really tell the artist at the present time - the revolutionary artist here or abroad: 'Look at your inside'? No! We must tell him: 'Look - they are making ready for a world war! Look - the fascists are trying to stamp out the remnants of culture and rob the workers of their last rights! ... We must turn the artist away from his 'inside', turn his eyes to these great facts of reality which threaten to crash down upon our heads. [11] It was not just the Marxists of the 1930s who felt that Joyce's concern for characters' 'insides' in 'Ulysses' had led him away from crucial larger matters; writing in 1976 Terry Eagleton argued that in the 'alienated worlds of Kafka, Musil, Joyce, Beckett, Camus, man is stripped of his history and has no reality beyond the self; character is dissolved to mental states, objective reality reduced to unintelligible chaos', [12] and in another comment published the same year he suggested that Joyce's aesthetic ideology marked 'a retreat from a history in crisis'. [13] Marxist critics have also had many problems with the formal structure of 'Ulysses'. Lukacs has argued that the modernist novelist's retreat from plot is a retreat from the social world, as a plot forces the writer to examine character in a social and historical context,[14] and many Marxist critics have felt that in the absence of an order imposed by this 'discipline of the real', Joyce has injected a purely formal, artificial literary order into 'Ulysses', an order which makes no real contact with the experiences and inner lives of its characters. Thus a Soviet essay on the novel, published in English in 1938, claimed that the whole stylistic structure of Ulysses is contradictory. Designed to reveal the subconscious, to bring to the surface the primeval element in human psychology, and to establish the supremacy of the irrational, this novel is distinguished by the iron logic of its construction. [ 15] More recently,

Arnold Kettle has argued that at least half

114

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

the 'significances' of 'Ulysses' are arbitrary ones, and that the relationship between Bloom and Stephen is a fraud, imposed from above. [16] Terry Eagleton has suggested, in similar vein, that aspects of the novel draw attention to their flagrantly synthetic basis in Homeric myth, and that 'the factitiousness of that formal "resolution" is satirically revealed in the novel's content - in the unepiphanic non-event of the meeting of Stephen and Bloom'. [17] The foregoing criticisms of 'Ulysses' raise serious objections to the novel. How are they to be answered? I think that one should, first of all, recognise that in extremely difficult and unusual historical circumstances it may be the case that people's attention needs to be directed towards large social and political issues. It may also be the case that a concern for one's own subjective experiences and feelings can lead to one's cutting oneself off from social realities. In her 1972 preface to 'The Golden Notebook' Doris Lessing complained that when she began writing there was pressure on writers not to be 'subjective', a pressure which according to her began in communist movements and is still potent in communist countries. [18] But Doris Lessing's subsequent literary development suggests that those who were responsible for this pressure may not have been entirely wrong; certainly her novels written under this pressure do relate more meaningfully to the social world than those written after Lessing had reacted against it; the fantasy and desocialised mysticism of her recent work makes it seem shallow in comparison with what preceded it. And particularly in the social and political context of the 1930s it is hard to feel that Radek's position can be simply dismissed. After all, he is not saying things all that different from what Auden argued in his poem 'Spain' tomorrow the enlarging of consciousness, but today the struggle (although Radek says less of tomorrow than does Auden). Auden does however make the point in 'Spain' that there is an important relationship between our 'inside', as Radek puts it, and the 'great facts of reality which threaten to crash down upon our heads': On that tableland scored by rivers, Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises Have become invading battalions. [19] If so, then one cannot help feeling that the investigation of such thoughts and fears is not utterly irrelevant to the battle against those great facts of reality with which Radek is 115

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

concerned. Theodor Adorno has suggested that the achievements of modernist writing could be measured by enquiring whether 'historical moments' are given substance within the works in question, or whether 'they are diluted into some sort of timelessness'. [20] As Margaret Schlauch put it, in a temperate and analytical Marxist essay on 'Finnegans Wake' in 1939: It is not illegitimate to try a new technique in presenting a new world. It would however be a mistake to assume that this new inner world had nothing to do with the 'objective material' one. So palpable an error Joyce does not commit. The proper criticism would concern itself with the terms of correlation between the two. [21] Such a correlation can certainly be found in 'Ulysses', as I shall go on to argue later. For all that Joyce's social vision in the novel is partial and selective (which is hardly avoidable), one could counter-claim that few novels show their characters less as free, autonomous beings or more tied to their society and its history. What a striking contrast there is, for instance, if we compare 'Ulysses' with the plays of Harold Pinter. Pinter has said on a number of occasions that he was profoundly influenced by the silent, menacing encounters between Jews and Mosleyites in east London soon after the last war. But in his plays such silent, menacing encounters are utterly decontextualised; presented as somehow representative of all human relationships. This is certainly not true of 'Ulysses'. In one sense Eagleton is right that there is a sort of flight from history in the novel, for neither the characters nor their creator seem to have any conception of how change can take place - and this is as much true of personal relationships as it is true of the situation of Ireland. But paradoxically, Joyce shows very clearly how this paralysis is born of a particular social situation. Bloom is, after all, neither Everyman or Noman; his particularity is born of what, in an ugly modish jargon, one could call a given historical conjuncture, and this is as true of his secret thoughts, fantasies and dreams as it is of his public behaviour. One suspects that one of the problems for Georg Lukacs was that he really didn't have any confidence that there were 'terms of correlation' between the inner world and the 'objective material' one. At the head of his essay, 'The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization', Lukacs put a quotation from Heraclitus: 'Awake, men have a common world, but each sleeper reverts to his own private world.' Whatever shortcomings Marxists may find in Freud's work, his analysis of the dream world makes such a claim as Heraclitus' extremely tendentious, and had Lukacs paid a little more attention to the substance of Bloom's dreams he might have realised this. It is one of the great ironies of history that in 1934, the 116

'Ulysses’, modernism, and Marxist criticism

same year that Radek was savaging 'Ulysses' and calling for attention to be turned away from our 'inside', a book was published in the Soviet Union which paid considerable attention to our inside: L.S.Vygotsky's 'Thought and Language'. What is more, Vygotsky's account of the development of conceptual thought through the progressive internalisation of language advances hypotheses about the nature of the 'language of thought' which offer a fascinating way in to the study of Joyce's presentation of inner cerebration in 'Ulysses'. Vygotsky argues for a dialectical relationship between thought and language in which developments in the one facilitate and enable developments in the other. In particular, he suggests that language develops socially for the child, but that language developments are progressively internalised to structure new levels of thought, so that, for example, the acquisition of literacy has implications for the individual's ability to think. In the course of this argument he suggests that a sort of linguistic 'half-way-house' is what he terms 'egocentric speech'; when the growing child talks to itself not to communicate to others, but to organise its own thoughts. The relevance of this to our immediate subject is that Vygotsky suggests that The inner speech of the adult represents his 'thinking for himself' rather than social adaptation; i.e. it has the same function that egocentric speech has in the child. It also has the same structural characteristics: Out of context, it would be incomprehensible to others because it omits to 'mention' what is obvious to the 'speaker'. [22] Vygotsky suggests that the main distinguishing feature of inner speech is its peculiar syntax; compared to external speech it appears disconnected and incomplete, and that, in particular, 'it shows a tendency toward an altogether specific form of abbreviation: namely, omitting the subject of a sentence and all words connected with it, while preserving the predicate'. [23] This is certainly one of the general characteristics of Bloom's internal monologues: Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new garters. Today. Today. Not think. Tour the south then. What about English watering places? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy thought, gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages. Will eat anything. ('Ulysses', p.180) If we remember that the predicate of most of Molly's thought is 117

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

herself and her relationships, then we can recognise the same sort of abbreviation in her inner speech as we see in Bloom's. Vygotsky makes a number of other points about inner speech which are interesting in the context of an analysis of 'Ulysses'. He suggests that in inner speech the personal 'sense' of a word will be more important than its public 'meaning'. He also advances the hypothesis that inner speech is characterised by 'agglutination' - the merging of several words into one composite - and another process whereby 'the senses of different words flow into one another ... so that the earlier ones are contained in, and modify, the later ones'. [24] This is something that lovers of 'Ulysses' hardly need telling! One cannot but regret that in addition to his analyses of passages from the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Vygotsky had not been able to look in detail at the depiction of inner speech in 'Ulysses'. Analysis of one's own thought processes suggests that some thought seems to contain almost no verbal element at all, whereas on other occasions our thought seems structured through and even constituted by language. It is interesting to note, therefore, that Vygotsky's pupil, A.R.Luria, has suggested a distinction between 'taxonomic' and 'graphic' cognition; the former, which is the basis of conceptual thought is heavily dependent upon 'the shared experience of society conveyed through its linguistic system', whereas the latter is based on the 'individual's practical experience', and tends not to be structured through language. [25] This perhaps helps us to understand the difficulties - or some of them - that Joyce has in representing thought in 'Ulysses'. When Bloom is carrying out one of his extraordinary calculations - concerning the number of people buried in Dublin, and then the world, every day, for instance - the representation of his thought is relatively easy, as this sort of thought relies very heavily on language and is structured through it anyway. You cannot think, 'Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day' purely graphically; this level of conceptualising has to be done through language, and thus can far more easily be represented in written language. But take a passage like the following one: He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the time. Women enjoy it. Annoyed if you don't. Why didn't you tell me before. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there's a (whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked. Glimpses of the moon Still like you better untidy. ('Ulysses', p.85) The problem Joyce faces here is the representation of thought which mixes both graphic and verbal modes. We do not mentally verbalise our annoyance when we notice that our 118

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

clothing is disarranged, but when we think about our relations with other people our thoughts generally become far more verbal, as we are having to think about communication which in practice already contains a significant verbal element. Joyce uses a number of techniques to overcome the difficulty here. 'Hello', is what one might say in a comparable public situation, discovering something unexpected; it therefore 'stands for' the moment of Bloom's surprised discovery. The sentence following is, I have suggested, a verbal representation of that which normally wouldn't be thought in words; here Joyce leaves out the question mark that, grammatically, would be required. This indicates the non-social, self-enclosed nature of the thought to the reader; the reader takes this grammatical abnormality as a sign of the non-verbal nature of the thought. Molly's stream of consciousness is often seen as the most extreme form of technical innovation on Joyce's part in 'Ulysses', but it is worth noting that as nearly all of her thoughts concern her relationships with other people rather than merely physical sensation, their expression in words presents fewer problems than do some of Bloom's more ephemeral thoughts and sensations. In spite of her physicality and concern with sexuality, Molly consistently conceptualises; she does not just remember events, she comments upon them and tries to put them into some sort of order. We may remember Molly as an 'experiencer' rather than a 'thinker', but when we go back to her monologue we discover that she never stops interpreting and commenting upon her experiences. This is why we never feel any strain has been caused by representing her thoughts in words; they are generally at that level of conceptualisation which requires words anyway. In addition, of course, many of the events she is thinking about have had a significant verbal element in the first place. Vygotsky claims that inner speech normally has the form of a monologue, public speech that of the dialogue. [26] I am not sure; my own introspection suggests to me that the more that one thinks about social relationships, the more one's thought processes mimic dialogue. We have all had the experience of going through an unsatisfactory conversation, 'replaying it', as it were, so as to determine what it would have been better for us to have said. In addition to such exercises taking place after the event, it seems to me that we often go through elaborate mental exchanges prior to meetings with another person or other people which we know will be difficult. Such rehearsals are not only highly verbal - as verbal as thought can get, in my experience - but they typically take the form of a dialogue. 'Ulysses' contains no examples of this sort of mental process, and this, surely, is indicative of a certain absence in the novel. None of the characters in the novel plan for conflict. To put it another way; none of the characters in the novel are engaged in fighting to change their lives or society in such a way as necessitates such mental planning. No 119

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

one goes through the 'If he says this then I'll say that' process in their thoughts. To this extent some of the early criticisms of the novel's social selectivity made by Marxist critics are perhaps justified. There is an acceptance of 'how things are' on the part of the characters we get to know in 'Ulysses' that goes very deep. The novel does, however, offer what Margaret Schlauch asks for: some indication of the 'terms of correlation' between inner and outer worlds; it is certainly quite untrue that Joyce presents us with characters whose 'insides' are unrelated to larger external contexts. Leopold Bloom is a classic example of this. There is, I think, clearly a relationship between the objective social fact that Bloom is a Jew living in a society rife with anti-semitism, and the nature of his inner world. Joyce clearly goes to some lengths to stress the hostile environment in which Bloom lives; before he has appeared in the novel two characters - Haines and Deasy - have expressed ludicrous anti-semitic remarks; Deasy on two occasions. When Bloom is then introduced, the first sentence referring to him associates him with what we can call 'internality': 'Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.' Bloom's impulse towards the internal is surely connected to the factor of anti-Jewish prejudice in the society in which he lives. I am reminded very strongly of the illustrations depicting first-generation Jewish immigrants in America in David Efron's book 'Gesture, Race and Culture'. Efron's book, first published in 1941, aimed to counter Nazi theories concerning the racial inheritance of gesture. Efron studied Italian and Jewish immigrants to the USA through a number of generations, demonstrating that with each stage of assimilation gestural habits changed, being related not to race but to cultural environment. But some of the drawings depicting groups of Jewish people in New York who had just escaped from extremely oppressive, anti-semitic societies, are extremely thought-provoking. There is intense energy in the groups, but it is all directed inwards. No threat is directed towards outsiders, no demand made upon them - in marked contrast to the gestural behaviour of first-generation Italian immigrants, whose expansive behaviour immediately involves the onlooker. The picture that sticks in my mind is of a group of Jewish men, bending towards each other, gesturing and pointing at each other with extreme energy, but offering an unruffled, unchallenging exterior to the outside world. All the energy is directed inwards. Bloom is surely not unlike this, except that all his energies are inside himself rather than between himself and a small num¬ ber of fellows. On the outside, we are told of Bloom, 'he bore no hate' ('Ulysses', p.283), and that 'I resent violence or in¬ tolerance in any shape or form' ('Ulysses', p.564). Inside, as his sado-masochistic sexual fantasies show, the energies that are repressed in public behaviour mould and direct his fantasy 120

’Ulysses’, modernism, and Marxist criticism

life. Bloom's behaviour in the brothel acts out those larger conflicts he can only occasionally respond to in public (Cyclops). Even his masturbation - like the masturbation of Alexander Portnoy - represents a turning inwards for solutions to problems which cannot be solved on the social plane. (Philip Roth's definition of 'Portnoy's Complaint', at the front of his novel, has interesting points of contact with Bloom's predicament.) Erich Auerbach, contrasting the original Homeric 'Ulysses' with the biblical account of Abraham's journey to sacrifice his son, comments upon the 'simultaneous existence of various levels of consciousness and the conflict between them' expressed by the Jewish writers, and contrasts this with the lack of such complexity in Homer. [27] The contrast he makes is curiously reminiscent of that made by Efron between the first-generation Italian and Jewish immigrants; the former are fleeing from poverty, the latter from persecution. Thus it is in the Jewish writers, like the Jewish immigrants to America, that one finds internal complexity, as conflicts which cannot be resolved publicly by a persecuted people are forced inwards to create complex and divided inner states. Very similar points could be made about Stephen, who fears not persecution but engulfment from mothers he still partly belongs to but needs to reject. Thus his dominant mode is that of irony, a mode that grants partial assent to the claim made on him by his biological and religious mothers, but at the same time establishes a private space of his own. Since the 1930s Marxists have grown more interested in subjectivity as a result of a number of theoretical developments within Marxism. The work of Soviet psycholinguists such as Vygotsky represents one influential strand of work, the increasing concern with questions of ideology represents an even more persuasive theoretical development. If people's beliefs, habits of mind, modes of perceiving the world are important, then study of the manner in which these arise and are perpetuated is also crucial. Marilyn French points out that early on in 'Ulysses' we are introduced to the idea that the 'real' is knowable only through a particular mode of perception, and that this insight of Joyce's is related to the question of style, as 'mode of perception dictates mode of expression'. [2S1 She goes on to suggest that in the second half of the novel Joyce increasingly points to the fact that people do not perceive reality except by means of interlinked assumptions and strategies, which is not to say that reality is unimportant. Her claim that Joyce's stream of consciousness technique 'reflects a world with no deity' in which 'standards are internal'[29] comes rather too close for my liking to the thesis advanced by Colin MacCabe in his 'James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word' (1978). MacCabe claims that there is no metalanguage in 'Ulysses', and that thus the book rejects a representational view of language, breaking with the idea of 121

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

internal thought or external reality outside of language. [30] I do not agree. Surely the truth is that throughout 'Ulysses' Joyce actually eschews this sort of relativism; at most points in the book the reader is given a pretty clear idea of what is 'actually happening' alongside the perhaps different perceptions of events that the characters have. Nowhere do we have the straightforward lack of a metacommentary that I was amused to note on the title page of MacCabe's book, where the reader is informed in the same statement that the book was printed in Great Britain and printed in Hong Kong. We know, of course, that it must have been printed in either one place or the other, and Joyce - like any orthodox Catholic or Marxist - never denies the existence of a world existing independent of our consciousness of it. Very often this is the result, in 'Ulysses', of the creation for the reader of the sense of a consistent narrative point of view. In one sense, of course, this seems a wild statement to make, for in few novels does the technical point of view - the standpoint from or through which we perceive events - change so frequently. But most readers of 'Ulysses', surely, react to the particular selection and juxtaposition of characters, events, styles, and so on by building up an idea of the guiding principles behind such selection and juxtaposition. Take, for instance, the following passage: But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremor went over her. ('Ulysses', p.363) Now clearly on one level this represents a comic misperception. Bloom is a dirty old man misperceived by Gerty in terms of the hero of a romantic novel. The reader knows without any confusion 'what is happening'; Bloom is looking at Gerty and masturbating, while she, conscious of his attention, is encouraging him indirectly. On another level, however, Joyce indicates quite clearly that in another sense of the word what Gerty feels is 'real'; the pulp-novel style used to describe the episode represents Gerty's way of perceiving sexuality, it is the stuff of her thought, not just a means of presenting it. But of course the sort of novel Joyce is drawing upon would never include such an element as public masturbation in response to deliberate self-exposure; to this extent the 122

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

passage, as it reveals the extent to which Gerty is in thrall to a particular set of assumptions about sexuality, also reveals the inadequacy of those assumptions, that mode of perception, and indicates how in practice more sordid realities can be encompassed within what initially appears to be rather unpromising organising material. But this, surely, is not all. When we are shown Gerty thinking of Bloom as a man 'of inflexible honour to his fingertips,' the deliberate reference to fingers on Joyce's part reminds us what Bloom is actually doing with his hands and, in so doing, clearly reveals the presence of an organising intelligence behind the passage. The humour here reveals the humorist, a humorist who - like all good comedians - gets his laughs by building up his audience's knowledge of his assumed values. It is the construction of this 'value-centre' that allows Joyce to make the novel such an affirmation of human values. One of the ways in which this set of positive values is assembled and conveyed to the reader - in fact, the most important way - is through the humour of the novel. So few critics, Marxist or non-Marxist, talk about the fact that 'Ulysses' is one of the funniest novels in the English language that it is worth repeating Arnold Kettle's point that it is a very funny novel, 'including passages as uproarious as anything in modern fiction'. [31] The humour in the novel, however, is in no sense peripheral to the work, a sort of icing spread over the cake of learning that constitutes its bulk. Laughter is only possible when we feel the presence of an intelligence holding values we recognise as positive, confronting forces which we are led to see as antagonistic to those values. For all the complexity of 'Ulysses', its humour testifies to the existence of shared values, common perceptions. We can see this in miniature in the way in which humour is extracted from the contrast between Joyce's use of indirect speech and the actual words which we know will have been used. . A similar affirmation takes place on a larger scale within the novel. It is true that 'Ulysses' is structured in a way that is in a sense artificial; the structuring is beyond the perception of the characters (not to speak of the average reader), and exists on a different plane from the depicted life of the work. But this can be seen to mirror the order of a society which, also, makes little direct contact with the lived experience of its members, an order at odds with their essential humanity. And as this order is one that is imposed by two foreign masters there seems no reason why Marxists should expect it to be otherwise, or symbolically depicted in a more sympathetic light. In very broad terms the humanism of 'Ulysses is revealed through techniques similar to those employed by Sterne in 'Tristram Shandy': in both novels the richness and diversity of human life is threatened by alien and artificial forms of order, but in both novels life breaks through in 123

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

triumph. Mrs Shandy forgets everything her philosopher husband tells her, and Uncle Toby's fortifications collapse under the weight of Trim's love-making. Indeed, the following passage could well apply as much to Mrs Shandy as to Molly Bloom: What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things? The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experience. ('Ulysses', p.607) The humanist thrust of passages such as this, for all their humour, is not to be underestimated. 'Ulysses' is a novel with absences, omissions, incompletenesses. But as a recent critic of Lukacs's - John Thompson - has pointed out, we do not necessarily have to accept that the burden of giving an audience 'a real grasp of its historic situation' has to be borne 'by each text singly and anew'. As he adds, 'effects in themselves much smaller but cumulatively benign' can be welcomed. [32] 'Ulysses' certainly does not give us an exhaustive and comprehensive view of the historical situation of Ireland at the start of this century - although it gives more than some have conceded. But it does show us much about the relationship between inner and outer worlds, it gives us fascinating evidence concerning the connexion between mode of perception, style, belief, and reality. And it affirms certain human values in their social and historical specificity with such force that we cannot afford to dismiss it or them.

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6

7 8

Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce’ (London, 1959), p.3. Karl Radek, Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art, in 'Problems of Soviet Literature', ed. H.G.Scott (London, 1935), p.154. Ralph Fox, 'The Novel and the People' (London, 1937) p.94. R.D.Charques, 'Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution' (London, no date [?1933]), p.92. R.D.Charques, p.92. Karl Marx, Preface to 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' in 'Early Writings' (Harmondsworth, 1975), p.425. David Craig, Introduction, in 'Marxists on Literature', ed. David Craig (Harmondsworth, 1975), p.21. Georg Lukacs, Realism in the Balance, in 'Aesthetics and Politics' (London, 1977), p.38. 124

'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Karl Radek, p.153. Alick West, 'Crisis and Criticism' (London, 1937), p.169. Karl Radek, p.179. Terry Eagleton, 'Marxism and Literary Criticism' (London, 1976), p.31. Terry Eagleton, 'Criticism and Ideology' (London, 1976), p.157. Georg Lukacs, Marx and the Problem of Ideological Decay, in 'Essays on Realism', ed. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1980), p.145. R.Miller-Budnitskaya, James Joyce's 'Ulysses', 'Dialectics' (New York), 5 (1938), p.10. Arnold Kettle, 'An Introduction to the English Novel', 2 vols, (reprinted London, 1962), vol. 2, pp.157 , 156. Terry Eagleton, 'Criticism and Ideology', p.156. Doris Lessing, Preface, 'The Golden Notebook' (2nd ed, Frogmore, St Albans, 1972), p.12. W.H.Auden, 'Spain', written 1937. See 'The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-39', ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1977). Theodor Adorno, Reconciliation under Duress, 'Aesthetics and Politics', p.159. Margaret Schlauch, The Language of James Joyce, 'Science and Society' (New York), Fall 1939, p.489. L.S.Vygotsky, 'Thought and Language’, ed. and trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p.18. L.S.Vygotsky, p.139. L.S.Vygotsky, p.147. A.R.Luria, 'Cognitive Development' (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p.52. L.S.Vygotsky, p.142. Erich Auerbach, 'Mimesis', trans. Willard R.Task (3rd printing, Princeton, N.J., 1971), p.13. Marilyn French, 'The Book as World : James Joyces Ulysses' (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p.10. Marilyn French, p.65. Colin MacCabe, 'James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word' (London, 1978), p.4. Arnold Kettle, p.142. . , John O.Thompson, Up Aporia Creek, Screen Education , 31, Summer 1979, p.37.

125

9

‘ULYSSES’ IN HISTORY Fredric Jameson

One does not read Joyce today, let alone write about him, without remembering the fifteen-year-long struggle for freedom of the people of Northern Ireland; the following, then, for whatever it is worth, must necessarily be dedicated to them. I had it in mind, in what follows, to say something about the two most boring chapters of 'Ulysses': most people would agree that these are surely the Eumaeus and the Ithaca chapters, the scene in the cabmen's shelter and the catechism. I have found, however, that in order to do that properly one must necessarily speak about the rest in some detail so that finally those parts are greatly reduced. One of the things such a subject leads you to consider, however, is boredom itself and its proper use when we are dealing with literary texts of this kind, and in particular the classical texts of high modernism or even postmodernism. I will still say something about that I think there is a productive use of such boredom, which tells us something interesting about ourselves as well as about the world in which we live today - but I also mean to use this word in a far less positive sense, so I will do that first and say that if there are boring chapters of 'Ulysses', with which we must somehow learn to live, there are also boring interpretations of 'Ulysses', and those we can really make an ettort to do without, sixty years after its publication, and in a social and global situation so radically different from that in which the canonical readings of this text were invented It would be surprising indeed if we were unable to invent newer and fresher ways of reading Joyce; on the other hand, the traditional interpretations I am about to mention have become so sedimented into our-laxt - 'Ulysses' being one of those books which ^^jl^Iys-already-rSSdOalwavs sppti and interpreted by otherpeofrli~ before you begin trTKat IT'is hard’ to see it afresh and impossible to read it as though those interpretations had never existed. They are, I would say, threefold, and I will call them the mythical, the psychoanalytical, and the ethical readings respectively. These are, in other words, the readings of tpimoSeV +?rStr lu terms of the 0dyssey parallel; second, in terms of the father-son relationship; and third, in terms of some possible happy end according to which this day, Bloomsday, will have changed everything, and will in 126

'Ulysses' in history

particular have modified Mr Bloom's position in the home and relationship to his wife. Let me take this last reading first. I will have little to say here about Molly's monologue, and only want now to ask not merely why we are so attached to the project of making something decisive happen during this representative day, transforming it in other words into an Event; but also and above all to ask why we should be committed to this particular kind of event, in which Mr Bloom is seen as reasserting his authority in what can therefore presumably once again become a vital family unit. (You will recall that he has asked Molly to bring him breakfast in bed the next day - the triumph over the suitors!) In this day and age, in which the whole thrust of a militant feminism has been against the nuclear and the patriarchal family, is it really appropriate to recast 'Ulysses' along the lines of marriage counselling and anxiously to interrogate its characters and their destinies with a view towards saving this marriage and restoring this family? Has our whole experience of Mr Bloom's Dublin reduced itself to this, the quest for a 'happy ending' in which the hapless protagonist is to virilise himself and become a more successful realisation of the dominant, patriarchal, authoritarian male? Still, it will be said that this particular reading is part of the more general attempt to fit 'Ulysses' back into the Odyssey parallel. As for the mythical interpretation - the Odyssey parallel undoubtedly underscored for us by the text itself as well as by generations of slavish interpreters - here too it would be desirable to think of something else. We are today, one would hope, well beyond that moment of classical modernism and its ideologies in which, as Sartre said somewhere, there was a 'myth of myth', in which the very notion of some mythic unity and reconciliation was used in a mythical, or as I would prefer to say, a fetishised way. The bankruptcy of the ideology of the mythic is only one feature of the bankruptcy of the ideology of modernism in general; yet it is a most interesting one, on which (had we more time) it might have been instructive to dwell. Why is it that, in the depthlessness of consumer society, the essential surface logic of our world of simulacra - why is it that the mythic ideal of some kind of depth integration is no longer attractive and no longer presents itself as a possible or workable solution? There is a kinship here, surely, between this waning of the mythic ideal or mirage and the disappearance of another cherished theme and experience of classical or high modernism, namely that of temporality, 'duree', lived time, the passage of time. But perhaps the easiest way to dramatise the breakdown of myth and myth criticism is simply to suggest that we suddenly, with anthropologists like Levi-Strauss, discovered that myths were not what we thought they were in the first place: not the place of some deep Jungian integration of the psyche, but quite the opposite, a space preceding the very 127

'Ulysses' in history

construction of the psyche or the subject itself, the ego, personality identity and the like: a space of the pre-individualistic, of the collective, which could scarcely be appealed to to offer the consolations that myth criticism had promised us. On the other hand, as I stated previously, we can scarcely hope to read 'Ulysses' as though it were called something else. I would suggest, then, that we displace the act or the operation of interpretation itself. The Odyssey parallel can then be seen as one of the organisational frameworks of the narrative text: but it is not itself the interpretation of that narrative, as the ideologues of myth have thought. Rather it is itself - qua organisational framework - what remains to be interpreted. In itself, the Odyssey parallel - like so much of that whole tradition of the classical pastiche from Cocteau or even from 'La Belle Helene' all the way to Giraudoux or Sartre or even John Updike - functions as wit: a matching operation is demanded of us as readers, in which the fit of the modern detail to its classical overtext is admired for its elegance and economy, as when, in 'Ulysses', Odysseus' long separation from Penelope is evoked in terms of a ten-year period of coitus interruptus or anal intercourse between the partners of the Bloom household. You will agree, however, that the establishment of the parallel is scarcely a matter of interpretation - that is, no fresh meaning is conferred either on the classical Homeric text, nor on the practices of contemporary birth control, by the matching of these two things. Genuine interpretation is something other than this, and involves the radic.al historisation of the form itself: what is to be interpreted is then the historical necessity™for this very peculiar and complex textual structure or reading operation in the first place. We can make a beginning on this, I think, by y evoking the philosophicaT~gbncept, but also the existential experience, called 'contingency'. Something seems to have happened at a certain point in modern times to the old unproblematic meaning of things, or to what we could call the content of experience; and this particular event is as so often first most tangibly detectable and visible on the aesthetic level. There is something like a_cri§is^QL-d&tail, in which we may, in the course of our narrative, need a house for our characters to sleep in, a room in which they may converse, but nothing is there any longer to justify our choice of this particular house rather than that other, or this particular room, furniture, view, and the like. It is a very peculiar dilemma, which Barthes described as well as anyone else, when he accounted for the fundamental experience of the modern or of modernity in terms of something like a dissociation between meaning and existence:

128

'Ulysses' in history

The pure and simple 'representation' of the 'real', the naked account of 'what is' (or what has been), thus proves to resist meaning; such resistance reconfirms the great mythic opposition between the vecu, [that is, the experi¬ ential or what the existentialists called 'lived experience'] and the intelligible; we have only to recall how, in the ideology of our time, the obsessional evocation of the de jure exclusion, what lives is structurally incapable of sciences, of literature, of social practices) is always staged as an aggressive arm against meaning, as though, by some de jure exclusion, what lives is structurally incapable of carrying a meaning - and vice versa. [1] One would only want to correct this account by adding that the living, life, vitalism, is also an ideology, as it is appropriate to observe for Joyce himself more generally; but on the whole Barthes's opposition between what exists and what means allows us to make sense of a whole range of formal strategies within what we call the high modernisms; these range clearly all the way from the de materialisation of the work of art (Virginia Woolf's attack on naturalism, Gide's omission of the description of people and things, the emergence of an ideal of the 'pure' novel, on the order of 'pure poetry') to the practice of symbolism itself, which involves the illicit transformation of existing things into so many visible or tangible meanings. I believe that today, whatever our own aesthetic faults or blinkers, we have learned this particular lesson fairly well: and that for us, any art which practices symbolism is already discredited and worthless before the fact. A long experience of the classical modernisms has finally taught us the bankruptcy of the symbolic in literature; we demand something more from artists than this facile affirmation that the existent also means, that things are also symbols. But this is very precisely why I am anxious to rescue Joyce from the exceedingly doubtful merit of being called a symbolic writer. Yet before I try to describe what is really going on in the text of 'Ulysses', let me do something Barthes did not care to do, in the passage I quoted, and designate the historical reasons for that modernist crisis, that dissociation of the existent and the meaningful, that intense—experience—&£ contingency in question here. We must explain this experience ttlStorica3!ybecause it is not at all evident, and particularly not in the ideological perspective - existential or Nietzschean which is that of Roland Barthes, among many others, and for which the discovery of the absurd and of the. radical contingency and meaninglessness of our object world is simply the result of the increasing lucidity and self-consciousness of human beings in a post-religious, secular, scientific, age.. But in previous societies (or modes of production) it was Nature that was meaningless or anti-human. What is 129

'Ulysses’ in history

paradoxical about the historical experience of modernism is that it designates very precisely that period in which Nature - or the in- or anti-human - is everywhere in the process of being displaced or destroyed, expunged, eliminated, by the achievements of human praxis and human production. The great modernist literature - from Baudelaire and Flaubert to 'Ulysses' and beyond - is a_city literature: its object is therefore the anti--ftatugal, the humanised, par excellence, a jt landscape which is everywhere the result of human labour, in V which everything - including the formerly natural, grass, trees, our own bodies - is finally produced by human beings. This is then the historical paradox with which the experience of contingency confronts us (along with its ideologies ' existentialism and nihilism - and its aesthetics - modernism): j how can the city be meaningless? How can human production | be felt to be absurd or contingent, when in another sense one i would think it was only human labour which created genuine meaning in the first place? Yet it is equally obvious that the experience of contingency is a real or 'objective' one, and not merely a matter of illusion or false consciousness (although it is that too). The missing step here - the gap between the fact of the human production of reality in modern times and the experience of the results or products of that production as meaningless - this essential f mediation is surely to be located in the work process itself, U whose organisation does not allow the producers to grasp their )j relationship to the~Final product; as well as in the market system, which does hot allow the consumer to grasp the product's origins in collective production. I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that I do not have to insert a general lecture on alienation and reification, on the dynamics of capital and the nature of exchange value, at this point: I do want to dwell at somewhat greater length on one of the basic forms taken by reification as a process, and that is what can be called the analytical fragmentation of older organic or at least 'naturwuchsige' or traditional processes. [2] Such fragmentation can be seen on any number of levels: on that of the labour process first of all, where the older unities of handicraft production are broken up and 'taylorised' into the meaningless yet efficient segments of mass industrial production; on that of the psyche or psychological subject, now broken up into a host of radically different mental functions, some of which those of measurement and rational calculation - are privileged and others - the perceptual senses and aesthetic generally are marginalised; on that of time, experience, and storytelling, all of which are inexorably atomised and broken down into their most minimal unities, into that well-known 'heap of tragments where the sun beats'; the fragmentation, finally, of the older hierarchical communities, neighbourhoods, and organic groups themselves, which, with the penetration of the money and market system, are systematically dissolved into 130

'Ulysses' in history

relations of equivalent individuals, 'free but equal' monads, isolated subjects equally free to sell their labour power, yet living side by side in a merely additive way within those great agglomerations which are the modern cities. It is incidentally this final form of reification which accounts, be it said in passing, for the inadequacy of that third conventional interpretation of 'Ulysses' mentioned above, namely the fetishisation of the text in terms of 'archetypal' patterns of father-son relationships, the quest for the ideal father or for the lost son, and so forth. But surely today, after so much prolonged scrutiny of the nuclear family, it has become apparent that the obsession with these relationships and the privileging of such impoverished interpersonal schemas drawn from the nuclear family itself are to be read as break-down products and as defence mechanisms against the loss of the knowable communityT~The efforts ot Edward Said and others to demonstrate FRe omnipresence of ~£uch familial schemes in modern narrative should surely not be taken as an affirmation of the ultimate primacy of such relationships, but rather exactly the reverse, as sociopathology and as diagnosis of the impoverishment of human relations which results from the destruction of the older forms of the collective. [3] The father-son relationships in 'Ulysses' are all miserable failures, above all others the mythical ultimate 'meeting' between Bloom and Stephen; and if more is wanted on this particular theme, one might read into the record here the diatribes against the very notion of an Oedipus complex developed in Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus', which I do not necessarily endorse but which should surely be enough to put an end to this particular interpretive temptation. . But the psychoanalytic or Oedipal interpretation was itsell only a sub-set of the Odyssey parallel or mythological temptation, to which, after this digression, I promised to return. What I wanted to suggest about the kind of reading determined by the Odyssey parallel in 'Ulysses' is that this parallelism, and the kind of matching it encourages between the two levels of written and over-text, functions as something like • Like the classical unities, it offers a useful but wholly extrinsic set of limits against which the writer works, and which serve as a purely mechanical check on wTTaT risks otherwise becoming an infinite proliferation of detail. [4] The point is that, as we suggested a moment ago, tlie~51?ler traditional narrative unities have disappeared, been destroyed in the process of universal fragmentation: the ^organic unity of the narrative > can thus no longer serve as a SymbtTl—FbFthe "unity oF'experience, nor as a formal limit on the production of narrative sentences: the single day - that overarching formal unity of 'Ulysses' - is a meaningful uni neither in human experience nor in narrative itself. But at that point, if what used to be experience, human destiny and the like, is shattered into such components as taking a walk at 131

'Ulysses' in history

lunchtime from your place of business to a restaurant, buying a cake of soap, or having a drink, or visiting a patient in a hospital - each of these components being then in itself infinitely subdivisible - then there is absolutely no guarantee that the transformation of these segments into narrative sentences might not be infinitely extended and indeed last forever. The Odyssey parallel helps avoid this unwelcome development and sets "just such external limits, which ultimately become those of Joyce's minimal'" units Of composition - the individual chapters themselves. But what I wanted to show you was that alongside the type of reading encouraged by the mythic parallels - which I have called a matching up - there is a rather different form of reading which resists that one in all kinds of ways, and ends up subverting it. This is a type of reading which interrupts the other, consecutive kind, and moves forward and backwards across the text in a cumulative search for the previous mention or the reference to come: as Kenner and others have pointed out, it is a type of reading, a mental operation, peculiarly inconceivable before printing, before numbered pages, and more particularly before the institutionalisation of those unusual objects called dictionaries or encyclopedias. [5] Now one is tempted to assimilate this kind of reading to the more customary thematic or thematising kind, where we compile lists of recurrent motifs, such as types of imagery, obsessive words or terms, peculiar gestures or emotional reactions; but this is not at all what happens in 'Ulysses', where the object of the cross-referencing activity is always an event: taking old Mrs Riordan for a walk, the borrowed pair of tight trousers worn by Ben Dollard at a memorable concert, or the assassination in Phoenix Park twenty-two years before. This is to say that these seemingly thematic motifs are here always referential: for they designate content beyond the text, beyond indeed the capacity of any of the given textual variants to express or exhaust them. In such cross-referencing, indeed, one can say that the referent itself is produced, as something which transcends every conceivable textualisation of it. The appropriate analogy might be with the return of characters in Balzac's 'Comedie humaine', where the varying status of a given character - the hero in one novel, a character actor in a second, a mere extra in a third and part of an enumeration of names in a fourth - tends effectively to destabilise each of the narrative forms in question, and to endow them all with a transcendental dimension on which they open so many relative perspectives. What I want to suggest is that the analogous recurrence of events and characters throughout 'Ulysses' can equally be understood as a process whereby the text itself' is unsettled and undermined, a process whereby The' universal tendency of its terms, narrative tokens, representations, to solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic order as well as a massive [/ 132

'Ulysses' in history

narrative su^ace>i is perpetually suspended. I will call this process 'dfereificajian', and I first want to describe its operation i^/term/ of the city itself. The classical city is not a collection oi&Tuldings, nor even a collection of people living on top of one another; nor is it even mainly or primarily a collection of pathways, of the trajectories of people through those buildings or that urban space, although that gets us a little closer to it. [No, the classical city, one would think - it always being understood that we are now talking about something virtually extinct, in the age of the suburb or megalopolis or the private car - the classical city is denned essentially by the nodal points at which all those pathway^_and trajectories meet, or which they^ traverse: points ot toifflisatidn, we may call them, which make shared experience noksICTe^ and also the storage of experience and information, which are in short something like a synthesis of the object (place) and the subject (population), focal points not unlike those possibilities of wifying^pe£^^ti^^ Kevin Lynch has identifiedas the signs and emblems ot the successful, the non-alienating city■ [61 | But to talk about the city inTnis way, spatially, by identifying the collective transit points and roundabouts ot temple and agora, pub and post office, park and cemetery, is not vet to identify the mediation whereby these spatial forms are at one with collective experience. Unsurprisingly that mediation will have to be linguistic, yet it will have to define a kind of speech which is neither uniquely private nor forbiddingly standardised in an impersonal public form, a ype of discourse in which the same, in which repetition, is transmitted again and again through a host of eventful variations, each of which has its own value. That discourse is called gossip: and from the upper limits of city life - the world of patronage, machine politics, and the nse and fall ward leaders - all the way down to the most minute aberrations of private life, it is by means of gossip and through the form of the anecdote that the dimensions of the city are maintained within humane limits and that the unity of city life is affirmed and celebrated. This is already the case with that ur form ot the city which is the village itself, as John Berger tell us 1 'Pig Earth': The function of this gossip which, in fact, is close, oral, daily history, is to allow the whole village to define itself. The village ... is a living portrait of itself: a communal portrait, in that everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays. As with the carvings on the capitals in a Romanesque church, there is an identity of spirit between what is shown and how it is shown - as if the portrayed were also the carvers. Every village's portrait of itself is constructed, however, not out of stone, but out of words, spoken and remembered: out of opinions, stones, 133

'Ulysses' in history

eye-witness reports, legends, comments and hearsay. And it is a continuous portrait: work on it never stops. Until very recently the only material available to a village and its peasants for defining themselves was their own spoken words. ... Without such a portrait - and the gossip which is its raw material - the village would have been forced to doubt its own existence. [7 ] So in that great village which is Joyce’s Dublin, Parnell is still an anecdote about a hat knocked'WT^ucked^up and returned, not yet a television image nor even a name in a newspaper; and by the same token, as in the peasant village itself, the ostensibly private or personal - Molly's infidelities, or Mr Bloom s urge to discover how far the Greek sculptors went in portraying the female anatomy - all these things are public too, and the material for endless gossip and anecdotal transmission. Now for a certain conservative thought, and for that heroic fascism of the 1920s for which the so-called 'masses' and their standardised city life had become the very symbol of every¬ thing degraded about modern life, gossip - Heidegger will call it 'das Gerede' - is stigmatised as the very language of inauthenticity, of that empty and stereotypical talking pour rien dire to which these ideologues oppose the supremely private and individual speech,. ©fl-fTfe death anxiety or the heroic choice. But Joyce - a radical neither in the left-wing nor the reactionary sense - was at least a populist and a plebeian. I don't know why the communists don't like me,' he 'complained once, 'I've never written about anything but common people. Indeed, from the class perspective, Joyce had no more talent for or interest in the representation of aristocrats than Dickens; and no more experience with working-class people or with peasants than Balzac (Beckett is indeed a far sounder guide to the Irish countryside or rural slum than the essen¬ tially urban Joyce.) In class terms, then, Joyce's characters are all resolutely petty-bourgeois: what gives this apparent limitation its representative value and its strength is the colonial^situation itself. Whatever his hostility to Irish cultural 'pgjonahsm. . Joyce’s, is "theirtcoi?-the mdtropdITr~Wde r imperialism, in which the development of bourgeoisie' and pro¬ letariat alike is stunted to the benefit- of a national petty-’ bourgeoisie: indeed, precisely these rigid constraints imposed by^imperiahsm on the development of human energies account tor the symbolic displacement and flowering of the latter in eloquence, rhetoric and oratorical language of all kinds; sym- j bolic practices not particularly essential either to businessmen qLJ? work*ng classes, but highly prized in precapitalist societies and preserved, as in a time capsule, in 'Ulysses' tself. And this is the moment to rectify our previous account of the city and to observe that if ’Ulysses' is also for us the classical, the supreme representation of something like

134

'Ulysses’ in history

the Platonic idea of city life, this is also partly due to the fact that Dublin is not exactly the full-blown capitalist metropolis, but like the Paris of Flaubert, still regressive, still distantly akin to the village, still un- or under-developed enough to be representable, thanks to the domination of its foreign masters. Now it is time to say what part^gbssvp^plays in the process of what I have called dereification, or“indeed in that peculiar network of cross-references which causes us to read 'Ulysses' backwards and forwards like a handbook. Gossip is indeed the very element in which reference - or, if you prefer, the / 'referent' itself expands—and contracts, ceaselessly transformed ^ from a mere token, a notation, a short-hand object, back into a full-dress narrative. People as well as things^ are~tire ^reified markers of such potential story-telling: and what for a high realism was the substantiality of character, of the individual ego, is here equally swept away into aflqx of anecdotes - proper names on the one hand, an interrmttem^sTbreofgossip on the other. But the process is to be sure more tangible and more dramatic when we see it at work on physical things: the statues, the commodities in the shopwindows, the clanking trolleylines that link Dublin to its suburbs (which dissolve, by way of Mr Deasy's anxieties about foot-and-mouth disease, into Mr Bloom's fantasy projects for tramlines to move cattle to the docks); or the three-master whose silent grace and respectability as an image is at length dissolved into the disreputable reality of its garrulous and yarn-spinning crewman; or, to take a final example, that file of sandwichmen whose letters troop unevenly through the text, seeming to move towards that ultimate visual reification fantasised by Mr Bloom virtually in analogue to Mallarme's 'livre': Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life. ('Ulysses', p.641) The visual, the spatially visible, the image, is, as has been observed, the final form of the commodity itself, the ultimate terminus of reification. Yet even so strikingly reified a datum as the sandwichboard ad is once again effortlessly dereified and dissolved when, on his way to the cabman's shelter, gtephen hears a down-and-out friend observe: 'I'd carry a sandwichboard only the girl in the office told me they're full up for the next three weeks, man. God, you've to book ahead" ('Ulysses', p.538). Suddenly the exotic picturepostcard vision of a tourist Dublin is transformed back into the dreary familiar reality of jobs and contracts and the next meal: yet this is not necessarily a dreary prospect; rather it

135

'Ulysses' in history

opens up a perspective in which, at some ideal outside limit, everything seemingly material and solid in Dublin itself can presumably be dissolved back into the underlying reality of human relations and human praxis. Yet the ambulatory letters of the sandwichmen are also the very emblem of textuality itself, and this is the moment to say the price 'Ulysses' must pay for the seemingly limitless power of its play of reification and dereification; the moment, in other words, to come to terms with Joyce's modernism. Stated baldly, that price is radical depersonalisation, or in other words, Joyce's completion of Flaubert's programme of removing the author from the text - a programme which also removes the reader, and finally that unifying and organising mirage or aftermirage of both author and reader which is the 'character', or better still, 'point of view'. What happens at that point can perhaps oversimply be described this way: such essentially idealistic (or ideal, or imaginary) categories formerly served as the supports for the unity of the work or the unity of the process. Now that they have been withdrawn, only a Jorm of 7 material unity is left, namely the printed book itself, and its-/ material unity as a bound set of pages within which the cross-references mentioned above are contained. One of the classic definitions of modernism is of course the increasing sense of the materiality of the medium itself (whether in instrumental timbre or oil painting), the emergent foregrounding of the medium in its materiality. It is paradoxical, of course, to evoke the materiality of language; and as for the materiality of print or script, that particular material medium is surely a good deal less satisfying or gratifying in a sensory, perceptual way than the materials of oil paint or of orchestral coloration; none the less, the role of the book itself is functionally analogous, in Joyce, to the materialist dynamics of the other arts. Now in one sense textualisation may be seen as a form or subset of reification itself: but if so, it is a unique type of reification, which unbinds fully as much as it fixes or crystallises. They may, indeed^ offer the most appropriate contemporary way of dealing with the phenomena Joseph Frank described in his now classical essay as 'spatial form'. I am thinking, for instance, of the moment in which a remarkable and ingenious method for cabling news of the Phoenix Park murders across the Atlantic is described: the reporter takes an ad (Mr Bloom's 'one sole unique advertisement') and uses its spatial features to convey the trajectory of the killers and the map of the assassination ('Ulysses', pp.137-8). This is to institute a peculiarly fluid relationship between the visually reified and the historically eventful, since here these categories pass ceaselessly back and forth into one another. The climax of this development is in many ways reached in the Nighttown section, itself a prolongation of that comparable movement and outer limit reached by Flaubert in 'La Tentation 136

'Ulysses' in history

de Saint Antoine’. Indeed, had we more time, it would have been pleasant to discuss the peculiar representational space generated by these two 'reading plays', these two seeming eruptions and intrusions of a properly theatrical space in that very different space - no matter how experimental - of narrativ§__or_ novelistic.. representation. I think we would have been able to show that this new space, with its ostensibly theatrical form (scenic indications, character attributions, printed speeches, notations of expression), has nothing to do with the closure of traditional theatrical representation; far more to do, indeed, with that space of hallucination in terms of which Flaubert often described his own creative processes, and which, in 'Saint Antoine', he represents as follows: And suddenly there move across the empty air first a puddle of water, then a prostitute, the edge of a temple, a soldier's face, a chariot drawn by two white horses rearing. These images arrive abruptly, jerkily, detached against the night like scarlet paintings on ebony. Their movement grows more rapid. They follow each other at a dizzying rate. At other times, they come to a halt and gradually waning, melt away; or else they fly off, and others take their place at once. [8] Hallucinatory experience of this kind can be described, in the language of Gestalt psychology, as the perception of forms without background, forms or figures sundered from their ground or context, and passing discontinuously across the field of vision in a lateral movement, as though somehow on this side and nearer than the objects of the visible world. The instability of space or experience of this kind lies in the failure of the discrete or isolated image to generate any background or depth, any worldness in which it can take root. On the printed page, this essentially means that the ground, the anticipatory-retrospective texture, of narrative - what Greimas calls its isotopies, its anaand cata-phoric relationships is ruptured: it therefore falls to the typographic and material mechanisms of theatrical and scenic directions to bind (or rebind) these discontinuous images together. Typography thus becomes an event within the text among others. Or, if you prefer, since it is the reified sense of the visual which has here been solicited and stimulated, this sense will now begin to function as it were in the void, taking as its object the material signifiers, the printed words themselves, and no longer the latter's signifieds or representations or meanings. At any rate, this peculiar climax of 'Ulysses' in the seeming immediacy of a theatrical representation which is in reality the unmediated experience of the printed book will now help us to understand two kinds of things: the peculiarly anticlimactic nature of the chapters that follow it (I'm getting to them, at

137

'Ulysses' in history

last!), and the ground on which the depersonalised textualisation of the narrative of 'Ulysses' takes place, what one is tempted to call a kind of 'autistic textualisation', the production of sentences in a void, moments in which the book begins to elaborate its own text, under its own momentum, with no further need of characters, point of view, author or perhaps even reader: Mr Bloom reached Essex bridge. Yes, Mr Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. ('Ulysses', p.260) Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M.B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. ... You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. ('Ulysses', pp.331-2) The point I want to make about passages like these, and they are everywhere in 'Ulysses', is that 'point of view' theory does not take on them, nor any conceivable notion of the Implied Author, unless the I.A. is an imbecile or a schizophrenic. No one is speaking these words or thinking them: they are simply, one would want to say, printed sentences. And this will be my transition to the two most boring chapters of 'Ulysses', and thence to a close. Because what happens in the Eumaeus chapter is that, so to speak, Joyce lapses back into more traditional narrative 'point of view': that is, for the first time in 'Ulysses' we once again get the 'he thought/she thought' form of indirect discourse, what I will call the third person indistinct, and a henceforth conventional belief in that central reflective consciousness which is both appropriate and ironic in the chapter in which Bloom and Stephen are finally able to sit down together, two closed or solipsistic monads projecting that most boring theme of our own time, namely 'lack of communication'. Indeed, I am tempted to say, judging from the sentence structure, the elaborate periphrases, the use of occasional foreign expressions as well as cautiously isolated 'colloquial' ones, that this chapter really constitutes Joyce's attempt at a parody or pastiche of a writer he had no particular sympathy or respect for, namely Henry James. (If so, it is not a very good pastiche, and only ~our supreme belief in Joyce's power of mimicry, in his ability to do anything stylistically, has prevented us from noticing it.) Or better still, this chapter deploys the stylistic mannerisms of Henry James in order to record a social and psychological content characteristic, rather, of James's enemy brother and archetypal rival, H.G. Wells that is, an essentially

138

'Ulysses’ in history

petty-bourgeois content whose comfortable fit with the Jamesian narrative apparatus is somehow humiliating for both of them and sends both off back to back, as though their well-known differences on the form and function of the novel were less the taking of incompatible positions than - to use a more contemporary expression - mere variants within a single problematic, the problematic of the centred subject, of the closed monad, of the isolated or privatised subjectivity. The theory and practice of narrative 'point of view', as we associate it with Henry James, is not simply the result of a metaphysical option, a personal obsession, nor even a technical development in the history of form (although it is obviously also all those things): point of view is rather the quasi-material expression of a fundamental social development itself, namely the increasing social fragmentation and monadisation of late capitalist society, the intensifying privatisation and isolation of its subjects. We have already touched on one aspect of this development - reification - which can now be characterised in another way, as the increasing separation, under capitalism, between the private and the public, between the personal and the political, between leisure and work, psychology and science, poetry an prose, or to put it all in a nutshell, between the subject and the object. The centred but psychologised subject and the reified object are indeed the respective orientations of these two concluding chapters, Eumaeus and Ithaca: and it is as though Joyce meant here to force us to work through in detail everything that is intolerable about this opposition. What we have been calling boredom is not Joyce's failure, then, bu rather his success, and is the signal whereby we ourselves as organisms register a situation but also forms that are finally stifling for ^®rhapg

a uttle

easier

to

show

in

the

Ithaca

or

catechism sequence: the format - question and answer ~ 18 really, I think, a return to the experimentation - better still, the textualisation - of the earlier chapters. It is rather that quite different thing - the construction of a form of discourse from which the subject - sender or receiver - is radjcally excluded: a form of discourse, in other words, that would be somehow radically objective, if that were really possible. And if it is observed that even this seemingly sterilised alternation of question and answer turns increasingly, towards the end o theq chapter, around Mr Bloom7s private thoughts and fantasies in other words, around the subjective rather than the obfective, then . will reply by noting the degree t° which those fantasies, Mr Bloom’s 'bovarysme (tactfully called 'ambition' by Joyce), are henceforth inextricably bound UP with objects, in the best consumer society tradition. These are falsely subjective fantasies: here, in reality, commodities dreaming about themselves through us. , , These two final Bloom chapters, then, pose uncomfortable

139

'Ulysses' in history

problems, and not least about narrative itself: the subjective or point-of-view chapter, Eumaeus, asks us why we should be interested in stories about private individuals any longer, given the extraordinary relativisation of all individual experience, and the transformation of its contents into so many purely psychological reactions. Meanwhile, the objective chapter, Ithaca, completes an infinite subdivision of the objective contents of narrative, breaking 'events' into their smallest material components and asking whether, in that form, they still have any interest whatsoever. Two men have a discussion over cocoa, and that may be interesting at a pinch: but what about the act of putting the kettle on to boil - that is a part of the same event, but is it still interesting? The elaborate anatomy of the process of boiling water ('Ulysses',pp.591-4) is boring in three senses of the word: (1) it is essentially non-narrative; (2) it is inauthentic, in the sense in which these mass-produced material instruments (unlike Homer's spears and shields) cannot be said to be organic parts of their users' destinies; finally, (3) these objects are contingent and meaningless in their instrumental form, they are recuperable for literature only at the price of being transformed into symbols. Such passages thus ask three questions: 1

Why do we need narrative anyway? What are stories and what is our existential relation to them? Is a non-narrative relationship to the world and to Being possible?

2

What kind of lives are we leading and what kind of world are we living them in, if the objects that surround us are all somehow external, extrinsic, alienated from us? (It is a question about the simulacra of industrial society, essentially a question about the city, but in this form at least as old as the interrogation of the 'wholeness' of Greek culture by German romanticism.)

3

(A question I have already raised but which remains seemingly unanswered, namely) How can the products of human labour have come to be felt as meaningless or contingent?

Yet to this last question at least, Joyce's form has a kind answer, and it is to be found in that great movement of dereification I have already invoked, in which the whole dead grid of the object world of greater Dublin is, in the catechism chapter, finally, disalienated and by the most subterranean detours traced back ... less to its origins in Nature, than to the transformation of Nature by human and collective praxis deconcealed. So to the vitalist ideology of Molly's better known

140

'Ulysses' in history

final affirmation, I tend rather to prefer this one: What did Bloom do at the range? He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow. Did it flow? Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2,400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of £5 per linear yard.... ('Ulysses', p.591)

NOTES 1 2

3 4

5 /

6 7 8

Roland Barthes, L'Effet de reel, 'Communications', no. 11 (1968) p.87. See for a more detailed account of reification my 'The Political Unconscious; Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act' (London: Methuen; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. pp.62-4, 225-37, and 249-52. Edward Said, 'Beginnings' (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp.137-52. For further remarks on the proliferation of sentences see my 'Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). See Hugh Kenner, ’Flaubert. Joyce, Beckett: the Stoic Comedians' (Boston: Beacon, 1962). Also the work of MacLuhan and Walter Ong. Kevin Lynch, 'The Image of the City,' (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1960). John Berger, 'Pig Earth' (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p.9. Gustave Flaubert, 'La Tentation de Saint Antoine' (Paris: La Pleiade, 1951), vol.I, p.69.

141

10 REFLECTIONS ON EUMAEUS: WAYS OF ERROR AND GLORY IN ‘ULYSSES’ Alistair Stead

Text: Open thy mouth and put thy foot in it.

I While it may be absurd to argue that any single chapter of 'Ulysses' is of supreme importance to our understanding of the whole book, there is a good case for re-considering some of the peculiar virtues of the sixteenth chapter. Although Joyce declared the following chapter was his own favourite and called Ithaca 'the ugly duckling' of the book, it would seem perfectly reasonable to contend that most readers have regarded Eumaeus as the ugliest of his brood and beyond any metamorphosis into a swan.[l] Many critics have inveighed against the terrible tedium of such a slow-paced, thinly-textured anticlimax of a section; comparatively few have appreciated its 'exquisite humour'. [2] Exhaustion, sometimes erroneously attributed to the author, has often been the reported consequence of the exhaustiveness of Joyce's method in 'Ulysses'. [3] From Aeolus on, chapters seem to use up, to make a conspicuous waste of, all available styles for the rendering of the book's major theme, 'everyday human life'. [4] Among these chapters, Nausicaa and Cyclops are acknowledged successes in the extensive use they make of an exhausted language as constitutive, in part at least, of a commonplace reality. But, even if it is granted that most episodes in the later stretches of the novel might serve as paradigms of its deliberately (and liberatingly) exhaustive practices, Eumaeus offers more of a challenge; it goes so far. Even the extreme abstraction of character in Ithaca has the charm of (relative) clarity after the bemusing blur of this section. Clumsily, in characteristically aberrant English, Eumaeus signals the microcosmic nature of its concerns: Leopold Bloom, taking advantage of an adventure into a cabman's shelter after his retreat with Stephen from Nighttown, projects a magazine story about the scene, 'a miniature cameo of the world we live in'. As if seeking a model for his recounting of 'My Experiences', let us say, in a Cabman's Shelter', he turns to a copy of the Evening Telegraph', to an example of 'the allembracing give us this day our daily press' ('Ulysses',, p.567). This memorably awful phrase should in its turn recall the way' in which 'Ulysses' most distinctly alludes to itself, in The Oxen

142

Reflections on Eumaeus

of the Sun, as 'this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle' (p.420). The heavily jocular phrasing in Eumaeus lays emphasis, seemingly inadvertently, on the contradiction on which the style of the section is reared: 'allembracing', like a 'allincluding', makes an expansive gesture but the unfortunate collocation with the equivocal 'press' contracts it, even to suffocation. Such ludicrous carelessness of association, verbal counterpart to the theme of false friendship, is the norm of the section. 'Aliquandus bonus dormitat Homerus': Homer may nod, but he nods vigorously, by arrangement, it would seem, and the reader, situated in the midst of paradox, is galvanised into extraordinarily active arrangements of his own. Eumaeus is then experienced as a concentration of linguistic relaxations remarkable for a humorous defiance of its own soporific programme. In discussion of Eumaeus it is best to proceed, in the spirit of the governing organ ('nerves', according to Stuart Gilbert's scheme), nervously. [5] What may seem like a cheerfully incompetent narrator awards Bloom a series of quasi-Homeric epithets: 'that muchinjured but on the whole eventempered person' ('Ulysses', p.563) is most resoundingly called 'the neverfailing Bloom' (p.581). The irony of designation is complex. The reader may feel that in this chapter of accidents, which insists on 'language as deception',[6] it is too easy to see the blundering protagonist as ' ever failing', parodic inversion of that poly tropical Ulysses to which the novel's odd title is pointing. (The book's relation to Homeric epic is notoriously elusive, neither strictly satirical nor consistently analogical; Wolfgang Iser's case for the 'Odyssey' as the ground necessary for defining the figure of everyday human life seems most persuasive.) [7] So persistently does Bloom falter, fall and fail in the book, that we may be tempted to leave him 'formulated, sprawling' on the Prufrockian pin. As comic persona, he will never fail us. Yet, quite traditionally within that formulation, he may still surprise us with competence. Confused as he is in Eumaeus, Bloom does not make mistakes abut the history of the Jews and is constantly sceptical about the yarns of the extravagant seaman Murphy. As linguistic resource he seems inexhaustibly rich, increasingly open to the operations of that Joycean play where nothing succeeds like excess. Joyce delighted in his pliability and, as we weigh the implications of 'neverfailing' we may come to recognise that Bloom's elastic shape approximates that of the reader of 'Ulysses', endlessly productive of mistakes and so contributing to an ultimate comic triumph. That every reader makes mistakes is axiomatic but ever since the brilliant manipulations of Fielding and Sterne it has become a part of the fictional transaction to be vigorously exploited, not just in the comic novel in English but in the fiction of modernism generally, in the works of writers as various as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Vladimir Nabokov, William

143

Reflections on Eumaeus

Golding and John Barth. It is more usual for the modernist to orient his reader by disorientation. Samuel Beckett, like Joyce, has a penchant for locating his reader in a 'quandary' ('Ulysses', p.533). Beckett delights in the immediate confusion of literal and metaphorical meanings to 'finding our place in the story', as in the opening of his brilliant short story Dante and the Lobster: 'It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti of the moon.' A Dantesque name and an ambiguous 'stuck' trap the reader in the perplexity of the reader-protagonist. [8] That the reader should find himself, at least temporarily, in a world of impasse is the Beckettian design. The opening of Beckett's first published novel 'Murphy' is an exemplary occasion (in Beckett's French translation the scene is more crudely identified as 'l'impasse de l'Enfant-Jesus'): The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect.... The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun. [9] But the reader must not identify with the sun, 'that creature of habit', he must attend with vigilance to this rhetoric of fixity. As Hugh Kenner was the first to observe, the sun could not have shone in on Murphy if the flat was oriented in this precisely formulated way. [10] The vigilant reader will catch the allusion to the Antepurgatory (waiting-room for souls not ready to do penance) once he reaches Murphy's fantasy about Belacqua, 'looking down at dawn across the reeds to the trembling of the austral sea and the sun obliquing to the north as it rose'[11] and will turn back to Canto IV of the 'Purgatorio' (just before the encounter with Belacqua) where Dante wonders, as he sits with Virgil on a ledge facing east, why the sun is striking them from the left. [12] Apprised of Murphy's wish to emulate slothful Belacqua's embryonal repose, the reader might then retrace his steps and correct his probably overhasty reading of 'mew' as 'mews' (as a misprint perhaps); for 'mew' is not just a synonym for cage or a den but very specifically refers to a cage where hawks are put to moult and renew their feathers. Murphy may then be seen, by an ironic allusion to the maze-making and 'hawk-like man' whose name Stephen Dedalus bears in 'A Portrait of the Artist' (pp.173, 229) as an anti-artist, a progressively decreative spirit. Where Stephen aspires to fly beyond the nets of his culture, Murphy, more gull than hawk, has shed his plumage (his clothes, his pen) and resolved not to renew himself in this world, dying naked and bound to a rocking chair - in

144

Reflections on Eumaeus

virtually the same situation in which we found him at the beginning of the book. I have by no means exhaustively analysed the treacheries of Beckett's style in this brief passage nor would I claim that Beckett's deceptions derive from Joyce (though I am inclined to believe that the topographical absurdity of the scene may be a sly homage to that headpiece in the 'Freeman' that so amused Mr Bloom: 'a homerule sun rising up in the northwest' ('Ulysses', p.59), but I would stress that Joyce too provokes his readers into error, self-correction, renewed attention, the conditions of an act of reading that he exploits to the full in 'Ulysses' and which in Eumaeus he throws into sharp relief. Brook Thomas has plausibly argued, in his article Not a Reading of but the Act of Reading 'Ulysses', that 'our reading of "Ulysses" is founded on the possibility of error'. [13] Joyce makes of errors what Stephen in the National Library calls 'portals of discovery' ('Ulysses', p.190). Errors may characterise ('Bloom's garbled literary allusions or Molly's mispronunciations of long words or even Stephen's misquotations serve as revelation of character') but they also force us to switch from the 'naturalistic tale' to 'the tale of the telling'; [14] for as we recognise some misprint or misquotation or any verbal mistake in the text we read with double vision, reading both the error on the page and the correct (absent) word or phrase, and we are compelled thus to admit that the context for any meaningful mistake has been supplied by the hidden hand of the Arranger.[ 15] This is what is happening in 'Murphy': the fastidious naturalism of the setting is being exposed as a sham and we see, not into the nature of things, but into the whimsical nature of the self-conscious narrator. With Thomas’s accent on the release of the reader's creative energies through his encounters with errors I am then in general agreement. Joyce requires and provides for a more-than-usually active reader who is encouraged to commit, identify and correct a myriad mistakes and is prevented thereby from disassociating himself from the fallibilities of the characters or the author. That the reader may indeed be in danger of misrepresentation is readily illustrated from Thomas's own unfortunate choice of example. Bloom at Paddy Dignam's funeral thinks of a poem: 'Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell?' ('Ulysses’, p.115). Thomas maintains that as we spot the mistake and supply the correct title and author we are driven to notice the cleverness, not of Bloom ('I know of no critic who claims that Bloom is aware of his own mistake') but of 'a consciousness, the author, the narrator, the ventriloquist, the arranger or whatever'.[ 16] But it is necessary to keep in focus both the naturalistic tale and the tale of the telling. Bloom, in a typical fumbling for the right knob, has not yet found the right author and knows it; furthermore, he is making a joke about the title. Meditating on

145

Reflections on Eumaeus

inscriptions, he imagines more informative ones, tor example, the boast that 'I cooked good Irish stew’; hence 'Eulogy...it ought to be', a celebration of life. Bloom's misreading is creative and quite conscious. His resistance to his environment, though often vague, regressive, and ineffectual, is here characteristically good-humoured and humorous. He has been called an 'incurable punster'. [17] It is possible to exaggerate his capacity for verbal play - the determination o the environment is massively realised in the character - but there is 'that high magic to low puns', as that Joycean American novelist Thomas Pynchon puts it, and they are an important means to survival. [18] Even the superficially played-out texture of Eumaeus is infiltrated by the unexpected adaptation of the common. When Stephen rambles on about the passionate Italians, for instance: 'It's in the blood, Mr. Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the blood of the sun' ('Ulysses', p.558). A slight reformulation of Darwin gives a shrewd twist to a heartfelt banality: so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties invariably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity and the misery and suffering it entailed as a foregone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word, (p.577) Brook Thomas perceives that the dependence of 'Ulysses' on so much misreading and misprinting raises the question of the status of correctness. He concludes: 'There is no one correct reading, so the only totally incorrect reading is the one that claims to be the correct reading.'[19] With the cheerfully anarchic tenor of his remarks I feel some measure of sympathy, for, as I shall go on to argue, I an confident that Joyce is at war with the single-minded pedant in his work. But there is an extravagance in the critique of correctness which needs to be noted. Most of the errors in the book can only be appreciated if the reader acknowledges, if only provisionally, standards of correctness. Thomas proceeds on such an assumption when he suggests that Bloom is not clever enough to play on the title of Gray's 'Elegy': Thomas must be able to supply the correct title and a correct (more persuasive) account of Bloom's character. It is true that in an example drawn from the 'initial' style of the novel, such as Martha Clifford's error-strewn letter ('Ulysses', p.79), we are directed more forcefully to a reading in terms of the naturalistic tale. Later in the fiction, as Joyce reveals more of the arrangements of the hidden hand, the integrity of text and character is shaken. In Eumaeus Bloom finds himself misprinted as 'Boom' in the newspaper report of the funeral and the reader's attention seems to be drawn to the permutating Performer and his polysemous ambitions. [20] But the humble

146

Reflections on Eumaeus

basis for the game cannot be neglected. It is common knowledge that misprints are too frequent in newspapers and that a character called Bloom has existed - has been strenuously produced - since the fourth chapter of the book. The 'retrospective arrangement' of the character (of which the name is a symbol), the character who was so intimately rendered in the funeral scene, must still be felt, on one level at least, as a mis-representation. The continuing force of the elaborate naturalism of much of the first half (dependent as it is on some sense of the 'correctness' of linguistic forms) puts some constraint on the reader's wilder imaginings and helps to sustain the tension between the two 'tales' on which the novel depends. It would be wrong of course to suggest that Joyce made any fetish of correctness or naturalism in the book. It is well known that Joyce retained the 'crosstrees' of the three-master 'Rosevean' (p.56) although he knew them to be inaccurate. Many another error has crept in unregarded, as Robert Martin Adams has been most assiduous in demonstrating. [21] But Thomas, seeing error everywhere, goes so far as to doubt whether there is a valid text, for Joyce's proofreading was woefully deficient on account of his failing eyesight and both 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' still pay homage to the muse Errata. [22] There is no need to despair, however; Philip Gaskell has explored with care the problem of establishing an authoritative text and has, reasonably, projected the means of arriving at a definitive edition of 'Ulysses'. [23] We may certainly need to recognise the dimensions of error in Joyce and even concede that the hospitality to lapse and aberration waxes hydroptic in 'Finnegans Wake' (where Ireland has become Errorland, p.62); but we must also recognise that indispensable to the comic effect is the postulate of correctness. Very precisely, we must not punctuate the title of Joyce's last work: only a meticulous incorrectness will leave us free to play.

II In Eumaeus the paradigm of propriety and the desideratum of the well formed sentence are essential to energetic engagement with the text. Mistake and misconception are rife on the planes of language and of action. It is a section so 'copious in its fecund awfulness' that it might be taken for a Flaubertian compilation of betises.[24] It was Pound who proclaimed that in 'Ulysses' Joyce had completed 'le grand sottisier' which Flaubert had begun. (Pound had admired Rene Descharmes's demonstration that Flaubert had drawn on the 'Dictionnaire des idees reques' for the continuous dissection of the bourgeois in his major fictions and that the unfinished culminating anatomy, 'Bouvard et Pecuchet', was to have incorporated in the

147

Reflections on Eumaeus

projected second volume an Album composed of a multitude of quotations which would exhibit the fatuity of both the famous and the obscure.)[25] Eumaeus, crammed with cliches, has frequently invited comparison with the procedures of 'Bouvard et Pecuchet', which have usually been regarded as sardonic mockeries. [26] Marilyn French, although she refuses to see all of 'Ulysses' as an indictment of the modern world and does not invoke Flaubert, admits some satirical animus in Eumaeus and Ithaca, directed in the former chapter against 'the democratic era of the common man', his 'tasteless, rambling, carefully unoffending sentiments'. [27] But Pound's Flaubert had appealed mostly to the tyro. The Joyce of 1902-3, polymath, fastidious, aloof, had composed for himself a Flaubertian persona. He was hoarding his refined images of Dublin's moral squalor and intent on betraying her soul. It was his busiest time as a literary reviewer and he was lavish in reproof and pedantic correction, as the reprinted items in 'Critical Writings' testify. (He was also prone to misquote and misspell!) J.M.Synge met him in Paris at this time and found him 'obsessed by rules'. Joyce, then working on his Aristotelian aesthetics, subjected 'Riders to the Sea' to savage criticism and showed Synge 'a notebook containing Memorabilia, which turned out to be merely the solecisms of contemporaries'. Richard Ellmann quotes examples (including some lines of Yeats) which bear comparison with follies culled by Flaubert. [28] Two years later he was to ask, 'Would you be surprised if I wrote a very good English grammar some day?' ('Letters', II, p.86). By the time Joyce came to write Eumaeus the immature astringencies might be thought to lie behind him. Nevertheless, faced in 1920 with the excessive praise that Edmond Jaloux gave to Flaubert's 'faultless' prose, he was excited to assault the grammatical correctness of 'Trois Contes', coming to rest on the famous last sentence of Herodias (and so of the whole book): 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, ils la portaient alternativement.'[29] One wonders whether Joyce was aware of Proust's brilliant analysis of Flaubert's style in the January issue of 'La nouvelle revue frangaise' for that year. Proust had granted the great stylist's liability to error but admired his genius for exploiting grammatical deviation for aesthetic purpose; unsurprisingly he had singled out the last sentence of Herodias in order to draw attention to the ungainly but expressive positioning of the adverb. [30] Joyce's censure misses the finesse and condemns the master of the mot juste for using 'alternativement' when three, rather than two, carriers of the head of John the Baptist are denoted by 'ils'. Ellmann comments on the incident: Joyce was 'not above playing the pedagogue'. [31] An instructive phrase. Young Joyce's alter ego in 'Stephen Hero' is heroic, if at all, in his detective and corrective consciousness; he finds that Father Butt is ignorant of Turgenev (p.47). Father Dillon's elegant variations are utterly

148

Reflections on Eumaeus

predictable (pp.125-6), Dante's 'frode' epitomises the world of his education (p. 164). Out-pedagoguing the pedagogues is still a major concern of the more sophisticated and concentrated self-imagination in 'A Portrait', of which a crucial instance is Stephen's detection, in his Diary entry for 13 April, that the Dean of Studies has mistakenly claimed that 'tundish' was an Irishism (pp. 255-6). The creative consciousness has to be self-defensively critical. But there is evidence of self-criticism too. The pose may be directly analysed in 'Stephen Hero' (his 'taste for enigmatic roles', p.81) or lightly suggested in 'A Portrait' (he has the chief part in the Whitsuntide play at Belvedere, 'that of a farcical pedagogue,' p.75). Growth in the characters' consciousness of error in themselves may be seen to expand from the brief charities of 'Dubliners', where the imaginative boy-narrator of An Encounter, ironically calling himself by the forger's name of 'Smith', has to humble himself (inwardly at least) before the unlettered boy he calls 'Murphy'; and Gabriel Conroy, the intellectual protagonist of The Dead is more subtly and extravagantly humiliated into acceptance of the common lot. In 'A Portrait' the proud aesthete, keen to instruct his wayward fellows, veers between strictness and relaxation in his attitude toward himself. Finding he has misquoted a line by Nashe, Stephen over-reacts into self-disgust; 'All the images it had awakened were false' (p.238). But correcting his father's vigorous impropriety ('lazy bitch', p.178) he can laugh: 'he has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine' (p.179). Stephen's grandiose awareness that he may have to combat the limited mores of his community by making a mistake, 'even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake' (p.251), persists into 'Ulysses', but so does the self-deflating corollary, most notably in the conclusion to his impressive Shakespearean fantasy (where he is playing the pedagogue again, to the hilt), when he makes the comical confession of his pretentiousness: 'and in all the other plays which I have not read. He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage' (p.212). In Stephen's unsteady progress Joyce has dramatised the necessity and the folly of the pedagogical role (he had made more direct reference to his older self in that role in 'Giacomo Joyce'). As he was lambasting Flaubert's solecisms in 1920, he looked a humourlessly captious fellow; but, 'Fault-finding being proverbially a bad hat', (as Bloom has it, p.555), he was meanwhile making comedy out of his position in the happy fault of Eumaeus. Making Joycean comedy depends on the aggregation of examples, on the hoarding of that 'useless knowledge' to which he was devoted. Kenner's word for the extravagance of errors in Eumaeus was sensitively chosen, copious. 'Copia' was that 'fluency or free flow of speech' cultivated by the humanists and sustained by the keeping of commonplace books or copybooks (for 'to copy something is thus in this sense to enter it in a commonplace collection as

149

Reflections on Eumaeus

copia for future exploitation'. [32] By Joyce's time the copybook had been devalued. It was the school exercise book, such as the boys use in the Dalkey school where Stephen teaches, or a book containing models of handwriting for imitation, hence a treasure-house of trite maxims. Joyce uses the latter sense when attacking the 'copybook talk' of characters in a Hardy story ('Letters', II, p.199). The book which Synge had seen in Paris was the commonplace book en travesti, offshoot of Flaubert's Dictionary, even more comparable to the projected Album of the fatuous copyists. The writing of 'Ulysses', adventures of a soul among commonplaces, involved making use of such compilations, but in a self-critical and genial spirit. Among the books which Joyce had in his Trieste library was a copy of 'Errors in the Use of English' (Edinburgh, 1881), written by William Ballantyne Hodgson. [33] That Joyce employed this book to enrich the grammatical mayhem of a paragraph in The Oxen of the Sun (a forecast of the 'graceless' style of Eumaeus) has been noticed by J.S. Atherton. [34] Although a paragraph of Eumaeus hilariously ends 'with apologies to Lindley Murray' ('Ulysses', p.574) and Arnold Goldman has suggested that in a general way Murray's 'New English Grammar' may have fertilised Joyce's imagination, I am more inclined to believe that it is Hodgson who has presided over the linguistic farce of this section. [35] I doubt that it is an accident that Murphy, the genius loci of the commonplace scene and vernacular form of the sleep-inducing Morpheus, shares the same initials (W.B.) as the campaigning grammarian. [36] 'It does not aim at being exhaustive', Professor Hodgson writes of his Album, 'that were unhappily no easy aim; but it at least comprises all those everyday breaches of everyday rules against which writers should stand on their strictest guard' (p.iv). Over 200 pages are crowded with quoted examples of such breaches and Hodgson deals with many notable infringements that bespatter Eumaeus: faulty expressions, such as 'our mutual friend' (pp.38-9) and 'old veteran' (p.213), appear in the episode on pp.556 and 561 respectively; words not used in their original (therefore correct) sense, such as 'graphic' (p.31) and 'climax' (pp. 14-15), on pp.567 and 571; 'point', awkwardly used in more than one sense in a sentence (p.211), on pp.539, 597. Hodgson on the problem of plurals for nouns originally foreign (p.70) may have inspired Bloom's dither about 'virtuosos, or virtuosi rather ' on p.582. To other instances I shall attend later. Meanwhile I would, first of all, invite the reader to contemplate Joyce's relishing of the surely unconscious humour in Hodgson's devotion of his last anatomy to the topic of unintended anticlimax (an accusation brought against Eumaeus, Joyce's so carefully constructed abasement)! [37] Then, I should like to emphasise the advantage to Joyce of such an apparatus of pedantry, which

150

Reflections on Eumaeus

might help to expose the real weakness in his common man but also, through imitation of the very plethora of exempla, mocks the absurdity of the corrective posture. 'O foenix culprit!* ('Finnegans Wake', p.23). As to Joyce's pedantry about Flaubert's superbly climactic alternativement, this, I would suggest, is applied Hodgson. Hodgson points out the derivation of 'alternately', 'alternation', and ’alternative', from the Latin for 'other' (alter) and insists that they can only be used in speaking of two subjects or classes of objects: The loose employment of alternative for 'course', of alternation for 'succession' and alternately for 'by turns', destroys the force of the Latin derivatives, obliging one, for instance, to qualify alternative with epithets such as the 'only possible', (pp.4-5) Modern usage is certainly more flexible than this, but in Eumaeus 'alternative', 'alternatives', and 'alternately', not appearing in 'Ulysses' before this, have from the Hodgson point of view, been abused: 'an alternative postnuptial liaison' refers to a wife's infidelity (p.563); hesitating about taking Stephen back to Sandycove or home to Eccles Street for the night, Bloom finds himself in 'some perplexity as to which of the two alternatives' to follow (p.578); he foresees the equi¬ vocal Murphy 'alternately racking' the feelings of some pros¬ titutes 'and mauling their large-sized charms betweenwhiles' (p.578). Such Hodgson solecisms are extremely decorous in a chapter where alternatives or substitutions are always on offer, whether it is a soiled photograph of Molly (not the woman herself) or the euphemism of 'that consummation de¬ voutly to be or not to be wished for' for Home Rule (p.562). The correct usage, like the stable self, is virtually absent from the scene which is swamped in 'alias', 'other', 'altered', 'different', et cetera. The reader is teased by the supposed likeness of the keeper of the shelter to the revolutionary Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris and of another occupant to the town clerk Henry Campbell. More importantly, we are shown Bloom trying to draw closer to Stephen and identifying, if only in fleeting fantasy, with the evasive sailor Murphy, with Parnell, the adulterer and fallen hero, as well as with the wronged husband Captain O'Shea. 'Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur' or, as Bloom reflects on Murphy's story about a murder in Trieste, 'He might have done for his man, supposing it was his own case he told, as people often did about others' (p.556). Now James H. Maddox Jr has appreciated most sen¬ sitively the function of such false, suspected, or borrowed identities, recognising that, although all manner of Dubliners in the book bear unexpected resemblances to other persons, in Eumaeus, 'the characters themselves in their fatigued condition begin to see the same sorts of resemblance’. [38] Mistaken

151

Reflections on Eumaeus

identity may then be a resource and Bloom's projection into other people's stories may be seen as a means to solving his problems, a way of coping (chiefly) with the latest threat to his marriage. And the dynamic alternation of such projections has to be stressed. Maddox observes, for instance, that Murphv is 'a kind of alter ego to Bloom', then that 'Parnell, like Murphv, is Bloom's alter ego.'[39] The multiplication of 'ego' and 'alter' in the chapter tends to displace Hodgson correctness. This fluctuation of identity should be associated with the talismanic word 'parallax' which puzzled Bloom in Lestrygonians (p.153). It is generally understood to mean the apparent displacement of any object being observed by some change in the position of the observer, but I would like to stress two aspects of the meaning suggested by its derivation from the Greek. First, the word signifies not merely change but alternation. It is no accident that critics have repeatedly resorted to the idea of alternation to describe the narrative movement of 'Ulysses', the way Joyce (like his hero perhaps) contrives to have his cake and eat it. [ 40 ] Maddox had employed the notion to characterise the synthesis of extremes that he finds in the Bloom of Calypso: Bloom operates by a kind of internal gyroscope. He tilts alternately toward one extreme or the other, but his internal economy always rights the balance. Bloom does not really avoid extremes, as Stephen does in recoiling first from Mulligan and then from Mr. Deasy. Instead, Bloom includes both extremes of a given polarity and therefore is completely prey to neither. [41] The Bloom of Eumaeus is under considerably greater pressure and keeping his balance is an exhausting business, but he is still able to deploy the parallactic strategy to achieve a modest success. As Bloom ventures, apparently so maladroitly, in and out of his identities, his low-profiled purposiveness eludes the great dramas of choice (he seems wisest in silent scepticism during the political arguments in the shelter). For, second, parallax may be derived from a verb meaning to deviate, hence to slip aside, or escape. Early in the next chapter the idea of a nimble shifting of one's vantage point and of resisting any strict alternatives is humorously focussed when Bloom and Stephen try to gain access to 7 Eccles Street. What were then the alternatives before the premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple? To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock. Bloom's decision? A stratagem.

('Ulysses', p.588)

152

Reflections on Eumaeus

So Bloom lowers himself into the area to get in by the scullery door. There is a mock-heroic flavour to the passage: a stratagem is, after all, 'the device of a leader' and Bloom's way of handling his affairs is by unheroic evasion of confrontation. Instead of taxing Molly with Boylan he orders breakfast in bed. Bloom sidles forwards in Eumaeus, making repeated efforts to communicate with Stephen and establishing points of contact that are only fugitive. But the imprecision of his terms may disguise the authenticity of his manoeuvre. The tautology of 'the two alternatives' (see p.151 above) may be regarded as an anxious overstatement that obscures the fact that Bloom has already committed himself to offering Stephen hospitality. Deliberative process is exposed as mere rationalisation of some unexamined impulse in the depths. Bloom has to be shifty and perpetually re-creative in order to resist the pressure of alternatives. The reader, too, may be tempted to yield to that pressure, finding it easier to opt for Stephen's 'all or not at all' (p.55) and seeing Bloom as either Mr Zero or God; whereas Joyce, determining his own etymology for Odysseus('Outis-Zeus' or Nobody-God), would hold such opposing views in the witty tension of a pun or oxymoron. [42] Take the much-noticed moment when Stephen appears to identify Bloom with Christ: 'Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommital accent, their two or four eyes conversing, Christus or Bloom his name is, or after all, any other, secundum carnem' (p.563). This is oxymoron transposed into the strained idiom of the fatigued character. The iteration of 'or', so typical of the style, comically enacts the 'noncommital accent'; 'or' is not the expected token of real alternatives but the sign of included possibility. In particular, 'or after all, any other' may look like tired cynicism, but it should be seen as anticipation of Molly's late thought in Penelope, 'well as well him as any other' (p.704), which warily accepts Bloom, not as the greatest lover in the world, but as imperfectly real, and therefore still open to development. 'Or after all, any other' will also call to mind that earlier remark of Stephen's: 'Sounds are impostures._ Like names, Cicero, Podmore, Napoleon, Mr Goodbody, Jesus, Mr Doyle, Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What's in a name?' (p.543). As 'impostures' the names are no more than capricious translations out of the world-historical idiom into the vernacular. [43] This is a case, perhaps, of 'history repeating itself', as Bloom later philosophises, 'with a difference' (p.575), which may mean that tragedy must be succeeded by farce, as in Marx's celebrated remodelling of Hegel. [44] So be it, in that Joyce modulates Stephen's weary cynicism into the comic law of his fictional world. Mr Doyle may seem a droll notion of the divine, as Bloom looks an absurd manifestation of Odysseus. Stephen had seen Ibsen's Dr Stockmann as 'Jesus in a frock-coat' ('Stephen Hero', p.91), nevertheless Joyce had praised the author of 'An Enemy of the People' for not replacing 'the bourgeois by the

153

Reflections on Eumaeus

legitimate hero' ('Critical Writings', p.63). A translation of a classic text ought not to be literal; if it is to respond to the very different needs of modern readers, it must be faithful to the function of the text (and its various devices). [45] Bloom's abuse oT_rliterally' (p.581) underscores the point. Bloom, mysterious commonplace, is not Christ, or even Ulysses Redux. He can only be a modern equivalent, 'our hero' (p .579), the best that the author and reader can manage in the changed (and changing) circumstances. [46]

III In his deviousness, whether in his evasions of Boylan and interest in Stephen or in his staggering through the spectrum of possible selves from 'fidus Achates' to pimp. Bloom is true to the Ulyssean principle of the 'longest way round is the shortest way home' (p.375). The author, also Ulyssean, has proceeded in the latter half of the book by a series of 'errores' or deviations, studiously presenting his material through devices of alienation (the Russian formalist technique of 'making strange') whereby the dominant styles of the chapters have put into question the identity of the hero and actively engaged the reader in its production. In the opening chapter of the Nostos or homecoming, the Wanderings of the middle section of the novel are fittingly recapitulated, miniaturised, in the medium of Hodgson's 'Errors', in a language formidably passe. (Here Joyce, if not Stephen, fulfils Wells's prophecy and becomes 'the author of a second Trilby', something hypnotically 'old hat'! ('Stephen Hero', pp.76-7). Bloom seems, at first, entirely subdued to this exhausted medium. If style is vision then the vision of Eumaeus is perpetually double, verging on the trivial-quadrivial of 'Finnegans Wake' ('Blurry works in Hurdlesford', p.14), and appropriately embodied in intricately alternative ways of stating and naming (in whiskery and sagging periphrasis, antonomasia, and elegant variation) as well as what Hodgson deplores as 'squinting constructions', such as 'Tired, seemingly, he ceased' (p. 550). [47] Unchecked echolalia ('Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case', p.571) makes us see Bloom as Birkin sees Mr Brangwen in 'Women in Love': he was 'not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes'. [48] This used-up Bloom is created by a calculated ambiguity in the narrative technique; by exploiting to the full the blurring of distinctions between the narrator and the protagonist in the method of free indirect speech or 'narrated monologue', Joyce caricatures his hero. [49] Gerald L.Bruns, in a stimulating essay on this chapter, has argued that the collective or transindividual narrator of the traditional Victorian novel, who surrounded, permeated, and embraced his characters, has been personalised

154

Reflections on Eumaeus

here as a posturing story-teller, speaking the characters' parts for them and thereby reducing them to less than their worth. Consistent with the realist's common view of things, the presentation of Bloom is relentlessly 'formulaic': 'for the narrator in this episode is a figure of impoverished sensibility, a man unable to speak in his own voice but only in the impoverished language of the tribe.'[50] Bruns's narrative voice seems to function as the langue (the available linguistic codes which enshrine the doxa or conventional wisdom of the community) determining the constitution of the parole (the speaking subject or individual consciousness). In this perspective Bloom might appear the helpless product of corrupt discourses, a figure dissolved into the ground of William James's 'big blooming buzzing confusion' (the pun is intended). It would seem plain that the specific cultural determinant of the narrator's discourse is the paralysing language of the newspaper and the magazine. As Colin MacCabe in a discussion of Aeolus, spells out: 'The discourse of popular journalism constantly centres itself in the evident reality of ideology and can produce nothing but the nauseous repetition of stereotypes.'[51] So Bloom, as stalely reduplicative as Hodgson's 'old veteran', can emerge only as the copy of a copy. He has modelled himself on the commonplace discourse of 'Titbits' and, in a hallucinatory sequence in Circe, has already been arraigned for plagiarising the successful contribution of Philip Beaufoy to that favourite journal of the semi-literate (p.443).[52] Undoubtedly Bloom is the vehicle for Joyce's sense of the oppressions of culture (the specific Irish history of the forms these take is explored elsewhere in this volume). Nevertheless I would insist on Joyce's more fundamental commitment in his mature work to non-satirical comedy and that the margin for negotiating the codes, though small, is real. Bruns s con ception of a 'posturing' narrator, consonant with Hay man's Arranger, allows us to see how such a margin might open up. It is important to grasp the fact that Bloom has not written his little sketch in the Beaufoy manner, 'My Experiences in a Cab¬ man's Shelter’. [53] MacCabe gives a misleading impression when he says that Bloom 'manfully' attempts to give significance to the day’s events 'by writing the short story he has been contemplating all day'. [54] Hugh Kenner is nearer the mark with his statement that Bloom 'is treated to an episode written as he would have written it'. [55] For it would be truer to say that the episode covers more than the experiences in the shelter and deals largely with Bloom's reflections on the trivial actions taking place before, during, and after the visit. The reflections comprehending for the most part Bloom's overt and covert fantasies, seem to be transmitted in the putative written style of the protagonist (on Kenner's Uncle Charles Principle that 'the narrative idiom need not be the narrator's'). [56] But Kenner's confidence that this is Bloom's style is surely

155

Reflections on Eumaeus

misplaced. Although the narrative idiom seems to be properly adjusted to the banality of the fantasies, it concentrates so exclusively on that banality that we might suspect a deliberate depression of the scales. Kenner approaches Bruns's reasonable suspicion only in the phrase 'is treated to'. That Bloom is being given 'the treatment' is hinted at in a variety of ways in the episode. Notice, for instance, the function of another of those squinting constructions: 'To improve the shining hour he wondered whether he might meet with anything approaching the same luck as Mr. Philip Beaufoy if taken down in writing' (p.567). It is presumably the scene which is to be taken down (transcribed) but the erratic grammar seems to suggest that it is Bloom who is being taken down (humiliated). Sure enough, he turns to the 'Telegraph' and finds himself misprinted and the narrator mischievously insists on calling him 'Boom (to give him for the nonce his new misnomer)' (p.568). Once again Bloom has been translated; translated into print, into literature, he can only be traduced. Translators are proverbially betrayers (traddutori, traditori) and treachery is a common theme in the chapter and the book. Bloom is purportedly translating the low-life scene before him into the high-flown but flavourless mixture of circumlocution and slang that passes for 'style' in the journals of his time. Hugh Kenner borrows T.S.Eliot's words (on Byron's shoddy verse) to describe the effect to perfection: 'written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader.'[57] But it is Bloom who is being translated into 'common parlance’ (p.562), an unspeakable idiom which, as Kenner rejoices to notice, Bloom is occasionally given to speak! 'Parlance', it should be noted, is reprobated by Professor Hodgson, quoting Brewer's 'Dictionary of Phrase and Fable', as 'pseudo¬ gallicism'. [58] It is a sample of the pseudo-elegance which is the dominant style of the section, a species of 'translationlanguage' (on the analogy of the artificial or sub-language into which many nineteenth-century writers advocated that classical texts should be turned so as to preserve through deliberate archaism or difficult strangeness something of the remoteness of the original text from the contemporary reader. [59] Poor ’old] Bloom!) If the deceptive constructions of this style often squint, the point of view seems frequently to wink; for the unstable, impish narrator not merely ranges beyond Bloom's ken (into Stephen's mind) and indulges in other styles (Corley's genealogy, the miring of the horse), but points jokingly to the immanence of James Joyce; in the self-parody of the art of narration in Murphy's yarns, for instance. [60] The controlling principle of the comedy is excess. The reader w!}° aets out as a Hodgson detector of mistake and inelegance will find a surplus of corrigenda and will find it impossible to contrive a reading (something distinct from an indexing) which would identify all the slips. Manifestly no single character could ever be responsible for so many. Reduced to such a

156

Reflections on Eumaeus

quintessence of commonplaceness and gaucherie, Bloom is overdetermined. Here Gerard Genette’s acute commentary on the 'stylised' speech of Proust's characters seems particularly apt. In such speech, the author imitates his character not only in the tenor of his remarks but in the hyperbolic literalness of pastiche, which is always a little more idiolectical than the authentic text, as 'imitation' is always caricature through accumulation and accentuation of specific characteristics. Imposing a hyperbolic coherence on a character will probably undermine realism and render the character indefinable and mysterious. [61] I would agree then with critics like Gerald Bruns and Marilyn French that we have to react against the obscuring tendency of the style, against this hypertrophy of the cliche, to recover qualities of feeling or imagination which have been suppressed or temporarily attenuated. The active reader will have to be discriminating, however, about the cliche and not take a simplistic (Hodgson) line. Fritz Senn in his wise observations on the cliches of Nausicaa advises against 'pretending to remain perpetually above their inefficacious lure'. [62] Christopher Ricks goes further: 'Instead of banishing or shunning cliches as malign, haven't we got to meet them imaginatively, to create benign possibilities for and with them?'[63] If much of Bloom's thought is cliche-ridden it is still possible for him to make use of the cliche (as Ricks claims that George Orwell creates 'a bizarre vitality of poetry' out of the 'useless phrases' he seeks to deride). [64] In Eumaeus it is rare for Bloom to make much creative use of the codes. Stephen, of whom we expect more, does better only occasionally and here, for example, he is tactless in view of Bloom's Jewishness: 'Is that first epistle to. the Hebrews, he asked, as soon as his bottom jaw would let him, in? Text: open thy mouth and put thy foot in it' (p.568). But if we examine one example of the deployment of the used-up or useless phrase in the episode we might see how the working through the stereotypes, through the muddied substance of this (our) world, might complicate feeling and subtilise response. Flaubert wrote thus about style: 'Correction (I understand it in the highest sense of the word) does to thought what the water of the Styx did to the body of Achilles. It makes it invulnerable and indestructible.'[65] But he forgot about the untreated heel. Joyce's strength is in his acknowledgment and exploitation of weakness. In Eumaeus his hero's vulnerable part is on show and the clichd of Achilles' heel (on which Ricks comments in his analysis of Orwell) is prominently displayed. Apparently noticing the pseudo-Skin-the-Goat's unoriginal identification of Ireland as Brummagem England's

157

Reflections on Eumaeus

Achilles' heel (p.561), which is accompanied by a laboured explanation of the allusion, Bloom amusingly applies it to the Citizen with whom he had quarrelled in Cyclops (p.349): ’The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles, your God was a jew, because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhere about in the county of Sligo’ (p.579). ’Tender’, awkwardly duplicating ’vulnerable’ (and seemingly inspired by the sound and sense of the ’tendon’ to which the keeper had pointed in his explanation), combines with ’Achilles’ to produce the arresting effect of oxymoron. The Cyclopean Citizen was in the inflated style called our ’sinewyarmed hero’ (p.294), and ’our hero’ (Bloom) has a ’sinewless’ arm according to Stephen (p.581); but ’tender Achilles' arranges for a coincidence of weakness and strength that prepares for the further use of the cliche to relate what he takes to be Stephen's weakness to what he prefers to see as his own strength, as he elects to walk protectively on Stephen's right (the side exposed when Stephen fell asleep at the end of Circe): 'his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles' (p.581). Sinewless or not, Bloom's arm has managed to steer Stephen home to Eccles Street. As we lose sight of Stephen, singing 'Dulcia dum loquitur cogitat insidias' by Johannes Jeep, we get the last, paradoxically silent, allusion to the cliche. The third stanza, unlike the opening passage, goes untranslated by Stephen and therefore uncomprehended by Bloom. It animadverts upon the false friendship of the Sirens who have blinded many a hero, including Agammemnon and Achilles. [66] Achilles' heel is now his tenderness for women, something shared by Stephen and Bloom. Bloom has identified himself imaginatively with Parnell who, Achilles-like, was 'strong to the verge of weakness' (p.571) and so brought low by a woman. Both men have recently escaped from the fiasco in the brothel and, after the upsetting appearance of the prostitute at the door of the shelter (pp. 552-3), Bloom deems it appropriate to utter parental platitudes about siren-women. On the other hand, he slily attempts to interest Stephen in Molly (to distract her from Boylan? to keep Stephen near him?). The attempt aligns him with the Sirens against whom the son warns. (In Joyce's Notesheets in the British Museum Stephen’s reaction to the feel of Bloom's arm is elaborated: 'sinewless, ample, and of a whore’s approach'.) [67 ] The effeminacy of both characters might be associated with Achilles' well-known bisexuality. Stephen first introduces Achilles’ name into the novel when in the library he quotes (he is slightly misquoting) Sir Thomas Browne's epitome of the enigma: 'what name Achilles bore when he lived among women’ (p.193). It is in the library that Buck, ironically enough, warns Stephen against Bloom's perverse advances (p.217); and now it is Bloom who would make Stephen wary of Buck (p.585), and worries about Murphy's unsavoury attentions toward Stephen (p.543) and about the

158

Reflections on Eumaeus

bad habits his young protege might have picked up in Paris (p.566). The implications of the allusions are patently complex, characteristically contradictory, and very much in accord with the main ’action' of the episode. Stephen and Bloom are brought together, compatibilities are insinuated in spite of the surface insistence on 'poles apart' (p.554), but the marriage is not consummated. [68] The associations of this cliche have bracketed the characters in the manner of the pun or oxymoron which contemplates not fusion but momentary overlapping of distinct elements. So in Eumaeus such a cliche has a dual purpose, functioning in the naturalistic tale as the characters' burden and opportunity and in the tale of the telling as part of the Arranger's obsessive 'nervous system'-atising and of his outrageous comedy of errors. [69] As a 'bridge' between the tales it is as real and insubstantial perhaps as that alluded to in Stephen's last splendid lapsus linguae in Eumaeus, which betrays Jeep's song as it conjures up, only to banish, the shades of 'broken' (gebrochen) and 'wreck' (der Schiffbruch): 'Und alle Schiffe briicken' (p.586). [70] So Joyce, translating errors into ways of comic glory, builds fantastic bridges out of 'dropped bricks' (the real cargo of that schooner 'Rosevean' from Bridgwater), bridges that will always need to be built anew by the reader's energetically creative endeavours.

NOTES 1

2

3

4

Frank Budgen,'James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" and other Writings' (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.264. James H.Maddox Jr, 'Joyce's "Ulysses" and the Assault upon Character' (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1978), p. 156. Maddox justly points out the attractions of the Eumaeus style to Nabokov and Beckett. Excellent analysis of aspects of the style figure in Marilyn French, 'The Book as World: James Joyce's "Ulysses'" (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp.208-19, and Hugh Kenner, 'Joyce's Voices' (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), pp.35-8, 97-8. The supposed link between Joyce's fatigue and the style of the episode is insisted on by Phillip F.Herring in his editions of 'Joyce's "Ulysses" Notesheets in the British Museum' (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972), p.49, and 'Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for "Ulysses": Selections from the Buffalo Collection' (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), p.191. Wolfgang Iser, Doing Things in Style: An Interpretation of The Oxen of the Sun in James Joyce's 'Ulysses' in 159

Reflections on Eumaeus

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20

'The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett' (Munich, 1972; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.194. Stuart Gilbert, 'James Joyce's "Ulysses'" (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p.299. French, op. cit. p.214. Iser, op. cit. p.182. Samuel Beckett, 'More Pricks Than Kicks' (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), p.9. Gabriel Josipovici comments interestingly on this story as an example of the struggle between the writer and the reader in modern fiction. See 'The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction' (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp.293-5. Samuel Beckett, 'Murphy' (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969), p.5. Hugh Kenner, 'A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett' (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p.59. 'The view is to the northwest and we may wonder incidentally why a northwest window needs to be curtained off from the sun.' 'Murphy', p.56. Dante, 'Purgatorio', Canto IV, 11.52-7. He imagines how we would see the sun in the Antipodean world of Purgatory. 'James Joyce Quarterly', 16 nos 1/2 (1978/1979), pp.81-93, p.83. Ibid., pp.83-4. Thomas first employed these useful terms in his article The Artistic Touch of the Hidden Hand in 'James Joyce Quarterly', 15, no.l (1977), pp.36-42. 'Attentive readers find that the words of Ulysses sustain two "tales" simultaneously: the naturalistic” "story" and a self-reflexive "tale of the telling" which acknowledges the techniques Joyce uses to forge the counterfeit world of Dublin' (p.37). David Hayman's term. See his '"Ulysses": The Mechanics of Meaning' (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p.70. 'James Joyce Quarterly', 16, no. 1/2 (1978/1979), p.84. Melvin J.Friedman, Lestrygonians, in 'James Joyce's "Ulysses": Critical Essays' (ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), P-146. Friedman quotes, for example, 'Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness' ('Ulvsses', p.160). Thomas Pynchon, 'The Crying of Lot 49' (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966), p.129. ’James Joyce Quarterly', 16, nos.1/2 (1978/1979), p.89. 'Boom' may remind us that God is 'a shout in the street' according to Stephen ('Ulysses', p.40) or, as Thor's thunderclap, 'a noise in the street' (p.392). As a

160

Reflections on Eumaeus

21

22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30

nautical term, apt to the chapter’s art (navigation), it is either a spar to which sails are brailed (recalling the crosstrees of the 'Rosevean', p.56) or a barricade thrown across a harbour (an obstruction to 'plain sailing'). Sailing terms are often of Dutch origin (ahoy, rover, reef) and are associated here with the Flying Dutchman motif. Hence 'Boom' may be read as a piece of timber or a tree. Bloom had anticipated this metamorphosis in Nausicaa when, imagining that a bat had mistaken him for a tree, he was led to consider 'metempsychosis' again: 'They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief. Weeping willow' (p.375). And so punningly to Eumaeus, where, although Bloom may seem 'wooden', he is related to 'King Willow' as the cricketer Iremonger (or Odysseus in one etymology) about whose exploits with a bat Murphy is reading in the newspaper (p.580). Robert Martin Adams, 'Surface and Symbol: The consistency of James Joyce's "Ulysses'" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). Robert Manson Myers, 'From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf: An Astounding and Wholly Unauthorised History of English Literature' (London: Werner Laurie, 1954), p.66. Philip Gaskell, 'From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method' (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978), pp.213-4. Hugh Kenner, 'Joyce's Voices', p.38. James Joyce et Pecuchet, 'Mercure de France', CLVI 1 (June 1922), pp.307-20; reprinted in 'Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound's Essays on Joyce', edited with a Commentary by Forrest Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp.200-11. See Hugh Kenner, 'The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), and Robert Martin Adams, 'Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century' (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp.84-6. Richard K.Cross, in his 'Flaubert and Joyce: The Rite of Fiction' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), makes an extended comparison with Ithaca rather than Eumaeus, but argues cogently that Pound's view of both Flaubert and Joyce is misconceived: see Chapter VII. French, op. cit., p.213. Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.129. Ibid., p.506. 'As it was very heavy, they carried it in turn.' Marcel Proust, A propos du 'style' de Flaubert, 'Nouvelle Revue Frangaise', XIV, January 1920, pp.72-90, pp.81-2. Albert Thibaudet, to whom Proust here responds, defended himself in the March issue and, more

161

Reflections on Eumaeus

31 32

33

34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42

completely, in 'Gustave Flaubert' (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), forcefully arguing that there is no unusual grammar in the positioning of the adverb in the famous sentence, only a rhythmical weighting (p.262). I would claim that structural rhythm matters too, since the last word echoes an earlier phrase in the story ('ll les frappa toutes alternativement...'), where the visiting Proconsul Vitellius strikes in turn the cistern-covers in his quest for Herod's treasure; ironically, one of the cisterns houses John the Baptist, Herod's 'real' treasure. 'Trois Contes' (Paris: Gamier, 1960), pp.169, 203. Ellmann, op. cit., p.506. Walter J.Ong, SJ, 'The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History' (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p.82. Quotations are from the second edition (David Douglas: Edinburgh, 1882). Ellmann, op. cit., p.794, includes it in the inventory which Joyce made of his books in his Trieste flat and which is given in greater detail in the Appendix (Joyce's Library in 1920) to Ellmann's 'The Consciousness of Joyce' (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p .112. J.S.Atherton, The Oxen of the Sun, in 'James Joyce's "Ulysses'", p.332. Arnold Goldman, 'The Joyce Paradox: Form and Freedom in his Fiction' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p.103 n. The initials have several connotations of course. Principally they point to Stephen's (and Joyce's) 'poetical' - and therefore deceiving - fathers, to W.B.Yeats and William Blake. In 'Jerusalem', which Joyce was discussing with Philippe Soupault in 1920 according to Ellmann ('James Joyce', p.506), Blake uses the symbolism of nerves for susceptibility to or ramification of error and projects a vision of Albion (Man) struggling to awaken from a stultifying sleep. W.B. may also have a political significance in view of Murphy's talk of 'our empire' ('Ulysses', p.561); the initials may stand for 'West Briton’, Miss'Ivors's taunt to Gabriel Conroy in The Dead (’Dubliners’, p.170). Stuart Gilbert, op. cit., p.314, affords an example. Maddox, op. cit., p.161. Ibid., pp.158, 163. See A.Walton Litz, Ithaca, in 'James Joyce's "Ulysses'", pp.402-3, and Marilyn French, op. cit., p.227. Maddox, op. cit., p.49. On 'Outis-Zeus', see Richard Ellmann, 'Ulysses on the Liffey' (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), pp.112-3. Most pertinent is his discussion of the Joycean pun in 'The Consciousness of Joyce', pp.90-5. 'In a pun the 162

Reflections on Eumaeus

43

44

45

46

47 48 49

component parts remain distinguishable and yet there is a constant small excitement in their being yoked together so deftly and so improperly.. .the essence of the pun is not complete but incomplete juncture' (pp.90, 91). Compare Tony Tanner's fascinating exploration of the relation between Freud's study of the duplicity of language in some jokes and a kind of paranomasia, 'an almost identity between words with very dissimilar meanings', in Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary': 'Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp.328-36. Robert Martin Adams in 'Surface and Symbol' (p.223 , n.10) solves this name puzzle thus: Cicero = cicera (Lat.), chickpea = Podmore; Napoleon = Buonaparte = Goodbody; and Jesus = Christ = Anointed = oiled = Doyle. The last equation is very dubious. Much more probably Stephen associates Jesus Christ with J. C. Doyle, the baritone who is to sing with Molly ('Ulysses', p.65) and to share the platform with Joyce at the concert which was to be the high point of his musical career (Ellmann, 'James Joyce', p.173). Doyle derives from the Gaelic 'dubh gall', 'dark stranger', which reaches out to both the 'dark horse Throwaway' ('Ulysses', p.412) and the 'winedark hair' of the image of Christ that Stephen perceives in Bloom (p.610). Marx's opening sentence to 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' runs: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' F.L.Radford uses this as a starting point for a sensitive study of some of the political themes in 'Ulysses': King, Pope, and Hero-Martyr: 'Ulysses' and the Nightmare of Irish History, 'James Joyce Quarterly', 15, no.4 (1978), pp.275-323. See Susan Bassnett-McGuire, 'Translation Studies' (London: Methuen, 1980), for a lucid exposition of this central issue. 'Equivalent' is to be understood in the context of translation studies. Joyce foregrounds the ruling idea of translation by having his hero literally translated from the Hungarian (Lipoti Virag) and reworded for ’romantic’ ends (Henry Flower). This matches the title's implications: not Odysseus, but a version of that, Ulysses, itself of dubious origin (Ulixes, Uluxe, or Oulixes) and looking like a plural noun. Lamb's Ulysses, Joyce*s talisman, is Homer after Chapman. Hodgson, op. cit., p.163. D.H. Lawrence, 'Women in Love' (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p.191. 'Narrated monologue' is Dorrit Cohn's useful term: 163

Reflections on Eumaeus

50

51 52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65

'Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapter 3. Gerald L.Bruns, Eumaeus, in 'James Joyce's "Ulysses'", pp.365-7. Bruns errs, however, in his excessively solemn vision of Murphy as 'a man wearied to death by the commonplace' - like a disillusioned Conrad hero! (p.372) Colin MacCabe, 'James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word' (London: Macmillan, 1978), p.117. 'Titbits fi’om All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World.' This was a sixteen-page penny weekly, first issued in 1881 and the fountainhead of modern popular journalism. It was also the source of Joyce's father's general culture. Bloom/Joyce might also have had in mind Jack London's exposure of the East End squalor in 'The People of the Abyss' (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903). The author slums in 'seafaring clothes' (p.285), making notes on the 'submerged tenth' (p.41) and visits coffee-houses, like the cabman's shelter, where all you can drink is 'something in a cup purporting to be coffee' (p.232). London imagines a slummer retailing his night-long journey through the streets: 'It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer' (p.76). MacCabe, op. cit., p.131. Hugh Kenner, 'Joyce's Voices', p.35. Ibid., p.18. Ibid., p.37. Hodgson, op. cit., p.65 n. Bassnett-McGuire, op. cit., pp.67-8. A notable Victorian example is William Morris's translation of the 'Odyssey'. Maddox (op. cit., pp.159-60) develops the point interestingly. Gerard Genette, 'Narrative Discourse', trans. Jane E.Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 184-5. Fritz Senn, Nausicaa, in 'James Joyce's "Ulysses'", p.310. Christopher Ricks, Cliches, in ’The State of the Language’, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p.55. Idem. cf. Nabokov, surprisingly moved by cliched Nausicaa: 'Joyce manages to build up something real pathos, pity, compassion - out of the dead formulas which he parodies', 'Lectures on Literature', ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p.347. 'La correction (je l'entends dans le plus haut sens du mot) fait a la pensee ce que l'eau du Styx faisait au corps d'Achille. Elle la rend invulnerable et 164

Reflections on Eumaeus

66

67 68

69

70

indestructible', Flaubert, 'Correspondance', II, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p.248. Richard K.Bass ('The Explicator’, XXIV, February 1966, Item 55) supplies the words: Atrides hats erfahren wohl, Achilles ebner Massen manch schoner Held ist worden toll, der sich hierauf verlassen und hat mit grossen Herzelied sein Leben mussen enden, wann er mit falscher Freundlichkeit hat lassen sich verblenden. Herring (1972), op. cit. , p.413, 1.98. See Marilyn French's acute analysis of the intrusive love ballad, Samuel Lover's 'The Low-Backed Car', in the concluding paragraph of Eumaeus as token of a frustrated union. Op. cit., pp.215-16. Anthony Burgess, making amends for his denial of 'virtuosity' to the prose style ('Here Comes Everybody', London: Faber & Faber, 1965, p.167), detects 'beneath this cliche-bristling babble, a very wide-awake network of imaginative signals' ('Joysprick', London: Deutsch, 1973, p.106). The play on 'nerves' is such a network: 'nerve' (Latin: nervus) ramifies through sinew (strength, courage), penis, tendon (cf. Achilles' Heel), bowstring (alluding to Odysseus' need to rearm to combat the suitors). Although the language is predominantly patterned by words of tension (attention, pretend, tenterhooks, and so on) Bloom in a small way nerves himself and Stephen is momentarily released from strain. A literal translation (from the German) would be: 'And all ships are bridged.' See 'Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's "Ulysses'", ed. Don Gifford with Robert J.Seidman (New York: Dutton, 1974), p.459. The editors' observation that Stephen has mistranslated Sweelinck's title 'Mein junges Leben hat ein End' ('My young life here has end') as 'Youth here has End' reinforces the suggestion that Stephen's errors have (a modestly hopeful) point.

165

11 JOYCE AND LITERARY TRADITION: LANGUAGE LIVING, DEAD, AND RESURRECTED, FROM GENESIS TO GUINNESSES Philip Brockbank Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth_ These are the generations of Shem. Genesis 'The supreme test of a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring' says the A.E. (Russell) of 'Ulysses' (p.185). The springs of life may be in the past, as it were in the Book of Genesis, or in those energies that well up from our deepest consciousness. Living language has similarly remote and intimate sources. Stephen, at another moment of 'Ulysses' muses upon 'Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words' (p.194) and is surprised by the word 'still' - 'Once quick in the brains of men. Still' - into sensing the 'itch of death' to tell 'a maudlin tale' to living ears. Much later, the opening-closing-opening sentence of 'Finnegans Wake', with its 'commodius vicus of recirculation' is expressive of regeneration, of language resurrected. Joyce's long-sustained preoccupation with the task of giving new life to the old language finds a convenient focus in the fourteenth episode of 'Ulysses', The Oxen of the Sun, largely composed of parody, and urgently inviting reflections on the relationships that might be cultivated between living authors and dead ones. In the 'Odyssey' the voyagers bring disaster on themselves by failing to heed a warning not to touch the sacred cattle of the sun-god Helios. Joyce's cunning surprisingly makes it appear that the embryonic artist, in some sense a voyager, must in his progress come to terms with the sacred cows of literary tradition; Stephen, he says in a letter to Budgen, is the embryo. [1] An analogy between literary and human genesis brings the evolving foetus of the writer into the world of 'Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops' (p.421). His gestation takes him at once through the evolutionary processes of the organism, the species and literary culture. As 'In woman's womb word is made flesh' and 'all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away' (p.388), so the embryonic Stephen is taken by Joyce, with the help of Peacock's anthology, through a re-created version of 'English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin'. The birth of Stephen in the flesh converges on the present life of the word. The genesis of the word spans many generations, and Joyce conjures the old 1G6

Joyce and literary tradition

individualised musics of words from out of the generative linguistic flow. We hear, for example, in a clap 'the voice of the god Bringforth' (p.392), and Bunyan is slapped into life, resurrected, and then - it might be said - left for dead, for many have supposed Joyce to be the butcher of the 'oxen' sanctified in Peacock's pages and in Saintsbury's 'A History of English Prose Rhythm'. Eliot, for example, found in the episode 'the futility of all English styles', and others speak of 'desecration* and of 'travesties' with 'trivial and salacious implications'. [2] But Joyce knows that the writer's prospect of life depends both upon his ability to make the language do what it has not done before, and upon his capacity for what his parodied Bunyan calls the 'hubbub of Phenomenon' (p.392). Joyce found the episode an ordeal to write. 'His mind', says Ellmann, 'was so possessed by his theme that he felt as though he were himself eating the oxen'; [3] and so, in a sense, he was - inwardly digesting a score of his old masters, and much as the sailors slaughtered the oxen of the sun for the beef, he kills to eat. All the styles are required to keep in touch, if sometimes tenuously, with Joyce's narrative of Leopold Bloom, disappointed father in the flesh, trying to be father to the word and to see that Stephen becomes a successful writer. Many of the effects are poignant, not reductive - 'Before born babe bliss had. Within womb he won worship,'(p.382); and much of the comedy is genial, not derisive - 'Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?' (p.420). It is apt that Carlyle's thundering injunction to work should conclude the labour of Stephen's conception and birth 'Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang!' (p.420). The word, made Stephen-flesh, is precipitated into Joyce's Dublin, and among other verbal ordeals is required to listen to the ferocious blasphemies of an American evangelist: The Deity ain't no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he's on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in king Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God' (p.425). That bornagain language (which is still with us), unlike the languages of Malory and Sheridan, is mauled without honour. Much as Pope made Milton's voice resound in Grub Street, Joyce plays the old musics in the cacophonies of the Dublin present, the 'frightful jumble of Pidgin English, Nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel' that he describes in his letter to Budgen.[4] His parodies prove his capacity to live in the past even as he disengages from it. Like Hogarth, he is hostile not to the past masters but to those who expect the living artist to do no more than 167

Joyce and literary tradition

mimic the dead. Eating traditions, assimilating them, gives them a continuing life. Eliot, sharing many of Joyce s perplexities, found some critical solutions in his once celebrated essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent': No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is his appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. It needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that; but the conformities, Eliot persists, are not one-sided: The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and~so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between old and new. ('Selected Essays', 1932, p.l) We must not find it 'presposterous' that 'the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past'. I am not in a hurry to endorse this formidably transcendental idea of order, but I am confident that Eliot is right to claim that 'novelty' in his exacting sense of the word does change our experience of the literature of the past. Joyce's response to his literary and linguistic inheritance has changed our understanding of many of its energies and forms. Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne and Dickens, once their readers have visited 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' are not quite the same writers as they were before. The 'ideal order' of Eliot's critical discourse, however, has probably never had the stability that he as an aspiring classicist attributed to it. Nor are the changes that innovation brings about in our sense of the past necessarily reconstructive ones. As Eliot the poet has it, in 'Little Gidding': We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. Joyce introduces new chaos as well as new order into literary tradition, and because he was a highly self-conscious linguist and historian, he compels us to undertake a retrospective inquisition into our larger inheritances of language and civil¬ isation. I shall glance back from 'Finnegans Wake' to 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Dunciad', to 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Tristram 168

Joyce and literary tradition

Shandy' and 'Little Dorrit', and look again at certain insights of Vico, Hume, Coleridge and Saussure, kaleidoscopically com¬ mingled. 'Finnegans Wake', however, cannot casually be caught up in the discourse; it asks for special notice. [5] Occasional visits to the pub in Chapelizod are not much encouraged. Sometimes called the Bristol and sometimes identified with the Dead Man, presided over by the composite figure of Mr Porter, Finnegan and Earwicker, its houserules require that its guests acquire its language before being entitled to refreshment. And to acquire its language we need by disposition and nurture to be both demotic and hermetic; we need to find a certain satisfaction in the cadences and knockabout of human ordinariness, and at the same time to be fascinated by intimations of a higher order to which human access can be won through an arcane speech and an intricate frame of reference. We also need to learn to do without sentences of the kind I have just pronounced; that is, inside the Dead Man we need to do without them - outside, wondering where to go next and how to get there, we need all the help we can get. Novitiate readers, like myself, are embarrassed by a prose that seems at once stationary and in eager motion. Rhythms and cadences suggest a pace of narrative and thought that is continually frustrated by verbal vortices; we are whirled round words or non-words, and the eye is at a loss to go either forwards or backwards; we are in a milling crowd, a hubbub of linguistic phenomena. Is this living language or dying language? Joyce claims to 'have put the language to sleep' and in a letter to Harriet Weaver reminds us that 'one great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot'. [6] A sleeping language invites sleeping readers, but many remain vigilant in the wake of the unawake in the fragmentary dissolutions and resolutions of half-awake consciousness, of falling to sleep or falling to death, as language lapses from its goahead functions to feats of condensation, displacement and assimilation. Common sense and experience may take their bearings by comparing the last movement of The Dead in 'Dubliners', with those of Anna Livia Plurabelle and of Book IV of 'Finnegans Wake'. The Dead is poised upon our everyday bewilderments about past life and life to come; consciousness of the past attends to spent life, to death, but it is also present awareness of life once lived; consciousness of the future offers an illusory prospect of life terminated by death: One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.... His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not 169

Joyce and literary tradition

apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. ('Dubliners',

p. 200) But although about dissolution, this is not a dissolving language; it remembers 'The Tempest' and 'Inferno', and is unlikely to perplex Harriet Weaver or the rest of us. The close of Anna Livia Plurabelle and of 'Finnegans Wake' Book IV takes language itself into a 'wayward and flickering existence'; 'Nature', to borrow a phrase from 'King Lear', 'stands on the very verge of His confine'. In reading 'Finnegans Wake' and in listening to it, we are moving on the threshold of significance, both in the individual consciousness and in the processes of language. There are effects of spontaneity and effects of calculation - both contrived by Joyce's art - and our responses to them depend in part upon our own experience of literature and on our attitudes to the nature of language. Responses cannot, in the end, depend upon literary history or linguistic theory; but some initial difficulties may be diminished and some prejudices dislodged if certain inadequate routine assumptions are called into question, by confronting them with the insights, either imaginative or discursive, of other writers. Milton found it hard to make up his mind whether God created the world out of a void or out of chaos - a question that has long troubled people who worry about such matters. He characteristically has it both ways. God sets his golden compasses upon 'matter unformed and void' and his glory rides 'Farr into Chaos, and the World unborn' ('Paradise Lost', VII, 218-42). 'Chaos' is a word that quickly comes to mind in reading 'Finnegans Wake'; but it is not the chaos of the cosmos but rather that of the mind which Pope, in mimicry of Milton, evokes in 'The Dunciad',[7] 'Where nameless Somethings in their causes sleep' (1.56), 'new-born nonsense first is taught to cry' (1.60), and the poet is found 'Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound' (1.117). Pope's hero found that 'Round him much Embryo, much Abortion lay' (1.120), and in the early version the chaos of Tibbald's mind is like the chaos of his garret, 'Where yet unpawn'd, much learned lumber lay'. I am not invoking Pope in the hope of making a dunce of Joyce. Like Pope, Joyce was much taken with the ordeals of the creative writer in the at once frantic and tedious ethos of the modern city. But Joyce does not allow himself the satirist's perspectives or the confidence of 'common sense', the 'sensus communis' upon which decorum depends. When Pope in 'The Dunciad' recalls Homer, Virgil or Milton, it is to dramatise the bizarre failures of decorum attending the displacement of the old heroic and aristocratic civilisation by its modern mercantile counterpart. Failures of decorum in both 170

Joyce and literary tradition

’Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' are more pervasive and more insidious, as Joyce himself, not despairingly but inquiringly, sinks from thought to thought into the vast profound. Like Pope at work upon Milton, Joyce creates a new set of relationships between blasphemy, fall and exposure to chaos. From this point of view 'Finnegans Wake' as an exercise in the embryology of literary creation (like The Oxen of the Sun) converges upon the fall, and upon the ambiguous cycle of creation and uncreation in Milton's chaos: Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which must ever fight. Unless th'Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds. (11,910-16) When we speak of failures of decorum in 'Finnegans Wake', we cannot restrict the word either to literary or to social decorum. There is in the work no system of proprieties which makes one mode of language fitting in one context and a different mode fitting in another. 'Immaculate contraception' compels us in a phrase to confound our pieties with our precautions, and like many an assault on propriety might be thought of as dislodging covert hypocrisies of the language. The sustained liturgical rhythms of the 'Egyptian Book of the Dead', 'I am pure. My purity is the purity of that great Bennu', are re-deployed in the service of brothel hygiene,^ Trc^S which they disengage with an impudent breach of linguistic decorum, out of English into Latin, traversing Italian, and inter-breeding Irish and Egyptian names, backward words and forward words, the death-world and the life-world: Unclean you art not. Outcaste thou are not. Leperstower, the karman's loki, has not blanched at our pollution and your intercourse at ninety legsplits does not defile. Untouchable is not the scarecrown is on you. You are pure. You are pure. You are in your puerity. You have not brought stinking members into the house of Amanti. Elleb Inam, Titep Notep, we name them to the Hall of Honour. Your head has been touched by the god Enel-Rah and your face has been brightened by the goddess Aruc-Ituc. Return, sainted youngling, and walk once more among us! (p.237) The transmigrated vowel that turns the Egyptian underworld (Amenti) into the house of lovers, and the transformation of a hair-tonic (Harlene) and skin-food (Cuticura) into Egyptian deities, are, in different senses of the word, preposterous. 171

Joyce and literary tradition

But they are not accidental or arbitrary. Joyce's sallies against decorum, both playful and radical, serve both his understanding of city life and his understanding of the nature of language. 'Return, sainted youngling' may glance at Jung in 'Jungling', but it also invites us to go back, to turn back life and letters to a state of innocence. We notice 'you art not', and, having gone back that way through the cosmetics of Joyce's Dublin youth, take the sense, 'you use no artifice', and the word 'art', when we move forward again, is displaced from the grammar of the next sentence. Since I am as yet unacquainted with Dublin, my credentials for talking about the city of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' are modest, but it may say something about the universal character of that city if I touch upon some of the ways in which my own youngling memory of Merseyside makes Joyce's world seem as familiar to me as it seems strange. 'Rememboring'; the hazard, as Joyce's pun reminds us, is that as Kierkegaard put it, in a passage familiar to readers of 'Finnegans 'Wake', [8] we have a choice of boring others and interesting ourselves, or interesting others and boring ourselves. A reader's tracks through 'Finnegans Wake', however, depend upon his experiential as well as his literary associative capacities. I recollect, close to the river and the docks, a maze of shabby streets named after Eden, Paradise and the twelve apostles, and heraldically styled pubs trading in, among other things, Guinness and Jameson's whiskey. The voice of Mamalujo (Joyce's composite citizen, named after the four gospellers, pillars of society and bedposts), I now believe and probably believed then, could have been heard alike in the backstreet chapels, the Roman churches and the Rose and Crown. The name of Wellington signified a hotel with a busy public bar; that of St Paul, an unending road of black terraced houses and makeshift factories. Balfour and Chamberlain were streets overlooking tanks of molasses; and as for Madame Blavatsky and the 'Vesica Piscis', I first heard of them from a Liverpool tram-driver, and read about them in 'Bibby's Annual', the lavish and aspiring publication of a liberally inclined soap company. Bethany and Hebron were brick and tin boxes which, like Stephen's Merrion Hall, enjoined us to be 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' or proclaimed the Resurrection and the Life. Monday was a different kind of washday, when women swabbed and dollied and mangled and gossiped when they could, doing battle with the grime of city life, tonguing time and scrubbing the canon's underpants. [9] No doubt authority obscurely intended that the grid of parliamentary and biblical names imposed upon the chaos of the suburbs should invoke the proper political and divine allegiances, but the endeavour to raise what was low often brought the civic gods sliding down Olympus on their backsides. City life itself informs, therefore, the verbal metamorphoses 172

Joyce and literary tradition

which turn Genesis into Guinnesses (by way of gueneses), apocalypse into bockalips, and the thirst for righteousness into the search for tighteousness (pp.4-6). In the abyss of the city, as in Milton's abyss of 'pregnant causes' and 'dark materials', words and names, to use Sollers's word, 'germinate'. Creation is, again in the Milton/Pope tradition, a warm prolific flow, in Milton evoking the rivers of Eden and Siloah's brook, in Pope the cloacal flow of the Fleet and the city sewers. The flow of language, however, is older than the culture of cities, and like Eliot's river in 'The Dry Salvages', 'a reminder of what men choose to forget'. The idea that language flows into the present from earlier phases of history, bringing with it something of the old life of a community's culture would have been familiar to Joyce from Vico's 'New Science'. Joyce assimilated into the four-part structure of 'Finnegans Wake' the theory of history which traced a cycle of theocratic, aristocratic and democratic stages to a ricorso returning the process to its beginning. And he also res¬ ponded, in the might and mainstream of his art, to Vico's claims about the nature of language. Vico put a high value upon the imaginative language of the first phase and did not, as Comte was to do, see it as displaced by the more instrumental languages that were to come. Within the greater perspectives of the cycle, the past life is also the life to come, a simple but troublesomely complex notion at work in both 'Finnegans Wake' and the 'New Science'. The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped us to understand continued for a long time into the historical period, much as great and rapid rivers continue far into the sea, keeping sweet the waters borne on by the force of their flow. [10] That is in Vico's third chapter, Corollaries concerning Speech by Poetic Characters among the First Nations; in a later corollary arguing that 'It is Divine Providence that Institutes Commonwealths and at the Same Time the Natural Law of the Gentes', he uses the metaphor again: We have seen that the generation of commonwealths began in the age of the gods, in which governments were theocratic; that is, divine. Later they developed into the first human, namely the heroic, governments, even as the mighty current of a kingly river retains far out to sea the momentum of its flow and the sweetness of its waters, the age of the gods courses on, for there persisted still that religious way of thinking according to which it was the gods who did whatever men themselves were doing. [11] The women on the banks of the Liffey in Anna Livia Plurabelle 173

Joyce and literary tradition

talk of Vico as if in a verbal trance; for we cannot say the women remember - it is the language that remembers: 'Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be' (p.215). Fragments crystallise and coalesce under pressures that owe nothing to the women's directing consciousness. What they owe to Joyce's depends upon his understanding of the quasi-autonomous processes of the language; we speak and write the language, and the language speaks and writes us. Vico distinguishes between the 'copious divine vocabulary' of the first age, making 'a deity of every stone, spring, brook, plant, and offshore rock'; the 'heroic emblems' that Homer called 'semata' - including metaphors and images 'which, having passed into articulate speech, supplied all the resources of poetic expression'; and 'epistolary speech' which is 'suitable for expressing the needs of common everyday life in communication from a distance'.[ 12 ] Anna Livia's voice modulates from the epistolary ('spread your washing proper!'), through the poetic to the divine. It is not, in the tiresome routine sense of the word, 'communicating' to meet the needs of everyday life, like morse-code or a bookie's tick-tack. It is assisting in and at the creation and re-creation of community; its rhythms are liturgical (invoking the gods) and commemorative (recalling heroes) and its flux is age-old, here-and-now, and still-to-come. 'Many happy returns of the day', from the epistolary present, looks back to the awed response of the divine age to the river god (Thames and Tees) and its assurance of teeming, regenerated life; the name of Vico would have been known to one of Anna's companion manifestations, Issie, the innkeeper's daughter, as that of a road in Dalkey; in Anna's voice the name nests in the ancient Ordovician rocks near the estuary, and Vico's language hides in the heart of man as an anagrammatic signature - 'viri cordo' - in 'vi ricordo', I remember. Vico sometimes makes it appear that the starting point for his speculations about language was the 'Cratylus' of Plato. Cratylus himself believes that names are 'natural', while Hermogenes cannot convince himself 'that there is any principle of correctness in names other than convention and agreement'. [13] Hermogenes' position is familiar to us in Saussure's formulation of his first general principle, proclaiming 'The Arbitrary Nature of the Sign' which, he tells us, 'no one disputes': 'The idea of "sister" is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-6-r which serves as its signifier in French.'[14] I do not wish- to "dispute what no one disputes, and I can see that in the territories of 'epistolary communication' the arbitrariness of the sign is a principle to be respected. It would be a treacherous betrayal of the principle, for example, to anglicise Saussure as 'So-sure'. But the arbitrariness of the sign entails the arbitrariness of the pun, and indeed of a large proportion of 174

Joyce and literary tradition

those verbal interinanimations which depend upon bonds be¬ tween words - of sound, sense, appearance, articulation and reference. If it were treated as an adequate critical principle, the arbitrariness of the sign would reduce much of ’Finnegans Wake' and 'Ulysses’ to the mere crossword-play that many have taken it for. Even admirers are at risk. Sollers, for example, commends Joyce for writing 'SINSE', reading since, sense and sin: The 'syllogistic' development of this condensation is as follows: ever since sense, there is sin; ever since sin, there is sense; ever since since (time), there is sin and sense. All in a flash in SINSE. In one word, as in a thousand, you have a thesis on language and man's fall from paradise. [15] The 'flash', no doubt, is a glance at Earwicker's misconduct in Phoenix Park. In fishing the pun out of the riverrun and flux of Joyce's prose and filleting it, Sollers is, in the lingo of 'Finnegans Wake', sitting on the stony bank with Shaun the post, reducing 'Paradise Lost' to a telegram in a serpent's hiss. Shem the penman needs the language to flow through time, and its motive and emotive power depends upon its flux. But even in Sollers's account it is clear that the pun reduces the arbitrariness of the sign only when there is some kind of experiential or narrative connection between the bonded significations. Sollers needs to give us a run-down of the fall in Genesis; Joyce is looking for a way of living through the processes of fall in the cycles of generation and in our inheritance of language. It is not always easy to tell when he is exploiting the arbitrariness of the sign and when, like many a wordsmith before him, he is working to diminish it. Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure' is rich in discoveries about the word 'sense' and we can locate the same verbal nexus active in the span of the play: 'She speaks, and 'tis/Such sense that my sense breeds with it...who sins most?. ...To sin in loving virtueYour sense pursues not mine...sense in truth and truth in virtue.' (Act II.2, 4; Act V. 1). The nexus is more than verbal, however. The word 'since' is not made to chime with 'sin' or 'sense', but the fall is a turning point: 'A due sincerity governed his deeds/Till he did look on me. Since it is so,/Let him not die' (Act V.l) Reading Shakespeare after Joyce we may well pause upon the word 'sincerity' after the prompting of 'since' has returned us to it. In the obscurities of our verbal consciousness, if not in the public domain of the post and telegraph office, the sign ceases to be wholly arbitrary. 'Ho, talk save us!' cries the voice of Anna Livia as her time is running out ('Finnegans Wake', p.215). Minutes, or hours before, depending on the pace of our reading, she has felt the coming on of age: 'O, my back, my back, my bach! 175

Joyce and literary tradition

I'd want to go to Aches-les-Pains' (p.213), recalling Juliet's Nurse 'how my head aches! My back a't'other side - ah, my back, my back!' Coleridge took a more than casual interest in that nurse, for he found that her modes of thought and recollection were at the centre of his preoccupation with Hartley and the theory of the association of ideas. 'The character of the Nurse', he says, 'is the nearest of anything in Shakespeare to borrowing observation', and he asks us to notice 'the mode of connecting by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in her childish age.' And again (still harping needlessly on old age), in Collier's transcript of another lecture, he wonders at Shakespeare's ability 'to descend to the lowest characters' and to discover that the cultivated mind recalls the past by 'certain regular trains of cause and effect' ('the hooks and eyes of memory' he calls them elsewhere) 'whereas with the uncultivated it was wholly done by a coincidence of images or circumstances which happened at the same time'. [16] The experience of listening again to the nurse after listening to Joyce is not quite the same as Coleridge's, but together they enable us to see how the colloquy in Act I, scene 3, in which she tells Juliet's age 'unto an hour' serves the simple purposes of the nurse and the complex ones of the poet and playwright: I'll lay fourteen of my teeth And yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four She's not fourteen. The absurd and arbitrary pun on 'teen', meaning pain or distress, accidentally reassures us that Juliet is not 'for teen', but 'Come Lammas-eve at night' she shall be. The nurse's own daughter, who was 'of an age' is 'with God' because 'too good for me'. We catch a glimpse of a world in which, colloquially, the good die young, and common, good-natured voices are reconciled to living on. The nurse was responsible for Juliet's nurture and weaning, and indeed for bringing her to marriageable age, a point first hit upon in an accidental pun, 'That shall she, marry, I remember it well', before it becomes Lady Capulet's deliberate pun, 'Marry, that "marry" is the very theme I came to talk of'. But the parents are sig¬ nificantly absent, 'at Mantua', at the time the nurse recalls, laying wormwood to her dug, 'Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall'. The idyll is catastrophically shattered by the simultaneous striking of the earthquake and the child's dis¬ covery of the bitterness of its nourishment: 'pretty fool To see it teachy and fall out wi'th'dug!/Shake, quoth the dovehouse.' The nurse runs from the fall, and thinks of Juliet running and falling, picking herself up again and being com¬ forted by her dead husband, a 'merry man', playing Juliet's father. Shakespeare's use of the language persists in the nurse's use of it; his 'great and mighty being', as Coleridge 176

Joyce and literary tradition

says, changes itself into the nurse. The obscurities of our awareness recognise that in the current of the language Juliet says 'Ay', falls backwards and comes to grief at Lammas-tide, the time of ripeness and fruition. The nurse will, in the action of the play, see Juliet trip and will try to pick her up again; but her 'Ay' to life is the survivor's and the compromiser's, while Juliet's eagerness for life converges, in this stricken Verona, on her readiness to die. I hesitate to persist in this mode of post-Joycean exegesis (although there are many rich opportunities for it to be found in Shakespeare's plays) because obscure effects should be allowed to operate obscurely; it is enough that the diver should surface with samples from the sea-bed. Dickens inherits Shakespeare's interest in loquacity and anticipates Joyce's. The 'disjointed volubility' of Flora is a vital element in the art-speech of 'Little Dorrit': 'Oh good gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a bachelor so long on my account! ....but of course you never did why should you, pray don't answer, I don't know where I'm running to, oh do tell me something about the Chinese ladies whether their eyes are really so long and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-of-pearl fish at cards and do they really wear tails down their back and plaited too or is it only the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off their foreheads don't they hurt themselves, and why do they stick little bells all over their bridges and temples and hats and things or don't they really do it!' (Chapter XIII) Her conversational soliloquy is sustained by the decanter, and Clenham observes that 'she combined a great deal of sherry with sentiment' and 'her present appetite for eating and drinking, with her past appetite for romantic love'. But other voices are heard at the same table. Flora's 'legacy', 'Mr F.'s Aunt', occasionally breaks in upon the party, 'to offer remarks, in a deep warning voice, which, being totally uncalled for by anything said by anybody, and traceable to no association of ideas, confounded and terrified the mind'. The only guest whose courage allows him to retort is Mr Pancks, whose voice sounds more clearly as he and Clenham walk 'citywards' away from the spell of Flora's 'murmuring': 'Have you no taste for anything, Mr Pancks?' 'What's taste?' drily retorted Pancks. 'Let us say inclination.' 'I have an inclination to get money, sir,' said Pancks, 'If you'll show me how.' He blew off that sound again, and it occurred to his companion for the first time that it was his way of laughing. He was a singular man in all respects; he might not have been quite in earnest, but that the 177

Joyce and literary tradition

short, hard, rapid manner in which he shot out these cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency, seemed irreconcilable with banter. (Chapter XIII) Coming from Finnegan's Dublin and still dreaming his dream, we may suppose Flora as well as Florence Nightingale to be a voice in Anna Livia's choir - ’(floflo floreflorence), sweetishsad lightandgayle, twittwin twosingwoolow' (p.360). Pancks, on the other hand, would be a manifestation of Earwicker, another voice of the city-builders collecting the rent for 'that jackhouse that jerry built for Massa and Missus and hijo de puta' (p.274). He would be at home in the city which Joyce conjures out of Rowntree's 'Poverty': 'house lost in dirt and blocked with refuse, getting on like Roe's distillery on fire' (p.543). After Clenham has left Pancks he goes looking for one of the great city thoroughfares, hoping to find 'light and life', but finds himself at the scene of an accident which reaches us through snatches of conversation: 'They come racing out of Lad Lane and Wood Street at twelve or fourteen mile an hour, them Mails do. The only wonder is, that people an't killed oftener by them Mails.' Dickens connects the pace of city life with the hard, rapid tempo of Pancks's talk and with his habit of never reading 'anything but letters and accounts'. Sherri the penman is at work upon Shaun the post. It would not be difficult to devise a mock page of 'Finnegans Wake' from a honeymoon conversation between Flora and Mr Jingle, starting with the stage-coach garrulities adduced by Harry Levin: 'forgot the arch - crash - knock children look round - mother's head off - sandwich in her hand - no mouth to put in - head of a family off - shocking, shocking!' But merely local comic ingenuity would not find in Joyce's work any equivalent to the commanding structural principles at work in Shakespeare and the mature Dickens. Joyce's powers of evoking the flux and chaos of life generated in the world and the word seem often to exceed his abilities to evoke order; yet both kinds of magic are recognisably in operation. Finding order - form and direction - in the flux of consciousness had been a problem for Coleridge's generation, inherited from the eighteenth century's attempts to make the laws of association work like the laws of gravity in the human psyche. David Hume, in the Appendix to his 'A Treatise of Human Nature', had reflected on the puzzling nature of the 'self' and, concluding that it was nothing but a peculiar composition of perceptions, distinguished one self from another by comparing rivers from the same source taking different paths to the sea, each distinctive, but each obedient to the same laws of motion. There is a familiar, direct connection between Locke's theory of association, Hume's and Hartley's refinements of it and the novels of Sterne. Coleridge made the 178

Joyce and literary tradition

connection and worried about it, as a few samples will show: I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the Origin of moral Evil from the streamy Nature of Association, which Thinkings Reason, curbs & rudders/how this comes to be so difficult/Do not the bad Passions in Dreams throw light & shew of proof upon this Hypothesis? - Explain those bad Passions & I shall gain Light, I am sure. [17] An inkling of the particular 'bad Passions' that Coleridge had on his mind can be found in an earlier note which tells of his attempts and Southey's to relate incest-revulsion to the association built up in childhood; over many years the growing boy is discouraged by 'shakes of the head and serious looks' from believing that he is free to marry his sister. On reflection, however, he sees that these are directed and not free associations; association must be 'curbed and ruddered' if we are not to fall into Sterne's abyss: All the evil achieved by Hobbes, and the whole School of Materialists will appear inconsiderable, if it be compared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental Philosophy of STERNE, and his numerous imitators. The vilest appetites, and the most remorseless inconstancy towards their objects, acquired the titles of the Heart, the irresistible Feelings, the too tender Sensibility; and if the Frosts of Prudence, the icy chains of Human Law thawed and vanished at the genial warmth of Human Nature, who could help it? It was an amiable weakness! ('Aids to Reflection*, On Sensibility) Free sentiment and free association meet in the genial warmth of 'A Sentimental Journey', but it is in 'Tristram Shandy' that 'amiable weakness' owes most to Locke's postulated laws. Coleridge's hostility to Sterne's sentimentalism has its analogues in the reactions of those readers of Joyce who find him defective in moral and political responsibility. Others have retorted by commending a creativity that accommodates creeping and slimy things on equal terms with the brave and beautiful and sees that all is good. In regulating and ordering the flux of his fiction, Joyce in 'Finnegans Wake' makes minimal use of narrative and moral fable - principally the Genesis stories of the Fall and of Cain and Abel. The motion and motives of quest, pilgrimage, voyage, courtship, war and revolution are fragmented and dissolved; and there are no prospects towards which we are ourselves advancing, only a strong verbal undertow, back to where we came from. There are no sustaining communal illusions - no Promised Land, New Jerusalem, City of God, Dictatorship of the Proletariat or Withering of the State. Nor do we find the equivalent personal illusions, like Mrs. Ramsay's Lighthouse, or Dorothea's Rome. 179

Joyce and literary tradition

From another point of view, there is no place in the narrative and not much in the syntax for the Super-Ego to exercise its determinations - to wield Coleridge's rudder. Those who rejoice in the evaporation of the individual self may still find themselves frustrated by the dissolution of communal identities, and be tricked into proclaiming a new universal language whose climactic joys will create a universal society, 'an active transnationalism, disarticulating, rearticulating and at the same time annulling the maximum number of traces - linguistic, historical, mythological, religious'[18] - about as far beyond good and evil as we may hope to get. But it is time to put the language to sleep again, and to recognise that determined purpose has no proper place in the flickering twilight of 'Finnegans Wake'. The flux has to be differently ordered and Joyce uses the traditional orderings of the Genesis tradition: 'Male and female created he them'; and, 'He set a compass on the face of the depth'. Much of 'Finnegans Wake' polarises between the phallic drives and the engulfing hospitalities of the womb, and much is encompassed by an elaborate geometry and arithmetic of symmetries and cycles. Many professional readers of 'Finnegans Wake' seem to have a keener eye for phallic intrusions than I have, and I am in no position to sensitise the thick-skinned reader. I pause only to make the commonplace point that Sterne too worked to diminish the arbitrariness of the sign in the world of the phallic pun. Sterne discovered that the pace of narrative language was not the pace of life, that community depends less upon communication than upon the affections accommodating our neighbours' idiosyncrasies, and that the laws of association play their part in keeping up the phallic comedy of human existence. Joyce's affinities with Sterne, for example, can be activated by comparing a moment in the gestation of Tristram ths cricket and pricket of the copulation scene in Finnegans Wake' (pp.583-4). When Tristram is about to be born and the sounds of labour can be heard from the next room, Uncle Toby mounts his hobby-horse and lectures the company on fortifications, specifically about the two kinds of outwork, the ravelin and the demi-lune: Where then lies the difference? (quoth my father, a little testily.) - In their situations, answered my uncle Toby: For when a ravelin, brother, stands before the curtin, it is a ravelin; and when a ravelin stands before a bastion, then the ravelin is not a ravelin; - it is a half-moon; - a half-moon likewise is a half-moon, and no more, so long as it stands before its bastion; - but was it to change place and get before the curtain, - 'twould be no longer a half-moon. ('Tristram Shandy', Il.xii) Sterne sees to it that some of the jokes are sign-posted; 180

the

Joyce and literary tradition

curtains are said to be 'well flanked1, and Slop says, "Tis the case with other curtains'; and Shandy, hating puns, tells Slop that Toby's 'horn-works' have nothing to do with the 'horn-works of cuckoldom'. Uncle Toby, generating the comedy, sees none of it. Shandy resists it and Slop sees more of it, but the refinements are picked up only by those who share Toby's (and Sterne's) knowledge of fortifications and Slop's and Shandy's preoccupation with the genesis next door. The 'ravelin' and the 'demi-lune' were virtually the same thing, in different verbal states according to their situations; but some designs show that the demi-lune had a less erect profile than the ravelin which, as Toby says, stands before the curtain. Uncle Toby's experience of horn-works was in both senses curtailed by his wound in the groin, but he would not himself be able to give an account of his hobby-horse, any more than Shandy could of his preoccupation with noses. Anthropologically speaking, comedy is a phallic festival, and 'Tristram Shandy' is a comedy that encompasses even the maimed phallus. Distinctions between phallic drives and generative capacities might be pursued through an inexhaustible literary tradition, as the glimpse of Juliet's nurse in Anna Livia Plurabelle has reminded us. The sexual polarities are inescapably related to the generative cycle - 'birth, copulation and death'; coming, coming, going, coming again. The Liffey, like all of Joyce's several hundred rivers, runs into the sea, and sun and rain bring it back to its sources. Vico, as Stuart Hampshire says, claims that the human story 'can only in part be told as a progress ... it must also be told as an overlapping of great circles, like the circles of the seasons'.[ 19] 'The wheel' said Joyce of 'Finnegans Wake' 'is a perfect square'. [20] Simply taken, the four seasons punctuate the circling year; more arcanely, we may look to the multiple identities gathered, frequently in fours, under the sigla deftly anatomised for us by Roland McHugh. [21] As the geometry engages with the flux its polarities keep shifting; identities change within large unities, of which the largest offers to be the book itself. 'We become what we imagine', as Blake, on his way to Jerusalem, has it. We needn't worry about cloning, since we are all composed of an inexhaustible number of contending selves, with each comprehensive self still obeying the laws of genesis. Among the mutations of Cain and Abel, Shem and Shaun, we come upon the Mookse and the Gripes, perched respectively on the stone side and the elm side of the water (a little like Blake's Clod and Pebble). Gripes is a time-presence and Mookse a space-presence; but to call them diachronic and synchronic would be to speak Mookse's lingo. For Mookse has the power to regulate and spatialise time in horology: 'Let thor be orlog' (p.154). I shall keep my distance from the many prophetic intricacies and traditional reverberations of this pronouncement, and content myself with saying that the 181

Joyce and literary tradition

celebration of a Joyce centenary is an act of Mookse: 'Efter thousand yaws’, says the voice from the stony side, ’you will be belined to the world', using a word that hides ’blind’ inside the idea of bounding with an outline and making clear. I hope we will not always wait until horology requires us to look again at Joyce, but that we go on listening to his still, but still-audible voice, letting him talk with and from the great dead. Powerful and vital insights are at work in Joyce, however, reducing the urgency of our moral and political motivations: Blake's principle, that 'Everything that lives is Holy’; Bruno's, that all things are made up of opposites; St Paul's, that 'all have sinned and come short of the glory of God'; Augustine's felix culpa, making every fall a prelude to an auspicious rising; and Ecclesiastes', 'That what hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been'. The fall in Joyce's version of Genesis cannot be called to moral account, for upon Here Comes Everybody the court can only return the verdict 'Nolans Brumans', catching up 'nolens volens' with Bruno of Nola, meaning that the fall came about willy-nilly and inside Bruno's world of vital contraries. But 'fall' lingers in another sense - the falling to sleep and falling to death which motivate the drift of much of the language. The febrile exuberances of Joyce's celebration of creation belong still to that fall of words into sleep, and the verbal intricacies of 'Finnegans Wake' are not capable of directing us towards new possibilities of waking life, but only of stirring inklings of what is to come from the cycle of what has gone. If we look fpr a Promised Land we have to make our Exodus out of Genesis and out of the land of Aruc-Ituc. After the sleep of language, however, we may hope to awake refreshed and find that the dead languages too are reactivated and asking to be heard in new ways. Then we can get on with the job of seeing to it that our civilisation is not 'astoneaged' to its 'metagonistic' beginnings by a megatonic thunder-clap: 'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!' It is imper¬ ative that we attend to the voices of dead poets, of which Joyce is now one, as well as to those of living political theorists and economists. Imaginative literature cannot be allowed the kind of autonomy that Eugene Jolas claimed for it in The Revolution of the Word, but since 'we become what we imagine', it must commune with what we have been, what we are, and what we are about to become. It is 'the essence of historical materialism', it has been said, 'that economic history is the deep central channel of the stream of history which must be sounded before its surface currents, eddies, shallows and backwaters can be understood'. [22] That is the Mookse speaking, and I would answer with the voice of the Gripes. The growing points of human consciousness, as F.R.Leavis perceived, are in those spaces between what we are now and what we obscurely seek to be; those spaces in which the 182

Joyce and literary tradition

'nisus' catches an inkling or 'ahnung' of our as yet still unrealised and as yet uncreated potential. Language cannot adequately theorise itself, and I pause upon the edge of the abyss for just long enough to observe that there is a time for righteousness and a time for tighteousness, for Genesis and for Guinnesses, and for lots of fun in 'Finnegans Wake' - as long as we don't stay there for ever.

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17

18 19

22 March 1920, and see Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce' (New York, 1959), pp.489-90. See Ellmann, 'James Joyce', p.490, and Van Wyck Brooks on Joyce in R.H. Denning (ed.), 'James Joyce, the Critical Heritage', 1970, p.743. 'James Joyce', p.490. 'James Joyce', p.490. In treating 'Finnegans Wake' I have made free with a score of commentaries unacknowledged in my text and have had open before me Roland McHugh's 'Annotations to Finnegans Wake' (London, 1980). See Ellmann, 'James Joyce', pp.559, 597. I develop this theme more fully in The Book of Genesis and the Genesis of Books, in 'The Art of Alexander Pope', ed. Anne Smith and Howard Erskine Hill (London, 1978). See 'Finnegans Wake', p.585 , and McHugh's 'Annotations'. See 'Finnegans Wake', p.206. Laundry plays a significant part in the epistolary chatter of Richardson's 'Pamela'. T.G.Bergin and M.H.Fisch (trans), 'The New Science of Giambattista Vico' (New York, 1968), para. 412. 'New Science', para. 629. 'New Science', paras. 438, 439. 'Cratylus' 384d (Jowett's translation). Ferdinand de Saussure, 'Course in General Linguistics', trans. W.Baskin (London, 1960), pp.67-9. Philippe Sollers, Joyce & Co., trans. Stephen Heath, in 'In the Wake of the Wake', ed. D. Hay man and E.Anderson (London, 1978), p.113. Terence Hawkes (ed.), 'Coleridge on Shakespeare' (London, 1969), p. 135; R.A.Foakes (ed.), 'Coleridge on Shakespeare, The Text of the Lectures of 1811-12' (London, 1971), p.79. 'Notebooks', ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York, 1957), vol.l, note 1770; see also note 1637, f81-f82, and 'Aids to Reflection', On Sensibility. 'In the Wake of the Wake', p.108. G.Tagliacozzi and D.P.Venene (eds), 'Vico's Science of 183

Joyce and literary tradition

20 21 22

Humanity' (Baltimore and London, 1976), p.323. Ellmann, 'James Joyce', p.609. 'The Sigla of "Finnegans Wake"' (London, 1976). M.H.Fisch and T.G.Bergin (trs), 'The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico' (New York, 1944), Introduction, p.106.

184

12 READING ‘FINNEGANS WAKE’ Pieter Bekker

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this daybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? ('Finnegans Wake', p.18) During the fifty-odd years or more since extracts from 'Work in Progress' first began appearing in little magazines, reactions have ranged from the angrily dismissive - declaring that 'life is too short and Literature too precious for something much worse than levity and affectation - namely, for outright Rot'[l] - to the proclamations of the adulators intent on asserting Joyce's revolutionary role in the world of letters and 'Work in Progress' a work 'without parallel in modern literary history', in which the English language 'reaches heights not achieved since Shakespeare'. [2] The excitement stimulated by the publication of 'Finnegans Wake' has never really died down, as the ever-increasing mass of articles and books devoted to explaining its mysteries bears out. It is probably unique in having an entire journal devoted exclusively to the elucidation of its parts. It has remained a text which most ordinary readers find impenetrable and which is still being hailed as revolutionary by the avant-garde, particularly by the new wave of structuralist and post-structuralist critics who respond to the very elements that provoked in H.G.Wells the assertion that it was 'a dead end'. [3] The publication recently of Roland McHugh's book, 'Annotations to "Finnegans Wake'"[4], represents an impressive culmination of much devoted and painstaking work that has been going on ever since 'Our Exagmination'[5] first alerted the public to some of the mechanisms at work in the 'Wake'. One of the implications for the reader of 'Finnegans Wake' is hinted at when McHugh describes his book as having been designed to assist the reader 'to cope with the formidable secondary task of identifying the components of the text'. [6] For it is true of 'Finnegans Wake', as it is not of most other literary texts, that its lexical items are not immediately recognisable to the average reader; that it is a text that requires of the reader an activity not dissimilar from that of the translator. In view of the various controversies that have surrounded (and still surround) 'Finnegans Wake' and in the light of recent critical debate about modes of representation in literature, self-reflexivity and foregrounding of language, it

185

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

seems an appropriate moment to consider how we might read the book and how we are to make use of McHugh's lexicon. One of the things McHugh's book does not do, at least not explicitly, is to instruct us in the ways in which we ought to compose the various components he has identified. Presumably we are free to accept or reject any annotation, and it is probably as well for the reader to be wary of accepting all the annotations; for, while many of them are based on intersubjective agreement amongst experienced 'Wake' scholars, many are also conditioned very much by McHugh's own subjective reading of the text. A book like the 'Skeleton Key', [7] however, has a much more insidious effect on the reader, both for its inevitable reduction to an apparent 'content' at the expense of the effect of the text on the reader and for its provision of a paradigm that explains the total structure of the work, its phenomenal world and the themes that it enunciates. Declaring 'Finnegans Wake' 'a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind', [8] the authors provide a commentary strongly conditioned by their belief in the Viconian structure of the book. Many other readers have confirmed this pattern. Others have felt the Viconian structure to be just one amongst many. But there is a temptation in this no less seductive than in an uncritical acceptance of McHugh's annotations. 'The problem', as Philip Hobsbaum has observed of the tendency in general, is that, in order to keep the work in his mind as anything more than detached fragments, the critic has to make some effort at interpretation, no matter how private, how personal, the result may be. The temptation then is to pass on that result in toto to the reading public. [9] This problem, which Hobsbaum calls 'the concept of availability', has been ascribed by Wolfgang Iser to the 'moving viewpoint' of the reader, a condition, he suggests, that 'necessitates consistency-building': A typical instance of this is the metaphor used by Fielding, Scott, and others, whereby the reader is likened to a traveller in a stagecoach, who has to make the often difficult journey through the novel, gazing out from his moving viewpoint. Naturally, he combines all that he sees within his memory and establishes a pattern of consistency, the nature and reliability of which will depend partly on the degree of attention he has paid during each phase of the journey. At no time, however, can he have a total view of that journey. [10] 'Finnegans Wake', a book that has been described as 'a simulacrum of the machinery of God's creation'[11] by one reader, comprises particularly complex vistas for the reader's 186

Reading ’Finnegans Wake'

'wandering viewpoint'. No wonder, then, that he yearns for a 'total view' that will help him subdue the multifaceted text to some memorable, significant structure. One of the most persistent and widely accepted of paradigms affording a 'total view' of 'Finnegans Wake' is the notion that it represents a dream or is constructed in a man¬ ner explicable by reference to dreams in general, and to Freudian 'dream-work' in particular. This paradigm enabled Edmund Wilson to explain the 'Wake' according to fairly trad¬ itional novelistic criteria as 'The Dream of H. C.Earwicker'. [ 12] It allowed Clive Hart to work out an intricate scheme of epi¬ cycles and dream layers. [13] Most recently Margot Norris has brought the paradigm up-to-date by utilising the theories of Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Derrida, to prove 'Finnegans Wake' 'a Freudian dream world of sexual transgression and social dissolution'.[ 14] The persuasiveness of this paradigm lies not only in the explanation it provides for the 'everintermutuomergent' ('Finnegans Wake', p.55) characters, the protean nature of its 'funnaminal' (p.244) world and the fixations and repressions that seem to underlie its repetitive events, but also in the rationale it affords to its language, to the 'variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns (p.118). r - , Joyce himself has been responsible for giving authorial weight to the dream paradigm, and apologists have sought and found amongst his letters and reminiscences of his friends sufficient quotable material to support their theories. A letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926, for instance, contains an apparent explanation of the rationale for 'Finnegans Wake . 'Today I restarted. One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.'[15] The relevance of Joyce's use of over forty different languages to the dream conception is suggested by Frank Budgen's recollection that 'Joyce accepted the tower of Babel as a symbol of sleep'. [16] And in the 'Scribbledehobble notebook we may find some comments that hint at Joyce s decision to call his book 'Finnegans Wake': 'dream thoughts are wake thoughts of centuries ago: unconscious memory: great recurrence: race memorial: repressions: fixation'. [17] And, finally (though the evidence is rather second-hand) the notion of there being a dreamer who may be 'dreaming' the entire discourse is provided by Adaline Glasheen, who reports a comment Joyce apparently made to Dr O’Brien, a friend of his, that 'Finnegans Wake' 'was "about" Finn lying dying beside the river Liffey with the history of Ireland and the world cycling through his mind'. [18] , There are, of course, salutary reminders that Joyce s non-fictional writings and off-the-cuff comments are to be treated with care. Budgen was quite adamant that Joyce was 187

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

his own man when it came to creativity and ardently denied that Joyce had been influenced by psychoanalysis. Joyce, he insisted, 'was always impatient or contemptuously silent when it [psychoanalysis] was talked about as both an all-sufficient Weltanschauung and a source and law for artistic production.'[19] Ellmann relates an incident that supports Budgen's view. Tom Kristensen, the Danish writer, had asked Joyce for some help with his reading of 'Work in Progress'. Joyce referred him to Vico: 'But do you believe in the Scienza Nouva?' asked Kristensen. — 'I don't believe in any science,' Joyce answered, 'but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung.'[20] At the very least we may take this as an admission that he read some of the works of Freud and Jung and is likely to have made use of them as he undoubtedly did of Morton Prince's book[21] and the writings of other psychoanalysts. The real issue for the reader of 'Finnegans Wake', however, is the extent to which a knowledge of psychoanalytic theory and, in particular, the psychology of dreams is necessary equipment for reading the text. Clive Hart, who inclines to the view that Joyce allows the 'Dreamers' in 'Finnegans Wake', 'to draw on the whole quasi-Jungian collective unconscious for the substance of their fantasies', [22] and that the text 'is full of allusions to, and employs techniques broadly based on the theory of, a common psychic substratum in which individuality is dissolved maintains that 'All Joyce requires of his "ideal reader", besides patience, is intelligence, good will, a certain amount of learning, and common sensitivity.'[23] Most 'ordinary' readers, I suspect, would dispute this. On the face of it, Hart's requirements sound eminently sensible. Yet those readers equipped with a reasonable amount of the recommended stock-in-trade may be pardoned their disbelief. For a closer inspection of Hart's description of the equipment needed to read the ’Wake’ reveals the sleight-of-hand in his advice and, at the same time, a rationale for a reading of 'Finnegans Wake' that proceeds from the text itself. Sound sense as it seems, his 'advice' is, in effect, a reference to the chapter in 'Finnegans Wake’ (Book I, Section 5) which may well be seen as containing Joyce’s advice to the reader, heavily disguised, of course, beneath layers of irony, parody and pastiche. Now, if reading, as Wolfgang Iser maintains, 'is an activity that is guided by the text',[24] it might be worth ™hll,e„considerin£ the usefulness of the guidelines offered to us in Finnegans Wake' through the mediation of Clive Hart deferring, for a while longer, the examination of the reading process itself, the activity with which this essay is concerned The narrative technique of this chapter has been described 188

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

as that of a lecture, and the subject of the lecture as the scrutiny and identification of what is variously described by the narrator as an 'untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest' (p.104), as a 'proteiform graph' (p.107), and as something that 'looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass)' (p.lll). The chapter is one of the most amusing and most easily readable (by conventional standards) in 'Finnegans Wake'. It contains within it the well-known passage (pp. 119-24) which, by way of parodying Sir Arthur Sullivan's commentary on the 'book of Kells',[25] introduces the reader to the sigla, what are elsewhere referred to as 'the strangewrote anaglyptics of those shemletters patent' (p.419) that Joyce used in his notebooks and letters to represent different persona in the 'Wake': the initials majuscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign m, finally called after some his hes hecitency Hec, which, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller fontly called following a certain change of state of grace of nature alp or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside the consort, (p.119) It may come as some relief to the reader who has been bemused by the recurrence of the letters H, C and E to be told that the sign is 'meant to be baffling'. On the other hand, we are just as likely to doubt the sagacity of our in¬ formant who, in novelistic terms, may well be the most untrustworthy exemplar of unreliable narrators. If we persist in reading the narrative as being, on one level at least, a burlesqued commentary on the Wakean text itself and on the reader's encounter with the text, we will find references to the various constituents of literary fictions. In answer to the question, 'Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhaga wrote the durn thing anyhow?', we are informed that the writer is 'a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learn¬ ing' (pp.107-8). The characters are described as 'a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document' (p.107) and the events as being 'probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be' (p.110). Our own bewilderment seems encapsulated in the narrator's observation that 'every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway con¬ nected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and chang¬ ing every part of the time' (p.118). The patience advocated by Hart as a necessary attribute for reading 'Finnegans Wake' may seem as difficult to sustain to the reader as it appears to be for the narrator. For, having insisted that 'above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience', he appears very soon to have lost his: 189

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return, whereabouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that glorisol which plays touraloup with us in this Aludin's Cove of our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us the dinkum oil? (p.108) There is a kind of sense in all this and much rumbustious humour, we may wryly acknowledge, dependent on our recognising the appropriateness of the analogy. It is obvious, of course, that this is not the sort of thing Iser meant when he described reading as an activity guided by the text; nor, for all its apparent commentary on itself, what is meant by the self-reflexivity of its language. And Hart's prescription for the 'ideal reader', somewhat undermined by the contradictions in this narrative discourse, can only be evaluated by examining the operations dictated by the text itself. Let us consider more closely what we are being required to do when reading the text, for the previous activity was really only a pretence at reading; a selection of passages whose significance was attained only by suppressing discordant elements and imagining a kind of sense behind or beneath the non-sense. The passage alluded to by Hart is peculiarly suited to our purpose: and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia, (p.120) It is impossible to make sense of this unless we perform the mental reconstructions that enable us to recognise its significations. One of these is to relate it to its immediate context in the narrative discourse, allowing us to recognise some similarity between the object, the 'funferal', and the missive found by the hen when scratching in the fecund midden in which litter and letter decompose. The link between chicken, egg and literature (or letters) lies probably in the old chicken-and-egg problem of the propagation of the species linked with the propagation of meaning from the alphabet. We may discover, too, a connection between the hen's laying of eggs (p.112) and Shem's creation of 'synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's waste' (p.185). Searching for some hypogram that will provide a clue to the structural principle underlying this passage, we may discern a metonymic deviance from the original metaphors which have become the cliches, 'food for thought' and a voracious reader'. We are enabled thereby to recognise the yoking together of terms denoting linguistic elements 190

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

(pronouns, sentences, engraving and retouching) with those connected with food (pudding, egg, pemmican). Roland McHugh's gloss on the word 'pemmican' reveals the same operations, a chain of metonymic associations proceeding through 'condensed food' to 'condensed thought and matter'. [26] Once the process has been initiated, the reader is off on a progressive journey of recreation. Pemmican, he may soon realise, is a bit like polony. Scrambling eggs produces omelettes. Together they come to resemble Hamlet and Polonius, a conclusion that may be arrived at via McHugh's annotation referring the reader to the Shakespearian origin of the phrase 'very like a whale's egg', as well as the occurrence of the phrase in the 'Proteus' episode of 'Ulysses' where Stephen ponders, Hamlet-like, on the ineluctable modalities of the visible and audible, and somewhat ruefully contemplates his younger self, 'Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night' ('Ulysses', p.46). Because it is the narrator who appears to be responsible for the whole utterance, something of Polonius's insensibility and bombast attaches itself to him, just as something of Stephen Dedalus adheres to the object of his thought, the 'ideal reader', by way of the 'Ulysses' intertextuality. The reader is able, therefore, to connect the rhetoric of the utterance with a personality and to give the flesh of speech to the syntax: intonation, word order, cadence become the means whereby the reader creates the narrator. In performing the operations above, guided very much by the signs in the text, we have been 'reading' the text in a manner that accords with our response to literary texts in general. It may be that our route has been more devious than usual, that we have had to recognise that the axes of selection and combination in 'Finnegans Wake' may be differently aligned from more traditional narrative discourses; but the performance is, in essence, the same as that enjoined on the reader by any literary work. If the relations between the text and the reader rely on his literary competence, on his ability, as Sartre has put it, 'to recompose the beautiful object beyond the traces left by the artist', [27] the relations between the text and an extratextual reality may be more problematic. As mentioned earlier, the most widely accepted paradigm of the kind of extratextual reality to which the narrative discourse of 'Finnegans Wake' may relate has been the dream. And Freud's discussion of the 'means of representation in dreams' in Chapter VI of 'The Interpretation of Dreams' contains a section which seems to relate the task of the psychoanalyst to that of the reader of the 'Wake' most suggestively. Talking about 'essential dream-thoughts', Freud points out that they usually emerge as a complex of thoughts and memories of the most intricate possible structure, with all the attributes 191

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

of the trains of thought familiar to us in waking life. They are not infrequently trains of thought starting out from more than one centre, though having points of contact. Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart, linked with it by antithetical association. The different portions of this complicated structure stand, of course, in the most manifold logical relations to one another. They can represent foreground and background, digressions and illustrations, conditions, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is brought under the pressure of the dream-work, and its elements are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together ... the question arises of what happens to the logical connections which have hitherto formed its framework.... The restoration of the connections which the dream-work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the interpretative process. [28] While there is a superficial appearance of similarity between Freud's description and 'Finnegans Wake', there are at least two significant differences. One is the delineation of the interpretative process (of the psychoanalyst) as the restoration 'of the connections which the dream-work has destroyed'. Yet the reader of 'Finnegans Wake', even if he plunders Joyce's letters or traces the compositional process back through the notes and drafts that have become readily available, is unlikely to conceive of the published text as representing a deconstruction of some pre-existent, 'connected' reality. As I have tried to illustrate above, he is more likely 'to bring into the world something which has never existed at any other time or place before'. [29] The other difference, too often ignored by critics, is Freud's description of dream-thoughts as having 'all the attributes of the trains of thought familiar to us in waking life'. The language in which dream-thoughts are expressed and which enables the psychoanalyst to undertake his restorative task of interpretation is, as many linguists have observed, quite different from that which is found in 'Finnegans Wake'. In a paper presented at the 1969 Dublin Symposium and published in 'New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium' in 1972 , Strother B.Purdy attempted to redress an imbalance in Wakean studies and, at the same time, dispel the myth (as he saw it) that 'Wake' language resembled dream language: I think that a great deal of Finnegans Wake criticism has been overly word-oriented, seeking and finding words in the text without concern for the sentences that contain the words. A great deal of criticism has been written as well on Finnegans Wake as a drama, a novel, a myth, with the 192

Reading ’Finnegans Wake'

result that there has been full discussion of the two poles of its linguistic structure - word, and total form - but little discussion of the center, the sentence and its immediate constituents. Yet it is a basic linguistic assumption that neither the meaning of the words nor the identity of the whole discourse can be established in any other terms than that of the utterance unit, or sentence. [30] As a linguist, he is particularly scornful of explanations of the language as representing the speech of dreams, confirming Freud's hint. 'The words and sentences dreamers hear are usually quite normal', he asserts, adding that it is this 'very real' language that 'is used as a key to the unconscious by psychiatrists'. [31] And by the application of the rules of transformational-generative grammar to 'Finnegans Wake' he found that a large number of sentences are ungrammatical, and came to the conclusion, after analysing a number of representative sentences, that 'Finnegans Wake' 'is strongly deviant from English ... and cannot be considered to be written in any real, or natural, language, in the speech of any group'. [32] Purdy's brief study is useful in alerting us to the difference between dream language and the language of the 'Wake'. His attempt to study the syntax of 'Finnegans Wake' was a bold attempt, though it seems to have led him only to the rather bleak conclusion that 'until we establish its rules we cannot move on to a mastery of the whole'. The linguistic method of analysis may prove to be hampered by the very flaw that inhibits the psychoanalytic approach to the literary text. What both come up against is the literary phenomenon which, as we will see, has a relation to ordinary phenomena in the real world quite distinct from that of either the dream or the spoken utterance. It is to a consideration of how we might 'rede its world' (p.18) that we now turn, beginning with a reading of the title of the book as a 'pretext' for adopting the strategies that will guide our reconstruction of the inanimate text and lead us towards a perception of the extra-textual paradigm we require to anchor our 'wandering view-point'. One of the disturbing aspects of the title of the book, 'Finnegans Wake', is that it has no meaning, because of its ungrammaticalness. As it stands it can never be anything other than a paradoxical pair of words. One way in which it acquires a 'meaning' of a kind is when the reader who has read the work makes of it a sign of equivalence for as much of the text as he has read. It is true of all titles of texts that they acquire this kind of signatory 'meaning': 'Hamlet' is fre¬ quently used to refer simply to the play, 'Paradise Lost' to the poem. But it is also the case that we feel a compulsion to find a grammatical significance that will reduce the threat posed by the sign. It is not surprising, therefore, to find many people 193

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

writing 'Finnegan's Wake' and ardent Joyceans expressing their scorn at the 'error'. Yet the 'absence' of the problematic apostrophe is significant precisely because it creates the compulsion, not to restore it (for it was never there), but to engender its existence. The reader's compulsion to insert an apostrophe enables him to indulge in consistency-building; it provides him with a conceptual frame, the ballad of Finnegan's Wake, enabling him to perceive relationships and patterns in the text by reference to the characters and events that occur in the ballad. At the same time, the 'absence' of the apostrophe insists on its ungrammatically and it is in the dialectic between the two effects that we may observe the operation of the literary pretext. Not only is this dialectic - the engendering of a third dimension out of the interaction of the written word and the reader's reconstruction - true of the kind of operation that occurs generally in a reading of 'Finnegans Wake', but it is immediately observable in the variations of the title that recur throughout: 'Tim Finn again's weak' (p.93), 'Lapps for Finns This Funnycoon's Week' (p.105), ’Hops of Fun at Miliken’s Make’ (p. 176), ’Fenegans Wick’ (p.358), 'loss of fame from Wimmegame's fake' (p.357), 'Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake!' (p.415), ’to Finnegan, to sinagain' (p.589), 'Finn, again! Take.' (p.628). Not only do these variants undermine the stability of the Tim Finnegan paradigm and so introduce the interchangeability of persona in the text, they also illustrate the mechanics of the word-play in 'Finnegans Wake'. The retroactive effect on the reader is that they constantly affect the stability of his point of view, causing a continual shifting of focus between Hod-carrier Finnegan and the chiaroscuro of alteregos that his name engenders: "Timeagen' (p.415), 'Quinnigan' (p.496), 'Funnycoon' (p.499), 'Ealdermann Fanagan' and 'Junkermenn Funagin' (p.576), 'Fullacan' (p.531), 'Big Maester Finnykin' (p.576) and 'funn make called Foon MacCrawl' (p.617). The cumulative effect of these wildly different echoes is to cause the reader to read the first word of the title in the singular possessive case, in the nominative and accusative plural, to split it up into French 'fin' and quasi-Latin 'negans'. The same process takes place with the word 'Wake'. The variants in the text render up 'weak' !P‘o2r( ,Vy®ek’ (P-105), 'Make' (p.176), 'Wick' (p.358), 'fake' Cp.375) Quake' (p.496), 'sake' (p.531) and 'Take' (p.628). ihe replacement of nouns for verbs, adverbs for adjectives, of singular for plural, the transposition from one referential trame to another quite unrelated to the first - simply on the basis of paronomasia in many instances - serves to disrupt the reader's preconceptions and habitual strategies and compel a radical reappraisal of the relationship between word and thine subject and object, and of the reading process itself. Just as it would be absurd to suggest that all this occurs at a first reading, or occurs to all readers at any particular 194

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

stage in the reading process, so would it be false to imply that this reading of the title is anything other than a demonstration of the instructions to the reader that might be considered to be latent in the title's threat as a sign. As such, it has enabled us to perceive the interactive dialectic between written text and the active mind of the reader, preparing us in advance for our encounter with the text itself. As there has probably been more written about the opening three paragraphs than about any other section of 'Finnegans Wake', we have a plenitude of commentaries to call upon in order to assess the intersubjective mechanisms of reader re¬ sponse. Before doing so, however, we might profitably con¬ sider some of the ways in which a reader might reasonably be expected to respond to the text. The opening of 'Finnegans Wake' offers a mixture of the familiar and the disconcerting: 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs' (p.3). The familiar fictional techniques are the creation of a sense of place in the terminus ad quern, 'Howth Castle and Environs', and a sense of move¬ ment along an identifiable route, ’past’ one place, and 'from' one point 'to' another. The narrative form employed seems con¬ ventional enough, a public use of the first person plural, traditionally a variant of the first-person narrator sanctioned by custom. Rhetorical elements in the syntax, like the obvious lyricism of the alliterative phrases and the somewhat pompous metaphor of 'a commodius vicus of recirculation', tend to encourage the reader to begin a process of character-building, in keeping with the personality traits associated with the rhetorical flourishes. There seems little in the opening to suggest that we are viewing a dream landscape or reading 'dream thoughts'. But there are, of course, disturbing ele¬ ments. There is no 'proper' beginning and we begin the pro¬ cess of reconstructing a grammatical narrative unit to reduce the threat of the ungrammatical text. Like most readers we are likely to perform this transformation by accepting the ex¬ planation that Joyce offered Harriet Shaw Weaver when he told her that his book 'really has no beginning or end. ... It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence.'[33] If we then 'begin' our reading from the end of the book, we experience an activity that we may have performed frequently in the past in order to 'find out what happened'. But if we peruse the last page after having just looked at the first paragraph, we must experience a sense of disruption, for the style of the last part seems very dif¬ ferent from the opening, evocative of a quite different personality: 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the' (p.628). The rhythmical cadences of this are so different from the more robust speech patterns of the opening that most readers are likely to feel the need to supply some other explanation for the abrupt beginning than the acceptance of the circularity of the 195

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

text. (Though it should be mentioned that the strength of this feeling is likely to alter continually, to be slightly different at each successive reading.) An alternative reconstruction by a reader might be based on an analogy with some personal experience, such as eavesdropping on a discourse already in progress or coming within earshot of a speech already begun. There are other elements that are likely to disconcert the reader, such as the absence of italicisation of the phrase 'commodius vicus' or, alternatively, the un-English spelling of 'commodius'; and perhaps the capital E of 'Environs' may cause a flutter. As the explanations just given have been made deliberately naive, we might turn to consider some of the responses of experienced 'Finnegans Wake' readers. To David Hayman, 'We are entering an inverted world and consequently we follow the 'riverrun' backwards from the sea as in the playback of a film¬ strip.'[34] For Michael Begnal, 'the perspective is quite dis¬ tant and general, both in spatial and temporal terms. Our first view of Dublin is seemingly from on high in the air, since we watch the river Liffey as it flows past Adam and Eve's Church and catch a glimpse of Howth Castle.'[35] To Adaline Glasheen we, as readers caught up in the action, are somehow included in the discourse: 'The first paragraph states that we have left behind us the Dublin quays - site of the Catholic Church, Adam and Eve - and come to Howth.'[36] And, finally, we find the authors of the 'Skeleton Key' self-consciously 'bringing into focus the composition of place': 'We follow the topography of the Irish shoreline from the mouth of River Liffey north¬ ward to a deep bend where the waters of Dublin Bay pound the Hill of Howth.'[37] Perhaps the single response shared by all four readers is that they participate willingly in an action or event either as observers or as actors in the event being narrated. For three of them, the topography appears to be that of Dublin and, consequently, landmarks not in the text are readily identified: Adam and Eve's Church, the waters of Dublin Bay, the Hill of Howth, the Dublin quays. Where they diverge is in their des¬ criptions of the point of view or perspective they, as readers, have of the narrative event. To Hayman it is like following a film being played backwards; for Begnal, who employs the analogy of a 'movie camera with a telephoto lens’, the action is viewed as if from a distant point; Adaline Glasheen feels no sense of detachment - it is as if she herself has been borne along on the tide; Campbell and Robinson appear to be in¬ volved in the scene as observers. Contradictions exist between Hayman's notion of an 'inverted world' and the orderly phen¬ omena observed by the others. Yet even this, based as it pre¬ sumably is on the reversed word-order of Adam and Eve's, seems more like a naturalistic metaphor used to explain a movement backwards through the same phenomenal world witnessed by the others. 196

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

Perhaps the 'key' to the shared response of the four readers is their assumption that the first person plural of the opening includes them as it would be likely to do in a more traditional novel. The 'us' of the speaking subject becomes the means whereby they feel able to enter into the world that is subjectively perceived by him; though their description of that world is also the extratextual world of Dublin. In marked contrast to these readings is the following, by J.Mitchell Morse: The first narrator, who talks as if he stood with a lectern before him, a map behind him, and a pointer in his hand, is most probably Shaun; learning is not inconsistent with Shaun's character, and the vulgar tone of the whole lecture seems to be his. [38] I am not concerned here with taking up Morse's specific identification of the speaking subject as being 'probably Shaun'. What I do find interesting is the way he has been able to postulate a quite different reading from that of the others considered above. Here, instead of the extra-textual reality of Dublin, Liffey, Howth, as the objects 'perceived' by the reader are the imaginable 'props' of a fictitious lecture room: the map, lectern and pointer. Once we concede the viability of the referential frame, the reading sounds eminently convincing. As a response to the tone and rhetoric of the passage it generates quite a different set of relations between the reader and the 'action'. Excluded from the 'us' of 'brings us back', the reader is free to assemble an imaginary situation which will allow the narrator to be caught in the act of addressing a silent (for the present) audience. Morse's conception of the lecture-room is strikingly like that to be found in an early sketch of Joyce's in the 'Scribbledehobble' notebook: 'it expanded the bosom of George Stanislaus Dempsey to expound to a narrow classroom the expanses of the riverful lakerich mountainmottled woodwild continent of North America by him lately but not too late discovered.'[39] This little vignette, evoking as it does the 'gisture expansive' (p.350) of the narrator as well as the contrast between the classroom setting and the 'riverful.. .mountainmottled' landscape being imaginatively drawn for his auditors, underlines the significant emphasis Morse places on the role and persona of the speaking subject in mediating between the reader and the fictional 'world'. There are two valuable operations that become possible for the reader accepting Morse's hypothesis. One is that it focuses the reader's attention on an aspect of Joyce's writing that is a notable feature of his development. For if his works become more and more densely allusive and if, as A. Walton Litz demonstrated, the later works are the result of a 'painstaking composition by accretion', [40] it is also evident that his ability 197

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

to evoke the personality behind the utterance becomes increasingly more compact and economical - a gradual education of the reader leading him to perform more demanding and complex tasks of reconstruction. The opening passage requires a modest measure of reader activity; but there are others where the reader is compelled to perform the sort of tasks that a conventional narrator might, particularly in providing speaker-auditor contexts and filling in the 'he saids' and 'she replieds' that are missing from the 'continuous present tense integument' (p.186). Michael Begnal feels that there is an omniscient narrator who 'has his feet firmly rooted on the ground of Earwicker's Chapelizod, but his head rises above all this into the clouds of the world of reality which the reader inhabits.'[41] This seems to me to be unlikely. Even in 'realistic' fictions it is only a paradigm of reality the reader may encounter through the discourse of a fictive narrator. In 'Finnegans Wake' this paradigm seems remote from any waking reality, and we have already observed how readers have had to 'invert' the text in order to gain access to the Dublin landscape that is strangely metamorphosed in the 'Wake'. 'Phew!' (p.10) says a voice in the text, leaving the reader to imagine the speaker uttering the gasp of relief after leaving the hectic interior of the 'Willingdone Museyroom' (p.8). 'What a warm time we were in there but how keling is here the airabouts!' (p.10), we read. The reader is left to supply the missing contexts which will make sense of the 'there' and the 'here' in the same way as Morse set about supplying the missing 'props' in the opening passage. Not only do we engage in situation-building, we also have to respond to the instructions enabling us to flesh out the speaking voices. Morse does this by responding to the 'vulgar tone' of the pedagogue he assembles in the opening. We, too, may recognise the lyricism bordering on cliche that seems implicit in the rhetorical flow of the whole passage and in the cadences of 'from swerve of shore to bend of bay' (p.3), in particular. The hint of braggadocio in the phrase 'a commodius vicus of recirculation' seems not unlike Simon Dedalus's cultivation of the phrase, 'fidus Achates' ('Ulysses', p.89), in reference to Mulligan, or Mr Power's relish in the pomposity of 'a more commodious yoke' ('Ulysses', p.91). If Morse's response to the text seems to characterise the kind of activity signified by the strategies implicit in the narrative discourse itself, the intersubjective agreement of readers like Hayman, Begnal, Glasheen and others may well call for a reconsideration. Indeed, it is as true of 'Finnegans Wake' as of other fictional texts, that successive readings yield changing viewpoints to the reader. And it is the common experience of readers who have had sustained encounters with the 'Wake', that they gradually begin to enter into the operations of the narrative with more ease and less sense of disiuption of point of view. The growth of an impression that 198

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

we may be participants in something real has been ascribed by Iser to the 'dynamic interaction between text and reader (that) has the character of an event'. [42] It is also partly due to the reader's effort in creating the missing subject of the text, the construction of a personality behind the pronoun that we imagine addresses others and ourselves. Sartre gives a most poignant account of this effect: On the one hand, the literary object has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh. [43] A new significance of the dream paradigm can be formulated in the light of the foregoing exploration. For if we begin reading the text along the lines suggested by Morse, engendering a grammaticality from the ungrammaticalness of the text, we also begin to fulfil the role of the missing subject. In thus activating the potentiality of the text, one that resists subjugation to any paradigm of a waking extratextual reality, we may fruitfully describe our operations in terms of the Freudian model: the reader becomes the dreamer of 'Finnegans Wake' creating the real dream-work. We thus become both subject and object: the subject generating the 'event' (the reading), as well as the object upon whom the event acts. One crucial aspect of the text has yet to be mentioned: the fact that it has been written. A great deal could be said about this most absorbing aspect and its effect on the reader. For if the reader is impelled, in one direction, to give form and flesh to the voices that inhabit each utterance, he is also compelled to recognise the persistence of visual signs that require operations quite distinct from the former. The presence of all those 'shemletters patent' (p.419) is but one example of the foregrounding of the writing of the text. The 'gentlewriter' (p.63) who may be accounted responsible for the transcription of the 'traumscrapt' (p.623) may also be conceived of as being a fictive personality, an 'implied writer' reconstructed from his signatures by the reader in much the same way as the narrative voices are given substance. There is also a 'third party' whose presence, more refined out of existence than ever before, presides over all our performances, directing the construction of the dream-work in absentia: a comic spirit controlling our dreaming in much the same way as the ghost of an apostrophe disturbs our waking hours.

199

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

NOTES 1

2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

'E.Oldmeadow', Rot, 'The Tablet', 14 January 1933, in 'James Joyce: The Critical Heritage', ed. Robert H.Deming (London, 1970), p.513. Eugene Jolas, Homage to James Joyce, 'Transition', no.21, March 1932, in Deming, p.570. H.G.Wells in a letter to Joyce, 23 November 1928, in Deming, p.458. Roland McHugh, 'Annotations to "Finnegans Wake"' (London, 1980). S.Beckett et al., 'Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of "Work in Progress'" (London, 1972 edn). McHugh, p.vi. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, 'A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake'" (New York, 1961). Campbell and Robinson, p.3. Philip Hobsbaum, 'A Theory of Communication' (London, 1970), p.47. Wolfgang Iser, 'The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response' (London, 1980), p.16. Adaline Glasheen, 'Third Census of "Finnegans Wake'" (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1977), p.xi. Edmund Wilson, 'The Wound and the Bow' (London, 1961), pp.218ff. Clive Hart, 'Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake'" (London, 1962), p.84 and passim. Margot Norris, 'The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake'" (Baltimore and London, 1976), dustjacket. 'Letters', III, p.146. Frank Budgen, 'James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" and Other Writings' (London, Oxford and Melbourne, 1972), p.336. 'James Joyce's "Scribbledehobble": The Ur-Workbook for "Finnegans Wake'", ed. Thomas E.Connolly (Oxford, 1961), p.104. Adaline Glasheen, Out of My Census, 'The Analyst', no.XVII, 1959, p.23. Budgen, p.356. Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce' (Melbourne, London and Toronto, 1966), p.706. See Adaline Glasheen, 'Finnegans Wake' and the Girls from Boston, Mass., 'Hudson Review', vol.VII, Spring 1954, pp.89-86. Hart, p.80. Hart, p.146. Iser, p.163. See James S.Atherton, 'The Books at the Wake' (London, 1959), pp.64-7. McHugh, p.120. 200

Reading 'Finnegans Wake'

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

Jean-Paul Sartre, 'What is Literature?', trans. Bernard Frechtman (London, 1967), p.33. Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams', trans. J.Strachey (London, 1965), pp.311f. Henry James on 'Appearance', paraphrased in Iser, p.6. Strother B.Purdy, Mind Your Genderous: Toward a 'Wake' Grammar, in 'New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium', ed. Fritz Senn (Bloomington and London, 1972) p.47. Purdy, p.50. Purdy, p.74f. 'Letters' I, p.123. David Hayman, Farcical Themes and Forms in 'Finnegans Wake', 'James Joyce Quarterly', vol.II, no.4, Summer 1974, p.340. Michael H.Begnal, The Narrator of 'Finnegans Wake', 'Eire', vol.4. Autumn 1969, p.43. Adaline Glasheen, The Opening Paragraphs, 'A Wake Newslitter', vol.II, no.2, 1965, p.6. Campbell and Robinson, p.25. J.Mitchell Morse, On Teaching 'Finnegans Wake', in 'Twelve and a Tilly', ed. Jack P.Dalton and Clive Hart (London, 1966), p.70. 'Scribbledehobble', p.71. A.Walton Litz, 'The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake'" (New York, 1964), p.125. Begnal, p.40. Iser, p.67. Sartre, p.31.

201

13 JAMES JOYCE AND HUGH MacDIARMID Edwin Morgan

I ought perhaps to begin with the apology, or at least the warning, that my essay may seem to be more about MaeDiarmid than about Joyce, but I have written it under the umbrella of the collection title of 'James Joyce and Modern Literature', and I hope that my use of Hugh MaeDiarmid will give a new perspective to some of the wider issues of Joyce's work. I shall not be writing about any personal relationship between the two writers, since that did not exist; but the absence of such a relation may even help in seeing more clearly such relations as obtain between their oeuvres. Now that the writing of both men is complete - MaeDiarmid died in 1978 and his 'Complete Poems' was published in the same year[l] - we can survey them from the vantage-point of history, and begin to map out some remarkable points of contact and overlap as well as some instructive differences. Although they were near-contemporaries, and had many literary acquaintances in common, Joyce and MaeDiarmid never met. Meetings were set up several times, but for various accidental reasons failed to materialise. We have MacDiarmid's word for it that Joyce knew his poetry and in particular 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' (1926)[2], but the influence that can be documented goes in the other direction, and is shown most obviously in the title of MacDiarmid's long poem 'In Memoriam James Joyce1 (1955)[3]. Lack of documentation, however, does not rule out the interesting possibility that 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle', which appeared while Joyce was working on 'Finnegans Wake', may well have contributed something to the shaping of that novel. There are a number of suggestive similarities: ’A Drunk Man’ is a long, multi-layered, stylistically diverse poem, set at night, using much interior monologue, bringing in historical as well as contemporary figures, frequently fusing the local and the universal, climaxing in a vision of the Great Wheel of history which makes its complete turn every 26,000 years, having a hero who if not a publican is a drunk man, and closing with the words of the hero's wife. Drink, in ’A Drunk Man’, takes the place of dream or nightmare in ’Finnegans Wake’, and has the same effect both of liberating the deeper levels of thought and experience and of encouraging the emergence of startling verbal juxtapositions and incongruities. As we try to read the mysterious letter scratched from the dump in 'Finnegans Wake’, so we struggle to see clearly the shaking moonlit thistle which 202

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

the Drunk Man confronts, and which is metamorphosed dozens of times, from an actual thistle emblematic of Scotland to Yggdrasil the World Tree to a pickled foetus to Christ on the Cross to the speaker himself as a Jekyll-and-Hyde. And MacDiarmid's wheel image seems to have much the same function as Joyce's Viconian cycles, in that it serves to telescope history, although MacDiarmid stops short of the complete identificatory device of the pun which allows Joyce to condense more material more continuously. The skippin' sparks, the ripples, rit Like skritches o' a grain o' grit 'Neth Juggernaut in which I sit. Twenty-six thoosand years it tak's Afore a'e single roond it rnak's. And syne it melts as it were wax.

[scrape]

[then]

The Phoenix guise 't'll rise in syne Is mair than Euclid or Einstein Can dream o' or's in dreams o' mine. Upon the huge circumference are As neebor points the Heavenly War That dung doun Lucifer sae far,

[dashed]

And that upheaval in which I Sodgered 'neth the Grecian sky And in Italy and Marseilles, And there isna room for men Wha the haill o' history ken To pit a pin twixt then and then. ('Complete Poems', p.159) I am sure that Joyce, when he read a passage like that, must have appreciated the way in which MacDiarmid planted his little seeds of information and 'point', though he himself would have brought them even closer together: 'Juggernaut' and 'Euclid' reminding us of the Great or Platonic Year of Hindu and Greek astronomers, after which the heavenly bodies would return to their original places, the 'sparks' of the heavily rolling wheel leading to its final phoenix-like melting and resurgence, the datable autobiographical reference to MacDiarmid's service in the Mediterranean during the First World War juxtaposed against a War in Heaven which is out of time altogether, so that the wheel is suddenly seen to be both historical and metahistorical. It would not be surprising if 'Finnegans Wake' showed a measure of influence from 'A Drunk Man', but in any case there has clearly been some parallel development going on in the two authors which encourages us to look at them together, and also to think of them as belonging to a period when such contemporaries as Ezra Pound and David Jones were 203

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

f v

exploring history and ideas about history in large-scale works of a similar ambitiousness and inclusiveness. Joyce and MacDiarmid both emerged from social and literary environments where they felt impelled to adopt a critical, single-minded, often lonely role. They laid on themselves a weight of responsibility which Joyce dealt with almost entirely in terms of art and which in MacDiarmid issues in ceaseless journalistic and publicistic activity as well as in art but which in both men had deep roots in their national feelings, about Ireland and Scotlandas places presenting challenges and problems quite distinct from those of England or (if there is such a thing) 'Britain'. Not only Stephen Dedalus wanted to 'forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race' ('A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', p.257); Joyce himself wrote in a letter to Nora in 1912 that he was 'one^afthe writers of this generation who are perhaps creating,,- at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race' ('Letters', II, p.311). Indeed, he had said earlier (1906) to Grant Richards that in writing 'Dubliners' he had 'taken the first step towards thp _gpvHtiig] lih^j^atjp«--Qf my^ountgy* ('Letters', I, p.63). This is very much in keeping^witnMacDisrrmid's lines in 'A Drunk Man': 'A Scottish poet maun [must] assume/The burden o' his people's doom,/And dee to brak' their livin' tomb' ('Complete Poems', p.165). The 'living tomb' that MacDiarmid saw the Scottish people imprisoned in at the begin¬ ning of the twentieth century is a close cousin of the 'paral¬ ysis' Joyce saw gripping Ireland: a mixture of complacence, sentimentality, provinciality, and philistinism, differing only with the Catholic background in Ireland and the Protestant background in Scotland. Both authors sought to dent the provinciality by looking first not to writers in England or America but to notable figures of Northern Europe: Joyce going to Ibsen, MacDiarmid to Dostoevsky and Blok and Shestov. This aim at the Europeanising or internationalising,,of two small peripheral nations (re-Europeanising and re-internationalising would be more accurate, since both countries had had rich international contacts in their history) has to be seen in a political context of nationalism as well as in a cultural context of revitalisation. With MacDiarmid the nationalism was overt, committed, and life-long (he was one of the founder members of the National Party of Scotland), though his international interests made him an uneasy bedfellow in a largely inward-looking nationalist movement. That Joyce's feelings about Ireland were divided and often problematical is well known, but there Is no mistaking their intensity or their continuing active presence. Revisiting Dublin from Trieste in 1909, he wrote to Nora: I felt proud to think that my son - mine and yours, that handsome dear little boy you gave me, Nora - will always be a foreigner in Ireland, a man speaking another language 204

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

and bred in a different tradition. I loathe Ireland and the Irish. They themselves stare at me in the street though I was born among them. Perhaps they read my hatred of them in my eyes. I see nothing on every side of me but the image of the adulterous priest and his servants and of sly deceitful women. It is not good for me to come here or to be here. ('Letters', II, p.255) To Joyjce, a straightforward nationalism like MacDiarmid's was impossible, and his exiling of himself from his own country something which MacDiarmid could never had done - gave the clearest indication that so long as Irish nationalism implied continued support for the Catholic Church and continued faith ih'/the revival of Irish Gaelic as the native tongue, it could never command his loyalty: I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.... Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead.... The old national soul that spoke during the centuries through the mouths of fabulous seers, wandering minstrels, and Jacobite poets disappeared from the world with the death of James. Clarence Mangan.... It is well past time for Ireland to have done once and for all with failure. If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake. ('Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages', 1907[41) Despite his moods of impatience and revulsion, however, Joyce could not help retaining a painful interest in Irish politics, especially during the gestation of the Irish Free State, and Dominic Manganiello has usefully traced the details of his complex position in 'Joyce's Politics' (London, 1980). Clearly Joyce was pro-Triah in being anti-English, but he saw his Irishness as working on a more modern and international level ^ than the Irishness of those who made a virtue of their patriotism and sense of tradition. His scathing comment in a letter to his brother Stanislaus in 1906 underlines this distinction: If it is not too far-fetched to say that my action, and that of men like Ibsen &c, is a virtual intellectual strike I would call such people as Gogarty and Yeats and Col[u]m the blacklegs of literature. Because they have tried to substitute us, to serve the old idols at a lower rate when we refused to do so for a higher. ('Letters', II, p.187) MacDiarmid, without going into exile and without Joyce's fear of the implications of the word 'nationalist', had nevertheless a similar sense of isolation from, and frequent opposition to, what his co-nationalists in Scotland appeared to stand for. His anti-wet intellectualism, his extreme pro-Gaelic 205

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

language platform, and most of all his espousing of communism in the early 1930s, left him with a constant fight on his hands. It is the Gaelic cause which particularly interests us here, because this is one of the links with Ireland, though not with the Ireland that Joyce wanted to see. In his autobiography, 'Lucky Poet' (London, 1943), MacDiarmid has a recurrent awareness of Ireland as the great Celtic motherland, and claims that 'a Scottish Scotland must be a Gaelic Scotland' (p.201). Scottish Gaelic, like the Irish Gaelic from which it had originally diverged, was on the retreat, but MacDiarmid was nothing if not quixotic, and called for a resurgence of all the Celtic languages, going hand-in-hand with a cultural and political self-determination until there was a united and steely 'Celtic crescent' of workers' republics from Scotland down through Ireland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, which would eventually become a pincer movement and squeeze the English into final submission. Finnegan wakes! That is not, I think, a James Joyce scenario. Yet the imaginative as distinct from the practical appeal of such an awakening is by no means alien to Joyce's concerns. Both Finn and Finnegan, after all, to say nothing of that rex futurus Arthur, were chosen by Joyce as chief exemplars of reawakening, and all are Celts. And as a codicil to any evocation of the broken barrows of Arthur and Finn, let me mention another small and curious Joyce/MacDiarmid link, which if accidental is surely ben trovato. Not only the giant Finn of Irish legend, but the Finns of Finland, could be expected to emerge from burial-mounds. It was a part of European folklore that Finns - and the name was applied to people of the remote north even if they were not properly speaking Finnish - had magic powers, including the unnerving ability to spring up from the burial-barrow. So famous were they for this Lazarus-like behaviour that in the dialect of Shetland (the part of these islands nearest to Finland) the phrase 'hjokfinni body' means an odd, uncanny person who might well be a witch or wizard, like a Finn from a hjok or hog (= burial-mound). In 'Lucky Poet', MacDiarmid writes near the end (p.379): If I were asked by someone, who was finding it difficult, to describe in a single sentence - or express in a brief parable - just what the sort of life I have had, as described in or implied by the foregoing chapters, amounts to, I would probably reply: 'It's all just a matter of a Hjok-finnie body having a ride on a neugle'. Later, he explains (in a very Joycean phrase) that a Hjok-finnie body is 'a buried Finn up again', and that a neugle is a water-horse, a creature which only a Finn could safely ride. This is MacDiarmid's view of himself as shaman, ethnic trickster, prankster, male prankquean. That the image 206

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

has, however, a heroic as well as a comic aspect is shown elsewhere in 'Lucky Poet' (p.186), when he writes: 'Like David Jones, I have always "had in mind the persistent Celtic theme of armed sleepers under the mounds".' Joyce and MacDiarmid seem frequently to meet, therefore, in the dream-ridden, deep-imaged, mythological areas of creative experience, especially but by no means only against a background of Celtic culture and history. But this does not explain the initial impact, and to a large extent the continued impact, of Joyce upon MacDiarmid, which was linguistic. MacDiarmid does not appear to have taken any great interest in 'Dubliners' or 'A Portrait', but the publication of 'Ulysses' in 1922 took him by storm. There are reasons for this which are quite separate from the general reclame of that book. MacDiarmid was at a moment of crisis and decision in the development of his own poetry, which had not yet been published in a personal collection in book form. In that year he turned from writing in English to writing in Scots, and discovered in the process that he had released a totally unexpected but amazingly fresh and original vein of poetry the short lyrics of 'Sangschaw' (1925) and 'Penny Wheep' (1926) and the long philosophical poem 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle'. Even though he did not attempt to imitate it, it was the bold and innovative use of language in 'Ulysses' that encouraged him to take equal risks in giving new life to what had become the effete tradition of writing in Lowland Scots (or Lallans, or simply Scots, which is now the preferred term). The followers of Robert Burns in the nineteenth century were a maudlin, pawky crew who reduced poetry to light verse and left it there. Despite attempts at a more serious Scots poetry from Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Spence, Violet Jacob and some others, the situation was still far from healthy when MacDiarmid began to write and publish just after the First World War. At first he associated the use of Scots with a provincial nostalgia for old simplicities which had gone for ever, and attacked it much as Joyce mocked the use of Irish Gaelic. But then he had a good look at the language in dictionaries and grammars, became more and more excited by what he found, and put this excitement to the test by deploying the rich and largely forgotten vocabulary of Scots in a series of new poems written from 1922 onwards. In doing this he felt that somehow Joyce was at his elbow, and he tried to say why, in an article in his own magazine, 'The Scottish Chapbook'. [5] After remarking that he had been greatly struck by a 'moral resemblance' between Joyce's 'Ulysses' and Jamieson's 'Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language', he went on: A vis comica that has not yet been liberated lies bound by desuetude and misappreciation in the recesses of the Doric: and its potential uprising would be no less prodigious, 207

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality than was Joyce's tremendous outpouring. (You will notice that the image of the sleeping and resurrected giant is not too far from that passage either.) A liberation through language and, interestingly, a liberation that will please the spirit of comedy: MacDiarmid, like Joyce, is to a considerable extent a comic writer, and also like Joyce, he sees an effect of moral catharsis in comedy. And the language had to be fresh, surprising, unconventional, far from the homely cliche-dropping humour of post-Burnsian verse; that was why Jamieson's dictionary was important to him. In these early poems he showed an extraordinary ability to mix convincingly together English words (to be spoken of course with a Scottish accent), Scottish forms of words which are still com¬ monly heard and understood, and then suddenly the startling dictionary word given a new life in a new context, rising from the grave like a hjokfinni, rising like the word hjokfinni when MacDiarmid uses it. He would have liked to add Gaelic, as Scotland's third language, but knew too little to employ it cre¬ atively as he employed Scots and English. What MacDiarmid was doing was unlike what Joyce was doing, yet it was parallel to it, as it had links also with the work of Eliot and Pound and with modernist writing in other countries wherever the revolution and restoration and 'making new' of the word were to be found. MacDiarmid's Scottishness and Joyce's Irishness were perfectly compatible with this instinctive feeling for the age, both as a period of climactic general change and as a period when language had become and would continue to be a matter of central importance. In a 1932 article on Problems of Poetry To-day, [6] MacDiarmid wrote to defend Joyce against the attacks which had been made on him after magazine publication of sections of 'Work in Progress': in Work in Progress Joyce, using about a score of languages, becomes not less, but more, Irish. 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' may look incomprehensible on the printed page; but on the gramophone record, in Joyce's own voice, it gets right over to every hearer above the level of a mental defective. This view of MacDiarmid's, that it is the native or national aspect of an international modernist_writer "which keeps fFTe wolf of incomprehension from the door, has an element of paradox about it, but it is a theme to which MacDiarmid often rbverts, and I am not sure that Joyce would have disagreed with it. I believe most people will confirm that hearing Joyce reading from 'Finnegans Wake' is a revelatory experience, and this not only because it suddenly does become more comprehensible, but also because the very marked Irishness of the voice and indeed of the whole performance makes one think 208

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

again about the purpose and meaning of the whole work. (A more recent example of this sort of reaction is the record of William Burroughs reading from ’The Naked Lunch’; hearing that very American voice, with its sardonic deadpan humour, you suddenly realise that he is in the tradition of great American storytellers, nearer Mark Twain than Schwitters or Dada.) MacDiarmid’s enthusiastic response to the fragments of 'Work in Progress', as they appeared during the late 1920s, elicited at least one direct tribute in his own poetry. 'Water Music', included in 'Scots Unbound and Other Poems' (Stirling, 1932), is a lyrico-musical, alliterative, onomatopoeic recognition of the 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' section of 'Finnegans Wake'. Here is how it begins: Wheesht, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear Nae Anna Livvy's lilt, But Wauchope, Esk, and Ewes again, Each wi' its ain rhythms till't~ Archin' here and arrachin there, Allevolie or allemand, Whiles appliable, whiles areird, The polysemous poem's planned. Lively, louch, atweesh, atween, Auchimuty or aspate, Threidin' through the averins Or bightsom in the aftergait. Or barmybrained or barritchfu', Or rinnin' like an attercap, Or shining' like an Atchison, Wi' a blare or wi' a blawp. They ken a' that opens and steeks, Frae Fiddleton Bar to Callister Ha', And roon aboot for twenty miles, They bend and bell and swaw. Brent on or boutgate or beshacht Bellwa-verin' or borne-heid. They mimp and primp, or bick and birr, Dilly-dally or show speed. Brade-up or sclafferin', rouchled, sleek, Abstraklous or austerne, In belths below the brae-hags And bebbles in the fern. Bracken, blaeberries, and heather Ken their amplefeysts and toves, Here gangs ane wi' aiglets jinglin'. Through a gowl anither goves. 209

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarrnid

Lint in the bell whiles hardly vies Wi' ane the wind amows, While blithely doon abradit linns Wi' gowd begane anither jows. Cougher, blocher, boich and croichle, Fraise in ane anither's witters, Wi' backthraws, births, by-rinnin's, Beggar's-broon or blae - the critters! ('Complete Poems', pp.333-4)

MacDiarrnid was brought up in the Scottish Borders, and in his autobiography he recalls ('Lucky Poet', p.219) the delight he took in the countryside as a boy, the forests and heather hills and moorlands, the 'strange and subtle relationships of water and light', and above all the 'multitude of rivers, each with its distinct music'; these, he says, were 'the champagne days - these long, enchanted days on the Esk, the Wauchope, and the Ewes'. Memory of a happy childhood chimes in with his delighted reading and hearing of Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle as he makes use of the topos of praising one's little-known native place and saying that it deserves artistic immortality at the side of places already made famous. His method is to scour the dictionary for Scottish words, many of them rare or for¬ gotten, which will describe the appearance, movements, moods, colours, and sounds of rivers. These words - and you may have caught the fact that they are taken from the A, B, and C pages of the dictionary, which would have appealed to Joyce as an example of virtuosity - are mostly unfamiliar. What happens therefore is that a certain degree of onomatopoeia, and the alliteration which combines with well-marked rhythmic effects to convey impressions of movement and speed, help to give the poem an interesting mixture of imitative form (which facilitates at least some entry into the landscape content) and the linguistic and extraneous ABC element (which acts as a distancer and reminds us that this is a poem about poetry and not merely about rivers). As he says, the 'polysemous poem' is planned to move on its different levels, at different rates, with different characteristics, and in this it is working like Joyce's fiction. Yet to most readers (even Scottish ones!), and this too would be in line with statements made by Joyce about Anna Livia Plurabelle, it must come across as 'polysemous' mainly in the way that music could be called polysemous, as a complex exhilarating flux of sound, and one comes back to the title, 'Water Music'. Richard Ellmann reports[7] how when Nino Frank was discussing an Italian translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle with Joyce in 1937 , Joyce's 'whole emphasis was again on sonority-, rhythm* and. verbal play; to the sense he seemed indifferent and unfaithful, and Frank had often to 210

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

recall him to it'. But with one central Joycean device MacDiarmid has little to do; the pun he leaves aside, under Joyce's trademark. In the fourth line of the poem quoted above, Joyce would not have missed the latent pun in 'till't, which means 'belonging to it, attached to it' but could also suggest the River Tilt in Perthshire, one of the rivers Joyce does in fact refer to in Anna Livia Plurabelle. In the poem, however, that added meaning would be an irrelevant import. MacDiarmid admitted frankly, in another 1932 essay, The Case for Synthetic Scots[8], that his 'synthetic Scots has not touched the fringe of Joycean experimentation’ and that 'the small innovations I have already attempted do not go nearly far enough'. 'A Joycean amalgam,' he adds, 'of Scots, Gaelic, and English, plus Gothic, Sanskrit, Old Norse, seems to me a medium through which a great deal could be done to advance this world-wide experimentation and bring language abreast of modern psychological requirements.' Such an amalgam, although it brings its variety of languages together as a collage or mosaic rather than in the Joycean melting-pot of punning, was MacDiarmid's final tribute, 'In Memoriam James Joyce' (1955). This 'hapax legomenon of a poem', as its author calls it, is described on the title-page as being only a part of a larger unpublished work, 'A Vision of World Language', but is itself over 6,000 lines long, and is decorated, like the Book of Kells or 'Finnegans Wake', with indignant Celtic whiplooplashes, prudently blocked rounds, whirligig glorioles, and tiberious ambiembellishments by the Scottish artist J.D.Fergusson, including James Joyce's name set forth in best stubby orgam. Joyce would doubtless have accepted such a majestic and pan-Celtic memorial as no more than his due. But is this enormous poem, like so many elegies, a work that tells us more about its author than about its subject? The poem has six sections. The first and longest has the actual title In Memoriam James Joyce and aims to describe, by every direct and indirect means, the kind of poetry MacDiarmid likes and would like to write; and it is a poetry which he relates specifically to the major work of Joyce. Particularity of language, and range of knowledge and of reference, are important to it. Plenitude and richness of the linguistic texture, however, should not be so continuous as to rule out moments of silence, absence, abstracted vision, black holes in the text through which we can suddenly peer into alternative worlds: So beyond all that is heteroepic, holophrastic, Macaronic, philomathic, psychopetal, Jerqueing every idioticon,

211

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

Comes this supreme paraleipsis, Full of potential song as a humming-bird Is full of potential motion. ('Complete Poems', p.771) ('So beyond all that is of non-standard pronunciation, that compresses many ideas into a single word, that combines different languages, that loves learning, that homes in on the mind like a target, that ransacks every dialect and jargon dictionary, comes the supreme emphasis of non-emphasis, of omission, of absence, which is full of potential song as a humming-bird is full of potential motion.') The second section, The World of Words, moves in roughly the same territory as the first, but is directed more towards the psychology of readers' reception and perception of words, the reactions we have to names, images, sounds, colours, letters, metres, syntax, symbols, spelling, calligraphy, shibboleths, secret languages - everything involved in the complex relations between writing, speech, and thought. The third and fourth parts, called The Snares of Varuna and The Meeting of the East and the West, bring in a theme that is important to MacDiarmid and to a lesser extent to Joyce also the significance of oriental and especially Indian thought and the necessity to move beyond a Europe-centred idea^ot culture to a .vyorld-literature overview. The fifth section is a satirical scherzo called England Is Our Enemy where MacDiarmid parades what in 'Who's Who' he liked to define as his Anglophobia (a characteristic not unknown to Joyce either), attacking English literature and criticism for that very bland, anti-extremist insularity - 'a stone-heap, a dead load of moral qualities' - which he and Joyce had been doing their best to discredit by bypassing- Anglosaxondom, jumping from Vico Road to Vico or fronr^cclefechan to eternity. In the sixth and last section. Plaited like the Generations of Men, the poem tries to draw all its strands together, admits it can have only a partial success in doing so ('Have I failed in my braid-binding?'), but establishes its main positive theme of belief in human evolution, with the evolution of language persistently contributing to it and with the work of Joyce masterfully contributing to the evolution of language. The poem, like 'Finnegans Wake', is full of 'quahsed quotatoes, messes of mottage' (p.183). It is to a great extent a mosaic of extracts from MacDiarmid's reading of books, articles, and reviews, the prose being rewritten as verse, with quotations from many languages although the main body of the writing is in English. Like Joyce and Rabelais and Swift, MacDiarmid makes much use of the catalogue: he has lists of languages, of poets, of scholars, of books, of dissertations, of philological terms, of styles of Chinese writing, of Shetland words for the sea, of mathematical theories, of archaisms, of tropical woods, of translators of Sanskrit. In Joyce, such 212

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

catalogues have that mixture of the comic and the tiring which seems inseparable from the device, but in MacDiarmid, because he can be very humourless where his hobby-horses are co¬ ncerned, one is not so sure of the comic component. Joyce, an arch-hypertrophist, loved to mock the hypertrophies of scholar¬ ship, as in the Book of Kells pages of 'Finnegans Wake': see, he says, 'Some Forestallings over that Studium of Sexophonologistic Schizophrenesis, vol.xxiv, pp.2-555', and compare Later Frustrations amongst the Neomugglian Teachings abaft the Semi-unconscience, passim* ('Finnegans Wake', p.123). MacDiarmid seems to me now to be more aware of the comic potential of such lists than I thought at the time when the poem first appeared, but he has still more of the didactic than Joyce. Both comic and didactic aspects slide into this passage: Kroh's 'Eidetiker unter Deutschen Dichtern,' too And Martin's exhaustive study of imaginal traits, 'Die Projektionsmethode und die Lokalisation visueller und anderer Vorstellungsbilder,' And, of course, the 'Vergniigliches Handbuch der Deutschen Sprache' Parts of which might well have been written By Edward Lear and Wilhelm Busch With occasional advice from Lewis Carroll - Yet a mine of information about German life and habits. ('Complete Poems', p.806) Joyce in the poem is to some extent a Virgil to MacDiarmid's Dante. His presence is strongly felt, to anyone who knows his work, even when he is not being mentioned, but periodically MacDiarmid will interrupt his narrative, exclaim 'Ah, Joyce...', and engage the novelist in direct address, sometimes expressing solidarity, sometimes admitting differences, sometimes praising him as innovator and forerunner. This was a favourite method of MacDiarmid's; you can see other examples of it in his various 'Hymns to Lenin' and in his 'Letter to Dostoevsky' in 'A Drunk Man'. Three of the passages addressing Joyce are of special interest. In the second section, The World of Words, there is a long passage beginning 'Ah, Joyce, this is our task' which goes on to define the linguistically central labour - 'So this is what our lives have been given to find,/A language that can serve our purposes' - and finally brings everything together in a striking illustration, not unlike an epic simile in the remoteness and elaborateness of the ground of comparison. The labours of writers like Joyce and himself in the world of words remind him of stories of the difficult physical exploration of the Greenland icecap:

213

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

When climbing on to the ice-cap a little south of Cape Bismarck And keeping the nunataks of Dronning Louises Land on our left We travel five days On tolerable ice in good weather With few bergs to surmount And no crevasses to delay us. Then suddenly our luck turns. A wind of 120 miles an hour blows from the East, And the plateau becomes a playground of gales And the novel light gives us snow-blindness. We fumble along with partially bandaged eyes Our reindeer-skin kamiks worn into holes And no fresh sedge-grass to stump them with. We come on ice-fields like mammoth ploughlands And mountainous seracs which would puzzle an Alpine climber. That is what adventuring in dictionaries means. ('Complete Poems', p.823) Superficially this might seem to be not far from Eliot's 'intolerable wrestle/With words and meanings' in 'East Coker', or indeed with the wrestling with his material which every serious writer has to undergo, but in fact MacDiarmid, and by implication Joyce, are taking it a step farther back, back into the dictionary, the store of all human words, which is waiting to unlock its treasures but is guarded, as treasure-mounds are, by dragons: of strangeness, of difficulty, of unfamiliarity, of over-familiarity, of jargon, of technicality, of unpronounceability, of semantic elusiveness, of phonic unhelpfulness. With this Joyce would surely agree. From the 'paralysis', 'gnomon', and 'simony' of The Sisters in 'Dubliners' (p.7) to the 'alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons' of 'Finnegans Wake' (p.19), he invests the individual word with an almost magic power, and it is a power which is not won easily. In a second passage, from the last section of the poem, and with a pretty instance of that paraleipsis he had mentioned earlier, MacDiarmid exclaims, 'Ah Joyce, enough said, enough said!' and then proceeds to bombard that vacuum with illustrations of his favourite theme of continuous evolution. Science synthesises new colours; human consciousness is growing in secret 'like a mango tree under a cloth'; Schonberg was right in saying it was not for the evolution of music to wait on the human ear but for the human ear to catch up with the evolution of music; and Schonberg, Joyce, and MacDiarmid himself are evolutionary forces - articulators of the new - in music, prose, and poetry. In another of his remarkably applied, lengthy similes, drawn from Sir Charles Sherrington's 'Man on his Nature' (Cambridge, 1940), MacDiarmid suggests 214

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

•Xxva, it is not for these present

Even as nerves before ever they function Grow where they will be wanted; levers laid down in gristle Become bone when wanted for the heavier pull Of muscles which will clothe them; lungs, solid glands. Yet arranged to hollow out at a few minutes' notice When the necessary air shall enter; limb-buds Futile at their appearing, yet deliberately appearing In order to become limbs in readiness For an existence where they will be all-important; A pseudo-aquatic parasite, voiceless as a fish, Yet containing within itself an instrument of voice Against the time when it will talk; Organs of skin, ear, eye, nose, tongue, Superfluous all of them in the watery dark Where formed - yet each unhaltingly preparing To enter a daylit, airy, object-full manifold world They will be wanted to report on. Everywhere we find Prospective knowledge of needs of life Which are not yet but are foreknown. All is provided. As Aristotle says, 'To know the end of a thing is to know the why of it.' So with your work, vastly outrunning present needs With its immense complication, its erudition, (The intricacy of the connections defies description. Before it the mind halts, abased. In tenuis labor.) But providing for the developments to come. ('Complete Poems', pp.886-7) This claim opens very large questions, to which I shall return in a moment. Let me first quote the last of these 'Ah, Joyce!' passages, where near the end of the poem he thinks of Joyce's death and prepares to take his leave, in a mood of gratitude and optimism. With its use of English, French, German, and Greek it brings us back to the multilingual theme, but what is most notable about it is its dramatic, excited style, which itself enacts the splendid exit of Joyce's soul from this world to the next, seen first from our side and then by a sudden twist, rather like that of 'Alice Through the Looking-Glass', from the other. Ah, Joyce! We may stand in the hush of your death-chamber With its down-drawn blind But those who were on the other side When you passed over would find It (despite the general view: 'Another queer bird gone!') 215

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

As when - no! Not the Metaphysical Buzzard! (C'est un numero! C'est marrant - in both senses!) But the peacock flew in through the open window With its five-foot tail streaming out behind, A magnificent ek-stasis Counterpart of your great Aufhebung here. Per Sinn des Schaffens completely seen at last. -The supreme reality is visible to the mind alone. ('Complete Poems', p.888) So as a peacock, ancient symbol of immortality, Joyce makes his ecstatic exit from the poem, the meaning of the creative acf (der Sinn des Schaffens) seen finally as a flash, an epiphany, a sudden revelation, without which all the painstaking accumulation of detail would be in vain. But what of evolution, what of MacDiarmid's view of the artist as someone creating for, and in a sense truly creating, the future? I am not sure that anyone knows, even yet, what Joyce was doing with language, in the steps he took from 'Dubliners' to 'Finnegans Wake'. That there is a steady evolution in his own work is clear. But how did he see himself and his function? Did he have a sense of function at all, or does MacDiarmid foist this upon him because of his perhaps Scottish didacticism? In a letter to Nora in 1909, Joyce spoke of 'those boundless ambitions which are really the leading forcer^m^JflEer ('Letters', II, p.256), but he did not say what the ambitions were. In later years he usually deflected enquiry by saying he wrote to make people laugh, or to give them pure music, not literature, or to keep critics busy for centuries to come. 'The green wothe botheth,' as the child Stephen Dedalus sang, and it was 'his song', no one else's, but how did that green rose, that Hibernian blue guitar, come into being from the 'wild rose blossoming on the little green place' of the 'real' song? ('A Portrait', p.7) Is this a pointer towards artistic creativity, or to the fact that Joyce was to become a pillar of the Berlitz, able to answer his correspondents in fluent French, German, Italian, or Triestine dialect? MacDiarmid's argument, throughout 'In Memoriam James Joyce', is that he and Joyce were both working towards world-consciousness, and that this was in fact the next general evolutionary step. Values in national cultures isolated by their individual languages were often neglected or lost or unknown, and it was the function of the artist either to engineer fruitful confrontation of cultures or deliberately to mingle them. In an epigraph to 'In Memoriam James Joyce', MacDiarmid quotes the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov: The true unity of languages is not an Esperanto or Volapiik or everyone speaking French, not a single language, but an all embracing language, an interpenetration of all languages.' That last phrase would apply to Joyce better than to MacDiarmid, who uses collage rather than interpenetration. But 216

James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid

it is very doubtful if Joyce reached the 'unity of languages' for the evolutionary or social or humanistic reasons Solovyov and MacDiarmid put forward. This is not to say that Joyce has no interest in the future, or that 'A Portrait', 'Ulysses', and 'Finnegans Wake' are not in some sense forward-looking and even optimistic works. The welcome to life and the forging of the uncreated conscience at the end of 'A Portrait', the affirmative and lyrical 'yes' of Molly Bloom, and the strong feeling of moving out into the unknown, into something more than—the- expected cycle of nature, at the end of 'Finnegans Wake', are not as passive or as self-enclosing as they are sometimes made out to be. But for all that, it is hard to resist the conclusion that MacDiarmid did to some extent create the Joyce he praised. The way he did it is what draws us to take a new look at both writers.

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Hugh MacDiarmid, 'Complete Poems 1920-1976', ed. Michael Grieve and W.R.Aitken, London, 1978. I owe this information to Dr Donald Low of the University of Stirling, who showed me a letter written by MacDiarmid to Dr Low's wife, answering a query about his contacts with Joyce. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'In Memoriam James Joyce: From "A Vision of World Language'", Glasgow, 1955. 'The Critical Writings of James Joyce', ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London, 1959), pp. 173-4. A Theory of Scots Letters, 'The Scottish Chapbook', 1 (1922), pp.180-4 (p.183). Hugh MacDiarmid, 'At the Sign of the Thistle: A Collection of Essays', London, 1934 , p.118. Richard Ellmann, 'James Joyce', New York, 1959, p.713. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'At the Sign of the Thistle: A Collection of Essays', London, 1934, pp. 184-7.

217

INDEX

The first section includes references to authors, works, and themes (except ing Joyce and his works); the second indexes allusions and quotations from Joyce's works. Those contributions which take the form of fiction and poetry are not indexed, and the contents of Joycean quotations have not been indexed. Footnotes have been indexed only when they include signif¬ icant quoted matter. GENERAL Book of Kells, 189, 213 Book of the Dead, 171 Booth, Wayne, 58 Boredom, 126, 138, 140 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1 'Bouvard et Pecuchet' (Flaubert), 147-8 orandabur, Edward, 10 Althusser, Louis, 99 Bratby, John, 56, 71 'The Ambassadors' (James), 60 Brian Boru, 40 Antheil, George, 42 'Anti-Oedipus' (Deleuze and Guattani), Browne, Sir Thomas, 158 Bruno, Giordano, 182 131 Bruns, Gerald L., 154-5, 157 Aquinas, Thomas, 31, 36, 85 Budgen, Frank, 33, 168, 187-8 Aristotle, 148 Bunyan, John, 167 Arnold, Matthew, 35 Burns, Robert, 207 Atherton, J.S., 150 Burroughs, William, 209 'Atlantis', 2 Butor, Michel, 57, 60 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 115 Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord, Auerbach, Erich, 121 30, 32, 38-42, 49, 52, 156 Augustine, St, 182

Abraham, 121 Abrams, M.H., 31, 32 Achilles, 157-8 'Adam Bede' (Eliot), 56 Adams, Robert Martin, 147 Adorno, Theodor, 87, 116 'A.E.'. see Russell, George William

Balfour, James, 47 Balzac, Honors de, 132, 134 Barth, John, 57-8, 66, 69, 144 Barthes, Roland, 3, 67, 68, 69, 70, 128-9 Baudelaire, Charles, 31, 130 Beckett, Samuel Barclay, 1, 3-4, 95, 114, 134, 144-5 'La Belle Hdlfcne', 128 Begnal, Michael, 198 Berger, John, 133-4 Bergson, Henri, 47 Berkeley, George, 47, 77 'Between the Acts' (Woolf), 60 Bildungsroman, 93 Blake, William, 30, 32, 43-53, 181 Blok, Alexander, 204 Boehme, Jacob, 92

'Cain' (Byron) , 42 Campbell, Joseph, 102 Campbell; Thomas, 31 Camus, Albert, 114 Carlyle, Thomas, 167 Cathleen ni Houlihan (allegoric fig¬ ure), 51, 83 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' (Yeats), 100 Charques, R.D., 112 Christiani, Dounia Bunis, 96-7 City, the, 130, 133-5, 170, 172-3 Cocteau, Jean, 128 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 169, 176-7, 178-9, 180 Colum, Padraic, 205 'La Comedie Humaine' (Balzac), 132 'Complete Poems' (MacDiarmid), 202 Comte, Auguste, 173

218

Index

Connolly, James, 99 Conrad, Joseph, 77, 78, 87-8 Consumerism, 99-100, 113-14, 130 Cooper, Fenimore, 77 'Correspondence' (Flaubert), 157, 164-5 'The Countess Cathleen' (Yeats), 82-3, 90-1 Crabbe, George, 31 Craig, David, 112 'Crisis and Criticism' (West), 113-14 Dante, 2, 3, 43, 144, 149, 170 'Dante and the Lobster' (Beckett), 144 'Death in Venice' (Mann), 58-9, 63, 67 'Defence of Poetry' (Shelley), 35, 36, 37 Defoe, Daniel, 47, 47 , 53 Deleuze, Gilles, 131 Derrida, Jacques, 67, 70, 187 Descartes, Rend, 66, 69 Descharmes, Rene, 147 Devlin, Denis, 2 Dickens, Charles, 61, 134, 168, 177, 178 'Don Juan' (Byron), 40, 42, 52-3 Donoghue, Denis, 2 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 118, 199, 204 'A Drama in Muslin' (Moore) , 97, 106 'Dunciad' (Pope), 169, 170

Frank, Joseph, 136 Frank, Nino, 210-11 French, Marilyn, 121, 148, 157 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (Fowles), 57 Freud, Sigmund, 81, 85, 116, 187, 191-2, 193 Gaelic League, 84, 97 Gaskell, Philip, 147 Genesis, 166, 175, 179 Genette, Gerard, 157 Gide, Andre, 129 Gilbert, Stuart, 91, 143 Gillet, Louis, 40 Girard, Rend, 19 Giraudoux, Jean, 128 Glasheen, Adeline, 96, 187, 198 Gleckner, Robert, 40, 41-2, 43 Gogarty, Oliver St John, 205 Goldberg, S.L., 36 Golding, William, 143-4 Goldman, Arnold, 150 Gray, Thomas, 145-6 Greimas, A.J., 137 Grieve, Christopher Murray, see MacDiarmid, Hugh Guattari, Felix, 131 'Gulliver's Travels' (Swift), 9 Gunpowder Plot, 49 'Hamlet' (Shakespeare), 92, 191, 193 Hampshire, Stuart, 181 Hardy, Thomas, 85, 150 Hart, Clive, 187, 188, 190 Hartley, David, 178 Hayman, David, 155, 198 'Heart of Darkness' (Conrad), 77 Heidegger, Martin, 134, 187 'Hellas' (Shelley), 33 Hemans, Mrs Felicia Dorothea, 31 Henri IV, 49 Heraclitus, 116 History (and Joyce's work), 48, 87-95 Hitler, Adolf, 83 Hobbes, Thomas, 179 Hobsbaum, Philip, 186 Hodgson, William Ballantyne, 150-1, 154, 156, 157 Hogarth, William, 168 Homer, 87, 115, 121, 126-8, 131-2, 140, 143, 170 Hume, David, 47 , 169, 178

Eagleton, Terry, 114, 115 'Easter 1916' (Yeats), 100 Easter Rebellion, 93 Ecclesiastes, 182 Efron, David, 120, 121 Eliot, George, 56, 58, 65, 180 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 2, 6, 61, 62, 63, 65, 87, 143, 156, 167, 168, 173, 208 Ellis, Edwin J., 46, 50, 52 Ellmann, Richard, 33, 82-3, 148, 167, 210 Essen, Siri von, 2 'The Everlasting Gospel' (Blake), 44 Fenianism, 50 Fergusson, J.D., 211 Fielding, Henry, 61 Fitzgerald, Desmond, 86-7 Flaubert, Gustave, 6, 20, 36, 79, 130, 136-7, 147, 148, 149, 150, 157 Ford, Ford Madox, 77 Foucault, Michel, 58, 67, 70 'Four Quartets' (Eliot), 65, 69, 168, 173, 214 Fowles, John, 57, 58, 68 Fox, Ralph, 112

Ibsen, Henrik, 52, 86, 153, 204, 205 'In Memoriam James Joyce' (Mac¬ Diarmid), 202, 211-16 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (Freud), 191-2 'Irish Homestead', 8

219

Index

Irish language, 77, 81, 84, 94, 95, 205, 207 Iser, Wolfgang, 143, 186, 188, 190 Jacob, Violet, 207 Jaloux, Edmond, 148 James, Henry, 56-7, 60, 65, 77, 138-9 James, William, 155 Jameson, Fredric, 78 Jolas, Eugene, 112, 182 Jones, David, 203, 207 Joyce, Lucia, 4 Joyce, Stanislaus, 6, 8, 9, 30, 44-5, 86, 205 Jung, Carl Gustav, 127, 188 Kafka, Franz, 114 Kavanagh, Patrick, 2 Keats, John, 30, 32, 40 Kenner, Hugh, 78, 88, 92, 93, 132, 144, 149, 155-6 Kermode, Frank, 2 Kettle, Arnold, 114-15, 123, Kierkegaard, Soren, 172 'King Lear' (Shakespeare), 170 Kipling, Rudyard, 77, 78, 83, 86 Krehayn, Joachim, 98 Kristensen, Tom, 188 Kristeva, Julia, 3 Krupp, Alfred, 112 Lacan, Jacques, 85, 187 Laplace, Pierre-Simon (Marquis de), 88, 92 Lawrence, David Herbert, 6, 154 Leavis, F.R., 56, 98, 182 Leigh, Augusta, 40 Lessing, Doris, 115 Lessing, Gottfried, 92 Ldvi-Strauss, Claude, 127, 187 Levin, Harry, 46, 178 Lichtenstein, Roy, 57 Life Story (Barth), 57-8, 66-7 Linati, Carlo, 33 , 92 'Little Dorrit' (Dickens), 169, 177-8 'The Little Review', 99 Litz, A. Walton, 197-8 Locke, John, 178 Lodge, David, 2 Lukacs, Georg, 87, 91, 113, 114, 116, 124 Luria, A.R., 118 Lynch, Kevin, 133 Lyons, John Benignus, 95-6 'Lyrical Ballads' (Wordsworth), 31

MacManus, M.J., 97 'Madame Bovary' (Flaubert), 6 Maddox, James H. (Jnr), 151-2 Magalaner, Marvin, 10 Mahaffy, John Pentland, 77, 84 'Maid of Athens' (Byron), 41 Mallarme, Stephane, 68, 135 Malory, Sir Thomas, 167 Mangan, James Clarence, 32, 33, 35, 47, 205 Manganiello, Dominic, 205 Mann, Thomas, 58-9, 63, 69 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (Blake), 43-4 Marryat, Frederick, 77 Marx, Karl (and Marxism), 1, 83, 87, 98, 112-24, 163 'Measure for Measure' (Shakespeare), 175 'Merlin's Prophecy' (Blake), 45 Michelangelo, 46 'Milton' (Blake), 47 Milton, John, 97, 167, 170, 173 Mitchell, Susan Langstaff, 97, 99 'A Modest Proposal' (Swift), 9 Moore, George Augustus, 97, 101, 106 Moore, Thomas, 30, 41 Morse, J. Mitchell, 197 'Mrs Dalloway' (Woolf), 19 'Murphy' (Beckett), 144, 145 Murphy, William Martin, 99 Musil, Robert, 114 Nabokov, Vladimir, 143, 164 Nationalism, Irish and Scottish, 204-5 'La Nausde' (Sartre), 60, 65, 66 'The New Science' (Vico), 173 Newman, John Henry, 65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129 Norris, Margot, 187 'La nouvelle revue frangaise', 148 O'Connor, Frank, 61 O'Faolain, Sean, 2 O'Farrelly, Agnes, 97 O'Farrelly, Feardorcha, 97 O Hehir, Brendan, 81 Orwell, George, 157 O'Shea, William, 151 'Our Exagmination ...' (Beckett et al.), 185 'Outlook', 77 'Paradise Lost' (Milton), 169, 170, 171, 175, 193 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 99, 134, 151, 152, 158 Pater, Walter, 32, 65 Peacock, W., 166

MacCabe, Colin, 73, 121-2, 155 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 202-17 McHugh, Roland, 97, 101, 181, 185, 186 220

Index

Picasso, Pablo, 57, 99 'Pig Earth' (Berger), 133-4 Pinter, Harold, 116 Plato, 36, 174 'PN Review', 3 Pope, Alexander, 1, 62, 167, 173 'Portnoy's Complaint' (Roth), 60, 121 Pound, Ezra Loomis, 5-6, 61, 62, 71, 147, 148, 203, 208 Power, Arthur, 30, 45-6 Practical Criticism, 2 Press, the, in Joyce's work, 36-7, 81, 99 'Promotheus Unbound' (Shelley), 32, Proust, Marcel, 60, 62, 63, 148, 157 Purdy, Strother B., 192-3 'Purgatory' (Yeats), 95 Pynchon, Thomas, 146 'Quarterly Review', 40 Quinet, Edgar, 96 Rabelais, 212 Radek, Kark, 112-13, 114, 115, 117 'A la recherche du temps perdu' (Proust), DO, 62 Reed, T.J., 59 Rembrandt, 36 Rhodes, Cecil, 112 Richards, Grant, 5, 7, 8, 14, 97 Ricks, Christopher, 157 'Riders to the Sea' (Synge), 148 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 70-1, 95, 143 Robinson, Henry Morton, 102 'Robinbon Crusoe' (Defoe), 47 Rockefeller, John D., 112 'Romeo and Juliet' (Shakespeare), 169, 176-7 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 45, 57 Rossetti, William Michael, 30, 45, 46 Roth, Philip, 60, 121 Russell, George William ('A.E.'), 8, 166 Russian revolution, 93 Said, Edward, 20, 131 Saintsbury, George, 167 Sapir, Edward, 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60, 65, 66, 69, 127, 128, 191, 199 Saussure, Ferdinand, 65, 169, 174 'Scheherazade', 67 Schlauch, Margaret, 116, 120 Schoeck, Othmar, 42 Scholfield, 51 Schonberg, Arnold, 214 Scott, Sir Walter, 30-1, 92 Senn, Fritz, 157 Shakespeare, William, 1, 62, 168, 176, 178, 185; see also entries for individual plays 221

Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 93 Shelley, Percy Busshe, 30, 32, 33-6, 38, 41, 51, 53 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 167 Sherrington, Sir Charles, 214 Shestov, Leo, 204 Sibelius, Jean, 99 Smith, J.T., 52 Sollers, Philippe, 173, 175 Solovyov, Vladimir, 216-17 'So This is Dublin' (MacManus), 97 Southey, Robert, 31, 179 Soviet Writers' Congress (1934), 112 'Spain' (Auden), 115 Spence, Lewis, 207 Sterne, Laurence, 123-4, 168, 178, 179 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 207 Stravinsky, Igor, 42 Strindberg, August, 2, 99 Suarez, Francesco, 49 Sullivan, Arthur, 189 Sullivan, John, 42 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 46, 49 Swift, Jonathan, 5, 8-9, 168, 212 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 62 Synge, John Millington, 83, 86, 148, 150 Talavera, Juan Mariano de, 49 'The Tempest' (Shakespeare), 170 'La Tentation de Sainte Antoine' (Flaubert), 136-7 Thomas, Brook, 145, 146, 147 Thompson, John, 124 'Thought and Language' (Vygotsky), 117-19 Tiresias, 49 Tolstoy, Leo, 118 'To the Lighthouse' (Woolf), 60, 179 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (Eliot), 168 Trilling, Lionel, 77 'Tristram Shandy' (Sterne), 123-4, 169, 179-81 'Trois Contes' (Flaubert), 148 Trollope, Anthony, 56 Turgenev, Ivan, 148 Twain, Mark, 209 'Ulysses, Myth and Order' (Eliot), 87 Updike, John, 128 Van Dyck, 36 Vico, Giambattisto, 169, 173-4, 181, 186, 203, 211 Virgil, 170 Vygotsky, L.S., 117-19, 121 'The Waltz' (Byron) , 40-1

Index

'Women in Love' (Lawrence), 154 Woolf, Virginia, 6, 19, 60, 63, 65, 129 Wordsworth, William, 30, 31, 32, 101

'The Waste Land' (Eliot), 63, 65 Watt, Ian, 60 'The Waves' (Woolf), 60 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 169, 170, 187 Wells, H.G., 138, 154, 185 West, Alick, 113-14 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 65 Williams, Raymond, 98 Wilson, Edmund, 187

Yeats, William Butler, 5, 6, 9, 30, 33, 43, 46, 59, 83, 85, 86, 87, 90-1, 94, 99, 100, 101, 148, 205 Young, Sir Charles, 43

JOYCE'S WRITINGS 'Critical Writings’, quoted, 31, 32, 33, 35, 43, 45, 46-7, 48, 49, 51-2, 153-4 'Dubliners', 5-20, 78, 87, 92, 93, 97, 98, 102, 112, 149, 207, 216; After the Race, 14; Araby, 13-14, 19, quoted, 13; Clay, 14; The Dead, 5, 6, 14, 17-20, 37-8, 80, 149, quoted, 17, 18-19, 169-70;An Encounter, 17, 149, quoted, 1112, 13, 14; Eveline, 8, 14, 81, 94, 97, quoted, 15, 79-80, 82; Grace, 5, 14, 15, quoted, 17; Ivy Day in the Committee Room, 14, 78; A Little Cloud, 14, 38; A Mother, 14; A Painful Case, 14, 81, quoted, 81; The Sisters, 8, 13, 15, 80, 96, 214, quoted, 10-11, 17; Two Gallants, 14, 16, quoted, 16 Ecce Puer, 20, 40, quoted, 20 'Et tu, Healy', 8 'Exiles', quoted, 47; notes to, quoted, 37 'Finnegans Wake', 30, 36, 42, 43, 44, 78, 87, 92, 95, 101, 116, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 185-99, 202, 208-13, 216, quoted 1, 39, 40. 41, 43, 48, 49, 62, 63, 65, 96-9, 101, 102, 147, 151, 175-6, 178, 180-2, 185-99 'Giacomo Joyce', 149 'The Holy Office', 8 'Letters', quoted, 5, 6, 7, 8, 15-16, 31, 40, 42, 45, 78, 86, 92, 97, 148, 150, 204-5, 216

222

'A Portrait of the Artist' (essay), 93-4, 101, quoted, 79 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, 5, 6, 12, 17, 32, 35, 44, 49, 56, 58, 61-2, 63-4, 67, 69, 71, 85-6, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 100, 144, 149, 207, 216, quoted, 34, 38-9, 45, 50, 59, 61, 64, 65, 84, 85, 86, 90, 204 'Stephen Hero', 5, 6, 8, 17, 30, 32, 36, 44, 61, 148, 149, quoted, 3, 30, 31, 32, 35, 39, 153, 154 'Ulysses', 35, 36-7, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 61, 63, 77, 86-7, 91, 92, 93, 99-100, 101, 112-24, 126-42, 168, 171, 207; Aeolus, 81, 99, 142, 155, quoted, 136; Calypso, quoted, 52; Circe, 36, 47, 93, 136, quoted, 50, 51, 89; Cyclops, 33, 92, 121, 142, quoted, 138, 167; Eumaeus, 126, 138-41, 142-59, quoted, 135, 142, 143, 146, 153, 157; Hades, 94, 102, quoted, 48-9, 95, 145, 198; Ithaca, 36, 126, 139-41, 142, 148, quoted, 124, 135, 141, 152; Lestrygonians, quoted, 117; LotosEaters, quoted, 118; Nausicaa, 9z, 142, 157, quoted, 122; Nestor, 47, quoted, 48, 50-1, 90; Oxen of the Sun, 92-3, 142-3, 150, 166-7, 171, quoted, 143, 166-7; Penel¬ ope, 49, 119, 127, 128, quoted, 38, 153; Proteus, 47, 191, quoted 91-2; Scylla and Charybdis, 47, 48, quoted, 47, 145, 166; The Sirens, 92, quoted, 138; Telemachus, quoted, 2, 88-9, 90; Wandering Rocks, 92, quoted, 93

.

THE EDITORS W. J. McCormack is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and the New University of Ulster, Coleraine, and is the editor of A Festschrift for Francis Stuart (Dolmen Press, 1972) and author of Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Clarendon Press, 1980). He is also general editor of the Centenary Edition of Trollope’s ‘Palliser’ novels (World’s Classics). Alistair Stead is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. He was educated at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and is the author of numerous articles including critical-biographical contributions to Webster’s New World Companion to English and American Literature (1973) and Essays in Honour of Arnold Kettle (Open University Press, 1982).

Jacket illustration by Pieter Bekker Printed in Great Britain (TY)

SOME RELATED BOOKS ANNOTATIONS TO ‘FINNEGANS WAKE’ Roland McHugh Also available in paperback JOYCE’S POLITICS Dominic Manganiello JAMES JOYCE A Student’s Guide Matthew Hodgart

Also available in paperback JAMES JOYCE: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE Edited by Robert H. Deming Volume 1 1907-1927 Volume 2 1928-1941

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL