DAVID SOLWAY
READING THE ENCYCLOPEDIA DEMENTIA
David
Solway has recently published a new collection of poems entitled
The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat (Goose Lane Editions,
2005), and is now working on his fourth book in education and
culture, entitled Reading, Riting and Rhythmitic. A
collection of literary/critical essays, Director's Cut,
was released by The Porcupine's Quill in Fall 2003 and a new
volume of literary/scholarly essays, Peregrines, is
slated for McGill-Queen's University Press. He was appointed
writer-in-residence at Concordia University for 1999-2000 and
is currently a contributing editor with Canadian Notes &
Queries and an associate editor with Books in Canada.
_______________________
The
encyclopedic technique in fiction when deployed with the consummate
scope and art of James Joyce has as its inevitable corollary
the vast, scholastic profession of source-and-allusion hunting.
The impulse which drives this profession is theoretically boundless
since, unbeknown to itself, the Creation and not the text has
become the ultimate object of the quest. The headlong pursuit
of meaning, however, in the absence of controlling principles
leads inescapably to absurdity. Scholars tend to treat Joyce's
text as a carte blanche so that the hermeneutic project
comes to resemble the legendary excesses of rabbinical pilpul
or to approach the futile erudition of Trivial Pursuit.1
But
one cannot blame the Joyce-bedazzled scholar entirely. Every
scintilla in a book like Ulysses must be remorselessly
explicated. The novel, “this chaffering all including
most farraginous chronicle,” as Joyce calls it in Finnegans
Wake, not only invites us to range beyond its fictional
limits and trespass on the domain of the world outside the text,
it positively compels us to do so. As R. M. Adams makes abundantly
clear in his fastidious study of Joycean detail, Surface
and Symbol (seconded by the more pedestrian labours of
compilers of dictionaries of allusions such as Don Gifford and
Weldon Thornton), much of Ulysses (let alone Finnegans
Wake) remains hidden in impenetrable obscurity if the factual,
scholarly and biographical ephemerae with which it swarms are
not tracked down and duly elucidated.
Two
cases in point from a myriad which Adams discusses: the cabdriver
reading the Irish Evening Telegraph of June 16 chances
on an article actually printed in the London Times
of June 17, whereas W. B. Murphy reads only what is demonstrably
in the Telegraph. Joyce's point, apparently, is that
the cabman “sees more than his eyes see, and is wiser
than his mind knows”; Murphy, however, is confined to
mere exiguous event. The reader who refuses to dig scrupulously
into the mass of buried, mycelial fact on which the novel is
erected remains as purblind as Murphy, deprived of the conic
mirror which Joseph Campbell (in Creative Mythology),
applying Schopenhauer's theory of anamorphosis, posits as necessary
to resolve the fragmentary images with which the book is so
generously sharded.2
Again:
Saverio Mercadante the composer (1795-1870), to whom Bloom attributes
musical compositions by Rossini and Mayerbeer, was not a Jew.
He was the illegitimate son of Guissepe (ie, Joseph) Mercadante
and a servant girl, Rosa Bia. Is Joyce, Adams wonders, trying
to establish the correlation of bastard: Jew: redeemer? An ingenious
reader might continue the guessing game. Is the author merely
providing us with one more example of Bloom's characteristic
fuzzy-mindedness, or perhaps testing the reader's dedication
to the text by presenting him with another in an indefinite
series of daedalian conundrums, or running “Mercury”
and “Dante” into the same onomastic portmanteau?
At any rate, when so much of the novel's intrinsic design is
made to depend on such subliminal connections and recognitions,
which even the educated reader cannot be expected to manage
for himself or herself, one is surely justified in putting the
entire project into question. So indiscriminate a levy upon
the field of the “historical” produces not increased
significance but obscurity and distraction, except in the case
of the ideal reader suffering an ideal insomnia who, moreover,
enjoys ideal access to an ideally complete documentation.
Typical
of this endless catechising is Reading Joyce's Ulysses
by Daniel R. Schwarz, which glosses, among a proliferation of
such minutiae, the “sand-blind upupa” in Bloom's
reverie of dissolution in the Oxen of the Sun chapter as suggesting
papa, “the identity that Bloom seeks to redeem his wasteland,”
and pupa, the insectal transformation stage, that “calls
attention to the embryonic growth of both the Purefoy heir and
language as well as the possible metamorphosis of Bloom into
a suitable father . . .”3 Well, maybe. How useful this
sort of exegesis is or the extent to which it illuminates the
common reader's experience of Ulysses remains an open
question. It may be more to the point to recall that the upupa,
as Albertus Magnus tells us in The Book of Secrets,
is really the Lapwing (or Black Plover), a bird associated in
both the Portrait and Ulysses with Stephen
Dedalus: a bird, moreover, whose eyes have the magical property
of pacifying a man's enemies and whose head immunizes a man
against deceit. It is also connected, says Albertus, with the
Quiritia stone found in its nest, whose property of ferreting
truth from a sleeping man may or may not apply to either Bloom
or Stephen (or HCE, for that matter), depending on how we agree
to define “truth” in this context. Schwarz also
notes the homophonic resemblance to the notorious Breen postcard.
One can continue the hunt, as the upupa comes increasingly to
approximate the vanishing snark, by consulting T. H. White's
The Bestiary in which the bird's uncleanliness is mentioned.
A reference to Bloom's new, hydrophobic heir? Perhaps the “sandblind
upupa” is the scholiast himself for whom each word in
the text is a kind of Quiritia stone to tease the truth from
the dream of the Sleeping Giant, since it is obviously Joyce
and not Finn McCool who slumbers beneath the Howth of contemporary
Joyce scholarship.4
Admittedly,
the larger patterns of relationship between the chief characters
remain more or less observable, as do the mythic and archetypal
paradigms, but the teeming field of private association, “historical”
incident and empirical and scholarly reference through which
the reader must stumble constitutes a serious obstacle in the
way of understanding and appreciation. Multiply such nano-details
exponentially and we have in effect one of the sovereign techniques
of Ulysses, the interplay, in Adams' words, “of
reality and illusion so subtle as to be almost impenetrably
private.” This technique derives from an attitude to the
world and the reader which renders both subordinate to the text:
knowledge of the contents of London and Dublin newspapers for
June 16/17, 1904, or of the biography of a little known composer,
are essential if these portions of the text are to be even potentially
intelligible. Such aphidian moments have become part of the
texture of the novel, as necessary to the total schema of Ulysses
as they are historically indiscernible to all but a handful
of privileged scholars who receive Guggenheims to discriminate
them. Empirical fact has been incorporated into the substance
of the novel and the reader transmogrified into a Joycean archivist:
both have become servants of the text. As L.A.G. Strong, a favourable
reader, asserts in The Sacred River, “To assess
Joyce's work fully, the critics must know as much as Joyce did.”
He might have added: and exactly what Joyce knew as
well. Anthony Burgess in Joysprick makes a similar
point, perhaps a shade more temperately, when he says, “there
has to be curious learning . . . encyclopedic rather than mere
lexicographical knowledge . . . ”
But
the function of Joycean detail must always remain to some extent
enigmatic. Marilyn French in The Book and The World
regards the mass of such detail as an attempt to ground or hypostatize
the novel in the reader's sense of felt reality, that is, to
check the diffusions of subjective parallax. “That is
why small factual details were so essential in the composition
of Ulysses. [They] . . . provide the reader with a
firm concrete base, a sense that there is a reality similar
to one's sense of one's own world.” She does not see the
book as simply a reflection or construal of human experience,
but contends that Joyce “literally set out to create a
replica of the world...not a metaphor for it, but a copy of
it . . .” That the details which form the “concrete
base” of the novel are often obscure, elusive, private
or bafflingly recondite corresponds to its central intention
of “reproducing all the coincidences, mysteries and incertitude
that pervade actual life.” Possibly.
On
the other hand, Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader
views the issue from a different “parallactic” standpoint.
He argues that the essential Ulysses can never be satisfactorily
grasped. The patterns of event, allusion and archetype which
committed readers continue to disinter are not determinate or
representative, but are merely “transitory units”
which enable us to experience the book in one way or another.
No single reading is definitive, “and the mass of details
presents itself to the reader to organize in accordance with
his own acts of comprehension.” The details exist to serve
as material which the “implied reader” orders and
manipulates to satisfy his quest for coherence. They are the
iron filings without which the magnetic field cannot appear
to the observer. Only, the number as well as the potential forms
of such fields are theoretically inexhaustible. The empirical
data which Joyce so painstakingly accumulates thus function,
according to Iser, not to anchor the novel (as French believes),
but to cut it loose.
Is
this databank pervasiveness another instance of Joyce's parallactic
joke on the reader, like the various schemata which he released
for the edification of a Gilbert or a Linati, leaving the way
open for scholars like Ellmann (see Ulysses on The Liffey)
to devise yet others even more comprehensive? There are times
when I think of Joyce as the ultimate gingerbread man, fleet
and mischievous, running away from those who wish to possess
his meaning (and who may be refracted in the character of Sebastian
Dangerfield in J.P. Donleavy’s hilarious novel The
Gingerbread Man) --- or like Hamlet, perhaps, rebuking
a world of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns who would pluck out
the heart of his mystery. But perhaps there is no mystery. Joyce
is simply the gingerbread man who turns and devours the fox,
only to be devoured in turn by the story he writes to record
the event. Or a Hamlet who, counterfeiting his death, brings
his adversaries to ruin and retires into the depths of the great
textual pyramid, his subterranean motives a source of perpetual
controversy.
There
may be many readers who resist or resent Joyce's text because
they suspect that it is omnivorous and feral: that in order
to read it with the maximum of understanding and sympathy, one
has to become as much like Joyce as possible. This is because
Joyce has only one ideal reader: Joyce himself. Finnegans
Wake may, theoretically, represent a more extreme proposition:
as Umberto Eco proposes in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods,
the Wake is the sort of text “which foresees,
demands, and requires a model reader endowed with an infinite
encyclopedic competence, superior to that of the empirical author
James Joyce” (italics mine). In Ulysses, however,
Joyce himself remains the asymptotic target no reader is empirically
capable of reaching. Even chosen exegetes like Budgen or Gilbert,
duly primed, cultivated and anointed by the master, leave much
to be desired, the former too naively apostolic to bring much
in the way of analytic perspicacity to the text, the latter
too stiffly learned and tidy to appreciate the real poetic beauty
of the rhythm and language of Ulysses. But Ulysses
or Joyce can be approached in this manner only at the peril
of vortical subsumption. In reading Mann or Conrad, for example,
one can bring one's personality to bear without fear of incorporation.
But Joyce's text reaches out for the reader who tends insensibly
to become a kind of meta-Dubliner moving sluggishly along the
coils of the author's Lestrygonian accomplishment. Pertinent
here is the excerpt from the letter of an Irish friend with
which Hugh Kenner begins the first chapter of Dublin's Joyce:
“Willy-nilly we are all living inside Joyce's head . .
. There is a sort of nightmare quality about not being able
to get out of literature however hard we try.”
Strong
informs us that the “priest-like austerity with which
Joyce cut short his intake of material at the crucial day in
June 1904 was rewarded by the preservation, intact and pristine,
of those early impressions of Dublin.” The second part
of this statement hardly offsets the sacrificial enormity implied
in the first part. In a similar vein, A. Walton Litz in The
Art of James Joyce deposes that Joyce “ceased during
his later years to assimilate significant new experiences into
his artistic imagination...new techniques rather than new experience
being the source of vitality.” Systematic technique has
always been one of the chief artistic means of confronting and
managing the chaotic welter of raw experience (formal exclusion
is another), but from the perspective adopted here technique
is also understood as an artistic reflex to near-limitless engorgement.
It is the bureaucracy of the imagination that continues to function
when the economy of life has grown static and bearish, the mind
devouring its own substance in the absence of further nourishment
and stimulus. One is reminded of Swift's spider in the Battle
of The Books, “drawing and spinning out all from
[it]self” --- an involuted dialectic in which technique
becomes its own ultimate datum or in which, as Kenner comments
approvingly in Dublin's Joyce5 “the subject is
'style,' and what style implies.” But the strategy of
containment leads, paradoxically and inevitably, to inanition.
Jacques
Derrida in “Two Words for Joyce,” from the Cambridge
compendium Post- Structuralist Joyce, confesses to
the same sort of ambivalent feeling toward Joyce which informs
this “lese-majestical” essay. “One can admire
the power of a work and have...a bad relationship with its signatory...I'm
not sure I like Joyce.” The sense of uneasiness which
ruffles Derrida's suave critical composure is partially explained
by an “act of writing by which whoever writes pretends
to efface himself, leaving us caught in his archive as in a
spider's web.” Derrida's reference is to the gigantic,
arachnoid memory which Joyce commands -- Strong and Litz, we
recall, consider it a substitute for fresh experience --- which
he calls “hypermnesia” and which provokes resentment
because it “inscribes you in the book you are reading.”
And this ingestion, he claims, can only be pardoned “if
one remembers too that Joyce himself must have endured this
situation.” (I don't know if the ethical valence suggested
by a term like “pardon” is entirely appropriate
in the development of a critical argument, though a psychological
inflection in Joyce's case seems hardly to be avoided).
The
attempt to enclose the world culminates in a double form of
self-inscription. The writer, as a part of the world being encircled,
finds himself encysted within his own sufficient text from which
he is no longer capable of detaching himself --- there is no
way out of the encompassing labyrinth; at the same time and
by the same token, he has no choice but to continue preying
on himself as memory gradually replaces the field of experience.
Theseus finds only himself at the centre of the labyrinth, waiting
for himself in the shape of the minotaur he has inexorably become,
both source and victim of the peculiar mnemophagy of his art.
Moreover,
memory supplants experience in the same way as technique replaces
substance, word supersedes narrative, schema banishes development.
The result may be as wonderfully intricate and symmetrical as
the wheels within wheels of Ezekiel's vision or Anaximander's
philosophy (or Bloom's “wheels within wheels” in
his reflections on change and coincidence in the Lestrygonians
chapter), but it fails to convince adequately on the human plane.
One can always hear the quiet pineal hum of the primal cyborg
deriving its power from a cerebral generator, not from insight
into the mysterious depths of the heart and the will. That is
why Joyce's characters remain artificial constructs, their thoughts
and motives -- they cannot properly be said to have feelings
-- assembled and locked into place like bits of Lego according
to the dictates of a complicated blueprint.6 Occasionally pieces
are carefully interchanged, as when Bloom in the Sirens episode
thinks Stephen's earlier thoughts about Shakespeare (“In
Gerard's rosary of Fetter lane . . . ” etc.) -- one scarcely
notices the substitution at first reading. The difficulty is
to know how to engage a text which resists both the domestic
and cultivated practice of reading: to say “I am reading
Joyce,” as Derrida testifies, produces a merely comical
effect. The Joycean desideratum of a lifelong reader is more
than the amusing exaggeration many have taken it for. Joyce
is not simply a writer, even a great writer; he is a fate.
What the student discovers in time is that he does not read
a Joycean text. He is written, or perhaps more accurately,
re-membered into it.
For
the book is specifically designed to incorporate the world of
which it forms a small, if significant, part, thereby reversing
the traditiona -- and I think proper -- relation between literature
and reality. This amounts to nothing less than a form of expropriation,
a literary takeover prompted by a revanchist impulse against
the domination of the reality principle. Further, reality is
assigned a new and ancillary status as a textual appendix, an
informative glossary or at best as the invisible section of
the novel which formal and aesthetic considerations have excluded.
Reality is nothing other than the deleted portion of the
draft, the phantom text which the “graduate reader”
must consult if he wishes to master the novel's enormous and
presumably rewarding complexities. The “revolution of
the word” (to quote Leavis) has succeeded: fact has been
turned into an integral aspect of fiction and the world absorbed
and digested into the ever-expanding system of the book itself—the
entire book, that is, both printed text and original manuscript.
One might even consider the scholarly apparatus that has attached
itself to the process of introjection as one of its chapters.7
Thus
what we call reality is by implication no longer merely to be
lived -- loved, celebrated, cursed, opposed, studied,
approximately understood -- but annexed as the vast,
provincial supplement whose function it is to be taxed and exploited
for the maintenance of the governing fiction, the factual granary
of the imaginative empire. For the Erysichthean mind, experience
is the enemy, barbarous and threatening; as such it must be
rigorously controlled, subdued, and finally assimilated, so
to speak, into the latifundian expanse of the imperial fiction.
What this project envisions, then, is a form of intellectual
colonialism in which, once the war of pacification is over,
the conquered territory is accorded a perfunctory, second-class
status. It may constitute the greater portion of the new configuration;
it may be necessary for the survival and prosperity of the putative
victor; yet it is manifestly inferior and subservient now that
the subject of the fiction has been rendered subject
to it.
Joyce's
congenial practice is perhaps most succinctly epitomized by
the protagonist of Borges' enigmatic short story, Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote. Pierre Menard has set himself
the impossible task of writing Don Quixote word for
word—not rewriting it but composing it for the first time,
as it were. It is true he carries a dim recollection of the
book from having read it in his youth, but this serves merely
as the indispensable catalyst of his enterprise, its genetic
condition. Joyce has gone even further. He proposes, I suggest,
not to write or rewrite the Odyssey but to write the
entire Creation, beginning with the thoughts and movements of
a determinate number of characters on a certain day in a given
city. Inscription inevitably becomes transcription as ever larger
chunks of reality are intromitted into the novel's sinuous and
meandering ramifications. The project is theoretically endless
and is cut short only by the accident of mortality. I suspect
there is no inadvertence in the fact that Borges concludes his
story with a reference to Joyce as the potential author of the
Imitatio Christi.
Few
readers can deny that Ulysses is a splendid book, technically
the supreme literary achievement of our century. It is precisely
for this reason that it remains so problematic and disquieting.
It bears striking witness to an Icarian condition of mind or
will, a conviction of nullius momenti before the senseless
profusion of the cosmos, that responds by mounting a flanking
operation of truly startling dimensions.8 Joyce, writes Iris
Murdoch in her Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, “tries
to change life into literature and give it the cohesion of a
myth” -- but the myth is doubly Procrustean, stretching
the text as it absorbs, and so paradoxically truncates, the
scope of worldly experience. Ulysses attempts to defeat
the world by surrounding it and transforming it into a subtext
or a speculatively infinite referential network. In writing
the world into his book, Joyce has provided us with the cardinal
example -- perhaps the only example -- of an unfamiliar literary
genre: the Revenge Comedy.9 But the world always has the last
word in the politics of textual exploitation as the law of diminishing
returns swings into action: when the field of experience which
the text ensepulchres grows too intricate, detailed and private,
too coiled in personal space and time, it becomes progressively
inaccessible, with the inevitable result that the book in which
it is embodied becomes generally unreadable to any but the specialists.
As David Gervais suggests in a recent essay entitled “The
Persistence of Myth,” with respect to Ulysses,
“In theory, if he or she works hard enough, the reader
should end up knowing everything about everything. This seems
a rather arid outcome to look forward to.” If a book is
to survive without relying on prosthetic artifice it must rest
upon the principle of economy. The local and the particular
give flavour, resonance and authority -- up to a certain critical
point, beyond which the text begins to recede into the maze
of the subjective and the minuscule. Thus there is a sense in
which Joyce comes to resemble his own Mr. Deasy (‘desy”
in Sanskrit means “of the locality”): pursuing his
own private vision of theurgic immanence, paying off personal
scores, and finally bogging down in the terminal eccentricity
of a parti pris.
But
the text need not degenerate into something like the verbal
icon or concrete universal so beloved of the New Critics in
order to establish its own independent mode of existence, related
in commensal harmony to the world which it addresses but without
either rejecting or admitting it. The work of art remains a
heterocosm, a second creation founded on the triple rule of
elegance, consistency and meaning, yet depends for its prosperity
on a reciprocal agreement with experience which enriches, as
it is enriched by, it. If the relation is not right, the consequence
is always a greater or lesser degree of unintelligibility. Derrida
was gravely mistaken when he proposed that “Il n’y
a pas de hors-texte,” piquant as the formulation
may be; it is, on the contrary, the relation to what is outside
the text, that is, the world of the reader, that justifies
and valorizes what is in the text. The writer who seeks to establish
his autonomy by cleansing his work of all demotic impurities
concludes in mannered sterility; the writer who tries to turn
the tables upon the clamorous world by opening his borders and
absorbing it will eventually subside under the inundation of
sheer data: personal, historical, mythological, linguistic.
The price in the first case is reader boredom and neglect, in
the second, bewilderment only partially atoned by delight.
Thus
it would seem the Joycean strategy of textual subversion is
finally self-defeating. Joseph Prescott in James Joyce:
The Man and His Works assumes that the incomplete term
of the progression Ulysses-Finnegans Wake would be
a book called Tabula Rasa,10 for the propagation of
“inconsequent” (as Mulligan calls himself) details,
philological hybrids and subjective communings leads not to
the multiplication of meanings but to a featureless amalgam
of constituent distinctions: what we might refer to as a condition
of textual leucography. Joyce (whom Harry Levin calls “a
one-man Sinn Fein movement”), for all his indisputable
genius, would not find many readers among the diminishing population
of the literate had he not become (O foenix culprit!) a thriving
scholarly multinational.
Mario
Vargas Llosa in Making Waves rightly praises Joyce
for “the supreme ability of a writer, through use of detailed
memories of the small world of his birth and through his extraordinary
linguistic facility, to create a world of his own.” But
he does not recognize that this “world of his own”
can inflate almost illimitably and swallow its creator whole,
along with the legions of devoted acolytes who retrace Leopold
Bloom’s steps every 16 June in a largely fictional Dublin.
The only hope for self-retrieval is furnished, perhaps, by the
anonymous correspondent who sent me an email offering a “Dimensional
Warp Generator #52 4350a wrist watch, an XK memo replica or
similar technology” to help counteract the “nanoprobe
tracers and mind-transducers” used by unspecified aliens
to take over one’s life.
If
in the beginning was the Word, we would do well to remember
with Stephen that in the end was the world without end, which
like Joyce's own fulminating gigant, smelling de bloodz odz
an Iridzman, will neither be devoured nor shaken from his Ygdrasil.
1 Or as Joyce
would have put it, “quadrivial” pursuit.
2
The idea is also taken up by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance
Self-Fashioning, with particular reference to Holbein’s
The Ambassadors in which the distorted skull at center
bottom can be properly seen only from an oblique viewing angle.
“To enter this non-place is to alter everything in the
painting and render impossible a simple return to normal vision.”
Greenblatt then applies this technique of “anamorphic
virtuosity” to More’s Utopia to determine
the way an official perspective on the text’s grapple
with reality may be unsettled, placing the traditional “methods
of ordering and measuring the world” in a new and unexpected
light. Similarly, Campbell, taking his cue from a formulation
of Schopenhauer’s, argues that the reader must approach
Ulysses from the side, as it were, bringing a “conic
mirror” to bear and reading anamorphically from a Joycean
vantage point to resolve the novel’s enigmas and complexities.
3
It is interesting to note that Schwarz, in his semi-deconstructionist
study of Joycean metaphoricity (or “metaferocity”),
blithely approves of the text's evident amoebic qualities. “Does
not such a linear series where one event signifies the subsequent
one become a structural endorsement of the contiguous metaphoricity
by which characters, events, and words signify and are signified
by one another until the book becomes coterminous with recorded
history and spatially (sic) equivalent to the whole world?”
4
It is not so easy to determine how the symbol of the lapwing
is to be understood and applied. As the bird whose cries lure
attackers away from the nest, it may suggest Stephen's flight
to the continent to protect his fledgling artist's soul from
Irish indifference or animosity. It is, appropriately, also
the symbol of callow impetuosity, as in Horatio's comment on
Osric: “This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head,”
a reading which ironically qualifies the former acceptation.
In Goldsmith's The Deserted Village it represents social
and economic desolation: “Amidst thy desert walks the
lapwing flies.” Blake's notebook lyric gives us a somewhat
different picture again, presenting the lapwing as potential
victim:
Which
links up nicely with Stephen's image of the three nets of language,
religion and nationality that he must fly by. In Albertus it
is the talismanic properties of the bird which are emphasized,
and this may correspond as well to Bloom's apotropaic soap and
potato. (Cf. William Schutte in Joyce and Shakespeare for
the Hamlet and Blake references).
5
Kenner's main argument in Dublin's Joyce, surely one
of the most brilliant and wrongheaded books on Joyce ever written,
assumes that Joyce's intention in Ulysses is largely
parodic: that Stephen represents an aesthetic cul-de-sac which
Joyce anatomizes and repudiates and that Bloom is a “low-powered
variant” of “the insane mechanical meticulousness
of that mode of consciousness...proper to industrial man.”
Joyce, he contends, does not stand behind Ulysses paring
his mandarin fingernails, but somewhere above the industrial
(and cybernetic, as we would say now) wasteland which the book
is designed to reflect and condemn. This would mean that Joyce's
relation to his characters in particular and to his book in
general is chiefly antiphrastic, that it is written in what
Yeats called “the spirit of accusation” and not
in “the spirit of forgiveness.” Such an assumption
does violence not only to Joyce's own recorded sentiment of
Bloom as essentially “a good man” (cf. Budgen),
but to the profound conviction on the part of many readers that
Stephen (despite the irony of his presentation) is very much
as Joyce was in his youth and that Molly has about as much Nora
in her as she does das ewig Weibliche.
What Kenner has done is to mount an impressive salvage operation;
having recognized Ulysses as a kind of “huge
and intricate machine clanking and whirring for eighteen hours,”
he proceeds to regard it as a deliberate parody-reflection of
a nightmare society or, say, an ironic critique in the form
of a Trismegistian inversion: as below, so above. This redemptive
view turns the novel into pure satire which, though it may contain
elements of satire and considerable irony, it assuredly is not.
Clearly a work cannot be justified by reproducing the very quality
it is presumably denouncing, as Walter Scott understood when
he remarked that Jane Austen ran the risk of boring her readers
by a faithful rendering of dull characters. (See S.L. Goldberg's
The Classical Temper, Ch. IV, for an extensive commentary
on Kenner's reclamation project).
6
The philosopher Albert Cook is a markedly unfriendly witness.
In The Dark Voyage and The Golden Mean he writes: “But
one searches any of [Joyce's] books in vain for a deep probing
of the individual, any character who is more than a type...Bloom,
despite the elaborate documentation of his personal history,
is merely a type, like HCE . . .A brief comparison of Joyce's
entire repertoire of characters with those in Dostoevsky...will
show to all but the most ardent enthusiast the comparative poverty
of Joyce. He was a rationalist writer of satire and comedy,
with an average imagination and an immense memory.” There
is, I believe, a certain amount of truth in Cook's disclaimer,
but it leaves too much out of consideration: the complex humour,
the undeniably great writing, and the most impressive architectonic
in all of modern literature. Moreover, it is surely misleading
(and possibly a function of animus) to dismiss Joyce as the
bearer of an “average imagination,” despite Joyce's
own self-suspicion on this count. But to focus on the rationalist
and memorial aspect of Joyce's writing is to strike at the Achilles
heel of the entire Joycean project, namely, at the way in which
it resembles a campaign, conscious, patient and systematic,
against an adversary too inexhaustible to be decisively defeated.
“Another victory like that and we are done for.”
7
Wyndham Lewis felt that Joyce's method set “the reader
in a circumscribed psychological space, into which several encyclopedias
have been emptied,” and went on to smear Ulysses
as “a monument like a record diarrhoea.” Lewis'
animus against Joyce and against the stream-of-consciousness
technique is too well known to require renewed documentation,
and in any case tends to come across more as a personal vendetta
than a lucid and balanced critique. Joyce was aware of the ad
hominem element in Lewis' attack and considered it at best
as amounting to no more “than ten per cent of the truth.”
But it seems to me that Lewis for all his unhelpful belligerence
and unmannerly vehemence had his moments of shrewd insight,
as for example in Time and Western Man when he characterized
the experience of reading Ulysses as a kind of bathyspheric
plunge: “It is you who descend into the flux
of Ulysses, and it is the author who absorbs you momentarily
into himself for that experience.” I would cavil, however,
with the “momentarily.”
8
It is as if, psychologically, Icarus precedes Daedelus. Having
plummeted from the sky, he reacts by constructing a labyrinth
which encroaches upon the universe. What he possesses can no
longer dispossess him. To change the metaphor, he has come to
inhabit what Joyce calls in Finnegans Wake a “Tiberiast
duplex” from whose central podium he can proceed, like
his own Professor Jones, to lambast the understandings of all
us “lattlebrattons” and “muddlecrass pupils.”
9
The revenge theory figures prominently in Armin Arnold's James
Joyce. Arnold contends, for example, that Ulysses
“can be interpreted as Joyce's revenge on Ireland, the
Church, and everybody and everything that had contributed to
making his life such as it was.” As for Finnegans Wake,
it “could then be interpreted as the ultimate expression
of Joyce's innermost resentments against the language he had
to use, the civilization in which he had to live, and the universe
in general.” Such evaluations are not only unkind, they
are manifestly useless and smack of some form of personal (to
use Baron Corvo's word from Henry VII) liblabbery.
As for the Revenge Comedy, one thinks of J.M. Synge’s
The Playboy of the Western World as another Irish candidate
for this hypothetical classification of literary intent.
10
Joyce was apparently considering a follow-up to Finnegans
Wake to be called The Sea. What that book would
have been like is anybody's -- or rather, nobody's -- guess.
But one can't help speculating. Would it have been a single,
vast, tidal word flowing in for the first half of the book and
ebbing in reverse, like Hebrew Temura, for the remaining half?
Prescott's suggestion, while unlikely, is by no means preposterous,
in that the book he envisions would probably have been no more
indecipherable than the one I have imagined. Or might Joyce
in his jocoserious way have taken the literary world by surprise
and produced a straightforward, 19th century, readily-available
tome complete with transparent, narrative meta-language, consistent
characters, and dialogue set off in what he once called “perverted
commas”? Joyce was certainly no less unpredictable or
implausible than his fictional namesake in Flan O'Brien's The
Dalky Archive, who professes ignorance of both Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake and claims to have written
Dubliners in collaboration with Oliver Gogarty.
