James Joyce (Part 2)

(Pictured: James Joyce.) We herewith present the second post of P. E. More’s essay, “James Joyce,” the fourth of nine essays that make up More’s book On Being Human. Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. He collaborated with Irving Babbitt from before 1900 in the project later called the New Humanism. His conservative literary criticism was published in the eleven-volume Shelburne Essays (1904-1921) and the three-volume New Shelburne Essays (1928). He also published several books on Plato and Greek philosophy, including the Greek Tradition. Late in his life he undertook Christian apologetics, notably in The Christ of the Testament. On Being Human was published in 1936.

[Excerpted from ON BEING HUMAN by Paul Elmer More. Princeton University Press, 1936. This excerpt is reprinted here by permission of Princeton University Press and may not be distributed or disseminated without the permission of the publisher.]

II

Now in what I have to say about that extraordinary book [Ulysses], I would first of all acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Stuart Gilbert’s analytical commentary, which seems to me, however I may disagree with its animating purpose, one of the most helpful and intelligent guides I have ever read to a difficult piece of literature. In chapter after chapter it brings out meanings and intentions which I should have missed in my impatient perusal, but which I find authenticated by reference to the original. And it has behind it the authority of Joyce himself, “to whose assistance and encouragement,” as the writer avows, his “work owes whatever of merit it may possess.” To those who find Ulysses impossible reading yet would know what it is all about, I recommend Mr. Gilbert’s volume as an easy and fairly adequate substitute.

In brief, Ulysses is the story of a single day in the life of one Leopold Bloom, a Jewish canvasser of advertisements in Dublin, beginning with his preparation of early breakfast for his wife in bed, following him through the city in his wanderings and occasional transactions of business, bringing him back home late at night, and ending with the half-awake and chiefly erotic musings of his wife as she lies again in bed. Crossing this journey of Odysseus-Bloom runs the divagation of Stephen Dedalus, the hero of the earlier Portrait, now a school-teacher and writer, who has left the house of his natural father, a pitiable example of Irish fecklessness, as Joyce sees his beloved countrymen, and is in search of a true father in the spirit, i.e., Bloom. That is the thread of the narrative; but it is entangled, lost here to reappear there, in the chance meetings of a host of other vagabonds, whose talk for the most part is in the language of the gutter. And all this takes place in the labyrinth of Dublin streets and houses, a kind of reeling kaleidoscope of fragmentary images which might with some justice be regarded as the true theme of the book.

The narrative, if such it may be called, is divided into eighteen sections, the first three of which are introductory, and deal with the setting-forth of Telemachus-Dedalus in search of a father and his meeting with a Nestor and a Proteus. Follows the body of the story of Bloom in twelve episodes, which bear some resemblance to the adventures of Odysseus with Calypso, the Lotus-eaters, Hades, Aeolus (a newspaper office), the Lestrygonians, etc., etc. The conclusion is again divided into three sections: Eumaeus (Bloom’s rescue of Stephen in a drunken brawl), Ithaca (Bloom’s return with Stephen to his home), and Penelope (Mrs. Bloom’s neurotic reverie in bed).

It may appear far-fetched to describe Bloom’s successive adventures in Dublin as an Odyssey, and indeed the relation to Homer’s tale is often indicated, at least for the casual reader, by such stray allusions as the disgusting table-manners of the diners in a restaurant, which may recall the filthy feeding of the Lestrygonians; or the first words of the Citizen in the Cyclops episode, who is telling how “I was . . . at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye.” More characteristic of this artificial association, and indeed of Joyce’s method generally, is the Wandering Rocks. This is but a brief incident in Homer, as it stands in Worseley’s translation :

. . . there wild rocks upswell
Vast, overshadowing, round whose bases cry
Dark Amphitrite’s billows. Gods on high
These rocks call Wanderers; and no winged thing
That place hath passed, or can pass, harmless by.

In Ulysses there is motion aplenty, and to spare, and in this particular episode the meetings of person with person jump about from street to street and from shop to shop in a manner to bewilder even a hardened reader. But what the Rocks of Homer have to do with all this, it is not easy to guess beyond the epithet “wandering.” If any classical analogy is to be sought for in such a maelstrom of incidents, the connecting thread of which can be known only to the author, if to him, it would be with the dance of the Lucretian atoms in the void. It is true that the name of Nausicaa can be attached with a little more propriety to the episode of the three girls on the beach. But even here it is to be observed that the opening scene, if decent, is flat and commonplace (flat and commonplace because decent, one is tempted to say), with no vestige of the charm of Homer’s princess sporting with her comrades; that the shy attraction of Nausicaa to the romantically appearing hero is utterly debased in the following pornographic account of Gerty’s wiles to seduce Bloom (suddenly revealed like Odysseus from his concealment), and that the meditations of Odysseus are hideously caricatured by the debauched soliloquy of Bloom when finally he is left alone. In one section only is the spirit of Homer’s allegory preserved, the Circe. Bloom is determined to watch over Stephen who, in the preceding episode, had gone out staggering drunk from an orgy in Burke’s public-house. To quote Mr. Gilbert’s summary:

“It is a misty night after the downpour and Mr. Bloom loses sight of Stephen at the entrance to nighttown. He presses on resolutely through the mist, past spectral shadows, drunken harpies, rowdy soldiers, lurching workmen, and finally comes upon Stephen in the house of Mrs. Bella Cohen in Tyrone Street. Stephen and Lynch, in the company of the prostitutes Zoe, Flora, and Kitty, are engaged in a rambling discourse on the philosophy of music; Stephen is strumming “empty fifths” on the brothel piano. Mrs. Bella Cohen demands her fees ; Stephen, with fuddled generosity, exceeds the tariff, but Bloom comes to the rescue.”

In the phantasmagoric visions of his former delinquencies that pursue Bloom while searching for his “spiritual son,” and in the transformations of the brothel scenes, there is more than a hint of the black magic of lust from which Odysseus saved his comrades in the enchanted island of Circe; but Homer’s poetic symbolism springs from a philosophy beyond the ken of the modern imitator.

Apart from this last episode, itself a doubtful exception, to any one who goes through Ulysses with the Odyssey fresh in mind, experto crede [trust me], the vaunted parallelism between the two works is thoroughly superficial. Nor can I see any grounds for taking seriously Mr. Louis Golding’s theory that the wanderings of the Homeric Odysseus have been converted into “a commentary on the evolution of mankind from its heroic beginnings to its present weary conditions.” (1) There are to be sure a few allusions to the ancient civilization of Ireland and other odd bits of antiquarian lore scattered about; there is, for one reader at least, abundant weariness in the life of Joyce’s Dublin, which may, if one chooses, be contrasted with the heroism of ancient Greece; but of historic evolution, such as Mr. Golding imagines, I see nothing. And I should hate to believe that three thousand years have brought to mankind only weariness and ugliness from which no escape is possible save in a weary and ugly art.

III

The evolution that interests the critic is of another and less grandiose kind. We have seen the nationalism and Christian sentiment of the Dubliners slipping over in the Portrait to a theory of irresponsible art, of art for art’s sake, with its goal set upon producing pure beauty and upon forging out of the reality of experience the uncreated conscience of the artist’s people; and now we see the execution of this ideal in the prodigy of Ulysses. I do not overlook the fact that there are dispersed fragments in the later book of such rhythmic beauty as gave charm to parts of the Portrait before the theory of pure art was carried fully into practice; but as a whole the realization of art in Ulysses is a creation of ugliness, a congeries of ugly pictures expressed in the speech of Dublin’s gutters. What has happened ? Here, I think, we can eliminate the factor of nationalism, which remains fairly constant from the beginning to the end of Joyce’s career; the changing factor is the self-liberation of the artist from the spiritual values and dogmatic authority of tradition, and the consequent forging of “conscience” out of the uncontrolled spontaneity of his individual consciousness. Here in the main Joyce was but following the path from symbolism to “naturalism” in France which recently has been so ably expounded by Marcel Raymond in his essay on the movement De Baudelaire au surréalisme, and which, stopping short of superrealism (we are looking for a parallel with Ulysses, not with Work in Progress), came to a climax in the fiction of Proust. And it may be noted by the way, merely as a curious fact, that the three acknowledged fathers of this general movement are Americans: Poe and Whitman and Henry James.

[To be continued.]

(1) James Joyce’s Ulysses, p. 95.