James Joyce (Part 3)

(Pictured: James Joyce.) We herewith present the third 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.]

The point is that the pursuit of art as an abstraction divorced from the responsibilities of life leads to nothing, and idealistic beauty loosed from belief in the higher reality of spiritual ideas is no more than a mist fluttering in the infinite inane. And the imagination of man, his whole soul, craves reality. The artist who sets out to capture that phantom ideal is like a man in a balloon when his moorings are cut. He soars upward and upward until the air about him grows too thin to breathe, and the chill temperature benumbs his blood, and in the great height above the solidities of earth and the comfortable contacts of humanity he is overtaken by an awful dizziness of the void. He deflates the balloon and falls rushing downwards. The aeronaut may land safely on the ground from which he rose. But for the artist there is rarely such a return. In his reactionary search for reality he is precipitated down and down into the depths of his own being, into that vast dark region of the soul below the plain of ordered and rationalized life. Being unable to sink lower he will feel that at last his feet are set on a foundation of facts which he calls the nature of man. His art will be to reproduce in flowing language the vapours that float up unsolicited through the conscious mind from that abyss of the unconscious. Rational selection and spiritual authority have been repudiated, and the only law governing the flux is the so-called association of ideas, the fact that one image by some chance similarity evokes another, and one sensation fades into another. In this way the artist who sets out to forge the “conscience” of his people ends in identifying this with the so-called “stream of consciousness” into which his own soul has been dissolved. Why it should be so may perhaps be beyond our comprehension, but the truth remains that sheer ugliness and morbid perversions abound in this stream from the bottom of man’s being. With Proust this meant that the ultimate reality of human experience is reached in the horrors of sadism and masochism. In Ulysses, perhaps owing to the hangover from a more religious training, perhaps to other causes, these vices are not conspicuous; but the root of ugliness is there and constantly recurring hints of sexual abnormality of another, if less cruel, sort.

Now the result of this spontaneous association of ideas may appear in either one of two forms. It may produce such spasmodic imagery as we saw in the episodes of The Wandering Rocks and Circe and indeed in the greater part of Ulysses, or it may flow continuously from image to image, and from memory to memory, and from desire to desire, as in the final episode where Mrs. Bloom’s dreaming meditations are written out in page after page without punctuation. For the reader, who would trace the law of association governing the stream, this is hard going, indeed a harder book to read than Ulysses you will scarcely find, unless it be Joyce’s own later fragments of Work in Progress [which became Finnegans Wake], or some of the surrealiste vagaries which emanate from the same school of naturalistic art gone mad.

Why then do our fiercer “intellectuals” devote to the study of Ulysses, as in fact some of them do, an amount of study which they would disdain to apply to Plato or Aristotle or the Bible ? I believe that two causes are here at work. For the first there is a prodigious amount of sheer intellection behind Ulysses. This attempt to give expression to the stream of consciousness is not the outcome of haphazard writing, but is the product of a brain busily engaged in detecting and utilizing the association of ideas directing the flow. Such brain-work is not the creative power of a mind choosing out of the given mass of upsurging ideas those that can be formed into a noble pattern of life, but an intense concentration upon the currents and counter-currents, the sudden novelties and the repeated successions, just as these emerge into the light. And there is the inborn mastery of language to clothe in appropriate words each emergent image or situation as it is seen. The mere range of Joyce’s vocabulary devoted to the expression of the undercurrents of life has an almost inexhaustible attraction for the student of literary technique. For myself I have the impression that in this exploitation of the subconscious spontaneity of association Joyce displays a penetration and intelligence greater than that which made Proust famous, whether this be due to his earlier training in religious psychology or to native genius. And the disciple who will bestow upon Ulysses the time and concentration required for comprehending the procedure of the author’s mind has all the excitement of superior enlightenment.

The pleasure is there and real, to pick up if you care enough for that sort of thing; but its nature may be, and by the devotees of Joyce commonly is, mistaken. It is not, in itself, the joy of art. I do not mean to sever art as a pure abstraction from other activities of the mind; but I would insist that the difficulty of grasping the ideas of great literature involves an elevation of the will and the emotions in which this detective pursuit of difficulties plays a very subordinate role. That is certainly true of the Odyssey as compared with Ulysses. Nor is the excitement of unravelling Joyce’s method the same as that which may accompany the mastery of an artist who is also a great scholar. There is indeed a certain display of erudition in the composition of Ulysses; but it is of a disorganized sort, tags out of St. Thomas and Aristotle dispersed among floating allusions to very modern theories of psychology and aesthetics, with no comprehension of any one of the great systems of thought and no sense of the concatenated tradition of philosophy. Mr. Gilbert makes much of the Oriental, particularly the Hindu, element in Ulysses, but if this be examined it will appear to rest on the uncritical reading of such charlatans as Mme. Blavatsky and Mr. Sinnett’s facile references to transmigration and nirvana and the growing soul-ego, which can only bring a smile to any one who has drunk deeply of the genuine springs of Orientalism. They remind me of an incident of my own youth. I had got the first volume of Isis Unveiled [by Helena Blavatsky] from the local library, but inquiry after inquiry for (the second volume always brought from the girl at the desk, a friend of mine, the reply that it was out. At last, seeing and admiring my eagerness, she broke the rules of the library, and kept the book hidden for me when next it was turned in. And so I was able to finish that masterpiece of theosophy. “And what did you think of the book?” she asked when I brought back the second volume. “It interested me,” I answered, “but annoyed me too because I couldn’t make out what it was all about.” “Oh,” said she, leaning over the desk and speaking in a mysterious whisper, “you are not supposed to understand it !”

No, the pleasure of the intellect that infatuates the ordinary partisan of Ulysses has little to do with thought in the larger sense of the word. It is the vanity of guessing why one incident succeeds another, where to the casual reader the connection seems purely arbitrary; or it is the satisfaction of grasping quickly that “Blmstup” is a humpty-dumpty compression for “Bloom stood up,” or that “monstruosity” is shorthand for “monstrosity-abstrusity” (this I love), or of filling out the innumerable examples of aposiopesis [device of suddenly breaking off in speech], or of guessing the sense of a phrase or sentence which is perfectly blank until one goes back to it after pages of patient reading. To illustrate this last point I may quote the opening lines of The Sirens [Episode Eleven of Ulysses]:

“Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.

“Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

“Chips, picking chips off rocky thuiribnail, chips.

“Horrid 1 And gold flushed more.

“A husky nfenote blew.

“Blew. Blue bloom is on the

“Gold pinnacled hair.”

And so on and on and on. Mr. Gilbert admits that these pages are “almost meaningless” (why the “almost”?) until the reader has pursued the chapter to the end. But he regards the whole thing as a supreme achievement of “ ‘atonement’ between subject-matter and form”:

“This episode differs from most examples of “musical prose” in that the meaning does not lose but is, rather, intensified by the combination of the two arts; sense is not sacrificed to sound but the two are so harmonized that, unless his ears, like the Achaeans’, are sealed with wax against the spell, the reader, hearkening to ‘the voice sweet as the honeycomb and having joy thereof, will go on his way the wiser.’ ”

To me, as I suspect it will be to most readers, the notion that wisdom is to be got out of all this mystification looks like an act of artistic faith beyond anything required by the mysteries of religion. But I admit that, if you like that sort of thing and have nothing else to think about, the puzzle of getting sense out of apparent nonsense may have its reward.

[To be continued.]