James Joyce (Part 4)

(Pictured: James Joyce.) We herewith present the fourth and penultimate 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.]

If this were all [“the puzzle of getting sense out of apparent nonsense” (See third post).] one might dismiss the champions of Ulysses as mere cranks, endowed with a restless brain and cursed with nothing to think about and such there are, I am sure, among the sanctified band. But there is something else. The book has another attraction arising out of its forense (if I may make a feeble addition to the Joycean lingo), to explain which an exposition must be added of Joyce’s, and his admirers’, aesthetic philosophy. In a notable passage of the Portrait a sharp distinction was drawn between what the author describes as the “kinetic” and the “static” aim of art, terms which he connects with Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy in the Poetics, and which are so important for his practice as well as his theory that I must quote his argument at some length. Stephen Dedalus, the embryonic artist of the Portrait and the spokesman there and in Ulysses for the author himself, is talking with a fellow student named Lynch:

“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

“Repeat said Lynch.

“Stephen repeated the definition slowly. . . .

“The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The aesthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”

Now so taken, with the right qualifications, this distinction between kinetic and static is, I hold, sound and fundamental. The moment literature aims to move, to be kinetic of, the physical sense of desire and loathing to rouse the lustful passions, to produce horror of the nerves (as for example the actual nausea of altitude stirred by the fall of Frollo in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame), to effect bodily shrinking from the loathsome (as in much of the post-War literature) that moment, whatever its excuse as propaganda, it ceases to be art, or becomes bad art, which is the same thing. And Joyce goes on to connect this thesis with his conception of rhythm and beauty:

“Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an aesthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.”

That, in its first intention, I believe, is a noble theory of art, nobly stated, and if carried out with Joyce’s native endowment of genius, might have enriched literature with a masterpiece of beauty. But upon this theory there is superimposed another view of art which has led to confusion of ideas in the Portrait and to worse confusion of execution in Ulysses. According to this superimposed theory, derived not at all from Aristotle or from classical practice but from romantic naturalism, stasis acquires an independent meaning of its own, beyond the mere opposition to the wrong sort of kinesis. Static art should not only refrain from exciting the physical sensations of desire and loathing, it should not merely avoid immorality, but should aim to be neither immoral nor moral by maintaining the complete “indifference of nature” towards what is seen, and by reproducing the facts of nature with a realism that eschews any attempt at interpretation. So it is that the romantic notion of art for art’s sake, set loose from any responsibility to the authority of spiritual law and traditional inhibitions, merges into a naturalism which rejects from reality all but the physical and in the end all but the ugly.

Now this romantic-naturalistic theory of art which Mr. Gilbert has developed with much acumen in the first chapter of his commentary, does give a veracious account of what such writers as Proust and Joyce have sought to accomplish and to a degree have accomplished. But to designate this accomplishment as “realism” if by that one means that such artists have represented the bare facts, and all the facts, of life without selective interpretation is to fall into gross misunderstanding that borders on stark nonsense; it even gives to stasis a meaning utterly inconsistent with Joyce’s own use of the word as formally distinguished from kinesis. The simple truth is that all literature, except perhaps the humblest and least pretentious kind of fiction, is interpretative, and as such is kinetic, in so far as it is creative. Homer was not only interpreting, but more or less purposely reshaping, the earlier Greek notions of life and religion. Virgil was consciously, for a purpose, interpreting the facts of Roman history. And there is no need to pursue this argument down through the names of Dante and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Milton and Racine and Voltaire and Goethe. What I would enforce is the point that Joyce’s Ulysses is not at all the sort of realism which he and his critic Gilbert take it to be, but is in the fullest measure an interpretation of what the world and life are in accordance with a particular philosophy of life and under the sway of a particular philosophy of reality; that he worked out this interpretation with extraordinary industry and cunning; that his claim to a place in the higher region of literature depends not on a supposed realism but on his interpretation of reality, and that it is assent to the highly kinetic philosophy underlying this interpretation which enthralls most at least of his rather simple-minded devotees and explains their zestful expenditure of labour.

To bring these conclusions back to the theory of art expounded by Joyce in the Portrait, I should say that the initial error there was one of terminology. He would have formulated his principles more correctly if, instead of a contrast between kinetic and static, he had distinguished between art that aims to arouse physical lust or loathing and art that seeks to move desire and joy of hyperphysical realities; for all art, so far as it is alive, must be kinetic. And then, by identifying stasis with naturalistic “realism,” he has rendered his art kinetic in precisely the sense he started out to avoid.

IV

Now the naturalistic philosophy behind Joyce’s art is in itself simple enough, and indeed is already obvious in what has been said of his psychology, being nothing more than a theory of objective reality which will correspond to the inner stream of consciousness. As that view of the soul was attained by liberating the ego from any spiritual authority not itself, and from any selective law of reason within itself, so the field of visible phenomena and of physical events, amid which the soul plays its part, shall be freed from the governance of any transcendent power and from any principle of order within itself. To the irrational association of ideas shall correspond a conception of nature as an accidental succession of emergencies, and the irresponsibility of conscience shall be the mirror of a world which merely is what it is.

And what of the theoretical distinction of kinetic and static art when put to the test of reality so conceived? Some light, I think, will be shed upon this question by the monumental decision of the United States district court rendered December 6, 1933, by the Hon. John M. Woolsey, lifting the ban on Ulysses, which is prefixed to the American edition of the book. Judge Woolsey’s decree is based on literary and moral grounds. For the first he sees clearly enough the artistic method of the work:

“Joyce has attempted it seems to me with astonishing success to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a [the?] penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behaviour of the character which he is describing.”

And the judge’s ethical acquittal is given in the belief that the execution of this method, though “in many places it seems to” him “to be disgusting,” is neither “pornographic” nor “obscene.”

Now we may grant that Ulysses as a whole is not pornographic, if by that term we mean an intent “to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts.” To this extent the book is not kinetic in the Joycean conception, though for myself I cannot see how certain isolated passages, as for example Gerty’s seductive wiles in the Nausicaa episode already referred to, can be relieved of such an imputation. But the case stands otherwise if we consider the word “obscene.” Judge Woolsey seems to make no distinction between pornography and obscenity, and indeed the above-given definition of pornography is cited by him from an earlier legal decision in regard to the obscene. But however it may be in law, are the words actually synonymous? Is not obscenity a more general term signifying what is foul, what excites disgust? And if Judge Woolsey is right in holding that the book in many places is disgusting, then, by Joyce’s own definition of kinetic as that which moves the reader to loathing as well as to lust, is not the art of Ulysses on this side kinetic, rather than static, and so bad art ?

[To be continued.]