James Joyce (Part 5)

(Pictured: James Joyce.) We herewith present the fifth and final 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.]

I do not see how, by the author’s own definition, his work can escape this condemnation; indeed, in detail after detail, he would seem to have gone out of his way to introduce the note of obscenity with the direct aim of exciting disgust of the loathsome. We have seen how in the Lestrygonians he exhausts all his resources to describe the bare act of eating in a manner almost to produce physical nausea. But the climax of this intention comes in the Hades episode, where the unclean circumstances of death are gloated over with a horrible fascination suggestive of the sort of nightmare that might haunt the sleep of one who, by the favour of a knowing undertaker, has gazed upon what ordinarily is hidden from the eye. And then the graveyard:

“An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: great-grandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wriggling itself in under it. Good hiding place for treasure. . . .”

There is worse than that, much worse; things that the normal human mind would never imagine and that it would be a pollution to quote.

But these details of tumescent filth are only symptoms of an inwardly corroding disease. The realism, of which Joyce’s admirers make so much, springs from a belief, not the less devastating because perfectly arbitrary, that reality must be sought in what lies below the surface of appearances, what lies above having been expunged as a delusion of authority. The living man as a vehicle of the soul is not a real thing, but only the putrid corpse; the body as it appears to the eye is not a real thing, but to know its reality you must strip it of its integument and fumble in its entrails. And this identification of realism with the under side of nature is the almost inevitable companion of an atheistic philosophy that dissolves the universe into a Protean flux of meaningless change. The bottom of things, the darkness from which the sun is excluded, is verminous. As Mr. Gilbert says of a scene in the Scylla and Charybdis,

“. . . we feel a tensity of cerebration that is almost pain in Stephen’s dialectical progress towards a paradoxical conclusion, the cul de sac of a mystery. On that mystery the book Ulysses, all religion and every explanation of the universe is founded ‘upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.’ This spirit of incertitude is materialized in the Circe episode, where phantoms of the ‘feast of pure reason’ Shakespeare among them gesticulate mechanically, inane puppets, in a danse macabre.”

Whether this philosophy of the inane, where ugliness breeds spontaneously, is a consequence of a psychology which dissolves conscience into the stream of consciousness, or whether the genetic order is the reverse, I should not care to say. In either case obscenity becomes a kind of substitute for the ideals of religion, a despotic faith in the horror of utter disorder behind the illusion of decency and stability. There is thus no reason to be surprised at the strange inverted reminiscences of Joyce’s early Catholicism that come here and there to the surface of his naturalism.

The book opens with a mocking intonation of the Introibo ad altare Dei, and the preface to any particularly polluted incident is likely to be some other tag from the liturgy of the Church. Hints of the eucharist abound, the climax of the blasphemous parody coming at the wildest moment of the brothel scene, when a Black Mass is celebrated, with antiphonal voices of the Damned and the Blessed, and the sacred words are read backwards : “Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!”

It is this religion à rebours [backwards, against the grain] in Ulysses, this faith in the final reality of nature as something so loathsome that man is relieved of the burden of loyalty to any authority outside himself, and is left to revel in his own sense of superiority, it is this, behind the joy of “a tensity of cerebration,” I would assert, that fascinates a certain type of modernist above all the vanity of the illusion of irresponsibility.

V

To Mr. Eliot the bitter realization of obscenity in Joyce and there is bitterness beneath his rollicking audacity gives to his work the note of religious “orthodoxy” based on the conviction of sin. To me, I will confess, this spectacle of a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility, while the fabric of society is shaken to its foundation, brings rather dismay and sadness. With Mr. Eliot I disagree reluctantly, since at bottom we are, I trust and believe, in accord; but there are those, the “emancipated,” with whom the issue is of another sort.

Here I will for once fling caution to the winds and speak out what I feel, though it subject me to the retort of ribald laughter. In this art I see at work not the conviction of sin, but the ultimate principle of evil invoked as the very enemy of truth. And I fortify, or rationalize, my instinctive revulsion by what I hold would be the judgement of philosophy and theology. For the first, what else is this exploitation of the subconscious but an attempt to reduce the world and the life of man back to the abysmal chaos out of which, as Plato taught, God created the actual cosmos by the imposition of law and reason upon the primaeval stuff of chance and disorder. And for the second I would appeal to no formal treatise of theology but to one of the “ghost” stories in Monsignor R. H. Benson’s Mirror of Shalott, which has haunted my imagination all through the reading of Joyce.

I refer to the tale in which Father Girdlestone relates the three assaults of the devil to capture his soul. Now what first impressed me in that ghostly narration was the order in which the author arranged these temptations, seeming to begin with the most radical and to end with the least radical. And this apparently inverted climax puzzled me until I saw how curiously it corresponds with the actual progress of Joyce from the Portrait to Ulysses. In Benson’s fiction the first temptation is “completely in the transcendent sphere; it is an intrusion of the evil one into the priest’s spiritual dreams, as when one’s imagination is full of some remembered melody and a real sound breaks upon it”; it is a questioning of the validity of all religious experience as something unreal and devoid of authority. Then follows a more open and direct attack upon the reason. “It was intellectual doubt of the whole thing. . . . After all, . . . where is the proof? What shadow of a proof is there that the whole thing is not a dream? If there were objective proof, how could any man doubt? If there is not objective proof, what reason have you to trust in religion at all?” And the priest adds: “A heavy deposit had been left upon my understanding. I did not dare to sit down and argue; I did not dare to run for refuge to the Silence of God. I was driven out into the sole thing that was left the world of sense.”

So far we are moving parallel with what we have seen to have been the two steps in the emancipation of Stephen in the Portrait. And then, carrying us over to the execution of art in Ulysses, comes the third and deadliest assault. In the priest’s story this is described as the insurgence of evil from its last and most secret lair, a voice crying to him that even the world of sense is an illusion, a whirling of shadows in the void beneath which the only reality is some horror of loathing. It is as if the solid objects about him, the very furniture of the room where his religious life had passed, were “striving to hold themselves in material being under the stress of some enormous destructive force.” At times they seemed to him “to have gone, simply to have dissolved into nothingness, as a breath fades on a window to retain but a phantom of themselves.” And it was known to him that what was intended was to merge the world of sense into the very essence of evil:

“I understood at this moment, as never before, how that process consummates itself. It begins, as mine did, with the carrying of the inner life by storm that may come about by deliberate acquiescence in sin I should suppose that it always does in some degree. Then the intellect is attacked it may only be in one point a “delusion” it is called; and with many persons regarded only as eccentric the process goes no further. But when the triumph is complete, the world of sense too is lost and the man raves. I knew at that time for absolute fact that this is the process. The ‘delusions’ of the mad are not non-existent; they are glimpses, horrible or foul or fantastic, of that strange world that we take so quietly for granted, that at this moment and at every moment is perpetually about us foaming out its waters in lust or violence or mad irresponsible blasphemy against the Most High.”

That would be the report of theology on the art of the obscene, and if it seems to a certain type of reader purely arbitrary to apply such a criterion to the work of Joyce, let me recall to him the words of Stephen in the Portrait: “I imagine that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.”

[The end.]