No More Learning

Oddness is more easily excused in a poet tharr in a novelist. The poet's trade is with words, an odd trade anyway, and he has to arrange them oddly to draw attention to the mystery oflanguage (a mystery which is a distraction in the market-place). But the novelist's trade is less with words than with people and places and actions. Most novel-readers want to get at the content of a novel without the intermediacy o f a kind o f writing that seems to obtrude, rivalling the plot in its claim to be looked at. In the works of the late Nevil Shute there is no such distraction:
He called the front basement room his clean workshop, and this was his machine shop. Here he had a six-inch H. erbert lathe for heavy work, a three-and-a-half-inch Myford, and a Boley watchmaker's lathe. He had. a Senior milling machine and a Boxford shaper, a large and a small dnll press, and a vast arr~y of tools ready to hand. A l. 0! lg bench ran across the window a tubular lIght system ran across the ceIlIng, and a small camera and flashgun stood ready for use in a cupboard, for it was his habit to take photographs of interesting processes to illustrate his articles,
That is from Trustee from the Toolroom, a novel so readable that it slips down like an oyster. Consider also a passage from the late Ian Fleming's Moonraker:
The amenities of Blades, apart from the gambling! are sO,desirable. that the Committee has had to rule that every member IS reqUIred to wm or
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lose ? 500 a year on the club premises, or pay a~ annual fine of ? 250. The food and wine are the best in London and no btIls are presented, the cost of all meals being deducted at the end of each week pro rata from the profits of the winners. Seeing that about ? 5,000 cha:nges hands each week atthetablestheimpostisnottoopainfulandthelosershavethes~tisfac- tion of saving something from the wreck; and the custom explams the fairness of the levy on infrequent gamblers.
The solidity of such prose is more apparent than real:' it derives
from the content, the hard inventories of fact; otherwise it is pedes-
trian enough. But the average novel-reader can only take descriptive prose of a static nature (that is, prose that is not dialogue and prose that does not present physical action) if it evokes the market-place. If a novel attempts static analysis of a scene, a situation, or an emotion, the average novel-reader becomes uneasy: if you cannot give us action, then give us an inventory. If the covers of a novel could contain a film rather than a book, such readers would be pleased. The film, the comic-strip adaptation, the Reader's Digest summary-these are, in order of easiness, the easiest ways of getting at the heart of a novel. They agree in finding many novels too wordy; words, a necessary evil in the days of primitive art, are rendered supererogatory by the new, mostly visual, media. This is the general view: it is wrong for the novel to be literature. The popular novel
never has been literature, and that is why it is popular: the language
is transparent, a window on to generalised situations and generalised characters. Joyce's novels are all too literary, his language horribly opaque.
All this means is that Joyce is a sort of prose-poet, and to be that is to be a cheat-the dry bread of a good yarn seems to be offered, but it turns out to be the stone (precious but still inedible) of words or symbOl. The thing to do is to forget that the field of the novel is as limited as the cult of the contemporary best-seller is making it, and to consider that Joyce may be within his rights in turning language into one of the characters of Ulysses (perhaps in Finnegans Wake the only character). In Ulysses, the poeticising and the pastiche and parody serve, as we shall see later, a dramatic enough purpose; they also deepen the human characters by adding to their ordinary human dimensions the dimension, first, of history, then of myth. Here is the hero of Ulysses seen in his primary, Nevil Shute, aspect, though the language ofthis inventory has, in sheer sound, in sheer organisa- tion of consonants and vowels, a distinction few popular novelists could reach:
22
Solemnisatians
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fO'~vls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, l. lver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he lIked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Here he is seen in relation to one phase of past history:
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
And here he is in one of his comic-mythic aspects:
And there carne a voice out of heaven, calling: EliJah! Ellj? ah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohue's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.
'Comic' is the key-word, for Ulysses is a great comic novel-though comic in a tradition that has been obscured by 'popular' cpnceptions of comedy-Po G. Wodehouse, Richard Gordon and the rest. The comedy of Joyce is an aspect of the heroic: it shows man in relation to the whole cosmos, and the whole cosmos appears in his work symbolised in the whole of language.
One idea that should now be emerging is that Joyce is a very traditional writer: he belongs to a period in which the warring notions offine'art and pop-art had no place; he antecedes, certainly, the popular novel in the sense in which we are using that term. He is very close to novelists like Cervantes, Fielding and Sterne, masters of the mock-epic. There is a great deal of Rabelais in hlm and not a little Dickens. He belongs, in fact, to the comic-heroic tradition of Western Europe-a tradition based on a kind of qualified humanism. Man is interesting and important enough to be examined in great detail and at great length, but he is not by any means the Lord of the Universe. The universe can be a mystery or an antagonist: against it the comic-epic hero opposes all he has, and it is not much-merely free will and a capacity for love. His defeats are inevitable but always
contain the seed o f a victory that the universe, a vast mass o f organised
ironmongery, is not equipped to understand. It is the victory of the
stoic who, though the gods themselves crush him with superior weight, knows that his values are right and theirs are wrong. The heroes ofthe great mock-epics are, by an ironical twist, always more admirable, because more human, than the demi-gods of true epic
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Soiemnisations
It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little ortho- doxies which are now contending for our souls.
No face shines through the novels of James Joyce, and this is dis-
turbing. He is cut off from his own creation, as he is cut off from God's, and he has no comment to make about either. He cannot be enlisted in the cause of Irish nationalism, Fascism or Communism, though-like Shakespeare, a man legitimately faceless because he wrote plays and not novels-he has been invoked in the name of every ideology. Perhaps, among novelists, only Flaubert approaches him for self-effacement.
But, to the novel-reader brought up in a cosier tradition, such
self-effacement looks like hauteur, the nose in the air, the swollen head, the snob. It ought not to look like that. Joyce's aim was the ennoblement ofthe common man, and this could best be achieved by letting the common man speak for himself. T o watch over one's hero, coddle him, discuss him with the reader, offer him praise or pity- is not this perhaps the real posture of superiority, the imitation of God? We are given Leopold Bloom and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker without apology and without the intermediacy of attitudes imposed on the reader. We have to make up our own minds as to whether we like them or approve of their actions (Bloom's masturba- tion, for instance, or Earwicker's incestuous fantasies); ultimately, liking and approbation do not apply-we become concerned with the harder discipline of love. The priest is the agent of solemn cere- monies, and we are never drawn to look at his face or consider what thoughts and feelings move behind it. Joyce, without blasphemy, saw his function as priestlike~the solemnisation of drab days and the sanctification of the ordinary. .
It is this preoccupation, even obsession, with the ordinary that
should endear him to ordinary readers. Nobody in his books is rich or has high connections. There is no dropping of titled names, as there is in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, and we enter no place more exalted than a pub or a public library. Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody. Given time, Joyce will flow through the arteries of our ordinary, non- reading, life, for a great writer influences the world whether the world
25
whom they parody. Odysseus and . I? neas are all for imposing their weight, little Mediterranean kings; they try to imitate the cosmos, and the cosmos is flattered into supporting them with occasional miracles. Don Q1ixote and Leopold Bloom merely want to improve society with decent acts. But the cosmos sees human society as a model of itself and does not want it disturbed, hence its resentment- expressed in thunder, practical jokes, gross coincidences.
It is evident that the mock-epic novel is not just spinning a yarn and cannot be content with the language appropriate to a plain tale. The difficulties of Ulysses and, very much more, of Finnegans Wake are not so many tricks and puzzles and deliberate obscurities to be hacked at like jungle lianas: they represent those elements which surround the immediate simplicities of human society; they stand for history, myth, and the cosmos. Thus we have not merely to accept them but to regard them as integral, just as the stars overhead are integral to the life of the man who, micturating in the open air, happens to look up at them. What is difficult in Ulysses and Tristram Shandy is meant to be difficult: the author is not coyly withholding a key.
James Joyce, starting on his literary career, said that one of his
artistic weapons was to be that of the labyrinth-maker-not brute cunning but human cunning. The average reader, coming to Joyce for the first time, resents the cunning. Perhaps even more he resents another of the author's declared weapons-silence. No writer was more autobiographical than Joyce, but no writer ever revealed, in the telling of his story, less of himself. He keeps silent, he never judges, he never comments. I am convinced that many novel-readers go to a book not merely for the story but for the companionship of
the teller of the story-they want a friend with a somewhat greater knowledge of the world than themselves, one who knows the clubs, a good cigar, Tangier and Singapore, who has perhaps dallied with strange women and read odd books, but remains friendly, smiling, tolerant but indignant when the reader would be indignant, always approachable and always without side. Read Nevil Shute and you will meet the no-damned-nonsense engineer who has no arty preten- sions; read Ian Fleming and you will meet the globe-trotting club- man who is one of the lads; read Somerset Maugham and you will meet the sceptical raisonneur with a well-hidden heart of gold. These images are sometimes an unforced expression of nature, sometimes (as with Maugham) a very cleverly made persona. In the works of Dickens George Orwell saw a face:
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likes it or not and the blessing of the ordinary must eventually trans- figure it. W; see Gerard Manley Hopkins in cor. nflake advertise- ments ('gold-toasted, sugar-tossed, hghter-than-alr, 0 cnsp, they crunch and crackle') and we hear Joyce's interior monologues in the 'think-tape' of television plays and documentaries, even hear SO~~- thing of his word-play in radio shows. But 'Introibo ad altare De:' IS the first spoken statement in Ulysses, and we are Wlsest If we get up early and deliberately go to the great comic Mass, rather than n:;erely let its deformed and thinned echoes trickle through to us. It IS not a Black Mass, even though Guinness is drunk and bawdy songs punctuate the golden liturgy; it is a solemnisation without solemnity.
2: Inheritances
BESIDES SILENCE AND CUNNING, JAMES JOYCE NEEDED ANOTHER condition for expressing himself in art-exile. It was, on the face of it, a more thorough exile than, say, Ovid or Dante had known; it looked like an almost sacramental disowning of family, city, race, and religion. But such gestures are usually less drastic and dramatic and self-denying than they sound, nor could this one be wholly ful- filled: Joyce ended his days as a son and a brother, a walking guide to Dublin past and present, an expatriate Irishman, a Mass-missing Catholic who knew as much as the priests. Exile was the artist's stepping back to see more clearly and so draw more accurately; it was the only means of objectifying an obsessive subject-matter. Joyce wanted to 'forge the uncreated conscience' of his own people, and exile was the smithy.
The heroes of Joyce's two greatest books are both family men. Family was important to Joyce, and he expressed its importance by cutting himself away from his father's decaying house and starting a family of his own. As for the umbilical cord, it does not seem to have exerted a very strong pull. Amor matris is a big theme in Ulysses, but only in one of its meanings. Stephen Dedalus remembers his mother with pity, but, when she rises from the dead in the late-night brothel scene, she is the enemy, making her son cry: 'The corpse- chewer! Raw head and bloody bones! ' and smash the chandelier with his ashplant. She seems to provoke the same feelings as those two greater mothers, Ireland and the Church-. a mixture of guilt, anger terror and disdain. That earlier, remembered, incident where Stephen refuses to pray at his dying mother's behest, is not an exact representation of what happened in Joyce's own life, but it stands for the non serviam he wanted to shout at all his mothers. Joyce, unlike D. H. Lawrence, was no mother's boy. But the father- son relationship is a different matter; it was one that Joyce was able to enter into in both capacities and it had for him a 'mystical'
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significance: Bloom and Stephen come together despite the lack of
a biological tie or even a cultural or racial affinity.
Of all the numerous family he hegot, John Joyce seems to have been liked only by his eldest son James. Perhaps 'liked' is too strong or too weak a word: tolerance in youth gave place to a sort of gmlty love in middle age. I f Joyce's mother represented the yin side of. the Irish psyche, all pregnancies and forbearance. and supe~StltlOn, Joyce's father was very much the yang-charm, vmhty, dissipatIOn, improvidence, bibulous shiftlessness, the relics of~Iddace~cy,tale~t let run to seed. In A Portrait Stephen enumerates ghbly his father s attributes' :
- A medical student an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician a smalliancllord a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storytelle;, somebody's sec;etarJ;, somet~ingin a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praIser of hIS own past.
The variousness which the son put into his art the father put into his life, though to no profit. Andyet he ends up, the eternal father-figure, in Earwicker in Finnegans Wake. More than that, only such a father could have begotten such a son, for ~ames Joyce is his father with genius added the peculiar chaos of his father orgamsed mto a cos- mos. Stephe~Dedalus says that Socrates learned dialectic from his shrewish wife Xantippe, and from his midwife mother 'how to brmg thoughts into the world'. He does not say what he learned from his father. What Joyce learned, or inherited, from his own father was a voice, the gift of song and the gift of rhetoric. .
John Joyce was not just a tenor but a fine tenor~ an? his eldest son v'as almost a great tenor. The importance ofsong ": his books c. ann~t be exaggerated. Ulysses sings all the way or, when! t does not smg,! t
declaims or intones. It has been turned into a stage-play-Bloomsday; it could also be turned into an opera. The 'Sirens' episode is com- posed in the form of a fugue, but the symp~O! :ic~atureofthe whole work only appears when we come to the Circe. chapter-here we have a free fantasia or development seetlon which gathers all the whirling fragments of the long day together and, in the sphere of the special logic of the imagination, relates one w t\Ie other. As for Finnegans Wake, parts of it are essentlOlly bard! c: they req~1fe the voice and the harp. But joyce's father could do more than. smg; he could speak as well. He had the gift of eloquence, especlOlly m ab~s;, and this was heard at its best when he was denouncmg his wife s family ('0 weeping God, the things I ~arried into'). The denuncia- tory rhetoric of the 'Cyclops' episode m Ulysses! S pure John Joyce,
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while the highly idiosyncratic tropes of Simon Dedalus ('Shite and onions', 'Melancholy God', 'Jesus wept, and no wonder, by Christ') are no more than transcriptions of actuality.
The ear and the voice ofJoyce's father produced, in his son, a pro- digious appetite for langnage. Joyce wrung the English language nearly dry in Ulysses and, in Finnegans Wake, had to devise a new medium-a composite tongue, a kind of pan-European, in which the vocabulary was drawn from all the languages Joyce knew-a very considerable number. Joyce's urge to learn foreign languages began
with "a desire to communicate with the great Europe 'out there': he had no interest in learning Erse, a very insular tongue. While still an undergraduate, he wrote a Jetter of admiration to Ibsen in Dano- Norwegian. Italian was becoming his second language (later it was to be his first, and that of his wife and children). He could be creative in French. He learned German in order to translate Hauptmann. Even before he began to write his characteristic works, his world was becoming a world of sounds-meaningful or otherwise, though, as Leopold Bloom points out, everything speaks in its own way. Whether the primacy of the ear and the tongue in Joyce is, building on a natural endowment, fate's way of compensating him for weak sight and, later, near-blindness-this is a matter which it is not profitable to debate. Blind Homer is a strongly visual poet, blind Milton is not. The weak-sighted . cherish what little they can see; the near-sighted turn themselves into microscopes. I am myself a novelist classified as 'partially sighted', but the visible world exists for me, especially in the close print of cigarette-ends in a dirty ashtray, segs on potato-peeling fingers, the grain of wood, the bubbles in tonic water, a painter's brushwork. There are plenty of visual minutiae in
Joyce's novels but (contrast him here with another poor. . . ighted author, Aldous Huxley) there is not much interest in the visual arts- not because of poor vision but because of poor provision on the part of the world that reared him. The dim fairy water-colours of George Russell (AE) represent the approach of fin de siecle Dublin to the painter's art. Joyce as a young man knew pornographs and hagio- graphs-dirty pictures hidden up his bedroom chimney, the Sacred Heart and the BVM above the mantelpiece; what works of art he possessed in later life were dear to him because of their literary or verbal associations-weaving Penelope; a view of Cork framed in cork. The Dublin of his youth nourished his auditory gift. It was
very much his father's city, keen on rhetoric and Italian opera; it found its colours and shapes in sounds.
Inheritances
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Inheritances
Joyce left his father's house in order to convert his father into myth, but he encouraged one member of the family to follow him into exile and stay in exile-his brother Stanislaus. If James Joyce brought his father's voice and ear to his art, he took his father's capacity for disorder and improvidence into his private life, Trieste (his first place of exile) apparently encouraging him to promote the vices ofshiftlessness and squalor on a spectacular, Continental, scale. Stanislaus, 'brother John" had been inoculated against all this: he was solid, reliable, and had a great appetite for order and responsi- bility. Against incredible odds he helped to keep the new Joyce menage afloat, and his book about James was well-titled-My Brother's Keeper. But his importance to those who want to read
Joyce, not just read about him, is mythical. Finnegans Wake pre- sents, as one o f its themes, the eternal opposition o f brothers: Shem is an autobiographical study (Shem~James), the hard core of Shaun (=John) is Stanislaus.
Despite his temperamental inability to be solid, reliable, an earner of good wages, James Joyce had it in him to be a good husband and father. Though he ran off with Nora Barnacle in '904, they did not legally marry till '93' (at a London registry office, 'for testamentary reasons'). They were glued together by affection, not form. If John Joyce rightly saw that a girl with a name like that would never leave his son, James's need for Nora was beyond all fancy. She was un- literary, had no patience with her husband's bizarre projects (why couldn't he write an ordinary story that people could understand 1), but she is firmly planted in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake-not
biographically but mythically. Joyce saw in her the essential virtues
o f woman. She was down-to-earth, anti-romantic, common-sensical,
loyal, forgiving. If Stanislaus was his foil, she was his complement. As for Joyce's paternal gifts, these were as powerfully developed as we should expect from the creator of Bloom and Earwicker. One of the most affecting relationships in the whole of modern biography is that between himself and his daughter Lucia, the poor girl who in- herited her father's genius in the form of dementia.
Joyce's unwillingness to 'regularise' his menage had less to do with an antipathy to the forms of marriage than a total rejection of the Church. Marriage was a sacrament, therefore not for him. The alternative of a purely legal wedding would not do. Leaving the Catholic Church did not mean becoming a Protestant, for that would be merely the exchange o f a logical absurdity for an illogical one; similarly, one did not spurn religion in order to fly into the arms of
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the State. 'Non serviam' meant what it said. Joyce, who admired William Blake, had a lot of Blake in him: all laws were bad; damn braces, bless relaxes.
And yet Joyce's rejection of Catholicism was far from absolute. The Jesuit's boast about conditioning a child's soul for ever is not an empty one, and Joyce was brought up by the Jesuits. He might refuse to take the sacraments, matrimony along with the Eucharist, but the disciplines and, in a tortured renegade form, the very fundamentals of Catholic Christianity stayed with him all his life.
There is a sense in which the novels ofEvelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both Catholic converts, are less Catholic than the works of the great Jesuit apostate. Waugh looks for an unbroken tradition of English Catholic aristocracy with a terrible hunger for certitude, but it is less an eschatological certitude than a social one; he wants a code of behaviour and a code of taste that are sponsored by the oldest possible tradition. Greene is a Jansenist, and Jansenism, with its emphasis on man's impotence to do good or obey the command- ments, is too close to Calvinism to be good Catholicism, and, indeed,
the Church has repeatedly condemned Jansenism as a heresy. But Joyce's residual Catholicism never really leaves the norm. As Buck Mulligan says of Stephen Dedalus, he has the Jesuit strain injected the wrong way. The blasphemies of Ulysses are a kind of affirmation (the following is a statement about discipline in the British Navy):
They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.
That is meant to shock, just like 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus' and the story of Mary and Joseph and the pigeon. All through Ulysses and Finnegam Wake we catch echoes of the liturgy in parodic form ('Hail Mary, full of grease, the lard is with thee'), but we also meet learned chunks of theological speculation, as well as close Thomistic reasoning. It is typical of Joyce that, creating a religion of art to replace his Catholicism, he has to formulate his aesthetic in the terms of the schoolmen, and that his very premises come out of Aquinas. He cannot slough ~he Church off, he can never become completely emancipated. In Ulysses he is obsessed with the mystical identity of Father and Son; in Finnegans Wake his only real theme is that of the Resurrection.
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Inheritances
The first words spoken in U! ysses are the opening words of the Mass. Buck Mulligan, robed, bearing a razor and a mirror crossed, ascends to the top ofa tower to perpetrate the first blasphemy ofthe book: 'For this, 0 dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. ' But the blasphemy belongs to the character; the liturgical tone belongs to the book. Here, Joyce seems to say, a rite of solemn meaning, however comic the surface, is about to begin. And both of his major works are rituals: there is a hidden substance, a cunning planting of occult symbols, there is more than meets the eye. Every chapter of Urysses performs several functions at one and the same time: it tells the story, signifies an, art or science, stands for a part of the human body, has an appropriate symbol, is even dominated by an appropriate colour and (but this is not quite so esoteric, since the title of the book gives us a huge clue) has a parallel in Homer's Odyssey which is worked out in rich and secret
detail. Behind the 'accidents' of a mock-epic lies a substance qualita- tively different: in a sense, a sacrament is being administered. This very Catholic desire for the certitude of an organic system-and that seems to be one of the motives for writing Ulysses-is cognate with a priestly love of mysteries.
Joyce's attitude to Catholicism is the familiar love-hate one of most
renegades. He has left the Church, but he cannot leave it alone: he attacks it to the priests but defends it from the protestants. Despite all the mockery and blaspheming, it is safe to put Joyce's works into the hands of the devout believer. The Church may be an absurdity, but its 'logic is not denied j nor is there any institution less absurd. The Church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence. And, even in small particulars, Joyce seems to add to the literature of the Church rather than the literature
of the unbeliever:
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen'S memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanetam catholicam et aposto/ieam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for Pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the co"nsubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sa. bel- lius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulhgan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. ~he
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void awaits. surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a'disarming and a worstmg f~om those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her m the hour o f conflict with their lances and their shields.
Joyce's intellectual grasp of Catholicism was as beyond his mother's simple faith as his refusal to make his Easter duty. But there are shreds of peasant Catholicism left in him. His governess, Mrs Conway (,Dante' in A Portrait), taught him to make the sign of the cross when there was a flash oflightning and say, 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, from a sudden and unprovided for death deliver us, 0 Lord. ' In Joyce's books thunder is always the voice ofa wrath- ful God. In Urysses it rumbles while the students in the maternity hospital are mocking the forces of life. The language used for it is full of primitive terror: 'Loud on left Thor thundered, in anger awful the hammerhurler. ' In Finnegans Wake thunder appears as one of the characters, symbolised in a word of one hundred letters (like 'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthu- nntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnukl'), the power which drives men to shelter but makes them start building civilisa- tions. Joyce himself always trembled at the noise of thunder and, to those who asked why, he said, 'You were not brought up in Catholic Ireland. '
As for Joyce's Irishry, we need not make too much fuss about it, for it is perhaps the least important element in his make-up. His means of creating for Ireland the conscience it did not want was to drag Ireland-into Europe and, later, use Ireland as the nucleus of a universa~ myth. He spent his nationalistic ardour very early in life, though he retained throughout his exile a profound knowledge of the history of Ireland's struggle for home rule. His work derives from no Celtic originals (the part played by the Book ofKells in Finnegans Wake is the least of the reader's worries); he had no role in the literary movement which Yeats glorified; he did not even, like Synge, eavesdrop on the flavoursome speech of the peasantry. His Irishry was passive, merely innate, unpromoted; his aim was to be a Euro- pean artist rather than the bard-senator of a backwater republic. Dublin pub-crawlers claim him as their own, but official Ireland rejects him. This is as it should be. Joyce's purpose in life was to glorify the Dublin of pubs and poverty, not to further a shining national image. He was a Dubliner as Bloom and Earwicker are Dubliners, and both Bloom and Earwicker are foreigners.
Joyce's books are about Dublin, all of them. In the earlier sections of A Portrait we visit other Irish places, but briefly. We home back
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to Dublin with relief. But we are wrong if we think that Dublin encloses the work of Joyce, that a knowledge of the city is the key to understanding. The living Dubliner claims a superior appreciation of Joyce because he knows the distance from Sir John Rogerson's Q;tay to Mount Jerome Cemetery. This is a delusion. Dublin, in Joyce, is turned into an archetypal city, eventually into a dream city. Moreover, the Dublin of 1904 is, with romantic Ireland and O'Leary, dead and gone. Davy Byrne's is a smart bar now, not a boozer. The Martello Tower is a Joyce museum, an omphalos of petrifaction. It helps us to know something about Dublin, the real city of Joyce's memory, when we tackle the myths he has made out of it, but it is by no means essential. The real keys to an understanding of Joyce are given to the diligent reader, not to the purchaser ofan Aer Lingus ticket. My own best claim to an appreciation of his work, apart from application to it, is a Lancashire Catholic upbringing, a superstitious grandmother called Finnegan, and a strong auditory bias. Dublin is a city I know far less intimately than Singapore or Leningrad.
But, plunging into Joyce's books, we plunge into a kind of Dublin.
The Hill of Howth is man, and the river Liffey is woman, and the city ends as a metaphysical city, a place for the working out of the whole of human history. Before we reach that consummation we have to see it as a paradigm of all modern cities, a stage for the enactment of paralysis, the befouled nest of a poet.
3: A Paralysed City
JOYCE'S FIRST PIECE OF PUBLISHED JUVENILIA WAS A VERSE
encomium on dead Parnell and an attack on Parnell's chief enemy.
It was called Et Tu, Healy and it was written when he was nine. Here ends the bibliography of Joyce the committed or engage. His student writings praised Ibsen and poured scorn on the Irish Literary Theatre ('The Day of the Rabblement'). Before leaving Ireland, almost for ever, he wrote a Swiftian-or Hudibrastic-poem called The Holy Office, in which the parochial poetlings of the Celtic Twi- light have a few drops of acid thrown at them:
So distantly I turn to view
The shamblings of that motley crew,
Those souls that hate the strength that mine has Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.
Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed I stand, the self-doomed, unafraid,
Unfellowed, friendless and alone,
Indifferent as the herring-bone,
Firm as the mountain-ridges where
I flash my antlers on the air.
Bold words, and a bold manifesto:
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy stl:'eams
For I can do those things for them
Through which I lost my diadem,
Those things for which Grandmother Church Left me severely in the lurch.
Thus I relieve their timid arses;
Perform my office of Katharsis.
Joyce, at twenty-two, had no doubt of his artistic function, nor of its importance. The office of purgation, of making art a kind of sewer for the draining-off of man's baser elements, wasnotwhattheChurch
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34
? ? ? The Stones
A Paralysed City
And sobbing beside my printing press
My awful sin I will confess.
My Irish foreman from Bannockburn
Shall dip his right hand in the urn
And sign. crisscross with reverent thumb Memento homo upon my bum.
But printing the name of the Wellington Monument and Downes's cakeshop was, after all, the thin end of the wedge. Admit the naturahsm of a picture postcard and you must soon admit also graifiti on lavatory walls, the blaspheming of jarveys, and what goes on m th~ back bed:ooms of Finn's Hotel. Dubliners was totally naturalistIC, and no kind of truth IS harmless; as Eliot says, mankind
cannot bear very much reality.
And yet, first as last, Joyce did not want merely to record the
current . of ordmary I1fe. There was this business of epiphanies,
defined m Stephen Hero (the first draft of A Portrait):
Byanepiphanyhemeantasuddenspiritualmanifestation whetherinthe yulgarity of ~peech or ~fgesture or in a memorable ph;se of the mind ltself: He 1. >eheved that It was for the man of letters to record these epi- ph~mes WIth extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delIcate and evanescent of moments,
Stephen Dedalus tells his friend Cranly (as, in A Portrait, he is to tell Lynch-more eloquently and at much greater length) that Aq~mas'st~reeprerequisites for beauty are integrity, symmetry and radl~nce. Flfst the:pprehending mind seporat<< the object-'hypo- thetlcally beautiful -from the rest ofthe universe and perceives that 'it is one integral thing'; it recognises its integrity or wholeness. N~xt, 'the mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation
to Itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, Con- templates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure'. As for the third stage-'radiance'-that is Stephen's trans- lation of Aquinas's claritas-it is a sort of quidditas or whatness shining out of the object:
. . : finally, when th~rela~onofthe par. ts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted ,to the specIal pomt, we recogmse that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, ItS whatness, leap,s to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of t~e commones. t object? the ~tructureof which is so adjusted, seems to us radIant. The object achIeves Its epiphany-
The term seems ironic when applied to the 'showings forth' of Dublmers, but, after all, the original Epiphany was ironic enough to the Magi-a child in a dirty stable.
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would call holy; still, Aristotle-who gave him the word katharsis- was sponsored by St Thomas Aquinas, and St Thomas Aquinas was not of the same world as the Christian Brothers and the Maynooth priests. Joyce has the image of a great traditional intellectual aristo- cracy, to which he himself belongs. Prettiness, fancy, devotionalism have no place in the austerity and self-dedication of its creed. It is demanding, and one must be prepared to be damned for it (Joyce sees himself in a sort of hell of artists, 'self-doomed, unafraid, un- fellowed, friendless and alone'). And so the deliberate cutting-off, the exile.
The first big fruit of Joyce's exile was the volume of short stories"
Dubliners. It seems a very mild purge to us now, chiefly because it is the first in a whole pharmacopoeia of cathartics to which we have de- veloped a tolerance. To its eponyms it seemed strong enough; printers and publishers would not at first administer it; its little saga of rejections, bowdlerisations, burnings looks forward to the epic struggle of Ulysses (itself originally conceived as a story for Dub- liners) to get itself first into print and then past the customs-houses. The book was mainly written in Trieste in 1905, worked up from I)otes Joyce had made while still in Dublin. Grant Richards, to whom it was first sent, would and would not publish it. In '909, Joyce gave it to Maunsel and Co. in Dublin. In '9'0, Maunsel and Co. grew frightened of it and postponed publication. In 1912, the type was broken up by the printer and Joyce, in a broadside called 'Gas from a Burner', made the printer say:
. . . I draw the line at that bloody fellow
That was over here dressed in Austrian yellow, Spouting Italian by the hour
To O'Leary Curtis and John Wyse Power
And writing of Dublin, dirty and dear,
In a manner no blackamoor printer could bear. Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print
The name of the Wellington Monument, Sydney Parade and Sandymount tram, Downes's cakeshop and Williams's jam?
. . . Who was it said: Resist not evil? I'll burn that book, so help me devil. I'll sing a psalm as I watch it burn
And the ashes I'll keep in a one-handled urn I'll penance do with farts and groans Kneeling upon my marrowbones.
This very next lent I will unbare My penitent buttocks to the air
? ? The Stones
The glory and mystery of art can lie in the tension b~tween the appearance and the reality, or, rather, between the subject-matter and what is made out of it. The view that subject-matter should be in itself enlightening still persists, chiefly because a moral stock- response comes more easily to most people than a genume ae~th:tlc transport. When Grant Richards eventually got round to pubhshmg Dubliners-as he did on June 15th, '9'4: very nearly the tenth anm- versary of the Bloomsday that had not yet happened-few people were ready for it: the taste was for the didacticism, the pedestnan
moral lessons of a less naturalistic fiction. In Dubliners the reader was not told what to think about the characters and their actions, or rather inactions. There were no great sins, nor any performance of great good. Out of drab ordinariness a purely aesthetic quidditas
A Paralysed City
leaps out.
. . . .
the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself? ' Meanwhile, the dead priest is 'lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast'.
That is the whole story, and it is more an attempt at establishing a symbol than manufacturing a plot: a broken chalice, an idle chalice. The shameful discoveries about the adult world continue in the next
'An Encounter', in which the boy-narrator and his friend Mahony 1';. 7 truant from school for a day. Their heads full of The Union Jack, Pluck, and The Halfpenny Marvel, they meet adventure, but not in the form of the innocent violence of their little Wild West mythologies. A shabby man accosts them, full of perverse fantasies. Mahony runs away, but the narrator has to listen to the man's mono- logue about whipping boys who have sweethearts. 'He described to me how he would whip such a boy, as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him. ' The narrator gets away from the de- mented babbling, calling Mahony. 'How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little. '
'Araby' is the last of this opening trilogy of stories in which the
world is seen from a child's-eye view. Here, though, the passionate
frustration belongs to the boy himself. He is past the stage of en-
countering external mysteries-ritual and dementia-and is now learning about love's bitter mystery through pubescent experience. Here comes the eucharistic symbol: 'I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in. strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. ' We are to meet this symbolism again, in the 'Villanelle of the Temptress' -named in Stephen Hero, presented in A Portrait. In 'Araby', though, the loved one is no temptress but a girl at a convent-school. She wants to go to the bazaar called Araby (this, hke all the public events in Joyce, is historical: it was held in Dublin from May 14th to 19th, 1894, in aid ofJervis Street Hospital); un- fortunately there is a retreat at the convent and she has to be disap- pointed. The boy promises to go instead and bring her back a present. It is the last night ofAraby, he must get some money from his uncle, and hiS uncle comes home late and fuddled. When he arrives at the bazaar it is closing down; the lights are going out.
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All the stories in Dubliners are studIes In paralYSIS or frustratlOn, and the total epiphany is of the nature of modern city life-the sub- mission to routines and the fear of breaking them; the emanCIpatIOn that is sought but not sought hard enough; the big noble attitudes
that are punct~redby the weakness of the flesh. The first story, 'The Sisters', presents the key-word in its very first paragraph:
Every night as I gazed up at the window I sa~d softly to my:self the word paralysis. It had always sounded stJ:"angely. m my ears,. hke the wor~ gnomon in the Euclid and the word sImony In the Ca~echlsm. . But now It sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and smful bemg. It fill~d me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon ItS
deadly work.
The narrator is a young boy. Behind the window Father Flynn lies dead. The boy, like Joyce himself, is drawn not only to the myst~ry of words but to the terrifying complexities of the rites that the pnest has administered. As for the priest himself-old and retlf~d ~nd dying-the boy's feelings have been a mixture of awed fascmatlOn and repugnance. Father Flynn looks forward . to the unpleasant priests of Graham Greene and the dramallc pOSSlbIl1l1es of the con- trast between their function and their nature. He has been a messy snuff-taker. 'When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured
teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip. ' But now he is dead, and the boy goes with his aunt to see the body in the house of the Misses Flynn, the sisters of the priest. He learns, o:er a glass of defunctive sherry, that Father Flynn's illness began With the break- ing of a chalice, that this affected his mind,: ~. : . And what do y~u
think but there he was,' says Ehza Flynn, slttmg up by himself m 38
? ? ? ? ? The Stones
Gazing up into the darkness I saw my. self as ~ creatuft;! driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned WIth angUlsh and anger.
The seeming triviality of the frustration and the violence of the language which expresses it are, as it were, reconciled by the aesthetic force of the epiphany: here, drawn from commonplace experience, is a symbol for the frustration o f adolescence and, by extension, of maturity too.
The rest of the frustrations and cases of paralysis belong to the adult secular world.