No More Learning

But the rapprochement is there and, when Bloom, who has forgotten his key, enters his own house by a stratagem (he climbs over the area railings and opens the area door), enabling Stephen to make a more orthodox entrance, we can settle to a long and irrelevant
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Home is the Sailor
analysis of race, temperament, education, family-exhaustive and
exhausting-which runs parallel to the truth. The truth, which has nothing to do with statistics, is that Bloom and Stephen can talk together and get on, that they will meet again and modify each other's lives, that Bloom will gain a suitor-conquering power from his contact with the intellectual imagination, and that Stephen will some day be able to write Ulysses.
T h e comic impertinence o f the catechism is best seen when
Bloom turns on the kitchen tap for water to make cocoa for his
guest:
Did it flow?
Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity o f 2 , 4 0 0 . million . gallons, percolatin& through a subterranean aqueduct o f filter mams of smgle and double plpeage constructed at an initial plant cost of ? 5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and ~allowhtll to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance o f 22 s~atute mdes, and then~e, through a system of relieving tanks, by a gradient of 2 5 0 feet to the CIty boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson st~e::t, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply o f I 2 t mllhon gallons the water had fallen below the sill o f the overflow weir for which reason the bor? ugh su~eyor and waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E. , on the mstructlons of the waterworks committee had pro- hibited the use of municipal water for purposes other than thdse of con- sumption (envisaging the possibility o f recourse being had to the impotable water of th~ Grand . and Royal Canals as in 1893) particularly as the South Dubhn Guard~ans, notwithsta! lding their ration of IS gallons per dayperpaupersupphedthrougha6lllchmeter hadbeenconvictedofa wastage. of 2 0 , 0 0 0 gallons per night by a readi~g of their meter on the affirmatl(~m--? f t h e l a w a g e n t . o f t h e c o r p o r a t i o n , M r I g n a t i u s R i c e , s o l i c i t o r , thereby actmg to the detrIment of another section of the public self-
supporting taxpayers, solvent, sound.
J
All this to get a couple of cups of cocoa.
Yet the statistics do remind us of the unconscious groping towards
each other that Bloom and Stephen have, usually off their guard, in the margins of thought, exhibited all day-the 'postexilic eminence' of Moses of Egypt and Moses Maimonides (Stephen has mused briefly on both), to whom Bloom adds Moses Mendelssohn' the Jewish father-and-daughter theme in the National Library, "':hich leads Stephen to sing the anti-semitic ballad of Hugh ofLincoln;1 the parallel between oppressed Jews and oppressed Irish that was rhetorically expounded in the 'JEolus' scene. And yet all this has when all is said and done, little to do with Bloom and Stephen:
1 In a setting too low for Stephen's tenor voice. Why?
IiI
? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
What at length emerges from the load of abstract facts is something quite strange and unexpected. The duumvirate seem to borrow a kind of abstraction of their own from the skeletal catechism: they lose one kind of substance and gain another. Their reality becomes that of the moon or stars, whose weight and chemical constituents, tem- perature and canals and mountains may be known, but only re- motely. Stephen and Bloom become heavenly bodies, and we note that Joyce has made Comets the special symbol for this chapter. It is
not excess of factual matter that has wrought the metamorphosis; it is the lack of human reference, the sucking out of blood from the human. Stephen and Bloom soar above the world of sense and take their places among the constellations, 'the heaventree of stars hung
with humid nightblue fruit'.
Bloom invites Stephen to spend the night in his house, bnt
Stephen declines. This is far from goodbye, though: the two will meet again for further talks; there is also the question of Stephen's voice and Stephen's Italian and Molly Bloom. They propose 'to inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place the residence of the instructed' (that will put Molly's 'voglio' right: Bloom has never been too happy about her pronunciation of it); 'to inaugurate a course of vocal instruction, place the residence of the instructress'. And so Stephen leaves, going we know not where under 'the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way' and 'Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained'. Bloom is left alone
among the rearranged furniture of the sitting-room (wifely whim) and quiet meditations which may induce peaceful sleep. We are face-to-face with him for the last time, and so we must have our catechistic fill of his residual thoughts, dreams, hopes for the future. Nor is his house (after all, this is Ithaca) neglected: contents of drawers and bookshelves are fully listed, and there is an inventory. of the thoughts and sensations called up by such items as an 'in- distinct daguerreotype of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag), and the letter from Martha Clifford which he adds to his secret hoard. But Bloom tires as we do. Undressed, he goes to the bedroom, where Molly lies awake. He views the adulterated bed with equanimity; he answers Molly's questions about the long day with fair frankness, though omitting certain items which she might neither understand nor appreciate. But she catches at the mention of Stephen Dedalus, 'professor and author'-son, lover, messiah-and will soon weave him into her before-sleep meditations. Bloom, more self-assertive
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Home is the Sa;"'r
than he has been for years, asks for his breakfast in bed. There is no doubt he will get it.
He lies as Joyce himself used to lie-with his feet towards the head of the bed, 'laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the index- finger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose . . . the childman weary, the manchild in the womb'. The questioner will not give up even now:
Womb? Weary?
He rests. He has travelled.
With?
S! nbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and
WhInbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the O! Iailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.
The rhyt? ms of these names are the rhythms of steady breathing. If
the questlOner wants another answer he must expect a nonsensical
one. Finally he will get no answer at all.
When?
qoing t. o dark ? ed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's
auk s egg In the mght of the bed of all the auks of the roes of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.
Where?
Bloom is asleep.
Molly Bloom is not, however, not yet. Penelope has to be revealed
as, despite everything, fundamentally faithful, and Bloom's conquest of the suitors-again despite everything-must be celebrated in grudging, though never spoken, admiration. More than that we have lived for hundreds of pages in a man's city, and woman' has had very little . to say. Underneath man's artefacts lies eternal, unchanging woman, gIver of hfe, repository of the true creative urge. Woman is the earth; Molly lies 'in the attitude of Gea-Tellus fulfilled recum- bent, big with seed'. She has her own laws, which drenot m~n's;the rhythms of her meditation despise man's dams and fences:
y ~s becaus. e he never did a thin~ like that before as ask to get his break- fast In bed w~t? a couple of eggs SInce the City Arms hotel when he used t~ be pr~tendm9 to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make hImself Interestmg to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a. great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul grea~e~t . rni. ser ever was actually afraid to layout 4d for her methylated spmt telhng me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about polities and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a
'73
? ? The Labyrinth
bit of fun first God help the world if an the women were her sort down on bathingsuitsandlownecksofcoursenobodywantedhertowearIsuppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice . . .
And so on and so on and so on: twenty-five thousand words (a third of an average-length novel) without any punctuation at all. The nakedness is total, and in the French version of Ulysses Molly even takes out her accents, like so many hair-pins. It is the final, and in many ways the most astonishing tour de force of the book.
And yet it is less a display of art than a revelation ofinsight. Joyce has dared to think his way into a woman's mind: it would be danger- ous to shape, use the artist's cunning: it is safer to leave the flood- gates open and let the dark turgid flow have its will; otherwise the spell might be broken. And so we listen to an incredible torrent of reminiscence, a great deal of it erotic, out of which we must pick out a wife's portrait of Leopold Bloom. His faults are many- arguing, familiarity with servants, saying that O U f Lord was a carpenter and the first socialist, pretending that he is dying when he has cut his toe with a razor, being a nuisance about the house, bring- ing her, his wife, to the sin of adultery through his own neglect, and so on. He is so unsatisfactory that she is glad to think that she may soon be able to replace him with Stephen, artist-son-Iover. But, when she compares him with Boylan and other Dublin drinker- lechers, she is prepared to concede good points. He can be gentle,
his manners are good, he is not led astray by male cronies, there is something of the artist in him, he understands a wome. n and knows how to give her pleasure. There was a time when he demonstrated that he had more spunk than the others, shot a stronger arrow. At the least, he is to be tolerated, even protected. Boylan, who laid a lionlimb by her that afternoon, is coarse by comparison: his thrusting yard isnot the whole of manhood. Ultimately Molly feels that she encloses all the men she has ever known, a tolerant mother. But with her husband there remain certain imponderables; she cannot be too sure of him; he is always capable of doing the unexpected. Boylan
may have brought wine and peaches and a great readiness to be at it, but Leopold, Poldy, Don Poldo de la Flora, has brought a fatherless and motherless poet, asking only in return his breakfast in bed (two eggs-the return of his manhood). Bloom will do very well; in his passive way (but is not passivity a kind of cunning 1) he has killed all the suitors.
There, then, is Penelope. But she is also Gea-Tellus, Cybele, our great earth-mother. That she herself should have had a mother
'74
Home is the Sailor
.
seems ridiculous; we cannot take Lunita Laredo-Spanish-Jewish
bride of Major Brian Cooper Tweedy-all that seriously: after all 'Lunita' means 'little moon', and little moons do not produce their own planets. Molly is eternal earth, rolling round unsleeping on her creaking bed. Dirt is of her essence: she likes smutty books; she is not embarrassed by corner-boys' talk of what is 'only natural'. She is uncertain of her age, but she recalls epochs in her long geological history-the fire inside her gushes out; there was a terribly cold ice- age winter when she played with little dolls, primordial men; she loves the mornings when the world is deserted save for flowers and vegetables all dewy on the market-stalls. She is passionate for flowers, would like to have the whole house full of them; for her there is nothing like nature.
But she is endearing as well as formidable. Her womanly common sense makes her husband's seem like higher mathematics. She is all for life, detests wars and the men who make them, is angly at the ravaging of fine bodies on the battlefield to serve some factitious ideal. She loves love. She loves God, but her God is not the comic- cruel butcher of Stephen's tortured broodings:
. . . God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches prim- fl? SeS and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something, I often asked him atheists or whatever they call them- selves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first . . .
Her God is the creator; the God of Stephen's mother is the des-
troyer. In her the whole comptex of remorse, 'agenbite of inwit~, the sense of blasphemy against amor matris (which may, after all, be the most important thing in life) is cleansed and purged away in a concept of motherhood which is not mean and nagging and tearful and self-pitying but humorous, drenched in light, born of the sun.
Before sleep Molly makes her affirmation, says 'yes' to life, in a glorious fantasy that combines God, Bloom's kisses and promise- 'tomorrow the sun shines for you'-on Howth Head, and her girl- . hood and first love in Gibraltar, when she was 'a flower of the moun- tain'. Gibraltar is right for her-the gateway to the middle sea of sun and wine, the eternal flower-covered rock. Her final reminiscence is, after the long years ofsour banning, at last in the anthologies, learnt
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? ? The Labyrinth
by heart, a classic quotation, but incapable of being wearied or staled by repetition:
. . . yes when I . put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though~ well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask agam yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me
so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
There is nothing in all literature more joyous. The book is ended, and yet we are called back, after its final period, to the memory of a weary odyssey that contains this of Bloom's, the artist's exile and wanderings, the long years of toil and disregard:
Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 19[4-1921.
Ther: are ~enty more years of travel to come-seeking, striving, refusmg to yield. One may sleep in Ithaca, but one does not die ! ! 1ere.
12: The Bedside Labyrinth
Ulysses IS A BOOK TO OWN, A BOOK TO LIVE WITH. TO BORROW it is probably worse than useless, for the sense ofurgency imposed by a time-limit for reading it fights against the book's slow pace, a leisurely music that requires an unhurried ear and yields little to the cursory, newspaper-nurtured eye. Most of our reading is, in fact, eye-reading-the swallowing whole of the cliche, the skipping of what seems insignificant, the tearing out of the sense from the form. Ulysses is, like Paradise Lost, an auditory work, and the sounds carry the sense. Similarly, the form carries the content, and if we try
to ignore the word-play, the parodies and pastiches, in order to find out what bappens next, we are dooming ourselves to disappoint- ment. Ulysses is not an action-crammed thriller. It will, however, yield to a reading-plan that combines the approach of the ordinary novel-reader and the more rarefied poetry-taster. When I first read Ulysses, at the age of sixteen, I tried to gobble it and failed, but I still contrived to make a comparatively swift meal of it-four full days of a school vacation. Did I read every word, then, or did I skip? I
skipped a little, chiefly in the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode and in . Molly Bloom's final monologue. I was impatient with some of Bloom's interior musings and faintly irritated with the 'Sirens' scene.
But, at the end of my four days, I knew what the book was about. In the thirty-odd years since that first reading-an experience that made my examination set-books look a little pallid-I have only twice re-read the book continuously through, from stately plump Buck Mulligan to the final 'yes'. I bave preferred to take it in chapters, choosing anyone I fancied at any particular time, recognising
favourites-usually the episodes I liked least when I first met Ulysses -and, inside those favourites, turning to certain passages again and
again.
Ulysses (and, even more so, as we shall see, Finnegans Wake)
invites this approach, rather as the Bible does. It is, in many ways, a '77
? ? ? The Labyri1lfh
The Bedside Labyrinth
precursor of the new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopaedia-something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator. The 'Wandering Rocks' episode of Ulysses is a reminder that the whole book has a spatial scheme in which time has been divested ofits bullying hurry-along authority, and this is reinforced by our knowledge that the final image is of a human body, presented piecemeal in its various organs. Time is-the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it. Time has
to be put in its place.
Ulysses, then, is a labyrinth which we can enter at any point, once we have satisfied ourselves as to its general plan and purpose. It is one of the very few books in existence that can be picked up at any time, enrichening any odd moment and-rather than a tome we have to engage strenuously at a library table-it is a book for the bedside. T o say that one has to live with it is not to utter a prejudiced, partisan claim but to state quite objectively that there is enough meat in it to last a lifetime. Its scope is deliberately encyclopaedic and its subtleties and puzzles require a sort of retired leisure for their working-out. One can never thoroughly understand any book (not even one's own), mainly because words are autonomous and have an endless range of possible meaning and because time itself, the flux that the author tries to trap, has a habit of opening up new significations in a book, shifting stresses, achieving new topicalities, suggesting fresh patterns of relationship with the rest of emergent literature. The paradox about Ulysses is that it remains, at any given time, more immediately intelligible than books that essay a greater lucidity: it does not wrest its meanings from here-and-now, it clamps down on time instead of riding with it. At the same time it invites further exploration and discovery, not of the answers to conundrums but of a greater richness of understanding of what is already well enough understood.
Let it join the bedside library, then, along with Joyce's other big book, Shakespeare, the Bible, Boswell, The Anatamy o f Melancholy, Rabelais, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Tristram Shandy, and other works which are more concerned with solid objects in space than with the illusory current o f mere time. And now let me attempt to sum up its qualities. I am wretchedly and impotently aware of my failure to celebrate tbese in the brief survey I bave just completed. There is
'78
the awful danger of solemnity, which turns readers as well as writers into bloody owls. Joyce wrote Ulysses to entertain, to enhance life, to give joy. It is all too easy to destroy the winged life, not by binding so much as by brooding.
First, then, Ulysses is a great comic novel. It is one of the very few books that can make one laugh aloud. Its humour is of an im- mense variety, ranging from stage Irish knockabout to the most rarefied wit. The humorous tradition in English literature has- since the Puritans slammed shut the doors of the playhouses in
,642-been somewhat limited, and the typical comic English book in the period on which Joyce supervened gained its effects by making sandwiches of farce and sentimentality. Jerome K. Jerome is more typical than Lewis Carroll, and the humour resident in the English language i\self-a language with two warring elements-has never been much exploited. Joyce is remarkable in that the vis comica operates consistently in his work, and that even the shocking and pathetic is presented in terms of comic bathos: the two apparitions of the 'Circe' episode, the ghosts of Stephen's mother and Bloom's son, owe all tbeir effectiveness to the deployment of a technique traditionally associated with laughter. Earnestness is always forbid- den, and even the raptures ofsex (which Lawrence taught us to take too seriously) are deflated to the near-grotesque. The laughter of Jonathan Swift turns all too easily into a snarl or a howl, but the saeva indignatio has no place in Ulysses, any more than that horrified fascination with the lowlier bodily functions that attests Swift's dementia. Joyce, like all Ireland, was washed by the Gulf Stream;
Swift cleansed himself with (Dr Johnson's words) 'Oriental scrupu- losity'. It is healthier to accept a bit of dirt-some would say there is more than a bit in Ulysses-than to go through the vain motions of washing out original sin. And so some of the satisfaction we obtain from the coarser jokes of Ulysses is not an aspect of the 'cloacal obsession' that Professor MacHugh attributes to the English: it is part of a total, cosmic, laughter that takes in drains, love, politics, and the deathless gods, and feels guilty about nothing.
One of Joyce's deatbless gods is language, and it is proper that he should find inherent comedy there. English is peculiar among the tongues of the world in that its two basic elements-Latin and Anglo-Saxon-are, though both derived from Indo-Germanic, differ- ent in genius, tugging opposite ways. The Anglo-Saxon favours the short word and the earthy denotation; Latin is more dignified, an intellectual language, happiest with orotundity and abstraction.
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? ? ? The Lab)" ,irllh
The Bedside Labyrinth
Joyce does not attempt to make an easy digestible cocktail out of them; he tends rather to push each to its limits. Gerard Manley Hopkins overstressed the Anglo-Saxon in English, John Milton the Latin, and the aim of each was highly serious. Joyce does what both did but knows that both processes best serve a comic purpose. And so Stephen's remorse over his dead mother and decaying family is lifted to a comic-ironic region by being expressed as 'agenbite of inwit', and 'ineluctable modality of the visible'-especially as it comes immediately after 'through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins' - w i l l warn us not to take the earnest young Stephen too seriously. When parodies appear they are usually parodies of silly-pompous Latinate prose, but Anglo- Saxon can be pushed far enough to take the edge of earnestness off
even the most blood-chilling description: 'Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun. '
Mter humour, and cognate with it, humanity. Ulysses is one of the most humane novels ever written. There is no cruelty to any animal (not even to dogs, which Joyce feared), and there are no notable acts of violence. The Citizen hurls a biscuit-tin after Bloom but misses him: even if he had hit him no great damage would have been done.
A more sensational writer would have been glad to send Bloom off to lick genuine wounds. But the violence is symbolic here, as it is in the 'Circe' episode when the soldiers knock down Stephen. Stephen is more drunk than hurt, and even the expressed intention of violence brings on the Black Mass and Armageddon, as though the normal order of things can barely sustain it. The Croppy Boy is hanged in song and hallucination, and the technique of hanging in general is discussed, but it is all cleansed to comedy. Ulysses may do violence to language, but never to people.
There is plenty of hate in the book, as there are plenty of the hateful, but Joyce's doctrine of stasis insists on the artful purgation of strong feeling. The Sinn Fein attitude to the English oppressor is a convention, like the legend of poor suffering Ireland, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Kathleen na-Houlihan, the Shan van Vocht. It is blown up, especially in the- 'Cyclops' chapter, to a pitch of absurdity, so that the oppressive English reader may even enjoy the hate. As for the hateful, these are, by definition almost, those characters who are inimical to Stephen and Bloom, and their author's only revenge on them is to make them gently ridiculous. It seems that Joyce's intention was that the reader should find Buck Mulligan
180
more and more detestable on each appearance, but this never hap-
pens: he is always welcome because of his wit. As for the other Antinous, Blazes Boylan, he is doomed to be ridiculous from the very start of his adulterous journey to Eccles Street, and we end with pity rather than hate. If we are really anxious to find someone to dislike in Ulysses, we should look rather in the direction of its secondary hero, Stephen Dedalus-insolvent, bumptious, full of in- tellectual pride and irreligious bigotry, drunk, would-be lecher, poseur. But, of course, we need his weaknesses as we need Bloom's strength, and without an imperfect Stephen the book could have neither plot nor pattern. We end up, to our surprise, by looking for
the good in everyone and discounting faults (there is nothing that can be called evil) as so many shadows. '.
Joyce is no Wellsian optimist- he does not believe in the perfec- tability of man-but he accepts the world as it is and relishes man's creations (why, otherwise, glorify an art or science in every chapter except the last ? ). The greatest of man's achievements, after language, is the community, and Joyce's Dublin stands for every city-state that ever was. The impersonal conurbation, what Auden calls -the 'abstract civic space imposed upon the fields', has no place in this concept. T o Joyce, a community is men meeting,. drinki~g, ar~uing) recognising each other in the stree~s, and one of. hIs pecuhar ~Il1racl~s
is to make a real historical Dublm (the Dubhn that flOUrIshed m summer, 1904) an eternal pattern of human society, All men gain strength and even a certain nobility from belonging to It, and Bloom and Stephen are equally citizens of a blessed Imperfect CIty, despIte their intermittent sense of inner exile. They are Dubliners first and all else after.
But, beyond the city, lies the whole of Western civilisation, and Bloom's strength can be properly exhibited only m relatIOn to that. It strides through the book in many of its aspects-economics, politics literature architecture, music and the rest-trying to dwarf Bloom,'shout hirr: down, overawe him. But he comes through it all unscathed, the common man undiminished by the acts of uncom- mon men. More than that, the 'Laestrygonians' episode shows him (as the 'Nestor' episode shows Stephen) as aware of the true natu~e of the time-process all men must suffer that cIVIlIsat10n (which IS not the same as history) may be achieved. History is a mess, an imposition of the dead on the living, a nightmare from which one is always trying to awaken (Finnegans Wake is to demonstrate that
history is a sham); art and science and the wonder of the human ,81
I?
? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
community are, nevertheless, distilled out of histoty. It is the old business of the opposition of time and space. In Ulysses civilisation, like civic statues and an opera-house, fills up a spacious city; time is cut down to its minimum-nine-hundred-odd pages and far less than twenty-four hours. The next task (reserved for Finnegans Wake) will be to get rid of time altogether.
The spatial representation of the whole of Western culture-an heroic background for an advertising canvasser who is also a cuckold -calls for vast linguistic resources and justifies the stretching to the limit of the English language, the creation of new words and the resurrection ofold ones. The need to tell the truth about man's daily mind necessitates the fracture of syntax, the fusion and truncation of words, the phonetic transcription of vocables which are not properly words at all. No reader will find this linguistic display purely wanton, knowing Joyce's deeper aim. But he will be justified in being apprehensive about Joyce's next book. After the exploita- tion of the pre-verbal conscious mind, and even the odd trip to the borders of sleep, what can Joyce do next? He can only plunge straight into the unconscious mind and, for the purpose of des- cribing it, create something like a new language. We must take a deep breath before plunging with him. But, wherever we go and whatever we hear, we shall still be in Dublin listening to the speech of Dubliners, glorifying the family and the civic community, and tracing the adventures of a father, an exile, an unheroic hero.
PART THREE
THE MAN-MADE MOUNTAIN
? ? ? ? I: Big Night Music
STONES WERE THROWN AT STEPHEN, THE PROTOMARTYR. BY A miracle, he escaped hurt, kept the stones, and used them for building a labyrinth. Then, dissatisfied Daedalus, he broke up that all too merely superhuman structure and fused the stones into the first-ever fabricated mountain. The artist had been a metaphorical God-the- Father only; the time had come for him literally to rival the primal Creator by making something whose majesty and terror all men would perceive but which they would spend their lives trying to interpret. Finnegans Wake is as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got-massive, baffling, serving nothing but itself, suggesting a meaning but never quite yielding anything but a fraction of it, and yet (like a tree) desperately simple. Poems are made by fools like Blake, but only Joyce can make a Wake.
It took seventeen years to synthetise, starting after the launching
of Ulysses and reaching completion just before the outbreak of the second World War. It looked like a warning of the chaos to come; actually, so the interpreters found, it was all the bitterness of past time healed, Humpty Dumpty put together again, a secret guide to re'constituting any given chaos into a cosmos. None of this was clear during the long period of gestation: those who had given Joyce most support during the making of Ulysses were inclined to desert him as a man who was going further than was either sane or decent. But the fragments that appeared in the journal transition and the little pamphlets that came from Faber during the thirties-Anna Livia Plurabelle, Haveth Childers Everywhere, Tales Told ofShem and Shaun-seemed to us sixth-form boys merely charming:
o tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I la;low, go on. Wash quit and don't be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your
18 5
? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Big Night Music
talktapes. And don't butt me-hike I-when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park . . .
Everybody knew that these were substantial trailers of a big emer- gent book called, because the mystery-loving author would not divulge his ultimate title, Work in Progress. Something of the whole ambitious plan was revealed in a volume of essays called Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, but it seemed possible to take the verbal fun of Anna Livia not too seriously, especially as Joyce himself had advertised it like this:
Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber & Faber
To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper. Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose,
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
What was it all but a more sophisticated 'Jabberwocky'? The derivation from Alice was pointed by the identification of the hero of Haveth Childers Everywhere with, though without his talent for semantic exegesis, Humpty Dumpty himself:
Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse, Humptydump Dublin hath a horrible vorse
And with all his kinks english
Plus his irismanx brogues
Humptydump Dublin's grandada of all rogues.
It was in an honoured English tradition-puns, portmanteau-words, teasing mystifications-but there were times when it seemed to go too far. How about all those names of rivers flashing like fish through the prose of babbling, bubbling, deloothering, giddygaddy, granny- rna, gossipaceous Anna Livia, water and woman?
Tell me the trent of it while I'm lathering hail out of Denis Florence MacCarthy's combies.
Is there irwell a lord of the manor or a knight of the shire at strike . . . ? . . . tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in ana pietaring out
and clyding by on her eas! way.
Not where the Finn fits into the Mourne, not where the Nare takes lieve afBloem, not where the Braye divarts the Farer, nat where the May changez her minds twixt Cullin and Conn tween Cunn and Collin?
Moreover, the portmanteau-words of 'Jabberwocky' play fair. Forms like 'brillig' and 'slithy' resolve themselves into simple
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English, but Joyce knows more languages than Alice (whose dream- poem, after all, 'Jabberwocky' really is) and his puns and portman- teaux seem to be the thin end of a wedge that, driven into English, will cause it to crack, collapse, and be capable of being put together again only under the auspices of UNO. Joyce's language is a weird sort of pan-European, Eurish (I thank Michael Frayn for that term) with Asiatic loan-words added. Pun-European, rather. 'If one knows many foreign languages well, it is difficult to keep them out of the pun-mixer. Not that any average reader would cavil at 'silvamoon- lake', where 'silva' is not only 'silver' but a Roman wood. But one needs a sliver of Slav to cope with Anna Livia's soothing words to her crying son (almost at the end of Finnegans Wake): 'Muy malinchily malchick! ' This is evidently a sleepy deformation of ,My cold and melancholy male chick' but it is also the Russian 'Mory maiJenki malchik'- 'my little boy'.
How far can word-play legitimately go? The foreign language I . know best is Malay, and were I writing a new Finnegans Wake, I might be tempted to produce a sentence like 'Lanky Suky! Seidlitz! Bear rna stout in! ' One has a dream-sensation of a headachy Negro or Scot calling his wife or servant for a seidlitz powder followed by a bottle of stout, but at the same time the caller is stating that he is now thoroughly settled in Malaya (Langkasuka-the old Indian name for the country; 'seidlitz' pronounced 'settlers'; bermastautin- Malay for a settler). Would Joyce be pleased with that? Probably not with the clumsiness, but he would approve the attempt at widening the linguistic resources available for the punning technique. His aim, as we shall see, is the creation ofa universal myth, to which all cultures and languages are relevant (Chinese would have to be soft-pedalled, though, since it is a tongue incapable of admitting puns). If we do not catch all the references, even on a twentieth reading, that does not matter: the references are there, waiting for when we shall
understand them. Finnegans Wake, like Eliot's The Waste Land, is a terminus for the author-all the trains of his learning end up there- but it is also a starting-point for the reader: catch this slow train for Upanishad country; this express goes to German metaphysics; here is the special for the Book ofKells. We must not attempt to under- stand everything at once: that way madness lies. But Finnegans Wake hides in its word-playa very great amount of world culture, as well as Dublin street-cries, music-hall songs, cowheel, tripe, and best- sellers, and it waits on our becoming as erudite as Joyce himself.
I Plust not, anywhere in this part of my book, give the impression 187
? ? ? ! 'he Man-made MOllnfain
that Finnegans Wake is a humourless monster crammed with learning and merely seasoned with a few puns. It is always funny where it is not touching and inspiring, and it is provocative ofloud laughter just as is Ulysses (Nora Joyce heard that laughter constantly comin~ out of her near-blind hard-working husband's work-in-progress- room). The book has already revivified language for us, so that we all accept 'c\applause', the 'abnihilisation of the etym' (which means, optimistically, the re-creation of meaning out of nothing), 'In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen' and a host of other felicities. The play extends beyond mere words and embraces music: A. D. and B. C. -the whole of history- are reduced to a tinkling tune; Shaun, one of Anna Livia's sons, has a GBD pipe in his face or FACE, thus turning himself into a treble stave. A ghastly sequence of world-history ends with a mar- ginal drawing of dry bones and a nose with fingers put to it. The initial of the hero, Earwicker, falls on its back or claws the ground with its three feet. Aona Livia Plurabelle is turned into an ALP. Fancy knows no limits.
A giant disports itself with all learning and all language, a terribly
irreverent giant. But no man writes a book of six hundred and
twenty-eight pages (especially a man with Joyce's lack of sight, wealth and encouragement) for the sake of pure play and sheer irreverence. The technique is in the service ofsomething important, and we must now consider what that something important is. Alice again gives us our first clue. Her two books were all about dreams, and so is Finnegans Wake-or rather it depicts one great dream, the dream which is life ('Ever drifting down the stream-Lingering in the golden gleam-Life,what is it but a dream? ': Lewis Carroll's
epilogue is also an epigraph). In dreams we are released from the limitations of the spatio-temporal world. That world insists on one event following another and on keeping identities distinct, so that A cannot occupy the same bit of time-space as B; nor can A ever become B. But a dream permits Jonathan Swift to be also the Tristram that fell in love with Iseult and, at one and the same time, Parnell. A dream permits one's wife to become confused with one's daughter. In a dream Napoleon can defeat Wellingron, and in the year A. D. II32 at that. Dreams represent, however feebly, the world we all yearn for, a world of infinite plasticity.
To represent a dream convincingly, one needs a plastic language, a language in which two objects or persons can subsist in one and the same word. More than that, one requires a technique for killing the
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! ime-element ~hat resides in all language. I say, in waking language, My ~orpse Will eventually fertilise the earth and help the crops to grow, and that spatial process loses. Its quality of miracle (from death comes hfe) because of the d! lutlOn caused by the time-bound verb and adverb. Joyce throws the whole structure overboard uses Simple metathesis: 'corpse' becomes 'cropse'. Could anythi~gbe more beautIful or legitimate? At the same time a dream is not to be regarded as primarily a revealer of identities which the space-time world (that world of phenomenon, not ultimate truth) seeks to hide from us. We hve primarily in a waking world, and we cannot be
expected to understand everything that takes place in the world of dream. Hence dream-language must often deliberately conceal things frem us: It must appear to us as strange, almost gibberish-a non- stop babble. which throws up images of the non-time-space-world -only mterffilttently. In reading Fi1tnegans Wake, we are sometimes ~hocked by a sudden appearance of what looks like waking sense, as m some of the. footnotes to the long chapter that seems to satirise scholarly leammg: 'All the world loves a big gleaming jelly'-a fair enough teleV1SlOn commemal slogan; 'Real life behind the flood- 11ghts as shown by the best exponents of a royal divorce. ' It is a rehef to find that dream-logic kills the waking sense: we refer to the words ofthe text which these footnotes seem to gloss and find nothing but nonsense. The word 'brandnewburgher' in the text is defined in the footnotes as 'A viking vernacular expression still used in the Summe:hill distri~: for a jerryhatted man of forty who puts two ~ngers m. to hiS bOllmg soupplate and licks them in turn to find out If there IS enough mushroom catsup in the mutton broth. ' We would hke more word-play there, more of the look of nonsense. We becom~ used to the mad idiom as we become used to the dark- either m sleep or at the cinema-and to blink one's eyes in the light of a sentence capable of orthodox grammatical analysis (even if the total sense has httle to do With the real world) is somewhat painful. L. "t us have more of 'Tomley. The grown man. A butcher szewched him the bloughs and braches. I'm chary to see P. Shuter. '
Joyce, ~owever, in planning his work, did much of it in the light. It IS shocking :0see how much of the early drafts of Work in Progress m. a~es pedestnan sense. Here is the first version of part of the Anna L,VIa Plurabelle chapter, as published in Navire d'Argent, '925:
~e;l me, ~ell me, how could ~he cam through all h~r fellows, the dare- devil. Lmki~g one ~nd knockmg the next and polhng m and petering out and clydmg by in the eastway. Who was the first that ever burst?
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Big Night Music
? The Man-made Mountain
Big Night Music
Someone it was, whoever you are. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Paul Pry or polishman. That's the thing I always want to know.
Two years later, in transition, it had become
Ten me, tell me, how could she cam through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? Linking one and knocking the next, tapping a flank and tipping a jutty and palling in and petering out and clyding by on her eastway. Wai-whou was the first that ever burst? Someone he was, whoever they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Paul Pryor polishman. That's the thing I always want to know.
The following year it had thickened to
Tell rIle tell me how cam she carolin through all her fellows, the neckar she was the diveli~e? Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pietaring out and cIyding by on her eastway. Waiwhou was the first thurever burst? Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack. or in single c? mbat. ~inker, titar, souldrer,
salor, Pieman Peace or Pohstaman. That s the thmg I always want to know.
In the final version the thickening has gone further and, since Joyce never lived to prepare a revised edition, furthest:
Tell me tell me how cam she camlin through all her fellows, the neckar she was the diveli~e? Casting her perils before our swains from Fonte-in- Monte to Tidingtown ~nd from Tidin~to~ til~avet. Linkin~ OI~e and knocking the next, taptmg a flank and tlptmg a JUt! )' and pallmg m and pietaring out and cIyding by on her eastway. Watwhou was the first thurever burst?