No More Learning

Stephen does what Aristotle did not do, and ~ow follows his definitions of pity and terror With a sttlct dehnutauon of the term 'tragic'. People die in street accidents, but we canno~,hke n. ewspap~r reporters, properly call such deaths tragic: 'the tragIC em? tlon . . . IS a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. ' (Both terror and pity, he has said, arrest the mind 'in the presence of whatsoever
62
is grave and constant in human sufferings'. ) 'I mean that the tragic emotion is static. ' Joyce is really defining his own kind of art, proper art. The arts which excite desire or loathing are improper, kinetic: they are pornographic or didactic. With the 'static' aesthetic emotion -which we cannot feel in relation to real-life events-'the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing'. This, of course, is why proper art cannot be popular, why Ulysses and Finnegans Wake met either fury or indifference. Your list of best-sellers always in- cludes the pornographic (the arousers of desire) and the didactic (the books which tell you what to do). Combine the didactic and the
pornographic, as in some Hindu sex-manual, and you have your best best-seller. The aesthetic emotion is no more generally wanted than is the mystical state. The average reader does not want to get outside life, to view it detachedly and indifferently; he requires the illusion of being more deeply involved in it.
We are already in deep philosophical water. Stephen's general
definition of art requires setting off with memories of Cranly who,
recalls Lynch, 'told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs'. The
pigs snort about Stephen's lucidity: 'Art is the human disposition of
sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end. ' But what is the
aesthetic end, what is beauty? Stephen goes to Aquinas, who says:
'That is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. ' This is a starting-point. Truth and beauty Stephen, like Keats, recognises to be akin. If we want to know more about truth we must study the intellect which tries to perceive it, we must 'comprehend the act itself of intellection'. Similarly, to understand the nature of beauty we must 'understand the frame and scope of the imagination, . . . comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension'. Before we can go further we must meet the fat student Donovan on Lower Mount Street. He announces examination results and goes off to eat pan- cakes. Lynch is scornful and envious of Donovan : 'T o think that that yellow pancakeeating excrement can get a good job, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes! ' We have had our breather; we are ready fo~ 'integritas, consonantia, claritas': how far do these, Aquinas's condi- tions for beauty, correspond to 'the phases of apprehension'? Stephen translates them as 'wholeness, harmony and radiance'. He now proceeds to define them.
A butcher's boy has a basket on his head. Stephen asks Lynch to look at it; to do this he must separate the basket from the rest of the visible universe. 'You see it as one whole. You apprehend its whole- ness. That is integritas. ' Immediate perception is synthetic (many
63
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Free Flight
is no doub~ th~t we are listening to the Joyce voice, voice of Shem, and that thIS pIece of drama is really a piece of epic. Joyce is his own Proteus, and he IS never more dramatic than when not using the outward shapes and machinery of drama.
The discourse ends-in rain, shelter, the sight of the girl who has become . namel~ss u? der the arcade of the National Library. 'Your beloved IS here, whIspers Lynch. Stephen feels a twinge ofbitterness
seeIn~ her standmg there silently among her companions-'She has
no pnest to flirt with'-but his mind takes on a listless peace-the
druid5cal ~cease,to str~ve' peace he is to know again when, having
emptIed hIS bram of hIS Hamlet theory, he is to stand in sunlight on
thIS very spot, Bloomsday halfway through. The peace engenders chanty now:
And if he, had)udged her harshly? If h. er life, were a ~imple rosary of
hours, her hfe s~mple and strange as a blrd's hfe, gay In the morning,
restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?
Having talked of the enchantment of the heart, Stephen is now to
e~pertence It. , He wakes to a morning inspiration, the beat of a vlllanelle passmg from his mind to his lips:
Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Reading the poem, we cannot but feel a little let down. After the wave~ 0:eloquent aesthetic theory, after the wonderfully moving deScrIptIOn ofthe dawn rapture-'In the virgin womb ofthe imagina- ! I. onthe word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the vIrgm's chamber'-we have the formal perfection of Fleet Street ;hymesters, followers of Austin Dobson, and the stale Swinburnian- ISm of'. : . languorous l? ok and lavish limb'. Stephen is as small a poet as ~IS ~reator, T h e mterest o f the section lies, as always, in the
prose WIth ItS subtle rhythms, the evocation of subtle moods. What
formed solid narrative i~ Stephen Hero-the parties, the classes in Erse, the coy dark-eyed glrls-becomes here a lyric memory. Stephen may despISe the composite image of Irish womanhood he has formed, he may be angry with the girl whom Lynch has called 'your beloved'-'He had done well not to salute her On the steps of the lIbrary. He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy
WIth a church whIch was the scullerymaid of christendom'- but the strength of his feelings is a kind of homage. And here now is the
65
parts bound up into the sense of a whole); after this first phase comes analysis: 'Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, har- monious. That is consonantia. ' Lynch says that if he will tell him what claritas is he wins the cigar. Stephen tells him, eloquently. We have heard about claritas, or 'radiance' before, in Stephen Hero-it is the quidditas, the 'whatness', shining out of the perceived object. Then we heard much about epiphanies, now the word is not men- tioned: Stephen prefers terms like 'the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the enchant- ment of the heart'.
Stephen ends his discourse with succinct definitions of the three main literary forms-the lyric, in which the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the dramatic, in which he presents it in immediate relation to others; the epic, in which he presents it in mediate relation to himself and others, But these forms interpene- trate, or rather form a natural continuum, so that the personality of the artist starts as the lyrical centre, then passes into the epic narra- tive, and finally refines itself out of existence in the dramatic form.
- The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, in- different, paring his fingernails,
- Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
Much of this aesthetic theory, despite its strange and limited
provenance, goes on making admirable sense; but it is of greatest value when considered in relation to Joyce's own work. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake look like epics but are really dramas: Joyce achieves the divine aim of invisibility and indifference by handing over the task of narration to unsympathetic or even inhuman agents-a pub cadger, a woman's magazine, a fugue, a scientific catechism, a dreaming mind. That chapter of Ulysses which is couched in drama- tic form is not necessarily the most truly dramatic part of the book. The stage directions of the brothel scene are written in highly man- nered prose, so that-as with the reading of Shaw's plays-we are aware of the dramaturgist breathing down our necks. Is this drama- turgist Joyce, 'mediately' presented, or is it some specially intro- duced play-writing agent who enables the true creator to remain in the background, invisible impresario, paring his fingernails? There
64
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Free Flight
poem for her-what in Stephen Hero is called 'The Villanelle of theT<;mptress'. Hesees her shorn of her Irish piety, or pseudo-piety, and YIeldmg to hIm, the priest of the imagination. The poet is also magICIan an~ can turn a trim-booted colleen, equipped with Irish phrasebook, Into eternal woman.
. The priest of th<; imagination draws a good deal of his villanelle's Imagery from the nte practised by the lowlier, despised priests of the Chu. rch. Blasphemy? The temptress is praised in a eucharistic hymn, sacnficIaI hands raJse the chalice. If it is blasphemy it is also a kind of homage, a homage to be accorded back-handedly again and again throughout the major works. Stephen says, in the penultimate section we now approach, that he fears 'the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration'. He will not
make a sacrilegious communion; he is under no delusion as to the ~ncomp~eteness of his emancipation. But, perhaps without knowing It, h~ will best free himself from the Church's domination by secu- lansmg the emotIOns attached to her rites and symbols. Stephen secular Jesuit, heretic Franciscan, is less mixed-up than he seems. '
The final narrative section begins in a flurry of birds. Stephen in
fin de siecle weariness, leans on his ashplant watching them wheeling 'about a temple of air' in Molesworth Street. The bird motif is fullest developed here-Cornelius Agrippa on bird-auguries, Sweden- borg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect. Stephen's stick becomes that of an augur, the image of ibis-headed Thoth, god of writers, appears to him; in a sort of fear he sees Daedalus hi~self, 'soaring out o f his captivity on osierwoven wings'.
The actual buds of Molesworth Street he cannot identify-are they swallows? It is the word 'swallow' that conjures the thought of his own impending migration, also-through the line 'I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes'-the remembered opening of the new National Theatre with Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, the hissing and cat- calling of his fellow-students-'A libel on Ireland! ' and 'Blasphemy! ' and the rest. Cathleen had sold her soul to the devil to buy bread for her starving people; the audience was not willing to wait for her r~demption, God's ways exhibited as stranger and more compas- sIOnate than the Dublin Catholics would allow. Everything points to Stephen's leaving.
The time for exaltation, for really taking to the air, must wait till the very last. Stephen must clear his mind in the presence of Cranly, make a final confeSSIOn and a final avowal. We are very much earth-
66
? ound ~gain; the ~ext is full of dragging-down symbols-the priest m the hbrary readmg-room who closes his copy of The Tablet with an angry sr:ap; ~ranly's hook, Diseases ofthe Ox; the Scott-reading dwarf who IS sald to he the product of a noble but incestuous union (Stephen sees this act in an unbidden visionary flash, matching that earher one of the Foetus-carving student in Cork-the rainy park the swans, the embracing brother and sister); the coarse banter of the students under the colonnade; his own awareness ora lousy body and of thoughts that are 'lice born of the sweat of sloth'? his ambiva- lent bitterness towards his 'beloveti'. But Temple, like an oracle, makes mad and prophetic pronouncements. He says that Giraldus Cambrensis celebrates Stephen's people as pernobilis et pervetusta familia. He quotes the last sentence of the zoology textbook: 'Reproduction is the beginning of death. ' The Church, he says boldly, is cruel like all old sinners. Stephen at last drags Cranly away from the student-crowd. Dixon whistles the bird-call from Siegfried after them: we must not forget the mystery of flight.
Stephen tells Cranly that he has had a quarrel with his mother (the quarrel that is presented as a painful and lengthy narrative in Stephen Hero): he refuses to make his Easter duty. 'I will not serve', sa~s LUCifer-Stephen, giving meaning to the line he has just now misquoted to hlmself-'Brightness falls from the air. ' He is, as the protomartyr, doomed, but his damnation may be more than a meta- phor. It is one thing to fall as Icarus (the father-son identification theme of Ulysses is emerging at the end of A Portrait: 'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead'); it is another to f~ll as Lucifer. Siegfried-Stephen, who understands the song of the btrds and brandishes the sword Nothung at visions of hell, may yet have to go to hell; but he says that he is willing to make mistakes that he is not afraid to make even 'a great mistake, a lifelong mistak~ and perhaps as long as eternity too'. Cranly does not respond to all this as Lynch might have done; Stephen could not say to Lynch what he now says to Cranly:
- I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve
that in which I no longer believe: whether it call itself my home, my fat~erland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of lIfe or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning.
This is, des~ite the brave words, a scene lacking altogether the fine, uncompronusmg, blade-bright confidence of that peripatetic lecture.
67
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Pree Plight
There is desperation in the defiance, a sense that what is being abandoned is being abandoned through pride as much as vocation, that a 'malevolent reality' may well reside in the bit of consecrated bread Stephen will not take, as well as in the whole absurd coherence and logicality of the Church. Above all there looms the terrible image of loneliness, incarnated in the cold sadness of Cranly's face.
- And not to have anyone person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, morc even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.
Stephen says he will take the risk.
Here the action of the novel ends. We must mark time a little
before Stephen's mother puts his 'new secondhand clothes in order' and the self-doomed, unafraid young artist prepares to embark. We need a brief epilogue in which the mood ofexcitement at the prospect of flight can be restored, in which the spirit of the great comic novel to come can be hinted at, in which a new literary technique can be foreshadowed. The diary entries which close A Portrait anticipate, in their clipped lyricism and impatient ellipses, the interior mono- logue of Ulysses. But they also look back to the very opening, the baby Stephen coming to consciousness in flashes of discrete observa- tion. This is right: the cutting of the physical omphalic cord is matched by the cutting of the spiritual. 'Welcome, 0 life! ' says
Stephen, going forth 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race'.
A Portrait is, by any standard, a remarkable novel, though Ulysse;, which carries on Stephen's story, overshadows it and makes both its candour and its technical innovations seem less considerable than they really are. To the young, discovering it in paperback, its modernity may, since it is the spring o f a whole contemporary mode ofwriting, seem unremarkable; the free-loving, drug-taking, agnostic undergraduate may wonder what the fuss could ever have been about. The type of student whom Stephen Dedalus represents, poor, trea- suring old books with foxed leaves, independent, unwhining, deaf to political and social shibboleths, fanatically devoted to art and art
only, is no longer to be found in the cities of the West: he dIsap-
peared in 1939. He is the traditional student, as old as Chaucer, and
literature, as life, must be poorer without him. The rebels of the
post-1945 novel rebel against everything on behalf of nothmg-
against coherent theories of art as much as agamst the authonty of
at all. But at least Lynch listened to Stephen's aesthetic and even asked for some of the definitions to be repeated. Stephen Hera- that abandoned title is a proud one and a just one: Stephen Dedalus is the last of the artist-heroes of bourgeois fiction. The concept of the young man as comic Hamlet or ineffectual rebel remains, but he derives more from Eliot's Prufrock than from Joyce's Stephen- the innocent blushing butt of a hard world assured of certain certain- ties. As Denis in Huxley's Crame Yellow he shambles shamefully out of the picture; as Paul Pennyfeather in Waugh's Decline and Pall or William Boot in the Same author's Scoop, he achieves his triumphs through a kind of trickery or the intervention of the god from the machine. But the rounded portrait of a young man who sins, suffers, and develops a noble f<1naticism is hardly to be found after Joyce: Stephen Dedalus is both an end and a summation.
The book is not just the character: it is also itself-a lyric medita- tion which is also highly organised, in which symbolism is cunningly planted and even the most casual record of seemingly pointless speech or action proves (and this is even more true of Ulysses) to have its place in the intricate scheme-there is no slack, no irrele- vance. The symbolism under the naturalism is not there for the glorification of Stephen, but for the glorification of art. If it were not for this perpetual feeling that every word, every act means more than it says or does, the name Stephen Dedalus would be a mere bit of pretentious decoration. As it is, the final image of Stephen as a priest of the imagination holds. Like a priest of the Church, he is bigger than himself by virtue of the power of which he is an agent. . The egoism is not self-aggrandisement: it is the god inside the priest saying '0,"-I, myself. ' And finally the artist, the maker, is himself a creation of unknown arts-the ignotae artes of the epigraph: he is enclosed by a mystery. It is because of the presence of this mystery that our final response to A Portrait is one of wonder.
church state and family. They are closer to Lynch than to Stephen,
,.
grumbling . about having to smoke cheap cigarettes or no CIgarettes
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? ? ? 6: 'You Poor Poet, You! '
,COUSINSWIFT,'SAIDJOHNDRYDEN,'YOUWILLNEVERBEAPOET. , Stephen Dedalus, walking on the beach in Ulysses, thinks of Swift- one of his literary ancestors-and even, for a brief moment, identifies himself with the great Dean. But he says to himself: 'Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. ' He resists literary condemnation but will gladly enough accept the other kind. Joyce must have been aware of the slenderness of his poetic talent, but it is essential to the Stephen Dedalus image that it be haloed with great poetic promise and even achievement. The only verses that Stephen makes in Ulysses are poor Rhymers' Club stuff; the villanelle in A Portrait is, after the loftiness of the artist's claims, very disappointing. The poems that Joyce published in two separate volumes-Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach-make no great pretensions: they arc not to be read in a' Stephen Dedalus context. They are charming, competent, memorable, but they would never, on their own, have m~de t~e name of their author. The 'poetic' side of Joyce (using the term m its narrowest most orthodox sense) had to be enclosed in the irony of the great ~rosebooks for it to be effective. His verse talent is, in fact, close to that of Swift (Dryden was, of course and as always, right), and this is appropriate for the second man to draw great prose our of Ireland. Joyce the versifier is best in lampoons and m the occasional parodies and private satires he wrote for his friends. ,
We can take Chamber Music in good heart when we have taken itS title. There are coarse undertones: Joyce read the poems to a woman who interrupted the recital to relieve herself, audibly, behind a screen. This oracle named the book. When the book first appeared, in 1907, it brought Joyce into association with the Imagist poets. But the artist who drew his aesthetic philosophy from Aristotle and Aquinas was not one 'to derive his poetic inspiration from c? n- temporary modes of versifying, and there is as little of the Imagls:s in the poems of Chamber Music as there is of Yeats and the CeltiC
70
Twilight. These slight lyrics go back to the Elizabethans and they
are meant to be set to music and sung. Joyce the tenor knew what
was needed in words for music-plenty of long vowels, simple
stanzaIC forms, no great length, umty ofmood, conventional imagery
~ndso ~n. These p0. ems sound better than they read and they come mto thCll own m Ehzabethan-type settings (the ear shudders at the notion of their being done as Lieder), like those of E. J. Moeran:
Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where The willows meet.
The poems are always being freshly set and are regularly sung and ? ne could, if they were not by Joyce, leave them at that.
But ;here IS always more to even the simplest Joyce creation than meets the eye or ear. Chamber Music is not a mere collection of verses? it is a seque~ce, a se}ection made from the large amount of vers~ Joyce wrote In Dublm and ,arranged to suggest a story. It is a love story, b~t no mere conventIOnal one, such as the Elizabethan sonneteers might have devised:. it is autobiographical, like everything Joyce
wrote, but the autoblOgraphy is heightened, turned into myth. His love affalf With Nora Barnacle lasted all his life; here love has to end. ~ real-l~fe t r a n S I e n t m o o d o f l o n e l i n e s s h a s t o b e . t u r n e d i n t o a f i n a l , meverS! ble, state. It is the shaping of art.
The arrangement is as cunning as we might expect from the Great
Shaper. The three ope". ing poems are a tiny preludiai suite, setting
the mood. The scene IS suburban rather than rural-there is an
avenu~ and a lamp . and a girl is playing the piano-and this homely actuality keeps the harps playing unto Love' in check. In the fourth poem the lover-poet sings at the gate of his beloved, then in the fifth he spOlls everythmg by apparently invoking a different girl alto-
gether m one of the most atrocious lyrics ever penned by a great
wrIter:
Lean out of the window, Goldenhair,
I heard you singing A merry air . . .
. . . I have left my book:
I have left my room: For I heard you singing
Through the gloom,
(You Poor Poet, You! '
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'You Poor Poet, You l'
Singing and singing A merry air.
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.
Soon it is true country matters, flavoured wi~h genuine Elizabet~an locutions like 'Welladay' and stiffened with harder words hke 'plenilune' and 'epithalamium'. The beloved unzones her girlish bosom to louder than the earlier strings and harp, 'the bugles of the cherubim:,? the lanruage becomes biblical: 'My dove, my beautiful one, I Aris~,arise! ' ~ndthe lover waits by a cedar tree (Dublin is far). Consummation is achieved, then stings follow the honey. The lover's friend grows jealous (the biographical roots are easily un- covered: Oliver St John Gogarty-Buck Mulligan in Ulysses-is the friend) and the beloved's name is dishonoured. An antique dignity enters the verse:
He who hath glory lost, nor hath Found any soul to fellow his,
Among his foes in scorn and wrath Holding to ancient nobleness,
That high unconsortable one- His love is his companion.
The proud young poet flashes his antlers, unafraid but not alone. But love has seen something of the rottenness of hfe, and the speck touches the apple. Shakespeare, whose songs were, after all, not all of pretty ringtime, is invoked, bequeather of m~d tales 'at ghosting hour conjurable'; we hear a couplet too soIld for love
poetry:
. : . And all for some strange name he read In Purchas or in Holinshed.
Love is coming to an end. Rain falls, 'the year is gathering', then
winter cries at the door. The three postludial poems are the best of
the sequence, and the last two-with the noise of waters~the desper- ate call of the forsaken lover who hears 'an army chargmg upon the land'-approach the lichievement of Yeats, though they are essen-
tially Joycean. , .
' Y o u p o o r p o e t , y o u ! ' T h e w o r d s a r e C r a n l y s , a n d ~f ~e t o o ~ant to use them ofJoyce-Stephen we must borrow Cranly s mtonatlOn- mocking but affectionate and even reluctantly admiring, though not too much. For though the greater part of Chamber Music withers under criticism we are still left with two things-the sense of a small
72
but powerful narrative structure; awareness of an almost shameful
potency that Noel Coward authorised our finding in 'cheap music'.
Some of these lyrics-and not the best ones either-call up the image of a young man genuinely in love, mooning about suburban avenues in 'cheap dusty mourning'. They are a commentary on an aspect of Stephen Dedalus that neither A Portrait nor Ulysses allows us to see. And if, as some of us did, we first read these poems when we our- selves were poor students and also in love, we find that the old uncomplicated emotions hang about them, like the cheap perfumes that were all our mistresses could afford. I know that this has little to do with literary criticism. A character in William Golding's The Brass Butterfly says that when he re-reads Virgil he is not transported to the Virgilian world but back to his own childhood: 'I am a boy again reading Virgil. ' That is perhaps no tribute to great poetry, but to minor love-lyrics it might well be the best of all.
Joyce produced his other volume of verse-slighter even than
Chamber Music-in '927, when Ulysses had been out five years and the agonies of Finnegans Wake were under way. Pomes Penyear/z cost a shilling, so that there should be twelve poems, but Joyce- like the old milkwoman at the beginning of Ulysses-adds a 'tilly', and 'Tilly' is the name of the first poem in the book. There seems little advance, either in language, rhythm or organisation, on the slender craft of the earlier volume: there are weary apostrophes to love, sighs of nostalgia and regret, and a sufficiency of thou-and-thee. Only occasionally does the prose-experimentalist peep out, as III 'A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight':
They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung, As sour as eat's breath,
Harsh oftongue . . .
When we are moved it is often for the wrong reasons. \Ve read into
'A Flower Given to My Daughter' not only the devotion of Joyce the father but the tragedy of Lucia Joyce's madness yet to come; in 'On the Beach at Fontana' the 'ache of love' felt for his son illumi- nates the facts of biography-we are perhaps too interested in what the poems tell us of Joyce (compare, if this be allowed, the Sonnets of Shakespeare) and too little interested in what the poems are capable of saying about ourselves. Yet could any lyric be less
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(You Poor Poet, You! '
general, more particular, than 'Ecce Puer', which Joyce wrote in
'932 ? His grandson Stephen was just born; his father had just died:
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle The living lies.
May love and merc), Unelase his eyes!
YDung life is breathed On the glass;
The world that was not Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
0, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
In these poems of the mature Joyce we espy a deliberate limitation, and if we think about this we allow the old gloomy and indigestible questions about the nature of poetry to rise up again-questions which it is better not to ask. For it is the two big publications of '922 - Ulysses and The Waste Land-which show how far the poetic and the non-poetic can interpenetrate, and how little significance terms like 'verse' and 'prose' really possess. How are we to classify the following? -
. . . If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one. ) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face. It's them pills I took to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George. ) The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. . . .
The first passage is, of course, from The Waste Land and the second is from Ulysses. There is no doubt as to which contains the more poetic intensity. But The Waste Land remains a poem and Ulysses a novel. Eliot's passage of flat colloquial is a deliberately adminis- tered glass of cold water to wash away the rich fruit-cake taste of the preceding Keatsian section; it also prepares our palates for a different, tarter, richness to COme. The Ulysses passage is pure Stephen Dedalus interior monologue: we snaIl be all the readier for Leopold Bloom's grilled kidney when we have read it. The total structure is all.
That complexity and suggestiveness of language that we call poetical flourishes in Joyce not in the isolated lyric but in the enclosed lyric passage-he needs the flat setting for his flights just as Eliot needs the intense setting for his flatness (in The Waste Land, anyway). And, in general, it would be true to say that Joyce is most sure of himself in all the non-novelistic branches of litera- ture he wished to practise when he is safely encastled in a great prose structure. The dramatic skill of Ulysses maddens adaptors into drag- ging pieces of it on to the stage; the 'Nighttown' episode is one of the great closet-dramas of all time; but Joyce as a playwright for the theatre is as little a success as Henry James.
It was inevitable that, having chosen Ibsen as his liberating saint,
Joyce should early on have se~n himself as a poet-dramatist. His first play, A Brilliant Career, has been remembered, however, only for the arrogance of its dedication (to the author's own soul) and for the interest that William Archer showed in it. The more mature effort, Exiles, belongs to the a1Z1ZUS mirabilis 1914, when A Portrait had been completed and Ulysses was about to be started and when the first tendrils of recognition and help were putting forth. Exiles was published in '9'S. It has been much read but little acted. Its interest is less artistic than biographical: we tend to approach it with the wrong motives.
Exiles does, in fact, illuminate a phase ofJoyce's personal develop- ment and, since it is set in Dublin, 1912, this phase is far closer to the actual time of writing than is usual with him-except, of course, for the epiphanies of Stephen Hero. In other words, Joyce seems concerned with making a final declaration about his relationship with the world of his own past before getting down to the task of creating two huge myths out of that worId. This is the last important bit of clearing up before the beginning of the real exile. Not that Exiles is all autobiography. Joyce returned to Ireland in '9'2, just
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74
. . . Wombed in sin darkness I was too,
Made not begotten.
By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a Ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.
They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages He willed me
And now may not will me away or ever.
A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then
The divine substance wherein
Father and Son are consubstantial?
? ? The Stones
'You Poor Poet, YouI'
o~ human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, RIchard? Have you the courage? Even if it shatters to atoms the friend- s. hip between us, even if! t breaks up for ever the last illusion in your own hfe? There was an etermty before we were born: another will come after we are de~d. ! ~e blindin~ instant of passion alone-passion, free, un- asharn. ed, IrreSlstIble-that IS th~ only gate by which we can escape from the mIsery of what slaves call hfe. Is not this the language of your own yp~th that I heard so often from you in this very place where we are sittmg now?
This sounds like highly dramatic language, but dramatically it does not come off at all. This is partly because nobody, not even Stephen Dedalus, speaks like that; it is also because Robert Hand, for all the careful blocking in of his background, for all his high feeling and epigrams, never comes to life-in his own right: he is merely an aspect of Richard. Bertha, with her '0, my strange wild lover, come back to me again! ', sparks into occasional life because a sort ofIbsen-heroin: intensity is, when Joyce-Richard can spare the tIme from gestlculatmg at hIS other self, deliberately imposed on her; but the whole play resolves itself into a very static portrait of the wounded artist liking, rather than licking, his wounds. Bertha very sensibly asks him: 'In what way are you wounded! ' And Richard talks of the deep, deep wound of doubt in his sou! . Bertha could well say that, with his perverse desire for betrayal, he has brought the wound on to himself. And so he has, but he still seems to want pity
. and a kind of foetal cosseting. Bertha really comes out of it very well: we gain a fleeting glimpse of Nora Joyce as one of the great heroines of our time.
This is by no means an ill-constructed, amateurish play. It is very well put together, but it is a piece of pure morphology. It is the classic example of what a close student of Ibsen can do if he lacks talent for the stage. For much of the time we have the strange sensation that we are reading a rather stilted translation of Ibsen- there is a great lack of colloquial raciness, of even the normal con- tractions that we expect in everyday speech. Yet the stiffness and grandiloquence do not suggest poetry. The language is as special as the language of Finnegans Wake, but it is not rooted in actuality: it seems to be a grotesque attempt to make something dramatically viable out of the dead pedantic COrrectness of the hack translator.
Of all the plays of Ibsen which find echoes in Exiles, perhaps one of Ibsen's least successful- When We Dead Awaken-sounds out the strongest: it has a wounded artist and his wife who are contrasted, in neat symmetry, with a couple whose temperaments are less intense
77
like his writer-hero Richard Rowan. Buck Mulligan in Ulysses talks about 'hellenising' the island; Richard, eight years later, wonders whether he should accept a professorship of Romance languages at his old university and leaven dull doughy Dublin with the quick spirit of Europe. It is his friend Robert Hand who brings the offer of the appointment from the Vice-Chancellor, saying that his past 'act of folly' will be forgotten: Dublin is ready to do him honour as 'a scholar, as a literary personality'. The 'act of folly' was Joyce's own, only it is sharpened here into something like melodrama:
ROBERT: . . . Here is how the matter stands, Richard. Everyone knows th~t y o u r a n a w a y y e a r s a g o w i t h a y o u n g g i r l . . . H o w s h a l l I p u t i t ? . . . WIth a young girl not exactly your equal. (Kindly)Excuse me, Richard, that is not my opinion nor my language. I am simply using the language of people whose opinions I don't share.
RICHARD: Writing one of your leading articles, in fact.
It is in this connection ofa wife who is too desirable to be thought of as a lady and the husband's masterful yet masochistic attitude to her that the play, starting as near-autobiography, takes off into very interesting but very non-dramatic regions. All this business of the wounded artist will do very well for a self-portrait ofJoyce in 1912 ('You have that fierce indignation', says Robert, 'which lacerated the heart of Swife). But the triangular torments which give the play what action it has have little to do with Joyce and Nora Joyce and anybody else: Joyce is soaring into the fantasy zone which, more comically, Bloom is to reach in the nightmares of the brothel episode of Ulysses. He is here indulging a delicious dream of cuckoldry.
Robert says he loves Bertha, Richard's wife. At the peak of the second act Richard confesses how one part of his mind has longed for betrayal by the two people who mean most to him-his wife and his best friend: ' . . . in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her-in the dark, in the night-secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be . . . to be for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame. ' Robert also has his big moment of eloquence. He wants a sort of duel between himself and Richard:
A battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world. A battle ofyour soul against the spectre offidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship. All life is a conquest, the victory
76
? ? The Stones
'You Poor Poet, You! '
(as Richard is contrasted with Robert, so Bertha-the awakened won:an-is. set against the mild virgin Beatrice Justice, Robert's cousm). The young Joyce wrote an article on When We Dead Awaken-his first published prose-and, going back to his other early wntmg~ on drama, one is able to toy with the notion of Joyce as a proleptlcally :ery sound drama critic, one who needed the experi- ence of creatmg even a bad play to qualify him for the making of Ju. dgen:ents on other men's works. But it went the other way round wIth hIm: after the essays 'Drama and Life' (not to be confused with the identically titled paper read in Stephen Hero), 'Ibsen's New Drama' (both written in 1900) and 'The Day of the Rabblement' (190. 1) the great dramaturgical act was 10:1g in coming, and Joyce perSIsted most of his life in considering Exiles a play well worthy of performance. He could be very obstinate about his own work.
Joyce practised dramatic and literary criticism in a somewhat dis- tracted manner for most of his life, but we cannot regard his critical wr. itir:gs as 'professional'- he is not a critic in his own right as, say) ElIot IS. The Sacred Wood helps us to understand the poetic aspira- tIOns of the author of Gerontioll) but if Eliot had never written a line of verse he would still take his place among the great twentieth- century critics. When we read Mason and EHmann's edition of Joyce's reviews and lectures and letters of protest (The Critical Writings ofJames Joyce, Faber and Faber, 1959) we do so not to learn about the authors Joyce deals with but to understand better this particular author. Thus the essay on James Clarence Mangan (1902) IS ,:oncerned with blue-printing an aesthetic theory (the one delIvered m the Stephen Hero paper 'Drama and Life') and in stating what kind of poet is needed by renascent Ireland-one not merely romantIcally mournful but also precise, Augustan, even joyful. The paper on William Blake-originally given as the second of two evening lectures in Trieste in 1912, delivered in Italian and called 'Ver~smo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese'-points a powerful affimty between the creator of the Giant Albion and the creator of Finnegan. The superficial resemblances between Blake and Joyce begm WIth theIr both marrying women of inferior education but
blessed with the 'lineaments of gratified desire' and continue with
the working ofthe details ofdaily life into eternal myth-the soldiers who were so rough with Blake become giant symbols ofevil; the civil servants who annoyed Joyce ended up as the rough soldiers who disrupt Nighttown.