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Vol. LX, No. 3: AUTUMN 2007
Grease, Balance, and Point of View in the
Work of Anthony Trollope
Skating Upriver; A Wedding in Maine;
Ring Effect
Bald Spot
The Interpreters;
In Tide Pools
CHRONICLES
Art
At the Galleries:
Toronto & New York
Theatre
International Theatre
Dance
Cunningham's Collaboration
REVIEWS
The Long and the
Short of Robinson
The Art of What Remains
How Dosty Did It
Another Wharton
If Lucky Jim Could
See Him Now
Jim Crace's
Violent Verities
COMMENT
Letter from India
James Joyce is literature’s crooked genius, a lord of language on a throne with no right legs. Those of us who love his work have grown accustomed to agreeing with his own assessment, confided to Samuel Beckett, that “I can do anything with language I want”; but in fact a great part of the power of language is denied him. Conrad writes that the aim of the novelist is to make us see, but Joyce does not make us see; he does not, with words, startle the mind into vision, into those detonations of perception by which literature rolls its echo of reality over imaginary worlds. Other great writers—Tolstoy, Bellow, Flaubert—seem to look through a clear-seeing inner eye which in Joyce is milkily, filmily sheened. In Tolstoy we have a sense that the work’s highest intellectual essence depends on our being made to feel the flakes of mud on the carriage wheel, that the one proceeds from the other, so that what is moving or meaningful in the story literally comes into being through the rendering of the palpable world. Joyce, who never forgets the rude reality of his surroundings, nevertheless grapples toward it through a gray blizzard of intellection. He cannot give it the same thick life or bring it to the same living immediacy.
Reality was not dull to Joyce, however; if anything, it was too vivid to portray. He was born in Dublin in 1882, into a precarious middle-class family whose fortunes sank through the long wreck of his childhood. Family life during his first years was a series of organized demotions, as the respectable Joyces held out as long as they could on credit before removing to yet another slightly dingier address; at last they succumbed to the hopeless and alcohol-soaked poverty that Joyce would depict so movingly in Ulysses. (He wrote movingly about the family’s collapse in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, where the children discuss an impending eviction in a private nonsense language: “Becauseboro theboro landboro lordboro willboro putboro usboro outboro.”) From this life of shabby material grandeur he was sent to be educated amid the shabby philosophical grandeur of the Jesuits, first at an exclusive boarding school, Clongowes Wood, and finally as a charity student at Belvedere, a day school in Dublin. Fitfully arrogant and painfully sensitive, he was attracted to Newman’s prose and the plays of Ibsen; he conceived of himself as a literary genius partly as a means of retaining for himself the sense of superiority that was vanishing from his family. His election to the rank of a great artist also raised him, in his own mind, above any familial, social, or religious obligation. A fervent believer as a boy, he broke with the church as an adolescent, pettishly refusing his mother’s dying request that he make his confession and take Communion. (He would dramatize this act in Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus refuses to kneel at his mother’s deathbed and is haunted in dreams by her ghost.) “My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity,” he wrote to Nora Barnacle, his future wife, in 1904—“home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines.”
But his first significant writings, which date from around this time, show how partial and porous his rejection of the church really was, how what he received from religion affected his ability to represent reality in words. These early writings are the “epiphanies,” a term Joyce took from liturgy and used to describe mo- ments of secular revelation, when the essence or the “whatness of the thing” became suddenly and radiantly apparent. Both his privateering theft of the religious term and his regard for Aquinian “whatness” show the Jesuits’ fiercely unresolved influence; in a draft of Stephen Hero, the aborted first novel that was later transformed into A Portrait, Stephen considers the idea of epiphany in explicitly Aquinian terms:
—You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. . . . First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.The “object” that Stephen refers to could equally be a condition, an attitude, or a relationship. Joyce’s epiphanies, many under a page in length, are the fleeting traces of minor telling moments, many taken from the writer’s own life. Many record the daily humiliations he felt with such exquisite keenness: a girl gently teases a young man, an aunt mistakes her nephew for a niece. And yet these frail visions of Dublin life are the pinprick originals of much of his later work, not only because he would rework many of them into fuller scenes in Dubliners and the novels, but because they reveal something essential, some wispy signature of mind which would sprawl across all his future books.
Joyce got from the Jesuits both the airy Platonic idealism that his aestheticism demanded and the grounded Aristotelian realism that his insecurity craved. The objects of Catholic faith provided substance for his ethereal and shape-shifting imagination—which he set loose in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses and throughout Finnegans Wake—and confirmed the presence of ultimate things, whose lineaments he could trace. The rationalizations of Catholic faith—in addition to Newman, he loved Giordano Bruno, and always and especially Aquinas—gave him an analytic discipline that soothed his frantic, ego-panicking intellect and kept him staked in the world. Catholic ritual, which he was never able to renounce, united the two, and it is not inappropriate that Ulysses begins with a parody of the Eucharist, transforming flesh into the word. “Christianity,” writes his best biographer, Richard Ellmann, “had subtly evolved in his mind from a religion into a system of metaphors, which as metaphors could claim his fierce allegiance.” In Stephen Hero, the protagonist declares that “I must wait for the Eucharist to come to me,” then work at “translating the word into common sense.” Something of this sort is already at work in the method of the epiphanies, whose precisely selected situations show the work of a conclusive and critical intellect at the same moment as their powerfully intuitive discoveries show a longing for spiritual manifestation. The young author, uncertain of his subject, pares away sensation and substance, gesturing with language toward a reality so mysterious, present and powerful that it almost could not be described.
Joyce was a relentlessly autobiographical writer, and nearly all the incidents he would revisit in his fiction had taken place by the time he had passed his mid-twenties. At University College he entered literary life and joined a clamorous and rough-edged group of rivals who gave him the patterns of many of his most significant minor characters, his gallery of Cranlys and Lynches. Perhaps most notably, Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus’ grinning nemesis in Ulysses, was based largely on Oliver St. John Gogarty, Joyce’s grinning nemesis in the collegiate pubs. Dublin pressed hard on Joyce; it coaxed out his vanity and stung him, it tested and antagonized his mind in ways that he was never able to escape. In 1903 he wrote a review of three novels by A. E. W. Mason that might have applied almost without alteration to his own future work:
These novels, much as they differ in their subjects and styles, are curiously illustrative of the truth of one of Leonardo’s observations. Leonardo . . . has noted the tendency of the mind to impress its own likeness upon that which it creates. It is because of this tendency, he says, that many painters have cast as it were a reflection of themselves over the portraits of others.If this is true of Joyce, as well as of A. E. W. Mason, it must be so in part because of Dublin’s provocation. The city and his acquaintances in it became such intense and looming presences in his mind that their existence was almost intolerable to him. He fled to Europe with Nora at the age of twenty-two, styling himself an exile, and spent the rest of his life in cities like Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, writing with ferocious concentration about his experiences years earlier in Ireland. In A Portrait of the Artist, he transformed his childhood into a story of young Stephen; in Ulysses, which portrays an astonishing breadth of Dublin life in its single day of action, he continued Stephen’s story while remaking himself as a mature man into the splendid comic figure of Leopold Bloom. And yet his Dublin remains, in the imagination, a misty and imprecise setting. It is full of references to real people, real places, real songs, which are given no more description than the note of their proper names. A mind which is given some context will imagine a scene more clearly, but for Joyce existence is its own consuming context, revoking distinctions. (We would gain nothing in vividness from hearing the tune the old man plays in the great scene after the hunt in War and Peace, because Tolstoy perfects the scene himself; but the instant we hear a recording of one of the songs from Ulysses, “The Croppy Boy,” say, or “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” the whole of Dublin in June 1904 becomes suddenly much more picturable.) These people, these places, and these songs are so real to Joyce that they burst to life for him at the mere mention of their names; they require, for him, no further elaboration. He never doubts, as his reader might, that they are there. He enfolds his Dublin in a cloud of givenness.
I do not mean to suggest that there are no sense impressions to be found in Joyce’s books. There are, and some are stunning: the fireworks over the beach in the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses, the equation unfolding like a peacock’s tail in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. He is one of literature’s great writers of atmosphere and is perfectly capable of a striking, sudden image: “A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish.” But reading his work through, one is struck by how seldom the pictures in one’s mind are the direct result of the phrases in one’s eyes, how often one’s imagination must fill in for a missing description or supplement an ineffective one.
Of course we do not want a writer to describe everything for us, and we dislike it when one tries. An overlong description bores us, it exhausts our ability to hold the image. We do not wish to be treated as passive receptors of descriptive data but to have our imaginations coaxed into active engagement, which requires, for one thing, metaphor, and for another, at once a careful selection and an artful neglect of detail. But Joyce is a naturally elucidating rather than a naturally metaphorizing writer, and in his elucidations the balance between what is included and what is excluded is almost always upset. For long stretches the imagination must struggle against the flat, wide and pavement-colored blank that threatens to swallow whole sections of Ulysses; then Joyce’s catechetical brain will suddenly seize hold of an object and turn it quickly about, measuring and labeling its parts in such a concentrated flurry that it baffles visualization. In A Portrait, Stephen sees a flock of birds in this way: “He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings. . . . They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.” In its entirety this passage may be an excellent representation of Stephen’s state of mind; it may be an excellent expression of the symbolic notice of birds which has recurred throughout the novel; it may be any number of things, except one which it certainly is not: an excellent visual depiction of a flock of birds in flight. The analytic exactitude of it—first a flash, then a swerve, then specifically a dart—is so far removed from the experience it describes that we can connect the two only through an effort of will. An understanding of the component parts of the experience that can only have come about in retrospect is made to replace the stageless perception of the experience itself. (Metaphor, which might bridge the gap, is only occasionally called on to do so.) Dividing intellect pulls apart unified sense, a condition which frequently intrudes even on Joyce’s simplest and most impersonal descriptions, as in this from Dubliners: “A little lamp with a white china shade stood upon the table and its light fell over a photograph which was enclosed in a frame of crumpled horn.”
The cause of this dislocation, this crack where the analytic breaks loose from the picturable, at times seems to extend even to Joyce’s most basic sense of adjectives, even to his most basic sense of words. Writers make images vivid in any number of ways, one of which is by allowing into their text subtle redundancies of description which blur the distinctions between words and suggest a unity of parts. When Shakespeare speaks of “the teeming autumn big with rich increase,” or mirrors a verb with a matching adjective—wounding in Shakespeare is always done by an injurious hand—he is not merely emphasizing the selected idea by repetition, he is merging the described object’s various facets of being, appearance, and action into a single rounded essence. The autumn acts abundant (it teems), looks abundant (is big), and contains abundance (increase), which is itself abundant (rich). Each word catches the sense of the last and concentrates it; each word contains its own associations, so that what is intensified through similarity is enriched at the same time through difference. At the end of the phrase, “rich” blazes with the connotations of “teeming,” “autumn,” and “big” and adds to the mix its own connotations of wealth, luxury, the autumnal color of gold. Shakespeare, a master of rhetorical repetition, is also a master of descriptive redundancy; Joyce, who certainly inclines to the first, abhors the second almost by temperament. The metaphysical taxonomies of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas trained his visual imagination to be a compiler of aspects, a kind of Aristotelian calculator of size, shape, color, position, and temperature.
Consider his description of the “young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes” examined by Blazes Boylan in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Ulysses. Where Shakespeare’s abstract description of autumn takes on concrete vividness through the magnetic pull of the words, Joyce’s adjectives seem separated by a great amount of space. Each is terminal; each corresponds to only one aspect of the thing described. “Young juicy crinkled and plump red”: age, saturation, texture, weight, and color. Each word performs its solitary duty unassisted by the others, with the result that Boylan’s tomatoes, rather than being shown, are only subtly anatomized. (Compare D. H. Lawrence’s extraordinary description of the kangaroo with its “drooping Victorian shoulders,” or Melville’s of the shark moving under the waves with its “white gliding ghostliness of repose,” for a fine illustration of the effect of deft redundancies.)
Joyce himself was certainly aware of his dissecting inclination. He apotheosized it in the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, where, when Mr. Bloom knocks his head painfully against a sideboard, his author positively revels in the disconnect between language and sense: “The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.” No sentence has ever been less viscerally suited to its subject, which is why it makes us laugh; but surely some part of the comedy comes from its aspect as self-parody, from our sense that it is only the extreme expression of a habit of mind we have felt throughout the book. When, elsewhere in “Ithaca,” Joyce portrays Bloom unlocking a door by noting that he “raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied at its fulcrum,” one catches the sly exhilaration of a writer who, under a disciplined stylistic stratagem, has cast off all restraints.
Joyce’s lack of a natural visual sense is not an inconsiderable weakness. If we suppose that the act of reading fiction is necessarily accompanied by a sequence of images in the mind, then it is not outrageous to expect that the artist of fiction will try to make something of those images. What is made in this respect may not be the highest purpose of fiction—I think it is not—but when that purpose depends, as it does even in Joyce, on the realization of dramatic incident in the imagination, then image-making plays a role in the achievement that cannot be ignored. Even for Joyce, the novel is not merely a lyric of characters; where there is a scene, there is something more than a character’s thought to express. For this reason it seems possible that the somewhat fearsome reputation of Ulysses, the popular idea of its lofty unreadability, owes as much to its erratic attention to image as to the more widely famous difficulty of its language. Apart from a few very challenging passages, the language of Ulysses is surprisingly easy to understand: it is seldom hard to know what is happening, or at least to infer what is happening, at a given point in the book. But when we read imaginative literature we expect that, as in life, our understanding will follow our sense: that we will know what is happening because we see what is happening, and not merely because we are able to resolve the meanings of words. Joyce’s tendency in Ulysses to disregard almost all description for long stretches at a time, and his analytic vigor when he turns to it, mean that it can be very hard for a reader to envision what he supposes to be happening, and in this sense the book’s interior monologues, its rummagings through its characters’ thoughts as they respond to their experience, are precisely unlike actual experience, in which sensory perception is always immediately present. As one reads Ulysses, one’s perfectly accurate intellectual conception of a scene is frequently undermined by its vague indeterminacy, its hazy outline in the imagination; one is almost fooled into confusion by the failure of Joyce’s language to embody its meanings in images. The mind may try to make its own images out of its abstract idea of a scene, but in the same moment its abstract idea is thrown into frustration by the absence of spontaneous images to suggest it. Thus the problem one faces has less to do with any inherent difficulty in resolving Joyce’s language than with the fact that one’s mind is made to work simultaneously in two contradictory ways.
With Finnegans Wake, this problem reaches such a scale that it is almost the central fact of the writing. Here, unlike in Ulysses, Joyce’s language is at first as blank as a cliff face; a passage may be deciphered, but any singular or lucid meaning one discovers in it must be so alien to the original mode of expression that the language can really have no image-making property at all. However, in Finnegans Wake—also unlike in Ulysses—merely decoding the language is such an arduous task that one scarcely notices how little it acts on the imagination; and if one does notice, there is always Joyce’s own explanation that the book takes place at night, when “things should not be so clear.” Just as Dubliners and Portrait are conventional enough not to be unduly jeopardized by Joyce’s weakness with images, Finnegans Wake’s lovely equivocations are unconventional enough not to be jeopardized by it. It is Ulysses which stands in the balance, Ulysses which is jeopardized, Ulysses which runs the risk of being misunderstood.
Has any other book provoked such noisy extremes of opinion? The Bible has hardly been so widely loved and hated. Almost from the moment it appeared, Joyce’s book began attracting the impassioned adherents who have declared it a masterpiece of care and ordonnance, a joyous comic vision of human love and redemption. Almost from the same moment it attracted critics who have persisted, for more than eight decades, at the margin of the celebration, decrying it as a fraud perpetrated on literature, a chaos of reference to dupe the gullibility of scholars, as cold and inhuman as a glacial floor.
Taking all this in, one confesses to being puzzled by so much wildness. The weaknesses of the book, some of which I have mentioned, are so plain that it seems perverse to deny their existence; its glories, about which I shall have something more to say, seem so obvious that to miss them one must be blind. The certainty of the other makes each side a little frenzied, with the result that Ulysses, the least dogmatic of novels, has been the most dogmatically criticized. Though both sides have had a say in this condition, the dogmatism has been most pronounced among the book’s detractors, who have generally understood it less well than its enthusiasts, and been goaded to exaggeration by the feeling of missing something. Their line of criticism is very familiar, and, thanks to the minor furor of publicity surrounding the recent Bloomsday centenary—June 16, 1904, is the day on which Ulysses is supposed to take place—has been giddying the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic. (Hysterically attacking Joyce is a proven way for a moderately well-known writer to get his face in the New York Times Magazine.) It runs something like this. With Dubliners, and particularly “The Dead,” Joyce demonstrated a formidable talent for literary storytelling which he proceeded to ruin with the experimental conceit of A Portrait. Nobody actually reads Ulysses, but by establishing itself as a test of literary acumen, it has drawn a hypocritical following of insecure elites anxious to prove their own sophistication. A kind of flypaper for the pretentious and voluble, its reputation is an illusion, its acid influence responsible for the disintegration of twentieth-century literature; it is an unholy mess which could have done with a good editor. Most of all it is bankrupt of humanity, a monstrous indulgence of cleverness, essentially cruel: an unfunny, unmoving, unsympathetic piece of abstract style, the pit of the quicksand of modernism.
There is no reason, of course, that most of these arguments should disturb a lover of Ulysses. After all, thousands of people really do read the book, and thousands of people are moved by it, and no one who has read it and been moved by it should have a very difficult time disproving to her own satisfaction the assertion that she does not exist. In fact only the last few points in the screed—that >Ulysses is cold, chaotic, and abstract—touch the book directly, because only those points bear on its aesthetic success. (And those points are really the source of the rest: surely no one who had not found the book repulsive and inconceivable would resent its success enough to blame it on widespread hypocrisy; surely no one who had been able to finish the book would proclaim that no one could.) And this is why Joyce’s limitation as a writer of images is so consequential: because the confusing visual blank that hovers over so many incidents in Ulysses makes its good qualities—its comedy, its warmth, its human sympathy; its magnificent characters; even its story and its conflict—almost uniquely easy to miss.
Finding a way into fiction, discovering in oneself a potential for sympathetic response, depends on recognizing in what one reads something that resonates with reality as one has perceived it. It is not reality itself, and it need not overtly resemble it, but it must assume in the mind that mysterious part-identity with reality that is the vital condition of art. The echo of belief that fiction hopes to make us feel is called up only by the echo of reality that we hope to find in fiction. Sense perception, the means by which we know the world around us, may be simulated through language in the imagination, and the simulation—whether perfunctory, as in Thackeray or Dostoevsky, or richly detailed, as in Tolstoy or Proust—is one of the most direct and primary means by which we are made to feel the reality of fiction. In Ulysses, in the absence of sensation, one too easily feels that there is no reality at all, only a scattering of phrases, and no resonance, because the phrases fly from the imagination like iron filings from the wrong end of a magnet. A scene seems cold and lifeless which, if it could simply be looked in on, would seem moving and alive. Thus one may conclude that Ulysses is unmoving and conceptual, that there is no human feeling to be found: one detects a seeming coldness when the real problem is simply that the sympathetic thing has not been directly represented.
One short example will suffice to show what I mean. In Chapter 6, Mr. Bloom rides to a funeral in a carriage with a group of acquaintances. He watches the streets through the window as they pass. He sees a theater and has a sequence of seemingly insignificant thoughts about whether to see a play that night. The other men call out the window as if to a friend in the street, and Mr. Bloom sees a figure in a straw hat pass by them. He studies his fingernails and recalls watching his wife, Molly, dress on the night of a dance. Then the other men ask him about a concert tour which Molly, a singer, is preparing to undertake.
On the surface of this passage there is not much for the reader to catch hold of. We understand that the men are in the carriage, that Mr. Bloom looks out the window, sees Blazes Boylan’s white straw hat, scrutinizes his fingernails. We follow the dialogue between Bloom, Mr. Power, and Martin Cunningham about the concert tour. But something is missing, because there is nothing for us to see. Saint Mark’s, the railway bridge, the Queen’s Theatre, the fountain bust, the men themselves, are merely ideas; they are spectral, nominal presences, entries in an intellectual register which only dimly corresponds to a vision of the world. Bloom, whose mental activity we follow closely, looks out on a scene the appearance of which we are left to infer from his thoughts: we do not see what he sees, we do not hear what he hears. As a result the life of the scene seems kept from us, as though it held us at arm’s length. Something has eluded us, and though we have caught the outline of the events, there is nothing to reconcile our impression of arbitrariness: the scene seems merely a scattershot record of the pointless transitions of everyday life. Mr. Bloom looks down at his nails? Mr. Bloom has personal business in the County Clare? Well, why should we be made to learn it? There can be no dramatic interest in this, we conclude; this is not a coherent thing. We lay the book aside, feeling irritated at the pretense and waste of it, saying to ourselves that Joyce may have been a genius, but as Aldous Huxley observed, he must also have been one of the dullest writers ever to fondle a pen.They went past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark’s, under the railway bridge, past the Queen’s theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go see Leah tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big powerful change. Wet bright bills for next week. Fun on the Bristol. Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a drink or two. As broad as it’s long.
He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs.
Plasto’s. Sir Philip Crampton’s memorial fountain bust. Who was he?
—How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in salute.
—He doesn’t see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?
—Who? Mr Dedalus asked.
—Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.Just that moment I was thinking.
Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: spruce figure: passed.
Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body getting a bit softy. I would notice that: from remembering. What causes that? I suppose the skin can’t contract quickly enough when the flesh falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is still there. Shoulders. Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind.
He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant glance over their faces.
Mr Power asked:
—How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?
—O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It’s a good idea, you see . . .
—Are you going yourself?
—Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.
—Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now. Have you good artists?
—Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we’ll have all topnobbers. J.C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in fact.
—And madame, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and clasped them.
How different would this scene appear if we were able to see it clearly—if we had caught the tone of Mr. Power’s voice, or the light in Mr. Bloom’s eye? Can we use what we are given to imagine the scene that way? Let us consider the passage once more, with a more patient and, admittedly, a harder-staring eye. To begin with, if we had not been struggling to imagine something that would bring together all the competing data Joyce gives us, we might have noticed a hint, easily overlooked, merely the faintest of echoes from the beginning of the book: we have seen the name Boylan before. In Chapter 4, Mr. Bloom brings Molly her breakfast in bed, and with it her mail; among the letters there is one from someone called “Boylan,” and Molly pointedly tells Bloom that Boylan is bringing over a new batch of songs for her this afternoon. Bloom wonders whether Boylan has wealth. From the fact that Mr. Power brings up Molly’s singing tour immediately after seeing Boylan, it would seem that Boylan is the manager of the tour, and that this is common knowledge, at least among Bloom’s acquaintances. So the chain of associations is not haphazard after all. Looking at the theater, Bloom thinks of Molly’s performing career and remembers her appointment with Boylan: “He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs.” When the men see Boylan in the street, Bloom is startled by the coincidence: “Just that moment I was thinking.” And Mr. Power, remembering Boylan’s association with Molly, leans forward to ask about the concert tour.
If we could only have seen them—if a visible pang had widened Bloom’s eyes when he heard the name “Boylan”; if Mr. Power’s voice had warmed into a condescending lilt when he asked about the tour; if we had been given any of the details of eyes, mouth, hands, and voice by which we routinely interpret the behavior of the people around us—the hidden depth of the exchange might have seemed immediately apparent. As it is, it must simply be puzzled out, and an inattentive or distracted reader is likely to pass over it. For there is more to it still than we have understood. Mr. Bloom spies Blazes Boylan and immediately looks away from his companions, down at his hands; he seems to examine his nails. He tries to suppress his own reaction to the sight of Boylan: “My nails. I am just looking at them.” But a little gasp of thought escapes his control: “Is there anything more in him that they she sees?” “Him” is Boylan, and Bloom wonders, in a strange locution, what “they she sees” in him. But it is not strange, because he is thinking simultaneously of women in general (“they”) and Molly in particular (“she”). Boylan is attractive to women, and Bloom’s wife is attracted to him. Bloom thinks that this is because he is reputed to be a scoundrel: “Fascination. Worst man in Dublin.” At once he begins to imagine his wife’s body. He knows what will happen when Boylan visits her alone later that day; Molly will allow Boylan to seduce her. Worse still, the other men know it too: Molly’s budding relationship with Boylan is evidently not a secret. Bloom must avoid their gazes and endure his humiliation by staring at his fingernails, and when Mr. Power asks about the concert tour, interrupting Bloom to emphasize the fact that Bloom is not accompanying Molly and Boylan on their journey, and suggestively referring to Molly as madame, he is mocking Bloom for the amusement of the other men in the carriage. He is ridiculing Bloom for the infidelity of his wife.
When we read the passage again with this in mind, it is a thing transformed. We feel Bloom’s dread over his wife’s susceptibility to Boylan; we feel the mild contempt in which he is held by the other men. Bloom is trying to suffer through his day without thinking of Boylan’s impending visit to Molly; but everything he sees reminds him of it. “He’s coming in the afternoon”: a bolt of remembrance, which he tries to temper, pathetically reminding himself of the excuse Molly gave him for receiving Boylan alone: “Her songs.” When the men see Boylan, Bloom is upset (“Just that moment I was thinking”) and looks away; when he has mastered his feelings, he turns his gaze back toward them with pleasant vacancy, only to face Mr. Power’s subtle ridicule. When Mr. Power has finished, the sociable, peaceful Mr. Bloom, though an object of amusement to the other men in the carriage, merely unclasps his hands “in a gesture of soft politeness.”
A number of things should be clear from reading this excerpt this closely. First is that if the shortage of sensory detail makes the echo of reality harder to catch in Ulysses, it is nevertheless present and may be discovered through careful reading. The delicate chain of Mr. Bloom’s mental associations, uncontrollably returning to his painful awareness of Molly; the behavior of the middle-class men in the carriage, with its rude politenesses; the embarrassed equanimity of the humiliated Bloom—all are very finely observed and ring true however little they are embodied in images. Second, I think it will also be clear that the charge against Ulysses, that it is unmoving and inhuman in its subject of interest, is absurdly unfair. Mr. Bloom’s position, in love with an unfaithful wife, too well-meaning and congenial to stand up for himself, is not less poignant because Joyce refrains from melodramatizing its poignancy. Beneath the visual haze, the hapless, inquisitive and kindly figure of Leopold Bloom is one of the subtlest and best characterizations in the literature of the last century; like all great fictional characters, he seems to operate on a set of principles known in its entirety neither to the reader nor to himself. He surprises us when he least surprises himself, as when he crouches down in the museum behind a statue of a goddess to inspect the accuracy of her anatomy; and he surprises himself when he least surprises us, as when he timidly stands up to the bullying nationalist in Barney Kiernan’s pub. (In this marvelous comic scene, Mr. Bloom, in the heat of debate, defines a nation as “the same people living in the same place,” then declares when pressed, “Or also living in different places.”) Whether one likes or dislikes the style or the styles of Ulysses, and whatever one thinks of its well-known parallels to the Odyssey, one can hardly dispute the claim that Mr. Bloom is the source of a purely human interest (as, in his more restricted way, is the novel’s main supporting character, Stephen Dedalus). Ulysses is an experimental novel, in some ways one of the most experimental ever written; but the experiment is always at the service of the story and the characters. Mr. Bloom’s day of wandering Dublin, kept from going home by the knowledge of Molly’s affair, provides the book with its representational purpose, and its compassionate delight in Mr. Bloom’s character charges it at every point with the feeling that it seeks to share with us.
And this is the most important conclusion we may draw from our extended reading: that if Joyce’s clouded vision is a flaw in the book’s presentation, it is a flaw that gives life to its own compensation. Bloom’s heavy-falling thoughts—“Just that moment I was thinking”—have a power which is different from, not less than, the power of a more accessible narrative style. Joyce refracts the outside world through the prism of his characters’ minds; he strikes style like a tuning fork to sound their constant notes. The direction of a great novelist’s innovation is often away from his weaknesses, and by showing us reality in its responsive negative, by implying the world through its presence in the thoughts of his characters, Joyce devises an escape from his limitations as a descriptive writer that fully engages his strength as a writer of character. In the same moment he essentially invents a new kind of reading, in which the note of reality enters, not at once through the visual imagination, but slowly, through flashes of insight in the pause after deductive thought. We must judge fiction not by its success in this or that area, but by its total effect. If the difficulties of Ulysses are the price of the inexpressible joy of reading Mr. Bloom, it is a price we are happy to pay.
Fiction at its greatest allows us to hold a whole world suspended in our minds, bringing into the mind a singular apprehension of what normally lies outside it. Ulysses does this, as Melville writes that fiction should do it, by bringing us nature “unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed.” It does so with great warmth, good humor, and a compassionate vision of humankind. Pass by the book’s detractors. These qualities are too rare in fiction not to cherish them wherever they are found.
The Hudson Review Vol. LVII, No. 2 (Summer 2004)
Copyright © 2004 by The Hudson Review