James Joyce. Volume 2: 1928-41 by Deming Robert;

Author:Deming, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

267. Pound on Ulysses and Wyndham Lewis

1933

Extract from ‘Past History’, English Journal, xxii (May 1933), 354–5 [349–58]. Reprinted in College English, xxii (November 1960), 81–6.

…The parallels with the Odyssey are mere mechanics, any blockhead can go back and trace them. Joyce had to have a shape on which to order his chaos. This was a convenience, though the abrupt break after the Telemachiad (Stephen’s chapters) is not particularly felicitous, I mean that to the reader who is really reading Ulysses as a book and not as a design or a demonstration or a bit of archaeological research, this chop-off gives no pleasure and has no particular intrinsic merit (tho’ it has parallels with musical construction and can be justified by a vast mass of theory)….

Joyce has made, to date, 3 contributions to literature that seem likely to be there for as long as any of the rest of it. His last decade has been devoted to experiment, which probably concerns himself and such groups of writers as think they can learn something from it. It can hardly be claimed that the main design of his later work emerges above the detail….

Mr. Wyndham Lewis’ specific criticism of Ulysses can now be published. It was made in 1922 or’ 23. ‘Ungh!’ he grunted, ‘He [Joyce] don’t seem to have any very new point of view about anything.’ Such things are a matter of degree. There is a time for a man to experiment with his medium. When he has a mastery of it; or when he has developed it, and extended it, he or a successor can apply it.

Ulysses is a summary of pre-war Europe, the blackness and mess and muddle of a ‘civilization’ led by disguised forces and a bought press, the general sloppiness, the plight of the individual intelligence in that mess! Bloom very much is the mess.

I think anybody is a fool who does not read Dubliners, The Portrait, and Ulysses for his own pleasure, and—coming back to the present particular and specialized audience—anyone who has not read these three books is unfit to teach literature in any high school or college. I don’t mean simply English or American literature but any literature, for literature is not split up by political frontiers.

I can not see that Mr. Joyce’s later work concerns more then a few specialists, and I can not see in it either a comprehension of, or a very great preoccupation with, the present, which may indicate an obtuseness on my part, or may indicate that Mr. Joyce’s present and my present are very different one from the other, and, further, that I can not believe in a passive acceptance.

In judging the modality of another intelligence one possibly errs in supposing that a man whose penetrations and abilities exceed one’s own in a given direction shd. at least equal them in some other. In other words, the times we live in seem to me more interesting than the period of what seems to me reminiscence—which (to me) appears to dominate Anna Livia and the rest of the Joycean curley-cues.

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