James Joyce. Volume I: 1907-27 by Deming Robert;

Author:Deming, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1970-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Mr. Joyce does none of these things. He is the extreme individualist. He acknowledges no social morality, and he completely rejects the claim of social morality to determine what he shall, or shall not, write. He is the egocentric rebel in excelsis, the arch-esoteric. European! He is the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky. But he is so individual that very few people will know when the bomb has exploded. His intention, so far as he has any social intention, is completely anarchic. But in order to be a successful anarchist you must work within the comprehension of society. You have to use the time-tables and the language of ordinary men. By the excess of his anarchy, Mr. Joyce makes himself socially harmless. There is not the faintest need to be concerned about his influence. He will have some, no doubt; but it will be canalized and concentrated. The head that is strong enough to read Ulysses will not be turned by it.

Upon such a head, indeed, the influence of Ulysses may be wholly excellent. For the driving impulse of this remarkable book is an immense, an unprecedented, liberation of suppressions… Ulysses is, fundamentally (though it is much besides), an immense, a prodigious self-laceration, the tearing-away from himself, by a half-demented man of genius, of inhibitions and limitations which have grown to be flesh of his flesh. And those who read it will profit by the vicarious sacrifice.

But limitations and inhibitions are necessary to the European. Not, indeed, the extraordinary ones which oppressed the author of Ulysses, the explosiveness of whose anarchy is in direct proportion to the closeness of the constraint, but some. The best European is the one who bears his restrictions with the best grace, as recognizing their necessity. Mr. Joyce’s book will possibly serve others as an indication of the limits they must not pass. It may help them to free themselves of inhibitions which are really destructive of vitality, and, at the same time, make it easier for them to accept those which are the conditions of civilization, and perhaps of art itself. For just as Mr. Joyce is in rebellion against the social morality of civilization, he is in rebellion against the lucidity and comprehensibility of civilized art.… Still, if we ask the essential question: Is Ulysses a reflection of life through an individual consciousness, there can be no doubt of the reply. It is. It is a reflection of life through a singularly complex consciousness; and this reflection is concentrated and crystallized into a day of the existence of three human beings: Stephen Dedalus (the hero of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Leopold Bloom, a Hungarian Jew by descent, now an advertisement canvasser in Dublin, and Bloom’s wife, Marion. One might almost say that all the thoughts and all the experiences of those beings, real or imaginary, from their waking to their sleeping on a spring day in Dublin in 1904, are somehow given by Mr.

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