Roger Scruton on James Joyce

It is easier for the ordinary English reader to come to terms with Joyce than it is for many English critics. Joyce's writings are everywhere ironical, but nowhere satirical; they contain characters but no drama; pathos, but no true suffering. They are ex- ecuted in a bewildering variety of styles, richly studded with symbols, images and arcane devices; but at the same time it does not seem possible to extract from them any definite moral purpose. In shori, they are a delight to the scholar but an anomaly to the critic. We should not be surprised, therefore, to be told that, in frustrating the ex- pectations of criticism, Joyce damaged the artistic quality of his novels and that his work is so heavily riddled with ambiguity that there is no way of knowing how to read it. Mr Gross—in an admirably written and intelligent study—shows a great deal of sympathy with this view, while continuing, unfortunately, to believe that Joyce's stylistic and technical eccentricities are compatible with an orthodox reading of the novels in terms of character and plot.

Gross tackles his subject bravely, con- fronting many of the fundamental questions which Joycean scholars avoid. But in his lucid discussion of these questions, he misconstrues a great deal of Joyce's mean- ing. Readers of Ulysses, for example, face the following dilemma : either Bloom is an adequate hero, and the sole task of the book is to display his day's adventure; in which case what is the point of the structural sym- bolism? Or else the structure itself is the point of interest, in which case the book must lack a centre. Gross takes a beneficent view of Bloom—he is the `good man' Joyce intended him to be, passive but well- intentioned, not a modern Everyman, but a fair representant, nonetheless, of 'ordinary, inartistic humanity'. (According to Gross this makes Ulysses one of the most democratic of modern novels—an unusually eccentric non sequitur.) As a result, Gross is impatient with the Homeric aspect of Ulysses, and with the elaborate pattern of symbolism (revealed by Joyce himself to Stuart Gilbert, one of his earliest interpreters) which remains so conspicuously absent from an ordinary reading of the book. Gross argues that the book's success is to be judged on the level of the Bloomsday story, and fails to carry over into the realm of myth; that Joyce's allegory is too cerebral and con- trived; and that it is impossible to use mere technical devices to impose on the quotidian adventures of a modern secular man the heroic structure which his experience denies.

The trouble lies more with the incidental symbolism than with the -Homeric parallel. Mrs Bloom is not only Penelope but also, ac- cording to Gilbert, the Flesh, the Earth, and even Gca-Tellus, the Ancestral Mother of All Things. Gross retorts that she is simply an unamiable and slatternly adulteress.

This is an extreme view, although in face of the excesses of Joycean scholarship one feels a certain sympathy with it. Yet we must remind ourselves how much the Homeric parallel contributes to the impact of Ulysses. It would be wrong to think of the parallel as a clumsy attempt to vindicate Bloom's ex- perience through its relation to some more heroic universal For in fact a contrast is being pointed, and irony is being used to point it. If critics fail to see this it is because for Joyce irony involves the acceptance, not the rejection, of its object. As for the in- cidental symbolism, this is unobtrusive, and is justifiable merely as an artist's aide- mbttoire. The sequence of bodily organs, of arts, techniques and colours, the strange at- tempts at literary mimesis (as in the Fuga per Canonem of the Sirens episode), are all simply. parts of the linear variation essential to an episodic structure. If they present a difficulty it is that of attempting to construe a psychological novel in other than dramatic terms. Yet when a single day's experi- ence is recounted as a 'comic epic in prose'. all real dramatic conflict is curtailed. in Ulysses nothing can be put to the test; there are no moral choices to be made and no great adversity to face up to. When Bloom

and Stephen meet at last, the imaginary nar- rator of 'Ithaca' contrives, in a series of devastating questions and answers, to destroy the sense that anything has passed between them. Dramatic possibilities are deliberately neutralised (no relationship could be formed in this meeting that is not sentimental or banal) and it would be a monstrous disproportion if Bloom's ex- perience should suddenly break through the boundary of day-to-day occurrences. Yet, with a characteristic inattention to Joyce's irony, Gross considers that something might have happened between Bloom and Stephen, and that indeed, in a mysterious way, something did happen.

It is true, of course, that Stephen's presence elicits from Bloom an important feeling. In Stephen's company Bloom senses an ache of paternal responsibility. He sees himself as an individual standing against the current of mere animal life, inheriting con- sciousness and passing it on. But Stephen is not the object of this feeling, which preceded their meeting and which is wholly characteristic of Bloom. It is in the light of this experience, indeed, that Molly Bloom's soliloquy is to be understood. Molly exists outside the realm of moral knowledge, im- mersed in sensuality, indifferently reflecting the unconscious currents of organic life. She resents Bloom, who moves in the sphere of personal choice and social struggle. But she complements him too. Her thoughts drift at last towards a vagrant acceptance of her hus- band as she falls asleep beside him.

Perhaps it was excessive of Joyce to refer to so many female archetypes. But Molly's feelings are as typical of her sex as Bloom's are of his. She is the perfect counterpart to Bloom, experiencing the feminine micro- cosm, just as he experiences in a complete but diminutive way the fact of being male. There is a natural place for Joyce's sym- bolism which does not require us to give way to `Molliolatry', as Gross derisively calls it. The book itself explains the symbols; it is not explained by them.

This is something which commentators on Finnegans Wake too readily forget. Gross thinks that Joyce is to blame if his most difficult work lies buried beneath a heap of scholarship and if in Finnegans Wake the symbolism is no longer self-explanatory. The references to books, political events and mythologies which are central to an un- derstanding of the work, are, he claims, too private for the effort of understanding to be justified. Many will find Gross's arguments convincing—they are put forward with characteristic vigour and intelligence. But they are one-sided and provide no alternative approach to Finnegans Wake.

Gross contends that 'however great its curiosity-value, as a work of art on the scale which Joyce intended the Wake stands or

falls by its central myth But what is this central myth? So many myths are woven in- to the fabric of the work that it is very hard to think of any one as central. Gross joins with most commentators in assuming that the content of the book is to be explained in terms of the cyclical view of history and the cabbalistic mumbo-jumbo which evidently dictated to Joyce the particular sequence in which episodes occur. It would seem to follow that the book cannot be built on one particular myth—that its content is only the form of a myth, into which myths and characters can disappear at will. In a sense, of course, there are characters and episodes, (thanks to Campbell and Robinson's brilliant Skeleton Key we can be reasonably sure of many of these). But each character obscures another, and behind each episode lies another, less concrete; nothing occurs in the book which does not disintegrate on closer scrutiny into endless strata of fact and fable. Every certainty the reader is offered stands proxy for a greater doubt.

Such an extraordinary way of presenting a novel cannot depend on the myth which it is supposed to enact. For nothing is enacted. Myth has entered Joyce's thinking in an un- familiar and essentially anti-dramatic way. In Finnegans Wake myth is not embodied in character. On the contrary, human character is absorbed into fable, fable into myth, myth into symbol, and symbol itself gives way at last to a bare struggle between consciousness and sleep. As a result there can be no dramatic conflict. If 'opposites are recon- ciled' in Finnegans Wake it is for this reason only and not on account of any doctrine Written into the imagery of the work. The idea of such a doctrine as a structural prin- ciple (dictatipg the activities of a thousand Shems and Shauns) is really very misleading, for it does not tell us how to read the book. Is it true? Is it false? Is it being enacted here? Or here? Those most responsible for Gross's reservations are the scholars (such as James Atherton and Clive Hart) who insist that we should approach Finnegans Wake in the light of certain structural axioms and motifs—the polarity of opposites, the cycle of history, the necessary dependence of part on whole (all the banalities of occultism are there).

It is impossible to read Finnegans Wake as a dramatisation of these doctrines, in the way that the Ring is in part a dramatisation of Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Will. No interpretation in epic or dramatic terms seems to produce anything but useless Pedantry. Much of the book reads, in fact, like a parody of the modern Joycean scholar relentlessly hunting 'in the fragments of a scribbled manuscript for the secret of Earwicker's crime. Like the hen which Pecked Anna Livia's letter from the dungheap, Gross sets about unearthing Joyce's book from its mound of com- mentaries. But like the hen he leaves only a scratched and unreadable palimpsest. Fin- negans Wake has no central myth and no dramatic meaning. We can no more be interested in Earwicker as a character than in the Fisher-King of Eliot's Waste Land. Joyce

gave many useless and confusing clues to his acolytes, and perhaps he is to blame if the lyric quality of his masterpiece is still ignored. But he did once try to convey to Eugene Jolas that the real heroes of his book could only be characterised as 'Time and the river and the mountain'.

One feels that, in the struggle between Joyce and the ordinary reader, Gross has been too eager to take the latter's side. One senses too the effect of recent biographical criticism, in particular of Ellmann. Ell- mann's book is so admirably complete that in many ways one can only think of it as a model of what a biography should not be.

The scholarship is not used in support of any particular vision of Joyce's work, and the work is made to seem a by-product of other interests, and it is, for example, possible to

follow Gross in seeing Dubliners as a work of satire only if the unassimilated bitterness

of this part of Joyce's life (as Ellmann paints it) is allowed to override the settled irony with which the book is written.

In the Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus makes the much quoted pro-

nouncement that The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring

his fingernails'. This echoes the Flaubert of the Correspondance, and makes explicit the

Flaubertian objectivity which remained part of Joyce's ambition. Now Gross—seeing the book in terms of fantasies which Ellmann has made clear to us—is driven to deny that

any objectivity exists. Yet if objectivity is not in the book, it should be a reading of the Portrait that persuades us of this, not a knowledge of irrelevant biographical ma- terial. The confusion comes out in various ways. After discussing the Portrait, Gross

concludes that, while the first two thirds is completely successful, the book becomes suddenly contestable as Stephen enters his adolescence and his mature personality

begins to show. For Stephen is still the un- disputed hero of the book, and nothing reminds us that we are not to accept him at his own valuation. But we can hardly do so—he is a 'second-rate aesthete', sterile, ar- rogant and rather repulsive. Are we then to regard the final sections as ironic? Hardly, Gross argues, for it would be odd to dispatch in such detail so small a victim.

There is something absurd in regarding Stephen as a victim, let alone a 'small' one. Is he any 'smaller' than (the more virtuous) David Copperfield, or the Griine Heinrich of Keller's romance? It is strange that Gross should have ignored the sensitivity, single- mindedness and social isolation which Joyce is at such pains to portray. These certainly are in the book, and there is irony too; but it is the irony of Flaubert, the irony which 'n'enleve rien an pathetique'. Joyce followed Flaubert's unwritten precept : never use language that will show you superior to the feelings you are trying to ex- press—let feeling show itself. In particular, do not portray the experience of an adoles- cent in terms of the intellectual and moral framework of adult life. For Joyce there was only one possibility : Stephen's remarkable mental life must reveal itself in its own arch and exquisite accents. The success of the book lies in its tact—a tact which en- couraged Joyce to abandon the heroics of Stephen Hero and follow more closely the manner of L'Education Sentimentale. Stephen's language is both remote and Mov- ing; it is the callow intellectualism of an adolescent which has all the precision and single-mindedness characteristic of sincere belief. The mistake comes in thinking that because the material of the novel is autobiographical, the language must be the language of the writer himself. But it is no more Joyce's than is the language of Bloom's monologue interieure, or the language of the sickly girl's romance which recounts Gerty MacDowell's experience in Ulysses.

Roger Sermon is reviewing regularly for the SPECTATOR and is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge