The reticence of Ulysses PERSONAL COLUMN

ANTHONY BURGESS

I write this from Malta, which has been identified by some with the island of Ogygia,

where Ulysses was detained for seven years

by the goddess Calypso (if Ogygia was not Malta, it must have been the subsidiary islet of Gozo). I am exiled from England for a year, so I can only imagine the pleasure with which Joyceans have been

able to see the novel Ulysses, in its Penguin format, put forth like flowers all over Eng- land. Here in Malta we are unlikely to have

this ten-shilling people's edition. The censor- ship is very powerful, and it even had a nibble at one of my own blameless works, a novel praised for its eschatological content

by the Jesuit periodical The Month. Admit- tedly, it was the French translation of the

book that the censors pored over, there being something essentially obscene about French. But Desmond Morris, owner of one

of Malta's finest mansions, found the cen- sors intransigent over his own The Naked Ape, Malta being the only country of the free world unwilling to admit it.

Some of us are becoming angry with the censorship. The university librarian has com- plained publicly that certain technical works,

needed for the department of psychology, have been impounded. The other week, Life magazine came to us with loving felt-

pen hatching-over of certain anatomical commonplaces in photographs of a pro- duction of a Greek tragedy. The book-

shc.-s are full of Denise Robins, Malta, whicil got the George Cross for bravery, must be protected from Life, life.

This is not really my point, except in so far as Malta reminds me of England at

the time when I first read Ulysses. I was

sixteen, and I had imported the Odyssey Press edition of the work, all neatly filleted and distributed over my body. The thrill of eating that forbidden fruit in my bed- room is hard to recapture now, but, callow and healthily smutty as I was, I was im- pressed by the essentially artistic use to which Joyce put obscenity. I am no longer precisely sure what are the boundaries of the verbally disgusting, but I think our Maltese censors might hover with their Biros over The snotgreen sea. The scroMmtight- ening sea' in the first chapter. But how apt those epithets are. Mr Bloom has: on his way home with his breakfast kidney, a vision of his ancestral lands: The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere; It lay -there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world'. Think of an uncensorable synonym —womb, matrix? None has the hardness, the elementality, the disgust.

The Maltese search for further dirt might (since the obscene is; by definition, the dis- gusting). be rewarded by Mr Bloom's two-

page visit to the outside. jakes. He has con- stipation: he reads, appropriately, Tit-Bits.

Cut out these pages, as Ezra Pound did on

the first serialisation of Ulysses, and you Cut out essential symbolitm. Mr Bloom is Ulysses in Ogygia, a man of the East de- tained in the West by singing Calypso, the wife who will later turn into Penelope. Calypso's land is full of caves, Mr Bloom is haunted by the word metempsychosis. The soul of man moves from body to body,

which means from cave to cave, hiding from the primal or ultimate light. Zolaesque naturalism might regard an after-breakfast evacuation as something to take for granted. So might Joycean naturalism. But the dark cave of the yard-toilet is too good a symbol not to use.

The more one reads through Ulysses, the more one is surprised by a reticence that,

granted Joyce's refusal to submit to the normal taboos of 1922 fiction, seems almost prudish. There is nothing to stop him filling Bloom's interior monologues with dirty words and erotic desiderations, but he avoids frankness for frankness's sake. The auto- erotic act that Bloom performs on the beach is symbolically suggested by a distant fire- work display, and even if we object to the act at all, Joyce is justified by the needs of his plot. Bloom has to enter the land of Circe, where men are turned into swine. He alone, cunning Ulysses, must be impervious to sorcery. Circe's land is, in 1904 Dublin, a street of brothels. Bloom, his erotic itch already artificially appeased, walks through it unenticed. He has put forth the white flower moly.

When, in this brothel scene, a couple of British tommies assault young Stephen, Telemachus to Ulysses-Bloom, language ex- plodes for the first time into violent obscenity. We are shocked, and are meant to be shocked, but the shock has nothing to do with the breaking of a taboo. It is rather that, with the book's first and only incursion into physical violence (we can ignore the throwing of a biscuit-tin at Bloom by the Irish patriot who is also Poly- phemus), the careful deployment of exact language has to break down. The only ver- bal equivalent of violence, which Joyce abhorred in life as much as in art, is mind- less obscenity. Modify the obscenity, censor it, and the climax is muffled.

There is a curious irony in the fact that the victory of two highly moral books over the state's long oppression should open the gates to the indiscriminate use of literary obscenity. Neither Lady Chatterley's Lover nor Ulysses is indiscriminate in its use of four-letter words. Lawrence, cut off from English usage by a long exile and perhaps protected from street-dirt by a doting mother, made the semantic error of trying to employ army language in a context of love and tenderness. But he was a puritan, and he would have been shocked by what young American authors are now free to do. Joyce had something of the tight-lipped Jesuit in him. He was a gentleman, given to the use of honorifics, distrustful- of over- familiarity, far from loose-mouthed how- ever much he drank. He would have been disgusted to see one magazine called Fuck You and another called Horseshit. • For, as every ex-soldier knows, once you admit verbal obscenity you admit it every-

where. It becomes debased, it loses all force and, worst of all, it ceases to have much aesthetic value. A good deal of present-day 'permissive' writing admittedly does no more than record the speech of the low. I heard a boy in Brooklyn ask another what the time was. He got the reply: -`0h, four o'clock, or some shit like that.' But, once the speech of the low has been set down, the reader automatically ignores the purely

decorative obscenities: he reads them as Malays read punctuation-words like maka.

Joyce and Lawrence were concerned with the serious, not flippant, use of obscenities: every dirty word had to tell, being trans- muted into an exact technicality or else into a symbol of mindlessness.

The worst of all revolutions is that their high ideals become debased by mediocrities. Once a writer is allowed to set down freely

what was formerly taboo, there will be writers who gain reputation solely from the

breaking of taboos. Art is not a two-way mirror on a brothel ceiling, nor is it a cachette full of four-letter words. Art is the imposition of a pattern on the whole of life, which is only partly sex and swearing. ,,If we are concerned with aesthetic effects, we shall get them best through reticence.

Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy has no de- scriptions, either naturalistic or symbolic, of the sexual act, but, at a very late point in the story, the husband and wife whose story it is go into their bedroom and, a little later, come out again. The effect is far more devastating than anything in An American Dream.

I myself, as a practising novelist, am not altogether happy about the new freedom that the Ulysses and Lady Chatterley cases have given to the writer. I wrote my Inside Mr Enderby when four-letter words were still forbidden, and had to be content with locutions like 'For cough'. When I wrote Enderby Outside, there was no need for such orthographical squeamishness, but I kept to 'For cough'. I clung to the taboo because I enjoyed the ingenuity of getting round the taboo. I would still- have a character call somebody a `arkin Kant than spell it out in the casual manner of our permissive era. Sex and the vocabulary of sex, however metaphorical its use, seem to me too powerful and important to be thrown around like the counters of a child- ren's game. To turn the female pudenda into a German philosopher is an act of trans- literation which keeps the anatomical term pure for more serious use—like that of Joyce in Bloom's broodings over the dead lands.

I am not, of _course, suggesting that the free world turn back the clock. and be- come a sort of felt-pencilled Malta. I think merely that, having gained their freedom, writers might try sometimes to forget that - they have gained it and see what can be done within -the limits of a selft-imposed censorship—in other words, to be like Joyce in Ulysses. One valuable lesson I learned when I studied orchestration' was that the effect of the percussion instruments diminished with the frequency of their use, and that a gong, for instance, must only strike once if it is to be taken seriously. I fear that our post-Joyce freedom may re- sult in both -literary sex and literary obscenity becoming, like •a gong on its twentieth striking, virtually inaudible. Ulysses, which teaches so many great artistic lessons, teaches us to give the percussion- players more rest than noise.