ULYSSES^[1]
LE 403-409

Pollwn d' anqrώpwn iden astea kai noon egnw

All men should ‘Unite to give praise to Ulysses’; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders; I do not mean that they should all praise it from the same viewpoint; but all serious men of letters, whether they write out a critique or not, will certainly have to make one for their own use. To begin with matters lying outside dispute I should say that Joyce has taken up the art of writing where Flaubert left it. In Dubliners and The Portrait he had not exceeded the Trois Contes or L’Education; in Ulysses he has carried on a process begun in Bouvard et Pécuchet; he has brought it to a degree of greater efficiency, of greater compactness; he has swallowed the Tentation de St Antoine whole, it serves as comparison for a single episode in Ulysses. Ulysses has more form than any novel of Flaubert’s. Cervantes had parodied his predecessors and might be taken as basis of comparison for another of Joyce’s modes of concision, but where Cervantes satirized one manner of folly and one sort of highfalutin’ expression, Joyce satirizes at least seventy, and includes a whole history of English prose, by implication.

Messrs Bouvard and Pécuchet are the basis of democracy; Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the man in the street, the next man, the public, not our public, but Mr Wells’ public; for Mr Wells he is Hocking’s public, he is l’homme moyen sensuel; he is also Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, Everyman, and ‘the goat’ … polla ... paqein ... kata qumon

Flaubert having recorded provincial customs in Bovary and city habits in L’Education, set out to complete his record of nineteenth-century life by presenting all sorts of things that the average man of the period would have had in his head; Joyce has found a more expeditious method of summary and analysis. After Bouvard and his friend have retired to the country Flaubert’s incompleted narrative drags; in Ulysses anything may occur at any moment; Bloom suffers kata thumon; ‘every fellow mousing round for his liver and his lights’: he is polumetis and a receiver of all things.

Joyce’s characters not only speak their own language, but they think their own language. Thus Master Dignam stood looking at the poster: ‘two puckers stripped to their pelts and putting up their props...

‘Gob that’d be a good pucking match to see, Myler Keogh, that’s the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bob entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. When is it? May the twenty second. Sure, the blooming thing is all over.’

But Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed: ‘And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The House was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughn would come again to preach. O, yes, a very great success. A wonderful man really.’

Father Conmee later ‘reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs where men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.’

The dialects are not all local, on page 406 we hear that:

‘Elijah is coming. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Come on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled,peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from ‘Frisco Beach to Vladivostok. The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet, and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle Almighty God.... Not half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.’

This variegation of dialects allows Joyce to present his matter, his tones of mind, very rapidly; it is no more succinct than Flaubert’s exhaustion of the relation of Emma and her mother-in-law; or of Pére Rouault’s character, as epitomized in his last letter to Emma; but it is more rapid than the record of ‘received ideas’ in Bouvard et Pécuchet.

Ulysses is, presumably, as unrepeatable as Tristram Shandy; I mean you cannot duplicate it; you can’t take it as a ‘model’; as you could Bovary; but it does complete something begun in Bouvard; and it does add definitely to the international store of literary technique.

Stock novels, even excellent stock novels, seem infinitely long, and infinitely encumbered, after one has watched Joyce squeeze the last drop out of a situation, a science, a state of mind, in half a page, in a catechismic question and answer, in a tirade á la Rabelais.

Rabelais himself rests, he remains, he is too solid to be diminished by any pursuer; he was a rock against the follies of his age; against ecclesiastic theology, and more remarkably, against the blind idolatry of the classics just coming into fashion. He refused the lot, lock, stock, and barrel, with a greater heave than Joyce has yet exhibited; but I can think of no other prose author whose proportional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of Ulysses.

James (H.) speaks with his own so beautiful voice, even sometimes when his creations should be using their own; Joyce speaks if not with the tongue of men and angels, at least with a many-tongued and multiple language, of small boys, street preachers, of genteel and ungenteel, of bowsers and undertakers, of Gertie McDowell and Mr Deasey.

One reads Proust and thinks him very accomplished; one reads H. J. and knows that he is very accomplished; one begins Ulysses and thinks, perhaps rightly, that Joyce is less so; that he is at any rate less gracile; and one considers how excellently both James and Proust ‘convey their atmospheres’; yet the atmosphere of the Gerty-Nausikaa episode with its echoes of vesper service is certainly ‘conveyed’, and conveyed with a certitude and efficiency that neither James nor Proust have excelled.

And on the home stretch, when our present author is feeling more or less relieved that the weight of the book is off his shoulders, we find if not gracile accomplishments, at any rate such acrobatics, such sheer whoops and hoop-las and trapeze turns of technique that it would seem rash to dogmatize concerning his limitations. The whole of him, on the other hand, lock, stock, and gunny-sacks is wholly outside H. J.’s compass and orbit, outside Proust’s circuit and orbit.

If it be charged that he knows ‘that provincialism which must be forever dragging in allusions to some book or local custom’, it must also be admitted that no author is more lucid or more explicit in presenting things in such a way that the imaginary Chinaman or denizen of the forty-first century could without works of reference gain a very good idea of the scene and habits portrayed.

Poynton with its spoils forms a less vivid image than Bloom’s desired two story dwelling house and appurtenances. The recollections of In Old Madrid are not at any rate highbrow; the ‘low back car’ is I think local. But in the main, I doubt if the local allusions interfere with a general comprehension. Local details exist everywhere; one understands them mutatis mutandis and any picture would be perhaps faulty without them. One must balance obscurity against brevity. Concision itself is an obscurity for the dullard.

In this super-novel our author has also poached on the epic, and has, for the first time since 1321, resurrected the infernal figures; his furies are not stage figures; he has, by simple reversal, caught back the furies, his flagellant Castle ladies. Telemachus, Circe, the rest of the Odyssean company, the noisy cave of Aeolus gradually place themselves in the mind of the reader, rapidly or less rapidly according as he is familiar or unfamiliar with Homer. These correspondences are part of Joyce’s mediaevalim and are chiefly his own affair, a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only. The result is a triumph in form, in balance, a main schema, with continuous inweaving and arabesque.

The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only criticism of any work of art that is of any permanent or even moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job; and not, not ever from the young gentlemen who make generalities about the creator. Laforgue’s Salomé is the real criticism of Salammbo; Joyce and perhaps Henry James are critics of Flaubert. To me, as poet, the Tentations is jettatura, it is the effect of Flaubert’s time on Flaubert; I mean he was interested in certain questions now dead as mutton, because he lived in a certain period; fortunately he managed to bundle these matters into one or two books and keep them out of his work on contemporary subjects; I set it aside as one sets aside Dante’s treatise De Aqua et Terra; as something which matters now only as archaeology. Joyce, working in the same medium as Flaubert, makes the intelligent criticism: ‘We might believe in it if Flaubert had first shown us St Antoine in Alexandria looking at women and jewellers’ windows.’

Ulysses contains 732 double sized pages, that is to say it is about the size of four ordinary novels, and even a Iist of its various points of interest would probably exceed my allotted space; in the Cyclops episode we have a measuring of the difference between reality, and reality as represented in various lofty forms of expression; the satire on the various dead manners of language culminates in the execution scene, blood and sugar stewed into clichés and rhetoric; just what the public deserves, and just what the public gets every morning with its porridge, in the Daily Mail and in sentimento-rhetorical journalism; it is perhaps the most savage bit of satire we have had since Swift suggested a cure for famine in Ireland. Henry James complained of Baudelaire, ‘Le Mal, you do yourself too much honour ... our impatience is of the same order as ... if for the "Flowers of Good" one should present us with a rhapsody on plum-cake and eau de cologne.’ Joyce has set out to do an inferno, and he has done an inferno.

He has presented Ireland under British domination, a picture so veridic that a ninth rate coward like Shaw (Geo. B.) dare not even look it in the face. By extension he has presented the whole occident under the domination of capital. The details of the street map are local but Leopold Bloom (né Virag) is ubiquitous. His spouse Gea-Tellus the earth symbol is the soil from which the intelligence strives to leap, and to which it subsides in saeculum saeculorum. As Molly she is a coarse-grained bitch, not a whore, an adulteress, il y en a. Her ultimate meditations are uncensored (bow to psychoanalysis required at this point). The ‘censor’ in the Freudian sense is removed, Molly’s night-thoughts differing from those versified in Mr Young’s once ubiquitous poem are unfolded, she says ultimately that her body is a flower; her last word is affirmative. The manners of the genteel society she inhabits have failed to get under her crust, she exists presumably in Patagonia as she exists in Jersey City or Camden.

And the book is banned in America, where every child of seven has ample opportunity to drink in the details of the Arbuckle case, or two hundred other equodorous affairs from the 270,000,000 copies of the 300,000 daily papers which enlighten us. One returns to the Goncourt’s question, ‘Ought the people to remain under a literary edict? Are there classes unworthy, misfortunes too low, dramas too ill set, catastrophes, horrors too devoid of nobility? Now that the novel is augmented, now that it is the great literary form ... the social inquest, for psychological research and analysis, demanding the studies and imposing on its creator the duties of science ... seeking facts ... whether or no the novelist is to write with the accuracy, and thence with the freedom of the savant, the historian, the physician?’

Whether the only class in America that tries to think is to be hindered by a few cranks, who cannot, and dare not interfere with the leg shows on Broadway? Is any one, for the sake of two or three words which every small boy has seen written on the walls of a privy, going to wade through two hundred pages on consubstantiation or the biographic bearing of Hamlet? And ought an epoch-making report on the state of the human mind in the twentieth century (first of the new era) to be falsified by the omission of these half a dozen words, or by a pretended ignorance of extremely simple acts. Bloom’s day is uncensored, very well. The faecal analysis, in the hospital around the corner, is uncensored. No one but a Presbyterian would contest the utility of the latter exactitude. A great literary masterwork is made for minds quite as serious as those engaged in the science of medicine. The anthropologist and sociologist have a right to equally accurate documents, to equally succinct reports and generalizations, which they seldom get, considering the complexity of the matter in hand, and the idiocy of current superstitions.

A Fabian milk report is of less use to a legislator than the knowledge contained in L’Education Sentimentale, or in Bovary. The legislator is supposed to manage human affairs, to arrange for comity of human agglomerations. Le beau monde gouverne - or did once - because it had access to condensed knowledge, the middle ages were ruled by those who could read, an aristocracy received Macchiavelli’s treatise before the serfs. A very limited plutocracy now gets the news of which a fraction (not likely to throw too much light upon proximate markets) is later printed in newspapers. Jefferson was perhaps the last American official to have any general sense of civilization. Molly Bloom judges Griffith derisively by ‘the sincerity of his trousers’, and the Paris edition of the Tribune tells us that the tailors’ congress has declared Pres. Harding to be our best dressed Chief Magistrate.

Be it far from me to depreciate the advantages of having a president who can meet on equal trouserial terms such sartorial paragons as Mr Balfour and Lord (late Mr) Lee of Fareham (and Checquers) but be it equidistant also from me to disparage the public utility of accurate language which can be attained only from literature, and which the succinct J. Caesar, or the lucid Macchiavelli, or the author of the Code Napoléon, or Thos. Jefferson, to cite a local example, would have in no ways despised. Of course it is too soon to know whether our present ruler takes an interest in these matters; we know only that the late pseudo-intellectual Wilson did not, and that the late bombastic Teddy did not, and Taft, McKinley, Cleveland, did not, and that, as far back as memory serves us no American president has ever uttered one solitary word implying the slightest interest in, or consciousness of, the need for an intellectual or literary vitality in America. A sense of style could have saved America and Europe from Wilson; it would have been useful to our diplomats. The mot juste is of public utility. I can’t help it. I am not offering this fact as a sop to aesthetes who want all authors to be fundamentally useless. We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate. The specimen of fungus given in my February letter shows what happens to language when it gets into the hands of illiterate specialists.

Ulysses furnishes matter for a symposium rather than for a single letter, essay, or review.

This formed the author's 'Paris Letter' to The Dial, New York, LXXII, 6 (June 1922). Dated 'May 1922'.

[1] This formed the author's ‘Paris Letter' to The Dial, New York, LXXII, 6 (June 1922). Dated ‘May 1922'.