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Ulysses and the Impasse of Individualism


ISSUE:  Autumn 1941

For James Joyce one accepts the prevailing formula: he found life a chaotic whirlpool of contradictions, without pattern or direction. In order to achieve pattern, he retreated further and further into a subjective world which he could control. But the pattern which at last satisfied him proved unintelligible to virtually everybody else. It has not afforded comfort either to those who admire or to those who reject him. Sociological critics who find themselves unable to read “Finnegans Wake” are too outraged for mirth. To them it is absurd to create an order which cannot be communicated, and which therefore only throws one more element of disorder into the social cauldron. But those who are making a last desperate stand for art in our time have been just as unable to reach the Olympian perspective. They have been too busy reading “Finnegan,” offering their backs, like the master, to the gloomy shore before they plunge into the sheltering, as well as suffocating, waters of the unintelligibly subjective. I should like to join both groups for curiosity’s sake. But time, if not intelligence, wanting, I prefer to remain buffeted by the winds along the shore. It is easier to reflect there that Joyce did not take the plunge with the alacrity imagined either by those who have fled from him or by those who have fled with him.

My purpose, therefore, is largely to show that Joyce rejected a realistic attitude not in “Ulysses,” but after it. The correct perspective finds, I think, the young Joyce hesitant, “Ulysses” an attempt to reach a decision by compromise on an objective plane, and “Finnegan” the final solution by a shift to an uncompromisingly subjective base. Psychologically, Joyce’s career is a later clarification of Flaubert’s. Both began with the dilemma of hating a world they could not reject. They hated it because it seemed to them in process of disintegration. They could not reject it because its interest in science and history had engendered in them a respect for objective fact. Both in “Madame Bovary” and in “Ulysses” there is a desperate attempt to subject disorder to the aesthetic forms of fiction. Both authors felt impelled thereafter to escape the objective present. Flaubert hesitated between escape to the objective past in “Salammbo” and to the timeless subjective in “The Dream of Saint Anthony.” In “Finnegan” Joyce was able to proceed directly to the timeless subjective. His hesitation had come before “Ulysses,” when he alternated between the subjective of the “Portrait” and the objective of “Dubliners” and “Exiles.” The play “Exiles” has, in fact, been unwisely neglected, for it is the connecting link between the “Portrait” and “Ulysses.” Its hero is a Christian first draft of Mr. Bloom, while Stephen, who was the hero of the “Portrait,” becomes in “Exiles” as in “Ulysses” the character of second importance. That Joyce should have utilized the dramatic form is proof enough of the pull of objective reality upon him.

One of the reasons, perhaps, why we refuse to face the fact of Joyce’s objectivity has been the great influence of “Ulysses” as the most important, if not the first, novel in the “stream of consciousness” technique. The publication of Joyce’s novel gave this new style of writing a prestige it has only recently begun to lose. We are consequently led to forget, I dare say, that scarcely one-fifth of “Ulysses” is anybody’s “stream of consciousness.” For the greater part, what Bloom and Dedalus experience in their seventeen hours of a Dublin day is taken over by Joyce and presented in the style he thinks appropriate to convey the collective tone of the particular group (and its particular problem) in the particular chapter. Thus is established a complex but definite “view of Dublin,” of which Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus form only a part, although it must be admitted to be the principal part. As sensitive a formalist as Joyce would not have been satisfied with a novel composed solely of three contrasting streams of consciousness. And it is absurd to take the notorious final chapter as a submission of the whole narrative to Molly’s simon-pure but disconcerting stream of consciousness. We as readers do the summing up, surely, even if we do it with the aid of her necessary final information. We by ourselves get the unifying thesis that is not found in the personality of any single character, but just as certainly follows from our acquaintance with them all.

But suppose we examine the streams of consciousness that do appear. We must not forget that the method they involve is not ipso facto a mechanism for escape into the inner world of fantasy which an individual may carry around with him. It is not, after all, a stream of unconsciousness; rather it is the apparently dissociated flow of conscious ideas, images, perceptions, which are evoked by external stimuli exciting our various senses and directly or indirectly making contact with the body of our previous experience. The unconscious may become involved, but to the extent that an individual can achieve a scientific attitude or that approximation to it that we call a common sense view of things, his stream of consciousness, affected of course by certain idiosyncratic interferences, will nevertheless tend to present a fair picture of objective reality. As far as deference to actuality goes, there is no necessary contradiction between this sort of subjective novel and the objective method. Molly’s stream of consciousness at the end of the book distorts the facts of her life less than Stephen’s does his in the third chapter. The distortion becomes extreme in the “nighttown” chapter, passes over, indeed, into a more successful stream of unconsciousness than “Finnegan” attains; the whole day’s experiences are translated into fantasy under the direct pressure of anxieties and desires previously repressed by the consciousness. They are mostly Mr. Bloom’s. But save for this climactic chapter, Mr. Bloom’s stream of consciousness is almost abjectly literal. He is ordinarily an individual who has taken seriously what many of us would call the best in modern society: the skepticism of a Voltaire, the belief in democracy, the desire for social reform, the respect for science, the striving, as far as personal limitations will allow, for the right sort of relationships with his fellow men. If these are the central traits of the chief character of the novel in his conscious observations and contacts, we need not fear that seeing them through his stream of consciousness will mislead us as to the facts of Dublin life.

If there has been a second reason for mistaken emphasis, the master himself has been responsible. All these years we have been sitting at Joyce’s feet with Mr. Gorman and Mr. Budgen and Mr. Gilbert. Authors are likely to be bad critics of their own work because their perspective is distorted by the urgency of some immediate problem of expression. We have paid too much attention to Joyce’s conscious statements about his meanings and intentions. Too much of our criticism of him has been an amplification of remarks he himself dropped in the hearing of the rapt and ecstatic few whom he carefully and not altogether naively admitted to the presence. But the effect has been misleading, because what Joyce preferred to talk about was the chapter upon which he was working, or some interest, like place names, not vital to the central meaning. Joyce happened to have theories about the interpretation of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Therefore we have been drenched with full details about the “Ulysses” parallel until we have lost sight of the central fact that it is not simply a parallel but a parallel in reverse. Here, of course, lies the significance. The opposite of everything that happens in “Ulysses” happens in the “Odyssey.” Mr. Bloom is the opposite of the crafty, conquering warriorking. He meets in his wanderings with contempt or indifference. He appears to resist Circe but he has really lost the capacity to become normally excited. He returns home, knowing that his wife is faithless, that the suitors have been victorious, and that he has lost a son. The parallel in reverse makes glaring the decay in our time of the individual, the family, and the community as integrated social units. Other learned interests in “Ulysses” are not, as in this instance, misused, but are simply irrelevant. Thomism was an influence, and a painful one, upon the substance of the “Portrait.” It was probably the fundamental source of Joyce’s insistence upon aesthetic structure. But once we get beyond the “Portrait,” Thomism recedes and Freudianism comes in to take its place.

Joyce’s cynicism, too, should be put on a broader base than that of simple bitterness of reaction to childhood faith. It was a disillusionment with every possible source of faith, political as well as religious. The Parnell influence is quite as deep-seated in the “Portrait” as is the Thomist. Joyce was of that unfortunate generation born too late to believe in Parnell and too soon to believe in Sinn Fein. His was a world in which aristocracy was either dead or foreign, the poorer classes still besotted, and the middle class not yet risen into power within the Irish Republic. Indeed, the belated rise of the middle class in Ireland was fated to be only the ghost of its heroic rising centuries before in England. Through some fortunate conjunction of personal circumstances, Joyce recognized as few of his contemporaries did these devastating truths of practical life. In so doing, he also recognized the belated romanticism of the literary revival: the unpractical restoration of the Gaelic language; the poetry that sought to build a mysticism upon mediaeval survivals; the drama that for the most part could do no better than indulge in droll banter at the superstitions of the peasants, the irresponsibility of the workers, or the quaint provincialisms of the Irish temperament. Joyce saw that he must escape from Ireland if he would understand Ireland, if he would escape the illusions which concealed from his contemporaries of the literary world the stultifying actuality of the situation—which was that their own middle class position did not warrant the complacency made possible by the shallowness of their social perceptions.

“Ulysses” is Joyce’s rejection of this new bourgeois world that seemed to be decaying in the very process of birth. Stephen is clearly the embodiment of Joyce. He rejects this world with an impotent savagery which in Joyce himself is softened into irony because channeled into creative expression. But Mr. Bloom is Joyce too, his non-creative side, masochistic in the absence of any confident talent, pummeled by the thousand contacts of a disintegrating world of business that is too indifferent to him for active hostility. Mr. Bloom is what Joyce might have become if forced by want of creative talent to remain the man in the street. This explains the strange sympathy the reader feels for this helpless creature of habits and aborted good intentions. It is the sympathy Joyce could feel for his incompetent practical self, since the very act of literary expression saved him from that aspect of himself.

But there is another reason why Joyce does not treat Mr. Bloom as sadistically as Stephen Dedalus does. It is that Joyce, thus freed (as Stephen was not) from his weaker side, is in a position to recognize that Bloom is the victim of circumstances beyond his control. Bloom, like all of Joyce’s characters, is particularized in great detail, but this should not obscure the fact that he is only an extreme example of the corruption of the personality in a disintegrating society. Ireland, with her long history as one of the earliest of colonial possessions, had become no more than typical of a well-nigh universal process of decay. If Ireland could show the extreme form of this decay, who better could serve as a glaring example of it in the individual than a petty bourgeois canvasser of ads for a newspaper, already qualified as outcast by the unhappy fortune of having been born a Jew as well as an Irishman? Mr. Bloom is generically the little man, the average man of the middle classes.

Here once more it is necessary to dissociate from Joyce’s pedantry a common interpretation of “Ulysses,” for the whole thesis of father-son relationship which Stephen presents in the library has been given more significant connotations by Joyce the author than by Joyce the critic. Shakespeare, says Stephen, wrote his plays to satisfy on the level of fiction the true spiritual relationship between father and son he had not been able to achieve in his own life. Whether or not we have parents living, whether or not we have living sons, what we require is not the blood relationship so much as the certainty of spiritual kinship. As he talks, we know that Stephen is expressing his own inner need, no matter whether his theory is fantastic or plausible as criticism of Shakespeare. What I have been saying is only an extension of this idea first to Joyce himself, to afford him the same excuse as Shakespeare for literary expression, and second, to the whole fabric of modern life through the narrative content of his own novel “Ulysses.” According to this new Ulysses, the father-son relationship which the Greek Ulysses could adequately recover, in spite of all his wanderings, has vanished from modern society. That men may have physical sons makes only the more conspicuous their loss of the spiritual relationship. It is obvious that the quest for it by both Stephen and Bloom ends in failure. In the “nighttown” chapter, the fantasy of Mr. Bloom’s emotional orgy (for he has been drinking mostly by proxy) foreshadows the impossibility. The drunken Dedalus does not even recognize the identity of Mr. Bloom when at the highest moment of the lonely man’s expectation, Mr. Bloom leans over to establish the contact in a whisper of his name: “Mr. Dedalus ! . . . Stephen !” Instead, the phantom of Bloom’s own son, long since dead, arises to seal the frustration. But this failure on the level of intoxication (and how universal it is the grotesque parodies of friendship at any bar may testify) must be repeated on the level of sobriety. And so Mr. Bloom, now sober himself, sobers Stephen with food and coffee. The very style Joyce has chosen intensifies the futility of the attempt, for they talk to each other in the stilted question and answer, in the cumbersome impersonal jargon, of a scientific catechism. Stephen now recognizes Bloom with barely concealed aversion, and leaves him, though it is far into the morning and he has nowhere to go. But the ironic anticlimax for poor Bloom, Joyce mercifully discloses to the reader alone. When he gets into bed with Molly, who has shared the afternoon with her lover, she is dreaming how pleasant it would be to seduce a younger man like the handsome Stephen Dedalus. If the wretched man had succeeded in his quest for Stephen’s friendship, the reader knows it would have been only to be cuckolded once more.

Doubtless this is the immediate theme of the novel. But it must not escape notice that Bloom’s unsuccessful pursuit of Dedalus is only the supreme failure of a day that has been a failure from beginning to end for everybody. In the morning Molly has been reading a letter from her lover while Poldy cooks her breakfast. When his own attention later wanders to other women, it is lack of courage and not virtue that holds him back. He is in a state of vague erotic suspense that he can never pull together into a focus. In the park when Gertie flirts with him, the normal outgoing emotion gets corrupted into self-pity. His sympathy for the woman in childbirth likewise becomes a perversion of his own desire to create someone who will love him. He is equally unsuccessful in his casual contacts. When he passes through the library, no one accosts him, but Buck Mulligan calls after him, “The sheeny!” At lunch he listens at his table while others sing at the bar. When later he takes a drink, the appearance of friendship disarms him; he breaks into praise of the Jews, and almost gets into a fight. Though he starts a collection for Dignam’s widow, he receives so little credit for anything that in the published list we are not surprised to find his name buried towards the bottom and misspelled as “L. Boom.” In “nighttown,” what little aggressiveness his heightened emotion gives him shows itself as maternal protection for the drunken Stephen. For the most part the series of Freudian reveries into which he translates the day’s experiences reveal how thoroughly mauled and hated by Dublin he feels himself to be. It is an orgy of masochistic vision.

Mr. Bloom, none the less, is only an extreme example of a universal Dublin experience. Stephen so loathes Mulligan’s hostility and Haines’s English imperviousness that he refuses to return to common living with them. He is disgusted with his father, who after the loss of his money has become a sentimental toper; and he has refused his dying mother’s request for a prayer. The head of his school is an Irish Protestant who underpays him and shares with him the single common bond of hatred for England. Nor has Stephen any greater interest in his students; they are alienated from him by the useless pedantry of their lessons. His father-son theory is received with polite credulity by the literary lights of Dublin, for whose talents he has scant respect. Only when he lies in the street rejecting the Bloom he does not recognize does he come into unreal temporary reunion with his mother as he drunkenly sings phrases of an old song he once heard from her. He seeks his mother as Bloom seeks him, but he deems Bloom’s friendship a degradation.

Indeed, all relationships in the book are either superficial or unsuccessful. We are living in a society where rejection is the norm and men have lost the fundamental basis for companionship. What Mr. Daiches calls public truth has disappeared. There is no common ground of attitude that can be taken for granted. Otherwise, why is the chapter on the viceroy’s progress included? The viceroy rides out, ironically enough, with the humanitarian objective of dedicating a hospital in the suburbs. But he has become an empty symbol of order and unity. What his progress denotes, rather, is the complete disunity of the Irish people. For he is greeted in every conceivable way: with sycophancy by those who profit from the English occupation, with hatred by those who remember Parnell; with indifference by the merely curious, with attention only by those who are distracted by magnificence. Some turn their backs on him in passive disobedience; others thumb their noses or mutter unflattering comments in acts of frank but ineffectual rebellion; still others do not recognize him at all until it is too late. The literary style of the chapter (which, as distinguished from anybody’s subjectivity, is always the clue to the emotional meaning in “Ulysses”) is the falsetto gentility of the society columns of our newspapers. For all his splendor the viceroy is as solitary in a hostile world as the haughty young intellectual or the wandering Jewish salesman.

Only in drink or reverie can the illusion of friendship be secured. The universal drinking is not mere local color but a pathetic attempt to create the warmth of some common ideal which can bind men together and satisfy their essential need for comradeship which the actual world, with its cult of competition and individualism, has long since broken down, Someone raises an old Irish song, and the tears fall in sentimental, wasted recognition that the feeling of simply belonging together, which once no man was poor enough or wretched enough to lack, has vanished from the contemporary world. Nor does anybody get consolation from looking ahead, save that among Bloom’s useless reveries there float vague images of a better life. When he imagines a prosperous and happy “Bloomusalem” in the fatuousness of his “nighttown” dreaming, the grotesqueness of the ideal of progress becomes only the more sharply apparent. In the world of Dublin as it is, to which in “Ulysses” Joyce remains so wilfully and completely anchored, friendship is only pre* tended and men are withering from the lack of it. Molly Bloom, who has appeared complacent with her leisure, her music, and her secret lover, is no happier than the rest when we look beneath the surface that Joyce ever keeps ironically before us until the final chapter. She too is starved and restless for lack of love, and can find it only in the unreality of illusion. She has already disclosed that she married Bloom years before not because she loved him but because she felt she could use his placid nature for her comfort. But infidelity has not quenched her romantic craving. She takes refuge in evoking a false memory of those days in Gibraltar against a background of soldiers and blue sea when both of them were young. She pretends that a valid affection existed between them then, and in her dream cries “yes I will Yes” in a belated and now impossible sincerity of acceptance to an imagined Bloom’s offer of his heart.

This cry of Molly Bloom’s with which the book ends is as ecstatic and positive as it is unreal. It matches her husband’s earlier fantastic and faltering whisper of Stephen’s name. But hers is an affirmation and not a weak request; and it is an affirmation of the acceptance of a proffered love. As such it contrasts with virtually everything that has actually happened in the book. For elsewhere the positive, in Stephen and Buck, has been the surly “No!” of rejection. The reality of this universal rejection, whatever qualification of tone or intensity it may take on, is thus immensely heightened by the book’s ending upon this resonant note, this delusion of rich, full, unqualified acceptance. We cannot take Molly’s “Yes” in any other sense than as the ironic summation of all the sorry existent “Noes” of a Dublin in social disintegration. Like a keystone that marks and finishes the arch of a book’s form, this single final word summarizes everything in a contradiction of its real meaning and emotion. The energy of the affirmation points its falsity. But it also frees the reader for the time being from his participation in the book by leaving him helplessly suspended between the buoyancy of its falsehood and the hopelessness of the true situation.

What one does with the book, therefore, will depend upon bol of order and unity. What his progress denotes, rather, is the complete disunity of the Irish people. For he is greeted in every conceivable way: with sycophancy by those who profit from the English occupation, with hatred by those who remember Parnell; with indifference by the merely curious, with attention only by those who are distracted by magnificence. Some turn their backs on him in passive disobedience; others thumb their noses or mutter unflattering comments in acts of frank but ineffectual rebellion; still others do not recognize him at all until it is too late. The literary style of the chapter (which, as distinguished from anybody’s subjectivity, is always the clue to the emotional meaning in “Ulysses”) is the falsetto gentility of the society columns of our newspapers. For all his splendor the viceroy is as solitary in a hostile world as the haughty young intellectual or the wandering Jewish salesman.

Only in drink or reverie can the illusion of friendship be secured. The universal drinking is not mere local color but a pathetic attempt to create the warmth of some common ideal which can bind men together and satisfy their essential need for comradeship which the actual world, with its cult of com- I petition and individualism, has long since broken down. Someone raises an old Irish song, and the tears fall in sentimental, wasted recognition that the feeling of simply belonging together, which once no man was poor enough or wretched enough to lack, has vanished from the contemporary world. Nor does anybody get consolation from looking ahead, save that among Bloom’s useless reveries there float vague images of a better life. When he imagines a prosperous and happy “Bloomusalem” in the fatuousness of his “nighttown” dreaming, the grotesqueness of the ideal of progress becomes only the more sharply apparent. In the world of Dublin as it is, to which in “Ulysses” Joyce remains so wilfully and completely anchored, friendship is only pre-tended and men are withering from the lack of it. Molly Bloom, who has appeared complacent with her leisure, her music, and her secret lover, is no happier than the rest when we look beneath the surface that Joyce ever keeps ironically before us until the final chapter. She too is starved and restless for lack of love, and can find it only in the unreality of illusion. She has already disclosed that she married Bloom years before not because she loved him but because she felt she could use his placid nature for her comfort. But infidelity has not quenched her romantic craving. She takes refuge in evoking a false memory of those days in Gibraltar against a background of soldiers and blue sea when both of them were young. She pretends that a valid affection existed between them then, and in her dream cries “yes I will Yes” in a belated and now impossible sincerity of acceptance to an imagined Bloom’s offer of his heart.

This cry of Molly Bloom’s with which the book ends is as ecstatic and positive as it is unreal. It matches her husband’s earlier fantastic and faltering whisper of Stephen’s name. But hers is an affirmation and not a weak request; and it is an affirmation of the acceptance of a proffered love. As such it contrasts with virtually everything that has actually happened in the book. For elsewhere the positive, in Stephen and Buck, has been the surly “No!” of rejection. The reality of this universal rejection, whatever qualification of tone or intensity it may take on, is thus immensely heightened by the book’s ending upon this resonant note, this delusion of rich, full, unqualified acceptance. We cannot take Molly’s “Yes” in any other sense than as the ironic summation of all the sorry existent “Noes” of a Dublin in social disintegration. Like a keystone that marks and finishes the arch of a book’s form, this single final word summarizes everything in a contradiction of its real meaning and emotion. The energy of the affirmation points its falsity. But it also frees the reader for the time being from his participation in the book by leaving him helplessly suspended between the buoyancy of its falsehood and the hopelessness of the true situation.

What one does with the book, therefore, will depend upon one’s already formed attitudes. Those who have the certainty of despair will stay with it. The aesthetes, enchanted by the marvel of its technical perfection, will find themselves translated, like true saints of decadence, into the world of dreams with Joyce. But those who reject decadence will at least have profited by the encyclopaedic description of it. Nor will they allow this final word of “Ulysses” to shake them loose from the cumulative significance of its discouraging but realistic detail. They will remain conscious of the despair and not be decoyed by the false final hope of the illusory. Nor will they permit themselves to be distracted by another stylistic device that Joyce uses occasionally throughout the book, when he attempts to qualify the gravity of the tragic spirit by the distraction of the animal spirits of the grotesque. It is as though he felt on occasions that the meaning of the book could be palliated if not altogether denied by a robust excursion into the Rabelaisian. It is as though he sought to make the disorder, which I have interpreted as particular to our period, a universal one which the artist’s aesthetic consciousness of the grotesque can perennially surmount and vanquish. The Rabelaisian exuberance of “Ulysses” strains at the leash of its theme and seeks to obscure it by the restless, strident irrelevancy of its application. It would give an illusion of vitality to drown by its clamor the stern sad meaning I have isolated.

Now this, I take it, is a very different application of the Rabelaisian spirit from that found in the original. Joyce, in so far as he is a Rabelais at all (and only at a few moments does this form of escapism show itself) is a Rabelais disillusioned, intent upon making his disillusionment universal and impersonal by the gusto of its statement. Thus the individual spirit of the artist would seek to exempt itself from involvement in the spectacle of the universal bankruptcy of individualism. With Rabelais it was otherwise. He ended his book also with a single word of dubious affirmation. It was not “love,” however, but “drink”: and it was an honest ambiguity, not a contradiction. Rabelais commands us to “drink” because life is truly glorious, and we may ignore its endless possibilities, its immense range of activities now first revealed, since we are safe in the ecstasy of the new immediate interest. We may safely drink to forget the frivolity of boundless aspiration, but we drink also to redouble the expansive powers of the individual spirit as it explores the newly found possibilities of the life about us. Only too well has the Western world obeyed Rabelais’s injunction. The Gargantuan spirit of the awakened individualism of the Renaissance has long since become a Frankenstein monster which has now turned from devouring others to devouring himself. Now, after four centuries of drunken individualism, we awaken from our intoxication to find that our ecstasy has cost us love and comradeship and the glory of a common purpose. If Rabelais is the literary record of the birth of individualism, “Ulysses” illustrates its final bankruptcy in the hopeless isolation of the individual spirit.

It has been left to others than Joyce to find a way for Molly’s cry of acceptance to be wrested from the world of dreams and restored to the realm of actuality. It has been left specifically, I think, to the novels of Andre Malraux and John Steinbeck. But before he turned his back upon the social actuality, for reasons of personal salvation, and entered into the dream world of “Finnegans Wake,” Joyce did us the service of revealing without essential compromise not merely the Dublin of 1904, but the distraught spirit of the war-torn world as it very largely is at the present time.

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