The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (129 page)
Read The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Online
Authors: Daniel J. Boorstin
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
27 April. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
Dublin 1904
Trieste 1914
In Dedalus’s encounters at school and the university we meet some of Joyce’s most elegant, most eloquent, and often-quoted aphorisms.
Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air.… a symbol of the artist forging anew and in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
And even in this straightforward narrative of a boy’s education, word and idea interpenetrate. Words become ideas, the self’s inward product of a
blurred vision of the outer world. Not in re-creating the outer world but in making words their own world Joyce the creator imitated God.
Words. Was it their colours?… No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
The continuity of thought in all Joyce’s writing is not surprising, for it is all autobiography. He would expand the application of his ideas from childhood and adolescent tribulations to personal epic, and on to his epic of world history. Stephen Dedalus, whose young consciousness is chronicled in
A Portrait
becomes a hero of Joyce’s next book.
A Portrait
ends on April 27, 1904, and
Ulysses
picks up the autobiography in a new mode on “Bloomsday,” Tuesday, June 16, 1904. During the short omitted interval, Stephen has been in Paris, until his dying mother brings him back to Dublin. And as
Ulysses
opens, Stephen is living in the Martello tower at Sandycove with his friend the medical student Buck Mulligan.
Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei
.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head.
And
Ulysses
re-creates Joyce’s personal story in a new world of myth and symbol.
But why Ulysses? Joyce’s reading had opened to him the world of biblical and classical myth, of Irish legend and history. At school, when his English teacher asked him to write an essay on his “favorite hero,” he had chosen Ulysses. So the vagrant Ulysses must have lingered on when Joyce sought a frame for his work about 1914. By then his own experience of exile had given the most famous ancient exile a special intimacy. Back in 1906 he had thought of a work to be called
Ulysses at Dublin
(in place of
Dubliners
) recounting the ordinary day of an ordinary Mr. Hunter. And then, halfway
through
A Portrait
he began to see how
Ulysses
might provide the frame of his next book. The only competition might have been Dante’s frame for his
Divine Comedy
, which had engrossed Joyce and left its mark on all his work.
“I am now writing a book,” Joyce explained to his friend Frank Budgen in 1918, “based on the wanderings of Ulysses. The Odyssey, that is to say, serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is recent time and all my hero’s wanderings take no more than eighteen hours.” When Budgen seemed puzzled, Joyce asked him if he knew “any complete all-round character presented by any writer.” Budgen ventured Goethe’s Faust or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To which Joyce retorted that not these but Ulysses was his “complete man in literature.” It could not be Faust. “Far from being a complete man, he isn’t a man at all. Is he an old man or a young man? Where are his home and family? We don’t know. And he can’t be complete because he’s never alone.”
No-age Faust isn’t a man. But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a Jusqu’auboutist [bitter-ender]. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall.
The
Odyssey
became Joyce’s way of measuring his hero against “the complete man.”
Later, when Joyce said he had been working hard on the book all day, Budgen asked if Joyce had been “seeking the
mot juste
.” He already had the words, Joyce said, but was seeking “the perfect order of words in the sentence. I think I have it.”
I believe I told you that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the
Lestrygonians
episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch. But there is a Seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king’s daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women’s silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.” You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged.
Joyce went on to explain that his book was also “the epic of the human body.” The thoughts of the characters cannot be recounted otherwise. “If they had no body they would have no mind.… But I want the reader to understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement.”
In his Odyssey of the eighteen hours of Bloom’s and Dedalus’s day Joyce combined a scrupulous verisimilitude with extravagant symbolism. He pored over maps of Dublin and made sure that his book could be read in the same length of time in which the events occurred. In 1920, writing to the critic Carlo Linati, Joyce attached a Homeric title to each chapter, along with its own hour of the day, a dominant color, a technique, a science or art, an allegorical sense, an organ of the body, and symbols. After revising the scheme in 1921, he sent it to a few critics and to Stuart Gilbert to be included in his
James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1930). But when Sylvia Beach published
Ulysses
in Paris in 1922, Joyce had suppressed the Homeric tags, leaving his reader the challenging Joycean opportunity to explore for himself.
Joyce did generally follow the Homeric story of the wanderings of the heroic warrior. Homer’s first four books (the Telemacheia) tell of Odysseus’ son Telemachus, unhappy at home in Ithaca, then visiting the mainland for news of his father. The eight following Homeric books recount Odysseus’ wanderings and adventures in the twenty years after the fall of Troy that took him from Calypso’s island to the encounter of the naked hero with Nausicaa, and the legendary encounters with Polyphemus and Circe. Finally, Homer’s concluding twelve books (the Nostos, or Homecoming) tell how Odysseus returns home and recovers his kingdom.
Joyce adapts this Homeric scheme to his own purposes. His first three chapters (his Telemacheia) offer a prologue of the daily life of Stephen Dedalus. When the book opens at 8:00
A.M
. on Tuesday, June 16, 1904, Stephen is at home in the Martello tower in Dublin with his roommate, the medical student Buck Mulligan, and their visiting Englishman Haines. We see Stephen teaching his class at the school and the headmaster Deasy (Nestor) asking him to help secure publication of his article on the foot-and-mouth disease. En route Stephen is tempted by girls on the beach at Sandymount (Proteus). Then in Book II the other Ulysses-hero, Leopold Bloom, appears, also at 8:00
A.M
. on the same day, preparing breakfast for his wife, Molly.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature.
Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the Chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
—Mrkgnao! the cat said loudly.
There follow twelve chapters of everyday episodes in the life of this Jewish salesman for newspaper advertisements. These include soliciting a customer, attending a funeral, discussing politics, eating lunch, visiting the library and pubs, enjoying the sight of attractive women, celebrating the safe delivery of a baby to his acquaintance, and finally going into Dublin’s brothel quarter.
These episodes are not told in the order of Odysseus wanderings, but do include counterparts to Calypso, the Lotus Eaters, the Voyage to Hades, Aeolus King of the Winds, the Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, the Wandering Rocks, the Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, the Oxen of the Sun, and Circe. Joyce’s final three chapters, the Homecoming (Nostos), offer counterparts of Homer’s Eumaeus, Ithaca, and Penelope, as they converge the day of Stephen and Leopold. Stephen accepts Leopold’s invitation to a cup of cocoa at his 7 Eccles Street home. Stephen walks off into the night, and we are left with Bloom, whose Molly ends the book with the famous stream of her consciousness.
Joyce himself explained to Linati that
Ulysses
, besides being an encyclopedic cycle of the human body, was an epic of two races, the Jews and the Irish—both historic victims on the periphery of European history. Joyce seized his opportunity, using pagan and Judeo-Christian lore to rescue them both to the center of the human stage. The headmaster Deasy put the question:
—Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews.… And do you know why?.…
—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
—Because she never let them in.…
At first it seems odd that Joyce should have chosen one of the few Chosen People to stand for Everyman. But in this way he gives his readers another opportunity “to understand through suggestion rather than direct statement.” By creating Leopold Bloom as his Ulysses he showed he was not confined by autobiography.
Ulysses
is the story of itself. Ingenious theological interpreters see Bloom as God the Father and Dedalus as God the Son, who must be united by the
Holy Ghost in the miracle of artistic creation. And the accounts of Bloom’s bodily processes affirm the universal humanity of the story. While the chapters recounting Dedalus’s day have their correspondences in the Gospels (the Last Supper, Jesus’ conflict with the scribes and Pharisees, the Temptation of Jesus in the Desert), Bloom’s day has its Old Testament counterparts (from Genesis to Elijah).
Dublin, a modern city-state, was providentially suited for the Joycean Odyssey. “It was … a happy accident,” Stuart Gilbert notes, “… that the creator of Ulysses passed his youth in such a town as Dublin, a modern city-state, of almost Hellenic pattern, neither so small as to be merely parochial in outlook, nor so large as to lack coherency, and foster that feeling of inhuman isolation which cools the civic zeal of Londoner or New-Yorker.” Joyce’s confidant in Zurich in 1918, Frank Budgen, luckily for us described the process of writing
Ulysses
. “Joyce wrote the ‘Wandering Rocks’ with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city.… Not Bloom, not Stephen is here the principal personage, but Dublin itself.… All towns are labyrinths.…” While working on his chapter, Joyce bought a game called Labyrinth, which he played every evening for a time with his daughter, Lucia. From this game he cataloged the six main errors of judgment into which one might fall in seeking a way out of a maze. Just as the
Odyssey
would become a geographical authority on the Mediterranean world, so
Ulysses
would be a social geography of Dublin, with no falsifying for effect, no “vain teratology” or study of monsters.
Joyce’s most celebrated literary innovation—the “stream of consciousness,” unspoken soliloquy, or silent monologue—was for him no flight of fancy but a device of realism, making art follow nature. Still, he disavowed credit for its invention. In 1920, as he was completing the last episodes of
Ulysses
, he explained to Stuart Gilbert that the
monologue intérieur
had been used as a continuous form of narration by a little-known French symbolist, Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949), in his novel
Les Laurier sont coupés
(1887) some thirty years before. “The reader finds himself, from the very first line, posted within the mind of the protagonist, and it is the continuous unfolding of his thoughts which, replacing normal objective narration, depicts to us his acts and experiences.” Joyce’s own way of revealing, exploring, and recounting the secret sources of the self by the interior monologue was already inviting imitation even before the whole of
Ulysses
was published in book form, for parts were being published in the little magazine
The Egoist
. Joyce set the example in the stream of Molly Bloom’s consciousness, the last forty pages, which he explained to Budgen: