The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (130 page)

And this is how her soliloquy ended:

Joyce himself had arranged a public lecture by a popular French novelist, Valéry Larbaud (1881–1957), who had been “godfather” to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. Having been instructed by Joyce, Larbaud explained the Homeric correspondences and other symbolisms in the hope of making the book intelligible and persuading readers that this might be an epic for their time. Joyce seems finally to have been torn between his axiomatic desire only to “suggest” and his fear that readers would not understand.

To make his book universal, Joyce drew heavily on anthologies, handbooks, compilations, and textbooks. Critics have marveled at the prodigious learning revealed, for example, in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter, written in the different styles of the periods of English literature in chronological order. But their authenticity comes from the fact that they are mosaics of the authors parodied, drawn from their very words found in two textbooks, Saintsbury’s
History of English Prose Rhythm
and Peacock’s
English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin
. Joyce, never forgetting the self, found ways to make this progress of styles symbolize the growth of the human fetus in the womb.

Ulysses
, like Joyce’s other works, was focused on the act of creation in the arts. Significantly he had finally titled the first part of his autobiography, revised from his earlier
Stephen Hero
, “A Portrait of the
Artist
as a Young Man.” By naming his autobiographical hero Dedalus after the “fabulous artificer” of wax wings, he depicted “a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?” Like Proust, Joyce made his
work the story of its own creation. By adding Bloom he chronicled the divided self in
Ulysses
, the commonplace alien part of the artist, the Jew always in exile.

In
Ulysses
Joyce re-created the mystery of art and the universe. “Here form is content, content is form,” as Samuel Beckett would say of
Finnegans Wake
. “His writing is not about something, it is something itself.” And a mystery, too—realist, naturalist, symbolist, parodist, comic, epic—of countless levels, embodied and enshrouded in the Word.

Still, the cryptic depth of
Ulysses
did not faze censors across the English reading world when the book was published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1922. The authorities struggled to protect the public from the frank interior monologues and from a few taboo words. Five hundred copies of the Egoist Press London edition were burned that year by the Post Office authorities in New York, and 499 of their third printing of 500 were seized by the English customs authorities in Folkstone. But the censor’s efforts eventually enlivened the Federal Law Reports with a concise and favorable review of
Ulysses
by Judge John M. Woolsey. He found it “not an easy book to read … brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns,” but not obscene.

Eleven years after
Ulysses
first appeared in English, in that same first week of December 1933, when Americans repealed their Prohibition of alcoholic beverages, Judge Woolsey determined that Americans should no longer be prohibited from reading Joyce’s “true picture of the lower middle class in a European city” and sharing Joyce’s effort “to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.” Although certain scenes were strong medicine for “some sensitive, though normal, persons to take … my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses’ on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” And since there was no law against importing emetic literature, he ordered
Ulysses
to be admitted to the United States.

Where to go after
Ulysses
? There seemed no place to go, either in realistic depiction of daily life or in symbols to give art and grandeur to the trivia
of the conscious self. “I will try to express myself,” Stephen Dedalus had declared, “in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” Joyce’s cunning in elaborating and embroidering Everyman’s self was limitless and undaunted. He had taken on the vocation of a writer but had added little to his outward experience in a world of turmoil. He spent the years of World War I under the umbrella of Swiss neutrality in Zurich writing
Ulysses
. Now at the war’s end he went to Paris at the invitation of his patron and mentor Ezra Pound. With his vision confined by near-blindness, he turned deeper inward. And not merely to the resources of involuntary memory. He re-created his language into a refuge, a sanctuary, and a whole New World of the self.

Ulysses
, as Judge Woolsey had certified, was surely “not an easy book to read.” To one uncomprehending American reader, Joyce explained, “Only a few writers and teachers understand it. The value of the book is its new style.” On other occasions he was less patient with the obtuse audience. At the end of one evening in Paris soon after
Ulysses
had been published, his melancholy at the cool reception of his book had been deepened by strong drink. As the taxi delivered him home to his door he ran up the street shouting, “I made them take it!” But a full decade would pass before he could make Englishmen or Americans “take it.” In 1932 he was still trying to persuade T. S. Eliot to publish the book in London for Faber & Faber. While willing to publish episodes in his
Criterion Miscellany
, Eliot would not take on the whole book and Joyce refused to allow publication of either an abridged or an expurgated edition. “My book has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he insisted. “Which would you like to cut off?”

Meanwhile he spent himself on what he only called his “Work in Progress,” which would occupy him for sixteen years from March 11, 1923, when he wrote the first two pages—“the first I have written since the final
Yes
of
Ulysses
. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so I could read them.” Just as
Ulysses
was the sequel (in a new mode) to
A Portrait
, so
Finnegans Wake
would be a sequel (in another new mode) to
Ulysses
. As
Ulysses
had ended with Molly and Leopold eating the same seedcake (Eve and Adam eating the “seedfruit”), now
Finnegans Wake
would begin with the Fall of Man—symbolized in the fall of the hero of the music-hall ballad, the hod carrier Finnegan, from a ladder to his “death,” then his resurrection by the smell of whiskey at his wake. The new novel would incorporate and exploit many leftover ideas from the twelve kilos of notes that he had collected for
Ulysses
.

Compared with
Finnegans Wake, Ulysses
would be simple clarity itself. Here the admiring reader of Joyce meets his match, and is reluctantly driven to a heavy reliance on interpreters. Even the puzzled serious student
comes to feel that he is trying to understand the ground plan of an elaborate filigreed castle in a treatise by its architect written in an only partly intelligible code. Is the plan itself all there is to the castle? We know much more about how the book was made than of what it was. Does
Finnegans Wake
describe anything, or is it itself the thing? The book reminds us of an existentialist parable. A man sees a “For Sale” sign outside a house and goes up to ask the price. To which the occupant replies, “Only the sign is for sale!” Does
Finnegans Wake
tell us about anything beyond itself?

It is one of those books, Anthony Burgess reminds us, “admired more often than read, when read rarely read through to the end, when read through to the end not often fully, or even partially understood.” Burgess has dared help us with
A Shorter Finnegans Wake
. Other intrepid critics, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, “Provoked by the sheer magnitude of the work … felt that if Joyce had spent eighteen years in its composition we might profitably spend a few deciphering it.” Why has so eloquent and lucid a writer as Joyce spent his energies teasing us with a book of colossal proportions, of 628 dense often-unparagraphed pages, with its puzzling plenitude of invented words, multiple puns, and onomatopoetic inventions? Is it inconceivable that this master of the comic may have launched the biggest literary hoax of history? But generations of readers still assume that it is they and not the author who is amiss.

Whatever else it is, the book is the
ne plus ultra
of the literature of the self. Perhaps at this dead end the book is something only the author (and he only partially) can understand.

What was it about? “It’s hard to say,” Joyce told a sculptor friend, August Suter, in 1923. “It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find.” He had already christened it “Finnegans Wake,” omitting the apostrophe because it was about both the death of Finnegan and the revival of all Finnegans (Finn-again).

In another time sense, too, it was a sequel to
Ulysses
. As
Ulysses
was a day book, he had already decided that
Finnegan
would be a night book, with its own special language. “I’m at the end of English” (
Je suis au bout de l’anglais
), he confessed. “I have to put the language to sleep.”

When someone objected to his puns, Joyce replied, “The Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough
for me.” (“Thou art
Peter
, and upon this
rock
I will build my church.” Matthew 16:18). And as for triviality, “Some of the means I use are trivial—and some are quadrivial.”
Finnegan
was to make his quadrivial dimension the world of dreams.

The theme of this night story was the whole history of the human race. “Art is the cry of despair,” Arnold Schoenberg observed in 1910, “of those who experience in themselves the fate of all mankind.” And a night story it should be, for Stephen Dedalus had explained in
Ulysses
that “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Though Joyce’s history was veiled in myth and in his private language of sleep,
Finnegans Wake
was still a story designed to be everybody’s—of the fall and resurrection of mankind. The comical fall of Finnegan with which the book begins is only a prologue to the entry of the hero, a stuttering Anglican Dublin tavern-keeper, HCE—Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody, or Haveth Childers Everywhere. A candidate in a local election, HCE had once reputedly committed an exhibitionist act (Original Sin?) in Phoenix Park before two girls. This memory and rumor never cease to dog him, and he is also cursed by an incestuous passion for his daughter. After several bouts of gossip, of changing winds of public opinion, and trivial misadventures, HCE is arrested for disturbing the peace, which seems to express his own obsessive guilt.

Earwicker’s wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), is the woman of many forms—Eve, the mother at the Wake, the River Liffey which changes from the nymphlike brook in the Wicklow Hills to the drab filthy scrubwoman river that drains the city of Dublin in its circular course into the Ocean, then up into mists to fall in mountain rains to refresh the brook again. And we hear Anna Livia’s complaints of those who soil her currents:

The reader ceases to be puzzled, and simply wonders at Joyce’s bardic music when he hears Joyce’s recorded voice reading the liquid words of Anna Livia Plurabelle.