98
PARTISAN REVIEW
learned to appreciate, we will be content to proceed for some time
by what Yeats somewhere calls "little sedentary stitches".
The first and most obvious of the problems is, of course, that
of communication. Here the most simple-minded explanation that
can be offered is that Joyce is reducing language to "pure music".
It is undoubtedly true that the musical effectiveness of the style is
quite overwhelming; there is nothing like it in contemporary
writing. To hear portions of the work read aloud, especially
if
it
is by Joyce in the phonographic recording that he has made, is to
relax all too easily into the kind of swoon induced in untrained
listeners by music. But this is a danger always inherent in really
successful verse, and perhaps the first point that should be made is
that if the style here is not exactly that of verse, it is something
intermediate between that of verse and that of prose. It depends
for its movement pretty consistently on a recognizable unit of
verse-structure. This is the pattern of movement established by the
three-syllable foot, dactylic or anapestic, with its possibility of
almost infinite variation within the line through the substitution of
other shorter feet. "Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure
sanscreed into oure eryan". This is a line capable of being analyzed
as a quite acceptable example of the rare dactylic octometer-with
a cresura after "scholard". More often than not, Joyce begins with
a regular metrical beat only to drop it suddenly for an effect of
surprise: "Drop me the/ sound of the/ findhorn's/ name, Mtu or
Mti, sombogger was wisness". The first two feet are perfect dactyls,
the third a spondee, and then the line seems to dissolve into prose.
The predominant foot throughout the work, however, is the more
lilting, caressing anapest because of its closer correspondence to
theme and subject. As Samuel Beckett points out in the symposium
already mentioned, the work is "not
about
something;
it
is that
something itself".
And if the anapest is used so often, it is because
it is the inevitable movement for rendering the babbling and the
bubbling of the "gossipaceous" Anna Livia that is the river of
Time: "with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking,
rocks drops in her tachie, tramtokens in her hair, all waived to a
point and then all inuendation".
But this is still not to give justification to the charge that Joyce
has reduced language to pure sound, which is to betray an unaware-
