FINNEGANS WAKE
109
The identification rather is with the
idea
of the role of the artist,
which is simply one of the projections of what Freud calls the
Super-ego.
Ulysses
records in its opening episodes the insufficiency
of the program of "silence, exile, and cunning". And the crisis to
which his new spiritual isolation has brought him is not resolved
until he is put into communication with Bloom, the representative
(If common humanity. Through his imaginative sympathy with
Bloom he is restored to the state of grace which will make freedom
of creation at last possible for him. Now the main difference
between
Ulysses
and the present work is that where humanity is
represented in the first by a "coalescence" of universalized traits
into a single figure existing in time and space, in the second these
traits are diffused through time-space and coalesce finally only in
the-pattern
of history. Humanity is impressive not
in
its actuality
but in its immanence. And this becomes something comparable to
the conception of the Divine Idea of the medieval
theologians~
that which is capable of taking on matter but is itself infinite in
time and space.
Naturally the question is whether such an idea of Humanity
is
"anterior, posterior, and superior" to the individual, whether it
can be an adequate object for transcendence. Croce, in his work
on Vico, stresses the latter's theory of knowledge-the basis of
which is the formula that only that cari be known which is created.
Perfect knowledge is the province of God alone because God
created the universe. Man cannot know even the world of nature
because he did not create it; therefore, the Cartesian school of his
time were moving up a blind alley
in
their attempts to chart nature
with their geometry. But Vico did insist that there is one realm
which man could know because he created it-and that was his own
history. Michelet sums up Vico's thought with the sentence:
lwmanity is its oum creation.
According to such a criterion of truth the symbols included in
the
myths and legends of the human past are just as capable of
allegiance as the truths presented by the discursive intellect. The
myth
of man would be as true as the myth that has arisen through
the separation of his reason from the rest of his nature at the
Renaissance. But the pragmatic test of truth here as elsewhere
would be the extent to which it could be made to function for the
iDdividual. And for the artist no truth may be said to exist that
