6
PARTISAN REVIEW
with Buffon, "the style is the man"? But "style" does not say enough,
and it is not enough to remain happy with the judicious aphorism or
with Stephen's judicious critical obsetvation. The modem critic can–
not rest easy with this eighteenth-century piece of astuteness, which
long ago passed into the stock of our critical assumptions; we begin
to know too much and we must dig mines beneath its truth.
But it is well to begin from such broad and obvious data of
criticism (instances of which we could multiply indefinitely) for we
may now pass on to the more complex and really monumental exam–
ple provided us by James Joyce. In his
Portrait of the Artist
Joyce
develops a theory of literary creation, anchored on the metaphysics
of St. Thomas but essentially expressing the Flaubertian view of the
writer as a god who remains above and beyond his creation which he
manipulateS as he wills. But in
Finnegans Wake
the universal human
symbol of the writer has now become the infant Earwicker twin scrawl–
ing with his own excrement on the floor! (Between the two, some–
where near the midpoint of this remarkable evolution, Stephen Deda–
lus declares, in the famous discussion of Shakespeare in
Ulysses,
that the writer, setting forth from his door for the encounter with
experience, meets only himself on the doorstep.)
If
Joyce is the great
case of a rigorous and logical development among modern writers,
each step forward carrying the immense weight of
his
total commit–
ment and concentration, we are not wrong then to find in this chang–
ing portrait of the artist a measure of how far he has matured as
man and writer from the once youthful and arrogant aesthete. And
if we will not learn from our own experience, do we not remain
formalists toward literature only at the expense of neglecting Joyce's
far deeper experience?
But in fact we already know there is no escape from ourselves.
Existence is a dense plenum into which we are plunged, and every
thought, wish, and fear is "overdetermined," coming to be under the
infinite pressures within that plenum of all other thoughts, wishes, and
fears. Fingerprints and footprints are our own, and Darwin has
pointed out that our inner organs differ from person to person as
much as our faces. The signature of ourselves is written over
all
our
dreams like the criminal's fingerprints across his crime. The writer,
no more than any other man, can hope to escape this inescapable
density of particularity. But his difference is precisely that he does
not merely submit but insists upon this as his fate. It is
his own
voice which he wishes to resound in the arena of the world. He knows
that the work must
be
his, and to the degree that it is less than his,
