PARTISAN REVIEW
back through the corridors of memory. In memory, as
in
dreaming,
the time of immediate action no longer applies. The involved sen–
tence was as necessa.rfy for Proust as was the flow of words without
the restrictions of punctuation and the measurements of fully articu–
late and rational wakefulness for the dreaming of Mrs. Bloom with
which Joyce's
Ulysses
closes. Yet on the other hand, Proust's aestheti–
cism was that of the decadents. Proust adapted and strained conven–
tional French syntax but he in no way tampered with words or en–
deavored to become more "vivid" by being less "refined." In his
attitude to the vocabulary he was a typical Alexandrian, writing at
a late period and
in
a late classical form. He did not struggle against
this limitation or endeavor to introduce vitality by exploring the
possibilities of slang and dialects. In this he was unlike Joyce: the
effect he wished to give was not vitality.
Joyce is representative of those who tackled the problem of
language not by accepting the limitations of our culture in its decline
but by attempting to overcome them. In his youth he tried to mani–
pulate English or Irish-English in the old familiar way-in the diary
at the end of
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and in
the not very successful poems of
Chamber Music.
In fact Joyce wac;
as sensitive to the old language as any writer. I suspect that at times
he was tempted to write like Apuleius, to use archaisms and aban–
don other thoughts.
But Joyce also wanted to write a living language-as living as
sixteenth-century French was to Rabelais or sixteenth-century English
to Shakespeare. And _in fact he broke away from the classical language
and developed another, based on the whole bazaar of modem Euro–
pean languages and dialects of English and on the .new vitalist spirit
which took the place of the old rationalism. I do not know whether
we can consider that Joyce's experiment was successful, for there is
one obvious difficulty. Nobody, so far as I know, has ever been able
to read
Finnegans Wake
through from cover to cover. Nevertheless,
in parts Joyce achieved magnificent and powerful effects which can
be appreciated only after long and careful study and repeated read–
ing aloud. To understand Joyce, even to understand him partially,
requires a special knowledge of: Dublin, Jesuit schools, scholastic
philosophy and theology, large sections of the history of diverse coun–
tries, different literatures and languages. The combination of such
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