PARTISAN REVIEW
Stuart Gilbert and Campbell-and-Robinson are much more coherent
and comprehensive.
To read steadily through these pages is to find the total Joyce
growing more and more remote and being replaced by a textbook
ideogram of his work based on the repetition of a fairly small number
of quotations and references; yet the persistent reader may gain from it
a fairly clear sense of the limitations and difficulties of Joyce criticism.
Like Eliot, Joyce makes wonderful material for the favored mode in
contemporary criticism, the feminine and subservient elucidation of a
difficult text in which the critic, giving himself up completely to the
work of art, takes on himself for a time its glory and its power. But
this is an anxious service, even when it is most devoted and apparently
perceptive. One can make dreadful
gaffes,
as several footnotes in this
volume show.
Moreover, in everything about their work which most fascinates
contemporary critics-obscurity, erudition, allusiveness, language, ortho–
doxy-Joyce excels Eliot, and the huge size of
Ulysses
and
Finnegans
Wake
compared to
Ash Wednesday
and
Four Quartets
permits an
overwhelming complexity of interrelationships.
If
Levin and Shattuck,
in a long essay reprinted here, could discover for the first time in 1944
that there was a detailed correspondence between the
Odyssey
and
Dub–
liners
(a correspondence that throws a strange light on the "order and
myth" of some of the later correspondences), who knows what unpre–
dictable discoveries lie years ahead in
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake?
With
this possibility before them, and warned by the example of the older
critics like Gosse, More, Brooks and Stoll, who felt that they could
attack without understanding, and with all but two writing since 1939
in a period in which criticism grounded in the historical-social context
is out of favor, the critics in this volume put their emphasis not on
judging or "placing" Joyce, or relating the inside to the outside, but
almost wholly on attempting to find out what he is doing within the
limits of his own intentions and ideas.
This, too, is easier with Eliot, because though Eliot refuses to
write official interpretations of his own. poems, he has expressed him–
self so fully and explicitly on all other subjects. Joyce, however, since
his two youthful essays on Ibsen and Mangan, has published only creative
work. What he wanted known of its patterns he revealed through in–
timates whose dependability cannot be judged. As David Daiches has
complained, they have told us very little of Joyce's reading in his later
years, though they secured books for him and often read them aloud.
They have also told us very little about the composition of
Finnegans
1016
