536
PARTISAN REVIEW
and uninteresting male garments called "pants" by most of the inhab–
itants of the British Isles. For the word was for Joyce a word of power,
and in it lay all the magic of the thing designated by it. To witness I
call one of the pieces of advice he sent to me dictated to Paul Leon:
"As regards the Nausikaa chapter you will receive a ponderous
volume of some six hundred large pages on the origin and history of
what he chooses to call
Le Manteau de Tanit.
He believes this subject
should be treated by you with
IMMENSE
seriousness, respect, circumspec–
tion, historical sense, critical acumen, documentary accuracy, citational
erudition and sweet reasonableness...." And on the same subject in
a further dictated letter: "St. Bernard wrote,
'Qui me amat amat et
canem meum,'
but the love philtre of Isolde is alluded to somewhere by
her in W.i.P. [Note:
Work in Progress]
with this free translation, 'Love
me, love my drugrs.' Verbum sap."
It has often been said of Joyce that he was greatly influenced by
psychoanalysis in the composition of
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake.
If
by that is meant that he made use of the jargon of that science when
it
suited the purpose of his fiction, or made use of its practical analytical
devices as when Bloom commits the
Fehlleistung
of talking about "the
wife's admirers" when he meant "the wife's advisers," the point holds
good. But if it is meant that he adopted the theory and followed the
practice of psychoanalysis in his work as did the Dadaists and the
Surrealists, nothing could be farther from the truth. The Joycean
method of composition and the passively au tomatic method are two
opposite and opposed poles.
If
psychoanalysis cured sick people, well
and good. Who could quarrel with that? But Joyce was always impatient
or contemptuously silent when it was talked about as both an aU-sufficient
Weltanschauung
and a source and law for artistic production.
"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious?"
he said to me one evening at the Pfauen Restaurant. "What about the
mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"
One might say that both as man and artist Joyce was exceedingly
conscious. Great artificers have to be. As I saw him working on
Ulysses
I can testify that no line ever left his workshop without having been
the object of a hundredfold scrutiny. And I remember myoid friend
August Suter telling me that in the early days of the composition of
Finnegans Wake
Joyce said to him, "I feel like an engineer boring
through a mountain from two sides.
If
my calculations are correct we
shall meet in the middle.
If
not. ... " Whatever philosophy of compo–
sition that indicates, it is certainly neither automatic nor convulsive.
