460
ist is deeply concerned with the
careers of his people.
Ulysses,
for
example, has difficulties of man–
ner, but is not in its conception
hermetic. Leopold Bloom is a rep–
resentative, poignant, and troubl–
ing instance of city-dwelling man;
his fretting and wandering in Dub–
lin bring to us the challenge and
limitations of our own intelligence,
ambition, and ability to love.
James Joyce's personal voice here
is many-focused, as true personal–
ity always is, not the pale self-con–
templation, blank and onanistic,
which
the
seventeen-year-old
thinks of as the pursuit of him–
self; nor is it the cruelly partial
view of the writer fleeing his larg–
est intelligence. It is a lyric reverie
in the light of
the wide world of
society.
What is that grit out of a unique
individual which somehow pro–
vokes the novel of largest general
~~-k//
NEktJ
/NIn
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By ARTHUR E. ROWSE
Foreword by
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A detailed chapter
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The reception
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Louisville Courier-Journal
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BUCON PRESS - BEACON HILL, BOSTON
significance? The nature of the
writer's involvement with his ma–
terial (which consists of all that
he knows of life) suggests another
clue. For complex psychological
reasons, many novelists have been
unavowed Platonists, philosophical
idealists, possessed of a spectator
theory of reality. That is, life has
meaning as the shadows on Pla–
to's cave have meaning-as flick–
ering glimpses through fire of
something beyond life, something
perfect and unchanging and fi–
nally unknowable by men. Their
world is a system deduced from
unknown premises.
Unknown–
this paradox torments them. How
can deductions be made without
defined terms? Therefore they
look for moral abstractions, cate–
gories, faiths, anything that can
place them outside the tormenting
flux of time and sensuality. Per–
haps they become doctrinaire re–
ligionists or Marxists. They take
their stand as viewers, as unwind–
ers. What is the effect on their
novels? Well, some of these writ–
ers are great ones, like Proust and
Henry James, engaged in enter–
prises of passive integration in or–
der to give some "symbolic" sense
to the unruly factness of life. They
shrink; still they cannot avoid
rendering this dense, combative,
time-ridden teeming. Despite their
static position, Proust and James
at their best project a moving im–
age of desire.
But in anything less than a mas–
ter, the
type
of self-absorption in
