256
is
and nothing can be done. But the basic attitude of
this
deeply pessimistic. Space is imprisonment, time a tyranny, and
a nightmare from which nobody can awake. The temporal is
session dominating
all
phases of life. Similarly the tone is
and seeks merely to describe, with no moral or lesson or
thesis.
more Joyce
is
the culmination and fullest expression of the
and
Ulysses
is
the most scrupulously non-kinetic of novels. It
to nothing but sheer contemplation, which was the author's
and sole objective.
There are also formal resemblances in the Joyce traditiOil
set it off from the Butler-Forster-Lawrence line. Primarily the
tion is self-consciously "literary," both in structure and style.
Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, whatever their great differences,
all united in a devotion to the carefully planned structure,
James's "point of view," through the looping narrative of
and the artfully planned one of Virginia Woolf, to the gigantic
ship, with everything in place from the underwater bolts to
ing on the conning tower, of
Ulysses.
Likewise these authors
magicians of "the word," not only the right words, but the right
in the right order. For each, language
per se
was a kind of
almost an objective entity- a lovely goddess appearing to the
less aging bachelor Henry James on a New Year's Eve, a
strument to Joyce for transforming that reality behind which
a God in whom he still believed but could no longer serve.
None of these writers was connected to one another by
any
scious lines of influence, with the exception of Virginia Woolf's
nizing the importance of
Ulysses
for the method and purpose
own work. James was "The Master,"
sui generis;
Conrad a
working in a strange tongue; Virginia Woolf
all
alone
in
her
with a view; Joyce an Irishman living on the Continent and
sciously disdainful of all that had preceded
him
in English
Thus each thought of himself or herself as a new start,
speaking. Seen in retrospect, they all prove to be culminative
lutionary, but this evolution resulted from the workings of the
geist
and not from the workings of their own minds, each of
saw itself as unique, precarious, and isolated. .
The Butler-Forster-Lawrence tradition explicitly reverses
these characteristics. In the first place it is quite consciously
