260
epic depended and which made its existence impossible once
disappeared have no real analogy in the history of the novel.
more there have been in the past, in the history of the English
periods of stagnation, as, for example, in the late eighteenth
before Scott and Austen, and in the early nineteenth century,
Dickens and the great Victorians.
It
is possible for twO such
as Lawrence and Joyce to exhaust momentarily the
tJV~"l'UillIAll
a medium, for between them both they seem to say everything
can be said. Like Scott and Austen, a century before, they
have divided
all
human experience, and then, each in his own
ince, to have done everything that could be done. All of the
torians were brought up on Sir Walter, and each thought in
his
that there was to be no "competing" with
this.
But compete
him they did, and in many cases surpassed him.
Just so, Lawrence and Joyce now look overpowering,
and
because of the antithetical nature of their talents: to abjure
to compete with the other. Joyce is the great "artificer,"
the great "natural"; Joyce celebrates the mystery of fatherhood
represents the male principle, while Lawrence is the voice of
hood .and her mysteries; Joyce describes the intricacies of the
while Lawrence is the rhapsodist of nature; Joyce
examines
illogicalities of conscious and unconscious life, Lawrence the
ways of the instincts; Joyce is the voice of Catholicism,
Protestantism; Joyce is the cosmopolite, Lawrence the
Joyce stands for history, Lawrence for futurity; Joyce is a
comedian, Lawrence a Puritan prophet; Joyce apotheosizes the
Lawrence romantic love; Joyce describes, Lawrence evokes; for
sex is of the devil, for Lawrence it is a religion; Joyce
pathos of frustration, Lawrence prophecies an imagined release
fulfillment; Joyce thought language an ultimate reality,
thought it an ultimate sham. Psychologically, culturally,
they are antithetical in every respect, and they stand like great
blocks whose existence seems to imperil any fresh starts.
But they are roadblocks of a differing order, Joyce a real
Lawrence only an apparent one.
Finnegan
is a literal "wake"
certain kind of novel, but
The Man Who Died
is an allegory
to a prose fiction of the future. Joyce's work carries the
of the psyche, literary elaboration, the sense of human
tn·,.tr"ti"n
