450
MARY McCARTHY
mnemonics. Stephen and Mr. Bloom, in their itineraries, cover
certain key points in the life of the city-the beach, the library,
the graveyard, the cabman's stand, Nighttown-and a guide to
Joyce's Dublin has been published, with maps and a key. Nor
is it by chance that the peripatetic Mr. Bloom is an advertising
canvasser.
He travels back and forth and up and down in
society like Ulysses, who explored the four corners of the
known world. The epic, I might put in here, is the form of
all literary forms closest to the novel; it has the "boiler-plate,"
the lists and catalogues, the circumstantiality, the concern with
numbers and dimensions. The epic geography, like that of the
novel, can be
mapped,
in both the physical and the social sense.
This clear locative sense is present in all true novels. Take
Jane Austen.
Emma
and
Pride and Prejudice
contain few facts
of the kind I have been speaking of-nothing like the paper
business or the history of the Russian monk. Yet there are
facts of a different sort, documents like Mr. Collins's letters,
charades, riddles, dance programs (" 'Then the two third he
danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas,
and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two sixth with Lizzy,
and the
Boulanger-'
"),
menus- feminine facts, so to speak–
and a very painstaking coverage, of a genteel class within the
confines of a certain income range, marked off, like a frontier.
One difference between Jane Austen and Henry James is that
the reader of
Pride and Prejudice
knows exactly how much
money the characters have: Mr. Bingley has four or five
thousand a year (with
.a
capital of nearly one hundred thou–
sand) ; Mr. Bennet has two thousand a year, ENTAILED, while
Mrs. Bennet brought him a capital of four thousand from her
father, an attorney at Meryton; Mr. Darcy has ten thousand
a year; his sister, Georgiana, has a capital of thirty thousand.
The same with distances, ages, and time. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet
have been married twenty-three years; Mrs. Weston, in
Emma,
has been Emma's governess for sixteen years; Mr. Knightley
is 'about seven or eight and thirty; Emma is nearly twenty-one;
