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t.4ARY t.4cCARTHY
a master
mimic
of the voice of conscience, and Mr. Bloom and
Molly are genuine imitations. This blind artist was the great
ventriloquist of the novel. A sustained power of mimicry is
the secret of
all
creators of character; Joyce had it while Virginia
Woolf, say, did not. That is why Joyce was able to give shape
.and body-in short, singularity, definition-to the senseless data
of consciousness.
The notion that life is senseless, a tale told by an idiot–
the under-theme of twentieth-century literature-is affirmed
again by Faulkner in
The Sound and the Fury.
Yet here, as in
Ulysses,
characters appear from the mists of their own reveries
and sensations: the idiot Benjy, Jason, Di1sey the Negro cook.
And a plot, even, is indicated for the reader to piece together
from clues dropped here and there: the story of Caddy and the
castration of Benjy and Quentin's suicide. The materialization
of plot and character prove that there
is
being, after
all,
beyond
the arbitrary flux of existence. Following Joyce and Faulkner, the
imitation-from-within became almost standard practice for writ–
ers who were impatient with the fragmented impressionist novel
and who had assimilated nonetheless some of its techniques. To
use the technique of impressionism to create something quite
different-a character study-seems the manifest intention of
Joyce Cary in
The Horse's Mouth,
where the author, as it were,
impersonates the eye of Gulley Jimson, an old reprobate painter
down on his luck; the dancing, broken surface is only a means,
like the muttering of an inner dialogue, to show the man
in
action, incessantly painting in his mind's eye as he boozily
peregrinates the docks and streets. Something very similar is
John Updike's
the Poorhouse Fair,
which is seen through the
resentful hyperopic eye of an old man sitting on the porch of
a county poorhouse. The sign of this kind of writing, the mark
of its affiliation with the pure impressionist or stream-of-con–
sciousness novel, is that when you start the book you do not
know where you are. It takes you quite a few pages to get
your bearings, just as if you were bumping along inside a sack
