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ROBERT MARTIN ADAt.45
gratified by our exercise of broadmindedness, we may well have
carried the hygienic view of Joyce further than the facts will sustain
it. A few recent apologists have gone far toward maintaining that
Joyce was a kind of Irish Homer Lane-morally and socially thera–
peutic, intellectually farsighted as well as consistent, a kind of moral
surgeon plying his steely art upon the conscience of the western world.
The facts as we are coming to see them appear rather more complex
and less dramatic. Like Swift, Joyce was a prurient author, as a
result of both his temperament and his background. Dirty words and
fecal images had a powerful inflammatory influence on his mind;
he didn't generally use them (any more than Swift did) for thera–
peutic or cathartic effect. (Whether they can possibly have such an
effect, I leave to the sexologists.) With his vigorous sense of obscenity
and filth he combined a characteristically late-nineteenth-century
worship of woman as the great redemptive force of modern life.
Joyce found in sex a fearful and rapturous experience, the more
dramatic because of all the taboos and cosmic rewards he grafted
onto it. This combination of extreme attitudes on the subject of sex
seems to me rather remote from any attitudes I recognize as wide–
spread in the educated sixties. It is remote from healthy-minded
"realism," from romantic promiscuity, or from the impersonal, empty
mechanism which is the characteristic form of most modern literary
sex. Joyce found in woman a doorway to heaven and/or hell; I
think historical distanie is making it easier to understand this view
and less necessary to react for or against it.
joyce's view of sex-no longer a revelation from Erebus or
Olympus-is starting to be recognizable as a set of dramatic properties
supplied by his social circumstances and personal temperament; much
the same thing can be said of his politics, his "philosophy," his
esthetics. I don't mean to sound condescending or triumphant here–
as
if
at last, after all these years, we were starting to see around
old Joyce. I mean only that, having been distracted all too long by
questions about whether Joyce is bad or good for the young, or for
Ireland, for the recognition of the truth, or the freedom of the psyche,
we are finally coming to judge him as an artist, whose work
is
a
structure of impressions. In building that structure, he came about as
close to producing a durable scheme of philosophically impregnable
positions as artists usually do.
As
a matter of fact, he had scruples
