JOYCE IN THE SIXTIES
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all his life (honorable but probably quite unnecessary scruples)
about his own power to create impressions, and thought himself a
forger and a fraud precisely by virtue of his art. That he was
a verbal prestidigitator is not the final truth about Joyce, nor is it
even true of him in the same degree as of Eliot-whose flats and
contrivances I take to be, by now, almost scandalously visible. But
it is a real and inevitable part of the Joyce of the sixties, that the
things he was able to hang people up on in the twenties-like the
theory of epiphany, the bit about Dedalus the maze-maker, and the
great Earth-mother image-are starting to look a little threadbare.
This fact, which inevitably involves loss as well as gain, still frees
us to recognize some interesting things about his art.
Though it is an important element in the working of Joyce's
books and necessarily absorbs a good deal of the exegete's energy,
the sort of intellectual and mythical scaffolding that he erected has
remained largely idiosyncratic. During the twenties the use of classical
myth as a principle of structure and order seemed an outstanding
innovation of
Ulysses;
so no doubt it was, but this is not the feature
which subsequent novelists have seen fit to use, any more than they
have been inspired by the Viconian cycles of
Finnegans Wake.
The
fact is that for a work of anything less than epic proportions, the
mythical parallel is better used as adornment, as allusion, as passing
commentary, than as structural principle. Joyce found it particularly
handy as a groundwork for verbal and thematic embroidery; but
Joyce's habit of mind was peculiar, indeed unique, in its passion for
involuted decoration. He may well have inherited this trait, as he
liked to think, from progenitors who had produced the Book of Kells;
one may also feel that his intricate arabesques serve as a gigantic,
complicated trap in which to involve and defeat the reader's conscious
mind, in preparation for an appeal to deeper and darker levels of
response. But neither rationale is capable of very general application.
Whatever its function, whatever its origins, the crustacean, exoskeletal
quality of joyce's patterning has not been accepted as viable by
other novelists, and seems likely to remain a personal oddity.
Much more interesting to people who are not professional
Joyceans is joyce's use of language. Here one has a considerable
span of performance to deal with, from the stripped and polished
subtleties of
Dubliners
to the dark oddities of
Finnegans Wake.
The
