510
ROBERT MARTIN ADAMS
first thing to say is that Joyce helped clean English fiction of its
thick crust of nineteenth-century gingerbread, and made it impossible
to write as badly as was commonplace before him. Of course many
others took part with him in this cleaning of the stables, and it is
impossible to sort out his specific contribution. But anyone who
has
prowled the jungle of late-nineteenth-century fiction, fiction written
not by abysmal incompetents but by intelligent and often perceptive
men, will testify to the stifling quality of the conventions which
Joyce and his contemporaries inherited. Puffy and overstuffed lang–
uage, a flat style, and a general disdain of literary effects-from
Gissing to Galsworthy, and not excluding Hardy, these qualities were
the rule. Now that the conventions are safely surmounted,
it
is easy
to underestimate the considerable energy which was necessary to
overcome them. But this is still only a historical reason for remember–
ing Joyce, and he has better claims on our attention.
When one says that Joyce enriched the speech of English fiction,
there is a natural tendency to think of the various taboos he violated,
the various censorships he knocked down. The matter is more con–
siderable than this. One has only to look at the first chapter of
Ulysses,
less than twenty pages of prose, to sense the dramatic rich-
ness, flexibility, and complexity of the language. The scene moves
with elegance and under its own power; the hand of the novelist
does not have to tug it along. Symbols are pervasive, vivid yet un–
demanding. The tonality of the chapter is sunlit, yet under the
surface one senses the sulky, resentful power of Stephen'S mind,
cuddling its enmity. A complex of energies is effortlessly set moving
l
in these pages; the economy of means and richness of achievement
mark a genuine imaginative achievement. In the diction of a passage
like
this,
Joyce worked to standards of subtlety, economy, and exact-
ness by which English novels will be measured for years to come;
his ability to do so was quite independent of technical innovations-
I
stream of consciousness, mythic parallels, multilingual puns, and
~
so forth.
I
As
it was not joyce's invention, the "stream-of-consciousness"
device which he did so much to popularize can not be laid at his
personal doorstep. Historically viewed, it actually does not seem to
have been anyone individual's contribution, and literary historians
of the future will no doubt see it as simply one episode in a process
