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JOYCE IN THE SIXTIES
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by which the action of the modern novel was interiorized, its defini–
tion of reality changed from social to psychological. Seen simply as
a shift in representational conventions, it is less than startling. Experi–
ence is caught at an earlier and less complete stage of digestion,
but the artifice of expressing it is just as apparent as in the fully
formed, grammatically articulated sentences of Jane Austen and
Walter Scott.
If
the novelist had to go into the pre-articulate stages
of
his
characters' existence, and stay there permanently, it is not clear
that the device would be justified; used intermittently, it adds extra–
ordinary mobility to the novelist's repertoire of effects, enabling
him to move from inner fantasy to outward reality and back again,
with a minimum of explanation. What he finds under the surface,
too, can be expressed poetically without the implication that his
character is a frightfully arty chap. A character like John Updike's
Rabbit Angstrom displays, alongside an appallingly nebulous blank
of mind and almost no verbal subtlety, an intricate gift of feeling
conveyed in complex poetic metaphors. His brains are buried some–
where in his nerves, deeper than words, deeper even than neuroses,
in his perceptions themselves; and I think it was Joyce, as much as
anyone, who encouraged Updike to see them there. Flaubert said
with a sneer that the debris of a poet is to be found in the corner
of every notary's heart; Joyce makes good the observation without
the sneer.
Of the prose of
Finnegans Wake
it is less easy to speak.
If
it was
an experiment, it was given the most splendid and exhaustive tryout
of any on record, and has left a whole generation of writers with no
experiments to make which don't look puny by comparison. But the
word "experiment" repreSents a weak evasion here;
Finnegans Wake
is a rigorously rational adaptation of language to the expression of
the irrational. There is nothing tentative about it, and one has no
sense that Joyce is trying to see what can be done with a technique.
Joyce saw the history of a culture and a personality under the image
of an immense litter-pile, its clutter arranged in vague layers and
suggesting dim but complicated patterns. The manner of
Finnegans
Wake
is a direct outcome of a mode of vision. Considered as a
complete style of writing (not just a ragbag of occasional tricks), this
manner is of relatively slight value independent of the insight it
implies. The chief writers who seem inclined to share Joyce's point
