JOYCE IN THE SIXTIES
513
say that the pattern very probably won't work out. Joyce is not, like
Dante, a rigorous and utterly consistent systematizer. The more rigor–
ously you read him, the more loose ends you uncover. The more
intricately you explain one set of details, the less chance there is that
this
explanation can be made to dovetail with anything else in the
book or the career. The more ingenious your explanations, the more
explanation they seem to need themselves. At the moment, we are
under no immediate compulsion to give up on the big-pervasive–
pattern presumption-but
it
seems like a terribly apt time to start
looking for alternatives. The reason is not simply that evidence on
hand fails to establish the existence of such a pattern; it
is
that almost
all
the new evidence which keeps turning up works directly against
it. There comes a time in the history of certain projects when someone
has to say "We're never going to get a concert violin out of this
thing, no matter
how many
toothpicks we use in it."
What, then, is the shape of the new Joyce? I think we must
look for him in the figure of a visionary vulgarist, a man whose
extraordinary view of life grew out of a defeat for, and disillusion
with, the conscious, rational mind. The narrow young man whom
Joyce calls Stephen Dedalus exemplifies one terminus of the conscious
mind, when he tells prudent, flabbergasted Bloom that "Ireland must
be
important because it belongs to me." The sort of impressionism
he has learned from Walter Pater (see the famous conclusion to
The Renaissance)
culminates in this near-solipsism. On another level,
and within the same book, the long dry catechism of "Ithaca"
contracts itself into that famous round black dot (which the Random
House edition shamefully omits), and disappears into permanent
darkness. Having tied itself in tighter and tighter knots throughout
the book, rationality blacks out altogether, and the book culminates,
not with the achievement of a symbolic pattern, but with the absorp–
tion of all thought in the endless spinning motion of the blindly
appetitive life-force. Common as dirt, majestic, luminous, and all–
embracing, the sensual life of Molly Bloom is, imaginatively, the
beginning and end of us all. From the dark of "Penelope," Joyce
passed to the deeper darkness of
Finnegans Wake,
and found there
such rewards as, after rationality is defeated, remain to a great artist–
a religion of man which he could scarcely formulate without deriding
it; occult and pantheist notions which he took only half-seriously;
