JOYCE IN THE SIXTIES
515
tried to do so,
it
seems inevitable that thousands of adventitious
errors got past him. There are plenty of them in
Ulysses
(errors of
transcription, errors of usage, errors of inconsistency and uninten–
tional inaccuracy) , where for the most part Joyce had the conventions
of English speech and spelling to help him; whether one
thinks
they
matter or not-whether, in fact, they are all discoverable or not–
there are unquestionably even more in
Finnegans Wake.
And it is
part of the argument for a "bent" Joyce that in the last part of his
life he was writing in such a way that one cannot distinguish signif–
icant and purposeful from insignificant and accidental elements of
his writing.
His nickname in youth, bestowed by Gogarty, was "Kinch the
knifeblade" ; and he pursued the metaphor with relish, describing
his brother Stanislaus and various other acolytes on whom he used
to sharpen his mind as his "whetstones." That the mind so assiduously
sharpened buckled in mid-career, and surrendered to accident, to
whim, or to circumstance a great part of its control over its own
materials may imply a sort of defeat on Joyce's part. This isn't a
point to be lightly conceded, and there's not much doubt that Joyce
would deserve well of any critic who showed us a feasible way
around
it.
At the moment, one would have to describe informed
opinion as regretfully sceptical that such a way will ever appear.
Yet how much occasion for regret do we (as readers of the
1960's) really have? Joyce was not a consistent, inclusive, or coherent
philosopher, any more than he possessed the power of transmuting
metals; but he would not be a man of our times if he had these
powers, or believed that he did. The medieval synthesis, out of which
Dante wrote so firm and controlled a world-poem, has long since
been shattered; there is even doubt now that it was ever as firm
as it has since seemed to the eye of nostalgia. Neither Joyce nor any
modern writer can count upon that framework of arching, intricate
logic which entitles Dante to inscribe, without irony, over Hell-gate:
FECEMI LA DIVINA POTESTATE
LA SOMMA SAPIENZA E IL PRIMO AMORE.
Power, wisdom, and love, here invoked as coordinate forces without
the slightest hesitation that they can be shown to work together,
