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ROBERT MARTIN ADAMS
simply did not work together for Joyce- as they don't for our world,
generally. There is nothing idiosyncratic about joyce's "bending";
he took it, perhaps, harder than most because the early sense of
unusual power and discipline engendered in him the conviction of
a special intellectual destiny. No man who sets before him, as Joyce
did in youth, the austere and rigorous example of Dante, can fail to
be disappointed when he discovers that it is just not possible to write
like Dante any more. An early review speaks with lofty contempt
of "a young generation which has cast away belief and thrown
precision after it, for which Balzac is a great intellect and every
sampler who chooses to wander amid his own shapeless hells and
heavens a Dante without the unfortunate prejudices of Dante."
Except for admiring Balzac, the elder Joyce might be thought to
exemplify precisely these terms of disdain formulated by his younger
self.
In
a famous essay of the twenties much hacked over lately, T. S.
Eliot spoke of the "dissociation of sensibility" characteristic of our
times as distinguished from the seventeenth century. Whether our
sensibility is more dissociated now than it was then may be debated;
what causes led to this dissociation (whenever we suppose it to have
begun) may provide further subject of speculation. But the fact,
simply as a fact, is scarcely open to question. The division between
scientific knowledge and human feeling is not, however, the only
"dissociation" we have to contend with; rifts and schisms in the world
of the mind are so many and so deep that the modem sensibility
can't be called simply "dissociated"-it is fractured, splintered,
Balkanized. For good or evil, the characteristic arts of our age are
unstructured; the invertebrate, episodic novel, music improvised or
only loosely patterned, maze-like painting, these are our characteristic
products. Not only this, but our social life seems to me more and
more unstructured. We are in the age of the independent voter,
responsive not to the principles but to moods, in the age of the
wildcat strike, directed against union bureaucracy as much as against
management. Distinctions between cultures, classes, even levels of
mental organization are breaking down; witness, for instance, the
peculiar ambivalence taken on by a word like "primitive." I even
hear rumors of places where the distinction between the sexes is
getting ambiguous.
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