JOYCE IN THE SIXTIES
517
To such a world, the very ideal of a monolithic structure of
compelling belief is irrelevant. Setting aside the nostalgia of my
conservative prejudices as unprofitable, I take Joyce as a type of
the artist who is willing to live in and write for the future. The
world he chose or was forced to choose, seemingly against the very
nature of his gift, is the one we now inhabit. Having passed through
the latter stages of
Ulysses,
we are entering upon the first pages of
Finnegans Wake,
a murky passage of confused time enlivened only
by the incidental jokes of the indifferent. Joyce found not only the
available structures of ideas and beliefs, but the very texture of
language corrupted; and so undertook, not to build anew, but to
write in a way that needed neither conventional ideas nor conven–
tional language. His problem was one which it may not seem too
pretentious to describe as a general problem of our time-how to
wash clean in dirty water, how to do worthwhile work with bent,
second-hand tools.
Finnegans Wake
may be perceived very hand–
somely as a game of billiards played
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And ellipitical billiard balls.
In
its pages, Joyce has successfully performed the reduction of the
arts to philology, and so far as is possible re-enacted the creation
of the cosmos (a new and private cosmos) within the proscenium
of his peculiar gift. That he was able to do this using only the
junk and litter of the original cosmos is a splendid achievement; but
its splendor need not blind us to its perversity, and its perversity
cannot be judged independently of the age to which it is a response.
Thus we circle back to the
Zeitgeist,
about which it seems we must
have opinions.
What Joyce saw (and it is an inevitable part of my argument
that he saw truly) was an age of bind and smudge; of consciousness
and above all of self-consciousness almost infinite in extent but foggy
and unformulated in its topography. A peculiarity of modern feeling.
as evident in Franz Kafka and Jackson Pollock as in
Finnegans Wake,
is loss of horizon, obliteration of perspective. Experience flickers
through the darkroom of our consciousness like a film projected
