518
ROBERT
MARTIN ADAMS
immensely too fast-out of control, altogether. With straining eyes
and anxious small gestures we try to follow the flicker or even react
to
it;
but our best postures are hollow and irrelevant. The language
itself is
vermoulu;
the wells of thought and feeling have been fouled.
The art of the later Joyce lies in extracting a kind of bubbling gaiety,
a verbal vaudeville, from the desolation of this landscape. The old
controversy roused by
Ulysses
over Joyce's alleged pessimism or optim–
ism thus fades, for the 1960's, into a mere matter of emphasis. In
particular, the view of Joyce as an intricate, unwearying cosmic
ironist (a view which leads Hugh Kenner, for example, to see the
Portrait
as primarily an extended assault on Stephen and
Ulysses
as
primarily an extended assault on Bloom) seems bound to fade.
Joyce did not seek or make a desolation, he found it as in the air
we breathe, and extracted from it the juice of a small and flickering
joy. He is not the greatest modem ironist, he is the only great modem
humorist.
One last speculation. The less we see Joyce's work as an intricate,
logically arranged machinery of glittering, sterile edges, and the
more we emphasize the commonness of his materials, the more we
are likely to think his art itself a work of magic-one which touches,
through intuitive insight, the chords of secret, irrational sympathies.
These are not fashionable concepts in modem criticism, any more
than in modem psychology; but modem criticism and psychology
may well be obsolete before
Ulysses
is. In any event, Joyce (following
Baudelaire and Mallarme) himself accepted and made use of sub–
stantially this view of his art. An age more impressed than our own
by its inability to understand its own reactions may well revert to
a view of Joyce as verbal necromancer, if only because the fact of
his impact is there, and the available ways of accounting for it are
patently inadequate. The middle ages, Bloomishly fond of adapting
antique temples into habitable hovels, reworked Apuleius and Virgil
into the semblance of warlocks; very probably, in a century or so,
the same process will be under way with Joyce. The new age will
find, though, that Joyce has been beforehand with them-having
not only constructed his own inimitable architectures, but himself
pulled some of them down to make shanties and outhouses.
