WYNDHAM LEWIS
261
tive; his passive receptivity to any stylistic wind is of a piece with
his
lack of preference for one particular point of view over another.
His impartiality, then, is a defect
in
artistic personality, in individual
identity. Again like Pound, although the point is not made explicitly,
Joyce is an untrustworthy guide to the present because his present is
the past - the accumulated Dublin rubbish of his young manhood.
He has great sensitivi ty to verbal cliches, yet his characters are cliches
of type rather than individuals; he finds it difficult to set before us
a convincing identity that doesn't depend on conventional notions of
race or class - the stage-Irishman, the stage-Jew, etc. He looks, once
more like Pound, through other people's eyes and not through his
own (how Joyce must have responded to the accusation of having
second-class sight!). In
Ulysses)
nineteenth-century naturalism com–
bines with the passing parade of objects to form a great
nature
morte;
the oppressive thing about it all is that the parade of objects
is
really one of reflections taking place in somebody's head and repro–
duced through internal narrative: in other words, Joyce has
capi~u
lated to the time-philosophy. Lewis does not minimize the considerable
achievement
Ulysses
represents; his metaphors boldly create the kind
of achievement he takes it to be:
It is like a gigantic victorian quilt or antimacassar. Or it is the
voluminous curtain that fell, belated (with the alarming momentum
of a ton or two of personally organized rubbish), upon the victorian
scene. So rich was its delivery, its pent-up outpouring so vehement,
that it will remain, eternally cathartic, a monument like a record
diarrhoea. No one who looks
at
it will ever want to look
behind
it.
It is the sardonic catafalque of the victorian world.
Aside from the impressively overwhelming nature of the description,
its penultimate sentence is most important. Here, Lewis is saying, is
a book of the surface of things past, internalized into mental dead–
ness, enveloped by thickly-wadded words. In a sense the book really
doesn't
mean
anything ("No one who looks
at
it will ever want to
look
behind
it") and why should it, since its author has nothing to
tell us, is not a mind at all but a demon craftsman, fascinated with
doing things as many ways as possible.
Of course from Stuart Gilbert on, most criticism of
Ulysses
has
been very much interested in looking behind it, explaining and inter–
preting symbols, even supposing great wisdom was contained within
