262
WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
if only the key to it all could be found, meanwhile ignoring what
Lewis saw very clearly and emphasized as a given - the comic, en–
cyclopedic nature of the book. Only recently has the critique been
recognized for the useful starting-point it provides for discussion of
Ulysses;
that it is a starting-point rather than a terminus is shown
by the way critics who begin with it arrive at very different estimates
of the book. Hugh Kenner's
Dublin's Joyce
brought Lewis' critique
into circulation by calling it, provocatively, a brilliant misreading.
Kenner then proceeded to defend the book as more thoroughly sar–
donic than Lewis realized; if Lewis thought Stephen Dedalus was
a prig, ("It would be difficult, I think, to find a more lifeless, irritat–
ing, principal figure than the deplorable hero of the
Portrait of the
Artist
and of
Ulysses")
Joyce knew it as well or better than anyone
and liked him no better than Lewis.
If
Ulysses
is a vast glut of matter,
a cathartic monument to the Victorian world, a record diarrhea, Joyce
meant it to be just that, established Molly Bloom at the head of the
flux and looked down in ironic mastery and mockery of it all. Kenner's
argument is fascinating and unanswerable if one is willing to imagine
a Joyce fully disengaged from his creations. But, as S.
L.
Goldberg
demonstrates in
The Classical Temper,
Kenner's criticism turns Lewis
upside down and transforms every apparent vice of
Ulysses
into a
hidden virtue. By contrast, Goldberg's own reading of the book re–
fuses to simplify Joyce's irony at its best into an either/or affair, looks
behind the sardonic catafalque and finds, not mystic meanings, but a
Joyce both sympathetic with and critical of his heroes, Bloom and
Stephen. Like Lewis and Kenner, Goldberg sees the book as comic
but finds the comedy a more humane one than do they.
This brief mention of one event in recent Joyce criticism takes
us away from Lewis' own work, but demonstrates in a particular
case how a critique lay around more or less unnoticed for twenty-five
years, then became important to someone and now looks like per–
haps the most acute writing about Joyce done in the early years of
Ulysses'
publication. That Lewis' account is tendentious, inconsistent
with itself, perhaps inspired by motives of jealousy, general malice or
whatever one wishes to impute may well be true; but it has stirred
other readers to defense and rejoinder and is therefore alive today.
Its most salutary assumption is that a novel should be read, responded
to and taken into our experience as a living book (even if it is a
