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JOHN HOLLANDER
Ellmann guesses, in July or August of 1914, and his remarks on it tend
to place this lyrical evocation of an "affair, of eyes, rather than bodies"
as transitional work betwen the completed
Dubliners
and
Portrait
(par–
ticularly the latter portions).
It
is also preparation for the transcendence
of Stephen Dedalus' lyric manner in the interior monologue of
Ulysses,
where the surface of the prose and the depths of consciousness below
it have come to
contain
the intrusions of street noise, remembered song,
foreign phrase and urban event, rather than, as in
Portrait,
to be
punctuated by them. It is perhaps for this reason that the introduction
to the present edition avoids comment on the relationship between Joyce
and the actual prototype of the dark anima of the story, going so far as
not mentioning her name, although the fact that she was a Jewess
and her father's name was Leopold come in for some notice in the
biographical study. Ellmann's preface here constantly looks forward to the
expansion of themes and fragments that well up in the strophe-like
paragraphs of the text, varying from a line of a few words to a com–
plex block of over two hundred, in Joyce's subsequent work.
For anyone who has read the bulk of the story in the previously
published fragments, most of the new material will bring few surprises.
The self-mocking irony that coils ungentle tendrils around the green
longings of over thirty for under twenty is present throughout; the
piece opens, not with a description, not with a name or the name of
a name - "She!" for example - but with an undercutting "Who?"
The title, derived from Casanova's Christian name, invokes a colloquial
Italian designation of the cocksman, but the girl of the story is an
untouched and besonnetted lady. The continuity of the paragraphs is
indeed much more like that of a sonnet sequence than it is of any
sort of narrative; various scenes and situations, some obviously weeks
apart, are sketched out and inevitably moralized with a start, a sigh,
a phrase, a memory or a laugh. A single line may be the skeleton of a
conceit, or a rather lush description of a scene, a time of day, or an
erotic fantasy may round out a moment of encounter. In all this, what
gives continuity is the inevitability of the two parallel lines of man
and girl preserving their equidistance: they will not sleep together
and their parting will not be tragic. Only the mode of satiric vision
changes, and the imagery moves toward the serpentine and the enven–
omed, through a miniature phantasmagoria of purgation, to an upsurge
of release into art: "Youth has an end: the end is here. It will never
be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What
else are you good for?"
But it is precisely this bit of nightmare vision for which the earlier
fragments leave one unprepared. With a rhythm that builds, through
