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RICHARD POIRIER
meaning even as he enthusiastically moves on to new modes of
production.
The risks inherent in self-parody can't be ignored, however, even
in
Ulysses.
It, too, is at times boring on purpose and for too long.
Who can deny a tedious lack of economy in Joyce - or in Beckett
or Borges, Burroughs or Barth - an overindulgence in mostly
formal displays where little more is accomplished than a repetitive
exposure of some blatantly obtuse formal arrangement? In
Ulysses
the so-called "Aeolus" and "Oxen of the Sun" episodes are instances,
the former being an early version of Burroughs' "cut-ups." But the
longeurs
in Joyce are relieved by his participation in momentary
acts of faith: he participates in the productive illusions of Bloom and
Molly and in the nostalgia of Stephen Dedalus for the possible saving
grace of institutions whose impotence he is also exposing. So that
while he seems more often than not to subscribe to the credo of
Barth's hero in
The Floating Opera
-
"Nothing is of intrinsic value"
- Joyce is never as happy as Barth with the necessities of novel–
istically enacting it. It can be rendered in fiction mostly by the
deflations of any heroic (or Homeric)
claim
to the world. No
wonder efforts to project a self of historical consequence are
largely missing or the object of mockery
in
the literature of
self-parody. Plots seldom issue as they do in earlier fiction, from
the interplay and pressure of individual human actions. Notably
in such recent examples as Pynchon and Heller, plot can be said to
exist prior to the book. It's a self-generating, even possibly self–
generated formula of myths and conspiracies whose source is as mys–
terious as the source of life itself, and within it characters try, often
vainly, to find a role, or to find any possible human tie not implicated
in the impersonality of the plot. And the role of the novelist in the
book is equally insecure - what is Joyce's style, where is
his
voice
in
Ulysses?
Within the vastness of
V.
is there any locatable presence of
Thomas Pynchon? The novelist in such instances is the distracted
servant to servants, discovering that none of his material is original,
none of it truly his, none of it derived from any state of "nature" or
"life." Life, even before the novelist proposes to represent it, exists,
it would seem, in the conditions and shapes imposed upon it by art,
by the pastoral, allegorical, epic, narrative, political imaginations,
all as much as by the myths and rituals that are the accompaniment
of nationality and religion.
