SELF-PARODY
347
The literature of self-parody is bound by its allegiance, minute
by minute, to the passage of time. Its practitioners are doing what
Griffith thought of doing with his camera: of holding it on a scene
so long that the scene would have to break up. Hold the camera,
that is, on the noble rider until he climbs down, and after the hilarity
of watching a line of men fall into an open manhole, keep your
camera there until they have to crawl out, bloody, bruised and half–
conscious. The passage of time distorts any shapes proposed by art,
and this has by now become a major theme of literature no less than
of painting and film. Necessarily, the theme belongs to artists of a
classic rather than a romantic inclination, to writers ,as obsessively cul–
tured as Joyce or Eliot, as incredibly read as Borges, as learned as
Barth, as encyclopedic as Pynchon. They are all, to different degrees,
burdened with the wastes of time, with cultural shards and rubbish.
Joyce's great theme, finally, is that the mind, the conservative and
responsible mind, can hold its contents only by acts of perverse and
mechanical will. In
Ulysses
Joyce's own acts of historical and literary
recollection are exposed to the modifications that are the inescapable
result of their being inserted into the passage of time, here and now.
It is as
if
Joyce wanted to show why it is no longer possible to be a
poet in the sense proposed by Kierkegaard. It is no longer possible,
that is, to be a happy genius of recollection, striving day and night
"against the cunning of oblivion which would trick him," says
Kierkegaard in
Fear and Trembling,
"out of his hero."
In assessing the grandeur of Joyce's achievement as against
that of any writer since, one has to consider the scale of the objects
which provoked his memory and the sufferings of memory. The kind
of object that excites memory need make no difference to its inten–
sity:
in that respect the Catholic Church is no more imposing than
a fishing trip to the Big Two-Hearted River. But the nature of the
object can make a considerable difference to the texture of prose.
Nostalgia for the Church can easily pass beyond personal depriva–
tions to incorporate, by images and styles derived from it, the sup–
posed agony of a culture facing the horrors of institutional collapse.
The failure of endurance in institutions has a literary analogue in
those works of literature which expose their own shapings to the
dilapidating effects of duration. Nostalgia for lost or desiderated
orders that once let a writer participate in a cultural or social com–
plex - such nostalgia gives enormously richer pathos to the self-
