348
RICHARD POIRIER
parody of Joyce or Nabokov or Borges than it does to Barth or Iris
Murdoch. (Pynchon seems to me to succeed in making such orders
out of the cults of young people of the sixties, a remarkable thing to
have done. He shows us how a favorite bar or a prospect of
Los
Angeles can now have some of the resonance of a cultural tradition.)
The limited durability of any sense-making structures bedevils
the careers of Joyce's characters, but he feels it himself even more
acutely in
his
career within any particular book. The drama of
Ulysses
is
only incidently that of Stephen, Bloom and Molly; more
poignantly it
is
the drama of Joyce himself making the book. The
fact that the many and various techniques in the chapters of
Ulysses
are made to appear forced, superimposed and mechanical, that each
in tum
is
dispensed with so that another might be tried - this fact
in itself constitutes the drama of the novel. Joyce enacts by his per–
formance in the book the problem which is felt with a sentimental
enervation by Stephen: the problem of being unable to build, as it's
phrased in
A Portrait,
"... breakwaters of order and elegance against
the sordid tide of life." It's a mistake, I think, to assume that the
last section, Molly Bloom's soliloquy,
is
meant either to represent
the disorganized flow of that life or that it constitutes some sort of
Joycean affirmation. Molly
is
merely saying "yes" to whatever has
happened to her. Because of the increasingly tight organizational
schemes of the immediately preceding sections,
this
last one does seem
free of at least punctuational barriers to the flow of life independent
of time. But like
all
other sections of the book, it takes its form from
a compulsive feeling about the ravages of time, a compulsive recol–
lection.
Time in Molly's soliloquy has eroded not the great schemas of
western civilization or even the lesser ones of the modem city.
It
has instead begun to lay waste to the body of a very human woman
in the early middle ages of her life. Molly's self-consciousness about
sex should
be
thought of no differently from Joyce's self-consciousness
about the institutions that appeal to
his
imagination. In both cases,
recollection has become the subject of nostalgic jokes, of longing
chastened by a nervous confidence in the salvation afforded by some
present or anticipated performance. There are analogues in Bloom
thinking of Rudy and being pacified by
his
saving of Stephen at the
end of the Circe episode, in Stephen thinking about the Church he
has disowned and living with unacceptable substitutes for it - the
