PARTISAN REVIEW
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the defining themes of "Scylla and Charbdis" are paralleled and com–
pleted, Stephen's "vision of the act of love as the basic act of art"
finding its counterpart in Molly's "vision of love as the basic act of
nature."
Ellmann's insistence on Joyce's reverent earthy affirmativeness
ought to put to its final rest the old view of
Ulysses
as a companion
in despair to
The Waste Land.
This limiting vision of Joyce's novel,
still revived from time to time, seems now to be a response only to Joyce's
satiric side. Others have pressed the larger, more encompassing view
before, and Ellmann himself contributed much to it in his 1959 biogra–
phy. (Ironically, despite its apparent allegiance to the latest critical
fashions, Cixous's book regresses at times toward the older, largely
discredited conception.) Ellmann's new volume fortifies and decisively
extends our understanding of Joyce's impulse to comic celebration, im–
plicitly locating
Ulysses
in a redefined modernism that is no longer dom–
inated by visions of barrenness and no longer completely hostile to the
nineteenth century.
Ulysses on the Liffey
invites significant dissent, I think, in but one
respect: its occasional willingness to collapse the distance between Joyce's
intentions and what is actually there in the text itself. The most drama–
tic
instance of this is EHmann's claim that the various bodily organs
assigned to each chapter in Joyce's elaborate schemas are really to be
found in the novel. Ellmann presents a striking theoretical justification
for this "archetypal man whose body the whole book limns." Perhaps
he
ought
to be present, but the text seems to me unwilling to cooperate.
Beyond this, and far more tentatively, one wonders whether the mar–
riage of form and content in a few of joyce's more flamboyant chap–
ters is always as pacific as Ellmann's account implies. Even granting his
notion that the literal level of the book declines in importance as the
novel advances, there remains the possibility that Joyce's particular
narrative strategies may yield his meanings (literal or otherwise) only
imperfectly. Ellmann's explications do not sufficiently acknowledge the
distinction between a theoretically persuasive strategy, an
intention,
and what is actualized on the page: do not acknowledge, that is, what
many readers know with certainty - that "Cyclops" is a brilliant suc–
cess while "Oxen of the Sun" is (relatively) a failure .
So, it may be, even Ellmann nods. But the substance of this hu–
mane, this witty and serious book is beyond challenge. It will enlighten
new readers of J oyce as well as scholars, and it should also delight and
move them. For like the greater book with which it is concerned,
Ulysses
on the Liffey
is a rare testament to the humanizing value of intelligence
and imaginative sympathy.
David Thorburn
