GEORGE STADE
Trilling and
Ulysses
Thirty years ago, shortly after I began teaching at Columbia, Lionel
Trilling, with his exacting sense of the obligations that rode on his fame,
walked into the office in Hamilton Hall that I shared with three other
instructors, introduced himself, and sat down, thus throwing me into
that condition of frozen panic with which the wildebeest faces a lion,
for that's what we juniors called Lionel Trilling, "the lion." And where
my office-mates were, now that I needed them to absorb some of
Trilling's armor-piercing, blue-eyed gaze I can't remember. In a fruitless
attempt to put me at my ease, Trilling offered me a cigarette, for in
those days even smart people smoked, and asked me how I like teaching
Humanities A.
We agreed that Thucydides was a very smart man; and then, desper–
ately rummaging around in my forebrain for something, anything, worth
saying, I added that the course ought properly to conclude with James
Joyce's
Ulysses,
a book that both disestablished and salvaged everything
that went before. I gather that you think
Ulysses
is a good novel, said
Trilling. His tone was dry. The best ever written, I said, although I had
by no means read them all. What's good about it? asked Trilling. Now
that was a stumper, for like Joyce, and maybe Trilling, I believed two
things about value judgments: that you couldn't help making them, and
that you couldn't in the end support them, for value judgments, to
quote Joyce, were irremovably "founded, like the world, macro and
mi–
crocosm, upon the void." So I opened my word-hoard to some com–
monplaces about the novel's stylistic innovations. Maybe, said Trilling,
getting up, grinding out his cigarette. You'll remember, he said, moving
toward the door, that at the end of his day, Leopold Bloom removes his
shoe, sees his big toe poking through a hole in his sock, breaks off a
piece of the nail, brings it to his nose, and smells it - "with satisfaction."
That's what's really new - and good - about
Ulysses,
said Trilling, and
he walked out the door.
Squelched as I was, I could still see that Trilling, like Leopold
Bloom, had put his finger on something. For starters, he was right at
least in the trivial sense that Bloom was the first character in fiction to
sniff his toe-jam. I say this with confidence, although I still have not read
all
the novels.
It
is true, of course, that many of the body's waste and by–
products had appeared in earlier literature, usually in sermons and satires,
usually for the purpose of shaming us out of our congenital narcissism
