The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  —Mrkgnao! the cat said loudly.

  There follow twelve chapters of everyday episodes in the life of this Jewish salesman for newspaper advertisements. These include soliciting a customer, attending a funeral, discussing politics, eating lunch, visiting the library and pubs, enjoying the sight of attractive women, celebrating the safe delivery of a baby to his acquaintance, and finally going into Dublin’s brothel quarter.

  These episodes are not told in the order of Odysseus wanderings, but do include counterparts to Calypso, the Lotus Eaters, the Voyage to Hades, Aeolus King of the Winds, the Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, the Wandering Rocks, the Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa, the Oxen of the Sun, and Circe. Joyce’s final three chapters, the Homecoming (Nostos), offer counterparts of Homer’s Eumaeus, Ithaca, and Penelope, as they converge the day of Stephen and Leopold. Stephen accepts Leopold’s invitation to a cup of cocoa at his 7 Eccles Street home. Stephen walks off into the night, and we are left with Bloom, whose Molly ends the book with the famous stream of her consciousness.

  Joyce himself explained to Linati that Ulysses, besides being an encyclopedic cycle of the human body, was an epic of two races, the Jews and the Irish—both historic victims on the periphery of European history. Joyce seized his opportunity, using pagan and Judeo-Christian lore to rescue them both to the center of the human stage. The headmaster Deasy put the question:

  —Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews.… And do you know why?.…

  —Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

  —Because she never let them in.…

  At first it seems odd that Joyce should have chosen one of the few Chosen People to stand for Everyman. But in this way he gives his readers another opportunity “to understand through suggestion rather than direct statement.” By creating Leopold Bloom as his Ulysses he showed he was not confined by autobiography.

  Ulysses is the story of itself. Ingenious theological interpreters see Bloom as God the Father and Dedalus as God the Son, who must be united by the Holy Ghost in the miracle of artistic creation. And the accounts of Bloom’s bodily processes affirm the universal humanity of the story. While the chapters recounting Dedalus’s day have their correspondences in the Gospels (the Last Supper, Jesus’ conflict with the scribes and Pharisees, the Temptation of Jesus in the Desert), Bloom’s day has its Old Testament counterparts (from Genesis to Elijah).

  Dublin, a modern city-state, was providentially suited for the Joycean Odyssey. “It was … a happy accident,” Stuart Gilbert notes, “… that the creator of Ulysses passed his youth in such a town as Dublin, a modern city-state, of almost Hellenic pattern, neither so small as to be merely parochial in outlook, nor so large as to lack coherency, and foster that feeling of inhuman isolation which cools the civic zeal of Londoner or New-Yorker.” Joyce’s confidant in Zurich in 1918, Frank Budgen, luckily for us described the process of writing Ulysses. “Joyce wrote the ‘Wandering Rocks’ with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city.… Not Bloom, not Stephen is here the principal personage, but Dublin itself.… All towns are labyrinths.…” While working on his chapter, Joyce bought a game called Labyrinth, which he played every evening for a time with his daughter, Lucia. From this game he cataloged the six main errors of judgment into which one might fall in seeking a way out of a maze. Just as the Odyssey would become a geographical authority on the Mediterranean world, so Ulysses would be a social geography of Dublin, with no falsifying for effect, no “vain teratology” or study of monsters.

  Joyce’s most celebrated literary innovation—the “stream of consciousness,” unspoken soliloquy, or silent monologue—was for him no flight of fancy but a device of realism, making art follow nature. Still, he disavowed credit for its invention. In 1920, as he was completing the last episodes of Ulysses, he explained to Stuart Gilbert that the monologue intérieur had been used as a continuous form of narration by a little-known French symbolist, Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949), in his novel Les Laurier sont coupés (1887) some thirty years before. “The reader finds himself, from the very first line, posted within the mind of the protagonist, and it is the continuous unfolding of his thoughts which, replacing normal objective narration, depicts to us his acts and experiences.” Joyce’s own way of revealing, exploring, and recounting the secret sources of the self by the interior monologue was already inviting imitation even before the whole of Ulysses was published in book form, for parts were being published in the little magazine The Egoist. Joyce set the example in the stream of Molly Bloom’s consciousness, the last forty pages, which he explained to Budgen:

  Penelope is the clou of the book. The first sentence contains 2500 words. There are eight sentences in the episode. It begins and ends with the female word yes. It turns like a huge earthball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning. Its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt, expressed by the words because, bottom, woman, yes. Though probably more obscene than any preceding fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. “Ich bin das Fleisch das stets bejaht.”

  And this is how her soliloquy ended:

  … or shall I wear red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  Joyce himself had arranged a public lecture by a popular French novelist, Valéry Larbaud (1881–1957), who had been “godfather” to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. Having been instructed by Joyce, Larbaud explained the Homeric correspondences and other symbolisms in the hope of making the book intelligible and persuading readers that this might be an epic for their time. Joyce seems finally to have been torn between his axiomatic desire only to “suggest” and his fear that readers would not understand.

  To make his book universal, Joyce drew heavily on anthologies, handbooks, compilations, and textbooks. Critics have marveled at the prodigious learning revealed, for example, in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter, written in the different styles of the periods of English literature in chronological order. But their authenticity comes from the fact that they are mosaics of the authors parodied, drawn from their very words found in two textbooks, Saintsbury’s History of English Prose Rhythm and Peacock’s English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin. Joyce, never forgetting the self, found ways to make this progress of styles symbolize the growth of the human fetus in the womb.

  Ulysses, like Joyce’s other works, was focused on the act of creation in the arts. Significantly he had finally titled the first part of his autobiography, revised from his earlier Stephen Hero, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” By naming his autobiographical hero Dedalus after the “fabulous artificer” of wax wings, he depicted “a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?” Like Proust, Joyce made his work the story of its own creation. By adding Bloom he chronicled the divided self in Ulysses, the commonplace alien part of the artist, the Jew always in exile.

  In Ulysses Joyce re-created the mystery of art and the universe. “Here form is content, content is form,” as Samuel Beckett would say of Finnegans Wake. “His writing is not about something, it is something itself.” And a mystery, too—realist, naturalist, symbolist, parodist, comic, epic—of countless levels, embodied and enshrouded in the Word.

  Still, the cryptic depth of Ulysses did not faze censors across the English reading world when the book w
as published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1922. The authorities struggled to protect the public from the frank interior monologues and from a few taboo words. Five hundred copies of the Egoist Press London edition were burned that year by the Post Office authorities in New York, and 499 of their third printing of 500 were seized by the English customs authorities in Folkstone. But the censor’s efforts eventually enlivened the Federal Law Reports with a concise and favorable review of Ulysses by Judge John M. Woolsey. He found it “not an easy book to read … brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns,” but not obscene.

  Joyce has attempted—it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

  Eleven years after Ulysses first appeared in English, in that same first week of December 1933, when Americans repealed their Prohibition of alcoholic beverages, Judge Woolsey determined that Americans should no longer be prohibited from reading Joyce’s “true picture of the lower middle class in a European city” and sharing Joyce’s effort “to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.” Although certain scenes were strong medicine for “some sensitive, though normal, persons to take … my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses’ on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” And since there was no law against importing emetic literature, he ordered Ulysses to be admitted to the United States.

  Where to go after Ulysses? There seemed no place to go, either in realistic depiction of daily life or in symbols to give art and grandeur to the trivia of the conscious self. “I will try to express myself,” Stephen Dedalus had declared, “in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” Joyce’s cunning in elaborating and embroidering Everyman’s self was limitless and undaunted. He had taken on the vocation of a writer but had added little to his outward experience in a world of turmoil. He spent the years of World War I under the umbrella of Swiss neutrality in Zurich writing Ulysses. Now at the war’s end he went to Paris at the invitation of his patron and mentor Ezra Pound. With his vision confined by near-blindness, he turned deeper inward. And not merely to the resources of involuntary memory. He re-created his language into a refuge, a sanctuary, and a whole New World of the self.

  Ulysses, as Judge Woolsey had certified, was surely “not an easy book to read.” To one uncomprehending American reader, Joyce explained, “Only a few writers and teachers understand it. The value of the book is its new style.” On other occasions he was less patient with the obtuse audience. At the end of one evening in Paris soon after Ulysses had been published, his melancholy at the cool reception of his book had been deepened by strong drink. As the taxi delivered him home to his door he ran up the street shouting, “I made them take it!” But a full decade would pass before he could make Englishmen or Americans “take it.” In 1932 he was still trying to persuade T. S. Eliot to publish the book in London for Faber & Faber. While willing to publish episodes in his Criterion Miscellany, Eliot would not take on the whole book and Joyce refused to allow publication of either an abridged or an expurgated edition. “My book has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he insisted. “Which would you like to cut off?”

  Meanwhile he spent himself on what he only called his “Work in Progress,” which would occupy him for sixteen years from March 11, 1923, when he wrote the first two pages—“the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so I could read them.” Just as Ulysses was the sequel (in a new mode) to A Portrait, so Finnegans Wake would be a sequel (in another new mode) to Ulysses. As Ulysses had ended with Molly and Leopold eating the same seedcake (Eve and Adam eating the “seedfruit”), now Finnegans Wake would begin with the Fall of Man—symbolized in the fall of the hero of the music-hall ballad, the hod carrier Finnegan, from a ladder to his “death,” then his resurrection by the smell of whiskey at his wake. The new novel would incorporate and exploit many leftover ideas from the twelve kilos of notes that he had collected for Ulysses.

  Compared with Finnegans Wake, Ulysses would be simple clarity itself. Here the admiring reader of Joyce meets his match, and is reluctantly driven to a heavy reliance on interpreters. Even the puzzled serious student comes to feel that he is trying to understand the ground plan of an elaborate filigreed castle in a treatise by its architect written in an only partly intelligible code. Is the plan itself all there is to the castle? We know much more about how the book was made than of what it was. Does Finnegans Wake describe anything, or is it itself the thing? The book reminds us of an existentialist parable. A man sees a “For Sale” sign outside a house and goes up to ask the price. To which the occupant replies, “Only the sign is for sale!” Does Finnegans Wake tell us about anything beyond itself?

  It is one of those books, Anthony Burgess reminds us, “admired more often than read, when read rarely read through to the end, when read through to the end not often fully, or even partially understood.” Burgess has dared help us with A Shorter Finnegans Wake. Other intrepid critics, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, “Provoked by the sheer magnitude of the work … felt that if Joyce had spent eighteen years in its composition we might profitably spend a few deciphering it.” Why has so eloquent and lucid a writer as Joyce spent his energies teasing us with a book of colossal proportions, of 628 dense often-unparagraphed pages, with its puzzling plenitude of invented words, multiple puns, and onomatopoetic inventions? Is it inconceivable that this master of the comic may have launched the biggest literary hoax of history? But generations of readers still assume that it is they and not the author who is amiss.

  Whatever else it is, the book is the ne plus ultra of the literature of the self. Perhaps at this dead end the book is something only the author (and he only partially) can understand.

  What was it about? “It’s hard to say,” Joyce told a sculptor friend, August Suter, in 1923. “It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find.” He had already christened it “Finnegans Wake,” omitting the apostrophe because it was about both the death of Finnegan and the revival of all Finnegans (Finn-again).

  In another time sense, too, it was a sequel to Ulysses. As Ulysses was a day book, he had already decided that Finnegan would be a night book, with its own special language. “I’m at the end of English” (Je suis au bout de l’anglais), he confessed. “I have to put the language to sleep.”

  In writing of the night, I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages—conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again.… I’ll give them back their English language. I’m not destroying it for good.

  When someone objected to his puns, Joyce replied, “The Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough for me.” (“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” Matthew 16:18). And as for triviality, “Some of the means I use are trivial—and some are quadrivial.” Finnegan was to make his quadrivial dimension the world of dreams.

  The theme of this night story was the whole history of the human race. “Art is the cry of despair,” Arnold Schoenberg observed in 1910, “of those wh
o experience in themselves the fate of all mankind.” And a night story it should be, for Stephen Dedalus had explained in Ulysses that “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Though Joyce’s history was veiled in myth and in his private language of sleep, Finnegans Wake was still a story designed to be everybody’s—of the fall and resurrection of mankind. The comical fall of Finnegan with which the book begins is only a prologue to the entry of the hero, a stuttering Anglican Dublin tavern-keeper, HCE—Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody, or Haveth Childers Everywhere. A candidate in a local election, HCE had once reputedly committed an exhibitionist act (Original Sin?) in Phoenix Park before two girls. This memory and rumor never cease to dog him, and he is also cursed by an incestuous passion for his daughter. After several bouts of gossip, of changing winds of public opinion, and trivial misadventures, HCE is arrested for disturbing the peace, which seems to express his own obsessive guilt.

  Earwicker’s wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), is the woman of many forms—Eve, the mother at the Wake, the River Liffey which changes from the nymphlike brook in the Wicklow Hills to the drab filthy scrubwoman river that drains the city of Dublin in its circular course into the Ocean, then up into mists to fall in mountain rains to refresh the brook again. And we hear Anna Livia’s complaints of those who soil her currents:

  Yes, I know go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. And don’t butt me—hike!—when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it?