The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The reader ceases to be puzzled, and simply wonders at Joyce’s bardic music when he hears Joyce’s recorded voice reading the liquid words of Anna Livia Plurabelle.

  Their twin sons were curiously modeled on two feeble-minded brothers whom Joyce had known in Dublin. “Shem the Penman” (Jerry: the artist, man of thought, explorer of the forbidden) and “Shaun the Postman” (Kevin: the practical political man of action) reveal again the eternal conflict between the Bloom side and the Dedalus side of Everyman in all history. All this is in mythic tales of flesh-eating and stories like “The Ondt and the Gracehoper.” Their conflict is finally resolved in the reunion of their father, HCE (from whom their two natures originated), with their all-embracing mother, ALP, in a diamond wedding anniversary.

  But the story is not as easy to follow as the ordinariness of the intelligible characters would suggest. Joyce himself gives us a clue in the opening words of the book:

  riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

  These first words are meant to complete the incomplete sentence that concludes the book:

  A way a lone a last a loved a long the

  Like all Joyce’s clarifying symbols, this has a cryptic iridescence. By opening with a small letter, he declares the cyclical, circular character of experience, and “vicus,” the Latin form of the Italian name Vico, identifies the scheme of the whole book with the mythic philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744).

  Vico’s scheme of history described each community rising from the “bestial” and passing through three stages: the Age of Religion and the Gods, the Age of Heroes celebrated in poetry and ruled by custom, and the Age of the Peoples expressed in prose and ruled by laws. The last stage results in anarchy, and the return to relive the cycle (corso).

  It is surprising that Joyce should have turned from poetry to philosophy, from Homer to Vico, for the frame of his final work. But in an age when the arts were turning inward, exploring and re-creating the self, it is not surprising that he chose Vico, sometimes called the first modern historian. While others had seen history as the chronicle of men and events or the unfolding of a divine providence, for Vico history was a saga of the human consciousness, of man’s different ways of seeing himself. Against Descartes’s view of history as the unfolding of reason, which was the same in all ages, and of man’s encounter with nature, Vico focused instead on the self. Man, he said, was capable of understanding only what he could create. Since man had created culture, he could understand it, could observe the universal stages in his consciousness, reflected in the institutions of his making. Vico’s New Science was a science of the stages and cycles of human consciousness. Joyce used Vico’s scheme to fold the whole history of the race into Finnegans Wake. For Vico, like Joyce, gave primacy to language and myth and justified Joyce’s re-creating the language as the sanctuary of the self.

  So, in his own way, Joyce accomplished what Gertrude Stein, also in Paris, hoped for—to be “alone with English,” but with his own re-created English. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was a letter to himself that neither the writer nor the recipient fully understood—“that letter selfpenned to one’s other, that neverperfect everplanned.” It is not surprising, either, that it would entice and frustrate generations of interpreters.

  Finnegans Wake was his “essay in permanence,” still another Joycean way of conquering Time. “A huge time-capsule,” Campbell and Robinson, his pioneer interpreters, explain. “The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium.” Yet this miscellany of the past revealed a universal pattern of repetitive recurrence, Joyce’s way of denying time.

  Joyce’s ultimate accomplishment in symbolism was to make his final book almost as unintelligible as the whole mysterious universe. Finnegans Wake, Joyce himself confessed, was addressed to “that ideal reader suffering from the ideal insomnia.” Knowledgeable interpreters call it “one of the white elephants of literature”—“notoriously the most obscure book ever written by a major writer; at least, by one who was believed not to be out of his mind.” Yet the riddle of Finnegans Wake reflected no obscurity or confusion in the author. It re-created the language with unfathomed possibilities. And when Murray Gell-Mann in 1964 needed a name for the newly discovered ultimate particle of matter and found that there were three of them in the proton and the neutron, he recalled from Finnegans Wake the exclamation, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” So Joyce’s ultimately unintelligible language provided the name for the ultimately intelligible particle of matter.

  Asked why he had written the book as he had, Joyce mischievously answered, not in apology but as a boast, “To keep the critics busy for three hundred years.” Perhaps Joyce shared Einstein’s wonder that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” Joyce’s final “extravagant excursion into forbidden territory” made the language of the self an invitation to rediscover and delight in the mystery.

  69

  “I Too Am Here!”

  BESIDE the Mystery of Time, with its staccatos and its continuities, there is the Mystery of Woman. Virginia Woolf’s novels of consciousness let us share her wonder at the feminine self. Sometimes she can take refuge from time in the instantaneity of her “moments of being,” which fill her writer’s diary. Or she can follow the self through time—for centuries in Orlando, years in To the Lighthouse, and hours in Mrs. Dalloway. But for her there is no refuge from being a woman. She writes a great deal about women writers and their inhibitions in the England of her day, their endless “confinements” in pregnancy, their deprivation of education to play “the Angel in the House.” She knows there is a unique feminine perception, but its definition eludes her. A woman needs A Room of One’s Own (1929) to make her free. “In fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

  Virginia Woolf’s feat was finding, like Joyce, so many different ways to reveal “the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain.” Called a pioneer of the “stream of consciousness,” she was properly a pioneer of streams of consciousness. Proust and Joyce created their great works around one master consciousness. But each of Virginia Woolf’s novels is a new experiment with the self. Unlike Proust or Joyce, she produced no copious masterpiece but numerous cogent experiments. Unlike Dickens or Balzac, who created new vistas of experience, she was concerned not with narrative but with reflection. Nor did she seem impoverished by her lack of experience. Any country house could be her Dublin.

  Women had not the raw materials in their own lives for chronicles of worldly conflict and adventure, of struggles for wealth and power. The few who enriched English literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when women were becoming an increasing part of the reading public, had the talent to embroider their limited experience.

  Jane Austen (1775–1817), whose stature has increased with the years, led an uneventful life on the English countryside in her father’s parsonage and in the Hampshire cottage to which the family retired. As she grew up she suffered no Dickensian poverty, nor did she witness the troubled city scene. Her family life was a caricature of the respectable literate middle class, with the six boys and two girls being inducted into literature by their father. While she never married, she seems to have had suitors, and her novels explored the provincial quests for propertied husbands for marriageable daughters. She made a human comedy of provincial manners. In her forty-two years, with Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), and other novels, she earned a secure place in English literature. The most dramatic event in Jane Austen’s own life was accepting the offer of marriage by the heir of a neighboring Hampshire family, then changing her mind overnight to refuse him after all.

  Women were not to expose themselves to public view as a
uthors, and in her lifetime her name never appeared on the title page of her works. Only after her death was her authorship publicly noted. Other women authors, such as Charlotte and Anne Brontë, sought the cover of a male pseudonym to avoid the condescension reserved for female authors. And Mary Ann Evans adopted the male nom de plume of George Eliot. The young Brontë sisters took refuge in the fairy-tale kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein and other Gothic novels sought escape from feminine confinements in tales of fear and fantasy.

  The conspicuous disproportion until recently between the numbers of male and female authors reflected the narrowness of women’s lives. Women wrote about what they were allowed to know about—the manners they witnessed in country houses, the follies and ironies of the marriage market. Or they reacted into exotic imaginings of horror. Ironically, English women writers of the early nineteenth century who were still conventionally confined by female proprieties became pioneers of realism in the modern novel. They made their own way. Sir Walter Scott acclaimed the “nameless author” of Jane Austen’s Emma as a prophet of modern realism, and praised her “exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting.” Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) was censured for dealing too freely with subjects not proper for young ladies even to read about. Then there was the scent of scandal because she was rumored to have had an affair with Thackeray, to whom the second edition of Jane Eyre was dedicated. Like the hero of the book, Thackeray also had an insane wife. George Eliot (1819–1880), sometimes called the first practitioner of psychological realism in the English novel, defied convention by living with G. H. Lewes, a married man. And Virginia Woolf praised Middlemarch (1871–72) as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

  Important women novelists in the English language suddenly increased in the twentieth century. The “women’s movement” was bearing fruit. Also the inward resources of the self had finally become the novelists’ raw material. For these explorations, women needed no male passport. Women writers then pioneered in novels of the self, which liberated literary women from the private audience of their diaries and letters.

  “I too am here!” Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866) wrote plaintively to her friend John Sterling on June 15, 1835. The problems of literary women were eloquently revealed in her life. She had married the domineering Thomas Carlyle—“a warm true heart to love me, a towering intellect to command me, and a spirit of fire to be the guiding star—light of my life.” Jane Welsh’s uncommon literary talent was revealed in her letters, which survived. A letter directed expressly to her, she explained:

  … was sure to give me a livelier pleasure, than any number of sheets in which I had but a secondary interest. For in spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, but merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half; I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me. Little Felix, in the Wanderjahre [of Goethe], when, in the midst of an animated scene between Wilhelm and Theresa, he pulls Theresa’s gown, and calls out, “Mama Theresa I too am here!” only speaks out, with the charming truthfulness of a child, what I am perpetually feeling, tho’ too sophisticated to pull people’s skirts, or exclaim in so many words; Mr. Sterling “I too am here.”

  While she dared not compete with the “towering intellect” of her husband in the public literary form, the letter was perfect for her, as it had served frustrated literary women for centuries. Whenever she and Carlyle were separated she sent him a daily letter, “which must be written dead or alive,” and she expected the same from him. When he once apologized for the length of a letter, she replied, “Don’t mind length, at least only write longly about yourself. The cocks that awake you; everything of that sort is very interesting. I hasten over the cleverest descriptions of extraneous people and things, to find something ‘all about yourself, all to myself.’ ”

  After Jane Welsh Carlyle nearly a century passed before Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) made the novel her versatile medium for exploring the self. The even tenor of her life, as lacking in worldly adventures as that of Jane Austen or Franz Kafka, forced her to wreak her literary talent on herself as her raw material. She wrote of the world within her, which she imagined also to be within others.

  She was born in London in 1882 into a numerous family dominated by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen. A leading intellectual and editor of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, to which he contributed some four hundred articles, he gave her “the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library.” Her father’s first wife was Thackeray’s daughter, her godfather was the poet James Russell Lowell, then American minister to England, and she was tutored in Greek by Walter Pater’s sister. The eminent Victorians, one way or another, swam into her sedentary bookish ken. She longed for the life of the university that her brothers had enjoyed at Cambridge, but which her sex had denied her. She and her sister, Vanessa, were allowed to spend only the mornings studying Greek or drawing, but afternoons and evenings had to be given to proper womanly activities—looking after the house, presiding at tea, or being agreeable to other people’s guests. To brother Thoby at Cambridge she wrote:

  I dont get anybody to argue with me now, & feel the want. I have to delve from books, painfully all alone, what you get every evening sitting over your fire smoking your pipe with [Lytton] Strachey, etc. No wonder my knowledge is but scant. Theres nothing like talk as an educator I’m sure. Still I try my best with Shakespeare. I read Sidney Lee’s life.…

  She never lost her sense of being ill-educated, which she blamed on the feminine stereotype.

  Her evenings out remained a painful memory. For example, when she accompanied her half brother George Duckworth and Lady Carnarvon to dinner and theater, she made the terrible mistake, as they talked of art, of asking Lady Carnarvon if she had read Plato. If she had, Lady Carnarvon said, she surely would remember it. Virginia’s question had spoiled the evening and appalled George, for Plato could lead to subjects unsuitable for a young lady to think about, much less discuss in public. He reminded her that “they’re not used to young women saying anything.”

  But George showed less respect for the proprieties in his brazen sexual advances to his two half sisters, which they found impossible to repulse. He tried to smother their pain and disgust with ostentatious courtesies, presents, and invitations to parties and excursions, but Virginia and Vanessa freely expressed their venomous detestation of him to the puzzlement of friends. Virginia’s first distasteful experience of sex and of child abuse, from her sixth year, affected her profoundly. “I still shiver with shame,” she wrote in the last year of her life, “at the memory of my half brother.” She was also abused by her other half brother, Gerald Duckworth. There is no evidence that Virginia was sexually abused by her father, but he did nothing to protect her. Victorian modest reticence and her mother’s insensitivity prevented her seeking protection. Her recurrent “madness” may have been a reaction to these traumatic childhood experiences.

  She had a number of passionate and sometimes troubling love affairs with women, not only with Vita Sackville-West, whom she admired. Being hotly pursued in 1930 by the aging Ethel Smyth (who sometimes wrote her twice a day) she found less pleasant, for Ethel blew her red nose in her table napkin, and her table manners were repulsive. “It is at once hideous and horrid and melancholy-sad. It is like being caught by a giant crab.” In her letters Virginia casually refers to her own frigidity and wonders why people “make a fuss about marriage & copulation?” She never had children, presumably on her doctor’s advice, but there may have been other reasons. “Never pretend,” she wrote in 1923, “that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.… Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things.” Still, her unsavory childhood experiences with George may also have nourished her willingness to rebel against the male-dominated literary world.

  To be the writer she wanted to be, she
recalled in 1931, she had to conquer a “phantom” hovering over her:

  And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem [by Coventry Patmore (1823–1896)]. The Angel in the House … It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her.… She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace.… And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room.

  Having killed the Angel in the House, what was the woman writer to do? She need only be herself! “Ah, but what is ‘herself? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know.… I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

  Despite the world’s inhibitions Virginia Woolf found in herself the resource for her creations. Her birth, her father’s “unexpurgated” library, her female loves, and the circle of leading male intellectuals all helped. But she missed the stimulus of her own generation that she might have had at the university, even as she observed the galaxy of Victorian men of letters whom her father attracted. Seeing Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, John Morley, and Edmund Gosse over the teacups must have cured any awe of the literary establishment and encouraged her to make new literary connections of her own. On her father’s death in 1904, with her sister and brothers she moved to 46 Gordon Square in the Bloomsbury district of London. There they attracted a galaxy of their own generation, including Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster.