The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  This is seen in Dubliners when the boy narrator realizes, “as the [Araby] bazaar is closing down around him, that he doesn’t have enough money to buy a present for Mangan’s sister [Mangan is one of his playmates].” Elements of the episode—the shopgirl’s nationality (English), her flirtatious manner and his regret at not being able to reciprocate, the fact that he is in the bazaar at all, being there to escape his dismal home circumstances—comprise the Joycean epiphany, which does not so much confirm a truth “as disrupt what one has grown comfortable in accepting as true.”11 In other words, for Joyce, an epiphany is an inverted version of what it is in, say, the Christian world, producing a sinking feeling rather than a rising one. Living down to fact again.

  As this suggests, Joyce, like other modernists (Chekhov, Proust, Gide, James, Mann, Woolf), is less a narrator in the traditional sense than an “evoker” of a particular consciousness (“the transfiguration of the commonplace,” in the critic Arthur Danto’s words). His achievement in his three great works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), is best appreciated if they are seen as one collective enterprise, a portrait of the artist as a young man, as a middle-aged man and as an aged man. The fact that these works are long and difficult is part of the point. Joyce’s view, which can scarcely be reduced to a few words without making him seem banal, entails offering a new golden rule or categorical imperative. Instead of “Do unto others as you would be done by” he offers this: Lead your life so that, looking back on it when you are old, you will be able to say that you have become a person you would want to be, that you have actively chosen the self you are, without unreflectively acquiescing in the plans of others; life is to obtain its meaning by what we do, not what is demanded of us by some “long-distance laird” (compare Gide, Rilke, Heidegger).

  There should be a pattern to a life, Joyce says, one that we have woven ourselves and do not regret; it should contain intimate relationships, the desire to create and an act of creation that has an effect on others; we should realize that there is a price to pay for conformity—that one becomes a sham—while the committed individualist risks becoming an outsider, “locked into his or her narcissism” (compare Kafka below). These issues overlap and allow us during a lifetime to take on a number of identities, and it is important that we find one that makes life livable. Furthermore, any acceptable narrative of a human life will have to come to terms with a fall from innocence, and will be judged by the actions that flow from that fall, by how we live down to fact (compare O’Neill). Ultimately, the great satisfaction—and significance—life has to offer is not just love (which many people have said) but, more precisely, enduring love.

  When we have said this, though, we are only halfway there, at most. Joyce’s language, famously, notoriously, was difficult but also musical, inventive and punning, designed to show the very great possibilities of human experience, the chaos and delicious contingency of who we are, as he sought to celebrate the delight we should take in everyday things. He shows that there is no significant difference between a life lived on a large scale and one lived on a small scale, that Christ’s pain, as he puts it, was no more significant than that of ALP (one of the main figures in Finnegans Wake).

  The celebrated puns and double entendres are not intended merely as “pun”ishments, but like Picasso’s paintings they show us the units—here, the words—from different directions all at once, as devices to underline and celebrate the joyful instability of experience: an aging woman is described as “beautifell,” the morning papers as “moaning pipers” (as a Cockney might say), a fine backside as a “beauhind”; à la Proust, the orchards of his youth are “evremberried,” a lover confesses he “waged love” on a young girl, Shakespeare is variously Shopkeeper, Shapesphere and Shakhisbeard, a form of theatre is “Ibscenest nansence,” stories “disselve,” a prayer ends “as it is uneven,” a letter describes the writer’s attendance at a grand “funferall,” and a question in a (Dublin) game is “Was liffe worth leaving?”

  But these puns and neologisms—call them what you will—are more than mere wordplay for the sake of it. Carefully chosen, based on close observation and reflection and rarely lacking in wit, they are in fact new names for the phenomena of the world, which invite and encourage us to notice, to recognize and to name new aspects of experience that we thought were familiar and settled. Moreover, out of all these at times hilarious, at times tedious, at times astonishing ambiguities and teases—a form of ordered and intended chaos—Joyce challenges us to forge a stable story; and this is how, ultimately, the dense form of his books shows us how to live. A successful achievement is a stable identity that has been chosen and earned.

  A COMIC GOSPEL AND THE ANDROGYNOUS MAN

  Joyce said of Ulysses that it was an attempt to write a book “from eighteen different points of view,” and this certainly sums up Joycean criticism, which comfortably exceeds eighteen different points of view. From among this plethora two more are worth singling out.

  Brett Bourbon makes the case that Finnegans Wake is in itself a spiritual exercise—that is, a modern form of askesis, the practice in ancient Greek philosophy that had as its goal “the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being,” a form of self-discipline. Bourbon argues that Finnegans Wake is ultimately nonsense, deliberate nonsense when conceived overall, but that it embodies an essentially comic stance toward the world—it is, in effect, a “comic gospel.” He maintains that Finnegans Wake offers us an essentially theological lesson, exposing us to the “entanglement” of our world, our way of thinking through words, which is designed to provoke self-reflection. “What have replaced God in the Wake are particular kinds of nonsense. . . . This nonsense, or rather the limit between nonsense and sense . . .”12

  This lack of sense is designed to drive us back on ourselves in an examination of how we, individually and collectively, construct sense. Because Finnegans Wake as an entity has no meaning, we must do the work instead. In particular, there is no intention in it, and showing what it is like to live in a world without intention is perhaps its most significant achievement. Intention is not God-given; it has to be conceived, then worked at. The lack—the absence—of intention is a form of salvation.

  Declan Hibberd, of University College Dublin, introduces the idea that, in addition to all this, there was and is a specific point to the characterization in Ulysses (which originally had Homeric titles to all its chapters). Joyce thought that the search for heroics was vulgar, that man’s littleness “is the inevitable condition of his greatness.”13 Likewise he disdained the “muscular Christianity” preached in the schools of Ireland’s occupying power, together with the “redemptive violence” of the myths invented and re-invented by Irish authors such as W. B. Yeats. The central character of Ulysses, Hibberd reminds us, is an Irish Jew, who has no hankering to become a somebody, “neither a Faust nor a Jesus.” (Jesus never lived with a woman; “Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.”)14

  In Ulysses, Joyce affords the body equal recognition to the mind, notes that real heroism is never conscious of itself and indeed redefines heroism as the capacity to endure rather than inflict suffering; he notes that a man requires great courage to enter “the abyss of himself,” that words as often conceal as they reveal, that language lags behind technical progress, that there are limits to communicability. But above all he wants (us) to go beyond what he saw as part of the ecclesiastical heritage—our false ideas of masculinity. The man of the future, for Joyce, the character type that gave hope to the world, would be the androgynous man—“That’s the new messiah for Ireland.”15 Nothing was intrinsically masculine anymore, and he felt that many people knew this in their hearts without acknowledging it—it was implicit. Bloom, Hibberd says, never feels himself a freak in Dublin. “On the contrary, his androgyny gives him a unique insight into womanhood.” In thi
s he likens Bloom to “that near-perfect androgyne,” Shakespeare, and he finds a similar theme in Wilde, O’Casey, Shaw, Synge and even Yeats.

  Joyce spoke of the “plurability” of experience, of people having a multiple self, but above all Bloom represents “a wholly new kind of male subject in world literature, a man whose womanly multiplicity is intended less to exact derision than to provoke admiration. . . . Because the feeling of masculinity in males is less strong than that of femininity in females, there has been an ancient prejudice in most cultures against the womanly man . . . it was Joyce who rendered the womanly man quotidian and changed forever the way in which writers treated sexuality.” It was this that provided the most original of the “redemptive glimpses of a future world.”16

  BIOLOGICAL WARMTH AND WARM OTHERNESS

  D. H. Lawrence had little time for Joyce. He rejected his work as “too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life.” The writer and critic Stephen Spender was in no doubt about the difference between the two men. In reviewing Joyce’s letters, published in 1957, he said:

  “In letters like those of the fathers of the early Christian church there is interchange within God; in those of Keats and his friends there is interchange within poetry; in those of Vincent and Theo van Gogh, interchange within art; in those of D. H. Lawrence and Middleton Murry, interchange within wrath. In all these others there is agreement on both sides that the writer and the person written to share some overarching conception of life which is outside and beyond them both. With Joyce there is no sense of sharing at all. . . . His letters are, quite strictly, ‘hand-outs’ . . . what is lacking is love. In the acrimonious correspondence of Lawrence and Murry there is more love than in Joyce’s most expansive bulletins.”

  But there was this similarity, arguably more profound than the differences: “David Herbert Lawrence spent much of his creative energies contriving a second faith, something to succeed what he considered false Christian philosophy and its successor, the sterile rationalism of science.” In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), The Man Who Died (1929) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1930), Lawrence explored the post-Christian psychological world. He had several starting points. He had a mystical bent in which the oneness of all creation is the “fundamental prehension,” but he inveighed against all abstractions, including psychological ones. “The original sin against life is abstract thought.”17

  Lawrence believed, as Nietzsche believed before him, that life is erratic and irrational, and that we have a tendency to over-rationalize it. (Lawrence spent time in Germany, had a German wife, and was much influenced by German ideas, not only Nietzsche’s.) But he also thought that life is fundamentally erotic. Freud was condemned in Lawrence’s mind because psychoanalysis “is out, under therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.” And he staked his case on a revival of “the erotic mode as a therapeutic release from inwardness.”18

  Lawrence equated mysticism with the unconscious—mystical knowledge, for him, is essentially unconscious self-knowledge, and is therefore non-rational. Science, in eschewing contact with the irrational, was for Lawrence distancing itself from “life.” He thought the Christian God had died in 1914 and he disliked the religious conventions of the day, which were equally cold and automatic, and as distant from our experience as the Aztec gods he explored in The Plumed Serpent. He found humanism sentimental, he objected to science’s way of assigning man a “more modest” place in the scheme of things, and he saw the West’s “binge of inwardness” likewise as a diminishing of who we are. Our aim should be to lead an “impassioned and yet social life.” He objected to science’s “machine metaphors” of the human passions, which, he said, emptied passion of its social content.

  The erotic aspect of life being so important to Lawrence, he was convinced that the relationship between men and women lay at the base of a happy and fulfilled life—at one stage he imagined an assembly of men and women who would form the “nucleus of a new belief,” an “organic” society which would “permit” communal passion.19 The “irrational power of love” was for him the antithesis of the coldly rational scientific world, and the freer expression of man’s erotic behavior was an expression of the divine.

  The Plumed Serpent is a novel of pagan religiosity, its plot focusing on the conversion of a Western woman to a primitive Aztec cult. Lawrence invokes the ritual of sun dancing as a reflection of divine concern with the human being. The protagonist, Kate, is cultured, informed and educated and, moreover, not in thrall to any Western ideology. Moved by where she is, she accepts her religious duty, with its sexual implications, and consents willingly to marry the high priest of the cult. Lawrence’s point is that she chooses to participate in a “passional community,” not simply remaining an observer, an outsider, as her European background would normally lead her to do. “An embarrassment even to ardent exegetes of Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent runs together just these motifs—the sexual, the instinctual unconscious, and the religious—which in the European culture have strenuously been kept apart,” says Philip Rieff in his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic.20

  In The Man Who Died, Lawrence contemplates the ending of the Christian passion, portraying Jesus as admitting the error of becoming Christ. Jesus is never named in the story, though he is clearly identified. We meet him as a confused and frightened man who expects to be rescued by his heavenly father before the time appointed for his crucifixion, and who therefore feels betrayed. He is also anxious that if the Romans find out that he has survived “they will come for him and finish him off again.” He is now a far from spiritual figure—only too human; he travels to Egypt, where he seduces one of the goddess Isis’s temple priestesses. When the Romans do catch up with him he escapes by boat, leaving a slave to be mistaken for him.

  Baldly stated, the plot was probably at the time offensive to a great many people, as Lawrence intended. (Alternatively, it is another “embarrassment.”) Upon his resurrection, Jesus realizes he cannot regain his moral edge; and he rediscovers what for Lawrence was his true divinity—his “amatory humanity”—in a directly sexual way, via a blond votary in the cult of another god. For Lawrence, this is a form of resurrection—Jesus, as a man now, has recovered his identity. Here one thinks of Joyce’s assertion that the most difficult thing a man can do is live with a woman, which the biblical Jesus never did. Salvation, Lawrence’s Jesus realizes, lies only in the intimate, private life—and that is his only lesson for others. Lawrence wrote to Bertrand Russell, the supreme intellectual of his day: “For heaven’s sake, don’t think—be a baby, and not a savant anymore. Don’t do anything anymore—but for heaven’s sake begin to be—start at the very beginning and be a perfect baby: in the name of courage.” To Lawrence, thinking—the intellect—is not a virtue. We should stop thinking always of ourselves first; restraint and prudence are less needed than fortitude and justice.

  Lawrence’s two main criteria “for the living of life” were, first, “the need to unite with another in the alternately straining and easing relationship of love”; and second, the need for “passionate purpose,” quite separate from erotic engagement and its release, passionate purpose being about making “something new and better in the world.” “If passionate purposes are to be effective, they must be steady; and if they are steady, then they develop inevitably into ‘fixed ideals.’” At the same time, he did believe that each self has one purpose only, namely to come into “the fullness of its being,” in which he thought that the “fact of otherness,” as experienced in the “erotic crucible,” could fuse together—if only for brief (sacred) moments—to “proximate fulfillment.” The object of these experiences, Lawrence believed, was precisely what Freud meant by the “oceanic feeling”—at one point Lawrence talks about the “Oceanic God.” In The Plumed Serpent, when Kate decides to dance with one of the Quetzalcoatl men, looking to the primitive as a source of spiritua
l renewal for Europe as well as for herself, she slips into a trance-like “second consciousness” and finds herself “caught up and identified in the slowly revolving ocean of nascent life” around her.21

  He thought that our aim should be “biological warmth,” in particular a biologically warm family; being a good parent was one way to preserve “the human being [parent and child] all his life fresh and alive, a true individual.” The sense of otherness, which we gain in the crucible of the erotic, we must transfer to our relationships with our children, not in the same erotic sense but in the sense of “warm otherness.” For Lawrence, love and otherness are the twin divinities: these are what we must show if we are to lead exemplary lives, always aware that this may reveal itself in “patches of compromise,” and that the desire for possession (of the loved other) is offset by the need to be free (of the other). (When he went to Mexico, he actually found the “radical alterity” of the locals “profoundly hostile.”)22

  In all this, for Lawrence, the means are more important than the ends, our actions are what count—ecstatic, erotic action, an echo of Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. For Lawrence, passion is holy: “Screams of violence are more full of life than the hushed tones of tolerance.” (Owen, the American who travels with Kate in Mexico at the beginning of The Plumed Serpent, and refuses to leave the bullfight early because, he believes, “Life means seeing anything . . . on show,” is condemned as having “the insidious modern disease of tolerance.”) The core aspect of life is, after all, our encounter with instinct, and how we manage that encounter is all-important. God having died, we must learn to love ourselves as we “collide” with our instincts, which means that the decisive factor in humankind is the will, or desire—not intellect.23