The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  That is melodious enough; a variation on a well-known theme. It is a victory for sound at the expense of sense. It is to writing simply what humming is to conversation. Indeed, the Duchess’s advice in Alice in Wonderland, “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves” is more truly in line with the orthodox theory of literature. And it is worthy of note that when the characters are drunk Mr. James Joyce’s straying sentences are most suitable for their purpose.

  Ulysses would be a simpler piece of work if it were by a man who were no more than a joker. But the author is for ever obstinately giving us proofs that he is a scholar also; or at least a man who has gone into the library, and the dictionary, at A and come out again at Z, having remembered all the names he met with on the way. Thus we come upon such passages as this:

  the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as masculine subject, monosyllabic, onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb and quasimono-syllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary masculine agent) in the passive voice …

  which leaves us wondering whether the mind that wrote it is profound, funny or simply fuddled.

  As we proceed we find ourselves following up long passages of archaic or technical prose, and identifying more obscure references, Greek and Gaelic, topical and obscene, than it seems fair of any writer to impose on his readers. If it were not that Mr. Stuart Gilbert in his wonderfully patient James Joyce’s “Ulysses ”: A Study has made an elaborate tracing-paper which, when laid over the original, explains the allusions, many of them would be lost to the reader who has not read where Mr. Joyce’s spirit has listed.

  Even more common than the classical references are the sexual references. And it is possible to have a great respect for the experimentalist with words who wrote Ulysses and still wonder whether the intellectual proportions of the novel are not a little gawkish, and whether Life really takes its business of reproduction so seriously that it can never forget about it.

  The novel is comprised of descriptions of one long, lecherous day in a Dubliner’s life with the heady drums of sex continuously sounding. It was for the frankness of the language of some of the scenes, notably the one set in the brothel, and of the long monologue of the nymphomaniac woman lying in bed that led to the banning of Ulysses. Actually there was not the slightest need for the censor to act. No one who could derive the slightest harm from Ulysses could ever have struggled through it as far as to arrive at the regions of danger.

  It may be wondered how it is that Mr. Joyce has exercised any influence at all. And it may be due to the fact that he remains a fascinating figure no matter whether he is regarded as a valiant pioneer leaving his footprints startlingly distinct across the virgin snows of the mind—which is a perfectly just view—or merely as a man industriously and conscientiously commiting literary suicide. For Mr. James Joyce is either an Evangelist of a new literary faith or a man who has contrived on the strength of earlier works to be admitted to the home and has then committed hara-kiri on the best carpet.

  In his earlier novel, Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, Mr. Joyce revealed himself as a writer whose prose was as vivid as vermilion yet as plain as paint. And occasionally in Ulysses such an adjective as “crucified,” when applied to a shirt hanging on a line, sets us wondering whether any writer has ever used isolated words with so much effect before.

  In Haveth Childers Everywhere, however, one is set wondering whether any writer has ever used them to less:

  Amtsadam, sir, to you! Eternest cittas, heil! Here we are again. I am bubub brought up her under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric Shinkanbeard (or is it Owllaugh MacAuscullpth the Thord?), but, in pontofacts massimust, I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allengliches Angleslachen is spoken by Sall and Will from August-anus to Ergastulus, as this is, whether in Farnum’s rath or Condra’s ridge or the meadows of Dalkin or Monkish tunshep, by saints and sinners eyeye alike as a clean-living man and, as a matter of fict, by my half-wife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up.

  In experiment Mr. Joyce has taught the lesson and set the fashion. Novels in which the only action is that which exists between mind and mind, and consciousness and consciousness, or takes place within the sphere of one consciousness, are now common. From Mr. Faulkner to Miss Sylva Norman the younger writers have shown that they have learnt the lesson and are in the fashion.

  Mrs. Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse and Jacob’s Room and most remarkably in The Waves, has shown what an exquisitely graceful and orderly mind, educated in the tradition, can make of a disorderly modern method. In Orlando, a story in which neither Time nor Sex is as constant as it is in life, there is again to be seen that restless impatience with what have hitherto been regarded as the invariables, that is at the back of the modern mind.

  That the novel at its most orthodox is still paying a handsome dividend of attention is indisputable. There is, however, an apparent discontent with orthodoxy. In reality this means very little more than that men have discovered the novel to be the medium in which any sort of thought can most easily be expressed. Thus so abstract and mystical a mind as that of Mr. Charles Williams, which in any other age would have turned, as Donne’s turned, to poetry, brings its Platonics and symbols to fiction, and encases them in The Place of the Lion in the form of a “thriller ” that is as formally correct as a sonnet, yet as exciting as its modern shape suggests.

  One has only to remember The Good Companions, strong with the inherited strength of the huge family of picturesque, picaresque English novels that have gone before it, healthy, humorous and supremely honest about its intention of being purely a good story and not an essay in psychology, normal or otherwise and, say, the most recent of Mrs. Woolf, and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Mr. Tomlinson’s Gallion’s Reach, and Mr. Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies—to plot no more than a few points on the map of fiction of 1931—to see what an area of the human mind the novel covers to-day; and why as fast as definitions of the Novel are devised a new novel comes along to destroy it.

  If one can make any generalisation about the modern novel it is that it is always strenuously endeavouring to do something else. The novel has become, like the sonnet, an exercise in ingenuity as well as a statement of life. Mr. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, for example, begins by being told by a congenital idiot, whose mental development is infantile, who has no sense of the passage of time and whose brain hands him out thoughts upside down and in the wrong order. For some reason—possibly a sense of fatigue, possibly a sense of failure—Mr. Faulkner, however, finally turns to a rational mind to complete the narration.

  The human mind has lately been dissected in the laboratories of Vienna and the novelist has increasingly become the more or less popular exponent of the new theories. This, of course, does not mean that he is necessarily more wise or more penetrating than his predecessors. Wisdom and understanding can never be the product of a college course. It means merely that the modern novelist uses a new language to explain himself. And inasmuch as the new language is more exact and better suited to its purpose, his novel, if he is naturally a man of discernment, may excel in its revelation of the soul the novels of those writers who had to blunder blindly along with only the traditional vocabulary to help them.

  But it is a mistake to imagine this or that novelist saying to himself: “I will be modern.” Even if he does he is as likely to write like Mr. Evelyn Waugh as he is to write like Mr. James Joyce. And Mr. H. M. Tomlinson in writing All Our Yesterdays, which is a brilliant essay in atmospheres, is quite as much experimental as Conrad or as Mr. Faulkner, though his apparatus is not so pretentious as the latt
er’s.

  The present spate of experimental novels should not be crowned simply because they are experimental any more than they should be ridiculed simply because they look as funny as a foreigner. Experiment is-primarily the affair of the experimentalist. And if he is honest his object is to write not differently but merely better.

  The reader may be wise to suspend judgment until the first novelty of method has worn off before he attempts to say whether Mr. Bloom is finally as satisfying to the intelligence as Mr. Pickwick. And the writer should instinctively suspect a medium which is so easy that his mind can float and does not have to swim to keep in movement.

  In short, the Golden Rule for readers would seem to be: “Beware of the contemporary writer: he is foolhardy,” and for writers: “ Beware of the contemporary reader: he is a fool.”

  If these Rules are observed, Literature a hundred years hence will be richer, even though we meanwhile may all have had to hang ourselves with vexation.

  THE END

  To S.H.C.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  ISBN: 9781448201068

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