Privilege and Allegiance in Literature: Joyce the Satirist
p. 53-68
Résumé
While the modern novel and its progenitors took some pride in the dichotomy they thought they had effected between life and art, Joyce’s artistic achievement was often held up as the ultimate in stretching the boundaries of art to their utmost limits, even though one of the significant strands in Ulysses is satire. Some of the early reviewers had referred to Joyce’s satirical skills, yet ‘Joyce the Satirist’ is not exactly a common theme in Joyce scholarship. ‘Cyclops’ is perhaps best viewed as a manifestation of this remarkable literary genre. Often referred to as a literary device, or a tool, a satire is better appreciated as embodying, and an expression of, an attitude, albeit an aggressive, critical and sometimes destructive attitude. In its sharper penetrations, Joyce in ‘Cyclops’ should remind one of Pope’s Dunciad. The day to day trivia of life in Ulysses, and specially in ‘Cyclops,’ lend themselves to Pope—like treatment of the petty and the insignificant bloated to heroic levels. Ridicule, wit, humour, parody, the comic abound in ‘Cyclops.’ Of the several targets of Joyce’s militant attitude, one of the chief focuses of satire is violence provoked by Irish nationalist causes. Joyce’s achievements as an artist, as also the unmistakable underpinning in his work of a strong satirical strain, would require rephrasing the question regarding the claims of art as against life, as also necessitate reframing the time-honoured answers to such time-honoured questions.
Texte intégral
1Much before his life was stigmatised as immoral by the age he wrote for, Wilde had proclaimed in ‘The Critics as Artist,’ ‘All art is immoral.’1 He went on to elaborate elsewhere, ‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standards of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.’2 There is, as we all know, a long history to the view that maintains that ‘art is self sufficient, need serve no ulterior purpose, and should not be judged by moral, political, or other non-aesthetic standards.’3 A whole body of thinkers, writers, and philosopher emerging out of the German romantic movement had sought to establish the autonomy of art. Goethe had insisted that a work of art was an independent organism; for Kant, art had a pure and disinterested existence; Schiller had focused on the primacy of form in art; and Schelling thought art was a unique revelation of the universal in the particular (Preminger 6-8). The notion of the autonomy of art had received much fillip from Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson. Baudelaire proclaimed the sovereignty of the artist. The Symbolistes, with Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry in the vanguard, sought to render poetry as disembodied emotion, much like music. Pure poetry was the objective. Words and images were the poem, and not in or of the poem. Eliot achieved for poetry the status of impersonal disinterestedness and the all important notion of the autonomy of art was apparently here to stay.4
2The modernists’ attempt to lend art a self-sufficient, independent, and autonomous identity resulted from marginally different priorities. They sought freedom not for their art, but for themselves to be able to identify, achieve, and articulate their perception of life, or reality as they preferred to call it. There was, in fact, much theorizing among the practitioners of art. ‘On all sides,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in exasperation, ‘writers are attempting what they cannot achieve, forcing the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it.’5 ‘I have an idea,’ she wrote in her diary in 1927, ‘that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “Novel,” a new? by Virginia Woolf. But what?’6 Joyce wrote: ‘[O] ne great part of human existence cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead prose.’7 Tennysonian agonizing over life criss-crossed by the great incertitude of doubt and faith appears tame, indeed, in comparison to what Darwin, Freud, Einstein and a host of others had done to human existence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Woolf speculated that life, or reality, could receive just and fair treatment only in a medium which would have ‘something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose’ (Woolf 1994, 435). She wrote in ‘Character in Fiction,’ ‘[W] hat is reality? And who are the judges of reality?,’8 and a year later elsewhere, ‘Is life like this? Must novels be like this?’ (Woolf 1994, 224). She asks herself in her diary, ‘Have I power of creating the true reality?’9 Henry James had remarked that ‘Humanity [was] immense and reality [had] a myriad forms.’10 What reality certainly was not was, in the words of Ian Watt, ‘a full and accurate report of human experience’ with such detail thrown in as ‘the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions [...] presented through largely referential use of the language.’ Conrad wrote to Arnold Bennett: ‘You stop short of being absolutely real because you are faithful to your dogmas of realism.’11 And Henry James, writing to H.G. Wells, maintained:
So far from [art of] literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life [...] I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, [...] and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.12
3These distressing speculations about pressing concerns of life in counterpoint to the inadequacies of artistic expression led to articulations that were, as Deboarah Parsons succinctly puts it, ‘[f] ormally radical, subjectively real and aesthetically autonomous, expressive of a world in which the present seems dislocated from the past, experience is fragmented, multiple and limitless, and previous certainties about the physical world and our selfhood within it have been swept away’ (Parsons 3). Some of the newly chiselled tools that these concerns with the bewildering architectonics of the British modernist writing threw up, included several that came to be labelled as literary impressionism, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, and epiphany.
4A self-reflexive attention to design and form and focused experimentalism is central to Joyce. Joyce himself appeared to have valued the significance of his achievement in formal terms. ‘The value of the book is its new style,’ he told Arthur Laubenstein, an American organist who coached him in Paris, a year after Ulysses was published.13 Joyce used language in such a way that the words become the property of the speaker rather than of the phenomena they denoted. The signifiers were no longer looking for the signified. The words no longer sought to embrace the objects they had been commanded to name but reverted allegiance to the speaker. The author did not use the words to name the objects he wished to name. The language no longer performed the instrumental function of communication, but, as Donoghue puts it, in Joyce words are ‘verbal ends masquerading as means’ and his styles, ‘styles of compensation.’
5The innovations wrought by Joyce provoked immediate response. The novelist Ford Madox Ford wrote in the Yale Review: ‘Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, Ulysses does: for no novelist with serious aims can henceforth set upon a task of writing before at least he has formed his private estimate as to the rightness or wrongness of the methods of the author of Ulysses.’14 Eliot told Virginia Woolf that ‘Ulysses had destroyed the whole of the 19th century’ (Woolf 1978, 203). He observed in ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’: ‘I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’15 The genre of the novel had exhausted itself and no longer served the creative purpose. If Joyce appeared to the likes of Richard Aldington16 ‘as a prophet of chaos,’ Eliot found in him order and control. He remarked, ‘Mr Joyce’s parallel use of Odyssey [...] has the importance of a scientific discovery. [...] It is [...] a step towards making the modern world possible for art, towards that order and form that Mr Aldington so earnestly desires’ (Kolocotroni 372-373).
6Woolf’s genteel distaste for the book’s content is well known: she wrote to Lytton Strachey towards the end of April of the year of the publication of Ulysses,17 describing the book as ‘[t] he scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges,’18 and ‘an illiterate, underbred book [...] the book of a self-taught working man [...], egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating’ (Woolf 1978, 189) but had written in her diary when Eliot had first tried to interest Hogarth Press to publish Ulysses, ‘[Eliot] said nothing—but I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce’ (Woolf 1978, 69).
7No wonder Joyce stands in the minds of readers as well as scholars as the very epitome of the strength and power of autonomy in art which in many ways chiefly characterizes the modernist movement.19 Therefore, even to begin to suggest that Joyce employed satire as a tool, a method, and an attitude as a writer is to invite derision. Yet, from the ‘Holy Office’ to ‘Cyclops’ there is that spicy, stimulating and unforgiving mode of interpreting life and letters writ large over the Joyce canon.
8Even though some of the early reviewers had referred to Joyce’s satirical skills, ‘Joyce the Satirist’ is not exactly a common theme in Joyce scholarship. The two-volume, eight-hundred-and-twenty-one-page depository of Joyce’s early reviews by Robert Deming in the Critical Heritage series has five entries on satire in the index, and of the five notices that these refer to, only one has ‘satire’ in its title. Abstracts of English Studies, in its December 1983 issue, carried abstracts of all materials in the James Joyce Quarterly published in its first twenty volumes from 1963 to 983. To go by the abstracts, not one article has anything to do with ‘satire.’ The three-hundred-and-ten-page strong special issue of In-between containing 26 articles on almost all aspects of Joyce and his works does not go much further.20 Steven Connor’s monograph21 on Joyce in the Writers and Their Work series, published in 1996, has in its index entries on ‘selfhood, male’ ‘self-making,’ ‘Sirens’ and ‘spiritualism,’ but none on ‘satire.’ Neither Michael Mason’s 1972 monograph called James Joyce: Ulysses,22 nor Matthew Hogart’s 1978 book23 on Joyce, make any mention of Joyce’s interest in this ancient mode. More recently, neither Derek Attridge’s Cambridge Companion to James Joyce24 (1990) nor Eric Bulson’s Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (2006)25 would have anything to do with arguably Joyce’s one major interest as a novelist.26 Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated,27 I think, fares no better. Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography of the novelist, in the index to the book, lists under the sub-head, ‘James Joyce, personal characteristics,’ ‘humour and wit,’ ‘religious and political attitudes,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘smoking,’ ‘superstitions,’ and ‘style of life’ (Ellmann 5), but no mention is made of the iconic verbal aggression hiding as words that kill.28
9An interesting and clear indication of general attitude to Joyce in this context is revealed in an article in Stanford Slavic Studies, subtitled ‘A Comparative Study of a Satirical Mode,’ which mentions in the title several authors it plans to deal with, and reads as follows: ‘Zinoviev, Aleshkovsky, Rabelais, Sorrentino, Possibly Pynchon, Maybe James Joyce, and Certainly Tristram Shandy.’29
10While neither the current worshipful attitude that marks the Joyce industry in certain quarters, nor the absence generally of scholarship in this context, is indicative of it, there is much, one would venture to suggest, in Joyce to establish satirical intention. To begin with, he had the temperament and he developed a certain attitude early enough in life (Ellmann 165). He had written to Ibsen when he was still at college, ‘I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence—your lofty impersonal power. You minor aims—your satire, your technique and impersonal harmony—these too I advanced.’30
11In response to a request for a contribution, Joyce had sent ‘The Holy Office’ to Constantine Curran, who was then editing St Stephen’s, the University College magazine. The submission was quickly returned but remains, as Ellmann puts it, ‘Joyce’s first overt, angry declaration that he would pursue candor while his contemporaries pursued beauty’ (Ellmann 165-166). He felt free to attack ‘his literary compatriots for dealing in milk and water which tasted no better for being called Irish and spiritual.’ Ellmann goes on:
For the moment, the whole literary movement seemed to him as much a fraud as the Irish virtues, among which cruelty masqueraded as high-minded moralism, and timid onanism masqueraded as purity. One could meet these writers of the ‘revival’ and read their works without suspecting that the writers were made of flesh and bone. (Ellmann 166)
12Joyce’s ‘holy office,’ as Ellmann describes it, ‘yoking Christian ritual to Aristotle’ is ‘Katharsis’ (Ellmann 166):
Myself unto myself will give
This name, Katharsis-Purgative.
I, who dishevelled ways forsook
To hold the poets’ grammar-book,
Bringing to tavern and to brothel
The mind of witty Aristotle,
Lest bards in the attempt should err
Must here be my interpreter.
13With much ruthlessness and sharp dismissive strokes, he damns his contemporaries. Yeats, Synge, Gogarty, Colum, Roberts, Starkey, and Russell earn denunciation:
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams
For I can do those things for them
Through which I lost my diadem.
14To his time-serving contemporaries he imputes basest of impulses, he himself alone holding up the vital spirit of freedom:
My spirit shall they never have
Nor make my soul with theirs as one
Till the Mahamanvantara31 be done:
And though they spurn me from their door
My soul shall spurn them evermore.
15In 1904, Joyce decided to print ‘The Holy Office’ as a pamphlet at his own expense, but when the printer demanded payment, he could not find the money. Presumably, the printer destroyed the forms as the payment was never made. But a year later, self-exiled now in Trieste, Joyce, convinced that ‘[his] friends had played him false in order to remain true to conventions, which were his real enemies’ (Ellmann 200), obtained from a printer fifty copies of ‘The Holy Office’ and sent them to Stanislaus requesting him to distribute them to several of his friends. He apparently curbed his enthusiasm and did not send copies to Yeats, or Lady Gregory. He wrote to Stanilaus:
By the Lord Christ I must get rid of some of these Jewish bowels I have in me yet. I went out yesterday for a walk in a big wood outside Trieste. The damned monotonous summer was over and the rain and soft air made me think of the beautiful (I am serious) climate of Ireland. I hate a damn silly sun that makes men into butter. I sat down miles away from everybody on a bench surrounded by tall trees. The Bora (the Trieste Wind) was roaring through the tops of the trees. I sniffed up all the fragrance of the earth and offered up the following prayer (not identical with that which Renan offered upon the Acropolis)
O Vague Something behind Everything!
For the love of the Lord Christ change my curse-o’-God state of affairs. Give me for Christ’ sake a pen and an ink-bottle and some peace of mind and then, by the crucified Jaysus, if I don’t sharpen that little pen and dip it into fermented ink and write tiny little sentences about the people who betrayed me send me to hell. After all, there are many ways of betraying people. It wasn’t only the Galilean suffered that. Whoever the hell you are, I inform you that this [is] a poor comedy you expect me to play and I’m damned to hell if I’ll play it for you. What do you mean by urging me to be forbearing? For your sake I refrained from taking a little black fellow from Bristol by the nape of the neck and hurling him into the street when he spat some of his hatched venom at me. But my heroic nature urged me to do this because he was smaller than I. For your sake, I allowed a cyclist to use towards me his ignoble and cowardly manners, pretending to see nothing, pretending that he was my equal. I sorrowfully confess to you, old chap, that I was a damn fool. But if you only grant me that thing I ask you for I will go to Paris where, I believe, there is a person by the name of Anatole France much admired by a Celtic philologist by the name of Goodbetterbest and I’ll say to him ‘Respected master, is this pen pointed enough?’ Amen. (Ellmann 201)
16Satire was to assert itself in Joyce’s maturer work even more insistently. In Ulysses ‘Cyclops’ is perhaps best viewed as a manifestation of this remarkable literary genre. Often referred to as a literary device, or a tool, a satire is better appreciated as embodying, and an expression of, an attitude—albeit an aggressive, critical and sometimes destructive attitude. In its sharper penetrations, Joyce in ‘Cyclops’ should remind one of Pope’s Dunciad. The day to day trivia of life in Ulysses, and specially in ‘Cyclops,’ lend themselves to Pope like treatment of the petty and the insignificant bloated to heroic levels. Ridicule, wit, humour, parody, and the comic abound in ‘Cyclops.’32
17Of the several targets of Joyce’s militant attitude, one of the chief focuses of satire is violence provoked by Irish nationalist causes.33 Ireland is a running theme in Ulysses, but here Joyce is at his venomous best. The conversation in the pub in ‘Cyclops’ centres on political matters but takes in such subjects as lynching in America, flogging in the British Navy,34 boxing, hanging, sport—everything that is connected with violence. Irish fondness for violence in sport and even entertainment is drawn attention to. Anti-semitism becomes the topic of discussion among the pub customers, and soon religion is brought in and conversation becomes inflammatory. Revolutionary and violent nationalism is set against the violence unleashed by the British Imperialism, the political overtones of religion and anti-Semitism as a particularly disgusting form of political prejudice. Joyce identifies Jews with the Irish, the two oppressed people struggling for independence, and, ironically, only Bloom sees the connection. In ‘Aeolus’ Parnell is depicted as the Irish Moses. In ‘Cyclops’ the Citizen and his friends, the other customers, fail to ‘connect’ and thus their ‘legitimate nationalism has become barbarous insularity as tyrannical as the foreign rule to which it is opposed. This is one of the reasons Joyce rejected the demands of nationalism on himself as artist and went into exile’ (Hodgart 102).
18Other favourite Irish obsessions exfoliate during the conversation in the pub. Religion and politics rub shoulders with song, booze, and horses. Parody, hyperbole, reduction, irony, and sarcasm abound. Rabelaisian burlesque, mock-heroic, and gross inflatory travesty have an expansive field day. Joyce ridicules bad journalism, fake versions of epics like Ossian and the apocalyptic tone of nationalistic rhetoric. Hardly less barbarous and Cyclopean are the discussions and fantasies about corporal and capital punishment. The thirty-three parodies, (including those of the scriptures, ‘the blasphemous technique’) create wonderfully abundant mock-heroic effect which had dominated the eighteenth-century satire.
19The title of a work itself can be an exercise in mock-heroic subversion. Joyce had written to Arthur Symons in 1906, ‘The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent, I should prefer a title which repudiated the book without altogether disparaging it’ (Ellmann 124).
20Joyce, then, had the temperament, a bent of mind, a cause, an intellectual justification of that cause, and above all the ability to handle satire and its tools, to give the impression, and perhaps just and fair impression, that he could fight for a cause, a cause that kept him motivated, energised his mind and art for a very long part of an active intellectual and creative career.
21Now satire is nothing if not aggression. In just about all the definitions that I have come across, it does nothing if not ‘mock,’ ‘censure’ and ‘ridicule,’ as in J. A. Cuddon, who also uses military metaphors such as ‘attack,’ ‘saturation bombing,’ and ‘chosen targets.’35 Such being the choice of verbs, the adverbs and adjectives chosen are, appropriately enough in Cuddon, ‘ferocious,’ ‘scathing,’ ‘sardonic,’ and ‘ironical’ (Cuddon 781).36 When such are the descriptive labels for a mode of articulation, artistic autonomy becomes irrelevant.37 An active declarative verb needs an object, a ‘chosen target.’ It needs to connect and it does not look inward. When one is a satirist, one’s commitment lies with commitment, and not with the self-congratulatory, self-sufficient, and autonomous ‘timid onanism masqueraded as purity,’ as Ellmann puts it (Ellmann 166). Joyce, I think, would have agreed.
22Where does this focus on modernists’, and Joyce’s, insistent pursuit of the novelties of process, coupled with Joyce’s mad delight in the giddy pursuit of the satirical extravaganza, take us? What entails an extended delineation of satire, parody, irony, and paradox as tools of interaction with life in Joyce’s work, is a relative lack of visible interest in Joyce scholarship. It is important as all that it achieves is establish a counterpoint to the popular image of Joyce. It is this predilection on the part of Joyce that leads to a paradoxical conclusion that in the context of modernist art Joyce’s obsessive preoccupation appears to have been, on the one hand, with the triumphant autonomy of art, as we have noted above: he nourished art and made it new but subjugated it to no other priorities. And on the other hand, he viewed life as one for whom art was on the side of life and had a purpose.
23One could further elaborate Joyce’s interest in matters away from the modernists’ focus on formal matters. In ‘Drama and Life,’ one of Joyce’s early pieces that he read before University College Literary and Historical Society on January 20, 1900 at the age of eighteen, he proclaimed the primacy of commonplace in art: ‘out of the dreary sameness of existence a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama,’ he maintained. This was Joyce’s earliest statement of his aesthetic principles as well as a definition of his raw material his creative endeavours would draw upon. His aversion to conventions comes out the strongest. He would draw upon the material his own life and times offered. Essential humanity is one, and time and place do not alter the essential eternal laws that govern man’s life and living.
24Joyce described ‘drama in life’ as a quality or a goal for a writer to strive for:
By drama [, Joyce explained,] I understand the interplay of passions to portray truth; drama is strife, evolution, movement in whatever way unfolded; it exists before it takes form, independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene. It might be said fantastically that as soon as men and women began life in the world there was above them and about them, a spirit, of which they were dimly conscious [...] and for whose truth they became seekers in aftertimes, longing to lay hands upon it. For this spirit is as the roaming air, little susceptible of change and never left their vision, shall never leave it, till the firmament is as scroll rolled away.38
25Joyce had an inescapable sense of fact. Even though he once wrote that he had committed himself to the ‘task [... of] writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown and undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen,’39 he also remarked to Arthur Power:
in realism we get down to facts on which the world is based; that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealisable misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It we put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotism. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.40
26In his two 1912 lectures on ‘Realism and Idealism in literature,’ delivered in Trieste, he faulted Defoe’s method as its realistic precision had led to the neglect of the spiritual side of man. He commends Blake for his ability to move ‘from the infinitely small to the infinitely big, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars.’41 Deborah Parsons points how ‘[i]n this emphasis on human perception and aesthetic form, the tragedies and comedies of everyday life and the archetypal laws of human existence, cinematic realism and creative correspondence, artist as “idefatigable scribler” and the artist as visionary genius lay the germ of Ulysses’ (Parsons 41).
27If the modernists’ preoccupation with formal innovations meant abandonment of the demands of the social or the political, it does not appear to have been the case with Joyce. He surely does not illustrate a creative self in pursuit of artistic perfection immunized against social life, in ‘a narcissistic pursuit of aesthetic perfection,’ as David James pithily puts it.42 Surely, it would be simplistic to categorise an author such as Joyce as one or the other when his different works, in fact, portions of the same work, have been found to respond to varied classifications. But for small segments, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have been adjudged Victorian; if Ulysses is primarily modern, portions of it can be viewed as postmodern. Finnegans Wake is found to be wholly postmodern.43
28Literature, then, it would appear, for Joyce, had a dimension that for want of a better word could be called ‘relevance’ in quite the sense F. R. Leavis uses the word. In The Great Tradition F. R. Leavis points out how ‘[The great writers] are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.44 Introducing a collection of essays, called Presentist Shakespeare,’ Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes maintain how ‘we can never, finally, evade the present. If it is always and only the present that makes the past speak, it speaks always and only to—and about—ourselves.’ They continue:
Indeed [texts] don’t speak at all unless and until they are inserted into and perceived as part of specific discourses which impose on them their own shaping requirements and agendas. We choose the facts. We choose the texts. We do the inserting. We do the perceiving. We order the priorities which govern everything. Facts and texts, that is to say, don’t simply speak, don’t simply mean. We speak, we mean, by them.45
29Whether, in the context of arts and literature, autonomy celebrates or isolates, is as hard to determine as whether commitment connects or vitiates. It would be useful, one would think, to recognize that between the two apparently opposing positions there are shades of gray. In the context of human articulation in whatever mode, form, or genre, let’s perhaps not expect—nor does it there probably exist—any territorial integrity. Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) to my mind demonstrates that while seeking an essentializing and transcendent definition of art, the tradition has, in fact, served to buttress particular ideas of subjectivity, freedom, autonomy, and universality, which makes it inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class society. Aesthetics, like art itself, therefore, becomes ideological and a historically conditioned set of discourses. In the present context it is commonly thought, and it is perhaps not completely off the mark, I think, that the image-driven world of the post-modern has produced an entirely aestheticised society. In which case, where all is seen as fashion, taste and style, there can be nothing to detach itself from or connect with.
30In a perfectly delightful study of the moral element in the neo-classical poetry, Peter K. Elkin tells us that there is no evidence of any moral motivation in eighteenth-century satire.46 Maybe the neo-classicists practised satire in the spirit of art for art’s sake! Maybe Joyce did too. When asked whether literature should be a record of fact or the creation of art, Joyce had answered, ‘It should be life, “and had continued,” in my opinion there are as many forms of art as there are forms of life.’47 Eliot wrote in The Dial that the novel in the hands of Joyce ‘instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age’ (Eliot 177).48
31Bonnie Scott points out49 how the making, the formal experiment, no longer seems to suffice as definition. Mind, body, sexuality, family, reality, culture, religion, and history were reconstructed. Also, the modernists’ statements on the representation of the relation of art and life have been taken as clear manifestos for modern fiction, yet ultimately they question more than they answer, no fixed paradigm or critical concepts of the ‘modernist’ novel emerging directly from their work. Rather than espousing any single and homogenous theory of the novel, they were committed to a constant exploration and renegotiation of modern fiction’s limits and possibilities. With every new generation of readers, or new individual readers, the works of art and literature would relocate themselves within the landscape, with the landscape too forever shifting boundaries—the term providing the assurance of inherent fault-lines, which would enclose yet keep the discourse open. In a relatively recent study, Tim Armstrong points out how modernism is as much a movement in revolt against the modern world, as an attempt to engage with that world: to engage with, say, politics as much as with inherited literary modes and styles.50
32As Hugh Keller defined modernism, the likes of Joyce achieved integrity of perception and definition of experience, not mere facticity but what Pound called a ‘constatation of facts,’ a larger extra-literary intellectual sensitivity to, or better preoccupation, involvement with, say Marconi’s wireless, Einsteinian physics, Curie’s X-ray, or the typewriter. For Kenner, high modernism rose above the preoccupations defined by class, nationalism, or ethnicity.51 Jacque Aubert points out how Joyce is replete with dichotomies, contradictions, and paradoxes. Joyce’s thought was distracted by tradition, romanticism, and the sublime on the one hand, and innovation, classicism, and the trivial on the other.52
33A useful trajectory to the whole question of autonomy and commitment could be to examine the issue from the view-point of the reader. For the practitioners and scholars examining the question of commitment, the commitment belongs to the author. But in a climate in which authors seek to abdicate their ownership and thereby the implied responsibility for positing the ideology, other questions arise and need to be answered. In ‘What is Literature?,’ Sartre had defined the role of the reader in the creation of the text:
literary object is a peculiar top that exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this can last. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper. Since the creation can find its fulfillment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal. To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation that I have undertaken by means of language.53
34Once created by an author, a text needs to be ‘realized’ (konkretisiert), and this realization can be accomplished only by the reader. ‘The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence.’54 Barthes and Foucault later went on to develop the notion of the ‘death of the author’55 and sought to liberate the text from the constraints imposed upon it by being linked with its supposed progenitor.
35The issue then perhaps is not whether the so-called autonomy of a modernist work is fundamentally deceptive, but whether it is possible; or, not whether commitment is an inescapable condition of literary production, but whether it is necessary, relevant or even literary. Also, whether the two conditions must operate as one to the exclusion of the other, on the oppositional point-counterpoint paradigm. If the case of Joyce, as I have tried to explain above, tells us anything, it is chiefly this, that creativity does not easily assimilate itself to simplistic categories, nor do creative endeavours lend themselves to easy explication through traditional notions that inescapably operate in conflict and resistance.
Notes de bas de page
1 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), The Works of Oscar Wilde (1948; London: Collins, 1968) 1009-1060, 1039.
2 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889) (Wilde 970-992, 982).
3 See ‘Aestheticism,’ Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (1965; London: Macmillan, 1974) 6.
4 See T.S. Eliot: ‘[...] subject may recede to the background: instead of being the purpose of the poem, it becomes simply a necessary means for the realization of the poem. At this stage the reader or listener may become as nearly indifferent to the subject matter as the primitive listener was to the style.’ ‘From Poe to Valéry’ (1948), To Criticize the Critic and Other Writing (University of Nebraska Press, 1992) 27-42, 38; and Pound: ‘[T]he author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed of system of ethics or economics.’ Quoted in Deborah Journet, ‘Yeats’ Quarrel with Modernism,’ W. B. Yeats: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. G. R Taneja (New Delhi: Pencraft, 1995) 62-76, 63.
5 Virginia Woolf, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ [‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’], The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeilie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994) 428-441, 429.
6 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, eds. Ann Olivier Bell & Andrew McNeilie (London: Hogarth Press, 1980) 34.
7 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3, eds. Gilbert & Ellmann (London: Faber, 1966) 146.
8 Virginia Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Andrew McNeilie (New York & London: HBJ, 1988) 426.
9 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, eds. Ann Olivier Bell & Andrew McNeilie (London: Hogarth Press, 1978) 248.
10 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), The Development in Criticism since Henry James, ed. Stephen Hazell (London: Macmillan, 1978) 35-53, 42.
11 Letter, quoted in Deborah Parsons, Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge, 2007) 25.
12 Quoted in Parsons 25. It is tempting to interpret James’s use of the word ‘process’ to refer to what ‘art’ in ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ implies.
13 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1983) 557.
14 Ford Madox Ford, ‘A Haughty and Proud Generation,’ Yale Review 11 (July 1922): 714-717, excerpted in Robert Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1970) 129.
15 T.S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ in Vassiliky Kolocotroni, et. al., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998) 371.
16 See Richard Aldington, ‘The Influence of Mr Joyce,’ English Review xxxii 32 (April 1921): 331-341, excerpted in Deming 186-189.
17 Ulysses appeared in 1922.
18 Letter to Lytton Strachey, 22 April 1922, quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, ed. Peter Kemp (1997; Oxford: OUP, 1999) 309.
19 See Deborah Journet: ‘[M]odern writers [...] were [...] searching for a kind of art that impersonal, objective, and cleansed of all external concerns, an art to be evaluated in term of its craftsmanship and technique, rather than in terms of the independent value of its subject matter’ (Taneja 63).
20 ‘Satire’ secures for itself a mention only on one occasion:
‘I would like to argue here that in Ulysses, Joyce includes, digests, and reproduces the Book of Revelation in satiric form. [...] this apocalyptic interior frame is satiric, often marked by scathing parody and the paratactic juxtaposition of the high and the low—of the daily events of Dublin and the religious prophecies of Revelation. Frequently, understanding such satire requires that we participate in the types of word play and gamesmanship for which Joyce is so well noted. [...] These allusions [to Revelation], in turn, help to shape the religious satire throughout Ulysses.’
The rest of the article focuses on allusions to the Book of Revelation in Ulysses. See Terry Reilly, ‘Apocalyptic Satire: Reading Ulysses through Revelation and Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending,’ James Joyce, special issue of In-between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism, 12.1-2 (2003) 301-309, 303-304, 307.
21 Steven Connor, James Joyce, Writers and their Work, new series (Plymouth: Nothcote, 1996).
22 Michael Mason, James Joyce: Ulysses (London: Edward Arnold, 1970).
23 Matthew Hodgart, James Joyce: A Students’ Guide (London: Routledge, 1978).
24 Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1990). A second edition with much revision and additional essays appeared in 2004.
25 Eric Bulson, Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2006).
26 Attridge’s Companion mentions, albeit casually, satire and irony several times in its many essays, yet it avoids any enumeration of these in the index to the book.
27 Don Gifford Ulysses Annotated (U. of California P., 1989).
28 There is an odd occurrence of the word in the body of the text. The most interesting goes as follows: ‘Joyce was the first to endow an urban man no importance with heroic consequence. For a long time his intention was misunderstood: it was assumed he must be writing satire. How else justify so passionate an interest in the lower middle class? Marxist critics leaped to attack him, and Joyce said gently to his friend Eugene Jolas, “I don’t know why they attack me. Nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds” (Ellmann in interview with Mrs Maria Jolas, 1954).’
29 Edward J. Brown, ‘Zinoviev, Aleshkovsky, Rabelais, Sorrentino, Possibly Pynchon, Maybe James Joyce, and Certainly Tristram Shandy: A Comparative Study of a Satirical Mode,’ Stanford Slavic Studies 1 (1987): 307-25. Italics added.
30 Letter in Dano-Noerwegian, March 1901, to Ibsen; quoted from the draft in English in Ellmann 86. Joyce had reviewed ‘When We Dead Awaken’ for The Fortnightly Review and had spoken about Ibsen ‘in debating-societies, and so forth’ (See Ellmann, 86ff).
31 Mahamanvantara: [Sanskrit from maha great + manvantara period of manifestation]. ‘A great cycle of cosmic manifestation and activity, whether of a universe, solar system, or planet.’ Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Mahamanvantara. www.experiencefestival.com/a/Mahamanvantara/id/134153. Accessed June 1, 2007.
32 Zack Bowen mentions Joyce as an influence on John Barth in the latter’s use of irony, satire, and the use of his own personal character involvement in Barth’s fiction, and refers to Joyce’s ‘parodic thinking.’ Joyce’s last two book, Bowen observes, were ‘conceived and executed as comedies [...] Comedy was historically a corrective to the view that tradition, arbitrary moral codes of behaviour, and hierarchical values actually represented some higher or more elevating truth than the daily struggle to survive. [...] Joyce resurrected and modernized the technique and made the association of the great with the common the stuff of modern comic satire.’ See ‘Barth and Joyce,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37.4 (1996): 261-269.
33 ‘It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs about my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.’ James Joyce, Letter to Grant Richards, June 23, 1906, quoted in ‘Introduction’ to Dubliners (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) xv.
34 See for example: ‘They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, the creator of hell upon earth and Jack Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was sacrificed, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose from the bed again, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come drudge for a living and be paid.’ James Joyce Ulysses (1922; London: Flamigo, 1994) 427.
35 ‘Satire,’ A Dictionary of Literary terms and Literary Theory, ed. J. A. Cuddon (London: Blackwell, 1998) 780-81.
36 The most non-violent description of satire that I have come across is from Ian Jack: ‘Satire,’ he says, ‘is born out of the instinct to protest; it is protest become art.’ Ian Jack, Pope. Writers and Their Work series (London: Longmans, Green, 1954) 17.
37 Jean-Jacques Lecercle remarked in the course of a conversation (March 30, 2007) that he could not imagine satire operating in private space.
38 James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writings (Oxford: O.U.P., 2000) 25.
39 James Joyce, Letter to Harriet Weaver, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Gilbert & Ellmann (London: Faber, 1966) 167.
40 Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Heart (London: Millington, 1974) 74-75.
41 James Joyce, ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature’ (Joyce 2000, 189).
42 David James, ‘Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Fictions of Impersonality,’ Modernism/Modernity 12.1 (2005): 111-131, 112.
43 See Christopher Butler, ‘Joyce the Modernist,’ in Attridge’s Companion to James Joyce; Brian Mchale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987); and Brian Richardson, ‘The Genealogies of Ulysses, the Invention of Postmodernism, and the Narratives of Literary History’ ELH: English Literary History, 67.4 (2002): 1035-1054.
44 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1974) 10.
45 Authors’ italics; Hugh Grady & Terence Hawkes, ‘Introduction,’ Presentist Shakes-peares (London: Routledge: 2007) 1-5, 3. See Leavis: ‘The serious critic’s concern with the literature of the past is with its life in the present; it will be informed by the kind of perception that can distinguish intelligently and sensitively the significant new life in contemporary literature. [...] If literature, as the critic is committed to suppose it does, matters, then what in relation to it matters above all is that it should be what it might be in contemporary life’. F. R. Leavis, A Selection from ‘Scrutiny’ vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968) 297.
46 Peter Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973).
47 Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (1974; Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1999) 43, 45.
48 T.S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth,’ Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Harvest, 1975) 177.
49 See Bonnie Scott, Joyce and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1984).
50 See Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Oxford: Polity, 2005).
51 See Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (New York: Knopf, 1988).
52 See Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, trans. Diane Collinson (1973; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1992).
53 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘What is Literature?,’ The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001) 1337, 1340.
54 Woolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process,’ Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, eds. Rice & Waugh (1989; London: Edwin Arnold, 1992) 77-83.
55 See Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (Leitch 1466-1470) and Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author’ (Leitch 1622-1636).
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