Mr. James Joyce
Tins booklet has a fault : Mr. Duff, in his effort to make things plain to the plain reader, often makes passages of Ulysses ordinary._ For instance, his relation on page 16 of Stephen Daedalus'• conduct of his class puts the whole episode on a low. plane : "The boys are fond of him, though they regard him as the sort of a person whose leg can well be pulled without risk of danger. Thus, in the middle of the lesson one of them asks him to tell them a story, an idea immediately taken up by another who sty/tests that it be a ghost story. A moment later the work is foraotteli while the master asks his class riddles. It is altogethal,, , Dublin classroom atmosphere, and the time is whiled awe,
harmless exchanges of wit and wisdom until the I. of freedom strikes."
This brings it down to the ground. The boys, when they spoke of a ghost story had penetrated to Stephen's brooding on the death of his mother ; the riddle that he asks has to do with that obsession. The scene is -really a prelude to the brothel -scene, and Mr. Duff by putting it on this plane has emptied it of significance. It is true that he does not make other episodes so ordinary. Still, a s'nse of things being put on a lower plane, of unacknowledgement of the fact that the writer being dealt with is a poet, accompanies my reading of James Joyce and the Plain Reader.
There is an argument in the booklet that I am glad to see made : it is to the effect that Joyce's mind is not tragic, but genial and comic, and that Ulysses should be read, not altogether, but to a great extent, for the fun of it. Mr. Joyce has great power of extravagant comedy—Leopold Bloom himself is a comic creation of the first rank—and I know no grander piece of humorous writing than there is in the scene where Bloom comes into conflict with the Citizen in the public house. From the first to the last word spoken by the Dublin " bowsie " who relates it, the episode is comic in its language, character and action. And Mr. Duff is right when he states that eath of Joyce's works is more genial than its predecessors. However, he is in two minds about Tl'ork in Progress. In his bibliography of Joyce, he puts it down as a " poetic novel," but in the text he suggests that it may be " a superb piece of nonsense-prose springing from the giantism of friskiness' . . . an item flung at the heads of critics, a breed very heartily detested by Joyce." Now Mr. Joyce has no detestation of critics. And it is very wrong to give the suggestion that Work in Progress has nonsense in it, or that it can be compared in any way with the non-intellectual exercises of Gertrude Stein. It is based on a remarkable idea and it is being given remarkable organization. We should read it in the way we look on tapestry—the figures and natural objects are different from what they would be on canvas—less representational, more full of suggestion, emerging from and merging into each other. I have always considered that Joyce's primary distinction is in his power to reveal what Professor Santayana names " essences "—the timeless aspect of the things we can distinguish. Take Gertie MacDowell RS she appears on the beads at Sandymoont (not Hearth as Mr. Duff supposes). The mind that is shown us is the mind of an ordinary adolescent girl. But looked at with comprehension, an ordinary adolescent girl has, like every other creature or thing, a timeless aspect : the bell rings for the Angelus in the Star of the Sea chapel, a memory of the Odyssey is brought to us, and we see Gertie as Nausicau, the eternal young girl, the Virgin. The technique by which Joyce reveals the " essences " is all his own, but his per- ception of them may have been assisted by that training which Mr. Duff and others take note of—his training in Catholic philosophy. " Always round the corner, but strangely out of sight," says Professor Santayana in noting the support that he has for his doctrine of essences, " is Catholic philosophy." It is absurd to imagine that either Clongowes or University College, Dublin, led their students into the realm of essence ; the Jesuits in Ireland have no more interest in metaphysics than any other teachers there have : Mr. Joyce must have discovered that realm for himself. But he got some support for his feeling about it from the aesthetic of Saint Thomas, and, probably, from certain Catholic practices : the Mass, after all, is a solemn revelation of " essences," and so are the other sacraments. On this side, too, there has to be taken into account Joyce's objection to history—an objection which a proud spirit in a defeated and frustrated country might easily find in himself. History, or the denial of reality, for they are two names for one thing, may be said to be that which deceives the whole world," he declared in a youthful essay published in his college magazine. This luck of interest in the succession of ages, this insistence upon what is timeless, leads him to telescope Ithaka and Dublin in Ulysses and Abraham and Daniel O'Connell in Work in Progress.
There is a section of the reading public to whom Mr. Stuart Gilbert's Baedeker to Ulysses is likely to seem too formidable. '1',• than this booklet may be recommended. The author is
. • in having Mr. Herbert Read's prefatory letter for his
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