BOOKS
Opaque and Glittering
BY BERNARD BERGONZI COME time in the Twenties or Thirties Ulysses Ostopped being just a dirty book—`a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud,' as Mr. Forster primly described it—and became a great many other things: an encyclopedia, an ex- ploration of the unconscious, and above all a vast, marvellous system of interlocking symbols. Stuart Gilbert's book, published with the authority of the. Master himself, first established the notion that Ulysses was a tissue of symbolic correspondences, and set the scene for nearly three decades of interpretative criticism, cul- minating in the exertions of Magalaner, Tindall and Kenner. Nothing in Ulysses was accidental: every seemingly casual reference had its special significance, or significances, and was related to every other reference. Much of this exegesis was brilliantly performed and sometimes illuminat- ing, but it did tend to lose sight of the fact that Ulysses was massively rooted in the soil—or mud, or dirt—of Dublin in 1904. The tendency of symbolist literature to form hermetic, self- Contained systems makes for facility of expli- cation; but there is a great deal in Ulysses that obviously isn't hermetic at all. I believe that one distinguished critic of Joyce only visited Dublin for the first time after he had written his book : personally I found that Ulysses meant considerably more to me once I had stood in silent awe outside No. 7 Eccles Street and made- !he Pilgrimage to the Martello Tower. Ulysses is, after all, one of the most parochial as well as one of the most universal novels in the world (it is also, let us not forget, one of the funniest). There is, it seems to me, quite a lot to be said for regarding Ulysses as, in the first place, a story about two chaps called Leopold and Stephen, and what they did in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Some such conviction has evidently Possessed Mr. S. L. Goldberg, writer of the study of Joyce in the 'Writers and Critics' series of Paperbacks.* But Mr. Goldberg's little book makes it only too clear that where the ground has b. eFri made slippery by much critical scuffling 11 is dangerous to lean over backwards; one can !asilY:lose one's balance altogether. Mr. Gold- berg is determined to read Ulysses as a Great- Tradition type study in maturity and moral seriousness (terms desperately inappropriate to .1..0Yee, one would have thought), a simple, lucid table about responsibility and self-awareness;
i and n order to make this improbable thesis fit
he ruthlessly jettisons everything that gets in the w2Y.. That is to say, not only do all the sym- 'hurt and complexities of structure have to vto, but so does Molly Bloom's soliloquy. What e are left with is rather little of Joyce's giant °°vel; and that little is, pretty boring. A. much more interesting and explosive blow against a...1nst accepted views of Ulysses is struck by bert Martin Adams's Surface and Symbol, a ;j°Yce. By S. L. Goldberg. (Oliver and Boyd, 5s.) SURFACE AND SYMBOL. By Robert Martin Adams. (Qt-i,P., 42s.) thoroughly subversive book.t Professor Adams is an admirable critic who should be better known in this country. He has a wide-ranging, energetic, destructive mind, and, rarest of all in an American academic, an urbane and lucid prose style. Surface and Symbol is, in fact, a work of rigorously scholarly inquiry rather than of criticism; but it provides material that will be indispensable for future critics of Ulysses. Mr. Adams's concern is to separate what is fundamentally and irreducibly symbolic in Ulysses from those other elements which Joyce introduced as part of a collage technique in an attempt to incorporate as much 'of the detritus of Dublin life into his, fiction as he could. By way of illustration, Mr. Adams refers in his opening pages to a list of racing cyclists riding through College' Green; one of them is called J. A. Jackson, and this name has prompted one Joycean to suggest that it conceals a reference to the author himself—James Augustine, son of Jack Joyce. But the bicycle races actually took place in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and the winner of the half-mile, handicap was called J. A. Jackson. By a principle of economy, Mr. Adams suggests, an event or name need not be deemed to be symbolic if a simpler explanation can be found.
Mr. Adams goes through Ulysses with great care and energy, tracking down the sources of various incidents, characters and references. Some of the time, one must admit, his approach is rather reminiscent of those indefatigable in- vestigators who try to piece together a complete picture of the life and personality of Sherlock Holmes, as when he truces the various lodgings the Ellooins lived in during their married life, and shovv-s solve curious inconsistencies in Joyce's account. But much of Mr. Adams's material is significant and disturbing. It is com- mon knowledge, of course, that Ulysses is full of factually authentic material—names, places, persons; but Mr. Adams shows that a lot of the facts are wrong—and sometimes deliberately so. We even have the astonishing spectacle of Joyce providing right information in the manuscript or serial versions of the text, then deliberately re- ducing it to error in the final version. Sometimes this can be justified as dramatically appropriate to the character involved; but at other times the, changes are inexplicable. Sometimes, perhaps, Joyce himself didn't know quite enough. At one point Bloom thinks about his next-door neigh- bour: 'Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish.' Thom's Directory, to be sure, shows No. 8 Eccles Street as occupied by `R. Woods.' But 'R. Woods' was a lady, Rosanna Woods, and on June 16, 1904, she announced in the Irish Independent that she was selling her house by auction. Was Joyce unaware, or did he merely choose to leave Bloom in ignorance?
Most curious of all are those passages where Joyce himself seems to be setting deliberate booby-traps for the diligently inquiring reader. How is it, for instance, that Bloom is described as a well-built man of 5 feet 9 inches, weigh- ing over eleven stone, and yet is given a chest measurement of under thirty inches? Joyce's sardonic humour is certainly in evidence here; as it is in the newspaper office scene, when J. J . O'Molloy makes a remark about the assassination of General Bobrikoff, Governor- General of Finland; and Stephen replies, 'We were only thinking about it.' Mr. Adams points out that this event took place in Helsinki on the same day and about an hour before their conversation.
Mr. Adams has shown by his exhaustive and fascinating examination of Joyce's- sources that the factual material in Ulysses is more important and ' lecS,:s1r:iirightftivvvard than one might have thought. He'JnSists that a close reading shows that; 'the meaningless is deeply interwoven with the meaningful in the texture of the novel.' There are undoubted symbolic patterns, but there are "fewer of them than many critics have claimed. Above all, Mr. Adams ha's made it difficult to go on thinking of Ulysses as a totally consistent, luminous, claSsical_ structure. Rather, it contains a great deal that is raw and arbitrary and all the evidence suggests that Joyce wanted
it that way. Mr. Adams observes: .
Finally, there is an appetite for self-destruc- tion in Joyce and in his fiction which is very reminiscent of.Swift. He breaks the texture of the book _ which he has taken such pains to establish, for no other evident reason than that he has got the reader to trust in it. He is con- temptuous of smooth surfaces and easy re- sponses; he fractures them to display power over his world, himself, his reader.
In Mr. Adams's hands Ulysses becomes less of an all-inclusive symbolic entity and, if anything, rather more of a novel:
Ulysses has its longueurs, its msthetic lapses, its ingenious sterilities; what epic does not? But it has also the quality of the very greatest epics in that one feels, beneath the massive struc- tural balances required by the form, the move- ment and passion of an intricate individual vision.
I still find myself surprised by the things Mr. Adams has told me about what he calls this 'opaque and glittering' masterpiece. He has given its an unfamiliar' Ulysses; but I think we shall have to accept it.
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