ABSTRACT
Now one hears that shock very often in modern literature, in the writings of persons who have practised some revolutionary austerity regarding the superficialities of writing, and feeling, therefore,—having a streak of Puritan optimism in them-that they must thereby have bought salvation by it…Shock. One hears the sound again and again in Ulysses. Seduced by his use of a heterodox technique into believing himself to be a wholly emancipated writer, James Joyce is not at all ahead of his times in his enslavement to the sentimental. That is manifest in isolated incidents. For example, the volitional character of Miss Brill is nothing as compared to that of Gerty MacDowell, the girl who sat on the beach to the detriment of Mr. Bloom’s chastity. Her erotic reverie is built up with as much noisy sense of meeting a special occasion as a grand-stand for a royal procession, in order that we may be confounded by the fact of her lameness. Shock. But, more important, his sentimentality deforms the conception of one of the two protagonists, and that the one which should have been presented with the most careful sincerity and grace: the young Stephen Dedalus, whose quarrel with the grossness of man’s theory of living (as symbolized by the Roman Catholic Church) and the grossness of man’s living (as symbolized by Leopold Bloom) is meaningless unless they are destroying in him a sincere and graceful spirit. But the young man is transparently a hero. His creator has given him eyelashes an inch long. And how he comports himself! He rolls his eyes, he wobbles on his base with suffering, like a Guido Reni. This is partly, of course, a consequence of Mr. Joyce’s habit of using his writing as a means of gratifying certain compulsions under which he labors without making the first effort towards lifting them over the threshold that divides life from art. An obvious example of this is his use of obscene words. This might be a perfectly justifiable artistic device. I would hesitate to say that some artist may not at some time find it necessary to use these Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, which are in a sense so little used and in a sense so much, for the completion of some artistic pattern. But that Mr. Joyce is not that artist, that his use of obscene words is altogether outside the esthetic process is proven by that spurt of satisfaction, more actual but also more feeble than authentic artistic emotion which
marks the pages whenever he uses them. Simply he is gratifying in his maturity the desire to protest against the adult order of things by the closest possible verbal substitutes for the practical actions, originating in the zone against which adults seemed to have such a repressive prejudice, by which he could register such feelings in his infancy…. There is working here a narcissism, a compulsion to make a selfimage and to make it with an eye to the approval of others, which turns Stephen Dedalus into a figure oddly familiar for the protagonist of a book supposed to be revolutionary and unique. In his monologues on esthetics, in his unfolding of his theory concerning Shakespeare, he enjoys the unnatural immunity from interruption that one might encounter not in life but in a typical Freudian wish-fulfilment dream….
