ABSTRACT
James Joyce has brought out a new book. It is a fragment of a longer one, and is called Anna Livia Plurabelle. We are used to the reputations of authors fluctuating from year to year, but Mr. Joyce’s also fluctuates from place to place. He is resented in Ireland, neglected in England, admired by a set in America, and idolized by another in France…. Thus Joyce’s only disciples in Ireland are the young realists of the post-rebellion period. In England the literary public is governed by good taste…. The general public is equally conservative, and the fate of a book like Ulysses, so hopelessly unpresentable when submitted to the Chelsea canon, is decided in advance. It is in America, where there is a large and less sophisticated general public, and in Paris, where there are a great many young writers anxious to experiment in literary form, that the ‘Ulysses generation’ has grown up…. Let us get a clear idea of Ulysses before we try to estimate the later work of its author. James Joyce is, by temperament, a mediaevalist. He has always been in revolt against his two greatest limitations, his Jesuit education and his Celtic romanticism. Each of his books reveals a growing fear of beauty; not because life is not beautiful, but because there is something essentially false and luxurious in the ‘Celtic Twilight’ approach to it. This tinsel element is very strong in Joyce’s early poems, and is contrasted with an equally pronounced repulsion from it in The Portrait of the Artist. In Ulysses he has got it in hand, and is experimenting in other approaches to beauty, the pagan simplicity of Mrs. Bloom’s reverie, the mathematical austerity of the catechism which precedes it. Only Stephen Dedalus, the Hamlet young man, thinks automatically in the diction of the Celtic Twilight; but in him the remorse, the guilty sense of loneliness which attacks brave but weak men who destroy the religious framework of their youth, has fused with his minor
poet melancholy, and gives to his reverie the quality of a Greek chorus…. The central emotion of Ulysses is not indignation, but remorse; and remorse, though perhaps second-rate in life, is an emotion which entirely comes off in literature. Expiation and the sense of doom, which is the essence of Greek tragedy, are only a variation of this feeling; and though remorse seems so feebly static in real people, the very tranquillity and remoteness from acts lend it a glassy literary beauty…. Literary English has become very hackneyed, as a glance at any book of essays or a preface to an anthology at once will show, and Joyce in Ulysses set out to revive it by introducing the popular colloquial idiom of his own city, by forming new words in the Greek fashion of compound epithets, by telescoping grammar, by using the fresh vocabulary of science manuals, public-houses, or Elizabethan slang….
