ABSTRACT
This unsociable quality in the intellect, which can coexist with so much superficial sociability or herding in the habits, is the most outstanding fact about really able writers in recent days. One of its manifestations is a verbal eccentricity in works of a talent that goes beyond the eccentric. It is something like the secret language that is invented by a child. Ulysses contains a number of very queer words; though perhaps none queerer than Ulysses. For the comparison is curious in itself, seeing that throughout a prolonged pagan epic Homer manages to be very pure in very plain language, while Joyce manages to be very coarse in very esoteric language. There are whole passages, of the sort on which the moral argument turns, which are dark to the point of decency. He has been compared to Rabelais, but the very comparison should be enough to show us vividly the difference made by the Spirit of the Age. It is the whole force of Rabelais that he seems to roar like ten thousand men; that one of his giants is like a multitude turned into a man. What he roars may not always be very distinct or intelligible, any more than the roar of an actual rabble or mob; but we know that what is being shouted is something quite normal and human, even if it be what some would call bestial. But we do not feel, or at least I do not feel, that James Joyce ever speaks for anybody except James Joyce. We may call this individuality or insanity or genius or what we will; but it belongs to its time because of this air of having invented its own language; and moved a little further away from anything like a universal language. The new Ulysses is the opposite of the old Ulysses, for the latter moved amid ogres and witches with a level-headed and almost prosaic common sense, while the former moves among common lamp-posts and public houses with a fixed attitude of mind more fantastic than all the fairy-tales. I am not here either adequately
praising or adequately criticizing this much controverted work; I am merely using it as an illustration of the isolation of one mind, or even of one mood. Rabelais sometimes seems confusing, because he is like twenty men talking at once; but Joyce is rather inaudible, because he is talking to himself….
