james joyce's what-is-it?

DAVID CORT

an open-minded preview of the great irishman's forthcoming book, a titan's revolt against language

■ "Eins within a space and weary wide space it wast were wohned a Mookse. The onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsitslike, broady oval, and a Mookse he would a walking go (My hood! cries Antony Romeo) so one grandsumer evening, after a great morning and his good supper of gammon and spittish, having flabelled his eyes, pilleoled his nostrils, vacticanated his ears and palliumed his throats, he put on his impermeable, seized his impugnable, harped on his crown" (and so on). Work in Progress, by James Joyce.*

■ Consider the signature. If the above were swimming into our ken under the trademark of Frank Sullivan, we could joyously surrender ourselves to glee. If its author were Gertrude Stein, it. might be met with cheerful catcalls. The unenlightened probability, however, would claim it as the freak of an epileptic linotype machine or a maniac with enough cash to get his ditherings into print. But alas, the signature is that of the man who is probably the most important, by any measure, practitioner of modern English, Mr. James Joyce of Dublin and Paris, author of a conventional shorthand of immense tragedy in the short stories in Dubliners, of a passionate hymn of youth and growth and naked revulsion from Catholicism in the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, of some lovely poetry in traditional forms in Chambermusic, and of the stupendous maze, Ulysses.

For the sake of anyone who may chance on these lines without the advantage of knowing or caring who James Joyce is, a few facts may be enumerated. Ulysses, his last book, published in 1922, is the Domesday Book and the Talmud of every young writer of consequence in Europe and America. Joyce has published nothing since then until now. He has been working consistently on the tremendous effort from which the above is quoted and from which Shem and Shaun brings into book form three fragments, two of them based on the fables we know under the names of The Fox and the Grapes and The Ant and the Grasshopper. Mr. Joyce is an artist's artist, his books have never made publishers' fortunes. His present work, thus far titled Work in Progress, and to be, when completed, about half the length of Ulysses, would seem to any reader solidly, continuously and en bloc the purest gibberish. For long passages not a recognizable article or preposition peeps out. The example quoted here is among the most reasonable passages. But the point is that during those seven years since Ulysses Mr. Joyce has been perfecting a new language in art. Now for the first time in book form we can see the strange, dislocated idiom of this new lingo.

*In addition to serial publication in the magazine Transition, Joyce has permitted the publication of three semi-detached fragments in a volume entitled, Tales Told from Shem and Shaun, Three Fragments from Work in Progress, all of which have been published by The Black Sun Press, Paris.

For these reasons Mr. Joyce's experiment has in the literary world a paramount news value. The initial guffaw sinks into an uncertain silence. Whatever Mr. Joyce elects to write must now command serious attention.

Remember that this is the last recorded state of a man who has been on occasion an artist of the first rank, who has played the game of words by the same rules as, but for higher stakes and better than any of his contemporaries. It would seem to be a serious and considered state. The temperament of the man as it is scrawled across all his work denies the possibility of a gigantic hoax, even if that were not already eliminated by the fact of the imposing amount of work that Mr. Joyce has put into it.

■ This edition is introduced with a preface by a grammarian who tries to show Joyce's chief devices in building up his word-structures, inserts an irrelevant explanation of Eskimo infixes and concludes with some rejoicing at Joyce's "interest in words". All this can be discarded as trivial and misleading. There are available, however, more pertinent and suggestive analyses of Joyce's intention. M. Marcel Brion suggests that Work in Progress represents a carrying-over into human life and human language of the modern scientific conception of time, as seen in the fact that if one could move away from the earth at a speed faster than that of light, the events of history would unroll backwards before one's eyes, and if one could shoot through space at an infinite speed, one would see everything almost simultaneously. Briefly, Mr. Joyce shuttles back and forth incessantly at this infinite speed. In practice this means that Menelaos, Edmund Crouchback and Franklin D. Roosevelt are the same person; Troy, Bruges and Schenectady, New York, the same place; and every when the same moment. In practice all this cataclysmic activity means simply that you can say anything in any order. It would appear to dispense with all the unities and any known system of artistic control of material. What unities are substituted I am not competent to say. However, these conceptions of time, universality, omnilinguality, and the like, are extremely interesting, and a supremely valuable book might be written incorporating them into an intelligible art.

Might be, that is. For Mr. Joyce has not engaged himself to any such enterprise. He has, rather, chosen to conform the texture of his work to its content, and so we have not only three men from the beginning, middle and end of time spoken of, but we have their names fused into one name, their languages fused into one language. This is of course the logically correct way to do it. But let us attempt to read the result. The intention sounds altogether admirable, but the peculiar thing about literature, that distinguishes it from every other art, is that it must be read. Thus, our investigation into Work in Progress must naturally take the form of reading it.

■ Let us begin with an easy example: "Sis dearest, Jaun added, with voise somewhit murky as he turned his dorse to her to pay court to it, melancholic this time whiles his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction followed swift to an imaginary swellaw, O, the vanity of Vanessy! All ends vanishing! Pursonally, Grog help me, I am in no violent hurry. If time enough lost the ducks walking easy found them." Mr. Stuart Gilbert in his admirable essay, Prolegomena to Work in Progress, has set about interpreting an extended passage from Work in Progress, from which the foregoing is a selection. In order to give the novice a handhold on Mr. Joyce's prose, he analyzes this set piece in some detail. We take the liberty here of quoting some of his clues to the quotation given above:

Voise.—His voice, grown rather hoarse, suggests "noise".

Somewhit.—A trifle less than "somewhat".

Dorse—He turns his back on her to pay court to his voice.

Onsaturncast.—Upwards (towards the planet) plus "uncertain" (timidly).

Stellar.—The allusion is to Dean Swift's Stella; in the following sentence VANISSY (Vanessa) continues the motif.

Swellaw.—He swallows down an impediment in his throat, looking towards a bird that is not there, a projection of the "bird" allusion in "swift". Swellaw, thus spelt, may also suggest celestial ordinance.

Pursonally.—He has been complaining that he wants more money; Jaun is the sort of man who never has enough of it.

IF TIME . . . Them.—A variant of the proverb Chi va piano va sano. If Mr. TimeEnough lost his ducks, Mr. Walking-Easy found them.

In its most elementary form, this gives you the idea. The words here are for .he most part recognizable. Well, Mr. Joyce has written a book, and the question is: what will its life be in the great world; is it possible to predict what will be its history? And it is not going very far to say that that history will be intimately conditioned by the intention out of which it was written. Men have written hooks before, and always in one of two minds: either they have wanted to say something to themselves and for themselves for the pure sake of articulation, or they have addressed themselves to the interests and comprehensions of one or ten or a hundred or a million men, Montaigne being perhaps an example of the first and Christ of the second. Now in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we get something new, the peculiarly narcissistic abomination, the bastard of vanity and fatuity, the creed that is familiar enough to us under the name of Art-for-Art's-Sake. The delusion of the devotees of this religion is that they have their eye intently on the absolute, the infinite, pure beauty, as they work. But the fact is that, wherever one eye is, the other is invariably in the employ of snobbery, emulation and self-canonisation, and is acutely sensitive to the current fashions in pure art. Since this art is avowedly not in terms of what its audience wants, it is not unfair to say that its artists do not wish an audience. The ultimate testing-vat of "literature" is exceedingly impatient of humbug, a primary insincerity and false posturing. The world remains hard-boiled. The ages don't have to impress anybody, they can read what they like. And the evidence of the past coincides with the probabilities of the future: that men will continue to read only what has something to say to them. "Experiments in English prose" of themselves cast no shadow whatever, and one of Joyce's American defenders damns him as absolutely as possible when he writes: "What Joyce is saying is a literary thing." If one could be absolutely certain that Joyce is saying no more than "a literary thing," these remarks need go no further. The dead might be left, for all anyone cared, to bury their own dead.

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But if he is using the materials of literature: words, in a valid and ponderable way, to say a little of what he is unquestionably competent to say, that is another matter. Joyce, they say, is attempting to restore to words their pristine virility, to lop the banal fungi of authorized usage from them, and to perfect a medium as rich in power, chiaroscuro and suggestiveness (can this really be so?) as Elizabethan English. Here is a great man, a genius, who is not satisfied with the medium in which he has shown himself unequivocally a genius. He wants not only to choose and arrange the words, but to invent the words. More and more he wants, he conceives himself to be a Prometheus Bound. He turns from the challenge that the limitations of a traditional language delivers to him, as it does to such other great contemporary word-users as Robinson Jeffers, George Moore and D. H. Lawrence, and leaps masterfully into a scrupulously arranged chaos. But the chaos of his language, be it noted, would have no value whatever, were it not for the order of English usage of which it is a free perversion. And the obvious, almost the necessary, reaction of the reader in going through Work in Progress is to cultivate mental nimbleness, to catch from each word the most superficial possible intention— to delay, to reflect, is fatal—and to make a legible total of cursory impressions. This is inevitably the way Work in Progress will be read. One is inclined to think that Mr. Joyce, rather than muscularizing his language, has brought it to the final enfeeblement of decay. Words with the Elizabethans were still young, they were used in the consciousness of their roots, their brief and lusty history, and for that reason they had an immense force as simple and upright symbols for things. One must in vain ask Mr. Joyce what knowledgeable integer, what thing, a single word of his stands for. Consider this for example: "0 them doddhunters and allanights, aabs and baas for agnomes, yees and zees for incognits, bate him up jerrybly! Show that the medium, hce che ech, interecting at royde angles the parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuts both the arcs that are in curveachord behind. Brickbaths." Or: "But asawfulas he had caught his base semenoyous sarchnaktiers to combuccinate upon the silipses of his aspillouts and the acheporeoozers of his haggyown pneumax to synerethetise with the breadchestviousness of his sweeatovular ducose sofarfully the loggerthuds of his sakellaries were fond at variance with the synodals of his somepooliom and his babskissed nepogreasymost got the hoof from his philioquus." Or: "The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the softzing at the stir of the ver grose 0 arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing, duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds."

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It is possible to detect, as in the last example, away beneath the surface, Mr. Joyce's method of playing with the immediate, unconsidered reaction that a particular cliche starts in the reader's mind.

He has refined this technic to an almost unimaginable degree, but at its base it seems to be this. And this is the identical technic used by such American comedians as S. J. Perelman, Jimmy Durante and the Four Marx Brothers. Naturally they use it in an entirely different way and for utterly other ends, but the flippant, glancing use of cliche is the same. Some diligence in reading fails to reveal in Work in Progress, apart from this cliche business, any word—joking aside— which I feel has enriched my vocabulary and which I am likely to add to my conversational weapons. For all this stupendous effort of Mr. Joyce's, I have gotten nothing, no word, no picture, no music, no knowledge, no wisdom, nothing.

Indeed it is only in such an era as the present one that Work in Progress could occasion anything but ribald dismay. The cult of snobbism and the intellectual climbers have brought about a state where no one can be quite sure of himself. Not one irascible and eccentric duchess survives to hurl the thing incontinently out the window. I am as uneasy as anyone in the uncertain waters of this enterprise. Everyone remembers too well the instances of obscure conceit ridiculing dawning genius. I too should like to align myself with what will eventually be the winners, and it is with the greatest embarrassment that I fish up what I really think I think about Mr. Joyce's experiments in prose.

Mr. Joyce, in fact, as the author of Ulysses, is in an excellent strategic situation. That too was called gibberish, but a little inspection and mental adaptability showed it to be perfectly understandable. The original hullabaloo sounds now in retrospect awfully silly, as it sounded then stupid, for Ulysses offered a consecutive and absolutely intelligible story, made difficult for only the most rudimentary minds by a few logical tricks of punctuation and a gay but very literate sporting with syntax. Ulysses is neatly and beautifully the instance par exemple of the airplane in literature: a Joyce's Folly to match a Wright Brothers' Folly, and the wise ones were those who bought in on the ground floor. Mr. Joyce was right once on the short end of the odds, and he may be right again. The critical world is human: once bitten, twice shy, all very natural. But it makes things very hard for an ordinary reader who is and has always been a violent admirer of Mr. Joyce in all his moments up to now. One is willing to go to an incredible amount of trouble to find something to like in this latest work.

One can, for example, read it as pure sound, without any conscious attempt to appraise the sense. It becomes then apparent that with few exceptions this prose is made up of a series of banal, monotonous rhythms, and dull disagreeable sound. Such genius as is employed in Ulysses is rarely called into play here in the subtle and overlapping use of the suggestiveness of English words, of sonorous and delicate sound. The sentences are overlong, the clauses bump down or up from level to level. Where there are curves at all, they are the regular lifting and falling of a macadam road.

We have spoken our piece about the theory that Mr. Joyce proposes to "open up" the English language, to initiate a reaction against the traditionalizing and narrowing of the use of English words. But it is possible to describe this intention in another way, that is to say, that he is trying to achieve a perfect communication. Language has of course fearful limitations; it is proper to make the generality that words cannot possibly convey spiritual states with exactness from one consciousness to another. The aeon-old attempt to diminish the margin of misunderstanding has until now taken the form of using words in an increasingly precise meaning, but even so,no matter how precise the definition, the overtones of association in a single word must inevitably vary from person to person. Now (perhaps) Mr. Joyce has turned from that traditional effort —which intended at best only to diminish by half the distance to perfect correspondence and again by half and again, thus mathematically approaching infinity—and proposes to address perfectly a few (by definition very few, since the imaginative equipment of very few will correspond exactly with his) auditors. He proposes (so we say) to do this by an abandonment of all order and authority, all reason and good sense, by disdaining any longer to beg the patronage of the conscious mind, so rigid and "civilized". Instead, by playing loosely on an unlimited keyboard of associational sounds, he hopes to evoke from the subconscious mind of his elect reader, somehow mystically controlled, something closely approximating the sum of all he himself thought in writing it and with which he charged it. If all this is so —and I have no way of being certain of it—Mr. Joyce wishes to perfect what might be called a metaphysical prose, summoning up the super-sanity of madness or of dream; he wishes to master the vocabulary in which are couched the terrible and inaudible mutterings behind the curtain of the mind.

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But if this is what he is trying to do, he here does it uncommonly badly. His communication with me in, for example, the passage entitled The Ondt and The Gracehoper is far less perfect than that of Aesop telling the same fable. There is of course a vast difference in colouring: with Aesop it is simply a motto in an orderly and moral world; with Joyce it is a vast and jeering, crocodile-teary joke, besmudged with such puns as that in the title. Still the latter too tells a story, the same story, though what he adds to it, so far as pure Content goes, I cannot tell, unless it be a rain of distorted cliches and an amplifying of two types of morality.

So it is with all three pieces. From away beneath the jagged surface glimmers of something intelligible and good come slanting up, but one continues to feel the initial error that vitiates it all. One would be absurd to deny the magnificence of the effort or to ignore the compliment that it pays the world of readers. Nor is there a total lack of critics willing to accept the compliment. Indeed twelve gentlemen including Marcel Brion, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, and William Carlos

Williams, have gotten up a thick book titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress and published almost simultaneously with Shem and Shaun, in which they elaborately accept the compliment. Yes indeedy, they understand every word of it and they go to some pains to register their illuminated delight. They interpret and they defend, they act in a mass going-outand-spreading-of-the-Word (there are twelve of them—plus a minority opinion of two). Hardly any of them are fools, and much that they write is consistent and plausible, but it is all an elaboration of a false conception. The Picassos, Antheils and Gershwins (they say) have brought to painting and music new vocabularies and methods—why cannot the same be done for literature? They observe that the break with tradition has been healthy for the two former arts, and ask its offices for the latter. In music, however, and to a lesser degree in painting, pure art is possible: sound and colour and line are sensuous things, making a direct sensory impression. In literature, on the other hand, the medium is the word (an artificial event, a human invention), the word must be understood, enjoyment is conditioned by the necessity for understanding. The primary terms of music and painting (sound, colour, line) have an absolute integrity of their own. The experts in these arts can proceed in their development without any check from the public at large. But literature can never be pure art in the sense that music and painting can be art; it must lamentably make sense, must be able to pass through the comprehensions of the people. To this degree its advancement is governed by the body of educated readers, beyond whom the experts cannot go too far and whom they can never Utterly leave. It would seem that they have taken home their toys when they stop using -words with meanings, in the same way that that would be true of a composer who stopped writing in sound and took up the art of smells. If we slur over this eternal imperative, this binding (and frightfully banal) so-far-and-no-further, everything adumbrated by the lyric gentlemen who interpret Mr. Joyce so splendidly is perfectly sound. They can continue to dance with complete security on air, supported by their flawless columns (though invisible to us) of unanswerable logic.

They remain invisible to us because we cancel (deliberately) any intention of Mr. Joyce's and refer solely to the event of Work in Progress, its unaffected impact on one lay mind, and from these clues its usefulness and its probable history among the odds and ends that this generation will bequeath to posterity.