Blasting the bombardier: another look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf - Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf

In contrast to the jelly-fish that floats in the center of the subterranean stream of the "dark" Unconscious, I much prefer, for my part, the shield of the tortoise, or the rigid stylistic articulations of the grasshopper. (Men. 99, qtd. in Scott 176)(7)

So Lewis places Joyce in the realm of the jellyfish, which is also, Scott argues, Woolf's realm: "It was the transparent envelope of the jellyfish, the darker, psychological Joyce that had won the admiration of that female definer of modernism, Virginia Woolf" (Scott 176). Thus the critic skillfully matches Joyce with Woolf, depicting both as feminist modernists, co-champions Of the jellyfish, in opposition to the misogynistic, tortoise-loving Lewis.

One must pause, however, over Scott's claim that Joyce the stylist had "won the admiration" of Virginia Woolf. In reading Woolf's response to Joyce in essays, letters, and diary entries, one discovers that her admiration for Joyce's style lasted all of a paragraph. That paragraph is in her 1919 essay "Modern Novels," which was revised and reprinted as "Modern Fiction" in the first Common Reader (1925). There Woolf writes of the "Hades" chapter of Ulysses (which had appeared in the Little Review), "The scene in the cemetery . . . it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we want life itself here, surely, we have it" (155). Woolf proceeds, however, to discuss the ways in which Joyce's text fails:

It fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer's mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer to our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside of itself and beyond? (156)

Woolf then retrieves what she had but a moment before bestowed: "This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or ignored" (156; my emphasis).(8) Woolf is even more explicit in her complaints about Joyce's style in a letter of 23 April 1918 to Lytton Strachey: "We've been asked to print Mr. Joyce's new novel ["We" being Virginia and Leonard Woolf, managers of Hogarth Press], every printer in London and most in the provinces having refused. First there's a dog that p's - then there's a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject - moreover, I don't believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes. So I don't think we shall do it" (Letters II 234). The Woolfs did not do it, and when the book came out in 1922, Woolf did not change her mind about Joyce's method. On 6 September of that year she writes in her diary: "I finished Ulysses & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think, but of inferior water. The book is diffuse . . . it is underbred . . . A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky, startling; doing stunts" (Diary II 199). Finally, in another letter to Strachey, Woolf writes that she will contribute five and sixpence to a fund for T. S. Eliot's upkeep "on the condition he puts publicly to their proper use the first 200 pages of Ulysses. Never did I read such tosh" (Letters II 551). Begging critic Scott's pardon, this does not strike me as admiration.