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

In blasting Joyce's method, however, Woolf may be protesting too much: the violence of Woolf's rejection may be interpreted as a sign of her anxiety over being influenced by Joyce. This anxiety is most clearly expressed in a diary entry of 26 September 1920:

Somehow Jacob's Room has come to a stop, in the middle of that party too, which I enjoyed so much. [T. S.] Eliot coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction . . . made me listless; cast shade upon me; & the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness & self-confidence. He said nothing - but I reflected how what I'm doing is probably being done better by Mr. Joyce. Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing. . . . An odd thing, the human mind! so capricious, faithless, infinitely shying at shadows. (Diary II 68-69)

Woolf's metaphor of "casting shade" foreshadows Harold Bloom's metaphor of the anxiety-provoking precursor, who as "Covering Cherub" casts a shadow of influence over the later, belated poet.(9) With the above entry in mind, we return to Scott's comment that Lewis "resents Woolf's use of Joyce's Ulysses." Clearly it is Woolf who resents Joyce, fears that he may have both anticipated and bettered her.(10) Scott goes on:

To Lewis, Ulysses is "robustly complete. . . . It is not the half-work in short 'pale' and 'dishevelled' of a crippled interregnum." . . . He explains, "Mrs. Woolf is merely confusing the becoming pallor and uncertain untidiness of some of her own salon pieces with that of Joyce's masterpiece." (176)

Scott here ends her paragraph and proceeds to Lewis's attack on Joyce in "Satire and Fiction." What the critic has done is neatly gloss over the fact that in Men Without Art Lewis, rather than "resenting" Woolf's "use" of Ulysses (as Scott puts it), actually accuses Woolf of plagiarizing from Ulysses in the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. In attacking what he terms the "Bloomsbury technique," Lewis writes:

In the local exponents of this method there is none of the realistic vigour of Mr. Joyce, though often the incidents in the local "masterpieces" are exact and puerile copies of the scenes in his Dublin drama (cf. The Viceroy's progress through Dublin in Ulysses with the Queen's progress through London in Mrs. Dalloway - the latter is a sort of undergraduate imitation of the former, winding up with a smoke-writing in the sky, a pathetic "crib" of the firework display and the rocket that is the culmination of Mr. Bloom's beach-ecstasy). (139)(11)

Lewis's main textual target in this chapter is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1923-1924), where Woolf repeated her earlier complaints about Joyce's method and lumped him in with the other "failures" of her generation: "Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr. Prufrock - to give Mrs. Brown some of the names she had made famous lately - is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her" (211). Lewis perceives this comment as symptomatic of Woolf's (and by extension Bloombury's) dilettante defeatism, to which he reacts with some violence: