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Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Stephen Sicari
Michael Levenson documents the development of Hulme's thought, and sees in "Humanism" and "Modem Art" its emergence beyond the rather narrow confines of the earlier distinction between "Romanticism and Classicism" to a more compelling distinction between naturalism and abstraction, between humanism and antihumanism.(8) It was Hulme's reading of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfuhlung that enabled him to begin his critique of humanism, a critique to be based on Worringer's critique of empathy. There are two tendencies in art, one toward empathy and one toward abstraction. Empathy is "the pleasure we take in viewing works of art that are naturalistic or realistic as we find in them an objectification of our own pleasure in activity, and our own vitality" (85). In geometric art, "there is no delight in nature and no striving after vitality. Its forms are always what can be described as stiff and lifeless." This kind of art is based on the "desire to create a certain abstract geometrical shape, which, being durable and permanent shall be a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature" (86). Joyce gives us in the opening episodes an extraordinarily lucid depiction of the world of flux, out of which the rest of the novel seeks to extract something durable and permanent. What Hulme says about abstract geometric art I will be arguing about in the later episodes of Ulysses: "All art of this character turns the organic into something inorganic, it tries to translate the changing and limited into something unlimited and necessary" (106).
It is instructive to reflect on Michael Groden's discoveries about possible changes in the conception Joyce had of his novel as it progressed and as he was reviewing the earlier episodes in light of the later ones on which he was working. According to Brook Thomas,
What Groden does not point out, however, is that changes from stage to stage correspond closely to Joyce's own re-reading of his text in preliminary form. A major departure from his initial technique occurred soon after Joyce must have re-read drafts of the early chapters for publication in the Little Review. Similarly, Joyce's final revisions, many reflexive in nature, are prompted by his reading of the book in proof before final publication. (281).
Elaborating on the work of Litz and Groden, Thomas provides a fundamental insight to the writing of this novel, that the later episodes are the result of Joyce's own "re-reading" of Ulysses.
So we can ask what is it that Joyce hopes to accomplish as he revises "Aeolus" for final publication, adding the often comic headlines that disrupt the "flow" of what is still, for the most part, a naturalistic narrative? The answer is precisely that the flow is disrupted, that the illusion of this prose to mime a "stream of consciousness" is punctured by these bold and loud headlines that freeze the action. It's as if Bloom's or Stephen's thoughts and the action surrounding them stop for a moment as we have to read these often absurd headlines. We become aware of the artifice, that what we are reading is a book and not life, and a book that no longer wishes to be simply a transparent window onto the world. This is the beginning of the abstraction of Bloom and Stephen, of taking them out of the naturalistic context of the earlier episodes.(9)
