Joyce's Visions

2

Has any other book provoked such noisy extremes of opinion? The Bible has hardly been so widely loved and hated. Almost from the moment it appeared, Joyce's book began attracting the impassioned adherents who have declared it a masterpiece of care and ordonnance, a joyous comic vision of human love and redemption. Almost from the same moment it attracted critics who have persisted, for more than eight decades, at the margin of the celebration, decrying it as a fraud perpetrated on literature, a chaos of reference to dupe the gullibility of scholars, as cold and inhuman as a glacial floor.

Taking all this in, one confesses to being puzzled by so much wildness. The weaknesses of the book, some of which I have mentioned, are so plain that it seems perverse to deny their existence; its glories, about which I shall have something more to say, seem so obvious that to miss them one must be blind. The certainty of the other makes each side a little frenzied, with the result that Ulysses, the least dogmatic of novels, has been the most dogmatically criticized. Though both sides have had a say in this condition, the dogmatism has been most pronounced among the book's detractors, who have generally understood it less well than its enthusiasts, and been goaded to exaggeration by the feeling of missing something. Their line of criticism is very familiar, and, thanks to the minor furor of publicity surrounding the recent Bloomsday centenary-June 16, 1904, is the day on which Ulysses is supposed to take place-has been giddying the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic. (Hysterically attacking Joyce is a proven way for a moderately well-known writer to get his face in the New York Times Magazine.) It runs something like this. With Dubliners, and particularly "The Dead," Joyce demonstrated a formidable talent for literary storytelling which he proceeded to ruin with the experimental conceit of A Portrait. Nobody actually reads Ulysses, but by establishing itself as a test of literary acumen, it has drawn a hypocritical following of insecure elites anxious to prove their own sophistication. A kind of flypaper for the pretentious and voluble, its reputation is an illusion, its acid influence responsible for the disintegration of twentieth-century literature; it is an unholy mess which could have done with a good editor. Most of all it is bankrupt of humanity, a monstrous indulgence of cleverness, essentially cruel: an unfunny, unmoving, unsympathetic piece of abstract style, the pit of the quicksand of modernism.

There is no reason, of course, that most of these arguments should disturb a lover of Ulysses. After all, thousands of people really do read the book, and thousands of people are moved by it, and no one who has read it and been moved by it should have a very difficult time disproving to her own satisfaction the assertion that she does not exist. In fact only the last few points in the screed-that Ulysses is cold, chaotic, and abstract-touch the book directly, because only those points bear on its aesthetic success. (And those points are really the source of the rest: surely no one who had not found the book repulsive and inconceivable would resent its success enough to blame it on widespread hypocrisy; surely no one who had been able to finish the book would proclaim that no one could.) And this is why Joyce's limitation as a writer of images is so consequential: because the confusing visual blank that hovers over so many incidents in Ulysses makes its good qualities-its comedy, its warmth, its human sympathy; its magnificent characters; even its story and its conflict-almost uniquely easy to miss.