#walton litz

Joyce's writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great. 

Eliot's insistence on the unity of Joyce's art has been supported by our examination of the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake developed. Earlier chapters have shown that the methods Joyce employed in the last stages of his 'journey'--the techniques which shaped Ulysses and the Wake--evolved from the formal aims of his previous fiction. It remains to take some measure of the relationship between these final methods and the visions of reality found in his last two works.

For a variety of personal and and environmental reasons Joyce ceased during his later years to assimilate significant new experiences into his artistic imagination. With all their complexity and freshness of technique, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are but new visions of the world described in Dubliners, Stephen Hero and A Portrait. We can find evidence of Joyce's tenacious hold on the concrete elements of his early experience on every page of his notebooks and rough drafts. No incident capable of symbolic extension was ever wasted...

Viewed as a single achievement, his writing recapitulates three generations of literary experiment. This is one of the reasons why Joyce has not been a seminal force in modern literature, but rather the terminator of traditions.Joyce lived through an age in which the traditional forms of mind and society had become problematical, perhaps even illusory. As a stay against this chaos he fell back on the arbitrary forms created by language, and it is no wonder that as we trace his art from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake words cease to be signs or symbols of external reality and become dynamic units which create a new vision of reality. It is customary to compare Joyce's elaborate correspondences with those of Dante, but the comparison is specious. The extrinsic order of the Divine Comedy reflects a view of man's destiny which informs Dante's entire work, whereas Joyce's mechanical frames are too often neutral patterns, arbitrary scaffolds. This is but to say that in Joyce we find many of the medieval impulses freed from the experiences which gave them life: techniques tend to exist for their own sake, imposing order rather than reflecting it

There are certain simple motives whose interweaving and commingling determines the character of this ornament. At first there is only the dot, the line, the ribbon; later the curve, the circle, the spiral, the zigzag, and an S-shaped decoration are employed. Truly, no great wealth of motives! But what variety is attained by the manner of their employment! Here they run parallel, then entwined, now latticed, now knotted, now plaited, then again brought through one another in a symmetrical checker of knotting and plaiting. Fantastically confused patterns are thus evolved, whose puzzle asks to be unravelled, whose convolutions seem alternatively to seek and avoid each other, whose component parts, endowed as it were with sensibility, captivate sight and sense in passionately vital movement. 

These rapid changes in Joyce's technical aims are reflected in the radical alteration of his method of composition. The late work on Ulysses reveals a process almost “he opposite of that which transformed Stephen Hero into Portrait of the Artist. In revising Stephen Hero Joyce exercised a rigorous selectivity, discarding the multiple events and elaborate expository passages of the earlier work in favour of a few scenes or 'epiphanies' which embody the essential characteristics of Stephen's development. The richness of the earlier work was sacrificed in favour of intensity, and in accordance with Joyce's shifting attitude toward his own youth. But the revisions of Ulysses undertaken during the last years of its composition were seldom selective. They were almost entirely expansive, and the economy Joyce exercised in achieving isolated effects was overshadowed by the incessant elaborations. The ideal of dramatic compression that governed the recasting of Stephen Hero was replaced by an ideal of inclusiveness. 

In one of his early notebooks, dating from 1904, Joyce jotted down the phrase 'centripetal writing'.  His early revisions of Dubliners and the autobiographical novel were 'centripetal', turning in upon a few dramatic situations. But the revisions of Ulysses were centrifugal, moving further and further away from the conventional centres of action. Fortunately the human forces of Bloom and Stephen, and the momentum established in the early chapters, kept the revisions of Ulysses from completely overshadowing the données of each episode. But in Finnegans Wake, where the process of revision was intensified and carried out over a much longer period of time, one often finds crucial elements in the first drafts which have been totally obscured by the time the final version is reached.This movement from 'centripetal' to 'centrifugal' writing during the evolution of Ulysses mirrors a general change in Joyce's artistic stance. A process of selectivity harmonizes with his early notion of the 'epiphany', which assumes that it is possible to reveal a whole area of experience through a single gesture or phrase. In shaping the Portrait Joyce sought continually to create 'epiphanies', and to define Stephen's attitudes by a stringent process of exclusion; later in his career he attempted to define by a process of inclusion. The earlier method implies that there is a significance, a 'quidditas', residing in each thing, and that the task of the artist is to discover this significance by a process of distillation. In the later method it is the artist who creates the significance through language. Thus in the Portrait a single gesture may reveal a character's essential nature; but in Finnegans Wake Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker's nature is established by multiple relationships with all the fallen heroes of history and legend.

Succeeding chapters will examine in more detail the implications of Joyce's late work on Ulysses, and attempt to formulate those artistic ideals which emerged during the making of Ulysses and governed all of his work on Finnegans Wake. However, it seems appropriate at this point to seek for the reasons behind Joyce's growing interest in formal--almost mechanical-designs. What rationale can we provide for the elaborate patterns of analogy characteristic of each episode, patterns which often (as in Oxen of the Sun) seem grotesquely over-elaborate? To what extent is the schema of the novel an essential adjunct to the human drama?

First it must be acknowledged that the 'epic' proportions of Ulysses are absolutely dependent on the major Homeric analogues and, to a lesser extent, on the other ordering frames. But can we justify these intricate elaborations solely on this ground? I do not think so; at least two other factors must be considered.

One of these is Joyce's increasing preoccupation with linguistic experimentation, his desire to stretch the potentialities of English prose in all directions. This desire was bound up with a sheer delight in verbal manipulation, a delight which permeates these remarks to Frank Budgen concerning Oxen of the Sun:

Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene: Lying-in-hospital. Technique: a nine part episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and AngloSaxon ('Before born the babe had bliss. Within the womb he won worship.' ' Bloom dull dreamy heard: in held hat stony staring.') then by way of Mandeville . . . then Malory Morte d'Arthur. . . then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a Latingossipy bit, style of Burton/Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque . . . After a diary-style bit Pepys-Evelyn . . . and so on through DefoeSwift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This procession is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. The double-thudding Anglo-Saxon motive recurs from time to time ('Loth to move from Horne's house') to give the sense of the hoofs of oxen. Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo. How's that for High? 

But beyond the function of the schema as an essential vehicle for Joyce's themes, and as a vehicle for his restless experimentation, we must acknowledge its function as the source of 'neutral' but controlling designs. In his attempt to compose an epic of a single day, and to record the internal as well as the external lives of his characters, Joyce sacrificed many of the traditional unities of the novel. The well-made novel of the nineteenth century, founded on chronological action and composed of dramatic and expository passages ( Henry James's 'drama' and 'picture'), possessed a form which Joyce could no longer employ. In 1919, while part of Ulysses was being serialized in the Little Review and the Egoist, Virginia Woolf defined Joyce's break with traditional forms of expression:. 

. . he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see. 

Here is a clear recognition that Joyce consciously rejected those traditional 'supports' which provided order for both author and reader; but Virginia Woolf does not describe the radical innovations which replaced them. In his attempt to bring the effects of poetry to the novel, to 'internalize' the narration and record various levels of consciousness, Joyce needed as many formal orders as possible to encompass and control his work. And as conventional representation decreased in importance toward the end of Ulysses, the need for other patterns increased. The multiple designs Joyce wove into Ulysses provide a stable scaffold for the reader, but the 'support' they gave to Joyce may have been even greater. Most criticism of Ulysses is founded on the assumption that the essential life of the novel lies in the elaborate scheme of correspondences which Joyce revealed to his early commentators; but anyone who has examined his worksheets will realize that many of the correspondences represented for Joyce a kind of 'neutral' order. They provided frames which could control his diverse materials without merging into them. Deprived of the traditional orders of home, country and religion, Joyce had a desperate and rather untidy passion for order of any kind. All sorts of mechanical systems are used on the note-sheets to organize the diverse elements. While writing the last episode Joyce kept a sketch-map of Gibraltar before him, not because there is a complicated use of geographical detail in Molly's monologue but because the map provided Joyce with fixed points of reference. Similarly, there are many more Homeric references on the Ulysses note-sheets than ever made their way into the text, and we are forced to conclude that the parallel with the Odyssey was more useful to Joyce during the process of composition than it is to us while we read the book. Time and again he spoke of the comfort he derived from the narrative order of the Odyssey: it provided him--in his own words--with fixed 'ports of call'. The major parallels between the wanderings of Mr. Bloom and those of Ulysses are an important dimension of the novel, but in working out the trivial details of the Homeric correspondence Joyce was exploring his own materials, not preparing clues for future readers.

We have already seen the care Joyce took during the course of composition to define the various qualities symbolized by 'Moly', the magic herb which saves Ulysses from Circe's magic. But are we as readers expected to discover and relate to each other the multiple equivalents enumerated on the note-sheets? Probably not. In this case, as in so many others, the detailed working-out of a 'correspondence' was primarily for Joyce's benefit, a part of the rigid discipline he had to undergo in order to control his disparate materials. Many of these detailed schemes lurk in the background of the novel, like the discarded scaffolding of a building which reflects its external form but tells us little of the essential nature. It would be a grave mistake to found any interpretation of Ulysses on Joyce schema, rather than on the human actions of Stephen, and Molly, and Mr. Leopold Bloom”.