Joyce—The Third Period.

Mr. Joyce’s reputation, such as it is, rests upon two books, |The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man| and |Ulysses|. In the two other
books that preceded these he was obviously handling material which he
could not work; he was neither, a great romantic poet nor a great
realistic story-teller, and his poems and stories were excellent
only in their sensitiveness to form and style.

In the two biographical fantasies that followed, Ireland found its
greatest artist. The _Portrait_ was an astonishing advance upon
_Dubliners_, but _Ulysses_ was a still more astonishing advance upon the
_Portrait_. With it one became aware of the artist’s two obsessions,
language and form. In _Ulysses_ language became putty in his hands; he
made it do things one had thought it impossible for language to do; at
one moment it suggested the movement of waters, at another the stale
air of a bawdyhouse; it was passionate, sentimental, maudlin,
etiolated, violent, obscene and exquisite by turns. And in _Ulysses_
form had become for Joyce as it became for some of the Irish poets,
ritual. The book followed in outline the story of the _Odyssey_, and
since Mr. Bloom was its Ulysses, Mr. Bloom must do what Ulysses had
done, and so we have the Sirens and Cyclops and the rest of the
Homeric paraphernalia. One of the scenes took place in a lying-in
hospital, and the style had to show in microcosm the passage from
non-being to being, from darkness to light, resuming from paragraph to
paragraph the whole experience of mankind as reflected in English
prose style. It was the form of a great artist who was also a pedant,
who attached to form a significance that it has seldom had outside
ritual.

In his latest work, reviled by friend and foe alike, Joyce has carried
those two obsessions a step further, but the step is as big as that
between the _Portrait_ and _Ulysses_; it is Joyce of the third period,
and the greatest of Irish artists has sailed off into a world where
the atmosphere—for most normal lungs—is so rare that it is scarce
liveable-in. Nobody quite understands the form; nobody in Europe is
quite qualified to say what any particular passage may mean, and
Joyce’s critics ask in something like his own words, “Are we speachin
d’anglas landadge, or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch?”

That I think is not Mr. Joyce’s fault. He is really not a lover of
mystification, and he has done his best to make his meaning clear. I
have before me a book of essays on his latest work by some of the
young people who have come under his influence.* [* Our Exaymination
round his Faciification for Incumination of Work in
Progress. Shakespeare and Co. Paris. 24f.] Two or three of these
essays—I am thinking in particular of Samuel Beckett’s, Eugene Jolas’
and Thomas McGreevy’s—are very interesting, and with a little more
detachment would have been first rate criticism; others are merely
dull. (While, of course, one distrusts the philology of the writer who
tells us that " usqueadbaugham " is Gaelic for whiskey). But good or
bad, the ideas are Joyce’s, and as such to be treated with respect.

His new work as I understand it is founded on the philosophy of Vico
as Ulysses was founded on the _Odyssey_. Its very title _Work in
Progress_ resumes an idea of Vico. All the characters are ideal
characters, that is to say, they may change name or substance at the
artist’s pleasure; they move in a world of ideal time and space, so
that the background, Dublin, may become any place at any time. This
sense of ideal characters existing in ideal time and space is
conveyed to the reader by the language, which is almost entirely
associative, so that a servant’s fall from grace, as well as being a
symbol of the fall into original sin, may also be an image of the
battle of Waterloo.

    Boo-hoo, what’l she do?
    The general lost her maidenloo,
as Hosty smgs.

This associative language is the reader’s first and greatest stumbling
block, because, since the ideas which it expresses are universal, it
is necessarily derived from every activity of the human soul. It
anticipates in the first place the break-up of the English language
into dialects, a phenomenon that is already taking place slowly under
our eyes in American, Scots and Irish literature—one has only to
think,of negro poetry in America or McDiarmid’s experiments in
synthetic Scots. It also anticipates the universalisation of
language. Whether one can anticipate natural processes is a question
that might very reasonably be put. Meantime it seems entirely futile
for literary men to set Joyce’s work aside as unintelligible; if a
critic can tell us no more than the indigent humourists of literature
have told us already he had far better be silent. The question is not
whether _Work in Progress_ is intelligible or unintelligible—no
serious critic speaks to-day of the unintelligibility of Mallarmé’s
_Après midi d’un Faune_—it is whether _Work in Progress_ is good or
bad, readable or unreadable.

Can one appreciate Mr. Joyce’s new work? I think one can, though for
myself _Work in Progress_ like _Ulysses_ contains a vast amount of dead
wood. I have never been able to appreciate Mrs. Bloom’s soliloquy and
many other passages in _Ulysses_—admirable no doubt in themselves—and I
am certain that whole tracts of _Work in Progress_ will remain forever
outside the range of my interests. But I have got many things from
it. I have enjoyed the Anna Livia episode with its haunting
four-dimensional pattern; the two washerwomen calling to one another
across the river; the river itself flowing on, imaging all the rivers
of earth and heaven and hell; then as night draws on the changing of
the two women into a stone and a tree while their voices, become faint
as echoes, fade out above the darkness of the river. I have enjoyed
above all the wild and sparkling humour of certain passages like the
ballad of Persse O’Reilly which I have quoted, and the delicious
museyroom episode which is surely one of the finest pieces of comic
writing in any literature. Like the rest of the book it needs to be
read aloud, using the full speaking voice briskly and without
over-emphasis. Unfortunately the only portion I have by me at the
moment is a quotation in the book under review, and this is far from
being the best.

This is lipoleums in the rowdyhouses. This is Willingdone, by the
splinters of Cork, order fire. Tonnerre! (Bullsear! Play!) This is
camelry, this is floodens, this is panickburns. This is Willingons
cry. Brum! Brum! Cumbrum! This is jinnies cry. Underwetter! Ghoat
strip Finnlambs! This is jinnies rinning away dowan a
bunkersheels. With a trip on a trip on a trip on a trip so airy.

And there are those brilliant phrases which only Joyce could have
written, things that for their humour and melody haunt one’s mind long
after one has forgotten what they are about. “Tempus fidgets.”
“Viragoes intactas.” “Rockquiem eternuel give donal aye in dolmeny.”
As I remember them it seems to me that this book, full of verve and
sparkle, is Joyce’s happiest. Not that it is entirely divorced from
the work o£ his youth, which gave one the impression that it was
written in tears. Like everything else of his it is intensely
personal, and people and things associated with, his earlier books
reappear. Cork is there with its “straat that is called corkscrewed (a
phrase that should delight any Corkman)....the finest boulevard billy
for a mile in every direction from Lismore to Cape Brendan, Patrick’s
if they took the bint out of the mittle of it.” Dublin, of course, is
there under a thousand forms from the memory of a child’s song

  Esker, Newesle, Saggard, Crumlin,
  Dell me, Donk, the way to Wumblin

to “the brodar of the founder of the father of the finder of the
pfander of pfunder of the furst man in Ranelagh.” But the cruelty, I
think, is gone and the humour being more abstract is kindlier, as
though the quarrel with his “poor little brittle magic nation, dim of
mind” needed no longer to be expressed in the savage taunts of the
_Portrait_ and _Ulysses_. Here and there too, we find the artist,
breaking the silence to which he had pledged himself, emerging to
indulge in a sly gibe at his critics.

By this new work Joyce has kept for himself a place among one greatest
in literature to-day, and for his country a place in the mind of
Europe. It would have been so easy for him, after _Ulysses_, to have
been content with the position of an imitator of himself. Only the
very great have that tirelessness, that relentlessness, and beside
it the question of whether _Work in Progress_ will prove a gigantic
failure, as some believe, or another masterpiece, as I hope, makes
little matter.

FRANK O’CONNOR.

Irish Statesman, 1930-04-12, pp. 114-116