Ulisses e os poemas de G.Steiner

Then and Now, 1937

We look back to a review by Alan Clutton-Brock of the first English edition of Ulysses

Published: 10 June 2015, TLS

“Mr. Joyce’s major work is at any rate obscure enough to have invited several interpretations, and its structure is sufficiently unlike that of the ordinary novel to have suggested hidden messages and meanings. It has, for example, been supposed to have a pattern analogous to that of the Odyssey, to give an accurate and realistic account of the “stream of consciousness” in the human mind, and by a new technique of writing to have expressed the nature of the characters’ thoughts without the usual distortion of common sense and literary forms. But such explanations commonly arise when a new artistic method is invented; when the post-impressionists first startled the world with their pictures it was commonly believed that in some mysterious fashion they described essential as opposed to accidental properties of natural appearances. Later the artistic purpose of the new method emerges, and there is no longer any need to justify it either by supposing that it conceals as in a cryptogram an intelligible plan like that of previous and familiar works, or as a mode of scientific investigation.

There is, of course, a deliberate attempt to impose order on the incoherence of Ulysses by making all its events belong to a single day and by making the same episodes and characters appear and reappear in the kaleidoscope. But when one chapter contains a succession of masterly parodies of English prose in chronological order, from Beowulf to modern slang, when another is an amusing and satirical excursion on the Irish literary movement, another an irresistibly funny transcription of a young girl’s daydream in terms of the novelettes she has been reading, then the use of the same characters and episodes has the appearance of a merely conventional link between all the sections of the book. No doubt the link has a certain use in helping the reader along, but there is no reason to suppose that it makes the book a coherent whole from which no part can be removed without disaster. It is of no use to look for secret connexions, for in a work of art if the relations of the parts are not apparent enough to be felt, then the parts are not artistically related.

Mr. Joyce’s unit, in fact, is not the book as a whole but the chapter, often the paragraph, and sometimes, one might almost say, the phrase, or even the word. Ulysses is evidently the production of a man fascinated by language rather than by thought or observation; the progress of his style towards the final word-making and word-taking of the unintelligible “Work in Progress” has always been away from observation of life and towards the word as a complete substitute for the flesh. Like the lunatic whose speech degrades into a set of arbitrary sounds more and more remotely connected with his interior preoccupations, Mr. Joyce has played with language – it is perhaps the last development of the Irishman’s habit of inventing new languages which shall not be English – until it has become his private construction. This is not, because he is content, like the lunatic, with any private or delusory world: but it is a curious fact, which several writers have noticed, that there is a remarkable similarity between Mr. Joyce’s compositions and the prose style of certain lunatics. In the two instances the ordinary structure of the language is broken down for quite different reasons, but the results are oddly alike. And with the lunatic it may be worth while looking for the hidden connexion and meaning of apparently disorderly phrases; but with Mr. Joyce we are not to analyse the latent content of his verbal constructions, we are only concerned with the artistic and therefore immediate effect of his language.

But Ulysses only marks a stage in this progress, and his release from the ordinary linguistic conventions only enables Mr. Joyce to exercise all his talent, his almost incredible virtuosity, to the full. Passages that are genuine poetry alternate with the harshest and most deliberately contemptuous parodies, uproarious burlesque with subtle indications of character in a phrase. It is still a work of much observation, and of observation sharpened by disgust; but it is above all the profusion and fertility of language that will fascinate the reader. In this, the first edition published in England, there is an appendix giving, among other details of controversy, the decisions of the United States District Court and of the United States Court of Appeals which allowed Ulysses to be published in that country."

 ‘For R. P. Blackmur Reading His Poems During An Eclipse’

by George Steiner; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

Published: 21 April 2015,TLS

“In 1951, Theodor Adorno famously claimed there could be “no poetry after Auschwitz”. In a TLS article twelve years later, George Steiner took a less pessimistic view. While there was no denying that men with civilized tastes had committed inconceivably barbaric acts, he argued it was still true that ‘what light we possess on our essential, inward condition is still gathered by the poet’ (“Humane Literacy”). And not only was the poet still relevant, so too was the critic, whose job it was to clear the ground for a new poetic age. In the “unprecedented ruin of humane values and hopes” Steiner found a new starting point for the serious discussion of literature. And after the wholesale cheapening and twisting of language by Nazi propaganda, one of the critic’s most urgent jobs was to help restore the integrity of language itself by reminding us how to read “as total human beings”.

Steiner is under no illusions about his own literary abilities. In an interview with the Paris Review he said his French lycée education taught him to regard the ability to write verse as a necessary accomplishment for any civilized person “so I wrote poems . . . some of which were perhaps a tiny shade better than that”. For Steiner, poetry was the opposite of Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”: “if you flowed over you wiped it up”. But he also insists on the pre-Romantic view of poetry as a suitable medium for analytical discourse (Pope’s Essay on Criticism, for example) and it is perhaps in this light that we should read “For R. P. Blackmur Reading his Poems during an Eclipse”. Although it appears to be a darkness in the heavens that brings Blackmur’s poems down to earth, it is hard not to see here the closing-in of terrifying political shades. For Steiner, the threat of this “ashen triumph” makes the poem a crucial gesture of pure and lasting “defiance”. All that dignifies us are our creative acts: “The word alone outstays / The green armadas of the equinox”.

For R. P. Blackmur Reading His Poems During An Eclipse

I

By that ceremonious prosody of shade
And slow cesura of the light, you read
Twelve poems of the roiling sea. Though salt
Shone in your voice – no actor mimes the fault
And yowing of a poet at his speech –
Though the blue riot and November reach
Of tides sang through the room, that high eclipse
Forced on the sea-shell murmur of your lips
A precept earthbound as the schoolmen teach.

II

The berry grays under the web of frost
No touch of spindrift but wears rock to dust.
These wan conceits and barrens of our state
Take on sharp presence when the moon flares out.
The ashen triumph of that nibbling arc
The lunge of night, make of the poet’s work
A pure defiance by which soul can breathe
A hawser lashing in the smoke-white seas.
Moon and the lover founder in the dark.

III

We cry no miracle, leap to no dance
At light reborn (all hope is arrogance).
A magic graver than this play of air
Holds our breath. Like flame upon a stair
The parched and flickering ones from their dry rocks
Shadow the house, but living song unmasks
Their hollow spell. No acts, no courtly ways
Of heart endure. The word alone outstays
The green armadas of the equinox.

George Steiner (1961)