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.
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.
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)
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.
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