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April 8, 2003
Joyce's modernism
Continuing the theme of modernism from yesterday ... For six hundred years, English has been tinkered with until it has become a fine instrument for describing what's literally going on and what people are thinking. The vocabulary is famously huge, the syntax is supple, and there are narrative techniques for all occasions. As an example of perceptive modern prose, consider James Joyce's spare description of Leopold Bloom in a hearse:
Mr. Bloom entered and sat in a vacant place. He pulled the door to after him and slammed it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds of the avenue. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she was passed over. Glad to see us go we give them so much trouble coming.
We don't really know how the old woman talks or what she's thinking. Maybe she's a police informant spying on the house opposite; maybe she's a he. But Joyce has focused his lens so that only Bloom's mind shows clearly. Thus we learn about the objects that Bloom handles—the door and the armstrap—but only about their functions, because he is too preoccupied to note accidental features like material and color. His very name reflects his state of mind, for he experiences himself as "Mr. Bloom" when he rides in a hearse. We might like to learn more (for instance, what kind of buildings line the avenue?), but such information would ruin the realism. Thinking is perspectival, selective; and we know just what Bloom notices.
Modern literary English allows an author to choose almost any vantage point, any focus, and any depth of field. Why then does Joyce use so many other idioms? For instance, in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, he mimics every major prose style in the history of English. At one point, Bloom has just entered a house where a woman is suffering her third day of labor. He means to express his sympathy to the family, but he finds himself among callous drunks who are loudly discussing whether it would be better in the eyes of the Church for the woman or the baby to die. Bloom mutters vague abstractions to avoid expressing a view, perhaps because any opinion could be heard upstairs. Then ...
| in Joyce's version ....
That is truth, pardy, said Dixon, and, or I err, a pregnant word.
Which hearing young Stephen was a marvellous glad man and he averred
that he who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord for he was
of a wild manner when he was drunken and that he was now in that
taking it appeared efstoons. |
|
Joyce's prose resembles a thick but uneven hedge screening the literal truth. Here, we can just about cut through the fifteenth-century language to to see what's going on. In other places, it is impossible to make out even the basic narrative facts. For instance, we are almost never permitted to overhear Bloom's thoughts about what to do or where to go next. Much like Odysseus, he just shows up in episode after episode.
Frustrated by this and other omissions, we might say: If only Joyce would
just tell the story! Why does he have to use a pastiche of past and present
styles, so many of which are opaque?
The question assumes, of course, that there is a truth to grasp. But
perhaps my "literal interpretation" above is simply one idiom,
a product of its time, just as Everyman reflects the culture of
England in 1500. In that case, Joyce has carried realism to its final
stage. He doesn't describe the world or consciousness (either objectively
or subjectively), because to do so would be to forget the fact that all
seeing is from the point of view of a style. Instead, he describes some
past and contemporary ways in which life has been described. As in one
of Nietzsche's magic tricks, the real world—disappears! Literature,
not life, is the subject of Ulysses; yet the book itself counts as literature
(in Stephen's words, as an "eternal affirmation of the spirit of
man"), because it is perceptive, tender, and humane.
This rare combination—a declaration of the End of Art that is also
art—is characteristic of the greatest works of modernism. Note, however,
that Joyce must deny that there has been progress in the history of English
narrative style. The succession of idioms that he mimics does not evolve
toward clarity. If modern English prose has somehow surpassed its predecessors,
then Joyce would have no excuse to abandon it.
April 8, 2003 12:08 PM | category: fine arts | Comments