Aspects of the novel
We never have any confidence in the intervener. Nor is the intervener,
when it comes to the point, sanguine. With mistrust mounting to
exasperation Zuleika sat watching the faint and frantic researches of
her maid.
"Stop!" she said suddenly. "I have a much better idea. Go down very
early to the station. See the stationmaster. Order me a special train.
For ten o'clock, say."
Rising, she stretched her arms above her head. Her lips parted in a
yawn, met in a smile. With both hands she pushed back her hair from her
shoulders, and twisted it into a loose knot. Very lightly she slipped up
into bed, and very soon she was asleep.
So Zuleika ought to have come on to this place. She does not seem ever
to have arrived and we can only suppose that through the intervention of
the gods her special train failed to start, or, more likely, is still in
a siding at Bletchley.
Among the devices in my list I mentioned "parody" or "adaptation" and
would now examine this further. The fantasist here adopts for his
mythology some earlier work and uses it as a framework or quarry for his
own purposes. There is an aborted example of this in _Joseph Andrews_.
Fielding set out to use _Pamela_ as a comic mythology. He thought it
would be fun to invent a brother to Pamela, a pure-minded footman, who
should repulse Lady Booby's attentions just as Pamela had repulsed Mr.
B.'s, and he made Lady Booby Mr. B.'s aunt. Thus he would be able to
laugh at Richardson, and incidentally express his own views of life.
Fielding's view of life however was of the sort that only rests content
with the creation of solid round characters, and with the growth of
Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop the fantasy ceases, and we get an
independent work. _Joseph Andrews_ (which is also important
historically) is interesting to us as an example of a false start. Its
author begins by playing the fool in a Richardsonian world, and ends by
being serious in a world of his own--the world of Tom Jones and Amelia.
Parody or adaptation have enormous advantages to certain novelists,
particularly to those who may have a great deal to say and plenty of
literary genius, but who do not see the world in terms of individual men
and women--who do not, in other words, take easily to creating
characters. How are such men to start writing? An already existing book
or literary tradition may inspire them--they may find high up in its
cornices a pattern that will serve as a beginning, they may swing about
in its rafters and gain strength. That fantasy of Lowes Dickinson, _The
Magic Flute_, seems to be created thus: it has taken as its mythology
the world of Mozart. Tamino, Sarastro, and the Queen of the Night stand
in their enchanted kingdom ready for the author's thoughts, and when
these are poured in they become alive and a new and exquisite work is
born. And the same is true of another fantasy, anything but
exquisite--James Joyce's _Ulysses_[6] That remarkable affair--perhaps
the most interesting literary experiment of our day--could not have been
achieved unless Joyce had had, as his guide and butt, the world of the
_Odyssey_.
I am only touching on one aspect of _Ulysses_: it is of course more than
a fantasy--it is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is
an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed
where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human
character in the interests of Hell. All simplifications are fascinating,
all lead us away from the truth (which lies far nearer the muddle of
_Tristram Shandy_), and _Ulysses_ must not detain us on the ground that
it contains a morality--otherwise we shall also have to discuss Mrs.
Humphry Ward. We are concerned with it because, through a mythology,
Joyce has been able to create the peculiar stage and characters he
required.
The action of those 400,000 words occupies a single day, the scene is
Dublin, the theme is a journey--the modern man's journey from morn to
midnight, from bed to the squalid tasks of mediocrity, to a funeral,
newspaper office, library, pub, lavatory, lying-in hospital, a saunter
by the beach, brothel, coffee stall, and so back to bed. And it coheres
because it depends from the journey of a hero through the seas of
Greece, like a bat hanging to a cornice.
Ulysses himself is Mr. Leopold Bloom--a converted Jew--greedy,
lascivious, timid, undignified, desultory, superficial, kindly and
always at his lowest when he pretends to aspire. He tries to explore
life through the body. Penelope is Mrs. Marion Bloom, an overblown
soprano, by no means harsh to her suitors. The third character is young
Stephen Dedalus, whom Bloom recognizes as his spiritual son much as
Ulysses recognizes Telemachus as his actual son. Stephen tries to
explore life through the intellect--we have met him before in _The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, and now he is worked into this
epic of grubbiness and disillusion. He and Bloom meet half way through
in Night Town (which corresponds partly to Homer's Palace of Circe,
partly to his Descent into Hell) and in its supernatural and filthy
alleys they strike up their slight but genuine friendship. This is the
crisis of the book, and here--and indeed throughout--smaller mythologies
swarm and pullulate, like vermin between the scales of a poisonous
snake. Heaven and earth fill with infernal life, personalities melt,
sexes interchange, until the whole universe, including poor,
pleasure-loving Mr. Bloom, is involved in one joyless orgy.
Does it come off? No, not quite. Indignation in literature never quite
comes off either in Juvenal or Swift or Joyce; there is something in
words that is alien to its simplicity. The Night Town scene does not
come off except as a superfetation of fantasies, a monstrous coupling of
reminiscences. Such satisfaction as can be attained in this direction is
attained, and all through the bode we have similar experiments--the aim
of which is to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and
art, by turning them inside out and upside down. Some enthusiasts may
think that _Ulysses_ ought to be mentioned not here but later on, under
the heading of prophecy, and I understand this criticism. But I prefer
to mention it today with _Tristram Shandy_, _Flecker's Magic_, _Zuleika
Dobson_, and _The Magic Flute_, because the raging of Joyce, like the
happier or calmer moods of the other writers, seems essentially
fantastic, and lacks the note for which we shall be listening soon.
We must pursue this notion of mythology further, and more circumspectly.
[Footnote 6: _Ulysses_ (Shakespeare & Co., Paris) is not at present
obtainable in England. America, more enlightened, has produced a
mutilated version without the author's permission and without
paying him a cent.]
VII
PROPHECY
WITH prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no
concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for
righteousness. What will interest us today--what we must respond to, for
interest now becomes an inappropriate word--is an accent in the
novelist's voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of
fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something
universal, but he is not necessarily going to "say" anything about the
universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in
the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine
with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall
have to answer "not too well": the singer does not always have room for
his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through
which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a
drawing-room after an earthquake or a children's party. Readers of D. H.
Lawrence will understand what I mean.
Prophecy--in our sense--is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the
faiths that have haunted humanity--Christianity, Buddhism, dualism,
Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power
that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what
particular view of the universe is recommended--with that we are not
directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter
into the turns of the novelist's phrase, and in this lecture, which
promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere
to the minutiae of style. We shall have to attend to the novelist's
state of mind and to the actual words he uses; we shall neglect as far
as we can the problems of common sense. As far as we can: for all novels
contain tables and chairs, and most readers of fiction look for them
first. Before we condemn him for affectation and distortion we must
realize his view point. He is not looking at the tables and chairs at
all, and that is why they are out of focus. We only see what he does not
focus--not what he does--and in our blindness we laugh at him.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality in
the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility
and the suspension of the sense of humour. Humility is a quality for
which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a
great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy. But
humility is in place just now. Without its help we shall not hear the
voice of the prophet, and our eyes will behold a figure of fun instead
of his glory. And the sense of humour--that is out of place: that
estimable adjunct of the educated man must be laid aside. Like the
schoolchildren in the Bible, one cannot help laughing at a prophet--his
bald head is so absurd--but one can discount the laughter and realize
that it has no critical value and is merely food for bears.
Let us distinguish between the prophet and the non-prophet.
There were two novelists, who were both brought up in Christianity. They
speculated and broke away, yet they neither left nor did they want to
leave the Christian spirit which they interpreted as a loving spirit.
They both held that sin is always punished, and punishment a purgation,
and they saw this process not with the detachment of an ancient Greek or
a modern Hindu, but with tears in their eyes. Pity, they felt, is the
atmosphere in which morality exercises its logic, a logic which
otherwise is crude and meaningless. What is the use of a sinner being
punished and cured if there is not an addition in the cure, a heavenly
bonus? And where does the addition come from? Not out of the machinery,
but out of the atmosphere in which the process occurs, out of the love
and pity which (they believed) are attributes of God.
How similar these two novelists must have been! Yet one of them was
George Eliot and the other Dostoevsky.
It will be said that Dostoevsky had vision. Still, so had George Eliot.
To classify them apart--and they must be parted--is not so easy. But the
difference between them will define itself at once exactly if I read two
passages from their works. To the classifier the passages will seem
similar: to any one who has an ear for song they come out of different
worlds.
I will begin with a passage--fifty years ago it was a very famous
passage--out of _Adam Bede_. Hetty is in prison, condemned to die for
the murder of her illegitimate child. She will not confess, she is hard
and impenitent. Dinah, the Methodist, comes to visit her and tries to
touch her heart.
Dinah began to doubt whether Hetty was conscious who it was that sat
beside her. But she felt the Divine presence more and more--nay, as if
she herself were a part of it, and it was the Divine pity that was
beating in her heart, and was willing the rescue of this helpless one.
At last she was prompted to speak, and find out how far Hetty was
conscious of the present.