April 11, 1954

Book Review
By JOHN GROSS

ULYSSES ON THE LIFFEY
By Richard Ellmann.

N one can altogether ignore the elements of myth in "Ulysses," but most ordinary readers, as opposed to professional Joyceans, are probably content to take the book fairly straight, as a slice of life with mythological trimmings. And small wonder if they turn for guidance to what looks like the obvious starting-point, the quasi-official commentary by Stuart Gilbert. Amid the immense literature which has grown up around the novel, Gilbert's exposition stands out as something of an embarrassment. It was supervised as well as authorized by Joyce himself; under the circumstances, even the most dogged opponent of the International Fallacy would surely hesitate to set it aside. Yet what it reveals is uninspiring, and on the whole uninspired: a mechanical master-plan, with each episode allotted its presiding symbols like so many signs of the zodiac, and with the various underlying analogies--Homeric, physiological, et cetera--worked out in minute and often grotesque detail. An indispensable work of reference, perhaps, but also an interpretation of "Ulysses" which many admirers would be only too relieved to dispense with if they could.

One of the many virtues of Richard Ellmann's new study is that he shows how far it is possible to move beyond Gilbert without necessarily discarding him. In his own attempt to elicit a basic Ulyssean myth, he takes due note both of Gilbert's schema and of the somewhat different outline which Joyce sent to his Italian translator, Carlo Linati, but refuses to regard either of them as in any way definitive: for the most part he draws his evidence from that unrivalled source, the novel itself. And, even more important, he is primarily concerned with the moral and intellectual burden of "Ulysses" rather than its technique--to borrow his own distinction, with Joyce's meaning (about which the writer was reticent) rather than his means. Provided we go along with him, a good deal of what might otherwise seem mere arbitrary pattern-weaving can consequently be interpreted, and justified, as significant form.

Reduced to its simplest terms, Mr. Ellmann's book is an account of the ways in which "Ulysses" arrives at its final affirmation. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom complement each other, move steadily closer together, and between them come to represent a liberating denial of both secular and spiritual tyranny. Stephen, steering a middle course between brute materialism and rarefied idealism, gradually achieves "a vision of the act of love as the basic act of art"; Bloom, more humbly, demonstrates what love is; Molly, completing the trinity, enables us to see that love is also "the basic act of nature." And behind this sacred-and-profane trio there looms an unnamed, archetypal, androgynous figure, including and subsuming all of them. By analogy with Blake's giant Albion, he "might be called Hibernion. One day he will be Finnegan."

A summary as bald as this, however, can scarcely hope to do justice to either Ellmann or Joyce. What may sound, in paraphrase, like the simplifications of "Ulysses on the Liffey" are in fact elegant solutions: the main strength of the book lies in the insight, subtlety and tact with which the corresponding problems are first analyzed and thought through. It is also, one should add, a highly entertaining book, wittily written and enlivened by some ingenious detective-work. Never again, after Mr. Ellmann's investigations, will readers have to puzzle their heads over such conundrums as why Bloom eats a gorgonzola sandwich, or the exact genito-urinary implications of Breen's anonymous postcard ("U.P.: up"), or the concealed literary allusion in the joke about "Mr. Leopold Shakespeare." At the same time, there is no parade of ingenuity for its own sake. Clues are followed up only when they throw light on the central design, and, conversely, Mr. Ellmann is every bit as spry and readable on the big metaphysical themes--Joyce's handling of time and space, say--as he is on less daunting topics such as the inner life of Gerty MacDowell.

As far as it goes, the final result is as distinguished as anyone who knows Mr. Ellmann's biography of Joyce ("James Joyce," Oxford, 1959) would expect; lucid, well-proportioned, humane. There is one major (and presumably self-imposed) limitation, however. In clarifying Joyce's intentions, Mr. Ellmann more or less equates them with the finished product: we are invited to take Joyce very much on his own terms. And unless we are also willing to accord "Ulysses" the status of Holy Writ (there are those who are), this means that we still have to decide for ourselves how far the myth can be said to work, and how far it tallies with our over-all impression as readers.

My own feeling is that whatever Joyce may have supposed he was up to when he planned "Ulysses," the book which he actually wrote is at once too rich and too ramshackle to be adequately encompassed by any monomythic interpretation, even the most flexible. Mr. Ellmann is alert to the danger of unduly hard-and-fast formulations: indeed, he makes a good deal of the way in which Joyce deliberately wove "an uncertainty principle" into the narrative, while some of his most original pages are devoted to arguing that for half-a-dozen episodes the dominant mood of the book is doubt, and the foremost philosophic presence that of the arch- skeptic Hume ("Bloom's day but also, for the nine hours from three to midnight, Hume's day"). Yet in the end, by the very nature of his enterprise, he seems to me to be describing a work which is more orderly and harmonious than "Ulysses" itself--and for my money, somewhat less congenial. For all his epic aspirations, Joyce's vision was profoundly subjective. He could also be perverse over and above the call of any uncertainty principle; but that is simply part of the price which we have to pay for his creative, formula-transcending energy.

As for the mythic scaffolding itself, Mr. Ellmann is more persuasive than most of his predecessors, but there are still many points at which he leaves me unconvinced--about the measure of Joyce's success, that is, not about his aims. The famous device of identifying each episode with a separate part of the body, for instance: does it really add up to the "slow accretion of a human form"? Personally I would have said that the effect is about as "organic" as a collection of specimens in an anatomy museum.

Once we start entertaining our doubts about the mythos of "Ulysses," it is unlikely that we are going to feel quite as comfortable as Mr. Ellmann does with the book's underlying ethos. Take Joyce's attitude towards history, the nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is trying to awake. As Mr. Ellmann maintains, with considerable eloquence, a consistent social morality can be deduced from the novel, a rejection of nationalism, imperialism or any ism which makes for bigotry and violence. Against the poisons engendered by the will to power Joyce prescribes, however obliquely, love and lovingkindness. But if only it were all so simple. Surely the least we can do is to think long and hard, before endorsing Stephen's view that all victories in war are equally Pyrrhic, or accepting, say, that the last word of Robert Emmet's speech from the dock is Leopold Bloom breaking wind. At one level Joyce's urge to abolish history may represent a selfless conviction that individuals ought to be freed from the forces which thwart them; at another it smacks of colossal arrogance.

Unless, that is, we can bring ourselves to think of him as a kind of latter-day Blake, authentically persuaded that it might be possible to hold infinity in the palm of your hand. Certainly there is a strong intellectual tug in that direction throughout "Ulysses": Mr. Ellmann demonstrates how much the structure of the novel depends on the example of Giordano Bruno, with his vision of a universe where "contraries coincide to confirm their mutual participation in Being, 'the foundation of all kinds and of all forms.'" But while Joyce's imagination may have been peculiarly stirred by a doctrine which gave him carte blanch to search out hidden affinities, whether he took it literally is another matter. As Mr. Ellmann also points out, the Brunonian (or Brunoesque) pattern in "Ulysses" is superimposed upon without being allowed to supersede the more fundamental influence of Aristotle, for who one thing was irrevocably itself and not something else--and as long as Joyce distinguishes between Bloom and not-Bloom, or Stephen and not-Stephen, he is recognizably a novelist as well as a mythmaker.

Reaching out for universal significance, "Ulysses" remains rooted in the here-and-now of Bloomsday; and even if we agree with Mr. Ellmann that Joyce ultimately "outflanks the individual lives of his characters," it is only because those lives have first been brilliantly and movingly realized that the book continues to cast so powerful a spell