3 - Lapsarian languages

Summary

In “Drama and Life” (1900), first of those undergraduate writings to intimate its author's mature intelligence, Joyce draws a distinction that prefigures a central tension and problematic in Ulysses:

Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours – a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them. Drama has to do with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motley agents who bear them out.

(CW, 40)

The force of determinist fate that Joyce assigns equally to drama and society may originate in Attic theater, at least in its reconstruction by anthropologists contemporary with him, like Jane Ellen Harrison and other members of the Cambridge School, who tied its performance to seasonal cycles and stressed its connection to collective and timely rites of fertility. The same matrix of social needs and mythic rituals provides a source for the Homeric poems, or so this classical scholarship argued and, in doing so, allowed the 18-year-old to discern those “changeless laws” in the Odyssey as well. Is Joyce auguring the determining force that the Homeric schema will exert on Ulysses? If so, the extent or completeness of that correspondence is already an issue, for the absolute control of such archetypes is even now resisted, here by “literature,” an art of letters that can be aligned easily with the stylistic high jinks of Ulysses.