The Tragedy of James Joyce

Extract

Mr. Eliot’s criticism of Joyce has been of two kinds; moral and technical. Moral, in such phrases as ‘the most ethically orthodox of the more eminent men of my time ‘and ‘an extremely serious and improving writer,’ technical, as in the introductory note to the present selection, where the reader is told that ‘Stuart Gilbert’s Ulysses is the standard analysis of the structure of that work; and An Exagmination of ‘Work in Progress ... is a useful introduction to Finnegan’s Wake.’ In all cases a moral judgement in literary criticism is more valuable than a technical one because it is more inclusive. In criticism of Joyce a moral judgement is the only judgement because a technical judgement is not only irrelevant, it is misleading. It is misleading because it distracts from an attempt to reply to another, and a very different, moral judgement—D. H. Lawrence’s ‘My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is ! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness,—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! ‘It distracts from a firm realization that Finnegan’s Wake is gibberish.

Finnegan’s Wake fails even in Mr. Eliot’s own minimal requirement of literature—‘to communicate before it is understood.’ The fact is so obvious that it is rarely stated. The function of an ‘introducer ‘of Joyce should not be to refer the reader to An Exagmination of Work in Progress but should be to explain to him how the change from the earlier to the later prose took place’. Such an explanation is contained in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in a passage which Mr. Eliot includes in his selection. Stephen is replying to Cranly, who has been questioning him why he left the Church : ‘Look here, Cranly, he said.