There have been great novels written about an outsider. Possibly the best in this category was Notes From the Underground. And of course the modern novel is often dated to Ulysses, whose Leopold Bloom is the very definition of one who doesn’t belong comfortably to any tradition.
So The World According to Garp is hardly doomed in advance to failure under either classic or modern standards. Indeed, today I assume most would not call Garp a failure at all. It is a title that many are familiar with, it was made into a motion picture, and I would guess that it also made a good deal of money for its author. The story and its characters are vivid, engaging, and memorable.
But so is a dirty joke. A successful dirty joke relies on the same elements as any successful joke, with the added fillip of forbidden vulgarity. Without pressing the analogy too hard, I suppose the same can be said of successful vulgar novels: it is not the vulgarity that makes the success, though it can probably be relied on for the sales. But whether or not Garp made a lot of money, its aspirations are so prosaic that it cannot even be called a failure. It generally lacks a plot, being chiefly an episodic “life” novel, like a modern Barry Lyndon or David Copperfield.
The life and world of T.S. Garp is impelled by a clumsy theme: lust is the essential, volatile element and it corrupts, often comically. Not by accident, Garp is a writer and the book is therefore interlarded with periodic ruminations on how to be a novelist, tell stories, etc. Hence there are several stories within stories – and even a momentarily arresting dream within a dream – but although Irving has his reasons for this, the stories are too numerous, overwritten, and not nearly as good as Irving thinks they are. Irving badly needs an editor and a sense of restraint. I do not mean to suggest that any novel is obliged to be edifying, but I do expect that in some sense it will offer some new or enlarged perspective.
That brings me back to outsiders, a view of whom in this novel is the element that should transcend the coarseness. But instead, throughout the book Irving simply peppers the reader with semi-sententious remarks, usually uttered by the characters, which are apparently to be understood as an explanation or perhaps a defense of Irving’s determined and obsessive vulgarity. Meanwhile, no character speaks with a distinctive voice; they are all interchangeable; and in fact Garp left me with the uncomfortable feeling that it may have been even worse than I had originally concluded: that it is not even essentially a work of imagination – as to which I agree with Irving that that is the novelist’s preeminent mission – but a portrait of the author’s genuine view of how people really are if only it were told.
It is less imagination, I fear, than wishful thinking. Irving clearly thinks his book is a laff riot. It isn’t; it’s crude and pathetic.
Endnotes
1. Shakespearean borrowings are fine, but not from Titus Andronicus.
Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle –
They say that reading has dropped off in the generations seduced by televison, motion pictures, video games, remote channel selectors, etc. Our attention spans are said to be short and impatient. If this is so, imagine how welcome this typical sentence from The Beast in the Jungle would be to a high school sophomore:
“The deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher’s expert attention had recognized from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn’t bristle.”
Actually, an impatient (or efficient) mind might admire this deft rendering of much information into four lines with one period, but the fact is they don’t write this way anymore and it will take some patience to accommodate ourselves to it. But if we can muster it, the effort will be rewarded with a perfect miniature worthy of display.
The novella begins in an English country house where two weekend parties from different homes converge to take a sedate tour. John Marcher, a member of one of the groups, encounters May Bartram from the other and, with her urging, realizes that he has met her 10 years ago in Italy. She reminds him obliquely what he had said to her on that occasion by asking, “Has it ever happened?”
It was a momentous inquiry going back a decade, though Marcher himself had forgotten the event. She reminds him that he had said that from his earliest moments he felt within him “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange.” Perhaps they are both talking about love, but it seems not as the conversation develops. Marcher has had that callow expectation that something will happen to him. But it has never left him and over the years remains in his subconscious “like a crouching beast in the jungle.” May, who is five years younger than Marcher, has taken him seriously and what could be more momentous for a man. Furthermore, although they are now both mature people, Marcher could not consider a marriage proposal because “a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.”
Instead, they continue as regular companions, Marcher feeling his obsession as though it were a camel’s hump which he pretends to ignore and May never mentioning it except as “the real truth” about him. And so they have a lengthy friendship in which she becomes his “kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and . . . not disreputably occupied.”
Eventually it comes to Marcher that she knows what the event is to be and he does not. Furthermore, she will never tell him and she sees it as her mission to help him “to pass for a man like another.” As the years go by, she sickens. Suddenly Marcher realizes that he is old, and, worse, that not only he but also May “might be recorded as having waited in vain.” It was in Time that he was to have met his fate. “It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonored, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” He perceives eventually that she knows what he does not. James, in short, is dealing in a commodity which is much prized and much traduced by modern writers: irony. But this is irony on a mature scale. James is dealing with adult lives in which irony is not only inevitable, but genuinely bitter.
“She had deceived him to save him – to put him off with something in which he should be able to rest. What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude – that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods.”
And she does die. Marcher travels the world, but returns to visit her grave then at least monthly. While there one day, he sees another man of about his age, ravaged with grief at another grave. This man had something which Marcher did not, which made the man “bleed and yet live.” Suddenly Marcher sees passion, which he had never had and which she had seen and offered him.
“It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited, the wait was itself his portion. This the companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then offered him the chance to baffle his doom. One’s doom, however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him.”
Henry James, The Aspern Papers --
Literary historians probably all know what I only accidentally discovered on reading Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, namely that the lead character in this almost perfect novella is based on one of Shelly's mistresses. Of course that has noting to do with the merits of the work, but such incidental details have always kept me interested in literary products.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl –
Often it seems that Henry James’s most important audience, in some ways his only audience, is himself. Every sentence is modified, reconsidered, nudged, qualified, and explained. I am not aware of any other author whose compulsion to get the nuances exactly right so much interferes with the narrative of his tale. Sometimes, James seems so self-absorbed that he quits his reader entirely and uses pronouns so exclusively that we forget who they refer to. Readers of Henry James are obliged to pay attention.
This reminds me of a witty remark, attributed, I think, to the wife of Henry Adams, that James always “chewed more than he bit off.” The Golden Bowl, surely written after that observation would have been made, is a splendid exemplar of the point. The story is an extended recitation of the intricate and recondite moves about a marital chessboard where everyone in an emotional sense is lying to everyone else and where the stakes are exceedingly high. The idea is interesting, but it is chewed to a faretheewell.
Or at least the stakes are high for the players and the author; an impatient reader might not finish the course. For the most part, it is, for example, essentially a four-person novel, the psychological tension of which substitutes for that normally-essential fifth person. In terms of this novel, actually, this is one of the points, for James periodically repairs to the image of “equilibrium,” particularly among his characters. Perhaps this is why James wrote it – as a proof that it can be done, rather like Conrad at his virtuoso best. And yet the effort is not breath-taking the way Conrad can be, nor is it fully sustained, as I will discuss. It is the work of a master craftsman, an object of admiration, perhaps even a tour de force – but it is too contrived to be loved by many. The Golden Bowl is not for everyone and – although it is really too precious to say so – itself may be flawed like the bowl of the title.
1. Pieces on the Board.
The Prince. The first section is called “The Prince,” referring to the Roman bachelor Amerigo Calderoni whose lineage this young man traces at least as far back as an unprincipled Pope of some earlier century, and even farther back to the unscrupulous Americgo Vespucci, “the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer” of the American continent. Apparently impoverished, Amerigo now lives in London, which he sees as modern incarnation of his ancient city. More importantly, he has just become engaged to a wealthy, naive American girl, Maggie Verver. We have, in other words, another Jamesian tale of a slightly louche European encountering an optimistic but naive American.
They have a common acquaintance from the past. On the day the engagement is formalized, Maggie’s old friend from home, Charlotte Stant, arrives in London from America to share in the wedding preparations. Charlotte is lovely, intelligent, and and pleasingly self-confidant, though not moneyed like the others. To the reader it is immediately evident that she has known the Prince from earlier times.
The Assinghams. It develops, in the meantime, that the Prince’s engagement had been a project of his and Maggie’s mutual English friend, Fanny Assingham. Fanny, a clever, enterprising, and somewhat voluble woman (we learn later she has “American blood”) who travels in the same elevated social circles as Maggie and the Prince, appears perplexed by Charlotte’s arrival. She too knows Charlotte from earlier times and attributes her appearance to Charlotte’s distaste for America where there is no comfortable place for a woman of her station and abilities. Charlotte and the Prince had been in love, Fanny knows, and they had also been sensible enough to know that nothing could come of it, chiefly because of the prince’s impecuniousness. “That was their little romance – it was even their little tragedy.” The romance, Fanny says, was in “their frustration, in their having the courage to look the facts in the face.”
The Bowl. Acknowledging their diverse destinies, Charlotte and the Prince take an afternoon on their own, the objective (and pretext) being a shopping excursion for Charlotte to purchase a wedding gift for Maggie. At a Bloomsbury shop Charlotte finds an old crystal gilded bowl. As she haggles with the proprietor (the Prince is waiting in the street), she ventures that it probably has a flaw which should figure in the price. This leads to a conversation with the merchant, fraught with double meaning including speculation about the possible intentional destruction of the object. Temporizing with the shopkeeper, Charlotte rejoins the Prince back in the street and learns that he had detected, even in his brief instant of glancing at the bowl, that it was cracked – though that was imperceptible to her. The sale is not made.
Mr. Verver. Maggie’s impossibly wealthy father, Adam Verver, is a widower, entirely content in using his staggering wealth in collecting things of surpassing beauty which, in his vocabulary is anything but “angular.” More than a collector, he sees himself as a connoisseur and so it is significant that he describes the Prince, his soon-to-be son in law, as a “perfect crystal.” On the other hand, the diminutive Mr. Verver[1] is also the perfect unsubtle American type, as James sees it. He was “the man in the world least equipped with different appearances for different times. He was simple, he was a revelation of simplicity. . . .”
2. The Relationships.
Maggie and her Father. Not wasting time on Maggie’s marriage to the Prince and the birth of their child, James concentrates on Maggie’s very close relationship with her father. A lengthy conversation, for example, leads her to confide in him that she really hopes to locate a husband for Charlotte Stant. And this is followed by Mr. Verver’s conversation with Fanny (she periodically fills the balancing role of the missing fifth character) in which she observes to him that Charlotte is “the real thing,” a locution that catches his interest as an art collector. On consideration, then, though he had not been looking for a wife, he proposes marriage to Charlotte – though he also sends for Maggie’s approval. It is forthcoming, of course, but it does not change the relationship between father and daughter– a state of affairs which Charlotte understands.
Charlotte and the Prince. The relationship between these two is the engine – if that is the word for Henry James – of this novel. James describes Charlotte and the Prince as “a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair.”[2] But they fall into an implied adultery, as each also seems to become more secure – obviously because of their separate access to the Verver wealth. Ever observant, Fanny nevertheless finds the situation beyond her apprehension.
For that matter, even the Prince (who was “so much of [Maggie’s’] own great mundane feather”) is confounded by Fanny’s – and really the entire group’s – dullness respecting what imagination should have supplied. “One had never to plot or lie for them.” And Charlotte, meantime, has simultaneously become by default the social major domo of both hers and Maggie’s household. By this I do not mean that she becomes a grande dame. Rather, without rancor, Charlotte becomes one who performs – and performs well – “the duties of a remunerated office” while Maggie and her father, immersed in each other’s company, are congenitally incapable of admitting peacefully “that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it.”
Fanny and Bob. At a reception is held for Mr. Verver and his new wife, he fails to appear (a situation which intermittently repeats itself). Maggie therefore departs to be with him and the Prince and Charlotte are thus left to themselves in the group. Fanny, of course, takes note.
This is the catalyst for one of many periodic conversations between Fanny and her stolid husband Bob. She does most of the talking as they return home. But as the carriage arrives finally at their door, his laconic admonition, “Let them alone, they’ll manage,” leaves her nonplused. He disembarks and mounts the steps while she remains pensive in the vehicle. James allows Bob’s emphasis to be “sinister,” and yet Colonel Bob is like Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson, a sounding board only. He is amiable, but usually vague (and he is the only character in the book who has his own voice – a persistent problem with Henry James) while it is Fanny, like Holmes, who is destined to decide what must be done. And what must be done, she decides, is nothing (as Bob has said). Things as they are must be disagreeable to Maggie, she decides, so that she must decide to live – but not for her marriage and not for her child. She must live to save her father “from her own knowledge.”
3. Moving the Plot.
At the end of Volume One, circumstances throw Charlotte and the Prince together once again in “an exquisite sense of complicity” as guests at Matcham, a country home where a variety of acquaintances including the Assinghams have assembled. It becomes – not just for the Prince and Charlotte – a grotto of love, particularly when the Assinghams must leave and Charlotte confidently makes arrangements permitting her and the Prince to remain on the premises with the hostess and her own illicit love. But they must eventually return to town and Fanny, in the meantime, has naturally noticed everything. Her despair and sense of how she must not let this get out of hand, as she expresses it to her husband, is one of the book’s more touching passages.
4. Maggie’s Evolution.
Volume Two opens with an arresting image which Maggie takes as symbolic of her “situation” – i.e. having married without separating decisively with her father. She envisions the arrangement as a “pagoda” in her flower garden “like some strange tall tower of ivory.” Of course she vaguely recognizes the state of affairs between the Prince and Charlotte and she instinctively moves to re-balance their mutual relationships by the simple means of showing a renewed interest in both of them, thus essentially returning each to their earlier relationship, including Charlotte’s subtle subordination (socially if not emotionally) to the richer girl. In a fashion this is successful, but the Prince is up to the game and in his subtle and charming way in the space of carriage ride disarms Maggie of her resolve.
Maggie is set back, but not done. She arranges another visit to her father’s country place in Kent where through her contrivance her husband and Charlotte arrive first. Here Maggie confronts Fanny, impulsively asking her about the relationship between her husband and Charlotte. James being James, his first interest is the question’s impact on Fanny. They finally get to the point, however, and Fanny delivers her opinion that neither of the two would do anything to damage Maggie. This is a delicate scene, wonderfully delivered. It ends with the two women embracing with mutual tears.
Fanny now briefly emerges as significant beyond what has appeared to be her role as just a character who moves the plot, a high-level but calculating busybody. Her conversations with Bob – essentially retrospectives of events and the role that she has played in them – reveal that she sees herself, accurately or not, as the conscious architect of the plot’s main events. She has always contrived to be “agreeable” to the Prince, she says, including her strategy of getting him married to Maggie both because he would have access to Mr. Verver’s fortune and because Maggie would be sweetly kept, in effect, as his mistress. This does not import less affection for Maggie, though. As Fanny sees it, she and Maggie have a tacit compact between them to keep up the mutual “lie” that the prince and Charlotte are innocent – Fanny to argue the lie to Maggie against all evidence, which is Fanny’s field, and Maggie to believe the lie against the innate instinct, which is her strength[3] .
And Maggie continues to get stronger. Although the novel is more than 100 years old, I am reluctant to describe how the golden bowl of the earliest chapters now makes its way back into the story at Maggie’s initiative and actually plays a role – again symbolically – in what is virtually the only scene in the book in which something actively happens. I will only say that the bowl is finally broken. In the following chapters, the parties are all given Jamesian time to reflect on the matter, particularly on Maggie’s knowledge of and indirect communication to her husband of his connection with Charlotte. For the passive Maggie, however, it also activates her imagination to which her husband’s initial response is a “tacitly-offered sketch of a working arrangement.”
“‘Leave me my reserve; don’t question it – it’s all I have just now, don’t you see? so that if you make me the concession of letting me alone with it for as long a time as I require I promise you something or other, grown under cover of it, even though I don’t yet quite make out what, as a return for your patience.’”[4]
5. Changing Relationships.
But this is insufficient. At her father’s country home one evening, Maggie, in a wonderfully imaginative scene, walks around the whole home on a veranda beside a balustrade, looking inside at the lighted rooms to see the other four in a game of cards and then adjourn. Charlotte, she sees, has left the party to look for her. Anticipating the encounter, Maggie reflects that the broken golden bowl “stood for not any wrought discomposure among the triumphant three – it stood merely for the dire deformity of her attitude toward them.” And the encounter itself culminates with a re-enactment of the mutual lie – and a magnificent kiss betewen Maggie and Charlotte for the benefit of the others.
The novel could end there. Instead, father and daughter commence a lengthy second private conversation – conducted in the same location as the one I have mentioned above – which becomes their re-visitation of what they recall of the earlier “sweet evening.” Faulkner would have done a better job with this interesting way of advancing the story, but James has different purposes, as well as a decidedly different technique. For two supposedly ordinary people, Maggie and her father then get into a somewhat abstract exchange about whether they are “fools” (a personal social indifference, in Fanny’s meaning of the word) or just “selfish,” which to Maggie means jealous. Her remarks are sufficiently ambiguous that we can doubt, when“selfishness” is mentioned, whether she refers to her husband or Charlotte. Without saying more, however, ultimately the conversation resolves the two of them in their more mature relationship with each other.
And while this unfolds, in their separate ways Amerigo and Charlotte also come to see things more clearly. For Charlotte, and those who reflect on her situation, that situation is painful in the extreme. Essentially, she is incapable of matching her husband’s erudition, or even Maggie’s innate sense of value, and this incapability builds a profound fear in her, making her previous confidence a counterfeit, a simulacrum of what had previously been genuine. For visitors, she virtually becomes little more than a tour guide to the treasures of the house, sometimes informative, sometimes “so perversely wrong” that she sounds to Maggie “like the shriek of a soul in pain.” Amerigo too notes this and decamps to London to be alone – “doing penance.”
To say that Charlotte is “defeated” would probably be to say too much. But she does arrange to return to America with her husband, while Maggie is still left in England with Amerigo whose own situation must be managed, which can only be done by Maggie’s instinct and not calculation. His situation was a strange one,
“like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie’s own had come to show simply as that improvised ‘post’ . . . with which she was found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous beadwork to sell.”
The Golden Bowl essentially ends there: not a truce, not an accommodation, but more like an achieved understanding.
6. My Final Thought.
On my one reading, I have tried to give this novel the attention it demands. But if I were ever to attempt it again – which I very much doubt I will – I would probably agonize over my persistent discomfort with the central symbol. Don’t give such things more meaning than the author intended, I tell myself. Don’t try to “fit” each detail of the plot to them. But it is, after all, not just a useful device; it’s the title of the novel.
The golden bowl, the golden bowl. It is not cubist or “angular” in the expression of Mr. Verver. It is pleasing to see – though it would not have been pleasing to Mr. Verver, who is never exposed to it. It is not gold, it is crystal; it is not perfect, but has a flaw. It is destroyed midway through the novel but is a totem of two marriages which endure. Don’t ignore the symbol and don’t make too much of it, I tell myself. Think about it and move on.
ENDNOTES
1. “What [Maggie] unfailingly made out [through Charlotte’s ‘grave eyes’] was the figure of a quiet little gentleman who mostly wore, as he moved alone across the field of vision, a straw hat, a white waistcoat and a blue necktie, keeping a cigar in his teeth and his hands in his pockets, who oftener than not presented a somewhat meditative back while he slowly measured the perspectives of the park and broodingly counted . . . his steps.”
2. Charlotte cannot be called sophisticated. As she and the prince look out romantically over Glouscester, she contributes to his bliss in the view by agreeing that “[t]here are cloisters or towers or something. . . . Or the tomb of some old king.” This inane remark brings them back to the flawed golden bowl they had seen in the Bloomsbury shop.
3. The word “lie” is used throughout the novel, particularly toward the end.
4. Don’t try this at home.
Henry James, The Portrait Of A Lady --
Victorian novels of manners are not so much imitative as “concentric,” to take a thought from Irving Babbitt. But the form had been invented by Jane Austen two decades before Victoria ever took the throne and by the time Henry James was encumbering it with his "east meets west" overlay, the entire idea had become pretty much exhausted.
To appreciate these novels, you have to appreciate style above all else. All the Victorian novelists of manners (e.g. Eliot, Thackeray, Wharton, etc.) were great observers of details. This can make for a witty novel, possibly an insightful novel, but not often a gripping novel. (James did come close to "gripping" with The Turn Of The Screw.) Indeed, we turn to James chiefly because of his insights and style, and almost never because of his plots. But it seems to me that his style actually gets in the way of his insights. It becomes irritating after a while to watch him approach every scene like a cat putting her nose into a paper bag. He always seems reluctant to commit himself. There is not just a step on the stair; it must be a woman's step, a tentative step, the step of a stranger or perhaps a too infrequent guest. In a single conversation, characters go from "saying," to "venturing" to "advancing" to "urging" to "regarding," etc., etc.
This said, what do we have beyond the routine American in Europe plot? Isabel Archer, the American, is in England to visit her recently discovered expatriate family. She finds herself the love object of her old American suitor, an English lord, and her half-and-half cousin. Presently – and after a most unlikely inheritance -- she travels to Italy and becomes engaged and then wed to a mysterious Europeanized American named Osmond. James's manner of announcing this union is unusual (it is explained after the fact midway through the book) although I would say that it is less a matter of an interesting stylistic choice than it is a method of avoiding 200 extraneous pages.
As for the mystery which keeps the plot going, it is neither so obvious or elaborate as what one would find in Dickens nor as enjoyable. Some might even call it predictable. On the other hand, the character Isabel herself, while not a complete novelty in Victorian literature, is somewhat more independent than most heroines of the time.
Finally, a word about the ending. I do appreciate James's unwillingness to furnish an emotionally-satisfying last chapter. In this -- as in, to my recollection, Washington Square and The American -- he is scrupulous to give a realistic conclusion without pandering. This requires enormous discipline.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (II)—
Reading The Portrait of a Lady put me again where I always seem to find myself once I'm into a novel: considering the author's techniques, thinking about how I have been helped (usually) by the point of view, the architecture, things like the imagery and foreshadowing, and the overall sense of whether I am in good hands. Sometimes there is also a bonus, meaning a story which moves on two levels of meaning[1].
Nothing in the writings of Henry James
falls within the latter category, although it would certainly not have been
beyond his grasp. For example, you needn't look too hard to find in his
writings the occasional symbol (think of The
Golden Bowl), but I think that the main point about Henry James is that, though
he wrote in an earlier era in which such tricks were less popular, it is unlikely
that he will ever be out of date. He is a master novelist in complete control
of his characters and material and, to my tastes, his longest books are his best[2].
With the possible exception of Leo Tolstoy — who is otherwise all passion to
James's calculation — I can think of no other author who is so successful in
presenting such a wide variety of characters, each of whom interacts with the
others with such complexity, detail, and subtlety, and each of whom carries
forward the deceptively superficial plot with such fascinating specificity.
1. Psychology. His readers, however,
must be patient. His plots are not dramatic or colorful even in the Tolstoian
idiom. Modern tastes might even call them glacial because they inevitably
entail the internal and evolving reactions and maneuverings of the characters over
an extended time period. Mostly thematic, James's plots grow out of relatively
familiar domestic affairs such as a marriage, a death, a significant change in
scenery, etc. set against the tension of Americans confronting Europe and vice
versa. There is a fascination in how the patterns develop, but little conventional
action. James's stories are what might be called psychological without in the
least being Freudian.
Countless incidents related throughout The Portrait of a Lady are engrossing on
that psychological level, but too numerous to itemize. And yet, if not read
with care, their link to what is to follow might be overlooked. For example, the
initial chapters, which appear to be a conventional introduction of characters
and scene, when considered somewhat more closely also portray rather odd
relationships within the main character's family. There is no point to detail
them here, but as we go forward we hear echoes of that sub-story. Meantime, a
rough sketch of the main story, without disclosing the long-anticipated plot
resolution, is as follows.
2. The Women. The American women
in The Portrait of a Lady live in a
relentlessly Victorian world where the traditions of wealth, marriage, and
filial piety were virtually legal commandments. James describes each of these
women at some length. They are not of equal importance with each other, of
course, but in the novel all four of them are independent and even
unconventional in their own way. Giving the novel a traditional reading permits
us simply to transport ourselves back to the 19th Century and to
accept the conventions as a contemporary reader would have done. For my part I
think it is a perfectly sensible — and always interesting — approach. Below,
however, I will consider how these events integrate with more modern practices.
3. The Characters. The novel
covers a period of about six years in the 1870s, dealing with the growing
maturity of Isabel Archer, a naïve and high-spirited young woman from Albany. Her
parents having both died, she is left with no financial means of her own to
speak of. Her entire story is set in Europe, during which time she unexpectedly
inherits a considerable amount of money from her expatriate uncle, meets
another extraordinary expatriate, Madame Merle, and marries still another,
Gilbert Osmond. Indeed, nine of the 10 main characters in the novel are
Americans living for the most part in Europe — which has affected them in both
vivid and imperceptible ways.
In his attractive opening portrait of Isabel,
the first of those characters, James also cautions that notwithstanding her
innate American independence, honesty, and curiosity, she is not yet worldly
and is definitely unsophisticated in the European sense. Her self-confidence is
obvious, but there is also this early alert: "[S]he was in the habit of
taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right." James also
makes it clear that internally she continues to struggle between her natural modesty
and her innate self-regard.
Four of the other characters are men:
Isabel's beloved older cousin Ralph Touchett[3],
Caspar Goodwood[4] (a
sound, energetic, and upward-bound American suitor who has proposed marriage to
her), Lord Warburton (really the only European in the story and another fine
man who also seeks to marry her), and her eventual husband, Gilbert Osmond, who
turns out to be her grand mistake.
The rest of the characters are the
aforesaid women. Isabel's practical and plain-spoken aunt Touchett is emotionally
and physically estranged from both her husband (she lives in Florence, he in
England) and to a lesser extent from her adult son Ralph — but she nevertheless
has a strong sense of duty toward both of them as well as towards Isabel, whom
she has brought to England for education. Next is Isabel's close friend,
Henrietta Stackpole, a roving correspondent for an American periodical[5].
Then is Countess Gemini (nee Osmond) who eventually becomes Isabel's
sister-in-law. She is followed by a somewhat unformed teenaged girl, Pansy
Osmond, Mr. Osmond's daughter from an earlier marriage[6]
then made Isabel's step-daughter. And finally there is the most prominent
character in the tale other than Isabel herself, Madame Merle, the charming,
influential, and well-connected widow who takes Isabel under her wing.
4. Summary. Now we finally get movement.
Having rejected two worthy proposals, having suddenly been made wealthy with no
forewarning, and then having fortuitously met Madame Merle at her uncle's
English manor, Isabel embarks for Europe with her aunt and Ralph. Madame Merle
soon joins them as a guest in Florence where, with Rome, much of the rest of
the story takes place.
(a) Madame
Merle; "Arranging a Marriage." This is where Isabel's marriage to
Osmond is single-handedly and elegantly choreographed by Madame Merle. Her designs,
however, are entirely unspoken and she only confides them to Osmond himself[7].
The entire process then takes almost a quarter of the novel. Madame Merle's initial
demarche is by placid indirection only, merely suggesting to Isabel that she
will soon discover that her travels and the recent changes in her life will
present this conundrum: Americans do not really belong in Europe because they have no natural place there and are
essentially "parasites." And yet, she adds,
"[a] woman perhaps can get on; a
woman it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself
she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. But the men, . .
. what do they make of it over here? . . . . The worst case, I think, is a
friend of mine, a countryman of ours[8],
who lives in Italy. . . and who is one of the most delightful men I know."
With
a shrug she then describes Osmond as a painter and collector who has "no
career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no
anything." [9]
In time Isabel actually rejects Osmond's
offer of marriage and then, without warning, James then breaks off the story
for a year. During that year, however, (which passes in the interval between
two chapters) she apparently comes to evaluate Mr. Osmond as a fascinating and
reserved man of high intelligence and culture whose personal lack of fortune
must be overlooked in favor of these higher qualities. Neither her (nor his) thought
process, however, is otherwise explained. Instead, when the story picks up
again in the next chapter, we abruptly but indirectly learn (a letter from Isabel
to the rejected but still hopeful Mr. Goodwood) that she has decided to be Mr.
Osmond's wife. James offers no further detail. Rather, what the reader next
learns consists chiefly of the ensuing explicit objections of Isabel's family
members and Osmond's sister. The perceptive Ralph actually tells her that she has
invented and succumbed to a "theory" about Osmond, viewing his
imperfections as "poverties dressed out as honors." These criticisms
have no effect. Isabel is content that she has judged Mr. Osmond's essential
qualities and minor drawbacks and that she has emphatically come to an adult
conclusion in favor of the match. She never suspects Madame Merle whose
subtlety has been so great that even we as readers puzzle how she did it.
In fact, except for his unusual way of
reporting this decision, James himself has given us little reason to ponder the
matter. Up to now — and almost for the entire balance of the novel — Madame
Merle's contacts with Isabel are always portrayed as gentle, sympathetic, and
even self-effacing. In their earliest conversations she even briefly displayed
a certain world-weariness, discounting her talents by vouchsafing that she only
uses them "to get through the hours, the years, to cheat myself with some
pretence of action." James himself adds that although Madame Merle had
never played a great part, she had been on the best terms with many fortunate
Europeans, while never quite counting herself as their intimate. And yet "she
had . . . to Isabel's imagination, a sort of greatness." And that to
Isabel, who already prided herself on evaluating the character of other people,
was the ideal quality,
"'the supreme good fortune to be in
a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you.'
. . . [T]his, when she considered it, was simply the essence of the
aristocratic situation."
But there is more to say about Madame
Merle. Remarkable and irresistible— yet always opaque — she carries everyone
forward with her endearing conversational intelligence and allure, and yet throughout
the novel James never permits us to participate in her own internal dialogue
the way we do with Isabel. We only learn about her what we are told; she almost
never reveals herself. Still, when James periodically returns to his America vs
Europe theme, he reliably raises a particular quality in reference to Madame
Merle: she lacks an American "naturalness." She had been, he says, "too
much overlaid by custom and her angles too much smoothed. . . . [S][he had rid
herself of that tonic [American] wilderness . . . ."[10]
(b) Mr.
Osmond. If this is to say that Madame Merle is an enigma, the same has to
be said of Mr. Osmond. Not that James has cheated us in his pre-marital
portrait of the man; rather he has given us all there is — yet leaving us to assume
there will be more. In this phase of the book our impression of him is not
intended to be negative. At most Osmond gives off the impression of a slight
sadness and a distinct unconventionality[11].
His "keynote" was that he left the appearance "of thinking that
life was a matter of connoisseurship" colored also, perhaps, by his "never
[having] forgiven Providence for not making him an English duke." And there
is also this. Once he divines that Isabel had rejected Lord Warburton's
proposal[12],
it casts a new light on the girl whom he has previously regarded with
admiration and interest, but not ardor. Now the idea of including in his
collection a woman who has had the high mindedness to have rejected a member of
aristocracy is important to him.
James gives closer attention to Osmond's
character after the marriage. Following another
break (three years) we learn that the couple lost a child in the second year and
we also detect various collateral strains — including between Isabel and Mrs.
Merle. Isabel now wears a serene mask colored by a kind of violence even though
she continues her "great love of movement, of gaiety, of late hours, of
long drives, . . . ; an eagerness to be entertained, . . . to make
acquaintances . . . ." But where there was once curiosity, there is now
indifference. Ralph (whom James calls an "apostle of freedom") tells
his cousin that she should have selected a more active man "with a freer
nature." "[T]here's something small in Osmond. . . . I think he's
narrow, selfish. He takes himself so seriously. . . . [He has] the
sensibilities of a sterile dilettante."
James himself remains circumspect. Osmond,
he says, had always had an eye for "effect" and his effects had now been
embellished by marriage with the best material.
"Osmond lived exclusively for the world.
[But] far from being its master, as he pretended to be, he was its very humble
servant. . . . Everything he did was pose
— a pose so deeply calculated
that . . . one mistook it for impulse. . . . His ambition was not to please the
world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then
declining to satisfy it."
5. The Crisis. A moment arrives
when Osborne shows a more concrete ambition than that, however. Lord Warburton reappears
and signals his interest in Osmond's now 19-year-old daughter Pansy[13],
still a naif. Because of his wife's earlier friendship with Lord Warburton,
Osmond expects Isabel to produce an engagement. Here is trouble — and even
beyond the husband's peremptory expectation of cooperation. First, Isabel realizes
that she and Lord Warburton had not totally severed their tie. It was still
there, "as thin as a hair, but there were moments when she seemed to hear
it vibrate." Second, and much more important, she also secretly admits
that she has come to mistrust her husband who had a "faculty for making
everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked
at."
She finally sees it: he hates her! Most
of the rest of the novel concerns how she must and must not deal with that —
beginning with a lengthy chapter during which Isabel meditates deeply into the
night[14].
Originally, she and Osmond had both entirely agreed that he was "the first
gentleman in Europe." Only now does she see the unrealized implication: He
had "a sovereign contempt for everyone but some three or four very exalted
people whom he envied." Now she grasps that her "real offense"
"was her having a mind of her own
at all. . . . He didn't wish her to be stupid. On the contrary, it was because
she was clever that she had pleased him. . . . [A]nd so far from desiring her
mind to be a blank, he had flattered himself that it would be richly
receptive."
As
for himself, Osmond had likewise perceived that Isabel
"was not what he had believed she
would prove to be. He had thought at first he could change her, and she had
done her best to be what he would like. But she was, after all, herself . . . .
She had effaced herself, when he first knew her; she had made herself small,
pretending there was less of her than there really was. It was because she had
been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put
forth."
The two of them now quarrel overtly
between themselves for the first time. Conducted in the fashion of that day, it
is a deadly confrontation (though by contemporary standards it would also come
across as the epitome of good breeding — which it also is)[15].
But it is also decisive because it culminates both in Isabel's unwillingness to
cooperate in Pansy's fate and in her unilateral decision to return to England
against Osmond's wishes to care for Ralph in his dying days.
The break in the marriage would now seem
to be utterly complete and the story to be reaching a bleak but now predictable
conclusion. Isabel — who has always been private and self-contained — actually expresses
aloud to her friend Henrietta Stackpole that she is "miserable,"
something she would never have admitted to Osmond. But why did she say this to
Henrietta, a lesser character, and not to her beloved cousin Ralph or either of
the two men who were most directly interested in her happiness? Because Henrietta
"was a woman, she was a sister; she was not Ralph, nor Lord Warburton nor Caspar
Goodwood, and Isabel could speak."
6. The Portrait of a Lady. It was
at this moment and with this remark that I realized that as readers we had
never been shown that Isabel had a beating heart. She was always admirable,
recognizably human, and enormously complicated. But it was the misery that was missing. And once James
puts it expressly before us, he doesn't even end the story. Instead, he proceeds
to lay out an intractable problem which he deliberately leaves unsolved — a
problem and which does not seem even to be part of today's contemporary
conversation about feminism.
Before entering those turbulent waters,
however, I will say that it was also at about this same time in the novel that
it occurred to me that James had not made any significant use of the word
"lady," which after all is the title of his book. In my unreliable
notes I find I have only two references, both from relatively late in the
story. One of them is James's observation after the marriage that Isabel had
become "a fine lady who was supposed to represent something." The other
occurred before the quarrel I mentioned, during a scene where Isabel obliquely
introduces the subject of marriage to the innocent Pansy who has her eye on a
rather dull young American man. This ignites a shy but eager response from the
girl that she would appreciate Isabel's advice.
"'It's difficult for me to advise
you,' Isabel rejoined. 'I don't know how I can undertake that. That's for your
father; you must get his advice, and above all, act on it.'
"At
this Pansy dropped her eyes; for a moment she said nothing. 'I think I should
like your advice better than papa's,' she presently remarked.
"'That's
not as it should be,' said Isabel coldly. 'I love you very much, but your
father loves you better.'
"'It isn't because you love me —
it's because you're a lady,' Pansy answered with the air of saying something
very reasonable. 'A lady can advise a young girl better than a man."
To me it seems that these two
remarks, taken together, ask the reader to think, not about the inherent power that women have — as emphasized by
modern feminism — but rather about the responsibility
they had if they achieved the status of a "lady" — as understood in
Victorian times. Early in the book, Madame Merle had candidly confessed to
Isabel that she was ambitious[16],
which of course is often a fault and a very close cousin to the exercise of
power. But Isabel, whose reflections James gives us at almost every turn, never
shows such a defect. Instead, without being didactic, James takes the trouble
to pit Isabel's most attractive personal qualities — which emphatically include
a sense of decency and obligation — not only against the ambitions of both her
husband and Madame Merle but more broadly also against the less congenial conventions
of the Victorian era.
Furthermore, Isabel is not part of a
movement. Her ruminations and decisions are inevitably centered upon herself
and her circle and upon her own intelligent evaluation of the personal
circumstances which the novelist has presented her[17].
The novel is a portrait of a particular
lady, Isabel Archer, and the Victorian context notwithstanding, she is most
dramatically portrayed as set off against the background of James's simultaneous
portraits of the other women. This is why Henry James today is probably
regarded as no more than a proto-feminist (assuming the subject comes up at
all). Today's frantic feminism does not really tolerate a passive Victorian
reading of this novel.
James concludes The Portrait of A Lady without a resolution. Isabel, still turning
things over in her mind, considers her future under striking personal circumstances.
Six years have passed in the course of the story. She now has, on the one hand,
the experiences, expectations, and conventions of a woman of wealth living in a
European Victorian world. On the other, she also still has parallel
experiences, expectations, and natural instincts of a clever, mature American woman
of good sense. It means that she has no illusions now, but also that she must
act. Whatever is to come will not be a girl's dream.
(January 2017)
[1]
A second level is not an essential component to the story; I think of it like
the deeper sections of the orchestra underscoring the theme. I find it most
exciting, however, in authors like Joyce and Nabokov: brilliant deliberate
obscurity amounting to a direct challenge to the reader and often with an
intentional joke built into it— "Catch me if you can."
[2]
At the top of my list is The Wings of the
Dove, followed by The Portrait of a
Lady, and then The Golden Bowl.
[3]
Ralph, slowly dying from an unnamed disease, is secretly responsible for her getting
the unexpected inheritance from his father, uncle Touchett. Isabel is ignorant
of this until very late in the story.
[5]
Of Henrietta, Isabel says "she is a kind of
emanation of the great democracy [America] — of the continent, of the country,
of the nation. . . ."
[7]
Cool and tasteful by nature, he seems only mildly interested in the prospect.
Isabel herself has much the same initial reaction towards him and of course is totally
ignorant of the older woman's intentions.
[9]
Osborne's lack of means was a knotty point for me throughout the novel. It is
repeatedly emphasized as a denominating feature, and yet the character himself
maintains an apparently attractive home in Florence, travels at whim to Rome,
and collects (at bargain prices) some very valuable art pieces.
[10]
In retrospect it seems to me that the word
"natural" (contra "artificial") — and for that matter the
word "smooth" — occur with some significant regularity in the story. Osmond
says "I sometimes think we have got into a rather bad way, . . . marrying
foreigners, forming artificial tastes, playing tricks with our natural
mission." Later he tells Isabel, "A woman's natural mission is to be
where she is most appreciated." And when Caspar Goodwood is finally able
to bring himself to ask Isabel out loud what she has made of her life, he says,
"[Y]ou yourself say you are happy, and you are somehow so still, so
smooth. . . . You conceal everything."
[11]
Whenever Osmond is in a scene, James is sure to point out that he inevitably
stretches himself out at length when sitting, his arms often behind his head.
It is a deceptive look of languor and indifference, but belies his intelligence
and concentrated attention.
[14]
In the midst of these very tangled and somber thoughts, James leaves a joke.
Isabel remembers that Mr. Osmond had told her that she had "the moral
horizon of a Unitarian minister. Poor Isabel, who had never been able to
understand Unitarianism!"
[15]
I might add that the art of such combat, which really requires opponents of equivalent
status, has died in the last 100 years or so. Today, when I see one side show
the rapier, the other, more often than not, will snivel, change the subject, or
repair to tu quoque. If they have a weapon at all, it is the sledgehammer or —
most cowardly — subsequent defamation in a different venue.
[17]
At one point, I confess, Isabel makes the modern remark that her clothes (which
I agree were something else in 1874) are "imposed" on her "by
society."
James Joyce, Ulysses — (II)
About a decade ago I made my first trip through Ulysses and now I have just completed the odyssey again (2016). Here is a novel which has no narrator and is insistent in moving forward mainly through the thoughts and sentence fragments of its dozens of characters. It is both showy and challenging. And yet looming over all of the devices, characters, and allusions, on every page we inevitably encounter the unidentified James Joyce.[1] So here is what I conclude about Joyce himself — meaning his talents and genius — as derived from this remarkable and unusual novel.
First, notwithstanding that Ulysses is widely considered to be a great, path-breaking effort, there are reasons to question that conclusion. After all, though the idea of using one of history's greatest epic poems as an inspirational format might be ingenious, in another sense it is surely derivative as well. After all, The Odyssey itself consciously echoes the story of the House of Atreus, meaning to me that Ulysses is demonstrably third in line.
This does not necessarily constitute a criticism. The idea remains clever, though not astonishing, and it is as well realized as could be. Is it more audacious for Joyce to suggest a comparison of himself to Homer than it was it was for Shaw was to put himself beside Shakespeare? At his best, Shaw was very good; Joyce is also very good, but the great Caesar himself was honest enough to note (and lament) that he was still not the recreation of Alexander. And yet, I give Joyce credit for the audacity of the comparison. Great authors really do stand apart from the others. Why disparage a new one with demonstrable talent for nominating himself for the pantheon? His will not be the only vote.
But in addition to his "talents," I also just adverted to Joyce's "genius." Here is a fraught word. In today's newspaper, for instance, I just read an article discussing the "genius" subject in reference to five different books which supposedly attribute genius to specific persons. The writer, whom I do not fault, dealt with three books about people of science (pure and applied), one about a Broadway playwright, and the last about a World War II general. I am in no way situated to argue that any of these prodigies was less than a genius in his or her own field, but a conversation with any educated person would produce a good deal of disagreement about what "genius" is, after all. (Until he died, Ray Charles, I believe, was happy to advertise himself as "The Genius.")
To add my own idiosyncratic views to that conversation —while still trying to confine this reflection to Joyce and this particular novel — I distinguish between (a) what genius is and (b) its advertised specimens. It does little good to start with specimens though. That list would be long and incoherent. What comes first is the admissions test.
So what is genius? High intelligence is not enough; the intellect must be applied to something worthwhile. So my own definition is that if a person has a genius it means he has an uncanny ability —in concert with a capacious intelligence and often after years of patient study — to see, describe, analyze, and often solve and explain intractable and lofty problems with bracing, rejuvenating simplicity. Furthermore, geniuses always share one additional quality with their less-gifted cousins: a mastery of their medium. So for me, it's pointless to look for specimens in every field. Some fields are barren of problems of edifying significance[2].
My own interest is directed toward the genius who creates and who, willy-nilly, has become our teacher by virtue of a body of work, challenging, but both simple and beautiful[3]. If this limits the discussion, it also opens it beyond scientific and philosophic matters to include artists and thinkers like Plato, Paul of Tarsus, Leonardo, Shakespeare, and Mozart — and eliminates the occasional flash in the pan.
And yet this is still unsatisfying, perhaps because I have left out "passion" as a part of the equation. The word "passion," which in this era has a special cachet, might seem an obvious element of genius, although I rather think it is at war with both reason and beauty. To me passion seems no more essential to genius than the psychological terms "obsession" or even "compulsion." Freudian pathologies still remain popular, but it debases the entire idea of genius to insist upon them as essential to the definition. However there is another ingredient which seems a likelier candidate: a talent for noticing both the likenesses between unlike things and differences between things which are supposedly similar. Joyce certainly has this knack, by which I mean that in Ulysses he and his characters are constantly bombarded by and expressing how one thought or image creates or collides with something entirely unrelated, and illuminates them both[4].
As for any genius's given medium, it is not enough just to call Joyce's medium "literature" and let it go at that. Literature is creative, but virtually none of its practitioners or their product is at the genius level. When the literary world refers to Ulysses as a product of Joyce's genius, I assume it is because of his unprecedented craftsmanship within that medium, applied to an idiosyncratic view of life's meaning, using superficially incoherent ingredients. More concretely, Joyce makes wholesale use of the so-called "stream of consciousness" literary style[5] to tell — with both pleasant and also remarkably unpleasant fragments of thought, conversation, incidents, memories, myths, songs, etc. —a quotidian tale of a long day in the internal life of a man killing time in Dublin.
Putting it another way, whether or not I can call Joyce passionate, it does seem to me that he is certainly a compulsive noticer who has called upon and synthesized scraps of wonderful, elusive, and heterogeneous notions in his creation of Ulysses. Here are a few of the subjects a reader should prepare to encounter if he hopes to profit from the novel: Homer (of course), opera, the layout of Dublin, Hebrew, Gaelic, English and Irish poetry, Irish history, church Latin, and Shakespeare. And yet simply to say that Joyce knew and cared about each of these things is no more penetrating than to say that Michelangelo knew how to mix paint. The point is that in Joyce, the passion and the genius seem to drive the noticing.
And now the vision. "What is my nation?" asks Captain Macmorris in Henry V, anticipating Joyce by a few hundred years. Joyce implicitly asks the same question. It seems to be an angry question, too, probably because the answer never becomes clear in Ulysses or in the mind of its author. Bloom, the main character, both a Jew and an Irishman, struggles with this duality and it's hard not to conclude that Joyce himself is tormented by a similar unresolved internal struggle[6].
Regardless of Joyce's obvious great fondness for his three main characters, Bloom, Steven, and Molly, his overriding love (and doubt) is fixed on Ireland and how all of those magpie fragments he assembles to tell his characters' simple story shed light on it. But they don't solve it; at most they accommodate it. When it comes to literature, some would argue that this is no flaw, that Joyce did all he intended when he left his readers sifting through the clues for their own answers and a mild sense of resolution.
But earlier I fixed on simplicity and clarity as reliable indicators pointing toward genius. Should I not also acknowledge that a mysterious ambiguity in a literary work can also be a most seductive quality: an invitation to re-read it again and again, each visit likely to bring new rewards. In this sense, Ulysses is overwhelmingly seductive. It can leave one with the unshakable conviction that the answer is surely there, if only he works more at it.
But if the answer is not there, then the technique of leaving such an impression is not so much literary genius as it is — to use a modern concept — marketing genius. In my view Ulysses is an extremely clever novel, worth reading and re-reading. But I think it ultimately fails the vision test.
[2] Goodbye to Bobby Fischer. Also eliminated are otherwise remarkable people in secondary fields, e.g. surgeons, athletic coaches, generals, politicians, etc.
[3] I am sorry to live in an age in which beauty is often dismissed by the bien pensant as superfluous, artificial, and even gauche.
[5] Joyce didn't invent the methodology; Proust beat him to it by several years and I believe there were others as well.
[6] More than once as readers we confront "agandath netaim," and the elusive concept of whether a promised land might also be a waste land.
James Joyce, Ulysses -- (I)
Uncongenial and often irritating, this novel is widely considered the great mountain of twentieth century English literature. I do have several reservations, however. My first thought is about fairness. A man who writes a book like this reminds me somewhat of those hermits of early Christianity who would sit atop a great column for 30 years and then die. Their reasons for taking such an extreme measure are ostensibly private, other-worldly, and for the greater glory of God; but the act is also highly ostentatious and the actors deliberately excite public regard and comment. What do they mean by doing such things and in such a way?
Is it reasonable -- or fair -- for Joyce to ask me to make an effort to understand his private jokes, sentence fragments, and abstruse references? Even if the answer is yes, it is a subjective answer because -- to oversimplify -- the esoteric writer has two missions. The first is a mission of technique: he must use his puzzles, allusions, etc. to keep the reader reading with interest, with curiosity, and above all with anticipation of the second (actually the primary) mission: "the meaning of it all." For without the "meaning" (which I distinguish from the odious "message" novels), the esoteric novel becomes a shaggy dog story. The distinguishing feature of a great novel is not that it provides a message, but that it always provides a distinctive alternate world and a distinctive point of view.
This brings me to simplicity. Ulysses is so difficult because Joyce has invented a new way to tell his story: a kaleidoscopic perspective. He "moves the camera," as Hollywood might put it, and he certainly likes to include sound effects. (Interestingly, another element that innovative novelists manipulate -- time -- is treated more or less conventionally; indeed, I would say that it is about the only reliable feature of the structure. I wonder, by the way, whether I am correct that Bloom and Molly have more or less simultaneous orgasms, though in different parts of town.) This complex technique, which certainly has its intellectual rewards for the reader, is used to illustrate a simple and sweet theme concerning love and fate.
And so when I say that Ulysses is uncongenial and irritating, that is my subjective reference to the technique and not the theme. I do take some satisfaction in solving the puzzles and noticing literary devices. But I am never embarrassed to confessing genuine emotion when I read of the death of David Copperfield's mother or the sack of Troy or the fate of Quasimodo. There may be some good laughs in Ulysses, but with the possible exception of Molly's concluding soliloquy, there is little that speaks to the heart (my heart). It is not a novelist's obligation to do that, of course, but a satirical novel (which Ulysses certainly is, in part) virtually guarantees that it will not be "loved" in the traditional sense.
Then there is the matter of punctuation. Let us not forget that as it has developed over the past millennia, punctuation's sole mission has been to clarify the text. Joyce, by contrast, more or less does away with punctuation (thank God he remembered to paragraph occasionally) and necessarily sacrifices clarity. It wasn't an accident, of course, but to my way of thinking, except for the plausible notion that we don't punctuate our own thoughts, why is this a good thing? Indeed, it is not a good thing, it is a stupid thing. And Ulysses, for all its innovation, is really a giant step back beyond the Middle Ages into the days of illuminated manuscripts when reading was confined to the faceless few and understanding was even more limited.
As for the title of the book, I think it's just excellent -- just as I think that Joyce was very well advised to have dropped all the related chapter titles from the published version. This novel is by no means a metaphor and drawing attention to rickety parallels in Homer would do no good. But having a tincture of the Odyssey is just right. And this leads me to what I found to be the most interesting part of the work: the Shakespearean, not Homeric, references. Essentially these take the form of theories about fathership using Hamlet and his father's ghost as a platform to look at Ulysses/Telemachus/ Virag/Bloom/Stephen. In the library, Stephen holds forth brilliantly on Shakespeare but -- and this is one of the few jokes that I laughed at -- when he is asked if his theory is sound, he says that it applies to each of the plays, including those he hasn't read.
A final word about the deliberately abstruse style. In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellman tells us that Joyce criticized T.S. Eliot for publishing a guide to "The Wasteland," remarking that you as a reader are more liable to prize a treasure if you worked on locating it instead of having it bestowed upon you. Fair enough. But then I also learn that Joyce himself had his own written structure for Ulysses -- discussing the parallels with the Odyssey, the body parts emphasized in each chapter, the varying styles employed and the reasons therefor, etc. -- which was widely circulated among his friends though embargoed for the rest of the world. Of course Ulysses is about 600 pages long and I imagine the structure is 3 or 4. Nevertheless, this underlines my point about fairness and the novelist's mission. Is the book written for a secret club whose members use a secret password?
1 comment:
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