"Compliment accepted".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

Dublin's Joyce. By Hugh Kenner. Indiana University Press. $5.75.

Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation. By Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain. New York University Press. $5.00.

The Early Joyce: The Book Reviews: 1902-1903. Edited by Stanislaus Joyce and Ellsworth Mason. Mamalujo Press. $1.50.

James Joyce: Epiphanies. Edited by O. A. Silverman. Lockwood Library: University of Buffalo. $5.00.

Joyce et Mallarme. By David Hayman. Paris: Lettres Modernes. 2 vols. $4.50.

Joyce and Aquinas. By William T. Noon, S.J. Yale University Press. $3.75.

Kenner's Joyce is an indispensable book. There is no book on Joyce or Eliot that does not contain some new fact or insight that is helpful. But Kenner sets himself the job of showing us how to read Joyce by showing us how he worked. That Joyce should have paid his century the compliment of taking the reader into the creative act was prophetic of the challenge which our technology has presented to the globe itself. The reader's response has been a gaunt whisper: "Another compliment like that and I'm finished." But Kenner shows us how we can accept the compliment and enjoy it. Since nobody who is interested in Joyce at all is going to pass by Kenner's book there is no need to detail his approach. Basically, he differs from all other commentators in stressing the total relevance of Joyce's Roman Catholicism to his art. The stress on "Roman" implies Joyce's radical use of reason as a spiritual faculty and not as a mere instrument. It is Joyce's awareness of reason in this plenary sense that determines his attitude to the verbal universe. Like Pound and Eliot, Joyce assumed that verbal art in the electronic age had to assume the responsibility of precision and power equivalent to the physical sciences. His work simply shoulders the burden both of the alchemy of the word and of the alchemy of history in an act of inclusive consciousness. Kenner shows us how he proceeded in this task which he accomplished triumphantly. It is no reflection on anything but ordinary human limitations that the entire world has not responded to this feat which concerns its health so nearly.

Magalaner and Kain have taken a more modest bite in launching themselves upon the Joycean seas. This is the first PMLA type of work on Joyce. It illustrates how Ph. Deism is going to find Joyce the richest uranium field in the history of human effort. We might as well build new shelves at once to hold the commentaries that are even now moving off the assembly lines of print. It already seems natural to devote an entire graduate course to Joyce, and The Joyce Review has begun to appear. Magalaner and Kain offer a survey of Joyce comment to date plus a bibliography of periodical essays on Joyce which is quite helpful.

The Early Joyce book reviews are mostly from the London Daily Express. Joyce was an avid newspaper reader all his life, never regarding the press as anything less than a powerful new art form. The tone of the reviews is kindly and urbane: their subjects range from Buddhism and Ibsen's Catilina to Lady Gregory's Poets and Dreamers. Of this latter he says: "In her new book she has left legends and heroic youth far behind, and has explored in a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility." And: "out of the material and spiritual battle which has gone so hardly with her Ireland has emerged with many memories of beliefs, and with one belief-- a belief in the incurable ignobility of the forces which have overcome her."

The Buffalo edition of the Epiphanies is a Joyce collector's item issued in 500 copies. There are twenty-two epiphanies, and notes which offer correspondences from his later work. The epiphanies are very limp compared with the later work, but are structured situations, having the proportions of complex dramatic metaphors. It is obvious that Joyce at this early period was training his faculties of perception to obtain riches from the most casual and ordinary matters.

David Hayman's Joyce et Mallarme at last provides an apparatus of actual texts from Mallarme which are discussed with detailed reference to texts from Joyce. He is well aware that it is Un Coup de Deqs, the last work of Mallarme, which Joyce found most useful in his work. The main difference between the method of Mallarme and that of Joyce in Finnegans Wake is that Joyce does with words themselves what Mallarme had done with letters, punctuation, syntax. Mallarme stayed with conventional words. Joyce fabricated freely for each phrase.

It is specifically the theme and techniques of suggestion which Hayman considers in Mallarme and Joyce. But he hits upon some new critical insights right in the middle of the road which has been tramped by so many, as in the matter of the keys in Ulysses: "During the whole day's action of Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen are men without keys. Bloom forgot his in the morning. Stephen handed over the key of the tower at the request of Mulligan ... which reinforces the father-son theme." To be without keys is to be without country and without home. Hayman enlarges on this and many other matters very ably.

Father Noon's Joyce and Aquinas, besides reviewing the entire epiphany question, opens up the Trinitarian theme as Joyce has used it from Aquinas. He suggests that there is some Joycean irony in young Stephen's presentation of Aquinas in the Portrait and that the aesthete's stress on process of aesthetic apprehension was not Joyce's own interest at the time of writing. Rather, as the Zurich notebook says, "he had found in practice another triad that would be more decisive for mature work: "Good diction: tria-metaphor, antithesis, energy." Joyce had, of course, made quite clear in the Portrait that the aesthetic was not a poetic.

It is characteristic of the careful examination that Father Noon makes that he has constantly to brush off many current views of Joyce: "Joyce is about as far from nihilism as you can go and still write novels and not 'tracts for the times.'" Again, "The self-imposed rationalist limits of the comic artist may not allow him to affirm (or deny) the truth of the Catholic's faith in Mary, the Mother of God. His laughter at the behavior of Catholics like Gerty, who do seriously affirm such to be their faith, is however an excellent comic purgative ... The reasonable Catholic is not so much likely to be offended as to feel the need to make a serious examination of his own conscience." Of Finnegans Wake: "The avowal of personal faith is not explicit in the book and seems in the main to be absent, but the whole mythic material in the poetry revolves around a core of theological acceptance." "Joyce never committed himself as a poet to the 'Thomistic system,' any more than he did to any other philosophical system ... He took from each system he encountered what proved most helpful to him as a writer ... Sometimes he qualified what he found; often he dramatized it, earnestly or ironically; almost always he combined it with something else. The fact that Joyce found Aquinas as helpful as he did is at one and the same time a sign, it would seem, of the philosophia perennis and of Joyce's own vast resourcefulness."

H. Marshall McLuhan

University of Toronto

"COMPLIMENT ACCEPTED" (5)

(5) Renascence 10.2 (1957): 106-108.