"Joyce as critic".
McLuhan, H. Marshall
The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Edited by Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann. United Kingdom Press. $5.00.
James Joyce, the first native Irish writer to achieve the Dantesque
level of performance, published a considerable body of criticism in his
lifetime. Now it is all between two covers, and there are also several
unpublished essays translated from Italian for the first time. To those
who have followed every contour and every resonance of Joyce's
works, it is almost traumatic to encounter him chatting about Blake or
Parnell in the ordinary patterns of prose. Joyce used to intimidate
Yeats while listening to the great man converse by saying: "Why
don't you put it into creative order?" Here is Joyce in his
shirtsleeves talking prosaically about things he did elsewhere put into
creative order. It is obvious that he had no subliminal side to him. He
was terribly aware. His "silence, exile, cunning" was a bare
necessity of existence. What Kenneth Galbraith calls the "vested
interests of acquired knowledge" can never tolerate such
clairvoyance in any time or place. And even had Joyce remained a
practicing Catholic his earthly course could not have been less stormy.
For, in the secular order, he spoke with the "authority of
knowledge" to those who will always be content to live with
derivative opinion.
Two essays on "Drama and Life" (1900) and
"Ibsen's New Drama" (1900) are of great relevance to the
student of Joyce, showing how seriously he took drama into every phase
of his own work. In literature we allow conventions, for literature is a
comparatively low form of art. Literature is kept alive by tonics; it
flourishes through conventions in all human relations, in all activity.
Drama will for the future be at war with convention, if it is to realize
itself truly. And Finnegans Wake is pure drama. It touches in the most
effective way what Joyce saw as the core of drama. But the naked
drama--either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a
great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the
actors--this is what primarily rivets our attention. In a word Joyce
realized that Aquinas also is drama in the highest mode.
There is a full length essay on Blake (1912) translated from
Italian. It is of the greatest interest. Joyce admired Blake for his
personal heroism: "It seems to me that Blake is not a great
mystic--in him the visionary faculty is directly connected with the
artistic faculty--Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural
wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of
memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the
divine bosom." Again: "A full study of Blake's
personality should logically be divided into three phases--the
pathological, the theosophical, and the artistic. The first, I believe
we can dismiss without many qualms. Saying that a great genius is mad,
while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying he
had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes."
At the end of an essay (translated from Italian) on Galivay, called
"The City of the Tribes" (1912), there is this paragraph which
will reveal a good deal to the Joyce student: "The evening is quiet
and grey. From the distance, beyond the waterfall, comes a murmur. It
sounds like the hum of bees around a hive. It comes closer. Six young
men appear, playing bagpipes, at the head of a band of people. They
pass, proud and warlike, with heads uncovered, playing a vague and
strange music. In the uncertain light you can hardly distinguish the
green plaids hanging from the right shoulder and the saffron-coloured
kilts. They enter the street of the convent of offerings, and, as the
vague music spreads in the twilight, at the windows of the convent
appear, one by one, the white veils of the nuns."
H. Marshall McLuhan
University of Toronto
"JOYCE AS CRITIC" (7)
(7) Renascence 12.4 (1960): 202-203.
