"One wheel, all square".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

The Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. Viking. $7.50.

A Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles. By Adaline Glasheen. Northwestern University Press. $5.00.

Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. By William M. Shutte. Yale University Press. $4.00.

Dedalus on Crete: Essays on the Implications of Joyce's Portrait. Saint Thomas More Guild, Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles.

The James Joyce Review, Vol. 1, No. 1. Edited by Edmund L. Epstein. $1.00.

"By way of Clongowes Fr. Conmee used to say my letters home were like grocer s lists." The reader of this volume will find it loaded with groceries, animal, vegetable, and mineral. No richer collection of letters exists. From one point of view the book is an unwitting indictment of our age. To those who have no first-hand assurance of Joyce's artistic stature this aspect of the volume will not prove very discomfiting. But Joyce's case with publishers, critics, and friends is a discouraging exemplum concerning the narrow limits of human perception and good will. Not that both of these were lacking entirely for Joyce. But they proved puny and useless to save him from frantic labors and misery. There would appear to be an intuitive recognition of all men of high vitality like Joyce, and a secret determination to make them pay for this power, even on the part of their friends of ordinary vitality. Have we not all seen fine artists surrounded by well-to-do well-wishers who relish the association but do nothing to relieve the daily plight of the artist? This is not the result of stupidity--not every time. There is a deep resentment of the artists' powers even among their closest friends.

As for the power of committees of philanthropic foundations to spot or support talent, no hope or help can possibly exist in that quarter until they entrust the whole operation to a secret service division. An anonymous gum-shoe squad disguised as beat-up bohemians might ferret out some genuine talent. But a James Joyce would never dream of applying to a Foundation for aid. Not while sweep-stakes tickets are still available. The figure of Harriet Shaw Weaver emerges in a most benign light, because her bequests to Joyce from 1917 led to his keeping her supplied with copies of his work as it progressed. Accompanying the samples of Ulysses and the Wake went his often detailed exegeses. It is a striking instance of that natural wish of the artist to instruct his patrons and consumers.

As Joyce said, "My consumers are they not my producers?" But this wish to instruct the audience has been frustrated since the rise of the huge middle-class public after the Napoleonic wars. The middleman then appeared, to mediate between artist and over-sized public. And the middleman soon began to call the tune to both artist and public.

These exegeses of his own work supplied to Miss Weaver, which have been accessible to some critics already, are frequent in the present collection. They should be made available in a separate volume, together with similar comments (if any) for which room was not found in the present collection. It is these notes on his methods of work and expression which will put Joyce studies on a very different basis from now on: "I am writing Ithaca in the form of a mathematical catechism," begins his account of that matter. And of the Wake: "I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I'm driving at, don't you? ... You must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it's a wheel, I tell the world. And its [sic-ed.] all square."

There is the impressive enactment of the twilight of madness descending on Swift for which Joyce provided Gilbert with a word by word key. Gilbert reprints the key. This item is followed by one of the most depressing things in all of English literature--namely, H. G. Wells's letter of appraisal to Joyce which begins, "My dear Joyce: I've been studying you and thinking you over a lot." The great pulpeteer and cooker-up of sciencefiction takes us into his constabulary bosom and licks his pencil and marks his pad with deep sincerity and even deeper stupidity. Did not this crass mind once note the style of Henry James as the effort of an elephant to pick up a pea? Well, his letter to Joyce is the perfect example of the pea trying to pick up the elephant. It exceeds even the genteel fog and vulgarity of mind of Edmund Gosse, who was also led into undying public folly on the subject of Joyce.

When Wyndham Lewis portrayed the puny trivialities of Bloomsbury in The Apes of God, he was accused of wasting heavy artillery on petty subjects by the victims themselves. It all gives so spuriously to think.

Writing of the madness of his daughter Lucia, Joyce concludes, "I do wish I was settled in a home, sweet home with a piano to which I could sing Come into the garden Maud every evening at 6 p.m." There are terrible letters like the one about Lucia which concludes, "I do not like you to mention her in the same breath with my cousin or sister or anybody else. If she could be so mentioned then it is I who am mad." Nothing could be more touching than the Italian letter written to Lucia and translated into English by her: "But the flower that is born from our land takes some time to grow and one does not see immediately the true sense of the proceedings.... I am slow O yes. 8 years to write a book and 18 for its successor. But I will understand in the end." The endocrine ailment which destroyed Lucia, Joyce was able to spot in time in the case of the daughter of Siegfried Giedion. What the doctors were unable to do for Lucia Joyce, he was able to do for Miss Giedion. Dr. Giedion told me this himself. There is in a letter to Miss Weaver a wonderful parody of The Waste Land, which contains such lines as:

   I heard mosquitoes swarm in old Bordeaux
   So many!
   I had not thought the earth contained so many
   (Hurry up, Joyce, it's time)....
    But we shall have great times,
    When we return to Clinic, that waste land
    O Escalapios !
    (Shan't we? Shan't we? Shan't we?)

Is it not ridiculous that people should deprive themselves of the pleasure of knowing that they have lived with greatness? Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Yeats--these figures are not just national but global giants whose work our words and thoughts and feelings have nourished. But the greatest of these is Joyce. And the Letters are now here to elucidate that fact. A Census of Finnegans Wake tackles Joyce's alchemy of the world from a special point of view: "The Earwickers play human history in a series of dramatic roles in the manner of actors in old stock companies.... Much of the fun of Finnegans Wake hangs on the Earwickers being such very bad actors. They will not sink their own clamorous voices in their parts, they continually break off their lines to address the audience or rail at one another. Characters from one drama wander into a second: Swift's struldbrugs leer at the mating of Tristram and Isolde; Brutus and Cassius quarrel over Cleopatra.... An actor often plays several parts at once.... Issy is both Isoldes, both Swift's Esthers. She plays parts as diverse as Alice and Ophelia."

This much having been said, it should be plain that Joyce was all his life attempting to devise means of coping with the problems of inclusive consciousness that have been thrust on men by the simultaneous and instantaneous flow of information which results from electronic channels since the advent of the telegraph. Anybody who can look at Joyce and say, "It is all very confusing," has not looked at the world he lives in. Joyce is order, mastery, lucidity compared to the ordinary daily press or the university curriculum. Joyce's work is a synthesis not merely of information but of all the methods men have ever devised for coping with experience. Other poets have used a method for ordering experience. Joyce devised a method for handling all their methods simultaneously. He revealed the dimensions of the living world as the source and type of all creation. Puns are merely one of his ways of revealing the complex vitality of the most ordinary words. But for cultures unwittingly bound to writing and print the riches of ordinary speech are baffling and terrifying. A being equipped with two-dimensional perception would be confounded by an encounter with even a three-dimensional object.

The difficulty of trying to isolate names in the Wake is clear from the author's comment: "I am not here concerned with the language of Finnegans Wake, but only with the thousands of proper names that occur on the language level of the book.... I call these thousands of people 'tropes,' though I should very much like to be given a better word." Joyce would probably have said, "Oh, tripes," and set up a tripos for Miss Glasheen.

A few years ago Maritain lectured in Toronto frequently mentioning the "longing for God," but it always sounded like "lunging for God." On looking up the word "longing" in the OED, I discovered that it is indeed related to "lunge," that length of rope used to exercise a horse in a circle. This is an instance of the sort of awareness which Joyce had of all levels of language and discourse as a living and inter-related verbal universe.

According to William M. Shutte, "the importance of the Shakespeare theme in Ulysses is suggested by the first scene in the book, in which both setting and action recall the early scenes of Hamlet." Stephen "has associated himself not with Hamlet the son but Hamlet the father, the solitary ghost whose hair in death as in life, Horatio tells us again, was 'a sable silver'd.' ... In this context, as at the opening of 'Telemachus' Mulligan is Claudius. And Stephen is now the elder Hamlet, who paces the path above the rocks, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood."

In a footnote Shutte adds: "The shift from Prince to King is consistent with the handling of the paternity theme throughout Ulysses" for Stephen in the Library episode features the heresy of Sabellius who "held that the Father was Himself His Own Son."

Once Joyce got moving along the lines of analogy in literature and life he provided more material for exegetes than anybody who ever wrote. We are still in the age of the first exegetes of Joyce, and they will "never have it so good again." The game is so tame and plentiful at this stage that every student feels like a Nimrod, and with reason.

"Stephen Dedalus, as we have seen, frequently imagines himself as successor to Shakespeare and uses Shakespeare in an attempt to define his relation to the world around him. The same cannot be said for Leopold Bloom. In 'Ithaca' Bloom distinguishes his temperament from that of his guest. Stephen's is artistic; his is scientific."

Now Bloom the advertising copy-writer is the hero of this epic. His dealings with Shakespeare are voluminous but via oral cliche. Joyce uses Bloom's peculiar awkwardness of Shakespeare as a principal means of characterizing his resourceful nature.

It is Shutte's theme, however, that it is Bloom who for Joyce corresponds to Shakespeare. While Stephen daringly draws attention to his own approximation to Shakespeare, Joyce simply trumps his arty pretension by making Bloom correspond point by point: "Similarity in temperament and outlook is emphasized by Stephen's labelling Shakespeare a 'commercial traveller,' an occupation which suits Bloom because it allows him time and scope for his dilettantising and dreams."

As Joyce's Letters show, he was far more industrious as a note-taker and a literary researcher than any Ph.D. student or Guggenheim Fellow of whom there is yet record. Perhaps after a century of organized team-work some adequate picture of Joyce's industry and insight may emerge. Shutte has given quite a boost to this process.

It was an excellent idea to center the efforts of a college integration program on a work of Joyce, the experiment which gave rise to Dedalus on Crete. Is it not strange that colleges have not long ago made the obvious discovery that artists are masters of integration? In any age they devote their entire energies to creating the most luminous analogical order for the unique experience of that age. Since no human age ever embraced such scope or diversity as our own, the artists of this time have been given superhuman tasks. And to match these tasks a race of superhuman artists has appeared. Joyce is the greatest of these. But in painting, music, architecture, and science our thrilling but unhappy age has seen the limits of human effort touched again and again.

The inspired use which a Pound or an Eliot makes of Dante provides for this time the right approach to Dante. The extensive use which Joyce made of Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare provides the ideal portals through which to enter their worlds. By contrast the chronological procedure is based on the evolutionary and biological metaphors which have had no relevance to twentieth-century modes of experience. This is not to be a-historical. On the contrary, we know today that nothing is more false to history than lineality.

The present small book born of an integration program is introduced by Joseph Feehan saying that the aim was "to give the entire student body an experience of joint learning. As teachers, few things have excited our envy quite so much as the spectacle of a group of architectural students engaged in a corporate attack on a problem, each individual's solution to which became at once common property and the subject of scathing criticism from the entire group ... What we most wanted to do was to cut across department and catalogue lines to counteract the splintering and compartmentalizing of knowledge."

Obviously Feehan is proposing a return to the oral as opposed to the written and printed traditions of learning. And to me this seems only common sense in our century, though it certainly does not imply any rejection of books.

Students and teachers alike contributed to this volume, the fine title essay on "Dedalus on Crete" being by a professor, John Frederick Nims. The new Joyce Review should have no trouble in finding many excellent pieces to publish. The first issue contains Joyce's own youthful essay on Mangan, as well as the earliest sections of E W. with discussion by M. J. C. Hodgart. J. Mitchell Morse in an essay on "Art and Fortitude: Joyce and the Summa Theologica" considers the uncompromising renunciations of Joyce's life as a writer. Northrop Frye in "Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake" traces some parallels between the work of Blake and that of Joyce. Finally Ruth yon Phul in "A Note on the Donkey in F. W." pursues the idea that "there are veiled suggestions that Joyce may have come to the end of a quest in Finnegans Wake and there found a faith, if not 'The Faith,' that he is declaring a Christian belief."

H. Marshall McLuhan

University of Toronto

"ONE WHEEL, ALL SQUARE" (6)

(6) Renascence 10.4 (1958): 196-200.