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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

WHAT WILL SUFFICE:
CULTURE, HISTORY, AND FORM

IN MODERN LITERATURE
presented by

Thomas Carleton Foster

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph . D . degree in English

(3 K 7/11 ELLA-ya

 

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Date July 7, 1980

 

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WHAT WILL SUFFICE:

CULTURE, HISTORY, AND FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

by

Thomas Carleton Foster

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1981

ABSTRACT

WHAT WILL SUFFICE:
CULTURE, HISTORY, AND FORM IN MODERN LITERATURE

by

Thomas Carleton Foster

Through a close examination of four major works: The

Waste Land, Ulysses, Go Down, Moses and the lyric poetry of

 

 

William Butler Yeats, this study discusses Modernist
literature as a formal response to historical, political, and
cultural forces. It also contains an extensive discussion of
previous attempts at defining Modernism and of contemporary
critical theories.

Chapter one deals with the existing body of criticism
on the Modernists. A great deal of commentary on Modern
literature has accepted and promoted the notion that it is
an aesthetic, decultured formalism spawned by the Symbolist
rebellion against utilitarian art, a suggestion created in
part at least by the writers themselves in their various
defenses of their writings; or else it has pursued the
approach that Modernism grows out of Naturalism carried to
its furthest limit. Different though they are in many
respects, these two approaches share an understanding of
literature as growing out of other literature; that is, to
use Eliot's phrase, the works of literature form an ideal
order among themselves. In the work of formalist critics
from the New Critics through Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom

this insular View of literature is carried to its limits:

Thomas Carleton Foster

the existing monuments form an order impervious to ”extra—
literary" forces. Against these views are others, particu—
larly the Marxists', which examine the form of the Modernist
work as sociological detritus, as evidence of the breakdown
of the bourgeois society. Chapter two considers these
conflicting arguments and attempts to map out a course which,
rather than privileging either literary history or socio-
political history, sees literature as an active encounter
with its time as well as its own literary antecedents. The
chapter moreover suggests that the characteristically
Modernist response tends to be formal rather than thematic
because changes in society invalidate the previous,
specifically Victorian literary practices.

Chapters three through six embody criticism of specific

works by Modern writers. Chapter three discusses The Waste

 

Land's formal and mythological elements as Eliot's attempt

to come to grips with the effects of World War I as well as
his attempt to place his poem among the existing monuments.
Chapter four presents a reading of the story, sentence, and

novelistic structure of Go Down, Moses as exemplary of

 

Faulkner's artistic practice accounting for the constant
presence of the remnants of slavery and shattered greatness
in the South of his own time. Chapter five attempts to
connect Yeats's political concerns with the development of
his mythology: finding traditional Irish mythology usurped
by nationalistic propaganda, he elaborates a mythology that

can account for his personal ambivalence and vacillation

Thomas Carleton Foster

regarding the political turmoil of Ireland's struggle for
independence. Finally, chapter six adumbrates a reading of
Ulysses in which the narrative voice of the public episodes,
particularly ”Aeolus," "Cyclops," and "Sirens," can be
explained as the collective experience filtered through
collective political, historical, religious, and cultural
mythology, as a symbolic as well as linguistic mode of

communication.

For my parents,

who believed I could.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professors Linda W. Wagner,
Evan Watkins, and William A. Johnsen for their valuable
and insightful assistance on this work and throughout my
graduate career. My special thanks to Professor R. K.
Meiners for his guidance, advice, and editorial skills,
all of which improved the present work. I also owe a
debt of gratitude to many of my fellow graduate students
with whom I debated issues that eventually led me to my
current critical positions, and particularly to J. Chris
Looney and Robert J. Denn. Most importantly, many thanks
and much love to my wife, Brenda, without whose encouragement,
editing, support, understanding, and typing I never would

have brought this work to fruition.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

Page
INTRODUCTION ..................................... 1
MODERNISM AND THE CRITICS ........................ 5
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY ........................... 21
THE WAR AND THE WASTE LAND ....................... 65
HISTORY AND NARRATIVE FORM IN GO DOWN, MOSES ..... 89
POLITICS AND VISION IN YEATS'S LATER POETRY ...... 111
JOYCE'S GRAMMAR OF EXPERIENCE .................... 152
CONCLUSION ....................................... 184
NOTES ............................................ 188
BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................... 195

iv

INTRODUCTION

This study grew out of a sense of frustration I felt
when I first began to study Modernist literature seriously.
I found that the habits and strategies of reading that I had
acquired in my earlier studies of Romantic and Victorian
works availed me little, while the literary theories I
turned to that were roughly contemporary with Modernism,
specifically New Criticism and archetypal-mythic criticism,
were little better. It seemed to me that the readings I was
able to generate were incomplete, that while they explained
parts of the work very well, they stopped short of dealing
with the whole of the works. And although Marxism provided
a genuine alternative to those approaches, that alternative
seemed to have a deeply ingrained and even constitutional
hostility to Modernism. That is, a great deal of commentary

on Modernist works, and here Ulysses and The Waste Land are

 

prime examples, has followed the tentative lines suggested
by the writers themselves, and a great deal more has been a
reaction against them, a retrenchment of earlier principles
and methods in the face of novelty. Thus the dilemma I
found myself confronting, in general terms at least, seems
to me characteristic of criticism's relation to Modern

literature.

The chapter on Go Down, Moses is a case in point.

 

When I first read that book I was struck by a conviction
that it was a novel, that it did have unity, and that it
deserved attention, as a whole, as one of Faulkner's best
novels. For a long while I labored to show that it was a
single unit and that the essential structure of narrative
from the whole novel down to individual sentences was of a
piece. I delivered a paper on the subject and began to feel
pretty confident that I had accomplished my goal. Then
another question occurred to me: having proved that the
novel had unity, what had I said? The problem soon became
less one of unity than of how I could understand that unity,
that structure which Faulkner elects to use, within the
context about which he is writing. In a fairly short period
of time I found my whole approach to the question of poetic
autonomy shifting. I had previously worked with the unstated
assumption that what I was studying were self-contained
objects with beginnings, middles, and ends, and that these
objects, like Keats's urn, were oblivious to their surround-
ings. I now realized that my earlier assumptions were
unsatisfactory, but I had not yet found anything with which
to replace them.

Several things happened more or less at once to lead me
to where I am now. One was that I decided to take Wallace
Stevens at his word when he says in "Of Modern Poetry" that
poetry had to change because the world it confronted had

changed. Another was that while I rejected the Marxist

notion that literature is somehow subservient to the socio-
economic structure of society, I found the concept of the
literary work as process rather than product very useful.
But the most important element in my arrival at a new
position was that I kept reading Faulkner, and kept working

on Go Down, Moses in particular. The more I read the more

 

I became convinced that the act of literary creation is a
process of coming to terms with history, society, and
literary history, and not simply a matter of producing
well-wrought artifacts.

I then discovered that I had to re-confront the
Modernist works I wished to study according to my new
principles of criticism, if they can be called that, and to
rethink my appraisals of existing critical theories as well.
Moreover, my own confrontation with Modernist works led me
to examine the attempts other critics have made to define
a Modernist movement or a Modernist aesthetic, and here I
again found a suprise. I discovered that my original plan,
to work up a definition of Modernism I could live with, no
longer satisfied me, and it failed due to its very nature:
defining a movement required the collecting of specimens,
the accumulation of objects, and, for me, a return to a
discarded mode of thinking. I found instead that what
really interested me was attempting to articulate a way of
reading books and poems, not constructing a museum in which
to keep them. What I also feared was the tendency of

description to become prescription (as with Aristotle and the

4

criticism of tragedy after him) and to become a principle of
exclusion when it only means to define. I wished instead to
develop a set of principles that would enable me to
encounter the works not as further exhibits but as acts of
confronting their culture.

What follows is the process of articulation, of
discovering that set of principles, or at least a preliminary
set, which will allow some initial soundings to be taken.
There are a number of issues concerning Modernism which this
study will not address; many of them deal with its literary
history or its ancestry, its vital dates, or the list of
authors or works admitted to the congregation. These are
issues which I originally intended to examine, and which I
still find interesting and perplexing, but which are no
longer immediately relevant to my purpose. I hope that what

remains will not be unduly narrow.

MODERNISM AND THE CRITICS

One of the more paradoxical aspects of literary history
in the Twentieth Century is the way in which "modern" has
become a term that applies not to our contemporary literature
but to a literature which is receding into the past. The
application of "Modernism" to the work of writers concerned
with "Making it new,” in Ezra Pound's words, has with the
passing of time changed the connotation from one of newness
to one related to a specific moment in the past. This
situation, itself absurd, leads to others even more so, such
as the naming of the succeeding movement ”Postmodernism,"
which raises the question of how many prefixes the word will
be able to stand (a game of names within names, appropriately
enough for the Modernist sensibility). The modern paradox,
then, is that in following what William Johnsen has called
the "compulsion to be modern,"1 the artist and critic-scholar
have destroyed the term; in their act of being new, they have
created an archaism.

This paradox is merely the first of many encountered by
the student of Modern literature, and very probably the least
significant. At the same time, however, it serves as an
anticipation of difficulties to be raised in attempting to

define what Modernism is, or was, an accomplishment that has

6

yet to be fully realized. Part of the reason for the failure
of any completely satisfactory definition to appear is that
literary definitions are inevitably false, through vagueness
or exclusivity. Nevertheless, it is necessary to examine how
others have described Modernism, in order to provide a
starting place for further discussion.

Even the dates of Modernism are open to debate. To
be sure, the Twentieth Century is marked with dates of
tremendous global significance, including two World Wars,
and yet these dates seem to have little to do with developing
or even defining the artistic sensibility of the period.
The movement was already well underway and the major artists
(except for the American novelists) already established
before the first war, while the movement was Virtually defunct
by World War II, and the artists, particularly the British,
had for the most part died or drifted into silence. Despite
this lack of temporal landmarks, there are general
guidelines, if not specific agreements, concerning the
Modern period. Monroe K. Spears sees 1870 as "marking a
break from the past," while the specific period of Modernism

begins for him in 1909, reaches its anni mirabiles in the

 

years 1922-1925, and virtually ends by 1957.2 Cyril

Connolly believes the period slightly shorter, 1880 marking
the "point at which the Modern Movement can be diagnosed,"

and 1950 ending the movement absolutely. Between those dates,
1910-1925 is the peak period, while at the end of the Thirties

"works like Finnegans Wake or Gide's Journal or Between the

 

 

7

.Agts resound like farewells or epitaphs. Yeats, Joyce,
and Virginia Woolf are gone within six months of each other
and everything the Movement stood for is dubbed 'degenerate
art'--or converted to propaganda."3 The period of most
general interest among critics is roughly outlined by these
dates, and the works to be examined by this study all fall
in the period between the wars, the two decades of intensest
Modernist fervor.

If there is disagreement over the dates of Modernism,
it seems concurrence by comparison with various theories of
what constitutes Modernist writing. The theorists cover the
entire range of literary definitions from neo-Romanticism
to anti-Romanticism, Naturalism, Classicism, Symbolism, and
virtually any combination of these. There are, of course,
agreements within the disputes, as well as disputes over the
value or dESirability of elements even within agreements over
the elements themselves. Significantly, a preponderance of
commentary has focused on the literary history of Modernism
in trying to define it; that is, Modernism is an outgrowth of
i or a reaction to certain previous literary movements. That
commentary should center its attention there holds several
implications not only for understanding Modernism specifically,
but literature generally, as well.

Perhaps the best place to start is with Maurice Beebe's
post—mortem, ”What Modernism Was":

First, Modernist literature is'distinguished by its

formalism. It insists on the importance of structure

and design—-the esthetic autonomy and the independent
whatness of the work of art—-almost to that degree

8

summarized by the famous dictum that "a poem
should not mean but be.” Secondly, Modernism
is characterized by an attitude of detachment
and non-commitment which I would put under the
general heading of "irony" in the sense of the
term as used by the New Critics. Third,
Modernist literature makes use of myth not in
the way myth was used earlier, as a discipline
for belief or a subject of interpretation, but
as an arbitrary means of ordering art. And,
finally, I would date the Age of Modernism from
the time of the Impressionists because I think
there is a clear line of development from
Impressionism to reflexivism. Modernist art
turns back upon itself and is largely concerned
with its own creation and composition. The
impressionists' insistence that the viewer is
more important than the subject viewed leads
ultimately to the solipsistic worlds-within-worlds
of Modernist art and literature.

Beebe here brings together several popular conceptions of
Modernism, all of them growing out of the central notion
that the artiSt is militantly anti-social in his act
of creation. This notion is quite common among critics
of Modernism; Edmund Wilson sees modern literature as a
product of the willful separation from life, of Axel's
castle.5 Once he has removed the artist to the tower, the
individual points he makes follow more or less logically.
There are problems, however, with those considerations, as
of course there are with any sweeping definitions, in that
they either exclude too much of modern literature from
Modernism if strictly applied, or they are only partial.
For instance, his first point, that Modernism is
distinguished by its formalism, is at once true and not very
helpful. The Moderns are essentially formalistic, but
Beebe does not make clear (perhaps it is not possible to

do so) how much formalism is required of a writer before he

9
may be considered a Modernist, and whether or not he must,
like Pound and Eliot, theorize about the form of his art,
about the importance of the structure of his work, before
he is being formalistic. If by formalism Beebe means that
writers consciously reject prescribed forms (metrical lines
and regular stanzas in poetry, authorial intervention,
consistent chapter development, beginning—complication—
climax-denouement structure in the novel) as requirements
of art in favor of a constant struggling after forms which
will satisfy the demands each new work places on the writer,
then his assertion seems valid enough. At the same time,
however, the rejection of the style and form of one
generation by another is scarcely restricted to this century;
Wordsworth's rejection of eighteenth-century poetics in favor
of a purer "form" is but one recent example from earlier
literary history.

This argument is not entirely unfair to Beebe, for it
points up a major problem in Modernist criticism, that while
structure, design, and style-—formalism--are integral parts
of Modernist literature, no one seems to be able to point
to a specific use of any one feature and say, "This is the
characteristic Modernist use of structure.” This is not to
suggest, of course, that there is a single structure common
to all Modern writing. However, at this point few critics
have dealt with Modernist formalism with the depth that
many have shown in dealing with Modernist themes. While the

problem exists with all genres, it is particularly apparent in

10

the case of fiction, for which there is a wealth of
information on the uses of structure and style in various
individual works, but comparatively little of a general
nature that is useful. Nor should this situation be surpris-
ing; it is very difficult to enumerate similarities among
Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolf, Fitzgerald,
Forster, and Ford, to name just a few who must be considered,
once we have noted that all employ justified right margins in
their printed forms. There has been more general discussion
of the characteristic form of modern poetry, but there too it
will be difficult to find uses of form common to not only
Pound and Eliot, but Yeats, Frost, Lawrence, Stevens and Tate.
Beebe's other points suffer from similar difficulties.
As he points out himself, irony is scarcely confined to this
century. The Augustans are probably more detached and
ironic than the Moderns, although it may be that the kinds
of irony are not the same. Similarly, reflexivism, art's
concerning itself with its own creation, predates even
Impressionism by a few hundred years at least, occuring,
among other places, in Milton's early poetry and Shakespeare's
sonnets. Reflexivism may well be more representative of
Modernism as a whole than of any other movement or period.
Beyond this consideration, though, there are really two
points tied up in this one, and it might be valuable to
separate the two. Art's concern with its own production and
worlds-within-worlds does not seem precisely the same. For

instance, the novel's concern with itself is evident in

11

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while A Passage to

 

 

India does not manifest the same traits, and yet both are
concerned with the worlds-within—worlds psychological
interest that nearly everyone acknowledges as distinctly
Modernistic. Reflexivism seems more a point within the
larger point than a characteristic in its own right. It
certainly exists, but the question is whether it is a
universal quality. Then too, it must be remembered that
Beebe first published these remarks in "Ulysses and the
Age of Modernism,” so that his comments are, understandably,
tempered by his work with Joyce.
Beebe's treatment of Modernism is vocally anti-Romantic.
He claims that the movement developed autonomously, without
aid from earlier literary periods, although he is willing
to credit Impressionism for passing reflexivism along to
the Moderns. He also recognizes that his views stand in
direct opposition to those of many other critics who believe
Modernism to have developed directly from Romantic tradition.
Cyril Connolly goes even further, to assert that Modernist
literature is a culmination of the best traits of more than
one previous movement:
The Modern Movement began as a revolt against the
bourgeois in France, the Victorians in England, and
puritanism and materialism in America. The modern
spirit was a combination of certain intellectual
qualities inherited from the Enlightenment: lucidity,
irony, scepticism, intellectual curiosity, combined
with the passionate intensity and enhanced sensibility
of the Romantics, their rebellion and sense of
technical experiment, their awareness of living in

a tragic age.6

Connolly's remarks are unfortunately brief, coming as they do

12

in a short introduction to a list of what he considers the
one hundred best books of Modernism, for it would be
interesting to watch him resolve the apparent paradox of
irony on the one hand and passionate intensity on the other.
Furthermore, irony as used by the Moderns is less a matter
of scepticism than of detachment, there being a modest
though significant difference between the two. Indeed,
Joyce's ideal artist paring his fingernails hardly seems a
model of passionate intensity, although perhaps Joyce the
writer living solely for his art does.

Robert Langbaum, who expresses a similar theory, sees
a major difference between the modern Romantics and their
nineteenth-century counterparts:

Our best writers . . . are twentieth-century
romanticists who have managed to sustain the
potency of the self by joining it to powerful
outside forces--by recognizing, for example,

that the self is not, as the nineteenth-century
romanticists tended to think, opposed to culture,
but that the self is a cultural achievement,

that it is as much outside us as inside, and

that the self exists outside us in the form of
cultural symbols. In assimilating ourselves,
therefore, to these symbols or roles or
archetypes, we do not lose the self but find it.
When writers are as deliberate and self-conscious
as this, however, in bridging the gap between

the individual and the culture that seemed to
make tragedy impossible, the art they come out
with may have or suggest the richness, depth, and
complexity of tragedy, but it must be in its final
effect comic or rather tragicomic. That is why
tragicomedy would seem to be the characteristically
modern style in literature.

While the premise that the best modern writers are romanticists
is not very useful, the main idea of recognition and self-

conscious usage of the archetypal existence of the self is.

13

The writer who comes after Freud and Jung and Nietzsche is
able to see the archetypal possibilities of myths, that our
myths are implicit in our very existence, and he can
therefore dismiss those myths as religious-spiritual guides
and use them structurally, selecting, modifying, mixing myths
from various cultures and epochs, to order his art. This is
the same point to which the professed anti—Romantic, Beebe,
addressed himself. Whether or not tragicomedy is the
characteristic literary style of Modernism is another matter
entirely. Inasmuch as an ironic literature precludes high
tragedy, even in a tragic age, tragicomedy may well be the
prevalent mode of this century, although Joyce's jocoserious
seems closer to the mark. Langbaum's contention that our
century is incapable of high tragedy is expressed by other
critics as well, notably by Raymond Williams in his study,

Modern Tragedy.8

 

Still, Langbaum's most interesting insights remain in
the field of myth and archetype:

The psychological interest passes over into the

mythical at that psychological depth where we

desire to repeat mythical patterns. Life at its

intensest is repetition. Mann tells us that the

ego of antiquity became conscious of itself by

taking on the identity of a hero or god and

walking in his footsteps.
He raises two important points in this passage. The first is
that life at its intensest is repetition, and the second is
that twentieth—century literature probes the psychological

depths at which mythical patterns exert their influences.

This great depth, in its turn, leads back to an older god,

14
one that Nietzsche dredges up in The Birth of Tragedy From
the Spirit of Music10 and that Monroe Spears applies

specifically to Modernist literature in Dionysus and the

 

City:

He appears to the Greeks not as a magnified but \.
familiar human form thrown on the clouds, like .
the Olympian deities, but as more mysterious ,
and disturbing. Against the Apollonian tradition;
dominant in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, with;
its emphasis on the normal and rational, the '
cultivation of the aristocratic self—sufficient
individual, the criterion of sanity and health,

he represents the claims of the collective, the
irrational and emotional and abnormal; of the
feminine or androgynous or perverse; of
intoxication and possession, surrender to
non-human forces; even of disease. Hence, once
more he is a fitting embodiment of the modern
concern with these matters, from Conrad's

Heart of Darkness (1899) and Mann's Death in
Venice (1911) on through Forster's Passage to
India (1925) and many other avatars to the
recrudescence beginning in the latter 1950's.11

 

Dionysus is for Spears the rather obvious link between the
Twentieth Century and earlier romanticism, but at the same
time, the god goes beyond that linking function to embody
dark, mysterious forces which Spears views as characteristic
of modern literature. Certainly the claims of the collective
can be seen as a twentieth-century concern, particularly in
light of modern interest in the mythic and archetypal; in
the individual, private self's relationship to the cultural,
universal self; in the rather disturbing power seen in the
masses, especially non-European masses. Faulkner's Benjy
would be a foremost instance of the interest in the
irratidnal or abnormal, in direct contrast to the previous

century's many voices of reason and intelligence. Indeed,

15

it is precisely on the basis of Modernism's apparent
infatuation with the abnormal that Lukacs bases his attack
on its lack of perspective. He sees evidence in the
creations of Musil, Kafka, Joyce, as well as Faulkner, that
the modern, naturalistic (as he sees it to be) novel fails
“to live up to its responsibilities to its community, to
.create lasting human types, to recognize aberrant individuals
for what they really are. It is precisely this Dionysian
element of modern fiction that he attacks, the Apollonian he
valorizes. His selection of one type over another, Thomas
Mann over Franz Kafka, demonstrates the failure of Spear's
assessment of Modernism as Dionysiac literature to encompass
the entire range of Modernist works.12

The Dionysian interpretation works extremely well for
those Modernists who exhibit strong romantic ties, such as
Yeats and Lawrence, and for certain works or parts of works
by other writers as well. At the same time, however, it
seems that Spears may be entirely mistaken in dismissing
the Apollonian influence too summarily. Beebe, for one,
strenuously objects both to Spears's insistence on
Dionysus as the god of the age, and to the general idea that
Modernism is essentially romantic:

If we see modern poetry as a current which moves

from Whitman to Frost to Graves to Ginsberg (to

Bob Dylan?) and if we see Lawrence, Hesse, Hemingway,

and Mailer as the major novelists of the twentieth

century, then I suppose it may be possible to see

Modernism as only another wave in the incoming tide

of Romanticism. But what then do we do with Flaubert,

James, Conrad, Ford, Woolf, Forster, Shaw, Pound,
Stein . . . and James Joyce? To label these writers

16

Romantic seems to me a clear case of mistaken or

insufficient identification, and to reduce them

to the status of minor writers would violate all

sense of critical justice. Monroe Spears says that

"if any god personifies modernism, it is Dionysus,"

but try to imagine Henry James on a Dionysiac

frolic with Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann. Surely

a stronger case could be made for the major

Modernists as Apollonian.
Beebe's first point rings true; few names on the list he
offers (the proportions of which in the original were truly
staggering) can really be called Romantics. His hypothetical
"frolic" is indeed more than a little difficult to image,
and it serves both to lighten the tone of the debate and to
point up Spears's vagueness. However, Spears is not talking
about a rollicking, jovial god of wine when he speaks of
Dionysus, but rather a darker, mysterious, almost unknowable
force. Among the writers Beebe mentions, nearly all make
use of some aspects of what Spears labels the Dionysian, at
least occasionally. Nevertheless, neither label—~and here
Beebe falls into the same pit he digs for Spears--neither
Dionysian nor Apollonian, really satisfies as a term to
describe the entire range of Modernist literary interests and
treatments. And here is the problem with not only the labels
at stake in this particular debate, but with literary labels
in general: they are either too restrictive to fit properly,
or they are so loosely constructed as to be meaningless.14

The problem of labels is particularly troublesome in the
ongoing argument over the literary heritage of Modernism,

since to identify one literary period or movement in terms of

another doubles the problems of definition and abstraction.

17
Having said, with Wilson, that Modernism is a continuation of
Symbolism; with Langbaum, of Romanticism; with Lukacs, of
Naturalism; with Graham Hough, that it is a detour from the
main tradition altogetherls; even with Harold Bloom, that it
is the inheritor of an inheritor of an inheritor, each weaker
than the one from which it inheritsl6; what have we really
discovered about the nature of any particular Modernist
work? Very little, it seems to me. The best the process
of labelling can hope to achieve is identifying parts of
the whole, elements within the larger body. Any label that
attempts to embrace the whole of Modern writing is doomed
to failure by the shortness of its reach.

We must, then, look for another way of understanding
Modernism: if not the ancestry of the movement, then perhaps
the process of creation. Spears supplies a starting point,
when he states that free verse and rhetorical discontinuity
are no longer satisfactory criteria for defining modern poetry,
and then looks for suitable defining ideas or movements:

Perhaps the largest generalization that can be made

is that there are two primary impulses in modern

literature, both always present but one or the

other dominating. The first is the drive toward

aestheticism, toward the purification of form, its

refinement and exploration, the development of

those features that are most distinctive. The

illusion becomes more convincing and self-sufficient;

there is a tendency for the art-world to become

more separate and independent from life. This is

countered by the opposing impulse, to break

through art, destroy any possibility of escape to

illusion, to insist that the immediate experience
is the most important thing. . . .

18

The drive toward form and then through it, to

art and then beyond it and back again to reality,
truth, immediate experience; and the incorpora-
tion of this whole process into art--these are
central to modernism.

This passage illustrates a problem common to virtually
all critics of modern literature: how to reconcile the
obviously formalist impulse present in so many Modernists,
particularly the impulse to talk about the importance of
form, with its absence among the many others who rarely
discuss it. Spear's explanation helps to reconcile in part
the apparently irreconcilable, although it does not really
go far enough. He applies his theory to the movement as a
whole, saying that some people are formalists, others "life-
ists," but as Johnsen shows, this same idea of motion back
and forth between life and formalist aesthetic can be carried
a good deal further:

Newly sensitized to the Modern's own mistrust of
myth and metaphor, we find allowing for individual
permutation, Moderns such as James Joyce, W.B.
Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence articulating

a common, three-fold pattern of experience: (1) Man
suffers the frustrating disparity between a fallen
outer world of disorder and a more perfect inner
world; he exchanges the soft, wet outer world of
disorder, contingency and chaos for the hard, dry
inner world of metaphor, myth and history.

(2) Man realizes both the falsification of reality
that order inevitably produces, and his loss of
immediate contact with humans and things; confronted
with a world becoming ethereal and narcissistic, he
returns to re-examine the real, the natural, the
unordered. ~

(3) Facing again two polarized choices, man tries
to envision an excluded middle when he comes to
realize what the structuralists understand:
opposed choices are inverted mirror images of each

19

other, mutually dependent, ordered by a common

point of View. Existing between polarities, the

excluded middle or third possibility cannot be

grasped with the same sureness as the first two

stages 18
Johnsen's dialectic of modern literary creation encompasses
and puts into perspective several contradictions or disputes
that show up in the work of other critics. When the work
is seen not as an object with qualities but as a process of
negotiation and relationship, it becomes possible to
understand that the work may contain both the Romantic and
the anti-Romantic, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the
formalistic and the anti-formalistic within the same
structure. The false or incomplete labels for qualities can
then be seen for what they are, identification of elements of
a larger process rather than complete explanation. Moreover,
the process can be taken a step further: what Johnsen
describes is a movement witnessed primarily on the level of
character or persona, while the dialectic encounter of self
and world can be said to happen on all the levels of creation.
The form of the work can be understood as a social and
historical as well as an artistic act, by which the writer
makes a response to his society as well as his specific
artistic situation, for the two cannot finally be separated.
Such an understanding holds the possibility of understanding
the Modern work whether it be essentially formalist or not,
whatever one's understanding of that term may be, as of a

kind with other Modern works by virtue of its relationship

to its society and to literature.

20

If one defines Modernism as a characteristic action or
process rather than a characteristic product, then one can
begin to overcome certain misunderstandings based on the
appearance of the poem or the novel or whatever. This
enhanced understanding can lead, in turn, to a conception of
Modernism that genuinely advances our understanding of the
specific work at hand. Moreover, the concept of process
can lead to a further understanding of those initial
difficulties in facing the Modern work itself, and of trying
to define the movement more generally. If literature is
a total historical process--that is, if it is a movement
within and through history, society, and culture as well as
other literature—-then we are not free of Modernism, but
are instead still living through it. However absolute the
mid-century rift between Modern and Postmodern may appear,

the one is tied inexorably to the other.

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

Before turning from these discussions of Modernism to
the literature itself, I should like to examine some major
developments in critical theory over the last half-century
in terms of two related considerations. First, where do
these theories locate the literary work in its milieu, and
second, what implications does that placing have for the
Modernist works with which we are concerned? There are a
number of reasons for pursuing this limited objective, not
the least of which is spatial. Moreover, the placement of
the literary work would seem central to a critical theory, as
a point most likely to reveal underlying biases and ideolo-
gies as well as the point from which readings of individual
works emanate and judgments about broader categories, such as
"the nature of literature," become possible. Thus even in
its truncated form such an examination is essential to an
understanding of how critics approach Modernist literature.

There are three general ways in which the literary work
has been understood by criticism over the last fifty years or
so. The first two grow out of an understanding similar to

T. S. Eliot's in "Tradition and the individual Talent":

21

22

The existing monuments form an ideal order among
themselves, which is modified by the introduction
of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
The existing order is complete before the new work
arrives; for order to persist after the superven-
tion of novelty, the whole existing order must be,
if ever so slightly, altered . . .

 

The first school of criticism employs the notion of literary
works as monuments, as completed objects, and has gone under
the loose appellation New Criticism, although the term
Anglo-American (to distinguish it from the Russian cousin to
Structuralism) Formalism is preferable, since more descriptive
of the primary concern of so much of the criticism practiced
by Ransom, Blackmur, Burke, Tate, Richards, Empson, and
‘Brooks and their colleagues and followers. The second type
of criticism goes beyond the notion of monuments in isolation
to a position more closely approximating Eliot's ideal order;
the literary work, however radioal it may be, becomes a
moment in literary history, a continuation of, or reaction to,
or variation on the existing body of literature. This
category encompasses not only Eliot and his followers, such
as Northrop Frye, but also critics such as Harold Bloom who
seek to demystify the notion of an ideal order and are there-
fore nominally at odds with Eliot, as well as a great deal of
generic criticism from E. D. Hirsch to some of the
Structuralists.

The third major critical mode involves the privileging
of some other discipline over literature, so that the
literary work becomes a sociological, or economic, or psycho-

logical, or linguistic artifact. The priviledged discipline,

23

usually one of the social sciences, subsumes art into itself,
lends its terminology, often its method as well, to the
critic, who then plays the results back into the master
discipline. Stated so schematically, this sounds
tautological——ask an economic question and you get an economic
answer-—but behind each of these various methods there is the
need, usually unstated, that literature must be seen in terms
of a context larger than itself. In other words, the works

of literature do not form an ideal order among themselves, or
if they do that order is subordinate to a larger order.

Where these theories create difficulties is in the implication
carried by the notion of subordination, that literature is a
secondary and derivative activity.

The problem, then, at the outset is this: how can
literature maintain its identity as a distinct activity with—
out falling into that separation suggested by its modern
apologists? By way of addressing this issue, it will be
necessary to examine the positions held by proponents of
these three modes of criticism, and then to suggest a method
of mediating between them, of studying the form of a literary

work within its cultural context.

II

In The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom attacks the

 

ethical emphasis of Yvor Winters' poetics:

24

Now I suppose he would not disparage the integrity

of a science like mathematics, or physics, by

saying that it offers discourse whose intention

is some sort of moral perfectionism. It is

motivated by an interest in mathematics, or in

physics. But if mathematics is for mathematical

interest, why is not poetry for poetic interest.
And elsewhere he characterizes Winters thus:

Mr. Yvor Winters is a Victim of the'moralistic

illusion, but independently of that comes closer

than anybody else I know to realizing what I

should regard as the most fundamental pattern of

criticism: criticism of the structural properties

of poetry.
These two statements portray fahfljraccurately the salient
points of theoretical American Formalism (as opposed to its
practical workings, which sometimes differ a great deal).
The impulse behind such a stand originates, I believe, from
the reactions against two essentially Victorian ideas still
holding sway in the academy (and elsewhere) at the time of
the New Critics' ascension to faculty positions. The first
is the notion of a utilitarian art, that literature can be
used to accomplish social goals, and the second is the study
and teaching of literature as a philological-historical
procedure, a literary analogue to Darwinian scientific study.
The vehemence with which some of the formalists reject these
older practices is largely a response to the ferocity of the
attacks by scholars of the old school against criticism.4
The result of these reactions is to produce a theory in which
poetry becomes an insular object, cut off from other aspects
of experience. In the first of the Ransom quotations just

cited, for instance, Ransom evidently takes poetic as a

synonym for aesthetic in his attempt to sever poetry from

25

ethical concerns after the fashion of the sciences. While he
elsewhere does not deny that poems have meaning, that meaning
is nevertheless intra-poetic, closed off from the world
outside the poem.

Another formalist who follows Ransom in his insistence
on insularity, and who is even more programmatic in establish-
ing his theories, is Cleanth Brooks. A poem for Brooks is a
linguistic object, a closed system. He further reinforces
that closure by his split between referential and emotive
language. By eliminating the referential side of language
from poetics and relegating it to the abstract, denotative,
exclusive language of the sciences, and seeing poetic
language as emotive, concrete, inclusive, and paradoxical, he
eliminates the possibility, theoretically at least, of the
‘sort of demands Winters makes on poetry.

Moreover, he further solidifies that position by his
"heresy of paraphrase,” in which he claims any statement
about poetry is an abstraction from it; that is to say, the
critic is reduced to using referential language to discuss
the emotive language of the poem itself. His statement,
therefore, will necessarily be limited and thin in comparison
with the richly dramatic presentation of the poem itself.
This position is at once one of Brooks's chief contributions
to criticism and a major liability in his own critical
position. It is a positive contribution inasmuch as it
removes the possibility of a reductionist, utilitarian

criticism whose main criterion for judging poetry is whether

26

or not the message serves society well. The liability for
Brooks himself lies in the problem of following his own
precepts, as Kenneth Burke points out regarding his study of
Faulkner.5 In practice, it will be nearly impossible and, I
believe, not even desirable to wholly avoid the thematic
elements of literature, since however emotive the language of
a poem may be, it must still refer in some degree to the
world outside itself or readers could never understand it.
Brooks himself recognizes this problem:

[The poet] must return to us the unity of the

experience itself as man knows it in his own

experience. The poem, if it be a true poem is

a simulacrum of reality--in this sense, at least,

it is an "imitation"--by being an experience

rather than any mere statement about experience

or any mere abstraction from experience.

(Urn, p. 213)
Brooks is sufficiently aware of the flaw in his discussions
of poetry that he must remind the reader that he knows it
exists; at another point, however, he says that critical
practices and attitudes of the past force him to take what is
essentially a weakened position so that he may successfully
combat those practices and attitudes. But the "simulacrum of
reality" statement muddies the flow of his thought a good bit.
’vThroughout The Well Wrought Urn he insists that poetry is a
special mode of language, that its use of language is what
distinguishes it from the sciences. Then, at the end of the
text, he slips in the notion that poetry is also a matter of
(recreating reality, or some imitation of it. It is this

basic inconsistency in his position which Burke counter—

attacks in his examination of Brooks's study of Faulkner.

27

Brooks himself apparently fails to recognize how much that
'contradiction compromises his theory.

This split in his thinking is constantly present in the
book, and manifests itself most clearly in the tension
between his theory and his practical criticism. Nowhere is
this tension more explicit than in his discussion of Yeats's
"Among School Children," in which he incessantly moves
outside the poem to the poet's life, his mythological system,
and the history of ideas, and in which he nevertheless
steadfastly maintains the impropriety of doing so:

But I believe that, in making such an

interpretation, they have allowed themselves to

be too much influenced by the assumption that the

woman in Yeats's thought must be Maude Gonne; and

have therefore concluded, from the dates of the

poem—-the perils of biographical bias!--that the

Ledean body is that of an old woman. (Urn, p. 183)

The perils he alludes to in this passage are not so much
those of biographical bias as they are of shoddy reading that
relies too heavily on biography. The context of the Ledean
reference would seem to exclude the possibility that, what-
ever Maude Gonne's age at the time of the poem, the poet is
dreaming of an old woman's body. At the same time, there is
no need to attack, as Brooks does here, the propriety of
biographical information in criticism, particularly not when
he has just employed information from outside the poem:

In Yeats's system of symbols, man and woman are

related as the two cones in his figure of the

double cone--one waxing as the other wanes,

waning as the other waxes--in dynamic antithesis.

The sphere, by contrast, is a type of harmony

and repose. The blinding of nature which they

experienced went beyond sexual attraction and

repulsion: it was a childlike unity of being.
(Urn, pp. 181-82)

28
Given the statements he makes elsewhere, Brooks's
introduction of outside material at this point is indeed
curious, since of all the references in the poem to the
material of A Vision, this one is perhaps least damaged by
ignorance of that material. Certainly the richness of the
passage is diminished by such a spare reading, yet it seems
possible that a reader could enjoy and understand this poem

with no understanding of A Vision. Brooks violates his

 

precepts at a moment when, seemingly, he need not do so.

That he does points to a confusion in his theory. This
is made clear in the closing paragraph of the chapter, in
applying the dancer/dance metaphor to the poem itself:

It is entirely legitimate to inquire into the

dancer's history, and such an inquiry is certainly

interesting for its own sake, and may be of value

for our understanding of the dance. But we cannot

question her as dancer without stopping the dance

or waiting until the dance has been completed. And

in so far as our interest is in poetry, the dance

must be primary for us. We cannot afford to

neglect it; no amount of notes on the personal

history of the dancer will prove to be a substitute

for it; and even our knowledge of the dancer gua

dancer will depend on some measure on it . . .

(Urn, p. 191)
The confusion of this passage resides in Brooks's ambivalence
toward the dancer's history--literary biography--as an
element of criticism, and perhaps in part as well from a
misunderstanding of the Yeatsian question that forms the
central metaphor of this passage. The position he argues
against, rightly, suggests that literary biography can
successfully substitute for genuine criticism of the literary

work. That such approaches not only existed when Brooks

29

formulated this argument but are with us still is attested to
by the work of critics who seize the poem as an opportunity
to psychoanalyze the poet. Brooks stumbles on just what the
role of biographical information should be: having excluded
it on one level, he cannot seem to articulate the terms of
its reentry or its significance. Moreover, the metaphor
breaks down in his statement that we cannot question the
dancer during the dance, for while ceasing our reading in
mid-poem to search about for illuminating data could hardly
be considered a satisfactory method, we can take a knowledge
of the poet into our reading which can inform our understand—
ing of the poem as we read. Brooks's model of the reading
process, as demonstrated in this passage and elsewhere in the
book, suggests a single-minded rapture on the part of the
reader that experience will not bear out.7

Because the poem is constructed with words, the reader
is constantly pushing into areas beyond it to search out
meanings that enrich his appreciation of it, unlike the viewer
of the dance, whose appreciation of the dance is relatively
passive. The division between intrinsic and extrinsic
meanings dissolves precisely because words imply, suggest,
extend beyond themselves. This is true of even the least
poetic, most neutral sorts of prose; one of the great
contributions to language studies by the Marxists has been
their demonstrations of the ideologies and prejudices
betrayed inadvertantly by writers whose intentions were to

convey logic, reason, and equilibrium. In poetry, where the

30

intention is often to be more inclusive, the distinction
breaks down even more, and with it Brooks's dancer analogy.
Again, it is useful to remember that he is in part forced
into the extremity of his insistence on always looking inward
at the poem toward its core because he is reacting against a
criticism that stands almost wholly outside the work itself.

Extremity is a useful word to bring to the discussion of
Brooks at this point, for it may be objected, justifiably,
that he represents not the norm of American Formalism but its
furthest limits. Certainly his fellow New Critics have tried
to distance themselves from him:

The worst difficulty with Brooks's method, as we

see it in operation, is this: that any poem in

which he can detect the ironical or paradoxical

structure--and he can detect it almost anywhere--

appears to him excellent, and nothing except this

structure appears, in his opinion, to be involved

in the art of poetry.

Winters goes on to object to the method of The Well Wrought

 

Urn chiefly because of its lack of ethical or judgmental (the
two are often synonymous) grounds. Yet it is in connection
with Winters himself that Ransom suggests a critic like
Brooks as the model New Critic several years prior to the
appearance of the Egg, by his attack on Winters' moralism as
inappropriate to criticism and his subsequent praise of the
structural analyses themselves (when separated from the
moralism).9 Similarly, Burke's disagreement with Brooks has
less to do with Formalist theory than with individual
practical permutations. Therefore, while Brooks stands at a

far edge of Formalism, he is nevertheless representative of

31

of the movement generally, for his extremity lies not in
departures from orthodoxy but in his programmatic insistence
on that orthodoxy.

An implicit feature of the Formalist method, if not of
all its critics, is its bias toward the Modern poem. The

structure of The Well Wrought Urn, as it runs from

 

Shakespeare and Donne to Yeats, tacitly maintains that all
poems can be subjected to the same method, that, as Winters
complains, there is no basis for value judgments in this
criticism. The chief beneficiary of such a position is the
new poem, which must no longer wait for its writer to die
and be valorized, reviled, or emulated by subsequent writers
in order to find its way into the academy, but which now
becomes legitimate material for criticism the instant it is
published. Allen Tate notes this phenomenon of the New
Critics' work, and sees it as a mixed blessing:

A modern poem becomes history for the fewer
before the few, a handful of unprofessional
readers, can read it, or read it long enough

to dry the ink. Our critics, since Mr. Richards
started them off with The Principles of Literary
Criticism in 1924, have been perfecting an
apparatus for "explicating" poems (not a bad
thing to do), innocent of the permanently larger
ends of criticism. They give us not only a
"close reading" but the history of the sources
of a new poem by Eliot or Stevens . . . before
it is able to walk. Within five years of the
appearance of Four Quartets, we knew more about
the poem than Mr. Eliot knew . 0

 

 

 

The Formalist method invites, by its very nature, the kind of
instantaneous attention to the new poem of which Tate speaks,
which benefits not only the living poet by lending legiti-

macy to his creation, but also the critic, for whom a

32

completely new field of study opens up. What Tate sees as a
liability in this practice is the lack of time for separating
fad and judgment; there is a tendency in the valorization of
the new to valorize simply because it is new. Tate, in
asking that the poem be allowed to "learn to walk," asks for
time enough for sober judgment to overtake the worship of
novelty. There is, of course, no way of building such safe-
guards into a "pure” Formalism, just as there is no way of
assuring discernment and skill in the critics who practice
it. The New Criticism, however much it may be based on older
poetry, lends strong support to the new poem, and in its
tacit connection of old and new, it moves toward the second
part of Eliot's "monuments" statement, toward the notion of

an ideal order, or literary continuum.

III

Many of the critical theories that have succeeded the
New Criticism have viewed the literary work in ways related
to, or growing out of, Eliot's ideal order of monuments.
In so doing, they have cast aside a Formalism based on the
organic unity of the individual work in favor of a formal
typology; by substituting the system of literature for the
work of literature as the basis for study, they have
exchanged one notion of poetic autonomy for another. Among
the proponents of such theories, Northrop Frye stands out as

one of the earliest and most persistent, as well as perhaps

33

the most influential. Other critics working from similar
(although by no means the same) starting points are

E. D. Hirsch, with his genres or types, Harold Bloom, with
his theory of poetic misprision, and Geoffrey Hartman, who

in Beyond Formalism aims at very much the sort of shift away

 

from New Critical Formalism that we are discussing. Frye, of
course, offers the clearest connection to Eliot, in his
statement that Anatomy of Criticism is an attempt to annotate

the concept of an ideal order.11 Bloom also suggests the

 

notion of a body of literature in such statements as "Poems
rise not so much in response to a present time, as even
Rilke thought, but in response to other poems,"12 although
he introduces a tension between the new work and the pre-
existing order altogether missing from Frye.

What Anatomy of Criticism purports to do is raise

 

criticism to the level of a science, or a social science,
which can proceed systematically and impartially through the
literary field, and which is now non-existent:

If criticism could ever be conceived as a coherent
and systematic study, the elementary principles

of which could be explained to any intelligent
nineteen—year-old, then, from this point of View
of such a conception, no critic now knows the

first thing about criticism. What critics now
have is a mystery—religion without a gospel, and
they are initiates who can communicate, or quarrel,
only with one another. (AC, p. 14)

Such a statement suggests that a major factor in making
criticism scientific is the tyranny of the university; if it
won't teach, it isn't valid. It further suggests that coher-

ence and systematization are the most important elements in

34

developing such a science, and indeed, the heavily schematic
nature of the Anatomy bears out this latter suggestion:

Frye's impulse toward pattern elaboration and taxonomic
classification frequently leads him to steamroll the individu—
ality of the single work. His concept of science, in fact,

is closest to nineteenth-century biological taxonomies:

If criticism exists, it must be an examination

of literature in terms of a conceptual framework

derivable from an inductive survey of the field.

The presence of science in any subject

changes its character from the casual to the

causal, from the random and intuitive to the

systematic, as well as safeguarding the integrity

of that subject from external invasions.

(AC. p. 7)

By criticism, then, Frye means a classificatory activity, a
placing of works within a "conceptual framework," within a
larger literary context than the works themselves. This
placing he accomplishes by "stepping back” from the work,
(AC, p. 140) by moving away from it where the New Critic
presses closer.

Despite this methodological difference, however, he
shares with the New Critic a notion of poetic autonomy, and
in fact he is as explicit as Brooks on the point when he
says, in Fables of Identity, that the critic deals with the
literary work by freezing it, ignoring its movement in time,
and examining it as a completed and, by extension self-
contained pattern of words.13 However, he pushes this
reification even further, and actually suggests a commodity—

consumer relationship between poems and their readers,

particularly in the Polemical Introduction to Anatomy of

 

35

Criticism, from his image of the critic as middleman or

 

consumer's researcher (AC, p. 20) to his statement the critic
should move toward the "undiscriminating catholicity," of
Wilde's auctioneer, equally appreciative of all literature.
(AC, p. 25)

That he conceives of literature as a product to be
consumed, an autonomous object, further betrays itself in
the heavily noun—oriented manner of his criticism:

For some reason it has not been nearly so well

understood that discursive writing is not

thinking, but a direct verbal imitation of

thought; that any poem with an idea in it is a

secondary imitation of thought, and hence deals

with representative or typical thought: that

is, with forms of thought rather than specific

propositions. (FI, pp. 238-39)

Frye's radical disjuncture of the acts of writing and
thinking, in the first part of the passage, carries two
major problems. The first is something like the problem of
representational art in classical thought: in the present
instance, art, or writing, can never be more than an imita-
tion of thought, and stands at a remove from the genuine
intellectual activity of thinking. Writing, then, becomes a
necessary parasite, the transmitting form for a pre-existent
content. The question that follows from this position runs
something like this: "If writing is a secondary mental
activity, in what way does it obtain its value?” For Frye,
of course, the value of literature lies everywhere except in
what he would describe as its idea—content. Such a bias,

however, brings us to the second problem, the essentially

static nature not only of art, but of thought as well.

36

Thought, in this context, can be brought into being without
language, in a state of pure mind. It is only thought--not
the process of thinking but the final product--with which
writing can deal. Writing, speech, language has no shaping
function; thought occurs at a pre-linguistic level of mind,
and language's job is to body forth a suitable imitation.
Such a conception denies the possibility that language and
thought are more closely related, that writing is not merely
the form to thinking's content, but that it plays a decisive
role in the thinking process, that thinking in any pre—
linguistic state is incomplete at best, that there is no
content without form, nor, for that matter, form without
content. The second part of the passage is mainly a develop-
ment of the first: the poem, since it is more concerned with
form than is discursive writing, is even less able to deal
with ideas. This position is particularly telling, since the
poetry in connection with which these comments are made,
Wallace Stevens', is so heavily idea-laden. Moreover, the
relation between poetry and idea is not only often specific,
but frequently quite active as well, particularly in a poem
like ”The Man on the Dump," which is not only a representation
of an idea, the poet as man on the dump, but is the act of
the poet wading his way through the refuse of poetry, beating
out his own dissonances on "an old tin can, lard pail."
Stevens consistently gives us, not the static, representa-

tional forms Frye suggests, but poetry actively encountering

37

world, idea, and itself, ”The poem of the mind in the act of
finding / What will suffice."14

Even so, Frye must necessarily reduce the work to its
forms, for his object of study is much wider than that of
Brooks. The individual work is rarely of much interest to
Frye, gua individual, although it is a necessity as a point
of departure for his criticism. Indeed, his metaphor for
relation of critic to work is one of distance, of standing
back:

In looking at a picture, we may stand close to

it and analyze the details of brushwork and palette

knife. This corresponds roughly to the rhetorical

analyses of the new critics in literature. At a

little distance back, the design comes into clearer

View, and we study rather the content represented

. . . The further back we go, the more conscious we

are of the organizing design. At a great distance

from, say, a Madonna, we can see nothing but the

archetype of the Madonna, a large centripetal blue

mass with a contrasting point of interest at its

center. (AC, p. 140)
The rhetoric here is telling: at a great distance, that is
to say the distance from the work at which he elects to work,
everything except the archetypal pattern is obliterated—-we
can see nothing but, he says--and the individuality of the
work is lost. This loss, however, is not a restriction but a
liberation from the restrictions of the New Critical attach-
ment to the work; he is freed, in short, from the tyranny of
the poem, so that he may examine poetry.

And indeed, the procedures he follows in his practical
criticism bear out this theoretical bias toward the general.

In the already-mentioned essay on Stevens, he forsakes

discussion of any of Stevens' poems in favor of Stevens'

38

poetics: using snippets, lines, and overtones from the

Collected Poems and an occasional passage from The Necessary

 

 

Angel, Frye attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Stevens
is "one of our small handful of essential poets.” Nowhere in
the essay does any one poem receive more than passing
attention. More commonly, though, his method moves him out—
side the writer in question altogether, into the larger
category of literature:

We said that we could get a whole liberal

education by picking up one conventional poem,

Lycidas, for example, and following its archetypes

through literature. Thus the center of the

literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be

reading. One step further, and the poem appears

as a microcosm of all literature, an individual

manifestation of the total order of words. (AC,

p. 121)

Again, he is the victim of a rhetorical betrayal. What he
evidently wishes to suggest is that the individual work
interests us because it distils the archetypes into a single,
special phenomenon; whereas, what he in fact conveys by the
phrase "whatever poem we happen to be reading" is that the
individual poem is of interest only insofar as it dissolves
itself and allows us to observe the larger patterns working
through it.

Here again, his biology metaphor is the ruling principle:
the individual is of interest only as a representative of its
type:

That such patterns exist leads him to his theory

of a literary universe: the study of archetypes

is the study of literary symbols as parts of a

whole. If there are such things as archetypes
at all, then, we have to take yet another step,

39

and conceive the possibility of a self—contained
literary universe. (AC, p. 118)

All poetry, then, proceeds as though all poetic

images were contained within a single universal

body. (AC, p. 125)
The step he proposes in the first quotation is a short one.
Archetypes must have a source of power, and if one rejects
the Jungian collective unconscious, as Frye does, then the
source must have a material location, the total collection
of written words: literature. The movement of poetry, then,
is inevitably backwards, toward the source. The tension in
the individual work is not one of breaking with or overcoming
previous literature, as it is in Bloom, but one of joining
with it, of becoming part of a community, and thereby
escaping the ignominy of total individuality. And despite
his methodological differences, Bloom must surely have a
similar notion of a "total order of words" behind such
statements as

Let us give up the failed enterprise of seeking

to "understand” any single poem as an entity in

itself. Let us pursue instead the quest of

learning to read any poem as its poet's

deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a

precursor poem or of poetry in general. (AI,
p. 43)

 

or
we are dealing with primal words, but
antithetical meanings, and an ephebe's best
interpretations may well be of poems he has
never read. (AI, p. 70)
The only way we can possibly make sense of the second of
these passages (since Bloom never explains himself) is to see

behind it to a concept of a literary universe, of "poetry in

40

general.“ The first passage, too, sounds like Frye in its
premises (although it moves in different directions), in its
demand that we stand back from the individual poem so that
we may see a larger context.

Such a concept of an autonomous literary universe leads
to difficulties for both critics, difficulties to a large
extent inherent in the concept itself. The first is change.
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot says that
each new work modifies the total order in some small way;
explaining that modification is Frye's most glaring weakness
in his attempt to annotate Eliot's statement. The existing

order in Anatomy of Criticism tends to be totalitarian,

 

subsuming the work into its system of myths and archetypes.
Frye can explain very well the mythic patterns shared by the
Odyssey and Ulysses; he is less strong on how, and more
importantly why, they differ on the use of those patterns.
To say that Ulysses is different because it is a further
displacement of the myths than its ancient counterpart is
merely redundant. Yet because Frye's universe is self-

contained, he has no other means of explaining these

 

differences; historical, political, philosophical, social--
the whole spectrum of "extraliterary”--factors and exigencies
are denied him as possible explanations. Similarly, Bloom,
whose theory is one of change, can explain that change only
in terms of the new poet's "anxiety of influence." Never
does he suggest the possibility that the ephebe might reject

the poetics of his precursor(s) not only because he must

41

establish his own voice, but also because he finds that
older poetics no longer adequate to deal with the world.

A second problem arises when the ostensibly heuristic
categories become constitutive elements of "great literature"
of "strong poetry.” In speaking of "fictions like those of
Trollope," Frye states:

If . . . we go on to study the theme or total

shape of the fictions, we find that it also

belongs to a convention or category, like those

of comedy or tragedy. With the literary category

we reach a dead end, until we realize that

literature is a reconstructed mythology, with its

structural principles derived from those of myth.

(FI, p. 38)

Now on the face of it, this statement seems innocent and
descriptive enough, but if we look elsewhere, into the
Anatomy, for instance, we find its prescriptive underside:

This coincides with a feeling we have all had:

that the study of mediocre works of art remains a

random and peripheral form of critical experience,

whereas the profound masterpiece draws us to a

point at which we seem to see an enormous number

of converging patterns of significance. (AC, p. 17)

No longer is it a simple matter of literature being a
reconstructed mythology. Rather, we find a buried adjective,
a hidden value judgment: good literature is a reconstructed
mythology, and the closer a work lies to its mythological
patterns, the better it is. Mediocre works are mediocre not
through poor writing, weak plot, thin characters, shoddy
rhythms, but through their failure to play out certain
accepted patterns of literary typology. Thus it is entirely

possible for a work to fulfill Frye's criterion for profound

masterpieces--that is, that it have "an enormous number of

42

converging patterns of significance"—-and still be a work
which is quite without interest for its readers. Put another
way, the work might appear great at the considerable distance
from it that Frye urges the critic to adopt, at which only
patterns can be discerned, while looking worse and worse the
closer the reader approaches it. At the proximity of the
actual reader, it can be a catastrophe of bad writing and
silliness, devoid of any intelligible meaning. Frye simply
assumes that his system can at once provide an accurate
taxonomy and means for sorting out good from bad, without
forcing the critic into the (for him) distasteful practice of
making value judgments based on taste. His value judgments
are based instead on an objective, if not entirely measurable,
criterion.

The chief beneficiary of his value judgment is the
modern work, the new, even the unwritten, for he pOints the
way to greatness for the aspiring creator of literature.

Like Eliot, he admits the new work into the ideal order of
monuments at once; there is no resistance, no tension, in
Frye's theory between the old and the new. He even shows a
distinct bias for Modernist works. At the same time, however,
those same works become extremely problematic for him: they
lead him dangerously near tautology. Much of his theory of
criticism is based on an assumption that the critic can

stand back farther from the work than the artist, who,
involved as he is with the moment to moment exigencies of

creation, may not be aware of the mythic patterns on which he

43

draws, nor indeed must he be, so deeply ingrained are those
patterns by his previous experience of literature. With the
Modern work such an assumption is clearly inaccurate; The

Waste Land and Ulysses, for example, are keenly aware not

 

only of the myths on which they draw but also of the ways in
which those myths are displaced. In dealing with such
self—consciously archetypal, mythic literature, Frye's
archetypal, mythic criticism becomes precisely the sort of
unpacking of the writer's literary valise that he is trying
to avoid. Nor does saying that irony bottoms out into myth
once again explain adequately what happens in these works,
for the myth of Ulysses is not the same as the myth of the

Odyssey, and the Tristan and Iseult of Finnegans Wake bear

 

only limited resemblance to the original. "Quest and Cycle

in Finnegans Wake," to pick a notable example of Frye's

 

practical criticism, is valuable not as criticism so much as
Baedeker, as map of surface phenomena, for in a work such

as the Wake the mythic elements are the obvious, the surface
elements past which we must penetrate. Much the same thing
can be said, as we shall see in the next chapter, of Frye on

The Waste Land. Because the literary universe described in

 

Anatomy of Criticism is so rigidly self-contained, there

 

appears to be no suitable method of understanding the
necessity of displacement or of ”bottoming out" into myth
except to say that it happens as part of a cycle larger than

the works themselves. In order to move toward a more

44

adequate explanation of the use of myths and other literature

in Modern literature, we need to break down the battlements.

IV

The criticism that most systematically assails the walls
of poetic autonomy is, of course, Marxism. Fredric Jameson's
attacks on Structuralism's closed system of language in The

Prison-House of Language can be transferred almost directly

 

to a closed literary system such as Frye's:

The work would therefore be an equation whose
variables we are free to fill in with whatever
content or interpretive code we chose. . . . Yet
these alternatives, while indicating the virtu-
osity of the interpreter, point to some basic
structural flaw, some almost allegorical slackness,
in the concept of the method itself, for which

the refusal of all privileged content amggnts to

a license to use any kind indifferently.

where [Russian Formalism] saw the coming

into existence of the work as the latter's

ultimate content, now the Structuralists read

the content of a given work as Language itself,

and this is no mere accident or idiosyncrasy on

the part of the individual critic but rather a

formal distortion inherent in the model itself.

(P-H, pp. 200-01)
These two passages point to prejudices inherent in
Structuralism as well as in Frye's formalism, and in the
objections to those prejudices, Jameson offers us a lever for

,,working Marxist criticism against such formalism. The first

is the refusal of any privileged content, the isolation of
the work from the outside world. We have already seen how

Frye cuts off literature from all that is not Literature in

45

much the same way the Structuralists cut it off from all
that is not Language. The second prejudice emanates from
the first: if the work is cut off from everything except
Language (or Literature) then the subject matter of the work
must necessarily be Language (or Literature). Frye says as
much in his essay on Stevens:

Stevens is of particular interest and value to

the critical theorist because he sees so clearly

that the only ideas the poet can deal with are

those directly involved with, and implied by, ,

his own writing: that, in short, "Poetry is the ‘

subject of the poem.” (FI, p. 238)

Such a View of the poem's solopsism is evidence of the

, critic's (or the poet's or both) reification of the work, of
his cutting the poem off from its historical process and
treating it as an autonomous object, in short, of his
ideological bias.

As a counter to such reification and the superficial
_thinking it entails, Jameson offers Marxism as a genuinely
critical, rather than ideological, system, and as a
-heightening of thought:

It is, of course, thought to the second power:

an intensification of the normal thought process

such that a renewal of light washes over the

object of their [the critics'] exasperation, as

though in the midst of its immediate perplexities

the mind had attempted, by willpower, by fiat,

to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps.16
"Thought to the second power" means thinking about the
historical and social origins of one's own thought as well

as about the object of thought in and of itself. Thus the

critic approaches the work through a critique of pre-existent

46

categories, re-situates both the work itself and his own
criticism within a determinant historical context. The
critic can, by this objective approach, unmask the ideologies
behind the literary work, uncover the true nature of the
event. Marxist criticism, then, is the attempt to apply this
methodology, to look at literature dialectically in order to
discover problems in its ideology and in the manifestations
of that ideology, the work itself.

Marxist criticism as a science of ideologies is made
possible because its nature is critical rather than ideologi-
cal, because it is a genuine system of thought rather than a
system of belief masquerading as a system of thought.

Because it can account for its own presuppositions in a way
ideological thought cannot, Marxism can undertake an
examination of the hidden presuppositions of ideological
thought. If, however, Marxism is itself through and through
ideological, that is to say, if it is founded on a belief
system whose historical origin it fails to recognize
adequately--if it fails to be "thought to the second power"--
then its claims as a purely critical mode of thought are
seriously compromised. If we examine Marxist criticism as
practiced by Jameson, Georg Lukacs, and Raymond Williams in
terms of that failure to account for its ideological basis,
we can then proceed to an analysis of the results of that
failure on the way those critics View the literary work in
general, and the Modernist work specifically, since
Modernism itself stands as a challenge to that unrecognized

origin and its concomitant assumptions.

47

Two statements by Jameson offer an introduction to the

ideological nature of Marxism:

What distinguishes such concepts [which see a
renewal of our perception] philosophically from
genuine dialectical thinking is of course their
failure to account for the initial numbness of
our perception in the first place, their inability
to furnish a sufficiently historical explanation
for that ontological deficiency which they can
only understand in ethical and aesthetic terms.
Yet such intellectual distortion, such structural
repression of an essential element in the situa-
tion, is amply accounted for by the Marxist
theory of ideology, which posits a kind of
resistance of mauvaise foi that grows ever
stronger as we draw closer and closer to that
truth of the socio—economic which, were it
realized in all its transparency, would immedi-
ately obligate us to praxis. (M&F, p. 374)

 

 

In this first passage, Jameson rests his case on a pair of
tautologies to which he is blinded by his own masked ideology.
The first tautology is that Marxism can offer historical
explanation for the initial numbness of which Jameson speaks
because, unlike other systems, it posits historical explana-
tion as all-encompassing. The implication that need not
follow is that the Marxist conclusions are therefore superior,
that the problem is remediable only if it is placed in its
historical context, and not if it is merely identified and
diagnosed. The second tautology follows from the first: if
we can see the emptiness of an ideology we will be forced to
adopt something else. Of course this is true, although it
need not follow that the something else will be Marxism, any
more than it necessarily follows that, as religious leaders
are wont to tell us, the failure of one form of secular

humanism or another must lead us back to the Church. The

48

Inasked ideology here is that Marxism is an ineluctable
alternative to present ideologies, that it requires no act of
conscious will, but is automatic and inevitable, which leads
us to the second passage:

I believe it can be said that the only
philosophically coherent alternative to such an
interpretation out of the social substance is one
organized on a religious or theological basis, of
which Northrop Frye's system is only the most
recent example. We may therefore define religion
as that set of imaginary propositions which must
be believed if the theoretical consequences of
Marxism are to be avoided. (M&F, p. 402)

To suggest that Anatomy of Criticism or a kindred system is

 

the only alternative to Marxism is nonsense, but the analogy
is telling. Jameson's rhetoric here attempts to show the
necessity of a "leap of faith" to religion in order to avoid
the socialist consequences, which are logically unavoidable,
just as in the first passage he puts forth the notion of a
perverse resistance to truth by the intellect, so that it may
elude similarly ineluctable consequences. Traditional
Christian rhetoric attempts to show the inevitability of God,
the ineluctability of belief, and, like Jameson, that not to
believe requires an act of will, a leap of unfaith. What
Jameson fails to recognize is that, like Christianity, that
set of principles to which he adheres is not a fact of
existence but a belief system, that it does require an active
will-to-believe. This failure leads in turn to a host of
other problems.

One such problem is the failure of Marxism to see itself

(as the product of a historical moment, the middle of the last

49

century in England. More specifically, while the critics
Inay acknowledge their roots in that time and place, they go
about using their system as though it were ahistorical. To
claim a methodology is outside history, universally
applicable, for use on all theories, events, and works of
art, to determine their historical and cultural significance,
is patently absurd. Marxism can no more escape its origins
and built-in prejudices than can the ideologies it attacks.
It is a product of the same set of circumstances (although a
different reaction to them, certainly) that produced British
Utilitarianism. Its basic notions about the perfectability
of man, the value of mass education, social evolution or
progress toward a goal (the notion of telos shares something
of the substance although little of the optimism with
Mary Baker Eddy's "Every day in every way, things get better
and better") are all profoundly nineteenth-century ideas.

The system, then, has certain built-in biases, and a
failure to recognize them can result in difficulties similar
to those of which Jameson accuses Wayne Booth:

Mr. Booth has thus something in common with the

object of his criticism: for James also attempted

to arrive at the universal laws governing the

proper composition of the novel in general, and

showed as little awareness of the historically

conditioned nature of form. The difference is

that James in doing so reflected his moment in

history, whereas Mr. Booth does not. (M&F, pp.

358-59)
This argument can be turned back on a good deal of Marxist

criticism, of which Lukacs is a representative, which

valorizes the sort of literature produced in the mid-nineteenth

50

century. It displays a decided preference for realistic
fiction and for utilitarian literature, while denigrating
art-for-art's-sake in favor of art for something else's sake,
art that can be used as a lever against something in the
world. In Lukacs, for instance, art is asked to become a
socialist lever or, failing that, at least not become a lever
against socialism, "non-rejection of socialism is a sufficient
basis for realism."17

Furthermore, Lukacs accepts only realistic fiction as
valid, this despite the fact that literary realism has not
been the dominant mode in over half of a century:

A realistic work of art, however rich in detail,

is always opposed to naturalism. But an artistic

method which reduces the dialectical--social-and-

individual-—totality of human existence must

relapse, as we have seen, into naturalistic arbi-

trariness. It will then be incapable of depicting

distortion in human nature or in the individual's

relationship to his environment-~incapable, that is,

of seeing distortion as distortion. (RT, p. 75)
He goes on to say that this distortion is inevitable under
capitalism, but that modernism is ultimately incapable of
handling it properly because of a lack of critical distance.
Evidently, he requires critical detachment to exist on the
page itself, between the level of the action and the level of
the narrator, and indeed this seems to be a requirement, as
he demonstrates in his comments on subjectivity:

The uncritical approach of modernist writers--

and of some modern philosophers--reveals itself

in their conviction that this subjective experi-

ence constitutes reality as such. That is why

this treatment of time can be used by the

realistic writer to characterize certain figures
in his novels, although in a modernist work it

51

may be used to describe reality itself. Again
and again Thomas Mann places characters with a
time-experience of this subjectivist kind in
relation to characters whose experience of time
is normal and objective. (RT, p. 51)

Lukacs does not explain how a character in a novel can have

an objective and normal experience of time. It would seem

 

that a character, if realistic, can only experience time

 

subjectively, although he may step back from his experience
to try to formulate a theory of objective time. But he will
never be able to experience time objectively. That is a
contradiction in terms. Even the novelist cannot, but must
attempt to picture objective time, and objective reality, by
stepping out of his experience.

Lukacs' observations on objectivity are directly related
to the system he employs, which is historically conditioned
to be out of step with his age. The very notion of a telos,
a goal toward which man is moving inexorably and which exists
outside him, is a product of the thinking of the 1840's and
1850's, and is a response to the subjectivity of Romanticism.
No, say the Victorians, man is moving toward universal
improvement and benefit (the greatest good for the greatest
number). No, say the Marxists, man is moving toward freedom
from economic oppression. The difference lies in the source
of the movement: for the former it is a mixture of God-sent
goodness and plain old English common sense and generosity;
for the latter, the discontent of the working man. However,
that they both sense a telos is indisputable. In failing,

then, to recognize the historicity of those ideas, Lukacs

52

(as do others) disqualifies himself from being able to deal
effectively with modernist literature in which (as a response
to these preceding movements) the sense of the future is much
less clear.

A second problem arises from the ideological notion of
telos when the Marxists attempt to deal with modernism: the
concept of imminent collapse. The manifest future envisioned
in communist theory leads critics to see their age as perched
on the brink of demise as bourgeois civilization burns itself
up, with the new proletarian society rising out of its ashes.
A pre-requisite of this state of affairs, however, is a
demonstration of the decline of society to its current preci-
pice. The first step here is the positing of a past ”golden
age" in which external things were seen as a product of human
activity, and thought and action were unified:

For Aristotle, the emotional satisfaction of

tragedy is easily divided into its functional

components of pity and fear, which attach to fate

witnessed and thereby purge individual and

community alike of their own social and existen-

tial anxiety. Such a final cause of tragedy is

therefore able to serve a social function in tis

very nature. (M&F, pp. 394-95)

In other words, Aristotle's audience went to the theater to
be purged of social anxieties, to see a society which was

worse off than its own be taken to the brink of disaster in
the fall of the hero, and then resolve its crises after the
fall. The next step is to oppose modern abstraction against

past concreteness:

In contrast, pleasure under capitalism is simply
the sign of the consumption of an object: it is

53

thus relatively extraneous to the objects'

structure or use, since it can attach to any kind

of object, and is at the same time gratuitous that

it serves no collective function beyond that of

encouraging further consumption and making the

system operate at top capacity. (M&F, p. 395)
Jameson does not show how he arrives at the notion that the
pleasure derived from watching a modern production is
necessarily degraded. He simply states it, as he does the
first half of the argument, assuming that his audience,
sharing his beliefs, can fill in the required logic. His
notion of the ancients' possessing a unified culture, in
which individual and whole, religion and government, economics
and art were inextricably tied, in which the play-goer would
be so in tune with his experience that dramatic Thebes became
indistinguishable from real Thebes, thereby provoking genuine
pity and fear rather than degraded forms of pity and fear the
modern audience pretends at, is a pernicious form of the
"noble savage" argument which equates ancient with primitive
and unsophisticated.

Raymond Williams indulges in a variation of teleological
distortion in his discussion of tragedy:

The ages of comparatively stable belief, and of

comparatively close correspondence between beliefs

and actual experience, do not seem to produce

tragedy of any intensity, though of course they

enact the ordinary separations and tensions and

the socially sanctioned ways of resolving these.

The intensification of this common procedure, and

the possibility of its permanent interest, seem to

depend more on an extreme tension between belief

and experience than on an extreme correspondence.

Important tragedy seems to occur, neither in

periods of real stability, nor in periods of open
and decisive conflict. Its most common historical

54

setting is the period preceding the substantial

breakdown and transformation of an important

culture.

This seemingly innocuous and neutral observation on the
historical nature of tragedy takes on added significance when
looked at in context, as the jumping—off point for a book on
modern tragedy. The false syllogism behind that statement
goes something like this: important tragedy precedes cultur—
al breakdowns; modern tragedy is important; modern culture is
about to break down. This is specious. Williams demonstrates
neither causality nor necessity, and his error stems from his
ideology. His sense of telos requires that he see bourgeois
culture as ready to collapse, so he seeks to show that it is
producing significant tragedy (despite the claims of other
critics, who say it is not producing tragedy at all, but
pathos).

Williams' problem here, as with the other problems
encountered in Marxist criticism, is that his ideology blinds
him to certain aspects of the thing criticized, so that while
some genuinely valuable observations are made, much is
falsified or ignored, so that we may ask with Lukacs "not:
is § present in reality? But rather: does 5 represent the
whole of reality? Again, the question is not: should g be
excluded from literature? But rather: should we be content
to leave it as 5?" (RT, p. 45) The question becomes not:
has something been accurately observed, but: has that which
has not been observed affected that which has? Ideology is

something critics bring with them to the work. When a system

55

that claims to be a "science of ideologies,” however, fails
to account for its own ideological nature, a priori biases
masquerade as objective analyses.

Williams' failure to account for the historical origin

of his own thought distorts his analysis of Women in Love

 

as a modern tragedy:

The turning away from the social dimension is

also, and inevitably, a turning away from persons.

It is an attempt to create the individual person

without any relationships. . . . when we arrive

at that final division, between society and

individual, we must know that an assertion of

belief in either is irrelevant. What has actu—

ally happened is a loss of belief in both, and

this is our way of saying a loss of belief in

the whole experience of life, as men and women

live it. This is certainly the deepest and moig

characteristic form of tragedy in our century.
Here Williams is doing what a number of commentators before
him have done, focus on a single character at a single point
in the novel as Lawrence's spokesman, Birkin on the "two
stars at polar opposition." Williams is doing so to grind
his ideological axe: his sense of imminent collapse of the
existing society urges him to focus on only one aspect of the
novel. This is a profoundly undialectic way to read Lawrence,
particularly in light of the complex system of dualism, in
which no element is defined by itself, in isolation, but
always in opposition to another element. Relationships
between things, and between people, are immensely important
in Lawrence, and he would agree that the individual without

any relationships is the deepest form of tragedy, in this or

any other century. That is not, however, the plight of the

56

living at the end of Women in Love, as Williams maintains.

 

Rather, life without relationships is the downfall of Gerald,
who becomes more and more enamored of the cold isolation of
the Tyrol until it kills him. Birkin and Ursula return to
the world of relationships, to England, and at the end are
discussing not how to live in proud singleness, but what
kinds of relationships are needed for a fulfilling life.

Lukacs also suffers from this affliction, although his
is frequently related to nostalgia rather than telos:

And though Kafka's artistic method differs from

that of other modernist writers, the principle of

presentation is the same: the world is an allegory

of transcendant Nothingness. . . . To sum up our

enquiry so far: similarity of technique does not

imply similarity of ideology; nor is the approval

or rejection of certain techniques a pointer to a

writer's basic aim. (RT, p. 53)
Lukacs castigates Kafka for not being Hoffmann, for not using‘
his realism to depict an ideology not of his own time. In
finding replacement of telos with Nothingness unacceptable,
Lukacs conforms with Marxist ideology, but he flies in its
face by saying form does not bear a necessary relationship to
content. In this he has reverted to the pre-Marxist concep-
tion of form and matter, in which the latter is inert, rather
than the mutually active form and content Jameson discusses.
Lukacs here adheres strictly to one part of his ideology, so
much so that it conflicts with another part.

Furthermore, he, like Williams, is eager to see man

portrayed in modernist literature without relationships, cut

57

off not only from other human contact but from history as
well:

First, the hero is strictly confined within the

limits of his own experience. There is not for

him--and apparently not for his creator-—any pre-

existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon

his or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the

hero himself is without personal history. He is

'thrown into the world': meaninglessly, unfathom-

ably. He does not develop through contact with

the world; he neither forms nor is formed by it.

The only 'development' in this literature is the

gradual revelation of the human condition.

(RT, p. 21)
Again, the hero in total isolation is the great characteristic
of modernism for the Marxists, who wish to see in the col-
lapse of relationships the symptoms of the breakdown of
modern society. So Lukacs sees isolation everywhere in
modern literature. We have already seen that Lawrence does
not subscribe to the solipsism, and turning to that other
pillar of modern British fiction, Joyce, we find that neither
does he. In Ulysses, for example, characters are always and
everywhere acted upon by other characters, by society, by
personal and public history. Stephen is followed by the
memory of his mother, Bloom by the ghosts of his father and
son, Molly by her lovers, past and present. Nor are rela-
tionships confined to those with the dead. Stephen's poor
relationship with his family drives him into the world,
while the lack of human relationships has brought him back to
Dublin. Molly's affair with Boylan does affect Bloom, while

his scheming in turn affects both her and Stephen. Characters

interact on a psycho-social level to produce, as collective

 

St

38

58

expressions, the lofty rhetoric of the Cyclops episode and
the fugue of the Sirens. For every human action in Ulysses
there is a corresponding reaction; characters do not exist in
isolation, but always in relation to other characters.

Finally, there is a serious methodological problem posed
by Marxist ideology. Critics can only take an extrinsic
approach to literature: how does a piece of literature fit
into its historical setting; what problems does it point out
in society; what answers does it pose to the problems? In
short, Marxism wants to study literature as if it were
philosophy or sociology, and to deny its artistic elements.
Only the most general formal considerations are admitted, and
then merely as they apply to the philosophy of the work.
Lukacs' comments on symbolism and allegory point up this
weakness:

Allegory is that aesthetic genre which lends

itself par excellence to a description of man's

alienation from objective reality. Allegory is

a problematic genre because it rejects that

assumption of immanent meaning to human existence

which . . . is the basis of traditional art.

(RT, p. 40)
In pressing for a one-to-one obvious correspondence between
the work of art and the world outside, he fails to see that
allegory, and symbolism (which he seemingly includes as a
sub-species) are not a turning away from the outer world, but
another method of illustrating the relationship. Moreover,
the structural unity which can accrue from symbolic use can

strengthen not only the work, but its philosophical content

as well. Symbolism is not "'an infallible sign that his

59

thinking-—or the thinking of the class which he represents,
in the sense of its social development--does not dare

'"20 but may

penetrate the reality which lies before its eyes,
indeed be a more potent way of penetrating that reality.

It turns out, then, that the weaknesses of Marxist
criticism are most glaring in light of modernist literature,
which is a reaction against the age of which Marxism is a
product. In failing to recognize the historically conditioned
basis of its method, as well as that of the movement under
critique, Marxism factors an equation with one element

missing, and until all the elements are considered, the

results of that equation will be skewed.

This discussion of critical theories has proceeded along
the lines of several implicit principles, and it is essential
that, before looking at the Modernist works themselves, these
principles be given voice and set in motion as an active
force. They will not cohere into a uniform system so much as
a foundation on which to build. In fact one of the conclu-
sions they lead to is that theory, at the point at which it
becomes system, subsumes its subject into itself and becomes
the center of its own interest, something I wish to avoid in
this study.

1) The literary work does not exist independently of its

contexts, social, historical, or literary—historical.

6O

2) At the same time, neither does it assume a subservient
role to those contexts.

These first two points enable any further literary
examination; they are at once inseparable and worthy of sepa-
rate consideration. What the preceeding theoretical analyses
have attempted to demonstrate is that in one way or another
the major critical theories of this century have reinforced
the split between the literary work and its context, particu-
larly its social context. Even Marxism, which argues against
the form and content split it finds in bourgeois criticism
and which extends the notion of form and content outside the
work to the work-in-society, actually lends further support
to the separation. By privileging society over the work,
literature becomes less an element of society which somehow
works within society than a symptom of society's health or
sickness. Marxism shares with the systems it critiques a
tacit assumption that the work of art, particularly the work
of art under capitalism, is a product, a commodity, an
object. The sociological approach forces those who would
resist it into theories of artistic autonomy; nineteenth-
century literary criticism is a case in point. So long as
the work is seen as an object it will require that we under—
stand it either as a product of its society, as a sociological
artifact, or else out off entirely from that society. This
dilemma leads us to the third consideration.

3) Work is also a verb. Thus the literary work is better

understood as a process of carving out a space for itself

61

within the various historical situations it confronts than as
an object or a product. Conceiving it as a process obviates
the possibility of a form-content split. That split occurs
because we see two objects, a text contained on a page, or in
a book (that text is an object, an entity held between covers)
and a society which appears quite independent of, or oblivious
to, the text. The text must therefore be a product of the
larger, intractable object, or it must assume a similarly
oblivious attitude, if it is to retain its autonomy as a
thing in itself. In viewing the literary work as a process,
however, we move toward a vision of the text not only as an
object before our eyes, but also as pretext, or text in the
act of becoming. That is to say, the work is not only that
apparently finished product lying before us, but also the
encounter of the individual writer with his social, personal,
and literary histories, and with the problems or situations
he is attempting to work out through his writing. The writing
itself becomes an attempt to somehow mediate between self and
world.

4) Literary creation, then, is not a wholly private act
either in its origins or its goals. It is not written from
a vacuum, however attractive the lonely artist in his tower
has become as an image of the modern artist, since even his
cloistering himself away is a social act (or rather, perhaps,
an anti-social act). Moreover, a book or poem will not be
aimed at every potential reader, yet its attempt to reach one

audience--and exclude another-—is also a social act. Joyce

62

may have hoped his book would keep the scholars busy for
decades, but he did not hope it would be unread. The writer
shapes his writing with his goals in mind, and while he may
select elements that shock or dismay or perplex his readers,
it seems extremely unlikely that he makes his selection based
on those elements' inferior ability to achieve his goals.

5) Form, therefore, is not merely an internal device
acting within the work. Rather, it is an element of the
process; it is "the poem of the mind in the act of finding
what will suffice." The Victorian novel, with its socially
and economically ordained form, and the Modern novel, with
its constant searching after suitable form, are nevertheless
similar in that their uses of form are part of the process of
carving out their relationships to their societies, and to
their own literary antecedants. Only when the reader reifies
the works and internalizes his understanding of form do they
become formally dissimilar. Form, finally, is as much an
element of meaning as content, is equally a part of the
social and historical interaction of the work, and is insepa-
rable from content. Form without content is an abstraction;
even the outline of a work, which is perhaps the most formally
abstract writing possible, is not simply a shape without
content. At the same time, content without form is also
impossible; content cannot be presented without form. The
process of writing is simultaneously an act of finding one's

meaning and giving it shape.

63

My final two points are at once conclusions drawn from
the first five and directions the critical studies of the
individual Modernist works will attempt to follow.

6) I would argue these principles are necessary if a
theory is to avoid, at the extremes, solipsism or sociology.
Even granting their necessity, however, many methods are
possible and indeed desirable within the work of a single
critic: the relationship between society, literature, and
the artist at work will suggest different approaches for
different works, genres, periods, writers, even within the
canon of a single writer. The critic's activity is also one
of finding what will suffice. The critic who, like Brooks,
grasps a single method as Truth and applies it promiscuously
to every piece of literature he encounters, without examining
the differences in contexts between one work and another,
falsifies the nature of the experience of reading as well as
of the creative process. This falsification is no less true
of Bloom: can the only reason that one writer differs from
his literary ancestor (as if he had but one) possibly be the
anxiety of influence? While the desire not to show influence
too directly may well exert power over the writer's creativ-
ity, surely an equally compelling reason he "swerves" from
his progenitor's methods is that those methods, that style,
is no longer adequate to the world as he understands it.
These are specific examples of the falsification which
inevitably results from the translation of critical principles

into overarching system. For system will ossify, bending its

64

subject of study to accommodate itself, rather than remaining
pliant to the special needs of its subject. System tends to
become object, to reify itself, to become forgetful of its
own origins while retaining the final product. As product it
has an interest in proving itself valid, and that interest
leads to the ossification, the intractability of system to
circumstance. Criticism, on the other hand, must remain
process, must, in each new encounter with literature,
rediscover its methods.

7) In order to avoid this ossification of system, the
critical activity must begin with a fairly close attention to
the text, to the work itself, for it is there that the
nuances of the creative dialectics play themselves out.
Attention to the work is a way of following critical princi-
ples without moving toward the sclerotic systematization of
methodology that attends a too profound involvement with
principles in isolation. So long as the critic allows the
work to suggest a method of proceeding with his criticism of
it, rather than allowing methodology to dictate an approach,
he avoids the risk of falsifying the work to fit the system.
The place to start, then, with our understanding of the
creative dialectic is with the evidence that remains to us,
with the text, and to understand that text as process, as the

act of finding what will suffice.

THE WAR AND THE WASTE LAND

 

In a way not available to many literary works, T. S.

Eliot's The Waste Land has controlled its own criticism.

 

To be sure, nearly any work will exert influence over its
critics' methods, but few have been able to dictate those
methods with anything like the success of Eliot's great poem.
While this is not to suggest that all critics are reduced
to a single approach in dealing with the work, it is meant
to imply that there are very strong trends in that body of
criticism which the poem has spawned, and this is so for
three reasons: the nature of the poem, the notes, and
Eliot's work as a critic. The first two we shall encounter
as we move into the poem, but any thorough understanding of
the poem's relationship to its critics must begin with an
understanding of Eliot's relationship as critic to those
who follow him.

In several senses Eliot is the father of modern formalist
criticism. His statements in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" argue for a view of poetry as an autonomous world, a
View subsequently adopted by a good deal of modern criticism:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete

meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation

is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets

and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must

set him, for contrast and comparison, among the
dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not

65

66

merely historical, criticism. The necessity that

he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not

one-sided; what happens when a new work is created

is something that happens simultaneously to all

the works of art which preceded it. The existing

monuments form an ideal order among themselves,

which is modified by the introduction of the new

(the really new) work of art among them. The

existing order is complete before the new work

arrives; for order to persist after the supervention

of novelty, the whole order must be, if ever so

slightly, altered; and so the relations,'

proportions, values of each work of art toward

the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity

between the old and the new.
Eliot removes art from its social context in this passage by
killing it; by placing the living poet among the dead and his
work in an "ideal order" of monuments, he removes from both
poet and poetry the responsibility of corresponding to life.
In saying that each new work of literature informs the existing
order and is in turn informed by that order, he posits a
self-contained literary universe in which the main concern is,
ultimately, itself. He is not, of course, the first to View
literature in such a manner; in the century preceding the
publication of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Arnold's
touchstone theory and Pater's Art for Art's Sake, as well as
the work of the Symbolists, outlined similar theories. And
like Pater and the Symbolists, Eliot is motivated in his
theory, in part at least, by a reaction against nineteenth
century political-aesthetic philosophy which saw literature
as a social weapon and which still existed in 1919 in the
work of the New Humanists, among others. However, whereas

Arnold proposes an idea more than a system of thought, and

whereas Pater and the Symbolists are more concerned with a

67

program for poets than a critical system, Eliot puts forth
the basis for a coherent critical method in his essay, a
new line of aesthetic criticism. Further, his extensive body
of practical criticism, which has been so effective in
changing critical evaluations of poets and periods in the
last half-century, adds considerable force to his theory.

That his theory meets with success is attested to by
the fact that eleven years later Edmund Wilson must deal
with Eliot the critic in his discussion of Eliot the poet:

Eliot and Valéry follow Coleridge and Poe in their

theory as well as in their verse, and they seem to

me to confuse certain questions by talking as if

the whole of literature existed simultaneously in a

vacuum, as if Homer's and Shakespeare's situations

had been the same as Mallarmé's and Laforgue's, as

if the latter had been attempting to play the same

sort of roles as the former and could be judged on

the same basis.
What Wilson attacks is precisely that sense of tradition
Eliot pushes for, the simultaneous existence of monuments.
Of course, as a modern poet, Eliot has a vested interest in
such thinking; the admission of Mallarmé and Laforgue--and,
by extension, Joyce and Eliot--into literary journals and
university curricula alongside Homer and Shakespeare greatly
enhances the respectability of the modern artist. It removes
from consideration questions of popularity and places the
artist instead in the protected, comparatively changeless
world of the academy. It is not really the monumentalization
of his work that is at issue. One recalls Shakespeare

confidently proclaiming that his sonnet will outlast the great

statues. Eliot, however, is perhaps the first to need so

68
badly to accomplish it during his own lifetime. While
Shakespeare's claim acts as a proof against the oblivion of
death and the amnesia of the future, Eliot's acts as a proof
against the ignominy of the present. In nearly every major
statement of his career——his famous retrenchments in politics
and religion; his nostalgia for a time before the dissociation
of sensibility; his desire to have his own work set beside
that of the old masters--Eliot shows himself reacting against
the flow of the modern world, and his theory of tradition
allows his work to be placed within the tradition not only
by the activity of subsequent critics, but also by the sort
of poetry such a theory leads him to create. The notion of
tradition works itself out in his poetry as a style heavily
laden with allusions, parodies, and quotations, and by the

ill-fated notes to The Waste Land.

 

To a greater degree, perhaps, than his critical writings,
Eliot determines the direction of modern criticism by adding

the notes to The Waste Land. His initial impulse to include

 

notes seems to stem from his notion of a poetic continuum or
ideal order, that the new poem draws on and adds to earlier
poems, and that, by extension, the poem will not be understood
completely if its specific antecedants are not recognized.

. The notes also manifest a concern to demonstrate that the poem
is a product of erudition, design, and control, rather than

of madness and chaos, a concern which takes on special
significance in the face of the decay and collapse of modern

society discussed in the poem. Indeed, The Waste Land can be

 

69

read as an attempt to protect the poet from the decadence
it depicts (although, I believe, that part of the attempt
fails), as if the poem, by identifying the problems of
relativism, fragmented consciousness, and spiritual dryness,
can shelter him from their effects. Ultimately, Eliot finds
himself implicated by his own methods, but the desire for
protection nevertheless remains, and it expresses itself in
the notes, which continue the monumentalizing (along
different lines, however) that fails in the poem.

The importance of the notes, however, rests at least
as much with the critics as with the poet, and in this
connection the most crucial is the unnumbered headnote:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good
deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem
were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book
on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance
(Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted,
Miss Weston's book will elucidate the
difficulties of the poem much better than my
notes do; and I recommend it (apart from the
great interest of the book itself) to any who
think such elucidation worth the trouble. To
another work of anthropology I am indebted in
general, one which has influenced our
generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough;
I have used especially the two volumes Adonis,
Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with
these works will immediately recognize in the
poem certain references to vegetative ceremonies.

 

 

 

This note, along with those that follow it, has controlled
criticism of the poem, and of modern literature in general,
for over fifty years. Nor is this merely incidental; Eliot
offers, at a propitious moment in literary history, a
method that allows criticism an opportunity to create

monuments of its own. That criticism had need of such an

70

act is largely a function of the rise of the sciences:
critics have, over the last half century or so, expressed
the desire fo put their endeavors on a par with the sciences,
to "make criticism scientific," by which they generally mean,
in Northrop Frye's words, "rigorous and systematic.”
Humanistic disciplines, in an increasingly scientific and
technological society, find themselves the poor cousins.
Eliot's notes extend to criticism the possibility of a
systematic, non-impressionistic method analogous to the
methods of the sciences, a method which finds its eventual

apotheosis forty years later in Anatomy of Criticism.

 

More than any other single critic, Frye is indebted to
Eliot's notion of tradition as a simultaneous structure, and
he is at pains to acknowledge the debt in the Anatomy. Not

surprisingly, then, when he turns his attention to The Waste

 

gapg, which more than any other of Eliot's poems incorporates
that same notion into its design, he follows very closely
the mode of analysis that the poem implicitly, and the notes
explicitly, suggest. The method Frye adopts in dealing
with the poem involves first of all distancing himself from
the content, from the "raw material" of the poem as much as
possible. This distancing he accomplishes by focusing his
discussion on consciously literary aspects: the Grail
legend, the citations, the patterns of imagery. To explain
the passage in which the crowds stream across London Bridge,
for example, Frye notes that Eliot "repeats another line
from the same Canto 3: 'I had not thought death had undone

so many.’ Most of the people are coming out of tube-stations,

71
and the subway is a good image for this waste—land world
because, like Dante's scene, it is just below the surface
of the ground."4 The tenor of this statement, like most
of Frye's comments on the poem, suggests that the poem is
of interest because of the way it fits itself into the
larger category of the existing monuments--here, how the
subway is a good version of Dante's Hell--rather than how
or why the poem incorporates those borrowings into itself
and turns them to its own ends.

Moreover, Frye's reliance on a method that rests so
heavily on sources that are outside the poem leads him to
conclusions that are not entirely supported by the poem
itself: "the Thames carries the filth of London into the
sea, where we meet Phlebas again, and the healing waters
return as rain at the end, reminding us of the symbolism

5 Both the river's cleansing

of baptism in Christianity."
of the city and the healing waters' return are debatable,
since the poem shows us neither the cleansed city (only
the polluted river) nor the rains themselves (only their
promise). By reading the poem through the filter of
Literature, as it were, Frye transforms the poem into a
sort of clearinghouse for death-and-rejuvenation myths.
He is not, of course, without justification. Those myths
are all there; Eliot acknowledges them in the notes, puts
them in the poem. But what happens, it seems, in an

Eliot-conditioned reading of the poem is that rather than

reading those elements of the work through the work itself,

72

the work is redistributed among its elements. The defect

in Frye's approach, the approach the poet himself validates,

is not so much the method as the order of priorities.

There is really no question that those citations, allusions,

and parodies are in the poem. But what are they doing

there? How do they advance or subvert the poet's impulses,

and how are they made appropriate to the business of the poem?
If we are to answer these questions about the poem, then

we must adopt a more dynamic view of the creative act than

the commodity-structure of Frye's system6 allows: reading

the poem becomes a reconstruction, an attempt to recapture

the dialectic encounter of the poet with society and history,

with those forces larger than himself of which he must try

to make sense.
II

Alternately villain, hero, symbol, or indictment of
the system, World War I served as a source of material for
virtually every American writer of the late teens and early
twenties. Its influence extended from popular songs to
novels by practically every important writer of the time

to the poetry of Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and of course

 

The Waste Land. Eliot's poem, however, represents a

 

different aspect of the war: not the war as experience, not
the war as ideology, not the war as capitalistic tool, but

the war as effect. The reader sees neither an immediate

73
image of the war itself, nor the underlying philosophies
and pre-war power struggles. Rather, he sees the effects
of the war on English and European culture. Eliot makes
it nearly impossible, moreover, to identify the war as
the lone source of any single passage, by two elements of
his poetic method. For one thing, he rarely alludes
directly to the war. Secondly, his presentation is not
one of cause and effect, but of effect only; that is, he
gives the reader a portrait of the condition or situation
as it exists, with little or no authorial explication
regarding the forming of the situation. At the same time,
this presentation of an ambiguous present, due to its
very nature, cannot close off the possibility that the war
is a major source of the conditions presented in the poem.
Much of the imagery of the poem can be tied to the effects
of the war on the fabric of European society. While these
ties are suggestive rather than concrete, an examination of
the poem in terms of them might lead to a different way of
understanding not only the poem's relation to recent history,
but to its literary history as well.

Paul Fussell has suggested the connection between the
poem and the war in The Great War and Modern Memory, indicating
it was

more profoundly a 'memory of the war' than one had

thought. Consider its archduke, its rats and

canals and dead men, its focus on fear, its dusty

trees, its conversation about demobilization, its

spiritualist practitioners reminding us of those

who preyed on relatives anxious to contact their

dead boys, and not least its settings of blasted
landscape and ruins, suggestive of what Guy

74

Chapman recalls as 'the confluent acne of the
wasteland under the walls of Ypres.'7

Fussell's comments offer a starting point for a discussion
of the relation between the war and the poem, although they
do not (nor do they presume to) deal with the poem in its
entirety. These elements he notes are surface developments
(he is more interested, after all, in the poem as literary
sociology than as an individual work of art), while the poem
is so often concerned with breaking through surfaces, with
mythological correlatives to current conditions. To locate
the war firmly in the poem requires the reader to marry
Fussell's provocative suggestion to the archetypal
criticism the poem seems to demand.

Perhaps one of the most important effects of the war on

The Waste Land is its effect on the poet himself. The war

 

did not have the same impact on Eliot that it had on so many
young American and British artists, because he did not go.
He did volunteer but was turned down by the Navy and the

8 Therefore, his

Intelligence Service on medical grounds.
perception of the conflict is not one of first-hand experience
on the battlefield, but rather one of witnessing the results
of that conflict at home in England. Like Pound, and for

that matter nearly everyone living in Europe during the war,
Eliot had friends and acquaintances killed in battle.

While the loss of these friends fails to show up directly in
his writings as it does in Pound's or Yeats's, Eliot was

still distressingly aware of the young, promising, creative

men who went off to war and did not return. The loss of

75

that creativity and fertility, as well as the accompanying
spiritual dryness, manifests itself in a number of ways in
the poem, from the title itself to the final image of the
ruined tower and the benediction of peace, and in fact it
continues to manifest itself in "The Hollow Men."

The first striking manifestation of war and death
imagery is, of course, in the superstructure of the poem,
in the title and the section headings. The title itself
sets the tone of the work, and the central theme becomes
that of the wasteland: dry, rocky, barren, with its
attendant cultural stagnation and barrenness. If barrenness
and destruction are set forth in the title, they become
even more explicit in the five section headings: ”The
Burial of the Dead,” "A Game of Chess," "The Fire Sermon,"
"Death by Water," and "What the Thunder Said." Eliot chooses,
appropriately enough, to begin his poem with a section called
"The Burial of the Dead,” a heading which brings the remem-
brance of the war into the poem almost immediately. Burial
of the dead is one of the most frequently repeated actions
of war, and in beginning here, Eliot is taking us back into
the war——almost. Burial is a finalizing action, and in this
first section of the poem it takes us back only far enough
to close off the war itself as material for examination,
burying the war along with its dead. This section contains
nearly all the traces of the war that Fussell mentions, and
several oblique suggestions of it that he does not. The

section, for instance, displays the resentment at the promise

76

of life continuing, at spring rains ”stirring / Dull roots,”
at the fulfillment of the promise of renewal. Counterpointed
against that is the failure to fulfill a similar promise, the
"desolate and empty sea" which does not return "Mein Irisch
Kind" to the hyacinth girl. The section also contains the
nationalistic objection, ”Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus
Litauen, echt deutsch," and an almost prelapsarian germanic
innocence. It is in this section, too, that the phrase
”Unreal City” first appears:

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many. (11. 60-63)
Eliot is speaking here of the dead souls among the living, as
well as the actual dead returning to the city. Frye notes of
this passage that the subway from which the crowd emerges is
appropriate to the original context in Dante, but the use
Eliot makes of Dante is more complex than a simple pairing
of situations. It seems equally plausible that both the
tube-station (if that is where the crowd is coming from)
and the original passage in Dante are appropriate to the
moment because they evoke two images the war impressed on
the modern consciousness: the mass grave and the trenches.
The spiritually dead, then, find counterparts not only in
the subterranean world of the Inferno but also in the
physically dead of the recent war.

"A Game of Chess” is the most clearly war-related of

the sections, for a number of reasons. First of all, chess

is a war game, requiring strategy and the capture (killing)

77

of pieces. Within the section, however, is an even more
direct reference to the military, to Albert, who has been

in the Army four years, and within that passage is a telling
statement on the results of the war:

He's been in the army four years, he wants a

good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others
will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something 0' that, I
said. (11. 147-149)
The reason, of course, that there are so many who will offer
Albert a good time is that wholesale deaths of young men
have created a huge surplus of unattached women. What
appears at first, therefore, to be a sordid, isolated scene
contrasted against a remembered ideal of love takes on
more universal, poignant overtones as a reminder of the
thousands upon thousands of dead young men, lost in the war,
and of the equally numerous situations of which this dialogue
is typical.

The remaining three sections, while still concerned
with images of death and destruction, are less closely tied
to the Great War itself. They do, however, reinforce the
more general themes, and the tangentiality of their refer—
ences to the war serves to integrate it into the broader
state of culture with which the poem struggles. The war is
a critical moment in modern consciousness for Eliot, but by
no means the only one. The muting of references serves to

blend it into the whole of experience, to make it always

loom in the background.

78

In the poem itself, the death and destruction themes are
carried to greater lengths, and in fact they become the
death of European culture and spiritual life. The downfall
of civilization which Eliot describes is due, in large part,
to economic factors, as the "Death by Water" section shows:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and the loss. (11. 312-314)
Frye sees Phlebas' death as accompanied by a cyclical rebirth9
that is virtually required if one sees the poem as conditioned
by a reading of Weston and Frazer. The resentment at renewal
and the actual failure of renewal and return in the poem's
first section suggests a similar rift in the case of Phlebas.
There seem to be few instances in the poem to support Frye's
optimism, for while Eliot draws extensively on Weston's work,
he also inverts much that he finds there.

Indeed, much of the poem can be taken as an inversion

of earlier forms of poetry and romance. For instance, the

opening takes the sweet showers of The Canterbury Tales and

 

turns them into "April is the cruelest month.” There are
not sweet showers in this poem. Rain brings not the promise,
but rather the threat of life, and this inversion of imagery
baffles those who, like Frye, attempt a purely archetypal
reading:

Poets tend to identify, by metaphor, the different
aspects of cyclical movement in nature. Winter,
death or old age, night, ruins and the sea have
ready-made associations with each other, and so
have spring, youth or birth, dawn, the city, and
rain or fountains. Eliot's fondness for cyclical
imagery meets us at every turn.

79

Eliot's fondness, however, does not preclude the possibility
of his turning that cyclical imagery back against itself.
Look for a moment at the second grouping in the above
excerpt; all of those images are associated with fertility
and life. In the poem, on the other hand, they are
associated with the first group of images: spring is cruel,
the city is dead, the rains fail, and birth has no place.
The cycle Frye sees as a necessary component of the poem
does not follow so neatly as he would have the reader
believe, because the two associative groups do not balance
each other out. While the poet does draw heavily on the
Grail legend, he inverts much that he finds there to suit

his design, for he does not find the Grail in The Waste Land.

 

An inversion of the death by drowning motif from a
purifying experience to a nullification is not surprising
within the context of the poem.

Just as Phlebas is killed for his commercial interests,
so the death of Europe is associated with the avarice and
the commercialism it displays. In what stands as virtually
the only idyllic moment of the poem, the sounds of the
mandoline and the fishmen's chatter, Eliot shows a rare
glimpse of the "real” city untainted by the large commercial
interests that have made it unreal. This pleasant moment is
sandwiched between two ugly images, the encounter between the
typist and the "small house agent's clerk" who is associated
with Bradford manufacturing-wealth, and the Thames, disgust-

ingly filthy from its use by commerce. The loss of pastoral

80

innocence and the rise of technological capitalism are
closely linked in the poem, and the destruction of the
unreal, pan-European, dead metropolis is brought about by an
economic war. Historically, the environment of crumbling
empires and self-serving alliances of the participants in the
war suggests a decay that preceeds the war itself, so that
the conflict, seen by Germany as its only viable economic
alternative, is perhaps not so much cause as symptom,
delivering the fatal shock to an already dying organism.11

A second connection with the war and the death of
Europe is in the figures of the hooded horde swarming. There
are three related images at work here: the cicada, the
swarming horde, and the mysterious third hooded figure of
lines 360—366. The cicada, or locust, or grasshopper (the
precise insect described by these three names varies with
locality) has traditionally been associated with plagues,
bringing death and starvation in its attacks. It becomes
an apt image for the poem because it is a swarming insect,
and because its general outline is of a hooded figure.
The hooded horde swarming, then, may be representative of
Christ walking with the disciples to Emmaus (suggested by
the mysterious third figure), but it may also be the plague,
the army of swarming locusts descending on the already
barren land. The image of armies brings withiit yet another
remembrance of the war.

Yet another connection lies in the thunder of section

five. The thunder is not that promising regenerative powers

81

of rain, but "dry sterile thunder without rain.” Such a
description, coupled with the equally sterile and dry
landscape of the passage and the ”hooded hordes swarming /
Over endless plains," indicates not thunder at all, but
the thunder of guns, as an echo. The thunder as weapon also
leads rather logically into the falling towers of the
composite Eurasian city of lines 374—377.

A fairly common reading of the poem suggests that death
is brought to the Waste Land, Europe, and that the poem is
a funeral service for the dead civilization. The movement
of the poem would seem to corroborate such a suggestion,
beginning with the Anglican burial service and ending with
a benediction of peace. The greater misfortune, however, is
not that Europe is dead and dying, but that the death is
irrevocable and, in a sense, retroactive, pulling the past
down with the present. A pair of images come to mind to
support such a sense. One is the twin figure of Elizabeth
and Leicester, who are merely another example of life failing
to come to fruition (and whose proximity to the typist and
the clerk is telling). The other is "O O O O that Shakespe-
herian Rag—" in which the glories of the master poet are
demeaned by tawdry jazz-age tongues. Infertility at all
levels, natural, human, spiritual, and cultural, becomes the
central problem for which the wasteland image stands. Much
of that fertility has been lost in consequence of the war--
the human, of course, but also the natural and the cultural,

through the terrible destruction of the shelling, the "dry

82

sterile thunder.” And of course the war, as the poem
suggests, did destroy the past, particularly the architecture
and statuary of the past, with which it came in contact.

The infertility on which the poem focuses much of its
attention, and which leads to the imagery of the Grail legend,
has in a sense created its own kind of criticism. There is
no doubt that Eliot has the Fisher King and the Grail images,
among others of dying and reviving gods and lost and
recovered fertility, in mind. These connected images have
led a number of critics to see, as Frye does, the poem as a
cyclical process, from the burial of the opening to the
regenerative rains of the close. Such a reading is
attractive, but not entirely accurate.

Here again, Eliot subverts the traditional cycle, turns
it from ritual into grotesque rather than romance:

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

(11. 71-72)
This reference to ritual death of fertility gods is twisted
and blown out of proportion; the poet suggests the citizens
of the unreal city have corpses in their gardens, and that
those corpses are not gods who will revive but common
cadavers that will decay and return to nature as humus. The
problem with either possibility is that it does not fit the
larger context of the poem. The image of fertility presented
in those two lines is therefore ironic, as their tone implies,
and the "corpse you planted" will not sprout at all. The

counterpointing of mythic with modern is the more poignant

83

because, unlike the mythological fertility gods, the young,
virile men killed in World War I can never be revived, nor
will they help to continue the species. The dead do not
regenerate in the modern world.

That dying and reviving god imagery gives way in part
five to the hooded figure, the image suggestive of the
crucified and resurrected Christ walking with the two
disciples to Emmaus. The ironic counterpOinting of the
earlier instances of reviving gods turns against itself at
this point in the poem because it finds in this Christ figure
not a promise but a threat. The context in which the hooded
figure appears, that of the swarming horde and the cicada and
the drought, lends a frightening ominousness to the already
mysterious figure who is never actually identified by the
poet. That the possible presence of the resurrected Christ
offers no comfort finds support in other of Eliot's poems,
from "Christ the tiger" in "Gerontion" to and ambivalence
at the birth of Christ in "Journey of the Magi," with its "I
should be glad of another death." As with the fulfillment of
the natural cycle in the poem's opening, this renewal
provides a bitter contrast to the condition of the merely
human elements of the Waste Land.

Both the impotence of society and the crumbling tradition
are realized in the single image of the ruined or falling
tower. The tower in a state of decay is a common symbol
for the decay of society, and appears in the work of

Yeats at nearly the same time as The Waste Land, although

 

84

with a major difference: Yeats restores his broken tower,
both in his poetry and in his life. In the Waste Land a
broken tower cannot be restored; it remains to another poem,

Ash-Wednesday, written some eight years later, for an ascent

 

up the stairs to appear. As an image of a crumbling phallic
symbol, the ruined tower also serves as a final image of
impotence and infertility in the poem: "Le Prince d'Aquitaine
a la tour abolie" (l. 430), an image of the male inability to
regenerate.

Eliot does in fact picture the people in the Waste Land
as unable to regenerate. There is the reminder by Lou the
charwoman that the fertile men will not all be returning from
the war. At the same time she reveals that even those who do
return, such as Albert, will be unable to father children.
All the people of the post-war Waste Land are unable to
regenerate either through a flaw in the male, often pictured
as death, or in the female, which takes the form of lack of
sexual desire or (as in the case of Lil) a desire not to
procreate. Then, too, there is the image of the personality-
melting that renders fertility impossible. Woman melts into
woman, man into man, prophet into prophet, god into god,
until the sexes begin to melt into each other and to
culminate in the figure of Tiresias, perhaps the ultimate
figure of infertility. He has the characteristics of both
sexes, but at the same time he is neither of them. He is at
once beyond sex and without it, a sexless, infertile, aged

voyeur.

85

The infertility in The Waste Land goes beyond the human

 

level to a more general symbolic infertility. This inability
of the land to regenerate is most explicit in the section
”What the Thunder Said":

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop and think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But only dry sterile thunder without rain. (11. 331—42)

The dry, rocky landscape runs to nightmarish proportions in
this passage and the one following, emphasizing the dry
sterility. The arid climate runs through much of Eliot's
work during and after the war, including ”Gerontion” and "The
Hollow Men":
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
("Gerontion,” 11. 75-76)
and
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar. ("The Hollow Men," 11. 9-10)

These other poems do not prove, of course, the failure of the

rains at the end of The Waste Land, but they do support a

 

contention that there is not the cause for optimism that a
purely archetypal reading would lead to. There is a damp
gust bringing rain at the end of the poem, although no actual
rain, but even here the promise of renewal must be doubted.
One is reminded of Catherine Barclay lying dead while

Frederic Henry walks from the hospital in the rain which

86

brings no spiritual rebirth and mocks the failure of the
process of birth which has killed her. There is also the
memory that Spring, the time for renewal, was the favorite
time for launching offensives,12 and that the rains at
Passchendaele brought not regeneration but death to the

13 While it is impossible

soldiers who drowned in the mud.
to carry metaphors over from one author to another, it is
interesting to note that the regenerative rains fail so

often in literature of the Great War, sometimes failing to
come and sometimes failing when they do.

So it is finally that the dryness and the sterility rule
the Waste Land, a land of infertility in which the planted
corpse will not sprout and the dead tree can give no shelter.
Perhaps it is in this context that the poem as funeral
service makes the most sense. The city is itself planted,
the tower in ruins, and while it may be that, as Kenner

claims, "Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities,

as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older

 

poems,"14 it may also be that in the infertile world Eliot
presents the ruins of civilization cannot regenerate at all.
It may be that the war-ruined culture can only hope for the
shantih of the benediction.

Indeed, the prospects for the peaceful society are
little better, as "The Hollow Men” shows. They are
explicitly not products of the war:

Remember us--if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men
The stuffed men. (11. 15-18)

87

They are products of peace, and yet like their wartime

counterparts of The Waste Land in their lack of spiritual

 

substance. A major difference between the two poems is that
the emphasis of the later work is not so much on the failure
to regenerate as on the lack of anything to be regenerated.
The landscape is much like that of the longer poem, a dead,
barren land, cactus land, a landscape suggesting both
emptiness and infertility. So the hollow men are empty
and infertile, perhaps infertile because empty. There is
also much in the imagery of the poem that recalls the earlier
poem, from the rats and the hollow valley to the falling of
the Shadow, the threat, again, of a vaguely seen figure.
There is nothing left to them but meaningless ritual and
”deliberate disguises," the disguises of children's games and
hollow piety.15 They do not practice a sham religion, but
an empty one. They are the hollow men, the men without
positive traits of good or evil, living a meaningless and
hollow existence. Nor will the hollowness be reproduced;
they are the last generation, and they know it:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper. (11. 95—98)
It is not the thunder of guns that destroys their waste land
but the quiet hollowness that simply stops, with a whimper.
In a way the hollow men are the true populace of the Waste
Land, impotent, pathetic, meaningless, vacuous. Their

infertility, like that of the Waste Land itself, may be a

blessing rather than a curse. Moreover, the peace which they

88

inhabit, in which they are dying, is itself a product of war.
This is not a pre—lapsarian garden but a land ravaged and
wasted, full of broken glass and lost kingdoms.

A second difference between the two poems is that in
"The Hollow Men," Eliot does not attempt to distance himself
from his material in the same violent way he does in 292

Waste Land. In the earlier work there is a sense that he is

 

using the past to indict the present, that he invokes the
language and the monuments of a richer, more fertile time to
sharpen the contrast with the thin, sterile culture of his
own. By using these fragments of the past, he is attempting
to set his own monument among the existing order, to protect
it against the ravages of the Waste Land he describes, to
portray without being tainted. Finally, though, he cannot,
and he realizes in section five that he is implicated by his
methods, that his ransacking of the past is a correlary
activity to ”O O O O the Shakespeherian Rag." Rather than
the borrowings protecting him from the present, they are
themselves colored by it; they lose much of their original
meaning and take on meanings from the present context. Eliot
realizes the failure of his attempt, doomed to failure
because of the demands it makes on the world. And so he
finishes, no longer demanding that modern society measure up
to past glories, but asking, "Shall I at least set my lands
in order?” Even though London Bridge is falling down, the
poet must look to his own problems, must shore the fragments

not against society's ruins, but against his own.

HISTORY AND NARRATIVE FORM IN GO DOWN, MOSES

 

The present of Go Down, Moses is steeped in the past.

 

Indeed, the narrative present frequently is the past, as the
various stories move backward and forward in time with a
fluidity which belies the stability of the present, even of
the reader's own apparently stable present. The reader finds
himself drawn into and thoroughly enmeshed in an entanglement
of generation, race, personal and public history, blood ties
and prejudices, and wilderness that seems to have existed
before time and may return after it, or outside it. Time
here is a far cry from Quentin Compson's petty notion of the
steady accumulation of seconds, minutes, and hours toward
death that makes him break his watch. The past co-exists
with the present (Carothers McCaslin walks around with Isaac
McCaslin and Carothers Edmonds and Lucas Beauchamp as much as
they with each other), and the future often seems available
as well (as when Sam Fathers and Ike "see" the future of the
wilderness tied up with their own future, implicit in the
moment).1 The impulse to tell a simple, clear story of the
present is overwhelmed by hordes of images and spectres from
the past, so that the most casual narrative becomes a major
detour through qualifications, clarifications, recapitula—

tions, genealogies, and relationships.

89

90

Nor is this true only at the level of whole stories;
even at the most elemental level of narrative, the sentence,
the same pattern can be discerned: sentences begin,
apparently simple and declarative, only to be inundated by
clauses and phrases that modify, reduce, expand, clarify, or
subvert the initial meaning as the past rushes in on that

meaning. The informing principle of Go Down, Moses exerts

 

its influence outward beyond the level of story to novel
(despite arguments, possibly valid in other contexts, which
might be raised that the book is not cohesivez) and inward
to a single syntactic unit, reinforcing and highlighting the
larger narrative.

The book opens with a pair of such sentences, if indeed
the second can be called a sentence:

Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and
nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more,
a widower now and uncle to half a county and
father to no one

this was not something participated in or even
seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin
Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and
so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding
the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of
that which some had thought then and some still
thought should have been Isaac's, since his was
the name in which the title to the land had first
been granted from the Indian patent and which some
of the descendants of his father's slaves still
bore in the land.

This sentence contains a great deal of apparently needless
information, one way or another, and still more of it as the
second sentence goes on. Why, for instance, is it important
to know Edmonds' relationship to Ike? Why even is Ike needed

at all at this juncture, when he will make no direct

91

appearance until the fourth story? The second sentence, in
its second paragraph, moves toward something like an answer:
not something he had participated in or even

remembered except from the hearing, the listening,

come to him through and from his cousin McCaslin

born in 1850 and sixteen years his senior and

hence, his own father being near seventy when Isaac,

an only child, was born, rather his brother than

cousin and rather his father than either, out of

the old time, the old days (p. 4)
The story that follows will predate Ike by several years, and
yet it has importance for him, enough so that it sticks with
him from a mere retelling. Its significance to him is
twofold: it gives him a picture of his father to supplement
the few he has from personal recollection, and it provides
him with a connection to "the old time, the old days." Its
significance for the reader goes beyond this to give us an
insight into Ike and his background, particularly when teamed
with the diary entries in "The Bear," into the automatic,
although unmalicious, indifference of his culture to the
black man. However, such a significance does not explain the
relationship of part one to the rest of the story—-nor can it
ever, for read backward from the story, part one must
necessarily seem out of place, inconsistent. Rather, "Was"
must be read from part one forward toward the rest of the
book, so that it, along with the two stories that follow,
form a parenthetical insertion in the narrative of Isaac

McCaslin. (Ike's appearance resembles that of the protagonist

of Greek drama and reminds us the term proto-agon [first

 

actor] refers to the hero, who normally appeared on stage

first.)

92

Within that parenthesis are three stories about the
world, past and present, in which Ike lives. None of the
stories mentions him as a participant or a direct force with
the exception of Lucas Beauchamp's belief that he was hustled
out of his inheritance and that the Edmonds family is there-
fore an usurper wrongfully occupying the McCaslin farm.
”Pantaloon in Black" does not mention him at all, yet it
seems to have a legitimate claim to its place in the book, as
do the others. This rightful place, however, can only be
explained (if the book is to be seen as having unity) if the
stories are read as background--important in their own right,
but background to the larger context nevertheless-—in
parenthesis. The idea of parenthesis, of discontinuation for
the purpose of providing additional information, suggests
itself from the uncompleted frame-tale form of "Was," which
breaks in mid-sentence to open out on the story, never to
come back to the sentence. Since the sentence is never
concluded in the novel, it would be possible to say that the
whole book serves to describe Ike's world, or that all is
background leading up to his socially conditioned response to

Roth's part—black mistress, "Maybe in a thousand or two

 

thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now!

 

He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity, and
outrage: 'You're a niggerl'" (p. 361). But it is more
fruitful to see the parenthesis apppp Ike ending with his
appearance proper, in "The Old People." The periodic

repetition in "The Fire and the Hearth" of the book's opening

93
reinforces such a reading by constantly reminding the reader
of Ike's centrality. Without him the conflict between Lucas
and Roth would not exist, for Lucas sees Roth as the usurper
of the land:

. . . relinquished, repudiated even, by its true

heir (Isaac, 'Uncle Ike', childless, a widower

now, living in his dead wife's house the title

to which he likewise declined to assume, born

into his father's old age and himself born old

and became steadily younger and younger until,

past seventy himself and at least that many years

nearer eighty than he ever admitted any more, he

had acquired something of a young boy's high and

selfless innocence) °.' . (p. 106)

In this case the secondary information appears in literal
rather than figurative parenthesis, and it reiterates the
form as well as the substance of the opening, almost as if
those two initial sentences were reappearing, re-exerting
their domination over the background material, reminding the
reader that this is, after all, Ike's novel.

"Pantaloon in Black" carries no such reminder and is,
on first glance, the most problematic piece in the book. It
bears no immediate relationship to Ike and seems wholly
unrelated unless read, like the first two, as background,
essential to an understanding of the land and, therefore, of
the man. If the first two stories point to the white man's
blindness toward the humanity of the black, this one is a
study of that humanity in all its fraility. Rider's
prodigious stature only serves, by comparison, to amplify
his fragility. What he tries to do is forget his humanity,

to become a "nigger," and he performs all the acts expected

by the culture of one. His grief, however, drives him beyond

94

the limits of that role, one of which is that "niggers" do
not kill white men even when a "man" would, or when a black
would be allowed to kill another black. Although he tries
to put his manhood in the past and assume the identity of
his race, the past keeps seeking him out:

But it was not his knees on the floor, it was his

feet. And for a space he could hear her feet too

on the planks of the hall behind him and her

voice crying after him from the door: "Spoot!

Spoot!"--crying after him across the moon-dappled

yard the name he had gone by in his childhood and

adolescence, before the men he worked with and the

bright dark nameless women he had taken in course

and forgotten until he saw Mannie that day and

said, "Ah'm thu wid all dat," began to call him

Rider. (p. 151)

Neither he nor his aunt will let him forget that he is
not a stereotype but an individual human being. His
relationship with Mannie is not general or racial but
individual and personal, and his aunt's use of the childhood
nickname, Spoot, evokes a flood of images from his own
particular past. The fluidity of time is brought to bear in
that single sentence, as the present and all phases of the
past rush in on Rider with unbearable simultaneity. His
attempt to escape into racial anonymity drives him on toward
the fatal crap game.4

It is as an example of the black man's humanity, then,
that "Pantaloon in Black" fits as part of a unified book,
enlightening not only the Ike stories but the actions of
Gavin Stevens and Miss Worsham in the title story as well.

Indeed, without the earlier tale of black grief to support

and explain it, "Go Down, Moses" appears to present mere

95

cartoon figures as Mollie and the Worshams act out their
grief ritual. The story's more immediate purpose, however,
is to close out the narrative parenthesis and clear the
stage for the entrance of Isaac McCaslin.

Ike does not stride onto the stage; however, he
materializes out of the gray formlessness in an opening
evocative of both Crane's ”The Open Boat" and the Book of
Genesis not as "Uncle Ike, past seventy and nearer eighty
than he ever corroborated any more," but as a boy shooting
his first deer. The past, a rapidly dying past which will
see no future of its own, pervades both ”The Old People" and
"The Bear," and the stories concern themselves with that past
living through actors in the present. Sam Fathers passes it
along to Ike in the blood ritual after the killing of the
deer, and General Compson speaks of it when he tells Cass
”you aint even got a good hand-hold where this boy was
already an old man before you damned Sartorises and Edmondses
invented farms and banks to keep yourselves from having to
find out what this boy was born knowing" (p. 250). The
title, "The Old People," refers not only to the participants
in the story, since it is set many years prior to the "now"
of the book, but also to the people of antiquity, white, red,
and black, who act in the story as spirits, as presences:

They were the white boy, marked forever, and

the old dark man sired on both sides by savage

kings, who had marked him, whose bloody hands had

merely formally consecrated him to that which,

under the man's tutelage, he had already accepted,

humbly and joyfully, with abnegation and with
pride too; the hands, the touch, the first worthy

96
blood which he had been found at last worthy to

draw, joining him and the man forever, so that the

man would continue to live past the boy's seventy

years and then eighty years, long after the man

himself had entered the earth as chiefs and kings

entered it;--the child, not yet a man, whose

grandfather had lived in the same country and in

almost the same manner as the boy himself would

grow up to live, leaving his descendants in the

land in his turn as his grandfather had done,

and the old man past seventy whose grandfathers

had owned the land long before the white men

ever saw it and who had vanished from it now

with all their kind, what of blood they left

behind them running now in another race and for

a while even in bondage and now drawing toward

the end of its alien and irrevocable course,

barren, since Sam Fathers had no children. (p. 165)
The main sentence here, "They were the white boy, marked
forever, and the old dark man sired on both sides by savage
kings, who had marked him" is complete in itself,
grammatically, yet it says next to nothing about them or
about its own meaning. It virtually requires additional
information, which appears in the sentence itself: the past,
the spirit of kings, lives through nature, through the buck
Sam addresses, "'Oleh, Chief,‘ Sam said. 'Grandfather.'"
Nor is it merely the white ancestry living in the boy; Sam
had imparted to him the Indian and, more incidentally, the
black ancestry which he cannot pass along directly since he
has no children. The ceremony of blood, then, is a laying
on of hands, a passing on of the line of kings which Ike,
because he has no children and no one to pass the line on to
and not even the realm to pass on (the wilderness will not
survive him), will be the last possessor of. The sentence

is wrong in this respect: "the end of its alien and

irrevocable course" is not Sam Fathers but Isaac McCaslin.

97

The connection between Ike and the death of the
wilderness is inevitable in the sentence quoted above. The
main clause links them, then the first long modifying clause
on the ceremony, with phrases such as "under the man's
tutelage . . . joining him and the man forever, so that the
man would continue to live past the boy's seventy years and
then eighty years," links the two of them explicitly. The
second half of the sentence then brings to the surface the
ancestors of both the man and the boy in alternating
dependent clauses-~there are no verbs for either ”the child"
or "the man"--so that each clause appears as if it could be
placed anywhere in the sentence, even in the main clause, in
parenthesis. However, as it stands it not only fulfills the
parenthetical function of providing background and movement
in time, it also re—emphasizes the relationship between Sam
and Ike, in form as well as content.

The connection between the two runs through all three
Ike stories, even "Delta Autumn," although (or perhaps
because) Sam Fathers is long dead. The connection is made
through Ike's musing on the wilderness and why he never tried
to save it.

It was because there was just exactly enough of

it. He seemed to see the two of them--himself

and the wilderness-~as coevals, his own span as a

hunter, a woodsman, not contemporary with his

first breath but transmitted to him, assumed by

him gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from that

old Major de Spain and that old Sam Fathers who

had taught him to hunt, the two spans running out

together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but

into a dimension free of both time and space
where once more the untreed land warped and wrung

98

to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the

frantic old-world people to turn into shells to

shoot at one another, would find ample room for

both--the names, the faces of the old men he had

known and loved and for a little while outlived,

moving again among the shades of tall unaxed

trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong

immortal game ran forever before the tireless

belling immortal hounds, falling and rising

phoenix—like to the soundless guns. (p. 354)
His life begins not at birth, and his ancestors are not the
whites, or at any rate not just the whites, from whom his
blood descends. Rather, life is "transmitted,” given to him
by Sam Fathers in his teachings and in the blood ritual as
well, and by the other old people who take him to the
wilderness: Major de Spain, General Compson, McCaslin
Edmonds, Walter Ewell,:uu1even Boon Hogganbeck. This
passage comes quite shortly after a recapitulation of the
episode at the beginning of "The Old People," so the reader
sees Ike's relationship to the wilderness revolves around not
only the two men in the passage, but the others as well.
Moreover, shortly before that Ike sees the human devastation
of what once was the wilderness, "the land in which neon
flashed past them from the little countless towns and
countless shining this-year's automobiles sped past them on
the broad plumb—ruled highways," and he sees the change in
the men from Compson and de Spain to Will Legate and Roth
Edmonds. The latter pair are figures of inheritance, Roth
bearing the same given name from the progenitor of the

McCaslin line and Will Legate with his curiously redundant

name meaning to give by bequest, but theirs is an inheritance

99
much diminished in stature and scope, as they themselves are
diminished inheritors. The comparison shows that the
wilderness life is reaching its earthly end, as is Ike.
But an earthly end is not a total cessation of
existence, and the quoted passage points up a major meta-
physical difference between Go Down, Moses and, say,

The Sound and the Fury. In the latter work man is viewed as

 

possessing no spiritual life, and death is therefore the end
of all life; while in the former, spiritual existence is a
major part of man, and life in the flesh is an imperfect
stage to be suffered through on the way to the ideal state.
The quoted sentence is very explicit on this point, "the two
spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness,
but into a dimension free of both time and space." Moreover,
one of those spans belongs to the wilderness, which as the
reader has seen in previous stories possesses a spiritual
existence. Its relationship to Ike is, to his mind, one of
contemporaries, coevals; it completes with him the process it
begins with Sam. Interestingly, the two men named in this
passage on the death of the wilderness are the two most
closely connected with it: Sam, whose death coincides with
the beginning of the end, and Major de Spain, who began
selling it off to the timber company, who is in large measure
responsible for turning it into "the untreed land warped and
wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic
old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another."

The older wilderness is contrasted here with its greatly

100

fallen successor, both of which are contrasted later in the
sentence with the ideal-world wilderness. The others—-
Compson, Ewell, Cass, and Boon--although they are significant
in many respects are not so closely tied to the death of the
woods and therefore recieve no mention here. Sam Fathers is
the most important person because he symbolizes the plight

of the wilderness.

If Ben is an objective correlative to the woods and his
death stands for its downfall as well, then Sam is the human
correlative. Similarly, the final demise has as its
objective correlative "the mathematical squares of rank
cotton," a complete taming of the land, and as its human
correlative Isaac McCaslin, the woodsman besieged by the
trappings of civilization--mistresses and city-dwellers with
no respect——even as he goes out on his last trips to the no-
longer wilderness. When he dies, the wilderness will be gone,
and the two will move together toward a hunter's Valhalla.
The structure of the sentence itself suggests freedom from
earthly constraints, as it runs fluidly, relatively free of
punctuation (for Faulkner), and mystical-sounding, "moving
again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless
brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before
the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising
phoenix-like to the soundless guns." It is for this world
Ike has spent his life preparing, for a world where the
natural aristocracy of Sam Fathers and Old Ben and Major

de Spain and General Compson dominates over lesser beings,

101
where trappings of society are worthless (just as Ike,
earlier, has to give up his compass to see the bear), where
the warriors of the hunt may be killed each day to rise each
evening.

Ike has been aware, almost since his first encounter
with the wilderness, of its symbolic or mythic qualities, as
embodied by Old Ben:

It was as if the boy had already divined what his

senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that

doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly

and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who

feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and

nameless even to one another in the land where the

old bear had earned a name, and through which ran

not even a mortal beast but an anachronism

indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time,

a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild

life which the little puny humans swarmed and

hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like

pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant . . .

(p. 193)

Ike's vision of the wilderness, both here and elsewhere in
the book, partakes of neither mind nor senses, but of the
mystical side of experience that appears not to be part of
the white man's—-or perhaps simply the modern man's--
cognitive baggage. General Compson, although not fully
understanding for his own part, must translate Ike's inarticu-
late desire to remain in camp for Cass, who as an Edmonds,
that family of farmers and bankers--of new people--can no
longer recognize his visionary side. Ike's vision allows him
to break through barriers himself, to recognize connections
between the bear and the wilderness, between black, red, and

white races, between past, present, and future, although,

because of its private quality, he cannot effectively

102

communicate it, try as he may in the fourth section of
"The Bear." His youthful View of the wilderness in the
above passage corresponds closely to his vision of his own
relationship to it in the passage quoted earlier from ”Delta
Autumn," in that both are non-intellectual, non-sensory
perceptions on the intuitive, instinctive level that seek
out (or perhaps discovers is a better word, since it implies
less willful activity) connections.

These connections enable him to move freely in mental
time and space, and they provoke the narrative of his tale
into curious peregrinations. Ike's story is, in its most

distilled form: "He had heard about an old bear and finally

 

got big enough to hunt it and he hunted it four years and at

last met it with a gun in his hands and he didn't shoot"

 

(p. 297). The rest of the story, arguably the rest of the
novel, stands as a commentary on that single most important
event in his life. That event, an inaction, aptly charac—
terizes Ike and is a keynote by which the other incidents
which purport to explain it can themselves be measured and
explained. It is the elemental core out from which the story
builds forward and backward and to which the narrative must
occasionally return to regain its perspective. The itali—
cized sentence, for instance, occurs not in a description of
the hunt, but in the midst of dialogue between Cass and Ike
about family history, a discussion that moves like the
narrative itself and to which we shall return. The

experience with the bear, however, while the most important

103

feature of both Ike's life and the story, is the climax of
neither, and it makes new demands on both the narrative and
the reader. The plot cannot merely build, as it would in a
typical story, to that crescendo and then drop off. Rather,
it must build around it; the episode is not at the end of
the novel but at its heart. Moreover, the pattern of
narration is colored not only by Ike's perceptions, but also
by that cultural hobgoblin, the past, which continually
intrudes and forces characters and narrator alike to deal
with it.

"The Bear" is perhaps Faulkner's finest attempt to
capture the whole world in a single syntactic unit, a goal
which, as he writes Cowley, he always seeks:

I am telling the same story over and over, which

is myself and the world. Tom Wolfe was trying to

say everything, get everything, the world plus 'I'

or filtered through 'I' or the effort of 'I' to

embrace the world in which he was born and walked

a little while and then lay down again, into one

volume. I am trying to go a step further. This

I think accounts for what people call obscurity,

the involved formless 'style,‘ endless sentences.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between

one Cap and one period.

In the case of "The Bear," the entire story serves as a
parenthetical insertion to that single italicized sentence,
explaining and being explained by it. Yet the attempt is no
less present in the novel as a whole or in any of his novels,
and the constant telling over and over of the same story is
the authorial parallel to Quentin's attempting to define his

relationship to his homeland through the reconstruction of

the tale of Thomas Sutpen. Faulkner's attempt appears

104

motivated, as is Quentin's, by a desire to reveal the true
nature of his ambivalence toward the South, a relationship as
complex and difficult to explain to non—Southerners as Yeats's
or Joyce's ambivalence toward Ireland is to non-Irishmen, so
difficult, in fact, that a lesser artist such as Quentin finds
himself reduced to crying out that he does not hate the South,
and his creator must surely share in part of that cry.

That ambivalence works itself out in Faulkner's

narratives as a dialectical movement, of which Go Down, Moses

 

is in many ways the clearest example. The movement of the
narrative in the novel from particular moment to general
background and back and forth parallels Ike's own desire to
understand his relationship to history, to find his place in
it and yet not be overwhelmed, to keep himself inviolate in
the face of crushing historical guilt and power. Ike refuses
to accept his inheritance as commodity, and begins to explore
the process, through the ledgers, of the family's ownership.
“Ulen he discovers the incest and casual cruelty brought about
‘by the historical fact of that ownership, he is moved to
praxis. Characteristically, that action is an inaction, not
a move to change the system but rather an attempt to extri—
cate himself from that system. He has the opportunity for
truly meaningful action but his vision fails him at the key
moment; he is still too much the product of that historical
movement he seeks to escape to cede his inheritance not to
Cass, or at any rate not only to Cass, but to the representa-

tive of the wronged and neglected side of the McCaslin line,

105

Lucas Beauchamp. Ike recognizes his responsibility in
seeking out Fonsiba to see that she gets her thousand dollars,
but he fails to recognize also that the Beauchamp claim to
the land is every bit as strong as the Edmonds claim, and
stronger, if Lucas is to be believed, as Warren Beck notes:
”He even speaks of his cousins the Edmonds men as woman-made,
as if his descent in a male line through Tomy's Turl
(Tomasina's Terrel) outweighed the preceding illegitimacy and
incest.”6 Ike's attempt at dialectical thinking ultimately
:fails because he is still too much a product of his culture,
21nd his knowledge and insight in the wilderness, as exempli-
jfied by not shooting Old Ben, fail him in social contexts.
Ike's failure, however, is not Faulkner's. In a letter
‘t<) Malcolm A. Franklin on Independence Day, 1943, he commented
(>11 the murder of twenty blacks in Detroit on the same day a
£3c1uadron of black pilots flew a successful mission at
I>2tntelleria:

Suppose you and me and a few others of us lived in
the Congo, freed seventy-seven years ago by Ukase;
of course we cant live in the same apartment hut
with the black folks, nor always ride in the same
car not eat in the same resaurant, but we are free
because the Great Black Father says so. Then the
Congo is engaged in War with the Cameroon. At
last we persuade the Great Black Father to let us
fight too. You and Jim say are flyers. You have
just spent the day trying to live long enough to
learn how to do your part in saving the Congo.
Then you come back down and are told that 20 of
your people have just been killed by a mixed mob
of civilians and cops at Little Poo Poo. What
would you think?

A change will come out of this war. If it
doesn't, if the politicians and the people who run
this country are not forced to make good the
Shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom, liberty,

106

human rights, then you young men who live through

it will have wasted your precious time, and those

who dont live through it will have died in vain.

(Letters, pp. 175—76)
Faulkner's attack against injustice and inhumanity, as this
letter demonstrates, aims not only at the South, but at the
hypocrisy and double-thinking of Washington and the North as
well. He writes of the South because he knows it, and
because the waters of bigotry and abuse are less muddied by
sham humanitarianism. Unlike Ike McCaslin, Faulkner can see
the consequences of ceding the inheritance to the Edmonds
family, which are that very little is changed except that
matters are made worse because the Edmondses, as evidenced by
Zack's treatment of Lucas and Molly and Roth's dealings with
his mistress, show less compassion for their black cousins
than does Ike. Faulkner uses his understanding of race

relations and history to create a dialectic narrative in

Go Down, Moses; his "world filtered through '1'" becomes a

 

play of past and present which is nowhere more evident than

in the fourth section of "The Bear." The section opens and
closes with incompleted sentence fragments, and the remainders
of those sentences are missing from the book; the effect of
these fragments is to open the section out onto the preceding
and following sections, so that its meaning is not intrinsi-
cally its own but belongs instead to the rest of the story.
Moreover, despite the use of a number of periods and question
marks, the customary indicators of completed sentences, the
section stands as a single syntactic unit, a continuous,

flowing, unbroken, parenthetical insertion that just happens

107

to be sixty-one pages long. This sub-story, in true
dialectical fashion, has no justification of its own but
finds its justification in the main story, on which it acts
in turn, not as background but as process of Ike's discovery
of self-in-history. His discovery of the nature of his
family's ownership of the land and his repudiation of his
birthright are built on--and clarify-—his earlier understand-
ing of the wilderness and the validity of the Ikkemotubbe—
Sutpen—de Spain-lumber company claims to ownership.

Similarly, the older narrative, the ledgers, with which
Faulkner shares the fourth section, perfOrms as more than
mere background, becoming instead an active force in Ike's
conception of himself:

. . . he seemed to see her actually walking into
the icy creek on that Christmas day six months
before her daughter's and her lover's (Her first
lover's he thought. Her first) child was born,
solitary, inflexible, griefless, ceremonial, in
formal and succinct repudiation of grief and
despair who had already had to repudiate belief
and hope
that was all. He would never need look at the
ledgers again nor did he; the yellowed pages in
their fading and implacable succession were as
much a part of his consciousness and would remain
so forever, as the fact of his own nativity:
Tennie Beauchamp 21yrs Won by Amodeus McCaslin
from Hubert Beauchamp Esqre Possible Strait against
three Treys in sigt Not called 1859 Marrid to
Tomy's Turl 1859 (p. 271)

 

Ike not only employs the records as part of his own
consciousness, he becomes an active participant in them by
undating the entry for Tennie's Jim. What Ike never seems to
realize, though, is that these records, functioning as the

family Bible for the black McCaslins, are financial ledgers,

108

emblematic of the single most monstrous fact of their
treatment by the white McCaslins, and from which all the
other indignities spring. He seems able to recognize and
willing to atone for all the evil in the ledgers except for
the sheer fact of their existence, which he apparently never
questions. The tale told in the ledgers acts positively on
Ike, influencing his decisions within the larger narrative.
So too it acts on the readers, influencing our understanding
of Ike, his noble qualities, and his shortcomings. Moreover,
the seemingly benign records are colored by the larger
narrative, as we discover with Ike, and even beyond Ike (as
in the title story) the often tragic consequences of the
events recounted in the ledgers. Then, too, the fourth
section draws together not only the rest of the story but the
rest of the novel, as it prepares us for Ike's failure to
accept Roth's mistress in ”Delta Autumn," a rejection
conditioned by his personal inability to recognize his
historically-dictated response to blacks not as people but as
chattel.

The final section of "The Bear” reminds us that Ike's
place is, after all, in the woods. Just as the encounter
with the wilderness brings out excellence, albeit momentary,
in Boon Hogganbeck, so in Ike it inspires a nobility and a
holiness that, despite his emulation of the Great Carpenter,
fails him in the wilderness of social contexts and race
relations. Small wonder, then, that he gives Roth's mistress

a stock social response on discovering that she is black.

109

Indeed, the response seems to be more on the level of what

society is saying collectively than of a personal outcry, as

 

he thinks, "Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in

America . . . But not now! Not now!" (p. 361). It is and is

 

not a personal response, a voice from somewhere else that
nevertheless speaks for the actor, in much the same way non-
human voices speak for Aziz at the end of E. M. Forster's

Passage to India: "But the horses didn't want it . . . they

 

said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,‘ and the sky said
'No, not there.'"7 Ike is simply too little the social man
to transfer his woods-wisdom to other contexts, and however
much the final story valorizes, rightly, the response he
fails to make, the response Miss Worsham does make, it can
never hold him responsible in a world he has never occupied
with his real living self. His recognition of the inadequacy
of man's heritage and properties, human constructs both, in
the face of the larger truth of the wilderness cannot carry
him through the tangle of social relationships; even his
relationship with Sam Fathers, close as it is, stems from the
wilderness rather than from civilization, and while it
represents a movement, it is not an arrival.

Indeed, Ike's failure to fully understand his
relationship and responsibility to his black cousins causes
the action of the title story; the executed man, Samuel
Beauchamp, grandson of Lucas and Molly and the fifth genera-
tion (like Roth) from old Carothers McCaslin, was initially

thrown off the McCaslin farm for breaking into a storehouse

110

to which he held an equally strong moral claim as that of the
legal owner, Roth Edmonds, and a claim he could exericse if
only Ike's liberation from his culture had been more
complete.8 Ike, as much as Roth, bears responsibility for
selling Molly's Benjamin into Egypt. Ike functions, then,
not as a model but as a bridge to that more complete
liberation of the human spirit represented by Miss Worsham.

His entanglement in the past is too complete.

POLITICS AND VISION IN YEATS'S LATER POETRY

The early poetry of William Butler Yeats manifests a
naive conception of the relation between society and
literature in the insistence of treating Irish subjects
exclusively with Irish themes, symbols, and myths. This
nationalism reveals itself not as propaganda (which he
consistently battles against in his writings on the Young
Ireland Poets) but as local, or in this‘case national, color:

But I would rather speak to those who . . . are

convinced, as I was convinced, that art is

tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No

Man's Land. The Greeks looked within their borders,

and we, like them have a history fuller than any

modern history of imaginative events; and legends
which surpass, as I think, all legends but theirs

in wild beauty . . . while political reasons have

made love of country, as I think, even greater

among us than among them.

The love of country, which the poet here sets down as a
program for Irish writers, is always a feature of his work,
but is particularly emphasized in his Celtic Twilight
writings. The first four books of poetry deal mainly with
Yeats's personal life, Irish folk life and legend, and super-
natural happenings as their subject matter, with the
overwhelming majority of these poems expressed in terms of
national history, literature, and legend. That the super-

natural is linked to the national he makes quite explicit in

the essay quoted above: "But here in Ireland, when the arts

111

112
have grown humble, they will find two passions ready to their
hands, love of the Unseen Life and love of country." (Essays,
p. 204) His supernatural beings at this period are almost
invariably the Sidhe, his mystical symbol the Rose, and both,
in his hands, are as much Irish as they are spiritual.

One of the Irish subjects, however, that he rarely deals
with at all is its politics. The reader of the early poems
is hard pressed to discern the political and social climate
of the Ireland contemporary with them. This apolitical tenor
of the early poems is in part caused by Yeats's escapist
tendencies, his impulse to express the here—and-now in terms
of the there—and-once, so that "To Ireland in the Coming
Times” is the most political poem of the early period, and
only rarely does he approach social concerns that closely.
There is, however, a second, perhaps stronger, factor at work
in his poetry, and that is his reaction against the more
rabidly nationalistic poetry being produced at the same time.
He seems to have intuited that jingoistic patriotism or
Anglophobia was the surest way for a poet to compromise his
art, to lose his soul:

He [the artist] must make his work a part of his

own journey towards beauty and truth. He must

picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees

them, not as he is expected to see them, and he

must comfort himself, when others cry out against

what he has seen, by remembering that no two men

are alike, and that there is no 'excellent beauty

without strangeness.‘ (Essays, p. 207)

This passage points to the artistic problem Yeats wrestles

with his entire career: maintaining the integrity of his

individual vision while at the same time recognizing himself

113
as part of a larger group. In this case, the problem
manifests itself as the dilemma of creating a national art
without losing his role as individual artist.

That dilemma leads to the seeming irony that, later in
his career, as he confronts Irish political and social
problems with increasing regularity, he all but abandons the
Irish symbols and legends characteristic of his early work.

By the publication of Responsibilities in 1914 his poetry has

 

begun to take on topical, even polemical dimensions. In
"September 1913" the poet questions not only the present
Ireland's ability to measure up to the past, but also the
adequacy of that past for poetically confronting the present:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

* * * * *
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

The death of romantic Ireland becomes a statement not only on
the condition of the Irish soul, but on the state of Yeats's
poetic as well, for if that version of the country is "dead
and gone," it can no longer serve his poetry in quite the way
it has before. He must therefore set about establishing a

style, a symbolism, a poetic of his own that is adequate to

114

his subject matter. It is not an easy conquest, and the
resulting struggle is what Frye alludes to when he calls
Yeats a "growing" rather than an "unfolding" poet:

. his technique, his ideas, his attitude to
life, are in a constant state of revolution and
metamorphosis. . . . Perhaps it too is a by—product
of the breakdown of criticism. Dante unfolds into
the Divine Comedy because the grammar of its
symbolism is present in the culture of his time;
Goethe grows into the second part of Faust because
he has to rediscover the conventions of symbolism
for himself. Yeats, then, may have been compelled
to 'grow' by a personal search for symbols, and if
so, his revisions may signify a desire to force
the developing Body of his work into a single
unfolding unit.

 

 

Anyone who has read the early drafts of many of Yeats's poems
can think of several more pressing reasons for revision than
a desire to produce a unified body of poetry. Nevertheless,
Frye's assertion that Yeats, finding the "grammar of
symbolism" available to him unsatisfactory, pursued a
continual search for personal symbols, for a coherent
personal mythology to replace the failed, received mythology,
is particularly evident in the work following the publication

of Responsibilities.

 

One may argue with Frye on his contention that this
search results from the breakdown of criticism (although such
a breakdown may be a part of the problem), for it seems to
result more from the poet's sense that the "grammar of
symbolism" available to him as an Irish poet fails to give
him the necessary leverage to deal with public events. If
this is so, it is because he rarely treats of public events

as part of the crowd, and here it is important to remember

115

his statement that the poet "must make his work a part of his
own journey towards beauty and truth." One never has the
feeling about Yeats, as one may sometimes have with Eliot,
that he is merely a particle of humanity as it is swept along
it knows not whither. However much he is buffeted by
circumstances, he always manages to absorb and reshape those
circumstances into part of his own mythology, so that the
poems are stamped indelibly as his production rather than his
society's. Edmund Wilson's comments on prose style apply
equally well to Yeats's poetry:

The style of the seventeenth century . . . was a

much more personal thing: it fitted the author

like a suit of clothes and molded itself to the

natural contours of his temperament and mind; one

is always aware that there is a man inside,

whereas with Kipling, Eliot or Shaw, the style

seems to aim at the effect of an inflexible

impersonal instrument specially designed to perform

special functions. Yeats's prose is, however,

still a garment worn in the old-fashioned personal
manner with a combination of elegance and ease

.4
Yeats's poetry, especially the later work, is very much in
the nature of a garment that fits the man. Moreover, this
personal mark extends beyond mere stylistic considerations;
form, tone, mythology, symbolism all bear the Yeats stamp.

In the case of history appearing in the poems, he usually
reduces the large abstraction to a single personal experience,
with the effect of making history more human, as when he
reduces the colossal waste of human life that was World War I
to the single tragic waste in "In Memory of Major Robert

Gregory." No doubt, the special relationship of the Irish to

the Great War, in which they found themselves aligned with

116

the English, against whom they were fighting for independence,
has much to do with this personalized aspect. Just as Yeats,
with his Anglo-Irish background, manages to distance himself
and his work from the more jingoistic brand of nationalism,

so too were Irishmen, with their dislike of the English and
their tradition of the "Wild Geese," able to maintain a
distance from the propaganda of the British war ministry.

The heretofore missing element that allows him to
distance himself from events and still be involved with them
is the comprehensive personal mythology of A Vision. Through-
out his career Yeats is concerned with shaping the world as
he finds it into a suitable aesthetic universe. His early
attempts, as we have seen, expressions of Ireland in terms of
Irish myth and legend, are naive in that he merely tries to
match up received tales and forms with events and situations
on the basis of geography. His thinking seems to be that
Irish problems demand Irish treatments, and his problems stem
largely from the received nature of the treatments--an Irish
handling of a literary problem is not necessarily Yeats's
simply because he is Irish. The great importance of A Vision
is twofold; it affords him a unified, comprehensive system
of metaphor, symbol, and myth, and it is pig. That A Vision
offers him, for the first time, a symbolic network of his own,
one that he at least had a hand in shaping to his own satis-
faction, seems clear enough. Of equal importance is that it

is also comprehensive—-it gives him a totalizing system for

117

turning personal, historical, political, and social events,
the chaos of experience, into the order of art.

A Vision is at best a formidable undertaking for the
casual reader, and even the scholar can hardly be expected to
know the entire system by rote, although some knowledge of
the phases and gyres and their application to history and
personality is central to a reading of Yeats's later work.
Yeats applies the actual lunar phases to man's personality
traits, each phase having certain traits associated with it,
while at the same time he says that the incidents, which he
calls Body of Fate, in one's life are also governed by phase.
On the greater scale, he asserts that history is also governed
by lunar phase, a full cycle of twenty-eight occuring every
thousand years. Two millenial cycles of twenty-eight phases
each are imposed on each other antithetically, like inter—
penetrating cones or gyres. The gyres, as Richard Ellmann
notes, are major symbols that satisfy many of Yeats's needs:

Wedded in antagonism, they symbolize any of the

opposing elements that make up existence, such as

sun and moon, day and night, life and death, love

and hate, man and God, man and woman, man and beast,

man and his spiritual counterpart of 'daimon'; on a

more abstract level, they are permanence and change,

the one and the many, objectivity and subjectivity,

the natural and the supernatural worlds. With the

gyres Yeats had a more excited and interesting

picture than, for example, two armies drawn up

against one another would have afforded him; for

the point of one gyre was in the other's base, as

if a fifth column were operating in the very

headquarters of the enemy. He concurred with Hegel

that every thesis had implied in it its own anti-

thesis, and modified the notion that every movement

holds the seeds of its own decay by identifying the
seeds as those of a countermovement.

118

The gyres satisfy multiple needs simultaneously for Yeats,
then. As Ellmann notes, they symbolize opposing elements of
almost any nature, and, because they are themselves moving
and whirling forces rather than mere static objects, they
answer the need for motion, and are therefore more satisfac—
tory as symbols for the movement of history. What in Hegel
are the opposing forces working toward synthesis become in
Yeats even more kinetic: antithetical gyres simultaneously
whirling about a single axis, although the result is not
generally so clear a synthesis. Another advantage the gyres
afford is that they place the lunar phases in a larger context,
an overarching structure which frees the phases from their
customary relation to time so that they may apply to larger
spans of time without losing their essential relationships to
one another.6 They offer him, in short, a personally
comprehensible method of organizing history into manageable
form, rather than relying on the methods of other historians.
The gyres, in their turn, are subsumed into a larger
context of twelve cycles. The double millenium, which
actually overruns two thousand years slightly, is the primary
structure of history, and is ushered in by a new annunciation
of God to man. The present cycle was begun with the birth of
Christ, while the previous cycle began with Zeus, as a swan,
raping Leda, bringing in the Homeric period. The dozen
cycles fit, more or less, into a larger cycle of 26,000 years,
corresponding to the Great Year of the Ancients. A thirteenth

CYCIe extends the possibility of escape from the Great Wheel

119

of history, in much the same way that it offers escape from
the wheel of incarnation on the personal level. The major
emphasis of A Vision, however, is not with escape from the
process but with the process itself, with which Yeats, in the
Ireland of his day, must have been constantly concerned. And
so the poems which follow will be concerned with the poet's

relationship, through his visionary work, with history.

II

With The Wild Swans at Coole Yeats announces a different

 

poetry: different tone, subjects, treatment. In the title
poem the evidence of change is unmistakable:

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still. (9P, p. 129)
This is no mere poem about a man growing older, says Yeats.
"All's changed"-—his fiftieth birthday, his marriage, the
Great War, Major Gregory's death, the Easter Rebellion have
conspired to cut off any retreat to the past, to a time when
he walked "with a lighter tread.” In contrast, the swans
paddle "unwearied still," showing no evidence of the heaviness

that burdens the speaker. Their world is just the same as it

120
was nineteen years earlier, while his is, as he sees it now,
completely overhauled. Moreover, it is a sense of loss
rather than simple change that weighs him down, as he worries
over the envisioned loss of the one remaining mark of
constancy, the swans themselves.

”The Wild Swans at Coole" goes beyond simply expressing
loss, however, to introducing major symbols of the later
poems. The swans themselves are the most immediate symbols
in the poem. The final book of A Vision is entitled "Dove
or Swan," representing the Christian and Greek cycles of
history, respectively. The birds symbolize the annunciation
of God (or gods) to men and usher in new ages. Of course,
this does not mark the first of Yeats's bird symbolism.

From his earliest poems birds have appeared, but his infatu-
ation with the subject matter of A Vision brings swans, in
particular, into his poems in increasing numbers, most
notably in his treatment of the Ledean myth which, like the
Christian Nativity, is an active, dynamic example of the link
between gods and men, and, in Yeats's mind, of the beginnings
of new historical eras. In "The Wild Swans at Coole" the
swans have not yet taken on such full meaning, but they
nevertheless represent a nonhuman world that goes on regard-
less of the events in the human, a world in which their
hearts do not grow old with the poet's, in which passion and
conquest, apparently unavailable to wearied speaker, "attend

upon them still."

121

The second major symbol introduced in the poem is that

of the gyre:

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings. (92, p. 129)
The association with the gyres here is simply one of movement,
and the reader who knows nothing of A Vision loses little
(the same is true of the swans), for the great image remains
vivid. The reader of A Vision, on the other hand, can see
in this poem Yeats introducing symbols from the prose work
as images, without forcing them to bear the symbolic load
they will in the later poems. He seems to be trying to
accustom the reader to the symbols themselves before intro-
ducing the ideas being symbolized, as he does again in the
following poem, "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory":

Now that we're almost settled in our house

I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us

Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower,

And having talked to some late hour

Climb up the narrow winding stairs to bed:

Discoverers of forgotten truth

Or mere companions of my youth,

All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

(Q. p. 130)
This first stanza introduces variants of the gyres, the tower
and the winding stair, which become such powerful forces in
his poetry that they become titles of two later volumes. In
this poem, however, they are not the major symbols they are
to become, but homely objects. The ancient tower is quite
literally Thoor Ballylee, "our house," in which he sups beside

the fire, while the winding stairs are the way to the

bedrooms. The connection between the tower and stair and the

122
gyres is not made in this poem; rather, as in the preceding
poem, the objects are allowed to be themselves. The power of
these later symbols, aside from their visionary functions,
lies in their being local and personal objects as well. The
swan is not just the shape Zeus assumes to rape Leda, but
also that bird on the waters at Coole Park. The crumbling
ancient tower, while connected both with the gyres and with
Greek civilization, is also the place where the Yeatses set
up housekeeping.

Once again, though, the poem does much more than deal
with symbols only; just as the large symbols are made homely
and personal, so is the tragedy of war. The tone of the
poem is set by the marvelous ambiguity of the final line of
the first stanza: ”All, all are in my thoughts to—night
being dead." The intended meaning of the line appears to be
that all the companions are dead, but the syntax is such that
”being dead" also reflects on both ”to-night" and "my thoughts."
The rest of the poem contains all three partial meanings, as
Yeats spends the evening "in death," reminiscing about his
dead friends. Moreover, his thoughts are all of death; each
time he begins to think on life his thoughts are wrenched
back to death:

I am accustomed to their lack of breath,

But not that my dead friend's dear son,

Our Sidney and our perfect man,

Could share in that discourtesy of death. (92, p. 131)

Later in the poem, he realizes that such discourtesy is the

only end for "our Sidney”:

123

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

As 'twere all life's epitome.

What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

(2. p. 133)
The speaker realizes here, in Stanza XI, that an uncommon man
such as Gregory or Sidney can expect no common life or death:
he died in what was seen as the glamorous death-~if such a
thing is possible--of World War I, the aviator's death in
action. Though the poet catalogues Gregory's achievements
in life, he is inevitably brought back to the fact of his
death: "but a thought/Of that late death took all my heart
for speech" (92, p. 188). The war, unmentioned save for the
epithet ”soldier" and Gregory's rank in the title, is brought
into the poem not as a general calamity but as a single,
local (although noteworthy) loss. The tragedy of war is not
lessened, nor does the comparison with Sidney, however much
the reader sixty years later may feel it hyperbolic, affect
that tragedy. The poem is ultimately concerned with human
loss and waste of life; the rest is embellishment.

"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” emphasizes the
wanton waste of the war:

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before. (92, p. 133)
The speaker's reasons for fighting have nothing to do with
those espoused by the British propagandists: ”Nor law, nor

duty bade me fight,/Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.

Rather, he expresses that peculiar relation of Ireland to

124

England during the war, that sense of being aligned with the
enemy, of harboring no animosity toward the opponent.
Moreover, the feelings the speaker expresses, that he has no
political or national interest in the war, present a knowledge
that must have been widespread in Ireland: no direct link
existed between the fighting on the continent and Irish
independence. A British Victory changed nothing, since
Ireland remained a captive state, nor would a German conquest,
in all probability, have affected matters—~Yeats, like his
speaker, is shrewd enough to see German assistance to Ireland
for what it was, an act of war against England, not a blow
for liberty. The Kaiser was no Lafayette. Such an attitude
makes this poem characteristically Irish, a work of complex
political and personal affiliations. The war offers the
speaker no opportunity to advance or preserve any cause he
believes in.

What it does offer him is the possibility of a heroic
life and death:

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

(92, pp. 133-34)
Yeatsian heroism in this poem, as in many others, closely
resembles existentialism on several points, especially in
its emphasis on solitary action and on courageous pursuit of

doomed enterprises. It is the "lonely impulse of delight”

that sends the speaker off to fight, and the tone of

125

individuality is set by the triple emphasis of the first
line's "I know that I shall meet my fate” [italics mine].
Similarly, the repetition of ”waste of breath" at the end of
line fourteen and the beginning of line fifteen in connection
with the other possibilities life offers serves to emphasize
the attractiveness of the airman's life and death. One can
read this poem back into the preceeding poem, as Yeats's
attempt to justify what seems, from the perspective of

Thoor Ballyleee, a senseless death. Such a reading offers,
whether one identifies the speaker as Gregory or not, an
understanding of how any non-heroic life, no matter how
successful or comfortable, fails in comparison with the
heroic life, no matter how momentary.

The solitary man, too, takes on a sort of heroism by the
mere fact of his solitude, by not being part of the rabble.
There is nothing about the action of ”The Fisherman"
reminiscent of the Irish airman's death, and yet the poet
holds him in the same sort of admiration:

Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face,

And grey Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark under froth,

And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;

126

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, 'Before I am old

I shall have written him one

Poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.' (93, p. 146)

The great majority of humanity, including Irishmen, hold no
attraction for Yeats. He writes with distaste for the paudeen

beginning at least in Responsibilities, and his writings on

 

Parnell demonstrate his feelings that Parnell was brought
down as much by his ”friends” as his enemies. Other people,
and other people's beliefs and visions, are not to be trusted,
hence the emphasis on the solitary man and the artist's
loyalty to his own "journey towards beauty and truth." The
imagined fisherman, the man dressed quietly who picks his own
way among the rocks in the dawn, suits Yeats perfectly as a
metaphor for the poetic act. Yeats, writing in his tower

in the midst of turmoil and strife at home and abroad, finds
in the lonely casting of flies at dawn (for he is no longer
the poet of twilight) an apt symbol for the writing of his
lyrics. He, like his fisherman, must pursue his own course,
heedless of the rabble. The closing statement, with its hope
of a special poem for a special audience, displays a major
change from the Yeats of the Celtic Twilight. No longer

does he feel the need to write of the common legends because
he is writing for an Irish audience. Now a single, cold,
hard, heroic poem will suffice, and this poem, whatever its
successes or failures on other levels, achieves that hard,

delicate tone he desires.

127

Of course, as Louis MacNeice points out, Yeats's
conception of heroism is not limited to the artistic life:

I do not mean that Yeats remained a disciple of Art
for Art's sake; we have already seen how he deviated
from that conception. Art for Art's sake defeated
its own end because Art was thought of almost solely
in terms of form, whereas the material of art is
life and matter conditions form. . . . The paradox
of poetry is like the paradox of individual freedom.
An individual is not less free but more free, if he
recognizes the factors which condition him and
adjusts to his context; a poem is not less of a
poem, but more of a poem, if it fulfills its
business of corresponding to life.

The events in Ireland during the war years make it impossible
for Yeats to ignore them in his work. Although he can refuse
a request for a war poem, "We have no gift to set a statesman
right," he cannot maintain an Aesthetic posture after 1916,
even if he wants to (which is unlikely). While the death of
Major Gregory in 1918 might be dismissed by some as an event
of local interest, the circumstances of the Easter Rebellion
are both major and public. Even so, Yeats is able to draw

it into himself, to make the reader aware of the personal
significance of this national event:

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born. (92, pp. 177-78)

128

The tragic seriousness of the events that give rise to the
poem are contrasted in this first section with the casual
pettiness of the speaker's relations with the principals.
Until the final two lines the emphasis rests entirely on the
common insignificance of the interactions between the speaker
and the rebels, as the repetition of "polite meaningless
words" suggests. Then too, there is an air of comfort, of
middle-class-ism in this section, with its "grey eighteenth-
century houses" and men around the fire at the club. The
safety and insularity of the middle class stand foremost in
the poet's mind, and yet they are gone. The tone of the
section contrasts with the ease of the actions: the phrasing
of "polite meaningless words" suggests the waste of those
words, and the "Being certain that they and I/But lived where
motley is worn" carries with it the implication of error.
One rarely refers to one's past assuredness unless it is
proved to be unfounded. In this case, he is aware of the
insufficiency of his understanding of the rebels, not so much
that he misjudged them, but that their participation in the
rebellion and their subsequent deaths and imprisonments have
taken them out of the ordinary realm of personal judgment.
That single action turns back on all others, forcing the
speaker to re-evaluate his attitudes toward them.

The second section examines this shift in attitudes
further, pushing the meaninglessness of the first to greater
specificity. The people appear, along with Yeats's earlier

opinions of them; what the reader finds is not that the

129

poet's relationships were inconsequential, but that they were
invalidated by the rebellion and its outcome:

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born. (93, p. 178)
The "casual comedy" refers not to anything in the Yeats-
MacBride acquaintance but to the whole sphere of ordinary
existence which finds itself invalidated by these extraordi-
nary events. MacBride's new "reality" has turned his earlier
reality--and the poet's opinion of him--to a dream. Moreover,
that which is transformed becomes more specific in this
section: the conspirators, particularly those executed, have
undergone the transformation. This additional detail adds
a tension to the final line not found in its first appearance;
the birth of the terrible beauty is inextricably linked to
the deaths of sixteen men. The two most striking changes in
this world, birth and death, are, in this poem, finally
inseparable. Yeats contrasts this radical transformation
with natural change in the third section, for this change is
not moment by moment but rather permanent, frightening,
apocalyptic. The beauty is terrible.

The poet's ambivalence toward the rebellion and its
consequences runs through the final movement of the poem.
The conspirators provide him with a nearly perfect example

of heroism, and yet their actions may finally have been

foolhardy:

130

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died? (92, p. 179)
Heroism is here coupled with lost alternatives; the executed
rebels have become national monuments, icons (Yeats sometimes
employs them as such in his later work), while at the same
time they have cut short possibilities the poet sees as
perhaps more satisfactory. Yeats does not condemn them,
however, He employs an and rather than a but in the lines,
”And what if excess of love/Bewildered them till they died,”
indicating not a change of heart on his part, but a recogni-
tion that heroism and error are not mutually exclusive. So
the poet finds himself confronted by laudable heroism coupled
with dubious wisdom, neither of which can be overlooked. His
ambivalence toward the situation appears in other poems as
well, notably in ”Sixteen Dead Men”:

But who can talk of give and take

What should be and what not

While those dead men are loitering there

To stir the boiling pot? (92, p. 180)
The slain leaders of the rebellion, whatever they gave
Ireland, have removed the possibility of rational, leisurely
debate. Not only, as the poem suggests, can corpses not
participate in discussion with the living, but the deaths

have incited the living to a point where reason is no longer

an option.

131

The situation offers no clear paths to resolution, and
yet Yeats, as poet, must reach some resolution even if, as
citizen, he cannot. To this end, he slips quite self-
consciously into his role as poet:

I write it out in a verse -

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born. (92, pp. 179-80)

The poetic resolution incorporates the personal ambivalence,
for he has to pass no judgment, to reach no decision about
ultimate good or evil. At the same time, he does not retreat
from the scene. His poetry is an instrument of understanding,
something that allows him to take stock of the situation,
rather than a political weapon that forces him to find an
answer to it. It is enough to recognize the apocalyptic
nature of the times.

That sense of apocalypse is taken up again in "The
Second Coming," this time connected with the material of
A Vision. The first line introduces the gyre in a way
altogether more satisfactory and sensible than that of "Demon
and Beast,” which immediately precedes it: ”Turning and
turning in a widening gyre" makes a good deal more sense than
"Now gyring down and perning there," especially to the reader
not initiated into Yeats's visionary system. The image of
the falcon sweeping out higher and farther until he is out of

range of his master is marvelously vivid; it gives life and

clarity to the otherwise abstract third line, "Things fall

132

apart; the centre cannot hold.” The falcon warrants the
reader's attention for a second reason; although Yeats calls
the final section of A Vision ”Dove or Swan,” he uses neither
in this poem about the birth of a new age. Whether or not
the falcon or desert birds will be the instrument of the new
annunciation, they are certainly here a harbinger of the new
age, as it moves out in a gyre that is inaccessible to its
human master. The poem's visionary aspect, however, does not
exist alone, and the next five lines bring it back to the
familiar world:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (92, pp. 184-85)
At the time he writes this poem, in January 1919,8 Yeats has
just seen Europe come through the bloodiest five years in
history, and the "blood-dimmed tide" must seem to him a very
apt metaphor for the tremendous loss of life. Moreover, the
political situation in his own country suggests to him that
anarchy threatens to supplant order altogether. This is also
a great period for Wobblies and anarchists of all descriptions,
particularly in America, although it is unclear how much
attention Yeats gives to it. The phrase, "Mere anarchy,” is
marvelous in its performance of two duties at once: while
”mere" suggests that it is only anarchy, with nothing positive
coming from it, there is also the trace of the older meaning

0f total or absolute, hinting that anarchy may completely

overrun the world. These two destructive forces drown the

133

"ceremony of innocence,“ that pre-war "casual comedy" of
”Easter 1916." The sense in Yeats's poetry at this time is
very strong that the world of a few years earlier is lost
irretrievably. The final two lines of the first section also
recall ”Easter 1916," for it is in that poem that we see
Yeats unable to reach a resolution, "lacking all conviction,”
in contrast to someone like MacBride, certainly one of the
worst in the poet's mind, who is "full of passionate
intensity.”

The poem then shifts in the second section into a vision
of apocalypse. This Yeatsian version, true to his Vision, is
not an absolute end but both an end and a beginning, although
that lessens the terror not at all:

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (92, p. 185)
This birth of a god has very little to do with the standard,
mild, Christian version of the birth of the Christ, aside
from the choice of Bethlehem, and the same tone appears in
related poems, particularly "The Mother of God”: "The terror
of all terrors that I bore/The Heavens in my womb" (92, p. 244).
Terror is the word that colors the human in its interactions
with the divine, and the poet's ”terrible beauty" seems to
have nearly universal applicability to his poems of the

transition from one era to the next, which so often end on a

questioning note:

134

This love that makes my heart's blood stop

Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones

And bids my hair stand up? (92, p. 244)

This terror is a major aspect introduced into Yeats's
poetry in "The Second Coming," but it is not the only one.
In fact, the poem may be even more significant for its inte—
gration of the mundane and the mythological, in which mingling
it is one of the first. Since 1917 the two aspects have both
appeared in the poetry, but separately; "The Phases of the
Moon" and "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes," for instance,
concern themselves almost exclusively with the material from
A Vision, while that material appears only as isolated
references in the poems of more common reality. "The Second
Coming,” then, stands as one of the first successful attempts

to fuse the two, and as such marks a shift in the method of

his later work.

IV

In his work of the late Teens and early Twenties Yeats
introduces his new poetic interests, the material of A Vision
and the political realities of Ireland. With the poems from

The Tower and the volumes that follow it, his work begins to

 

take on something like Northrop Frye's ”ideal order" on a

smaller scale. In The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes

 

and the Dancer the visionary and political elements fail to

 

coalesce convincingly, for the most part, and such poems as
"The Phases of the Moon" and "The Saint and the Hunchback"

remain didactic exercises, lacking the engaging human

135

qualities of his best verse. In his later work he achieves a
more suitable integration of these two new elements, owing
largely to his ability to incorporate his visionary material,
as well as the politics of Ireland, into his personal
experience.

The gyres, for instance, appear only rarely in the later
work as themselves, but the poet calls often upon their homelier
cousins, the tower and the winding stair. These two appear
quite frequently, and usually together: just as one gyre is
philosophically untenable without another for Yeats, so is the
tower, in a very mundane way, useless without a winding stair.
Moreover, the two images are usually local and as solid as
Thoor Ballylee itself; they overcome the problem of abstrac-
tion inherent in the gyres. "Meditations in Time of Civil
War" makes just such use of them:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding-stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and a written page. (92, p. 199)

The introduction of tower and stair here is casual, off-handed,
and in keeping with the overall tone of the poem. This poem
is in many ways central to his later work, introducing themes,

symbols, phrases he will use time and again. Its greatest

contribution, however, may well be its melding of personal,

136

visionary, and political elements into a single unity. This
is neither a war poem nor a private poem, and the reader must
be careful to remember the whole title. The meditation is
present, to be sure, as the speaker looks at himself, his
neighborhood, his home, and his descendents, but it is a
meditation springing from the civil strife around him. The
clash of the brutality of the conflict and the casual, off—
handed tone of the poem creates tremendous tension:

We are closed in, the key is turned

On our uncertainty, somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

(92. p. 202)
The civil war is an inescapable fact for the poet; he has
been a close observer of the Irish political scene for years,
and now, as Ellmann points out: "At Thoor Ballylee in 1922
the symbolical tower seemed likely to be attacked by
unsymbolical men and weapons at any moment, and husband and
wife frequently ran to the window to look out when the sounds
of gunfire were especially close."9 The "retreat," then,
into the private world of his tower is an act less of escapism
than of simple self-preservation--Yeats turns inward because
he cannot go out. In section V, "The Road at My Door," not
only is the road at his door, but so are representatives of

both warring factions. This situation forces him into his

tower to look out at the stare's nest. Throughout the poem

137

he contrasts the quietness of the tower to the violence
outside, and in the refrain, "Come build in the house of the
stare," he juxtaposes the calm, homely plea for constructive
actions with the destructive power of the war. Even the
descriptions of the fighting are unhysterical, almost medita-
tive: "somewhere/A man is killed, or a house burned,/Yet no
clear fact to be discerned.”

The potential for destruction nevertheless remains
present in the poem, and images of that destruction abound,
particularly, as always, in the image of the tower:

May this laborious stair and this stark tower

Become a roofless ruin that the owl

May build in the cracked masonry and cry

Her desolation to the desolate sky. (93, p. 201)

On first reading this passage seems to be a curse, but when
the rest of the poem is read back against it, it appears more
a warning than a curse. An actual peril presents itself to
those who consort with fools or who, becoming too caught up
in "business with the passing hour,” lose their sense of
perspective. Such peOple will need no curse; they will let
an old, irrelevant tower fall into disrepair through their
own lack of interest. The crumbling tower finds an analog in
the empty stare's nest, and it is on the top of the tower,
leaning upon a broken stone, that the poet sees "phantoms of
hatred.”

The destruction and tumult continues in "Nineteen Hundred

and Nineteen":

138

Many ingenious lovely things are gone

That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,

Protected from the circle of the moon

That pitches common things about. (92, p. 204)
"Seem” is perhaps the key word in this poem, for the imagined
reality of earlier days has been shattered by the harsh
brutality of the Black and Tans. Here in the first stanza
the poet realizes that those seemingly immutable "ingenious
lovely things" are in fact under the moon's sway and'therefore
subject to change. The present reality changes everything:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go soot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. (93, p. 205)
This poem speaks back to, and is informed by "Easter 1916,"
for in this poem Yeats shows much more vividly the ways in
which his world is "changed utterly." There is a more general
sense of terror in the later poem, for where only the
conspirators in the Easter rebellion were punished, no one is
safe from the violence of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Everything must be redefined in terms of the present situation,
and so those who, with the poet, would have changed the world
are reduced to "weasels fighting in a hole." Men and monu-
ments lose all value:

A man in his own secret meditation

Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
* * * * *
if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude. (92, p. 206)

139

Under the influence of the events of 1919 the poet finds
himself confronted by the seemingly opposite situation from
that of the poem's opening. The spirit of negation becomes
here an active force, not merely levelling monuments, but
turning them against their creators. Mockery, then, becomes
spirit of the age, counting among its victims mockers and

mocked alike. And yet, out of this demonic ne plus ultra,

 

Yeats writes his poem. Seemingly convinced that this poem,
this monument, will turn back against him, mocking, he goes
ahead and writes it. Whether such persistence attests to his
ability to believe or to doubt, it in any event demonstrates
his ability, his desire to peer over the sometimes ugly head
of event into the chasm of history.

Whatever the merits of Yeats's system may be for anyone
else, it allows him to View history as an ongoing process
rather than a discontinuous series of occurances, so that
"Easter 1916" leads not to nihilism but to a second coming,
so that the tumult of the rebellions and the civil strife
leads not to the end but to an end, not to apocalypse but to
another Leda. Images of a new annunciation, either of Leda
or Mary, recur throughout his later poetry. In ”Among School
Children” the poet is obsessed with the notion of Leda as he
sees it embodied by, presumably, Maud Gonne. Yeats makes, in
this poem, one of his greatest attempts to bring together all
aspects of his thought and life, to achieve Unity, if not of
being, at least of poetics. His relationship with Maud Gonne,

his role in Irish politics, his advancing age, his mythology

140

of history and thought-—all find a place in this poem, which
in its final stanza looks forward to the ideal of Unity of
Being:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

Body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

(92. p. 214)

He appears to long for this unity because he finds only
fragmentation or incompleteness in his world, where a Ledean
body holds only the promise, not the fulfillment of a new
age, where old men are reduced to "Old clothes upon old
sticks to scare a bird."

And yet the promise remains. The Leda image is not
always thwarted; it finds its most notable fulfillment in, of
course, "Leda and the Swan,” a poem made almost inevitable by
"The Second Coming.” The language of the two poems, the
brutality and terror they express, makes them companion pieces,
along with "The Mother of God," so that one is tempted to say,
with MacNeice:

Yeats's obsession during this period with the myth

of Leda also signifies his belief that, in defiance

of Aristotle, history has its roots in philosophy,

that the eternal (Zeus) requires the temporal (Leda),

further (for the myth is complex) that the human

(Leda) requires the animal (the swan), that God and

Nature in fact require each other and that the wprld

will only make sense in terms of an incarnation. 0
Unfortunately MacNeice stops short of a full explanation of
the myth, neglecting the terrifying aspects of those encoun-

ters. The ”twenty centuries of stony sleep" are not awakened,

but ”vexed to nightmare," and it is a "terrible beauty" which

141

is born in the Easter poem. The prospect of the new age is
thoroughly terrifying, and the curtain hiding it from the
poet only lifts for a moment, long enough to reveal a
frightening image, and then drops again. Moreover, the annun—
ciation itself partakes of the terror in the air:

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

(92, pp. 211-12)
The fright inspired in the human by the animal/divine is
closely akin to that of "The Mother of God," in which the
terror of the act itself is exceeded only by the terror
inspired by the knowledge that she bears "The Heavens in my
womb." In "Leda and the Swan," though, the fright is enhanced
by the physical brute presence of the swan and by the indiffe-
rence of Zeus once he has raped her. Such indifference alters
significantly MacNeice's notion of how the eternal requires
the temporal. And finally, the terror promises to continue:

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. (92, p. 212)
The chaos and violence of the end of a cycle ceases, only to
be replaced by war and treachery in the new cycle. In short,
Yeats finds small comfort in the promise of a new age, although
he finds manifold terrors in the end of his own era.

Again in this poem Yeats employs familiar images to convey
his visionary-poetic message. The swan has been turning up

regularly in his poetry for a long while, quite often as the

unmythologized white birds of Coole Park. Its use in this

142

poem stands as an attempt to make the mythology part of his
own poetic cosmos. The "broken wall, the burning roof and
tower" represent the same attempt, though on a more sweeping
scale. Once again the poet finds that the crumbling battle-
ments of Thoor Ballylee can serve his poetic purposes, for

the broken tower is the ideal emblem for the destruction of
Troy and hence for the historical cycle ushered in by the rape
of Leda. Furthermore, the tower is a powerful symbol for
Yeats because it is his own; through it he can make connec-
tions with his own life, with the Irish political situation
(since the tower serves him so well in poems of the rebellions
and the civil war), and with the scholarly or poetic life in
general (a function it takes on in many of the Vision poems).
The tower, therefore, is an ideal symbol for performing
several functions at once, an important capacity in such a
compact poem. "Leda and the Swan," then, becomes the poet's
own, part of his own mythology rather than someone else's and
as much related to his era as to its own. His ability to
absorb the material into his own poetic universe saves the
poem from being a mere curiosity.

It is just such connection between the visionary and the
familiar that allow Yeats to write the Byzantium poems. His
enthusiasm for the Byzantine empire is discussed in A Vision:

I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never

before or since in recorded history, religious,

aesthetic and practical life were one, that archi-

tect and artificers--though not, it may be, poets,

for language had been the instrument of controversy

and must have grown abstract-—spoke to the multi-

tude and the few alike. The painter, the mosaic
worker, the worker in gold and silver, the

143

illuminator of sacred books, were almost impersonal,

almost perhaps without the consciousness of indi-

vidual design, absorbed in their subject—matter and

that the vision of a whole people. (Vision,

pp. 279-80)
His Byzantium is a place of Unity of Being, and is entirely
unique, unmatched even by other people inhabiting similar
phases. Of course, Yeats has no access to recorded history
of other cycles, so the holy city which unifies the secular
and spiritual lives remains unique, in which the artisan
could discuss the mysteries of the universe, "the super-
natural descending closer to him than to Plotinus even"
(Vision, p. 279). Using Byzantium as a subject does not, of
course, guarantee a good poem, but then again, the subject of
these two poems is not the city but rather, as ever, the poet
himself. They become a process of negotiating relationships
with homeland, art and nature, and eternity. In ”Sailing to
Byzantium" the speaker leaves behind a homeland in which age
is devalued, where life is commended and where "all neglect/
Monuments of unageing intellect," where the temporal singing
schools study themselves. The speaker has left that temporal
country to come to the city which looks toward the atemporal:

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing—masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity. (92, p. 191)
His gaze is directed toward the eternal here, as he hopes his

soul may learn to sing of (presumably) God's magnificence.

Moreover, he seems only too eager to leave his physical self

144

behind, to cease to be part of "Whatever is begotten, born,
and dies." Indeed, even the physical aspects of the journey
are down played, as Ellmann notes:

In the early versions of "Sailing to Byzantium,"
Yeats described at some length the long voyage by
which he attained the imperial city, but as he
worked on the poem the voyage was reduced to two
lines,
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium,
while the main image of the poem became the
enraptured prayer for transmutation, for possession
by the god; the vision descendsland demands not
belief but emotional response.

The poet's dissatisfaction with age and physical decrepitude,
echoed in many of the later poems, spreads in this poem to
encompass the whole natural world, so that eternity can only
be expressed in terms of artifice, and the city of artifice
becomes a forerunner of the eternal:

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

(93. p. 192)
The poet seeks to sing like the bird, equally of past, present,
and future, to move outside the ordinary boundaries of time.

This attitude is picked up in the first stanza of
”Byzantium”:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins. (93, p. 243)

The speaker contrasts the artificial with the natural and

human, here and in stanzas three and four, and chooses the

145

artificial. Even his choice of time of evening suggests the
desire to escape the human:

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong. (93, p. 243)

Yet even in this attempt to escape the human, Yeats finds
himself thrown back into the terrors of the human world, for
he describes life in the holy city in terms of "Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen." The Emperor's army evokes images of
the atrocities committed by the Black-and—Tans, while the
night-walkers' song reminds the reader that "All men are
dancers and their tread/Goes to the barbarous clangour of a
gong” (92, p. 206).

Moreover, for all his desires to leave the natural world
behind, the speaker finds himself obsessed with it. His
spirits, themselves blood-begotten, arrive "Astraddle on the
dolphin's mire and blood," and he ends the poem looking out
to sea, toward nature and generation:

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin torn, that gong-tormented sea.

(9_P. p. 244)

For all his hailing of death-in-life and life—in—death, for
all his infatuation with the miraculous golden bird, he cannot
quite bring himself to let go of the familiar, physical

world. The eternal, attractive though it be, is not yet his

home, and he cannot yet ignore the world.

146

In much the same spirit he has Crazy Jane tell the
Bishop:

'A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.‘ (93, p. 255)

Crazy Jane refuses to separate the physical and the spiritual,
and her difficulties with the Bishop result from his orthodox
notions of the sinfulness of the flesh. Her statements often
ring like Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," smashing against the
wall of orthodoxy with surprising force. Her argument,
connecting the physical, ”foul," love's mansion with the
Bishop's heavenly mansion, is echoed by ”The Spur”:

You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attendance upon my old age;

They were not such a plague when I was young;

What else have I to spur me into song? (92, p. 309)
Where the young Yeats sometimes produces disembodied, spirit—
ridden poetry, the older Yeats can never forget the physical,
even when, as in "Byzantium,” he would prefer to. In the
later poetry there is connection: physical with spiritual,
mythological with political, image with image, poem with

poem.

This connection allows him, in his Last Poems, to bring

 

everything he knows to bear on his poetry. All past charac-
ters, past themes, past forms reappear in his final volume,
although with a difference from their previous appearances:
he employs them not as nostalgia, not merely as he had

earlier, but as he needs them for the work at hand. Ballads

147

are not simple imitations of older forms, but become instead
vehicles for tough, bitter, often ironic tales. Refrains are
not so much logical outcomes as ironic counterpoints, as in

"The O'Rahilly” with its "How goes the weather." Pearse,

 

Cuchulain, Lady Gregory, and Plotinus, the gyres and the

Sidhe, all appear side by side in the Last Poems in a way

 

that rarely occurs elsewhere in Yetas. Several possible
reasons suggest themselves for this ecumenism.

The first is that the poet, knowing he is nearing the
end of his life, looks back over that life and others which
ran with it, judging their progress. From at least "Among
School Children" Yeats has been concerned with the idea that
old age is no satisfactory extension of the promise of youth,
and in "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" he makes his point
more explicitly:

Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce;

A Helen of social welfare dream,

Climb on a wagonette to scream. (92, p. 333)

Yeats sees the flowering of Ireland, and of his own talent,

as something irrevocably lost, "a thing never known again."

He has watched his hope of an Olympian Ireland, a place of
intellect, vision, and liberty, disintegrate into murder,
civil chaos, and Paudeenism. He has watched his own gift
become less easy to call up, his own physical self fall victim

to the ravages of old age. And so his last work may stand

as an attempt to bring the young poet and the old together,

148

to re—evaluate not only himself but his country and its recent
history as well. Such a notion finds support in the numerous
poems of Parnell, Pearse and Connolly, de Valera and others
in the final volume.

Nor does his intermingling of previous work limit itself
to the more overtly political poems such as ”The Statues.”
In "News for the Delphic Oracle,” for example, hardly a
political poem, Yeats uses figures from both his early and
later work:

Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed

By Oisin on the grass;

There sighed amid his choir of love

Tall Pythagoras.

Plotinus came and looked about,

The salt-flakes on his breast,

And having stretched and yawned awhile

Lay sighing like the rest. (92, p. 323)
The figures from the Celtic Twilight and those from the period
of A Vision share the scene equally in this first section,
whereas in most of the earlier poetry they are an either—or
proposition. Moreover, they are equally the targets of his
irony, his reference to them as ”the golden codgers,” an
irony which ultimately must be seen as self-irony, since those
figures are products of the poet's earlier work. The following
stanza exhumes yet another previous image, the dolphins
bearing spirits on their backs, this one picked up from
"Byzantium." This image, too, fails to fully satisfy his
needs, for it is, as are Niamh and Plotinus, overly spiritual;

the dolphins are mire and blood, but the Innocents are not.

And so in the final movement the poet introduces sensual

149

presences into the version of paradise he offers to the
Oracle.12

A similar, and surely the most famous, use of bygone
images in the interest of self—irony occurs in "The Circus
Animals' Desertion":

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. (92, p. 355)
The poem takes on in this first stanza a self-mocking tone,
aimed not only at the poet in his old age and despair but at
his younger, creative self as well. To call his images
”circus animals,” with all the attendant associations of hoop—
jumping and tricks-by-rote, immediately focuses the reader's
attention on the sham quality of poetry, the sideshow artifice
of symbolism. In the enumeration of old themes, he pauses
at the end of each stanza to remind the reader that he, the
ringmaster, has been duped by his own artifice:

Players and the painted stage took all my love,

And not those things that they were emblems of.

(92. p. 336)
With this statement Yeats joins any number of his critics who
charge him with lacking humanity, with choosing artifice over
the world.13 Of course, such a ploy works to distract our
attention from the profoundly human quality of his poetry—-
the vacillation, the struggle to come to terms with nation,

history, and fellowman, the continual exploration of his own

heart.

150

He is surely aware that he misrepresents himself, and
the final stanza points to a reason:

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

(2. p. 336)
That the images are masterful and complete suggests that they,
not he, have outlived their poetic usefulness; when they
become purely intellectual, and thereby dissociated from the
human heart, they can no longer serve as poetic images, for
poetry is concerned, ultimately, with humanity and life. And
so the poet has been searching among them for his theme in
vain: theirs is a world of pure artifice, no country for old
poets. Rather, he must look into himself once again, must
lie down "in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” because,
however much he represents its unappealing aspects, his heart
is the only fertile ground for poetry. Whether or not the
poem is intended as a clearing out of what has gone before
falls into the realm of pure speculation, but the movement of
the work suggests a renewed dedication of his poetry to
humanity.

This rededication is echoed in "Under Ben Bulben":

Poet and sculptor, do the work,

Nor let the modish painter shirk

What his great forefathers did,

Bring the soul of man to God.
Make him fill the cradles right. (92, p. 342)

151

There is no difference, finally, between proper craftsmanship
and the study of humanity: to fail in one is to shirk the
other. While the poet is here concerned with "singing the
people," his attitude casts light back on his earlier senti—
ments that bad poetry in the cause of nationalism performs a
disservice to the nation.

Moreover, this last poem brings to our attention something
we have known all along: when he says humanity he really means
the Irish. Whatever direction his poetry has taken him, it
has always brought him back again. He moves, not from Irish
poets to poets in general in this poem, but vice-versa. And
so he returns himself, after all his exotic spiritual and
intellectual ramblings, to Drumcliff churchyard and the
horsemen of faerie, with an epitaph that misleadingly points
toward disaffection with humanity, while actually reminding
us that individual life and death merely punctuate the larger
cycle of humanity:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago, a church stands near,

By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death
Horseman, pass by! (92, p. 344)

 

 

 

JOYCE'S GRAMMAR OF EXPERIENCE

James Joyce, along with Eliot and Yeats has fallen victim
to readings that see him finding the flux of existence chaotic
and meaningless, investing that existence with an arbitrary
mythic significance. Indeed he seems, especially in the
later novels, to invite such readings.1 There is, however,
another way of viewing the order running through the chaos,
that Joyce has not put it there, but found it there. His
fictional characters are themselves creators of fictions,
perceiving, ordering, interpreting, and acting out experience
through a complex system of symbols and patterns. Nor do
they arbitrarily invest experience with the power of this
system, which draws its strength from the whole of Western
culture and history. In his fiction, then, Joyce displays
the presence of the system in his characters: in the trivial,
the routine, the mundane, the scatological, the daily (and
nightly) actions they express themselves through the system,
which veers increasingly toward a complete language of symbols

or archetypes as his work matures. In Dubliners the sense

 

of cultural system is limited to individual characters'
relationships with their personal (or, as in the case of
Parnell, the immediate historical) dead; in A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man, the emphasis is still on an individual,

 

152

153

Stephen Dedalus, but he brings to bear on his experience an
increasingly broad sense of history and culture; in Ulysses
both the patterns and their expression become collective as
well as individual, as the system takes on properties of

language; while in Finnegans Wake the individual is all but

 

lost under this ”language of archetype.”

It is in Ulysses that the interplay between the individual
and society achieves its fullest development. At the end of
the Portrait Stephen has withdrawn from Dublin, from the world
of contingency and flux because it fails to conform to the set
of images he employs to understand it. So he goes to Paris,
hoping for an ideal world.

In Ulysses he returns to that world of contingency and
flux, for the ideal world is ultimately untenable. The world
of contingency, however, is problematic for character and
author alike, and Joyce's portrayal of this world has led
critics to read the book as the superimposition of order on
chaos. Indeed, many have found the order as chaotic as the
raw material, so much so that Stanley Sultan, viewing the
critical shambles of forty years, feels compelled to return
to the book's argument, to begin Ulysses studies again with
plot analyses.2 These order over chaos readings, however,
allow for only two interpretations, both unsatisfactory:

Joyce is elevating the characters to mythic and universal
levels and their earthly existence is mere formality, to be
ignored; or else Joyce constructs the mythic framework as a

large scale framework against which his paltry characters can

154

be even further diminished and degraded. Hugh Kenner, in his

Joyce's Voices, offers the definitive discussion of the

 

narrative nastiness of Ulysses in suggesting that Joyce lets
the characters hang themselves, that he incorporates their

words into the narration the better to ridicule them.3 Such
a reading is possible, if we read the novel, as Kenner does,

as simply an extension of the narrative method of Dubliners.

 

It fails to account, however for two important points: Joyce
learned from his first book that such an ungenerous narrative
voice implicates the speaker as much as those spoken of, and
there is no excuse for a seven hundred page novel whose main
purpose is to knock down straw men.

In addition to the mythic parallels, the stream-of-
consciousness technique is frequently discussed as an overlay,
a filter for arranging the events of Bloomsday into an orderly,
manageable form.4 These readings turn the book back in on
itself, following a tendency that it displays toward insula-
rity, so that the world of Ulysses has few points of contact
with the world outside the novel, and those (most commonly)
are autobiographical.5 But for many studies even that
extraliterary connection is secondary to the novel's literary
or mythic parallels, so that work after work contains a
version of the schema, and we are faced with an endless series
of variations on Stuart Gilbert's book. The schema becomes
the novel, for many critics, and the cleverness of the produc-
tion overwhelms the reader's sense of the book, as Edmund

Wilson complains:

155

It seems to me difficult, then, not to conclude

that Joyce elaborated Ulysses too much. [The

flowers in Lotus-Eaters] do not create in the

Dublin streets an atmosphere of lotus—eating.

And do not the gigantic interpolations of the

Cyclops episode defeat their object by making it

impossible for us to follow the narrative?
Wilson's comments, like the work of so many illuminators of
Ulysses, are invited by Joyce, in the novel itself as well as
in his handing out copies of the schema and in encouraging,
if not actually supervising, Gilbert.

Such commentaries rest on the usually unstated assumption
that the novel's artistic pyrotechnics exist for their own

sakes, in a state of aesthetic isolation, and that they are

themselves the controlling forces, the raison d'etre, of

 

Ulysses. Even such fundamentally different critics as Sultan
and Lukacs find room for agreement:

Their [Cervantes, and Sterne's] play was created
for its own sake as a quality of their art; Joyce's
modernist play had to be work as well. That is to
say, his parodies, burlesques, tricks, and manipu-
lations of the conventions of the novel as a genre
are not only play that points outward to a particu-
lar writer, literary form, or real situation; they
are also and primarily——like his patterns of
allusion7-purposeful work that functions within
Ulysses.

I refer to the fact that with Joyce the stream-of-
consciousness technique is no mere stylistic device;
it is itself the formative principle governing the
narrative pattern and the presentation of character.
Technique here is something absolute; it is part and
parcel of the aesthetic ambition informing Ulysses.
With Thomas Mann, on the other hand, the monologue
interieur is simply a technical device, allowing the
author to explore aspects of Goethe's wopld which
would not have been otherwise available.

 

 

Both Sultan and Lukacs, then, see the technique as central to

the novel (Lukacs, I believe, would go further still, and say

156

it is the novel), and both see that technique as a purely
internal, or at least purely literary, concern. Yet neither
offers a reason for the centrality of that technique. Lukacs,
of course, seeks no answer, finding rather that the excessive
concern for technique is his answer, that Joyce, like Kafka
and Musil, is alienated to such an extent that the Dublin he
”lovingly depicts is little more than a backcloth; it is not

9 In short, he takes the

basic to [his] artistic intention."
stream-of—consciousness as symptomatic of the decay of art
under the bourgeois. Sultan, on the other hand, has no such
ideological need to find Modernism wanting--quite the opposite,
he's tremendously positive about what he calls "Our Modern
Experiment"--yet he too offers no rationale for the novel's
concern with technique, apparently finding it its own justi-
fication. Technique, for Sultan as for so many Joyceans, is
a purely internal matter.

Lukacs objects to stream-of—consciousness as a formative
principle because it appears to reinforce the isolation of
the character from other people and from personal and private
history: "He does not develop through contact with the world;
be neither forms nor is formed by it."10 This debasement of
character by technique he opposes to realistic fiction, in
which narrative method exists to produce an understanding of
character (as evidenced by his praise of Mann's use of the
interior monologue). This View, although it focuses on

different aspects of the problem, addresses very much the

same issue as does Kenner's discussion of the narrative

157

viciousness and Wilson's objection to overelaboration: the
novel, including characters, exists for the sake of technical
narrative experiment. Such reachings ultimately fall back

on a notion of the design being superimposed on the material
of the novel, order upon chaos, a profoundly undialectical
way to read the novel. There is, however, another method of
discussing the book, one which allows for a more dynamic
connection between existence and design. The characters in
Ulysses carry with them a system of patterns and archetypes
through which experience is ordered, perceived, and expressed
--in short, a grammar of experience--drawn from literature,
religion, myth, history, politics, from the whole of Western
civilization.

The system, or grammar, can be thought of as a language
of symbolic action, and the terminology of linguistics
presents a useful way of discussing the system. The entire
system comprises the langue, the rules and standards for
generating the speech of the characters, while their actual
utterances constitute the parole. Like a language, this
grammar of experience is acquired through the daily inter-
actions of people with one another, and characters possess
the ability to make utterances often without realizing they
have assimilated the system, or even that such a system exists.
They may, then, order their experience according to cultural
or mythic forms while remaining unaware that they are doing
so and quite ignorant, intellectually, of those forms. As

with any language, of course, there are levels of awareness,

158

from the narrative presence who is quite sensitive not only
to the system but to the characters' individual permutations
of it as well, down to someone such as the barfly of ”Cyclops,"
who evidences virtually no awareness of such a system. Any
single person, while possessing the rules of the language, is
only capable, due to experience, education, outlook, interest,
and immediate social context, of producing one set of
utterances from all those possible. Molly, for instance, will
never sound like Stephen, nor Bloom like Gerty MacDowell..
This is not, however, to suggest that their utterances are
completely controlled by circumstance; there are many instances
in the novel of characters manipulating the grammar to make
it fit their circumstances, or to make circumstances bearable.
They cannot control the langue, the universe of possible
paroles which exists externally to them; they can make choices
about their particular utterances, although these choices
(like the utterances themselves) are often made at a subcon-
scious or pre-conscious level. Moreover, the reader
participates in this language, just as he does in what we
customarily think of as language, by interpreting and recon—
stituting the utterance in terms of its cultural framing of
the character's action.

This relationship of the individual mind to the collective
understanding, like the relationship of ideolectal variation
to the whole of the language, does not dictate mass uniformity,
but rather, it allows for individual integrity and mutual

communication simultaneously. No two characters produce

159

exactly the same set of utterances, and yet, because those
utterances spring from the same underlying grammar, the
characters understand one another and, more importantly, the
reader can understand them as well. For instance, when Bloom
says ”'Wait, I'll just pay this lot.‘ The best plan clearly
being to clear out, the remainder being clear sailing,"11 the
importance of the Homeric parallel (Bloom as sailor, paying
”this lot," the rabble, and clearing out--Odysseus clears out
the suitors and Bloom is aware that Molly takes lovers)
resides not in Joyce's conscious use of it but in Bloom's
unconscious linguistic calling-forth. Moreover, the language
—-not the action, but the language and thought--also calls to
mind a symbolically related action, Christ's clearing of the
temple. The words Bloom chooses spring to his mind in light
of the immediately preceeding passage in which he thinks of
Molly, of "the crux of it," of "your God a jew," of "a bite
from a sheep," and of "tender Achilles." His words are,
then, at once products generated through the cultural grammar
and agents that produce expansion of that system, just as any
expression in language, generated out of its grammar, either
reinforces or expands the language.

This cultural grammar, although it can be expressed
through ritual (and one has but to think of Mulligan's Black
Mass), tends more often to inform language, whether word or
thought, and the significant ”events" of the novel are apt to
be verbal rather than active. In fact, we see virtually none

of the consequential relationships--Stephen's to his mother;

160

Bloom's to Molly, Milly, Rudy, and his father; even Molly's

to Boylan--directly, but rather through the thoughts of the
characters. For example, Stephen remembers his mother not as
she was, a woman dying of cancer asking her son to pray for
her, but as an image, transformed into a crab (the Cancer of
the zodiac) coming after him, and as a ghastly priestess with
her chalice of greenish bile and people kneeling at the rail
of her bed. Even the relationship of Stephen and Bloom,

which we do see, with its ritualistic catechism and communion,
rests very heavily on linguistic expression of the experien-
tial grammar. Nor are the expressions limited to the three
main characters. Almost everyone in the book uses the grammar
at some point to order experience, such as the scene in the
cabman's stand when Parnell's resurrection is prophesied
(following again his connection with Christ, already established

in Dubliners and Portrait).

 

Moreover, not only are the characters' paroles generated
from this grammar, but the utterances frequently help to
shape the narrative. In the case of Molly's soliloquy, the
utterance is the narrative, but this is merely the most
obvious example. Each episode's technic can, in fact, be seen
as a result of the workings of the minds of its characters:
the catechisms of Nestor and Ithaca reflect the question—and-
answer dialogues (and monologues) in which the characters
engage; the dialectic of Scylla and Charybdis is a result of
Stephen's back—and-forth "weaving and unweaving" (the image

he calls forth is of a fictional characters, Penelope, rather

161

than a historical one, Socrates--this may be a comment on the
relative force with which myth and history are ingrained on
our consciousness); while the ”headline” environment and
mentality of the characters in the Aeolus episode gives rise
to the boldface headlines of the narrative. The grammar's
role in the characters' ordering and narrating of experience
makeszuurtraditional notion of a narrator or point—of—view is
inadequate in dealing with the book.

The Nausicaa episode is a case in point:

Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were

of the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous

lashes and darkly expressive brows. Time was when

those brows were not so silkyseductive. It was

Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman

Beautiful page of the Princess novelette, who had

first advised her to try eyebrowleine which gave

that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming

in leaders of fashion, and she never regretted it.

. . . But Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of

wonderful hair. (p. 349)
To read this passage as having a traditional narrator forces
the reader to envision that narrator as sitting in judgment
on his characters, making nasty, demeaning comments on them

through his style. But such a reading poses problems: has

not Joyce already discovered, in Dubliners, that such an

 

ungenerous, sniping narrator is implicated by the act of
describing the ”scrupulous meanness" he seeks to stand above?
And if, as I believe, Joyce's narrative voice moves beyond
that vulgar nastiness in the marvelous final passage of

”The Dead," to see him returning to it in Ulysses would be to
suppose a wholly inexplicable regression. More appropriate

is a version of the authorial presence as recorder or

162

interpreter rather than narrator, as one who is sensitive to
the characters' paroles because he shares in their langue,
the larger system of which the individual utterances partake.
Such a reading of Gerty's passages shows her thinking about
herself and her world in language drawn from and, in turn,
invoking fashion magazines and advertisements (as in the above
passage), dime store romances, and classical and biblical
notions of beauty: ”The waxen pallor of her face was almost
spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth
was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect" (p. 348).

Throughout the novel characters express themselves and,
perhaps more importantly, think about themselves by means of
this grammar, selecting bits of language which they then
piece together into more or less coherent utterances. In so
doing they become creators of fictions, their thoughts and
wordsru)longer unmediated and spontaneous, but rather narra-
tives mediated (what could be less spontaneous than Gerty's
description of herself?) by this experiential grammar, which
acts as a filter even when the utterances are unconscious and
automatic. The characters, then, become narrators of novels
in which they are the main characters, novels which are not
the novel Joyce is writing. When Kenner says that Wyndham
Lewis "scored a near-miss in spotting traces of the kind of
novel in which Dedalus and Mulligan imagine they are charac-
ters, while not noticing that such traces do not exist beyond
the first episode,"12 he scores a similar near miss; the

traces do not exist because the fiction that the first

163

episode's confrontation requires is not similarly required

in other episodes. Just as one does not use the same sentence
in every situation all day long, so neither does one employ
the same fiction to explain every experience. The characters
change their narrations as smoothly as they alter their
sentences. So deeply ingrained is the ability to narrate
experience vis-a-vis this grammar that it is second nature,
and characters can co-author segments. While Gerty's
"narration" is individual, others, like the Cyclops and Sirens
episodes, are public or collective. The style of Cyclops, for
instance, presents the reader with very much the same problem
as Nausicaa, namely how to deal with the inflated passages
interspersed through the first-person narration. Again, the
notion of a traditional narrator is untenable, yet if there

is not one, who is responsible for the language of those
passages?

Before turning to a discussion of that narrative voice,
we need to look at how, and more particularly why, Joyce
employs it. First of all, the mode of narration represents
a truly democratic turn in the author's thinking. While
dialectal variations is a key to maintaining a stratified class
structure, the universality of language constitutes a basis
for equality. Everyone in English speaking societies speaks

essentially the same language, and those differences of

 

dialect upon which class prejudice and conflict depend are
not structural but rather surface features. Similarly the

basic patterns of cultural and historical experience are

164

shared by everyone, while the dissimilarities between, say,
Stephen Dedalus and Gerty MacDowell are variations on a theme
rather than differences in kind. As we frequently see in the
course of the novel, the ideolectal variations of the cultural
grammar do not impede mutual understanding or, in the collec—
tive episodes, collaborative narration.

The second major reason for the book's narrative voice
is historical or geographical: a non-Irish Joyce would not,
in all probability, have written Ulysses. In one of his
Triestine lectures of 1907 he discusses the factors behind
the paralysis of Ireland like this:

The soul of the country is weakened by centuries of

useless struggle and broken treaties, and individual

initiative is paralyzed by the influence of the

church, while its body is manacled by the police,

the tax office, and the garrison. No one who has

any self—respect stays in Ireland, but flees it as

from a country that has undergone the visitation

of an angered Jove.

In short, history and culture conspire to keep Ireland
subserviant and incapable of action; the past paralyzes the
present. This finds its way constantly into Joyce's work and
its fullest development in Ulysses. Language is the gift

(or curse) of the past to the present. Received and subse—
quently passed along by each generation, it influences and is
shaped by the issues of the time. The cultural grammar
functions in much the same way, and the past exerts its
influence over the present. Control by the church, a history
of conquest and occupation by foreign powers, failed heroes,

lost causes, as well as the personal dead, the ghosts of their

own fathers, all contribute to the system of symbol and

165

archetype that the characters employ in organizing experience.
Moreover, the Irishness of the book adds another layer of
meaning to this grammar, because the symbols and patterns
available to the characters, and even the language used to
give them expression, stand as emblems of the very situation
they so frequently are used to describe, the oppression of
the Irish by foreign powers. Such a concern manifests itself
in other Irish writers, perhaps most notably in the recent
poetry of Seamus Heaney, in which the civil strife in Ireland
is seen as someone else's war being waged by Irishmen. The
technique of Ulysses, then, has its basis in the cultural

and political history of its country: like the poetry of

Yeats it is truly national, rather than blindly nationalistic.
II

The narratives of Ulysses arrange themselves roughly into
two categories: the personal, in which monologue or private
(and not wholly untraditional) narration predominate, and the
public, in which the narrative voice becomes decentered and
group collaboration abounds. Certain episodes present
difficulties in classification--for example, Ithaca exhibits
elements of both the public and the private--but most resolve
themselves fairly clearly into one group or the other. Of
the two groups the public chapters--Aeolus, Sirens, Cyclops,
Wandering Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, Oxen of the Sun, Circe,

Eumaeus, and Ithaca--present the greatest difficulties in

166

understanding, precisely because of the decentering of the
narrative voice. It is with those episodes that Edmund Wilson
finds greatest cause for complaint, and in them that the
disparity between action and narrative mode seems the widest.

The key to those public chapters, and in many respects
to the whole novel, comes not from among them but from an
early, private episode, from the classroom scene in Nestor:

- Yes, sir. And he said: Another victory_like

that and we are done for.

That phrase the world had remembered. A dull
ease of the mind. From a hill above a corpsestrewn
plain a general speaking to his officers, leaned

upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They
lend ear. (E, p. 24)

 

 

What remains in the public mind is not a date or a place, not
any really significant fact of battle, but a saying, a type,
a cliché waiting to happen. Stephen's response is quite
perceptive; it could be any general to any officers, so that
history comes down to a series of hackneyed expressions from
among lost events. Perhaps, though, this situation is not
the catastrophe that Stephen, in his capacity as teacher,
imagines it to be. What people remember is not the battle
nor the political reality, nor even the personality of the
speaker, but a way of organizing and talking about a certain
type of experience, so that one can talk about a Pyrrhic
victory with the same confidence that one is understood as
when one talks about a tree. That cliché is a fact of exis-
tence in much the same way the tree is: accepted, absorbed
into our consciousness, automatically known. It is in this

regard that the trite, the hackneyed, the clichéd discover

167

such power in Ulysses, that they afford immediate, mutual
recognition of ideas, situations, patterns of experience,
while the original, clever expression requires additional
processing. Stephen's students, while they instantly grasp
the historical saying, are disconcerted by his statement that
a pier is a disappointed bridge, and he, disconcerted by their
responses, determines to try it again among his friends, whom
he believes will value the witticism more highly. He is not,
particularly in the case of Haines, totally correct in his
appraisal. Not only does the phrase-become-community—property
allow for communication, it also provides the basis for
collaborative narration.

The first, and possibly most striking, example of the
non-personal narrative voice appears as the boldface head—
lines of Aeolus. The headline of each passage, starting with
IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS, provides a key, or
focus, for the section that follows. The obvious suggestion,
and one quite frequently made, for the existence of the
headlines is that Joyce is practicing organic form, that the
modern cave of the winds, the newspaper office, warrants a
journalistic treatment. Of course, there can be no doubt
that the headlines in the episode parallel actual newspaper
headlines, but that is a treatment, not a purpose. The
unasked question is why: why does Joyce employ the headlines,
and how do they fit in with the rest of the episode? To see
them as authorial overlay, as Joyce's mimicking of the people

he creates is to render them artistically indefensible on two

168

grounds. In the first place, such a reading forces the
reader to see Joyce setting up fictional straw men for the
sole purpose of knocking them over, a mean and ungenerous act
quite unworthy of the effort, and a practice he gives up, as

we have seen, at the end of Dubliners. Secondly, and more

 

significantly, such a reading ultimately requires that the
chapter be wrenched apart into the basic narrative and a
superimposed, essentially unrelated superstructure. In other
words, the episode's design dooms it to failure. Such a
reading is therefore unsatisfactory and requires the reader
to look elsewhere for explanation, to the characters them-
selves. Aeolus presents the first major problem in point-of-
view in the novel, for there is no single character whom the
reader can follow throughout the episode- While it is true
that one or the other of the book's primary characters, Bloom
and Stephen, hold the stage for almost the entire episode,
running as it were a main character relay, the narration does
not focus sufficiently strongly on them for us to explain its
structure. Rather, the newspaper office, or its inhabitants,
is the focal point of the narrative presence. Nearly every-
one in the office is concerned, in one way or another, with
the production of the paper, and they are all familiar with
what a newspaper is and what functions it performs. The form
of a newspaper is part of the modern experience, a fact so

deeply ingrained that we take it for granted.

169

Small wonder, then, that the events of the episode are
punctuated by boldface headlines that inflate the actual
occurrences out of proportion:

WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE
DISSOLUTION OF A MOST RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS

Hynes here too: account of the funeral

probably. Thumping thump. This morning the

remains of the late Mr. Patrick Dignam. Machines.

Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught.

(E, p. 118)

The headline in this case is a possible but by no means
certain version of the one on Dignam's obituary. What's more,
the "story" that follows has only tangential connection to
the headline, offering a possible first line to the story.

It is one of the few articles in the episode, moreover, that
could plausibly appear in the actual paper; others, such as
"CLEVER, VERY" most certainly would not. The characters
organize their collective experience by means of the common
grammar most readily available to them, that of the

newspaper office.

A further case can be made for such a reading by looking
at the actual speech produced in the episode. Stuart Gilbert
states the art of Aeolus as Rhetoric,14 but in fact an
equally strong case can be made for Reportage. While that
art discussed by the characters is oratory (and while they
are all pleased with clever rhetorical devices) the language
function they employ to discuss it is the journalist's,

narrative exposition. When, for example, Professor MacHugh

relates John F. Taylor's speech, he does not simply recite

170

it, but puts in all the pertinent information of who, what,
when, and where:

The finest display of oratory I ever heard was a
speech made by John F. Taylor at the college
historical society. Mr. Justice Fitzgibbon, the
present lord justice of appeal, had spoken and
the paper under debate was an essay (new in those
days), advocating the revival of the Irish
tongue. . . .

- It was a speech, mark you, the professor said,

of a finished orator, full of courteous haughtiness

and pouring in chastened diction, I do not say the

vials of his wrath but pouring in the proud man's

contumely upon the new movement. We were weak,

therefore worthless. . . .

- Taylor had come there, you must know, from a

sick bed. That he had prepared his speech I do

not believe for there was not even one shorthand—

writer in the hall. His dark lean face had a

growth of shaggy beard round it. He wore a loose

neckcloth and altogether he looked (though he was

not) a dying man. . . .

-When Fitzgibbon's speech had ended Joyn F. Taylor

rose to reply. Briefly, as well as I can bring

them to mind, his words were these. (H, p. 141)
Ultimately the listeners' attention will be focused on the
remembered oration; MacHugh captures and holds it by his
ability to relate the story surrounding the speech itself.
He presents all the pertinent facts of the case with style
but without excessive detail, so that his audience is fully
informed but not distracted from the central concern. The
professor proves himself a capable reporter. Throughout
Ulysses the ability to tell a story is highly prized, but
here even more than in other episodes that talent is not only
valued but actually required. A man's importance in the

newspaper office extends as far as his ability to hold the

center stage as a storyteller, and so Bloom is ignored and

171

Stephen esteemed. Bloom is even cursed when his telephone
call interferes with Miles Crawford's story, "--Tell him to
go to hell, the editor said promptly. X is Burke's public-
house, see?" (E, p. 137), when as editor Crawford should be
more interested in generating business than recounting an old
story. And finally, Stephen's story is not complete until he
gives it a title, a headline. In such an environment, with
such a common grammar, the headlines generate themselves;
they grow out of the action and the characters' awareness of
place.

A similar result of the grammar of place takes place in
the music room of Sirens, although the phase of experience
around which the characters cluster their activities and
perceptions changes. Again, their thoughts cluster around
a single topic, music and hearing, and indeed the episode
itself, without the prefatory theme, would be simply enough
explained as the jumble of thoughts as too many sensations
rush in at once. But the theme is there, and it colors the
rest of the scene, changing the reader's understanding of the
importance of certain moments and words. Its existence can
hardly be explained in purely musical terms (that is, Joyce
has composed a fugue in words); since much of the theme is
something less than euphonious, we must assume that Joyce
could have done better had he simply wished to perform a
.pppp.gp.fpppp. Rather, the creation of this fugue must be

credited to the participants themselves, not to anyone.

172

Bloom, on whom so much of the chapter is focused, has no
access to certain parts, such as the opening:
Begin!
Bronze by gold, Miss Douce's head by Miss

Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the

Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by,

ringing steel. (E, p. 257)
Bloom passes outside the window a few moments later, while
for his part he experiences scenes to which no one else has
access. No single character, therefore, can produce the
entire episode, and so once again the notion of a collective
narration offers help in understanding the narrative struc—
ture. To return to the playing of the theme once more, of
course the characters cannot elaborate the theme prior to the
experience out of which it grows, and so here it is even more
important than in Aeolus to reconstitute narrative presence
as an active, although non-controlling factor. That voice is
sensitive to the language of their experience--indeed, more
sensitive than his characters who, while they employ (like
the newspapermen) a common grammar of experience and place,
probably could not recognize it as such and therefore could
not reproduce it. In any such situation there are moments,
high or low points that for one reason or another register
upon one's consciousness, and the narrative voice of Sirens,
attentive as it is to those moments, gleans them, pieces them
together, and places them at the head of the episode so that
the reader will recognize the musical quality of this gather-
ing of people who are nét, for the most part, trying

consciously to be musical.

173

In this last respect Sirens is an apt metaphor for
Joyce's own relation to the book, for in letting his
characters move about and pursue their own business, yet all
the while remaining senstive to locale, to historical or
geographic context, to the moment, he creates art. He
certainly creates art out of even less artistic circumstances
than the concert room, and a prime example would be the
following episode, Cyclops. The crowd in Barney Kiernan's
has nothing artistic or even genteel about it; the men are
dirty, crude, coarse, nasty, and hateful. Yet here too
Joyce finds in the individual that same relationship to
history and to culture that he finds elsewhere, perhaps even
stronger here than elsewhere, for these men in their frustra-
tion and bitterness are more acutely aware of the crushing
weight of history and circumstance than others in the novel.
The art is not in their actions but in their collective
experience of those actions.

Certainly there is little that is artistic about the
conscious narrator of the episode; he is mean and ungenerous

in a way the young writer of Dubliners never thought of being,

 

and as strongly anti-Irish (although less consciously) as he
is xenophobic. He is a perfect example of Joyce's vision of
Ireland debasing itself to overcome debased England:

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 that have overcome her-—and Lady
Gregory. . . might add to the passage which forms
her dedication, Whitman's ambiguous word for the

174

vanquished--'Battles are lost in the spirit in
which they are won.‘ (CW, p. 105)

That the Irish have lowered themselves to the level of the
English is nowhere as clear as in the patrons of Kiernan's
pub: they have practiced hatred and bitterness toward the
English for so long that they have nothing else to turn
against each other. The narrator, for instance, has a bad
word for everyone and everything.

Yet the narrator and the characters do not take up the
entire episode, nor even necessarily draw the reader's main
attention, for there are those gigantic interpolations that
have only marginal connection to the basic story:

A most interesting discussion took place in the

ancient hall of Brian O'Ciarnain's in Sraid no

Bretaine Bhaeg, under the auspices of Sluagh na

h-Eireann, on the revival of ancient Gaelic

sports and the importance of physical culture,

as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome

and ancient Ireland, for the development of the

race. The venerable president of this noble

order was in the chair and the attendance was of
large dimensions. (U, pp. 316-17)

 

 

 

 

This is very high rhetoric for the coarse and no doubt
blasphemous argument it describes. The inflated language of
this passage is like that of bad journalism when it moves
closest to propaganda, which is probably the sort of paper,
given their interest and beliefs, the patrons of the tavern
most frequently read. Yet what it describes is in some
measure deserving of the heightened rhetoric: the men have
a very real sense that they are the inheritors of their race,
that the Citizen is the modern embodiment of the ancient

Celtic heroes, and that it falls upon them to reclaim the

175

greatness of Ireland. Their combined thoughts, then, produce
this understanding of themselves in terms of the ancients in
language which partakes not only of yellow journalism but
ancient epic, as well, for it is the propaganda sheet which
probably comes closer than any other modern writing form to
the high language of epic.

Nor should the possibility of these men simultaneously
creating this expansive rhetoric and variations of the spite-
ful and niggardly narration of the unnamed "I” seem surprising
or out of place, since a similar phenomenon takes place in
Sirens. With Simon Dedalus' song as catalyst, the characters'
thoughts are focused in a common direction. They are both
orchestra and audience, simultaneously producing the music
and watching others produce it, with the result that, while
any one or two are performing, the rest are watching and
listening, so that the emphasis of the action rests not with
the actors but with the viewers. And while they are overt
spectators, they are unwittingly performing a music of their
own. So the precedent for the simultaneous occurance of two
different and even antithetical actions on the part of the
characters is established at least in Sirens, and it is
carried still further in the episode in Barney Kiernan's. It
may even be that the one form of narration in Cyclops is
motivated by the other, or that they both find their source
in the same problem, and so they are not so antithetical

after all.

176

To be sure, they both grow out of a nationalism that,
while its manifestations are often maligned in Joyce criti-
cism, is nevertheless quite justifiable: these men are
rabidly nationalistic in a way only people who have been
denied their rightful status as a nation can be--only the
oppressed can fight against their oppressor. Much of the
epic language, therefore, can be understood in terms of
justifying the Irish claim to independence by demonstrating
Ireland's past greatness and modern Ireland's position as
rightful inheritor of that greatness, as with the early
description of the Citizen:

He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently

flayed oxhide reaching to the knees in a loose

kilt and this was bound about his middle by a

girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this

he wore trews of deerskin, roughly stitched with

gut. His nether extremities were encased in high

Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the

feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide

laced with windpipe of the same beast. From his

girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at

every movement of his portentous frame and on

these were graven with rude yet striking art the

tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines

of antiquity . . . (H, p. 296)

The list that follows begins with Cuchulin and works its way
through such "Irish” heroes as Ben Franklin and Cleopatra, as
well as some with adopted Irish first names, such as Patrick
W. Shakespeare and Brian Confucius. The list is quite
humorous, and even leads the reader to think of it as laugh—
able, as something produced by the author to ridicule his

characters. If, on the other hand, we see the entire passage

as generated out of the characters' collective consciousness,

177

we find that the passage fulfills several useful functions
for them while retaining its humor for us. First of all, it
connects these moderns to their ancestral greats and thereby
lends legitimacy to their claims to nationhood. Then, too,
it enhances their self-image, taking them away for the moment
from their current squalor and debasement to show them their
heritage, what they could have been in a free Ireland.
Moreover, it suggests that they can manipulate the system for
purposes of hilarity, or self-deprecation, that they can
undercut their own hyperbolic rhetoric. The famous foreign—
ers, who at first make the whole list seem ludicrous, in this
context add greater legitimacy still by appearing as equals,
as no greater than the Irish heroes. Quite apart from--as
Wilson charges--"making it impossible to follow the narrative,”
this particular gigantic interpolation adds new layers of
significance not only to the narrative but to the plight of
the characters.

Along with nationalism comes a more than healthy dose of
xenophobia for the pub's patrons. A good deal of Bloom's
difficulties stem from the others' perceiving him as an
outsider. They challenge his citizenship (U, p. 331), make
much of his Hungarian ancestry, and even manage an anti-Bloom,
anti-foreign collaboration when he attempts to explain the
hanged man's erection:

The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold

Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect

that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical
vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal

178

cord would, according to the best approved
traditions of medical science . . . (U, pp. 304-05)

Bloom is attacked on several grounds. This is a bad crowd to
practice intellectual explanations on, and he insists on
resorting to the approved authorities rather than simply
riding with the popular wisdom. Moreover, his answers are
always too long for a group more interested in one-liners.
In short, he simply fails to understand his audience. Worst
of all, as a man whose father was not born in Ireland, he's
an outsider. The collective narration turns him from an
Irishman to not a Hungarian but a German, and in so doing
they make him the object of their wrath for their English
rulers, associated in this episode as elsewhere with the
Germans through the royal family. Bloom, then, is made the
scapegoat for the latest version of the Germanic oppression
of Ireland, and again we see the political ends accomplished
through the epic heightening of the interpolation. Similarly,
the anti—Semitism aimed at Bloom throughout the final portion
of the episode culminates in a group narration:

When, lo, there came about them all a great

brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He

stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in

the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the

brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as

the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not

look upon Him. And there came a voice out of

heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he

answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And

they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid

clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the

brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over

Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off
a shovel. (H, p. 345)

 

 

179

A new wrinkle is added to the collective narration in that
its object, a Jew departing the scene, focuses them not only
on an appropriate Old Testament incident, but appropriate Old
Testament language as well. For several pages of text
everyone's attention at Kiernan's has been drawn to the fact
that Bloom is a Jew, first by the Citizen and then by Bloom
himself, who precipitates the final furious action by point-
ing out, quite rightly, that Christ was a Jew. This state-
ment infuriates the Citizen who, one may presume, always
considered El§ Savior an Irishman, although he, too, makes
the connection, albeit unwittingly, between Bloom and Christ:
"By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will" (U, p. 342). Further-
more, there is, as the narrator observes, many a true word
spoken in jest, or in this case ridicule, for the comparison
between Bloom and the prophets, and even Christ, is apt:
Bloom has come among them preaching brotherhood and love as
well as peace and understanding among nations, for which he
receives less than brotherly treatment.

Bloom himself picks up the link between himself, Christ,
and (adding an element) Parnell—-Martin Cunningham has
already noted that both the Jews and the Irish are still
awaiting their redeemers—-in Circe, first when John Howard
Parnell declares him a successor to Charles Stewart Parnell,
and then throughout the sequence leading up to the litany by
the Daughters of Erin:

Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.

Flower of the Bath, pray for us.
Mentor of Menton, pray for us.

180

Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us.
Charitable Mason, pray for us.
Wandering Soap, pray for us.
Sweets of Sin, pray for us.
Music without Words, pray for us.
Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us.
Friend of all Frillies, pray for us.
Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us.
Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence,
pray for us.
(A choir of six hundred voicesy conducted by
Mr Vincent O'Brien, sings the Alleluia chorus . . .)
(U, pp. 498-99)

 

 

Like the characters in Cyclops and elsewhere, Bloom thinks in
terms of a savior. If, as Miles Crawford suggests, every Jew
is excited by the birth of a son at the prospect that it may
be the Messiah, then it is equally true that every Irishman
is excited by the rise of a new leader, in hope that he may
be the one to lead them to independence, the one for whom
Parnell was only a poor prefigurer. Nor is this simply a
literary contrivance: the histories of Jew and Irishman, in
being denied rightful homelands, in being always subject
races, in having rights denied and revoked, are so similar
that they fairly scream to Joyce for artistic treatment
despite the overt anti-Semitism he depicts among the Irish.
In Bloom both strains come together, for his heritage is
Jewish and his nation is Ireland. Small wonder, then, that
Parnell and Christ suggest themselves in the fantasy about a
ruined deliverer, for they are both, for Bloom, failed
saviors, prophets of some greater coming, promise without
fulfillment.

The ways in which this connecting of failed saviors

takes shape present an even more interesting point of focus

181

than why it occurs. In Circe the psychological drama becomes
externalized, and the form of the episode centers around
performance: the drama, the Mass, Vaudeville. The grammar
of experience, never far below the surface of consciousness,
rises up in Circe, exhaustion and alcohol breaking down the
customary barrier, and projects itself out from the charac—
ters' minds so that they witness their own mental processes
without being able (as they usually are) to control them.
Images come up to them without invocation, and the mix of
private, social, historical, mythological, and ecclesiastical
is thorough. What comes through is an often absurd cluster
of images, as in the litany's references to Bloom's personal
events of the day, or Stephen's encounter with his mother:
THE MOTHER

(Her face drawing nearer and nearer, sending out

an ashen breath.) Beware! (She raises her

blackened, withered right arm slowly towards

Stephen's breast with outstretched fingers.)

Beware! God's hand! (A Green crab with malig-

nant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws
into Stephen's heart.)

 

* * *

Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake!

Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with

love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary. (E, p. 582)
Stephen's manner of thinking about his mother's death has two
primary sources, her cancer and her faith, and the images of
her come from divergent traditions. One is the zodiac: she
becomes a crab with, lest the reader miss the significance,

”malignant red eyes." Throughout the novel, his images of

his mother are ghastly, and they suggest that his brooding

182

over her has moved from grief into morbidity. They also
suggest the resentment that becomes more explicit in the
religious images of her. The Mother's Christ-connection

brings out the worst in him, his satanic Non serviam and his

 

shattering of the chandelier, for in that insistence on
submitting to God and Church she ceases to be simply his
mother and becomes instead a representative of the forces
trying to oppress him, of the nightmare he is trying to
escape. It may well be that her appearance as Christ helps
him dispel her image, possibly even that he casts her so that
he will be able to dispel her. Whatever the causes and
effects, it is clear that he thinks of her death in terms of
Christ on the cross, and in his Nighttown stupor is unable to
suppress that thought, so that it projects out into his
personal drama which, of course, the other characters do not
see.

Indeed, of all the public episodes in the novel, Circe
comes closest to being private, for in the breaking down of
the barrier between the collective consciousness and indivi-
dual expression, between langue and parole, the characters
temporarily lose the ability to make comprehensible utterances
and so are lost in their private shadow-plays. In this
privacy they prefigure Molly's sleepy soliloquy in Penelope
which, as Suzette Henke points out, prefigures Finnegans Wake:

Of all the characters in Ulysses, Molly Bloom

alone perceives the cyclical nature of recurrent

personal history. Her soliloquy presages

Finnegans Wake, a work in which Joyce moves toward
a broader mythic perspective. In both "Penelope"

 

183

and the Wake, Joyce posits a simultaneity of

human experience. He conquers time and space by

making all events contemporaneous aspects of

consciousness, accessible to the mind through

impassioned perception.
Molly, like the dreamer of the Wake freed from the constraints
of mutual intelligibility, can revel in the privacy of her
utterances which, precisely because they need not communicate,
are allowed to sink into the depths of universality. In a
similarly odd way the Wake is at once the most individual and
most universal of Joyce's novels: as the record of a dream
it deals with the mind of one person, but that mind turns out
to be not the separate, discreet intelligence we usually
imagine, but a collective body of knowledge spanning linguis-
tics, literature, geography, history, and myth. Molly and
the dreamer provide both illustration and extension of
revelations made in the public chapters of Ulysses, that at

our most private level we partake of a collective, cultural

grammar that allows us to communicate with our fellow men.

CONCLUSION

The oldest question in literary theory is the one about
how society and literature fit together. Plato saw a split
between their purposes and methods, and in a sense the whole
of critical history has been an attempt to answer his
charges, to prove that poets should not be thrown out of the
republic. The issue of the poet in society continues to
be problematic in our time. Literature as a social act has
been largely ignored in this century, in part because when it
was considered at all it was worded badly or discussed in the
wrong terms. Only a handful of critics have seriously
contemplated literature as literature (rather than as social
artifact) within its social or historical context. But we
must if literature is to have any further value for our
culture. We live in an increasingly technological society
which, more and more, sees the humanistic disciplines as
irrelevant, even dilettantish. This View is supported by
claims for poetic autonomy and Art for Art's sake. As a
counter to this prevailing attitude toward literature, a more
or less Platonic notion of the inferiority of poetry to
Nature or Life, we must offer a more Aristotelian concept of
literature as the articulation of the whole of human

experience.

184

185

In the realm of Modernist literature, there has generally
been a separation of social-critical novels, plays, and poems
from "art" works. We should move toward an understanding
that every work presents a critique of or response to its
society and history through its art; not just Babbitt and

McTeague and The Spoon River Anthology, but Ulysses and

 

Four Quartets and the Cantos. Such an understanding requires

 

a great deal from the critic. Of course, no essay can
accomplish everything at once; in the four critical essays
in this study a great many thoughts and insights had to
be sacrificed to the pursuit of a central concept. Many of
the ideas they put forth can be developed much further. They
are intended not so much as models or suggestions as general
directions to move, as attempts to articulate a way of
reading literature.

That way has to do with nothing so much as expanding
the notions of form and content so that they overlap and
become indistinguishable. Our current notions of those
two elements remain too often inside the work and simply
reinforce the society/literature separation by their narrow-
ness. Let us replace them with notions that move outside the
work. The act of creation is the process of giving shape and
voice to a response to the world one finds; it is a social as
well as a symbolic act. To consider form under such a concept
as purely internal matter, an ingenious device, is to falsify
not only the nature of writing literature, but the nature of

reading it as well.

186

The reader is as much a part of the process of creation
as is the writer. Were he merely passive, all criticism
would look the same, everyone would find the same truths,
the same techniques, and in a few months or years critics
would have said everything possible to say about the work.
But controversy reigns in criticism, and Hamlet is as much
a source of argument now as it has ever been. The reader's
perspective on the work is different from the writer's, and
the one may find ways the work relates to its history or
previous literature or philosophy that the other never really
thought about in the act of creation. The encounter is not
one of producer-consumer, but of co-creators in a dynamic
exchange.

Modern literature presents a particularly vivid example
of that exchange: the ways in which we read Modern works
has undergone a transformation since its apparent demise and
the rise of the Postmodern. This transformation is due in
large measure to the reaction against Modernist sensibility
among the post—war writers, as well as to the changes our
world underwent in that war and the years since. Modern
literature no longer shocks or befuddles us in quite the
way it did when it was new, and yet it presents a series of
problems to be worked out. That there is a Postmodernism
colors the understanding of Modernism. Each new work, as
Eliot said, changes the entire order, however slightly.
Recent history has also changed some of our understandings

of Modern works. Some of Lawrence and Kipling and Wyndham

187

Lewis looks different after the Holocaust and the civil
rights movement. But these are extreme examples. Every
work changes, if only slightly, with the passing of time.
Language changes, techniques become outmoded or accepted,
styles give way to new styles. The reasons for these
changes are complex.

As I tried to suggest early in this study, the Modern
writer is obsessed with form because the forms he finds
left to him from earlier literature are not adequate to the
task of interpreting the world he lives in. Similarly, the
Postmodern writer rejects much that is characteristic of
the Modern because the world has changed, and literature
must also. Art is neither tribeless nor timeless, as the
young Yeats thought, and if we are to understand it fully
we must set about the chore of seeing it as intricately
related to its people, its history, and its culture, as

the articulation of the whole of human experience.

NOTES

MODERNISM AND THE CRITICS

William A. Johnsen, "Toward a Redefinition of
Modernism," boundary 2 (Spring, 1974), 539.

 

Monroe K. Spears, Dionysus and the City (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 12-15.

 

Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement (London:
Hamisch Hamilton/Adre Duetsch, 1965), p. 2.

 

Maurice Beebe, "What Modernism Was,” Journal of
Modern Literature, III (July, 1974), 1073.
5 Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York: Scribner's,
1969 [1931]). Wilson's premise throughout the study is
that the Modern writer follows the Symbolists in his pursuit
of isolation and his rejection of political or social
commitment .

6 Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1970), p. 183.

 

 

 

 

7 Connolly, p. 1.

8 Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1966). The specific arguments Williams puts
forth regarding the failure of Modernism to produce great
tragedy will be taken up in Chapter two.

9

 

Langbaum, p. 177.

 

10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the
Spirit of Music, and The Case of Wagner,.trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).

11

 

Spears, p. 44.

2 Georg Lukacs, Realism in our Time, trans. John and
Necke Mander, ed. George Steiner (New York: Harper and Row,
1971). At any number of points in the book; see especially
the section ”Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann." More specific
arguments will be taken up in Chapter two.

 

188

189

13 Beebe, p. 1074.

14 I am aware of the irony of speaking of Modernism and
attacking labels in the same paragraph. It will be fairly
obvious by now, I think, that I am using Modern and Modernist
more or less interchangeably, and that I am referring to a
time the writing took place as much as anything else.

15 Graham Hough, Image and Egperience (Lincoln: Univ.
of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 56.

16 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 99.

17

 

Spears, pp. 61-63.

18 Johnsen, pp. 544-45.

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

1 T. 3. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
in his Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950),
p. 5.

2 John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.,
1941), p. 213.

 

 

Ransom, p. xi.

4 Yvor Winters, "The Anatomy of Nonsense," in In Defense
of Reason (New York: Swallow Press, 1947), pp. 556 ff. and
Allen Tate, "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer," in Essays of
Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968), pp. 141 ff.

5 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 481 ff., esp. 496-506.

6 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1947), p. 215. Subsequent references to
this edition will be included in the text in parenthesis as,
for example, (Urn, 215).

7 Brooks; see especially his discussion of Wordsworth's
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality."

 

 

8 Winters, The Function of Criticism (Denver: Swallow
Press, 1957), p. 16.

9 Ransom, especially pp. 212-234.

190

10
p. 212.

11 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 18. Subsequent references
to this edition will be included in the text in parenthesis
as, for example, (pp, p. 18).

12 Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 99. Subsequent references
will be included in the text in parenthesis as, for example,
(51, p. 99).

13Frye, Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1963), p. 21. Subsequent references will be included in the
text in parenthesis as, for example, (Fl, p. 21).

14 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf,
1977), pp. 202, 239.

15 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language,
Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 195—196.
Subsequent references will be included in the text in
parenthesis as, for example, (22H, p. 195).

16 Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1971), p. 307. Subsequent references will be
included in the text in parenthesis as, for example,

(MQF, p. 307).

17 Lukacs, p. 70. Subsequent references to this
edition will be included in the text in parenthesis as, for
example, (RT, p. 70).

18

Tate, ”Modern Poetry,” in Essays of Four Decades,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Williams, p. 54.

19 Williams, p. 183.

20 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 337, quoting Plakhanov.

 

THE WAR AND THE WASTE LAND

 

1 Eliot, pp. 4—5.
2 Wilson, p. 121.

3 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt,
1971), p. 50. All subsequent references to Eliot's poetry
will be to this edition, and will be accompanied by line
references in parenthesis in the text.

191

 

 

4 Frye, T. 3. Eliot (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963),
p. 52.

5 Frye, T. S. Eliot, p. 62.

6

Frye, Anatomy, pp. 20-25. Frye's use of commodity
structure as the metaphor for the writer—reader-text—critic
relationship could not be less happy, although it is a good
metaphor for the sort of ”freezing” of the literary work
that he proposes.

7 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 326.

 

8 Robert Sencourt, T. S. Eliot, A Memoir (New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1971), p. 65.

 

9 Frye, Eliot, p. 62.

10 Frye, Eliot, p. 49.

11 See, for instance, Robert Parkinson, The Origins of
World War One (New York: Putnam's, 1970), on the subject
of the relationship between economics, imperialism, and the
oncoming of the Great War.

12 Fussell, p. 239.

 

 

13 Fussell, p. 301.

14 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. 3. Eliot
(New York: Harbinger-Harcourt, 1959), p. 160.

15

 

Kenner, pp. 193-194.

HISTORY AND NARRATIVE FORM IN GO DOWNi MOSES

 

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, "On The Sound and the Fury: Time in
the novels of William Faulkner," in Faulkner, ed. Robert Penn
Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
Sartre's argument with The Sound and the Fury, true also of a
number of Faulkner's novels, that it has a past but no future,
can be satisfied in Go Down, Moses, for however much it seems
to dwell in the past, it is going somewhere.

 

 

 

2 Malcolm Cowley, ”Go Down to Faulkner's Land," New
Republic (June 29, 1942), p. 900.

192

3 William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage,
1973), p. 3. Subsequent references to this edition appear
in the text following the quoted material.

4 . .
A comparison of the uses of games of chance in
Go Down, Moses, in which the emphasis is shifted away from
the cosmic toward the human, and other works, particularly
The Sound and the Fury, might prove enlightening.

 

 

 

5 Joseph Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William
Faulkner (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 185.

6 Warren Beck, Faulkner (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin
Press, 1976), p. 346.

7 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harvest-
Harcourt, 1952), p. 322.

8 Edmond Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner
(New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), p. 231.

 

 

 

POLITICS AND VISION IN YEATS'S LATER POETRY

1 William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New
York: Collier, 1973), p. 522. Subsequent references to this
edition will be included in the text in parenthesis as, for
example, Essays, p. 522).

 

2 Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951),
p. 39. Subsequent references to this edition will be
included in the text in parenthesis as, for example, (92,
p. 39).

 

3 Frye, Fables, p. 222.
4 Wilson, p. 46.
5

Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 153.

6 Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier, 1973 [1937]),
p. 266. Subsequent references to this edition are included
in the text in parenthesis as, for example, (Vision, p. 266).

7 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1969 [1941]), p. 193.

8

 

 

Ellmann, p. 200.

9 Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York:
Dutton, 1958), pp. 244-45.

 

193

10 MacNeice, p. 129.

11 Ellmann, Man and Masks, p. 294.

 

12 Ellmann, Identity, p. 285.

13 Edmund Wilson is an early and vocal proponent of
such a View, but by no means the only one.

JOYCE'S GRAMMAR OF EXPERIENCE

1 From Axel's Castle on, this has been a sort of minor
critical convention in discussions of Ulysses.

 

2 Stanley Sultan, The Argument of Ulysses (Columbus:
Ohio State Univ. Press, 1964).

3 Hugh Kenner, Joycels Voices (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1978). Kenner maintains that throughout
his career Joyce is a nasty eavesdropper in his role as
narrator.

4 The critics are not simply imagining the concept of
superimposed order from out of nowhere. Joyce started the
whole problem when he handed out copies of the Schema when
the novel first came out.

5 See, for instance, Mary Parr, James Joyce: The
Poetry of Conscience (Milwaukee: Inland Press, 1961), and
John Garvin, James Joyce's Disunited Kingdom and the Irish
Dimension (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), as two
examples of overzealous pursuit of biographical information.

6

 

 

 

 

Edmund Wilson, p. 214.

7 Sultan, Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Modernism (Port
Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977), p. 49.

8 Lukacs, p. 18.

9 Lukacs, p. 21.

10 Lukacs, p. 21.

1 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961),
p. 658. Subsequent references will be included in the text
in parenthesis as, for example, (H, p. 658).

12 Kenner, p. 69.

194

13 Joyce, Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 171.
Subsequent references will be included in the text in
parenthesis as, for example, (CW, p. 171).

14 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (New York:
Vintage, 1955), p. 177.

15 Suzette Henke, Joyces Moraculous Sindbook (Columbus:
Ohio State Univ. Press, 1978). p. 250.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Robert Martin. AfterJoyce: Studies in Fiction after
Ulysses. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977.

---------- . Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James
Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962.

Beck, Warren. Faulkner. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin
Press, 1976.

Beebe, Maurice. "Ulysses and the Age of Modernism."
James Joyce Quarterly, 10 (1972), 172-188.

 

---------- . "What Modernism Was." Journal of Modern
Literature, 3 (1974), 1065-1084.

 

Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle:
Univ. of Washington Press, 1971.

 

---------- , ed. James Joyce, Dubliners, and A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man: A Selection of Critical
Essays. London: Macmillan, 1973.

 

 

Benstock, Bernard. James Joyce: The Undiscovered Country.
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MIC IES

WWMW