The Invention of Joyceâs Modernism
In Chapter 5 of Joyceâs A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus explains his aesthetic theory to his fellow college student, Cranly. At a crucial point in his exposition, he makes a distinction between âstaticâ and âkineticâ art: while the latter is âimproperâ and incites feelings of âdesire or loathingâ, the former is the cause of the âesthetic emotionâ which arrests the mind and raises it above the squalid materiality of the external world.1 After a complex elaboration of his quasi-scholastic approach to the artistic object, Stephen culminates his argument with his often-quoted description of the artist as the âGod of the creation, [who] remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernailsâ. However, his carefully wrought argument is no sooner finished than it is gruffly deflated by another of his classmates, Lynch: âWhat do you meanâ, he asks, âby prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable, Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this countryâ.2 With these remarks, it seems that Joyce is playing the aesthetic formalism of âstatic artâ against the social conditions of Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. Early reviewers of Joyceâs A Portrait and Ulysses were quick to identify Stephenâs aesthetic views with those of Joyce and to oppose the structural complexity of his works to the Irish background of their contents.3 As Joseph Brooker has noted, while some of these critics celebrated Joyceâs narrative by focusing on its âstaticâ architectonics, others denigrated it on account of its âkineticâ aspects.4 The opinions of the first group, which included Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, constituted the critical foundation of Joyceâs canonization as the epitome of âhigh modernismâ; the often enraged reactions of the second group eventually resulted in the notorious censorship of Ulysses in the United States and Great Britain until the 1930s.
Joseph Kelly has claimed that Pound and Eliot âchanged Joyce from an Irish writer into an avant-garde, cosmopolitan writer, shucking off his provincial huskâ.5 But how can one ignore the âIrishnessâ of a writer whose entire oeuvre revolves around Dublin and the speech and customs of its people? For Pound and Eliot, the Irish content of Joyceâs narrative was little more than the dull subject matter transfigured into art by the formal virtuosity of A Portrait and, most notably, Ulysses. This emphasis on the âstaticâ elements of Joyceâs prose was a necessary critical step toward establishing his style and techniques as the remedy for the rapid dissolution of European cultural values after World War I. For instance, Pound affirmed that the ârealismâ of Ulysses was the solution to the âhell of contemporary Europe. The sense of style that Joyceâs narrative represents would have saved America or Europe. The mot juste is of public utilityâ.6 For the author of the Cantos, this stylistic precision was testimony to Joyceâs detachment from the âlocal stupidityâ of his native Ireland and to his entrance âinto the modern worldâ: âHe writes as a European, not as a provincialâ, Pound unambiguously stated in a piece entitled âThe Non-Existence of Irelandâ.7
The âmodernâ and âEuropeanâ characteristics of Joyceâs Ulysses were also the main concern of Eliot in his well-known 1923 review âUlysses, Order and Mythâ. Eliot perceived in the mythical structure of Ulysses a paradigm of order fulfilling a function analogous to that which Pound assigned to Joyceâs narrative precision, namely that of âcontrolling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary historyâ.8 Though fragmentary, the post-Great War world of Eliot and Joyce could gain stability by association with the order of myth. Thus, what he called the âmythical methodâ â the manipulation of âa continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquityâ â afforded the possibility of concentrating on the âstaticâ architecture of Ulysses, while ignoring its âkineticâ contents. In this respect, A. Walton Litz maintained that âEliot was troubled from the start by the threat which Joyceâs diverse and rambunctious prose might pose to the âclassicistââ, adding that, like âa devoted but somewhat timid child, Eliot was trying to process Joyceâs novel into a congenial world of âauthorityâ and âtraditionââ.9 Therefore, the aesthetic principles of literary modernism as theorized and practised by Pound and Eliot found in Joyceâs Ulysses a space for projection.
Indeed, Eliot the âclassicistâ considered the âstaticâ order of Ulysses to be a remedy for the cultural fragmentation of the West, which he surely perceived as an extreme case of âdissociation of sensibilityâ. Eliot introduced this concept in his essay âThe Metaphysical Poetsâ (1921), where he claimed that Donne, Chapman and other English poets of the early seventeenth century exemplified the perfect integration of lived experience and intellectual learning.10 For these poets, feeling and thought were in perfect harmony, since their intellects were constantly pressing their experiences into systems or âwholesâ. Their minds were not assailed by the fragmentation that, according to Eliot, became increasingly frequent in English letters after the seventeenth century. Eliot must have noticed a strong parallel between this initial moment of âdissociation of sensibilityâ in the English poetic tradition and the consequences for artistic expression that he attributed to the âimmense panorama of futility and anarchyâ during the early decades of the twentieth century. In his review of Ulysses he sought an artistic frame to remedy the post-War âdissociation of sensibilityâ in the interpretations of primitive myth elaborated by the emerging sciences of anthropology, ethnology and psychology:
Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible only a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.11
What Eliot might have found appealing in these disciplines is their common goal to find in âsavageâ cultures an organic and undivided mode of thought. Marc Manganaro has identified the French ethnologist Lucien LĂ©vy-Bruhl as one of the central sources of Eliotâs views in âThe Metaphysical Poetsâ. Manganaro argues that the unified sensibility that Eliot ascribed to these English poets closely resembles LĂ©vy-Bruhlâs notion of the mentalitĂ© primitive, a mentality that perceives physical objects and their spiritual value as âun tout indĂ©composableâ [a synthetic whole].12 By linking Ulysses to the restorative potential of anthropological discourse, Eliot presents Joyceâs novel as an effort to regain for art the mythical value of the mentalitĂ© primitive and as a remedy against the âdissociation of sensibilityâ that affected the European psyche after World War I. In other words, for Eliot, the âstasisâ of the mythical structure informing Joyceâs book emerges as a powerful and convincing illustration of how art can provide a redemptive space where the âfutility and anarchyâ of contemporary life could be contained and controlled. Thus, the structural order of myth offers Eliot a space of representation where the unruliness of historical transformations and the external world could be successfully overcome. As Astradur Eysteinnson has noted, Eliotâs aesthetic ideas in âUlysses, Order and Mythâ closely parallel those of Stephen in A Portrait, adding that their shared theory of art âis frequently taken to constitute the center of the revolutionary formal awareness and emphasis that most critics detect in modernist worksâ.13
If the idea of a âmodernistâ Joyce goes hand in hand with a formalist and cosmopolitan reading of his work, those who decried Ulysses as mere pornography emphasized, more often than not, the authorâs Irish âbackwardnessâ. As Kevin Dettmar has aptly noted, to say that a writer was âIrishâ during the first decades of the twentieth century âwas not simply to supply oneâs readers with information about the authorâs national origin; for whether consciously or unconsciously, the label âIrishâ served to enmesh Joyce in a long history of British anti-Irish stereotypesâ.14 A case in point is H. G. Wellsâs 1917 review of A Portrait, where he interprets Joyceâs âcloacal obsessionâ and his anti-English feelings as the result of his âlimitationsâ as an Irishman. The âkineticâ nature of Joyceâs prose is perceived as a sign of underdevelopment with respect to England, whose modernity has successfully expunged the uncivilized features permeating A Portrait. Joyce, Wells writes, âwould bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversationâ. To these remarks, he adds the revealing comment that âWe shall do Mr. Joyce an injustice if we attribute a normal sensory basis to him and then accuse him of deliberate offenseâ.15 It appears that the cause of Joyceâs impaired âsensory basisâ is, according to English novelist, his Irishness. Thus, where Pound and Eliot had to denationalize and âmodernizeâ Joyce to bring out the âstaticâ side of his work, Wells immediately links up his nationality and the âkineticâ aspects of A Portrait to underscore the novelâs âbackwardnessâ. Likewise, while Eliot saw in the âorderâ of Ulysses a possible solution to the âdissociation of sensibilityâ that plagued the modern world, Wells alerts us to the disrupting effects of A Portrait and Joyceâs deficient sensorial perception.
Wellsâs notion of an Irish abnormal âsensory basisâ can be usefully connected to Kantâs ideas on how aesthetic perception or âtasteâ varies depending on race and nationality. For Kant, the right mode of aesthetic perception is that which can connect the purposiveness of nature to the cognitive structures of enlightened reason. Ethnic or national identity is a factor that affects this rapport between perception and cognition. In section four of his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant argues that âfiner feelingâ or appropriate taste is to be associated mainly with Europeans, and specifically with the Germans: they have âa fortunate combination of feeling, both in that of the sublime and in that of the beautifulâ.16 This âfortunate combination of feelingâ, reminiscent of Wellsâs ânormal sensory basisâ, is denied to other nations and races in direct proportion to their geopolitical distance from Germany. The lowest end of this aesthetic spectrum is occupied by the âNegroes of Africaâ who âhave by nature no feeling that rises above the triflingâ.17 The racial difference between whites and blacks, the German philosopher believes, âappears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colorâ.18 It seems then that the racism behind colonial structures of power did not only find support in a âdenial of coevalnessâ between the colonizer and the colonized, as has been convincingly argued, but also in what we might call a âdenial of finer feelingâ.19
Indeed, Wellsâs notion of what a ânormal sensory basisâ should be might have been conditioned by his perception of the Irish not only as Englandâs colonized âotherâ, but also as racially inferior. As Vincent Cheng has shown, âthe racial comparison most frequently and insistently made about the Irish during the latter half of the nineteenth century was with ânegroesââ.20 Wellsâs response to Joyce radically clashes with Eliotâs and Poundâs: far from being the champion of Western values, Wells sees Joyce as an intellectually deviant and anti-modern man, a man that, to borrow John Middleton Murryâs words, âwould blow what remains of Europe into the sky [âŠ] [due to his] rebellion against the lucidity and comprehensibility of civilized artâ.21
This brief survey of Joyceâs early reception in Europe illustrates the underlying connections between aesthetic theory, modernity and colonialism. These connections often determined and substantiated antithetical critical perceptions of A Portrait, and, most notably, Ulysses. Depending on the commentator, Joyceâs pros...