Exodus and Return: Joyce's Ulysses and the Fiction of the Actual

RALPH W. RADER Exodus and Return: Joyce's Ulysses and the Fiction of the Actual I Every first-time reader registers the quality which makes Ulysses different from earlier novels (except Portrait) in away in which no earlier novel is different from another. The felt quality of difference arises from the fundamentally new formal principle upon which Ulysses and its sister novel are constructed. Earlier novels of plotted suspense develop, within an illusion of real life, a dynamic affective pattern which leads the reader out of his own world into another where, moving with an alter ego, he can find a purpose, meaning, and consummation which real life does not have. Joyce's novels, in contrast, seek, in the phrase of Stephen Dedalus, to 'recreate life out of life,' so as to show us this life 'purified in and reprojected from the [artist's] imagination' l in a reconstruction which will at once image and transfigure the facts of our real existence. In traditional novels the author's purpose is to develop the reader's emotional investment in a central character whose concatenated choices involve him in a predicament which will draw out, and in its resolution cathartically discharge, that investment. This general intention requires the author to shape his protagonist so as to render him continuously sympathetic to projective identification as real people are not. At the same time, minor characters in standard novels are invented and deployed in action not in genuine autonomy, as people in real life are, but only apparently so, while actually they function, as James has indicated in many a preface, to shape the reader's response to the central characters and their dynamiC situation. Thus Mile de Vionnet in The Ambassadors is called into being in the first instance by James's need to prevent Strether and the reader from inferring too early the true state of affairs between Chad and Mme de Vionnet, and this need arises in turn from james's still more basic artistic need to give maximum affective force to Strether's discovery, gradually prepared through his experience of Mme de Vionnet as contrasted with Mrs Newsome, of what it might mean to 'Live all you can!' The characters of traditional novels and the experiences in which they are involved are consequently, by the very principle of their construction, necessarily in contrast with those of real life. Even the greatest such novels, whatever their spiritual depth and cathartic power, are involved in imaginative programmes in which finally the reality principle is subordinated to the pleasure principle, and the gratification UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1978/9 0042-0247179/0200-0149 $01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1979 150 RALPH W. RADER available through this subordination is a constant potential source not only of integration and insight but also of affective deception and distortion . It was this kind of fiction, its high artistic potential by the beginning of the twentieth century nearly exhausted, that Joyce consciously set himself not to write. His brother Stanislaus notes that the life which Joyce 'found in novels was not the life that passed before his steel-blue eyes and unblinking gaze at home and in the streets of Dublin, the emotions which he found in poetry were not those he found in his own heart.'2 Joyce himself wrote at age eighteen: 'Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery.'3 His ideal of artistic method was also developed early; it was a method which, he says in his youthful essay on 'James Clarence Mangan: 'bends upon these present things and so works upon them and fashions them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning, which is still unuttered' [my italics].4 It was to underline the all-important difference between traditional fiction and his own fiction of recreated reality that Joyce prompted Stuart Gilbert to write thus of Ulysses: In most novels the reader's interest is aroused and his attention held by the presentation of dramatic situations, of problems...