Moore's The Untilled Field and Joyce's Dubliners: The Short Story's Intricate Maze

291 Moore's The Untilled Field and Joyce's Dubliners: The Short Story's Intricate Maze By Karl Beckson (Brooklyn College of The City University of New York) Though critics writing on Dubliners (1914) speak of its theme of paralysis and quote Joyce's remark that he wished to write "a chapter of the moral history" of Irelandl (as though he had devised both theme and intent solely from his own genius2), few have examined the work of his predecessor in the short story, George Moore, who shared with Joyce similar attitudes towards art, religion, and Ireland and who envisioned symbolic labyrinths similar to Joyce's, Often overlooked ^ Moore's The Untilled Field (190 3) provided the groundwork for Dubliners by presenting what Brendan Kennelly has described as "essentially a scrutiny of spiritual inertia just as Dubliners is an exposition of various kinds of paralysis."^ In theme and image, Moore forged a vision of Ireland that anticipated Joyce's in a variety of ways and provided an alternative to the romantic idealism of the Celtic revival. How Moore accomplished this is the subject of this essay. The opening story of The Untilled Field,5 -In the Clay," immediately presents the problem of the artist in a repressive society. John Rodney's clay model of Virgin and Child has been destroyed, presumably by paid ruffians of Father McCabe, who, finding nothing immaculate in Rodneys conception, has objected to the nude sitting by Lucy Delaney. Rodneys friend, Harding, also an artist, believes that the aesthetic image of unholy nakedness should displace the traditional image of a sanctified birth as an object of veneration. Artistic conscience in Ireland, however, must retreat before religious restriction: thus, the priest, who had commissioned the work for his church, is reported to have said to a colleague that "bad statues were more likely to excite devotional feelings than good ones, bad statues being further removed from perilous Nature" (UF, p. 414). If "good art" is close to "perilous Nature," then the serious artist, Moore suggests, reveals Truth despite the peril to his soul. "Bad art," on the other hand, in being further removed from Truth, serves other ends. Rodney, distressed by a priest-dominated Ireland, sees himself as "the typical Italian" in appearance, more at home in Perugia , where sunshine and sculpture are natural and where one may live "a splendid pagan life." Dublin is merely "a place to escape from"; he yearns to go where there is the "joy of life, out of a damp, religious atmosphere in which nothing flourished but the religious vocation " (UF, p. 6). Hence, Rodney accuses the priest of being the destroyer : "It is he who blasphemes. They blaspheme against Life. . . . My God, what a vile thing is the religious mind" (UF, p. 20).6 The artist is thus celebrant of life; the priest blasphemes it in his "hatred of life." In the Romantic tradition, the artist is envisaged as a god-like creator, for his shaping imagination functions as a divine force of creation.7 In addition, since Blake and particularly since the late nineteenth century, the artist has increasingly been called upon to assume the role of mediating priest by providing man with a new imaginative vision of reality. Thus, in their interpretative 292 study of Blake, W. B. Yeats and Edwin J. Ellis, citing the Imagination as the "philosophical name of the Saviour," wrote in 1893: The prophets and apostles, priests and missionaries, prophets and apostles of the Redemption are, - or should be, - artists and poets. Art and poetry, by constantly using symbolism, continually remind us that nature itself is a symbol. To remember this, is to be redeemed from nature's death and destruction.8 In short, man cannot be saved until priests become artists and artists become priests. As an artist in this tradition, Rodney sees the redemptive value of art: to him, truth of inner vision precedes the church's restrictive view of art, for "everything is impure in their eyes" (UF, p. 20). Like Stephen Dedalus, "priest of eternal imagination , transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life,"° Rodney has transformed the common substance of existence, clay, into an...