Under West(ern)Eyes: Rebecca West Reads Joyce

"I shut the bookshop door behind me and walked slowly down the street that leads from the Odéon to the Boulevard St. Germain in the best of all cities, reading in the little volume which had there been sold to me" ¹ : such are the first lines of "The Strange Necessity," Rebecca West's 1928 essay, in which the writer represents herself leaving Sylvia Beach's bookshop in Paris with Joyce's Pomes Pennyeach in her hands.

Although West notes that what brought Ulysses to her mind that day "was a pure accident, [it] was my passing of Sylvia Beach's bookshop" ("Strange Necessity," p. 189), an attentive reading of the essay suggests that the relationship between the bookshop and her meditation on Ulysses is not altogether accidental. On the contrary, it could be part of West's strategy to withdraw the novel from the male modernist exegesis—based largely on the classic Greek and Latin tradition—and to reconduct it within a women's modernity. Beach's bookshop, in fact, is the place where the traditional critical history of Joyce originated with Valery Larbaud's lecture on 7 December 1921, in which Larbaud presented the novel to literary Paris and for the first time pointed out publicly the close parallelism between the Odyssey and the Joycean novel. ²

Joyce himself describes the particular atmosphere of the French city in those days as characterized by the presence of a group of male intellectuals working under the banner of the Homeric father: "Odissey very much in the air here. Anatole France is writing LeCyclope, G. Fauré[,] the musician[,] an opera Penelope. Giraudoux has written Elpénor (Paddy Dignam). Guillaume Apollinaire Les Mamelles de Tirésias . . . Madame Circe advances regally towards her completion after which I hope to join a tennis club." ³

It is not by chance, then, that West makes use of a real icon of the French city, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, to deconstruct Leopold Bloom's masculinity. Bloom is, in fact, compared to the façade of the cathedral but is defined as a façade with "some pretty bad holes" ("Strange Necessity," p. 44): if Notre-Dame has a body behind it that gives proportion to the whole building and sustains its elevation,

behind Mr. Joyce's Leopold Bloom there are no such expositions by proportion. Instead it is as if behind the façade of Notre-Dame there were another couple of towers leaning over at an angle of sixty degrees and then behind them another couple lying almost flat with the ground.

("Strange Necessity," p. 44)

As Umberto Eco points out, Joyce's mature work shows a nostalgia for the ordered world of medieval thought that is most notably expressed in the symbolic correspondence underlying the surface chaos of Ulysses:Joyce's novel, he suggests, is a Thomistic summa turned upside down, where a Catholic, Thomistic background props a disordered, decentered and anarchic vision of life. Eco wonders about the real function of Joyce's Thomism by comparing it to the pointed arch in the Gothic cathedral: the arch is a support only in course of execution, whereas when the construction is over the whole building stands almost exclusively thanks to the play of thrusts. ⁴

West's deconstruction of the cathedral built upon Joyce's individual talent, and then sanctioned by Ellmann's biography, enhances the possibility of placing the aloof male artist in a wider intellectual environment in which women played a major role: the Parisian avant-garde included, in fact, many women—artists, publishers, and intellectuals—who not only took part in the Modernist project, but also contributed in a decisive way to its birth and development. ⁵ Beach's bookshop is one of the most important links in this network of women, the place where the adventure of the publishing of Ulysses began, from the first meeting between Beach and Joyce on 11 July...