Paris: Shakespeare and Co., 1922, limited edition. Pp. 752.
The Dial, 75 (Nov 1923) 480-83
Mr. Joyce’s book has been out long enough for no more general expression of praise, or expostulation with its detractors, to be necessary; and it has not been out long enough for any attempt at a complete measurement of its place and significance to be possible. 2 All that one can usefully do at this time, and it is a great deal to do, for such a book, is to elucidate any aspect of the book – and the number of aspects is indefinite – which has not yet been fixed. I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. These are postulates for anything that I have to say about it, and I have no wish to waste the reader’s time by elaborating my eulogies; it has given me all the surprise, delight, and terror that I can require, and I will leave it at that.
Amongst all the criticisms I have seen of the book, I have seen nothing – unless we except, in its way, M. Valéry Larbaud’s valuable paper which is rather an Introduction than a criticism – which seemed to me to appreciate the significance of the method employed – the parallel to the Odyssey, and the use of appropriate styles and symbols to each division. 3 Yet one might expect this to be the first peculiarity to attract attention; but it has been treated as an amusing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author for the purpose of disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the completed structure. The criticism which Mr. Aldington directed upon Ulyssesseveral years ago seems to me to fail by this oversight – but, as Mr. Aldington wrote before the complete work had appeared, fails more honourably than the attempts of those who had the whole book before them. 4 Mr. Aldington treated Mr. Joyce as a prophet of chaos, and wailed at the flood of Dadaism which his prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of the magician’s rod. Of course, the influence which Mr. Joyce’s book may have is from my point of view an irrelevance. A very great book may have a very bad influence indeed; and a mediocre book may be in the event most salutary. The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio-full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs. Still, Mr. Aldington’s pathetic solicitude for the half-witted seems to me to carry certain implications about the nature of the book itself to which I cannot assent; and this is the important issue. He finds the book, if I understand him, to be an invitation to chaos, and an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial, and a distortion of reality. But unless I quote Mr. Aldington’s words I am likely to falsify. “I say, moreover,” he says, “that when Mr. Joyce, with his marvellous gifts, uses them to disgust us with mankind, he is doing something which is false and a libel on humanity.” It is somewhat similar to the opinion of the urbane Thackeray upon Swift. “As for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him.” (This, of the conclusion of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms – which seems to me one of the greatest triumphs that the human soul has ever achieved. – It is true that Thackeray later pays Swift one the finest tributes that a man has ever given or received: “So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling...
