come to realize that they are the story, just as much as the quest is. No clever game is being played with us, no puzzle is being presented for our ingenious and self-satisfying solution. We are simply being dropped into a new kind of reality, in which we will either sink or swim; by the end, perhaps, we may have learned to do both.
For a very different approach to literary innovation, consider James Joyce’s Ulysses . This is a novel that has always gotten on my nerves. I admit that part of what is annoying is how much other people love it and praise it, when it leaves me completely cold. I vastly prefer the youthful author of Dubliners , and even the slightly pushier fellow behind Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , to the highly self-conscious innovator who wrote Ulysses . By the time he reached that point, Joyce had begun to congeal into the artist who would eventually produce the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake , and the obvious source of the rot was his overweening desire for a great literary reputation. This trumped all other literary desires on his part, so that things which had mattered to him earlier—the creation of believable human figures, the portrayal of a particular moment in Dublin’s and Ireland’s history, the use of language as an element in our common experience, the reliance on real as opposed to fabricated emotions—all gave way to this one enormous wish: to be the greatest, most impressive writer of his generation. This is not a literary impulse but a self-promotional one, and you can sense it in every chapter, almost every line, of Ulysses . We are meant to admire each tour de force for its cleverness and its brilliance. We are meant to recognize and applaud the skillful scene-by-scene parallels between the heroic Homeric tale and its reduced Dublin version, the chortlingly amusing imitations of other literary forms, the archetypal renderings of Jew and Catholic and man and woman. Woman! Don’t get me started. If I hate anything more than the rest of the book, it’s that ridiculously orgasmic Molly Bloom soliloquy with which Joyce concludes—a ventriloquist’s dummy masquerading as a character. Reading her breathy Yeses, I can hear her all-too-evident author congratulating himself on his literary genius.
Finnegans Wake may be less hateful in part because it is more of a noble failure. Here the effort to charm the reader through a flamboyantly displayed intelligence has tipped over into something weirder, more willful, more insistent on having its own way to the exclusion of all else. This myopic intensity presents us with a more interesting project than the slyly clever Ulysses , but it is still too self-regarding to be convincing as literature. Authorial performance, rather than being simply the novel’s primary method, has become its raison d’être : there are no characters to be violated, no readerly sympathies to be toyed with, no fake emotions to be evoked, because all these old-fashioned novelistic elements have been jettisoned in favor of the desire to speak in a new kind of language. As poetry, Finnegans Wake may have value. As a novel, it does not really work, and only the most sympathetic Joyceans (myself certainly not included) have managed to make it all the way through.
At least one of those sympathetic readers was a great writer himself, and his reading of Finnegans Wake influenced him so heavily that his own innovative work grew out of it. I could be speaking about Samuel Beckett (who worked for a time as Joyce’s secretary and absorbed the influence at first hand), but in this case I’m actually referring to Thornton Wilder. His 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth was a direct response to Joyce’s late work—almost a borrowing from it, or a translation of it into understandable dramatic form. The play is indeed more coherent than Joyce’s novel, but it too is gigantic in its aspirations, attempting to encompass the whole history of mankind, not to mention all the
For a very different approach to literary innovation, consider James Joyce’s Ulysses . This is a novel that has always gotten on my nerves. I admit that part of what is annoying is how much other people love it and praise it, when it leaves me completely cold. I vastly prefer the youthful author of Dubliners , and even the slightly pushier fellow behind Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , to the highly self-conscious innovator who wrote Ulysses . By the time he reached that point, Joyce had begun to congeal into the artist who would eventually produce the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake , and the obvious source of the rot was his overweening desire for a great literary reputation. This trumped all other literary desires on his part, so that things which had mattered to him earlier—the creation of believable human figures, the portrayal of a particular moment in Dublin’s and Ireland’s history, the use of language as an element in our common experience, the reliance on real as opposed to fabricated emotions—all gave way to this one enormous wish: to be the greatest, most impressive writer of his generation. This is not a literary impulse but a self-promotional one, and you can sense it in every chapter, almost every line, of Ulysses . We are meant to admire each tour de force for its cleverness and its brilliance. We are meant to recognize and applaud the skillful scene-by-scene parallels between the heroic Homeric tale and its reduced Dublin version, the chortlingly amusing imitations of other literary forms, the archetypal renderings of Jew and Catholic and man and woman. Woman! Don’t get me started. If I hate anything more than the rest of the book, it’s that ridiculously orgasmic Molly Bloom soliloquy with which Joyce concludes—a ventriloquist’s dummy masquerading as a character. Reading her breathy Yeses, I can hear her all-too-evident author congratulating himself on his literary genius.
Finnegans Wake may be less hateful in part because it is more of a noble failure. Here the effort to charm the reader through a flamboyantly displayed intelligence has tipped over into something weirder, more willful, more insistent on having its own way to the exclusion of all else. This myopic intensity presents us with a more interesting project than the slyly clever Ulysses , but it is still too self-regarding to be convincing as literature. Authorial performance, rather than being simply the novel’s primary method, has become its raison d’être : there are no characters to be violated, no readerly sympathies to be toyed with, no fake emotions to be evoked, because all these old-fashioned novelistic elements have been jettisoned in favor of the desire to speak in a new kind of language. As poetry, Finnegans Wake may have value. As a novel, it does not really work, and only the most sympathetic Joyceans (myself certainly not included) have managed to make it all the way through.
At least one of those sympathetic readers was a great writer himself, and his reading of Finnegans Wake influenced him so heavily that his own innovative work grew out of it. I could be speaking about Samuel Beckett (who worked for a time as Joyce’s secretary and absorbed the influence at first hand), but in this case I’m actually referring to Thornton Wilder. His 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth was a direct response to Joyce’s late work—almost a borrowing from it, or a translation of it into understandable dramatic form. The play is indeed more coherent than Joyce’s novel, but it too is gigantic in its aspirations, attempting to encompass the whole history of mankind, not to mention all the
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