I am the first traveler from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses, a lush wilderness already traversed by Valery Larbaud, who traced its dense texture with the impeccable precision of a mapmaker (Nouvelle Revue Française XVIII), but which I too will describe, even though my visit within its borders has been inattentive and transient. I will speak of it with the license my admiration lends mе and with the murky intensity of those anciеnt explorers who described lands new to their nomadic amazement, and whose stories about the Amazons and the City of the Caesars combined truth and fantasy.
I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.
James Joyce is Irish. The Irish have always been famous for being the iconoclasts of the British Isles. Less sensitive to verbal decorum than their detested lords, less inclined to pour their eyes upon the smooth moon or to decipher the impermanence of rivers in long free-verse laments, they made deep incursions into the territory of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety. Jonathan Swift acted like a corrosive acid on the elation of human hope, and Voltaire's Micromegas and Candide are no more than cheaper versions of his severe nihilism. Laurence Sterne unraveled the novel by making merry with the reader's expectations, and those oblique digressions are now the source of his multitudinous fame; Bernard Shaw is today's most pleasing realist; but of Joyce I will say that he exercises with dignity his Irish audacity.
His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further. He was born in Dublin in 1882, into an eminent and piously Catholic family. He was educated by the Jesuits. We know that he possesses a classical culture, that he is not unfamiliar with scholasticism, that there are no errors of diction in his Latin phrases, that he has wandered the various countries of Europe, and that his children were born in Italy. He has composed lyrics, short stories, and a novel of cathedral-like grandeur, the motivation of this review.
Ulysses is variously distinguished. Its life seems situated on a single plane, without those steps that take us mentally from each subjective world to an objective stage, from the whimsical daydream of one man's unconscious to the frequently trafficked dreams of the collective mind. Conjecture, suspicion, fleeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the carefully conceived enjoy equal privilege in this book; a single point of view is noticeably absent. This amalgamation of dreams and the real might well have provoked the consent of Kant and Schopenhauer. The former did not deal with any distinction between dreams and reality other than that legitimated by the causal nexus constant in everyday life, and which from dream to dream does not exist. According to the latter, no criteria exist to distinguish dreams and reality, other than the merely empirical data provided by waking life; he added with meticulous elucidations that real life and the dream world are pages of the same book, and that custom calls real life the orderly reading, and dreams what we leaf through with lazy negligence. I wish, therefore, to remember the problem articulated by Gustav Spiller in The Mind of Man on the relative reality of a room seen objectively, then in the imagination, and lastly, duplicated in a mirror; he resolves that all three are real, and visually each takes up an equal amount of space.
As one can see, Minerva's olive tree casts a gentler shadow than the laurel upon the worthy Ulysses. I cannot find any literary ancestors, except perhaps Dostoevsky in his later years after Crime and Punishment, and even then, who knows. So let us admire the provisional miracle.
In Joyce's unrelenting examination of the tiniest details that constitute consciousness, he stops the flow of time and defers its movement with a pacifying gesture contrary to the impatient goading of the English drama, which encloses the life of its heroes in the narrow, thrusting rush of a few crowded hours. If Shakespeare -- to use his own metaphor -- invested in the turning of the hourglass the exploits of many years, Joyce inverts the procedure and unfolds his hero's single day into many days upon the reader. (I haven't said many naps.)
A total reality teems vociferously in the pages of Ulysses, and not the mediocre reality of those who notice in the world only the abstract operations of the mind and its ambitious fear of not being able to overcome death, nor that other reality that enters only our senses, juxtaposing our flesh and the streets, the moon and the well. The duality of existence dwells within this book, an ontological anxiety that is amazed not merely at being, but at being in this particular world where there are entranceways and words and playing cards and electric writing upon the translucence of the night. In no other book (except perhaps those written by Gomez de la Serna) do we witness the actual presence of things with such convincing firmness. All things are latent, and the diction of any voice is capable of making them emerge and of leading the reader down their avenue. De Quincey recounts that it was enough to name the Roman consul in his dreams to set off fiery visions of flying banners and military splendor. In the fifteenth chapter of his work, Joyce sketches a delirious brothel scene, and the chance conjuring of any loose phrase or idea ushers in hundreds -- the sum is not an exaggeration but exact -- of absurd speakers and impossible events.
Joyce portrays a day in modern life and accumulates a variety of episodes in its course which equal in spirit those events that inform the Odyssey.
He is a millionaire of words and styles. Aside from the prodigious funds of voices that constitute the English language, his commerce spreads wherever the Irish clover grows, from Castilian doubloons and Judas' shekels to Roman denarii and other ancient coinage. His prolific pen exercises all the rhetorical figures. Each episode exalts yet another poetic strategy, another private lexicon. One is written in syllogisms, another in questions and answers, another in narrative sequence. In two of them there is a silent soliloquy -- a heretofore unpublished form (derived from the Frenchman Edouard Dujardin, as Joyce told Larbaud) through which we hear his characters think at length. Beside the new humor of his incongruities and amid his bawdyhouse banter in macaronic prose and verse, he raises rigid struc tures of Latin rigor like the Egyptian's speech to Moses. Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass. Ten years from now -- his book having been explicated by more pious and persistent reviewers than myself -- we will still enjoy him. Meanwhile, since I have not the ambition to take Ulysses to Neuquen and study it in quiet repose, I wish to make mine Lope de Vega's respectful words regarding Gongora:
> Be what it may, I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand.
[1925] [SJL]
