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Virginia Woolf and "Ulysses"
From: Cambridge University Press
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Vincent Sherry |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Virginia Woolf famously dismissed Joyce's Ulysses as evoking the image of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. Yet Woolf proceeded to employ techniques and styles influenced by the same work, most notably in her novel Mrs Dalloway. Vincent Sherry of Villanova University, Pennsylvania, seeks the motivation behind the latter work and assesses its achievement when compared with Joyce's efforts. |
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| Virginia Woolf thought Ulysses to be an "illiterate, underbred book." | |
 n a diary entry of 1941, Virginia Woolf reports an earlier conversation with T. S. Eliot, who has invoked the difficulty--indeed the impossibility--of writing in the wake of Ulysses. For Eliot the final episode of the book represents a tour-de-force that renders silence the only possible imaginative response. While these remarks may betray the anxiety of Joyce's influence on The Waste Land, which followed the model of Ulysses in shifting several characters-in-voice around a central underlying myth, the predicament the poet expresses here must be sensed with far greater gravity and acuteness by a novelist. Already in 1923, Eliot can look back at the history of the genre and, from the perspective afforded him by Joyce's inventions, announce that the novel has already ended with Flaubert and James. |
Mimetic reliability, verbal transparency, serial plot, linear development of themes usually congruent with the middle-class mores of its reading public, psychological insight into characters who change in ways that do not threaten their credibility, and the moral authority of a superior narrator: these are the features of the novel at its climacteric, in the classic age of realism in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they cannot survive the colossal novelty of Ulysses. How to extend work in a genre that no longer exists--at least as a productive basis for imitation and variation--is the challenge Ulysses poses to those writing after it. This dilemma is the finer point of "P.S.U.," the little cryptoglyph Ezra Pound used to designate the post-1922 era of the novel: efforts in the old genre appear to be only post-scripts to Ulysses--second thoughts, negligible remainders. |
Joyce's example
It is nonetheless impossible to discuss the fiction of the last seventy years without reference to the central, ramifying influence of Joyce's example. A list of minor works unaffected by Ulysses might well be shorter than one naming the major novels obviously indebted to Joyce's opus. It is not the fact but the quality of influence that merits critical consideration--and discernment. Discrimination needs to be made in particular between works that merely imitate the surface mannerisms of Ulysses and those that master the challenge framed by Eliot and Pound; that extend the tradition of the new. For the imaginative possibilities Joyce opened in Ulysses are not necessarily advanced by the mere replication of techniques like "stream of consciousness" and "multiple perspective," the catch-phrases that conjure the standard examples of post-Joycean work in the usual narratives of literary history. These techniques are all too easily assimilated to work that affirms the social and aesthetic standards of the traditional novel, which--speaking in the language of ideal forms--asserts a middle-class morality and the attendant sense of individualism as a non-disruptive variation; that is, as a force held in private. |
The social totality to which Joyce's individuals are reconciled is of course a thing made, an imaginative construct, indeed as idiosyncratic as those radical subjects Bloom and Stephen. Its language--in the stylistic exercises of the second half of the novel--is humane but antic, as uncivil by any standard definition as Molly's monologue, which reads as its consummation. That Joyce ceased to call Ulysses a "novel" in mid-1918, moreover, just as the work was shifting its center of gravity from a narrative of character and incident to an exercise in styles, suggests that the forces driving his work past the standards (both social and artistic) of the traditional genre find their realization in the handling of language. Fiction that extends the Joycean project will participate in this energy. |
Class distinctions
"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught working man," a class-spectacle on which she summons the proper company: "we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating" (emphases added). |
Tellingly, Woolf's disaffection begins in the chapter that witnesses the erosion of the private individual's verbal sensibility, where Joyce has relocated the center of linguistic energy in the public realm of the newspaper. This fact lends a measure of rightness to the class identification she fixes on Ulysses--at least from the perspective of one disturbed by the force Joyce unleashes in that episode and amplifies through the rest of the book: the immanent anarchy (to Woolf) of a public (an underclass) given the power of speech, the custody of the tongue. |
Here indeed is the peril Ulysses poses to the social compact written into the history of the novel: the individuality privileged by the middle- or upper-middle-class situation of many early readers in the genre (reading, unlike speaking or listening, is solitary) suffers its demise from this point in Ulysses. This enterprise certainly threatens the social privilege into which Virginia Stephen was born; as a woman writer, whose models of literary authority are far fewer than Joyce's, she is, perhaps understandably, unwilling to forgo that privilege. In any case, she will not extend the work of Ulysses in ways that share in its essential energies. Her achievements are considerable but they are not Joycean. |
Mrs Dalloway
It is a testament equally to the influence of Ulysses and Woolf's own intellectual complexity that she tries to write a novel in the manner of the one she has just condemned. Virtually concurrently with those remarks of August 1922 she has begun to compose Mrs Dalloway (1925). Here her practices of multiple perspective and stream of consciousness, her compression of fictional events into a single day (in the middle of June) all show the immediate and local presence of Ulysses. But her novel is perhaps most interesting (in this critical context) in the way it fails to present an experience manifestly at odds with the social conventions and mental demeanor of its namesake heroine, and controlling consciousness. |
Clarissa Dalloway, wife of a highly placed member of the government, never meets Septimus Warren Smith, veteran and psychic casualty of the Great War. Their joint presences in the novel are balanced and made possible by the technique of simultaneous narration or multiple perspective that Ulysses has recently exemplified for Woolf. Septimus's non-entry into Mrs. Dalloway's social sphere may be designed by Woolf as a symptom of the avoidances and vacuities of high society, but his distress exerts no great pressure on the language Woolf crafts as his monologue--a usage all too consonant with the balances and decorum of Mrs. Dalloway's, a high dialect not unlike the one into which the author was born. Whether this is a failure of imaginative nerve on Woolf's part, or her conscious refusal to enter the alternate dimension of his psyche, there is a restraint that sets the whole effort identifiably to the side of Joyce's main initiatives in Ulysses, a model otherwise so manifestly present in her novel. |
The contours of the following passage merit scrutiny, especially where the voice of Septimus's incipient madness appears to enter Woolf's narrative. The modulation between his inward monologue and the narrative is exquisitely textured, but the difference between the two disappears into the tonic consciousness of Woolf the artist. She composes the passage aesthetically and recomposes the character psychologically--subduing the distress to a verbal music that finishes into a healing closure, a settling repetition: |
Look the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness. |
Joyce's verbal experiments are compelled by the psychology of necessary avoidance, at least in Bloom's confrontation with his private anxiety, but the author of Ulysses presents such avoidance strategically, consciously, as an aspect of dramatic character, not as the aim and function of narrative intervention. |
The pressure of consensus in Mrs Dalloway is at once a social theme that Woolf displays and a force she succumbs to. This normative perspective gives the narrator some moral jurisdiction over the plight of Septimus, but it also cancels the full presence and ultimate validity of that experience in the novel. This compromise finds its most telling sign in the narrative voice-over during his last moment before suicide: |
There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia's (for she was with him). |
Whether this action follows a high "idea of tragedy," or is merely a "rather melodramatic business," the theatrical tropes fit like generic characterizations around the otherwise poor, bare, unaccommodated animal of his psyche. Those phrases do not emanate from Mrs. Dalloway's sensibility, for she sees nothing of the scene, but from Woolf's narrator. They read like a reflex action, a self-protective gesture on Woolf's part (she would take her own life in 1941); they exercise the kind of labeling and stabilizing force that may add to the pathos of his uncontrol, but surely not to the reality of his death. Her method here, holding the individual against the type, shares in that sense of "proportion"--the lack of this, according to Septimus' psychiatrist, is his gravest danger--that is the essential social faculty, one that adjusts self to other and relates the individual to the larger social res. |
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