[163] The Ulysses of my title has to do with James Joyce and not with that shrewd and storm-driven figure of Homer’s world who knew how to escape by guile and wily deeds the enmity and vengeance of gods and men, and who after a wearisome voyage returned to hearth and home. Joyce’s Ulysses, very much unlike his ancient namesake, is a passive, merely perceiving consciousness, a mere eye, ear, nose, and mouth, a sensory nerve exposed without choice or check to the roaring, chaotic, lunatic cataract of psychic and physical happenings, and registering all this with almost photographic accuracy.
[164] Ulysses is a book that pours along for seven hundred and thirty-five pages, a stream of time seven hundred and thirty-five days long which all consist in one single and senseless day in the life of every man, the completely irrelevant sixteenth day of June, 1904, in Dublin—a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens. The stream begins in the void and ends in the void. Is all this perhaps one single, immensely long, and excessively complicated Strindbergian pronouncement upon the essence of human life—a pronouncement which, to the reader’s dismay, is never finished? Possibly it does touch upon the essence, but quite certainly it reflects life’s ten thousand facets and their hundred thousand gradations of colour. So far as I can see, there are in those seven hundred and thirty-five pages no obvious repetitions, not a single blessed island where the long-suffering reader may come to rest; no place where he can seat himself, drunk with memories, and contemplate with satisfaction the stretch of road he has covered, be it one hundred pages or even less. If only he could spot some little commonplace that had obligingly slipped in again where it was not expected! But no! The pitiless stream rolls on without a break, and its velocity or viscosity increases in the last forty pages till it sweeps away even the punctuation marks. Here the suffocating emptiness becomes so unbearably tense that it reaches the bursting point. This utterly hopeless emptiness is the dominant note of the whole book. It not only begins and ends in nothingness, it consists of nothing but nothingness.2 It is all infernally nugatory. As a piece of technical virtuosity it is a brilliant and hellish monster-birth.3
[165] I had an uncle whose thinking was always direct and to the point. One day he stopped me on the street and demanded: “Do you know how the devil tortures the souls in hell?” When I said no, he replied: “He keeps them waiting.” And with that he walked away. This remark occurred to me when I was ploughing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence rouses an expectation that is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing, and to your horror it gradually dawns on you that you have hit the mark. In actual fact nothing happens, nothing comes of it all,4 and yet a secret expectation battling with hopeless resignation drags the reader from page to page. The seven hundred and thirty-five pages that contain nothing by no means consist of blank paper but are closely printed. You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read. Occasionally you drop through an airpocket into a new sentence, but once the proper degree of resignation has been reached you get accustomed to anything. Thus I read to page 135 with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way. The incredible versatility of Joyce’s style has a monotonous and hypnotic effect. Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter. It plays on the reader’s sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to “do it justice,” as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.5 When I awoke quite a while later, my views had undergone such a clarification that I started to read the book backwards. This method proved as good as the usual one; the book can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards.6 You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don’t miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence—the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required.
[166] This singular and uncanny characteristic of the Joycean mind shows that his work pertains to the class of cold-blooded animals and specifically to the worm family. If worms were gifted with literary powers they would write with the sympathetic nervous system for lack of a brain.7 I suspect that something of this kind has happened to Joyce, that we have here a case of visceral thinking8 with severe restriction of cerebral activity and its confinement to the perceptual processes. One is driven to unqualified admiration for Joyce’s feats in the sensory sphere: what he sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, inwardly as well as outwardly, is beyond measure astonishing. The ordinary mortal, if he is a specialist in sense-perception, is usually restricted either to the outer world or to the inner. Joyce knows them both. Garlands of subjective association twine themselves about the objective figures on a Dublin street. Objective and subjective, outer and inner, are so constantly intermingled that in the end, despite the clearness of the individual images, one wonders whether one is dealing with a physical or with a transcendental tape worm.9 The tapeworm is a whole living cosmos in itself and is fabulously procreative; this, it seems to me, is an inelegant but not unfitting image for Joyce’s proliferating chapters. It is true that the tapeworm can produce nothing but other tapeworms, but it produces them in inexhaustible quantities. Joyce’s book might have been fourteen hundred and seventy pages long or even a multiple of that and still it would not have lessened infinity by a drop, and the essential would still have remained unsaid. But does Joyce want to say anything essential? Has this old-fashioned prejudice any right to exist here? Oscar Wilde maintained that a work of art is something entirely useless. Nowadays even the Philistine would raise no objection to this, yet in his heart he still expects a work of art to contain something “essential.” Where is it with Joyce? Why doesn’t he say it right out? Why doesn’t he hand it to the reader with an expressive gesture—“a straight way, so that fools shall not err therein”?
[167] Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of. The book would not meet me half way, nothing in it made the least attempt to be agreeable, and that always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority. Obviously I have so much of the Philistine in my blood that I am naïve enough to suppose that a book wants to tell me something, to be understood—a sad case of mythological anthropomorphism projected on to the book! And what a book—no opinion possible—epitome of maddening defeat of intelligent reader, who after all is not such a—(if I may use Joyce’s suggestive style). Surely a book has a content, represents something; but I suspect that Joyce did not wish to “represent” anything. Does it by any chance represent him—does that explain this solipsistic isolation, this drama without eyewitnesses, this infuriating disdain for the assiduous reader? Joyce has aroused my ill will. One should never rub the reader’s nose into his own stupidity, but that is just what Ulysses does.
[168] A therapist like myself is always practising therapy—even on himself. Irritation means: You haven’t yet seen what’s behind it. Consequently we should follow up our irritation and examine whatever it is we discover in our ill temper. I observe then: this solipsism, this contempt for the cultivated and intelligent member of the reading public who wants to understand,10 who is well-meaning, and who tries to be kindly and just, gets on my nerves. There we have it, the cold-blooded unrelatedness of his mind which seems to come from the saurian in him or from still lower regions—conversation in and with one’s own intestines—a man of stone, he with the horns of stone, the stony beard, the petrified intestines, Moses, turning his back with stony unconcern on the flesh-pots and gods of Egypt, and also on the reader, thereby outraging his feelings of good will.
[169] From this stony underworld there rises up the vision of the tapeworm, rippling, peristaltic, monotonous because of its endless proglottic proliferation. No proglottid is quite like any other, yet they can easily be confused. In every segment of the book, however small, Joyce himself is the sole content of the segment. Everything is new and yet remains what it was from the beginning. Talk of likeness to nature! What pullulating richness—and what boredom! Joyce bores me to tears, but it is a vicious dangerous boredom such as not even the worst banality could induce. It is the boredom of nature, the bleak whistling of the wind over the crags of the Hebrides, sunrise and sunset over the wastes of the Sahara, the roar of the sea—real Wagnerian “programme music” as Curtius rightly says, and yet eternal repetition. Notwithstanding Joyce’s baffling many-sidedness, certain themes can be picked out though they may not be intended. Perhaps he would like there to be none, for causality and finality have neither place nor meaning in his world, any more than have values. Nevertheless, themes are unavoidable, they are the scaffolding for all psychic happenings, however hard one tries to soak the soul out of every happening, as Joyce consistently does. Everything is desouled, every particle of warm blood has been chilled, events unroll in icy egoism. In all the book there is nothing pleasing, nothing refreshing, nothing hopeful, but only things that are grey, grisly, gruesome, or pathetic, tragic, ironic, all from the seamy side of life and so chaotic that you have to look for the thematic connections with a magnifying glass. And yet they are there, first of all in the form of unavowed resentments of a highly personal nature, the wreckage of a violently amputated boyhood; then as flotsam from the whole history of thought exhibited in pitiful nakedness to the staring crowd. The religious, erotic, and domestic prehistory of the author is reflected in the drab surface of the stream of events; we even behold the disintegration of his personality into Bloom, l’homme moyen sensuel, and the almost gaseous Stephen Dedalus, who is mere speculation and mere mind. Of these two, the former has no son and the latter no father.
[170] Somewhere there may be a secret order or parallelism in the chapters—authoritative voices have been raised to this effect11—but in any case it is so well concealed that at first I noticed nothing of the kind. And even if I had, it would not have interested me in my helplessly irritated state, any more than would the monotony of any other squalid human comedy.
[171] I had already taken up Ulysses in 1922 but had laid it aside disappointed and vexed. Today it still bores me as it did then. Why do I write about it? Ordinarily, I would no more be doing this than writing about any other form of surrealism (what is surrealism?) that passes my understanding. I am writing about Joyce because a publisher was incautious enough to ask me what I thought about him, or rather about Ulysses,12 concerning which opinions are notoriously divided. The only thing beyond dispute is that Ulysses is a book that has gone through ten printings and that its author is glorified by some and damned by others. He stands in the cross-fire of discussion and is thus a phenomenon which the psychologist should not ignore. Joyce has exerted a very considerable influence on his contemporaries, and it was this fact which first aroused my interest in Ulysses. Had this book slipped noiselessly and unsung into the shades of oblivion I would certainly never have dragged it back again; for it annoyed me thoroughly and amused me only a little. Above all, it held over me the threat of boredom because it had only a negative effect on me and I feared it was the product of an author’s negative mood.
[172] But of course I am prejudiced. I am a psychiatrist, and that implies a professional prejudice with regard to all manifestations of the psyche. I must therefore warn the reader: the tragicomedy of the average man, the cold shadow-side of life, the dull grey of spiritual nihilism are my daily bread. To me they are a tune ground out on a street organ, stale and without charm. Nothing in all this shocks or moves me, for all too often I have to help people out of these lamentable states. I must combat them incessantly and I may only expend my sympathy on people who do not turn their backs on me. Ulysses turns its back on me. It is unco-operative, it wants to go on singing its endless tune into endless time—a tune I know to satiety—and to extend to infinity its ganglionic rope-ladder of visceral thinking and cerebration reduced to mere sense-perception. It shows no tendency towards reconstruction; indeed, destructiveness seems to have become an end in itself.
[173] But that is not the half of it—there is also the symptomatology! It is all too familiar, those interminable ramblings of the insane who have only a fragmentary consciousness and consequently suffer from a complete lack of judgment and an atrophy of all their values. Instead, there is often an intensification of the sense-activities. We find in these writings an acute power of observation, a photographic memory for sense-perceptions, a sensory curiosity directed inwards as well as outwards, the predominance of retrospective themes and resentments, a delirious confusion of the subjective and psychic with objective reality, a method of presentation that takes no account of the reader but indulges in neologisms, fragmentary quotations, sound- and speech-associations, abrupt transitions and hiatuses of thought. We also find an atrophy of feeling13 that does not shrink from any depth of absurdity or cynicism. Even the layman would have no difficulty in tracing the analogies between Ulysses and the schizophrenic mentality. The resemblance is indeed so suspicious that an indignant reader might easily fling the book aside with the diagnosis “schizophrenia.” For the psychiatrist the analogy is startling, but he would nevertheless point out that a characteristic mark of the compositions of the insane, namely, the presence of stereotyped expressions, is notably absent. Ulysses may be anything, but it is certainly not monotonous in the sense of being repetitious. (This is not a contradiction of what I said earlier; it is impossible to say anything contradictory about Ulysses.) The presentation is consistent and flowing, everything is in motion and nothing is fixed. The whole book is borne along on a subterranean current of life that shows singleness of aim and rigorous selectivity, both these being unmistakable proof of the existence of a unified personal will and directed intention. The mental functions are under severe control; they do not manifest themselves in a spontaneous and erratic way. The perceptive functions, that is, sensation and intuition, are given preference throughout, while the discriminative functions, thinking and feeling, are just as consistently suppressed. They appear merely as mental contents, as objects of perception. There is no relaxing of the general tendency to present a shadow-picture of the mind and the world, in spite of frequent temptations to surrender to a sudden touch of beauty. These are traits not ordinarily found in the insane. There remains, then, the insane person of an uncommon sort. But the psychiatrist has no criteria for judging such a person. What seems to be mental abnormality may be a kind of mental health which is inconceivable to the average understanding; it may even be a disguise for superlative powers of mind.
[174] It would never occur to me to class Ulysses as a product of schizophrenia. Moreover, nothing would be gained by this label, for we wish to know why Ulysses exerts such a powerful influence and not whether its author is a high-grade or a low-grade schizophrenic. Ulysses is no more a pathological product than modern art as a whole. It is “cubistic” in the deepest sense because it resolves the picture of reality into an immensely complex painting whose dominant note is the melancholy of abstract objectivity. Cubism is not a disease but a tendency to represent reality in a certain way—and that way may be grotesquely realistic or grotesquely abstract. The clinical picture of schizophrenia is a mere analogy in that the schizophrenic apparently has the same tendency to treat reality as if it were strange to him, or, conversely, to estrange himself from reality. With the schizophrenic the tendency usually has no recognizable purpose but is a symptom inevitably arising from the disintegration of the personality into fragmentary personalities (the autonomous complexes). In the modern artist it is not produced by any disease in the individual but is a collective manifestation of our time. The artist does not follow an individual impulse, but rather a current of collective life which arises not directly from consciousness but from the collective unconscious of the modern psyche. Just because it is a collective phenomenon it bears identical fruit in the most widely separated realms, in painting as well as literature, in sculpture as well as architecture. It is, moreover, significant that one of the spiritual fathers of the modern movement—van Gogh—was actually schizophrenic.
[175] The distortion of beauty and meaning by grotesque objectivity or equally grotesque irreality is, in the insane, a consequence of the destruction of the personality; in the artist it has a creative purpose. Far from his work being an expression of the destruction of his personality, the modern artist finds the unity of his artistic personality in destructiveness. The Mephistophelian perversion of sense into nonsense, of beauty into ugliness—in such an exasperating way that nonsense almost makes sense and ugliness has a provocative beauty—is a creative achievement that has never been pushed to such extremes in the history of human culture, though it is nothing new in principle. We can observe something similar in the perverse change of style under Ikhnaton, in the inane lamb symbolism of the early Christians, in those doleful Pre-Raphaelite figures, and in late Baroque art, strangling itself in its own convolutions. Despite their differences all these epochs have an inner relationship: they were periods of creative incubation whose meaning cannot be satisfactorily explained from a causal standpoint. Such manifestations of the collective psyche disclose their meaning only when they are considered teleologically as anticipations of something new.
[176] The epoch of Ikhnaton was the cradle of the first monotheism, which has been preserved for the world in Jewish tradition. The crude infantilism of the early Christian era portended nothing less than the transformation of the Roman Empire into a City of God. The rejection of the art and science of his time was not an impoverishment for the early Christian, but a great spiritual gain. The Pre-Raphaelite primitives were the heralds of an ideal of bodily beauty that had been lost to the world since classical times. The Baroque was the last of the ecclesiastical styles, and its self-destruction anticipates the triumph of the spirit of science over the spirit of medieval dogmatism. Tiepolo, for instance, who had already reached the danger zone in his technique, is not a symptom of decadence when considered as an artistic personality, but labours with the whole of his being to bring about a much needed disintegration.
[177] This being so we can ascribe a positive, creative value and meaning not only to Ulysses but also to its artistic congeners. In its destruction of the criteria of beauty and meaning that have held till today, Ulysses accomplishes wonders. It insults all our conventional feelings, it brutally disappoints our expectations of sense and content, it thumbs its nose at all synthesis. We would show ill will even to suspect any trace of synthesis or form, for if we succeeded in demonstrating any such unmodern tendencies in Ulysses this would amount to pointing out a gross aesthetic defect. Everything abusive we can say about Ulysses bears witness to its peculiar quality, for our abuse springs from the resentment of the unmodern man who does not wish to see what the gods have graciously veiled from sight.
[178] All those ungovernable forces that welled up in Nietzsche’s Dionysian exuberance and flooded his intellect have burst forth in undiluted form in modern man. Even the darkest passages in the second part of Faust, even Zarathustra and, indeed, Ecce Homo, try in one way or another to recommend themselves to the public. But it is only modern man who has succeeded in creating an art in reverse, a backside of art that makes no attempt to be ingratiating, that tells us just where we get off, speaking with the same rebellious contrariness that had made itself disturbingly felt in those precursors of the moderns (not forgetting Hölderlin) who had already started to topple the old ideals.
[179] If we stick to one field of experience only, it is not really possible to see clearly what is happening. It is not a matter of a single thrust aimed at one definite spot, but of an almost universal “restratification” of modern man, who is in the process of shaking off a world that has become obsolete. Unfortunately we cannot see into the future and so we do not know how far we still belong in the deepest sense to the Middle Ages. If, from the watch-towers of the future, we should seem stuck in medievalism up to the ears, I for one would be little surprised. For that alone would satisfactorily explain to us why there should be books or works of art after the style of Ulysses. They are drastic purgatives whose full effect would be dissipated if they did not meet with an equally strong and obstinate resistance. They are a kind of psychological specific which is of use only where the hardest and toughest material must be dealt with. They have this in common with Freudian theory, that they undermine with fanatical one-sidedness values that have already begun to crumble.
[180] Ulysses makes a show of semi-scientific objectivity, at times even employing “scientific” language, and yet it displays a truly unscientific temper: it is sheer negation. Even so it is creative—a creative destruction. Here is no theatrical gesture of a Herostratus burning down temples, but an earnest endeavour to rub the noses of our contemporaries in the shadow-side of reality, not with any malicious intent but with the guileless naïveté of artistic objectivity. One may safely call the book pessimistic even though at the very end, on nearly the final page, a redeeming light breaks wistfully through the clouds. This is only one page against seven hundred and thirty-four which were one and all born of Orcus. Here and there, a fine crystal glitters in the black stream of mud, so that even the unmodern may realize that Joyce is an “artist” who knows his trade—which is more than can be said of most modern artists—and is even a past master at it, but a master who has piously renounced his powers in the name of a higher goal. Even in his “restratification” Joyce has remained a pious Catholic: his dynamite is expended chiefly upon churches and upon those psychic edifices which are begotten or influenced by churches. His “anti-world” has the medieval, thoroughly provincial, quintessentially Catholic atmosphere of an Erin trying desperately to enjoy its political independence. He worked at Ulysses in many foreign lands, and from all of them he looked back in faith and kinship upon Mother Church and Ireland. He used his foreign stopping-places merely as anchors to steady his ship in the maelstrom of his Irish reminiscences and resentments. Yet Ulysses does not strain back to his Ithaca—on the contrary, he makes frantic efforts to rid himself of his Irish heritage.
[181] We might suppose this behaviour to be of only local interest and expect it to leave the rest of the world quite cold. But it does not leave the world cold. The local phenomenon seems to be more or less universal, to judge from its effects on Joyce’s contemporaries. The cap must fit. There must exist a whole community of moderns who are so numerous that they have been able to devour ten editions of Ulysses since 1922. The book must mean something to them, must even reveal something that they did not know or feel before. They are not infernally bored by it, but are helped, refreshed, instructed, converted, “restratified.” Obviously, they are thrown into a desirable state of some sort, for otherwise only the blackest hatred could enable the reader to go through the book from page 1 to page 735 with attention and without fatal attacks of drowsiness. I therefore surmise that medieval Catholic Ireland covers a geographical area of whose size I have hitherto been ignorant; it is certainly far larger than the area indicated on the ordinary map. This Catholic Middle Ages, with its Messrs. Dedalus and Bloom, seems to be pretty well universal. There must be whole sections of the population that are so bound to their spiritual environment that nothing less than Joycean explosives are required to break through their hermetic isolation. I am convinced that this is so: we are still stuck in the Middle Ages up to the ears. And it is because Joyce’s contemporaries are so riddled with medieval prejudices that such prophets of negation as he and Freud are needed to reveal to them the other side of reality.
[182] Of course, this tremendous task could hardly be accomplished by a man who with Christian benevolence tried to make people turn an unwilling eye on the shadow-side of things. That would amount only to their looking on with perfect unconcern. No, the revelation must be brought about by the appropriate attitude of mind, and Joyce is again a master here. Only in this way can the forces of negative emotion be mobilized. Ulysses shows how one should execute Nietzsche’s “sacrilegious backward grasp.” Joyce sets about it coldly and objectively, and shows himself more “bereft of gods” than Nietzsche ever dreamed of being. All this on the implicit and correct assumption that the fascinating influence exerted by the spiritual environment has nothing to do with reason, but everything with feeling. One should not be misled into thinking that because Joyce reveals a world that is horribly bleak and bereft of gods, it is inconceivable that anyone should derive the slightest comfort from his book. Strange as it may sound, it remains true that the world of Ulysses is a better one than the world of those who are hopelessly bound to the darkness of their spiritual birthplaces. Even though the evil and destructive elements predominate, they are far more valuable than the “good” that has come down to us from the past and proves in reality to be a ruthless tyrant, an illusory system of prejudices that robs life of its richness, emasculates it, and enforces a moral compulsion which in the end is unendurable. Nietzsche’s “slave-uprising in morals” would be a good motto for Ulysses. What frees the prisoner of a system is an “objective” recognition of his world and of his own nature. Just as the arch-Bolshevist revels in his unshaven appearance, so the man who is bound in spirit finds a rapturous joy in saying straight out for once exactly how things are in his world. For the man who is dazzled by the light the darkness is a blessing, and the boundless desert is a paradise to the escaped prisoner. It is nothing less than redemption for the medieval man of today not to have to be the embodiment of goodness and beauty and common sense. Looked at from the shadow-side, ideals are not beacons on mountain peaks, but taskmasters and gaolers, a sort of metaphysical police originally thought up on Sinai by the tyrannical demagogue Moses and thereafter foisted upon mankind by a clever ruse.
[183] From the causal point of view Joyce is a victim of Roman Catholic authoritarianism, but considered teleologically he is a reformer who for the present is satisfied with negation, a Protestant nourished by his own protests. Atrophy of feeling is a characteristic of modern man and always shows itself as a reaction when there is too much feeling around, and in particular too much false feeling. From the lack of feeling in Ulysses we may infer a hideous sentimentality in the age that produced it. But are we really so sentimental today?
[184] Again a question which the future must answer. Still, there is a good deal of evidence to show that we actually are involved in a sentimentality hoax of gigantic proportions. Think of the lamentable role of popular sentiment in wartime! Think of our so-called humanitarianism! The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. Unfeelingness is the counter-position and inevitably suffers from the same defects. The success of Ulysses proves that even its lack of feeling has a positive effect on the reader, so that we must infer an excess of sentiment which he is quite willing to have damped down. I am deeply convinced that we are not only stuck in the Middle Ages but also are caught in our own sentimentality. It is therefore quite comprehensible that a prophet should arise to teach our culture a compensatory lack of feeling. Prophets are always disagreeable and usually have bad manners, but it is said that they occasionally hit the nail on the head. There are, as we know, major and minor prophets, and history will decide to which of them Joyce belongs. Like every true prophet, the artist is the unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of his time, and is often as unconscious as a sleep-walker. He supposes that it is he who speaks, but the spirit of the age is his prompter, and whatever this spirit says is proved true by its effects.
[185] Ulysses is a document humain of our time and, what is more, it harbours a secret. It can release the spiritually bound, and its coldness can freeze all sentimentality—and even normal feeling—to the marrow. But these salutary effects do not exhaust its powers. The notion that the devil himself stood sponsor to the work, if interesting, is hardly a satisfactory hypothesis. There is life in it, and life is never exclusively evil and destructive. To be sure, the side of it that is most tangible seems negative and disruptive; but one senses behind it something intangible—a secret purpose which lends it meaning and value. Is this patchwork quilt of words and images perhaps “symbolic”? I am not thinking of an allegory (heaven forbid!), but of the symbol as an expression of something whose nature we cannot grasp. In that case a hidden meaning would doubtless shine through the curious fabric at some point, here and there notes would resound that had been heard at other times and places, maybe in unusual dreams or in the cryptic wisdom of forgotten races. This possibility cannot be contested, but, for myself, I cannot find the key. On the contrary, the book seems to me to be written in the full light of consciousness; it is not a dream and not a revelation of the unconscious. Compared with Zarathustra or the second part of Faust, it shows an even stronger purposiveness and sense of direction. This is probably why Ulysses does not bear the features of a symbolic work. Of course, one senses the archetypal background. Behind Dedalus and Bloom there stand the eternal figures of spiritual and carnal man; Mrs. Bloom perhaps conceals an anima entangled in worldliness, and Ulysses himself might be the hero. But the book does not focus upon this background; it veers away in the opposite direction and strives to attain the utmost objectivity of consciousness. It is obviously not symbolic and has no intention of being so. Were it none the less symbolic in certain parts, then the unconscious, in spite of every precaution, would have played the author a trick or two. For when something is “symbolic,” it means that a person divines its hidden, ungraspable nature and is trying desperately to capture in words the secret that eludes him. Whether it is something of the world he is striving to grasp or something of the spirit, he must turn to it with all his mental powers and penetrate all its iridescent veils in order to bring to the light of day the gold that lies jealously hidden in the depths.
[186] But the shattering thing about Ulysses is that behind the thousand veils nothing lies hidden; it turns neither to the world nor to the spirit but, cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space,14 leaves the comedy of genesis and decay to pursue its course. I sincerely hope that Ulysses is not symbolic, for if it were it would have failed in its purpose. What kind of anxiously guarded secret might it be that is hidden with matchless care under seven hundred and thirty-five unendurable pages? It is better not to waste one’s time and energy on a fruitless treasure-hunt. Indeed, there ought not to be anything symbolic behind the book, for if there were our consciousness would be dragged back into world and spirit, perpetuating Messrs. Bloom and Dedalus to all eternity, befooled by the ten thousand facets of life. This is just what Ulysses seeks to prevent: it wants to be an eye of the moon, a consciousness detached from the object, in thrall neither to the gods nor to sensuality, and bound neither by love nor by hate, neither by conviction nor by prejudice. Ulysses does not preach this but practises it—detachment of consciousness15 is the goal that shimmers through the fog of this book. This, surely, is its real secret, the secret of a new cosmic consciousness; and it is revealed not to him who has conscientiously waded through the seven hundred and thirty-five pages, but to him who has gazed at his world and his own mind for seven hundred and thirty-five days with the eyes of Ulysses. This space of time, at any rate, is to be taken symbolically—“a time, times and a half a time”—an indefinite time, therefore; but sufficiently long for the transformation to take place. The detachment of consciousness can be expressed in the Homeric image of Odysseus sailing the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, between the Symplegades, the clashing rocks of the world and the spirit; or, in the imagery of the Dublin inferno, between Father John Conmee and the Viceroy of Ireland, “a light crumpled throwaway,” drifting down the Liffey (p. 239):
Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks.
[187] Can this detachment of consciousness, this depersonalization of the personality, can this be the Ithaca of the Joycean Odyssey?
[188] One might suppose that in a world of nothing but nothingness at least the “I”—James Joyce himself—would be left over. But has anyone noticed the appearance, among all the unhappy, shadowy “I”s of this book, of a single, actual ego? True, every figure in Ulysses is superlatively real, none of them could be other than what they are, they are themselves in every respect. And yet not one of them has an ego, there is no acutely conscious, human centre, an island surrounded by warm heart’s blood, so small and yet so vitally important. All the Dedaluses, Blooms, Harrys, Lynches, Mulligans, and the rest of them talk and go about as in a collective dream that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, that takes place only because “No-man”—an unseen Odysseus—dreams it. None of them knows this, and yet all live for the sole reason that a god bids them live. That is how life is—vita somnium breve—and that is why the Joycean figures are so real. But the ego that embraces them all appears nowhere. It betrays itself by nothing, by no judgment, no sympathy, not a single anthropomorphism. The ego of the creator of these figures is not to be found. It is as though it had dissolved into the countless figures of Ulysses.16 And yet, or rather for that very reason, all and everything, even the missing punctuation of the final chapter, is Joyce himself. His detached, contemplative consciousness, dispassionately embracing in one glance the timeless simultaneity of the happenings of the sixteenth day of June, 1904, must say of all these appearances: Tat tvam asi, “That art thou”—“thou” in a higher sense, not the ego but the self. For the self alone embraces the ego and the non-ego, the infernal regions, the viscera, the imagines et lares, and the heavens.
[189] Whenever I read Ulysses there comes into my mind a Chinese picture, published by Richard Wilhelm,17 of a yogi in meditation, with five human figures growing out of the top of his head and five more figures growing out of the top of each of their heads. This picture portrays the spiritual state of the yogi who is about to rid himself of his ego and to pass over into the more complete, more objective state of the self. This is the state of the “moon-disk, at rest and alone,” of sat-chit-ananda, the epitome of being and not-being, the ultimate goal of the Eastern way of redemption, the priceless pearl of Indian and Chinese wisdom, sought and extolled through the centuries.
[190] The “light crumpled throwaway” drifts towards the East. Three times this crumpled note turns up in Ulysses, each time mysteriously connected with Elijah. Twice we are told: “Elijah is coming.” He actually does appear in the brothel scene (rightly compared by Middleton Murry to the Walpurgisnacht in Faust), where in Americanese he explains the secret of the note (p. 478):
Boys, do it now. God’s time is 12.25. Tell mother you’ll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here! Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self.18 You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It’s a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It’s the whole pie with jam in. It’s just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores.
[191] One can see what has happened: the detachment of human consciousness and its consequent approximation to the divine—the whole basis and highest artistic achievement of Ulysses— suffers an infernal distortion in the drunken madhouse of the brothel as soon as it appears in the cloak of a traditional formula. Ulysses, the sorely tried wanderer, toils ever towards his island home, back to his true self, beating his way through the turmoil of eighteen chapters, and, free at last from the fool’s world of illusions, “looks on from afar,” impassively. Thus he achieves what a Jesus or a Buddha achieved, and what Faust also strove for—the overcoming of a fool’s world, liberation from the opposites. And just as Faust was dissolved in the Eternal Feminine, so it is Molly Bloom (whom Stuart Gilbert compares to the blossoming earth) who has the last word in her unpunctuated monologue, putting a blessed close to the hellish, shrieking dissonances with a harmonious final chord.
[192] Ulysses is the creator-god in Joyce, a true demiurge who has freed himself from entanglement in the physical and mental world and contemplates them with detached consciousness. He is for Joyce what Faust was for Goethe, or Zarathustra for Nietzsche. He is the higher self who returns to his divine home after blind entanglement in samsara. In the whole book no Ulysses appears; the book itself is Ulysses, a microcosm of James Joyce, the world of the self and the self of the world in one. Ulysses can return home only when he has turned his back on the world of mind and matter. This is surely the message underlying that sixteenth day of June, 1904, the everyday of everyman, on which persons of no importance restlessly do and say things without beginning or aim—a shadowy picture, dreamlike, infernal, sardonic, negative, ugly, devilish, but true. A picture that could give one bad dreams or induce the mood of a cosmic Ash Wednesday, such as the Creator might have felt on August 1, 1914. After the optimism of the seventh day of creation the demiurge must have found it pretty difficult in 1914 to identify himself with his handiwork. Ulysses was written between 1914 and 1921—hardly the conditions for painting a particularly cheerful picture of the world or for taking it lovingly in one’s arms (nor today either, for that matter). So it is not surprising that the demiurge in the artist sketched a negative picture, so blasphemously negative that in Anglo-Saxon countries the book was banned in order to avoid the scandal of its contradicting the creation story in Genesis! And that is how the misunderstood demiurge became Ulysses in search of his home.
[193] There is so little feeling in Ulysses that it must be very pleasing to all aesthetes. But let us assume that the consciousness of Ulysses is not a moon but an ego that possesses judgment, understanding, and a feeling heart. Then the long road through the eighteen chapters would not only hold no delights but would be a road to Calvary; and the wanderer, overcome by so much suffering and folly, would sink down at nightfall into the arms of the Great Mother, who signifies the beginning and end of life. Under the cynicism of Ulysses there is hidden a great compassion; he knows the sufferings of a world that is neither beautiful nor good and, worse still, rolls on without hope through the eternally repeated everyday, dragging with it man’s consciousness in an idiot dance through the hours, months, years. Ulysses has dared to take the step that leads to the detachment of consciousness from the object; he has freed himself from attachment, entanglement, and delusion, and can therefore turn homeward. He gives us more than a subjective expression of personal opinion, for the creative genius is never one but many, and he speaks in stillness to the souls of the multitude, whose meaning and destiny he embodies no less than the artist’s own.
[194] It seems to me now that all that is negative in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blooded, bizarre and banal, grotesque and devilish, is a positive virtue for which it deserves praise. Joyce’s inexpressibly rich and myriad-faceted language unfolds itself in passages that creep along tapeworm fashion, terribly boring and monotonous, but the very boredom and monotony of it attain an epic grandeur that makes the book a Mahabharata of the world’s futility and squalor. “From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes” (p. 412). And in this open cloaca is reflected with blasphemous distortion practically everything that is highest in religious thought, exactly as in dreams. (Alfred Kubin’s Die andere Seite is a country-cousin of the metropolitan Ulysses.)
[195] Even this I willingly accept, for it cannot be denied. On the contrary, the transformation of eschatology into scatology proves the truth of Tertullian’s dictum: anima naturaliter christiana. Ulysses shows himself a conscientious Antichrist and thereby proves that his Catholicism still holds together. He is not only a Christian but—still higher title to fame—a Buddhist, Shivaist, and a Gnostic (p. 481):
(With a voice of waves.) … White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won’t have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware of the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of storm birds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! … Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter.
[196] Is not that touching and significant? Even on the dunghill the oldest and noblest treasures of the spirit are not lost. There is no cranny in the psyche through which the divine afflatus could finally breathe out its life and perish in noisome filth. Old Hermes, father of all heretical bypaths, is right: “As above, so below.” Stephen Dedalus, the bird-headed sky-man, trying to escape from the all too gaseous regions of the air, falls into an earthly slough and in the very depths encounters again the heights from which he fled. “And should I flee to the uttermost ends of the earth …” The close of this sentence is a blasphemy that furnishes the most convincing proof of this in all Ulysses.19 Better still, that nosyparker Bloom, the perverse and impotent sensualist, experiences in the dirt something that had never happened to him before: his own transfiguration. Glad tidings: when the eternal signs have vanished from the heavens, the pig that hunts truffles finds them again in the earth. For they are indelibly stamped on the lowest as on the highest; only in the lukewarm intermediate realm that is accursed of God are they nowhere to be found.
[197] Ulysses is absolutely objective and absolutely honest and therefore trustworthy. One can trust his testimony as to the power and nugatoriness of the world and the spirit. Ulysses alone is reality, life, meaning; in him is comprised the whole phantasmagoria of mind and matter, of egos and non-egos. And here I would like to ask Mr. Joyce a question: “Have you noticed that you are a representation, a thought, perhaps a complex of Ulysses? That he stands about you like a hundred-eyed Argus, and has thought up for you a world and an anti-world, filling them with objects without which you could not be conscious of your ego at all?” I do not know what the worthy author would answer to this question. Nor is it any business of mine—there is nothing to stop me from indulging in metaphysics on my own. But one is driven to ask it when one sees how neatly the microcosm of Dublin, on that sixteenth day of June, 1904, has been fished out of the chaotic macrocosm of world history, how it is dissected and spread out on a glass slide in all its tasty details, and described with the most pedantic exactitude by a completely detached observer. Here are the streets, here are the houses and a young couple out for a walk, a real Mr. Bloom goes about his advertising business, a real Stephen Dedalus diverts himself with aphoristic philosophy. It would be quite possible for Mr. Joyce himself to loom up at some Dublin street-corner. Why not? He is surely as real as Mr. Bloom and could therefore equally well be fished out, dissected, and described (as, for instance, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).
[198] Who, then, is Ulysses? Doubtless he is a symbol of what makes up the totality, the oneness, of all the single appearances in Ulysses as a whole—Mr. Bloom, Stephen, Mrs. Bloom, and the rest, including Mr. Joyce. Try to imagine a being who is not a mere colourless conglomerate soul composed of an indefinite number of ill-assorted and antagonistic individual souls, but consists also of houses, street-processions, churches, the Liffey, several brothels, and a crumpled note on its way to the sea—and yet possesses a perceiving and registering consciousness! Such a monstrosity drives one to speculation, especially as one can prove nothing anyway and has to fall back on conjecture. I must confess that I suspect Ulysses of being a more comprehensive self who is the subject of all the objects on the glass slide, a being who acts as if he were Mr. Bloom or a printing-shop or a crumpled note, but actually is the “dark hidden Father” of his specimens. “I am the sacrificer and the sacrificed.” In the language of the infernal regions: “I am the dreamery creamery butter.” When he turns to the world with a loving embrace, all the gardens blossom. But when he turns his back upon it, the empty everyday rolls on—labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.20
[199] The demiurge first created a world that in his vainglory seemed to him perfect; but looking upward he beheld a light which he had not created. Thereupon he turned back towards the place where was his home. But as he did so, his masculine creative power turned into feminine acquiescence, and he had to confess:
All things ephemeral
Are but a reflection;
The unattainable
Here finds perfection;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The Eternal Feminine
Still draws us on.
[200] From the specimen-slide far below upon earth, in Ireland, Dublin, 7 Eccles Street, from her bed as she grows sleepy at about two o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth of June, 1904, the voice of easy-going Mrs. Bloom speaks:
O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
[201] O Ulysses, you are truly a devotional book for the object-besotted, object-ridden white man! You are a spiritual exercise, an ascetic discipline, an agonizing ritual, an arcane procedure, eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another, where amid acids, poisonous fumes, and fire and ice, the homunculus of a new, universal consciousness is distilled!
[202] You say nothing and betray nothing, O Ulysses, but you give us the works! Penelope need no longer weave her never-ending garment; she now takes her ease in the gardens of the earth, for her husband is home again, all his wanderings over. A world has passed away, and is made new.
[203] Concluding remark: I am now getting on pretty well with my reading of Ulysses—forward!