It is worthy of note also that Mr. Joyce defines specifically the sin against the Holy Ghost, which for long has been a stumbling block to priest and physician. He does not agree with the great Scandinavian writer toward whom he looked reverently in his youth. Ella Rentheim says to Borkman, “The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.”
The object of it all is to display the thought and erudition of Stephen Dædalus, “a sensitive nature, smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life”; and the emotions, perversions, and ambitions of Leopold Bloom, a devotee of applied science, whose inventions were for the purpose of
“rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard, catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes, exhibiting the twelve constellations of the Zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls.”
It is particularly in the next chapter, one of the strangest of literature, that Mr. Joyce displays the apogee of his art. Dædalus and Bloom have passed in review on a mystic stage all their intimates and enemies, all their detractors and sycophants, the scum of Dublin, and the spawn of the devil. Mr. Joyce resurrects Saint Walpurgis, galvanises her into life after twelve centuries' death intimacy with Beelzebub, and substituting a squalid section of Dublin for Brocken, proceeds to depict a festival, the devil being host. The guests in the flesh and of the spirit have still many of their distinctive corporeal possessions, but the reactions of life no longer exist. The chapter is replete with wit, humour, satire, philosophy, learning, knowledge of human frailties, and human indulgences, especially with the brakes of morality off. And alcohol or congenital deficiency takes them off for most of the characters. It reeks of lust and filth, but Mr. Joyce says life does, and the morality he depicts is the only one he knows.
In this chapter is compressed all of the author's experiences, all his determinations and unyieldingness, and most of the incidents that gave a persecutory twist to his mind, made him an exile from his native land, and deprived him of the courage to return. He does not hesitate to bring in the ghost of his mother whom he had been accused of killing because he would not kneel down and pray for her when she was dying, and to question her as to the verity of the accusation. But he does not repent even when she returns from the spiritual world. In fact, the capacity for repentance is left out of Mr. Joyce's make-up. It is as impossible to convince Mr. Joyce that he is wrong about anything on which he has made up his mind as it is to convince a paranoiac of the unreality of his false beliefs, or a jealous woman of the groundlessness of her suspicions. It may be said that this chapter does not represent life, but I venture to say that it represents life with photographic accuracy as Mr. Joyce has seen it and lived it; that every scene has come within his gaze; that every speech has been heard or said; and every sentiment experienced or thrust upon him. It is a mirror held up to life—life which we could sincerely wish and devoutly pray that we were spared; for it is life in which happiness is impossible, save when forgetfulness of its existence is brought about by alcohol, and in which mankind is destitute of virtue, deprived of ideals, deserted by love.
To disclaim it is life that countless men and women know would be untrue, absurd, and libellous. I do not know that Mr. Joyce makes any such claim, but I claim that it is life that he has known.
Mr. Joyce had the good fortune to be born with a quality which the world calls genius. Nature exacts a galling income tax from genius, and as a rule she co-endows it with unamenability to law and order. Genius and reverence are antipodal, Galileo being the exception to the rule. Mr. Joyce has no reverence for organised religion, for conventional morality, for literary style or form. He has no conception of the word obedience, and he bends the knee neither to God nor man. It is interesting and important to have the revelations of such a personality, to have them first hand and not dressed up. Heretofore our only avenues of information concerning them led through asylums for the insane, for it was there that revelations were made without reserve. I have spent much time and money in my endeavour to get such revelations, without great success. Mr. Joyce has made it unnecessary for me to pursue the quest. He has supplied the little and big pieces of material from which the mental mosaic is made.
He had the profound misfortune to lose his faith, and he cannot rid himself of the obsession that the Jesuits did it for him. He is trying to get square by saying disagreeable things about them and holding their teachings up to scorn and obloquy. He was so unfortunate as to be born without a sense of duty, of service, of conformity to the State, to the community, to society; and he is convinced he should tell about it, just as some who have experienced a surgical operation feel that they must relate minutely all its details, particularly at dinner parties and to casual acquaintances.
Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read “Ulysses” through, and of the ten who succeed in doing it for five of them it will be a tour de force. I am probably the only person aside from the author that has ever read it twice from beginning to end. I read it as a test of Christian fortitude: to see if I could still love my fellow-man after reading a book that depicts such repugnance of humanity, such abhorence of the human body, and such loathsomeness of the possession that links man with God, the creative endowment. Also the author is a psychologist, and I find his empiric knowledge supplements mine acquired by prolonged and sustained effort.
M. Valery Larbaud, a French critic who hailed “Ulysses” with the reverence with which Boccaccio hailed the Divine Comedy, and who has been giving conferences on “Ulysses” in Paris, says the key to the book is Homer's immortal poem. If M. Larbaud has the key he cannot spring the lock of the door of the dark safe in which “Ulysses” rests, metaphorically, for most readers. At least he has not done so up to this writing.