The key is to be found in the antepenultimate chapter of the book; and it isn't a key, it's a combination, a countryman of Mr. Joyce's might say. Anyone who tries at it long enough will succeed in working it, even if he is not of M. Larbaud's cultivated readers who can fully appreciate such authors as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.
The symbolism of the book is something that concerns only Mr. Joyce, as nuns do, and other animate and inanimate things of which he has fugitive thoughts and systematised beliefs.
After the Cheu-sinese orgy, Bloom takes Stephen home, and unfortunately they awaken Marion, for she embraces the occasion to purge her mind in soliloquy. Odo of Cluny never said anything of a woman's body in life that is so repulsive as that which Mr. Joyce has said of Marion's mind: a cesspool of forty years' accumulation. Into it has drained the inherited vulgarities of Jew and gentile parent; within it has accumulated the increment of a sordid, dissolute life in two countries, extending over twenty-five years; in it have been compressed the putrid exhalations of studied devotion to sense gratification. Mr. Joyce takes off the lid and opens the sluice-way simultaneously, and the result is that the reader, even though his sensitisation has been fortified by reading the book, is bowled over. As soon as he regains equilibrium he communes with himself to the effect that if the world has many Marions missionaries should be withdrawn from heathen countries and turned into this field where their work will be praised by man and rewarded by God.
Mental hygiene takes on a deeper significance to one who succeeds in reading “Ulysses,” and psychology has a larger ceinture.
Much time has been wasted in conjecturing what Mr. Joyce's message is. In another connection he said, “My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? No honourable and sincere man has given up his life, his youth, and his affections to Ireland from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but the Irish sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
“Ulysses” is in part vendetta. He will ridicule Gaelic renaissance of literature and language; he will traduce the Irish people and vilify their religion; he will scorn their institutions, lampoon their morals, pasquinade their customs; he will stun them with obscene vituperation, wound them with sacrilege and profanity, immerse them in the vitriolic dripping from the “tank” that he seeks to drive over them; and for what purpose? Revenge. Those dissatisfied with the simile of the fury of a scorned woman should try “Ulysses.”
Mr. Joyce has made a contribution to the science of psychology, and he has done it quite unbeknownst to himself, a fellow-countryman might say. He has shown us the process of the transmuting of thought to words. It isn't epoch making like “relativity,” but it will give him notoriety, possibly immortality.
“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” —Stephen Dædalus.
CHAPTER III
FEODOR DOSTOIEVSKY: TRAGEDIST, PROPHET, AND PSYCHOLOGIST
A hundred years ago, in Moscow, a being manifested its existence, who in the fullness of extraordinary vision and intellectuality heralded a religious rebirth, became the prophet of a new moral, ethical, and geographical order in the world, and the prototype of a new hero. Time has accorded Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoievsky the position of one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and as time passes his position becomes more secure. Like the prophet of old, during life he was fastened between two pieces of timber—debts and epilepsy—and sawn asunder by his creditors and his conscience. Posterity links his name with Pushkin and Tolstoi as the three great writers of their times. They are to the Russian Renaissance what Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were to the Italian Renaissance.