The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (35 page)

The nearest we can get to a spiritual feeling, Woolf is saying, is intense intimacy. By definition, therefore, we live most intensely in our families and with our friends. Indeed, this is the purpose of friendship, to search for, to create, intimate moments of being. The moments of bliss from our childhood create the benchmark; adult intimacy both recalls and overtakes that earlier experience. It is the purpose of art to identify these elements and preserve them, but the moments themselves are available to everyone.

IDEALISM AS RUIN

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have often been compared—and as often contrasted—as experimental novelists, as explorers of the “stream of consciousness” mode of writing. In her diary, Woolf remarked that
Ulysses
was “a misfire,” “pretentious” and “underbred,” though she thought it also had genius.

One big difference between them was that, unlike Woolf, Joyce thought of himself as a Nietzschean. In 1904, describing himself as “James Overman,” he was all for neopaganism, licentiousness and pitilessness. Nietzsche and others helped sustain his opposition to the totalizing religious and philosophical frameworks characteristic of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Joyce wrote in a letter to his wife, Nora: “My mind rejects the whole pres
ent social order and Christianity.” Stephen Dedalus is fond of saying “the Absolute is dead.”
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
recounts Stephen’s gradual rejection of his Catholicism. We feel the pull of religion as he accepts that his faith is “logical and coherent”; but what he fears is “the chemical reaction that would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are amassed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.”
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As Gordon Graham explains, “the hope, in other words, is not theological truth but spiritual freedom”; Dedalus’s aim is to discover “the mode of life or of art whereby [the] spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.” This is a vision of life as itself an aesthetic expression.
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But above all, Joyce had an extraordinary attachment to fact, a “scrupulous meanness,” in Christopher Butler’s words, to seeing things as they actually are. As he expressed himself to Arthur Power, an Irish friend who had lived in Paris before becoming art critic of the
Irish Times
: “In realism you get down to facts on which the world is based; that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable misconceived ideal. In fact, you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we
lived down
I
to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotism. In
Ulysses
I tried to keep close to fact.” So here Joyce is identifying a new form of false consciousness.

He also rejected any metaphysical order. Very possibly, he shared the views of his countryman Oscar Wilde, who said: “It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the skepticism of which they were afraid.” In
Stephen Hero
, Joyce the Catholic engineers Stephen Dedalus to confront loss of faith head-on, at the same time retaining and secularizing whole swathes of the vocabulary of religion. This is shown most clearly in his interpretation of the notion of “epiphany” as a secular spiritual moment when a collection of (usually ordinary) experiences, memories and ambitions coalesces in an intense, multilayered explosion.
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This is seen in
Dubliners
when the boy narrator realizes, “as the [Araby] bazaar is closing down around him, that he doesn’t have enough money to buy a present for Mangan’s sister [Mangan is one of his playmates].” Elements of the episode—the shopgirl’s nationality (English), her flirtatious manner and his regret at not being able to reciprocate, the fact that he is in the bazaar at all, being there to escape his dismal home circumstances—comprise the Joycean epiphany, which does not so much confirm a truth “as disrupt what one has grown comfortable in accepting as true.”
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In other words, for Joyce, an epiphany is an inverted version of what it is in, say, the Christian world, producing a sinking feeling rather than a rising one. Living down to fact again.

As this suggests, Joyce, like other modernists (Chekhov, Proust, Gide, James, Mann, Woolf), is less a narrator in the traditional sense than an “evoker” of a particular consciousness (“the transfiguration of the commonplace,” in the critic Arthur Danto’s words). His achievement in his three great works,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916),
Ulysses
(1922) and
Finnegans Wake
(1939), is best appreciated if they are seen as one collective enterprise, a portrait of the artist as a young man, as a middle-aged man and as an aged man. The fact that these works are long and difficult is part of the point. Joyce’s view, which can scarcely be reduced to a few words without making him seem banal, entails offering a new golden rule or categorical imperative. Instead of “Do unto others as you would be done by” he offers this: Lead your life so that, looking back on it when you are old, you will be able to say that you have become a person you would want to be, that you have actively chosen the self you are, without unreflectively acquiescing in the plans of others; life is to obtain its meaning by what we
do
, not what is demanded of us by some “long-distance laird” (compare Gide, Rilke, Heidegger).

There should be a pattern to a life, Joyce says, one that we have woven ourselves and do not regret; it should contain intimate relationships, the desire to create and an act of creation that has an effect on others; we should realize that there is a price to pay for conformity—that one becomes a sham—while the committed individualist risks becoming an outsider, “locked into his or her narcissism” (compare Kafka below). These issues overlap and allow us during a lifetime to take on a number of iden
tities, and it is important that we find one that makes life livable. Furthermore, any acceptable narrative of a human life will have to come to terms with a fall from innocence, and will be judged by the actions that flow from that fall, by how we live down to fact (compare O’Neill). Ultimately, the great satisfaction—and significance—life has to offer is not just love (which many people have said) but, more precisely,
enduring love
.

When we have said this, though, we are only halfway there, at most. Joyce’s language, famously, notoriously, was difficult but also musical, inventive and punning, designed to show the very great possibilities of human experience, the chaos and delicious contingency of who we are, as he sought to celebrate the delight we should take in everyday things. He shows that there is no significant difference between a life lived on a large scale and one lived on a small scale, that Christ’s pain, as he puts it, was no more significant than that of ALP (one of the main figures in
Finnegans Wake
).

The celebrated puns and double entendres are not intended merely as “pun”ishments, but like Picasso’s paintings they show us the units—here, the words—from different directions all at once, as devices to underline and celebrate the
joyful
instability
of experience: an aging woman is described as “beautifell,” the morning papers as “moaning pipers” (as a Cockney might say), a fine backside as a “beauhind”;
à la
Proust, the orchards of his youth are “evremberried,” a lover confesses he “waged love” on a young girl, Shakespeare is variously Shopkeeper, Shapesphere and Shakhisbeard, a form of theatre is “Ibscenest nansence,” stories “disselve,” a prayer ends “as it is uneven,” a letter describes the writer’s attendance at a grand “funferall,” and a question in a (Dublin) game is “Was liffe worth leaving?”

But these puns and neologisms—call them what you will—are more than mere wordplay for the sake of it. Carefully chosen, based on close observation and reflection and rarely lacking in wit, they are in fact new names for the phenomena of the world, which invite and encourage us to notice, to recognize and to name new aspects of experience that we thought were familiar and settled. Moreover, out of all these at times hilarious, at times tedious, at times astonishing ambiguities and teases—a form of ordered and intended chaos—Joyce challenges us to forge a stable story; and this is how, ultimately, the dense form of his books shows us how to live. A successful achievement is a stable identity that has been
chosen and earned
.

A COMIC GOSPEL AND THE ANDROGYNOUS MAN

Joyce said of
Ulysses
that it was an attempt to write a book “from eighteen different points of view,” and this certainly sums up Joycean criticism, which comfortably exceeds eighteen different points of view. From among this plethora two more are worth singling out.

Brett Bourbon makes the case that
Finnegans Wake
is in itself a spiritual exercise—that is, a modern form of
askesis
, the practice in ancient Greek philosophy that had as its goal “the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being,” a form of self-discipline. Bourbon argues that
Finnegans
Wake
is ultimately nonsense, deliberate nonsense when conceived overall, but that it embodies an essentially comic stance toward the world—it is, in effect, a “comic gospel.” He maintains that
Finnegans
Wake
offers us an essentially theological lesson, exposing us to the “entanglement” of our world, our way of thinking through words, which is designed to provoke self-reflection. “What have replaced God in the
Wake
are particular kinds of nonsense. . . . This nonsense, or rather the limit between nonsense and sense . . .”
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This lack of sense is designed to drive us back on ourselves in an examination of how we, individually and collectively, construct sense. Because
Finnegans
Wake
as an entity has no meaning, we must do the work instead. In particular, there is no
intention
in it, and showing what it is like to live in a world without intention is perhaps its most significant achievement. Intention is not God-given; it has to be conceived, then worked at. The lack—the absence—of intention is a form of salvation.

Declan Hibberd, of University College Dublin, introduces the idea that, in addition to all this, there was and is a specific point to the characterization in
Ulysses
(which originally had Homeric titles to all its chapters). Joyce thought that the search for heroics was vulgar, that man’s littleness “is the inevitable condition of his greatness.”
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Likewise he disdained the “muscular Christianity” preached in the schools of Ireland’s occupying power, together with the “redemptive violence” of the myths invented and re-invented by Irish authors such as W. B. Yeats. The central character of
Ulysses
, Hibberd reminds us, is an Irish Jew, who has no hankering to
become a somebody, “neither a Faust nor a Jesus.” (Jesus never lived with a woman; “Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.”)
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In
Ulysses
, Joyce affords the body equal recognition to the mind, notes that real heroism is never conscious of itself and indeed redefines heroism as the capacity to endure rather than inflict suffering; he notes that a man requires great courage to enter “the abyss of himself,” that words as often conceal as they reveal, that language lags behind technical progress, that there are limits to communicability. But above all he wants (us) to go beyond what he saw as part of the ecclesiastical heritage—our false ideas of masculinity. The man of the future, for Joyce, the character type that gave hope to the world, would be the androgynous man—“That’s the new messiah for Ireland.”
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Nothing was intrinsically masculine anymore, and he felt that many people knew this in their hearts without acknowledging it—it was implicit. Bloom, Hibberd says, never feels himself a freak in Dublin. “On the contrary, his androgyny gives him a unique insight into womanhood.” In this he likens Bloom to “that near-perfect androgyne,” Shakespeare, and he finds a similar theme in Wilde, O’Casey, Shaw, Synge and even Yeats.

Joyce spoke of the “plurability” of experience, of people having a multiple self, but above all Bloom represents “a wholly new kind of male subject in world literature, a man whose womanly multiplicity is intended less to exact derision than to provoke admiration. . . . Because the feeling of masculinity in males is less strong than that of femininity in females, there has been an ancient prejudice in most cultures against the womanly man . . . it was Joyce who rendered the womanly man quotidian and changed forever the way in which writers treated sexuality.” It was this that provided the most original of the “redemptive glimpses of a future world.”
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BIOLOGICAL WARMTH AND WARM OTHERNESS

D. H. Lawrence had little time for Joyce. He rejected his work as “too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life.” The writer and critic Stephen Spender was in no doubt about the difference between the two men. In reviewing Joyce’s letters, published in 1957, he said:

“In letters like those of the fathers of the early Christian church there is interchange within God; in those of Keats and his friends there is interchange within poetry; in those of Vincent and Theo van Gogh, interchange within art; in those of D. H. Lawrence and Middleton Murry, interchange within wrath. In all these others there is agreement on both sides that the writer and the person written to share some overarching conception of life which is outside and beyond them both. With Joyce there is no sense of sharing at all. . . . His letters are, quite strictly, ‘hand-outs’ . . . what is lacking is love. In the acrimonious correspondence of Lawrence and Murry there is more love than in Joyce’s most expansive bulletins.”