In the writing process of Finnegans Wake, the year 1926 must have been one of the toughest for Joyce as several of his supporters openly expressed their doubts concerning Joyce's linguistic 'experiment'. By the end of the year Ezra Pound wrote he could "make nothing of it whatever" and only a few days later, Joyce received a letter by Harriet Weaver, in which she cautiously pointed out "that without comprehensive key and glossary, such as you very kindly made out for me, the poor hapless reader loses a very great deal of your intention" (Ellmann 584). A few months later, the first issue of Wyndham Lewis's review The Enemy came out, without the triangle episode which Joyce had written on Lewis's request(1), but with a long essay by Lewis instead. This essay, "The Revolutionary Simpleton", was later reprinted in Lewis's book Time and Western Man. Especially Chapter 16, "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce" (p. 91-130) contains serious criticism on Joyce's work. This, however, was not the first critical analysis of Joyce's work by Lewis. Early in 1926, Lewis had published The Art of Being Ruled. Although Joyce's work is not analysed in such detail, the disapproving, sharp-tongued tone did not escape Joyce's notice.(2) Lewis's book is referred to as the "art of being rude" in chapter I.6 of Finnegans Wake (FW 167.03). But whereas this chapter was drafted in 1927, partly in response to Lewis's later criticisms, an earlier and more immediate reaction to The Art of Being Ruled(3) is to be found in an episode known as "Dave the Dancekerl" (FW 461.33-468.19; III.2B). Notebook research not only reveals Joyce's evident interest in Lewis's work, but also his way of dealing with this criticism by incorporating it and treating it as a contribution to his encyclopedic novel by one of "the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators" (FW 118.34-6).
"Mr. Jinglejoyce"
In "Clones and Mutations" David J. Califf has drawn attention to the
many references to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in "Dave the Dancekerl"
and pointed out that "the Lewis-Dave connection, although it would be worked
out only gradually during the next eleven years, is already suggested in
1926" (Califf 142). Califf also quotes Geoffrey Wagner's discussion of
Lewis's criticism, especially the charge that Joyce's stream of consciousness
technique was merely an imitation of Dickens (Wagner 170). In The Art
of Being Ruled, this criticism is concentrated in chapter VI of part
XII, "Mr. Jingle and Mr. Bloom". Here, Joyce is compared to Gertrude Stein,
"the best-known exponent of a literary system that consists in a sort of
gargantuan mental stutter." (Lewis, Art 400) Lewis regards Stein's
writing technique as "a photograph of the unorganised word-dreaming of
the mind when not concentrated for some logical functional purpose". He
subsequently makes a link with Joyce's stream of consciousness technique:
"Mr. Joyce employed this method with success (not so radically and rather
differently) in Ulysses. The thought-stream or word-stream of his hero's
mind was supposed to be photographed. The effect was not unlike the conversation
of Mr. Jingle in Pickwick." (Lewis, Art 400) This remark seems to have
caused the first reaction to be incorporated in the "Dancekerl" episode
as Joyce added the following sentence to the third draft (III.2B.*2): "Can
you
jingle sing us a shive* now encore
on your jubalharp, eh Mr. j Jinglejoys?"
(JJA 57:188b; 47483-123v; FW 466.18) (4)
But Joyce's reading of The Art of Being Ruled did not confine itself to this chapter. Most of the references to Joyce's work in The Art of Being Ruled are located in Part XII, "The 'Intellectual'" (5), in which Lewis expresses his more general objection, i.e. that "[w]e are all the patients of a great cult" centered around "The Great God Flux" (Chapter III, Art 387), with Henri Bergson as one of the high priests. While reading, Joyce jotted down a few notes. Notebook VI.B.20 contains the entry "bflux" (69), which found its way into the first fair copy (III.2B.*3): "That was to let the crowd of Flu Flux Fans [behind him see me proper]" (JJA57:199; 47483-126). Amongst these 'fans' of the Great God Flux, "are to be found" - according to Lewis - "the psycho-analysts, futurists, dadas, proustites, (6) etc" (Art 397). Although no "proustite" appears in "Dave the Dancekerl", Joyce wrote down the word in notebook B.20 (page 73); and the final version does contain the warning: "Watch the swansway." (FW 465.35) Another 'proustite' is C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, the English translator of the Recherche, who is referred to as Schott in the introduction to the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes, where apart from the bergsonian "sophology of Bitchson" (FW 149.20), several references are made to Proust, "who the lost time we had the pleasure we have had our little recherché brush with, what, Schott?" (FW 149.23-4).
The nature of Joyce's note-taking during his reading of The Art of Being Ruled is rather unsystematic. The entries directly derived from Lewis's text are interspersed with other notes and ideas. Although Joyce seems to have taken some interest in the content of the work, (7) his attention was particularly caught by special vocabulary, phrasings, or linguistic oddities. An example of this focus is the entry "blepharospasm" (B.20: 73), derived from Lewis's chapter on "The Great God Flux":
The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time. Time, especially, has received a very severe shaking from Einstein [...] (Art 388)Whereas the "theorics of Winestain" (FW 149.28) are more extensively dealt with in the fable of "The Mookse and the Gripes," the blepharospasms were used in one of the four old men's questions during their interrogation of Yawn in Chapter III.3: "Happily you were not quite so successful in the process verbal whereby you would sublimate your blepharospasmockical suppressions, it seems?" (FW 515.16)
In The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis has drawn up a short table of
the principal forms of what he calls an "anti-intellect campaign" (397),
divided into four groups: "The Child", "The Amateur", "The Demented", and
"The Pragmatic". These categories are explained subsequently; especially
the third may have drawn Joyce's attention: "Under the heading of the
Demented you get Miss Gertrude Stein and the various stammering, squinting
punning group who follow her." The epithet "stammering" is recognizable
in an addition to the first fair copy (III.2B.*3): "And I hear
see he has is stop dropping the stammer
out of his bladder" (JJA 57:200; 47483-127; FW 467.19)
At the same draft stage Joyce added: "The misery billyboots I used to
lend him before we split." (JJA 57:200; 47483-127; FW 467.01-2) This is
probably a reference to the pair of old brown shoes, sent to Joyce by Ezra
Pound in an act of pity of Joyce's poverty and delivered in Paris by T.S.
Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.(8) Joyce
seems to have been quite embarrassed, for not only did he pay all his visitors'
expenses during their stay, the incident also became a leitmotiv that keeps
recurring in the Wake.(9)
"Well, ladies upon gentlermen"
While in the third draft, the episode started with the words "Well, ladies & gentlemen", and in the first fair copy with "Well, ladies on gentlemen", the gentlemen became "gentlermen" in the second fair copy, and the ladies not only came first but were even placed "upon" the other sex. Lewis's text offers an explanation for this evolution. A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:
ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) This reference also occurs in Joyce's notebook: "The Dominant Sex / Vaerting". (VI.B.20: 49)(10) Joyce most probably copied it from The Art of Being Ruled, since a number of surrounding entries refer to subjects discussed by Wyndham Lewis, whose initials appear on page 48: "Melo = W.L." The next entry, "erect", as well as the note "menkind" on the previous page, possibly refer to Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:
The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)Joyce's alternative "menkind" (VI.B.20:47) is everything but more neutral. To the second fair copy, Joyce also provocatively added a short introduction, using the same typography as in The Art of Being Ruled, in which the first word of every chapter as well as the words stressed by Lewis are in capitals:
MEN! Jaun responded fullchantedly to her sororal sonority, with his [chalished] drink now well in hand. Ever gloriously kind! And I truly am obligated. Well, ladies upon gentlermen [...] (JJA 57:242; 47483-152; FW 461.33)It is remarkable that in order to emphasize man's "erectness" (11) Lewis employs the 'erect' typography of capitals.
The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)The irony of this tension between Lewis' message and the way it is expressed and represented is something James Joyce, being an excellent "craftsman", may have spotted immediately. After all, according to Lewis's own analysis in "The Revolutionary Simpleton," "that is what Joyce is above all things, essentially the craftsman." Lewis's main criticism is that Joyce's writing is dictated by techniques, by "ways of doing things" instead of "things to be done", and that it does not matter to him what world-view he expresses; or even worse:
Some of Lewis's own points of view were quite "special" indeed, such
as his flirtation with fascism (12)
as expressed in The Art of Being Ruled, (about thirty page befores
his opinions about Joyce). Instead of this outspoken "blinkpoint of so
eminent a spatialist" (FW 149.18-9), Joyce - "with his blackguarded eye
and the goatsbeard in his buttinghole of Shemuel Tulliver" (FW 464.12-3)
- apparently preferred a more Swiftian attitude. In "A Voyage to the Country
of the Houyhnhnms" Gulliver remembers "it was with extreme Difficulty that
I could bring my Master to understand the meaning of the Word Opinion,
or how a Point could be disputable; because Reason taught us to
affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our Knowledge we cannot
do either." (Swift, Gulliver 241-2)
"the reputation of being swift"
Lewis remarked in "The Revolutionary Simpleton" that "Joyce is not a homologue of Swift. That is a strange mistake. [...] He is genial and comic; a humorous writer of the traditional English School - in temper, at his best, very like Sterne." (Lewis, Simpleton 96; Time 92) To the first fair copy (III.2B.*3), Joyce had added: "after he earned the reputation of being swift," (13) but the main reaction to Lewis' article in The Enemy was an extra paragraph that was added to the end of the "Dave the Dancekerl" piece in the second fair copy (III.2§2B.*4):
Well, I hate to look at alarms but I hear from my seeless socks 'tis time to be up and ambling. [...] Somewhere I must get far away from Banbashore, wherever I am. So I think I'll take freeboots' advice. I'll borrow a path, to lend me wings quickquack and from Jehusalem's wall clickclack to Cheerup street I'll travel the void world over. [...] Here goes the enemy! [...] (JJA 57:248; 47483-158)Apart from the reference to Lewis' review, the paragraph - especially the "wings" and "freeboots' advice" - provides the connection between the anecdote of the old brown shoes and Swift's Battle of the Books, in which the spider replies to the bee: "What art thou but a Vagabond without House or Home, without Stock or Inheritance? Born to no Possession of your own, but a Pair of Wings and a Drone-Pipe. Your Livelihood is an universal Plunder upon Nature; a Freebooter over Fields and Gardens; [...]" (Swift, Battle 149). This link with the Battle of the Books sheds some light upon the relationship between the two writers. For both undoubtedly regarded themselves as Moderns. Even at the end of the writing process, Joyce called his "Work in Progress" a "wordspiderweb".(14) In Chapter I.7 (47471b-64; JJA 47:359) Joyce had presented Shem as a spiderlike writer, producing ink from his own excrements. Three years later, possibly thanks to Wyndham Lewis, Joyce's self-image seems to have changed. At least in comparison with Lewis's work, Joyce's writing method corresponds better to that of the Ancients, summarized by Aesop in The Battle of the Books:
pray Gentlemen, was ever any thing so Modern as the Spider in his Air, his Turns, and his Paradoxes? He [...] scorns to own any Obligation or Assistance from without. Then he displays to you his great Skill in Architecture, and Improvement in the Mathematicks. To all this, the Bee, as an Advocate, retained by us the Antients, thinks fit to Answer; That if one may judge of the great Genius or Inventions of the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have Countenance to bear you out in boasting of either. Erect you Schemes with as much Method and Skill as you please; if the materials be nothing but Dirt, spun out of your own Entrails (the Guts of Modern Brains) the Edifice will conclude at last in a Cobweb [...] As for Us, the Antients, We are content with the Bee, to pretend to Nothing of our own, beyond our Wings and our Voice: that is to say, ourFlights and our Language; For the rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite Labor, and search, and ranging thro' every Corner of Nature [...] (Swift, Battle 151)Knowing that Joyce was on the verge of writing 'The Mookse and the Gripes' and 'The Ondt and the Gracehoper', it is not inconceivable that the idea to react to Lewis in the form of a fable was inspired by this associative detour (Lewis - Swift - The Battle of the Books - Aesop). With his analysis, Lewis tried to provoke a counterattack; that at least appears to be how Joyce interpreted his criticism, in response to which he wrote in his notebook: "bregard me / bas an / benemy" (VI.B.20:76(i)) and "bregard me / bas enemy" (VI.B.20:77(a); JJA 57:248; 47483-158; FW 469.23). But instead of allowing Lewis to force him into the position of The Enemy's opponent, Joyce nuanced both his and Lewis's position. In a similar way Thomas Mann made an end to the plagiary dispute with Schoenberg concerning Doktor Faustus by writing (in a letter to the composer): "Wollen Sie durchaus mein Feind sein - es wird Ihnen nicht gelingen, mich zu dem Ihren zu machen." (15) Whereas the dispute between Schoenberg and Mann was one of the impulses that caused Mann to write a defense of his "Montagetechnik" in the form of Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, Lewis' attack seems to have been an inspiring incentive for Joyce to write himself out of a crisis. At a time when his most loyal supporters lost their faith in the project, deeming the language experiment had lasted long enough, Joyce's self-defense in answer to Lewis made him persist in the intention to raise his "Work in Progress" above the level of a mere experiment or a fashionable way to be Modern.
The way in which he managed to do so, confirms his superb "craftsmanship"
by means of which he checkmated Lewis. After having read Lewis' "Analysis"
Joyce kept adding reactions, even at later stages in the writing process,
such as the "diarrhio" in the sentence "And I see by his diarhiodiarrhio
he's dropping the stammer out of his silenced bladder" (JJA 415; 47483-21;
FW 467.19).(16) David Califf
suggests that this is a reference to Pound's frequent use of excremental
imagery (Califf 134). Since the rest of this sentence came into being
in response to Lewis's attacks, it is also possible that this late addition
was another reaction to Lewis. After having defined Ulysses as "the
very nightmare of the naturalistic method" and a "stupendous outpouring
of matter, or stuff"(Lewis, Time 108), Lewis remarks:
It is like a gigantic victorian quilt or antimacassar. Or it is the voluminous curtain that fell, belated (with the alarming momentum of a ton or two of personally organized rubbish), upon the victorian scene. So rich was its delivery, its pent-up outpouring so vehement, that it will remain, eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarrhoea. (Time 109)Joyce subtly replied to Lewis by making him the very supplier of the "matter" of the Wake, by integrating the words with which The Art of Being Ruled was composed, and adding more "stuff" to the episode when Lewis wrote more of it in The Enemy and Time and Western Man. No matter how outspoken Lewis's opinions were, Joyce dismantled them before he recycled the neutralized fragments in his own encyclopedic work, and certainly did not allow them to rule his art.
Notes
(1) Wyndham Lewis asked Joyce for a contribution to his review, as is evidenced in a letter to Miss Weaver, dated May 21, 1926. [back]
(2) On March 23, 1926, he wrote to Harriet Weaver that he was reading The Art of Being Ruled to and that it contained some serious criticism. [back]
(3) On March 30, 1926, Joyce mentioned (in an unpublished letter to Miss Weaver) that he was replying to this criticism in an addition to /\b. [back]
(4) The transcription method adopted is the one designed by David Hayman in A First Draft Version of 'Finnegans Wake' (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963). [back]
(5) To the fair copy (III.2B.*3) Joyce added: "that intellectual debtor". (JJA57:199; 47483-126) [back]
(6) In the 'Carnet de 1908' Proust has noted down a series of excerpts referring to "Bergson Matière et Mémoire 'contracte' / 'coupe' 73 'pointe poussée par le / passé' 74, / vide finit dans l'avenir" (47v°; Kolb 113). Unlike Joyce, Proust usually indicated his sources and marked his excerpts by means of quotation marks. Philip Kolb has retraced these passages and compared them to the text of the Recherche: "Dans un passage de Sodome et Gomorrhe qui évoque les effets du sommeil sur la mémoire, le philosophe norvégien cite à ce sujet l'opinion de Bergson. Proust affirme que sa propre expérience lui a donné des résultats opposés." (notes 482-7, Kolb 197) The first quote ('contracte') refers to a passage in which Bergson discusses "l'opération par laquelle on contracte le souvenir-habitude, l'intervention latente du souvenir-image" (Kolb note 484). Bergson illustrates the difference between these two kinds of memory with a lesson, learnt by heart. One can reproduce it without thinking of the effort it has taken to learn it by heart. This is what Bergson calls souvenir-habitude. But if all of a sudden, one remembers the scene of the first moment one tried to memorize the lesson, this would be a "souvenir-image". Although these two kinds of memory are not identical with Proust's voluntary and involuntary memory, Bergson apparently did inspire Proust in a number of ways. [back]
(7) Page 72 shows some entries derived from Part
XII, Chapter IV ("Hatred of Language and the Behaviorist 'Word-Habit'"):
* VI.B.20:72(g): btester; see Lewis, Art 392: "Behind the word is the
mind or reason, which is the metaphysical enemy. In the schools of american
psychology, deriving from William James, you find this war of words, or
against words, being waged more epically and with more concentration than
elsewhere. In examining the tester, or behaviorist-tester, at work for
a moment, we shall be transporting ourselves to the so-called 'laboratory'
where the word is actually being annihilated, or where the 'mind,' the
'intellect,' is being drilled out of it. And Professor Watson is the greatest
exponent of behaviorism, and the king of testers."
See also VI.B.20:90(j): "/[ tester".
* VI.B.20:72(h): "explicit / implicit"; see Lewis, Art 393:
"There are for Watson two main points of behaviour, and two only. And into
these two physiologically controllable forms the whole of the human personality
is contained. There is no metaphysical or non-metaphysical element of personality.
These two forms of behaviour are the big and the little; or, as he puts
it, those affecting the large musculature of the animal, and those affecting
the small. The former, the big, he calls explicit behaviour. The lesser,
the small, he calls implicit behaviour." [back]
(8) An account of this delivery by Wyndham Lewis is quoted in extenso in Ellmann's biography (493). [back]
(9) For example in "The Ondt and the Gracehoper": "shooshoe" FW 417.34. [back]
(10) Apparently Joyce's reading of The Art of Being Ruled constantly reminded him of the embarrassment of the old shoes incident, as the entry "boots S" on the same notebook page evidences. [back]
(11) "So 'a man' is an entirely artificial thing, like everything else that is the object of our grudging 'admiration.' Or if there is an exception to this rule, it is the abnormal or exceptional man, whom we worship as a 'hero,' and whose unnatural erectness arouses almost more hatred than surprise. Prostration is our natural position. A wormlike movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men. As active, erect, and humane creatures they are in a constantly false position, and behaving in an abnormal way." (Art 281) [back]
(12) See Part X, Chapter XII: "Fascism as an Alternative": "I have already said that in the abstract I believe the sovietic system to be the best. [...] And yet for anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would probably be the best. [...] Fascismo is merely a spectacular marinettian flourish put on to the tail, or, if you like, the head, of marxism: that is, of course, fascism as interpreted by its founder, Mussolini. And that is the sort of socialism that this essay would indicate as the most suitable for anglo-saxon countries or colonies, with as much of sovietic proletarian sentiment as could be got into it without impairing its discipline, and as little coercion as is compatible with good sense. In short, to get some sort of peace to enable us to work, we should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised." (Lewis, Art 370-1) [back]
(13) The complete addition reads: "And I hear
see
he has is stop dropping the stammer out
of his bladder since I sent him to grow his a muffbathe
camomise his feet down on the river airy after he earned the reputation
of being swift." (JJA 57:200; 47483-127 > FW 467.19)
[back]
(14) Letter to Ferdinand Prior, 30 May 1938, Selected Letters 392: "But the devil knows whether you will be able to understand what the story means or what this entire wordspiderweb is about." [back]
(15) "Even if you insist on being my enemy - you will not manage to make me yours." (Letter to Arnold Schönberg, 19 December 1949; Dichter über ihre Dichtugen, vol. 14/III, ed. Hans Wysling (Passau: Heimeran/Fischer 1981) 243. [back]
(16) III.2§2B.9' (fourth proofs (duplicates)
for transition 13, dated by the printer 5 June 1928. [back]
Works Cited
Califf, David J. "Clones and Mutations: A Genetic Look at 'Dave the Dancekerl'." Genetic Studies in Joyce (European Joyce Studies 5). Eds. David Hayman and Sam Slote. Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Hayman, David. A First Draft Version of 'Finnegans Wake'. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963.
Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
Proust, Marcel. Le Carnet de 1908 (Cahiers Marcel Proust 8). Ed. Philip Kolb. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Lewis, Wyndham. The Art of Being Ruled. London: Chatto and Windus, 1926.
Lewis, Wyndham. "The Revolutionary Simpleton." The Enemy 1,1 (January 1927): 25-192.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927.
Swift, Jonathan. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, known as Gulliver's Travels. Ed. Angus Ross. London: Longman, 1972.
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub With Other Early Works. Ed. Herbert Davis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965.
Wagner, Geoffrey. Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge, 1957.