A review by Anthony Cronin of  The Sympathetic Alien by J. Mitchell Morse taken from the 3,000th issue of the TLS, which appeared on August 28, 1959.

We are republishing it to mark our 6,000th issue, which is out this week. 

Joyce is one of those writers who are neither permitted to be without beliefs nor believed about their freedom from such encumbrances; and the title of Mr. Morse’s book seems at first to promise exegesis of a dubious kind. We have had more than one recent attempt to present Joyce’s work as the embodiment of orthodoxy, however inverted. The obscurity of Finnegans Wake encourages the idea that behind it must lie a portentous message and provokes attempts to read a cosmology into it. Since one particular philosophy of history, Vico’s, is used in it as a structural device, the confusion is easy. All this is a pity, inasmuch as it distracts from true criticism; and it is ultimately as false and as distorting as the opposite and rather more old-fashioned picture of Joyce the atheist presiding in gratified horror over a godless world, so torn by his own apostasy and consequent vision of futility and loathsomeness that his work is simply an expression of a Swiftian disgust.

Joyce was born in a country where Roman Catholicism is a fact like climate or history, so that it was forever part of his consciousness and his human material; and it seems to be sometimes forgotten that such material could not be dealt with at all without reference to it. Besides, he enjoyed theological discussion in the abstract and respected it as a way of thought; and he employed it gratefully, as he employed so much else, both as parody and as structure in his work. He continued all his life to use, sometimes ironically, sometimes affectionately, sometimes satirically, the terminology of what had not only been his faith but is, after all, a very great structure of human thought.

Mr. Morse examines some of the many ways in which he did use it. He does this without bias but he is inclined, like many recent Joyce commentators, to indulge in flights of fancy, to build too much on too little; he is too dogmatic where the facts do not warrant dogmatism or where there are no facts at all: and he is too chary—for one who shows evidence of a brilliant critical faculty—of criticism. He tells us that the scorn of literary criticism of another Joyce commentator—and good critic—Mrs. Glasheen has “some what chastened” his own practice of it; his book might have been better if the critic had chastened the commentator more often.

Some of the correspondences with Augustine, Loyola, Scotus Erigena, William of Ockham and the Old Testament on which Mr. Morse depends may arise simply from the fact that both Joyces work and that of the fathers and doctors from whom Mr. Morse quotes are deeply grounded in human nature. The difficulty is to say when Joyce is consciously using an idea or a definition of Augustine’s, say, as part of his structure, when he is doing it unconsciously because it was part of his mental furniture, when the apparent use is sheer coincidence, and when it is sheer fancy on Mr. Morse’s part. Thus, when Mr. Morse tells us:

All sins, says Saint Augustine can be summed up under three heads: the lusts of the flesh, intellectual curiosity and pride. Almost everything Bloom does or enjoys is a sin. Almost everything Dedalus does or enjoys is a sin. In this however they are not alone: all Dubliners, knowingly or unknowingly, bear the Christian’s burden. Those who sink under it into damnation, however, are not the Bloom’s or Dedalus’s but the thoughtless ones, the Mulligans, Punch Costellos and Father John Conmees. All take it up at breakfast, the thoughtful and thoughtless alike, the comparatively free and the wholly bound: “For by eating and drinking,” says Saint Augustine. . .

And when he then goes on to favour us with a lengthy quotation from the saint on gluttony, we may be permitted to wonder which should get the credit: Joyce, Saint Augustine, or human nature. After all, it is pretty clear that the writer and the moralist were, whether they liked it or not, forced to cover much the same ground. Again, when he proceeds to classify various sins committed in the course of the day according to classifications used for the benefit of the faithful in the medieval treatise, Agenbite of Inwit, we may think the credit should go to the author of the treatise for inventing a nomenclature which stands up to such an extensive modern test, rather than to Joyce for cleverly constructing his book round it. The more so since, as Mr. Morse does not seem to be aware, the phrase “agenbite of inwit” did not appear in the first version of Ulysses at all.

In the same chapter Mr. Morse builds a great deal on an incident in the cabman’s shelter, where Stephen understandably (considering the night he has had) refuses any refreshment. Mr. Morse says:

As his intellectual independence dates from his refusal to enter the church, so his social independence dates from his refusal to enter the family. He rejects the inefficacious sacrament of the cabman’s shelter (“something in the shape of solid food. . . a bun or so it seemed” and “what was temporarily supposed to be coffee”). . .

This incident Mr. Morse turns into the climax of the book:

Dedalus does have many social sins on his conscience—almost the whole catalogue of Agenbite of Inwit—and he is absolved from them by refusing to take communion. That is the act of renunciation that purifies and frees the artist in him.

The actual incident is disappointing after this. All that happened in fact was that Bloom, believing Stephen should have “something in the shape of solid food, say a roll of some description”, ordered it and the coffee for him. When they arrived he was preoccupied with his theory that the proprietor of the stall was in fact Skin-the-Goat, the famous assassin of Lord Frederick Cavendish, so he silently pushed the cup of “what was temporarily supposed to be called coffee” and the “so-called roll” over to his companion. Some ten pages later he breaks off a discourse on Bacon’s authorship of the plays of Shakespeare to say:

—Can’t you drink that coffee by the way? Let me stir it and take a piece or that bun. . . Try a bit.
—Couldn’t. Stephen contrived to get out his mental organs for the moment refusing to dictate further.

It will be seen that Mr. Morse has here carried the game of discovering symbols pretty far. It is the more the pity that he should do so because what he makes out of them in the end is true; but it is the sort of truth that might be more obvious and more readily admissible without such dubious props:

Bloom and Dedalus are everything that Mulligan and his friends are not: individuals conscious of their individuality and struggling to maintain it. Ulysses is the story of a critical day in the lifelong struggle of two men to say with God, “I am.”

Indeed the great merit of Mr. Morse’s book lies not in his facts but in his feeling for the work he is discussing, for its temper and the temper of its author’s mind. He realizes that Joyce was no Promethean rebel but one who deserted orthodoxy simply for a humanism based on self-knowledge, “the right to leave questions unanswered” and to develop his own creative faculty in freedom. The movement of his work is away from authority towards the lonely individual deprived of the support of the multitude; deprived even of much pride in the existence of the self precisely because of the extent of his knowledge of his own weakness, but sticking stubbornly nonetheless to the only position he can respect. That secured, Joyce and his hero exemplify a second movement of an even more difficult and dangerous order—that towards an acceptance of the human condition with all its pains and complexities and, through art, of the world with which the individual must nonetheless contend.

This acceptance requires courage and honesty of an even higher order than revolt; but for the artist in the end it is an aesthetically superior position: it is the “classic temper” that Joyce achieved in spite of the opposition of so much of his own nature—though again with the aid of a great deal of it. Mr Morse lays due emphasis on the first movement of Joyce’s mind: but not nearly enough on the second: and though he examines in some detail the influence of Aquinas on Joyce’s aesthetic and the fortitude in Aquinas’s sense which went to shape his work, he perhaps could have said more about the naturally religious passion which Joyce brought to the service of an art which was essentially human and humanist: a curious employment of the religious spirit for the triumph of mere humanity over dogma.

In the Portrait Stephen Dedalus is shown as in revolt against a collectivity that, while claiming to speak dogmatically for the spiritual side of man’s nature, is yet really materialist. It is a comparatively simple position and one that contains its own joys. In Ulysses the danger of the futility that attends such a revolt threatens to destroy him. What, except an ethereal poetry, the handful of abstract lyrics of the “bullock-befriending bard,” or an account of his own revolt, can be the outcome?

Part of the answer is supplied by Bloom. Parallel to Stephen’s dramatic defiance of convention and society runs Bloom’s comic, shaky, often degraded and seldom dignified spiritual quest with precisely the same end in view—to be himself. Bloom, with his ridiculous name and still more ridiculous virtues, his monstrous acquiescences and still more monstrous dignity, would appear to have little to do with Stephen’s aestheticism. Yet his creation is its extremely odd justification. As Mr. Morse truly says,

as the book proceeds, this unprepossessing, unsuccessful, unrespected, neurotic, guilty, nasty man grows on us as a moral giant. That is the miracle or Ulysses. . .  No man can look on naked divinity and live: there is the well-known case of Actaeon, as well as the authority of Scripture; divinity therefore appears to our weak sight disguised as a familiar or even a ridiculous object: a bull, a swan, a cloud, a pile of coins, a wrestler, a burning bush, a swineherd, one’s own husband, a destitute couple, a carpenter’s son – why not an ad salesman? Bloom is the conscience not only of Ireland but of the world. To create him, under all the difficulties that beset Joyce from 1914 to 1921, was an act not only of genius but of the utmost fortitude.

That is well said, but Ulysses would be a considerably less great book than it is if it were all the story. Many people have found the book terrible. George Orwell believed that it was “the product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is “here is life without God. Just look at it!” Mr. Harry Levin believes it to be “totally lacking in the epic virtues of love, friendship and magnanimity” and Mr. William Empson thinks that Bloom’s isolation and Stephen’s megalomania are so monstrous that, if the book is to be bearable, it must have a happy ending. He believes the seeds of this can be seen in Stephen’s future relationship with Molly and her eventual restoration to Bloom as a result of this putative liaison.

But surely it is not necessary to go this far? Surely the happy ending is in the very temper of the book itself, full of that “profane joy” which Joyce came to believe all art should exhibit? If the author of Dubliners had looked upon the gorgon’s head, the man who wrote Ulysses had not been turned to stone. Is there not a touch of shocked Protestantism, of upset liberalism in the judgments just given? Yeats agreed that the book was “cruel” but added that it was “an Irish cruelty, our kind of strength.”

Stephen Dedalus could conceivably from his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man have turned out a writer of genius. We can imagine anything we like as having been written by him – something in the neo-Baudelairean fashion of the nineties perhaps, or even something like Une Saison en Enfer – but surely the last thing the world might have expected would be something like Ulysses, with its unending comedy, its grotesque vitality in the midst of decay. Nobody reading Dubliners or the Portrait could have thought Joyce capable of the great and lasting humour of Ulysses. In the two previous books there is irony in plenty: the idiotic things done and said give Joyce and the reader a great deal of mordant and bitter amusement – the asinine conversation about the doctrine of infallibility in the story “Grace” for example. But though there is satire and comedy in the technical sense in Dubliners there is no hint of the great, true comedy of Ulysses; while any reader might have been forgiven for thinking that the one thing lacking in the author of the Portrait was a sense of humour.

Mr. Morse quotes Friedrich Hebbel’s remark to the effect that in the drama “all the characters must be in the right.”

This truth [he says] implies another: that all the characters must be in the wrong. . .  if Stephen Dedalus were merdy in the right he would be in sufferable. . . the difference is that Stephen, being more fully aware of the complex interplay of values in life, cannot limit himself to the role of defiant hero.

But in the book, this, more or less, is what he is limited to. The difference between this book and the Portrait is that its author has now realized that all the characters are aesthetically, creatively, and in an ultimate human sense—in the right. Joyce, having brought Stephen to the edge, did not turn back; with the aid of the unbiddable comic spirit he went on to achieve what he had always seen as the true end of art, the “profane joy” of a classic act of acceptance.

Mr. Morse is a shade too solemn perhaps about the third main protagonist in the book. The world does not appear here simply as the stupid, malevolent, materialist enemy of the good man or the artist. Much more than the world of the Portrait it is the world of Simon Dedalus, of whom we have had previous and not too flattering glimpses. The sight we get of him now can still hardly be called flattering, but he is far beyond judgment, in the colours of a scandalous autumn, and we leave him in full sail. Bloom is still morally greater than the citizens among whom he uneasily dwells; and Stephen must escape or be destroyed by agenbite of inwit, encountering a “salt green death” among the “lank coils” of his sisters’ “seaweed hair”, but the book he will write, “the spitting image”, as Joyce told Louis Gillet, of his father, will accept the comic mystery of the world as only those who are free can accept it.

It was not the whole story. One of the themes of Finnegans Wake is the reconcilement of opposites—a theme in the manipulation of which Joyce drew a good deal, as Mr. Morse demonstrates, from a fellow Irish man, similarly condemned, Scotus Erigena. In Finnegans Wake the circle is completed and the penman is once more under attack, from the world and from the self. It is an attack from which he emerges victorious; but the cost is counted; and it is part of the greatness of the victory that the cost is so high:

. . . and now forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds fornenst sods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom or the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul.