As you read it, try to keep in mind some of Joyce's pur- poses:
To trace, as completely as possible, the thoughts and doings of a number of Dubliners during the day and night of June 16, 1904.
To trace, virtually completely, the thoughts and doings of two of them: Stephen Dedalus, the now classic type of the modern intellectual, and his spiritual father, the more or less aver- age man, Leopold Bloom.
To give his book a form paralleling (not always obviously) the events and characters of the Odyssey of Homer. Thus Stephen is Telemachus, Bloom Odysseus (Ulysses), Molly an unfaithful Penelope, Bella Cohen Circe.
To invent or develop whatever new techniques were needed for his monumental task. These included, among dozens, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody, dream and nightmare sequences, puns, word coinages, unconventional punctuation or none at ali, and so forth. Ordinary novelists try to satisfy us with a selection from or summary of their charac- ters' thoughts. Joyce gives you the thoughts themselves, in ali their streamy, dreamy, formless flow.
Even the attempt to read Ulysses can be a great adventure. Good fortune to you.
At this writing probably the best edition to use is the 1986 Vintage Books (Random House) paperback, described as "The corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior." Perhaps even better is the edition by John Kidd (Norton, 1994).
C.F.
I I I
VIRGНNIA WOOLF
1882-1941
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
Three names among the brilliant but overpublicized Bloomsbury group have not only survived but grown more impressive with the passage of time: those of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Long before her death in 1941 Woolf had already begun to influence decisively the course of the English novel. That influence has continued to expand. We can legiti- mately claim that, along with Conrad [100], Henry James [96], Proust [105], and Joyce [110] (whom she did not admire), she is truly seminal.
To put it in formula terms, she demonstrated that the accepted realistic English novelists of the first quarter of the century—Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells—suf- fered from an inadequate view of the resources of their art. They dealt in surfaces, as she argued in her trail-breaking essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." She proposed to get under- neath these surfaces by using devices that have become familiar—stream of consciousness, interior monologue, the aban- donment of linear narrative, and a sensitive adaptation of some of the techniques of poetry. At times she failed in her endeavor; more often she succeeded.
Of the four novйis here recommended, Mrs. Dalloway is perhaps the most accessible. Through the central figure, a wealthy political hostess, Woolf gives us a picture of the London upper class, of a whole society at its highest peak of self-confidence. The great themes of love and death dominate. But there are interesting minor ones such as snobbery (Woolf herself was partly a snob), rebellion against privilege, and, more faintly, lesbian attachment. Her own intervals of mad- ness, which were to culminate in suicide, gave her extraordi- nary insight into the mind of the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, a character as firmly realized as Mrs. Dalloway herself.
In To the Lighthouse, as in ali the novйis beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, we slip in and out of people's minds, sometimes with no warning. The personages, drawn from Woolfs own family memories, are consciousnesses rather than characters. Not chronological time but moments of epiphany determine the novePs form and structure. She writes, . . any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and trans- fix the moment.,>
The original of Orlando, in the book so titled, was Virginia Woolf s great friend, the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West, wife of the writer-diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson. This elaborate fan- tasy glancingly recapitulates parts of English history from Elizabethan times to 1928. It seems to anticipate the Latin American school of magic realism [132]. An element of play enters; perhaps Orlando bears the same relation to Woolfs total production that Graham Greene's Entertainments bear to his.
The Waves is her most difficult novel. Six members of the privileged class, three of each sex, are carried rapidly from childhood through youth, university, and middle age. There is no movement in the usual sense, merely six souls soliloquizing
in turn. As one of them, Bernard, reflects: "There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event." Not everything the characters say or think or feel is graspable by even the most sensitive reader. The effect is of beauty without clarity. Not her most successful book, The Waves is neverthe- less probably the most original development-novel of the first half of the century.
C.F.
112
FRANZ KAFKA
1883-1924
The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories
If we think only of the West, there are perhaps five creative writers of the century who have most influenced other twentieth-century writers. Franz Kafkas name would probably be among them. He would be classed with Joyce [110], Proust [105], Yeats [103], and T.S. Eliot [116]. About two decades after Kafkas death the poet W.H. Auden [126] wrote: "Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante [30], Shakespeare [39] and Goethe [62] have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." Even less restrained praise was accorded him by the great French poet and dramatist Paul Claudeclass="underline" "Besides Racine, who is for me the greatest writer, there is one other— Franz Kafka."
These judgments were expressed at perhaps the peak of the Kafka boom. I say boom because his reputation is in part cult- inspired. But it remains true that the dark anomie and spiritual hunger of our unhappy epoch are both classically reflected in the dreams and nightmares of Kafkas fictions.
None of this was apparent during his brief lifetime. His enormous reputation is almost entirely posthumous. It is based, furthermore, on very little actual production: three not- quite-finished novйis, a dozen short stories, and a scattering of brief parables, plus some correspondence. It may in part be explained, as in the cases of Stendhal [67] and Tocqueville [71], by Kafka's powers of prophecy. Though he died as long ago as 1924, his symbolic visions seem to us to foretell our own period, marked by the German near-imposition of a state of total terror; by the bureaucratic maze that is the essential structure of ali modern governments; by a sense that, as spiri- tual beings, we have lost our way and must rediscover it; by the invasion of our very souls by the machine; by a pervading feel- ing, hard to pin down, of universal guilt; by dehumanization. Borges [121] speaks of "the Kafka of somber myths and atro- cious institutions.,>
Kafka's externai life, though not notably happy, was shel- tered, reasonably rich in interesting friendships, and untouched by war. (His three sisters, however, were murdered by the Nazis; he would not have been surprised.) His personal- ity was intensely neurotic. This neurosis he put to creative use in his disturbing fictions. He suffered ali his life from an obses- sive sense of domination by his materialistic father, a Jew who acted more like a Prussian. This obsession reflected itself in his two major works, The Trial and The Castle, though their sym- bolism is so intricate and multileveled that biographical inter- pretation becomes hazardous. Yet it is clear that these novйis turn on feelings of guilt and inferiority. The Trial tells the story of a man who feels guilty but is never able to discover just what he is accused of. The Castle is about a similar figure enmeshed in a bureaucratic system with which he can never make contact but which nevertheless represents some kind of redeeming authority.