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6 J A M E Sbut when she heard that in the river were two washerwomen scrubbingdirty linen, she was disgusted. 4To Joyce the juxtaposition was easy andnatural. The river is lovely and filthy; Dublin is dear and dirty; so are themind and body. In theory we grant these combinations, but in practiceseem to hold the units apart. Joyce never does. What other hero in thenovel has, like Stephen Dedalus, lice? Yet the lice are Baudelairean lice,clinging to the soul's as well as the body's integument. What other herodefecates or masturbates like Bloom before our eyes? Joyce will not makeit easy for us either to contemn or adore. If we go to him thinking hemay be the apostle of brotherhood, he shows us brothers in violent quarrel.If we go to him to find a defender of the family, he presents hiscentral hero—the cuckold. If we ask him to be the celebrant of the isolatedindividual, Joyce shows isolation making him morose and defenseless.If we look for the spokesman of life, he introduces us to the dead.The reconciling factor is the imagination, which, working through wit,brings opposite ends of the mind together, and makes our seeming unlikenessessuddenly gregarious.Joyce is the porcupine of authors. His heroes are grudged heroes—theimpossible young man, the passive adult, the whiskey-drinking graybeard.It is hard to like them, harder to admire them. Joyce prefers it so. Unequivocalsympathy would be romancing. He denudes man of what weare accustomed to respect, then summons us to sympathize. For Joyce,as for Socrates, undejstand^gjs._a.jtmWecan move closer to him by climbing oveTthe obstacIeToFour pretensions,but as we do so he tasks our prowess again by his difficult language. Herequires that we adapt ourselves in form as well as in content to his newpoint of view. His heroes are not easy liking, his books are not easyreading. He does not wish to conquer us, but to have us conquer him.There are, in other words, no invitations, but the door is ajar.It is not easy, either, to enter into his life with the abandon of comradeship.'A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism,'5he described himself to C. G. Jung, and to Louis Gillet, the FrenchAcademician who wished to exalt him, he said, 'Don't make a hero outof me. I'm only a simple middle-class man.' He surrounded himself withpeople who were mostly not known: some were waiters, tailors, fruitsellers,hotel porters, concierges, bank clerks, and this assemblage was asinevitable for Joyce's temperament as marquises and marchionesses werefor Proust's. To those who admonished him for wasting his time, hereplied, 'I never met a bore,' 6a remark that from most writers wouldsound merely sentimental. That he meant it is demonstrated by the thousandsof phrases garnered mostly from undistinguished friends with whichhe filled his books. 'This book,' he said to Eugene Jolas of FinnegansWake, 'is being written by the people I have met or known.' 7His contemporaryJohn Synge listened to people through a knothole in the floor;Joyce met them face to face, as unassuming in his behavior as he was