And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life of ... - The Modern Word

life. 29
He sent the play to Archer for criticism, and what little is known of the lost play today comes
in part from Archer’s letter. One criticism, that he first employs a large canvas only, in the end, to
focus on a few people, became the virtues of “The Dead,” Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. 30
Perhaps Archer’s finest comment echoes all would-be fans of Joyce: “At present I am interested
and a good deal impressed, but also, I must confess, a good deal bewildered.” 31
Between 1900 and 1903 Joyce began scribbling the prose experiments he called
“Epiphanies,” by which he meant
the sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment in which ‘the soul
of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant ... a sudden spiritual
manifestation [either] in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phrase of the mind itself.’ 32
Joyce’s aesthetic, given in full in chapter 5 of Portrait, was the result of many years of
thinking. Perhaps first stumbled upon when reading Ibsen, the double-realization was that art
need not be moral, and that the lives of supposedly “ordinary” people were as worthy subjects for
art as kings.
By declaring that art need not be moral, Joyce did not mean to favor the creation of immoral
art; rather he rejected didactic judgments of any kind. Art should not tell us how to live our lives
but, by understanding and experiencing genuine works of art, our own lives are vitalized.
He felt proper art, rather than being kinetic, was static: it didn’t impel you to do anything.
Rather you stand away and, instead of judging a work, you simply behold it. Here he used
Aquinas’ three terms when apprehending beauty: you apprehend a work’s integritas, its
wholeness as one thing. Next, you understand the relationship of each of the parts to one another,
each of the parts to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts: its consonantia. Finally there is
the breakthrough, the claritas, which Stephen Dedalus calls
the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything ... You
see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he
speaks is the scholastic quidditas, or whatness of a thing. 33
To help realize this, Joyce rejected the literal teachings of Catholicism but nevertheless
ransacked and made its symbols relevant to his secular art. He once remarked to Stanislaus,
Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass
and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying ... to give people some kind
of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of
everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for
their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift. 34
And on another occasion:
Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of that tram? Consider,
if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I
don’t mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his
thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of
trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may
eventually read me. 35
With help from Aristotle’s Poetics, he determined the proper nature of tragedy and comedy
(the latter which he came to prefer for his work), and distinguished three forms art can take on:
lyrical, epic, and dramatic. In the lyric, being “the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion,” the author and subject are one, and the experience is entirely personal. In the epic, the
events described are of equal distance from the author and from others, but the author is still
hovering there waiting to comment (this is the form most novels have always taken). But in the