It is in comparing this city-world, vague, diffuse, amorphous, with that narrower, but more integrated and still perfumed, if wholly decadent, world of Proust’s that we realize the change which has come over the world in but a few years. The things men discussed in that artificial world of the Faubourg St. Germain no longer bear resemblance to that which passes for conversation in the streets and pubs and brothels of Dublin. That fragrance which emanates from the pages of Proust, what is it but the fragrance of a dying world, the last faint perfume of things running to seed?
When, via Ulysses, we penetrate Dublin and there detect the flora and fauna stratified in the memory of a highly civilized, highly sensitive being such as Joyce, we realize that the absence of fragrance, the deodorization, is the result of death. What seem to be alive and walking, loving, talking, drinking people are not people, but ghosts. The drama is one of liquefaction; it is not even static, as in Proust’s case. Analysis is no longer possible because the organism is defunct. Instead of the examination of a dying, though still intact, organism, as with Proust, we find ourselves inspecting cell life, wasted organs, diseased membranes. A study in etiology, such as the Egyptologists give us in their post-mortems of post-mortems. A description of life via the mummy. The great Homeric figure of Ulysses, shrunk to the insignificant shadow now of Bloom, now of Daedalus, wanders through the dead and forsaken world of the big city; the anemic, distorted and desiccated reflections of what were once epic events which Joyce is said to have plotted out in his famous ground-plan remain but simulacra, the shadow and tomb of ideas, events, people.
When one day the final interpretation of Ulysses is given us by the “anatomists of the soul” we shall have the most astounding revelations as to the significance of this work. Then indeed we shall know the full meaning of this “record diarrhoea.” Perhaps then we shall see that not Homer but defeat forms the real ground-plan, the invisible pattern of his work.
In the famous chapter of question and answer is it wittingly or unwittingly that Joyce reveals the empty-soul quality of the modern man, this wretch who is reduced to a bundle of tricks, this encyclopedic ape who displays the most amazing technical facility? Is Joyce this man who can imitate any style—even the textbook and the encyclopedia? This form of humor, in which Rabelais also indulged, is the specific remedy which the intellectual employs to defeat the moral man: it is the dissolvent with which he destroys a whole world of meaning. With the Dadaists and the Surrealists the powerful stress on humor was part of a conscious and deliberate attitude toward breaking down the old ideologies. We see the same phenomenon in Swift and Cervantes. But observe the difference between the humor of Rabelais, with whom the author of Ulysses is so frequently and unjustly compared, and Joyce. Mark the difference between that formidable Surrealist, Jonathan Swift, and the feeble iconoclasts who today call themselves Surrealists! Rabelais’s humor was still healthy; it had a stomachic quality, it was inspired by the Holy Bottle. Whereas with our contemporaries it is all in the head, above the eyes—a vicious, envious, mean, malign, humorless mirth. Today they are laughing out of desperation, out of despair. Humor? Hardly. A reflexive muscular twitch, rather—more gruesome than mirth-provoking. A sort of onanistic laughter . . . In those marvelous passages where Joyce marries his rich excretory images to his sad mirth there is a poignant, wistful undercurrent which smells of reverence and idolatry. Reminiscent, too reminiscent, of those devout medieval louts who kneeled before the Pope to be anointed with dung.
In this same chapter of riddle and conundrum there is a profound despair, the despair of a man who is giving the works to the last myth—Science. That disintegration of the ego which was sounded in Ulysses, and is now being carried to the extreme limits in Work in Progress, does it not correspond faithfully to the outer, world disintegration? Do we not have here the finest example of that phenomenon touched on before—schizophrenia? The dissolution of the macrocosm goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the soul. With Joyce the Homeric figure goes over into its opposite, we see him splitting off into multitudes of characters, heroes, legendary figures, into trunks, arms, legs, into river, tree and rock and beast. Working down and down and down into the now stratified layers of the collective being, groping and groping for his lost soul, struggling like an heroic worm to re-enter the womb. What did he mean, Joyce, when on the eve of Ulysses he wrote that he wanted “to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race?” When he cried out—“No, mother, let me be; let me live!”—was that a cry of anguish from a soul imprisoned in the womb? That opening picture of the bright morning sea, the image of navel and scrotum, followed by the harrowing scene with the mother—everywhere and throughout the mother image. “I love everything that flows,” he says to one of his admirers, and in his new book there are hundreds of rivers, including his own native Liffey. What a thirst! What a longing for the waters of life! If only he could be cast up again on a distant shore, in another clime, under different constellations! Sightless bard . . . lost soul . . . eternal wanderer. What longing, groping, seeking, searching for an all-merciful bosom, for the night in which to drown his restless, fruitless spirit! Like the sun itself which, in the course of a day, rises from the sea and disappears again, so Ulysses takes its cosmic stance, rising with a curse and falling with a sigh. But like a sun that is up-to-date the split-hero of Ulysses wanders, not over the waters of life and death, but through the eternal, monotonous mournful, empty, lugubrious streets of the big city—dirty Dublin, the sink of the world.
If the Odyssey was a remembrance of great deeds Ulysses is a forgetting. That black, restless, never-ending flow of words in which the twin-soul of Joyce is swept like a clot of waste matter passing through the drains, this stupendous deluge of pus and excrement which washes through the book languidly seeking an outlet, at last gets choked and, rising like a tidal wave, blots out the whole shadowy world in which this shadowy epic was conceived. The chapter before the last, which is the work of a learned desperado, is like the dynamiting of a dam. The dam, in the unconscious symbology of Joyce, is the last barrier of tradition and culture which must give way if man is to come into his own. Each idiotic question is a hole drilled by a madman and charged with dynamite; each idiotic answer is the detonation of a devastating explosion. Joyce, the mad baboon, herein gives the works to the patient antlike industry of man which has accumulated about him like an iron ring of dead learning.
When the last vestige has been blown up comes the flood. The final chapter is a free fantasia such as has never been seen before in all literature. It is a transcription of the deluge—except that there is no ark. The stagnant cesspool of the cultural drama which comes again and again to nought in the world-city, this drama which was personified by the great whore of Babylon, is echoed in the timeless reverie of Molly Bloom whose ears are stuffed by the lapping of the black waters of death. The very image of Woman, Molly Bloom bulks large and enduring. Beside her the others are reduced to pygmies. Molly Bloom is water, tree, and earth. She is mystery, she is the devourer, the ocean of night in which the lost hero finally plunges, and with him the world.
There is something about Molly Bloom, as she lies a-dreaming on her dirty, crummy bed, which carries us back to primordial images. She is the quintessence of the great whore which is Woman, of Babylon the vessel of abominations. Floating, unresisting, eternal, all-contained, she is like the sea itself. Like the sea she is receptive, fecund, voracious, insatiable. She begets and she destroys; she nourishes and she devastates. With Molly Bloom, con anonyme, woman is restored to prime significance—as womb and matrix of life. She is the image of nature itself, as opposed to the illusory world which man, because of his insufficiency, vainly endeavors to displace.
And so, with a final, triumphant vengeance, with suicidal glee, all the threads which were dropped throughout the book are recapitulated; the pale, diminutive hero, reduced to an intestinal worm and carried like a tickling little phallus in the great body of the female, returns to the womb
of nature, shorn of everything but the last symbol. In the long retrospective arc which is drawn we have the whole trajectory of man’s flight from unknown to unknown. The rainbow of history fades out. The great dissolution is accomplished. After that closing picture of Molly Bloom a-dreaming on her dirty bed we can say, as in Revelation—And there shall be no more curse! Henceforth no sin, no guilt, no fear, no repression, no longing, no pain of separation. The end is accomplished—man returns to the womb.
OF ART AND THE FUTURE
(FROM SUNDAY AFTER THE WAR)
In the book where this text appears there is a footnote saying—“Written expressly for Cyril Connolly.” How this happened I am at a loss to recall. Most likely Connolly, then editor of the London magazine Horizon, had requested “a literary flowerpot” for old times’ sake. I had met Connolly several times in Paris and, when I settled in Big Sur, he paid me a visit—primarily, I discovered later, to have a look at the sea otters, now rare, which could be seen at the foot of the cliff where we then lived. He was crazy about sea otters.
The text was written in the Green House at Beverly Glen (California), with John Dudley, now dead, looking over my shoulder and giving me counsel now and then. It was a water-color period rather than a writing one. At the time I was more interested in reading Rimbaud and in talking astrology. I was also trying to get some one to make a film of the “Maurizius Case” (Wassermann). With the aid of a Viennese physician and judge then living in Hollywood, I tried to write a script for the movies, but no one was interested.
The war was still on, my royalties from Europe were cut off, and I was in the doldrums. It was more fun to paint water colors and talk to Knud Merrild, the Danish painter, who wrote that remarkable book, called A Poet and Two Painters, on D. H. Lawrence.
To most men the past is never yesterday, or five minutes ago, but distant, misty epochs some of which are glorious and others abominable. Each one reconstructs the past according to his temperament and experience. We read history to corroborate our own views, not to learn what scholars think to be true. About the future there is as little agreement as about the past, I’ve noticed. We stand in relation to the past very much like the cow in the meadow—endlessly chewing the cud. It is not something finished and done with, as we sometimes fondly imagine, but something alive, constantly changing, and perpetually with us. But the future too is with us perpetually, and alive and constantly changing. The difference between the two, a thoroughly fictive one, incidentally, is that the future we create whereas the past can only be recreated. As for that constantly vanishing point called the present, that fulcrum which melts simultaneously into past and future, only those who deal with the eternal know and live in it, acknowledging it to be all.
At this moment, when almost the entire world is engaged in war, the plight of a few artists—for we never have more than a handful, it seems—appears to be a matter of the utmost unimportance. At the outbreak of the war art was by universal agreement at a perilously low ebb. So was life, one might say. The artist, always in advance of his time, could register nothing but death and destruction. The normal ones, i.e., the unfeeling, unthinking ones, regarded the art products of their time as morbid, perverse and meaningless. Just because the political picture was so black they demanded of their hirelings that they paint something bright and pleasing. Now all are bogged down, those who saw and those who did not, and what the future contains is dependent on that very creative quality which unfortunately seems vital only in times of destruction. Now every one is exhorted to be creative—with gun in hand.
To every man fighting to bring the war to a victorious end the result of the conflict calls up a different picture. To resume life where one left off is undoubtedly the deepest wish of those now participating in the holocaust. It is here that the greatest disillusionment will occur. To think of it descriptively we have to think of a man jumping off a precipice, escaping miraculously from certain death and then, as he starts to climb back, suddenly discovering that the whole mountain side has collapsed. The world we knew before September 1939 is collapsing hour by hour. It had been collapsing long before that, but we were not so aware of it, most of us. Paris, Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Rome, London, New York—they may still be standing when peace is declared, but it will be as though they did not exist. The cultural world in which we swam, not very gracefully, to be sure, is fast disappearing. The cultural era of Europe, and that includes America, is finished. The next era belongs to the technician; the day of the mind machine is dawning. God pity us!
Taking a rough, uncritical view of history we realize at a glance that in every stage of civilization the condition of the common man has been anything but a civilized one. He has lived like a rat—through good epochs and bad ones. History was never written for the common man but for those in power. The history of the world is the history of a privileged few. Even in its grandeur it stinks.
We are not suddenly going to turn a new page with the cessation of this fratricidal war. Another wretched peace will be made, never fear, and there will be another breathing spell of ten or twenty years and then we shall go to war again. And the next war will also be regarded as a just and holy war, as is this one now. But whatever the reason for or nature of the coming war, it will no more resemble this one than this one resembles the previous one which, significantly enough, we speak of as “World War No. 1.” In the future we shall have only “world wars”—that much is already clear.
With total wars a new element creeps into the picture. From now on every one is involved, without exception. What Napoleon began with the sword, and Balzac boasted he would finish with the pen, is actually going to be carried through by the collaboration of the whole wide world, including the primitive races whom we study and exploit shamelessly and ruthlessly. As war spreads wider and wider so will peace sink deeper and deeper into the hearts of men. If we must fight more whole-heartedly we shall also be obliged to live more whole-heartedly. If the new kind of warfare demands that everybody and everything under the sun be taken cognizance of, so will the new kind of peace. Not to be able to be of service will be unthinkable. It will constitute the highest treason, probably punishable by death. Or perhaps a more ignominious end awaits the unfit and unserviceable: in lieu of becoming cannon fodder they may become just fodder.
The First World War ushered in the idea of a league of nations, an international court of arbitration. It failed because there was no real solidarity among the so-called nations, most of them being only cats’ paws. This war will bring about the realization that the nations of the earth are made up of individuals, not masses. The common man will be the new factor in the world-wide collective mania which will sweep the earth.
The date most commonly agreed upon (by professional prophets) for the end of this war is the fall of 1947. But by 1944 it is quite possible that the war will assume its true aspect, that of world-wide revolution. It will get out of the control of those now leading “the masses” to slaughter. The masses will slaughter in their own fashion for a while. The collapse of Germany and Italy will precipitate the debacle, thereby creating a rift between the British and American peoples, for England (her men of power) is still more fearful of a Russian victory than of a German defeat. France has still to play her true role. Fired by the success of the Soviets, she will overlap all bounds, and, just as in the French Revolution, amaze the world by her spirit and vitality. There will be more blood shed in France than in any other part of Europe, before a quietus is established.
An era of chaos and confusion, beginning in 1944, will continue until almost 1960. All boundaries will be broken down, class lines obliterated, and money become worthless. It will be a caricature of the Marxian Utopia. The world will be enthralled by the ever-unfolding prospects seeming to offer nothing but good. Then suddenly it will be like the end of a debauch. A protracted state of Katzenjammer will set in. Then commences the real work of consolidation, when Europe gets set to meet the Asiatic invasion, due about the turn of the century. For,
with the culmination of this war, China and India will play a most prominent and important part in world affairs. We have roused them from their lethargy and we shall pay for having awakened them. The East and the West will meet one day—in a series of deathlike embraces.* After that the barriers between peoples and races will break down and the melting pot (which America only pretends to be) will become an actuality. Then, and only then, will the embryonic man of the new order appear, the man who has no feeling of class, caste, color or country, the man who has no need of possessions, no use for money, no archaic prejudices about the sanctity of the home or of marriage with its accompanying treadmill of divorce. A totally new conception of individuality will be born, one in which the collective life is the dominant note. In short, for the first time since the dawn of history, men will serve one another, first out of an enlightened self-interest, and finally out of a greater conception of love.
The distinctive feature of this “epoch of the threshold,” so to speak, will be its visionary-realistic quality. It will be an era of realization, accomplishment and vision. It will create deeper, more insoluble problems than ever existed before. Immense horizons will open up, dazzling and frightening ones. The ensuing conflicts will assume more and more the character of clashes between wizards, making our wars appear puny and trifling by comparison. The white and the black forces will come out in the open. Antagonisms will be conscious and deliberate, engaged in joyously and triumphantly, and to the bitter end. The schisms will occur not between blocs of nations or peoples but between two divergent elements, both clear-cut and highly aware of their goals, and the line between them will be as wavering as the flow of the zodiacal signs about the ecliptic. The problem for the next few thousand years will be one of power, power in the abstract and ultimate. Men will be drunk with power, having unlocked the forces of the earth in ways now only dimly apprehended. The consolidation of the new individuality, rooted in the collective (man no longer worshiping the Father but acknowledging sources of power greater than the Sun), will dissolve the haunting problem of power. A dynamic equilibrium, based upon the recognition of a new creative center, will establish itself, permitting the free play of all the fluid, potent forces locked within the human corpus. Then it may be possible to look forward to the dawn of what has already been described as “The Age of Plentitude.”†
The Henry Miller Reader Page 25