It is on1y in her posthumous diary that we discover with what agony she struggled all through her life with this problem of how to convey the spirit without, or at any rate with, as little as possible of the flesh. One entry will suffice to reveal her in the throes of her dilemma: it was written when she was working over The Waves, which at that stage she was calling The Moths.

"Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that's not it-that's not it. What is it? And I shall die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it." It is not exact1y beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory, achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I; what am I; and so on ..."

If it were not for the whole context of her life one might dismiss this as anybody’s casual "What does it all mean?" Knowing her prevailíng attitude to life we see a sensitive, delicate-minded wornan-the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the eminent Cambridge rationalist who had been married to Thackeray’s daughter and had known almost every distinguished writer of his era; she was the goddaughter of James Russen Lowell; Meredith is said to have fallen in love with her when she was ten-walking in Russell Square (that is to say, lookíng out of her study-window) and not so much not knowing what she sees as not seeing it at all. Clouds and the moon. Narcissa involved in her own strangeness all her life. Subject and Object far from at loving peace with one another. The experience is certainly not intellectual, though she may think of it as "mystical." The actual event practically does not exist, nor time either. Russell. Square does not exist. It does not radiate out in associations, into accepted traditions, is not firmly seated, has so little sense of fixture or solidity that the moon is over Ispahan. Certainly this daughter of the great Victorians will not want to write of any sort of real, commonly accepted world. (She was to try it, once, in The Years, a novel that almost broke her, and which is the least characteristic of all her books, and can only be counted a sad failure--for her.)

Strachey: And your novel?
Virginia: Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.
Strachey: That’s what’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.
Virginia: Yes, l'm twenty people . . .

What order, form, method, meaning, one must wonder, can possíbly be won by the bran pie method?
Her Bloomsbury friends, one fears, were, like Strachey, too polite and kind, but one gave her a clear pointer to her difficulty, and with her usual honesty she saw the point. When Roger Fry told her that she was overdoíng the prose-lyric: vein, she saw the truth and force of the criticism. "I poetise my inanimate scenes, stress my personality, don't let the meaning emerge from the matiere." It was the outward symptom of her inability to come to terms with actuality, to give it a fair "do," to cut down her ration of "personality."

Here, for example, is an alleged1y prose passage describing a woman, Mrs. Dalloway, sewing by the window of her home in London. I print it for what it really is -vers libre:

That is a beautiful picture of Virginia Woolf. That is Nature holding the mirror up to the artist. That is an enchanting  pause set in the flow of life, like standing on a stepping-stone, for a second, to glance at the stream at one's feet, a brief, of necessity brief moment of personal ecstasy, a summary of a purification of the perpetual flux of cornmon things.

Inevitably she was never able to achieve organic form. She could not, because she was unable to extract from her experience any insight, any group of ideas, any clear, objective attitude that would - as the later Yeats did- impose form on its chaos. She remained to the end so intoxicated by the wonder of the universe that she never achieved a position of intellectual or emotional equipoise in relation to outer reality, never won control over herself or her material. At bottom her trouble was a psychological one; it was, in her own words: "Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker?"  But can Narcissus ever be outside Narcissus?

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In James Joyce who thinks it? Is the writer ever outside the thinker? Does he really sit in the clouds paring his nails in a godlike indifference to the doings of his characters? I suggest that he is not in the least as detached as all that: on the contrary, he is closely involved, both emotionally and intellectually, in the doings of all his characters. Yet he did achieve a remarkable degree of detachment, rare among such  subjective novelists as he.

Joyce may have foreseen this danger. For it is a danger to persuasiveness. We do not question the imagination, we allow it great liberties, but we do question that which is not a product of the imaginatíon. He might well have foreseen, then, that in putting himself into his novel he was laying a special strain on our sympathy. He might have foreseen that we might fear that: we were beíng "got at" through a ventriloquist's dummy. And it is true that we will always be slow, or actually may cease, to give our assent to any book where we feel that the characters are not autonomous, but are being manipulated by a marionette-master-as happens constantly when we read Graham Greene.

Joyce therefore employed three devices to give us the illusion of detachment, of objectivity. (1) He built up a realistic background by the use of a meticulously accurate naturalistic detail. (2) He used this naturalistic realism to persuade us that he was quite detached intellectually from Stephen Dedalus, especially by his frequent use of ironical comment on Stephen through sardonic contrasts. (3) He then boldly employed the subjective method to cast the spell of Stephen's personality over us; and did it so well that it is with the greatest difficulty that we withhold from him our entirely uncritical sympathy.

Almost any sequence in which Stephen Dedalus appears shows this triple device at work. Its main purpose is always the same: to lure us into the interior of Dedalus-Joyce. Once we enter that magic cave the spell becomes well-nigh irresistible.

His treatment of Buck Mulligan is most cunning. For while the actuality of Buck Mulligan is undeniable, we note that just as Mulligan literally presents his shaving-mirror to Stephens eyes, in these opening pages he is also, metaphorically, holding a mirror up to him for our benefit. Stephen sees himself in Mulligan's eyes. In fact, the whole saraband of characters who circle about Stephen do likewise. He-and Joyce--oscillates constantly between a cool observation of his fellows and  fevered contemplation of himse1f. This does not make him  complete Narcissus, but he is partially a Narcissus insofar as he is incapable of seeing any character without relating him to himself. His detachínent, in short, is not only an illusion but, if we are deceived by it, a delusion. We might go so far as to call it a confidence trick which he plays on us. (He was, also, no doubt, playing it on himse1f.)  "See," he seems to say to us, and to himself, "how truthful I am about places, people, dates, details. How objective I am when I remove the mask from Cranly, Bloom, Lister, A.E., Father Conmee, Mulligan. See how I mock the dreams of this young fool Dedalus." We are deeply impressed. We applaud. We fail to notice that these characters only seem to go freely on their own fair or unfair flesh1y way- "seem," because all the time they are being functional to Stephen whose life is lived at their center, reflecting them, reflected in them, turning back constantly to himself from them, self-concerned, intellectual, an ego brooding on himself, using them to see and express himself in a private world which is, at every moment of self-consideration, not their world but his own private cosmos-which is, in fact, the author's main subject. When this happens is Joyce "outside the thinker?"  Are we? We, too, become part-Narcissus, and the figures that shimmer in the pool under our eyes are, for those revealing moments, no longer objectíve. It is this Dedalus-spell which is, in the ultimate, the spell of the Portrait and Ulysses, and while we delight in it we must fear it.       

What Joyce is doíng is to blind us to the fact that this is, after all, an enclosed, prívate and highly personal world, the envelopment of his romantic moi, with which we identify ourselves. Joyec's world is as prívate a world as that of Proust. But Joyce, too, is like Proust in search of essences-whích he calls epiphanies. If we were, then, to believe from Stephen's descríption of his aesthetic in Stephen Hero that Joyce was a classicist, we would be very wide of the mark. The amount of romanticism infused into his work by his near-narcissism and exhibitionism is abundant and pervasive.

Does it matter? It matters enormously. For what we are dealing with is a man's life-sense, his view of life, his personal maniere de voir, expressed in terms of a novel. For what, after all, is a novel but precisely this~-one man's way of seeing things. To define it explicitly: a novel is a prose-narrative dealíng with a number of characters whom the author succeeds in making interesting and persuasive, and whom he deploys in a manner that, within his view of lífe, he considers fitting, and we with hím. The external interest of his characters is primary in point of teclinique; their internal interest is primary in point of importance. They are decoys, no more. We do not read about them for their sake, we read about them for what the author conveys, speaking in terms of character as a painter speaks in terms of colors and forms. He selects the characters that will convey his maniere de voir, he emphasizes chosen aspects of their behavior, he gives them the fate that he, with what one may vulgarly call his "philosophy," considers fitting for these his representative figures. Naturally, the more individual the writer is, the more personal to his own view of life will this idea or notion of fitness be. So that, at all times, when reading a novel we must first form a clear idea of the sort of spectacles a writer wears; otherwise wé shall not understand at all what he is getting at, which is more or less what: Mlle Claude Edmond-Magny means by saying that all criticism is autobiography: the reader, or critic, always walking arm in arm with the writer, and saying Yes or No in terms of his own experience.

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The most striking thing in all Joyce's work is the impression he constantly conveys of a nature torn between a painful sense of shame and an almost diabolical pride. The one postulates the other. If we glance over, say, the last hundred pages of A Portrait of the A rtist as a Young Man it ís surprising how often the two notes are struck in references to Poverty. So, when Stephen talks to Davin in his room among the poor streets around Grantham Street he is affected by the thought of the "starving Irish village" which is Davin's background, and on leaving Davin he is importuned by a flower-seller to whom he twice says he has no money. At the corner of Saint Stephen's Green this moment of "discouraged poverty" is prolonged in bitter hurt by the memory of the "tawdry tribute" paid to the patriot Wolfe Tone in 1898, and the whole city, past and present, seems "venal" to him, a purchasable quantity.

In a characteristic contrast, when he entera the College and begins to discuss the nature of the Beautiful with a priest, the priest is lighting a fire with parsimoniously garnered candle-ends, and "a desolating pity" begins "to fall like dew upon his easily embittered heart." (There may or may not be a symbol here of the materials of which the fire of faith ia made.) At the lecture which follows he does not even possess a sheet of paper on which to take notes, but immediately after it he reveals or boasts to some of his fellows that he has been to the Office of Arms to look up his family tree. "I know you are poor," he says frankly to Lynch, and shares his last cigarette with him. When a fat student says he has joined a field club to he1p his botany studies, Stephen says drily: "Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you go out ... to make a stew."

When, thinking of his love, he lies in bed writing a villanelle the contrasting squalor of his room is emphasized in a typically masochistic Joyceian vein. There is a reference to a broken shoe-sole. He is distracted by a louse crawling on his neck, and 'The life of bis body, ill clad, ill fed, louse eaten" makes him   "close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair." Soon after, as he pauses outside Maple's Hotel its façade stings him "like a glance of polite disdain" and he imagines "the sleek líves of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm" and he derides the whole batlike race of serfs to whom he belongs-kowtowing to these nabobs. Cranly now joins him and he mocks, to him, his father's position and his own circumstances. "Born," Cranly says sardonically, "in the lap of luxury." It is in this passage of arms with Cranly, who is intent on bringing him. to realize his condition and compromise with it, that he utters his final arrogant decision to be bought by nobody, to serve nobody, but to achieve his ambition to be whole and free.

Note the setting for the passage. It occurs at the end of Chapter IV which, we recall, opens with an account of Stephen's life after the famous Retreat. He has begun to order his life into a rosary of virtuous thoughts and acts; he has bound his hot flesh with the cincture of purity; he has submitted his mind to humility and piety. While he is in this mood, a Jesuit, toying with a loop of cord from the windowblind, tries -in a striking passage- to lure him into the noose of the order of Loyola. He retums to his home, described naturalistically with the discarded crusts on the kitchen table and the lees of tea in the bottoms of the jam jars and jam pots that do service for cups in this impoverished household, and he finds his brothers and sisters, in the fading afterglow of the dying day, sitting tranquilly about the table and, in their young etiolated voices, singing that sad song of Tom Moore's, "Oft in the Stilly Night." The seene is described in a naturalistic way but it is probable that we are expected to hear Joyce's fine -tenor voice lingering over the words (which he does not print) that give significance to the moment:

The smiles, the tears of boyhood years,
The words of love then spoken .

Or, sardonically:

I feel like one who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted . . .

At which point we have entered the young man's mind again. We next find him on the wide strand at Dollymount on a lovely day of dappled seaborne clouds." The Jesuit's temptation has passed. (In all Joyce we will note that the pilgrim's progress is reversed. Satan is tempted by Christ, but surmounts Him.) Why, Stephen asks himself, has he not surrendered to the priest's pleadings? The answer is not stated but is , clearly given in the following naturalistic description of a "squad" of "Christian Brothers" with "uncouth faces" tramping back to their monastery. We have again oscillated inward when the sight of them raises "a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration" in his face. (In that Ireland, to be a Christian Brother was to be on about the same level as a Plymouth Brother.) The clouds now dominate his mind, clouds blowing westward across the Irish Sea from Britain, from Europe, and they raise within him a confused music and old memories and names that gradually recede and merge ínto "a voice from beyond the world" calling him by his ancient name: Stephanos Dedalos! BousStephanoumenosl Bous Stephaneforos!

It is here at last that the image of the flying artificer rises in his mind, dispelling those melancholy images of lost boyhood that Tom Moore's song had evoked the night before.

"His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proud1y out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a livíng thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable."

Just then he sees, as in a vision, a true showing-forth, a girl standing among the rock-pools on long, white legs, her thighs as soft-hued as ivory, her bosom as soft and slight as a darkplumaged dove. The image informs and enchants him. He cries out in joyful profanity:

"Her image had pused into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fan, to triumph, to re-create life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!"

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1 think we must agree that these are not the sort of moments of vision that illuminate life for Virginia Woolf. These are moments infinitely expanded and fortified by Joyce's awareness of the intellectual content of all experience, its moral content, giving to his narrative a force and a meaning far beyond that of mere aesthetic or sensory experience, radiating out of an intense personal drama, in which the antagonists bear many names and aspects-shame, pride, surrender, revolt, good, evil, faith, unfaith, liberty, fraternization-but all of them so many elements in the interpretation of the protean life-sense of one satanically and triumphantly arrogant young Irishman bearing the banner with the device, Non Serviam. The point is that Joyce's epiphanies are, at theír most effective, far more than tinglings along the nerves. They come from somewhere far beyond the actual of the there and the then, the external Dublin, the overt reality. His mirror-bearers are men, but the images they reñect are more than human, because they pierce into the man's depths where the struggle and the prize are both superhuman. Dedalus is the persona or mask of a man who has handed back his ticket to the Almighty out of much more than human pity for the sufferings of humanity. He is a Promethean rebel defying Nature and God by the extent and intent of his rejection. He re-invokes Camus's statement about the individualist-that he must reject reality in order to affirm his own existence. "He wanted," we are told of Dedalus, "to meet in the real world the unsubstantíal image which his soul constantly beheld." Not finding it there, he will fly away like his famous namesake from and beyond the world.

That flight from Dublin - of Dedalus and of Joyce - is de symbol of a far greater flight. Dublin is his microcosm of the total divergence between Man and God. For in rejecting his native city and all it stood for, he rejected his one fated field of life wherein he might have read the signatures of mortal things and made them tolerable, intelligible, meaningful. In their place he hoped to create, like a God, a completely new materiality. This splendid1y blasphemous intent is to be found in that part of his first novel wherein he makes the absurd claim for himself, as an artist, which his whole work in fact belies-that the artist can be detached. "The personality of the artist . . . refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination." So far we can go with him. But then: "The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails . . ." And so far one cannot go with him, since the artist cannot but be, him
that was terrible enough to be worth denying, and in denying which he clarified himself. Before he finished with Ireland he at least knew what he did not believe in, and had inklings of what was worthy of a man.

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