Faintly Contemptible Vessels
Though the two enjoyed much the same milieu in the expatriate society of Paris, Thornton Wilder and James Joyce plied their trade at such far removes of the stylistic spectrum that it is easy to conceive of them as occupying entirely separate literary epochs. Joyce’s prose is as erudite and self-conscious as Stephen Dedalus himself. Wilder’s has the free and easy fictive air of an uncle spinning tales for his nieces and nephews around the Thanksgiving table. Joyce whirls the reader’s imagination across the page in the torrent of his prose, while Wilder’s words are both window and mirror, like a limpid, slow-flowing stream.
For all their variance of style, Wilder and Joyce demonstrate a shared interest in the infinite possibilities of storytelling. The span of 265,222 words which comprises Ulysses may fairly leave us gaping in wonder, not simply at the how—the technical fireworks, the endless allusions amounting to immersion in the totality of the literary tradition, the weave of narrative layers—but also at the why. Why did Joyce choose these words? Why did he arrange them thus? Why did he choose in this place straightforward narration, while in that he favored the most abstruse interior monologue? Every moment of the text provides an opportunity for like wondering.
These questions depend upon certain assumptions about authorial intent: that it exists, that it has meaning for the reader, that it remains operative when the pen has been capped and the cover designed and the voices of the reviewers have begun to tune up. We will leave the question more or less aside for the moment, except to observe, in the first place, that much as we might like to separate art from author, we remain curiously intent upon ferreting out every facet of our great artists’ lives. In the second, though we tend not to care in the least about the names, habits, or manners of our chief automotive engineers and though we hardly know the workings of a half dozen of the hundreds of parts under the hood, we accept that the engineer knows them and we expect that his intention remains at work in the daily accomplishment of our commute.
Whatever their intentions in the execution of their works, both Wilder and Joyce make it plain that they are deeply concerned with how it is that fiction gets written. One of the first questions the author must consider is that of narration. How—that is, through whom—is the tale to be delivered? The answer has considerable implications for how the tale is received. There are certain authors whose narrators we tend entirely to trust, either for their majesty or for a simple presence which strikes the mind as unexceptionable. Tolstoy’s in War and Peace, at least until the wandering philippics against Napoleon, comes to mind. We are perfectly content to be told at the outset of Pride and Prejudice that such and such men must be in want of wives. Of course they must.
Then there are narrators who by their very peculiarities make us ask, Who are we dealing with? It is not necessarily that we don’t trust them. Yet they’ve said something to make us stop for a moment and eye them askance.
Consider the opening of Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel ends, in a sense, in its opening line: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” The bridge, we are told, is a local institution, a sine qua non of the spiritual tenor of Lima in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite the clear rendering of this bridge as categorically unreliable—it is over a century old and it is woven of osier; we know full well that, saintly patronage or no, the thing has to snap someday—we immediately wonder with the rest of Peru that it should have been those five who died thus, and we feel quite plainly that it could as easily have been us walking across that bridge that glorious July day as them.
We are told of a witness to this wonder: Brother Juniper, a Northern Italian Franciscan who in the course of his missionary labors happens to come round a bend and hear the twang and watch the dread plunge. Again, it is astonishing enough that anyone should happen to observe this gruesome tableau. Brother Juniper, not content merely to wonder, begins a labor he has long pondered but now finds possible: a grand theodicy. To determine what course of providence brought them all to that pass and so justify the ways of God to man, Brother Juniper dedicates his life to tracing scientifically the courses of the five lives fallen from the bridge that day. Because Brother Juniper seems to think that, could he know in full both the laws of spiritual physics and the position of every soul at any given moment, he could map out all the past and future courses of salvation, he begins to interview all of Lima, filling notebook after notebook with the helpful, misleading information of the citizenry, who are eager to assist the Brother in understanding this accident which struck so near to each of their hearts. The remainder of the novel thus leads, thread by thread, back to the disaster where it began.
As with many life-absorbing labors, Brother Juniper’s comes almost to nought. His great book is burned in a public square, under circumstances not revealed to us (though the whiff of the Inquisition emerges frequently throughout the story). However, a copy of the text made its way into a university library, and our narrator has had the fortune to study it.
We have been primed to follow the Juniperan account of our tragic lives, but it is just at the point when we are prepared for this that this narrator emerges from his omniscience to set himself alongside us and Br. Juniper as fellow seekers. The narrator gives us a bracing reminder of the limits of fiction and of sympathy: “Yet for all his diligence Brother Juniper never knew the central passion of Dona Maria’s life…And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?”
Who are we dealing with here? Our narrator seems not to be, like Juniper, a religious and a spiritual mathematician. He is rather a poet. Does he indeed know so much more than Brother Juniper did, and, if so, in what does this knowledge consist?
This last is in its way a strange question. We inheritors of the Cartesian dream are taught early and often that there is but one sort of knowledge and that if we had enough of it we could know all the past and all the future and banish the fictions which for a hundred millennia have spelled our ruin. What distinguishes matters of faith from those of mathematics—or even, we might add, those of metaphysics, psychology, or ethics, from those of mathematics—is the degree of certainty to which our native faculties alone can attain.
The question at hand, then, is one which demands that we take stock of the many ways and several perspectives whereby we can get to know the world and ourselves in it. Whether our source be Brother Juniper or the nameless narrator, whether we consider the sadness and suffering of existence through the eyes of la Marquesa de Montemayor, or Esteban, or Uncle Pio, we must ultimately make an existential stand. What will we stake our lives on? And to what degree will our stance permit our embracing the many existences which at all times swirl around us?
Again, for all the stylistic difference—and the narrator of San Luis Rey tells us that style is the “faintly contemptible vessel whereby the bitter liquid [of the heart poured forth on the page] is recommended to the world”—Joyce shows himself concerned with much the same questions in Ulysses. There is something mathematical in Joyce’s approach, an obsessive concern with distances, times, routes, position, and velocities. He knew exactly how long it would take Mr. Bloom to get from Eccles St. to the butcher’s and just how far the Liffey, given the tides, would take a betting slip slung down upon its bosom by mid-afternoon. Yet in all this, Joyce’s concern is not mastery of past and future but, with Wilder’s narrator, “the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart.”
Such notation often confounds us. Its modulation through the diversity of consciousness we meet in Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold and Molly Bloom, to say nothing of Dignam, Boylan, Fr. Conmee, Mina Purefoy, and the Citizen, demands an openness of heart which eludes our adversarial politicism and an attention to being which soars high above the vision of the physical sciences. For the readers, the task runs in tandem with the author’s: the reliability of fiction’s inhabitants is so vastly variable that to get to know them constitutes a highly refined moral education, an instruction in avoiding the cyclopic vision which is our typical democratic posture.
Modernity has bequeathed us a dual inheritance: a mode of knowing bounded by the methods of the physical sciences and a mode of story-telling assured, even in its inchoate, primitive, or else post-Logical way, of the Logos-ruled capacities of man. We feel at once that the breaking of the bridge of San Luis Rey is a mere accident—not even that, but the eternally ordained effect of physics—and yet we cannot help believing that it was not for the sake of physics that the Marquesa fell to her death just two days after coming to know the import of love. The novelist, the poet, steps for a moment through the mathematical into the suffering motion of the Logos and invites us with him to the freshness biding every age in the human heart.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings. His new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by sculptor Timothy Schmalz, was published this year in celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.