JULY 2004

LECTURE ON

a day in the life of a man who solicits advertisements for an insurance company (sic). The whole day is described from beginning to end. What exactly did Joyce do?He took one character, one person, one event and looked at it under an incredible microscope. Ordinarily you could describe a day like that in three or four pages. He began to examine all the details under the microscope, that is, he unfurled everything that you see at that moment...But as a method this forces art into science, that is, a method which is appropriate to science is applied to art. I mean scientific not in a global sense, but in some limited sector. In his microscopic treatment of phenomena Joyce uses for artistic purposes a method more appropriate to science....

When Joyce approached that character a whole complex of other complicated phenomena ocurred to him. But he didn't have a unified approach..... He took that insignificant figure and examined it greatly enlarged. As in every brilliant work, the treatment of the theme and the content permeates the form as well. What happens with Joyce? If he is examining the content (that very same individual) under the microscope, then the texture of the writing ends up under the microscope as well. I told you that every phrase, every speech period, consists of various genres; questions and answers, figurative definitions, enumeration of facts, and so on. It this is typical for every speech period and phrase, then what do we get with Joyce? He also enlarges each stylistic possibility to the size of a chapter and he has chapters written in a different style. One chapter is written in the form of a catechism: the whold plot is laid out in the form of questions and answers. So what did Bloom and his companion do at such and such a time? They walked up to the house. And after they had walked up to the house, what did they do? They looked for the key and when they found it they put it in the lock and unlocked the door. Another chapter is build around the imitation of sounds. there the construction is based on the sound that is going on at the time.........This means that the elements of onomatoepoeia which exist in every normal word are raised to the form of a whole chapter. He has a scene that takes place in the editorial office of a newspaper. All the action in that office is described by means of headlines, and the content and brief information - what was happening - in bold face. And all the dialogue, the whole scene going on at the office at that time is portrayed using that method, as in some cheap newspaper. And each chapter is wroitten in the corresponding stylistic key. Each chapter has its own forms, and it's chosen not just because it's original, but each time it is tailored to the specific nature of the plot, sometimes more successfully, sometimes less so. Sometimes it becomes a mannerism, just a mannerism and sometimes it's appropriate. A whole chapter is written without any punctuation. This is the chapter where Bloom's wife is lying in bed falling asleep and remembering her three lovers. Her thoughts intertwine. The style of this chapter is though which hasn't been broken down by logic, when you begin to fall asleep, when one subject merges into another, one word into another.

Someone in the audience comments: Dos Passos does that,

Don't ever draw parallels, especially with the 42nd Parallel (published 1930), that just confuses things. It's disgraceful what the critics are doing, linking Joyce with Proust or whomever. Don't make that mistake.

There are a few chapters which are constructed on the principle of tour de force. There's one chapter that takes place in a maternity hospital, waiting for the birth of a child. And this chapter is written so that from beginning to end the language in which it is written reproduces the whole birth process. It begins with Old English and gradually goes through all forms of syntax and speech until the birth of the child, when it gets to the language of today. It's a purely stylistic study of the movement of style, done on the theme of the birth of a child.

It's a made thing, therefore, sometimes directly, like the dreaming of that woman as she falls asleep, that is, pure realism, pure naturalism, the imprint of the thought process. In another case it is given a form, as in a newspaper. Short dialogues fit into that form very well. Sometimes it's done in the form of a pun, when the birth of a child is rendered in the form of the birth of language......What we are saying is that in every ordinary construction, you use this very same polygenrism. And now you have in Joyce a brilliant example, where you have that polygenrism raised to hyperbole.

An absolute literary value can be controversial. But from the point of view of the accumulation of authorial experience, from the point of view of the study of the possibilities and devices of writing in this form, you can already see from my short exposition the degree to which the fund of Joyce's experience is inexhaustible. the same thing also happens when, for example, you study those corpuscles in the blood: you don't take a pail of blood, you take a drop...and you look into the microscope............You look at that drop of blood under the microscope and you see what you need. And the same is true for studying, mastering the texture of the literary art. It's extremely useful for you to have a work like Joyce's, which you can examine and come to understand.

Audience comment: Is it compositionally unified?

Brilliantly!In spite of the incredible tour de force of the language it is a brilliant work. It is one of a kind. But it's important to me that you understand that in relation to the literary texture of the writing, you have a model being examined under the microscope. You have a magnification, and if you need it in its normal dimensions, then it's useful to know that in advance. The usefulness, in the sense of learning the art of literature from Joyce, is tremendous.

Criticism of Joyce goes along other lines. I don't want to talk about that now. The evaluation of him is very incorrect. Right now I am studying questions of the technique of writing and the form of writing. You understand that there is an enormous amount of material here for the aquisition of experience. For the first time you have a literary texture shown in that way, that is, a literary discovery of almost the same scope as the possibility of seeing the human texture under a microscope for the first time, which was of tremendous importance to physiologists.

What is happening? Radek's criticism of Joyce was based essentially on one point. He said that we don't need things in such microscopic detail. We don't see that way, such phenomena don't exist. But that criticism is as if a person at some first-aid station saw an enlargement of something seen under the microscope on the wall and said, "Why is this necessary? After all microbes aren't that big. After all you don't see all that in real life." Do you understand the mistake here? The thing is that you have to study those charts in order to be able to know those invisible bacteria, those invisible elements, in order to possess them.
And that's the significance of studying Joyce and it's on that level that he analyses things. Radek based his criticism totally demagogically on the idea that ofcourse every sensible person will say "ofcourse bacteria aren't so big, they don't look like that." That's a polemical device. What did his speech lead to? His speech discredited Joyce terribly and as a result Joyce probably won't be translated. The want to translate him and publish in a small edition for creative and scientific workers! After Radek's speech Joyce was completely done for and removed from consideration. Those few who have been able to read him in English and German ...........find that the broad mass of Soviet writers are left without him.

After all you go to different writers to learn different things. To learn how to create a character you go to Balzac. You wouldn't go to Zola for that. And here is an immense reservoir of experience, of artistry...

It's important to know what to take from every phenomenon. ....The mastery of the art, the mastery of the form of writing, here I think our writers can go to him en masse....This completely false criticism confuses things; they're criticising him from the wrong direction. In my opinion their behaviour towards Joyce is simply wasteful........And what do you want? Our own writers don't know how to create a character in the process of becoming or to show the typical in typical circumstances.....Bourgeois perception, bourgeois presentation of phenomena , events, character, can go no further. This is the limit. this already tears the fabric apart, tears apart the unity. In that regard Joyce is a direct successor to Balzac. Balzac is part of the 1830's and 40's and Joyce takes Balzac's contribution further, almost to the absurd. And it's natural for him to look in the microscope, he has no place else to go. He doesn't do it of his own free will but because bourgeois limitation makes it impossble to go any further. That why he stops in that spot and tries to answer those questions deeply and broadly. And what must we do? We must study that experience of going to the limit and go further and not sweep it aside. That's not all. Joyce doesn't stop at Ulysses, he wants to go further. And in his next work (Finnegans Wake) Joyce becomes one who is not advancing, but going backwards. And this last novel conserns twilight consciousness....Ulysses is a turning point. His next novel is a dream and an incoherent image of thought. That is, what in the last chapter of Ulysses was presented positively, in the next novel is already going off into the night. In itself this is interesting, but it is already turning into a clinical case. It is not only that he goes into the texture of the structure, not of the style, but of the word. Besides it is a useless task: lava existed, words crystallized out of it and there is no point in going back into it............

The remarkable thing is that he hold that process of disintegration in stylistic unity...........The most ridiculous aspect of criticism of Joyce is that when they deny the question of the usefulness of studying Joyce and when they write about learning from Joyce, they keep viewing learning as slavish copying. Whether they say that it isn't necessary to learn, or it is necessary, they always look at learning as copying. But learning is not copying but understand what the particular process consists of; not in borrowing the external form, but in understanding the principle, re-examing the principle and making it one's own, and then there will be one's own representational form.

If you read Radek's speech on learning, then you can see it very clearly: we mustn't copy from Joyce, and once we mustn't copy then there is nothing to study!

Audience comment "I've read Joyce's Dubliners"

You wasted your time.There's nothing in Dubliners.Between Dubliners and Ulysses there was one more novel, a transitional link. the interesting thing about Joyce is that in each work he's completely different. You can follow Joyce's rise and fall from one work to another. From one to another there is the most terrible progression. I don't know a single writer who could have evolved like that.

Audience: Gritsenk asks if Joyce's principle is naturalism or something else.

You want labels! Read Mirsky or Radek. Use whatever names you like. what is important to me is that you have an exact understandoing of the process. What to call it stylistically - do as you like!

Audience "Why is it called Ulysses?

It's the Odyssey and the very name is a parody. this is the name given to the voyage of this person from morning to evening....You see you can talk about Joyce in several lectures in a row!

Formally Joyce went as far as Literature could go. And many things he did are now impossible; here he goes beyond the limits of literature, and a whole new series of thngs which are very difficult to do in a work of literature can now be done much more easily in another art form. From Joyce the next leap is to film, where it's much easier (i.e. about a person's inner struggle ) ... this Joyce couldn't show.

In this respect film has many more possibilities than literature. Joyce and I talked about this in Paris, and I explained to him the arsenal that we have. Take for example non-sequential action. Joyce has the following scene; a man is walking along the street thinking about something. Joyce has it written down almost stenographically. At the same time it's on three levels. One, the man is thinking about something else he has to do; two, the accumulation of what in psychology is called trauma....your conscience is bothering you because you haven't finished your work. And the third thing is that you meet a streetcar, you meet some girl; and that is all mixed in with what you are thinking about....and Joyce manages in some parts of the novel to write this way.But here it is typical that Joyce, as a bourgeois artist, doesn't see byond the surface of phenomena. You know how the saying "being determines consciousness" has been vulgarized: Being is understood like this - someone's shoe is torn, therefore he has a vagabond mentality. Joyce understands things the same way. He sees how external circustances affect and change a train of thought, but he doesn't see the understanding of social phenomena which outgrow consciousness. Consciousness is completely limited. He gives a lot of attention to inner states of experience without contact with their preconditions, that is those inner traumas where Freud's influence on Joyce can be felt. For example in Ulysses Bloom has a trauma that his child has died and he doesn't have any heirs....Another character has a mother complex. And that's as far as Joyce goes. In his work you have the presence of phsycological complexes and that's all. The means by which a mperson can write - words, words and words...he has to take the road of description. You can find the purely descriptive path in dostoevsky: Raskolnikov. In one way Joyce continues Dostoevsky....Dostoevsky takes the path of description, the outer logic of speech. Joyce, in terms of a method of description, went further. He uses the syntax and grammar not of emotional thought but of, so to speak, sensual thought.When you thnk of yourself you don't use words, you have another system. some words you name, some you think in images, and from that is formed the arrangement of speech, which, if you were to say it out loud, would be incoherent.....if you write it down you'll have the model of the alogical system of speech. On marvellous pages Joyce achieves this brilliantly; in the arrangement of words, in the way phrases break off, and so on. But he is limited to a purely verbal fabric.

Eisenstein's lecture was given to fourth-year students at the State Institute of Cinematography. Nov.1st 1934