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Perhaps the most important pioneer work on the structural significance of time in the fiction of James Joyce was done by William York Tindall in James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World. 1 Here Tindall argued that "to replace Christianity Joyce needed a system in which man could occupy the center" and that in effecting this, "cyclical recurrence became his substitute for metaphysics." 2 However, Tindall accords only two paragraphs to cyclical patterns in A Portrait and Ulysses, and his main discussion of the topic centers on Finnegans Wake, to which he devotes the majority of the chapter called "Family Cycle." Although Tindall offers a rich perspective on Joyce's possible sources for cyclical recurrence (among them Plato, Vergil, Shelley, Jung, and Yeats), probably the most convincing case is made for Giambattista Vico, whose philosophy of history is explained in his La Scienza nuova ( 1725). Tindall makes it plain that Joyce preferred Vico to other "cyclists," and he demonstrates this by describing the three Viconian Ages and the reflux that appear in each of the four books of Finnegans Wake, the main structure being a large cycle containing four smaller ones, as well as many other wheels within wheels. Such juxtaposition of cycles within cycles provides complex levels of meaning: contrasts and contraries made to compare and to run parallel; antitheses uniting. Joyce turned to both Nicholas of Cusa and to Giordano Bruno of Nola for the theory of the "coincidence of contraries," which involves the unity of the cycle, "each thing is the starting point of its contrary," 3 a theory discovered also in the work of Hegel. In the same chapter Tindall proceeds to a discussion of the influence of Bishop Berkeley, "the subjective idealist"; of J. W. Dunne and his concept of serial time; and of Eddington and the expanding universe. Joyce found eternity, according to Tindall, in "the historical pattern, the family and man," rather than in the "absolute time" of Bergson and of Proust. 4 In 1950 Tindall opened a veritable cache of critical subject matter for scholars who followed him. In reviewing Tindall's work, Richard Kain writes: "If the initiate suffer at times a certain headiness from finding symbol within symbol and cycle within cycle, he cannot deny that such correspondences were among Joyce's constant preoccupations." 5 In 1951, A. M. Klein elaborated on Vico's influence in the Nestor episode of Ulysses, 6 and in 1956 Fred H. Higginson explored a sentence in Finnegans Wake suggesting Quinet, Vico, and Bruno as fundamental keys to the book. 7 The 1950s were also to see important discussions and exegeses of the stream of consciousness technique (stemming from a Bergsonian base) as well as Shiv K. Kumar's early work on space-time polarity in Finnegans Wake. 8 Citing, like Tindall, both Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno of Nola, Kumar points out that "the contrapuntal nature of space and time" 9 is symbolized by both character and episode in Finnegans Wake. Shem symbolizes duration; Shaun is spaceoriented. Direct allusions to the space-time polarity which undergirds the structure of Finnegans Wake are also numerous, riverrun circulating and recirculating throughout and within and around the environs of the city of Dublin. However, the works of Robert Humphrey, Hans Meyerhoff, and Melvin Friedman must be seen as the central discussions of stream of consciousness in the decade of the 50s. 10 Humphrey, dealing with Ulysses, points out that the formless nature of the psychic life of his characters forced Joyce to impose exterior patterns on his narrative; thus, rigid form and formlessness interact in creating the effect of the novel. One pattern is, of course, the eighteen hours of one day; another is one city and its geography. A third device is the use of motif, such as the image of Stephen's dying mother or Bloom's potato. The burlesque or parody of Homer Odyssey is still another deliberate attempt to create a form that will offset and add meaning to the free-flowing processes of consciousness. Similarly, Meyerhoff pointed out how Joyce injects into the stream of consciousness the hours of the day. The unities of time, self, and narrative are thus rendered: "time and life form a unity within the most bewildering multiplicity." 11 Meyerhoff is one of the first critics to suggest that the cyclical theory of Vico may have had significant impact on Joyce's fiction as early as A Portrait, enabling Joyce to rediscover the mythical Daedalus at the book's end. 12 Melvin Friedman's more extensive treatment of the stream of consciousness technique explores its backgrounds, mentioning in some detail William James, Bergson, Freud, Jung, Larbaud, and Dujardin, the last of whom Joyce referred to as the source of his own interior monologue. Friedman maintains that Joyce's fiction demonstrates the fullest development of the potential of the stream of consciousness method. Cadence, internal rhythm, fluidity, and balance reach perfection in the long monologue of Molly at the end of Ulysses. Seven years later, in 1962, Shiv K. Kumar was to deal more narrowly with the influence of Bergson, T. E. Hulme, and William James on narrative technique in Joyce's work. Bergson's sense of fluid reality was a phenomenon of the Zeitgeist, according to Kumar, and he speaks thus of parallels rather than of influences. His chapter on Joyce, like Friedman's, serves to point out the role of flux, of a continuum, in the novels, a "conception of life as a river rushing on unimpeded." 13 Time as an organizing principle was seen in still a different perspective by Robert Ryf in 1962 in his A New Approach to Joyce, 14 one of the most perceptive critical works on Joyce written in the 1960s. Ryf sees A Portrait as a nuclear work around which all the rest of Joyce's fiction revolves in expanding circles. Taken together, Joyce's canon tells one story: first, of those who do not escape the nets in Dubliners; of the microcosm of self that does escape in A Portrait; of modern man coming to terms with the world in which he lives in Ulysses; and finally of the circle of human history in Finnegans Wake. "If the Portrait is the microcosm and Ulysses the cosmos, then Finnegans Wake is the macrocosm." 15 Such a pattern contains curious and intriguing echoes of the Viconian system: Dubliners represents the Age of the Fathers (Gods) from whom one may not escape; Portrait, the Age of the Sons (heroes), who rebel in order to escape and to attain freedom of choice; Ulysses, the Age of the People, the world to which Bloom and Stephen must adjust; and Finnegans Wake, the ricorso ("fall if you will but rise you must"), 16 the fall of empire and its regeneration in new forms. Thus, Ryf's pattern is essentially temporal, suggesting the various ages of man as in the riddle of the sphinx. Thus far two major temporal patterns have emerged in critical assessments of Joyce's works: a structured Viconian pattern and a more freeflowing Bergsonian one, one socially and historically oriented, the other individually. Joyce's own work tends to move in constant tension between these two forces, the society of which each Dubliner is a part and the individual citizen of that Dublin. My own book Time and Reality ( 1963) dealt with both influences, though stressing the Bergsonian. Along with the influence of Bergson, my chapter on Joyce indicates the importance of Jung and Freud for Joyce (despite his expressed preference for Dujardin) in developing his sense of free association, the stream of consciousness, and the recurrent myth. 17 My chapter traces as well the incipient influence of Vico's ages of man in Ulysses, leaving the full impact of Vico for the discussion of Finnegans Wake. Interest in the relation between Vico and Joyce substantially escalated after the early 1960s. In an article published in 1964, Matthew Hodgart singles out a sentence near the end of the Cyclops episode for analysis. 18 The sentence contains the name of "the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson K.G., K.P. . . , " which according to Hodgart may reflect the three stages of Viconian history: "Hercules (the age of the giants and theocracy); Hannibal (the age of heroes and feudalism); and Habeas Corpus (the age of law and democracy)." 19 Hodgart goes on to trace other Viconian motifs throughout the Cyclops chapter. In 1969 A. Walton Litz's essay on Joyce and Vico appeared in Giorgio Tagliacozzo's symposium volume on Vico. 20 Litz attests to the undisputed power of Vico over Joyce's imagination, but claims no specific role for Vico in Dubliners or Portrait, only that "interest in heroic types and cyclic form" 21 which made Joyce so receptive to Vico. In Ulysses, however, Litz finds a "conscious intention" and an ambiguous role for Viconian views: "although Joyce clearly had Vico in mind, he did not demand that the reader share this association." 22 Litz sees Vico's chief influence in the structures of Finnegans Wake: "This four-part cycle, with its historical and personal implications, pervades every aspect of Finnegans Wake, governing the construction of words and sentences as well as the largest structural patterns." 23 Not only was Joyce influenced by Vico's cyclic view of history but by his treatment of language. My 1968 article on Dubliners broke new ground in asserting that Vico could have been an important influence for Joyce as early as 1903 and in demonstrating a Viconian pattern in Dubliners. 24 The first three stories portray not only childhood but also an ironic image of Vico's first age, the Divine Age or Age of the Parents. The Heroic Age or Age of the Sons may be seen in the next eight stories, populated with sons reared by the kind of parents we meet in the first three tales. These are "anti-heroes" incapable of supplying the support and guidance they themselves have been denied. In Vico's Human Age, represented by the next three stories, we find that the committees and councils of this society are equally corrupt, and the final story, "The Dead", serves as the ricorso, representing the eternal dance of recirculation, the grouping and regrouping of human energies. Likewise in 1976, my chapter "Portrait and Giambattista Vico: A Source Study" in Approaches to Joyce's Portrait established a clear Viconian pattern for that novel. 25 Vico's Divine Age may be seen as the basis of chapter one, where we view Stephen submissive to his parents and to the parent priests at Clongowes. In addition, the older boys at school provide models of mock divinity. The second chapter, where Uncle Charles is relegated to the outhouse and Stephen's mind turns to Mercedes and the Count of Monte Cristo, constitutes the Heroic Age. Hints of rivalry may be found in conversations between Simon Dedalus and his son, but at the end, Stephen's dreams of Mercedes are actualized in the arms of a prostitute. The Age of the People is seen in chapter three, where Stephen achieves, even though temporarily, uneasy religious communion with his fellow man. And the ricorso occurs in chapter four, where images of falling, of bridges crossed, of epiphany and prophecy prefigure a turning of the tide and the beginning of a new Viconian cycle. It is my contention that chapter five is a second Age of the Fathers in which the parents and priests of chapter one are replaced by the gods of the university, those who teach literature, art, and philosophy, and under whose authority Stephen now places himself. This Age of the Fathers leads into a new Heroic Age, the Age of Telemachus in the first chapter of Ulysses. In 1978, my essay "Fiction: The Language of Time" (in The Study of Time) went on to trace this pattern in Ulysses, the first three chapters of which continue a cycle begun in the last chapter of A Portrait. 26 Telemachus suggests the Age of the Heroes, Nestor the Age of the People, and Proteus the ricorso, where the swirling waters of the sea metaphorically depict circulation and recirculation, like Proteus himself, an everchanging form. The twelve chapters of the middle section of Ulysses may be divided into three groupings of four and similarly interpreted. Thus in Calypso, Bloom is seen initially as a kind of mock paterfamilias; in the Lotus Eaters, engaged in narcissistic and titillating adolescent activity; in Hades, in a communal setting with friends and citizens of Dublin; and in Aeolus, at the newspaper offices, where circulation and recirculation characterize existence. My essay traces similar arrangements in the next eight sections of Ulysses, arriving finally at the Nostos where the last three sections can be seen as the beginning of a new cycle that culminates in the giant ricorso of Finnegans Wake or "riverrun," the first word of that ever-cycling book. Joyce thereby links together his three central fictional works by means of Viconian cycles left to be completed in the succeeding novel. He uses Vico as a structural means to unify his entire canon, the course of history being seen as a recurrent building up, then breaking down of form (in the four ricorsi, Proteus, Aeolus, Sirens, Circe, of Ulysses). The wavelike structure of all process is thus represented in Joyce's narration of events on a June day in the city of Dublin. The late 1960s and early 1970s were to see new and exciting reinterpretations and repudiations of Vico's influence on Joyce. In 1966 in an essay, "Finnegans Wake in Perspective," Clive Hart renounced his own earlier Viconian interpretation of Finnegans Wake through symphony, fable, nightmare, and macromyth ("The Viconian cycle of ages"). 27 Rather than rationality, architecture, internal coherence, Hart now saw a "fractured and distorted surface," enabling the reader to lead the text where he might like. Consistency is achieved by linguistic phenomena, which, as Joyce himself said, should be allowed to affect us "as such." 28 Hart was thus one of the first critics to open the door to structuralist interpretations of Finnegans Wake which have resulted in such studies as Margot Norris The Decentered World of Finnegans Wake: A Structural Analysis. 29 In an essay published in 1974, Norris remarked that although Joyce valued Vico as a social historian, Vico failed to provide him "with an individual psychology to complement his social theories. . . ." The theories of Vico or Bruno of Nola are thus for Norris structural principles rather than the "models, plans or patterns" which I had outlined in my articles on this subject. For example, the four Viconian cycles enable us better to understand the relationships of fathers, sons, and brothers as they rise and fall in Finnegans Wake, but they provide no neat blueprint of the work. 30 Likewise, in 1973 Patrick White claimed that there was no ontological or psychological justification for the use of Viconian cycles in Ulysses. 31 Attempts to discover such cycles (he cites, in a footnote, Mason, Tindall, Klein, Church) merely support the dubious notion that the order of Ulysses is "an imposed order, a purely aesthetic order." "Instead of imposing one or more of Vico's cycles on the action of the novel, Joyce locates the action at a stationary point along Vico's ideal, eternal history that is traversed in time by the actual history of all nations." This stationary point is for White located within the ricorso or "period of disintegration" of Vico. With this in mind White examines in some detail the Hades episode and burial rites, concluding that what redeems contemporary man is that "he did not choose to be born into such a period of disintegration." 32 One of the most challenging treatments of Joyce and Vico in the 1970s was that of Stuart Hampshire in a 1973 review of Norman O. Brown's Closing Time. 33 Hampshire takes pains to repudiate what he sees as Brown's "literal and immediate interpretation of Vico." In language almost as lyrical and literate as Joyce's, Hampshire points to the larger focus on Vico to be found in Joyce's work: "the great revolving years of ideal history"; "the renewals and returns and disguises" that remove him from pessimism; the middle way between a definition of human nature as unchanging and human nature as essentially "open to development without limit." "Humanity," writes Hampshire, "ascends or descends only as day into night, or spring into winter, in the long cadence which allows one leading nation or leading family or leading hero to succeed another in the returning and renewing circle of spiritual seasons." 34 Treatments of stream of consciousness technique in Joyce also continued in the 1970s. Richard Peterson pointed out in 1973 that Dubliners, in which Joyce depicts "the paralyzing and destructive effect of time," may have been the spur which encouraged him to lay emphasis on "human time and timelessness" in the fiction that followed it. 35 In 1971 K. E. Robinson explored psychological time in A Portrait, breaking the book into two structural units of stream of consciousness, one interior, the other narrated and beginning after the asterisk in chapter four. 36 The most extensive treatment of stream of consciousness in the 1970s is Erwin Steinberg The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in Ulysses for which there is not space in this essay for a detailed rethese focuses in conjunction with one another rather than as opposing factors. One is reminded here of descriptions of Freud's working quarters in Vienna, filled with innumerable objects from antiquity. Twenty statuettes were arranged on Freud's desk, neither by subject, period nor culture--ancient Greek or Roman next to Egyptian or Chinese. This archaeological jumble represented, of course, the kind of polyexpression described by Cope, events in time crowded in a disorganized heap into the unconscious mind of race or individual. Nor can one omit mentioning the special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly in 1979 devoted to structuralist matters and reader response. 43 Here Jean Ricardou establishes two distinct levels, "the time of the narration" and "the time of the fiction," as his basis for discussion. He concludes that writing and architecture are contradictory magnitudes placed face to face, and fiction is the mediator in this conflict. 44 Other important essays in this same issue deal with similar problems of textuality. Thomas Staley, writing in the introduction, remarks that they open up the question of narrative "in ways which reflect many recent developments," recognizing the influence that theories emanating from France and Eastern Europe have exerted on the "Anglo-American critical consciousness." But such matters as "deep structure," "deconstruction," and "reader response," as Staley notes, "have diminished as battle cries and have become terms for serious discussion on the nature of the text and its relationship to the author, reader, and the vast body of literature in which it resides." 45 More seminal work remains to be done in this field and in these areas. In addition, a more detailed examination of mystical influences on Joyce's interpretation of time needs to be carried out. Bruno of Nola and Nicholas of Cusa merit further study, but Far Eastern sources have been largely neglected in this respect and deserve attention. Furthermore, Joyce's interest in esotericism is a wide-open field whose exploration should give us insight into the archaeological past that Jackson Cope has begun to uncover in his recent volume, where he attributes elaborations of the Ulysses structures to cabbalistic texts and to key images in the Zobar. However, studies on the Viconian ages and the stream of consciousness in the Joycean canon are by and large definitive, and have earned a rest, at least until the "commodius vicus of recirculation" returns critics to "Howth Castle and Environs" ( FW 3.2-3), "where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy" ( FW 3.23-24). Notes
| 1. | ( New York: Scribner's 1950). | | | | | 2. | Tindall, p. 65. Ellsworth G. Mason unpublished Yale dissertation, "Joyce's Ulysses and the Vico Cycle," preceded Tindall's study by two years. | | | | | 3. | Tindall, p. 84. | | | | | 4. | Tindall, p. 93. | | | | | 5. | "Mythic Mazes in Finnegans Wake", Saturday Review of Literature, 4 March 1950, p. 19. | | | | | 6. | "A Shout in the Street", New Directions, No. 13 ( 1951), pp. 327-45. | | | | | 7. | "Homer: Vico: Joyce", Kansas Magazine ( 1956), 83-88. | | | | | 8. | "Space-Time Polarity in Finnegans Wake", Modern Philology, 54 ( 1957), 20-33. | | | | | 9. | Kumar, p. 230. | | | | | 10. | Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr., 1954); Meyerhoff, Time in Literature ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr., 1955); Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1955). | | | | | 11. | Meyerhoff, pp. 39-40. | | | | | 12. | Meyerhoff, p. 81. | | | | | 13. | Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel ( New York: New York Univ. Pr., 1963), p. 107. | | | | | 14. | A New Approach to Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Guidebook ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr., 1962). | | | | | 15. | Ryf, p. 98. | | | | | 16. | Ryf, p. 105. | | | | | 17. | Church, Time and Reality ( Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1963). | | | | | 18. | "A Viconian Sentence in Ulysses", Orbis Litterarum, 19 ( 1964), 201-4. | | | | | 19. | Hodgart, p. 203. | | | | | 20. | "Vico and Joyce", in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1969), pp. 245-55. | | | | | 21. | Litz, p. 247. | | 22. | Litz, p. 248. | | | | | 23. | Litz, p. 251. | | | | | 24. | "Dubliners and Vico", James Joyce Quarterly, 8 ( 1968), 150-56. | | | | | 25. | Ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock ( Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Pr., 1976), pp. 77-89. | | | | | 26. | Ed. J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, D. Park ( New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978), III, 500-11. | | | | | 27. | In James Joyce Today, ed. Thomas F. Staley ( Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Pr., 1966), pp. 135-65; Hart's earlier work, of course, is Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake ( Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1962). | | | | | 28. | Hart, "Finnegans Wake in Perspective", pp. 164, 165. | | | | | 29. | ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1976). | | | | | 30. | "The Function of Mythic Repetition in Finnegans Wake", James Joyce Quarterly, 11 ( 1974), 347, 353. | | | | | 31. | "Vico's Institution of Burial in Ulysses", Ball State University Forum, 14 ( 1973), 59-68. | | | | | 32. | White, pp. 59-60. | | | | | 33. | "Joyce and Vico: The Middle Way", New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973, pp. 8-21. | | | | | 34. | Hampshire, pp. 21, 16, 14. | | | | | 35. | "Joyce's Use of Time in Dubliners", Ball State University Forum, 14 ( 1973), 51. | | | | | 36. | "The Stream of Consciousness Technique and the Structure of Joyce's Portrait", James Joyce Quarterly, 9 ( 1971), 63-84. | | | | | 37. | ( Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Pr., 1973). | | | | | 38. | Steinberg, pp. 8-10. | | | | | 39. | Ulysses ( London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980). | | | | | 40. | Montage in Joyce's Ulysses ( Madrid: José Porr£a Turanzas, 1980). | | | | | 41. | ( Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr., 1981). | | | | | 42. | ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1981). | | | | | 43. | Structuralist/Reader Response Issue, James Joyce Quarterly, 16 ( 1978/79). | | | | | 44. | "Time of the Narration, Time of the Fiction", trans. Joseph Kestner, James Joyce Quarterly, 16 ( 1978/79), 7-15. | | | | | 45. | Staley, "Introduction", James Joyce Quarterly, 16 ( 1978/79), 5. |
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