Eliot and Joyce

Both these books are new studies of much-examined writers by critics of sufficient knowledge and intellectual subtlety to avoid the obvious and make the theme their own. Mr Kenner has the advantage, among critics of Eliot, of being an American. He sees Eliot as the great expatriate American poet whichpage 438 he is, rather than the mysteriously cosmopolitan English mandarin which he is not. He has the right clues. In particular, his analysis of ‘Gerontion’ is exact and illuminating:

‘Gerontion’ was written by an American, who, acquiring this corrupt tradition by great labour – notably by detailed studies of the later Jacobean dramatists – resembles no other American writer so much as he does Poe. . . Eliot’s ventriloquial pastiche incorporates with great deliberateness the possible historical range of every word, each word adjusted to its neighbours in order to generate a maximum of controlled ambiguity . . .

The parallel is a just one, which probably only an American critic could have deduced. Mr Kenner examines the entire range of Eliot’s work, critically, learnedly, and often wittily, giving us new bearings on Eliot the poet and reducing considerably the anonymity of Eliot the man.

Mr Levin’s book is an equally fruitful survey. He traces the development of Joyce as an artist with intricate knowledge and no discernible prejudice; and he has made a new contribution to the criticism of Joyce by providing an intelligible key to the hieroglyphic code of Finnegans Wake. The clue in this case is the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, an Italian anti-scholastic whom Joyce read with approval, who regarded history as a merry-go-round that repeats itself – in Joyce’s phrase, a ‘wholemole mill-wheeling vicociclometer’. In the dream of Mr Earwicker, that dubious and earthy Irish publican, the whole of human history revolves. And why indade should it not be so?

1961 (232)