The Darkening Age

 Catherine Nixey

Celsus professes himself baffled by the extent to which Jesus’s teachings seem to contradict many of those laid down in the Old Testament. Have the rules of an allegedly omniscient god changed over time? If so, then “who is wrong? Moses or Jesus? Or when the Father sent Jesus had he forgotten what commands he gave to Moses?” Or maybe God knew he was changing his mind, and Jesus was a legal messenger, sent to give notice that God wished to “condemn his own laws and change his mind.” 

Celsus cannot understand, either, why there was such a ‘reat gap between the creation of mankind and the sending of Jesus. If all who don’t believe are damned, why wait so long to enable them to be saved? “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the life of men? Did he not care before?”* Moreover, why not send Jesus somewhere a bit more populous? If God “woke up out of his long slumber and wanted to deliver the human race from evils, why on earth did he send this spirit that you mention into one corner” of the world — and, Celsus implies, a backwater at that?” He also queries why an omniscient, omnipotent God would need to send someone at all. “What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God?” he asks. “Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? . . . Does not he know everything?’” 

Jesus’s logistical abilities are, like God’s, called into question. Celsus attacks the tendency for some of his most miraculous moments to be witnessed by the fewest number of people. “When he was punished he was seen by all; but by only one person after he rose again; whereas the opposite ought to have happened.”** What witnesses the Bible did offer were, for Celsus, rarely reliable. Of the Resurrection he says: “Who saw this? A hysterical female, as you say” —and one other person who then went on to invent this “cock-and-bull story.” The Resurrection was therefore either “wishful thinking” or perhaps “a hallucination.”” 

The claim that Christ was divine seems to Celsus a logical impossibility: “How can a dead man be immortal?”* The idea that Jesus came to save sinners also comes in for short shrift. “Why on earth this preference for sinners?” he asks. “Why was he not sent to those without sin? What evil is it not to have sinned?””? 

The arguments go on, hammering at Christianity’s central beliefs. The Creation story itself takes a particular bashing, Celsus disdains the idea of an omnipotent being needing ta piece out his work like a builder, to make so much on one day, so much more on a second, third, fourth and so on—and particularly the idea that, after all this work, “God, exactly like a bad workman, was worn out and needed a holiday to have rest.” 

To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of , “Creation myth” was not only implausible but redundant During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philo. sophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory—an Epicurean one — stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own struc. ture and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos“the uncuttable thing”: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space “in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that.”” Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than “a haphazard union of elements.”* The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics —the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligencesurvived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these “lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit... unt! nature brought that race to destruction.” 

The intellectual consequences of this powerful theory weré summarized succinctly by the Christian apologist Minucius Fe jix. If everything in the universe has been “formed by a fort jtous concourse of atoms, what God is the architect?” The obvious answer is: no god at all. No god magicked up mankind out of nothing, no divinity breathed life into us; and, when we die, our atoms are simply reabsorbed into this great sea of stuff. “No thing is ever by divine power produced from noth: ing,” wrote Lucretius in his great poem On the Nature of Things, and “no single thing returns to nothing.”* Atomic theory thus neatly did away with the need for and possibility of Creation, Resurrection, the Last Judgment, hell, heaven and the Creator God himself. 

As indeed was its intention. Thinkers in the classical world frequently lamented the mortal fear of divine beings. Superstition, wrote the Greek biographer Plutarch, was a terrible affliction that “humbles and crushes a man.”* People saw earthquakes and floods and storms and lightning and assumed, in the absence of any other explanation, that they are “done by divine power.’*” The consequence of this was that people tried to propitiate these temperamental gods. Writers such as Lucretius argued that atomism, correctly applied, could blast this fear into tiny pieces. If there was no Creator—if lightning, earthquakes and storms were not the actions of irate deities but simply of moving particles of matter—then there was nothing to fear, nothing to propitiate and nothing to worship.* Including no Christian God. 

In the ensuing centuries, texts that contained such dangerous ideas paid a heavy price for their “heresy.” As has been lucidly argued by Dirk Rohmann, an academic who has produced a comprehensive and powerful account of the effect of Christianity on books, some of the greatest figures in the early Church rounded on the atomists.” Augustine disliked atomism for precisely the same reason that atomists liked it: it weakened mankind’s terror of divine punishment and hell. Texts by philosophical schools that championed atomic theory suffered. 

The Greek philosopher Democritus had perhaps done more than anyone to popularize this theory — though not only this one. Democritus was an astonishing polymath who had written works on a breathless array of other topics. A far from complete list of his titles includes On History, etc etc. Today Democritus’s most famous theory is his atomism. What did the other theories state? We have no idea: every single one of his works was lost in the ensuing centuries. As the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli recently wrote, after citing an even longer list of the philosopher’s titles: “the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.’ 

Democritus’s atomic theory did, however, come down to us —pbut on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt has called “an explosion of interest in pagan antiquity” and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein. 

In the Renaissance, Lucretius and his atomic theories were revolutionary. In Celsus’s time they were utterly unremarkable. It wasn’t just the fact that Christians were ignorant about philosophical theories that annoyed Celsus; it was that Christians actually reveled in their ignorance. Celsus accuses them of actively targeting idiocy in their recruitment. “Their injunctions are like this,” he wrote. “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils.” 

He went on: Christians “are able to convince only the fool ish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children.”“? They made overtures to children, cobblers, jaundry-workers and yokels, then dripped honeyed intelleccual poison into uneducated ears, claiming “that they alone... know the right way to live, and if the children would believe ghem, they would become happy.’ Christianity’s lack of inv gellectual rigor worried Celsus for the same reasons that it had  Bothered gaylen. Christian's Celsius wrote do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe and use such expressions as do not ask questions just believe. To men as educated as Celsius and gaylen this was unfathomable in Greek philosophy faith was the lowest form of cognition.

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Celsus, however, implied that if people were better educated they would be more resistant to such hucksters as Peregrinus — or indeed to Jesus, whom Celsus considered little more than a “sorcerer. ” The “miracles” that Jesus performed were, he felt, no better than the sort of thing that was constantly being peddled by tricksters to the gullible across the Roman Empire. Ina world in which medical provision was rare, many laid claim to magical powers. Travel in the east and you would come across any number of men who “for a few obols make known their sacred lore in the middle of the market-place and drive daemons out of men and blow away diseases,” and display “dining-tables and cakes and dishes which are non-existent.” Even Jesus himself, observes Celsus, admits the presence of such people when he talks about men who can perform similar wonders to his own. Modern scholarship supports Celsus’s accusations: ancient papyri tell of sorcerers who had the power to achieve such biblical-sounding feats as stilling storms and miraculously providing food.” 

Celsus touches on a sore point here. Early Christianity would have to spend a considerable amount of time and effort policing the boundaries between sanctity and sorcery. A large amount of ink was spilled on the subject of Simon Magus (the Magician). A quick summary of Simon’s life makes it clear why he was so threatening: Simon performed various miracles, gathered a following of people who thought he was a god ~including a former prostitute — and one of Simon’s disciples “persuaded those who adhered to him that they should never die.”® His followers even honored him with a statue inscribed with the words “To Simon, the Holy God” — in Latin, Simoni Deo Sancto. Interestingly, it is not Simon’s supernatural abilities that are denied by Christian accounts —the texts admit he can perform amazing feats — merely his divine right to do so. The criticism seems to be not one of religious fakery but of rel. gious fuel: Simon gains his power not from God but “by virtue of the art of the devils operating in him.” 

Christians debunked pretenders. The ancient world debunked everyone else. Stories of witty atheists were treasured, told and retold. When one man asked a Greek philosopher to go with him to a shrine to pray, the friend replied that he must think the god was very deaf if he couldn’t hear them from where they were.” 

Some Romans had so little patience for Roman religious rites that they discarded them entirely. One moonlit night in the third century Bc, a Roman consul called Publius Claudius Pulcher decided to launch a surprise attack against an enemy fleet. Before he moved, he took the usual auspices required before military action. In accordance with these rites, the sacred chickens were released from their cage. They refused to eat —a terrible omen and a clear sign to all that the gods did not favor this attempt and that it should be abandoned. It was not clear to Publius Claudius Pulcher. Throwing the chickens into the sea he scoffed: “Let them drink, since they don’t wish to eat,” and sailed into what would be a disastrous battle.

There was a strong strain of skepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God isprovided there is a God—. . . he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.”® Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists—-emperors were even deified after their death, and their “genius” (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: “Gah I seem to be turning into a god.”

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So influential were such tales that, as the academic Robin Lane Fox has pointed out, when a group of Christians were martyred by the Muslim authorities in Cordoba in the ninth century, the accounts of their trials set them before a “consul,” as if this was all taking place in ancient Rome.” Walk around any great European art gallery today and the walls will be peopled by the most agonizing deaths depicted in lovingly — and often alarmingly — graphic detail. 

Martyrs became art. And not always good art. While the earliest—and most reliable martyr tales were often affecting in their simplicity and their honesty, many of the later and more fictional ones suffered from crass characterization, barely sublimated sexuality and lashings of gore. The Victorians, naturally, adored them. In the nineteenth century, hymns flowed from pious pens. “Bright the stones which bruise thee gleam,” ran one verse on St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, “Sprinkled with thy life blood’s stream.” Another hymned the saints who “met the tyrant’s brandished steel / the lion’s gory mane.”

Four centuries after Caxton, these lurid stories could stil sell copies. In 1895 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz published a novel that became an international bestseller and contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for litera ture. This seventy-three-chapter behemoth told the story of the Christian martyrs who were put to death by the emperof Nero. It concluded with the observation that “Nero passed on, as a whirlwind, as a storm, as a fire, as war or death passes, but the Basilica of Peter still stands on the Vatican Hill and rules over the city and the world.”” Today, the book has been all but forgotten but its title, Quo Vadis, has not. Hollywood went on to make numerous film and television series by this name. The most famous was the 1951 swords-and-sandals epic in which a rotund Peter Ustinov as Nero smirkingly looks on while Christians, wearing white and looking pious, are pursued by lions in the arena, managing to sing hymns up to the very moment of mauling.” 

But although martyr stories have often made for arresting and compelling drama, very few, if any, of these tales are based on historical fact. There were simply not that many years of jmperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen —in three whole centuries of Roman rule. These years may have loomed understandably large in Christian accounts but to allow them to dominate the narrative in the way that they have—and still do—is at best misleading and at worst a gross misrepresentation. During these first centuries of the new religion, local persecutions of Christians occurred. But we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity with the exception of Nero’s —and Nero, with even-handed lunacy, persecuted everyone. For two and a half centuries the Roman imperial government left Christianity alone. 

The idea, therefore, of a line of satanically inspired emperors, panting for the blood of the faithful, is another Christian myth. As the modern historian Keith Hopkins wrote, “the traditional question: “Why were the Christians persecuted?’ with all its implications of unjust repression and eventual triumph, should be re-phrased: “Why were the Christians persecuted so little and so late?” 

Nevertheless, martyr tales have been hugely influential, not least on Christianity’s image of itself. The academic Candida Moss has argued that in the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desire, martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it wa, said that the scripture promised “multiplication, even to a hyp, dred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homesx Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clea, but the general principle was: those who died early, public and painfully would be best rewarded. 

In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less thy the Romans want to kill—and more that the Christians wan to die. Why wouldn't they? Paradoxically, martyrdom hel considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw ac. idly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way aman can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that — provided you believe in its promised rewards — martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer, far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had “begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants. 

There were incitements for Christians not only to die but to die as painful a death as possible. As one soon-to-be martyred Christian irritably explained, the greater the pain, the greatef the gain: “Those whose victory is slower and with greater dif ficulty, these receive the more glorious crown.” As martyr literature developed the descriptions of the deaths became graphic to the point of prurient.

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The Most Dangerous Book

 Kevin Birmingham

—_ . a 4 

Fatherhood was a burden for Joyce. At twenty-three, he was unprepared for the responsibility, and the prospect of dragging children from one impoverished household to another, as his own father had done, haunted him. The passionate life with Nora was fading, and she was indifferent to his work, which was more vexing than if she had despised it. When she saw him copying small scenes into his manuscript from loose sheets, she asked, “Will all that paper be wasted?” 

Joyce’s brother Stannie joined them in Trieste a couple of months after Giorgio’s birth. He took a job at Berlitz, and together they made eighty-five crowns a week. It was on the lower end of the average Triestine salary, but it would have been sufficient for a thrifty lifestyle. To save money, they shared a flat on the outskirts of town with the school’s other English teacher, Alessandro Francini, and his wife. But Joyce was bad with money. Instead of saving the few spare crowns they had, he insisted that they dine out at restaurants, preferably the one with electric lighting. Later in the evenings, he would venture into the Cittavecchia, the old city, passing small wineshops and trundling oxcarts—some of the streets were too steep and narrow for carriages. He was drawn to working-class trattorias and grungy osterte where men shouted at one another in Czech or Hungarian. Joyce drank absinthe and sang songs with the wharf porters before making his way to the brothels. 

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Weaver approached printer after printer only to have each one refuse, sometimes brusquely. “We could not for one moment entertain any idea of printing such a production,” Billing & Sons wrote to her. “We are convinced that you would run very great risk in putting such a book on the market,” and they advised her to scour the text and cut any objectionable passages. Over the next few months, thirteen printers refused to print A Portrait in its entirety. Every time a printer suggested an expurgated version, Miss Weaver declined. 

Pound, who was nothing if not resourceful, came up with an idea: they could leave large blank spaces in the text wherever a printer wished to cut words or passages. Then they could type out all of the deleted portions on quality paper and paste the omitted words into every single copy—“‘And damn the censors.” Joyce thought it was ingenious. The printers, unfortunately, thought it was madcap. 

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In June 1915, Joyce was unemployed, two months’ salary in debt and a Britie citizen residing in enemy territory. He put up his furniture as collateral to purchase train fare from Trieste to neutral Switzerland for himself, his wife and his two children, ten-year-old Giorgio and eight-year-old Lucia. The circuitous route through the Austrian war zone took three nerve-racking days before they arrived in Zurich, which had become a haven for smugglers and spies, forgers and deserters, propagandists and black market tycoons. Food was scarce, especially in winter, when the corn and potatoes planted along the lake were dormant. When meat wasn’t available, people ate boiled chestnuts and frog legs. Instead of sugar cubes, cafés served coffee with saccharine pills. 

The war gave Zurich a surreal atmosphere. In July 1916, Hugo Ball read out the Dada Manifesto in a Zurich guild house: “How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness.” Dadaists wearing masks and outlandish costumes performed dances bordering on madness in the Cabaret Voltaire. They recited poems of nonsense words, hiccups, whistles, moos and meows. Dadaism was Futurism with buffoonery instead of violence. What the two movements shared was a desire to start from scratch. In the midst of a war of unprecedented scale, they wanted to begin civilization anew. The Swiss did not approve. 

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docks, where they were alone for the first time. June 16, 1904. The ink of each word in his manuscript made those fugitive moments incrementally more indelible. Ulysses was his final love letter. 

The erotic letters between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are one of the secret headwaters of modern literature. For it was here that Joyce had an epiphany about language itself: the souls of the commonest words illuminated the fact that the ultimate power of writing is its ability, like love, to render the writer helpless. His most intrepid letters dissolved into abject pleas (“Forgive me!”) and feeble iterations of Nora’s name. Joyce was discovering the paradox of words when he was most apt to benefit from it—he had left Dublin to become a writer only to return five years later as an agent for a short-lived cinema. He had spent those years belaboring a novel that no one had read—that perhaps no one would ever read. But with Nora, Joyce had an audience. She was not a scholar or an aesthete, not a patron or a literary critic, but she was devoted, and she read his letters carefully. It was in their secret exchanges in 1909 that Joyce, who spent so much time gaining mastery over words, abruptly found himself mastered by them. That helplessness gave his diligent craftsmanship a dimension of awe, a fear and a thrilling freedom, a recklessness and an openness that must have felt like endless talking. 

An intellectual gulf separated the Galway girl from the artist, and yet in some ways she became a model for every reader he ever wanted. The “ideal reader,” Joyce would write years later, suffers from “an ideal insomnia.” He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism’s great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers. 

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premises and asked Miss Beach if there was anything he could fix for her, He applied his expertise to a cigarette box from Sarajevo and a wobbly chair. 

Sytvia Beach had impeccable timing. The First World War had created a generation of transnationalists. Young men and women who never thought of leaving their hometowns found themselves serving 1n allied or enemy countries and imagining cosmopolitan lives. The booming American and British economies and the plummeting franc made Paris the perfect cosmopolis. Between 1915 and 1920, the franc lost nearly two-thirds of its value against the dollar, and Paris’s affordability made its charms irresistible. Only fifteen thousand Americans had visited France annually before the war. In 1925, American tourists numbered four hundred thousand, and many of them stayed. There were eight thousand American permanent residents in Paris in 1920. Three years later, there were thirty-two thousand. The influx made Paris’s changes seem like Americanizations. One-way streets and electric signs appeared along with English-language newspapers. There were American churches and grocery stores, Masonic lodges and basketball leagues. Cabarets and café concerts were supplanted by large music halls where expatriates listened to jazz while sipping bright jumbles of alcohol they called “cocktails” without having to worry about federal raids. 

Shakespeare and Company transformed an Anglophone convergence into a community. It was, in fact, a thinly monetized social center. Library membership fees barely covered expenses, and the shop made only one hundred dollars in profit in 1921. The importance of Shakespeare and Company had nothing to do with money. By the end of the year, it was a place where readers and writers could talk to one another, where older and younger people exchanged ideas and where Sylvia Beach introduced writers to editors and publishers. If you wrote or read literature and found yourselfin Paris fora week, amonth oradecade you knew where to go. Shakespeare and Company became a literary node ina cultural metropolis, 

Culture needs locations. It is not a seamless backdrop so much as a patchwork of local phenomena. Cultures have centers, specific arenas where artists join institutions, where people influence and repel one another, where active ties change because of planned and unplanned events and where one can be exposed to people and ideas from Japan, Moscow, West Africa and Dublin all in the same day—cultural centers exist because they are hubs for the peripheries. If modernism had a preeminent location, it was Paris: atop Montmartre before the war and then, when prices became too high, the Left Bank, less than two square miles of narrow streets and wide boulevards south of the arcing River Seine. 

Left Bank neighborhoods were diverse, inexpensive and saturated with cafés, This was especially true of Montparnasse, a Left Bank neighborhood where working-class people, immigrants and political refugees mixed with artists and the bourgeoisie as well as students from the adjacent Latin Quarter. Artists like Chagall and Brancusi drank with butchers at the Café Dantzig because Montparnasse’s major artist colony was next to a slaughterhouse. 

Cafés were more than just the accoutrements of Paris’s cultural life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were more drinking establishments in Paris than in any other city in the world—one for about every three hundred people. That was three times as many per capita as in New York and more than ten times as many as in London. The sheer number of Parisian cafés facilitated the formation of small groups in uncrowded spaces, which allowed people to talk, plan and argue freely. If the arguments became fierce, the café culture helped with that, too—there was always another one down the street, and their sidewalk access facilitated the chance encounters that allow groups to form, dissolve and reconfigure. Though fluid, café interactions were far from frivolous. They thrived in France partly because they were havens from stringent nineteenth-century assembly laws. Uprisings from 1848 to the Paris Commune to 1919 arose seemingly spontaneously because workers organized in cafés rather than through unions. Left Bank cafés were at once intimate and ephemeral, playful and consequential, semipublic proving grounds for ideas and semiprivate sanctuaries from the state. They were the perfect spaces for modernism and for a book as urban as Ulysses. 

Shakespeare and Company was a hybrid space, something between an open café and an ensconced literary salon, which suited Anglophone patrons for whom café culture was always adoptive. Sylvia Beach’s bookshop gave British and American travelers a dose of the stability that cafés didn’t provide. Several members had their mail sent to Shakespeare and Company (for some writers it was their only reliable address), and Beach used a pigeonhole box to sort their mail alphabetically. The Lost Generation had a home. 

ON a HOT SUNDAY AFTERNOON in July 1920, Adrienne invited Sylvia Beach to an early dinner party at the home of a French poet named André Spire. Beach didn’t want to go. She admired Spire’s poetry, but she didn’t know him personally, and he hadn’t invited her. Adrienne nevertheless insisted and, aS usual, she had her way. Spire’s warm welcome put his American guest at ease, but as they entered, he pulled her aside and whispered something that terrified her. “The Irish writer James Joyce is here.” 

....his r’s trilled upward. The novel he was writing was “Oolissays.” Joyce’s skin was fair and flushed. He had a small goatee, and there were lines etched into his forehead. She thought about how handsome he must have been asa young man. But there was something abnormal about his right eye, something mag. nified or distorted by his thick glasses. It was nearly grotesque. 

The name Shakespeare and Company made him smile, almost as much, perhaps. as “Sylvia Beach.” He was looking for signs of luck in Paris, and these were auspicious names. As she told him about her bookstore, he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and held it close to his eyes so he could write down the address. It was heartbreaking. Just then, Joyce jumped at the sound of barking from across the road. She went to the window and saw Spire’s tiny dog bounding after a ball. 

“Is it coming in? Is it feerrce?” 

She assured Mr. Joyce that the dog did not look at all fierce, and he was certainly not charging toward the library. He had been bitten by a dog on the chin when he was a boy, he explained, and they had terrified him ever since. The great James Joyce was a blushing, trembling man with weak eyes and a fear of dogs. He was adorable. 

The next day, Joyce walked into Shakespeare and Company wearing a dark blue serge suit and a black felt hat. He had a slender cane and a regal bearing undercut by dirty canvas shoes. He ambled over to the photographs of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, and if she wondered in those brief moments what he thought about her small bookshop, her anxiety was relieved as he sat down in an armchair and asked to join Miss Beach’s lending library. He could afford a subscription for one month. 

Sylvia Beach saw Joyce as sensitive and vulnerable. His list of fears included the ocean, heights, horses, machinery and, above all, thunderstorms. As a child, he hid in the cupboard at the sound of thunder, and the tempests seemed to pursue him all his life. Beach remembered him cowering in his hallway during thunderstorms, which he blamed on the preponderance of Parisian radio broadcasts. Beach encouraged Joyce to talk about his troubles, and he had a few to discuss. The apartment that Pound got for Joyce and his family was a small, fifth-floor servants’ flat in Passy. It had one double bed, no bath

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“over-ripe, the thing that burst itself” The “Lesbianisms” of Greenwich Vil. lage, the scrotumtightening sea of Manhattan’s immigrants and James Joyce’s epic of the human body all reminded Quinn of his own failing body and the lethal rupture to come. Joyce seemed to be making an art form out of the many ways death and decay could bloom within the living. Quinn’s mortality pursued him no matter how many artworks he purchased or how many cases ‘won. 

A stirring courtroom argument did nevertheless stave off the feeling of death, and a defense of Joyce against obscenity charges required the sophisticated legal creativity he found envigorating. Quinn had to base his courtroom argument on mid-nineteenth-century British law, for the definition of obscenity that guided Anglo-American jurisprudence in 1920 was articulated by a British judge in 1868: “I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” This definition of obscenity became known as the Hicklin Rule, and it transformed obscenity law. Instead of targeting pornographers profiting from books that were offensive to “any well-regulated mind,” as the author of the Obscene Publications Act put it, the Hicklin Rule defined obscenity by a book’s effects on society’s most susceptible readersanyone with a mind “open” to “immoral influences.” The purview of the law shifted from protecting well-regulated minds to sheltering ill-regulated minds. Lecherous readers and excitable teenage daughters could deprave and corrupt the most sophisticated literary intent. The Hicklin Rule inspired Quinn to argue that a book couldn’t be filthy if it was unintelligible or disgusting or private. “You could not take a piece of jiterature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy, within the meaning of the law.” It had to “corrupt” or “deprave” a mind, and judges generally read “corruption” as a synonym for “arousal.” What this implied was that if Gerty were ugly—if she were entirely unarousing—she would be legal. Quinn continued: “Ifa young man is in love with a woman and his mother should write to him saying: ‘My boy, the woman you are infatuated with is not a beautiful woman . . . She sweats, she stinks, she is flatulent. Her flesh is discolored, her breath is bad. She makes ugly noises when she eats and discharges other natural functions’”—the mother would be writing ugly truths for her son’s moral benefit. Gerty MacDowell, Quinn argued, similarly sends men running toward virtue. He insisted that Joyce was like Swift or Rabelais: he was not an artist of corrupting beauty. He was an artist of ugly truths. 

It was not clear what, precisely, Quinn found so disgusting about Gerty MacDowell. 

She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart his hoarse breathing. 

Were readers supposed to be disgusted by Gerty because she is mawkish or because, as we discover later in the chapter, she is lame? One of the Joycean touches is that reality topples Bloom’s fantasy when Gerty limps away pages after her beautifully shaped legs appear. If that’s what makes her unappealing, surely Joyce’s story was at least plausibly filthy under the law. 

A single word in the Hicklin Rule—a word that Quinn studiously ignoreddramatically expanded judges’ authority by making censorship a preemptive activity. Publishers, booksellers, printers and writers were liable not just for corrupted readers but for a publication’s “tendency” to corrupt. By focusing on a book’s hypothetical effects on hypothetical readers, the Hicklin Rule made an obscenity judgment a feat of the imagination—for certainly the judge himself was above such “immoral influences.” Rather, it was his task to determine whether the book would deprave someone entirely unlike him. Judge Corrigan would have to peer into the mind of Ogden Brower’s young daughter (herself peering into the mind of Gerty MacDowell) and imagine her potential reactions. The law required the judge to be a bit like Joyce. 

Quinn could be right about Joyce’s moral lessons and ugly truths, and it still wouldn’t matter. So long as there was some measure—any measure—of potentially corrupting beauty, Joyce’s episode was illegal. Gerty’s charms got Ulysses indicted for obscenity as Judge Corrigan decided to hold the editors of The Little Review for trial. Quinn retorted that his decision proved he had a dirty mind. It was a sly comment—almost a Jab. Was Corrigan aroused when he read the magazine in his chambers? Corrigan merely smiled as he made out the warrant for the imprisonment of Anderson and Heap and set their bail at twenty-five dollars each, which Quinn reluctantly paid. 

&

...the god Hermes gives him an herb that will protect him from her spell. The herb that saves Ulysses is called Moly (things like this were no coincidence), Joyce wondered if the word sypAilis had its origins in Circe—perhaps it was Greek: ovgtAta, Su + philis. “Swine love,” the spell that drove men to brute madness. After Ulysses compels Circe to transform his men back into humans, she regales them with a celebration that lasts a full year. Joyce toiled on “Circe” months longer than he planned. The episode became at turns a carnival, a nightmare, a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Miracles are performed and humiliations enacted. Genders change. Hours dance. Moths speak. Nearly everything and everyone the reader has seen through the day returns as a nightmare. Gerty MacDowell reproaches Bloom (“Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.”). Blazes Boylan tosses him a coin and hangs his hat on Bloom’s antlered head (“I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?”). Bloom shakes hands with the blind stripling (“My more than brother!”). “Bronze by gold,” the prostitutes whisper. The nanny goat, dropping currants, ambles by. Father Dolan emerges to uphraid Stephen for the glasses he broke in A Portrazt when he was six years old (“lazy idle little schemer”). The ghost of Stephen’s mother, like Joyce’s mother, appears with green bile trickling from her mouth (he asks her to tell him that she loves him). Bloom’s father, who committed suicide years ago, touches Bloom’s face with “vulture talons.” The long-awaited Elyah finally arrives and begins to dispense judgment (“No yapping, if you please .. . ”). Rudy, Bloom’s son, appears as he would have if he had survived infancy.

The prospects for the publication of Ulysses in the United States were bleak, and Quinn felt genuine remorse. He wrote to Anderson, “I thought of Joyce and of his need for the money and that he was abroad and out of touch with things here, and perhaps not in the best of health. And I remembered how hard it was for serious writers to live in these years and months and days .. . [have done the best I could, and I failed.” Word spread that the Post Office had sent the seized copies of The Little Review to the Salvation Army, where fallen women in reform programs were instructed to tear them apart. 

ANDERSON AND Heap were lucky. No one at the Little Review trial noticed the most scandalous aspect of “Nausicaa,” the obscurity at the heart of the episode: while Gerty MacDowell is leaning back on the rocks, Leopold Bloom is masturbating. The judges, the reporters, the innocent girl’s father and John Sumner himself missed it, which is understandable. Even if one were looking for something so improbably, outlandishly offensive, it wasn’t easy to find. When Gerty limps away, Bloom “recomposed his wet shirt,” but Pound had cut the word wet. A few pages later, the manuscript read, “O sweety. All your little white up I saw. Dirty girl. Made me do love sticky.” Pound crossed out “up I saw. Dirty girl” and, prudently, “love sticky” so that The Little Review’s version was more discreet though less coherent: “O sweety all your little white 

I made me do we too naughty darling.” An especially astute reader might con

&

But why should it matter? The end of style seems a long way from FeALAR bombs and the collapse of civilization, yet the critics’ comparisons were trying to capture the novel’s apparent recklessness. To turn style into futility, it seemed, was to lay waste to all foundations. When a well-known poet named Alfred Noyes delivered a lecture in front of the Royal Society of Literature in October 1922, he launched into a familiar diatribe about the unprecedented obscenity of Ulysses. But what infuriated Noyes most was that Joyce’s emergence signaled the degradation of the United Kingdom’s foundational values. Literary critics were casting aside the best of English literary tradition for madmen calling themselves modernists. It was as if an entire civilization were in the process of forgetting itself. 

To be oblivious of English values did not strike Noyes as a matter of losing the past. It struck him as a matter of losing grasp of reality. “The lack of any conviction that there are realities, standards, and enduring foundations in literature has had a deadly effect,” he told the Royal Society. Groundless literary criticism was introducing “elements of chaos” into the minds of the younger generation. 

&

He had a point. Narratives are the way we make sense of the world. We parcel existence into events and string them into cause-and-effect sequences. The chemist comparing controls and variables and the child scalded by a hot stove are both understanding the world through narrative. Novels are important because they turn that basic conceptual framework into an art form. A beautiful narrative arc reassures us that the baffling events around us are meaningful—and this is why Ulysses appeared to be an instrument of chaos, an anarchist bomb. To disrupt the narrative method was to disrupt the order of things. Joyce, it seemed, wasn’t devoted to reality. He appeared to be sweeping it away. 

If you were a modernist—if you believed the order of things was already gone—you thought differently. T. S. Eliot defended Ulysses by objecting to its critics’ premise. Life in the age of world war was no longer amenable to the narrative method, and yet Ulysses showed us that narratives weren’t the only way to create order. Existence could be layered. Instead of a sequence, the world was an epiphany. Instead of a tradition, civilization was a day. The chaos of modernity demanded a new conceptual method to make sense of the contemporary world, to make life possible for art. And that is what Ulysses gave us. 

&

Joyce spent the years after Ulysses tunneling into a denser, more obscure novel. Finnegans Wake is written in the weltering language of dreams, Words spill out of definitions and syntax like a river breaking the banks, and puns are as destructive as they are playful. Joyce felt as if he had arrived at the end of the English language. 

All the world’s in want and is writing a letters. A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world’s on wish to be carrying a letters. A letters to a king about a treasure from a cat. When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader. 

This is one of the more lucid passages. Finnegans Wake kept Nora up at night. “Jim is writing at his book,” she told a friend. “I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing.” She would get out of bed and pound on the door, “Now, Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.” 

Almost no one liked Finnegans Wake. When Ezra Pound first read a por tion in 1926, he replied, “I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."

Dubliners

 From my favorite story

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles, He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling: 

“Yal yaka, yaka, yaka!”’ 

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true. 

19 

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of cuiture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to ume by un. kempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel. 

“This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’ . . . Goon! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’ . . . Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?” 

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning. 

‘What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were . » - National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or...” 

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when th restraining influence of the school was at a distance  I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those Chronicles of disorder alone seem to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures I reflected do not happen to people who were made at home they must be sought abroad.

Jane and Prudence

Should we have something to eat before we go, do you think?" Jane asked. ‘I believe refreshments are provided but they may not be till rather late.’ 

‘Perhaps a glass of sherry and a biscuit?’ suggested Prudence hopefully. “One doesn’t really want much to eat...’ but how we need a drink, she continued to herself; the idea of facing thy whist drive without one was quite terrifying. 

‘Oh, yes, that would be the thing,’ said Jane quickly, with he head bent. She found herself quite unable to look at Prudence, whose eyelids were startlingly and embarrassingly green, glistening with some greasy preparation which had little flecks of silver in it. Was this what one had to do nowadays when one was unmarried? she wondered. What hard work it must kx, always remembering to add these little touches; there was something primitive about it, like the young African smearing himself with red cam-wood before he went courting. The odd and rather irritating thing about it was, though, that Nicholas was gazing at Prudence with admiration; it was quite noticeable. So it really did work. Jane studied her own face in the looking glass above the sideboard and it looked to her just the same as when Nicholas used to gaze at it with admiration. Would he look at her with renewed interest if she had green eyelids? she wondered

The Violent Bear it Away

My great uncle said he hated to admit it that his own sister was a whore but he had to say it to say the truth, the boy said. 

Shaw, you know yourself that it give him great satisfaction to admit she was a whore, the stranger said. He was always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore. That's all a prophet is good for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore. And anyway, he asked slyly, what do you know about whores? Where have you ever run up on one of them? 

Certainly I know what one of them is, the boy said. 

The Bible was full of them. He knew what they were and to what they were liable to come, and just as Jezebel was discovered by dogs, an arm here and a foot there, so said his great-uncle, it had almost been with his own mother and grandmother. 

&

It was not to be wondered at, the old man would say, that the schoolteacher was no better than he was with such a father as he had. The man, an insurance salesman, wore a straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a cigar and when you told him his soul was in danger, he offered to sell you a policy against any contingency. He said he was a prophet too, a prophet of life insurance, for every right-thinking Christian, he said, knew that it was his Christian duty to protect his family and provide for them in the event of the unexpected. There was no use treating with him, the old man said; his brain was as slick as his eyeballs and the truth would no more soak into it than rain would penetrate tin. The schoolteacher, with Tarwater blood in him, at least had his father’s strain diluted. “Good blood flows in his veins,” the old man said. “And good blood knows the Lord and there ain’t a thing he can do about having it. There ain't a way in the world he can get rid of it.” 

&

The boy only stared at him, his eyes filmed with a dull cast of nausea. 

“The great dignity of man,” his uncle said, “is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I'm content with it. It’s enough to be a man.” There was a light ring in his voice. He watched the boy closely to see if he had struck a chord.

On Joyce

 From Louis Gillet

I had never seen him without his sombre myopic lenses which seemed to be part of his person. Now the mask appeared bare, abruptly confessing its truth. At the moment of death, a relaxation takes place, the face seems washed as if a hand had wiped the wrinkles of life from it. This occasionally imparts a spark of youth to the dead, whence the medieval belief that they all have in heaven the common and perfect age of thirty-three. 

But here the dead preserved an attitude of combat. It was indeed the prominent forehead, the slender cheeks and sharply-etched bones, the determined chin, the long phiz—that is the word—of a Don Quixote just lifting his vizor. I still saw defiance in it. This was not the look of someone vanquished, of someone defunct—as termed by the beautiful language in which the Church embalms its dead, defunctos, those that have resigned, relieved themselves from existence—there was never so much haughtiness, so much inflexibility, never a look of pride more abrupt! It was the No! of the unsubdued, the refusal of a rebellious angel. 

Ulysses

 Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it. Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere: pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses without thorns. 

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the Coombe, linked together in the rain. 

O, Mairy lost the pin of her drawers. She didn’t know what to do 

To keep it up 

To keep it up. 

&

Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He doesn’t know who is here nor care. 

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he’d have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it. 

O, poor Robinson Crusoe, How could you possibly do so? 

Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding let it down that way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow’s. They’re so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one cofhn. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The Irishman’s house is his cofin. Embalming in catacombs, mummies, the same idea. 

&

 We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet. L 

Haines opened his newbought book. 

— I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. 

The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street: 

— England expects .. . 

Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter. Wa You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. 

andering AEngus I call him. 

—I am sure he has an idée fixe, Haines said, pinching his chin thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it would be likely to be. Such persons always have. 

Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely. 

— They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet. 

The joy of creation . . . — Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It’s rather interesting because Professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an interesting point out of that. 

Buck Mulligan’s watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to unload her tray. 

— He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does he write anything for your movement? 

He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily. 

— Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something in ten years. 

— Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon. Still, I shouldn’t wonder if he did after all. 

He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup. 

— This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don’t want to be imposed on. 

Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. 

&

— Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran. 

So I saw there was going to be bit of a dust. Bob’s a queer chap when the porter’s up in him; so says I just to make talk: 

— How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf? 

— I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that . . . 

— You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who? 

— With Dignam, says Alf. 

— Is it Paddy? says Joe. 

— Yes, says Alf. Why? | 

— Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe. 

— Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf. 

— Ay, says Joe. 

— Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff. 

— Who’s dead? says Bob Doran. 

— You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm. 

— What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five .. .What? .. . and Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s ... What? Dignam dead? 

— What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about. . . ’ 

— Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are. 

— Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow. 

— Paddy? says Alf. 

— Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him. 

— Good Christ! says Alf. 

Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted. 

&

and on the other a happily chosen position, succubitus felix, of the passive element. The other problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways, Mr M. Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleges, and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas—there, he said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agrecable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statucs such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or ofhcial, culminating in the exposture of newborn infants, the practice of criminal abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former (we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which often balk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained. Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet’s words, give us pause. Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law of anticipation by which organism in which morbous germs have taken up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement, which, though productive of pain to some of ....

&

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? 

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in scaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddics, freshcts, spatcs, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maclstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its varicty of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, iccflocs: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, clectric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its efAuvia in lacustrine marches, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. 

Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap? 

To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington’s lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller. 

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer? That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language. 

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot? 

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius. 

&

What special afhnities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? 

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inafhrmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. 

What were habitually his final meditations? 

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop am wander, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life. 

The Glimpses of the Moon

The Rector, returning from India, had been surprised to find his property baptised in his absence, but, not being a man very sensitive to literary nuances, had done nothing about the sign until many years later, when the Major had filled a conversational gap by suggesting that not worrying was probably a Popish practice, and so ipso facto unfit to be continuously recommended on the gates of proper Christian people of any sort, let alone proper Christian clerics. Though temperamentally little subject to anxiety himself, the Rector, struck by this notion, had at once gone to work on the nuts and bolts which held the sign to the massive wrought-iron curlicues of his great-grandfather’s gate. When these resisted him—being by now rusted tight—he had seized a hatchet and dealt the sign itself a heavy blow diagonally across the middle, and would certainly have gone on to reduce it to splinters but for being interrupted by a parishioner in trouble. Later, after he had given the parishioner a lot of money and no advice, it had occurred to him that since many undeniable Protestants, such as Jesus of Nazareth, had advised against worrying, the Major must have been speaking frivolously; so that apart from a sermon against frivolity the following Sunday, with special reference to the Major (lightly camouflaged as “a certain retired military person’), he had expelled the matter of the sign from his mind, and it had stayed expelled. 

Watt Crusoe 3

 (b) 

There is a great difference, however, between Bunyan and Defoe, a difference which suggests why it is Defoe, rather than Bunyan, who is often considered to be our first novelist. In the earlier fiction of the Puritan movement—in such works as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, or the stories of Bunyan and his Baptist confrére Benjamin Keach—we have many elements of the novel: simple language, realistic descriptions of persons and places, and a serious presentation of the moral problems of ordinary individuals. But the significance of the characters and their actions largely depends upon a transcendental scheme of things: to say that the persons are allegorical is to say that their earthly reality is not the main object of the writer, but rather that he hopes to make us see through them a larger and unseen reality beyond time and place. 

In Defoe’s novels, on the other hand, although religious concerns are present they have no such priority of status: indeed the heritage of Puritanism is demonstrably too weak to supply a continuous and controlling pattern for the hero’s experience. If, for example, we turn to the actual effect of Crusoe’s religion on his behaviour, we find that it has curiously little. Defoe often suggests that an incident is an act of Divine providence or retribution, but this interpretation is rarely supported by the facts of the story. To take the crucial instance: if Crusoe’s original sin was filial disobedience—leaving home in the first place—it is certain that no real retribution follows, since he does very well out of it; and later he often sets out for further journeys without any fear that he may be flouting Providence, This indeed comes very near to the ‘neglect’ of the ‘Cautions, warning and instruction . .. Providence’ which Crusoe called a ‘kind of Practical Atheism’ in his Serious Reflections. Where Providence is bringing blessings—as, for instance, when he finds the grain: of corn and rice—things are different: Crusoe need only accept. But the trilogy as a whole certainly suggests that any of the less co-operative interventions of Providence can safely be neglected. 

Marx sourly noted this somewhat gratuitous character of Crusoe’s religious life. ‘Of his prayers we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks on them as so much recreation.’2 He would have been pleased to find that Gildon thought that the ‘religious and useful reflections’ were ‘in reality ... put in . . . to swell the bulk of Defoe’s treatise to a five-shilling book’. Both Marx and Gildon were right in drawing attention to the discontinuity between the religious aspects of the book and its action: but their explanations do Defoe some injustice. His spiritual intentions were probably quite sincere, but they have the weakness of all ‘Sunday religion’ and manifest themselves in somewhat unconvincing periodical tributes to the transcendent at times when a respite from real action and practical intellectual effort is allowed or enforced. Such, certainly, is Crusoe’s religion, and we feel that it is in the last analysis the result of an unresolved and probably unconscious conflict in Defoe himself. He lived fully in the sphere of practical and utilitarian action, and could be wholly true to his being when he described this aspect of Robinson Crusoe’s life. But his religious upbringing forced him from time to time to hand over a brilliant piece of narrative by a star-reporter to a distant colleague on the religious page who could be relied on to supply suitable spiritual commentaries quickly out of stock. Puritanism made the editorial policy unalterable; but it was usually satisfied by a purely formal adherence. In this, too. Defoe is typical of the development of Puritanism; in the phrase of H. W. Schneider, ‘beliefs seldom become doubts; they become ritual’. Otherworldly concerns do not provide the essential themes of Defoe’s novels: but they do punctuate the narrative with comminatory codas that demonstrate a lifetime of somewhat mechanical practice. 

The relative impotence of religion in Defoe’s novels, then, suggests not insincerity but the profound secularisation of his outlook, a secularisation which was a marked feature of his age —the word itself in its modern sense dates from the first decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe himself had been born at a time when the Puritan Commonwealth had just collapsed at the Restoration, while Robinson Crusoe was written in the year of the Salters’ Hall controversy, when, after the last hopes of Dissent in a compromise with the Anglican Church had been given up, even their effort to unite among themselves proved impossible. In the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s hero meditates on the ebbing of the Christian religion throughout the world; it is a bitterly divided minority force in a largely pagan world, and God’s final intervention seems remoter than ever. Such, at least, is the conclusion to which Robinson Crusoe is forced by his own experience in the last words of the book: 

. no such zeal for the Christian religion will be found in our days, or perhaps in any age of the world, till Heaven beats the drums itself, and the glorious legions from above come down on purpose to propagate the work, and reduce the whole world to the obedience of King Jesus—a time which some tell us is not far off, but of which I heard nothing in all my travels and illuminations, no, not one word.! 

‘No, not one word’: the dying fall leaves Crusoe to his despair. What he was told to expect and what he has experienced do not agree. Until heaven beats the drums itself he must reconcile himself to a pilgrim’s progress through an effectively secular world, make his own way along a path no longer clearly illumined by God’s particular providences. 

The causes of secularisation in the period are many, but one of the most important, especially as far as Puritanism is concerned, was economic and social progress. In New England, for instance, the Pilgrim Fathers soon forgot that they had originally founded ‘a plantation of religion, not a plantation of Trades’; and it has been said that Governor Bradford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, shows how a Puritan saint came to write ‘less and less like a Puritan preacher and more and more like the author of Robinson Crusoe’.2 In England. by Defoe’s time, the more respectable dissenting sects at least were dominated by wealthy and somewhat time-serving merchants and financiers; and opportunities for further gain drove many prosperous Dissenters not only to occasional conformity, but into the Anglican Church.! In his early years Defoe had violently denounced occasional conformity, but Robinson Crusoe, we notice, Is an occasional conformist with a vengeance—he even passes as a Papist when it is economically expedient to do so. 

The conflict between spiritual and material values is an old one, but it was perhaps more obvious in the eighteenth century than at any other time; more obvious because so many people thought, apparently in perfectly good faith, that it did not really exist. Bishop Warburton, for example, argued that ‘to provide for utility is, at the same time, to provide for truth, its inseparable associate’.? ‘The reluctance to consider the extent to which spiritual and material values may be opposed is very marked in Defoe’s novels, and it can even be argued that the crucial critical problem which they raise is whether they do not in fact confuse the whole issue. But, whatever our decision on this point, it is at least clear that the mere possibility of such a confusion only exists because Defoe presents us with a narrative in which both ‘high’ and ‘low’ motives are treated with equal seriousness: the moral continuum of his novels is much closer than was that of any previous fiction to the complex combination of spiritual and material issues which moral choices in daily life customarily involve. 

It would seem, then, that Defoe’s importance in the history of the novel is directly connected with the way his narrative structure embodied the struggle between Puritanism and the tendency to secularisation which was rooted in material progress. At the same time it is also apparent that the secular and economic viewpoint is the dominant partner, and that it is this which explains why it is Defoe, rather than Bunyan, who is usually considered to be the first key figure in the rise of the novel. 

De Vogiié, the Catholic opponent of the French Realists, found an atheistic presumption in the novel’s exclusion of the non-natural;' and it is certain that the novel’s usual means —formal realism—tends to exclude whatever is not vouched for by the senses: the jury docs not normally allow divine intervention as an explanation of human actions. It is therefore likely that a measure of secularisation was an indispensable con. dition for the rise of the new genre. The novel could only concentrate on personal relations once most writers and readers believed that individual human beings, and not collectivities such as the Church, or transcendent actors, such as the Persons of the Trinity, were allotted the supreme role on the earthly stage. The novel, Georg Lukacs has written, is the epic of a world forsaken by God; it presents, in de Sade’s phrase, ‘le tableau des meoeurs séculaires’.

This, of course, is not to say that the novelist himself or his novel cannot be religious, but only that whatever the ends of the novelist may be, his means should be rigidly restricted to terrestrial characters and actions: the realm of the spirit should be presented only through the subjective experiences of the characters. Thus Dostoevsky’s novels, for example, 1n no sense depend for their verisimilitude or their significance on his religious views; divine intervention is not a necessary construct for an adequate and complete explanation of the causes and meanings of each action, as it is in Bunyan. Alyosha and Father Zossima are portrayed very objectively: indeed, the very brilliance of Dostoevsky’s presentation shows that he cannot assume, but must prove, the reality of the spirit: and The Brothers Karamazov as a whole does not depend upon any non-naturalistic Causation or significance to be effective and complete. 

To sum up, we can say that the novel requires a world view which is centred on the social relationships between individual persons; and this involves secularisation as well as individualism, because until the end of the seventeenth century the individual was not conceived as wholly autonomous, but as an element in a picture which depended on divine persons for its meaning, as well as on traditional institutions such as Church and Kingship for its secular pattern. 

At the same time the positive contribution of Puritanism, not only to the development of modern individualism but to the rise of the novel, and to its later tradition in England, must not be underestimated. It was through Puritanism that Defoe brought into the novel a treatment of the individual’s psychological concerns that was a tremendous advance in the kind of forensic ratiocination which had previously passed for psychological description in even the best of the romances, such as those of Madame de La Fayette. Nor does the fact that, in the words of Rudolph Stamm, who has given the most complete account of Defoe’s religious position, Defoe’s writings show that his ‘own experience of reality had nothing in common with that of a believing Calvinist’! disprove the positive importance of Defoe’s dissenting background. For we can say of him, as of later novelists in the same tradition, such as Samuel Richardson, George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence, that they have inherited of Puritanism everything except its religious faith. They all have an intensely active conception of life as a continuous moral and social Struggle; they all see every event in ordinary life as proposing an intrinsically moral issue on which reason and conscience must be exerted to the full before right action is possible; they all seek by introspection and observation to build their own personal scheme of moral certainty; and in different ways they all manifest the self-righteous and somewhat angular individualism of the earlier Puritan character. 

Ulysses

 Richard Ellmann narrates the actual events. Joyce was living at the tower, largely at Gogarty’s expense and "sufferance" (the word used by Stanislaus Joyce in his diary). Relations were strained, but Gogarty did not want to endanger his bohemian reputation, and his chance of appearing in a good light in Joyce's fiction, by putting Joyce out. Trench, whom Gogarty knew from Oxford and who had become a fervent follower of the Irish Revival, was living with them in the tower. On the night of September 14, 1904 Trench woke up screaming about a black panther that was about to spring on him, fired his revolver at the fireplace beside which Joyce was sleeping, and then went back to sleep. His nightmare returned and he screamed once more and reached for his revolver, but Gogarty had taken it. Gogarty said, “Leave him to me,” and shot some pots and pans over Joyce’s bed, which crashed down on him. "The terrified Joyce considered this fusillade his dismissal" (175). He got up, dressed, left the tower, and walked all the way to Dublin. The next day, he wrote a note to a friend asking him to go to the tower and pack up his trunk. Ellmann comments: “Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else packing the trunk.”

Alberto Manguel

“After intercourse all animals are sad,” Aristotle (or perhaps Galen) is supposed to have said, and to have added: “except the rooster, who then sings.” Aristotle was referring to sexual intercourse. Perhaps all intercourse—with pictures, with books, with people, with the virtual inhabitants of cyberspace—breeds sadness because it reminds us that, in the end, we are alone. 

**

Packing and unpacking are two sides of the same impulse, and both lend meaning to moments of chaos. Thus is the existence of. the collector,” wrote Benjamin, “dialectically pulled between the poles of disorder and order.” He might have added: or packing and unpacking. 

There are certain readers for whom books exist in the moment of reading them, and later as memories of the read pages, but who feel that the physical incarnations of books are dispensable. Borges, for instance, was one of these. Those who never visited Borges’s modest flat imagined his library to be as vast as that of Babel. In fact, Borges kept only a few hundred books, and even these he used to give away as gifts to visitors. Occasionally, a certain volume had sentimental or superstitious value for him, but by and large what mattered to him were a few recalled lines, not the material object in which he had found them. For me, it has always been otherwise. 

x Coventry Patmore, in a poem I learned by heart as a child, says that after having struck his young son for disobeying him, he went that night into the boy’s bedroom and saw that on a table drawn beside his head, He had put, within his reach, 

A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone, 

A piece of glass abraded by the beach 

And six or seven shells, 

A bottle with bluebells 

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art, 

To comfort his sad heart. 

Comfort is of the essence. The comforting objects on my own night table are (have always been) books, and my library was itself a place of comfort and quiet reassurance. It may be that books have this reassuring quality because we don’t really possess them: books possess us. Julio Cortazar, warning against accepting the gift of a watch, tells his readers: “When they give you a watch, they give you the fear of losing it, of having it stolen, of letting it drop on the floor and breaking. They give you its brand and the assurance that it’s a better brand than other brands, they give you the need to compare your watch with other watches. They don’t give you a watch as a gift, it is you who are the gift, it is you who are being given for the birthday of the watch.” Something of the sort can be Said about my books. 

Perhaps the books we choose determine our perdition or salvation in the eyes of whimsical gods. In her “Report on Heaven and Hell,” Silvina Ocampo concluded: “The laws of heaven and hell are versatile. Whether you go to one place or the other depends on a tiny detail. I knoy, people who, because of a broken key or a wicker Cage have gone to hell, and others who because of a newspaper page or a cup of milk, to heaven.” My salvation might depend on having read a certain book by Richard Outram, by William Saroyan, by Jan Morris, by Olga Sedakova. 

The books in my library promised me comfort, and also the possibility of enlightening conversations. They granted me, every time I took one in my hands, the memory of friendships that required no introductions, no conventional politeness, no pretense or concealed emotion. I knew, in that familiar space between the covers, that one evening I’d pull down a volume of Dr. Johnson or Voltaire I had never opened, and I would discover a line that had been waiting for me for centuries. I was certain, without having to retrace my way through it, that Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday or a volume of Cesare Pavese’s poems would be exactly what I required to put into words what I was feeling on any given morning. Books have always spoken for me, and have taught me many things long before these things came materially into my life, and the physical volumes have been for me something very much like breathing creatures that share my bed and board. This intimacy, this trust, began early on among readers. 

Sennett on the development of the city

 The street 

We would expect a large trading city like medieval Paris to have well-made roads to move goods through the city. Along the banks of the Seine River they existed; from 1000 to 1200, these banks were lined with stone walls so that trade on the river could be moved more efficiently. But inland, the growth of the city did not create a system of roads easily accommodating transport. “Roads were in a poor state,” Le Goff notes; “there was a limited number of carts and waggons, which were expensive, and useful vehicles were absent’; even the lowly wheelbarrow did not appear on Parisian streets until the end of the Middle Ages. The Roman city, with its beautifully engineered roads bedded deep into the earth, was a construction miracle of the past. 

The messy form as well as sorry physical condition of the medieval street resulted from the very processes of growth. The roads of one commune had seldom been laid out to join those of a neighboring commune, since its boundaries were originally the end of a smaller, villagelike settlement turning inward. Nor were the bourgs laid out to connect to other bourgs. The chaotic shape of the streets also arose from the use the owners made of the land they controlled. 

Most pieces of land in a cité or bourg were leased, or the building rights on them sold, to individuals. These diverse builders had the right to construct as they saw fit on the land owned by a large instituion like the Crown or the Church; moreover, the various parts of a single building, on different floors or the same floor, might be owned and developed by different persons. “There was,” says the urbanist Jacques Heers, “a veritable colonization of building land within the city of in its immediate environs.” Rarely did the landholder attempt to influence the builder in terms of urban design; indeed, on a purely economic level only in exceptional cases could the King or Bishop seize a building or force its owner to sell to someone else. In Paris, King or Bishop invoked “eminent domain” mostly to add to a palace or a church. 

Only medieval cities which had been founded in Roman times were likely to have a street plan or an overall design, and the Roman grids had, save in a very few cities like Trier and Milan, been cracked by the growth process into disconnected bits and pieces. Neither King nor Bishop nor bourgeois had an image of how the city as a whole should look. “The cramped, fragmented nature of the public sphere reflected, in the very topography of the city, the weakness, lack of resources, and limited ambitions of the state,” claims one historian. Builders put up whatever they could get away with; neighbors fought each other’s constructions with lawsuits, and often more brutally with hired gangs of thugs who ripped down a neighbor’s work. From this aggression came the Parisian urban fabric, “mazes of twisting, tiny streets, impasses, and courts; squares were small, and there were few broad vistas or buildings set back from the street; traffic was always clogged.”° 

Medieval Cairo and medieval Paris formed a telling contrast, though to the modern eye they might have seemed equally jumbled. The Koran lays down precise instructions for the placement of doors and the spatial relationship of doors to windows. In medieval Cairo, land owned by a Muslim had to be built according to these instructions, which were enforced by charitable foundations in the city. Such buildings, moreover, had to relate in form to one another, had to be aware of one another; one could not, for instance, block a neighbor’s door. Religion decreed contextual architecture, though the context was not one of linear streets. The buildings of medieval Paris were under no such divine—or royal, or noble—command to take account of one another. Each was fenestrated and floored according the single owner’s will; it was common for builders to block access to other buildings with impunity. 

The space of the Parisian medieval street was no more and no less than the space which remained after buildings had been constructed. Before the great Renaissance palaces arose in the Marais, for instance, this swampy settlement on the Right Bank had streets which suddenly narrowed so that a single person could barely pass berween buildings that different owners had built out to the edge of the lot lines. The abbeys and the King’s quarter had more serviceable streets, since the owner was also the builder, though even in the episcopal district around Notre-Dame different orders pushed into the street according to their own desires, and to test the limits of their privileges. 

The street bore the imprint of aggressive assertion, then, it was the space left over after people asserted their rights and powers. The street was no garden, no coenobitic place created by common labor. If the street lacked those qualities of place, however, it did possess certain visual features which made it function well as an economic space. These features could be read on its walls. 

In the non-ceremonial and poorer districts of ancient Greece and Rome, the wall related to the street as a solid barrier. The medieval urban economy made the street wall permeable. In the Parisian district of leather workers on the Right Bank, for example, the windows of each shop displayed goods to people walking in the streets through an innovation in window architecture: the windows had wooden shutters that folded down to serve as counters. The first building with windows known to be designed in this fashion dates from the early 1100s. Using the walls in this way, the merchants focused on the display of their goods, to make people on the street aware a shop contained something worth looking at inside as well. The buyer walking the street looked to the walls, their surfaces now active economic zones. 

The medieval courtyard became tied in the same way to the economic activity of the street. The courtyard  Served as a showroom as well as a workroom its entrance gradually enlarged so that people passing by could see what was happening within. Even in very grand palaces in the Marais district as late as the 16th century the ground floor Courtyard was planned as a bee hive of shops producing and selling to the general public as well as provisioning the noble household above. 

The development of this porous economic street space encouraged a change in street time. The ancient city depended on daylight; trade in medieval Paris extended the hours of the street. People went into the streets to shop before or after they had finished their own labors; the dusk as well as dawn became hours of consumption, the bakery at dawn, for instance, and the butcher shop late at night, after the butcher had purchased, prepared, and roasted his meats during the day. The counter stayed down and the courtyard stayed unlocked as long as there were people in the street. 

These streets whose buildings arose from the aggressive assertion of rights, whose porous surfaces and volumes encouraged economic competition, were also famously violent. Modern experiences of urban street crime give us no way to imagine the viciousness which ruled the medieval street. But this medieval street violence was not also what we might logically deduce, a simple consequence of economics. 

Violence in the street was aimed far more frequently at persons rather than property. In 1405—06 (when the first reliable crime figures are available for Paris), 54 percent of the cases that came before the criminal courts of Paris concerned “passionate crimes,” while 6 percent arose from robberies; in the decade from 1411 to 1420, 76 percent of the cases were about impulsive violence against persons, 7 percent concerned thefts.’ One explanation for this lay in the nearly universal practice among merchants of hiring guards; indeed, the very wealthy maintained little private armies to protect their mansions. There were municipal police in Paris from 1160 onward, but their numbers were small, and their duties consisted mostly in guarding public officials when they travelled through the city. 

The crime statistics from the High and late Middle Ages are far too crude for us to know who was attacked, whether family and friends or strangers on the street. It is a plausible inference, from the existence of so many hired guards and soldiers among the affluent classes, that most of the violence practiced by poor people was directed at other poor people. We do know, however, one of the main causes of such attacks; it was drink. 

Drinking was linked to about 35 percent of the murders or grave violent attacks in the Touraine, largely a rural region of France. In Paris the correlation was even higher, for drinking occurred not only at home, where a drunk could go to sleep, but in the public cellars \ wine shops which lined the streets of the city.8 Groups of people got drunk together and then late at night erupted into the street, picking fights. 

The need to drink had a compelling origin: it came from the need for bodily heat. In this northern city, wine warmed people’s bodies in buildings that lacked effective heating; the fireplace set against a reflecting wall, with a flue leading to an external chimney, made its appearance only in the fifteenth century. Prior to this, open braziers or fires built directly on the floor provided a building’s heat, and the smoke of these fires kept people from settling too close. Moreover, the heat was quickly dissipated, as few ordinary urban buildings had windows sheathed with glass. Wine served also as a narcotic that dulled pain. Like heroin or cocaine in modern cities, fortified wine created a drug culture in the Middle Ages, particularly in the public cellars and wine shops. 

To be sure, street violence could take a political turn, in Paris as jn other medieval cities. “Urban revolts were born, were propagated, and were aggravated in the street.”” These revolts had impersonal causes, such as corrupt officials charged with distributing grain. But jn Paris the constables of both King and Bishop suppressed these uprisings quickly; most lasted for only a few hours, at most a few days. The usual physical violence people experienced on the street was unpredictable—an unprovoked knife thrust, a fist in one’s stomach by a man who lurched by, blind drunk. We need to imagine, then, a street marked by different but discontinuous forms of aggression: purposeful economic competition and impulsive non-economic violence. 

Verbal violence did play an important role in economic competition, if it rarely translated into violent action. People came to houses to threaten, without restraint and in the most gory detail, the person or the families of debtors. Some historians believe the very violence of this language served as a kind of emotional discharge, permitting competitors to act aggressively without in fact coming to blows. Be that as it may, the political and ecclesiastical powers ruling the city made little effort to punish sellers who threatened to punch or stab buyers who resisted concluding a sale, or who harassed other sellers in the street. 

The low levels of property crime signalled that an effective but peculiar order reigned in urban space. It might have been invisible to the contemporary resident of Cairo, whose trading followed the overt dictates of religion. Beyond injunctions against usury and stealing, neither the Old nor the New Testament offered much guidance about how to behave economically. And perhaps this was why John of Salisbury also could not make sense of economic behavior. Competition was not choleric, in the sense the Ars medica described choler, the violent choler of the fighting soldier. It bore little resemblance to the sanguine civic command of the ruler, none to the phlegmatic considerations of the scholar. Competition certainly was not melancholic, nor nurturing. Just who was this economic creature became a little more evident in the organization of fairs and markets, spaces subject to more overt civic control than the streets. 

Watt Crusoe 2

 

Economic individualism explains much of Crusoe’s character; economic specialisation and its associated ideology help to account for the appeal of his adventures; but it is Puritan individualism which controls his spiritual being. 

Troeltsch has claimed that ‘the really permanent attainment of individualism was due to a religious, and not a secular movement, to the Reformation and not the Renaissance’. It is neither feasible nor profitable to attempt to establish priorities in such matters, but it is certainly true that if there is one element which all forms of Protestantism have in common it is the replacement of the rule of the Church as the mediator between man and God by another view of religion in which it is the individual who is entrusted with the primary responsibility for his own spiritual direction. Two aspects of this new Protestant emphasis—the tendency to increase consciousness of the self as a spiritual entity, and the tendency to a kind of democratisation of the moral and social outlook—are particularly important both to Robinson Crusoe and to the development of the presuppositions on which the formal realism of the novel is based. 

The idea of religious self-scrutiny as an important duty for each individual is, of course, much older than Protestantism; 

it derives from the individualist and subjective emphasis of primitive Christianity, and finds its supreme expression in St. Augustine’s Confessions. But it is generally agreed that it was Calvin, in the sixteenth century, who re-established and systematised this earlier pattern of purposive spiritual introspection, and made it the supreme religious ritual for the layman as well as for the priest: every good Puritan conducted a continual scrutiny of his inner man for evidence of his own place in the divine plot of election and reprobation. 

This ‘internalisation of conscience’ is everywhere manifested in Calvinism. In New England, it has been said, ‘almost every literate Puritan kept some sort of journal’; and, in England, Grace Abounding is the great monument of a way of life which Bunyan shared with the other members of his sect, the Baptists, who were, with one or two minor additions and subtractions, orthodox Calvinists. In later generations the introspective habit remained even where religious conviction weakened, and there resulted the three greatest autobiographical confessions of the modern period, those of Pepys, Rousseau and Boswell, all of whom were brought up under the Calvinist discipline; their fascination with self-analysis, and indeed their extreme egocentricity, are character traits which they shared both with later Calvinism in general and with Defoe’s heroes. 

(a) 

The importance of this subjective and individualist spiritual pattern to Defoe’s work, and to the rise of the novel, is very evident. Robinson Crusoe initiates that aspect of the novel’s treatment of experience which rivals the confessional autobiography and outdoes other literary forms in bringing us close to the inward moral being of the individual; and it achieves this closeness to the inner life of the protagonist by using as formal basis the autobiographical memoir which was the most immediate and widespread literary expression of the introspective tendency of Puritanism in general. 

Defoe himself, of course, was born and bred a Puritan. His father was a Dissenter, perhaps a Baptist, more probably Presbyterian, in any case a Calvinist; and he sent his son to a dissenting academy, probably intending him for the ministry Defoe’s own religious beliefs changed a good deal, and he expressed in his writings the whole gamut of doctrines, from intransigent predestinarianism to rational deism, which Puritanism held during its varied course of development; nevertheless, there is no doubt that Defoe remained and was generally considered to be a Dissenter, and that much of the outlook revealed in his novels is distinctively Puritan. 

There is nothing to suggest that Robinson Crusoe was intended to be a Dissenter. On the other hand, the note of his religious reflections is often Puritan in character—their tenor has been seen by one theologian as very close to the Presbyterian Shorter Catechism of the 1648 Westminster Assembly." Crusoe certainly exhibits frequent signs of Bibliolatry: he quotes some twenty verses of the Bible in the first part of Robinson Crusoe alone, besides making many briefer references; and he sometimes seeks divine guidance by opening the Bible at random. But the most significant aspect of his spiritual life is his tendency to rigorous moral and religious self-examination. Each of his actions is followed by a passage of reflection in which Crusoe ponders over the problem of how it reveals the intentions of divine providence. If the corn sprouts, it is surely a divine miracle ‘so directed for my sustenance’; if he has a bout of fever ‘a leisurely review of the miseries of death’? eventually convinces him that he deserves reprobation for neglecting to show his gratitude for God’s mercies to him. The modern reader no doubt tends to pay little attention to these parts of the narrative; but Crusoe and his author showed their point of view very clearly by allotting the spiritual realm as much importance as the practical, both in space and emphasis. It would therefore appear that what are probably the vestigial remnants of the Calvinist introspective discipline helped to provide us for the first time in the history of fiction with a hero whose day-by-day mental and moral life is fully shared by the reader. 

This crucial literary advance was not, of course, brought about by the introspective tendency of Puritanism alone. As we have seen, the gospel of work had a similar effect in giving the individual’s daily economic task almost as much importance as his daily spiritual self-examination; and the parallel effects of both tendencies were supplemented by another closely related tendency in Puritanism. 

If God had given the individual prime responsibility for his own spiritual destiny, it followed that he must have made this possible by signifying his intentions to the individual in the events of his daily life. The Puritan therefore tended to see every item in his personal experience as potentially rich in moral and spiritual meaning; and Defoe’s hero is acting according to this tradition when he tries to Interpret so many of the mundane events of the narrative as divine pointers which may help him to find his own place in the eternal scheme of redemption and reprobation. In that scheme, of course, all souls had equal chances, and it therefore followed that the individual had as full an opportunity of showing his spiritual qualities in the ordinary conduct of life as in its rarer and more dramatic exigencies. This was one reason for the general Puritan tendency towards the democratisation of the moral and social scale, and it was assisted by several other factors. ‘There were, for instance, many social, moral and political reasons why the Puritans should be hostile to the aristocratic scale of values; nor could they fail to disapprove of its literary expression in the traditional heroes of romance, extrovert conquerors whose victories are won, not in the spirit or in the counting-house but on the battlefield and in the boudoir. It is at all events clear that Puritanism brought about a fundamental and in a sense democratic orientation in the social and literary outlook of its adherents, an orientation which was described by Milton’s lines in Paradise Lost: ‘To know / That which before us lies in daily life / Is the prime wisdom’,' and which evoked one of Defoe’s most eloquent pieces of writing, an essay in Applebee’s Journal (1722) on the funeral of Marlborough. The essay’s peroration begins: 

What then is the work of life? What the business of great men, that pass the stage of the world in seeming triumph as these men, we call heroes, have done? Is it to grow great in the mouth of fame, and take up many pages in history? Alas! that is no more than making a tale for the reading of posterity, till it turns into fable and romance. Is it to furnish subject to the poets, and live in their immortal rhymes, as they call them? That is, in short, no more than to be hereafter turned into ballad and song, and be sung by old women to quiet children; or, at the corner of a street, to gather crowds in aid of the pickpocket and the whore. Or is their business rather to add virtue and piety to their glory, which alone will pasg them into Eternity, and make them truly immortal? What is glory without virtue? A great man without religion is no more than a great beast without a soul. 

Then Defoe modulates into something more like the narrowly ethical evaluation of merit which was to be one of the legacies of Puritanism to the middle-class code: ‘What is honour without merit? And what can be called true merit, but that which makes a person a good man, as well as a great man’.! 

Neither Crusoe, nor indeed any of Defoe’s heroes, it must be admitted, are conspicuous by these standards of virtue, religion, merit and goodness; and, of course, Defoe did not intend them to be so. But these standards do represent the moral plane on which Defoe’s novels exist, and by which his heroes must be judged: the ethical scale has been so internalised and democratised that, unlike the scale of achievement common in epic or romance, it is relevant to the lives and actions of ordinary people. In this Defoe’s heroes are typical of the later characters of the novel: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and even Colonel Jacque never think of glory or honour; they have their being on the moral plane of day-to-day living more completely than those of previous narratives, and their thoughts and actions only exhibit an ordinary, a democratic goodness and badness. Robinson Crusoe, for instance, 1s Defoe’s most heroic character, but there is nothing unusual about his personality or the way he faces his strange experiences; as Coleridge pointed out, he 1s essentially ‘the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself . . . nothing 1s done, thought, suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for’.? 

Defoe’s presentation of Robinson Crusoe as the ‘universal representative’ is intimately connected with the egalitarian tendency of Puritanism in yet another way. For not only did this tendency make the way the individual faced every problem of everyday life a matter of deep and continuing spiritual concern; it also encouraged a literary outlook which was suited to describing such problems with the most detailed fidelity. 

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In Mimesis, a brilliant panorama of realiatic representation in literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Erich Auerbach has demonatrated the general connection between the Christian view of man and the serious literary portrayal of ordinary people and of common life. ‘The classical theory of genres had reflected the social and philosophical orientation of Greece and Rome: tragedy described the heroic vicissitudes of people better than ourselves in appropriately elevated language, whereas the domain of everyday reality belonged to comedy which was supposed to portray people ‘inferior to ourselves’ in an appropriately ‘low’ style. Christian literature, however, reflecting a very different social and philosophical outlook, had no place for this Stiltrennung or segregation of styles according to the class status of the subject-matter. The gospel narratives treated the doings of humble people with the utmost seriousness and on occasion, indeed, with sublimity; later, this tradition was continued in many of the mediaeval literary forms, from the lives of the saints to the miracle plays; and it eventually found its greatest expression in Dante’s Divina Commedia.! 

The classicising tendencies of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, however, re-established the old doctrine of genre, and indeed elaborated it to an extent that would certainly have surprised Aristotle. The supreme example of this elaboration is found in French literature of the seventeenth century, and especially in tragedy; not only was the unremitting use of a fully codified 'style noble' prescribed, but even the objects and actions of everyday life were banished from the stage. 

In Protestant countries, however, the Stiltrennung never achieved such authority, especially in England where neoclassicism was confronted by the example of Shakespeare and that characteristic mingling of the tragic and comic modes which was part of his legacy from the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, in one important respect even Shakespeare followed the Sultrennung: his treatment of low and rustic characters is very similar to that of the protagonists of the neo-classical tradition from Ben Jonson to Dryden, and there is nothing egalitarian about it, It is  Very significant that the main exceptions to this derogatory attitude are found in the works of puritan writers. In Adam Milton created the 1st epic hero who is essentially a universal representative Bunyan seeing all souls is equal before God accorded the humble and their lives a much more serious and sympathetic attention than they received in the other literature of his period. While the works of Defoe are the supreme illustration in the novel of the connection between the democratic individualisation of puritanism and the objective representation of the world and all those who inhabit it.