At the beginning of Ithaca the conversation between
Stephen and Bloom appears to be going much better than it did
in most of Eumaeus, but at least one of Stephen's
ideas clearly strikes Bloom as, in the words of Eumaeus,
"a bit out of his sublunary depth." He declines to voice an
opinion on what his young companion calls "the eternal
affirmation of the spirit of man in literature," a phrase
which strongly recalls ideas that the young Joyce had
advocated in a lecture inspired by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The lecture
praised art which affirms human life but tells the truth about
it, no matter how unflattering.
In January 1900, when he was only seventeen years old, Joyce
delivered a lecture titled "Drama and Life" to the Literary
and Historical Society of University College, Dublin. In this
important announcement of aesthetic views that would continue,
with some significant modifications, to occupy Joyce
throughout his writing career, he argued that great drama was
superior not only to facile stagecraft but also to mere
"literature" for its capacity to represent enduring truths of
human experience. Later, persuaded in part by his own greater
talent for novelistic fiction than for stage plays, Joyce
abandoned the invidious distinction between drama and
literature. But he maintained his belief that fiction should
represent eternal truths of the human condition.
"Drama and Life" proposes that "Human society is the
embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities
and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap." The
essay presents these "eternal conditions"
metaphorically as the "spirit" of humankind: "It might be said
fantastically that as soon as men and women began life in the
world there was above them and about them, a spirit,
of which they were dimly conscious, which they would have had
sojourn in their midst in deeper intimacy and for whose truth
they became seekers in after times, longing to lay hands upon
it. For this spirit is as the roaming air, little susceptible
of change, and never left their vision, shall never leave
it, till the firmament is as a scroll rolled away."
The artist who seeks to capture this eternal spirit in words
studies "men and women as we meet them in the real world, not
as we apprehend them in the world of faery." Such pitiless
scrutiny is a stronger response to life, Joyce argued, than
high-minded idealization of the human condition, or earnest
ethical programs, or religious worship, or pursuit of beauty,
or mere amusement. Such an art "may help us to make our
resting places with a greater insight and a greater foresight"
because it grounds us in the unpretty, but substantial, truth
of what we are. The powerful "Yes"
with which Molly concludes Ulysses breathes the same
spirit of looking hard at what life has offered and affirming
its value.
[2025] Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner cite another of Joyce's
early essays which contains an even more exact anticipation of
Ithaca's mention of "the eternal affirmation
of the spirit of man in literature." In the 1902 essay
on James Clarence Mangan Joyce wrote: "all those who have
written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate
and weary have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom. Nay,
shall not such as these have part, because of that high,
original purpose which remembering painfully or by way of
prophecy they would make clear, in the continual
affirmation of the spirit?" The commentators note that
Joyce returned to this formulation in Stephen Hero:
"The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and
machinery, has need of these realities, which alone give and
sustain life.... Thus the spirit of man makes a continual
affirmation."
