Splinters

Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians is underpinned by Walter J. Ong's argument that "printing was the efficient cause of those intellectual movements which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries destroyed the hierarchies of knowledge and rearranged the things we know for the sake of pedagogic convenience." Extrapolating on this key idea, the legendary critic Hugh Kenner goes on to discuss how the Gutenberg Revolution and the Enlightenment impacted the art of literature.

The Age of Reason gave birth to at least three new types of book. The encyclopedia and the dictionary were created as compendiums and catalogues of the things of the world. Then there was the novel, which started out as a form of storytelling ruled by verisimilitude and plausibility. Luckily, a disorderly trend quickly took root:

"The form so circumscribed has this peculiarity, that it tempts subverters; and the significant history of fiction is defined by a list of practitioners who found in its curious rules a challenge."

In the hands of writers such as Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett, the novel becomes a "Knowing Machine" for regurgitating the contents of the Enlightened books of fact. All three belong to the tradition of writers who see the importance of treating "the book as book". The printed book acquired strange new conventions that set it apart from other forms of communication. For example, the footnote was "a step in the direction of discontinuity: of organizing blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than consecutively in time." Swift was a pioneering artist of print culture:

"A Tale of a Tub is the first comic exploitation of that technological space which the words in a large printed book tend to inhabit. Commerce and capital had recently discovered that printing is not simply a way of disseminating manuscripts, but that a book is an artifact of a new kind."

The author of Madame Bovary was surrounded by books, and well aware of the fact: "We note the continuity of Flaubert's themes; from first to last he is the great student of cultural feedback, writing books about what books do to the readers of books, one eye always on the sort of thing his own book is going to do to its own reader."

In the chapter on Flaubert, Kenner focuses mainly on the delightful Dictionary of Received Ideas and the unfinished novel Bouvard and P?cuchet. Here, as throughout the whole book, Kenner's lively language is casually learned and highly entertaining. The discussion is free of witless bloat and pedantic trivia. Each work mentioned in passing receives a quicksilver reading.

"Joyce writing a sentence" by Guy Davenport

Joyce is the comedian of the inventory: the text of Ulysses forms a closed system made out of myriad lists. A great many of them are outlined in Joyce's schemata for the novel, but a list for the sake of a list isn't very much:

"We have heard of this side of Joyce often enough, but we have not perhaps heard the right things about it. As every commentator since Stuart Gilbert has discovered, nothing is easier than to disentangle, with patience, lists and more lists from the Protean text. What seems to be not dwelt upon is the fact that these lists are commonly finite, and so far as he can, Joyce is at pains to include every item on them."

Endless lists wouldn't take advantage of the technological space of the printed book: quick cross-referencing is easy with a handy and inexpensive volume. The reader only needs to thumb the pages back and forth. The symmetric correspondences between the items of the numerous lists, spread across the chapters of Ulysses, maintain Joyce's house of fiction. The appearance and reappearance of things turns the novel into a game: "We have the double pleasure of knowing what should be present, and knowing that all of it is present."

The exhaustiveness of Flaubert and Joyce left Beckett to witness the arrival at an impasse. With Ulysses in particular, the novel seemed to have reached a definite terminus. Where to go now? Beckett confronted head-on the paradox of the Cretan liar at the heart of the novel. From the end of Molloy: "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It is not midnight. It is not raining."

Beckett created narrators whose routines and procedures exhaust all the options presented by the characters' actions and thoughts. In this regard, the short quotations of Beckett's prose (or the snapshot-like descriptions of his work) fail to convey the essential:

"For since someone else, a character, is responsible for the narration, we are not simply considering buttons [in this case, Malone's], but attending to the intimate deliverances of a human mind, which in finding the buttons of absorbing interest, proves to be itself of absorbing interest, to us."

The Stoic Comedians (Dalkey Archive Press, 107 pages with 10 illustrations by Guy Davenport) is a rich and energizing work which not only serves as a spirited introduction to the major works of the titular writers, but also provides a nice recap of the emergence of the printing press.