'A Collective External Brain for Man'

In The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928), in a long essay titled “The Strange Case of James Joyce,” Rebecca West writes:

“I do not think we can exaggerate the fundamental unity of all art and all experience. In both alike the individual is examining his environment to see what chances of survival it affords him. This does not mean that he is looking for nuts to gnaw or a cow to milk; it means that he seeks circumstances in which his soul can exercise certain choices.”

For West, this is virtually what it means to be human. She has a way of describing, usually without trivializing or indulging in confession, deeply personal experiences and relating them to larger themes – in this case, the way we produce and consume works of art. That would become one of her trademarks as a writer, a method she perfected in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941).

Her evaluation of Ulysses, which from the start had attracted at least as many acolytes and exegetes as readers, is refreshingly mixed. She describes Joyce as “a great man who is entirely without taste,” a failing that results in “the gross sentimentality which is his most fundamental error.” She writes: “Seduced by his use of a heterodox technique into believing himself to be a wholly emancipated writer, James Joyce is not at all ahead of his times in his enslavement to the sentimental.” On the positive side she adds:

“I claim that the interweaving rhythms of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus and Marion Bloom make beauty, beauty of the sort whose recognition is an experience as real as the most personal experiences we can have, which gives a sense of reassurance, of exultant confidence in the universe, which no personal experience can give.”

Again, West insists on relating the reader’s experience of art and “real life.” Here’s the most intriguing portion of her essay, coming shortly after the passage quoted at the top:

“And what else was James Joyce doing when he wrote Ulysses? Push back the superficial ‘story’ layer and you will come on the same process. It is the great human game. For that reason, as Santayana has put it, ‘it might be said of every work of art and of every natural object, that it could be made the starting-point for a chain of inferences that should reveal the whole universe’; and it follows that all works of art are valuable to any human being who is part of the civilization that produced them. They will confirm his own researches into a common problem.”

The Santayana passage she quotes can be found in the “Goethe’s Faust” chapter in Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (1910):

“Heard philosophies are sweet, but those unheard may be sweeter. They may be more unmixed and more profound for being adopted unconsciously, for being lived rather than taught. This is not merely to say what might be said of every work of art and of every natural object, that it could be made the starting-point for a chain of inferences that should reveal the whole universe, like the flower in the crannied wall. It is to say, rather, that the vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best-chosen words.”

Santayana, with his allusions to Keats and Tennyson, seems to take West’s point for granted. Each accomplished work of art is ours by inheritance, and from each we might derive the civilization that produced it. Art genetically encodes its origin. This suggests that Joyce’s boast, that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book [Ulysses],” may have merit.  

In a letter to her publisher Jonathan Cape, written in December 1927, West describes her Joyce essay as “probably the first estimate to be done neither praying nor vomiting. In it I come to the conclusion that though it is ugly and incompetent it is a work of art. That is to say it is necessary.” She goes on to outline the “double and vital function” Ulysses and all true art fulfills:

“Firstly it makes a collective external brain for man; secondly it presents certain formal relations to man which suggest a universe more easy in certain respects than the one he knows.”