The quote Mr. Stadlen uses is indeed in reference to Ulysses, a book as different from Wake as day is from night.  I take the quote to mean that VN feels Joyce sometimes slipped and fell into the stream of consciousness he employed to irradiate the souls of Daedalus and the Blooms.

Other readers than VN believe the stream of Stephen Daedalus's consciousness is carrying a lot more philosophical reflection, not to mention sheer visual detail, than could reasonably be the case in a "naturalist" novel, even considering Daedalus's troubled Hamlet-like brilliance.

(I consider Uly a naturalist novel in spite of its forays into different levels of consciousness. Joyce faithfully and correctly expanded the naturalist vision to the workings of the bowels and the rioting of the brothel: why not the unconscious as well?).

Similarly, the stream of Leopold Bloom's lucubrations is found by many, perhaps including VN, to be glutted with highbrow literary, theological, and philosophical erudition beyond the reach of the humble fellow with whom we've sat in the fragrant jakes, mulling a magazine story (Matchem's Masterstroke). Bloom's hallucinations, later, in Nighttown, come from a greater mind. Possibly the many-voiced nocturnal intelligence that later floods the Wake.

I've always enjoyed VN's description of JJ's novels as "great machines." It's a telling observation, true in a number of ways. But I've never bought VN's rating his own English as "patball" compared to JJ's "championship game." The prose of the Dubliners stories and Portrait of an Artist is, with the exception of a number of achingly beautiful, transcendent passages, not imbued line by line with any special luster. JJ's choice of the mot juste and the perfect image owes more to a journalistic-like savvy than to a throbbing vein of poetry. Reread "Grace," "Two Gallants," "The Boarding House."

Andrew Stuart Brown

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