Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7965

Q: The English reader has digested Carlyle and swallowed Meredith and is not quite unwilling to reJOYCE in even more startling strangenesses of expression at the present day. Will his stomach really turn at the novelty of that phrase which you wouldn’t approve: “the voice of a devouring eye”? “The voice of an eye” sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective “devouring” is added the phrase seems to become effective. “Devouring eye” is then a synecdoche – isolating and emphasising Shakespeare’s most remarkable quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the oral epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis from being too startling. If Milton could give us “blind mouths” and Wordsworth

Thou eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, readst the eternal deep,

is there very much to object to in this visioned voice?

A: Can’t accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of an eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me.

The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter. Poetry is permitted to be insane – the poet and the madman go together: though even there there are limits. Meredith and Carlyle are tortuous or extravagant in their style only – though they can be perfectly sane when they want. In poetry anything can pass – for instance, my “voice of a tilted nose”:

O voice of a tilted nose,

Speak but speak not in prose!

Nose like a blushing rose,

O Joyce of a tilted nose!

That is high poetry, but put it in prose and it sounds insane.

5-5-1935