The Sow That Eats Her Own Farrow

The Land of Eternity

The first act of the tragedy, or comedy (in the scholastic sense of the word), whose main character is a certain Gould Verschoyle, begins as all earthly tragedies do: with birth. The rejected positivist formula of milieu and race can be applied to human beings to the same degree as to Flemish art. Thus the first act of the tragedy begins in Ireland, “the ultima Thule, the land on the other side of knowledge,” as one of Dedalus’s doubles calls it; in Ireland, “the land of sadness, hunger, despair, and violence,” according to another explorer, who is less inclined to myth and more to laborious earthy prose. However, in him too a certain lyrical quality is not in har...