Free Adeline by Norah Vincent Page B

be found.”
    Leonard pulls the pipe from his mouth and smiles at her in spite of himself.
    “Yes. Yes,” he proceeds more smoothly, “I understand your objection to Freud, though part of it, you must admit, is purely xenophobic—”
    She begins to object, but he cuts her off affectionately.
    “But Newton was an Englishman, and he was making the same mistakes, albeit centuries before. Still, you call it Germanic imbecility in the mouth of Freud, but I am right about the cosmology, and I’m sorry to say that the modern improvement on Newton that you are so clearly invoking comes from the same Teutonic stock.”
    “What
are
you babbling about?” she squawks, but there is delight in her voice.
    “You said this very thing in passing at one point in
Dalloway
,” he says. “Like poor Septimus watching the aeroplane disappear in the sky, it is with the eyes of Herr Professor Einstein that you are seeing your new world.”
    “Oh, don’t tell me about Septimus,” she cries. “Or Einstein, for that matter. Yes, it’s true, I referred to Einstein in
Dalloway
, and yes, I meant it, but right now, the thing I am talking about right now, well, I am not seeing with anyone’s eyes. I am not seeing with eyes at all. That is the point.”
    Leonard is not remotely convinced, of course, but he is too relieved by the turn in her to do more than puff contentedly at his pipe and wait.
    “I am saying merely,” she resumes, “that the old ways of thinking will not do when we are trying to capture the mystery of consciousness, the complexity of the human personality or the shifting texture of the world as it really is. Newton, Freud, they are stuck in the same dead nomenclature. Using it in this context is like trying to play a violin with a cudgel, or like conducting a séance—as the devotees of Dr. Freud no doubt would—by defecating on the floor. Only the flies will gather.”
    He is enjoying this immensely, and grinning. She is whipping herself up again, but harmlessly.
    “But it is not just science that has it wrong,” she is saying. “Even language as we have used it, the corseted novels, poems, plays we have known, they are all still more of the same. Inadequate to the task. Henry James is the prime example. When in art we attempt to render a person, his concerns, his time and place, we say with Hamlet that we hold the mirror up to nature. And so we do—so I did in the hall in Talland House—but that is precisely what is wrong. We reduce this thing we are reaching for to our limited terms, and in doing so, we are merely aping (and I use this word particularly) what we do vainly every day in the dressing room—what I was doing as a girl in the house in St. Ives.
    “We look in the looking glass to see ourselves. But we do so—I say again—
vainly.
For what is vanity but action in vain, ineffectual, a mistake, the primate’s blunder of taking the beguiling silver surface for the thing itself. We reduce the wonder of ourselves and the universe to two dimensions, an ape, or a silly little girl, primping before a plane of glass.”
    Leonard is beaming. The thrill of her mind never loses its power to beguile. Yet he is struck by the predominance of her vanity in all this, though he knows that he should not be struck at all, since vanity is one of the traits in her that is most familiar and entrenched. It played its vital role in the subtext of this exchange.
    And yet, he marvels, look how she plays it. For all her flaws and failings, all the hardships of staying by and righting her, there is this: She knows herself. She knows that she is vain. What’s more, she has turned the awareness on itself. She is making art of it—and science and metaphysics, too. Talking with her this way ameliorates everything. Without bodies, it is how they make love.
    “But surely,” he exclaims with uncurbed relish, “you concede that Joyce at least broke through all this primitive realism.
Ulysses
is nothing if not a reinvention of the