James Joyce: Wrapping up, and a nod to the Wake

xxxiii.

Of course, this is the right way to write. It’s better to add ‘it seems’ to the sentence ‘the author is saying such and such’ because you can never be sure of what the author is saying. But as long as the nature of the interpretation remains untouched, it remains pure rhetoric. Brilliant theories expressed in anti-intellectual rhetoric (Nietzsche, Baudrillard) remain every bit as influential. Whether you are respectful or not, whether you add ‘it seems’ or not, is almost completely irrelevant, because all the ethical weight of the idea is carried by the way and extent to which said idea changes the world around you. You may be ostracised by the intellectuals if you don’t follow their rhetoric and write like an unsubtle oaf (see Terry Eagleton’s response to Dawkins), or you may be called an incomprehensible snob if you do follow those conventions, but the personal reputation of the speaker (i.e., which ‘club’ he belongs to) is not the measure of the idea’s value. If the idea is useful and finds its applications, it will exert influence in ways which are not necessarily in harmony with the rhetoric used to express it. In other words: if you’re willing to pass for an idiot, you can really change the world.

xxxiv.

For what it's worth, and if anyone has failed to notice, I’ve been writing in exactly the above style for all of these meditations.

xxxv.

The type of rhetoric employed has no bearing on the validity of an argument. You can employ intellectual rhetoric and be wrong, and you’ll still be an intellectual. But then, in the humanities, where propositions lack verifiability, there is no such thing as being right or wrong. There is only the power of your statement and position, and the degree of said power.

xxxvi.

The virtue of saying ‘I don’t know’ is humility. But we must be careful here: there is a very important difference between humility and what is only the rhetoric of humility.

xxxvii.

And so we may go back to our old friend:


The correct answer is D. You do not ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Ulysses. You belong to it, or you do not. You belong to the culture, the education, the preparation which allowed for and are simultaneously the product of Ulysses. And that’s what you’re really answering when you say ‘I like…’ (Besides, going by my personal memory of it, if I had to choose an adjective to describe the novel it would be neither ‘beautiful’ nor ‘outrageous,’ neither ‘boring’ nor ‘clever'. I think what I’d go for would be ‘bizarre’ – very bizarre. Maybe that will count for something).

xxxviii.

According to Rorty, Kant did the same thing before Joyce but in another discipline, because you could no longer claim to be a professional philosopher if you hadn’t mastered the first critique. He institutionalised philosophy.

xxxix.

I should close this long sequence of meditations with the great absentee from all of my discussions: Finnegans Wake. Did I like it? Well, I have not yet read this one. I’ve been asked whether I’ll ever deign to read it. Why wouldn’t I? Not because it’s hard work, because I’ve already undergone that preparation, and not out of lack of interest, because it looks like a really intriguing text. In fact, I probably will read it, but not in the near future, and this for a reason very different from my not wanting to. The actual reason is, much more simply, that it has some tough competition to get on my reading list. Finnegans Wake, like Ulysses, belongs to a genre we may refer to as the Great Classics, or the Great Bores – those books which are simultaneously pillars of our culture and also very long and very hard. I am estimating that there’s fifty to one-hundred and fifty such books in Western literature, depending on how strict your categorization is, of which I have read perhaps ten. Now all of these books are very well publicised and all of them elicit my interest, so the question for me is not ‘should I read Finnegans Wake,’ because my answer is an unconditional yes. My question is, ‘when should I read it, and why should I read it before its peers?’ Unfortunately, there’s a few Great Classics/Bores which have been given more and better publicity than the Wake, and the ignorance of which leaves greater holes in my general intellectual culture. Consider me a consumer convinced by the competition, then, because Joyce’s masterpiece is going to have to wait. If you support this book, then maybe you should reconsider your sales policy.

James Joyce: Ulysses and rhetoric

xxvii.

There is no innocent position. Even those who claim that it is possible to say ‘I do (not) like Ulysses’ without taking positions, are already taking positions. They belong to the group who are ‘for’ Ulysses. They deny the idea that Ulysses requires preparation, because they already have that preparation – and therefore they are claiming that what they have is not ‘preparation’ at all, but the normal condition of things. People who are against Ulysses claim that they are the normal guys, who should not be expected to do the ‘hard work’ of reading it, while those who are in favour claim themselves to be the normal ones, because you don’t need anything in particular to enjoy Ulysses.

xxviii.

Ulysses is a mark of belonging. It asks, ‘do you belong to our clan?’ And saying that you do or do not like the novel is one form of answering yes or no. Ulysses is the keyword one needs to give to the gate-keepers to be allowed into the village. Those outside form their own clan. They need it to survive.

xxix.

As an aside, one may complain that it took me more than twenty ‘chapters’ to actually start discussing the text itself, rather than its reputation. But what could I possibly write as a way of close-reading that has not already been said, and better, by the academics? As I mentioned, Ulysses has given way to a golden era of academic criticism and analysis. Other than Shakespeare, I don’t know if there’s an author in the English language with more books of criticism behind him/her than Joyce.

xxx.

The intellectual world has been given a gold-mine by Joyce – that, and a password. If you read Ulysses, then you are or aspire to be an intellectual, implicitly. And so this is the clan to which the novel gives access. Of course this is why it is so flustering to an undergraduate, above all others. S/he is, after all, an aspiring intellectual. Joyce poses the conditions for that. There’s other novels which are ‘hard work,’ but they are not hard work which you are expected to do, because they are not keywords for being an intellectual. And undergraduates are expected to become intellectuals (once they graduate). After all, these other books are only ones among several; they are not the final book, they are not the key book, and therefore they are not the key-word. Ulysses is the final book; and what is beyond the final book? The reward of the books, the one you have always been seeking in all the books you have been reading, and after all, this one contains them all. The covers of Ulysses are like the gates. You can be before it or beyond it.

xxxi.

‘Intellectual’ is not to be confused with ‘intelligent.’ That is not what I am talking about at all. Intelligence is not a club; it is an aristocracy. As with ‘talent’ and ‘looks,’ you do not gain access to it, regardless of the keywords or exchange items you may possess. If society sees you as an intellectual, that is a position of power; if they see you as intelligent, that is a position of privilege.



xxxii.

The intellectual is defined by his/her rhetorical register, one which is a direct reflection of Ulysses (and, to some extents, one which was produced by that selfsame novel). This rhetorical register is one of the things they teach you in academia, alongside the critical skills (in the literary departments, anyway). It is the register you find in the writings of Derrida or Barthes. Much like Ulysses does not settle on a final anything, so the rhetoric of the intellectual mitigates all forms of finality or conclusiveness. You do not say, ‘this statement is wrong.’ You say, ‘the statement seems incautious.’ The verb ‘to be’ is consistently replaced with verbs of appearance: it seems, it appears, it would look like this author is stating such and such. When speaking of a poem or a novel, the most general and widespread synonym you can find for ‘good,’ and the only one which will always apply to all texts regardless of period or genre, is ‘subtle.’ The Aeneid is incredibly subtle, Eliot’s metaphors are particularly subtle (I have never encountered ‘clear’ as a statement of merit).

Default academic register is the first person plural. ‘We shall now consider,’ ‘we shall go on to discuss,’ ‘we cannot help but notice…’ It is the same mark of belonging as that of Ulysses. ‘Perhaps’ is the queen word of intellectual discourse. This is perhaps the greatest poem of the modernist period, perhaps the greatest intellectual paradigm shift of the century was psychoanalysis, no theorist compares to him other than perhaps Aristotle. Clearly, statements of deferral abound: I can’t give a complete answer to the questions this raises, we do not have the space to discuss the full implications of, and shit yo. It’s also custom to say that ‘the boundaries of these two issues are blurred.’

If you cannot choose words other than ones with ‘final’ implications, you suspend their value by means of quotation marks (as I’ve just done). So Joyce will be writing an ‘epic,’ and tragedy will be a discussion of the ‘truth,’ and we will be the ‘spectators’ for the unfolding of ‘history’ (this trend was very much in vogue a few years ago, but thankfully it seems to be dying out). There is never such a thing as a final, discernible reason or social use for starting a thesis. Rather, it is attributed to a candid emotion: what interests me or intrigues me or fascinates me about this proposition… (or, when you condemn it: this concerns me).

One general term to say that a text is bad is to say that ‘it is problematic.’ This leads to some extraordinary rhetorical turns. In the great tradition of deconstruction, the act of identifying the problem is already the solution. Generally, the ‘problems’ of a text are posed by the act of analysis in the first place. As ‘problems,’ they do not have solutions: but they allow for the act of staging the ‘interpretation’, which is already the redemption to the problems posed by the text. The problems themselves are retrospective products of their own solution. In fact, this is why they do not have solutions: because they are solutions in the first place, albeit disguised as problems. A rhetorical question is its own answer. Rhetorical problems are just one version of rhetorical questions. And this kind of intellectual rhetoric employs problems, questions, issues, fallacies of all sorts.

And so on so forth. A person who masters this rhetoric is an intellectual.

The last entry is coming tonight or tomorrow, fellas. A brief post to wrap it all up.

James Joyce: Ulysses and teleology

xvii.

On a simpler level, a difference between Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the reason why I prefer the novel by Marquez, is that the latter makes its teleological statement through canons which are far closer to the traditional way of reading the novel – the old ideas of adventure novels, or romantic novels, or war novels. The stories within One hundred years, if enucleated from their original text and stylistically re-polished, could well become the substance for works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas or Emily Bronte. From this point of view, Marquez’s masterpiece does exactly what I am looking for in a novel, as it takes me to lands and times I could never imagine and showers me with constant wonders. Perhaps this accounts for the ease and the success with which magic realism has been picked up in South America. From Allende and Esquivel to Sepulveda and Coelho, I have yet to read a South American novelist without finding the fingerprints of Marquez everywhere. Notably, these authors are also very successful, and their books are international bestsellers (not always deserving their honours, in my view, but then the same is true of many acclaimed writers).

xviii.

Mark Harkin asks, ‘What about the spawn of Ulysses, the fiendishly difficult novels that came in its wake decades after, those which weren’t really worth the reader’s effort?’ This is a funny comment – I’ve never encountered these novels that he is talking about. I know of writers who have clear debts with Joyce, but these are people whom I very much enjoy (Faulkner) or who are held in very high esteem (Gadda, Pynchon). That said, if the above statement is true, then it makes for a very obvious point of divergence between Marquez and Joyce – as I mentioned above, One hundred years kicked off a golden era for the South American novel, with astonishing peaks of popularity in the ‘offshoots’ of his writing. I’m not sure what to make of this difference either way.


xix.

Besides, there is no doubt that Ulysses kicked off a golden era for literary and academic criticism. Again, much like the Divine Comedy.

xx.

I mentioned that ‘what binds [Ulysses and the Divine Comedy] is the teleological intent, the writing of a text that includes all possible texts, and is therefore final.’ Of course, the Divine Comedy was anything but final. It inaugurated Italian literature in every way that matters, including the fact that Dante chose to write in the vulgar tongue rather than in Latin. Now this was seen as scandalous only because it grated with the teleological intent (and the apocalyptic power of this choice must have been apparent even back then). When the Divine Comedy is the final text, the language in which it is written becomes the final language. This officially sanctioned the death of Latin.

xxi.

One hundred years and Ulysses are both ‘final’ texts. They represent landmarks, simultaneously ending and inaugurating literary seasons. But One hundred years does not compel you to respond. You do not hear undergraduates ranting out loud about ‘who’s crazy enough to read One hundred years from cover to cover’ or wondering why Marquez can’t just write ‘about the simple life, about expressing his feelings’. There are two possible reasons for this. 1.) Obviously, the fact that One hundred years is a novel in the more traditional sense, one which can be read by a child, and arguably an easy and entertaining read throughout. It’s not ‘hard work,’ so what is there to rant about? 2.) More likely, a cultural question. The ‘responsibility’ of Ulysses is far weaker outside of the English-speaking world. Students in France feel a greater compulsion to respond to Proust, for instance. It is plausible to imagine that One hundred years is expected reading in the intellectual world in South America, albeit with lower resistance on account of not being such hard work.

xxii.

Ulysses is a story which includes all possible stories. This is, of course, what makes it hard to criticise it: your criticism is already included in the novel.

xxiii.

The thing is that Ulysses brings together specification and generalisation. It includes specific rhetorical registers which seem to ‘say’ something, but it immerses them in a generalised collection of voices. This means that none of the voices in Ulysses is the ‘final’ voice, the authoritative one. This is what makes the novel itself final. Any ‘final’ statement made by another novel will be included, as a possibility, in Ulysses, while any other ‘collection of statements’ will be no more than a repetition of Ulysses. Naturally this is only theoretical; the novel doesn’t actually say all that can be said, but it stages singularity on a neutral plane (specification/generalisation), and this act of ‘staging’ is what makes the novel final. Ulysses is the final stage where all voices can come and play out, even the ones which are potentially not included in the novel.


xxiv.

And the specification/generalisation duality makes any final judgment on the novel impossible (or ‘rash,’ as we put it in ii.). I am using ‘judgment’ as a loose term to refer to acts of categorisation. Whatever you say about it (or against it) cannot be conclusive, because the novel includes the opposite of itself. It is at once mundane and heroic, modern and classical, constitutive and satirical, normative and destabilising, idealistic and pragmatic, romantic and cynical, transcendent and immanent. This is what makes it so difficult to say ‘I don’t like Ulysses’. Because you cannot possibly qualify such a statement: whatever you bring up against it, it can be pointed out to you that the novel is saying (or doing) the opposite.

xxv.

More: saying ‘I don’t like’ a novel is usually just a form of qualifying your taste. But saying ‘I don’t like Ulysses’ is never a neutral comment. It is a statement of ideology. The undergraduate who says that this novel is ‘rubbish’ is so adamant and pejorative because he is identifying his ideological position – he is waving his flags. As we said, one is for or against. There is no innocent position.

xxvi.

Ulysses compels you to respond. Virginia Woolf famously bashed the novel after she finished it (the prototype of the undergraduate). But the question is, why did she finish it? Depending on your edition, Ulysses is 700 to 900 pages long. Usually, if you find a book as intolerable and worthless as she claimed it to be, you don’t go on beyond the first 100 pages – not when it’s so uncompromisingly bulky, anyway. Her story is common. It is not surprising that, when the novel was published, it was given some very scathing reviews. What’s surprising is just how many reviews it was given. In their numbers, they are simply not commensurate to a novel as bad as the reviews almost concordantly claimed it to be.

Part 4 coming tomorrow. Yep, I'm still not done.

James Joyce: Ulysses compared

xi.

Did I think that Ulysses was hard work? Yes, very much so.

Did I think that Ulysses was boring? I cannot say this of the book as a whole. There were some chapters which I thoroughly enjoyed (Aeolus, Sirens and Nausicaa, off the top of my head), and others which I did find very tedious (Scylla and Charybdis, Wandering Rocks, Circe). I had a similar experience with the Bible, another very irregular text which alternated sequences of great beauty and entertainment with real mud-ponds where movement was close to impossible.

xii.

I’d like to go back to that statement I made on people enjoying this novel intellectually rather than emotionally. Rash as it was and way off as a generalisation, I don’t feel like revoking it completely. I think what I was talking about was the way in which I enjoy novels. My favourite novels are usually brief or semi-brief ones which pack a powerful emotional punch. Animal Farm, A Broken Woman, Of Mice and Men, All Quiet on the Western Front, Portnoy’s Complaint, One Hundred Years of Solitude. These books made me cry, or they made the hairs on my arm stand on end, or they made me laugh out loud, or they sent shivers down my spine. Animal Farm made me visibly morose and depressed for a full week from the moment I put it down. (Notably, longer novels by the same authors, like The Grapes of Wrath or I Married a Communist are not quite so high in my estimation). Now the point is that I never got anything of the sort from Ulysses. My intellect was very much involved with the material, but there was never a scene where I wept, or laughed out loud, or felt my heart accelerating. At no point did the reading translate itself into visible signs on my body, other than a couple of erections in the Penelope chapter. Perhaps I’m just talking about physical reactions, but these are usually the result of extraordinarily intense emotional feelings, which are very rare when I read literature (less so with film, which appeals directly to the senses), and I didn’t get them from Ulysses. But then, I recognise that this is very subjective.

xiii.

Of course, the reason why one may find Ulysses boring goes straight to the question of ‘the way in which we enjoy novels.’ Personally, I like novels which can turn me into a child again, and give me the sense of transport I experienced fifteen years ago when reading the adventure books by Willard Price or the thrillers by Michael Crichton. I want a novel to take me to far-away lands, or in distant epochs, or in the middle of bizarre and unusual characters, or at the crossroads of history. If I want more inspirational reading, stuff which makes me feel like an adult, usually I turn to poetry. Ulysses is about exactly the opposite of that type of novel. Of course the idea of adventure is in there by metaphor and intertext and reference, but the story itself (in terms of the contents of the actual diegesis), is the most mundane thing you can imagine. As one of my friends put it, “I read the novel as simply the best Everyman story there is. Leopold Bloom is even better than Homer Simpson.” This is an appreciation which I’ve heard and read many times, but alas, what works for some people doesn’t for others. I read novels to get out of the everyman and the everyday, not to revel in it. This is the reason I’m also quite indifferent to novels by Jane Austen or EM Forster, which also deal with very ordinary events. Or if a novel really has to be about situations in which nothing really happens, then I like it when it can do something like Fight Club or Nausea, and distil shock from flat waters. The funny thing is that the referent for Joyce’s novel, that is to say, the Odyssey, is the mother of all adventure novels, and one of my very favourite stories out there.

Stand me now and ever in good stead

xiv.

But the fact that I’m indifferent to Austen and Forster doesn’t mean that I’m indifferent to Joyce. As I said, one has to take a stance. The only way to be indifferent to Ulysses is by not knowing it. This implies not having done the ‘preparation’ which is required to read the novel. Which brings us back to point ix: it’s unfair to criticize Ulysses for requiring hard work, because if you’re interested in reading Ulysses, then it means you’ve already undergone the hard work.

xv.

You can draw an interesting comparison between Ulysses and my own favourite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Joyceans likely scoff at the idea that you could compare Marquez’s novel with the monumental work of Joyce, and there’s no doubt that the Irishman’s work is much broader in scope and technical execution. But both novels are kaleidoscopic attempts to tell a story that includes all possible stories. Both novels, too, have been enormously influential. ‘Stream-of-consciousness’ and ‘magic realism’ have become household items even outside academia, and traditions of ‘experimental’ and ‘historical’ novels have dominated the scene in the English and Spanish language respectively.

xvi.

Of course, in terms of sheer complexity, Ulysses far outdoes One hundred years. In fact, the only work of literature I know which compares to Joyce’s novel for breadth of aspiration and achievement is the Divine Comedy, another ‘story to end all stories,’ also heavily and carefully structured, drawing all mythologies, real or imagined, into its single narrative. What binds these two texts is the teleological intent, the writing of a text that includes all possible texts, and is therefore final.

Meditations on James Joyce. Part 1

A sequence of reflections on the question 'Do you like Ulysses?' that will probably take me the whole week. Here goes!

i.

There’s no way of writing this as a cogent article without falling into academic discourse. I think that aphoristic mini-chapters will prove more appropriate (if nothing else, more entertaining).

ii.

Do I like Ulysses, the novel by James Joyce? I recently had a remarkable discussion on facebook with some friends (students of Joyce, all of them), and there seemed to be a tacit assumption among my interlocutors: that I do not like Ulysses. At the core of this assumption was a rather rash statement I once made at the pub, reported as follows: ‘No-one actually enjoys Ulysses emotionally, do they – just intellectually.’ I’ll discuss this statement further on. I’m not retracting it, but it’s definitely rather rash. Though of course any judgment made on Ulysses is rather rash, by default. Including this one.

iii.

Did you like Dubliners? Yes. A very solid collection of short stories, technically brilliant, very colourful and consistently enjoyable.

Did you like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Decidedly disliked it. But then, I am normally averse to autobiographies unless the writer has spent twenty years in Tibet or been in a war, because I honestly can’t think of any other reason why I should give a fuck about the guy’s life. The Portrait gives no such reason, because Stephen Dedalus spends the entire novel doing nothing, and eventually decides to withdraw from religion, politics, nationalism, and everything else. Exactly what he’s going to engage with is unclear. For all of the linguistic pyrotechnics, the assumption behind the book remains, ‘my life is so important because I am an artist.’ To the point of writing an entire novel dedicated to nothing but the ‘Portrait of the Artist’, aka a self-portrait. There’s probably plenty of people who find the book’s passages beautiful, but for my own part, the feeling of circularity and narcissism (and the typical, misleading confusion between artistic maturity and spiritual fulfillment) that belie the plot are just too disturbing to overlook.

Did you like Ulysses? Well, now...

iv.

Consider the following image.



Which of the answers is the right one?

v.

Why would I not like Ulysses? Without plunging into denial: because it’s boring. Wait – is it? There’s plenty of passages in the novel which I read with a sense of great enjoyment. It may be more accurate to say that it has a reputation for being boring. Is this reputation deserved? That depends. There is a difference between something being ‘boring’ and something being ‘hard work.’ Anyone who sees the two things as synonymous will think, legitimately, that Ulysses is boring. But regardless of the kind of work it implies, we may answer the original question: one reason why I may not like Ulysses is that it is hard work. Is that a good reason?

vi.

Be it or not a good reason, something immediately jumps to notice– just the act of discussing the novel has led me to question my ideas and standards of literature. What is it that I enjoy in novels, and what are the ethical responsibilities of the reader (why should he engage in the ‘hard work’?) – these are both natural follow-ups to the above. This points to one of the major identifying features of Ulysses – its responsibility, intended as, its capacity to call, evoke, or demand a response. You must respond to Ulysses. Whether for or against, you must take a stance on it.

vii.

This leads to the continuous jack about Joyce that you get among undergraduate students of literature. Your first two years at university are usually the age you’ll get in contact with Ulysses (even read the whole thing, if you’re the smartass type). It’s one of the most common discussions in the hood – not on the novel’s meaning or its significance, but on whether it’s good or not. The most vocal of the students are usually those who insist it is rubbish – and in my five years within academia, I’ve met quite a lot of them (did my share of protesting too, I won’t hide). Not just mediocre or generally not very good, but outright rubbish, nonsense. They rebel, even fiercely, to the idea of having to do the ‘hard work.’ But this is the point – they have to respond. They need to qualify their rejection. And the pressure goes both ways – students are pressured to justify themselves because they are also pressured to read it. The problem is not that Ulysses is hard work, but the fact that it’s hard work that you’re expected to do. Ulysses compels you to respond.

viii.

Let’s examine for a second this notion that Ulysses is hard work. Is it true? One thing is certain – it presupposes a lot of background reading, even without counting the Odyssey, and if you haven’t gone through that, then you can’t read Ulysses. A child cannot be expected to read Ulysses, and people who don’t read much or even dislike reading can’t either. So preparing yourself to read this novel is hard work, if you are not already prepared.

ix.

If you are not the kind of person who is ‘prepared’ to read Ulysses – then you probably wouldn’t be trying to read it in the first place. So the argument is moot.

x.

Those who have nothing to do with art should have nothing to do with art (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec). Similarly, Ulysses is NOT hard work only to those whose profession is literature (or art) in the first place. (And even then, of course, it’s not necessarily an easy ride. But more on this later).

Part 2 to follow tomorrow.