Homage to Joyce, Dedalus and Kate Bush

 To celebrate the centennial of the publication of Ulysses, here are three very different responses to that astoundingly multifarious and kaleidoscopic masterpiece, whose lasting resonance has yielded generations of notable epigones, byworks and intertexts. Firstly, the modernist composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) with his Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1953), startlingly ahead of its time in taking a recitation of Chapter 11 of Ulysses by Berio's then-wife Cathy Berberian and - using tape-manipulation techniques - subjecting it to a "reorganization of the phonetic and semantic elements of Joyce’s text".

  Secondly, I've been reading Chris McCabe's novel Dedalus (2018), a beautifully presented edition created by Henningham Family Press. At first I thought the concept behind this project was too ambitious to work: a sequel to Ulysses? Which writer would think they could manage a continuation of the greatest novel ever written? But in truth I've been won over by McCabe's wildly imaginative take on the day after Bloomsday, very much his own revisioning of the interweaving stories and themes and characters of Ulysses born of an intimate knowledge and passionate enthusiasm for the novel. Years ago I did a Poetry School course lead by Chris on "Ulysses as Poetry" and as well as some chapters that stand as worthy imitations of Joyce's interior monologue prose-style, other chapters metamorphose into visual or sound poetry in a way which feels much in keeping with Joyce's ludic approach both in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

  Finally, the wonderful video for The Sensual World by Kate Bush, which memorably uses the words of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in 'Penelope'. As we know, KB is having a moment this month thanks to Netflix's Stranger Things, which I'm a big fan of particularly for the nostalgia-drenched soundtrack and a plethora of references to tropes from early 80's TV and movies. It's great to see a resurgence of interest in 'Running Up That Hill', which will hopefully send people back to the marvellous Hounds of Love album - and indeed The Sensual World in all its far-reaching, haunting beauty.

Happy 100th Birthday, Ulysses

  A dedalian bloom of internet articles and radio programmes to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in the past week or so, which coincided with Joyce's 40th birthday on 2.2.22 (I'm sure, as a lover of Dante, he was drawn to that rhyming of numbers too.) Due veneration and recognition of its pivotal importance somehow still seem tempered in some quarters with bafflement or peevish contempt for its supposed "impenetrability," as though holding it up as a great cultural monument absolves you of the need to actually read it. Even Anne Enright in The Guardian, while showing some regard for the novel and for Joyce, repeats the notion that "it's a novel in which nothing happens" whereas surely the opposite is the case:

"It is an epic of two races (Israelite — Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). […] It is also a kind of encyclopaedia."

This is an excerpt from a letter Joyce wrote to his friend Carlos Linati, quoted in the most fascinating of the articles I've come across, "Deadline Ulysses" by Phillip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books, who makes the point that up to a third of the novel was added at the final revision stage in 1921 including some of the most original, innovative material.

   Just as Ulysses repays frequent re-readings throughout a lifetime, because its kaleidoscopically multiple perspectives and layers will yield a intrinsically different novel to the reader at different points in their own timeline, so does it morph and undulate in its wider valency to history and society. What I keep noting on my current re-perusal is how much a novel for own rancorous, divided times this is. Most of the other high Modernist classics   - from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and The Waste Land to A La Recherche, The Man Without Qualities and The Magic Mountain - counterbalance a fraught vision of fragmentary modernity with plaintive nostalgia for a more stable age d'or when high culture supposedly held societal values in place and liberal humanist sensibilities had not begun to suffer dissociation. Joyce - a life-long socialist (in distinction to almost every other major Modernist) - was more inclined to celebrate the bustling, interactive heterogeneity of the modern city than deplore it, in particular foregrounding the rich linguistic buzz of different registers and idiolects weaving in and out of one another. 

   However, in choosing a second generation Jewish inhabitant of Dublin as his wandering mock-hero, Joyce hones in on the potential prejudice and ostracisation caused by what we now call "othering". You might miss them on a first reading, but the early chapters involving Bloom (especially 'Hades') are subtly dotted with moments of "micro-aggression", of slights and shrug-offs, nothing overt but enough to mark him as an outsider within the bluff, jokey discourse of Dublin street-life. This rises to a mock-heroic climax in his encounter with The Citizen, a one-eyed Cyclops who demonstrates that nationalism of any kind (even the anti-British, Irish nationalism with which Joyce had some sympathy) invariably masks a xenophobic agenda - as we have seen disastrously writ large in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Bloom's rejoinder to the antisemitism of the grandiloquent myope sums up the novel's underpinning ethos: 

    "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life (...) Love"

   This is why Joyce's encyclopaedic epic of the human race, of the human body in all its fallibility and persistence, culminates in a small act of kindness between two apparent outsiders - Bloom the intinerant Jew, continually on the run from thoughts of his wife's adultery and his son's death in infancy, helps out Stephen Dedalus the malcontent poet, in flight from the nets of state and religion and thoughts of his mother's recent death. Nothing happens in Ulysses the way it does in War and Peace or A Tale of Two Cities or even Middlemarch - but if a profoundly rich and detailed celebration of the ordinary "life for men and women" and an unlooked-for action of support for another human being is nothing then we need to keep reading and re-reading the novel for another hundred years.

Neo-Nietzschean Clatter: The Neophyte as the Letter N

  The best projects find us, rather than we finding them. I've always believed in that Ballard line "Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences". I spent much of last year engaged in writing a book on Nietzsche, a journey of rediscovery which turned into the opening of a whole new area of enquiry and fascination.
  Nietzsche has been a key member of my personal pantheon for as long as I remember; perhaps for nearly as long as I began discovering books for myself around the age of 16, encouraged by a particularly imaginative teacher and the creative exploration of poems on my A-Level English syllabus she initiated.  It may have been the mention of "übermensch" in the opening chapter of Ulysses, or the strange phrase "neo-Nietzschean clatter" in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley or even, a little later, the line  "Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool" in Wallace Stevens's 'Description without Place' which sent me to the library (unbelievably there were no one-click Google searches in those days) to research this often-invoked forerunner of many of the Modernist writers I was voraciously absorbing at the time. 
    Equally, to unearth the fact in the briefest of biographical accounts that Nietzsche had "gone mad" at the height of his writing career and never recovered seemed to align him with the lineage of doomed 19th century Romantics and bohemians I was also obsessively drawn to, the sicker, more unhinged and more thwarted in their personal life the better.
   The first book of Nietzsche's I chanced across in the secondhand bookshop in Horsham where I acquired almost all of my reading matter was Ecce Homo. This bizarre experiment in tangential autobiography (written, as I now know, on the brink of mental collapse and scattered with sentences betraying delusion, megalomania and a generally shaky grasp of reality) cemented the overlap between N's life and his philosophy in my callow mind, a blurring which in spite of my later immersion in critical theory and the Intentionalist Fallacy, has always seemed to me inescapable. 
    Most philosophers, as Nietzsche spent a good deal of time wittily deploring, are dry academics so deluded by systems of baseless abstractions and the "will to truth" that they take whole books proving - through the counter-intuitive circumlocutions of reductive logic and the lumbering shire-horse of syllogistic prose - that they themselves exist, a ludicrously muddle-headed example of the "falsification of the evidence of one's own senses". By aligning themselves with mathematicians, believing they were delineating objective truths through the factual, transparent medium of language, these metaphysicians merely compounded their own errors. Apart from Plato - wise enough to use the dramatic framework of Socratic dialogue to problematise any simplistic interpretations of his wisdom - Nietzsche was the first philosopher to grasp that philosophy is writing, first and foremost, and that the form and style of its language are what constitute its claim to the truth, no longer by the 19th century a monolithic, God-bestowed tablet of laws and more a writhing, many-headed Hydra. 
    Trained as an academic philologist in the historical analysis of words and steeped from an early age in music and literature, Nietzsche saw all too clearly the need to develop a new way of writing philosophy that - like poetry - prized concision, ambivalence and multi-sidedness rather than the long-winded, dogmatic expositions of the German idealist tradition he was heir to. Equally, as part of this rejection of academic philosophy, he replaced the serious, supercilious tone of Hegelian sturm und drang with a playful, self-mocking spezzatura, embracing the sense of cosmic irony Kierkegaard (in 1841) had identified as "the absolute infinite negativity". If the initial part of Nietzsche's project is deconstructive, "philosophy with a hammer", acerbically debunking the entire history of western metaphysics, Christianity and nearly all of western culture along the way (particularly German culture, in fact), the second, complementary aspect is a "revaluation of all values", a dauntingly ambitious endeavour to single-handedly replace this toppling tradition with his own ecstatically affirmative vision of human potential, summed up in the figure of the übermensch and the cosmic driving force he called "will to power".

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the book in which Nietzsche most cogently embodied these central concepts of his mature philosophy, both his Sermon on the Mount and an allegorical gospel dramatising his struggle to communicate his message to a largely unresponsive world. To go back to my own engagement with N.'s work, Zarathustra did turn into a kind of Bible for me when - as an almost Aspergically bookish and insular 23-year old -  I read into its rhapsodic pseudo-poetry the key to my own "self-overcoming", the highly-changed narrative of how I too could come out of my solitary cave and through sheer will and determination turn myself into a positive, empowered new version of myself, if not quite a Superman then perhaps at least the successful writer I knew I had it within me to become. 

   A dog-eared Penguin edition of Zarathustra was lodged into my small, Army Surplus rucksack that summer (almost entirely crammed with books and notebooks rather than spare clothes) when I went off travelling across France with my brother Laurence, starting off in Paris (busking on the Metro, staying in a squat, scribbling some half-baked translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and then hitching down to the south to do grape-picking. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the porch of the church at Libourne, near Bordeaux, where I think we ended up sleeping that night. It was the end of the summer and the sky was the most incredibly intense, deep, vertiginous blue. We were drinking cheap red wine from the bottle and smoking horrible throat-grating Gitane Jaunes (horrible to me even at the time but all part of the bohemian "deregulation of all the senses" I was bent on). Caught up in the moment we began taking it in turns to recite passages from the book, joining in to intone the phrase "Thus spoke Zarathustra" after each paragraph as though we were members of a religious order conducting a strange, illicit ceremony. 
    You could attribute this to the naive follies of youth and I would be the first to agree, but at the time it felt enormously inspiring and almost revelatory to do so, as though the words of the book perfectly embodied the sense of exploratory liberation our travels in France had emboldened us with, as though somehow Nietzsche's writing and our experiences had fused in what felt like a transformative new synthesis.
   Who the Hell is Friedrich Nietzsche? is available here.

Corbyn as Joycean

  Another good thing about Jeremy Corbyn is that - as revealed in today's Evening Standard - his favourite book is Joyce's Ulysses. One would hardly expect the Standard to be awash with Corbynistas, but the way they wheel out some faux-academic who clearly hasn't read the book to beat the embattled Labour leader over the head with it is shameful.
   The blatant inaccuracies come thick and fast, more demeaning to Joyce than they are to Corbyn. How can anyone think Ulysses "a novel without a single working class character", that most of the text "is about sex and crapping" or that Leopold Bloom is "an old man who is disappointed in life"? John Sutherland, a Professor of Modern Literature at UCL who hasn't read the key novel of Modern Literature, wants to imply that Jeremy Corbyn's choice of reading-matter is as overrated as his performance as leader of the Opposition and somehow unconducive to his leftist political agenda. However, anyone who has seriously engaged with Ulysses will understand the novel as a profound embodiment of Joyce's life-long socialism in theme, form and linguistic range, an unparalleled celebration and vindication of the lives of the ordinary working people Corbyn has always spoken of defending.

Coffee With Joyce

  As part of a camping trip to Istria in northern Croatia, I discovered this tribute to my favourite writer James Joyce at Cafe Uliks (Croatian for Ulysses) in the beautiful Italianate town of Pula. The bronze statue seems a substandard second-cousin of Gaudier-Brzeska's head of Ezra Pound - whether that's a deliberate reference given their connection I'm not sure.
   Pula was the first place Joyce lived in after he had eloped from Dublin with Nora Barnacle in late 1904, then called Pola and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He taught English here at the Berlitz School for some months before moving on to Trieste, the first city of the famous peripatetic trio of locations cited on the last page of Ulysses. It seems a suitably multicultural, polyglot meeting-place for a writer who incorporated so many languages into his prose: I recall there being Serbo-Croat and Hungarian words melded into Finnegans Wake from the time I studied it intensely although the references escape me now. The head of the Berlitz Schools in Pola and Trieste, the euphonious Almidano Artifoni, is immortalised in Ulysses by lending his name (somewhat improbably) to Stephen's music teacher, to whom he speaks Italian in the 'Wandering Rocks' chapter.
    I also came across an allusion to Pula in Dante, Joyce's favourite writer:


"As at Arles where the Rhone sinks into stagnant marshes,
   as at Pola by the Quarnaro Gulf, whose waters
   close Italy and wash her farthest reaches,
the uneven tombs cover the even plain..." 

                                                 Inferno, Canto IX, tr, John Ciardi


  Basically Dante's drift is that Pola was the site of an extensive Roman cemetery (ie. a pagan sepulchre comparable to the one he finds in the City of Dis). Pula today still boasts some impressive Roman monuments such as the amphitheatre and Forum.

guest contributor: rob taylor

Ictus is very pleased to welcome a new piece of writing by Rob Taylor, a poet and musician based in Brighton; an insightful reading of Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a novel notoriously difficult to gain a critical angle on. It's the first of what will hopefully turn out to be a regular series of contributions from guest-writers this year, so the blog is not just me wittering on:

DFW, not Rob Taylor!

          'Heightened-State Micro-Obsessiveness':
                    Reflections on Infinite Jest                    
   Capitalism and the Novel have grown up together. For 300 or so years the development of the one has been variously and suggestively mirrored in the other. But where Capital subsumes, homogenises and reifies, the best novels are able, momentarily at least, to awaken the multiple transgressive energies, meanings and divergences within human consciousness which the mechanisms of hegemony rigorously function to expunge and conceal.   David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is an incredibly apposite and percipient exploration of the pathologies at once the by product and life blood of our current phase of pervasive global Capital. The novel’s consubstantial trinity of themes – obsession, compulsion, addiction – are tackled with what is itself a kind of heightened-state micro-obsessiveness resulting in some of the finest comedic writing ever conceived. Conversely, the very same aspect of the book also produces some deliberately trying passages of maniacally convoluted detail and tangential prolixity designed to test the endurance of the hardiest reader in much the same way as the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses or Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale. Extensive footnotes function as a sort of anti-narrator frequently sending you to the back of the book for lengthy digressions of anything up to nineteen pages of tiny print itself smattered with microscopic sub-footnotes.
    From a subtly different yet closely related entry-point it is equally a book about loneliness, loss, disconnectedness and the longing for human contact these precipitate. Beneath the broadly comic satire and intermittent brushes with nihilism there is compassion and a sense of ineffable sadness for human failure and frailty.
    It is a huge novel: experientially vast, with frequent supple narrative shifts adapting proteanly to the various characters and their environments. As with the narrative strategy of Joyce, there is no neutral or default narrative voice from which the plurality of idiomatic registers depart. Infinite Jest consistently employs what is, as Hugh Kenner first noted, a characteristically Joycean approach to narrative; that the consciousness of the nearest presiding character inflects the rhythm, diction and ideological complexion of a sentence at any given point in the book. This is made nicely explicit when the hospitalised and delirious Gately, having been phantasmagorically visited by James Incandenza’s ‘wraith’ , finds his mind inundated with words which are entirely unknown to him:

‘..with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape.’

   This passage also points up the way in which socially and culturally disparate characters are in fact very close in terms of their experential malaise and are ironically connected through the very isolation of their various solitary compulsions. The twin axes at the novel’s centre, Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, both encapsulate a boundlessly lonely emptiness. Judged by the criteria of ‘the American Dream’ they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of achievement and prestige but both symbolise equally, the impossibility of attaining, let alone maintaining, the imagined point of fulfilment. Both sets of inmates are just as in thrall to the chimerae of consumer-culture’s hollow drives; their shared nexus an agonisingly single-minded will to self-transcendence and annihilation. Thanatos and Eros are locked in a perpetual, tormented dance for which Incandenza’s ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ might provide an apt embodiment. The dialectic of ‘pleasure’ in a consumption-driven capitalist monoculture lies at the heart of Infinite Jest. What at first may seem diametrically opposed turn out to be two sides of the same desolate moon, as, indeed, the author of Hamlet who supplies the book’s title often demonstrated when dramatising his own anxieties toward a then just-emergent capitalist culture.
    Infinite Jest contains some of the most haunting, funniest and uncannily exact prose you could hope to encounter. It’s bawdily humane, prodigiously generous in its refusal to pass judgement on the self-inflicted sufferings of its characters. It’s anarchically form-defying, ever-shifting vastness - is, finally, its own ungraspable form. The bathetic tailing-off of its many plot-strands seems at once inevitable and unsatisfactory but really it would be fatuous to expect some kind of denouement or plot resolution from an ‘entertainment’ such as this one. It is the bastard offspring of Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick midwifed by Gravity’s Rainbow and at the same time nothing at all like any of them or any other contemporary novel. In a literary culture that has still perhaps yet to recover from Foster Wallace's staggeringly untimely death by suicide in 2008, we are equally yet to measure the full importance of this seismic, gargantuan anti-epic, whose dystopic fictional future (conjectured back in the early 90's) seems uncomfortably near to where we are now.

                                                     

Happy Bloomsday

'Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.'

'A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.'

Where now?'