Acephalous

On James Joyce, who is very important, and Jacques Derrida, who is also very important, though more to other people than myself, but nevertheless is still more representative of this blog's content than a picture of two dirty-minded Muppets.

As a few people have expressed interest (and because Inside Higher Ed chose to link here on a day in which a picture of Bert and Ernie ogling a young woman has primacy of place), I thought I'd share a bit of the soon-to-be-published essay that will knock the socks off anyone who loves James Joyce or is passionate about newspapers and tramlines. 

Of particular interest to longtime readers is the deft and not-the-least-bit-overcompensatory inclusion of Derrida halfway through the paragraph,  because when I began my graduate career, I could barely write a paragraph without dropping an Important Name; but by its end, I managed to write an entire dissertation without ever mentioning a single theorist.  If you think that last bit constitutes evidence of an overcompensation as powerful as the earlier one that drove me to lard every paragraph with one luminary or another, you probably wouldn't be wrong.  But enough about that.  Here's the excerpt:

References to [William Martin] Murphy’s tramlines bookend “Aeolus,” a chapter [in Ulysses] that structurally and thematically criticizes the workings of the Irish press.  Although the majority of the chapter occurs in and outside the Freeman’s Journal and not Murphy’s Irish Independent, the coincidence of these two industries is significant.  As in “A Painful Case,” a tramcar stoppage is recounted through a narrative structured as a newspaper article: in “A Painful Case” it was an actual article, in “Aeolus” a sequence of headlines. Importantly, the headline that prefaces the first mention of Murphy’s tramlines, and in fact the very first headline, is “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS” (7.1).  Immediately below that headline we learn that “[b]efore Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown, and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar, and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend, and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross.  The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off” (7.3-8).  In “Devant la Loi,” Derrida claims “that the power and import of the title have an essential rapport with something like the law” (132), that is, that a title has a determinative effect on the “meaning” of the text that follows it.  The title cordons the play of signification in the text below it in such a way that, despite its exclusion from the text proper, it becomes an integral part of the text.  In another Joycean anticipation of Derridean thought, the relationship of titles to texts is deconstructed in “Aeolus” (if not in the novel as a whole, as the obsession with the Homeric parallels present in each unofficially named chapter demonstrates).  The title of this first section, “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS,” literally cannot contain the text beneath it, which describes the movement of tramcars away from Nelson’s pillar towards the remoter areas of Dublin.  (In fact, the tramcars are bound for Kingston, as were those that struck Mrs. Sinico at the Sydney Parade Station, and Sandymount, where Bloom alighted from the Haddington Road line [the so-called “little Sandymount”] and Stephen from the Dalkey line.)  We may be in the heart of the Hiberian metropolis, but the tramcars are only passing through.  This undermines the connection between the metropolitanism of Dublin and Murphy’s tramlines that this title unsuccessfully attempts to forge.  The tramcars are not representative of the static heart of the Hiberian metropolis, that which is essentially Irish (whatever we take that to mean).  They represent an active interference traversing that static heart.

Not only is that a single paragraph, there are still two more sentences to go.  I would add them, but at that point I start transitioning to a discussion about adulterers, plums, and masturbation and then what would have been the point of bumping down Bert and Ernie?

The market will never know what hit it.

When I try to secure a position as a 19th Century Americanist at the MLA in December, my most prestigious publication will be about:

• James Joyce, an Irish expatriate
• the novel Ulysses, which was not published in the 19th Century
• Fredric Jameson, who is American, on imperialism in Ireland, which is not America
• Walter Benjamin, who is not American, on flânerie in France, which is also not America
• Jacques Derrida, also not American, on how titles are like the law, which is neither here nor there

I am become a bill of goods.  (Or so it seems to me.)

From the Annals of Fauxprundity: THIS STORY IS ABOUT GRANT MORRISON WRITING THIS STORY!

Two or three years back, tomemos and I were discussing Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and he said something like, "Morrison is the ultimate 'either/or' author writing today: you either love and appreciate him or hate and are incapable of understanding why other people appreciate him."  Until this week, I never understood quite what he meant. 

With most polarizing literary figures—Pynchon, Barthelme, Acker, Wallace, and so forth—even when a person chokes on the air of consuete affectation, he still understands why other readers happily inhale it.  Pound might not be your bag, for example, but you understand why someone else would stick his head in it.  It also works the other way around: I love Ulysses, but I can understand why an intelligent person would just as soon chute the book as read it.

Except with Grant Morrison. 

The chapter Wolk devotes to him in Reading Comics scans like a fanboy's paean to a body of work he barely understands:

It's smart and complicated, and sometimes rushed and baffling, but mostly it's awesome, and where The Invisibles occasionally kicks back to indulge in its metaphysical side, Seven Soldiers starts hammering the FUN!!! button on its first page and never really stops.  Still, it's loaded to the gills with subtext.  It doubles as a Kabbalistic parable that also discusses the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional existence and features symbolic correspondences with the chakras and the elements and planets—nearly every character, object, and incident in it has some kind of distinct allegorical value.  The symbolism, as clear as it is, is almost never made explicit, but if you're looking for it, it's there on every page. (278)

What can a critic do with a paragraph in which someone praises Morrison for writing an obliquely-allegorical new-age amphibian with a fun-button?  Nothing.  So this past week I sat down and read reams and reams of Morrison (about 70 percent of the material on this bibliography) and came to the conclusion that tomemos knows of what he speaks—because now I both hate Grant Morrison and am incapable of seeing why anyone appreciates him.  Why?

Because in the end every Grant Morrison story is about Grant Morrison writing stories.  Consider the final issue of his run on Animal Man (1990):

Not infodumps. Constellations.

The infodump, as Todd VanDerWerff points out, may well be the single generic feature shared by all flavors of science fiction:

You might find some infodumping in a Western or in a period piece, but for the most part, we know the rules those genres play by because those genres take place in our reality, just in the past . . . . To a large degree, the division between hard and soft [science fiction] often hinges on things like infodumps. The hard [science fiction] is often for the people who are really, really interested in the science part of the science fiction equation. The soft stuff skews more toward the fiction end of things and isn’t particularly concerned with plausibility much of the time.

This strikes me as wrong in one crucial respect: the infodumps about which people complain occur at the outset of a work. They're presented as the technological enablers of the narrative to follow. They are exposition before the fact—before readers have any emotional investment in the characters whose narratives are enabled by the infodumped technology. No surprise, then, that people whose primarily invest in character or narrative find the lengthy technological preambles of hard science fiction off-putting.

To label as infodump the exposition on the Battlestar Galactica episode "No Exit" is to be a little too literal. "No Exit" did "dump" quite a bit of "info" on its audience, but the information was not intended to make the narrative work, because it already does. You cannot have an infodump four seasons into a series: you can only have a revelation. The argument should be whether too much information was revealed too quickly, but what else were the characters meant to do? Naming an episode after Sartre's No Exit signals a forthcoming entrapment of the character's own devising. Their Hell will be the other people they're trapped with.

But that's not where I'm headed with this post. I think the thematic parallels with Sartre's play are important—certainly significant is the implication that this is a Hell of their own devising, one in which they remain not by force or compulsion, but through fear of the unknown. (That all the characters begin by talking about what happened on Earth, only to become increasingly occupied with their own infighting seems an important parallel, even if I am being a bit literal.) What I want to focus on the effect on a viewer when almost 70 hours of thin-streaming history are followed by one of torrential exposition.

On a certain type of reader/viewer, the result is little different than the cumulative effect reading Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest; namely, this person feels like the night sky yearns to snap into constellations—he feels like the heavens look down on, disappointed, because some personal failing prevents him from discovering the order they contain. So what does this person do?

If he's reading Ulysses, he maps Joyce's universe onto the tram-lines of William Martin Murphy in order to demonstrate that

[Stephen's] attempts at upward mobility are futile, frustrated in large part by Murphy’s reluctance to lower the tramfare. However, were Murphy to lower the tramfare, the people riding the tramcars would no longer comprise a tram-riding elite, and Stephen’s desire to ride the tramlines might atrophy into little more than a timesaving utilitarian impulse. Understood in this manner, Stephen becomes a pathetic figure obsessed with belonging to a class he can only feign membership in on payday.

If he's watching Battlestar Galactica, he writes the following post.

(x-posted.)

Hand on Smut and Smoot

(x-posted.)

On this day in 1934, Augustus Hand scored a second, binding victory for psychological realism.  Obscenity charges had bedeviled James Joyce’s Ulysses before he even finished it.  In 1920 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice convinced the Post Office to seize four installments of the novel published in The Little Review: “Lestrygonians,” “Scylla and Charybdis,” “Cyclops,” and “Nausicaa.”  No one had any clue what to make of the first three chapters, but the fourth was certainly somehow pornographic.

The book-in-process was deemed obscene and banned.  It would remain so until 1933, when Random House challenged the — wait for it, wait for it – Hawley-Smoot (sometimes known as Smoot-Hawley) Tariff Act’s prohibition on immoral articles.  In United States v. One Book “Called Ulysses,” John Woolsey was only asked to determine whether the novel was obscene.  His opinion, however, was a tactful, informed defense of psychological realism:

In writing “Ulysses,” Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks, not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the city bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film, which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.

To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of “Ulysses.” And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce’s sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.

If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in “Ulysses,” the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.

It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.

Today in History

At 8 a.m. on the morning of 16 June 1904, two men woke up.  One shaved for class and breakfasted with his usurper and an anti-Semite.  The other, a Jew, purchased a pork kidney and serves it to his wife in the same bed in which she cuckolded him.  He left to pick up a letter from his secret sweetheart and chatted with the people he met on his way to the baths.  Once clean, he attended a funeral and saw a mysterious man. 

After the funeral, he tried to place an advertisement in a local newspaper but decided more research was required, so he scooted off to the library where, unbeknown to him, the first of our two men was disquisiting on Shakespeare. 
Many people walked around, including our Jew, who decided to follow his morning kidney with an afternoon liver.  He ogled the barmaids and thought about his wife who, if his suspicions were correct, would soon be cuckholding him again.  So he exited the bar with the pretty reminders of his pain and entered another full of anti-Semites.  Fists and cans were thrown. 

Troubled by thoughts of wife and ancient grievances, he wandered seaside way and publicly co-masturbated with a cripple.  He later attended the birth of a child and the English language before following our first man into the red-light district.  He caught up with him, himself, himself-in-drag, his dead grandfather, Nobodaddy, a giant green crab, a talking hat-stand and ducked out when the police arrived.  Chastened, the two men entered a dive and met a drunken sailor.  They absconded to the home of the Jew and bonded while urinating under the stars. 

As 16 June 1904 came to a close, the Jew returned to his troubled marital bed and asked his wife to serve him breakfast in it tomorrow. 

She considered his request but never decided one way or the other.

(Happy Bloomsday.  Sorry about the spoilers.)

Anonymity (Doffs, Tips a Macintosh)

People disappear. 

They wake up Tuesday morning and decide it's better to be a no one somewhere else than some damn fool soul here. 

Happens all the time. 

You expect a familiar face and are greeted by a stranger with a story.

"He moved to Michigan."

"Michigan?"

"To Dexter, I think.  Not even a town.  A village."

"What's in Dexter?"

"A village.  He wanted to live in one."

Who could blame him?  The living in hamlets ain't easy.  (Settlements neither.)  No one with any sense plants roots in unincorporated municipalities anymore. 

Why not abscond to villages distant and remote? 

Why not abandon the inessential and reinvent yourself somewhere pleasant?

The appeal's as obvious as it is compelling: no one appreciates the person rank circumstance created.  Everyone thinks they could be more given a fair shake in honest environs.

Only everyone is wrong.

Some people are destined to fail spectacularly.  Doesn't matter where they move to or who with, in two months their straits choke desperate. 

They disappear into and become the Man in the Macintosh. 

This they desire, to be anonymous and unknown, to flit from mourner to mourner without explaining anything to anyone. 

Tortuous anonymity is palpable from space. 

(Even in Michigan.) 

Like Joyce I wonder who it is who makes this מנין sing:

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

We all come to look at it eventually.

Then we die.

(cue earnest horns)

pastcast, v.

To ascribe, assign, bestow to historical personages, as a defining property or characteristic, contemporary theories, doctrines, beliefs which they did not or could not have held.

1939 J. Joyce, F. Wake. 314 Paradoxmutose caring, but here in a present booth of Ballaclay, Barthalamou, where their dutchuncler mynhosts and serves them dram well right for a boors' interior (homereek van hohmryk) that salve that selver is to screen its auntey and has ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash substittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitzh call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd. 2007 S.E. Kaufman, Diss. 171  In Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), written during the decade in which the [Modern] Synthesis gradually coalesced, Richard Hofstadter pastcasts a heavily synthesized Darwinism into fin de siècle American culture as a means of justifying New Deal social policy through an implicit comparison of the consequences of Roosevelt's interventionist approach to the depredations brought about by the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age.

Better Than Ezra?

No, you won’t find—especially when he’s reading his own work.  Be warned, however, as he does do the police in different voices.  His reading of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1939 sounds like his answer to Joyce’s reading of Finnegans Wake, right down to the exaggerated (and, in Pound’s case, affected) Irish accent.  Listen to how Joyce reads the line “a man and his bride embraced between them” and tell me he doesn’t ham it up.  (You can try.  I won’t listen.) The Joyce reading is from the ALP section of the Wake, and the text he reads is transcribed here.