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Tag: modernism (page 6 of 7)

Finnegans Wake and Little, Big

29 May 2006 / / 2 Comments

I purposefully read Beckett’s Watt after Proust to clear away ideological detritus. After Finnegans Wake, I didn’t sense any particular residue, so I chose to reread John Crowley’s brilliant and unique Little, Big, not realizing that its approach is in some ways opposite that of the Wake.

The two books don’t seem to have any special relation, and I don’t know anyone that’s claimed a place for Joyce as one of Crowley’s major antecedents. (I see more of James Branch Cabell and Charles Kingsley than Joyce, for example.) But with the Wake floating in my mind, there was one polar difference that weighed on me the entire time I was reading Little, Big, which I’d loosely put as gnosticism vs. physicalism.

Now, I’m a bit biased here because my Wake teacher is an avowed enemy of gnostics (his criticism in a nutshell: “They just make shit up!”) and so had something of a vested interest in reading an anti-gnosticism into Finnegans Wake, but even on the surface level, the Wake is a very physical and visceral book. It’s most obviously present in Joyce’s obsessive scatology and descriptions of near-every bodily functions, which eventually make the book clinical enough that all disgust and fetishism fall away, and you might as well be reading about the sexual proclivities of moths. But as I said last time, Joyce isn’t one to deal in ephemeralities: there is little theology or eschatology in the Wake. When religion is invoked, it’s often with direct relation to the physical or the historical.

Little, Big (and for that matter, much of Crowley’s work) not only sets itself to discussing the reality behind the appearance, but does so in a rather gnostic matter. The subsequent Aegypt books make this connection explicit, but it’s certainly there in Little, Big, in which a set of the privileged are allowed mysterious, ineffable access to a world within a world that exists consubstantially with ours.

One look at Finnegans Wake and it seems like mysticism. But Joyce is almost devoutly quotidian: the things he repeatedly, obscurely analogizes are the very basics of the world and more importantly, the known: male, female, parents, children, birth, death, day, night, sex, education, work, play. The most realistic scene (in
III.4) appears to concern a pub-owner and his family, and the
situation as far as I can discern it is hardly anything more unusual than Leopold Bloom’s in Ulysses. If anything, it’s more normal, as there’s far less information given to make these people unique. The pub-owner, named Porter, is a Protestant Irishman and well-respected citizen leeading an typical middle-class life. Joyce loads the scene up with the usual allusions and such, and I take from it that this scene is to be put on an equal footing with all the complications and mysteries have gone before. The message: This is it. This is the world for all to see and all that anyone can see.

It’s hardly so clear-cut, of course, and the heavy use of the Egyptian Book of the Dead are one of the most prominent mythologies that seem to negate Joyce’s physicalism. But as I read it, these mythologies chiefly analogize the physical, monistic reality around us, rather than alluding to some Other realm, just as Bloom’s hallucinations in Nighttown explore his brutal reality. You’re welcome to disagree, but the sense I get is that language and the physical are the two realms at work, and Joyce’s problem isn’t the lack of correlation between one and the other, but the overlapping and overloaded correlation between the two.

Little, Big, on the other hand, purposefully portrays the world-as-we-know-it through a gauzy haze, abstracting New York as “the City” and only vaguely referencing massive events of upheaval in this world, as though to emphasize that the characters are already in process of leaving this world and entering another. Little, Big repeatedly invokes the unexplainable and mysterious motivations in showing the encroaching Otherness in the familiar world. The basic illusoriness of the physical is even more present in Engine Summer, and I think that Crowley enjoys using the concept to show how stories and conceptions of the world trump any certainty about the world itself, using fairy tales as one of his key metaphors. And ultimately, I think Joyce prefers to use the tales to serve the world, rather than the other way around.

Supposedly the hyper-obscure debate between Bishop Berkeley (note the “Ding hvad in idself” reference to Ding an sich) and Saint Patrick near the very end of Finnegans Wake describes the triumph of materialism over Platonic-styled idealism, but I won’t pretend to have much idea of what it means. But consider Giordano Bruno, who figures heavily in both Crowley and Joyce’s worlds. For Crowley, it’s the gnostic/hermetic tradition that Bruno embodies, with his memory arts and mystical reality therein. At least to my eye, Joyce doesn’t reference those aspects often, at least nowhere near as much as the near-constant references strewn about to Bruno’s cosmology and the physical, natural homogeneity of the universe. (Bruno was quite creative and disparate in his philosophies and heresies!) I think he was quite happy having his hands full with the world as we know it.

I don’t really have a preference for one approach over the other, but amazing how Joyce made me forget about non-monistic accounts of reality. Amazing Joyce’s utter presence in this world.

[Thanks to those who responded. I will address your comments soon!]

Reflections in/on Finnegans Wake

27 May 2006 / / 4 Comments

I’ve spent the last few months slowly reading Finnegans Wake, which has been the biggest reason for the sparseness of posts. I didn’t find it suitable for the sort of episodic reflections that I was able to make with Proust, and anyway, my experience was biased by having one particular guide’s view as I read it. Hell, it was tainted by taking one particular approach to the book, that of the old-time Joyceans like Roland McHugh, Clive Hart, and Fritz Senn. I like this approach–it may be the best first approach these is–but clearly the exercise of reading in this manner is very different than the one that spurred John Bishop’s idiosyncratic reading in Joyce’s Book of the Dark, which abandons most of the purported thematic elements (Vico, fathers and sons, etc.) to focus on the quiddities of sensory perception.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The idea of writing for “those other people who’ve read the Wake” seems silly even on a little blog like this one. And I don’t know if I’d say that I’ve read it, but I can say that I am now familiar with it. I feel like I have an idea of the shape of the book, and how the verbiage ebbs and flows over the course of 600+ pages. I know that the second book (of four) is an absolute cauchemar of impenetrability, while parts of the first sometimes approach clarity.

One thing I’ll say, though, is that calling it nonsense is a bit perverse given Joyce’s attitudes. Joyce was a obsessive conceptualist and list-maker, and he organized his lists by even more concepts. The trend is there, buried, in Portrait, and it’s rather straightforwardly present in Ulysses, which lays at least one big analogy on top of one big story. Finnegans Wake, then, was Joyce’s attempt to lay all analogies on top of all stories and to revel in the contradictions rather than making the pretense of resolving them. He let puns and portmanteaus be his serendepitous guides in associating ideas, but he never left it at that. If Buckley and Berkeley happened to sound the same, Joyce would be damned if he didn’t create a conceptual schema behind them linking the two…or, more likely, several contradictory schemas. One term of Joyce’s that’s been suggested for this is “transaccidentation.”

Now, of course these things collide constantly, but they’re always there. Given determined effort, meaning and allusion start pouring out of the text, and they do so in structured ways. It’s when the structures start overlapping and colliding that the book becomes genuinely baffling. Add to that the constant knowledge that there’s plenty that you’re missing, and you grow tentative. Since it is clear that any sense of the book lies in the contradictions and not in any one interpretation, there is the sense of boring through a wall of infinite depth with a variety of implements. Whether with a toothpick or with a jackhammer, there can be slow progress and fast progress, but you’re not going to see the end of it. I think Fritz Senn has it right:

FW goes so much against the grain of the binary, digital predominance
all around us. It shows that the world is never to be resolved into either/or, cannot be reduced to 1’s and 0’s. There is no doubt a need for ambiguity and indeterminacy. FW cannot be dominated, controlled, domesticated, in spite of our efforts.

Q9: Can we learn something by reading it?

I suppose it reinforces a sort of skepticism. Its basis seems (to me) instant contradiction, or a choice of alternatives. Antidote to dogmatism. It may also teach that all is vanity, the same anew, but somehow must go on.

The book is easier than its reputation would have you believe because it exudes purposeful meaning: everything is there for a reason, and usually several reasons. It’s more difficult than its reputation because underneath the surface text, there is no single plot, character, or explanation for what is buried under the opaque verbiage. This becomes most noticeable in most of Book III, where the text tends to be a lot less abstruse than in Book II, but in which the situations being portrayed are even less realistic than before, culiminating in the grandiose fantasia of III.3, in which four senile old men seem to be excavating the mound of history itself, until a litany of betrayals and suffering pour out. I found this section tremendously moving, however little I understood it. Though the book may be impenetrable, Joyce is not the most philosophical of writers: he constantly references the physical and the commonplace, and as much as we all know these things, we can read ourselves into bits and pieces of the Wake.

Why did I do it? As a reader, as a writer, as a student, I want to read things that are sui generis. This was looming large on that list.

What did I get from it? Among other things, a sense of limitless possibility.

Was it worth it? Yes. But I have only invested a couple months, not the decades that others have.

To be continued…

(To all: please comment with your thoughts and experiences on FW! The book, more than any other I know, is a collective experience.)

Georg Buchner: Lenz

8 June 2005 / / 0 Comments

[Here’s a tricky one: should I spell his last name “Buchner,” “Buechner,” or “Büchner” so as best to assist English-speaking people in finding the page?]

Hard to read this without thinking of the other masterpiece that followed it a century later, Hofmannsthal’s “The Lord Chandos Letter”. Just as Hofmannsthal sets the goals of modernism even as he posits their impossibilities, by portraying the greatness of the mind as he details the inability of the title character to articulate any of it, Buchner so sets the goals of romanticism, then shows the madness they lead to.

This isn’t the self-pity of Goethe’s unfortunate Sorrows of Young Werther. The main character, Lenz (a real playwright), is genuinely insane and suffering, and moves over the course of the story from revelation to agony and shutdown. It’s not clear that they are any different for him; his revelations have the same visceral force as the pain. He comes to be disgusted by all abstractions and ideas. It is only through the force of the emotionally apprehended that he can perceive the world. Lenz says:

“What I demand in all things is life, the potentiality of existence, and that’s that; we need not then ask whether it be beautiful or ugly, the feeling that whatever’s been created possesses life outweighs these two and should be the sole criterion in matters of art. As it is, we encounter it rarely, we find it in Shakespeare and it rings forth fully in folk songs, now and then in Goethe. Everything else can be tossed into the fire. These people can’t even draw a doghouse. They claim they want idealistic figures, but from what I’ve seen, they’re all just a bunch of wooden puppets. This idealism represents the most disgraceful contempt for human nature.”

Coming as it does in the middle of a mixture of fugue states, exhaustion, and eventually a total flip-out (before a return to functioning), Lenz seems quite touched, but this is his most coherent moment. Lenz wants an art of total mimesis, but why? There are two rationales that run through the story. First, Lenz has gone mad to the point where sensory impressions are overwhelming him, and ideas and abstractions lack “life.” Second, Lenz is struggling to get away from his own mind: he desires that he exist purely in the world of the noumenal, where his mind is no longer acting as an interpreter but as a passive observer. This abandonment of the self as rational adjudicator stands in the romantic tradition, but Lenz articulates it in an almost synaesthetic manner. The abstractions have become pinpricks on his mind because they throw him back to an interpretive state; the more he sees the world recreated by a person, the more he sees himself harmoniously integrated with the world.

By Hofmannsthal’s time, the abstractions have moved to the forefront of the real and Lord Chandos is trying to figure out how to get the thoughts into his mind out into the world through speech. This then mutates into the madness of Clarisse in The Man Without Qualities, where she is wholly romanced by ideas and removed from the physical world. Lenz’s madness seems more fundamental, less controllable, more native.

Yet Lenz’s cogency doesn’t last, and by the end of the story he has collapsed into fits. But he recovers. He doesn’t die or go completely insane, but simply soldiers on out of sight, representing an eternal and eternally tormented spirit, set upon by primordial sensitivities that set upon his brain, rather than emanate from it.

Richard Foreman: The Gods Are Pounding My Head!

15 March 2005 / / 0 Comments

Not a lot to say on this piece of surrealist theater, since I’m not versed so much in the influences that inform Foreman’s work, nor in the skills needed to analyze the very open-ended symbolism of the play. But here is Foreman’s note on the play, which, besides providing invaluable pointers on what he’s getting at, stands on its own:

This very&#x97to my mind&#x97elegiac play does delineate my own philosophical dilemma. I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality&#x97a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate&#x97 especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modernism”&#x97to cut down , like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land&#x97 this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance&#x97as we all become “pancake people”&#x97spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so&#x97and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

But, at the end, hope still springs eternal…

There are echoes here of “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, as memorably referenced by Sam Jones, so perhaps the dichotomy between a wide-ranging fenceposter and a burrowing hedgehog is not that new. Perhaps it’s been there since Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, about which someone (I can’t remember who) said that it was the last time that someone could lay claim to all the written knowledge in the world. But the problem has certainly gotten worse lately, something you become acutely conscious of while writing a weblog like this one.

Also see this set of Richard Foreman interviews.

Paul Craig Roberts on the Neocons

29 February 2004 / / 0 Comments

I just read Paul Craig Roberts’s review of Claes G. Ryn‘s America the Virtuous, in the Jan 2 TLS. Roberts, author of books like The New Color Line, has bona fide conservative credentials: Hoover Institution, Wall Street Journal, and so on. But he’s far more Edmund Burke than Leo Strauss:

The rise of a new Jacobin ideology…has captured the Bush administration and formerly conservative media, such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, the Washington Times, and Fox News. Known to the world as neo-conservativism, this ideology is radical, not conservative. It appears to be conservative because, unlike cultural Marxists who find endless social and moral vices in American values and institutions, neo-conservatives find virtue.

Like the Cato Institute, who haven’t been big Bush boosters for a while, Roberts is enough of a libertarian to have it trump his traditional party allegiances. He’s not concerned with corruption, class stratification, or cultural divisons; he’s worried that the “neo-Jacobin” (i.e., Leo Straussian neo-conservatism) approach will be disastrous and wreck the country economically, militarily, and politically.

Listen to him bemoan the lack of an opposition to the neo-cons:

The alternative voice to the new Jacobins is that of postmodernism and cultural Marxism. This voice, strongest in the universities, is hostile to America and works against enculturation of its youth in traditional American values. As cultural Marxism does not resonate with the general population, it is not a political check on the neo-conservatives.

The description of academia is a little harsh, but I have to admire the pithiness of his assessment of its effectiveness.

But I do think he’s gone astray. With Richard Perle out at the Defense Policy Board and Paul Wolfowitz supposedly the next to go (keeping my fingers crossed there), he picks at the wrong part of Strauss’s agenda. Americans aren’t Romans and they aren’t anywhere near as keen on military adventurism; that would be the first chip to fall. Likewise the proclamation of American virtue over rest-of-world vice: it’s a useful rhetorical device, but the ultimate authorities (I would speculate: Rove and Cheney; maybe Rumsfeld, who had different axes to grind than the neocons) decided the adventure in Iraq was a safe bet, not an ideological necessity. Why else was there such a hard push to convince us all (citizens and executives alike) that Iraq would be a cakewalk?

The Roberts article is interesting to me because after all his excoriation of “conservatism” in America today, it still gives the movement some benefit of the doubt by assigning them some pragmatic motives:

The same pragmatic politicians who have no interests except their own re-election might, in fact, safe us from the world the neo-Jacobins have in mind.

Add “accumulation of unchecked, centralized executive power” to the list of interests. This is the Straussian principle–the presence of a totalitarian Platonic ruling class–that poses the most threat to Roberts’s libertarian agenda, and it&#x92s the one most likely to survive the downfall of neo-conservatism…or the downfall of the Bush administration. Here, I think Paul Krugman is totally on the mark:

There is no higher goal. Bush’s motivations are dynastic–to secure his family’s rightful place. While he may have some policy biases–like that “instinctive policy fealty” to the investment business–policy is basically there to serve the acquisition of power, and not the other way around.

The story of neoconservatism and the movement of a radical ideology to the center of the political establishment is more interesting than your typical power-hungry executive, but it’s secondary to, and I think separable from, the dominant theme of domestic control. Still, I have to respect a classical conservative desperate and consistent enough to end on this note:

Although most Americans are unaware of it, their best hope is that Iraqi insurgents succeed in driving the US out of Iraq, thus destroying Bush’s re-election.

What would Burke say?

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