Strolling through Ulysses

Robert Gogan’s one-man show, “Strolling through Ulysses” (ongoing at The Stag’s Head pub and other venues, Dublin) is ideal for anyone from the James Joyce scholar to the intrepid reader who found the work impenetrable. The former will be engaged by how Gogan highlights certain layers – especially the potentially humorous ones – of that manifold work, and the latter will be delighted to find a perfectly accessible presentation of Ulysses as a piece of entertainment. Even those who have never tried the tome will have no trouble following the plot and pleasures of Gogan’s show.  Mainly, for those of us who read the novel with a mixture of admiration and frustration, Gogan brings back the good memories without triggering the bad.

Probably the lynchpin of the show is Gogan’s delivery style – the facial expressions, the rhythm and pace, the lingering on key phrases from the book (e.g., “scrotum-tightening sea”) that are pregnant with humor and with deeper meaning at the same time. Part of the story’s pace is driven by the erratic transitions (“ok, let’s get back to…”; “anyway…”). This is no oversight but a reminder that perfect continuity was never the point in Joyce’s writing. Gogan teases us into enjoying the associative flow without getting anxious about “losing the thread.” That, indeed, might be the best learned secret to enjoying Joyce’s longer works.

If any improvement could be made, Gogan could perhaps use props and dynamic movement to better distinguish the characters. One could picture a bit more color and prancing about. The second act is more polished in this regard, especially in the excellent segments on Gerty and Molly. Gogan’s epilogue of contemporary criticism fit well and could even be extended a bit for my taste. But as I press to think of how to pull out more potential, even that pressure is a sign of the show’s strength. As in Ulysses itself, part of the richness lies in the sense that there are always, no matter how many readings you give, more hidden opportunities to be dug out of the text.

 

       

 

San Fran ’60s

Review of San Fran ‘60s, M. W. Jacobs. Escallonia Press, 2017.

If you want an insider, Gonzo-style, journalistic account of daily life in late ‘60s Haight-Ashbury, this is your book. Jacobs gives a series of varied-length vignettes moving back and forth across time, as our personal memory moves back and forth across time, from the early 60s to the 80s, from San Francisco to a cabin and milk truck proto-commune in the Mendocino forests, with forays to Mexico and New York. But the keynote keeps coming back to 1967, the Summer of Love in the Upper Haight.

Some might wish for more pop and drama, or maybe a more well-wrought plot to sustain a rollicking ride. I myself was looking for a bit more development of the ideals that we all associate with the hippies. These stories can get a little dark after 150 pages. But perhaps this is all personal preference. What Jacobs does he does well, and that is to give an unromanticized, street-level account of the male hippie’s daily hunt (in both its comical and disturbing aspects) for chicks and drugs and ways to beat the draft. We do get some dramatic tension with recurring mini-plots that thread through multiple stories – the “speed disaster,” Bernie’s big secret – but many of the tales are uneventful, in the way that the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners are uneventful, giving no payoff but leaving you at a point that’s poised between potential and kinetic energy. If Jacobs’s plot lines don’t keep you on the edge of your sit, though, his prose style always engages. His wit can be purely humorous, as with the “plump, middle-aged straight lady” who works the sidewalk grill and is presently “expounding, spatula in hand, on what was thrown off Tallahatchie bridge in the lyrics of an AM radio hit” (“The Street”). Or it can be disquieting, as when he describes driving high in the fog: “It was Russian roulette and every car that didn’t hit us was an empty chamber” (“Gilroy”). This latter expression too is humorous, no doubt, but it is the humor of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a belly laugh laced with the idea that this could turn very serious any moment.

The parade of momentary but sharply sketched characters is also memorable – the speed freak who’s “a walking filibuster” (“Amateur Insanity”), or Cappy, “a gifted storyteller” who was “short, skinny, and hunched, with a spoon-shaped torso” (“Junkie Love”), or Dan, “who no more believed in God than a man believes in the train that has run over him” (“There Is Only One Misfortune”), or the various “couch nomads” and communist “connoisseurs of outrage” to be found in this “colony of rejects” (“Summer of ‘66”). The characters sometimes come and go too quickly, but the narrator’s observation of them is packed with emotional and psychological nuance. Even his own “frenzied self-analysis” (“Gilroy”) may not be healthy, but it brings us closer to him.

The book’s strengths are in the vivid, grounded sense of time and place, in the parade of quirky but real characters, and in the play of the language when Jacobs works it. Plot and theme seem a little uneven, and as I think back on what I enjoyed most about the book, they do not rise to the top. In my opinion, though, the tradeoff is worth it, as we get a sense of journalistic, unembellished life in the Haight – and beyond the Haight as we come to identify with our narrator in general, to feel his emotional life as his memory moves poignantly back and forth, from the primeval forest moments with Yvette in the ‘70s, then back to ’67, then up to the 1980s, recounting personal loves and losses as he ponders his luck at catching cultural history at just the right time and place.

  

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Notes to myself on William Butler Yeats: a terrible beauty is born

“Terrible beauty” is the signature oxymoron in William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” I am not particularly a Yeats scholar, but it seems to me that this is also the signature oxymoron of Yeats’s poetic landscape in general.

If I were to presumptuously set up a one-session primer on Yeats, I would include “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming,” and “Leda and the Swan.”

All three have to do with rupture, paradigm shift, or, to wit, the moment in which some “terrible beauty is born.” In “Easter 1916,” numb Victorian complacency shatters with a revolutionary eruption, beautiful in its sudden move from deadening complacency toward freedom, passion, and authenticity, but terrible in its violence.

On a personal level, the rupture may recall for some the Romantic move from Innocence to Experience (explicit in Blake but implicit in all six canonical Romantic poets). For Yeats, this may be best marked by his sudden, disruptive passion upon meeting Maud Gonne, whom he loved unrequitedly for decades.

On the level of cultural history, the vision is one not of gradual evolution but of long ages punctuated by violent eruptions/paradigm shifts. Although the paradigm shift in “Easter 1916” is political, a spiritual world view infuses Yeats’s vision. Look at “Leda and the Swan” and “The Second Coming” and you see supernatural eruptions every 2000 years that determine the next historical cycle (Helen of Troy is conceived in “Leda and the Swan,” Christ is born about 2000 years later, and in “The Second Coming” Yeats sees forces gathering at the beginning of the 20^th for another supernatural explosion). This sense of paradigm shift was shared by Yeats’s younger contemporaries like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. And indeed it was a cultural paradigm shift that cut across all disciplines. The modernist style of Joyce and Woolf and Eliot broke radically from the Victorian style of Dickens and Tennyson. Cp. Picasso in painting (sense of depth yields to colliding surfaces), Stravinsky and DeBussy and the sudden rise of atonal, impressionistic music that would have been utterly nonsensical a few years earlier (and indeed was still nonsensical to many contemporaries), Freud, Einstein, the rise of existentialism. Not to mention the drastic review of the “meaning” of life precipitated by the trench warfare of World War I and then the rise of Hitler.

You can see this stuff all over in our selection – “Leda” begins with a “sudden blow” and drives forward with a swirling mix of beauty and terror, a power both gigantic and indifferent, richly sensual but cosmic as well. This is not a rational, Newtonian universe. And it applies on all levels – personal growth, political/cultural history, cosmic/mythological history. (For an exquisitely personal sense of this alien omnipresence indifferently driving our fates, you might see Emily Dickinson, also a contemporary of Yeats though a cultural world away.)

“The Second Coming” starts with an almost pure physics approach to the same kind of break, “turning and turning” toward the rupture point when all hell will break loose. It’s a combination of the Book of Revelation, trench warfare, the premonition of Hitler, the obliteration of innocence, etc., etc., all delivered in richly concrete terms.

Much more could be said about particular word choices and image patterns, but I’d close by saying that, for me, the key things to look for in Yeats are suddenness, fracture, power, terrible beauty, and the three primary levels to frame them with are cosmic/mythic, historical/political, personal.

Freud’s Wolf Man and Joyce’s Dubliners

It’s hard to read Freud’s case histories of the Rat Man (1909) and the Wolf Man (1918) and not be fascinated. Most intriguing of all is how Freud slowly pieces together the patient’s unconscious backstory using what little the patient gives him, small memories that have stuck with the patient for some reason: he was holding his mother’s hand as a toddler, and she was lamenting her illness to a doctor she was seeing off at the train station, and her words made a deep impression; he was standing with his governess in front of the house watching a carriage drive off with his father, mother, and sister, and then walked peacefully back into the house with his governess; there was a picture book with a wolf standing upright that his sister had used to frighten him. Each snapshot seems insignificant but left its mark, and indeed these “insignificant” moments become defining moments, albeit unconsciously, that shape all the subsequent life of the patient’s psyche.

Notice the similarity to James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). Joyce spearheaded a turn in the history of the novel away from the perfectly crafted plotlines of Dickens toward something more subjective. What happens when you can no longer rely on plot milestones and neat closures to frame the flow of meaning? What happens – at least if you are in the early 20th century – is you stumble into a Freudian frame of meaning. In Dubliners, each story captures a moment with no big drama but with an impression left on the protagonist’s mind – the character’s disappointment in “Araby” when he arrives too late at a fair and is unable to get a gift for the girl he secretly loved, the child’s sense of the corpse’s presence at an in-home wake (“The Sisters”), the sense of something peculiar and transgressive in the old man’s approach in “An Encounter.” These moments have the same kind of vitality as the memory-scenes in Freud’s case histories. No bells and whistles, but they capture an impression that leaves a deep mark on the psyche.

I don’t know how deliberate Joyce’s Freudian ground of meaning was, but history makes some cross-pollination inevitable. Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press was offered (but declined) Joyce’s Ulysses for publication around the same time that they were publishing English translations of Freud’s on-going works (and poems by the likes of T. S. Eliot). Certainly all these towering early modernists – Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Pound, D. H. Lawrence – were moving in the same circles, with Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group as one of the nuclei. But however tenuous the cross-connects, there is no doubt that Joyce’s Dubliners participates in reshaping the form of fiction away from the organizing principles of plot and climax. (Woolf’s To the Lighthouse [1927], to me, would be the greatest example of the modernist novel built around subjective points of reference, but Dubliners is closer to the kick-start.) Joyce thus helps to reshape modern identity – first by changing the form in which we see these human stories transacted, and secondly by changing the role of the reader. The reader must orient differently to Dubliners than he had to Dickens. No more of the objective markers that make Dickensian characters so memorable (one thinks, e.g., of Gradgrind, “whose head was all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie”), or of the dramatic climax that brings all the plot threads together. In the trajectory of fiction from Dubliners to Woolf, the reader herself is cast into the role of psychoanalyst, peering into the minds of minor characters, looking for how lasting impressions are made of seemingly trivial events. It’s not about what the characters are doing so much as it is about the dynamics of being.

So was Joyce deliberately deploying Freud? Was Freud perhaps influenced by modernist writers and artists of the day? I’ll let others measure out the exact influences, but I’d recommend this experiment for my own readers: Pick up a copy of Freud’s Three Case Histories, which includes the Wolf Man, notice how reading it places you into the role of psychoanalyst, and ask yourself if the reader is not cast into the same role when he or she reads Dubliners or To the Lighthouse. And ask yourself if that shift in orientation about how we read does not partly reflect and partly implement a shift of human identity into its modern form.

Related: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon/Sula; Jung on Joyce’s Ulysses

When Sirens Call

Review of Paul David Adkin’s When Sirens Call. Melbourne, Australia: Threekookaburras, 2014.

When Sirens Call finds its center of gravity in the romantically charged meeting between Belinda Babchek and Robert Aimard on a Greek island, but this is not your dime store romance novel. Paul Adkin tackles something much more ambitious, something that picks up on the modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, using the framework of odyssey and romance to explore the nuances of intersubjective separation and contact.

True to the expectation created by the setting, Adkin’s descriptions are finely crafted, from the Greek island scenery to the stream-of-consciousness flow of associations within the young Aussie traveler and photographic artist, Belinda, and the English ex-pat writer and island hotelier, Robert. Indeed, the travelogesque descriptions often clothe the philosophical points of the novel. Belinda notices early on, for example, before leaving Madrid, that “the megalopolis … seen from without, seems nobler,” while seen from within it is “chaos … vulgar, bitter, sharp, filthy” (37). This, in a way, encapsulates the novel’s whole point about human identity and the world we live in. The island scenery, the “tiny fishing trawler … the setting sun … gleaming yachts” (130) that form the outer shell of our protagonists’ experience, are beautiful and real, but equally real are the messy subjective interiors struggling anxiously, hopelessly, “absurdly” as both our protagonists like to say, to define a self and a place in the world. The same doubleness reads as a critique of the “romance” genre into which the novel might faux fit, a genre that typically achieves an outer shell of dreamy idealism, even in tragedy, but does so only by obfuscating the messy interior of bodily functions and psychological disturbances. Adkin doesn’t spare us the messy interior, but rather lifts the veil on the genre itself. The romantic island “paradise,” as Aimard suggests, is a poor cover for a “wasteland” within (186).

The two principal characters do not meet until the second half of the novel, and this may make for a slow start for some readers. The first half, with little or no plot, develops subjective and intersubjective spaces, building up a sense of human identity and a modernist force field of themes – alienation, dislocation, loss of meaning, the individual adrift. Separately, we bob along the interior currents of Robert and Belinda, following their inner lives as they daily reconstruct an identity built upon fears, hopes, lost loves and missed connections, percepts in the immediate environment, nuggets of philosophy and social criticism, literary and archetypal allusions that float in and out of their minds. Each character marks out an identity by a mental repetition of fence posts – cultural, historical, personal, and archetypal reference points that stabilize the frame. But the real pressure points are the points of intersubjective contact – the string of ghosts, shadows, substitute antecedents for the missing him or her, the compulsive desire for, and destabilizing fear of, human contact. The “traps” and “tricks” of Belinda’s photography, of Robert’s novels, might be seen in this light as the traps and tricks we register in all our past relationships and with which we inexorably color our future relationships in advance.

Despite differences in age and background, Robert and Belinda share much when it comes to the struggles of identity construction and sense of loss and emptiness in their lives. Indeed, as we oscillate between their streams of consciousness before the meeting, one wishes that Adkin had done more to differentiate the two, had given a more unique prosody and rhythm to each of these interior monologues, had more sharply distinguished the laws of physics governing these respective psyches. But these are the flaws of highly ambitious writing, and it is difficult not to appreciate what Adkin has accomplished as we stumble into and explore the interior landscapes he has given us.

Once the two meet, this modernist base, this malaise of intersubjectivity, is coupled to a plot with an arc, a tension, a sense of anticipation that pulls the reader into the story by the buttonhole. The plot does not have the intricacy and complexity of a classic Dickens plot, but comes rather in the mold of a D. H. Lawrence plot, where the objective sequence is simple but the subjective dynamics foster ample suspense and expectancy to drive the reader forward.

We do get our plot resolution in the end, and I for one like the novel best when the plot becomes superimposed upon the subjective arena at its base, but this is finally not a novel about plot. It is a novel about subjective spaces, lonely spaces, and moments of separation and contact. Like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, it is a novel not exhausted by the plot, but rather a novel one can return to over and over, expecting with each reading the discovery of new layers of flora and fauna in those fluid spaces between the archetypal and the everyday, where “fishermen’s beards become philosophers’ beards” (21), where all lines converge toward Greece, the cradle of our collective unconscious.

Jung on Joyce’s Ulysses

Thanks to fellow blogger, Manja, for the following:

In 1932, renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote a largely critical piece for Europäische Revue on the subject of Ulysses, James Joyce‘s groundbreaking, controversial, and famously challenging novel. From Jung’s essay:

“I read to page 135 with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way. The incredible versatility of Joyce’s style has a monotonous and hypnotic effect. Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter […] Yes, I admit I feel have been made a fool of. The book would not meet me half way, nothing in it made the least attempt to be agreeable, and that always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority.”

In September of that year, Jung sent a copy of his article to Joyce along with the following fascinating letter.

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.

Well, I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,

C. G. Jung

xxx

Gary to Manja:

Thanks, Manja, for that gem of cultural history. I often hear lavish praise or contemptuous disregard or sheer mystification from readers of Ulysses, but Jung captures the comprehensive experience best of all. The frustration, the admiration, the resentment toward Joyce, the moments of humorous tit-for-tat between reader and text – this is remarkably close to my own experience with Ulysses. And despite my large range of reactions, like Jung I feel the dominant one is that I have been fooled or defeated. For a more unambiguously satisfying experience with that modernist stream-of-consciousness style, I prefer Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which I think it is the most successful expression of that style/period and one of the four of five best novels ever written in English. It unfolds into a wonderfully rich modernist novel without the maturbatory antics or readerly frustrations of Joyce’s prose. It too is a difficult novel, but while reading To the Lighthouse, I never once doubted that the difficulty was worth it. With Ulysses, I’m still not sure it was worth it.

Gary

The Clown and the Tiger

“That’s water-turned-wine,” said Jane, archly but without a trace of impatience.  “Your turn.”

I pulled two cards from the top of the deck and studied them.  Far away, goats’ bells ding, and still further out, glimpsed between the gnarled crosses of olive trees tumbling down the rugged hillside, lies the expansive, dark blue Mediterranean.  Two white chickens, boisterous, nearer to the scene, patrol Spiro’s patio.  Unripe grapes hang, lemony waxen bath beads, above our heads.  Time passes.  Giovanni deals the cards, suffers a poor draw.

One must not forget: the sun is to be worshipped here.  We fill an empty bottle with local wine, swim, and prostrate ourselves before said deity, naked like stones in the sand. A hoary old Greek raises a piece of driftwood shaped like the arm of Achilles and heaves it with great show of violence into the sea; he stares straight at me with a look of wild relief, laughs, spits, and disappears down the east beach.

I jump when awakened.  It is one of my traits.  This time, I am awakened at Lake Travis, Austin.  Years seem to have passed.  Jane is naked, shorter than average but perfect in form, waist deep in water. The tips of her hair, long, brown, silky, dip the water. Her solid brown eyes, soft but alert to every modulation in the visual universe, observe, assess, and disregard two kids wading toward her. I lay back and close my eyes at the sun, as Jeff sits up and says something about chili rellenos.  I hear the kids shriek and plunge.  A stout woman screams something in Spanish.  I open my eyes. The beach is deserted save for them and us.

On the way home I know Jeff is about to speak by the way he rubs the swarthy stubble on his jowls, making the pint-sized popeye tattoo on his upper arm seem to rise from the dead and then die again with each stroke.  He pats his paunch thoughtfully, the face tensing slightly under the massive crown of black locks until it achieves an expression that might have become Humpty Dumpty just before the fall.  “Katie is in trouble,” he says. “She needs to move in with us.”

We find Katie and Alissa, her four year old, in the front yard studying a caterpillar. Alissa has Katie’s narrow chin and high cheekbones. One can already see her life unfolding through the features. The caterpillar reminds Jeff of a story.  Once he had waited for months for a cocoon to open. He had pictured the fuzzball breaking open like a pomegranate.  But eventually he forgot about it.  Then one day he was playing in the yard and heard a little scratching sound.  He turned and saw the cocoon just beginning to tear.  And do you know what came out of that cocoon?

“What?”

“A TIGER.  RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.”

“No,” said Alissa.  “A butterfly.”

We load Katie’s boxes and take her mattress to the dump. We do not notice the city’s mysteries along the way because Jane and Katie and I are together, and are absorbed in each other’s radiance, so to speak.  In a way, I suppose, we are all in love.  The dump is a mess with its own incalculable aesthetic.  Dump trucks fly past, magical beasts from an unwritten landfill fairy tale.  We wave.  We are high at the dump.  Jesus.

Now we have five residents in our household.  Jeff is the most observant.  Jane is the most beautiful.  Katie is the most fun (but tragically not so on the day of our story).  Alissa is the youngest.  And they say, perhaps jokingly, that I am the philosopher.

Perhaps we are not all in love.  Perhaps I am oversimplifying.  I say this because of what I saw at Bartholomew Park.  The joggers, thin, fashionable, or flabby, loped past.  At the center of the park is a playground.  There is one child in the playground.  She pops a yellow, curly-topped head out from under a slide, pokes a stick in the sand.  One of the joggers, a woman, perhaps in her late 20s, has stopped near a trash barrel.  Her gym shorts sport a High School logo no longer legible and an animal face about the size of a walnut.  Several Coke cans and the meat of a fruit lay around the barrel.  The jogger near the barrel is Jane.  She is breathing heavily.  No, she is weeping.  The child is studying something dark that she holds in her hands.  It begins to rain. I will not see Jane again.

Year after year we play cards.  Once, long ago it seems, Jeff and Katie and Jane were playing, and Alissa and I were arranging her toys into a line from the refrigerator across the kitchen threshold and out to the front left leg of her mom’s chair.  “Your turn,” I heard Jane say, her impatience light as a feather.  It reminded me of something, one of those faint patterns that ruffle the edges of our sensible spectra, lending coherence by sheer resistance.  A smell of violet, a certain hair texture, a voice, a symbol.  “Should I put in the clown next?”

“No,” said Alissa, “the tiger.”

(Gary Gautier)