Unlikable Protagonists and Ulysses
Unlikeable Protagonists
The more fiction or films or streaming
series you see a certain pattern takes place.
You can't actually place it for a while.
But it happens again and again in current work as you watch characters
writhe around under the camera lights or through the author's typing. It's this.
The characters are many times drama queens and kings - idiots, emotional
wrecks, damaged, childish, clueless, angry, depressed, violent, narcissistic,
passive-aggressive, incompetent, crazed, sad, fucked-up, neurotic, addicted,
evil, thuggish, generally dysfunctional.
And that’s just the adults. Name
your diagnosis. This overly-emotional
baggage seems to be the only character currency that modern fiction
spends. You wonder – who are these
fuckin' theatrical people? They are all
over the top. Are these figures drama
and comedy click-bait or real? People
I've rarely met? I'm not talking about super-heroes, cartoon characters or some
fake avenger who can't be killed by a thousand bullets. Those are made-up. Instead these people are
deeply but cutely flawed. Angerholics, assassins,
criminals, killers, druggies, alkies, neurotics, narcissists, fools. So much
comedy! So much drama! So many clicks!
So the question that follows is – is this descriptive or prescriptive? Or a combination of both? In other words, do these kind of portrayals actually encourage dysfunctional human emotions and normalize them, making them seem just fine? Giving neo-liberal capitalism and its psychological impact a 'normality' it shouldn't? Or is this a literary therapy mentality, being considerate and observant of 'the human condition' or 'the human comedy' with the aim of enlightening the viewer or reader or cozily identifying with them? Or is portraying these kinds of overwrought people a trick so we can gawk? Quirky dysfunctional fuckups, aye! It's like psych porn. I think it is a form of normalization in the end.
JAMEY JOYCE
James Joyce's main works – 1922's Ulysses and 1939's Finnegan's Wake – are usually considered as strictly modernist books given their sexual undertones, interior monologues, fractured structural techniques, inventiveness and playful use of language. Most critics agree with this approach. However, if you delve into the philosophy behind them, you will find pre-modern thinking ... really becoming the last major classical works in English literature. They straddle two worlds but are intellectually tethered to the past, perhaps attempting to create a 'wholeness' of some sort between the two periods.
Ulysses is based on the Greek myth, carefully structured to mimic each of the 18 episodes in Homer's original epic written in the 8th Century. In Ulysses Homeric characters interpenetrate with Dublin ones - Greece and Ireland together. Few now follow Greek myths - except maybe the Cohen brothers. New myths are being created yearly and have more relevancy for all but the classically-trained - like Lord of the Rings and even Game of Thrones. Someone please tell Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. The Bible still packs a small punch, but its influence is waning in fiction except for The Book of Revelation. While Nordic sagas are having a bit of a comeback on streaming, they are still relatively unknown except, again, Ragnarok. Using a Greek fable set in modern times could be construed as adapting the past to the present – substituting a normal human salesman, Leopold Bloom, for a heroic Phoenician mariner. Bloom sallies forth from 7 Eccles Street in Dublin like Odysseus, then returns in the evening, a perfect loop. Like Picasso's Minotaur or Dali's Renaissance surrealism, Ulysses brings the past into modernity. In this case this approach is a hint that the philosophic view is backward, towards some kind of aesthetic 'eternal.'
There is politics of a sort in Ulysses. A 'cyclops' Fenian Irish nationalist in a bar is an anti-Semite, a hater of Scots and any non-Irish. Bloom the Semite gets his ire. The cyclops is the typical right-wing nationalist found in nearly every nation. In chapter one Stephen Daedalus says that he, like Ireland, is cursed by Catholicism and the British, both repressive forces. And many nationalists were just that, virulent Catholics. Joyce goes on to make fun of sensationalist newspapers and undermines prudes and religious nuts – easy to do now, but not then. This is why he moved to Paris and Europe. But other than that ... politics is a dim sidelight in this book. Joyce himself was involved in the Easter Rising as a young man, and took over a café from his boss for a time during that event. Joyce was clearly a liberal humanist of some sort. Ulysses was banned by the censors, but that ban was eventually defeated, as the books are in no way ‘prurient.’ The bourgeois press excoriated Ulysses anyway.
 |
| They still call him 'the prick with a stick.' |
The Philosophy
The philosophy animating both of Joyce's
books is 'recurrence' – a circular view of history, human life, nature,
technology, etc. The focus on the
Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose idea this was, is littered
throughout Ulysses. Vico
considered his idea to be an 'empirical deduction' based on his study of
history. In the same breath Vico opposed
rationalism in the name of classical antiquity.
The title Finnegan's Wake is word play on circularity – Finn
Again, Finn Awakes. Which Finn kinda
does when beer is spilled on his corpse in an open casket. Recurrence relates to the idea of Hindu
reincarnation scattered through the books ... another religious, circular idea.
Joyce uses the term 'metempsychosis' – the transmigration of the soul after
death – for this same idea. The
reactionary philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer also dwelled on
transmigration.
A funeral, a birth; a butterfly, a man; a death, a return. Christ's death and resurrection, Christ Again. In Ulysses, Leopold is the Jewish father and his spiritual son, Stephen, is not - he's a renegade Christian. Molly, his wife, might be the Holy Ghost, but she is really a lover of life. They are really a very odd Trinity. Now reincarnation does not account for the rise in the Irish population, nor the planetary one by any scientific logic. Somehow the butterflies are so 'good' they've become humans on an algebraic scale. It's a joke as a philosophy but it provides some kind of conservative comfort. We're still waiting for the 'second coming,' another chimerical idea. This eternal return is the logic embedded in the books - and not shyly. Finnegan's Wake begins with a half sentence which connects it to the half last sentence in the book - making a circle.
Aesthetically it means a calm, all-encompassing stasis, which was Joyce's literary goal in spite of his avant-garde techniques. I think it was achieved. These are great, if complex and dense works of art, of artifice, of artificial construction, of humanity. But that humanity is not unusual, as many pre-modern writers attest. For Ulysses you need a deep knowledge of Irish history, the Odyssey, Greek culture, Shakespeare, Hamlet, mysticism, Dublin, rhetoric, Christianity, the Bible, languages and music, along with a perceptive toleration for word fun. No one has all this, which is why it remains a partial mystery to nearly every reader and every avoider.
Circular thinking is conservative because it ignores change. At the time Joyce was writing these books Marxist dialectics and revolutionary movements were intruding on normal bourgeois philosophy and life. Not to mention the capitalist disasters of the First World War and fascism. 'Human nature' in bourgeois philosophy is not thought of as human physical needs but as innate corruption that will never change, leading to social corruption and on and on. It is the Christian idea of 'original sin' or the Hindu understanding of karma, which is also in the books. And Joyce, for all his ex-Catholicism and ‘lewdness’, was imbued with sub-Christianity if these books are any intimation.
HISTORY
History in the books, especially Irish
history, soaks the narrative, as if all history is present at all times.
Parnell and O'Connell loom large - yet there is no hint of the Easter Rising to
come. As Faulkner put it 'the past is never past' but evidently the future is
also past. In a sense this is true, but it’s an archaic idea that ignores change. Joyce got a classical education at a Jesuit
college in 1893 and went on in 1898 to a higher Dublin university studying
languages. He published his first book, Dubliners,
in 1914 at the start of World War I, though he'd written it in 1905. His second, Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, was published during the war in 1916, but written prior to
that. Bloom's day, June 16, 1904, - the
day in Ulysses that is pictured - is prior to World War I too, set in
the waning days of Victorian colonialism.
The period these focus on is a high point of early capitalist society
before the great disruption of the world war, which is the historical event
that really led to full modernism. As
that war showed, even war had morphed into something else, something bigger and
more destructive, not a mere repetition of the past.
We are taught that the sun rises, the sun sets and the days march in a regular order until the end of time. Humans wake, humans sleep, humans live, humans die. Humans never change and are on a treadmill – yet they do change constantly. Even nature changes. Climate change is the obvious example, as humans have affected the apparent cycles, destabilizing a semi-predictable system. Nature has been disrupted before of course, as our geologists know. Even solid rocks degrade. Joyce sought to create a reproduction of the universe in his books, a smaller literary version. The real universe is not a static, aesthetic 'place' but a dynamic, tumultuous material network of plasma filaments and electro-magnetic energy, an infinite aurora borealis of galaxies, stars, planets, magnetism, dust - ever-changing, not merely repeating. In a way Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake replicate this dynamism, but swirling in a closed globe.
WORDS
One of Joyce's foremost interpreters,
Stuart Gilbert, agrees on this thesis regarding Ulysses … it's promotion of aesthetic stasis and
philosophic recurrence. Another
stylistic hint in the book is 'the words.' First there was 'the word,' then a world
created by words, then a world filled with words, then the word’s many
derivations and tongues, then two books which contain the greatest profusion of
English wordiness ever to be done, and probably never overcome or undone by
anyone. The word is actually the endgame
here. This is the method of semiotics,
of hidden and mystic signs, delightful as it is. Its high literature so it counts, but it’s
not grounded materialism. It's word
magic.
I later came across a full defense of Joyce in Socialist Revolution about his progressiveness and modernity. I think the author reads too much of his own ideas into the text, while making the point that Joyce was thoroughly grounded in ‘the ordinary man.’ Many European writers prior to Joyce were also ‘grounded’ like this – witness Balzac, Zola, Dickens or Hardy. This is standard humanism, divorced from gods and heroes. SR accurately defends Joyce against the depredations of Radek and some other Marxists, but in doing so go the opposite route.
P.S. - "The CIA published Russian translations of Joyce’s Ulysses in Italy, as part of a program the Agency called “a Marshall Plan for the Mind.” The idea was to distribute Western literature in the Communist Bloc during the Cold War. CIA-backed Bedford Publishing Co. had an office in Rome. At the time, Italy had the largest Communist Party in Europe. (See Hot Books in the Cold War by Alfred Reisch)."
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Irish Literary Trail,” “1916 Rebellion Walking Tour,” “History and Class Consciousness,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “The Immortal Irishman,” “Sean O’Casey,” “James Connolly,” “Jimmy’s Hall,” “The Wonder,” “Black 47,” “Rebellion,” “Dream of the Celt.”
The Cultural Marxist
September 2, 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment