16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the Greatest Writer Ever

This was originally posted last summer. Today being Bloomsday, I figured it was a good time to post it once more.


1. The simple fact that his writing is beautiful
All good writing strives towards poetry as poetry is the highest form of writing. Joyce started off as a poet and was good enough to receive attention from W.B. Yeats who encouraged Joyce to "turn his mind to unknown arts." This unknown art is a manner of prose in which every word and the flow of the words are considered with precise poetical precision. So Joyce's writing is an original, beautiful gleaming mass that yields gems like this one:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

2. Joyce is to literature what Einstein is to science
In Ulysses Joyce toys with time and space all throughout the book. In the "Proteus" chapter, Stephen Dedalus ruminates and meditates on the nature of Time and Space using Schopenhauer's interesting words Nacheinander (German for "succeeding each other") and Nebeneinander ("beside each other"). The main character Leopold Bloom sells newspaper advertisement space for temporary periods of time. In Richard Ellman's complex exegesis, Ulysses on the Liffey, he argues convincingly that the 18 episodes can be broken into six triads within which the dominant categories of Space, Time, and Space-Time repeat over and over. Relativity (or more specifically what Einstein called "special relativity") also dominates the book, especially in the first six chapters as we follow the movements and thoughts of two different, separate characters at the exact same time of day. Relativity abounds in Bloom's cosmic reflections in the Ithaca episode. Also, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated explains how Joyce stretches out time by depicting the events of the day through a "rich mix of clock time, psychological time, and mnemonic time."

We are all aware, for example, that we can think and perceive far more in the course of a few minutes of multi-leveled consciousness than we could spell out in words in as many hours. Joyce variously explores this disparity. (Gifford, pg 3)

16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the Greatest Writer Ever

I actually started to write this over a year ago and now it's finally complete. It was originally intended to be posted on June 16 (thus the 16 reasons) but that never worked out. It's not meant to be exhaustive or even all that serious, but I think it gets the point across. 

1. The simple fact that his writing is beautiful
All good writing strives towards poetry as poetry is the highest form of writing. Joyce started off as a poet and was good enough to receive attention from W.B. Yeats who encouraged Joyce to "turn his mind to unknown arts." This unknown art is a manner of prose in which every word and the flow of the words are considered with precise poetical precision. So Joyce's writing is an original, beautiful gleaming mass that yields gems like this one:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

2. Joyce is to literature what Einstein is to science
In Ulysses Joyce toys with time and space all throughout the book. In the "Proteus" chapter, Stephen Dedalus ruminates and meditates on the nature of Time and Space using Schopenhauer's interesting words Nacheinander (German for "succeeding each other") and Nebeneinander ("beside each other"). The main character Leopold Bloom sells newspaper advertisement space for temporary periods of time. In Richard Ellman's complex exegesis, Ulysses on the Liffey, he argues convincingly that the 18 episodes can be broken into six triads within which the dominant categories of Space, Time, and Space-Time repeat over and over. Relativity (or more specifically what Einstein called "special relativity") also dominates the book, especially in the first six chapters as we follow the movements and thoughts of two different, separate characters at the exact same time of day. Relativity abounds in Bloom's cosmic reflections in the Ithaca episode. Also, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated explains how Joyce stretches out time by depicting the events of the day through a "rich mix of clock time, psychological time, and mnemonic time."

We are all aware, for example, that we can think and perceive far more in the course of a few minutes of multi-leveled consciousness than we could spell out in words in as many hours. Joyce variously explores this disparity. (Gifford, pg 3)

"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 3 (Expansive Bibliography)

To finally close out this treatise, I would like to share thoughts on some of the books used in the research process.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali

Published in 1942, this is really the definitive text to read for those interested in Dali. His writing style is superb though often flashy and exuberant as he tells the story of his life starting with intrauterine memories (seriously). The intrauterine stuff was actually very interesting, especially as compared to Stanislav Grof's research on the subject (which came decades later). As often seems to be the case, Dali's artistic intuition is so precise that it matches perfectly with later scientific findings.

Next to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this was one of the main texts for my paper and (as the point is belabored in the paper) its style of "autobiographical mythology" certainly makes for an interesting comparison with Joyce's autobiographical novel. One of the differences between them though is that Dali's book is filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations depicting symbols, scenes, characters, etc drawn from the story.

Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali
Although the opening pages, detailing his disputes with the Surrealists and André Breton, make for interesting reading, I didn't find this book to be all that good. Sure, Dali's writing style is always entertaining but this book is literally a diary, a daily account of a few years in Dali's life and we get to read how many times he crapped that day, what he ate, etc. It's not all boring, but I wouldn't read it again.





The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (as told to André Parinaud)

This book is a written account of Dali dictating his life, his work, and his theories to Parinaud and it makes for a great read. It was composed in the 1970s when Dali had been a famous artist for about five decades so there's plenty to talk about and in the 300 pages there's tons of great material. There are illustrations (and photos) in here as well, hand-drawn in an interesting charcoal style. Plenty of great material on the paranoiac method in here, it's also got the only mention of Joyce by Dali that I've been able to track down. Very briefly, he shares Helena Rubinstein's account of the great writer: "nearsighted and smelling bad."


Salvador Dali by Robert Descharnes
Descharnes is Dali's main biographer and this big coffee table art book has an engaging account of the artist's life and career while also displaying big, beautiful color images of many of his paintings. This is the first Dali book I read and it remains a great one.


Dali: The Impresario of Surrealism by Jean‐Louis Gaillemin
When I visited London back on Thanksgiving 2008, there was an art museum right on the Thames River that had a big Dali exhibit. Of course I checked it out and it was great (they had some of his illustrations of The Divine Comedy which I loved). Afterwards I was in the gift shop trying to avoid getting anything (so as to conserve my meager funds), but this little book caught my attention and I couldn't resist picking it up. I devoured it on the return flight and still pick it up every now and then. It's another book about his life and career but it goes a little bit deeper into certain things like frequent motifs or his interactions with people like Jacques Lacan. In fact, it was reading this book that first put me on to the role Lacan plays in this whole thing. This is a great introductory primer to Dali and his work, I highly recommend it. It's also a very tiny book that could fit in your back pocket.


James Joyce: Portraits of the Artist in Exile edited by Willard Potts
When I was at the Joyce conference last month I often brought this book up in conversation and it seemed nobody had heard of it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a collection of recollections of Joyce by a number of writers, artists, scholars, etc. that encountered him at various points in his life all throughout Europe. It's a highly entertaining book of anecdotes and there's tons of material in it that I've never read anyplace else. This might be meaningless to most people, but it reminds me of the great baseball book The Glory of Their Times.  

James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism by Jean-Michele Rabaté
I've always thought this title sounds boring and overly academic but it's a great read. Rabaté is one of the best of the current Joyce scholars and he writes very well.

A Reader's Guide to James Joyce by William York Tindall
This book really came in handy when I first read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Tindall writes in a very clear and engaging style and he weaves through the mass of Joycean symbols and motifs very smoothly. My understanding of the symbols in Portrait really owes a lot to Tindall. (This is also a good book to have when reading Ulysses as he gives clear and brief breakdowns of each chapter.)

Coincidance by Robert Anton Wilson

I picked up this book very late in the research process and so I didn't include it in the actual bibliography but it certainly helped me put everything together. I've been admiring RAW for a while but this is the first book of his that I actually read and it was spectacular. It is a collection of essays dealing for the most part with instances of synchronicity all over the place in art, science, and history (there are also many essays about things that have nothing to do with synchronicity at all). He has three pieces on Finnegans Wake that are as interesting as anything I've come across yet on the Wake and which might convince you that Joyce was really working on some sort of unknown cosmic level. In one essay he details how the characters (and sigla) of the Wake coincide perfectly with the trigrams of the I-Ching and effectively ties both of those in with the composition of DNA. Really, really delicious food-for-thought. (There is also a footnote in which he claims certain parts of the Wake are influenced by Dali but I didn't find his argument convincing at all.)

Jacques Lacan by Elizabeth Roudinesco
For someone who lived such a wild, "rock-and-roll" lifestyle, I thought Roudinesco's account of Lacan was pretty boring. Her writing style was very dry and bland. Somebody at the conference asked me what's the best book on Lacan's life and, as far as I know, this is the only one and I wasn't too impressed with it.


How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan by Roberto Harrari

Out of all the books I read for my study, this was the most difficult. The "final Lacan" is Lacan's 1975-76 seminar on le sinthome or "the symptom" and it's the one where he focuses entirely on Joyce who, he was convinced, was schizophrenic but was able to channel his madness through his art and thus remain on the safe side of sanity (although his daughter inherited the sickness and perished). That sounds easy enough to understand but Lacan illustrated his theories using the Borromean knot and twisted and tied everything in all different ways because he was at that time hanging out with a lot of mathematicians. In this book, Harrari tries to explain all of Lacan's darting thoughts but I found it impossible to follow. If you flip around the book using the index, though, it's easier to glean what info you need.

Flickerings of Film

Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali

Went to see Midnight in Paris last night and enjoyed it very much. I had heard a lot of good things about it from people and it certainly lived up to expectations. Getting to see some of the past greats like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot and everyone else in a modern film was certainly a treat. I was especially impressed with Adrien Brody's portrayal of Salvador Dali. As you can tell if you've read this blog much at all (or even looked at my previous post), I've been involved in closely studying Dali's life and work for a little while and so I was glad to see him get such a nice portrayal in the film, especially from a big actor like Brody. In all honesty, I can be a harsh critic with this kind of stuff, especially when it deals with something I've spent so much time being involved with, and I genuinely really enjoyed Brody as Dali. In fact, he may have been the best character in the entire movie (though Ernest Hemingway was certainly really good and the laughs in the theater certainly attested to that).

The one thing that bothered me, of course, was the absence of James Joyce. His name was mentioned in an anecdote very early in the film but through all the adventures the main character had with the big figures of 1920s Paris, we never got to meet Joyce. This was really disappointing because I know his character would've stolen the show, just as the real Joyce did within that rich artistic environment. The Joyce of the 20s was also perhaps the one best suited for big screen portrayal; he had the eye patch at that time, the great fame from having just published Ulysses, and was in the midst of his greatest (and most baffling) work of all, Finnegans Wake. And the biographical books are certainly filled with his wild carousing with the likes of Hemingway who had a relatively huge role in the movie. I wonder if there were Joyce scenes that were cut out that might be included in a future DVD set. I'm really interested to find out because I thought Woody Allen handled all these old famous figures extremely well.

While my girlfriend and I were getting ready to go see the movie, I reflected on how for decades and decades couples were in that same spot, getting dressed for a night at the movies to see "a Woody Allen film." It struck me for a reason I can't quite elucidate (eternal recurrence through the ages, perhaps). I've never had any real interest in Allen's films before and, really, I can't name a film of his that I particularly enjoyed. I know of Annie Hall but haven't seen it, and the last time I started to watch a Woody Allen movie I found the whiny arguments so grating I had to turn it off (admittedly, Whatever Works starring Larry David was not bad). This movie was completely different and, really, there wasn't much indication that it was a "Woody Allen" film. The director managed to stay out of his work, as in Joyce's description of the dramatic art form: "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

*   *   *

Speaking of directors, God, and creation, I have to say a few things about Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. As I wrote a few months back, the trailer for this movie captivated me and the scope seemed to perfectly fit my current mindstate. I dragged my uninterested girlfriend to a packed theater on the first night it was playing here in Austin and after nearly three hours of completely unconventional cinema, I was left in a daze. She absolutely hated the film and it doesn't surprise me that it has evoked similarly strong reactions from the public on each side of the pole.

To put it bluntly, the style of the film does not make for a palatable cinematic experience. One has essentially no idea what they are watching from beginning to end. The dialogue is minimal and most of the talking we hear is in hushed whispers. What we encounter is a collage of memories, moments, seemingly personal explorations of the unconscious. Whose unconscious it is, we're never really sure, but it seems to be that of Sean Penn's character as he goes about his work day and experiences a sort of crisis within himself.

The style was unlike anything I've experienced from a movie, it was perhaps a bit more like a (lame) amusement park ride. There is a constant pattering upon the senses of a variety of sounds, gleams of sunlight, and, if it were somehow possible, smells. (A recent piece in Salon magazine likened it to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man where we also experience the character's developing senses.) I think it is a film that speaks very clearly to our unconscious but is quite difficult for our conscious minds to ascertain. From the trailer, I expected it to be a monumental epic that would hit my emotions and provide that feeling of aesthetic arrest but it was only during one brief scene that I could feel the depths of my own memories get a bit rattled. It was a simple scene within the family kitchen on a bright afternoon and it unearthed a dusty old cave somewhere in my mind that brought about visions of my upbringing and made me a little nostalgic for Staten Island (or, at least, the innocent Staten Island of my childhood).*

I had expected the scenes showing the Big Bang and the creation of the universe to be special and indeed they were. My problem with it is that they seemed to leave something out, as we didn't get any kind of transition from all of that to the small-town Texas family. It was just a bunch of cosmic creation, formation of planets, life, etc and then a cut back to the family scene. While the point ("we are walking manifestations of the history of the universe") seems clear enough, I don't think the delivery of it was well executed. Nevertheless, an extremely admirable and ambitious idea.

I don't want to offer a firm judgment on the overall quality of the movie because I've only seen the film once and really didn't connect with it the way I expected to. That doesn't mean I think it sucked, it certainly left me in a blank daze for a while afterwards, but that may have just been due to the aforementioned tender onslaught of sights and sounds which can be hypnotizing in a way. I think I'd like to give it a look one more time and then decide how I feel about it. It's certainly sending some of our cinema scribes into a state of spiritual serenity.

*Interestingly enough, the final scene (trust me, this won't ruin it for you) is a view of Staten Island from across the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn. In the context of the film, I don't have the slightest clue why this appeared but it certainly hit me personally as that bridge holds an important place in my heart for many reasons (one of which is that it allowed my parents, from Brooklyn and Staten Island respectively, to join together.)

*   *   *

Lately, I've come to think that the movie trailer is, itself, a new medium. I can think of many examples of films that had awesome trailers while the actual film was disappointing (my favorite example is probably Revolutionary Road which had a stirring Nina Simone song). The crafting of movie trailers has gotten so good that we often relish the opportunity to watch previews just as much as the actual movie itself when we go to the theater. I certainly do, at least, and I'm always open for that next big potentiality to light up my eyes and expectations. Well, a new one of those hit me yesterday and it's called Take Shelter. Here's the trailer:



With my recent studies on paranoia (and my own occasional feelings of impending doom within this crumbling American Empire) this one seems right up my alley. Plus those are some pretty strong endorsements included within the trailer.

"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 1

"Everything that terrifies others delights me, the fears and phantasms that others commonly carefully repress are to me so many fresh sources for my critical intelligence, but one would have to be far more foolish than I to try to analyze the complexity of my intentions and motivations. I who live them am far from understanding all about them! Fortunately, there are still my works which, subjected to the most objective examination, allow some of the truths I have been dredging up from the depths to come through."

-Salvador Dali (The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, p. 141)

At the top of this post is the cover for the presentation/paper I delivered at the James Joyce Conference two weeks ago. The drawing is from Salvador Dali's book The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (which features prominently in my study) and it was put together by my girlfriend's dad, Luther, a highly talented graphic designer. The talk that I gave in Pasadena was just a very basic overview of the material in the paper. The full version is available in a 17-page booklet format with color images so if you'd like one of those just let me know and I can mail you one.

The essence of my paper is an analysis of Salvador Dali's The Temptation of St. Anthony showing that the material in the painting bears a striking resemblance to the symbols and structure of Joyce's first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then I go on to explore whether Dali ever explicitly acknowledged any Joyce influence (or vice versa) and what this interpretation of the painting means, concluding with a look at Jacques Lacan's role as "shoelace" tying together Joyce, Dali, and my new interpretation of the painting.

What I'd like to do here is present some of the left-over material that didn't make it into the final version of the paper and also (in Part 2) discuss the meaning of the title which, unfortunately, I didn't really get to touch on at all in the paper. In the interest of graciously acknowledging all of my sources, I will also go through most of the books and scholarly stuff I used in my research (this will be Part 3) and point out some of the material one should seek to study if they have any further interest in this stuff.

Image drawn at the top of a chapter in Dali's book The Secret Life.

So, in analyzing the painting, the first thing I looked at is that tiny image in the very center amid the elephant legs showing what appears to be a parent with child and, as I tried to show, this is Dali himself as a young child, an image of his earliest memories and experiences. What I didn't get to mention is that this is a frequent motif in Dali's paintings from around this era (1930s-40s), as you can see from these examples.

Atavistic Ruins After the Rain (1934)

And (as in the St. Anthony painting) much smaller, barely visible here:

Geological Development (1933)

The Ambivalent Image (1933)

Here are a couple more instances of this motif appearing, this time in two of Dali's works that incorporate the elements from Jean-Francois Millet's Angelus which Dali became obsessed with.

Archaeological Reminscence of Millet's Angelus (1935)

The Architectonic Angelus of Millet (1933)

The Angelus

As a child going to school, there was an image of Millet's The Angelus hanging on the wall just outside the classroom door and young Salvador would stare at it until it was branded on his brain. As you can see, he was prone to incorporate this image or its likeness into his work. In the 1930s, when penning numerous articles and essays on his developing paranoiac-critical method (one of which I've published on this blog before) he composed a paranoiac study of The Angelus in which he asserted a whole new and different meaning behind the painting. One of his assertions was that the man and woman in the scene (to the right) are standing over the buried body of their child. In 1963, the laboratory at the Louvre actually x-rayed the original painting and saw that there was originally what looks like a casket at the mother's feet but it had been painted over by Millet.

Unfortunately, there's no way to x-ray The Temptation of St. Anthony to see if my interpretation of it is accurate but I did confirm that the meanings I perceived within the painting were apprehended, witnessed, or "thought through my eyes" in a process exactly like Dali's paranoiac-critical method. I did manage to magnify and zoom into some of the smaller elements in the painting and the autobiographic aspect of my interpretation is, as I've showed, justified by just taking a look at the images in Dali's wonderful and illustrated autobiography entitled The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.

To be continued...

Retrospective Arrangement of Thoughts

Dali's "architecture of eternity" sketching

It's about time I resuscitate this blog after nearly a month of silence. My absence was due, as I've frequently mentioned, to the completion of my paper on James Joyce and Salvador Dali as well as the visual presentation material that I delivered to a group of about 25 people this past Thursday morning at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. My paper, entitled "Thought Through My Eyes: A Portrait of the Artist as a Dali Painting" was well-received; everybody seemed to enjoy it and I got plenty of positive feedback from folks. Having not endured public speaking for nearly four years, I somehow managed to avoid spontaneously combusting. In fact, I think I did pretty well.

The Joyce Conference overall was fun, though a bit mentally taxing (which is to be expected). Everybody I met was very nice to me and the whole group of Joyceans were very welcoming and appreciative that a young, non-academic like me was there to present my work. I did feel a little bit out of place at times, especially since most people would ask "so where are you from?" upon introduction, expecting to hear what university I teach (or go to grad school) at but not only am I independent of any university, I've also bounced around three time zones the last three and a half years. So, my answer was always complicated. Nevertheless, I made some friends and had a good time with everyone, getting to hang out with folks from all over the globe (Denmark, Australia, UK, Canada, Japan, to name a few).

One of the more interesting individuals there was an Australian named Jaya Savige who, as I realized earlier today from Googling him, is an award-winning poet attending Cambridge University on a full scholarship. One night, while gripping a glass of some sort of hard liquor, he told a memorable story about confronting Bill Gates on capitalism to the point where the bajillionaire Microsoft man accused him of being a "Stalinist." The story becomes all the more comical when you read that Savige is in fact a Gates Scholar, receiving the rare $100K scholarship grant to attend Cambridge for free.

Throughout the four day conference, the most captivating things I witnessed were:

1. Adam Harvey's mind-blowing performance of the Mookse and the Gripes story from Finnegans Wake, reciting with great dramatic emphasis the entire 15-page selection from memory. As far as I know, it was the only thing in the conference that achieved a standing ovation.

2. Actress Fionnula Flanagan's recitation of the short story "Counterparts" as well as the discussion afterwards. The Dubliners story, about a man who slips out of work for a quick beer, gets berated by his boss, gets drunk after work, loses a barroom arm-wrestling match and then beats up his son, was emotionally striking and she performed it extremely well. Afterwards, the white-haired (but beautiful) Irish woman discussed how important the story is to her because of the realness of it, mentioning "the sickness of my nation: alcoholism," and reflecting on why she feels it's the greatest short story ever written.

3. The closing ceremony, an outdoor dinner in the middle of a beautiful old Spanish-style villa on the campus of Caltech (right underneath the windows of a room where Albert Einstein lived for a while) in which two old songs that appear in Portrait and Ulysses were sung. I had never really thought I would enjoy hearing these old songs but the magical alchemy of the evening managed to lift me off the earth momentarily. Particularly, the song sung acapella (and with no microphone) by Patrick Reilly of the CUNY Graduate Center entered me into a trance, the undulating tones of human chords making me feel as though my beating heart were a uvula dangling alone in the universe amidst the entire vibrating energy of existence. Yup, it was that good. (The song is an old ballad called "Love is Pleasin', Love is Teasin'.")

4. Some of the academic papers I enjoyed were: Jeffrey Drouin's talk on Joyce as "The Einstein of English Fiction"; Benjamin Boysen's takedown of Jacques Lacan entitled "When the Psychiatrist Needs a Psychiatrist"; Tim Martin talking about Ulysses as an elegy; Mark Osteen on the "Handiwork of Portrait"; and Sheldon Brivic's paper on "Ulysses and Badiou" even though I didn't know who Badiou was and still don't (Brivic was just really interesting to listen to).

It is often sporting events that mark historical points in the constellations of my life experiences, time markers, helping me reach back and remember the specifics of past autobiographical events. This wonderful return trip to Cali certainly had that: I watched the Mavericks capture the NBA Finals inside the hotel bar drinking a brew with a new pal from the University of Alberta, and then sat next to a table full of black-and-yellow-clad cheering Bruins fans in a restaurant when they won Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

Certainly a memorable time. I'll probably have much more to say about it soon and I'm working on some more posts about my Joyce-Dali paper (which I printed in a monograph booklet, contact me and I'll send you one) as well as a bunch of other writings to come.

The Tree of Life (Expectation)

Though it was first released to the public three months ago, I have only just recently had a chance to see the trailer for the upcoming film The Tree of Life. It looks pretty special, the trailer had my soul buzzing. Check it out:



Here is how writer/director Terrence Malick describes the film:

We trace the evolution of an eleven-year-old boy in the Midwest, Jack, one of three brothers. At first all seems marvelous to the child. He sees as his mother does with the eyes of his soul. She represents the way of love and mercy, where the father tries to teach his son the world’s way of putting oneself first. Each parent contends for his allegiance, and Jack must reconcile their claims. The picture darkens as he has his first glimpses of sickness, suffering and death. The world, once a thing of glory, becomes a labyrinth.

From this story is that of adult Jack, a lost soul in a modern world, seeking to discover amid the changing scenes of time that which does not change: the eternal scheme of which we are a part. When he sees all that has gone into our world’s preparation, each thing appears a miracle—precious, incomparable. Jack, with his new understanding, is able to forgive his father and take his first steps on the path of life.

The story ends in hope, acknowledging the beauty and joy in all things, in the everyday and above all in the family—our first school—the only place that most of us learn the truth about the world and ourselves, or discover life’s single most important lesson, of unselfish love.

From the looks of it, with its scenes of everyday life growing up, as well as the visual splendors of the planets, the cosmos, inner and outer space, this will probably be one of those extraordinary films that produces a feeling of the sublime; the static feeling of "aesthetic arrest" as described by James Joyce in his first novel. I'm definitely looking forward to it.

*   *   *

When looking up information about the movie, every site emphasizes that the director/writer, Malick, has kept the details about the film under tight wrap for years now, not letting anything leak out into the public sphere. This reminded me of another famous work of art with the same name: a magnificent, elaborate marble frieze entitled The Tree of Life by Viennese painter Gustav Klimt. Klimt worked on his Tree of Life for about six years, collaborating with many artists and artisans who he instructed to keep the work a secret. The final piece is one of Klimt's most famous images.

The two main motifs are (from left to right) Expectation and The Embrace. I have a print of this painting (hard to call it just a "painting" because the real work is etched into a marble wall) hung on the wall right behind me as I write this, the curling branches seemingly bursting out of my head.

And my Expectation is through the roof for this new film of the same name.

Potent Postables

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man by Salvador Dali

At last, I am reconnected to the internet. Not counting a couple nights in a La Quinta Inn, I haven't had regular internet access since the end of January.

It's certainly been a productive interval, though. We drove for four days through California, Arizona, New Mexico and the dreadfully huge and empty wilderness of Texas; scoped out and settled into an apartment; did our best to make it a cool and comfortable place to live; and I've finished the first part of my three-part essay on Joyce & Dali which I'm submitting for the North American James Joyce Conference.

Now that I've got my connection to the interwebs back, I've got plenty to post about on here. Here are a few of the things you can expect to see.

- I've had this half-finished post sitting in the pipeline for a while but I'm determined to finish it up in the next week or two: "16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the Greatest Writer Ever."

- Along those same lines...one of the great things so far about Austin is a chain store called Half Price Books. Their selection is ENORMOUS and, unlike the big corporate bookstore chains, they aren't promoting the usual bullshit, heavily-marketed, high-budget junk. Instead they've got aisles and aisles of whatever you want. It's like a huge, well-stocked library where the books cost 5 bucks or less. Anyway, the store near downtown Austin had a shockingly rich Joyce collection. Naturally, I picked up a bunch of books (for an average price of about 4 bucks each). But they've also got a special secluded section in the store for rare books. In there I found a gem that was so freakin' cool I had to acquire it for my treasure chest even though it was a bit expensive.

It's an elongated, beautifully designed artsy collection of Joyce's poetic writings (including all of his poems as well as his epiphanies and some of the most poetic selections from all of his books). What makes it so special, to me at least, is that it's a book from 1969 that was printed in Poland with English on one side and Polish translation on the other, put together by a famous Polish translator named Maciej Słomczyński. With exquisite etchings all throughout and thick parchment paper it's certainly pleasing to the eye but reading Słomczyński's introduction is what drew me in. It begins:  

James Joyce was probably one of the greatest poets who ever lived on our globe, so abundant in poets, but he did not trouble himself to create within the limits of this or that literary genre. 

His words on Joyce's masterpiece are also worth sharing:

Almost everybody who had enough strength and patience to make his way, day after day, step by step, through the incredible labyrinth of [Finnegans Wake], realized that he is dealing with an extraordinary book, great but inaccessible.
I remember my first reading and my impression of listening to someone singing beautifully, but in an incomprehensible language, accompanied on some unknown instruments which issued fascinating sounds yet unlike anything I had known before, sounds I was unable to define in any musical scale.
Years later I began to understand: Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce wanted to embrace everything---the whole history of man, all his arts, sciences, misfortunes and expectations---is a book written in the Tower of Babel in mixed languages and in dialects of all epochs and all countries. And, to my mind, it is the purest poetry I could imagine.
 

- When I contemplated who are, at this moment in time, my favorite artists in any genre, those whose work I'm highly passionate (near obsessive) about, I came up with a pretty interesting list and I will be sharing that here very soon.

- Moving on to the hip hop sphere... All throughout the road trip from Cali to Texas and our subsequent drives around to explore this new city, and while we unpacked our stacks of boxes in the new place, I had the same album playing over and over again on the speakers and it's only continued to sound better and better. The album is a brand new release from Kevlaar 7 of the Wisemen (his first official solo album, actually), an EP entitled Who Got the Camera? that deals entirely with themes of revolution and social upheaval, exactly what we need in this country right now but also, synchronistically, exactly what is going on throughout the world right now (the album was released on February 1st and the Cairo street protests started escalating right about the same time). It's a highly emotional, musically superb, big-palmed slap to the plastic face of our criminally oppressive (at home and abroad) empire. When I was first listening to it, hearing one of my favorite current hip hop artists speak so clearly, openly, informatively (and angrily) about this current situation just perfectly embodied, to my mind, Ezra Pound's famous words on the social importance of the artist: "The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter." Not the journalist, the TV news anchor, or the politicians. The artist is the antennna tuned into the current frequency of the world and he (or she) interprets it through art, in this case: music. What's in the air? "Pungent smells of classism and oppression" or as Kevlaar later announces: "Storms of persecution should spark swarms of revolutions."

I've been so struck by this album and the weighty message it carries that I have created a new blog which will be entirely devoted to analyzing, expanding upon, and discussing the content of it as well as educating folks on some of the many historical figures mentioned and keeping up with the happenings of the world and the crumblings of the New Roman Empire.

The first song I will analyze is called "I Have a Dream," the first single (released on MLK Day) off the album, its immensely strong beat provided by an expert underground loop-crafter named Woodenchainz (whom I've spoken about here before). Lyrically, it is a modern day retelling of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, an update so to speak.

Spectrums of creative suffering,

the mainstream is bubblin'

showing zero substance, I've had enough and passion's doublin'

   Stumblin' in the valley of anguish,

                                            hungry for dreams,

                                                           in fact: WE FAMISHED

                      deep-rooted, examinin' antics

I have a dream today that the devil vanished

                              Replant this in our handbooks, TEACH OUR CHILDREN THE ANSWERS

- I'm thinking of starting a couple of regular weekly posts on here. The first will be "Thirst for Knowledge Thursdays" in which I will randomly select a book from my Jacob's Ladder Bookcase and discuss it, explain why it should be read, and how I came across it. Another is "Potent Quotables" and that'll just be a cooler name for something I've already been doing a little bit of: posting cool quotes. (The title for this post is from an oft-used Jeopardy category that always stayed in my head from watching SNL's Jeopardy parodies. "Potent Potables" actually means strong, alcoholic drinks.)

- The chronicles of my journey across the southwestern quadrant of the US will definitely have to be put together and I will share it here on the blog, although, since it will inevitably take up many many paragraphs, I'll stick it behind some kind of "Read the rest of this entry" wall instead of clogging up the page with it.

- I'd like to write a couple of posts about my time in San Diego because it was an extremely cool place and time. I met a lot of great people, in fact, you can definitely expect a post about "The Coolest Person I've Ever Met" all about a good pal of mine in San Diego.

- Also, coming along down the line.... MLB 2011 season preview, Carmelo/Knicks and other NBA gushings, some sports book reviews and all kinds of other things. Stay tuned.

A Portrait of A Portrait as a Young Novel

Having already written pretty extensively about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man so far on this blog, I'd like to now share a bit about the environment and reception of James Joyce's first novel.

The book which Joyce had labored on (writing it, scrapping it, and then completely re-writing it) over a period of ten years (1904-1914) first appeared to the world in serialized fragments in a London literary magazine called The Egoist. In autumn of 1913 the magazine's literary editor, Ezra Pound, wrote a letter to Joyce and asked him to submit some of his writing to be printed in the "new and impecunious" magazine. Joyce sent his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short-story collection Dubliners that he'd been trying, with gruesome results, to get published for almost ten years. Pound was highly impressed and organized to have Portrait published in serial form beginning with the issue on February 2nd, 1914 (Joyce's birthday).

After appearing in The Egoist from February 1914 to September 1915, the book was rejected by every publisher in London to whom it was offered. They thought it was dirty and offensive. The Egoist's editor (and lifelong Joyce patron) Harriet Shaw Weaver then decided to help out by having it published in book form, setting up the Egoist Press on her own expense for this very purpose, but then the printers actually refused to print it. It was finally published in New York by B.W. Huebsch (later called Viking Press) in December 1916. The Egoist then imported printed sheets from America and, in February 1917, published the first English edition of 750 copies which was sold out within a few months as glowing reviews started trickling in from the likes of Ezra Pound and even H.G. Wells.

But, of course, one of the reasons Joyce had so much trouble getting the book published in the first place was because his work was so far ahead of its time and thus many of the critics and reviewers simply didn't get it. Today, I came across a comical collection of reviewer comments that was originally compiled by The Egoist in 1917, here are some of them exactly as they appeared in the magazine's June 1917 issue.

James Joyce and His Critics:

Some Classified Comments

Caution: It is very difficult to know quite what to say about this new book by Mr. Joyce. --Literary World

Drains: Mr. Joyce is a clever novelist, but we feel he would be really at his best in a treatise on drains. --Everyman

Cleanmindedness: This pseudo-autobiography of Stephen Dedalus, a weakling and a dreamer, makes fascinating reading... No clean-minded person could possibly allow it to remain within reach of his wife, his sons or daughters. --Irish Book Lover

Beauty: There is much in the book to offend a good many varieties of readers, and little compensating beauty. --New York Globe

The most obvious thing about the book is its beauty. --New Witness

Realism: It is a ruthless, relentless essay in realism. --Southport Guardian

To put the literary form of rude language in a book makes some authors feel realistic. --Manchester Weekly Times

Mr. Joyce aims at being realistic, but his method is too chaotic to produce the effect of realism. --Rochester (New York) Post-Express

Its realism will displease many. --Birmingham Post

Mr. Joyce is unsparing in his realism, and his violent contrasts--the brothel, the confessional--jar on one's finer feelings. --Irish Book Lover

Wisdom: Is it even wise, from a worldly point of view--mercenary, if you will--to dissipate one's talents on a book which can only attain a limited circulation? --Irish Book Lover

Imagination: He shows an astonishingly unCeltic absence of imagination and humour. --Bellman (U.S.A.)

Religion: The irreverent treatment of religion in the story must be condemned. --Rochester (New York) Express

Nowadays, the book is considered a classic and the consensus is that it's undeniably earth-shatteringly awesome. The Modern Library ranked it as the third greatest English-language novel of the 20th century (behind Joyce's Ulysses #1 and The Great Gatsby #2).

New (old) Books Scooped Up Recently

Went to my favorite used book store last night and picked up some gems. Got into an interesting exchange with the cashier too when he foolishly dissed Joyce, more on that in a minute.

A few years ago there was a period I went through when I was carrying around Emerson's Nature and Selected Essays in my back pocket just because every time I read any selection from it I always found it was such an enlightening and enjoyable read, like imbibing a refreshing drink. Looking at this biography about him called The Mind on Fire I couldn't help but get it when I saw reviews that said stuff like this:

[This is] one of those exciting books that flash bolts of lightning across an entire intellectual era and up and down modern history.

And then Jung's book on Mandala Symbolism is great and has a whole bunch of illustrations of mandalas from himself, patients of his, artists, and historic art from around the world. Great pick up. Check this out:

And then the top book on the pile is a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man featuring a whole bunch of critical texts and commentaries from sources like H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and more. Definitely will be using this to help construct my Dali-Joyce essay I'm brainstorming on right now.

The last thing I got is by far the coolest:

It's an amazing edition of Ulysses that's put together like The Bible or some other great holy book. The arabesques all over the cover are amazing and perfectly representative of the verbal arabesques that twirl throughout this entire epic. And this is the good edition of the text, not the butchered Hans Walter Gabler version. Here's some more pics, check out the gold-tipped pages.

It even has illustrations throughout the book from Kenneth Francis Dewey. This one is from the Lotus-Eaters episode.

It's a great book to have and read and such a perfect rendition of the monstrous, so thoroughly intricate novel. Before I knew this edition existed, I'd have hoped someone would make one like it.

Upon seeing the Joyce books, the cashier said "Well, these will be torture" to which I laughed thinking he was kidding. When it was clear he meant it I said "Nah man, I'm obsessed with this stuff" and he blatantly let out his foolishness with an emotional and insulting blurt of "He couldn't write a coherent sentence to save his life!" I was tempted to crack open to any page in Ulysses and teach him what a random line is saying but he then admitted (if it was indeed true) that he'd tried to read the book once and immediately gave up because it was like gibberish. My girlfriend later revealed that she was amazed at how calm I was when the guy seemed to flat out insult my favorite writer, but I explained that his reaction to Joyce is the same as most people who haven't really tried to read and understand it. It's the consensus, mainstream opinion that he's too difficult because nobody actually dares to dig in.

When I was in the cultural utopia of San Francisco last week I also scooped up a few great Joyce books, especially this one of super high-quality old photos, drawings and paintings called Joyce Images by Bob Cato and Greg Vitiello with an introduction by my old buddy Anthony Burgess. The cover is a drawing of Joyce made up of signatures ("Signatures of all things I am here to read.") of the names of Joyce's characters all weaved together.

Also got a nice copy of Harry Levin's entertaining study of Joyce (a rare and out of print book) and a newer paperback version of Ulysses to replace my current tattered copy (this was of course before I had bore witness to the huge masterpiece above).

Examining James Joyce/Stephen Dedalus' Esthetic Philosophy (part 2)

"Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have."

Thus Stephen Dedalus boldly begins his discussion on esthetics. He is referring to Aristotle's Poetics in which the Greek philosopher says that tragedy evokes pity and terror to achieve catharsis. But since Aristotle did not define pity and terror, scholars have misinterpreted him for the last 2,300 years, interpreting catharsis as a purging of these emotions, getting rid of them by a large dose of the same. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his study of Greek drama The Birth of Tragedy, has written of this misinterpretation:

Now the serious events are supposed to prompt pity and terror to discharge themselves in a way that relieves us; now we are supposed to feel elevated and inspired by the triumph of good and noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of a moral vision of the universe. I am sure that for countless men precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy, but it plainly follows that all these men, together with their interpreting aestheticians, have had no experience of tragedy as a supreme art.

The emphasis is Nietzsche's, not mine.

Let’s look at the usage of this word “catharsis,” a term which has led to some confusion among scholars unsure whether Aristotle had in mind a medical (his father was a physician) or moral significance. The word “catharsis” comes from the Greek katharsis derived from katharein, “to cleanse.” As Joseph Campbell tells us in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, in Greek religious vocabulary the term referred to “a spiritual transformation brought about by participation in a rite. The mind, ‘cleansed’ of attachment to merely secular aims, desires and fears, is released to a spiritual rapture.” Campbell also notes that the Greek theater was associated with the shrines and festivals of Dionysus, in fact the tragedies were performed during the Great Dionysia at Athens, a yearly festival. Dionysus was the god of wine and ecstasy “but also, more fundamentally, of the generative power of all life, the will in nature."

In Nietzsche’s aforementioned book, he analyzes what he believes to be the main factors at work in Greek tragedy and calls these the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian is essentially the ego-shattering, sublime experience of one-ness with all things.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man…Transform Beethoven’s ‘Hymn to Joy’ into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck--then you will approach the Dionysian…Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity.

Now, let us go back for a moment to Stephen’s definitions of pity and terror. He says:

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

He uses the word arrest, that static emotion of complete rapture that we looked at in Part 1 of this post. The mind perceiving the “grave and constant” in the sufferings of man, the inevitability of death and pain, is risen beyond individuality to compassion and a recognition of shared humanity. The feeling of terror (something different than fear, mind you) shatters us in awe at the workings of the life-giving and life-consuming universe.

Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist---how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the ‘wide space of the world night,’ enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd’s dance of metaphysics?

That’s Nietzsche describing the feeling of Dionysian rapture again. But, as I’ve said, there’s also the Apollonian factor in Greek tragedy. The Apollonian is the dream illusion, the veil placed in front of infinity to make us feel as though we’re individuals confined in bodies within space with its separate objects. While the Greek tragedy is eliciting that feeling of Dionysian one-ness, the Apollonian illusion brings us back to realize that this is all being enacted by characters in one single image of the world, a stage. (This is also, in Stephen’s view, the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of a beautiful self-contained image.) In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote:

Thus the Apollonian tears us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in individuals; it attaches our pity to them, and by means of them it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense impact of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollonian tears man form his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process…

And so Aristotle either had it wrong or was misinterpreted. The tragic emotions, pity and terror, are evoked so that the audience can come to a deep realization. I’ve already made such heavy usage of Nietzsche’s work that I’ll let him have the final word on the matter (this one from Twilight of the Idols):

Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility...that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge—Aristotle misunderstood it that way—but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming.

Examining James Joyce/Stephen Dedalus' Esthetic Philosophy (part 1)

James Joyce cannot be described as simply a ‘novelist.’ He was a poet before he had even attempted to write prose. In fact, he composed a poem at the age of 9 that was so incredible his father mailed it to the Vatican. Calling him a ‘writer’ simply doesn’t do the trick either, it’s best to describe him as an ‘artist’ and Joyce himself made the distinction clear in the title of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which details Joyce’s own life from childhood through young adulthood in a prose style that grows more complex and intelligent as the character does. 

He is also a philosopher, at times outlining his own philosophies and theories through his characters (mainly, his alter ego Stephen Dedalus) and this is especially so in Portrait. In the final chapter of the book, Stephen is a student in the first years of college and he’s already gained a reputation for being an aspiring poet.  We’ve heard him describe his goal to escape the nets of nationality, language, and religion which are flung at souls to hold them back from flight. And, in a conversation with the school’s dean, we learn that Stephen has been working on an esthetic theory using ideas from Aristotle and Aquinas. A few pages later, in conversation with his friend Lynch who jokingly acts disinterested, Stephen outlines in detail his esthetic philosophy.

Proper vs Improper Art
Joyce first distinguishes between proper and improper art.

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Proper art = static
Improper art = kinetic

Proper art is art in the service of what is properly the function of art and that function is to elicit a state of esthetic arrest. Arrest = static (from the Greek statikos, “causing to stand”). You apprehend a proper piece of art and you can only stand there in sensational (esthetic) contemplation and enjoyment. You’re in awe, raised above desire and loathing. Whereas a picture of a pretty girl or even of a plate of delicious food draws you physically to desire it. Joyce calls this pornographic art and, in this sense, all advertising art is improper art. Derogatory satire, art with social criticism that causes you to loathe or dislike something: that’s improper art---it’s didactic, instructing you what to do.

The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system.

What is art?
We then get into what exactly art is and there is a quote which I think perfectly describes James Joyce or Stephen Dedalus (or, perhaps, any artist) at this point in his life:

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand---that is art.

Once art and its proper function (esthetic arrest) are understood, the artist crafts an image of beauty using things like sound, shape, and color which open the gates of the soul.

Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Beauty
In response to his friend’s question “What is beauty?” Stephen (Joyce) gets even deeper. Thomas Aquinas’ simple definition (“that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases”) does not suffice because, using woman as example, he notes how the many different cultures around the world “admire a different type of female beauty.” The popular hypothesis explaining the phenomenon is that the physical qualities admired by men are “in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.” Stephen dislikes that dreary hypothesis (“It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic”) and describes his own:

This hypothesis is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty.

And a few pages later he continues:

The most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty…[Now quoting Aquinas again] Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony and radiance.”

Looking at each one now:
1. Wholeness: [He points to a basket someone is carrying on their head] “In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness.”

2. Harmony: “Then you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.”

3. Radiance: “When you have apprehended that object as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

Joyce alludes to this kind of esthetic apprehension in Ulysses: “Any object intensely regarded may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” And Joseph Campbell elaborates the experience for us in his book Mythic Worlds, Modern Words:

This is a breakthrough. You have gone through the object and felt the transcendence that manifests through it, the transcendence of which you are yourself a manifestation. Pure object turns you into pure subject. You are simply the eye, the world eye, regarding beyond desire and loathing…

Forms of Art
Having explained what (proper) art is and how we apprehend beauty, Stephen now goes on to describe what he sees as the three forms of art, in all of which “the image must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others.” The three forms, each “progressing from one to the next,” are:

1. the Lyrical form: “the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself”
2. the Epical form: “the artist presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others”
3. the Dramatic Form: “the artist presents his image in immediate relation to others”

He elaborates each one:

The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.

The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narrative itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

The lyrical form seems quite easy to understand from his explanation, it’s as simple as a poem written by someone in love. The poet is presenting his image (the poem) in “immediate relation to himself” while everybody else reads the poet’s feelings expressed in lyrics. In the epic, the artist presents his work in mediate relation to others, I find Ulysses to be a perfect example as Joyce (through Stephen) is directly involved in the action but the story is presented with a full, detailed backdrop of the city, its inhabitants and especially the other main characters. One could perhaps make an argument that, in his three books, Joyce displayed the progress from one form to the other: the self-centered autobiographical Portrait (lyrical) leading into Ulysses (epical) and then the intricately crafted dream world of Finnegans Wake (dramatic). But, more likely, both Portrait and Ulysses should be considered epics and Finnegans Wake the absolute epitome and farthest extreme of the dramatic form.


Read Part 2 HERE

(Note: This whole discussion owes a great deal to Joseph Campbell's book Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce.)