In 2002, I wrote, with Simon Critchley, a short essay on Joyce. We delivered it at the International James Joyce Symposium—the eighteenth one, held in Trieste, the windswept Adriatic city that, depending on how you parse a certain phrase of Joyce’s own, either gave him cirrhosis, turned him into an autophagic cannibal, or turned itself, through some miraculous alchemy—metempsychosis, Leopold Bloom might have called it—into the distilled body that’s the subject of these new reflections:
And Trieste, ah Trieste ate I my liver!
In other words: In Trieste I ate my liver; or (after Verlaine), Trieste était mon livre—Trieste was, or became, my book, namely Ulysses. The phrase itself doesn’t come from Ulysses; it comes from Finnegans Wake—but it refers in grand part to the former, points (sadly, retrospectively) toward it as triste Trieste did to Dublin. That seemed like a good place to start our essay, then: not Trieste but somewhere else. “Our hypothesis,” we grandiosely stated, “is that in Joyce and elsewhere”—and we added at this point a short aside: “(where Joyce might be seen as the index for an elsewhere of absolutely modern literary, visual and musical art) . . . ”
It’s this aside that interests me right now, not the hypothesis that followed. I think we were onto something. “ . . . the index for an elsewhere of absolutely modern literary, visual and musical art.” It sounds good. What does it mean? I don’t know—but I still think we were onto something. If that “something” is to be recovered, though, it needs to be un-tangled from a mesh of contradictions. If the modern is contingent, if modernity itself is understood as no more than a confluence of historical and political and technological and aesthetic contingencies, how could one talk about its “absolute” or non-conditional manifestation? Were we picturing some cultural thermometer whose lower end would run to minus-273, the type of absolute zero that the early Barthes ascribed to the post-Symbolists? If so, would Joyce’s work stand at that end, or would it, still warm, merely point to it, a compass needle that will always show some other north? An “index”: for the great semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, this—the indexical—names a key dimension of the sign—of any sign, be it linguistic or mathematical; yet, as any mathematician will tell you, the “absolute” value of a number is precisely its non-indexical value. Absolutes and indices don’t go together.
But all this is getting needlessly complicated, when in fact it’s very simple. How do you write after Ulysses? That’s the question. “Whenever I sit down to write a novel,” Anthony Burgess claimed, “it is with a sense of despair, because I know I’ll never match that book.” It isn’t just that Joyce writes better than anyone else (although he does); beyond that, it’s the sense that Ulysses’s publication entails a kind of rapture for literature, an event in equal parts ecstatic and catastrophic—perhaps even apocalyptic. A certain naive realism is no longer possible after it; but hasn’t every alternative, every avant-garde maneuver imaginable, also been anticipated and exhausted by it too? As though that weren’t enough, Joyce returns to the scene of his own crime, arriving not incognito (in the manner of his shady non-character McIntosh), but brazenly assuming the role of principle mourner. Just as Ulysses was initially conceived as an extra chapter to Dubliners, Finnegans Wake gestated as a nineteenth episode of Ulysses. We should not only consider all three works as part of a continuum whose critical moment (and I use this term in the dramatic sense, the sense of crisis) remains Ulysses, but also view Ulysses itself as a work whose own wake, and that, perhaps, of the novel tout court, is already at work in it. What new patterning, what plowing of the sea, could a writer envisage that would pattern independent of the ripple-field already sent out by Joyce’s churning-up, the sum of its mutating patterns? Derrida (as so often) hits the nail on the head when he complains of the Wake’s relentless “hypermnesia” that “a priori indebts you, inscribes you in advance in the book you are reading.” “The future,” he affirms, “is reserved in it.”
•
DERRIDA’S COMPLAINT is, at base, an economic one: doubly so, with its dual metaphors of debt and of reserve. And this was the “hypothesis” Critchley and I advanced in Europe’s former storehouse or profit-and-loss portal of Trieste: that, in Joyce, economics is elevated to the level of cultural form. Shakespeare might reflect, in The Merchant of Venice, on the moneying of love, or Flaubert in Madame Bovary on the penetration and determination of all areas of human life by capital, but in Joyce money becomes literature itself, and vice versa. In Finnegans Wake, pages become banknotes, scraps of “pecuniar interest”; the manuscript of the debt-ridden writer Shem, another marker for the pound or “livre” that is Ulysses, becomes “an epical forged cheque” passed off “on the public for his [Shem’s/Joyce’s] own private profit”; the economic aspect of the very verb to tell is fully played out as the book’s whole tale or content becomes “retaled.”
Becomes—or rather, has already become: by Finnegans Wake, the “economantarchy” (as Joyce calls it) that is literature’s trading-floor is fully up and running. But the minting, I would argue, happens back in Ulysses. “The problem,” Stephen tells Buck Mulligan after the latter scolds him for trying to trade Shakespearian theory for a bit of English coin in Chapter One, “is to get money.” Should they solicit this, he sarcastically inquires, from Haines or from the milk-woman who’s just passed by? The latter takes money from them and extends them credit at the same time—but her real-terms contribution (as economists would say) to the novel is the stunning short speech that she delivers:
—Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That’s a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.
We could celebrate the revolutionary nature of this speech for many different reasons (the way it sheds and fractures the conventions of literary realism precisely by being realistic, for example, or the poetry of its repetitions)—but the aspect of it that I want to flag up is the way the logic of accountancy has permeated prose itself, wormed right into its bones: the passage isn’t simply about totting up a bill; rather, the mechanism of financial computation generates what’s on the page; what we read is like the paper tape that issues from an adding machine. A literal cash machine, with turning slots for shillings, sixpences, halfcrowns, and crowns appears in the next chapter, in which, while England is cast (by the schoolmaster Deasy) as a land of monetary self-sufficiency (albeit one that’s threatened by usurious Jewish merchants), all of Ireland is recast (by Stephen) as a pawnshop, one to which (we realize as he enumerates his debts) he’s more in hock than most. The chapter ends in a strangely Bataillean image (more of him later), as the sun profligately flings, through a checkerwork of leaves, dancing coins on Deasy’s shoulders: light itself turning into money.
Stephen’s debt will re-emerge in Scylla and Charybdis, assert itself during his argument with the poet George “A. E.” Russell (one of his many creditors) as the underlying “given” that binds his ever-changing molecules, his fraught bid for literary inheritance, and his own reserve and storehouse, the five-voweled alphabet, together: A E I O U. In Burke’s pub and Bella Cohen’s brothel, Stephen will be as spend-thrift as the sun, prompting Bloom to relieve him of his coins for safekeeping—which turns him, Bloom, into a cash machine as well: Bloom, son of a money-lending Jew of the type so despised by Deasy, who moves around Dublin negotiating terms and profit margins; who in his reveries hatches get-rich-quick schemes; who, ever inquisitive, marks the edge of a florin before tendering it to a grocer “for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.” In (or out of ) Bloom’s hands, this grubby coin turns into the eponymous Homeric hero, or the other way around: Ulysses becomes currency. As the milkwoman’s invoice opened the Odyssean day of reckoning, so a new check will call time on it, as Joyce carries the logic of financial computation one step further still: the bill we are presented with in Ithaca isn’t simply like a tabulated sum—it is one, reproduced unchanged in double-entry format. Bloom has fantasized repeatedly about becoming a writer, earning good cash by publishing detective stories or accounts of characters encountered at nocturnal cab shelters; this, though, is the real “account” he’ll write of his day, his true act of bookkeeping.
•
ONE OF BLOOM’S mooted entrepreneurial schemes involves selling human waste on an industrial scale. The passage from excrement to money is one that my own Joycean career has followed, albeit in reverse. After Trieste, Sam Slote, a standing member of the Great Council of All Things Joycean, invited me to the next symposium, to be held in Dublin in 2004—Bloomsday’s centenary. What would you like to talk about? he asked. Oh, I don’t know, I told him. Joyce ’n shit. Joyce and shit? he repeated. That’s good—really good. He was serious—and with reason: Joyce’s work is mired in excremental language, excremental imagery: waterclosets, commodes, sewers, “clotted hinderparts,” “soiled goods” and “slopperish matter,” “nappy spattees,” “pip poo pat” of “bulgar . . . bowels” and so on. There may be, as I suggested, something eschatological about the Joyce-event, but this comes coated in a straight-up scatology so vulgar it would make Beavis and Butthead blush.
Nowhere is Joyce more potty-mouthed than when taking on the language and procedure of religious devotion. At the outset of Finnegans Wake the books of Genesis and Exodus become urinary and colonic tracts and Christ the salmon turns into a big brown trout, a “brontoichthyian” thunder-fish or turd floating in a stream mingling with “piddle.” Or rather—once more—have already become and already turned into: the counter-Midas moment, the general en-merding, takes place (as before) in Ulysses. Bloom starts his day by votively bowing his head as he enters his outhouse to perform the act of defecation that will retroactively see him hailed as “Moses, Moses, King of the Jews” who “wiped his arse on the Daily News.” Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Catholic Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginary stool sample floating in what he’s up to now presented as an altar-bowl and, covering it quickly up again, sends the sick man who produced it back to barracks.
The actual content of Mulligan’s bowl may not be feces, but it is human waste nonetheless: unwanted stubble, cast-off skin-cells, dead matter that his body has expelled, let drop. These things, too, belong to the category of excreta, as do phlegm, bile, navel cords and blood; whatever is excessive, leaking, training, dragging or trascining. Ulysses is packed to overflowing with such things; or, better to say, every theme or term or concept that enters its pages, no matter how intangible or rarified, is transformed into such a thing—lowly, degraded, abject—the more so the more elevated it held itself to be before the novel’s degradatory machinery took hold of it. Poetry turns into snot; nature, the very contours of the Romantic sublime, its bay and shoreline, turn into a bowl of sluggish vomit. Just as the book’s economic register orchestrates a flattening of all fields, their subjection to the logic of soiled currency, so its excretative one oversees a general debasement, a downpegging of all categories to a baseline of the bodily, of bodies ingesting or discharging other bodies. Forget Apollonian beauty: what Bloom wants to know is if statues of Greek gods have assholes. For him, the heart, seat of refined emotions, is a rusty pump; communion is cannibalism; justice just “means . . . everybody eating everybody else.” He is obsessed with falling bodies, their weight and volume and the speed at which they fall. Ulysses is a heavy book, a book that’s full of weight: a fallen book. What has fallen in it, into it, is all that literature, and culture in general, previously held immaterial or abstract; in its pages, the ideal implodes; metaphysics collapses into (to borrow artist Jake Chapman’s term) meatphysics. It’s hard to think, outside of zombie movies, of a work more omnivoric—and omni-emetic. Rats eat corpses; savages eat missionaries; Bloom eats cheese; cheese eats itself; dogs eat themselves too, spew themselves out, eat themselves again; the city and the day eat and spew Bloom . . .
Joyce, needless to say, is a materialist. Over the neo-platonism of A. E., his trite assertion that “Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” he champions Stephen’s Aristotelian materialism of the now, the here, the art of forms and form. Against vague cosmic and chthonic mysticism he pits Bloom’s vision of spinning gasballs—“Gas, then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock”—and of “entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa.” But this materialism should not be confused with empiricism. On the contrary, it’s a materialism of the type that Georges Bataille, in a short text that perfectly formulates all that I’ve been tracking here, announces as “base materialism.” For Bataille, the positivist materialism of science or the dialectical materialism of Marxism are nothing more than Christianity in disguise, and a philosophy grounded in them remains an idealist one. Against crypto-Platonic versions of “form” he proposes “the Formless,” or l’Informe. L’Informe, Bataille writes in his Critical Dictionary,
is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down . . .
[the French term he uses for “bring down” is déclasser, which carries the dual sense of lowering in class, or demoting, and of releasing from all classificatory or taxonomic constraints]
. . . a term that serves to bring things down in a world that generally requires that each thing have its form. What this word [l’Informe] designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless [informe] amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.
Bataille’s vivid passage proclaims and champions what I see as one of the central thrusts of literature as it moves into and through the twentieth century—perhaps the central one; a thrust whose own central moment or prime axis would, for me, be Ulysses. You can see it swelling in late Yeats, the downgrading of his lofty esoteric icons to a clutter of half-broken rag-and-bone-shop trinkets in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”; you can see it, later, fully blown in the proêmes of Francis Ponge, his celebration of the endomorphic thingliness of things, the way their sheer material facticity breaches the limits of every attempt to conceptually or aesthetically contain them; or in Wallace Stevens, his plum that “survives its poems,” oozing and rotting beyond and between their lines; in visual art, you can see it in the thick, muddy canvases of Dubuffet, where materiality far overtakes mimesis; or, later, in the unformed mounds of fat slapped down in front of us by Joseph Beuys. But the nucleus of this thrust; the engine room in which the process—reverse alchemy, let’s call it—fully plays itself out, whirrs and clunks and splats and squelches through its paces; the stage on which its playing-out can be fully viewed and audited; or (let’s try that term again now) its index, would be Ulysses. Ulysses matters most, because it makes matter of everything. Everything in Ulysses is déclassé, or (to use another term of Joyce’s) “netherfallen.” Things aren’t even things in Ulysses—at least not in any quasi-autonomous sense, monadic entities in which subjective sovereignty has been re-housed, refuged or reconstituted; rather, they too are abject, broken, other things’ excreta. Everything is a by-product of something else. Cheese isn’t just self-consuming: it’s the “corpse of milk”; jackets, soap and margarine are corpses of corpses, the offslew of hide, hair and horns disgorged by slaughterhouses—what Bloom, brilliantly, calls “the fifth quarter”: not the fourth quarter but the fifth, the one that’s surplus to a thing’s integrity, to mathematics itself, a remainder.
By-products, or throwaways. This last word doesn’t only name the horse Bloom inadvertently tips; it also designates the crumpled scrap of paper that goes drifting down the Liffey in The Wandering Rocks. Just as Joyce links literature to money, he binds it in even more solidly with base matter. Bloom’s actions and preoccupations, time and again, assess the written word solely in terms of its by-products: the blotting paper that he used to sell, that he blots Martha’s name with, hatching an idea for a detective story in which blotter-residues lead a sleuth to solve a crime; the giant sheet of it that he proposes the stationer Wisdom Hely parade through the streets; or the equally enormous inkbottle he also pitches Hely, “with a false stain of black celluloid” (Claes Oldenburg’s entire career opens and closes in the space of that throwaway); or the actual ink, “encaustive pigment” he recalls Molly leaving her pen in, “exposed to the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall.” His own compositional effort in Nausicaa (“I am a . . . ”) also gets bogged down by the material he writes on, as his stick sticks in the mud and thus becomes the very thing it tries to represent. Stephen, for his part, obsesses with the question of the word becoming flesh and flesh becoming word; he sees words in Eumaeus “changing color like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colors of different sorts of the same sand . . . ”
Crabs, worms, spiders. Stephen, walking on the beach in Proteus, is walking through Bataille’s l’Informe—affording it no rights, crushing it everywhere:
His boots trod again a damp crackling mass, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
He may be crushing it—but this crushing affords him no domination; on the contrary, the quagmire starts to drag him, like Bloom’s stick, into its base plane:
Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man’s ashes.
Slippery, treacherous, it won’t sit still for him or let itself be pinned down, enumerated, mathematically frock-coated. Déclassé and déclassant, it renders impossible a certain—classical, enlightenment or romantic—model of subjective, cognitive or literary mastery. And yet it’s legible, laced with the “signatures of all things I have come to read . . . coloured signs . . . language tide and wind have silted here” (or, as he also terms it, “wild sea money”). As Stephen moves through it, rhythm begins—poetic rhythm, “Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching.” This, for me, is quite simply the primal scene of modern writing. World, whooshing, comes in waves to Stephen, in the basest form imaginable: silt, broken hoops, a boat’s gunwale; fragments of other objects, their by-products or corpses—which are themselves also signs and codices, whole cultural histories (Théophile Gautier’s entire oeuvre is embedded, via Louis Veuillot, in the gunwale alone) that Stephen, practicing a kind of haptic semiotics, crushcrackcricks his way through, “scann[ing]” the shore as his feet sink into its sockets. Which, in turn, makes writing stir—not in the tranquil, Wordsworthian guise of a fait accompli, but restlessly, as no more than potentiality and fragment. Stephen’s first line is itself a by-product, a corpse-part of the decomposing verse he’s replayed moments earlier:
Won’t you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
degrades itself, agallop, into
deline the mare
—a line, or half-line, that itself suggests the very act that Stephen’s doing, his delineating of the sea, or rather his delineating of space itself, his erasure and re-inscription of its lines and borders. Writing on Bataille, the art critic Yves-Alain Bois proffers the term “pulsation,” which
involves an endless beat that punctures the disembodied self-closure of pure visuality and incites an irruption of the carnal . . . Once the unified visual field is agitated by a shake-up that irremediably punctures the screen of its formality and populates it with organs, there is “pulsation.”
He could be describing Stephen’s beach—a place in which the visual field has been punctured by an irruption of the carnal. It is spattered with organs, a diaphane in bodies: bladderwrack, sockets, swaying arms, a redpanting tongue, a bloated carcass, “bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine.” Zombie omnivorism names the very possibility of literature, as “Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead.” Cut to Bloom, who devours a urinous offal from all dead before going off to watch “HOW,” as Joyce announces in capital letters, “A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT.”
The organ Bloom watches being turned out is, of course, a newspaper; what is being dismembered, cut up in proto-Burroughsian (the adding machine’s scion) fashion is—again—snatches of prose. Language, in Ulysses, is just another organ—and, like so many other organs in this genuinely obscene book, it keeps getting unzipped, whipped out, flashed left and right and center. Critics and teachers should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s trademark outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue; it’s exterior consciousness, embodied—or encorpsed—consciousness that has ruptured conventional syntax’s membrane, prolapsed. Turned out, fallen, consciousness and language lie and drift around Dublin’s streets like ozone in dystopian sci-fi fables: H and E and L, printed on sandwich-boards, march along the gutter while Y lags behind, cramming a chunk of bread into his mouth. Even the novel’s letters eat and crap! Michel Leiris, Bataille’s co-author of the Dictionary, describes, in Scratches, eating alphabetti spaghetti as a child; eating too much, and consequently being sick; watching the dented letters fall back from him: far from being a tool for refining the world into concepts, language is what mixes with saliva in your mouth, gets kneaded by your tongue and teeth, repeats on you. Joyce knows this all too well:
Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips.
This scene, repeated not just once but twice (Molly replays it too), itself reprises Stephen’s half-formed (or half-deformed) vampire-poem (written on a torn-off scrap of Deasy’s foot-and-mouth letter) in which mouth to her mouth’s kiss degrades into mouth to her moomb, then oomb, allwombing tomb, then finally mouth to my mouth. But it’s the seedcake episode, and not the slight, if suggestive, poem, that for me most amplifies and makes resonate, re-sound, the field of potentiality, literary potentiality, that has lain immanent, or imminent, throughout the novel. Seedcake, not fruitcake or carrot cake: this is a scene of both fertility and (to use one of Derrida’s favorite terms) dissemination; writing as material transmission, repetition, pulp of joyful, sweetsour mumbling.
•
AND YET neither the seed-spitting nor the vampire poem are, at this point, in and of themselves, the work, any more than Bloom’s tabulated bill is. The work, at this point, remains to be written. To put it another way: Ulysses is (like several of Thomas Bernhard’s novels) a book in which the central stake is the coming-into-being of the book itself. This, effectively, is what Stephen is tasked with: to write Ulysses. “I want you to write something,” says Miles Crawford. “You can do it. Put us all into it, damn its soul.” He has in mind a piece of long-form journalism, but the exhortation, for both Stephen and the reader, carries far, far wider implications, especially when the press-headline repeats it (in block capitals once more): “YOU CAN DO IT!” “All desire to see you bring forth the work you meditate,” Lenehan tells Stephen in Oxen of the Sun, after the latter has encircled his own head with a putative laurel, drunkenly boasting of his bard’s ability to make “ghosts troop to my call.” Actually, it’s the ghosts who order him, and Stephen knows it; knows of the coffined, mummified, word-embalmed thoughts in Dublin’s library that “an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.” Here another sense of Bataille’s term déclasser suggests itself, a decidedly twenty-first-century one: declassification: Stephen as a kind of hacker, called upon to dicky into sealed and buried files, to crack them open, break their contents out again, so that these may commingle, necroactively cross-pollinate to produce new effects, new situations. For the political theorist McKenzie Wark, to hack is simply “to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation”—which, in turn, breaches open a fresh field of space-time, the grounds of possibility for the new creative event. Stephen, like his predecessor Hamlet, has been ghost-(or corpse-) called; where Hamlet’s orders were to act (orders that he disobeys by instead writing), Stephen’s orders, from the outset, are to write. Nonetheless, he’s as useless at carrying them out as Hamlet. Stephen, I’d suggest—and it’s impossible, when pointing at Stephen, not to also finger Joyce himself—is as agonized as Anthony Burgess, agonized to the point of paralysis, by the same question: How do you write after Ulysses—if we take Ulysses to mean the plane of possibility breached or hacked open by the extraordinary creative wave on whose breaking crest he finds himself borne—or, perhaps, to downgrade the surfing metaphor, within whose surging foam he finds himself submerged. No wonder he’s both afraid of and fascinated by the sea.
The main ghost in the library may be Hamlet’s—although Hamlet is already, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, quite a crowd: Hamlet Senior, Hamlet Junior, Shakespeare, Hamnet, Bloom, Rudis Senior and Junior, Stephen’s mother, and so forth. But the ghost that interests me most here—one that glides just fleetingly through the chief librarian’s office—is that of another Stephen: Mallarmé, who in his own essays depicts Hamlet “reading the book of himself ” and “struggling beneath the curse of having to appear.” If Joyce has a rival as a framer of modernity in terms of tombs and crypts and corpses, it’s the Mallarmé of Igitur; if he has a rival as purveyor of the rapturous event of literary modernity, it’s the Mallarmé of Un Coup de Des. Like Ulysses, Un Coup enacts the ruin of a certain type of cultural space, a certain model of subjective and creative mastery, enacts the wave-tossed breakdown, degradation, atomization of ship into gunwale, language into typographic fragments—a shattering and breaking that, in their very destructiveness, prize open the abyssal space in which the decisive new poetic act might “happen” or emerge: like Ulysses, it grasps after “a movement . . . an actuality of the possible as possible.”
Not only, as critics have already noticed, is Un Coup, its imagery, scenarios, even vocabulary, hacked up and re-devoured, regurgitated in the text of Ulysses (once you’ve started noticing it—the shipwrecked sailors, mermaids, obsessions with numbers and computations and so on—it’s everywhere: Stephen on the beach could even be said to be reenacting Un Coup, pacing out poetry as spacing, nach and neben, marking signs on a white field); but Joyce’s novel, just like Mallarmé’s poem, is dominated by its own anticipatory or “futural” relation to the looming specter of a work-to-come. Mallarmé famously claims in Le Livre—Instrument Spirituel that “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book.” The conventional “book” being insufficient to the task of storing and transforming the whole world, Mallarmé starts deforming the book, cracking its ribs and spine, folding out its pages in a bid to overhaul it into the expanded livre that would be up to the job: these are the terms and context under which Un Coup is written. But, as Maurice Blanchot points out, we should not, nor did Mallarmé, see Un Coup as this über-livre’s realization; rather “it is its reserve and its forever hidden presence, the risk of its venture, the measure of its limitless challenge.”
Reserve, risk, venture: here the economic field asserts itself once more. Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, manically apostrophizing the gold he’s dug up from the ground, simultaneously curses it as a “defiler” and marvels at the way it “solder’st close impossibilities/and makest them kiss”—the latter capacity, of course, being precisely the one McKenzie Wark attributes to the hack. Joyce seems to intuit the same connection: Ulysses’s economic register, grubby though it is, also underwrites a giant speculative system in which, amidst collapse and boom, the promise of a monumental or unprecedented return gestates; the promise of literature as this return; a promise that remains deferred—indeed, whose deferral is necessary for the speculative system’s very existence. Where the critic William Carpenter sees Ulysses “as” the Mallarméan Book, I’d want to keep it in the same frame but view it from the flipside, as the exact inverse—doubly so. Mallarmé’s Book cannot be written, but the demand to do so, once it has been issued, sets the parameters of future serious literature. Ulysses inhabits these impossible parameters, these parameters of impossibility—and consequently is not only not the Book heralded by Mallarmé, but also not the book anticipated or announced by itself. When you read it, you’re reading what’s actually there always in relation to a framework that’s not “there,” mundane contemporary events always in terms of an epic ur-historical “outside” that remains outside, its reflection appearing inside only by inversion. Bloom is not Odysseus, nor Molly Penelope; every Homeric link is effected as a negative, a gap, the distance between (for example) a Cyclops-blinding poker and chimney-sweep’s brush, or a siren’s foam-lashed rock and a beer-flecked bar counter, or an Aeolian harp-string and a strip of dental floss; there is no heroic or redemptive reconciliation between Bloom and Molly; no resurrection of the dead; even Molly’s landmark speech remains unspoken. Just as history, for Stephen, is a repository or storeroom of all the events that failed to happen, infinite ousted possibilities, so the whole “story” of Ulysses takes place in the negative, a place where, ultimately (to quote Mallarmé), nothing will have taken place except the place. The movement toward almost miraculous actuality, impossible to possible, is at every instant set in motion and held in abeyance, in reserve, displaced or “offset” from a reality that might be consummated as reality onto the disjecta-symbols of another, unrealized totality: onto potted meats, keys and Keyes ads, the trajectories of urine, menstrual blood in a chamber pot.
Form, the formless, speculation: that’s what it comes down to. This last term, “speculation,” in addition to its economic and intellectual connotations, carries an astronomic meaning: contemplation of the heavens. And it’s within the umbra of this meaning that the largest of Un Coup’s shadows hides itself in Ulysses. Like Mallarmé’s poem, Joyce’s novel is full of constellational imagery. Stephen repeatedly invokes the delta of Cassiopeia—“the recumbent constellation,” as he notes in Scylla and Charybdis, that hung over Shakespeare’s birth. In The Wandering Rocks he pictures stars flung by archangels to the wormy earth, to be rooted out by pigs and poets. The link between poetic words, their formatting and spacing, and the layout of the stars is crucial to the climax of Un Coup, whose high point (literally) is the Septentrion or North Star—a point at which a “place” would fuse with its own beyond, and for that very reason a point never attained, but in whose orbit thought, writing-as-thought, rolls and flashes sidereally across the gutter of the page, numbering its compte total en formation, forming its inky account. The same climactic movement builds up at the end of Ulysses, which sweeps us from the North Star Hotel on to a barrage of meditations on constellations: the milky way, Arcturus, equinoxes, nascent new stars and “the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers.” After these meditations, Bloom, as we know, tots up his own account, then pictures himself navigating, “septentrional, by night the polestar,” wandering “to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit . . . to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events.” But this, of course, is all speculation; what he actually does is lie in bed, viewing his lodestar Molly from the wrong end.
Parallax, we should note in passing, hits on the one counter-intuitive meaning of a term that kicked this whole discussion off: the “absolute magnitude” of a star is “the apparent magnitude which the star would have if it was transferred to a distance from the sun corresponding to a parallax of 0”1.” In constellational terms, absolute is as relative as index. If Bloom is always elsewhere, beyond himself, this is because Ulysses is always elsewhere and beyond itself as well; lost absolutely in its index, it moves in the orbit of its own beyond; just as it carries its own wake in it, it carries its own elsewhere in it too, or rather lets this elsewhere carry it, training, dragging and trascining it, load and lode. Which means that it carries the novel in it, as elsewhere: book-to-come, a possibility in impossible form.
How to write after Ulysses? What would this question even mean? Time, in Ulysses, is fallen too, a by-product of earth-pulled bodies; Dunsink done sunk, and the hours dance across a brothel floor. Joyce-time no longer moves in a straight line from past to future; rather, it, too, accretes and self-consumes: future plunges back into past, “now” being the transit-point or orifice through which this involution passes. When Stephen tells us as much in the library he’s sketching out a new type of cultural time that we could say Joyce’s work inaugurates: a time not of cultural progress, even from one vanguard to the next, but rather one in which culture will also involute, consume its own tail, its actors becoming agents as and when they join the never-ending zombie eucharist.
By the Wake, this involuted schema will be fixed as a Viconian one of ricorso or reenactment, in which objects and situations, far from being apotheosized or sublimated, bob about and return (albeit in slightly different form). This schema is already evident in Ulysses, its recirculation of detritus in the form of things, images, events, its many instances of “history repeating itself,” as Bloom puts it, “with a difference.” But the temporal metronome to whose beat Ulysses’s hours most dance is (I’d suggest), once more that of constellation—understood now in its Benjaminian sense, as a cross-or trans-historical (and necessarily arbitrary or relative) joining-up of disparate or previously unconnected points—a joining-up that generates a sudden flash of paradoxical simultaneity, the revolutionary ground for a whole new realm of understanding. If you like, another hack. This is the hack performed by Molly, as, lying on a plane on the 53rd parallel of latitude north, and the 6th meridian of longitude west, she places the City Arms Hotel, Ontario Terrace and Howth Head and a soup-altercation waiting for a train and an ankle-spraining incident at a party and the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the sea and Bloom and Stephen all on a plane of constellated simultaneity. It’s a constellation that can only be construed from elsewhere, parallactically. Even as she plots her ties to Stephen, he has already wandered off; the very stars presiding over her are fading, and their light is years old anyhow; beside which, the revolving earth is sending them, like Gabriel Conroy, Westwards. But an alignment has taken place; a conjunction been passed through; an event-plane hewn into appearance: the event-plane of the word itself, its own unfolding elsewhere. That’s why Ulysses matters. Where Stephen, like Cordelia, says Nothing (or, after Siegfried, Nothung), Molly carries negative logic to its outer limit by not saying anything at all—but then I don’t need to tell you what the very last word that she doesn’t say is.
2013