“Darling, when I go back now I want you always to be patient with me. You will find, dear, that I am not a bad man. I am a poor impulsive sinful generous selfish jealous dissatisfied kind-natured poet but I am not a bad deceitful person. Try to shelter me, dearest, from the storms of the world. I love you (do you believe it now, darling?) and O I am so tired[…] that I think when I reach Via Scussa I will just creep into bed, kiss you tenderly on the forehead, curl myself up in the blankets and sleep, sleep, sleep.
[…]You proud little ignorant saucy dear warm-hearted girl how is it that I cannot impress you with my magnificent poses as I do other people? You see through me, you cunning little blue-eyed rogue, and smile to yourself knowing that I am an impostor and still you love me.
[…]Darling, I am a sad-hearted person in reality…dear, I am too jealous, too proud, too sad, too lonely! I would not go on living, I think. Even now I feel my heart so quiet and sorrowful at the thought that I can only stare at the words I am writing. How sad life is, from one disillusion to another!
[…]My little mother, take me into the dark sanctuary of your womb. Shelter me, dear, from harm! I am too childish and impulsive to live alone. Help me, dear, pray for me! Love me! Think of me! I am so helpless tonight, helpless, helpless!
A million kisses to my darling dew-laden western flower, a million million kisses to my dear Nora of the curls.” -James Joyce, in letters to Nora Barnacle, dated 23rd, 24th December, 1909
The version of this magnificent, awful essay collected in The Modernist Papers (2007) omits the dedication. I wonder why. In general, I find Jameson both loathsome and impressive, loathsomely impressive, impressively loathsome. How both? Because of the inimitable frisson he creates by casually endorsing not just a civil rights movement but what was in effect a terrorist paramilitary campaign, which he conflates in true Leninist style with the will of “the people”—this in an essay about a quasi-pacifist skeptical of nationalism no less—before calmly assuming his customary perch on the peak of absolute knowledge from which all culture can be surveyed and measured.
Anyway, my main interest in the essay is his assessment of Ulysses’s class character:
Now for a certain conservative thought, and for that heroic fascism of the 1920s for which the so-called ‘masses’ and their standardised city life had become the very symbol of everything degraded about modern life, gossip— Heidegger will call it ‘das Gerede’—is stigmatised as the very language of inauthenticity, of that empty and stereotypical talking pour rien dire to which these ideologues oppose the supremely private and individual speech of the death anxiety or the heroic choice. But Joyce—a radical neither in the left-wing nor the reactionary sense—was at least a populist and a plebeian. ‘I don’t know why the communists don’t like me,’ he complained once, ‘I’ve never written about anything but common people.’ Indeed, from the class perspective, Joyce had no more talent for or interest in the representation of aristocrats than Dickens; and no more experience with working-class people or with peasants than Balzac (Beckett is indeed a far sounder guide to the Irish countryside or rural slum than the essentially urban Joyce). In class terms, then, Joyce’s characters are all resolutely petty-bourgeois: what gives this apparent limitation its representative value and its strength is the colonial situation itself. Whatever his hostility to Irish cultural nationalism, Joyce’s is the epic of the metropolis under imperialism, in which the development of bourgeoisie and proletariat alike is stunted to the benefit of a national petty-bourgeoisie: indeed, precisely these rigid constraints imposed by imperialism on the development of human energies account for the symbolic displacement and flowering of the latter in eloquence, rhetoric and oratorical language of all kinds; symbolic practices not particularly essential either to businessmen or to working classes, but highly prized in precapitalist societies and preserved, as in a time capsule, in Ulysses itself. And this is the moment to rectify our previous account of the city and to observe that if Ulysses is also for us the classical, the supreme representation of something like the Platonic idea of city life, this is also partly due to the fact that Dublin is not exactly the full-blown capitalist metropolis, but like the Paris of Flaubert, still regressive, still distantly akin to the village, still un- or under-developed enough to be representable, thanks to the domination of its foreign masters.
This is clever, very, but then if colonialism plays the role he here attributes to it, what was Dickens’s excuse for also creating petit-bourgeois utopias in the heart of Victorian London (Orwell on Dickens: “the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie…a dream of complete idleness”)? What, for that matter, is the class character of The Waste Land, with its clerks, typists, and (Phoenician) merchants? I mostly got this from my own dissertation advisor, and she mostly got it from Rita Felski, but I want to run with it to the end of the line: modern literature is the paradise of the lower middle class.
A sequel to yesterday’s post: maybe it took another Irishman to do it; maybe Ulysses after all is the Bible of occultic Nietzschean Catholicism. Note that Gilbert leaves Wilde among the nameless “writers of the ’nineties,” whereas I tend to think he is the key that picks the Joycean lock. Then again, I confess to not knowing Meredith except as a poet, to not having gone beyond Modern Love, so perhaps there’s something there.
As for theosophy—and the connection more broadly between modernism and magic—this is a book that should be better known (you can get it for free on libgen, you didn’t hear it from me):
I read it in graduate school but wasn’t then able to integrate it into my thesis. I’m still pondering the implications. I myself know theosophy mostly by reputation.
I see with some amusement that an eminent theosophical book Gilbert cites among Joyce’s sources is Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism: this is available on Amazon in a version edited by probably the most fascinating and original of the right-wing YouTubers, the occultist, libertarian, and Trump supporter Tarl Warwick AKA Styxhexenhammer666. Would would Joyce make of that?
MOVIE STARTERS VOL.15 THE MATRIX THE WACHOWSKI SISTERS
❛ I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. ❜
❛ Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. ❜
❛ This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. ❜
❛ What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets? ❜
❛ I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid… you’re afraid of me. ❜
❛ I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. ❜
❛ What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. ❜
❛ Sooner or later you’re going to realise just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. ❜
❛ I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole? ❜
❛ I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. ❜
❛ I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life. ❜
❛ Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. ❜
❛ You have to let it all go. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind. ❜
❛ To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human. ❜
❛ After nine years, you know what I realise? Ignorance is bliss. ❜
❛ Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? ❜
❛ As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. ❜
❛ You’re cuter than I thought. I can see why she likes you. ❜
❛ I’m trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. ❜
❛ Never send a human to do a machine’s job. ❜
❛ What are you waiting for? You’re faster than this. Don’t think you are, know you are. ❜
❛ Come on. Stop trying to hit me and hit me. ❜
❛ So what do you need? Besides a miracle. ❜
❛ The body cannot live without the mind. ❜
❛ Unfortunately, no one can be told what it is. You have to see it for yourself. ❜
❛ That is the sound of inevitability… It is the sound of your death. ❜
❛ You’re looking for it. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. ❜
❛ The answer is out there, and it’s looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to. ❜
❛ Do you think that’s air you’re breathing now? ❜
❛ Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger? ❜
Teaching aid for “Ulysses”: the schooner “Rosevean”
Teaching aid for “Ulysses”: the schooner “Rosevean”
Walking along the beach at the end of the Proteus episode, Stephen sees “Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship” (3.503-05). That night, in Eumaeus, Stephen and Bloom meet one of the threemaster’s sailors, able-bodied seaman D. B. Murphy, who tells them, “We come up this morning eleven o’clock.…
À bout de souffle (Breathless) - Jean-Luc Godard (1960)
I just started posting reviews and I noticed that if someone based my website on the first two films I reviewed they’d think I was super super lame, so I thought I’d pull up one of my favourite films of all time, Jean-Luc Godard’s classic.
Breathless is one of the greatest films ever made in my opinion.
The character development is so different than other films. Godard doesn’t use dialogue and character history to make us feel something for the character, he just let’s us watch them; let’s us observe them when they’re alone.
Belmondo’s character even breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience, and it actually works really well. He’s a bit of a douchebag but I didn’t even mind, I still like him.
Godard breaks all of the conventions set for him by filmmakers at the time, and questions ’whyis the camera always supposed to be fixed on their face when they speak?’ and films however he feels will best suit his film. It’s like James Joyce’s use of punctuation and grammar towards the end of Ulysses. Godard was such a genius that he couldn’t even be subordinated by film conventions.
The scenes filmed in the public really were filmed in the public. As in, the supposed extras who are in the background are all looking directly into the camera, some stopping, pointing and looking at Belmondo and Seberg act. But it just adds a new, amazing dimension. Belmondo himself thought this film was so terrible, but it’s the fact that it’s different that makes it so fresh and calming.
I can’t even put into words how perfect this film is. Godard does not need a good plot line, he does not need film sets and perfect lighting and he does not need to follow the ‘rules’ of film. All he needs is a camera and to question why film had such conventions anyway.
There are some serious literary and artistic allusions, that were fun to pick up on too. Godard knows that the film has so many things that would be considered wrong and bad at the time, but he sees film outsider the boundaries of just being the same story with better and better sets. He is truly innovative. He focuses on so much over the plot that the film has such a unique dimension.
Entertaining,different (which I can never stress enough as being the key to a good film) and refreshing. Also you feel pretty damn cool watching it.
reading modernist literature that uses stream of consciousness as a narrative device is like I’ve connected the dots. I didn’t connect shit. I am begging for a dialogue. I want these people to shut up. I am reading poetry in the form of prose. I am having a seizure. I am having the time of my life. I am so stupid. I am the only one who understands this book. not even god could understand this book.
Writer friends, I discovered a fun website today. It’s called “I Write Like” and here’s the description:
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
“And I am married to a poet. We came together in that church of the chimney sweeps with nothing but love & hope & our own selves: Ted in his old black corduroy jacket & me in mother’s gift of a pink knit dress. Pink rose & black tie. An empty church in watery yellow-gray light of rainy London. Outside, the crowd of thick-ankled tweed-coated mothers & pale, jabbering children waiting for the bus to take them on a church outing to the Zoo.
And here I am: Mrs. Hughes. And wife of a published poet.”
—fromThe Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Cambridge Diary, Monday afternoon: February 25 1957
***
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes first met on 25 February 1956 at party in Cambridge, England. They married only four months later on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr, Holborn, Camden, London in honor of Bloomsday with Plath‘s mother Aurelia being the only wedding guest. They have been married for six years and four months until Plath commited suicide on 11 February 1963.
Even though they have been separated for five months since September 1962, they never got a divorce. Maybe today would have been their 65th anniversary, if they were alive and stayed together.
Picture: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes photographed by by Lettice Ramsey at Ramsey & Muspratt in Cambridge, England in 1956.
This picture is one of 10 Plath and Hughes had taken a few moths later in November 1956 as their official wedding photos. They are wearing their actual wedding attire and Plath wore a “pink knitted suit dress”.
They both ended up hating the photographs.
If you want to find out more on their wedding and the story of these wedding pictures, I highly recommend you to read Ann Kennedy Smith‘s blog post at https://akennedysmith.com/
Aries: “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
Taurus: “While you have a thing it can be taken from you… but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always.”
Gemini: “Molecules all change. I am other I now.”
Cancer: “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”
Leo: “God made food; the devil the cooks.”
Virgo: “Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
Libra:“Absence, the highest form of presence.”
Scorpio: “First we feel. Then we fall.”
Sagittarius:“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
Capricorn: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
Aquarius: “You knew me once, but you won’t know me twice.”
