For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality

For most people, the real is what cannot be argued with (it partakes of a transcendental authority); for me (and those who agree with me), the real is what cannot be avoided, what must be dealt with, what must be interrogated, acted on, argued with. (Again, it's synonymous with the political.)

- Samuel R. Delany

Pound's and Eliot's Ulysses is a depressing impoverished book by a quirkily upstart Irish-Catholic Zola. I don't know if they could've produced a plot summary, but it would've supported their view: This is the worst day of the protagonists' lives, and there's no reason to think next week or year will get any better.

Whereas my Ulysses has been a reliable pick-me-up Wonderworker for 25 years.

What the book does is much stranger than what the book tells.

As we learn more — bewilderingly more — details about the characters and their context, the text we know them by becomes more — bizarrely more — distant. This long dolly-zoom effects a vertginous ambiguity of scale. The clowns swell to heroic, archetypal, even divine proportions: Aristophanes on Olympus.

We lose all sense of perspective. We might even come to believe that there was some innate possibility for beauty and joy in the mere inescapability of human limits and plasticity of human vision. Almost like we wouldn't mind being one ourselves.

Near as Human, as Theodore Sturgeon almost might've said.

Like the best science fiction, a genre developing at the same time under similar pressures, Joyce's writing refuses either to evade the real or to take it as a given. Unlike science fiction, Joyce keeps his fire scrupulously within the confines of the whale.

Finnegans Wake would be the sneeze.

Mystery Macintosh, My Darling

"The M'Intosh Murder Mystery" by John Gordon,
Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2005) 1

All right-thinking people agree that The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism's most unconscionable omission was James Thurber's "The Macbeth Murder Mystery", and so I'm certain John Gordon is a right-thinking person.

Except in this case.

[For the non-Joyceans in our audience, here's the story so far.

Aside from its status as early science fiction, Ulysses represents advanced evolution of the detective story, with each incident a visible and meaningful clue. Having played so fairly, Joyce could dispense with the handwaving detective hero, and instead left handwaving in the laps of the readers. And a jolly time we've had of it, too!

As early Joyceans gained confidence in their ability to tie every detail to every other detail, the few remaining danglies gained weightiness. (Weightiness to a Joycean, mind you; the centrality such nits assume in the secondary sources can sadly mislead a first-time reader of Ulysses. "When do we get to the word known by all men?")

Some of these puzzles, I think, weren't originally meant as puzzles. The (scanty) evidence suggests that "U.P. Up." delivered a clear message to nineteenth-century English and Irish urbanites but happened to escape documentation, becoming a hapax legomenon of popular culture. Numeric errata seem best explained as Homer nodding. Or shrugging. Come on, you ask Homer "How many fingers am I holding up?" what's he gonna do?

The Man in the Macintosh, however, emphatically riddled from his first appearance:

"Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is."

A lot of scholars have tried to earn that trifle over the years, and Gordon deserves an "A" for assurance:]

"I have lived with [the proposed solution] for a while and have come to think of it as a solid and upstanding reading which improves on acquaintance. I believe in it. It can come to dinner; it can date my daughter."

Gordon proposes that M'Intosh is the ghost of Bloom's father, who committed suicide after the death of his young wife. And (so confident is he) this proposed solution is used only as a tee-off from which to approach another, less often asked, riddle: What killed Bloom's mother? (So's not to steal Gordon's thunderclap, I'll just say Joyce may have anticipated the misogynous hard-boiled dick.)

But I do not think his proposal makes a solid and upstanding tee-off. I do not believe in it; I do not want it to date my daughter. (I am, however, prepared to buy it a drink some time.) Because the character who inspects M'Intosh most closely is Leopold Bloom.

Now I admit it's a wise son that knows his father's ghost. But even a flibbertigibbet like Hamlet was able to recognize Hamlet Senior's form straight off. And clear-sighted Bloom doesn't note a family resemblance? In a graveyard?

No, I'm afraid all the lovely circumstantial evidence Gordon's gathered just shows how irreconcilable the lyric and the narrative finally are, even in Ulysses. Poetically, his argument's airtight. Prosaically, it won't fly.

(And who do I think M'Intosh is? Well, since I ask, personally I think he's the fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.)

The View Down Eccles St.

The Dubliners flinch at the moment a camera snaps them into paralysis. Portrait's wins are serially deceiving, each end-of-play a bump to the next game level. Exiles is interminable. All the suggested stories of Finnegans Wake collapse in a bright overnight eruption of slime mold. And all the episodes and parallels of Ulysses try closure on for fit and discard it.

It's fun to imagine an offended Mrs. Bloom fetching a badly cooked egg to a puzzled Mr. Bloom. Even if that scene did take (some other) place on the morning of June 17, though, it would hardly be the start of a second honeymoon, and, given the unlikelihood of separation, homicide, or suicide, their marriage was never in real danger of ending. It would continue as it had continued if it had ever continued. Some days will be better; some days will be almost as bad; one day all days will be unreachable.

For years Mr. Bloom's chief emotional support has been his daughter. Her absence pointedly suspends in working holiday.

The most stinging loss is the fate of Stephen Dedalus. Insofar as a nice normal high-mainstream storyline can be extracted from Ulysses, it must lead to Stephen's rest chez cher Bloom. And Joyce explicitly refuses both rest and explication. With nowhere left to go, to where does Stephen go? Does he hop a steamer, stoke his way to London, bed H. G. Wells and Henry James, invent a time machine, and return as the Man in the Macintosh? Does some unforeseeable encounter guide the fictional character onto a fictional path in which he'll someday write a fictional version of the book we've just read? Or have universes diverged too far to ever rejoin? Maria Tymoczko justly compares his exit to that of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The only thing we know's that Stephen Dedalus has left the house of fiction, and good riddance.

+ + +

The View U. P.

"One Squire Mornington's, they told me; and somebody said they supposed it would be all u—p, up. Well, it will make him know what it is to be a poor man, for once in his life."

"If so, it's all U—P, up, adjective, not down, as the worthy Mr. Squeers said."

"Then," growled Goldsmith, with a note of desperation in his deep-sea bass, "it's h, a, double h'ell — h'all, u, p — h'up, h'all h'up, bullies."

'Never mind, Dick, old man,' said Harry kindly; 'it's all U. P.'

'All up,' cried Dick.

Bloo... Meat?

James Joyce as generative procedural writer

SUPERSTITION. 1. ... religion without morality. ... 4. Over-nicety; exactness too scrupulous.

- A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

A view held in late antiquity is that the use of the words superstitiō ‘superstition’ and superstitiōsus ‘superstitious’ with reference to religion derives from the idea that such practices were superfluous or redundant.

- Oxford English Dictionary

January 31, 1930: At last J.J. has recommenced work on Work in Progress. The de luxe edition by ? soon to come out — about the old lady A.L.P. I think. Another about the city (H.C.E. building Dublin). Five volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on his sofa. He has made a list of 30 towns, New York, Vienna, Budapest, and Mrs. Fleischman has read out the articles on some of these. I ‘finish’ Vienna and read Christiania and Bucharest. Whenever I come to a name (of a street, suburb, park, etc.) I pause. Joyce thinks. If he can Anglicize the word, i.e. make a pun on it, Mrs. F. records the name or its deformation in the notebook. Thus ‘Slotspark’ (I think) at Christiana becomes Sluts’ park. He collects all queer names in this way and will soon have a notebook full of them. The system seems bad for (1) there is little hope of the reader knowing all these names — most seem new even to Joyce himself, and certainly are to me. And supposing the reader, knowing the fragment dealt with towns, took the trouble to look up the Encyclopedia, would he hit on the Joyce has selected? (2) The insertion of these puns is bound to lead the reader away from the basic text, to create divagations and the work is hard enough anyhow! The good method would be to write out a page of plain English and then rejuvenate dull words by injection of new (and appropriate) meanings. What he is doing is too easy to do and too hard to understand.

April 28, 1930: His method is more mechanical than ever. For the ‘town references,’ he scoured all the capital towns in the Encyclopedia and recorded in his black notebook all the ‘punnable’ names of streets, buildings, city-founders. Copenhagen, Budapest, Oslo, Rio I read to him. Unfortunately he made the entries in his black notebook himself and when he wanted to use them, the reader found them illegible.

- Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert’s Paris Journal,
ed. Thomas F. Staley & Randolph Lewis

Joyce lost his faith but kept his superstition. And proselytized. By constructing reality effects which transform from red herring to vital clew on research and re-reading, Joyce fed the generic allures of puzzle-mystery and conspiracy theory into formalist realism, and thereby trained a generation of Joyceans into an everything-connects superstition of their own.

But while in the midst of serializing those carefully cross-wired diagrams of sub-sub-trivia across Ulysses, he began to immerse them in pointedly redundant anti-reality effects. "Cyclops" may be scrupulous about something, but whatever it is ain't "meanness." And after his increasingly bouncing babes were carted to the printshop and carted back again, he would improvise riffs across the proofsheets, snatching any chance to strengthen the scribbly cross-hatched fabric of the book or merely to, like the god of creation, wake up bleary-eyed and say Fuck me what was I doing last night?

On reading a letter from his daughter Milly, who had just turned 15 on 15 June, Bloom says ‘Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too.’ More to the point, Joyce’s revision in proof gives the letter 15 sentences. But every editorial attempt to ‘correct’ Milly’s adolescent syntax and punctuation, by reverting to earlier versions, has of course changed the count and obscured the point. So too, the passage in which Bloom reflects on the rate at which an object falls to earth (‘thirty-two feet per second’) is heavily revised in print to make it the 32nd sentence in the paragraph, where reversion to earlier readings, as in the 1984 edition, obscures that convergence of sign and sense. On page 88, Joyce added in proof a sentence of eight words to expand a newspaper death notice. It reads: ‘Aged 88, after a long and tedious illness.’ To page 77 he added in proof the phrase ‘seventh heaven’; and on page 360, Bloom meditates on cycles.

- Bibliography & the Sociology of Texts by D. F. McKenzie

What this showed McKenzie and John Kidd was that James Joyce thought his books too brittle to survive a page break. What it shows me is an unquenchable thirst for suspicious coincidence. Such details might have struck some unknown peculiar reader of the first edition, as they happened to strike the first edition's known peculiar writer; peculiar readers of later editions will presumably be struck by plenty of details of their own. Throw enough and someone will be struck. And who knows but that many of the belated recognitions of 1950s and 1960s Joyceans were just as casually opportunistic? If Joyce considered each precious intersection vital, wouldn't he have included them in his first drafts and poured them into the ears of his authorized explicators?

The contingent and ephemeral hold all we can reach of the necessary and eternal; we mold meaning from the pleasantly stinking loam of chance — such Good News can't be carried in rice-paperish porcelain; its vehicle should be built to survive chipping; should, ideally, become self-healing....

Or so I gather from the cheerfully incorporated bloopers and wide-world-of-kitchen-sinks ("Frightful stench, isn't it? Just too awful for words") method of Finnegans Wake, and from Joyce's remarks when questioned by a friendlier sort than Gilbert: his hope that a random reader in some far-off location would trip across a regional reference (my own muddy MO! my own K.C. jowls, they sure are wise!) and feel peculiarly addressed. In this work, at least, the readerly goal writerly assumed doesn't seem to have been full mastery — mulching libraries and and acquaintances so rapidly, odds are slim that Joyce himself would recall much source material after a month — but frequent recognition.

(Why a lad or lassie from Baton Rouge or Bucharest should bother to position themselves so as to encounter these happy accidents would be an unfriendly question to ask any author, I think, and at any rate went unanswered.)

Absolute control remaining unreachable, the artist might endeavor to maximize happy accidents. During my first reading of Finnegans Wake in 1980, I found a history of the Beatles, and, if we choose to take auctorial intention into account, this would be as the author intended. Most attempts to adapt Joyce's works to other media have been miserable things. The relative success of John Cage's slick and cheesy Roaratorio depends on chance, but isn't happenstance.

James Joyce as cartoonist

Flaubert's invention of detached formalist realism had the (possibly unanticipated) effect of rallying readerly sentiments against the all-powerful know-it-all artificer and toward his deluded, destructive protagonists. Eventually, in Trois Contes, he worked out of this particular bind by letting his protagonist retain her delusions (with Joyce following suit in "Clay"). But his less detached-realistic works avoided the question altogether. We can easily picture the endearingly idiotic tenacity of Bouvard and Pécuchet as a one-joke comic strip like "Little Sammy Sneeze" or "The Family Upstairs" or "That's My Pop!" Lines on paper don't sense pain as we know it.

Joyce found a way to join forces with himself. Even on my first, unaided reading, I felt rightness in the increasingly grotesque gigantism of Ulysses, and when I return to the book, that (possibly unanticipated) affective response is what I want to relive: an alliance with breathing ugly-as-life almost-humans repeatedly smacked down under floods of mocking inflation and bouncing up again ignorant as corks and damaged as new. Yes, the two male leads are having one of the worst days of their lives, presumably at the behest of some author. But because The Author in Our Face has directed our attention to his louder, noisier, and impotent assaults, the result is less like a vivisection than like a mixed-animation heroic epic of "Duck Amuck" starring Laurel and Hardy.

I've never managed a similarly direct response to Finnegans Wake, although I keep hoping. It looks like giants all the way down. Faced with a foundational secular religious document, I want Krazy Kat and I get Jack Kirby's New Gods.

James Joyce as boring old guy

James Joyce and Louis Zukofsky share an odd career pattern: a hermetic retreat into and outrageous expansion of the nuclear family, attempting to fit all space-time into an already crowded apartment.

The "cocooning" idiom bugged me from the start. A cocoon isn't a cozy retreat or celebration of stasis. By definition, cocooning occurs with intent to split. Maybe it's appropriate for them, though?

candour and verisimilitude

- for David Collard, with gratitude

"W. N. P. Barbellion" claimed instant fellowship with (what he lived long enough to read of) James Joyce. They shared pride and poverty, compulsive truth-telling, retreats into silence, and a sense of exile.

More particularly they were both intellectually ambitious provincials stuck on the periphery of longue durée cultural shifts.

Bruce Cummings was born to be a naturalist in the grand old tradition, devoting his passions and skills to the present-to-hand reality of plants, beasts, and earth on the ground. He should've sailed on the Beagle or explicated the ecology of the English countryside, but such escapades had already become a gentleman-scholar's game and would soon become the niche of pop-science writers like Barbellion's champion H. G. Wells. "Real" working-class science instead took place in urban offices and urban labs for the greater profit of industry or government.

Although I sense a leap in energy and happiness whenever Cummings returned to the countryside, he never himself described that dichotomy in so many words. Instead, like other brilliant articulate failures, he redirected himself from his first vocation to literature. He would still observe, analyze, and describe, but specimens would be human and he would be first on the dissection table.

James Joyce faced similar blockages but his vocations were spiritual and literary from the start, and due to whatever combination of history, capability, and opportunity Joyce became more explicitly aware of his dilemma, formed vaster ambitions, and lived to fulfill them.

We have no way to know where Cummings would've gone next, or if he would have been able to publish even one book without the sales hook of his early death. On the other hand, would Joyce be remembered if he'd died at Cummings's age, with only Chamber Music to his name? At the very least, Cummings's publications provide a unique testament of Dedalus-in-progress, drowned before flight, as I reckon most members of the extended Dedalus clan have been.

More particularly still, they share a certain attitude.

Embodied/embedded/naturalist philosophers and scientists, much as I love 'em, often speak of human experience in ways which would (thoughtlessly for the most part, sincerely for the horrifying part) dismiss the blind, the deaf, the pained, the frail, the immobilized, the illiterate, or the starving as not-really-human. (Other philosophers seem willing to dismiss any non-philosopher, no matter what shape they're in, as subhuman, so it may just come with the territory.) Those philosophers, theologians, and mystics who do admit the existence of suffering also tend to deny the existence of anything else, with sweet nothing our only transcendence.

In literature there's a minor muscular-secular-hedonist tradition, viz. that hearty medico buck Oliver Gogarty, but from Rochester through Zola what's labeled Naturalism leans grim and nihilist. Early critics received Joyce's first books (and Barbellion's Journal) accordingly, sometimes awarding them extra-naturalistic points for having come straight from the whoreson's mouth of a native informant. (Richard Wright's helpfully titled Native Son would be a later example of such critical reception.) And it's true that Joyce and Cummings, like Flaubert and Ibsen, were to varying extents out for revenge.

They were not, however, out for nothingness, and desperate though their circumstances might be, their works were above all else lively: liveliness was their chief defense. Flaubert and Ibsen had violently and despairingly alternated between Romantic/Naturalist inflationary/deflationary antitheses; learning from their examples, Joyce achieved a bizarrely cheering synthesis, and reconstructed the incarnate spirituality of the Church as inspirited carnality.

As for Barbellion, naming his posthumous-to-be collection Enjoying Life exhibited a sense of humor but not sarcasm. He did "enjoy life," and dutifully recording his own disgust, pain, and hopelessness was another method of enjoyment.

Most particularly they were drawn to a certain technique whereby enforced isolation, quotidian (if not downright nauseating) realism, and defiant vibrancy might merge.

Barbellion on Joyce's Portrait: "He gives the flow of the boy's consciousness — rather the trickle of one thing after another.... It is difficult to do. I've tried it in this Journal and failed."

Deliberate production of personality-tinted-or-tainted discourse is at least as old as classical rhetoric. "Stream of consciousness" is only its most recent technique, and in a way the most limited.

As Barbellion noticed, it's also misnamed. What it transcribes isn't a stream, or consciousness, and definitely not silently meditative abstraction staring into an abyss of unframed dust-free mirror, but an inner monologue. Whereas William James wanted to emphasize continuity, linear speech is forced to present one damned blessed word after another. Memories can't be conveyed without a hint of obsession; nonverbal perceptions can't be conveyed without a hint of focus.

Most crucially, an inner monologue takes place in solitude, when the only thing hopping is our antsy brain. Like poetry, it makes nothing happen. Engaging in dialogue with company or trying to learn a novel practice or becoming absorbed in almost anything other than our unlovely self forces (and allows) us to drop the burden of our inner chatter. Which doesn't mean our book has to stop: although the only time you talk to yourself is when you're not talking to anyone else, the only time you reveal yourself is always. If the "stream" is interrupted, we can simply flip to free indirect discourse (personality-tinctured third-person-limited) or drama (a report of direct speech) or narrative with a heavy tincture of narrator (that tried-and-true device common to Swift's satires, nineteenth-century dialect comedy, and the "Nausicaa" and "Eumaeus" episodes of Ulysses).

Given those limitations, a journal or diary is a natural home for inner monologue. Similarly, Joyce's "stream of consciousness" is tailored to the occasion of Ulysses, a day of excruciatingly extended emotional isolation for both male leads, and suits Molly only once she's trapped by insomnia in the dead of night.

But within those limitations, the inner monologue has a peculiar strength: it makes nothing happen. In the midst of sweet-fuck-all it spills a past, a present, alertness, misunderstandings, hopes, vexations, half-quotes, dumb jokes, old clothes, an embedded life dragging world and culture along in its rat's-nest-tangle. In either fiction or journal, no matter how dismal the life might objectively appear (as if there were anything objective about it), it exhibits a liveliness worth living.

Bloomsday 2022 Gift Guide

Hoyced the Bloomingdayl sailes!

Joyceans do not live by exegeses alone; we crave congenials with our genealogies. For your general all-round touch-of-the-poet Joycean, I warmly recommend these recent manifestations of congeniality.

Pride of Essex and host of hosts David Collard has wrangled online salons weekly since early 2020. And while David was saving (or at least boosting) my and other attendees' socially-distanced sanity, he was, on the side, sustaining his own (and now yours, purchaser-to-be) with the fresh-off-the-Sagging-Meniscus wonderworker Multiple Joyce, an addictive yet fat-free jumbo heart-shaped box of Joyce-friendly and Joyce-adjacent bonbons.

(There is a slight difference of opinion between myself and the grand Collard insofar as I prefer Gabler's edition of Ulysses to its precursors — taking for granted that all editions are and will be mistaken, Gabler's errors have the advantage of being volitional and explicit, and "Nother dying" and "Mity cheese" more than compensate any doubts about the word known to all men — yet [as David says] we can all unite to expel a chorus of raspberries at Danis "Usurper" Rose.)

My favorite Joycean, Fritz Senn came from the fannish pre-academic-respectability era of Joyce scholarship, and remains a model of rectitude, generosity, and wit — not as trademarkable a regimen as Silence, Exile & Cunning Ltd., but awfully attractive all the same. I'm now enjoying the dadblanged heck out of his third book in English, Joycean Murmoirs ("once more a book that I have not really written comes out under my name"), a good old fashioned voice-driven fan history. If you find this first page excerpt charming, give it a try:

But I never had any doubt that my preoccupation with Joyce — and I always mean the works and far less the author — is a substitute (or "Ersatz") for a satisfactory life or the kind of success one dreams of in adolescence and can never stop desiring. Maybe a term like "sublimation" comes close to it. [...] One has to cling to something, I imagine.

And if you don't, at least try some of Senn's more traditional critical essays. I see he's got a new collection coming in a month or two, Ulysses Polytropos, available to pre-order for only, er, $120. Senn's no academic but I guess his current publisher is.

For this season's primary source re-reading, I decided to pass my blearing eyes over every page of Finnegans Wake for the first time since 1979. Even with the widely-spaced benefit of McHugh's Annotations (published 1980), it was rough going — literally, since more-extended-than-usual subvocalization soon strangled my sixty-three-year-old throat into a persistent dry cough.

To my rescue came a McHugh upgrade, FWEET, and a vocal upgrade, last year's audiobook. Barry McGovern's performance is unprecedentedly skillful, unlikely ever to be approximated, and although costar Marcella Riordan outclasses most rivals, I can't help wishing McGovern had been granted the whole. These our troubled times are such that their recording's most easily obtained in streaming form, but unless you plan to stay awake, finger tracing pages, for thirty hours straight I'd recommend either the 23-disk CD set or the 105 low-quality high-convenience MP3 files. "Responsible" corporate entities have not seen fit to provide any placeholders, cue sheets, or titles to connect recording to book.

Update: I've indexed the audiobook's MP3 files with a TSV spreadsheet containing track number, traditional page number (and starting text, to help with nontraditional page numbering), and file duration (to help with other audio formats).

the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter

My fine fleshy friends have already had quite enough of this corny story, thank you, but since it's the only thing I'll ever write that would please James Joyce, and I know Hell and Purgatory have solid internet connections — that being the explanation for Facebook — I should document it.

Our back yard, relatively large, with some beds of diggable soil, has served as home or vacation rental to several generations of scrub jay. We may have established a reputation as contemplative, quiet types; at any rate, the scrub jays (unlike the mockingbirds, crows, and hummingbirds which contest the territory) show no dismay or annoyance in our presence, and we're comfortably domestic together, or anyway as comfortable as birds and neurotics get.

When shade is available and a paper book is underway, I often go to the yard to read. In early June, I brought Finnegans Wake along, settled myself on a wooden chair by the back fence, and began subvocalizing away. Elsewhere, the adolescent jay — its blue come in, but still scruffy and lanky — was poking around the mulch.

After laboring over a page or two, I heard a low flutter, looked up, and saw the jay hopping in my direction. It paused to give me the twice-over we get as they decide whether they mind us knowing the location of their peanut cache. I kept reading, it hopped to my feet — and then began a murmuring croon. (Jays use a range of soft affectionate vocalizations with their intimates, like unto the secret language of ducks but harder for us to mimic.)

We duetted a bit, and then went on to other things, including (in my case) a coughing fit.

I later assigned the toughest job to Barry McGovern, and I, he, and the book all visited the yard a few times, phone speaker low and muffled in my shirt pocket. The jay came calling all the same, so it would appear to be the song, not the singer.

Stereochronic, Sustanze partite da materia, nature morte, all-round, one-sidedly

Months of Dante reading left me in a conjunctive mood. But Gian Balsamo's rubber biscuit repulsed my age-brittled jaws, and while James Robinson's Joyce's Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community hit some exhilarating high points, the ratio of insight to overreach fell short of full satisfaction.

Instead, tops in Joycean reading this year was Andrew Gibson's The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898-1915, a prequel to his fine twining of Ulysses with Irish politics, and even finer by dint of its longer duration, less familiar material, and triple-storied structure — Irish politics at the time Joyce wrote and Irish politics at the time of which Joyce writes, with Joyce's work to bind them — which counterintuitively made the recursive knots of Irish history easier to follow than a straightahead chronicle would. Garnish with fresh-ground peppery defenses of Stephen Dedalus's honor and Exile's worthiness.

Gibson's Exile chapter-and-championship delivered engaging history; still, I'm not yet willing to re-enter the turf-colored stale-urine-scented ditch of the play itself. But he did make me wonder how my reaction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might have changed since my last full reading, and how scholarship might have changed since my ancient used paperbacks of the novel and Don Gifford's Joyce Annotated were published.

The University of California libraries own no copy of the Gablerized edition, since it never appeared as an exorbitantly priced university press book. (For the same reason, they lack copies of the most interesting scholarly editions of The Way of All Flesh and Vanity Fair.) However, Jeri Johnson's post-Gabler notes for the 2000 Oxford paperback resolved a long-standing curiosity as to why Baby Tuckoo pronounced the "r" of "green" but not of "rose"; her introduction did me the further favor of pointing towards my even more ancient used paperback of James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses by Frank Budgen.

I'd come to think of the Budgen as one of those publications which exist largely to publicize and excerpt otherwise inaccessible work. Unfair! Budgen sustained a respectful but not sycophantic and almost comfortable friendship with Joyce longer than nearly anyone else managed, he supplied much of Joyce's most quoted table-talk, and, as Johnson says, his mini-Lacoön is suggestive and useful. In my instance, it usefully soothed my occasional wish that the streamlined-for-Bildungsroman stereotyping of Dedalus had been scuffed a bit by young Joyce's real-world athleticism and singing career: Rembrandt portrayed himself holding paintbrushes rarely, but canal-jumping never.

Joyce said to me once in Zürich:

"Some people who read my book, A Portrait of the Artist forget that it is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

He underlined with his voice the last four words of the title. At first I thought I understood what he meant, but later on it occurred to me that he may have meant one of two things, or both. The emphasis may have indicated that he who wrote the book is no longer that young man, that through time and experience he has become a different person. Or it may have meant that he wrote the book looking backwards at the young man across a space of time as the landscape painter paints distant hills, looking at them through a cube of air-filled space, painting, that is to say, not that which is, but that which appears to be. Perhaps he meant both. However, it led me to ask myself if the writer, representing his own past life with words, is subject to the same limitations as the painter representing his physical appearance with paint on a flat surface. How near can each one get to the facts of his own particular case? Their limitations cannot of course be the same, but they are equivalent, and on the whole, the painter has the lighter handicap and is the likelier of the two to produce a true image of himself in his own material, although the extra difficulties that confront him are considerable. His first limitation is the inevitable mirror. The best of quicksilvered glass gives an image that is less true than an unreflected one, and the size of that image is by half smaller than it would be, were the same object standing where stands the mirror. He sees in the mirror a man holding in his left hand brushes and in his right hand a palette and he paints righthandedly this left-handed other self. Then he is fatally bound to paint himself painting himself. His functional, his trade self is in the foreground. The strained eye, the raised arm the crooked shoulder may be ingeniously disguised (they generally are) but something of objective truth gets lost in the process. And he is not only painting himself painting himself; he is also painting himself posing to himself. He is painter and model, too. The painter may be pure painter, but the model may be a bit of a poet or half an actor, and this individual will slyly present to his better half's unsuspecting eye something ironical, heroic or pathetic, according to the mood of the moment or the lifetime's habit. The limitation of viewpoint is obvious. The painter's two-dimensional mode of presentation limits him to one view of an object whatever he paints. He chooses that view and must abide by his choice. All that he can do is to convey the impression in painting one side of an object that the other side exists. In the case of any other object but himself he has at any rate the whole compass to choose from. He can walk round any other model but not round himself. So that, unless he resorts to one of those cabinet mirrors in which tailors humiliate us with the shameful back and side views of our bodies, he can see nothing of himself but full face and three-quarter profile. All this has to do merely with the getting to grips with what is usually called nature. The resulting picture, as all the galleries of Europe testify, may be as good as any other. Are there any Rembrandts we would change for the best self-portraits? One difficulty or limitation more or less among thousands is of no consequence.

And the writer's self-portrait? Goethe subtitled his own, Dichtung und Wahrheit. Did he mean that he consciously mixed fiction and fact to puzzle, delude or please, or did he mean that some Dichtung would be there by sleight of memory or because there were many true things better left unsaid? All the psychological inducements to fictify his portrait are present in greater measure for the writer than for the painter. A painter will rather paint the wart on his nose than the writer describe with perfect objectivity the wart on his character. All the posing that the painter does for himself the writer must do also. If he has a passion for confession he will exaggerate some element or other — make the wart too big or put it in the wrong place. He has his favourite role too — villain, hero or confidence man — and he would be more than human if he failed to act it. But, worst of all, his medium is not an active sense, but memory, and who knows when memory ceases to be memory and becomes imagination? No human memory has ever recorded the whole of the acts and thoughts of its possessor. Then why one thing more than another? Forgetting and remembering are creative agencies performing all kinds of tricks of selection, arrangement and adaptation. The record of a man's past is inside him and there he must look with the same constancy as the painter looks at his reflection in the mirror; only he is not looking at something (still less round something like a sculptor) but into something, like a mystic contemplating his navel. He can as little walk round his past life psychologically as the painter can walk round his reflected image. Between the moment of experiencing and the moment of recording there is an ever-widening gulf of time across which come rays of remembered things, like the rays of stars long since dead to the astronomer's sensitive plate. Their own original colours have been modified by the medium through which they passed. The "I" who records is the "I" who experienced, but he has grown or dwindled; in any case, he has changed. The continuous present of the painter is the writer's continuous past. No doubt, the most fervently naturalistic painter paints from memory, for there is a moment when he turns his eye away from the scene to his canvas and he must remember what he saw, but for practical purposes his time may be regarded as present time. Interpretation in material, words, pigment, clay, stone, is equivalent in all arts and all have the same aesthetic necessities. One other thing: if the writer cannot see the other side of himself, by a still more elementary disability he cannot see the outside of himself in action at all. He knows what he does as well as any, and why he does it better than any, but how he does it less than any.

Does he even, for example, know the sound of his own voice? If he is a singer he may, after long practice, get to know the sound of it when he is singing, but he will certainly not know how it sounds when he is arguing with a taxi driver. He knows the inside of himself and the outside of everybody else. He supplies other folk with his inner experiences and motives, and himself, by judgment and comparison, with the visible outward of their actions. The mimic among our friends will show the assembled company how we walk or talk. It seems strange and unbelievable to us, but from the laughter and "just like him"s of the others we know that it must be reasonably like. The essence, however, of this comparison is to show that all self-portraits, whether painted or written, are one-sided — that they are pictorial in character, not plastic.

Stephen Dedalus is the portrait and Bloom the all-round man. Bloom is son, father, husband, lover, friend, worker and citizen. He is at home and in exile. [...]

Rodin once called sculpture "le dessin de tous les côtés."; Leopold Bloom is sculpture in the Rodin sense. He is made of an infinite number of contours drawn from every conceivable angle. He is the social being in black clothes and the naked individual underneath them. All his actions are meticulously recorded. None is marked "Private." He does his allotted share in the economic life of the city and fulfils the obligations of citizen, husband and friend, his body functioning meanwhile according to the chemistry of human bodies. We see him as he appears to himself and as he exists in the minds of his wife, his friends and his fellow citizens. By the end of the 1day we know more about him than we know about any other character in fiction. They are all hemmed in in a niche of social architecture, but Bloom stands in the open and we can walk round him. [...]

His wife, Marion, is a onesidedly womanly woman.

— Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses