<?page no="0"?> Parallaxing Joyce Paparunas / Ilmberger / Heusser (eds.) Parallaxing Joyce Penelope Paparunas / Frances Ilmberger / Martin Heusser (eds.) Parallaxing Joyce is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays, as it approaches James Joyce’s work using parallactic principles as its overriding theoretical framework. While parallax, a frequent term in Joyce’s work, originally derives from astronomy, it has been appropriated in this volume to provide fresh perspectives on Joyce’s œuvre. By comparing Joyce and Marilyn Monroe, films, art, serializations, philosophy, translation and censorship, among others, these scholars transform our way of reading not only Joyce but also the world around us. This volume will appeal not only to academic researchers and Joyce enthusiasts, but also to anyone interested in literary and cultural studies. ISBN 978-3-7720-8589-5 <?page no="1"?> Parallaxing Joyce <?page no="3"?> Penelope Paparunas / Frances Ilmberger / Martin Heusser (eds.) Parallaxing Joyce <?page no="4"?> Cover image: Sabrina Alonso Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb. dnb.de abrufbar. © 2017 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72 070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Werkdruckpapier. Internet: www.francke.de E-Mail: info@francke.de Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-7720-5589-8 <?page no="5"?> 5 Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgements Foreword Andreas Fischer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Introduction Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen Elisabeth Bronfen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses Griselda Pollock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge Katharina Hagena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts Philip Keel Geheber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” Ivana Milivojevic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses Amanda Sigler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day , and Censorship, 1930-1933 Václav Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” Sam Slote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art David Spurr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax Sabrina Alonso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 <?page no="6"?> 6 Inhaltsverzeichnis Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh Shane Walshe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax: Miklós Szentkuthy’s Hungarian Translation of Joyce’s Ulysses (1974) and Its Remake (2012) Marianna Gula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” Erika Mihálycsa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction: Foster Wallace, Goldsmith, Danielewski David Vichnar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery Ilaria Natali . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses Thomas Gurke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs: Close-Ups from Sylvia Beach’s Letters to James Joyce in the 1920s Ruth Frehner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant Ursula Zeller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 <?page no="7"?> For Fritz Senn <?page no="9"?> Acknowledgements 9 Acknowledgements We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the many who have contributed in sundry ways to the publication of this collection of essays. Fortunately, for the editors, help for a project that is dedicated to the incomparable Fritz Senn is always forthcoming. This book would not have been possible without the generous financial support from several institutions including the English Department at the University of Zurich, the Zürcher Universitätsverein ( ZUNIV ), the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation and the UBS Culture Foundation. In particular, we would like to single out Mirjam Beerli, Seraina Rohrer, Hansruedi Isler, Katherine Williams, Daniel Schreier, and Marianne Hundt. We are also most grateful to Ron Ewart, Tim Martin and Thomas Honegger for their expert opinions and helpful advice. Thanks also go to Andreas Fischer, Martin Heusser, Therese Frey Steffen, Paul Michel, Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller and many unnamed advisors. We are especially thankful for Sabrina Alonso’s amazing artistic talent, as she was able to realize our Joycean nod to Magritte for the cover image. We are greatly indebted to Elisabeth Bronfen and Griselda Pollock for their perspective from beyond the Joycean community. We would sincerely like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their insightful parallactic explorations. Thanks also go to Roland Lerch, Hans Zappe and Max Zappe for their technical advice and for their oft-tested unconditional patience. Thanks to Gunter Narr, Vanessa Weihgold, and especially the ever understanding Kathrin Heyng at Gunter Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. Penelope would like to thank her parents, Corina Zindel and Daniel Pensa for their enthusiasm and motivation to finish up this project, and Frances would like to thank Hans and Max Zappe for their steadfast patience, support and understanding. Thanks especially to Fritz Senn, to whom this book is dedicated, for his endless wealth of knowledge, his unparalleled generosity, inspiration and many years of friendship. We believe we speak for all in this volume when we say you have deeply touched our lives and we will never be the same. <?page no="10"?> 10 <?page no="11"?> Foreword 11 Foreword Andreas Fischer Parallax , according to the Oxford English Dictionary ’s precise, but somewhat cumbersome definition, refers to the “apparent displacement, or difference in the apparent position, of an object, caused by actual change (or difference) of position of the point of observation” ( OED Online ). Or, in Fritz Senn’s equally precise, but more vivid words, it “is an instance of sending the observant mind in two, or more, different positions and having it compare notes” ( Dislocutions 79 ). Parallax, therefore, encapsulates a very basic, essential principle of vision and thus of cognition: In order to ‘see,’ that is, to understand, an object of any kind in its fullness one has to change one’s own position, one’s point of view, one’s angle of vision. From a fixed point of view one has only one, necessarily limited view, but when one moves, perspectives multiply and one’s view automatically becomes multidimensional. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses , is such a mover in space and time: His wanderings on June 14 , 1906 , literally from morning until late at night, give him - and the readers of the book - a continually changing view of the city of Dublin and its inhabitants. Readers of Ulysses , of course, experience a further dimension of parallax: They witness Bloom’s wanderings not from one perspective, but “from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles” ( Joyce in a letter to Miss Weaver dated June 24 , 1921 , qtd. in Ellmann 512 ). Parallax, in short, is one of the guiding principles of Ulysses . Joyce himself was a wanderer, too, though on a much larger scale than Bloom. Having left his native Dublin in 1904 , he spent the rest of his life as an exile in various European cities and it may well be argued that his “observant mind” could focus on Ireland and Dublin precisely because it did so from the “different positions” afforded by Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Fritz Senn, to whom this book is dedicated, is also a mover, though not in a physical sense. Ever since encountering Joyce’s work as a young man, he has “parallaxed” it in his many publications, in lectures, conference papers and, of course, in seminars, workshops and reading groups that multiply perspectives by the number of people taking part in them. Although he is not a friend of theories ( Murmoirs , 145 - 158 ), he has even developed his own theory of movement or, rather, its opposite: The (mock) “science” of ochlokinetics ( Murmoirs , 173 - 177 ) shows how people in groups obstruct each other even though they <?page no="12"?> 12 Foreword may all have the same goal. Fritz Senn, however, is nimble: He moves through Joyce’s works and through the world of Joyce scholarship with ease, erudition and eloquence. May he be able to do so for many more years and may he enjoy the parallactic views on Joyce collected in this volume! Bibliography Primary Source Joyce, James. Ulysses . 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. London: The Bodley Head, 2008. Print. Secondary Sources Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce . Oxford: OUP , 1982. Print. “parallax.” OED Online . OUP , December 2013. Web. 23 December 2013. O’Neill, Christine, ed. Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce . Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007. Print. Senn, Fritz. Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation . Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. Print. <?page no="13"?> Introduction 13 Introduction Parallax, a theoretical concept encompassing the notion of seeing an object from different positions, is an oft-cited term in Joyce criticism, but it is not limited to the Joycean universe. The term crops up in the cultural imaginary in such divergent areas as film, literature, architecture, astronomy, web design, video games, philosophy or cultural theory. 1 As diverse as these cultural applications may be, they, in some sense, all share a semantic encoding of an alternating, changing or even distorting element ( OED ). Joyce’s fascination with the parallactic, in fact, not only shows in his recurring use of the actual signifier in his oeuvre - most notably so in Ulysses - but even more so in his unique texture which is constantly saturated with difference, adding a parallel or refracted, sometimes distorted side to it. If Joyce’s interest in parallax has been noted by many Joyce specialists and in particular Fritz Senn, who explains this complex theoretical framework as “an instance of sending the observant mind in two, or more, different positions and having it compare notes” ( Dislocutions 79 ), it remains somewhat of a conundrum that apart from a few shorter negotiations (cf. Stevens Heusel or Zeller, to name but a few), a book-length study on the parallactic, and the Joycean parallactic, for that matter, has not yet been produced. This collection of essays, therefore, attempts to fill this gap in the Joycean research field by exclusively focusing on parallax. True to the vibrantly rich ingredients of the Joycean cosmos, the thematic aspects in connection to Joyce and parallax range from Marilyn Monroe to music, film, censorship, serialization, contemporary art and literature, psychoanalysis, translation, imagery, genetic studies, law and epistolary explorations. A special highlight, an art object inspired by parallax, is also included, which gives all theoretical renditions an individual twist. What all of them have in common is a take on Joyce that transgresses the ordinary critical vision; indeed, their critical perception is a doubled, a refracted one that takes note of something that is beside, alongside, beyond - para - the usual critical or artistic point ( OED ). What is more, this introduction of Parallaxing Joyce , which is inspired by Fritz Senn’s lifelong, meticulous engagement with this modernist classic and without whom this book would never have been realized, is itself marked by a parallactic haunting: The interview with Elisabeth Bronfen, which opens this volume, stands in a way as a parallel - parallactic - 1 The most well-known interventions on the parallactic are Žižek’s tour de force booklength philosophical endeavor as well as Pakula’s cinematic rendition, The Parallax View ( 1974 ), which deals with a very specific kind of distortion, that of paranoia. On that particular aspect of paranoia, see, for example, the study by Krause, Meteling and Stauff. <?page no="14"?> 14 Introduction vision to these initial remarks on parallax (and vice versa), as it encompasses key theoretical issues that pertain to the core theme of this book. It is then, true to its core of ‘parallax,’ a prerequisite to read these essays, - as this introduction in juxtaposition with the said interview (to view between, beside) - beside, alongside, past, beyond each other and the Joycean critical world at large. * This collection draws primarily on scholars from two groups connected with Fritz Senn: The first group comprises former Zurich James Joyce Foundation scholars and the second members of the English Department at the University of Zurich. The former group was intended as an ersatz for Fritz Senn’s longtime desire to gather together all of the nearly one hundred former Foundation scholars, which alas is logistically not feasible, and the latter group was intended to convey a small token of appreciation for all Fritz Senn does for the UZH English Department. The editors, themselves former students of Fritz Senn, have enjoyed his immense wealth of knowledge of and great passion for Joyce’s texts and have experienced his generosity and kindness on many occasions. It is with profound gratitude that we present to Fritz Senn this volume on parallax for sharing his expertise and friendship with us. * The essays in this collection are ample proof of their enlightening perspectives on the parallactic: In reading Eve Arnold’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Joyce’s Ulysses semiotically, culturally, and historically, Griselda Pollock draws new lines from what is known about the staging of the iconic photograph Monroe to Joyce studies and back again. Shifting from side to side, Katharina Hagena explores the different philosophical points of view on and from bridges of all kinds - i. e. disappointed and crossed - in Joyce’s Ulysses and beyond. From Kingstown pier to Bloom on O’Connell Bridge to a different kind of “disappointed bridge” in “Penelope” to the bridge of a ship, Hagena leaves no span untraversed. Focusing particularly on the body, Philip Keel Geheber addresses the uncertainty of knowing in literature despite Joyce’s attention to detail. Ulysses continually forces the reader to change perspective as new pieces of information about the character, the narrative, or the city of Dublin are presented, yet it remains impossible to complete a convincing picture of something as fundamental as Bloom’s corporeality as parallactic views do not afford certainty. Ivana Milivojevic sees the idea of the impossibility of knowing from a different <?page no="15"?> Introduction 15 perspective. Her article highlights “productive failure” in “The Dead.” She explores the failure of true communication and understanding between Gabriel Conroy and the guests at the Morkan’s dinner party and Gretta Conroy in particular. Amanda Sigler and Václav Paris begin with a view to the effects of censorship. Sigler brings the contemporary reader closer to the pleasures and frustrations of virgin readers of various serializations of Ulysses (then and now), demonstrating how censorship changes the reader’s experience of the text. For his part, Paris perceives aesthetic and historic parallactic conjunctions between Joyce’s Ulysses and Nathan Asch’s unacclaimed novel Pay Day ( 1930 ). Paris explains how this obscure novel may have (unwittingly) played a pivotal role in the obscenity trial of Ulysses in 1933 . Several contributors approach Joyce’s works through art. Using the Venus effect, Sam Slote ponders the conundrum of what Bloom, Stephen, Lynch, and the ladies of ill repute see in the mirror in the “Circe” episode. He reflects on where Bloom and Stephen’s hallucinations in the brothel converge and where they diverge. David Spurr sheds light on a literal and metaphorical Joycean parallax in an underground parking garage in Lyon, France. In this unlikely space can be found Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art instillation, which illuminates texts from the works of James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. Spurr explains how this work is parallactic on numerous levels from its underground location, its distortion of Joyce’s text, its juxtaposition of Joyce and Carroll to its luminous functionality in this dark space. Sabrina Alonso describes her parallactic gift to Fritz Senn: a Joycean memory game based on instances of parallax in Ulysses . Her artistic handiwork illustrates this concept by creating a new perspective when the images are placed side by side. Shane Walshe, Marianna Gula, and Erika Mihálycsa address the challenges of adapting and translating Joyce’s work. Walshe shows that the adaptations of Ulysses by Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh provide very different understandings of the plot, discourse and characterization of Joyce’s tome while Gula and Mihálycsa take on the problems of translating and retranslating Ulysses . Gula shares her experience of the decision-making process in attempting to render Joyce’s wordplay into Hungarian whereas Mihálycsa considers the foreignizing and domesticating practices of translation in the Romanian and Hungarian translations of “Oxen of the Sun.” The inevitable failure to achieve a satisfying adaption or translation provides the reader with new insights into the original text. Joyce’s work is also reworked in other ways. David Vichnar examines the multiple ways in which the Joycean model of literature is revisited and reworked by contemporary American writers David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Kenneth Goldsmith. <?page no="16"?> 16 Introduction Further parallactic readings range from semantics to classical explorations to biographical negotiations. Ilaria Natali identifies a recurrent pattern in Joyce’s uses of image metaphors in Epiphanies , Portrait and Ulysses . She shows how the associations of words and images cause a change in view as they require a simultaneous presence of a sensory experience and a concrete object. Thomas Gurke’s approach to parallaxing Joyce is steeped in Greek lore. He uses the Pythagorean term acousmatic to describe an “audible parallax”: Gabriel’s and Gretta’s perceptions of “The Lass of Aughrim” in the famous staircase scene in “The Dead,” and then he applies the term acousmatic to a steely interpretation of “Sirens” in Ulysses . Rounding off the collection, Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller provide a different angle on Joyce by illuminating his complex relationship with his literary manager Sylvia Beach. By using new material from the Hans E. Jahnke bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Frehner and Zeller provide a new perspective on the nature of the Beach-Joyce relationship. Bibliography Krause, Marcus, Arno Meteling, and Markus Stauff, eds. The Parallax View: Zur Mediologie der Verschwörung. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011. Print. Mediologie 22. “parallax.” OED Online . OUP , December 2013. Web. 23 December 2013. Senn, Fritz. Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. Print. Heusel, Barbara Stevens. “Parallax as a Metaphor for the Structure of Ulysses .” Studies in the Novel 15.2 (Summer 1983): 135-146. Web. Zeller, Ursula. “‘Parallax stalks behind’: The Walk-In Book, or the Text as Space in Ulysses .” James Joyce: “gedacht durch meine Augen” “thought through my eyes.” Ed. Ursula Zeller, Ruth Frehner, and Hannes Vogel. Basel: Schwabe, 2000. 140-55. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture . 1991. Cambridge, MA : The MIT P, 2000. Print. -. The Parallax View . 2006. Cambridge, MA : The MIT P, 2009. Print. <?page no="17"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 17 Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen Elisabeth Bronfen Let us start with the word “parallax.” Its etymology is based on the prefix -para meaning ‘beside, alongside of, by, past, beyond’ and allassein , denoting ‘to change, exchange, to alternate’ (from allos , ‘other’). There are three main semantic strands of parallax according to the OED , namely: a) difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points (astronomy) b) in figurative contexts: distortion, the fact of seeing wrongly or in a distorted way c) a defect in a photographic image caused by differences in the position of the camera; specifically incorrect framing of an image due to the differing positions of the viewfinder and the lens) When you hear or use or think about parallax, which description speaks most to you? 1 The second description definitely speaks most to me. The first description sounds to me very much like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, that is to say, that there is a difference between the viewer and the object that is being viewed, and the object that is being viewed changes if the person viewing an object or an event takes on a different position. Basically, the first definition refers to two viewers in relationship to an object of an event and this is a fairly straightforward issue. It is not necessarily the reason why cultural theory or literary theory has come to be interested in notions of parallax. Here, at issue is the idea of a parallel vision, or rather a parallel perception, which is to say the way parallel perceptions bring disjunction into play in the field of vision. The second definition allows us to use the concept of parallax as a critical term for thinking through issues having to do with distortion. I would add, however, that parallax does not necessarily mean that something is being seen incorrectly. Instead, the interesting point about parallax, especially for a critic like myself who has been trained in psychoanalytic thinking, is the cognitive gain to be had from seeing things in a distorted manner. In German, this is called ‘ auf eine entstellte Weise ,’ indicating that there is a change in position regarding an object owing to one’s psychic predisposition. For me, the notion of a ‘parallax view,’ made so famous by Alan J. Pakula’s conspiracy film bearing 1 Conducted by Penelope Paparunas and Frances Ilmberger in Zurich on 15 December 2013 . <?page no="18"?> 18 Elisabeth Bronfen this title, immediately brings into play the idea of paranoia - that the hero, and along with him the privileged spectator, comes to see an event differently from the way ‘normal’ people see it. They do so because they had a different predisposition towards what it is they are looking at; no longer the predisposition of the ordinary everyday. However, if one does not want to limit a discussion of parallax view to paranoia and conspiracy theory discourse, which became so prevalent in the late twentieth century, one might already look for a parallax view in Shakespeare’s plays. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream , for example, you have parallax perception, conjoining seeing with emotions, particularly on the part of the Athenian lovers, who flee into the nocturnal woods. Their perception of the world changes radically, particularly for the two young men, Demetrius and Lysander, whose vision has been altered by Puck’s application of a magical juice to their eyes. And given Bottom’s transformation into an object of erotic desire for a fairy queen, you might even speak of a parallax vision on the part of Titania. In fact, Shakespeare straddles two positions, bringing the first definition of parallax into play as well. Let us remember, throughout the scenes of amorous confusion, we see Oberon and Puck on stage, observing either the lovers or Titania and commenting on and cruelly enjoying the way those characters whose eyes have been anointed with magic juice see their love objects with transformed vision. The important point is not just the idea of a distorted vision in the sense of seeing incorrectly. Rather, the fairy queen perceives something in Bottom which is, in fact, there, namely his animalistic charm. We must not forget, she is a fairy creature, and what she now notices (which she would not have done before) is the sheer fleshness of this male body. Parallax in A Midsummer Night’s Dream involves two axes of vision: Titania’s desiring gaze at Bottom, and the manner in which Oberon and Puck observe this visual desire. The question is, of course, whose perception is correct and whose is not. What I want to underscore is that distortion in the sense of parallax need not necessarily be incorrect, nor need it be corrected (as Titania’s gaze is at the end of the play). Rather, parallax refers to a non-ordinary way of seeing, of taking note of something that the ordinary eye does not (or cannot) see. This extra-ordinary perception is what the lovers refer to when, waking up at the end of the fourth act, they speak about seeing the world with doubled eyes. I have discussed their double vision as the result of a residue of the nocturnal knowledge they gained in the fairy woods remaining with them upon waking up. They are looking at their ordinary everyday with traces of their night vision still intact, and for this reason, they are seeing double. 2 Each of these lovers is carrying a bit of parallax 2 For example Hermia: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double” ( MND 4 . 1 . 186 - 187 ). <?page no="19"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 19 vision with himself or herself because they are in the process of transitioning from the nocturnal into the diurnal world, from the phantasmatic or the fantastic into the ordinary. And, as a final point, this is basically what art does: it produces parallax vision on the part of the spectator or the reader. This, in fact, fits in nicely with the second question: in our seminar “Hoffmann, Poe, Hitchcock: Charmed Vision,” 3 we have been talking a lot about how these literary and cinematic texts engage a visualization of psychic disorders, that is, we are confronted with a framed, transgressive, heightened, distorted, yes, charmed view or perspective. Could we say that a charmed vision is ultimately a parallactic vision? If so, what is the difference? I would strongly support that, and, indeed, perhaps this is an ‘ ur -definition’ of a type of art, obviously not all art: the mimetic, ‘realist’ tradition would probably fit this less well than other forms of art, which is why it is perhaps interesting to ask oneself at what historical moments does parallactic vision or a parallactic type of an aesthetic text surface. One moment, surely, is the early modern period, as it marks the transition from an extremely hierarchical, religious order of things (to quote Foucault) ordering the world to the beginning of modern subjectivity. A second historical moment would be around 1800 , where, as we move from a highly rational structuring of the world to a stronger emphasis on more subjective reconceptions, we find a reverberation of the early modern, a resurfacing of the magical thinking we connect with the early modern period, as this includes the Baroque. At issue for me in seeking to discover analogies between the early modern ( 1560 - 1680 ) and what we call Gothic sensibility is the heightened importance of the subjective for Romanticism; the manner in which, by 1800 , an intimate, subjective vision of the world is privileged. What emerges is an important aspect of epistemological uncertainty. On the one hand, the subject can claim for itself, “I am the authority of myself, the center of everything I say, do, feel, write.” On the other hand, what emerges is a radical doubt: “But if I am the primary authority on whom I perceive the world and through whom I communicate myself, how sure can I be of the validity or plausibility of what I am seeing? ” In other words, in one and the same gesture, one acquires an empowering but also a disempowering aspect to the radical subjectivity that takes hold during the Romantic period, and we find this doubt at the heart of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke as well as the Gothic novellas by American authors such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James. The term ‘ Nachtstück ,’ in fact, sees itself as a narrative version of the chiaroscuro style in Baroque art, where one finds such harsh shadows because the scene is shown 3 M. A. seminar held at the English Department of the University of Zurich during the autumn semester in 2013 . <?page no="20"?> 20 Elisabeth Bronfen to be illuminated by only one light source (e. g. a candle, the moon). In much the same way, Gothic narratives, as well as the German Nachtstück , transpose the idea of a single source of illumination to the one privileged subject perceiving a given situation. We see everything lit only through their idiosyncratic attitude toward the world, which is to say only the way their subjective attitude toward the world shapes the given event, scene or problem. In Baroque painting, this means that a very limited frame of vision is harshly lit and strongly contoured, while the rest of the scene lies in shadow or complete darkness. Similarly, in the Gothic narratives, certain aspects of the story are brought into sharp focus while others exist only as ellipses, or are only vaguely gestured towards. In literary texts around 1800 , you have a parallax view when the narrative is reduced to such extreme subjective focalization, and yet what also comes into play is a textual self-reflexivity. By signaling to us that what we are given is a highly focused, and thus highly exclusive perception of the world, the text offers a double vision. We can look through the eyes of the hero or heroine and we can observe them with a certain ironic distance. If we take the most successful stories by Poe, for example, we have a narratorial voice who relates at a distance from the horrific events that make up the story, and it is this distance - a double temporal and spatial moment - which makes for the parallax. In one and the same gesture, we look at an event - in “Ligeia,” for example, the spectral resurrection of a dead woman - from the position of someone recalling it and from the position of someone experiencing this implausible event. Or, if we think of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , so typical of multiperspectival narratives, parallax comes into play between several intradiegetic and frame narratives. They are parallactic not only because they herald the radically subjective position of the speaker, but also because, taken together, they give us a panoply of different, equally valid perspectives on the key event. Thus, we have a collection of extremely subjective focalization, and we have the distance the implied author as a textual agency produces, drawing our attention to the fact that there is more than one vision, more than one valid attitude toward the world. It would be interesting to read the entire nineteenth century for eruptions of parallactic vision. If you tried tracking this, you would notice that Victorian moral imagination, which we normally think of as fairly uniform and univocal, at least in the value judgments it makes on the world, is less consistent. I am less interested in the explicit use of multiple perspectives in texts such as Browning’s The Ring and the Book , Stoker’s Dracula or Collins’ The Woman in White . Instead, if one looked at possible parallactic depictions in Middlemarch , for example, one could focus on the way key characters misunderstand each other because they do not share a way of looking at the world because they do not have a common world view, and on how the text offers us an ironic distance <?page no="21"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 21 to this misunderstanding. The ethical force, I would wager, lies less with the moralistic utterances of the narrator than the way the text as a whole, juxtaposes various perceptual positions, leaving us, the readers, to settle the question, particularly for our contemporary concerns. Such multiple, refracted, distorted vision becomes, of course, a key concern within Modernism. Around 1900 , we have the language crisis (‘ Sprachkrise ’), the invention of film and photography, as well as a shift in the natural sciences for which we usually think of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, etc. We find here a return to the problem that a subjective point of view is connected to uncertainty, and it raises doubts regarding the reliability of the subject’s vision and judgment. In addition, modern literature uses multiperspectival narration so as to bring together multiple voices, different focalizations, different experiences of the world, and different readings of the world that are no longer homogenous. That is to say, in contrast to the Gothic period, what finds articulation in modern literature is no longer simply the bourgeois male subject, trained in Classics and canonic texts. Instead, we begin to hear the voices of people of different ethnicities and different classes, and we begin to hear voices marked distinctly as feminine. The idea of multiplicity so tantamount to a sense of modernity brings into play a parallactic attitude in the sense that at issue is less what is told in the text than how the text tells its story. This would be as true for Joyce as for Dos Passos, Woolf, Faulkner, or Pynchon. Another aspect of parallax is the notion of conspiracy or paranoia, which you have also mentioned in your response. The recent book The Parallax View: Zur Mediologie der Verschwörung ( 2011 ) by Krause, Meteling and Stauff deals precisely with this semantic field of parallax (cf. Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View ( 1974 )). You have worked on conspiracy as well, namely, for example, in your essay “The Conspiracy of Gender: Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s Passionate Histrionics.” What did you have in mind there? I was interested in looking awry at Hamlet - and that in itself carries an aspect of parallax - by provocatively claiming that we do not really know that Claudius killed Hamlet’s father. There is only one passage in the play where we have him kneeling in front of an altar, allegedly making a confession. But let us remember, we are looking at him along with Hamlet, who wants to kill him but cannot do so because, were he to kill the man while he is praying, his victim would go to heaven. 4 Strictly speaking, Hamlet should not be able to hear what Claudius is saying in his prayer, and it is the implausibility of his overhearing 4 Cf. Hamlet 3 . 3 . 73 - 78 : “Now might I do it pat, now a is praying, / And now I’ll do’t, / [He draws his sword] / and so a goes to heaven, / And so am I revenged. That would be scanned. / A villain kills my father, and for that / I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven / O, this is hire and salary, not revenge! ” <?page no="22"?> 22 Elisabeth Bronfen his enemies thoughts that I am basing my wager on. Claudius is obviously not praying aloud, so one might say that what we hear is what Hamlet is imagining that Claudius is confessing. The monologue we here is what Hamlet would like Claudius to be saying in front of the altar. Apart from this one moment, there is nothing in the play that confirms his theory that his father was murdered by his uncle, which I read as a conspiracy theory, or as a parallactic vision. If asked why the notion of murder is so dear to Hamlet, I would answer as follows: Death, usually a contingent event, needs to be rendered meaningful, even if the meaning pertains to violent, treacherous murder. It is easier for Hamlet to imagine that the death of his father was triggered by his uncle’s jealousy than an accident. By imagining this political conspiracy, he endows death with meaning. To see death as something that simply strikes at random is far less bearable. Hamlet, I would argue, is in an intense state of mourning, and in order to overcome his melancholia, he comes up with a narrative that will explain away all of his discontent. It is important to remind ourselves that conspiracy narratives tend to be all-inclusive. Even if they are horrible, they comfort because they allow all contingency to be brought in line with an explanatory pattern. We find such an attitude even in relation to the traumatized war veteran Septimus in Mrs Dalloway . His is a parallactic vision. Where, during the famous scene in the park, others read the writing in the sky as an advertisement for toffee, he sees the dead signaling to him. But this also means that the world is utterly coherent for him. Everything fits his idée fixe that his dead commander has returned to him and wants to draw him into the world of the dead. But to return to Hamlet, once he has convinced himself of his conspiratorial idée fixe that “my father did not just die of a random accident but he was murdered by my uncle,” then death is not only meaningful but he can also take up arms against death and he can seek revenge. The conspiracy narrative is more satisfying than the idea that the father died a natural death. We have two perspectives of the cause of death and thus a distortion. However, what I was also interested in is the way Ophelia responds to Hamlet’s conspiracy, as he seeks to draw everyone in Elsinore into his spectacle. After all, she also must deal with the death of her own father, who, incidentally, was killed by her lover, Hamlet. I wanted to read her hysteria as another form of parallax, because, on the one hand, we have Hamlet’s murder / revenge story and, on the other hand, we have her hysteria / self-destruction story. Both are refractions or refigurations of the death of a parent. Indeed, I think refraction is an interesting word in relationship to parallax. The perceptions of the two characters involved are refractions of what actually happened, and any aesthetic text, in turn, offers yet another refraction. We may not agree on the fact that Claudius did or did not kill the older Hamlet, but what is more interesting is that <?page no="23"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 23 we agree that the two children produce counter-narratives askew to each other and to what is, in fact, happening. People tend to forget that there is a war going on. By virtue of their narratives - Hamlet’s murder conspiracy and Ophelia’s hysteric suicide - all three figures of the second generation are, in fact, fighting through the battles of their parents. Their domestic deaths are in the context of a political battle that was initially fought between old Hamlet and old Fortinbras, which the former won. Now their two sons are repeating this battle, and, in fact, the troops of the younger Fortinbras are approaching the castle at the beginning of the play. Anticipation of a battle about to unfold is the ‘ordinary’ version, the normal understanding of the context for the multiple deaths, which will occur in the course of the play. What I became interested in is the following: the first people to see the ghost of Hamlet’s father are the soldiers, standing on the parapet at night, on the lookout for enemy soldiers. Rather than seeing these soldiers emerge on the horizon, they see Hamlet’s ghost. Could we not also say that they tell themselves they are seeing a ghost in lieu of the enemy that they expect to see? So, in fact, we have three competing perspectives: Hamlet’s murder / revenge plot, Ophelia’s hysteria / suicide plot, and the serious, imminent threat of battle with which the play actually ends once the other two have been resolved by virtue of multiple killings and suicide. These are the three positions that we get, and they are in competition with each other. However, I would like to read Ophelia’s taking her own life as the model for Hamlet’s final act. Having seen her take action, albeit against herself, he can finally move beyond his melancholia and act himself. Fortinbras, appearing on the scene, declares in his final monologue - using performative language - Hamlet to be a hero. He gives his rival the burial owed to a valiant soldier who died in battle. And this final perspective, clearly a distortion of what we saw happening on stage throughout the play, puts closure on all other parallactic visions. Many years ago, you mentioned parallax in connection to the eponymous journal established in 1995 by Adrian Rifkin, Marq Smith and Joanne Morra. Could you perhaps enlighten us on how the journal came to be? Why did the founders choose the title ‘parallax’? The journal started as (and still is) a graduate student journal at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, run by Prof. Griselda Pollock. The idea behind the journal was really to showcase theoretical debates within the field of visual culture and cultural studies, with a strong emphasis on art history. Pollock and Rifkin represent the ‘new art history’ that was prevalent in Britain in the 1980 s and 1990 s, when the introduction of theory into the study of art history was extremely contested. Particularly important for Griselda Pollock was bringing the work of Julia Kristeva as well as Aby Warburg to bear on a discussion of gender, psychoanalysis and art, so <?page no="24"?> 24 Elisabeth Bronfen as to use art history as a way of thinking about cultural memory and issue of the contemporaneous. To a degree, visual culture has moved into more cultural-sociological directions. Morra and Smith are now the editors of The Journal for Visual Culture . Pollock and, for that matter, I remain primarily interested in issues of aesthetic formalization, the interface between the visual and the textual and above all close readings of texts so as to engage with the way these produce theoretical concepts of their own. The concept parallax seems to be of perpetual interest to the cultural imaginary. It was obviously an issue in the 1970 s, cf. Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View ( 1974 ). Why did parallax creep in again in the 1990 s (journal, comic)? And why does it seem to be so relevant today considering Žižek’s eponymous, seminal study The Parallax View ( 2006 ) or, to name but a few, the mainstream films Vantage Point ( 2008 ) or The Green Lantern ( 2011 )? Why parallax becomes an interesting concept in the 1990 s? I think it has to do with people like Žižek, who started writing in the late 1980 s and early 1990 s. Žižek is one of the people who got us all thinking about conspiracy theory with his reading of the aforementioned movie The Parallax View . When the film The Parallax View came out, it was read as a critical, anti-government film, a symptom of the civil unrest prompted by the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis. But Žižek, borrowing Lacan’s discussion of the anamorphic gaze, used the film to bring into critical play the idea of looking awry at a text, at a political situation, as a philosophical debate. He got us interested in parallax as a theme - in films, in literature - especially, of course, in texts engaging with conspiracy theory. Indeed, we are also noticing a renewed interest in Baroque double visions, in fact in a more general sense in connections that might be drawn between early modern / Baroque culture and postmodern culture. In the 1990 s, it was the aesthetic and theoretic avantgarde that tried to pit something against the new public economy of the Reagan-Thatcher policies. Parallax is a useful critical term to discuss how artistic practices in general break norms and conventions, try to see things anew or askance, bring different and often competing points of view into dialogue. In part, I think, the critical concept parallax became trendy at the time because it was able to describe what artists themselves are doing in the 1970 s, 1980 s, and 1990 s. What you now have is a kind of mutual implication between aesthetic practice and theory. You have theorists like Žižek, Kristeva, and Derrida writing about art, and artists reading their theoretical discussions, incorporating these back into their own art. The influence goes in both directions. You have written several pieces for the journal Parallax we mentioned earlier. One is “Freud’s Hysterics, Jaspers’ Nostalgics” ( 1996 ). Which parallactic angle did you have in mind there? <?page no="25"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 25 Whenever I am working on a book, I tend to just give lectures that have to do with its subject because this allows me to work out theoretical problems. This particular article came out while I was working on a book on hysteria, ultimately entitled The Knotted Subject . I wanted to discuss hysteria not just as a psychosomatic illness, but as a form of creative self-expression, which art, in turn, picked up on. In their surrealist manifesto, Breton and Aragon call hysteria the greatest invention of the nineteenth century. For both those suffering pathologically from nostalgia as well as the hysterics, one can say that they offer a different view of the world than what one takes to be the ‘normal’ one. It was important for me to underline that the hysterics Freud discussed in his case histories, while they had real psychosomatic incapacitations, also made a significant point. Their hysteria was a form of communication, a way to articulate that they were dissatisfied with their cultural environment, and particularly with the Law of the Father (as Lacan came to call symbolic law). I wanted to read their interminable self-performances as an appeal: “Look at me, I have something to say! ” The hysteric, I would claim, uses her bodily incapacitation because she believes that the world could be good, she believes in perfectibility, and she believes in the restoration of happiness. It is just the way things are at the moment that produces her discontent. It is important to remember that many of Freud’s hysterics were late-nineteenth century bourgeois women who were highly intelligent and highly gifted. Their incapacitation was their way of articulating that their current situation was unsatisfactory. As such, we can read a political moment in their hysteric utterances about what was wrong with the situation of bourgeois women at the turn of the century, putting into question the need for proper marriages and the valorization of bourgeois wealth. Their insistence of having their voice heard was a critique of the Victorian family’s ideas about what a young woman’s life should be like, her desires, her aspirations, and her visions of the future. Karl Jaspers’ work on nostalgics goes back to his dissertation on Heimweh und Verbrechen ( 1909 ), where he looks at the case histories of young women who were sent away by their parents (usually poor farmers) to work as nannies and who, in order to get back home, would either burn down the house and / or kill the child they were meant to take care of. I thought of these case histories as a fascinating reflection on concepts of the home. In the end, for them, there really was no place like home because, after they had committed their crime, their parents’ house was the one place these young women would never be able to return to. Around 1800 , Heimweh (‘homesickness’) was called die Schweizer Krankheit (‘the Swiss malady’) because there were so many cases of nostalgics in Switzerland: either young girls being sent to work for the farmer on the other side of the hill or young boys who enlisted in the army. <?page no="26"?> 26 Elisabeth Bronfen Jaspers, of course, privileges the young girls who, owing to their homesickness, commit crimes over the young soldiers pining for home in foreign lands. This involves a historically specific parallactic vision, shedding light on a particular industry at the time, which involved the children of the poor, sent away from their families to work under unfamiliar (and psychically unbearable) conditions. What these nostalgics implicitly offer is a comment not only on the poverty in the homes that they had to leave but also on the emotional poverty they came to experience in the homes they were meant to take care of. In both cases, and this was the point I was particularly interested in, their crimes belie the idea of home as a protective space. Both nostalgics and hysterics want to correct the conditions they find in their homes. The hysterics do so by incapacitating their own bodies, the criminal nostalgics by burning down the house they find themselves imprisoned in. We have already touched on Žižek’s groundbreaking role in connection to parallax several times. As both you and Žižek come from psychoanalysis, what is your take on his description of parallax? He describes parallax as the illusion of being able to use the same language for phenomena which are mutually untranslatable and can be grasped only in a kind of parallax view, constantly shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space - although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed side of a Moebius strip. ( The Parallax View 4 ) Žižek mentions several examples: one is the parallax of the unconscious, that is, “(the lack of common measure between the two aspects of Freud’s theoretical edifice, interpretations of the formations of the unconscious [The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious] and theories of drives [ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and so on])” ( 7 , Žižek’s brackets and italics). Žižek also discusses, among others (cf. the ontological difference, the scientific parallax etc.), the political parallax, “the social antagonism which allows for no common ground between conflicting agents […]” ( 10 ). Žižek is the theorist who got us thinking about how fantasy is the way we resolve, on the level of the imaginary, social antagonisms that cannot be resolved in the real. He takes this from Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of myth. Within film studies, this Denkfigur (‘figure of thought’) has been fruitfully used to show how classic Hollywood narratives give resolutions to social antagonisms on screen that are self-consciously marked as fictional resolutions. The statement they make is a double one. They show what it would take for an actual social situation to be resolved, but, by offering only an imaginary resolution, they also point to the fact that it cannot be resolved in the real. It can only be resolved on <?page no="27"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 27 the level of fiction: were it resolvable on the level of the real, there would be no need for the fiction. This does not mean that fiction is a way out. It does, however, draw attention to the fact that there is no resolution possible for antagonisms in the real. Such thinking has proved particularly useful in a globalized world, where we are confronted more and more with politically irresolvable positions between genders, classes, ethnicities, superpowers, religions, etc. Parallax can also be read generally as a trope for the critic’s work with literary texts, we would argue, because in light of one of its etymological strands, namely, the “difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points” ( OED ) parallax, in fact, reflects a critical perspective on a particular text that then is ‘pairallaxed’ with another critical stance. This dialectic - or parallactic tension / contention / energetic struggle - is what gets criticism as such going, is it not? Why is this very basic principle of what we do as literary or cultural critics not commonly recognized and referred to as ‘parallactic’? After all, it is this ‘energy (energia) , contention, gap…’ which is the mainstay of criticism as such. How do you see this? While I would agree with this point to a certain degree, I think one would need to distinguish more clearly between parallax and irony. I am using the notion of irony in the way that Richard Rorty uses it to discuss critical distance. If, however, you say that all criticism is parallactic, you basically are not saying anything about literary criticism. When people, for example, explicitly read texts ‘with the grain,’ I think it would make no sense to speak about this being a parallactic way of reading. They are looking at a text, they may or may not identify with characters in a text or with a narratorial voice, but they are basically still reading within the framework of what the author intends, of what the implicit meaning is, etc. It makes no sense to claim that this is a parallactic activity. I think it is important to bear in mind that parallax has to do with Entstellung (‘distortion’). Distortion is not such a good word because it is so negatively connotated. Entstellung - changing a position ( Stellung ) - involves a conscious production of difference. It involves a tension or space between what you are reading and how you are reading it. So, a parallactic reading of literary texts, for example, would mean explicitly bringing into play the fact that you are not looking for what it says but perhaps for something else. Tom Conley, for example, offers parallactic readings when he is less interested in the story a given film narrative has to tell. Instead, he focuses on surface signs and, in so doing, connects details as well as events that you would never bring together in relation to the story, but that you can find correspondences for, if you purposely do not look at the story. He is less concerned with psychoanalysis, however. Here, I would say, at issue is a tension on the level of the meaning being produced. A typical response from a psychoanalytic critic would be to say about a moment in a text: “it says this but <?page no="28"?> 28 Elisabeth Bronfen it means something else,” and that is, of course, deeply parallactic. I have suggested thinking of psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking that puts everything under suspicion to a certain degree and thus itself partakes of a conspiratorial attitude towards the world. Tom Conley, however, is looking for connections not on the level of the semantics of a text, but on the level of morphemes, of words that are repeated, or visual details. By drawing out these connections, you get an alternative map to the story that is being told; in fact, the text becomes a map, distanced from what the story it is telling, distanced from references the text may be making to an extradiegetic world. Such a reading strategy means that you really are looking at two things at the same time, namely, the text on the page and then the mapping that can be isolated from the story told. You are basically seeing both, and this might produce a new narrative and new semantic interconnections. That, I would say, is also a form of parallactic reading, and one inspired by what Joyce does. In a sense, what Tom Conley produces with his readings is the Joycean text. He offers, in a sense, a Joycean reading because he in a sense ‘imitates’ Joyce, that is to say, he is partaking of the same gesture, which is to isolate words and word phrases and match them up so as to produce a critical textual surface. The notion of producing a critical map foregrounds that his reading strategy is not interested in producing a straightforward critical commentary. Instead, it is aimed at making the reader see interconnections in the text and in his work of Raoul Walsh, a whole set of texts, namely classic Hollywood films of the 1930 s, 40 s and 50 s and how they relate to American culture at the time. I would go so far as to say that what Tom Conley is offering us is an archaeology in the cultural unconscious of modernity, and therein I would see the connection to Joyce. That is what Joyce does as well, only not on the straightforward, literal level by producing new configurations that then allow us to track layers of cultural strata, but also by virtue of effects, or textual effects to be precise. How do you see Eve Arnold’s famous picture of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses ? I am assuming that what Griselda Pollock is going to be playing with is the idea that we do not think of Marilyn Monroe as a reader. What recent publications as well as documentary films have, however, drawn attention to is that no Hollywood star of the 1950 s had herself photographed with books as much as Marilyn Monroe did. She was insistent on showing herself to the camera as a reader. So we might ask ourselves, first of all, why did people not notice this at the time? I cannot recall any photographs of Betty Grable or Lauren Bacall reading, nor even of Katherine Hepburn. The Eve Arnold photograph is particularly striking insofar as here we have a female photographer looking at this star, this icon of feminine seduction, and doing so awry. Although she is photographing Monroe <?page no="29"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 29 in alluring attire, she is playing with the idea that that there are two ways that one can think of this Hollywood idol of feminine fascination. You can either see her as a sex goddess or as a very well-read and, in fact, verbally brilliant person. This photograph was taken late in her all too short life. Marilyn Monroe was already extremely well known for her incredible verbal wit. Whenever she gave interviews, she would come up with these extraordinary quips and comments. I doubt that people wrote them for her to memorize. You find them on the Internet now, of course, and in the publications such as Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words . She would say things like the problem with being a star is that “you’re always running into someone’s unconscious.” 5 Or: “I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol of something I’d rather have it sex than some other thing they’ve got symbols of! ” Her verbal wit is on the level that Joyce is so interested in, and may well have been inspired by her reading of his work. So, the fact that she is reading Joyce, and that she is reading the “Penelope” chapter in Ulysses , suggests that what comes to be condensed at her body in Eve Arnold’s photograph is the feminine jouissance that is celebrated in the Penelope monologue, as well as the verbal wit with which Joyce represents Penelope’s / Molly Bloom’s erotic jouissance . This jouissance , furthermore, is primarily, in the case of the Joyce text, on the level of language. Eve Arnold’s photograph, one might say, appeals to us not to look at Marilyn Monroe’s hips and breasts or whatever - let us not forget that she is cradling the novel in her lap and that she is completely absorbed in her book - but to see her rather as a form of author. Such a reading, of course, goes against not only the way the audience wanted to see Monroe at the time, but also the way the studios were selling her. But what Eve Arnold captures for me is a different Monroe: a Monroe that was trying to author herself over and against the scripts that others were asking her to play, on screen and off. Let us also remember that she had left Hollywood several times and gone to New York already to set up her own production company, to work again with Lee Strassberg. To me, the photograph is an appeal to look anew and see something different in a woman about whom the public thought they knew everything. Fifty years later, after so much has been written about her, this is perhaps more obvious than it was at the time. Let me put it this way: it was possible for people at the time to ignore the way Eve Arnold was asking the audience to take Monroe as an intellectual seriously. It is harder for us to ignore this today. We may well be dealing with the exact opposite of a parallax view. Parallax view is sometimes too willing to see things differently; one could say that in the 1950 s and early 1960 s, people 5 Cf. also: www.theguardian.com / theguardian / 2007 / sep / 14 / greatinterviews <?page no="30"?> 30 Elisabeth Bronfen were still not yet willing to see this icon, and the idiosyncratic femininity she stood for, differently. You seem to have been working parallactically for quite some time. It could be argued that one of your most recent books, Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict ( 2012 ), is structured parallactically, with chapter 4 being the ‘dead center / vanishing point’ and chapters 1 - 3 and 5 - 7 representing two alternative views on / of war and home. Moreover, your book circles around the (haunting) gaze and parallax ultimately also deals with the gaze or perception at large. Another example of your oeuvre would be Crossmappings: Essays zur visuellen Kultur ( 2009 ), in which you not only mention Holbein’s famous anamorphic painting The Ambassadors , a parallactic example par excellence , we would argue, since it captures the visuospatial quality of parallax perfectly; even your very fruitful figure of thought ‘crossmapping’ could, in fact, be read as parallactic, because it precisely engages with the critical thinking space (Denkraum) that is generated by the unorthodox mapping of aesthetic texts of different times and media onto each other, even if they do not stand in a direct intertextual relation. Hence, it seems that you have been working in the ‘parallactic mode,’ so to speak, without actually specifically using the term parallax. Why is this so? If you use the word parallax, people will either think you are referring to conspiracy theory and I did not want that, or they do not know what the term means. Yet, what I have been trying to do in recent years is write philosophically complicated books in such a way that my readers understand my project without being frightened away by theoretical concepts that they are uncomfortable with. That is the simple answer. Yet, Specters of War addresses the same theoretical issues you are concerned with: my claim is that in war, whether on the battlefield or in any other war situations (including marriage as domestic war), you have no clear vision of what is happening, you lack the distance necessary for comprehending. Yet, you always need distance in order to evaluate and, indeed, represent, comment on a situation. That is why I became interested in that gaze over the shoulder of those who fought on Omaha Beach and who could only see the casualties, the three thousand dead, after everything was over. During the battle, their vision was impaired. John Ford, who landed with the second wave, makes the point that while he was filming, he could never see more than about twenty people at a time. His vision was delimited by the viewfinder of his camera. Only afterwards could he understand what he had seen. Written into any representation of war is a parallaxis because there is a blind spot, which the best of the war films comment on. A director like Spielberg is at pains to underline that what he is bringing to the screen is a cinematic re-imagination of the actual historical event. Sitting in the audience, you are looking at an event like Omaha Beach at a different place and time, in a manner that is aesthetically formalized. This is the most basic description of what it means to represent war <?page no="31"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 31 in entertainment cinema. The furor of war can be represented only as an anticipation or as a retrospective reworking. At the same time, because those who return from war can usually not speak about their experiences (or choose not to do so), we are dealing with a form of transgenerational haunting. The children and grandchildren of these soldiers must imagine the war experience their parents and grandparents did not talk about or only talked about in the form of myths. While psychoanalysis uses the notion of transgenerational haunting to speak about inherited trauma, Hollywood films address this type of legacy in less pathological terms. If you think of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers , it becomes clear: the son must imagine his father’s experience on Iwo Jima. And he can only do so by invoking the core gesture of fiction. He knows he was not there, but he tries to imagine what it would have been like if he had been there. What you get is an imaginary approximation: something other than, and perhaps different from, the actual experience but as emotionally effective. Were you thinking about parallax at all when you were writing the book? No. For me, with Freud, Barthes, Kristeva and Derrida as some of my key theoretical points of orientation, it has become completely intuitive to think along the lines of double vision. I am always looking at distortions, always aware that any reading will produce yet another fractured view. Recently, I have also found it more interesting to perform the theoretical issues at stake in a given book project, drawing out thematic analogies rather than foregrounding the theories at issue. I now prefer to show how textual examples are philosophically and aesthetically connected, explaining what the connection is, and then forcing the reader to draw certain connections for themselves. I have come up with the critical concept crossmapping as to draw attention to the cultural survival of visual and thematic forms ( Bildformeln, thematische Formeln ) as these keep resurfacing at different historical moments and in different types of aesthetic representations. Once you see the analogies and correspondences, you are compelled to ask yourself why a problem is resolved in a certain way in one text and in a different way in another text. What does it mean for it to be either resolved in the one or the other manner? Fritz Senn’s definition of parallax reads as follows: “an instance of sending the observant mind in two, or more, different positions and having it compare notes” ( 79 ). His philologist perspective on literature is quite distinct from your own critical perspective. Could you still imagine some common ground between your fundamentally alternate angles? I think the difference lies in the fact that you call his perspective a philologist’s perspective. Philology is a form of textual studies, and I would say, people who work in deconstruction and rhetorical criticism are very much in that tradition. <?page no="32"?> 32 Elisabeth Bronfen While I started out in deconstruction, I have come over the years to be more interested in the interface between verbal and visual representations, and, with the book on war films, the cultural-historical specificity of certain representations. I really see myself now as a Kulturwissenschaftlerin (‘cultural critic and analyst’). At issue is whether you foreground an explication of a text, that is to say, a hermeneutic undertaking, which is what Fritz Senn’s work on Joyce is - it is an explication of the incredibly vast universe that opens up when you do an extremely close reading of the Joyce text. In my recent work, I have come to foreground the interrelation between various media, between literary texts, cinematic texts, and especially the way aesthetic refigurations offer a cultural theory of their own. However, what connects our projects is the idea of bringing two contradictory things into play at the same time, wanting to be looked at those two things simultaneously. Barthes speaks about the duplicity of the signifier and his example is as follows: Driving in a car, you can look out the window. Either the windowpane is in focus or what you are seeing through the windowpane, but never both at the same time. Instead, your gaze must oscillate between the two. 6 I would say that is the bottom line for my own work with aesthetic and cultural artifacts; the way I think about literary texts, their connection to the world and to my own reading. Bibliography Primary Sources Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights . 1847. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Pauline Nestor. London: Penguin, 1995. Print. Browning, Robert. The Ring and the Book . 1869. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Print. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White . 1859-1860. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Julian Symons. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Print. Eliot, George. Middlemarch . 1871-1872. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Print. Hoffmann, E. T. A. Nachtstücke . 1816-1820. Ed. Hartmut von Steinecke, with Gerhard Allroggen. Frankfurt am Main: DTV , 1985. Print. Vol. 3 of Sämtliche Werke . Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker 7. 6 In Barthes’ words: “In the same way, if I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full” ( 123 - 124 ). <?page no="33"?> Parallaxing Joyce: Interview with Elisabeth Bronfen 33 Joyce, James. Ulysses . 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. London: The Bodley Head, 2008. Print. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream . 1600. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition . New York: Norton, 1997. 814-863. Print. -. Hamlet . 1603. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition . New York: Norton, 1997. 1668-1759. Print. Stoker, Bram. Dracula . 1897. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Print. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway . 1925. Ed. Stella McNichol. With an introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print. Films Flags of Our Fathers . Dir. Clint Eastwood. Paramount Pictures, 2006. Film. The Green Lantern . Dir. Martin Campbell. Warner Bros., 2011. Film. The Parallax View . Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Paramount Pictures, 1974. Film. Vantage Point . Dir. Pete Travis. Columbia Pictures, 2008. Film. Secondary Sources Aragon, Louis, and André Breton. “Le cinquantenaire de l’hystérie: 1878-1928.” La Revolution Surréaliste 11 (1928): 20-22. Print. Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies . 1957. London: Vintage, 1993. 109-159. Print. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Crossmappings: Essays zur visuellen Kultur . Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2009. Print. -. Das verknotete Subjekt: Hysterie in der Moderne . Trans. Nikolaus G. Schneider. Berlin: Verlag Volk & Welt, 1998. Print. -. “Freud’s Hysterics, Jaspers’ Nostalgics.” Parallax 2.2 (September 1996): 49-64. Print. -. Hollywoods Kriege: Geschichte einer Heimsuchung . 2012. Trans. Regina Brückner. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2013. Print. -. Liebestod und Femme Fatale: Der Austausch sozialer Energien zwischen Oper, Literatur und Film . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Print. Erbschaft unserer Zeit: Vorträge über den Wissensstand unserer Epoche 13. -. Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film . 2008. Trans. by the author, with David Brenner. New York: Columbia UP , 2013. Print. -. Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict . New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP , 2012. Print. -. “The Conspiracy of Gender: Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s Passionate Histrionics.” Web. 2 April 2013. -. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP , 1998. Print. <?page no="34"?> 34 Elisabeth Bronfen -. Tiefer als der Tag gedacht: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Nacht . Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998. Print. Conley, Tom. “Montaigne on the Road.” Zurich, University of Zurich. Travelling Narratives: Modernity and the Spatial Imaginary. International Symposium, 29 November - 1 December 2013. 30 November 2013. Keynote address. Jaspers, Karl. Heimweh und Verbrechen . Diss. U Heidelberg. Leipzig: Vogel, 1909. Print. Krause, Marcus, Arno Meteling, and Markus Stauff, eds. The Parallax View: Zur Mediologie der Verschwörung . Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011. Print. Mediologie 22. Meryman, Richard. “Great Interviews of the 20 th Century: ‘When You’re Famous You Run into Human Nature in a Raw Kind of Way.’” 17 August 1962. The Guardian 14 September 2007. Edited version. Web. 13 April 2014. “parallax.” OED Online . OUP , December 2013. Web. 23 December 2013. Rorty, Richard M. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity . Cambridge: CUP , 1989. Print. -, ed. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method: With Two Retrospective Essays . Chicago: Chicago UP , 1992. Print. Senn, Fritz. Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation . Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture . 1991. Cambridge, MA : The MIT P, 2000. Print. -. The Parallax View . 2006. Cambridge, MA : The MIT P, 2009. Print. <?page no="35"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 35 Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses Griselda Pollock In the autumn of 1996 , on her way to Dublin to meet with and learn about the work of James Coleman (b. 1941 ), an Irish contemporary artist who, in the moment before PowerPoint, made art installations using tape-slide projections, the esteemed American art historian Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941 ) tells us that she took out, once again, her incompletely read copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses . This is my fourth entry into Bloom’s world. At each reading I come to grief at about page 100. This time I hope to vanquish the book, buoyed by the very landmarks of Bloom’s and Stephen’s passage through the city. (Krauss 89-90) If the arch-modernist intellectual admits that she had to make repeated but unsuccessful forays into this most canonical of avant-garde texts by starting again and again at the beginning, another American, forty years earlier, but this time a movie star, Marilyn Monroe, had a different strategy. Apparently, she just carried the book around with her, dipping in, trying out Joyce’s tome in short doses. She definitely got, if not to, the end. How do we know this? We have a photograph of it (fig. 1 ). Here’s the story. One day, knowing that there can often be dead time waiting around while lighting and equipment is set up, Marilyn Monroe took the heavy, hardbound volume with her to a photo-shoot. The photographer, Eve Arnold ( 1912 - 2012 ), having done her preparations, snapped the actor still reading her book. 1 In her reflections on her ten-year photographic relation with Monroe, Arnold tells this story of how it began: In the early 1950s, Marilyn Monroe saw an article of mine in Esquire which she liked. She asked a colleague to introduce us. The pictures were of a recording session in which Marlene Dietrich sang Lili Marlene and other songs she had made famous during the war. The piece had received attention because it was a documentation, a departure from the carefully lit, posed and retouched genre of movie-star studio portraits. Since Dietrich was known to be extremely knowledgeable about, and a stickler for, proper lighting and camera work, it was considered both a coup and an innovation 1 Arnold was associated with the prestigious Magnum Agency that she joined in 1951 becoming a member in 1957 . <?page no="36"?> 36 Griselda Pollock to have been permitted to photograph her on a bare, neon-lit sound stage while she was at work. (Arnold 9) Arnold and Marilyn Monroe then met in New York at a party for John Huston in 1952 . Arnold writes that Monroe approached her and asked “[…] with a mixture of naïveté and self-promotion that was uniquely hers - ‘If you could do that well with Marlene, imagine what you could do with me ? ’” ( 9 , original emphasis). To make sense of this, we have to summon into our memories the iconically sculpted face of Dietrich from her movies for von Sternberg, couple them with the political stance of Dietrich, adamantly anti-Nazi, singing for the Allied cause, entertaining the troops as Monroe herself did in the later Korean war in 1954 , then look at the photographs Arnold produced of an unvarnished film star rehearsing taken in the least advantageous lighting conditions and snapping the singer, exhausted by the working process of rehearsing and recording. From there, we have to ask what it was that Marilyn Monroe imagined would be the outcome of Arnold’s work with her at this point in her career? It is not at all obvious. Arnold’s account of their encounter is problematic. Arnold places the event of meeting and the photo-shoot in 1952 . Why would Monroe seek out Arnold in 1952 ? It might have been to escape from the staged movie-star and cheesecake photography to which she had subjected herself as the means of getting into and being recognized within the cinema industry. It might have been to be seen backstage, working. But what kind of ‘ au naturel ’ would Arnold produce for Monroe at that point in 1952 when she had hardly made it out of bit parts and was not yet the stellar Marilyn Monroe? Arnold presents Monroe at that moment in 1952 as a “starlet and relatively unknown […] on her way up and anxious for all the press help she could garner” ( 10 ). Hence we could explain her hunger for publicity but not necessarily for a different kind of image. Arnold names the relationship “ quid pro quo , based on mutual advantage” that developed, however, into a friendship. Monroe liked Arnold’s subsequent photographs because “they were a fresh approach for presenting her - a looser, more intimate look than the posed studio portraits she was used to in Hollywood” ( 9 ). It has been established, however, that the photo-shoot in question actually took place in the late summer of 1955 by which time ‘the starlet’ was definitively one of the reigning stars of Hollywood cinema and about to challenge the Hollywood system for greater control of her career on the back of the box office successes of four of her last six films. Monroe was also living in New York, having left Hollywood, and was seeking friendships and a life-style based on the intellectual and artistic culture signified by the East Coast. <?page no="37"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 37 The shoot on which an iconic photograph was snapped matching the American film star to the Irish novelist’s text that she apparently carried around with her was thus scheduled for Labor Day 1955 when Monroe would be staying with her new literary friends Hedda and Norman Rosten on Long Island for the holiday weekend (Rosten). 2 In preparation, Arnold tells us that she had sought a spot that would not draw a troubling crowd. An abandoned playground near the town of Mount Sinai was chosen along with a ‘Chinese landscape’ that unfortunately became marshy after overnight rain. Reproduced repeatedly on covers of books that seek to show a serious side to Marilyn Monroe, the image of Monroe with Ulysses has also become a topic for Joyce scholars (Buchthal and Comment; Jaffe; Mason; Kiberd; Brown and Brown, “Marilyn,” 170 - 79 ). The apparently self-evident contradiction between Monroe and Joyce, between Hollywood cinema and Irish novel, between popular culture and high art, form the obvious points of entry into the reading of this image as a paradox. But they tell us nothing about how, why and with what effect the encounter was engineered and staged that became the photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses, thus introducing a parallax into the histories and meanings of both components of the image: woman and book, Monroe and Joyce. ‘Parallax’ here takes and renders metaphoric the classic definition of displacement of an object that is altered when viewed by different lines of sight. In this case, each element - woman, book, Monroe, Joyce - is displaced and differenced as the lines traced by this encounter shift perspectives and in turn transform each object into a force acting on each other in the field of analysis of this momentary encounter. If Monroe the reader parallaxes Joyce - that is, introduces a radically unexpected position from which to view Joyce - so too does the presence and use of the book Ulysses parallax Monroe - alter and reframe - in ways that will require several different methods to plot. Suspending the celebrity of both actor and novelist, I aim to examine semiotically several photographs from this shoot before subjecting them to cultural, historical and finally speculative readings. Then I aim to work my way through the anecdotal and historical material that frames the photo-shoot, moving from the Monroe archive through to some Joycean studies and back. We shall thus also need to examine the textualities of this case. One is the memoir by Arnold and the other is the section of Ulysses that has been made part of the image so as to arrive at what I am calling ‘Monroe’s Molly.’ 2 She only met the Rostens in 1955 and this fact dates the photo-shoot. See Rosten ( 11 - 14 ) for an account of their friendship initiated by photographer Sam Shaw during the period when Monroe was in New York studying at The Actors Studio. <?page no="38"?> 38 Griselda Pollock I The Photograph: Series and the Pose I cannot trace the original source of this image that floated up through the Internet although I continue to do detective work to locate the original print (fig. 2 ). It seems clearly part of the Arnold-Monroe photo-shoot, but is probably a crop from another print. The close-up already inscribes someone else’s desire to get nearer to the ‘woman’ and to the luminous halo around her absorbed presence. We see a close-up of a young woman reading out of doors. We see her face, bare arms, curling hand and clothed torso. She is seated against a vague parkland background. She appears to be wearing a boldly striped sleeveless t-shirt top over tighter-fitting black shorts - it may be a one-piece bathing suit but external evidence suggests otherwise. 3 Hardly a glamorous or figure-hugging costume, its lively colors create a bold effect visually matching the orange-colored metal bar that cuts into the space while another metal curve is just visible behind the woman’s shoulder. The woman is known to favor white and pale colors so such a noisy vest-top obscuring her well-known form raises a question in my mind. The woman is holding a book in her right hand. The book rests on her thigh and is held in the crook of her arm. Her long fingers curl around the hardback of a long book. The woman appears to be reading its final pages. Looking at the photograph, the eye is drawn to the whiteness of the woman’s flesh and the way its expanse frames her face so that both elements, body and flesh, are set off against the strong, colored stripes of the bathing suit and the surrounding greenery. The face is pale and without sharp contours. The dark lines of the peaked penciled eyebrows, the blackened semi-circles of lowered eyes heavy with mascara and the slash of red on the parted lips produce a face defined cosmetically rather than plastically, in the sense of what a trained artist might draw. Foundation flattens structure and evens out skin tone to float the cosmetically enhanced markers of brows, eyes, and lips that shift us from the face as portrait to the face as icon (Pollock, Vision ). 4 Suspended between classical beauty and winning prettiness, the aesthetic of this face-image is, shall we say, pleasing. It is neither what Roland Barthes defined as the face-object associated with Garbo’s almost unnatural beauty in the film Queen Christina nor is it the winsome gamin -look Barthes suggested was emerging during the 1950 s as its replacement. Barthes had Audrey Hepburn in mind as the new face of this moment. Writing anachronistically to hark back to the age of Garbo or Harlow ( La Chambre ), Barthes found no place for Monroe, perhaps because her publicity images at the time tended to exaggerate 3 There are photographs of Monroe from 1956 vacationing with Arthur Miller wearing this top under a straw sunhat. 4 I discussed this effect in one of my early forays into feminist analysis tracing a genealogy of this in Pollock ( 1998 , 2003 ). <?page no="39"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 39 the Monroe-Harlow reanimation rather than to discover a radically new kind of representation of femininity. Undeniably articulating a specific mode of the feminine in visual representation, I choose to name the quality of this photograph loveliness . Such a quality deflects - a little - the double freight of the image of feminine beauty in phallocentric culture oscillating between an unearthly classical formal beauty that deifies and an earthy, eroticized, corporeal desirability, both of which constructs veil the masculine fear of women’s monstrosity and concealed deadliness. 5 Combining with the pallor of the exposed arms, hand and legs, the backlighting created by the late afternoon sun renders the crown of short blonde hair even more golden, so that it sets off the lightly shadowed face within an aureole of light that contrasts with the bold modernism of the clothing. Shockingly taken in the new bold color that was also cinema’s current tool in the war against television, and whose use was new for the photographer herself schooled in the drama of both documentary and glamor photography in black and white, this photograph enables me to stress the formal infrastructure of the photograph qua composition of woman, setting, light, before it is drowned by the connotational freight of image. What matters here is that the angle of vision does not name the book. So we must read it otherwise. The outdoor setting and the book might connote summertime, leisure-time, vacation reading. Or we could title the photograph a study in concentration. The woman seems absorbed in the book. Can we bear that? Does it not, therefore, suggest her indifference to the witness of the scene, a self-preoccupation that might cause the viewer anguish? How has the image made it bearable for us to gaze upon her when she is neither offered to our gaze nor interested, it seems, in our presence? There is more than silent reading in this image. The woman’s mouth is slightly opened. This animates the moment before us, as if she might be mouthing to herself the words she reads. This introduces into what might otherwise be still and static both the breath of the reader and the relation between words on the page and those not yet heard but ‘mouthed’ in accordance with the passage of graphic signs through a reading consciousness. It turns a scene of reading into the image of the act of reading in which a reading body and a book become a dynamic exchange, inciting eye and tongue, orality and vision. This image serves as a foil for the photograph that stands out from this photo-shoot and has entered into conversation with other worlds: of literary studies 5 I cannot elaborate the Medusan genealogy in detail here but refer readers to two vital texts: Elisabeth Bronfen’s magisterial Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic . Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992 , and Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999 , notably Part 3 - Move 3 : “The Monstrous Union of Virginia Woolf and Marilyn Monroe,” 236 - 272 . <?page no="40"?> 40 Griselda Pollock and feminist analysis (fig. 1 ). The subject of the photograph remains in the same pose. But the photographer has moved some meters to the right of the position in the initial image. Moving out from the fragmented body of the close-up to larger scale, the viewer is now shown the whole woman, seated precariously on a bench that belongs to a children’s playground carousel, her knees drawn up and her left hand almost clasping her right leg. Now a blue metal bar cuts across the space dividing her space from ours. The modernist blue and orange bars of the metal apparatus contrast with the intense greens of the surrounding park while sharing in the stripes of the clothing. The lightly-clad woman perched on the orange bench in her boldly striped, loose-fitting vest-top and shorts is poised between the natural world to which her body might be assimilated (as American nymph or movie-star Venus in a landscape setting) and the manufactured objects that clothe her and hold her body suspended in its frame. What has made this photograph famous and much reproduced results from the fact that the title and author of the book that the woman is holding are now clearly visible. This has been the shock: the punctum as it were, what is not expected. The author’s name is printed in black letters: James Joyce and the title Ulysses appears in red. The image is no longer a picture of a woman reading. It is on the way to becoming a scene of this woman reading this book. I can no longer sustain the device of calling the woman in this photograph simply the woman. It matters, of course, that it is a woman who is reading this novel. But it matters considerably more that this woman is Marilyn Monroe presented in this photograph in a non-Monroe outfit and a non-Monroe situation, on the basis of there already being by the date of this photograph, 1955 , a sufficient archive of images by which viewers would have a sense of what could be identified and expected as photographic Monroe-ness . Perhaps this is partly what this sitting for Eve Arnold was calculated to rework, perhaps explaining why Monroe approached Arnold in order to create a specific kind of image that could be a statement about Monroe not so much ‘ au naturel ’ (although the setting is just that in a very banal sense) but ‘otherwise.’ Just as much a manufactured image as any other, the photograph as event, pose, production, and selection is the site of work by both parties to create a space in that iconography for another dimension of the sitter that cannot but resonate with the whole iconography that precedes it. The hinge is the book in her hands. The date of this photograph, 1955 , means that the public understanding of Monroe as sign would include in reverse order The Seven Year Itch ( 1955 ), There’s No Business Like Show Business ( 1954 ), River of No Return ( 1954 ), How to Marry a Millionaire , Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Niagara - all three major <?page no="41"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 41 hits released in 1953 . 6 Having filmed The Seven Year Itch in New York in the fall of 1954 , Monroe had also become notorious for the prolonged and teasing photo-shoot, witnessed by a considerable crowd at 586 Lexington Avenue for the scene in which her character, known only as ‘The Girl’ stood over a subway vent to allow the rushing air generated by a passing train to cool her legs while blowing her billowing white skirt, often above her waist. A monumental cutout of this scene, tamed somewhat for the actual film, had adorned movie theaters across the nation on the film’s release in January 1955 to gross $ 8 million. Following offers of film parts she thought demeaning, Monroe had walked out on her long-term Twentieth Century Fox contract and moved to New York in a daring gesture of defiance that would only come to an end in December 1955 when her own production company signed a new deal with Fox. Thus the period during which this photo-shoot took place falls between a culmination of an intense three-year period of stardom and months of withdrawal to the other side of the continent, to the other America, identified not with the dream factory but with the gritty, dynamic and intellectual culture of contemporary American literature, theatre and art. Attending Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, getting deeply into psychoanalysis, and cultivating friendships with Jewish and non-Jewish New York poets, photographers and writers living in the city or outside on Long Island or in Connecticut, Monroe was in the process of making a radical gesture of self-fashioning that already involved the splitting off the ‘dumb blonde’ image which she could play comedically to perfection in order to embrace a world hitherto foreclosed to an uneducated working class white girl from the poor, Depression-gutted parts of Los Angeles, a girl ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’ who had spent much of her early childhood engrossed only in the images of the dream factory offered to a lonely child during the 1930 s sitting out abandoned time in the movie theaters of Hollywood. Yet the combination of such potentially knowing uses of literary text and specifically its final, gender-switching episode with the playground setting and the childlike swimsuit creates another line of enquiry. Amongst the few photographs we have of the infancy and toddler years of Norma Jeane Baker are a few shots of a day at the beach with her mother Gladys Monroe Baker. Baby Norma Jeane is wearing a child’s bathing suit of the late 1920 s: black bottom with striped sleeveless top up to the neck (fig. 3 ). This recall of the baby photograph is my association, linking the two scenes. But the oddity of her having 6 In How to Marry a Millionaire , Monroe plays a shortsighted fashion model who pretends to read on an airplane while her myopia is found out because she has the book upside down. This would serve as the model for the joke of the dumb blonde and any book. The book she is reading is Murder by Strangulation , written by a woman whose author picture appears on the back cover. <?page no="42"?> 42 Griselda Pollock chosen a bathing costume that is so radically unlikely in relation to the other costumes she brought with her and wore on the same shoot: a leopard skin one piece which she wore for the shoot in the marshland and the checkered bikini that focused attention on the size and shape of her breasts, suggests that we need to pay attention to the striped outfit’s displacement of attention from those attributes that signified the public’s fantasy of Marilyn Monroe at that date. The photo in the playground is legible, I suggest, as a moment before the camera’s eye of the little sister ‘Monroe’ carried with her, Norma Jeane. To make this point let us look briefly at two other photographs. The woman is now dressed in a ‘Monroe’ signature bikini (fig. 4 ). Strong black and white checks form the halter top of the bikini holding the breasts so that both the symmetrical inner curves of each breast and the upward and outward point of nipple is emphasized as they are held by the cloth tied in the bow at the center. The woman is seen frontally, knees together, wearing matching black and white shoes. She is holding the opened book on her knees, supported by both hands. The woman is seated in the hollow of a gnarled tree that creates a dark frame for the pale hair and glowing skin. Holding the head over the book means that the face is less visible while also becoming less flat. The focus of the image lies between the downturned face and the opened book: the woman’s checkered breasts. The title of the book is not visible. It is just a big book. This reminds us how the elements of Arnold’s full image of Monroe on the carousel with the book’s identity on show achieves its significance culturally as so much more than an image of woman of a certain iconic status, scantily clad holding a serious-looking book. In one of the photographs taken at the other marshy venue during the photo-shoot, the woman is wearing a tight, figure-defining leopard skin bathing suit crawling in the mud of a newly rained-on marshland at the golden hour of a late summer afternoon (fig. 5 ). The difference is that she is meeting the gaze, doing nothing other than posing. The body is stretched out on the ground and out of the muddiest and darkest center of the image rises the golden haired woman in a facial pose she had fashioned for herself: eyes heavy lidded and half closed, head back, mouth open to reveal the upper teeth. The face is written in light in what has become known as a kind of come-hither expression whose explicit sexual invitation Monroe managed both to mute and to monumentalize. The image is almost high fashion modeling with its excessive and unreal setting suggestive of a metaphor: woman as feline beast-cum-serpent slithering out of the primal ooze. Name the brand of swimwear and it would work as fashion photography because model, pose, clothing, and mise-en-scène work in harmony to produce a ‘sign.’ Despite the look, it is not a ‘Monroe’ photograph. <?page no="43"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 43 Back in the playground series, there is one image in which the woman looks up and gazes directly at the photographer (fig. 6 ). The photographer has pulled back and so the body appears suspended in space, arms elegantly crossed and hand hanging into space beneath the carousel’s seat. The focus of the image is the face of the woman. The book’s pages are erased by dazzling light. Floating in this truncated form amidst the trees and earth held on the orange and blue frame the pensive gaze of the woman meets the camera’s lens and the photographer’s hidden eye and the contemporary viewer’s incoming gaze with acquiescence, with gentleness, with wistfulness. It is not one of the exhibitionary photographs for which Monroe was expert, projecting out a vibrant or overtly sexual force. Arnold placed this image as the first product of the shoot to be illustrated in her 1987 publication on page 38 . It opens the section titled “Miller Place, Long Island, 1952 .” It introduces another story - what happened near Miller Place two days before the famous shoot in the playground near Mount Sinai. Walking on the beach near her home on Long Island, Arnold tells us that she met the poet Norman Rosten and a pretty, plump, blonde woman who looked small and remote. It turned out to be Monroe, who suggested a meeting the next day. Arnold then records the story of what occurred the next afternoon when she witnessed the arrival of Monroe on the beach and the ‘storm’ it caused once the other swimmers recognized the movie star. Monroe arrived in a white bikini: Tight, short, white balloon-cloth bottoms and a bifurcated brassiere, each section barely covering a breast and supported by a narrow band at the base. There were string shoulder straps to hold it up. On her head she had a huge natural-coloured straw hat and for footgear she had found a pair of men’s army boots - government issue. (39) Drawn to her as she went to swim, a massive crowd gathered around her in the water, packed so closely that the Rostens and Arnold feared the crush would drown Monroe, who had to be rescued by the harbor police (or passing lad in a speedboat). Norman Rosten would also record a slightly different account of this extremely dangerous moment in which he plays a central role in which Monroe could easily have died ( 16 - 18 ). This episode precedes the account of the photo-shoot. Arnold is a bystander, watching the manipulation of the scene by Monroe in performative mode, creating the scene by displaying herself in a public place, dressed in this curious combination of revealing bikini, farm-girl hat and army boots. Then moving into the water, Monroe becomes the potential victim of her own Siren-like power to draw people, men as well as women we must presume, towards her. The magnet - the self-sexualizing woman on display in the new garment named after the atoll on which nuclear bombs were tested - risks being drowned in the <?page no="44"?> 44 Griselda Pollock enthusiasm she has so consciously stirred up and desired. Who is the persona this same photographer encounters when alone with her soon thereafter? Thus if the best-known photograph from this photo-shoot appears to be a picture of a known Hollywood movie star reading a - if not the - most notorious and toughest of modernist novels of twentieth century literature, this back story of model, photo-shoot and its very varied results indicates that the cultural iconicity of the one image (fig. 1 ) requires now a critical and cultural reading of what makes it distinct: iconic. Now we need to approach this image from the Joycean angle. II The Joyceans Read the Image The most obvious level of reading of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses (fig. 1 ) is as paradox or worse, as a joke. Joyce scholar Richard Brown remarks: For many (and not only male) readers of the photograph who now frequently talk to me about it, the photograph and certainly this reading of it would have a primarily comic effect. How can one imagine Marilyn Monroe, prime cultural symbol of a certain kind of “dumb blonde” stupidity, reading Ulysses , equally potent cultural symbol of demanding literary genius, a kind of Everest for readerly intellectual achievement? In popular cultural semiotic shorthand the two symbols clash to produce a response of derision, just as Marilyn herself famously had to contend with derisory laughter at her acting and cultural ambitions throughout her career. (172) If it were, as a consequence of the typing, impossible to imagine Monroe ‘really’ reading a ‘good book’ at her leisure, the book becomes, according to this reading, merely a prop in a staged photo-shoot that also belittles Monroe because it is […] part of an elaborate symbolic code that operates between picture and viewer that may have overtones that are both erotic and sinister in the sense that the subject of the picture herself is ironically excluded from the code and victimized within its terms. The self-style knowing (and let’s say voyeuristic) reader, no doubt bringing certain assumptions about Ulysses as a famous “dirty” book, may find the whole scene subliminally eroticized by the presence of the text. (172) So much more than a prop, argues Brown, the presence of the book Ulysses itself, by virtue of its other reputation as a scandalous text, endows the scene once again with the very erotic overtones it seeks to foreclose. By linking Monroe the sex goddess with avant-garde literature, the scene had attempted to refute the dominant paradigm associating Monroe with sexuality, which ironically the Joycean text reinjects. This creates yet another reading. The scenario might then be said to play, in an almost Sadean manner, with the idea of the innocent “dumb blonde read[ing] a dirty book,” her face expressing a certain “ravished <?page no="45"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 45 but sexual innocence” as she parts her lips in inadvertent erotic response to what she is reading ( 172 ). At this point of his essay, Brown counters these readings by attending to the Eve Arnoldness of the photograph. That is to say, Arnold was known for capturing the famous outside of their own self-imaging, in off-duty moments, in intimate reveries and revealing quietude. Thus, beyond that first, sexist level of reading for the inherent comic quality of Monroe reading Joyce, and the second Sadean twist of Monroe as abused Justine, this image might read as a moment when Monroequa -Monroe is off-duty, a dimension heightened by the withholding of the film star’s typically soliciting and camera-directed gaze, which is, instead, focused on the book, and thus bonded with a moment of intimacy with literature indifferent to the presence of a viewer so structural to her on-screen persona. Reading is an intimate activity but here it is staged before at least one other - the photographer - to create an image that may become public (that is the intention) while being an image of what is typically not shown in performative mode before the movie camera when enlivening the decade’s sexist comedies with impersonation. ‘Acting’ is displaced by staging an image formula for ‘being a self,’ which may itself need props borrowed from the world of literature. To gain further insight, Richard Brown approached the photographer, Eve Arnold, by then living in England, to ask her about the historical situation in which Monroe coincided with Joyce’s novel. He received a letter from Arnold dated 20 July 1993 in which the photographer vouchsafed this story of the photograph: We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet. As far as I remember […] I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself - but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned - but almost more her input. (174) Do we, can we, believe this story that raises as many questions as it appears to solve? Let me recap. Brown set up the voyeuristic reading: the photo is a joke at Monroe’s expense. Then he shifted our reading. Her half-opened mouth introduces a sense of sexuality both to text and subject. He then offered Arnold’s account, which makes Monroe the subject of the picture and the book is no longer a prop. It is what Monroe was doing before being photographed. Now the photograph is literally of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. She becomes <?page no="46"?> 46 Griselda Pollock the subject as reader, introducing into the cultural history of the novel the particularity of that reader with all her own connotations. For Brown, this opens onto his concerns as a literary scholar who is exploring what he names the post-culturalist status of Joyce’s text. This means that by tracking the subsequent, varied and perhaps specifically the feminine or feminist readings of Joyce’s text, themselves shifting as the histories of women and sexuality shift over the twentieth century, and thus altering the very sense of what women could be, the text is refashioned preposterously by its readers post-culturally (Bal). 7 The book becomes what its readers introduce into a text that has, however, anticipated them and their unforeseen changes to gender and sexuality. In this sense Brown can conclude: That far from being comical or all too obvious, imagining what we might do with Marilyn as a reader of Ulysses remains one of the most exciting, challenging and complex tasks that we, as teachers and theorists of the literary text, can perform. ( 179 ) This might count as one moment of ‘ parallaxing Joyce,’ arriving at the text from Monroe as one such preposterous reader bringing her own history, era and sexual radicalism to the text, given Monroe as a figure of sexuality embedded in her own singular historical and cultural moment. In this Brown is acknowledging and extending an argument made by Giorgio Melchiori just one year after the photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses was made iconic by its publication in Arnold’s personal account of photographing Monroe over a decade titled Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation . Melchiori writes: She is in shorts, sitting on a playground roundabout, reading from a ponderous volume. The Book is Ulysses , and it is clear from the way the book is open, that she is reading the last episode, Penelope. What is remarkable is her expression; it shows a child’s concentration, and a child’s perplexed wonder. She is translating - translating Molly’s allusive unpunctuated stream of words in the language of her personal experience, or rather she is experiencing Molly’s language as one of Marilyn’s languages. Like any other reader of Joyce’s work, she is not so much appropriating a linguistic experience, as creating it, writing anew, at each reading, Joyce’s book. (7-9) Even in being represented twice as a Justine-like innocent, a child, in this reading Arnold’s Monroe becomes more than a reader. She is another writer of an open text. 7 Bal’s concept of preposterous history refers to a way of understanding cultural history such that works or images precede chronologically images or works that in effect produce the earlier works or images as their aftereffects. Thus the readers of Joyce’s text are makers of that text rather than merely consumers of a fixed, time-confined original. <?page no="47"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 47 Of all the movie stars of her generation and even of Hollywood, Monroe is the only one for whom we can find a substantial archive of photographs of the star with a book. Literature played a role in this woman’s life and in her managed self-representation. With the publication of private notes and notebooks of Marilyn Monroe in 2010 under the title Fragments , the Huffington Post amongst other press organs published lists and images of books on Marilyn Monroe’s shelves ranging from Steinbeck, Dreiser, Miller and Hemingway to Conrad, Camus and Flaubert (Buchthal and Comment 226 ): What couldn’t Marilyn Monroe do? The stunning actress is remembered for her beauty and captivating on-screen presence, but, as most book nerds know, she was also a voracious reader and writer. Nerds everywhere have drooled over photos of her thumbing through books on Goya or sunbathing with James Joyce’s Ulysses in-hand. Fragments , a new book that anthologizes poems, notes and letters by Monroe, offers a glimpse into her fascinating reading life. Not only did she seem to adore Hemingway and Steinbeck, but she even tried her own hand at creative writing. (“Marilyn Monroe’s Books,” par. 1) On 28 - 29 October 1999 , Christie’s New York auctioned 390 books belonging to Marilyn Monroe, which were then listed by Stephen J. Gertz in 2010 . 8 For an era before Amazon risked impoverishing us all by the ease with which books can be acquired, a library of this size acquired by someone who never finished high-school, was married at sixteen, sent to work in a factory at eighteen and became a pin-up model and a struggling actress thereafter before finally achieving some stardom at the age of twenty-six is not only remarkable. It is indicative of a desire to enter into the world opened up by literature and shared thus with those who normally inhabit that world. This is a matter of class as well as gender in a cultural structure of inclusion and exclusion against which Norma-Jeane Baker-become-Marilyn-Monroe actively worked in her self-fashioning as a person of substance not only of surface and desirability. Her decision to be photographed in repeated relation to literature functions, therefore, as both her attempted reparation of a missing education and as a statement about her relation as a woman, a working class white girl, and an actress, to what others inhabited: Culture. At times she got the coordinates of this search for the image that could combine both elements wrong (fig. 7 ). In 1952 , Philippe Halsman, also a Magnum photographer, often working for Life magazine, did a photo-shoot with Monroe in her Hollywood apartment. Monroe posed in a see-through black negligee that had lacy material covering her breasts and a somewhat more opaque under layer 8 Gertz <www.booktryst.com / 2010 / 10 / marilyn-monroe-avid-reader-writer-book.html> accessed 2 February 2014 . <?page no="48"?> 48 Griselda Pollock to ensure some genital modesty. In her exotic and self-sexualizing garb, Monroe set up an awkward opposition between this costumed image and what an attempted self-portrait indexed by setting herself amongst the contents of her apartment, which featured a bookcase and a record player. She loved Beethoven we are told. The bookcase held many hard-backed books as well as some larger art books on Goya and Botticelli. A photograph of Eleanor Duse, the renowned Italian dramatic actress, is visible on a side table. In this image, Monroe is seated crossed-legged on the floor, a black chiffon scarf draped over her breasts, her arms extended to hold an open book between her opened legs, her gaze focusing down on the pages. But there is perhaps too much in this image to allow the gesture at its core to exercise the kind of disturbance to expectations we discover in the economy of Arnold’s photograph. One of the canonical novels of the modern era owned and we assume read by Monroe from those shelves is entirely about a woman led astray by her reading of romantic literature: Madame Bovary . The central character of Gustave Flaubert’s novel tries to live out the fictions of her reading only to find cruelty and abuse that lead to her suicide. Setting woman the reader as the opposite of man the writer, Flaubert added a new and powerful chapter to the constructs of woman, reading, intellect, passion, truth and fantasy, and the correlation between femininity and mass culture that Andreas Huyssen has identified from the mid-nineteenth century ( 45 - 62 ). What woman and the masses appear to share is the susceptibility to the illusions and manipulations of the pleasures of the text. Where can we fit an image of a woman reading a post-Flaubertian modernist novel, in which the title of the novel signposts a degree of serious engagement with experimental literature and with one of the most iconic images of a transgressive, modernist literature that in reworking a classical epic gives the final word to a woman using the words to speak her sexuality? What sense can we make of the juxtaposition of this novel with an equally iconic signifier of its times, whose freight is neither fantasy nor piety, neither purity nor intellectuality, but sexuality under a new post-Kinseyan, pre-feminist regime? Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was published in 1953 , the year of both the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the first issue of Playboy magazine. 9 9 This juxtaposition is made by Brown ( 170 - 79 ), Podlesney ( 80 - 90 ) and Pollock (“Killing” 226 - 27 ). <?page no="49"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 49 III Photography Given to us by Eve Arnold in several places, the story of this photograph has, as I have already shown, certain inconsistencies. Misdating the shoot on Long Island to 1952 , linking it closely to the meeting with the actor at the 21 Club in New York at a party for John Huston, who had directed Monroe in her first dramatic role in Asphalt Jungle ( 1950 ), Arnold told Richard Brown in 1993 - let me quote the letter again hearing it differently: She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time […]. When we stopped at a local playground she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned - but almost more her input. (174, my emphasis) Do I believe this contingency? Great photographs often come about because of chance situations that are seized upon by the photographer. Clicking several frames of a then newly but seriously famous movie star reading a book, wearing a shapeless and figure-disguising vest-top and shorts in a children’s playground suggests to me, however, that much more is going on. The given reasons for going to an abandoned children’s playground to be able to shoot freely in natural light so as also to avoid potential crowds who might recognize the model takes us only to the beginning of what happened and is happening in the photograph before us. The photographer has no idea what will be the outcome of the exercise. S / he hopes that there will be amongst the many frames shot something called ‘the photograph,’ something that becomes an event sustained by both the rightness of the formal elements and the achievement of an affective surcharge that will take the photograph from being mere record of there-and-then across the threshold into its acquiring iconicity. Roland Barthes famously gave us the terms studium and punctum as tools for analyzing why some photographs inform us while others arrest us, holding us before them in fascination, often with a detail ( La Chambre ). For Barthes, the punctum , the wounding trauma of the photograph, is contingent and personal in contrast to the informational or culturally recognizable dimensions of a photograph. The Arnold-Monroe photograph is interestingly resistant to this distinction. At once a legibly cultural image in terms of the ‘readers of Joyce’ and the self-fashioning of Monroe in 1955 , both of which are triangulated by the personal encounter of Monroe and Arnold, two women are alone with a camera between them in an out of the limelight space at the magic hour of the day. Approached from another image theory offered by art historian Aby Warburg’s concept of the Pathosformel and what Warburg identified as the iconological interval, the photo-image becomes the place of a trans form ation. The <?page no="50"?> 50 Griselda Pollock transaction has to hold the cognitive and the affective in an incalculable tension which can be identified not at the level of personal memory (Barthes) but of cultural memory, transmitted through the persistence or the after-living of the image as carrier, through gesture and formulation of signs that arouse once again the passion originally performed and encoded in a body’s action or a gesture’s expressiveness. If the photographer is both at work in hope of achieving ‘the photograph,’ and then after printing and selecting, acting only as the belated discoverer of an event s / he did not witness in the rush of clicking many shots while working diligently with her lenses, light readings, angles, and film stock, the model emerges now as so much more than the mere object of that image-work. The model / photographer / photograph triangle has to be rethought because we have paid attention to the elements in these images that formally, aesthetically and iconologically cohere. In the field of photography in which Eve Arnold was working, the person who was the subject of her photograph was already expert in ‘being for a camera.’ She was to a profound extent its effect. Norma Jeane Baker had been discovered by being photographed one day in a parachute factory. She had been encouraged to take up modeling. She had worked hard and long in many kinds of photo-shoots to keep herself visible and alive including many on the cheesy and the semior even soft-pornographic side of the image industry. She became an anguished and brilliant star of the spectacle of cinema in a world where her future lay in maintaining an endless visibility in the public eye that might keep the sexist moguls giving her work because she made them money through the public’s hunger to ‘see’ her. The Arnold-Monroe-Joyce event is, however, a specific site of photographic, not cinematic history. Movies involve performing for the camera rather than merely being photographed. Photography is the work of the pose. Beyond acting for the movie camera and posing as the star made known by and identified with all the roles played for the movie camera, another persona was in the process of being photographically produced in self-making images projected towards the image-finder (in the photo-shoot) and in images discovered by the photographer (in developing and printing) after what occurred in that transaction when the contact sheets were perused, doctored, rejected and selected. It is significant that one of the few scholarly essays dedicated to the exquisite skills of Monroe in still photography, titled “The Body as Art” by Kathryn Benzel does not discuss the photographic shoot created with Eve Arnold and hence the photograph of Monroe reading Ulysses . This is all the more puzzling because of the way Benzel introduces her study of Monroe’s artistic agency in still photography. <?page no="51"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 51 The legend built around Marilyn Monroe in forty-something biographies, her films, and films about her portrays an artist whose beauty and sensitivity were taken advantage of by Hollywood’s star system and the public’s need for an American heroine. Most of these portraits present Monroe as a victim overwhelmed by her own success and sexuality, bound up in a kind of sexual advertisement. But the Monroe myth does not simply represent only her sexuality; it also epitomizes her struggle against the Hollywood star system, against female stereotypes, and against her own insecurities. Monroe demonstrates this paradoxical image in an artistry that both represents and undermines the stereotype of the sex goddess. (1, original emphasis) Benzel will push the tension between the concurrent construction and resistance to argue for the production of another configuration of sexual difference, subjectivity and the body in the ‘work’ of Monroe in still photographs. We see that even though the Monroe myth was conceived through media texts of others, primarily men, she manipulated those conventions so as to complicate and confuse the expected image of the sex goddess, and to reveal her own artistry as one based not on the masculine definition of sexuality but on her unique definition of femininity. (1) The manner in which this can occur is identified by Benzel in a play between objecthood and subjectivity in the image, which is a non-verbal text, a statement with the body: When Monroe displays herself as object and plays herself as subject in still photographs, Monroe becomes the artistic subject in a text without words, a text that invites the viewer’s participation. (1) The pin up, the film noir femme fatale, the pouting Clara Bow type ‘it’ girl: there are many tropes in this archive which Monroe, having spent a childhood watching the screen idols of the 1930 s and 1940 s had internalized from not only Garbo and Crawford, but also Mae West and Jean Harlow. We can see her replaying these grand Hollywood ‘queens’ in many of her posed photographs, which verge, sometimes knowingly, into the mode of camp. Monroe began as a model, learning her craft with David Conover and Andre de Dienes. Once beginning to get visibility as a movie star, over her career, she worked with rather than just for some remarkable photographers. The archives of Richard Avedon, Philippe Halsman, Sam Shaw, Milton Greene, Cecil Beaton, Bert Stern, George Barris reveal the extraordinary range of Monroe as photographic subject - the paradoxical term that alone does justice to the personae that she fashioned in this intimate relation to artists whose unique photographic styles she was able to recognize, mobilize, respond to, extend in the moment of joint production of a visual event created with the camera. <?page no="52"?> 52 Griselda Pollock Detailed study of all these archives is needed to expand these passing remarks about the genesis of that which now constitutes the multiplicity of visual signs that nonetheless share more than the common designation of a name of the model-subject: a fake name, an assumed and confected persona Marilyn Monroe. But now is not the time. The statements above serve as background to Monroe’s work with one photographer before whose lens the agent we must now name Monroe / Baker could work differently and did so: Eve Arnold. Clearly her difference is her difference; she was a woman photographing the subject Baker-become-becoming-Monroe. But a world of complexity lies in that statement. Nothing can be presumed either from the fact of their shared gender since the potential for erotic exchange between women is both possible and a known possibility for Monroe / Baker. The shifter is the man’s book. IV The Book Let us now turn to the other star of the photograph: the book itself. It too has some history. I am pretty convinced that the chance presence of this hardback volume of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Marilyn Monroe’s car cannot account for the existence of these images of Monroe with the book during the 1955 shoot. In his substantial biography, Donald Spoto details the activities of Monroe during 1955 . In March, Spoto states that Monroe scoured the bookshops in lower Manhattan ( 348 ). I imagine that she went to the most famous, the Strand Bookstore, founded in 1927 on Fourth Avenue, which was New York’s legendary Book Row. There were forty-eight bookstores on the stretch that ran from Union square to Astor Place, of which only the Strand survives to this day as a major emporium of new and second hand books. There she bought her copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses . It was a significant copy she bought, being the first American edition published in 1934 by Random House. This edition was brought out immediately following the historic judgment in 1933 by Judge John M. Woolsey of the United States District Court that Joyce’s book was not obscene. This occurred before the censorship was removed in Britain ( 1936 ) and thus made the American edition the first legal publication of the book in the English-speaking world. The ruling of Judge Woolsey, named a “distinguished critical essay,” was included in the publication (Levin 128 ). I shall come back to Woolsey’s essay in the final section. As part of my research, I acquired a copy of the same edition (fig. 8 ). I was surprised when it arrived. The book was so much smaller and more compact than it appeared in the photographs, where it seems a heavy tome. I have practiced holding the book in the pose. It is difficult. There has to be some tension involved in holding the back upright, the legs at that angle and arm across the legs. <?page no="53"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 53 Despite its presence, we cannot assimilate the photograph that contains a visual reference to Ulysses to the Joycean field. The photograph is about a deliberate inclusion of this specific book, this personally-owned volume in the creation of the photographic self-inscription / self-creation by a woman whose identity remains elusive despite the immense exposure of images of her, images performed by her, images solicited and managed by her in conjunction with intelligent and gifted photographers. Something is being signaled in a relay between the woman and the book that needed Eve Arnold, who would snap the casual (but clearly) staged moment of Monroe reading its final pages. V Monroe’s Molly Arnold tells us that Monroe was honest about her experience with Joyce. The book was hard-going and she could not grasp it all. She dipped in and enjoyed reading the words aloud. Nonetheless, Arnold’s photographs, I suggest, are not of Monroe reading Joyce, nor is she as Giorgio Melchiori suggested, just mouthing Joyce’s unpunctuated language. She is doing something far more specific. As Melchiori pointed out, those familiar with the novel will know that the final fifty pages are the concluding episode Penelope , known as Molly Bloom’s monologue. Lying in bed, toe to head with her husband who has not had sex with her for ten years since the death of their infant son, the Gibraltar-born performer and beauty Molly is reminiscing about their life together, her sexual liaison with Boylan and others, her meeting with Leopold and her accession to his proposal of marriage symbolized in the repeated word: YES . The affirmation that begins the fifty-page, eight-paragraphed monologue and, repeated several times, ends it. For some, according to Richard Brown, this places Monroe’s eyes, mouth and fingers in the “dirtiest part” of the dirtiest book ( 172 ). Yet as the same scholar rightly remarks, the cultural revolution of the 1960 s that has occurred since both 1934 and 1955 has turned the discourse of sexuality itself upside down, not cleansing its dirtiness but restoring the cultural value of its honesty. In 1933 , the book was tried for obscenity. Judge Woolsey’s judgment had this to say in its exoneration of the explicitness and use of old Saxon words for sex and body parts “known to almost all men and, I venture, many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe” (xii). If sex was on their minds a lot, the judge reminds his readers that the book is set in a Celtic culture and in the spring. He thus concludes: Ulysses is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me disgusting, but although it contains, as I have <?page no="54"?> 54 Griselda Pollock mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers. (xii) A page earlier the judge commented in the innovative mode of writing with which Joyce was experimenting: Joyce has attempted - it seems to me, with astonishing success - to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of actual things around him, but also in the penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the unconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing. What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus by varying degrees. (xi) I imagine Marilyn Monroe reading this very useful introduction to the novel, grasping from it what kind of reading the novel anticipated through her own increasing understanding not only of modernist literature but her other great interest, psychoanalysis, and hence psychic life. She might recognize the multiple layers of lived and momentary time and the web of impressions that floated into and out of focus in this palimpsestic condition to which Joyce sought to give literary form. As a cultural agent and that culture’s willing representative in regard to the continuing struggle over honesty and sexuality in a Puritanical American culture, Monroe herself sits in the mid-point between the moment when Joyce’s, and let it be said Lawrence’s, literary work challenged existing concepts of the sayable in the field of sexual under the legal rubric of obscenity, and the subsequent impact of the feminist intervention which would introduce a new element into the debate: women’s right to claim a sexuality associated with their own agency and self-knowledge, articulated through a ‘new language of desire.’ Monroe is not reading Ulysses . She is not just writing Ulysses anew in a post-culturalist gesture. She has chosen to be photographed in a specific encounter with Molly Bloom, the single woman character with a voice, who speaks its final pages in a written form that resists the literary convention of grammatical syntax in a manner infinitely more defiant than the use of coarse, everyday vocabulary for sexual parts and bodily functions. We arrive simultaneously at her present and her memories, woven on the palimpsestic plane of a modernist representation of a feminine subjectivity and sexuality that has a <?page no="55"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 55 voice, a consciousness, memories, and presumably an unconscious archive of a formative past. If we merely remained with the conventional paradox of Eve Arnold’s photograph as being the conjunction of the sex goddess / dumb blonde reading the mighty tome representing avant-garde literature, we would be tempted to miss the historical moment of which Monroe was both an effect and an agent, a moment that would begin the cultural shifts around sexuality and gender, shifts which mark the distinctiveness of the women’s movement of the later twentieth century. I am proposing that Marilyn Monroe was not casually carrying around a book that was used to while away the tiresome moments of waiting for the technology to be ready. Monroe chose a particular swimming costume to wear for a shoot in a playground carousel and posed in the act of mouthing aloud to herself the words of James Joyce’s woman character, the one moment of a woman’s point of view, even if imagined by a man. Episode 18 traces a certain picture of the world from a woman’s point of view while also being a representation of the world of women from Joyce’s imagined view of women. Two themes of the unpunctuated stream of consciousness that would only make sense when read aloud as if spoken, as if acted, are the inner loneliness of one woman longing to be loved, remembering her childhood loss of a friend, feeling acutely the coldness of her husband and the disinterest of her child. This loneliness is matched by the subsequent section that reveals the uncertainty that expresses itself in envy and competitiveness with other women over their abilities as performers and their sexual knowledge. If Monroe chose to be photographed reading Molly Bloom’s monologue, she was making visible a knowledge of the structure of the novel that would be apparent to any other reader of Ulysses . She is speaking to them. She was also inviting that knowing reader to remember the text sufficiently to engage with what it was in that section that might be pertinent to a woman reader, someone involved in performance, in competition and in the public and private knowledge about her sexual persona and history. There are several reasons why we might discover Monroe-Baker reading Molly Bloom’s monologue written in eight unpunctuated sentences. Posing a challenge for the educated reader expecting parsed sentences, the power and significance of this formatting goes well beyond the anecdotal explanation that Joyce here thought to reproduce the format of the eccentric written prose of his wife, Nora Barnacle. It is a written representation of the speaking voice whose phrases are not graphically marked with punctuation, but with pauses and elisions, shifts and switches, returns and resumptions of dropped thoughts, tenses and interruptions. Fancied up as ‘stream of consciousness’ in literary theory, this dramatic format would be alive to an actor such as Monroe, newly exploring <?page no="56"?> 56 Griselda Pollock ‘the Method’ and thus bringing to any words on the page the necessity to animate them with memory, to enliven them with resonances from the bodily and psychological experiences of the person whose speaking of the words would make them become vivid, real, believable. Whose words might she be thus enlivening: Joyce’s impersonation of a woman? In exploring the unhappy history of literature by women and about women, Virginia Woolf, the co-creator of stream of consciousness writing, famously castigated her predecessors in literature such as Charlotte Brontë for their failure to create a new sentence attuned to feminine experience and subjectivity; Charlotte Brontë was criticized for her disfiguring mimicry of the portentous tone of the masculine, Dickensian sentence ( A Room 76 - 77 ). Beyond a new writing was the other question of the writing of feminine desire. Virginia Woolf would also claim that, to her knowledge, no woman yet had been free enough to write what must be written for writing to be true, namely the “truth about my own experiences as a body.” She sets the scene, describing a scene of modern writing for a woman being like that of “a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water […] letting her imagination sweep round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged beneath the depths of our unconscious being.” Freely rushing, the imagination-line flows until it smashes against something hard that destroys the dream. “To speak without a figure, she has thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say […]. She could write no more.” Woolf roundly denounces the men of her time who thus censor women’s imaginations. They allow themselves a freedom while condemning such freedom in women. Woolf concludes: “[…] telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt any woman has solved it yet” (“Professions” 61 - 62 ). If as still image and cinematic icon ‘Marilyn Monroe’ takes her place, as she must alongside both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf - the latter bearing witness to the limited freedom of women that contrasts with the former’s freedom if temporarily halted by censorship - in a history of sexuality, of its censorship and its contestation, of its inscription and its representation, the juxtaposition of the woman who was Norma Jeane Baker and became Marilyn Monroe, living the tension between a deeply troubled past and an invented, self-fashioned persona lived in the limelight of publicity, celebrity and visibility, the photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses cannot be considered a curiosity or a mere paradox. She is knowingly reading a specific, notorious and significant episode within the epic modernist narrative of masculine subjectivities. She has placed herself in and with Penelope in a moment of history when Virginia Woolf and other women’s voices were not yet part of the canon of the ‘Culture’ an aspir- <?page no="57"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 57 ing, working class white woman would seek to acquire to pass amongst the masculine intelligentsia of New York. She had, as she always had to do, to draw nourishment from the perverse offerings of masculinist culture, high and low, in which the resources for fashioning oneself as a woman-subject conflicted with becoming famous for being all sorts of idiotic, sadistically conceived characters who functioned as a foil for narratives essentially about the drama of the men in the story. In a deep sense, we might argue that in her preor even non-feminist moment, Joyce’s Molly was the best she could get. The point I am making is that granting Monroe agency in the making of this image produces Monroe’s Molly , a tantalizing event that feminists might just want to reclaim. The reading of this section of James Joyce’s otherwise hard-going novel may well have been a revelation at many levels to the aspiring working-class woman who became Marilyn Monroe. It represents another way of saying things that did not need the accoutrements of education and practiced literacy. It inscribes, even within the marking of feminine difference by its irregular formatting, a woman’s point of view, a sexual woman’s point of view, speaking of her relations to men, speaking a kind of imagined truth of her experiences as a sexually desiring body and a lonely soul. When we return to Eve Arnold’s photograph, we see both Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker ventriloquizing the words from a novel - high art - that breached its own censors to speak the body and to create within it a space that gave words that had to be voiced to become intelligible to a woman speaking her experiences as a body and a soul in a world of men. Could any photograph ‘say’ all this? No. By virtue of the seeming paradox of sex goddess reading Joyce, it could, would and has provoked a reading that tries to say some of this. Thus the image contradicts Arnoldness , for Eve Arnold never produced another image like it, with or without Monroe. It contradicts Monroeness , so often performed for the camera in a dazzling variety of forms that always leave us gazing in fascination - or revulsion or embarrassment - at the image that remains enigmatic in terms of telling us who the person thus imaged was. The photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses, however, is one of those rare moments of crossover between two histories, cinema and literature, that also offers a parallaxing of both in their representative forms: the woman-actor and the man-novel. With her choice to be seen reading the end of Ulysses , Monroe was clearly making a knowing point, an identification perhaps at so many levels with the words, the spoken words of an uneducated woman, allowed to have an inner and a sexual life, and to have the final say. Between the ludic elements of the child in the playground and the vamp in the swamp, this extraordinary image was formed when Monroe performed for herself Joyce’s text and created, with Eve Arnold’s unknowing compliance, the passing glimpse of Monroe’s Molly. <?page no="58"?> 58 Griselda Pollock Epilogue I want to end with the legacy of this image in another citation. In the remarkable TV series Gilmore Girls , written by Amy Sherman-Palladino between 2000 and 2007 , three generations of women, grandmother, mother and daughter, are the focus of a women-centered narrative of great intelligence, pathos and wit. Rory Gilmore, the daughter born out of wedlock to her sixteen-year-old mother Lorelei, comes of age in a lively environment of a mythical small-town in Connecticut: Stars Hollow. Rory is intelligent and will ultimately make it to Yale. During her adolescence, she is frequently shown reading. Of course, she is reading Ulysses . Here is a schoolgirl in uniform, backpack on her back, frowning in concentration as she reads a chapter falling right in the middle of the book. Rory seems to be reading Episode 13 : Nausicaa . What is fascinating is that this fictional character has given rise to a book club fostering reading literature as a cool occupation for girls based on the example of the representation of femininity proffered by Rory Gilmore, who will move on from James Joyce in her early teens to Sylvia Plath as she gets older. In setting this scene, Sherman-Palladino has to be knowingly referencing the Arnold-Monroe image. But instead of the sunbathing movie star, we have the earnest school-girl in a TV series aimed at producing representations of women that conjugate beauty, sexuality, with intelligence, affection and intellectual achievement. Fig.1 Eve Arnold Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses , 1955 (Estate of Eve Arnold Magnum Photos). <?page no="59"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 59 Figure 2. Eve Arnold Marilyn Monroe Reading, Cropped , 1955 (Estate of Eve Arnold; Magnum Photos). Fig 3. Norma Jeane Baker with her mother on a beach, ca. 1928. (Hutton Archive; Getty Images) <?page no="60"?> 60 Griselda Pollock Fig 4. Eve Arnold Marilyn Monroe Reading , 1955 (Estate of Eve Arnold; Magnum Photos). Fig 5. Eve Arnold Marilyn Monroe , 1955 (Estate of Eve Arnold; Magnum Photos). <?page no="61"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 61 Fig 6. Eve Arnold Marilyn Monroe , 1955 (Estate of Eve Arnold; Magnum Photos). Fig 7. Philippe Halsman Marilyn Monroe Reading in her Hollywood Apartment , 1952 (Magnum Photos). <?page no="62"?> 62 Griselda Pollock Fig 8. Author’s copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses , 1934. References Arnold, Eve. Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Print. Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print. Barthes, Roland. La Chambre Claire. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980. Print. -. “The Face of Garbo.” Mythologies . 1957. London: Granada, 1972. 57-8. Print. Benzel, Kathryn. “The Body as Art: Still Photographs of Marilyn Monroe.” Journal of Popular Culture 25.2 (1991): 1-29. Print. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester UP , 1992. Print. Brown, Richard. “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Post-Cultural Cyborg? ” Ed. R. B. Kershner. Joyce and Popular Culture . Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1997. 170-79. Print. -. Modern Novelists: James Joyce. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992. Print. Buchthal, Stanley, and Bernard Comment, eds. Fragments Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe. London: Harper Collins, 2010. Print. “Marilyn Monroe’s Books: 13 Titles That Were on Her Shelf.” Huffington Post 15 Oct. 2012. Web. 11 March 2014. Gertz, Stephen J. “Marilyn Monroe: Avid Reader, Writer and Book Collector.” Booktryst 8 Oct. 2010. Web. 2 Feb. 2014. <?page no="63"?> Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph 63 Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1987. 45-62. Print. Jaffe, Aaron . Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity . Cambridge: CUP , 2010. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses . 1922. New York: Random House, 1934. Print. Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living . London: Faber & Faber, 2010. Print. Krauss, Rosalind. “On the Road.” Under Blue Cup . Cambridge, MA : MIT P, 2011. 51-100. Print. Levin, Harry. James Joyce . Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1960. Print. Melchiori, Giorgio. “The Languages of Joyce.” The Languages of Joyce: Selected Papers from the 11th International James Joyce Symposium Venice 1988 . Ed. Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, Carla Marengo Vaglio and Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993. 7-9. Print. Podlesney, Theresa. “Blondes.” The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory . Ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 80-90. Print. Pollock, Griselda. “Killing Men and Dying Women: A Women’s Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting in the 1950s.” Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed . Ed. Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock. Manchester: Manchester UP , 1996. 219-294. Print. -. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art . 1988. London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Rosten, Norman. Marilyn: A Very Personal Story . 1967. London: Millington Books, 1980. Print. Mason, Simon. The Rough Guide to Classic Novels from Don Quixote to American Pastoral . London: Rough Guides, 2008. Print. Silver, Brenda R. “Mis-fits: The Monstrous Union of Virginia Woolf and Marilyn Monroe.” Virginia Woolf Icon . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 236-272. Print. Spoto, Donald. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography . London: Chatto Windus, 1993. Print. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own . 1928. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974. Print. -. “Professions for Women.” 1931. Women and Writing . Ed. Michèle Barrett. London: Women’s Press, 1979. 57-63. Print. Woolsey, John M. “Decision of the United States District Court Rendered 6 December 1933 by the Hon. John M. Woolsey, Opinion A.110-59.” Reprinted in Ulysses . 1922. By James Joyce. New York: Random House, 1934. ix-xiv. Print. <?page no="64"?> 64 Katharina Hagena Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge Katharina Hagena When Stephen Dedalus in the second chapter of Ulysses asks his student Armstrong if he knows anything about Pyrrhus, Armstrong says: “- Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier” ( U 2 . 26 ). 1 Stephen is “poking the boy’s shoulder with the book” ( U 2 . 30 ). By doing so he forms a very short-lived and instable physical link or bridge between them. He then pokes his student’s brain with the question: “- What is a pier? ” This question seems to establish a connection with Armstrong, whose name suggests that his head might actually not be his strongest bodily part. He takes up Stephen’s last word “pier” and says: “- A pier, sir, […]. A thing out in the water. A kind of a bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.” Armstrong uses the word “pier” at the beginning and the end of his answer; his speech act is strung between those two “piers,” which thereby adopt the function of syntactical piers. Thus the word “pier” becomes itself what it talks about, and the signifier almost becomes the signified, but not quite. For Armstrong is right, it is only a kind of bridge. It is “a thing out in the water,” which, in opposition to a full bridge, does not connect land to land, but lingers, lost and unredeemed, between the elements. Stephen agrees: “- Yes, a disappointed bridge” ( U 2 . 39 ). He is rather proud of this little aphorism. But, alas, he is at once aware of the one regrettable truth: “No-one here to hear” ( U 2 . 41 ). His witticism is wasted on Armstrong and his disappointing peers, indeed, Stephen’s words “troubled their gazes” ( U 2 . 40 ). But at least he can appreciate himself: “here…hear.” Stephen’s attempt at a joke - a form of communication, which, like a bridge, either works both ways or not at all - is like Kingstown pier itself: It peters out without reaching a destination, nobody is able to connect to it, and his own “shout of nervous laughter” ( U 2 . 116 ) which he releases later in the same chapter is merely “echoed” by their cries of dismay. The students’ gazes are at first “blank” ( U 2 . 6 ) and then “troubled” ( U 2 . 40 ), a word that comes from turbidus , “muddy,” just like the agitated water between two piers. The spark of interest Stephen was able to kindle for a brief moment in his lesson - and indeed, sparks can be employed as temporary bridges too - is soon extinguished by that turbid sea of troubled gazes - and Stephen is as disappointed in his students as they are in him. It seems that Kingstown pier is not the 1 James Joyce, Ulysses . The Corrected Text . Edited by Hans Walter Gabler et. al. New York: Vintage Books, 1986 . All Ulysses quotations will be from this edition. <?page no="65"?> Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge 65 only disappointed bridge in Ulysses . Everywhere in the book connections are being made and dissolved, links are tentatively established and cut, hopes and expectations in characters as well as readers are constantly raised and thwarted. Things do not quite meet up and are not being met. They start shifting about, change their positions, look different from different angles and show all the signs of “parallactic unease.” Bridges cannot only be found across rivers, ravines and railway tracks but also in works of music or on string instruments. They appear on top of ships, in electric circuits, as a card game, on noses, glasses and teeth. Architecturally, a bridge is not at all a simple thing. Is it a building? A space? A street or path? A deck? An access road? A roof ? A monument? A sculpture? As always, it depends on your perspective of the object and thereby also of the “apparent displacement of the object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight” (Žižek 17 ) - in short, on parallax. A bridge is a structure that spans from one side to another side across an obstacle. It gives you many different views of the same things, a view from one side to the other side and from the other side back to the one side and from infinite numbers of points on the bridge onto infinite numbers of points around it or even on it. It is in itself a parallactic construction, a construction of changed and changing views. However, not only may the views on the bridge vary but, since the observer of the bridge can himself or herself be on that bridge, there is, according to Slavoj Žižek quoting Jacques Lacan, a “philosophical twist to be added. […] ‘Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I, I am also in the picture’” ( 17 ). The I that is always in the picture takes over the role of a “blind spot,” something that prevents us from seeing things really objectively, a gap in our perception. It is the very space that renders a bridge “disappointed.” Bridges are thresholds, places of transition, leading from here to a beyond. A bridge can be as sacred and miraculous as Jacob’s ladder in the Old Testament, forming a passage between heaven and earth. It may take on the guise of a rainbow and serve as the pathway of Iris, the divine messenger in ancient Greek mythology. Bridges are usually man-made but, as Joyce shows his grandson in The Cat and the Devil , they can also be the work of the devil, who then happens to be crossed by a cat that happens to cross that bridge. Bridges are war theaters, they are strategic aims and they can decide life or death. A bridge allows for unity and progress, but at the same time is also a suture, a predetermined breaking-point. In Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra , a book mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of Ulysses , Zarathustra says: Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman - a rope over an abyss. <?page no="66"?> 66 Katharina Hagena A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going . (43-44) An Übergang and an Untergang: Übergang can mean transition as well as crossing, passage as well as change whereas Untergang is both, decline and undercrossing. What Zarathustra says about man can also be applied to Ulysses , a book in which people are constantly crossing roads, rivers or each other, crossing over, crossing under, double-crossing, crossing out and are coming across things and each other (we even find an acros(s)tic in “Ithaca”). Reading Ulysses is exactly that, “a dangerous wayfaring,” and it seems its characters are, too. Readers as well as protagonists oscillate between transition and decline. And what is great about this book is, exactly what, according to Nietzsche, is great about man. Namely, that it is “a bridge and not a goal.” Joyce’s Ulysses is crammed with bridges of all kinds, and they are disappointed as well as crossed. I counted, in fact, sixty-six routes across, most of them in Dublin. We not only find places like Kingsbridge Station, Bridgewater and Ballsbridge, but there are also railway bridges and most of the famous Dublin bridges such as, for example, O’Connell Bridge, Essex Bridge or Ha’penny Bridge. There are a couple of “pontoons,” too, and even one “transpontine bison,” which is a beast on the other side of a bridge. The “sovereign pontiff,” the maker of bridges, is mentioned twice, and then there is this mysterious “Bridgeman,” whom Dignam owed money. Almost every chapter in Joyce’s novel has its bridge. It starts with the disappointed one in “Nestor” ( U 2 . 39 ), and continues with Bloom tearing up Martha’s envelope under the railway bridge in “Lotus Eaters” ( U 5 . 300 ). Bloom crosses four rivers and thus four bridges in “Hades,” and later, in “Lestrigonians,” he stands on O’Connell Bridge, hovering between heaven, earth and water, and meditating on food, poetry and death. Here, we might pause and take a look around. In a novel that explores the essence of nebeneinander und nacheinander , a meditation on bridges is as appropriate as a meditation on top of a bridge. For a bridge creates both, nebeneinander and nacheinander , depending on your point of view, and it creates them in both, a nebeneinander and nacheinander fashion. In his short essay on “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger takes the bridge as an example of how a construction, an artefact, something that has been built, determines the space surrounding it: “The bridge swings over the stream with ‘ease and power.’ It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream” ( 151 - 53 ). It is the view onto a bridge which makes the riverbanks become two <?page no="67"?> Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge 67 separate sides of one place. It creates this space. It is through the separation, through the awareness of the two opposite banks, that the bridge constitutes their connection. “Even when the bridge covers the stream,” Heidegger goes on, “it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more. The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants the way to mortals so that they may come and go from shore to shore” ( 151 - 53 ). This would also apply to O’Connell Bridge as it is depicted in the eighth chapter of Ulysses . The bridge does indeed determine its surroundings. Bloom walks from the northern side of the town over to the southern side. In this episode, the bridge spanning across the river Liffey becomes a separate microcosm, a misty in-between realm with “puffballs of smoke pluming up from its parapet” ( U 8 . 44 ). Water passes underneath, and into the sea. Yet, with the river being so close to the sea it flows upstream again when the tide comes back in. Gulls flap over it. Death seems not far. Bloom even contemplates throwing himself into the river ( U 8 . 52 ) but, being Bloom, he throws down a crumpled paper ball instead ( U 8 . 57 ). The paper ball’s speed from the bridge must be, Bloom thinks, “thirtytwo feet per sec” before it touches the water. Bloom watches it disappear between the “bridgepiers” ( U 8 . 59 ). The river, seen from a bridge, is full of parallactic effects: If you see a “Brewery barge” ( U 8 . 45 ) moving down to the sea, the boat appears to be slower than when it goes against the stream at the same speed. When you look straight down to seagulls wheeling and flapping “ o’er the waters dull ” ( U 8 . 63 , original emphasis) you might think they move much faster than when you watch them flying before a blue sky. A rowboat “at anchor on the treacly swells” will only be rocked “lazily,” whereas a crumpled paper ball “on the wake” of those same swells floats and bobs and appears to move much more quickly. Therefore, it is not surprising that Bloom starts his contemplation on parallax right here, on O’Connell Bridge. O’Connell Bridge in this episode becomes a space within a space, temporary and unstable, almost a kind of wandering rock. Bloom himself seems to become a little unstable as he contemplates jumping off the bridge: “What if I threw myself down? ” ( U 8 . 52 ). But he quickly regains his inner balance and asks himself some of his very-down-to-earth questions. Thus not only does he wonder why “saltwater fish are not salty” but also about how one can “own water really. It is always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream” ( U 8 . 94 - 95 ). Bloom is busy with the parallactic activity of seeing the river as both, a conglomeration of single, unique droplets that will never again come together in just this constellation of “flowing in a stream,” and at the same time his eyes <?page no="68"?> 68 Katharina Hagena are seeking “answers from the river” ( U 8 . 87 ), a river that is “the stream of life,” “Anna Liffey” ( U 8 . 80 ), and thus always the same for everybody at every time. The bridge provides both views in a parallactic nebeneinander . Bloom watches the flow of the water, which triggers off a meditation on “the flow of the language,” namely on Shakespeare’s blank verse. Bloom picks out the one quote from Hamlet where the ghost speaks about his own transitorial state: “I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night” ( H I. v. 9 - 10 ). But Bloom, as everybody knows, says “time” instead of “term,” and “earth” instead of “night” ( U 8 . 67 - 68 ). Through Bloom’s misquote the ghost of Hamlet’s father seems to become much more of a Nietzschean man, of an “ Übergang and an Untergang ,” a going across and a down-going, “a bridge and not a goal.” For while “term” implies the end, something terminal, determined or with “a goal” the word “time” seems to be more like a transition, a bridge in that Nietzschean sense. Besides, “walking the earth” evokes more of that “dangerous wayfaring” Zarathustra spoke about than the ethereal “walking the night.” The two quotes, both the correct one from Hamlet , which is not there but which hovers over Joyce’s text like a ghost, as well as the misquoted one, which has long become an original Bloomism and thus a famous Ulysses quotation in its own right, exist simultaneously. Although they do interact there still remains a parallactic gap between them, similar to the gap between the two ends of a disappointed bridge. Shortly before he leaves the bridge, Bloom has something of a visitation himself. Remembering a bill he once saw in a urinal he must think of “[s]ome chap with a dose burning him” ( U 8 . 101 ), which seems to lead to the frightening idea that Boylan (“If he …? ”) might have the clap too (“O! ”) ( U 8 . 103 ) and thus might give it to Molly (“No … No.”) ( U 8 . 105 ). But Bloom does not let the idea rise to the surface of his consciousness and so it remains hidden underneath the surface of the text. “No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely? ” ( U 8 . 106 ). Bloom is rattled by this thought as Hamlet is rattled by the appearance of his father’s ghost. Yet, instead of hesitating, brooding and probing like the Danish prince, Bloom moves “forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that” ( U 8 . 108 ). He raises his eyes from the surface of the water; it is too dangerous to dwell there for too long. Looking from bridges into the water seems to have a similar effect as looking into that dark, back-staring Nietzschean abyss. For just like the eyes of Stephen’s students before, Bloom’s eyes have become “troubled,” turbid, muddy like the stream of life he has been contemplating from that bridge. When Bloom continues his way over and off O’Connell Bridge - with raised eyes - he sees that it must be “[a]fter one. Timeball of the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of Sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, <?page no="69"?> Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge 69 parallax” ( U 8 . 109 - 112 ). The timeball, as Gifford explains, was attached to a pole on top of the ballastoffice just off O’Connell Bridge, on the south side, of course, and “rigged to drop at a specific time, in this case 1 pm Greenwich time” but since Dublin time was on “Dunsink time” and not Greenwich mean time, “Bloom’s ‘after one’ is inaccurate because the dropped time ball would mean only after 12 . 35 pm in Dublin and from where he is in the street, he could not have seen the clock face that would tell him Dublin time” ( 160 ). This contradicts Hugh Kenner, who claims that Bloom sees the clock and the timeball simultaneously and thus exercises parallax while trying to think of what it is exactly ( 75 ). In a short article in the James Joyce Quarterly from 1998 , Deborah Warner found out that Bloom was right about it being “after one,” as in 1904 the clock and the timeball did not show different times at all but were both synchronized to the clock at Dunsink observatory and thus to Irish time ( 861 - 64 ). It is easy to believe why, as Warner states, the head of the Dunsink observatory, the astronomer Sir Robert Ball, very much preferred the timeball to drop in accordance with his clock at Dunsink, and thus with, so to speak, “Ball time.” However, what is more important is that the time ball which happens to be positioned on top of the ball ast office reminds Bloom, whose chains of associations are often triggered off by words and sounds, of Sir Robert Ball and his book The Story of the Heavens , which Bloom possesses himself - as we learn much later in the book. In this book, as Bloom indicates, Sir Robert Ball does indeed write about parallax. Especially in chapter XXI on “The Distances of the Stars,” Ball explains, at length and with many illustrations, this old but still up-todate method of measuring a distant star by observing a closer one. “Thus,” Ball writes, “as the observer moves around the whole orbit in the annual revolution of the earth, so the star appears to move around in an ellipse on the background of the sky” ( 444 ). In a way, this is what Bloom is doing here: He observes the globular, starlike timeball from a fairly short distance in order to measure the much more abstract, cosmic and similarly circular phenomenon time. Thus the contemplation on parallax itself is achieved by a parallactic action. Finally, to round it all up, the word that connects the “timeball,” “ballastoffice” and Sir Robert “Ball” with “parallax” - and later even “parallel” - is nothing less than the word “all” itself. But then, it seems only appropriate that an astronomer and an every-man and allrounder like Bloom have a mutual interest in the all, the “everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…” ( U 11 . 749 - 50 ). Interestingly, Ball, in the chapter on the “Distances of the Stars,” mentions his work at Dunsink observatory: <?page no="70"?> 70 Katharina Hagena It not unfrequently happens that a parallax research proves abortive. The labour has been finished, the observations are reduced and discussed, and yet no value of the parallax can be obtained. […] Even from such failures, however, information may often be drawn. Let me illustrate this by an account derived from my own experience at Dunsink […]. (455) Bloom’s chain of association is not only triggered solely by the ball on the pole but also by the “Dunsink time” of the clock and finally even by the attempt to tell the time from where he stands. But not only does he think he is wrong about the time but his own attempt to remember exactly what parallax actually is, fails, and his own “parallax research” proves just as “abortive” as Sir Robert’s: He “never exactly understood” it anyway and he does not bring himself to ask the priest. Bloom’s disappointment in himself is acute: Ah. His hand fell to his side again. Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock, like that pineapple rock. ( U 8.579-84) Even though he seems to hurl his thoughts out in a mood of self-disgust and frustration, Bloom is the most exact when he is trying the least. For Bloom here gives a brief and bold summary of Ball’s Story of the Heavens , which is also the story of the creation of planets, stars, galaxies, the universe. But at the end, Ball, like Bloom, must admit that we “never know anything about it,” or, as Ball puts it, thereby giving a wondrously apt description of Joyce studies in general: Yet how little can we see with even our greatest telescopes, when compared with the whole extent of infinite space! No matter how vast may be the depth which our instruments have sounded, there is yet a beyond of infinite extent. (557) So would it all be a “[w]aste of time,” as Bloom says? Yes indeed! For Bloom’s short history of “gasballs spinning round” and producing “frozen rock, like that pineapple rock” not only makes our swirling heads spin round to the first line of the very chapter “pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch,” but it also makes us see something else. All those bits of rock, dead shell, chaff, chips and other matter drifting around and coincidentally forming this or any other plant, are literally exactly what Bloom says they are, namely, the “[w]aste of time.” <?page no="71"?> Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge 71 However, even though no “information could be drawn” from all this, Bloom does draw from it. For his failures and frustrations make him remember Molly and her equally failed attempt to understand the meaning of yet another Greek word, metempsychosis, and he recalls the joke she makes of it. And so, by the end of his failed parallax research, “Mr. Bloom smiled” ( U 8 . 114 ). However popular Ball’s book may have been, it is still written in the language of an astronomer, which, for many people, including myself and maybe also Bloom, means that one understands most things while they are being explained to one but as soon as one has to repeat or summarize them, one fails disgracefully. Bloom tries to take the origin of the word as a bridge over his troubled memory and mind to the actual meaning of the word but he only gets halfway across: “Par” ( U 8 . 111 ) - he does not seem to be able to get his head around the “all.” He toys with the idea of asking the priest he happens to see that very moment. Yet Bloom probably knows that even this humble servant of the world’s greatest bridgemaker, the pontifex maximus , might not be able to help out. Thus Bloom’s half-remembered parallax becomes yet another disappointed bridge. It seems that O’Connell Bridge itself is a kind of planet, which means ‘wanderer,’ a wandering rock. The bridges, however, that are actually appearing and disappearing in the “Wandering Rocks” episode are again quite different from O’Connell Bridge. For in the tenth chapter, the rocks seem to be loosely linked by unstable, somehow wandering bridges. They are constructed and de-constructed by language itself. We can see this, for example, in the short passage about the two priests in their two separate trams on the same bridge: On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of Saint Francis Xavier’s church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound tram. Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of saint Agatha’s church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge. ( U 10.107-112) “Newcomen bridge” is not only just the place where the priests’ paths cross, but the two words “Newcomen bridge” are, again, the two syntactical bridge piers, between which as well as through the crossings and crossings-over of the two sentences are constructed. In the syntax of “Sirens,” we find similar bridge constructions. Here, they become playfully erotic: “Essex bridge. Yes, Mr. Bloom crossed the bridge of Yessex” ( U 11 . 229 ). Bridges do seem to have an erotic effect on Bloom, for in “Circe” he is asked to confess to what he did “under Ballybough Bridge” ( U 15 . 1875 ). Later, he tries to justify yet another sin by explaining that Lotty Clarke “rolled down Rialto bridge, to tempt me with her animal spirits” ( U 15 . 3357 ). Bridges, we come to realize, are not only there to connect two places and to be crossed but they also possess that shady and totally unconnected place underneath. It <?page no="72"?> 72 Katharina Hagena is a kind of underworld where the homeless are at home and where the rules of the above do not apply. Stephen, too, draws nearer to the pillars of Loop Line Railway Bridge in order to avoid being seen by an acquaintance - but then Bloom meets one right there in the dark, which causes him to worry about violence under bridges. According to Heidegger, the passage created by a bridge emphasizes the separateness of the two banks: “The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other” ( 153 ). So where there is a bridge, there are two separate sides. This is true of the conflict about the so called “Bloody Bridge” as well as the fight between the Northand the Southside of Dublin during the seven-minute war on Richmond Bridge, both of which events are discussed in “Eumaeus.” At the end of that episode, Stephen sings an isolated line that is certainly not from Johannes Jeep’s ballad, even though Gifford says so (cf. 562 ). It is a verse that stands as isolated as a bridge without piers: “ Und alle Schiffe brücken ” ( U 16 . 1884 ), that is, ‘and all ships bridge.’ The Joycean world, especially the German-speaking one, is still wondering where the quote comes from. In 1997 , Danis Rose found a very practical solution. He tried to put an end to all puzzlement in his “readers’ edition” of Ulysses , a re-corrected version of Gabler’s corrected edition, by firmly replacing the - indeed wrong - German brücken (the word Brücke , pl. - en only exists as a noun, not as a verb) by the straightforward verb brechen , ‘to break.’ 2 Now, “the end of the ballad” ( U 16 . 1883 ) is and will be very different if all the ships are breaking instead of bridging. Unfortunately, there does not seem to exist a ballad with that new line in it either. This sourceless quote of a quote will probably always remain something like a blind spot, yet another one, in Ulysses ; but as a comfort to all of us, Fritz Senn has once pointed out that a bridging ship is, after all, a disappointed pier. 3 It is also a comfort when we see Bloom, at the end of “Ithaca,” asleep with his fingers on the bridge of his nose. He has come full circle. Even his hand forms a circle, with the bridge of his nose being a bridge connecting his head with his hand. As he lies next to Molly, their bodies are touching in a similar closed circuit position. Speaking of Molly, I feel there is one more bridge-phenomenon I ought to mention. And it is a disappointing one, too. For at the very end, in the “Penelope” episode, not a single bridge crosses Molly’s mind. There is certainly water enough in her stream-of-consciousness. Yet, there is no bridge (Kingsbridge Station does not count). Perhaps the rigid, steely, or stony construction is un- 2 Funnily, Danis Rose re-re-corrected this word in one of the later editions. So indeed all the ships, including his, are bridging again. 3 Fritz Senn remarks that he might have said it once but that he does not know where and when and that he rejects any responsibility for anything he has ever said anyway. Cunning. <?page no="73"?> Cross and Disappointed: Views On a Bridge 73 necessary as it is the “everchanging-neverchanging water” ( U 17 . 233 ) itself that forms the connections and disconnections, the links as well as the leaps. On the other side - and there must always be an other side when we talk about bridges or parallax - her seemingly rushing, flowing discourse is certainly as artificially and solidly crafted as any bridge, or sentence in the book. But then, if we look again at the very end of the very end of the text, we do come across a bridge after all. Well, not quite a bridge and not quite across. For when Molly on the 16 th of June reminisces about the past, she remembers herself reminiscing about the past: till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier ( U 18.1580-85). “On the pier,” Molly says at the end, or, if we want to keep the bridge image, at her end of the novel. A pier. A kind of bridge. “- Yes, a disappointed bridge,” Stephen Dedalus quips on his end. Stephen’s “yes” from the beginning resounds in Molly’s yesses at the end just as Molly’s “pier” is an echo of Stephen’s “disappointed bridge.” Neither the first nor the last “kind of bridge” in Ulysses actually reaches across to an opposite bank. Both are piers and thus must remain disappointed. A pier is the - concrete - image of how, in this novel, expectations are being raised and disappointed (and thus made to dis-a-pier), or, of how we are constantly being confronted by parallactic gaps, which we then may overcome or just leave open, gaping. These gaps we bridge or break by gaping at them from different angles and standpoints. So that, like Molly, we may continue “playing […] on the pier” ( U 18 . 1585 ). * As an afterthought and as a bridge for the disappointed, I would, once more, like to quote Sir Robert Ball to bring home the comforting message that the possibility of failure is built into any human endeavor, this article included, as, according to Ball, “it not unfrequently happens that a parallax research proves abortive. […] Even from such failures, however, information may often be drawn” ( 455 ). <?page no="74"?> 74 Katharina Hagena Bibliography Primary Sources Joyce, James. Ulysses . 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et. al. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ed. T. J. B. Spencer. London: Penguin, 1988. Print. Secondary Sources Ball, Sir Robert Stawell. The Story of the Heavens . New and revised ed. London: Cassel and Company Limited, 1900. Gutenberg Project . Web. Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated . Revised and expanded ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Print. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought . Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. 145-61. Print. Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses . Revised ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP , 1987. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One . Translated and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1969. Print. Warner, Deborah. “The Ballast-Office Timeball and the Subjectivity of Time and Space.” James Joyce Quarterly 35 / 36 (1998): 861-64. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View . Cambridge, MA : MIT P, 2006. Print. <?page no="75"?> Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts 75 Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts Philip Keel Geheber Valery Larbaud’s October 1922 promotional essay “The Ulysses of James Joyce” describes Joyce’s compositional method in terms of mosaic construction. Specifically drawing attention to Joyce’s use of notesheets, Larbaud writes that Ulysses “is a genuine example of the art of mosaic. I have seen the drafts. They are entirely composed of abbreviated phrases underlined in various-coloured pencils” ( 102 ). Just as each colorful square and shard of tile are cemented into a mosaic to cumulatively reveal the larger image, details dispersed throughout Ulysses ’ eighteen episodes give readers a sense of a complete and accurate depiction of 1904 Dublin and its citizens generally and Leopold Bloom specifically. Each new piece of information about Bloom revises and refines previous conceptions of his character so that Ulysses requires a parallactic reading practice. Ulysses forces readers to continually refocus their vision to see how each additional colored tile modifies the overall image; readers reassemble pieces of information to form their own holistic concepts of the text. Joyce’s piecemeal strategy of relaying information in the text seems to increase its encyclopedic scope and verisimilitude; however, it allows many realistic details to slip through the cracks between Ulysses ’ differing narrative voices. This is especially true of characters’ bodies, which for the most part receive only fragmentary representation, like mosaics with missing tiles. Even though, or perhaps since, much of the novel is focalized through Bloom’s perception, he is “The Man in the Gap” ( U 12 . 186 ). In the end, readers learn far less about Bloom’s physique than about metonymic signals of his corporeality, like his clothing and moustache cup. Even “the baldest coldest” ( LI 159 - 60 ) facts given about Bloom’s body like his height, weight, and measurements in “Ithaca” are contradictory and problematize the readers’ ability to ever know that s / he knows anything definitive about Bloom’s physique. To adapt Slavoj Žižek’s image of this “parallax gap,” different pieces of information about fictional character’s bodies remain on opposing sides of a Moebius strip ( 4 ). Ulysses ’ representations of bodies indicates that we can never “[s]ee ourselves as others see us” ( U 8 . 662 ), which is to say, parallactic views remain in disharmony and can never be fully resolved into a unified whole. Ulysses , and particularly “Ithaca,” challenges the positivist idea that we can know what we know and know that it is correct. Joyce’s style marks part of <?page no="76"?> 76 Philip Keel Geheber this challenge as it shifts from pictorial realist representations to relational representations, which refer readers to other parts of the text or outside of it. Relational description is a primary function of text but it becomes more explicit in the mid-nineteenth century as cataloguing and collecting knowledge were a strong component of the 1860 s Zeitgeist in Paris. In 1863 , Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française appeared in four volumes, and two years later Pierre Larousse’s fifteen-volume Grand Dictionnaire universel began to be published. Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues deconstructs the positivist pretensions to classify and categorize in any encyclopedically complete way. By illustrating the deferral of meaning by referring to other entries rather than satisfying one’s search for an end-authority in a single entry, Flaubert’s Dictionnaire forces any future encyclopedic texts, like Ulysses , to account for a self-reflexive and indeterminate production of meaning. For example, the entries “B londes . Hotter than brunettes. (See B runettes )” and “B runettes : Hotter than blondes. (See B londes )” both refer to each other in an indeterminate and infinitely looping relationship that negates itself (they cannot both be “hotter” than each other) ( The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas 18 , 19 ). 1 Additionally, the later entry “n egresses . Hotter than white women. (See B londes and B runettes .)” ( 61 ) provides another term in this comparative series which claims a superior relationship but must refer to the looped, indeterminate entries “Brunettes” and “Blondes” to define itself. A final entry, “r edheads . See B londes , B runettes and n egresses ” ( 71 ), provides yet another way into the circular logic of Flaubert’s definitions. The Dictionnaire also mocks this need to rely on authoritative dictionaries and encyclopedias, undermining its own sense of authority and utility with the entries “D ictionary . Say of it: ‘It’s only for ignoramuses! ’” ( 28 ) and “e ncyclopédie : Laugh at it pityingly for being quaint and old-fashioned; even so: thunder against” ( 33 ). 2 Like Flaubert’s later works, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake display what Hayman calls the “encyclopedic itch, the urge to include, control and record everything, to set everything in motion, to reconstitute a universe” so that in some ways they “may even be read as deconstructed encyclopedias” ( 26 ). This itch to include everything is most apparent in the additions to “Ithaca.” By Richard Madtes’ count, Joyce added 42 % ( 9 , 380 words) of the episode’s final word count ( 22 , 421 ) to the fair copy Rosenbach manuscript ( 36 ). 1 “B londes : Plus chaudes que les brunes. (voy. Brunes)” ( Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues 54 ); “B runes : Sont plus plus chaudes que les Blondes. (Voy. Blondes)” ( 55 ). 2 “N égresses : Plus chaudes que les blanches (voy. Brunes et Blondes)” ( 107 ); “r ousses : (Voy Blondes, Brunes, Blanches et Négresses)” (XXX); “D ictionnaire : En rire - n’est fait que pour les ignorants” ( 69 ); “e ncyclopédie (L’): En rire de pitié, et même tonner contre comme étant un ouvrage rococo” ( 75 ). <?page no="77"?> Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts 77 In deconstructing the encyclopedia, Ulysses illustrates the inability of a grand narrative of knowledge to be internally consistent. Joyce’s accretion of textual detail most often relies on simply naming a place, person, or historical event, then assuming that the reader has knowledge of these referents. The inexhaustible encyclopedic expansion of the text in this way becomes a growing system of cross-reference and denotation. Clive Hart notes the gaps in Joyce’s text stating that since “ Ulysses is far from explicit […] the reader finds that he [sic] must go in search of further documentary facts with which to supplement Joyce’s account” ( 186 ). Ulysses can be most closely compared to the skeleton and structure of an encyclopedia without much of the explicative content. Budgen summarizes this phenomenon of Ulysses in this way: [I]t is not by way of description that Dublin is created in Ulysses . There is a wealth of delicate pictorial evocation in Dubliners , but there is little or none in Ulysses . Streets are named but never described. Houses and interiors are shown us, but as if we entered them as familiars, not as strangers come to take stock of the occupants and inventory their furniture. Bridges over the Liffey are crossed and recrossed, named and that is all. (68) Ulysses presents Dublin and its citizens to the world, but it does not describe them; it cites, names, and cross-references, like Flaubert’s Dictionnaire , but seldom defines. Following Flaubert, Joyce destabilizes and deconstructs the encyclopedia so that the location of knowledge in Ulysses ’ is in the imaginary space created by an individual’s interaction with the text. Bloom’s body is an excellent case to illustrate since Joyce gives him the most comprehensive and seemingly objective physical stats in the novel. Additionally, Bloom’s stats are relatively stable throughout different editions of Ulysses , so editorial choice does not impinge on questions of Bloom’s physique. Starting with explicit measurements, the description of Bloom’s “stratagem” to climb the area railings of 7 Eccles Street at the beginning of “Ithaca” reveals that he is “five feet nine inches and a half ” tall and falls “[b]y his body’s known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in avoirdupois measure” ( U 17 . 86 - 87 , 91 - 92 ). He also wears a 17 -inch collar ( U 17 . 1431 ), an appropriate size for his reported build. Later Bloom’s body measurements are given “before, during and after 2 months’ consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser” (though the two measurements given for each body part are likely before and after) as “viz. chest 28 in and 29 ½ in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8 ½ in and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf 11 in and 12 in” ( U 17 . 1816 - 17 , 1818 - 19 ). 3 “Ithaca” also 3 The height, weight, collar, and other measurements are the same in all published editions with the exception of Bloom’s thigh girth in Danis Rose’s Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition . <?page no="78"?> 78 Philip Keel Geheber notes that Bloom is “[c]onscious that the human organism, [is] normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons” ( U 17 . 1086 - 87 ). Sam Slote uncovered the formula developed in 1916 by DuBois and DuBois, which calculated a body’s surface area from height and weight. Using Bloom’s measurements above results in an approximate surface area of 18 , 700 cm 2 , which at 1 atmosphere of pressure ( 1 . 03 kg / cm 2 ) results in a total force over his body of 19 , 300 kg, equivalent to 19 tons avoirdupois ( Ulysses 840 n. 4 ). All of these details are beyond the scope of those that earlier realist novels would provide, but they do not necessarily resolve into a more complete picture of Bloom since they do not easily translate into a reader’s visual imagination. The specificity of Joyce’s ‘scientific’ language obstructs understanding more than it clarifies. Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot demonstrates the pictorial techniques of realist literature to depict bodies that Ulysses largely ignores. Balzac’s belief that character traits and physiognomy mirrored each other led him to introduce most characters by physical description. Comparing his narrative framing to the task of the painter, Balzac comments that it is “on [Goriot’s] head a painter, like this historian, would have focused all the light in the picture” ( 15 ). He then focuses all of his narrative light on Goriot’s head to describe how Goriot appeared to Madame Vauquer when he moved into her pension at the age of 69 : Although Goriot’s tear ducts were deformed, swollen and sagging, so that he had to keep wiping them, she found him personable and proper in appearance. Besides, his bulging fleshy calves, as well as his long square nose, betokened moral qualities to which the widow apparently attached importance, and were reinforced by the inane simplicity of the old chap’s moon-like face. He wore his hair in pigeon-wing style, coming down in points over his low forehead and setting off his features to advantage; the barber from the École Polytechnique came in every morning to powder it. Although his looks were somewhat rustic, he was always so neatly turned out, he took such generous pinches of snuff. (17) 4 The before and after measurements Rose gives are 16 inches and 20 inches ( 632 ), more plausible thigh measurements for someone with a 17 -inch neck. The Rosenbach Manuscript has Bloom weighing in a bit less than Byrne at “ten stone and four ounces” (Ithaca I p. [ 1 r]). 4 “[L]e père Goriot, sur la tête duquel un peintre aurait, comme l’historien, fait tomber toute la lumière du tableau” ( Le Père Goriot 14 ); “Quioque le larmier des yeux de Goriot fût retourné, gonflé, pendant, ce qui l’obligeait à les essuyer assez fréquemment, elle lui trouva l’air agréable et comme il faut. D’ailleurs, son mollet charnu, saillant, pronostiquait, autant que son long nez carré, des qualités morales auxquelles paraissait tenir la veuve, et que confirmait la face lunaire et naïvement niaise du bonhomme. Ce devait être une bête solidement bâtie, capable de dépenser tout son esprit en sentiment. Ses cheveux en ailes de pigeon, que le coiffeur de l’École polytechnique vint lui poudrer tous les matins, dessinaient cinq pointes sur son front bas, et décoraient bien sa figure. Quioque <?page no="79"?> Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts 79 Oozing “deformed, swollen and sagging” tear ducts, “bulging fleshy calves,” a “long square nose,” a simple “moon-like face,” and powdered “pigeon-wing style” hair pointing over his low forehead all instantly give an image of Goriot’s appearance. Furthermore, Balzac uses these physical features to highlight moral qualities and a punctilious attention to daily regimens. Balzac often appeals to the conceit that his writing is simply a recording of reality, even claiming in the opening of Père Goriot that “this drama is not fiction or romance. All is true ” ( 2 , original emphasis). 5 Balzac’s truth-claim illuminates the fundamental question of literary realism: how can language reproduce reality? Part of Joyce’s point in naming “science” the art of “Ithaca” on the Gilbert schema is that science relies on narrative constructions to describe the world just as fiction relies on narrative. Thomas S. Kuhn argues this same point in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , where he discusses scientists observing the same range of phenomena but interpreting them in different ways. He writes that [n]o natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism. If that body of belief is not already implicit in the collection of facts - in which case more than ‘mere facts’ are at hand - it must be externally supplied, perhaps by a current metaphysic, by another science, or by personal and historical accident. (17) No matter how encyclopedic or objective any language might aim to be, it will always necessarily contain lapses and contradictions, because of the necessity for selection, which implies the theoretical position of the observer. Foregrounding the slippery nature of knowledge, Ulysses , and modernism more broadly, does not allow readers to ‘see’ bodies in the same sense that realist narrative desires. Joyce’s text refuses to pictorially represent bodies as unified wholes. Throughout Ulysses , Joyce gives snippets of information about Bloom’s body, but for the most part any factual knowledge about his physique must be inferred until the stats given in “Ithaca.” For example, at the close of “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom “foresaw his pale body,” not an unusual trait for an inhabitant of Ireland, and then imagines that “oiled by scented melting soap” it is “lemonyellow” ( U 5 . 567 , 568 , 569 ). Bloom’s descriptive “lemonyellow” (“whitey yellow” later in “Lestrygonians” ( U 8 . 1142 )) is the result of the lemon soap he purchased from Sweny’s rather than a genuine attempt to describe his pigmentation. Unlike Balzac’s characters, who illustrate equivalence between appearance and perun peu rustaud, il était si bien tiré à quatre épingles, il prenait si richement son tabac […]” ( 16 ). 5 “[C]e drame n’est ni une fiction, ni un roman. All is true ” ( 2 ). <?page no="80"?> 80 Philip Keel Geheber sonality, we come to know Bloom not by what his body is but by what he does with it and the commodities associated with it. Bloom defecates at the end of “Calypso,” bathes after “Lotus Eaters,” dines in “Calypso,” “Lestrygonians” and “Sirens,” masturbates in “Nausicaa,” and urinates in “Lestrygonians” and “Ithaca,” with a fart mixed into “Sirens” for good measure. Thus his body is shown to function throughout the day in the same ways as the bodies of everyone reading about him, but parts of his body are only occasionally described. In the essay “Molly Inside and Outside ‘Penelope,’” Valerie Bénéjam has described a similar piecemeal “staging” of Molly’s body and the way fetishistic associations color a reading of her corpus. Bénéjam foregrounds “synecdochic fragmentation and metonymic fetishism” ( 65 ) as the primary representative strategies that Joyce uses to “show” Molly to the reader. Joyce uses this textual strategy of metonymic fetishism to represent Bloom’s moustache, perhaps his best-known feature. Joyce’s famous caricature of Bloom complete with bowler hat, moustache, and the first line of the Odyssey in Greek 6 seems to be largely responsible for this received notion of Bloom’s appearance, but in the text, it is a less definitive feature. Bloom’s moustache situates him within the dictates of social style for facial hair in Edwardian Dublin; however, Joyce only refers to Bloom’s moustache indirectly so that it is an inferred facial feature of Bloom’s, rather than an explicitly stated and qualified characteristic as it is for other Dubliners. While Bloom notices M’Coy “picking at his moustache stubble” ( U 5 . 164 ), Bantam Lyons has shaved his off ( U 5 . 521 ), Simon Dedalus’ is “angry” ( U 6 . 72 ), he never thinks of his own by comparison. For the most part, this is due to the narrative voice being so closely associated with Bloom’s perceptions of the world, but even when the narrative is primarily a detached third-person voice, as in “Wandering Rocks,” the moustache still escapes mention. Simon Dedalus frequently tugs at his ( U 10 . 654 , 667 ), “Father Cowley brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand” ( U 10 . 885 ), Tom Kernan notes his “[g]rizzled moustache” as he “preen[s] himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser” ( U 10 . 756 , 742 - 43 ), and in “Sirens,” Ben Dollard “wagged huge beard, huge face over his blunder huge” ( U 11 . 535 ). In “Calypso,” the reader guesses Bloom has a moustache because he pours his tea into “his own moustache cup” ( U 4 . 283 ), which is described in more detail in “Ithaca” as a “moustache cup of imitation Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent (Milly)” ( U 17 . 361 - 62 ) for his twenty-seventh birthday ( U 17 . 921 ). Molly mentions later that she will “throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup [Milly] gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose” ( U 18 . 1504 - 6 ). The “moustachecup” metonymically signals the presence 6 See Plate XXXVII in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce . <?page no="81"?> Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts 81 of a moustache, but it could also be the case that Bloom had a moustache and no longer does. The only notice Bloom’s moustache receives is in “Nausicaa.” Gerty MacDowell takes special notice of moustaches since her ideal future husband “would be tall with broad shoulders (she had always admired tall men for a husband) with glistening white teeth under his carefully trimmed sweeping moustache” ( U 13 . 235 - 37 ). She compares Bloom to the popular English actor and producer Sir John Martin-Harvey: She could see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matinée idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she wasn’t stagestruck. ( U 13.415-18) Martin-Harvey did not sport facial hair and Gerty “wasn’t stagestruck,” so Bloom’s moustache attracts her to him. Bloom does not think about his moustache throughout Ulysses and thus never sees himself as Gerty does. Just as this view of Bloom is filtered through Gerty’s romantic imagination, Joyce presents most bodies through Bloom’s gaze, ever attuned to potential views of the human form. Bloom notes the nextdoor girl’s “vigorous hips” in Dlugacz’s ( U 4 . 148 ) and unsuccessfully attempts to rush out of the butcher’s for another glimpse. Similarly, he tries to spot the white silk stockings of a woman getting onto the outsider in front of the Grosvenor hotel ( U 5 . 98 - 133 ). He’s luckier with the statuary around Dublin, but these are evoked in the same metonymic and synecdochic manner as the women Bloom sees, populating the text with more incomplete bodies. Bloom asks himself who Sir Philip Crampton was, as the funeral cortège passes his “memorial fountain bust” ( U 6 . 191 ), notices Sir Thomas Farrell’s sculpture of William Smith O’Brien ( U 6 . 226 - 28 ), and comments jokingly that Tommy Moore’s statue is correctly located over a public urinal as he crosses under his “roguish finger” ( U 8 . 414 - 15 ). 7 Joyce ironically comments on the realism of Bloom by having him plan to check out the backside of Praxiteles’ Venus in the National Museum to see if she has an anus ( U 8 . 930 - 32 ). If Praxiteles had succeeded in a true-to-life portrayal of the goddess’s body (assuming that the bodies of gods and goddesses functioned like regular human bodies), then he would have carved the stone to portray accurately all aspects of the human form. This Venus sculpture was a plaster copy (Slote, Ulysses 635 n. 1 ), which also introduces problems of realism and reproduction. The statue is a copy of a representation, which reflects Roland Barthes’ description of realism in S / Z : “realism (badly named, at any rate often 7 In a typical Joycean misdirection, one of the few statues Bloom does not comment on is Oliver Goldsmith’s statue at the front gate of Trinity College. Instead, Bloom notes Walter Sexton’s goldsmith and jewelry shop across the street from the Provost’s house ( U 8 . 500 ). <?page no="82"?> 82 Philip Keel Geheber badly interpreted) consists not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy of the real” ( 55 ). Given Joyce’s attempts to make Bloom as ‘round’ as possible, it is not surprising that the obsessive verisimilitude with which he presents Dublin is employed to flesh out his hero’s body and limbs. However, like Barthes’ sense of realism, Joyce fashions Bloom’s realistic body by copying copies of the real. Returning to Bloom’s Ithacan stats, he stands 5 feet 9 ½ inches ( U 17 . 86 - 87 ) and weighs 11 stone 4 pounds, or 158 pounds ( U 17 . 91 ). The height and weight that Joyce gives to Bloom were J. F. Byrne’s, with whom Joyce stayed at 7 Eccles Street in 1909 . Byrne describes in his memoirs, Silent Years , that on one occasion he had to jump over the area railings to enter the house just as Bloom does ( 157 ). 8 Bloom’s body measurements are given “viz. chest 28 in and 29 ½ in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8 ½ in and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf 11 in and 12 in” ( U 17 . 1816 - 17 , 1818 - 19 ), but these do not match with his height and weight. Hugh Kenner discovered these “impossibly small” measurements by checking the testimonials in Eugene Sandow’s Strength and How to Obtain It ( 1897 ) ( “Ulysses” 164 ). The dimensions Joyce gave to Bloom come from the first testimonial in the book, Mr. Thomas A. Fox of Limehouse. However, Fox’s cover letter describing his two years’ dedication to Sandow’s exercises notes a starkly different stature to Bloom’s: “I am nineteen years of age and small of stature being only five feet in height and seven stone in weight” (qtd. in Kenner 165 ). Kenner dismisses this incongruous combination of Byrne’s height and weight with Fox’s measurements as a deliberate choice on Joyce’s part: An unlikely error even for a distracted half-blind man in a hurry? Not necessarily. Not all men know their own chest measurements nor even what a plausible one would be, as witness the fact that Bloom’s twenty-eight-inch chest was forty years striking anyone as unlikely. (165) Slote takes up Kenner’s argument in “An Imperfect Wake ” to demonstrate that Bloom’s “fallible self-knowledge” is an example of epistemological error ( 137 ). “[E]pistemological error requires a faith in facticity: to know what is wrong you need to know what is right,” or at least believe that you know, in Slote’s 8 Joyce’s question to his aunt Josephine asking for details about the height of the drop at 7 Eccles Street corroborates Byrne’s recollection of this jump and demonstrates Joyce’s obsession with verisimilitude: “Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself down from the lowest part or the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt. [sic] I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build. I require this information in details in order to determine the wording of a paragraph” (to Mrs. William Murray, 2 November 1921 ; LI 175 ). <?page no="83"?> Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts 83 formulation ( 139 ). Bloom’s body, though, is composed of incongruous realities, which question not only which fact is right or wrong, but also whether correlative truth claims can be fully reconciled. Joyce queries whether parallactic views can cohere into a unified whole and whether a composite representation more accurately depicts what one thinks one knows of the referent. Returning to the mosaic analogy, additional tiles increase the resolution to shrink the apparent gaps in the image, but these gaps can never be fully eliminated. The substitution of green tiles for red, say by a colorblind artisan, introduces an epistemological error and disrupts the mosaic’s mimetic function for those who can distinguish between red and green. “Ithaca’s” prime target is this “faith in facticity” and the optimistic progressive’s assumption that ‘objective,’ scientific language exists and can provide the most accurate and transparent representation of phenomena. As Kuhn argues, any natural history involves “more than ‘mere facts’” ( 17 ) and beliefs of the observer determine the narrative. If the reader takes Bloom’s measurements as accurate representative fact, they must trust the questioner and answerer of “Ithaca” to faithfully narrate the episode, a function, which the episode’s ‘scientific’ language seems to affirm. However, filtering, selection, and ordering of the information necessary for ‘realist’ or ‘mimetic’ writing betray a subjective arrangement and introduce the somewhat deviant personalities of the voices in the catechism. The answerer is incapable of correctly ‘reading’ the spine of Eugene Sandow’s book on Bloom’s shelf, Strength and How to Obtain It ( 1897 ), which is incorrectly named “ Physical Strength and How to Obtain It ” ( U 17 . 1397 ). Similarly, the budget compilation is reported through the same incapable or inaccurate bookkeeping narrative voices. Kenner points out that the budget should be Ulysses ’ “Objectivity of Objectivities,” but it is corrupted to account for the eleven shillings left in the brothel ( Joyce’s Voices 96 ). 9 Mark Osteen argues 9 This omission includes Bloom’s 10 shilling “gift” to Stephen in Bella Cohen’s ( U 15 . 3583 - 84 ) and the 1 shilling Bloom gave Bella to repair the broken lamp ( U 15 . 4312 ). The textual history of the budget creates its own set of problems. Danis Rose summarizes the monetary errors in his essay “The Strange Case of the Disappearing Bread - Balancing the Book(s) - Leopold Bloom’s Budget for 16 June 1904 .” In the first edition of Ulysses , the debit side of the budget does not add up correctly, so for the second edition of 1926 , Joyce correctly sums the figures to arrive at the mathematically correct balance of 17 s. 5 d (the balance was 16 s. 6 d. in the first edition). Gabler emends the price of the piece of chocolate from 1 d. to 1 s. 0 d., which fixes the arithmetic and restores the 16 s. 6 d. balance, but it is a historically inaccurate price for a square of chocolate (this is also a rare example of Gabler editing the text without any manuscript precedence; Rose 85 ). Rose claims that his Reader’s Edition fixes these mistakes and makes “the three books balance - Bloom’s, the narrator’s, and James Joyce’s” so that his “corrected budget allows a one-to-one correspondence between the events as narrated and the specifics of the two columns” ( 91 ). Rose’s editorial decisions, however, presume that the Ithacan budget <?page no="84"?> 84 Philip Keel Geheber in The Economy of “Ulysses” that the budget distills Ulysses ’ “conflict between realism and excess” ( 396 ) into what is, in one sense, “a minimalist narrative of transactions,” “if narrative is an account, accounting is also a narrative” ( 410 ). Like realist fiction, the budget tries to stabilize the world by assigning the material signifier cost to goods and services, but the budget also removes chronology and causality from this account ( 410 ). The list of discrete items purchased during Bloom’s day may at first seem to have been tampered with, but the narrative voices hint toward the overall function of realist, objective, or scientific language. Osteen comments that “the budget actually suggests by its omissions that social and economic life cannot be summed up by debit / credit accounts” ( 412 ), just as the incongruous sets of data about Bloom’s body highlights fiction’s incapability of fully presenting a portrait of a body. The emendations to the budget and the misreported book title call into question the veracity of the answerer. If this voice cannot or chooses not to report accurately Bloom’s expenses and the title of the book from which Bloom derives his exercise and measurement program, then it cannot be wholly trusted to read Bloom’s already possibly incorrectly collected or recorded measurements. The description of Bloom’s physique comes near the end of a long passage indicating the contents of the first unlocked sideboard drawer ( U 17 . 1774 - 1823 ). The first item listed among the drawer’s contents contains another representation of Bloom’s body. Pages in Milly’s old Vere Foster’s handwriting copybooks “bore diagram drawings, marked Papli , which showed a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot” ( U 17 . 1776 - 78 ). Milly’s drawing of her father, colored by the subjective vision and under-developed sketching abilities of a child, is no more accurately representative of an adult male figure than the seemingly objective measurements listed at the end of the same passage. Both attempts to flesh out Bloom do so, but they carry with their executions the subjective vision or imperfect skills of Bloom’s representers: Milly and the catechistic answerer. The parallactic gaps within and between representations of ‘Bloom’ remain. The failure of the text to describe Bloom completely and accurately highlights the same inevitable shortcomings of Ulysses ’ encyclopedic efforts on a macro-scale. “Ithaca” thematizes error, and as Sebastian Knowles strongly argues, “errors are inevitable” in Ulysses ; for “a book so concerned with the human such errors are not only forgivable but necessary” ( 3 ). If anything, Ulysses is certainly a “human” book in the way it reflects the fallibility of human knowledge and the and the narrative voices describing it are meant to be read as an accurate, trustworthy, ‘realist’ account of the rest of the novel. For my argument here, “Ithaca” undermines this pretension to verifiable fact and the impossibility of absolutely truthful representation by its inclusion of error, corruption, and inaccuracies. <?page no="85"?> Parallaxing Bloom’s Person: Assembling a Body from Its Parts 85 often irreconcilability of differing vantage points. For all of its local color and realistic detail, Ulysses departs from earlier pictorial modes of realist depiction to piecemeal presentation, incomplete mosaics of its characters’ bodies. Parallaxing Bloom’s body demonstrates how Joyce’s representative strategies rely on synecdoche and the accretion of details that often negate each other: the words creating one of the most specified characters in fiction cannot become flesh. Works Cited Balzac, Honoré de. Le Père Goriot. Œuvres Complètes de H. de Balzac . Vol. 4. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1926. 1-244. Print. -. Père Goriot . Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: OUP , 1991. Print. Barthes, Roland. S / Z . Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print. Bénéjam, Valerie. “Molly Inside and Outside ‘Penelope.’” European Joyce Studies 17: Joyce, “Penelope” and the Body . Ed. Richard Brown. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 63-74. Print. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1960. Print. Byrne, J. F. Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce and Our Ireland . New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1953. Print. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce . Rev. ed. Oxford: OUP , 1982. Print. Hart, Clive. “Wandering Rocks.” Ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman. James Joyce’s Ulysses : Critical Essays . Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. 181-216. Print. Hayman, David. “Towards a Postflaubertian Joyce.” Ed. Claude Jacquet and André Topia . “Scribble” 2: Joyce et Flaubert . Paris: Minard, 1990. 33-64. Print. Flaubert, Gustave. Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues et Le Catalogue des idées chics . Ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1997. Print. -. Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.” Trans. Jazques Barzun. New York: New Directions, 1954. Print. Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce: Volume 1 . Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections, 1966. Print. -. Selected Letters of James Joyce . Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Print. -. Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Random House, 1986. Print. -. Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition . Ed. Danis Rose. London: Picador, 1997. Print. -. Ulysses . Ed. Sam Slote. London: Alma Classics, 2012. Print. -. Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript . Introd. by Harry Levin, bibliographical preface by Clive Driver. 3 vols. New York: Octagon; Philadelphia: The Philip H. & A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1975. Print. Kenner, Hugh. Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians . Boston: Beacon, 1962. Print. -. Joyce’s Voices . Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Print. <?page no="86"?> 86 Philip Keel Geheber -. “Ulysses.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 1987. Print. Knowles, Sebastian. The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001. Print. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . 50 th anniversary ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Print. Larbaud, Valery. “The Ulysses of James Joyce.” Ed. Robert H. Deming. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Volume 1, 1907-27. 1970. London: Routledge, 1 1997. 252-62. Print. Madtes, Richard E. The “Ithaca” Chapter of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Epping, England: Bowker Publishing, 1983. Print. Osteen, Mark. The Economy of “Ulysses”: Making Both Ends Meet . Syracuse: Syracuse UP , 1995. Print. Slote, Sam. “An Imperfect Wake .” Errears and Erroriboose: Joyce and Error . Ed. Matthew Creasy. European Joyce Studies 20 . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 135-50. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 2006. Print. <?page no="87"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 87 The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” Ivana Milivojevic It was a long time ago when I first heard Fritz Senn saying that a good paper on a Joycean subject, 1 among other things, should not include anything that itself excludes a possibility of claiming the opposite. I am a little uncertain about my own memory of Fritz’s exact words, but at the time, I understood that, if something does not invite discussion, it must have been obvious to the point that it was not even worth mentioning. Good ‘practical’ advice, one could say, but also advice that implicitly resists over-relativization: if you write in a way that allows counter-argument, you better make sure that your own argument is convincing enough to endure its questioning. Today, however, Fritz’s observation not only indicates to me a reason for the world-wide, interminable interpretation of Joyce’s works, but also suggests that reading Joyce inevitably means a series of parallactic readings, in a way the parallax view is contemplated by Slavoj Žižek in a book he dedicated to the theme: a “constantly shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible,” where “there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space - although they are closely connected” ( Parallax 7 ). Regardless of our eagerness to recognize the ‘close connections’ - named references, random overlaps, or anything in between - as points of synthesis and mediation in Joycean scholarship, they are not necessarily the markers of the space we share. And this is simply because we cannot know, from our particular perspectives, what the space we share precisely is. This, of course, is not ignorance of an ‘ordinary’ kind. It comes not just from the fact that every singular reading is a parallactic act, an act that by default misses the infinity of other possible readings, but also from the fact that the subject of literature is, from the reader’s perspective, a parallactic object. Nevertheless, a remark that Žižek makes on the early pages of The Parallax View , that there still must be “a minimum of conceptual order” which enables us to operate with the very notion of this in its very nature “nonsystematic deployment” ( 13 ) provides, at least, some comfort in dealing with this double entropy. He suggests, namely, that there are three main modes of parallax, to which the infinite number of possible parallactic perceptions could be brought down: scientific , po- 1 Or any subject that concerns a work of literature, for that matter. <?page no="88"?> 88 Ivana Milivojevic litical and philosophical . 2 Daniel Schwarz’s collection of readings of “The Dead” from different theoretical perspectives - psychoanalytic, reader-response, new historicist, feminist and deconstructive - is itself a good illustration of similar thinking. What I would like to attempt, however, is a reading of Gabriel Conroy, as the main character of the story, from these three parallactic angles, while presenting him, at the same time, as himself a parallactic reader, or ‘interpretative figure’ of the characters in the story he is surrounded by. In such a reading, the scientific parallax would coincide with an old-fashioned question: how much can we know, according to what is offered to us as ‘truth,’ and how subjective any ‘objective’ truth becomes through the very act of a certain (literary) character speaking of it? Furthermore, how important for us as listeners, or readers, is what the speech or the text is missing, and how the un-knowledge so produced is, actually, a starting point for interpretation? Where is the place for Gabriel Conroy in our own perception, a place determined by the narrator of “The Dead” and, in the final instance, Joyce as an author? The political parallax in the story re-opens another question with a familiar sound, about Gabriel’s relation to the world around him, but also assigns a particular position of the story’s discourse within the culture of Joyce’s time. The ‘social antagonisms’ come to the surface in so many ways: through the details of the very setting of Misses Morkan’s annual dance, through the gap between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ principles embodied in various characters portrayed in “The Dead,” through the West and the East of Ireland as paradigms. Those undercurrent streams, already recognizable from the early scene of the Conroys’ entering the house on Usher’s Island and Gabriel’s words: “But as for Gretta there, […] she’d walk home in the snow if she were let” ( D 180 ), expose the inadequacy of binarisms between classes, mentalities, ideologies and genders. Between this sentence which captures the essence of Gretta in Gabriel’s eyes while also capturing the character of Gabriel through the perception of her, and the last sentence in “The Dead” about the snow faintly falling, only through those undercurrent streams of the narrative can the reader approach the philosophical parallax , the ultimate, as Žižek claims, “ontological difference” which “conditions our very access to reality” ( Parallax 13 ). In the center of it lies, for 2 He says: “First, there is the ontological difference itself as the ultimate parallax which conditions our very access to reality; then there is the scientific parallax , the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific account / explanation, which reaches its apogee in cognitivism, with its endeavor to provide a ‘third-person’ neurobiological account of our ‘first-person’ experience; last, but not least, there is the political parallax , the social antagonism which allows for no common ground between the conflicting agents […]” ( 10 , original emphasis). <?page no="89"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 89 Gabriel, the enigma of what Gretta wants, but, more importantly, a mystery of who he is outside of the network of his variously constructed relationships. In a way, only this third parallax contains an ‘element of surprise,’ the mystery that suddenly catches up the married couple being initiated by an enigmatic appearance of Michael Furey in the snowy night, the juncture in the story when the myth of a young lover who dies for his darling transforms from a ‘missing element’ into an element with an overwhelming presence. The moment when this myth appears is, however, also the moment that illuminates Gabriel’s life, as well as Gretta’s, as a ‘life’ itself created within the story, therefore a fiction, so that the mystery opens for the reader’s interpretation both as a literary paradigm and an individual myth. And it is through this parallactic perspective, simultaneously directed towards the universal and towards the particular, that Joyce’s story seems to be full of potential to reveal how myth, in its ideal form, could serve as a ‘parable’ for literary fiction, as well as for the fantasy too often elucidated as a ‘truth’ of life. The enigma of the story that persists, which also makes the processes of writing and reading continue without ever reaching completion, presents in a way a ‘productive failure’ of which Joyce’s “The Dead” is a perfect literary example. Only in the end of the story do we seem to have learnt what the story is about: the impossibility of knowing. At the level of the literary character, this ‘failure’ connects three parallaxes just mentioned: one of the impossibility of intersection, understanding, authentic communication between Gabriel Conroy and other characters present at Misses Morkan’s dinner party, another one of the alienating, parallel existence of him and Gretta at the level of knowledge, and eventually the one of self-alienation. But what weaves them together itself forms a fourth parallax that unveils the inevitable ignorance of and about a protagonist as a figure of speech and implies a parallactic, epistemological gap between the ‘character’ and the ‘reader.’ And it is that gap, that missing element, that makes literature and the thinking of it possible without an end. It would be a common place to say that, being on a borderline between realistic and modernist poetics, “The Dead” fluidly moves from the story-teller’s omniscience towards the technique of ‘ambiguity’ and the other way round - in other words, back and forth from a ‘psychological genre’ towards modern narration. But through this very form, it also shows that it is impossible to identify a human life with either its social, or biographical or psychological dimensions, and therefore its characters, its figures, ‘work’ independently from the course of time and from the psychology that would explain their acts and their speech. The ‘fluidity’ of the poetics, therefore, conceals and reveals at the same time that there is always more than one voice behind the words spoken with doubtless confidence. This split, or multiplication, somehow determines the story, as a <?page no="90"?> 90 Ivana Milivojevic way the language, the very material of “The Dead,” is thought-out, produced and read. For instance, this is how the moment when the Conroys arrive at the party continues: She broke out into a peal of laughter and glanced at her husband, whose admiring and happy eyes had been wandering from her dress to her face and hair. The two aunts laughed heartily, too, for Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke with them. “Goloshes! ” said Mrs. Conroy. “That’s the latest. Whenever it’s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. Tonight even, he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn’t. The next thing he’ll buy me will be a diving suit.” ( D 180) Initially, when the laughter is triggered by Gabriel’s remark that Gretta would “walk home in the snow if she were let” ( D 180 ), the entering scene is colored by lighthearted associations to the opening Christmas season and the accompanying celebrations. Gabriel’s “admiring and happy” gaze serves as an image for their marriage, the wandering of his eyes that embraces her figure, face and hair being a sign of flirtation that still sparks between them. But the crack in this idealized picture comes to the surface through the joke: of course, neither would Gretta walk home in the snow, nor would Gabriel buy her a diving suit to protect her from the snow, but the emphasized gap between their ‘personalities’ carries a metaphor that says something about the symbolic dimension of their marriage. Several narrative lines that start from here will develop throughout the story: one of them will reveal Gretta’s ‘individual myth,’ another one will pose a question to Gabriel of ‘whether he is alive or dead,’ but before these two lines find their conclusion in the final scene at the Gresham hotel, the goloshes, that new and oddly called fashionable item imported from ‘Europe,’ will appear as a symbol of not only the difference between him and Gretta, but also the gap between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ of Ireland, the ‘insular’ and the ‘continental,’ the ‘force of nature’ and the ‘inheritance of civilization.’ It could be said that this flirtatious scene with a man and a woman entering a party and at the same time entering the story initiates the reader’s simple desire to know ‘what happens (with them) in the end,’ but the other part of the ‘(so far) unknown,’ the part that will always be missing, remaining outside the words of which the story is made seems to be more intriguing. It implies a different ‘desire to know’ and a different knowledge we want. And since this desire is never satisfied with the answer of ‘what happens in the end,’ and since we know that we can never know ‘everything’ about a literary text, we must also know not only that this desire is unsatisfiable , but also a desire for the unsatisfiable desire. 3 Thence repetitive readings towards diverse, or convergent but always 3 A hysteric desire, so to speak, if one would like to name it using psychoanalytic terms. <?page no="91"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 91 distinct interpretations, in parallel with the hopeless desire for knowledge that would bring some sort of a closure to the text. This longing without a hope for fulfillment introduces to the reader a somewhat confusing aspect of interpretation. It suggests not only incompletion, but also diffusion of the material we deal with and, again, the particularity of interpretative choices we have. For an illustration of how Joyce’s text plays with the notion of objective, realist writing technique, in an empirically descriptive sense, only to undermine it at the same time, here is a passage from “The Dead” when Freddy Malins is introduced: In fact, right behind her Gabriel could be seen piloting Freddy Malins across the landing. The latter, a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy. He was laughing heartily in a high key at a story which he had been telling Gabriel on the stairs and at the same time rubbing the knuckles of his left fist backwards and forwards into his left eye. ( D 184) The role of Freddy Malins, a chronically drunk relative and subversive element at the annual dance party, is multivalent in Joyce’s story. At this moment, the reader already knows that Freddy has been anticipated by the Morkan sisters as a ‘screwed’ potential trouble. In this sense, the realistic account of his features, as well as of his gestures, follows the anticipation. There is, nevertheless, a remark that ‘sticks out,’ a moment of estrangement from the narrative current as formalists would put it, a detour from the ‘automatic pilot’ of objective narration: a little observation that Freddy was “a young man of about forty.” This observation, a detail sometimes emphasized in the readings of “The Dead,” itself points to diffusion - within a linguistic structure - and puts ‘objectivity’ into question. And it does so in more than one way: not just because it claims something in discrepancy to what would be considered ‘objective,’ since objectively a middle-aged man must be middle-aged, but also because such a perception contrasts the accuracy of the physical details Joyce uses here to portray the character, and then again because this very contrast shows how Joyce in fact parodies the realist poetics when he uses it. More importantly, though, this shows how the text works as another subject in relation to the reader as a subject. If we read the text as the narrator’s string of words, this could be a ‘slip of the tongue,’ particularly since towards the end of this fragment the narrator in fact describes Freddy, “laughing heartily in a high key” while rubbing his eye with a fist, as if he were a baby. But if we read the text strictly as a linguistic <?page no="92"?> 92 Ivana Milivojevic structure, it brings us to the point where we can say that the text itself is ‘a subject,’ in other words, something that presents itself, through its own words, as a split body of language. It could be said, at the same time, that the little twist in the quoted paragraph, about the young middle-aged man, a black sheep of ‘everyfamily’ whose role is to distract ‘everyfamily’ from what really goes on behind the curtains of its stage performance, is a linguistic twist that does not really sabotage the ‘objectivity’ of Freddy’s portrait. In fact, it only encapsulates the impression of its reliable narrator. But it still appeals to the reader with an inherent suggestion to approach the realist principle with a pinch of irony - the phrase “a young man of about forty” shakes the context of the sentence it is a part of, and by doing so, it changes its sense - with that twist, the realist code converts into something else. Nevertheless, without knowing, from ‘the realist part,’ certain ‘objective facts’ about Freddy Malins, the isolated observation about his age in relation to his appearance would be meaningless. What is essential in this relation is the code that connects the two, realism and modernism, the imaginary and the symbolic, the same code that makes the interpretation possible. On the other hand, this code of language shows in two different, but mutually related, manifestations. Firstly, because through a certain code and in relation to the narrative structure, there is something we recognize as ‘strange’ and ‘unfitting.’ Secondly, because these ‘estranged’ places in the narrative are disjointed from the ‘objective’ context, these places call for our attention. The following is such an example: Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders, so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers. Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it was long after ten o’clock […]. ( D 176) The only thing that Lily’s three mistresses “would not stand was back answers.” Nested between a list of little hedonistic indulgences of these otherwise “small, plainly dressed old women” ( D 179 ) and a narrator’s comment about their understandable fussiness on the long-anticipated night, this seemingly en passant remark will be in different manners re-activated in the story. But while a ‘fussy’ reader might wonder of how this phrase, planted at the beginning of the story, will echo further down the narrative stream, most of the readers would not even notice it when they read “The Dead” for the first time. Only in the course of a repeated reading will it rattle in their mind as a nodal point of the story that shows in many ways that there is no answer without a “back answer.” In <?page no="93"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 93 a similar way, it shows that there is no view but a parallactic view to another one. That is, if we approach ‘from the back,’ its usual meaning of a cheeky, if not disrespectful, response, and make of it in-any-event-existing back-up answer, a shadow-answer, some sort of a ‘negative’ that resists being just a negative. The back-answer motif initiated through the master-servant relationship is itself an interpretative temptation, a question of who is the real master here. This will echo in the encounter between Lily and Gabriel in the hallway, when he offers her a tip and she refuses it, and later in the story when it re-appears as a parameter to define more significant relationships between Gabriel and Miss Ivors, or Gabriel and Gretta. And through these one-on-one connections and disconnections, as a metaphor for one’s refusal to comply, for the will of one’s voice to be heard in spite of a possible rejection, it will also re-emerge at the ‘social’ level - say, of nationalists and unionists in Ireland - but, more significantly and more generally, as a human impossibility of so-called authentic communication. This is because a “back answer” is always based on something that is missing from the ‘original answer,’ and there is always something missing from it. One could even say, this is where the inevitability of the parallactic view sprouts from, while it could also be claimed that any answer has a back answer because communication as such starts from the parallactic views that imply “the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against the background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight” (Žižek, Parallax 17 ). Furthermore, this is why “The Dead,” as a piece of fiction, itself presents a particular, but diversified, “back answer.” It is, as Margot Norris argues in “Not the Girl She Was at All: Women in ‘The Dead,’” “the stifled back answer” ( 192 ) to gender oppression, but it is also Joyce’s response to realism through modernism and yet by manipulating the elements of the realist poetics. At the same time, it is a back answer to the Irish Revival and yet putting powerful nationalistic arguments in the mouth of Miss Ivors and to the English language as master’s discourse, while using the language of the master. This clash of views, one way or another, occurs however only at the level of the “ work ” (Barthes 156 , original emphasis), “a fragment of substance” ( 156 ) “the imaginary tail of the Text” ( 157 ) as Roland Barthes defined it in “From Work to Text.” The “ text ,” on the other hand, itself shows that it immanently “only exists in the movement of a discourse” ( 157 , original emphasis). “The Text cannot stop” and, therefore, as Barthes claims, “taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical ” ( 158 , original emphasis). The paradox is, of course, in the parallax: this is only another way to say that there is no view without a view from a different angle that changes what we see as an ‘object,’ and, finally, that there is no answer without a possibility of claiming the opposite, if we use Fritz Senn’s words. No doubt, all of these features are <?page no="94"?> 94 Ivana Milivojevic also present in the nineteenth century, ‘substantial,’ ‘imaginary,’ ‘meaningful’ narratives - if one just thinks, say, of any of the Russian or French classic novels. But, as Barthes puts it, “The work - in the best of cases - is moderately symbolic (its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text . Thus is the Text restored to language; like language, it is structured but off-centred, without closure” ( 158 - 59 , original emphasis). To think of this further, we can start from what Žižek implies by saying that “subject and object are inherently ‘mediated,’” or, “to put it in Lacanese - the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its ‘blind spot,’ that which is ‘in the object more than the object itself, the point from which the object itself returns the gaze” ( Parallax 17 ). In simple terms, the subject views the object, but the subject is still a part of a broader view; within that broader view, the subject for himself / herself is a blind spot, and this blind spot is precisely the missing part in the perceived reality. Since this blind spot is always particular, the broader picture is always particular, and since the place in the ‘reality’ for each subject is different, the object is always seen from different perspectives and thence different for individual subjects. What makes it ‘more than an object’ is what is individually ‘added’ to it by the view from a certain perspective. To think of this practically, we can start by quoting a fragment from “The Dead,” probably the climax in the discussion between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors: “Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany,” said Gabriel awkwardly. “And why do you go to France and Belgium,” said Miss Ivors, “instead of visiting your own land? ” “Well,” said Gabriel, “it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.” “And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with - Irish? ” asked Miss Ivors. “Well,” said Gabriel, “if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.” Their neighbours had turned to listen to the cross-examination. Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead. “And haven’t you your own land to visit,” continued Miss Ivors, “that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country? ” “O, to tell you the truth,” retorted Gabriel suddenly, “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it! ” “Why? ” asked Miss Ivors. Gabriel did not answer for his retort had heated him. “Why? ” repeated Miss Ivors. <?page no="95"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 95 They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss Ivors said warmly: “Of course, you’ve no answer.” ( D 190) If we read it in an ‘objective’ manner, this scene is not much more than a faithful mimesis of an exchange of lines between a “West Briton,” as Miss Ivors addresses Gabriel earlier in the story, and an aggressive Irish nationalist, as experienced by Gabriel, Miss Ivors herself, towards whom he has to strike a defensive pose. If we read it in a ‘linguistic,’ ‘metaphoric’ manner, the scene is momentarily lit by the words familiar to us from the previous one, with Gabriel ‘piloting’ Freddy Malins down the corridor. Suddenly, as Michael Levenson notices in his paper on “Living History in ‘The Dead,’” “the task of policing Freddy Malins, who, after all, shows himself to be the most harmless of threats, displays Gabriel’s role as the figure of domestic control” ( 173 ), but, no less importantly, this “small physical gesture might stand as a metonymy for an entire apparatus of imperial control” ( 175 ). At the same time, it could be said that Molly Ivors embodies a synecdoche, a part for the whole, a particularity for the general disposition in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, she wins the discussion by saying, “Of course, you’ve no answer,” because Gabriel does not have one. On the other hand, by not having a “back answer” to Miss Ivors’ unquestionable tone, and possibly by starting to question himself as a “blind spot,” as a subject, at this very moment Gabriel positions himself beyond the social, cultural, political. He is touched to the core. This, however, belongs to the realm of reader’s ‘interpretation.’ Gabriel, as a literary character or as a ‘human being,’ only recognizes himself in what he has , and that is simply because one cannot recognize oneself in what one is . Gabriel has a house in Monkstown, he has a family and in it he has his ‘other half,’ he has two aunts for whom he represents some sort of an ideal ego, but he also has an education he is proud of and he has knowledge more comprehensive and profound than anyone else at the party. Or, at least, those are the possessions he believes himself to have. But there is one more thing he has, although it seems that he does not know whether he wants it or what to do with it, and his ambivalence only deepens towards the end of the story. That thing is his country. At the same time, it seems that Miss Ivors loves it and knows quite well what is the best relationship she can have with it. She appears here as someone who teaches Gabriel about his national identity, but also as someone who would not accept a back answer, an alternative vision. In that sense, she represents a model for those for whom, as Žižek observes in The Parallax View , ethnic roots or national identity are “ a category of truth ,” viewed as such because of the following an impulse to engage in a “ private use of reason , constrained by contingent dogmatic <?page no="96"?> 96 Ivana Milivojevic presuppositions” ( 9 , original emphasis). 4 Or, as he puts it simply, we should not be ashamed of our roots and tradition, we can love them, be proud of them, “but the fact remains that all this is ultimately irrelevant” ( 9 ). Straightforward as it is, Miss Ivors’ perspective is easy for a reader to understand and what makes Gabriel’s more complex is the fact that he is not quite her opponent in this exchange of arguments, even though he does not quite know that. He reckons that he ‘tells her the truth’ when he says “I’m sick of my own country,” but what echoes is the signifier my own country , to the point that it sounds as if there is Gabriel’s own parallactic split, between a part of him producing the words “I’m sick of ” and another part underlining “my own country.” In relation to this, paradoxically, when he says a little earlier that Irish is not his language, he epitomizes ‘his country’ more than Miss Ivors, and he does so similarly to the way Joyce himself did. From the moment Miss Ivors points out to Gabriel that he has no answer, something in him is being changed in a way that her response to his inability to answer the ‘why’ question becomes for him a ‘moment of conclusion.’ This does not happen because a new level of communication is suddenly reached between the two protagonists; on the contrary, their arguments are determined, from the beginning to the end, by what they see as the other one’s (social) image. It happens because she has somehow provoked Gabriel to utter a word that is for him the keyword, the symbolic expression for enjoyment, the master signifier, or all this encapsulated in the term of the unconscious sinthome , as Jacques Lacan named and used it in his seminar on Joyce held in Paris almost forty years ago. During and after this scene, Gabriel does not learn anything new, but the ‘knowledge’ he has already had starts to work for him in a different way. For Gabriel, the master signifier is language . He wants to visit different countries so that he can keep in touch with foreign languages, he is also a journalist and his life, even at a family party, circulates around words, speech and writing. Because of the reputation of the magazine he writes for, he is identified by Miss Ivors as a unionist, although he “wanted to say that literature was above politics” ( D 188 ). Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the story, the relationship of misunderstandings between him and women he talks to continues, as if he cannot find a common language with them. We can interpret this as his awkwardness, but we can also assume, especially since he is presented in the story as a ‘man of words,’ that the misunderstanding reflects something that surmounts words or that in one’s attempts to communicate through words there is always something beyond words - even in the most trivial situations, there is something unspeakable, something lacking. Of course, this becomes more 4 At this place, Žižek founds his own reasoning on the Kantian critical concept. <?page no="97"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 97 obvious but also more intriguing as Gabriel develops as a character through the development of the story. There is a place in Lacan’s “Rome Discourse” where he evokes La Rochefoucauld’s thought about “people who would never have fallen in love but for hearing love discussed” ( Écrits 219 ). This is what happens to Gabriel after his conversation with Gretta at the Gresham, when his vision of Gretta changes from a ‘sensual’ woman to an ‘enigmatic’ woman, if what he experiences at that very moment is “an authentic recognition of what love owes to the symbol and of what speech brings with it by way of love” ( 219 ). It is arguable, however, that Joyce, through his language, dealt in a similar way with the love and enigma that Nora Barnacle represented for him. A parallel Lacan finds in his twenty-third seminar provides a hint: One woman among others is moreover one who has a relationship with any other man whatsoever. And it is indeed this any other man whatsoever that is at stake in the character that he imagines, and for whom at this date of his life, he knows how to open up, to open up the choice of the One woman in question, who is none other, on this occasion, than Nora. ( Joyce and the Sinthome 63) 5 This quotation refers to Exiles , but the question Lacan poses through it is in fact a question that followed Joyce throughout his work and a question that still exists independently from literary considerations or biographical parallels that open up for its readers. To put it in Freudian terms, this was Joyce’s way of asking what woman wants , in an attempt to answer what woman is , and thence he would create a gallery of women to solve the enigma, but also a parallax par excellence . If Gretta is the first figure in Joyce’s opus to represent the question of femininity, then the gradation that takes place between the figures of Bird Girl, Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle could only be the author’s progressive surrender to the unknown. It is almost that the more he tries to capture the enigma of women, by the means of language, of the symbolic, the more elusive the feminine figure becomes. But to return to Gabriel Conroy, in the space of a short story and within the course of a few hours of his marriage, that is precisely what he experiences, strangely in a way, since the more Gretta speaks about her past life, the more Gabriel knows about her, the more of a mystery she becomes for him. In fact, from a “country cute” 6 girl ( D 187 ), his simple girl taken for granted, towards the end of the story she transforms for him not only into an enigma of womanhood, but, moreover, into an enigma of 5 In the lecture held on 31 Jan. 1976 . 6 “Country cute” is Gabriel’s late mother’s “once spoken” expression, to which he reacts with words “and that was not true of Gretta at all” ( D 187 ). But he is the one who remembers and returns to the expression over the years of their marriage. <?page no="98"?> 98 Ivana Milivojevic his own subjectivity and his own individual myth. In that sense, the shift inside him is triggered when: He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. ( D 211) One might assume that, after the awkward moments with Lily and Miss Ivors, and after the anxiety he felt about the speech he delivered at the dinner, Gabriel frightfully chooses to not even try to translate this perception into words. But one can also believe that somewhere in his mind he knows that there is nothing he can say about this woman that does not exist. In a way, she does not exist because, as Margot Norris points in “Not the Girl She Was at All: Women in ‘The Dead,’” at this moment there is no Gretta, what unfolds in front of our eyes is a Pygmalion myth that “figures the displacement of woman by the male’s aesthetic imago of her.” In other words, what we see is a “social construction of femininity by the narcissistic male more interested in his creative powers than in woman” ( 196 ). While one can only agree with such an observation, the feminist perspective still belongs to the realm of categories, ‘social constructions,’ imaginary relationships, binarisms of power, and exists in a parallax to a possible view Lacan expressed in the R. S. I. seminar: “I do not know if it is a power - people are very, very fascinated by notions, categories like that, power, knowledge, all that. They are silly notions in fact, silly notions which leave the whole place to women, and I did not say The woman , to the women who are not concerned with it, but whose power goes immeasurably beyond all the categories” ( R. S. I. 71 , original emphasis). 7 The exaggeration is, presumably, intentional - to think just of his theory of discourses would be enough for one to understand how important for Lacan’s teaching these “silly notions” are. But the exaggeration is there exactly to emphasize how, in the presence of the unsolvable enigma of femininity, the superiority of these concepts starts to crumble. And that is why, although in a devious and paradoxical way, feminist theory has already made its point in Joyce’s story. The scene with a man standing “still in the gloom of the hall, […] gazing up [and] a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music” ( D 211 ) does not only embody the famous parable of the impossibility of a sex- 7 In the lecture held on 11 Feb. 1975 . <?page no="99"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 99 ual relationship, of a man and a woman digging two parallel tunnels towards each other. A parallactic view leads to a slightly different conclusion: we cannot claim that these tunnels never converge or intersect; the thing is, even if this happens, the intersection where their two languages meet, or, figuratively speaking, where they fit into each other, is just impossible to perceive, thus it becomes non-existent for the two subjects. The ‘key’ cannot be symbolized. That is why Gabriel, unconsciously, chooses not to describe Gretta with words and decides that he would materialize her in the form of a painting. But that would not work either, so all he can do is to identify her with “distant music.” It is certainly not a pure coincidence that this image of Gretta on the top of the stairs is colored by music, “The Lass of Aughrim” sung by Bartell D’Arcy, heard by Gabriel from a distance. The experiences Gabriel and Gretta have while listening to the song are worlds apart, but we do not quite know what this parallax is about until the dramatic scene in the Gresham hotel unfolds. Nevertheless, immediately after this scene and on their way to the hotel, the gap between Gabriel’s and Gretta’s desires - since we do not know anything about her enigmatic existence except from what we receive through Gabriel’s porous knowledge - is no longer the only significant gap that tickles our imagination. From this moment on, precisely at the level of language, the reader is given a chance to recognize that two different kinds of desire are present in Gabriel’s own individuality. Along the narrative stream, he gradually shapes up, describes and analyzes his sensual and at the same time conscious wish for Gretta, “happy that she was his,” contemplating “the first touch of her body,” feeling “a keen pang of lust” ( D 216 ). Gabriel’s language, or more exactly Joyce’s language, illuminates Gretta as someone who is the object of her husband’s desire, while he cannot recognize in her the object cause of his desire. In other words, up until the “Lass of Aughrim” is sung in the background, the connection between Gabriel and Gretta is, in Barthes’ or Lacan’s vocabulary, imaginary. Thereafter, Gabriel does see her as a symbol, but this symbolization is incomplete, so far failed, because there is nothing to put together Gretta from Gabriel’s imagination and Gretta from Gabriel’s symbolization. This connection will be made only when Gretta really starts to speak. In The Parallax View , Žižek defines l’objet petit a as a pure parallax object: “it is not only that its contours change with the shift of the subject; it exists - its presence can be discerned - only when the landscape is viewed from a certain perspective ” ( 18 , original emphasis). What provides such a landscape for Gabriel is the story Gretta tells him about her unrealized love, a story that ends with the death of a sixteen-year-old boy. “‘I can see him so plainly,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them - an expression! ’” ( D 220 ). And when Gabriel asks her “what did he die of <?page no="100"?> 100 Ivana Milivojevic so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it? ” she answers: “I think he died for me” ( D 221 ). Her act of speaking in the hotel room - and it should not be forgotten that their verbal exchanges take place instead of a sexual act that Gabriel has been imagining throughout the evening and night - exposes how little freedom, simply because she speaks of something she has to say , is left for Gretta in a series of associations through which Gabriel, also without consciously wanting to hear what has to be heard, guides her with his questions. He wants her to say that young Michael died of tuberculosis, and although, in fact, he did die of tuberculosis, this is not the truth. When Gretta utters the words, “I think he died for me” ( D 221 ), what she believes becomes true for both of them. There is something essential in relation to this linguistic play, through which unconscious desires come to the surface, in Lacan’s Direction of the Treatment : “Nothing is to be feared more than saying something that might be true. For it would become entirely true if it were said, and Lord knows what happens when something can no longer be cast into doubt because it is true” ( Écrits 515 ). Now we come to the point in “The Dead” when a new discourse is established, when something that incarnates Gretta’s question is revealed, but what happens then? There must be something she can gain from Gabriel as a (clandestine) master, a narcissistic Pygmalion or any other imaginary version of him created throughout the story. The thing is, once Gretta’s language starts to rule the game, what she gets is a chance to re-fabricate her man the best she can, as a man animated by the desire to know ( Psychoanalysis Upside Down 61 ). 8 Thence whether Gabriel wants or does not want to know that Michael Furey died for Gretta, from her perspective, she has to give him that knowledge, because only then his own imperfection, so revealed, will start to function for her. That is, if one believes that “the truth is: impotence. It is on this that everything involved in the truth is built. That there should be love of weakness is no doubt the essence of love” ( 67 ). 9 The parallax is also in the fact that, once the truth is pronounced, something shifts in Gabriel in the way Gretta somehow wants it to shift. And this is based on what inevitably remains a mystery about her, for him. Only from that moment on, Gabriel’s objet a is set in motion as his object cause of desire - an object that is originally lost, that coincides with its own loss, that (re)emerges as lost. And even though he does not know that, something in Gabriel is, or could become now, such an object for Gretta. This is because, we can dare to assume, Michael Furey is for her not only a different object, but an objet a she is driven 8 In the lecture held on 17 Dec. 1969 . 9 In the lecture held on 14 Jan. 1970 . <?page no="101"?> The Mystery of a Missed Story in “The Dead” 101 to in a different way, the ‘object’ as directly the loss, the distance itself. 10 She is not in love with the boy, but with the idea of his intangibility. This difference is a part of the aesthetics of the story and, as such, a reason why Joyce provides us with such little knowledge about what happened between Gretta and Michael. Therefore, through the body of language of “The Dead,” the myth of Gretta and Michael becomes an engine for another intersubjective relationship, between Gretta and Gabriel, inexhaustible exactly because what she says can only express her truth in a mythic mode. The myth, as the best available substitute for the truth of an individual, represents at the same time the mirroring of the universal and the symbolization of it, but what brings these two parallactic spheres together has to be something that itself escapes both the imaginary and the symbolic and resists any form of representation. It re-appears, however, in Joyce’s story as the motif of death - the most and the least real thing that can come into one’s mind - so closely connected to the motif of snow , the inorganic snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” ( D 225 ). There is that ever-lasting question of whether the end of “The Dead” speaks of the beginning of a new life for Gabriel, now that he has learnt and is willing to learn from the ‘symbolic’ Gretta, or of his reconciliation with his own mortality. Could this itself be another parallax inherent to the story? Because these two potential views are nothing but the same, although seemingly opposite views: Gabriel, like anyone else, experiences his own mortality only through the death of (an)other, and he experiences it, like anyone else, with the inevitable conclusion, regardless of the interpretative variability, that the very fact that we shall die provides meaning for our lives from the day we are born. With this conclusion, something for Gabriel has changed, and it has changed in a parallel with the experience of the reader who followed his fictional existence. They have both not only been on a journey, but they also got to a different place, closer to the fulfilling of their never completely satisfiable ‘desire to know.’ This different place is, of course, parallactic, different for any singular reader and for any singular reading. What keeps it ‘unlocked’ is a possibility, if not a fact, that a literary text is, in its writing as well as in its reading, a creation, not out of nothing, but out of everything that is missing. Interpretation is, accordingly, based on what is not there rather than on what is there, and that is precisely why there is always more than one valid interpretation, more than one valid failure - the failure to communicate, which makes literature possible to begin with. 10 In relation to this, see Žižek’s “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses.” <?page no="102"?> 102 Ivana Milivojevic Works Cited Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Image Music Text . Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 155-164. Print. Joyce, James. Dubliners , London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits . Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Print. -. Joyce and the Synthome (Seminar XXIII ) . (1975-1976). Trans. Cormac Gallagher. Jacques Lacan in Ireland: Collected Translations and Papers . Web. -. Psychoanalysis Upside Down / The Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XVII ) . (1969-1970). Trans. Cormac Gallagher. Jacques Lacan in Ireland: Collected Translations and Papers . Web. -. R. S. I. (Seminar XXII ). (1974-1975). Trans. Cormac Gallagher. Jacques Lacan in Ireland: Collected Translations and Papers . Web. Levenson, Michael. “Living History in ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce: The Dead . Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1994. 150-177. Print. Norris, Margot. “Not the Girl She Was at All: Women in ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce: The Dead . Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1994. 178-205. Print. Schwarz, Daniel, ed. James Joyce: The Dead . Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1994. 85-124. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses.” Lacan.com. Web. -. The Parallax View . Cambridge, MA : MIT P, 2006. Print. <?page no="103"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 103 Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses Amanda Sigler The Periodical Scene Then and Now We tend to read Ulysses in book form today, but Joyce’s novel was initially published serially. Ulysses first appeared in the Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920 , with a few installments surfacing in the Egoist as well; several years later, it was published without Joyce’s permission in Two Worlds Monthly . Today, it is being serialized online in Ulysses “Seen,” Robert Berry’s comics adaptation of the novel. These serializations, I argue, foreground the scandalous nature of Joyce’s work, cause readers to appreciate more fully the visual aspects of Ulysses , and make the experience of reading Joyce’s text more interactive. They also add nuance to Margot Norris’ claims that Ulysses is a much more suspenseful text for virgin readers. 1 To think through these various serializations of Ulysses , I want to use the concept of parallax - a term that surfaces most conspicuously in the “Lestrygonians” chapter of Ulysses but that carries ramifications for other chapters as well. In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom first thinks of parallax as it relates to the difference between Greenwich time and Dunsink time. He looks at the “Timeball” on the ballast office, which leads him linguistically and associatively to the book written by “Robert Ball” ( U 8 . 110 ), wherein parallax is scientifically defined as the “apparent displacement” of an object “relatively to the distant background” (Ball 182 ). The displacement occurs when the observer changes position (or closes one eye and opens another), and Bloom tests it out when he raises his little finger to blot out the sun ( U 8 . 564 - 67 ). 2 Thus, Bloom takes a sophisticated scientific concept and brings it to a personal, experiential level, asking how the concept plays out when approached by individual observers who may not fully understand it (“I never exactly understood [parallax],” Bloom confesses - U 8 . 110 - 11 ). Bloom’s methodology encourages us to perform our own parallactic experiments, which we will conduct in this 1 Rather than list all the Little Review and Two Worlds Monthly items separately in a bibliography, I have, for the purposes of this article, indicated page numbers parenthetically in the text, with reference to issue date in the surrounding context. This identifying information should allow readers to find the articles I discuss. I use the abbreviation “ LR ” to refer to the Little Review and “ TWM ” to refer to Two Worlds Monthly . 2 See Thwaites 499 . <?page no="104"?> 104 Amanda Sigler article by viewing serials as displaced objects akin to Bloom’s sun. Bloom’s musings also remind us that in conducting such tests we should consider the implications for those who might not fully understand a concept or the object of study. Such observers would be akin to Margot Norris’ “virgin readers,” or firsttime readers who “pick up Ulysses knowing nothing about it, with no idea of what to expect” ( 1 ). 3 Just as Stanley Fish argues that “everything a reader does, even if he later undoes it, is a part of the ‘meaning experience’ and should not be discarded” ( 4 ), so the virgin reader’s initial interpretations should be given careful consideration, even if - in fact, I would say particularly when - they diverge from the veteran reader’s final conclusions. When Tony Thwaites argues that “Joycean parallax does not begin with the observer,” but “instead with objects out there in the world, and with the ways in which they triangulate, place, and make demands on subjects” ( 499 ), we must remember that Ulysses , too, is an object that assumes physical and visual form on magazine pages and web pages. These pages “triangulate, place, and make demands” on readers. If “Joycean parallax does not begin with the observer,” it may very well end there, since the understood meaning of a passage can often depend on the angle taken by a given reader, and this angle will vary based on the reader’s experience level. 4 Thus, I will consider how various iterations of Ulysses - whether in the Little Review , Two Worlds Monthly , or Ulysses “Seen” - both differ from each other and assume new aspects when viewed by virgin readers, as opposed to veterans who are familiar with the text. Logically, of course, a single virgin reader cannot experience parallax. Parallax does, howev- 3 Norris posits that “[v]ery few” first-time readers of Ulysses would be “unfamiliar with the characters, ignorant of the events that will unfold, and oblivious to its parallel to Homer’s Odyssey ” ( 1 ). Thus, true “virgin readers” would be “unlikely to exist” and should be considered “an imaginary construct” ( 1 ). I will treat “virgin readers” as readers who are approaching Ulysses for the first time, with virtually no prior knowledge of the text. Even if these virtual virgins may not be technical virgins in the strictest sense of Norris’ term, they fall, for all practical intents and purposes, into the same category, and the actual first-time readers I cite support the assumptions Norris makes about the way her “hypothetical figure” would react ( 1 ). Hence, what Wolfgang Iser says of Michael Riffaterre’s “superreader,” of Stanley Fish’s “informed reader,” and of Erwin Wolff’s “intended reader” can be applied to Norris’ “virgin reader”: “Although these readers are primarily conceived as heuristic concepts, they are nevertheless drawn from specific groups of real, existing readers” (Iser 30 ). 4 Fish has argued that “meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produce” ( 322 ). Along similar lines, I argue that the packaging and surrounding artifacts in magazines create interpretive communities and influence individual readers’ responses to the text. Because fictional works were often published serially before being published as books, early serialized readings will in most cases be virgin readings. <?page no="105"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 105 er, exist between virgin and veteran readings, just as it can exist between two virgin readers’ view of the same version of Ulysses . Usefully extending the scientific concept of parallax to the literary realm, Fritz Senn defines it as “an instance of sending the observant mind in two, or more, different positions [sic] and having it compare notes” ( 79 ). In my article, I will be sending our minds in several different directions, asking what happens when we view Ulysses in the Little Review , in Two Worlds Monthly , and in Ulysses “Seen” all at once. We will embark on a quick aerial view of “Telemachus” and “Aeolus” before zooming in on “Calypso.” I will also refer from time to time to the 1922 book publication of Ulysses , since both Two Worlds Monthly and Ulysses “Seen” base their versions on that edition. The way Ulysses was packaged in each of these serializations influenced readers’ understanding and reception of the novel. Ulysses reached its first public audience in the pages of the Little Review , a magazine edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in New York. The editors’ goal was to provide a forum where experimental writers could publish their works. Famously, it attracted the ire of government censors when the scandalous “Nausicaa” episode appeared, forcing the editors to cease publication of Ulysses in 1920 . Readers had to wait for the conclusion until 1922 , when Sylvia Beach published Joyce’s complete novel, unabridged and uncensored. As Lawrence Rainey and Paul Vanderham discuss in some detail, Joyce’s novel was banned in America but marketed to an elite audience in Europe. 5 A few years later, in July 1926 , the New York-based editor Samuel Roth decided it was time to make Joyce’s expensive, banned novel available in censored form to a wider US public. Without Joyce’s permission, he began serializing Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly , a magazine that presented a salacious version of Modernism. Roth vigorously advertised Joyce’s novel as a temptingly 5 See Chapter 2 of Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism . After the Little Review trial, Joyce’s would-be American publisher, Ben Huebsch, refused to publish Ulysses without excisions ( 49 ). Across the Atlantic, France’s relatively liberal publishing environment made it feasible for Beach’s Paris-based Shakespeare and Company to bring out Ulysses . Interestingly, the subscription list for Beach’s deluxe edition of Ulysses included American buyers as well as European ones. For instance, the Sunwise Turn, a New York bookstore, ordered eighteen copies ( 65 ). Thus, although Joyce’s novel could not be printed in America, at least not without significant legal risks, it still made its way onto American shores. There, its value quickly skyrocketed: “Already on 27 March, scarcely seven weeks after the first copies had reached Beach in Paris, Quinn reported that copies of the lowest-priced issue of Ulysses were generally circulating in New York for $ 20 (£ 4 , or 200 francs), with one having reached $ 50 , almost 350 percent more than the original asking price” ( 69 ). Nevertheless, by “the end of 1922 , the US authorities were regularly confiscating copies of the Paris edition - even those Sylvia Beach had disguised with dust jackets bearing titles like Shakespeare’s Works and (better yet) Merry Tales for Little Folks ” (Vanderham 82 ). <?page no="106"?> 106 Amanda Sigler scandalous work, and he later attacked Joyce for refusing to go along with his schemes, but generally he did not provide much explanation of Ulysses itself. In this respect, he mirrored both Anderson and Beach, whose versions of Ulysses refrained from annotating the novel and left readers to discover its meaning through their own devices, including reliance on each other. Fast forward about a hundred years to Ulysses “Seen,” an illustrated version of the novel that began appearing in June 2009 with the release of “Telemachus” and is now available online through the Dublin James Joyce Centre and as an iPad app. “The work here, as Joyce did with the original novel, is [to] be presented in an on-going serialized form,” Berry explains in an introductory page called “Read the Comic.” Unlike earlier serializations, however, Berry’s publication provides a lot of context that makes Joyce’s novel more accessible to first-time readers. The production consists of three layers: the comic itself, the reader’s guide that annotates each page of illustrations, and the comments section with readers’ responses. Mike Barsanti articulates the project’s philosophy of annotation in the “Reader’s Guide” to “Telemachus”: If you know anything about Ulysses , you might know that it bears a strong family resemblance to Homer’s Odyssey . … But if you just pick up Joyce’s novel, you have no idea that the first episode is called “Telemachus.” [Nor, for that matter, do you know that it’s June 16, 1904, 8: 00 a. m., or a Thursday. It takes hundreds of pages to figure this out. But we bring it to you on a platter! ] (1; Barsanti’s brackets, my ellipses) In this way, Ulysses “Seen” orients the reader with respect to the text and provides the virgin reader with the tools and insights of the veteran reader. 6 Notably, Ulysses “Seen” is meant to serve as a “companion piece to the novel,” not as a replacement for it (according to the press release entitled “Ulysses ‘Seen’ Original Art at the James Joyce Centre”). Technically, then, it is not a serialization of Ulysses in its textual entirety, but a serialization of an adaptation of Ulysses . Part of my point, however, is that any serialization - whether in the Little Review , Two Worlds Monthly , or Ulysses “Seen” - is to some extent an adaptation, since editors historically have altered and packaged the text in accordance with their own editorial agendas. Furthermore, adaptations to Ulysses in serial format were often but not always linked to censorship. Sometimes adjustments to Joyce’s text were made to avoid censorship, as in the case of the Little Review ’s and Two 6 Yet when Ulysses first appeared in the 1910 s and 1920 s, these veteran perspectives would not have been available to Joyce’s readers. Such readers were left to their own devices - or, as was often the case in the Little Review , they turned to each other for explanations, only to discover that other readers were just as disoriented as they were. Little Review readers and editors, lacking the experience of Ulysses “Seen” creators, were unable to identify “Thursday” as the day on which Ulysses took place. <?page no="107"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 107 Worlds Monthly ’s expurgations. Other times, however, adaptations actually led to additional censorship, as in the case of Berry’s illustrations, which augment the scandalous nature of Joyce’s text. Parallactic Snapshots of “Telemachus” and “Aeolus” Fig. 1. The opening of Ulysses in Ulysses “Seen” (“Telemachus” panel 3). Courtesy of Robert Berry and the James Joyce Centre, Dublin. Employing a parallactic view that compares all these publications, we see that, from the opening page of the novel, readers of Ulysses encountered very different visual presentations of Joyce’s work. In Berry’s adaptation, the opening page of Ulysses is filled with colorful illustrations (figure 1 ). Although the initial “S” of “Stately” looms large, the first page does not even include an entire sentence of text. 7 Instead, we see Mulligan in a yellow bathrobe, surrounded by the stones of the Martello Tower, with the sea and dark blue sky in the background. The early twentieth-century serializations, by contrast, cram many more words onto 7 Before the page with the opening sentence of Joyce’s novel, Berry’s “Telemachus” includes a title page that announces the date and time and another introductory page that announces the setting both visually and verbally. <?page no="108"?> 108 Amanda Sigler a single page than the 1922 book edition, which in turn prints more words than Berry’s version. The financially constrained Little Review , printed on cheap and brittle wartime paper, embeds Ulysses firmly within the magazine, placing the words “ Ulysses ” and “James Joyce” underneath the Little Review ’s own name (figure 2 ). Only after reading this other information and situating ourselves as Little Review readers do we arrive at Joyce’s first sentence. The 1922 Beach edition, which waits a quarter of a page to print anything at all, thereby advertises that it could financially and aesthetically afford to “waste” space to achieve a more dignified appearance (figure 3 ). When Ulysses returns to serialized format in 1926 , the amount of text on the page once again increases, in accordance with the strictures of magazine publishing (figure 4 ). Through the use of space and the physical positioning of words, publications shape and define their audience - as primarily readers or viewers, as middle-class or affluent, as consumers of an independent text or participants in a larger project encompassing multiple texts. Fig. 2. The opening of Ulysses in the Little Review (March 1918). Courtesy of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. <?page no="109"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 109 Fig. 3 . The opening of Ulysses in Beach’s 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition. Courtesy of the Modernist Versions Project (mvp.uvic.ca). Fig. 4. The opening of Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly ( July 1926). Courtesy of the Modernist Versions Project (mvp.uvic.ca). <?page no="110"?> 110 Amanda Sigler Fig. 5. The opening of “Aeolus” in the Little Review (October 1918). Courtesy of the Modernist Journals Project (Brown University and the University of Tulsa). Fig. 6. The opening of “Aeolus” in Beach’s 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses . Courtesy of the Modernist Versions Project (mvp.uvic.ca). <?page no="111"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 111 Fig. 7. The opening of “Aeolus” in Two Worlds Monthly (September 1926). Courtesy of the University of Virginia (mvp.uvic.ca). A visual comparison of these documents immediately brings another feature of Roth’s publication to light: his decision to print Ulysses in the double column format, instead of in a single column like his predecessors. This decision had important interpretive consequences for “Aeolus,” another chapter whose visual appearance varies significantly depending upon which edition is being consulted. In the Little Review ’s version of “Aeolus,” there are no headlines (figure 5 ); by the time of the 1922 Beach edition, however, Joyce had added the headlines, in accordance with the chapter’s newspaper theme (figure 6 ). The introduction of the headlines has already been examined thoroughly by genetic scholars such as Michael Groden, Luca Crispi, and Sam Slote; to these accounts of the episode’s evolution, I would like to add that in Roth’s version, the text both has headlines and appears in columns (figure 7 ). 8 Thus, as we move chronologically through these early publications of Ulysses , we see that the format of the episode increasingly resembles the format of a newspaper. Furthermore, this evolution 8 See, for example, Groden’s “Ulysses” in Progress ; Crispi’s timeline for Genetic Joyce Studies ; and Slote’s “Ulysses” in the Plural . <?page no="112"?> 112 Amanda Sigler of the text, in its final stages, was beyond Joyce’s control, insofar as he had not authorized Roth’s publication. In the magazines, Ulysses was not an autonomous artifact, but rather part of a larger product being shaped by editors who controlled the visual presentation of Joyce’s text. Reviewing the Scandal of Ulysses: Conflicting Points of View All of these serializations were subject to some degree of scandal and censorship. Often, we see discussions of scandal in the text converted into visual terms. The trials and controversies surrounding Ulysses indicate the way readers are visualizing the words on the page. They show how different individuals, operating from divergent points of view, see the text and the images it evokes quite differently. Among serialized episodes, “Nausicaa,” with its erotic exchange between Bloom and Gerty, may be the most obvious test case for pornography, but nudity surfaces as early as “Telemachus” - a once-innocuous episode that has gained surprising censorial attention in recent years. Pornography, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. In the case of the Little Review , this parallax was almost immediately evident. From the point of view of Joyce’s publishers, Ulysses was an artistic masterpiece. “This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have to publish,” Anderson records having called out to Heap (“Greetings” 77 ). But from the point of view of the censors, who were also among Joyce’s first readers, the text of Ulysses looked “filthy” and obscene (Weir 396 ). The Little Review was suppressed four times during the serialization of Ulysses , most famously for the July-August 1920 issue containing “Nausicaa.” At that point, “John S. Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, swore out a complaint” against Anderson and Heap, thereby bringing the Little Review to court (Weir 394 ). In its coverage of the ensuing trial, the Little Review would use visually conspicuous devices such as exclamation points, asterisks, and boxed text to draw attention to the scandal and highlight the deleterious effects of censorship. 9 Such devices may seem primitive, but they do represent what the Little Review was financially and technologically capable of accomplishing when it wished to direct readers’ eyes toward particular announcements. More startling, however, is the way the Little Review’s lawyer, John Quinn, visualized the courtroom scene. After representing the Little Review in a prelimi- 9 See, for example, Margaret Anderson’s article, “ Ulysses in Court,” published in the January-March 1921 issue of the Little Review on pages 22 - 25 . The article concludes with a series of exclamation points and is followed by a boxed announcement declaring that, because of censorship concerns, the serialization of Ulysses will now be delayed. In fact, the serialization of Ulysses was never continued. <?page no="113"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 113 nary hearing of 21 October 1920 , Quinn wrote a letter to Ezra Pound, describing the courtroom as a “fashionable whorehouse” and Heap as a “brazen madame” (qtd. in Weir 397 ). As David Weir notes, “The docket sheets for 21 October 1920 for the Second District Magistrates Court do not indicate any arrests for prostitution” ( 398 ), so Quinn’s characterization is an act of imagination and not an expression of fact. The lawyer’s mental re-visualization of the court as a “brothel-like” space populated with “pimps” and “prostitutes” may, Weir plausibly suggests, have in turn influenced Joyce’s composition of the “Circe” episode, wherein “Bloom is put on trial for - among other things - conveying obscene literature to those highly respectable women Mrs. Yelverton Barry and Mrs. Bellingham” ( 398 ). Quinn’s mental recasting of the courtroom is significant not only because of its gendered assumptions - the female editors Anderson and Heap, as Bonnie Kime Scott records, produced very different accounts - but also because it shows how parallax applies both to the book and to the courtroom. 10 Just as readers view the book differently, they also see the courtroom differently. Readers (whether they are censors, lawyers, or editors) cannot reach a consensus as to what either space (book or courtroom) looks like. Even among Joyce’s supporters, disagreement surfaces when it comes to their experience of the text and of the scandal it caused. In the case of Two Worlds Monthly , opinion differs (among scholars and among Joyce’s contemporaries) as to whether Roth was doing Joyce a service or a disfavor. Joyce complained of the “pirating” and “mutilation” of Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly ( Letters III 145 ; LettersI 267 ), and his supporters circulated the famous “International Protest,” which denounced Roth’s decision to publish Ulysses without permission (technically, because of copyright laws of the time, it was not “pirated” as Joyce claimed in his letters, a legal circumstance acknowledged by the International Protest). Roth himself viewed his actions as laudable, and even Pound pointed out that Roth was “after all giving his public a number of interesting items that they would not otherwise get” (qtd. in Gertzman 40 ). Roth’s publication of Ulysses caused scandal less because of potentially offensive passages than because of his decision to publish without first contacting the author. Joyce could not sue for copyright infringement, but he did procure a New York Supreme Court injunction against Roth, prohibiting him from using Joyce’s name “for advertising purposes or for purposes of trade” (Spoo, “Copyright Protectionism” 640 ). Sumner, who had earlier attacked the 10 Scott discusses how Anderson viewed the courtroom experience as a way of silencing women in her article, “‘The Young Girl,’ Jane Heap, and the Trials of Gender.” Scott also analyzes Heap’s defense of “Nausicaa,” which queries, “If the young girl corrupts, can she also be corrupted? ” ( 87 ). The quotation is from Heap’s article, “Art and the Law,” in the September-December 1920 issue of the Little Review . <?page no="114"?> 114 Amanda Sigler Little Review , appears to have threatened Roth with legal action in early 1927 , but he eventually retreated, convinced after conversations with Roth that Two Worlds Monthly , with its expurgated Ulysses installments, was not in fact violating the law or threatening morality (Roth, “Mr. Sumner and Beau ,” TWM , March 1927 : 359 - 60 ). In March 1927 , the Clean Books Committee of the Federation of Hungarian Jews in America brought Roth to court, but he was not convicted at that time (Spoo, Without Copyrights 220 ). In 1929 , Roth was “sentenced to sixty days in jail” for printing a book version of Ulysses , but four years later Judge Woolsey established that Ulysses was not obscene and could be legally distributed in the United States (Hamalian 897 ). If Roth could serialize Ulysses without being censored by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and if Judge Woolsey had declared Ulysses to be legally permissible art, then why, three-quarters of a century later, would another agency find Ulysses obscene and object to its publication? For that is what happened in June 2010 , when the makers of Ulysses “Seen” sought permission to publish Berry’s illustrations as an iPad application, only to be rejected by Apple. After an onslaught of criticism, Apple quickly relented, but the company’s initial objections should still give us pause. 11 Apple’s censorship differed in three important ways from the earlier suppression of Ulysses : ( 1 ) Apple objected not to Joyce’s words, but to visualizations of Joyce’s words; ( 2 ) Apple suppressed Ulysses without being under realistic threat of government censorship; and ( 3 ) the censorship of Ulysses began with “Telemachus,” the only episode Berry had illustrated at the time of his appeal to Apple. By contrast, in the Little Review , Pound had left “Telemachus” untouched. The first episode to be censored inhouse by Pound was “Proteus,” and the first episode suppressed by an outside agency (in this case, the US government) was “Lestrygonians” (as documented in Vanderham’s appendix, “The Censor’s Ulysses ”). Similarly, Roth expurgated portions of Ulysses , but he did not encounter problems with “Telemachus,” and Two Worlds Monthly was not suppressed. To be sure, US Attorney Martin Conboy objected to parts of “Telemachus” when he contested the Woolsey decision in 1934 (Vanderham 169 ), but the Court of Appeals upheld the Woolsey decision ( 143 ). Thus, the “Telemachus” passages Conboy objected to never caused 11 In a New York Times article of 13 June 2010 , Berry is recorded as saying that “he did not feel ‘remotely censored by Apple.’ ‘It’s their rules,’ he said. ‘We’re coming to their dinner party at their house’” (Bosman n. p.). Indeed, it is important to recognize that the images to which Apple objected were already available on the website ulyssesseen. com, so Apple was not preventing public access to the images in any universal sense; it was simply refusing to carry a particular product in its store. Nevertheless, because the popular press refers to Apple’s actions as censorship, and because Apple did initially prevent the images from being published in its store (even while not suppressing the web images that were outside its jurisdiction), I employ the term “censorship” here. <?page no="115"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 115 Ulysses to be suppressed. In the long history of Ulysses ’ serialization, the 2010 Apple controversy appears to be the first time that Ulysses was suppressed because of material in “Telemachus.” This delayed emergence of “Telemachus” as an episode controversial enough to warrant censorship suggests that the way a reader visualizes scenes of Ulysses could be far more scandalous than the text itself, particularly if that reader happens to be an illustrator who transfers his mental images to the canvas or the digital screen, where they are readily available for others to see. When the makers of Ulysses “Seen” submitted “Telemachus” to Apple, the software company rejected it because of “nudity” (Reid, “Apple Relents”). According to National Public Radio : Business manager Chad Rutkowski then got a call from an Apple representative. “They asked two things of us,” Rutkowski says. “One, please remove the image of the bare-chested goddess on page 37 . And please rate it NC- 17 .” Rutkowksi says he argued vigorously to keep the image of the goddess and naked drawings of the character Buck Mulligan a few pages later. (Rose, “Apple Relents”) The “goddess” on panel 37 represents Stephen’s imaginative recasting of the milkwoman as a “messenger from the secret morning” ( U 1 . 406 ; the line is quoted on panel 37 of Ulysses “Seen” ). Berry’s “goddess” is thus not a representation of an event actually taking place in Ulysses , but a representation of Stephen’s representation of the milkwoman. When Stephen thinks of the milkwoman, it is clear that he imagines her in sexualized terms (with “[o]ld shrunken paps” - U 1 . 398 ), but does he also imagine her as the naked, attractive and majestic woman bathed in golden light that Berry portrays? The battle over these images, then, becomes not just a question of censorship, but a question of representation. In spite of headlines such as “Joyce Found Too Graphic” and “Joyce’s Ulysses Banned Again,” it is not so much Ulysses that is being censored here, but rather an artist’s representation of the milkwoman in Ulysses . Indeed, the milkwoman seems to surface in three distinct forms in three separate spaces: she exists as a character in Ulysses , as a somewhat mystical figure in Stephen’s imagination, and as an erotic figure in Berry’s illustration. Even if readers do not envision the milkwoman as a beautiful nude, it is clear that she undergoes some kind of transformation in Stephen’s imagination. If Stephen mentally recasts the milkwoman, does this not provide a model for readers to follow, setting a precedent for the very sort of re-fashioning Berry performed? When Stephen thinks of her “[o]ld shrunken paps” (shown in panel 36 ), is he imagining them bare or clothed? Even though one reader of Ulysses “Seen” predicted that “experienced Joyceans will not read your [Berry’s] work” (Comment by Frank D, “Telemachus” Comment Forum 11 ), I believe that vet- <?page no="116"?> 116 Amanda Sigler eran readers can benefit from Berry’s work because it prompts us, through its parallactic re-visioning of Ulysses , to ask questions we may not have considered previously. It reminds us that Ulysses is a visual as well as a textual event, and the project as a whole invites us to consider the extent to which readers have authority to visualize the words on the page. A similar, though less complicated, problem of representation emerges with Berry’s images of the naked Buck Mulligan. Whereas Joyce’s descriptions of the milkwoman do not necessarily imply that she was naked in Stephen’s imagination, Joyce’s words at the end of “Telemachus” almost certainly imply that Mulligan was naked in reality. When Mulligan prepares to jump into the sea, he undresses, but Joyce’s text does not give us explicit details as to the appearance of Mulligan’s unclothed body. Berry fills us in. In Ulysses “Seen,” Mulligan is depicted standing on a rock at the edge of the sea, in full frontal nudity (panel 63 ); he is shown naked in profile, with a closer view of his genitalia (panels 64 and 65 ); and he is shown leaping naked into the sea, arms outstretched, proclaiming, “ THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA ” (panel 66 ). I think it is fair to say that, while Mulligan is naked, Joyce’s text is not that explicit about it. Nevertheless, when readers visualize this scene, they must see something. Some might conceivably imagine even more detailed images of Mulligan’s body. Others, however, might imagine something akin to the revised drawings that Berry sent to Apple, which cropped the images to avoid displays of Mulligan’s genitalia. Still other readers might be aware that Mulligan is naked, but fail to construct a mental image of his body. Do they, in effect, close their eyes and only hear the text? The text, at any rate, seems historically to have been less offensive than the visual images it evokes. It is as if the words on the leaves of Ulysses , though they are not quite fig leaves, cover Mulligan’s nudity and make it acceptable to authorities such as John Sumner or government censors. It is only when Mulligan assumes concrete visual form that he becomes problematic. Incidentally, Apple originally told Berry’s team that even using “fig leaves” or similar devices to cover Mulligan’s genitalia would be insufficient; the nude images must be redesigned entirely (Spence). Apple’s initial refusal to allow the nude images testifies to the power of the visual, showing how illustrations that make Ulysses easier for novice readers to understand also make early scenes of the novel more difficult for authorities to digest. Additionally, Ulysses “Seen” is not the only serial artifact to contain pictures of nudes. The Little Review and Two Worlds Monthly also published images of nudes at various points. For instance, the Little Review printed four drawings of nudes by James Light immediately after the “Scylla and Charybdis” installment of May 1919 , and Roth boldly displayed a nude on the same magazine cover that announced “ MR . ROTH HALED INTO COURT ” ( TWM , April 1927 ). While <?page no="117"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 117 such images were not meant to depict scenes of Ulysses , they were nonetheless viewed in conjunction with Joyce’s novel. Reading Ulysses and looking at visual representations of nudes in the same publication was not entirely new with Ulysses “Seen,” but dates all the way back to the Little Review and Two Worlds Monthly . Whether in the magazine pages or on the web, serializations of Ulysses offer up a more visual and potentially more stimulating reading experience. Magazines and websites represent not just containers for texts but different presentations and interpretations of texts. The packaging, editorial decisions, and surrounding artifacts not only influence readers’ perception of Ulysses but also allow for a more interactive reading experience. Particularly in the Little Review and Ulysses “Seen,” serial publishers actively encourage readers to engage with the text by writing in letters to the editor or by commenting in online forums. In the Little Review , readers report being both scandalized and frustrated by Joyce’s emerging novel. They question whether Joyce’s novel will evade the censors; they compare Joyce to other authors in the magazine, sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably; they attack Joyce for indecency and alleged artistic shortcomings; they blame the editors for allowing so many misprints and errors to creep into Ulysses . Yet, amidst all of this controversy, they are still asking very basic questions about the content of the novel. One reader bombards fellow “ Little Reviewers ” with questions about the plot and setting, inserting a frank confession between queries: “I read [ Ulysses ] each month with eagerness, but I must confess that I am defeated in my intelligence” ( LR , May-June 1920 : 72 ). In an attempt to help this lost reader, Jane Heap advises that the book takes place all on one day - “Tuesday” ( 72 ). Consequently, Margaret Anderson’s co-editor both clarifies and muddies Ulysses for first-time readers: she correctly identifies Ulysses as a one-day novel, but she does not know which day it is. These comments reveal how difficult virgin readers found it to navigate the text of Ulysses . They show how readers would rely on each other to make sense of the text, and how the magazine, far from merely being the physical place where Ulysses was being printed, became an interactive space where readers were writing alongside Joyce. Little Review subscribers opening a periodical issue not only read Ulysses but also read what other people are saying about Ulysses . The meaning of the text is socially constructed, a product of what readers generate by conversing with each other. Even when we move from 1920 s magazine publication to twenty-first century electronic publication, this tradition of readerly engagement continues - but consensus as to the meaning of Joyce’s text does not become any clearer. In the Ulysses “Seen” forums, one reader refers to Joyce’s novel as an “impossible work of literature” (Comment by jlev, “Telemachus” Comment Forum 11 ), and veteran readers debate whether Berry’s illustrations accurately represent <?page no="118"?> 118 Amanda Sigler the text. 12 Some readers suggest that there is a kind of parallax between what Joyce writes and what Berry draws, as evinced by the following critique in the Comment Forum: I find it hard to resolve the disparity between some of your images and Joyce’s explicit “instructions” to the reader in the book. For examples, we know the tower is at most 16 feet across at the top but you make it look 30-40; Joyce says the sea is green but you make it blue; Joyce says [the] sky is sunny but you make it dark and cloudy; […] Joyce says Stephen is 22 you make him look to be at least 30-35. We are only at the book’s eighth page or so and already it is a different book. (Comment by Frank D, “Telemachus” Comment Forum 11) To this reader’s comment I would like to add that, basically, anytime readers pick up a different version of Ulysses , it is going to be a different book. Debates about whether a given publication accurately represents Ulysses date all the way back to the Little Review , which censored certain passages of the novel, thereby angering Joyce, who composed a sternly-worded letter: “The text hitherto published in Little Review is not my text as sent on in typescript” ( Letters II 456 ). 13 Joyce also objected to the errors in the 1922 edition and to the alteration of his text in Roth’s version. Therefore, none of these versions I have been discussing are entirely faithful to Joyce’s intentions. “Calypso” in Parallax My point, however, is that with serializations of Ulysses , these differences between authorial intention and final product tend to be amplified, as editors and readers assume a more active role in shaping Joyce’s text. “Calypso” serves as a useful case in point. When Ulysses was being serialized in the Little Review , Joyce sent his manuscript first to Pound, who then passed it on to Anderson and Heap. When Pound read “Calypso,” he objected to Joyce’s descriptions of certain bodily functions and decided to preemptively censor Joyce’s text. In Pound’s version, Bloom does not explicitly grab a “paper” to “read at stool” (Vanderham 170 ; U 4 . 465 ), but he does find “an old number of Titbits ” to take out into the garden ( LR , June 1918 : 50 ). 14 Veteran readers can easily fill in the blanks, but virgin readers may be left wondering. 12 The reader adopting the name “jlev” is Josh Levitas, who is the web designer and production artist for Ulysses “Seen.” 13 This complaint occurs in a December 1919 letter to James B. Pinker. 14 Vanderham’s appendix, “The Censor’s Ulysses ,” usefully documents the passages that the Little Review omitted. As Vanderham explains, the “expurgations have been inferred from comparison of the Rosenbach manuscript ( ‘Ulysses’: A Facsimile of the Manuscript ) and the first Paris edition” ( 233 ). For ease of reference, not as a means of determining what <?page no="119"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 119 It is entirely plausible that Bloom goes outside to survey his garden, and to read the paper while enjoying some fresh air. 15 In the Little Review , readers are told that Bloom went into the garden and listened for sounds of his neighbors; then he “bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall” ( LR , June 1918 : 51 ), which prompts him to think about fertilizer, including the “droppings” of hens and the “dung” of “cattle” ( 51 ): Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden; their droppings are very good I heard. Best of all though are the cattle, specially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. (51) In the Little Review , this is as scatological as Bloom gets. We are told, explicitly, that he thinks about excrement; we are never told that he actually produces any of it. Actions are reduced to thoughts, and excrement is categorically confined to the manure of animals. In the Little Review , Bloom never “kicked open the crazy door of the jakes,” “undid his braces,” or sat “[a]squat on the cuckstool” (Vanderham 170 ; U 4 . 494 , 497 , 500 ). Instead, he “walked on,” continuing his stream-of-consciousness musings about hats, baths, shopkeepers, and related associations ( LR , June 1918 : 50 ). Then, apparently, he glanced down at Titbits and came across “Our prize titbit. Matcham’s Masterstroke . Written by Mr. Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers’ Club, London” ( 51 ). This story led him to a new chain of associations in his stream of consciousness; then, still in the “bright light” of his garden, “he eyed carefully his black trousers: the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What time is the funeral? Better find out in the paper” ( LR , June 1918 : 52 ). For readers of the Little Review , the “bright light” in the garden seems to be a confirmation of Bloom’s earlier assertion that it is a “[f]ine morning” ( 50 ). Readers of the magazine do not know that Joyce intended the “bright light” of the garden as a juxtaposition to the “gloom” of the “jakes” (Vanderham 170 ; U 4 . 539 ); in their version of the the Little Review omitted, I have provided the corresponding episode and line numbers in Hans Walter Gabler’s oft-cited edition. 15 Indeed, my students, reading Ulysses for the first time in the Little Review , were puzzled by the vague descriptions of Bloom’s actions and conjectured that he might be doing something of the sort. Of course, twenty-first century students may not readily associate a periodical with toilet paper, or gardens with a means of accessing toilets. The act of “filling in the blanks” arguably becomes more difficult for virgin readers of the twentyfirst century than for those of the early twentieth. Could they have hypothesized that Bloom, who grabbed some paper before going outside, was in fact making a trip to the outhouse? Possibly. But they could have just as easily dismissed this suspicion, since it was not commonplace for characters in literature to use the restroom. <?page no="120"?> 120 Amanda Sigler text, “bright light” is juxtaposed to “black trousers” and Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness musings on “[d]ay: then the night” in the immediately preceding sentence ( 52 ). The intervening paragraph about the jakes is missing. There is no literal darkness from which Bloom emerges; rather, darkness is confined to the “night” of Bloom’s imagination. In the Little Review , Bloom looks at his trousers not because he wants to inspect their condition after defecating and pulling them back up, but because he is thinking about the black garb worn at funerals. The stated function of “paper” in the Little Review ’s “Calypso” is to provide information about funerals and other events, not to provide a smooth surface for wiping one’s bottom. Thus we see that the Little Review ’s version of this scene restricts the meaning of Joyce’s text, so that the additional, scatological implications and vulgar associations are obscured. Functions, motives, reasons, positions - all of these change when we encounter the Little Review’s “Calypso” without the knowledge of veteran readers. This reading is entirely in alignment with Vanderham when he writes, “Joyce’s intention in the jakes passage, as Pound saw it, was to contrast Bloom’s ‘interior poetry’ with his ‘outward surroundings.’ […] By deleting entirely Bloom’s visit to the jakes, Pound obscured the very contrast he allegedly sought to heighten” ( 23 ). But something else is going on here. Besides interfering with Joyce’s artistic intentions, Pound is also altering Joyce’s narrative and thereby the virgin reader’s experience of the text. Bloom’s trip to the outhouse is an event that never took place in the Little Review . From the perspective of veteran readers who have encountered the text in Joyce’s full-length version, we can bemoan Pound’s squeamishness and censorship all we want. But original readers had no idea that the text was being censored. For them, Bloom’s decision to go outside remained a mystery. Was this a morning habit of his? Was he looking for something in the garden? Is the author or editor of “Calypso” hiding something from us? Could this mysterious incident at the end of “Calypso” be akin to Bloom’s famous exchange with Bantam Lyons at the end of “Lotus Eaters,” which is only explained in “Cyclops”? These are all possibilities for virgin readers of the Little Review , though they would have referred to the chapters by their numbers, not by their titles. 16 Fittingly, “Calypso” means “Concealer” (Gifford 70 ). In the absence of chapter titles though, Little Review readers would not have made this connection; the title “Calypso” was itself concealed from them. When Norris comments on the etymology of “Calypso,” she perceptively concludes that “the device or construct of the virgin reader would allow us to see that it is not only the characters in the episode who are concealers, but that 16 Occasionally, however, the Little Review editors make reference to chapter titles, even if they do not print them at the head of chapters. <?page no="121"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 121 the narration itself functions as a ‘Calypso’ or ‘Concealer.’ And when a text hides information from the reader, it creates the conditions of suspense” ( 85 ). The chapter’s concealed elements, Norris argues, will lead virgin readers to ask questions such as: “Why must the slip of paper [in Bloom’s hat] be kept safe and from whom? ” ( 87 ). In Bloom’s exchange with Dlugacz, is Bloom looking for a “homosexual assignation” ( 88 )? What about “Molly’s hidden letter, and the ambiguities in Milly’s letter,” which seem to suggest “that the Bloom family is embroiled in goodness knows what sorts of sexual ambiguities and entanglements” ( 91 ; 92 )? In the midst of all these suspicious behaviors, “Bloom’s peaceful defecation will curiously survive as one of the most innocent moments in the episode” ( 94 ). But in the Little Review , the suspense of “Calypso” extends to this scene as well. Bloom’s “innocent” trip to the garden becomes just as mysterious as his exchange with Dlugacz or the letter Molly hides under her pillow. In the next issue of the Little Review , one reader describes Joyce’s prose as “impressionistic” and “bewildering” ( LR , July 1918 : 62 ). Another refers disparagingly to “Joyce’s pleasing habit of throwing chunks of filth into the midst of incoherent maunderings” ( 64 ). Keep in mind that in the Little Review “chunks of filth” would have meant cow manure and chicken droppings. The reader did not know what he had been spared. 17 For Americans who did not manage to acquire a copy of the 1922 Ulysses , an item difficult to obtain for financial, legal, and geographic reasons, Roth’s version of “Calypso” in Two Worlds Monthly would have provided some additional clues as to Bloom’s activities. In the August 1926 issue of Roth’s magazine, as in the Little Review , Bloom grabs a copy of Titbits and heads outside. Roth’s version clarifies, however, that Bloom exited “through the backdoor” ( TWM , Aug. 1926 : 215 ). Once outside, he muses for a bit about the use of excrement as fertilizer, following a similar script to that of the Little Review . Then, however, Bloom comes to another door, which he kicks open. While going into this new space, which is described as moldy and malodorous, Bloom thinks, “Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral” ( TWM , Aug. 1926 : 215 ). Then he “undid his braces” and sat down ( 215 ). Now readers can surmise that Bloom is sitting on the toilet, and the mystery of why he later “eyed carefully his black trousers” is solved ( TWM , Aug. 1926 : 215 ; LR , June 1918 : 52 ). As Jay Gertzman 17 It is not until the issue of May-June 1920 , when “Nausicaa” was being serialized, that a reader complained of “frankness about natural functions” ( LR , May-June 1920 : 73 ). Her comment, however, references a letter of April 1920 , which suggests that readers may have begun noticing and discussing “natural functions” at an earlier point. In May 1919 , Margaret Anderson had cut passages from “Scylla and Charybdis” in an attempt to avoid censorship, explaining: “I have ruined Mr. Joyce’s story by cutting certain passages in which he mentions natural facts known to everyone” ( 21 ). <?page no="122"?> 122 Amanda Sigler documents, Roth, who was working from the 1922 Ulysses , has omitted some phrases from this passage. But the element of suspense is largely lost. In Two Worlds Monthly , descriptions such as the following clarify Bloom’s activities through highly suggestive phrasing: Asquat, he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees. […] Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. […] He read on. […] He tore away half the prize story sharply. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door and came forth from the gloom into the air. ( TWM , Aug. 1926: 215-216) To be sure, Roth has omitted “on the cuckstool” from the modifier beginning “[a] squat” and erased “seated calm above his own rising smell” from the sentence beginning “[h]e read on; ” he has also deleted the second half of the predicate - “and wiped himself with it” - from the sentence about Bloom tearing the Titbits story (Gertzman 54 ; cf. Beach 66 - 67 ). He has also expurgated a few sentences that elaborate on Bloom’s “yielding” to his excretory urge. Nevertheless, nearly all of these positions, sensations, and actions are strongly implicit, even if they are not directly stated. If Bloom is “[a]squat” in what appears to be an outhouse, one could easily guess that he is seated on the toilet; if he is doing what most people do on toilets, it is likely that a smell would emerge; if he has torn away part of the paper, it is probably because he needed something with which to wipe himself. Bloom’s activities at the end of “Calypso” are no longer vague mysteries. However, even though the element of suspense largely disappears, the reader still engages with the text by mentally filling in some of the missing information. The reader of Two Worlds Monthly must take a more active role in constructing meaning than the reader of the 1922 Ulysses , who is explicitly told where Bloom is sitting, what he is smelling, and why he is tearing Titbits . Censorship in the periodicals alters the reading experience, not only by depriving readers of information, but by giving them opportunities to create it. In magazines, as compared to books, relatively less action takes place on the page, and comparatively more takes place in the reader’s imagination. If Roth’s version of Ulysses seems explicit, it becomes even more so in Berry’s version. In Ulysses “Seen,” Bloom’s activities are abundantly obvious, as frank visual images reinforce blunt textual descriptions. Bloom is shown walking along the edge of the garden, kicking open the outhouse door with a “ THUMP ! ,” and pulling down his pants, baring his bottom to readers. We receive images of Bloom from various angles, including a frontal view of him opening the outhouse door, a rear view of him lowering his trousers, and a side view of him sitting on the toilet, with his pants gathered about his feet. Where the Little <?page no="123"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 123 Review and Two Worlds Monthly had been reserved, Ulysses “Seen” unabashedly retains candid descriptions, such as: “He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes” (panel 48 ), a sentence omitted entirely in the Little Review , and which Roth had shortened. Berry’s illustrations reinforce Joyce’s words, making it clear that Bloom is entering the outhouse. In the next panel, Berry augments the scene such that we acquire underground vision and see even more than Bloom sees (figure 8 ). Depicted in profile, Bloom is sitting on the toilet to the far left of the page, which is more or less evenly divided between sky and earth. Thought bubbles convey what Bloom is thinking in his head above ground, while the divided screen allows us to see what Bloom’s waste is doing beneath the ground. As Bloom reads the columns of Titbits , a column of black waste inches down the underground pipe. Then, piles of black excrement accumulate and, as indicated by three surrounding squiggles, begin to emit a smell. Whereas the Little Review had omitted the details of Bloom’s trip to the outhouse, effectively burying Bloom’s waste out of sight, Berry’s illustrations present an explosion of added details that exhume the waste and present it as overwhelming sensory evidence, piled on top of Joyce’s words. Fig. 8. Berry’s illustration of Bloom on the toilet in Ulysses “Seen” (“Calypso” panel 49). <?page no="124"?> 124 Amanda Sigler Ulysses “Seen” clarifies Joyce’s novel in another way, by segregating Bloom’s internal monologue from narratorial descriptions. White, round bubbles represent Bloom’s thoughts, while yellow, rectangular boxes encapsulate narration. In panel 48 of “Calypso,” the words “ OUR PRIZE TITBIT ” and “ PAYMENT AT THE RATE OF ONE GUINEA A COLUMN” (among other phrases) occur in white thought bubbles above ground, while the words “[q]uietly he read, restraining himself ” (and similar descriptions) are found in yellow rectangles below ground. Initially, this visual division between thoughts about writing and descriptions of excrement may seem to reinforce Pound’s view of Joyce’s intention, which “was to contrast Bloom’s ‘interior poetry’ with his ‘outward surroundings’” (Vanderham 23 ). Notably, however, Bloom’s thoughts about writing mix art with commerce, since he immediately correlates Philip Beaufoy’s creative work with the amount of money the author would have been paid. Moreover, on the same page of Berry’s illustration, the thought bubbles include the words “ HOPE IT ’S NOT TOO BIG BRING ON THE PILES AGAIN ” (a sentence that Roth omitted and that did not occur in the Little Review ). On a single page, Bloom’s “interior poetry” encompasses art, commerce, and excrement, thereby dismantling the neat divisions set up by Pound. By allowing “low” thoughts about defecation to appear above ground alongside thoughts about literary and commercial production, Berry’s artwork reinforces Joyce’s insistence upon mixing the high with the low, and the literary with the excremental. In addition to reinforcing certain aspects of Joyce’s intention, Berry’s illustrations also perform interpretive work, sometimes embellishing or even departing from Joyce’s text (as addressed by “Frank D” in online comment forums). Though the illustrations of Ulysses make explicit what some other versions conceal, they also compel veteran readers to rethink their own readings of the text. For instance, because the word “column” visually occurs above and below ground, in two separate quotations, 18 Berry’s illustration suggests that “column” could refer both to columns of type in Titbits and to the column of feces being secreted into the toilet. The illustrations also force us to think about how we should appropriate the words of Ulysses , and specifically how to parse interior monologue and narration. For example, the last two yellow boxes in panel 48 of “Calypso” contain the words “[m]idway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently… …that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone” (Berry’s ellipses, representing di- 18 “PAYMENT AT THE RATE OF ONE GUINEA A COLUMN HAS BEEN MADE TO THE WRITER” occurs above ground, while “the first column and, yielding but resisting” occurs below ground. The second quotation is in reference to Bloom reading the first column of Titbits , but when the quotation is viewed with its accompanying image of Bloom’s feces, it brings other associations to mind. <?page no="125"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 125 vision between boxes). Because these words appear in yellow boxes, readers of Ulysses “Seen” will associate them with the narratorial voice, not Bloom’s voice. Veteran readers, however, might question whether “that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone” should in fact be attributed to the narrator and not to Bloom. Why not put these words about constipation in a thought bubble? Then again, can we be certain that is where they belong? If each reader independently divided Ulysses into white thought bubbles and yellow boxes (adding separate colors and shapes for dialogue), we would likely come up with as many distinct visualizations as there are readers. Obviously, this disparity presents a problem for virgin readers encountering the novel for the first time in Ulysses “Seen,” since there appears to be no mechanism for preserving the ambiguities of Joyce’s prose, at least when it comes to the question of interior monologue versus narration. Illustrating Ulysses is somewhat like reading Finnegans Wake out loud, insofar as decisions about visualization and pronunciation will close off other possibilities. This does not mean that any given visualization or pronunciation is invalid, but simply that multiple variations will proliferate as long as there are readers to invent them. Just as someone who only heard Finnegans Wake on tape would not be aware of other ways the words could be pronounced, someone who only saw Ulysses in comics form might not be aware of other ways the words could be attributed. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Berry expresses the desire that people will not “read the comic version only” (“Telemachus” Comment Forum 11 ). This is also why a parallactic reading that brings multiple versions of Ulysses together promises to increase the rewards of reading. Someone who only read “Calypso” in Ulysses “Seen” would not experience the level of suspense and confusion felt by readers of the Little Review , nor engage in the imaginative exercise of “filling in the blanks” like readers of Two Worlds Monthly . At the same time, someone who only read “Calypso” in the Little Review or Two Worlds Monthly would not be exposed to the frank and visually explicit nature of the text presented by Ulysses “Seen.” Concluding Titbits By comparing all of these versions, then, we see how Ulysses , far from being a purely textual event, is also a highly visual experience. We see how alterations in the text and in its presentation impacted early readers’ understanding of the novel. Margot Norris’ insightful arguments about virgin readers of the novel can be further enriched by looking at these serializations. In addition to what she argues about the novel creating suspense for first-time readers, I would like to add the following three observations: <?page no="126"?> 126 Amanda Sigler ( 1 ) Not all first-time readers of Ulysses were looking at the same text. “Calypso” would have created varying degrees of suspense for first-time readers, depending on which version they encountered. In the Little Review , it is very uncertain what Bloom is doing at the end of the chapter, so the text has potential to generate suspense. In Two Worlds Monthly , it becomes clear that Bloom is going to the outhouse, but some of the more explicit references to his activities are eliminated. It may still be a little suspenseful, insofar as readers have to fill in a few blanks or make a few inferences: for instance, when we are told that Bloom opens the “crazy door,” we assume it is the door of the outhouse (“of the jakes” - Beach 66 ). In Ulysses “Seen,” by contrast, there is no real suspense or wondering in this part of the novel. The drawings make Bloom’s activities very explicit. ( 2 ) In discussions of suspense, it is relevant to keep in mind that first-time readers of Ulysses who encountered the novel in the Little Review or Two Worlds Monthly had to wait at least one month for the next installment to come out, and more than a year to get halfway through the novel. This extremely prolonged reading experience adds to the suspense, since readers cannot immediately turn to the next chapter as in a book. ( 3 ) Virgin readers of Ulysses who encountered the novel in the Little Review or Two Worlds Monthly never got to the end of the text, at least not in those versions. For these readers, the novel never came to an end because the editors were forced to stop serialization prematurely, whether because of legal or financial reasons. Readers get to “Oxen of the Sun” and are just left hanging. They remain perpetual virgins who never go all the way to the end. Suspended in suspense, they do not know whether Bloom will invite Stephen to his house, whether Molly has actually followed through with her plans to meet Boylan, or whether Bloom and Molly will reconcile at the end of the day. 19 The serial evidence supports Norris when she writes, “The degree of reader participation is inevitably much greater for a virgin than a veteran reader, thereby producing not only more extensive speculation, greater risk, but also a wider and more interesting range of interpretation” ( 10 ). Her hypothetical first-time reader can be paired with the evidence of actual first-time readers by 19 In his summary of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Harry Blamires writes that Bloom appears at the end of the chapter, “Bloom[,] who tonight will bring him [Stephen] friendship and take him home” ( 91 ). Yet virgin readers of “Scylla and Charybdis” do not know this, and readers would not encounter this outcome in the Little Review or Two Worlds Monthly . The extent of Bloom’s friendship with Stephen is concealed from early magazine readers. As regards Molly’s relationship with Boylan, Norris writes, “By the end of the novel Boylan will indeed have become Molly’s lover. But this is not yet true in the morning, and there is nothing to prevent ‘Penelope’ from revealing at the end of the work that adultery never took place and that Molly, like her mythical prototype, remained faithful to her husband” ( 2 ). <?page no="127"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 127 looking at letters to the editor and reader comment forums. And it is evident, as she hypothesizes, that they were quite confused about a number of things. In fact, in early serializations, Ulysses is so suspenseful and has so many gaps that readers get frustrated. There is a point at which suspense tips into frustration. There is just too much they do not know. Finally, it is useful to remember that the serialization of Ulysses is an ongoing event. It is not something that stopped with the Little Review and Two Worlds Monthly back in the 1920 s. The advent of digital technology, so far from rendering serializations obsolete, opens new possibilities for distributing Ulysses in serial form. For example, over the course of 2012 - 2013 , the Modernist Versions Project gradually released electronic installments of the 1922 Ulysses . A new episode was published every three weeks, and the complete novel is now available as a PDF download online. Even now, Ulysses “Seen” continues to be serialized, in comics form. Berry predicts that the project will take him ten years to complete (Reid, “Dublin James Joyce Center”). If so, this promises to be the longest serialization of Ulysses yet. Serialization lends itself to parallactic vision, facilitating our ability to send our eyes in two directions at once. This kind of vision is useful both when we are comparing different versions of the same text and when we are comparing scenes within an individual publication. Ulysses “Seen” actively encourages parallactic reading by departing from Joyce’s chapter sequence and serializing “Calypso” immediately after “Telemachus”: that way, according to the creators of the project, episodes taking place at the same time can be viewed in parallel (Reid, “Throwaway”); repeated visual motifs reinforce this principle and strengthen the link between Stephen’s day and Bloom’s day. 20 The digital technology makes it easy to jump back and forth between panels. 21 But this ease of comparison is also true of serial installments in magazines like the Little Review . Because episodes were serialized across multiple magazine issues, it was possi- 20 When it came to later chapters, the creators of Ulysses “Seen” decided to serialize “Nestor” and “Lotus Eaters” as part of one large chapter, not two separate ones. Thus, while “Telemachus” and “Calypso” appeared independently, “Nestor” and “Lotus Eaters” emerge simultaneously, with a location switch every few panels. 21 The Reader’s Guide for Ulysses “Seen” mentions parallax directly, in reference to the cloud covering the sun that both Bloom and Stephen observe: “The observation of the same phenomenon from two different places invokes parallax, an important concept for Ulysses . […] Bloom, who has an active, if uninformed interest in astronomy, thinks about Parallax several times during the day, but it also is a kind of metaphor for Joyce’s method. We see the phenomena of one day in the life of a City from several different perspectives, and we need to take more than one perspective into account to find the real depth of the story. Rob’s drawing reinforces this idea” (Reader’s Guide, “Telemachus” 25 ). The creators of Ulysses “Seen” thus actively encourage parallactic reading. <?page no="128"?> 128 Amanda Sigler ble to have Ulysses opened to more than one page at once. Since “Telemachus” and “Calypso” were printed in separate issues, one could easily spread open both issues and read them side-by-side. Serializations, then, allow us to see different instances of parallax at work. Serial publications are more interactive venues that encourage us to think of the text in more visual ways. Whereas early serials add suspense and confusion to the reading experience, the later serial, Ulysses “Seen,” floods readers with images and explanations. But vigorous debates continue, and interpretation does not necessarily get any easier, for virgin or for veteran readers. Today, we question whether there could be true virgin readers of Ulysses . When the early serials were published, one might question whether veteran readers could be said to exist. The early serials show what it is like to read Ulysses without the expertise of veteran readers. They show how communities of readers came together to try to create meaning and understand the text, forming the legacy of an intimate interpretive community that we continue to enjoy today. Works Cited Anderson, Margaret. “Greetings to The James Joyce Society from Margaret Anderson.” A James Joyce Miscellany . Ed. Marvin Magalaner. New York: The Publications Committee of The James Joyce Society, 1957. 77. Print. Ball, Robert. The Story of the Heavens . London: Cassell, 1901. Print. Barsanti, Mike. “Reader’s Guide” to “Telemachus.” Ulysses “Seen.” Throwaway Horse and the Dublin James Joyce Centre. 2009-2013 (ongoing). Web. 28 July 2013. Berry, Robert, illus. Ulysses “Seen.” Throwaway Horse and the Dublin James Joyce Centre. 2009-2013 (ongoing). Web. 28 July 2013. Blamires, Harry. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses. 3 rd ed. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Bosman, Julie. “Joyce Found Too Graphic, This Time by Apple.” New York Times 13 June 2010. Web. 29 Dec. 2013. “Comment Forum.” Ulysses “Seen.” Throwaway Horse and the Dublin James Joyce Centre. 2009-2013 (ongoing). Web. 28 July 2013. Crispi, Luca. “Manuscript Timeline 1905-1922.” Genetic Joyce Studies 4 (2004). Web. 23 Dec. 2013. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? : The Authority of Interpretive Communities . Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1980. Print. Gertzman, Jay. “Not Quite Honest: Samuel Roth’s ‘Unauthorized’ Ulysses and the 1927 International Protest.” Joyce Studies Annual (2009): 34-66. Project Muse . Web. 23 Nov. 2010. Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. 2 nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print. Groden, Michael. “Ulysses” in Progress . Princeton: Princeton UP , 1977. Print. <?page no="129"?> Censorship and Parallax in Serializations of Ulysses 129 Hamalian, Leo. “Nobody Knows My Names: Samuel Roth and the Underside of Modern Letters.” Journal of Modern Literature 3.4 (April 1974): 889-921. JSTOR . Web. 21 Feb. 2011. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP , 1980. Print. Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Cited as LettersI . Print. -. Letters of James Joyce. Vols. 2 and 3. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Cited as Letters II and Letters III . Print. -. Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986. Print. Cited as U plus episode and line number. References to Ulysses in the Little Review are cited as LR plus page number. References to Ulysses in the Two Worlds Monthly are cited as TWM plus page number. References to Ulysses in the 1922 edition are cited as Beach plus page number. Norris, Margot. Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. New Directions in Irish and American Literature. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture . New Haven: Yale, 1998. Print. Reid, Calvin. “Apple Relents: ‘Ulysses Seen’ and ‘Being Earnest’ Comics Approved for the iPad.” Publishers Weekly 22 June 2010: n. pag. Web. 28 Dec. 2013. -. “Dublin’s James Joyce Center Licenses Web Rights to ‘Ulysses Seen.’” Publishers Weekly 1 May 2013: n. pag. Web. 17 July 2013. -. “Throwaway Adds ‘Calypso’ to ‘Ulysses Seen; ’ Releases ‘The Wasteland’ App.” Publishers Weekly 13 June 2011: n. pag. Web. 17 July 2013. Rose, Joel. “Apple Relents, and ‘Ulysses Seen’ Is Seen After All.” National Public Radio 16 June 2010: n. pag. Web. 30 Dec. 2013. Scott, Bonnie Kime. “‘The Young Girl,’ Jane Heap, and the Trials of Gender in Ulysses .” Joycean Cultures / Culturing Joyces . Ed. Vincent J. Cheng, Kimberly J. Devlin, and Margot Norris. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998. 78-94. Print. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1984. Print. Slote, Sam. Ulysses in the Plural: The Variable Editions of Joyce’s Novel . The National Library of Ireland Joyce Studies, No. 05. Ed. Luca Crispi and Catherine Fahy. [Ireland]: The National Library of Ireland, 2004. Print. Spence, Nick. “ Ulysses Seen iPad Webcomic Gets Apple Approval After Cuts.” Macworld 8 June 2010: n. pag. Web. 29 Dec. 2013. Spoo, Robert. “Copyright Protectionism and Its Discontents: The Case of James Joyce’s Ulysses in America.” Yale Law Journal 108.3 (December 1998): 633-67. JSTOR . Web. 31 Dec. 2013. -. Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain . Oxford: OUP , 2013. Thwaites, Tony. “Molly and Bloom in the Lists of ‘Ithaca.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51.4 (Winter 2009): 494-502. Project Muse . Web. 22 June 2013. <?page no="130"?> 130 Amanda Sigler Ulysses “Seen.” Illus. by Robert Berry. Reader’s Guide by Mike Barsanti and Janine Utell. Graphic / web design by Josh Levitas. Throwaway Horse and the Dublin James Joyce Centre. 2009-2013 (ongoing). Web. 30 Dec. 2013. “ Ulysses ‘Seen’ Original Art at the James Joyce Centre.” Ulysses “Seen.” 23 July 2012. Web. 30 Dec. 2013. Vanderham, Paul. James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses. New York: New York UP , 1998. Print. Weir, David. “What Did He Know, and When Did He Know It: The Little Review , Joyce, and Ulysses .” James Joyce Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring and Summer 2000): 389-412. Print. <?page no="131"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 131 The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 Václav Paris “ Pay Day - A New York version of the joycean influence.” New York Times . 2 March 1930. 1 “If it’s not art, it’s at least history.” 2 - Thomas Hart Benton In the personal library of the American author Theodore Dreiser, there is a little-known book by Nathan Asch entitled Pay Day . Inside this book is a folded letter addressed to Dreiser from Joseph Brewer of the publishing company Brewer and Warren. It is dated Friday, 25 April 1930 , and reads as follows: Dear Sir: At the suggestion of Morris L. Ernst, Esq. who is representing us in a proceeding brought on the complaint of Mr. Sumner, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, we are sending to you a copy of “Pay Day,” by Nathan Asch. Thus far only a complaint has been filed and the case has not yet come up in court. In view of its having been “marketed in a dignified manner,” and considering its reception in major newspapers, Brewer feels that “the attack on the book at this time is arbitrary and unwarranted.” Hence: 1 “Display Ad 197 - No Title.” New York Times 2 Mar 1930 . ProQuest Historical Newspapers ( The New York Times 1851 - 2006 ): 74 . 2 Qtd. in Conn 1 . <?page no="132"?> 132 Václav Paris We ask that you be good enough to read the volume and let us know by letter or telegram your position on its proposed suppression. In our opinion, it is an honest portrayal of the adolescent frustrations that beset a great portion of our American population. We are not interested in a literary judgment, but we should like to have your opinion as to the value of the book as a social document. We appeal to you because we realize that the battle against censorship, in this case as in every other case, will be won or lost depending on the measure of informed and intelligent support rallying to the cause of the publication to be suppressed. May we look to you for a prompt answer? You may wire us collect. 3 If Dreiser took up the generous offer to wire collect, no record survives. Pay Day was taken to court, found - after several legal twists and turns - to be obscene, and silently banned. The reader may be wondering why I am telling this history in a volume of collected essays in honor of Fritz Senn, celebrating the work of James Joyce and the concept of parallax. Both Pay Day ’s setting (New York), and its historical context (the early 1930 s) appear a long way from the orbit of Ulysses ; the book’s unfortunate fate seems irrelevant to a study of James Joyce. And indeed, it would be so if it were not for three points of conjunction - or what I shall call ‘parallaxes’ - between the two novels. (In this - admittedly loose - use of the term, I imagine an astronomical figure, in which each novel provides a line of vision on reality. These two lines of vision run almost, but not quite, parallel to each other. Where they touch, they form a parallax: revealing both the identity and the crucial differences in their objects, historical settings, and narrative modes.) The first such parallactic conjunction is visible in the content and form of Pay Day . By no means a premier work of modernism, Pay Day shares a surprising amount with Ulysses - at least when it comes to judging literature as a ‘social document.’ Set over the course of a few hours on the night of 22 August 1927 , Pay Day is ostensibly a historical novel, dramatizing the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, however, is really only a backdrop for a much more mundane action. It provides, as Auden wrote of Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus , a glimpse of: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 3 Brewer, Joseph. Unpublished letter to Theodore Dreiser (in Dreiser’s copy of Nathan Asch’s Pay Day ). Theodore Dreiser Archive: U of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt Library Rare Book Room. <?page no="133"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 133 As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. (Auden 179) To the extent that Pay Day looks away from the monumental to the banal, paying more attention to the everyday than the extraordinary, yet folding that extraordinary into the terms of the everyday, the book is ‘Ulyssean.’ The figure on whom this routine action focuses, and the bearer of its characteristically modern, characteristically-urban Simmel-like ‘blasé attitude,’ is our hero: Jim. Jim, we find out, is a coarse, callow, and largely unremarkable New York office worker. Adopting a stream of consciousness narrative, Asch’s novel follows Jim, just as Joyce’s novel follows Stephen Dedalus, on his inebriated, nocturnal adventures after work on payday. As with Stephen’s or Bloom’s peregrinations in Ulysses , the action appears less central than Jim’s commonplace thoughts. The novel is frank, not only about the blatant corruption of the US legal system and the hypocrisies of nightlife under prohibition, but also about Jim’s body and secret sexual desires. As we will see, it is also Joycean in its use of newspapers - which, among other things, periodically announce what is happening in Boston. Like Joyce, Asch pays a lot of attention to having certain leitmotifs resurface throughout what seems to be a largely unstructured day. The second parallactic conjunction between Ulysses and Pay Day is the supposedly ‘dignified marketing’ of Ash’s novel. Pay Day ’s Joycean style and content are features noted both by its marketing and by its first reviewers. Thus one of the first advertisements for the book, which appeared in the New Times York on 2 March 1930 , quoted Harry Hansen, who claimed the novel to be a “[s]traightforward and honest record. A New York version of the joycean [sic] influence” (“Display Ad. 197 ; ” see fig. 1 above). And on Sunday, 11 May 1930 , the New York Times Book Review wrote: Mr. Asch has fished out the inner feelings of a pretty uninteresting character in “Pay Day,” a lengthy and tedious study in mediocrity. Borrowing the form of Ulysses [sic] and attempting to employ the Joycean subjective method in the greater part of his work, the author has taken endless snapshots of his pimply-faced young clerk on his weekly night of pleasure following pay day. 4 Even by the time Dreiser received his letter then, Pay Day had been interpreted as Asch’s politicized, American reworking of Ulysses . And since Ulysses was, of 4 “‘Trumpet in the Dust’ and Other Works of Fiction.” New York Times 11 May 1930 : 67 . <?page no="134"?> 134 Václav Paris course, banned in 1930 , Joyce’s book may have been indirectly guilty of creating the circumstances for Joseph Brewer’s letter. The third and final conjunction between Pay Day and Ulysses is a historical parallax. As the astute reader may have already noticed, the person threatening to bring charges against Pay Day was one “Mr. Sumner” of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The lawyer defending Joseph Brewer and Asch’s book was “Morris L. Ernst.” These were, of course, the very same players that were to battle out the legal fate of Ulysses in the United States three years later. Dreiser also played a role - albeit a small one - in the Ulysses case. Almost exactly two years after receiving Brewer’s missive, Dreiser found a similar request in his letterbox from Bennett A. Cerf, president of Random House. This letter, part of a pre-litigation strategy identical to that of Joseph Brewer, elicited Dreiser’s support for a fresh case attempting to repeal the obscenity charge against Ulysses . Dreiser, along with other high-profile literati such as William Rose Benet, Louis Untermeyer, John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, John Farrar, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, promptly gave it (see Pagnattaro 227 ; Moscato and LeBlanc 125 - 128 ). “I have always regarded the attempted censorship of any book as one of the most absurd of all unintelligent human actions,” he wrote from his room on Broadway on 13 May 1932 . And then, in what is one of Dreiser’s only comments on the book: Ulysses is, of course, a highly intellectual work. To read it is to spend a day inside a seeking and profoundly observant human mind, to learn its mysterious wanderings and secret paths. And because it is what it is, some things enter into it which are not generally recorded. But, and for precisely that reason, those things add to its value as an amazing, if not unique, social and literary document. (Dreiser to Cerf, qtd. in Moscato and LeBlanc 127) Dreiser defends Ulysses on documentary grounds: precisely the grounds on which he was asked to defend Pay Day three years earlier. Dreiser’s tack is the same as Brewer’s in his appeal. And indeed, in these last words, he echoes Brewer: “We are not interested in a literary judgment, but we should like to have your opinion as to the value of the book as a social document.” It is valuable not so much for the way or the nature of what is recorded as for recording “some things […] which are not generally recorded.” 5 Pay Day thus stands to be seen in a transatlantic, parallactic relation to Ulysses on both aesthetic and historic axes. It reworks Joyce’s style and content while also raising the same legal questions by the same major actors - offering us a close comparison to the historic 1933 court case. Reading Pay Day alongside 5 Brewer, Joseph. Unpublished letter to Theodore Dreiser. <?page no="135"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 135 Ulysses offers us a way to trace changes in the interpretation of the value of unabashedly realist literature between the 1920 s and 1930 s, and more specifically between 30 April 1930 and 6 December 1933 . It also, more broadly, helps us to gain an insight into the transition between the 1920 s and the 1930 s as an opposition between ‘high modernist’ aesthetics and ‘late modernist’ politics. For an important shift occurred in the appreciation of Ulysses in the US within these years of which Dreiser’s newfound allegiance is symptomatic: namely, Ulysses became a crucial work of contemporary social critique within this period. Moreover, it became an object relevant to the contemporary United States. Louis Untermeyer points this out in his own response to Cerf: “Apart from its literary value, however - and I find it hard to separate the literary from the social aspect - it is a document of these times so revealing, so significant, that it can no more be ignored than the daily depression” (qtd. in Moscato and LeBlanc 125 ; my emphasis). By looking at Ulysses ’ New York interpretation by Nathan Asch, we can see one way in which the question was raised that made it impossible to separate social from artistic value, or lack of value, in the early years of the 1930 s. As T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom, among others, have pointed out, influence works in both directions: derivative novels change the nature and interpretation of the original. They change, however minimally, the literary tradition of which they are part. (Fritz Senn’s version of this is the counterintuitive claim that Joyce influenced Homer.) Pay Day is one example of how Ulysses was brought to New York to inform the “daily depression” and how the “daily depression” in turn informed Ulysses . This essay will analyze how this was achieved, firstly, by looking at the ways in which Pay Day prepared the ground for Ulysses in the United States, and secondly, by showing how Pay Day articulated, through its relation to newspapers, a potential defense of Ulysses in terms of free speech in the United States. A New York Ulysses? Towards the New Bloomusalem In her article “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and ‘Ulysses,’” Marisa L. Pagnattaro discusses three censorship cases leading up to the case of Ulysses : that of a pamphlet entitled The Sex Side of Life , a book called Contraception ( 1931 ), and a book called Married Love ( 1931 ). Each publication dealt with sex for the purpose of education, and in each case, Morris Ernst was the lawyer selected to lead the defense. Through an analysis of these cases, Pagnattaro notes how Ernst managed to carve out an exceptional space for Ulysses in which it could not be justly called obscene. Pagnattaro does not mention the literary precursors. However, by writing Asch’s Pay Day back into this <?page no="136"?> 136 Václav Paris history, it is possible to look not only at the issues of what could be printed in terms of content, but also at the numerous issues raised in Ulysses concerning the relation between literary style and legality. Indeed, although it is not mentioned anywhere in Ulysses ’ publication history, for Morris Ernst, Pay Day must have been a sort of dress rehearsal for the trial of Ulysses as he used similar strategies in its defense. Thus on 29 April 1930 , the New York Times announced “‘Pay Day’ Publishers Win Points at Hearing”: a success which consisted of Ernst insisting that an unmarked copy be presented to the judge so that the questionable passages might be considered in the context of the whole book. This was a crucial juncture in the first hearing of Ulysses in 1933 as well as during the appeal. The sixth point of Ernst’s legal brief was that “Ulysses [sic] must be judged as a whole, and its general purpose and effect determined. On that basis it must be cleared” (qtd. in Pagnattaro 228 ). Likewise, Ernst insisted in both cases that the books be considered against the standards of the time and not against an outdated definition of obscenity. But Pay Day was not only a ‘mock trial for Ulysses ’ where Ernst could flex his juridical muscles. There are many ways in which Asch’s work prepared the ground for an American reception of Ulysses in the public sphere and in literary criticism, and not just in court. Most notably, Pay Day is among the first works to offer the possibility of interpreting Joyce’s narrative as relevant to US history and political life. To understand this, one needs to think about how Pay Day “translates” Ulysses (in the etymological sense of a geographical transfer or translatio ) for a particular audience and thus stages for us the change in popular conceptions of the original book. Ulysses , of course, was set in Dublin, and it was written, as the proxy-signature of the novel attests, in “ Trieste - Zurich - Paris .” Its context - including the version of modernism and the older prose traditions that it engages with - was almost exclusively European. When it came to a binary case, as it did in New York in 1933 , of United States v. One Book Called “ Ulysses ,” Ulysses ’ domain was very much on the other side of that “ v .”: a metonymic Atlantic. 6 Pay Day , however, was one of the few works that could serve as a potential bridge. Nathan Asch, a Polish Jew freshly re-arrived from Joyce’s Paris in 1930 , might be expected to sit with the council for the defense, and he does, at least in terms of style. Yet Pay Day , as I have said, was set in New York: it imported a foreign perception to US soil, attempting to blur the boundary between Ulysses and US history. Pay Day questioned national limits - from the perspective of an autochthonous American literary heritage, it was like a Trojan horse. Pay Day , we might say, 6 United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 - Dist. Court, SD New York 1933 . <?page no="137"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 137 performed an illegal border crossing smuggling in the wily Odysseus. Stephen and Bloom were given citizenship in the guise of Jim: an average clerk. This is also a simplification and democratization, a making the ‘subjective method’ accessible to a broad US readership. One no longer need worry about keeping up with wanting or not wanting Stephen’s “medieval abstrusiosities” ( U 3 . 320 ) or Bloom’s Irish soap connoisseurship - for Pay Day is often, as the New York Times review suggests, obvious to the point of tedium: “a lengthy and tedious study in mediocrity” (“Trumpet in the Dust and Other Works of Fiction” 67 ). Consider, however, the difficulties that faced Ulysses ’ readership in the 1920 s. These were not so unlike the difficulties that readers encounter today but with no notes, no critical guidance, no Fritz Senn, and no Zurich James Joyce Foundation reading groups. The first real guide to the book - Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses (which was also the first publication of the Homeric schema to the episodes) - would not be on the shelves until several weeks after the appearance of Pay Day in 1930 . As a result, Ulysses often became conflated with its notorious reputation. As Jeffrey Segall notes in his introduction to Joyce in America , “It was difficult to separate Ulysses from the aura of notoriety surrounding it” ( 2 ). Indeed, how was one to talk about Ulysses from an informed perspective and not merely through spurious second-hand knowledge? How did an average US reader get hold of Ulysses ? In this climate, Pay Day might well have stood as a substitute, promoting ideas about how to read the original. Joyce’s book, as Richard Aldington famously wrote, was “a tremendous libel on humanity” ( 198 ). The 1930 s, however, also saw the ascendancy of a constellation of left-wing critics who celebrated the way Joyce’s characters represented more than just themselves, embracing the “tremendous libel” as contemporary truth (hence Dreiser and Untermeyer’s responses to Cerf above, or John Dos Passos’ argument that “[s]ince it deals with human life it can’t very well help having some smut in it” (qtd. in Moscato and LeBlanc 126 ). At their fore, as Segall writes, was Edmund Wilson. Wilson’s major contribution is his essay on Joyce in Axel’s Castle ( 1931 ), where he argues that, unlike Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu , “[ Joyce’s] work is unshakably established on Naturalistic foundations” (qtd. in Segall 99 ). And hence the story hinges precisely on the recognition of Molly’s body as representative of a new human body politic: This gross body - upon which the whole structure of Ulysses rests - still throbbing with so strong a rhythm amid obscenity, commonness, and squalor - is laboring to throw up some knowledge and beauty by which it may transcend itself. (224) Thus Joyce becomes “the great poet of the new phase of the human consciousness” ( 221 ). In the 1930 s, his work was redeemed in terms of its power to rep- <?page no="138"?> 138 Václav Paris resent the ordinary (working-class) man. Note for instance Wilson’s use of the words “commonness,” “squalor,” and “laboring.” It is from the criticism of this time that we still have a strong academic tradition of thinking of Bloom as an everyman, and a hero of the everyday. But to return to Pay Day and Brewer’s letter to Dreiser, Brewer, perhaps aware of Dreiser’s distance from the Joycean mode, wrote: “We are not interested in a literary judgment, but we should like to have your opinion as to the value of the book as a social document.” Pay Day , with its straightforward structure and basic characterization, is not properly experimental fiction but much closer to the broad brushstrokes of city murals. Brewer attempts to redeem Jim’s stream of consciousness as representative of the masses. “In our opinion, it is an honest portrayal of the adolescent frustrations that beset a great portion of our American population,” writes Brewer, laying a particular stress on this being of national ( US ) value. Louis Kronenberger’s review in The Bookman (April and May 1930 ) denounces precisely this characterization of Jim as a failure: “it is only the type in him which rings true” (qtd. in Berthoff, “Reception” 269 ). This may, however, have been what Asch was aiming for. The impression is reinforced not only by Asch’s emphasis on popular routine, but also by certain details. Jim earns thirty dollars a week, that is, five dollars a day: the wage of a typical worker in one of Ford’s auto plants. He has few meaningful relations in the novel; several brief encounters with women take the place of sustained romance. In this sense, the book fosters an impression of Jim as an exchangeable, almost-anonymous unit of humanity rather than as a person with a unique identity anchored in a specific social circle. It is an impression reinforced by the recognition that Jim’s thoughts, which are heavily influenced by the mass media, lack an individual quality: newspapers provide the vocabulary for even his most anarchic fantasies. Thus on the subway, he thinks: Now wouldn’t it be wonderful, he said, if there should be an accident? If the whole shooting match just left the rails and went against the pillars? He saw headlines: DISASTER IN THE SUBWAY. ONE HUNDRED KILLED. HUNDREDS WOUNDED. SUB- WAY SYSTEM TIED UP . ( PD 33) Indeed, the subway, which features so prominently, further reduces Jim’s individual identity: in it, he becomes part of an underground crowd whose movements are limited. Jim spends the majority of the novel in some form of mechanical transport, never driving himself - he is part of the machine of the metropolis. Rereading the novel with this mechanical understanding brings to mind classic celebrations of modernism’s subterranean Untermensch in Lang’s Metropolis ( 1927 ), Huxley’s Brave New World ( 1932 ), or Chaplin’s Modern Times ( 1936 ). It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that Asch, like Huxley six <?page no="139"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 139 years later, became a scriptwriter for the ‘endless snapshots’ of Hollywood in 1931 . If we put this reading of Asch’s novel alongside Ulysses , Pay Day becomes precisely what Wilson is looking for in Joyce. It is a model of the stream of consciousness method used to represent the body of a new urban humanity in need of transcendence through a single greater identity - a transcendence that Ulysses routinely denies, but Pay Day proffers, at least minimally, through Jim’s final moment of expansive sympathy when he recalls that Sacco and Vanzetti are dead. The novel is involved in a proletarian cause which, if not absolutely socialist, is at least socially conscientious, moving from Jim’s sociopathic violence to a moment of shock in the Ibsenesque concluding lines: “He suddenly remembered and said: ‘Oh my God. They’re dead.’ He went into the house” ( PD 265 ). Pay Day , I suggest, paves the way for a parallactic appreciation of Joycean realism - an understanding in which gritty or sordid details may be seen from the angle of the promotion of social morality, and not corrupting the minds of its individual readers. There is a slant to this argument provided by the details of race. Leopold Bloom is a Jew as well as an Irishman. The question of his nationality is raised in the oft-quoted “Cyclops” episode and roundly summarized with his definition: “A nation is the same people living in the same place” - a definition which he goes on to qualify with “[o]r also living in different places” ( U 12 . 1248 ). The question is analogous to debates over nativism in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. If one attempts to define an American nationality or race - which, as Walter Benn Michaels narrates was a major preoccupation of the period ( Our America 6 - 8 ) - then the last resort would be to say that being American entails being ‘in America.’ In fact, Bloom, when he goes on to talk about his nation or race, is misunderstood by the “citizen” as talking of the “new Jerusalem.” In “Circe,” this then becomes a fantasy of the technologically advanced “New Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future”: a “colossal edifice” with “crystal roof ” and “forty thousand rooms” ( U 15 . 1548 - 1549 ). Bloom might have been describing New York here. After all, a large proportion of immigrants in New York in the first three decades of the twentieth century were Irish or Jewish. Ulysses then, provides within its pages a potential justification for thinking of New York as the home for Bloom’s nation or race: a potential that Nathan Asch, as a Polish-American Jew himself, explores through the person of Jim Cowan (an Irish name) in Pay Day . <?page no="140"?> 140 Václav Paris New Ulysses: Making Ulysses News In providing a New York version of Ulysses , Pay Day makes Joyce’s techniques ‘new’ in a number of ways. Most obviously, Pay Day brings the ‘Ulyssean’ narrative mode forward by twenty-three years. Where Ulysses is set on 16 June 1904 (‘Bloomsday’), Pay Day is set on the night of 22 August 1927 . Where the Shakespeare and Company Ulysses looks eighteen years into the past, Pay Day looks back only two and a half years to a well-remembered moment whose reverberations were far from over. As correlative of this update, Asch also made Ulysses and its methods ‘new’ in another sense: that is, by making Joyce’s work ‘news.’ The relationship between news and literature is a connection between Pay Day and Ulysses that is worth exploring in some detail. Both novels are full of newspapers, and both seem to bring news and literature into close relation, yet their use and significance is subtly different. In Ulysses , we encounter newspapers most strikingly in the seventh episode, “Aeolus,” which is set in the offices of the Evening Telegraph . This newspaper becomes interwoven with the texture of Joyce’s novel. Headlines appear in the text, giving the impression that the narrative we are reading is itself a series of news articles. On the whole, Joyce’s use of the newspaper is playful: it is full of bombast - or wind as the title of the episode “Aeolus” suggests - and the Evening Telegraph appears to be an irrelevant or ineffective medium in political terms. It is an impression bolstered by the kinds of articles that we encounter in the novel, from Mr. Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease to the advertisement from Agendath Netaim’s planter’s company selling tracts of Turkish land (the advertisement in which Bloom’s kidney is wrapped). Pay Day is a novel that is similarly saturated with newspapers. They are omnipresent from the moment when Jim first steps into the subway station on the second page. We are even told that Jim worked as a newspaper boy before his current job. Yet, unlike Ulysses , newspapers in Pay Day are rarely flippant. In contrast to Joyce, one might say that Asch has faith that the free press and free speech are a cause for social improvement. If they were free, they would possess the power to speak out against social depredations such as the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Indeed, if there is a hero of Pay Day , it is the unnamed reporter whom we meet in the evening when Jim is at a speakeasy. Recognizing a corrupt New York senator, this reporter challenges him with the reality of Sacco and Vanzetti’s death: They looked at him. He stopped laughing, and he said very slowly: “I’ll tell you what they’re doing. Tonight they’re murdering two men in Boston.” <?page no="141"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 141 “Oh that,” said the senator. “Well they had it coming to them for seven years…” ( PD 186) At this point, Paddy the barman intervenes, confronting the “guy” (the unnamed reporter). As the reporter departs, he offers these last words: The guy got up, laughed and said: “The power of the press. But the press’s not using its power. The press is afraid of losing its job. Goodbye, Senator. See you in Albany. Hope the liquor holds out.” ( PD 188) Pay Day ’s moral force lies in the encouragement of the power to speak out despite its consequences: a moral encapsulated by the single episode title “The Speakeasy.” Free speech is an important theme in Pay Day . Jim, when drinking with the senator and his girls, is rendered silent by fear that he will say something wrong. The others around him speak while he listens. Jim in fact spends most of the novel in silence, speaking only to himself. Asch often uses the verb “said” to punctuate this monologue, as if the thought was indistinguishable from speech. Unlike Joyce, however, who eschewed speech-marks in favor of his signature dashes, Asch retains them around Jim’s sonic utterances, and hence imposes a visible distinction between the two realms of private thought and public speech. The theme of speaking out climaxes in the last - nostos - episode of Pay Day , “Home Again.” Here, as Jim returns uptown in the subdued subway, one anonymous man with apparently no distinguishing features asks another: “What if I stood before this car and told the people here a terrible injustice, an awful crime, had been committed” ( PD 253 ), referring to the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. The train shakes, his voice becomes louder: Try to think of a way to reach them, these rulers of the country for whose benefit all this was arranged, as a warning, as a lesson. Somehow try to wake them up. Words mean nothing to them. They’re old, stale, they have been used too much. ( PD 254) He then complains about the ineffective newspapers constantly screaming headlines, and concludes: “Find a way to wake them, to make them realize words. Try to talk to them, to make them understand. Do something” ( PD 255 ). At this point, a drunk gets up and shouts at the man: “Go on, say something. I’m tired of hearing about those two bozos. Explain what you’ve got to say. We’re here, we’re listening, we don’t know what it’s all about. You seem to know. Here is your chance. Talk.” Everyone in the car laughed. Somebody whistled, somebody else began to speak. “Let those guys talk,” the drunk cried. Someone yelled: “A speech.” ( PD 255) <?page no="142"?> 142 Václav Paris The drunk highlights the difficulty which the man tries to express, demanding words when “[w]ords mean nothing to them” ( PD 254 ). Coming from him, it is laughable, yet this is the point of the passage. To make them understand, we have to “make them realize words” ( PD 254 ). This could be interpreted as a quintessentially modernist urge: to “make it new” in Pound’s phrase, or in George Orwell’s twist on it, to avoid dead metaphors or clichés. It is also a radical affirmation of freedom of speech: “Let those guys talk” is a colloquial rephrasing of the content of the First Amendment. In this sense, Pay Day was its own defense against the censors. It tries to perform a radical speech act in opposition to the arbiters of taste, justifying that speech act not only by its historical relevance, but also through a reminder of the constitutional necessity to let democratic opinion circulate. Experimental form, suggests Asch’s novel, is now a necessary mode of historical reportage. As we have seen, Pay Day has an interesting extra-textual relationship to newspapers. It began its public life being advertised in various newspapers. And as Joseph Brewer wrote to Dreiser, “It has been extensively reviewed in responsible and representative newspapers and periodicals.” 7 Asch was well aware that newspapers (and particularly the New York Times ) played a role in the novel’s fate, and not just within it. In fact, one could trace the origin of Pay Day to a challenge made in the New York Times on 6 December 1925 , in a review (which included Asch’s novel The Office ) by Lloyd Morris: “Doubtless some novelist will eventually achieve an expression of New York equivalent to Joyce’s expression of Dublin in ‘Ulysses’” ( BR 2 ). Newspapers were also set to play a role in the defense of Pay Day when it was tried on 28 April 1930 until Mr. Sumner objected that their reviews were irrelevant. Asch uses newspapers both within and without his novel as part of similar social cause - one that boils down to the freedom of speech. The Sacco and Vanzetti case itself is exemplary not so much of brutality, as it is of an abused right to be heard. The ‘Ulyssean’ form is a way of getting through to people - of making language fresh so that they pay attention - and Asch was clearly aware of the amount of attention being paid to Joyce. At the same time, however, this form brings with it the challenge of censorship. Battles against censorship in the early thirties revolved around one central issue: the meaning of the word obscene. American jurisprudence relied on Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s definition, formulated in 1868 , which declared material to be obscene according to the following ‘test’: 7 Brewer, Joseph. Unpublished letter to Theodore Dreiser. <?page no="143"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 143 whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall. (qtd. in Pagnattaro, “Carving a Literary Exception” 218) This, in combination with the working assumption from an earlier case that a book needed only to be obscene in part of its contents (Pagnattaro 219 ), was outrageous to upholders of the First Amendment. Pagnattaro comments: This harsh rule became the nemesis of free-speech advocates. As one outraged court in Pennsylvania observed, this rule, if strictly applied, “renders any book unsafe, since a moron could pervert to some sexual fantasy to which his mind is open the listings in a seed catalogue. Not even the Bible would be exempt.” (qtd. in Pagnattaro 219) Therefore, one of the major advances of Ernst’s defense of Ulysses was, according to Pagnattaro, succeeding in redefining the working definition of obscene from the effect of parts to the effect of the whole. This advance could equally well be ascribed to Pay Day two years earlier. Pay Day , in fact, seems far more actively involved with such legislation than Ulysses , although of course, the significance and reputation of Ulysses ’ case for future understandings of obscenity cannot be denied. Pay Day lobbies - and lobbies successfully - against abuses of the First Amendment both within and without its binding. Coda: What Happened to Pay Day? Pay Day was successful at least for a little while. And it would seem as if its notoriety might help it along. In other words, by being notorious, the press coverage that it gleaned would help market it. The New Republic’s review (signed only M. J.) from 16 July 1930 suggested as much: The shallowness of the pimpled clerk who revels while the persecuted Italians are electrocuted, seems even more terrible in contrast to their burning. Because “Pay Day” really rebukes the metropolis as a begrimer of helplessly whirling lives, its grand-jury indictment should be applauded everywhere. A sincere sociological novel thus becomes assured of untold readers. (M. J. 232) This grand jury indictment was not, however, the same case as that during which Ernst defended the novel. It was an altogether less successful affair. In his chapter on Asch, used as an introduction to Pay Day for the 1990 reprint (and the only recent published criticism of the book), Warner Berthoff speculates about what the reviewer could mean, suggesting that “ Pay Day apparently came under at least the threat of a grand jury citation.” But the Times , he claims, “carried no further articles on the affair” after 16 May 1930 , when the original case was dismissed (xxxv). Berthoff, however, appears to have been mistaken, <?page no="144"?> 144 Václav Paris for the Times did carry two articles on Pay Day in June. The first article, on 10 June 1930 , claims that the day before the book had gone back to court to face the grand jury on request of District Attorney Crain “on the report of Assistant District Attorney Albert B. Unger that he had found the book had no literary merit and might be considered offensive” (“ Pay Day Under Fire Again” 33 ). Nine days later, the grand jury indictment was upheld, and the book was ruled obscene. The New York Times ’ headline on page fifteen on 20 June 1930 reads unequivocally: “Grand Jury Holds Book by Asch Is Obscene, After It Had Been Upheld by Magistrate.” Berthoff wonders why the publishers made no further effort to sell Pay Day and blames its demise on the difficulty of obtaining copies. Suggesting that Asch was speaking figuratively, he quotes him in later years as always saying “of the fate of his best novel that it had been ‘suppressed’” (xxxv). This, it turns out, was true. I began this essay with a quotation from the American artist Thomas Hart Benton: “If it’s not art, it’s at least history” (qtd. in Conn 1 ). In relation to Benton’s own murals, this aphorism can be understood as a justification for his monumental and popular style. However, as I found them, opening Peter Conn’s magisterial history, The American 1930s , they appear as an apology for a whole decade. In contrast to the more aesthetically-concerned European 1920 s, the American 1930 s were inseparable from debates about politics, morality, and the historical or social value of a given artwork. In this context, the line helps to illuminate what we learn from the parallactic conjunctions between Ulysses and Pay Day in the transition period between those two decades and places. For in 1930 , Pay Day lost its case with the grand jury. Yet, although Pay Day ’s own case was unsuccessful, it garnered attention in New York courts and in the minds of lawyers and the readers who either managed to obtain copies before it was taken out of circulation, or who read about it in the newspapers or received one of Joseph Brewer’s letters. Invoking Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Aesthetics , we might say that it played a role (however small) in a change in the “distribution of the sensible” ( 1 ): affecting a shifting set of arguments in regard to the value of literary realism, helping to transform the ‘high modernist’ ‘aesthetic regime’ of the 1920 s (in which the news appears in playful relation to literature) <?page no="145"?> The New York Parallax: Ulysses, Pay Day, and Censorship, 1930 - 1933 145 into the more sociological ‘ethical’ and ‘representational regimes’ of the 1930 s (Rancière 43 ). The fact that Pay Day played this role, and that it eventually resonated back on the case of Ulysses , to some extent gives the novel a social or historical importance regardless of its own literary merits or demerits. Hence again - “[i]f it’s not art, it’s at least history”: Pay Day may now be remembered, if at all, precisely as Joseph Brewer’s wished in his letter to Theodore Dreiser, in historicist terms, as “a social document” rather than primarily as a work of literature. Works Cited Aldington, Richard. Literary Studies and Reviews . 1924. Freeport, NY : Books for Libraries Press, 1968. Print. Asch, Nathan. The Office . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925. Print. -. and Library of Theodore Dreiser. Pay Day . New York: Brewer and Warren, Inc., Payson and Clarke, Ltd., 1930. Print. -. Pay Day . 1930. Ed. Warner Berthoff. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990. Print. Auden, W. H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Collected Poems . Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. 179. Print. Berthoff, Warner. Introduction. Pay Day . 1930. By Nathan Asch. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990. Iii-xxxviii. Print. -. Reception. Pay Day . 1930. By Nathan Asch. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990. 267-70. Print. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry . New York: OUP , 1997. Print. Brewer, Joseph, Unpublished letter to Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser Archive, U of Pennsylvania. (This letter is folded inside Dreiser’s copy of Pay Day ). Print. Conn, Peter. The American 1930s: A Literary History . New York: CUP , 2009. Print. “Display Ad 197 - No Title.” New York Times 2 Mar 1930. ProQuest Historical Newspapers ( The New York Times 1851-2006): 74. Web. 25 July 2014. Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism . London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1920. Print. Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study . New York: Knopf, 1952. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Oxford: OUP , 2000. Print. -. Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print. Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce . London: Chatto & Windus, 1955. Print. Loving, Jerome. The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser . Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Print. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism . Durham: Duke UP , 1995. Print. M., J. “Pay Day (Book).” New Republic 63.815 (1930): 242. The New Republic Archive . Web. 25 July 2014. <?page no="146"?> 146 Václav Paris Morris, Lloyd. “Skimming the Cream From Six Months’ Fiction.” New York Times 6 Dec. 1925. ProQuest Historical Newspapers ( The New York Times 1851-2006): BR 2. Web. 25 July 2014. Moscato, Michael, and Leslie LeBlanc. The United States of America v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce: Documents and Commentary: A 50-Year Retrospective . Frederick, MD : U Publications of America, 1984. Print. Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language: An Essay . Evansville, IN : Herbert W. Simpson Inc., 1947. Print. Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and Ulysses .” Twentieth Century Literature 47.2 (2001): 217-40. Print. “ Pay Day Under Fire Again.” New York Times 10 June 1930. ProQuest Historical Newspapers ( The New York Times 1851-2006): 33. Web. 25 July 2014. “Pay Day Publishers and Agent Indicted: Grand Jury Holds Book by Asch Is Obscene, After It Had Been Upheld by Magistrate.” New York Times 20 June 1930. ProQuest Historical Newspapers ( The New York Times 1851-2006 ): 15. Web. 25 July 2014. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible . Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. Segall, Jeffrey. Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses . Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print. Temkin, Moshik. The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial . New Haven: Yale UP , 2009. Print. “‘Trumpet in the Dust’” and Other Works of Fiction.” New York Times 11 May 1930. ProQuest Historical Newspapers ( The New York Times 1851-2006): 67. Web. 25 July 2014. “United States v. One Book Called Ulysses ,” 5 F. Supp. 182 - Dist. Court, SD New York 1933. Web. 25 July 2014. Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 . New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1931. Print. <?page no="147"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 147 Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” Sam Slote According to Arthur Power, Joyce once remarked that in “Circe,” “I approached reality closer in my opinion than anywhere else in the book, except perhaps for moments in the last chapter. Sensation is our object, heightened even to the point of hallucination” (Power 86 ). For an episode that features amongst its cast, talking soap, a pantomime king, Bloom birthing octuplets, the apocalypse and, perhaps most amazingly, the monoptic Citizen merrily cavorting with Garrett Deasy, Joyce’s claim that “Circe” harbors the closest approach to reality in Ulysses , with the possible exception of parts of ‘Penelope,” is somewhat strange. But, of course, the key word in Joyce’s claim is “approached”: “Circe” is but an approach towards and approximation of reality. As Joyce says, the object of the episode is sensation heightened to the point of hallucination. By exaggerating, even to the point of caricature, various traits, new and different perspectives can be allowed. There is a small, specific scene of sensation heightened to the point of hallucination in “Circe” that I would like to look at because it suggests a perspective (or two) in which Bloom and Stephen co-relate or, even, unite. At this point in his late night adventures, Bloom has just endured or been subjected to a hallucination wherein he acts as an eager and voyeuristic lackey to Boylan. That particular scene is itself a good illustration of sensation heightened even to the point of hallucination in that it exaggerates Bloom’s masochistic paranoia over Molly’s infidelity and his concomitant cuckoldry. Bloom’s reverie of watching and cheering on Boylan is interrupted by the prostitutes’ laughter as they are reacting to something of which Bloom remains oblivious. BELLA , ZOE , FLORRY , KITTY Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee! LYNCH (points) The mirror up to nature. (he laughs) Hu hu hu hu hu! (Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.) SHAKESPEARE (in dignified ventriloquy) ’Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (to Bloom) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (he crows with a black capon’s laugh) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo! <?page no="148"?> 148 Sam Slote BLOOM (smiles yellowly at the three whores) When will I hear the joke? ( U 15.3817-31) The question I would like to start with is: what do the various characters - Bloom, Stephen, Lynch and the ladies - see (and not see) in the mirror? And, is Joyce’s arrangement compatible with a plausible disposition of the characters in the room relative to the mirror? Obviously, Shakespeare himself, whether bearded or not, has not entered Bella Cohen’s, but, because of Lynch’s cruel comment and the prostitutes’ laughter, we can plausibly infer that within the naturalistic setting of the brothel they are seeing something in the mirror. When both Bloom and Stephen turn to look in the mirror, this something is described in the stage directions as being a beardless Shakespeare. Because of the way mirrors work, the thing that Bloom and Stephen see - that which is identified as Shakespeare - is not necessarily the same thing that Lynch and the prostitutes see and, indeed, Bloom and Stephen are not necessarily seeing the same thing. That is, they each see something different but these two somethings are rendered through Circean exploding vision as Shakespeare. I think this scene is significant because this is the only hallucination in “Circe” that is shared by Bloom and Stephen. Their hallucinations converge but their respective vision of what is in the mirror diverges. Shortly after this scene, there is a second and final appearance of Shakespeare, which can be more comfortably characterized as an instance of pure hallucination since there is nothing that pegs this apparition to the naturalistic scene within the brothel: SHAKESPEARE (with paralytic rage.) Weda seca whokilla farst. (The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare’s beardless face. The marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the children run aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in merry widow hat and kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily.) ( U 15.3852-58) Cunningham’s resemblance to Shakespeare was first noted in “Grace” in Dubliners ( D 157 ) and also in “Hades” ( U 6 . 345 ). Here, the Cunninghamian Shakespeare mumbles a line from Hamlet that Stephen had quoted in “Scylla”: “wed her second, having killed her first” ( U 9 . 679 ; after Hamlet III .ii. 190 ). The connection to “Scylla” is, of course, significant. In both apparitions, the mirror Shakespeare recapitulates if not reflects Stephen’s Shakespearean disquisition. Returning to the apparition of the beardless Shakespeare, we have three observers, Bloom, Stephen and Lynch, who are each looking into the mirror. It is perhaps not viable to expect that Ulysses in general and “Circe” in particular me- <?page no="149"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 149 ticulously obey the laws of physics, but I would like to examine the mechanics of this scene to see if the underlying optics are plausible. From the perspective of Lynch and the prostitutes, the mirror concatenates Bloom’s face with the previously mentioned “ antlered rack of the hall ” ( U 15 . 2032 - 33 ), thereby creating the image of an antlered, and thus cuckolded Bloom; hence the joke that prompts Lynch and the prostitutes to laugh. Lynch’s line “[t]he mirror up to nature” ( U 15 . 2820 ) is a citation from Hamlet ( III .ii. 16 - 24 ) when the Prince is describing the motivation behind his play-within-a-play The Mousetrap . Hamlet is hoping to elicit a confession from Claudius, an adulterer and murderer, whereas Lynch cites this line to indicate that the cuckold has inadvertently confessed to his humiliation. For Lynch, the image of a horned Bloom indicates the deeper, submerged truth that he is a cuckold, a truth that was very much in Bloom’s mind with his previous fantasy. If Lynch can see the reflection of the antlers superimposed over the reflection of Bloom’s head, then it is physically impossible for Bloom to also see this particular juxtaposition in the mirror since his position and perspective are different. For Lynch to just see Bloom in the mirror, the angles are reasonably generous, but for him to see a juxtaposition of the antlers crowning Bloom, the angle is tight. This happens because mirrors work parallactically: that is, the configuration of the image they reflect is relative to the specific positions of different observers (Gregory 28 ). As Bloom says, he does not hear the joke, or, more precisely, he does not see , or rather should not see the visual pun of himself being antlered. There is another thing that Bloom does not see. He is described as smiling “yellowy,” which is perhaps a bit difficult to do unless one realizes that “yellow” is Lynch’s idiosyncratic profanity - which Stephen commended him for back in A Portrait ( P 204 ). 1 Even though Bloom does not see the superimposed reflection of himself and the hatrack in the mirror, Bloom and Stephen do each see an antlered face in the mirror, a face that is identified as a beardless Shakespeare. And, of course, both Bloom and Stephen are beardless. If Lynch sees the reflection of the antlered hatrack superimpose over Bloom’s reflection in the mirror, it is possible for Stephen to see the hatrack superimpose over his own reflection, but Bloom would likewise be oblivious to this particular juxtaposition as well. So, a physically plausible scenario would be that Lynch sees the antlers over Bloom’s reflection and Stephen sees the antlers over his own reflection, while, properly, Bloom does not see any juxtaposition. However, the way this scene is described in “Circe,” this particular mirror appears to return a juxtaposed hatrack and head, whether that head is Bloom’s or Stephen’s, to all three observers. The scopic 1 This profanity is reprised in “Oxen”: “excrement yellow” ( U 14 . 1579 ). <?page no="150"?> 150 Sam Slote does not and cannot match the optics. The stage directions suspend or ignore the parallactic effect of mirrors. The stage directions indicating that Bloom sees Shakespeare crowned by the antlered hatrack cannot be accurate in a world with laws of optics akin to our own. Thus, the stage directions make us misread the mirror. The psychologists Marco Bertamini, Richard Latto, and Alice Spooner have termed the misreading of the parallactic effect in the representation of mirrors the “Venus effect.” Specifically, they discuss this in terms of representations of mirrors in the visual arts, although their analysis is not without relevance here. They define the Venus effect as occurring “every time the observer sees both an actor (e. g. Venus) and a mirror, not placed along the observer’s line of sight, and concludes that Venus is seeing her reflection at the same location in the mirror that the observer is seeing” (Bertamini, Latto, Spooner 596 ). They discuss examples from Titian to Berthe Morisot and beyond. Typically, such paintings feature Venus (hence the name), but non-Venusian narcissists can also be found. One interesting and representative example would be Peter Paul Rubens’s painting the Venus at a Mirror (figure 1 ). Were Venus actually looking at herself in the mirror, the observer would not see Venus’s image reflected in the mirror but Fig. 1. Peter Paul Rubens’s Venus at a Mirror , c. 1615 <?page no="151"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 151 would instead see themselves, or, perhaps, since this is a painting, a reflection of the artist at his easel, as in Velásquez’s famous painting Las Meninas . Likewise, were Venus actually looking at her reflection, the mirror could not reflect Venus’s face from the observer’s perspective. The Venus effect is not exactly an illusion, but rather a misapprehension of how mirrors work. Some people do figure out the proper perspectives involved here and intuit that the figure cannot be looking at themselves in the mirror, but most people do not make this deduction. While filmmakers rely on this effect when filming characters who are looking into mirrors, art historians have apparently missed this particular problem in paintings with mirrors (Bertamini, Lawson, Jones, Winters 1948 ). Although art historians have overlooked this effect, it does seem unlikely that painters would have been oblivious to it since artists often cheat when it comes to representing mirrors (Gregory 19 ). For example, the Rubens painting exhibits a very common tactic used in paintings of characters looking into mirrors. In the painting, Venus’s head and its reflection are the same size although in the real world the reflection of one’s head in a mirror is always exactly half the size of the head. Ernst Hans Gombrich explains, “since the mirror will always appear to be halfway between me and my reflection, the size on its surface will be one half of the apparent size” ( 5 ). 2 In the cases of both the head size and the Venus effect, the painter lies, dissimulates the operation of optics, precisely because the lie seems more truthful than an accurate representation. It seems that Rubens might be cannily indicating his dissimulation in his painting since Venus’s earring is clearly and unambiguously different in the mirror: Venus’s earring is white and her reflection’s is blue. Perhaps he is showing the truth behind the dissimulation in his painting. Rubens’s mismatching of the earring color shows us that reflections can be troubling things, if, indeed, reflections can be said to be things at all. In her study of the history of mirrors, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet writes, “By extending the field of sight and revealing images that would be impossible to view directly, the mirror questioned the visible, the appearance, and the real, and thereby demanded a critical mind” ( 164 ). A mirror does not so much reflect truth as it indicates that appearance is unequal to and incommensurate with reality. As we have in the title of Joyce’s high school essay, “Trust not Appearances.” I would like now to briefly look at two other examples of the Venus effect in paintings. In February 2013 , an anonymous hacker who operates under the 2 In his seminal book Art and Illusion , Gombrich discusses illusory effects in paintings with mirrors at great length while missing even the potential of something like the Venus effect. <?page no="152"?> 152 Sam Slote baroque name Guccifer surreptitiously accessed emails sent by former U. S. president George W. Bush and some of his family members. These emails included images of paintings that Bush had done in his retirement. One of these paintings is a self-portrait in which the former president is looking at himself in a mirror in his shower. Of course, since this is a self-portrait the image that is in the mirror could be a reflection of the Bush that is painting the picture and not a reflection of the image of the Bush who is standing in the shower. In addition, it seems that Bush has not succumbed to distortion when it comes to the size of the head’s reflection since it is about half the size of the head of the figure, in other words, perfectly accurate. But then, I might be giving Bush too much credit here. I bring up this painting because of a word the American comedian Stephen Colbert coined in 2005 to satirize the kinds of appeals to emotion and gut feeling associated with right-wing media and the Bush administration’s disingenuous political rhetoric, “truthiness.” Colbert’s pithy definition is: “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth - the truth we want to exist” (qtd. in Sternbergh). The Venus effect would thus be an example of the truthiness in painting; somehow we expect that if we can see Venus in the mirror, then obviously Venus must also be looking at herself. 3 Another striking example of the Venus effect is Johannes Gumpp’s Triple Self-Portrait from 1646 (figure 2 ). On the one hand, this seems like it is a demystification of how self-portraits are painted since we see the painter looking at his reflection in a mirror, which he uses as his model for his painting. From the perspective of the observer, unlike that of the depicted painter, it is impossible for both the mirror and the painting to present the face at the same angle. Furthermore, it seems like the painter is misaligned with the mirror: judging by the part in his hair, the mirror should reflect him in profile rather than in three quarters. Furthermore, while there is nothing wrong with having the head in the mirror be the same size as the head in the self-portrait, both these heads are actually larger than that of the figure of the painter at the easel. So, Gumpp’s apparent demystification is itself an example of the truthiness in painting: he presents something that appears to be truthful and legitimate, but is, in fact, a distortion, a distortion that has a greater semblance of truth than the truth itself. 3 This is part of the point Derrida makes about the “truth in painting”: “The truth, then, is no longer itself in that which represents it in painting, it is merely the double, however good a likeness it is and precisely other by reason of the likeness” ( 5 ). <?page no="153"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 153 Fig. 2. Johannes Gumpp’s Triple Self-Portrait , 1646 Bertamini, Latto and Spooner’s explanation for why we are prone to the Venus effect is that “[w]e see Venus from one vantage point, but we see the reflection from a different one, namely with the eyes of Venus herself” ( 598 ). In other words, the observer unselfconsciously combines or conflates two distinct perspectives, their own and Venus’s. The Venus effect is a misapprehension of parallax. There are two different perspectives one can take about this perspectival conflation; that is, two perspectives on these multiple perspectives. On the one hand, this could be taken as indicating that the observer empathizes with Venus and adopts her perspective. On the other hand, there is an egotistical possibility for the confusion. Instead of believing that Venus is looking at herself because of an identification with her perspective, the observer mistakenly accepts that she is looking at her reflection because the observer does not acknowledge that what they themselves see is contingent upon their perspective. The modality of the visible is ineluctably delimited. That is, the observer tends towards truthiness, the semblance of truth, not out of empathy but out of the belief that what they see must be true. Thus the second perspective or explanation of the Venus effect is that the observer is blind to the provisionality of their own perspective. <?page no="154"?> 154 Sam Slote The mirror is held not up to nature but to our solipsistic misapprehension of nature. The assumption is that mirrors somehow can present a view of and upon the truth, whereas they actually merely return and reflect our own individual perspectival delimitations. If the observer empathizes with Venus’s perspective, then the Venus effect stems from a parallactic conflation of one perspective (the observer’s) with another (Venus’s). On the other hand, in the egotistical reading, the observer surrenders to the effect because they (mistakenly) believe that they have access to a universal truth. Therefore, the effect results from suspending an awareness of parallax. And so the Venus effect wavers between egoism and empathy. These two different perspectives or hypotheses of the Venus effect - egoistic and empathetic - are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The fault-line between egoism and empathy is precisely what is at stake with the Shakespearean mirror up to nature in Bella’s brothel and this is why the Venus effect would be relevant to this passage even though Joyce’s optics are misaligned. Shakespeare is self-reflexive for both Stephen and Bloom, albeit for different reasons. Shakespeare speaks in a “dignified ventriloquy,” which is apt because Shakespeare’s first line is not Shakespearean, but rather a citation from Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village : “And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind” (l. 122 ). This, of course, seems to chide Lynch and the prostitutes for laughing at Bloom’s expense. Shakespeare’s first ventriloquy, the line from Goldsmith, is a personal message to Bloom. Ventriloquy involves a kind of parallactic synaesthesia between sound and vision since the voice comes from elsewhere. Goldsmith is not the only ventriloquist for Bloom’s Shakespeare since Bloom also sees and hears Stephen’s Shakespeare, that is, the Shakespeare formed by Stephen in “Scylla.” This conjunction of Bloom and Stephen is potentially significant because in “Scylla,” Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare implicates Bloom in a direct manner. 4 According to Stephen, Shakespeare’s motivation in writing Hamlet was to enstage a confrontation in which he, playing the rôle of the ghost of King Hamlet, would confess that he is a cuckolded husband and the father of a dead son. By addressing Hamlet through the proxy of the dead king’s ghost, Shakespeare addresses his dead son Hamnet: “[Y]ou are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway” ( U 9 . 178 - 80 ). In other words, Stephen’s Shakespeare, a cuckold with a dead son, is a man not unlike Bloom. And so, through Stephen’s theory, Bloom fulfills one of his preterit childhood ambitions, as indicated in “Ithaca,” of becoming an “exponent of Shakespeare” ( U 17 . 794 ). 4 The following few paragraphs recapitulate an argument I develop at length in chapter 3 of my book Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. <?page no="155"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 155 The antlers also suggest another resonance between Bloom and Stephen’s Shakespeare. Horns are associated with Jewishness because of the Moses of Michelangelo in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, which is referenced in “Aeolus” ( U 7 . 757 , 768 ). This statue is horned because of an erroneous translation of a passage from Exodus. 5 This (faulty) consociation of Jewishness and horns elicits a further connection between Shakespeare and Bloom because of Eglinton’s challenge to Stephen in “Scylla” to “[p]rove that [Shakespeare] was a jew” ( U 9 . 763 ). As with most aspects of Shakespeare’s life, his religious convictions have been subject to endless speculation, with no definite historical conclusion. Eglinton’s question is also entirely apposite to Bloom since his own Jewishness is by no means unequivocal. Ned Lambert’s question in “Cyclops” - “Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he? ” ( U 12 . 1631 - 32 ) - is neatly representative of Bloom’s hybrid religious affiliations. And so one could equally ask Bloom to prove that he was a Jew. The link between Stephen’s Shakespeare and Bloom is magnified in Stephen’s reformulations of his theory. Stephen began his argument by positing Shakespeare in the rôle of King Hamlet, but in conversation with others this evolves into a theory of Shakespeare as the pre-eminent figure of a godlike artist, Coleridge’s polytropic “myriadminded man” ( U 9 . 768 ) 6 who encompasses all creation and, in so doing, creates himself. This would mean that Stephen’s initial premise is faulty since Shakespeare, in his divine plenitude, could not be reduced to any single one of his characters. As Eglinton observes: “The truth is midway […]. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all” ( U 9 . 1018 - 19 ). Stephen agrees: He is […]. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline , in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer. ( U 9.1020-24) Like Gumpp in his triple self-portrait, Shakespeare is all in all; he is both bawd and cuckold, Iago and Othello. The multiplicity of the myriadminded mind means we are all subject to multiple, incommensurable emotions, perspectives 5 “In Exodus 54 : 37 - 59 , where we are told that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai ‘the skin of his face shone,’ the Hebrew for this shining [ qaran ] may be translated either as ‘sent forth beams’ or ‘sent forth horns; ’ and the Vulgate took the latter as correct” (Evans, s. v. Moses). 6 In the Biographia Literaria , Coleridge writes that his own work could not surpass “the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare” ( 320 ). <?page no="156"?> 156 Sam Slote and mental states. The horned and cuckolded Shakespeare in the mirror thus perfectly performs Stephen’s point that hornmad Iago wills - a play on the name, a “fair name” ( U 9 . 921 ) - that the moor in him shall suffer with his invective “Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo! ” ( U 15 . 3828 - 29 ). This line ventriloquizes Stephen’s Shakespeare and, in so doing, the Shakespeare in the mirror reflects in both sound and vision the masochistic comportment of Bloom’s temperament. If Shakespeare is “all in all” throughout his works, then he would be perfectly representative of the ego-centric and omnipresent godlike artist that Stephen had theorized in A Portrait , “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” ( P 214 - 15 ). Lynch would be familiar with this theory since he was Stephen’s interlocutor in A Portrait . But, in “Scylla,” Stephen introduces a significant modification to his egotistical aesthetics immediately after he proclaims that Shakespeare is “all in all” and this is something of which Lynch would be ignorant: The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics calls dio boia , hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself. ( U 9.1046-52) If Shakespeare is in all his characters, “all in all” as Eglinton had said, then this omnipresence is itself present in everyone, “all in all in all of us,” as Stephen says. The artist - whether Shakespeare or Stephen or Joyce or God - is not the only focal point; egoism is multi-polar. The myriadminded man is every man and an everyman. And the corollary to that is that any man can be an everyman, just as any day can be a Bloomsday, or as Stephen puts it, “Every life is many days, day after day” ( U 9 . 1044 ). In this way, Molly’s rationale for choosing Bloom is also the rationale for his being an everyman, “as well him as another” ( U 18 . 1604 - 5 ), as she says near the end of “Penelope.” Indeed, Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare as the everyman artist obviously redounds to Bloom. Bloom is not an everyman in all the exact specifics of his characteristics; rather he is an everyman in that he is detailed in such a richness of specificity . Not all men like kidneys, but every man has their culinary idiosyncrasies and so on. Bloom is an everyman not because he is perfectly, or even adequately, representative of all mankind, but because his specific quirks are precisely enumerated. As Joyce told Budgen, “I see [Bloom] from all sides, and therefore he is all round in the sense of your sculptor’s figure” (Budgen 17 - 18 ). Joyce thus admits to having a bit of a Venus effect when it comes to Bloom: he concatenates Bloom from <?page no="157"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 157 across multiple perspectives. Stephen’s Shakespeare is not just a man not unlike Bloom; he is also an everyman not unlike Bloom. With his theory of the everyman artist, Stephen proposes something like an egotistical empathy; that is, an empathy that derives from an egoism. According to Stephen, the artist is important precisely in that he is multiple, and this multiplicity is reciprocal and communal: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” ( U 9 . 1044 - 46 ). In effect, Stephen here proposes an egoistic plurality, the artist-as-everyman, and, conversely, everyman-an-artist, or, at least, a potential artist. And, indeed, there is a touch of the artist about Bloom, pace Lenehan ( U 10 . 582 - 83 ). There is a countervailing tendency in Stephen’s argument. Stephen, in propounding his theory, sets up himself as an exponent of Shakespeare. While unnoted in Ulysses , it is not insignificant that Hamnet Shakespeare shared a birthdate, 2 February, with Joyce and, likely, Stephen (although there is some ambiguity as to Stephen’s exact birthdate). The image of Shakespeare returned in the brothel’s mirror is “ beardless ” ( U 15 . 3822 ), which echoes Stephen’s claim that the Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet could not have seen himself as Prince Hamlet, the “beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg” ( U 9 . 832 ). Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare in “Scylla and Charybdis” provides, in effect, a genealogy of the artist and the artwork. In proffering an interpretation of Shakespeare’s artistic creations, Stephen presents a rationale for his own conceptualization of himself as an artist. Stephen characterizes Shakespeare as a Dadalian artist so that he can claim the Shakespearean mantle. In this way, Stephen and Shakespeare are mirrors of each other. As Polixenes to Camillo in A Winter’s Tale , “Your changed complexions are to me a mirror. Which shows me mine, changed too” (I.ii. 379 - 80 ). Stephen sees himself as Shakespeare even as he makes Shakespeare like himself; or, as Mulligan mockingly put it, “he himself is the ghost of his own father” ( U 1 . 556 - 57 ). We see this in the Hamlet theory with Stephen’s Shakespeare taking the raw ingredients, or “Local colour” ( U 9 . 158 ), 7 of his life as lived (his dead son, his unfaithful wife) and reconfiguring them into his art; like Stephen, Shakespeare aims to “recreate life out of life” ( P 172 ). So, both Bloom and Stephen see themselves as - and are seen as - being Shakespeare. Shakespeare - the egocentric everyman - reflects, in different ways, both Bloom and Stephen. After Stephen has finished his peroration, he admits that he does not believe in his own theory ( U 9 . 1065 - 67 ). At this, Eglinton cannot resist interjecting a 7 The phrase “Local colour” is the heading of a subchapter on Hamlet in Georg Brandes’s book on Shakespeare ( 357 - 60 ). <?page no="158"?> 158 Sam Slote variety of other au courant theories about Shakespeare and Hamlet and sarcastically notes that, at the very least, the proponents of these theories did believe in them ( U 9 . 1070 - 77 ). Stephen then thinks: I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap. ( U 9.1078-80) Stephen does not necessarily not believe in his proposed theory, and there’s the rub. On the side of belief lie the egomen, or rather, the Greek expression ego men , “I, for my part” or “I myself,” which would be roughly equivalent to mé fhéin , the singular of Sinn Féin . 8 And, on the side of unbelief, there is everybody else, the “other chap” of alterity. Not believing thus marks the retreat of the ego and the approach of alterity and Stephen does not know yet where to go. This indicates the flaw in Stephen’s theory, which is why it would be more of a prolegomenon to Bloom than a theory of Bloom as such. Stephen concludes the proposition that the artist is “all in all in all of us” with the postulation that he would be “an androgynous alien, being a wife unto himself ” ( U 9 . 1052 ). To this, Mulligan sarcastically cries “ Eureka! ” ( U 9 . 1053 ). This then leads him to his crude satire of Stephen’s proposition “ Everyman His Own Wife / or / A Honeymoon in the Hand ” ( U 9 . 1171 - 73 ). The crass, masturbatory joke is actually quite apposite to the logic of Stephen’s argument. Stephen’s formulation of egoistic openness is still somewhat solipsistic in that it omits the care, that is to say, the love of alterity. Stephen’s theory of egoistic empathy omits love. If love is the word known to all men, then it is also the word unknown to Stephen, although, as we see with his debate with the Citizen, love is not a word unknown to Bloom ( U 12 . 1485 ). Stephen’s Venus effect is thus of the egotistical variety, whereas Bloom’s is of the empathetic. And Joyce, in seeing Bloom from all sides, asks us to see Bloom with an empathetic Venus effect. Bibliography Bertamini, Marco, Richard Latto, and Alice Spooner. “The Venus Effect: People’s Understanding of Mirror Reflections in Paintings.” Perception 32 (2003): 593-99. Print. Bertamini, Marco, Rebecca Lawson, Luke Jones, and Madeline Winters. “The Venus Effect in Real Life and Photographs.” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 72.7 (2010): 1948-64. Print. Brandes, Georg. William Shakespeare: A Critical Study . Trans. William Archer, Mary Morison, and Diana White. London: Heinemann, 1898. Print. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” Oxford: OUP , 1989. Print. 8 On the Rosenbach draft, Joyce wrote: “Who helps to believe? I myself ” (f. 32 ). <?page no="159"?> Seeing the Venus Effect and Shakespeare in “Circe” 159 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: OUP , 1985. Print. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting . Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1987. Print. Evans, Ivor H., ed. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable . New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Print. Goldsmith, Oliver. Poems and Plays . London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1948. Print. Gombrich, Ernst Hans. Art and Illusion . London: Phaidon, 2002. Print. Gregory, Richard. Mirrors in Mind . London: Penguin, 1997. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968. Print. -. “Dubliners”: Text, Criticism, and Notes . Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print. -. “Trust not Appearances.” Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing . Ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford: OUP , 2000. 3. Print. -. Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al . London: The Bodley Head, 1993. Print. Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History . Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce . Dublin: Lilliput, 1999. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works . Ed. W. J. Craig. Oxford: OUP , 1905. Print. Slote, Sam. Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics . New York: Palgrave, 2013. Print. Sternbergh Adam. “Stephen Colbert Has America by the Ballots.” New York Magazine 16 October 2006. Web. 10 June 2013. <?page no="160"?> 160 David Spurr Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art David Spurr Detail from Joseph Kosuth, Les aventures d’Ulysse sous terre , a permanent installation in the underground parking garage of the Lyon Part-Dieu railway station, Lyon, France. Photo by David Spurr. In what Fredric Jameson has called the cultural turn of the late twentieth century, the sphere of the aesthetic has expanded beyond its traditional and experimental forms to become coterminous with market society itself: “social space is now completely saturated with the image.” The utopian space of aesthetic autonomy and its specific claims to an otherwise unspoken realm of being have all been “penetrated and colonized, the authentic and the unsaid, in-vu , non-dit , inexpressible, alike, fully translated into the visible and the culturally familiar” ( 111 ). When culture at large is transformed into the production of images, objects and textual forms designed to appeal to the public imagination through design, advertising, electronic media, etc., the aesthetic as a privileged category tends to disappear into the universality of the aesthetic. <?page no="161"?> Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art 161 The consequences of this cultural turn can be summed up as including the calling into question of the nature of art as a cultural and aesthetic category, the production of works that disregard traditional art forms and genres, and the waning status of the art work either as the expression of an individual talent, or as a unique and permanent object subject to private ownership. This situation can be understood partly as one of resistance to the commodification of art most readily seen in painting, which, in the view of many, had been largely reduced by the nineteen sixties to being “an expensive form of home decoration” (Kosuth, “Conversation” 77 ). Instead, a new generation of artists coming of age in recent decades have conceived of their work as an intervention in the public sphere, frequently taking the form of projects realized in the built environment of public space. Architecture has been of central importance to such projects, not only as providing the concrete context for their realization, but also in its theoretical character as the imaginative redefinition of space in which aesthetic experience intersects with the material forms of social life. Marcel Broodthaers’ Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department ( 1972 ), Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc ( 1981 ), Joseph Beuys’ Plight ( 1985 ), and Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag ( 1995 ) all belong to this tendency of contemporary art to define itself in relation to architectural form. With this group, one would have to include Joseph Kosuth, one of the key figures of the ‘conceptual art’ movement. The particularity of Kosuth’s ‘conceptual’ art lies in its materialization of language, and in the free play of linguistic and architectural forms in its ongoing interrogation of art’s meaning in relation to its human context. Kosuth essentially confirms Jameson’s analysis of the relation between contemporary art and the economic foundations of culture when he states, “My initial reasons in the sixties for attempting to use language as a model for art […] stemmed from my understanding of the collapse of the traditional languages of art into that larger, increasingly organized, meaning system which is the modernist culture of late capitalism” (“No Exit” 63 ). The difference is that where Jameson sees this situation as one to deplore, Kosuth and other artists of his generation see in it the possibility for art’s subversive intervention in late capitalist culture. In Joyce in Art , Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes has documented the heterogeneous ways in which Joyce has inspired the work of many contemporary artists. In my own assessment of precisely what it is about Joyce’s work that makes it of interest to contemporary art, I would cite the following reasons. First, Joyce materializes language; he continually calls attention to the visual and the auditory dimensions of the word, such that the reader sees and hears Joyce’s language in highly vivid ways. This rendering of the word as a material object corresponds with Joyce’s re-appropriation of the ‘readymade’ language of public space, for example that of advertising and newspaper headlines. When Joyce incorpo- <?page no="162"?> 162 David Spurr rates an outdoor sign like that advertising “Kino’s 11 / - Trousers” ( U 8 . 90 - 93 ) 1 into his work, it is no surprise that such a move should attract the attention of artists like Kosuth, who want to put their work in the public space offered by billboards. Both are examples of breaking the artistic frame and of exploiting the visual, physical presence of language. This reason for contemporary artistic interest in Joyce’s work is related to a second one, which we can define as the displacement and re-contextualization of discourses not traditionally part of literary language. The hospitality of Joyce’s work to political rhetoric, theological disputation, barroom talk, gutter slang, sensational journalism, popular songs and real estate promotion can only serve as inspiration to other artists who want the freedom of using every possibility offered by modern material culture in the construction of an artwork. When Kosuth, as we shall see, posts literary texts in the form of illuminated signs in a parking garage, it is but the reverse, in terms of displaced cultural registers, of the move made by Joyce when he puts a list of tram lines in Ulysses ( U 7 . 3 - 9 ). This permeability of the work, its hospitality to non-literary material, is only one aspect of Joyce that tends to put the nature of the artwork itself in question. Others include the absence of an authorial presence, of a master narrative, and of a hierarchy of taste; a formal disposition toward fragmentarity and discontinuity, toward a multiplicity of voices, of points of view, and of linguistic registers. Kosuth is the artistic creator of a permanent installation entitled The Adventures of Ulysses Underground ( 1995 ). 2 Commissioned by Lyon Parc Auto, a mixed public and private enterprise that builds and operates parking facilities for the city of Lyon, France, this work consists of a series of 25 illuminated signs bearing texts from James Joyce and Lewis Carroll and distributed throughout the underground parking garage of the Part-Dieu railway station. The installation occupies the principal spaces used by the public: the pedestrian entry hall and the four levels of parking surface below. Its material form is that of black serigraph texts on framed, translucid plates of white glass illuminated from behind by tubes of fluorescent lighting. The luminous fragments from Joyce and Carroll, both of them masters of the underground, the dark, and the dream, are embedded in the walls and pillars of the structure in such a way as to organize the different spaces of the garage into a continuous text. The architectural space 1 In conformity with standard practice in Joyce scholarship, citations from the Gabler edition of Ulysses give the chapter number followed by the line number. 2 The on-site title of this installation is Les aventures d’Ulysse sous terre , and the texts used are French translations of Joyce and Carroll. The former is the translation of Ulysses originally by Auguste Morel and Valéry Larbaud (Paris: La Maison des amis des livres, 1929 ; Gallimard, 1930 ). For the purposes of this essay I have used the original English texts throughout. <?page no="163"?> Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art 163 thus serves as a literalization of the underground world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( 1865 ) and as a spatial metaphor for the hallucinatory depth of the “Circe” episode (chapter 15 ) of Joyce’s Ulysses ( 1922 ). It also provokes a reflection on the relation between these texts: between the demi-monde of Dublin and the erotically-charged fantasy world of Victorian Oxford, including the manner in which both constitute a series of metamorphoses which the hero or heroine survives by successfully resisting a total anarchy of desire. Kosuth’s interpretation of Joyce is relevant to the concept of parallax according to the first two definitions of this word given in the Oxford English Dictionary . The first, from astronomy, defines parallax as the change in the apparent position of an object as seen from two different points. In Kosuth’s installation, the spectator is invited to contemplate Joyce’s text through Carroll’s, thus altering the familiar position of Ulysses on both historical and semantic levels, as if it were written “in the wake” of the Alice books, which indeed are to figure prominently in Finnegans Wake. The second OED definition for parallax concerns the figurative sense of “distortion; the fact of seeing wrongly or in a distorted way.” Such distortion is the most pervasive feature of the “Circe” episode; it is also suggested by Kosuth’s installation, where the luminous panels of text, strangely suspended in the subterranean darkness, appear altered in aspect by the moving lights and reflections of the passing vehicles. In keeping with the nature of the architectural space of the garage, the spectator as reader is necessarily mobilized. Whereas in other installations one can take in the entire work in from a single spot, in Lyon one performs the act of reading only by being on the move, much like the ambulatory persons of Ulysses . If one is to read the texts from Joyce and Carroll in the order in which they figure in the works from which they are cited, one passes from one level of the parking structure to the next in descending order, on each level making a clockwise tour of the entire surface, beginning and ending at the north end, which is also where motorists enter and leave the structure. In addition to an introductory sign in the entrance hall, there are six signs on each level. These are mounted on either side of the massive concrete pillars supporting the entire structure on its central axis. Their illumination serves the practical function of helping people find their way in these otherwise shadowy depths. The textual content of the illuminated signs follows a certain syntax. Each text bears at its head, underlined in bold capitals, a chapter title from either Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass ( 1871 ). This is followed by a passage cited from Joyce’s “Circe.” For example, the first illuminated sign on the first level down (level − 1 ) of the parking structure is headed “Down the Rabbit Hole,” the title of the first chapter of Alice . This is followed by a passage from the first part of “Circe,” where Leopold Bloom, in pursuit of the <?page no="164"?> 164 David Spurr wayward Stephen Dedalus just as Alice pursues the white rabbit, finds himself in Talbot Street amidst the bewildering surroundings of Dublin’s Nighttown: BLOOM Stitch in my side. Why did I run? (He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the lampset siding. The glow leaps again.) ( U 15.162-65) An illuminated sign on the same level is headed with the initial chapter title from Through the Looking-Glass , “Looking-Glass House,” and quotes the second speech from “Circe,” the “answer” to the call, “Wait, my love, I’ll be with you”: THE ANSWER Round behind the stable. (A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus’ dance.) ( U 15.12-15) The anonymous calls and responses that Bloom hears on entering Nighttown can indeed be read as a kind of auditory equivalent to Alice’s giddy experience in Looking-Glass House, where the chess pieces are alive and Alice floats through the hall without touching her feet to the floor. The only exception to the rule of using Carroll’s chapter titles is the introductory panel of the installation, a long illuminated sign mounted on the wall of the entrance hall to the structure. This is what members of the public first see on descending the escalator or the stairway from the main floor of the railway station. Its heading, The Adventures of Ulysses Underground , combines elements from the titles of Carroll’s and Joyce’s works, while making explicit reference to the excavated space which the passer-by is about to enter, usually in search of a parked car. This title is followed by the opening lines of “Circe,” which introduce us to the surreal scene of colored lights, deformed creatures, and the wonderful sight, amid the squalor of grimy houses with gaping doors, of an ice gondola in the form of a swan making its way through the dim streets at midnight: (The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti’s halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly, children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer.) ( U 15.1-9) The 13 meters of Kosuth’s sign are long enough to print the entire nine lines from the Gabler edition of Ulysses on only two lines of illuminated glass. The <?page no="165"?> Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art 165 “underground” of the installation’s title reminds us that Alice’s dreamed Wonderland is underground, and that her Looking-Glass world, as well as Joyce’s Nighttown, are also underground in a metaphorical sense to the extent that they represent an alternate universe to the waking world of logic and rational order. In the background of cultural memory here are Odysseus’s sojourn on the island of Circe, where his men are turned to swine, and Aeneas’ descent to the underworld, where Virgil prays for the power “to show things buried deep in earth and darkness” ( Aeneid VI : 267 ). The basic dynamics of such myths, from Homer to Freud, are fundamental and universal to the human imagination: they are those of metamorphoses and the transgression of limits between the known and the unknown, the living and the dead, the human and the animal, waking and the dream, consciousness and the unconscious. Like Freud, Kosuth understands that these fundamental dynamics of the human imaginary have their place in everyday life. The originality of his work is to have reinterpreted the modern literary expression of these dynamics in terms of the spatial dimensions offered by what generally passes for the most banal and utilitarian of public spaces. The parking garage as a genre corresponds perfectly to Marc Augé’s definition of non-lieux or non-places: those anonymous if heterogeneous constructed spaces designed for the rapid circulation of persons and goods, like autoroutes , freeway interchanges, railway stations, airports, supermarkets, and, in another register, encampments for military units, refugees, or transitory workers: Si le lieu peut se définir comme identitaire, relationnel et historique, un espace qui ne peut se définir ni comme identitaire, ni comme relationnel, ni comme historique définira un non-lieu. (100) If place is defined as identitory, relational, and historical, the space that can be defined as neither identitory, relation, nor historical defines non-place. (My translation) The non-lieu is therefore the opposite of a home, a dwelling, or any place endowed with the significance derived from affect, memory, or myth. Its contents are in constant movement, as here, with the continual arrival and departure of automobiles. What Kosuth has done, however, is partly to have reclaimed the parking garage from its status as a non-lieu . Indeed, the garage at Part-Dieu is considered by those responsible for it as an “underground museum” 3 in addition to being a functional parking facility. The 3 “Un musée souterrain” is the title of a brochure distributed to visitors by the managers of the 12 Lyon Parc Auto facilities, all of which feature works of contemporary art. <?page no="166"?> 166 David Spurr guards behind the security desk also act as informal guides by greeting visitors, passing out brochures, and answering questions about the construction, maintenance, and organization of the installation. Kosuth’s project was conceived in collaboration with the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, responsible in particular for “interior scenography.” 4 In keeping with Wilmotte’s conception, the interior of the structure has a distinctly underground look, as if inspired by the landscape of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre ( 1864 ), or rather its 20 th Century-Fox film version ( Journey to the Center of the Earth ) produced in 1959 . The concrete on the walls and pillars is rough-cast and left without cladding to produce the impression of bare earth, like the walls of a cave; yellow lighting is used, particularly in the elevator shafts, as if to suggest smoldering subterranean fires. Emerging from an elevator onto the landing of each level, one sees the parked cars through circular windows that resemble nothing so much as the salon porthole of the submarine Nautilus in the Disney version ( 1954 ) of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ( Vingt mille lieues sous les mers , 1869 ). However, if the semantic content of Kosuth’s installation reinforces the elements of the fantastic characterizing the architectural structure, its material form owes more to the world of public display advertising. Within the parking structure itself, the fragments of Carroll and Joyce vie for attention with other backlit display panels that advertise, for example, the new Renault Laguna. Moreover, the graphic design of Kosuth’s panels recall an aspect of his work that began in the late sixties by using billboards and other anonymous advertising media in public spaces. In part, this was a way to subvert the modernist tradition of the individual artistic genius who creates works for the private ownership of wealthy collectors - an approach that rejected gallery spaces as well: “We really wanted to break the form of making meaning radically and we didn’t want to show in galleries and museums. We wanted to work directly out in the world” (“Conversation” 76 ). From another perspective, this kind of work brought about what Gilles Deleuze would call a “deterritorialization” 5 of media: forms like public display advertising could be diverted from their conventional, commercial functions into the art work, which at the same time was being liberated from the limits of its own traditional media, viewing space, and public. It was a way for art to invade public space and speak directly to the public. In the present context, there is something both humorous and provocative in the juxtaposition between the Renault display and the illuminated text on the opposing wall where, under 4 Ibid . 5 See, for example, the chapter “Sur quelques régimes des signes,” in Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie II . <?page no="167"?> Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art 167 Carroll’s title “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” we read the following passage from Joyce’s text: THE SIGHTSEERS (dying) Morituri te salutant. (they die) (A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated finger at Bloom.) ( U 15.1556-59) There is little apparent connection between Joyce’s characters and the inane twin brothers of Through the Looking-Glass , unless it is the equally bizarre scene of sightseers quoting Suetonius as the walls of Dublin collapse beneath them, and of the normally taciturn man in the brown macintosh denouncing the newly glorified Bloom. There is even less of a connection between this combination of texts and the Renault advertisement with which it shares part of the space of the parking garage. But this fragmentation of texts and dislocation of contexts is precisely the point. The Renault display by itself does nothing but confirm the users of the garage in their function as motorized consumers; it favors continuity of context in a fully mechanized and commercialized system: to the extent that any fantasy is encouraged on the part of the driver, the object of that fantasy is a new car. But Kosuth’s installation encourages another kind of fantasy, that of the literary imagination, here made both visible and enigmatic, as if to convey the message that the content of art, unlike that of advertising, is always enigmatic. In an early number (No. 10 ) of The Spectator , Joseph Addison in 1710 claimed to have brought philosophy to the breakfast table. In like manner, Kosuth has brought literature into the parking garage, in pursuit of a not-dissimilar class of new readers. Again, the aesthetic is one of rupture, deterritorialization, dislocation, and subversion: to break the frame is also to break the context, making room for the logic and content of the dream in the space of daily life. In addition to being a material installation, Kosuth’s treatment of Joyce and Carroll also amounts to a reading of their works in relation to one another, and in this manner can be considered from the perspective of literary interpretation. For literary scholars, the standard reference for Joyce’s relation to Carroll remains James Atherton’s The Books at the Wake with its chapter on Carroll as the “unforeseen precursor” ( 124 - 36 ) to Finnegans Wake . Atherton cites a host of references to Carroll’s works in Finnegans Wake , including allusions to most of the characters from the Alice books, from “Hatter’s hares” ( FW 83 . 1 ) and “Muckstails turtles” ( FW 393 . 11 ) to the “Whitest night ever moral saw” ( FW 501 . 31 ). The Wake repeatedly identifies Dublin with the figure of Humpty Dumpty. Joyce’s Iseult is shown to have origins in the person of Isa Bowman, the young actress who played the title role in the first stage production of Alice <?page no="168"?> 168 David Spurr in Wonderland , and Carroll himself figures in the Wake in his role as a great creator identified with the Egyptian god Atem who, according to myth, peopled the world by spitting on the primordial mud-heap at Heliopolis, or, in a variant of this myth, by spilling his onanistic seed on the same mound. In the particular type of word-sequence that Carroll called “doublets,” Joyce offers his version of what the god Carroll-Atem might have uttered at this moment of creation: “Item…Utem…Otem…Etem…Atem” ( FW 223 . 35 - 224 . 07 ). The divine name invoked here becomes the throat-clearing “Ahem” in a later passage that explicitly acknowledges Joyce’s debt to Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson: “To tell me how your mead of mard is made of. All old Dadgerson’s dodges one conning one’s copying and that’s what’s wonderland’s wanderlad’ll flaunt to the fair. A trancedone boyscript with tittivits by. Ahem” ( FW 374 . 1 - 4 ). Wonderland’s wanderlad would be Joyce himself, a male version of Alice, who is copying and flaunting to the literary fair all of Dodgson’s dodges, i. e. his language games in the form of neologisms, condensations, accretions, palindromes, and portmanteau words, in which, as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, “there are two meanings packed up into one word” (Carroll 187 ). If Finnegans Wake is directly indebted to Carroll, Kosuth has nonetheless shown the right instinct in seeing Carroll’s shadow in “Circe” as well, which of all the chapters in Ulysses most resembles the world of Finnegans Wake . In the scene that takes place in Bella Cohen’s brothel, Bloom, having given up his talismanic black potato to Zoe, forlornly speaks the line, “I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to…” ( U 15 . 1323 ), he is only slightly misquoting Carroll’s poem “Tema con variazioni” ( 1883 ), itself a parody of Thomas Moore’s sentimental epic of 1817 , Lalla Rookh (Gifford 470 ). But more directly relevant to the Alice books is the threatening speech given by Bella when transformed into the sadistic Bello, who tells Bloom that he will be “laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets” and “restrained in nettight frocks,” pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. ( U 15.2974-81) Bella / Bello’s ominous tone resembles that of the Queen of Hearts, who, finding Alice to be trespassing on the royal croquet-ground, turns crimson with fury, glares at her like a wild beast, and screams, “Off with her head! ” (Carroll 72 ), whereas “petticoats and fringes and things” figure both in John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice and in Dodgson’s photographs of little girls, including the real Alice Liddell. When Bella / Bello predicts that “Alice will feel the pullpull,” s / he is actually referring to Bloom, thus creating the parallel between Alice and Bloom that Kosuth has elaborated in Ulysses’ Adventures Underground . Bel- <?page no="169"?> Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art 169 la’s menaces transform Bloom into a “charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth” ( U 15 . 2985 - 86 ), one of the many metamorphoses in which he is by turns debased and aggrandized throughout the episode: from adult to child, from king to slave, etc. This inconstancy of form he has in common with Alice, who finds herself alternately shrinking and growing gigantic in unpredictable ways. The underground or dreamlike spaces in which the respective narratives take place favor this continual transgression of the material limits and logical norms that apply in the surface, waking world. Returning to the form of the textual fragments that Kosuth has put on display, we may observe that, architecturally speaking, they follow the principles that apply to the parking structure itself, those of horizontal continuity on structurally independent levels. Let us recall that each display consists of two distinct textual fragments divided by a horizontal line. If, in moving through the architectural space, the spectator reads the displays in the order defined above, i. e. clockwise on each level down, Carroll’s chapter titles will be seen to follow the order they have in the Alice books. Below the line, the fragments from “Circe” also follow the sequence they have in Joyce’s text, taking into account the fact that together they represent only a small part of that text. Thus the Joyce material, having begun on the entry level to the structure with the introductory lines of “Circe,” passes through various scenes from that chapter on each descending level, ending deep in the earth at the end of level − 4 , where a drunken Stephen finds himself involuntarily drawn into an altercation with the soldiers. The last display but one is headed “Which Dreamed It? ,” the final chapter title of Through the Looking-Glass . It quotes Stephen’s fantastic, confused speech: Kings and unicorns! (he falls back a pace) Come somewhere and we’ll … What was that girl saying…? ( U 15. 4481-82) The last display in the spatial order I have outlined here is headed “Alice’s Evidence,” the final chapter title of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , and the textual fragment beneath it testifies to Bloom’s intervention in the altercation in an effort to restore peace: (terrified) He said nothing. Not a word. A pure misunderstanding. ( U 15. 4600) But once again, to speak in architectural terms, if the textual fragments are horizontally integrated, creating a continuous flow on each level above and below the line that separates Carroll’s from Joyce’s text, the vertical integration within each fragment, i. e. that which would connect Carroll’s title to Joyce’s fragment in any meaningful way, is left to chance and to individual interpretation. It is only in a general, thematic way that we can connect Carroll’s “Which Dreamed <?page no="170"?> 170 David Spurr It? ” with Stephen’s drunken speech, for example by noting that “kings and unicorns” occur elsewhere in Carroll and that the figure of the dream applies to Joyce’s text as well as to Carroll’s. Similarly, it is only on this thematic basis that we can understand “Alice’s Evidence” as a formula relevant to Bloom’s intervention in a street altercation, in the sense that both involve a sort of rhetorical defense against a false accusation, whether the charge be that of stealing the tarts or insulting the king. This analysis of the textual structure of Kosuth’s installation can be expressed in linguistic terms: the textual fragments are linked horizontally on a syntactical axis corresponding to the order of their occurrence in Carroll’s and Joyce’s texts, respectively. But the vertical axis within each fragment is metaphorical rather than syntactical, being based on a relation of thematic resemblance rather than textual sequence. This distinction also applies to the architectural principle of the parking structure: on the horizontal axis, each level defines a continuous space, but on the vertical axis, the relation of one level to another is one of resemblance and functional equivalence rather than one of spatial continuity. At the beginning of this essay, I named a number of reasons why contemporary artists take their inspiration from Joyce. In addition to these, there is a final, overarching reason, which is that Joyce’s work abandons, in form and content, the ideology of aestheticism represented by Stephen Dedalus, and implicitly locates the potential source of its own meaning in its social and cultural contexts: in the institutions of Church, state, and nation; in the network of urban space; in the modern moment’s relation to history and tradition; in the psychopathology of everyday life. As we have seen, this is precisely the move made by contemporary artists from Marina Abramovic to Joseph Beuys to Joseph Kosuth. All of this makes Joyce’s work of direct relevance to contemporary artists who are interested in the question of what art is and how it functions in the world. Works Cited Atherton, James. The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake . Carbondale, IL : Southern Illinois UP , 1959. Print. Augé, Marc. Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité . Paris: Seuil, 1992. Print. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass . London: Penguin, 1998. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie II . Paris: Minuit, 1980. Print. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 . London: Verso, 1998. Print. Joyce, James . Finnegans Wake . New York: Penguin Books, 1967. Print. <?page no="171"?> Ulysses Underground: Joyce and Contemporary Art 171 -. Ulysses: The Corrected Text . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London: Bodley Head, 1993. Print. Kosuth, Joseph and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. “A Conversation.” Art and Design 9: 1 / 2 (1994): 76-81. Print. -. “No Exit.” Art and Design 9: 1 / 2 (1994): 59-63. Print. Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria. Joyce in Art . Dublin: Lilliput, 2004. Print. Virgil, Aeneid . Trans. Frank O. Copley. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Print. <?page no="172"?> 172 Sabrina Alonso Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax Sabrina Alonso In response to the call for papers for this collection, I became increasingly fascinated with the idea of making a predominantly visual contribution to reflect the notion of parallax in Joyce; thus I have created a Ulysses memory game, which I would like to describe here. The finished article will be presented to Fritz Senn, to whom this collection is dedicated. The game is based on pairs of passages taken from Ulysses , which provide the basis for the cards and illustrations. Two corresponding cards, when matched to each other, make up one parallactic example. Visually, when placed side by side, the cards also make up the two halves of what is intended to suggest a stereoscopic photographic print. These were used around the end of the 19 th century to produce a 3 D effect by employing stereoscopy, a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image through binocular vision. A stereoscopic memory game seemed to lend itself to Ulyssean parallax for two reasons. First, since parallax is principally a visual effect (whereby the position or orientation of an object appears to shift when viewed from different positions), a graphic design borrowed from visual technology seemed appropriate. The stereoscope is particularly suited not only because its two-element structure lends itself well to a memory game, but also because it alludes to the three-dimensionality that Joyce introduces into his text. This comes about in Joyce through an intricate network of internal references the sense of which, as is commonly stated, we often realize only retroactively or, in the text’s words, by “retrospective arrangement” ( U 6 . 150 ), 1 that is, when we look back and piece together the elements from various standpoints or positions and thus gradually move from a linear to a more panoramic view of the novel. Or rather (and this is where memory comes in), we would do so if only our powers of recollection were perfect or we had the time to re-read the novel often enough to absorb all the details. Of course, a game of memory will not greatly enhance our capacity for recollection as such, but its form will at least serve to acknowledge our awareness of its potential usefulness. 1 All references are to Gabler’s edition. <?page no="173"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 173 The Elements of the Game This game features ten parallactic examples from Ulysses (i. e. 20 different quotations taken from the text) and gives a visual rendering of them on 20 separate memory cards. The matching cards, although they are not identical, should look similar enough to be recognizable as a pair, as exemplified here (the images can be reproduced only in black and white here, but the cards themselves are in color): The passages on which these cards are based are taken from “Cyclops,” where the continuous and forceful report given by a talkative eyewitness is repeatedly interrupted by parodistic insertions. When the talk turns to Mr Breen, who is just passing the pub with his wife, the two are first described (in the voice of one of the narrative insertions) in grand, epic tones: “there passed an elder of noble <?page no="174"?> 174 Sabrina Alonso gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race” (U 12 . 246 -48 ) (the two are depicted on the left-hand card). However, when the men in the pub take over again, they carry the talk in the opposite direction: they laugh at Mrs Breen, who they think only gets what she deserves for having married a man like Mr Breen, and they laugh at his insane obsession with the anonymous postcard he has received and for which he intends to sue the unknown sender for an astonishingly large amount of money. Prompted by the Breens’ passing the pub door, the narrator thus tells the others: And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman trotting like a poodle. ( U 12.252-55) This less flattering version of Mr and Mrs Breen is shown on the second card. When placed side by side, they form a stereoscopic picture to represent the parallactic view: The whole of “Cyclops,” which employs a technique Joyce called gigantism, operates on two stylistic levels (that of the eyewitness’ oral report and that of the interspersed parodies), which continually clash with each other. Both styles and their idioms exaggerate and amplify the narration in their own way and reflect opposite and highly subjective points of view. From early on, then, the chapter prepares us to sustain parallactic vision. Another example I used for the cards, which is also taken from “Cyclops” and spills over into the following chapter, “Nausicaa,” is provided by descriptions of <?page no="175"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 175 Garryowen, the dog. When the narrator and Joe Hynes enter the pub, they find the citizen there, sitting thoughtfully in a corner, “having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen,” his fearsome-looking pet ( U 12 . 119 -20 ). The eyewitness goes on to report: The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I’m told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a licence. ( U 12.124-28) He comes back to the “bloody mongrel” later to testify how it “began to growl that’d put the fear of God in you seeing something was up” ( U 12 . 263 -64 ). My visualization is of an aggressive-looking Irish wolfhound: In the following chapter, however, we are given a completely different view of the dog when it is seen through Gerty’s eyes. She pictures herself living a life of domestic bliss involving good cooking, a warm fire, a well-furnished drawing-room, and (a less obvious attraction for the reader) “the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked, it was so human” ( U 13 . 232 -33 ). What was seen as a snappish Garryowen from a previous perspective is now made to look almost like a lapdog. <?page no="176"?> 176 Sabrina Alonso When placed side by side, the two memory cards form a stereoscopic pair presenting this parallactic view of Garryowen: Being given varied views of Garryowen does not mean, however, that we will ever know what the dog is really like. All we have as readers are alternative views of it, Garryowen parallactically distorted. The famous bee sting of 23 May 1904 also makes a memorable parallactic appearance. It first features in the sixth chapter, when, sitting in the carriage on their way to the cemetery for Dignam’s funeral, Bloom, Cunningham, Mr Power and Simon Dedalus are riding along Eccles Street and pass Our Lady’s Hospice for the Dying. On seeing the “ward for incurables” ( U 6 . 376 - 77 ), Bloom remembers a young doctor who used to work there and once treated him for a bee sting: “Nice young student that was dressed that bite the bee gave me” ( U 6 . 380 - 81 ). <?page no="177"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 177 The bee sting features again several chapters later in quite a different guise. At the maternity hospital, where Bloom inquires after Mrs Purefoy, whereupon Dixon, the student doctor, comes out and invites Bloom to join him and others at a party inside. Bloom’s recollection of the incident is presented in the chivalric style of “Oxen”: in the house of misericord where this learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. ( U 14.127-31) As a pair, the two cards juxtapose these two very different accounts of the same incident: <?page no="178"?> 178 Sabrina Alonso Another pair of cards shows Bloom being mocked by the boys in “Aeolus.” At the offices of the Freeman’s Journal , after having talked to Nannetti about the advertisement for Keyes, Bloom leaves to go to Dillon’s Auction Rooms. After Crawford has dismissed him with mock solemnity, a group of newsboys follow him, aping his walk. Professor MacHugh and Lenehan watch through the window: “Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr Bloom’s wake” ( U 7 . 444 -45 ). Six chapters later, in “Nausicaa,” we see a change of perspectives when Bloom himself recalls the same scene. At the beach, after Gerty has left, Bloom notices the “nobleman” pass by for the second time and, imagining all sorts of things about him (that he must be enjoying an after-dinner walk, that he probably has “a small bank balance somewhere,” or a seat in government etc.) and thinks: <?page no="179"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 179 “Walk after him now make him awkward like those newsboys me today. Still you learn something. See ourselves as others see us. So long as women don’t mock what matter? ” ( U 13 . 1056 - 59 ). Retrospectively, we thus learn that Bloom had in fact already been aware that the newsboys were mimicking his walk that morning and so, for a moment, we have a double view of the incident: “Wandering Rocks,” too, prepares the reader for parallax, though by its own means. It is a chapter whose nine vignettes set in different locations move around the city a great deal and presents Dublin from various points of view. The action remains predominantly on the surface, moving on a two-dimensional labyrinthine plane, with the paths of many of the novel’s characters <?page no="180"?> 180 Sabrina Alonso crossing each other. At the same time, it includes parallel montage (not unlike that sometimes used in film), which allows us to see simultaneous action in different places; this is one way of introducing multi-perspectival view and of simulating synchronicity. The movements and trajectories we follow in this chapter allow shots of the same objects from different angles, as in the following example, where the Dignams’ boy, reluctant to go back home, is dawdling along the streets: “In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff’s mouth and a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was telling him and grinning all the time” ( U 10 . 1150 - 52 ). In this description, we recognize Blazes Boylan, whom we saw some 700 lines earlier in Thornton’s shop, where the blonde assistant was making up the basket of fruit he was sending to Molly to prepare the way for his four-o’clock visit. As she bent over to add up the bill, he studied the contents of her blouse and picked the red carnation which, after a brief flirtatious exchange, he put between his teeth before asking to use her telephone: “Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the red flower between his smiling teeth” ( U 10 . 334 - 35 ). <?page no="181"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 181 Thus, in “Wandering Rocks,” Boylan the toff is seen with the carnation at two different moments from two different angles: The next example illustrated by these cards is provided by two views of the young couple, introduced in “Wandering Rocks” and first seen by Father Conmee as he is walking across the school field at Clongowes reading his breviary: A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man raised his cap abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig. Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his breviary. ( U 10.199-204) <?page no="182"?> 182 Sabrina Alonso The young lovers appear again in the fourteenth chapter, when Lynch describes a romp in the fields with his girlfriend one day; he tells his companions how, emerging through the hedge, they met Father Conmee and, to cover her embarrassment, the girl concentrated on removing a twig clinging to her skirt: The sweet creature turned all colours in her confusion, feigning to reprove a slight disorder in her dress: a slip of underwood clung there for the very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she glanced at her lovely echo in that little mirror she carries. But he had been kind. In going by he had blessed us. ( U 14.1156-61) Through delayed recognition, the couple encountered by Father Conmee on his walk in the tenth chapter are now identified. <?page no="183"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 183 Next, there is a cloud in Ulysses, which is observed twice at different times by two different characters. First, in “Telemachus,” it is seen by Stephen in Sandycove. Mulligan has gone downstairs after his morning shave at the top of the tower and has left Stephen to think about forgotten friendships and forgotten shaving bowls; as he gazes toward the sea, “[a] cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song” ( U 1 . 248 - 49 ). In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, musing on various topics, when his attention rests on the headpiece over the Freeman leader depicting a sunburst over the Bank of Ireland. He finds this amusing because, given the position of the bank (and as he remembers Arthur Griffith saying), this <?page no="184"?> 184 Sabrina Alonso would mean the “Homerule sun” rises “in the northwest” ( U 8 . 473 -74 ). Then, a cloud obscuring the sky darkens his thoughts: His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. ( U 8.475-78) We recognize the cloud that eclipses the sun as seen by Stephen at 8 a. m. and by Bloom at around 1 p. m. as the same one (presumably carried westward by the winds), which turns both men’s thoughts towards death: <?page no="185"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 185 Correspondence, however, is far from guaranteed by parallax. Events may differ when experienced by different characters or remembered at different moments. The night Bloom and Molly went to the opera is a case in point. It comes back to Bloom in “Sirens” when he is wondering how women respond to music and remembers sitting in a box with Molly, who was wearing a low-cut dress that attracted the men’s opera glasses, but he was able to hold her attention with his talk of Spinoza: “Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent” ( U 11 . 1058 - 59 ). Molly remembers the same evening later in “Penelope.” Far from being hypnotized by Bloom’s conversation, however, she now appears rather more concerned with the fact that her menstrual period had just started. Here, parallax produces comic irony: and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I could all in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to sit it out then to the last tag ( U 18.1114-17) Another example that lends itself well to this game is the Blooms’ cat, as it is viewed from two different perspectives by two separate observers. In “Calypso,” the cat comes into the kitchen while Bloom is preparing breakfast and there ensues a brief communicative exchange of caresses and mewing noises between the two. Bloom starts wondering about cats, including how they might see the world, and, in a way typical of him, attempts a change of perspective by trying to see himself and the world through the cat’s eyes: They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. … Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me. ( U 4.26-29) <?page no="186"?> 186 Sabrina Alonso Molly has different thoughts about the cat, but she, too, tries to imagine what things must look like to their pet: I wonder has she fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking but I hate their claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening as I wait ( U 18.935-38) This instance of the cat seen as a creature that is itself looking back provides a more complex example of parallax, in that it combines several lines of vision crossing from different directions: we see the cat from two perspectives (Bloom’s and Molly’s), as well as the scene as perceived by the cat itself from two angles (once from below as it looks up at Bloom, and once from above, as it is sitting on the stairs, possibly looking at Molly or at Molly’s surroundings). <?page no="187"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 187 It is a watching cat in parallactic view and forces the reader’s eye to jump several times, thus illustrating how parallax always involves a re-orientation of the eye. Finally, I would like to examine the parallactic view we are given of the coin that is flung into the street. In “Wandering Rocks,” there is a moment when three hurling actions occur simultaneously: a one-legged sailor “jerked himself ” into Eccles Street, growling, “For England, home, and beauty” ( U 10 . 229 , 232 , 235 ), while “Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin” ( U 10 . 221 - 23 ). <?page no="188"?> 188 Sabrina Alonso In “Penelope” Molly remembers: “when I threw the penny to that lame sailor for England home and beauty” ( U 18 . 346 -47 ). The two cards together thus depict the coin, the spit, and the arm in stereoscopic view: It may also be worth noting in passing that there is an additional visual effect in this particular illustration, in that the left-hand card when taken on its own appears to show a stream of spit flying from right to left; when placed next to the second (right-hand) card, however, this could - visually at least - be retrospectively seen as the putative trajectory of the coin entering the frame from the right-hand card. <?page no="189"?> Memory Game: Ulyssean Parallax 189 Parallax, the effect whereby an object appears to change in some way when viewed from different positions, implies that different observers will see different things. Presenting an incident in parallax creates two standpoints offering two possible ways of perceiving the same object or event; it does not modify the event, incident or object itself, but it produces a shift in the way in which it is perceived. The memory game described here seeks to give a visual rendering of instances of parallax in Ulysses , with the design of the stereoscopic card alluding to Joyce’s application of an originally visual concept to the medium of literature. In so doing, he allows an experience of simultaneity and of space in what is, by its very nature, the successive and linear reading of a text. The Rules of the Game The Parallax Memory Game can be played purely visually, using only the images as one would in a classic game of memory, or by including the quotations from the text. For the latter purpose, a quotations board is provided in A 3 format. On this, a grid of forty squares is printed, each of which either contains a quotation or holds an empty space in which to place the corresponding card as and when it is found. The game itself may be played alone or by a group of up to four players; in the latter case, a quotations board is given to each competitor before play begins. Bibliographical Reference Joyce, James. Ulysses . 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984, 1986. Print. <?page no="190"?> 190 Shane Walshe Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh Shane Walshe If parallax, as Fritz Senn has claimed, “is an instance of sending the observant mind in two, or more, different positions [sic] and having it compare notes” ( 79 ), there can hardly be a better test of that notion than comparing translations or adaptations of a text. The acts of translation and adaptation both require one to engage with a text on a level far beyond that of the casual reader and then to transpose that text as one sees it to another language or medium. While James Joyce himself felt that his most famous work could not easily be translated into another language, he believed that it could readily be transferred into another medium such as film (Ellmann 561 ). Despite this, there have been dozens of translations of Ulysses into other languages but only two feature-length film adaptations - Joseph Strick’s Ulysses ( 1967 ) and Sean Walsh’s Bloom ( 2003 ). In adapting Joyce’s work for the screen, both directors encountered the usual problems facing those who undertake to adapt a novel for the cinema, namely which scenes, plotlines, characters, etc. to include, omit and combine, as well as the far greater task of trying to emulate in cinematic terms Joyce’s stylistic literary flourishes. Given Ulysses ’ reputation for being unfilmable (and, indeed, among the general population, for being unreadable), it is perhaps not surprising that much of what little academic attention the Ulysses adaptations have received has focused on the extent to which they have succeeded or failed in visualizing Joyce’s myriad literary techniques. 1 The justification for this approach is that, according to Margot Norris, “[i]n practical terms, interpretations vary less with respect to plot and characterization whose understanding has 1 The most notable works in this respect are Ulysses , Margot Norris’ analysis of Strick’s film for the Ireland into Film series and Keith Williams’ “Odysseys of Sound and Image: ‘Cinematicity’ and the Ulysses Adaptations,” which, as the title suggests, looks at the cinematicity of both Strick’s and Walsh’s films and offers a brief discussion of Werner Nekes’ Uliisses ( 1982 ), an avant-garde film which loosely adapts Joyce’s novel. There is also Rudolph von Abele’s invaluable “Film as Interpretation: A Case Study of Ulysses ,” which highlights a number of shortcomings in Strick’s film, as well as David A. Hatch and David C. Simmons’ “Sausage Smoke Leading to Mulligan’s Breakfast: Film Adaptation and James Joyce’s Ulysses ,” which compares the movies in terms of their cinematic achievements. <?page no="191"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 191 consolidated into a consensus over time than in determining what aspects of the writing are particularly striking or significant” ( Ulysses 31 ). It is my contention, however, that, despite the supposed consensus regarding the seemingly more straightforward aspects of the adaptations, namely plot and characterization, the interpretations, in fact, vary quite dramatically in these very aspects due to decisions made by the respective directors. Thus, rather than retreading the ground covered in previous research and analyzing whether and how these filmmakers found cinematic solutions to Joyce’s stylistic achievements, this chapter will, in the spirit of Fritz Senn’s aforementioned definition of parallax, compare and contrast the two adaptations of Ulysses and demonstrate how the directors’ decisions to foreground certain characters and chapters, while eliding and excising others, lead to audiences being presented with two very different views of the novel. This notion of a particular perspective being forced on the viewer is very much in keeping with von Abele’s comment regarding the parallax that is inherent in film adaptation, namely that “[t]he viewer is there obliged to see clearly and univocally what he might not wish to see that way; what, as reader of the novel, he often would not see that way” ( 499 , emphasis in original). Indeed, this paper will go so far as to argue that if two “virgin audiences” were to go into two different cinemas, one to watch Ulysses and the other to watch Bloom , they would come out with very different impressions of the novel, regarding its plot, discourse, and characterization. 2 Their understanding of the book would be very much dependent on what they experienced on the screen before them and whether it was the perspective offered by Strick or Walsh. In this regard, this paper will, somewhat heretically, not place much emphasis on Joyce’s text per se , but rather on the diverging, parallactic perspectives of it. It will compare the adaptations in the light of what they show of the novel, operating on the understanding that both of them are in their own way true to the novel and that the differences that exist stem from the varying viewpoints that they take. 2 This concept of “virgin audiences” is borrowed from Norris’ concept of “virgin readers.” Such audiences would be cinemagoers who would not have read Joyce’s novel and who would be going to see the film “knowing nothing about it, with no idea of what to expect” ( Virgin 1 ). <?page no="192"?> 192 Shane Walshe The Films Condensing Joyce’s 644 -page novel to a feature-length film is no mean feat, particularly when one bears in mind that the unabridged audio version of the book clocks in at 29 hours 45 minutes. 3 Nonetheless, as noted above, it has been done twice, with varying degrees of success. 4 The first adaptation of Ulysses for the big screen was Joseph Strick’s film of the same name, which had a running time of 123 minutes and was shot in black and white in Dublin and Gibraltar in 1966 . The director’s boldest, and most significant, stylistic choice, however, was not his use of monochrome, but rather his decision to set the movie in the present day instead of the 1904 of the novel. This shift in period has an effect not only on the costumes and hairstyles that appear on-screen, in the form of mini-skirts and mop-top haircuts, but also on several major plot points which now must remain off-screen as they have become anachronous, most notably anything related to the whole issue of Irish independence. Although this shift to the present day might seem to be a huge deviation from Joyce’s novel, the general consensus is that, in setting the film in the 1960 s, Strick offered a clever justification for the cutting of large swathes of the novel and, thus, sidestepped the problem of what to leave out. 5 3 The texts referred to are the Gabler Edition and the Naxos AudioBooks version read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. 4 In keeping with the notion of parallax, it is fitting that critics have seen the merits of each film quite differently, both on the films’ own terms and when compared with each other. Sheehan for The Sunday Times , for example, declared Bloom to be the superior picture, saying: “An earlier version, directed in 1967 by Joseph Strick, was more straightforward. Strick believes that a filmmaker’s duty to great books is to copy them literally. Walsh is more artistic: he is actively looking for ways to transfer Joyce’s originality, rather than just his characters, to the screen. Metaphors are made visible.” Alan Morrison for Empire Magazine , in contrast, saw the situation entirely differently, criticizing Walsh’s adaptation with words similar to those that had previously been directed at Strick’s film and, instead, proclaiming Ulysses to be the better movie: “Only the ‘Nighttown’ sequence is entertainingly visualised; the rest, heavy with voiceover narration, is more like an abridged audio book with pictures. The result - regardless of the Irish Academy Awards it won back home in 2003 - is incomprehensible without a working knowledge of the novel, and inferior to Joseph Strick’s version from 1967 .” What becomes clear from these, and indeed the majority of reviews, is that, as noted above, the main criterion on which people have judged these films tends to be their cinematic achievements, with matters of characterization, narrative and theme receiving comparatively little attention, despite their importance. 5 Norris, for example, states that “[t]he shift to the 1960 s served to give a historical logic to many of the omissions, while simultaneously tightening its ideological emphasis. […] Specifically, the shift in time transfers the political locus of oppression in the film to anti- Semitism, with its sharply enlarged significance after World War II” (“Updating Ulysses ” 81 ). <?page no="193"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 193 The second Ulysses adaptation, Sean Walsh’s Bloom , was shot in Dublin in 2002 and 2003 and was released to coincide with the 100 th anniversary of Bloomsday in 2004 . Walsh condensed Joyce’s text even more than Strick had done and delivered a film with a running time of 108 minutes. 6 Unlike Strick’s adaptation, Walsh’s movie retains the period setting of the novel. This does not mean, however, that the latter film is necessarily any more faithful to Joyce’s work than the former is. Indeed, the entire issue of Irish nationalism is similarly eschewed in the more recent production and, thus, one of the areas in which the two films could potentially have differed greatly is avoided. Nonetheless, as we shall see, there are plenty of other ways in which the two films differ in their perspective. Plot and Discourse One of the most obvious ways in which the movies differ in their viewpoint of the novel is in their approach to the book’s plot and narrative discourse, with plot referring to the narrative’s basic story-line, i. e. the sequence of events as they occur chronologically, and discourse referring to the way in which this plot is narrated, for example with the aid of flashback, flashforward, repetition, etc. (cf. Simpson and Montgomery). In each of the productions under examination, the decisions made by the directors have a major effect on the cohesion of the film and on the clarity of its narrative, particularly for audiences unfamiliar with the original novel. Depending on what narrative strands the directors include and the order in which they present this information, virgin audiences will receive very different impressions of the film. For his adaptation, Strick adhered largely to the structure of Joyce’s text, albeit with a few notable changes. The most obvious of these is the way that he alternates chapters from the “Telemachiad” with those from “The Wanderings of Ulysses,” thereby introducing Bloom to the audience much earlier than is the case in the novel, where we do not meet him until Chapter 4 . In Strick’s film, he is introduced immediately after the first scene with Stephen at the Martello tower, courtesy of a cut that merges Haines’ extradiegetic comments on the perfidious threat posed to his country by the Jews with the sight of the domesticated Bloom in an apron cooking breakfast in his kitchen. The cut and corresponding comments are also underscored by a musical motif of Klezmer music, a motif which is used again in the “Nestor” scene during Deasy’s rant 6 The running time attributed to the film on IMDb and on the DVD is 113 minutes, which is very generous, as the running time, including quite lengthy credit sequences, in fact, amounts to 108 minutes, meaning that the time available to tell Joyce’s story in Walsh’s film is actually only about 103 minutes, or 20 minutes shorter than Strick’s film. <?page no="194"?> 194 Shane Walshe to Stephen about the Jews and is intended to remind the viewer of Bloom and draw a connection between the two scenes. These cuts between scenes featuring Stephen and Bloom respectively lend a sense of cohesion to the film right from the beginning, in the way that they link the two characters. This connection is further established shortly afterwards through the merger of the “Proteus” and “Hades” chapters, where we see Stephen walking on the beach from Bloom’s perspective in the funeral carriage, thus echoing the scene in Joyce’s text where the two characters’ paths briefly cross. From that point on, the film returns to the structure of the novel and proceeds more or less as readers know it. There are, however, some exceptions, as events, protagonists and locations of some chapters are merged or entirely omitted. The first is true of the “Lestrygonians,” “Sirens” and “Cyclops” chapters. Here, rather than have Bloom consume his famed glass of Burgundy and his gorgonzola sandwich in Davy Byrne’s, and later eat dinner and listen to music in the Ormond Hotel before encountering the bigoted Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub, Strick combines these scenes to one location. Bloom can now be found drinking his glass of Burgundy in Barney Kiernan’s pub, while Simon Dedalus plays the piano beside him and the Citizen lurks ominously at the bar in the background. Other chapters are completely omitted, as is the case with “Scylla and Charybdis” and “Eumaeus,” the effect of which will be explained in detail later, when we look at characterization. Walsh’s film plays around with the structure of Joyce’s novel even more than Strick’s movie does and, thus, in terms of narrative discourse, resembles the original text less than the 1967 production does. The movie is bookended by Molly Bloom’s “Penelope” soliloquy, which partly appears in a pre-credit sequence and then closes the film. In between, Walsh goes to even further lengths than Strick to create the sense of events on that fateful day happening simultaneously, crosscutting between scenes with greater frequency, particularly at the beginning of the movie. Whereas Strick had alternated chapters of “The Telemachiad” and “The Wanderings” (Chapters 1 , 4 , 2 , 5 , 3 , 6 ) before returning to the novel’s chronological structure, Walsh divides up the individual chapters several times (Chapters 1 , 4 , 1 , 4 , 2 , 4 , 2 , 5 , 3 , 6 ), which creates an even greater sense of simultaneity and of events and characters being interconnected. What is more, unlike Strick’s film, which after Chapter 6 returns more or less to the Joycean structure, Bloom continues to crosscut between scenes, such as between “Lestrygonians” and “Scylla and Charybdis,” as well as “Wandering Rocks” and “Cyclops” (Chapters 7 , 8 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 9 , 10 ). This approach reflects arguably one of the greatest achievements of Walsh’s film: the sense of there being an interconnectedness not only between the two main characters whose paths are destined to cross later that day, but also between a variety of Dubliners who <?page no="195"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 195 share the same city streets with them. For example, we see Father Conmee 7 time and again over the course of the movie: first, when Bloom passes him on his way to the post office; then, later, at Paddy Dignam’s funeral; once again, in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter as Boylan, and, then, Stephen pass him in the street; and, once more, leading the rosary in the church in the “Nausicaa” scene. He also appears several times throughout the “Circe” episode. Similarly, Walsh creates a composite character, the veiled girl, who at different points of the movie serves as the focus of sexual desire of Bloom, Stephen and Boylan. Her various appearances in the confectionary shop, the butcher’s, and, finally, in the “Circe” scene as the Bloomite who commits suicide all add to the sense that Dublin is a small town in which it is likely for people to bump into each other, thus emulating Joyce’s achievements in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter. 8 A further way in which greater cohesion is achieved in Walsh’s film is in the way he succeeds in conveying the many links and hidden references in Joyce’s work, be it the man in the Macintosh coat at the funeral, the references to Bannon’s girl in Mullingar, or the allusions to Bloom’s pseudonym, Henry Flower. Creating such allusions was something which Walsh has said was of great importance to him when he was making the movie, and they certainly lend the film a greater sense of cohesion. 9 Despite this cohesion, Philip Watson, writing in the Observer , cites an unnamed critic as having described Walsh’s film as “disjointed and incoherent.” This criticism, while not valid for the entire film, as shown above, is certainly legitimate when it comes to the last third of the film, which is deeply dissatisfying and likely to leave audiences feeling particularly aggrieved, and confused, by the fact that Walsh gives Stephen and Bloom almost no screen time together. Bloom does not appear at all in the maternity hospital scene, and he and Stephen 7 Credited as Father Coffeey. 8 Although Norris has praised Strick’s film for the way that it retains “the ethos of a homely village” ( Ulysses 77 ), it is Walsh’s film which succeeds better in conveying the small town nature of Dublin city and the “random encounters which propel Ulysses ,” as Kiberd describes them ( 25 ). 9 Walsh has interacted with both fans and detractors of his film on the IMDb website, explaining his intentions behind making the film: “What makes Ulysses [sic] special (for me) is the way in which Joyce uncovers and reveals the multilayered characters of Leopold and Molly Bloom and also how he created a myriad of links and connections within the novel. These links may be based on places, people, time or events and by the way, a lot of [these] links / connections are hidden within the film and may only be spotted on a second viewing.” Here, Walsh highlights another form of parallax, one which has been highlighted by Ursula Zeller in her “‘Parallax stalks behind’: The Walk-In Book, or the Text as Space in Ulysses ,” namely the aesthetics of delay and the way in which “a seemingly meaningless passage makes sense retroactively, from the vantage of a later passage” ( 141 ). <?page no="196"?> 196 Shane Walshe are merely shown briefly together in the brothel and again on the street outside before Walsh offers us a fleeting glimpse of them walking home, of Stephen singing Siúil a Rún at the kitchen table, and, finally, of the pair bidding each other good night at the door of the house. The entire “Eumaeus” chapter and most of “Ithaca,” including the crucial symbolic urination becoming one stream, which has been described by Heusel as “the reason for the wanderings” ( 142 ), are omitted. Such scant attention to one of the most momentous encounters in all of literature is all the more troubling since, unlike Strick, Walsh actually goes to great lengths throughout the film teasing the audience with the prospect of the paths of these two characters crossing. He constantly hints at the inevitability and the magnitude of this encounter, whether it is via Stephen’s dream of “that man” - his premonition of meeting Bloom, which Walsh visualizes by a foreshadowing close-up of Bloom whispering to Stephen in the later Nighttown sequence, or in the scene in the National Library where Bloom and Stephen meet at a door and pause and do an ostentatious double take and appear to be on the verge of saying something to each other. Strick’s film, in comparison, does not offer this sort of teasing in anticipation of their meeting. There is no premonition, and the meeting at the door, in this case of the National Gallery, actually seems to make more of the fact that Bloom and Mulligan have met each other twice in a matter of minutes than it does of Stephen and Bloom’s silent encounter. Instead, Strick’s film focuses more on the importance of the actual time the characters spend together. Accordingly, he offers considerably more screen time to the pair; the “Ithaca” section of the film alone is almost nine minutes long (the third longest section after “Circe” and “Penelope”) and shows the two protagonists talking at length and offers an extensive summary of the content of their conversation by means of a two-person voiceover that employs the chapter’s famed catechism style. Walsh’s treatment pales in comparison. What is more, the effect of the large-scale omission of the “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” chapters in Bloom is that viewers of Walsh’s film have no idea what sort of relationship has developed between the two characters, apart from what can be garnered from Molly’s soliloquy. Even then, it is not clear how Molly even knows what she knows about her husband’s day, as Walsh shows us Bloom quietly getting ready for bed, kissing Molly’s backside, etc., all while she is sound asleep. Thus, in this movie, we never see Bloom actually tell her anything about his night out with the students or about his plans for having Stephen teach her Italian, etc. So how does she know all of this? This is certainly the kind of disjointed and incoherent material that the unnamed critic was referring to with regard to Walsh’s adaptation. Strick’s film, in contrast, is much clearer. As noted above, it shows Bloom and Stephen conversing beneath the voiceover that recounts the catechism-like responses from “Ithaca.” It shows them drinking cocoa, echoing <?page no="197"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 197 a scene imagined by Bloom with Rudy from earlier that day, and, importantly, it later shows Bloom recounting the day’s events to his wife, who is sitting up in bed waiting for him. From the above, we can see that choices regarding what material is included, omitted or combined and how it is presented plays a significant role in the perspective that audiences, particularly virgin audiences, have of the respective films. Whereas Walsh’s film initially succeeds in creating more cohesion through frequent crosscutting and through including many of Joyce’s intratextual references which invite the audience to join the dots and rewards them for doing so, it also leaves some glaring gaps in the narrative which detract from the viewing experience. Strick’s Ulysses , in contrast, attempts fewer throwaway references which later prove to have significance, but instead succeeds in offering a clearer account of the narrative and, most importantly, rewards the viewer for sticking with the protagonists by dedicating an appropriate amount of time to their meeting at the end of the day. Characters and Characterization Characters In terms of characters and characterization, the two adaptations also approach the film from different perspectives offering audiences a parallax view of the source material. Just as the directors’ decisions on which scenes to include or omit play an important role in our understanding of the narrative, their decisions on which characters to retain or reject also play a significant part in how we view the film. A quick roll call of the figures that feature in the two productions already reveals some significant differences. Although there are figures who appear in Strick’s film but not in Walsh’s, they tend to be ones of limited significance and include Alexander J. Dowie, Myles Crawford, Nurse Callan, Dr. Dixon, as well as Bloom’s cat and the Citizen’s dog Garryowen. Characters who are included in Walsh’s film and omitted from Strick’s, in contrast, are often extremely important, as they aid in shaping our understanding of the main protagonists. In this regard, the most notable omissions are, without a doubt, Milly Bloom and Virag Bloom. 10 10 Other notable omissions are Martha Clifford, George Russell and John Eglinton, the significance of which will become greater when we look at the characters of Bloom, Molly and Stephen in greater detail below. <?page no="198"?> 198 Shane Walshe Milly Milly Bloom, the Blooms’ fifteen-year-old daughter, is not even mentioned in the 1967 film, but features quite prominently in the novel and in the Walsh adaptation. She is first referred to by Molly on two occasions in the pre-credit sequence and again shortly afterwards by Bloom when he comments on her having sent a letter and a postcard. Mulligan also speaks of her being the “sweet young thing” that Bannon has been seeing in Mullingar. Subsequent references to her include Bloom’s comparing the blind stripling’s hand to hers and Molly’s comments on Milly being sent to Mullingar due to Molly’s relationship with Boylan. Not only is she mentioned, but she is also given a voice of her own and, thus, greater significance when her letter is read in voiceover by a young female voice. More than this, she even appears on screen on several occasions in the film and is, thus, given a physical presence and consequently more prominence. Indeed, the huge significance of the character of Milly really only becomes apparent when she is removed from the narrative, as is the case in Strick’s production. First of all, the complete omission of Milly from Strick’s film serves to make greater the loss suffered by the Blooms with the death of young Rudy. To the uninitiated viewer, then, the message is that the Blooms have lost their only child and that this is the source of all their marital difficulties. This notion is strengthened by the fact that Strick offers several tragic visual references to Rudy throughout the film: we see the newborn Rudy in a baby photo, an image triggered by Bloom’s musing over the transmigration of souls, then again in the same photo when Simon Dedalus is commenting on his own son, followed by a montage of what might have been if Rudy had lived (images of Bloom and Rudy playing chess, of Rudy walking as a toddler, of Molly and Rudy feeding ducks and of Bloom serving his son a cup of cocoa). In that same scene from “Hades,” the tragedy of Bloom’s son’s death is heightened by the image of a hearse with a little white coffin, a particularly poignant image. What is more, these visual images are also underscored by a musical motif, which occurs with the first appearance of the aforementioned baby photo and is repeated later, for example, when Bloom, in one of his few interior monologues in Strick’s film, is pondering the decline of his relationship with Molly and admits that “something changed after Rudy.” Although there are also references to Rudy in Walsh’s film, they are not always visual in nature and, when they are, they are less vivid and rely far less on evoking pathos. More importantly, they are also balanced with numerous references to Milly, as observed above, thus lending them less significance in the overall narrative. The second important effect of excising Milly completely from Strick’s Ulysses is that Molly’s comparisons of herself and her daughter (and, indeed, Bloom’s comparisons of his wife and his daughter) are omitted. These comparisons are <?page no="199"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 199 significant in the novel, as, according to Groce, “Milly’s resemblance to Molly is a constant, painfully nostalgic reminder for both Molly and Bloom of their youth in all its liveliness and sexuality” ( 26 ). This notion is retained in Walsh’s film in the scene where Bloom imagines Milly kissing Bannon (accompanied by the image of Bannon groping her breast) and in the scene where Molly comments on the fact that Milly will not have been able to feel sexual intercourse very deeply yet. However, in Strick’s film, Milly, and, thus, the effect she has on her parents, is completely missing, thereby giving viewers of that movie a more limited perspective into those characters. Virag The omission of Virag Bloom from the Strick film is also significant, particularly when compared with the Walsh adaptation. Although the 1967 production does have Martin Cunningham briefly mention how he was mortified by the talk about suicide in front of Bloom (whose father took his life in a hotel in Ennis), this is the only reference to Virag in that movie. The 2003 film, in contrast, goes far beyond passing references to Bloom’s deceased father. For example, Walsh includes an image of Virag’s pale, dead face as his son remembers it, the use of the image once more anchoring the information better in the viewer’s mind and drawing more prominence to it than the casual aside in Strick’s film. This image is also supported by a voiceover from Bloom’s interior monologue regarding the suicide note that was left for him, saying “Poor Papa. Poor man. A letter. To my dearest son, Leopold.” In addition to receiving this more vivid depiction of Bloom’s father in the “Hades” scene, viewers of Walsh’s film see Virag several times more in the “Circe” sequence: first, when he condemns Bloom for being in Nighttown and, later, when he plays the role of the judge in the courtroom scene (in contrast to Strick’s use of the Citizen in that role). The effect of these scenes is that they amplify the significance of Bloom’s family in the movie and show an additional facet to Bloom’s preoccupations, namely that he worries about having let his father down and is concerned about being judged by him (rather than by a bigoted Irishman, as in Strick’s film). In this regard, Walsh’s film therefore comes closer to dealing with what von Abele has called “one of the deepest themes of Ulysses ,” namely “death guilt and its ancillary problems” ( 500 ). 11 Indeed, Luca Crispi, who has traced the evolution of the character of Virag Bloom in different 11 The short shrift that Rudolph receives in the 1967 movie was picked up in one of the earliest Ulysses reviews, with Richard Kain regretting the fact that “Bloom’s pious respect for his father is not accented” with “no reference to his annual memorial pilgrimage” ( 351 ). Bloom , in contrast, obliquely references Bloom’s yearly trip to Ennis on his father’s anniversary, by having him comment that he has “to go down to the County Clare on <?page no="200"?> 200 Shane Walshe drafts of Joyce’s novel, has also pointed out that, despite the fact that much of what we know about Bloom’s father and his untimely death was added at a very late stage of the writing process, the significance of this information in terms of the general themes of the novels is great: Although decades of readers have tended to directly link this earlier family tragedy with the sorrow Leopold and Molly feel for the loss of their only son, Joyce in fact only developed the ground for this possible connection between the stories of Ulysses as he rushed to get the book published. By creating a more ample web of associations between what were separate stories, Joyce further established an intertextual connection that substantially enriches the intersubjective bonds within the Bloom family and the affective resonance of Ulysses . (26-27) The absence of Virag from Strick’s film, however, weakens the aforementioned familial bonds and detracts from the affective resonance of the film. Characterization In addition to omitting individual characters from their films, the directors also frequently omit individual character traits in their protagonists, thereby significantly affecting our understanding of these figures. Such changes may be due to constraints of the medium or to the narrative choices of the filmmakers. However, others are invariably born of the necessity to cut large swathes of the novel, which means that the complexity of the characters has to be sacrificed. This is something which Vickie Olsen has also observed in her analysis of the 1967 version of Ulysses , but which applies equally to Walsh’s production, and indeed is likely to apply to any future adaptations: “At no time is Strick unfaithful to Joyce, but the obvious inviability of filming everything in the massive novel leads to what Ellmann labels ‘a new form of censorship’” ( 103 ). Evidence of this censorship and how it results in one-sided views of the characters can be seen if one looks closely at the portrayals of the main protagonists in the films. Bloom In Strick’s film, Milo O’Shea’s Bloom appears to be more of a victim of his wife’s infidelities than his counterpart does in Walsh’s movie. It becomes clear to the viewer not only that Molly is being unfaithful to Leopold, but also that half of Dublin knows about it. There are constant allusions to this fact, be they comments and knowing glances from Bantam Lyons about the fact that “Boylan is getting it up,” or the wink winks and nudge nudges by the patrons in Barney some private business.” However, this reference is wasted on anyone who has not read the novel, as Walsh never explains where the suicide occurred in the first place. <?page no="201"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 201 Kiernan’s pub. Even the cuckoo clock in the bar mocks him, crying out “Cuckold! Cuck-old! ” Indeed, Strick also includes a montage of these allusions towards the end of the film, with the repetition of images that have been seen earlier serving to reinforce their significance and, thus, further elicit the audience’s pity for Bloom. What is more, Bloom’s role as a victim in Strick’s film is accentuated by the fact that his own indiscretions are downplayed in the narrative, making him a man more sinned against than sinning. Although Richard Kain argues that “the pathos of Bloom’s domestic life might have come through better had not Martha Glifford [sic] been omitted and the part of Gerty MacDowell not been so severely cut,” I would argue that the opposite is, in fact, the case. The fact that there is no mention of Martha Clifford or of her and Bloom’s inappropriate correspondence actually creates the impression that the cuckolded Bloom is an innocent party and, thus, evokes even more pity for him. Walsh’s film, in contrast, makes much more of Bloom’s own inappropriate sexual behavior, showing that Leopold is not much better than his wife. There is even a suggestion in the film that it is Bloom’s behavior that has driven Molly to infidelity. The film also highlights his duplicitous nature, by showing how he has assumed the pseudonym Henry Flower and opened a post office box for his “naughty” correspondence with Martha. It also reveals the lengths he goes to in concealing this relationship from Molly, as he is shown both covering up a letter he is writing to Martha and checking on the visiting cards bearing his assumed name which he has hidden in his hatband. 12 Moreover, unlike in Strick’s film, where Bloom’s sexual fantasies are largely limited to the “Nausicaa” and “Circe” scenes and his glancing at books by Paul de Kock, in Walsh’s film, Bloom is shown to be a lecherous man, who is constantly ogling women and fantasizing about them. This is evident not only when he masturbates in broad daylight on the beach - the equivalent scene in Strick’s film is more muted, with Bloom’s lower body concealed behind a wall - but also in the scene where he imagines the rump of the aforementioned veiled girl in the butcher shop, for example, or when he is caught by Molly admiring the servant girl’s bottom. Thus, although viewers of Walsh’s film may still feel some pity for Bloom being cuckolded, the degree of sympathy is lessened by the fact that he is no saint himself. This, as noted above, is in stark contrast to the portrayal in Strick’s film. Sympathy for the Bloom in the 1967 film is also greater due to the fact that he comes across as a more likeable person in general. O’Shea’s Bloom appears to be far more caring and sensitive, as can be seen in his greater concern for 12 Indeed, the scene showing him covering up the letter is shown twice, both at the beginning and at the end of the film, with the repetition serving to reinforce the notion that he is being unfaithful. <?page no="202"?> 202 Shane Walshe Paddy Dignam’s widow and children and for Minna Purefoy, who is suffering a protracted labor in hospital. Although Stephen Rea’s Bloom in Walsh’s film also mentions the insurance for Mrs. Dignam and also enquires about Mrs. Purefoy, his interest in doing these tasks does not come across as quite as sincere. This may be because Walsh’s more frequent use of voiceover for interior monologue means that we can hear Bloom’s thoughts and know, for example, that in his discussion with Josie Breen regarding Minna Purefoy he is not actually thinking about her, but rather of more mundane matters, such as whether or not he remembered to flush the toilet that morning. Moreover, in Bloom , unlike in Ulysses , it is not made clear that Bloom’s motivation for going to the hospital is an altruistic one, namely to enquire about Minna Purefoy. Strick’s film makes a point of showing Leopold going to Holles St. with the express intention of visiting her and shows him expressing his concern to the nurse on duty. It is at the hospital that he, by chance, crosses Stephen’s path when a doctor at the hospital insists that he wait in the medical students’ lounge while he makes an enquiry. This fortuitous meeting presents Bloom with another chance to display his caring side, and we see him worrying about Stephen’s drunken state and admonishing Mulligan for seemingly spiking the young bard’s drinks. Strick’s inclusion of this scene also offers a legitimate reason for Bloom to follow Stephen to Nighttown, namely to see that he comes to no harm. Walsh’s film, in contrast, offers no clear reason. The fact that Bloom never sets foot in the hospital (thus neither asking about Mrs. Purefoy nor seeing Stephen’s inebriated state) but only sees the students emerging, creates the impression that he is not actually concerned about Stephen, but just decides to tag along with the group of revelers on their night out. Indeed, Bloom even echoes the viewer’s confusion regarding his motivations when he asks himself: “What am I following them for? ” Finally, although both incarnations of Bloom are later shown to be looking after Stephen and his money in the brothel, it is again O’Shea’s Leopold who displays the more caring side, in that he also intervenes on Stephen’s behalf after the argument with Privates Carr and Compton - a scene which is not even included in the Walsh version. By showing all these actions, Strick, therefore, conveys Bloom’s caring, paternal side - or perhaps maternal one, if one agrees with Kiberd’s claim that “one of Bloom’s fundamental desires is to mother people” ( 271 ), which leads us to another major difference in how the two films view the characters. A further way in which the two portrayals differ is regarding the masculinity of the main character, which is constantly called into question in Strick’s film. This is already evident in Bloom’s first scene, where he appears wearing a frilly apron while preparing breakfast, thereby echoing Kiberd’s comment about Bloom in the novel being “something of an androgyne, with elements about him <?page no="203"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 203 of the dainty housewife” ( 85 ). This notion is supported again later, when he is shown playfully prancing about holding up Molly’s underwear. The clearest questioning of his masculinity, however, occurs in Barney Kiernan’s pub, where Martin Cunningham recounts seeing Bloom “buying stacks of baby food six weeks before the wife was delivered,” to which the Citizen replies, “You call that a man? ” before going on to question Bloom’s ability to even father a child, with the words “And who does he suspect? ” referring to the paternity of little Rudy. What is more, Strick’s film also hints on several occasions that Bloom may actually be homosexual, with Mulligan, in particular, guilty of such allusions. Although his line to Stephen “[h]e looked upon you to lust after you” ( U 9 . 1210 ) does not appear in the film, Mulligan does tell him to get “a breechpad,” implying that it will protect him against buggery from the Wandering Jew. Moreover, while singing a crude song in the maternity hospital, Mulligan makes a point of slowly turning his head to Bloom and raising his eyebrows while emphatically delivering the last four words of the line “[c]ousin Caspar’s been transported for a homosexual crime .” Such explicit references are not included in Walsh’s film and, thus, although both films have characters in “Circe” attest to the fact that “Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man,” it is only Strick’s film which reinforces the notion throughout that Bloom is not very masculine and, indeed, possibly homosexual. Thus, for virgin audiences, impressions of Leopold Bloom will depend very much on which film they see. Viewers’ reactions to the different incarnations of Bloom are governed not only by what material from the book the directors have decided to include or exclude, but also by their casting decisions. As Norris argues, “O’Shea and Rea are conspicuously different physical and temperamental types, one droll, sharp, endearing, the other lugubrious, meek, alienated” (“ Ulysses at the Movies” 14 ). These crucial differences in the casting of the leads are not just the opinion of one scholar, but also something which have been picked up on by numerous film critics, as can be ascertained from the contrasting vocabulary which they use when describing the portrayals of Joyce’s hero in the adaptations. Whereas O’Shea’s Bloom is referred to as an “innocent drifter” (Hammond), someone who is “spry” “good-natured” and “mild mannered” (D. W. 137 ), and as “dignified, vulnerable, sensitive and tragicomic” (Bradshaw), Rea’s Leopold is described as “soulful and stoical” (Carty), “typically morose” (Sheehan), and as embodying “baleful resignation” (Watson), while “delivering lugubrious lines with his accustomed skill” (Rowan). Thus, given the contrasting personalities of the actors cast in the role of the Jewish advertising salesman, as well as the degree to which the directors edited the original text, it is not surprising that audiences watching different adaptations of Joyce’s novel will come away from the experience with very different ideas about who Leopold Bloom is. <?page no="204"?> 204 Shane Walshe Molly The same applies to the character of Molly Bloom. Again, casting decisions have an impact on audience interpretations of the character, as can be seen from film critics’ comments on the two incarnations. In Walsh’s film, Molly is played by Angeline Ball, who is most famous for her role as Imelda Quirke in Alan Parker’s The Commitments ( 1991 ). Reviews of her Molly seem to focus predominantly on her sexiness, thereby echoing the sentiments expressed by Imelda’s band mates in the aforementioned film that she was “a little ride.” Ciara Dwyer in the Sunday Independent , for instance, states: “This Molly Bloom would even make Sharon Stone blush. […] She is voluptuous and earthy and, in short, she is every living man’s fantasy.” Ciaran Carty in The Sunday Tribune , meanwhile, describes her as “sensually direct,” while Maeve Sheehan in The Sunday Times praises her for “breathing raw sexuality” and for the fact that “she brings the carnality of Molly Bloom to life without substituting a modern woman for the character.” Her sexual allure is further noted by Philip Watson in The Observer with the claim that “Angeline Ball is utterly venal, conniving and captivating, she is word become flesh again.” Although many of the reviews of Strick’s film also describe Barbara Jefford’s Molly as an attractive woman, they also invariably focus on the fact that, although passionate, she has let herself go somewhat and is overweight. For example, echoing the words used by a character in the “Hades” scene, Wally Hammond, the Time Out film critic describes Jefford’s Molly as an “adulterous ‘armful’” while Bosley Crowther of the New York Times refers to her as “a robust woman just this side of course.” This notion of her robustness is similarly echoed in an early review from Variety , which states that “Barbara Jefford’s Molly is handsomely overblown, a wasted garden of a woman.” Descriptions of Ball’s Molly, as we have seen, offer no such indication of her being a woman who is big-boned, even though Ball was pregnant and, thus, more voluptuous during the filming. Aside from their physical differences and the effects they have on the viewer, the characterization of Molly in the two movies differs considerably. Given the fact that in Walsh’s film the focus on Ball’s Molly is largely on her sex appeal, it is appropriate that Molly’s concerns about her passing beauty should also feature more prominently in that movie. As noted above, the inclusion of Milly in Bloom means that Molly is continually reminded of the ephemeral nature of beauty and has someone with whom to compare herself, thereby confirming Kiberd’s observation from the novel that “[s]he talks as if her daughter Milly were more rival than child” ( 271 ). She appears to be envious of the fact that her daughter has her whole sexual life ahead of her, while hers is largely behind her with the exception of her dalliances with brutes like Boylan, and she compares her passing allure with that of her teenage daughter (“She’s pretty with her lips <?page no="205"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 205 so red. It’s a pity they won’t stay that way”). Since Milly does not appear at all in Strick’s film, this aspect of Molly’s character is largely absent. Strick’s film does have Molly looking back on her own sexual awakening and her relationship with Mulvey and others in Gibraltar, yet here again the portrayal differs markedly from the one in Bloom . In Bloom , the ephemeral nature of beauty and attraction is also accentuated by the additional casting of a more nubile Molly (Caoileann Murphy), with the use of this younger actress making the transformation that has occurred to Molly all the greater. In Strick’s film, in contrast, Jefford plays the role of both Molly at the age of 33 and as a younger woman and, thus, the sense of the passing of time and of all the unfulfilled dreams which that entails, is not as evident to the viewer. In any case, Strick’s film offers a Molly whose aspirations relate to matters beyond the bedroom and who sees more to life than just a series of sexual conquests. This multifaceted nature of Jefford’s Molly is something which has also been noted by Norris: “She is presented as much more cultivated and culturally and socially ambitious than Angeline Ball’s Molly, imagining herself as smartly dressed and out and about in society, a diva on stage, an elegant matron in the tearoom, and authoress signing her book for admiring ladies” (“ Ulysses at the Movies” 14 - 15 ). A final way in which perspectives on Molly differ relates to their characters at the conclusion of the films. Although both films ostensibly end, as the novel does, with Molly’s famous “yes I said yes I will Yes,” this does not necessarily mean that they both end on the same affirmative note with regard to Molly and Bloom’s relationship and the possibility of reconciliation. This is because Walsh’s film also uses the “Penelope” soliloquy in the pre-credit sequence but pointedly ends that sequence on Ball’s unambiguous delivery (in close up) of the line “I can’t wait until Monday,” clearly emphasizing her desire to continue her relationship with Boylan. Thus, viewers of Walsh’s film, just like readers of the novel, are faced with having to decide on the destiny of the Blooms’ troubled marriage. Viewers of Strick’s film, in contrast, are not presented with any statement at all about Monday, but rather with the far less certain “if it’s going to go on” and are, thus, more likely to remember the positive ending and to seek a happy end for the couple. This is something which has also been observed by Norris (“ Ulysses at the Movies” 8 ). Moreover, even if viewers of Strick’s film do decide that Molly is likely to continue being unfaithful, they are more likely to think that it will be with Stephen and not Boylan. This is because Strick’s film presents numerous imagined sequences of Molly and Stephen together, kissing, in bed, getting married, etc. Further evidence of the fact that Strick’s film makes a stronger case for the likelihood of a relationship between Molly and Stephen is apparent from the cover of the Ulysses DVD , both in terms of its blurb and its artwork. One of the three images on the back of the DVD case shows Molly and <?page no="206"?> 206 Shane Walshe Stephen in bed, while the description of the film beneath it ends with the words: “When Dedalus leaves, Molly lies awake in bed thinking about her present and past loves, and the possibility of an affair with Dedalus…” The focus on Stephen and the tantalizing ellipsis at the end of the sentence give this possible coupling much more significance than is the case in Walsh’s film, where it is only hinted at once. Thus, it becomes clear once again that viewers of the two films will come away with very differing perspectives about the character of Molly Bloom and of her intentions at the end of the movie. Stephen Although the portrayals of Molly and Bloom differ somewhat in each film, criticism of the performances has been largely positive in each case. This was not the case for the portrayals of Stephen, however, with Maitland McDonagh’s TV Guide review stating that Hugh O’Conor in Walsh’s film is “a bland Dedalus,” while The Guardian ’s Peter Bradshaw describes Maurice Röeves’ portrayal in Strick’s Ulysses as “flat and uninteresting.” While one could argue that Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is not the most likeable of characters, he is at least a well-rounded character. The problem with both films, however, is that they offer very one-dimensional views of Stephen, albeit from different dimensions. For example, Variety notes that Röeves’ Dedalus “might have been more impressive had some of the many flashbacks been used to better fill in his past - viewers are only told that he comes from an unhappy home, with a failure of a father.” This impression of the character not being fleshed out is largely due to the degree to which scenes from the novel featuring Stephen have been severely edited down, something which has also been noted by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times . He argues that “[u]nfortunately, truncation of the novel has made it so we see less of him and have less clarification of his relations with Bloom and Molly than we should.” If a lack of clarity regarding Stephen’s relations with Bloom and Molly is a problem for audiences of Strick’s film, then it is a considerably bigger one for audiences of Walsh’s picture, where, as noted above, the majority of Bloom and Stephen’s scenes together from the novel are cut or dramatically shortened. Stephen’s connection to Molly in that film is even more problematic, in that it is only evident in the “Penelope” soliloquy. This in itself is not a problem, as this is also the case in the novel. However, as explained earlier, the omission of the majority of the “Ithaca” and “Eumaeus” chapters makes her sexual fantasy about this student, whom she has, to our knowledge, never encountered before, very confusing. The lack of clarity regarding Stephen’s relationships to Bloom and Molly, however, is only one aspect of how his character differs between the two ad- <?page no="207"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 207 aptations. A more significant one is related to Stephen’s personality in general. Again, editing choices by the directors / screenwriters seriously influence the insights that audiences receive into his character, with severe cuts to the source material leading to a very one-dimensional view of him. In his early review of Strick’s film, Kain opined the degree to which material featuring Stephen had fallen victim to the editing process, stating that “the curtailment of his role is drastic” ( 352 ). The effect of such drastic curtailment is the sacrificing of some very important aspects of Stephen’s character in Strick’s Ulysses . One significant example is the almost complete elision of Stephen’s scholarly side and particularly the public aspects of it, which has led von Abele to describe the film as having “a distinct anti-intellectual bias” ( 493 ). The entire “Scylla and Charybdis” scene, for instance, is cut and the audience, therefore, never get to see Stephen displaying his learning to his peers and espousing his theories about Hamlet and Shakespeare. Similarly, although we see Stephen in front of the classroom in the “Nestor” scene, he is not actually teaching the students anything, but sitting correcting papers in silence while they solve the exercises on the blackboard. Thus, we again are denied a public display of his intellectual prowess. Indeed, the only real insight we receive into his intelligence comes in the “Proteus” scene, but it is, once again, not ostentatious, instead taking the form of an interior monologue as he walks on the strand. 13 Therefore, although Maurice Röeves’ Stephen appears to be an intelligent but tortured soul, his intelligence comes across in his introspection and interior monologues and he makes no attempt to show off his learning. In Walsh’s film, in contrast, Hugh O’Conor’s Stephen is ostentatious in his scholarliness, taking a visible joy in being smart and in confusing others with his intelligence. A good example of this is in the first scene from “Nestor,” where we encounter Stephen pontificating in front of the classroom and confusing the young boys with cryptic rhymes and riddles. The impression left on the audience is of a young man who is smug, one who sees himself as intellectually superior to those around him, whether it is the young boys he ‘teaches’ or his friends, as becomes clear in the library scene. There, we hear him espouse his theory on Shakespeare, which in keeping with the movie is a much shorter version of the chapter in the novel, but is the scene in which Stephen has the most lines and therefore reinforces our perception of him as a public intellectual. Thus, over the course of Walsh’s movie, we see a good deal of Stephen’s intellectual posturing and his attempts to impress or 13 Justification for this compromise comes from Norris, who explains Strick’s omission of “Scylla and Charybdis” as follows: “Stephen’s meditations in ‘Proteus’ stand in for Stephen’s subtle and sensitive intellectuality, with its more direct address to motherhood and paternity a clearer representation of Stephen’s personal preoccupations than the more abstruse Hamlet lecture” (“Updating Ulysses ” 82 ). <?page no="208"?> 208 Shane Walshe confuse people with his knowledge, whether it is holding court in school, in the library or in the brief scene at Holles Street hospital. Ironically, despite the fact that Walsh’s film offers an ostensibly more intellectual take on Stephen, audiences have not always seen it that way, often finding fault with Hugh O’Conor’s credibility in the role. According to Richard Brown, for example, “The problem with the accomplished Hugh O’Conor’s worthy but somewhat uninspiring Stephen is that, for all that he looks really nice and quietly sensitive and delivers most of Stephen’s ultra cool one-liners with a degree of superficial coffee-shop panache, one cannot really believe him capable of having had such thoughts in the first place” ( 1 ). He adds that “we don’t really get enough to be engaged with him as an intellectual” and that “[w]e don’t so much care about what he thinks as we should” ( 1 ). This lack of depth is also something alluded to by Keith Williams, who contrasts the performances of Stephen in the two films and judges Röeves’ portrayal to come out on top: “Hugh O’Conor, on the other hand, ignoring Stephen’s Hamletian dress sense, seems correspondingly less darkly introspective” ( 161 ). Watson reviewing the film in the Observer also notes O’Conor’s performance as the sole bum note in the film, saying “It’s only the mannered, theatrical Hugh O’Conor as Dedalus who fails to convince.” Thus, as with the other characters, casting decisions play an important role in audience perceptions of Stephen Dedalus, possibly even trumping the editorial omissions by the scriptwriters, so that although O’Conor’s character, unlike Röeves,’ receives the opportunity to articulate Stephen’s more intellectual side, his delivery of the lines actually undermines that very intention, thereby detracting from his credibility. Conclusion In “ Ulysses at the Movies,” Norris praises both Bloom and Ulysses for the way that “they successfully clarify the novel’s plot and the complex triangular relationships of the characters” ( 6 ). However, as will have become evident over the course of this paper, plot and characterization are not always clear and are certainly not the same in the two films. By heavily editing large portions of Joyce’s book and by reordering and conflating chapters, Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh produced two very different films that leave us with a parallax view of Ulysses , in that they provide us with contrasting viewpoints of the same object. As we have seen, the structure of the films and the directors’ choices about what scenes to omit or compress have serious effects on the narrative and on our understanding of it. Whereas in the first part of his film, Walsh may have been more successful than Strick in highlighting the interconnectedness of the protagonists and indeed of their fellow citizens, his omission of key scenes from <?page no="209"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 209 the novel in which the two main characters occupy the same space is a misstep. The result is anticlimactic and highlights a problem with the film that goes beyond whether or not Joyce’s literary style has been conveyed cinematically. Similarly, in terms of character and characterization, the audience’s impressions of the protagonists depend very much on which adaptation of the novel they see. Viewers of Ulysses see a film in which Leopold is an innocent victim of infidelity, a situation which is all the more troubling given that he is a caring (somewhat effeminate or possibly homosexual) man who always has the interests of others at heart and who is a victim of the tragic death of his only child. They see a Molly who has effectively gone to seed, but who is known all over town to be an adulteress and will likely find a new lover in the guise of the young student, Stephen. They also see a Stephen, who is a quiet, introspective character who does not say very much most of the time, and who appears to have problems coming to terms with the death of his mother and with his estrangement from his father. Viewers of Bloom , in contrast, encounter a lecherous Leopold who feigns interest in others, but whose mind is usually elsewhere, either thinking about his daughter, fantasizing about a variety of women or philosophizing about life and death. They see a Molly who is highly sexed and sexy, yet who is conscious of the ephemeral nature of such things and, thus, constantly compares herself to her daughter and her younger self, while eagerly waiting for Monday (and Boylan) to come again. Finally, they see a Stephen who is greatly troubled by his mother’s death, but who seeks distraction in intellectual pursuits, ideally with an audience he can perform for. From the above, then, it is clear how two films working from the same source material can offer very different views of even the most seemingly straightforward aspects of the novel. This notion of parallel visions of the text only serves to confirm von Abele’s observation regarding Strick’s Ulysses that “[r]elative to the novel, the film is indeed an interpretation, a critical commentary, a judgment as to what is centrally significant in the novel. But it is an interpretation, one among many that may be offered; and yet it must be experienced as though it were exclusive” ( 499 ). Thankfully, with the release of Walsh’s film in 2004 , filmgoers have been provided with another interpretation of the novel, and, although that too remains “one among many that may be offered,” it allows audiences to compare the productions and to gain a more stereoscopic view of Joyce’s work as a result. What is more, with Ulysses having recently emerged from copyright, there exists the exciting possibility of audiences being offered further cinematic perspectives of the novel in the future. Until the next screen adaptation is released, however, cineastes should take the time to gain their own perspectives by reading the novel again (or, indeed, for the first time). <?page no="210"?> 210 Shane Walshe Works Cited Bloom . Adapt. from Ulysses . By James Joyce. Dir. Sean Walsh. Odyssey Pictures, 2003. Film. Bradshaw, Peter. “ Ulysses .” The Guardian 19 Nov. 2009. Web. 23 Jan. 2014. Brown, Richard. “The New Faces of the Blooms.” James Joyce Broadsheet 66 (October 2003): 1. Print. Carty, Ciaran. “Getting a Handle on Joyce.” Sunday Tribune 20 July 2003. Print. Crispi, Luca. “The Genesis of Leopold Bloom: Writing the Lives of Rudolph Virag and Ellen Higgins in Ulysses .” Journal of Modern Literature 35.4 (2012): 13-31. Print. Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: ‘ Ulysses’ Brings a Faithful View of Joyce’s Dubliners: Movie Will Open Today for 3 Days’ Stay.” New York Times 14 March 1967. Web. 23 July 2014. Dwyer, Ciara. “At Last, a Molly who Blooms Brazenly.” Irish Independent 20 July 2003. Web. 23 July 2014. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce . New and rev. ed.. New York: OUP , 1982. Print. Forbes, Shannon. “Joyce’s ‘Saucebox.’” Irish Studies Review 14.1 (2006): 39-55. Print. Groce, Sara. “Shes Restless Knowing Shes Pretty”: Milly Bloom as Catalyst in Ulysses .” CCTE Studies 64 (1999): 23-9. Print. Hammond, Wally. “ Ulysses .” Time Out 17 November 2009. Web. 23 July 2014. Hatch, David A., and David C. Simmons. “Sausage Smoke Leading to Mulligan’s Breakfast: Film Adaptation and James Joyce’s Ulysses .” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches . Ed. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins. Teaneck, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson UP , 2010. 160-79. Print. Heusel, Barbara Stevens. “Parallax as a Metaphor for the Structure of Ulysses .” Studies in the Novel 15.2 (1983): 135-46. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York / London: Garland Publishing, 1984. Print. Kain, Richard M. “ Ulysses on Film.” James Joyce Quarterly 4.4 (1967): 351-53. Print. Kehr, Dave. “Ulysses.” Chicago Reader . Web. 23 January 2014. Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living . London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print. McDonagh, Maitland. “Bloom: Review.” TV Guide . Web. Morrison, Alan. “ Bloom : Joyce’s Epic Ulysses Gets Another Big Screen Outing.” Empire . Web. 23 July 2014. Norris, Margot. Ulysses . Cork: Cork UP , 2004. Print. -. “ Ulysses at the Movies.” 2004. Web. 23 January 2014. -. “Updating Ulysses : Joseph Strick’s 1967 Film.” James Joyce Quarterly 41.1-2 (2003 / 04): 79-87. Print. -. Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Olsen, Vickie. “On the Page / On the Screen: Two Ways of Reading Joyce.” BELLS : Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 9 (1999): 99-108. Print. “Review: Ulysses .” Variety 31 December 1966. Web. 24 Jaunury 2014. <?page no="211"?> Forced Perspective: Seeing Ulysses through the Eyes of Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh 211 Rowan, Jerry. “Bloom’s Odyssey of Pleasure and Frustration.” Sunday Independent 25 April 2004: 8. Print. Sheehan, Maeve. “Irish to Bring Ulysses Alive on Big Screen.” Sunday Times 17 September 2000. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation . Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. Print. Simpson, Paul and Martin Montgomery. “Language, Literature and Film: The Stylistics of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal .” Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context . Ed. Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber. London: Routledge, 1995. 138-64. Print. Ulysses . By James Joyce. Dir. Joseph Strick. Laser Film Corporation and Ulysses Film Production, 1967. Film. von Abele, Rudolph. “Film as Interpretation: A Case Study of Ulysses .” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31.4 (1973): 487-500. Print. W., D. Review of Joyce, James, Ulysses , Dir. Strick, 1967. Monthly Film Bulletin 34.396 (1 January 1967): 137-38. Print. Walsh, Sean. “Re: this is madness, what the heck is this about? ” Internet Movie Database 14 May 2007. Web. 24 Jaunury 2014. Watson, Philip. “Bloom or Bust.” The Observer . 23 November 2003. Web. 24 Jaunury 2014. Williams, Keith. “Odysseys of Sound and Image: ‘Cinematicity’ and the Ulysses Adaptations.” Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema . Ed. John McCourt. Cork: Cork UP , 2010. 158-73. Print. Zeller, Ursula. “‘Parallax stalks behind’: The Walk-In Book, or the Text as Space in Ulysses .” James Joyce: “gedacht durch meine Augen” “thought through my eyes.” Ed. Ursula Zeller, Ruth Frehner, and Hannes Vogel. Basel: Schwabe, 2000. 140-55. Print. <?page no="212"?> 212 Marianna Gula Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax: Miklós Szentkuthy’s Hungarian Translation of Joyce’s Ulysses (1974) and Its Remake (2012) Marianna Gula As James Joyce, the fabulous artificer, notoriously stated, he designed Ulysses to keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what he meant. His (meta) textual universe, in turn, has provided numerous critical tools with which academics can weave and reweave his textual image on the looms of interpretation. The religious concept of “epiphany,” imbued with a secular, aesthetic meaning by Stephen Daedalus in Stephen Hero has conveniently fulfilled this function since the dawn of Joyce criticism, as have “paralysis” and “gnomon,” highlighted on the opening page of Dubliners as words that “sounded strangely” in the unnamed protagonist’s ears. “Parallax,” another strangely (Greek) sounding word that crops up by way of a stumbling block on the stream of Leopold’s Bloom’s consciousness in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses - “Parallax. I never exactly understood. […] Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax” ( U 8 . 110 ) - has also been fruitfully applied to describe various narrative, structural and stylistic features of Joyce’s texts, Ulysses in particular, and, conversely, has been deployed as a metaphor for the reading method required by them. A parallactic view, as the editors of this volume observe and as Fritz Senn’s critical oeuvre demonstrates, is a “prerequisite for reading and grasping Joyce’s texts in general.” The multiply parallactic quality of Ulysses plays a crucial role in rendering the task of translators particularly challenging, and is to a great extent responsible for the cultural fact that Ulysses not only has been translated into innumerable languages, but recently has also become the target of a vibrant re-translation activity. The concept of parallax also succinctly describes the relationship between literary texts and their translations, as well as the relationship between literary translations and re-translations in general, all the more so in the case of translations and re-translations of as complex a text as Ulysses . Here I will explore the parallactic renderings of Joyce’s text in the canonical Hungarian translation by Miklós Szentkuthy ( 1974 ) - which pushed Endre Gáspár’s first translation ( 1947 ) into almost complete oblivion - and its reworking, the product of a process in which I participated ( 2012 ). 1 More particularly, I will highlight how 1 The other members of the translator team were András Kappanyos, Gábor Zoltán Kiss and Dávid Szolláth. Working on the basis of Szentkuthy’s 1974 translation, we also took <?page no="213"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 213 the two versions negotiate crucial parallactic elements and qualities of Joyce’s text, especially the parallactic phenomenon of wordplay, ubiquitous in Ulysses . Translation as Parallax Derived from the Greek παράλλαξις ( parallaxis ) - as Bloom rightly assumes - meaning “alteration,” parallax was first used in astronomy to describe “the difference in direction of a celestial object as seen by an observer from two widely separated points” ( Encyclopaedia Britannica ). More particularly, it denotes “the angle formed by the rays of vision running towards an object from two points of observation” (Zeller 148 ). The Irish astronomer Sir Robert Ball, in whose fascinating little book, The Story of the Heavens , Bloom comes across the concept, offers the following optical example to explain the phenomenon: Let us take a simple illustration. Stand near a window whence you can look at buildings or the trees, the clouds or any distant objects. Place on the glass a thin strip of paper relatively to the objects in the background. Close the right eye and note with the left eye the position of the strip of paper relatively to the objects in the background. Then while still remaining in the same position, close the left eye and again observe the position of the strip of paper with the right eye. You will find that the position of the paper on the background has changed. […] The apparent displacement of the strip of paper, relatively to the distant background, is what is called parallax .” (qtd. in Zeller 181, emphasis added) It does not take too big an imaginative leap to read this illustration of parallax as an analogy for the process of translation, with the translator corresponding to the observer, the source text to the background and the apparently displaced strip of paper - its oscillation relative to the background - corresponding to the production of the target text, which, as Umberto Eco has noted, is a constant process of negotiation between the source text and the translator. By the same token, the analogy can hold for the relationship between various translations of a source text, the oscillating strip of paper corresponding to different translations. The shift in the observer’s position, in turn, reflects the difference not only between the subsequent translators’ attitudes to the task, but also between the respective historical moments and cultural milieux in which the translations were produced and which ineluctably shaped them. Since 1974 , when Miklós Szentkuthy’s seminal Hungarian translation of Ulysses was published, several dimensions of the cultural context have radically changed and, into account Tibor Bartos’s 1986 slightly revised edition of Szentkuthy’s translation. The fact that in this paper there will be no further references to the 1986 edition is due to the fact that Bartos left all the discussed instances untouched. <?page no="214"?> 214 Marianna Gula largely as a result of this, the editor-translator team revising his translation conceived of the task in radically different terms from those of Szentkuthy. As Szentkuthy’s and the revising team’s divergent attitudes to the task have been mapped out before, here I will highlight only some pivotal points. 2 As András Kappanyos observed long ago, Szentkuthy wanted to appropriate Ulysses as his own work (“ Ulysses , a nyughatatlan” 214 ), often co-authoring rather than translating Joyce’s text. On the whole, his translation was enthusiastically received, marking the real beginning of the reception of Ulysses in Hungary, and it had a huge impact on the Hungarian literary scene as well. The almost cultic status that Szentkuthy’s translation has come to assume in Hungarian literary circles also partly explains why Kappanyos, the conceiver and coordinator of the collective editing-translating project decided not to start from scratch, but to build on the existing translation’s merits. Yet, Szentkuthy’s translation, making its translator all too visible, also had its detractors from almost the moment of its publication, the praise of his ingenuity being counterpointed by a fervent criticism of his often irritating arbitrariness. 3 Szentkuthy’s practice of projecting his own personality onto the translated text is, of course, not a unique, isolated phenomenon, but fits into “the tradition of the belles infidèles , that produced quantitatively as well as qualitatively the better part of the Hungarian versions of early 20 th century prose and poetry in the interwar period,” as Erika Mihálycsa has noted ( 80 ). 4 As opposed to Szentkuthy’s visible as well as domesticating translation poetics - the latter also characterizing Hungarian literary translation in the first half of the twentieth century, even though not in vogue by the time Szentkuthy’s translation came out - the revising team, in compliance with current translation norms, was invariably driven by respect 2 For a discussion of the aims and methods of the collective effort see the articles of the team members in the Hungarian literary journal Alföld 61 . 9 ( 2010 ). In English see Kappanyos’s “Fragments of a Report: Ulysses Translation in Progress” in the James Joyce Quarterly ( 2010 ), and Gula’s “Lost a Bob but Found a Tanner: From a Translator’s Workshop” in Scientia Traductionis - James Joyce and Translation ( 2010 ). 3 See especially Tamás Ungvári’s article a year after the publication of Szentkuthy’s translation. Relying on images used by Szentkuthy himself in a 1968 essay on Ulysses , he observed that Szentkuthy renders the “Joyce of the fool’s cap” credibly and wittily, but falls short of the “Joyce of the bowler-hat.” 4 It should be noted however, that Szentkuthy’s intervention is not always beautiful, as he often renders the text more vulgar. Several lyrical passages shed their beauty in his translation: for instance, one of the most poetic images in the whole novel appearing on the opening pages, “wavewhite wedded words” is rendered by Szentkuthy as “hullámfehér párzó szavak” (‘wavewhite copulating words’) (Sz 13 ). The new version replaces this with the lyrical “hullámfehér egybekelt szavak” (Revised 15 ). See also my discussion of how in Szentkuthy’s translation Bloom’s stream of consciousness often assumes a vulgar hue even when there is no hint of vulgarity in the original (“Leopold Bloom” 2011 ). <?page no="215"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 215 for what the author of the source text has written, trying to make themselves as little visible as possible. 5 Finally, the diachronic parallax formed by subsequent translations can be complemented by a form of synchronic parallax, if the (re-)translation is carried out collectively, rather than by an individual translator, an increasingly popular practice in translating Ulysses . 6 In this case, the oscillation of the metaphorical ‘strip of paper’ is due to the multiple clashing visions within the team concerning the literary translator’s task in general as well as concrete tasks at hand. So far, I have referred to our translator-team as a homogeneous unit; it was not. While we all agreed concerning the question of the translator’s visibility, and invariably considered the task first and foremost a critical enterprise, there was no unanimous agreement among us concerning several other points, for instance, as to which general direction we should choose: a targetor source-oriented one. I agree with Eco that the choice of one or the other is a matter of negotiation and should be decided in every individual instance ( 100 ). Yet, on the whole, I tended to advocate foreignizing solutions - solutions that stretch the boundaries of the target language rather than curtail the linguistic oddities of the source text to fit the conventions of the target language - proportionally much more often than the other members of the group. As a result of negotiations, in most questions, different views could blend and fuse, in several respects, however, parallax stubbornly “stalked behind” and goaded us to the end. 7 Translating Parallax I: “As he mostly sees double (or multiple)” As Fritz Senn has noted, parallax is “an instance of sending the observant mind in two or more different positions and having it compare notes” ( JD 79 ). This succinctly describes a recurrent textual practice / reading effect produced by Ulysses . If in the case of the above quoted optical example in Sir Robert Ball’s book, the oscillation of the strip of paper can be eliminated by opening both 5 As for the wider contextual changes, see Kappanyos’s “Utószó” (‘Afterword’) and Gula’s “‘The Spirit Has Been Well Caught’: The Irish Dimension of the Cannonical Hungarian Translation of Ulysses ( 1974 ) and its Remake ( 2012 ).” 6 Working on a new German translation in the 1970 s, translator Hans Wollschläger was aided by Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert (JD 25 ). The recent re-translations of Ulysses into German, French and Dutch have been carried out collectively. When the Hungarian poet-writer-translator Mihály Babits thought of translating Ulysses into Hungarian in the 1930 s, he intended to do it in a collective way (Gáspár, Előszó [‘Foreword’] to his 1947 translation iv). 7 The question whether to explicitate or not, often arising out of the linguistic fact that in Hungarian the third person singular pronoun is ungendered, was, for instance, a recurrent bone of contention. On problems caused by pronouns see Kappanyos’s “Fragments of a Report” and Gula’s “Leopold Bloom Coming into His Own.” <?page no="216"?> 216 Marianna Gula eyes, thus gaining a stereoscopic vision, which blends the two differing views into a three dimensional picture, in the case of Ulysses the interpretative process often cannot lead to a final resolution between two or more different positions, but will sustain an endless oscillation between them. As Ursula Zeller has put it, “The ‘stereoscopic’ process in the reader’s mind can never be completed” ( 148 - 49 ). In her article “‘Parallax Stalks Behind’: The Walk-In Book, or the Text as Space in Ulysses ,” Zeller has given a lucid overview of how parallax operates in Ulysses both on the plot and textual levels. 8 The former naturally represents less difficulty for translators - even if this dimension is not without its potential pitfalls. Let us take just one example. To demonstrate the operation of parallax on the plot level, Zeller highlights how the memory of the first night when Leopold Bloom and his future wife, Molly, met is represented from multiple perspectives in twelve textual splinters overarching the whole narrative that refuse to cohere into a unified picture. As Zeller notes, six times it is Mat Dillon - the host of the convivial evening where the encounter takes place - that functions as the textual hinge between the disparate passages and four times it is the motif of the lilac, as Dillon’s house has a lilac garden. While Mat Dillon poses no problem in the process of translation, the way the lilac motif functions as a link has proven a stumbling block for previous Hungarian translators. In “Sirens,” under the spell of Simon Dedalus’s musical performance, Bloom’s mind becomes flooded by impressions of the first night he met Molly. At one point, in turn, an impression of seduction from the present (a splinter from Martha Clifford’s titillating letter) becomes interpolated into them - the interpolation linguistically marked by the grammatical tension between a singular verb and a plural noun juxtaposed: “First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon’s in Terenure. […]. Singing. Waiting she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees ” ( U 11 . 725 - 31 , emphasis added). In Szentkuthy’s translation of the italicized passage - “Parfümmel telt hang miféle parfümöt szokott a nyiló orgonád” (‘Voice full of perfume what sort of perfume does your budding lilac ,’ translation mine) 9 (Sz 341 ) 10 - the lilac motif, changed from plural “lilactrees” to singular “your budding lilac,” does not function as a textual marker of that 8 The essay is a two-dimensional, verbal companion piece to a three-dimensional representation of the all-pervading parallactic quality of Ulysses in a “walk-in book,” which formed part of the excellent 2001 James Joyce exhibition in the Strauhof Museum, Zurich. 9 If not otherwise stated, all translations are mine. 10 The following abbreviations will be used with the parenthesised page numbers to indicate the various Hungarian translations of Ulysses : ‘G’ for Gáspár, ‘Sz’ for Szentkuthy, and ‘Revised’ for the most recent version. <?page no="217"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 217 past night, since it is grammatically integrated in the preceding syntagm, which, in turn, is not an excerpt from Martha’s letter. Presented in this way, Bloom’s thought is deprived of its multiply evocative force, and rather becomes a somewhat nonsensical cluster of associations. The new translation renders the impressionistic flow of Bloom’s thoughts: “Telt, parfümös hang, milyen parfümöt használ, orgonafák” (Revised 267 ). 11 Szentkuthy’s rendition of Bloom’s thought process in “Sirens” demonstrates two general features of his translation that have greatly damaged the parallactic structure and texture of Ulysses . It is a widely recognized structural and stylistic feature of Joyce’s text that from “Sirens” on the text recapitulates itself. This process becomes manifest in the recycling of novelistic material in ever renewed, often parodic verbal costumes, on the one hand - no wonder the word “parallax” appears a second time in the course of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode - and, on the other hand, in the recycling of the same verbal units in ever renewed contexts. While Szentkuthy often ingenuously reproduced the former, as he himself was a writer with a predilection for satire and parody, he almost completely ignored (or was unaware of ? ) the latter. In his translation, for instance, “Circe” totally sheds its parallactic quality, ceasing to function as a carnivalistic, libidinal recycling of the preceding episodes, as he kept reinventing familiar verbal items. More often than not, his translation defies recycling even when verbal items do not step out of the confines of the characters’ minds, but keep popping up as traces of the more or less distant past triggered by free associations, as in the above-quoted example from “Sirens.” Furthermore, Szentkuthy’s misrepresentation of Bloom’s train of thought generated by free association in “Sirens” also exemplifies how in his translation some crucial, parallactic dimensions of Joyce’s use of the stream of consciousness technique become misrepresented, which is all the more surprising as free association functioned as a major structural principle in his own creative writing as well, and has been identified as a common feature between his and Joyce’s poetics. The example from “Sirens” shows how the mind’s inorganic juxtaposition of diverse impressions as a result of free associations is often formally enacted by the transgression of grammatical rules in Ulysses . At times, the transgression of grammatical rules can also highlight the parallactic oscillation between various levels of narration, as in the following passage in “Proteus”: “The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats , 11 The introduction of commas in between the items is the result of a compromise solution; in my view the commas hold up the flow of Bloom’s consciousness, but within our group interpretative scruples of this kind clashed with scruples of what Hungarian readers can accommodate. <?page no="218"?> 218 Marianna Gula wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada ” ( U 3 . 147 - 49 , emphases added). The sentence narratively enacts the central theme of protean change in the episode, as an apparently external narrative voice describing Stephen’s actions fluctuates with grammatically unintegrated associations reflecting Stephen Dedalus’s imagination. In Szentkuthy’s translation, this diffuse, protean narrative structure becomes a homogeneous whole - a third person voice narrating the events - all of its parts related to each other according to the rules of grammar: “A szemcsés homok megszűnt a lába alatt. Cipőjével korhadt, szálkákra szálazódott árbocdarabba, fűrészkagylókba, csiszogó kavicsokba botlott, számtalan kavicsréteg kavicsaiba, tengeri szú rágta fákra és elsüllyedt Armadára terülő kavicsokba” (Sz 51 , emphases added). The new version, by contrast, renders the ungrammatical narrative oscillation within the sentence, also introducing the truncated echo from King Lear - “that on the unnumbered pebbles beats” - so far missing from the Hungarian version: “A szemcsés homok elfogyott a lába alól. Bakancsa újra korhadt, csikorgó árbocdarabon, fűrészkagylókon, csiszogó kavicsokon taposott, teménytelen kavicson küzd , tengeri szú rágta fákon, elveszett Armada ” (Revised 44 , emphases added). 12 It is worth noting here that the question of how to handle passages where the text transgresses grammatical rules for parallactic ends initially also parallactically divided our translator team, especially during the revision of “Sirens,” but with time, the other members of the group have also come to see that its reproduction in Hungarian is desirable and feasible. Since it is impossible here to give a comprehensive overview of the operation of parallax on the textual level in Ulysses , in what follows, I will highlight a few instances of verbal parallax that enact, on a micro level, crucial thematic and textual features of Ulysses in general, and which often pose challenges to translators. By way of a starting point, let us take one of Fritz Senn’s hobbyhorses, the recondite “U. P.: up” ( U 8 . 258 ), appearing in “Lestrygonians” soon after the word “parallax” pops up in Bloom’s mind. Scribbled on the back of a postcard sent to Denis Breen to take “the rise out of him,” the message is perfectly meaningful to the characters, as it propels Breen to seek libel action and, as the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy says later in “Cyclops,” he is right to do so as “[i]t implies that he is not compos mentis ” ( U 12 . 1043 ). Readers of Ulysses , by contrast, are 12 The Stephenesque thought echoes Edgar’s words that in good-hearted deceit conjure up the sea to his blind, distressed father in King Lear : “the murmuring surge / That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafe / Cannot be heard so high” (IV. 6 . 21 ). Szentkuthy, of course, did not have Gifford and Seidman’s invaluable annotations at his disposal; thus, he cannot be blamed for the fact that unnumbered Shakespeare quotes, allusions or echoes are not reproduced in his translation. Neither have Gifford and Seidman mapped fully Shakespeare’s intertextual presence, for that matter. As for the rendition of the stream of consciousness technique, Szentkuthy’s translation disrupts it from time to time in simpler instances as well. <?page no="219"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 219 left in the dark as to the implication of the message, even though conjectures abound: you pee, up yours, Ulster or Unionist Protestant or Presbyterian, and so forth. By way of a personal aside, let me note that when I first heard Fritz Senn talk at the second Trieste Joyce Summer School in 1998 , he - one of the most knowledgeable readers of Joyce - was talking about what we still do not know or understand in Joyce’s textual universe, among others, the meaning of “U. P.: up.” It was that incident that to a great extent determined the aftercourse of my life. As Senn has also highlighted, however, what is conspicuous about “U. P.: up” is that it is doubled up, its two components almost the same, but not quite, as the second is a formally, typographically displaced version of the first one (“Law” 432 ). 13 Thus formally it enacts the parallactic principle operating in multiple ways in the whole of Ulysses . Furthermore, by foregrounding a formal parallax and obfuscating the referent, it also proleptically enacts how in the “second half ” of Ulysses the constant parallactic rescripting of the action obscures the referential function of language. As Senn mapped out at a Zurich translation workshop in 2010 , translators have juggled with the narrative function and the formal doubling of the construct in various ways. Some reproduce the parallactic formal effect with more or less referential success; some sacrifice the formal parallax for the sake of reference. Szentkuthy concentrates on the formal aspect at the cost of reference, as he is often wont to do: “Camp és Petz. Kampec” (Sz 192 ). Kampec means you are ‘finished / done for,’ while Camp és Petz (‘Camp and Petz’) does not mean anything in Hungarian; its sole function is to double up the subsequent Hungarian word, displacing a few letters, recalling English and German spellings respectively. Kampec , however, does not imply any libel that would make an action lie, as O’Molloy suggests. For this reason, the new translation substitutes it with a new solution: “ PU hap” (Revised 156 ). This invented lexical item does imply a libel, since it is not a self-contained word, but if read as elliptical - which 13 It could be further noted that every time the construct appears in the text, it is associated with some kind of parallactic doubling. In “Lestrygonians” right after Mrs Breen tells Bloom about the card, his mind “compares notes” of Josie Powell as a girl and the married woman standing beside her (temporal parallax) ( U 8 . 270 ). Immediately after this, to distract attention from the card, Bloom asks Mrs Breen about Mrs Beaufoy, but in her answer the name becomes displaced into the similar sounding Mrs Purefoy ( U 8 . 276 ). In “Sirens,” when Bloom is writing a letter to Martha Clifford in a doubled up performance - writing in the shade of a newspaper and murmuring something else for the benefit of Richie Goulding - his chain of associations brings him from Mr Beaufoy to Mrs Purefoy, reiterating the displacement in “Lestrygonians,” which is highlighted by the fact that his train of thought is brought to a close by “U. P.: up” ( U 11 . 903 ). In “Cyclops,” in turn, Alf Bergan, whom Bloom suspects wrote the card for a lark, is “doubled up” with the laughter on entering the pub looking at Breen outside traipsing all round Dublin in search of a G man ( U 12 . 257 ); and so on and so forth. <?page no="220"?> 220 Marianna Gula readily offers itself to a Hungarian eye or ear - it can suggest puhapöcs (‘limp dick’ or ‘pansy’), pöcs also being a pejorative slang word for a vulgar, inconsiderate person, roughly the equivalent of a ‘dick.’ Thus it can be understood literally, as referring to sexual impotence or metaphorically, as suggesting lack of manliness, both fitting into Breen’s characterization. In addition to the more easily decodable sexual implication, PU hap may also contain a pejorative religious, ethnic, political innuendo, as the first two letters could form the initials of “ P rotestáns / P resbiteriánus U ndormány” (‘Protestant / Presbyterian abomination’). Thus the new version fulfils its narrative function better than Szentkuthy’s - even if it still does not suggest that Breen is not compos mentis - and its movement between the literal and the metaphorical also produces a faint semantic echo of parallax. Yet, it contains no trace of the conspicuous formal parallax of the original. 14 Instances evidently abound when a poignant parallactic effect in Ulysses at best metamorphoses into some other kind of verbal event in the course of the linguistic transfer. Let us hop on another one of Senn’s hobbyhorses: the graphic parallax of “ POST NO BILLS . POST IIO PILLS ” - two small graphic erasures spelling a wholly different message - which Bloom recalls seeing or imaginatively projects onto the wall of a public urinal ( U 8 . 101 ). Surprisingly enough, Szentkuthy does not even seem to have made an effort to create some kind of striking verbal effect in its place: “Falragasz tilos. Falra kenni szigorúan” (‘Posters prohibited. Smearing on the wall strictly’) (Sz 187 ). 15 The new version tries to preserve an echo of the parallactic game by turning it into an instance of Bloomian wit, infusing paronymous playfulness into the passage, also drawing the next sentence, “Some chap with a dose burning him,” into its semantic field: “Ha felragaszt száz gyógy tapaszt , megszünteti a panaszt . Tilos a falragasz ! A pasasnak meg pont megvan a keserű tapasztalat ” (‘If you paste a hundred plasters, the complaint will be gone. Post no bills. The chap, in turn, has the bitter experience’) (Revised 152 ). The verb felragaszt (‘paste, stick, post’) chimes in neatly with the noun falragasz (‘bill’), as does the noun tapasz (‘plaster’) with panasz (‘complaint’) and tapasztalat (‘experience’). Furthermore, translated this way, the passage also enters into a parallactic relationship with a 14 It was András Barkóczi, our editor at Európa Publishing House, who suggested this solution. The solution no doubt is ingenious in several respects; my only concern was that there is nothing parallactic about its form, a concern not shared by the other members of the translator team. Gáspár’s previous translation tried to reconcile reference and formal play, yet the result can at best be described as uninspired, the splitting unmotivated: “HÜ. LE: hülye” (‘STU. PID: stupid’) (G 124 ). 15 Gápár’s version tries to bring some rhythm into the bargain, but the translation makes no sense whatsoever: “NEM REKLÁMCÉDULA. BEVEENDŐ PIRULA” (IT IS NOT A BILL. IT IS A PILL TO TAKE) (G 121 ). <?page no="221"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 221 scene in “Cyclops,” where Joe Hynes jokingly disrupts the citizen’s reading out of names by suggesting that he knows a fellow called “Cockburn” - “C. Phylis” in the new Hungarian translation - “from bitter experience” ( U 12 . 231 ), which is translated with the same expression “keserű tapasztalat” (Revised 289 ). 16 So far, I have highlighted major translation cruces that translators around the world struggle with. At times, however, the reproduction of parallactic effects in Hungarian is prevented by structural differences between the source and the target languages, as in the case of a simple sentence from “Proteus”: “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain” ( U 3 . 478 ). It is a paragon of the kind of sentence that performs its own meaning, a kind of sentence that Joyce created and Senn has analyzed with relish ( JD 76 , IS 99 ). The sentence enacts the central theme of the episode - as well as a crucial feature of Ulysses and Joyce’s texts in general - by a series of linguistic metamorphoses, facilitated by / manifested in the parallactic oscillation of the syntactical status of the words “man,” “fish” and “barnacle goose” within the sentence. Since Hungarian is an agglutinating language indicating linguistic relationships with various inflections, the metamorphoses cannot take place within the nouns themselves. Szentkuthy rightly recognizes that the duplication of the four nouns is inevitable: “Isten lőn emberré, és ember lőn hallá , hal lőn örvöslúddá , örvöslúd lőn dupladunyhává” (Sz 63 , emphasis added). All the revised version does is it eliminates the commas and the connective és (‘and’) to recreate at least a distant echo of the linguistic metamorphosis in the source text. 17 Conversely, at times in the course of the revision process, apparently unproblematic verbal phenomena in the source text opened into a parallactic angle, being interpreted in different ways within the group. An instance of this is Bloom’s simple musing in “Lestrygonians” whether he was happier before than 16 Ironically enough, while Szentkuthy was given to translating / domesticating even historical names if he detected a shade of sexual meaning in them - a glaring case in point is his rendition of the writer Paul de Kock’s name as “Paul de Basoche,” (automatically suggesting to all Hungarian ears and eyes one of the vulgar expressions for having sex in Hungarian) - in “Cyclops,” where the sole function of the name “Cockburn” is that Hynes can imbue it with a sexual implication, he did not translate the name at all, this way also marring the narrative situation. 17 “Isten lőn emberré ember lőn hallá hal lőn örvöslúddá örvöslúd lőn dupladunyhává” (Revised 52 , emphases added). Szentkuthy’s translation of “featherbed mountain” as dupladunyha (‘double duvet’) is of course an instance of poetic liberty, but since the original’s play on the toponym is impossible to render in Hungarian, we left it untouched. Gáspár tried to render Joyce’s game, but this way he changed the meaning of the sentence, eliminating the chain of metamorphoses, as God remains the exclusive agent in the sentence all through: “Isten emberré lesz, hallá lesz, tengeri lúddá lesz, lúdtollá lesz” (G 40 ). <?page no="222"?> 222 Marianna Gula now, which triggers a philosophical questioning of identity itself: “I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? ” ( U 8 . 608 ). Szentkuthy translated this sentence as “Akkor boldogabb voltam. Én voltam az? Vagy most én vagyok én? ” (‘I was happier then. Was that me? Or am I me now? ’) (Sz 205 ). The sentences remained unmodified in the end, as the foregrounded meaning is accommodated in the English sentences as well. In my view, however, the textual context clearly points in another semantic direction. The way the questions stand now in Hungarian, they portray a rift in consciousness, Bloom wondering whether he was the one who was happy, or whether he is himself right now. However, in the context of the episode, in which Bloom’s stream of consciousness recurrently returns to the idea that life is a stream and the past is irrecoverable - “Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand” ( U 8 . 610 ), as he thinks a few lines later - what Bloom’s mental probing, like Ulysses in general, suggests is that identity is a parallactic phenomenon, always changing, impossible to pin down. The Hungarian translation rendering this semantic dimension would have been: “Az voltam én? Vagy most vagyok én én? ” To eliminate the clumsy repetition of the first person singular pronoun én at the end of the second sentence, one could go about the task from an altogether different angle - fruitfully exploiting the linguistic differences between English and Hungarian - by getting rid of the problematic personal pronoun altogether and producing a sentence that would introduce a pertinent Biblical echo along with an echo of linguistic parallax: “Vagy most vagyok, aki vagyok? ” “Vagyok, aki vagyok” - vagyok being the first person singular conjugated form of ‘to be’ - is how God defines him / her / itself to Moses on Mount Sinai in Hungarian translations of the Bible (Exodus 3 : 14 ). Translated thus, the sentence could open up into a parallactic oscillation between human and divine efforts at self-definition, which would assume a comic overtone in the light of the parallactic opening scene of the episode, where Bloom misrecognizes himself in the divine: “Bloo… Me? No, blood of the Lamb” ( U 8 . 8 - 9 ). The duplicitous linguistic parallax, in turn, lies in the polysemy of vagy , meaning both ‘or’ and the second person singular conjugated form of the verb ‘to be.’ It is a pity that this solution did not occur to me at the time; my interpretative scruples may have found more sympathetic ears. In the above example, the context disambiguates, clearly pointing in a semantic direction. In numerous instances, however, the whatness of a verbal unit lies in its luminous silent parallactic oscillation between two different meanings / readings, facilitated by the context - epiphany becomes parallax becomes <?page no="223"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 223 interpretative pleasure. 18 For instance, on the basis of Molly’s recollection of the first night she and her future husband saw each other, “we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as if we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother” ( U 18 . 1184 ), it is impossible to decide whether Molly is Jewish or simply looks it. Her wording “sends the observant mind in two different positions” indeed and keeps it endlessly oscillating between them. That this oscillation takes place between identity and appearance is not only resonant of Homer, but it also encapsulates a crucial feature of Ulysses : its resistance to clear-cut identification, categorization in multiple ways. Molly’s recollection of a youthful confession of hers likewise functions as a parallactic staging of identity, this time creating an oscillation between identity and performance: “then I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool ( U 18 . 108 , emphases added). That Molly in retrospect is irritated by the priest’s roundabout way of trying to expose her sexual promiscuity is evident - “O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it” ( U 18 . 110 ) - yet there is no way of telling whether at the time she really was that naive, which, in retrospect she derides, or already then she was consciously staging a performance of naivety, pretending not to understand, deliberately pulling the priest’s leg. Often it is the elliptical nature of the characters’ stream of consciousness that facilitates the parallactic avoidance of clear identification. For instance, the way Bloom thinks about how his and Molly’s (presumably sexual) relationship has changed - “When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy” ( U 8 . 610 ) - does not identify the agent, does not put the blame on either of them. It could be Bloom himself or Molly or both of them who stopped liking “it” as a result of the son’s death. Despite Szentkuthy’s sensitivity to language, in his translation, parallactic identity games of this kind repeatedly become becalmed in short circuit, that is, disappear without a trace: Molly becomes Jewish - “mert zsidó vagyok a mamára hasonlítok” (‘because I am Jewish taking after my mother’) (Sz 880 , emphasis added) - and is portrayed as so naive that she did not understand what the priest meant - “és én megmondtam hogy a folyóparton amilyen kis hülye voltam ” (‘and I confessed on the canal bank like the little fool I was’) (Sz 838 , emphasis added). As for Bloom’s thought, Molly becomes identified as the 18 Joyce’s textual universe itself associates epiphany and parallax through the spatial image of the Ballast office. In Stephen Hero right after defining epiphany in his own terms, Stephen tells Cranly “that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany” ( 216 ). In Ulysses the word “parallax” comes to Bloom’s mind as a result of a series of associations originating from the time ball on the Ballast Office. <?page no="224"?> 224 Marianna Gula one responsible for the change - “Már nem kellett neki Rudy után” (‘She did not want it after Rudy’) (Sz 205 , emphasis added). 19 One wonders whether such an interpretation of the elliptical thought was propelled by male chauvinism on the translator’s part, reflecting an assumption that only women can lose their sexual appetite. In our four-member team, I - the only female member - was the one who insisted on rendering the thought as elliptical. The revised version then repeatedly releases the potential energy, short-circuited before, by opening up parallactic angles when rendering such crucial parallactic verbal units. 20 Translating Parallax II: “Could make a kind of pun on that” In what follows, from among the numberless parallactic verbal phenomena in Ulysses , I will highlight wordplay, a parallactic phenomenon par excellence , as a working definition offered by Dirk Delabastita suggests: “Wordplay is the general name for the various textual phenomena in which structural features of the language(s) are exploited in order to bring about a communicatively significant confrontation of two (or more) linguistic structures with more or less similar forms and more or less different meanings” ( 128 ). Wordplay is ubiquitous in Ulysses - the German translator-critic Frank Heibert has counted 735 instances of it (Klitgaard 78 ), out of which fewer are puns, as Fritz Senn has pointed out, than has been suggested by numerous critics glossing over all kinds of semantic convergences, contrived ambiguities as such (“Symphoric Joyce” 69 ) - and in Finnegans Wake it becomes so piled on that it challenges the referential function of language. Wordplay was also pivotal for Szentkuthy as a creative writer, whose monumental, metafictional novel Prae ( 1934 ) is built around a theory of wordplay, which, as Dávid Szolláth and Erika Mihálycsa have noted, may owe something not only to Ulysses but also to Work in Progress (Szolláth 67 , Mihálycsa 82 ): 19 Actually the inflected third person singular pronoun neki in the sentence does not indicate gender for reasons described above, but in the context it clearly refers to Molly. Upsetting the balance of the elliptical thought in this way is curious because it appears in Bloom’s stream of consciousness, so he would be a more likely candidate for the omitted agent than Molly. See sentences like: “Wonder what I look like to her” ( U 4 . 28 ), “Could have given that address too” ( U 5 . 3 ) - the latter mistranslated by Szentkuthy as “ezt a címet is megadhatták volna” (‘they could have given that address too’) (Sz 84 ) - and so forth. 20 The new translations of the three sentences discussed above: “mert zsidónak nézek ki anyám után ” (Revised 667 , emphasis added), “én meg mint egy kis hülye mondtam hogy a folyóparton (Revised 637 , emphasis added); “Rudy után már nem volt ugyanolyan” (Revised 165 ). <?page no="225"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 225 The whole century progresses towards wordplay […] Wordplay is the expression of the instinct by which we consider the relationships born out of chance to be more perennial realities and much more characteristic beings than the very objects that feature in the relationship. One can thus imagine the new setting of the world: trees will vanish from the alleys where only the patches of intertwining foliage remain; the elements will disappear from chemical compounds, leaving behind the vectors of their bindings as sole material realities […] All left and right banks will fade, but the world will be filled with an infinite number of solid bridges ( Prae I, 30, Mihálycsa’s translation, emphases added) There is unanimous agreement between Szentkuthy critics that Prae falls short of its own theory of wordplay. According to Mihálycsa, however, Szentkuthy fruitfully applied it in translating Ulysses several decades later, when aiming to reproduce the linguistic and cultural shock effect of the original, he created “punning interlingual bridges” in “superlatively misleading way[s]” ( 83 - 90 ). Closely inspecting several of Szentkuthy’s self-invented, transluding interlingual bridges 21 - of the punning as well as of the portmanteau variety - Mihálycsa claims that Szentkuthy seems to have approached Ulysses “from, and with a background knowledge of the unbound semiosis of the Wake - packaging, as it were, the experience of reading two texts in one for the Hungarian reader” ( 87 ). Mihálycsa’s point is compelling and illuminating, yet, as her analyses also highlight, Szentkuthy’s overindulgence in linguistic inventiveness tends to reflect “his own idiosyncratic and encyclopaedic patterns of erudition” and often totally overlooks not only the words of the source text, but also the narrative situation as well as the characters’ verbal and mental habits. His translation, for instance, “offers us a slightly Wakean-leaning Bloom, who, unlike his original, the timid bricoleur of the words of others, in his interior monologues routinely lets loose idiosyncratic witticisms and ‘high falutin stuff’” (Mihálycsa 84 ). To Mihálycsa’s pertinent examples of how Szentkuthy recreates Bloom in the image of the Wake let me add one more: in “Hades,” coming out of the mortuary chapel, Bloom starts lilting to cheer himself up a bit, when suddenly it dawns on him that this may not be proper behavior: “The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn’t lilt here” ( U 6 . 640 ). Szentkuthy renders this as: “A riccs, a reccs, a giccs, a hecc. Uram, Uram, mea kuplé , ne dúdoljak” (‘The crick, the crack, the kitch, the prank. Lord, Lord, mea kuplé , I mustn’t lilt’) (Sz 127 , emphasis added). “[M]ea kuplé” is a joking distortion of the Latin mea culpa , “kuplé,” after the 21 As Senn has observed, echoing a wordplay in Finnegans Wake , “transluding from the Otherman or off the Toptic” ( FW 419 . 24 ), “translations are off the toptic, are less gushing, less dynamic, less Protean, less self-righting, less looming, less weaving, less misleading - also more misleading -, less synechdochal, less dislocutory, less everything and - perhaps more bitterly - less transluding. They should be admired, not trusted” ( JD 37 ). <?page no="226"?> 226 Marianna Gula French couplet , meaning a song with a mocking, satirical bent, or a song full of cheap jokes. Witty as Szentkuthy’s solution is, it is a crass intervention into the narrative situation, which in the original suggests Bloom’s capacity for empathy, not a narcissistic rehearsal of wit. 22 As Mihálycsa also rightly notes, Szentkuthy’s “carnivalised, even babelised translation text” “did everything to entwine the Hungarian Ulysses with laughters low,” either rendering sexual innuendoes explicit or sneaking them in at every turn ( 87 - 88 ). By way of an example of how Szentkuthy “may resort to double-entendre playfully clothing openly sexual content in foreign phrases and quasi-medical-sounding Latinisms,” Mihálycsa highlights Szentkuthy’s translation of a (parallactic) “Sirens” crux: “Woodwind like Goodwin’s name” ( U 11 . 1050 ). Forsaking the problematic name Szentkuthy renders this as “ F agott és f uvola mintha f alliteráció” (‘Bassoon and flute as if f alliteration’) (Sz 353 , emphases added). As Mihálycsa succinctly puts it, “The Hungarian sentence f-alliterates on two musical instruments in a word amalgam with a recognisably phallic touch, from whose casual encounter with the (sexually charged) flute cultivated readers might also detect more than a hint at fellatio” ( 89 ). Ingenious as Szentkuthy’s solution may seem, its transluding quality may turn from a source of fascination into a source of irritation if one looks at how it fits into its context. Being an instance of Bloomian wit - the Joycean kind not that of Szentkuthy’s - the formal association between a musical instrument and a musician’s name concludes a train of thought in which Bloom imagines musical instruments in terms of various animals: “Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin’s name” ( U 11 . 1053 - 55 ). Since in such a narrative context a sexual innuendo is completely uncalled for, the new translation replaces it with a pertinent wordplay of the punning variety: “Goodwin zongorájának nyitott fogsora, krokodilszájában zene. Fagott fogért ” (‘The open jaws of Goodwin’s piano, music in its crocodile mouth. Bassoon for a tooth’ ) (Revised 276 ). “ F agott f ogért,” (f)alliterating without a sexual innuendo functions as a smile-provoking musical displacement of a fundamental tenet of lex talionis , “fogat fogért” (‘tooth for a tooth’), which fits perfectly into the associative logic and mood of Bloom’s thoughts. 23 22 The new version restores the neutral tone of the thought so that it can fulfil its narrative function: “Taríí taráá taríí taráá tarúú. Te jó ég, dudorásznom talán mégse kellene” (Revised 105 ). 23 In Szentkuthy’s translation the whole passage: “Futamtutam. Rézfúvósok bőgő ordítása, feltartott ormányok. Nagydögbőgők, f-luk sebek az oldalán. Fafúvósok, birkabú. Kereszthúros zongora nyitva krokodil szája van. Fagott és fuvola mintha falliteráció” (Sz 353 ). <?page no="227"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 227 As the above example suggests, in dealing with wordplay, the revision process aimed to create motivated bridges instead of the apparently ingenious disappointed bridges that proliferate in Szentkuthy’s translation. Furthermore, it aimed to reproduce crucial instances of wordplay that have disappeared in his translation. As it is impossible to give a comprehensive overview of all types of wordplay here, I will only highlight how the most parallactic of them all, puns - those that Senn would sanction as such and that are clearly intended as such - fare in Szentkuthy’s translation and its remake. As Senn has noted, recalling Leo Knuth’s observation that “puns are the verbal equivalents of theological miracles,” there is something epiphanic about puns, as they call forth an instant or perhaps delayed revelation (“Symphoric Joyce” 71 ). The revelation, mostly jocular in nature, in turn, consists in the perceiving mind’s oscillating recognition of two meanings within one verbal unit. As Senn has pointed out, only three instances of the word “pun” occur in Ulysses , out of which only once is it used in the precise sense of the word: “Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that” ( U 11 . 997 ). As Bloom thinks of Molly’s chamber (pot) music in the ensuing paragraph, in a kind of retrospective arrangement the context does indeed turn the phrase into a pun. As the literal translation of the musical form does not yield to playful double coding in Hungarian, Szentkuthy wittily replaced it with a punning echo of a composition for a chamber orchestra, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik ( Kis éji zene in Hungarian): “Egy kis éjjeli zene” (‘A little chamber pot music’) (Sz 350 , emphasis added). The only problem is that this way Bloom’s ensuing observation suggesting a potential does not make sense, as his mind has already performed the operation. As Szentkuthy’s solution was ingenious in its largest outlines, the new translation offers a slightly tailored version of his. Out of sheer oversight, however, the narrative credibility of Bloom’s punning observation has still not been restored. 24 More than just minor tailoring was needed in other crucial instances of punning rehearsed by Bloom’s mind. In “Hades,” reflecting on the Christian notion of resurrection and the last day idea, he recalls a commonplace Dublin pun: “ Come forth , Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job” ( U 6 . 679 , emphases In the new version: “Tülkölés. Fatörzsnyi rézfúvósok szamárbőgése, tehetetlen nagybőgődögök, oldalukon tátongó seb. Fafúvók, búgó-bőgő marhák. Goodwin zongorájának nyitott fogsora, krokodilszájában zene. Fagott fogért” (Revised 276 ). 24 Szentkuthy’s version: “‘Egy kis éjjeli zene.’ Szóviccet lehetne csinálni a címéből” (‘A little chamber pot music. It would be possible to make a kind of pun on its title’) (Sz 350 ). The new version gets rid of the quotation marks from around the punning title, as well as of the indefinite article: “Kis éjjeli zene. Szóviccet lehetne csinálni belőle” (‘Little chamber pot music. It would be possible to make a kind of pun on that’) (Revised 274 ). <?page no="228"?> 228 Marianna Gula added). Szentkuthy’s version does not even make an effort to offer some kind of wordplay in its place: “Lázár, mondom, kelj fel ! És ő ötödiknek jött , és elvesztette a partit” (‘Lazarus, get up . And he came fifth and lost the card game’) (Sz 128 , emphases added). The new translation, taking a thematic cue from his version and relying on the Hungarian version of the Biblical sentence, which Szentkuthy avoided before, reproduces the pun in Hungarian: “Lázár, jöjj ki ! De nem jött ki a lépés és befuccsolt” (literally: ‘Lazarus, come out . But the step did not come out and he went phut; ’ meaning: ‘Lazarus, come forth. But things did not work out and he lost the card game’) (Revised 105 - 06 , emphases added). To make the pun more motivated, Bloom’s preceding idea “[t]hat last day idea” is also drawn into its semantic playground: “ Jönnek itt az utolsó ítélettel! ” (literally: ‘they come with the last day idea’) seems to trigger the whole pun. 25 Relying on the canonical Hungarian translations of well-known intertexts in Ulysses helped reproduce missing puns in other instances as well. In “Cyclops,” the citizen’s tirade against the inhuman custom of flogging in the English navy - which “the modern God’s Englishman calls […] caning on the breech ” - triggers a joking comment by John Wyse Nolan in the form of a Shakespeare quote, as is his wont: “‘Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance” ( U 12 . 1342 , emphases added). As Hamlet’s indignant remark concerning Claudius’s drinking habits becomes displaced into a new context in Ulysses , it assumes the status of a pun facilitated by the homophony between “breach” and “breech.” Szentkuthy’s version reproduces the playfulness of the remark, but neither is it an instance of pun, nor an instance of comic parallactic recontextualization of a quote from Hamlet : “a modern Isten angolszászai nadrág szorítónak becézik […] Pedig inkább lazítja a fegyelmet, mint szorítja ” (‘the modern God’s Anglo-Saxons have nicknamed it a breech tightener .’ ‘However, it loosens order rather than tightens it’) (Sz 409 , emphases added). The new version renders both: “az istenadta modern angolja csak vessző tör ésnek hív- 25 For some obscure reason Szentkuthy refrained from relying on Hungarian translations of the Bible in other crucial instances as well, even if they could conveniently facilitate the reproduction of parallactic effects in Ulysses . In “Aeolus,” for instance, Stephen opens his Dublin vision with the parallactic displacement of God’s first command in calling the world into existence, “Let there be life” ( U 7 . 930 ); this way associating divine and artistic creation. Szentkuthy translates this as “Éljen az élet” (‘Long live life’) (Sz 177 ), which is not reminiscent of divine creation in any way, thus his translation deprives the sentence of a crucial interpretative potential. Relying on canonical Hungarian translations of the Biblical sentence “Legyen világosság ” (‘Let there be light’) (Genesis 1 : 1 , emphasis added), the new version transfers this potential: “Legyen világ ” (‘Let there be world’) (Revised 143 , emphasis added). The punning comic rhyme evoking Biblical genealogy that Bloom recollects in “Lestrygonians,” “Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there” ( U 8 . 741 ) has also shed all its playfulness in Szentkuthy’s translation. For a discussion of the Hungarian translations of this passage see Wawrzycka. <?page no="229"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 229 ja. […][…] Oly szokás, melyet meg tör ni tisztesb, mint megtartani” (Revised 317 , emphases added). It relies on the canonical Hungarian translation of the line and matches the phrase “meg tör ni” (‘breach / break’) with a compound “vesszőtör és” (‘breaking a cane [on someone’s back]’), which contains the homonym root verb tör . That John Wyse Nolan is given to quoting (Shakespeare) for purposes of comic commentary is clear already from his ironic recognition of Bloom’s generosity in “Wandering Rocks”: “I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly” ( U 10 . 980 ). Szentkuthy’s John Wyse, however, does not quote there either, nor is his utterance qualified as a quotation in Szentkuthy’s translation: “Sok jóság van a zsidó szívében - jelentette ki gavallérosan” (‘he stated gallantly’) (Sz 304 , emphasis added). Ironically enough, however, when the text does not only highlight that it quotes, but also identifies the source text that facilitates the parallactic recontextualization for punning purposes, as in the case of Bloom’s thought in “Nausicaa,” “For this relief much thanks. In Hamlet , that is” ( U 13 . 940 ), Szentkuthy had no choice but to damage the parallactic game, as the rendition of the sentence in the canonical Hungarian translation by János Arany does not yield to an oscillation between a military and a sexual meaning. Thanks to the miracle of literary retranslations, however, the revised version managed to render the parallactic intertextual game, since the way the sentence is rendered in Ádám Nádasdy’s recent retranslation of Hamlet perfectly fits into the context of “Nausicaa.” Hungarian translations of Shakespeare, canonical or otherwise, could also help to some extent in negotiating the polyphonic Shakespearean punning of “Scylla and Charybdis,” even if translators often have to rely more heavily on their own creative resources. The episode functions as a compendium of wordplay, its punning evoking Shakespeare’s predilection to this rhetorical activity, hinged in several sonnets on his own protean name, Will. This is enacted at one point when the voices of the young blades suddenly blend in a punning polylogue on the name, which undergoes a series of metamorphoses: - Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently. - Which will ? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed. - The will to live , John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s widow, is the will to die . - Requiescat! Stephen prayed. What of all the will to do? It has vanished long ago … (U 9.793-99, emphases added) <?page no="230"?> 230 Marianna Gula To reproduce the pun on the basis of the name is, of course, impossible in Hungarian. Thus, Szentkuthy chose to create some wordplay on the basis of the Hungarian word for poet, költő , which lends itself to punning thanks to the polysemy of the root verb költ meaning ‘write poetry,’ ‘spend money’ as well as ‘hatch.’ He starts playing (not punning) with the word already in Best’s remark: “Kedves költő nkről elég durván kezdünk beszélni - költ ötte a nemköltő Mr Best” (‘We have started to talk roughly about our kind poet , said poetically the nonpoet Mr Best,’ emphases added). Mulligan’s ensuing question, in turn - “Ki költ ? Mit költ ? (‘Who is writing poetry / spending money / hatching ? What is he / she writing / spending / hatching ? ’ emphases added) - may give the Hungarian reader the sense of some punning taking place here, even though in a tired, unoriginal manner. The whole effort goes completely phut, however, with John Eglinton’s remark, resonant with Puritan belief (see Gifford 238 ) as well as Freudian psychoanalysis in the original, as it is rendered in a way that makes no sense at all in Hungarian: “A költő élete […] Will özvegye számára ezentúl már csak a költő halála ” (‘The poet’s life … for Will’s widow from now on is merely the poet’s death, ’ emphases added). Nonsense culminates in Szentkuthy’s rendition of the two lines of poetry (from a poem by AE ) popping up in Stephen’s mind, which completely forgets about the word költő , and introduces a dubious image: “ Willy Wilmos milljomos . / Zsidók árja merre mos? ” (‘ Willy William the millionaire. Which way does the stream / flood of Jews carry you? ’) (Sz 254 , emphasis added). The Jewish thematics is not out of place, since not long before John Eglinton demanded of Stephen to “prove that he [Shakespeare] was a jew” ( U 9 . 763 ). Yet, in a passage that makes a conspicuous effort, no matter how successful, to play on words, the syntagm “zsidók árja” (literally: ‘Jews’ stream’) - the word árja also being the Hungarian variant of the racial concept of “Arya” - introduces a historically unpalatable resonance. The new version sets out in a completely different direction. Drawing on the narrative fact that the marital bed of the Shakespeares has just been the pivotal point of discussion, it introduces a play between the paronymous Hungarian words ágy (‘bed’) and vágy (‘desire’) into the passage. Thus to Mr Best’s remark “Kezdünk durván beszélni a nyájas Will vágyáról ” (‘We have started to talk roughly about graceful Will’s desire ,’ emphasis added), Mulligan quips: “Melyik ágyáról ? ” (‘Which of his beds ? ,’ emphasis added). John Eglinton’s remark, in turn, perfectly reproduces the Freudian (as well as the Puritan) resonances of the original: “Az élet vágy […] Will özvegye, szegény Ann számára csak halál vágy ” (‘The will / desire to live for poor Ann, Will’s widow is merely the will / desire to die,’ emphases added). Finally, the two lines of poetry in Stephen’s head conjoin vágy in a poetically parallactic, punning way with ágy : “ Hol van a sok régi vágy, Soha be nem töltött ágy” (literally: ‘ Where are all those old desires, those ever <?page no="231"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 231 unfilled beds? ’), where the syntagm be nem töltött ágy (‘unfilled beds’) is just a letter away from be nem töltött vágy (‘unfulfilled desire’) (Revised 203 ). The play on ágy / vágy in the new translation, in turn, is further motivated by the cultural fact that in the canonical Hungarian translation of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 135 ,” a sonnet that piles on pun after pun on the basis of the name Will - which is why it is highlighted in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of W. H.,” discussed in the episode before - the word vágy figures prominently. 26 So far, I have focused on puns which operate locally in Joyce’s text and which can be reproduced in the target culture even though they rely on / call forth intertextual dynamics. At times, however, puns in Ulysses are so closely embedded in the socio-cultural, historical context that the reproduction of the culture-specific oscillation of meaning enacted by them is impossible not only in Hungarian, but also in languages belonging to the Indo-European family. A case in point is the intricate cluster of puns revolving around the signifier “bull,” thoroughly mapped by Ida Klitgaard in her essay “Taking the Pun by the Horns: The Translation of Wordplay in James Joyce’s Ulysses .” The most intricate component of this cluster is a punning polylogue in “Oxen of the Sun,” reminiscent of the one in “Scylla and Charybdis” discussed above, in which voices, mediated through the burlesque style of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub , blend and fuse in a collectively created narrative: Mr Stephen, a little moved but very handsomely told him no such matter and that he had dispatches from the emperor’s chief tailtickler thanking him for the hospitality, that was sending over Doctor Rinderpest, the bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy, with a bolus or two of physic to take the bull by the horns . Come, come, says Mr Vincent, plain dealing. He’ll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a bull that’s Irish , says he. Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop. I conceive you, says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull that was sent to our island by farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattlebreeder of them all, with an emerald ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr Vincent cross the table, and a bullseye into the bargain , says he, and a plumper and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock. He had horns galore , a coat of cloth of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out of his nostrils so that the women of our island, leaving doughballs and rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains. ( U 14.573-89, emphases added) 26 In the first half of the Hungarian poet, Lőrinc Szabó’s translation of “Sonnet 135 ” the word vágy appears three times: “Villik rajzanak körül, száz lidérc, / Villik szeszélyek, vágy , kéj, ezer álom. / Ha túl nagy is az ostrom, mért ítélsz / Száműzetésre, ha köröde vágy om. / szíved villikkel áldott, s villogó / Seregükből kizárod ezt a villit, / Az én vágy amat.” (emphases added). <?page no="232"?> 232 Marianna Gula Originating from an idiom - “to take the bull by the horns” - that figures in wit-aspiring Mr Deasy’s letter suggesting a remedy for a disease that threatens Irish cattle, the polytropic passage performs a series of semantic and semiotic metamorphoses of the word “bull,” which serves the purposes of a scathing satire on British colonization in Ireland, as well as on the Catholic Church’s complicity in the colonial project. The playfully literalized and hibernicized “bull” idioms may take translators to task, but it is the two major punning pivots of the narrative, “a bull that’s Irish” and the “bull that was sent to our island by farmer Nicholas,” that puts them on the horns of a dilemma. 27 While the former, apart from an animal bred in Ireland, also evokes “an Irish bull,” that is, a linguistic phenomenon which in the eyes of the British colonizers proved the cognitive inferiority of the Irish; the second creates an oscillation between a bull in the sense of an animal and a papal bull, evoking the historical fact that the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century was sanctioned by a papal bull from the only English pope in the history of the Catholic Church, Nicholas Breakspear, Pope Adrian IV . As there is no equivalent of the expression “Irish bull” in Hungarian, it is impossible to reproduce the semantic / semiotic oscillation of the first pun, thus in this case, Hungarian translations ineluctably disrupt the intricate subtextual game of the original, also weakening the interpretative potential offered by the original to read this “Oxen” passage, incongruous, illogical on the surface but pregnant with double-coded meaning, as an extended Irish bull. As for the second, the task seems to be equally impossible, as the Hungarian word for bull in the sense of an animal is bika , while in the sense of papal bull it is bulla . This sense of impossibility is reflected in the revised version, which eliminating the pun makes the two meanings oscillating in the homonym explicit in the playfully alliterating bikabulla (Revised 382 ). 28 In a kind of retrospective arrangement, however, this solution appears to be the product of trumpery insanity, as despite the apparent impossibility, Szentkuthy managed to find before a word, billogos (Sz 496 ), that could accommodate both denotations of the English bull, even if in a more obscure, obsolete way than the original. The obsolete Hungarian word billog , derived from medieval times, means both a leaden seal that authenti- 27 Only the first idiom, “to take the bull by the horns,” has a matching bull idiom in Hungarian. To render the semantic oscillation of “bull” between the literal and the metaphorical in Hungarian Szentkuthy resourcefully introduced into the passage archaic proverbial sayings that he apparently found clustered in a book of Hungarian sayings and proverbs - Gábor O. Nagy’s Magyar szólások és közmondások - first published in the 1960 s. 28 The effort to give the Hungarian reader a sense of the double meaning of “bull” has given birth to a clumsy Minotaur: “ Bull: Ír bika az angol porcelánboltban. […] Ez az a bikabulla, melyet Miklós Gazda küldött szigetünkre […]” (Revised 382 ). <?page no="233"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 233 cated official documents, among others papal bulls, and a (cattle)brand, animals marked by a billog being called billogos . That the word is obsolete fits thematically into the passage as well as stylistically into “Oxen.” The only reason that could make the ‘correction’ excusable is that without paratextual help very few contemporary Hungarian readers would suspect that in the context billogos is capable of functioning as a pun participating in an Irish cultural, historical subtext. Yet, such reasoning goes against the raison d’être of the revision process, since we also corrected numerous instances of mistranslations that few readers would notice without paratextual help. Thus, all I can say is that, in this particular instance, we owe Szentkuthy and Hungarian readers sincere apologies. By way of a final example, I will highlight a pun that has become one of the cruces of Ulysses translation not so much because of its epiphanic valence as a pun, which is lacking, but because of its parallactic qualities unrelated to the wordplay, and even more so because of its parallactic integration into the rest of the narrative. In the wayward conversation of the “Aeolus” episode, Lenehan suddenly blurts out his “brand new riddle”: “What opera is like a railwayline? ” ( U 7 . 513 ), to which he himself offers a solution later: “ The Rose of Castile . See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee! ” ( U 7 . 591 ). The not so brand new pun in the solution consists in a homophonous play on the title of an opera by the Irish composer, Michael Balfe, The Rose of Castile , widely known in Joyce’s Ireland. 29 As Senn has pointed out, “the phonetic near convergence” creating the pun also “echoes a device of superimposing the title of a work of art (whether opera or epic) on a naturalistic urban novel (‘rows of cast steel’),” that is, a device which lends an all-pervasive parallactic quality to Ulysses (“Symphoric Joyce” 73 ). Furthermore, Lenehan’s riddle and the title of Balfe’s opera are among the numberless verbal items that become recycled, parallactically recontextualized or parallactically recast in the rest of the narrative, participating in a subtext that haunts the whole of Ulysses : the interplay between sexual and imperial desires - first evoked in the two lines from Balfe’s opera sung in the newspaper office, prompting Lenehan’s riddle, “‘ Twas rank and fame that tempted thee , / ‘ Twas empire charmed thy heart ” ( U 7 . 471 ). Translations evidently cannot do justice to all these nebeneinander and nacheinander parallactic qualities of the construct; in addition to the different potentials of the target languages and cultures, they will also reflect translators’ different emphases, interpretative decisions, as Senn has mapped out exploring the rendition of the riddle in seven different languages ( JD 13 - 16 ). Szentkuthy, for instance, treated the task locally, as usual, trying to create some kind of 29 For how brand new Lenehan’s idea is see www.jjon.org / joyce-s-allusions / rose-of-castile. <?page no="234"?> 234 Marianna Gula paronymous wordplay (not a pun) by replacing Balfe’s opera with an echo of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville , more resonant for Hungarian readers: “Melyik operát nem illik megenni? ,” “A Sevillai -t. Ha egyszer nincs hozzá se villa , se kanál, se tányér! Hö! ” (Sz 161 , 164 , emphases added). 30 The problem, however, is that he totally ignored further parallactic games in which the riddle participates, rendering the recurrence of the “Rose of Castile” image, literally translated as Kasztília Rózsája from “Sirens” on, totally unmotivated. In “Circe,” in turn, for the garbled replay of the riddle, “What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rose of Casteele” ( U 15 . 1731 ), he invented a new wordplay, which does not bear the slightest resemblance to his wordplay in “Aeolus.” 31 The new version, by contrast, approaches the task globally. Thus, it restores the title of Balfe’s opera and offers some moderately witty wordplay, a pun-like structure in search of an epiphany, accordingly - “Melyik operát adják a virágpiacon? ” “A Kasztília rózsájá t. Értitek, hogy adják, he? ” (‘Which opera is for sale / on at the flower market? The Rose of Castile. You see it’s for sale / on’) (Revised 131 , 133 ) - since it is this way that the riddle can participate in the parallactic textual game, at least in its nacheinander variety, and give the reader the joy of intratextual discovery. As this selective overview has hopefully shown, the revision process has significantly enhanced the transluding quality of Szentkuthy’s translation, invariably in a motivated manner, however, that is, respecting the word of the author, carefully balancing interpretative potentials and considering global consequences within Joyce’s textual universe. Thus, in the larger analysis, the revised translation offers Hungarian readers parallactic pleasures that do not reflect the translators’ creative self-indulgence, but rather their parallactic view of an inherently parallactic text. 30 Literally: “Which opera is not proper to eat? The one from Seville. Since you do not have a fork or a spoon or a plate.” Sevillai and se villa (‘no fork’) converge only in writing, not phonetically. Gáspár, like Szentkuthy creates a moderately witty wordplay on an opera more resonant for Hungarian readers than The Rose of Castile , Verdi’s Il Trovatore ( Trubadúr in Hungarian): “Melyik opera az, amelyiknek a címe hangnem? ” “ A trubadúr . Értitek a csíziót? Nem moll, dúr . Hé! ” (G 104 , 106 , emphasis added). Unlike Szentkuthy, however, Gáspár also makes an effort to introduce the Rose of Castile motif in “Aeolus,” thus his Lenehan extends his answer with another exhausted riddle: “Na és melyik operát árulják a virágkereskedésben? A Kasztília rózsá ját” (‘And which opera is sold in the flowershop? The Rose of Castile ’) (G 106 ). 31 In Szentkuthy’s version the garbled riddle in “Circe”: “Melyik opera játszódik patikában? A Pasztilia Rózsája” (Sz 584 ). <?page no="235"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 235 Works Cited Delabastita, Dirk. Introduction. Wordplay and Translation: Essays on Punning and Translation . Ed. Dirk Delabastita. Spec. issue of The Translator 2.2 (1996): 7-39. Print. Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation . London: Phoenix, 2004. Print. Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California P, 1988. Print. Gula, Marianna. “Leopold Bloom Coming into His Own.” The Binding Strength of Irish Studies: Festschrift in Honour of Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse . Ed. Marianna Gula, Mária Kurdi, and István D. Rácz. Debrecen: Debrecen UP , 2011. 117-30. Print. -. “Lost a Bob but Found a Tanner: From a Translator’s Workshop.” Scientia Traductionis 8 (2010): 122-33. Web. -. “‘The Spirit Has Been Well Caught’: The Irish Dimension of the Cannonical Hungarian Translation of Ulysses (1974) and its Remake (2012).” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 21.1 (2015): 123-50. Print. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero . 1944. London: Paladin, 1991. Print. - . Ulysses . New York: Vintage, 1986. Print. -. Ulysses . Trans. Endre Gáspár. Budapest: Nova Irodalmi Intézet, 1947. Print. -. Ulysses . Trans. Miklós Szentkuthy. Budapest: Európa, 1974. Print. -. Ulysses . Trans. Miklós Szentkuthy. Ed. Tibor Bartos. Budapest: Európa, 1986. Print. -. Ulysses . Trans. Miklós Szentkuthy, Marianna Gula, András Kappanyos, Gábor Zoltán Kiss, Dávid Szolláth. Budapest: Európa, 2012. Print. Kappanyos, András. “Fragments of a Report: Ulysses Translation in Progress.” James Joyce Quarterly 47.4 (Summer 2010): 553-66. Print. -. “ Ulysses , a nyughatatlan” [ Ulysses , the restless]. A fordítás és az intertextualitás alakzatai . Ed. Lóránt Kabdebó, et al. Budapest: n. p., 1998. 203-18. Print -. Utószó [Atferword]. Ulysses . 2012. Trans. Miklós Szentkuthy et al. Budapest: Európa Press, 2012. 681-87. Print. Klitgárd, Ida. “Taking the Pun by the Horns: The Translation of Wordplay in James Joyce’s Ulysses .” Target 17.1 (2005): 71-92. Print. Mihálycsa, Erika. “Horsey Women and Ars-temises: Wake-ing Ulysses in Translation.” Why Read Joyce in the 21 st Century? Ed. Franca Ruggieri and Enrico Terrinoni. Roma: Edizioni Q, 2012. 79-92. Print. Senn, Fritz. “Arguing about Law: Cyclopean Language.” James Joyce Quarterly 37.3 / 4 (Spring / Summer 2000): 425-46. Print. -. Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce . Ed. Christine O’Neill. Dublin: Lilliput, 1995. Print. -. Joycean Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation . Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. Print. -. “Symphoric Joyce.” Classic Joyce . Ed. Franca Ruggieri. Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. 69-88. Print. Joyce Studies in Italy 6. Szentkuthy, Miklós. “Miért újra Ulysses? ” Nagyvilág [Around the World] 2 (1968): 325-32. Print. <?page no="236"?> 236 Marianna Gula Szolláth, Dávid. “Leletmentés: Válogatott Szentkuthyzmusok az Ulysses szövegében.” Alföld 61.9 (2010): 64-74. Print. Ungvári, Tamás. “Joyce magyar utazása” [Joyce’s Hungarian Journey]. Nagyvilág 20 (1975): 1064-72. Print. Wawrzycka, Jolanta. “Sandwich on a Mission: Polytropic Vagaries in ‘Lestrygonians.’” Scientia Traductionis 8 (2010): 175-82. Web. Zeller, Ursula. “’Parallax Stalks Behind’: The Walk-In Book, or the Text as Space in Ulysses .” James Joyce: “gedacht durch meine Augen” / ”thought through my eyes.” Ed. Fritz Senn, Ursula Zeller, Christa Lerm Hayes, Ruth Frehner, and Hannes Vogel. Basel: Schwabe, 2000. 140-55. Print. <?page no="237"?> Translation as Parallax, Translating Parallax 237 The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” Erika Mihálycsa Fritz Senn says, “A prime characteristic of Ulysses is its lofty reluctance to conform, its resistance to any of our categories, to any kind of methodization. It still eludes us […] the certainties academically announced tend to be mainly in the eyes of the beholders” ( Dislocutions 199 ). It would be trite to make the roll call of all the Joyceans and theorists who have reiterated this since; even the claim that the “Joyce of impossibilities” 1 continues testing all theories and academic methodologies has become something of a dogma in need of testing. There is no denying that Joyce’s place in modernism became central after the rise of “High Theory,” partly because his works play the “keystone” in our current conception of modernism and partly because they have been “the privileged testing ground or dumping site” of the heterogeneous discourses commonly labeled as Theory, greatly increasing their visibility and “visitability” (Rabaté 124 ). With all the spreading academic incredulity towards what continues to be called “Theory” after the turn of the millennium, Joyce’s place seems more secure than ever. More and more voices argue for the necessity of a genuine intellective turn that identifies the literary - the singularity of singularities which alone can show what language is able to do and reveal the limits of language, its dislocutions in Senn’s terms - as the site that theory should inhabit. This is envisaged as “a constantly renewed mise-en-scène of human intellective failure by means of semantic lacks” which brings out exemplarily the defeat of meaning, enacting the very “defensiveness of logos” (Dubreuil 240 ). Today, it looks highly likely that theory “after Theory” would be a theory not of , but as literature, “a literature raised to the power of speculation” (Rabaté 8 ), more plied to the literary as both theoretical and post-theoretical, since its experience invites us to “violently reconsider how, and why, we speak and think” while it simultaneously “does and undoes what makes theory” (Dubreuil 243 ). So, the livre à venir of the theory of literature’s singularity, that seeks to address a configuration of textual properties going beyond the possibilities pre-programmed by a culture’s norms through which most cultural products are understood (Attridge 63 ), will predictably reinstate Joyce in the center of its preoccupations, since this is the 1 I am borrowing the title of an article by Fritz Senn that demonstrates how each type of reading Joyce misses out. <?page no="238"?> 238 Erika Mihálycsa author of exemplary modernist texts that exceeded and resisted all pre-existing general cultural determinations, and to a certain degree continue resisting current determinations as well. 2 For such a theory turning towards the inventive and to the defamiliarizing aspects of the literary work that drill into the working of language, Fritz Senn’s exegesis of the dislocutory , provective textual dynamics of Joyce’s works, his method of reading-as-translation, and of philologically punctilious far-fetching , 3 continue to be a privileged model of creative and responsible reading. 4 Especially so is the constant warning in Senn’s Inductive Scrutinies , that Joyce’s texts solicit a dynamic reading of corrective unrest, a reading-as-translation, which can always ever be but defective. Such understanding of the singularity of the literary work, always inviting and existing in the form of multiple translations, and of the singularity of Joyce’s work in particular, whose every sentence is virtually an “event of style,” as Senn often affirms, constitutes a testing ground for translation studies as well. Translation is per se a parallactic activity: being a “complete running commentary of the original” ( Dislocutions 2 ) based on the closest of readings, it acts out the mental processes involved in reading, as often as not choosing one direction over another one made possible in the original, clarifying, disambiguating but also, making visible our groping for meaning - a process that is never perfected but potentially perfectible. Ideally, literary translations should be read transversally as interpretations around an original, in an ever-expanding constellation in constant motion with respect to its mobile center (in the case of Ulysses , itself an unstable text) and to the other translation texts. To complicate matters further, re-translations are also implicitly commentaries around pre-existing translation 2 In The Singularity of Literature , Derek Attridge defines singularity as “the hitherto unimaginable disposition of cultural materials that comes into being in the event of invention.” It is constitutively impure, “always open to contamination, grafting, accidents, reinterpretation, and recontextualization,” and eminently imitable and translatable: “not merely available for translation but […] constituted in what may be thought of as an unending set of translations - for each new context in which it appears produces a further transformation.” Like inventiveness and alterity, singularity is an event which takes place in reception, produced, not given in advance, functioning as a signature; its emergence coincides with the beginning of its erosion as it brings about the cultural changes necessary to accommodate it ( 63 - 64 , 73 ). 3 In a conversation with Jolanta Wawrzycka and myself on his method of reading Joyce ( 2012 ), Senn called himself “a far-fetcher by constitution.” 4 As Attridge claims, the text that functions powerfully as literature, “as singular staging of otherness” which uses the materials of culture in a way that cannot be accounted for by those materials that enable it, solicits a creative reading as “responsible response.” Such reading can be described as “a performance of [singularity] that, while it inevitably strives to convert the other into the same, strives also to allow the same to be modified by the other” ( 124 ). <?page no="239"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 239 versions: not only do they reflect the informed reading of, and actively shape the reception of a given author in their target language ( TL ) culture at a given moment, but they also embody and perform a critical reflection on previous translations and tacit TL cultural expectations. Translation studies is thus parallactic at its best, situated as it is at the interface between literary theories, textual criticism, reception history, genetic studies, forays into cultural memory, as well as the theory and practice of translation. In this sense, Senn’s method of reading-as-translation turns translation studies upside down, for he uses translation texts to reflect back on our mental framing of the original’s textual effects, rather than the other way round - just like his unique attempts to read Homer’s Greek epic from the perspective of the Joyce reader. Trying to read Ulysses in (and as ) translation, with an eye to what may be called the novel’s complex pedagogical strategy of guiding the reader through its autocorrective text, while soliciting constant readjustments and mental repair-work from him / her, necessarily reconfigures and complicates translation ethics, and such notions as ‘domesticating’ vs. ‘foreignizing,’ ‘invisible’ vs. ‘visible’ translation. While being dependent on the host culture’s norms and dominant literary practices, as well as on the mutations in the reception of the given author, these respective strategies also engender significant mutations in those very norms. Foreignizing translation, favoring ethical literality (Benjamin, Berman) and allowing languages to arcade each other as instances of incommunicability, incommensurability and ineffable remembrance (Benjamin) “seeks to evolve a sense of the foreign in the target language culture by choosing a foreign text and developing a translation method along lines which are excluded by dominant cultural values in the target language.” In contrast, domesticating translation is defined by its “adherence to domestic literary canons both in choosing a foreign text and in developing a translation method” (Venuti, “Strategies of Translation” 241 - 2 ). Domestication into near-equivalents in TL - most manifest in the translation of realia tantum , literary and cultural references in the source language ( SL ) culture - tends to accommodate the reader’s expectations rather than respecting the original text and prioritizes the illusion of fluency and transparency - that is, with the translator’s “invisibility” (Venuti). However, as Ira Torresi insightfully shows on case studies from Ulysses , Modernist texts that are inherently foreignized and disruptive and rely on internal defamiliarization, paradoxically require a certain degree of micro-domestication in translation in order to enable macro-foreignization. 5 Joycean texts repeatedly 5 As Torresi shows, the prioritizing of stylistic and sound effects in prose translation - in themselves disrupting fluency and transparency - may go along with, or even require, a certain degree of lexical and morphological domestication. In the case of experimental texts like Ulysses “even partial domestication does not necessarily hinder, but at times <?page no="240"?> 240 Erika Mihálycsa show us that “correct,” literal translations can falsify meaning and distort character (Senn, Dislocutions 10 ). I will attempt to show, by examining the Romanian and Hungarian translations of “Oxen of the Sun” how overtly domesticating and foreignizing, minoritizing translation practices may bring about quite opposite effects of “visibility” vs. “invisibility” in TL literature, forcing readers to a reconceptualization of issues of translation ethics that have been periodically re-aligned with the latter practice by Benjamin, Berman, Venuti and others. 6 “Oxen” and the Parallax of Criticism “Oxen of the Sun” is an ideal episode to rock the boat of the mainstay doctrines of translation theory. Being the most parallactic episode where language is not used to define, fix, an object (involving restriction to a chosen viewpoint) but to show its growth, “Oxen” is an accumulation of mobile, fluid views that show the essential expansiveness of reality. The juxtaposition of mutually relativizing styles, in a spiral where these seem to replace and erase each other ever more rapidly, creates a kaleidoscopic motion where neither object nor observer remain stable. The chapter (meta)thematizes the technique of the novel’s constantly changing style: in a book that is “the first consistently intratransferential fictional work” where the change of techniques also serves a rectificating, remedial function (Senn, Dislocutions 52 , 66 ), this chapter faces the reader with narrative and stylistic intratransferentiality at its most overt and demanding, tracing the history of linguistic growth and the evolution of literary devices with the corresponding mutations of literary conventions and readerly expectations. Seen from the angle of the history of Joyce’s reception - particularly between the 1960 s and the 2000 s, when the translations examined here took shape - “Oxen” illustrates the shifts in reading Joyce as an increasingly experimental or “postmodern” modernist. As early as 1966 , when New Criticism and the doctrine of Joyce’s “mythic method” dominated the international discourse on Joyce, Goldman intuited that “Oxen,” which was not reducible to the topos of mirroring the gestation of the embryo in the gestation of English prose styles, actually enhances, the general foreignizing potential of the work, just as it does not make the translator invisible.” Moreover, the very act of translating disruptive, inherently foreignizing works “makes the translator conspicuous in the literary scene of the target language” ( 107 ) - as was the case with the canonical translations of Ulysses into both Hungarian and Romanian, by Szentkuthy and Ivănescu. 6 I am indebted to Arleen Ionescu, Elena Păcurar, and Petronia Popa Petrar for their attentive reading of, and insightful suggestions to my analysis of the Romanian translation’s language effects. I would like to express my gratitude to Marianna Gula, whose critical observations greatly helped the shaping of my text. <?page no="241"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 241 was Joyce’s extended authorial commentary on his own work ( 95 ). With the gaining in ground of poststructuralist theory, exegesis has increasingly brought to light the various double-decker techniques by which Joyce’s elfish, anarchic approach undermines the elaborately structured program he himself constructed in his 1920 letter to Frank Budgen. The episode soon grew into the privileged site of abandoning expressive form, 7 the mode of Modernist mimeticism by excellence, in favor of the antics of excessive form that puts an end to representation (Dettmar 142 - 3 ), exploding in the novel’s most programmatic and multifaceted discourse parallax. Thus theory-bred constructions of an increasingly metafictional and self-ironic “postmodern” Joyce stressed how each style in this sequence ultimately exposes its own frames of reference rather than its subject matter, and exposes at once the limitations of all styles through the system of thought underlying them, and those aspects of the object that remain hidden by the perspective mode of observation (Iser 35 ). At the same time, textual exegesis backed up by genetic studies has demonstrated that, far from chronologically following their alleged “originals,” the “Oxen” parodies make systematic use of anachronism, stylistic miscegenation and hybridization, adulteration, contamination, recontextualization, as well as outward mockery, whose ludic nonchalance and impish gaiety no Joycean scholar fails to register. 8 New historicist and postcolonial-informed studies have pointed out that “Oxen” is structured like an anthology or rather, anti-anthology, insofar as it ironizes “the voices of the fathers, subtly eroding the historicoliterary progression” (Spoo 148 ). Moreover, since the anthologies Joyce relied on in his array of parodies were themselves highly ideological constructs, literary monuments that actively shaped a sense of “Englishness,” the Joycean parodies can be seen as acts of defacement, “graffiti-work” that reverses the colonial vector of cultural power and the process of adulteration, developing a “different, 7 This term that gained currency in New Criticism, coined by Yvor Winters to describe the Modernist prose technique par excellence, presupposes a direct, mimetic correspondence between substance and style, harks back to Clive Bell’s 1913 term “significant form” describing “forms and relations of forms” in the visual arts, adopted by Eliot to literature in his Metaphysical Poets as “unity of sensibility” (Dettmar 142 - 3 ). 8 Genetic studies illuminated how Joyce gradually entangled, and ultimately confounded the orderly pattern of the “apostolic succession” of English authors, and how each style carries within itself a tension, a contradiction between form and use. The identification of the anthologies that served as Joyce’s sources, starting with Janusko’s groundbreaking 1983 volume and the significant contributions by Mary King, James P. Sullivan, Andrew Gibson and most comprehensively, Sarah Davison, have located the systematic additions, at late compositional stages, of internal anachronisms and intrusive (clipped) phrases from later prose styles, that render the episode a pastiche of many, internally mongrelized, voices. <?page no="242"?> 242 Erika Mihálycsa rival splendor of its own” and exacting “a cultural retribution on the English” through the vehicle of style (Gibson 101 ). The Fruitfulness of Parody: the Case of the Romanian Domestication of “Oxen” From the two possible routes - in Schleiermacher’s terms, of bringing the work “home” into the translating language, or taking it “abroad” - the first, a thorough adaptation of styles to the translating culture’s literary tradition was the way chosen by the 1984 Romanian Ulise , translated by poet Mircea Ivănescu. The opposite, ‘foreignizing’ strategy - of attempting to recreate in the translating language the effect of the original’s style parodies, with no intention to parallel the evolution of the SL literary history with corresponding phases in the TL literary tradition - was adopted by the 2012 re-translation and re-editing of Ulysses into Hungarian, partly based on the previous, 1974 text by novelist Miklós Szentkuthy and the still earlier, 1947 translation by Endre Gáspár; the earlier translations, especially Szentkuthy’s, largely fall into this category as well, although hardly programmatically. 9 Ivănescu’s and Szentkuthy’s translations share a similar, canonic status in TL literature. Completed roughly between the 1960 s and the 1980 s, when translation was a refuge to the most gifted and erudite writers in the former Eastern Bloc (a category into which both translators belong) who applied their linguistic and formal daring to the classics or the works of classical modernity and contemporaries exempt from ideological censorship, these translations tend to be stylistically adventurous, even overwrought, while being almost symptomatically out of touch with modern, contemporary elements of popular culture and demotic idiom. Due to the disruptiveness of Joyce’s textuality and to the discreet fame of the two artist-translators in TL culture, both translations of Ulysses played a central role in the reconceptualization of language in the 1970 s- 1980 s prose turn of Hungarian and Romanian literature. “Oxen” occupies a special place in the history of Joyce’s Romanian reception: the first complete translation of Ulysses in the language began with a spectacular rendering in 1971 in the prestigious magazine for world literature, Secolul XX . 10 9 András Kappanyos, the coordinator of the new Hungarian version’s translator team that includes Joycean scholar Marianna Gula, as well as critics Dávid Szolláth and Gábor Zoltán Kiss, shared the team’s program of translating the “Oxen” style parodies with the participants of the international workshop dedicated to specific translation problems in Ulysses , organized at the Zurich Joyce Foundation in 2010 . 10 Ivănescu’s translation of “Oxen” came out in an issue dedicated to Joyce, together with a foundation text for Joyce exegesis in Romania, critic Ion Brezianu’s essay “Parodie și rodnicie” (‘Parody and fruitfulness’), addressing Joyce’s novel from the vantage point <?page no="243"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 243 Poet-translator Mircea Ivănescu’s dispatching 11 was accompanied by a brief translation program where he proposes to meet the onerous task of rendering the original’s enormous stylistic variety by ‘compressing’ the millennial history of English prose styles into 500 years of Romanian literacy and literary history, trying to follow the period styles of Romanian literature, “inevitably more concentrated in the chronological evolution, yet perhaps as rich in nuances as the original,” ranging “from the chroniclers through the first classical literary texts, to the verbal outbursts of colloquial language and Romanian patois ” (note 2 , RO / Iv II . 446 ). Ivănescu’s text is a thorough cultural translation: it is seductive to speak, in his case, of a trans-daptation and even a travesty . Since the first extant document in Romanian dates back to 1521 and through the 16 th - 17 th centuries there is barely more than a series of chronicles - annals in Romanian - alongside ecclesiastic translations with many loanwords from Old Church Slavonic (apart from a few isolated works of considerable literary value), we cannot speak of a Romanian literary tradition proper before the late 18 th , early 19 th centuries. In the second half of the 19 th century, the institutional background of Romanian literature is established. The turn of the 19 th century brought a language renewal movement, aiming at ‘back-Latinizing’ Romanian - leading to the shedding of the old Cyrillic and the adoption of the Latin alphabet, previously only used in Transylvania under Hapsburg rule, and the uploading of Latin-derived neologisms into Romanian, often through French, traditionally the second language of the Francophone higher classes and intelligentsia. Besides attuning the sequence of parodies to the distinct phases of the translating language’s evolution, Ivănescu’s exemplary cultural translation harnesses echoes from domestic literary tradition: some of the 18 th century parodies of the English text of parody: see Adrian Oțoiu on Joyce’s Romanian reception. The virtuoso display of the “gestation in the womb” of Romanian literary styles had a decisive influence on the postmodern turn of Romanian literature from the 1980 s - most notably, on Mircea Cărtărescu’s 1990 epic poem, Levantul ( The Levant ) written in a succession of verse parodies from early 19 th century to present-day poetic idiom. 11 Mircea Ivănescu ( 1931 - 2011 ), one of the most original postwar poets in the language, was also a prolific and erudite translator. The most comprehensive study dedicated to his Ulise to date - unanimously recognized as one of the most extraordinary achievements of literary translation into Romanian - is the joint work of Arleen Ionescu and Laurent Milesi ( 2008 ), and Ionescu’s chapter-length analysis (”Hos(ti)pitality in Translation: Joyce into Romanian,” Romanian Joyce 137 - 194 ). Apart from its vast cultural horizon, linguistic and stylistic resourcefulness and musicality in dealing with the overtly experimental chapters, the translation is also remarkable for its careful structural fine-tuning. However, the translation tends to disambiguate Joyce’s elliptic, ruptured syntax and, as Ionescu discusses in detail ( 155 - 178 ), it systematically euphemizes the original’s explicit sexual references and salaciousness in conformity with the ideological strictures in Ceaușescu’s Romania. <?page no="244"?> 244 Erika Mihálycsa ring, in Romanian, with the French malapropisms and comically pretentious and often maladroit neologism of early 19 th century poets, or of the heroine of two popular, Sheridanesque comedies, Chirița în Iași (‘Chirița in the Capital’) and Chirița în provincie (‘Chirița in the Country’), written in the 1840 s by one of the major Romantic poet-playwrights, Vasile Alecsandri. A passage from the carnivalesque Swift parody on the symbolic emasculation of the (English John, papal) bull , Bos Bovum gives ample sense of the domesticating travesty performed in the Romanian text where the bull is literally cross-dressed and potentially re-gendered: “the father of the faithful” ( U 14 . 604 ) is turned into “tata credincioaselor,” allowing a reading in the feminine of the genitive syntagm’s normative nominative tatăl , ‘father of,’ in an ingenious grammatical oxymoron, also assigning feminine gender on ‘the faithful’ ( 71 ). His garments, culturally non-specific in the original, become stereotypical, traditional Romanian female folk costume: And they dressed him […] in point shift and petticoat with a tippet and girdle and ruffles on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him all over with spermacetic oil. ( U 14.599) L-au îmbrăcat […] și în iie cu funduliță și în fotă și cu băsmăluță și cu bete și cu mânecuțe la mădulare și-au tuns și cârlionțu și peste tot l-au frăcat cu spermanțăt. (Ro / Iv II .71) These garments adorned with folksy, endearing diminutives are: ie (richly embroidered traditional blouse made of very thin linen), fotă (traditional wraparound woolen skirt, or skirt-like garment resembling two aprons worn in front and behind; from a word of Turkish origin), bată (long, multicolor woolen girdle), basma (traditional headscarf of Turkish origin) - the transvestite Swiftian bull coming to resemble one of the peasant girls on the canvases of national painter Nicolae Grigorescu, member of the Barbizon school. Joyce’s politically explosive satire is re-dressed into the peculiar humor of folk tales, harnessing their tone of concessive cunning. The same costume appears with minor differences in the Sternesque parody where Bannon enthuses over the cameo portrait of his sweetheart, Milly Bloom: “Ah, Monsieur, he said, had you but beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting instant with her dainty tucker and her new coquette cap” ( U 14 . 756 ). In Romanian, the citified girl in question turns into a “country cute”: “în iia ei frumușică și cu băsmăluță nouă și fărmăcată” (Ro / Iv II . 76 ), with “ ie ” and headscarf; the effect is akin to the Mandeville parody’s translation of canned fish and beer into the verbiage of an age that has no experience of such produce. Ivănescu’s “Oxen” works with multiple strategies: foreign-language substitution and the thorough cultural translation and adaptation of realia, culturally <?page no="245"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 245 specific titles and concepts are no less important than harnessing echoes of, and references to, TL literary tradition. Systemic foreign-language substitution 12 is seen in the supplanting of Latinate idiom and elements of Norman French in the Middle English passages, with (Old Church) Slavonic elements reminiscent of the early chronicles and ecclesiastic works; these are supplemented with a Levantine jumble of linguistic borrowings from Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, and Italian starting with the heteronomous Elizabethan period pastiches, corresponding to the period of Phanariote rule in Romanian history. 13 Starting with the equivalents of the mid- 18 th century parodies, the number of conspicuous Latinisms (often, neologism adopted from the Italian or French) with archaic inflections and mimicking period spelling, increases, mirroring the cultural, political agenda of the language renewal movement, to “classicize” or “back-Latinize” Romanian. 14 In addition, the Romanian text also relies extensively on the whole range of linguistic “remainders” 15 - especially regional 12 The systematic supplanting of loan words coming from a foreign language in the original, with elements from another foreign language that played a similar role in the literary / cultural history of the translating language as did the foreign language employed by the original, as discussed by Kasia Bazarnik in relation to Krzysztof Bartnicki’s translation of Finnegans Wake into Polish ( 571 ). 13 Phanariote rule in Vallachia and Moldavia lasted throughout the 18 th century: the provinces under Ottoman rule lost their right to elect a prince, the Porte appointing - de facto , selling ruling administrative functions to - loyal members of the, mostly Greek, Levantine ascendancy, named after Constantinople’s Phanar district, to its Balkanic provinces. The late 18 th century chronicle writers, vernacular poets who shaped the genres - and who as a rule were also well versed in Greek - used a high density of Turkish, Greek and Italian lexis (Călinescu 60 - 62 ). 14 The programmatic “Westernizing” of Romanian literature was initiated by the Romanian intelligentsia of Transylvania, then under Hapsburg rule, with a strong cultural and political agenda of national emancipation. Among its priorities were the adoption of the Latin alphabet, the elaboration of dictionaries and grammars of the language that would prove its Latin origin. As Călinescu shows in his history of Romanian literature, the striving to gain visibility to Romanian as a Romance language often resulted in the leading Transylvanian literati “forcing” the language on the Procrustean bed of Latin and willfully attempting to eliminate the “barbarous” Slavic elements from the language; spelling and etymology were both “stretched” to the verge of fictitiousness ( 60 - 64 ). The early 19 th century witnessed a similar cultural and political agenda in Vallachia, with massive, programmatic transformations of the vocabulary, and the ascension of a classicizing esthetics in letters ( 143 - 150 ). 15 Venuti applies Lecercle’s “remainder” theory to translation, pointing out that in varying the standard dialect, the remainder (which includes regional and social dialects, cliché, technical jargon and slang, archaisms and neologisms, foreign loan words, figures of style and stylistic innovations) “complicates the communication of a univocal signifier.” In translation, the remainder “consists of linguistic forms and textual effects that simultaneously vary both the current standard dialect of the translating language and the formal and semantic dimensions of the foreign text. The variations that comprise the remainder <?page no="246"?> 246 Erika Mihálycsa dialectal versions, onomatopoeic coinages and (often “fake,” self-invented) archaism and antiquated neologism, employing internal translations that are at times no less defamiliarizing than the English original. All these increase the translation text’s play of the signifier, cultivating polysemy, archaism, nonstandard dialects, elaborate sound effects and effects of style - textual features that frustrate immediate intelligibility, empathic response, interpretive mastery (Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility 130 - 31 ). In line with the evolution of Romanian literature, the style parodies roughly corresponding to the Middle English to mid- 18 th century pastiches are steeped in Slavic idiom. Not only is most of the vocabulary derived from Old Church Slavonic, but neologisms also get Slavic inflections: when Buck Mulligan presents his fertilizing program in a style reminiscent of Addison and Steele, the original’s “obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt” ( U 14 . 685 ) is rendered “obeli ște tăiat și învârtoșat” ( 74 ), where the word obelisc - of Greek origin, adopted into Romanian via French - is adorned with a fake Slavic-sounding inflection and an archaic participial adjective derived from vârtos (‘strong, upright’). The same parody’s Latinisms, pretentious neologism and erudition terms are transposed into heavily Slavic diction with folksy accents: … so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin ( U 14.675) … atâtea femei de farmec pline și cu mădularele podoabe, căzute pradă unor popi scârbavnici, care își ascund flacăra sub obroc în vreo mânăstire întunecoasă sau își rumpt floarea femeiască în labe de dihor puturos (Ro / Iv II .73) The Oriental aura of bonzes is domesticated into popi (Christian / Orthodox priests); the conspicuous French-derived flambeau is domesticated, while the idiom “hide under a bushel” is supplanted by a Romanian equivalent ( a ascunde sub obroc ) featuring a historical unit of measurement, (Sl.) obroc . The Slavic-derived vocabulary is counterbalanced by a (possibly ‘faked’) obsolete conjunction of the verb a rupe (‘to break; ’ cf. normative Rom., își rup ), which conserves the consonant cluster of the Latin rumpere . The original’s elevated rhetoric is consistently played down, with a distinctly down-to-earth and alliterative touch seen in the explicitation of what, in the late 18 th century, was considered a howling malapropism, “embraces of some unaccountable muskin” (Gifford 402 : 21 ) into labe de dihor puturos (‘stinky polecat paws’). The substitution of complicate the establishment of a lexicographical equivalence with the foreign text because they work only in the translating language and culture and reflect the linguistic, cultural, and social conditions of the receptors” (“Difference that Translation Makes” 219 ). <?page no="247"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 247 Latinate terms with a mix of Slavic elements and regional idiom is even more conspicuous in the Beaumont and Fletcher parody - the “delicate poets” being re-baptized “gingașii menăstrași” “Beau Mult și Flocosul” (‘they-drink-much’ and ‘the fuzzy one’): folk fiddlers and singers with a nonce folksy inflection of French-derived menestrel , and an adjective of Hungarian origin: An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion ( U 14.352) Epithalamion negrăit dulce cu îndemnuri peste poate înmuietoare pentru tineri nestruniți în ale amorului pe care făcliile aromitoare ale rusalcelor i-au mânat cătră culcușurile cu patru picioare ale nunteștilor însoțiri. (Iv / Ro II .62-3) The Romanian version turns the original’s courtly elevation and musical wording into a folksy-courteous note, with Slavic-derived ibovnici (pl., ‘lovers’) and rusalce (pl., ‘lovers’) making up for internal translation in an otherwise wholly domesticated passage; the accompanying “clerks” singing “kyries” ( U 14 . 347 ) mutate into “chirici” ( 62 ), a regional term for cricket. Neighboring passages show a high density of Levantine loan words in conjunction with a markedly rustic, mostly Transylvanian regional touch manifest in humorous onomatopoeia and loan words. Alongside Slavic, the inflation of Latin-derived vocabulary, often with comical Gallicisms and Italianism, with antiquated or nonce vocabulary is the prime strategy of defamiliarization, harking back to the programmatic language renewal that started towards the end of the 18 th century. Ivănescu’s text draws on this tradition, mixing it with savory regional accents and pretentious, often unstable Latinisms, in dealing with most of the 18 th - 19 th century pastiches. The awe-inspiring Walpole gothic parody, for instance, lapses into bathos in Haines’s operatic diction in Romanian, since most of its vocabulary has only been adopted into modern Standard Romanian with specified meaning, at a considerable angle from the one implied in the passage. The echo from “Telemachus” mutates into “istoria e de blamat” (“for which […] history is to blame,” U 14 . 1016 ), which uses the past participle of the cognate verb derived from the French blâmer , having a restricted meaning (approx. ‘disgrace’) in modern Romanian. Even more comical in its attempted elevation is the translation of the phrase, “it is what I tried to obliterate my crime” ( U 14 . 1022 ): “Este tot ce am cercetat eu să șterg suvenirul crimei mele” ( 85 ), where suvenir , obviously from the French souvenir (‘memory, reminiscence’ as well as ‘gift’), evoking mid- 19 th century Romanian literariness, would nowadays mostly connote the gift-shop. Ivănescu plays with the semantic differences of never-adopted cognate Latinisms, false friends or obsolete pretentious terms in Romanian. Haines <?page no="248"?> 248 Erika Mihálycsa is armed with “romanțuri celtice” ( 84 , for “Celtic literature,” U 14 . 1013 ), an archaic term from the Italian romanzo , on the crossroads between novel (‘roman’) and popular (verse) romance (‘ romanță ’), back-dating the preferred genres of the Celtic Twilight (poetry and drama) to the late medieval and early modern metamorphoses of (both verse and prose) narrative. Such use of diachronic defamiliarization draws attention to the hybridity at the core of a language’s evolution. The effect of fluctuation, gestation of language before eventual standardization affects not only vocabulary but also grammar, orthography and stylistic decorum - although Joyce’s original never attempts to mimic period orthography. With the arrival of the stylistic equivalents of late 18 th -mid- 19 th century Romanian literary styles corresponding to the sequence of pastiches ranging roughly from Burke to Dickens, the previously Levantine and folksy-regional, richly onomatopoeic mix gradually gives way to highly idiosyncratic, re-Latinized lexis with inflections altered sometimes beyond recognition and a forcedly (at times fictitiously) ‘etymological’ spelling that results in macaronic Italoor Latino-Romanian - as in the equivalent of the Sheridan pastiche: Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not to be rejoiced by this freshest new of the fruition of her confinement since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. ( U 14.880) Consecuinte in acquesta se dezveli ellu la minte spre celù de aproape, dicendu que, a esprima concepciunea sa despre tòte, opiniunea sa (quare pòte nu avea dispensă a o dice) era qua a nu am juisa oarecine de acquesta cea mai noua novella a fructiferarii confinamentului acquelleia quare prin atata labóre fusese innocenta de ori ce culpa de a fi de o gelidă minte și de frigid ingeniu ar însemna. (Ro / Iv II .80) Some of the Italianate and French-derived neologism never attained circulation in the language: such as the antiquated verb a juisa (from Fr. jouir ); the adjectives gelid , frigid give the passage a touch of operatic Italian, as the latter is used in the medical, sexual sense only; the Italian novella (‘news’), just like Latin culpa (‘fault’) and the pseudo-Latin labòre (‘work’) have to be back-translated. The willfully etymologizing spelling that pre-dates the standardization of diacritics converts Romanian diphthongs into monophthongs (closer to Latin) and Latinizes the spelling of all pronouns: e. g., care (‘which / that’) is rendered quare ; the Romanian verb a zice (‘to say’) is forced back into its Latin root via Italian, dice re . Giving the original’s convoluted syntax and roundabout idiom another twist, the Sheridan parody is rendered in a grotesque Latinate / Italo-Romanian diction that is closest to mid- 19 th century poet Ion Heliade Rădulescu’s <?page no="249"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 249 programmatic classicism, prone to etymologizing excesses. 16 So is “Wilhelmina, my life” ( U 14 . 890 ) re-baptized and relanguaged “ Gulielmina, trezorele meu ” ( 80 ): the neologism, derived from Fr. trésor , only survives in the noun trezorerie (treasury). Purefoy the potent “old bucko” is dubbed “betranul capricorn” ( 80 ) - the noun capricorn being only used as an astronomical term in modern Standard Romanian; most interestingly, his capacity to “knock another child out of her” ( U 14 . 892 ) is rendered “a esmulge altii puerii den dansa” ( 80 : cf. normative “a smulge alți copii din dânsa”), where the verb smulge (from Lat. exmulgere ) is force-marched back along the comparative history of Romance languages, and the Latin noun puer that was not adopted into Romanian ( copil , the standard Romanian for ‘child,’ being of Albanian extraction), is smuggled ‘back.’ Some of the Latinate neologism is grammatically unstable, mirroring the alterations through the 19 th century before the standardization of modern Romanian: gender fluctuates, like in the case of “ ruinurile timpului ” ( 60 : “Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions,” U 14 . 289 ), where ruin (normative fem. ruină / ruine ) appears to be a neutral noun (masc. sg. ruin - fem. / neut. pl. ruin uri ). In the Middle English morality, Everyman is directly addressed in Romanian with the Latinizing Vocative “ Ome ” ( 53 ) - departing from the normative modern omule (noun om + def. art. - ul + Voc. - e ). The use of archaic and / or deviant grammatical forms supplements the multiple strategies of defamiliarization, compelling the Romanian reader to continuous back-translation. Ivănescu’s text also offers a practical display of the mutations in notions of style and decorum. One of the infelicities sanctioned by current linguistic and stylistic norm in Romance languages, particularly in Romanian, is cacophony; however, until the second half of the 19 th century, when most of the Romanian classics were published, overt cacophony resulting from the combination of prepositions and pronouns or nouns was rather common. The Romanian “Oxen” harnesses marginal effects of language resulting from such parapraxis. In rendering the Swift parody’s unbuttoned “as fast friends as an arse and a shirt” ( U 14 . 638 ) for instance, Ivănescu’s version ‘elevates’ the phrase at face value: “priateni nesmintiți ca cămașa cu spinarea” (‘as inseparable friends as a 16 Ivănescu’s parody conjures up the Latinizing excesses of poet and scholar Ion Heliade Rădulescu ( 1802 - 1872 ), chief ideologue of the “Westernizing” movement of the 1840 s. Militating for the adoption of the Latin alphabet and of a Latin-based vocabulary, and for the shedding of Slavic and Phanariote loan verbiage, the self-taught Rădulescu considered Romanian and Italian to be merely dialects of a common Latin tongue and therefore propagated that modern Romanian should take back its old Roman costume; his work occasionally lapses into grotesquely macaronic Italo-Romanian, in an etymologizing spelling that willfully disregards the pronunciation and inflections of modern Romanian (Călinescu 143 - 150 ). <?page no="250"?> 250 Erika Mihálycsa shirt from the back,’ II. 72 ). The phrase that shies away from the coarse term slips in comically subdued bawdry through the back door of stylistic error. The thorough cultural adaptation is best seen in the translation of historical titles and appellatives, in religious terminology and realia, where the cultural gap forces translators to paraphrase, resort to paratextual explanation, or adapt. 17 Religious concepts are especially prone to mutations: limbo and purgatory (“purgefire” ( U 14 . 225 )), absent from Eastern Orthodox dogma, are routinely paraphrased - the first, in Dantesque fashion, in period Romanian: “din întunecimea dintâiului cerc ce hăul-ngrădește” (‘from the darkness of the first circle that surrounds hell,’ 58 ); “focul de curățire“ (‘cleansing fire,’ 58 ). Purefoy, markedly Protestant, apostrophized “Old Glory Allelujurum,” is ‘converted’ into “betranul Doamnemilueșce” ( 80 ) - Doamne miluiește being the (Slavic-derived) translation of Kyrie eleison / Gospodi pomiluy , ritually repeated at the beginning of liturgy. Similarly, all titles are domesticated: the Middle English sire , my lord is usually rendered jupân (from Sl. županu ), a historical administrative function and title of the landed gentry, boier / boierule (from Sl. boljarinu ), the title of the gentry, peers in the Romanian provinces. Administrative, juridical terms are consistently adapted to the medieval and early modern realities of the Romanian state. Similarly, realia are thoroughly trans-dapted, as if testifying that in translation everything but content can be carried across. Culinary terms get local seasoning: the mead of the Mandeville parody becomes rachiu (from Turk. raki ), a pan-Balkanic alcoholic spirit. Buck Mulligan’s diet of “tubercles” and “coneys” - an overtly defamiliarizing term, from the name of the island - seasoned with “capsicum chillies” ( U 14 . 696 ), gets its distinctive taste in Romanian from the markedly alliterative “un bumb de boabe usturoiate” ( 74 : approx. ‘a button of garlicky seeds’) - chilli pepper being a relatively late (Turkish) import into local cuisine. In the parody of 18 th -century satirist Junius, Bloom’s reprehensible anticonceptional practices are bashed in harsh Latinate tones, leading to the verdict, “the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid and inoperative” ( U 14 . 940 ). The rustic Romanian translation (“zeama care iesă din el e stătută, borșită și nelecuitoare” [ II . 82 : ‘the juice that issues from him is stale, borș-ed and not healing’]) turns Bloom’s semen into a traditional soup, ciorbă , whose 17 Although Ulise came out with annotations by Ivănescu largely based on Gifford’s notes, the translator - forced by circumstance - only supplied 6 , very general notes on individual episodes for Volume 2 (from “Nausicaa” to “Penelope”), in stark contrast to his meticulous annotation of Vol. 1 ( 337 notes). To “Oxen” he wrote a page-long explanatory note about the episode’s use of parody, explaining his approach of adapting the succession of English period styles to Romanian. <?page no="251"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 251 distinctive taste is given by borș - a ferment made of cereals used for giving sour taste and consistency to soups. Besides thorough cultural adaptation, systematic foreign language substitution and creating an intertextual network with TL literature, Ivănescu’s version also harnesses the full range of Romanian regional dialects and folklore genres, in order to create effects of internal translation similar to those of the original. 18 His stylistic play and unleashing of a carnivalesque multiplicity of idioms within Romanian stands out as a prime example of “abusive fidelity” where translation, concentrating on the signifier, focuses on the ‘abuses’ of SL text - passages that are “in some sense forced, that stand out as clusters of textual energy,” and attempts to reproduce their “abusive” quality in the TL culture (Philip Lewis, qtd. in Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility 181 ). Such textual effects proliferating in Joyce’s writing have been described as dislocutions by Senn, asking for a similarly dislocutory and provective translation practice. 19 To conclude, Ivănescu’s text is a thorough cultural adaptation that seeks to supplant SL literary contexts with TL literary allusions and genre specificities, as well as a linguistic adaptation: it deviates, detours and displaces Joyce’s dislocuting phrase, converts Joyce’s heteroglossia into a Romanian idiom seen both synchronically (in its pluridialectal forms) and diachronically (covering the phases of linguistic evolution from the beginnings of Romanian literacy to the work’s present). Through the internal diversification of idioms, idiolects, as well as of the varying density of Slavic and Levantine loan words, regional dialectal terms and Latinate neologism (with ever-changing derivations and inflections), a fine-tuned differentiation of successive styles is achieved, contributing to the 18 Ivănescu’s pervasive use of (pluridialectal) regionalism and savory onomatopoeia may create a reference to a unique and in many respects marginal literary work in the Romanian canon, Ion Budai Deleanu’s mock-heroic verse epic Țiganiada (“The Gypsiad,” 1812 ). This anti-feudal and anticlerical allegory whose savory dialectal diction, proliferating self-invented onomatopoeia and liberal variations of grammatical inflections and gender according to the requirements of rhyme, unleashes a carnivalesque linguistic energy. 19 “Dislocution,” a spatial metaphor for unorthodox uses of language and style, is tentatively defined by Senn as “all manner of metamorphoses, switches, transfers, displacements,” expressive of a persistent principle of the text that produces deviations, heretical turns, multiple (transmission) errors and miscommunications ( Dislocutions 202 ); (mis)quotations and allusions function as, or are literally, dislocutions ( 206 ) - and so do, by extrapolation, the numerous style parodies of the book, that metamorphose, transfer, dislocate, their “originals.” “Provection” is proposed as an umbrella term for a pervasive drive of the Joycean text to go over, go too far, to be e-normous (outside implied norms), and which is characterized by “augmentation, intensification, hypertrophy, amplification, and then, secondly, some divergence, a turn, a change, some divarication” ( Inductive Scrutinies 37 , 40 ). <?page no="252"?> 252 Erika Mihálycsa overall effect of metamorphosis of literary language, comparable to that of the original. Moreover, rather than rendering an effect of gestation of language as in an organic metaphor, the Romanian “Oxen” thematizes the manifold interventions and hybridizations at work in the evolution of language, hence its effect of enhanced parody of (eventually aborted) linguistic excess, especially of stillborn forced Latinizing and Frenchifying, in comparison with Joyce’s original. Joyce’s “word-promiscuity” 20 : the Hungarian Dispatching of “Oxen” If, in the case of the Romanian version, “Oxen” represents the apex of translatorial, linguistic, stylistic invention, in the case of the Hungarian versions it would have to take a back seat. To date there are three complete versions of Ulysses in the language: the earliest translation, by Endre Gáspár, came out in 1947 and never had the chance to penetrate and fertilize indigenous reading and writing practices; for an early translation, it shows a remarkable sensitivity to Joyce’s allusive and elliptic compositional principles and tends to be faithful to the point of literalness. 21 The translation of experimental novelist Miklós Szentkuthy ( 1974 , re-edited 1986 ) has the fame of carrying Joyce’s linguistic experiment, language games, effects, calembours over the top, at times even suggesting a translation practice that tries to elicit in the Ulysses text the reading experience of the Wake . 22 The latest version, launched on Bloomsday 2012 , is a 20 Szentkuthy characterized the language of Ulysses with the formulae “word-promiscuity” and “giant fairy-tale-like pun” in his 1947 essay ( 136 ). 21 See Márta Godmann on Joyce’s Hungarian reception. Gáspár’s translation is praised by Péter Egri for its merits of transposing the original’s “surrealist, expressionist, impressionist, naturalistic and symbolic effects” ( 234 ). In his 1947 essay on Joyce Szentkuthy originally included a four-page-long critique-cum-analysis of Gáspár’s translation pointing out instances where Gáspár’s text irons out elliptic and disrupted syntax, “corrects” intentional infelicities of style and parapraxis (e. g., word repetition), fails to render musical and sound effects and, most importantly, fails to live up to the parody and humor of the Joycean text ( 136 - 145 ). 22 Szentkuthy’s Ulysses , hailed as one of the highest achievements of inventive translation in Hungarian, tends to appropriate Joyce’s work, “out-Joyceing Joyce himself ” (Goldmann 244 ); Kappanyos (“Joyce: classic author”) and Szolláth both draw attention to its tendency to proliferate excesses of language - often gratuitous and not supported by the original - that became Szentkuthy’s signature. The pervasive use of ostentatious wordplay, arcane multilingual cultural allusions and salacious innuendos gives the impression that Szentkuthy was packaging in the Hungarian Ulysses text the reading experience of the unbound semiosis and disseminative language poetics of the Wake : see Szolláth, Mihálycsa (“Horsey Women”). The translation has been criticized mostly for its careless handling of the original’s vital structural network of allusions and internal echoes, its tendency to ‘cover up’ semantic and contextual obscurities with over-the-top wordplay, its ignorance of the work’s Irish, local reference and of Hiberno-English idiom: see Kappanyos (“At the End; ” “Joyce: classic author”), Gula, Mihálycsa (“Horsey Women; ” “From <?page no="253"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 253 partial re-translation and thorough re-editing based on the previous translation versions, carried out by a team of Joycean scholars and critics 23 ; I will henceforward refer to it as the “Revised” version. It is to the last two translations that I will refer to in the present analysis. Neither of these attempts a cultural translation / adaptation of “Oxen.” They do not substitute English prose styles with remotely ‘equivalent’ Hungarian styles and stages in the gestation of language: rather, they try to render the effect of the succession of these English style parodies. Szentkuthy’s text, almost infamously indulging in self-generating language games and Gargantuan humor, produces an Oxen translation that is remarkably unadventurous up to the outburst of the coda which was visibly rather more to the translator’s palate. Both Szentkuthy’s text and the methodologically more rigorous “Revised” version combine several strategies: from the use of archaic wording, phrasing and antiquated tenses (the Hungarian imperfect, plusquamperfect and future, abandoned in the 19 th century) to the occasional stylistic markers or “remainders” recognizable from early Hungarian texts, which create intertextual, and sometimes cross-genre allusions to works of TL literary history. Theoretically, Hungarian could juggle with a tradition of literacy that reaches back to the 12 th century; however, due to the limited corpus of written documents up to the late 15 th century, the assessment of the state and evolution of the language remains highly speculative. 24 We can speak of a continuous literary tradition from the 16 th century onward, with the emergence of courtly culture, the spreading of the print, the standardization of language through the first full Bible translation ( 1590 ), and the emergence of a Renaissance and Baroque poetic tradition in addition to popular verse lays, histories, romances. The history of Hungarian also presents a curiosity: at the turn of the 18 th - 19 th centuries the Mess to Message”). The most comprehensive, critically informed comparative analysis of Szentkuthy’s translation and the “Revised” one to date is Dalma Véry’s 2014 study. 23 The objectives of the translator team included correcting Szentkuthy’s obvious mistakes and lapses, paring down his intrusive linguistic concoctions, restoring the vital network of the novel’s structural allusions and intratextual echoes, and maximizing the Hungarian reader’s opportunity to read with the creative cooperation that Joyce’s text invites. As Marianna Gula writes, the global method employed in the new text could be described as “a transference of functions and effects. This means that we try to re-channel semantic, semiotic, stylistic and so forth potentials: if language as co-author must recede in the Hungarian translation at numerous textual loci where it performs an awful lot of work in the original, then we make it perform more intensely in places where it is less epiphanic there” ( 123 ). 24 The first extant text documents in Hungarian are translations from Latin: the so-called Funeral Sermon ( Halotti Beszéd , ca. 1195 ) is a vernacular translation of a Latin model; likewise, the first extant poem in the language, the Lament of Mary ( Ómagyar Mária Siralom , early 13 th century) is the translation of a Latin planctus . <?page no="254"?> 254 Erika Mihálycsa language was programmatically renewed, its vocabulary radically reinvented by a group of influential literati of classicist tastes, with the aim of creating an adequate tool for the translation of the major works of Western literary and discursive-philosophical tradition and for the creation of a national canon on a par with the latter. 25 The most striking feature of Szentkuthy’s dispatching of the Joycean parodies is the ease with which it disrupts the pattern of sequence in the language’s evolution, and with which it deviates from attempts to mimic period discourse. In the first (‘Old English’) passage already, the second sentence flaunts a conspicuous neologism together with a derived generic noun that only appeared in post-renewal Hungarian: “Embrióimádó emberiség” (Sze / 478 , ‘Embryo-worshipping humanity’). Similarly, in the rendering of the parody loosely based on the Anglo-Saxon elegy The Wanderer , we find the following: Watchers tway there walk, white sisters in ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding wariest ward. ( U 14.76) Duo in Deo nővérek járnak közöttük enyhét fájdalomnak osztva tizenkét holdközben háromszor egy száznak. Gyermekágyak igaz gardedámjai ők ambulanter ambo kettő A. Horne honában. (Sze / 478, my emphases) The effect of the Hungarian translation is of contrived, slightly Latinate phrasing and syntax sprinkled with occasional archaism and some linguistic red herrings: the mock-Latin Duo in Deo (for the Anglo-Saxon tway ) is a conspicuous Szentkuthysm working as ‘latrine Latin,’ and so is ambulanter ambo kettő (approx. ‘walking both two’), not to mention the howling Gallicism gardedame planted in the equivalent of Old English. The passage continues with a mixture of heavily alliterative cadences and nonce archaisms that sometimes push parody towards downright caricature; the occasional anachronism lends it a feel of café witticism. The “Revised” text aims, consistently with its general program of paring down Szentkuthy’s intrusive concoctions, at a transposition of effects: although 25 The renewal uploaded into Hungarian vocabulary a huge amount of mirror-translations from Latin and German, resulting in indigenous-looking compound words and coinages. Regionalisms were standardized on account of their musicality; mosaic words were cached by methods unparalleled in the history of European languages. For instance, the indigenous-sounding word for piano , to replace the foreign pianoforte / clavichord / Klavier , was created from pasting the first and last syllables of “zengő” + “tambura” (‘resonant + cyther-like instrument’), to result, via phonetic assimilation, in “zongora.” The fact that some of these, grotesquely ‘poeticized’ nonce coinages were assimilated into standard vocabulary while others were eventually dropped, seems a textbook example of the Saussurean tenet of the linguistic sign’s arbitrariness. <?page no="255"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 255 it elicits no foreignizing effects comparable to Joyce’s partly faked Old English vocabulary, the rigorous alliterative pattern is preserved with a faint, stylized archaic aura resulting from phrasing more than word choice: Fáradhatatlan őrzőik párban, fehér főkötőben róják folytonos őrjáratuk. Szúrás szűnik, émely enyhül tizenkét hó alatt háromszor száznak. Ágyak vitéz védői ők valóban, hisz Horne-nak házát éber őrség vigyázza. ( HU / “Rev” 369) Interestingly, we find the addition fehér főkötő (‘white bonnet’), obviously for the sake of alliteration; although the latter compound word (literally, ‘head-wrapper’) seems smoothly integrated in the passage, neither the item of clothing nor the word existed in the age allegedly referred to in the pastiche - yielding one of the rare examples where the “Revised” text seems to favor the signifier over the signified, as is Szentkuthy’s practice throughout. Such ‘stretching’ of linguistic history is supplemented by the occasional use of linguistic markers that open allusive bypaths into TL history - slightly at odds with the declarative translation strategy of not domesticating the style parodies: Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. ( U 14.96) Elbúsula a férfiú e szóra, mely jonhaira bánatsúlyt akaszta. ( HU / “Rev” 369) The strong foreignizing effect of “ruth-ful” (compassionate: cf. “stark ruth of man,” U 14 . 73 ) is approximated by the use of “jonh” (‘bowels / womb, bosom / heart’), a word of uncertain meaning known from the Lament of Mary , the first extant poem in Hungarian, and which is not preserved in modern Hungarian. The cadence and internal rhyme of the line, taken over from Szentkuthy, recalls faintly the wording of folk ballads (“bánatsúlyt akaszta”: ‘hanged sorrow-weight on’) and suggests one of the commonest Hungarian meters frequently used in folk poetry. Comparing the overall feel of the two translations - however risky such a venture may be - one can state that Szentkuthy’s version, with all its obvious faults, inaccuracies, blatant anachronism not supported by the original, and general failure to live up to the plurivocity of “Oxen,” is more consistent in its effort to give the Hungarian text a defamiliarizing touch of ‘period’ idiom, through its pervasive use of emphatic, antiquated cadences (sometimes stretched to the point of caricature) and nonce archaisms. The “Revised” version all too often back-normalizes and explicitates these solutions; in addition, it does not succeed in giving a sense of variety and specific, infinitesimal difference between the original’s successive style parodies. In addressing realia especially, Szentkuthy’s version employs existing and self-invented archaism alongside multiple style effects. So Mulligan’s fertilizing diet in the 18 th century essayistic pastiche is seasoned with “capsicum chillies” ( U 14 . 696 ) - “maró <?page no="256"?> 256 Erika Mihálycsa perui pirospaprika” (‘scorching Peruvian red-pepper,’ Sze / 500 ), an alliterative circumlocution in tune with the plant’s and the term’s novelty, and indicating its New World origin. The “Revised” version opts, instead, for “chilipaprika” - a patent neologism that smacks of contemporary cookbooks rather than period texts. The Bunyan parody’s “bottle Holiness” ( U 14 . 434 ) is rendered by Szentkuthy as “szentség butéliája” (Sze / 491 ): the obsolete loan word butélia , from the German version ( Buttel ) of the Latin butta / butella (cf. Fr. bouteille , It. bottiglia ) was still widely used in 19 th century Hungarian. This defamiliarizing solution is exchanged for “szentség palackja” in the “Corrected” version, where palack (a loan word from the Serbo-Croat ploska , ‘flat bottle’), the standard contemporary word for ‘bottle,’ has no period ring whatsoever. Since Ulysses , a text that is already a translation, enlists its English-language readers as translators and gives them the task of putting the language of the “Oxen” parodies “back into the sort of contemporary English from which the text departs so saliently” (Senn, “Dynamic Changes” 78 ), its translator should aim at estranging the TL reader from his / her own language in a similar manner. Apart from archaic loan words and terms known from early Hungarian texts, the two Hungarian versions also employ rhetorical means in order to render the effect of period pastiche. In the parody of Elizabethan chronicles, Stephen’s quixotic celebration of fecundity (“a pregnancy without joy, a birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness,” U 14 . 309 ) is dispatched by Szentkuthy with the humorously oxymoronic closing formula, “has hasasság nélkül” (‘a belly without belly-ishness,’ Sze / 487 ), based on alliteration and word repetition, and employing an obsolete folksy term for pregnancy. The “Revised” version substitutes here the bland current term, “has terhesség nélkül” (“Rev” / 375 : ‘belly without gravidity’). The latter’s tendency to explicitate and disambiguate is visible throughout, favoring analytic forms to Szentkuthy’s more synthetic, complex, often self-coined compounds. In the same passage, the theological speculation about humanity’s link to Eve “by successive anastomosis of navelcords” ( U 14 . 299 ) is translated by Szentkuthy as “köldökzsinórok folyamatos egybeszájadzása” (Sze / 486 ), where the Greek theological term is replaced by a (fake archaic) coinage - literally, ‘mouthing-into-one-another.’ This is explicitated in the “Revised” text’s “köldökzsinórok egymásba szájadzó fonala” ( PG , ‘navelcords’ thread mouthing into one another’). In dealing with the original pastiches’ rigorously differentiated use of overtly foreignizing, mostly Latinate wording, the two Hungarian versions deploy several strategies. Egregious Latinisms are rarely preserved unchanged. Such an instance is seen in the 18 th century essayistic style parody’s mock-medical coda, “whether his incipient ventripotence […] betokened an ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due… to a wolf in the stomach” <?page no="257"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 257 ( U 14 . 727 ), which is almost identically reproduced in Szentkuthy’s text and, due to the remoteness of Hungarian from Indo-European and particularly Romance languages, appears even more opaque and pretentiously overblown than in the original: “vajon kezdődő ventripotenciája […] ovoblasztikus gesztációnak jele-e prosztata utrikuluszában avagy hímméh avagy… gyomorfali bőrfarkasnak tulajdonítandó-e” (Sze / 501 , emphases mine). The “Revised” version takes over the transliteration of the mock-medical jargon here, sensitively intervening in disambiguating Szentkuthy’s word choice for “male womb” (“ hím + méh ,” due to homography and homophony, reads both as ‘male womb’ and ‘male bee ; ’ “apaméh” - ‘father(’s) womb’ - arguably connotes the uterus more than the insect). The same applies to the idiom ‘wolf in the stomach’: Szentkuthy’s flamboyant, mock-medical contrivance, literally ‘dermal wolf of the stomach wall,’ needs some deciphering in a context which gives next to no clue to the Hungarian reader. The “Revised” version supplies the corresponding TL idiom, “úgynevezett farkasétvágy”: ‘so-called wolf hunger’ (“Rev” / 386 ). On the whole, however, both translations are strongly domesticating in their word choice, and the interlingual back-translation solicited by the original tends to be replaced by intralingual back-translation, sometimes substituted with stylistic means that divert genre specificities. A more interesting language effect is seen in addressing another conspicuous linguistic marker of the original, in the Middle English parodies: the Malory parody’s “Againbuyer” - registering an internal translation, from Redemptor , into a language at a still inchoative stage of its evolution - is given in Szentkuthy the flamboyant name “ Megebblegváltónk .” The word, a morphological gibberish with a nebulous meaning at first sight, amalgamates “Meg-váltó” (‘Savior, Redeemer’) with two prefixes codifying the comparative and superlative in the comparison of adjectives; its structure can best be approximated by resorting to German, ‘ Er + löser’ + -er + -est, in the nonce form “Er-er-est-löser.” The effect is of a linguistic oddity resulting from maladroit translation, of translatorese gone askew at a stage when the (medieval) vernacular was still groping for forms. This, conspicuously absurd, solution is replaced in the “Revised” text with the nonce appellative of the divinity, “ Lelkönk Furdolója ” (‘driller into our conscience’) adorned with an archaic inflection: the latter goes back to an existing collocation in transposing into Hungarian remorsus conscientiae (lelki[ismeret]furdalás) and ultimately, the “agenbite of inwit” from “Telemachus,” into a nominal agent: Agenbiter of our Inwit . This is a characteristic example of the “Revised” version’s exploitation of linguistic remainders and its overall strategy to reinforce intratextual links to earlier episodes. With a fair amount of generalizing, one might affirm that Szentkuthy’s text seems to systematically favor the signifier over the signified: whenever a lan- <?page no="258"?> 258 Erika Mihálycsa guage effect is at stake, it will prevail over the translation of content. This is even more pronounced in the coda where Szentkuthy attempts to recreate kaleidoscopic textuality by four main strategies: ( 1 ) the studding of the text with extra language games and portmanteaux; ( 2 ) the insertion of literary and cultural allusions (mostly not supported by the original); ( 3 ) augmenting linguistic humor through sliding signification, (vulgar) double entendre ; and finally, ( 4 ) a tendency to proliferate tropes and enhance rhetoric (Mihálycsa, “From Mess to Message” 12 - 23 ). Alliteration, for instance, is pursued almost compulsively throughout the episode: “cracked kreutzer” becomes “kurva krajcár” (‘bloody’ - lit., whore (of a) - Kreutzer); the Swift parody’s “finest strapping young ravisher” ( U 14 . 598 ) is augmented into “legacélosabb liliomtipró” (Sze / 497 : ‘steeliest deflowerer’), to be mitigated into “legdélcegebb szívtipró” (“Rev” / 382 : ‘sturdiest breaker of hearts’) in the “Revised” version. This is both its strength and its shortcoming: Szentkuthy’s portmanteaux and event-sentences all too often disregard the specific allusion patterns, systems of correspondences, even stylistic and linguistic fine-tuning in favor of the verbal artillery deployed at virtually every step, and pertaining mostly to the same literary idiolect. The Swift parody’s delightfully unbuttoned praise of the English / Irish bull, “a portlier bull… never shat on shamrock” ( U 14 . 585 ) is rendered, “nyakasabb bika még nem f osott f űbe” (Sze / 496 ), where for the sake of alliteration the act of defecation is given a touch of diarrhoea (also connoting the idiom, ‘being in a funk’). However, shamrock - the emblem of the Emerald Isle - falls victim to this alliterative drive, being stripped of specificity, becoming nondescript grass . The “Revised” text opts for preserving the cultural allusion rather than the alliterative pattern, and supplements rhetoric with an extra textual correspondence: the bull, endowed with two epithets, becomes a Mulligan-lookalike, “ plump , portly” - “ gömbölydedebb és méltóságteljesebb bika sosem szart még lóherére” (“Rev” / 382 ). The Bunyan parody, Szentkuthyfied, displays four pillows that would suit better a fin-de-siècle metropolitan whorehouse amalgamated with a post- 1968 sexual liberation movie, than the grot of lechery imagined by the pious author: “Pickaback, Topsyturvy, Shameface, Cheek by Jowl” ( U 14 . 463 ) become the somewhat more athletic positions, “Előrehátulról” (‘forward-from-behind’), “Hatvankilenc“ (‘sixty-nine’), “Nincsszemérem” (‘there is no pudicity’), “Par Version la Myroir” with its suggestion of French perversion (Sze / 492 ). These are clarified in the “Revised” version: “Hátulrólbele” (‘Infrombehind’), “Fejtőllábtól” (‘Head-to-toe’), “Csukdbeszemednyisdkiszád” (‘Closeyoureyesopenyourmouth’), “Hashozhas” (‘Belly-to-belly’: “Rev” / 379 ) - with the ironic twist that the third item simultaneously conjures up the turn-of-phrase when presenting children with a surprise gift. The 18 th century Addison and Steele parody’s <?page no="259"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 259 sir Fopling Popinjay and Milksop Quidnunc metamorphose into the playfully multilingual “ Jampezzo di Campezzo ” and “ Piculáré Banyanyaló ” in Szentkuthy ( 499 ) - working as translations from Hungarian: the fake Italian name hides jampec (approx. ‘buffoon’), and kampec (from German, ‘finished, done for’), whereas the second suggests a gigolo: from picula (‘coin, money’) + ‘hag-licker’]. The “Revised” text supplies, in a rare gesture of cultural translation, two Hungarian names in be-nobled spelling, suggesting end-of- 19 th century caricature operetta gentry: “Ficsúrházi Kinyalth Tasziló” - a stereotypical surname for comic aristocrat (approx. ‘Tasilo Cosmeticized von Rakeburgh’), and “Nyammoghy Pletyó” (approx. ‘Gossiper Munch-munch’: “Rev” / 384 ). This is complemented by Szentkuthy’s tendency of slipping in extra sexual innuendos: the same parody’s exposition of the epochal project for a national fertilizing and incubating establishment laments the loss of “so many agreeable females with rich jointures” that, in Hungarian, is given the two-directional reading “hány ragyogó nőszemély bő keccsel és csekkel ,” where the playful inversion (‘with generous charms and cheques’) elicits the reader’s filling-in with the low colloquial “csecs(csel)”: ‘boobies.’ The Sterne parody’s wonderland, Cape Horn, was probably taken as a derivative of horny - so in Szentkuthy’s version it metamorphoses into Phalladia ( 503 ). Ironically, Szentkuthy’s “Oxen,” by its ‘word-promiscuity’ - unabashedly overlooking the historical embeddedness and succession of Joyce’s ‘period’ style parodies - freely mixes in its own egregious anachronisms. The Hungarian reader who ought to be reading the Hungarian transposition of 15 th - 17 th century English prose styles, bumps into wordplay, language effects redolent of contemporary colloquialisms (often of German-Yiddish extraction), café table talk, neologisms on every page. At times the effect seems to unwittingly belie Joyce’s own tongue-in-cheek comment added in the coda of his elaborate explanation of Oxen, in his famous 1920 letter to Budgen - “How’s that for high? ” ( LJJ I: 139 - 40 ). The “Revised” “Oxen” text works, in this respect too, backwards : it rectifies textual loci perverted by Szentkuthy, and generally clarifies and explicitates there where Szentkuthy tended to cover up and fill in with his flamboyant event-sentences, opening up eminently obscen-able or, alcoherent readings. A Case Apart: Anachronism The episode’s systematic use of internal anachronisms as a structural device has been receiving considerable critical attention since the 1980 s. Certainly neither Szentkuthy nor Ivănescu could possibly have been aware of insights published after their respective translations - not to mention the fact that circumstances made possible to neither of them to keep in touch with current Joycean research, <?page no="260"?> 260 Erika Mihálycsa which the 2012 Hungarian Ulysses could make full use of. However, some of the more obvious dissonances and deviations from framing styles and registers (usually identifiable voices or intratextual echoes from elsewhere in the novel) are sporadically signaled even by early translators. One such howling breach in style and register occurs early in the episode, in the Malory pastiche where the “franklin” Lenehan makes a rather inclement remark on Mrs Purefoy’s prolonged labor, “Expecting each moment to be her next” ( U 14 . 178 ) - an unequivocal intrusion of pub witticism into the 14 th century style frame. The sentence is one of the numerous intratextual echoes, this time of Lenehan’s comment in “Cyclops,” “Expecting every moment will be his next” ( U 12 . 1649 ); translations thus have to re-create the link to the previous Lenehanism, while also departing significantly from the framing style. Ivănescu’s sentence is consistent with the surrounding pastiche and rhetoric, only to reveal a comically altered archaism: “Așteptându-ne noi oareșicare clipă să îi fie țeonchiul acuma” (approx. ‘expecting each moment to be her end’: RO / Iv II . 56 ) where the nonce țeonc , based on the antiquated term țenc ‘limit; end’) (and possibly playing on the German-derived țanc , as in the idiom la țanc : ‘in the nick of time’), creates the effect of an over-the-top parody of period parlance rather than of intrusive contemporary lingo. Szentkuthy, surprisingly for his general practice, opts for literality here; his sentence, lacking any stylistic or rhetorical figures, stands out from the pastiche unobtrusively for its bland colloquial matter-of-factness and absence of archaic intent: “minden pillanatban várjuk hogy ez a következő” ( HU / Sze 482 ) - failing at the same time to provide the link to “Cyclops.” The “Revised” version gives this rendering a twist: “minden pillanatban várja, hogy az lesz-e a következő” ( HU / “Rev” 371 ), restoring the internal correspondence to the Lenehanism in “Cyclops.” The interrogative subclause (‘whether it will be the next’) heightens the sense of mild colloquial witticism, so both versions create a breach in the framing style. We find a telling difference in translating the Gothic parody where the English Celtophile Haines speaks in the characteristic phrasing and vocabulary of Synge-like stage Irish - a literary idiolect inscribed with internal translations from Gaelic. The passage is punctuated by one of the episode’s most conspicuous and dislocutory breaches in the continuity of style(s) and discourse(s): Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland’s, is in this life […] Dope is my only hope. ( U 14.1018, my emphasis) The jocosely rhyming “Dope is my only hope” brings a linguistic shock-effect and transforms the culmination point of the Gothic parody into utter bathos. <?page no="261"?> The Trials of Foreignization: Transposing Joyce’s “Farraginous Chronicle” 261 Dope is a patent anachronism in the pastiche of “period English,” being documented with the meaning “drugs” from 1889 only ( OED ) fully a century after Walpole’s Castle of Otranto . Ivănescu’s solution intensifies the breach in style and register by placing the in-yer-face neologism drog in a rhetorically highwrought sentence: “Drogul îmi este singura speranță” ( RO / Iv II . 85 : ‘drug is my only hope’). Szentkuthy’s solution, “Tápszerem a kábszer” (‘My nutriment is drugs,’ Sze / 511 ) harnesses the chiming repetition in two conspicuously contemporary and colloquial compounds, where kábszer is the contraction of kábítószer (‘hallucinatory substance’: drug). Both versions seem to underscore Joyce’s elfish reminder re of his authorial design, “How’s that for high? ” Before assuming, however, that Szentkuthy had ingeniously intuited what genetic studies confirmed 40 years later - that Joyce deliberately placed linguistic landmines to upthrow the apple-cart of his own schemata - one needs to mention that his 1974 “Oxen” is brimming with similar anachronistic witticisms and translator’s bloomers, as discussed before. What stands out in the original as a striking incongruity becomes assimilated to the other ‘Szentkuthysms,’ these contrived word-concoctions dominating the pages of the Hungarian Ulysses in such density as to become its chief stylistic marker, obscuring thereby other important thematizations of language, diachronic as well as pertaining to the use of internal translations or dislocutions. In the “Revised” version, this sentence is ironed out and fades into its context: “Egyetlen remény e hűs edény” (‘the sole hope is this cool vessel,’ “Rev” / 393 ) is an overwrought phrase with an internal rhyme that metonymically substitutes “dope” with its recipient, its style congruent with that of the passage, of overblown literariness augmenting the sense of self-parody. However, by smoothing out the incongruity that Joyce planted so carefully into his text, this version performs a rather pedantic correction, stripping the text of perhaps its most daring and subversive layer of self-parody - one that shows even its founding conceit to be arbitrary, and the authorial design at work in the text closer to the “Deranger” than to the “Arranger.” In the happiest cases, (re-)translations carry the sum total of textual knowledge about the original, about SL literature and culture, while also embodying the amount and quality of work done on, and in, SL literature in a given period. (Re)translations of Ulysses especially have the ethical duty to perform the (present-day, all-time) readers’ continuously revised, verified and corrected groping for meaning in a text whose prime characteristic is perhaps the discomfort (and the contingent sense of discovery) it causes in readers by refusing to behave even according to its own norms established in some previous episode and style. As Senn reminds us throughout Dislocutions , “ Ulysses is probably the first consistently autocorrective work of literature” ( 69 ). Ethical translations in this <?page no="262"?> 262 Erika Mihálycsa sense will be those that do not cover up but dramatize our laborious coping with ignorance, with our proceeding by trials and errors, tacitly accepting the fact that the Ulysses text refuses to be comprehended in both senses of the word. 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Print. -. “Strategies of Translation.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies . Ed. Mona Baker. London: Routledge, 1998. 240-244. Print. -. “The Difference That Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious.” Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline . Ed. Alessandra Riccardi. Cambridge: CUP , 2002. 214-241. Print. Véry, Dalma. “Az Ulysses t olvasva” (Reading Ulysses ). Nagyvilág 59.5 (2014): 541-596. Print. Wawrzycka, Jolanta. “‘Tell Us in Plain Words’: Textual Implications of Re-Languaging Joyce.” Joyce Studies in Italy 10: Joyce in Translation. Ed. Maria Bollettieri and Ira Torresi. Roma: Bulzoni, 2007. 39-52. Print. <?page no="265"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction: Foster Wallace, Goldsmith, Danielewski265 Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction: Foster Wallace, Goldsmith, Danielewski David Vichnar To explore the importance of James Joyce for post-war, let alone contemporary, literature presents a challenge to, if not undermining of, most conceptualizations of what has come to be called literary ‘postmodernism,’ which, at least in its application as a period-marker, is ever so often characterized as a replacement of, or successor to, modernism. This, despite the fact that one of its inaugural formalizations, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge ( 1979 ), is based within a “future / anterior” temporality that disproves any simple succession between the two: A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done . […] Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo) . (81, original emphasis) To paraphrase Lyotard’s argument, the effects of Joyce’s poetics cannot be “judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories” to them, for those rules and categories are what Joyce’s fiction “itself is looking for.” Lyotard’s further conceptualization of postmodernism only enhances its paradoxical temporality vis-à-vis modernism: “a work can only become modern if it is first post-modern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” ( 79 ). So long as the postmodern and modern co-exist simultaneously in any culture at any time, their difference is not temporal, but conceptual - and here Lyotard resorts to the notion of the sublime, marking both as different from the realist mimesis whose task is to depict the world “from a point of view that would give it a recognizable meaning” in order that its audience can “decode images and sequences rapidly” and thereby “protect [their] consciousness from doubt” ( 70 ). The sublime, characterized as a disturbance of everyday sense-making, consists in “presenting the existence of something unpresentable. Showing that there is something we can conceive of that we can neither see nor show” ( 74 ). The <?page no="266"?> 266 David Vichnar difference, then, between the modern and the postmodern, for Lyotard, lies in their different employment of this unpresentable sublime - in the modern, the unpresentable is “invoked only as absent content, while the form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader material for consolation or pleasure,” while the postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (81) Remarkably for the present overall argument, when providing two contrastive examples, Lyotard pits against the modernist Proust and his À la Recherche du temps perdu none other than Joyce and his Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , whose use of allusions, intertexts, polysemy and linguistic distortion ambiguity disrupts readers’ perceptions about what a novel - or text, or language, for that matter - should be and do. A similar, yet somewhat cruder, attempt at reconceptualizing the modernist / postmodernist moment in literature (and Joyce) has been undertaken in the highly influential work of Brian McHale. McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction ( 1987 ) argues that the move from modern to postmodern fiction is one from a focus on epistemological issues to an exploration of ontological questions. Thus, whereas the modern is concerned with questions of truth, knowledge and interpretation, the postmodern asks about the following: “What is a world? What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated? ” ( 10 ). Here, a clear progression from the former to the latter is implied, even though no definite lines of division are drawn. Curiously, then, when later on dealing with Joyce’s work in Constructing Postmodernism , McHale enlists Ulysses for his postmodernist cause. A whole chapter of McHale’s book deals with “The Case of Ulysses ” and opens by observing that in spite of its traditional alignment with High Modernism, Ulysses “has lately entered upon a strange second career as a post modernist text” ( 42 ). This is due to its being composed of “two differentiable texts placed side by side, one of them the hallmark of High Modernism, the other something else,” a something else that has recently been called “postmodernism,” the relation between these two, for McHale, being “one of excess and parody : the poetics of the postmodernist chapters exceed the modernist poetics of the ‘normal’ chapters, and the postmodernist chapters parody modernist poetics” ( 43 - 44 , original emphasis). <?page no="267"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 267 McHale proceeds with a discussion of these two halves , one after the other. He examines the “modernist Ulysses ” by means of two formal methodological sub-categories, mobile consciousness and parallax . These two, to McHale’s mind, operate simultaneously within the many varieties of interior discourse techniques which render the mind more mobile, “freer to digress along associative pathways and to produce ‘subworlds’ of its own making,” with the necessary corollary of the “stability of presented world” ( 45 ), but also give rise to perspectivism, and a parallactic “multiplication of versions” of the perceived reality. Parallax, in other words, “both serves to confirm the stability of the world outside consciousness […] and at the same time exposes the similarities and differences between different minds” ( 46 ). McHale’s examples range from individual incidents (the famous cloud scene in U 1 . 248 and 4 . 218 ) to entire episodes (“Wandering Rocks”). McHale’s “other, postmodernist” Ulysses seems to push “the modernist poetics of mobile consciousness and parallax to a point of excess where it topples into something else,” while parodically undermining that modernist poetics ( 47 - 8 ). For his examination, McHale chooses the categories of the mobile world and discursive parallax , generating a postmodernist undecidability based on how “a discourse implies a world,” encoding a particular version of reality, and Joyce’s multiple discursive versions of reality end up inevitably “mutually incompatible, incommensurable” ( 54 ). A case in point of the mobile world category is the “Circe” episode, where the boundary between the “real” and the “hallucinatory” becomes obliterated, as opposed to, for example, the “Proteus” episode where mobility was the property of consciousness only. Discursive parallax is, then, achieved chiefly in episodes such as “Cyclops,” “Oxen of the Sun,” and “Ithaca.” If, in the earlier chapters of Ulysses , there is “an effect of parallax between adjacent sentences of a character’s interior discourse and authorial discourse,” then the later episodes introduce “even a finer-grained parallax within a character’s discourse, a kind of micro-parallax” ( 51 ). Instead of finding fault with the dichotomy of the modern and the postmodern and attempting to reconcile them, McHale resorts to other critics’ conceptualizations of the notion of modernism that would allow him to accommodate its supposed other, although the problem identified here has clearly more to do with critical terminology and reading methods rather than with anything ‘intrinsic’ to Joyce’s text. McHale refers to Helmut Lethen’s article “Modernism Cut in Half,” which argues against the officially presented High Modernism of the likes of Thomas Mann, which he terms “conservative” in that it excludes its avant-garde and consequently projects it onto postmodernism. In this context, Lyotard’s contention that postmodernism presents modernism in its nascent state, and therefore precedes modernism, resonates again: postmodernism “thus <?page no="268"?> 268 David Vichnar precedes the consolidation of modernism - it is modernism with the anomalous avant-garde still left in” ( 81 ). This process, as Lyotard remarks, is constant; McHale argues that what Lyotard means by this is, in effect, “not the particular history of the phases of the twentieth century but a general historical principle whereby each successive cultural phase recuperates what has been excluded and ‘left over’ from the preceding phase and bases its ‘new’ poetics on that leftover” ( 56 ). Thus, the most conclusive point about Joyce vis-à-vis postmodernism of McHale’s entire book lies in its very title: postmodernism itself is a construct , a notion within the critical discourse used as shorthand, to denote both a period and aesthetics. However questionable his modernist / postmodernist binary, McHale’s notion of discursive parallax is not without its merits as a tool for distinguishing between the ambiguous and contradictory drives in Ulysses vis-à-vis the literary tradition and the postmodernist debate. Still, as this essay tries to show, McHale’s notion fails to take stock of the richness Joyce’s heritage offers contemporary writers. The variegated uses to which the Joycean model of literature as stylistic and linguistic plurality has been used in the work of David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Kenneth Goldsmith, go well beyond McHale’s reductive binary. McHale’s notion of the parallax is here reapplied as a metaphorical emblem for the plurality of Joyce’s influences - and the multitude of viewpoints from which Joyce’s oeuvre gets revisited and reworked. I David Foster Wallace’s ( 1962 - 2008 ) Infinite Jest ( 1996 ) is a monumental 1 , 079 page novel in the great American tradition, with a complexity of themes and styles well beyond the scope of the present résumé , yet a work ushering in a new sensibility characteristic of much of contemporary US fiction. Prior to the publication of his opus magnum , Wallace had gained a reputation as a critic and theorist who openly rejected the postmodernist / modernist divide, or the critical casting of his work as belonging to either label. Instead, as critic Marshall Boswell has put it, Wallace “proceeds from the assumption that both modernism and postmodernism are essentially ‘done.’ Rather, his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back” ( 1 , original emphasis). Wallace’s clearest, most programmatic explanation of the next step he is proposing to take came in his 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction,” included later in the non-fiction collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again ( 1997 ), one of the most important pieces in Wallace’s corpus of nonfiction, preceded the publication of Infinite Jest and in many ways prepared the way for that <?page no="269"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 269 career-making book, a response to John Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion.” For Wallace, the self-reflexive quality of Barth’s work, the way it challenges the belief in literature’s ability to address directly the world outside itself, serves as a necessary and even useful response to the modernist project. In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace accuses television of being the primary cause of this shift from a liberating to an isolating anxiety driving the postmodern project. The salient facts about television are, according to Wallace, its emphasis on surface, and its adoption of self-referring postmodern irony as a form of self-defense. The essay primarily seeks to demonstrate how current trends in television have succeeded in dissolving the subversive power of postmodernist metafiction. Wallace distinguishes among three evolutionary stages in the responses of American fiction to this medium since the 1960 s: first, the early work of Gaddis, Barth, and Pynchon, which engaged with pop culture; then, in the 1970 s and 1980 s, with the medium’s increasing importance, irony became fiction’s ground-clearing tool, utilized with the idealist belief that “etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; ” in the third wave, with which Wallace associates himself, fiction does not simply use televisual culture, but attempts to restore the television-flattened world “to three whole dimensions” (qtd. in Burn 16 ). Thus, Wallace’s own method emerges, one that attempts to join “cynicism and naïveté,” as Wallace puts it, or “to turn irony back on itself, to make his fiction relentlessly conscious of its own self-consciousness, and thus to produce work that will be at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth” (Scott 40 ). In this respect, Infinite Jest , stages Wallace’s attempt to prove that cynicism and naïveté are mutually compatible by fictional means, ironizing hip irony in such a way that the opposite of hip irony, that is, “gooey sentiment,” can emerge as the work’s indirectly intended mode, in the service of fiction’s primary task of articulating “what it is to be a fucking human being ” (McCaffery 131 ). The influence of Wallace’s elusive style in service of conveying his very basic message has been remarkable. 1 The encyclopedic form of Infinite Jest most clearly recalls the tradition of massive fictions written by older post-war American writers, beginning with Gaddis’ The Recognitions , and later including works like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow ( 1973 ) or John Barth’s Letters ( 1979 ). And lurking behind them is of course Joyce’s encyclopedic project undertaken in and between Ulysses and the Wake , with which Wallace’s Infinite Jest , based on detailed 1 As Boswell has argued, “since Infinite Jest , a whole new group of emerging young writers has copied the elusive Wallace ‘tone,’ that paradoxical blending of cynicism and naïveté, as well as Wallace’s use of self-reflexivity for the purposes of moving beyond irony and parody” and his examples include Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as “the most prestigious confirmation of Wallace’s revolution in literary sensibility” ( 19 - 20 ). <?page no="270"?> 270 David Vichnar “data-retrieval” ( IJ 332 ), overlaps. Joyce is an unmistakably important influence on Wallace, acknowledged, for example, in his repetition of Buck Mulligan’s adjective “scrotum-tightening” ( IJ 112 ; 605 ) and his shared Ulyssean interest in “telemachy” ( IJ 249 ), but by the same token, Wallace is keen on foregrounding the limitations of the encyclopedic impulse. As Burn has noted, “its fundamental process is to seek exhaustive accounts, and to dramatize the accumulation of information, but most of these efforts (like Hal’s attempt to list everything blue in the headmaster’s waiting room) prove empty and futile exercises” ( 20 - 1 ). As the narrative approaches its inconclusive conclusion, Wallace’s metafictional remark observes that the narrative is moving “toward what’s either a climax or the end of the disk” ( IJ 807 ). But as the reader who reaches the end realizes, the final pages are not really the climax, the end having been already related a few pages before, but instead an invitation to circle back to the beginning of the narrative disk to review the crucial information from the so-called “Year of Glad.” Part of Wallace’s aim seems to be to break with self-reflexivity and direct the reader, in a quasi- Wakean fashion, outside of the book, to find what has escaped the encyclopedia and the self-reflexive, autonomous world of fiction. Thus, even though acknowledging Joyce as creator of memorable coinages and a pioneer of the encyclopedic fictional narrative, Wallace tries to position himself in opposition to Joyce’s materialist poetics based on the autonomy of the literary idiom. Wallace’s revisitation of Joyce’s heritage is “parallactic” in the original Greek sense of “alteration” - Joyce’s encyclopedic style and self-reflexive language are regarded as, however fruitful and inspiring, finished projects, to be altered and ultimately abandoned. II Mark Z. Danielewski’s (* 1966 ) two best works to date, House of Leaves ( 2000 ) and Only Revolutions ( 2006 ), also deal with the situation of the book in the late 20 th -century media environment, facing similar dilemmas and challenges of the digital age identified by Wallace, even though their reactions and proposed solutions are markedly different. A possible synopsis of House of Leaves would run as follows: The novel is composed of an extensive narration of a film by a blind man, Zampano, who dictates his critical commentary about the documentary film The Navidson Record , which was shot by photographer Will Navidson. The film details Navidson and his family’s terrifying ordeal living in a house whose insides gradually grow larger than its frame; the house’s hallway mutates into a labyrinthine black hole that devours sound, light, and eventually human beings. Zampano’s ekphrasis of the film is a scholarly one, incorporating analyzes and judgments <?page no="271"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 271 from literary critics and scientists, both real and imagined. After Zampano’s mysterious death, his scholarly manuscript, The Navidson Record , is discovered by Johnny Truant, a psychologically damaged but highly literary maverick who, in one of the book’s many self-descriptive passages, encounters Zampano’s text as a collection of multimedia scraps: “Endless snarls of words […] on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope […] legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch-taped” ( HoL xvii). Piecing together these disparate fragments, Truant weaves them in his own narrative layer through a set of footnotes that describe his hyperactive sex life, traumatic childhood dominated by a deranged mother Pelafina, and devastating experience with the editing of Zampano’s text. Truant’s version of Zampano’s The Navidson Record is then edited by the corporate entity, “The Editors,” whose presence is noted by the monosyllabic “Ed.” Proceeding in an objective tone that contrasts with Truant’s highly emotive commentary, the Ed. produce an additional set of editorial commentary, footnotes demarcating emendations to the text or acknowledging missing information. Of equal importance is the book’s graphic appearance and textual presentation. Each of these narrative voices is identified by a different font and is associated with a specific medium: Zampano’s academic commentary appears in Times Roman, the font associated with newspapers and the linotype; Truant’s footnotes are in Courier, imitating a typewriter’s inscription, and, as critics have noted, thematically identifying him as the middleman, the “courier” of the manuscript; the terse notations from the Ed. are appropriately presented in Bookman. Furthermore, House of Leaves forms a central node in a network of multimedia, multi-authored forms that collectively comprise its narrative: the House of Leaves website (www.houseofleaves.com), The Whalestoe Letters (an accompanying book by Danielewski containing a section from the novel’s appendix) containing Pelafina’s letters to her son from a mental asylum (in the Dante font), and the musical album Haunted by Danielewski’s sister, the recording artist Poe. Before its publication by Random House, House of Leaves was posted online, twice. Indeed, House of Leaves is not only a layered narrative with multiple narrators, set in an elaborately visual, concrete manner; it is a book conceived as a material object constructed collaboratively by multiple authors and transcription technologies. At the same time, it is a text structured explicitly as a hypertext. The reasons for and the consequences of this are deeper and further reaching than the use of multiple footnoting and the superimposition of narrative framing. The technology of hypertextual writing is present on the micro, textual level. Every appearance of the word “house” is blue, the color of an active hyperlink on the Internet, inscribing the Internet’s interface into the book’s print pages. Besides <?page no="272"?> 272 David Vichnar imitating the interface and navigation structure of the Web, House of Leaves positions itself as a node on the information network before its narrative even begins. Beneath the copyright and publisher’s information is the web address for the official House of Leaves website which, sharing both the title of the novel and its publication date, is its fraternal twin. Thus, rather than viewing the central symbol of the text, the eponymous house, as an updated gothic / horror version of a (Borgesian) textual labyrinth, there is evidence enough to suggest that more appropriate is to treat Danielewski’s House of Leaves as a fictional conceptualization of the situation of the book in a digital age. In his introduction, Johnny Truant warns the reader that “old shelters - television, magazines, movies - won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted” ( HoL xxiii). It is not just the man-eating house that haunts House of Leaves ; it is the mutation of “old shelters” (e. g. books), induced by digital technology. Zampano identifies the digital as the ghost haunting the film The Navidson Record : “even though the spectre of digital manipulation has been raised in The Navidson Record , to this day no adequate explanation has managed to resolve the curious enigma” ( HoL 335 ). The real ghost in the film, and the novel that subsumes it, is the “spectre of digital manipulation” - the presence of an invisible network of technologies that infiltrate our existence, our access to information, and our ability to read our world and its narratives. The ‘horror’ effect of Danielewski’s text is achieved through the well-known identification technique - by conflating the house with the book, he casts the novel’s reader in the position of a reader within the text. This is evident in the pivotal scene when Will Navidson’s brother, Tom, struggles to save Will’s daughter Daisy from certain death. The house swallows him into its dark abyss, and in this moment of horror and ontological impossibility, the house is described as a text: The whole place keeps shuddering and shaking, walls cracking only to melt back together again, floors fragmenting and buckling, the ceiling suddenly rent by invisible claws, causing moldings to splinter, water pipes to rupture, electrical wires to spit and short out. Worse, the black ash of below, spreads like printer’s ink over everything, transforming each corner, closet, and corridor into that awful dark. ( HoL 345) The “black ash” of the house’s internal abyss is compared to “printer’s ink” whose “transforming” power rewrites every space with which it comes into contact. The house is like a book: made of ink, it becomes a thing to be read and analyzed, navigated and referenced. On a macro level, the novel achieves this haunting sense of a narrative crossover between worlds and walls through its relationship to its multimedia net- <?page no="273"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 273 work and in particular to Poe’s album Haunted. House of Leaves promotes a networked reading strategy not only by rewarding the reader with clues contained in its multimedia assemblage, but also by providing, in its central text, a pedagogical example of a reader learning to navigate the system. The production of the novel is an ongoing process, for the Eds. not only acknowledge omissions but also promise future editions: “Though we were ultimately unsuccessful, all efforts were made to determine who wrote the above verse […]. Anyone who can provide legitimate proof of authorship will be credited in future editions. -Ed.” ( HoL 45 ). Such fictional promises to amend the book acknowledge that in a digital age, wherein information can be easily altered and updated, the book is never a discrete and complete object but always a node in an ever-changing network of information, interaction, and potential or ‘virtual’ readings. As must by now be evident, the “fall” of House of Leaves (Poe - not only Danielewski’s sister, but also Edgar Allan - is a touchstone intertext) as a narrative comes as an after-effect of the collapse of text and paratext: Zampano’s The Navidson Record is pure paratext, an ekphrasis on a film; Johnny Truant’s interaction with Zampano’s manuscript provides paratextual commentary in the form of a personal narrative; and the Ed.’s comments on publication serve as a constant reminder of the novel’s processual re-shaping by its paratext. House of Leaves is simultaneously revolutionary and representative of the state of the contemporary novel in its conscious relationship to and incorporation of emergent forms by enacting the process on the level of the medium itself: presenting the book of the twenty-first century as printed medium open to, and evolving into, its digital and electronic contexts. Danielewski’s second novel, Only Revolutions ( 2006 ), is another book-object of the ‘metatextual,’ concrete sort, undermining several of the basic conventions underlying the very process of reading. Only Revolutions reworks the road-movie genre as its plotline traces the journey of a couple of teenage lovers moving through various places and moments in time as they try to outrace history. Their episodic story is told twice, once in Sam’s voice and from his point of view, the other in Hailey’s, and the two versions are often at odds: Only Revolutions is a classic exercise in modernist narrative parallax, however, transposed from the conceptual / narrative level to that of the text / book itself. 2 Only Revolutions is a text that needs to be read in more than one direction, a text with two beginnings, two ends, and a central typographical parallax. The book is produced so that both covers appear as the front of the book. There is the side with the 2 Since it is impossible to read both passages together at once, in McHale’s words, “to integrate them at all requires a dimensional shift from the 2 -D space of the page to the 3 -D space of the book,” a move “beyond the space of the page to the space of the whole book ” ( 148 , original emphasis). <?page no="274"?> 274 David Vichnar green cover, which is the story as told by the character Sam, and the side with the gold cover, which is the story as told by the character Hailey. Every page contains an upside-down text in the bottom margin which forms the pages of the opposite volume, so that the first page of Hailey’s story contains the last several lines of Sam’s story, which appear upside down. These double-block texts create a parallelism, as the plotline and the book as object falls into two equal 180 -page halves mirroring one another. To reconstruct the parallelism, one must leaf back and forth between the two page layouts, flipping the book in the process. The book is designed to be read in both directions: beginning at the title page, one reads the top parts of every page; then, rotating the book 180 degrees and flipping it over, one re begins at a new title page, again reading only the top portions of every page. The two narratives converge in the middle, forming a textually reversed parallax of sorts: on pages 180 - 1 , the same events are narrated in unison by the two characters, though in passages of opposite orientation, one upside down relative to the other; then they diverge again. 3 If House of Leaves invoked as its media-intertext the Internet, then Only Revolutions ’ circularity and the changes evoked in its reading process recall the medium of the cinema, as is evident from Danielewski’s insertion of ‘periods’ in the upper right corner of every twenty pages, referring to the cinematic technique of movie projection, resembling the changeover cues marking the end of a reel in movie projection. The conceptual tie of this book’s circularity to that of the Wake is evident, but as the Joyce critic Dirk Van Hulle has shown, Only Revolutions also employs various specifically textual references. For instance, its very opening, “[b]end by bend I leave every curve / blossomingly,” in the upper text ( OR H 4 ), counterpointed on the same page (upside down) with Sam’s text mentioning “swerves of Peace” ( OR S 357 ), echoes the Wake ’s own opening sentence and its “from swerve of shore to bend of bay” ( FW 3 . 4 ). Toward the very end, on page 355 , a dot in the upper right corner announcing the changeover cue alludes to the Wake ’s “bend of bay” again, announcing the imminent “pause” button ( OR H 359 ), the final change-over cue: “What bending she allways resolves. / What evolving she allways ends” ( OR S 355 ); “What resolving he allways bends. / What ending he allways evolves” ( OR H 355 ). These changeover cues, notes Van Hulle, “turn the readers into projector operators […] In this way, Danielewski gives a whole new meaning to the notion of a page turner […] Before even realizing it properly, the reader unwittingly speeds up the narrative pace and becomes the 3 As Brian McHale notes: “Parallelism here is four-fold . Each passage has an equivalent in the other narrative, but it also parallels (with conspicuous variations) another passage in the same narrative. The effect is one of double mirroring , as it were: mirroring above and below the horizontal line that divides the two narratives, but also mirroring across each narrative, on the same plane” ( 153 , original emphasis). <?page no="275"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 275 one who shuts the. Door - to paraphrase Finnegans Wake ” ( 130 - 1 ). Another example of a Wakean echo would be the scene of bee stinging: “But O what a sting! Now? Me? Over with? ” ( OR S 322 ), which ends the page abruptly, and the next page starts with the word “Wake? ” ( OR S 323 ). The corresponding page in Hailey’s part (after her fall, OR H 321 ) opens: “Hit? / But softly,” recalling Anna Livia Plurabelle’s moving end on the Wake ’s last page: “Finn again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! ” ( FW 628 . 13 - 4 ). 4 Taken together, Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Only Revolutions present a highly imaginative reconceptualization of the role and function of the book in the 21 st century, as well as an innovative project of creating new typographical arrangements and a language capable of responding to the many challenges of the digital age. III Kenneth Goldsmith’s (* 1961 ) Fidget ( 1999 ) opens as follows: Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Stretch. Swallow. Head lifts. Bent right arm brushes pillow into back of head. Arm straightens. Counterclockwise twist thrusts elbow toward ceiling. Tongue leaves interior of mouth passing through teeth. Tongue slides back into mouth. Palm corkscrews. Thumb stretches. ( F 1) In her afterword to the second edition published in 2000 , Marjorie Perloff insists that this is not literary invention or stylization à la Beckett; this is “ poésie vérité , a documentary record of how it actually is when a person wakes up on a given morning” ( 90 - 1 ). 5 Divided up into eleven sections, corresponding to Goldsmith’s eleven hours awake that day, Fidget is clearly structured as an 4 In Van Hulle’s witty commentary, Only Revolutions is a markedly modernist text in that its “chiastic structure has the effect of marking a centre of indifference in the middle of the whirlpool of revolutions. Joyce seems to have employed this marker as a kind of stylistic equivalent of the pencilled x with which one marks an interesting passage in a book, thus drawing attention to epiphanic moments, comparable to Marcel Proust’s memoires involontaires or Virginia Woolf ’s ‘moments of being.’ But Only Revolutions does not seem to imply the same modernist suggestion that a special meaning could be attached to such moments of ‘being’” ( 136 ). 5 As Goldsmith explains in a letter to Perloff: “ Fidget ’s premise was to record every move my body made on June 16 , 1997 (Bloomsday). I attached a microphone to my body and spoke every movement from 10 : 00 AM, when I woke up, to 11 : 00 PM, when I went to sleep. I was alone all day in my apartment and didn’t answer the phone, go on errands, etc. I just observed my body and spoke. From the outset the piece was a total work of fiction. As I sit here writing this letter, my body is making thousands of movements; I am only able to observe one at a time. It’s impossible to describe every move my body made on a given day. Among the rules for Fidget was that I would never use the first-person ‘I’ to describe movements. Thus every move was an observation of a body in space, not <?page no="276"?> 276 David Vichnar homage to the hour-by-hour chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses , the epic of the body. And as in Ulysses , different actions dominate different hours. Goldsmith’s performative Bloomsday experiment has a number of interesting consequences. As Perloff notes, telling the “truth,” Goldsmith quickly discovers, may be the biggest “fiction” of all, it being “humanly impossible to track all of one’s bodily movements” ( 91 ). Goldsmith admits in his letter that after five hours of the experiment in which he monitors his body as it gets out of bed and interacts with objects like coffee cups, he “began to go crazy.” By 6 : 00 PM , “as a defence my body put itself to sleep,” yet upon waking, realizing he still has five or six hours to go, the defence mechanism is alcohol. Later, when he plays the tapes, Goldsmith finds that in the drunk sequence his words have become completely slurred and in the last chapter ( 22 : 00 ) quite incomprehensible. So, in a Beckettian move, “I ran the first chapter backwards, mirrored it, then reversed every letter,” bringing the whole text to a close: “.pilfocragniwolloftfelothtuom foe dis thgirmorfgnivompilrewolssorcasnureugnoT Eyelids close” ( F 87 ). The sentences from this last chapter were then put into reverse order, with the last actions coming first, and the first coming last. The only exception is the very last line of the book, “Eyelids close,” which is printed in standard order, “creating a full circle of closure for the day. Further editorial interventions included the elision of all articles or “unnecessary words,” as well as “all possible literary and art references,” with the aim to make the text “very dry and descriptive” and “to divorce the action from the surroundings, narrative and attendant morality” ( 92 - 3 ). Let me trace this process of disintegration by means of a few passages. Here is, for example, coffee-drinking at noon: Back on back of chair. Legs touch legs. Arms parallel arms of chair. Hands grasp end of arms. Legs push back. Feet flat on ground. Elbow on arm. Arms out. Cup to mouth. Swallow. Cup put down. Teeth outside mouth. Legs lift. Legs stretch on legs ninety degrees. Grasp paper towels. Slide to front. Left hand grasps right. Pull away from left. Left hand stretches. Fold. ( F 22) Fidget ’s breakdown of bodily functions into their smallest components has a strong effect of defamiliarization, a synecdochic decentering of human subjectivity, which also marks so many of Ulysses descriptions of bodily movements or actions. There are some strong poetic effects present here, too: the relation of human arms and legs to the metaphoric arms and legs of a chair or a table, the place of the teeth as one opens one’s mouth wide enough to drink, the movement one makes when folding a paper towel - “all these,” notes Perloff, my body in a space. There was to be no editorializing, no psychology, no emotion - just a body detached from a mind” (qtd. in Perloff 90 ). <?page no="277"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 277 take on an aura of gravity as if something of great importance is taking place, something in need of urgent commentary” ( 96 ). Such self-consciousness, or more properly body consciousness, is gradually abandoned, with the entries getting shorter and shorter and by the time one gets to chapter nine ( 18 : 00 ), one finds the following: “Reach. Grasp. Reach. Grab. Hold. Saw. Pull. Hold. Grab. Push. Itch. Push. Push. Turn. Walk. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Turn” ( F 70 ). Shortly after, the language of description disintegrates into nonsense and neologism: “Spinger thumb. Now is lift. Thumb to flip. Now thumb. Indents forefinger. Crease unnaturally lumpy. Right and right is face down on ground. Riched lightly. Arching four and blade middle and not touch ground. Still harrow. Body is sit. Licks wet” ( F 75 ) or “Unpegged chip of tongue. Stealing very hard ridge. Very hard skin in its septemberary. Hoohoo arises. Giggle hits head” ( F 78 ). Goldsmith’s transcription of the first chapter in reverse order also achieves some highly poetic effects, words achieving new unexpected meanings: a key word is “morf ” (from), a word highly applicable in the context along with “woble” (elbow), or “pil” (lip). There is much “dna” (and) about. When finally the language game has occluded the multiform activities of the moving body, “[e]yelids close” ( F 87 ). What marks Fidget as a new development in poetics at the turn of the 21 st century is its existence in multiple media realizations, the printed text being only one of them. There is a musical version, which was performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and there is also the Java applet e-version. 6 Thus, what Perloff terms Goldsmith’s differential poetics is not the usual “intermedia” poetics (produced by blending word with image or by setting word to music or reciting it on film), but the production of a work that exists differentially in alternate media, “as if to say that knowledge is now available through different channels and by different means” ( 101 ). In 2002 , Goldsmith created a slightly different “uncreative project.” In Head Citations , he presents 800 variations, paronomasiac and malapropistic, on famous pop song lyrics. Christian Bök’s back-cover blurb describes Goldsmith as “the Napster of the malapropism” who “downloads the poetic genius of the masses as they croon to themselves in their showers.” Craig Dworkin’s praise 6 As Perloff describes: “Time is speeded up in the applet so that each hour period takes approximately five to seven minutes to complete. The viewing of the Java applet from any specific site would take about eighty minutes, and then the cycle begins all over again. […]. When the text’s linear momentum is replaced by spatial organization, words interact in new ways. […]. In the applet, words appear as words rather than signifiers of X or Y, morphology and physical appearance taking precedence over denotations. […]. As a visual and kinetic space, Fidget has an austere and silent beauty quite different from the printed version or from its oral enactment, for, as seen on the screen, this language has neither memory nor agency” ( 99 - 100 ). <?page no="278"?> 278 David Vichnar even quotes Finnegans Wake : “‘Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness’ to this book of earrors and close listing, as Joyce would put it. So prick up your arse and glisten well. Besides, ‘e’erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? ’” To equate or parallel Head Citations - the title coming from “ 11 . She’s giving me head citations” ( HC 7 ) - with Finnegans Wake is absurd, of course, although the parody of the mythology of popular song is performed with a similar ear for possible eroticized détournement , and to similarly amusing effect. From “ 1 . This is the dawning of the age of malaria. 2 . Another one fights the dust. 3 . Eyeing little girls with padded pants. 4 . Teenage spacemen we’re all spacemen” ( HC 7 ), via sequences such as 673. Are you going to Harvard or Yale. 673.1. Are you going to Scarlet O’Hare. 673.2. Parsley, sage, rosemary and Todd. 673.3. Parsley’s age grows merry in time. 673.4. Parsley’s angels, Mary and Tom. 673.5. Partly saved, Rosemary and Tom. 673.6. People say it was Mary and Tom. 673.7. Parsnips say Rosemary is blind. ( HC 72) all the way to “ 800 . Sleep in heavenly peas, sleep in heavenly peas” ( HC 87 ), Head Citations ’ paronomasiac humor entails some highly destabilizing effects. Most recently, 2011 saw not only the publication of the co-edited (with Craig Dworkin) Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing - an almost six-hundred-page compendium of conceptual writing, regarded as our contemporary instantiation of avant-garde poetry, whose official debut the anthology is supposed to launch - but also Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age . Its opening premise is that writing, in the digital age of the web, has “met its photography,” its technological extension that can transpose it into a whole new medium and simultaneously bring about a major change in its functioning. If painting, a hundred years ago, reacted to photography by abstraction, then, Goldsmith observes, the reaction of writing could be the opposite: “It appears that writing’s response - taking its cues more from photography than painting - could be mimetic and replicative, primarily involving methods of distribution, while proposing new platforms of receivership and readership” ( Uncreative 15 ). This “mimetic and replicative” writing is then contextualized as part of the development of literary modernity: from Stéphane Mallarmé via Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound to the language-poetry of e. g. Charles Bernstein. An important step in this process is Joyce’s Wake and its original encrypting through writing of the medium of the voice. Even though, on the page, Finnegans Wake remains “a book of compound words and <?page no="279"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 279 neologisms, all of which look to the uninitiated like reams of nonsensical code,” which renders it, to Goldsmith’s mind, “one of the most disorienting books ever written in English,” when read aloud and heard, the Wake undergoes a marked change: But hearing Joyce read / decode a portion of Finnegans Wake , most famously his own recording of the “ ALP ” section, is a revelation: it all makes sense, coming close to standard English, yet on the page it remains “code.” Reading aloud is an act of decoding. Taken one step further, the act of reading itself is an act of decoding, deciphering, and decryption. ( Uncreative 19) The change brought about by the digital age to the functioning of writing and language, Goldsmith observes, has been (and will continue to be) momentous. 7 The virtual omnipresence, in the contemporary culture, of text and writing as code, calls for a consideration of what Goldsmith dubs textual ecology, “an ecosystem that can encompass language in its myriad forms” ( Uncreative 27 ). His literary analogue, again, is Joyce and his meditation on the universal properties of water in the “Ithaca” episode: When Joyce writes about the different forms that water can take it reminds me of different forms that digital language can take. Speaking of the way water puddles and collects in “its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs,” I am reminded of the process whereby data rains down from the network in small pieces when I use a Bit-Torrent client, pooling in my download folder. When my download is complete, the data finds its “solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes” as a movie or music file. When Joyce speaks of water’s mutability from its liquid state into “vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail,” I am reminded of what happens when I join a network of torrents and I begin “seeding” and uploading to the data cloud, the file simultaneously constructing and deconstructing itself at the same time. ( Uncreative 27) Discussing the compositional procedure by means of which Joyce wrote this passage, by patch-writing an encyclopedia entry on water, Goldsmith even enlists Joyce as a precursor to his practice of uncreative writing. Joyce “presages uncreative writing by the act of sorting words, weighing which are ‘signal’ and which are ‘noise,’ what’s worth keeping and what’s worth leaving. Identifying - weighing - language in its various states of ‘data’ and ‘information’ is crucial to 7 Goldsmith notes: “What we’re experiencing for the first time is the ability of language to alter all media, be it images, video, music, or text, something that represents a break with tradition and charts the path for new uses of language. Words are active and affective in concrete ways. You could say that this isn’t writing, and, in the traditional sense, you’d be right. But this is where things get interesting: we aren’t hammering away on typewriters; instead - focused all day on powerful machines with infinite possibilities - the writer’s role is being significantly challenged, expanded, and updated” ( Uncreative 24 ). <?page no="280"?> 280 David Vichnar the health of the ecosystem” ( Uncreative 28 ) - an official acknowledgment, on Goldsmith’s part, of an artistic and ideological connection with Joyce’s poetics, evident in both his theory and practice of fiction. IV This essay’s exploration of the liveliness and relevance of James Joyce’s heritage for contemporary American fiction, as exemplified by David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Kenneth Goldsmith, has revealed the following parallactic observations: Wallace’s Infinite Jest attests to the liveliness of Joyce’s stylistic plurality and his lasting contribution to the genre of the encyclopedic epic - even though Wallace’s own parallax is a contesting alteration. Whilst Danielewski’s House of Leaves seems to revisit the modernist heritage of concrete writing and typographical collage, Only Revolutions goes even deeper in reusing the modernist parallelism of perception and multiple viewpoints on the material plane of the book as medium. Finally, Goldsmith’s texts such as Fidget reuse Joyce’s ‘hyper-realist’ poetics of linguistic materialism in order to capture, ever so exhaustively, the everyday ‘real,’ and his essayistic work shows how Joyce’s oeuvre can be put to creative use as a reservoir of ideas and concepts by which to capture the status of writing and textuality in the age of electronic media. Taken together, the three writers’ creative reworking of the many techniques employed in Joyce’s poetics attest to the fact that, far from reducible to a single concept or overriding tendency as in McHale’s theory, Joyce’s heritage for literary practice is inexhaustibly parallactic, changing together with its observers’ own changing viewpoints and literary concerns - whether these may entail advances in the novel genre (Wallace), experimentation with typography and the book medium (Danielewski), or the many possibilities offered by the digital age to textual encoding and its performative decoding (Goldsmith). Now, halfway through the second decade of the twenty-first century, as at the time of its inception, Joyce’s poetics still continues to offer a fresh multitude of various perspectives to its new observers. Bibliography Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace . Columbia: U of South California P, 2003. Print. Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide . London: Continuum, 2003. Print. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves . London: Anchor, 2000. Print. -. Only Revolutions . New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Print. Goldsmith. Kenneth. Fidget . Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000. Print. <?page no="281"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 281 -. Head Citations . Great Barrington: The Figures, 2002. Print. -. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age . New York: Columbia UP , 2011. Print. Lethen, Helmut. “Modernism Cut in Half.” Approaching Postmodernism . Ed. Douwe W. Fokkema and Hans Bertens. Utrecht: Publications in Comparative Literature, 1986. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP , 1991. Print. McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993): 127-150. Print. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction . London: Methuen, 1987. Print. -. Constructing Postmodernism . London: Routledge, 1992. Print. -. “ Only Revolutions , or, the Most Typical Poem in World Literature.” Mark Z. Danielewski . Ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. Manchester: Manchester UP , 2011. 141-158. Print. Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Vocable Scriptsigns’: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget .” “Afterword” to Fidget . 2000. By Kenneth Goldsmith. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000. 90-107. Print. Scott, A. O. “The Panic of Influence.” New York Review of Books 47.2 (2000): 39-43. Print. Van Hulle, Dirk. “Only Evolutions: Joyce’s and Danielewski’s Works in Progress.” Mark Z. Danielewski . Ed. Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. Manchester: Manchester UP , 2011. 123-140. Print. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest . New York: Little & Brown, 1996. Print. -. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction , 13: 2 (1993: Summer). 151-194. Print. <?page no="282"?> 282 Ilaria Natali “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery Ilaria Natali Such is the plight of those, like me, who look at the trees, even the leaves, and never see the wood. (Senn, Murmoirs 172) 1 The concepts of parallax and metempsychosis govern the construction of Joyce’s Ulysses , where they are at play on various levels. These mutually constitutive elements often intertwine with each other, as is the case with Molly and Bloom’s parallactic definitions of metempsychosis: Molly re-interprets the word through a phonetic misreading, whereas Bloom attempts an etymological (but equally confusing) explanation of it. An explicit connection between the two ideas is then established in Bloom’s thoughts: Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks! ( U 194.8-11) Actually, textual patterns related to the concepts of parallax and metempsychosis characterize Joyce’s writing well before the composition of Ulysses , and can be traced back to the first testimonies of his literary inspiration. I am especially referring to associations of words and images that bring about a change in perspective by connecting seemingly distant items: in this process, a visual stimulus is interpreted through a metaphorical transformation of sensory experience, so that a ‘concrete object’ is associated with another that it might be thought to resemble. The most representative examples of this procedure are included in Giacomo Joyce , where ‘naked appositions’ are frequently encountered: (1) Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded mollusks. ( GJ 5) (2) Great bows on her slim bronze shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl. ( GJ 8) 1 I am greatly indebted to Fritz Senn for precious teachings, ideas, guidance, support, humor and hospitality over the years. My special thanks also go to Professor Donatella Pallotti (University of Florence), from whose essays on Giacomo Joyce I derived much inspiration for the present work. <?page no="283"?> Parallaxing Joyce In Contemporary American Fiction 283 In the above excerpts, objects acquire new forms through a sort of metempsychosis, as the imaginative shift proceeds from one physical entity to another: in passage ( 1 ), lips are linked to molluscs; in passage ( 2 ), Donatella Pallotti emphasizes that it is not clear whether we should relate “bows” with “spurs” or “shoes” with “spurs,” but, in any case, two different tangible elements are associated ( 308 ). In Joycean terms, this sort of metaphoricity disentangles “the […] soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances” to “re-embody it” in artistic terms ( SH 78 ). It should be noted that recent studies in mental imagery and cognition are relevant to Joyce’s ‘re-embodied’ images, as it is possible to relate these associations to the conceptual theory of metaphor. In mental imagery studies, connections between two or more perceptible entities are defined as “image metaphors,” which “depict one thing in terms of another based on shared perceptual features (visual or otherwise)” (Grady 193 ). Simply put, image metaphors create a relationship between concrete entities that share structural and physical similarities, encouraging a sensory reading of the textual fragment. In grammatical terms, image metaphors often imply associations between nouns; as Baker points out, “the noun, among all the parts of speech, has a distinctly sensuous and especially visual quality” ( 128 ). The mechanism underlying this subset of resemblance-based metaphors can remind us of parallax especially because both displacements provide “a model for changing our way of looking at things” (Fitzgerald 216 ), but there are further aspects to this relationship. Studies on both mental imagery and image metaphor have demonstrated that the human mind works out associations visually, but is not capable of fusing the images together; it can switch back and forth between them, and not superimpose or merge them (Finke et al. 52 - 4 ; Gleason 439 ). Thus, combinations such as those of “lips” and “molluscs,” or “bows” and “spurs” exist independently from one another in the reader’s mind and, at the same time, pair to form a single effect - as in parallax, they send “the observant mind in two, or more, different positions” (Senn, “The Challenge” 136 ). Both Joyce’s published and unpublished works are rich in examples of image metaphors, often connected by common threads and recurring patterns: (3) In the colonnade are the girls, […] They are leaving shelter, with […] the pretty rescue of petticoats, under umbrellas, a light armoury, upheld at cunning angles. (Scholes and Kain 35) (4) Poised on its [of the piano] edge a woman’s hat, red-flowered, and umbrella, furled […] casque, gules, and blunt spear on a field, sable. ( GJ 16) In excerpt ( 3 ) from Epiphanies , umbrellas are related to “armoury,” as they may recall round (spiked) shields. Umbrellas seem to protect the girls from masculine <?page no="284"?> 284 Ilaria Natali attentions; at the same time, they are also weapons of seduction. 2 A similar relationship between umbrellas and weapons is established in excerpt ( 4 ): a woman is objectified through her accessories, which are then transformed into a coat of arms, making particular reference to color correspondences. Such analogies are established through structural similarity, amid a grid of other references, and they require an imaginative effort on the reader’s part. This effort fosters a visual experience, as clearly emerges from the scholarly comments on the passage: Vicki Mahaffey argues that the arrangement of the umbrella and the hat could be seen to form “a lowercase ‘a’” ( 391 ); Joseph Valente adds a resemblance to a “p” according to the possible dispositions of these objects on the piano, and mentions “a cubist portrait” of a woman’s name ( 130 ). At a conceptual level, the metaphors tackle the conventional opposing categories of ‘love and war,’ staging a sort of ‘battle of the sexes,’ in which possible weapons include the symbols of feminine vanity. This sort of battle often recurs in Joyce’s corpus, 3 especially in the “umbrella history” in Finnegans Wake , where “all’s fair in vanessy” ( 3 . 11 - 12 ); the need of a “parasoul” ( 569 . 20 ) or shield against seduction also re-surfaces in Portrait while Stephen is musing on an illicit relationship: (5) The park trees were heavy with rain; and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. […] They embraced softly impelled by […] the shield-like witnessing lake […]. ( P 248) The correspondence lake / shield is obviously visual, in that two shiny grey surfaces are associated by structural similarity. At the same time, quotations ( 3 - 5 ) all employ heraldic terms, with possible reference to both chivalrous love and the moral decay behind the aristocratic façade. 4 In Portrait , image metaphors often map essential, ‘geometric’ forms in seemingly elementary patterns that can hardly be said to represent metaphors “not used in everyday reasoning” (Caballero 78 ). 5 Yet, the associations are highly personal in nature, since the main frame for the creation of meaning is not mere semiotic interplay but individual (and textual) memory: 2 Interestingly, any reference to “armoury” disappears when the epiphany is re-elaborated in Portrait , where the girls act “demurely” ( P 235 ), and the idea of feminine delicacy or coquetry is partially eliminated. 3 See also Pomes Penyeach , “Simples,” lines 9 - 12 ( PP 48 ). 4 On this topic see also O’Shea. 5 Caballero, who analyzes image metaphors in the architectural discourse, questions this assumption suggesting a need to review the definitions of “image metaphor” provided so far. This need is particularly evident, in my opinion, if we consider the somewhat confusing theoretical discourse regarding the conceptual import of image metaphors. <?page no="285"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 285 (6) There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography: a big ball in the middle of clouds. ( P 12) (7) A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand […]. ( P 187) (8) The earth was like a swinging smoking swaying censer, a ball of incense, an ellipsoidal ball. ( P 236-237) In these excerpts, Stephen’s metaphors tend to relate celestial bodies to earthly forms. While Epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce bring about unexpected and highly imaginative associations with an effect of estrangement, Portrait often produces a metaphoric shift towards a familiar sphere of everyday objects, which fit the experience of the world of a child (excerpt 6 ) or a young man ( 7 , 8 ). In quotation ( 6 ), Stephen’s seeing the earth as a “ball” suggests a standard similarity of shape; not only is the imagery culturally determined, but the relationship is also predictable, since it must be suitable for a child’s mind. 6 Yet, all three mappings offer a privileged access into Stephen’s multi-layered domains of knowledge, and they seem to reflect his various interactions with the physical and cultural environment. In passage ( 7 ), a more mature Stephen apparently interconnects two different kinds of life experience. Reference to the “hoop” brings to mind childhood imagery; 7 then, echoes of early days combine with what might be Stephen’s recollection of later literary readings, as a “silver rim” of the moon also appears in line 113 of Keats’ poem “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill.” In a similar way, example ( 8 ) ironically connects in a sequence of images drawn from Stephen’s memories and concerns, both recent and deep-rooted; the latter certainly include the leitmotiv of the church, hinted at through the “censer.” Suddenly, though, recollections of the lecture about the “elliptical and ellipsoidal” ( P 207 ) and Moynihan’s crude humor about it mark a sharp turn in the chain of associations. The intratextual reference to “ellipsoidal balls” can be said to ironically and critically re-read young Stephen’s naive view of the earth as “a big ball,” showing that, together with Stephen’s personal memory, a sort of textual memory has been accessed. Somehow, the two similar associations earth / ball provide a parallactic view of Stephen’s mind, a before and an after in his experience and modality of apprehension. 6 Incidentally, this procedure resembles the “geometrical” perception of nature in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves ( 9 ). 7 In y too, the hoop functions as a symbol of youth: “What memories had he of her adolescence? She relegated her hoop and skipping rope to a recess” ( U 812 . 12 - 3 ). <?page no="286"?> 286 Ilaria Natali In Portrait , interrelated image metaphors not only re-read each other, but, at times, they also concur in creating an effect of dynamism. This is apparent in the episode where Stephen is corporally punished at Clongowes: (9) A hot burning stinging tingling blow […] made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire […] his crumpled burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. ( P 51) The whole passage is rich in syntactic and lexical repetitions that emphasize the sequence of Stephen’s interassociating perceptions and senses. The various fragments are connected in a progression, producing a sense of continuity comparable to that of a cinematic sequence: the dynamism of subjective experience subdivides the narrative in a flow of brief and juxtaposed images, and the two similes “like a leaf in the fire” and “like a loose leaf in the air” can be compared to consecutive frames in a film. The temporal unfolding of the scene is especially suggested by the recurrence of the verb “crumple” in different moods, while the noun “leaf ” represents a visual point of reference. It is worth underlining that, whereas in Portrait image associations can be connected to one another in dynamic sequences, in Epiphanies the illusion of movement is sometimes inherent in a single image. The epiphany which opens with “[t]hat is no dancing” illustrates this technique well: (10) He begins to dance […] until he seems to be a whirling body, a spider wheeling amid space, a star. (Scholes and Kain 23) First, the human body metaphorically transforms itself into a spider, in an only seeming violation of Lakoff and Turners’ principle that image metaphors relate source and target “by virtue of their common shape” ( 90 ). Actually, the association human body / spider entails a ‘multiplication of limbs’ that could be interpreted as a representation of movement, anticipating the Futurist pictorial experimentation; we might think, in particular, of Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash ( 1912 ). Different semiotic practices adopt similar mechanisms: Joyce’s text blurs the figure into a dark, indistinct and many-limbed shape to suggest simultaneous frenetic motion in a single image. The subsequent stage of apprehension pictured in the epiphany further enacts the sense of enfolding movement and brings it to its ‘extreme’ representation: “a star.” The lines signaling movement become copious and energy-laden like rays of light; the moving body is now not only blurry but also ‘dazzling,’ as any synthesis of movement is at least partially invisible to the eye. The alliteration of “s” and “w” provide an additional unifying element, underlining that the different views are stages of the same process. <?page no="287"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 287 To return to Portrait , ‘image re-embodiments’ raise a final question: the associations often involve all senses, as is typical of young Stephen’s multisensory understanding of reality. Some constructions associate sound-to-sound impressions, with only a partial or ‘functional’ visual import: 8 (11) The laugh, pitched in a high key and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the whinny of an elephant. ( P 218) (12) […] he could hear […] the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl. ( P 61) The texts exploit metaphoric sound transferences between different domains, while physical or spatial information is contextual to the auditory element. In particular, in excerpt ( 12 ), the process of apprehension is represented through a sequence of colons, which delays the actual association. The pre-semantic sounds that precede the simile (“pick, pack, pock, puck”) allegedly represent pure perception, yet the object of that perception is already identified and present in Stephen’s mind (“sound of the cricket bats”). Thus, the expected process of apprehension is here subverted and might be thought to bring us a step back instead of a step forward. We can interpret this subversion as a result of Stephen’s reflection on phonetic language features as acoustic material; indeed, part of the sentence could be read as a musical notation, since two vertically aligned dots (resembling a colon) are commonly used as a ‘repeat sign’ in sheet music. More often, however, image metaphors in Portrait create synesthetic relationships based on recognition of the same stimulus through different sensorial modalities: (13) […] there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. ( P 181-182) (14) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot […] Their cry was shrill and clear […] like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools. ( P 243) In excerpt ( 13 ), different senses activate each other and interact in creating new meaning; the pattern is quite clear, since it relates absence of sound to that of light, as well as their possible opposites, a note and a star respectively. Quotation ( 14 ) opens with an almost entirely aural association, and then shifts to purely visual terms, as the aural impression triggers an image in the perceiver’s mind (“threads of silken light”). 8 Image metaphors can also map non-visual elements, as they are concerned with sensorial impressions in a broad sense; see Sullivan 107 . <?page no="288"?> 288 Ilaria Natali Once again, image ‘re-embodiments’ seem rooted in a sort of mnemonic ground, which includes intertextual associations (or textual memories). Although the image of the ‘mouse behind the wainscot’ is quite common, 9 it notably appears in Tennyson’s Maud ( VI , viii, 9 ), along with a “silken net” imagined by the speaker ( VI , iv, 7 ). At the same time, the silken threads from “whirring spools” might recall Browning’s Pippa Passes , or “pippap passage,” as it is distorted in Finnegans Wake ( 301 . 07 ). The parallactic procedure in excerpt ( 14 ) is thus articulated on different levels: the image transference itself provides a dual perspective, enhanced by the shift from one mode of perception to another, and further enriched by the coexistence of an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ discourse, which connects the past with the present. As Roger Shattuck observes in explaining Proust’s ‘binocular vision,’ “like our eyes, our memories must see double: these two images then converge in our minds into a single heightened reality” ( 47 ). *** The examples provided so far show that image associations in Portrait are almost inevitably conveyed by similes. This figure of speech somehow creates a distance between the two poles of the comparison while also making their relationship explicit. As Karen Sullivan notes: Because similes draw attention to partial mappings and novel metaphors, these constructions are particularly effective in image metaphor. The sparseness of mappings and novelty of image metaphors makes them especially compatible with a simile-type hedge. (112) Debate on different effects of similes is still open, and it is not easy to offer generalizations. We might certainly assume that, compared to prototypical metaphoric constructions, similes reduce tension and semantic shock; as a consequence, ambiguity is often relieved, and the sense of ‘friction’ created by mere juxtaposition is absent. Croft and Cruse note that “in the vast majority of similes, there is a specification of the respect in which the resemblance holds” ( 213 ), and this common procedure ‘guides’ and facilitates interpretation. 9 Interestingly, mice “making a noise behind the wainscot” also appear in Barbauld’s Lessons for Children from Two to Three Years Old ( 42 ). Barbauld’s book fosters learning through the senses and understanding of metaphorical expressions; in 1814 , the Lessons were adopted by the Kildare Place Society (Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in England), which “produced them in large quantities for distribution by Irish booksellers” (Raftery 156 ). <?page no="289"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 289 Similes are hardly ever employed in image metaphors in Ulysses , where different elements are generally linked together through appositional constructions. Two tendencies seem to characterize image re-embodiment in Ulysses ; despite the flexibility of styles in the novel, a general distinction might be drawn between the representation of thought connected to Stephen and to Bloom. While in the chains of reasoning pertaining to Stephen, image metaphors are usually introduced by commas, Bloom’s sense-perceived associations are dotted by a stream of colons: (15) Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn […] ( U 46.26-7) (16) Hair braided over: shell with seaweed. ( U 363.11) The use of punctuation deeply correlates with the structures characterizing the representation of Stephen and Bloom’s thoughts. Commas and colons help encode different syntactic patterns; punctuation marks do not shape such patterns, but make them more visible, and have a core function in establishing their overall rhythm and effect. In excerpt ( 15 ), Stephen envisions Eve’s body; incidentally, its association with a buckler adds to the motif of heraldic imagery and (illicit) seduction that we have seen in Joyce’s earlier works. The alliterative sequence of “b” sounds finds an abrupt interruption in the prepositional phrases that close the analogy; although Stephen re-introduces a regular rhythm in the clause when he corrects himself, the sound pattern is lost. Accordingly, the whole construction seems to represent a search for perfection in literary form and imagery rather than a mere mental process. The series of juxtapositions produces a kinetic effect; fragments are separated by commas, the smallest interruption in continuity of speech, and create a flow of associations which progresses by accumulation of ideas. The brief phrases give a sense of forward motion, yet the overall feeling is of tension towards a closure that is only provisional or partial, as the self-correction suggests. Quotation ( 16 ) presents Bloom’s thoughts while looking at Miss Douce in the Ormond Bar. We perceive the association as more dramatic than ( 15 ); the connection between the two images appears clear-cut and ‘closed,’ expressed through a fragmentary and laconic construction where the second member of the apposition apparently identifies the first. In general, the colon is said to serve as a mark of anticipation, as it prepares the reader for a forthcoming explanation, amplification or re-formulation of the material. In passage ( 16 ), the use of this punctuation mark is not conventional, but it still captures the reader’s attention, introducing a break in continuity; it could hint, for instance, at a shift in the planes of perception. The colon here might also function as a “graphological indicator of identification” (Quirk et al. <?page no="290"?> 290 Ilaria Natali 1309 ); certainly, it denotes a close relationship between the two units, the purport of which remains implicit. As Clive Scott remarks discussing Baudelaire, “the colon loads syntactical and semantic relationships with invisible motive and intention; by concealing these motives, [it] engages readerly intuition, suspicion, interpretivity” ( 161 ). Image re-embodiments in Ulysses often follow these two tendencies and are included either in a continuous flow of discourse or in a broken syntactic movement: (17) […] lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. ( U 33.11-2) (18) A tilted urn poured from its mouth a flood of bloodhued poplin: lustrous blood. ( U 213.30-1) In excerpt ( 17 ), Stephen is allegedly reading the “signatures of all things” ( U 45 . 7 - 8 ), including a stain of ink on his student’s skin. The list-like enumeration of coordinate phrases establishes a rhythmic succession of fragments, with a sense of increase that escalates to a final climax in “a snail’s bed.” The clause proceeds by accumulation, and we might view the final apposition as a further ‘addition’ to the sequence. On the other hand, quotation ( 18 ) reflects Bloom’s imaginative experience as he passes a mercer shop. The use of the past tense suggests that the first part of the sentence can be ascribed to the narrator; therefore, the parallactic procedure operates on multiple levels. The images “poplin” / “blood” belong to different sources in two ways: they represent a shift in planes of knowledge and, at the same time, they are conveyed by distinct fictional figures. It might be noted that representations of Stephen’s thought in Ulysses rarely involve mapping the structure of a sensory image onto another sensory image; the shift is more commonly from a concrete to an abstract domain, as with the “lions couchant” on the gate of the school, which become “toothless terrors” ( U 44 . 13 - 4 ). When two ‘concrete objects’ are related, the connection is often based on a key conceptual projection rather than on the images’ physical properties, as is the case with the dog scraping “up the sand […] a pard, a panther” ( U 58 . 30 - 1 ). Both Bloom’s interior monologue and the narrator’s reports concerning this character, instead, are rich in image metaphors, as might be predictable in light of Bloom’s sense-filled experience of the world. Accordingly, parallactic shifts of images establish a thematic pattern in Ulysses ; they often reflect not only sensuous, but also ‘sensual’ individual experience. This procedure emerges particularly in the “Sirens” episode, which is devoted to seduction and desire, but it probably finds a typical expression in the wellknown closing of “Lotus Eaters”: <?page no="291"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 291 (19) He saw […] his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. ( U 107.18-22) Since Bloom’s thoughts are conveyed by the narrative voice, “it is not crystal clear whether Bloom himself, rather than the narrator on his behalf, analogizes his penis to the lotus flower” (Gillespie 331 ). Such analogy, together with the preceding ones, is enclosed within a ‘fluid’ narrative, which reminds us of the ‘flow of discourse’ which I have broadly associated with the representation of Stephen’s mental processes. In this case, however, the syntactic construction is meant to fit the context of the passage, in which the character imagines himself bathing: the prose rhythm mimics the swaying motion of water as well as of Bloom’s body parts. 10 The associations are organized in such a way as to insinuate and progressively reinforce the idea of Bloom’s ‘femininity.’ On the one hand, his navel is seen as a “bud [of flesh],” the promise of a blossoming new life which bears a maternal suggestion; our thought might go back to Eve’s “belly without blemish” in Stephen’s imagination. On the other hand, a metaphor within the metaphor links “the limp father of thousands” to “a languid floating flower,” a symbol that is commonly associated with the female body. Not only do all image metaphors map nouns belonging to the same semantic class of vegetation, but they also establish a chronological and visual sequence between “bud” and “flower.” Whereas the ‘budding navel’ portends growth, ‘flowering’ is naturally followed by senescence, as suggested here by the adjective “languid.” In other words, image juxtapositions suggest that Bloom possesses a fertile and burgeoning female sexuality, while his masculinity is pictured as defective, or on the point of ‘withering.’ In the same episode of Ulysses , other image associations can be interpreted in the same line, although their meaning is more implicit: (20) He eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. ( U 106.30-1) The narrator’s voice mentions a “horseshoe poster,” preparing the reader to mentally picture a man bent over his bicycle, then imaginatively compare it with a “cod in a pot.” The relationship moves from the motionless picture of a human being to the idea of a lifeless animal ready to be eaten (a progression which, incidentally, touches on the recurring motif of cannibalism). 10 The fact that in Ulysses prose rhythm can suggest the characters’ physical movements is discussed in Senn’s Ulyssean Close-ups 17 - 45 . <?page no="292"?> 292 Ilaria Natali Quotation ( 20 ) is very rich in overtones, as well as in interand intratextual connections. The ‘domestic’ picture of “a cod in a pot” recalls the advertisement of “Plumtree’s Potted Meat,” which can also be read as a metaphoric substitution of conjugal intercourse (or lack thereof in Bloom’s household), with consequent allusion to Boylan and betrayal. 11 The idea of ‘demasculinization’ is also introduced by the slang associations of “cod,” and further reinforced by the fact that “cod in a pot” is a possible allusion to an Irish ballad about a soldier who returns from battle limbless and blind (Bowen 100 - 1 ). Much of the character’s personal experience seems to be projected onto this image; after all, Bloom himself is called a “dead cod” in the “Circe” episode ( U 663 . 10 ). No wonder he considers this a “damn bad ad.” 12 Excerpts ( 16 ), ( 17 ), ( 19 ) and ( 20 ) also highlight that image associations in Ulysses tend to assimilate human traits with elements of the animal or vegetable kingdoms. The world is thus seen as an organism whose parts can only be understood in their interactive relations. Joyce “had a way of expressing in representative detail what is also present in the organic whole” (Senn, “Book of Many Turns” 45 ); accordingly, ‘biological’-oriented image metaphors re-state and corroborate ideas which compose the thematic macrostructure of the book. The presence of two motifs is especially reinforced; just as metempsychosis works horizontally (the soul inhabits different bodies) and vertically (it goes through a series of body-stages), these motifs concern a synchronic and a diachronic dimension respectively. On the one hand, image ‘re-embodiments’ demystify the principle that human beings partake in the destiny of the wild in an “eat or be eaten” philosophy ( U 216 . 29 ). On the other hand, the directionality of image metaphors highlights the existence of a life cycle underlying all beings, which constantly undergo biological evolution and change of form: “molecules all change. I am other I now,” says Stephen ( U 242 . 26 - 7 ). Every entity, animate or inanimate, is a process; like history, life also repeats itself with a difference. This ‘biological’ tendency in image metaphors is by no means confined to Ulysses . We have already seen it at work in Giacomo Joyce (examples 1 - 2 ), Epiphanies ( 10 ) and Portrait ( 9 , 11 , 12 , 14 ), but it especially characterizes Dub- 11 For the various meanings of “Plumtree’s Potted Meat” see Hogan 140 . I might add that the word “horseshoe” itself might be read as a hint to Boylan: in Ulysses we know he jingle-jaunts on his car around the city, bets on the horse Sceptre and was seen with Bloom at the Bleeding Horse pub. 12 Further associations between “Bloom” and “cod” appear in “Cyclops,” where Bloom’s ‘femininity’ is underlined ( U 391 . 31 ), and again in “Circe,” where “[a] deadhand” proposes a solution to Bloom’s incomplete self-definition on the beach, writing “Bloom is a cod” ( U 616 . 10 ). <?page no="293"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 293 liners . In the collection, image re-embodiments link not only human features with animal or vegetable forms, but also inanimate objects with living beings: (21) [Aunt Kate’s] face […] was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour. (“The Dead,” D 179) ( 22 ) [Alleyne’s] head itself was so pink and hairless it seemed like a large egg reposing on the papers. […] [Farrington] stared fixedly at the polished skull […] gauging its fragility. (“Counterparts,” D 87) (23) […] he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. (“A Painful Case,” D 117) As might be noted, image associations in Dubliners are often conveyed through similes in which the motivation of the construction is made explicit. Quotation ( 21 ) provides two different instances of the passing of time in organisms, and then ‘extends’ the simile describing the tonality of hair color, which substantiates an idea of “ripeness” common to humans and fruit alike. In excerpt ( 22 ), we find a sort of anticipation of the Wakean humpty-dumpty trope; in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass , where this character (re-)appears, figurative language often turns into literal language, as is the case with the flower-bed in “The Garden of Live Flowers” (Carroll 151 ; see Brown 41 ). Similarly, in “Counterparts,” the imaginary and the real interact, and the simile apparently becomes referential: Farrington observes Alleyne’s head “gauging its fragility,” as if he were actually looking at an eggshell. A sense of wholeness of matter and living beings further emerges in ( 23 ): as Rabaté remarks, the “train” / “worm” association alludes to death and continuation of life at the same time ( 92 ). An interesting variant of Joyce’s ‘natural’ metaphoricity can be found in the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses , characterized by “precious, elevated diction, pretentious and threadbare metaphors” (Senn, “Nausicaa” 305 ). Here, image associations represent and re-read conventional imagery: ( 24 ) […] her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. ( U 452 . 24 - 5 ) The most common directionality of projection in Ulysses appears inverted: associations move from the natural world (“rosebud”) to human features (“mouth”) and close with an inanimate object (“bow”). Occurrence of transfers ‘towards the inanimate’ in “Nausicaa” might emphasize that Gerty is a “conventionally passive […] object of sexual curiosity” (Parkes 77 ), whose discourse betrays an “attempt to freeze and reify the world’s dangerous flux” (Osteen 296 - 7 ). A later addition to the typescript of Ulysses , excerpt ( 24 ) fits both the theme and tone of the episode very well in many respects. For one thing, there is no <?page no="294"?> 294 Ilaria Natali structural correspondence between “rosebud” and “bow,” the two “poles” of the figurative chain; the “mouth” image is indispensable to making the series of analogies work. Even so, readers might be confused when trying to read the passage visually, as they are forced to picture either two different mouth shapes or two different facial expressions. Apparently, there is hardly anything “Greekly perfect” about this clause, which is slightly lacking in balance; one might even say that the construction itself is ‘lame.’ The conventional association “bow” / “mouth” is ironically echoed in the “stolentelling” of Finnegans Wake : (25) Bow your boche! Absolutely perfect! ( FW 458.34-5) We might assume that the word “bow” is used here as a verb; yet, it does not lose the visual properties typically associated with nouns. As we have seen, metaphorical image associations in the Joycean corpus are introduced by a variety of syntactic devices, which ‘guide’ the reader to different extents in recognizing and interpreting the transfer. In Finnegans Wake , not only is any syntactic indication absent, but the nature of the text itself makes it questionable whether sensorial objects can be associated primarily by virtue of their common shape. Structural resemblance between images is hardly ever at the core of a transfer, since other semantic, linguistic, graphic and phonic associations also come into play and trigger multiple responses in the reader. Each word is a hinge to a multi-layered plurality of meanings: for instance, “hayair” ( FW 4 . 10 ) can be an image metaphor of the kind ‘hair is hay,’ but it can also contain “heir” and “air,” or refer to a Sanskrit word for “horses” included in the Bhagavad-gétä . Perceiving an image metaphor in “hayair” is perhaps chiefly a matter of readerly perspective; after all, as Fritz Senn puts it, Finnegans Wake is “what we do with it” (“Vexations of Group Reading” 63 ). In the Wake , associations of structurally similar images are commonly enclosed in one noun, especially in compound neologisms: (26) wither hayre in honds tuck up ( FW 4.29) (27) over our home homoplate ( FW 119.03) As the above quoted “hayair,” “hayre” includes amongst its other meanings “hair” and “hay,” which recall the ‘fair Isolde’ motif. “Homoplate,” too, underlines a ‘physical’ resemblance between “home plate” (the final base in a baseball field) and “omoplate” (French for “shoulder blade”). In both cases, however, contextual information is ambiguous, and it is not possible to determine which term belongs to the source and which to the target domain. Image mappings lose the directionality that determines how meaning is extended, so that “there <?page no="295"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 295 is only a connection across domains, with one concept seen through the filter of the other” (Lakoff and Turner 131 ). With the latter remark, recent scholarship critically questioned Ivor Armstrong Richard’s ‘a-directional’ definition of metaphor, according to which “two thoughts of different things [are] active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction” ( 93 ). Despite their theoretical flaws, Richard’s assumptions seem very apt to describe the kind of “borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts ” ( 94 ) that characterize Finnegans Wake . 13 In addition to nouns, other parts of speech can convey image-to-image mappings; as a matter of fact, the grammatical function of words is unstable in Finnegans Wake , and each term can refer to an entity, one of its properties, or a process at the same time: (28) your mouth’s flower rose ( FW 140.26) (29) the flower that stars the day (248.12-13) (30) this flower that bells (598.13) (31) as your hair grows wheater (26.08) (32) his cabbageous brain’s curlyflower (409.13-14) Out of context, “rose,” “stars” and “bells” can be both verbal forms and nouns; in conjunction with “mouth” and “flower,” they invite a visual response in the reader, who is likely to perceive a resemblance of shapes, rather than an activity. Similarly, “wheater” is ‘whiter’ but also ‘more wheat-like,’ and a ‘vegetating’ human brain can be “cabbageous” (or cauliflower-like) in many senses, not last in a visual one. In Finnegans Wake , ‘noun-shaped’ verbs and neologisms derived by the ‘adjectivization’ of nouns are common means to highlight structural similarities; thus, noun phrases lose their primacy in expressing image-to-image projections. Clearly, Joyce is exploring here not only every (visual) possibility of language, but also the different aspects of its ‘physical nature,’ from the materiality of writing to the sensuousness of the signifier. *** 13 It might be worth underlining that directional ambiguity does not concern all image associations in compounds, as is shown in “his handshell cupped […] his handleaf fallen” ( FW 407 . 23 - 24 ). <?page no="296"?> 296 Ilaria Natali Image metaphors have been studied especially within corpora of poetical texts, namely Imagist works. 14 Often mentioned in opposition to propositional metaphors, these constructions have not received much critical attention; Gibbs dismisses the subject saying that “it is clear [that they] make up a good deal of the metaphors found in poetry and literature” ( 259 - 60 ). Viewed as having more to do with literary aesthetics than cognition, “image metaphors are generally considered […] to be relatively unimportant to reasoning” (Deignan 454 ). In this sense, I believe that shifting focus to the literary function of this specific class of metaphors proves particularly fruitful, as they may reveal broad semantic implications and textual patterns. In Joyce’s works, image associations undoubtedly participate in conveying a parallactic view of experience, showing that “the poles of sameness and difference, and the process of transformation bringing them about, underlie everything” (Senn, Dislocutions 197 ). Since these constructions can draw together heterogeneous elements, they produce plurality and difference; valorizing non-coincidence over similarity, they reveal a dialogic potential. In addition, the unconventionality of most image projections often require us to actively cooperate and create the correspondences in the reading, synthesizing what is presented to us using both the verbal and the visual mode. It is also relevant to consider that, mapping mental images at the conceptual level, image metaphors offer an alternative way of organizing thought, partially compensating for the structural limitations of language. Mental images are closely linked not only to the perceived object, but also to previous individual experience; their association, thus, opens the present to review and interpretation, while exposing a subjective perspective. In a sense, the ‘parallactic motion’ functions both in space and time, involving a sort of mnemonic process. Although Joyce’s sensory associations cannot be said to overtly compare past and present, every image projection possesses the individual’s signature and is always imbued with personal knowledge of the world; it does not present to us something which has been, but simply something which is […] It is a recollection of the present moment in the actual moment itself. It is of the past in its form and of the present in its matter. It is a memory of the present. (Bergson 148) Image transfers can therefore be thought of as transmigrations of form with a sensuous residue of previous impressions. This is yet another level on which 14 See Gleason and Crisp. These are cognitive and phenomenological investigations which do not aim to discuss the effects that metaphors bring about in the texts. Both studies, moreover, acknowledge that image metaphors are relevant in poetical works of various periods, but do not seem to consider the potential of exploring novelistic imagery. <?page no="297"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 297 metempsychosis, together with parallax, is figuratively present in Joyce’s works: image ‘re-embodiments’ reveal corporeal associations that might remain latent in the abstract conceptuality of language. I believe that much can still be done in the study of Joyce’s works in connection with image metaphor theory; the idiographic approach adopted in this study has barely scratched the surface of a potentially wider topic. In order to highlight the presence of patterns, I have primarily focused on Joyce’s visual associative constructions, thus partially neglecting other ‘sensorial perspectives’ from which his texts can be analyzed. But, as Fritz Senn says, “we follow Joyce’s lead when we look for patterns; like him we are purposefully, unlike him we may be unthinkingly selective” (Senn, “Weaving” 47 ). Works Cited Abbreviations D Joyce, James. Dubliners . 1914. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print. FW -. Finnegans Wake . 1939. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print. GJ -. Giacomo Joyce . Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1968. Print. P -. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . 1916. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print. PP -. Poems and Exiles . Ed. J. C. C. Mays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print. SH -. Stephen Hero . Ed. Theodore Spencer, J. J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1963. Print. U -. Ulysses . 1922. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print. Other Primary Sources Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. Lessons for Children from Two to Three Years Old . 1778. Dublin: Hibernia Press, 1814. Print. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass . 1865 and 1871. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print. Keats, John. The Complete Poems . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Print. Tennyson, Alfred. Selected Poems . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007. Print. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves . 1931. Ed. M. Herbert, S. Sellers and I. Blyth. Cambridge: CUP , 2011. Print. Secondary Sources Baker, William E. Syntax in English Poetry . Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. Print. Bergson, Henri. Key Writings . Ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. London: Continuum International, 2002. 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Print. <?page no="299"?> “A Myriad Metamorphoses of Symbol”: Some Remarks on Joyce’s Parallactic Imagery 299 Raftery, Deirdre. “Colonizing the Mind: The Use of English Writers in the Education of the Irish Poor.” Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices . Ed. Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 147-162. Print. Richards, Ivor Armstrong. The Philosophy of Rhetoric . New York: OUP , 1936. Print. Scholes, Robert and Richard M. Kain, eds. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Evanston: Northwestern UP , 1965. Print. Schwarz, Daniel R. Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature . New York: Palgrave, 1997. Print. Scott, Clive. Translating Baudelaire . Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000. Print. Senn, Fritz. “Nausicaa.” James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: Critical Essays . Ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. 277-312. Print. -. “Weaving, Unweaving.” A Starchamber Quiry: A James Joyce Centennial Volume, 1882-1982 . Ed. E. L. Epstein. New York: Methuen, 1982. 45-70. Print. -. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation . Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. Print. -. “Vexations of Group Reading: ‘transluding from the Otherman.’” Finnegans Wake: Fifty Years . Ed. Geert Lernout. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. 61-78. Print. European Joyce Studies 2. -. “The Challenge: ‘ignotas animum’ (An Old-fashioned Close Guessing at a Borrowed Structure).” James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: A Casebook. Ed. M. A. Wollaeger. Oxford: OUP , 2003. 129-42. Print. -. “Book of Many Turns.” James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Casebook . Ed. Derek Attridge. Oxford: OUP , 2004. 33-54. Print. -. Ulyssean Close-ups . Rome: Bulzoni, 2007. Print. -. Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce . Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007. Print. Shattuck, Roger. Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in A la recherche du temps perdu. Princeton: Princeton UP , 1983. Print. Sullivan, Karen. Frames and Constructions in Metaphoric Language . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. Print. Valente, Joseph. James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference . Cambridge: CUP , 1995. Print. <?page no="300"?> 300 Thomas Gurke Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 1 Thomas Gurke The phenomenon of parallax in James Joyce’s Ulysses is ascribed to Robert Stawell Ball’s The Story of the Heavens ( 1885 / 1900 ), where the term refers to alternate viewpoints of stellar objects and their continuously changing positions, as well as to “the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars” ( U 17 . 1052 - 53 ). Leopold Bloom famously ponders parallax and Ball’s publication as his train of thoughts is triggered by recurring references to the time ball on the ball astoffice: “Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax” ( U 8 . 110 ). Ironically, the term also features in publications such as Certaine Errors in Navigation ( 1599 ) 2 - which is somehow appropriate considering the erring in Joyce’s work. For whenever Bloom is stuck for the concrete definition of a word, he refers back to its etymology: “Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax” ( U 8 . 111 - 12 ). However, this seldom proves to be enlightening: “I never exactly understood” ( U 8 . 110 - 11 ). Thanks to Fritz Senn, we do understand: parallax constitutes one of the “key-principles in stereoscopic vision based on at least two different reports” (“Remodeling” 75 ). Appropriately, the following essay will trace two different instances of Pythagorean influence in Joyce’s writing - a topic which Senn has also commented on in the past. First, the experiences of listening to the song “The Lass of Aughrim” in “The Dead” will be discussed as an ‘audible parallax’ by utilizing the inherently Pythagorean term acousmatic . Then, the ‘musemathematical’ calculations in “Sirens” will be read anew based on the ancient mathematician’s acousmas . Both analyses are ‘parallactically’ linked to “Pythagorean lore” (Senn, “Met” 111 ) through the term acousmatic as a vantage point. 1 The paragraphs concerning the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses were part of a talk held at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation during the “Musicillogical Joyce” Workshop in 2009 . I wish to personally thank Fritz Senn for helping me with his insightful comments and critique concerning this part of the following text. 2 I am not claiming that Joyce knew of this publication, but it is interesting that the earliest occurrences of the term parallax refer to problems in navigation: “ 1599 E. Wright Certaine Errors in Navigation sig. N3v , ‘Neglecting the paralax or eccentricitie of the eye.’” “Parallax, n.” OED Online . October 2014 . OUP 2013 . <?page no="301"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 301 The Acousmatic as Audible Parallax The word acousmatic is derived from the Greek akousmatikoi (ἀκουσματικοί) meaning ‘listeners,’ a term used to refer to pupils of the philosopher Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans were taught by listening to Pythagoras’ lectures from behind a screen. This early learning technique, which required absolute silence, focused on the audible in order to gain information: “For the akousmatikoi , the physical body of Pythagoras was hidden, leaving them with only the sound of their master’s voice” (Kane 17 ). This ancient practice was revived during the first half of the 20 th century by the French composer and pioneer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer ( 1910 - 1995 ) to explain electro-acoustic transformations in particular regarding media which use loudspeakers as an output source. For Schaeffer, the speaker is analogous to the Pythagorean screen: In ancient times, the apparatus was a curtain; today, it is the radio and the methods of reproduction, with the whole set of electro-acoustic transformations, that place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, under similar circumstances. (“Acousmatics” 91) Media such as radio, telephone or phonograph are considered to be ‘acousmatic media’ as they transmit sounds without a visible emitter. He accordingly defines acousmatic as “referring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it” (“Acousmatics” 91 ). 3 For Schaeffer, who was also a radio-engineer, this goes beyond mere observance. It is within his musique concrète that he recognizes the phenomenological - and near-philosophical - impact this would have for his compositional technique: sounds are recorded on tape and then later manipulated in order to create new audio material. By employing the manipulated tape recordings, Schaeffer challenges traditional methods of composition, and is thus to be regarded in the vein of 20 th century composers such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen. 4 But for Schaeffer, the distortion of the source material 3 Schaeffer’s notion of the acousmatic goes beyond the simple definition of the Larousse dictionary, which he here partially paraphrases. For him, the term marks a turning point in aural perception, enabled by new technologies: “The new phenomenon of telecommunications and the massive diffusion of messages exists only in relation to and as a function of a fact that has been rooted in human experience from the beginning: natural, sonorous communication. This is why we can, without anachronism, return to an ancient tradition which, no less nor otherwise than contemporary radio and recordings, gives back to the ear alone the entire responsibility of a perception that ordinarily rests on other sensible witnesses” (Schaeffer, “Acousmatics” 77 ). 4 The focus of these avant-garde composers on the phenomenon of sound enables an escape from the beaten paths of traditional composition. This has to be viewed in terms of a reduced listening, since - as McKinnon states - “acousmatics tend to treat that which <?page no="302"?> 302 Thomas Gurke has another vital effect: it omits the identification of the original output source and, at the same time, opens up a window to the phenomenological process of hearing itself: “The tape recorder has the virtue of Pythagoras’ curtain: if it creates new phenomena to observe, it creates above all new conditions of observation […]” (“Acousmatics” 81 ). By taking a sound and altering it electronically, Schaeffer demonstrates the objectivity of a sound across its various instantiations and thereby creates a stream of multiple perspectives (Kane, “L’Objet” 16 ) - a parallax phenomenon in itself. Schaeffer’s idea is that of an aural reduction through the process of reduced listening or epoché . This procedure - influenced by the phenomenological concepts of Edmund Husserl - redirects the subject’s awareness to perceive pure ‘sonorous objects’ ( objets sonores ) as a series of “Adumberations” (Schaeffer, “Acousmatics” 93 ): [T]he recorded sound is stripped of its original causal basis, facilitating a re-direction of attention. […] Thus, by removing sounds from the flux of causality, recording affords the possibility of studying sounds with a degree of specificity and detail heretofore unimagined. […] By passing through the test of the epoché , the sound object, mutatis mutandis , can be no physical object. The upshot is that the acousmatic experience of sound opens up the possibility of identifying modes of listening more essential than those that depend primarily on context. (Kane 18, original emphasis) The acousmatic experience bars direct access to visible, tactile and physically quantifiable assessments and reduces sounds to the field of the aural alone. Instead of identifying a sound with its cause or source, emphasis is placed on the essence of the ‘sonorous object’ itself. The French film theorist Michel Chion employs Schaeffer’s “direct sound” (Schaeffer, “Acousmatics” 79 ) for his theory of “visualised sound” (Chion 72 ), i. e. the use of offscreen sound in film. He conceptualizes this in two ways: a sound may be visualized first and subsequently ‘acousmatized,’ or it can be ‘acousmatic’ (i. e. invisible) to start with and later visualized as a dramatic after-effect. In the first case, a sound is linked with a precise image from the outset. This image will then be triggered in the recipient’s mind each time the sound is heard offscreen. In the second case, the sound’s source is first withheld but is then revealed in the process of ‘de-acousmatization’ (Chion 130 - 131 ). Chion uses Schaeffer’s four characteristics of the acousmatic situation - La pure is being recorded as decontextualised source material; isolation from a spatial, functional, or semantic context radically reframes this material and in doing so makes it possible for it to be regarded as non-representational matter, malleable and amenable to poietic will in this abstracted state” (McKinnon 3 ). I am not suggesting that Joyce is employing techniques of avant-garde music. It is the non-representational character of aural perception that my reading of “The Dead” will focus on, since the story features an acousmatic situation. <?page no="303"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 303 écoute (‘pure listening’), L’écoute des effets (‘listening to effects’), Les variations de l’écoute (‘variations of listening’) and Les variations du signal (‘variations in the signal’) (Schaeffer, Traité 93 - 94 ) - in order to differentiate between three simple modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. ‘Causal listening’ is a mode in which one identifies a sound with its cause, i. e. a violin or a creaking door. Chion points out that this is the most common and yet deceptive of the three modes ( 25 - 26 ). ‘Semantic listening’ is a mode which Chion describes as “[l]istening for the purpose of gaining information about what is communicated in the sound (usually language)” ( 224 ). It thereby focuses on a code or language to interpret a message. Identifying a sound as ‘squeaky,’ for instance, would be an example of semantic listening ( 28 ). ‘Reduced listening,’ on the other hand, is the mode that Schaeffer calls pure écoute . This describes the attempt to approach the actual, naked content of a sound by excluding the ‘lazy’ habit of trying to assign a causal meaning or fixed semantic value to it ( 29 - 30 ). For Chion, this entails identifying pitch, intervals or single tones in a line of melody, as these characteristics are independent of the sound’s cause ( 30 ): Acousmatic sound draws our attention to sound traits normally hidden from us by the simultaneous sight of the causes - hidden because this sight reinforces the perception of certain elements of the sound and obscures others. The acousmatic truly allows sound to reveal itself in all its dimensions. (32) The notions of the acousmatic as described by Schaeffer and used by Chion hark back to the ancient Pythagorean screen, which veiled a sound’s initial cause. Furthermore, it already entails a notion of parallax, since various sessions of listening are needed in order to dislocate the sonorous object from its cause or fixed meaning. Although this process usually relies on pre-recorded sounds, the following analysis will establish how the various modes of listening are realized in Gabriel’s and Gretta’s individual perceptions of the song “The Lass of Aughrim” in “The Dead.” “Distant Music” and Ghostly Acousmatics in “The Dead” Gabriel is clearly fascinated with graphic depictions and ‘scenic’ descriptions in connection with music. During Mary Jane’s “Academy Piece,” which simply has “no melody for him” as it is “full of runs and difficult passages” ( D 186 ), his eyes wander over the various pictures in the Morkan’s household, which distract him from the “ thought-tormented music ” ( D 192 , original emphasis). He is aware of the music’s source and able to analyze the sounds he hears in detail as an “opening melody with runs of scales after every bar” or “a trill of octaves in the treble and a final deep octave in the bass” ( D 187 ). Gabriel’s perceptions are <?page no="304"?> 304 Thomas Gurke narrated as being primarily visual, entailing comments on Mary Jane’s posture and descriptions of “her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation” ( D 186 ). Although Gabriel is able to analyze the music’s properties, the ‘sonorous object’ does not reveal itself to him, since the images surrounding him tinge his listening experience as both ‘causal’ and ‘semantic’: the source of the sound is clearly visible and although the piece has “no melody” ( D 186 ) - i. e. ‘meaning’ - for him, it is supplemented with visual perceptions of performer and instrument. Chion’s terminology can thus be utilized when reexamining Gabriel’s perception of music in “The Dead.” However, a purely acousmatic situation does not occur here, since ‘causal’ and ‘semantic’ listening take precedence over what Schaeffer would describe as ‘pure’ or ‘reduced listening.’ The latter can only take place within an acousmatic situation. The famous staircase scene in “The Dead” supplies the right conditions for a purely acousmatic experience: the source of the sound is veiled as the unseen Bartell D’Arcy performs the song “The Lass of Aughrim.” At the same time, both Gabriel and Gretta listen to his distant voice in silence and from very different perspectives, thereby in parallax. For Gabriel, the experience of listening to music is, once again, tinged by visual imagery: he labels Gretta’s devout listening to the music as a picture that he would - rather appropriately for the acousmatic - entitle Distant Music : He asked himself what is a woman standing on the staircase in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. ( D 211) Gabriel does not immediately identify the woman as Gretta due to the poor lighting conditions: he is standing in the “gloom of the hall” ( D 211 ) while she is standing nearly invisible “on the stairs in the shadow” ( D 211 ). It is only upon noticing the “terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white” ( D 210 - 211 ) that he identifies her as “his wife” ( D 211 ). Gabriel’s wish to be a painter capturing the scene, instead of the singer or pianist actually performing the song, emphasizes a preference of visual over aural perception. The narrative’s depiction of Gretta’s “attitude” having “grace and mystery as if she were a symbol of something” ( D 211 ) constitutes a rather naïve, symbolic reading of her as necessarily representing “something.” This again emphasizes a form of ‘semantic listening’: the narrated description of Gretta through Gabriel has to be viewed as a symbolic representation of the music’s expressiveness, since her image supplies him with the - seemingly <?page no="305"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 305 needed - visual context. Gabriel here semantically reads the scene rather than listening to the music itself. He is able to identify the music’s properties - thereby, again, executing a form of ‘reduced listening’ - as he asserts the song “to be in the old Irish tonality” with the singer being “uncertain both of his words and of his voice” ( D 211 ). But his ability to distinguish between the archaic modal tonality of Irish music and the classical tonal system as present in Mary Jane’s “Academy Piece” earlier on does not reveal to him anything about the sound itself. The “grace and mystery” of the situation thereby remains within Gretta’s “attitude” ( D 211 ) and not the music as such. Had he been able to see the source emitting the sounds (Gabriel does not know at this point who is singing the song), he might have concentrated on the tenor’s posture or facial expression. Instead of this, he focuses on his wife’s attitude, as she seems to mediate the music’s expressiveness. What is veiled from both Gabriel and the implied reader is Gretta’s perception of “The Lass of Aughrim.” A reading of the famous staircase scene thereby already entails acousmatic and parallactic traits: First, the causal source behind the sound is veiled, as is the semantic meaning of the song for Gretta. Second, the music is perceived from two very different perspectives, of which only Gabriel’s is overtly narrated. Nevertheless, a re-reading of this passage, regarding the various modes of listening presented above, can help to differentiate her position and listening experience. What seems to captivate Gretta is neither the cause of the sound nor the semantic value of the song as such: it is rather the ‘pure sound’ of D’Arcy’s voice that transfixes her. It is revealed later that the song recalls her past love for Michael Furey. But this is the mere semantic value attached to it. Yet, as the source of the sound is veiled, the first instance of perception is an act of pure ‘reduced listening’ in the sense of Schaeffer’s pure écoute (Schaeffer, Traité 93 ). 5 Gretta may, of course, be connecting the song with visual imagery from her girlhood in Galway, such as Furey standing in the back garden and so on. But in light of Schaeffer’s and Chion’s observances of sound in acousmatic conditions, it is rather that the ‘mysterious attitude’ attributed to Gretta is a facet of the sound itself. The tone of D’Arcy’s voice seems to entail an encapsulating, affective aura that can only unfold within the mode of ‘reduced listening’: There is always something about sound that overwhelms and surprises us no matter what - especially when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention; and thus sound interferes with our perception, affects it. Surely, our conscious perception can valiantly work at submitting everything to its control, but, in the present cultural state 5 This effect is further exploited in John Huston’s movie adaptation ( 1987 ), in which the song is sung a capella , thereby enabling a focus on the voice alone. <?page no="306"?> 306 Thomas Gurke of things, sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit our perception. (Chion 33, emphasis added) In comparison to Gabriel, Gretta has no visual agenda whilst listening to the song, as she seemingly stares into nothingness, thereby focusing on the sound of the singer’s voice alone. As the text mentions, D’Arcy’s voice is hoarse ( D 211 ) and thereby physiologically similar to that of the ill Michael Furey. This must be read as directly effecting the sound produced in “The Lass of Aughrim” and, subsequently, as influencing Gretta’s perception of the same. It has been noted that emotions influence physiological processes, which in turn influence the acoustic character of speech and song (Spencer 400 - 451 ): 6 “there are emotion-specific patterns of acoustic cues that can be used to communicate discrete emotions in both vocal and musical expression of emotion” ( Juslin and Laukka 799 ). 7 Chion also ascribes a stronger affective impact to the aural than to the visual, especially concerning autonomic affective processes, when stating that “sound, much more than the image, can become an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation […] [and] sound works on us directly, physiologically (breathing noises in a film can directly affect our own respiration)” ( 34 ). Thus, what affects Gretta in the first place is the pure sound of D’Arcy’s voice, not the semantic value(s) attached to it. This is evident in the fact that she cannot even recall the song’s title: “‘The Lass of Aughrim,’ she repeated. ‘I couldn’t think of the name’” ( D 213 ). Reading the music’s impact solely as a symbolic reflection of her past lover would be committing a mistake similar to Gabriel’s: for him, the song’s meaning is embodied in Gretta’s image on the staircase, just as the name “ Distant Music ” plainly indicates that the music is in the “distant” background. 6 It was Spencer’s article, “The Origin and Function of Music” ( 1857 ), in which he argues that vocal music is intimately related to vocal expression of emotions. His hypothesis is known as ‘Spencer’s Law,’ by which emotions are seen as influencing physiological processes, which in turn influence the acoustic character of both speech and singing: “We have here, then, a principle underlying all vocal phenomena; including those of vocal music, and by consequence those of music in general. The muscles that move the chest, larynx, and vocal chords, contracting like other muscles in proportion to the intensity of the feelings; every different contraction of these muscles involving, as it does, a different adjustment of the vocal organs; every different adjustment of the vocal organs causing a change in the sound emitted; - it follows that variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling. It follows that each inflection or modulation is the natural outcome of some passing emotion or sensation; and it follows that the explanation of all kinds of vocal expression, must be sought in this general relation between mental and muscular excitements” (Spencer 404 ). 7 Juslin and Laukka actually base their experiments on inferences made by Spencer and connect these to early evolutionary biology: “In accordance with Spencer’s law, Darwin ( 1872 / 1998 ) noted that vocalizations largely reflect physiological changes […]” ( Juslin and Laukka 772 ). <?page no="307"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 307 The affective hold of the song on Gretta, however, remains invisible to Gabriel (and the reader) as it is veiled acousmatically. Gabriel’s and Gretta’s perceptions can be regarded as two reports on a unique sound-event and thereby as an ‘audible parallax.’ But there is a further instance of the acousmatic which enables a reading of this passage in ‘parallactical’ terms: the hoarse voice of D’Arcy recalls the ‘original version’ of the song by Michael Furey qua its sonorous characteristic. Thereby Schaeffer’s observance of initially unique sound-events which are recorded and distorted in order to create new conditions of observance seems apparent here. For there are, in fact, two voices performing the song in “The Lass of Aughrim”: one veiled in space (D’Arcy) and one in time (Furey). This creates two individual instances of (acousmatic) ‘distance’ that simultaneously converge - in parallax - in the “ Distant Music ” of “The Dead.” In particular, the ghostly presence of Michael Furey can be explained through a further use of the acousmatic . Chion notes that ‘de-acousmatization’ takes place whenever the source of a sound is revealed as a dramatic aftereffect: “the opposition between visualised and acousmatic provides a basis for the fundamental audiovisual notion of offscreen space” ( 73 ). A first instance of such an “offscreen space” is established in “The Dead” during the performance of the song “The Lass of Aughrim.” Shortly afterwards, the initially veiled source of the sound is revealed by Mary Jane: “It’s Bartell D’Arcy singing” ( D 211 ). The more effective offscreen space, however, is disclosed later in the hotel room, when “[o]ther forms” appear to be “near” ( D 224 ). These forms signify the ghostly presence of Michael Furey, who first remains acousmatized in the music of “The Lass of Aughrim” only to be de-acousmatized later in Gretta’s revelation of her past. Similar to Gabriel’s earlier perception of his wife as “a woman standing on the staircase, in the shadow,” Furey now appears in his imagination as “the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree” ( D 224 ). In both cases, Gabriel’s perception is not pure, but “identified with an image, demythologized, classified” ( 72 ), as Chion would add, as it necessarily needs a ‘form.’ Schaeffer’s and Chion’s frameworks of the acousmatic and its various modes of listening can thus be utilized for a new reading of “The Dead.” It seems that Gretta perceives the song in the mode of ‘reduced listening’: the ‘sonorous object’ is dislocated from its original cause and semantic value, re-locating “The Lass of Aughrim” somewhere between Furey’s original interpretation and D’Arcy’s rendition. This parallax creates a moment of indeterminacy and thereby adds an emergent quality to the performance in “The Dead.” What Joyce’s text conceals from us is also unknown to Gabriel: the secret of musical affectivity that seemingly transfixes Gretta is one that remains unsaid as it stands outside of causal or semantic frameworks. Perhaps this is why Gabri- <?page no="308"?> 308 Thomas Gurke el ponders: “Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? ” ( D 215 ). Joyce’s “The Dead” reflects the object of music - in parallax - from two very different perspectives, by using a situation akin to Schaeffer’s and Chion’s idea of the acousmatic. But the original tradition of Pythagorean acousmata also entail notions of parallax by viewing music in epistemological and mathematical terms. This shall be pursued further behind yet another Joycean veil: the “screens of language” (Kenner 41 ) that constitute “Sirens.” From the Acousmatic to the (Muse)Mathematic of “Sirens” Not only does the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses constitute an intermedial paradigm in the field of musico-literary experimentation, 8 but the criticism which this text has yielded - especially regarding the myth-ridden term fuga per canonem - also constitutes a perpetual canon in itself. 9 There has, however, been less critical inquiry into Pythagorean references in the Joycean text. The most prominent concept of this sort in Ulysses is “metempsychosis,” of which “Pythagoras is probably the best-known exponent of the idea” (Thornton 73 ). Bloom again deduces the meaning etymologically: “Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek” ( U 4 . 341 ), which Fritz Senn has traced to Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary (“Met” 109 ). Regarding Pythagorean mathematics, Susan Brown argues that geometric structures and the “golden section ratio” are present throughout Ulysses , and especially within “Sirens.” She reads the ominous word “[m]usemathematics” as a “technique that [ Joyce] employed himself to provide geometric balance between the scenic divisions of his experimental cohesion of music and literature” ( 152 ). Thomas Jackson Rice notes a connection between “Sirens” and the “Music of the Spheres” as conceived by the Pythagoreans, while claiming Bloom’s calculations to be incorrect ( 222 ); Sebastian Knowles seems to concur regarding this point ( 76 ). Vike Plock recently re-examined the mathematical operations in question, concluding that these are of Pythagorean origin and doubts that Bloom is miscalculating ( 487 - 88 ). But these comments neither explain the function of the strange calculations nor why Bloom (or the text) would rehearse Pythagorean mathematics in the first place. Thus the following reading will view “Sirens” from a close Pythagorean 8 Werner Wolf ’s seminal study on intermedial relationships between text and music - The Musicalization of Fiction ( 1999 ) - makes the point of rightly proclaiming Joyce’s “Sirens” as a “classical text, which, among all experiments with musico-literary intermediality, has triggered the most critical response” (Wolf 127 ). 9 For a recent and comprehensive summary and discussion of Joycean criticism on the “Sirens” chapter, especially regarding the fuga per canonem , see Witen 2010 . <?page no="309"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 309 angle in order to show how this text creates a further parallax with regard to music in Joyce’s texts. In contrast to “The Dead,” music here will not be viewed in terms of a phenomenological aesthetics of reception, but as an object that is caught between epistemological and methodological approaches. “Sirens” is not just about music ; it questions what music itself is about : its aesthetic nature and affective power are particularly at stake when Bloom bluntly asserts that it is all “[n]umbers” ( U 11 . 830 ). The musemathematical calculations that follow project a methodological certainty of numbers onto an epistemological axis of knowledge: “ All music, when you come to think” ( U 11 . 830 , emphasis added). This raises an issue within “Sirens” that recalls ancient Pythagorean precepts of knowledge - also known as acousma or acousmata - that Pythagoras’ pupils heard from behind a screen (Kane, Sound 61 ). The most famous of these acousmata mentions the mythological Sirens: What is the wisest thing? Number. […] What is the most beautiful? Harmony. […] What is harmony? That in which the Syrens subsist. (Iamblichus 43) Since the Sirens feature so prominently within the Pythagorean acousmata , I find it fruitful to connect the ‘musemathematical’ calculations in Joyce’s “Sirens” chapter to the ancient mathematician’s school of thought. Pythagoras’ pupils heard these maxims, often cryptic in nature, from behind a screen (i. e. acousmatically) and, since they were not aloud to speak, they accepted them on authority without justification or proof. Acousmata raise questions of an epistemological order, while mathemata seek methodological proof of the proposed hypotheses (van der Waerden, “Die Harmonielehre” 180 ). 10 Then when they had learned the most difficult of all things, to keep silent and listen, and had begun to be skilled in silence […] then they were given the power to speak and 10 The Pythagorean exegesis of the word logos creates a web of interrelationships between number, cosmos, language and music, which is difficult to unweave in the short space of this analysis. However, I would like to point towards Jörg Zimmermann’s excellent article, which explains how qualitative and quantitative relations are linked: “Die Entfaltung des Logos-Sinnes und der mit ihm verwobenen harmonikalen Grundbegriffe stiftet ein Netz von Beziehungen, dessen Sprach-Relativität nicht durchschaut wird, so daß ein sprachlich nahegelegtes Sinnverständnis als Erfassung des ‘Wesens’ erscheinen kann. Dabei spielt die Bedeutung des Logos als Zahlenverhältnis die Rolle eines Paradigmas, d. h. eines Maßstabs, an dem gemessen wird. Alle anderen Dimensionen des Logos und der mit ihm verwandten Begriffe werden hinsichtlich ihres Sinnes auf die Zahl als einheitsstiftendes Prinzip bezogen, ihre in einem ursprünglichen Sprachverständnis begründete semantische Verwobenheit auf diese Weise metaphysisch als analogische Entsprechung von [ 84 ] Zahlenverhältnissen erfahren. So manifestiert sich der mathematische Logos gleichermaßen in der Ordnung der Musik, der Sprache, der Seele und des Kosmos” (Zimmermann 84 - 85 ). <?page no="310"?> 310 Thomas Gurke to ask and to write what they had heard and to express what they themselves thought. At that time they were said to be mathematikoi , from those arts which now they had begun to learn and study, since geometry, gnomonics, music, and likewise other deeper studies were called mathemata by the ancient Greeks. (Boas 90 , original emphasis) 11 The studies that fall under the umbrella term mathemata already show the close alliance between music and mathematics. And, ever since harmonic consonances were proven to be calculable and expressible through numerical ratios, this alliance has become legendary. The Pythagoreans claim that a corporeality of numbers stems from an apocryphal legend involving Pythagoras himself walking by a blacksmith’s shop in the sixth century BC . A famous account of this ‘hammer and anvil legend’ is given by Nicomachus of Gerasa: 12 One day he [Pythagoras] was deep in thought and seriously considering whether it could be possible to devise some kind of instrumental aid for the ears […]. While thus engaged, he walked by a smithy and, by divine chance, heard the hammers beating out iron on the anvil and giving off in combination sounds which were most harmonious […] He recognized in these sounds the consonance of the octave […]. (83) 13 Although it is doubtful that this heavy-metal experience really took place ( 93 ), 14 the overtones of this fable survive to this day as a key myth in Western culture and have been adapted to various cultural backgrounds. 15 It is, therefore, plausible that Joyce may have known this legend and made use of it in “Sirens.” When reading the first peculiar lines of this text - under the Pythagorean guise - one can draw a connection to the ‘hammer and anvil legend’: “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing” ( U 11 . 1 ). The metals bronze, gold and iron are heard “ringing steel” ( U 11 . 65 ) but also “ringing in changes” ( U 11 . 175 ) later on in the text. “Bronze” and “gold” initially refer to the hair colors of the barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, who hear the sound of the “steelyringing” 11 Boas here quotes from Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae , I, ix. 12 Flora Levin partially retraces the transmission of this legend: “Once recorded, it was passed along from Nicomachus, to Adrastus, Gaudentius, and Censorius, to Iamblichus, Macrobius, and Fulgentius, to Chalcidius, Boethius, and Isidore of Seville - gathering celebrity in transit and charming its hearers wherever it was told” (Flora Levin’s commentary in Nicomachus 86 ). 13 See also: James 35 ; Münxelhaus 36 ; van der Waerden, “Die Harmonielehre” 170 . 14 Even Nicomachus himself questions the validity of the ‘hammer and anvil legend’ ( 93 ). In fact, many mathematicians and musicians have proven the constituents of this story to be flawed. See also: James 92 - 93 ; van der Waerden, “Die Harmonielehre” 170 ; Münxelhaus 36 ; Kittler 242 . 15 McKinnon traces parallels to the biblical figure of Jubal, who makes a similar discovery involving a blacksmith’s shop (McKinnon, “Jubal”). <?page no="311"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 311 hoofs of the viceregal cavalcade as it passes through the streets of Dublin. 16 But the notion of metal and its “steelyringing” sound also conjures up the image of a blacksmith at his craft. According to Nicomachus, Pythagoras heard the high and low notes of an octave ringing from an anvil. The Joycean text is filled with examples that suggest a close connection between Mina “bronze” Kennedy and Lydia “gold” Douce as the respective low and high notes of this original octave, by sounding “shrill” and “deep”: Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from Miss Kennedy’s throat. ( U 11.144, emphasis added) O! shrieking, Miss Kennedy cried. […] Miss Douce chimed in a deep bronze laughter. ( U 11.146-47, emphasis added) [G]oldbronze voices blended […]. Shrill, with deep laughter, after bronze in gold, they urged each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. ( U 11.174-76, emphasis added) The octave (or diapason ) is what the Pythagoreans referred to as “harmony” since it was the first interval which Pythagoras allegedly discovered and because it entails twice the same tone, a high and low note, that seemed to resonate in perfect relation to one another. “Harmony” thus became a yardstick of aesthetic beauty, as it recalls the simple proportions of a musical octave: 2 : 1 . The mythological Sirens, in turn, were equated with these proportions, as they also seemed to sing in perfect unison. They are mentioned in the most famous Pythagorean acousma : “What is harmony? That in which the Syrens subsist” (Iamblichus 43 ). 17 This is where the cryptic acousma and the legendary walk by the blacksmith’s shop - a mathemata - are interlinked. If, therefore, the beginning of Joyce’s “Sirens” chapter bears a close connection to this legend, a parallel between the two Dublin Sirens, Douce and Kennedy, and the Pythagorean yardstick of aesthetic beauty - namely the octave - seems sound. A further ‘Pythagoreanism’ can be traced in Joyce’s text: the mathematical experiments that were conducted using a so-called monochord. Nicomachus reports that Pythagoras, who was elated by the initial discovery of the octave “since it was as if his purpose was being divinely accomplished,” “ran into the 16 Gifford merely asserts that “[b]ronze and gold were the principal metals in the Homeric world” and that “the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel, Miss Lydia Douce (bronze) and Miss Mina Kennedy (gold), hear the viceregal procession” (Gifford 290 ). 17 In one of his last publications, Musik und Mathematik ( 2006 ), the late Friedrich Kittler suggested that this Pythagorean acousmata may comprise two Sirens that stand for the high and low note of an octave: “Was ist das Raunende in Delphoi? Die Tetraktys - ganz wie die Harmonie, in der die [zwei] Sirenen [singen]” (Kittler 233 - 234 , original brackets). <?page no="312"?> 312 Thomas Gurke smithy and found by various experiments that the difference of sound arose from the weight of the hammers” ( 83 ). From the different weights, he concluded the ratio of the octave as being in a proportion of 12 : 6 (or 2 : 1 ) and used a monochord in order to prove his findings ( 84 ). This device, also referred to as “canon” ( 61 ), was first mentioned in Greece in the sixth century BC and is said to have been an invention of Pythagoras. Rather than being used as an instrument, its function lay mainly in teaching and experimentation (van der Waerden, Die Pythagoreer 369 ). It consisted of a single, stretched gut-string with a moveable bridge: “By moving the bridge you shorten the part of the string being plucked, just as a guitar player or a violinist produces a musical tone by shortening the string with his fingertip” ( James 36 ). 18 By halving the single string of the monochord, the note produced resonates exactly one octave higher. This adds a further numerical relationship to the interval of the octave: while the initial observation in the smithy showed the second note of an octave to reverberate twice as much as the first ( 2 : 1 ), the experiments involving the monochord proved the proportions of this unison by division ( 1 : 2 ). This was seen as factual proof of Pythagoras’ story of walking by the blacksmith’s shop and hence, connects it to the aforementioned acousma entailing the two Sirens. The monochord experiment resurfaces in Joyce’s text when Bloom fiddles with an elastic band: Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. […] Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast. ( U 11.681-84) I agree with Vike Plock’s initial assertion that “Bloom’s fingers perform the Pythagorean sound experiment, by winding the string around his (tuning) fork-fingers to simulate the production of an octave” ( 486 ). However, it is not only the ratio of the octave which resurfaces here, but the entire enterprise that leads to it: the winding up of the elastic band mimics the Pythagorean ratio of 1 : 2 since the string itself is subsequently halved: [I]f one compares the note produced by plucking the entire string with that produced by plucking half the string […] he will find the interval of an octave, the sound of half the string compared with that of the whole string being in a greater proportion, that is, in a duple proportion, a result exactly inverse to the reciprocal data of the length. (Nicomachus 141) 18 In contrast to the ‘hammer and anvil legend,’ Pythagoras’ experiments on the monochord are of sustainable validity: “We can readily demonstrate the numerical ratios that account for musical tones on any stringed instrument today […]” (Rice 217 ). See also Adkins 495 ; Münxelhaus 53 ; van der Waerden, “Die Harmonielehre” 172 . <?page no="313"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 313 This explains how the Joycean text is - quite literally - ‘tied’ to Pythagorean lore: the stretching of Bloom’s elastic band will have the same effect as that attained by Pythagoras when moving the bridge of his monochord to halve the gut-string: the note produced sounds an octave higher (the double proportion) as the string’s tension tightens. Moreover, the transformation of Bloom’s elastic band to a “slender catgut thong” ( U 11 . 896 ) in the progress of “Sirens” can be viewed as a further reference to the aforementioned monochord’s single gutstring. But the Pythagorean plot thickens, as the most prominent reference to the ancient mathematician made in “Sirens” occurs in a passage containing strange ‘musemathematical’ calculations ( U 11 . 830 - 37 ). At first glance, Bloom’s initial figuring seems straightforward: “[t]wo multiplied by two divided by half is twice one” ( U 11 . 830 - 31 ). 19 But as Thomas Jackson Rice correctly asserts, the result should not be “‘twice one,’ but eight” (Rice 222 ). However, I agree with Plock that, although Rice’s calculations are right, the inferences drawn are not ( 488 ). Here, Bloom is rehearsing what the monochord had initially taught Pythagoras and his followers: the ratio of the octave is 2 : 1 , which can be directly linked to the “twice one” in Joyce’s text. Furthermore, as Plock also points out, it can be read as a reference to the two intervals comprising an octave, i. e. the fourth and fifth ( 487 ). But most importantly, “twice one” clearly indicates the duality within the unison of the octave, as it entails twice the same note at its respective beginning and end, while it also refers to the initial ratio inferred by Pythagoras in the blacksmith’s shop. Ironically, Rice’s calculations are also correct, since eight notes constitute a whole octave. In this case “eight” is the same as “twice one.” Perhaps this explains why Bloom ponders that you can “do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that” ( U 11 . 833 - 34 ), as Pythagorean ratios indeed do depend on comparing proportions of “difference” and “relationship” to one another: Those who believe that difference and relationship are the same thing are wrong in their thinking. For consider: 2 to 1 comprises the same difference as 1 does to 2 but not the same relationship. For 2 is twice that of 1 […]. (Nicomachus 173) Yet, apart from being a mere game of numbers, the calculations in Joyce’s ‘musemathematics’ passage reaffirm “ultimately Pythagorean lore” (Senn, “Met” 111 ), as the decisive ratio of a musical octave - 2 : 1 or “twice one” - resonates throughout the “Sirens” chapter: the numbers can be traced back to Pythagoras’ 19 Here, Zack Bowen also sees the starting point of Bloom’s numerical-musical adventures, but does not go into detail as to what he is actually calculating. Bowen merely states that Bloom muses “on numbers and the mathematical basis of musical vibrations” ( 56 ). <?page no="314"?> 314 Thomas Gurke findings using a monochord - an exercise which Bloom also seems to mimic in “Sirens.” The monochord experiments, motivated by a legendary discovery in a blacksmith’s shop, also seem to resurface at the very beginning of Joyce’s text, as “bronze by gold” are heard “ringing steel” ( U 11 . 1 ). In addition, the two Siren-barmaids of the Ormond can be identified as the respective high and low notes of an octave, thereby adding validity to this Pythagorean perspective. Lastly, Pythagoras’ initially perceived consonance of the octave - an interval that remains in a perfectly proportioned or ‘harmonic’ ratio - is equated with the unison of the mythological Sirens. These are themselves cornerstones of Pythagoreanism and govern a central acousma : “What is harmony? That in which the Syrens subsist” (Iamblichus 43 ). Just as Pythagoras’ followers must have been intrigued by this cryptic acousma - listening to their teacher’s voice from behind a screen - so are we as readers confronted with Joyce’s complex “Sirens” chapter, a text that is not just about music , but questions what music is about . What is the nature of music? What does it consist of most? What is to be done? It is Bloom, who seeks Pythagorean mathemata as proof of these central acousmata , by asserting that music consists of “[n]umbers,” “[v]ibrations” and, subsequently, “[m]usemathematics” ( U 11 . 830 - 37 ). Questions regarding the inherent nature of music constantly pervade the texts of James Joyce. As the ‘acousmatic’ reading of the short story “The Dead” from Dubliners shows, music is treated as an object situated between the dynamics of ‘causal,’ ‘semantic’ and ‘reduced’ listening. Even in this early text, music is approached as a mysterious and highly affective sonorous event - rather than constituting a mere Romantic-symbolic representation. Depending on the perspectives of the characters in “The Dead,” the sound’s veiled source entails multiple acts of perception, with a ‘blind spot’ always-already inscribed in the modes of ‘causal’ and ‘semantic’ listening. Furthermore, as the dislocated ‘sonorous object’ cannot be traced to an original source, Schaeffer’s proposition for manipulated tape recordings can be identified in Gretta’s perception of “The Lass of Aughrim” as a version “of what was originally a unique event” (Schaeffer, “Acousmatics” 79 ). This explains the affective emergence in Gretta’s seemingly ‘silent’ response to the song. In addition, it can also be read as Joyce’s credo for the power of a unique sound event in the face of pre-recorded music. What can be observed as an early quest for the affective power of music in “The Dead” - by virtue of the acousmatic situation - is intensified in the most musical chapter of Ulysses . In “Sirens,” the legendary experiments involving the blacksmith and monochord resurface and thereby create a Pythagorean parallax that approaches the object of music from epistemological and methodological perspectives. The strange ‘musemathematical’ calculations that follow are representative of a central Pythagorean exercise: explaining acousmata through <?page no="315"?> Pythagorean Parallaxes in “The Dead” and Ulysses 315 mathemata . Indeed, it seems that “Sirens” itself contains a cryptic Joycean acousma that can now be answered: “Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind” ( U 11 . 825 ). What lies submerged in Joyce’s ‘words’ (his early and late texts) is a study of the object of ‘music’ from various perspectives (in parallax) that investigates the processes of musical perception, effects and its core substance - as if peeking ‘behind’ the Pythagorean screen. Works Cited Adkins, Cecil. “Monochord.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . Ed. Stanley Sadie. 2 nd ed. Oxford: OUP , 2001. 495-96. Print. Ball, Robert Stawell. The Story of the Heavens . Rev. ed. London: Cassell & Company, 1900. Print. Bauer, Julian Georg. Theorie, Komposition und Analyse: Der Einfluss der Mathematik auf die Musik im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2009. Print. Boas, George. “Ancient Testimony to Secret Doctrines.” The Philosophical Review . 62.1 (1953): 79-92. Print. Bowen, Zack. “The Bronzegold Sirensong.” Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music . Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1995. 25-84. Print. Brown, Susan Sutcliff. The Geometry of James Joyce’s Ulysses : From Pythagoras to Poincaré. Joyce’s Use of Geometry for Structure, Metaphor, and Theme . Diss. U of South Florida, Ann Arbor: UMI , 1987. Print. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen . New York: Columbia UP , 1994. Print. Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated . 2 nd ed. Revised and enlarged by Don Gifford. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print. Iamblichus. Life of Pythagoras, Pythagoric Life . Trans. and commentary by Thomas Taylor. London: J. M. Watkins, 1818. Print. James, Jamie. The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe . New York: Grove Press, 1993. Print. Joyce, James. Dubliners . London: Penguin, 1992. Print. -. Ulysses . New York: Vintage Books 1986. Print. Juslin, Patrik N. and Petri Laukka. “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance: Different Channels, Same Code? ” Psychological Bulletin , 129.5: (2003): 770-814. Print. Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice . Oxford: OUP , 2014. Print. -. “ L’Objet Sonore Maintenant : Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction.” Organised Sound 12.1 (2007): 15-24. Print. Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices . London: Faber and Faber, 1978. Kittler, Friedrich. Musik und Mathematik 1: Hellas 1: Aphrodite . Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006. Print. Knowles, Sebastian D. G. The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce’s Ulysses. Florida: UP of Florida, 2001. Print. <?page no="316"?> 316 Thomas Gurke McKinnon, Dugal. “The Acousmatic and the Language of the Technological Sublime.” EMS : Electroacoustic Music Studies Network . DeMontfort / Leicester 2007. Web. McKinnon, James W. “Jubal Vel Pythagoras, Quis Sit Inventor Musicae? ” Musical Quarterly 75.1 ( January 1978): 1-28. Print. Münxelhaus, Barbara. Pythagoras musicus: Zur Rezeption der pythagoreischen Musiktheorie als quadrivialer Wissenschaft im lateinischen Mittelalter . Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1976. Print. Nicomachus. The Manual of Harmonics of Nicomachus the Pythagorean . Trans. and commentary by Flora R. Levin. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1994. Print. Plock, Vike Martina. “Good Vibrations: ‘Sirens,’ Soundscapes, and Physiology.” James Joyce Quarterly 46.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2009): 481-96. Print. Rice, Thomas Jackson. “The Distant Music of the Spheres.” Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce . Ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles. New York: Garland, 1999. 213-27. Print. Senn, Fritz. “Met Whom What? ” James Joyce Quarterly 30.1 (Fall 1992): 109-13. Print. -. “Remodeling Homer.” Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism . Ed. Heyward Ehrlich. New York: New Horizon 1984, 70-92. Print. Schaeffer, Pierre. “Acousmatics.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music . Ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2004. 76-81. Print. -. Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines . Paris: Seuil, 1966. Print. Spencer, Herbert. “The Origin and Function of Music.” Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. 2 . London: Williams and Norgate, 1891. 400-51. Print. Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List by Weldon Thornton . Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1986. Print. van der Waerden, Bartel Leendert. “Die Harmonielehre der Pyhagoreer.” Hermes 78.2 (1943): 163-99. Print. -. Die Pythagoreer . Zurich: Artemis, 1979. Print. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Print. Witen, Michelle. “The Mystery of the Fuga Per Canonem Reopened? ” Genetic Joyce Studies 10 (Spring 2010). Web. Zimmermann, Jörg. “Wandlungen des philosophischen Musikbegriffs.” Musik und Zahl: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zum Grenzbereich zwischen Musik und Mathematik . Ed. Günter Schnitzler. Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1976. 81-135. Print. <?page no="317"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs: Close-Ups from Sylvia Beach’s Letters to James Joyce in the 1920s Ruth Frehner The very first pictures we probably have of Sylvia Beach and James Joyce show them in the doorway of Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at 8 , rue Dupuytren in 1920 , before she moved her shop to the famous location at 12 , rue de l’Odéon in July 1921 (Cato and Vitiello 36 - 37 ). In one of the pictures, we see a frontal view of the bookshop, with Joyce standing - sheltered - on the threshold in a relaxed pose, leaning with his right shoulder on the outer edge of the doorframe, his right leg crossed over his left, his right hand lightly propped up on a slim walking stick, his left hand in his trouser pocket: a bit dandyish, with his light-colored shoes and his bowtie and fedora hat. He is looking at Sylvia Beach, who is standing on the pavement - a bit less sheltered, a bit lower down - leaning with her back on the other doorpost, looking out into the street, her left hand in the pocket of her jacket. The other picture, the famous one taken from inside the shop, shows them both on the threshold, and their clothes suggest that the two pictures were taken on the same day. Here, Joyce is looking confidently straight into the camera while Beach is looking intently at Joyce. In both pictures, their eyes do not meet. Distance between the two emanates from these two early photos, a distance that probably has to do with Sylvia Beach being so much in awe of Joyce. A Panoramic View of the 1920s Letters The very first letter written by Sylvia Beach on Shakespeare and Company stationery that is part of the Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation also dates from 1920 . 1 Although Beach writes in the first person, the letter is not from her. Starting her letter with “Je suis le peintre américain […]” (‘I am the American painter […]’), it is immediately clear that she lends her voice, her pen and paper and most notably her French to an American artist who wishes to recommend Joyce as a tenant to a landlord whose apartment he had visited and 1 There are some 100 items (letters, postcards, telegrams) of the Beach-Joyce correspondence at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, dating from between 1920 - 1937 . They were donated to the Foundation in 2006 by Hans E. Jahnke, Giorgio Joyce’s stepson. Unless otherwise stated, letters from Beach to Joyce are part of the Jahnke Bequest. <?page no="318"?> 318 Ruth Frehner found too dark for his work as a painter. 2 Joyce did not move to this apartment, but Sylvia Beach invested time - if not money - on his behalf. She had, for a brief moment, given up her own identity and, probably out of necessity, even signed for the American painter, putting a tiny “par S. B.” below the ‘signature.’ This letter can serve as an epitome of one of Beach’s most characteristic traits, that of the helper, facilitator, adviser, intermediary. The first letter of the Beach-Joyce correspondence proper, which starts in early January 1921 , continues in this vein: Beach suggests one of her customers as a possible typist for parts of his Ulysses manuscript and passes her address on to Joyce. Only one and a half months later, in late February 1922 , she forwards him a momentous letter by Valery Larbaud, the well-known poet, translator, man of letters and lover of American literature who acted as godfather to Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company and to whom she and Adrienne had introduced Joyce the previous Christmas. On 22 February, Larbaud wrote that he was “raving mad over Ulysses ” and had not been so enthusiastic about any book since reading Whitman at the age of eighteen (Larbaud, Lettres 40 ). Ending her cover letter to accompany Larbaud’s with “Hurrah for ‘Ulyssees’! [sic]” (Beach to Joyce, 22 February 1921 ), Beach must have known that Larbaud would be instrumental in promoting Ulysses . She would come into her own as the publisher of Ulysses only a few weeks later, when Joyce “immediately and joyfully” accepted her offer to publish his novel at the end of March 1921 (Beach 47 ). Thus the letters start off with Sylvia Beach at the beginning of an adventure that she had probably not even dreamt of a year previously: the adventure of publishing Ulysses in France. The letters to follow show her initially as an inexperienced enthusiastic publisher, we see her grow into her role as an agent and arts manager, but frequently also get a glimpse of the secretary, bookkeeper, moneylender and errand girl. Many of the letters are fairly short notes about daily business, which formed quite a substantial part of their relationship. It is also notable that between 1924 and 1928 , the most active years of correspondence in the 1920 s, some 130 letters from Joyce to Beach have survived whereas we have only 53 from Beach to Joyce. The most striking imbalances occur in 1924 - 25 and 1927 - 28 , i. e. from mid-August 1924 to the end of December 1925 , when there are 36 letters from Joyce and only 4 from Beach, and from May 1927 to the end of July 1928 , when there are 50 from Joyce versus 2 from Beach. His letters include thanks for (no longer extant) holiday greeting cards from her, or requests for a reply, which most probably were not ignored by the conscientious Sylvia Beach. Though quite a number of ephemera from 2 The American painter was George Macrum; letter dated 11 October 1920 . <?page no="319"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 319 her have survived in Joyce’s papers, it is quite likely that, with his frequent changes of address and his traveling, he kept less from her than she did from him. Moreover, there were times when he simply could not write: during the 1924 - 25 period, he was hospitalized for his eye-illness four times. Very often, the letters he sends her require some action on her part: he asks her to send books to various people, or money or medicines to him when he is on holidays; he wishes her to order books for him or to copy letters he received which he wants to pass on to somebody else; or he asks her to write letters on his behalf to printers, publishers, friends and foes. Sylvia Beach’s letters to Joyce in the 1920 s convey a portrait of the artist as a manager: an author managing, with the great help of Sylvia Beach, his own work, his life and his self-promotion. In addition to looking for a flat for the Joyces and trying to find a typist for the Ulysses manuscript, Beach is concerned with Joyce’s never-ending money shortages, the subscription of Ulysses , the subsequent sale of the book, and the translation of Ulysses into French. A translation of Dubliners is on its way, and there is also a new edition of A Portrait by Jonathan Cape, published after the closure of the Egoist Press, which must have made him realize just how generous an arrangement he enjoyed with Sylvia Beach as the publisher of Ulysses . And then there is Exiles , which Joyce so much wants to see performed on a Parisian stage, and time and again there are Joyce’s troubles with his eyes. The letters of the 1920 s also mention the making of a record with Joyce reading from the “Aeolus” episode in Ulysses , the publication of first passages from “Work in Progress” in the avant-garde journal transition , and, to top it all, the pirating of Ulysses by Samuel Roth, which came to a head in a quite unprecedented way, culminating in the famous letter of protest signed by 167 prominent writers, artists and thinkers from all over the world, which was released on Joyce’s birthday on 2 February 1927 . As in the Samuel Roth case, most of the letters of the 1920 s are only the tip of the iceberg, and an editor or annotator can at least reveal some of the stories that are below the surface. The added context to the letters may broaden the view of present day readers, offer them access to another perspective and thus make the letters come alive at all. There is sometimes a great deal of subtext to the often hastily written letters, and bringing this subtext to the fore, the annotations often create a shift in perception - a parallax - for the present-day reader, by adding a second eye to a previously monocular vision. It is, however, not only the contemporary context, but also the appraisal of the past events in question from today’s perspective that enhances our perception. This is particularly obvious not only for the complex case of Samuel Roth, but also for Exiles , which is only marginally treated in the letters. With the added background through the annotations, however, we <?page no="320"?> 320 Ruth Frehner come to realize how much Joyce cared for his play, how he not only dealt with the literary élite when it came to Ulysses , but, with Sylvia Beach’s connections, also managed to get the attention of the crème de la crème of the Parisian theatre world with his much less prominent play. High Drama I: Exiles in Paris Bernaert, du Pasquier, Hébertot, Copeau, Jouvet - these names were the editor’s starting point for an enquiry into what became the Parisian non-staging history of Exiles - and into the muddles of the Parisian theatre scene at the beginning of the 1920 s. The title of the play appears rather symptomatic for the experience Joyce went through with his play: it seems the play just would not fit in with the programs of the theatres it was offered to, although there were plenty of “almosts” that raised high hopes. Yet, there is only scant evidence in Joyce and Beach’s letters that Exiles was such an issue. She mentions Exiles only four times in her letters, three times referring to a possible Paris performance, and once to the Neighborhood Playhouse performance in New York. Exiles is first mentioned on 26 June 1923 and we learn the following: But Baernaerts has come to tell me that he and Mme du Pasquier have proposed Exiles to Hébertot and that they have every hope that it will be given at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées next season […] This is in medias res , almost three years after the first plans to have Exiles performed in Paris were being made. As early as 1915 , even before coming to Paris, Joyce had tried to get it on stage when he offered it to the leading theatres in Berne and Zurich, and he even tried in Geneva for a French version, 3 as well as in England, but his efforts were in vain. 4 He also asked Pound to try and have Exiles staged in America, and he offered it to Yeats and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Yeats, having read Joyce’s Portrait , even thought that the Abbey “should [dare to] face a riot for [a play by Joyce],” 5 but later rejected it on the grounds that the Irish theatre was not good at that type of play as it was “too far from the folk drama.” 6 In 1918 , for a short while only, he also considered producing it in English with The English Players in Zurich, the company he himself had founded together with Claud Sykes after receiving a generous stipend from Edith Rockefeller McCormick (Ellmann, Joyce 422 - 23 ). 3 Letter to Michael Healy, 2 November 1915 ( James Joyce, Letters Vol. I: 85 , henceforth abbreviated as Letters I ). 4 Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1 July 1916 ( Letters I : 92 ). 5 Letter from Yeats to Pound, dated 11 February 1917 (qtd. in Ellmann, Joyce 401 n.) 6 This appears in an unpublished letter by Yeats to Joyce (qtd. in Ellmann, Joyce 401 ). <?page no="321"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 321 Incidentally, Exiles was the first of Joyce’s works to be published in translation. Stefan Zweig, a great admirer of Exiles , found the Austrian-Czech Hannah von Mettal to translate the play into German (Faerber and Luchsinger 56 ), and it was published in Zurich in 1919 by a bookseller and publisher called Rascher Verlag. However, the play did not sell, probably because the Munich performance of 1919 had not been well received, and by 1926 , Rascher sent a sales statement declaring only nine copies sold. 7 Sylvia Beach mentions that Exiles was one of the first problems that Joyce brought her: very soon after his arrival in Paris - and not very long after the Munich performance - Joyce had agreed to a contract offered to him by Aurélien Lugné-Poë, who, at that point, thought it would bring in no money but intended to stage it nonetheless. 8 In autumn 1920 , Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus that Exiles was being translated into French - by Lugné-Poë’s then-secretary Jacques Natanson, who was himself to become a playwright - and would be produced by Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in December. 9 Lugné-Poë ( 1869 - 1940 ) was a French actor who had founded a successful company, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, which brought Paris truly cosmopolitan avant-garde drama with new playwrights such as Maeterlinck, Wilde, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, d’Annunzio, and Jarry. 10 Beach considered him to be one of Paris’ “most esteemed theatrical managers” (Beach 163 ), the Encyclopaedia Britannica called him a brilliant promoter of budding playwrights. However, by June 1921 Lugné-Poë had changed his mind and to Joyce’s great disappointment declined to stage Exiles , saying that “he was not such a fool as to put on the piece and lose 15 , 000 francs.” 11 Beach, in her account of the story, shows some understanding for Lugné-Poë, who maintained that he had to consider the demands of present-day theatergoers who asked for something that made them laugh (Beach 164 ). While it is true that he concentrated mainly on comedies and farces at that time, he also staged Strindberg’s Dance of Death in 1921 . 12 However, as Ellmann states, before breaking off his history of the non-staging of Exiles in Paris ( Joyce 498 ), Lugné- Poë’s success with his production of Fernand Crommelynck’s farce Le Cocu magnifique , which had premiered in December 1920 , 13 forced a postponement 7 Sales statement of the Rascher Verlag, dated 24 March 1926 . Rascher Papers at Zentralbibliothek Zürich, MS 74 . 8 Letter by Joyce to Jenny Serruys, 20 October 1920 ( James Joyce, Letters Vol. III : 24 - 5 , henceforth abbreviated as Letters III ). 9 Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 28 October 1920 ( Letters III : 26 ). 10 Styan 30 - 38 , 45 - 47 ; Encyclopaedia Britannica , “Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.” 11 Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 June 1921 ( Letters I : 166 ). 12 www.lesarchivesduspectacle.net; 13 April 2010 . 13 www.lesarchivesduspectacle.net; 30 May 2010 . <?page no="322"?> 322 Ruth Frehner of Exiles until spring, when he finally declined. “ Le Cocu took the wind out of the sails of Exiles ,” Joyce told Budgen, “as the jealousy motive is the same in both cases. The only difference is that in my play the people act with a certain reserve, whereas in Le Cocu the hero, to mention only one, acts like a madman” (Budgen 350 ). In 1922 , Jacques Copeau ( 1879 - 1949 ) came onto the scene - again, one should say. He was a French actor, literary critic, stage director, and dramatic coach who was at the forefront of a movement against realism in early twentieth-century theatre. In 1913 , he had founded the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier. Together with Louis Jouvet, he sought to break down the barrier between actor and audience, and they redesigned the theatre in 1920 as a reconstruction of the Elizabethan apron stage without the proscenium arch and with simple screens to suggest locale. The atmosphere of each play was created almost entirely by lighting. Emphasizing the play rather than its trappings, Copeau concentrated on training the actors, and eventually his company ranked with the great Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavsky. 14 Beach had every hope that Jacques Copeau would produce Joyce’s play, as she writes in her book Shakespeare and Company ( 165 ): although he turned down Exiles in October 1920 , he added that he might consider it later: Mon programme est complet pour cette saison-ci. Mais si cela vous convient je lirai volontiers votre pièce et pourrai considerer la possibilité d’une représentation pour une date ultérieure. (‘My program is made for this season. But if you wish I will gladly read your play and I could consider the possibility of a performance for a later date.’) 15 Almost two years later, in July 1922 , Copeau told Beach that he had now finally read the play and found it very interesting, and he offered to consider staging it at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier; he even added that the role of Richard attracted him personally. 16 He also asked Beach to check whether Lugné-Poë would renounce the rights, which the latter did. 17 There were great hopes that things would work out this time, and Beach felt that Copeau should be able “to get into Richard’s skin and communicate the Joycean subtleties to his atten- 14 “Vieux-Colombier, Theatre of the.“ Encyclopaedia Britannica . 15 Letter from Jacques Copeau to James Joyce, 5 October 1920 . Unpublished letter, Poetry / Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, The James Joyce Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, henceforth abbreviated as JJUB . XI. Copeau to Joyce. All translations if not otherwise stated are mine. 16 Letter of 28 July 1922 ; Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, henceforth abbreviated as SBPU . Box 144 : Exiles . 17 Sylvia Beach in an undated draft of a letter to Copeau ( SBPU , Box 144 : Exiles ) <?page no="323"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 323 tive listeners.” Yet, at the end of the 1923 / 1924 season, to everyone’s surprise, Copeau retired from the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier to the country and to a life of contemplation without having produced the play (Beach 165 ). At roughly the same time, Edouard Bernaert, a Belgian poet and journalist who also worked for the Editions de la Sirène, 18 had prepared a translation of the play together with Hélène du Pasquier, who had already translated stories from Dubliners . 19 They proposed it to Jacques Hébertot of the prestigious Théâtres des Champs Elysées. Beach said about his theatres that “[t]he performances […] - music, ballet, and drama - were events nobody could afford to miss; or to attend, unless you were invited, as I was” ( 164 - 5 ). It was at the Grand Théâtre des Champs Elysées that in the previous years Stravinsky / Dhiagilev / Nijinsky’s Sacre du printemps had premiered and created a scandal. The smaller theatre was the Comédie, and in 1923 , Hébertot inaugurated the tiny Studio (Whitton 82 ). Once again, a performance seemed near, with “Hébertot’s little bulletin” already announcing it; once again, the plans came to nothing (Beach 164 - 5 ) and the Bernaert / du Pasquier translation was never published. Needless to say, that in this matter too, Sylvia Beach acted as Joyce’s agent. At least, things looked brighter on the other side of the Atlantic: the Neighborhood Players in New York planned to put on Exiles , so they sent a contract, which Beach mentions in her letter of 24 July 1924 . And indeed, they performed it 41 times in February and March 1925 , but without creating the sensation that Joyce had hoped for. 20 In that same letter, Beach says that Hébertot is in a mess just now; Jouvet wants to leave him and take over the Vieux Colombier for himself and he and Romains and the Pitoëffs and Hébertot and everybody 18 Cf. the letter from Hélène du Pasquier to Joyce, 27 Oct [ 1923 ] where she says that she met Bernaert “de la Sirène” ( SBPU , Box 144 : Folder 6 ; Hélène du Pasquier did not put a year on her letters, but from the context it must have been in 1923 ). La Sirène successfully published translations and the editors had a flair for good texts in the fields of drama, cinema or musicology. <www.imecarchives.com / fonds / fiche.php? i=SRN > 19 October 2009 . 19 Hélène du Pasquier (née Gibert, d. 1941 ) had, by 1923 , published translations of two Dubliners stories, in Les Écrits Nouveaux ; “Éveline” in VIII: 11 (Nov 1921 ) and “L’Arabie” in IX: 2 (February 1922 ). In 1926 , the full collection of stories was published as Gens de Dublin , with translations by du Pasquier, Yva Fernandez and Jacques-Paul Reynaud. Apart from “Eveline” and “Araby,” du Pasquier also contributed “An Encounter” and “After the Race.” See also: <www.comediedeschampselysees.com> 23 December 2013 <www.regietheatrale.com / index / index / sitehebertot / dp_hebertot.pdf> 23 September 2009 20 See letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 11 July 1924 , Letters III : 100 n 1 . <?page no="324"?> 324 Ruth Frehner connected with the Champs Elysées Theatre are in a great mix up. 21 If Hébertot lives through it he will probably put on Exiles next winter we think. He did not. There were other attempts by various people to translate and / or stage Joyce’s play in Paris in the 1920 s, but France had to wait until 1950 for the first published French translation - by Jenny Serruys Bradley, who had been working on it already in the very early 1920 s (Larbaud, Letters 111 ). This is an astonishing time lag for a work by an author who had definitely established himself internationally with Sylvia Beach publishing his Ulysses in 1922 . It may bespeak the rather divergent perceptions by the author and by producers / publishers as regards the topicality of Exiles and its performative qualities. Thus France had to wait until 1954 to see Exiles on stage. 22 Interlude: The Translation of Ulysses into French The translation of Ulysses , although an undertaking on a rather large scale, did not leave many traces in Beach’s letters to Joyce either. However, the anecdotes are worth mentioning for revealing a surprisingly carefree attitude towards translation. First attempts were made even before the first edition of 1922 came out, when the very young Jacques Benoist-Méchin in collaboration with Léon- Paul Fargue translated some excerpts for Larbaud’s talk on Ulysses at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop in December 1921 . 23 In summer 1924 , these were pub- 21 Louis Jouvet was Hébertot’s technical director but had also been with Copeau at the “Vieux Colombier” until 1922 (as to the French writer Jules Romains , Sylvia Beach belonged to his circle of “copains.” Georges Pitoëff directed his own amateur company in St. Petersburg, and after World War I the couple emigrated to Paris, where they greatly influenced French theatre through their subtle and inventive productions of more than 200 plays. In addition to presenting an international repertoire including Chekhov, Shaw and Pirandello, the Pitoëffs introduced the works of French innovators such as Cocteau and Anouilh (“Georges Pitoëff.” The Columbia Encyclopedia .) 22 In 1922 , there was another attempt, by Marcel Ray, to have the play staged. Ray had more or less talked Firmin Gémier, who had been Hébertot’s predecessor at the “Comédie des Champs-Elysées” and was director of the “Théâtre de l’Odéon” in 1922 , into staging Exiles , even though Gémier had not yet read the play (letter from Marcel Ray to Valery Larbaud, 9 October 1922 (Larbaud, Correspondance 54 and 302 n 3 ). Marcel Ray wanted to make another, more literary translation of the play, which would not compete with the stage adaptation based on Serruys’ translation that had already been made by Lugné-Poe’s secretary, the playwright Jacques Natanson (letter from Valery Larbaud to Marcel Ray, 13 October 1922 (Larbaud, Correspondance 55 and 303 n 1 ). Thanks for this information on Marcel Ray to Andreas Weigel, Vienna. 23 Jacques Benoist-Méchin ( 1901 - 83 ) was a music student when he joined Beach’s lending library only nine days after the opening. He played an important role in dramatic events in the rue de l’Odéon (Riley Fitch 45 and 73 ). Later he made a political career and, as a Germanophile, he collaborated with the German government. During the war, he seems <?page no="325"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 325 lished along with further passages in the first issue of Commerce and that is when a “pastry problem” (at least relating to translation) arose. On 16 July 1924 Beach writes the following: Dear Mr Joyce, Adrienne and I thought that “gâteau aux amants” might do but Fargue turned it down. He says it’s rather feeble. There is a cake called “puyt d’amour” - round with custard in the middle - but Adrienne thinks it too messy for the purpose. She thinks ‘brioche’ will have to do if you are willing. Fargue paid a nice visit to his friend the pastrycook’s wife but he found nothing in her repertory corresponding to a seed cake. 24 Gâteau aux amants , literally ‘gateau of lovers,’ was Joyce’s suggestion for the translation of “seedcake,” which occurs twice in the novel, in “Lestrygonians” and “Penelope,” 25 and apart from the procreative connotation of gâteau aux amants , it added the overtone of almonds as one of the main ingredients to the cake, just as, conversely, the constituent ingredient of the innocuous seedcake made it a cake of lovers in the context given. Also, the puyt d’amour would have been a rather nice equivalent, in spite of - or rather because of - its messiness. It seems that madeleine was at one point an option, which Joyce, for obvious reasons, wanted to avoid ( Joyce to Beach, 13 July 1924 , Banta and Silverman 41 ). Eventually, gâteau aux amants was chosen for the excerpt from “Penelope” published in the first issue of Commerce in 1924 ; for Adrienne Monnier’s first edition of Ulysse ( 1929 ), Auguste Morel opted for gâteau au cumin (‘caraway’) in “Penelope” ( 709 ), but the less specific gâteau chaud mâché for the seedcake in “Lestrygonians” ( 173 ). Aubert et al. ( 2004 ) chose gâteau à l’anis for both ( 222 and 967 ). While Joyce’s suggestion clearly plays on the seed / semen line, Morel and Aubert seem to have conscientiously consulted recipes involving seeds. Yet the symbolic significance of the “seedcake” Molly is chewing and passing on to Bloom before he proposes to her on the Hill of Howth is rendered somewhat less obvious by both “cumin” and “anis.” In the same letter of 16 July 1924 , the discussion of a more cardinal problem is referred to: to have used his connections to get Sylvia Beach released from her internment at Vittel in 1941 (Riley Fitch 403 ; cf. also Walsh 193 n 13 ). Léon-Paul Fargue ( 1878 - 1947 ) was a French poet and also a frequent caller at Shakespeare and Company. Involved in the translations of Ulysses for the séance at Adrienne Monnier’s, he helped prepare the first extracts of a French translation of Ulysses for the first issue of Commerce (Banta and Silverman 23 , note 6 to letter 15 ). 24 Letter at JJUB , XI. Beach to Joyce. 25 In Ulysses 8 . 907 and 18 . 1574 . <?page no="326"?> 326 Ruth Frehner Larbaud has written to Adrienne that Penelope […] is to appear without accents and no remarks or explanations or apologies of any sort and he will take the entire responsibility for the translation. (underline by S. B.) Valery Larbaud had supervised the translation of the fragment of “Penelope” which was to be published in Commerce . Monnier, in her article about the translation of Ulysses , mentions that Joyce had suggested “that it would be good, for the translation of the fragment of ‘Penelope,’ to suppress not only the punctuation, as had been done, but also the accents over the letters and the apostrophes” ( 132 ). Monnier was “frankly against it” but to her surprise, Larbaud’s telegram answer from Italy was “Joyce is right Joyce ha ragione ” ( 132 , original emphasis). And a last reference to the French Ulysses translation in Beach’s letters to Joyce is a rather casual remark: Beach nonchalantly mentions on 18 August 1928 that “Adrienne and I are about to translate two missing pages of Ulysses . Morel asked us to. They had got lost somehow.” This, indeed, is a look behind the translators’ scenes, and few as the references are to the process of translation of one of the most difficult books to translate, they give an atmospheric view of the hilarious side of this collaborative effort of what can be a very lonely activity. High Drama II: Samuel Roth and the Pirating of Ulysses From 1926 , no less than 23 letters from Beach to Joyce have survived, which is the annual record of the 1920 s. Fifteen of them were written after the summer break, when news had reached her that Ulysses had been pirated by Samuel Roth: in the same month, the prestigious American journal The Dial had accepted the “Shaun” section of “Work in Progress” 26 (later FW III : 403 - 590 ) but would not print it in full length, which Joyce, in turn, could not accept as he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 24 Sept 1926 ( Letters I : 245 ). In the very same month, Wyndham Lewis was eager to print another excerpt from “Work in Progress” called the “Triangle” piece 27 (later FW II : 282 . 05 - 304 . 04 ) in his new review The Enemy but eventually decided otherwise. Beach mentions “the pirating of Ulysses ” for the first time in her letters to Joyce immediately on her return from her holidays on 1 September 1926 . It seems, however, it had been a topic between the two before, as she merely informs him that Lewis Galantière, a mutual friend of theirs, had offered to write a letter about the case to the American papers. On 9 September, she tells Joyce, who was still at the seaside at Ostende, that Gorman had called before sailing to the States and would do anything Joyce wished him to do about Samuel Roth. 26 This section later became Finnegans Wake III: 403 - 590 . 27 This became Finnegans Wake II: 282 . 05 - 304 . 04 . <?page no="327"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 327 However, Joyce’s no less than eight letters to Beach in the remaining weeks of September show that he still has other concerns: the German translation, the two excerpts from “Work in Progress” for both The Dial and Wyndham Lewis, and finally money as his holidays turned out to be very expensive. No sign of the storm that was to develop. The prelude to the so-called “ Ulysses pirating” took place four years earlier, in 1922 , when Roth had written to Joyce asking about the possibilities of printing a novel by him in his then not yet existing Two Worlds . He had promised “on appearance in his first issue […] an advance royalty of one hundred dollars and later fifteen percent on the sales of the issue” (Roth to Joyce, 10 May 1922 ), 28 which Joyce had turned down as he had urged Beach to ask Harriet Shaw Weaver “to reply to Two Worlds one or two words to the effect that he would be unable to accept this proposition” (Beach to Weaver, 6 June 1922 [Walsh 92 ]). Roth had also invited Ezra Pound to be on the board of editors, and Pound accepted, suggesting that he could also use Joyce’s new “Work in Progress” (Kugel 243 ). It was only in September 1925 that Two Worlds was launched, not with a serialized Ulysses but with installments of “Work in Progress” that were then available in Europe, for which Joyce accepted $ 200 (Gertzman, “Samuel” 36 ). The real trouble started when Roth launched the publication of Two Worlds Monthly in July 1926 with installments of Ulysses . Jay Gertzman claims that whether Roth actually had permission to publish Ulysses excerpts in Two Worlds Monthly can be answered only tentatively (Gertzman, “Samuel” 36 ). Although missing, a letter of permission dating from 3 July 1922 may be inferred from a follow-up letter by Pound on 4 July, which Kugel quotes in her article ( 243 ). However, Pound, who approved of the suggestion at that time, would no longer have been authorized to give permission for printing, as in July 1922 , Ulysses had already been published by Shakespeare and Company, and, therefore, if anyone, Sylvia Beach or Joyce himself should have been asked (Gertzman, “Samuel” 41 - 2 ). Beach could not have consented as she rebuked him for publishing excerpts from “Work in Progress” without permission in a letter of 5 December 1925 (Gertzman, “Samuel” 43 ). Yet, this charge was not correct, as Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 5 March 1926 that he “wanted to revise Shaun abc 29 for Mr Roth [but] could not do so” as he was too tired ( Letters III : 139 ). The same letter also contains a paragraph showing that Joyce and Roth had some kind of agreement that involved money (Roth’s check of $ 100 for two pieces printed in September and December 1925 respectively) 28 SBPU , Box 129 , Folder 3 . 29 The “Shaun” section in Finnegans Wake consists of 4 parts, which Joyce labeled a, b, c, and d. <?page no="328"?> 328 Ruth Frehner as well as Roth’s offer for future printings. Mysteriously, Ellmann omitted this paragraph in the third volume of the Joyce Letters Edition; Kugel, on the other hand, quotes it in her article ( 244 ). 30 Things were made even more complicated by the fact that Joyce had not received any money from the editors of The Little Review for printing installments of Ulysses ; thus Roth could claim that it was quite customary among little magazines not to pay their contributors (Margaret Anderson qtd. in Saint-Amour 463 ), and Joyce was advised against a law suit as Roth’s printing at that time meant no violation of American law: as it was banned in the US , Ulysses had never been printed and therefore never been copyrighted in the United States. In addition, the United States had not signed the Berne Convention, which would have protected the book against piracy (Riley Fitch 244 ). In 1926 , many copies of the Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses had been confiscated, and as a result, Gertzman suggests, Joyce and Beach were worried that Roth would sell large numbers of his excerpts and would thus ruin their profits on Ulysses , which they hoped to make not least through limited editions. However, why would they who wanted beautifully produced editions be worried about the cheaply produced excerpts in the little magazine format (“Samuel” 47 )? The famous protest published in 1927 , exactly five years after the Paris First Edition of Ulysses had appeared and for which Beach had collected 167 signatures, was first and foremost a moral appeal to boycott Roth 31 on the grounds that he had not obtained permission nor paid any money to the author and for mutilating the text. Both accusations are not quite true and not quite false. As Amanda Sigler and others state, it is true that Roth did expurgate the text in order to appease the censors, but critics also agree on the extent of expurgation that was performed by Pound for the Egoist and by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap for The Little Review for the same reasons: if anything, the changes they made were more, not fewer than Roth’s. Gertzman mentions that Roth actually printed the “Nausicaa” episode (of all episodes) unaltered in Two Worlds Monthly , which was not acknowledged by Joyce’s supporters (“ 1925 ” 72 ). The international protest contributed to Samuel Roth ( 1893 - 1974 ) being ostracized by the literary establishment both as a publisher of pornography and a literary pirate. As a result of extended research into the transatlantic asymmetries of copyright law and the difficulties of European authors to have their works protected in America at that time, Roth’s position and contribution to Modernism have come to be re-evaluated. And while not everything he did was above 30 It was in fact Roth’s daughter Adelaide Kugel, who started the ball rolling in Roth’s case with her short article in the Joyce Studies Annual in 1992 . 31 The text of the protest ended by appealing to the American public “to oppose Mr Roth’s enterprise the full power of honorable and fair opinion” ( SBPU , Box 130 , Folder 3 ). <?page no="329"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 329 suspicion, his dealings are now seen in a wider context. As suggested above, annotating Beach’s letters to Joyce here means to provide the reader with the contemporary context to the letters as well as the findings of research on the historical events dealt with in the letters. This will inevitably create a double shift in perception in Roth’s case: first in making the reader realize that the scant traces of the matter in the Beach-Joyce correspondence belied the extent of it, and second in showing that things were not as black and white as Joyce and Beach made them appear. Thus it is quite astonishing that there are only four letters by Beach in which this case is referred to, all sent in September and October 1926 , and they merely mention people who offer their help. From Joyce’s side, we have five letters, all of which were written between January and May 1927 . 32 Very little is revealed in the correspondence between Beach and Joyce of that absorbing affair that kept both of them extremely busy, especially Beach, who received many more orders from Joyce than the ones he gave her in the five letters. Thus she wrote to innumerable American papers, let alone all the other letters that Joyce asked her to write, and not to speak of the 167 signatures for the protest letter, which she collected mostly herself by sending a personal letter to each of the renowned artists and thinkers (Beach 181 ). There is a touching memento of her incredible efforts in the Sylvia Beach papers at Princeton: a small box with all the carefully wrapped and labeled little printer’s plates of all the signatures. 33 In her letter of 22 October 1926 to Joyce, which is still at the beginning of the whole drama, Beach is quite dispirited: Dear Mr Joyce, I enclose a letter from a Hungarian publisher about Ulysses. I didn’t understand very well your remark today about Samuel Roth’s edition of Ulysses preventing the money from coming into my coffers. I have thought more of your interests in the matter than of mine as usual. Yours faithfully Sylvia Beach (underline by S. B.) “Yours faithfully”: this is the only time she closes a letter to Joyce in this highly formal way. In its brevity, it reflects a deep hurt and foreshadows a crisis between the two that came to a head after the protest had been released on Joyce’s birthday in 1927 . As Beach’s biographer Noel Riley Fitch notes, this most complex story “put a strain on the relations” between the two. Joyce even suggested 32 Banta and Silverman, letters 30 Jan (no. 94 ), p. 115 ; n. d., probably February (no. 95 ), p. 116 ; n. d. probably spring (no. 101 ), p. 118 ; n. d. possibly spring? (no. 102 ), p. 118 ; and n. d. probably May (no. 108 ), p. 121 . 33 SBPU , Box 131 , Folder 4 . <?page no="330"?> 330 Ruth Frehner to Beach that she should transplant her shop to the United States in order to fight against the piracy “presumably by arranging an American edition” ( 259 ). From notes that Beach did not include in her memoirs, we learn that she felt that Joyce saw “Shakespeare and Company as something God had created for him, but to me it had other sides than the Joycean. Happily for Joyce himself as that was one of the reasons why my little enterprize [sic] was so useful to him” (Beach qtd. in Riley Fitch 260 ). On 12 April 1927 , around the time the protest appeared in the April issue of the Humanist , Beach wrote her rather famous letter to Joyce, which she did not send but kept in her files and which is printed in the Joyce-Beach letters edition. The opening is quite calm in spite of the uncomfortable fact that she owes the English publishers some £ 200 (ca. $ 10 , 500 nowadays), and she tells him that she cannot finance his and Nora’s trip to London “with money jingling in [his] pocket; ” then, in the second part, she reasons with him about his never-ending demands: The reward for my unceasing labour on your behalf is to see you tie yourself into a bowknot and hear you complain. (I am poor and tired too) and I have noticed that every time a new terrible effort is required from me, (my life is a continual ‘six hours’ with sprints every ten rounds) and I manage to accomplish the task that is set me you try to see how much more I can do while I am about it. Is it human? With kindest regards Yours very sincerely Sylvia Beach (Banta and Silverman 209) The letter that she did send on 29 April 1927 is no longer just a complaint, but she rebukes him for not realizing what she is in fact doing for him. It is the only time when she really loses her temper in her (surviving) letters to Joyce. After giving him some figures about his considerable earnings thanks to the sales of Ulysses , she makes it clear that she would have expected her efforts to be appreciated and she would no longer hide her disappointment at his failure to do so. She ends her letter with a blunt accusation: [It] would have been more sportsmanlike of you to own up to spending this considerable amount of money than to tell a lot of cock-and-bull stories to me who is your friend if ever you had one. You are the greatest writer who ever lived but even Pound has more sense. Do go to the moneylender. […] With kindest regards Yours very sincerely Sylvia Beach <?page no="331"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 331 From early on in their relationship, Sylvia Beach must have had a close-up view of Joyce the author and Joyce the man, and she enjoyed it. She admired the author, she was fascinated by the man and his personality from the very first (Beach 37 ), but she always knew as well that there was a price for her pleasure: I understood from the first that, working with or for James Joyce, the pleasure was mine - an infinite pleasure; the profits were for him. All that was available from his work, and I managed to keep it available, was his. But it was all I could do to prevent my bookshop from getting sucked under. (Beach 201) Now, she allowed herself in her letter to let Joyce know that she had seen the underside of “the greatest writer who ever lived,” that her reverential respect for him was, at least temporarily, suspended. A parallactic experience for her if ever there was one. Bibliography Banta, Melissa and Oscar Silverman, eds. The Letters of James Joyce to Sylvia Beach . Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP , 1987. Print. Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company . London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Print. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses . London: OUP , 1972. Print. Cato, Bob, and Greg Vitiello. Joyce Images . New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Print. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce . 2 nd rev. ed. Oxford: OUP , 1982. Print. -. The Letters of James Joyce . Vols. I- III . London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Print. Faerber, Thomas and Markus Luchsinger. Joyce in Zürich . Zurich: Unionsverlag, 1988. Print. Gertzman Jay A. “Samuel Roth’s ‘Unauthorized’ Ulysses .” Joyce Studies Annual 17 (2009): 34-66. Print. -. “1925-1927 - ‘Damn His Impertinence. Bloody Crook.’ Roth Publishes Joyce.” Samuel Roth - Infamous Modernist . Gainesville, FL : UP of Florida, 2013. 63-100. Print. Gide, André. Corydon, Quatre dialogues socratiques. Nouvelle Edition. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1924. Print. Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake . 1939. London: Faber & Faber, 1980. Print. -. Ulysses . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984. Print. -. “Ulysse: Fragments.” Trans. Valery Larbaud and August Morel. Commerce . (Été 1924): 123-58. Print. -. Ulysse . Trans. Auguste Morel, with Stuart Gilbert. Reviewed with the assistance of the author by Valery Larbaud. 1929. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Print. -. Ulysse . Trans. Jacques Aubert, Pacal Bataillard and Bernard Hoeffner. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Print. -. Letters of James Joyce . Vol. I. 1957. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. Rev. ed. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Print. <?page no="332"?> 332 Ruth Frehner -. Letters of James Joyce . Vols. II and III . 1957. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Rev. ed. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Print. Larbaud, Valery. Lettres à Adrienne Monnier et à Sylvia Beach 1919-1933 . Ed. Maurice Saillet. Paris: IMEC Editions, 1991. Print. Larbaud, Valery, and Marcel Ray. Correspondance 1899-1937 . Vol. I- III . Ed. Françoise Lioure. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1979-1980. Print. Kugel, Adelaide. “‘Wroth Wrackt Joyce’: Samuel Roth and the ‘Not Quite Unauthorized’ Edition of Ulysses .” Joyce Studies Annual 3 (1992): 242-47. Print. Monnier, Adrienne. The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier: An Intimate Portrait of the Literary and Artistic Life in Paris between the Wars . Trans., with an introduction and commentaries by Richard McDougall. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. Print. “Pitoëff, George.” The Columbia Encyclopedia . Sixth Edition. 2008. Questia . Web. 17 April 2015 Saint-Amour, Paul K. “Soliloquy of Samuel Roth: A Paranormal Defense.” James Joyce Quarterly 37.3-4 (2000): 459-77. Print. Sigler, Amanda. “Scandalous Reputations. Serializing Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly.” Berfrois 16 June 2011: n. pag. Web. 29 December 2013. Styan, J. L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 2: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd . Cambridge: CUP , 1981. Print. “Vieux-Colombier, Theatre of the.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Online . Encyclopedia Britannica, 2009. Web. 1 Dec. 2009. Walsh, Keri, ed. The Letters of Sylvia Beach . New York: Columbia UP , 2010. Print. Whitton, David. Stage Directors in Modern France . Manchester: Manchester UP 1987. Print. <?page no="333"?> Joyce through the Reading-Glass of Everyday Affairs 333 “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant Ursula Zeller Some time in 1937 , during one of their conversations in Paris, Beckett mentioned to Joyce that many intellectuals were turning now to Kafka. Joyce was perplexed and bothered by this new figure of literary pre-eminence, as Beckett remembered, since “[t]he name was known to Joyce only as that of the sinister translator of the Frankfurter Zeitung , Irene Kafka” (Ellmann 702 ). Curiously enough, the primary source of Joyce’s irritation was not artistic rivalry per se, but the coincidence of names by which he associated his new rival (who had died in 1924 ) with quite another person and another conjunction of names, a vexing incident six years earlier, which also implicated questions of artistic recognition and reputation. The story involving one Kafka and two Joyces, the so-called Frankfurter Zeitung affair, takes up just a few months in Joyce’s life and a paragraph or two in Ellmann’s biography, while it occurs in a handful of Joyce’s letters to a number of people. With Sylvia Beach’s letters to Joyce in the Hans E. Jahnke Bequest, there emerged a significant number of items which are concerned with this curious issue. 1 In fact, in the entire correspondence, there is no other single topic that takes up the same amount of space: 14 out of 41 letters dating from 1931 deal with it, which makes up one third of her letters to Joyce that year. Even considering the missing letters that would have dealt with other issues, the Frankfurter Zeitung affair remains an astonishingly strong presence - all the more so as the incident, while mildly amusing, is in itself rather trivial. Hence, in view of Joyce’s heavy investment, the biographical anecdote deserves a closer look, which most of all serves to highlight a certain aspect of Joyce’s personality, a paranoia about names and a propensity for litigation. Joyce’s distorted and exaggerated perception of this incident, his suspicion towards nearly everybody involved, his loss of any sense of objectivity - in short: his paranoid reaction - created a gap between his and the other party’s version of events far beyond a merely subjective divergence, affording no common ground. In order to present a fuller picture of the incident, an account through the Beach-Joyce 1 All letters from Beach to Joyce referred to in this essay are part of the Hans E. Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, which is subsequently cited as ZJJF Jahnke. <?page no="334"?> 334 Ursula Zeller correspondence thus requires a ‘Frankfurt parallax,’ as far as the extant sources on the newspaper’s position will allow. On 19 July 1931 , the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung , the forerunner of today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , mistakenly published a short story entitled “Vielleicht ein Traum” - a genre mix of crime and fantasy - under Joyce’s name: “We hereby publish a fragment by James Joyce, the author of the great English novel Ulysses ,” while a certain Irene Kafka is credited as its translator “from the English manuscript.” During the Weimar Republic, the Frankfurter Zeitung ( FZ ) was one of the leading Southern German daily newspapers of international reputation, liberal in its political orientation and particularly well-known for its high-level, sophisticated feuilleton . With ca. 60 , 000 copies, the FZ ’s circulation was not enormous, but for a German newspaper with the limited target audience of a cultural elite and the progressive segment of the upper and middle classes, that figure was quite remarkable. Moreover, delivering daily to 5 , 730 post offices all over Germany and Europe, it could boast of an extraordinarily wide reach beyond its home territory. 2 In his Zurich years, Joyce, too, was an occasional reader of the Frankfurter Zeitung , which is evidenced by two entries in the Subject Notebook for Ulysses that can be traced to this newspaper. One of them is, in fact, excerpted from its feuilleton (van Mierlo). The Frankfurter Zeitung , in turn, published a number of articles on Joyce, the first one, in August 1919 , being a review of the first stage production of Exiles (in the German translation, Verbannte ) at the municipal theatre in Munich. Reviews of Joyce’s works were to follow as they were published in German, as well as seven poems from Chamber Music in a German version (signed “Alastair” by the unknown translator) in December 1930 . Some three months before the FZ incident, a report appeared in the FZ on the reading of the French version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop. The newspaper continued to publish articles on Joyce’s work after the conflict over “Vielleicht ein Traum,” such as a longer essay by Carola Giedion-Welcker on the occasion of Joyce’s 50 th birthday (Füger passim). Altogether, there was no other German daily newspaper that featured as many articles on Joyce as the Frankfurter Zeitung . 3 The tenor of their reviews was in the main rather favorable, especially when compared to most other early German criticism (Mitchell 19 ). Joyce was also discussed in the context of general articles on contemporary literature in English, among them a commentary criticizing Joyce’s absence from a list of the most important literary works of 2 Todorow, “Wollten die Eintagsfliegen in den Rang höherer Insekten aufsteigen? ” 713 . Subsequently cited as Todorow, “Eintagsfliegen.” 3 The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was however coming very close to the FZ ’s number of articles (Füger passim). <?page no="335"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 335 the 20 th century, published in the English periodical Weekly Westminster (Füger 101 ). In the words of Joyce’s German publisher, the FZ was “consistently friendly” and “always stood up for [his] work” (Daniel Brody to Joyce, 30 July 1931 ). 4 The FZ incident, then, has to be read against the backdrop of hitherto excellent relations between writer and newspaper. It was Joyce’s German (or actually Swiss) publisher, Daniel Brody of Rhein-Verlag, who discovered “Vielleicht ein Traum” by chance. Since his firm held all German rights on Joyce, he immediately inquired at the newspaper, where he was told that the translator Irene Kafka had received a written authorization from Joyce to translate his story. Brody then asked Joyce whether this was actually the case: it was not. 5 It later turned out that the story was by a Michael Joyce and that Irene Kafka, or her secretary, as Kafka claimed, had confused the two names. Joyce was more than upset. “Vielleicht ein Traum, aber gewiss eine Schweinerei,” as he put it bluntly in a letter to Ivan Goll, the Rhein-Verlag representative in France ( 30 July, Letters III 224 ) (‘perhaps a dream, but most certainly a filthy disgrace; ’ my translation). What followed was a big whirl of excitement that lasted for nearly three months and turned an embarrassing, but minor, mistake into an international affair, involving people in Ireland, England, Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland. Joyce immediately forwarded the matter for further investigation to Monro, Saw and Co., his legal representatives in London (Beach to Brody, 8 August, ZJJF Jahnke) and also cabled Brody to “intervene at once” (Brody to Broch, 28 July, Brody 225 ). At the same time, he sent out a first round of letters in various directions for help to identify the obscure Michael Joyce and Irene Kafka: to Ivan Goll, Daniel Brody, Ralph Pinker, his literary agent in London, to his German translator Georg Goyert and his brother Stanislaus. Joyce had the catalogue of the British Museum searched, several literary agencies in London rung up ( Joyce to Beach, 14 August 6 ), all to no avail. He suspected his namesake to be the newspaper’s invention and hence a cheap excuse for their error, until it transpired that the other Joyce was a contributor to a few journals such as The Blue Peter , a magazine of sea travel ( Joyce to Beach, 19 August), or the London Mercury , a literary monthly, where the story had first appeared in the original. 4 Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, subsequently abbreviated as SBPU. Box 120 , Folder 1 . Since most correspondence concerning the FZ affair dates from 1931 , subsequent letter dates will indicate the year only if it is other than 1931 . 5 Brody to Hermann Broch, letter of 28 July, Broch and Brody 225 . Subsequently cited as Brody. 6 All letters from Joyce to Beach referred to in this essay are in Joyce, James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach . <?page no="336"?> 336 Ursula Zeller Despite Joyce’s publicity campaign, which ironically for a time also brought his namesake into the limelight, Michael Joyce remained a fairly unknown writer who pursued his literary work alongside an impressive career at the Bank of England. After an early novel, Peregrine Pieram: The Strange Power of His Pen and the Story He Never Wrote ( 1936 ), Michael Joyce ( 1903 - 1977 ) wrote mostly literary and historical monographs about Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon for the Longmans’ “Men and Books Series,” while continuing to publish short stories in magazines like The New Statesman and the London Mercury . 7 “Perchance to Dream,” the original title of “Vielleicht ein Traum” (a quote from Shakespeare’s Tempest ), made its way into various anthologies, where it is no longer associated with its famous namesake but enjoys the company of other renowned authors such as Ambrose Bierce, Elizabeth Bowen, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire or Paul Verlaine. 8 Irene Kafka, in turn, is in the main associated with more distinguished writers than Michael Joyce. If her translation was poor, as Daniel Brody wrote to Beach ( 2 October 1931 , SBPU Box 120 , Folder 3 ), this may have been due to the fact that she was primarily a translator from the French. While her English repertoire was limited to popular crime novels, Kafka translated for example Molière, Alfred de Musset, Pierre Ronsard and Julien Green, as well as some poems by Proust and Jules Romains. Little else is known about her, except the tragic end of her life. The Gestapo archives in Vienna record that “on 7 May 1940 , the author Irene Kafka was arrested for ‘atrocity propaganda’ (‘journalistic activities for the anti-German foreign press’)” (original parentheses). A further reason for her arrest is noted: Jüdin (‘Jewess’). Kafka was transferred to the concentration camp Ravensbrück, where she died on 9 May 1942 (Dokumentationsarchiv; my translation). Meanwhile, however, Kafka was merely troubled by Joyce’s paranoia. It is probably no exaggeration to describe his behavior in such pathological terms, with its mix of general mistrust on the one hand - what Mary Colum once called his “persecution complex” ( 194 ) - and a sense of grandeur on the other. Joyce’s preoccupation with the matter was so out of proportion to the event that for months he found it hard to take an interest in anything else. His obsessiveness distracted him even from the serious and pressing professional concerns which make up the other recurring topics in the 1931 letters between Beach and Joyce. Among these are the ongoing negotiations for an American edition of Ulysses and for a contract for Work in Progress , as well as the promotion of Joyce’s latest 7 “Michael Joyce” (retirement notice) 174 . I am grateful to John Simpson and Harald Beck for their detective skills in identifying Michael Joyce and in finding his daughter Louise McConnell, who provided me with useful information, too. 8 Cf. Karloff and Aldiss. <?page no="337"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 337 work, since its pre-published sections had not yet received much attention or understanding, let alone praise. Thus Beach writes to Joyce some six weeks into the whole affair: Adrienne says Gillet’s article has had a great effect in France and is the most important for you since Larbaud’s. But it doesn’t interest you particularly, I imagine, with this Frankfurter Zeitung business engrossing you at present. (1 September) Louis Gillet, one of the leading French critics and an enthusiastic advocate of Joyce’s works with a recent convert’s fervor, 9 had published “M. James Joyce et Son Nouveau Roman” in the Revue des Deux Mondes just about a week after Joyce had learned of the Frankfurter Zeitung ’s mistake. Whereas usually Joyce “kept a careful eye on the reviews as they appeared” and was “anxious for a good press in French journals,” 10 he now was too preoccupied with the seeming damage to his reputation to savor its actual increase on another front, an increase which was badly needed and which also resulted in material gain: “I have sold a great many shilling HCE s and ALP s this summer, and since Gillet’s article the French are buying them,” as Beach remarked to Joyce in a letter which also deals mostly with the FZ affair ( 26 August). Instead, Joyce was busy launching his campaign against the FZ . On 13 August, he wrote to Beach, “Have now sent off 36 letters and 11 wires on the F. Z. affair” and signed the brief note with “salutations cordiales,” a remarkable departure from his standard “kindest regards” and “sincerely yours,” which expresses more affection than he could otherwise muster in all his letters to Beach over a 17 -year period. 11 As if the conflict and the prospects of litigation had an energizing effect that warmed him up to his combatant. Joyce’s published correspondence, Beach’s letters to Joyce, the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton, Joyce’s letters in the ZJJF Jahnke Bequest yield a total of 115 letters and telegrams that went back and forth regarding the affair. 12 There are still good reasons to doubt its completeness, quite apart from the handwritten and typed copies of many of these letters that Beach at Joyce’s request forwarded to some friends, or was to show to her customers at Shakespeare and Co. to further publicize the affair; these are not included in my count. All in all, Joyce called upon at least 25 people to join him in his campaign, among them 9 On Gillet’s conversion from a pointed critic to a staunch admirer of Joyce, see Riley Fitch 312 - 313 . 10 Banta and Silverman, introduction to James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach 7 . 11 There is one other exception to be found in a telegram announcing that the German translation of Ulysses was completed. 12 This figure includes those that are not extant but referred to in the other correspondence. <?page no="338"?> 338 Ursula Zeller T. S. Eliot, Sean O’Casey, Harriet Weaver, Adrienne Monnier, Philippe Soupault, Ernst Robert Curtius, Padraic Colum and, first and foremost, Sylvia Beach. “My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance” (U 15.834) In his campaign, Joyce followed two main lines of action. The first was a series of protest letters which he had his legal representatives, his literary agent Pinker, as well as some author colleagues send to both Kafka and the Frankfurter Zeitung , demanding immediate financial redress and public rectification, some combined with the threat of a lawsuit ( Joyce to Beach, 7 August, and Joyce to T. S. Eliot). 13 Upon Joyce’s request, Beach urged Padraic Colum to ask the Irish minister in Berlin to send an official letter of protest to the FZ (Beach to Joyce, 11 August): the magnitude of the damage Joyce had to suffer through their erroneous attribution, in his view, deserved no less than the status of a state affair. Joyce further suggested that, apart from her role in the orchestration of the affair, Beach herself, in her capacity as his publisher and as holder of all his unpublished manuscripts, write a letter of protest to the FZ and to Irene Kafka: “You can scarcely do less than denounce this affair as a fraud” ( Joyce to Beach, 9 August). What presumably was a simple mistake and what most people would see as such, in Joyce’s paranoid interpretation, turned into an intentional deception. Beach, ready as always to comply with his wish, promptly replied ( 11 August). Two days later, she wrote that she had planned to send a letter of protest to the FZ , “which they must print on the front page” ( 13 August) - a rather grandiose demand of an international daily newspaper, which, more than anything else, seems to reflect Joyce’s own exaggerated claims. But then, she continued, Goll had persuaded her that it would be a futile endeavor, since “only your name would have any weight with them” (ibid.) - an argument, which, if any, may have convinced Joyce to abandon this particular idea. At the same time, Beach thought it worth mentioning to Joyce that Goll also asked “what good was it to put yourself on bad terms with them” (ibid.). Goll was not the only one who tried to dissuade Joyce from pursuing his idée fixe any further. However, Joyce, with his penchant for litigation, remained intent on suing the newspaper. It was not enough - as nothing in this matter could ever be enough - that Irene Kafka had already written three personal apologies: to the newspaper, to the Rhein-Verlag and to Joyce’s Zurich friend Georges Borach to convey to Joyce her “deepest regrets” in this “painful affair,” as she would sum up in a fourth apology to Joyce’s London lawyers, expressing 13 Letter of 27 August. Joyce, Letters of James Joyce , vol. III, 228 . Subsequently cited as Letters III . <?page no="339"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 339 her astonishment at his persistent complaints (Kafka to Monro Saw & Co., letter of 17 August, SBPU , Box 120 , Folder 3 ). Meanwhile, Joyce’s obsession had become such that he extended his general distrust beyond the offenders to one of his strongest supporters. He was growing suspicious even of Brody. 14 While at first it had been agreed that Brody, in his capacity as Joyce’s German publisher and copyright holder, was to sue the newspaper - “I understood [Goll] had agreed with you to put the matter entirely into the hands of the Rhein-Verlag” (Beach to Joyce, 6 August) - Joyce now wanted to keep him out of it. It is true that Giorgio, who seemed to have inherited his father’s all-round suspicion of nearly everyone outside the family, was instrumental in this dynamic, and he managed to convince Beach of it, too. As she wrote to Joyce: Giorgio [sic] has just been in. We are now convinced, both of us, that the Rhein Verlag is taking over the matter so as to get the damages that are rightfully yours. We must get the better of them if that is their game. The business must be handled through Messrs Monro, Saw & Co and I do hope it hasn’t already been settled out of court by the Rhein Verlag, they pocketing a large sum for damages. (6 August) “It is not his affair, but mine,” Joyce joined in (letter to Beach, 7 August), and upon his request Beach wrote to Brody “that the affair is entirely between Mr Joyce and the Frankfurter Zeitung and that it is quite unnecessary for the Rhein Verlag to come into it at all” (Beach to Brody, 8 August, ZJJF Jahnke). Even though Brody, as Joyce himself reported to Beach, wanted him “to hush the affair up” (ibid.), he continued to distrust him on that account. A few weeks later, he asked her to “copy out the clause in the Rheinverlag contract under which Brody in your opinion intended at first to take action against the F. Z [sic] for infringement of his rights” ( Joyce to Beach, n. d., ca. 20 August). There is no indication that Brody ever meant to keep potential damages for the Rhein-Verlag. Anyhow, for him as a publisher, it would indeed have made sense to let the matter drop altogether, since the Rhein-Verlag could have no interest whatsoever in spoiling their good relations with such a prominent newspaper that was a prime mass forum for advertizing the Rhein-Verlag’s modernist literature in their arts pages. Brody, who repeatedly brought up this argument (apart from the FZ ’s good attention to Joyce’s work), pointed it out already in his very first letter on this affair, which is a balancing act between indignation and prudence: 14 Brody had in fact bought the Rhein-Verlag in 1929 for the sole purpose of “becom[ing] James Joyce’s publisher,” as he replied when asked about his choice from among several small publishing houses (Brody 1179 ). Joyce’s work had been appearing there since 1926 . <?page no="340"?> 340 Ursula Zeller If we give the editors as little trouble as possible, we shall be left with a considerable moral balance in our favour, which might be of great benefit to us very soon, or at the latest on the 2. II . 32 on the matter of Anna Livia Plurabelle or of the Gilbert-book. (30 July, SBPU , Box 120, Folder 1) But Joyce was at no point willing to capitulate, not even for the sake of the promotion of his work. It did not seem to matter to him that a breach between newspaper and publisher would have affected the publicity of other Rhein-Verlag authors, too, among them Hermann Broch, Italo Svevo, Ivan Goll, and Ilja Ehrenburg. “with tosend and obertosend tonnowatters” (FW 70.08 f.) Joyce’s other line of action was a publicity campaign involving the international press, which again was to be managed mainly by Beach. From her letters to Joyce, we know that she repeatedly tried to get hold of the FZ correspondent in Paris ( 6 August), and that she talked to journalists from the Associated Press, the United Press of America and from the Chicago Tribune ( 26 August). To cover the German scene, she was to write to Hans Trausil, a German journalist friend of Colum’s, who should publicize the affair in various newspapers there ( 11 August). For the French press, Joyce requested that Beach seek Adrienne Monnier’s help ( 7 August), and as she reported back, the two women consequently wrote to the editors of the weekly Nouvelles Littéraires , as well as the daily newspaper L’Intransigeant ( 13 August). Finally, the writer and former diplomat Harold Nicholson, who had changed to a post on the London newspaper Evening Standard , should be asked to take care of the English scene ( Joyce to Beach, 13 August). In this context, Joyce also mentions the BBC to Beach (ibid.), which suggests that he also wished the FZ scandal to be broadcast on radio (though there is no further evidence of this). Despite Joyce’s hugely overblown battle plan and despite Beach’s countless endeavors, the publicity campaign never really got off the ground. If in 1927 , Ezra Pound had been one of the few writers and intellectuals who refused to sign the international protest against Roth’s piracy of Ulysses , arguing that Joyce was using “a mountain battery to shoot a gnat” (Ellmann 586 ), this time he was obviously not the only one of this opinion. Two short newspaper articles were the meager outcome of it all. Nevertheless, in this case, the mere (and repeated) threat of a campaign was apparently enough for the FZ to eventually yield to one of Joyce’s most important and unrelenting claims: to get a public rectification. Naturally, the FZ literary editors were most reluctant to publicize their embarrassment in their own pages, “the biggest disgrace they had ever met with” (Brody to Joyce, 30 July, SBPU , Box 120 , Folder 1 ), their good name being <?page no="341"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 341 at stake just as much as Joyce’s. In one of his letters to the FZ , Brody replied with the threat that “the disgrace would be much greater if they waited till the affair is brought to light by other papers,” as he reported to Joyce (ibid.). On 9 August, after long hesitation and repeated appeals to Joyce’s understanding (Brody to Broch, 28 July, Brody 225 ), the newspaper published an apology entitled “Michael und James.” It started off by asserting that of course they had asked Frau Kafka concerning authorization 15 and continues: What editor would not have jumped at a story by James Joyce even if it did not reveal the powerful archery of “Ulysses”? Perhaps it was an early work, perhaps it was a by-product, or perhaps a work written for self-relief in an hour of relaxation as Goethe turning from his “Elective Affinities” wrought a story of a man of fifty or as Thomas Mann turning from his longer novels gives us an occasional tale. […] We ourselves remembered his book of stories “Dubliners,” which show the great poet not as advancing the claims of “Ulysses” but in mood of leisure. After all, no master is obliged to produce only master-pieces and every lion in his tenderer moments draws in his claws and becomes playful. 16 This is what the FZ ’s literary editors ostensibly understood by a master’s divertimento and what they saw, or rather pretended to see, as on an aesthetic level with Dubliners : Hush, she said, didn’t you hear it, didn’t you … She stopped, breathless. He could hear a slight rustling like wind among leaves, a tiny click-click from the landing; then suddenly, framed in the doorway, stood the Chemist, an axe raised above his shoulder. The Traveller recoiled instinctively, and on the instant the man was through the door and making straight across the room to his wife. There was a scream, a scuffle, and a crash. Crossing the room in panic, the Traveller found his sister still cowering against the further wall while the Chemist lay inert upon the floor, his head in the hearth. 17 On the whole, then, “Michael und James” is an awkward self-justification which tries to play down Kafka’s mistake by presenting it as a “happy coincidence of sur-names [sic],” which brought Michael “before the notice of the German-speaking public” (“Michael and James,” translation). 15 According to Michael Joyce, however, he had not been contacted either, as he writes in a letter to Joyce, expressing his regrets that his work had been attributed to him ( 3 September, SBPU, Box 120 , Folder 3 ). According to his daughter, Michael Joyce was “utterly horrified and wrote in strong terms to the paper about the liberty they had taken in publishing his story without his permission” and he was also convinced “that they had deliberately taken the name of a more renowned writer” (personal communication from Louise McConnell, 20 September 2013 ). 16 “Michael and James,” typescript of a translation, with an autograph comment by Joyce. Subsequently cited as “Michael and James,” translation. 17 Joyce, “Vielleicht ein Traum” 15 . <?page no="342"?> 342 Ursula Zeller “my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the beast” (U 15.844 f.) Joyce, of course, was not willing to accept this as an apology. “The story was bad enough but the apology is worse,” Helen Joyce felt (letter of 18 August to Joyce, ZJJF Jahnke), and he was more intent than ever on suing the newspaper (“Michael and James,” translation, autograph note by Joyce). He was fuchsteufelswild , (‘mad as hell’), as Brody with some amusement described Joyce’s reaction in a letter to Hermann Broch (Brody 235 ) and he wanted to send his namesake to hell , too. “Nothing emerges as to a Michael Joyce. There is a Michael Scott (not to be confused with Walter Scott) mentioned in Dante’s Inferno,” Joyce wrote to Brody (qtd. in Brody 235 ). Thus another conflation of names, willful and arbitrary this time, in an affair that was characterized by Joyce’s paranoia of the name in particular. As he wrote to his brother Stanislaus, he was most of all displeased with the title of the piece, “Michael und James.” The conjunction of the two names apparently irritated him just as much as the initial misappropriation of his name ( 22 August, Letters III, 227 ) . Hence, a second letter of protest that Joyce had his lawyers send to the FZ after their apology was signed not only in Joyce’s but also in Sean O’Casey’s and T. S. Eliot’s name. “I have used your name and O’Casey’s,” he wrote to Eliot, “coupling them with my own” ( 27 August, Letters III 228 ). Against “Michael und James,” this association with writers of a similar artistic league also reads as an uncoupling from his unfortunate namesake. When referring to the FZ incident, Joyce would often use a pun: “another piece of Frankfurt’s furto franco” he wrote to Giorgio and Helen ( 21 August, ZJJF Jahnke) and to Stanislaus he sent “Three hoots for Furtofranco” ( 22 August, Letters III 227 ). With Furto franco , meaning open or obvious theft, Joyce rated the erroneous use of his author’s name as an act of piracy damaging his work. 18 He did, in fact, draw a parallel between the FZ affair and Samuel Roth’s unauthorized publication of Ulysses four years earlier, which had come to preoccupy him again in the spring of 1931 . As he wrote to Stanislaus: “I’m going to sue them [the FZ ] anyhow so that’s that. […] You know, you advised me to proceed against Roth and not ‘play the gentle Jesus always’” (ibid.). Conversely, Joyce understood Roth’s offence as both “misuse of my name and mutilation of my work,” as he put it, in that order, to Benjamin Conner, an American lawyer in Paris ( 1 September 1928 , Letters III 181 ). To Joyce, they were essentially identical offences, both damaging to his reputation, even though, one should think, the difference between the two is that in the Roth case a lot of mon- 18 Ironically, some had actually understood the FZ story, announced as a “fragment by James Joyce,” to be a portion from his Work in Progress ( L’Intransigeant , issue of 1 September, SBPU Box 120 , Folder 4 ). <?page no="343"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 343 ey was at stake: the illegal edition had “crippled” the huge American market, as he put it in a letter Harriet Shaw Weaver ( 1 October 1931 , Letters III 230 ). However, Joyce’s inflated concern about his name was coupled with a marked sense of self-worth that also translated into economic terms. He wrote to Stanislaus: In addition to writing begging letters I have refused thousands of pounds for years past because I would not write for the press on commission and now one of the leading European newspapers goes and puts my name under a fraudulent shoddy piece of journalese and will not even apologize for it. (22 August, Letters III 227) In the same breath as he denounces Michael Joyce’s fiction as poor journalistic language, Joyce elevates the value of his potential journalism to impressive heights. Here, a first parallactic shift to the situation of the German press might be instructive. If we take Joyce’s “thousands of pounds” to mean, say 3 , 000 , its value today would be nearly half a million pounds: £ 465 , 000 or US $ 740 , 000 . 19 Then as now, freelance journalism was not exactly the highroad to wealth, with an average rate of ca. six Reichsmark per manuscript page (Fischer 112 ), today’s equivalent of US $ 32 or £ 20 . It is true though that the FZ ’s star reporter, the author-journalist Joseph Roth, received the dream fee of one Reichsmark per line (von Cziffra 12 ). Thus, indeed, the best-paid feuilleton writer of the Weimar Republic earned about as much as Joyce was estimating for himself in this matter. However, Roth did so at the cost of his literary work proper, and also, with this outstandingly high fee, the FZ paid for their monopoly on Roth’s journalistic work, since a feuilleton ’s exclusive association with a renowned writer’s name was crucial to its profile. 20 Ironically, Joyce further complains to Stanislaus that the FZ , even though “they had the thing in their hands for months, made no effort to get into touch with me or my publisher, never sent me a copy of the paper [the story] appeared in or tried to pay me the big fee they knew I would be entitled to” (ibid.). Entitled on what grounds? Hardly on the strength of a text Joyce had just described in such disparaging terms, a large fee would have been his due by virtue of his name alone. When in late August, Joyce proceeded to sue the newspaper for damages, he did not quite ask for “thousands of pounds,” but still instructed his lawyers to aim for a generous figure. As we know from a notice in the Chicago Tribune : 19 www.measuringworth.com / ukcompare, 22 November 2013 , using the average earnings indicator to compute the relative value. The same calculation applies in subsequent examples. 20 Todorow, Das Feuilleton der “Frankfurter Zeitung” in der Weimarer Republik 114 . Subsequently cited as Todorow, Feuilleton . <?page no="344"?> 344 Ursula Zeller James Joyce To Sue German Newspaper For Use Of His Name A suit for $5,000 damages for the appearance of an article under his name which he claims he did not write is scheduled to be instituted by James Joyce, Dublin born author of Ulysses , against the Frankfurter Zeitung , according to a report received here yesterday. […] (issue of August 28, SBPU Box 120, Folder 4) The equivalent today of $ 5 , 000 , or some £ 1 , 100 , would be $ 290 , 000 (£ 180 , 000 ). To put it in relative terms, the sum Joyce demanded from the FZ was one third more than the advance on royalties he could expect for Work in Progress , which was being negotiated at the time: Vikings offered him an advance of $ 3 , 850 , or £ 850 ( Joyce to Beach, 19 July). However, in October, Joyce’s lawyers advised him to let the matter drop. In fact, they refused to pursue it any further, as chances were very slight that Joyce could win the case. Appealing in turn to Joyce’s good name, the German lawyer Willi Rothschild, who had looked into the matter for Joyce’s London lawyers, wrote that “in Frankfurt, the slip would be regarded as trifling, and a lawsuit on account of it would seem vindictive and exacting, unworthy of a writer of repute,” thus Ellmann’s summary of Rothschild’s letter ( Letters III 230 ). The most Joyce could expect if the case were won, would be £ 25 . In the end, instead of getting him any redress, Joyce’s campaign in this whole affair cost him £ 48 of lawyers fees, or some £ 8 , 000 in today’s terms. The Frankfurt Parallax On the newspaper’s side, the primary sources are regrettably scarce, since the Frankfurter Zeitung ’s archives were lost after their evacuation to Silesia during the Second World War. For want of insight into their correspondence concerning “Vielleicht ein Traum,” a look at the general position from which the FZ feuilleton was dealing with the Joycean challenge may afford at least a partially parallactic view on the affair. Joyce was well aware of the FZ ’s outstanding reputation: in a letter to Stanislaus he called it “one of the leading European newspapers” ( 22 August, Letters III 227 ). Through Brody, he also must have been aware of the FZ ’s journalistic attention and their favorable attitude to his work. At the same time, however, Joyce, like most people in the English-speaking world, presumably was not conscious of the status and significance of the German-language feuilleton , just as the term itself inadequately translates into English as “literature and arts section.” As that letter to Stanislaus shows, he drew a clear line between literary activity and the production of “journalese,” claiming he would never stoop to writing for the press just for easy money and thereby corrupt his prestigious name. While, to some extent, this attitude had also existed vis-à-vis the <?page no="345"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 345 high-level German feuilleton , since the early 1920 s the feuilleton had self-consciously been attempting to further enhance its artistic value and overcome the traditional opposition between “high” literature and feuilleton journalism altogether. Part of their strategy was to employ established writers, many of whom belonged to the intellectual or literary avant-garde (Utz 155 - 156 and Todorow, “Eintagsfliege” 729 ). Hence, by the time of the “Michael und James” debacle, a considerable part of contemporary German literature, philosophy and the social sciences expressed itself in newspapers like the FZ , which by then had acquired a legendary reputation as an excellent forum, equally important to the social and cultural discourse as the relevant periodicals. Joyce would hardly have known that among the regular contributors to the FZ feuilleton were writers like Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Egon Erwin Kisch, Max Weber, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin (Todorow, Feuilleton 35 and passim, as well as “Frankfurter Zeitung”). In fact, many of them were scrambling to publish in the FZ , for economic reasons (during the Great Depression), but just as much for prestige and the prospects of a mass audience. As a saying from the 1930 s sums it up: to be published in the FZ feuilleton was the next best thing to winning the Nobel Prize (Weidermann 25 ). All this, of course, does not make Michael Joyce’s story any better, or more sophisticated, than it actually is. Rather, it highlights the irony that a feuilleton like the Frankfurter Zeitung’s in its rectification “Michael und James” had to defend a publication which more than ever ran counter to its self-image. In a number of programmatic feuilleton articles, the editors had publicly reflected on their changing role as a cultural forum and redefined their standards as a move away from entertainment and the classic critic’s “lecturing” towards a new, open literary aesthetic and a sociological examination of reality (Todorow, “Eintagsfliegen” 737 - 738 ). The pre-publication in installments of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin , Alexanderplatz in 1929 - a novel that is often compared with Ulysses - was an expression of the FZ ’s new attitude, as was the ensuing controversy with scandalized readers that the paper carried out publicly in their pages. Like Joyce’s literary advocates, they had to defend Döblin’s text against charges of ‘cloacal obsession’ (“wallowing in filth and faeces”) and of “modernity at all costs” (Zeller 238 ; my translation). To some extent, then, the feuilleton ’s self-reflection and dialogue with its readers was not unlike the debates in little magazines such as The Little Review , though naturally without their purely avant-garde orientation. In “Michael und James,” the newspaper had to justify the publication of the very opposite genre of text, a crime and fantasy story written “in mood of leisure,” as they put it, the kind of pure entertainment the FZ no longer subscribed <?page no="346"?> 346 Ursula Zeller to. In the context of their ongoing communication about the programmatic changes in the feuilleton , the “Michael und James” apology gains additional, and problematic, weight. From this perspective, it makes all the more sense that, in order to demonstrate consistency in their editorial practice, they would associate “Vielleicht ein Traum” with a minor work of one of their literary figureheads, Thomas Mann, as well as with Joyce’s own early work. Here, then, the parallactic gap arises from the editors’ need to save face and is paradoxically created to hide the fact that this once, Joyce’s and the FZ ’s perspective touch common ground. It is clear that in the enforced so-called apology, the FZ primarily had their readership in mind, rather than Joyce. In no way could they afford to undermine their authority and publicly expose their lack of critical judgment or lack of diligence (whichever it was). This all the more so as the affair was occurring just at a time when the FZ was engaged in severe ideological and economic competition with the conservative Münchner Neuste Nachrichten to gain ground in Southern Germany (Todorow, Feuilleton 114 ). The feuilleton played a crucial role in this, since in German newspapers, it was the feuilleton section that was considered to best convey a paper’s particular character, more so, in a sense, than its political position (Utz 159 ). The feuilleton was thus decisive in establishing customer loyalty. Consequently, rather than apologizing, the FZ feuilleton editors presented the mistake as entirely Irene Kafka’s and their own oversight as a well-considered decision, quite in line with their carefully cultivated “image of rationality and integrity,” as Todorow describes it in a different context (“Eintagsfliegen” 720 ). Thus, despite the fatal coincidence of names, they “would have printed the piece in question if Irene Kafka had offered it to [them] as the work of a writer named Smith, for its own merit justified such a step on our part entitling it to appear in our pages,” the FZ maintains in its conclusion, thus emphasizing their critical competence. Michael Joyce, it is true, received more attention because of his famous namesake, but in any case it was the FZ ’s “pleasure to have launched him” in the German speaking world (“Michael and James,” translation). Such a self-defense would hardly have satisfied anyone, let alone Joyce. What otherwise intrigued and inspired him as a writer in this case could not arouse his sense of humor, his appreciation of coincidences and mistaken identities. In Ulysses , he self-ironically comments on his vain youthful efforts to place a short story, “Matcham’s Masterstroke,” for easy money (“one guinea a column,” U 4 . 503 f.) in the penny magazine Titbits by having Bloom flush it down the toilet; a story which Joyce may well have plagiarized in parts from a prize-winning piece by the ever-successful Philip Beaufoy (Kenner 11 ). This fraud is mockingly mirrored in the “Circe” trial scene as an infuriated Beaufoy reviles Bloom as “a soapy sneak masquerading as littérateur ” ( U 15 . 822 f.) - in the FZ <?page no="347"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 347 affair Joyce was accurately behaving as he had depicted the hilariously raging author. Joyce’s paranoia in this affair opens up a parallactic gap not only between his and the FZ editors’ perspective, but also between Joyce the artist and Joyce the man that again is in excess of any inevitable difference between the two roles. If as Spurr defines it “paranoia is a fundamental dysfunction of the relation between the subject and the object world” ( 179 ), then perhaps paranoia can also be described as a dysfunctional ‘parallactic ability,’ i. e. the ability to oscillate between multiple and conflicting views - the very quality that is also a major element of Joyce’s aesthetics. Joyce’s lack of self-irony in the FZ affair is thus an instance of that parallactic dysfunction: trapped in his paranoid behavior, he is no longer capable of seeing himself both from within and from without, of bridging that parallactic gap between self and other, subject and object world. Still, in the end, after all the time, nerves and money it had cost Joyce and his entourage, he was able to produce from the FZ affair a certain artistic added value. It made a couple of lines for Finnegans Wake : In the first deal of Yuly wheil he was, swishing beesnest with blessure, and swobbing broguen eeriesh myth brockendootsch, making his reporterage on Der Fall Adams for the Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule, and er, consstated that one had on him the Lynn O’Brien, a meltoned lammswolle, disturbed, and wider he might the same zurichschicken other he would, with tosend and obertosend tonnowatters, one monkey’s damages become. (70.03 ff.) Bibliography Aldiss, Brian, ed. Best Fantasy Stories . London: Faber & Faber, 1962. Print. Beach, Sylvia. Unpublished Letters to James Joyce . Hans E. Jahnke Bequest. Manuscripts. Broch, Hermann and Daniel Brody. Briefwechsel 1930-1951 . Ed. Bertold Hack and Marietta Kleiss. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung Gmbh, 1971. Print. Colum, Padraig, and Mary Colum. Our Friend James Joyce . New York: Doubleday, 1958. Print. Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands. Erkennungsdienstliche Kartei der Gestapo Wien . Web. 10 May 2010. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce . New and rev. ed. Oxford: OUP , 1982. Print. Fischer, Ernst, et al., and Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels / Historische Kommission, eds. Die Weimarer Republik 1918-1933 . Munich: K. G. Saur, 2007. Print. Vol. 2, part 1 of Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert . Print. Füger, Wilhelm. Kritisches Erbe: Dokumente zur Rezeption von James Joyce im Deutschen Sprachbereich zu Lebzeiten des Autors . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Print. Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce . Vol. III . Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Print. <?page no="348"?> 348 Ursula Zeller -. James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach. 1921-1940 . Ed. Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman. Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1987. Print. -. Ulysses. The Corrected Text . Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head, 1986. Print. -. Finnegans Wake . London: Faber & Faber, 1957. Print. Joyce, James [sic] [Michael Joyce]. “Vielleicht ein Traum.” Frankfurter Zeitung , 19 July 1931: 14-15. Print. Karloff, Boris, ed. And the Darkness Falls: Masterpieces of Horror and the Supernatural . n. p.: The World Publishing Company, 1946. Print. Kenner, Hugh. “Beaufoy’s Masterpiece.” James Joyce Quarterly 24.1 (Fall 1986): 11-18. Print. Mitchell, Breon. James Joyce and the German Novel: 1922-1933 . Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP , 1976. Print. “Michael und James.” Frankfurter Zeitung , 9 August 1931: 10. Print. “Michael and James.” Hans E. Jahnke Bequest. Typescript of a translation, with an autograph comment by Joyce. “Michael Joyce.” Retirement notice. The Old Lady , September 1963 (Bank of England Archive, ref. no. E8 / 172): 173-174. Print. Riley Fitch, Noel. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties . New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Print. Spurr, David. “Paranoid Modernism in Joyce and Kafka.” Journal of Modern Literature . 34.2 (2011): 178-191. Print. Todorow, Almut. Das Feuilleton der “Frankfurter Zeitung” in der Weimarer Republik: Zur Grundlegung einer rhetorischen Medienforschung . Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tübingen, 1996. Print. -. “‘Wollten die Eintagsfliegen in den Rang höherer Insekten aufsteigen? ’ Die Feuilletonkonzeption der Frankfurter Zeitung während der Weimarer Republik im redaktionellen Selbstverständnis.” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte . Vol. 62 (1988): 697-740. Print. Utz, Peter. “Sichgehenlassen unter dem Strich: Beobachtungen am Freigehege des Feuilletons.” Ed. Kai Kauffmann and Erhard Schütz. Die lange Geschichte der kleinen Form: Beiträge zur Feuilletonforschung . Berlin: Weidler Buhverlag, 2000. 142-162. Print. Van Mierlo, Wim. “The Subject Notebook: A Preliminary Analysis.” Genetic Joyce Studies 7 (Spring 2007). Web. 13 November 2013. Von Cziffra, Geza. Der Heilige Trinker: Erinnerungen an Joseph Roth . Mit einem Vorwort von Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Berlin: Berenberg-Verlag, 2006. Print. Weidermann, Volker. “Davor und Danach.” Review of FZ editor-in-chief Benno Reifenberg’s biography by Dagmar Bussiek. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 8 May 2011: 25. Print. Zeller, Bernhard, ed. Alfred Döblin 1878-1978 . Marbach: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. Marbacher Kataloge 30, 1978. Print. <?page no="349"?> “The Frankofurto Siding, a Fastland payrodicule”: Portrait of the Artist as Litigant 349 Location of Munuscripts SBPU Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton Univerity Library ZJJF Hans E Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation <?page no="351"?> Contributors 351 Contributors s aBrina a lonso was born in Zurich and graduated from the University of Zurich with a degree in English Literature and Linguistics, Italian Literature and Comparative Literature. She has taught in higher education since 1996 , worked in the field of product design since 2005 , and was employed at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation 2012 - 2015 . e lisaBeth B ronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007 , Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She did her PhD at the University of Munich, on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage , as well as her habilitation, five years later, Over her Dead Body . A specialist in the 19 th and 20 th century literature, she has also written articles in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture. Her most recent publication is Mad Men: Death and the American Dream . Her current research projects include Shakespeare and seriality. a ndreas f ischer was Professor of English Philology at the University of Zurich from 1985 through 2014 ; from 2008 through 2013 he served as its full time President. Most of his research has been on varieties of English and on historical English lexicology, but he has also published articles on Joyce. He has been a member of the board of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation since 1993 . r uth f rehner has worked part-time at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation since its beginnings in 1985 . As a curator she has, together with Ursula Zeller, realized various projects, among them exhibitions and publications. Currently, they are finishing an edition of Sylvia Beach’s letters to James Joyce. She is also working on the revision of Hans Wollschläger’s German translation of Ulysses (together with Harald Beck, Ursula Zeller and Fritz Senn). Moreover, she is engaged in teacher education. p hilip K eel g eheBer completed his PhD in 2013 at Trinity College Dublin. His book manuscript, entitled Joyce, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel , examines the development of Joyce’s narrative style through comparisons with the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. He was a scholar at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in 2013 and is currently an instructor at Louisiana State University. <?page no="352"?> 352 Contributors M arianna g ula lectures in the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, teaching courses on Irish culture, literature, and film. She is author of A Tale of a Pub: Re-Reading the “Cyclops” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Context of Irish Cultural Nationalism ( 2012 ). Her articles, mostly dealing with James Joyce, have appeared in the Irish University Review , European Joyce Studies , Papers on Joyce , Scientia Traductionis and in Hungarian (English language) journals. She was a member of the translator team thoroughly reworking and re-editing the canonical Hungarian translation of Joyce’s Ulysses (published in 2012 ). She has enjoyed the research facilities and hospitality of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation on several occasions (the most extended period being almost one-and a half years in 2000 - 2001 ), both as a beneficiary of the generous grants of the Friends of the Foundation and as a participant in the international Zurich workshops. t hoMas g urKe was a Zurich James Joyce Foundation scholar in 2009 and he is currently a lecturer at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. He completed his PhD in 2014 and is finishing a book manuscript examing the intermedial, aesthetic and affective dynamics of music and literature in the works of James Joyce. K atharina h agena was once a scholar at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. She wrote two books on the sea in Ulysses , taught German literature at Trinity College in Dublin and English Literature at the University of Hamburg before she became a full-time writer. Her novels have been translated into many languages. Katharina Hagena lives with her family in Hamburg, is currently working on her third novel and, in liaison with the illustrator Stefanie Clemen, on an 18 -volume Ulysses -flipbook. e riKa M ihálycsa is a lecturer in twentieth-century British and Irish literature at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania. Her fields of research include Joyce and Beckett studies, Modernism studies, literary theory, Irish studies, and translation studies. Her articles on Joyce’s and Beckett’s language poetics, and Joyce in translation have appeared in Joyce Studies Annual , Joyce Studies in Italy , Scientia Traductionis , HJEAS . Together with Fritz Senn, in 2010 , she organized an international workshop at the Zurich Joyce Foundation, dedicated to specific problems in (re)translating Ulysses , the materials of which she co-edited with Jolanta Wawrzycka for Scientia Traductionis ( 2012 . 2 ). A literary translator from and into English, including works by Beckett and Flann O’Brien, she is editor of the literary and arts journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics (Contra Mundum Press, New York). <?page no="353"?> Contributors 353 i vana M ilivojevic became enthralled by Joyce’s works during her studies in Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature in Belgrade, Serbia. She moved to Ireland where she dedicated a number of years to her thesis on James Joyce and Danilo Kiš. She spent the spring of 2006 at James Joyce Foundation in Zurich and this visit inspired her to organize the “Central Joyce / Marginal Joyce” conference in Belgrade, 2008 . The author of Authorial Figures ( 2001 ) and Love of Diversity ( 2000 ), she has also worked as a psychoanalyst, translator, editor and water engineer. i laria n atali currently teaches at the University of Florence and at the University Institute “Carlo Bo” (Florence). She has long been interested in analysis of modern manuscripts and has published two books about genetic approaches to James Joyce’s criticism, which she was able to complete thanks to a scholarship at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. More recently, she has engaged in studying madness in English literature, co-editing the collection Symptoms of Disorder and the book “Remov’d from human eyes: ” Madness and Poetry 1676-1774 (now in print). v áclav p aris was a Zurich James Joyce Foundation Fellow in 2013 . He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 . He is now an Assistant Professor at City College New York. His published writings include academic articles on James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Louis Aragon, and Walt Whitman as well as translations from Czech into English. He is currently working on a book about national narrative and evolutionary theory in the modernist period. g riselda p ollocK is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. A long-standing feminist cultural theorist and analyst, her current research areas include trauma and aesthetic transformation, Holocaust and concentrationary memory, and the contemporary art exhibition. She has just completed a monograph on Charlotte Salomon and is preparing a feminist cultural analysis of the image of Marilyn Monroe in film, drama, art and photography. Recent publications include After-Affects / After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester University Press, 2013 ); Concentrationary Memories; Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance , edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (I. B. Tauris, 2013 ); Visual Politics and Psychoanalysis: Art & the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (I. B. Tauris, 2013 ); Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration: Sigmund Freud , Anna Freud and Bracha Ettinger in the Freud Museum (Wild Pansy Press with the Freud Museum, 2013 ). <?page no="354"?> 354 Contributors a Manda s igler is Assistant Professor of English at Erskine College in South Carolina. She was a scholar at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in 2007 . She graduated with her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2012 and is completing a book project on Modernism and periodicals. Her essays have appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly , the Joyce Studies Annual , European Joyce Studies , the Henry James Review , and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature . s aM s lote is Associate Professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent book is Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave, 2013 ). In addition to Joyce and Beckett, he has written on Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, Dante, Mallarmé and Elvis. d avid s purr is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. His many publications on Joyce include Joyce and the Scene of Modernity ( 2002 ). He is a Trustee of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. d avid v ichnar is senior lecturer at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University, Prague. In 2013 he received a double PhD (from Charles and Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) for his thesis mapping James Joyce’s heritage for the post-war Anglo-American and French literary avant-gardes. He works as an editor, publisher and translator. His publications include Joyce Against Theory ( 2010 ) and Subtexts: Essays on Fiction ( 2015 ), his edited publications include Hypermedia Joyce ( 2010 ), Thresholds ( 2011 ), Praharfeast: James Joyce in Prague ( 2012 ) and, most recently, Terrain: Essays on the New Poetics ( 2014 ). He co-edits VLAK magazine, co-organizes the annual Prague Poetry Microfestival, and manages Litteraria Pragensia Books and Equus Press. He also acts as chief editor of Hypermedia Joyce Studies , the first online journal of Joyce scholarship. His articles on contemporary experimental writers as well as translations of contemporary poetry - Czech, German, French and Anglophone - have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. s hane W alshe studied at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and at the University of Bamberg, Germany, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the representation of Irish English in films. He continues to combine his interests in both linguistics and media studies by investigating stereotypes of Ireland and the Irish in comics, movies and television. u rsula Z eller has been a curator at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation for many years. She is co-editor of A Collideorscape of Joyce: Festschrift for Fritz Senn and of a new translation of Penelope , as well as co-author of James Joyce - “thought <?page no="355"?> Contributors 355 through my eyes.” Apart from Joyce, she has also published on American Jewish literature and culture. She is currently collaborating on the revision of Hans Wollschläger’s German translation of Ulysses and is preparing, with Ruth Frehner, the edition of Sylvia Beach’s letters to Joyce, which are a core part of the Foundation’s Hans E. Jahnke Bequest. <?page no="357"?> Index 357 Index Abramovic, Marina 170 acousmatic 16, 300-5, 307-9, 314-16 adaptation 15, 103, 106-7, 190-3, 196-200, 203, 209, 210, 211, 242, 244, 250, 251, 253, 305, 324 Addison, Joseph 167, 246, 258 Adkins, Cecil 312, 315 Adorno, Theodor W. 345 Aldington, Richard 137, 145 Aldiss, Brian 336, 347 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 163-5, 167-70, 297 anamorphic gaze 24 Anderson, Margaret 105, 106, 112, 113, 117, 118, 121, 128, 328 Anouilh, Jean 324 architecture 13, 161 Arnold, Eve 14, 28, 29, 35-38, 40, 42-3, 45-6, 48-50, 52, 53, 55, 57-62 art 13, 15, 19, 23, 24, 25, 35, 37, 41, 48, 49, 50, 57, 62, 63, 75, 79, 106, 113, 114, 124, 130, 131, 144, 145, 150, 151, 157, 159, 160, 161, 165-7, 170, 171, 210, 211, 233, 241, 263, 265, 276, 277, 299, 322, 352, 353 Asch, Nathan 15, 131-6, 138-46 Atherton, James 167, 170 Attridge, Derek 237, 238, 262, 299 Aubert, Jacques 325, 331 Auden, W. H. 132, 133, 145 Augé, Marc 165, 170 Avedon, Richard 51 back answer 92-3, 95 Bal, Mieke 46, 62 Balfe, Michael 233, 234 Ball, Angeline 204, 205 Ball, Robert 68-71, 73, 74, 103, 126, 213, 215, 315 Balla, Giacomo 286 Balzac, Honoré de 78, 79, 85, 351 Banta, Melissa 325, 329, 330, 331, 337, 348 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 288, 297 Barber of Seville, The 234 Barnacle, Nora 55, 97 Baroque 19, 20, 24, 152, 253 Barris, George 51 Barsanti, Mike 106, 138, 140 Barth, John 269 Barthes, Roland 31, 31, 38, 49, 50, 62, 81, 82, 85, 93, 94, 99, 102 Baudelaire, Charles 290, 299, 336 Bazarnik, Kasia 245, 262 Beach, Sylvia 16, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 122, 126, 129, 317-40, 344, 347, 348, 349, 351, 355 Beaton, Cecil 51 Beaumont, Francis 247 Beckett, Samuel 85, 263, 275, 333, 352, 354 Beethoven, Ludwig van 48 Benet, William Rose 134 Benjamin, Walter 239, 240, 262, 345, 353 Benoist-Méchin, Jacques 324 Benton, Thomas Hart 131, 144 Benzel, Kathryn 50, 51, 62 Bergson, Henri 296, 297 Berman, Antoine 239, 240, 262 Bernaert, Edouard 320, 323 Bernstein, Charles 278 Berry, Robert 103, 106-8, 114-18, 122-25, 127, 128, 130 Bertamini, Marco 150, 151, 153, 158 <?page no="358"?> 358 Index Berthoff, Warner 138, 143, 144, 145 Beuys, Joseph 161, 170 Bible 143, 222, 228, 253 Bierce, Ambrose 336 Bloch, Ernst 345 Bloom 190, 191-94, 202, 205, 208, 209, 210 Bloom, Harold 135, 145, 262 Bloom, Leopold 11, 14, 15, 35, 66-72, 75, 77-85, 103, 104, 112, 113, 118-27, 129, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 147-50, 154-58, 163, 164, 167-70, 176-79, 183-6, 193-206, 211, 212-29, 235, 282, 289-92, 300, 308, 309, 312-15, 325, 346 Bloom, Milly 80, 84, 121, 197-99, 204, 205, 210, 244 Bloom, Molly 29, 35, 37, 46, 53, 54, 55, 57, 68, 71, 72, 73, 80, 85, 95, 97, 121, 126, 129, 137, 147, 156, 180, 185, 186, 188, 194-201, 203-06, 209, 210, 216, 223, 224, 227, 282, 325 Boas, George 310, 315 body 14, 18, 29, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 50, 51, 53, 57, 62, 75, 77-85, 99, 116, 133, 137, 139, 201, 256, 275, 276, 277, 286, 289, 291, 292, 301, 361 Bök, Christian 277 Borach, Georges 338 Botticelli, Sandro 48 Boulez, Pierre 302 Bowen, Elizabeth 336 Bowen, Zack 292, 298, 313, 315 Bradley, Jenny Serruys 324 Bradshaw, Peter 203, 206, 210 Brewer, Joseph 131, 132, 134, 138, 142, 144, 145 bridge 14, 64, 64-69, 71-73, 77, 136, 225, 227, 312, 313 Broch, Hermann 335, 340-42, 347 Brody, Daniel 335, 336, 339-42, 344, 347 Bronfen, Elisabeth 9, 13, 17, 33, 39, 62, 351 Brontë, Charlotte 20, 32, 56 Broodthaers, Marcel 161 Brown, Richard 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 53, 62, 85, 208, 210 Brown, Susan 308, 315 Browning, Robert 20, 32, 288, 298 Brueghel, Pieter 132 Budgen, Frank 77, 85, 156, 158, 241, 259, 322, 331 Bunyan, John 256, 258 Burke, Edmund 248 Burn, Stephen 269, 270, 280 Bush, George W. 152 Caballero, Rosario 284, 298 Cage, John 301 Călinescu, George 245, 249, 262 Camus, Albert 47 caricature 80, 147, 254, 255 Carroll, Lewis 15, 162-70, 293, 297 Carty, Ciaran 203, 204, 210 Cat and the Devil , The 65 Cato, Bob 317, 221 censorship 13, 15, 52, 56, 103, 106-7, 112, 114, 115, 120, 121, 122, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 142, 200, 242, 298 Chamber Music 334 Chaplin, Charlie 136 Chekhov, Anton 324 chiaroscuro 19 Chion, Michel 302-8, 315 Christo 161 Cocteau, Jean 324 Colbert, Stephen 152, 159 Coleman, James 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 155, 159 Collins, Wilkie 20, 32, Colum, Mary 336, 347 Colum, Padraic 338, 340, 347 comics 103, 125, 127, 129, 354 Conley, Tom 27, 28, 34 <?page no="359"?> Index 359 Conn, Peter 144, 145 Conner, Benjamin 342 Conrad, Joseph 47 Copeau, Jacques 320, 322, 323, 324 Cowley, Malcolm 134 Crawford, Joan 51 Crispi, Luca 111, 128, 129, 199, 210 Croft, William 288, 298 Crommelynck, Fernand 321 crossmapping 30, 31, 33 Crowther, Bosley 204, 206, 210 Cruse, David Alan 288, 298 Curtius, Ernst Robert 338 d’Annunzio, Gabriele 321 Danielewski, Mark Z. 265, 268, 270-75, 280, 281 Davison, Sarah 241, 262 de Musset, Alfred 336 “The Dead” 15, 16, 87-95, 98, 100, 101, 102, 293, 300, 302-4, 307-9, 314 death 22, 23, 39, 53, 62, 65, 66, 67, 99, 101, 140, 184, 198, 199, 200, 209, 223, 230, 262, 271, 272, 293, 321, 351 deconstruction 31, 32 Dedalus, Simon 80, 176, 194, 198, 216, Dedalus, Stephen 64, 73, 133, 164, 170, 206, 208, 218 Deignan, Alice 296, 298 Delabastita, Dirk 224, 235 Deleanu, Ion Budai 251 Deleuze, Gilles 166, 170 Derrida, Jacques 24, 31, 152, 159 Deserted Village , The 154 desire 14, 18, 25, 38, 44, 47, 54, 56, 79, 90, 91, 99, 100, 101, 125, 133, 163, 195, 202, 205, 230, 231, 233, 290 Dettmar, Kevin 241, 262 Dickens, Charles 248 Dietrich, Marlene 35, 36 diffusion 91, 301 Dislocutions 11, 12, 13, 16, 34, 129, 211, 235, 237, 238, 240, 251, 261, 263, 296, 299 Döblin, Alfred 245, 248 Dos Passos, John 21, 134, 137 Dracula 20, 33, Dreiser, Theodore 47, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142, 145 du Pasquier, Hélène 320, 323 Dublin 11, 35, 66, 69, 72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 106, 107, 127, 136, 142, 163, 164, 167, 179, 183, 192, 193, 195, 200, 219, 227, 228, 260, 311, 320, 344 Dubliners 77, 102, 159, 212, 293, 297, 314, 315, 319, 323, 341 Dubreuil, Laurent 237, 262 Duse, Eleanor 48 Dworkin, Craig 277, 278 Dwyer, Ciara 204, 210 Eco, Umberto 213, 235 Egri, Peter 252, 262 Ehrenburg, Ilja 340 Einstein’s Theory of Relativity 21 Eliot, T. S. 135, 145, 241, 338, 342 Ellmann, Richard 11, 12, 80, 85, 129, 190, 200, 210, 297, 320, 321, 328, 331, 332, 333, 340, 344, 347 encyclopedia 76, 77, 270, 279 Epiphanies 16, 283, 285, 286, 292 Evening Telegraph 140 exile 11 Exiles 97, 297, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 334 Faerber, Thomas 321, 331 Fall of Icarus , The 132 Fargue, Léon-Paul 324, 325 Faulkner, William 21 femininity 30, 39, 48, 51, 62, 63, 97, 98, 291 feminist 38, 40, 46, 48, 54, 57, 63, 88, 98, 353 <?page no="360"?> 360 Index fetishism 80 Finke, Ronald A. 283, 298 Finnegans Wake 76, 125, 163, 167, 168, 170, 224, 225, 245, 262, 266, 275, 278, 279, 284, 288, 294, 295, 297, 299, 326, 327, 331, 347, 348 Fischer, Ernst 343, 347 Fish, Stanley 104, 128 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 134 Flaubert, Gustave 47, 48, 76, 77, 85, 351 Fletcher, John 247 Foreignization 237, 239, 264 Foucault, Michel 19 Frankfurter Zeitung 333-48 Frehner, Ruth, nine 16, 211, 236, 317, 351 Freud, Sigmund 24, 25, 26, 31, 33, 165, 353 Fuga per canonem 308, 316 Gaddis, William 269 Galantière, Lewis 326 Garbo, Greta 38, 51, 62 Gáspár, Endre 212, 215, 216, 220, 221, 234, 235, 242, 252 Geheber, Philip Keel 14, 75, 252 gender 21, 23, 27, 33, 41, 46, 47, 52, 55, 88, 93, 113, 129, 224, 244, 249, 251, 351 genetic 13, 111, 128, 239, 241, 261, 262, 316, 348, 353 Gertzman, Jay 113, 121, 122, 128, 327, 328, 331 Giacomo Joyce 282, 285, 292, 297, 298 Gibbs, Raymond 296, 298 Gibson, Andrew 221, 242, 262 Giedion-Welcker, Carola 334 Gifford, Don 69, 72, 74, 120, 128, 168, 218, 230, 235, 246, 250, 311, 315 Gilbert, Stuart 79, 85, 129, 137, 145, 331, 340 Gillespie, Gerald 291, 298 Gillet, Louis 337 Gilmore Girls 58 Gleason, Daniel W. 283, 296, 298 Godmann, Marta 252 Goldsmith, Kenneth 15, 265, 268, 275-81 Goldsmith, Oliver 81, 154, 159 Goll, Ivan 335, 338, 339, 340 Gombrich, Ernst Hans 151, 159 Gothic 19, 20, 21, 247, 260, 272 Goya, Francisco 47, 48 Goyert, Georg 335 Grady, Joseph E. 383, 398 Gravity’s Rainbow 269 Green, Julien 336 Greene, Milton 51 Gregory, Richard 149, 151, 159 Grigorescu, Nicolae 244 Groden, Michael 111, 128 Gula, Marianna 15, 212, 214, 215, 235, 240, 242, 252, 253, 262, 263, 352 Gumpp, Johannes 152, 153, 155, Gurke, Thomas 16, 300, 352 Hagena, Katherina 14, 64, 352 Halsman, Philippe 47, 51, 61 Hamlet 21, 22, 23, 33, 68, 74, 148, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 207, 208, 228, 229 Hammond, Wally 203, 204, 210 Harlow, Jean 38, 39, 51 Hart, Clive 77, 85, 299 Hauptmann, Gerhart 321 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 19 Healy, Michael 320 Heap, Jane 105, 112, 113, 117, 129, 328 Hébertot, Jacques 320, 323, 324 Heidegger, Martin 66, 67, 72, 74 Hemingway, Ernst 47 Hepburn, Katherine 28 Heusel, Barbara Stevens 13, 16, 196, 210 Hitchcock, Alfred 19 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 19, 32 Hogan, Patrick Colm 292, 298 <?page no="361"?> Index 361 Hollywood 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 41, 44, 47, 51, 61, 139 Homer 104, 106, 135, 137, 165, 184, 223, 239, 311, 316 homesickness 25, 26 homosexuality 121, 203, 209 House of Leaves 270-75, 280 Hungarian translation 15, 212-236, 240, 242, 247, 252-63, 352 Huston, John 36, 49, 305 Huxley, Aldous 138 Huyssen, Andreas 48, 63 hypertext 271 hysteria 22, 23, 25, 33 Iamblichus 309, 310, 311, 314, 315 Ibsen, Henrik 139, 321 imagery 13, 282, 283, 285, 289, 293, 296, 298, 304, 305 Inductive Scrutinies 235, 238, 251, 263 Infinite Jest 268, 269, 280, 281 Ionescu, Arleen 240, 243, 262 Iser, Wolfgang 104, 129, 221, 262 Ivanescu, Mircea 240, 242, 243, 244, 247, 249, 250, 251, 259, 260, 261, 263 Jahnke, Hans E. 317 Jahnke, Hans E. Bequest 16, 317, 333, 335, 337, 339, 342, 347, 348, 349, 355 James, Henry 19, 354 Jarry, Alfred 321 Jeep, Johannes 72 Jewishness 155 Jones, Luke 151, 158 jouissance 29 Jouvet, Louis 320, 322, 323, 324 Joyce, Giorgio 317, 339, 342 Joyce, Helen 342 Joyce, Michael 335, 336, 341, 342, 343, 345, 346, 348 Joyce, Stanislaus 321, 335, 242, 343, 344 Juslin, Patrik 306, 315 Kafka, Franz 333 Kafka, Irene 333, 334, 335, 336, 338, 339, 341, 346, 348 Kain, Richard M. 199, 201, 207, 210, 283, 286, 299 Kane, Brian 301, 302, 309, 315 Kappanyos, András 212, 214, 215, 235, 242, 252, 263 Karloff, Boris 336, 348 Keats, John 385, 297 Kenner, Hugh 69, 74, 82, 83, 85, 145, 308, 315, 346, 348 Kiberd, Declan 37, 63, 195, 202, 204, 210 King Lear 218 King, Mary 241 Kinsey, Alfred 48 Kisch, Egon Erwin 345 Kittler, Friedrich 310, 311, 315 Klitgaard, Ida 224, 231 Knowles, Sebastian 84, 86, 308, 315, 316 Kosuth, Joseph 15, 160-70 Kracauer, Siegfried 345 Krause, Marcus 13, 16, 21, 34 Krauss, Rosalind 35, 63 Kristeva, Julia 23, 24, 31 Kronenberger, Louis 138 Kugel, Adelaide 327, 328, 332 Kuhn, Thomas S. 79, 83, 86 Lacan, Jacques 16, 24, 25, 34, 65, 96-102 Lakoff, George 286, 295, 298 Lament of Mary , The 253, 255 language crisis 21 Larbaud, Valery 75, 86, 162, 318, 324, 326, 331, 332, 337 Larousse, Pierre 76, 301 Las Meninas 151 “The Lass of Aughrim” 16, 99, 300, 303-7, 314 Latto, Richard 150, 153, 158 Laukka, Petri 306, 315 Lawson, Rebecca 151, 158 LeBlanc, Leslie 134, 135, 137, 146 <?page no="362"?> 362 Index Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 245 Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio 37, 41 Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria 161, 171, 236 Lethen, Helmut 267, 281 Lewis, Philip 251 Lewis, Wyndham 326, 327 litigation 134, 333, 337, 338 Little Review 103-6, 108, 110-30, 328, 345 Luchsinger, Markus 321, 331 Lugné-Poë, Aurélien 321, 322, 324 Lyotard, Jean-François 265-68, 281 Macrum, George 318 Madame Bovary 48 Maeterlinck, Maurice 321 magazine 47, 48, 96, 104, 105, 108, 112, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 126, 127, 159, 192, 242, 272, 328, 335, 336, 345, 346, 354 Mahaffey, Vicki 248, 298 Mallarmé, Stéphane 278, 354 Mann, Heinrich 345 Mann, Thomas 267, 298, 341, 345, 346 masculinity 203, 291 McConnell, Louise 336, 341 McCormick, Edith Rockefeller 320 McDonagh, Maitland 206, 210 McHale, Brian 266, 267, 268, 273, 274, 280, 281 McKinnon, Dugal 301, 302 McKinnon, James 310, 316 melancholia 22, 23 Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine 151, 159 Melchiori, Giorgio 46, 53, 63, Melville, Herman 19 memory game 15, 172-89 metaphor 16, 42, 90, 93, 127, 142, 163, 192, 210, 212, 251, 252, 283-99, 315 Meteling, Arno 13, 16, 21, 34 metempsychosis 71, 282, 283, 292, 297, 308 Michaels, Walter Benn 139, 145 Middlemarch 20, 32 Mihálycsa, Erika 15, 214, 224, 225, 226, 235, 237, 252, 258, 263, 352 Milesi, Laurent 243, 262 Milivojevic, Ivana 14, 87, 353 Miller, Henry 47 mimetic 19, 83, 241, 278 mirror 15, 80, 147, 148-52, 154, 156-59, 182 Mitchell, Breon 334, 348 modernism 21, 39, 63, 79, 92, 93, 105, 129, 132, 136, 138, 145, 237, 262, 265-68, 281, 298, 299, 316, 348, 352, 354 Molière 336 Monnier, Adrienne 324, 325, 326, 332, 334, 338, 340 Monroe, Marilyn 13, 14, 28, 29, 35-63, 353 Montgomery, Martin 193, 211 Morel, Auguste 162, 325, 326, 331 Morisot, Berthe 150 Morra, Joanne 23, 24 Moscato, Michael 134, 135, 137, 146 moustache 75, 80, 81 Mrs Dalloway 22, 33 Münxelhaus, Barbara 310, 312, 316 music 13, 65, 98, 99, 102, 185, 193, 194, 198, 216, 226, 227, 277, 279, 302-16, 323, 324, 334, 352 Nachtstücke 19, 20, 32 Natali, Ilaria 16, 282, 353 Natanson, Jacques 321, 324 newspaper 111, 131, 133, 135, 138, 140-42, 144, 146, 161, 219, 271, 334, 335, 238-46 Nicomachus of Gerasa 310, 311, 312, 313, 316 Nietzsche, Friedrich 65, 66, 74 <?page no="363"?> Index 363 Norris, Margot 93, 98, 102, 103, 104, 120, 121, 125, 126, 129, 190-92, 195, 203, 205, 207, 208, 210 O’Casey, Sean 338, 342 ochlokinetics 11 Olsen, Vickie 200, 210 Orwell, George 142, 146 Osteen, Mark 83, 84, 86, 293, 298 Othello 155 Oțoiu, Adrian 243, 263 Pagnattaro, Marisa L. 134, 135, 136, 143, 146 Pakula, Alan 13, 17, 21, 24, 33 Pallotti, Donatella 282, 283, 298 parallactic 6, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19-30, 65, 67, 68, 69, 73, 75, 83, 84, 87, 88, 93, 96, 99, 101, 103, 107, 116, 125, 127, 132-34, 139, 144, 149, 150, 154, 172, 173, 174, 176, 187, 191, 212, 213, 216-30, 233, 234, 238, 240, 267, 270, 280, 282, 285, 288, 290, 296, 300, 305, 307, 331, 343, 344, 346, 347 paranoia 13, 18, 21, 147, 333, 336, 342, 347 Paris 11, 76, 96, 105, 118, 136, 162, 320, 321, 324, 328, 333, 340, 342, 354 Paris, Václav 15, 131, 353 Parker, Alan 204 Parkes, Adam 293, 298 parody 168, 217, 242-44, 246-50, 252, 254, 256-61, 266, 269, 278 Passos, John Dos 21, 134, 137 Pathosformel 49 Pay Day 15, 131-46 periodical 117, 119, 122, 142, 335, 345, 354 Perloff, Marjorie 275, 276, 277, 281 philology 31 photography 21, 36, 39, 42, 49, 50, 278, 353 Pinker, James 118, 338 Pinker, Ralph 335 Pirandello, Luigi 324 Pitoëff, Georges 323, 324, 332 Plath, Sylvia 58 Plock, Vike 308, 312, 313, 316 Poe, Edgar Alan 19, 20, 271, 273, 336, Pollock, Griselda 9, 14, 23, 24, 28, 38, 48, 63, 353 Pomes Penyeach 284 Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, A 16, 145, 149, 156, 159, 284-88, 292, 297, 291, 319, 320 postmodernism 24, 63, 170, 240, 241, 243, 262, 265-69, 281 Power, Arthur 113, 114, 118, 120, 124, 142, 278, 320, 327, 328, 330, 340 Proust, Marcel 137, 266, 275, 288, 298, 299, 336 provective 238, 251 psychoanalysis 13, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 41, 54, 100, 102, 353 punctum 40, 49 Pygmalion 98, 100 Pynchon, Thomas 21, 269 Pythagoras 301, 302, 308-16 Quinn, John 105, 112, 113 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 237, 263, 293, 298 race 139, 174 Rădulescu, Ion Heliade 248, 249 Raftery, Deirdre 288, 299 Rainey, Lawrence 105, 129 Rancière, Jacques 144, 145, 146 Ray, Marcel 324, 332 realism 79, 81, 82, 84, 92, 93, 139, 144, 322, 332, 351 realist 19, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 91, 92, 93, 135, 265, Reid, Calvin 115, 127, 129 representation 30, 31, 32, 39, 47, 54, 55, 56, 58, 75, 76, 81, 83, 84, 101, 115, <?page no="364"?> 364 Index 116, 117, 150, 151, 207, 286, 289, 290, 291, 304, 314, 354 Rice, Thomas Jackson 308, 312, 313, 316 Rifkin, Adrian 23 Riley Fitch, Noel 324, 325, 328, 329, 330, 337, 348 Ring and the Book , The 20, 32 Romains, Jules 323, 324, 336 Romanian translation 15, 240-52, 250, 252 Romanticism 19 Ronsard, Pierre 336 Rose of Castile, The 233, 234 Rose, Danis 72, 77, 83, 85 Rossini, Gioachino 234 Rosten, Hedda and Norman 37, 43, 45, 63 Roth, Joseph 345, 348 Roth, Samuel 105, 111, 112, 113, 114, and 16, 118, 121-24, 129, 319, 326-29, 331, 332, 340, 343 Rothschild, Willi 344 Rowan, Jerry 203, 211 Rubens, Peter Paul 150, 151 Sacco, Nicola 132, 139-42, 164 Sandycove 183 Schaeffer, Pierre 301-08, 314, 15, 316 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 242 Scholes, Robert 159, 283, 286, 297, 299 Schwarz, Daniel 88, 102, 299 Scott, A. O. 269, 281 Scott, Clive 290, 299 Scott, Michael 343 “ Seen ” 104-07 114-18, 122-30 Segall, Jeffrey 137, 146 Senn, Fritz, nine 11, 10-16, 31, 32, 34, 72, 87, 93, 105, 129, 132, 135, 137, 172, 190, 191, 211, 212, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 245, 227, 233, 235-40, 251, 256, 261, 263, 282, 283, 291, 292, 293, 294, 296, 297, 299, 308, 313, 316, 351, 352, 354 serialization 13, 15, 103, 105, 106, 112, 115, 117, 118, 125, 126, 127, 128 Serra, Richard 161 Serruys, Jenny 321, 324 sexuality 26, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51-56, 58, 199, 204, 191 Shakespeare, William 18, 33, 68, 74, 105, 109, 110, 140, 147-59, 207, 218, 228, 229, 230, 231, 317, 325, 327, 328, 330, 331, 336, 337, 351 Shattuck, Roger 288, 299 Shaw, George Bernard 324 Shaw, Sam 37, 51, Sheehan, Maeve 192, 203, 204, 211 Sheridan, Richard 244, 248 Sherman-Palladino, Amy 58 Sigler, Amanda 15, 103, 328, 332 Silverman, Oscar A. 325, 329, 330, 331, 337, 353 simile 286, 287, 288, 289, 293 Simpson, Paul 193, 211 sinthome 96, 97 Slote, Sam 15, 78, 81, 82, 85, 86, 111, 129, 147, 159, 345 Smith, Marq 23, 24 Sonnet 135 (Shakespeare) 231 Soupault, Philippe 338 Spencer, Herbert 306, 316 Spinoza, Baruch 185 Spoo, Robert 113, 114, 129, 241, 263 Spooner, Alice 150, 153, 158 Spoto, Donald 52, 63 Spurr, David 15, 160, 347, 348, 354 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 322 Stauff, Markus 13, 16, 21, 34 Steele, Richard 246, 258 Stein, Gertrude 278 Steinbeck, John 47 Stephen Hero 212, 223, 235, 297 stereoscope 172, 174, 176, 188, 189, 209, 216, 300 Stern, Bert 51 Sternbergh, Adam 36, 152, 159 <?page no="365"?> Index 365 Sterne, Laurence 259 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 301 Stoker, Bram 20, 33 Story of the Heavens , The 69, 70, 74, 128, 213, 300, 315 stream of consciousness 55, 56, 119, 133, 138, 139, 214, 217, 218, 222, 223, 224 Strick, Joseph 15, 190-209, 210, 211 Strindberg, August 321 Sullivan, James P. 241, 263, Sullivan, Karen 287, 288, 299 Svevo, Italo 340 Swift, Jonathan 231, 244, 249, 258 Sykes, Claud 320 synecdoche 85, 95, 225 Szentkuthy, Miklós 212-34, 235, 236, 240, 242, 252-61, 263, 264 Szolláth, Dávid 212, 224, 235, 236, 242, 252, 263, 264 Tale of a Tub , A 231, 352 Tennyson, Alfred 288, 297 Through the Looking-Glass 168, 164, 167, 169, 170, 293, 297 Thwaites, Tony 103, 104, 129 Titbits 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 346 Titian 150 Todorow, Almut 334, 343, 345, 346, 348 Torresi, Ira 239, 264 translation 12, 13, 15, 16, 34, 48, 102, 155, 162, 190, 211, 212-35, 237-47, 249, 250-64, 299, 319, 322-27, 334, 335, 336, 337, 341, 342, 345, 346, 348, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355 Trausil, Hans 340 Trieste 11, 136, 219 Triple Self-Portrait 152, 153, 155 Turner, Mark 286, 295, 298 Two Worlds Monthly 103-7, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121-29, 327, 328, 332 Ulysses 11-16, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 87, 58, 62, 63, 64-74, 75-86, 103-48, 157, 158, 159, 160-71, 172-73, 183, 189, 190-211, 212-36, 237-42, 252, 256, 260-64, 266-69, 276, 282, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 297, 298, 299, 300, 308, 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 320, 324-32, 334, 336, 337, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345, 346, 348, 351, 352, 355; “Telemachus,” 105-7, 112, 114-18, 125, 127, 128, 183, 193, 194, 247, 258; “Nestor,” 66, 127, 193, 207; “Proteus,” 114, 194, 207, 217, 221, 267; “Calypso,” 80, 105, 118, 120-25, 127-29, 185; “Lotus Eaters,” 66, 79, 80, 120, 127, 290; “Hades,” 66, 148, 194, 198, 199, 204, 225, 227; “Aeolus,” 105, 107, 110, 111, 140, 155, 178, 228, 233, 234, 319; “Lestrygonians,” 79, 80, 103, 114, 183, 194, 212, 218, 219, 221, 228, 236, 325; “Scylla and Charybdis,” 116, 121, 126, 148, 154, 155, 156, 157, 194, 207, 229, 231; “Wandering Rocks,” 71, 80, 85, 197, 181, 187, 194, 195, 229, 267; “Sirens,” 16, 71, 80, 185, 194, 216, 217, 218, 219, 226, 234, 290, 300, 308-16; “Cyclops,” 120, 139, 155, 173, 174, 194, 218, 219, 221, 260, 267, 292, 352; “Nausicaa,” 58, 80, 81, 105, heading 12, 113, 121, 174, 178, 195, 201, 229, 250, 293, 299, 328; “Oxen of the Sun,” 15, 126, 149, 177, 217, 231, 232, 233, 240, 241, 242, 244, 249, 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 259, 261, 262, 263, 267; “Circe,” 15, 71, 113, 139, 147-49, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 195, 196, 199, 201, 203, 217, 234, 267, 292, 246; “Eumaeus,” 72, 194, 196, 206; “Ithaca,” 66, 72, 75-86, 129, 154, 196, 206, 267, 279; “Penelope,” 14, 29, 46, 53, 56, 80, 85, 126, 147, 156, 185, 188, 194, 196, 205, 206, 250, 325, 326, 354 <?page no="366"?> 366 Index Ungvári, Tamás 214, 236 Untermeyer, Louis 134, 135, 137 Utz, Peter 345, 46, 348 Valente, Joseph 284, 299 van der Waerden, Bartel Leendert 309, 310, 312, 316 van Hulle, Dirk 274, 275, 281 van Mierlo, Wim 263, 334, 348 Vanderham, Paul 105, 114, 118, 119, 120, 130 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 132, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146 Velásquez, Diego 151 Venus at a Mirror 150 Venus effect 15, 150-4, 156, 158, Venuti, Lawrence 239, 240, 245, 246, 251, 262, 264 Verlaine, Paul 336 Verne, Jules 186 Véry, Dalma 253, 264 Vichnar, David 15, 354 Victorian 20, 25, 163, 298 “Vielleicht ein Traum” 334, 335, 336, 341, 344, 346, 348 Virgil 165, 171 Vitiello, Greg 317, 331 voice 20, 21, 25, 27, 54, 55, 56, 57, 75, 80, 83, 84, 85, 89, 93, 98, 125, 141, 154, 162, 173, 192, 196, 198, 199, 202, 216, 218, 229, 231, 237, 241, 260, 271, 273, 278, 291, 301, 304-7, 311, 314, 315, 317 von Abele, Rudolph 190, 191, 199, 207, 209, 211 von Cziffra, Geza 343, 348 Wallace, David Foster 15, 265, 268, 269, 270, 280, 281 Walpole, Horace 247, 261 Walsh, Sean 190-211 Walshe, Shane 15, 190, 354 Wanderer , The 254 war 22, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 65, 72, 108, 192, 214, 243, 265, 269, 284, 324, 332, 344, 354 Warburg, Aby 23, 49 Warner, Deborah 69, 74 Watson, Philip 195, 203, 204, 208, 211 Wawrzycka, Jolanta 228, 236, 238, 263, 264, 352 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 11, 320, 321, 323, 326, 327, 338, 343 Weber, Max 345 Weidermann, Volker 345, 348 Weigel, Andreas 324 Weir, David 112, 113, 130 West, Mae 51 Whitman, Walt 318, 353 Whitton, David 323, 332 Wilde, Oscar 231, 321 Williams, Keith 190, 208, 211 Wilmotte, Jean-Michel 166 Wilson, Edmund 137, 138, 139, 146 Winter’s Tale, A 157 Winters, Madeline 151, 158 Witen, Michelle 308, 316 Wolf, Werner 308, 316 Woman in White , The 20, 32 Woolf, Virginia 21, 33, 39, 56, 63, 275, 285, 297, 354 Woolsey, John M. 52, 53, 63, 114 Work in Progress 224, 319, 326, 327, 336, 342, 344 Wuthering Heights 20, 32 Yeats, W. B. 320 Zeller, Ursula, nine 13, 16, 195, 211, 213, 216, 236, 333, 351, 345 Zimmermann, Jörg 309, 316 Žižek, Slavoj 13, 16, 24, 26, 34, 65, 74, 75, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102 Zoltán, Gábor 212, 235, 242 <?page no="367"?> Index 367 Zurich James Joyce Foundation 14, 16, 108, 137, 242, 300, 317, 333, 349, 352, 353, 354 Zurich 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 136, 219, 320, 321, 334, 338, 347, 351, 352 Zweig, Stefan 321, 345 <?page no="368"?> Parallaxing Joyce Paparunas / Ilmberger / Heusser (eds.) Parallaxing Joyce Penelope Paparunas / Frances Ilmberger / Martin Heusser (eds.) Parallaxing Joyce is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays, as it approaches James Joyce’s work using parallactic principles as its overriding theoretical framework. While parallax, a frequent term in Joyce’s work, originally derives from astronomy, it has been appropriated in this volume to provide fresh perspectives on Joyce’s œuvre. By comparing Joyce and Marilyn Monroe, films, art, serializations, philosophy, translation and censorship, among others, these scholars transform our way of reading not only Joyce but also the world around us. This volume will appeal not only to academic researchers and Joyce enthusiasts, but also to anyone interested in literary and cultural studies. ISBN 978-3-7720-8589-5