"Ineluctible modality of the visible..." James Joyce

Every other Wednesday evening I participate in a James Joyce reading group. It's

led by an excellent 80-year-old sparrow woman who inspires two groups, having

devoted her most recent decade to the author.

 

Joyce is the ultimate English-speaking author and thinker, bar none. No IMO.

I've been wondering how he'd address some of our airy-fairy photo-philosophic

prattle, were he to do so from his invention-of-Internet Ulysses mode.

 

As we know, philosophy, literature, and tax preparation occupy one side of the

brain, beer, sex, and whistling the other. I'm puzzled that that Mr. Joyce

seems, despite best efforts, not to occasionally make the moonshotlike

crossover, from one side to the other.

 

Any Joyce enthusiasts here? What's your thinking? Has he made that leap somewhere?

 

He didn't do it on this beach, though he identified things we'd photograph:

 

http://www.haverford.edu/engl/faculty/Sherman/JoyceBeckett/ReadingUlysses/topper.htm

> Joyce is the ultimate English-speaking author and thinker, bar none. No IMO.

 

You intend to spark a highbrow discussion by foisting an absolutist attitude like that on us?

 

I prefer Shakespeare to Joyce. So there.

Yes, I'll give you Shakespeare.

 

He's better on terrorism and oppression than is Joyce, who barely touches those horrors beyond mention of Black & Tans. The Bard, to what should be his shame, gives relatively short shrift to beauty, drinking or seaside eros, some of MY author's sweet spots.

 

"Will In The World" by Stephen Greenblatt was one of my favorite 2006 reads. Macbeth is one of humanity's artistic pinnacles..you will accept that? My prescription: Compare within a week Kurisawa's "Throne of Blood" to Polanski's "Macbeth" after reading Greenblatt.

 

If one is not permitted to be absolutist about Joyce (or Shakespeare) the species deserves its al Quaida.

 

I think JJ comes close to speaking about photography in "Ineluctible..." but he never quite manages...strange, as the craft was practiced all around him in Dublin and in Paris and Trieste, and Bloom worked for a newspaper.

 

Not a peep from The Bard on photography, which suggests he WASN'T enough of a deity to see into the future, not a step above Jehovah after all, despite Harold Bloom's absolutist attitude.

"Ultimate thinker?" Wow. Now, I'd have to pick a bone or two over that. Would I rather have spent an evening with James Joyce or Richard Feynman? With William Shakespeare, or with Neal Stephenson (that latter being still alive, and thus marginally more likely)? With Dorothy Dunnett, or Carl Sagan? It all sort of depends on what's being written and spoken <i>about</i>.

The "about" in this case has to do with photography. I'll admit that Shakespeare and Joyce are photographic stretches, but like some photography they both address things more mysterious than science attempts, per one of the self-admitted self-hobblings of science (it doesn't address what's not at the time scientifically unadressable...fundamental to scientific method).

 

As well, nobody who describes the universe using "billyuuuns and billlyunsss" has much command of English.

The irony, John, is that Sagan never actually <i>said</i> that. That's from a parody OF him. But if you've never picked up and read a copy of his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDemon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark%2Fdp%2F0345409469%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1188946940%26sr%3D8-1&tag=uplandlife-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325"><i>Demon Haunted World</i></a>, you've missed out on a terrific, wide-ranging review of human evolution and its role in perception, symbolism, and the misundertanding of what we see (through the camera lens, among other things). Essentially, he discusses science as a tool with which to specifically address those things that some people find mysterious, and - because of a world view that suggests those mysteries are beyond our comprehension and influence - allow to darken or stunt their intellectual lives. His command of English, and his ability to deploy reason and a thoughtful examination of reality (as often illuminated by science) in the face of a frequently irrational and superstitious audience is well worth experiencing. He's sort of like Edward O. Wilson, but with a wry sense of humor and an awareness that his readers include a wider swath of humanity.

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And, I'd be careful about picking on another writer's prowess with the English language when you roll out a doozy like <i>"it doesn't address what's not at the time scientifically unadressable"</i>! My point is: linguistic gymnastics, for me, take a back seat to perspective, experience, and something interesting to communicate. This applies, of course, to both the written word and the captured image. I can be hopelessly bored and un-informed/inspired by a technically marvelous image with no conceptual meat on its bones. It's one of the reasons I've stopped rating the photographic equivalent of the "seashore eros" prose you mention: the endless parade of carefully wrought, poetic, dramatic, and ultimately vapid sunset/wave shots or orchid macro work. Those folks may have a deep, even florid visual vocabulary within their areas of interest ... but they so rarely have anything to actually <i>say</i> to me. And of course, they would find me to be equally empty-headed. But I <i>know</i> I'm empty headed! That's the difference! And that's why I'd rather have dinner with Neal Stephenson and talk about The Baroque Cycle than beat my head against Ulysses, split hairs over which schema best describes its twists and turns, and fret over just how Modern it is/was/will-continue-to-be.

> If one is not permitted to be absolutist about Joyce (or Shakespeare) the species deserves its al Quaida.

 

This is so utterly wrongheaded it's *almost* funny.

 

It is not funny because absolutism is what *gives rise* to fundamentalism in the al Quaida style. And no, I'm not saying that "all things are equally good". All things are quite clearly not equally good, but what makes your deep convictions correct and others' wrong?

"The Bard, to what should be his shame, gives relatively short shrift to beauty, drinking or seaside eros, some of MY author's sweet spots."

 

You are joking, right? Oh I get it: Microsoft vs. Apple leads to Nikon vs. Canon which in turn leads to Shakespeare vs. Joyce . That is progress.

next Barthes vs. Sontag followed by the ultimate el supremo death match: Van Morrison vs. Richard Thompson.

Sontag's been done, on another thread (Ellis, Barthes is your job), but Richard Thompson and Van Morrison are an interesting pairing. They both tend to sound repetitive, but at their best each is elegant. One Vincent Black Lightning should be enough for any man http://www.rtlist.net/listen.htm . Van Morrison has been overplayed in my world, now usually sounds sappy to me, but I still love Tupelo Honey.

 

I heard the television Sagan say "billlllions", but I don't know if the flesh and blood version said it. Presumably he didn't write it.

 

It's saddening that some do worry about their photo ratings. I did some ratings, concluded it was, as Sagan once said, "like wow, reeely, reeely groaty!". It's a little known fact that he was born in San Fernando Valley.

 

As for orchids and sunsets, and I'll add dogs and hairy old men with pipes. I generally agree with Matt, but surely he'll admit that they aren't, um, ENTIRELY without value.

 

Good writing is one of mankind's highest achievements. I'm proud to have pushed Matt's buttons sufficiently to get him to write well about his.

 

HOWEVER, I actually did ask a photo question: if anybody had read Joyce, and if they'd noticed him a) saying anything about photography or b) even with his gifts, managing to stimulate the side of the brain that evoked images strongly. As to the latter, I can think of some in Dubliners, but am stumped with Ulysses.

John: Actually, it may just be that I'm having high school flashbacks to James Joyce, and THAT'S what pushed my buttons. But, I'll give you credit none the less. And of course - those sunsets and orchids have every bit of value that the photographer and his audience can muster between them, right where they intersect: at the photograph. I for one know that there is VERY little intersection with my oddball stuff (dogs, but no old guys with pipes!).

Joyce is a good read but the ultimate author and thinker? Mmmmm...not for me personally. Maybe you're just really enthusiastic about your study group...?

 

I like the following that speaks to biggest and greatest and enthroning entities as gods.

 

"Since there was nothing more exaltedly high than heaven and nothing more degradingly low than hell, up and down were limited or terminal dimensions.

 

Since humans were so tiny in respect to their laterally surrounding world, and since the tales of travelers reported greater mountains as one went inland from the sea, and since the sea ever surrounded the land, the best-informed humans assumed Earth to be an island floating on a sea that extended laterally to infinity in all horizontal directions as a plane, a plane whose surface could be made rough by god-blown winds, while the skies were filled with gods disguised as clouds blowing winds.

 

Since the shortest distances between two points seemed obviously to be a straight, stretched-hair line, all the straight lines on the infinite plane of the world ran to infinity; and since humans could never reach infinity, they need not worry about where the points were located between which the straight infinite lines were stretched. All they had to do was to have two local points through which to run their ?straight? line, which could thus be extended to infinity in two opposite directions. This was the genesis of "flat land," from which humans have not yet emerged. In flat land there are infinite biggest and smallest: In the vertical sense this means giants bigger than mountains and gods bigger than giants - ergo, the biggest greatest god, the biggest of visually engendered conceptioning enthroned on the highest mountain, while the invisibly smallest emerged as the elves and the evil spirits existing in things."

 

---R. Buckminster Fuller

John--

 

I'll take a stab even though I am not experienced in reading Joyce. I'm going on the three

paragraphs you linked to in your original statement above.

 

I assume you are in part making the analogy between Stephen's use and dependence on

text to

"translate" his sensory experiences to the reader and a photographer's use and

"dependence" on photographs to "translate" his or her experience to the viewer. Seems a

workable analogy.

 

I'd probably quibble with "Stephen's body is the barrier between his mind and the outside

world" since I think his mind is part of his body and I think of his body as neither

conductive nor obstructive of his mind's relationship with the outside world. That entire

formulation seems counterintuitive in today's world. For centuries, we've been trying to

think outside Descartes's box, and I think neuroscientists and contemporary philosophers

are formulating new vocabularies to accommodate a way of thinking that

doesn't foster a mind/body/outside world distinction.

 

Barriers of understanding I will go for, so that an intermediary between Stephen's own

relationship to his sensory experiences and, even moreso, an intermediary between

Stephen's sensory experiences and another's understanding of those experiences seems

not only comprehensible but necessary and expedient.

 

I would relate this to many of the discussions that have ensued here about the "truth/s"

that photography supposedly captures/reveals/communicates. I would also relate it to

discussions of the so-called "representative" nature of photography.

 

I think it's reasonable to think of photography as an intermediary. It doesn't reveal truth

(either mine or yours or nature's) and it doesn't represent, it signifies. I guess I use

"signify" as

Blamires uses "signs and symbols." Not only are Stephen's experiences reduced to himself

through signs and symbols, they are simultaneously, if not as accurately, reduced to the

reader through the words (symbols) of his text. Photographers who try to represent or

think they are representing are one thing. Photographers who create, who can use the

signifiers, the signs and symbols, to reach me and present (not represent) the experience

to me, are the ones I want to know. Surely, as Blamires recognizes, that experience will be

something short of the original, but it will be a thing unto itself just as reading Joyce is a

thing necessarily different from experiencing Stephen's experience.

 

If a photographer considers that his medium or product is an imperfect intermediary, one

relying on SIGNS and not replicas or duplicates or copies, he may come to recognize that

what he is granting his viewer is his perspective and his creation, not truth and not reality.

What may be important to the photographer is SIGNIFICANCE and SIGNIFICATION, not

objectivity, subjectivity, or representation.

John, I hope that your junior year is better than your sophomore year was.

 

Yes, Joyce was a genius, but so were Faulkner and Vonnegut and many others--in addition to those mentioned above. Let's not forget G.B. Shaw and Thornton Wilder.

 

What bothers me most of all about this thread, however, is what has bothered others: the "no IMO" implies a degree of certitude that I have never managed to achieve, and I hope that I never do.

 

My personal view is that you made a wrong turn way back at Aristotle. It is hard to get to the very best on the path taken by the man who gave us the Golden Mean, not to mention virtue as good habits. Ironic though it might be, photography at the philosophical level might better be approached through the insights and legacies of rationalists, not empiricists such as Aristotle--in spite of the fact that images do indeed come to us through the senses, observation, i.e., empirically. What those images evoke in us is quite another matter.

 

Nothing like a bit of hubris to provoke a bit of a reaction, though, if that is what you were aiming for. . . .

 

--Lannie

I read Ulyssses several times, but the last time was about ten years ago, so I may be misremembering. But I think the use of the phrase "ineluctible modality of the visible" has little to do with vision or visibility as such. Rather, I recall it has to do with a meditation about the transformation of identity as one gains experience. At one point, Daedalus muses on the fact that his body replaces all its cells every seven years. Is that person seven years ago the same person as I am today? And he closes his eyes for a moment. Opens them again....and the visible world is still there. In other words, the changes within you don't necessarily produce changes in the world around you -- in this phase of the meditation he is an objectivist. Of course, the meditation takes places throughout the whole book, and he slips and slides on what he really believes -- as we all do, I think.

 

Of course, Bloom has a similar meditation, beginning with the flies buzzing on the door screen. This prompts an extended reminiscence of his first date with Molly, and ends with the very sad, "Me then, me now" about how far he has fallen.

 

In any case, Joyce loved photography, and loved to have his photo taken. The best photo of him, I think, is the one by Giselle Freund. He loved every mode of recording fleeting reality -- a big big fan of sound recordings, too.

One's intentional insults are his measure: "IMO."

 

I'm 63, dragging my feet before an inevitable 4th reading of Ulysses (never read Joyce before 38, was biology-oriented, had zero English lit).

 

If an English speaker goes through life without Vonnegut, Shaw, Wilder, or Faulkner, it will only suggest he made other choices. Maybe he read others, such as Melville or Zelazney or Nabokov or LeCarre', or maybe he relished Popular Mechanics or devoted himself to music or photography...

 

By contrast, someone claiming to be well-read, passing through life not having adequately recognized Joyce and Shakespeare has shallow interest in his own favorites: Those favorites were almost certainly grounded in both Joyce and Shakespeare (Shaw and Aristotle being exceptions due to premature birth :-)

 

"Aristotle" is rarely invoked as more than a talisman, Dumbo's magic feather. He's mentioned when someone wishes to speak without having heard. Virtually nobody has read Aristotle in centuries, including philosophy teachers. Victorian English translations are not Aristotle. His conversion to standard Euro-culture philosopher does not make "Aristotle" worthless, but it's instructive to notice just when and why he's invoked.

 

"IMO" can be sensible online (one's thoughts on Photoshop, for example), but insisting that another person use "IMO" because one intends to show that person disrespect, is another matter.

 

Preaching against confidence in the intellect (and humor)of our peers, advising us to ask "better" questions and not to "bother" one with obvious statements of opinion...whew...1984 redux.

David, sorry. I posted that rant before I saw your fine observations. Thanks for so directly addressing my questions.

 

You've obviously read Ulysses more perceptively than I. Like yours, my last full go was about ten years ago.

 

I've found myself identifying with Buck Mulligan in the first pages ("Come up kinch, come up you fearful jesuit"), and that's somehow quite visual. Then I've repeatedly reread the funny bits, kept reading for more. You have inspired me to take another fearful step toward #4. My reading group is of course read aloud, the genders, generations, half dozen voices and minds adding a great deal to meaning. Context.

 

How do we know Joyce liked photography?

 

His immersion in music is obvious in the text (Molly the singer, song lyrics). I carelessly overlooked that in my questions. My reading group sometimes spontaneously sings, which yes, brings that side of the brain into the game. Yes, yes, yes etc. :-)

 

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/gisele/gisele.htm I think she did better with Beckett than Joyce. I envy photographers of writers, but I've never fully bought the idea that Ansel made music :-)

Fred, I'll have to take some time with your comments. Heavy lifting.

 

Perhaps you can expand on this (on another thread...I'll start it), as I say it it without knowing quite what I mean: SIGNIFICANCE and SIGNIFICATION

How about a French one? St Exupery."you can only see with the heart,the essential is invisible".From the book Le Petit Prince,which French kids read at twelve.

John H...yes...wonderful... a lot of American kids read it too, though there can never be enough.

"Virtually nobody has read Aristotle in centuries, including philosophy teachers."

 

John, we are reading Aristotle's <i>Politics</i> in my political philosophy class this semester, just so that we can get to laugh at such profundities as, "If the women join the men in the fields, who will take care of the house?"<p><p>

 

Of course, you are right about Shakepeare and Joyce. Sorry for the ribbing I gave you for the "no IMO," but you gave us too tempting a target on that one.<p><p>

 

--Lannie

Landrum, I expected and deserved worse than I got by mentioning Joyce...he's a classic subject for puffery and posturing.

 

Your housekeeping question is food for thought. Aristotle was onto something important.

 

You're probably not reading Aristotle in your class...its somebody's translation in an academic context. Aristotle could address that...that old Greek is never here when I need him.

 

...side note: if Landrum and I are related we don't know it, and he probably wouldn't want to know it :-)