A bit more on Modernism

One observation that I ruminated over several times whilst plodding my way through Ulysses is that the Modernist idea has had a heck of a lot more success in visual art than in literature. The supreme importance of novelty and the creative power of the observer over the work of art itself seemed to utterly win the field in the visual arts, while in literature they were nothing more than a fad lasting perhaps 30 or 40 years. Not that there aren't new and different styles, occasionally, in literature, but they are never radical departures, and their newness per se is not counted as a major point in their favor.

I developed a bit of a theory about this, which in part takes what I'm here calling Modernism seriously and partly treats it as a hoodwinking of a class of willing dupes. I don't think I have to commit to either interpretation to say that people are clearly more willing to subject themselves to art that they don't enjoy but wish to praise if the experience is short rather than long. Even a long viewing of a piece of visual art (excluding films) is unlikely to go beyond, say, half an hour. And that half hour would certainly not be a period of continual attention to the piece. A book, though, even a novella, is likely to take several hours. A "difficult" book, a Modernist experiment, is likely to take much, much longer. So I think it's much more difficult to fool ourselves about Modernist literature. One can very easily look briefly at all sorts of visual garbage and believe each piece is inspiring deep thoughts. Or, to put a friendlier light on it, it is easy to "look away," literally or not, from a visual artwork, and form an intriguing web of personal associations. The same is not true of a book.

It is mechanically, physically awkward to stop and linger over every word or every sentence.
It can also be exhausting, and that is the core issue with something like Ulysses, in which, for a man of my age and weight, so many of the references are almost meaningless. To try to get out of this work what appears to have gone into it is hopelessly wearying.

And Ulysses brings up another good point. It is relatively easy for a visual artwork to be a unitary object, because it is delimited in space. Even if it fails to meet any traditional standards of symmetry, it clearly has a physical boundary. Even if it is a pastiche of seemingly unrelated parts, they ultimately all fit into a whole. But for a novel to attack structure and symmetry is a different matter. Over the course of the maybe two dozen hours I spent reading Ulysses, I confronted a discontinuous patchwork which never satisfyingly added up to anything. That in theory it might, that parsing it for several months or years would show the thematic resonances etc., is no recompense for this unhappy experience.

One more point I wanted to make along these lines: It's interesting to think of music as an intermediary point between literature and visual art in terms of the success of Modernist efforts. Unlike Modernist literature, Modernist music is still appreciated with pleasure outside the academy, though not by many. The experience of a piece of music generally takes longer than one with a piece of visual art, but not nearly as long as one with literature. It is easier to "skim" music than literature - nonsense music just drifts away into the ether at its own pace, while nonsense words can quickly become a discouraging morrass.

Another way to look at these things is economically. A work of visual art is generally experienced as one of many at a gallery or a museum. The viewer does not expect any one work to be "worth the price of admission." A piece of music is also generally not presented alone, but the dozen or fewer pieces in a concert are often less than the number of works one would see in a gallery or museum. The pieces are expected to "pay off" a bit more - hence the tendency to pad Modernist music with more familiar and readily likeable fare. Finally, a novel has to stand on its own and has to be entirely worth its cover value. If the reader is disappointed, he can avoid Modernist novels altogether by not buying them.

I note the similarity of the time and cost arguments. Just as devoting less money to any one piece of art makes the appreciator more willing to be disappointed, devoting less time to any one piece of art has the same effect.

The greatest novel ever!

Not!
That would be, I suppose, the perfect example of the kind of apparently unsophisticated reaction I've heard complained of lately by those who say the book reviews that appear online should at best be called "book reviews" - in quotes - particularly in the current case, when I am referring to that holy of holies, Ulysses.

The offended ones say that the reactions we read online have none of the quality or significance of those we might read in the more admired journals of opinion because they don't emerge from deep knowledge of literature. There are too many things wrong with this argument for me to keep from vomiting a little, but what most deeply concerns me is that it rules out the possibility that the judgment of the cogniscenti is completely wrong. To examine the sources or even to question the ethical bona fides of Ulysses is perfectly acceptible, but to dislike it is, depending on who you ask, infantile or irrelevant.

I refuse, based on the combination of my self-respect and my sheepskins, to consider my reaction to any work of art infantile. As to whether liking or not liking a work of art is relevant or not to the discussion, time has been and will continue to be unkind to art that is highly respected by society in general but unpleasant in actual personal experience. But I don't want to get deep into this argument at the moment. I'll just deliver my infantile, irrelevant take on Ulysses.

The connection to the Odyssey is so loose as to be completely impossible of correct interpretation without Joyce's key. Therefore it fails to be a meaningful element of this work. I think descriptions of the book that say it is "based on the Odyssey" or that it parallels that work were written by people who have not read one or the other or both.

The parade of 18 different narrative styles comes off as artificial and juvenile. Rather unsurprisingly, the newness of new forms has in itself no zest 80 years later. Some of the forms, particularly that of the second-to-last section, are antithetical to pleasant reading and seem like nothing less than an insult to the reader, a joke at his expense. Who is the reader out there that gets any kind of pleasure from reading a page of legal boilerplate simply becuase it was perhaps oh so tres moderne 80 years ago to think of putting that in a novel?

Joyce is the only ideal reader for this work. I think it is reasonable to write a literary work completely accessible only to those of great learning. But that's not what Joyce did. He wrote a work completely accessible only to someone of his exact, peculiar learning. Simply everything Joyce knows or has looked up. This creates a work that no one can enjoy as much as Joyce, and in that I think it's a failure. It reminds me of Pound's Cantos. Once you learn all the allusions and such, the Cantos do something kind of neat, but to feel those allusions in anything like their real significance you have to read all the books Pound read - which is not some perfect compendium of world literature, but his own, peculiar, eccentric selection from it. With only one life to live, I can't dedicate my reading to reproducing Pounds' just so I can take as much pleasure from the Cantos as he did. The same goes for Joyce.

I barely skimmed the 600-page Notes for Joyce as I was reading Ulysses, because I found that simply knowing the bare facts of any one reference didn't make the reading come to life or become more meaningful. Perhaps reading all the original sources Joyce read would do this. But frankly, I was not inspired to care. Ultimately, going to a reference to understand the references is the same as having someone explain a joke (particularly in the cases where Joyce is being "humorous," but really in every case where I'm supposed to be struck with any kind of emotion or resonance by a reference I don't know).

Along the same lines, I found nothing the slightest bit funny in Ulysses, and I love to laugh. I loooooooooooooove to laugh. I'm ready to laugh. I get humor. And Ulysses is not funny. I suppose I could tell at times that things were supposed to be funny, sometimes in a just plain sad punning way, sometimes in a Shakespearian kind of way, sometimes in a satirical way. But it wasn't, any more than puns, Shakespeare or satire is funny. People who genuinely think these things are funny have no sense of humor. But I think most people who say Ulysses is funny are just ridiculous people who are full of themselves. I've heard the math majors laugh at math jokes. I know all about this kind of insider "humor." It is, pure and simple, a celebration of the fact that you know something other people don't and you're therefore better than them. I like to compare people calling this funny to people laughing out loud at musical "jokes" like the Surprise Symphony. Now come on. Be serious. That shit is not funny. And if it's witty, I apparently do not like wit.

Were there a couple of moments I genuinely enjoyed? Sure. I won't go so far as to say it was a total wash. But if I hadn't felt obligated by society (Society!) to read the fucking thing, I would have a abandoned ship a hundred times.

I would call this a work of almost purely historical interest. I would not recommend it to anyone. But such a recommendation would have been meaningless to me, and all others who feel similarly obligated, so take it for what you will.