Cambridge Humanities Conference August 4th 2005
I like to relay material from a previous talk into the talk to come and so in June of this year, at Cornell University at Ithaca in New York State for the annual Bloomsday Conference, I spoke of keeping Notes for my work in progress on Joyce and Duchamp, an activity that was key to both my protagonists. But the title Reading Joyce Reading Duchamp is starting to become a slightly deceptive one since so much more is inferred by it though in no way is the title misleading. In fact the art and business of being misleading, confusing, deceiving, equivocal, ambiguous, fallacious, specious, spurious, false, mock, pseudo, illusory, delusive, evasive, caustic, and sophistical barely appeared in 20th century art, and in the hands of current celebrity practitioners like Tracy Emin and Damian Hirst law-abiding ennui has taken guile’s place where once it was rife, for instance in the (largely Italian) Machiavellian late 16th Century. But this insight or note, with which not everyone will agree, only makes itself known after Reading (something like) Joyce - Reading (something like) Duchamp.
To return to the 16th and 17th Century is to take historical steps with Duchamp and Joyce to the Mannerist phase of the High Renaissance and the public position of the “Heroic” attitude at which it sneered.
It is to look again at the ‘dark arts’ and to the arts of alchemy, and in Duchamp and Joyce to the citation of Renaissance perspective laterally conceived with that of the fourth dimension, Poincaré, Bergson and Einstein.
Ronald Schleifer, in his book Modernism and Time writes:
Many thinkers associated with 20th Century Modernism – Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bergson, Schreiner, Einstein, Freud, Bakhtin – came to see that time is not an object, something that can be described, reported and referred to in a constative utterance. They also came to see that it is not something that can be simply presented and performed. Rather, time, they discovered, must be figured and, more precisely, articulated by something other than itself. That is why philosophers as different in temperament as Wittgenstein and Bergson came to understand that the very definition of time was a problem. Donald Lowe, among many others who have tried to define post-Enlightenment Modernism and modernity in terms of time, situates this problem in the first decades of the 20th Century and describes it as the transformation of space and time from ‘the absolute framework of perception’ into ‘mere functions within a closed system’. In this understanding, representation and temporality arise in the same movement, the movement of signification – situated in the juncture between language conceived as observation and language conceived as action’. (p.70)
In an essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: From Hypertext to Vortext/Notes on Materiality & Language from his book Joycemedia: James Joyce, Hypermedia & Textual Genetics, Louis Armand writes that:
“It may be that language occurs as such in the ‘suspension’ of verifiability. Or, we might equally characterise language as proceeding from a structural dependence upon a principle of the ‘arbitrary’ which is nevertheless tied to ‘correspondence’ [-] a form of complementarity from which symbolisation emerges as an effect of what has elsewhere been called entanglement”.
“The material indifference of semio-linguistic fragments to the constraints of context reminds us that in fact there is nothing purposeful about language – that language harbours no secret design or intent; that it is not a subject replete with its own psychology or psychological agency. At the same time, to speak of language as such, as of an entity, is to distort the fact of what we might call its ‘incompleteness’. We might say, indeed, that language can only be defined against completion, if not against its possibility, and that it is this incompletion, or condition of possibility, which lends a semantic complexion to these ‘material fragments’. Without such a possibility as this, it would be impossible to claim to be able to read Finnegans Wake, or indeed to read at all”.
The Large Glass and the text that is Finnegans Wake demonstrate legibility by erasing the usual characteristics of legibility and presenting instead what Jacques Derrida called differAnce and what Duchamp called “delay”; thus legibility and observation are prior to recognizability and action that links Joyce and Duchamp to time and its deep 20th century problematic.
By underscoring the importance of time in the work of art Duchamp and Joyce laid emphasis on morphological note making and writing that affected the experience of reading and understanding by uniting form and material. They drew attention to time in the early 20th century in ways other artists did not. Unlike the strict measurement of time required for mechanics for instance (the “science of time” as it was called in this period), Duchamp’s Bride domain is characterised by “time deviations” that create a kind of “oscillating” temporality as Duchamp’s notes continually stress.
The concept of a continuum of progressive states from microscopic to macroscopic realms is essential to both Joyce and Duchamp as it was for the scientist who most profoundly influenced Duchamp’s thinking on the Glass, Henri Poincare. Such a progression implies, at some point in time, a separation in dimensions which nevertheless still communicate. Thus, the Bachelor Domain of the Glass is redeemed from isolation by supplying its fuel which undergoes transformations as a distilled essence, and at last arrives to nourish the Bride and enable her, in turn, to provide for the limited world of the Bachelors a way of transcending their prescribed orbits, clothed in liveries and uniforms of stultifying conformity. Everywhere this continuum appears buffeted by chance or, more accurately, refined by chance, so that an alternative to the dead stasis of thermodynamic equilibrium is revealed in the universal play of energy states – as well as in the mind as in Nature. As chance has its play in the mind, Poincaré brought forward a theory of human creativity in his chapter on Mathematical Discovery in his Science & Method. In this formulation, following an intensive but more or less random input of study, ideas appear to sort themselves out in what he calls the “unconscious mind”. There follows tout fait the illuminating flash of insight but this epiphany had to be paid for in the laborious working out of inspiration.
In accordance with his universal postulate of collisions producing phenomena – from random collections of dust mites (an important Duchampian motif) to the vast interstellar space of the Milky Way where flaming gases mingled following principles laid down by Clerk Maxwell – all nature, including Mind, was subject to a process in which destined outcomes proceeded in an orderly fashion from inputs randomly fed into closed systems. Similarly in the creative mind, ideas, like molecules, collided and bumped against each other. At length, the closed system of the unconscious mind sorted out the most fruitful outcome, giving rise to a new paradigm. This is the central theme of the Large Glass and it is also one of the central themes of Finnegans Wake especially as John Bishop conceives of Joyce’s achievement in his work Joyce’s Books of the Dark. Margaret Solomon in her work Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake concentrates in her final two chapters on Joyce’s diagram that appears on page 293 of Finnegans Wake. Solomon quotes from Clive Hart:
“’When Joyce has cut the circles and stretched them out flat, the other nodal point falls exactly in the centre of the fabric. Represented in this way, the basic structure of Finnegans Wake thus looks rather like a figure 8 on its side, which forms the zeroic couplet, or the symbol for infinity’. But Joyce wants to combine his ‘perfect bodies’ in one ‘stable somebody’; he distorts the figure eight so that it will enclose the two triangles which, if linked with each other, would form a Solomon’s seal, the six-pointed star representing, in ancient symbolism, infinity of space multiplied by infinity of time”. (p. 109)
“Joyce, offering us graphically and insistently his ‘geomater’, who is, after all, the eternal bride of God, emphasizes the identification of time with woman, the river, the constant flow. There is no history without sex, since history – time – is the female force. Universal space has no meaning or shape without that dimension. […] One can begin to understand the way in which Joyce was able to integrate all of his structural patterns symbolically, by superimposing the ‘E’ [of HCE or Here Comes Everybody], in its proper ‘bisecting’ position, upon the basic two-dimensional structure Dolph (Shem) has drawn for Kev (Shaun) [the two brothers and sons of HCE and ALP in Finnegans Wake]. The result is a completion of the ‘trillitter’ mentioned on p. 286.22, a unification of Everyman’s and Everywoman’s Body with the World Soul, and infinite time with infinite space.
Another reason for Joyce’s playing with geometric symbols can immediately be seen: the historical and mystical implications made possible through the reconciliation of ancient magical symbolism and modern science.
To see ‘how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd,’ we need only to start extending lines from these basic shapes in all directions. The lines of the triangles will form spokes of wheels, larger triangles, hexagons; those of the T will divide as many equilaterals as we like into right-angled Issy-triangles with mirror images; the E, up ended and moved from side to side, will form quincunxes, and squares and squares of bisectors in both proper and perverse positions; circles will compose bicycles and tricycles, mandalas, and flowers all over the place. Such an expanding method of design illustrates very effectively Joyce’s method of elaboration and decoration of the WORD and it also emphasizes Joyce’s formal means of making certain that his ordinary little family, interacting with one another, will be recognised as representative of every possible aspect of human existence”. (pp. 110-111).
Here, on p.293, Joyce’s diagram becomes an initiatory sign for the combination of letters as image, and image as letters in the manner of the Book of Kells to which he refers several times in Finnegans Wake, and Duchamp and Joyce refer to the language of alchemy, the secreted, to “hiddenness”, to the veil itself and to things concealed.
Duchamp saw a quality of “hiddenness” in the Renaissance geometer Jean Francois Niceron and also perhaps comic relief since notions of the “hilarious invention” may be discovered in Niceron’s La Perspective Curieuse, while a concern with optics and perspective is common to Duchamp, Poincaré and Leonardo (in his Notebooks). Duchamp’s focus on the geometry of vision and the mechanics governing it is inseparable from the physiology of vision, and eyesight engrossed Joyce in Finnegans Wake spurred by the chronic and excruciating eye problems he suffered much of his life and especially during the early stages of working out the Wake. Such a density of material as indicated in some of the above, presented to even the most sophisticated public, can only be appreciated and unfolded properly through patience:
“Now, Patience, and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience”. (FW.108).
A reference to the “language” of the alchemists brings up Duchamp’s fascination with language and subtle levels of meaning. Word puns, anagrams and the whole elusive verbal trickery of Cabalism are common to Duchamp, Joyce and Alfred Jarry among others. In a period where ciphers and codes are looked for everywhere (affording a wealth of humorous material to advertisers and cartoonists), Duchamp and Joyce engaged in childlike pursuits in language in order to set precedents in critical analysis.
Joyce’s and Duchamp’s investigations of words and letters to meaning and ordinary everyday objects and experience – to visual and literary art – is founded on languages’ deconstruction since the critical analysis of language is a major preoccupation of our time. If Duchamp is more than a very clever master of word play, it is essential to look at the entirety of his life’s work including the period in which he said he was just “breathing”. The readymades, for example, form a continuous commentary on the Large Glass. In fact, every note and every artefact or “precision painting” forms part and parcel of a big “closed system”. Such smaller closed systems – mechanics; entomology; electro-magnetism; eroticism; non-Euclidean geometry; verbal manipulation; symbolism; alchemy – all feature in the compendiums or encyclopaedias, as it were, of the Large Glass and Finnegans Wake. Joyce and Duchamp recycled their earlier works into later works so that the circular motion of their output might create further circuits and correspondences that reach outward to the world. From this point of view, Joyce and Duchamp are major philosophers of our time, on a level with Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, or whomever one chooses to nominate. Only their mediums are different from the strictly verbal-literary works of those I have mentioned. In his essay, Two Words for Joyce, in Poststructuralist Joyce Derrida writes:
“Finnegans Wake is a little grandson of Western culture in its circular, encyclopaedic, Ulyssean and more than Ulyssean totality. And then it is, simultaneously, much bigger than even this odyssey, it comprehends it, and this prevents it dragging it outside itself in an entirely singular adventure, from closing in on itself and on this event. The future is reserved in it. The ‘situation’ of Finnegans Wake is also, because of this, our own situation with respect to this immense text. In this war of languages, everything we can say after it looks in advance like a minute self-commentary with which this work accompanies itself. It is already comprehended by it. And yet the new marks carry off, enlarge and project elsewhere - one never knows where in advance - a programme which appeared to constrain them. This is our only chance, miniscule and completely open”.
Derrida calls Finnegans Wake “a hypermnesiac machine”:
“there in advance, decades in advance, to compute you, control you, forbid you the slightest inaugural syllable because you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 100th generation computer – Ulysses, Finnegans Wake – beside which the current technology of our computers and our micro-computerified archives and our translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys. And above all its mechanisms are of a slowness incommensurable with the quasi-infinite speed of the movements on Joyce’s cables”.
The bringing together of one’s work into a whole made up of significant parts that interact refers to time and its passage. Time is also a theme in Duchamp and Joyce. Reighard Motz in his book Time as Joyce Tell It writes:
“[As against Ezra Pound] Joyce proves himself the true poet, the voice out of the depths, proclaiming new truths, and that is, in his understanding of time. Pound shows no comprehension that for modern man time is no longer what it was for the Chinese – for the Greeks - for the Renaissance man. He is concerned that we get back into organic rhythms, into time as related to earth music, but nowhere is there any hint of the wide gap the 20th century was to open – the perhaps most explosive discovery yet to be made by man, that time has three dimensions, that it can be physically measured, that it enters as an element into the physical structure of matter and anti-matter.
Earth shaking consequences and Pound is as unaware of them as a Victorian. Joyce’s poem, Finnegans Wake, is a poem about time, time in the primacy of its new place in physics, astronomy and the life of man. No longer is time accurately described as only linear – no longer will poets and theologians be able to groan over the desolateness of its passing”.
Wittgenstein pointed to the phenomenon of our perception of the world as being constituted by language rather than language being constituted by the world of ‘reality’, which underlines and reinforces the reason why poetry and science as determined by Joyce and Duchamp in the Wake and the Glass respectively have been construed as both synonymous and “hilarious”. Joyce made hilaritas a basic ingredient in the structure of Finnegans Wake and Duchamp’s Large Glass, The Bride Stripped bare by her Bachelors, Even, as he states in his Green Box Notes, is an “hilarious picture”. “The question would be this”, writes Derrida:
“Why does laughter here traverse the whole of the experience which refers us to Finnegans Wake, thus not letting itself be reduced to any of the other modalities, apprehensions, affections, whatever their richness, their heterogeneity, their overdetermination? And what does this writing teach us of the essence of laughter if it recalls that laughter to the limits of the calculable and the incalculable, when the whole of the calculable is outplayed by a writing about which it is no longer possible to decide if it still calculates, calculates better and more, or if it transcends the very order of calculable economy, or even of an incalculable or an undecidable which would still be homogenous with the world of calculation? A certain quality of laughter would supply something like the affect (but this word itself remains to be determined) to this beyond of calculation, and of all calculable literature”.
Margaret Solomon writes that:
Nothing is static in Finnegans Wake; its constant flux can be likened, I think, to the phenomenon of expansion and contraction in molecular activity when matter changes state.
My latest work has been on Picture 1 working with the 4th dimension in Duchamp and Joyce. The old men (X) appear first on page 6 which on my work is the top right-hand corner of the picture. The old men appear to represent the 4th dimension much of the time, but also appear as the cardinal points of the compass, the four winds, and all other significant ‘4s’ like Abraham, Isaac, Isaiah, and Jacob; earth, air, fire and water. They are alluded to as “old thalassocrats of invinsible empores [invisible empires], maskers of the waterworld, facing one way to another way and this way on that way, from severalled their fourdimmansions. Where the lighning leaps from the numbulous; where coold by cawled breide lieth langwid; the bounds whereinbourne our solid [solar] bodies all attomed attaim arrest: appoint, that’s all”.
Molecules move or are diffused by thermal means. In reading on Duchamp, Raymond Roussel’s curious physics and Jules Verne are conjured up because in Impressions of Africa the medium he calls “Bex” has been likened to a kind of magical liquid which, when applied to metals, allows it to bend and change its molecular structure.
The Cell and Molecules as diagrammed in textbooks can be rendered as modern equivalents for the Book of Kells – inventing the inverted synecdoche – the whole representing the parts and the multiple standing for the one. The passage from the specific to the generic, from painting to art in general, from restricted to general modernism, is played out within Duchamp’s enterprise through complex relations between works, titles of works, notes and language. It is also language that assisted Duchamp in reversing this trend through nominalism and the creation of a pseudo-specific language conjoining the Pataphysics of Jarry, the science of imaginary solutions, “that will examine the laws governing exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one”, for instance the regions of the fourth dimension to which I have been alluding. Jarry’s Pataphysics were propounded by his character Dr Foustroll. The so-called laws of science were, according to the doctor, merely exceptions occurring more frequently than others. This sceptical iconoclasm gave rise to Duchamp’s notion of playful physics and, as William Anastasi has noted, Jarry’s work was not only admired by Joyce but might plausibly have been the source for much that Finnegans Wake epitomizes.
Descriptions of the mechanics of DNA and RNA and the seemingly impossible phenomena of quantum mechanics provide fascinating paradigms for the kinds of description and analyses of language by theoreticians and exegetes on Joyce’s Wake and Duchamp’s Glass that harbour internal conflicts in the effort to deal with time, morphology, and the activity of reading and creativity. Louis Armand finds this exemplified in Joyce’s work through Hypertext as defined by Theodore Nelson who coined the term in the 1960s, that constitutes a non-sequential writing. Armand writes that Hypertext can be:
“understood in the post Mallarméan sense of non-sequentiality, or ‘simultaneity’ as later defined by Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars. The ‘hyper’ prefix is taken here to refer, not to a meta level of textuality (a form of semantic epiphenomenon), but to an ‘inherent’ mechanism of semantic entanglement or linkage, by which any textual element could be brought into ‘communication’ with any other”. (p.80)
Armand sights one of Joyce’s sources of inspiration for Ulysses/Finnegans Wake as a means of drafting in a kind of precursor to his way of handling language in his last work:
“In the section of Gulliver’s Travels devoted to the ‘Academy of Lagado’, Jonathan Swift describes a form of parodic random text generator ‘for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations’. Swift’s machine operates on the basis of lexical (or sublexical) combination and recombination, producing random ‘propositions’ which are subsequently analysed for their philosophical content. The analysts – nominally philosophers – are reduced to the role Alan Turing envisaged for computer technicians. That is, to mere attendants.
Swift’s prototypical ‘computing’ engine operates on a basis of non-predictability as the principle, in fact, of what remains a purposive form of textual production. However, the mechanism of recombination or ‘material variability’ is not only arbitrary, it is indifferent to outcomes, no matter how purposive they may appear as ‘objectives’, implying (in more than a satirical manner) that semio-linguistic correspondence is fundamentally fortuitous – but more, that it describes something like a statistical outcome; the work of virtually infinite possibility with the (normative) constraints of finite probability. (pp.78-79)
Armand has not acknowledged that the correspondences that hold here for Swift’s “text generator” and Joyce’s Wake are also true of Duchamp’s ideas-generating machine called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, though the quotation I have just read fits Duchamp’s practice of image and language–making exactly, as it does the work of John Cage, another artist who was of course engaged and influenced by the work of Joyce and Duchamp.
The First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Dada movement in art and letters in Zurich, Switzerland, (where Einstein has first studied physics) coincided, and Zurich must have been a stimulating and exciting place for a young student then. The sociologist Lewis Feuer, has even suggested that Einstein’s theories of relativity were nurtured by the revolutionary culture of Zurich, and Lenin and many other revolutionaries had found safe havens in Switzerland because of its policy to grant political asylum. Joyce lived there between 1914 and 1919 largely because Trieste, his home, was not a safe place.
Duchamp’s radical and iconoclastic ideas predated the founding of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916. By 1913, he had abandoned traditional painting and drawing for various experimental forms, including mechanical and machine drawings, studies, and notations that would be incorporated in the major work we have been discussing, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). In 1914, Duchamp introduced his readymades which had a revolutionary impact upon many painters and sculptors. In 1915, Duchamp travelled to New York, where his circle included Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, with whom he founded the Société Anonyme in 1920, as well as Louise and Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, and other avant-garde figures. Donald Theall, in his paper Beyond the Orality/Literary Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace, writes that:
“The experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the Dadaists, the Bauhaus and the Surrealists) and of individuals (such as Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein or Luis Bunuel) generated the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and involvements. Duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture and concept, exemplified in his Large Glass and the serial publication of his accompanying notes from The Box of 1914 through The Green Box to A l’infinitif. His interest in the notes as part of the total work, [published before the Glass was ever exhibited], echo Joyce’s own interests in the publication of Work in Progress and commentaries he organized upon it (Our Examination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress). Joyce also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and concept”.
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