Paper for Budapest: A Report for 2006 on Work in Progress.

Below is a draft of the paper I gave on the 15th June 2006 at the XXth International James Joyce Symposium. Included in the presentation were several visual works of mine in progress and images of Duchamp's Glass and Dust Breeding. Perhaps it's merely coincidental that simultaneous  with the reading of papers by Christa Maria Lerm-Hayes, Iris Bruderer-Oswald, Marianne Gula and myself on Word and Image Unions, Art and Language in room 0.817, were the sessions populated by such 'big guns' as Kim Devlin, Christine Smedley, Margot Norris, Fritz Senn and John Bishop in room 0.803. If we are a world that waxes and wanes as a whole (as Wittgenstein suggested) then we are, as Joyce and Duchamp both seem to continually suggest, within a world on its decline in the Arts at this time: the coagulation of image and text through respect and knowledge of the History of Art and the History of Literature is constantly and consistently being ignored, displaced, not understood and something to completely disregard. In Joyce it's not enough to 'read' him: one is invited to an imaginative feast. Duchamp is misrepresented so much in terms of his 'readymades': his writings and notes underline how literary a figure he actually was.

The accumulation of poetic/visual aporias linked with time and the 'instant' present in Joyce and Duchamp's oeuvres inevitably lead one to a crisis when commenting visually or attempting to illustrate them. The ideas both artists wryly exploit in prompting invisible exegetes to poetise in lieu of themselves can be described, as Lucia Boldrini describes it about Finnegans Wake, as a “[…] poetics 'in progress', a poetics, that is, continually worked out as the texts are written, subject to permanent revision and which implies that no work stands on its own in the writer's oeuvre”. (1)

Aporias orchestrated deliberately in Joyce and in Duchamp often take solid form in peripheralities and irrelevances. One of Joyce's 'apostles', Stuart Gilbert, in his diary for instance, reveals the obverse to his earlier position of the support he expressed in his Prolegomena to Work in Progress in Our Exagmination. He writes of Joyce's strategy of accumulating portmanteau'd punnings of town names in a chapter of the Wake like this:

"The system seems bad for there is little hope of the reader knowing all these names - most seem new even to Joyce himself, and certainly are to me. And supposing the reader, knowing the fragment dealt with towns, took the trouble to look up the Encyclopedia, would he hit on the 30 Joyce has selected. The insertion of these puns is bound to lead the reader away from the basic text; to create divagations and the work is hard enough anyhow! ... What he is doing is too easy to do and too hard to understand" (Gilbert 1993, 21)”. (2)

But of course the texture of the Wake changes its density according to details of knowledge like this of Gilbert's that add to the idea of “accumulative poetics in progress”. The assimilation of fragile detail and the nature of trials assessed through the aegis of commentary aware of Joyce and Duchamp's contemporaneous interest in art and time, can be equated with Plato's description of time and the 'instant': as that which lies between the separate 'nows' and as being of a strange nature, the Greek word for which is atopos - literally, “without a place”. In Joyce and Duchamp we find Aporias inserted inside language and image as inferences of atopos: they present faceted surfaces of the pictorial and the literary perhaps best described as a beckoning toward infinite exegesis on infinite perceptions. Reighard Motz in Time as Joyce Tells It, notes that time was Joyce's friend:

“Joyce was a classicist and believed in patience as a primary virtue. He had within him something of the same stubborn waiting that nature herself has. He is sure of the future and he is going to give it time to arrive”. (3)

To remain indifferent while one's audience finds unreadable such innovative, original and idiosyncratic 'instants' of aporia is to give oneself up to the consequences of time or its unfolding pleats that impress themselves upon observers as links understood, as Deleuze puts it, in the manner of a crease, or the folding and unfolding of time and space that Joyce and Duchamp succinctly located in the 4th Dimension.

Duchamp's Dust Breeding, an ostensible accumulation of time on the Bachelor Domain of the Glass layed out horizontally, is a Dadaistic homage par-excellence to earlier art, visual density, and the histories of Renaissance perspective and Cubist shallow depth poetizing the 'instant' in “no time at all”. Neither mere pun on Braque and Picasso's aesthetic, nor an undemanding jibe at Apollinaire, or a dig at Gleizes and Metzinger's Du Cubism, Duchamp's alternative materials in the Glass and elsewhere shifts his emphasis to language; sometimes poetic but more usually causal, referring to the textures of the optical and to those alternative linguistic possibilities he intended for critical extemporisations to come, openly vacant for everyone in the notes he created to accompany the Glass. Man Ray's hour-long-exposure capturing Duchamp's dust-layers provides a metaphor for the 'instant' on the photographic paper of crystals and grains of silver bromide and silver chloride suspended in viscous or jellied colloidal media-like-language on film or paper that Duchamp installed into his writing as a serio-comic matrix: always and happily at the mercy of time. Duchamp and Joyce instead of acquiescent to the law of the fall of a body toward a centre, say an AdamsApple, appositely studied pataphysical laws of antimatter and the moving of voids toward temporal peripheries, the transcendence of point-positions in space.

Or as Joyce puts the case for the expanding cosmos:

“Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied together, the merest and transparent washingstones to make Languid Lola's lingery longer? (FW.434.21-23).

Reading the surface plane of the art object has been the dominant focus of much art criticism during the past 100 years, yet in the hands of literary-minded art historians we find linguistic analyses and exegeses on artistic intent and the spectator's approach most consummately developed in discussions of artworks created during the Renaissance or shortly after it. Alluring then that Joyce and Duchamp found their respective niches just as closely aligned to Renaissance ideas as to technological and scientific as well as artistic interests of their own day. Leonardo da Vinci became one serious model for Duchamp as Giordano Bruno did for Joyce. The relation between the historical and transcendental in Duchamp's Glass resembles the paradox of what Duchamp called the “short-circuit” and the “vicious circle” of creativity: Aporias relating concomitantly to a history of art while immeasurably complicating conclusions. On the surface plane of Finnegans Wake the actual space of its letters and words are activated for us, and them by us: in seeing its letters responding to our deliberation we use its embossed writing and space elastically, not taking it for granted: variability and flexibility being encouraged.

If, as Lawrence Steefel writes, the Glass is Duchamp's Time Machine, then it becomes so on changing plateaus including “the purely imaginative act which transcends the aesthetic object itself” (as Steefel puts it), and also because of Duchamp's texts and his photographs that stress the self as a: “'magnetizer' [...] pointing towards an activity of pure creativity which does not need constructed form but only the application of the esemplastic imagination to the world at large”.(4) Duchamp's self-monitoring or autobiographical inventions are a backward and forward movement from image to writing and what Steefel refers to as “The radiant myth of Marcel”: a self-inventiveness uniting with a disdain for the readily understood by refusing stylistically to repeat himself. Reflections on hermeticism and androgyny in the Glass lead to metonymy that also distinguishes the unitary from the multitudinous in Joyce's deliberate obfuscation of critical and crucially apt puns on Bruno and the common crowd as “No man” and “Nolan” noted by Jean-Michel Rabaté in his Joyce upon the Void:
“No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude...”. [...] the deliberate trick performed by the internal rhyme (no man/Nolan) testifies to the hidden ambiguities of Joyce's rejection of the Irish crowd. While bringing Bruno's covert authority to bear on a precise diagnosis of the Irish paralysis, the reference must remain anonymous, or rather, the inevitable mistake over the name, which everyone is likely to take for a common Irish name, will give more credit to the artist's aloofness”.

The pentimento that has arisen from theoretical exegetical enquiries into the Glass, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, also indicates the presence of 'glazing' in both its senses: the sedimented layerings of thought and act in drawn writings, and transparent surfaces of musicality and poetic ornament which can be powerfully grafted to Deleuze's 'machinic' of the cinema; the 'machinic' offering a proliferation of further connections between Joyce and Duchamp via natural, technical, and time-space geometries. Discounting the world behind the Glass, its iconographical oddities superficially create speculative geometric male and female domains unlike Joyce's claustrophobic scumblings that define the Wake; yet thematically, metonymies of the male and female body draw Joyce and Duchamp together as do the Aporias of Heidegger and Derrida and their notions of différAnce. The absent or non-present background noises in Joyce and Duchamp's work are an essential call to literature after Mallarmé and also before Blanchot: the Blanchot who in his essay on Beckett suggested that the artist is sacrificed to art in an act of vitalist transcendence in becoming a nobody, by suspending judgement and eschewing all known and conventional artistic “duties”. Joyce and Duchamp's arcane murmurings or voices-under animate an otherwise uniform world giving us to think the force of time and the complexity of the real in detail.

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