James Joyce

Iron, 1922

1.

“I saw the hardware store from across the street. I didn’t know you bought flat-irons by the pound.”

 

2.

The speaker will decide on two, weighing six pounds each. He is The Sound and the Fury’s Quentin Compson, and he will use his purchase to weigh down the body when he drowns himself. The date of the event, in unpunctuated lapidary uppercase, will be JUNE SECOND 1910.

 

3.

In 1910, customers would ordinarily have bought their irons in pairs as Quentin did. The appliances were made of cast iron, they resembled the fourth of these tokens from a 1935 Monopoly set,

and while one was in use the other would have been heating on the stove. But the metals were changing.

 

4.

The iron made of iron gave its metonymic name to a building erected in 1902 on a triangular lot in New York formed by the diagonal intersection of Broadway with Fifth Avenue and East 22nd Steet. In 1904, an era when photography emulated what were then called the beaux arts, Edward Steichen shaped this image.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267803

 

5.

But compare

Color and detail restored.

See this one contra-Steichen: from top to bottom, starting with the printed date. For a year in a magazine about changing social fashions, that’s a point of origin. As of 1922, for one instance, 1922 was the year when the American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a social satire named Babbitt which by 1930 would make him the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s all but forgotten now, but in 1922 its description of an evening cityscape seemed memorable. It was full of styles. But just as a matter of professional practice, Lewis didn’t build anything in 1922 that Dickens in 1852 hadn’t built with more imaginative use of material in chapter 1 of Bleak House. More, and decisively: 1922 happened to be a year when the technology of writing English entered a new stage of development. With T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, a poem and a novel did to literature what the steel skeleton had done to architecture. Babbitt was to remain in the iron age. The Waste Land and Ulysses were wired for steel.

6.

In front of a high steel tower in 1922, a low steel tower moved traffic through gridded Manhattan. Entering stage right, a man in spats and a top hat came dancing through the grid. The zigs of Archie Gunn’s cartoon architecture were now ready to be seen as a jazz.

Wordless glare

In 1918 a caption written in American expository prose employed the word twixt. The caption’s author assumed that that word twixt would mean something to his readership, just like the two-word combination Hoffman House. If it has turned out that you don’t know what Hoffman House means, he was wrong. In 1918 his words were part of a lexicon dating from 1918, but that number turned out to be impossible for computers to handle in 1918, when the word computer referred to a person. In 1918, on May 19, James Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver about Ulysses, “It is impossible to say how much of the book is really written.” But in 1918 Joyce was in the process of writing off 1918.

William Joseph Showalter, “New York — The Metropolis of Mankind.” National Geographic, vol. 3, no. 1, July 1918, pp. 1-49.

In the same magazine, another block of prose suggested ten years as a range of history during which terms like Hoffman House might remain stably conceivable. The thought must have seemed reasonable while its subject was still sharing a present tense with horse traffic.   
But now we know that it’s harder to say “It identifies” than we used to think. In 1918 a billboard atop the building at the left of the image of Madison Square identified a remedy for indiscretion, but the identification couldn’t be read in 1918’s Geographic text and in texts post-1918 it can’t be understood.

But now that it can’t be understood, it can be read.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flatiron_building_1918.jpg. Contrast and detail adjusted.

As people say, it goes without saying. Artificial intelligence has transported us up Fifth Avenue to a caption. The caption’s lexicon now comprehends the legible words laxative water on a rooftop and legible fashion on women approaching a door. In the fullness of time, the deposit of data saved on a large-format negative in 1918 has matured at last. Its worth is redeemable now. But what, now, can at last mean?

We have been enabled to read 1918, but all we can do now that 1918 is over is to see it: depictionless, without seeing that its label bears a signature. Unsigned, however, is the glare that comes forward behind the Flatiron and reverberates from the wet paving. That you can still experience as people experienced in 1918: communication in a present not bound to a knowable future. The wordless glare in the gutter isn’t a part of the caption because it isn’t captionable. All along, faithfully paralleling the caption from 1918, has been something just above it on the page: something long pre-1918. There in the unchronicled is image uncaptioned, without words to slow the light that comes flowing down the gutters of Fifth Avenue to us.

From the binary stars a whisper

The singer James Joyce, author of a short story about a man who heard distant music, shelved this concert review in Leopold Bloom’s library.

“The Dead”; Ulysses 17.1373

Observing a bewhiskered black body in morning sun, Mr. Bloom remembered nights before and thought, “They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips.” The hungry black body moved toward him, was captured by his field, and became a satellite. Two desiring bodies making a little island group, his cat and he were seen by a storyteller to be orbiting each other in harmony.

Ulysses 4.15-42

Hammered gold and gold enameling

William Butler Yeats didn’t at all enjoy getting old, and like a Silicon Valley frat boy of the twenty-first century he tried to do something about it. One of his projects was to construct, elaborate and describe a model of himself as a poem self-transmigrated from a mortal body with ink-stained living fingers to an immortal mechanism: a prosody fabricating itself to carry out the work of eternity.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium

But Yeats also had a more practical project in mind. That one wasn’t an original poem; at the time, it was current in such other texts as the lyric of Irving Berlin’s song “The Monkey Doodle-Doo.” Its key word there, however, was not gold but gland, and that G-word wasn’t a bejeweled utterance gleaming in the air but a soft, flesh-muffled sense inside the body, warmed with the blood of mortal life and comical and shameful as life is comical and shameful. The joke is on you, sings gland’s song there through a mouthful of meat. I am going to give out on you no matter what, and so you are going to die.

https://archive.org/details/78_gems-from-cocoanuts_victor-light-opera-company-irving-berlin_gbia0115400b/Gems+from+%22Cocoanuts%22+-+Victor+Light+Opera+Company.flac

In Ulysses, gland takes on the comically anti-transcendental form of a pork kidney in a Zionist butcher shop. But Yeats’s gland was delivered to him on what he conceived of as an altar, even if the altar happened to be an operating table in a zoo filled with funny animals. At the end of this note you’ll find the animal joke’s sacerdotal history, with medical illustrations.

And now, a century post-surgery, the air over the island of Oahu is filled with the descendants of escaped cage birds. This one, a Java finch, lives with her family in the shadow under my eaves. But my eaves also shelter a Photoshop workshop, and Photoshop has joined with the feather-warmed bird to bring a simulacrum of light to bear on her image.

And see: gland has become jeweled artifice, and a beak has become an artwork claiming for its rigid boniness the fleshly attribute of smiling human happiness.

—

A history of the monkey-gland operation is at uroso20-history

Teaching aid for “Ulysses”: the schooner “Rosevean”

Walking along the beach at the end of the Proteus episode, Stephen sees “Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship” (3.503-05). That night, in Eumaeus, Stephen and Bloom meet one of the threemaster’s sailors, unsilent able-bodied seaman D. B. Murphy, who tells them, “We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks” (16.450-51).

In “Ulysses” Annotated, 3.504-05, Don Gifford notes that the “Shipping News” from the Freeman’s Journal for June 16, 1904, identifies Rosevean as a schooner, adds some information about the port of Bridgwater and its brick industry, and glosses the religious sense of “crosstrees.” In Conversations with Joyce (1934), Frank Budgen elicits a more detailed gloss from Joyce himself:

I stopped at the door as I was about to leave.

“You know, Joyce,” I said, “when Stephen sees that three-masted schooner’s sails brailed up to her crosstrees.”

“Yes,” he said. “What about it?”

“Only this. I sailed on schooners of that sort once and the only word we ever used for the spars to which the sails are bent was ‘yards.’ ‘Crosstrees’ were the lighter spars fixed near the lower masthead. Their function was to give purchase to the topmost standing rigging.”

Joyce thought for a moment.

“Thank you for pointing it out,” he said. “There’s no sort of criticism I more value than that. But the word ‘crosstrees’ is essential. It comes in later on and I can’t change it. After all, a yard is also a crosstree for the onlooking landlubber.”

And crosstree does recur in the pattern in that episode where Stephen discusses Shakespeare with some Dublin scholars. “Who, put upon by his fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree.”

(“James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Casebook,” ed. Derek Attridge [Oxford University Press, 2004], p. 262)

I now add this anonymous painting of the actually two-masted Rosevean, cleaned in post-processing and with an inserted arrow pointing to the fore crosstrees. The original is in Bridgwater’s Blake Museum, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-rosevean-of-bridgwater-39761.

Further introduction

In the Constantin Brancusi archive at the Centre Pompidou, the image linked here is captioned “Erik Satie, John Quinn, Brancusi et Henri-Pierre Roché, golf de Fontainebleau” and dated September 25, 1923.

https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cLrbRob

Satie and Brancusi are the composer and the sculptor. History has decided on their behalf that they need no further introduction. Differing from each other as to hat and beard, they partake differently of their culture, but they occupy the hat-and-beard part of it in common. A century afterward, you too can know what they were doing with their hatted and bearded selves outside the image, and what that meant then and means now. There’s no need to ask permission; the request was made and granted before you were born.

But unless you’re a specialist, Quinn will need to be introduced. A lawyer who hated his work but made it useful to some modernist artists whose work he loved, he lives on in history honorably but secondarily, only as an annotation. Speaking not Quinn’s language but history’s, Quinn’s specialist footnote will say to us, “Quinn was one of the patrons who made James Joyce’s language possible.” It’s an explanation not worth trying to understand unless you already know James Joyce’s language.

And the tall man on the right? To the extent that Henri-Pierre Roché, 1879-1959, may be known outside France, he will be probably be known as the author of Jules et Jim, ostensibly a novel with a title seen at speed as a historically famous movie’s credits roll. But in its pages offscreen, Jules et Jim is less a fiction than a fairy-autobiography: an aesthetic construction about the more or less actual Roché, the more or less actual German writer Franz Hessel, and the woman they both loved.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51PMFULRrhL._SX304_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

By contrast, the words embedded in this dust jacket demonstrate that their own tale (subtitled “The Woman who Loved Jules and Jim”) isn’t a story of a more or less actual Helen Hessel (“Helen, die Frau”) but instead a story of a Helen-image projected optically onto a screen. According to that story, the words Jules und Jim printed on their paper are only indices referring statically to a picture seeming to move.

https://www.wikiwand.com/fr/Henri-Pierre_Roch%C3%A9

But of course the moving picture has a soundtrack vocabulary, and a vocabulary is a multiplex always undergoing changes of the words through which it means. Franz Hessel’s parents were Jews who converted to Lutheranism, but that change reversed itself when the time came for their son to die in a Vichy concentration camp. Conversely, you and I probably wouldn’t be reading about Henri-Pierre Roché now if François Truffaut hadn’t happened to supplement our language in consequence of picking up a copy of Jules et Jim in a second-hand bookstore (Mary Blume, “The Secret Lives of Jules and Jim,” New York Times 25 April 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/style/IHT-the-secret-lives-of-jules-and-jim.html). And history can’t do a thing about any of that beyond turning up the lights in the archive, more or less at random.

But at least Photoshop is good about sliding the dimmers. So may I ask you to move to the bright side of the room for a moment and look with me at this Photoshop-renewed picture of a sex athlete standing head and shoulders above Erik Satie and Constantin Brancusi? In the image, he is in his own moment once again, and the story about the image is that when it’s annotated with words it seems to have been, just a moment ago, moving. The sense of movement will be an optical illusion, but while it lasts its Once upon a time words reverse themselves and seem to say what they once did say. Above us, once more, towers Henri-Pierre Roché in the knickered mode of 1923, and for him and for us the illusion is a word seeming to mean Now.

Note, July 21, 2022: The golf game is discussed on page 165 of Hugh Eakin’s just published Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America (Crown, 2022).

Snapshot photography: a facility of transit connecting to Flowerville

Just before dawn on June 17, 1904, home at last at 7 Eccles Street, Leopold Bloom thinks forward in time to an ideal Ithaca. Made ampler by the rich knowledge gained on June 16, the log of his adventures will now include these further chapters.

 

Simultaneously, in James Joyce’s Trieste, a ship named for the city of Bloom is setting forth. It already exists in a state of snapshot photography. From now on, as long as English or Greek is spoken, setting forth on the tide for Flowerville will always be what happens on the Adriatic coast of time.

 

Trieste, between 1915 and 1918, https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/20480101/365953. Contrast and detail restored. Adjacent images at this site show that the ship is boarding Austrian soldiers. A peacetime image of the ship is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leopolis.jpg.