why?

The third way.

Why Joyce Today? And why in this way?

 Joyce’s question is, in our opinion, still ours, unchanged: how to save oneself at the same time from the past and from the present, loving them both. Impatient in both. 

In artistic production, this has immediate consequences, a crucial identity problem.

To decline the pattern of this impasse: discomfort in the choice between ‘tradition’ or ‘last cry’; dominant or marginal culture; out or within the walls (of the city, region, nation, continent…) – also linguistically speaking; historical responsibility or refusing to share a story of defeat, if not slavery. Becoming apparatčik or oppressed; remaining marginalised or getting integrated into a ‘system’; staying victim or exploiting; and brutally said, feeling ‘old’ or ‘trendy’, derided or ‘sold’. Eternal student or arbiter elegantiarum.

In Joycean terms: English or Gaelic; Catholic (Mother) or destructured (Father).

Loving both worlds; fractious in both.

Love for the Past produces a Taste; the rejection of the present often follows.

Love for the Present responds to a sacrosant need for vitalism, but it too is destined for unhappiness (‘La dolce vita’); shipwrecks (Leopardi). ‘Sweets’ both, though.¹

Both are experiences of ‘unhappy consciousness’, of unattainability. 

It’s not a question of ‘Value’ – the presence of value is properly the reason for unhappiness.

The value of the past is self-evident (in Joyce the Jesuits and Thomas Aquinas – for the structures; Shakespeare and co.).

The value of the present is existential, and it cannot be eliminated ‘by statute’ – Bloom: the body, Dedalus, the spirit.

To use two examples: journalism for the sense of reality, philology for gravitas.

In parentheses – an answer still highly investigated in Italy today is the one of Pasolini: getting out of the present (‘cultural genocide’ and ‘homologation’ – concerning Italy in the 60’s) and the past (from a marxist point of view), looking for vitality, attribute of the present, in a preterite ‘third’ time – or third world; a social, ancient, previous ‘elsewhere’ (Rimbaud). Also destined to despair.

Those who move away from the contemporary, do so out of dis-taste (disgust). And find acceptance – or refuge – in the forms of minor identity: teaching – a compendium of love for the past and for the future, at the cost of the Blue Angel. Or isolation, a place of negative freedom, at the price of misanthropy – if not vice or ridicule.

In contemporary ‘pop’ terms, so unbearably intimate now: the artist as a ‘mutant’ or a ‘clone’. Futility of the second, suffering of the first. In a Bloomesque slogan:” The way is Away” (Agendath Netaim).

So, the only solution left is the one followed, best of all, by James Joyce. The New Jerusalem, a New Dublin rebuilt on the continent. The home of the individual is exile. ‘Patriotism’, ‘Motherland’: a place for fathers and mothers; not for sons.

Joyce’s gesture

Between Ireland and England, the two ‘wandering rocks’, Joyce flees, as the Cain he has been at times, to the East of his Eden; and how Dante’s Ulysses, he goes beyond his personal Pillars of Hercules; the new Ulysses will become the Author of himself at the end of the book, as the Narrator in Proust. June 16, 1904, is a day of departure, the day when incipit Vita Nova ². And starts the Metempsychosis.

The object

The artist, verification, continuation of man, is the one who creates. And to create, genetically speaking, means to forge a new DNA, a new mathematics. So each work has to create its language – that’s why Mollysday is like this.

The tension, the electricity between myth and everyday life is the theme of Ulysses, not surprisingly; only in creation (the artefact is a Code, not an object) is the individual born.

Between the nightmare of history and the nightmare of ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’, the only path left is the future (not like a Futurism, however, whose a priori removes value from the past – unloading one of the two poles).

Actually – and in our opinion this is decisive – this should only happen out of a necessity, and imposed by taste. Knowledge, practice, history. With an a posteriori process; the music is composed ‘on the piano’ (Stravinsky vs Schönberg), not by assumptions – ambiguity of the avant-garde. Only taste, continuity, generates living organisms (Episode 14 of Ulysses³).

A new piece of art is clearly the only way out. It must, nevertheless, be distinguished from the ‘novelty’, the main characteristic of the contemporary, of advertising, of consumer publishing. Pro-creation vs re-creation.

The novelty is the updating of the item, not the new operative system – to say it in computer terms.

The new-made cannot be a replica, an ‘update’ of the old – Rudy, though so yearningly loved, will not bring his grandfather Rudolph back to life.

On the other hand, Stephen’s non serviam⁴ is only a negative part, destruens (the ‘chandelier’).

Returning to Ulysses, with the counterpoint of the continuous recapitulations (Episodes 10, 15, 18 – a sort of Eternal return, or Reincarnation), between integration and censure, between Scylla and Charybdis, Mulligan and Haines, Conmee and the Viceroy, Bronze and Gold, Stephen and Mulligan (Bloom who sneaks), Carr and Compton… Joyce’s gesture is every time the same of Ulysses’s, who crosses the strait and like an Elijah, an Icarus, takes flight away. 

Molly

Molly, the Semitic-Phoenician nymph, guardian of the Pillars of Hercules/Gibraltar, of divine ancestry (Lunita/Periboea⁵, mysterious lunar divinity, who slept with Major Tweedy/Icarius) is the only character without nostalgia.

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(1) Giacomo Leopardi. The Infinite. Fellini. La dolce vita.

(2) Dante, Vita nova. In Latin: ‘Here begins the new life’ – the day he first met Beatrice.

(3) Stephen talks in ‘Portrait’ of “artistic gestation” (and conception and reproduction).

(4) Stephen Dedalus refuses ‘to serve’. His fundamental reason? Not for Pride. For Fear (“Come up, you fearful jesuit!” – first page of Ulysses). “I fear […] the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol” he confesses in one of the last pages of Portrait. Fear is an a posteriori, not some a priori ‘make it new’. Once again, we think this is the key of Joyce psychology: actions, facts, no matter if great or little – romanticism? marxism? – affect, if not build, your ‘core’.

And about some hypothetical role of psychology, let us remember that “Aristotle’s entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology” – as Dedalus says, always in Portrait‘s last chapter.

(5) Periboea, Penelope’s mother – wife of the spartan Icarius, a Naiad, a nymph – ‘my mother whoever she was‘ – in Molly’s monologue. The photo of the nymph above her bed, her firtree cove memory… Periboea name means: ‘surrounded – ‘peri’ – by cattle’. vtr  in Molly’s last page: ‘all the fine cattle going about’; but maybe also Bous Stephanoumenos; and all that foot and mouth desease perhaps gains a litte more importance too, for such sacred cows/Oxen of the Sun.

Her name, Lunita Laredo: Lunita (“Little Moon” in Spanish) – vtr “The young May moon she’s beaming love” – Laredo: a Cantabrian town and three notes (La-re-do, A-D-C).