Dubliners
When at last I decided I should pick a track of academic study and follow it to its end -- start to finish, a 13-year enterprise, -- I picked Linguistics at the University of Maryland.
I wrote about that elsewhere, in a more visceral and revolting way, so I won't subject myself, or your self, to that here.
The point then, as now, is that what Linguistics offered isn't what I sought.
Actually, you know what?
Let me give you a non-repulsive excerpt of what I said about it, because rather than breaking a sweat early in the morning in mining for gems, why not draw something already cut and polished from the coffer -- or coffin, as the case may be?
And, to be honest, I'd always enjoyed language as an esthete -- I loved poetry... imagery... sound, rhythm, the sudden joy of fresh expression.
I liked the mythological and genealogical and palaeo-onto-logical aspects of languages and their relationships to each other.
It was vocation.
To me, it was like getting to know a naked woman in the dark.
But to my linguistics professors, it was post-mortem necropsy; they seem the same, but they're pretty different.
I left out the explicit, or gruesome, pictures I originally included to illustrate the point; they were each indeed worth a thousand words, and perhaps a trip or two to the toilet, depending on your constitution.
What I'm saying is, as it turns out, language and literature courses came closer to what I was looking for -- less of a scientific, or pseudo-scientific, veneer, more room for interpretive liberty and flights of poetry, and richer food for the imagination.
One class I took was on James Joyce's Ulysses. We read the whole thing.
Actually, I read it more than once.
Maybe I'd like it less now; not only do I have a healthier disgust with and suspicion of modern art in general and post-Modernism in particular, but after that class, I read a biography of Joyce (some official one whose name I don't remember), and I was astounded to see just how biographical Ulysses was (and just how unpalatable a character Joyce himself was).
What I'm saying is, as I've often thought: I don't know whether I respect Joyce's art more, or less, knowing now just how much of Ulysses is biography.
But I said I read the book more than once.
I will say this, too.
The book is rich and dense; the more you bring to it, the more you get out of it, so despite what shallow readers might say, there is definite method to the madness, plenty of rhyme and reason.
How did I make it through?
I'd read a chapter fresh, not looking for any help in understanding or interpretation. Whatever I absorbed or understood, I absorbed and understood.
Then, I'd read the Cliff's Notes summary for that chapter. This would give me a broad sense of what the chapter had been about -- it filled in a lot of gaps and brought the kaleidoscope into focus.
Then, I'd read the chapter again, this time with the experience of my first foray, and Cliff's signposts, to guide me. At the same time, I had Ulysses Annotated (I think that's the name) right there with me. What a work! Every single reference, obscure and otherwise, annotated in detail -- hundreds of pages.
So, I'd read, and every single reference I didn't get, I'd look up.
Then, I'd go to class having done that and sit back, listening to the professor give his lecture on the chapter in question.
At that point, sometimes I'd read the chapter a third time.
That's how I did it; and I'd say, it's acquiring, or developing, this sort of skill that was the real education I received, not the fluff they insisted I jam between my ears.
That's a long preamble, isn't it?
Before we even got to Ulysses, the professor had us read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, both as context for the greater work, and, as Gurdjieff might have said, "for the 'swing of thought,' that is, for establishing a corresponding rhythm" between Joyce's thinking and ours.
It was one of those many moments in my life that, as another Master I love might have said, I just had to sit back and laugh.
What I'm saying is, to me, it showed the intelligence (not mine, of course) behind the course my life had taken -- how every experience, even if inscrutable at the time, had a place and a meaning, even if that place and meaning weren't clear till much later.
I talked about my high school English teacher elsewhere (here, here).
Well, in the 12th grade, he had us read "Clay" and "The Dead" from Dubliners.
My head was so full of static at that point, I didn't, or couldn't, read them then, though I tried. I absorbed nothing -- don't let his eulogy fool you.
15 years later, there I was reading them again, finally having the experience with them he had intended his students to have.
Seeds sprout when they will.
Anyway, here's what I said about Dubliners.
Oh, yeah. There is some Grown-Up Language in that writing. I take it you are a Grown-Up?
When, in my early twenties, having already been exposed, with modest comprehension, to Joyce through a high-school English teacher's walking me through “The Dead” and “Clay,” I thought that the foregoing experience and some linguistic precociousness would give me the means to understand the whole of the book, I read Dubliners, first word to last. I understood very little, and was moved not at all.
Now I see that, more than an ear for rhythm and a taste for turns and twists of phrase, what is needed to understand is to have lived a little -- to have felt some joy and sorrow, loss, frustration; to have seen one's own automatism, helplessness to do or to change, one's rationalizations and weaknesses; to have known types of people; and to be conscious that as great a gap of ignorance between what one will understand and what one does understand exists, as between what ones does understand, and did.
I nearly cried reading "A Painful Case." Here is Mr. James Duffy, a stern, introverted, isolated, monkishly self-regulated ineffectual intellectual, living outside of town because he despises it -- the people, their seeming superficiality and frivolity, the mean modernity of it all. He has a shrine to books: he lives some sort of spiritual-intellectual fantasy, where the dedication to knowledge and his monastic ideal belie a man who, really, has cut himself off from family, friends, feeling, life itself, and who is quite miserable without fully knowing it. Deep down, all his regulation is to fend off despair and felt meaninglessness; the disgust is to cover a longing to belong.
Then, by chance, in an empty theater -- there's symbolism! -- he meets a middle-aged mother and her daughter. The mother strikes up a conversation, and Duffy is intrigued by her boldness. Duffy is self-isolated; Mrs. Sinico is isolated because her husband is a ship-captain, ever away, and she is no longer an object of desire to him. They both need someone.
Their minds begin to intertwine -- they meet by night to walk, to talk; and in time Duffy comes to visit her at home, then at her cottage outside Dublin. At first Duffy merely talks to her of intellectual things -- his ideas, his readings, even sharing these with her; she listens, encourages him. These meetings begin to soften and to enliven Duffy, giving feeling to his dry thoughts, while it seems that Mrs Sinico enjoys the earnest attention and company, enjoys someone opening up his rich inner life to her and attending to her.
The tragedy is that Duffy is so wound up in his inner life, caught up with his own voice, that, in a poignant moment where he is talking about the loneliness of being (soliloquizing at Mrs Sinico, one might say), and Mrs Sinico grabs his hand, putting it on her face in a swell of emotion, he is startled -- scared -- and pushes her away. Duffy then cuts her off.
Years pass, and Duffy's blooming blights; he returns to his rigid routine, his monastic isolation, fleeing from life and love. One day, he reads that Mrs Sinico was hit and killed by a train -- she was crossing the track unseen. It comes out that she had become erratic, depressed, and had taken to drink; drunk, wandering by night, she had been killed.
Here's the tragedy -- Duffy's first reaction is self-righteous, full of rationalization and disgust: How could she have fallen so low! "The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred." (As if her love were not sacred!) "Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous... He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman." And so on -- Jesus!
Clearly her heart had been broken, he had broken her -- and he is disgusted by her weakness and lack of discipline? And yet, the truth of it bubbles up in his own mind -- Duffy has got to get a drink, or two; he feels "ill at ease"; he begins to imagine her voice, her touch, as he walks alone the old ways the two of them once walked together. He sees people fucking on the ground in the shadows, and dimly understands the beauty and the drive behind it -- the warmth of another person, the banishment of loneliness. He wonders, "Why had he withheld life from her?" And, in the end, though his illusion has crumbled a little, Mary Sinico is dead, and again he is alone.
And all these stories are the same -- sorrow, sorrow, failure, frustration, and paralysis.
"The Two Gallants" -- how ironic! The one, Corley, is a boor -- or, better, a douchebag. A big, greasy-headed, long-winded, narcissist son of a police-inspector: he knows everyone and everything, and is glad to let you know. With him, Lenehan, squat and ruddy, a social parasite, full of tales and limericks, useless education and genteel manner, a kiss-ass, servile and fawning. He is thirty-one, still without real work, a place of his own, real friends, or a woman; balding, graying, going fat and soft. And yet, here, as if they are two young gallants of twenty, these aging losers -- I am being harsh for quick portrayal -- walking about town on a Sunday, as if on the prowl.
Corley, apparently, has been working his slightly sleazy charm and older-man's experience on a young tart who is seeing a rather well-to-do milkman: he charms her, squeezes her, goes around with her -- whether or not they have sex is not clear, but I don't think so -- but, mainly, leeching off of her -- getting money from her, cigars, and other fine things. Neither he nor Lenehan have much money, both being un-, or barely-, employed. The lead up to the whole night's affair is Corley telling Lenehan that he's going to get something from the young woman, with Lenehan, dog-like, fawning over him, hoping for some vicarious or derivative enjoyment therefrom.
When Corley finally goes off with the young woman, promising to meet up again with Lenehan in a few hours, suddenly Lenehan, left alone after having made a furtive and jealous inspection of the woman, drops his mask, and is now the tired, aging man he truly is -- bitter and insensible of the gaiety around him, unable to muster the boldness to go after the women who pay attention to him -- walking aimlessly the whole while, unable to give himself direction in the absence of his friend.
The end is unimportant -- Corley comes back, having extracted a gold coin from the young woman, for the two gallants to spend on whatever they spend it on -- but the whole scene is important: the vision of these two sad, shiftless losers playing at life and going slowly nowhere.
07 April 2022
