James Joyce: A Portrait of the Autist as a Young Antifa
Ulysses predicted our insanity. Here's how, in 80 short statements.
I maintain that James Joyce’s Ulysses is a guidebook for tolerance in the modern and hypermodern era.
I maintain that Joyce’s Ulysses is a mental journey and interior battle against religio-political authoritarianism which, unchecked, the author knew, would result in ethnic-genocidal fascism.
I believe that Joyce wrote Ulysses to try and save the world.
I believe that Joyce felt he needed to write Ulysses in code, in stacked mythical form, for fear that naming the beast would birth it.
I believe our world is fractious and fractured because Ulysses is a journey that few travelers have taken from first page to last.
What follows is a little of what I’ve considered about Ulysses. I’ve tried a lot of other ways. But there’s no time. The fascists are here: the hypocrite fraudulent gaslighters threaten what little is left of American democracy. Russia is about to invade Ukraine. It is time to be succinct and direct and as immediate as possible.
Ulysses was built upon The Odyssey’s foundations. The Odyssey tells the story of a man who was too-clever by half – devising a means of victory which undermined the law of war, and literally opened the gates for atrocities.
For his audacity, he was punished by the gods: a decade-long journey to return home, a sole survivor of multiple calamities.
One tradition holds that ‘Homer’ is the collective anonymous name for prisoners of war; another asserts that ‘Homer,’ born on the island of Chios, was taken hostage (homeros) by the Lydians as they evacuated the city of Smyrna (now Izmir), as the Aeolians retook it. The Lydian soldiers blinded him. That’s how Homer came to be blind, in one tradition.
If Homer was a hostage, a POW, mutilated by his captors, that makes The Odyssey, more than anything else, an interior voyage homeward: a mental journey of a soldier’s PTSD.
More precisely: viewing in this way, we can recognize The Odyssey’s monsters as psychological, projective otherings of unacknowledged, hidden, unaddressed traumas: the other demons the soldier must battle, before one can come home again.
Joyce clearly understood this: he wrote the book during the Great War, fleeing from it. He knew it as surely as we must understand this now, with Vietnam repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, with 22 U.S. veteran suicides a day, with our daily mass murders, and over 900,000 dead from COVID. (At the original time of writing this, it was 500,000.)
Scylla and Charybdis, for example: the cliff-monster and the whirlpool: wrath and frenzy, or gyre and plummet: 2,500 years later, diminutized into the DSM-V as BPD. To navigate a careful path between them, in the Strait of Messina, as the historical geography holds.
This sounds simple, basic: grade-school diagramming. But we too are simple and basic; we have all now lived with the Cyclops. You saw him on TV – you couldn’t miss him – a giant of monocular vision, with his many, many voices: that Polyphemus. You saw that citizen Cain mock the more Abel and the less able; you observed how he devoured those under his thumb.
Joyce prophesied Trump among the Cyclops’ party: namechecked among the anti-Semitic nationalists in Joyce’s “Cyclops” episode. There he is, the fictional great-grandfather, in a list of puffed-up teardowns of European ‘dignitaries’ claiming to be ‘Friends of the Emerald Isle’:
“Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marla Virlaga Kisászony Putrapesthi, Hiram. Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi, Señor Hidalgo Caballero Dos Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps…”
The litany of names collapses toward its close in an avalanching satire of Germanic compound words: devolving linguistically into an intimation: “Herr Hurrhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli, Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumordinaryprivatdocentgeneralhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein.”
Yes, Joyce perceived Nazism coming, from more than a quarter-century prior.
The names are multilingual puns – a trick that Joyce plucked out from this use, and used for the entirety of Finnegans Wake.
“Mynheer Trik van Trumps.” Joyce is a fractalist. Let’s microscope in on “Mynheer.” In German, it sounds like “Mein hier,” or “Mine here.” “Myn” spelled like this actually means “mine” – in Afrikaans, which was spoken as a White-Indigenous colonial creole in Namibia as well as in South Africa. The German genocide of the Herero, in Namibia, began in 1904, the year in which Ulysses takes place. (The Herero had their own language.) “Heer” means “army” in German; and “lord” in Dutch; which segues into “Trik,” which is indeed how “trick” is transliterated in Indonesia, where the Dutch had built a racial class system.
The name plummets into an abyss of meanings, all circling around one big idea of land-seizure: “Mine. Here.” Of violence: “Mine Here.” My army, my lord. Through force or by law: I’m taking this.
In a single name, a history of white supremacist colonialism migrating from the German, to the Dutch, to the English language: an absolute look in the Cyclops’ eye. Tolkein’s Eye of Sauron bellowed, “I see you!” This is Joyce, increasingly one-eyed, looking eye-to-eye with the Cyclops of proto-fascism and replying:
I see you too.
Joyce was writing the Cyclops chapter in 1919 as post-war Germany was collapsing into civil war, as defeated German nationalists first printed their “Blood and Soil” propaganda to terrify the German volk with “rivers of blood” to flush out the Bolsheviks who wanted to internationalize the Revolution of 1917. Vico’s cycles of history; the gyres spinning faster. The effects of multiple post-war traumas were already occurring: the devolution of defeated nationalist fanaticism into delusions of ethnic purity and genocide.
Joyce prophesied where all this was heading: from 1919, when he wrote the chapter, to 1933, to 2016. Consciously or not. Bizarre twist of history. Uncanny imagining. Maybe Putin put in a word for some exegesis after a revival of Travesties. Now we have a criminal, a fraud, a traitor, and a mass murderer, his family named Trumps, goading fascist mobs against the democratically elected government of the United States of America.
We’re doing the same things, circling right down that spiral, because we continue to miss the underlying truths of The Odyssey, no matter how many times we rewrite it: victory achieved through deception has costs. Injustices deliver blowbacks. From the petty concerns of leaders’ beefs, successive traumas cascade outward: shearing the mental fabrics of ‘just war,’ of ‘honor,’ of ‘sacrifice,’ of ‘masculinity,’ of ‘pride’: you know, that basic type of hybrid semantic / epistemological / existential crisis all the fashionable people are talking about these days.
Twenty-two veteran suicides a day.
Murder-suicides, too.
And the other daily mass-murders.
Violence against self, family, or others or “the Other” is the result of unmitigated untransformed trauma: trauma that the state (which, in this country, is supposed to mean We, the People collectively) is responsible for inflicting: the insanities that provoke us to war, the insanities that force us to win, and the insanities that result from winning, leading to hubris and calamity. Cycles and gyres, cycles and gyres, with Yeats as well: the Irish Modernists could see a thing, with one eye or two.
Two eyes, then one. Here was Joyce’s epiphany: embedded within the Odyssey is an earlier tale, before the Mycenaean, back to the Minoan: the myth of Minos, and Pasiphaë, and Daedalus and Icarus, of the Minotaur and Theseus and Ariadne.
In the time of the gods, Poseidon watched three youths playing on a Cretan beach. He caused a magnificent white bull to arrive out of the foam, which knelt in front of one of the youths, named Minos, and spoke from the waves:
I send you this white bull as a sign that you shall become King of Crete: on one condition: after your coronation you must sacrifice this white bull in the name of Poseidon, who has given you this great power.’
And so it came to pass that Minos did become King of all Crete. But he did not sacrifice the white bull from Poseidon. It was precious to him. He commanded that another bull be sacrificed in its place.
If Eve tasting the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the Original Sin of Monotheistic Creation, then Minos’ deceit is the Original Sin of European Civilization. The counterfeit. Bullshit. Obvious, stupid bullshit.
The Sea-God Poseidon was irritated by this loan unrepaid by the T&Cs, and sent an irritant in return. A gadfly, in the proper classical terms, flicked over to Minos’s wife, Queen Pasiphaë. But what that really means is:
An insatiable bestiality kink. Queen Pasiphaë started lusting for that same white bull to fuck her.
You want it to stop there. But we have to penetrate further: into the symbolic, where action and cosmic Meaning are intertwined.
The white bull: divine bestiality: this story of caucasian Will-to-Power: a mythical (self-told)-justification for cruelty, an excusal for the violence of dominance. Myn heer.
The symbol of whiteness. As Melville would reflect upon, millennia later. Spotless. Blameless. Blank. A horror. The white bull, a symbol of so-called moral right.
It was not a gift from the gods. It was a contract. A limited contract. After you have risen to king, you, Minos, must sacrifice the white bull back to Poseidon.
Minos breaks the divine contract. He bites the fruit. He upsets the table. He tries to gaslight the Sea God. Minos seizes the symbol, while erasing the substance in that symbol.
Nemesis enjoys her attempt to balance the scales. The need to possess, be possessed by the pure beast overtakes his wife. The curse is visited not upon the man directly but on wife, and child, and Civilization.
It’s certainly a cock-up: the whole beastly affair.
Pasiphaë employs Daedalus, the King’s architect and mechanical genius, to design for her a hollow mechanical cow to crouch inside, so the bull can fuck her.
Let’s abstract this moment of crisis. If this were the Bible, we’d say: “In the Beginning, there was the God, the Beast, and the Machine.” A god set an agreement with man to be king with a sacrifice of the divine beast. To be king, you must sacrifice the beast to the god. Minos bullshitted Poseidon, so Poseidon tipped the balance of the contract. Daedalus created a machine with the form of a beast to contain a human. The structural foundations of the Trojan Horse are here: an archetype of cascading disobediences.
Pasiphaë gives birth to the Minotaur, a hybrid with a bull’s head and a man’s body and an appetite for human flesh. Daedalus is commanded to build a Labyrinth to contain the monster. Now the Beast is in the Machine below the Palace. Under the floorboards, raging in the subconscious, at the beginnings of European civilization.
They say that later, one of Minos’ sons, Androgeos – ‘man-of-the-land’ – “salt o’th’earth” – was murdered by an Athenian.
King Minos, in vengeance, extracted a tribute: a sacrifice: every 9 years, seven Athenian youths and seven Athenian maidens would be thrown into the Labyrinth, to be devoured by the Minotaur.
Let us pause here, as we register the shock they must have felt, that first crop of Athenian youths: this great Cretan myth has arc’d all the way from the ancient, to the Modernist era, to our own. You’ll recognize this ritualized performance of child sacrifice in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. You’ll recognize the name Pasiphaë from Monica Bellucci’s role in The Matrix: Reloaded.
The Wachowskis identified what we now see in the Cretan myth: the beginning of Cause and Effect. In both ancient Crete and in the Matrix, Pasiphaë kinks the rational into a chaos of consequences.
In the Wachowskis’ redemption arc, Pasiphaë tips the balance back toward the center, back to the human, from the monstrous Machine-God: in asking for a kiss from Neo, she wants to butterfly a hurricane of passion in a kink of the myth. So that Neo can get the Key to the door that leads to the Source, where we find The Architect.
Not who you were expecting? Blake’s “Ancient of Days,” 1794, representing Urizen circumscribing your universe.
Now let us download our way back: to the perpetual ritual sacrifice of young men and women, as a way to satiate the monster born as the result of a ruler’s epic bullshit.
The perpetual ritual sacrifice of young men and women, as a way to satiate the monster born as a result of a ruler’s epic bullshit.
Remember the Maine. Manifest Destiny. For King and Country. Dulce et decorum est. The Gulf of Tonkin. WMDs. And then. And then.
Twenty-two U.S. veterans kill themselves each day.
The great Cretan Myth Cycle, abstracted, is a cautionary tale, and a guide: the forces of God, Beast, and Machine are held in tension with each other, in the character of the Human. These tensions must be equally balanced. Imbalances make monsters out of people.
I believe that Joyce believed that the Cretan myth, and the symbolic Beast / God / Machine architecture, was the bedrock underpinning the entirety of European civilization: buried, forgotten, and metamorphosed by the Catholic Church.
We understand syncretism: Pagan holidays metamorphosed into Saints’ Days, for example. The Cretan failure animates the Homeric tragedy animates the modern tragedy, bedrock under bedrock under bedrock.
The Church gave us a tripartite God and a Devil, the Beast.
Where’s the Machine?
The failure to really create an ethical parameter for the Machine, for modernity, for scientific and technological progress, led to the immolation of Bruno, the ostracism of Galileo, and indeed the contemporary split between the humanities and the sciences that has degraded our polity and splintered the languages we use to communicate with one another.
Indeed, in modernity, this function, of ethical and humane parameters for the machine, has been left to the Market. But the Market is a Machine!
Youths to the Minotaur.
Who will play Theseus? Well, I guess I’ll play Theseus. Parts of me replaced so many times, is it really me anyway, or just games we play with language?
As I see it, over there in one corner, we have people who have become as gods, making Machines that manufacture Beasts.
In the other corner, we’ve got everybody born who doesn’t want to be food for them. But we’re on the edge of a precipice because, increasingly, the only way to not be food for the Beasts is to make the Machines that make the Beasts that eat other people.
And this is our great sadness, the tragedy in the day born over and over.
There is a chapter in Ulysses that doesn’t appear in The Odyssey. It’s the tale of the Wandering Rocks. It’s sonder before the Internet made the word hygge. It follows all the people who intersect with Bloom and don’t, all of the people Ulysses could have been about. If, by chance, our eye had not fallen on Poldy.
I see them all now, in my mind’s eye, Horatio! Walking in a ring.
A lot of people are leading the charge in turning the page. And we need to. Because we really need to stop reliving the 19th and the 20th centuries when the biggest crisis lies ahead for the planet in the 21st.
Some wish for the abyss. Some will throw you in there. Some are on the Highway to Hell. Some feel it’s the Apocalypse. Some think it’s God’s plan. But really, it’s just us. Just people. We fucked ourselves. And now we should really try to unfuck ourselves on a global scale.
Because the Wretched Summer is coming for us all. And it will last many an age unless we put a lot more human powers and machine powers toward what I consider a very simple idea:
God doesn’t want us to destroy the planet.
Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know what “God” thinks. My ancestors spent a lot of time reading the Torah. I spent a lot of time reading Ulysses.
Ulysses ends not with nihilism but with a Yes.
And this is what I saw in Ulysses.
All the exiles, all the failures, all of the japeries of this life, all the missives, all the errant missiles, all of it: these were all the Ariadne threads intended to lead you to this one idea, in 80 parts. The idea at the center of the maze.
“A man’s life is no more than to say ‘One.’” – Hamlet
So here is one.
Shantih shantih shantih.
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A one, and a two, and a ––