On the Sexiness of Ulysses

So there's this 2000 art-house film, Nora, based on the marriage of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle; I still haven't seen it, largely because the poster's tagline of "The World's Sexiest Writer Had One Inspiration..." seems about the wrongest way to market Joyce ever.  Anyone who picks up a Joyce book expecting some great Modernist "Dirty Novel™" á la DH Lawrence or Henry Miller is in for a bitter disappointment.  "World's Sexiest Writer" is generally the last descriptor that leaps to the mind of anyone who has ever been depressed by Dubliners, or baffled by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or actively irritated by Finnegans Wake.  About the sexiest thing most readers have said about Joyce is "Screw This!" approximately 3 chapters into Ulysses.

Call him difficult, call him challenging, call him innovative or ground-breaking or even overrated if you must, but sexy?  C'mon guys.  C'mon.

At least, so I assumed until my most recent re-reading of Ulysses.  I had already read it 3 times before--or should I say it had already defeated me 3 times before, as it is a work of such monumental complexity that so much of it flies over the head of even the most erudite reader (let alone me).  Now, life is short and art is long, so I hadn't planned to return to it anytime soon; but as I researched for my comps portfolio, I realized that no single novel looms larger over either the Irish canon or the Modernist canon than Ulysses, so I decided it was high time for me to scale this mountain once more.

Now, I don't know what's changed between now and the last time I read it 4 years ago--whether my PhD course work really has succeeded in making me a sharper reader, or if my mind simply isn't as innocent as it used to be, or what--but for whatever reason, this time around, it became exceedingly obvious that, boy howdy doody, no wonder this book was banned in 1922!  It is obscene.

I don't just mean it was obscene by the standards of the era (remembering that it would be another 18 years before Gone With The Wind would scandalize the nation with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a ----"); nor am I referring solely to the novel's hinted-at adultery (because Leopold Bloom, this modern Ulysses, instead of trying to get home to a faithful wife, is ironically trying to avoid going home to an unfaithful wife, get it?  Get it?!).  No, I mean that once you wade far enough and deep enough into the Leopold Bloom sections, you learn that this introverted, mousy character has some seriously troubling proclivities.  For example, hidden within the satirical-sentimentality of the "Nausicaä" episode lies voyeurism, exhibitionism, and an onanistic act you need a graduate degree to parse that that's just what happened.  The "Circe" episode much more explicitly foregrounds Bloom's repressed sado-masochistic, transgender, and cuckold fantasies.  In the wild, rambling, closing "Penelope" episode, Molly Bloom, half-awake and mind-racing at 1am, briefly fantasizes about fellatio with Stephen Dedalus, recalls how well-endowed her adulterous fling Blazes Boylan was (albeit she determines that "Poldy has more spunk"--ouch!), notes Leopold's disgusting cropology fetish, yet also remembers holding his head to her breasts on the day he proposed to her in Gibraltar as she answered with "yes I said yes I will Yes."

All in all, embedded within this text's labyrinthine allusions to classical history, mythology, music, literature, local slang, and Irish Nationalism, lies a surprisingly extensive catalog of sexual deviancies that even a 21st-century porn addict might be embarrassed to admit to.  And these references all sailed right over my head the first few times I read the novel.  Frankly, I'm impressed that the censors back in 1922 were able to read this book rigorously enough to find the stuff worth banning (book-burners ain't exactly known for their close-reading skills).

But this is not to claim that Ulysses should have been or still be banned--or that its obscenity should be considered pornographic.  As Judge Woolsey wrote in his 1933 decision to lift the U.S. ban on the novel, "I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist."  And he's right.  Pornography, as I understand it, does not generally require this much work to access.  More broadly, Bloom's fantasies of repression and punishment fit in with the novel's larger themes of impotence, paralysis, powerlessness, and guilt that were endemic not only to the pre-independent Irish state, but to Modern Man generally; this is sexiness not as escapist fantasy, but one that forces you to realize just how pathetic and sad your sexual fantasies really are.

But that still doesn't distract from the fact that Ulysses is still surprisingly sexy--and the thing about sex is that even when it's ironic and satirical and undercuts itself, it's still there.  Sex is intrinsically arousing, even when it's trying not to be.  Now, Ulysses may be the last book you would ever use to get your lover in the mood, yet still there is something disconcertingly sexual about Ulysses, something that challenges you to not only admit but just own that sordid part of your inner-self.  Now, openly admitting it can be the first step towards mastering it...but it can also be the first step towards sliding even further into self-indulgence, submission, paralysis, and thus remaining one of the "gratefully oppressed" (to quote Dubliners).  The censors were right to consider this book dangerous--but not just to their own puritanical mores, but dangerous generally.

But then, it's good for a book to be genuinely dangerous; that makes it feel like a book can actually matter, like it's some sort of radioactive energy that needs to be carefully grappled with and harnessed lest it destroy us, and not just as another obscure, esoteric artifact to keep the academics busy another thousand years.  And despite the danger, there is also still something transcending and life-affirming about that closing "yes I said yes I will Yes", a promise (albeit a precarious one) that we not only have been ("yes I said"), but still can be ("yes I will"), better than whatever it is we are right now.

Though it's still dumb to call Joyce "The World's Sexiest Writer".  C'mon guys.  C'mon.

Post-Comps: Princes of the Universe

I read over a hundred books.  Wrote over a hundred pages.  Out of necessity (the head of my committee is retiring next month; this was her final act as an academic), I did in 6 months what most grad students take a year to study for.

I even made flash cards to prepare my answers, carefully mapping out each response with relevant texts and theoretical frameworks--all for naught, for during the oral defense they did not ask me a single question I had prepped for, and every question I had not.  There was a whole lot of stammering and scrambling and thinking on my feet.

And I passed.

I passed my PhD Comprehensive Examinations.

I am now ABD.

All But Dissertation.

I have crashed now.  I am absolutely exhausted.  A day later, my body is still recovering--physically, emotionally, spiritually.  There were moments these past few days when I seriously worried I might have a breakdown.

But I didn't.  I passed instead.

The sky is bluer.  The sun is brighter.  My shoulders are lighter.  I feel elated and free.

Last year, at the end of my worst semester ever, I posted Frank Sinatra.  But this year, I'm feeling a little more...grandiose:

The Violence in Paris

The above is the famed 1939 photo of a Frenchman crying on the streets of Paris upon hearing the news that France had fallen to Nazi Germany.  The shock and sorrow expressed in it feels sadly apropos this morning--not that France is anywhere close to surrendering to ISIS or any such nonsense (really, my greatest fear right now is a further increase in European xenophobia, anti-Muslim violence, and a return to the French police state; as Tom Wolfe once said, "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe").  But the French are still reeling from a similarly devestating act of violence--though one that, as the photo reminds us, is sadly not that foreign to the City of Lights, as though violence were a strange thing to happen there.

It is, after all, the city of the storming of the Bastille, the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and Napoleon's Arc de triomphe--which were all in turn precipitated by the centuries of violence perpetrated by the French Crown upon its own impoverished.  A single visit to Versailles in all its stunning grandeur will remind you why the starving peasants revolted in the first place.  And that wealth came on the backs not just of the poor at-home, but abroad: the slavery of Haiti (that required its own violent revolt to overthrow), the bloody partitioning of Africa and the Middle-East with other European powers, the annexation of Vietnam, etc and etc and etc; the wealth and beauty of Paris was built up in part through brutal violence.

Please don't misunderstand, this is not to exculpate the cowardly terrorists who sent themselves to hell last night, nor blame the victims just trying to enjoy a Friday night for once as though they were somehow complicit in their own murders.  Far, far from it.  Paris is one of my favorite cities and, contrary to stereotype, I find the French to be some of the friendliest people I've met; I wish these attacks on no one, but least of all on them.  Rather, this is just a weary reminder that we are all still enmeshed in the same tangled web of history, the French as much as everybody, tragically swept away by events that predate us and remain far larger than all of us (the main thesis of War and Peace by the way--which incidentally is a novel about France invading Russia).  "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," sighs Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses (a novel also written in Paris), and we all got up this morning no more awake from the nightmare than we have ever been.

On The Recent Changes to Handbook 1...

...of which we scarcely need to even name now, do we.

A personal response in 9 movements:

1. I have had far too many intimate experiences with the Church and the Holy Spirit--too personal to detail here--to ever abandon them now. These include the many manifold times I have felt guided, protected, preserved, encouraged, discouraged, moved with and against the Spirit, moved with and against myself. My parents named me for the Biblical Patriarch who wrestled with God, and I have continued that wrestle throughout my own life.   I stay in the Church not because it's comfortable, no; it is precisely the discomfort that has kept me wrestling, kept me staying, and why I continue to stay.

2. But the sheer fact that I have feel like I have to reaffirm my commitment still demonstrates how upsetting the recent changes to Handbook 1 have been.  Even the most faithful have been troubled, caught off guard by its sheer viciousness, which scarcely needs to be recounted here. It lacks charity, without which "ye are nothing." I am saddened when people leave the Church, but I am even more saddened when they are given good reason to.

3. The many well-intentioned people who have struggled to defend the change have done so with the tacit acknowledgment that it is indeed a vicious one, that they so desperately wish it wasn't.  They've tried every Orwellian rewording in the book to make it look like a mercy, not punitive--and understandably so, because they love the Church, and so want the Church to be good. Yet their own shaky "I don't fully understand this but" belies their own insecurity, how hollow they know their words sounds.  I'm sadly reminded of an old Steven Weinberg quote: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." 

Meanwhile, in the most laughingly ironic twist of all, the most full-throated, sanctimonious defenders of the change have only outed themselves as lacking in charity themselves, neither "mourning with those who mourn," nor "standing with those who stand in need of comfort"--that is, in their defense of the Church, they have failed to behave like disciples of Christ, but rather like the Pharisees who crucified him.

4.  Also part of why the changes are so galling is just how uncharacteristic this all seems of the Church!  Did the Church not just give their unqualified support for anti-discrimination housing legislation in Utah less than a year ago?  Did not Elder Christofferson open up about his own gay brother and his husband a few months ago?  Did not Elder Oaks condemn Kim Davis just a couple weeks ago?  Has not President Uchtdorf repeatedly reached out to those who've felt unwelcome over the past several conferences?  Has not the Church extended repeated olive branches to the LGBTQ community over the past 7 years since the blowback over Prop. 8?  Have they not unrolled their massive "And I'm a Mormon" ad campaign with great PR savvy to promulgate a more inclusive image?  And in one fall swoop they dessimate all that hard work. They struggled to build up all this public goodwill, and then promptly handed the anti-Mormons all the ammunition they needed. This pain was entirely self-inflicted.

5.  What's more, they seemed to be genuinely surprised by the reaction they should've known they'd get--rushing Elder Christofferson to film a quick video with Deseret News that very evening and such--there appears to have been an utter bungling of not only the changes, but of the announcement itself. They were caught flat-footed with their hand in the cookie jar.  To quote Napoleon, it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder.

6. The only defense that has even remotely resonated is the reminder that God has often tried his people; "they must be tried even as Abraham" the Almighty told Joseph Smith--yet remember that what God asked Abraham to do was explicitly wrong!  Human sacrifice went against everything Abraham had ever preached throughout his century-long life, and Isaac was the Covenant child he had been promised throughout decades-long waiting that would try even the severest patience.  Yet when the moment came for Abraham to violate everything he had ever taught or believed as he raised his blade into the air, God sent his angel down to stop him at the last possible second, and provided a ram in the thicket.  The Lord needed Abraham to learn something about himself, but still stopped Abraham short of actually going through with it.  (Kierkegaard has a wonderful book on this topic, Fear and Trembling).  That is, maybe you're right and the changes to Handbook 1 are an Abrahamic test--yet that just underscores that it is so trying precisely because we rightfully feel in our bones that it is so wrong.  "Being in the Church isn't supposed to hurt this much" some critics have said; but maybe it is.

7.  But then again, this Abrahamic discussion is all predicated upon the assumption that this change did come of the Lord God Almighty.  I am still not convinced of this; let me explain why.  First is the fact that, according to the Doctrine and Covenants, all new revelations must be brought before the Church for a sustaining vote made "by common consent."  This was never presented as a new revelation; this was only a bureaucratic change to a manual.  Some might here argue that the vote is but a sustaining vote, and they choose to sustain whatever the First Presidency chooses to do.  Balderdash.  Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both declared that their greatest fears were that the Latter-day Saints would only blindly obey whatever the Prophet said and thereby drag themselves down to darkness.  We are no more excused from seeking a spiritual confirmation on this change, as we from seeking it on the Book of Mormon, or on Joseph Smith, or on the Atonement of Christ, or on literally everything else.

And here I must say: I have received no such confirmation.  I have fasted, and I have prayed repeatedly; I have long paid the price to learn how to distinguish the still, small voice of the Spirit from the noise of the outside world and from the prejudices of my own soul, and I know I still have a long way to go. Nevertheless, I have asked, I have wrestled.  I can speak for no one but myself, but I have thus far received no impression that this change comes of God.  Quite the opposite in fact.

8.  And that is fine.  For the leaders of our Church, inspired and well-intentioned though they may be, are still fallible human beings, ones subject to the vicissitudes of the flesh and their own weaknesses and filtering their inspiration through their preconceived biases and in need of repentance and redemption and the Atoning Blood of Jesus Christ as desperately as literally everyone else. The Catholics are the ones with Papal infallibility, not us, yet even they know how to separate their leaders from their faith. "I do not want any of you to think I am a very righteous man because I am not" said Joseph Smith, and he was not just being modest--especially when you consider his polygamy.

And then there's Brigham Young with his bizarre Adam-God theory, and his starting the Priesthood ban on black people, and of Bruce R. McConkie claiming that the ban would never be lifted in this life, and Boyd K. Packer claiming that no one is born gay, and endless Seminary teachers claiming the Third World were fence-sitters in the pre-existence despite official disavowals from the Church, and etc and etc and etc.  When Wilford Woodruff said God would never allow any man to steer the Church astray, what he perhaps meant was God would allow no man to steer it into a ditch--it can still veer wildly across multiple lanes and clip the median and ride the rumble strip.  The War in Heaven was fought over Free Agency, and the Lord allows us an astonishing amount of it in making our own mistakes.  (That's why the Atonement was necessary in the first place).

9.  Because that's how I finally made peace with the pre-1978 Black Priesthood ban, and how I'll likely make peace with the changes to Handbook 1: not as some mysterious revelation beyond the understanding of man, but as egregious errors made by fallible men whom I need to love and forgive as much as they doubtless feel the same about me.

CS Lewis, in A Grief Observed (written on the occasion of the death of his wife), said that what he most feared from his experience was not that he would now lose his faith, but rather that he would learn that this is how God actually is, to "be no more deceived" about the loving deity he thought he worshiped.  These changes have similarly unsettled me.  But though I'm saddened to learn what these changes reveal about some of the men I revered, I am thankfully not similarly convinced that this is how God actually is.  To quote Joseph Smith one last time: "Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in His views and boundless in His mercies then we are ready to believe or receive."  I am convinced we still have not learned how to believe or receive such divine liberality--and Handbook 1 is but the latest evidence of that.  In the meantime, I will not be seeking to defend or excuse or justify the recent changes to Handbook 1; I will only seek to mourn those that are mourning, comfort those who stand in need of comfort, and love my neighbor as myself. 

This experience has indeed shifted my relationship to the institutional Church.  But it has not my relationship with God--and whatever else its gaping flaws, I remain convinced that this Church still does belong to him, so I will stay with it, and will ride the Good Ship Zion through all its torments, even (maybe especially) the self-inflicted ones.

On Actually Enjoyable Academics

So our revels now are ended.  I have checked off each book on my titanic reading lists.  I have submitted my portfolio to my committee.  In less than 2 weeks, I defend my comps portfolio.  There is naught left but to prepare for battle.

Of those reading lists: roughly 50 of those books, or about a third altogether, were critical texts, works of scholarship written over the past century upon literary Modernism and Postmodernism.  My attraction to these art movements is derived in part, I dare say, from the same place that drives my childhood love of Star Trek: a sense of wonder.  For there's just this childlike awe about these texts, this feeling that all the old rules are off, that anything can happen now, that new worlds are upon us, that there exist infinite possibilities in infinite combinations that our imaginations are finally free to explore as widely and wildly as we are willing!

Even if so many of these literary experiments fail, even as they all must fail as their ambition far exceeds the limits of language and the sordid politics of this earth, as so many of these writers fell prey to the fatal seductions of fascism, of communism, of capitalism, etc and etc, yet still they at least tried, and dared to conceive of new ways of existing, of living, of thinking and of being.  For all their boundary-pushing, there's just something comforting about that sense of possibility.  I need no other defense of avant-garde literature than this: it makes the mind aware that other worlds are possible. 

Which is why I find so much of the criticism so stultifying, so frustrating, so inexcusably dull!  Great Guns, these literary scholars--folks, mind you, who have already dedicated themselves to soul-crushing years of poverty and grad school for the love of literature, who have basically won the lottery by scoring tenured-professorships whose sole job is to read beautiful books all day and teach them to students--these critics sprawl around them the most fascinating and exhilarating texts of the past 100-odd years, and they conclude that the best use of their prodigious gifts is to write about these texts as boringly as possible?!  They take great ideas and wonderful insights into ground-breaking texts, and cram them into the most formulaic and turgid of prose-styles?  Talk about missed opportunities, talk about an utter waste of potential!

Of course, scholars have been writing turgidly for as long as there has been scholarship.  Complain about Death and Taxes while you're at it, one might say, for all the changes you'll make to it.  Nevertheless, some rare few scholars are able to rise above the dense fog of torpor to create critical works that live up to the creative ones they examine.  I come not here to bury academese (it's not like that shuffling undead zombie can be buried anyways), but to sing the praises of those critics that actually make criticism seem worthwhile, who still preserve that childhood sense of wonder, and to remind myself what my critical writing should aspire to emulate as well.

Here's the small smattering of critical texts I read over the past 6 months in prep for comps, that I personally found well worth the effort:

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland

I groaned when I first checked out this 650-page behemoth--which then flew by faster than many 180-pagers I've had to drudge through.  Right from that killer first line--"If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?"--Kiberd's humor, insight, encyclopedic knowledge, and shear joie de vivre sweep you away on a journey that will convince you through the sheer force of its scholarship and personality that Ireland didn't just produce great literature: the literature produced Ireland.

Hugh Kenner The Pound Era 

As the '60s turned into the '70s, Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner was faced with a nigh-impossible task: how to recuperate the post-War reputation of Ezra Pound, whose critical recognition had significantly waned after siding firmly with the fascists during WWII?  (He was a POW of George S. Patton for crying out loud)?  Answer: by reminding us all why Ezra Pound mattered so much in the first place--namely, by producing a critical work as wild, inventive, innovative, insightful, and sheer fun as Pound's work originally.   

It is part Pound biography, part literary history, part artistic theory, yet still something different from and more than all those genres combined.  The book certainly lionizes Pound, but it is not hagiography; it does not attempt to skirt Pound’s fascism, for example, only explain it by means of his preoccupation with the “usury” endemic to capitalism, as Pound believed interest rates to be an exploitative evil that could only be neutralized through dictatorship (one anecdote—this text is rife with apocrypha—states that when Pound first became a radio propagandist for Mussolini, his speeches were so intellectually dense that the fascists worried he might in fact be sending coded messages to the Allies).  The byzantine prose and structure of Kenner’s suis generis blurs the line between scholarship and literature, rendering this tome perhaps more approachable as a fellow poetic work of late-Modernism than of criticism.

 John Harwood Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation

Admittedly, part of why I have been so preoccupied as of late with the torpidity of literary criticism is thanks to this very work.  Maybe I just enjoy a good rant and the English are just exceptionally good at them; but Harwood's book here is a tour-de-force of delightful academic writing, one that strives to be everything that modern scholarship is not.


He repeatedly punctures the utopic pretensions of literary critics, by in effect stating that if your goal is revolution and social change, then literary criticism is by far the least effective way to go about it, that the fate of human civilization certainly does not rest upon our interpretation of, say, The Waste Land, that most common readers in fact get along just fine without us.  And in fact, if one wanted to hatch a plan to sweep all the activists off the street, one could do no better than to convert them all to obscure French theorists, lodged in the ivory tower speaking past each other, unintelligible to anyone still on the streets. What Harwood wants more than anything is for us to remember why we read these works in the first place--not to impress people at parties, not to drone on in conferences, and certainly not to achieve tenure, no--it's because these texts are astonishing, and they can still overwhelm you aesthetically if you let them.

Leonard Diepeveen The Difficulties of Modernism 

Is it ironic that a book focused solely upon the difficulties of Modernist literature should be written so lucidly and clearly?  But Diepeveen has a real affection for his subject matter, and it shines through--the story of Modernism's reception history, how it was at once derided and praised as inaccessibly difficult from the very beginning, is a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it with aplomb!  Whether you agree with TS Eliot that human civilization has now become difficult and so its poetry must as well, or if you think that this all so much pseudo-intellectual blustering and pontificating, you will find your views challenged and expounded upon in every chapter.  And not patronizingly or antagonizingly, either, no: Diepeveen thinks this topic is fun, and you can't help but have fun reading him, too.

What academics have you found actually enjoyable to read?