This morning when I woke up the sun was shining in through the curtains hot onto my bed. I pulled up the weather forecast which predicted sun for the next three days. I put on my hoodless coat reserved for non-rainy weather, doc Martens, and headed to pick up my graded coursework in the Arts building before walking the short distance to the Lecture Theatres, where my Modernism lecture commenced at noon.
The week I went to Dublin with Megan, Kelsey and Angela, the Modernism module discussed Dubliners. I’d been recommended this collection by Ron Carlson last winter quarter in his fiction workshop so over the summer I’d read a little of it. I’d had this idea of Dublin in my head as a cold but beautiful place, sort of hinged on its working class and disillusioned youth, with grey skies and tall industrial buildings. Somehow I also imagined it as a place that opened back alleys to strangers and invited them in for pints and had gossip around a fire. I imagined Dublin as full of wind-bitten faces and people in large coats and friendly disposition.
What I found was half of what I hoped to find; I hadn’t considered the fact that my American accent and inability to maneuver my way around by city bus might hinder me as much as they seemed to. Half of the Dubliners I met were hospitable and half were gruff. Maybe those aren’t exact proportions. It felt like a real city, not a place of romantic stories; I could imagine the little boy from “Araby” walking down the streets, and for the first time I really felt for him, for what it must have done to him, to have that final realization: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
Megan and I have had that line memorized for nearly a year; but here it meant something to me.
There are other lines from Dubliners that are mysteriously embodied by the city: “When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street”--also from “Araby”--and “Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well”--from “The Dead,” whose main character is called, ahem, Lily--are two favorites.
It’s hard to describe what it is like to encounter a dream in the flesh. Not, perhaps, Dublin, but Ireland has been on my list of places to visit since I can remember really wanting to go anywhere. And you know the poems, the romantic ones, that the Irish wrote of their own kind, that people like Yeats and Thomas Moore used to create a mythology nearly separate to the actual history of the country--I felt that disparateness walking through the dark streets. There was a book my Craft of Fiction class read last spring called Fiction and the Figures of Life by William Gass, and he had a chapter in which he talked about the Irish romantics and I didn’t really understand what he meant then, but I think I’ve gotten a little bit closer to it having been to the heart--or one of them--of Ireland.
Gass brought up what’s usually on the philosophical plate of the writer who thinks about what he’s done after he’s done it: how have I represented the things I’ve written about? There’s a tendency in romantic writing--especially pastorals--to, well, romanticize. And--duh--but that’s the whole of it. If you’re a romantic writer you’ve got eyes that turn everything they see to beauty. For large audiences, I think, generally, we consider this beautiful and good. The Irish certainly seemed to have had this aim in mind, if I learned anything from my trip through the Writer’s Museum showcases in Dublin. But--and this is where Gass comes in, I think--if you’re romanticizing something, aren’t you doing some disservice to the thing itself? I’m talking about a flower, which is beautiful even with dirt clung to its inner parts, and aphids tearing holes in the petals, but I don’t write about that. I write about the sunlight falling on it in a forgotten, impossible moment, at the birth of King Arthur; looking at its delicacy not as an invitation to aphids but as the epitome of feminine beauty and sexuality.
Gass asks: well, what about the aphids? What about the Ireland that really existed, even when Yeats and Moore were writing about the gloss and green? I’m working from memory, so I could be misinterpreting, or remembering badly, but the point remains: Joyce is a person who worked with what Ireland had to offer and transformed it--not into something different, better, or worse. He looked into the lives of the disparate people who, together, were a community and united them by emotion and experience. Some call it the human condition. And it’s complete, with bodily fluids and common functions, but also with heights of realization and despair. The language is intensely motivated and is enjoyable to read.
There’s this really cool documentary about origami called Between the Folds that talks about origami as a transformative art, because it uses a single piece of material and folds it into something lasting and interesting, whereas painting is an additive art--one adds paint to canvas--and sculpting is subtractive or additive--one carves away what isn’t in the statue, or one adds motifs to a vase, etc. I’ve come to view Joyce’s writing in the stories of Dubliners as a transformative art. He’s taking up a city and folding it into something else but he’s only using the sheet of paper. He doesn’t cut it or paste it. He doesn’t paint onto it, like the romantics.
(Some people, who’ve read or studied Joyce, might argue that much of the charm that the city has to offer has been omitted. Joyce worried that himself in his letters. But as someone who’d never seen the city before and who didn’t know much about it other than what I’d read of Joyce’s, I’d argue differently. Somehow, I was set up with the expectations of a dirty, grungy, but well-meaning people, and that’s what I found. In my four days in Dublin, I like to think that I experienced some of the sights and smells and simple, human moments that Joyce might have, or that his characters might have, nearly a hundred years ago.
Something else--Joyce is a modernist writer, and what I’m learning is that modernists were concerned not only with making sense of a colossally incongruous world by displaying it in prose that is nearly equally incomprehensible, but also with highlighting corruption, closed-mindedness and basic humanity. Stories like “Araby” and parts of Ulysses like “Aeolus” will be darker by genre. That’s all.)
Another way that Between the Folds is relevant beside it being highly wonderful and that should be reason enough: it begins with a quote by Henri Mattisse, who was a French painter during the modernist period and during the time that Joyce was writing.
Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.
The first time I watched the film, this quote brought tears to my eyes; it rang true. I didn’t understand exactly what it meant, and I don’t know if I still do, but I know that there is something in an artist that needs escape, that wants for expression. Thoreau said that art had a right to exist; it had a place in the natural world. But I wonder if art could really exist without the human eye, or the human heart; there is beauty in nature, but what wrangles it into a story? When the hands of an origami artist grapple with paper, the spirit means to say something; and the hands through the paper, in their attempt to say what the spirit means, creates a physical object as memorial to whatever was inside.
I see Joyce as an artist who, with words, did the same thing. If you read Joyce, you’ll recognize immediately that his language is not our language; and not in the way that Shakespeare’s language is not our language, but in the way that Joyce is using the everyday words and manipulating them into doing things that nobody else had ever done with language before. Joyce said this--which I view as an interpretation of Matisse’s point--a point which, when Joyce makes it, and it is considered critically, self-illustrates the point it makes:
“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead prose.”
I could go on about this. I have a lot to say about the abstract and the concrete and where they might meet, at what points they must nearly collide in art and so do a lot of other people. A favorite is Hegel, and Schiller is also quite interesting, but harder to understand than Hegel, I think. These are German romantics. And a French linguist, Saussure, had similar things to say about language.
I am an American person. Sometimes I consider the thoughts I’ve had and wonder if they’re not the product of the things I’ve read and seen, and then I see how others have in different ways expressed the same things. Is it because as humans we all have the same capacities and longings? Or, at least, me and certain others? There’s a thing called collective memory and Jung, the psychologist, has theories about the archetype across cultures; anyway, I think what I’m moving to say is that, as I travel more and I learn more about the people of this planet and I start to encounter things that have only, up until now, been dreams inside my head, scrawled out into journals, the boundaries are lifting--not just between abstract and concrete and past and present--but between who I am as a person and who I am becoming.
If I was feeling like being succinct and a little bit self-depricatingly ironic--considering my stature--I’d say I can tell that I’m growing.
I’ll leave you with some good pictures of my long weekend in Dublin.
p.s. I have NO IDEA what kind of logic google used to order these pictures during the upload; I'd apologize but it's really not my fault.
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| being derp with a horse at the Guinness Factory |
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| my first beer! at Temple Bar, Dublin, with Megan |
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| Trinity College, Dublin |
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| Temple Bar, Dublin |
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| complimentary pint at the Guinness Factory; you can tell how good it was by how easy it looks like it was for me to smile |
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| Guinness Factory |
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| in the yard at the James Joyce Centre |
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| view from window in James Joyce Centre |
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| Dublin Castle |
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| Bailey's Coffee last night in Dublin |
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| my hair and a door; Angela took this picture and tagged me in it on fb |
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| Trinity College, Dublin |
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| Megan at MacDonalds in Dublin |
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| Writers Museum, Dublin |
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| James Joyce on the cover of a book at the J.J. Centre |
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| Trinity College, Dublin |
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| At the entrance to the J.J. Centre |
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| I couldn't take pictures in the exhibition, but it was a real highlight of this trip for me! |
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| At the Guinness Factory |
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| we found pizza after Angela dragged us to the ghetto looking for "Little John's House" on false information; i.e. her imagination post nubila, phoebus, right? |
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| and out of the part of town that we shouldn't have been in arose an old hospital that was surprisingly beautiful! (red building) |
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| outside the Guinness Factory |
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| Kelsey and Angela at MacDombles, Dublin |
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| Me standing in what were once J. Joyce's things (I think, I didn't read the signs) |
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| hey |
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| double hey |
