Theory: Joyce's epiphanies and invariance-under-zooming
Jorn Barger
http://groups.google.com/groups?scoring=d&q=author:jo...@enteract.com
Last year I proposed that our neural representations of external
objects had to evolve to allow recognition regardless of how
near or far we were, or what angle we were viewing from-- it
doesn't help to recognize a tiger only when it's facing in
one particular direction, at one particular distance.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=16e613ec.0308190514.64c6d9df%40posting.google.com
I tried to generalise this principle to apply to sense
modalities other than vision, as well, so that any idea we
might entertain could be viewed from many 'angles', up close
or from a distance.
I've also spoken in the past of a 'self-knowledge horizon'
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=self-knowledge.horizon
that makes it difficult for humans to see themselves in a
detached manner, from 'outside', from a distance. An
important form of _wisdom_ is the ability to penetrate this
self-knowledge horizon, and in my opinion the alltime
champion is James Joyce.
Joyce's own first literary hero was Ibsen, and at 18 Joyce
tried to write a play in Ibsen's realist style-- but was
humiliated to discover how difficult this was to get right.
For the next year he honed his craft, and it was during
this period that he wrote his first 'epiphanies' in the
form of short dramatic dialogs, overheard or reconstructed.
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/epiphanies.html
His goal in these epiphanies was to _disentangle_ the
essence of a human character from its accidental context,
and _isolate_ it in the fewest possible words. From 1901
to 1903 he accumulated dozens of these, and began to
arrange them chronologically into a skeletal autobiography,
which in 1904 became the basis for his fictionalised
autobiography, "Stephen Hero".
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/dedalus.html
Via this slow discipline of disentangling/isolation/
epiphany Joyce managed to systematically penetrate his own
self-knowledge horizon, so that we can see in the surviving
chapters of Stephen Hero a level of wisdom unprecedented in
a 22-year-old. But the title, based on the ballad 'Turpin
Hero', makes it clear he wasn't writing a straightforward
autobiography-- he was filtering and shaping the real
events to fit the pattern of the ballad, in which a sly
highwayman outwits his victims by seeing their weaknesses
more clearly than they do themselves.
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/portrait/shero.html
When AE offered Joyce some ready cash for short stories,
Joyce probably found it convenient to recycle
autobiographical episodes that didn't fit the 'Hero'
structure, even lampooning his own weaknesses in stories
like "Araby".
But after the birth of his first child in 1905, Joyce began
to think of more generous themes for stories, most notably
"The Dead" and the unwritten short odyssey of Alfred Hunter
that was to grow into "Ulysses".
Joyce chose Hunter because on one level he was a tragicomic
cuckold and underachiever, but more deeply because he
displayed many small virtues that Joyce could portray as
true heroism on a very parochial scale. But when Joyce
reread Homer in an attempt to flesh out this scheme, he
discovered that Homer's art demonstrated an unexpected
mastery of disentangling/isolation/epiphany, in that the
details chosen by Homer for each adventure managed to set
it off artistically, a compositional principle that Joyce
(in his notebooks) termed _decor ideal_.
Joyce realised that if he were to apply this principle to
each of Hunter's adventures, he could expand the story
into an encyclopedic inventory of Dublin life made
universal. And around the same time he realised that
Hunter's Telemachus had to be Stephen Dedalus, so he
abandoned "Stephen Hero" and began to rethink the
autobiography as an explicit _prequel_ to Ulysses.
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/prequel.html
From 1907 to 1914, Joyce patiently winnowed possible
correspondences between Homer's themes and Dublin life,
disentangling words and phrases that could eventually
form part of his decor ideal. More than any other novel,
Ulysses was literally constructed word by word, in
notebooks which have in part survived.
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/
And given the premises he started from (Homer, Dublin,
autobiography) Ulysses is also one of the most
_necessary_, least contingent novels ever written. But
when Ulysses was finished he felt he could take the
process one step further by eliminating even those
contingent premises, and creating a fully universal
cycle of history-- Finnegans Wake.
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/fwake/