JOYCE: The archetypes of Shem and Shaun
Jorn Barger
This is the third and possibly last of a short series. It's also the
most difficult, requiring the most AI-thinking from the lit side, and
the most literary thinking from the AI side.
Briefly:
- At the heart of AI there's an intractable Gordian knot, involving the
categories of human psychology
- Resolving this knot will require precisely differentiating all these
categories
- This differentiation will depend on identifying which psychological
categories supply the _deepest archetypes_
- James Joyce was clearly wrestling with this problem in Finnegans Wake
- At the center of his solution are the archetypal twins Shem (the
sinister experimenter) and Shaun (the virtuous conformist)
I explore the history of psychological category-systems in my AI FAQ
[1]. Roget's great-chain-of-being approach, for example, failed
especially because it failed to recognize that each level in that chain
is a *metaphorical mirror* for the levels above and below it. Library
classification schemes are a complete disaster at psychology. Doug
Lenat's Cyc project has explicitly 'punted' the whole question.
One of the few simple schemes that was evolved 'from the bottom up' is
George Polti's 36 dramatic situations, an inventory of literary themes.
I've reclassified his categories [2] in terms of my own fractal-thicket
approach:
person thing: Obtaining
person motive: Victim of misfortune, Disaster, Ambition
person motive motive: Self-sacrifice for an ideal
person motive modality: Daring enterprise, Remorse
person modality: Enigma, Madness, Fatal imprudence, Faulty judgment
person person: Revolt, Familial hatred, Family rivalry, Conflict with
a god, Loss of loved ones
person person place: Recovery of a lost one
person person place place: Pursuit, Abduction
person person motive: Supplication, Victim of cruelty, Rivalry between
superior and inferior, Crimes of love, Deliverance
person person modality: Kinsman kills unrecognized kinsman, Obstacles
to love, Mistaken jealousy
person person motive motive: Revenge, All sacrifice for passion,
Sacrifice of loved ones, An enemy loved, Self sacrifice for kindred
person person motive modality: Involuntary crimes of love, Discovery
of dishonor of a loved one
person person person: Adultery, Murderous adultery
person person person person motive motive: Vengeance by family upon
family
While this list surely omits some major themes, all the themes it offers
are inarguably important, so it does offer a startingpoint... probably
the most precise snapshot available of AI's Gordian knot. But _where to
go from here_ seems an almost hopelessly insuperable challenge...
James Joyce's literary journey began, to a great extent, when in 1904 at
the very young age of 22 he began to write a wrenchingly honest and
detailed autobiography called "Stephen Hero". After 1000 pages covering
his first 18 years, he took a break, grew dissatisfied, and rewrote it
entirely as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", condensing it by
a very deliberate policy of identifying the central themes, and seeking
out the _fewest possible_ incidents that managed to embody all those
themes.
So we find Stephen Dedalus lisping out a poem on the very first page of
Portrait, and thruout the book this 'motif' of _performance_ is returned
to again and again, as Stephen's psyche matures and uncovers new
approaches.
With "Ulysses" Joyce seems to have built on the same system of motifs,
but instead of following them thru one character's development, he now
tries to universalise them as a _psychological inventory_ of a single,
ordinary man's single ordinary day... using episodes of Homer's Odyssey
as a substructure!
Very little Joyce criticism has been devoted to differentiating those 18
psychological categories underlying Ulysses' 18 chapters, so it's hardly
surprising that Joyceans have largely thrown up their hands in
bafflement at his next project, "Finnegans Wake".
He stated in advance that this work would be a history of the world, but
the first sketches he wrote are entirely unexpected in their themes: a
fallen king, a flirting couple, an isolated saint, and a druid's
description of a king.
Moreover, these first characters seem to play very minor roles in the
final version of FW, which most prominently features an everyman called
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle Earwicker,
their twin sons Shem and Shaun, and their daughter Isobel.
My contention is this:
If we can figure out how Joyce made the jump from those early
sketches to those final characters-- a jump that happened in
the last months of 1923 and the first months of 1924-- we'll
understand which dramatic themes he'd identified as the most
deeply archetypal, and how he elaborated these to include all
of history and psychology.
In a sense, I think Joyce was merging all 36 of Polti's plots-- and
many, many others-- into a single storyline that traces the life of a
universal hero/everyman, centered on his achieving the role of king, and
then losing it thru a fall.
This throws a major curveball into the standard ways AI has been
accustomed to indexing large sets of items into a single structure--
unifying them *as a story* seems highly unscientific!
But given that Polti's units are themselves tiny abstract stories,
there's a promising logic to this approach.
For example, at the root you might have "hero falls and then rises
again" which ramifies at the next level into "hero rises by virtuous
conformity" and "hero rises by sinister experiment"...
So we might re-envision Joyce's career as the systematic pursuit of
which story-plots are deeper than which, brought to consummation with
the first drafts of FW.
I've placed on the net several megabytes of close-reading of these early
sketches, covering Joyce's first year of work [3]. But I feel stuck at
this point... and I suspect that the key to difficulties lies in
identifying exactly how Joyce distinguished Shem and Shaun!
Though they wouldn't be named with these names for a few more months, it
seems probably that the isolated saint would form the basis of Shaun...
but the flirting male also seems a precursor. I find considerable
evidence that the fallen-king sketch was written to mirror the isolated
saint, so he may very well be an early Shem... but he's also clearly an
early HCE. (In FW's cyclical river, though, it's not too much of a
paradox that he could be his own father!)
How these roles fit with the druid story is the biggest puzzle of all.
Joyce called it a 'defence and indictment of the book itself', and wrote
it in the most obscure language of anything in the early drafts.
But I rather feel that the solution will come, not from more study of
the notebooks and drafts, but from more reflection on the Shem-principle
and the Shaun-principle *as embodied in my own life*.
Joyce had freed himself at a very early age from the pressures of social
conformity, and this seems to have been the key to his creative genius.
The Shauns of the world (and of the Wake) are duller than the Shems, but
they seem to have a greater worldly success during their lifetimes.
Shaun in the Wake is a postman, an operatic tenor, a priest, and in some
ways a ladies' man, but also something of a repressed and repressive
moralist and hypocrite.
Shem is a coward, a pervert, a slob, and a bum, but also a supreme
artistic genius...
And somewhere in this heap of conflicting dualities, I think there must
be a central duality that Joyce chose as the defining one... and it
should probably be embodied as such in the druid sketch.
But I'm afraid I'm not yet deep enough, personally, to see it...
(Another aspect of the duality is surely emphasized by Joyce as a
'decision' motif, between good and evil, Shaun and Shem, that he would
have tied in with Pascal's wager and probably Parzival's and Hamlet's
hesitation as well. Joyce must have mapped this onto an anecdote about
an Irish soldier named Buckley hesitating to shoot a Russian general in
the Crimea... and the notebooks show pretty strongly that this was the
root of the druid sketch, qv.)
j
[1] <URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/ai/prehistory.html>
[2] <URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/ai/stories.html>
[3] <URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jj/newgame.html>
--
I EDIT THE NET: <URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblogs/weblog.html>
"The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery.
People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood." --Freeman Dyson
Puss in Boots
jo...@mcs.com (Jorn Barger):
>This is the third and possibly last of a short series. It's also the
>most difficult, requiring the most AI-thinking from the lit side, and
>the most literary thinking from the AI side.
They'll be Daedalus on arrival.
-- Moggin