Review: U.S.A., by John Dos Passos.

U.S.A. is Dos Passos' landmark trilogy, containing The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money, and although they've been sold in omnibus editions at various points in their publication history, I bought each one separately. Now, I consider myself too old to fall for the trilogy scam: I read to slowly for one thing, and I'm just too damn judgemental to suffer an author who can't decide how to market his bloated epic. Write one book or write three, dammit. But anyway, this isn't formula fiction and U.S.A. is epic enough as it stands to bustle its way into timelessness. It feels almost like a Western War and Peace, a tale of class struggle honoring the oppressed but expressed lengthily through the intersecting lives of sympathetic middling elites, this one full of obnoxious quick-talking (quicktalking) American verve. It was, at a minimum, engaging enough to break my rule of reading the same author sequentially, which, given Dos Passos' technique of breaking the book into stylistically different sections, it half feels like I'm doing anyway, even in one book. Stupid rules.

The bulk of U.S.A. follows the characters, a rat-a-tat exercise in plotting, drawing them from childhood through their adult lives, a miniature life story pulled quickly this way and then that, actions and consequence, ongoing. What the plot narration lacks in introspection, Dos Passos brings out in a long series of highly subjective snapshot segments, "The Camera Eye," closeups of what are presumably his own experiences told in a kind of freely structured prose, heavy on perceptions. (Heavily influenced by Joyce, I understand, but can't personally assert. The Camera Eyes are not challenging to follow.) I find some resonance in this approach, it captures the dynamic of early memories, images and feelings caught in time, both lucid and dreamlike. Here and there a detail sneaks out of these restless memories into the general plot, which is interesting, but not so frequently done as to write an easy thesis about it. He reserves his more obvious social commentary for another separate section, a series of snapshots of historical figures, painted tragically, lovingly, with contempt or irony. These figures lead more stable and pointed lives than do his various characters. "Newsreel" is the fourth running segment, short sections made up of song lyrics, newspaper clippings, and headlines pasted together into bits of found art, which sometimes informs the story clearly and sometimes vaguely, and generally gives the external context of confusing stuff happening all around. I enjoyed the Newsreel segments a good deal, and they'd be a fun motif to adopt in a short format like this one (much as I try to avoid being topical), in the modern wash of low-quality information.

What the U.S.A. trilogy conspicuously lacks is a discursive narrative heavy on analysis, on interpretation, on assumed significance, on romancing the horrors and the joys of the human condition. Even the introspective sections don't appear to go after any deep parallels, and whether Dos Passos was attempting to reveal a grand arc with all of small pieces is really what kept me reading until the end. Leisurely descriptions are also missing from these novels, although short serviceable ones abound. (It's interesting to read the characters describe one another differently, for example.) There's a solid sense of place that evolves, which almost surprises me, and many places get highlighted, a good fraction of which I've visited. Dos Passos takes us through industrial Connecticut, suburban Washington DC, Seattle,* Chicago, California, Paris, Miami, Pittsburgh, and while New York City is frequently featured, it's blessedly not the center of the universe, and as a canonical experience, farm life is (thankfully enough) completely neglected. There is humor, although not much, and it's delivered in small patches like everything else. If Dos Passos' Wildean quips felt sort of tortured, he was in his amusing element when he let the plot and dialogue unwind with a quick-spoken huckster's absurdity. The sense of time is most poignant, and it wasn't lost on me that this is my great-grandparents' generation. The survivors of U.S.A. would have been checking out just as I was checking in. Tag.

Considering Dos Passos' abrupt sort of plot exposition, the length of it is impressive. Stuff happens, and then it keeps happening. I started out really digging the short-story-ness of this approach, motivation and character economically dispensed with, and then scenes unfolding and closing like a life does (and as quickly). After a few iterations, this mode of exposition gave an impression of a mixed-and-matched set of plotlines, tracking a life through a sympathetic childhood to a disagreeable adulthood, going through some benchmarks in between: young impressions, walking out on the home, making friends, drinking, having sex, business success, drinking, dealing with unwanted pregnancy and/or closeted homosexuality, and eventually getting older. When the lines start interacting with one another, it's actually surprising, it seemed till then that the intent had been to present slices of so many unrelated lives, and if that trick is bordering on tiresome by the middle of 1919 (when everyone is in Paris somehow), it grew interesting again as the third novel progressed, as if he were looking, like I said, for a broad point as similar life events got repeated under evolving circumstances.

Ultimately I see the trilogy as a critique of the times. People have similar impulses, and the scope of their consequences is directed by external stimuli, and it's the latter, the external, which Dos Passos is really commenting on here. The 42nd Parallel features bright young people making their way, following their short-term desires, and if there are ideals tied up in their motivations, they are more tied to their upbringing or their character than to any universal good. Though it's clear where the author's sympathies lie, their ups and downs aren't governed by anything more than their own shallow decisions, and for all the bad times, the trend is upward in the first third. It's weird--really weird--that we see so little of the war, but the war still feels like a turnaround. Some characters suffer more tragically (almost in a conventional literary way). History gets warped as a consequence of the conflict, and importantly to Dos Passos, the Labor movement becomes more critical and (he appears to hope) adversarial. By The Big Money, some of the big events are hitting the character's lives in an obvious fashion, there's influenza now killing people on screen, and the lives lived in the boom twenties brings are larger, the self-destruction is deeper into society and more personally deadly to the people we're supposed to relate to. We see, by the end, shots of hopeless mine-town squalor, and of idealists getting beaten down and shot. We see a movement rise, which I'll tell you, is impossible to advocate in historical hindsight. But it's a subtle picture that emerges from the whole, put together almost like a mosaic of similar pieces, and it's an epic one.







* For the first several entries, it felt like Dos Passos was following me around, and there are enough O'Higginses, Higgenbothams, and Higginses sneaking around in the margins to make me positively paranoid.

Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

In the story of 2312, the emotional world of a gentle young acolyte explodes open when he discovers an ancient musical instrument in the caves outside Megadon city, under the twin moons of his home planet.  But, deterred by Father Brown and the other Temple priests, he suffers a mental breakd--

Oh shit.  Wait.  No, I'm describing the progressive rock epic, 2112.  The science fiction novel, 2312 is set a couple hundred years later.  Obviously.

It (the novel) primarily serves as a wide-angle view of life in the civilized solar system that takes place on almost all the other planets of the solar federation.  It's conveyed mosaic-like, primarily filled with point-of-view character sections, soaring across diverse geography, liberally broken up with creative lists, encyclopedia entries, interpretations of contemporary art forms, and highlights from historical documents.  (I'd bet that Mr. Robinson has also enjoyed a John Dos Passos phase.)

The year 2312, in Robinson's history, is a pivotal one.  The plot is... well, there is a plot, I guess.  The story begins with an attack on the primary human settlement on Mercury.  Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram, our two protagonists, are connected in different ways to one of extended humanity's key independent political and scientific groups, and in that capacity, they chase the whodunit clues around the solar system.  I believe that, plot-wise, the effect is meant to be one of various paths intersecting, showcasing kind of an inflection point between the ages in that titular, and no solid climax is really intended.  That's fine, but it's centered on a mystery and a chase, and that motor doesn't propel things forward worth a damn--seriously, I recall finding myself 200 pages in, trying to catalogue whether any movement toward solving the central mystery had occurred at all--and even by the end of the book, all that's really revealed is that the human sphere is a little bigger than realized, and that there are new factions in it, with different motivations. 

But for all that, it's not an unpleasant traipse.  Robinson's schtick, as I understand things, is environmentally-themed sf.  If we presuppose that human capability could advance so far, then how the heck could it be done?  I believe that 2312 takes place in the same continuity as his more famous Mars trilogy (probably why it's skirted here in favor of everything else), in which Robinson took to task a plausible-within-known-physics approach to making the red planet habitable, complete with planet-scale engineering and challenging political ramifications.  (Or so I understand without having read them--this is a theme of interest to me, but with a new author, I preferred a standalone volume for an introduction.) 

2312 takes place in the century following an established Martian civilization.  Most of the rest of the system has been worked over similarly by that year, and Robinson takes care to describe how, in the case of each sterile alien desert, a stable human environment could conceivably be engineered, trucking nitrogen from Titan, for example, or cooling Venus and whacking it hard enough with celestial objects to give it a day.  And if people lived on that toxic, cataclysmic rock, then what would the transition be like?  Or could a city could thrive by constantly fleeing the blazing hellscape of Mercury's bright side?  How could small bodies could be turned into floating terraria of all varieties?  (Robinson creates a lot of cultural diversity in these outskirts, and he smirks at a lot of classic science fiction societies along the way.)  How could our own earth possibly be un-fucked?  Robinson really enjoys humanizing these landscapes (figuratively and literally), and he shows at least enough scientific grasp of ecology, and paints enough limitations and constraints, for me to suspend my disbelief.  Even in 2312, with the ability to shift matter throughout the system at will, humanity is starting to confront resource shortages.  And so it goes.

My disbelief in human cooperation was a little harder to suspend, though.  One problem for me is that his society me an unfortunate parallel with those John Varley Seven Worlds novels (which I love), which maybe didn't wrangle the angle of geological science in such a detailed way, but understood us hairless apes so very brilliantly, and that society spread hypothetically across the ecliptic plane was dysfunctional enough to accept.  Real governments and populations are so diverse and cloying--and Robinson worked at this, I realize, he was taking a good approach to express exactly this, but the locals were still not shown as stultifying enough or brutal enough to convince me they could overcome themselves.  Maybe it's just my cynicism: I can't convince myself that 20 billion of us would survive indefinitely in a state of high technology, even after extending the odds by moving into every abandoned shack in Sol's neighborhood and squeaking a few minor gods out of the machine.

Not to say Robinson's individual characters are unconvincing.  I liked them well enough, and they kept me reading.  I think he did succeed in creating very exotic and altered people who could, superseding every homer prejudice we would ordinarily have, be easily recognized as not only regular folks, but good, decent, and distinguishable ones.  Of course, if, before I invested in them, I had caught on that impulsive, self-destructive Swan was not only from Mercury but mercurial, and that patient, thoughtful Wahram, from Titan, was literally saturnine, I might have found it a hair too cute.  So I may have just ruined them for you, but it worked out for me.  In all, it was a enjoyable tour.

Drunkard's Walk: Ten Short Thoughts

1. More digital age obsolescence: Cars, at least until recently, still got sold listing AM/FM radio (yup, frequency modulated signals processed at no extra charge) and tape decks, and while I'm aware that you can get modern car audio at a premium, I am not willing to pay for it. It was a shock that my '06 had come so far as to include a CD player standard. I don't want the fucking bluetooth, nor do I want to drop an extra hundred bucks (forty more than my beloved little MP3 player) on that broadcaster that sends signal to my radio, but Jesus, let's ease the transition here. It strikes me that it would be a simple engineering matter to add one of those TRS style audio jacks that have been around since forever, and which every pocket audio device has sported for the last 30 years as a headphone connector. In a sane world, I could just use my car stereo as an amplifier for whatever, without necessitating hundreds of dollars of electronics in between. Is it not expensive enough a solution to add on every car radio? It'd sure make me happy.

2. Warpaint: When the Black Crowes' seventh CD came out last year, and some hack at Maxim took the opportunity to unload his pent up opinions about the band without wasting the time to listen to it, I totally put the album on my to-buy list. Naturally, it took awhile. Admittedly, the project is not terribly inspired: the tracks have the casual brio of a talented hippie-party jam band, and compared to Shake Your Money Maker, the whole thing sounds a little...optional. But still. Criticizing them for knocking off the Rolling Stones? I am pretty sure that the Rolling Stones (not even mentioning their more embarrassing efforts) are not even aware that you can put so many instruments in a band, and tired as the Robinsons may be, when they play the bluesy, weed-baked, countrified rock songs, it sounds like they're at least vaguely in tune with wherever it is they came from.

3. Via IOZ (and recycling my comment): I don't know much about running companies, but from my passing association with certain kinds of nerds, I'm pretty sure that Carly Fiorina is the reason why people now say "Hewlett ...what?". But at least you could call her an economic expert by dint of some ruinous joyrides through corporate America. What have George Will, Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, or George Stephanopolous ever fucking done or learned? Check out the video. Paul Krugman looks like the tired foodie ringer they put in with the actors and celebrities that for unknown reasons make up the Iron Chef judging panels. At least there, people don't live and die by culinary art.

4. But let's not get carried away: But then, I don't fully accept economics anyway. No matter how furiously you model, how clever your mathematical simulations, even if you uncover some amazing truths about behavior in the ensemble, no matter how interesting it is, or how useful, and even if it can be an excellent approximation, economics ain't quite dealing with natural law. (Uh, probably.) How much people will pay for stuff is not, at the bottom of it all, a fact--it's an opinion. And let's face it, people's opinions tend to be stupid.

5. Anyway, we're still damned if we do: Speaking of economics, the new bailout is super (if you're creating money, then let's print a little for everyone) and so are green jobs, and maybe you can even change some of the deeply held public opinions about our relationship with energy (not that that's the intention), which would be awesome. But you can't trump physics with enthusiasm. No amount of legislated work projects is going to circumvent the usual conservation laws. If we're lucky, we'll keep ourselves from going too far or too quickly down the other side of the peak (and maybe economics will slow it naturally, provided we don't all lose the public faith), and maybe if we're far luckier than we deserve, we'll buy enough time for nuclear fusion to come on line or some such shit, but let's not pretend we're not limited by the rapidly disappearing black ooze. This is the second-biggest reason I hate American politicians, by the way, and if Obama's less aggravating than most of them, then, well, he's still going to molest my children sometime down the line. Maybe keeping up the infrastructure that connects the burbs with easy highway access shouldn't be the first priority going forward.

6. Bad Graphs: That said, while I buy into some version of peak oil, there are good and bad arguments going on there. The charts are famous enough, and it's easy to grasp how regional production peaks and then tails (pace Dr. Hubbert), and to picture that fact against how much many regions are still likely to be out there (e.g.). On the other hand, graphs that pretend to pinpoint the dramatic peak have to make their point by extrapolating heavily, and should therefore be regarded with caution. Penciling a line that tanks starting, always, one year from now (some more egregiously than others) is particularly inelegant. I believe you in the general sense, so please stop going out of your way to look like you're lying.

7. Spelling America with a 'K' are we?: Reading John Dos Passos (link forthcoming) got me thinking about the timing of anti-Communist sentiment in America. It Anti-Labor feelings had settled in pretty hard before the Great War, and a good historian would probably catalogue the movement as a response to conditions following the good ole industrial revolution, an answer to the new aristocracy and the condition of the filthy underpaid masses that grew out of those innovative times. Anti-communismlabor was, naturally enough, the response of that aristocracy, of the political and economic power. The Bolsheviks across the sea were hated by authority well before they earned it, and although they were conceived as anti-Capitalist, the notion of resisting Soviet geographic expansion came about somewhat later. That the Communist revolutions turned out to generate their own tyrants, that Communism turned into a competitor for big global authority...it all would be sort of funny if it weren't for the millions dead.

8. Last bit of radicalism, I promise: And you know, as a good technical guy (bourgoisie by way of Sallie Mae), I'm not a huge fan of labor unions, I'm unimpressed by their leadership, and have been occasionally miffed by their (okay: media-exaggerated) demands. If bad business practices must be countered with organization, then I still don't cherish the idea of yet another numbnut garnishing my wages in the name of alleged representation. This morning, WBUR's media analyst (now there's a job) John Carroll, showcased some ads on either side of the Employee Free Choice Act, featuring caricatures of both Labor and Corporate bosses, and I felt tempted to acknowledge a truth that might lie somewhere in between, if just this once. But if Communism was a disaster, limited Socialism didn't seem to tank Western Europe, and on a national or corporate level, either economic model can serve its people well or poorly enough. Democracy may be a bulwark against tyranny, but it's a temporary and often marginal one. The bottom line is not the vote and it's not the economic model--it's really more what we're conditioned, by ourselves and by experience, to expect. (You know, in the aggregate. I don't think any of us can just will our job back, at least if we don't work in marketing.) That can be changed in rare instances, sometimes surprisingly, and within some constraints, and for sure, it can be supressed.

9. Thought experiment: It's hard for humans to avoid identifying with one another according to sex or tribe, but the average opinion seems to be a little bit malleable vis a vis inclusivity. I'd argue that with some good marketing, and without longstanding systemic barriers (slavery, complicated pregnancy, and a good justification for the division of labor come to mind--admittedly I'm talking a sort of frictionless spherical social paradigm here), racism and sexism would likely relax to some inclusive equilibrium within the American tribe, such as it is. Unfortunately, homogenization still appears to be an ugly, generations-long process, walking toward uniformity according to some slow-ass rate law, a few hundred million individually diffusive events, human bumping into human. In this experiment, I think sexism would let go of its hold on public opinion sooner than racism. Why? Because we all have at least one parent that's of the opposite gender. (We could outgrow racism the same way of course, but I haven't had the nerve to even mention the Bulworth plan to my wife.)

10. My tribe didn't even make the playoffs: I'm rooting for the Steelers next week because it reinforces my long-held notion that the Arizona Cardinals are a clown factory of football, a perennially laughable franchise where stars go to underperform, and where playoffs are best viewed from a drunken self-loathing stupor. And it's not that it should have been so much different this year, with a 9-7 record going in, but, like, there they are. It took getting to the conference championship to match the win record of the New England Patriots. Now there may be some irony to take this position as a New England fan--you want to talk about your decades of quasi-football--but I point out that the Pats earlier Super Bowl appearances (even under that douchebag Parcells) were hard to imagine too back then too. On purely aesthetic grounds, if this be Arizona's 1997, then the world remains fathomable. I can live with however well or poorly they perform afterwards.

Review: Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano

So I was pleased to learn from this book that one name of the form is zuihitsu, based on Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book, one of classical Japan's several indelible contributions to literary form. At least it's a word to keep in mind as I attempt to review Steinbeck or Dos Passos doing similar things, even as they may diverge from the contemplative, essay-ish, impression-heavy style that the name more correctly implies. I like it better than writing "mosaic" or "tapestry," and it's nice to lessen the obligation to say things about sums and parts and all that, but of course I will anyway. Mirrors strings together historical tidbits, each several paragraphs long, more or less chronologically, chosen for poignancy, sensitivity, and horror. Given history, it's not like he lacks material. It feels a little bit like some polite children's lesson-book that one only barely remembers, but I'll tell you, picking at the world in three-paragraph chunks is also a lot like reading a blog. It would be a brilliant project in the right hands. Just sayin'.

Subtitling it "stories of almost everyone" is a bit ambitious (the original una historia casi universal appears to convey a slightly different meaning, no? Galeano evidently collaborated closely with the translator, Mark Fried, to ensure the right context), but it is impressive for its comprehensiveness just the same. He takes us through prose-poetry snapshots of lives, starting at the fuzzy dawn of human memory through the bloody birth of our new century, stopping at many corners of civilization along the way. Although I think it takes more excursions eastward than western literature may normally, the focus is still mainly centered on the Americas and Europe, but that's mostly, from Uruguay, what he has been confronted to explain. The language of each individual entry strives for a beautiful simplicity, and I have to admit that I wasn't sure at first that the language quite lived up to the attempted sentiment, but a couple things about that: (1) it's a translation from the Spanish, and (2) it does add up. So it's bigger than the sum of the parts after all; the cumulative effect gets in there quickly, and I surprised myself staying up late pulling through half the book in a night. As for the language, my running hypothesis is that Spanish (heavily Latinate, relatively formal) lends itself well to a certain directness of expression, which may be minimalist or deceptive, but it's pretty hard to make that case with so few data points. It's unfortunate that my language skills are not up to reading it in the original.

Galeano's historical mission is to remind his readers of the causes and the consequences of power. He neglects to address the somber, theatrical regrets that the wielders of power find so ennobling, and shifts his focus to the people who actually bore the cost of it all, on those obvious casualties that history likes to leave unmentioned. Revisionist? More like making a different claim as to What It's All About, which is worthwhile in any honest history, and in literature doesn't even require an explanation. These things happened, and happened more constantly and more universally than big daddy cracker's grand march of progress. The other half of it, the judgment that conquest just isn't so fucking great, becomes hard to refute when you actually start counting the lives, or the quality of lives.

The author's governing philosophy is gently humanist, maybe another Howard Zinn type of anarchist, with a general distrust of power and its justifications, formal or otherwise, perhaps a little optimistic about democracy, appreciative of open-minded scientific inquiry, of art, supportive of common wholesome comforts over the excess grief imposed by the big ideas of powerful men, however noble they may seem. If there's a religious sentiment here, it's more about quiet spirituality--early on, he grants primitive fables a lot of power--than any formal religion, for which he doesn't hesitate to document myriad horrors. If Inkberrow reads this thing, note that Galeano isn't too deluded about it all. He doesn't come out against the Enlightenment, aware that he is sharing many of the values purported at that time, and he extends them as their original proponents failed to. He takes a couple pokes at John Locke's convenient theories of property rights (or of their limits when it came to John Locke), the failures of the French Revolution, the limited sphere of the American founders, etc. What good are values of equality, after all, if after every implementation, the result is still violently unequal for so many people? My favorite quote in this regard was directed against Marxism:

And thus, for what it said and what it did not, the Manifesto confirmed the most profound truth its authors had hit upon: reality is more powerful and astonishing than its interpreters.

The generally equanimous view is one to which I am not unsympathetic, which is no doubt one reason I appreciated the book. In any given one-note vignette, the impression of many of our saints can become monstrous, and of our monsters, unforgotten. But he can sanctify normal people beyond normal too. He doesn't change these perspectives without awareness, and in at least one passage he pens how humans can be all of those things, which is of course true on an individual scale too. I tend to be more forgiving of history's more well-intentioned or half-right actors, who are inevitably flawed products of their times, although Galeano has knocked another chink or two in that apology, pointing to what the wrong half costs. And we can still look critically on the times themselves. Our times too.

Book Review: Ulysses, by James Joyce

Well, that took a while. Ulysses (maybe you've heard of this one) is really a special kind of challenge: the plot isn't terribly complicated, and the characters and their motivations are not indecipherable. It's not the kind of puzzle novel that obscures plot points amid selective omissions. It's got its share of jokes and analogies that probably require the better part of a bachelor's in liberal arts to get behind. I didn't get as many as I'd have liked--I realized, for example, that I was missing a lot of Stephen Dedalus's classical philosophical motif on his long walk on the beach--but I don't think they're unassailable. The real challenge is just the reading, it's the form, the structure, the confounding sense of flow. I've frequently been thinking of it as a long-form experiment with the language, which isn't wrong, but which is a little unfair. Ulysses does what novels generally try to do, even if takes the long way around. It explores and reveals some insight about the human condition using plot, character, setting, and the tools of language. What Joyce is doing is looking closer at the English's relationship to the other things. It's one of those books with a high entry fee--it's a lot to ask to decipher structure, theme and plot all at once--but I think it's actually easy to enjoy, provided you can get used to it and don't mind the length.

I guess the briefest of summaries is in order: 18 sequential chapters of novella length, each varying the frame in one way or another. Sometimes Joyce is getting in his characters' heads in a narrative that reads a little closer to the loopy curlicues of actual thought than the usual exposition-and-dialogue. Other times, he takes on some formal analogies here and there (headlines, a stage play, an oral defense). Some are chapter-long thematic vehicles, and there are a few episodes of unreliable, flawed narration, connected to the story or omniscient. A real hodgepodge of style, but it's connected, and you can get the authorial voice in all of them. I realize (based on reading part of the introduction) that each section is informally titled based on episodes from The Odyssey, but not familiar with the critical convention, I gave them nicknames of my own. (I try to avoid certain background reading before I get going with a review, because I usually find someone who has already did a better job of saying what I'm thinking. This'll probably be the worst case.) Although there are a number of throwaways to Homer's epic, I imagine it's "Ulysses" mostly for the general thematic case, a story that is meant to be some canonical representation of a bunch of stuff that happens in the wandering between a departure and a return. (Although having only read it once, I'm awfully hesitant to tell you what's not in there.) The narrative styles seemed intermittent to me, possibly selected for what might best illustrate a plot or thematic point, but if there was an overarching method to choosing the modes of expository madness, I missed it.

The most painful chapter? I found "Maternity" (ch 14) dreadful to get through, most frustratingly, because it's where the plot really begins to coalesce. It starts as a nearly unintelligible drumbeat of connected words, resolving to more sensible, but still difficult, prose, possibly meant to evoke the confusion of the exit which finally sends Stephen and Leopold Bloom on a parallel journey. For all the female points of view Joyce daringly got into in other chapters, here among Bloom, Stephen, and the medical students, for all of their clever contrasts about procreation, we never did quite hear what the ladies might have thought about it. Buck and the gang are never more annoying than in this chapter, and what actually bothered me most was that I just didn't understand the nature of the place--why did the ward have a bar in it? My favorite chapter ("The Tales of Brave Ulysses," Ch 12) was a more normal bar where a loquacious bigoted drunk recounts Bloom's visit, getting seamlessly interrupted by some other brain which goes off on silly, purple tangents. Bloom isn't represented as a potent soul here and his climactic rejoinder isn't impressive. The chapter balances the sympathy of the presumed listener and the distaste of the reader, and both voices of the narrators are, for their personal or intellectual failings, droll as hell, with even more smiles in the contrast. This is the chapter you most hear the brogue.

A great deal needs to be said about the audible element. It took me to Ch 11 (lamely, "Music") to finally realize that Joyce is doing more than offering a few occasional teasers on music, but he's often structuring his prose that way. It's not lyrical in the sense I'd usually mean it: although you'll find the occasional alliteration, repetition or rhyme, and the words are certainly chosen for aesthetic effect, it's not words to a song (well, usually--a short sample of lyrics are in fact how the chapter opens). Joyce is instead trying to make the language itself do the the things that music does. There are recurring rhythms and patterns that go along with episodes and characters. Right down to the syntax, he's trying to work harmonies, sometimes letting a sequence of thought or words trail up while another drifts down, like a dominant closing in on the tonic, or, you know, declining to close (hi switters). Maybe you'd say it's unrhymed poetry, but I think I'd rather call it prose music. Now, it's got to be hard to make literature do this on so fundamental a level, or at least it was tougher to read than a stage play. Do you really need prose to copy something that sound is already successful at conveying, that is, are there more reasons to read this than some experimental satisfaction? Well, there's more to Ulysses than that obviously, and Joyce eventually gets a payoff or two for his themes, which is probably a lot clearer on a second read.

The word I'm looking for up there by the way, is leitmotif, which, like I said, isn't exactly unfamiliar in other media. Stephen's theme music, the rhythm of his streams of consciousness, is scholarly and complicated, and is most likely to incorporate these language tricks I just described. I have him as played by a string quartet, an adagio on the beach, an allegro in the library (musical terms suit his Italian scholarship), possibly a march-timed interlude in the maternity ward. Bloom, on the other hand, is simpler than Stephen, he's a complex man too, but more linear, something just a hair odd in the gait and the tonality but still speech-like. A little uptight, and a little pervy. I don't doubt for an instant that Joyce had him as klezmer. (Although when I got bored of his section, I found that singing the lines to the melody of Blackbird usually worked.) Molly Bloom needs a Spanish guitar, slowly accelerating and upping the pitch to build to an offscreen climax (yes). These difference sound trite to describe, although I think I'm right about how they're intended, but they are executed very carefully. We get a treat when Joyce finally contrasts a pair of them in chapter 13 ("Voyeur"). On the beach, Gerty MacDowell's inner voice is (disappointingly) immature and most closely resembles the streams of consciousness you'll more commonly find in literature, and halfway in, as always without warning, we're back Bloom's agreeable up-tempo to learn about the other side of the skirt-peeping. What I most appreciated about this technique is that it built a real feeling of the differentness of the various characters, highlighted them as individuals, very separate in their own minds. It's different than the usual tools of character-building, in which the author identifies a few traits as a skeleton, then fleshes them out as needed. You can put traits on Joyce's characters too, but they're more emergent, the result of an accretion of representations by themselves and by others. Which is more realistic?

It's hard to read words as allegorical musical notes, but these various styles tapped other veins too. The visible is the other modality we can't avoid, thanks to Stephen. Chapter 15 ("Hookey") is a lengthy sequence of the shifting perceptions and thought excursions we got used to in the musical chapters, now written as if they are externalized and viewed, with elaborate props, costumes, gimmicks and stage cues inserted by the narrator. Joyce's go-to analogy was theater or vaudeville (or some fusion thereof--Stephen's friends always caper around in a gaggle, but here every bit player is a member of knowing extras, like a multipurpose chorus or a portable peanut gallery), but these absurd stretches of sight gags are very accessible to, um, a student of modern visual media. Imagine the visit to Dublin's night town as a cartoon and it loses its weirdness quickly. I get from chapter 10 ("Tales of Springfield") a similar feeling, this one closely resembling the kaleidoscopic visuals that John Dos Passos made a lot of hay with a few years later. And there's a hell of a cultural difference between 1904 (the setting) and 1920 (published) to account for this sort of perceptual thing, following along the rapid development and meteoric popularity of film. In those intervening years, the roving camera eye became a staple of the Western experience.

As the novel progresses, the frequency of leitmotifs declines and we get a number of formally structured chapters before it goes out on Molly's big solo. Although the narrators could get verbose, these more obviously engineered chapters were easier to digest, a straight story under the avoidable modifiers and cliches appropriate to the style of the mystery lecturers, or the mandates of the framing. Jesus, in a similar context did I write that "there's a fine line between cleverness and excusing yourself for bad writing, between showing your authorial hand and distancing your readers from your characters"? Well, it's the execution, right, and I think one reason that these skits go on so long is that Joyce wants to show beyond doubt who's in control of the language here; he tosses off a profundity now and again to let us know he's in on the ideas as well. We're not going to forget that it's good writing and not a hobble on some literary crutches.

So, how serious is Ulysses? The thing is full of humor really (a lot more ironic smiles than gut laughs), and a lot of the "important" subject matter gets subsumed under the imperfect characters and faulty narration modes. I don't think the characters are particularly deep, not in the sense of a direct and profound analysis, or of the sterling character traits with which novels usually present people, and Bloom, our main dude, nearly falls under the weight of stereotypes when it comes to the littler descriptions. Stephen is complex in an intellectually facile way, but he comes off as unfocused (understandable: he lost his mother and got sucked back to Dublin; he's broke and too proud or too decent to go home to a family that is also broke; his friends are assholes), and as a wounded idealist. We don't forget that he's young. Mind you, I have gotten this vibe from Shakespeare too (although in his case, he had defining adjectives run through his characters like pillars). 300 years of literature later, and I don't believe Joyce is exactly trying to sell us shallow characters either, more, maybe, on the idea that a lot of human depth in literature is illusory, that our actual nature doesn't map as well to storytelling as we pretend. Joyce is without doubt taking the novel representation very seriously indeed.

I should be in bed, but there's one last thing I want to say here. I think the reason Ulysses is liked because it has a good heart. It's got jokes, jerks, pontification, losers, fuckups and oddballs, life, youth, age, and death, satisfaction, disappointment, marriage, sex, food, drink, beauty, music. It's about the things we care about, and it may take a while, but eventually you find that you care about the people in there too. A lot of the story is a variously one-sided and unflattering portrait of Leopold and Molly's marriage, which is unfaithful in action and constantly disregarding or misrepresented in thought. But the funny thing is that the Blooms are always thinking about one another. They're in mutual orbit, and in their way, they do connect as the primary people in one another's lives. It's strange, but really quite genuine and sweet. After a long journey home, I found myself touched at the end.

[Some edits.]

[Update: I'm a fan of these sorts of synesthetic cross-media explorations in general, which is probably why so much of the review glommed onto that area. I happened to catch Ratatouille last night, and to blabber again what I loved about it, it did a great job expressing on film how food tastes, and in the sequence where the food critic was converted, the expression of the emotional connection we have with food crossed over into brilliance.

It's an activity we do all the time, right? We talking animals are always finding ourselves explaining how things feel or how things went down. It's central to our experience, and in one sense, it's what literature basically is. Joyce really broke some molds in finding and then using different representational modes in writing. A little higher-level (probably) than using jazz and fireworks to show how flavors feel, although I think future art historians will look kindly on the Pixar efforts too. Film, stage, music, and fuck it, even lectures (and maybe cuisine too) are interesting media in that they've always struggled with the reverse of what telling normally does. They take a story, and must then convert it to display and sounds. Always a challenge, and it can obviously be hard to do well, judging by the endless reels of crap out there. All the failures to make a decent movie out of a good book. But even there, we've assimilated some fairly complex things to teh point where we take them for granted. Imagine the work that goes into a good movie score, for example. I think when it hits, it can be a higher level of craft than we usually give it credit for. Much as I like words and all.]