Ulysses: James Joyce, Jesus Christ, and the Buddha

Well, it is that day.  Again.  Bloomsday, the James Joyce equivalent of Groundhog Day.

I used to despise the chore of having to read a James Joyce novel.  Not only that, I despised people who went around pontificating about the greatness of his works.  I read them as-at-gunpoint in college.  And years later, as an older man and with the best critical works at hand, I occasionally tackled one of his books again along with a reading group.  Eventually I became somewhat of an expert on the book and the critical literature.  I could see its value as a work of art, but my heart just wasn't in it.

That all changed when I discovered John P. Anderson's FINDING JOY IN JOYCE:  A READERS GUIDE TO ULYSSES (2000).  This non-academic (a recovering lawyer) explained the novel in a way that seemed miraculous to me, in a line-by-line interpretation.  I went on to read his multi-volume study of FINNEGAN'S WAKE, as well as his other critical works.  All of his books are now well-worn treasures on my "most-beloved" shelf.


From Anderson's introduction:

"The principal issue in this novel is creating individual meaning in modern life.  This continues to be the principal issue for human kind as the 21st century opens.  Stephen Dedalus, a character in the novel representative of the young Joyce, has the modern disease of the spirit, narcissism.'

"Joyce's medicine for the diseased spirit is a custom blend of self-realized individuality combined with a detached respect for the human unity.  This blend combines Jesus and Buddha, not as they have been marketed by institutional religions but as they lived their lives as humans.'

In Joyce's blend, the respect for the unity does not limit human possibilities.  Indeed, Joyce's Way to the eternal is for each individual to maximize his or her own human possibilities within recognition of the unity.  Founded on his own personal experience of the human condition, Joyce's existential medicine can provide spiritual health in the 21st century.'

"The sublime joy in Joyce is the art by which the levels of existential meaning are brought forth.  Many consider Joyce's art as seminal for modern literature.  He enlarged the possibilities of prose with revolutionary techniques and methods of coherence.

And his methods carry meaning.  In Joyce's Architecture, the material is cyclical and the part implies the whole.  These patterns bear the imprint of Joyce's views of historical and ultimate reality:  history is cyclical, and the human condition implies the nature of the powers that be.  Joyce's art is, in my opinion, one of the wonders of Western civilization.  My purpose is to make its power and beauty accessible to you.'


"But readers beware:  reading Joyce can fundamentally alter your entire outlook on life.  This is what Joseph Campbell, pre-eminent mythographer and life long Joyce reader said:

"When you are reading Joyce, what you get is radiance.  You become harmonized, and that is what it is about.  It is not teaching you a lesson.  It is feeding you, giving you spiritual balance and spiritual harmony."

______


When I first read Anderson's introduction, I thought it a great conceit.  I had already read the most acclaimed critical works and some minor ones as well, and I was always skeptical of anyone who saw religious ideas in the work.

But, as it turned out, he was right.  His book awakened in me a different way of seeing, a new mode of interpretation--at least for this reader.  With the help of Anderson's study, I am now able to see the universals that were there in the work all along, symbolic connections to what Emerson called "the Oversoul."

JAWS and MADAME BOVARY and ZEN: Thursday's Critical Anaylsis

You can see John P. Anderson's excellent Flaubert's Madame Bovary: The Zen Novel at google books, at this link.


Anderson gives the classic a wonderful Zen interpretation.  Gustave Flaubert drew from several influences when writing his great novel, including Flaubert's own family and the historical Delphine Delamare, the real Madame Bovary.


Flaubert invented new literary techniques to subvert reader expectations in order to bring them to a new awareness, not just of literature, but of their own daily lives as well.  One way he does this is through the counterpoint of style and plot.  "The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion, and determinism."


"Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom [free will] deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire.  The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction.  Emma (Madame Bovary) is not free because she has the worm.  Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more.  Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society."


For a definition of Zen, Anderson uses the one in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...the Buddha-nature, or potential to achieve enlightenment, is inherent in everyone, but lies dormant because of ignorance.  It is best awakened not by the study of scripture, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images but by a sudden breaking through of the boundaries of common, everyday thought."


This sparkling study is nearly line-by-line and is 229 pages long, full of insights and wisdom.  Many authors and philosophers are cited, but in particular Anderson uses Schopenhauer's The World As Will And Idea and Parerga And Paralipomena: A Collection of Philosophical Essays.


Anderson says that the first chapter of Madame Bovary is about the establishment of the self.  The change in the narrators, between Charles and an anonymous "we" and an anonymous "I" leads to the detached observer with a Zen perspective.  The observer is free, while Madame Bovary is a slave to mindless desire:  "Me me me.  More more more. Shop shop shop.  These are the call signs for Emma Bovary."

So what do JAWS and MADAME BOVARY have in common?


A lot.  The insatiable will to consume especially.  Dean Sluyter, in a marvelous essay entitled "All You Can Eat," draws a fine Zen interpretation from Jaws. 


As with Flaubert's novel, the movie of Peter Benchley's Jaws opens with the point of view of the shark, "the shark-as-self" established with an underwater camera, nosing through the seaweed as if looking for prey with that dualism of its driving music in the background.  The collective "we" of the audience looks through the shark's eyes, traveling through the ocean.  Consume, consume, consume.


The shark is the great white, the great blank, the great nothingness.  It is an emblem of what the Buddhist's call "the hungry ghost," the all consuming desire.

Sluyter says, the first victim is the long-haired girl who runs off from the beach party to skinny-dip at sunset, a naked Eve calling to her impassive passed-out Adam to join her.  "Shown in a long shot, she swims tranquilly in the twilit water, which glows with a jewel-like radiance and fills the screen with its vast expanse, a tiny figure easily at one with the ocean of wholeness."  As in Tim Winton's Breath: A Novel and all the other such transcendental works I review here, the ocean is a symbol of the collective Oversoul in this interpretation. 

Then the shark approaches and we see her from below, from the shark's point of view.

In the movie, the forces of material consumption live in denial.  They want to cover up the truth with illusions and salesmanship.  The three men who resist the denial and set out to hunt the shark represent a trinity, and the way Sluyter uses it is consistent with the way it is used by Emerson, Melville, McCarthy, Conrad, and so many others frequently discussed in this blog.

Sluyter says that the shark is the main character, that Hooper, Brady and Captain Quint "are supporting characters who exemplify three different ways to confront the hungry self."  Sluyter says that the three approaches are what Buddhists could call the fundamentalist, the Hinayana, and the Mahayana.  These approaches yield three different outcomes.

1.  Quint has the fundamentalist, eye-for-an-eye approach.  "It is the way of an aggression rooted in dualism."  You might say that Quint is  a basic man dominated by his animal-nature.  He is the body in the body/mind/spirit trinity.

Quint's fundamentalism is driven by a perpetual struggle against any adversary conceived as Other than the one who struggles.  This is reflected in everything he does, the song he chooses to sing, the destruction of the radio, in everything he says.  His consuming hatred of the shark becomes self-consummation. 

2.  Sluyter says that monkish Brady represents the Theravada/Hinayana branch of Buddhism, the "smaller vehicle" as befits the small cage in which he descends in an effort to kill the shark.  If Quint is the body in the body/mind/spirit analogy, Brady represents the mind, the scholar, the shark expert always seeking more knowledge, a better understanding.  It is Brady who, after confronting the shark face-to-face, declares, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

3.  Sluyter says that Hooper represents the Mahayana or "greater vehicle" of Buddhism.  Hooper contains metaphorically the spiritual force of our common humanity that finally blows away the shark, the nothingness blown to nothingness.  The last scene shows Hooper and Brady paddling together on two of the buoys lashed together.  Hooper, representative of the spirit, says that he believes that the tide is with them.  Brady, representative of the mind, tells him to keep paddling.

Mind, body, spirit.  You should read Dean Sluyter's entire essay, which runs a long twenty pages and is collected in Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies.

THURSDAY'S CRITICAL-ANALYSIS: THE FURIES IN CORMAC MCCARTHY'S OUTER DARK, JOSEPH CONRAD'S VICTORY AND AUSTIN WRIGHT'S TONY AND SUSAN

Earlier this week, on Transcendental Tuesday, I discussed the value of that universal, the Trinity, especially as a tool of literary interpretation.  As in Walter Van Tilburg's  The Track Of The Cat (Western Literature Series), the trinity is often stylized with a spiritual man, an animal man, and a middle man, torn between the extremes of his spiritual/animal nature.  All three are one, the human condition.


Some literary works place a duality on top of the trinity, splitting them, Zeus-like, into two trinities, one light and one dark.  The three in the light are the better angels of our nature, while the three in the shadow self are the furies.


The furies appeared in Virgil’s work, as well as in Dante’s INFERNO, and they were a trinity composed of Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera (blood vengeance, righteous anger, and jealousy). The furies represent the shadow self, the repressed animal nature of man.  Sopholcles used the furies in the Oedipus plays.


Joseph Conrad's furies are counterparts to Cormac McCarthy's furies.  Both are trinities--dark spirit, dark middle man , dark animal man; you might see them as a stylized shadow side of superego, ego, and id.  The three who descend together on the protagonists consist of, respectively:
1. Jones - the dark-suited leader who epitomizes the spiritual darkness. Like the unnamed leader of McCarthy's triune, he is identified with the devil. Jones is not really his name, but an alias. He is identified with fire, as McCarthy's counterpart is described as sitting in the fire.  As it happens, Conrad wrote an alternative ending of VICTORY with Jones being consumed by fire, laughing, yelling that he was a force that could not be destroyed.
2. Ricardo - who is the counterpart to McCarthy's Harmon, the middle man pulled both by the dark spirit and by his brute animal nature, which incorporates lust.  Material, cunning, greedy and jealous, never satisfied, Ricardo is again and again described by Conrad as a feline, a wild cat, and a "cat stalking." McCarthy also uses the cat to signify animal nature.
When reading Conrad's description of Ricardo's cat smile quickly appearing out of the darkness, I could not help but think of the cat smile on OUTER DARK's bloody baby.

3. Pedro - this is the counterpart to the id(iot) in the Outer Dark triune. He is basic brute animal man, he smiles but "gapes" stupidly, with "simian arms" and "a monkey mind."
Joseph Conrad's VICTORY is the parable of a man who represses his animal nature and isolates himself on an island, but after he rediscovers his need for love and intimacy, the darker forces of human nature also descend upon him.  Cormac McCarthy's OUTER DARK is a parable about the evolutionary fall of consciousness into animal man.

Other versions of the furies exist throughout literature, of course.  One of my favorite reads this past year was TONY AND SUSAN by Faulkner scholar Austin Wright, which I discovered through the Friday's Forgotten Books series at THE RAP SHEET (at this link).  This inner book (for, Joseph Conrad-like, it is a book within a book) concerns a professor living the life of the mind who represses his knowledge of the animal nature of man, much to his chagrin.  He and his family are set upon by a triune of thugs, a dark trinity of furies.  The symbolic cat gets some play in this novel too.


As with all great literature, interpretations of these books vary widely and I don't pretend that my take is any better than others.  Both the recalcitrance of the book and the great variety of possibile interpretations are what make such literary works fun to read.


Linked for additional reading: Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period by Dianne Luce, The Mythos of Cormac McCarthy by Elisabeth Andersen,  No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Studies in Major Literary Authors) by Jay Ellis, and Conrad's Victory: Resurrection Lost by John P. Anderson.