James Joyce Hacks Reality

When the subversiveness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is spoken of, most people jump to the book’s alleged pornography and to the obscenity trials that lend credence to that legend. While the pornographic element is certainly present in the text, Joyce’s florid prose renders actions that may be lewd in execution as poetry on the page (ex. He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the saddle may be vulgar but given the baseness of contemporary pornography Joyce seems far from scandalous). In all the bluster around the book’s notorious obscenity and route to publication, the book’s true subversiveness is often overshadowed. It is not pornography that makes this classic novel subversive, rather structural oddities that allow the text to subvert, and even ‘hack’, reality.

Our brains are simple organs of organic matter that have limited interactions with the rest of the material world. We can only see a fragment of the known visible spectrum, we cannot hear like dolphins or cats, we cannot smell like hunting dogs, we forget people and places and what we were doing this time yesterday. We are limited by the boundaries of our human perception, and our culture is a dynamic set of consensuses and perceptions that expand and contract with our understanding. Reality is, in many ways, whatever we agree that it is.

In this era where “commerce” is favored to “art,” where most of our music, movies, videos, games, tv shows, websites, and books are made with a toddler’s giddy hand clapping impulse of “do it again!!! do it again!!!!”, we sometimes forget that the role of the artist is not merely to give us the world as we know it: small, digestible, and easy to understand. Art should be a challenge, and art should have a tenuous relationship to the world as we know it. `True’ art—art that is done without care of the commercial contract but in the spirit of wild-eyed discovery in the unknown—is disruptive of ourselves and our perceptions. Disruptive, most of all, to our ordained narratives.

In Joyce’s time mankind’s view of reality had undergone, and was still undergoing, massive paradigmatic shifts. Darwin’s work on the theory of evolution was less than a century old, Einstein had just proposed his reality bending concepts of relativity and special relativity, Freud had given the world a new way of thinking about the human mind, and the freethought movement of the late 19th century had challenged the notion that all we see and known is the preordained plan of a divine creator. Still, in 1922 much like today the culture at large was divided between these new ways of seeing and the old dogmas these new theories threatened to displace. It is fitting, then, that Joyce’s Dublin has one foot in the 19th century and another firmly in the 20th. Make no mistake, though, Joyce’s mind had accepted these new notions of perception, and his characters emerge from this understanding as some of the first truly internalized depictions in literature.

Joyce’s reality hack comes in the way he dismantles story, and in doing so shows us how the human mind works—how we are all fragments of story and memory and how our interactions with one another and with the material world always happen in the midst of conflicts that are mostly internal. Ulysses is supposedly a recasting of Homer’s Odyssey, except there are no long voyages, no Sirens, no cyclops, no epic battles to reclaim a fallen homeland. Instead the “story” of Ulysses is simple, one man—Leopold Bloom—and a few minor characters going to a wake, going to work, eating, drinking, and doing all the simple and mundane tasks that fill our lives. In terms of epic fanfare, Joyce’s plot is surprisingly lacking.

By the time Joyce published Ulysses other modernists works were already poking their way into the mainstream, but it was Joyce who exploded the division between the internal and external worlds, casting his characters in a diaspora of visions, daydreams, musings, and reality. By fusing the internal and external worlds, dismantling the walls that had always divided the two, Joyce recreated how we all think of story. That is the essence of a reality hack.

Though the book challenged all the cultural and literary norms of its time, the “shock” of Ulysses’ design is difficult to place in our contemporary moment. Today we all swim in a wash of information unmoored. Joyce’s girth of information, his onslaught of myth and story, his meandering and myriad lists of characters, his hedonistic interiority, may seem self indulgent to the modern reader but the “revolutionary” tag, at least on the surface, doesn’t seem to hold.

Ulysses is a burst of information, a kaleidoscope in which all the known and unknown universe is unleashed in a torrent of words—words that bend reality, even sometimes creating new words from common words that only have have meaning within the context of the text at hand. The life of Harold and Molly Bloom—as we experience it on the page—is an ebb and flow of internalized data.

Since Joyce’s time our external world has come more and more to resemble that internal flow. Our world is inundated with such information. The internet, “smart phones,” mobile devices of all stripes, LCD screens on Buses and train stations, advertisements in the check out line, machines for buying tickets and banking, always and everywhere we are in the web and flow of digital media—of “information.”

Logic would seem to hold that our current state of overstimulated reality would make Ulysses easier to read, but Ulysses is a radical departure for the modern reader. The human model the text presents could not be more diametrically opposed to our way of living. As radical as Ulysses may have been in its time—it’s even more radical in a world so saturated with information. We can now “know” everything (the world’s data is only a click of the iPhone away), but few of us seem to “learn” anything.

Ulysses was written long before Wikipedia, before the utility of the internet, wireless phones and fax machines, before high speed rail and video conferencing. “Information,” back then, was far more difficult to obtain—and to find it people had to resort to barbaric rituals such as going to the museum or library, writing letters, or worse—talking to other people. To become a learned man, particularly a man as learned as Leopold Bloom, was a lifelong endeavor.

Perhaps the conditions that were required for a man like Leopold Bloom to become as knowledgeable about the world as he is also built an essential part of his character. What Leopold has is a sense of narrative—a sense of narrative that most of us who swim the endless sea of information in our world today seem to lack.

Leopold knows that he is both the most important person in the world (as one version of the world lives only inside his head, thus leading his perceptions of the world to be the perfect manifestation of the universe coming into its own awareness) and that he is totally inconsequential to the world (in the wake and scale of so many people and so many galaxies in the cosmos can one man really think that he matters that much?). In the theory of Joseph Campbell (who wrote a skeleton key to Joyce’s later work Finnegans Wake) Leopold is on a hero’s journey and that journey takes place on any given day, every day.

How few of us possesses this sense of journey today? We stumble from mall to grocery store, led along not by myth and legend but by marketing hyperbole. Awash in data, we think nothing of it. We do not shape our own reality, we are led to it by whichever marketer can most effectively play to our base sub-conscience desires.

How the marketers and the politicians would weep if ever enough of us figured out that all the external data in the world is meaningless to a man who has not invested in the development of his mind and soul. How the powerful would weep if today’s artists could only figure out how to subvert the cultural code—to challenge us to rise again to the weight and heft of our own narratives in the context of a world that remains, at its core, unknown and unknowable. To demand, like Leopold Bloom, that we each recreate the world in our own image each day, every day is a subversive act that few of us have the stamina for.

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