Bloomsday

104 years ago on this day, a fictional event took place in the book of James Joyce, Ulysses. The central character, hero and icon of that book was called Leopold Bloom. So, some Irish people like to commemorate the 16th of June each year as 'Bloomsday', by dressing up in Edwardian clothes, eating kidneys, and reading extracts from Ulysses.

Ulysses on Steady Diet of Books

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"...and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and then the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auction in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousand of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deep-down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire ad the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914-1921

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from Ulysses: A Short History, by Richard Ellmann

"Ulysses may be seen to conduct its affirmation by discovery of kinship among disparate things, whether these are mind and body, casual and important, contemporary and Homeric, or Bloom and Stephen. The universe is, if nothing else, irrevocably interpenetrating, Joyce takes an almost mystical pleasure in convergence – of times, persons, qualities. These receive authorization in Ulysses from no abstract statement, but from language, which is part of the argument as well as means of expressing it. By displaying the utmost linguistic variety, in levels of speech, in styles of writing, Ulysses testifies that, beneath all forms of conscious striving, of individual life or social organization, human beings are at work with syllables to submit language as living and delighting proof of their gregariousness."

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is - at least currently - likely the most recognized of the Irish humorist's novels. It holds a more glamorous reputation than that of the previously reviewed Dalkey Archive and is less achingly literary and somewhat more sensible than his acclaimed debut, At Swim-Two-Birds. What part of that reputation comes from its association with the TV show Lost, as I said before, is probably that "both works are probably equally as difficult to follow".

The Third Policeman is a dark fantasy, a comic tale that delves into murder, death and metaphysics, but never outright farce. The book is set in the provincial Irish countryside, as opposed to the urban and suburban (respectively) Dublin settings of At Swim-Two-Birds and The Dalkey Archive. Hence the focus of the story is on the isolated, cocooned inhabitants of a very strange police station, to which the narrator and main protagonist turns to for assistance at the novel's start.

These policeman (of which there are three) harbour some strange habits, obsessions and, as is ultimately revealed, arcane knowledge. The first, the Sergeant Pluck, is essentially the base for Sergeant Fottrell of The Dalkey Archive, with his obsession with bicycles and their atomic dangers. The second, young Policeman MacCruiskeen, has as a hobby the production of an infinitely regressing series of wooden chests, each fitting inside the one before. The third, Policeman Fox, is the most mysterious, leading a nocturnal and otherwise invisible existence, and not appearing until the very end of the novel. Other characters include John Divney, the narrator's partner- and rival-in-crime of the opening chapters, Mathers, the dead or not-quite-dead miser, Joe, the narrator's soul; a group of one-legged men, said to be allegorical to the IRA; and, in another overlap with The Dalkey Archive, the mad scientist De Selby - who appears in a series of lengthy footnotes which themselves make up a kind of book-within-a-book.

The Dalkey Archive begins autobiographically, in the second paragraph - the first actually begins "Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with a spade" - briefly charting the way in which the situation that the narrator finds himself in emerged: the death of his parents; his living in a strange kind of bondage with Divney, the caretaker of the family farm and, later, public house; and their plan to steal the old miser, Mather's, money. Following the apparent murder of Mathers, and some lengthy periods of distrust, the narrator is sent to the old miser's house to retrieve the stashed metal box containing the object of the theft. However, in the tradition of fantastical stories everywhere, as well as in classic science fiction tales of weirdness, 'something happened':

"I cannot hope to describe what it was but it had frightened me very much long before I had understood it even slightly. It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation. The fingers of my right hand, thrust into the opening in the floor, had closed mechanically, found nothing at all and came up again empty. The box was gone!"

From that point on, The Third Policeman descends into surreality and bizarre discoveries. The Harper Perennial blurb describes the novel as "distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy", delivered, it must be said, in the author's inimitable but quintessentially (and therefore, imitating) Irish style. Part of the book's appeal lies - and this is not exactly an original observation, but a memory of something I read elsewhere as well - in its combination of the parochial (the rural setting and the microscopic dramas of the police house) and the universal (the metaphysical and existential discoveries, trappings and just plain absurdities of the plot). While The Dalkey Archive was played as a detective farce, investigating the peculiar yet personal experiments of the inscrutable De Selby, The Third Policeman contains a much more entirely warped and twisted world:

"As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side was a house about which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked like it would not deceive a child. That was not in itself sufficient to surprise me because I had seen pictures and notices by the roadside before. What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply-rooted in my mind, that there were people inside it. I had no doubt at all that it was the barracks of the policeman. I had never seen anything with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder…

I kept on walking, but walked more slowly. As I approached, the house seemed to change its appearance. At first, it did nothing to reconcile itself with the shape of an ordinary house but it became uncertain in outline like a thing glimpsed under ruffled water. Then it became clear again and I saw that it began to have some back to it, some small space for rooms behind the frontage. I gathered this from the fact that I seemed to see the front and the back of the ‘building’ simultaneously from my position approaching what should have been the side. As there was no side that I could see I thought the house must be triangular with its apex pointing towards me but when I was only fifteen yards away I saw a small window apparently facing me and I knew from that that there must be some side to it. then I found myself almost in the shadow of the structure, dry-throated and timorous from wonder and anxiety. It seemed ordinary enough at close quarters except that it was very white and still. It was momentous and frightening: the whole morning and the whole world seemed to have no purpose at all save to frame it and give it some magnitude and position so that I could find it with my simple senses and pretend to myself that I understood it. A constabulary crest above the door told me it was a police station. I had never seen a police station like it."

In this bizarre universe, the narrator's journey takes on an air of inexplicability and unknowableness that marks it out as less of a comic fantasy than a science fiction novel. The wit is ever-present of course, but nonetheless often heavily overlaid with a profoundly odd sense of fear and trepidation. The Third Policeman is thus a novel of combination, "a murder thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle and a chilling fable about unending guilt".

Like Lost, the piece of modern culture that this novel is so tantalisingly connected to, The Third Policeman is a cryptic tale, but it is not one entirely without resolution or exposition. From the first extract above, and from some adjectives I could easily have used in describing the book, a good deal of the plot's secret may be guessed. Regardless of the actual nature of the plot or the narrator's journey, however, The Third Policeman remains a work of surreal comedy and bizarre wit. A useful appendix to my edition details some of the book's history, and proves that some of the book's truth is stranger than its fiction:

'A Curious Tale'

A publisher’s note at the end of The Third Policeman displays a letter, written in 1940 by O’Brien to the American author William Saroyan, in which he explains some of its eccentricities.

By the time they reach this letter, readers will already have marvelled at the book’s many themes: man’s search for God, for eternal youth, for unimaginable power and treasures, and his relationship with nature, with the soul, with the myriad mysteries of the universe and, crucially, with the bicycle.

A beguiling and curious combination of many books and styles – part Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, part Gulliver’s Travels, part Seventh Voyage of Sinbad - The Third Policeman drifts from bizarre fantasy to sheer nonsense and back again, propelled by frequent drafts of dry wit. It is, in the immortal words of one of the policeman, ‘nearly an insoluble pancake’.

Almost as strange as the novel’s plot is its history. It was written after the publication of O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, but was rejected by his publishers who wrote: ‘We realize the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this novel he is more so.’ He had been thinking about adapting it for the stage, probably influenced by Saroyan’s success as a playwright, but abandoned the idea after this blow.

Nevertheless, he did try his luck abroad, sending the manuscript to literary agents in America through a contact of Saroyan’s, with the perhaps more apposite title of Hell Goes Round and Round. However, further enquiries revealed that they had mislaid it. Perhaps enraged, or inspired, by this carelessness, he abandoned all attempts to place it with anyone and began telling friends that he had mislaid the manuscript, even inventing different fates for it. These ranged from the simple mistake of leaving it on a tramcar or showing it to someone at the Dolphin Hotel and then leaving without it, to the inspired notion that he had taken it on a trip to Donegal by car only for the pages to have somehow been blown out of the boot. To an actor friend who knew a film director and who felt it might be adapted into a script he offered the rather undramatic yarn of having left it on a train. Only his friend Donal McDonagh knew the truth and, after O’Brien had asked him to look at the novel again to see what was wrong with it, McDonagh replied ‘nothing’. Despite this assurance, it lay unread for twenty-six years.

Yet various chunks of The Third Policeman did appear in O’Brien’s final novel, The Dalkey Archive. Largely concerned with bicycles and policeman, some of the material has been lifted, word for word, from the original source. And a short story published under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, called ‘Two in One’, also borrowed from the unpublished novel. But when O’Brien’s friend and biographer Anthony Cronin suggested that the story should be published under the byline Flann O’Brien, the latter replied ominously, ‘I don’t know that fellow any more.’

Don DeLillo - Underworld

Another really mammoth novel, and again this time from America. Underworld deserves comparison to Ulysses, a fact I mentioned here. If not for any real Joycean stylings, then for a similar ambition that DeLillo brings to literature.

As you might expect, critics love this book, because they can make so many lyrical, profoundly aphoristic statements about its goals and intents. It’s the kind of book where the blurb quotes come in paragraphs rather than sentences. The most understated of them merely remarks that “Don DeLillo’s latest novel really is one of the finest of the century”. They tend to play the man not the ball, in near-fawning recognition of DeLillo’s status as a major literary writer – “In Underworld we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers”.

Yet as for the novel itself, its significance is in something other than its dimensions of length and weight; it is the experience and the affect of the work to the reader. Hence Underworld “demands our full attention. The reward is its great depth, shimmering prose and the feeling that when we put it down that we’re a little wiser than we were”. “Reading the book is a charged and thrilling aesthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form – it gets the human condition”.

Most pointed of all, is the description of the New York Times – perhaps since the city is the subject of the book - “This bravura master of cerebral pyrotechnics also knows how to seize and rattle our emotions… In this remarkable novel, [DeLillo] has taken the effluvia of modern society, all the detritus of our daily and political lives, and turned it into a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art”.

The final blurb I wish to include is one of the two on the front cover, and simply calls Underworld

“…an aria and a wolf whistle of our half-century

It contains multitudes.”

(Michael Ondaatje)

From one acclaimed author to another; Don DeLillo is the major writer of that ‘half-century’. That is a completely gratuitous statement – at the moment, the papers are full of obituaries for Norman Mailer, who I really should read – but I’ll fight my corner for DeLillo's importance as a really important stylistic American writer.

I say stylistic because, although DeLillo writes beautifully plotted books and tackles some pretty weighty subjects (the two that come to mind are Libra, which I’m just about to mention, about Oswald’s assassination of JFK, and Falling Man, about the Twin Towers disaster) it is the style of his writing which really gets me. The depth and fineness of his characterisation is also an important feature; but this, too, is mostly stylistic. As evidence, here is an extract from the first couple of pages of the very first chapter of Libra:

" ‘In The Bronx’

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control. The noise was pitched to a level of pain he absorbed as a personal test. Another crazy-ass curve. There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.

Workmen carried lanterns along adjacent tracks. He kept a watch for sewer rats. A tenth of a second was all it took to see a thing complete. Then the express stations, the creaky brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors, banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned, looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.

It had nothing to do with him. He was riding just to ride.

One forty-ninth, the Puerto Ricans. One twenty-fifth, the Negroes. At Forty-second Street, after a curve that held a scream right out to the edge, came the heaviest push of all, briefcases, shopping bags, school bags, blind people, pickpockets, drunks. It did not seem odd to him that they subway held more compelling things than the famous city above. There was nothing important out there, in the broad afternoon, that he could not find in purer form in these tunnels beneath the streets."

So what the DeLillo style is all about is getting a feel for a place, a scene, a moment in time. It’s psychological, psychogeographical even; a description of New York through real people who are also historical characters (as befits DeLillo's penchant for fictionalising celebrity, the opening preface has a three-way conversation between Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover at a baseball game). In fact, Underworld doesn't have much of a plot; just fifty years of numerous interweaving narratives and enduring symbols of culture and atttitudes; one half baseball, one half atom bomb.

Altogether, Underworld is a succession of episodes, scenes which begin and end without any real dramatic action, only portraiture and compelling, sympathetic description. This extract is one of those scenes, of a subway graffiti artist Munoz/Moonman who actually reappears much later in the novel. In total the scene runs to just over eight pages, juxtaposed with the viewing of a lost Eisenstein film, ‘Unterwelt’, uptown in the Radio City Music Hall:

“The statue in the marbled niche had the thighs and claves of a man, a man’s bundled muscles in the forearms, but the figure in fact was biblical Eve, tight-breasted, with an apple in her hands and the sloping shoulders of a fullback.

And why not. The evening had the slightly scattered air of some cross-referenced event…”

The subplot is that the socialite artist, Klara Sax, is involved in trying to get the backstreet graffitist to do a gallery show. Ironically, elsewhere in the narrative (and about twenty years later) she is in charge of a project to paint, not subway trains, but hundreds of decommissioned, steel-finished war bombers – linking back to the 1950’s atomic era, and so on. Even within the piece here, there is a lot of repetition – a subtle touch of Joycean stream of consciousness and internal dialogue – which is quite noticeable if you read carefully. (Here, the ellipses are mine)

"The train was one of his, Moonman’s, he had a dozen pieces running through the system, top-to-bottom burners, and it just so happens he was aboard tonight, under the water mains and waste pipes, under the gas and steam and electric, between the storm sewers and telephone lines, and he moved from car to car with each stop and checked out the people who stepped inside, wearing their retractable subway faces, and the doors went ding dong before slamming shut.

Ismael Munoz, dark and somber, watching people come aboard. Sparsely stubbled Ismael reading lips and faces, hoping he might catch a bravo comment. Hey this guy is lighting up the line. This was his newest piece so here he was going uptown on the Washington Heights local, every car tagged with his own neon zoom, with highlights and overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it’s all live jive, it jumps and shouts – even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax.

This is not a window-down piece. This was a whole-train burner with windows painted over and each letter and number bigger than a man.

Moonman 157

Ismael was sixteen, not too old and not too young and he was determined to kill the shit of every subway artist in town.

Nobody could take him down.

…

Once a man stood on the platform and took a picture of one of Moonman’s top-to-bottoms, a foreigner by the look of him, and Ismael sidled to the open door so he could be in the picture too, unknown to the man. The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace in Sweden he looked.

…

At Columbus Circle he changed to the Broadway train because he had business at the end of the line. He got on a train that was bombed inside and out by Skaty 8, a thirteen-year-old writer who frantically tagged police cars, hearses, garbage trucks, who took his Krylon satin colors into the tunnels and tagged up the walls and catwalks, he hit platforms, steps, turnstiles and benches, he’d tag your little sister if she was walking by. Not a style king, no way, but a legend among writers for the energy he put forth, getting his tag seen by major millions and then two weeks ago, and a genuine regret went through Ismael as he recalled being told, he slumped and sagged all over again and felt the deepest kind of soldierly sadness – Skaty 8 hit by a train while he’s walking on the tracks under downtown Brooklyn.

People moved along the car, they skated to a seat, they looked at display ads above the heads across the aisle, all without eye motion that you could detect with the most delicate device.

Ismael used to walk the tracks when he felt sorry for himself. Those were foregone times. He’d pop an emergency hatch in the sidewalk and climb down into a tunnel and just, like, go for a walk, be alone down there, keeping the third rail in sight and listening for the train and getting to know the people who lived in the cable rooms and up on the catwalks, and that’s where he saw a spray-painted scrawl, maybe five years ago, down under Eighth Avenue.Bird Lives. It made him wonder about graffiti, about who took the trouble and risk to walk down this tunnel and throw a piece across the wall, and how many years have gone by since then, and who is Bird, and why does he live?

And the guy who reached around saying excuse me please.

He rode up the edge of Manhattan headed for the Bronx. There was no art in bombing platforms and walls. You have to tag the trains. The trains come roaring down the rat alleys all alike and then you hit a train and it is yours, seen everywhere in the system, and you get inside people’s heads and vandalize their eyeballs.

…

The crew shook the cans and the ball went click.

He stood on the door edge of one train and leaned across to the train parked adjacent and tagged it from the windows up.

And he went down the slate stairway that crumbled to the pressure of his weight, his hand on the rusty pipe that was the banister, and he felt the mood of a tunnel on a given day. It might be a coke mood one day, Ismael did not do drugs, or a mood of speed that’s travelling through the tunnel, someone made a buy and shared it, or a mood of mental illness, which was often the case. And always a brown rat mood because they were there in pack rat numbers, an endless source of stories, the size of the rats, the attitude of unfearing, how they ate the bodies of those who died in the tunnels, how they were eaten in turn by the rat man who lived in level six under Grand Central, he killed and cooked and ate a rat a week - track rabbits, they were called.

In other words to muralize a whole train you need a full night and part of the next night and no shuffling bullshit talk.

And a mood of who you are in your head day by day, which he did not share with anyone at street level, and going to sleep in a cousin’s bed at night or in the supply cellar of some bodega where they knew Ismael Munoz and gave him a place that was adequate and hearing the doors go ding dong and seeing the man from Stockholm, Sweden who took pictures of his piece.

…

They had dozens of cans out and ready, all by prearrangement, and he called a color and they shook the can and the ball went click.

”Where’s my Perrier?” he said.

But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can’t know the feeling a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the backstreets talking, all the way from Bird, and you can’t not see us anymore, you can’t not know who we are, we got total notoriety now, Momzo Tops and Rimester and me, we’re getting fame, we ain’t ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead-eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living there even if you don’t see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, this is the art that can’t stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face – like I’m your movie, motherfucker."

(Part 4, Cocksucker Blues – Summer 1974, Ch. 3)

Phaedrus vs. Omar Khayyám (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, revisited)

(Now with Pt.III)

I’m a great believer in intertextuality… I love making comparisons; or rather, connections. As the quote goes, “Only connect”.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance although physically not that large a book, nevertheless contains so much that it was difficult to treat it anyway comprehensively in the one post. A second problem was that it’s a hard book to quote from: although it’s immensely readable and definitely at times quite lyrical, it doesn’t lend itself to outstanding extracts, which are after all only literary soundbites. That is not a comment on the quality of the writing, which is superb, but more on the method of the book, which is to layer thought upon thought (both intellectually and emotionally) until a beautiful structure of ideas is built up.

That is why I feel the need to add a little more around the bare bones of the original post. I’ve already put up some pictures of a certain other motorcycle road trip on my other (music) blog: Bouncing Souls vs. Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here, obviously, I’m going to look at books: specifically, books that are mentioned in ZMM.

I

"Books. I don’t know any other cyclist who takes books with him. They take up a lot of space, but I have three of them here anyway, with some loose sheets of paper in them for writing. These are:

a. The shop manual for this cycle.

b. A general troubleshooting guide containing all the technical information I can never keep in my head. This is Chilton’s Motorcycle Troubshooting Guide written by Ocee Rich and sold by Sears, Roebuck.

c. A copy of Thoreau’s Walden which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It’s a form of reading done a century ago… when Chautauquas were popular. Unless you’ve tried it you can’t imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way."

II

"The sunlight just touches the top of the bluff high above the draw we’re in. A wisp of fog has appeared above the creek. That means it’ll warm up.

I get out of the sleeping bag, put shoes on, pack everything I can without waking Chris, and then go over to the picnic table and give him a shake to wake him up.

He doesn’t respond. I look around and see that there are no jobs left to do but wake him up, and hesitate, but feeling manic and jumpy from the brisk morning air holler, “WAKE!” and he sits up suddenly, eyes wide open.

I do my best to follow this with the opening Quatrain of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It looks like some desert cliff in Persia above us. But Chris doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about. He looks up at the top of the bluff and then just sits there squinting at me. You have to be in a certain mood to accept bad recitations of poetry. Particularly that one.

Soon we’re on the road again, which twists and turns. We stem down into an enormous canyon with high white bluffs on either side. The wind freezes. The road comes into some sunlight which seems to warm me right through the jacket and sweater, but soon we ride into the shade of the canyon wall again where again the wind freezes. This dry desert air doesn’t hold heat. My lips, with the wind blowing into them, feel dry and cracked.

Farther on we cross a dam and leave the canyon into some high semidesert country. This is Oregon now. The road winds through a landscape that reminds me of northern Rajasthan, in India, where it’s not quite desert, much piñon, junipers and grass, but not agricultural either, except where a draw or valley provides a little extra water.

Those crazy Rubáiyat Quatrain keep rumbling through my head.

…something, something along some Strip of Herbage strown,

That just divides the desert from the sown,

Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,

And pity Sultan Mahmud on his Throne…

That conjures up a glimpse of the ruins of an ancient Mogul palace near the desert where out of the corner of his eye he saw a wild rosebush…

…And this first summer Month that brings the Rose

… How did that go? I don’t know. I don’t even like the poem. I’ve noticed since this trip has started and particularly since Bozeman that these fragments seem less and less a part of his memory and more and more a part of mine. I’m not sure what that means… I think… I just don’t know.

I think there’s a name for this kind of semidesert, but I can’t think of what it is. No one can be seen anywhere on the road but us.

Chris hollers that he has diarrhea again. We ride until I see a stream below and pull of the road and stop. His face is full of embarrassment again but I tell him we’re in no hurry and get out a change of underwear and roll of toilet paper and bar of soap and tell him to wash his hands thoroughly and carefully after he’s done.

I sit on an Omar Khayyám rock contemplating the semidesert and feel not bad.

…And this first Summer month that brings the Rose… oh… now it comes back…

Each Morn a thousand Roses bring, you say,

Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?

And this first Summer month that brings the Rose,

Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.

… And so on and so forth….

Let’s get off Omar and onto the Chautauqua. Omar’s solution is just to sit around and guzzle the wine and fell so bad that time is passing and the Chautauqua looks good to me by comparison. Particularly today’s Chautauqua, which is about gumption…"

III

Walden I bought about a year ago, and it is really rather good. In fact, it’s kind of similar to ZMM, in that it combines the practical story of Thoreau’s seclusion in the wood cabin of Walden Pond and his intellectual and political thoughts about American civilisation (Thoreau is famed as a committed 19th-century proponent of civil disobedience). So Walden is in effect another counterculture novel.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám I just picked up today. Blend mentioned below that he picked up his copy of ZMM for a dollar on the street. Unfortunately, we don’t have much of that going on in Dublin. We do have a little place called ‘The Secret Book and Record Store’, at the end of a corridor off a busy street - incidentally a few doors down from Tower Records, which we do still have here – where I found the copy of the Rubaiyat you see above, for €5.

Particularly at these current exchange rates, that’s a lot more than one dollar, but it’s very good value nonetheless. I found some other good stuff – Paul Auster’s City of Glass in graphic novel form drawn by Karasik and Mazzucchelli and with an introduction by Art Spiegelman (€7.95), Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America (€7.95) and Bernard-Henri Levy’s War, Evil and the End of History (€4.95; some French philosopher dude combining his war journalism with his refléxions on politics and the ’68 student rising – it had a cool black cover and the price was right, wasn’t it?). When I was paying for all this I saw a Hamsun at the top of the several piles of second-hand books yet to be priced; asked how much it was; the cashier went to the back of the store to consult with the owner, typed away at his computer for a while; repeated the process; and then told me €40! Apparently it was a first edition. I’m not even sure if it was any good (one of his later works), so obviously I left it.

So that’s my story of cheap/second-hand book-buying in Dublin. The whole twenty-quid extravaganza was partly in celebration of the fact that this blog has been going for about three months this weekend. It’s time to take stock, so any suggestions, requests or ideas for improvement are more than welcome – just leave a comment!

In any case, I’ve got a great book coming up – Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is currently vying with City of Glass as one of the coolest books about New York there is to read. Stick around…

James Joyce, Ulysses (II)

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat, and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak…”

(Ch. 1 - Telemachus)

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I

And so begins one of the most unfairly denigrated books of the twentieth century. Denigrated unfairly, in fact, for both obscenity and inaccessibility. Scholars of the future may well term this the ‘Joycean paradox’ – how a book was banned for its explicitness in the first half of the twentieth century, and how in the second half it was derided as meaningless nonsense. Hopefully, in the twenty-first century we should be able to come up with some kind of cohesive response.

To be kind to the unreconstructed bigots and the revisionists, who may or may not be all the same people, there is plenty that is difficult about this book. And furthermore, I’m not the kind of person to advocate any kind of Great Books - books that are not only must-reads, but must-likes. I just enjoy reading great books, and admit that it may be entirely possible to dislike Ulysses while retaining a full intellectual faculty.

So, to any remaining philistines who are reading this, I shall now endeavour to show you why Ulysses is a book well worth reading. (Rest assured, as well, that I often write with my tongue so far in my cheek that it pokes out the other side)

__________________________________________________

II

Ulysses is not really just a book, it’s a whole cultural experience. It is, after all, an epic description of a day in the life of Ireland’s capital city in the early years of the twentieth centuries, and with all the political, social and cultural baggage that comes with, transformed into an immense work of art. It’s not the greatest story ever told, but it is a good attempt at capturing everything about character and situation into the one book.

Even just as a book, it still works very well. I’ve never read Homer, so most of the whole Greek analogies are over my head, but Ulysses does have a certain structure to it. Originally, there were title chapters in the manuscript, corresponding to episodes of the Homeric poem – Sirens, Nausikaa, Telemachus etc – but at least in my Penguin edition, these aren’t included in the body of the text. I think that it is good to at least be aware of the extra level of meaning, but it is not really necessary to the appreciation of Ulysses as a modern novel. Sure, if you’re an English scholar, then maybe you should know…

The chapters do help structure the book, however, because what Joyce is all about here is switching between styles of writing – generally becoming increasingly impenetrable. The extract above reads pretty much as an ordinary novel, although there is hinted at that extra freedom of description, that lyrical touch which makes even comparatively normal Joyce (selections of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist) so enjoyable to read. In the other extracts I have produced (here and here) the effect is ratcheted up to a much heavier degree. A lot of the writing in Ulysses is pretty detached from meaning and any kind of real communication with the reader.

There. I said it – euphemistically, of course – that Ulysses is a load of nonsense at times, and that no right-thinking individual who isn’t an idiot savant or a crazed poet should really worry about understanding Joyce’s alleged masterpiece.

That’s true – if only for, as Terry Pratchett would say, a given value of ‘truth’ – but I hardly think it should stop you from enjoying the book. Common sense would seem to give you two options with regarding to reading the unreadable: either you keep hold of the idea that there is a meaning in there, to be decoded with sufficient attention and knowledge; or you just ride on over the passage, absorbing the language and the sounds, and the seemingly incidental ideas. Of course, the real answer has to be a synthesis of the two: just keep on going, and see what you pick up – you might be surprised!

________________________________________

(Yes, that is Marilyn Monroe, and that is apparently Ulysses that she is reading. She said she liked the sounds of the book, but more importantly she read it the way one is meant to - not all at once, but randomly, from chapter to chapter)

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III

As I say, Ulysses is a lot more than just a book. It’s a whole idea about approaching literature, about giving words meaning and power they might not have had already. It is an attempt to apply literature to as many facets of life as possible, to describe the whole sum of human experience, thought and communication and not just the rarified strand which makes up ordinary narrative.

In this sense, Ulysses is all about the legacy. For me, that legacy is chiefly the beat literature of Kerouac. Of course, Kerouac had plenty of other influences, and thankfully so, because otherwise he wouldn’t be half as interesting a writer. I wasn’t even consciously aware of the connection for a while, other than a few abstract references, and despite the fact that I began reading them within a few years of each other.

It was, though, when I broke with a pretty much continuous stretch of reading Kerouac’s novels and even some of his poetry, and picked up Ulysses again, that I realised that, in fact, I had been reading Joyce all along. Filtered through the Beat consciousness, the craziness of American popular culture and the haze of literary and psychochemical experimentation, it was all pretty much the same thing; the wholesale deconstruction and explosion of language. It’s all about, as well, the expression of thought and feeling in that wonderfully direct, expansive and lyrically beautiful fashion, although Kerouac comes across as a much more likeable and personable writer than Joyce.

Ulysses is built up so much as a classic of literature that it’s easy to forget sometimes what it’s meant to be; a document of communication, distorted for effect. It’s a statement, too, which is why it’s big and heavy. It’s a masterpiece, a virtuoso performance, which makes it so grand – but at heart, it’s simple really.

There must be hundreds of other difficult-to-read modernist authors who have come after Joyce, all of them owing a debt to the master and producing their own progressive, exciting pieces which join in the high miasma of modern literature. I haven’t had the chance to read many of them, but I’m sure they exist. Of course, it’s all post-modern now; Joyce is consigned to history, and the ideas have changed – but there will always be great books that attempt to describe life like Ulysses did.

Probably the best living American author, Don De Lillo, did something of the kind with his massive Underworld. It’s a globe-spanning, era-jumping description of New York in the second half of the twentieth century, just as Ulysses was a single-day, perambulatory account of Edwardian Dublin one warm summer’s day – both of them a view of life across classes, personalities, ideologies and histories. De Lillo’s prose is hardly to be called Joycean – in fact it’s qualitatively very different – but he does have some of the same kind of ambition that Joyce did.

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Today, Ulysses perseveres. Better still, it pervades. The cultural experience which is a novel of some 700-odd pages and lot of made-up words, is clung to tightly by a certain few in my native city – not to mention its global, and significantly, American, following.

It pops up in the strangest of situations: once, in the course of an amicable conversation with a police sergeant – in fact, the exact equivalent and real-life successor of Flann O’Brien’s Sergeant Fottrell – the values of marine bathing were discussed, and he quoted with great mirth Joyce’s “snotgreen scrotumtightening sea”.

In Dublin, Bloomsday is a significant annual celebration, with the centennial in 2004 drawing huge crowds of Joyceans, and other cultural tourists. Amongst other events, there was a massive open-air breakfast of lambs’ kidneys, numerous Gorgonzola lunches, as well as public readings from the book – invariably including a reading by Ireland’s first openly homosexual senator – and throngs of enthusiasts dressed in Edwardian clothing.

There may be a streak of fandom in the celebration of Ulysses which makes me uncomfortable. But it’s probably because I don’t want to see the greatest novel ever written being regarded with any more suspicion than it already is. Ulysses is, I suppose, just another book: but it is one which very much pushes at the boundaries of that concept.

James Joyce - Ulysses (I)

"Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthnthnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is in the

Gold pinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.

Trilling, trilling. Idoleres.

Peep! Who’s in the … peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked.

Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowel. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!

Jingle. Bloo.

Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.

A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.

Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

Horn. Hawhorn.

When first he saw. Alas!

Full tup. Full throb.

Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.

Martha! Come!

Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.

Goodgod henev erheard inall.

Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.

A moonlight nightcall: far:far.

I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming.

Listen!"

(Ch. 8 - Sirens)

Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (Yet Another Extract)

Like On the Road, Desolation Angels is primarily a novel of many journeys, with Kerouac as ever trying to live out (and describe) the American Dream as idiosyncratically and as anti-materialistically as possible. That, aside from the philosophical musings and emotional agonising, is the pure simplicity of the book. Kerouac was an author who combined deep introspection of his own psychological state with close observation of the world around him. Together, this produces in his writing neat, lyrical stories which would merely be called ‘real-life’ if, in fact, they were not so sublimely realistic and uniquely beautiful. Here, in ‘Passing through New York’, Kerouac nearly loses his complete pack while riding the bus – the story passing from sudden disaster to existential angst, on into biography, then religious mysticism and back to calm, Zen-like relief again:

“I got down to the bus station with my rucksack and foolishly (high on Jack Daniels) began talking to some sailors who then got a guy with a car to drive out to the back streets of Washington in search of an afterhours bottle. A Negro connection was dickering with us when up walked a Negro cop who wanted to search us all, but was outnumbered. I simply walked away with my rucksack on my back, to the station, got on the bus and fell asleep with the pack by the driver’s well. When I woke up in Roanoke Rapids at dawn it was gone. Somebody had taken it off at Richmond. I let my head fall on the seat in that harsh glare nowhere worse in the world than in America with a stupid guilty hangover. A whole new novel (Angels of Desolation), a whole book of poetry, and the finishing chapters of another novel (about Tristessa), together with all the paintings not to mention the only gear I had in the world (sleepingbag, poncho, sweater of holy favour, perfect simple equipments the result of years’ thinking, gone, all gone. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever. Soldiers waited for the bus smoking. Fat old North Carolinians watched hands aback clasped. Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere, sick and crying. Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make life something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobiles day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere. I saw the glum faces of my mother, of Irwin, of Julien, of Ruth, all trying to make it go on believing without hope. Gay college students in the back of the bus making me even sicker to think of their purple plans all in time to end blind in an automobile cemetery insurance office for nothing. Where’s yonder old mule buried in those piny barrens or did the buzzard just eat? Caca, all the world caca. I remembered the enormous despair of when I was 24 sitting in my mother’s house all day while she worked in the shoe factory, in fact sitting at my father’s death chair, staring like a bust of Goethe at nothing. Getting up once in a while to plunk a sonatas on the piano, sonatas of my own spontaneous invention, then falling on the bed crying. Looking out the window at the glare of automobiles on Crossbay Boulevard. Bending my head over my first novel, to sick to go on. Wondering about Goldsmith and Johnson how they burped sorrow by their firesides in a life that was too long. That’s what my father told me the night before he died, “Life is too long.”

So wondering if God is a personal God who’s actually personally concerned about what happens to us, every one. Putting us up to burdens? To Time? To the crying horror of birth and the impossible lostness of the promise of death? And why? Because we’re fallen angels who said in Heaven “Heaven is great, it better be anyway” and off we fell? But do you even remember doing such a thing?

All I remember is that before I was born there was bliss. I actually remember the dark swarming bliss of 1917 altho I was born in 1922! New Years’ Eves came and went and I was just blisshood. But when I was dragged out my mother’s womb, blue, a blue baby, they yelled at me to wake up, and slapped me, and ever since then I’ve been chastised and lost for good and all. Nobody slapped me in bliss! Is God everything? If God is everything then it’s God who slapped me. For personal reasons? Do I have to carry this body around and call it mine own?

Yet in Raleigh a tall blue-eyed Southerner told me my bag was being shipped to my destination station in Winter Park. “God bless you,” I said, and he did a calm double take.”

Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels is one of Kerouac’s later books, first published in 1965, nearly a decade after On the Road. Clearly, it is somewhat more advanced in both style and content, and can seem a little daunting in comparison. More dense than breathless, it is nevertheless a wonderful expansion of the great and profound Beat odyssey which begins with On the Road. I first found it in the college library in hardback, and avidly read the 186 chapters within a couple of weeks, at whatever opportunity presented itself.

Desolation Angels is more fragmented than the other Kerouac novels, in fact made up of two books, ‘Desolation Angels’ and ‘Passing Through’, Book One containing one hundred and two chapters, and Book Two eight-four, all of fairly short length. The chapters are further arranged by setting or theme: ‘Desolation in Solitude’, ‘Desolation in the World’; ‘Passing Through Mexico’, ‘Passing Through New York’, ‘Passing Through Tangiers, France and London’ and ‘Passing Through America Again’.

The Kerouac canon, or more specifically the ‘Duluoz Legend’ (the series of autobiographical novels, each written and published at the time with Jack Duluoz, i.e. Kerouac, under different aliases) overlaps significantly at this period. Desolation Angels begins almost exactly as The Dharma Bums ends, with Kerouac as a fire lookout in the High Cascades. Not only was the experience of Mt. Desolation made into the centrepiece of this novel (purportedly transcribed directly from his journals written at the time), but it is recorded in poetry in ‘Desolation Blues’, and in prose in ‘Alone on a Mountaintop’, part of Lonesome Traveler – which, to further complicate matters, also recounts the experiences of ‘Passing Through Tangiers, France and England’ as ‘Big Trip to Europe’. Finally, the tail-end of Desolation Angels hints at the even darker writing of Big Sur, Kerouac’s deeply disturbing tale of the D.T.s and paranoia in an isolated coastal cabin on the wild California coast, as a refuge from his unwelcome and intrusive new celebrity:

‘But enough about California for now – I later had adventures down there that were really horrible and only as horrible as you get when you get older and your last moment impels you to test all, to go mad, just to see what the Void’ll do – ”

As I say, Desolation Angels is a fragmented work, perhaps a return to the epic grandeur of the Great American Novel Kerouac always wanted to write, and away from the relative brevity and unrelenting movement of On The Road. Desolation Angels possesses in many ways a broader scope – travelling outside of the American continent, for a start – but also a broader, more reflective vision. Having absorbed and refined the exuberant style of On The Road, as well as progressing through the Buddhist mysticism of The Dharma Bums, the Kerouac of Desolation digs that little bit deeper into the Beat lifestyle.

At the same time, Desolation Angels has its extremes of wild exuberance as well as solemn introspection; it still works quite excellently as a Beat novel, as a superbly creative celebration of life’s loves and sorrows. It starts with Kerouac having attained the spiritual and literal peak of the previous novel, and yet grappling with the implications of prolonged (although desired) solitude. Here, Kerouac descends the trail on his return from his 63-day stint as fire lookout:

“The best way to come down a mountain is like running, swing your arms free and fall as you come, your feet will hold you up for the rest – but O I had no feet because no shoes, I was “barefooted” (as the saying goes) and far from stomping down on big trail-singin steps as I bash along tra la tra la I could hardly even mincingly place them the soles were so thin and the rocks so sudden some of them with a sharp bruise – A John Bunyan morning, it was all I could do to keep my mind on other things – I tried to sing, think, daydream, do as I did by the desolation stove – but Karma your trail is laid out for you – Could have no more escaped that morning of bruised torn feet and burning-ache thighs (and eventual searing blisters like needles) and the gasping sweats, the attack of insects, than I can escape and than you can escape being eternally around to go through the emptiness of form (including the emptiness of form of your complaining personality) – I had to do it, not rest, my only concern was keeping the boat or even losing the boat, O what sleep on that trail that night would have been, full moon, but full moon was shining down on the valley too – and there you could hear music over the waters, and smell cigarette smoke, and listen to the radio – Here, all was, thirsty little creeks of September no widern my hand, giving out water with water, where I splashed and drank and muddled to go on – Lord – How sweet is life? As sweet

as cold

water in a dell

on a dusty tired trail –

- on a rusty tired trail – bestrewn with the kickings of the mules last June when they were forced at stickpoint to jump over a badly hacked pathway around a fallen snag that was too big to climb, and Lord I had to bring up the mare among the frightened mules and Andy was cursing “I cant do this all by myself goddamnit, bring up that mare!” and like in an old dream of other lifetimes when I handled the horses I came up, leading her, and Andy grabbed the reins and heaved at her neck, poor soul, while Marty stabbed her in the ass with a stick, deep – to lead the frightened mule – and stabbed the mule – and rain and snow – now all the mark of that fury is dry in September dust as I sit there and puff – a lot of little edible weeds all around – A man could do it, hide in these hills, boil weeds, bring a little fat with him, boil weeds over small Indian fires and live forever – “Happy with a stone underhead let heaven and earth go about their changes!” sang old Chinese Poet Hanshan – No maps, packs, firefinders, batteries, airplanes, warnings on radios, just mosquitoes humming in harmony, and the trickle of the streamlet – But no, Lord has made this movie in his mind and I’m a part of it (the part of it known as me) and it’s for me to understand this world and so go among it preaching the Diamond Steadfastness that says: “You’re here and you’re not here, both, for the same reason,” – “it’s Eternal Power munging along” – So I up I get and lunge along with pack, thumbed, and wince on ankled pains and turn and turn the trail faster and faster under my growing trot and pretty soon I’m running, bent, like a Chinese woman with a pack of faggots on her neck, jingle jingle drumming and pumping stiff knees thru rock underbrush and around corners, sometimes I crash off the trail and bellow back on’t, somehow, never lose, the way was made to be followed – Down the hill I’ll meet thin young boy starting out on his climb, I’m fat with butchers, and it’s Springtime in the Void – Sometimes I fall, on haunches, slipt, the pack is my back bumper, I burnst right along bumbling for fair, what words to describe hoopely tootely pumling down a parpity trail, prapooty – Swish, sweat – Every time I hit my bruised football toe I cry “Almost!” but it never gets it straight so’s lame me – The toe, bruised in Columbia College scrimmages under lights in Harlem dusks, some big bum from Sandusky trod on it with his spikes and big boned calf all down – Toe never recovered – bottom and top both busted and sore, when a rock prods in there my whole ankle will turn to protect it – yet, turning an ankle is a Pavlovian fait accompli, Airapetianz couldnt show me any better how not to believe I’ve strained a needed ankle, or even sprained – it’s a dance, dance from rock to rock, hurt to hurt, wince down the mountain, the poetry’s all there – And the world that awaits me!”

To my mind, Kerouac is by far one of the most enjoyable writers to read in prose. I noted in my review of The Dharma Bums that I hadn’t talked much about Kerouac’s actual writing style, so I’ll try and rectify that here. ‘Beat’, ‘poetry of pure prose’, ‘spontaneous prose’, there are plenty of phrases to describe it – but, in the end, you can only experience it for yourself.

The extract above is as good as any, really, for appreciating the pure Kerouac style. Both palpably exciting and intellectually clever, his writing is to me often absolutely captivating. Moreover, it is (paradoxically, given the last remark) wonderfully free – in the sense that as a writer Kerouac plays loose and fast with language. Spontaneity, wordsmithery, humour, aural and visual allusions, all play a part in creating that superbly original style. Kerouac for me is someone who has deconstructed language – breaking down the conventions and constrictions of standard prose into a sublime string of words, phrases, meanings and transcendent emotions.

As an Irishman, I am that little bit proud to draw a link between Kerouac and the past master of expansive, streaming prose – James Joyce. A clearly acknowledged influence on Kerouac, what Joyce did in 1922 with Ulysses was to deconstruct both the novel and the language with which a novel was written. Obviously, Kerouac rarely reaches the extremes of that infamous book – although parts of Desolation Angels definitely come close – and as a Joycean, he was a partial, if devoted, follower. In his early journals (windblown worlds, p. 48) he remarks:

“…I do believe in the kind of writing that gives effortless pleasure to the reader. In the end, I am my own greatest reader. Also, I believe in sane writing, as opposed to the psychotic sloppiness of Joyce. Joyce is a man who only gave up trying to communicate to human beings. I myself do that when I’m drunk-weary and full of misery, therefore I know it’s not so honest as it’s spiteful to blurt out in associations without a true human effort to evoke and give significant intelligence to one’s sayings. It’s a kind of scornful idiocy.”

I’m pretty sure he was taking about Finnegan’s Wake, however! With some qualifications, the Joyce-Kerouac comparison is really crucial, in my opinion at least, to appreciating Kerouac’s writing. The trail extract above, while fairly straightforward, contains many Joycean elements, particularly in the association of words and sounds – creating a tone similar to that in the following extract. The blending of rhythms, orthography and jokey humour is evocative of language in its cultural association – here in a earthy, folksy American style rather than, as with Joyce, the cosmopolitan Dubliner speech. The style is used for both meaning and effect, for art and for emotion – but most of all, to show the capabilities and potential of language, its biblical, time-honoured significances, and the way it should intimately affect the reader. So here’s how Joyce did it (in the ‘Oxen of Sun’ chapter of Ulysses, as Bloom converses with a nun in the maternity hospital – I think)

“As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefore sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her asked if O’Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O’Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God’s rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men’s oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for go as he came.”

There is both a style and a meaning to this novel. Desolation Angels is - for all its superficial, carefree wanderlust experiences - a deeply philosophical, mystical and even religious work of literature. As Kerouac wanders from Seattle to San Francisco, Mexico, New York and Europe, he ponders the existential suffering of his life. The super-vibrant characters of On The Road and onward criss-cross this whole novel as well; Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and innumerable other literary heroes. Those people, who were previously Beats, Zen Lunatics or just sorrowful friends are all now, in Kerouac’s eyes, ‘angels in desolation’. In all, Desolation Angels reads like a massive beatific vision of a country and culture which Kerouac alternates between being jaded or eagerly anticipatory of. The novel alternates between both beauty and sadness.

Desolation Angels is an intensely psychological novel – an explanation, as Nelson Algren remarks, of ‘what the place of religion may have been in the Beat mystique’. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose spoke of literary freedom – freedom of style, and of content. As he says himself, returning again to Joyce, (windblown world, p. 242):

"Come a day there will when… authors of exact imagination will be free, as Joyce felt free, to wind out their moody shroud about the riddle of the tale being told."

Desolation Angels is also, lastly, a symbolic novel – an idealist novel, centred on the feeling of desolation, not depression but a feeling of ‘lostness’ in the world – based around an intense personal sadness and vibrant, mystical experience of suffering and joy. As he writes in the final chapter:

"How we continue in this endless Gloom I’ll never know – Love, Suffer and Work is the motto of my family (Lebris de Keroack) but seems I suffer more than the rest – Old Honeyboy Bill’s in Heaven for sure anyway – Only thing is Where’s Jack Going?”

Knut Hamsun - Hunger

Knut Hamsun's Hunger is, quite seriously, Fight Club coming straight from the 1890s. Some argue that it was the inspiration, effectively, for the books that were in themselves the inspiration for Fight Club and all that other bleak post-modern jazz. This, then, is the bleakest of them all.

“One of the most disturbing novels in existence” says Time Out, and they’re not far off. Hunger, or Sult in Norwegian, was written in 1890 by Hamsun, a Norwegian novelist who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. His many other novels attracted much critical praise, although none were stylistically as direct and uncompromising as Hunger.

“Hunger is the crux of Hamsun’s claims to mastery. This is the classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoevsky” says the Observer. Hunger is the deeply painful, despairing account of a young writer, existing on the edge of starvation, which blends physical intensity with a psychological paranoia. Its central – and effectively only – character is deeply unsympathetic, and indeed mentally unstable. Throughout, the demoralising, debilitating effects of hunger are written with uncomfortable vividness. What little hope the sparse plot may occasionally offer is dashed with tremendous unfeeling, so that the novel exists only in the monotony of despair. Such is its power, its profundity of effect, its sheer absence of positive relief, that the novel should not be described as merely disturbing, but also as peculiarly vicious.

Such is Hunger's status as a cult classic that it has recently been republished in an updated format, borrowing for its cover design the traditional imagery of the modern thrillers which it so overbearingly resembles. This 2006 Canongate edition features, in addition to the definitive Lyngstad translation (previous attempts erred heavily in the translation of Hamsun’s style), an excellent introduction by Paul Auster. Those of you familiar with Paul Auster will know that that makes it a work of art in itself, but in addition to an excellent lyrical portrait of the book, his introduction delves quite astutely into the literary and philosophical qualities of the novel. From the neutral, characterless facts which make up the structure and plot of the book, ‘the bare bones’, it follows primarily for Auster that Hunger: “….is a work devoid of plot, action and – but for the narrator – character. By nineteenth century standards, it is a work in which nothing happens. The radical subjectivity of the narrator effectively eliminates the basic concerns of the traditional novel.”

Hunger has become for many one of the first modernist books, using its radical differences to portray its central character in an astoundingly novel manner. Or as the Irish Times says, it is “…A work of pioneering modernism… black, funny, evocative, exasperating. A magical and terrible insight into the human soul.”

The elements which define Hunger as a uniquely modern work are many and diverse, but not completely obscure. It is a novel partly of nihilism, of existentialism and, in many ways, of sheer emptiness. The tale of starvation, as Auster notes, has no “redeeming social value”; although “it puts us in the jaws of misery, it offers no analysis of that misery, contains no call to political action”. It is debatable whether the novel brushes with pseudo- or proto-Nietzschean ideas, especially as Hamsun “who turned fascist in his old age during the Second World War” turns out to be a pretty despicable guy. Yet Hunger is so wildly cynical, so tragically comic and so utterly cutting that it would be hard to square it with any kind of fascist or semi-fascist ideology. Its central character is both maniacally deluded and pathetically weak, subsisting in a life of total physical and spiritual poverty, so that he could hardly be seen as some kind of super-man.

Perhaps, as a novel of survival and unflinching realism, Hunger may well be an artfully exaggerated masterpiece of modern auto-biography. However, as Auster remarks, making an interesting comparison to Joyce’s own masterpiece:

“Hunger; or the portrait of the artist as a young man. But it is an apprenticeship that has little in common with the early struggles of other writer. Hamsun’s hero is no Stephen Dedalus, and there is hardly a word in Hunger about aesthetic theory. The world of art has been translated into the world of the body – and the original text has been abandoned. Hunger is not a metaphor; it is the very crux of the problem itself.”

The modernism of this novel derives equally from its style as it does from its content. Hunger is a relentlessly subjective book, inhabiting all the follies and duplicities of its protagonist’s conscious and unconscious thoughts. Existential, and nihilistic, it abandons many of the fixed notions of traditional literature – again, as Auster says:

“Historical time is obliterated in favour of inner duration. With only an arbitrary beginning and an arbitrary ending, the novel faithfully records the vagaries of the narrator’s mind, following each thought from its mysterious inception all through all its meanderings, until it dissipates and the next thought begins. What happens is allowed to happen.”

Finally, it is the radical nature of this novel which ultimately assures it its power and status; a potent combination of abstraction and realism derived from nothing less than the rejection of all tradition and assumption, until there is no existence or meaning left; and for Hamsun or his character “there is nothing to keep him going – and yet he keeps on going. He walks straight into the twentieth century.”

Auster’s introduction in the modern edition, from which I have rather too liberally quoted here, was in fact originally written in 1970. My own first introduction to the book was actually from the 1999 Rebel Inc. anthology Rebel Yell: A Century of Underground Classics. It contained a series of introductions and short excerpts from a selection of cult classics, amongst which was Hamsun’s Hunger. The introduction there, by Donald MacLean, was equally superb, an enthusiastic paean to a book which, if it “were published today… would seem like the work of an exciting new voice, a voice by turns startingly direct and seductively lyrical”. Like Auster, he explores the subjectivity, immediacy and literary nihilism of the novel, and digresses into the controversial issue of Hamsun’s own personality, but at base he seeks only to enthuse on the intensity of Hunger.

Here below is an extract, roughly the second half of the excerpt printed in Rebel Yell. Little more needs to be said, except to note that Hunger is as relevant today as it was over a century ago, and the whole novel still proves as powerful, and as disturbing, as any of the other thrillers that abounds in modern literature. Enjoy!

"I had fallen asleep where I lay and was awakened by the policeman. There I was, mercilessly called back to life and my misery. My first feeling was a stupid amazement at finding myself out in the open, but this was soon replaced by a bitter despondency; I was on the verge of crying with grief at still being alive. It had rained while I slept, my clothes were soaking wet, and I felt a raw chill in my limbs. The darkness had become even thicker, I could barely make out the officer’s features in front of me.

‘Stand up now, will you!’ he said.

I got up immediately; if he had ordered me to lie down again, I would also have obeyed. I was very depressed and quite weak, and besides I started almost instantly to feel the pangs of hunger again.

‘Wait a minute, you dummy!’ the officer called after me. ‘You’re walking off without your hat. There, now go on!’

‘It seemed to me too there was something I had forgotten,’ I stammered absent-mindedly. ‘Thanks. Good night.’

And I shambled off.

If only one had a piece of bread! One of those delicious little loaves of rye bread that you could munch on as you walked the streets. And I kept picturing to myself just the sort of rye bread it would have been good to have. I was bitterly hungry, wished myself dead and gone, grew sentimental and cried. There would never be an end to my misery! Then I stopped suddenly in the street, stamped my feet on the cobblestones and swore aloud. What was it he had called me? Dummy? I’d show that policeman what it meant to call me a dummy! With that I turned around and rushed back. I felt flaming hot with anger. Some way down the street I stumbled and fell, but I took no notice, jumped up again and ran on. On reaching Jærnbanetorvet Square, however, I was so tired that I didn’t feel up to going all the way to the pier; besides, my anger had cooled off during the run. Finally I stopped to catch my breath. Who cared a hoot what such a policeman had said? - Sure, but I wasn’t going to swallow everything! – True enough! I interrupted myself, but he didn’t know any better. I found this excuse to be satisfactory; I repeated to myself that he didn’t know any better. And so I turned around once more.

God, the sort of ideas you get! I thought angrily: running around like a madman on sopping-wet streets in the dark of night! My hunger pains were excruciating and didn’t leave me for a moment. I swallowed my saliva again and again to take the edge off, and it seemed to help. I hadn’t had enough to eat for many, many weeks before this thing came up, and my strength had diminished considerably lately. When I had been lucky enough to get my hands on a five-krone bill by some manoeuvre or other, the money generally didn’t last me long enough for my health to be fully restored before a new hunger spell descended upon me. My back and shoulders had borne the brunt of it; I could stop that gnawing pain in my chest for a moment by coughing hard or by walking extremely bent over, but there was nothing I could do for my back and shoulders. Anyway, why didn’t my prospects simply brighten up? Didn’t I have the same right to life as anyone else, like Pascha the second-hand bookdealer, or Hennechen the steamship agent? Didn’t I have the shoulders of a giant and two stout arms for work, and hadn’t I even applied for a job as a woodcutter on Møller Street to earn my daily bread? Was I lazy? Hadn’t I applied for work and listened to lectures and written reviews and plugged away like crazy day and night? And hadn’t I lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I had plenty, bread when I had little, and gone hungry when I had nothing? Did I live in a hotel, did I have a suite on the ground floor? I lived in a godforsaken loft, a tinsmith’s shop abandoned by everybody and his brother last winter because it snowed in there. So I couldn’t make head nor tail of the whole situation.

I was thinking about all this as I walked along, and there wasn’t as much as a spark of malice, envy or bitterness in my thoughts..."