How far apart, really, are these dates? Not far at all. They are a blip on the space-time contiuum. They are on top of each other. They are seconds from touching.
December 6th, 1933 is the date that Hon. John M. Woolsey lifted the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses in the United States. In his justification for why Ulysses should no longer be banned, Hon. Woolsey argues that the novel "is not pornographic" and extols the virtues of the Irishman's masterpiece (of which I have only read 40 pages).
In describing Joyce's project, Woolsey says, "Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.
What he seeks to get is not unlike the results of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees."
I wrote a few days ago about Javier Sanjines and his double-vision as coupled with Ana Peluffo's estrabismo and here, again, is another articulation of this doubling. This myopia and hypermetropia, to borrow Edward Soja's terms from Thirdspace, seem to be everywhere. Are we near-sighted or far-sighted is not the question, but how the two intersect and combine to form myriad ways of looking at things. And depending on how we look, we are impacted by what we see. Do you see the forest for the trees or just the forest? No. Split seconds of both, all at the same time, flashing before your eyes. The numbers on a license plate in front of you on the highway in one second, the endless horizon line ahead of you the next; the entirety of Berkeley's campus from the Berkeley hills one second, the line in the leaf of your right hand the next. Zoom in, zoom out. Always, together, never, apart.
What am I thinking lately? I think that too many literature graduate students (myself included) ask questions of texts, critics, and themselves that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no" or a "wrong" or a "right." We should not be asking those types of questions because we are not in the hard sciences. We are not in a mathematics department. We are not aiming to arrive at WHY such an author did this that or the other because guess what? We have no idea, barring his or her appearance at our door, and even then, when he or she shows up, he or she is not the person that wrote, but someone else. Well, not entirely else, but someone that is a/part of the person that is the writer. A part and yet fundamentally apart. I think we should be thinking on the meta-level. Why do we ask what we ask of texts? What are the limits to the questions themselves? Who is deciding the limits of our questioning and can we see them, name them, hear them?
I am also thinking that we are not spending enough time thinking about the two levels of seeing -- the nearsightedness and the farsightedness -- while we are critiquing. It is hard to maintain a double focus. To walk in and around the text really carefully but still go behind it to grab the words that are actually blurry, even hidden, in the background of the plot. We memorize plots and characters and author's names and lives for exams, but do we actually put ourselves, put our "self" away, and put our other self into the forest of the plot, onto the ship, into the shoes of a fisherman or the boots of a solider? I don't know if we always do. And if we don't, I don't think we are fully doing our job. I think I have to do a better job of living in the text while still looking out at the sky, of memorizing more names of characters, but still giving myself space to see the repeatability of that character from Macondo to Delphi to New York City and back again. The repetition is not pure, but doubled and doubled again. It is often a blurry repetition, but that holds traces of something else. It also holds traces of the future iteration of itself.
For someone who writes a lot (probably too much) I don't know anything more than anyone else. I don't know what half of what I read actually MEANS. I know I have glimmers of beautiful grasping that slip away before I have even typed a coherent thought on to my brain, my own archive, my own clairefontaine endless pile of notebooks (they're the best. you must invest in claire fontaine. the pages are silk, if i have not said so already five times before). Glimmers. Blurs. That is the thought that reappears later when I am eating my dinner or watering my plants. But lots of times I think I am faking my way through half of what I do. I talked about this today. The faking part. Like the fact that I have given conference papers having read a third of the novel I am talking about. You realize the more you do this how little you actually have to do sometimes (I suppose everyone's "little" is relative) to get by. I do what I consider a lot. A ton. Way too much. But I do it for myself because I know most days I could get by with doing entirely less and probably be a happier, more well-balanced individual.
But I could do so much more. Way more. Infinitely more. I need to do a better job at creating my own double-vision. Maybe this is the reason why my glasses broke. Or that is, I broke my glasses. I never quite know who does what around here.
