This morning Samuel Beckett arrived in the post. I was still half-asleep when I opened his Letters, but was captivated by this:
“How energetic they always are, these self-avowed cynics and désabusés, bristling with passionate estimates and beating their breasts in a jemenfoutiste & jusquauboutiste frenzy.”
The last two words mean, respectively, ‘fed up-ness, don’t give a damn-ness’ and ‘to the full-ness, no-half-measures-ness,’ which he means derogatively, but which Katie and I appropriated to mean pursuing experience jusqu’au bout, to the end, going right to the edge of your limits. Being a hardliner in the best possible way. Think of it as a way of saying ‘fullness of life,' which, as well as being my Issue of the Day, ties in neatly with the essay I’m writing on James Joyce and Ulysses. Bear with me, I'm aware it may seem like it only ties in because it's my Issue of the Day. But this essay is the most complicated, demanding thing I’ve ever written, and simultaneously the easiest and most glorious.
Basically, I’m arguing in favour of the idea that Odysseus is the figure who “chooses custom and habit before all excellency.” He leaves the ravishing nymph Calypso and her promise of immortality shagging together, to struggle back to rocky Ithaca, see his now-grown-up son Telemachus and his loyal, no-longer-young wife Penelope, to get back into their old bed he carved himself out of a tree still growing out of the ground of his homeland. You’d think that excellency meant choosing personal glory, becoming immortal, by which choice he himself would literally, bodily, live forever. But this is an immortality which leaves behind humanity, making it incomplete. We die, which makes us mortal, human; we are mortal because we die. To explain a different kind of immortality, the kind which retains its humanity, apply the analogy of metempsychosis: the transmigration of souls which resurfaces throughout Ulysses like a subtle nudge. The term is taken from Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, who describes it as follows:
"As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, is no longer what it was; does not keep the same form; but is still one and the same; I teach that the soul is always the same, but migrates into different forms." Bk XV:143-175
Look for this even a little in Ulysses and we find Telemachus ‘reincarnated’ as Hamlet, who transmigrates nicely into Stephen Dedalus. These are sons are searching for their fathers. Bloom used to be, and still is, Daedalus the artificer, who has also lost a son; once upon a time he was Odysseus, the all-round androgyne patient striving family man. He is even Shakespeare: the appearance of the ghost of his baby son Rudy, now aged eleven, evokes Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, dead at eleven, the twin of Hamlet the play. Fathers and sons are everywhere because they represent inheritance: genetic, cultural and literary. Literature, or even simply words, is how we pass things on. Ulysses itself, as a book, is passing on these snippets of culture, folklore, forgotten language, new language, to make the whole vast patchwork of humanity complete. All of Bloom's life is in there: in the minutiae of his daily bodily functions as much as in the endless fragments of the past, past literature, real historical figures, of Irish culture, of Jewish legacy, of Christian myth and old Anglo-saxon epics, fairy tales and songs and snatches of every different tongue. In reading Ulysses, and through the character of Bloom, who, we cannot forget, is just one ordinary, insignificant human life, we become attached to this humanity, recognising that immortality isn’t to be gained just by agreeing to an empty eternity as a nymph’s divine sex slave. Immortality and excellency come through choosing custom and habit, by sailing home to your son and passing on your heritage and everything you’ve learned from your own brief journey, putting your energies into building a future for your little kingdom. All these people, all these patterns: we are all Hamlet, we are all Odysseus, we are all (to translate) Jesus Christ. It is ridiculous to imagine one person alone can achieve immortality, because the vital characteristic of this mass of human knowledge, this inheritance, is that it is shared and somehow mutual. One person can neither feel nor induce empathy.
At times, Hamlet and Odysseus both pretend to be mad, Odysseus when the Trojan war threatens to take him away from Ithaca and his young family, and Hamlet to throw his usurping uncle off the scent while he tries to plot justice for his father and a return of order and legitimacy to Denmark. When I was looking up a line reference for the part of the Odyssey where ‘mad’ Odysseus ploughs the sand of the sea-shore, and is subsequently found out in his sanity by refusing to endanger his baby son, I came across this quote by Joyce:
“Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subject to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him, and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist.”
It pulled me up short. I’d never heard that word before today, so naturally I felt briefly ignorant, but it arrived at precisely the right time. Reading Beckett on a break from my essay about the shared fragments which link us together, I find a word which Joyce then uses not two hours later (in my chronology) to describe his all-round hero, imperfectly human but a symbol of perfect humanity. Everything fits.
I have more to say about this. At the risk of turning into Katie Brooker, have you noticed how in Disney's Hercules, no matter how many grand heroic feats of strength he performs, he doesn't become a true hero until he becomes emotionally heroic and listens to his heart over his other muscles? He doesn't even choose immortality when he achieves this: he picks custom and habit over all excellency, humanity over immortality, so he can live his life with that apallingly thin woman. Just to show how the trickledown effect works, and how metempsychosis even applies to cartoons. See the infinite in the finite. I dare you.
“How energetic they always are, these self-avowed cynics and désabusés, bristling with passionate estimates and beating their breasts in a jemenfoutiste & jusquauboutiste frenzy.”
The last two words mean, respectively, ‘fed up-ness, don’t give a damn-ness’ and ‘to the full-ness, no-half-measures-ness,’ which he means derogatively, but which Katie and I appropriated to mean pursuing experience jusqu’au bout, to the end, going right to the edge of your limits. Being a hardliner in the best possible way. Think of it as a way of saying ‘fullness of life,' which, as well as being my Issue of the Day, ties in neatly with the essay I’m writing on James Joyce and Ulysses. Bear with me, I'm aware it may seem like it only ties in because it's my Issue of the Day. But this essay is the most complicated, demanding thing I’ve ever written, and simultaneously the easiest and most glorious.
Basically, I’m arguing in favour of the idea that Odysseus is the figure who “chooses custom and habit before all excellency.” He leaves the ravishing nymph Calypso and her promise of immortality shagging together, to struggle back to rocky Ithaca, see his now-grown-up son Telemachus and his loyal, no-longer-young wife Penelope, to get back into their old bed he carved himself out of a tree still growing out of the ground of his homeland. You’d think that excellency meant choosing personal glory, becoming immortal, by which choice he himself would literally, bodily, live forever. But this is an immortality which leaves behind humanity, making it incomplete. We die, which makes us mortal, human; we are mortal because we die. To explain a different kind of immortality, the kind which retains its humanity, apply the analogy of metempsychosis: the transmigration of souls which resurfaces throughout Ulysses like a subtle nudge. The term is taken from Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, who describes it as follows:
"As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, is no longer what it was; does not keep the same form; but is still one and the same; I teach that the soul is always the same, but migrates into different forms." Bk XV:143-175
Look for this even a little in Ulysses and we find Telemachus ‘reincarnated’ as Hamlet, who transmigrates nicely into Stephen Dedalus. These are sons are searching for their fathers. Bloom used to be, and still is, Daedalus the artificer, who has also lost a son; once upon a time he was Odysseus, the all-round androgyne patient striving family man. He is even Shakespeare: the appearance of the ghost of his baby son Rudy, now aged eleven, evokes Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, dead at eleven, the twin of Hamlet the play. Fathers and sons are everywhere because they represent inheritance: genetic, cultural and literary. Literature, or even simply words, is how we pass things on. Ulysses itself, as a book, is passing on these snippets of culture, folklore, forgotten language, new language, to make the whole vast patchwork of humanity complete. All of Bloom's life is in there: in the minutiae of his daily bodily functions as much as in the endless fragments of the past, past literature, real historical figures, of Irish culture, of Jewish legacy, of Christian myth and old Anglo-saxon epics, fairy tales and songs and snatches of every different tongue. In reading Ulysses, and through the character of Bloom, who, we cannot forget, is just one ordinary, insignificant human life, we become attached to this humanity, recognising that immortality isn’t to be gained just by agreeing to an empty eternity as a nymph’s divine sex slave. Immortality and excellency come through choosing custom and habit, by sailing home to your son and passing on your heritage and everything you’ve learned from your own brief journey, putting your energies into building a future for your little kingdom. All these people, all these patterns: we are all Hamlet, we are all Odysseus, we are all (to translate) Jesus Christ. It is ridiculous to imagine one person alone can achieve immortality, because the vital characteristic of this mass of human knowledge, this inheritance, is that it is shared and somehow mutual. One person can neither feel nor induce empathy.
At times, Hamlet and Odysseus both pretend to be mad, Odysseus when the Trojan war threatens to take him away from Ithaca and his young family, and Hamlet to throw his usurping uncle off the scent while he tries to plot justice for his father and a return of order and legitimacy to Denmark. When I was looking up a line reference for the part of the Odyssey where ‘mad’ Odysseus ploughs the sand of the sea-shore, and is subsequently found out in his sanity by refusing to endanger his baby son, I came across this quote by Joyce:
“Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subject to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him, and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist.”
It pulled me up short. I’d never heard that word before today, so naturally I felt briefly ignorant, but it arrived at precisely the right time. Reading Beckett on a break from my essay about the shared fragments which link us together, I find a word which Joyce then uses not two hours later (in my chronology) to describe his all-round hero, imperfectly human but a symbol of perfect humanity. Everything fits.
I have more to say about this. At the risk of turning into Katie Brooker, have you noticed how in Disney's Hercules, no matter how many grand heroic feats of strength he performs, he doesn't become a true hero until he becomes emotionally heroic and listens to his heart over his other muscles? He doesn't even choose immortality when he achieves this: he picks custom and habit over all excellency, humanity over immortality, so he can live his life with that apallingly thin woman. Just to show how the trickledown effect works, and how metempsychosis even applies to cartoons. See the infinite in the finite. I dare you.
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