Ulysses, African-American Authors, et al.
I continue to make my way through Ulysses. This morning I finished reading episode nine, “Scylla and Charybdis.” It was especially meaningful to me for several reasons. It’s a highly literary episode, as the characters, especially Stephen Dedalus and the poet A. E., discuss Shakespeare and, in particular, their various theories about Hamlet (and Hamlet and king Hamlet). Before reading Ulysses, I had not seen the parallels between Homer’s Odyssey — a text that I’ve taught for years — and Hamlet, a text that I’ve taught but it’s been awhile. Both, for instance, are very much concerned with the absent father (Odysseus and king Hamlet), and in both the returned father spurs them to violence against intruders to their home (the suitors and Claudius). The bipolarity of faithful Penelope versus faithless Gertrude is interesting, too.
Perhaps the most intriguing notion to come out of my reading of episode nine, however, is the idea that Joyce was exploring the dichotomy between Aristotle’s rationalism (represented by the cliff-dwelling Scylla) and Plato’s more organic idealism (the maelstrom Charybdis). I’ve been teaching and studying the Odyssey for years, but I’ve never thought of Odysseus as having to navigate between these philosophical poles — and the dangers associated with sailing too closely to one or the other. We can see this metaphor played out in our everyday lives. In education, for example, it seems that the Aristotelean has run amok with an overemphasis on standardized testing (crystallized in the politically named “No Child Left Behind” legislation) to the detriment of the more flexible and organic pedagogies, associated in this paradigm with the Platonic. That is, President Bush and the architects of NCLB wanted to treat students as if they were software that could be tweaked into superior performance — and dismissing the complexly organic nature of complex human organisms. Standardized testing has its place in education, but we mustn’t sail too closely to the rocks; a more moderate course is needed.
I’ve also been (re-)reading some slave narratives as I’m currently teaching one of my favorite courses at the college, Introduction to African-American Authors. I’ve taught it several times over the last four or five years, but I overhauled the syllabus, placing greater emphasis on the early slave narratives (Equiano, Prince, Douglass, and Jacobs), and also on the Harlem Renaissance. Regarding the latter, this new emphasis has allowed the poetry of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes into the reading list, as well as the novella The Blacker the Berry (1929) by Wallace Thurman. For the conclusion of the course, I’ve also switched out Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) for The Bluest Eye (1970). Of course, in revamping the syllabus the age-old problem has manifested itself: for everything the syllabus giveth, it must taketh something else away. In this case, I’ve lost some writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker (and Walker’s concept of “womanism” as opposed to feminism). These are great losses to be sure. I’ll have to evaluate this incarnation of the course once we finish in mid-June.
I continue to work on The Authoress and am very pleased with how it’s taking shape. I have a more solid sense of the ending, but it remains many, many words away, and I’m deliberately avoiding marrying myself to the ending as I envision it now — I want the narrative to have the autonomy to assert its own wishes and needs as we go along. The fine folks at Punkin House Press are getting things in order. I still haven’t been contacted by an editor there regarding Men of Winter, but it will no doubt happen soon. Their plate is mighty full, to put it mildly. Speaking of autonomy, PHP’s philosophy is to let writers have their own space to create and to promote themselves. On the one hand, I very much appreciate this noble philosophy, but, on the other, some writers could probably use a bit more guidance when it comes to presenting themselves to the world. I can offer no citation, but I’ve heard that when Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat”) would send his work to his publisher, the junior editors would draw straws to see who had to edit his writing, which was filled with misspellings and ungrammatical musings. Creativity — even if a sort of genius creativity — does not necessarily make one a master of the English language, which is why the gods invented editors.
And speaking of unmasterful endeavors, I continue to tinker with tedmorrissey.com — but there probably isn’t a lot more to do until Men of Winter gets closer to an actual release date.
Ulysses and my new website
Somehow or another in my college coursework and general bibliomania, I managed to miss pretty much all of James Joyce, other than reading Dubliners (1914) in bits and pieces over the years and including “Araby” on my syllabus when I’ve taught Intro to Short Fiction at the college; and I’ve always considered my lack of familiarity with Joyce as an enormous gap in literary knowledge. Hence one of my post-doctoral goals was to catch up on my reading of Joyce. In the fall I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and over the winter I began Ulysses (1922). Other pressures forced me to leave the text be for a time, but I’m back at it, and in the last week or so I’ve read the “Lotus Eaters,” “Hades” and “Aeolus” sections, and I’m working on “Lestrygonians.” Ulysses is a difficult text to be sure, and it requires focus. There have been a few episodes in which I’ve become enthralled as a reader and have been lost in the story, but for the most part it has required some concerted effort to stay with the narrative threads and make some sense of them. I doubt that I’ll pursue Joyce in a scholarly way, and I can’t see incorporating Joyce into my teaching other than via the stories from Dubliners, but it’s time well spent nevertheless. From a creative writing standpoint, Joyce’s experimentation and narrative courage, if you will, are valuable lessons to be learned or at least to be reinforced. I was inspired by the overall structure of Ulysses in the writing of the central section of The Authoress.
Speaking of The Authoress, writing has been going well. Though with over 200 pages of manuscript, I feel that the story is still waxing; it may end up being a fairly long novel, which is all right: I’ve always felt like the conclusion of Men of Winter was a bit rushed. A literary agent had been waiting to see the completed manuscript for three years (not with bated breath, mind you — but I was ever mindful of her expressed interest and was anxious to get it into her mailbox). And of course once she read it, she decided not to represent it anyway. And I may be mistaken (whatever “mistake” means when it comes to art): perhaps the conclusion is as it should be.
This past week I launched tedmorrissey.com, devoted to my creative writing endeavors. It’s very much a work in progress, and pretty low-tech as websites go these days. But it seems a virtual necessity to have a dedicated web presence as a contemporary author. Once Men of Winter gets closer to release, I’ll add some additional features. One of the things I need to work on, I feel, is a trailer for the novel — as far as I know it’s a twenty-first-century phenomenon to have a trailer for a book. One of the folks I follow on Twitter makes trailers, so I’m thinking of approaching her, but I’m also considering making it myself. It would definitely be a learning experience (like starting 12 Winters Blog and tedmorrissey.com). The publisher of Men of Winter, Punkin House Press, a brand-new press, is coming along. I can’t imagine the numbers of irons they have in the fire, as it were, attempting to launch a commercial printing house along with a vanity press, a marketplace for self-published books, and a literary journal — simultaneously. God bless em.
I submitted a proposal to write a chapter for a book on the artist and society; my chapter would be about William H. Gass’s The Tunnel. I should hear within a couple of weeks whether or not my proposal’s been accepted. The chapter will be due September 1 if it’s accepted. If it’s accepted, I’ll enjoy diving back into The Tunnel; but if it’s not, that will be time I’ll be able to devote to other projects — it’s a win-win either way.
Men of Winter to be published, and Hawkes’s The Cannibal
Well, it only took about ten years, but I’ve found a publisher for my novel Men of Winter. Punkin House Press has offered to bring it out as both an ebook and an actual book. Punkin House, whose CEO is Amy Ferrell, is adapted(ing) to the realities of publishing in the twenty-first century, I believe. For years editors/publishers have reacted to my book-length work in more or less the same way: They like it, they think it should be in print, but just not by them because they won’t make any money off of it. At a glance it appears that there are just as many publishing houses as there were twenty years ago, perhaps more. But, in fact, the same thing has happened in the publishing world that has happened in the TV and radio worlds — a few large corporations have acquired or driven out of business the smaller publishing houses, so what may look like a dozen houses is actually just one parent-owned house whose only interest is making a lot of money. So you have a small group of “name” authors who publish continuously, and thousands of worthy authors who can’t get the time of day from a larger publisher because a “no-name” author isn’t going to sell enough product to make it worthwhile (and, of course, no-name authors remain with no name in the business). Independent and university presses have tried to fill the void, but budget and staff restraints allow them to publish only a handful of titles each year. Also, these sorts of presses, especially university presses, tend to evolve very slowly in terms of using technology and adapting to market trends because they’re associated with bureaucratic systems that are driven by inertia rooted in tradition (that is, bureaucrats tend to stick with what they know, even long after it’s proven ineffective). Meanwhile, I continue to look for a journal to publish “Walkin’ the Dog,” which is really the last publishable story I have; and I work on The Authoress (novel in progress).
On the scholarship front, I’ve been busy tracking down the various portions of William H. Gass’s novel The Tunnel that appeared as excerpts or stand-alone pieces over about thirty years. So far I’ve mainly been acquiring the pieces and I haven’t had the opportunity to sift through them with care. What I’m especially interested in is how Gass may have revised them before they appeared in the novel itself. When I compared “The Old Folks” that appeared in The Kenyon Review with its counterpart, “The Ghost Folks,” in The Tunnel, I found a few — but significant — changes. I’m still interested in the metaphor of the tunnel itself as being rooted, psychologically, in the phenomenon of the fallout shelter. I was surprised at the references to tunnels and basements in Nabokov’s early novel Bend Sinister; likewise, I’m only a few pages into John Hawkes’s 1949 novel The Cannibal, which is set in a bombed-out German town, and I’m finding very interesting references to basements, etc. For example, in the opening chapter the character Balimir is set to work digging a pit in Madame Snow’s cellar, and we are told that as Balimir sits at the top of the steps all of Germany is at his feet. Similarly, Madame Snow herself “felt the vastness of community that was like burial, spreading over all borders and from family to family” (New Directions 1962 edition p. 17). That is, the entire town seemed to be underground.
I’m anxious to read on and see where these threads lead my research.
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