A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
Happy Bloomsday, everyone! That will be a main theme of today’s post, but before we get there, I remind you once again that you only have about two weeks if you’d like to purchase the soon-to-be collector’s item self-published first edition of my new novel Major Arcana on Amazon in print or on Kindle. After that, you’ll have to wait for the Belt Publishing edition in April 2025.1 (There’s also the original Substack serial for paid subscribers: this will remain available indefinitely.) In gratitude, I note a new five-star review of Major Arcana that appeared on Goodreads this week:
If you’d like to be here for it too, I will send a free pdf of Major Arcana to anyone who wants one in exchange for an honest review in a public forum; please just email me at the address in my bio or DM me here on Substack.
I also published a new book review this week of Naomi Kanakia’s recently released debut literary novel The Default World, a funny, gritty, and unsparing social novel in the grand realist tradition about a down-on-her-luck trans woman trying to infiltrate a self-satisfied group of wealthy San Francisco progressives. I will be reviewing new and forthcoming books all summer. If you’d like to send me a print copy of your book, please see this post where I specify what I’m looking for: serious fiction, in short, as well as arts-and-humanities nonfiction. No un-serious fiction, please—I’m talking here about treatment, not subject matter: science fiction, horror, crime, romance-erotica, et al. are welcome as long as there’s something going on artistically—and probably no memoirs unless you’ve profoundly manipulated the form, have some extraordinary experience to relate, or are just an all-around brilliant writer of the sort to whom no rules or prohibitions apply.
Finally, this week I released “Signatures of All Things I Am Here to Read,” my first of six Invisible College episodes on Joyce’s Ulysses. If you’ve always wanted to read Ulysses, if you’ve tried to read it and failed, if you’ve read it but want to understand it better, or even if you’re parasocially invested in the melodrama of my changing approach to the text, this summer reading session of the Invisible College is your opportunity.2 The full first episode, over two and a half hours long, is free to all; the next five will be paywalled. Please offer a paid subscription today!
To entice you further to join us in the Invisible College—like Norman Mailer, I advertise myself—this week’s post will be a Bloomsday walking tour of my last decade’s worth of writings on Joyce, with additions and annotations. Please enjoy!
The Word Made Flesh Word: My Annotated Bloomsday Autobibliography
I have always tried or aspired to be a Joycean. Someday I might even “finish,” whatever that would mean, Finnegans Wake.
As recounted in the latest Invisible College episode, I first became aware of Ulysses in adolescence—if not from references in comic books then from poking around the Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM (talk about dating oneself) that came with our first desktop computer.3
Intrigued by the notion of a book both filthy and impossible to read, I first checked Ulysses out of the library when I was about 12; it was the little suburban branch library adjoining the public pool as described in my novel The Class of 2000, where the 18-year-old hero Michael Abandanato spies the 42-year-old anti-heroine Donna Lydon née Belladonna Balestreri through the gaps in the shelves and ejaculates onto an edition of Jowett’s Plato—a very Joycean scene.
Anyway, I was experienced by then with the literary filth, having already read Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps, Philip José Farmer’s A Feast Unknown, and a pile of my father’s old Heavy Metal magazines found in the attic. But impossibility seemed intriguing, too, maybe even more intriguing than filth, an extension (I must have imagined) of the intricate structure and symbolism of Watchmen, which I’d also read by then. I remember staring at the first page of Ulysses hopefully but uncomprehendingly as I lay prone in the grass by the pool.
I would read the basically comprehensible first two chapters several times in my teens, always stopped by the famous “ineluctable modality of the visible” that begins the third episode and inaugurates the novel’s real difficulty. I would only read it cover to cover in a class in my first year of college, in the spring of 2001, when I was 19, about half a decade after I’d found it. I credit Bloom’s pacifism in “Cyclops” for my (very minor) anti-war activities in response to the later events of the year 2001, even though Hitchens and Amis would annex the text to their imperial bellicosity—the peril, as well as the pleasure, of writing a plural text.
Later, in graduate school, I would write a dissertation chapter on Joyce, but not on Ulysses. That would have thrown off my structure: four chapters on four short- to medium-length modernist novels: in Joyce’s case, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I tried to observe Bloomsday with a post on johnpistelli.com every year since 2015, a practice I continue this year on Substack. My substantial contribution this year will have to remain the Invisible College episode on the novel’s first three episodes, however. But as an addition to this, I will “curate” and annotate my previous Bloomsday pieces, hyperlinked by year of publication. I did a version of this index last year, too, but without a narrative of my shifting response, and anyway that was many hundreds of subscribers ago. Let us eke go:
—2015: in my first Bloomsday piece, I posted Mina Loy’s extraordinary poem “Joyce’s Ulysses,” written in 1922. As I noted in my comment on the poem, I don’t think any other early reader understood “the rejector-recreator / Joyce” as well as Loy did, by the evidence of her catalogue of his masterpiece’s themes.4
The word made flesh and feeding upon itself with erudite fangs The sanguine introspection of the womb Don Juan of Judea upon a pilgrimage to the Libido
—2016: then I considered the case against Ulysses. The strongest case, that is—not the philistine or phony-populist case that, for instance, Tolkien is better or more important, which I extensively debunked here. A strong case against Ulysses doesn’t damn it as unreadable or elitist, but begins from the premise that even if we haven’t read it, we’re living it. We inhabit a world almost totally shaped by Joyce’s rejections and recreations. (Not to read it, then, is not to understand ourselves.)5 I explicated, therefore, Leo Bersani’s brilliantly contrarian “Against Ulysses,” which condemns the novel for its veritably Austenian traditionalism as the ultimate work of sentimental realism, this in distinction to much more anti-humanist modernists like Flaubert, Lawrence, Bataille, and Beckett. Whether or not Bersani is right—right in his reading, right to condemn on the basis of it—has been a consistent question in my mind. My own version of “Against Ulysses,” as it turns out, would be almost the opposite of his argument. A friend-of-the-blog provocatively Tweeted my post at Joyce Carol Oates at the time, who rejected it—or rejected Bersani—no surprise, since she described Ulysses in her excellent essay “Jocoserious Joyce” as the “greatest single work of art in our tradition.” Today’s her birthday, by the way.
—2017: getting weirder, I summarized Carl Jung’s ambivalent response to Ulysses—ambivalent especially because the novel forced him to recognize that “medieval Catholic Ireland covers a geographical area of whose size I have been hitherto ignorant.” This is to say that Joyce’s work, like that of Jung’s erstwhile and also joy-named mentor, inaugurated a global uprising against repression: a veritable culture war. Jung’s otherwise un-Freudian reading of the novel mystified me at the time with its characteristically gnostic and spiritual emphasis—I didn’t see then what this had to do with the questions Bersani forced on me—but now that I’ve written Major Arcana, I get it. I get it, and I love it: ambivalently, of course, the way one loves anything.6 Jung writes:
Ulysses is the creator-god in Joyce, a true demiurge who has freed himself from entanglement in the physical and mental world and contemplates them with detached consciousness. […] He is the higher self who returns to his divine home after blind entanglement in samsara. In the whole book no Ulysses appears; the book itself is Ulysses, a microcosm of James Joyce, the world of the self and the self of the world in one. Ulysses can return home only when he has turned his back on the world of mind and matter. This is surely the message underlying that sixteenth day of June, 1904…
—2018: inspired by feminist Elaine Showalter’s call for a Dallowayday to gender-balance Bloomsday, I next pitted Joyce against Woolf. Because of the class-based slurs with which she unfortunately mixed her response, falsely calling Ulysses the “underbred” work of “a self-taught working man,”7 we often over-hastily dismiss Woolf’s substantial criticism that Joyce’s novel as too consumed with fragmentary cleverness to approach Tolstoyan power, but I credit this as another plausible case against Joyce’s unquestionably diffuse book. Above all, though, I anti-celebrate both Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway as fiercely and ferociously amoral works that defy the imperative to enjoy any feast day, unless we acknowledge that feast days, too, involve the whole range of human experience.8
—2019: I finally decided to get serious, so I wrote a vast conspective review of Richard Ellmann’s landmark Joyce biography. I took it as the occasion to pit Joyce’s anarchism against his socialism, his globalism against his nationalism, his aestheticism against his humanism, this to anatomize the very forces tearing our world apart just as they tore our penman apart. For the humanist Ellmann, Joyce just is Tolstoy, but it seems to me that things are much more complicated and tragic than that, not that they aren’t also very funny.
—2020: the seriousness continues with a full essay on Dubliners, almost an index of the many forms of cultural paralysis the collection depicts, with a final defense of Gabriel Conroy’s apolitical approach to art in “The Dead.” If my characterization of the activist Miss Ivors as a “proto-fascist” seems extreme, I would urge readers to retrieve the now somewhat repressed memory of what was actually happening in June 2020: a moment when those in our own time who want to submit culture to politics defended a mind-destroying and most un-Joycean mixture of civic violence (to “end racism”) and state repression (to “protect health”).
—2021: the seriousness deepens with an essay on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’ve never been all that satisfied with this one. I think the Invisible College episode on A Portrait is better, especially because it doesn’t include any references to Louis Althusser.9 (Nora Joyce had it hard, Adele Mailer had it harder, but Hélène Althusser had it hardest of all.) A late convert to Lawrence, I’m still thinking through my concluding comparison of modernism’s two great banned-book novelists.
—2022: the seriousness culminates with a centenary essay on Ulysses itself, an essay into which I tried to include all the best cases for and against Joyce’s epic. I have been asked if the case against will be incorporated in my Invisible College treatment. The answer is that we’ll have to see—every reading is different.
—2023: an epilogue befitting the other subject matter of my new novel, not spiritual quests but sequential art. This is a review of a recent comic-book biography of Joyce that I first published in a print journal a few years back. Of most interest is the opening speculation about what Joyce would have made of the art form of comics itself, the form that turns time into space, just as his fiction does in its attempt to arrest in an epiphany the moment as it passes.
To repeat what I’ve said earlier, the Belt edition will be substantially the same text as the self-published edition, which is substantially the same text as the Substack serial, but each iteration is tighter and more polished than the last. With the editorial mess that is Joyce’s Ulysses in mind, I hereby state for the future historian that the Belt edition represents my final intention and my preferred text.
And I remind new readers that we will move on to Middlemarch after Ulysses and then to American literature, including Moby-Dick, in the fall. The greatest Irish novel, the greatest English novel, and the greatest American novel: all in the Invisible College, not to mention the already completed archive of a survey of modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, and a forthcoming survey of modern American literature from Emerson and Poe to Stevens and Faulkner.
Insofar as Ulysses is literature’s electric-age apogee before print culture’s supersession by new media, this isn’t a bad way to find the novel. I was thinking that Ulysses is either the best or worst book for our moment. Reading it is not like reading most other novels; it scatters attention as much as it focuses attention, more like having 50 tabs open in a browser than like reading Middlemarch. To read it is to understand our moment better, but not to find any relief from our moment. If you need relief, the Invisible College will be reading Middlemarch in August.
The Pistelli completist will note that Loy also furnishes the epigraph to Major Arcana, this time from her most celebrated poem, the long love-sequence Songs to Joannes. Someone else will have to annotate the epigraph’s significance for the novel. If it isn’t unseemly, I’ll only say that I got a kick out of invoking “Joannes” at the head of the novel for much the same reason Morrison chose a Biblical reference to “Chloe” as the epigraph to Tar Baby.
Whereas my undergraduate Joyce professor was (somewhat infamously) one of Joyce’s first Anglophone poststructuralist celebrants, seeing in the hetero-text a blow against all imprisoning essentialisms, especially those of gender, my doctoral advisor was an anti-Joycean of the good variety with an opposite case to make. I summarized her argument perhaps most cogently in an old Tumblr post:
She was convinced instead that the novel by a canny sleight of hand repudiates Stephen’s idealism-gnosticism at the level of content only to reproduce it at the level of form. Doesn’t the equivalency of word and fetus in “Oxen” suggest as much? Joyce creates an experimental text of almost autonomous language that enshrines its author and his cosmopolitan expertise as the telos of western civilization at the expense of both nation and woman, both left prostrate, in bed, remanded to the provincial realm of nature which the inorganic metropolitan text, itself a premonition of global capital, omnisciently overwrites.
I forgot to link last week to Mary Jane Eyre’s recent essay on spirituality, but let me do so now. Mary’s post from today, which is about (inter alia) what to do now that we’re all on Substack together—can you give a bad review to a more famous writer who subscribes to you?—is also funny and thoughtful. (Becca Rothfeld, if you’re reading this, please know that I wouldn’t dare.) See also my publisher Anne Trubek’s recent reflection on Substack as potential successor to Twitter qua literary agora.
Joyce was Jesuit-educated and, properly speaking, petit bourgeois. Pound wrote: “NO; Joyce was not a painter not a bohemian, a small bourgeois, to the UTMOST.” I’ll spare you the whole of my regularly vented spiel on modern literature as a lower-middle-class—and for that very reason utopian and salvific—phenomenon. More importantly, see Julianne Werlin’s fascinating post on the cycles of expansion and contraction in the class character of the British literati from the late Middle Ages forward. A sometime skeptic of sociological criticism, I appreciate Werlin’s hesitation about social determinism in her argument. As a writer, I’d go crazy if I calculated my odds too precisely. I know I came out of nowhere in particular, but, like Joyce before me, I will recognize no limit. The manifestation coaches instruct us: “Delulu is the solulu.” To put that in canonical English, there’s always what the serpent told Eve in the modernist epic of another Irishman. Like Bobby Kennedy before me, I quote Shaw’s Back to Methuselah: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”
Joyce’s favorite Catholic holy day was a fast, not a feast: Good Friday, when all the lights go out in the church. This supposed “rejector” attended Good Friday services almost until the end of his life, as documented in a book I half-cited in Friday’s IC episode, Kathleen Ferris’s intriguing and disturbing James Joyce and the Burden of Disease.
An adaptation of a passage in my dissertation where, in pursuit of my argument that the postmodernist theorists owe it all to the modernist novelists, I elaborately demonstrate that everything in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is already there in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The mythic or Jungian dimension is more important to me now, though, and I do it more justice in the IC episode.