Weekly Readings #91 (10/30/23-11/05/23)

the brute blood of the air

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I published my monthly reading log, “October Books,” where I express my impatience with the Biblical prophets, analyze one of the best and most timely of Philip Roth’s novels, evaluate the overall aesthetic of Neil Gaiman, praise briefly A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and examine what the young and Japanophilic regard as one of the major works of art in our time—I ungenerously call it “2666 for weebs”—Inio Asano’s famously harrowing manga Goodnight Punpun.

I also posted “The Heresiarch,” the latest chapter of my novel-in-progress for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. A novel is not a bicycle race, said the late Milan Kundera, but a feast of many courses. I had particular fun preparing this one: among its other pleasures is a tale within the tale, the titular Heresiarch, my version of one of those strange hour-long no-budget horror movies that sometimes show up on Amazon. The next chapter will come back to earth, sort of, with an examination of late 2010s gender politics in an American high school. The plot summary of one of the novels involved in this week’s literary controversy¹—

—has elements of what I’m trying to do with Major Arcana: examine themes of gender, sexual, and spiritual identity that have long been part of the novel’s heritage and the life of most imaginative writers (who are or should be, as Coleridge and Woolf tell us with Shakespeare in mind, inherently androgynous), except with genuine literary interest mostly unavailable to the willed simplicity of the “YA style”² and outside the “social justice” frame that is, in popular fiction, mostly just a rhetorical legitimation of female pornography, including the pornography of false compassion.³

For this week’s post, I complete the loose trilogy on left-wing intellectuals and revolutionary violence begun in Weekly Readings #88 and #89 before I was interrupted last week by my Halloween consideration of Poe. I return, for the last time I hope, to the question of Edward Said, and, not for the last time, to the much larger question of William Butler Yeats. Please enjoy!

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A Sudden Blow: Yeats, Said, and the Question of Emancipatory Violence

Relief from Argos (50-100 AD)

I’ve never studied Yeats formally, nor even made a serious informal study of his work. I began reading him early, in middle school, guided by allusions in Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison comics—see a friend of the blog’s piece on Morrison for the way these comics functioned, reliably if erratically, as a certain generation’s syllabus—and I even concluded the epic graphic novel I wrote in the eighth grade with the time-traveling hero and heroine from an apocalyptic future walking into the prehistoric sunset (they had gone back in time to serve as Adam and Eve, to birth humanity) as the man recited the last stanza of “The Song of Wandering Aengus” to her.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Then, in college, I had the familiar Selected Poems and Four Plays volume, many lines of which but few full poems became engraved on my heart. I studied it not only for its own sake, but for the way Yeats seemed to serve as the poetic crux for many schools of literary theory as they negotiated the vaunted transition from modernism to postmodernism, even as Yeats himself rocked on the fulcrum of Romanticism and modernism.

Among these Yeats-concerned theorists was Edward Said. I’ve never told you why I read Said so much, other than his being one of the only literary theorists to write in an intelligible style. The main reason is that my college years (2000-2004) coincided with the Second Intifada, 9/11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. You’ve heard of the proverbial dorm-room bull session, where undergraduates talk spacily about how everything is, like, connected, man? In those years, the dorm-room bull sessions exclusively concerned Middle East politics. This is what I meant a few weeks ago when I said that I am not a newcomer to this subject, even though I am not an expert on it. It felt like the world was ending in about 2002, the way it feels now. I used about half of my college credits that didn’t go toward my English major taking classes on the histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, since this was presented to us in the mass media as a religious war. I also read all the popular polemicists on left, right, and center, which were distributed slightly differently then than they are now. In those years, and beyond those years, up until about my resignation from political criticism in 2009, I read Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Michael Walzer, Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit, Leon Wieseltier, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Norman Finkelstein, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Eqbal Ahmad, and people whose names I don’t even remember or wish to remember.

I was persuaded by the radicals on the above list. I became one in turn. I read Afflicted Powers by the Retort collective, which suggested that 9/11 was a defeat within the “spectacle” for western imperialism. I read Susan Buck-Morss, who proposed a shared genesis for critical theory and political Islam as comparable forms of critique—weren’t Theodor Adorno and Sayyid Qutb scandalized by the same provocations in their American exile?—and therefore a shared destiny on the global left. I even went to hear Buck-Morss speak, an event at which she laughingly admitted she had only a “formal” interest in Islam and had never read the Qur’an.

Never content just to read but always moved to write, I contributed very slightly to this avalanche of discourse; one of my first print publications—it’s not online, but I’ll show you; see below—was a book review that I took as a platform to denounce Israel and, somewhat in the spirit of Buck-Morss, to dare to hope for a progressive Hamas:

Rain Taxi, Spring 2008

After 2009, as I said, I decamped from the struggle. I tucked away in the back of my mind that idea that since the radical left was wrong about everything else, they were probably wrong about Israel and Middle East politics, too, to say nothing of Hamas-as-humane-authority, but I never went back to make sure; I still haven’t, though I still carry the assumption; if you’re hoping for an editorial on that specific matter, you’re in the wrong place. Almost two decades later, I no longer think there’s one word to be written in favor of Hamas, if you need me to say that, even as I deeply mistrust the ethics of the present Israeli government’s conduct of the present war, if you need me to say that. More than those two remarks I am currently unable to make.

My point is that I read Edward Said. Said came pre-dismissed for me by Harold Bloom (“no one has demonstrated that increased consciousness of the relation between culture and imperialism is of the slightest benefit whatsoever in learning to read Mansfield Park,” goes the subtweet from The Western Canon), but I couldn’t deny I was fascinated by Said’s claim for the political efficacy, even if this meant the political complicity, of major literature. I read Orientalism—I’ve even taught its introduction a couple of times—but it never moved me much.⁴ No, Culture and Imperialism, with its striking literary studies, was the book for me.

Among that book’s literary studies, and to balance its gentle rebuke to Jane Austen which I discussed a few weeks ago, we find an appreciation of Yeats as an anticolonial poet comparable to Neruda, Césaire, and Darwish, though these latter three were communists, while Yeats, we know, was certainly not. Even when I first read the book, between my second and third years of college, I thought Yeats was an odd choice.

Said, I knew even then, was not quite a nationalist, despite his supposedly championing the aspirations of the Palestinian people. I now have a more nuanced understanding of his trajectory: as a member of the PLO and advisor to Arafat in the 1970s and 1980s, he’d been of necessity a nationalist and an advocate for a Palestinian state. But after what he took to be the “Palestinian Versailles” of the Oslo Accords in 1993, he himself decamped from practical politics and gave his last decade to the utopian vision of a binational secular democracy that would honor the diversity and plurality of peoples the region had immemorially maintained. This view was already nascent in Culture and Imperialism, with its memorable quotations from Césaire about how “il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” and its lyrical conclusion citing Hugh of St. Victor (via Erich Auerbach) on the way “he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place.”

Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss. Regard experiences then as if they were about to disappear: what is it about them that anchors or roots them in reality? What would you save of them, what would you give up, what would you recover? To answer such questions you must have the independence and detachment of someone whose homeland is “sweet,” but whose actual condition makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness, and even less possible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma, whether deriving from pride in one's heritage or from certainty about who “we” are.

Said wanted universal rootless cosmopolitanism, predicated on a universal sense of vastation, for us all, not a state with its stately promised plenitude, for anyone in particular; arguably, his utopian horizon included no state at all. He conceded, as Adam Shatz reports, that his relationship to Palestine was “basically metaphorical.” This is the context in which he famously told the Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit toward the end of his life that he was “the last Jewish intellectual.” The whole exchange is never quoted, though it’s very illuminating (I take my text from Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan):

So for you personally there is no return?

While I was writing my memoir, my dear friend Abu Lughod, who is a refugee from Jaffa, went back to Palestine and settled in Ramallah. That was an option for me, too. I could have gotten a job at Bir Zeit. But I realized this is something I cannot do. My fate is to remain in New York. On a constantly shifting ground, where relationships are not inherited, but created. Where there is no solidity of home.

Are you addicted to homelessness?

I don’t know if I’m addicted. But I don’t own any real estate. The flat I live in is rented. I see myself as a wanderer. My position is that of a traveler, who is not interested in holding territory, who has no realm to protect.

[Theodor] Adorno says that in the twentieth century the idea of home has been superseded. I suppose part of my critique of Zionism is that it attaches too much importance to home. Saying, we need a home. And we’ll do anything to get a home, even if it means making others homeless.

Why do you think I’m so interested in the bi-national state? Because I want a rich fabric of some sort, which no one can fully comprehend, and no one can fully own. I never understood the idea of this is my place, and you are out. I do not appreciate going back to the origin, to the pure. I believe the major political and intellectual disasters were caused by reductive movements that tried to simplify and purify. That said, we have to plant tents or kibbutz or army and start from scratch.

I don’t believe in all that. I wouldn’t want it for myself. Even if I were a Jew, I’d fight against it. And it won’t last. Take it from me, Ari. Take my word for it. I’m older than you. It won’t even be remembered.

You sound very Jewish.

Of course. I’m the last Jewish intellectual. You don’t know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these people here in America. So I’m the last one. The only true follower of Adorno.⁵ Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian.

In an almost unseemly way, he crowed around the same time in a public lecture that the Palestinians have replaced the Jews in a role they forfeited with the founding of Israel: that of a synecdoche for the oppressed as such, the oppressed as a universal class whose resistance promises universal deliverance. Israel, then, is likewise for Said a metaphor in the same way that Palestine is: a metaphor for the obstacle to the reign of universal love, an obstacle which “won’t even be remembered” when this object is achieved. (I trust you don’t require my overt censure of the implied eliminationism here.)

To the extent that I dimly understood Said’s ultimate utopian vision, then, I wondered even 20 years ago: why Yeats? Said’s Palestinianism, including an exaltation of the diasporic Jew as utopian metaphor, resembled Joyce’s vision for Ireland in both his fiction and his nonfiction.⁶ So why focus Culture and Imperialism’s Irish chapter on Yeats? Yeats, while a cosmopolitan himself, writing latter-day Noh plays about Irish lore, represented a more decided cultural nationalism in politics. The answer has to do with the place of violence in the process of “decolonizing.” Strangely, the key poem in Yeats’s corpus for this concern is not an overt political statement like “Easter, 1916” or “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” or “The Statues,” but rather the sonnet “Leda and the Swan,” with its visionary, even entranced representation of the heroine’s rape by Zeus:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                                  Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

In the postcolonial reading of this poem, Leda is the colonized and Zeus the colonizer. The question then becomes: what aspects of the colonizer’s culture—the colonizer’s “knowledge”—should the colonized retain? The old “master’s tools master’s house” problem, in other words. As a modernizer and “secular critic,” Said favored retaining a high degree of the master’s tools (in the context of European and Arab relations, they weren’t the master’s tools in the first place, nor, come to think of it, were the Arabs historically innocent of imperialism), and he looked askance on cults of the primitive, as Yeats did not. But Said is even more interested in what the poem says about violence in the anticolonial struggle. An adoption of the colonizer’s knowledge means an adoption of his power, including his power to destroy. Said writes:

It is helpful to remember that “the Anglo-Irish conflict” with which Yeats’s poetic oeuvre is saturated was a “model of twentieth-century wars of liberation.” His greatest decolonizing works concern the birth of violence, or the violent birth of change, as in “Leda and the Swan,” instants when a blinding flash of simultaneity is presented to his colonial eyes—the girl’s rape, and alongside that, the question “Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” Yeats situates himself at that juncture where the violence of change is unarguable but where the results of the violence beseech necessary, if not always sufficient, reason.

I have never understood that last sentence. It’s a frankly terrible piece of writing. What does “unarguable” mean? That we can’t argue that the violence has happened? Or that we can’t argue that the violence was necessary? And hadn’t Said better specify which he means, given what’s at stake in the distinction? A deeply dishonorable equivocation can be read into just that one word. Then we find ourselves stranded (“beseech” can’t be the word he wants either) in the casuistry of necessary vs. sufficient causation: the same equivocation, except expressed more pretentiously. Is violence, Said wants to know, necessary but not sufficient for liberation, or is it sufficient in itself? The possibility of non-violence is not considered, though Said elsewhere (and even in Arafat’s very ear) argued for a postmodern war of images and representation rather than a modern war of arms. As it happens, we now “enjoy” both. Said also never considers that further violence, a cyclic eternity of violence (“And Agamemnon dead”) leading to “The Second Coming,” might easily be the sole result of his own decolonizing effort.

Said offers the above as a reading of a poem whose actual political subtext is Yeats’s theory of eternal historical cycles, a theory completely incompatible with any progressive idea of history as moving toward the manifestation of utopia. From a leftist’s perspective, the poem is an eloquent condensation into a single myth of the entire reactionary worldview. It has nothing in particular to do with Ireland. To a critic unobsessed with ideology, the poem’s incredible poignance and gravity can be found in the poet’s implied identification with the raped girl. Like the magical adept rapt by higher powers, Leda is a vessel for brutalizing historical forces she is in some danger of never understanding. Yeats’s concession that he stands, or lies, in this vulnerable, receptive posture before the forces he confronts is what makes him the most formidable and admirable of modern poets, regardless of what “thesis” he may or may not have wanted to express, regardless of his “politics.” Yeats, finally, is honest in a way that Said is not, in a way that the revolutionary pundit could never be.

Let us examine in conclusion the kitsch to which the revolutionary pundit’s victory in the war of images has given rise. Last week, I showed you some graffiti a few blocks from where I live. This week I give you a poster a few blocks from where I teach:

The olive branches doubly signify both the fruit of the land to be reclaimed and the peace that will follow the reclamation. As for whether or not the peace will accompany the reclamation, the poster is as equivocal as the theorist (Said, by the way, wrote the famous last line of Arafat’s 1974 U.N. address: “Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand”). Then there is the portrayal of the revolutionary nation as veiled woman, and therefore at once passive victim and seductive ideal: an old trope whose most famous historical example is now a 19th-century Italian bust often ignorantly cited by right-wingers as the apogee of art because they don’t grasp its political rhetoric. The keffiyeh doing triple symbolic duty as veil, balaclava, and Covid mask unites Islam to today’s radical left in one meme-like image. And “Zionists” names the obstacle to this universal revolution, as in Said’s thinking, while the injunction to them to “fuck off” brings us out of the concrete specificities of Anglophone poetry to the simplest, vulgarest idiom of the global lingua franca.

The woman in the picture has put on power. The question of whether she has put on knowledge remains open. The force that has mastered her, whether she knows it or not, nevertheless and ironically, is such a theory as Said’s reading of Yeats and his calculated vagueness on the necessity of violence to universal liberation. That I find this image posted up on the street over 6000 miles from the land to which it refers suggests that Said’s universalism has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams 20 years after his death—has succeeded so decisively that it may earn the very name of “empire” today.

1. It’s too stupid to discuss, and anyway, the belated cancellation attempt, better suited to Twitter in 2019 than to X in 2023, appears to be going nowhere. On the other hand, as Zarathustra teaches, “that which is falling should also be pushed,” so I’ll give a little summary. One (white) novelist got a book deal about a novel where the heroine develops “an obsessive crush on [her] family’s Black nanny” and must decide, in a crisis, whether to side with this crush against the presumably racist family or not. I wonder what she’ll choose? Somehow I suspect she will choose to become the most perfectly anti-racist white lesbian who has ever walked the earth, after, no doubt, some necessary self-criticism. To the nauseating banality and self-congratulation of this scenario, a rival novelist—Asian, as it happens, and the author of the “aromantic and asexual” romance discussed above—objected, “pretty sure we agreed a while ago that white people shouldn’t write plots centered on racism and BIPOC trauma.” The minuscule kernel of truth here—that even in a one-sentence summary the projected novel sounds a bit exploitative, in the 1970s sense of “exploitation cinema”—is unfortunately engulfed by a prevailing fascoid essentialism that would restrict literary subject matter per se on the basis of racial identity. And speaking of identity politics, both of these writers went to Wellesley College; a contest over this elite school’s legacy among contemporary authors of fashionable entertainment is, strangely, a chief source of this controversy (“as a wellesley student…i’m troubled by the concept of the book,” our critic began her critique). Having gone to Wellesley College, of course, is the most relevant “identity” involved; its current yearly tuition is almost $85,000.

Finally, if you’ll tolerate one of my footnotes-within-a-footnote, let me seize on the concept of “trauma” invoked above. Increasingly I wonder if there is a humane use for this concept at all anymore. Like many “therapeutic” ideas, it has an air of the predatorily iatrogenic, seeming to aggravate rather than to alleviate the pain it seeks to name by drawing endless attention to it, like picking at a wound to keep it open. We might at least pare it back to its more modest original usage: to describe of the psychic after-effect on an individual of severe physical violence, which that individual actually experienced, rather than vague notions of “collective trauma,” “heritable trauma,” “trauma” from the time someone made fun of you in school, etc. These mainly seem to serve the cynical purpose of granting their claimants vicarious currency in the victimology our cultural institutions have so disastrously adopted, in lieu of taste or intelligence, as their new economy of prestige.

2. The critics of “wokeness” often seemed to me to miss a chief part of what was pernicious about it: its popularization of intellectual and aesthetic styles whose allure is instantly lost the second they cease to be marginal. True, they may also be dangerous if widely adopted, but please also spare a thought for the aesthetic calamity that ensues with the mass adoption by people without taste or intelligence of ideologies or lifestyles that require massive amounts of taste and intelligence to pull off. This will probably sound outrageous, but it was also Susan Sontag’s claim about fascist aesthetics—see the less-discussed second half of “Fascinating Fascism” where she argues that fascist aesthetics may legitimately be explored by an elite minority (she implicitly includes herself) but are dangerous if popularized—so I feel safe in making it about the genuine spiritual intuition offensively banalized when “asexual and aromantic” become bureaucratic and marketing categories. On the other hand, let a hundred flowers bloom, as the man said (he said that as a trial run for his later campaign to encourage radical youth cadres to attack ideological middle management in a bid to bolster his own power at the top of the revolutionary hierarchy—but let that pass). As the aforementioned Nancy Armstrong once concluded a blistering Foucauldian critique of the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and Richard Rorty: “Our culture is a culture in crisis, and some of us like it that way.” I have that side of my personality, too, one better expressed in my fiction than my criticism.

3. The charge that popular fiction is women’s pornography (or at least highly enervating entertainment) now has a misogynist ring to it, but it was one of the founding irritants of feminism. As Mary Wollstonecraft complained of the middle-class women complicit in their oppression:

These are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest inactive, like the lurking particles of fire which are supposed universally to pervade matter.

George Eliot renewed the charge in her “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” She’s particularly good on the didacticism involved in such popular entertainments:

The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species—novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this: Take a woman’s head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English when not required.

That last sentence in all its venom and brutality pretty much covers the hegemonic cultural politics of the 2010s. I don’t necessarily share Wollstonecraft’s and Eliot’s moral or intellectual severity. Fiction may offer various forms of pleasure, the mind may feed on many sorts of matter, and the heart does not necessarily have only one set of duties. (Pornography itself has its place in the economy of entertainments and in its role as an ambitious artist’s materia poetica. The only work I’ve ever read that functions both and seamlessly as pornography and as literature was written by a woman: Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus.) But the irony and complexity proper to serious fiction do tend to degrade when the aim is only entertainment, titillation, propaganda, or, as in much pop culture, all three. As for the dense entanglement of feminism and misogyny—the difficulty, as some critics have observed, in telling Wollstonecraft apart from her contemporary Schopenhauer—I discuss it in my essay on A Room of One’s Own, which begins, with deliberately inflammatory excess, “Feminism and misogyny are the same: both aim to abolish female flesh.”

4. Orientalism’s range of reference was and remains too broad for me to evaluate, but even the youthful non-expert could see how confused and tendentious the argument was, torn between the incompatible theories of ideology provided by Gramsci and Foucault. Said spent the rest of his life quietly walking it back, aware that it had given support to mere resentment and religious grievance in the Middle East, when he had hoped rather to spread Enlightenment. A bit of an Orientalist himself—he grew up a wealthy Episcopalian reared in luxury on a pastoral island on the Nile in Cairo: not, therefore, what Gramsci meant by “the organic intellectual”—he was in fact concerned that the Arabs lacked a sufficient appreciation for psychology, at least according to the recent biography, Places of Mind.

5. Adorno, however, was a Zionist who regarded the “Arab robber states” in their opposition to Israel as successors to Hitler. These opinions were shared, more or less, as Said discovered to his despair, by the radical French intelligentsia from Sartre to Foucault—all except Deleuze, whose “nomadology” obviously chimes with Said’s “Palestinianism” as a utopianism of nowhere.

6. We could point to the symbolic import of the Jewish and Norwegian protagonists of the Irish and transnational epics Ulysses and Finnegans Wake or to Joyce’s own polemic in his 1907 lecture “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages”:

Our civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriae religion are reconciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language (if we except the few whom a playful will seems to have preserved in ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland. Nationality (if it really is not a convenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels of present-day scientists have given the coup de grâce) must find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word. The mystic theologian who says somewhere, ‘God has disposed the limits of nations according to his angels’, and this probably is not a purely mystical concept.

For the limits of such an attractive and utopian concept—for its too-easy assimilation into the 21st-century form of empire, the empire of managerial global corporatism—see this essay from 2020 by Substack’s and Ireland’s own Angela Nagle. Joyce anticipates this, however, with his fiction’s own irony, particularly in the parodies of Bloom’s liberalism to be found in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses. The impersonal and almost algorithmic logic of his fictional form, however, with its autonomy of style, nevertheless tends to encode this utopia, as discussed in my essay on Ulysses and in even more detail in my essay on Ellmann’s James Joyce. Like Joyce, we are all divided at least three ways: torn among anarchy, homeland, and empire.