C4 Key words

4. Scylla and Charybdis

 

C4 deals with the Scylla episode in Ulysses. That’s where Stephen launches his freewheeling theory on Shakespeare, full of bogus claims and exaggerations. Also, I’ve decided that these chapter concordances are going to change in style and approach. Might try to end up emulating Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas,” which is a more daunting task than writing about Ulysses IMO (19.02.22). Reading The Experimentalists by Joe Darlington and the translation of The Song of Kieu by Timothy Allen. These works are giving me new ideas for this concordance, the website, Vault, and even Binary Nights.

 

“the whoreson must be acknowledg’d” – epigraph from King Lear (Act I, Scene i, Line 24). It underpins the plot revelation in C4 of Billy Capri’s paternity as well as Don Cane’s survival and imminent return to Australia (Ithaca).

 

William Capri BA (1H, UM) – postgraduate student at the University of Sydney. Bogus honorifics in title.

 

Parramatta Road – historic main road artery of Sydney originating at the western border of the original European settlement at Sydney Cove (Circular Quay) and proceeding to the sustainable agricultural zone around Parramatta. It was a secondary artery to water transport at the outset of the colony.

 

A student in a wet business shirt rushed within its corrugated eaves. He shivered. Tom’s a cold – reference to King Lear.

 

Resistance – youth wing of Socialist Alliance, an anti-capitalist political group established by the USYD Labor Club and the Vietnam Action Campaign in 1967.

 

FREE LECTURE Ronald Reagan & the Capitalist Conspiracy – a lecture on President Reagan’s alleged involvement in a global intrigue to fund political and terrorist groups. This is examined in great detail in C10 in the context of the CIA’s involvement in drug-running and fund-raising for far-right insurgency. An American television investigative report on the work of Nugan Hand Bank and death of Frank Nugan is cited. Don Cane is being recruited for such a group, to be based out of Manilla.

 

Scylla is pronounced with a silent C (think ‘Silla’) while Charybdis has a hard C (as in Caribbean) – correct pronunciation of these terms, as an aid to the reader in scansion and prosody.

 

This episode represents a kind of Troy in which Stephen is trying to act like a Trojan Horse – Joyce uses Stephen (horse) inside the National Library (Troy) as a device to destroy conventional thinking about Shakespeare.

 

Those present are Richard Irvine Best, John Eglinton (William K. Magee), A. E. (George Russell), Lyster (the Quaker librarian), and, later, Leopold Bloom, who has sought refuge from Hugh Boylan on his procession to Molly, as well as, lastly, Malachi Mulligan (O. St. John Gogarty). This makes six heads in total like Homer’s Scylla – Scylla was a six-headed monster. Joyce is careful to get participants to reach the same number, reflecting his obsession with numerology.

This episode contains Joyce’s AGON with Shakespeare through Stephen’s exposition of his Hamlet theory. It is the intellectual core of Ulysses – Agon (or contest) was a literary critical theory of Harold Bloom, which he labelled ‘Revisionism.’

 

The Linati Scheme designates the organ as brain, the technique as dialectic and the art as literature – Joyce produced a complex explanatory scheme of Ulysses for his friend Carlo Linati in 1920 to aid comprehension of the novel. It covered episode title (aligned with Homer); time of day; principal coloration used in imagery; key characters; predominant science or art; overall episode meaning; literary technique; predominant bodily organ used in imagery; key symbols. This was just too hard and too brilliant for transfer to TMAC, which replaced it with postmodern effects.

 

Stephen connects biography directly to art product, deploying Aristotle’s concept of Experience with free-wheeling abandon – According to Aristotle the soul and the body are interdependent, and there is a close connection between human activity, human cognition, memory and perception with character, ethics and higher cognitive capacities on the other side. Also, Aristotle is inconsistent like Stephen Dedalus in this episode.

The entire rationale for Stephen’s discourse in Scylla is to force biographical correspondences with the life of James Joyce to be considered in any critical analysis of Ulysses. Joyce introduced a new (outer) layer to fiction with this device. An online contributor has called it a mise en abyme. But it is much more than just a reductive sequence of the same image. Joyce places himself (1) around the Homeric template (2) then drills into Shakespeare both older and younger (4b, 4a) through Stephen Dedalus (3) until he reaches Hamlet at the core (5) -– This is just plain fact. Supremely tactical of Joyce.

 

This tactic was crazy-brave impudence TBH because at the time of writing Joyce’s literary eminence did not possess the full weight of Ulysses. His reputation rested only on Dubliners, PAYM and a handful of short lyrics – Ellmann dates Scylla to 1919. It ends “Part 1” (p.442). 8 episodes published. Portrait & Dubliners live to air by that date. But I still reckon Joyce was AUDACIOUS to put Stephen/himself in that slot. I guess he knew what was coming. But what GUTS #JamesJoyce #Ulysses12:18 PM · Feb 12, 2022·Twitter Web App TWEET

 

On this date, Billy Capri had published two book reviews in Southerly. His first meta-portrait, “Of Virgilia Without Sound,” had been rejected by a new journal. He had drafted but not produced his radio-play, In Black Box – comparison of the literary output of Stephen Dedalus with his corresponding character in TMAC.

 

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Stephen and the whole fucking crew become marionettes in Joyce’s crude revenge masque against Dublin – the masque was a multi-media form of courtly entertainment in c16-17 Europe. It incorporated music, dancing, singing and acting all housed in a sumptuous stage design. It was intended to flatter the patron via grovelling allegory. It is a nice metaphor for the Scylla episode.

 

Joyce is settling ancient scores in this episode – Joyce never forgot and never forgave. Ulysses is a revenge drama against people who allegedly wronged Joyce 15-20 years previous.

 

Stephen Dedalus stands his intellectual ground on repeated occasions in Scylla – including attacks on his lack of literary achievement – in his only dominant performance in the whole of Ulysses – he is generally a blowhard, joker or boxer. His confrontation with Carr is an intellectual mismatch.

 

Resistance = Means x Will was Clausewitz’ equation. Success need not bear any relation to truth or ethics. It is simply a matter of having a platform and sustaining utterance – Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist. In “On War” (unfinished), section 5, “Utmost Exertion Of Powers,” he wrote: “If we desire to defeat the enemy, we must proportion our efforts to his powers of resistance. This is expressed by the product of two factors which cannot be separated, namely, the sum of available means and the strength of the Will” [my emphasis]. Shakespeare’s Caius Martius Coriolanus is an example of the ‘will to utterance.’ See TMAC (p.478, 511) for examination of his character type as The Coriolanian. See TWEET: Coriolanus in TMAC. I study Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in TMAC. He’s said to be a brooding guy, but in fact he does nothing but talk. I see him as the first SPASMODIC poet (Alexander Smith, anyone?) http://telemachus.com.au #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #TMACnovel #Shakespeare #Coriolanus

 

Stephen says that the middle plays were dark because Shakespeare’s life was bad but he lightened-up in his last works after the birth of his grand-daughter and reconciliation with his wife. There is no historical record to support this conjecture – another sample of Stephen Dedalus making it up as he goes along.

 

He also makes a number of fake claims: that the death of Shakespeare’s mother inspired the demise of Volumnia in Coriolanus; that Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare; that Hamnet’s death was depicted in the death of young Arthur in King John jumping from a prison wall (was it an escape attempt or suicide?); that the female characters in The Tempest, Pericles and Winter’s Tale were all well-known local strumpets; and, lastly, that the identities of Cleopatra, Cressida and Venus can all be ‘guessed’ – more fallacies for fun by Stephen Dedalus.

 

In the rest of the novel, Stephen Dedalus is shiftless, dissembling, petulant, trying to break out of traps mainly of his own making… even a figure of fun – an audacious theory. Examine Q&A with Bloom to see if this list fits SD.

 

He does not really believe his own theory but it is clearly well-rehearsed. Mulligan and Haines have already tried to elicit it in Chapter One. Stephen probably knows its fatal flaws better than anyone so he seeks to dazzle the audience with a stream of bold throwaways – Stephen tries to dazzle his audience. Billy does the same thing in C4.

 

There is credence to Mulligan’s jibe that SD proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. This is the type of perverted logic on display as Stephen negotiates false passage quickly in S][C – This is actually a really sharp joke by Joyce against himself and his character.

 

I too have no interest in consistent reasoning. Just speed. Jam Lear into Hamlet. Drop a stitch by shifting to the evolution of Australian literature. Own your own history. A bastard offspring. Link to the high watermark of British Imperialism no matter how otiose it seems today. Jump forward to French theory. Make arbitrary connections. Pile dead references across a prosenchymatic field until you overwhelm the defenders. Create great puns and bad puns with no filter. Invent your own terminology. Invert when cornered. Push it all onto characterisation. Revert in the end to Homer. But don’t mention Joyce. That too is a tactic. Make sure that YOUR OWN SELF inflects each spiral. Suffocate the text with the lamina of your own persona – a summary of the intellectual framework for Telemachus.

 

Joyce was the first writer to put a whole apparatus around his text through the work of third parties like Gilbert, Gifford et al. I don’t possess that kind of network. I have to do it ALL myself – the concordance to Telemachus is an example of this self-reliance.

 

Devise several selves then. At least get that one up on Joyce. He solely used Stephen Dedalus – Joyce largely used third-person narrator with the exception of “Circe” in the form of drama and Molly’s monologue. Telemachus has multiple narrative voices across time.

 

Neatsleather, Sinkapacing – language used by Joyce to describe Thomas W. Lister, librarian.

 

Still it was some refuge from oh yea the wind and the rain – allusion to Festes’ song in Twelfth Night. The opening lines are; “When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain…”

 

Hugo was a master of writing about breeze. Also, note Zhuangzi’s pipings. Nanguo Ziqi’s great clod. K’un with wings. Shelley’s fast chariots. See Aeolus episode [C10] – a list of famous authors who wrote about wind with feeling.

 

Sydney is presented inside a tempest during this work. This phenomenon is very different to its reputation for a temperate climate – meteorological fact about 5-6 November 1984 turned to an act of authorial intent. See below for literary justification.

 

Why? In Dante’s INFERNO, the second circle of hell punishes carnalism with an incessant gale that pounds the spirits of the dead sex addict. This motif designates the agitation caused by lust to the human spirit. Billy Capri tries to bust out of this confine in Chapter Four – justification of above.

 

Gifford notes that Irish tradition connects weaving with prophecy. He cites Isaiah as Stephen’s source – reference to Don Gifford (1919-2000), an authority on James Joyce famous for detailed annotations. There are numerous prophecies in the Book of Isaiah, some of which use weaving as a metaphor. However, Gifford is really explaining how Stephen Dedalus presents Ireland as a latter-day Israel: destroyed by foreign enemies and punished before being purified and governed by God’s chosen instrument (Ulysses) under the presence and protection of God (James Joyce).

 

Tom Hallem’s faithful Achates. The Goatrider? Yes. Yung Mulebludd – there are a strong of goat references to Billy Capri.

 

Berlin crows on a grave – reference to key image in Wim Wenders’ movie, “Angles Over Berlin.”

 

Sallow May – word play on the name Salome.

 

John’s detached head went yadda x3. – reference to Flaubert’s Iaokanann in “Herodias.” This story was a model for Wilde’s “Salome.”

 

Stephen places Shakespeare in the same kind of setting at the same hour of day in the same month as Ulysses. He is thus imprisoned inside James Joyce – Stephen does turn London, 1594 into Dublin on the day on which Ulysses is set. The following section in C4 explains how.

 

It could only have happened in the summer of 1596 before Shakespeare’s troupe found a permanent home. But Hamlet was not written until 1599. Joyce has thus coded Stephen’s discourse with yet another flaw. – a good example of Stephen’s license with facts to justify his theory.

 

Today’s play begins. A bass voice sounds. It is Shakespeare himself playing the role of the ghost of King Hamlet. Burbage is his son. INSERT SD QUOTE. “To a son he speaks (ie. Don/Simon/Shakespeare.), the son of his soul (Richie’s dead baby), whose mangulated form symbolizes his own guilthroes, the prince, young Hamlet (Stephen/Tom) and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, (Rudy + see above) who has died in Stratford (Manila) that his namesake may live for ever (James Joyce, Billy Capri, Shanghai Dog etcetera). Hamlet has now become both younger Shakespeare and dead Hamnet. He is both Stephen Dedalus and Rudy Bloom -– symbolic association of characters in Ulysses and Telemachus

 

Scylla is a rock (Aristotle). Charybdis: a whirlpool (Plato). Stephen goes closer to [A] like Odysseus. He rejects the neo-Platonic realm of forms and essences. Rather, art must be material, quotidian and autobiographical – Odysseus negotiated the gap between Scylla and Charybdis. Stephen is presented as undertaking a similar task in Ulysses. In this extract, Aristotle is seen as rock because his philosophy was based on logic and reasoning, whereas Plato resembles the whirlpool because his is more theoretical and abstract in nature. The narrator suggests that Stephen did veer to the Aristotelian side of the current.

 

Stephen Dedalus is partaking in wish-fulfilment on behalf of James Joyce in this structure by alluding to his own attempts to cultivate Maud Gomme in Paris in 1904. Add Yeats to induce a false trinity. This fantasy is later reprised in Ulysses when Bloom imagines Stephen and Molly together. It is explored in this work in the relationship between Elizabeth Archer and Tom Hallem. But in fact, it is inherent in any romantic condition involving gods and humans – Stephen did try to ingratiate himself to Yeats’ confidante, who had rejected his marriage proposal. The Trinity is a recurring emblem in Joyce’s work. Bloom certainly speculated on a physical union between his wife and protégé as a means of career advancement for his wife. This is the same logic used in TMAC between artist and art dealer, with the third-party being her husband, Leon Archer. It is a hallmark of Classical tropes that either another god or human will become emmeshed in such romantic entanglements ending in a bad outcome for the mutable form.

 

Joyce makes nothing more of this trope in Ulysses. His women are always much weaker than men – an error in some respects by the narrator of Telemachus.

 

You’re the one going to Oxford. They’ve just got second class B.A.’s and cheap tenure – due to the rapid expansion of universities in Australia after free higher education was introduced there was a shortage of academics which was often filled by recent graduates at Bachelor level. They went on to gain tenure, often without seeking higher degrees or publications. This had become a structural problem by the mid-1980s.

 

Still unaccomplished like Stephen Dedalus. A poet without product. Bard-un – the author of Telemachus resembles an ancient version of Stephen Dedalus, rather than James Joyce. The term, ‘Bard-un’ is a pun on his family name. See Chapter Eleven for further humour at his expense.

 

He had been excluded from Laby Weffy’s End of Semester party in Greenwich – the analogue is that Stephen Dedalus was not invited to Moore’s soiree.

 

McCreedy will scribe the national epic. There is consensus in the Faculty. It will be shot by Baz Luhrmann in Thailand. Starring Russell Crowe as Dorrigo Evans. With Cate Blanchett as Theodora Goodman. Michael Caton in the supporting role of Old Don – low-grade comedy by the author displaying envy of successful talents. This is known as the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” in Australia.

 

They’ve been holed up here since the Leavis wars – O is referring to an ideological conflict in the Department of English during the 1960s. It was resolved in favour of the Leavisites, but a rump of Goldberg’s tenured rebels remained on the lower levels and outer offices of the Department of English in John Woolley Building at USYD.

 

Leavis refused to separate art from life, or the technical from the moral. In this regard, he was aligned with Stephen Dedalus’ Hamlet theory – an ironic fact.

 

Chart a middle course then like S][C – innovative typographical rendering of the passage between Scylla & Charybdis.

 

Secret sewer-bars on the down side of castle-keep which can be cut away with hacksaws. We can then proceed with Prince Caspian to the tower in the student’s common room – comic allusion to The Chronicles of Narnia.

 

Westmoreland inverted the precepts of Sun Tzu. He wanted to draw the NVA into a cage fight using Khe Sanh and Dak To as bait just like the Frogs at Ding Bing Foo, as Johnson called it. But this time he wanted to hit them with nukes – a sample of US military strategy during the Vietnam Conflict.

 

Napoleon always did the unexpected – he would often undertake unorthodox manoeuvres which flummoxed his aristocratic opponents, who were fixed in their military tactics. This enabled smaller forces to defeat

larger armies.

 

Summon the gods Bacchus and Silenus – mixed Classical reference. Bacchus was the Roman version of Dionysus. Silenus was a companion of Dionysus, musician and prophetic drunkard.

 

Bring the woods to life. MacArthur at the Yalu – reference to the Korean War. Allusion to Macbeth. After the landing at Inchon in late 1950, MacArthur’s offensive continued all the way to the Yalu River, which was the border between North Korea and China. He was determined to invade China to try to thwart the recent communist revolution, even toying with the tactical use of nuclear weapons. However, Chinese ‘volunteers’ infiltrated the Allied lines using winter conditions to conceal their advance. When they finally attacked, the Allies were driven back deep into South Korea.

 

Clyde liked to get up real close so you had to call down artillery on yourself. The enemy rushed in successive waves until they overwhelmed the shallow fire trenches – “Sir Clyde” was a nickname for Vietcong forces in the Vietnam Conflict. They did engage at close-quarters to reduce the ability of US forces to use long-range artillery effectively. They also used mass charges to overwhelm US positions.

 

LIFE was not just a word in the wagons behind the poppy fields where Leavis lost his LIGHT – Leavis was a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit in WW1. This unit was organised by the Quakers to support the war effort while not transgressing their pacifist beliefs. They worked mainly on military ambulance trains. Leavis was assigned to Ambulance Train 5 from the Somme to Boulogne. Later, he recalled carrying buckets of cocoa along the roofs of French trains as an art form, as a circus performer might.

 

The Telemachiad is a kid’s Odyssey. Stephen’s exchange in the library is obscure. It had no formal status. There was not much of an audience. Even Russell is a minor figure. There was no record kept. It was a non-event in literary terms – it is worth keeping in mind that Stephen’s theory is an off-the-cuff rant delivered to a motley collection of literary fringe dwellers in Dublin.

 

Lir’s loneliest daughter – Cordelia in King Lear.

 

Polyhymnia – the muse of singing, mime, and sacred dance in Greek mythology.

 

Hamlet compares unfavourably with Prince Haimon. Another remnant fixated on family honour. Posh/lost.

 

“We’re meeting at the Shakespeare” – a popular pub in Newtown. Now called the “Cooper’s Arms.” Just down King Street from the Milton Hotel actually.

 

Keneng was how Zhu Di put it much later on – ‘keneng’ is used as ‘maybe’ in Mandarin in situations where the speaker does not want to reject an offer. It does imply that the balance rests against the proposal. Zhu Di was Shanghai Dog’s lover.

 

Turn away mechanically. Chart a middle course. Crack open the gap between Plato and Aristotle. Stick Art up the Spiritual. Abhor the vegetable world. Don’t treat with shadows. No magicians neither. Neither Hieratic nor Demotic speak. Accept disenfranchisement. Don’t present a blueprint. They’ll only wipe their wasted theories on it. Mock the national epic you long to create. Retain all technical insets despite every atom of awareness telling you to edit or even delete it. That risk is your only edge – Billy’s emotions merge with TMAC’s methods and author insecurities here (Tweeted 19.02.22).

 

Too late to change disposition Conradically as Nabokov said – this is a pun on the word ‘radical.’ Its relevance lies in Nabokov’s negative comments about Conrad and, indeed, Hemingway: “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as—but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.” (Playboy, 1964).

 

JJ = Mister W.H. – Unknown person to whom the first edition of William Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609) was dedicated.

 

There is no father’s name on my birth certificate. No paternal line acknowledged. Stephen says that “Paternity may be a legal fiction.” Telemachus also wears this doubt. Billy Capri has it confirmed in this Chapter. Stephen Dedalus asks a rhetorical question, “If the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son?” This is directly relevant to Telemachus as well as the author’s personal experience. It is NOT relevant to Stephen Dedalus or James Joyce – autobiographical elements link to Stephen’s comments on paternity. The narrator notes that the author of TMAC sits on the side of Telemachus in not knowing anything about his father or his fate. This can be contrasted with both Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce, who possessed ebullient biological fathers. It is also noted that Billy Capri, in fact, does find out that his notions of paternity are a ‘legal fiction’ in C4, when it is disclosed that Bob/Barry Capri is not his biological father (Tweeted 19.02.22).

 

Joyce de-coupled from all ancestry to free himself to become the son and father of the Canon – a negating literary genealogical act was the crux of Stephen’s comments on paternity.

 

“Here’s me,” I said mock-gaily – reference to Stephen’s self-introduction in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,

 

Putuwá – a critical word in TMAC. It comes from the Eora word-list of William Dawes c.1791. Putuwá means, “to warm one’s hand by the fire & then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person” (Notebooks, Book B, Page 21). Dawes’ prepared the word-list with Patyegarang, a young local woman. In Australians: Origins to Eureka, Thomas Keneally describes Patyegarang as the “chief language teacher, servant, and perhaps lover” of William Dawes (page 166).

 

Scylla was loved by Glaucis but he was loved by Circe in turn. Bad triad. She was transformed by monster potion in her bath. Grew six long necks with heads all wearing pale green eyes. A pregnant outcast – the Classical story of Scylla.

 

Gone up to Kings Cross to hide. – an autobiographical element linking the author’s mother with Scylla. His mother went to the bohemian community of Kings Cross shortly after his birth, where a single mother would not attract so much attention.

 

“And someone she called the slut’s son,” Tom Hallam added tightening his gaze – reference to a comment by Missus Hensley in TMAC, C3 (p.137).

 

Mother England blackened her breast. – the mother blackens her breast and nipple with charcoal in some cultures to wean the baby.

 

Australia also son w/out father – a key phrase in TMAC. Colonial Australia was, indeed, a rejected child of England.

 

Agenbuyer – pun on Joyce’s ‘agenbite.’

 

Hecatombs from Helen. Telemachus observing Athene’s prayer to Poseidon.

 

Odysseus’ enemy. He loved Polyphemus. Pain of any child scalds – Poseidon was the father of the blinded cyclops, Polyphemus. This simply makes the point that paternal anguish is also felt by the gods.

 

“Fastbuck” stuttered to life – song by feedtime from their eponymously-titled first album.

 

Coat of arms UP. Lizzie’s face in dirt. ODDS – reference to two-up. See Chapter One for link.

 

Involuntarily. Like drooling. See Appendix A – reference to “Blot.”

 

A clown juggling two balls. Prologue to the swelling act. Pluralise. His other wife. Myrto. Brothers but not quite. Like Luke and Leia – Tom Hallem muses on his father’s situation in 1962 when he got both his wife and her cousin pregnant inside 4 months. He compares the circumstances of himself and Billy with key Star Wars characters [Tweeted 19.02.22 as “Star Wars Analogy! Unusual for this author to find comps post-1922, but here Tom recalls those “not-knowing” siblings, Luke & Leia. But was there (incestuous) sexual tension between Tom & Billy? Kind of. Another META Tweet. http://telemachus.com.au #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #TMACnovel)].

 

Truth like Astyanax hidden in my father’s tomb – Astyanax was the son of Hector. There are numerous literary accounts where he survived the fall of Troy. Boiardo’s Orlando innamorati (1495) led this trend in medieval times by having his mother, Andromache, hide him in a tomb and replace him with another child who is killed by the Greeks.

 

Thrown off the walls by my mother’s pimp – another version of survival during the fall of Troy.

 

Take a horse ride to Sparta. Bonding on the plains. Telemachus must have been struck by the difference between his own life and that of Peisistratus – Homer sets up clear contrasts to life at Ithaca for Telemachus in the Telemachiad. In this instance, he gets to see Peisistratus’ full family life in Pylos.

 

Now Billy’s reduced to my level. Lower even. Barstead’s are beneath sons. Edgar and Edmund, Got to snigger or weep – Tom Hallem has been raised in a lower social category to his ostensible-cousin, Billy Capri. His father is gone and he is now the stepson of Les Hallem. In contrast, Billy Capri has apparently been the legitimate product of the marriage of Barry and Helen Capri. The revelation of their shared paternity in C4 flips this situation. Billy now bears the stigma of illegitimacy (like the author). Tom is remade in terms of what we will call, ‘hereditary succession.’ Tom compares their situation almost gleefully to that of Edgar and Edmund in King Lear (Tweeted 19.02.22).

 

Protean like Shakespeare. Various version(s) of Life. He died dead drunk. Shylock was based on his own self, said Stephen. Falstaff was another – more of Stephen’s comical fabrications about Shakespeare.

 

My mother like Andromache. Also Penelope. L’mmense majeste de vos douleurs de veuve – for Andromache see above (wife of Hector). Penelope as per TMAC, mother of Telemachus. The reference to “widow’s sorrows” comes from “Le Cygne” by Charles Baudelaire.

 

Our father left, the women stayed, we looked hard at each other – Don Cane left Sydney in 1962 prior to the births of his sons to join the AATTV in Vietnam. He did not return until 6 November 1984. Both Penelope Cane (later Hallem) and Helen McFadden (later Capri) stayed in Sydney and sorted out a way to live together.

 

To hold Tom would normally be good. To feel his top-heavy chest against my forehead. Rest there in situ. But not at this moment – this image is linked to the narrator’s memory in C1: “Like Tennyson, I just want to rest my cheek against your denim-shrouded shoulder once more. To reach into your embrace in another airport. To curl my fingers through your slick mane. And hear your thick lisp again. Putuwá” (p.15). Note reference to Putuwá (see above).

 

Mister Cane was dead fifteen minutes before he was born. Doomed to walk the stage like Melmoth. Prometheus in flames. Flee abroad – consecutive allusions to a famous quote from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (see later in this section for further variants); Melmoth the Wanderer (1830) by Charles Maturin, one of the earliest Gothic novels to incorporate the trope of the Wandering Jew; and the Classical figure of Prometheus the fire-bringer.

 

Hamlet Senior knows the means of his own death and his wife’s betrayal. How? Only Shakespeare could tell him. Stephen thus argues that Hamlet’s father is a part of Shakespeare himself – Stephen points out that Ham let Senior would not have been in a position to know the identity of his killer, given that he had poison poured into his ear while he was sleeping on a bench.

 

Cut off any notion of suspense. This is not a murder mystery – TMAC always pre-empts plot suspense.

 

Kevin Birmingham waits until page 289 of TMDB to reveal his controversial claim that “James Joyce was going blind because he had syphilis.” That would never do for TMAC – Birmingham uses conventional narrative method to build to the point of revelation in the excellent, The Most Dangerous Book. TMAC does not ascribe to suspense.

 

The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy the spoils without accepting debtorship, according to Oscar Wilde. – deliberate misattribution. It is actually Stephen Dedalus who says this line. It is a reworking of Oscar Wilde’s comment that, “a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

 

Evil Lord Mountfalcon – villain in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

 

Mister Brando, he not in Manila, Boss. He gone up Congo – allusion to famous quote from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

 

Feverel he done had or/deal. Avid was Moore. It’s a book about training not suffocating the fuck. Fell in love with a farmer’s niece. They always get duffed-up. Scuttling across the floor of silent seas to Paris – summary of the plot – and George Moore’s assessment – of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

 

Chu Chai tunnels. Charlie don’t surf – a tunnel system used by the Vietcong outside Saigon + famous line spoken by Lieutenant-Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.

 

I was offered the role of Martin Sheen’s body double by Coppola. I was a player back then. That was before I spent ten years on the pipe – apocryphal comment by Don Cane, who did live in Manila during the filming of Apocalypse Now.

 

Sir Austin’s wife ran off with a poet. He resolved to educate the boy at home. Parallels with Meredith. His wife eloped with Henry Wallis. Pregnant with his bastard. Did the dead Chatterton pose. Meredith was his model. Another fatherless son. Took a hot shot in Holborn at the age of seventeen – a segment shifting from

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to parallels between the novel and the life of George Meredith. His wife did elope with the painter Henry Wallis, who did indeed produce the definitive portrait of Chatterton using Meredith as the model. Chatterton did commit suicide.

 

Gaze up at the grill of the Lake – Ana Lafei’s final vision at death in C10.

 

The Bard-un. Anti-Shakespeare. Puns on various Wills – the syllables of the author’s family name can be inverted to produce the term, “Bardun.” This is then further unrolled.

 

Tom was made in a marital bed anchored by an olive branch – allusion to the bed built by Odysseus for his marriage to Penelope.

 

Penelope and Helen. First cousins. Neighbours – familial relations and proximity of two central female characters in TMAC.

 

Tutankhamen married his half-sister. They shared the same father. Their mothers were first cousins – a comparative example to the previous entry from world history.

 

Don Cane = John Shakespeare – fathers! Who’d have one?

 

All false father figures – TMAC is built on the false father motif. Biological fathers are seen as flawed and disappointing, while non-biological fathers are seen in the good > average range (ie. Barry Capri > Les Hallem).

 

My mother passed away in front of the television. Knitting in her lap. Kit-kat wrappers stuffed down the side of her brown armchair along with coins and tissues. She was making another elongated scarf. Her mind could no longer handle the complexity of weaving sleeves. Her last day was a happy one. It was sunny. She played in the garden with the puppy. She boasted about how the cat had moved into her flat. She went looking for Xavier when I called home at lunchtime. That evening, she climbed the ten steps after I got home from work to chat. This was unusual because the stairs were hard work these days. We touched for the last time. A kiss on a cheek now sagging. I went downstairs to check on her after dinner. I had seen her dozing like that countless times and moved silently off. Not wanting to wake her. But lately I started to dwell. Her breathing had become so shallow. This time she wasn’t breathing. She had passed away quietly. Without fuss. Just as she would have wanted. My mother lived her last day as she lived every day – independent, determined, useful and kind. These were her special qualities. The ambulance came. Then the police. Then the coroner’s van. Then she was gone – FACTUAL ACCOUNT OF THE ENDGAME OF MY MOTHER’S LIFE.

 

Chatterton recreated his lost father in the mythical figure of his patron Canynge – “The Storie of William Canynge.”

 

Lucy loses her mind – the fate of Lucy Feverel nee Desborough at the end of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. It would be useful to analyse why the author inserts multiple references to the novel at this point in TMAC.

 

Dead Ana – Ana Lafei dies in C10.

 

They do ceilings best in China. Tian Tan is like the roof of Alibaba’s cave. Restaurants with tiered ceilings displacing direct light. But that was a long time hence – the author muses on internal design in China, noting the richness of the ceiling in the Temple of Heaven, Beijing.

 

The foetal plant of organal wiriting in Stroya. Anew natal. Latan wena. Love of the ornate and allusive undercut by constant play of low images – playful use of language to make multiple points about Australian literature and the Australian dialect.

 

Havelock Ellis was Olive Schreiner’s Id – Havelock Ellis, the English Freud, was a companion and erstwhile fiancée of the South African writer, feminist and political activist, Olive Schreiner.

 

INSERT CHIDLEY – William James Chidley (?1860-1916) was an Australian sex, dietary and dress reformer who corresponded with Havelock Ellis. Two documents of substance arise from his life: The Answer, which explains his theories, and Confessions, which chronicles his life-story. The latter work was sent as a manuscript to Havelock Ellis, who gifted it to the State Library of NSW in 1935. It remains one of the most powerful pieces of writing in Australian Literature. The author has written extensively on it, including the seminal paper, “Head, Thoreau and Abdomen” (1992), which is cited during Billy Capri’s travels in C5. An updated version of this paper will be loaded onto the TMAC website.

 

Heterogeneity is the real hallmark of the Bulletin. It regularly published experimental overseas writers like Mallarme and Zola. Openness of an unformed culture. Ungathered momentum since – the author studied microfiche copies of the Bulletin in the early 1990s, during work on Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis. He was one of the first academics to disclose the wide range of writers promoted in its pages.

 

Frances Webb said that Art ought to spring out of you like Minerva or a new head which is “glued to the ear, and in it nothing but rage…  a transformer in which sound is tuned” and when you turn the knob all the way clockwise you get Hamlet. A little lower on the dial is Pope. McAuley and Hope muttered that “Brennan was solid second division” as they lifted the Maenad cup. And drank with thin lips clenched – extension of a radio wave metaphor by the Australian poet, Frances Webb, which is then applied to the canon. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was a top-rank English poet. Hamlet (1599-1601) is a first division play. James McAuley (1917-1976), Alexander Hope (1907-2000) and Christopher Brennan (1870-1932) were Australian poets.

 

How to measure epochs? Channel Leavis. Great works. Hired narratives. Short format. Quixotic even. Exhausted. A sudden pang – Billy Capri’s mind flits across different means of assessing literary periods before giving up altogether.

 

He hardened somewhat under the watchful eyes of Jack Kerouac – a sexual reference on behalf of Professor Milo Mildling.

 

Mulligan asks Best who is the male figure in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Anonymous. A lack of identity insinuated in code. Ghost man. Popular theory that it was William Herbert, Lord of Pembroke.

 

WILLY THE PIMP. AKA Marius the Hardrake. Pater’s Epicurean. Flavian’s love. Joyce’s joke on Eglinton who asks Mulligan if he is speaking of an Englishman’s love for his lord. Mulligan insinuates twice that Bloom has homosexual tendencies…. Dowden on pederasty. Mulligan warns Stephen of Bloom’s homosexuality. Evidence of his tin ear. Yet what man is not susceptible. Bernini’s hermaphrodite – relevant allusions in literature and art follow the introduction of a new character into TMAC.

 

Modern American Poetry @ 2pm. I’ll force feed them John Ashbery – University of Sydney, department of English, undergraduate course, Semester 2, 1985.

 

There stands the sacrifice with his master. Of bestial appearance. Light bearded. Kid-like. A lover of sprouts and highlands – more goat imagery relating to William Capri.

 

Associate Professor Aden Goldblum – another false father figure in TMAC.

 

From the Without of a Dominioned Literature, by William Capri – name of the subsequent paper. TMAC isn’t just a story or a form. It contains a lot of technical analysis (AKA lit crit). I posted 50 tweets on Dominioned Literature, based on a paper by Billy Capri which is the centrepiece of TMAC, C4.

 

Joyce starts Scylla with the Quaker librarian admiring Goethe – my family were Bourneville Quakers.

 

Succouring the Dragonis family next door. First wogs in Campsie. Greeks in exile. Xenia – our neighbours in 1960s.

 

Professor Guermantes – academic. I really struggled to name this character with final naming not taking place until last draft and I still don’t like it.

 

Sew eye stood up end lookt out and refelt sutch surgecal discust like I was gunna leak beeswax watt wif myma’s revaluations of re-sent tiems and my now-is brother revelated like Euclid Crow at the are’s end of the rhume but then unctuous phrases broke from my lips nun the less not with standing. “Thank you, Professor Goldblum,” I utt tho’ I was thinking about ma and ma/pa or new pa and ole pa or whatever I should call him now maybe SUB or ‘Uncle Cuck’ – a combination of styles blends in William Capri’s mind as he approaches the lectern: Joyce (High Modernism), Nick Cave (Faux Gothic) and Afflebeck Lauder (Strine).

 

Text of lecture, “From the Without of Dominioned Literature” – key quotes highlighted below.

 

1. At the beginning of their chapter “What is a Minor Literature?” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer the proposition that “a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language, it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.” This formulation is predicated on subaltern enclosure ‘within’ a master language and excludes the possibility of perpetual rejection and exile to ever‑receding sites of exclusion – spreading, for example, from London to Convict Sydney then Port Arthur, Moreton Bay and Fremantle in turn – that act as exit-points into Extrinsic Space. In short, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the relationship between majority and minority has an implosive spatial projection that excludes the Colonial experience and what I will call ‘Dominioned Literature.’
2. In this paper, I will formulate some basic precepts for Dominioned Literature as it stands outside Majority, forgotten and never-faced, gazing back at a past that may not even exist, but that may be seen as an idealised inversion of its LACK, wearing a demeanour of impossible deference in a place of utter remoteness.
3. … this is the essential posture of all Dominioned Literature – to be positioned beyond the margins & therefore OUTSIDE THE PRINTABLE AREA.
4. Deleuze and Guattari fundamentally misjudge the experience of Dominioned minority because of their status as privileged creatures of the Within: creations of the most conceited intellectual system in human history.
5. Dominioned Literature does not possess the skills or finesse to differentiate between the blocs and factions that compose any major literature. It can only perceive the Canon as a totality against which it registers its own negation. Such a consciousness cannot comprehend the national, spatial, linguistic and temporal distinctions between figures as diverse as Kafka, Joyce, Dostoyevsky and Flaubert – let alone historic icons like Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe. They are all collapsed inside a sheer culture-machine that produces a homogenising wall of sound.
6. To reveal the meaning of various marginal literatures, Deleuze and Guattari advocate “setting up a minor practice of major language from WITHIN” (my emphasis). For them, a Minor Literature is a synecdoche of the superordinate language, intervolved within it and possessing the capacity to become insurgent discourse. When it exercises this function, it becomes what they call a ‘literary machine.’’ Minor Literature then becomes a revolutionary force by enacting a ‘deterritorialization of language’; a procedure which necessitates linguistic movement to poles of either ‘exhilaration and overdetermination’ or ‘dryness and sobriety.’ Joyce (like the Prague School) and Beckett (like Kafka) are held to be representative of these antipodal usages. According to Deleuze and Guattari, these Irish writers are located “within the genial conditions of a minor literature” as if Imperial Dublin was some kind of Gaelic Arcadia. Here, encased in a dialectic and thus intervolved forever, they are able to partake of the “glory of this sort of minor literature ‑ to be the revolutionary force for all literature.”
7. This effusion over the insurgency of Minor Literature becomes the harbinger of paradox. Deleuze and Guattari state that “there is nothing that is major or revolutionary EXCEPT THE MINOR” (my emphasis). This stance is supplemented by a call to arms. They urge readers to “hate all languages of masters.” Predictably, this subversive pose offers seditious elements within the enclave of Major Literature – such as Deleuze and Guattari themselves – the freedom to indulge their pretensions to outsider status, rebellion and sub-alternity. They finally detach any residue of literal political and economic submissiveness from “minor” and designate it as the rebel “within the heart” of all literature (18). This enables them to bemoan their own privileged status: “even he who has the misfortune of being born in the country of a great literature must write in its language.”
8. All writing (and now the discourse is indubitably directed at those who are not subject to perpetual thrall) must therefore fabricate its own subjugation. It must make its own mimesis of retardation. It must affect its own Pidgin. It must profess its indigence. And it must move into the Without of its own desert.
9. The recommendation of a subaltern pose becomes the predicate for a strategy of usurpation by Deleuze and Guattari. Against thwarted fantasies of power, the injunction to “create the opposite dream” is an affectation of subaltern status to achieve expropriation. Writing like an obsequious clerk. A disguised tyrant. Is an artifice of humility analogous to Uriah Heep. Or a “becoming‑minor” that ultimately re-consolidates power like the return of Odysseus as a beggar. It is no longer a question of subaltern insurgency. The term “minor” becomes a metonymical appropriation from above: a becoming minor. It poses as Minor only so that it can exploit what Homi Bhabha calls “the menace of mimicry.” The literary machine of Major Literature thus becomes closed by an internecine struggle that internally generates power.
10. This shameless colonization of the concept of Minor Literature, so that the text speaks from a position of privilege at the privileged above the level of subaltern utterance, valorises the tactical advantage of “seeming” deficient and evokes the perpetual arrogance of the European Colonial enterprise. No place, no perception is to be denied it. It must be allowed to permeate all regions like the Blob. It can withhold all status yet nothing can be withheld from it. It is prepared to appropriate anything in the name of self‑interest. It will barter with beads. It will inhabit you. Yet its gaze is always backward and Within; always reverting to a home that it can still and one day will inhabit. But it will only return there on its own terms. And it will discard you again to the Without when it becomes convenient.
11. The perfect closure of the Within in a self‑perpetuating literary machine codes the Without with lack and disallows the concept of extrinsic space. Everything in exile becomes – like Ovid or Machiavelli – in constant expectation of a Prospero-like reprise.
12. Deleuze and Guattari’s centripetal compulsion replicates the structure of their literary machine: every part is integrated into a perpetual sequence within limits that are itself. Thus, it appears completely self‑sufficient from Without. An inviolable entity. There is no slippage. No leakage. Nothing can intrude. Despite every failure, even the “how many” failed literati are still enclosed in Major Literature like a protective cocoon (or an “antenatal tomb” as Shelley paradoxically terms it in “The Sensitive Plant”).
13. … this formulation [of Deleuze & Guattari] is predicated on subaltern enclosure ‘within’ a master language and excludes the possibility of perpetual rejection and exile to ever‑receding sites of exclusion – spreading, for example, from London to Sydney then Hellhole, Port Arthur, Moreton Bay and Fremantle – that act as exit-points into Extrinsic Space.
14. In this paper, I will formulate some basic precepts for Dominioned Literature as it stands outside Majority, forgotten and never-faced, gazing back at a past that may not even exist, but that may be seen as an idealised inversion of its LACK, wearing a demeanour of impossible deference in a place of utter remoteness.
15. For this is the essential posture of all Dominioned Literature – to be positioned beyond the margins & therefore OUTSIDE THE PRINTABLE AREA.
16. Dominioned Literature does not possess the skills or finesse to differentiate between the blocs and factions that compose any major literature. It can only perceive the Canon as a totality against which it registers its own negation. Such a consciousness cannot comprehend the national, spatial, linguistic and temporal distinctions between figures as diverse as Kafka, Joyce, Dostoyevsky and Flaubert – let alone historic icons like Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe. They are all collapsed inside a sheer culture-machine that produces a homogenising wall of sound.
17. The perfect closure of the Within [of Deleuze & Guattari] in a self‑perpetuating literary machine codes the Without with lack and disallows the concept of extrinsic space. Everything in exile becomes – like Ovid or Machiavelli – in constant expectation of a Prospero-like reprise.
18. … what of the individuals who gaze back from an Extrinsic Space which is so severe, so dislocated from its source in terms of both Time and Space, that they cannot clearly distinguish the Within or its hierarchy so that even Kafka appears to be just another privileged figure located within the master discourse? What is their dream but the nostalgic reverie of the Without for lost unity… itself an act of revision that completely effaces the truth of its servile position? This is the consciousness and condition of Dominioned Literature.
19. …. the colonial condition in Australia essentially became one of rushed misreading and mistroping throughout the initial phase of self-representation.
20. To their minds, colonisers were acting out a pioneer trope in Australia for which they would receive reward in due course. They had created outposts which replicated their perception of the Within; thus, imposing a received and transferred conception of how power operates onto a new landscape. We only have to look at how Governor Philip first mapped out space in Sydney to observe that sensibility. The difference was that the architectural emblems of power – the surveillance positions and walls of the convict settlement – held Nature OUT in New South Wales – rather than enclosing prisoners WITHIN.
21. Like Malayan rubber, the Imperial bond was supposed to stretch to the farthest corners of Empire and rebound all the way HOME (Empire-as-membrane). This was a gross error of judgment. For the circumstances of the Colonist once sited in Australia did not accurately fulfil the tenets of any extant trope of the Within.
22. The Dominioned condition was totally without precedent. There was no mechanism for re-integration and no will to create one in London.
23. The best symbol of Dominioned Literature attempting to break back into Majority is found in Charles Dicken’s Abel Magwitch. He must act as a fugitive in England who invests his wealth in a surrogate inside the machine. He resembles Odysseus who, after his long voyage home through the known world, returns to Ithaca only to see it used by the Gods as a slingshot to ricochet him into extrinsic space – in the other direction beyond Gibraltar – on a quest for something totally unlike him: people had never seen the sea. This place is or was Australia.
24. We are “stranded far from home,” as the Saints put it, and we are not able to conceive, let alone get back inside the Within to mount, what the Birthday Party called, a “Mutiny in Heaven.”
25. Eventually, Australian literature transcended its Dominioned status by fusing Shelley’s Alastor trope with its ANTIPODEAN: the prosaic fixity in dystopia of the Sensitive Plant. This apparently oxymoronic Master Metaphor overlaid the Within.
26. The Great Australian Novel cannot be defined by location. It must be a technical accomplishment at the same level of accomplishment as arch-canonical texts. It must disrupt historic continuity. It must induce a fundamental BREAK. The condition for this ‘upshot’ is already in place. It will be based on what Harold Bloom called clinamen: a wilful misreading of received tropes.
27. … the literary machine of Australian Literature is founded on a flawed and incomplete simulacrum of the Major Literature from which it originated; something like the patchy, distorting Modernism of the Ducal art collection in Walter Pater’s Duke Carl of Rosenmond. Its product cannot be considered a skeleton of any extant machine. This would imply that a complementary basic framework exists. Not so. In fact, it is a completely misshapen abomination whose lack of utility should really discount its signification as a ‘machine.’ It cannot conceive of itself warranting any naming that is not derogatory.
28. The indigenous peoples which it pursues and annihilates are, in fact, a metonymy of its own metonymical position. It is cast out of Heidegger’s En-framed space like Queen Mab and forced into acts of continuous self-abnegation. It is, thus, truly Dominioned Literature: one perpetuated by the repetition of the acts of its expulsions, which are the furthest point in the past repeated so often that they inhabit the present and fix the future.
29. This loyal refuse of Major Literature was unaware that it had been expelled from the Within forever…. For it was originally of the Within but it was the Within set in motion. Such satellites stay in orbit after their usefulness is exhausted. They are then allowed to drift in space. They are the inverse of Icarus.
30. A capacity for subversion was inconceivable to Dominioned Literature. It never altered its posture of deference. It was not a literature of subversion – but of imitation. It was not a “revolutionary force” in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms but a totem held in prosaic thrall.
31. It [Dominioned Literature] was like something suddenly detached from its Signified awaiting new classification to be imposed upon it. It did not have the resources to define itself. It knew only of itself as a metonymy. In a variation of Saussure’s famous analogy, it was a pawn which had been removed from the board. Even today, its discourse is trapped between Major Literature and the subversive Australian indigenous voice of dispossession.
32. So rather than quibble over what constitutes the term, Minor Literature, so that it appears that we are begging yet again for re-inclusion, it would perhaps be better to abandon Deleuze and Guattari altogether, along with the entire Within and its vast literary machine, which we know of only through lack…
33. … let it only be known that a true Minor Literature could never conceive of enacting a de-territorializing language; is never “political”; never takes on collective value. It is mimetic, craven, cannibalistic, alien to both itself and its fellow beings. Its energy is consumed in producing memoranda and internecine purges.
34. It [Dominioned Literature] is known only by the definition granted to it by Major Literature…. Sir Robert Menzies is its Prometheus.
35. In the extrinsic space of Dominioned Literature there is a surfeit of latitude. Out here, nobody ever makes contact. It would be good to use this vacant space for innovation. Yet how can invention be spurred?
36. … all that Dominioned Literature craves is to graft the precepts of Major Literature onto its self in a blasphemy of cosmetic surgery…. It will only produce a grotesque perversion of the Original; in other words, Frankenstein’s monster.
37. It is the core ambition of every Dominioned Literature to be pulped into Major Literature. Therefore, its first tactic is simulation. It is a form of adoration. Dominioned Literature thus constructs its own perversion of a literary machine: its own canon from which it excludes its own discordant elements.
38. What could be more pathetic than these texts that are proscribed even from the Without of a Dominioned Literature residing in the meta-extrinsic space of the “never” (x2) or “never-never” where Barcroft Boake’s ‘dead men lie’. This DOUBLE-NEVER is a landscape beyond the mis-replica of its literary machine – it is the arena of taboo upon taboo… or of a tattoo effacing another tattoo to create an illegible image like Kafka’s harrow.
39. In fact, the proscribed texts of Minor Literature… are the true Utopian texts of the Without. Only neglected or proscribed utterance from Within could offer any kind of analogy to this truly transcendent offspring of Dominioned Literature (like Sin’s incestuous offspring by Death in “Paradise Lost”). Certainly not the icons of Major Literature. To those places, there is no light.
40. Only the minor works of major writers could act as its tropes [of Dominioned Literature]. As well as those works of ‘thwarted literary groups’ that Deleuze and Guattari dump on their drive to hegemony.
41. What does Dominioned Literature appear like in comparison with what Deleuze and Guattari call a “literary machine”? It would bear some resemblance to its model. It may be a Spartan sort of replica, true. A shambles of the true machine.
42. In conceptualizations of size, the relationship of the words Minor and Major suggest that it [Dominioned Literature] would be diminutive in comparison to the original. This is improbable. In the vast expanse of exile, with only the exaggerations of a dimming memory to guide us (for example, adults appear huge in our memories), it is more likely to overestimate the scale of its model. Thus, it would be huge.
43. In addition, some individual components [of the machine] are likely to assume uber-significance and their proportions will then distort the machine. This could result in the head being enormous, the torso well‑tapered and the legs quite withered so that it topples over on bound feet.
44. Alternatively, the replica could be extraordinarily well‑grounded with a severely under‑developed head. This, surely, is the best analogy [for Dominioned Literature] as Oedipus means “swollen foot” in Greek.
45. Yet it [Dominioned Literature] could avoid scale together. That is possible. But, either way, it will end up as bloated as one of those primitive computers that use billions of punch cards to answer a simple equation.
46. As a dubious signification of a true machine, it is certain that the Dominioned Machine would be built out of gathered materials like stone, twine and wood. The complex alloys and plastics which construct a true literary machine are unavailable in its barren environment. It can only rely on scavenging and over-priced imports (i.e. expendable discards of Major Literature). Academic appointments in Australia are a good example of this practice.
47. But even if it [[Dominioned Literature] is not a grotesque parody of a machine at rest, even if it bears an extremely close resemblance to the model, even if it is a masterpiece of ornamentation (and the shells of a Minor Literature often outstrip their icons in ostentation), closer examination with it will always reveal that it is UTTERLY UNFUNCTIONAL.
48. For the Dominioned machine is a travesty of utility. Its pieces are fitted together without method. If it possesses some relevant parts, there is no understanding of how they can be combined to make a working machine (although the chances are still good that obsolete components were purchased).
49. And even if a plan of the machine [of [Dominioned Literature] was supplied, it would be held upside‑down by the frauds posing as our engineers…. even if they read the manual carefully, its instructions would be indecipherable.
50. Thus, like the Trojan Horse, a true Dominioned Literature is a grotesque parody of its signified. In other words, it is a signifier of a signifier not a trompe l’oeil representation. If you placed this abomination at the fortress door of Major Literature, it would be shunted into a stagnant moat outside the city walls with its brave volunteers trapped inside….
51. But let’s assume for one moment that it [Dominioned Literature] was wheeled inside the compound and allowed to rest overnight. Allow this concession: of having this hollow semblance of meaning enclosed within the territory of master language. The result would be that its comic figures dropped out of the trap‑door [in a blasphemy of birth] and surrendered in the hope of being kept on as slaves [of Major Literature].
52. Yet I could discard this entire formulation by asking one question: who would want to be part of any literary machine given the appalling record of Major Literature for suppression and censorship?
53. Better no machine, better no majority, better no text than merely to reimpose the brutal solution of tyrants. Better to move around extrinsic space with no map, in circles, governed by the need for sustenance and shade. This is a truly Australian version of experience channelling Romantic and Modernist symbols. It provides one version of the process of Becoming in Australia.

 

His family. Shambles of a machine. To become Edmund or not – Billy reflects on his changed circumstances, how everything has suddenly become a lie, and whether he should revert to a destructive figure like Edmund in King Lear.

 

SHIFT TO ARCHI-ECRITURE – a theory of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). He claimed that Western thinking since Plato had given pre-eminence to speech over writing. Derrida postulated a form of writing that preceded both speech and writing. It represented language as it exists prior to usage, in particular in its ingrained forms and common structures. His death is described in Chapter Six. The final section of Chapter 6, which deals with French theory, has a title derived from this term.

 

A purple smokescreen of Goofey Grape churning out of a LIVE LZ as the helicopters cancel out sound so communication is reduced to the movement of fingers. That is the basic template of this chapter – metaphor based on procedures used in the Vietnam Conflict to extract casualties.

 

“Nonetheless,” continued Smalls, “I would note, as an initial observation, that you have collapsed the distinction between literature and biography. This is what Joyce did to Shakespeare. Remember the Scylla episode? There is no separation of man from text. This brings us back to Leavis.” – a critical correspondence between Stephen’s discourse in Ulysses and Billy’s paper in Telemachus.

 

“Wimsatt would call it Affective Fallacy,” said Ilks coldly – a theory in New Criticism, coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. It attacks the historical notion – going back to the catharsis of Aristotle and the sublime of Longinus – that a text should be judged on the basis of its emotional effect on the reader. Rather, it seeks to work out what is the intent and consequence of the text. Ilks was a strict proponent of New Criticism, and a leading figure in the Leavis Wars at USYD in the 1960s.

 

Eglinton ridiculed Stephen’s theory. Search for six brave medicals to take dictation. Russell kicking a corpse. Make it seven monkeys with typewriters. Twelve men with resolution could free all Ireland. Insert data analysis. It only takes three per cent of a population to instigate revolution – .

 

Cut off their ears make a necklace give it to Yeats – macabre comic metaphor for the practice of making necklaces out of the ears of dead Vietcong soldiers. The reference to Yeats is obscure. In symbolic terms, it may relate to the listening “ears” of his readers.

 

Shakespeare was a middle-aged man when he wrote Hamlet. Thus, he identified principally with Hamlet’s father. He had reached Jacques’ fifth or sixth stage of manhood. Joyce was forty when he published Ulysses. Maybe he had reached stage four. A stranger full of strange oaths like Odysseus. Jealous in honour and quick in quarrel. Blowing his “bubble reputation” – Jacques classifies men according to seven stages in As You Like It: Infant, Schoolboy, Teenager, Young Man, Middle-Aged (father), Old Bloke, and Dotage.

 

Joyce knew that Ulysses was going to be GREAT. The feedback on each episode he published in Little Review confirmed it.  – he had small-scale, yet Hieratic, readership.

 

Leopold Bloom perused a thick volume looking for dry yellowed pages. Huang se dian ying…. The vendor pulled a wad of pirate DVDs from a milk crate. Shanghai Dog flicked through them. What would Zhu Di like to watch tonight? She enjoyed Japanese movies. Sorrows of Satan. Sweets of Sin. Tokyo Hot – Chinese term for pornographic videos (literally, ‘yellow movies’). See related scene in C10 (Shanghai Dog entering Jiangsu Lu Di Tie Zhan). Links Bloom to Shanghai Dog.

 

Bloom pays a pretty penny for books to excite Molly so she finally takes Boylan to bed – I really like this idea which makes me admire Joyce even more as a plot-maker. After all, Bloom is a SUB in SM terms as well as a cynical entrepreneur willing to orchestrate any situation to advance Molly’s career – even to the extent of arousing her with smutty books to accept Boylan as her mate.

 

Get a portrait in the Archibald – Australia’s leading art prize, promoting the field of portraiture. Long shunned by ‘serious’ artists, it enjoyed a revival after Brett Whiteley (AKA Read) won the prize with “Self-Portrait in the studio) in 1976. It became a normal career tactic for so-called ‘alternative’ artists with major private galleries to seek to be hung in the Archibald or, ideally, win it.

 

“Your theory prevents any judgment about what constitutes good or bad art. Your elevation of Chidley is the most obvious example” – see above re-Chidley. Professor Milkmaid launches a vigorous defence of Chidley hereafter.

 

“[Chidley] was what Harold Bloom would call a great reader in an age of great readers” – originally ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

Think Petronius. Think Catullus. Think Sade. All vilified. Of his nearest contemporaries, think Freud. Think Havelock Ellis – Milkmaid places Chidley in a historical line of writers and thinkers using sexuality as a principal subject.

 

“He deliberately chose an epistolary form because it is the best means of confession. He employed a personal Quest narrative. He crafted an effective chronological structure. And he is no more fragmentary than Montaigne or Rousseau.” – summary of Chidley’s form and tropology.

 

“So,” responded Krafter, “does it mean we can’t judge a rich period in Australian literature like the 1890s against a weaker time like the 1930s?” – the author parodies convention here, gently mocking Krafter. Generally, the pre-Federation period prior to 1901 is seen as a strongest literary era. The 1930s, in contrast, has been seen as underwhelming. Of course, these are arbitrary definitions based on something raw and illogical – temporal units of 10-years.

 

Surreal affectations on a bed of stale Dickens with pale Borgesian sauce – a summation of the early novels of Peter Carey.

 

Junkies with A-List looks churning out underdone novellas for future film rights – various 1990s authors.

 

Professor Pan’s fourth novel is dedicated to his third undergraduate wife – a parodic invention although not without parallels to campus life.

 

Gritty romances set in coastal caravan parks in winter. An ex-advertising executive and his favorite prostitute find love beneath the annexes. Masturbating Nazi brats – see above.

 

Expatriate fantasies about convent grrrls… – extended parody of archetypal plot of Australian Literature in c21 (192 words).

 

In relation to minor literature, are you saying a minor poem like Shelley’s ‘Hellas’ is more valuable to the Dominioned writer than a major work about a rebellious outsider like Prometheus Unbound?” – a logical extension of Capri’s theory.

 

“What I’m saying is that an apparently minor poem like ‘The Sensitive Plant’ was intended by Shelley to be seen as equivalent in stature to Prometheus Unbound. To him, a lyric was as powerful as an epic. The small was equal to the large. This was a moral position. He wanted them to be read in tandem. They acted as foils. This was telegraphed in how he presented these two poems in publication. ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is placed directly after Prometheus Unbound in the 1820 volume. It reverses the progress from torture to utopia in the Prometheus epic and reduces affairs from an immortal to a mortal and mutable scale. Action is decreased from High Mimetic to Low Mimetic. The static fable with its basic quatrains, simple rhyme scheme and cliched iambic meter acts as the antithesis of the extravagant Promethean saga with its dazzling array of forms and characters and sweeping shifts of place.” – an original piece of literary analysis.

 

“That’s all well and good,” interposed Doctor Deirdre Sackerson, larding the air with bile from her honey-bear mouth. “But I’d like to interrogate your so-called critical method. Or, rather, lack thereof….” – a verbal rendition of one marker’s assessment of Capri’s thesis some years hence.

 

“Glosynge is a glorious thing,” added Milkmaid opening his arms – quote comes from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, “The Summoner’s Tale,” line 129.

 

I do have a method, he thought – Capri goes on to outline the basics of Prosenchymatic theory. A full definition is given in Appendix 4 of this work.

 

Brennan’s Homerics – Christopher John Brennan (1870-1932) was a leading Australian poet. His Symbolist livre compose, Poems (1913), was influenced by the work of Stephane Mallarme and contained numerous Classical references. Famously, he referred to Sydney Harbour as a place where “Homer’s sea loses his keen breath…” (Poem 10, I, l.9).

 

Haines was interested in the Lovesongs of Connacht – Haines misses Stephen’s performance because he has gone to purchase “Love Songs of Connacht” (1893) by Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), who was a leading figure in the Irish Cultural Revival.

 

Hyde ended up King of All Eire. An Craoibhín Aoibhinn. He was famous for filling out his census form in Gaelic. Took the presidential oath in Roscommon – Douglas Ross Hyde (1860-1949), known as An Craoibhín Aoibhinn, served as the first president of Ireland from June 1938 to June 1945.

 

There were three hundred languages when the English arrived at Port Jackson. Twenty now extant – scope of Indigenous languages in Sydney region upon European invasion in 1788 and as at time of writing today (2022).

 

Dharuk is called the Sydney language – Dharuk or Dharug is an Eora language of the Yuin–Kuric group traditionally spoken in the region around Sydney.

Vocabularies were collected by Collins and Dawes off Arabanoo and Bennelong – the first Europeans to assemble word lists of local indigenous groups were David Collins, aide to Governor Phillip, and Lieutenant William Dawes. Arabanoo and Bennelong were prisoners of the invasion forces.

 

Patyegarang was only fifteen when Dawes got at her. Nyímuŋ candle Mister D, she said. Put out the light. Putuwá. Come back to bed. They held each other – Patyegarang was a young Indigenous woman who was a companion of Dawes. Their word-lists indicate intimacy.

 

Bosschaert – Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621) was a Flemish-born Dutch still life painter.

 

Russell on love songs. Real poetic power comes from the peasants, he said – George William Russell (1867-1935) or “Æ,” was an Irish literary figure.

 

MAO was a kulak – Chairman Mao came from a Hunanese family with above-average wealth and status. The term, Kulak, was coined during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to define peasants who had profited from the Stolypin land reforms (1906-1914) and were considered privileged landholders. The land size used to define a Kulak in Russia was 8 acres (or 3.2 hectares).

 

As Stephen to A. E. so I to Elizabeth re-debt – Joyce makes the famous joke, “A.E.I.U.O.” in Ulysses to describe Stephen’s pledge of debt (or I.O.U) of 5 pounds George Russell (or A.E). Tom Hallem actually has greater debts, obligations and vulnerabilities to Elizabeth Archer, his art dealer, in TMAC.

 

Willy is due. Hallem checked his watch – Willie the Pimp is a drug dealer in TMAC. He shares a homo-erotic relationship with Tom Hallem.

 

Shakespeare left Anne his second-best bed. The one she now shares with Les Hallem – Shakespeare’s will stipulated that his second-best bed went to his wife. This is seen as a downgrading of her status by critics. In TMAC, Penelope Hallem corresponds to Anne. She is also now married to Les Hallem, which deepens that metaphor.

 

Nothing like Bradley’s tough Hamlet – A. C. Bradley (1851-1935) wrote an influential essay on Hamlet which was contained in his volume, Shakespeare’s tragedy (1904).

 

It [TMAC] has been composed in bursts and ebbs using a method much like Nabokov’s file cards – Nabokov used file cards to collect material for his novels. It was later slotted into place as required. TMAC mimics that process in keeping with its charter to be a work which “denies itself the solace of good forms.”

 

… a life led in the same city as my former colleagues and peers but our paths never crossed. I moved like a sceptre across Sydney. Hamlet is a ghost story. I faded into impalpability through absence and changing fashions, as Stephen Dedalus said. Like Odysseus, I was king of a minor kingdom: MY MIND. No/man of genius. No volition in my errors. Just average mistakes. Amoral snubs. Ancient slights to be avenged. There were no portals. I was that absentminded beggar shuffling amongst the sandstone cloisters in the main quadrangle as the rain fell on Browning’s grasping jacaranda weed. The Man in the Brown Macintosh passed. Discovery came in patches. It glowed and ebbed. Insert Mulligan’s clap. Applause is a bucket. The audience began to rise – the author’s summary of life in Sydney, 1992-2021. [Tweeted 19.02.22

TMAC & author Author like Rimbaud in Abyssydneya (Yes, it’s a pun on Abyssinia/Sydney/abyss). Does self-deprecation get any better? “Like Odysseus, I was king of a minor kingdom: MY MIND.” http://telemachus.com.au #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #TMACnovel].

 

“Coriolanus was the first Byronic hero,” added Milkmaid. “He is a martial Hamlet” – Professor Milkmaid was a legendary outsider-figure in the English Department at the University of Sydney. Here, he nails Coriolanus as a

Byronic hero. Wikipedia defines them as: “arrogant, intelligent, educated outcasts, who somehow balance cynicism and self-destructive tendencies with a mysterious magnetism and attraction….” This is a pretty good summary of Coriolanus’ personality and (non-)actions. Also, Coriolanus was a solider who became indecisive like Hamlet.

 

“He was the first Spasmodic poet,” replied Mildling – this comment fastens onto Coriolanus’ hyperbolic language linking it to the Spasmodic School of poets in the 1850s in the UK.

 

“I prefer the term ‘Hyper-Romantic,’” said Milkmaid – Milkmaid replies with a new term, Hyper-Romantic.

 

“That term would suit Mister Capri’s writing admirably,” stated Professor Ilks coolly aloft. “I believe he has achieved a carefully-calculated Euphuism – a highly-mannered prose style named after Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit (1578) by John Lyly. The term was later adopted by Walter Pater in Marius the Epicurean (1885), where it is explained and exemplified in the Golden Book: the Metamorphoses by Apuleius.

 

“Will you write-up a condensed version for Southerly?” asked Laby Weffy as the group passed into the corridor.  “Is there a dollar in’t?” asked Billy – direct link to Stephen Dedalus’ reply when asked to write about his theory.

 

“There’s a proud tradition in English literature of dealing with a source by effacement,” said Blind Basil Kiernan who has inserted a dry pipe into his wet mouth. “Joyce never attributed his sources,” broke in Guermantes. “A skill he learnt off Walter Pater,” agreed Milkmaid. “Like a dog burying a bone,” O postulated. “Ironically, Pater suffered most from this approach,” added Capri. “Nobody knows of him today. But his disciples are considered the greatest writers of our century.” “Just as Pater subsumed Ruskin so Pater, in turn, was subsumed by Wilde,” said Mildling making a cross of benediction – an accurate summary of acknowledged influences in c19 English literature. The dog image refers to Kafka: Towards Minor Literature by Deleuze and Guattari.

 

“Obscurum per obscurius” – a Latin saying which means, “(explaining) the obscure by means of the more obscure.”

 

“Dorian’s Yellow Book is a corruption of Pater’s Golden One” – see above. Wilde comically degraded the Golden Book to a Yellow Book.

 

“Lord Henry Wootton is Flavian full-formed,” added O – Pater’s heroic Flavian in Marius the Epicurean is degraded by Wilde into a cynical aristocratic figure who come to control Dorian’s thinking.

 

“Wilde’s texts are all set-pieces,” said Tuck. “Aristocratic music hall comedy,” scoffed Mildling jealously. “Yet they all approach Paterian perfection of form,” stated Judith Guermantes decisively. “His trademark was the seamless execution of familiar forms. There isn’t one he didn’t master: ballads, farces, fairy-tales, plays, horror stories, even the mystery novel.” “But there is always a mechanical spirit to his texts,” concluded Liddle anaemically. “There is far less dilation in Wilde than Pater,” she replied – a good summary of Wilde’s achievements.

 

“Pater was utterly self-reflexive,” agreed Milkmaid. “In all his works, he speaks by historical metaphor of the self-absorption of late nineteenth century art. Remember his famous statement in Marius that even the work of genius must be largely critical. He identifies the rationale for this analytical drive in the exhaustion of matter. All that remained for Art was perfection of style and form. This drive – Pater would call it ‘centripetal force’ – is the very basis of Post-Modernism. It is the portal to a new Theocratic Age” – Milkmaid makes an essential link between late c19 literary theory in England and postmodernism.

 

The desert wilderness of Paris, Texas. Pasolini’s Oedipus – allusions to the movies, “Paris, Texas” (1984) by Wim Winders and “Oedipus Rex” (1967) by Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

Die like Kafka unread. Erase all self-vestige – a self-referential oath by the author of TMAC.

 

Imperialism was the cause of the Great War (source: Wikipedia) – comic rendering of a plausible theory on the origins of the First World War.

 

Sliver pieces – deliberate wordplay.

 

Joyce at Trieste Station. No Burberry coat. The brothers were never close again, wrote Ellmann – See “1919-1920” (Ellmann, p.470). The brothers returned to Trieste in 1919. Stanislaus had been in internment for four years. His historical grievances against his brother had been sharpened over this period. As for Joyce, financial freedom made him less solicitous of his brother.

 

Daughter of Caer – in Irish mythology, Caer Ibormeith married Óengus of the Tuatha de Dannan and become foster-mother of Diarmuid. This is another example of variants on biological paternity in TMAC.

 

Swanderbound – portmanteau word which combines Caer’s ability to become a swan with the tale of Oengus identifying her amongst 150 girls in chains.

 

A slight silhouette had lashed himself to the wall with Tom – enter Willie the Pimp – the villain of Telemachus takes to the stage. His name is based on a song on “Hot Rats” by Frank Zappa, featuring lyrics and vocals by Captain Beefheart.

 

I lifted headphones out of me earhoalz. Cut PJ Harvey off mid-verse. Why am I so obsessed with BACK THEN? Anyone can write that story. Only I will write canon. Textual genes and chromosomes. Correl. Pater’n’all DNA – an example of the unconscious arrogance of the deluded writer during the act of composition.

 

It is so late that it has become very early but I can’t sleep. Sounds real and recalled assail me. Poor Wat. A single car headlight flashing at tangents against Roman Blinds then gone. A propeller plane descending towards the third runway. It is forty-five minutes until the curfew is lifted. Ambulance sirens recede along Canterbury Road. Empty passenger trains career to the city fringes to thread back in the morning peak – description of 5.15am in Stanmore.

 

My father’s slippers sanding the grim linoleum floor of the ammonial hospital corridor. Orderlies propping him up under each soft, thick bicep. He fell. More luscious bruises. More rainbow-mica pelt – description of Don Cane’s predicament at an aged care facility. It continues

 

Before the last stroke, I asked him if he was content with his life he answered YES but he should have said NO – transcript of an exchange with my father.

 

His voice started clawing out a Will. I told him forget it. There was no house. No money. That was all lies. I’m the only one left. He’d used up and discarded everyone else. Tom was dead. Penelope and Helen would not see him. I look on my role as a form of charity. He smiled meanly. Glibly. With disdain. Even with barely any ammunition left in his cellophane body he can still try to wound me. I stayed with him half an hour. I processed all this stuff long ago. Now it’s just subject matter because of parallels to Joyce – an account of my last exchange with my father, my biological father, the only one I’ve ever known.

 

I am now about the same age as when I first met him in 1984. I observe some of my own features fall out of his sunk screen – I was twenty-two years old when I met my father, added Billy Capri. Shanghai Dog was 57 years-old at the time of writing. His father, Don Cane, was 54 when he returned to Sydney.

 

I lay down and dozed fitfully on a camp bed in his room. I woke in foetal thrall in grey light. Shift to present tense. My routine in Chisel is mundane. I traipse to the staff room to shave. I wash my face in cold water. For a moment, reality is suspended. But it is only a temporary respite. I gaze into the filthy mirror. Through trails of dried spittle, my father’s gormless features stare back – an account of my time in the hospice where my father spent his last days by Billy Capri. Note – there is an alternate version of the last days of Don Cane in Manila in C10.

 

Gerard Johnson chipping at his monument – Gerard Johnson (Gheerart Janssen) was a Dutch sculptor working in Jacobean England who is traditionally supposed to have created Shakespeare’s funerary monument.

 

Richirishironyinsitu – fun compound word crunching together different stuff.

 

He lived in twenty different homes – I started counting all Joyce’s residences in the Ellmann biography and stopped at twenty.

 

Limbs akimbo in a bed of Swiss shrubs: a man who never bothered much with nature – the grave of James Joyce.

 

Shuffling over the Ponte Rosso. Poking out of a retail wall in Szombathely. Bloom is the Hungarian connection. Peeping out of a massive bronze greatcoat in Moscow. Facing his former university at Newman House, animated by furtive, wavering lips – various statues of James Joyce.

 

He was born at 41 Brighton Square. He died in Zurich – the physical span of Joyce’s life.

 

“Does nobody understand?” were reputedly his final words – apocryphal utterance by Joyce promoted by admirers.

 

When I returned, my father’s eyes were stuck. I peeled them back. Bloodshot rafts – I did it. But I hated touching my father.

 

Willy = Haines. A drug dealer and a dealer in prestige. Moneyed classes. False transactions – a bit of a stretch but interesting to consider.

 

Stephen encounters the madman Farrell as he passes through the reading room. A symbol of what he could become. The endpoint of any fixation on words. You can write the same book forever and never finish. You get caught in a loop in the editing void. It’s a kind of delaying tactic. I can never publish this work. It has too much riding on it. There is too much at stake – progression from the end of the Scylla episode in Ulysses to a statement of personal insecurity by the author.

 

In the last lines of S][C, Stephen’s forthright speech collapses into a sequence of questions, word fragments, scraps of poetry, transcriptions of Mulligan’s ebullient babble, reprises and recriminations about his Shakespeare theory, disconnected images linked by ellipses and punctuation gaps making spaces on the page like Mallarme’s A DICE THROWN – Stephen’s mind through the pen of Joyce becomes like Farrell’s mind.

 

Joyce employs incremental repetition to give reactive depth to thoughts and scenes as Stephen is exposed to them: Aengus, lubber, murmur/mummer – more samples of verbal decay in Stephen Dedalus.

 

This poem’s visual presentation inspired the descent of Duchamp’s staircase – made-up idea.

 

To efface precursors = to efface the father. Minor/Major literature = son/father (Telemachus | Odysseus). Hamlet Snr/Jnr = real/ideal manhood – formulae for living and writing.

 

Shift from lecture theatre to my father’s death throes (see also C6). Kill him off in text. He died at 11am today just after I finished this draft in real life. REAL LIFE! It goes on valueless and flat – fact. See B. S. Johnston for prototype.

 

But no matter how much time elapses, no matter how often it is re-explained, how many excuses are made, and how much adult experience I bring to the situation, I can never comprehend my father’s acts. Juxtapose detached critical oratory with highly personal writing in this chapter – a personal statement of incredulity at my father’s attitude to me.

 

Inadvertently, I sent a text message to my colleague at lunchtime which read, “Feather dead.” This was a chance correspondence with the misspelled telegram from Stephen’s father announcing that his NOTHER was dead. Actually, it is a beautiful expression by chance for expiration – an ironic correspondence with the error in the telegram to Stephen Dedalus (AKA James Joyce).

 

In the beginning, I was only able to grasp at him (sucking tentacles), fearing collateral damage from his evil (Exodus 20:5, Numbers 14:18). Like Oedipus, I tried to place myself in contradistinction and go on – my approach to dealing with my father.

 

The son must invert the journey of the father – this was the original motto of TMAC. However, it was replaced by the subscripted/superscripted quote. However, the end of C4 remains the personal, emotional epicentre of TMAC.

 

Don became Odysseus, Hamlet Senior and Bloom. Don and Richie’s dead son was Hamnet. And Chaim. He was also my brother, Robert Richards, who succumbed to spina bifida before I was born – a bunch of dead babies in TMAC including my half-brother. Forget Rudi Bloom.

 

Immediately after coining the famous proverb, “Je est un autre,” in a letter to Georges Izambard from Charleville on 13 May 1871, Arthur Rimbaud added the phrase: “Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon.” It is so much worse for the wood which finds it is a violin. This apparent afterthought is a master metaphor for Dominioned Literature – link back to Billy’s speech earlier in C4.

 

Tom Hallem also starts the process of disconnecting from Sydney at this point. He begins to observe his body FROM WITHOUT like the subject of some grim Cartesian self-experiment. This split is a pre-condition for some types of hard drug addiction – a feature of some people with serious diseases is that they objectify their bodies.

 

Mulligan and Stephen separate decisively at the end of S&C in Ulysses. Stephen is irrevocably cut loose from literary Dublin. Billy Capri leaves Telemachus as an active agent although he comes back in part as Shanghai Dog. INSERT PROLEPSIS: Billy dropped into the pub, O didn’t come, he felt disaffected, his brother dishonoured him, he went back to his apartment, packed some final items, got a lift home off Barry and left Sydney – TMAC C4 ending.