Finnegans Wake Grappa discussion

http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v2/her...

This is an excellent essay, which provides some interesting thinking on the jazz/blues/wake crossings

It begins like this:

If we are to believe the biographers, much of Finnegans Wake was composed in a workroom where both Joyce's phonograph and his neighbors' carried sounds of Gershwin, Cab Calloway, "Mood Indigo," the "Vo-de-do-de-o Blues," Bessie Smith, and from 1925 onwards, the records of Louis Armstrong in that early period when he was backing Ma Rainey. As Ruth Bauerle has ably demonstrated in her excellent volume Picking up Airs, elaborating on information from Richard Ellmann and Brenda Maddox's biographies of the Joyces, during the 1920s and 30s Joyce had unexpectedly wide exposure to African-American music, to blues, swing, ragtime, spirituals, and early jazz, and he is said to have viewed his work on Finnegans Wake as like a "little Negro dance" performed in a Parisian club (Quoted in Bauerle 159). The blues tradition, construed partly as proto-jazz, rapidly became the primary metaphor in the Joycean lexicon for these several American genres, an absorption enhanced by the ready terminology of blueness for describing varieties of melancholy and synaesthesia. The historical connections to be probed here are many.

First in America and then across the water, an affiliation between Irishness and blackness was honed in the Afro-Hibernian crucible of the minstrel show where Paddy and Sambo interchanged roles, created a matrix of longing that encompassed both the Irish lament and the Delta blues ("Irish Mornings" 50-53). The interchange continues to this day as works by Paul Durcan, Van Morrison, Guy Clarke, and House of Pain amply demonstrate. But my purpose in this essay is not primarily to probe this crosscultural space, however compelling it is to explore the ways in which the cakewalk became the dehiscent structure of Joyce's "wakeswalks" (FW 455.5).

Rather, I want to meditate on the fact that in Joyce's writing the blues signal a recognition of sensory shifts accompanying modernization, the beginnings of technological change that Joyce imagined in their later body-invasive capacities. And I want to do so in order to speculate on the uses that American academics make of Joyce in American classrooms, where the relationship of the sensory-aesthetic-critical dimension and the socioeconomic-technological register is repeatedly mediated. For well or ill, the crucial and endless task of reinserting the sensory into the rationalized lifeworld remains historically emergent.

Surely one of the major educative aspects of Joyce's writing in Finnegans Wake is his coordinated representations of synaesthesia and of intermedia as they tutor us about evolving social relations--his insistent registering of the impact of rationalization on the senses and the individual's experience of somatic desires in a world that pervasively denies much that qualifies as need. For my purposes, bluesy expression--Joyce's "ragtimed revels" (FW 236.23)--draws attention to the space where capital captures both need and desire, through economic systems, through compelling and increasingly body-altering technologies. The blues form famously expresses both profound alienation from social organization and the sensory-somatic rhythms by which that alienation is modulated into something positive for the performer and her audience. In Finnegans Wake, the blues become a syn/coenasthesic vehicle for Joycean meditations on sensory deprivation, sensory loss, the alterity of individuals from socially sanctioned norms, and the possibilities for redemptive sensation.

The specificity of Joyce's knowledge of the blues in this register of social commentary is not hard to come by. Robert McAlmon, an American who in retrospect was astonishingly well tolerated by Joyce, wrote an almost forgotten poem that explored the blues idiom in some detail, and it is inconceivable that Joyce would have been unaware of McAlmon's effort given the attention that Joyce gave to his friend's fiction and the considerable time that they spent together, much of it in Parisian bars and clubs throughout the late twenties and thirties. McAlmon's poem, "North America: Continent of Conjecture," uses the blues form to ventriloquize for many of the migrant and dispossessed in America. Through a melancholic sense not of incompletion but rather of loss, America becomes an unfinished poem. McAlmon specifically and brutally rehearses America's commodification, America's displacement of native peoples, America's brutality. This "unfinished poem" grows from songlike interludes called "Historic Blues," "Aztec Blues," "Political Blues," "Steel-worker's Blues," "Law twisting blues," "Bootleg Town Blues," "Society and Advertising Blues," "They're gone or going blues," "Railwayman's Blues," "Cities Blues," "Machine Dance Blues," "Drunk Lumberjack Blues," "Face Lifted Blues," "Cult religion blues," and "Indian of the disenchanted desert blues." Most memorable for me is "Race Riot Blues"-- voiced by an African-American cabaret entertainer in Chicago who declares that he "ain't highbrow" but also isn't taking any shit from white folks anymore: "Yes man, I'm a dinge, if I sez it myself/ or lets a friend say it, and I got Irish blood,/ And I got you white trash's number, down cold./ And Chicago and Paris is just two places I can talk back . . . ."