1. Ulysses and Its Wake

2. Tom McCarthy

3. HOW do you write after Ulysses? It isnt just that Joyce writes better than anyone else (although he does), its thesense that Ulyssess publication represents a kind of rapture for literature, an event thats both ecstatic andcatastrophic, perhaps even apocalyptic. A certain naive realism is no longer possible after it, and everyalternative, every avant-garde manoeuvre imaginable has been anticipated and exhausted by it too. As thoughthat werent enough, Joyce returns to the scene of his own crime, arriving not incognito (in the manner of hisshady non-character McIntosh), but brazenly assuming the role of principal mourner. Just as Ulysses was initiallyconceived as an extra story in Dubliners, Finnegans Wake gestated as a 19th episode of Ulysses. The three arepart of a continuum, and Ulysses is a work whose own wake, and perhaps that of the novel tout court, is alreadyat work in it. What new patterning, what ploughing of the sea, could a writer envisage outside the ripple-fieldalready sent out by Joyce? Derrida complains of Finnegans Wakes relentless hypermnesia, which a prioriindebts you, inscribes you in advance in the book you are reading. The future, he says, is reserved in it.

4. Derridas complaint is economic: doubly so, with its metaphors of both debt and reserve. In Joyce, economics iselevated to the level of cultural form: money becomes literature, and vice versa. In Finnegans Wake, pages arebanknotes, scraps of pecuniar interest; the manuscript of the debt-ridden writer Shem is an epical forgedcheque passed off on the public for his own private profit; the economic aspect of the verb to tell is fully playedout as the book gets retaled. By the time of Finnegans Wake, then, the economantarchy (as Joyce calls it) thatis literatures trading-floor is fully up and running, but the process begins back in Ulysses. The problem, Stephentells Buck Mulligan after Buck scolds him for trying to trade Shakespearean theory for a bit of English coin, is toget money. Should they solicit it, he sarcastically asks, from the milkwoman whos just passed by? She takesmoney from them and extends them credit at the same time, but her real-terms contribution (as economists wouldsay) to the novel is the short speech she delivers:

5. Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, its seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopenceover and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two,sir.

6. The logic of accountancy has permeated the prose: the passage isnt just about totting up a bill; the mechanism offinancial computation generates whats on the page. What we read is like the paper tape that issues from anadding machine. And a literal cash machine, with slots for shillings, sixpences, half-crowns and crowns, appearsin the next chapter, in which England is cast (by Deasy) as a land of monetary self-sufficiency (though threatenedby usurious Jewish merchants), while Ireland is recast (by Stephen) as a pawnshop, one to which hes more inhock than most. The chapter ends as the sun profligately flings, through a chequerwork of leaves, dancing coinsonto Deasys shoulders: light itself turning into money.

7. Stephens debt re-emerges during his argument with the poet George A.E. Russell (one of his many creditors) ashe stakes his fraught bid for literary inheritance to his own reserve and storehouse, the five-vowelled alphabet:A.E.I.O.U. In Burkes pub and Bella Cohens brothel, Stephen is as spendthrift as the sun, prompting Bloom torelieve him of his coins for safekeeping, which turns Bloom into a cash machine too: Bloom, son of a money-lending Jew of the type so despised by Deasy, who moves around Dublin negotiating terms and profit margins;who in his reveries hatches get-rich-quick schemes; who, ever inquisitive, marks the edge of a florin beforetendering it to a grocer for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return. In (orout of) Blooms hands, the grubby coin turns into the Homeric hero, or the other way around: Ulysses becomescurrency. As the milkwomans invoice opened the Odyssean day of reckoning, so a new bill will call time on it:Blooms final totting-up of the days earnings and expenses is reproduced in double-entry format. Bloom hasfantasised about becoming a writer, about earning good cash by publishing detective stories or accounts ofcharacters encountered at nocturnal cab shelters: this, though, is the real account hell write of his day, his trueact of book-keeping.

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9. ONE OF Blooms mooted entrepreneurial schemes involves selling human waste on an industrial scale. Joyceswork is mired in excremental language and imagery: water closets, commodes, sewers, clotted hinderparts,

slopperish matter, nappy spattees, pip poo pat of bulgar bowels and so on. Nowhere is Joyce more potty-mouthed than when taking on the language and procedure of religious devotion. At the outset of Finnegans Wakethe books of Genesis and Exodus become urinary and colonic tracts and Christ the salmon turns into a big browntrout, a brontoichthyan thunderfish or turd floating in a stream mingling with piddle. But, again, the process hasalready begun in Ulysses. Bloom starts his day by votively bowing his head as he enters his outhouse to performthe act of defecation that will see him hailed as Moses, Moses, King of the Jews who wiped his arse in the DailyNews. Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginarystool sample floating in what he has been presenting as an altar bowl. The shaving bowl doesnt contain faeces,but other sorts of human waste: stubble and cast-off skin cells. These things, too, belong to the category ofexcreta, as do phlegm, bile, navelcords and blood: whatever is excessive, leaking, trailing, dragging.

10. Ulysses is packed to overflowing with such things: in it every concept, no matter how intangible or rarefied, istransformed into something lowly, degraded, abject and the more so the more elevated it held itself to be. Poetryturns into snot; nature, and the contours of the Romantic sublime, into a bowl of sluggish vomit. Forget Apollonianbeauty: what Bloom wants to know is whether statues of Greek gods have arseholes. For him, the heart, seat ofrefined emotions, is a rusty pump; communion is cannibalism; justice just means everybody eating everyoneelse. Hes obsessed with falling bodies, their weight and volume and the speed at which they fall. Ulysses is aheavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book. What has fallen in it, into it, is everything literature previously heldto be immaterial or abstract: in its pages metaphysics collapses into what the artist Jake Chapman nicely callsmeatphysics. Its hard to think, outside of zombie movies, of a work more omnivoric and omni-emetic. Rats eatcorpses; savages eat missionaries; Bloom eats cheese; cheese eats itself; dogs eat themselves, spewthemselves out, eat themselves again; the city and the day eat and spew out Bloom

11. Joyce, needless to say, is a materialist. Over the Neoplatonism of A.E., with his trite assertion that Art has toreveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences, he champions Stephens Aristotelian materialism of the now andthe here, the art of forms and form. Against vague cosmic mysticism he pits Blooms vision of spinning gasballs Gas: then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock and of entomologicalorganic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, ofmicrobes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa. But this materialism should not be confused with empiricism. Onthe contrary, its what Georges Bataille, in his Critical Dictionary, calls base materialism. For Bataille, thepositivist materialism of science or the dialectical materialism of Marxism are nothing more than Christianity indisguise, and a philosophy grounded in them remains an idealist one. Against crypto-Platonic versions of form heproposes the Formless, or lInforme. LInforme, Bataille writes, is not only an adjective having a given meaning,but a term that serves to bring things down in the world. (The term he uses for bring down is dclasser, whichcarries the dual sense of lowering in class, or demoting, and of releasing from all classificatory or taxonomicconstraints.) It is

12. a term that serves to bring things down in a world that generally requires that each thing have its form. What thisword [lInforme] designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or anearthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy hasno other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand,affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless [informe] amounts to saying that the universe issomething like a spider or spit.

13. Bataille here identifies what I see as one of the central thrusts of literature as it moves into and through the 20thcentury. You see it emerging in late Yeats, as his lofty esoteric icons are downgraded to a clutter of rag-and-bone-shop trinkets in The Circus Animals Desertion; you see it, later, in the promes of Francis Ponge, where hecelebrates the endomorphic thingliness of things, the way their sheer material facticity breaches the limits of everyattempt to contain them conceptually or aesthetically; or in Wallace Stevens, in his plum that survives its poems,oozing and rotting beyond and between their lines; in visual art, you see it in the thick, muddy canvases ofDubuffet, where materiality far overtakes mimesis; or, later, in the unformed mounds of fat slapped down in frontof us by Joseph Beuys. But Ulysses is where the process fully plays itself out, whirring and clunking and splattingand squelching. Ulysses matters most, because it makes matter of everything. Everything in Ulysses is dclass,or (to use a term of Joyces) netherfallen. Things arent even things in Ulysses, at least not in any quasi-autonomous sense, monadic entities with subjective sovereignty: they are abject, broken, the excreta of otherthings. Everything is a by-product of something else. Cheese isnt just self-consuming, its the corpse of milk;jackets, soap and margarine are corpses of corpses, the offslew of the hide, hair and horns disgorged byslaughterhouses, what Bloom, brilliantly, calls the fifth quarter: the one thats surplus to a things integrity, to

mathematics itself, a remainder. Bloom assesses the written word, too, solely in terms of its by-products: theblotting paper that he used to sell, that he blots Marthas name with, hatching an idea for a detective story inwhich blotter-residues lead a sleuth to solve a crime; the giant sheet of it that he proposes the stationer WisdomHely parade through the streets; or the equally enormous ink bottle he also pitches Hely, with a false stain ofblack celluloid (Claes Oldenburgs entire career opens and closes in the space of that throwaway); or the actualink, the encaustic pigment he recalls Molly leaving her pen in, exposed to the corrosive action of copperas,green vitriol and nutgall. His own compositional effort (I am a ) also gets bogged down by the material hewrites on, as his stick sticks in the mud and thus becomes the very thing it tries to represent.

14. Stephen, for his part, obsesses over the question of the word becoming flesh and flesh becoming word; he seeswords changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning, burrowing quickly into all colours ofdifferent sorts of the same sand. Walking on Sandymount Strand, Stephen is crushing things everywhere, as iftrampling Batailles lInforme: His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that onthe unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. But this crushing of things affordshim no domination; the quagmire starts to drag him, like Blooms stick, into its base plane: Unwholesomesandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered inseafire under a midden of mans ashes. Stephens beach is spattered with corpse parts: bladderwrack, sockets,swaying arms, a redpanting tongue, a bloated carcass, bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. As Stephenmoves through it, rhythm begins: Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. Zombie omnivorism is a descriptionof literature itself: Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Cut toBloom, who devours a urinous offal from all dead before going off to watch HOW, as Joyce announces, AGREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT.

15. The organ Bloom watches being turned out is, of course, a newspaper; what is being dismembered and cut up inproto-Burroughsian fashion in the Freemans offices and printing works is prose itself. Language in Ulysses is justanother organ, and like so many other organs in this properly obscene book it keeps getting unzipped, whippedout, flashed left and right and centre. People should desist, once and for all, from using the term interiormonologue to describe the novels outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue:its exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane ofconventional syntax. Language lies and drifts around Dublins streets like ozone in dystopian sci-fi fables: H and Eand L, printed on sandwich boards, march along the gutter while Y lags behind, cramming a chunk of bread intohis mouth. Even the novels letters eat and crap. Michel Leiris, another contributor to the Critical Dictionary,describes in Scratches eating alphabetti spaghetti as a child; eating too much, and being sick; watching thedented letters fall back from him: far from being a tool for refining the world into concepts, language is what mixeswith saliva in your mouth, gets kneaded by your tongue and teeth, repeats on you. Joyce knows this all too well:Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbledsweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips.This scene, repeated twice (Molly replays it too), itself reprises Stephens half-formed (or half-deformed) vampirepoem (written on a torn-off scrap of Deasys letter about foot and mouth) in which mouth to her mouths kissdegrades into mouth to her moomb, then oomb, allwombing tomb, then finally mouth to my mouth. But its theseedcake thats important, and its important that its seedcake, not fruitcake or carrot cake: this is a scene offertility and dissemination, writing as material transmission.

16. And yet the seedcake is not the work. The work, at this point, remains to be written. Ulysses is a book in which thecentral stake is the coming into being of the book itself. This is effectively what Stephen is tasked with: to writeUlysses. I want you to write something, Myles Crawford says. You can do it Put us all into it, damn its soul.He has in mind a long piece of journalism, but the exhortation carries much wider implications, especially whenthe press headline repeats it: YOU CAN DO IT! All desire to see you bring forth the work you meditate, Lenehantells Stephen after Stephen has encircled his own head with a putative laurel, drunkenly boasting of his bardicability to make ghosts troop to my call. Actually, its the ghosts who order him, and Stephen knows it; he knows ofthe coffined, mummified, word-embalmed thoughts in Dublins library that an itch of death is in them, to tell me inmy ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will. Here another sense of Batailles term dclasser suggests itself,a decidedly 21st-century one: declassification. Stephen acts as a kind of hacker, called on to dicky into sealedand buried files, to crack them open and break their contents out again, so that they may commingle and cross-pollinate. (In McKenzie Warks A Hacker Manifesto, to hack is to produce the plane upon which different thingsmay enter into relation, to open grounds of possibility for the new creative event.) Stephen, like Hamlet, has beencalled by ghosts (or corpses); where Hamlets orders were to act (orders he disobeys by writing instead),Stephens orders are to write. But hes as useless at carrying them out as Hamlet. Stephen and Joyce himself

is agonised, to the point of paralysis, by the familiar question: how do you write after Ulysses, if we take Ulyssesto mean the plane of possibility hacked open by the extraordinary creative wave, unleashed (in part at least) byhis own exertions, on whose breaking crest he finds himself borne, or perhaps within whose surging foam he findshimself submerged. No wonder that he is both afraid of and fascinated by the sea.

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18. THE MAIN GHOST in the library may be Hamlets, but another glides fleetingly through the chief librarians office:Mallarm, who in his jottings depicts Hamlet reading the book of himself and struggling beneath the curse ofhaving to appear. Like Ulysses, Mallarms Un coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard enacts the ruin of a certaintype of cultural space, enacts the breakdown and degradation of ship into gunwale and keel, of language intotypographic fragments. Not only is Un coup de ds its imagery, scenarios, even vocabulary redevoured andregurgitated in the text of Ulysses (once youve started noticing it, its everywhere: the shipwrecked sailors,mermaids, obsessions with numbers and computations and so on), but Joyces novel, like Mallarms poem, isdominated by its own relation to the looming spectre of a work to come. Mallarm claims in his essay Le Livre:instrument spirituel that everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book. Since the conventional bookis insufficient to the task of storing and transforming the whole world, Mallarm starts deforming it, cracking thespine, folding out the pages, trying to overhaul it into something up to the job. These are the terms under whichUn coup de ds is written. But, as Maurice Blanchot points out, Mallarm didnt see Un coup de ds as therealisation of this: rather it is its reserve and its forever hidden presence, the risk of its venture, the measure of itslimitless challenge.

19. Reserve, risk, venture: the economic field asserts itself again. Shakespeares Timon of Athens, manicallyapostrophising the gold hes dug up, simultaneously curses it as a defiler and marvels at the way it solderstclose impossibilities/and makst them kiss: the same capacity McKenzie Wark attributes to the hack. Joyce seemsto intuit the same connection: Ulyssess economic register, grubby though it is, also underwrites a giantspeculative system in which, amid collapse and boom, the promise of a monumental or unprecedented returngestates, a return that would be literature itself; a promise that remains deferred, whose deferral is necessary forthe speculative system to exist. Mallarms book cant be written, but the demand for it, once it has been issued,sets the parameters of future serious literature. Ulysses inhabits these impossible parameters, and so isnt onlynot the book heralded by Mallarm, but also not the book anticipated or announced by itself. When you read it,youre always reading whats actually there in relation to a framework that isnt there: you read contemporaryevents in relation to the ur-historical epic outside. Bloom is not Odysseus, or Molly Penelope; every Homeric linkis effected as a negative, a gap, the distance between (for example) a Cyclops-blinding poker and a chimneysweeps brush, or a sirens foam-lashed rock and a beer-flecked bar counter; theres no heroic or redemptivereconciliation between Bloom and Molly, no resurrection of the dead; even Mollys landmark speech remainsunspoken. Just as history, for Stephen, is a repository or storeroom of all the events that failed to happen, infiniteousted possibilities, so the whole story of Ulysses takes place in the negative, a place where, ultimately (to quoteMallarm), nothing will have taken place except the place. The movement from impossible to possible is at everyinstant set in motion and held in abeyance, displaced from a reality that might be consummated as reality onto thedisjecta symbols of an unrealised totality: potted meats, keys and Keyes ads, the trajectories of urine, menstrualblood in a chamber pot.

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21. SPECULATION: as well as its economic and intellectual connotations, the word carries an astronomic meaning contemplation of the heavens. And its within the umbra of this meaning that the largest of Un coup de dssshadows hides itself in Ulysses. Like Mallarms poem, Joyces novel is full of constellational imagery. Stephenrepeatedly invokes the delta of Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation that hung over Shakespeares birth. Hepictures stars flung by archangels to the wormy earth, to be rooted out by pigs and poets. The link between poeticwords, their formatting and spacing, and the layout of the stars is crucial to the climax of Un Coup de ds, whosehigh point (literally) is the North Star: a point at which a place would fuse with its own beyond, and for that veryreason a point never attained, but in whose orbit thought, writing-as-thought, rolls and flashes sidereally acrossthe gutter of the page, forming its inky account. The same climactic movement builds up at the end of Ulysses,which sweeps us from the North Star Hotel to a barrage of meditations on constellations: the Milky Way, Arcturus,equinoxes, nascent new stars and the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermovingwanderers. After these meditations, Bloom tots up his own account, then pictures himself navigating,septentrional, by night the polestar, wandering to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit to the extreme

boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. But this is all speculation: what heactually does is lie in bed, viewing his lodestar Molly from the wrong end. If Bloom is always elsewhere, beyondhimself, its because Ulysses is always elsewhere and beyond itself as well; just as it carries its own wake in it, itcarries its own elsewhere in it too, or rather lets this elsewhere carry it. Which means it carries the novel in it, aselsewhere: a book-to-come, a possibility in impossible form.

22. How to write after Ulysses? What would this question even mean? Time, in Ulysses, is fallen too, a by-product ofearth-pulled bodies; Dunsink done sunk, and the hours dance across a brothel floor. Joyce time doesnt move in astraight line from past to future: it too accretes and consumes itself: the future plunges back into the past; now isthe transit-point or orifice through which this involution passes. When Stephen tells us as much in the library, hessketching out a new type of cultural time that we could say Joyces work inaugurates, a time not of culturalprogress, even from one vanguard to the next, but one in which culture will consume its own tail: Mallarm,Goethe, Hamlet, Pickwick, Swinburne a never-ending zombie eucharist.

23. By the time of Finnegans Wake, this involuted schema will be fixed as a Viconian one of ricorso or re-enactment,in which objects and situations bob about and return, in slightly different form. The schema is already evident inUlysses with its recirculation of detritus in the form of things, images, events, its many instances of historyrepeating itself, as Bloom puts it, with a difference. But the temporal metronome to whose beat Ulysses reallydances is again that of the constellation, understood now in its Benjaminian sense, as a transhistorical joining-upof disparate or previously unconnected points, a joining-up that generates a sudden flash of paradoxicalsimultaneity, the revolutionary ground for a whole new realm of understanding. If you like, another hack. This isthe hack performed by Molly, as, lying on the 53rd parallel of latitude, N., and the 6th meridian of longitude, W.,she places the City Arms Hotel, Ontario Terrace and Howth Head and a soup altercation waiting for a train and anankle-spraining incident at a party and the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the sea and Bloom andStephen all on a plane of constellated simultaneity. Its a constellation that can only be construed from elsewhere.Even as she plots her ties to Stephen, he has already wandered off: the very stars presiding over her are fading,and their light is years old anyhow; besides, the revolving earth is sending them, like Gabriel Conroy in TheDead, westwards. But an alignment has taken place, a conjunction has been passed through, a plane ofpossibility hewn into existence: that of the word itself, its own unfolding elsewhere. Where Stephen, like Cordelia,says Nothing, Molly carries negative logic to its outer limit by not saying anything at all, but I dont need to tell youwhat the very last word that she doesnt say is.