"The natural outlawry of women"

 

In a famous passage in Marx’s Grundrisse, Marx wrote about the character form introduced by money: “The exchangeability of all products, services, relationships against a third, material one, which can without exception be exchanged – thus the development of exchange value (and the money relationship) is identical with general venality, corruption. General prostitution appears as a necessary phase of the development of the social character of personal resources, faculties, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relationships of exploitation and need.”

The Grundrisse was published by the Marx Engels institute, after its discovery among the manuscripts, in the 1930s. Long after the publication of Emmy Hennings Branded (or Stigma – Der Brandmal). This journal of a prostitute is easily assimilated into Emmy Hennings own life, but it is written as and conceived as a novel. The protagonist is, like Hennings, an actress and dancer, who is “guided” to prostitution by a man who provides her with the money to live. When we first meet her, she is on the verge of starvation – and nobody is going to feed her for free. Her use value at this point seems to be nill. The man who buys her food, however, sees a use and exchange value in her. And the narrator – without using the word prostitution – soon “has” money.

In a very brilliant bit (the book, written in the high style of the expressionists, is full of brilliant bits), the narrator has a sort of revery in which she becomes money – the coin or paper bill in her hand or pocket. And the money that she is, is everywhere, throughout the town. She is as available, as widespread, as common, as money.

“I would really like to know if money is the only visible sign of my “fallen state” (Verwarhlosung). Money in my pocket appears, to me at least, questionable. More and more suspicious. Money is disgrace, the most overt sign of scandal. I clean my money with a pocket tissue before I put it in harmless hands; thus, it is at least externally clean. The money is always false, but even so, it works capitally as exchange. There is no real (echtes) money, I tell myself. It would be only by chance that such a thing could be called real. What one exchanges is always something other. I can not, however, so subjectively make these value judgments. I have ordered a roll and a cup of coffee, and for this I put down my insane ten mark piece on the marble table. For this ten mark piece I will lay myself on the table, I will pay with myself Thus I lay a ringing gold coin on the table. And am I just this? Can one compare oneself with a gold piece? Me? Still I have something glimmering in me.”

To be identical to one’s pocket money – and at the same time, not to be identified with it, as it is purely exchangeable. Hennings’ prostitute experiences, due to her position, the impossible identity of the capitalist subject, who is what she earns. Prostitutes exist in the pores of the system – especially back in prewar Europe, half ancien regime, half industrial treadmill of production. In those pores, consumer culture is being transformed, and that transformation is the landscape of bars and restaurants and rent for the hour rooms, the places where eating, drinking and fucking is going on, the place of the transitory, where the narrator (we find that she is named Dagney, or at least uses that name, a third of the way into the book, when she records a conversation) is most at home, and most homeless. “I or the money? What a phantasmagoric, licenced swindle (Schwindel – also, vertigo).” Licenced, pantentierte – as in the licence to be a freelance prostitute.

In a sense, I read this book, or encounter it, with too much knowledge, since I know that this is a chapter not only from Dagny’s life, but Emmy Hennings. Though I might be clever enough to think that no piece of money is really authentic, I can be dull enough, as many a reviewer has been, to think that the woman who writes the journal in the novel is actually Hennings. Memoir, and not fiction. Hennings, however, was a writer with high talents, and if this journal is Dagney’s, I think we can assume that, at least for the author, Dagney’s life is not merely her shadow. Role-playing, who would know better? This is, in a sense, the way expressionist fiction often crossed the boundary between life and art, but not so that we can so directly privilege the former without losing a crucial nuance. The former only gains its value – its desperation is earned – only if it can be poured into the latter. Hamsun, Hennings contemporary, also put his adventures in Copenhagen in Hunger, yet that is read as a novel, and I think it is on that model that Hennings was working. The intensity of a life, the “glimmer” that is not in the gold piece, provides an illumination within the novel, which is a fictive in its gestures, its specifics, its self-reflection. Prison, another of Hennings novels, is bound up with Branded: the former novel also lifts a chapter, or chapters, from her real life. Hennings had short stays in prison, once for “stealing” – apparently, some client didn’t want to pay, so she took her pay and the client went to the police. She wrote Prison in 1918, and her partner, Hugo Ball, read it: “I now live as quietly as though in a cell. Your book, my dear, lies in my arms and legs. It entered my blood like a poison. I am a by no means contemptible public; it will have a wide effect.”

I don’t know if Grisélidis Réal, the Swiss prostitute and poet who militated for sex workers rights in the seventies, read Hennings Branded. And I’m almost sure that Colette, Hennings contemporary, never read her work, and may never have heard of her. All three, however, share an outlook, which is novelistically summoned by Christina Stead in her portrait of Henny Pollit, the wife and sworn enemy of Sam Pollit in The Man who loved Children: “the natural outlawry of womankind.” If law is founded in the will of the people, this outlawry is simply a fact: women have been denied full citizenship for millenia. Under the boot of the law, but never of the law. This chthonic postulate is hard to reconcile with feminism, with a feminism that has been so much about the law, within the law. It does inject a certain scepticism, not so much of nature but of history, into any feminist dogma. It is no accident that Hennings novels (Branded, Prison) are so concerned with the justice and the injustice of the law. And reflect her curious Catholic anarchism.

Hennings reflections on money might well have been influenced by reading Bakunin. Hugo Ball notes he was reading Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the idea of the state in 1915, when he and Hennings were starting the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

From Ball’s letter to a friend: ’Socialism, life with and in the people – at the moment Emmy Hennings and I are playing in a small suburban Variete. We have snake charmers, fire-eaters and ropewalker, everything one could wish for. One looks deeply into life here. One is poor, and yet very enriched.”

 

 

The imaginary Democratic Party

 I love the imaginary Democratic Party! The one against plutocracy, That is for hammering billionaires into millionaires via such things as a progressive capital gains tax. The one that is against corruption on the Supreme Court. The one acutely attuned to the problems of working class families, which begins, indeed,with the price of eggs and ends with the price of medical visits. The party against genocide! We should have a party like that.

But we don't. We have the party of Clinton. We have the party that dropped the A bomb, fought the Korean and Vietnam war, is aiding Israel as it commits genocide in Israel, and recently ran a presidential candidate who was closely advised by Lorene Powell Jobs, a billionaire.

Of course, the imaginary image of a party, a movement, an institution, a state is a sociological inevitability. We are, like all monkeys, creatures of fantasy.

But when imagination so interferes with real life that we develop problems in coping with real life, we have a neurosis.

Unfortunately, nobody has ever found a simple cure for neurosis.

Recognition, though, is a step forward.

2. The question is not what is good for the Democratic Party but what is good? And how do we get there?

I am generally lefitst by disposition. But I can imagine what it is like to be a Trumpist, or a Clinton liberal, etc.

In one party states (Texas, Kansas, Idaho, etc.) we've seen the liberal part of the population waste its time, for decades, hoping to put a Democrat in a Senate seat. We've seen, in Texas, the liberals waste their time trying to put a Democrat in the governorship. And we have seen the Dems nominate candidates that profess to be to the right of Manchin on the issues.

The controversial suggestion I would have is: in one party states, the game is in the party. Trump has done something to the GOP that is so far seemingly unrecognized. Republican women in Kansas, in Ohio, in Florida vote for abortion rights and for Trump, and the liberal commentariat, far from seeing that this opens up a space in the Republican party for the famous "moderate" candidate, come down on these women as racist pigs. Etc.

Now, it might well be that many of them are racist pigs. But they are racist pigs for abortion rights. In Texas, if the Trump standard of 15 weeks I believe it is was represented by some Republican in a Republican primary, it would be both a startling turnabout and a viable political ploy. The ploy would not be to elect a rightwing Democrat, but a 'populist" Republican. And in so doing, do something concrete to bring back abortion rights to Texas women.

Why, then, is the obvious not a political career path? It is because the imaginary and the real Democratic party are confused. There is no liberal Democratic party - save for a few reserved House seats - in Texas. There are Democratic mayors galore., however.

These mayors would do more if they became populist Republican mayors. They would have more power on the statewide playing field. That is a sad fact. But a happy fact is, the GOP can't, or rather won't, gerrymander against its own. If the state GOP did that, then the division between populist and far right GOP would become a politically interesting space for the Texas liberal.

Every once in a while, there is a sport of nature - a Democratic governor of Kansas, for instance. But you will notice these folks usually are center right. In NY, they would be mainstream Republicans.

This has been the state of play now for thirty years, yet the liberal activist in the South simply does not accept the party reality. It is as if the Democratic party - the party of Clinton, the party of Obama (who said, himself, that he was pursuing the politics of a liberal Republican), were a leftist org.

It isn't.

THE "MUSE" OF DADA

“I’m a woman. I’ve let go of the controls. The question about the „why“ and the „whence” .

I’m only confessing the “how”.

How was it?“

 - The brand

She lived, in the last year of her life, in a room above a gas station/grocery store, in Magliaso, Tessin, in Switzerland. It was 1948. Count the dead: Hugo. Eric. Else, Ernst’s wife. Kurt, in England. The gypsies, the bohos and drunks from Munich, the cabaret singers who supplemented their incomes with tricks on the side – like she did. Cities: Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden.

When she died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Hugo. There were some announcements in the Swiss papers. She was not utterly forgotten, ever. One paper commented that the price of her burial service was paid late: a collection was made among friends.

She was hewed out of the same raw sensitivity to the violence in half-capitalist/half ancien regime world that went into the great female characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, which she would have read in German translations in the Piper edition. Novels that were not “reflexions” of society, but much more suggestive, more intrusive than that: guides to excess, to marginality, to the polar opposite of bourgeois decency.  Dostoevsky was an event. Hamsun was an event. In Gide’s essay on Dostoevsky, he presents the credo:

I recently read an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux, who used a phrase that somewhat astonished me: : « First you have to try to know yourself,” he said. The interviewer must have not understood – Certainly a literatus who seeks himself [qui se cherche] runs a great risk: that of finding himself. After this, he will only write cold books, conforming to himself, all resolved. If he knows his lines, his limits, it is in order not to cross over them. He no longer has any fear of being insincere ; he is afraid of being inconsequent. The true artist remains half unconscious of himself, when he produces. He does not really know who he is. »

« He does not really know who he is”. The radical disjunction between who one is, from every social and political perspective, and who one is, from the subjective point of view, creates the space of a certain impossibility to settle on an identity. This space was populated by both artists and con artists, by cabaret singers and prostitutes, by pimps and poets, by agents and counter-agents, by revolutionaries and provacateurs. She was a familiar of this circle, which she found everywhere – even in Switzerland – in the 1910s and 20s. The underground, bohemia, the party, the cult, psychoanalysis or the avant-garde, these are names for overlapping domains.

The domains, of course, had a reach outside the circles in which she travelled. The Dostoevsky who discovered the Underground, for Gide, Hesse, Hugo Ball, etc., was at the same time the Dostoevsky who inspired the proto-Nazi antisemites that would latter fill the role of Nazi ideologues: Brasol, the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes of a Writer, would also translate and distribute Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the US, finding a patron in Henry Ford, and a receptive audience in Wilson’s State department and the Department of War.  

Alienation, like a hit of acid, is an unpredictable trip.

 In Der Brandmal, she wrote a novel that took its impetus from her own adventures; but her narrator was nevertheless a double, or perhaps the anima, of the narrator of Hamson’s Hunger, with the same mental obstruction lying in the path of any normal course of getting by, a certain refusal to shrink back from the brink of death – death by starvation. Hunger was a keynote. She was not born to bourgeois parents, professionals, she did not go to university, she did not recognize, even, the attraction of the stability of the bourgeois household. Her father, a sailor, was remade into a Sindbad or an Odysseus in her mind – but she was well aware that she was creating a symbol for her own use out of the old man.

Prison [Gefaengnis] and Der Brandmal are a set. The woman who is imprisoned in Prison, who is unjustly imprisoned, who is shaken by the experience so as to see everything in a new light, is connected to the woman who, in Munich, was ripped off by a client – and who consequently took from the client what they had agreed upon. It was for the latter – recompense for her, theft to the court – that she was imprisoned.

Of course, we can trace her in the texts of men, who often reveal their seedy sides in their notebooks, these exploitative fighters against exploitation. Eric Muehsam, for instance, an anarchist, who was later arrested after the Reichstag fire, and murdered “by an SS commando in the night of July 9-10, 1934” in the Oranienburg concentration camp, knew her and claimed she “seduced him” so that they had “coitus” when he was infected with gonnorhea. They were friends, they both worked freelance for Simpliccimus, and she probably charged him for the “coitus”.

Eric Muehsam: The poor girl gets way too little sleep. And since she is very willing, she never gets any rest.“  https://www.xn--mhsam-tagebuch-gsb.de/tb/diaries.php#h5_r190

 By this time she had a daughter. And she was living, as always, hand to mouth, even as she was building up a reputation as a cabaret singer and dancing. She was working at an artist’s bar, Kathi’s, until 3 in the morning, and taking painting classes. To be a cabaret singer you had to put in long hours: it wasn’t a matter of one song, it wasn’t Liza Minelli in Kabaret, it was work.

Later came Hugo, later came her entrance into history, opening the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The dances, the masks, the free-floating signifiers.

No Muse ever worked so hard.

ars poetica

 

The poem feels its erasures

As the old soldier feels his old wounds

Which make his dreams what they are.

 

And the household what it was

And the child the man

Who puts his raging alky Dad in the nursing home and done.

 

I am the eraser, I am the whiteout

In the nerveways I jump

And jack. Mostly jack.

 

“Similar tactics in other verticals”

A man once said to me

And then said, “all fixed. Should be right as rain.”

- Karen Chamisso

The fascitude ahead of us

We have the useful phrase virtue signaling to describe a certain hollow but scolding tone implying the speaker's woke state. We need a phrase for what Barnier is doing in France. We see it all the time - a politician almost literally begs the financial markets to help him out by raising interest rates or showing "chaos" in the market, etc. We have the phrase capital flight - which is short for taxing rich people and giving workers more benefits - but this an appeal to capital flight if the on display legislation - lowering taxes on the wealthy, tearing up the social insurance program, cutting medical and education expenditure, etc. - isn't voted through tout de suite. I suppose we could call it money signalling. Sometimes it works - in the UK, every step downhill has been accompanied by VSP saying this or that austerity measure must be put through or there won't be pudding. It always turns out that pudding is only for plutocrats. In any case, France still remembers that the social insurance system - retirement, health, education - was only put in place by violent struggle, and that memory remains in the street, though it is trampled under nightly by rightwing tv. Macron, drunk on non-power, laughed about Barnier's threats - France is a rich country, he said, which is so true that it vitiates his entire economic policy thus far.

So, the censure is happening today. Key question is: has Barnier kissed Le Pen's ass enough that the big Fascist will rescue her fine boy? The funny thing is that the RN is running on a leftward economic policy - keeping the social insurance network strong. Which shows that they actually know why they have been winning. The immigrant bigotry is one thing, but if their voters feel that the RN is taking away their healthcare and their retirement, they will go back to the Left.

The neolib consensus is breaking up in the fascitude that was always the next step. God help us.

Donne and the women

 

In 1980, Sarah Wintle, in the London Review of Books, wrote:  “Any close criticism of Donne’s poetry has, it seems inevitably, to be an account of oppositions in action.” The phrase sweeps up the critical dictum under which Donne has been read at least since Johnson’s phrase about the yoking together of opposites, and Eliots reflection on the  discordia concors.

There is a lot to be said for Donne’s attraction to opposites – black and white, East and West, constant and inconstant, etc. And one of the things to be said is that such opposites, resting on essence terms, are vulnerable to the inverting of those essences – an inversion that remains within the essentialist camp in order to create the paradoxes that Donne’s mind played with.  Donne’s paradoxes are never advances towards relativism, because he needed the essences to make sense of the paradoxes he could make out of them.

I am a great fan of Donne’s prose. Flannery O’Connor said she read Henry James to tone up her own prose; I use Donne, sometimes, for the same reason, although the sermons can become a bit too plummy as one wades through the intricate (and I often think bogus) philology and etymology to get to the redemptive point. Which, I think in the greatest of paradoxes, is also the generative point, redemption being another mask of creation.  Donne’s earlier prose, the Devotions, the Biathanatos, the paradoxes, are not meant as trials of hermeneutical weightlifting in the service of the King, but are to an extent ludic exercises – although of course the devotions and the Christian pamphlets have a more serious purpose. They are essays, but tend towards deforming or parodying the essayist’s usual intent. To my mind the Paradoxes, which were in vogue in the Renaissance, should be included in the pre-history of prose poetry: they are a poetry of pure opposition, of opposites as being, in that space between rhetoric and ideation,  themselves poetic tropes.

What you can do with such play, in early 17^th century England, is to make the essences approved of in common and scholastic life dance to it.

I would not defend the value of all the paradoxes, but, unlike Helen Peters, who condemns certain of the paradoxes – most notably the defence of the inconstancy of women – to the shadow realm of the Dubia, although the evidence for making the judgment that Donne didn’t write it seems pretty shallow to me. I just don’t think Helen Peters liked it.

Donne often took on the role of railer against women and as a railer, he permitted himself the rhetoric of extremism that Christianity as he conceived it permitted him. Yet, in Donne’s afterlife in the twentieth century, one notices that it is the company of women, academics and poets, that have not only gathered his works together with extraordinary scholarship, but who as well are the great arguers for his poetry. The last biography of Donne, by Katherine Rundell, is the heir of the work of Helen Gardner, Evelyn Simpson, and Helen Peters, among others. In particular, certain Catholic writers, such as Dorothy Sayers, have made a cult of Donne.

Perhaps it is the way in which Donne seems so dashing. To dash is to break out, to draw a line through, to thow away, and it is also, since the 18^th century, about making a brilliant show. Both means seem to mark Donne’s persona – and no matter how often, in a classroom, one is assured that the poem’s I is not identical with the biographical person, the mental superposition of one over the other happens, and happens as part of the poetic process. The moreso in Donne, who sent his poems privately, and never collected them himself.

The Defence of Woman’s Inconstancy is the longest of the paradoxes, and seems the most thought out, as a piece of prose. It launches itself with the same kind of gymnastic tonguework as many of the love poems:

“For every thing as it is one better than another, ſo is it fuller of change; The Heavens themſelves continually turne, the Starres move, the Moone changeth; Fire whirleth, Ayre flyeth, Water ebbs and flowes, the face of the Earth altereth her lookes, time ſtayes not; the Colour that is moſt light, will take moſt dyes: so in Men, they that have the moſt reaſon are the moſt alterable in their deſignes, and the darkeſt or moſt ignorant, do ſeldomeſt change; therefore Women changing more than Men, have alſo more Reaſon. They cannot be immutable like ſtockes, like ſtones, like the Earths dull Center; Gold that lyeth ſtill, ruſteth; Water, corrupteth; Aire that moveth not, poyſoneth; then why should that which is the perfection of other things, be imputed to Women as greateſt imperfection?”

The brilliance of this requires a convention that still dominates the discussion of gender: a type, which is woman, and a type, which is man, pieces upon a chessboard. The token never runs away with the type, never ruins it. Rather, in this game, we only drive to logical paradox the attributes of the type. But what a glorious length of the universe is trailed behind the attributes of the type – the air, the stars, water, color, the inventory of the world. As in Donne’s poetry, where love becomes not just a matter of the attraction of the poet to the woman he loves, but rather a microcosm of the macrocosm, a proof and reflection of the largest order, the All. Even if Donne’s poet casts an evil eye, a certain violence:

But O, self traitor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all

And can convert manna to gall;

Transubstantiation is a powerful word in this place – and the spider love that inhabits the speaker has an anti-Christ’s cast. The spider, the flea, worms, all the little and somewhat disgusting beasts are always at Donne’s beck and call, which is part of the dash of the poetry and the poetic persona. Here there is no sparing of the excremental side of life, blood and piss and shit. In the 1920s, when Donne became faddish, there was a larger sense of the excremental side of life among the cultivated – who’d splashed through four years of it at the front.

One of the great things about Donne is that he has never been wholly accepted as canonical. The excremental life, the imbalance as it might be seen by those who require balance to block out crouched man, taking a dump – that is the other side of the dashing persona. In this respect, Donne could be considered in the terms Orwell uses about Ulysses:

“The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared – for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique – to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose.” The “America” under everybody’s nose – one feels a link to Donne’s numerous uses of America to speak of bodies, discoveries, intimate space. Most famously in his account of getting naked with his lover:

 

O my America, my new-found-land,

 

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

 

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

 

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

james joyce, Mr. Claud Sykes, and dissimulation

 

Mr. Claud Sykes wanders into James Joyce’s life, according to Richard Elman, in 1917 in Zurich, when he applied for a role in a movie that Joyce was supposedly making with a crook named Jules Martin. Martin’s idea was to set up a movie company, borrow money for expenses and such, and in some vague manner abscond with the cash.

Mr. Claud Sykes remained in Joyce’s life as a friend, and the typist of Ulysses, for some time.

Ellmann interviewed Sykes in the fifties. He conveys what Sykes told him. He doesn’t doubt the story that Sykes and his actress wife had somehow, in the midst of WWI, washed up in Zuric. In a bit of luck for Joyce, were hard up enough to do typing for the miserable fees he was able to pay them.

And it may well have unfolded like this.

Yet, there is another side to Claud Sykes.

Alan Burton of Brunel University has written an interesting essay on the anti-communist thrillers of the thirties, and narrows the scope to the anonymous writer, Vigilant, who wrote a number of such thrillers as well as the non-fiction book, Secrets of Modern Spying. According to book publishing records, Vigiland was  Claud Sykes. And Claud Sykes seems to have known, from experience, a few of the secrets of modern spying. For what other reason could he, really, have been in Zurich in 1917?

“An obvious suggestion is that, as an accomplished German speaker, he was in some way serving British Intelligence, perhaps one his roles being to keep an eye on the wayward Irishman Joyce who was suspect in some quarters. One is immediately put in mind of the writer Somerset Maugham who had been recruited to the wartime British Secret Service and based around French-speaking Lake Geneva only 280km distant. It could be that Sykes was yet another of those British writers of spy fiction who had served in intelligence. Maugham, of course, was a celebrated case in point, publishing the classic Ashenden in 1928, a set of stories based on his espionage activities in neutral Switzerland.”

The Sykes who was given 10 francs here and ten francs there to type chapters in Ulysses is the same Sykes who, apparently, was the son of a fairly well to do father and the grandchild of a millionaire. Peter Fishback, whose interests are in the Royal Irish Fusiliers and in James Joyce (an interesting overlap!) has written a much denser post about British intelligence in Switzerland during WWI and Sykes profile. He includes the review of Sykes Secrets of Modern Spying that appeared, in 1930, in the Illustrated London News, which featured this bit:

“In a chapter entitled "Humours of Spying," "Vigilant" shows that even Intelligence has its lighter side. One of the stories, which tells how the Germans continued to send money to a spy after he had been shot, money which English counter-spies used to buy a motor-car (they called it by the dead man's name), is a very grim joke. But nothing could be more diverting than the fate of the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce's novel, “Ulysses." This masterpiece of modern fiction was sent to the Censor, who thought it so obscure and baffling be could not believe it was a novel and despatched it to Room 40, the department in Scotland Yard where codes are deciphered. After much fruitless study, in which their best decoders failed to elicit the book's meaning, the officials decided that perhaps it was a novel after all. A man of letters was summoned, who pronounced that it "bore some faint resemblance to literature." Thus vouched for, the manuscript was set free.”

Joyce, like any writer, was always on the lookout, one might even say vigilant, for any mention of himself in the press. So he might have read this. Joyce and his wife, Fishback sez, visited Sykes and his wife in 1929. He had already received a copy of Sykes’ first “mystery”, The Nine Pointed Star – so I imagine that Secrets of Modern Spying came his way.  It must have given him some ideas – especially as there is no accounting for how the chapters of Ulysses were rerouted to the British intelligence boys in “Room 40”. As well, of course, was information about the burglaring of the Austrian consulate in Zurich. Joyce no doubt knew this consulate, from having been in contact with Austrian officials when he was in Trieste. Stories of burglary and misrouted letters certainly floated into  Finnegans Wake.

Joyce scholars have used Sykes mainly as the source of Joyce’s knowledge of the theory that Shakespeare was really the Duke of Rutland – a theory Sykes got from a book by a German named Bleibtreu, which Sykes loaned to Joyce and Joyce, in a moment of grace, gave back. Ah, loaning – a word that hangs around Joyce, a man who was continually waiting for funds and continually in need of a loan. The theory about Shakespeare ends up in Ulysses, in the section where Stephen Dedalus, a much loaned to man himself,  spins out his theory of Hamlet.

As well, Sykes and Joyce put on Oscar Wilde’s play,  The Importance of Being Earnest. Both the Shakespeare story and the Earnest story are about people who are not who they claim to be – who dissimulate. And of course Oscar Wilde was a famous and tragic dissimulator in his own life. In Syke’s case, as a British agent soaking up information for his higher ups, he really was not who he claimed to be, or at least he claimed to be not all of what he was, doubling merrily between typing on a French typewriter an Irishman’s English to reporting on any suspect Germanness among the bohemians in Zurich, one supposes. Joyce would be a suspect type in many ways, since he made up songs mocking the war and claimed himself to be a pacifist, or at least against blowing holes in the bodies of strangers with rifles and such. If Joyce read Secrets of Modern Spying in 1929 or 1930, surely this must have struck him with a certain suggestiveness.

In Joyce, suggestiveness was sucked into the great work, sooner or later. Notes were taken, conversations overheard, information gets shifted and refracted among voices that are sometimes in the ambilocative, the neither here nor there, and that are sometimes the voice of public or pubic opinion in the great scenes in FW.   

Mr. Sykes is in there somewhere.

2.

 

Joyce  loved the mix of high and low, of Thomas Acquinas and Paul de Kock. I imagine, I fantasize that Joyce, reading Sykes on counterspies, on invisible inks (and their failures) and rerouted letters, might have thought about the whole rich Catholic literature on dissimulation. That literature which touches on casuistry, on the black legend of the Jesuits. Wasn’t Stephan Dedalus called a Jesuit by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses? The subtle mind, subverting certainty, exploiting ambiguity for the sack of the good, or the church, or Art.

In the Ways of Lying: dissimulation, persecution and conformity in Early Modern Europe, Perez Zagorin traces a certain scar in Catholicism, a certain opposition, a blind argument, back to Augustine and Jerome.

In particular, their controversy circled around a passage in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, 2:11-14. In this passage, Paul explains why he rebuked Peter in Antioch. Peter, who had ceased to observe the dietary laws, pretended, in the company of Jewish Christians in Antioch, to have remained an observer. He withdrew from the Gentiles, he dissembled – or so Paul claimed: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?”

Jerome had a rather extraordinary interpretation of this passage: he took it as an instance of Paul’s own dissimulation.  “According to Jerome, Paul’s rebuke to Peter was merely feigned, having been pre-arranged between two apostles for the benefit of both Catholic and Jewish converts.”

The theatricality of this episode, the conspiracy of it. Christianity here becomes strategy, and strategy becomes sacred. Jerome supports his interpretation by pointing to instances in the Acts where Paul also asked Gentiles to live as Jews – asking a convert to be circumcised, for instance.

Augustine, reading Jerome, couldn’t believe his eyes. He not only wrote to Jerome, asking him if he was serious, but he published his own interpretation. Jerome, that translator, was not a systematic thinker, or at least not on Augustine’s level. Augustine wrote that it was extremely dangerous “to admit that anything in the sacred books should be a lie… If once we admit in that supreme authority even one helpful lie, nothing will be left of these books.

Jerome is not known for being a liberal thinker. He was very rigid, so to speak, on the subject of female virginity. But here, here, perhaps he did think as a translator.  He, after all, translated the Bible into Latin. From the translator’s point of view, dissimulation could be much like translation. The language of the original text is, as it were, hidden under the language of the translated text. The translation is a sort of lie, a dissimulation, a silent ascent to what it does not say.

Translation as a sort of invisible ink.

Now, I have no proof that Joyce ever made these connections. Yet in the Shem the Penman sections of Finnegans Wake, there is surely some attraction to pennings and inks and dissimulations going on, some eavesdropping and counterspying. In Sykeness and in health, by the hand that holds the crayon.

Ah, dissimulation – I must write about this again.