Between extremities man runs his course… Yeats, “Vacillation”
I wrote this book as my PhD thesis during the final five years of the 20th century. I sat beside a stack of fat old books in the Lecky Library every day. I could have lived this life forever.
When I was finished, I defended my thesis to Declan Kiberd and Terence Brown. Declan advised me to publish my work, and suggested I try Cambridge University Press. I submitted the book to Cambridge twice, and each time they suggested revisions. I had given up on securing academic employment by this time, and decided to move to China. A comrade of mine, Greg Lansbury, had his doctoral thesis on Raymond Carver published by Routledge, and so I contacted them and they agreed to publish my book.
By the time the book was released, I was settled in China. I saw the book now as something that had stolen away the youth of my intellect, and I renounced it. When I received the author’s copies, I gave them away to Mongolian ladies from Maggie’s bar.
The rewrites had made the book into something other than I wanted it to be, into something of which I was ashamed. There was too much historical contextualisation. The socio-historical research was superfluous, a mere listing of facts, which was not what I was getting at. I was concerned instead with the phenomenological nature of reality. Still, there are things in the book that I stand by. The best of it is speculation on the universal nature of the topic.
I was awakened to dialectics in Kobrinsky’s lectures on the Kwakiutl Midwinter Festival at the University of Calgary. His description of the Cannibal ritual at the deepest point of solstice blew my mind. The tribe danced, becoming their totem animals amidst drumbeats and flickering fire. The son of the chief was released. In his vision quest he had become the Cannibal Monster. He rushed into the dancers, biting crow, badger, elk and bear. To distract him, they threw the bodies of his most recently deceased next of kin before him, and he ate of these until he vomited. He was taken away, and the vomit was collected in a sacred bowl.
This was the holy of holies, the spark of life, the end of winter. As winter had deepened the cannibal world consumed itself. Days grew shorter, animals more scarce. The ritual was intended to act as a tuning fork to the universe, through the principles of voodoo magic. Through creating an image of the universe, they hoped that the verity of their image would enable them to influence the universe. The snake was swallowing itself, and at the click of paradox, the tragic moment, the interchange of the tinctures, they inserted a solution. Winter would end, and summer begin. As the world warmed the maggots in the sacred bowl became flies, and birds ate these, and shat on the soil, and were eaten and shat out in turn, spreading fresh life from death.
As I scratched my head, Kobrinsksy continued to explain that this ritual was an expression of the Yin Yang, showing that each thing contains its opposite. There was all of Derrida. I had been engrossed in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and the binaries of the Apollonian tendency to calm reason and self differentiation on the one hand, and Dionysian rapture, instinct and dissolution of self on the other. More to the point was the dialectical movement of the Tragic Moment, when the Apollonian self dissolves in the Dionysian sea.
Everywhere I looked, I found this polarity between self and loss of self, recuperation and abandonment, and every essay I wrote for my undergraduate degree drew attention to the way in which the tension and interplay between these tendencies was hidden in the type of literature that spoke to me.
When I began my postgraduate studies in Dublin, I discovered Yeats’ dialectical system in A Vision. Again, differentiation and in-differentiation drawn as two extremes between which man was stretched. In the interchange of the tinctures I saw the Tragic Moment and the climax of the Kwakiutl Cannibal Ritual. Pure dialectics: the Primary produces an Antithesis, and when these tendencies collapse into one another they produce a new Thesis, which in turn produces its Antithesis, and so on, round and round.
I sketched out reconciliations of the Yeatsian gyres and the yin yang.
I needed to see if these antimonies, and their continual collapse into one another, were purely formal, or if it in any way touched on life. I sought the poles of this reductionist portrayal of universal tendencies disguised in the mundanity of our actions, hopes and fears. Was this dialectic system only applicable to great historical movements, or was it implicit in the nature of mind?
Where better to explore the phenomenological mundanity of every day life than in Joyce? I began to examine the cuckolding drama that is central to the Joycean ouvre. I delved into Freud, but he could only take me so far. Then, I discovered these dualities again in the post-Freudian writing of Deleuze and Guattari, and I used this as a critical foundation for my analysis of the cuckolding in Joyce.
The argument that I extrapolated from Anti-Oedpus was premised upon the assumption that all energies are sexual, and dualistic in nature. The antimonies here were paranoiac and schizophrenic identifications. In paranoia, Oedipal fear leads the subject to make an initial identification with the father. The father is scary, so he becomes scary as well. This develops into a majoritarian identification with a master race. Inherent to this psychic structure, is a sadistic, colonial energy. At the other pole of this duality is the schizophrenic identification which is associated with an absence of the father, and idealisation of the mother. This schizophrenia is embodied in a shape shifting sexuality that traverses a trajectory of diminishing minoritarian becomings. (Think MAGA and identity politics.)
From this dialectical vantage, I analysed the psycho imaginative complex of the Perverse Ideal as it was manifest in Joyce’s writings. I will not describe again the impossible dialectic in which this Ideal is caught up. Herman Hesse describes the Perverse ideal as follows:
And she told me about a youth who had fallen in love with a star. He stood by the sea, stretched out his arms and prayed to the star, dreamed of it, made it the object of all his thoughts. But he knew, or thought he knew, that a star could not be embraced by a mortal being. He considered it his fate to love a star without any hope of fulfilment, and on this conception he founded a poetic philosophy of renunciation, torment and silent suffering that would refine and cleanse him. Demian, p.121.
Again and again I saw the Yin Yang floating in front of me. I understood that reality was expressed in the rhythm of this dialectic system, but I could never pin down the nature of these forces. Of what did these psychological climates consist, and how did they integrate with life? Was it male and female, hard and soft, consolidation of self and loss of self, recuperation and abandonment, the scholar and the drunkard? Whenever I sat near paper and pen, dualistic columns, left and right, began to propagate in front of me. All tricks of mind.
And so there I had it, a book that raised more questions than it answered, and that made me uniquely unsuited to academic employment. It was with grim relish that I handed the copies Routledge had provided me to the three Mongolian ladies from Maggie’s Bar. I did not think about this book again until now. It is only now that I feel I understand what I was writing about. The Universal Consciousness is the screen onto which the delusory shadowplay of mind is projected as dialectics. To escape the torments of this delusion we must learn to escape or destroy the mind.