Márcia Lemos ‘An agony of perceivedness’? Gazes and Disguises in the Works of James Joyce and Cindy Sherman

James Joyce’s texts and Cindy Sherman’s photos have much in common. His work creates ‘endlessly inartistic portraits of himself,’1 constantly interrogating the boundaries between personal and collective history; her work ‘creates surrogates,’2 progressively appropriating images from our collective past. If Joyce’s texts developed into more voluminous and cumulative narratives, with the publication of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Sherman’s photos became increasingly larger, culminating in her 1985 life-size prints. This essay represents, therefore, an attempt to promote a dialogue between literature and photography through a dialogue between two of their most influential agents: James Joyce and Cindy Sherman. I will focus mainly on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and on a selection of Sherman’s photos in order to discuss the construction (and the deconstruction) of masks in both works. I will also consider the perceptions of readers and viewers when confronted with these masks.

Let photography be ‘literary’. Clement Greenberg

[T]he ungainly musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsounder […]. Finnegans Wake

Articulating a discussion on literature with a discussion on photography is never easy, but it is even harder to associate such a huge representative of Modernism, as James Joyce, with a clear representative of Postmodernism, as Cindy Sherman. To the obvious differences of medium, one has to equally add differences in form, in context, and in content.3 In this essay I will hold the view that there is much in common between Cindy Sherman’s ‘staged’ photos4 and James Joyce’s texts, particularly Finnegans Wake,5 to which I shall pay special attention. Indeed, despite being the work of one of the highest exponents of Modernism, Finnegans Wake is

1 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin Classics, 2000 [1939]), p. 182. 2 Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography Since 1974 (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1999), p. 9. 3 On the intersections between photography and literature in the twentieth century, see David Cunningham and others, eds., Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 2-9. 4 Andrew Fisher, ‘Anti-Modernism and Narrativity in the Work of Allan Sekula’, in Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century, ed. by David Cunningham and others (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 160-179 (p.161). 5 Henceforth FW. 350 Márcia Lemos arguably closer to postmodern fiction than to modernist texts. An analysis of Ihab Hassan’s schematic proposal (extensively discussed by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990) will, hopefully, provide evidence to validate my point of view. Hassan’s proposal is basically a twofold list of characteristics that aims at gathering and systematising the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism. It only takes a quick reading to conclude that if one had to define Finnegans Wake according to the items placed on each side, one would certainly have to choose numerous characteristics from the postmodern column: ‘antiform (disjunctive, open)’; ‘play’, ‘chance’, ‘process’; ‘dispersal’, ‘text/intertext’; ‘idiolect’; ‘polymorphous/ androgynous’; ‘schizophrenia’; ‘irony’; ‘indeterminacy’, to name just a few.6 In his own attempt to define Postmodernism, Harvey quotes Eagleton:

There is, perhaps, a degree of consensus that the typical post-modernist artifact is playful, self-ironizing and even schizoid; and that it reacts to the austere autonomy of high modernism by impudently embracing the language of commerce. Its stance towards cultural tradition is one of irreverent pastiche, and its contrived depthlessness undermines all metaphysical solemnities, sometimes by a brutal aesthetics of squalor and shock.7

He then concludes that ‘fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or “totalizing” discourses (to use the favoured phrase) are the hallmark of postmodernist thought’.8 In Finnegans Wake, Joyce (a native of a country colonised by the British) clearly seeks to expose and undermine all forms of ‘totalising’ and totalitarian power, namely of linguistic oppressive power, by creating his own linguistic ‘chaosmos’.9 In Joyce’s last work, words provide a unique, but constantly changeable, shape to chaos; a chaos that, thereby, becomes a cosmos of a sort. The prevalence of this chaotic cosmos that, though apparently disordered, still constitutes a cosmos (as implied by the collision of the two words), proves, moreover, that Finnegans Wake should not be read as a hopeless nihilistic book. On the contrary, the Wake should be understood as a gigantic linguistic construction site, where the work of (re)building language is never done, and the workers are indefatigable, dutiful, joyful words, recruited by Joyce from all corners of language. These words are obscure at times for they are endlessly mutable, metamorphic, and

6 Ihab Hassan, ‘The Culture of Postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 2 (3) (Fall 1985) 119-132 (pp.123-124). 7 Eagleton apud David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Social Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 7. 8 Harvey, p. 9. 9 FW, p. 118.