Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment: Joyce and the Cult of the Absolutely Fabulous

Abstract

Max Weber writes in 1918, returning to a phrase of Friedrich Schiller's which was to be an emblematic leitmotif for him, that The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by 'disenchantment of world.' Precisely ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into transcendental realm of mystic life or into brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental. Nor is it accidental that today only within smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, something is pulsating that corresponds to prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through great communities like a firebrand, welding them together (155). Again and again, Weber himself characterizes modem by recourse to its disenchantment, a process he glosses richly but disconcertingly across body of his work. Enchantment is bound up in magic, a concrete magic which provided of primitive image of world. In a now more and more denuded of its irrationality, primordial unity of image has split off into cognition and mastery of nature, on one hand, and into 'mystic' experiences on other, in a robbed of gods, as Weber has it (148). A moment's reflection on claim that art under such circumstances, that is, art of modern times, is only intimate and never monumental, is belied by work of James Joyce, among others. All cultural forms are in crisis, according to Weber, because culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection, and tension between rationality and irrationality intensifies the more external organization of is organized, and more conscious experience of world's irrational content is sublimated. And not only theoretical thought, disenchanting world, led to this course, but also very attempt of religious ethics practically and ethically to rationalize world (Weber 147). So intense does divide become that it is virtually impossible to imitate life of Buddha or Jesus, for example, under the technical and social conditions of rational life. Under such conditions magic, enchantment, irrational, sublime, and salvific go under cover, become intime and purely personal, miniature, and imperfect. A countereffect to this dwindling pianissimo, though, is truly monumentalized locus of imperfection which is Joyce's life work, particularly text we know as Ulysses. It intrigues me that Joyce's massive text is being produced just at moment Weber predicts shrinkage of modern art and its artifacts, unable to sustain any monumentality in his view because disenchantment is so