From Dowel to Tesseract: Joyce and De Stijl from “Cyclops” to Finnegans Wake

Abstract

Joyce and artists of De Stijl movement share problem of construction that comes with their dismantling of traditional form. They engage with this problem at time of massive, reconfiguration. The Cyclops episode was composed, Michael Groden observes in recent essay, between June and October of 1919, while Zurich, like much of Europe, was settling into return to peace and adjusting to political and national realignments that followed end of World War.1 We might connect this observation with Groden's earlier claim, in Ulysses in Progress, that Cyclops plays pivotal role in Ulysses. Groden shows that episode forms transition from first eleven interior-monologue episodes to final seven that dispense entirely with 'initial style'.2 The episode is thus crucial juncture in composition of Ulysses, as it moves from subject-centred narration to vigorous, depersonalised formal and stylistic innovation. If, as Luca Crispi observes, text block is a basic and fundamental aspect of Joyce's compositional method throughout his career,3 Cyclops is first episode in which Joyce displays text block as separate element, ostentatiously refraining from integrating it into continuous text. As Cyclops responds to challenges of new political context, its new joins different discursive reservoirs belonging to different communities. To do this, Joyce employs new mode of assemblage. The explicitly political De Stijl aesthetic can afford us politically engaged set of conceptual and formal terms with which to think about nature and significance of episode's conjunctions.Just after Armistice in November 1918, in another neutral, outlying, European country, first De Stijl manifesto was published in concerted defiance of tensions and of individually defined agendas. In Dutch, French, German, and English, it was signed by Theo van Doesburg, Robert van 't Hoff, Vilmos Huszar, Antony Kok, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, and Jan Wils. The manifesto proclaimed De Stijl's agenda of dispensing with old hierarchies in hope of surmounting divisions and achieving an all-embracing accord. Itself an exercise in welding together highly contrasting views of group of artists, it called for forging of new unity in every area:1. There is an old and new consciousness of age. The old one is directed towards individual. The new one is directed towards universal. The struggle of individual against universal may be seen both in world war and in modern art.2. The war is destroying old world with its content: individual predominance in every field.4The manifesto associates war with modern art, seeing them both as countering individuality with new universality, an international unity in life, art and culture. In their aesthetic programme, as well as their designs, artists of De Stijl group refuse predefined, determinate in order to oppose conventional understandings of nation, family, and individual. A conception that spans from left-wing politics of Van't Hoff and Wils to Hegelian-inspired philosophy of Mondrian,5 this new universal consciousness is free of personal concerns and embodied by new spatial continuity. The manifesto summons artists, architects, and designers to give both social and aesthetic expression to this new universality: the founders of new culture call upon all who believe in reform of art and culture to destroy these obstacles [tradition, dogmas and predomination of individual] to development, just as in plastic arts - by doing away with - they have eliminated that which stood in way of pure artistic expression, logical conclusion of every artistic concept.6 The De Stijl artists thus proclaim an art that is allied with social and political change, and rejection of natural form that is coterminous with restructuring of society. …