April 26, 2025
I've been having a bit too much fun writing in a style inspired by Joyce's Ulysses (and Faulkner, in a derivative sense). Modern, post-modern--more reflection is needed to refine my literary anchoring. Most of all, I've been having fun. I've always loved reading in this style (starting with Faulkner and, more recently, Joyce) but don't think I've ever pointedly applied force to try to emulate the style. I think now of Tobias Woolf's Old School. At one point, the main character sits in front of his typewriter and transcribes a story by Hemingway verbatim just to feel greatness--but, anyway, it's a nuanced recollection hazed by memory.
The writing here is a reflection response for my class on modern literature. I like how a reader could tell where depart from my own vision, steering and adhering my voice to the prompt (and pretending to respond to it). Though it reads plainly, my inspirations were Joyce's Ulysses, invocations from The Iliad and The Odyssey, Ritsos' The Fourth Dimension, and Breton's Mad Love. With the risk of enumerating too much, I'll leave it there. While I do not ascend to Joyce's genius, I lay down this work in homage of such powerful authorship.
(Caught between the bipoles of determinacy–a completed midterm essay, an incomplete final essay. Launched into a frenzy of recollection, to synthesize the strands of past and present into a coherent scroll. Courtyard. Grass and flowers, planted overnight, catch the sun’s luminescence and project this newly infused incandescence upon the grouped souls, settled repose. Disparate voices coalesce into the background of the courtyard’s singularity.)
THE VOICES:
Sing, O goddess, tell me, Muse, of his journeys far and wide, the then and the now, his heroic search to apprehend the modern. The people he met, the lessons he learned.
(Time dilates in accordance to the two poles. Divaricated vision reveals time as a composite then and now. A chain of voices circumscribe him, imprisoned in the present.)
THEN:
Communion between hand and pen. A pursuit of a harmonious coordination of the senses fraught with rigid determinacy. To become “now”, must become larger. More expressive, expansive.
NOW:
We poke and prod and probe the limits of penmanship as to ascertain its boundaries in a fine delineation of determinacy and then direct a steady applied force in the direction of these newly discovered limitations as to expand and improve the diameter of his talent. Looking back at then–only we can–we see the makings of passions that have not yet bloomed into experience. We embody that transformation, the then into now, the accumulation of experience, flowering skill.
(From the muse they divine and from the sun I. The limitations of form, the author’s steadying hand.)
So what was he then?
The single most transformative class for his academic writing was the seminar–take an individual in all of his nascency and strongly impart a schema by which to write formally. He learned to synthesize sources and develop a framework for thinking about writing in all of its rigidity. Later classes allowed him to more freely explore the style and form of his writing, in accordance more or less to that prescribed framework. Taking Modern Fiction can thus be seen as a continuation rather than a qualitative departure–to continue to expand his breadth and develop rhythm and intonation.
And what is he now?
When determination is ratified and the fruit by which the pursuit is to yield is agreed upon, is it better to exceed this agreement or stay within its bounds entirely? The intention: to become more comfortable with writing, to increase the breadth of his repertoire. He did not seek to elicit a qualitative change in writing (were sights set too low? were they appropriate just?). A failure or a success? A failure, and a success. A success (three steps forward), a failure (one step backward). So a success. But one step backward. A failure? No.
And by which medium did he extract the most benefit?
An environment free from scrutiny, sheltered from the expectations of rigidity. The discussion posts were an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the novels resonated with him in ways that yielded to his own whims of expression. It is through this medium that the greatest reward was attained–the freedom of expression engendering a generative quality acquiesced by him, to be used by him in all facets of writing.
As the sun sets behind the walls of this great artifice, the receding sunlight reveals that it was one large shadow, concealing a stage. Just when the author’s hand steadies into a calm assurance, the assignment’s framework, in all of its celestial vapidity, issues its current call. The duration felt short (how can 12 weeks be anything but?) but pointed, rewarding. In every essay I write, or idea I develop and imbue with a physical form, I like to think I become a better writer. I appreciate the novels from which I first generated my ideas, my peers with whom I urged these nascent musings further, and the teaching staff who imparted onto my own naivety (as inexperience becomes experience) direction and advice. As I was thrusted into the realm of the modern, I had high hopes; as the curtain begins to close, I’m happy to have realized these desires, eager to continue forth and develop more.