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Posted to rec.arts.books (etc) 11 Apr 1998
This is the third and possibly last of a short series. It's also the most difficult, requiring the most AI-thinking from the lit side, and the most literary thinking from the AI side.
Briefly:
- At the heart of AI there's an intractable Gordian knot, involving the categories of human psychology
- Resolving this knot will require precisely differentiating all these categories
- This differentiation will depend on identifying which psychological categories supply the deepest archetypes
- James Joyce was clearly wrestling with this problem in Finnegans Wake
- At the center of his solution are the archetypal twins Shem (the
sinister experimenter) and Shaun (the virtuous conformist)
I explore the history of psychological category-systems in my AI FAQ. Roget's great-chain-of-being approach, for example, failed especially because it failed to recognize that each level in that chain is a metaphorical mirror for the levels above and below it. Library classification schemes are a complete disaster at psychology. Doug Lenat's Cyc project has explicitly 'punted' the whole question.
One of the few simple schemes that was evolved 'from the bottom up' is George Polti's 36 dramatic situations, an inventory of literary themes. I've reclassified his categories in terms of my own fractal-thicket approach:
person thing: Obtaining person motive: Victim of misfortune, Disaster, Ambition person motive motive: Self-sacrifice for an ideal person motive modality: Daring enterprise, Remorse person modality: Enigma, Madness, Fatal imprudence, Faulty judgment person person: Revolt, Familial hatred, Family rivalry, Conflict with a god, Loss of loved ones person person place: Recovery of a lost one person person place place: Pursuit, Abduction person person motive: Supplication, Victim of cruelty, Rivalry between superior and inferior, Crimes of love, Deliverance person person modality: Kinsman kills unrecognized kinsman, Obstacles to love, Mistaken jealousy person person motive motive: Revenge, All sacrifice for passion, Sacrifice of loved ones, An enemy loved, Self sacrifice for kindred person person motive modality: Involuntary crimes of love, Discovery of dishonor of a loved one person person person: Adultery, Murderous adultery person person person person motive motive: Vengeance by family upon family
While this list surely omits some major themes, all the themes it offers are inarguably important, so it does offer a startingpoint... probably the most precise snapshot available of AI's Gordian knot. But where to go from here seems an almost hopelessly insuperable challenge...
James Joyce's literary journey began, to a great extent, when in 1904 at the very young age of 22 he began to write a wrenchingly honest and detailed autobiography called "Stephen Hero". After 1000 pages covering his first 18 years, he took a break, grew dissatisfied, and rewrote it entirely as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", condensing it by a very deliberate policy of identifying the central themes, and seeking out the fewest possible incidents that managed to embody all those themes.
So we find Stephen Dedalus lisping out a poem on the very first page of Portrait, and thruout the book this 'motif' of performance is returned to again and again, as Stephen's psyche matures and uncovers new approaches.
With "Ulysses" Joyce seems to have built on the same system of motifs, but instead of following them thru one character's development, he now tries to universalise them as a psychological inventory of a single, ordinary man's single ordinary day... using episodes of Homer's Odyssey as a substructure!
Very little Joyce criticism has been devoted to differentiating those 18 psychological categories underlying Ulysses' 18 chapters, so it's hardly surprising that Joyceans have largely thrown up their hands in bafflement at his next project, "Finnegans Wake".
He stated in advance that this work would be a history of the world, but the first sketches he wrote are entirely unexpected in their themes: a fallen king, a flirting couple, an isolated saint, and a druid's description of a king.
Moreover, these first characters seem to play very minor roles in the final version of FW, which most prominently features an everyman called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle Earwicker, their twin sons Shem and Shaun, and their daughter Isobel.
My contention is this:
If we can figure out how Joyce made the jump from those early sketches to those final characters-- a jump that happened in the last months of 1923 and the first months of 1924-- we'll understand which dramatic themes he'd identified as the most deeply archetypal, and how he elaborated these to include all of history and psychology.
In a sense, I think Joyce was merging all 36 of Polti's plots-- and many, many others-- into a single storyline that traces the life of a universal hero/everyman, centered on his achieving the role of king, and then losing it thru a fall.
This throws a major curveball into the standard ways AI has been accustomed to indexing large sets of items into a single structure-- unifying them as a story seems highly unscientific!
But given that Polti's units are themselves tiny abstract stories, there's a promising logic to this approach.
For example, at the root you might have "hero falls and then rises again" which ramifies at the next level into "hero rises by virtuous conformity" and "hero rises by sinister experiment"...
So we might re-envision Joyce's career as the systematic pursuit of which story-plots are deeper than which, brought to consummation with the first drafts of FW.
I've placed on the net several megabytes of close-reading of these early sketches, covering Joyce's first year of work. But I feel stuck at this point... and I suspect that the key to my difficulties lies in identifying exactly how Joyce distinguished Shem and Shaun!
Though they wouldn't be named with these names for a few more months, it seems probably that the isolated saint would form the basis of Shaun... but the flirting male also seems a precursor. I find considerable evidence that the fallen-king sketch was written to mirror the isolated saint, so he may very well be an early Shem... but he's also clearly an early HCE. (In FW's cyclical river, though, it's not too much of a paradox that he could be his own father!)
How these roles fit with the druid story is the biggest puzzle of all. Joyce called it a 'defence and indictment of the book itself', and wrote it in the most obscure language of anything in the early drafts.
But I rather feel that the solution will come, not from more study of the notebooks and drafts, but from more reflection on the Shem-principle and the Shaun-principle as embodied in my own life.
Joyce had freed himself at a very early age from the pressures of social conformity, and this seems to have been the key to his creative genius. The Shauns of the world (and of the Wake) are duller than the Shems, but they seem to have a greater worldly success during their lifetimes. Shaun in the Wake is a postman, an operatic tenor, a priest, and in some ways a ladies' man, but also something of a repressed and repressive moralist and hypocrite.
Shem is a coward, a pervert, a slob, and a bum, but also a supreme artistic genius...
And somewhere in this heap of conflicting dualities, I think there must be a central duality that Joyce chose as the defining one... and it should probably be embodied as such in the druid sketch.
But I'm afraid I'm not yet deep enough, personally, to see it...
(Another aspect of the duality is surely emphasized by Joyce as a 'decision' motif, between good and evil, Shaun and Shem, that he would have tied in with Pascal's wager and probably Parzival's and Hamlet's hesitation as well. Joyce must have mapped this onto an anecdote about an Irish soldier named Buckley hesitating to shoot a Russian general in the Crimea... and the notebooks show pretty strongly that this was the root of the druid sketch, qv.)
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