Joyce and the Drama of Cognition: Escher as a Visual Analogue Author(s): Barbara Stevens Heusel Source: Twentieth Century

Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 395-406 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441883 . Accessed: 10/10/2011 05:47
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Joyce
Escher

and

the as

Drama

of

Visual

Cognition: Analogue

BARBARA STEVENS HEUSEL

Familiarity with our world and our perceptual apparatus (our eye and brain mechanisms) deadens our perception, and so we need artists to shock us into seeing. James Joyce and M. C. Escher provide masterfully the necessary moments of surprise, trompe l'oeil, and tricks of the brain, to give us insight into cognition. They create a powerful conjunction because of their complexity and their play with our learned responses. Juxtaposing Escher's visual play and Joyce's verbal play forces us to look at processes we usually overlook or take for granted: moments when perception becomes cognition and when cognition can become art.1 Then we can analyze our own responses, as readers and as viewers. Joyce's most basic step in recognizing how cognition becomes art was his habit of scrupulously recording the moments of insight he called "epiphanies." Epiphany grows out of a long line of what M. H. Abrams categorizes as the "illuminated Moment."2 "By an epiphany" Stephen Dedalus in Stephen Hero means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself."3 Joyce's synthesis of two historical patterns-Aquinas' demonstration that inner conflict is as real a subject of art as outer conflict, and Poe's realization that a work of art is a retracing of an emotion4showed him that epiphany names the final stage of cognition. He was able then-by retracing the labyrinth of actions, gestures, thoughts, and feelings that lead to an illuminated moment-to record the universal drama, the acting out of the stages of apprehension or cognition, the artistic process.
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Unfortunately for students of literature, neither poetry nor prose can render unanalyzed, unsynthesized impressions, epiphanies, firsthand with the ease that the visual arts can. Because we can absorb Escher's tricks almost instantaneously, his teasing of our visual cognition highlights what could, in Joyce's prose, otherwise remain abstract. In addition to exercising the connections between the eye and the brain, Escher-and Joyce-manipulate the eye-brain relationship, tricking us into believing impossible figures that are impossible but, nevertheless, true. Using five of Escher's prints, I will demonstrate how Stephen's aesthetic theory helps us follow the pattern Douglas Hofstadter calls, in discussing Escher, the "Strange Loop,"5 a closed or reverberating loop. Joyce's explanation, which does not differ from Stephen's significantly, helps us follow the labyrinth of pathways a mind takes when viewing, and reviewing, Escher's work; our slide-that-by-me-one-more-time reaction, or the remapping of the paths, re-creates the loop or cycle Joyce recognized as artistic process. It is interesting to notice how the following passage from Stephen Hsro applies to Escher's Day and Night (Fig. 1).6 This is Stephen's prosaic explanation of the first stage of his theory, simply the first stage of the perceptual process, the figure-ground stage: Consider the performance of your mind when confronted with

Fig. 1 Day and Night (Photographby courtesy of the National Galleryof Art, Washington, D.C.)
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any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else; and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. (SH, p. 212) While Stephen is using object-ground only in its simplest form, not as a paradoxical figure, we see that Escher is playing with two paradoxical figures: object-ground reversible figures and figures that spontaneously change their position in depth. Several circumstances coalesce here to create the reader's illuminated moment. We notice at the center of the print that the eye and brain can focus on either light birds or dark birds but not on both at the same time. We must-as Stephen tells Cranly-lift one or the other away from everything else. The representational birds lose their three-dimensional bodies and become fields in the background and then divisions on a flat page. In addition, Escher fancifully flattens out the turning world onto a two-dimensional surface. The second stage of Stephen's theory illustrates steps our own perceptual mechanisms go through when we encounter the tricks in an Escher print. If the artist has, as Stephen says, "disentangle[d] the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and ((reembod[ied])) it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office" (SH, p. 78), we ought to experience an epiphany. In separating figure from ground in Waterfall (Fig. 2),7 we naively associate the scene with conventional waterwheels and with water that is running downhill. At this very moment our minds are illustrating the second stage: "The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, travels every cranny of the structure" (SH, p. 212). When we concentrate for any length of time, we recognize a shocking paradox: looking at any given corner confirms that the water is indeed running downhill, but tracing the path of the water proves undeniably that it has been running uphill. The jolt we receive from seeing this paradox-the involuntary smile it evokes-feels very like an epiphany. This is Stephen's explanation of epiphany: Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word . . . but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. (SH, p. 213)

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"Mak[ing] the only logically possible synthesis" is part of the appeal-the delayed gratification-we associate with a print such as Waterfall (Fig. 2). Realizing we have been tricked by the movement of the water, we remap the visual field, retracing the labyrinth to see at what point our eyes and brains have been led astray. We discover that

:.) C 0 c; T0

s-

Fig. 2 Waterfall 398

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our learned responses have caused us to make some invalid assumptions. The intricacies of those figures atop the towers, of the terraces in the background, of the steps and even the cogs on the waterwheels, not to mention the intricacy of those fantastic plants, all beguile the viewer into trusting that what seems to be the most simple element of the picture-the path that water takes, flowing downhill-is indeed realistic. We have assumed that because the bricks outlining the troughs proceed downward like steps and because each trough appears to carry the water lower, water will be lower still at the end of the course than it was at the beginning. Such simple notions as "end" and "beginning" work in a world of forthright Euclidian geometry-but not in the world Escher creates by distorting a three-dimensional figure on the flat plane of a piece of paper. If one imagines that he is holding the print in front of himself and tilting the top of the sheet away, he can visualize the plane that cuts through all six corners, recognizing that Escher was elaborating on the figure called the impossible triangle. It is helpful to imagine, superimposed over the waterfall, an early version of the impossible triangle (Fig. 3),8 a two-dimensional representation of what appear to be square beams resting upon each other at right angles. We see that his study includes four triangles, whereas Waterfall includes three, the right-hand triangle being eliminated. Another epiphany occurs. Synthesizing our observations has allowed us a glimpse of ourselves seeing. In Dubliners9we have a clear example of Joyce tricking us with a structural pattern in the same way Escher does visually. When we finish "Two Gallants," the epiphany is ours and not the protagonist's. We must retrace the labyrinth of behavior in the Dublin streets in order to realize shockingly that we have been voyeurs like Lenehan, anxiously trying to discover the way in which Corley is exploiting the young woman. This active viewing and reviewing is the prime characteristic of the work of both Joyce and Escher: it is not only the form but the content as well. Escher shows us that moving back to the second stage jars us into another epiphany of recognition, demonstrating a reverberating loop. In Gddel,Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Hofstadter explains this circular movement, calling it the "Strange Loop," or an endless process represented in a finite way: the "phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system [such as Waterfall (Fig. 2)], we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started ...."10 In fact, Hofstadter uses
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Fig. 3 The ImpossibleTriangle Waterfall to show that Escher creates "the most beautiful and powerful visual realization of this notion of Strange Loops" and uses ThreeSpheres II (Fig. 4) and Magic Mirror (Fig. 5) to show that this loop can illustrate the movement of the self-referential artist. This image of a loop helps in contrasting the most characteristic direction in which Escher and Joyce each directed his energies. For Escher this pattern was primarily a framework with which he could analyze the function of the artist at work. Joyce, by nature a navel-gazer, used the loop framework in a different way. Fascinated by Giambattista Vico's cyclic theory and its slowly ascending spiral or vortex, Joyce found the loop a convenient structure to step onto, in his moving Daedalean fashion outside himself and his work. Ultimately both Joyce and Escher stand outside their media, like gods paring their fingernails, seeing their material objectively while being seen participating in the process of creation. The sequence of Joyce's works demonstrates his movement outside his fiction, from the retracing of naturalistic labyrinths that lead to an 400

JOYCE AND THE DRAMA OF COGNITION

rig. 4 I nree Spneres 11 (Photograph by courtesy of- the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Fig. 5 Magic Mirror (Photograph by courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE epiphany in each story in Dubliners, through the objectification of the diary in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man1' and the newspaper headlines and catechism questions and answers in Ulysses, to the total distance of the multilingual puns in Finnegans Wake. While we talk about Joyce's willingness to reflect his own image very distinctly in his work, leaving it stamped there, Escher playfully carries the idea a step further by making his literal reflection the focus of a number of graphics such as Three Spheres II (Fig. 4). Escher's playfulness should remind us that Joyce's title A Portrait was itself originally a borrowing from another medium. In Three Spheres II notice the framed world, or fictive window, contains three worlds with varying surfaces that reflect in the writing table. But the writing table is reflected only in the middle mirror-like sphere, which reflects the whole surrounding area. The left-hand sphere, glass filled with water, reflects and magnifies the table top, the reflecting sphere, and the window. It reflects not only the window on its left side but also the window reflection from the middle sphere's reflection. The reflection of the artist drawing every detail is distorted only in the mirror-like sphere. All these surfaces, like the surface of Wordsworth's lake in The Prelude, are mirrors of the artist's mind or of memories in the artist's mind. Notice that the very center of the print is between the artist's eyes, at the still dead center of the artist's ego. Joyce's early works reflect in part portraits of himself: the Stephen of Stephen Hero is more like Joyce than the Stephen of A Portrait and Ulysses. R. P. Blackmur points out that the actions of Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses "suggest a single picture . . . the picture of Joyce, ,12 Moreover, working out the polarities of his own nature ... throughout Joyce's work his reflections become less personal and more abstract. His signatures are contained in his language, his style (irony and juxtaposition), his form, even his typography. In Ulysses Joyce inserts a labyrinth of analysis between his reader and his characters. The newspaper headlines in "Aeolus" and the chapter-long sentence in "Penelope" tease us into focusing on the black marks covering the page and on the elaborate pyrotechnics being set off in our heads. The form and typography of the novel are especially significant because they help us recognize the way characters not only reflect sides of Joyce's personality, or reflect real people, but reflect ideas. The most playful of these signs placed between character and reader comes at the end of "Ithaca" in the 1922 edition. Gifford and Seidman explain the reason for the "large black dot or period at the end of Episode 17, 722 402

JOYCEAND THE DRAMAOF COGNITION (737). A dot or period is a conventional sign for Q.E.D. (Latin: quod erat 'which was to be proved')."'3 demonstrandum, The most problematic signs are the majuscule letters S-M-P, which, in Bennett Cerf's 1934 American edition, introduce the three parts of the novel corresponding to the Homeric structure that Joyce discussed with Stuart Gilbert. Cerf's use of typography merely makes more vivid-more graphic-the logical pattern ingrained in Joyce's mind by the Jesuits. In 1959 William York Tindall linked the letters to the signs for the three terms of a syllogism: "Innocent of meaning, decorative in purpose, the enlargement of these initials in the American edition is a lucky accident, calling attention to what might have been missed."'4 Editor and critic illuminate another level of the labyrinth of tradition as they participate in the text. These initial letters at the beginning of the three-part structure resonate with the illuminated manuscripts with which Joyce would have been familiar. Letters have come to represent the protagonists and the content of their minds: Part I (The Telemachiad) begins with S for Stephen, preoccupied with himself; Part II (The Wanderings of Ulysses) begins with M for Molly, who occupies Bloom's pattern of thought; Part III (The Homecoming) begins with P for Poldy or Leopold, who occupies Molly's reverie.'5 Carrying Tindall's commentary forward in Notes for Joyce (1974), Gifford and Seidman emphasize Joyce's preoccupation with medieval pedagogy, which regarded the sequence S-M-P [subject, middle, predicate] as the cognitive order of thought and therefore as the order in which the terms initially should be taught. . . . The analogue of the syllogism (as the overall analogue to The Odyssey) suggests a logical and narrative structure, which the reader can grasp but of which the characters in the fiction are essentially unaware.16 Joyce's use of that orb at the end of "Ithaca" and his acceptance of those larger-than-life capital letters in the 1934 American edition, become an elaborate joke not only on the characters and the readers but on the creation of stories, a joke that resurrects Aristotle and Aquinas. Escher's creatures in Magic Mirror (Fig. 5) help us visualize the way Joyce manipulates characters inside the world of Ulysses and readers outside it. Escher uses his metamorphosing creatures to comment on the relationship of image to object. When they loop back toward the front of the mirror, they become spaces in a figure-and-ground grid or tiled floor. They appear to loop under the mirror, rather than through it. The figures we see marching in the upper-right corner are reflected twice: once on the flat, presumably opaque surface of the mirror, and 403

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE the mirror-in the figures we see marching in the again-through corner. That mirror is a fictive window, one that both reflects upper-left and is seen through; we see the mirror and the surrounding figures through a larger fictive window, which corresponds to the pupil of Escher's eye-which has become our own. Joyce's creatures are in comparable states of materializing and dematerializing. Ulysses is a study of a similar interaction between the flat and the spatial; flat, static black marks come to life, in the medium of writing a story and reading it, instead of drawing objects and perceiving images. Here Joyce gives us numerous perspectives simultaneously, as we have seen Escher doing in Day and Night and doing more thoroughly in Magic Mirror. Joyce uses the mirror of language to construct reverberating loops through which we can trace the corporeality of the characters at various discrete stages, from realistic people using romantic language, in the early chapters, to two-dimensional vehicles for ideas: psyches in "Circe," cliches in "Eumaeus," and Aquinas-like rhetorical patterns of questions and answers in "Ithaca." By the last chapter Molly has metamorphosed from being an idea, or bits and chips of memory in people's minds, into being a creature of flesh and blood-with emphasis on the flesh. Joyce also uses mirrors as fictive windows to achieve metamorphosis, merging, and simultaneity, most notably in the sifting of subconscious material in "Circe." For example, when Bloom first enters Nighttown, we see him, like the figures in Magic Mirror, creating a "composite portrait,"'7 reflected in concave and convex mirrors. The scene, Bloom watching himself as an element in the surrounding streets, is absorbed and reflected by "Gillen's hairdresser's windows" (XV:144). Flat, concave, and convex mirrors clustered tightly together create a cacophony of images that reflect and overlap, even as they penetrate the planes of glass. The reader sees external and internal realities merge and sees beneath the ego into the libido. A concave mirror in the window reveals the psychic pain of Bloom's tortured ego-"lovelorn longlost lugubru Blooloohoom"; then when his eye catches a convex mirror, it draws out his animal joy-"fatchuck cheekchops ofjollypoldy the rixdix doldy" (XV: 145-49). Immediately after Bloom has watched himself be cuckolded by Boylan, Bloom's and Stephen's fantasies coincide in an epiphany for the first time when they simultaneously look into Bella's mirror and see not each other but themselves revealed in Shakespeare. The three "men of letters" are "crownedby the reflection of the reindeerantlered hatrack in the hall" (XV:3823-24). The magic mirror takes in the reflections of the
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JOYCEAND THE DRAMAOF COGNITION two men and feeds them back with the image of Shakespeare to boot, creating a cycle or loop. This mirror, like many of Escher's, is permeable: we see Stephen and Bloom moving through it in "Circe" and recognize that they are on the other side of it in "Ithaca,"just as Escher's creatures live magically in two worlds-the world of reality reflected in the mirror and that other world beyond the back side of the mirror. I have used Escher's illuminated moments as visual analogues to help us see more clearly Joyce's concepts about artistic perception and process. Each artist analyzes portraits of the artist and his archetypal struggles. For Joyce a work of art is, according to Marshall McLuhan, the "process of retrieval, of reconstruction after a moment of insight."'8 Wordsworth and the Romantics, and the symbolists, prepared the ground for Joyce and for the "vivisections" he describes in StephenHero, vivisections of the artist's mind in action-the drama of cognition. Illustrations for this essay were provided through a grant from the Researchand PublicationFund of Wake Forest University. ' Marshall McLuhan uses this term, the drama of cognition, in "James in The Criticism Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial," TheInterior Landscape: Literary of MarshallMcLuhan1943-1962, ed. Eugene McNamara (New York: McGrawHill, 1969), p. 32: "For it is in the drama of cognition, the stages of apprehension, that Joyce found the archetype of poetic imitation. He seems to have been the first to see that the dance of being, the nature imitated by the arts, has its primaryanalogue in the activityof the exterior and interior senses." 2 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Traditionand Revolutionin Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 543. Leaving the debate on why Joyce stopped using the term "epiphany"and on how broadly to define and their predecessors to a future discussion, I rely on Abrams' "epiphanies" liberal definitions of the recurrent illuminationsWordsworthcalled "spots of time"and Joyce called "epiphanies." 3JamesJoyce, Stephen Hero(Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), p. 211. Subsequentreferences are found in the text, cited as SH. 4 Joyce's understandingof poetic process benefited, according to Marshall McLuhan, from Aquinas, William Wordsworth, and the Symbolists: Poe, Herothat Baudelaire,Flaubert,Rimbaud,Mallarme. Joyce'sstatementin Stephen Stephen's "Estheticwas in the main <applied Aquinas>" was so literal he had to scrap it (p. 77). In a postcard to his brother Stanislaus,Joyce makes his connection with Wordsworthclear: "I think Wordsworthof all Englishmen of letters best deserves your word 'genius.'" Letters,11 June 1905, ed. Richard Ellmann(London: Faber, 1966), p. 63. 5 Bach:An EternalGolden Braid(New Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gidel,Escher, York: Vintage, 1980), p. 10. 6 F. H. His trans. Bool, et al., M. C. Escher: Lifeand Complete Work, Graphic
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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE Tony Langham and Plym Peters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), cat. no. 303. Figures 4-5, cat. no., respectively: 339, 338. 7 The World of M. C. Escher, ed. J. L. Locher (New York: Abrams, 1971), prints 253 or 257. 8 Ibid., print 250. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Viking, 1958). 10Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, p. 10. " James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1956). Subsequent references are shortened to A Portrait. 12 R. P. Blackmur, "The Jew in Search of a Son," Virginia QuarterlyReview, 24 (1948), 115; rpt. in Eleven Essayson the EuropeanNovel (New York: Harcourt, 1984), p. 46. 13Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses (New York: Dutton, 1974), p. 2. 14William York Tindall, A Reader'sGuide to James Joyce (New York: Farrar, 1959), p. 126 f. Bennett Cerf's At Random says almost nothing about his publication of Ulysses.H. K. Croessmann, however, in "Joyce, Gorman, and the Schema of Ulysses: An Exchange of Letters-Paul L. Leon, Herbert Gorman, Bennett Cerf," publishes letters that dramatize the jealously guarded schema (A James Joyce Miscellany, Second Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1959], p. 9.). 15See Tindall, A Reader'sGuide to James Joyce, p. 126. 16Gifford and Seidman, Notes for Joyce, p. 2. 17James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland, 1984), XV:144. Subsequent references are found in the text. 17 Eugene McNamara, "Preface" to The InteriorLandscape,p. vii.

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