Beelines: Joyce’s Apian Aesthetics

Murray, Rachel

doi:10.3390/h6020042

Cited by 3 publications

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References 21 publications

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“…Rachel Murray's article, 'Beelines: Joyce's Apian Aesthetics'(Murray 2017) proved invaluable in uncovering this aspect of Joyce's writing.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Marrano Phenomenon

2019

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x xi to engage in religious thinking which would not be bound or wholly determined by the dogmas of any orthodoxy. More than that, as a truly liberated theological speculation, it often goes against the rigid law of the tradition-and thus becomes antinomian. The fascination with which so many 20th century diasporic Jews approached the 'Marrano theology' as a living hypothesis is mostly indebted to Gershom Scholem's not purely historical work devoted to presenting it as a still actual phenomenon within the Jewish world. Thanks to Scholem, the Marrano idea acquired a rich symbolic potential, linked to the messianic ferment of the Sabbatians, of whom, as Scholem has shown, a large number were Marranos. The most famous of xii them, Abraham Miguel Cardozo, wrote an entire treatise, "Magen Abraham (The Shield of Abraham)", devoted to the messianic significance of Marranism, in which the seeming vice of secrecy cunningly turns into a virtue of deeper truth. For, says Cardozo, the true faith can only be hidden.The Marrano rule, therefore, reads: only what is concealed can be an authentic faith; what becomes positively revealed is nothing but an official religion. Hence, the real faith needs to protect its subversive-antinomian character by avoiding open pronouncement and articulation. It was thus mostly due to this Marrano influence that Sabbatai Zwi's conversion to Islam became almost immediately interpreted as an act of free will, demonstrating that only 'hidden faith' can be genuine: inner, unconcerned, and unhindered by official norms and religious institutions. Cardozo believed the Marranos to be the truly chosen people, 'the righteous remnant of a true Israel', destined to save the world and spread the divine message through all the nations by subverting their pagan institutions from within. Sabbatai, therefore, not only followed the way of those reflexive Marranos, but also justified it and showed its deeper spiritual meaning; now, to convert to Christianity or Islam meant to be able to expand the messianic practice of 'lifting the sparks' from the realm of kelipot, the 'broken vessels', and to penetrate the darkest regions of the created world (such as Islam or Roman-Catholic 'Edom'). To choose faith in a hidden way meant a deliberate effort to keep the antinomian impulse opposed to all oppressive laws of this world, both secular and religious, from contamination with a fallen reality; to maintain it in a form of a hovering 'specter', distanced from any direct positive realization. It is precisely here that the 'hidden tradition' loses all persecutory and negative aspects of deficiency and becomes a positive mode of living, believing, and thinking.Yet, as I have already indicated, the true contemporary champion of the Marrano strategy, cunningly playing with the 'revealment and concealment' of the secret antinomian specter, is Jacques Derrida. Derrida performs his Marrano identification, but, being a 'true' Marrano (which, as Scholem rightly observes, is a paradox in itself), he never-or very rarely-talks about i...

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“…Rachel Murray's article, 'Beelines: Joyce's Apian Aesthetics'(Murray 2017) proved invaluable in uncovering this aspect of Joyce's writing.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Marrano Phenomenon

2019

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Bees of Rome

Wright

2020

JSRNC

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Readers of Tennyson's poetry enter charmed lands -'The Lady of Shalott', 'The Palace of Art', 'The Sleeping Beauty', the story world of The Princess, the entire kingdom of Camelot.They meet characters who have been charmed (as in 'The Lotus-Eaters'), or wish to possess charm (such as the speaker of Maud), in poems that exert a distinctive stylistic charm of their own. 1 Part of Tennyson's charm can be identified with his extraordinary facility with sound and repetition. But that is not, primarily, what charm meant to Tennyson; or rather, the long historical connection between charm and sound was only one component of his understanding, and it went hand-in-hand with another: an understanding of charm that he had learned from the Roman poet Horace.Critics discussing poetry and charm have long acknowledged the central relation of 'charm' to sound. Northrop Frye did so influentially in his Anatomy of Criticism, where he drew on the classical terms melos, lexis, and opsis (respectively, the sound element of poetry; the written word, with both aural and visual aspects; and poetry's visual element), before offering terms for what he called the 'radicals' of the first and last of these: 'charm' (melos) and 'riddle' (opsis). 2 Such linking of 'charm' to melos (tune, melody, harmony) leads round in a circle slightly, because the etymology of 'charm' (as Frye also noted) is carmen (song). This 'charm' is sound cut free from linguistic sense, but still imparting affect. More recently, Herbert Tucker follows this line of thinking, but takes his own argument in an historicaltheoretical direction to focus on what he calls the 'irreference' of charm words (in literature and spell-casting) and the centrality of 'irreference' to both the history and nineteenth-century 'survival' of charm 'after magic'. 3 Tucker's 'irreference' is something of a semantic equivalent of the sound-quality of Frye's 'charm'. Where, for Frye, 'charm' in poetry describes 'an independent rhythm equally distinct from metre and from prose', 'an oracular, meditative, irregular, unpredictable, and essentially discontinuous rhythm, emerging from the coincidences of the sound-pattern' (272, 271), Tucker's 'charm' is 'a verbal formula whose irreference compels reality rather than reporting on it', an 'empirical otherness [which] 1 Describing Tennyson's work and words, critics readily recur to the word 'charm'. Examples include Anna

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A Ruby and Triangled Sign upon the Forehead of Taurus: Modalities of Revelation in Megalithic Archaeoastronomy and James Joyce’s Novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Crook¹

2018

Religions

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This paper proceeds from the concurrent interpretation of two distinct, apparently unrelated disciplinary contexts, at the crossroads of the positivism of archaeology and the imaginary world of literature. The character of the reciprocal relationship between megalithism in Neolithic Portugal and the writings of the twentieth-century author, James Joyce, is transfigured through the introduction of a third element of interpretation, a deeply paradoxical current of Jewish thought, with messianic dimensions, antithetical to the forces of mythic reconciliation present in Joyce's fiction and in archaeological conceptions of 'symbolic systems' in antiquity, which tend to erase the innumerable singulars of experience. Applying a cryptotheologically-inflected exegesis immanent to the materials of text and archaeology in the light of their respective orientation to the same astral phenomenon, I seek to generate insights unanticipated within interpretations restricted to the disciplinary boundaries, theories and methodologies of archaeology and literary criticism as discrete entities. Within allegorised readings of archaeology and an archaeologicised reading of Joyce's texts I bring into play non-synchronous elements which both disrupt the idealised harmonies of social and religious conformity and illuminate hitherto unseen connections between diverse, seemingly incommensurable contexts, beyond the discursive conventions of detached objectivity, without relinquishing irreduceible remnants to a totalising synthesis.

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Beelines: Joyce’s Apian Aesthetics

Cited by 3 publications

References 21 publications

The Marrano Phenomenon

The Marrano Phenomenon

Bees of Rome

A Ruby and Triangled Sign upon the Forehead of Taurus: Modalities of Revelation in Megalithic Archaeoastronomy and James Joyce’s Novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

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