The Sirens’ Chant: Bloom & Chichikov

I deeply believe that a detailed juxtaposition of both works can provoke a novel understanding not only of the creative process of these authors but also a novel understanding of both cultures. Such a juxtaposition enriches the Joycean and Gogolian debate by indicating the metonymic proximity of both works, which encompass two seemingly divergent worlds. This can be sustained only if one integrates both works with the major philosophical, aesthetic and conceptual debates. Within such a context, I consider and interpret Joyce’s and Gogol’s work as an ‘event’ as a ‘phenomenon’. Such an ‘event’ is, moreover, imbued with an interconnected multi-meaning flow. Within such a flow context, the research methodology has to follow suit and correspond with the character of the work under discussion.

As already underlined above, besides the central Joyce-Gogol juxtaposition, other sources are included, which show that, in spite of radical aesthetic and ideological differences, one still encounters fascinating common denominators which enrich such artistic concurrence. Within this tributary bracket, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath were chosen. These were chosen not at random and not without a certain element of poetic licence.

The works were specifically chosen due to the fact that it was quite a challenge to overlay Joyce’s modernist-postmodernist petty-bourgeois urban realism with Gogol’s parodic-feudal peasant world. Yet, it was more challenging still to introduce Steinbeck’s humanist proletarian social realism with Bely’s dehumanized mystic symbolism, and yet …

The important thing to bear in mind is that this research work, from the methodological point of view, is not some surgically closeted academic analysis on Joyce or Gogol but a debate with and on them. This is the reason why, as a starting point, I chose only two specific chapters from the whole compendium of their chosen work. I am not offering a Joyce or Gogol ‘ivory-towered’ academic interpolation, but, with their permission, I am exploiting these authors as ‘excuses’ to show, amongst other objectives, how critical theory and creative-critical writing have become themselves a form of sophist mannerism which paradoxically is violently prohibiting any creative criticism.

Oxymoronically, one is encountering today a criticism intolerable to any kind of criticism. Instead of the elected child heir to Hegel’s idealist and Marx’s materialist dialectics, this makes critical thinking-creative writing the lost prodigal child. One has to await the child’s poiesis return so as to rejuvenate academia’s ageing corpse.

Obviously, for the one who is ivory ‘contained’, my methodology may seem idiosyncratic, a position with which I am in complete agreement. This is exactly my objective. An idiosyncratic multidisciplinary methodology is exactly what is needed to challenge recognized narrow and conventional scholarship. Even if this may seem to be bordering on the eccentric, challenging this conventionality is in itself an important contribution to the debate concerned. It can also be deemed as experimental, although in my vocabulary, the term experimental partakes of the whole process of creative-critical writing. For me, it is impossible to envisage creative-critical writing without being experimental – and vice versa – as there can be no experimental writing without it being creative and critical. The unfortunate situation of conventional scholarship is precisely its draconian and unwarranted surgical separation of these aspects, which in fact constitute one wholeness.

Similar to the works’ multi-tiered character, the main methodology exploited has to be a multi-level one. Although the following methodological categories may be obtuse to the reader, yet, if pondered upon, one should not get confused. These are only ‘clutch-gears’ to assist the research process. I am aware that this might provoke some form of incomprehensibility owing to the fact that I am gleaning from different sources stemming from different creative aspects and media, an approach that has been consistently disregarded by positivist conventional scholarship.

Thus, for example, besides ‘inheriting’ Ezra Pound’s idea of the ‘subject-rhyme’ and exploiting this in my research studies, I feel enriched by developing Michael Baxandall’s ‘period-eye’ category. I am doing the same with Foucault’s ‘episteme’ and with Gramsci-Deleuze’s ‘re-engineering’ concept. Analogously, the diverse theatre and cinema ‘montage’ categories, which I have appropriated for this debate, have unlocked the most exciting and surprising new filters of creative interpretation and their corresponding academic manifestation. Likewise, I have gleaned, as Homer’s Penelope did, other line-threads for my tapestried analysis. From philosophical arguments stemming from structuralist, post-structuralist ‘language’ and others, independently of whether or not I subscribe to the philosophy in question. All these are just tools.

This may sound a bit eclectic, but it is not, since such diverse categories I have appropriated are appropriated subject to and for my methodology. The appropriation of various research techniques is gleaned into one unified methodology, together with its poetizing. Unfortunately for conventional scholarship, this can of course come as a negative surprise since for our present contemporary episteme, one is being bureaucratically ‘planned’, compartmentalized and robotized. One is robotized and engineered to separate, differentiate and even negate those categories which are coming from the most diverse sources. This is precisely what I am challenging, particularly by abusing cinematic tools for multi-levelled textual back and forth flashbacks continuously flowing and oscillating throughout this study: a jolting clusterization against narrative linearity.

Another possible criticism may be that such a multidisciplinary, and what I term a multijuxtapositional, methodology, can be deemed formalist. Façade-wise, such an impression is correct, but only superficially, since I do believe that texts are alive and can keep on bloomingly evolving only through consistent and continuous interpretations, juxtapositions and jettisoning, which in turn provoke the corresponding friction caused by the mutual encountering of these. Without such friction, the text is dead. I am deeply fascinated by the fact that although there is a radical, differentiated, and diversified tapestried mosaic interflowing throughout these four epics, there is a magnetic, rooted sameness in all. It is, in particular, this friction, whether smooth or crude, that arises when these encounter each other that interests me. The action of one work on another, whether against or complementing, whether conflictual or empathic, provokes a frictional-magnetic relationship giving rise to various patterns.

Put differently, one visually identifies certain formal patterns and recognizes these when reflected or formed in other situations. In other words, familiar complex patterns in one work can be found rooted in the work of others. This tool, which I am appropriating from the visual world, is called the apophenic- pareidolic, and which I am here daring to transpose onto literature, finding in the process similar patterns radically appertaining to different times and to different socio-cultural awareness. Words, letters and texts in whatever form create, provoke and trigger images as much as visual praxis does.

Thus, even here, the apophenic-pareidolic plays a fascinating role. Basing myself on this, the montage principle with its form of simultaneity and super-positioning, which is exploited by both ‘Joyce and Gogol’ / ‘Bely and Steinbeck’ in ‘Ulysses and Dead Souls’ and in ‘Petersburg and The Grapes of Wrath’, is another tool which I draw upon extensively in my research, as can be clearly seen in the structure of this work. Such a principle cuts across the particular, different and conventional chronological time periods determining the works discussed. I opt, on the contrary, for an unconventional geo-chronotopic form in which all works are transformed into one immediate phenomenon.

Sustaining the above methodological categories, the interpolation technique, which activates important shifts in the works mentioned, together with the poetic, permeates throughout. These find themselves as compelling siblings in my research methodology.

In this present research work, the language itself being ‘manipulated’ reflects the language mosaic-flow found in the works under discussion. In other words, poiesis is not only reintroduced as part of the methodological aspect for research but is also attesting to the fact that many a time the intuitive and even irrational ‘discovery’ transcends the actual pragmatic and empirical textual-archival content – much to the dismay of the Dottore Balanzone2 scholarship.