“Did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a movie on?”
––Jim Morrison, “The Movie,” from An American Prayer
Everyone has a story to tell with a unique vision to tell it. In the tenth episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Wandering Rocks,” the author allows these stories to weave in and out of focus, as a roving “camera” exploration of Dublin – the city and its citizens. Jim Morrison’s poetry, like Joyce’s Ulysses – and to a lesser extent, Dubliners – is obsessed with voices, inner and outer, spectral or astral: death and living. Jim Morrison, the Doors’ lead vocalist, wrote poetry about love, sex, death, nationalism, religion and even metempsychosis – a constant theme for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. These poems were often transmigrated – and transfigured – into song lyrics and spoken word performances (particularly “Celebration of the Lizard”) and bespeak some of the book’s primary themes and concerns. If Ulysses is one long “rock” poem, how does Morrison’s verse teach us the music of modernism?
JOYCE’S POETICAL AESTHETIC
Modernism has come to be defined – critically, wholly, maybe holistically – by its difficult-to-grasp tendrils, as slippery (and unnamable) as H.P. Lovecraft’s oddities swimming amidst bobbing waves, circuitously unfolding and unfurling in a kaleidoscopic menagerie, where really, we are the creatures under observation. The text, its meaning, so much of what occurs in modernism – and for the purposes of this discussion, modernist literature – is off the scale … completely unquantifiable, without a viable taxonomy. “Joyce’s theme in Ulysses was simple,” writes Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann in his preface to the Gabler Edition. “He invoked the most elaborate means to present it. Like other writers, he sensed that the methods available to him in previous literature were insufficient, and he determined to outreach them” (ix). Joyce had exhausted the tools of English literature by the time he had finished The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and came to Ulysses prepared to throw open a door that did not quite exist – its corporeal nature, an elusive object, gesturing toward the spatial parameters widening ever more until Joyce unleashed his massive text in 1922.
When looking at the entirety of Joyce’s oeuvre, it would seem that Dublin, Ireland was his muse (and of course, his wife, Nora Barnacle), but in his essay, “Beyond Dublin,” Morton Levitt posits that for readers, Ireland – or the country’s history – is not the central question; there is a universality working through Joyce’s hyper-localized texts. “We do not read Joyce, it seems, for any reasons that have very much to do with Ireland (although knowing Irish history and culture will surely help us to understand his work, perhaps even more so than he was willing to acknowledge),” Levitt contends. “We read Joyce because he left Dublin behind him, because he became at last a universal author, the greatest and most influential of modern novelists, eponymous hero of the age: the Modernist Age might more tellingly be labeled the Age of James Joyce” (387). Before all of this, when the writer was developing what would arguably become the voice of the modernist age (or as Levitt called it, “the Age of Joyce”), he wrote poetry.
Joyce published his collection of poetry, Chamber Music, in 1907 to little fanfare, when comparing it to future work. It was a volume that contained a romantic edge, a deep concern with the heart. Randy Malamud contends that “22 of Joyce’s 50 collected poems contain direct references to the heart” (91). He also draws a connection between the Ulysses episode, Hades in which Bloom reflects on the heart of Dignam, a recently passed Dubliner, whose funeral is in progress. “Bloom thinks of the heart as the ‘Seat of the affections’ (87); but realistically, he immediately undercuts this: “Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else,’” (87) Malamud quotes from the book. Where Joyce’s poetry is concerned, he finds a “story of young love and failure” (92), which is carried through in A Portrait, finding a ripe apotheosis therein, swimming in the details. His first collection of poetry, “Moods,” as well as the second, “Shine and Dark,” has been lost (92), but what has survived – Chamber Music and some uncollected poems – would not have bothered Joyce, as he did not consider these defining works, however, he was content to have the remnants stand as a historic record of his artistic progress, or in Joycean parlance, a portrait of the artist. “Yeats, upon first meeting Joyce and hearing the young writer read his poems, presciently remarked (according to Stanislaus’s [Joyce’s brother] version of the polymorphous legend), ‘You have a very delicate talent, but I cannot yet say whether for verse or prose’ (Recollections 13)” (93), writes Malamud. Consequently, and this is an important consideration regarding Joyce’s style, he drifted away from verse, but poetry continued to flow from his pen in another guise entirely.
“Ulysses,” according to Malamud, “particularly ‘Penelope,’ is a love-poem and for Molly and Leopold, Nora and James: Chamber Music is not really for anyone” (93), meaning that Joyce wrote about love in the abstract, while once he met Nora, the love became real, tangible, inescapable. He began to follow – what Clarence Mangan called – a “pulsebeat” (98), or more specifically, when merging the world of Joyce’s early verse and the prose of his maturity, the reader experiences examples, possibly waves of “pulsebeat poetry,” as “Ulysses resonates with the monic rhythms of pulsebeat poetry: Stephen’s morning urination that calls forth (as it merges with) the rhythms for instance, or the fireworks that attend ‘Nausicaa’” (98). An example of Joyce’s rhythmic affinity, might be easily recognized in the XXIII section of Chamber Music:
This heart that flutters near my heart
My hope and all my riches is,
Unhappy when we draw apart
And happy between kiss and kiss;
My hope and all my riches – yes! –
And all my happiness. (641)
As with almost any apprenticeship work, Chamber Music serves basically as a pile of rocks, one stacked right after the other, threatening to topple over, as an outline appears, and eventually, the artist finds purchase, and climbs ever upward: in this instance, toward the summit of Ulysses, a new method, a new world to effectively conquer.
ACROSS THE WANDERING ROCKS
Ulysses is that achievement – one requiring elevation of self, fortitude of mind to fully navigate – and the episodes are a masterclass in everything that modernism attempts to cast aside and embrace. Joyce devises each episode with its own multiverse, collective self-contained world, where the prose settles into the rotation and wraps itself around the gravitational pull of the prose. By the time the reader reaches “The Wandering Rocks” episode, Joyce has again shifted narrative devices in order to explore the lives – in moments of minutia – of some Dubliners. With its nineteen sections, which move about in a sort of “simultaneity,” according to Huang, a feature that is clearly built into “‘Wandering Rocks,’ with ‘[s]ynchronizations’ as one of the symbols Joyce has for this episode in the schema he gave Carlo Linati in 1920. Its nineteen sections provide accounts of mostly independent activities of citizens in Dublin, connected only by what Karen Lawrence calls ‘coincidence in time and proximity in space.’ Frank Budgen tells us that ‘Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city’” (592). Gifford contends that what makes “Wandering Rocks” different from other episodes in the book is that while the Homeric title from The Odyssey might have informed the composition in some meaningful way for Joyce, “the episode does not occur in The Odyssey. The Wandering Rocks are sometimes identified with the Symplegades, two rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea that dashed together at intervals but were fixed when the Argo passed between them on its voyage to Colchis” (260). Consequently, “The episode is composed of nineteen sections, which are interrupted by interpolated actions that are temporally simultaneous but spatially remote from the central action in which the interpolation occurs” (260). Another feature which makes “Wandering Rocks” unique even in comparison to other episodes in Ulysses is the use of simultaneity and parallax – the ability to see everything at once.
“The episode’s presentation of simultaneity, however, also suggests plurality, since it provides chances to read with “[p]arallax” (U 8.110), which means ‘the apparent displacement of the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points of view.’ As a result of changing points of view, parallax will bring to light different facets of an object or, metaphorically, different readings of a text. Molly’s ‘generous white arm,’ for example, receives a more detailed, vivid description in its second appearance” (593), Huang explains. Moreover, “The sections are like small episodes joined together not by the narrative but by the routes of Conmee and the viceregal cavalcade. These are unifying devices external to the narrative, since what the church and the state each represents is external to colonial Ireland” (597). For a moment, it all literally stands in relief, in contrast to temporality:
Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal, trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted, signaling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling implements of music through Trinity gates
(10.363-66).
Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary’s fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones
(10.800-804)
The style Joyce employs, a modernist technique, called “block form,” in which John Shea invites an examination into this form, whereas a “narrative is constructed of discrete ‘blocks.’ These units are sometimes paragraph-length, sometimes briefer or longer, but always set off conspicuously from each other; and the seating-off may be accomplished merely through extra white space or more radically with the use of heavy dots, asterisks, numbers, individual titles, or other headings … the units are often, most simply fragments that are somehow related” (297). These “fragments that are somehow related” represent well the movement of Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks,” where narratives are picked up and not always completed, and ultimately, the block form was put to use in several places in Ulysses to great effect. “It is no surprise,” Shea writes, “that Ulysses, the most important and ambitious of the experimental Modernist novels, contains three chapters more or less in block form. ‘Aeolus,’ the earliest, is in some ways the most important because of its novelty. ‘The Wandering Rocks’ is less obviously constructed in blocks, since the first section runs for five-and-a-half pages; but after that, most of them are one to two pages long, separated by a star” (299). By using this type of construction, Joyce is able, through the employment of “discrete blocks … to play with time and perspective” (303) meaning that “time in effect, has been suspended … For the present, they [the characters] seem part of the scenery, frozen, ready to be animated the moment we focus upon their particular site and enter” (303). Other Modernist writers who have used block form to great effect include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and … Jim Morrison.
THE CELEBRATION OF THE LIZARD
Jim Morrison, a poet and singer with Irish roots like Joyce, “invoked the most elaborate means to present it,” only, his tools of artistry involved a three-piece band including members, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore: The Doors. The group’s debut album was released in 1967 and the final album, L.A. Woman, was released in April 19,1971. Morrison died three months later in Paris, living the expatriate life, the writer’s life.
Morrison, a graduate of UCLA’s film school, was as obsessed with film as he was with poetry – in many ways, they were intertwined in a greater way than most fans of The Doors music may not be aware. Morrison viewed cinema as having the ability to create “‘a total substitute sensory,’” writes Suzanne E. O’Hop, quoting Morrison in her essay, “Enough to Base a Movie on.” O’Hop continues: “One way this is done, according to Morrison, is by creating a ‘powerful, infinite mythology’ as well as an ‘illusion of timelessness’ (54)” (164). An unusual way that Morrison approached words – particularly lyrics – was in, according to bandmate Ray Manzarek, in cinematic terms: ‘He had always thought of music in cinematic terms because it evoked images and existed in vibrations … he was hearing cinematic poetry. Poetry that created images in the mind – pictures. The combination of the cinematic aspects of poetry and the cinematic aspects of music was a concept of unlimited potential” (164).
In “Wild Child: Jim Morrison’s Poetic Journey,” Tony Magistrale explains the power of poetry in relation to the Doors musical catalogue: “Most of the songs recorded by the Doors were originally conceived as poems; as the rock band’s music grew in popularity and the demand increased for more material, Morrison’s poetry notebooks became the wellspring for many lyrics. These notebooks supplied the Doors with complete compositions as well as poetic fragments from longer works which were then adapted into songs such as ‘Not to Touch the Earth’” (134). The Doors’ third studio album “Waiting for the Sun” included the song, “Not to Touch the Earth,” an extract from a larger work entitled, “Celebration of the Lizard.”
According to the notes section of The American Night, a posthumous collection of Morrison’s poetry and verse, concerning “Celebration of the Lizard,” the editors call it a “performance piece composed for the rock stage whose elements include songs, poetry, sound effects, music and, to a certain degree, audience participation. From the evidence in his notebooks, Jim was thinking about and writing portions of ‘Celebration’ as early as the summer of 1965. Over the next three years it was written and rewritten, dozen of times … The Doors recorded the piece and released it on the record, Absolutely Live” (206). If indeed, rock music and modernism meet, it is at the crossroads of rebellion and deconstruction, Eliot’s “objective correlative,” the quidditas of it all, breaking through to light another fire.
MODERNISM AND CLASSIC ROCK, OR THE ‘ROCKINESS’ OF ULYSSES
If we take the premise that modernism is some active attempt at deconstructing the world in some way, or a reinterpretation of modern times, The Doors and its front man, created a music that was certainly of its time (the 1960s), but the tools were well-worn, possibly predictive, and so Morrison with “a little help from his friends,” moved into a very different type of performance art – a kind of disruptive performance art that was mainly driven by the spoken word. If spoken word and lyrics can have cinematic qualities as Morrison attests, Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses shares a similar quality and aesthetic. In fact, the essay, “Joyce and Cinema” traces the cinematic techniques apparent in the Joyce’s work. “In his ability to visualize verbally, to transcribe outer and inner speech, and to suggest the physical presence of his characters in the world, Joyce was approximating the powers of the cinematic image and the continuous film sequence,” Perlmutter writes. “The indexical qualities of physical presence are inherent in the cinematic image, since the signifier nearly equals the signified” (482). Morrison’s poetry collection The Lord and the New Creatures ruminates deeply on death, love, sex, and cinema as the bridge between worlds:
Films are collections of dead pictures which are given artificial insemination (42)
Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing for omniscience. To spy on others from this height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of our lens like rare aquatic insects (9)
When play dies it becomes the Game.
When sex dies it becomes Climax (5)
Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971. However, the Morrison myth grew over time. Peter Jan Margry writes:
It was not until the late 1970s, however, that interest in Morrison received a new impetus, a revival that occurred more or less in parallel with the rediscovery of ‘his’ band, the Doors. This was prompted by the posthumous release of a special LP containing nothing but recordings of Morrison reading his own poems [An American Prayer], accompanied by music adapted by the three surviving band members. It also marked the beginning of a mythologizing process around the band and its front man, with Morrison increasingly being profiled as a writer. Added to that, 1979 saw the release of Francis Coppola’s anti-war film Apocalypse Now, in which the mysterious, dramatic Doors ’ song ‘The End’ featured prominently. No one here gets out alive appeared one year later. This successful – and controversial – Morrison biography presented for the first time in print various speculations about the final year of Morrison’s life in Paris and about how he met his end. (144)
In his poem, “An American Prayer,” Morrison muses: “Let’s reinvent the gods, all the myths/of the ages/Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests” (3). The Doors, through Morrison’s death were reinvented by necessity – and rock music was transformed, with Morrison taking the mantle as the rock poet of his generation. The Doors had such contemporaries as Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Janis Joplin, and others, but there was only one Jim Morrison, one group whose use of poetry was so pervasive. Comparatively, Ulysses might be viewed as one long rock poem with each episode serving as an album cut. Like a rock artist forging a playlist, Joyce kept the whole in mind while making each album cut a distinctive experience, changing key and tempo where necessary. Like Joyce, whose Ulysses is now seen by some critics as part of Irish nationalism studies (which is ironic considering Ireland’s original disdain for his work), Morrison and to some extent, the music of The Doors experienced a new renaissance. By the time Oliver Stone’s biopic The Doors hit theaters in 1992, the myth was locked in, and in 2019, it was announced that UCLA would restore student films by Morrison and Manzarek (his UCLA classmate). The Doors still record and perform live, but without Morrison, the poetry has vanished, and The Doors – what remains of the collective – are left as wanderers, like Leopold Bloom wandering the streets of Dublin. When Morrison talks about “wandering” and the loss of God in his spoken word song “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat),” containing the poem “Stoned Immaculate” from the album L.A. Woman, he could be talking about Father Conmee at the beginning of “Wandering Rocks” blessing the Dubliners, as he saunters through the timeless streets.
‘THIS IS THE END’
Joyce and Morrison might not seem an obvious choice of comparison, but as I hope this paper has shown, common themes and interests truly bind the two Irishmen together. Joyce longed for Ireland, to be back home, in some way, but like Thomas Wolfe’s famous rejoinder, he could not go home again. In contrast, home for Morrison was likely a quieter time, before The Doors, when he scribbled poems in a notebook and dreamt about cinema. Once moving forward, neither could go back in time. Both were expatriates … both were rock stars and modernists who used poetic forms of expression to disrupt content and delivery, the written and the spoken word.
Works Cited
Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Univ of California Press, 1989.
Huang, Shan-Yun. “‘Wandering Temporalities’: Rethinking Imagined Communities through
‘Wandering Rocks.’” James Joyce Quarterly 49.3 (2012): 589-610.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Vintage, 1986.
Joyce, James, and Harry Levin. The Portable James Joyce. Penguin books, 1976.
Levitt, Morton P. “Beyond Dublin: Joyce and Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol.
22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 385–394. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3831743.
Magistrale, Tony. “Wild Child: Jim Morrison’s Poetic Journeys.” Journal of Popular Culture,
vol. 26, no. 3, Winter 1992, p. 133. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1992.2603_133.x.
Malamud, Randy. “‘What the Heart Is’: Interstices of Joyce’s Poetry and Fiction.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 64, no. 1, 1999, pp. 91–101. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3201746.
Margry, Peter Jan. “The Pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s Grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery: The
Social Construction of Sacred Space.” Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World:
New Itineraries into the Sacred, edited by Peter Jan Margry, Amsterdam University
Press, Amsterdam, 2008, pp. 143–172. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mwt8.10.
Morrison, Jim. The American Night. Vol. 2. Vintage, 1991.
____________. The Lords and the New Creatures. Simon and Schuster, 1970.
O’Hop, Suzanne E. “Enough to Base a Movie On?” Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3,
July 1997, p. 163. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9710306899&site=ehost-live.
Perlmutter, Ruth. “Joyce and Cinema.” Boundary 2, vol. 6, no. 2, 1978, pp. 481–502. JSTOR,
Shea, John. “Modernist Precursors of the Block Form.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 12,
- 2, July 1985, p. 297. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=6898474&site=ehost-live.