Gutter Words

THE UNDERNEATH OF LANGUAGE

One particular edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses is the vehicle for this sustained enquiry, from which have emerged the multiple iterations of the Gutter Words project. These radical and material forms of writing through reading and listening through looking question the act, parameters and ineffability of the reading experience, encompassing the page, the book, the gallery, the web, and spoken word. That experience is an orchestrated one, a product of the synergy between the physical limits of the page, our intrinsic human thresholds, and the cultural gatekeepers of language, all of which contribute to our understanding of the written word.

The processes that have primarily driven Gutter Words – those of negation and erasure – are considered in the context of unmaking a work and whether it is possible to consider these processes beyond their implied destruction to ask: can the physical and editorial manipulation of a literary text create radical intimacy, and in what does this intimacy reside? What do we expose when The Underneath of Language is revealed?

I have fallen through the hard surface of words into a suspended space, my fall broken by The Underneath of Language. I can see and reach the surface but find myself held down by what moves around me. A swell of wordless words, lost words and the words of others. I can move freely through the inferred and the unsaid. I can embrace error and uncertainty. It is a private space where I do not have to fear language. There is no hierarchy and consequently no judgement. I can act out my creative impulses and be led by my curiosity. I can hold onto words and can set them adrift. I can speak to Joyce and care for his words – and I do want to care for his words. I can pay attention to the contingent forces of intimacy. I can allow myself to be seen. I can allow myself to be heard.

I want to continue falling through this space.

Gutter Words is an ongoing project. The creation of the sonic work continues at a slow and careful pace and will be released episode by episode.

Jo Hamill

CHANELLING JOYCE

Idiomatically, writers may say that they are “writing a book,” when in fact they are writing a novel, researching a monograph, collecting a sufficient number of poems, or somehow amassing enough language to warrant publication in the format of a codex – perhaps drafting a manuscript (or, more likely today, a typescript or digital document file). Books – with certain rare exceptions such as some “artists books” – are not so much written as assembled by multiple hands: from various kinds of editors, amanuenses, compositors, printers, binders, and others. One of the things those compositors can tell you – contrary to another idiomatic slip, which lets a lazy metonymy substitute for clear description – is that “prose” as well as “verse” is written in lines. Those who are not typesetters may forget this, given how familiar and commonplace the rectangular block of text has become, and given how the prevalent genres of vaguely realist, referential, and discursive literatures seek to distract from the ink on the page (what Ron Silliman has called the “optical illusion” of Capitalism’s literary modes) and to encourage readers, with sleights of semantic prestidigitation, to look through the print, rather than at its distribution.¹ Silliman goes on to argue that “in its ultimate form, the consumer of a mass market novel such as Jaws stares numbly at a ‘blank’ page (the page also of the speed-reader) while a story appears to unfold miraculously of its own free will before his or her eyes.”² The phantasmagoric apparition of the narrative world, in Silliman’s accounting, is bought at the cost of the disappearance of the material word. Contrary to the mechanisms of narrative’s illusions, one might not only look at words – even those set conventionally in their mundane blocks – but also recognize prose as a form in its own right (and not merely as a format, much less an imprecise designation of a genre, such as “fiction”). With Gutter Words, Jo Hamill shows one way that such a visual attention might proceed.

In order to see the prosaic text that cultural conventions and the deadening familiarity of personal reading habits would have us ignore, we would first need to identify the properties of prose. Above all, the uniform geometric extension and spatial distribution of language in lines of prose both disperses and consolidates, severing and solidifying the language that it sets. Prose fractures sentences, displacing and isolating certain syntactically neighboring words at the margins, on opposite borders of the prose block; at the same time, prose compresses its texts perpendicularly, establishing new proximities and vertical formations from what would otherwise be discontinuous and semantically unrelated words. The strata of prose, with its layered lines, short-circuit the sequential ordering of grammatical and rhetorical constructions. Even prosaic lines, in short, disrupt the linearity of language in the Sausurrean sense. At the same time, however, they establish a new vertical axes, a pair of which Hamill has highlighted along the margins of the block.³ Furthermore, as the occasional strangeness of the words here attests, an insistence on the form of prose might also resist ignoring the telling fact of hyphenation required (all the more urgently with justification) for the compilation of uniform geometric textual strata. Prose, that is, operates at times with a linguistic logic operating below the level of the word and independent of the morpheme. Prose’s use of language subordinates local semantic structures to larger rhetorical ones, and hyphenation is one indication that language has been put in the service of prose, and not the other way around.

By transcribing only those words in a particular edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamill defamiliarizes the logic of the textblock that she truncates, highlighting one of the very points at which readers must work hardest to ignore the spatial disruptions of the mechanism of prose (other points of pressure on the illusion of prose’s neutrality, of course, occur with the turning of a page or the upward leap of the eye from the bottom of one page to the top of the next).⁴ For Silliman, Joyce “attempts a frontal assault” on the ideologies that would seek the disappearance of the page, fighting the illusions of unmediated realism through “the reintegration of the novel into language.” Hamill, in turn, further estranges the very format of Joyce’s assault – the trojan horse of prose by which his linguistic experiments are furtively smuggled within the walls of canonical literature – and the innocuous look of the novel with which he disrupts the tradition of the novel.

To put Silliman’s argument in the terms of an equation, exophoric referentiality and metatextuality operate as inverse ratios. The less a text seems to describe some external, diegetic world, the more it seems to refer to itself. Texts, in short, attempt to conserve reference; they cannot help but point, and they will try to point back at themselves if denied some other, more obvious, target. Accordingly, the language remaining here from Joyce’s largely erased sentences is often remotivated to discourse upon its own materials and methods. “Gutter,” for one obvious example of a “book,/ keyed// word,” appears at the gutter at one point, with “gutters” in the same position some three-hundred pages later, both suggesting the “channels” that divide the two pages of an “opening” (the technical term for two facing pages in a book’s full spread) with a doubled self-referentiality: “itself/ it’s// Opening.”5 The “sheets” – understood as “sheets/ papers” – that define the field of the page point to the disruption of the original mise-en-page of Penguin’s setting of Joyce’s prose: “pages/ buckled” as the “words/ original” syntax in his urbane prose is passed through the sieve of the bound page’s margin: “Urbane/ purred:/ pages.”⁶ Calling attention to what is read at the edge of those pages (“rededged/ page”) with Hamill’s “inside/ paper/ writing” technique bringing out the “language// between” two columns – and to what passes between the “leaned/ edge” or “leaned/ face” of one page and the “braided/ counterledge” of the facing – the focus slips from the novel’s interior monologues of Bloom and Stephen and Molly to the interior margins of the book.⁷ Joyce’s trenchant (“of Language: incisive, vigorous [...] energetic”) prose proves trenchant (“cutting, adapted for cutting”) at trenchant, making a song (-chant) at the trench of the typographic gutter.⁸

If a gutter, originally, denoted a small watercourse like a stream or brook, or a channel made to carry off the excess flow of water, here both the characters’ streams-of-consciousness (Molly’s famously unimpeded by the conventional number of full stops) and the liquidity of prose itself are dammed and diverted and interrupted by Hamill’s procedure. The material of ink itself, of course, is a viscous liquid, but the prose printed with that ink is also affluent: text, with a kind of liquid intelligence, is said to be “run” in prose, and to “flow” in a uniform layout; the text of prose seeks its own horizontal level as it fills the container of the page. Indeed, as Hamill reveals, versions of “run” and “flow” recur often in the gutters of the Penguin Ulysses.⁹

With the “break” of the margin, however, the “printer’s” “ink” that once seemed as if it “composed/ itself” “fluently” in its “printed/ prior/ avenue” – a “rolled/flow” in “in/ running// letters” along the “hallway// of/ words” – finds its “flow/ crushed” and “broken” to only a “ration/ flowing” or “Separation./ running”: no longer spreading in a continuous “flow/ written” horizontally, but stacked in staccato units of “the/ flowed/ rising” of a new verticality.¹⁰ Language here is “paperstuck.”¹¹ One couplet nicely encapsulates the tension: “erect,/ spread/ and/ jolly/ run.” In the new dispensation of Hamill’s gutter words, the repeated “upright” takes on an added import, accordingly: “Allimportant/ the/ columns./ said.”

Trimming the text of the Penguin edition to the thin “razor/ edge” of the gutter, Hamill’s excising leaves the shorn prose “smoothshaven/ taken/ into/ busk,/ edge.”12 In the process, she highlights another aspect of the logic of prose: the unintended conjunction of words which – given the specifications of the layout (point size, trim, et cetera) – could not be otherwise but cannot be predicted until after the text is set. That the gutter words so often refer to chance and necessity is thus both expected and surprising. The chance that leads to Hamill’s collage leaves the “college/ that/ was/ chances” [from the Latin col- + legĕre: things ‘chosen together’] – a “coincidence” with an “unexpected/ word” that seems to have “defied/ chance.”¹³ Here at the gutter, “kismet” appears, and reappears personified as “Kismet,” just as “providence” emerges as “Providential.”¹⁴ These words were “predestined” to fall at the margin, once Penguin decided on its design standards, but despite that “fate,” such “luck” always feels against the “odds.”¹⁵ “Whether/ luck” or “Always/ destiny,” the paradoxical tension of aleatoric necessity in prose is highlighted by the “fortune/ elimination” of Hamill’s gutter-words procedure.¹⁶

In the “sequent/ render/ accident” of “the/ magic./ light// chance// eye./ years,” that procedure brings out the ears in “years” to complement the perceptive organs of the “eyes” – a conjunction more in the style of Finnegans Wake than Ulysses.¹⁷ In such moments the tension in Hamill’s own practice – at once rigorously procedural and nonsensical, conceptual and “irrational” – begins to comment on the innovations of its source.¹⁸ As Robert Weninger has noted, using an emphatic language of flow, there was a “peculiar ‘con-fluence’ of Joyce starting to draft Ulysses in Zurich as of 1915 while, as of February 1916, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck were staging the Dadaist avant-garde revolution […] literally just down the road.”¹⁹ Tom Stoppard fictionalizes that coincidence of revolutionary writers (Lenin was also in the neighborhood), in his 1975 play Travesties, although there is no indication that Joyce and the Dadaists knew of each other at the time.²⁰ But that inscience is telling in itself, given that “Joyce’s use of experimental form is fundamentally opposed to the kind of experiment in abstraction practiced by the Dadaists.”²¹ Dada’s aesthetics of chance and nonsense are exemplified by Tristan Tzara’s classic proposal for an experiment in abstraction, his recipe “Pour faire un poème dadaïste [How to Make a Dadaist Poem]”:

Prenez un journal.
Prenez des ciseaux.
Choisissez dans le journal un article ayant la longeur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.
Découpez l’article.
Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-les dans un sac.
Agitez doucement.
Sortez ensuite chaque coupière l’une après l’autre.
Copiez consciencieusement dans l’ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.
Le poème vous ressemblera.
Et vous voilà un écrivain infiniment original et d’une sensibilité charmante, encore qu’incomprise du vulgaire

[Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Select an article having the length that you want for your poem. Cut out the article. Then cut out each of the words constituting that article and put them in a bag. Shake gently. Then remove each clipping one after the other. Conscientiously copy in the order in which they were removed from the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are: an infinitely original writer of charming sensibility, though misunderstood by the unrefined masses].²²

With its “razor/ edge” scissoring, accordingly, one might read Gutter Words as a forced introduction between the two Modernist modes pioneered in war-time Zürich.

The conjunction of Dada theme and method, moreover, comes together in one of the poetic precedents for Hamill’s procedure: Clark Coolidge’s long poem “Cabinet Voltaire,” from his 1968 book ING.²³ A typical passage reads:

tradict

theless

it gether
tastic
for

gin tion

and sarily
and
sests

In an interview with Ed Foster, Clark Coolidge recalls:

I remember some of the earliest writing I did was an attempt to do automatic writing under the influence of the surrealist concept of automatism. I had read that Motherwell collection of Dada painters and poets. But I couldn’t figure out how to proceed. I just kind of started writing and it got awful right away, real gooey and either sort of (what would you call it?) substitute-sexual or sentimental or too easy in associative pattern. Nowhere near even something like Soluble Fish, which at least has its points of interest here and there.²⁴

Coolidge, however, did indeed “figure out how to proceed” directly from Motherwell’s book. As he explains in a later statement, the poem in ING “came from a scanning of Motherwell’s Dada Painters and Poets.”²⁵ Motherwell’s book – as a book, as a specific, printed object, like the Penguin Ulysses – provides the structured source material for “Cabinet Voltaire.” Even the oversized pages of Dada Painters and Poets, with their print closely set in an exceptionally small font, required occasional hyphenation to accommodate the uniform strata of prose. For instance, the typesetter fragmented Hugo Ball’s “Dada Fragments,” where the words “contradict” and “nonetheless” supply the first two lines in the excerpt above. Moreover, Coolidge often reads straight down the margin, taking the first word or word-fragment in a series of consecutive lines. Although not as strictly procedural as Hamill’s practice, the compositional rules for Coolidge – with only one or two exceptions in the entire thirty-page poem – seem to be that he may only take words from the margin and must take them in the order they appear. The contingent format of Motherwell’s printed prose thus discloses the logical sequential order behind Coolidge’s seemingly disjunctive, inexplicably nonsensical verse. The words in “Cabinet Voltaire” evince a linear order, in the sequential sense, even as they “nonetheless . . . contradict” the linear sequencing of Ball’s original syntax; their linearity simply proceeds along a vertical rather than an horizontal axis.

Seen from this perspective, the odd title “Cabinet Voltaire” – in place of the expected “Cabaret Volatire,” the name of the Dadaists’ Zürich performance venue – in fact makes a certain descriptive sense. Coolidge has replaced the indiscrete and promiscuous flow of the vaudeville cabaret with the small constrained geometric container of the prose block: the cabinet of found linguistic curiosities. So where the 1921 manifesto Dada soulève tout! announced, “The cabinet has been overthrown,” Coolidge reinstates it by leveraging the very spirit of the Dadaists’ revolutionary textual experiments.²⁶ Recognizing that the interplay of rule and chance was not only a key Dada principle discussed by the essays and manifestos included in Motherwell’s collection, but that they were also demonstrably enacted through the format of the book, Coolidge takes the defining dynamic of the prose-block format – the simultaneous pull of chance and necessity – as a form that reveals poetic vocabulary. The seemingly static format of prose, in Coolidge’s procedure, is recognized as an active structure that can be put in the service of a genre: the avant-garde lyric.

Part of the effect of Hugo Ball’s own avant-garde poetry had been the “guttural sounds” which it amassed – a “dark guttural chant,” to take the chance aptness of a line from Ulysses.²⁷ One imagines that Gutter Words – with its irreverent gutting of a canonical work, along with its radical formal abstraction and disruption of grammar – would have delighted Ball, and irritated Joyce, although the Dada impulse to épater la bourgeois was itself also a central aspect of the succès de scandale of Ulysses and the history of its status as a published book and circulated object. Among the raft of outraged correspondence sent to The Little Review following the periodical serialization of Joyce’s novel, one described the Nausicaa chapter as “filth from the gutter of a human mind,” going on to lament not so much “the mire of his effusion” (whether the reference is to Joyce’s verbosity or Bloom’s ejaculation remains unclear) but “all those whose minds are so putrid that they dare allow such muck and sewage of the human mind to besmirch the world by repeating it.”²⁸ Here, that repetition continues, though in a radically expurgated version of “paper/ smut.”²⁹ If Joyce’s first readers found he had his mind in the gutter, readers now can see what Jo Hamill has mined in the gutter.

Craig Dworkin, Salt Lake City, 16 June 2019

The givenness of prose was not always the case; see Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich: The Emergence of Prose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Ron Silliman: “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e Supplement 3, The Politics of Poetry (October, 1981): np..
Ibidem.
See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (Peru, Illinois: Open Court, 1986), 69 et sequitur.
James Joyce: Ulysses, Penguin Modern Classics paperback (London: Penguin, 2000).
306; 77; 603; 181; 489. “Gutter” appears in Ulysses as one of the subjects disputed in the Aeolus chapter; in which Professor MacHugh argues that the imperial “Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps,” brings “civilization” in the form “only of his cloacal obsession” and is “partial to the flowing stream” (166; 167). Countering the sway of phrases like “the grandeur that was Rome,” MacHugh takes up elocutionary arms against the Imperium romanum: “What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers” (166).
40; 44; 914; cf. 293; 31; 272; 235. Paper is mentioned with surprising frequency; see 76; 104; 113; 228; 336; 785; 854; 898; as well as “papershuttle-” (562) and “blottingpaper” (34).
287; 195; 450; 4; 476; 335.
Oxford English Dictionary at trenchant.
Whether this preponderance is an indication of the words’ statistical prevalence in Joyce’s lexicon or mere happy chance would require further statistical analysis. Joyce himself at one point has Bloom truncate “language of flowers” to “language of flow” (339).
79; 353; 845, cf. “breaking” (113; 329) and “breakdown” (119); 659; 359; 802; 614; 315; 659; 387; 75; 845; 121, 493, 701; 193; 80, cf. “inward/ and/ separation” (826); 84; 62, cf. “middle/ through/ of/ he/ rising” (533). In addition to “thick/print” (898); “printed” (820; 518; 523); “printing” (325); and “design?/ paper” (153), compare other resonant passages: “secretness/ flow/ topping/ feel/ gushes./Language” (354), “foot-/ then/ see/ slipped/ wadding/ and/ rose./ meet/ to-/ up/ lingering/ a/ flowerlike/ forgiving/ parting” (478), and the gorgeous imagist “per / run/ wren-” (604).
126.
375; 647.
519; 801; 210; 397; 725.
573; 373; 531; 727; 567.
810; 453; 221; 727.
750; 486’; 855. Cf. “acciden-” (468) and “fortuned” (508).
666.
855.
Robert K. Weninger: The German Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).
Tom Stoppard: Travesties (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
Weninger, op. cit..
Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer,” La Vie des lettres 4 (May 1921).
Clark Coolidge, ING (New York: Angel Hair, 1968), unpaginated.
Edward Foster, “An Interview with Clark Coolidge,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 3 (Fall 1989), 26.
Clark Coolidge, untitled statement, Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head: The Angel Hair Anthology, ed. Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh (New York: Granary Books, 2001), 581. Cf. Robert Motherwell: The Dada Poets and Painters: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn Schultz, 1951). For a discussion of Coolidge’s relation to the visual arts, including a reading of “Cabinet Voltaire,” see Tom Orange, “Clark Coolidge’s Visual Arts Intertexts, 1968-1976,” Fascicle 2 (Winter 2006-7), available at http://www.fascicle.com/issue0....
“The Cabinet is overthrown” is Robert Motherwell’s translation of “Le Ministère est renversé” (183).
Crystal Jean Hoffman: Religion in Flux: Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings: Dada’s Prophets of the Word (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2010): 24; Joyce, Ulysses, 655.
Margaret C. Anderson: My Thirty Year’s War: An Autobiography (New York: Covici Friede, 1930): 212-213.
656.

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