Enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment: Joyce and the cult of the absolutely fabulous

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1995 by Wicke, Jennifer

Max Weber writes in 1918, returning to a phrase of Friedrich Schiller's which was to be an emblematic leitmotif for him, that "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental. Nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together" (155). Again and again, Weber himself characterizes modern culture by recourse to its disenchantment, a process he glosses richly but disconcertingly across the body of his work. Enchantment is bound up in magic, a "concrete magic" which provided the "unity of the primitive image of the world." In a world now more and more "denuded' of its "irrationality," the primordial unity of the image has split off into "rational cognition and mastery of nature, on the one hand," and into "'mystic' experiences" on the other, in a world "robbed of gods," as Weber has it (148).

A moment's reflection on the claim that art under such circumstances, that is, the art of modern times, is only intimate and never monumental, is belied by the work of James Joyce, among others. All cultural forms are in crisis, according to Weber, because "culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection," and the tension between rationality and irrationality intensifies "the more the external organization of the world is organized, and the more the conscious experience of the world's irrational content is sublimated. And not only theoretical thought, disenchanting the world, led to this course, but also the very attempt of religious ethics practically and ethically to rationalize the world" (Weber 147). So intense does the divide become that it is virtually impossible to imitate the life of Buddha or Jesus, for example, under "the technical and social conditions of rational life." Under such conditions magic, enchantment, the irrational, sublime, and salvific go under cover, become intime and purely personal, miniature, and imperfect.

A countereffect to this dwindling pianissimo, though, is the truly monumentalized locus of imperfection which is Joyce's life work, particularly the text we know as Ulysses. It intrigues me that Joyce's massive text is being produced just at the moment Weber predicts the shrinkage of modern art and its artifacts, unable to sustain any monumentality in his view because disenchantment is so thoroughgoing. If we attempt to discern a cultural logic in the very structure of Ulysses, it may be possible to understand its textual procedures as in part responses to the phenomena Weber was alert to, arriving at a different answer. The rough magic worked by the text could be a concrete magic for modernity, a reenchantment effected by an art that is anything but small-scale and self-effacing. Perhaps an art that could be called intimately monumental, or monumentally intime.

To argue this leads to the second half of my title, the "cult of the absolutely fabulous." Of course I simply wanted to batten on a charged phrase of the current culture, as instantiated by the excitement over the British television show Absolutely Fabulous (written and produced by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) and the dissolute latter-day Penelopes (I refer here to the characters Edina and Patsy) who preside over it. Much more generally, however, the cult of the absolutely fabulous is hyperbolic shorthand for the aspect of culture I see Joyce as having "gotten," where Weber remained relatively mystified in his demystification. That is, the realm of celebrity and celebrity discourse, seen in a very attenuated sense, whose reenchantments can be seen as providing the very architecture of Joyce's text. The cult of the absolutely fabulous is another way of saying the charismatification of celebrity, its raising to a principle of knowledge and a cultural logic. For something or someone to be "absolutely fabulous" implies a hierarchy of value wherein fabulousness can be aspired to and ascribed and agreed upon, to the degree of absoluteness. Fabulousness is ineffable in that it does not inhere in actions or quantifiable deeds, yet it remains a potent and sublime cultural property bound up in fabrication and fashion to equal degrees. What this would mean when applied to an icon of modernism like Joyce's Ulysses, granting that there is a linguistic stretch involved, one with all the satisfaction of the tight yet provisional fit provided by spandex, is that the text participates in strategies of re-enchantment undreamt of in Weber's philosophy.

The cult of the absolutely fabulous would clearly not entail the worship of timeless values or stable verities; fabulousness is evanescent, numinous, and yet of the moment, at least of the moment when its fabulousness is pronounced absolute. Notice that I am not installing Joyce as a member of any cult per se, but rather acknowledging that the social sea change which sweeps in celebrity in its wake is registered and even embraced by the particularities of Ulysses as a text. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his recent book on what he therein calls the "short twentieth century" (1914-91), to wit, The Age of Extremes, begins his chapter on the arts from 1914 to 1945 with the following: