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

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

Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central. It is certainly crucial to anyone who wants o understand the impact of the age of cataclysms on the world of high culture, the elite arts, and, above all, the avant-garde. For it is generally accepted that these arts anticipated the actual breakdown of liberal-bourgeois society by several years. By 1914 virtually everything that can take shelter under the broad and rather undefined canopy of 'modernism' was already in place: cubism; expressionism; futurism; pure abstraction in painting; functionalism and flight from ornament in architecture; the abandonment of tonality in music; the break with tradition in literature. (178-79)

Magisterial, pithy--and yet Hobsbawm never gets back to those brilliant if notoriously non-analytic fashion-designers, who had anticipated the shape of things to come in such a crucial way. No more mention of them or their shapes in his chapter on the arts from 1914 to 1945 at all. And yet, in the sense that they are highlighted by this gesture, it would appear that fashion designers, or fashion itself, is somehow synecdochic with the revolution in the arts and society generally. I would elide this with the disenchantment line of flight I've been following, in that the centrality of fashion, with its emphasis on an absolutely fabulous now, is surely a re-enchantment accompanying the rationalizations exacted by an expanding consumer market.

It is difficult to disentangle the numinous social halo of celebrity from the frisson of fashion, as celebrity is a fashion, a fashion in people. Celebrity and fashion are convergent modes of apprehension and experience, as well as often dovetailing and intertwining in their construction, production, and marketing. The "Circe" chapter of Ulysses is a place to look concretely at the unfolding of this social magic. Setting to one side the enormously important and incisive readings of that chapter for its aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and political richness, I would simply draw attention to several features that snap into view under the celebrity lens cap. I'm sorry to report that i could not find the actual words "absolutely fabulous" in Ulysses or in "Circe," but I did come close with Bloom's comment to Mrs. Breen that "you're looking splendid. Absolutely it" (15: 399-400). My textual technique here makes use of Ulysses a bit after the fashion of the Sortes Virgilianis, the medieval combing through of the magical Aeneid for its Christian foreshadowings, using the language of my text as a prophetic I Ching, a mosaic of words that may yield the shape of things to come. Isn't that precisely how we read Joyce, as bell-wether of things to come after the fact? At any rate, I hope we agree that "absolutely it" has the same resonance as "absolutely fabulous," and that if anything it is more magically resonant a phrase, given the fragile "it" that is meant to bear the full weight of the metaphysical implication of the shared social knowledge of itness. Clara Bow may as well have been called the Das Ding an Sich Girl.(1)