Beautiful Dreamers: The Watched Watchers of Picasso and Joyce

Pre-ramble: These musings were inspired by reading one of the essays in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art by Leo Steinberg. The essay in question, Picasso's Sleepwatchers, raised certain resonances with Finnegans Wake. The book is vitally interesting in a general sense far beyond looting for quotatoes. A remainder floated into my awareness in the tail end of winter nap reverie.



As much as anything else can be said, in one of the scheherezadean multiplet of tales we tell ourselves of Finnegans Wake is that, as Bishop relentlessly suggests, it is the voyeuristic story of an "unquiring" Mr Porter who loses and "refinds" himself submerged in a fantastical and universal existence under the fantastical "agnomen" of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, aka the universal Here Comes Everybody. And said shadow existence is filled to its finny gills with watchers and watched and watched watchers. But to be fully fair we must add: and night watches watching on first-second-third watch, and the assignation of the hands of a watch, and watching out lest ye be watched, and so on down through all ad infinitum-cy.

Much of that essay set off Wakean alarms for me. ("Thank you Loud.") Picasso's images of sleepers watched overpower their watchers with an apparently passive and negative capability, but when examined fully suggest a hidden power rather than a potentiality. As Steinberg puts it:

Sleep, the interior privacy of the sueño--the state of sleeping and dreaming which in Spanish goes by a single name--may be Picasso's symbol of the inmost self. Once while challenging the would-be interpreters of his art, he asked "how can anyone enter into my dreams?" He was protecting the self in its solitude, but also its secret inner facility.

"Is there not one who understands me?" He goes on to add:

The naive image of inactive sleep is clearly too mechanistic for Picasso's art.

He also reflects that:

... Picasso's sleep watching also has a Hispanic flavor. It recalls the poet Quevedo "posing wakeful questions to the dream-life" and Spain's national drama, Calderón's La vida es sueño, whose complex plot demonstrates "each man dreams what he is"... 

It might also be noted, although Steinberg has not chosen to emphasize it, that it is in the nature of visual art to have it watched by a viewer, so that the watcher is being watched by the very nature of the medium. And psychically, this suggests the metaphorical potentiality fo further nesting.

Sleep and the transrational may transcend the limitations of the day life in the form of a rebellion of the repressed, whether psychosexual or sociopolitical. And it can be in this form its facility and power may be expressed.

After all, sleep consists of (ideally) one third of all human life. Indeed in precise ratio one third of the angels joined Lucifer in rebellion. And a match ("lucifer") in Phoenix park lights the guilt-ridden watching of a watch when watch hands match at midnight. Picasso kept, as Steinberg puts it,  "irregular hours" and was "asleep when others were awake"; Joyce wrote for the "ideal reader with the ideal insomnia". It must be noted that ideal insomnia precludes ideal sleep.

To rewrite the Happy Fall and Fault Joyce takes a page from Blake with whom he had a deep familiarity. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,  Satan, who is potent purveyor of Energy & Eternal Delight, is really an exiled Jesus who has "rebuilt Heaven" from the abyss. Joyce built his heavenly structure out of abysmal puns. Blake told of a Universal Man, Albion, asleep to his potency. But Blake's Universal Man is now become an Irishman, an alcoholic, overweight, flatulent, red-nosed, humpbacked, bat eared Irishman, a tavern keeper--but also an unknowing Jesus-Finnegan avatar, unaware of the universality of his story, and in uneasy sleep confronts always and only himself. His knowing and not knowing, and his encountering and avoiding take the form of multiple watchings and forgettings.

And it is with this in mind I include the passage from Steinberg that caught my eye and triggered this essay:

Even in common experience, where wakefulness is a running down and sleep a renewal of forces, the advantage of power balance is not all on the side of vigilance. And inside a picture, where real motion is stilled, the contrast between sleeping and waking may be so conceived as to beggar the state of waking. Then the sleeper's repose, being self-contained and replete, will discredit the waking state as a condition condemned to the avid intake of experience and data, a restlessness which in its need to be continually feeding betrays incompleteness: and the other's quiescence will appear more puissant, because less dependent on perpetual maintenance. Even in common American speech a "sleeper" is a potential winner; while the Spanish sueño implies nothing less than the power to dispel facts.

In the waking world, the male, the white, the English, are all dominant. In the world of the Wake, the riparian feminine infiltrates the received story and ribs its great folly; the forces of the dark and the dark-skinned join hands to subvert the tongue of Empire via polysemy and polyglot; the colonized Irish are the Adamic race now, Joyce flicking the Irish idiom as deftly as a Fenian blade. So too, the repressed psychosexual forces emerge from the shadows and frolic in Joyce's language of howling puns, seminal themes, and cunning linguistics.

Mr Porter-HCE figure plays all the roles in a great forgetting that is sleep. Yet his family recapitulate their waking roles in some of their Wakean ones, yet have analogs in his own body. He is watching himself. As one example, his auburn haired dream-wife, ALP, the ruddy river Liffey, is in physical manifestation, his circulatory system. She indeed keeps the "keys to his heart."

The watcher of the self suggests an esoteric out of the body aspect of the Self that can examine with dispassion the thrashing of the self-mind. The self persistently enters into delusion and forgets what it has discovered.

The first watcher is Joyce, who is, like the divine creator, sitting on his cloud and "paring his own fingernails". The next watcher is the reader. The reader constantly falls for the delusion that they can approach the reading passively and analytically and ends up with the same delusions as the next watcher, Porter.

Porter, who has become HCE, forgets his waking life in his Wakean life, yet recapitulates it in parody. He constantly beholds himself. Yet, he forgets who he is. The reader is confused. Confused that he is confused in reading HCE's confusion he forgets that he ought to find it confusing. The reader becomes part of the joke too. Blake, helpfully describing fragmentation of the aspects of the psyche into its lesser parts, states "They became what they beheld." 

Much of the watching takes the form of witnessing potential but unresolvable crime and guilt.  Much of the watching consists of watchers watching watchers. The indiscretion in Phoenix Park in some sense triggered by a voyeuristic watching of two women, in turn witnessed by three soldiers.   

Even Joyce leaves his cloud, enters the book himself as Shem to clear things up. He too becomes a watched watcher. Though viewed as a shameful shambling sham, ALP knows he reveals the words of the heart to regather and heal the scattered parts of the psyche, but the message gets through in fits and starts. Even the Four Analyst bedposts with their questing voyeurism cannot clear things up with their anal lists and transcripts. Perhaps the reader becomes part of Shaun in his role as critic and theologian. But HCE becomes his whole family, the entire populace, and multiple interrogators and constantly shifting encounters of watched watchers. The more he dissolves the more he forgets who is interrogating whom, and the more he becomes "Mister Finnagain!"