Amor Patriae: Changing the Subject

I spend many idle moments browsing new music, and most songs I pass over with barely a listen. Every so often, there is a song that I return to again, and again, and again. Each listen peels back another layer of meaning. The last song I kept replaying like this was “America” by Squid. The song is actually covering one of my all-time favorite artists: Bill Callahan. The original “America” has the same driving, lopsided beat. Callahan’s lyrics are a wry panegyric to America’s musical and military glory (“Captain Kristofferson! Buck Sergeant Newbury!”). The titular refrain starts to sound like a sardonic “‘merica!”, and certain lines allude to the nation’s oppressive history (“Everyone’s allowed a past / They don’t care to mention!”).

Despite my admiration for Callahan, I prefer Squid’s cover of this song. In Squid’s version, this darker undercurrent spills onto the surface. The song’s subtle irony becomes a sinister drive towards its explosive finale. Like all great covers, it kept to the original writing but, through stylistic interpretation, utterly transformed the song. As Bob Dylan said of Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower,” this cover has left an indelible mark on the original. I will always hear Callahan’s “America!” as an anticipation of Squid’s more menacing version. The two songs are like a time lapse of whatever America symbolizes, over ten years and across the Atlantic.

Perhaps this song sticks in my head because I am grappling with this same theme: what does America symbolize. Is it the grand, golden home of the brave and Johnny Cash? Or is it a looming imperial threat? (I swore off writing about politics here, but readers may guess why this is on my mind lately.) Although I’ve never been nationalistic, I can’t avoid some feelings towards my country. As I think about my own life and what my existence means, I’ll inevitably consider the history and significance of where I grew up.

My first passion for literature was not local, however. I followed my grandfather’s interest in Irish literature, ever since he gave me copies of Joyce’s novels. Joyce immediately captivated me, such that I entered college wanting to know as much about him as possible (although fully understanding Joyce will take more than a lifetime). Joyce, like much other Irish literature (with the interesting exception of Beckett) is intensely local. He would say that, by writing exclusively about Dublin, he could work towards a universal artistic expression. The particular reveals the universal.

Indeed, the geographic diversity of Joyce enthusiasts (a small population) has always inspired me. It testifies that he did achieve the universality that he sought in his local experience. Joyce himself apparently found Dublin suffocating and spent most of his life across Italy and France. Still, his literary project kept going to the hometown and unique characters that raised him.

There is one line from Ulysses, spoken by Stephen Dedalus in the Eumaeus chapter, that has stuck in my head lately:

We cannot change the country. Let us change the subject.

Americans can resonate with this sentiment as politics becomes taboo in just about every setting. When political speech is unlikely to make any change, except losing a few friends, it’s best to find other topics of conversation.

However, Stephen speaks out of frustration, not mindfulness of divergent political views. He just bewildered his interlocutor, Leopold Bloom, with this exchange:

— You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.

— I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.

— But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.

— What belongs? queried Mr Bloom, bending, fancying he was perhaps under some misapprehension.

Bloom was just exhorting Stephen to pursue a writing career and contribute his own talents to the nation. Stephen rejects Bloom’s goodnatured recommendations as another net that society casts to restrain his genius. Stephen wants to become much more than a beloved local writer; he wants to define his country for the world. Ireland would receive its value from him, and not the other way around.

Stephen’s egotism is so extravagant that Bloom assumes he misheard something. Bloom has a more worldly respect for the arts. Writing is one of many honorable talents contributing to a greater community. Bloom’s more common point-of-view shows why so many citizens feel passionately about politics. If they don’t care about politics per se, they at least care about their country’s political future. No matter what their daily pursuit, whether artist dentist or construction worker, it obtains value through their community. They must believe in this community, this nation, as something they want to maintain. If many ideas of the future are incompatible, politics will quickly become a taboo subject.

Stephen resists this form of value, following his tendency to reject societal norms (non serviam, “I will not serve,” is a common refrain that he directs against church, employers, and his own mother). As he imagines near the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he would rather fly past the nets that society creates for him, flying past earthly bounds like his namesake, Dedalus.

There is more than a little ironic distance towards Stephen, whom we can usually treat as a younger version of Joyce himself. It is notable that Joyce wrote this part of Ulysses just as ambitious statesmen were founding a new nation in Ireland, ready to wage war over their respective visions of the future. Joyce knew, at this point, that some actions could change the country. Stephen’s argument is partly meant to look immature.

Yet there is more to Stephen’s remark than brusque arrogance. Escape is a common theme throughout Joyce’s writing, from the downcast Dubliners looking for some lucky turn, to Stephen’s quest to awake from the nightmare of history. Finnegans Wake might replace that nightmare with a dream, from which readers have still not awakened. In Ulysses, Stephen is turning this search for escape into a more positive project. Rather than dodge the nets, reject them like every conceited teenager, he would take them over, construct a new system of values.

Unfortunately, Stephen himself does not seem to accomplish this noble mission. He makes a valiant effort with an aesthetic theory on Shakespeare (the Scylla and Charybdis chapter, one of the most infamous for scaring off would-be readers). His roommate, Buck Mulligan, crudely dismisses the abstruse theory as sterile (he titles the whole theory Everyman His Own Wife Or, A Honeymoon in the Hand: A National Immorality in Three Orgasms). It is debatable whether Joyce approaches this goal in his own work, Ulysses.

Stephen chose the more difficult path, to reject established norms and traditions and create values that do not yet exist. If I can manage to love America, it is through the work of others who chose this path: artists like Charles Olson, David Lynch (RIP), or Bill Callahan; those who are never satisfied with what society hands them and set to work remaking it. They all have a fascination with what surrounds them, with what makes up their history, but do not settle for the official account. They take up history as Charles Olson did: he glosses historein as finding out for one’s self. This is what poetry is: creation, in the truest sense of the word.