Terraplane, this question would be the key given this forum wouldn’t it? And even though I think it’s dangerous and a fallacy to consider it too deeply or for too long a time, personally anyway, it still crosses the ol’mind. But with that, I’d agree with your take. Partially b/c it’s a cyclical thing, as life…so the irony will dwindle and an honesty will be reborn. But a new honesty. The modernist period will never be again, not in it’s naivete in regards to truth and love…no matter how hard I pine for it. There are to many blankets of deception now, or so we make ourselves think. Some other thing will come though either gently or as a great fracture. But we’ll not be told about it until someone writes it all out in a neat and tidy package for the canon 5 decades from now.

I really appreciate your thoughts here though. Thank you.

But yes, the limits of any framework are where all the good things happen. Joyce’s use of language is unique, really. I love Pynchon, and I love Don Delillo, their use of language can sting, but not in the same way as Joyce. Joyce has a dimensionality to his language that is astonishing. Stinging, tender. Profane, beautiful, pulling the readers’ experience into his text, makes it breathe. Put into historical context, you see Joyce pushing against the language, against the form of a novel, generally, against the state, against tradition, striking a mighty blow for the new Modernism.

The study of language and the merger of fiction and philosophy is really interesting. It is the essence of what philosophers do, and writers as well. I’ve always liked the gradual philosophical tack fiction takes. Eco, Delillo, Pynchon, Sartre write with a point of view which is of course their experience. The way they see things. Their novels become emblematic of certain philosophies but I don’t believe that they started out that way. They put meat on the abstractions of Derrida, Semiotics, Lyotard, Lacan etc. They humanize Schopenhauer, or at least make him relevant to a larger audience.

Which begs the question, what is photography doing today? I really like Eggelston, some Opie stuff, but damn if most everything out of MFA programs (especially in NYC) all seem so familiar. The Dykstra/Opie/Soth postmodern portrait, a style that first surfaced in 1996 or so, is still being imitated, and lauded. The feeling I get is that things are moving towards something more genuine. Something that is closer to a universal experience through the specific, and its back to Joyce.

The universal in the specific…

The course of this discussion may lead to the idea that one of the main themes (or as I read once, the main characters) of Joyce’s work is the language itself.

Language creating a sort of framework (and thus limit) to our ability to understand and percieve, to our reality…as I read someplace else, philosophy is fundamentally the studying of those limits of language. it is where Joyce went, where Beckett went, where all writers go, or attempt to go, as writers and philosophers at some higher point become one in the same.

I think photography is the same sort of study. Struggling out to that edge…

…that blows back like a great unimaginable headwind.

What is that last picture of?