Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art by Nico Israel (review)

The pun in the subtitle is admittedly dreadful, but it turns out to be vital to the book’s main enterprise. Nico Israel says as much: “Inspired by the puns of Duchamp and Joyce, … I deploy the word ‘Whirled’ in my book’s subtitle to put pressure on this politically neutral notion of ‘World’” (11). Spirals aims to unpack, often quite brilliantly, linguistic accidents that send a text’s meaning flying outward, and it is in the chapter on Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce that Israel is at his most inspired. The readings of Duchamp’s spiraling ribbons of text in Anémic Cinéma are magnificent:¹

“ON DEMANDE DES MOUSTIQUES DOMESTIQUES (DEMI-STOCK) POUR LA CURE D’AZOTE SUR LA CÔTE D’AZUR.”

A literal translation of this counterclockwise spiraling passage might read, “SEEKING DOMESTIC MOSQUITOES (HALF-STOCK) FOR THE NITROGEN CURE ON THE AZURE COAST.” But this rendering almost completely elides what makes the intertitle both witty and salacious, a salacious wittiness whose circuit of implications even an attentive French reader might not have caught in the nineteen or so seconds during which the phrase spiraled on the screen. Availing ourselves of an interpretive languor that was unavailable to its original audiences confronting the speed of cinema: On demande is familiar from the language of newspaper want ads—“One asks [or seeks]” is a more polite way of saying “I want to buy.” From here, … the intertext relies on two puns involving echoic contrepèterie: the first is “des moustiques domestiques (demi-stock)” whose first three syllables—“des-mou-stiques”—morph into “do-me-stique” and then “de-mi-stock”; the second pun paronomastically counter-repeats the three syllables “cure-d’a-zote” as “côted’a-zur.”

(128-29)

One of the considerable pleasures of Israel’s text is his own spiraling style: “witty and salacious” turns into “salacious wittiness”; the rapid s’s of “nineteen or so seconds … spiraled on the screen” decelerate into the liquid l’s of “languor … unavailable to its original.” Israel was born to this: not for nothing are the letters of his last name hidden in the final intertitle of Duchamp’s work: “L’ASPIRANT HABITE JAVEL ET MOI J’AVAIS L’HABITE EN SPIRALE” (131). I live in the spiral: “ISRAEL” is in “SPIRALE.”²

This kind of analysis is tailor-made for Finnegans Wake, and Israel duly obliges, with readings of the spiraling T of the “Tunc” page of the Book of Kells, the ALP diagram in II.ii (FW 293.12), and a nice riff on “virevlies” (FW 199.36), a word that includes the Vire river, fireflies, and “hvirvel, the Danish word for ‘whirlpool’” (152). Once you start looking for them, spirals are everywhere in Joyce: Israel finds them in Molly’s tea (“The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea”—U 4.366), in Constantin Brancusi’s “Symbol of Joyce” (JJII 614), and, of course, all through “Scylla and Charybdis.” Citing “the whirlpool of Platonism” (142) as Stephen’s particular peril in that episode, Israel links the theosophy of William Butler Yeats and George Russell to Plato’s shadow kingdom and reminds us of Stephen’s vision of AE with the faithful hermetists “ringroundabout him” (U 9.282). Here, perhaps, Israel misses a spot: though the “auric egg of Russell” (U 9.103-04) is correctly understood as an acrostic of AE, the initial letters of the phrase also form a spiraling anagram of “ear.” The porches of the ear are everywhere in “Scylla,” but no more frequently than in this occult paragraph:

—People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the...