The American Ulysses

For the first few shows of Seinfeld we were still figuring it out.  And then one day Larry and I took a walk up Fryman Canyon which was a very oxygenated walk, it was really steep, we were really huffing and puffing but we were getting a lot of air to our brains, and suddenly we were talking about a story and suddenly it became a stream of consciousness, like a James Joyce, thing, like “this could happen, this could happen, this could happen, this could happen.” And suddenly the form of the show kind of emerged from this conversation.

                                    —Larry Charles in conversation

Anything that is felt, and that is felt deeply or deeply enough or even that gives amusement, is material for art.  We don’t have to take a conventional subject like Greek drama, which could speak only of gods, or medieval painting, which was largely devoted to Christian mythology.  We can use anything, anything at all.

                                    —William Carlos Williams

I am become a name.

—Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”

American poetry defines itself, in the terms of Emerson and William Carlos Williams, as distinct from the English tradition.   Our subject matter, therefore, need be not be the same as it is to the Europeans.  And the same goes for that which we pastiche, our inspirations and references are to what is ours, not that which has been inherited from centuries ago on the other side of the world: our Ulysses therefore would not be based in the Odyssey—it is Superman, the North American epic, which our distinct epic of pastiche would reference: our Ulysses is not The Wasteland, that “great catastrophe to our letters” as Williams put it, that “gave the poem back to the academics,” and signified the defection of Eliot from American literature to that of Europe—our great work would come later, once the canon has been established, and indeed exists in a form as Seinfeld.  

            In the great American pastiche—whether is be Paterson or Seinfeld—stories from the Bible are not referenced; they first must pass through America’s great book, Moby Dick.   And, in the case of Seinfeld, it is not the novel that reconstructs the epic poem so as to cast everyday characters in the place of Grecian heroes—it is the situation comedy that reconstructs the, similarly serial, comic book, casting its everymen in place of Superman.  Stuffy old-world scholarship is thrown out; the writers don’t devote themselves to reworking the storylines of the reference work in the way that Ulysses has each chapter correspond to each book of the Odyssey.  Rather it is the character of Superman, a myth who transcends the texts devoted to him—comic books, television episodes, radio broadcasts, movies—that plays a role within the show and casts a shadow over it, a benevolent and unconditionally American shadow.

            The Americanness of Seinfeld cannot be overstated, that is, the extent to which its humor depends upon American idioms, objects, and, of course, television.  The show answers the call that Emerson put out 150 years earlier for “the poet” who, “with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness,” manages to “address ourselves to life,” and to “chaunt our own times and social circumstances.” In other words there is no distinctly American artistic creation to mirror our distinctly American civilization—“no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer” (Emerson 338).  

            William Carlos Williams approached the same question in the next century and advocated a split from English poetic forms, whose traditions and constraints muddled with the new and invigorating possibilities of the American Idiom, which he saw as “characterized by certain differences from the language used among cultured Englishmen, being completely free from all influences which can be summed up as having to do with ‘the Establishment’” (Wagner 101).   For Williams, there is a very real connection between the tradition, “the Establishment,” and the impediment of expression. “The conventions of speech and the conventions of art, of the poetic line,” as an interviewed Williams said, “carry over the restricting formulations of that language.  They even modify the thought of the language” (Wagner 25). 

            Seinfeld gives very unflattering depictions of pretentiousness, usually involving affectations of faux-English accents and putting on high-culture airs, and even worse are those who are explicitly English: Jerry’s alcoholic seatmate whose dog Farfel Jerry must look after; the rich dupes who find genius in Kramer’s portrait and invite him over to dinner for further study; Elaine dates, first in “The Soup” “a real bounder”—who says things like “Where I come from, we don't say ‘What?’ It's proper to say ‘Pardon?’”—and then an Englishman with a ponytail—“Come on: Ponytail. Get real,” as Jerry puts it—who unironically flourishes in the affectations of Manhattan (working in a high-end clothing store), and sincerely enjoys J. Peterman, (saying to Elaine, “I especially enjoy the catalogue, those fanciful narratives really take me away”); Mr. Pitt is vaguely English, but wholly a lampoon of upper class airs, eating a Snickers bar with a knife and fork, and generally being slightly removed from American culture, using his assistant Elaine as an intermediary with the common world; Jerry dates a closet organizer, a decidedly unnecessary upscale luxury, who is a virgin, or, in other words, disconnected from the current of cultural understanding that involves the unclothed, undignified, impure, and unrestricted, which, is what separates English poetic tradition from that Williams’ liberated American Idiom expansion of acceptable material.

            Joyce, of course, an Irishman, was also concerned with disrupting English arrogance and decorum, and expanding the conception of what is acceptable material for literature, causing a decade long ban of Ulysses in the United Kingdom and the United States.    The “obscene” elements of the book were simply descriptions of what would normally go unsaid: what are considered personal, undiscussed experiences that occur, for the most part, in the bathroom; though, to me, the depiction of Stephen and Leopold peeing outside is the most beautiful moment in the book. 

            The avant-garde looked to Rabelais and the carnivalesque, and arose from the bathroom when Duchamp, at the same time Joyce was writing Ulysses, signed a urinal—making “R. Mutt” an important precedent for George Costanza, the name signed by Larry David on his receptacle—, called it Fountain and entered it into an exhibit, only to have it rejected; and from Piero Manzoni’s 1961 90 cans of Merda d’ Artista, each with 30 grams of his own shit sold at the going rate of gold, to Archie Bunker’s infamous off-screen-yet-audible flush, to Andres Serrano’s photo of Jesus crucified in a glass of his own piss, to Chris Ofili’s use of shit in The Holy Virgin Mary, the incorporation of what we all experience in the bathroom has bestowed works with a taboo realism and a minimalist attack on artistic pretensions and bourgeois austerity.  If we put certain people on a pedestal—literally in the case of the Fountain reproductions—in museums, in libraries, and on TV, everything he creates should merit our attention; and, at the same time, if an artist produces shit just like the rest of us then we shouldn’t take anything he does that seriously.  Or if one knows where to find the best bathroom wherever you are in Manhattan, as George Costanza has figured out—in other words, has perfected defecation to an art—he deserves the Turner Prize.

            Like scatology and masturbation the use of autobiography is essential to both Ulysses and Seinfeld, as in any epic made intimate.  One could say that Joyce places his didactic, intellectual self in Stephen Dedalus—his already established alter ego in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—and his more visceral, personal, and metaphorical self in Harold Bloom; and that Larry David places his successful, likable self in Jerry, who in turn is the infallible Superman side, and his more truthful, offensive self in George, the more human and frustrated Clark Kent.  But, of course, this ignores the fact that his co-creator plays himself and is much more obviously behind the creation of his own character.    The nature of Seinfeld’s multi-authorship reverses the typical mode of autobiographical interpretations of a work: the principle question is not which character has the author favored with his sincere sensibilities; it becomes which author has imbued himself with the dynamic between Jerry and George and extended to Elaine and Kramer, and with the nature of a serial show, the authorship can change from episode to episode or even line to line. 

            The allusion within the patronym of Joyce’s alter ego complicates the potential definition of its user: is Stephen Daedelus named for the great inventor and creator of Greek mythology, which would highlight the capacity for narrative creation and imaginative innovention?  Or is he son of Dad Daedelus—Simon, the father who is crucial to the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,[1]—which would highlight the arrogance in proclaiming your writing to be as grandiose as wings that could liberate one to fly to her freedom?  When Icarus soars too high with the wings constructed by his father, and ignores his warning that they will melt if he flies higher than he needs to, he loses it all.   Whether Joyce is the father or the son oscillates through the novel, if the “a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air....a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea” is in fact just a boy whose presumption of his capability makes him less capable than he ever was.

            The last season episode “the Blood” aligns George with the arrogant son of Greek mythology Icarus—having botched a relationship in an attempt to incorporate food and television into the couple’s sexual routine, George explains that he “[f]lew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami.”   Jerry scoffs at George’s presumption, saying sarcastically, “Yeah: that’s what you did.”  It is at this moment that the epic winds down.  Larry David had already left the show at this point, yet George remains as the memory of the man who created him in his image, but, like the aging Ulysses that has long return to Ithaca in Tennyson’s poem, he has “become a name,” become defined by a myth that is larger than a single person could be; George’s being is no longer traveling through epic levels of ambiguity and layers of irony, as Odysseus once had the adventure of all adventures; he has become a cartoonish hedonist whose depth is sarcasm deep: “Yeah, that’s what you did.”   David’s rigorous attention to detail, to the undecidable joke, has faded away, leaving “an idle king,” one who is not on a voyage somewhere between Daedelus and Icarus, between Leopold and Stephen, George and Jerry, George and Larry, and Seinfeld and David and every other person who wrote for, acted in, or somehow contributed to the show—but has instead become a name: Costanza.

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[1] A title which invites questions about the work of fiction’s relation to its author similar to the titling of a situation comedy and its main character with the last name of its star and (co-) creator