Bartholomew Ryan ‘the projection of a metamorphosis of reality’: Work in Progress, the transition manifesto, and surrealism
This presentation explores the relationship between the experimental journal transition, surrealism and Joyce’s final work Finnegans Wake, in the struggle to articulate and express new forms of reality. In issue 16/17 of transition in 1929, which was based in Paris, its co-founder and head editor Eugene Jolas published their manifesto called ‘Revolution of the Word’. Containing twelve points (each one a single sentence), transition called for a narrative that is ‘a projection of a metamorphosis of reality’; to ‘emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology’; and that ‘the plain reader be damned’. There were twenty-seven issues in total from 1927 to 1938, which included over sixty pieces by surrealists, including Breton and Soupault; artwork by Kandinsky, Picasso, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, Miró, and Kafka; and texts by Michaux, Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo, Artaud and Hemingway, amongst others. At the centre of transition was of course Joyce’s Work of Progress, where transition published many of Joyce’s texts which would later come together to be published in final form as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The writing of Work in Progress took place during the entire lifespan of transition. I will show how connections and differences occur between surrealism and Joyce’s attempt to construct a ‘universal language’ (Jolas) as the self-declared ‘greatest engineer’ (stated by Joyce in the same year as the first issue of transition in 1927). This triangle of journal, movement and masterpiece also provides a contrast with other leading modernist artists, whose politics developed in another direction which was a new conservatism and in many cases fascism (for example, Wyndham Lewis, Pound and Eliot). What I point out is that surrealism and transition pushed and helped to provide a space and freedom for Joyce to forge the most audacious and plural work of literature in the English language of the twentieth century, which we are only now perhaps ready to read on masse. Here is a work that is articulating ‘the metamorphosis of reality’ of the ‘woid’ and ‘chaosmos’; and while, as Joyce writes, ‘his heart, soul and spirit turn to pharaoph times, his love, faith and hope stick to futuerism’.
Bartholomew Ryan is a philosopher, musician, and researcher at IFILNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is the coordinator of the research group ‘Forms of Life and Practices of Philosophy’ at IFILNOVA, and has published various books and essays on the theme of the plurality of the subject and relation between philosophy and literature. He is co-editor of the volume Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021); and author of Kierkegaard Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill, 2014). His next books are: Fernando Pessoa: Critical Lives (Reaktion Books, 2024) and James Joyce: The Unfolding Art of Flourishing and Decay (Oxford University Press, 2025). He has taught at universities in various parts of the world, and he has released six albums with The Loafing Heroes and a solo album called ‘Jabuti’ (2022) under the name Loafing Hero in the genre of dream-folk. https://ifilnova.pt/en/people/bartholomew-ryan/