Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

e v e r y d a y L i F e
familiar is no longer familiar (as for example when we arrive in
a hotel room, or a furnished house, and trip over furniture, and
struggle to get the coffee grinder to work). But via this deviation
through disorientation and strangeness, Chaplin reconciles
us on a higher level with ourselves, with things and with the
humanized world of things. 13
The other brilliant spokesperson of the everyday is, of course,
James Joyce. His masterpiece Ulysses, Lefebvre notes, “demonstrates
that a great novel can be boring. And ‘profoundly boring.’
Joyce nevertheless understood one thing: that the report of
a day in the life of an ordinary man had to be predominantly
in the epic mode.” 14 The bond between Leopold Bloom, one
ordinary man during a single, ordinary day in Dublin, and the
heroic epic journey of Odysseus is precisely the bond that exists
between Lefebvre’s ordinary man and his “total man,” between
the present and the possible. The former is pregnant with the latter,
already exists in the former, in latent embryonic state, waiting for
Immaculate Conception, for the great, epochal imaginative leap.
Thus, while Lefebvre’s utopian vision of the total man seems way
out, and grabs us an idealist mixture of hope and wishful thinking,
his model is really anybody anywhere, any old Leopold or
Molly Bloom or Stephen Dedalus. What appears to be stunningly
abstract is, in reality, mundanely concrete: the ordinary is epic just
as the epic is ordinary. In Ulysses, “Blephen” and “Stoom” find a
unity of metaphysical disunity, just as the ordinary man and total
man can find their unity of metaphysical disunity; the poet–artist
son and the practical-man-of-the-world father conjoin. Two worldhistorical
temperaments—the scientific and the artistic—become
one and soon wander empty darkened streets, wending their way
back home to where Molly sleeps in Ithaca, at 7 Eccles Street.
In a stunning literary, psychological, and—perhaps—revolutionary
denouement, Ulysses ends with Molly’s tremendous stream
of unpunctuated consciousness; visions and opinions, fragments
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