March 14, 2009
Today in History: March 14, 1887
Sylvia Beach, who is responsible for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses
Sylvia said of Joyce: "As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore."
(Anyone who can say that he has "never met a bore" is a genius of the human spirit.)
A fascinating woman: born in Maryland, and as an adult a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Let's see - here are a couple of the names in Paris at that time: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Joyce ... (GOD for a time machine!) And so Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all.
When she met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". The funny thing about all of this is that Joyce said later, "The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it."
But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book, which was already highly controversial. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it.
And the shit hit the fan.
Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned (Joyce said later, "I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.") everybody was talking about it, who had actually read it? - you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - and there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet you could get a copy of Ulysses was through Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.
The comments of other great writers on this book are, of course, great interest to me. They run the gamut of disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... and I love it, too, that Yeats (an early supporter of Joyce) changed his mind. His first response on reading it? "A mad book!"
Then later, as it percolated, Yeats said: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
Hart Crane had this to say (or shout): "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."
George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, and its view of Ireland - so much so that it tormented him a bit. He saw it as an indictment (and, in a way, it was). He said, however: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."
T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?" And also - this quote really touches me, because as a writer, Eliot wasn't half-bad himself: "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." And lastly (and I think this pretty much gets at the root of what was so disturbing to Eliot): "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."
Goose bumps.
Edmund Wilson wrote of it:
The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.
Wilson also wrote:
"Yet for all its appalling longeurs, "Ulysses" is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. "Ulysses" has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."
And here is the lady who first made this "epic of the age" available to the world, at great financial and personal risk:
Joyce eventually moved to another publisher - for later editions - which left Beach financially stranded (along with the Great Depression which really hit Shakespeare & Co. hard.) But Beach had rich influential literary friends - many of whom came to her rescue during this difficult time. Famous writers did readings at Shakespeare & Co., admission was charged, people paid subscription fees - and in this way the bookstore made it through. Beach died in 1962. She wrote a memoir called Shakespeare and Company
She said:
I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.
February 9, 2009
It's kind of a family epidemic.
These photos were taken on the same day. It was not planned. It's just how things are when you are an O'Malley.
MY SHIRT
MY BROTHER'S SHIRT
February 5, 2009
Reunion
Speaking of Joyce and February 2nd and Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company:
Here is a great photo of a Shakespeare & Co. reunion. What a cast of characters. Posted on that wonderful website on February 2nd. Coincidence? I think not.
February 2, 2009
More Joyce
In my web wanderings today, I came across this wonderful post - a man tracking down Joyce's birthplace in Rathgar. With photos and commentary. He braved "the apocalyptic snows of Leinster to find the truth."
And thanks for the link, Ernie. You've been sending all kinds of fascinating people my way.
Today in history: February 2nd
Two things happened on today in history:
February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.
February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses
James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners
It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."
His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.
Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.
The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.
James Joyce had fled Ireland, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind him, back in 1904. Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school in first Zurich (that didn't work out), and then Trieste. He convinced his new-found love, Nora Barnacle, a wild girl from Galway, to run away with him. He had known her for only a couple of months. They had met on June 16, 1904 - the day that he would choose to set the entirety of Ulysses on, the ultimate tribute to what she gave him. James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife" (the two would eventually marry in the 1930s) ... and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was quite a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).
James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.
Joyce wrote:
Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!
What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?
Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?
James Joyce wrote once:
"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"
Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. One chapter (the Cyclops chapter, naturally) is the "eye" chapter. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
Ouch. Crows don't like that when you point it out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about the response of crows to their superiority. They need to just keep being eagles.
But James Joyce wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. He wasn't going for an effect, he wasn't trying to be clever. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He wrote from that stance. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't precocious, he wasn't self-conscious about it. (Actually, he was - but I'll touch on that in a bit.) The thing to get about Joyce (and this is where he is truly an eagle) is that he wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging.
He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):
The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.
I believe him. Certainly there were serious ideas in the book, it's a revolution, really ... but looked at in another light, in Joyce's light, there is "not one single serious word in it". It's a joke, a maze, a puzzle, an examination of ridiculous coincidences and connections. What does it "mean"? That's the stupidest question of all to concern yourself with. It means nothing.
Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:
You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.
And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. freakin' Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the real death-knell.
T.S. Eliot said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".
James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.
Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.
Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there.
I love this - here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).
Who was the cartoonist?
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).
When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. Let's not forget the huge influence of Freud at this time. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote. Freud - and Jung - were hugely influential to writers like Joyce and Proust.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives ... He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?
There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. You complain that you stubbed your toe that morning, and certain people will say, "TMI!" Someday I'll write a post on how much I despise the "TMI" trend, and how I think it is actually indicative of so much that is effed up ... "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" It's just that now that we have "TMI" to say, it's way over-used. If I never hear the phrase "TMI" again, I will fall asleep a happy woman. Sure, there's such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. Something that is not in any way, shape or form new - it's been going on forever, as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. I include myself, by the way, although you will never ever catch me saying "TMI"! I am all ABOUT "TMI"! But the first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."
Joyce cuts right to the core of that very human experience. He will not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead, with its final revelation of connection to all in the last four paragraphs, is all about. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.
To walk around saying "TMI, TMI" whenever anyone reveals anything about themselves is to exclude yourself from the human family.
The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. It's just that he was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table. He was rather conventional, rather bourgeois.
Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.
Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.
As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK.
Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.
All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language ... and her image of embracing her husband as they lie among the rhododendrons is some of the most romantic language of all time:
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Brings me to tears every time.
The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. Writers, in general, were itching to get their paws on the book ... what the hell is that crazy Joyce working on now?? ... people felt competitive, nervous ... he helped them up their own game ... but in terms of the business side of things, the controversy had started before the book had even been published.
But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.
I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach
And the shit hit the fan.
Nora Tully describes it thus:
The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".
Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.
Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:
Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?
Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.
Extraordinary.
Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which really left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.
Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.
Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of appeals judge, Judge Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States. It was a ground-breaking moment, a true historical watershed - and his decision reads almost like an insightful and intuitive literary review. Not to be missed. Go, Judge Woolsey!
The comments of other great writers on this book are of great interest to me. I can't get enough. I have compiled them all in a notebook. I love to read through them. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... He made other writers feel like putting down their pens. He enraged those who felt that THEY deserved HIS accolades (phone call for Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, phone call) ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.
Joyce had made his mark.
Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"
Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."
George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."
T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"
T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."
Edmund Wilson wrote of it:
The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.
Wilson also wrote:
Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."
Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a letter:
Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.
Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung
Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"
Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter:
"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"
The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:
"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."
Hilarious.
George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:
"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."
Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:
"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."
Gertrude Stein wrote:
"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."
Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."
George Bernard Shaw again:
"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."
Ezra Pound said:
"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."
Yeats wrote:
"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):
"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."
E.M. Forster wrote:
"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."
Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:
Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.
Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:
"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."
Ford Madox Ford wrote:
"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."
William Faulkner wrote:
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote:
Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.
That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".
Last year, at around this time - almost exactly a year now - my father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.
I have been unable to look at it over the past year. I brought it home with me, put it on a special shelf, and stayed the hell away from it. It seemed to mean something ominous, something final. I didn't want to pick it up, and be casual about it. Even just looking at the book gives me a chill down my spine.
This morning I took it out and spent an hour with it, treating it as carefully as a glass figurine. Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.
My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.
But it is now my most prized possession. I spent some time with it this morning. 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. In honor of the man who gave it to me, and in honor of the birthday of this book that means so much to me, that connects me to something so deep, so powerful - that I can barely speak to it.
I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.
The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance. My father taught us well.
Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece.
December 30, 2008
Happy birthday to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Dubliners
But it was Portrait of the Artist which really firmed up his reputation as a writer. Portrait, a book broken up into five long chapters, details Stephen Dedalus' journey from unknowing unthinking participant of life to artist. In order for Stephen Dedalus to put on the wings of Icarus, so to speak, he had to divorce himself from his influences: family, politics, church, language, and country. James Joyce himself wrote:
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning. ... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
Portrait is one of the most self-involved books of all time. Fatherland needed to be jettisoned. So did family. So did church.
It ends with the famous lines:
April 27 Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
It is that word - "artificer" - that is the clue to the book's power. What is art but artifice? This is not a bad thing in Joyce's lexicon. As a matter of fact, it is the whole point. It is the other things, the things we receive passively but without questioning (nationality, religion, our place in our own families) that are the true artificial entities ... Only art is real.
Then, naturally, 1922 brought the world Ulysses
Portrait is a huge accomplishment in and of itself, and it is best to look at it outside of the influence of Ulysses - because Ulysses is one of those things that casts such a long shadow in every direction - it's hard to see anything clearly. It's like trying to appreciate the other playwrights during Shakespeare's time (everyone besides Marlowe, I mean, who is great enough to be appreciated on his own). How does one get Shakespeare out of the way in order to appreciate the lesser accomplishments of his contemporaries? It's very difficult.
Kinda like that great quote from Bing Crosby, no slouch himself, on his contemporary rival Frank Sinatra: "Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in mine?"
Ulysses has the same effect - not just on Joyce's other writing, but on all other writers writing at that time (and they all knew it AS it was happening. Ulysses came out and it was like a bomb went off - the reverberations felt the world around).
I love Portrait of the Artist. I have read it many times, and each time I come to it I find something new. It's one of those books you can grow up with. At times in my life I find Stephen Dedalus frustrating. At other times I find him exciting, illuminating. It seems like the book changes with me. I also feel like I will never get to the bottom of the book. It's much more of a straight narrative than Ulysses (excerpt here) or Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) - but it still has a lot of mystery in it. It's not nonsensical - it's not mysterious for the sake of being mysterious - it's just that it's a deep deep pool. Joyce was beginning his internal journey, the one where he, as a writer, would try to break down what life actually felt like, moment to moment to moment ... For example, in the third chapter of Ulysses (excerpt here), Stephen Dedalus (again the protagonist) goes for a walk on the beach. We have learned in chapter one (excerpt here) that Dedalus has broken his glasses. Joyce does not remind us of this fact in chapter three. As a matter of fact, it never comes up again in the entire 800 page book. He mentions it just once. But in that walk on the beach, all of the sensations come to Dedalus as either blurry images or sound, just the way they would if you had lost your glasses. But Joyce doesn't spell it out, he does not say, "Having lost his glasses, Dedalus saw the world as blurry." Instead, he shows us this, he tries to put us inside that experience with lines like:
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.
Brilliant. The dog itself is not seen clearly or perceived. But the dog's bark runs towards him, stops, and runs back again.
Ineluctable modality of the visible.
Joyce complained once:
"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"
Trying to describe and experience "the mystery of the conscious" was what Joyce's life-work was all about.
Here is an excerpt from the masterful Richard Ellman biography of Joyce
:
To write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce plunged back into his own past, mainly to justify, but also to expose it. The book's pattern, as he explained to Stanislaus, is that we are what we were; our maturity is an extension of our childhood, and the courageous boy is father of the arrogant young man. But in searching for a way to convert the episodic Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce hit upon a principle of structure which reflected his habits of mind as extremely as he could wish. The work of art, like a mother's love, must be achieved over the greatest obstacles, and Joyce, who had been dissatisfied with his earlier work as too easily done, now found the obstacles in the form of a most complicated pattern.This is hinted at in his image of the creative process. As far back as his paper on Mangan, Joyce said that the poet takes into the vital center of his life "the life that surrounds it, flinging it abroad again amid planetary music." He repeated this image in Stephen Hero, then in Portrait of the Artist developed it more fully. Stephen refers to the making of literature as "the phenomenon of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction," and then describes the progression from lyrical to epical and to dramatic art:
The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event and this form progresses till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea ... The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life ... The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished.This creator is not only male but female; Joyce goes on to borrow an image of Flaubert by calling him a "god", but he is also a goddess. Within his womb creatures come to life. Gabriel the seraph comes to the Virgin's chamber and, as Stephen says, "In the virgin womb of the imagination, the word is made flesh."
Ellman goes on to discuss Joyce's structural choices for this book - much of it tied up with the fact that Nora (his wife) was pregnant at the time of writing:
His brother records that in the first draft of Portrait, Joyce thought of a man's character as developing "from an embryo" with constant traits. Joyce acted upon this theory with characteristic thoroughness, and his subsequent interest in the process of gestation, as conveyed to Stanislaus during Nora's first pregnancy, expressed a concern that was literary as well as anatomical. His decision to rewrite Stephen Hero as Portrait in five chapters occurred appropriately just after Lucia's birth. For A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul, and in the metaphor Joyce found his new principle of order. The book begins with Stephen's father and, just before the ending, it depicts the hero's severance from his mother. From the start the soul is surrounded by liquids, urine, slime, seawater, amniotic tides, "drops of water" (as Joyce says at the end of the first chapter) "falling softly in the brimming bowl." The atmosphere of biological struggle is necessarily dark and melancholy until the light of life is glimpsed. In the first chapter the foetal soul is for a few pages only slightly individualized, the organism responds only to the most primitive sensory impressions, then the heart forms and musters its affections, the being struggles towards some unspecified, uncomprehended culmination, it is flooded in ways it cannot understand or control, it gropes wordlessly toward sexual differentiation. In the third chapter shame floods Stephen's whole body as conscience develops; the lower bestial nature is put by. Then at the end of the fourth chapter the soul discovers the goal towards which it has been mysteriously proceeding -- the goal of life. It must swim no more but emerge into air, the new metaphor being flight. The final chapter shows the soul, already fully developed, fattening itself for its journey until at last it is ready to leave. In the last few pages of the book, Stephen's diary, the soul is released from its confinement, its individuality is complete, and the style shifts with savage abruptness.
If you go back and read the book again (or if you haven't read it - and are reading it for the first time), keep in mind the underlying structure. It's subtle - it's all done through metaphor, imagery, and language - but it's there. The development of the soul is never described - it is experienced through Joyce's language choices. This is Joyce's main contribution to literature as we know it. No other writer even comes close to accomplishing what he did - although many imitate him. Many probably imitate him without even realizing who it is they are imitating, that is the level of Joyce's influence. But Joyce was imitating no one. He had many influences - his sense of the tide of literature is encyclopedic - but he knew he was breaking with the past. He didn't break with the past just to be a rebel, or because he thought the past was worthless. On the contrary. He wrote the best way he knew how. He said later, "With me, the thought is always simple." And this is true in the stories of Dubliners, and it's true in the "gibberish" of Finnegans Wake
Remember: Joyce was an Irishman. The Irish language had been stomped out by British imperialism. Whatever language he wrote in, and he wrote in English, he knew that it was not really his own. Joyce wrote:
"Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The British, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget -- the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature."
Joyce also said:
"I'd like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition."
Portrait, without becoming polemical, without turning itself into Irish nationalistic propaganda (something Joyce had contempt for), describes one Irishman's journey to divorce himself from that tradition. Joyce wrote his books about Ireland, but they were not really FOR Ireland. The funny thing is: Joyce lived most of his life outside of Ireland. But he could not write about anything else. He had a lot of anger towards Ireland. My words there are not really appropriate. Anger? Try rage. The provincial nature of the culture, the priest-ridden social life (Joyce said, "In Ireland, Catholicism is black magic"), the inability of its inhabitants to live freely, to "touch one another" (not just sexually, altlhough he meant that as well) ... He knew he offended his countrymen by telling the truth about what really went on in Ireland, but he didn't care. First of all, he came to the realization at some point that "I can't write without offending people", and he also realized:
"It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.
Rage.
Joyce got in there WITH the language - and made it do what he needed it to do. He said that he would like a language that is "above all other languages". And so he set out to create it. Shakespeare did the same thing. Chaucer did the same thing. This is the level we're at here: Writers who didn't just accept language as it is. Writers who, through their own work, catapulted language to another level. We cannot think about the English language without talking about Shakespeare. Or Chaucer. Joyce, with his status as an Irishman, had a lot of feelings about all of this - because the English language was imposed upon his country. It wasn't imposed on him personally - he grew up speaking English - but it was imposed on his ancestors, and he had internalized that cultural disconnect. This is one of the reasons why he felt that the Celtic revival of his time, and all of the Irish language classes that started popping up again, were so ridiculous. Why would Ireland want to go backwards? Religion and language were the things that were holding Ireland back in the first place. He, unlike Yeats, unlike Synge, unlike the other big writers of that time, had no interest in cavorting with the peasantry in the west of Ireland. Joyce was a city boy, first of all, strictly urban ... and his gaze was turned permanently towards Europe. His first big influence was Ibsen. Dubliners is filled with stories where the characters yearn to get out, to flee ... they stare at the boats in the quays (excerpt here), boats from places like Norway and Argentina (excerpt here), and they know that getting out is their only chance of soul-survival.
Most writers who come from countries who were colonized have these feelings about language - it's a very interesting dialogue. If he COULD express himself fully - it would have to be in some OTHER kind of language (which is where Finnegans Wake came from.) Language ITSELF needed an overhaul. Again - you can count the writers on one hand who actually have this sense about language - and who are actually genius enough to pull it off. Joyce rebelled against that tradition of language, but unlike lesser talents, he didn't rebel against it by ignoring or belittling Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, or Chaucer, all of the great influences on the English language. No. He accepted that tradition, and he took from it what he felt would help him, propel him ... He loved language, and puns, and derivations ... He felt there was a deeper meaning to all of it, something that was quite universal. By retreating into the Irish language, Joyce felt that the Irish were damning themselves to irrelevance.
But he never forgot that English was NOT, in fact, his "native" language. It propelled him forward. It helped him be free of his influences (but not without a struggle), it helped him write from the inside, as opposed to narrate from the outside. This is one of the reasons why you can tell, just by looking at the page, that something is by James Joyce. His stuff doesn't LOOK like other people's stuff. It is instantly recognizable, not just by sound, but by sight as well.
The first chapter of Portrait is told from the point of view of Stephen Dedalus as a small child. Instead of either making the child precocious and able to narrate his own tale (like most writers do when writing from the point of view of children), or just deciding, "what the hell, he's a child, but he will speak with MY voice" ... Joyce opens the book with a cascade of senses, sound, sounds, colors, random comments, strange connections, nursery rhymes ... He was writing AS a child. What it might be like to BE a child. It is an act of ventriloquism.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckooHis father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.O, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:
-- O, Stephen will apologize.
Dante said:
-- O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.--
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.
This type of writing is par for the course now. Joyce's influence was as wide-spread as Marlon Brando's was in the world of acting. If you watch Streetcar now, it may not seem as revolutionary, because that is the style of acting practiced by pretty much everyone now (although without as much talent!). But that is only because of Brando's power and range in those early roles. He set the standard. There were others, of course, but his name will always be attached to that revolution in acting. Joyce's contemporaries - Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and others - were also working in the same vein as Joyce. This was not a singular journey, it was part and parcel of the mood of the time (same with Brando's new naturalistic style of acting).
As the book moves on, Stephen leaves childhood behind, and begins to open his eyes to the world around him. He is not immediately a rebel. On the contrary. He does not know yet that he is an artist. He is still a "young man". He wanders the streets of Dublin arguing about aesthetics and Aquinas with his friends. He resists, for some reason, signing petitions supporting Irish nationalism. The group will never be "for" Stephen Dedalus. Even before he knows who he is, he remains solitary, uncommitted. He will not be a joiner. Although he flirts with it. He becomes deeply religious in one chapter, terrified of the fires of hell (mainly because of his lustful thoughts and his masturbation). The pendulum swings to one side, and Dedalus feels he cannot keep up with his own sinning ... not enough praying in the world will make that sin vanish. The pendulum then swings back, and after the fire of religious piety fades, you get the sense it will never return. Dedalus has left it behind, shedding that self along his journey. He will now be free.
Language must also be jettisoned.
This is clearly shown in the "tundish scene", the most famous episode in the book. It is also (in my opinion) the most overtly angry, although you have to really pay attention ... Joyce requires you, the reader, to do some work here.
-- To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.-- What funnel? asked Stephen.
-- The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.
-- That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?
-- What is a tundish?
-- That. The funnel.
-- Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.
-- It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.
-- A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.
On the surface, that might seem like a benign moment. An intellectual moment. A moment of appreciating the difference of the languages and cultures. But that is a mistake with Joyce. If you take only the surface of it, you will never understand "what the big deal is" about this writer. Seen in its context, the "tundish scene" is one of the angriest moments in all of Irish literature, hell - all of literature, period. So yes, with Joyce, the "thought is always simple". In that scene, the English priest is unaware of the language of the country he actually lives in. It has never occurred to him that there might be another word for the "funnel", and he is fascinated by that prospect. But seen from the other side of the fence, the Irish side, the priest's ignorance of what his own culture has done to the culture it now sits upon, to know that a very fine word, "tundish", has been stomped out of existence ... and to have the priest be unaware of that fact, and also curious about it in mainly an intellectual way ...
It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Back to Ellman's analysis of the development of Portrait:
The sense of the soul's development as like that of an embryo not only helped Joyce to the book's imagery, but also encouraged him to work and rework the original elements in the process of gestation. Stephen's growth proceeds in waves, in accretions of flesh, in particularization of needs and desires, around and around but always ultimately forward. The episodic framework of Stephen Hero was renounced in favor of a group of scenes radiating backwards and forwards.1 In the new first chapter Joyce had three clusters of sensations: his earliest memories of infancy, his sickness at Clongowes (probably indebted like the ending of "The Dead" to rheumatic fever in Trieste), and his pandying at Father Daly's hands. Under these he subsumed chains of related mometns, with the effect of three fleshings in time rather than of a linear succession of events. The sequence became primarily one of layers rather than of years.In this process other human beings are not allowed much existence except as influences upon the soul's development or features of it. The same figures appear and reappear, the schoolboy Heron for example, each time in an altered way to suggest growth in the soul's view of them. E--- C---, a partner in childhood games, becomes the object of Stephen's adolescent love poems; the master at Clongowes reappears as the preacher of the sermons at Belvedere.2 The same words, "Apologise", "admit", "maroon", "green", "cold", "warm," "wet", and the like, keep recurring with new implications. The book moves from rudimentary meanings to more complex ones, as in the conceptions of the call and the fall. Stephen, in the first chapter fascinated by unformed images, is next summoned by the flesh and then by the church, the second chapter ending with a prostitute's lingual kiss, the third with his reception of the Host upon his tongue. The soul that has been enraptured by body in the second chapter and by spirit in the third (both depicted in sensory images) then hears the call of art and life, which encompass both without bowing before either, in the fourth chapter; the process is virtually compete. Similarly the fall into sin, at first a terror, gradually becomes an essential part of the discovery of self and life.
Now Stephen, his character still recomposing the same elements, leaves the Catholic priesthood behind him to become "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life." Having listened to sermons on ugliness in the third chapter, he makes his own sermons on beauty in the last. The Virgin is transformed into the girl wading on the strand, symbolizing a more tangible reality. In the last two chapters, to suit his new structure, Joyce minimizes Stephen's physical life to show the dominance of his mind, which has accepted but subordinated physical things. The soul is ready now, it throws off its sense of imprisonment, its melancholy, its no longer tolerable conditions of lower existence, to be born.
1 It is a technique which William Faulkner was to carry even further in the opening section of The Sound and the Fury, where the extreme disconnection finds its justification, not, as in Joyce, in the haze of childhood memory, but in the blur of an idiot's mind. Faulkner, when he wrote his book, had read Dubliners and A Portrait; he did not read Ulysses until a year later, in 1930, but he knew about it from excerpts and from the conversation of friends. He has said that he considered himself the heir of Joyce in his methods in The Sound and the Fury. Among the legacies may be mentioned the stopped clock in the last chapter of A Portrait and in the Quentin section.
2 In both these instances Joyce changed the actual events. His freedom of recomposition is displayed also in the scene in the physics classroom in Portrait, where he telescopes two lectures, one on electricity and one on mechanics, which as Professor Felix Hackett remembers, took place months apart. Moynihan's whispered remark, inspired by the lecturer's discussion of ellipsoidal balls, "Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!" was in fact made by a young man named Kinahan on one of these occasions. In the same way, as JF Byrne points out in Silent Years, the long scene with the deean of studies in A Portrait happened not to Joyce but to him; he told it to Joyce and was later displeased to discover how his innocent description of Father Darlington lighting a fire had been converted into a reflection of Stephen's strained relations with the church.
The end of Portrait fractures. The narrative voice has left us. The story fragments into Dedalus' journal entries. He is now free from family, church, the pull of Ireland ... he is now free to go inward and see where his soul wants to go. The wings of Icarus. It has not been an easy journey. Becoming free never is. But Dedalus now sees that he is an artist, he does not know what that means - he hasn't even created anything yet ... but he is ready ... ready ... for whatever what will come next.
Portrait of the Artist is the launching-off point.
For Ulysses.
Here are the excerpts I posted from each chapter of Portrait:
Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As with most other things, this book is so full of my father for me - that I can't tell where the book ends and my dad begins. He is woven into it. He taught me how to read it. He was there to talk with me about it when I wanted to talk, or ask questions. He showed me how to see.
Joyce, old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
December 27, 2008
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Ezra Pound
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
I grew up hearing stories of Ezra Pound - not just the stories of his fascism and his time in a cage in Italy out in the open air, or being indicted for treason or his breakdown - I mean, all that is interesting and fascinating and almost frightening. But Pound was a character in my childhood lexicon because of his support and promotion of James Joyce. His name came up all the time. Ezra Pound. Even the name calls up the rows and rows of books on my father's shelves, and my father's gravelly voice talking to me about these titanic clashes of the 20s and 30s, spearheaded by Pound.
Ezra Pound. The name is an onomatopoeic device. The man was tireless. He didn't just do it for Joyce, he did it for all of the Modernists. He was amazingly generous with new talent. Ferocious in his regard, and relentless. He promoted people until the public really had no choice but to accept the new voices. The relationship with Joyce is fascinating to me - but it is just the tip of the iceberg with Ezra Pound. Pound wasn't a rich man. He couldn't afford to be a Renaissance-era-type benefactor. But he had pull and power. He used his power wisely and well, yanking new writers into the spotlight, forcing them to stand still so that they could be fully regarded. Pound's dictum "make it new" is famous, and perhaps overused now - it is an oversimplification of Pound's general philosophy. Pound was a poet too, of course, but I think his true legacy lies in how he promoted other people. We owe him a great debt for that. His poems are controversial to this day, mainly because of his political beliefs and his eventual insanity. He was an anti-Semite, and worked against the United States openly during WWII. He paid for that, obviously.
Pound's poetry can be dense, difficult - and his contemporaries (like Eliot, Yeats) were conflicted about how good it was. I guess I am, too. Some of it blazes off the page with a truth that sears right through me - there are times (like the poem I post today) when his voice is clear, open, with nothing in between it and the reader. Pound can be awfully clever, and that can act as a smokescreen, or a barrier ... his cleverness ... but when he is NOT clever, when he speaks from the heart - I don't know, I find him to be pretty damn powerful. His engagement seems to me to be with abstractions. I could be wrong about that. I don't know much about Pound - although because he is such a giant figure to my father he resonates for me on that level as well. But it seems to me that Pound had that gift-slash-curse of the insane - which is to inflate abstractions into something almost unlivably austere. It is when people strive to live by their theories - come hell or high water - that they lose their humanity. The great political cataclysms of the 20th century, the genocides and slaughter, can all be somehow explained (again, oversimplifying) by heaving apocalyptic love affairs with theory. Let us take this THEORY of politics and force it into being. Abstractions imposed from above on a living breathing populace. It is amazing how powerful those delusions really are. One of the harbingers of living-by-theory is a belief in utopia (on the left-wing as well as the right-wing side), a true belief that the world can actually be perfected ... and it is my general belief that anyone who talks about utopia is someone to be feared. I've written about that before. Utopians may have the best intentions, but LOOK OUT for people with good intentions. Utopia requires the mess of humanity to be ironed out, eradicated. That is the only way it can work.
Now, again, I'm not a Pound scholar, so I don't want to go too off on a tangent here, because I am not on certain ground. But his insanity was obviously something clinical, a mental illness - but much of its manifestation had to do with the rigidity of abstractions. Rigidity cannot hold. There will be a snap sooner or later. There's controversy too surrounding Pound's eventual retraction of his fascism and anti-Semitism ... but all of that doesn't interest me as much as his poetry does. And even more than his poetry - his BELIEF in people of talent. James Joyce MUST find a wide audience. Pound was a dog with a bone when it came to his contemporaries with talent. My dad loves him for that, and so do I.
I also love Pound because that very tendency towards abstraction - which was so detrimental to his mental health, and led him down some very unsavory philosophical paths - also helped him be a master theorist of verse. He really engaged with poetry (that is also shown in the poem I posted below). He wrestled with it. He tried to divorce himself from his influences. He hated anything that was passively received. Everything must be examined, pulled apart, and evaluated on its own merits. Accept NOTHING at face value. He wrote about writing, he wrote about poets and poetry and what a poem SHOULD be (again with the dogmatic certainty, the pushing towards abstraction - which loves rules) ... and if he couldn't do it himself in his own work, he recognized the genius of others. He was not a bitter Salieri. Or who knows, maybe he was - but the impression I get of him is not of mediocrity, seething at the grandiose talents of his contemporaries. What I get from him is that he understood his poetry to be at the level it was at ... he worked hard at it, he was ambitious ... but his "mediocrity" (and please, I would count my lucky stars if I could be as "mediocre" as Ezra Pound) did not cause him to be ungenerous or stingy. Quite the opposite.
Modernism needed a champion. That champion was Ezra Pound.
He wrote in 1915:
Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (ie. simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions. It must be as simple as De Maupassant's best prose, and as hard as Stendahl's ... Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindeside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as 'addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing - nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Every literaryism, every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.
This was a revolution at the time.
Pound was breaking away from the Victorian stylings of the former generation. His belief was that Yeats was the greatest writer in English (and I can't disagree with him) and it was because of Yeats's emotional yet stark language, its lack of fripperies and embellishments (at least in his later great work) ... its sense that it was something "new". And indeed it was. Yeats began with lots of fripperies, lots of fancy-pants language, and while it always feels sincere - you can sense the struggle in Yeats. You can sense him trying to wrench himself out of the 19th century into the unknown 20th. Pound was instrumental in pushing him in that direction, encouraging him, saying, "yes, yes, yes, THAT way ... THAT is where you need to go ..." If you read Yeats's work in chronological order, the development is startling. It's like you are reading the works of two entirely separate poets. You wonder where that second guy, the guy who wrote poems like "Among School Children" came from. Pound was part of that breaking-free of the past for Yeats.
A fascinating man. There's a new biography
It sits on my father's shelf right now, taking its place beside all the other Pound books.
Pound's politics may have been controversial, and they certainly ruined him (along with a host of other factors). His reputation has not recovered, and maybe it shouldn't. Who knows. It's not my place to worry about Pound's reputation, or to try to explain to annoyed people who ONLY know him for his politics why he is such a giant figure in the world of 20th century literature, and why he must not be discounted. To discount him, to ignore him, is to render the entire Modernist movement opaque. He is too big. He cannot be gotten out of the way.
Here's a poem he wrote that I really like. Any artist must grapple with his influences - either accepting or rejecting. It is a process. Once upon a time I hated Herman Melville. Now I love him. Ironically, after all of this talk about Pound's political rigidity ... what I am struck most in this poem is its flexibility. Its willingness to accept, to change.
His reputation has not surpassed those of his friends whom he championed. Eliot, Joyce, and many many others ... they loom far larger on the literary map, casting shadows that are far longer. But if you look into their journeys on even a superficial level, one name comes up again and again and again.
Ezra Pound.
A Pact
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
December 8, 2008
Speaking of Joyce:
A very interesting article about hearing writers read their own work, and the shock that can come hearing the actual voice.
The British Library has released a CD series of the recordings they have in their archives. Here's an article about it that makes me drool. That National Post article above made me think that Joyce had been included which made me think: "Huh. I have just one question. James Joyce was British? You're opening up a whole can of worms there, boyo. Kinda like the Russian Film Society inviting Jack Palance, a Ukrainian, to one of their awards shows. Not a good idea." But no - this is a collection of American and English writers, reading their own work, being interviewed, etc. Marvelous.
James Joyce has a brawling lilting Dublin voice that seems straight out of a book of stereotypes. Interesting: that the man lived the majority of his life outside Ireland, and yet the brogue remained thick as butter. Not surprising.
(I've put a clip of him reading from Finnegans Wake below the jump. It's TO DIE FOR.)
Here's a post I wrote about Finnegans Wake for anyone who is interested.
Happy birthday, Mary Gordon
Best-selling author Mary Gordon has her birthday today. I am particularly taken by Gordon's essay on James Joyce's "The Dead", which I post here.
Mary Gordon on James Joyce's "The Dead"It begins with a slap in the face. "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."
Well, and did you fall for that one? Literally? Don't you know the difference between literally and figuratively? You're no better than Lily herself, are you? Or perhaps you're not Lily, but the garrulous speaker of the second paragraph, the platitude-spouting fool. "It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance ... Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember ... Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout."
"The Dead" is built around a party, and for most of its duration we, like partygoers, swim in a clamor of voices, not only Gabriel's and the omniscient narrator's. Even Gabriel has many voices. There is the self-conscious Gabriel, the prissy Gabriel, the pompous Gabriel, the affectionate Gabriel, the lustful Gabriel. But many others speak: Miss Ivors, the political nettler; Mr. Browne with his forced jokes; Freddy Malins, who's just a little bit "screwed"; his mother, who tells us everything is "beautiful", including the fish her son-in-law caught in Scotland and had boiled for their dinner by the innkeeper. There is the novelettish voice of such sentences as "Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief," and the society-page gabble of "the acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time." There is Aunt Julia's voice singing "Arrayed for the Bridal" and Bartell D'Arcy's singing "The Lass of Aughrim." There is the voice of Patrick Morkan, Gabriel's grandfather, imitated by Gabriel: the very model of a stuffy twit when his horse makes a fool of him by walking round and round the statue of the King: "Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? ... Most extraordinary conduct! Can't understand the horse!"
To add to the tumult, Joyce offers us a series of lists, giving us information we have no need of: things that are only there for the pleasure of their naming. Guests are introduced briefly, for the sound of their names: Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Power, Miss Furlong, Miss Daly. There are the secondhand booksellers on the Dublin quays: Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, Webb's and Massey's on Aston's Quay, O'Clohissey's in the by-street. And, most important, the meal spread out before us, like Homer's catalogue of ships. Followed by dessert, the sweetmeats joined together by their jumpy integument of "and's".
This is the hubbub of realism, the buzz and Babel of the nineteenth century. Words, words, words, talk talk talk, and in so many voices, such an abundance that of course there must be misunderstandings and mistakes. "The Dead" is chock full of mistakes, beginning with Gabriel's ill-considered joshing of Lily about her beau, to which she replies, "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." Twice, Aunt Julia misunderstands: she doesn't know what galoshes are and doesn't get Gabriel's reference to the Three Graces. Browne repeatedly calls Freddy Malins Teddy and embarrasses the young ladies by telling the kind of joke they don't like. Errors of tone abound. Gabriel takes the wrong tone in responding to Miss Ivors's political challenge, and he mistakes the pressure of her hand for a conciliatory gesture, when it is really a prelude to her standing on tiptoe to whisper into his ear: "West Briton." Aunt Kate offers an ill-considered criticism of the pope's decision to banish women from choirs in favor of young boys, and she is chastised for doing this in the presence of Mr. Browne, who is of "the other persuasion". A conversation about monks sleeping in their coffin is dropped because it is too "lugubrious". And Freddy is ready to pick a fight in defense of a black opera singer whom no one, in fact, has criticized. "And why couldn't he have a voice too? Is it because he's only a black?"
The mistakes and misunderstandings seem to be smoothed over by Gabriel's speech in praise of his aunts and cousin, whom he compliments for their hospitality, their harmoniousness. There is the bustle of leave-taking, when Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne can't make the cabdriver understand them, and everyone shouts directions from the door, only adding to the confusion. Finally, the cab takes off, and upstairs there is the sound of music.
In the quiet surrounded by music, Gabriel sees his wife standing on the stairs. "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of."
We usually think of mistakes as affairs of language, a by-blow of the very separateness that causes us to wish to communicate with one another. But what Gabriel perceives and tries to create in silence -- a woman who is a symbol -- constitutes the central mistake both of his life and of the story. He assumes that the light in her eyes and the color on her cheeks have to do with him, as he will later assume that she has understood his desire for her and shared it. In his silent creation of Gretta -- a creation brought about without a word from her -- Gabriel has misconstrued the woman he has lived beside. Just as the narrator refers to Gretta only as Mrs. Conroy or Gabriel's wife, Gabriel assumes that Gretta's whole identity is connected to him. It is only after she speaks what is in her heart, after she tells her story, that the vision which both takes in and transcends separateness can occur.
She tells him of a boy she knew as a young girl in the West Country, a boy who died for love of her. Afterward, she sleeps. And in this silence, the silence which comes after true speech, Gabriel is transformed from petty if dutiful pedant to a man of vision.
The process happens in stages. He is dully angry, and this anger rekindles his lust. He is jealous. He is ironic. He feels humiliated, seeing himself as far less than the boy who died for her. When he speaks, his voice is "humble and indifferent," the humility and indifference Joyce thought to be the necessary conditions of the true artist. Then he is terrfied at the "impalpable and vindictive being ... coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." He notes that Gretta's not as young as she used to be and feels disgust for the reality of her body, represented by her petticoat string and the limp upper of her boot.
He thinks of his Aunt Julia's impending death, and this thought, born of benevolence, leads him to understand that to be alive is to be in the process of becoming a shade. Tears fill his eyes, and his blurred physical vision allows him to imagine the dead boy -- a shade, to be sure, but standing near, under a dripping tree. Gabriel loses himself, that distinct and separate self by which he has been able to be named. He is among the dead.
"His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world in itself which these had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling." What a strange word, the word "reared". What does it imply? That the dead have nurtured the world we think of as the real one as parents "rear" a child, feeding it, sheltering it, educating it, until it is ready to leave them?
Gabriel's vision takes him to the graveyard where the boy is buried. The snow is falling. In the extraordinary last paragraph of "The Dead", the word "falling" is repeated seven times: seven, the theologically magic number, the number of the seven deadly sins, the seven moral virtues, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on "the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns," those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Consider the daring of Joyce's final repetitions and reversals: "falling faintly, faintly falling" -- a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.
And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.
Brilliant. My dad loved that last line, too.
October 21, 2008
"O tell me all about Anna Livia!
I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear."-- Finnegans Wake
A wonderful post from one of my favorite bloggers about Finnegans Wake, which he calls "one of history's freakish cul-de-sacs", (I love that).
Like Patrick, I have read Finnegans Wake - in increments - and mainly outloud to myself. In my opinion, it reads much better out loud - you can hear it - because Joyce, being nearly blind himself, was mostly all about the sound of things. He experienced the world not visually, but aurally ... and the music of Finnegans Wake, because that is what it is, is in what it sounds like.
I was in grad school, a rigorous environment already - and I found, while I was in school, that I only gravitated towards mostly difficult works. My brain was used to difficulty (and I've never been one who thinks "it's an easy book" is the highest of compliments anyway) so while I was in school, and already tremendously strapped for time, I found myself reading difficult things like Leviathan
Then, as now, I was a morning creature - waking up at 5:30 a.m. to have quiet alone time before charging off to school where I would be busy until 11 o'clock at night, with barely time to grab a granola bar for lunch. I would sit on the couch in the living room, and read out loud to myself (quietly, because I had a roommate) - drinking my coffee - and sometimes taking notes, underlining things that struck me. I could only do a couple of pages a day. That was fine for me. I felt no pressure. I didn't try to read it like a regular book.
I had, of course, already read all of Joyce's other stuff - multiple times - "The Dead"
There is always a 'code' in Joyce, he loved codes and symbols and secret messages - and while there is always much for me to learn with Ulysses, that first time, with the help of my dad, I cracked the code. I got it. Once I could see what he was doing, it was seriously like Alice in Wonderland going through the magic locked door into the Queen's garden of roses. Not that the language is that opaque, it's really not - certainly it's not the mysterious dreamspace language of Finnegans Wake - but it's way more fun to figure out what Joyce was attempting so that you can then just relax, and stop struggling. ("The Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses is a perfect example of what I am talking about. It is, by far, the most difficult chapter of the book - with language that predicts Finnegans Wake - and it was the only time where I felt, within 1 or 2 pages, "Yeah, uh-huh, so I am obviously not QUALIFIED to read this." And I still feel that way, to some degree - I am not a linguist, so I can't say what Joyce is up to 9 times out of 10 - but with the help of my dad, I saw what Joyce was doing - and so it stopped being a foggy mystery, a wall of incomprehensible language - and suddenly became, oh, one of the most genius things I have ever read in my life. Not because it was difficult - but because it was complex and had an inner structure that I couldn't really see until I adjusted my own vision. I was really pleased when I received an email from a graduate student in Ireland, telling me that he had tripped over my post about the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, and it had really helped him crack the code for himself. I MUST give the props to my dad for that, because he was a big reason why I could figure it out. "Okay, so that's a chapter about birth. So look for nine sections ... everything's about NINE in that chapter..." etc.)
Finnegans Wake (excerpt and essay here) makes Ulysses seem easy, like a dime-store novel. But to me, that is the fun of it. Ironically (or, not so ironically) Joyce considered it his most accessible book. Joyce did not worry about his audience (of course he didn't - he went 17 years in between books!!) - but he felt that Finnegans Wake was almost populist in nature, made up of folklores, myths, oral history, legends ... Anyone could understand it. (Of course "anyone", at least in the Western world, was way more educated back then - Greek, Latin, all of that was par for the course in primary education ... so the frame of reference was much larger). Nora (Joyce's wife) looked at one of his pages of gobbledygook language and said, "Why can't you write a book that people would want to read?"
However, she - a rough uneducated girl from Galway - said, after his death, when reporters continually brought up Ulysses to her:
"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."
I can't say I enjoyed Finnegans Wake (although once I got into it I actually found the whole thing to be a hoot. Seriously. A HOOT.) Joyce famously said about Ulysses:
The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.
And you know, the more I read Joyce, the more I see what he was talking about. He obviously took his work seriously, agonizing over commas, and stuff like that ... but regardless of his giant reputation in the canon of 20th century literature - and the shadow he casts forward and back ... I always find there to be a silliness in his work, a lightness (this is actually not the case in The Dubliners, which feel like straight-up social realism to me - you can feel the influence of Ibsen there, Joyce's favorite writer) ... but I find the books to be ABOUT nothing. There is no "theme", no "message" and if you try to pin it down you will certainly miss the whole of it. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are not their plots (thank God - because what the hell happens in those books??) ... they are their language.
To quote Samuel Beckett, who had this to say about Finnegans Wake:
You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.
And once I surrendered, once I let JOYCE lead, and stop trying to lead the book myself ... the language took over, filling my head with sounds and echoes and reverb ... silly, juvenile, audacious, pointless - yet fun. Because it was fun for Joyce.
E.M. Forster gave a series of lectures on "the novel" and devoted a great deal of time to Melville's Moby Dick. He closed his lecture with words I find appropriate for Joyce as well, and Finnegans Wake in particular:
Moby Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song.
And speaking of song: Patrick also has a link to James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake.
August 12, 2008
Perceptions of Portrait
I loved this 1958 essay by John Kelleher about James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is a book I have read probably 4 times, all the way through, and I feel that I am never done with it. I can never say, "Okay, won't be reading that again, probably." There are only a few books like that, for me.
Portrait continues to morph, and grow - in my perception as a reader. It never seems like the same book twice.
Kelleher writes about this:
I remember that when I first encountered Stephen Dedalus I was twenty and I wondered how Joyce could have known so much about me. That is what I mean by the sort of reading the book will continue to get, whatever literary fashion may decree. Perhaps about the third reading it dawned on me that Stephen was, after all, a bit of a prig; and to that extent I no longer identified myself with him. (How could I?) Quite a while later I perceived that Joyce knew that Stephen was a prig; that, indeed, he looked on Stephen with quite an ironic eye. So then I understood. At least I did until I had to observe that the author's glance was not one of unmixed irony. There was compassion in it too, as well as a sort of tender, humorous pride. By this time I was lecturing on Joyce, and I was having a terrible time with the book. I could not coordinate what I had to say about it; and the students; as their papers showed, were mostly wondering how Joyce could have known so much about them--which was fortunate, for the lectures made very little sense, and it was well that the victims had their own discoveries to distract them.
Beautiful!
I also very much appreciated Kelleher's thoughts on Joyce's technique and themes. Because Joyce is often misunderstood. As Joyce himself said in regards to Ulysses:
The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book [Ulysses], or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.
If you miss the fun, if you miss that part of his work ... you miss most of it.
Kelleher writes:
He was past master of the confessorial technique that confesses nothing because it blabs too much. He could rarely permit himself to write simply from the heart, though when he did--as in the ending of Finnegans Wake or in the poem, "Ecce Puer," on his father's death and his grandson's birth--a most poignant power was released. Such passages give the lie to his usual affectation of wearing his heart up his sleeve. Why, then, the affectation? Partly, perhaps, because his artistic discipline was primarily late nineteenth century, art for art's sake, absolute subordination of subject to form, and because his subject was usually his own, often bitterly unhappy experience. What impelled him, I think, to choose and continue such a discipline was not just his artistic proclivities or the fact that he grew up in a cultural province where that view of art and the artist was still high fashion, but rather that he had a very Irish nature (counter to another Irish nature) that instinctively chose mockery if the alternative was tears. It is useless to observe that tears might often have been better for his health or that there are many places in his work where open emotion could have been admitted without loss of integrity. He was what he was. He hated what he called the "whine" in Irish poetry. When he noticed the impulsive tear and smile mingled in Ireland's eye his instinct was to give it a rough wipe. He did his best to keep his own eye dry in public. If he sometimes succeeded all too well, that was only what he intended.
Marvelous insight, I think. It's a funny thing: the Irish have a reputation for being full of sentimentality and twee-ness ... but the opposite is also true. Joyce despised sentimentality. Kelleher's thoughts there are quite good.
And the ending of the article brought a lump to my throat. That is my response to his letters to his daughter Lucia as well. Upsetting. But full of love.
Joyce fans: Read the whole thing.
(Here is just one of my many posts about Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.)
August 7, 2008
Today in history: August 7, 1934
The US Court of Appeals judged Ulysses by James Joyce to be NOT obscene and declared that the book could be admitted into the United States. Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:
Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:
It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.
Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety - it's a masterpiece of its kind. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it ends up being an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself:
United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59
December 6, 1933
On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.
United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.
Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.
WOOLSEY, J:
The motion for a decree dismissing the libel herein is granted, and, consequently, of course, the Government's motion for a decree of forfeiture and destruction is denied.
Accordingly a decree dismissing the libel without costs may be entered herein.
1. The practice followed in this case is in accordance with the suggestion made by me in the case of United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, and is as follows:
After issue was joined by the filing of the claimant's answer to the libel for forfeiture against "Ulysses", a stipulation was made between the United States Attorney's office and the attorneys for the claimant providing:
1. That the book "Ulysses" should be deemed to have been annexed to and to have become part of the libel just as if it had been incorporated in its entirety therein.
2. That the parties waived their right to a trial by jury.
3. That each party agreed to move for decree in its favor.
4. That on such cross motions the Court might decide all the questions of law and fact involved and render a general finding thereon.
5. That on the decision of such motions the decree of the Court might be entered as if it were a decree after trial.
It seems to me that a procedure of this kind is highly appropriate in libels for the confiscation of books such as this. It is an especially advantageous procedure in the instant case because on account of the length of "Ulysses" and the difficulty of reading it, a jury trial would have been an extremely unsatisfactory, if not an almost impossible, method of dealing with it.
2. I have read "Ulysses" once in its entirety and I have read those passages of which the Government particularly complains several times. In fact, for many weeks, my spare time has been devoted to the consideration of the decision which my duty would require me to make in this matter.
"Ulysses" is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become its satellites. The study of "Ulysses" is, therefore, a heavy task.
3. The reputation of "Ulysses" in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written, for, of course, in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, -- that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.
If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.
But in "Ulysses", in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.
4. In writing "Ulysses", Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the City bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.
Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.
What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.
To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of "Ulysses". And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce's sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.
If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in "Ulysses" the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.
It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.
The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.
Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique seems to me to be little short of absurd.
Accordingly, I hold that "Ulysses" is a sincere and honest book and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed of by its rationale.
5. Furthermore, "Ulysses" is an amazing tour de force when one considers the success which has been in the main achieved with such a difficult objective as Joyce set for himself. As I have stated, "Ulysses" is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt's sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers.
If one does not wish to associate with such folk as Joyce describes, that is one's own choice. In order to avoid indirect contact with them one may not wish to read "Ulysses"; that is quite understandable. But when such a real artist in words, as Joyce undoubtedly is, seeks to draw a true picture of the lower middle class in a European city, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?
To answer this question it is not sufficient merely to find, as I have found above, that Joyce did not write "Ulysses" with what is commonly called pornographic intent, I must endeavor to apply a more objective standard to his book in order to determine its effect in the result, irrespective of the intent with which it was written.
6. The statute under which the libel is filed only denounces, in so far as we are here concerned, the importation into the United States from any foreign country of "any obscene book". Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305. It does not marshal against books the spectrum of condemnatory adjectives found, commonly, in laws dealing with matters of this kind. I am, therefore, only required to determine whether "Ulysses" is obscene within the legal definition of that word.
The meaning of the word "obscene" as legally defined by the Courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts. Dunlop v. United States, 165 U.S. 486, 501; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.
Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and thoughts must be tested by the Court's opinion as to its effect on a person with average sex instincts -- what the French would call l'homme moyen sensuel -- who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role of hypothetical reagent as does the "reasonable man" in the law of torts and "the man learned in the art" on questions of invention in patent law.
The risk involved in the use of such a reagent arises from the inherent tendency of the trier of facts, however fair he may intend to be, to make his reagent too much subservient to his own idiosyncrasies. Here, I have attempted to avoid this, if possible, and to make my reagent herein more objective than he might otherwise be, by adopting the following course:
After I had made my decision in regard to the aspect of "Ulysses", now under consideration, I checked my impressions with two friends of mine who in my opinion answered to the above stated requirement for my reagent.
These literary assessors -- as I might properly describe them -- were called on separately, and neither knew that I was consulting the other. They are men whose opinion on literature and on life I value most highly. They had both read "Ulysses", and, of course, were wholly unconnected with this cause.
Without letting either of my assessors know what my decision was, I gave to each of them the legal definition of obscene and asked each whether in his opinion "Ulysses" was obscene within that definition.
I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading "Ulysses" in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.
It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned. Such a test as I have described, therefore, is the only proper test of obscenity in the case of a book like "Ulysses" which is a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.
I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes "Ulysses" is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.
"Ulysses" may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.
JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge
My favorite line of the whole thing:
In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.
To quote Joyce - whose words have been at the top of my blog since I started this damn thing:
This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.
All my Ulysses book excerpts can be found as links on this page.
June 16, 2008
Bloomsday: "modality of the visible"
Notes in my copy of Ulysses
On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, on June 15, 1904. She was a waitress at Finn's Hotel, a girl from Galway who had moved to Dublin. They had had a chance encounter on the street, where she had wondered aloud if he was Swedish, because of his eyes. When she told him her name, he said something about Ibsen (his inspiration and guiding star as an artist). Nora obviously did not know who this Ibsen was but she knew she liked this Jimmy with the blue eyes. He had asked her "out" - which, in Dublin, in those days, meant going for a walk. She had blown him off. He sat in the park waiting. She never showed up. So on June 15, 1904, he sent her this note:
60 Shelbourne Road
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me -- if you have not forgotten me!
James A. Joyce 15 June 1904
And apparently - they went out the next night - June 16, 1904. They took a walk. It's not 100% certain what happened on that walk, although from various comments both of them made, it is clear that something sexual happened. James Joyce's main experience with women at that point was with prostitutes. In Nora, he met his match, his mate. He told Nora later that on that day, June 16, 1904, he became a man. He did not just mean because of the sexual encounter. He meant that he joined the world - the world of being connected, not isolated ... his own man. A couple of months later, he got a job in Europe through the Berlitz School, and she came with him. They fled Ireland together, an unmarried couple, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind them. They had two kids together - Giorgio and Lucia - and were not officially married until 1930. They lived "abroad" their entire lives together, and were rarely parted from one another, maybe a couple months in that entire time was spent outside of one another's presence. She was the only woman for him. They were not a romantic pair, not at all (just read their "dirty letters" to one another! - the early 20th century version of phone sex) - but whatever it was that was between them ... was profound. They both clicked into place. Nora was an uneducated wild girl from Galway, with a tragic failed romance in her past (which James Joyce would use to spectacular effect in 'The Dead' - excerpt here). He was a struggling writer, frustrated and claustrophobic in Ireland, a country he found provincial, prudish, and stifling. Years later, Joyce would pay tribute to the walk he took through the streets of Dublin with Nora, and what it meant to him, by setting the entire book of Ulysses on that one day: June 16 1904.
The best part of the whole story is a comment from Nora in one of her letters to James Joyce, 1940:
Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.
Nora exaggerated - she had read the books, although they were not her thing at all - and after his death, when every reporter was hounding her, asking her about Ulysses, she complained, with an insight that should be startling to anyone who underestimates her as some dumb silly woman (and believe me, there are those people out there):
"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."
Additionally, there is this comment from Nora - a most quotable woman. After her husband's death, she was asked what current writers she liked, and her reply was:
"Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."
Ulysses came out in 1922. Nora Tully describes the reaction:
The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once.
The wonderful John Banville, who has written a bit about Joyce, and how Irish writers get fed up with trying to struggle out from under his shadow:
Ulysses is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity, that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval.
I mean, how many people have an opinion about the book without having even read it?? It was never for the masses - Joyce always felt that Finnegans Wake was far more accessible, he thought everyone could read that book - 5 year old kids, 80 year old women, doesn't matter - it had everything in it, it was about sound and myth and dreams ... humanity. Ulysses was far more specific, it had far more ambition.
Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company in Paris, is the one really responsible for bringing Ulysses forth to the public - and because of all of the obscenity accusations and brou-haha about the content of the book - it was banned pretty much everywhere. You could be arrested if you were caught smuggling a copy into the United States. So because of that, there was a time where the only place you could get a copy of the book was at Shakespeare & Company - so frantic orders came in from people all over the world, famous, not-famous ... I've seen one of the orders - from Peggy Guggenheim - covered in exclamation points - begging to send her a copy as soon as possible. It was the literary event of the decade (and, eventually, the century - and pretty much everyone had that sense ... that Joyce, with one damn book, the Irish bastard, had changed everything. Like TS Eliot remarked, famously, "He has single-handedly killed the 19th century."). Here's a post I wrote in honor of Sylvia Beach.
Now. Enough about the background of the book.
The book itself.
I recently did long posts on each chapter in Ulysses - which were exhausting, actually - I had to gear myself up for it - and which were tremendously gratifying. I get wonderful emails from strangers telling me they used those posts as a guide when reading the book for the first time. I cannot explain how much that means to me - and how that is one of the main reasons I still maintain this blog.
One of the things that people don't get about Ulysses (by that I mean, the people who haven't read it, and yet still maintain some hostile opinion about it) - and one of the most important things to remember about the book is that it is not about anything. It is not "important", in any self-conscious way - although it is an extremely self-conscious book (Joyce was one of the most self-conscious of all writers - I don't mean shy or unsure, I mean acutely aware of himself) - it is not trying to make a point, it doesn't care about the world at large, it's not taking on "issues" of the day (at least not in any pamphleteering type way - although the book deals with Irish issues, and politics, and education, and sex and religion) - but Joyce didn't narrow anything down. It's not "important". It doesn't have anything to say about the world. It does not illuminate for us the subtext of a giant world war, or a Great Depression ... it is not political. It is a "day in the life" and that's pretty much it. Yes, the writing stuns ... the amount of information and references he gets in ... the style of each section is breathtaking ... but Joyce himself said (and this is key):
The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.
SO true and I think if the book is not read in that manner, if it is read in the way you would read any other socially conscious novel or novel that is attempting to shed light on a pressing issue, or an unforgotten people - we're all used to reading books like that ... If you try to read Ulysses in the same way, it will be absolutely impenetrable.
But if you give up your expectations of all of that, and surrender to the language - because that, after all, is what Joyce is all about - the sound (I am sure this is partly because of how blind he was - his books are so musical, not visual at all) - the book opens all of its secrets to you. It does not withhold. It does not stand like some snotty barrier written by a pretentious modernist. It is a rollick. A ridiculous romp through the streets of Dublin by human beings who worry, laugh, eat, fart, have fights, think about things, argue, chat ... It has NO point. It is not meant to have a point.
Another thing that Joyce said about his own work which I found really helpful to keep in mind was that: "With me, the thought is always simple." It should be a mantra for those wanting to read Ulysses for the first time. It is not a complex book, although the structure is highly intricate, and you could spend your entire life trying to unravel it, and understand it ... It's a hugely complicated and detailed web of references and styles and language clues - but the thought itself behind all of it is never ever complicated or opaque. The thought is always simple.
I want to belong.
I love my wife.
What does it mean to be a man?
What does it mean to be Irish?
What does it mean to be a Jew?
I wish I fit in.
I wish I was like everyone else.
I wish my wife loved me more.
I wish my husband loved me more.
Doesn't this beer taste good?
Why can't we all get along?
These are the thoughts that make up the book. Joyce makes you work for it, though - he sure as hell does ... but once it is revealed to you, once you open that magic door ... you are never the same again. There are sections of that book that will be with me forever.
So much of Ulysses is tied up, for me, in my father, who was my tutor and mentor when I first read the book. I have written extensively about that experience, and I won't go into it again. But one of the things I got from my dad was to just go easy with the book, don't work too hard, but make sure you try to get into his mindset (which changes from chapter to chapter) - because if you don't it will all seem to be gibberish. My favorite example of my father helping me do this is when I was struggling, desperately, over the first pages of what I now know is the Cyclops episode. Every "episode" in the book has a different style - dictated by an internal list of cues in Joyce's head which is what makes the book so fun - figuring out what the hell he is doing. And the chapters are not helpfully labeled "This is the Cyclops episode", "This is the Lestrygonians episode" - you have to figure it out yourself. It's helpful to have a copy of Homer's story nearby, it really is. So this new chapter starts, and it's a whole new voice - it's a first person narration but it is obvious that it is not Leopold Bloom speaking ... who the heck is this person? And this new narrator is regaling his friends with a story of what happened earlier - an altercation in a pub between a man known as The Citizen - a crotchety Irish patriot, a bigot - who eventually turns his sights on Leopold Bloom, also in the pub, with an anti-Semitic rage. Bloom is Jewish but he is also Irish. The Citizen is having NONE of that bullshit. But it's not The Citizen who narrates - it's some other guy. He tells his story, and one of the things he always says is: "says I" ... He's telling a story where he was a main player, so the refrain is "says I":
There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.
Just one example of many. I was completely LOST reading this. The writing itself is not unclear - but I needed to get into Joyce's motivations ... or I would never "get it". I said to my dad, "I have no idea what the hell is going on here." I handed him the book. He looked at the page. He didn't read any of it - just looked at it - and said, handing the book back to me, "Oh, that's the Cyclops episode."
What?? "How can you tell that just by looking at the page? You didn't even read it!"
Dad said, "Look at how many times the letter 'I' is on that page."
I glanced down again, and that was the key, that was the abracadabra: All I could see on the page suddenly was:
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
The clue was right in front of my face, I just needed a bit of a push to "see" it. That's another thing: Ulysses is one of the few books that you can identify just by the LOOK of the words on the page. And once you know the book, you can tell the episode you're in - by how the words LOOK on the page. The Molly episode, with its 40 page runon sentence, and almost no paragraph breaks, doesn't look like anything else. The Sirens episode, with its choppy musical beats, its short phrasing, doesn't look like anything else. And the Cyclops episode is slashed with the letter "I". The Citizen IS the Cyclops - and the one eye of the Cyclops is IN the language. You can SEE it. It's right there.
That's the fun of James Joyce.
He never disappoints. He may have "killed the 19th century" but he is still, today, fun and relevant and new. He will always be ahead of his time. That's why the writers of the day - Hemingway and Yeats and Pound and all the others - were so freaked and excited (and, in some cases, envious and pissed) by Ulysses. There was no middle ground. And I suppose there still isn't. Neither should there be.
It's just that kind of book.
And so, to those Joyce fans out there - to those heading off to Bloomsday celebrations - to those who decided to read the book based on my posts and who loved it and had fun with it - to those who approach Joyce with openness and curiosity (or, like William Faulkner commented: "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.") - I wish you the happiest of Bloomsdays!
I'll let Molly Bloom have the last word. I mean, she would anyway, so why not oblige her. Ulysses closes thus (and, in my opinion, it is meant to be read out loud - we are inside Molly Bloom's head in the last episode, there is no outside narration ... but we don't need it to understand what is going on ... especially here ... If you can't figure out what Molly Bloom is doing here, then there is no hope for you. But, as always with Joyce, there is another level ... or many other levels, I'm sure I am only aware of one or two ... Joyce said he wanted to end the book with "the most positive word in the English language" - and that is one of the things I think is so important to get about Joyce, whose reputation precedes him, and that is all well and good - but not if he is then suffused with a seriousness that he did not embody ... The man was fun, the man loved life - he loved his wife and kids - he even loved Ireland ... He was not nihilistic in his outlook at all. He is one of the great humanists of our age.) So, here's Molly, center stage now, closing out the book, in her declamation of positivity, of affirmation, of love and life:
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
yes, indeed.
Happy Bloomsday.
February 27, 2008
"I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true."
WONDERFUL interview with Anne Enright, author of The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize last year. I finished it near my birthday last year (post here) - and had mixed feelings about it, although the writing knocked me on my ass. I just LIKE her as a person, too - every interview I've read with her has been fascinating. Seems like a lady I'd like to have a pint with.
She says in the interview:
Q. Where does the idea of "authentic" Irishness come from?A. From the diaspora. They dreamt about Ireland and reinvented it. Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in "Old Ireland." It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.
I read that, and thought of the piece I wrote "Road Works Ahead". I'm a writer. I read other people's thoughts and think of my own work. That's the way it goes. I still get emails about that "Road Works Ahead" piece. Irish people, Irish-American people - but mostly straight Irish. After I wrote that piece, an Irish newspaper linked to it, a big one, a national paper - and my piece was used as a launching-off place for an op-ed column - by an Irishman, who was worried about what had happened to that good old Irish hospitality. I felt a cringing within me when I saw that I had been referenced, I have a sensitivity towards how i come off ... i didn't want to seem like I was criticizing Ireland, or behaving like an obnoxious irish-American, pissed off that there were no more leprechauns. But the op-ed column was quite honest, and quite open ... it took my observations (made as an outsider, yes) and started to ask questions, based upon those observations. And the response I got was overwhelming. And also quite respectful and nice. It was great. Like I said, people still email me about that piece.
I am (a couple generations removed) a member of the diaspora and I recognize it in her words. I recognize it from the conversation I had with Eamon in the piece I wrote above. The whole Quiet Man thing, and the whole ambivalence about progress and change.
And I LOVED LOVED LOVED Anne Enright's thoughts on Joyce. I literally giggled with glee when I read them:
Q. Almost every review of an Irish writer's work makes comparisons to James Joyce. Is it hard to get away from him?A. I don't want to get away from him. It's male writers who have a problem with Joyce; they're all "in the long shadow of Joyce, and who can step into his shoes?" I don't want any shoes, thank you very much. Joyce made everything possible; he opened all the doors and windows. Also, I have a very strong theory that he was actually a woman. He wrote endlessly introspective and domestic things, which is the accusation made about women writers - there's no action and nothing happens. Then you look at "Ulysses" and say, well, he was a girl, that was his secret.
Marvelous. I want to read that to my father. He will appreciate it.
February 2, 2008
Today in history: February 2, 1882
Today is the birthday of James Joyce. He was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar.
Joyce wrote:
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning. ... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
I chose one of my favorite Joycean quotes as the tagline to this blog ... and you know what? Even though I look at the quote every day ... it stilll inspires me.
In honor of his birthday, I will post some of my favorite quotes ABOUT James Joyce - said by his fans and fellow writers.
ABOUT JOYCE
-- Nora Joyce, his wife, said: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?"
-- T. S. Eliot said, after reading Ulysses: "He single-handedly killed the 19th century." (This way pissed Gertrude Stein off, because she was already convinced that SHE had killed the 19th century. hahahahaha)
-- Nora Joyce (Joyce's wife) - after Joyce's death - was asked about which new writers she read. Here is what she said: "Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."
-- James Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake for 17 years. Nora, looking at the gibberish pages, the ciphers, the codes, said, "Why don't you write books people can read?"
However: Nora always thought that Finnegans Wake - which pretty much the entire world thought was incomprehensible - was his best book. She understood it. She understood the language. Years after his death, she was still pestererd by reporters about James Joyce. And nobody ever asked about Finnegans Wake - which confused her. It was always Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses. She commented once, "What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."
-- George Bernard Shaw said, upon reading Ulysses (a book which disturbed him greatly): "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."
-- Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson - after reading Ulysses: "Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."
-- Gertrude Stein was very pissy and irritable about Joyce's phenomenal success. Here is what she said about him: "Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day." Joyce was told Stein's comment, and his response was: "I hate intellectual women."
-- TS Eliot said a lot about Ulysses but one of his comments that I really like is: "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." Writers everywhere had the same response.
-- Carl Jung read Ulysses and was so moved and disturbed by it that he wrote Joyce a letter about it:
Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.
Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung
My favorite thing is that Joyce was so proud of this letter (and rightfully so) and he read it outloud once at a dinner party, and Nora snarked after he finished: "Jim knows nothing at all about women."
-- Joseph Campbell said, upon reading Finnegans Wake: "If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake."
-- James Joyce said: "When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the 'second' city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world."
-- -- James Joyce said, in 1907:"If I knew Ireland as well as R[udyard] K[ipling] seems to know India, I fancy I could write something good."
-- Here is what Samuel Beckett had to say about the language in Finnegans Wake: "You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself."
-- Ezra Pound, one of Joyce's greatest champions, had this to say about Ulysses and The Oxen of the Sun episode: "In a single chapter he discharges all the cliches of the English language like an uninterrupted river."
-- Poet Hart Crane had this to say after reading Ulysses: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."
-- Sylvia Beach, book store owner and publisher of Ulysses had this to say about Joyce: "As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore."
-- Oliver Gogarty, friend of Joyce, and immortalized in Ulysses, said: "Looking back, there was something uncanny in his certainty, which he had more than any other writer I have ever known, that he would one day be famous. It was more than mere wishful thinking. It governed all his attitudes to his compatriots and accounts for what many referred to as his arrogance. He was never really arrogant, but seemed to have a curious sense of his own powers and wouldn't tolerate anyone who didn't really appreciate his work." (That comment about Joyce's supposed arrogance reminds me of one of my favorite quotes - this one from Bette Davis: "I was thought to be "stuck up". I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.")
-- William Faulkner said: "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."
-- More from TS Eliot: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."
-- Hart Crane wrote about Ulysses: "The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."
-- Edmund Wilson wrote: "Yet for all its appalling longeurs, "Ulysses" is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. "Ulysses" has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."
-- Paul Leon wrote: "[Joyce] had the necessary courage, perseverance, inner strength, and energy of mind -- any one of which might easily have been insufficient -- to overcome all obstacles, all suffering, and to attain perfection. When his work comes to be judged according to its true value, as posterity will judge it, it will appear overwhelming, if only because of the crushing labour that it obviously represents, and one man's life will seem to have been conceived on too small a scale in comparison with the immensity of the effort involved."
-- Dr. Joseph Collins, reviewing "Ulysses" in The New York Times: "Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence."
-- William Carlos Williams wrote: "Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."
-- WB Yeats wrote about Ulysses: "It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
-- John Banville said: "Ulysses is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity, that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval."
-- John Waters, columnist for The Irish Times, wrote: "Ulysses was about Ireland but it was not for Ireland. You could even say that it was against Ireland because Joyce was alienated from, and by, Ireland."
-- Carlos Fuentes wrote: "That James Joyce is indeed a black Irishman, wreaking a vengeance, even wilder than the I.R.A.'s, on the English language from within, invading the territory of its sanitary ego-presumptions with a flood of impure, dark languages flowing from the damned up sources of collective speech, savagely drowning the ego of the traditional speaker and depositing the property of words in everybody, in the total human community of those who speak and have spoken and shall speak."
-- The events of June 16, 1904 - and their importance in the Joycean mythology
-- Sylvia Beach: "I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922."
-- James Joyce: "I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people."
-- Virginia Woolf wrote about Joyce: "He's a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."
-- Stefan Sweig on meeting Joyce: "He was inclined to be testy, and I believe that just that irritation produced the power for his inner turmoil and productivity. His resentment against Dublin, against England, against particular persons became converted into dynamic energy and actually found release only in literary creation. But he seemed fond of his own asperity; I never saw him laugh or show high spirits. He always made the impression of a compact, somber force and when I saw him on the street, his thin lips pressed tightly together, always walking rapidly as if heading for a definite objective, I sensed the defensive, the inner isolation of his being even more positively than in our talks. It failed to astonish me when I later learned that just this man had written the most solitary, the least affined work -- meteor-like in its introduction to the world of our time."
-- Ezra Pound, Joyce's greatest champion, wrote: "Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."
-- Letter from James Joyce to Nora on Sept. 16, 1904 - shortly before the two of them fled Ireland together, without getting married: "When I was waiting for you last night I was even more restless. It seemed to me that I was fighting a battle with every religious and social force in Ireland for you and that I had nothing to rely on but myself. There is no life here -- no naturalness or honesty. People live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end they are as far apart as ever ... The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy ... Allow me, dearest Nora, to tell you how much I desire that you should share any happiness that may be mine and to assure you of my great respect for that love of yours which it is my wish to deserve and to answer."
-- Interviewer to Joyce: Whom do you consider the greatest writers in English today?
Joyce: Aside from myself, I don't know.
-- Joyce said: "Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The British, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget -- the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature."
-- Stanislaus Joyce (Joyce's brother) wrote: "Jim says that he writes well because when he writes his mind is as nearly normal as possible."
-- Edna O'Brien wrote: "To call this man angry is too temperate a word, he was volcanic."
-- Vladimir Nabokov wrote: "Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game."
-- And I hope Jimmy won't mind - but I'll give his wife Nora the last word:
"I don't know whether or not my husband is a genius, but I'm sure of one thing, there is no one like him."
Photograph of James and Nora below.
Happy birthday, dear Jimmy Joyce, murderer of the 19th century!! (All Joyce posts here)
Oops - want to include this as well. An essay by Mary Gordon about Joyce's "The Dead". Love it:
Mary Gordon on James Joyce's "The Dead"
It begins with a slap in the face. "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."
Well, and did you fall for that one? Literally? Don't you know the difference between literally and figuratively? You're no better than Lily herself, are you? Or perhaps you're not Lily, but the garrulous speaker of the second paragraph, the platitude-spouting fool. "It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance ... Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember ... Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout."
"The Dead" is built around a party, and for most of its duration we, like partygoers, swim in a clamor of voices, not only Gabriel's and the omniscient narrator's. Even Gabriel has many voices. There is the self-conscious Gabriel, the prissy Gabriel, the pompous Gabriel, the affectionate Gabriel, the lustful Gabriel. But many others speak: Miss Ivors, the political nettler; Mr. Browne with his forced jokes; Freddy Malins, who's just a little bit "screwed"; his mother, who tells us everything is "beautiful", including the fish her son-in-law caught in Scotland and had boiled for their dinner by the innkeeper. There is the novelettish voice of such sentences as "Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief," and the society-page gabble of "the acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time." There is Aunt Julia's voice singing "Arrayed for the Bridal" and Bartell D'Arcy's singing "The Lass of Aughrim." There is the voice of Patrick Morkan, Gabriel's grandfather, imitated by Gabriel: the very model of a stuffy twit when his h orse makes a fool of him by walking round and round the statue of the King: "Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? ... Most extraordinary conduct! Can't understand the horse!"
To add to the tumult, Joyce offers us a series of lists, giving us information we have no need of: things that are only there for the pleasure of their naming. Guests are introduced briefly, for the sound of their names: Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Power, Miss Furlong, Miss Daly. There are the secondhand booksellers on the Dublin quays: Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, Webb's and Massey's on Aston's Quay, O'Clohissey's in the by-street. And, most important, the meal spread out before us, like Homer's catalogue of ships. Followed by dessert, the sweetmeats joined together by their jumpy integument of "and's".
This is the hubbub of realims, the buzz and Babel of the nineteenth century. Words, words, words, talk talk talk, and in so many voices, such an abundance that of course there must be misunderstandings and mistakes. "The Dead" is chock full of mistakes, beginning with Gabriel's ill-considered joshing of Lily about her beau, to which she replies, "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." Twice, Aunt Julia misunderstands: she doesn't know what galoshes are and doesn't get Gabriel's reference to the Three Graces. Browne repeated calls Freddy Malins Teddy and embarrasses the young laides by telling the kind of joke they don't like. Errors of tone abound. Gabriel takes the wrong tone in responding to Miss Ivors's political challenge, and he mistakes the pressure of her hand for a conciliatory gesture, when it is really a prelude to her standing on tiptoe to whisper into his ear: "West Briton." Aunt Kate offers an ill-considered criticism of the pope's decision to banish women from choirs in favor of young boys, and she is chastised for doing this in the presence of Mr. Browne, who is of "the other persuasion". A conversation about monks sleeping in their coffin is dropped because it is too "lugubrious". And Freddy is ready to pick a fight in defense of a black opera singer whom no one, in fact, has criticized. "And why couldn't he have a voice too? Is it because he's only a black?"
The mistakes and misunderstandings seem to be smoothed over by Gabriel's speech in praise of his aunts and cousin, whom he compliments for their hospitality, their harmoniousness. There is the bustle of leave-taking, when Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne can't make the cabdriver understand them, and everyone shouts directions from the door, only adding to the confusion. Finally, the cab takes off, and upstairs there is the sound of music.
In the quiet surrounded by music, Gabriel sees his wife standing on the stairs. "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of."
We usually think of mistakes as affairs of language, a by-blow of the very separateness that causes us to wish to communicate with one another. But what Gabriel perceives and tries to create in silence -- a woman who is a symbol -- constitutes the central mistake both of his life and of the story. He assumes that the light in her eyes and the color on her cheeks have to do with him, as he will later assume that she has understood his desire for her and shared it. In his silent creation of Gretta -- a creation brought about without a word from her -- Gabriel has misconstrued the woman he has lived beside. Just as the narrator refers to Gretta only as Mrs. Conroy or Gabriel's wife, Gabriel assumes that Gretta's whole identity is connected to him. It is only after she speaks what is in her heart, after she tells her story, that the vision which both takes in and transcends separateness can occur.
She tells him of a boy she knew as a young girl in the West Country, a boy who died for love of her. Afterward, she sleeps. And in this silence, the silence which comes after true speech, Gabriel is transformed from petty if dutiful pedant to a man of vision.
The process happens in stages. He is dully angry, and this anger rekindles his lust. He is jealous. He is ironic. He feels humiliated, seeing himself as far less than the boy who died for her. When he speaks, his voice is "humble and indifferent," the humility and indifference Joyce thought to be the necessary conditions of the true artist. Then he is terrfied at the "impalpable and vindictive being ... coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." He notes that Gretta's not as young as she used to be and feels disgust for the reality of her body, represented by her petticoat string and the limp upper of her boot.
He thinks of his Aunt Julia's impending death, and this thought, born of benevolence, leads him to understand that to be alive is to be in the process of becoming a shade. Tears fill his eyes, and his blurred physical vision allows him to imagine the dead boy -- a shade, to be sure, but standing near, under a dripping tree. Gabriel loses himself, that distinct and separate self by which he has been able to be named. He is among the dead.
"His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world in itself which these had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling." What a strange word, the word "reared". What does it imply? That the dead have nurtured the world we think of as the real one as parents "rear" a child, feeding it, sheltering it, educating it, until it is ready to leave them?
Gabriel's vision takes him to the graveyard where the boy is buried. The snow is falling. In the extraordinary last paragraph of "The Dead", the word "falling" is repeated seven times: seven, the theologically magic number, the number of the seven deadly sins, the seven moral virtues, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on "the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns," those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Consider the daring of Joyce's final repetitions and reversals: "falling faintly, faintly falling" -- a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.
And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.
January 31, 2008
Will Ferrell: "James Joyce spent a lot of his life living outside of Ireland. I too have spent a lot of time living outside of Ireland."
Congrats to Will Ferrell - latest recipient of the James Joyce award. Now, honestly, you have to read the article - check out the OUTFIT he wore to accept the award. I'm howling!! And his comments on Joyce ("As I perused my leatherbound volumes of 'Ulysses,' 'Finnegans Wake,' 'Dubliners,' 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' standing in my mahogany library, a lot of feelings ran across my mind. Like: 'Damn, I should have read these books.' ") have already made my day and it's not even 8 a.m. yet.
January 25, 2008
Speaking of Molly Bloom
(oh were we? Well, actually, yes we were - haven't you been paying attention? Oh wait ... yes - Nightfly was listening!! Yay!) ... and speaking of the famous last passage of Ulysses:
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes
I was walking in my neighborhood on a chill bright morning and saw a sign in a window and wondered: "Hmmm. Does Molly Bloom live there?"
The Books: "Finnegans Wake" (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
Joseph Campbell wrote, in regards to Finnegans Wake, "If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake." James Joyce worked on this, his last book, for 17 years. For many years during that time it was just known as Work in Progress. Because of the atomic bomb of Ulysses, people were, naturally, anxious to the point of apoplexy to see what Joyce would come up with next. The book cannot be said to be written in English - not strictly - although it's amazing how much sense it does make, if you surrender to it. The entire book is made up of puns, word association games, interweaving webs of connections - He said that since Ulysses, except for that last episode, was a "daytime" book, this one was going to be "nocturnal". It takes on the qualities of a dream. Where things can be nonsensical and yet logical at the same time. The entire thing is, apparently, a dream of our lead - if you can call him that - Earwicker. Joyce incorporated over 70 languages into the book - and, naturally, there are great "keys" out there, that track down all of Joyce's influences. There are sections in Polynesian, Dutch, Lithuanian - and many many more. Joyce's interest (obsession) in language was the main driving force here. I'm not sure that he felt this, specifically, but to me, one of the feelings I get from this extraordinary book (that starts mid-sentence, and also ends mid-sentence) is that we are all one. All languages come from the same pot. We all influence one another. There are no barriers. They may seem real (the barriers) ... but if you poke holes in them, you'll start to see the back and forth flow. This also goes along wtih the river imagery that makes up such a huge part of the book. The book is not strictly about anything - in the same way that you can't really point to the "plot" of Ulysses. Joyce was never into the usual structures. He wrote the book from 1922 to 1939 - a very rough patch in his life. His eyesight got worse, he had numerous operations - and there were times when he lost his sight completely. Hard to imagine. But I think it makes so much sense that his books, his mature books anyway - have so much to do with the SOUND of things, rather than the LOOK. Finnegans Wake is musical. It's actually a lot of fun, once you let go of your normal expectations. And that's what Joyce requires. It's like a big puzzle ... you feel like a rock star when you understand a paragraph, and can recognize 2 or 3 of the references. There's a little something for everyone here: ancient history, modern literature, psychoanalysis, Irish politics - it is truly a "catholic" book, in many respects.
I can't remember where I found this, I think it was on the auction block last year - Thornton Wilder's personal copy of Finnegans Wake - here is just one of the pages:
Joyce corresponded with Swiss writer Jacques Mercanton during the writing of the book and in one of his letters he says:
You are not Irish ... and the meaning of some passages will perhaps escape you. But you are Catholic, so you will recognize this or that allusion. You don't play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician, so you will feel at ease in this passage. When my Irish friends come to visit me in Paris, it is not the philosophical subtleties of the book that amuse them, but my recollection of O'Connell's top hat.
Finnegans Wake is definitely the most consciously crafted book of the 20th century. There are stories of final drafts being sent back to Joyce from the printer, and him huddling over them, marking them up. Someone asked him, "What are you doing??" Joyce answered, "Removing commas."
The thing about a genius - like Van Gogh or Mozart - is that they must do what they must do. They must follow their genius - IT leads THEM. For the most part, it is not comprehensible to us mere mortals why they do what they must do. We reap the rewards in the results they come up with - although often we are still faced with incomprehension: like; WHY? Joyce himself said, mid-way through the writing of Finnegans Wake, "I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present." I am in awe of such certainty. Nora, his wife, looking at the gibberish pages, the ciphers, the codes, said, "Why don't you write books people can read?"
Now this type of work may not seem to be for everybody - although Joyce felt it was his most accessible work. Of course the general public was better educated back then - and you could assume certain things about what people knew. People knew about Waterloo, people knew about Brutus and Caesar - etc. That's not so much the case now. But still: Finnegans Wake is actually a lot of fun, even though it's a challenge. I read much of it out loud when I first read it - and that definitely helps. Again, nothing happens - although characters, of a sort, do emerge. Anna Livia Plurabelle, Earwicker - their sons. But the point is not literal. It is a dream-space, and Joyce was interested in re-creating a dream-space. Associations flowing, the mind let off the hook of consciousness. The characters do not remain static - they morph, transform, become animals, parabolae, rivers, whatever ... like Ovid's Metamorphosis. Nothing is stuck. Everything flows into everything else. A truly Joycean point of view.
The flipside to Nora's humorous comment I mentioned earlier is that years later, after Joyce's death, Nora was often interviewed about her famous husband, and all of the questions were usually about Ulysses. Nora was not a big reader, she liked romance novels, basically - which is so perfect that she would be married to Jimmy. Not a literary woman, at all. But one of her comments in these interviews shows that there was a deeply insightful person in there - someone who knew her husband was up to something that nobody else was. She said, "What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."
I think the rough Galway girl might be onto something.
My favorite comment about Finnegans Wake comes from Samuel Beckett:
You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.
Here's an excerpt from the 8th chapter - the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter - which is woven through with the names of almost every river on the planet (sometimes written in such puns that you have to untwist the language to see what he means).
EXCERPT FROM Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ’Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me. that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high hone there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp tawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine.
Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?
Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!
January 24, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Penelope episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Episode 15: The Circe Episode
3. (THE NOSTOS)
Episode 16: The Eumaeus Episode
Episode 17: The Ithaca Episode
TS Eliot wrote, of Ulysses, and this episode (the last in the book) in particular: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"
I want to take a second to talk about Joyce's impetus for writing the book, not to mention the fact that he chose to place the events of the one day in the book on June 16, 1904. Richard Ellmann in his biography of James Joyce describes what happened to Joyce himself on June 16, 1904:
The experience of love was almost new to him in fact, though he had often considered it in imagination. A transitory interest in his cousin Katsy Murray had been followed by the stronger, but unexpressed and unrequited, interest in Mary Sheehy. He shocked Stanlislaus [Joyce's brother] a little by quoting with approval a remark of a Dublin wit, 'Woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month and parturiates once a year.' Yet tenderness was as natural to him as coarseness, and secretly he dreamed of falling in love with someone he did not know, a gentle lady, the flower of many generations, to whom he should speak in the ceremonious accents of Chamber Music.Instead, on June 10, 1904, Joyce was walking down Nassau Street in Dublin when he caught sight of a tall, good-looking young woman, auburn-haired, walking with a proud stride. When he spoke to her she answered pertly enough to allow the conversation to continue. She took him, with his yachting cap, for a sailor, and from his blue eyes thought for a moment he might be Swedish.
Joyce found she was employed at Finn's Hotel, a slightly exalted rooming house, and her lilting speech confessed that she was from Galway City. She had been born there, to parents who lived in Sullivan's Lane, on March 21, 1884. Her name was a little comic, Nora Barnacle, but this too might be an omen of felicitous adhesion. (As Joyce's father was to say when he heard much later her last name was Barnacle, 'She'll never leave him.') After some talk it was agreed they should meet in front of Sir William Wilde's house at the turning of Merrion Square on June 14. But Nora Barnacle failed to appear, and Joyce sent her a note in some dejection:
60 Shelbourne Road
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me -- if you have not forgotten me!
James A. Joyce 15 June 1904
The appointment was made, and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend, and then arranged to meet again.
To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce's most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16, as he would afterwards realize, he entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother's death. He would tell her later, "You made me a man." June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband.
Many many years later, after Joyce's death, Nora - his wife and partner since that day in 1904, was asked by a reporter what other writers she thought were good. Her reply: "Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."
Joyce and Nora had their first "date" on June 16, 1904 - a date which consisted of walking around Dublin (it wasn't a time when men and women really dated - certainly not in Ireland) - and there was probably some kind of sexual encounter between them (Joyce references it obliquely, from time to time.) A couple of months passed, the relationship intensifying - and Joyce began to grow desperate to leave Ireland. He applied for a job in Europe -with the Berlitz school - and began to be convinced that Nora had to come with him. They had to be together. They could not live freely in Ireland. On September 16, 1904 - shortly before his departure date, he wrote a letter to Nora which still, for me, trembles with passion as I read it:
"When I was waiting for you last night I was even more restless. It seemed to me that I was fighting a battle with every religious and social force in Ireland for you and that I had nothing to rely on but myself. There is no life here -- no naturalness or honesty. People live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end they are as far apart as ever ... The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy ... Allow me, dearest Nora, to tell you how much I desire that you should share any happiness that may be mine and to assure you of my great respect for that love of yours which it is my wish to deserve and to answer."
When it came time for him to leave, she jumped ship with him. They left a wake of scandal and debt behind them - Yeats bailed him out financially, Joyce's brother was trying to sell his books for more cash ... and of course, he and Nora did not get married ... so it was an unbelievable scandal. James and Nora did eventually get married - in 1930 - and that was long after they had had two kids, and had spent almost 20 years together as a couple. It's a great love story. Chaotic, and very much their own. Joyce was a jealous man ... and jealous of Nora's affections for other men. He wondered if he were distinct to her. One of the things that really bothered him was her use of pronouns. She would say "he" and that "he" could mean anyone - him, another man, her father, a man from her past ... It made him feel like men all blended together into one being, for her ... that nobody "stood out", nobody was "named". Joyce uses this in Molly's monologue in this last episode - where sometimes it is a struggle to figure out which person she is talking about. She refers to her husband, Leopold, as "Poldy" - but more often than not, he's just "he". And Blazes Boylan is also just "he". She does not distinguish. She does in her heart - she's comparing and contrasting the two constantly ... but her language remains opaque. Joyce found this fascinating, infuriating, and very very female. So he used it. After the book came out, Nora was asked if she were the model for Molly Bloom. Her answer was blunt: "I'm not -- she was much fatter."
How much do I love Nora Joyce.
The Penelope episode is 40 pages long, and I think it only has 5 sentences in it. I actually went through once, trying to locate the periods. For the most part, it is a run-on sentence. Molly lies in bed, Leopold lies next to her - and she thinks out loud. About her life, her men, her rendesvous with her lover, her dead son ... but more than that: it is the ruminations of an insomniac, frayed by sleep, letting her mind off the hook that it needs to be on during the conscious daytime ... and going from topic to topic ... memories coming up, receding ... Molly is hugely witty. She has a healthy contempt for people ... she's not at all a romantic. She thinks men are rather silly. She thinks women are silly, too - but the silliness of men affects her more personally. She compares Boylan's fucking to Bloom's fucking ... you know, Joyce's worst nightmare (many men's worst nightmare) ... but she's not a vicious person. She's just truthful. The chapter is the only time in the book when a character is alone ... with herself ... and the darkness. The rest of the book is highly social - interactions with the human race left and right. But here, now, 3 a.m. ... it is dark, and Molly lies in the dark, unselfconsciously being with herself and her thoughts. It's a shockingly open look at womanhood - taking it off its pedestal, certainly. She muses in an annoyed way about how chamber pots are obviously created with men in mind ... because they're not convenient for women. She muses about her period (which has at that moment). The cramps, etc. You know ... this kind of stuff was just not talked about back then! And Joyce isn't talking about it in a grossed-out way, or anything ... It's just simple and truthful. In the same way that a man, lying in a tub, looks down at his penis, and contemplates it ... and other men would understand that, and know they have done such things ... the mystique of the genitalia does not exist in such casual moments. We deal with our private parts on a daily basis, it's not big deal. It's a big deal when we want to SHARE ye olde private parts ... but when you're taking a bath, or strolling around naked in a non-sexual context ... it's just another body part. Well, the same is true for women as well - and Joyce shows that, by putting us inside Molly's head. This is rather revolutionary, if you look at the literature of the time. And because there is no narrator in the Penelope episode - we are 100% inside Molly's head - Joyce makes a demand on us, the reader: If you judge Molly, or if you say "Ewwww", even to yourself, at some of the things she thinks about - then you are missing so much. You are missing not just her humanity, but your own.
Joyce said he wanted to end the book with the most positive word in the English language - which gives you some idea of his thoughts on the book as a whole. It's a comedy.
And Molly - who has been unseen and yet omnipresent thru the entire book - suddenly takes center stage. We have been totally on Bloom's side throughout ... why is she cheating on him? Why is she making him a cuckold? She is shaming him! Is she a whore? I don't LIKE her.
But then. She takes over the book. Joyce lets HER end the book - which seriously, is so amazing when you think about it. The ascendancy of the female ... the real female: not the whore of The Circe episode, not the sweet virgin of The Nausicaa episode ... but the wife. The human being. The flawed human being ... who loves Leopold Bloom, and whose heart has broken since he distanced himself from her following the death of their son. She is a vibrant funny philosophical woman, with much forgiveness towards menfolk (even with her sharp observations about how unfair much of life is for women) - she lies in bed, and aches for her marriage. Aches for the Bloom who had made love to her on the hills at Howth (a memory that he has already shared with us, the reader) ... She remembers how his mouth felt, and her breasts, and the way the rhododendrons were ... It is the sweetest most loving memory she has.
I don't want to really say anymore - because the episode is, in a weird way, even with all its bathroom humor, bodily functions, casual marriage-bed behavior ... it's quite delicate. It's a run-on sentence. You have to work hard to make sense of it and find the punctuation on your own. I've read it out loud ... and it's much much easier when you read it aloud. The sentences, even without periods and commas, just fall into place.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus has returned home and has killed all of Penelope's suitors. And at first, Penelope does not even recognize her husband. She only believes it is him when he describes their bed to her.
The voice of Molly, in this chapter, is not rambling, or incoherent. But it has something in it of a doubling-back, a word-assocation - puns leading to other thoughts, jokes made to herself ... sudden swoops of romanticism, punctuated by menstrual cramps. So: she is everything. She becomes - oddly enough - the entire human race, in all its messiness, beauty, pettiness, and physical limitations. But her voice itself is hypnotic, almost scary at first ... we are so deeply inside her, and up until this point in the book we have only heard things about her, and judged her behavior ... and Joyce does not prepare us for what happens in the last episode. He does not set us up carefully so we will be 'ready'. He throws us in. here: swim.
Joyce felt that women were, essentially, wild. Their bodies were wild ... way more out of control than men's - they bled, they had babies, their bellies swelled and fell ... Men were much more static, linear. Women ebbed and flowed. That was why 'they" could not use proper punctuation. Their thoughts did not line up neatly, into grammatical structures.
Molly is most commonly compared to Chaucer's Wife of Bath, with her great mix of sadness and laughter. Joyce, by letting her end the book, gives the Blooms, in a way, their only shot at saving their marriage. Bloom, with his idiosyncrasies, his insecurities, is a tough man to live with. Molly knows that well. But she accepts them, even if she makes fun behind his back or to herself - because that's what marriage is all about. He sleeps with his head at the foot of the bed, so his feet are beisde her face. That's weird. But that's what he likes. He's almost kicked her teeth out in his sleep ... but she accepts it, even though he's a weirdo. There are numerous examples in her long speech, of moments like that ... where we see Bloom in a completely different light ... because it's her perspective. She reminsices about making love with him - and thru the book we have just read, he's seemed so passive, and ... impotent, basically. So to have her raving in her memory about their great fucking in the past ... redeems Bloom so much. We realize (and it's one of the most important realizations a human being can ever have) that we have under-estimated Bloom. We have judged him on too little information. In the same way that Molly now needs to be taken into consideration in a differnt way. We have had all kinds of opinions about her, and about women who cheat on their husbands. This needs to be re-examined.
But Joyce doesn't stop to intellectualize any of this - mainly because Molly never would.
We just lie there, in bed with her, and follow the torrent of her thoughts.
I just can't bring myself to excerpt the final and famous last paragraph ... it really needs to be saved, for when it is in context with the whole.
But here's an excerpt from earlier in her monologue.
James Joyce wrote, in a letter to his brother Stanislaus:
Don't you think there is a certain resemblance betwen the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying ... to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.
And so you have, Jimmy. And thanks. Thanks to everyone who has read these excerpts, and commented and emailed me about them.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Penelope episode
yes because he couldnt possibly do without it that long so he must do it somewhere and the last time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a great squeeze going along by the Tolka in my hand there steals another I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back singing the young May Moon shes beaming love because he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case God knows hes change in a way not to be always and ever wearing the same old hat unless] paid some nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do it myself a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone with him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down on their cheek doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour question and answer would you do this that and the other with the coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some Dean or Bishop was sitting beside me in the jews Temples gardens when I was knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the German Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till ( he comes and then finish it off myself anyway and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking of his father I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick their bills up with some liquor Id like to sip those richlooking green and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera hats I tasted one with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the last time we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up as if the world was coming to an end God be merciful to us I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish when I blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar and they come and tell you theres no God what could you do if it was running and rushing about nothing only make an act of contrition the candle I lit that evening in Whitefriars street chapel for the month of May see it brought its luck though hed scoff if he heard because he never goes to church mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year as regular as the clock always with a smell of children off her the one they called budgers or something like a nigger with a shock of hair on it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I was there a squad of them falling over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ear supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they have us swollen out like elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked having another not off him though still if he was married I m sure hed have a fine strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly
January 23, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Ithaca episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Episode 15: The Circe Episode
Episode 16: The Eumaeus Episode
This episode, the Ithaca episode, was Joyce's favorite in the whole book - and I find that very illuminating. Kinda like how "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" was his favorite story in Dubliners. Not the obvious one ... but the one that many people, to this day, find confusing, difficult ... and yet ultimately so rewarding once you crack the code. The Ithaca episode is as though we, the reader, are suddenly circling the earth - in a satellite - listening in on a conversation from thousands and thousands of miles below. It's omniscent. Or kind of like an inter-galactic lecture hour. At first it's tough-going, reading the episode ... but once I got the hang of it, it became one of my favorites in the book, too. One of the things that is often missed about Joyce, because of his reputation as the most important author of the 20th century, is how funny and ultimately silly he is. He's not interested in big world-shaking moments. There's not a ONE in any of his books. He's not interested in making a statement about "How We Live Now". He couldn't be less interested in the generalized "we" of the human race. He's more microscopic than that. There is great wit in Joyce. Great silliness. And it can be seen most clearly in this chapter, where we are catapulted out into space, staring down, way way down, on Bloom and Dedalus, stumbling home to Bloom's house at 2 in the morning. Because wouldn't any conversation seem a bit silly if you were out in the cold reaches of space, listening in on it?
What is happening here is that Joyce is cataloging what is said - in an omniscent professor-ish tone ... and cataloging the similiarities and differences between Bloom and Dedalus, our two heroes. Or anti-heroes, as the case may be.
And the omniscent voice asks questions. And another omniscent voice answers. And it's as detailed as it can be - as minute as it can be ... and yet we never stop having the sense that we're on a space station, or on a far-away star ... staring down at earth, at the puny humans doing their thing, wandering, drinking, eating, talking ... what on EARTH are those pipsqueaks going on about? You'll see what I mean when you read the excerpt.
Bloom takes him inside and makes him a cup of cocoa. They sit in the kitchen talking about ... God, every topic in the book.
It's hypnotic, the language ... and extremely technical, almost like you're in a physics lecture, or a biology lecture ... something scientific. Yet what is being discussed is the human animal and the ups and downs on a specific conversation taking place at 2 a.m. on June 17, 1904. The omniscent lecturing voice - cataloging all of the topics covered, summing up the relationship being formed down on earth - gives us an odd sense of how important we are. It's that thing that you can get when you try to contemplate the vastness of space. Sometimes it makes you feel infinitesimally small. And sometimes it can make you feel transcendent, and miraculous ... that life has even formed, and flourished. Jodie Foster, in her monologue at the end of Contact expresses that perfectly:
I had an experience. I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever. A vision ... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are *not*, that none of us are alone! I wish... I could share that... I wish, that everybody, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish.
Tiny and insignificant and also rare and precious.
That's the realm we are in in the Ithaca episode.
The Ithaca episode in The Odyssey involves Odysseus' return home to Ithaca - where he slays all of Penelope's suitors. Hmmm. So Bloom has returned. After a long day. Molly has had a rendesvous with a lover. But we are no longer back in ancient Greece, where the rules are clear. Bloom does not kill Blazes Boylan. He passively thinks about divorce, maybe he'll have to go that route ... we're in the 20th century now. The rules are different. Bloom also is the kind of guy who can't help but see the other side of things. And so, in a weird way, he even understands why Molly has strayed. He sees her point. Bloom is (and has been) passive. He is sad, yes, he loves Molly ... but no suitors will be slayed. He will figure out what to do later. In the meantime, there is Dedalus to consider. Maybe he could sleep on the couch ... would Molly mind?
But it's not to be. Dedalus, after his cocoa, does end up leaving, and making his way home ... and Bloom reluctantly crawls upstairs and gets into bed with Molly. There is an imprint of a man;s body in the sheets - showing where Blazes Boyland had lain that day. Bloom and Molly sleep head to feet ... Bloom puts his head at the foot of the bed, next to Molly's feet (in the next chapter, Molly ruminates ruefully about how he has almost kicked her teeth out on occasion, in his sleep).
A couple of more notes on the language:
Not only is it like a question and answer session - but it's even more reminiscent (to Catholics, anyway) of the catechism - and Joyce loads the episode with religious language. It's just a conversation between two drunk men. But in Joyce's world view - even with his contempt of organized religion - it is THERE that God can be seen, felt, experienced. Joyce was a humanist. A Renaissance man. Man is the center. God is in man. Anyone who looks elsewhere is just an ignorant sheep.
There's another level here, too: Of all the episodes in the book, this is the one that could be called "objective". We're looking thru a telescope AND a microscope - at the same time. Bloom is about to face the pain of getting in bed with his wife, whom he fears he has lost (we realize in the next episode that all is NOT lost - but Bloom doesn't know that). So the objective language reminds me of the painful scene in Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle (Robert Deniro) calls up Cybill Shepherd and asks her out on another date, after their tragic one - where he takes her to a porno movie. She obviously doesn't want anything to do with him anymore, so in this phone conversation - and we only hear his side of it - she turns him down. But Scorsese does an interesting thing with his camera as Travis hears the news that she has said "No". He slowly pulls back, down the corridor, away from Travis, at the pay phone ... until Travis is quite small ... and then Scorsese pulls his camera around a corner, so we can't even see Travis anymore. We hear his voice, soft and solemn, but we no longer see him. The effect on me, the audience member, is even more acute than if we were in deep closeup seeing Travis' rejected face. It's almost like the pain Travis feels is so deep that Scorsese needs to give him privacy ... let him be, let him be. So the objective voice in Ithaca, is almost a protective measure against Bloom's devastation. It is the only way he (and we) can face the pain of the destruction of his marriage. Bloom is so upset that Joyce gives him his privacy, and pulls his "camera" way way way back ... to make him small, to leave him alone ... It's a fascinating device and works extremely well, I think. We have Bloom's memories of the death of his son here as well - a tragedy. But the quiet omniscent voice just keeps asking questions: "What was his first response to the death of Rudolph Bloom?" The equally omniscent voice answers - in a cataloging scientific way ... which is a shield against the devastation. Don't we do that sometimes when we are truly grieving? Joan Didion, in her marvelous book The Year of Magical Thinking, about her year following the death of her husband, is all about that sort of nonsensical cataloging and overly rational thinking that can follow in the wake of true and eternal loss. I have to do this, this, this and this ... and I will be safe. Well, no you won't. We are never safe. But grief is not rational. It is, in a horrible way, "magical".
Joyce even goes intergalactic - at the point that Dedalus departs. Dedalus leaves and there are stars above - 'celestial signs' - it is almost as though Stephen leaves, via a pathway of stars. As he departs, the church bells ring - another indication of Joyce's religious outlook. The entire episode has the feeling of a Latin mass. The intoned questions, the intoned answering of the flock ... only here we are with just two men, on Eccles Street in Dublin, talking about food, and drink, and life ... urinating together in the garden ... a sort of communion.
It is only now that Bloom is really ready to be home. To go upstairs to his Penelope (Molly), and let the day - the long long day he has just had - recede.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Here's an excerpt. Have fun with it. It's not normal language, but what he describes is quite prosaic, as you will see. But to Joyce, nothing was prosaic. That is one of the reasons why I love him so much, why he is such (to me) an emotional writer, passionate and beautiful, with a love of his fellow man that is unparalleled in modern literature.
Just so you can decipher what is going on here: Bloom takes Dedalus into his kitchen. He lights a candle (like the beginning of a mass). He fills the kettle with water, and puts it on to boil. It is 2, 3 in the morning.
And not to sway you one way or another, but I think Joyce's long description of water in the following excerpt is one of the most brilliant passages in the whole book. And the last line of the excerpt I have chosen shows Bloom's ultimate humanism, something that is difficult for many of us to LIVE, let alone comprehend. To not live in bitterness, to not hold grudges, to "be the better person" - and for REAL - without looking for anything in return ... Perhaps Bloom, earlier in the day, would not have perceived this in himself. But now he does, ministering to Stephen. He does, because it's so late, and he's near-sleep - and certain things, certain uglinesses fall away, when we are so close to unconsciousness. The Ithaca episode could only happen in the middle of the night.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Ithaca episode
Did the man reappear elsewhere?
Alter a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.
Did Stephen obey his sign?
Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's house.
What did Bloom do?
He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.
Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?
Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two, had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street: of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss Julia Morkan at 15 Usher's Island: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of Saint Francis-Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the physics' theatre of university College, 16 Stephen's green, north: of his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father's house in Cabra.
What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?
Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies' grey hose with lisle suspendertops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.
What did Bloom see on the range?
On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left (larger) hob a black iron kettle.
What did Bloom do at the range?
He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow.
Did it flow?
Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2,400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of #5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C.E., on the instructions of the waterworks committee, had prohibited the use of municipal water for purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of recourse being had to the importable water of the Grand and Royal canals as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers, solvent, sound.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?
To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington's lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.
What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom's offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.
What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach, and thenar or sole of foot?
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.
What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?
Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.
Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?
Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and recuperation.
What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the agency of fire?
The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat (radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal units needed to raise I pound of water from 50° to 212° Fahrenheit.
What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?
A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at both sides simultaneously.
For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?
To shave himself.
What advantages attended shaving by night?
A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.
Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noises?
Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine feminine passive active hand.
What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting influence?
The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human blood even when the end justified the means, preferring in their natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic surgery.
What lay under exposure on the lower middle and upper shelves of the kitchen dresser opened by Bloom?
On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white goldrimmed eggcups, and open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly copper, and a phial of aromatic violet comfits. On the middle shelf a chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four conglomerated black olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of Plumtree's potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co's white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper, a packet of Epps's soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch's choice tea at 2/- per lb. in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy's cream, a jug of brown crockery containing a noggin and a quarter of soured adulterated milk, converted by heat into water, acidulous serum and semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity subtracted for Mr Bloom's and Mrs Fleming's breakfasts made one imperial pint, the total quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of jamjars of various sizes and proveniences.
What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?
Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets, numbered 887, 886.
What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?
Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction, preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official and definitive result of which he had read in the Evening Telegraph, late pink edition, in the cabman's shelter, at Butt bridge.
Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him?
In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O'Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited) dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman's Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.
What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?
The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding originally from a successful interpretation.
His mood?
He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied.
What satisfied him?
To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others. Light to the gentiles.
January 21, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Eumaeus episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Episode 15: The Circe Episode
As I mentioned in the last post - Circe is the final episode of the "Odyssey" section of the book. Its hallucinogenic Jean Genet-esque style - of role-playing, transformation, descendence into bestiality, sexual fantasy, unsure of what is real and what is not - is where the Odyssey itself ends. Bloom and Dedalus must go through that - in order to be allowed to return. Because, of course, in Homer's epic - the "odyssey" is just a series of challenges, thrown into the path of Odysseus ... on his way home. Whirlpools, monsters, shipwrecks ... It is the ultimate story of eternal return. What is one thing we all, as a human race, have in common? Well, we're all human, of course - and that is no small thing. It may SEEM like other people are from a different species altogether, due to cultural differences, language differences - but that is just a problem of perception on our end, a fear of what is different or strange. We are all human. So there's that. And then: what is one of the driving forces of humanity - a force that expresses itself sometimes in great horrors like war, genocide, refugee camps? The need for a HOME. Fighting for your home, trying to get home, trying to clear an entire country of people so you can make it home ... whatever. Great tragedies and great triumphs are all under this umbrella. Homer's epic expresses this human drive, and taps into what is most ... uhm ... human. About all of us. Times change, eras move on, progress occurs ... but throughout history, people have loved, and strived, and missed their loved ones, and yearned for the quiet home surrounded by family. Even the galloping Mongol hordes probably had a nice matted-haired wife at home, in an animal-skin yurt, keeping the goat milk warm. And men (because historically, it's the men who go off, and the women who stay) need to either earn the right to go home, or fight for their lives in order to remove obstacles to home. It's never easy. We all have our "whirlpools" to struggle against, on whatever journey we are on. Even if we already live at home, and do not gallop with a Mongol horde ... we have these obstacles to ease, comfort, a feeling of belonging. The journey does not have to be far. The journey can be internal as well.
No wonder Joyce - with his themes of exile, and separation - was so obsessed with The Odyssey. It was his life. He had to leave Ireland in order to live the kind of life he wanted. But his gaze was always turned back to the homeland. He was a "continental", through and through. He spoke many languages, he lived in Trieste, Paris, elsewhere ... moving his family from place to place. He only returned to Ireland once or twice after the original departure. Amazing. But it wasn't like he left and never looked back. All he did was look back. Not one of his stories or novels takes place in any other nation than Ireland. He did not write of the ex-pat community on the Left Bank, or the multi-lingual world he lived in in Trieste. It was Ireland. And only Ireland.
All of this is to say: The final section of Ulysses is a three-episode section - a mirror-image of The Telemachia - the 3-section part that opens the book. In The Telemachia, we follow Stephen Dedalus through his morning ... from home to the beach ... getting ready to begin the journey of the day. And now, in The Nostos (or "return") - the final 3-part section - Bloom and Dedalus are now together, it is 1, 2 o'clock in the morning ... and it is time to slowly make their way home. Bloom to his sleeping wife - and Dedalus to the tower on the outskirts of London where he lives with his dissipated buddies.
The Eumaeus episode, which we are now in, takes place after the psychedelic visit to the brothel, described in the encyclopedic Circe episode. Bloom has rescued Dedalus from the whores, Dedalus has cut his hand - and he had a freak-out at the brothel, where he saw his dead mother's face in the ceiling, and tried to crash down the chandelier. Bloom intervened on his behalf. All of Dedalus' friends have disappeared ... so now Bloom and Dedalus are together. It's late late at night - 1 a.m. Instead of going straight home - or saying goodbye to one another and separating ... they decide to go take the edge off of their drunken states of mind - and get a cup of coffee, a bite to eat. They go to a cabman's shelter in Dublin - which also doubles as a coffeehouse, an all-night venue (which, even today, is rare in Dublin. It's not a 24-hour kind of town). The coffeehouse is full of "cabmen" off-duty. Bloom and Dedalus sit there, amongst the cabmen, and talk. For the first time, really.
One thing to make clear: Joyce, in a funny way, is not a romantic. Even though he was obviously a positive person. For example, in regards to Molly's famous run-on sentence that ends the book -he said, "I wanted to end the book on the positive word in the English language." ("Yes.") But the meeting of Bloom and Dedalus is NOT about kindred spirits, or finally finding someone who understands ... it is pretty clear that after this particular day, Bloom and Dedalus will go their separate ways. They will not become lifelong friends. There is too much of a gap between them. Joyce does not make them merge. Which is fascinating - because, in a way, that is what we, the readers, are looking for. After all that, after that whole day ... shouldn't they have a sense of recognition towards one another? Like: "you are what I have been searching for"? Joyce does not go that way, at least not explicitly. The Eumaeus episode is NOT about "mutual understanding" - as a matter of fact, it is just the opposite. It is about MISunderstanding. The language of the episode is fractured, fragmentary, lots of run-on sentences that trail off with no resolution. This is a brilliant mode for this episode which happens at 1 in the morning, when everyone is exhausted, still drunk, and yet unwilling to go home yet. The sharpness of thought in, say, the Scylla and Charybdis episode, is not in evidence at all here. Bloom and Dedalus talk, but exhaustion threatens to fog up the clarity. They discuss religion, different languages ... and in each case, Bloom and Dedalus are not on the same page. Ironically, Bloom sees Dedalus as an orthodox Catholic, whether he believes in the dogma of the church or not. We have seen Dedalus' disdain for organized religion - but regardless: Bloom's perception is that Dedalus is devout. Dedalus tries to talk about his ideas of God and simplicity to Bloom - but Bloom is not an intellectual. He is also not an artist. He just can't understand what Dedalus is talking about. And that would be a huge gulf between the two men. Bloom deals much more with reality - and what is right in front of his nose. Dedalus, with his broken glasses, and his bad eyesight - cannot, physically, even SEE what is right in front of his nose. So his mind is unleashed, far-flying, Icarus with his wings. Bloom is earthbound. It's a gulf that will not be crossed.
Bloom and Dedalus talk about politics and Ireland. Bloom is a socialist, and dreams of an Ireland where the workers are paramount. He does not realize that in saying so he is excluding the intellectual non-worker Dedalus from the new world order. Or at least he doesn't realize it immediately. Bloom (as we have seen in other episodes - primarily The Cyclops episode) can be a bit of a know-it-all. He pontificates on the way things should be, he knows the answers ... he lectures others, without realizing that blanket statements are fine if they remain ideas - but when you try to put them into practice, you'll run into trouble, like despotism, dictatorship, bigotry. Bloom realizes his mistake and tries to reassure Dedalus that "poets" would also be considered workers in his dream Socialist state. But it's too late. Again, that is a gulf between them that cannot be crossed. Dedalus doesn't care about politics - at least not in a practical way - and he doesn't care about the fate of Ireland. Or, let's say: he is not personally invested in Ireland - since he feels that Ireland is not personally invested in him.
At the start of the episode, as Bloom and Dedalus approach the coffeehouse, they run into Corley - a drunken mess of a man (who is one of the "stars" in Joyce's story "Two Gallants" from Dubliners - that's another thing: Ulysses is full of the same characters we met in Dubliners and Portrait - which is indicative of how claustrophobic Joyce found Irish society - where everyone knows everyone. You can't get away with ANYthing in Ireland. Reinvention is impossible). Anyway, they run into Corley - and chat with him - and Dedalus mentions to him that there is a position open at Deasy's school - and maybe Corley would like the job. We realize, even though he did not give notice in The Nestor episode - that Stephen will be leaving that job. He has already decided to decamp. He's done. Again, we don't know at one point during the day Dedalus made that decision - but by 1 a.m., it's final.
Bloom, meanwhile, has no idea of this - and begins to almost fantasize about how Dedalus will fit into his life. It's a bit self-serving (but that's okay - we're all self-serving). He thinks that maybe Dedalus could help him get published. Dedalus is also a tenor (just like Joyce was) - and Bloom has a dream of starting an opera company in Dublin (perhaps to impress Molly, perhaps to stick it to Molly's lover Blazes Boylan) - and perhaps Dedalus could be of help in that venture.
So again: misunderstanding is the key to the Eumaeus episode. And not bitter misunderstanding, as we saw in the Cyclops episode - it's more of a common human failing. We see what we want to see. We assume that other human beings will be on the same page as us ... and when they behave in ways that do not "fit" with our preconceptions - we are baffled. But that is OUR failing, not the other person's. Bloom thinks the friendship with Stephen will continue past June 16-17. It obviously will not.
In the meantime, though, they are together. Bloom thinks he will take Stephen home with him, at least just for the night. It's so late, and Bloom is concerned at the thought of drunken cut-hand Stephen trying to make his way back out to Sandymount, where he lives. Bloom worries that maybe Molly will not like having a houseguest. Bloom feels protective of Stephen - at the same time that he feels Stephen will be of use to him. Again, very human.
The connection with The Odyssey is: Odysseus meets Eumaeus, a swineherd - in his return to Ithaca. And then, first order of the day, Odysseus joins up with Telemachus to kill all of Penelope's suitors - who have clustered around her during his absence. An obvious parallel with Bloom's anxiety about Molly's unfaithfulness. Can he slay Blazes Boylan?
Oh, another really really interesting thing they talk about in this episode is Parnell - the man who haunts Ireland (almost to this day). The great hope ... who was murdered ... and discredited because of an extramarital affair. For years, the rumor was that Parnell had NOT died and that the coffin said to be carrying him was full of rocks. This goes along with the Christ-like feeling that you get when Parnell is discussed. Will Parnell "return"? Ireland waits. The void left by Parnell was never filled. They are still waiting for him, for a savior. Now we know, from the first chapter of Portrait how Parnell's death affected Stephen. We also remember Joyce's story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room", from Dubliners - a vision of post-Parnell Irish politics, and their hollow cynical quality. Parnell is the key to so much. He's not only one of the keys to understanding Dedalus, but he's also crucial to our understanding of Bloom. Bloom, as we know, feels impotent when it comes to his wife. It wasn't always that way, and he has wonderful memories of their intimacy in their early courtship and marriage. But that has long since passed. Parnell, who risked all to have an affair with the married Kitty O'Shea (wife of a Captain) - is seen as a virile reckless sexual hero. Kinda akin to Alexander Hamilton, who had the same risk-taking masculine energy, when it came to politics and when it came to sex. So Bloom, in talking of Parnell, has an uneasy feeling ... as though Parnell somehow threatens him ... who could resist a Parnell? What woman would turn that down? Blazes Boylan, her lover, is also seen as a virile stallion. Bloom cannot compete. Captain O'Shea decided to ignore his wife's infidelity - and stay with her ... and Kitty O'Shea agreed to denounce Parnell ... leaving Parnell undefended. The parallels are clear. Bloom, as much as he wishes to be a sexual athlete, is not. He is Captain O'Shea, a man willing to look the other way as his wife screws someone else.
The cabman's shelter is full of noise and talk ... the kind of conversations you hear between drunk men (no women) at around 1 a.m. They argue, but they are too tired to fight. So the arguments are fine, because it will never go too far. But there's a leftover hallucinatory feel here - the kind of surreal vision you get when you are over-tired. Another important character here is the sailor in the shelter - who has not been home in 7 years, I think - and he is nervous that his wife will not recognize him, or that she will have completely moved on in his absence.
Dublin, in the Eumaeus episode, seems frayed, unconnected to reality, and intensely depressing.
It's time for Bloom and Dedalus to move on, to the final leg of their journey.
Here's an excerpt from the Eumaeus episode. The sailor is pontificating on the glory of Ireland, and how Irish men should stay home and develop their country. Stephen, naturally, has his own feelings about that. It is as though his consciousness has already departed. Anyway, watch how the episode meanders ... it's intellectually rigorous, but everyone's exhausted, and nerves are frayed. (Just had to get that in there ... because the Eumaeus episode is the "nervous system", in Joyce's iconography. We have been moving throughout the body, for the entire novel - each episode representing another function, or system - and now, at the very end of the day ... we are in the nerves themselves. It's not relaxing. Synapses fire - sometimes misfire ... it's all connected.)
The excerpt ends with one of my favorite lines in the whole book.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - The Eumaeus episode
Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland, or something of that sort, which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God's earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in large quantities, six million pounds' worth of pork exported every year, ten millions between butter and eggs, and all the riches drained out of it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the nose always, and gobbling up the best meat in the market, and a lot more surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was Colonel Everard down there in Cavan growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated crescendo with no uncertain voice - thoroughly monopolising all the conversation - was in store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on account of her crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history. The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel, which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the Greek hero - a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.
Silence all round marked the termination of his finale. The impervious navigator heard these lurid tidings undismayed.
-- Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.
To which cold douche, referring to downfall and so on, the keeper concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.
-- Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and generals we've got? Tell me that.
-- The Irish for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial blemishes apart.
-- That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?
While allowing him his individual opinions, as every man, the keeper added he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few irascible words, when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing to the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long as they didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.
From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for, pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel, unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years the coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as time went On, that turned Out to be how the cat jumped all he could personally say on the matter was that as a host of contingencies, equally relevant to the issue, might occur ere then it was highly advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both countries, even though poles apart. Another little interesting point, the amours of whores and chummies, to put it in common parlance, reminded him Irish soldiers had as often fought for England as against her, more so, in fact. And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee of the place, rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as being on all fours with the confidence trick, supposing, that is, it was prearranged, as the lookeron, a student of the human soul, if anything, the others seeing least of the game. And as for the lessee or keeper, who probably wasn't the other person at all, he (Bloom) couldn't help feeling, and most properly, it was better to give people like that the goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether and refuse to have anything to do with them as a golden rule in private life and their felonsetting, there always being the offchance of a Dannyman coming forward and turning queen's evidence - or king's now - like Denis or Peter Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from that, he disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any shape or form, he certainly did feel, and no denying it (while inwardly remaining what he was), a certain kind of admiration for a man who had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his political convictions though, personally, he would never be a party to any such thing, off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south - have her or swing for her - when the husband frequently, after some words passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky mortal (the man having had the pair watched), inflicted fatal injuries on his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial liaison by plunging his knife into her until it just struck him that Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed, actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some legal luminary saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient history by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcetera, he had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought to have either died naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell - positively last performance then come up smiling again. Generous to a fault, of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort, always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some #. s. d. in the course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere of the Old Ireland tavern, come back to Erin and so on. Then as for the others, he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo, as he told Stephen how he simply but effectually silenced the offender.
He took umbrage at something or other, that much injured but on the whole eventempered person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew, and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too, and all his family, like me, though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone saw. Am I not right?
He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride at the soft impeachment, with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly .
-- Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or four eyes conversing, Christus or Bloom his name is, or, after all, any other, secundum carnem.
-- Of course, Mr Bloom proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality? I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak.
-- Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes' war, Stephen assented, between Skinner's alley and Ormond market.
-- Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that was overwhelmingly right and the whole world was overwhelmingly full of that sort of thing.
-- You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn't remotely.
All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood - bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag - were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything, greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.
-- They accuse - remarked he audibly. He turned away from the others, who probably... and spoke nearer to, so as the others... in case they...
-- Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History - would you be surprised to learn? - proves up to' the hilt Spain decayed when the Inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian, who, in other respects, has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any... because you know the standard works on the subject, and then, orthodox as you are... But in the economic, not touching religion, domain, the priest spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead America. Turks, it's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better - at least, so I think. That's the juggle on which the p.p.'s raise the wind on false pretences. I'm, he resumed, with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of #300 per annum. That's the vital issue at stake and it's feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man. At least that's my idea for what it's worth. I call that patriotism. Ubi patria, as we learned a small smattering of in our classical day in Alma Mater, vita bene. Where you can live well, the sense is, if you work.
Over his untasteable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular. He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning, burrowing quickly into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or didn't say the words the voice he heard said - if you work.
-- Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning to work.
The eyes were surprised at this observation, because as he, the person who owned them pro. tem. observed, or rather, his voice speaking did: All must work, have to, together.
-- I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest possible sense. Also literary labour, not merely for the kudos of the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel nowadays. That's work too. Important work. After all, from the little I know of you, after all the money expended on your education, you are entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is equally important.
-- You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.
-- I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.
-- But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.
-- What belongs? queried Mr Bloom, bending, fancying he was perhaps under some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately I didn't catch the latter portion. What was it you?...
Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee, Or whatever you like to call it, none too politely, adding:
-- We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.
January 19, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Circe episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Circe casts a spell over Odyseeus' crew and turns them all into pigs (Odysseus is not there - the crew have been invited to her home for dinner, and she poisons their meal and then waves her magic wand: Oink Oink). Circe's dad is Helios, the son god (which is obviously connected to the Oxen of the Sun episode) ... she lives on the island of Aeaea. Her home is surrounded by lions and other fierce animals, and she has the ability to turn her enemies into something else. She's also an expert on herbs, drugs of every kind (which could possibly explain the acid-trip energy of the Circe chapter!) One of the men had escaped, because he suspected all was not right in the state of Denmark - and ran off to tell Odysseus what had happened. Hermes gives Odysseus some advice before he tries to charge the castle to rescue his men: he gave him an herb to help him resist the potion Circe had given all the other men. He also told him to draw his sword as though he wanted to fight Circe. Circe would then want to sleep with him - because she was just that kinda gal. Hermes told Odysseus to always be wary of her, even if they did become lovers (which they did) - and to always be on his guard - because she could take his manhood away, she was that potentially awful. But Circe ends up, after a year of them living together as lovers, helping him on his journey home.
You can KIND of see the connection with the Circe episode - there's one point (if I recall correctly) that Bloom is tranformed into a pig, and I am sure there are many others. The episode begins after the men's time at the maternity hospital - and they all head over to "Nighttown", the red-light district. They go to Bella's brothel, on Tyrone Street, en masse. Dedalus, at this point, is not strictly aware of the fact that Bloom is now following him, to keep an eye on him.
But before I go further, I have to just mention the style of this particular episode, because it can't be denied - and it's hard to talk about the writing without acknowledging the extraordinary crazy style it's written in. It's written like a play. We get stage directions in italics (sometimes the stage directions go on for over a page) - and we get dialogue. Nothing internal. Because the form is in a play, a performance of some kind - all kinds of supposedly unreal things can (and do) happen. Kisses take the form of birds. Clocks actually talk and have lines. People from the past appear as literal apparitions. Paddy Dignam (dead, as we know) has a role. The climax of the episode is when Stephen's dead mother appears to him in the ceiling - and he goes batshit crazy, swinging his walking stick at the chandelier, trying to banish the image. It is not clear what is real, what is unreal. It's all one. It's like a drug trip. If you do hallucinogenic drugs, it's not LIKE the walls are breathing in and out. The walls are ACTUALLY breathing in and out. That's the world we are in here. Bloom is on a mission to save Stephen. He can sense Stephen's pain - and he also knows Stephen is wasted, so therefore he is vulnerable to the treachery of the whores, who could steal his money, etc. Bloom tries to make it clear that he is not there for himself. But it ends up not mattering. Bella (or Bello - as she is also called) is the mistress of the house, the main whore. It's her joint. So she emerges ... and hones in on Bloom (when you read the book, look for all the references to pigs and hogs. They're everywhere). She begins to break Bloom down - psychologically, bringing forth all of his sexual fantasies. They become real. It is all about debasement, Bloom groveling on the floor before the female, licking her boots, etc. It's shocking, all of it. Bloom has been so (pun intended) buttoned up for the whole book - except for his confrontation with the Citizen ... so to see him completely undone and transformed into a sniveling masochistic slave-boy - is totally disorienting, and it's meant to be so.
The connection with the Circe episode in The Odyssey seems clear - although perhaps once removed. There is a fear that un-leashed sexuality will turn us into animals. Literally. Not metaphorically. And so the human race has a great investment in limiting the expression of sex, so that it never goes as far as that. Keep it domesticated, keep it in marriage, keep it safe. We are NOT animals. We are above them. Joyce, in the Circe episode, shows the foolishness of such thinking, however understandable. Sex is, by definition, animalistic. And fantasies shows us who we are. Dreams show us who we are. Joyce needed to show Bloom's inner life - in a way that Bloom could never do himself. So he placed Bloom in this phantasmagorical brothel, where he's under a spell, where inanimate objects have voices, where nymphs sing in a chorus, etc. - so that we can see his inner life, his deepest desires. Masochistic, he yearns for a sadist. He has a vague sense of guilt about everything (perhaps dating back to the death of his son) - and so sexually, he wants to grovel, and beg and plead for forgiveness. Bella, like all good whores, knows how to bring it out of him. She sees it, senses it, and goes for it. There is a catharsis in being debased - and again, if you don't have that sexual proclivity you might find this utterly baffling. And maybe even threatening or gross. Perhaps in Bloom's conscious mind, he is grossed out by himself, that he wants these things, that debasement brings sexual satisfaction. That is certainly not a socially acceptable position to take, and the powers-that-be who want to domesticate sex - will never ever go for such a thing. So the Circe episode (which, I think, might be the longest in the entire book) - brings that which is socially feared - out into the open. It's almost scary, because nothing here is really real. For example, at one point - one of the whores refers to Mr. Bloom as "ma'amsir". A blend of the two sexes. I don't even have to tell you the response many have to such "blending". (I'm sure Alex could fill you in! Ironically, and perfectly - Alex played Bella in a production of Ulysses in Chicago - and our very first conversation - outside of our blogs, I mean - was a phone converstaion where she grilled me about Ulysses, in preparation for playing her role. It's one of my sadnesses that I did not get to see that production!! I'm sure she was brilliant!) But Joyce, in his imagination, and his heart - feels that we are all a bit of both sexes. The fear of merging is intense with some people ... they assert "this is what woman is", "this is what man is" ... and sadly (for them, I mean - since they;'re the ones who seem tormented by the thought that people are having sex in ways which they do not approve) many of us do not live by those rules.
And so we think we know Bloom. But then we realize: Wow. We don't know him at all. (This is a great point to make, though. The judgmental attitude towards other people's sex lives and what form it takes- needs to always be confronted, and at least questioned. Because we all do it - judge, I mean. Much of it comes from fear. Some of it comes from blatant incomprehension, like: 'Wow. You're into that?? That doesn't appeal to me at ALL.' And that's cool - as long as you have the humility to realize that your way is not the only way ... But at some point, on our journey thru life - as we grow older, and gain experience - we realize that you just never know what goes on behind closed doors ...you realize that those two 50 year old prim and proper American Gothic-looking people may have the hottest most subversive sex behind closed doors ... and you just never know. So lose the superior attitude. Lose the judgment. Lose all of it.)
We know Bloom's thoughts, his dietary likes and dislikes, the way he kisses, the way he walks, we know his speech patterns now, we know he's a bit clumsy ... we know he has hidden depths of strength and anger ... but we don't know everything. We realize in this chapter how important fantasy is ... and how human beings are made of their fantasies, wishes, desires, unfulfilled longings, haunting memories ... all of those ephemeral things that can take on a reality even more solid than that which is actually real. The last moment of the Circe episode is horrifying, since we have already been prepared for it. Bloom, after his catharsis of sexual debasement with Bella, gets a vision of his dead son Rudy. Is that a dagger I see before me. It is a hallucination, but it is, at the same time, completely real.
It's devastating. It echoes Stephen's devastation at seeing his mother's face in the ceiling of the brothel. That which remains unresolved in our psyches, will come back to haunt us, in greater and more hallucinatory forms. Man, I've experienced that in my own life, with various things. Things I have not dealt with, or healed (however uncompletely) will morph into ... almost a movie-monster in my head, something to be battled, or just flat out feared. Run!! Run!!
The Circe episode - which is a romp and a half, I tell you ... ends with a fight out on the sidewalk. Bloom has rescued Stephen from the clutches of the whores, and has also rescued him from the damage he did to the chandelier. Bloom has also exorcised a couple of demons - which is not a pleasant experience, all in all ... but groveling around in front of Bella for nigh on 15 pages. You feel like you need to take a break after the Circe episode, with its acid-trip images, its fantastical settings, its insistence that nothing is real. You yearn for something solid, something known and set in stone ... it's disorienting. Sex, I suppose, is also disorienting. Or has the potential to be so. Especially if, like Bloom, the main fantasies are never expressed. I'm not just talking about sexual fantasies - although Joyce was big on that ... but the grief over his son's death, the horror of guilt he feels ... all of that has been pushed so far down that when it emerges, here, it takes on dreadful proportions.
Circe is also a very funny chapter, even with its dark underbelly. The language reminds me a bit of Jean Genet's plays - with their violent imagery, the precise articulation of horrors and desire, the feeling of explosiveness running thru everything ... and also just a general subversive milieu. People in Genet's plays are the so-called freaks of the world: the sadists, the masochists, the sex slaves, the dominatrix-es, the whipping boys, the drug addicts and street urchins. There is a level of society where fantasies are meant to be acted out. There are a bazillion websites devoted to such things. But then when you read, oh, Glamour magazine, or some un-subversive magazine - the emotionally tortured questions like, "My husband wants me to dress up as a French maid ... Is that okay? Or is it weird that he would want that? What's the matter with me as myself?" Now, I am NOT making fun of people who find fantasies threatening or scary. They ARE threatening and scary. Because they require of us a dissolution of our everyday and well-known public personality. And that is, in general, terrifying. A common question in women's magazines is: "I have a fantasy of being raped. I'm really disturbed by that ... does it mean I want to be raped?" There is a discomfort with blending the fantasy world with the real world. And rightly so - because those who cannot disconnect the fantasy from the real are called mentally ill. HOWEVER. "Acting out" fantasies can be quite cathartic and awesome. And yes, scary, at the same time. So - there are those who want to delve into that stuff, and act stuff out, and dress up, and whatever ... this kind of lifestyle will probably never be socially acceptable to what is known as the "vanilla" crowd (and that's okay by me. What's the fun of being subversive if the mainstream gives its stamp of approval?) ... So Bloom, who is full of sexual anxiety about his wife - can he satisfy her, can he live up to Blazes Boylan ... wants to give up all of that power, wants to surrender completely to the female ... that is his how his sexuality truly expresses itself (but it can only come out under the influence of the whorehouse. What Bloom goes through in the Circe episode is probably 100% new to him. Which is why it's so disorienting and potentially terrifying.)
Joyce was not at all a libertine. He was a one-woman man, and stayed with the same woman for, what, 40 years or something like that. He was quite conservative in many ways, and was a family man. Granted, an insane-genius family man perpetually in mounds of debt ... but you know, there are stories of all the ex-pats in Paris, whooping it up at some table - drinking, going nuts, having affairs, etc. ... and over in the corner sat the Joyce family - mom, dad, 2 little kids - having dinner (that they couldn't afford), and drinking white wine. In a funny way, Joyce - who was the biggest rebel of them all, to the point that he couldn't even live in Ireland - was more conventional than all the other writers living in Europe at that time. BUT. And this is important. Because we know of James' and Nora's "dirty letters" (as they are referred to) - we know the vibrancy and activity of their sex life - as well as Joyce's fantasies, and what was desirable to him, etc. I'm not saying this to gross out the TMI set (although, Jesus, anyone who chirps "TMI" at the least provocation is going to have a helluva time with Joyce, who didn't have a TMI bone in his body) ... But anyway, I'm only referring to the "dirty letters" to point out that James and Nora were quite domesticated (in their ex-pat living-on-nothing way) - they were a pair, they traveled together, they had 2 kids, they were messy housekeepers. All relatively normal compared to the experiences of other writers living abroad at that time. James and Nora weren't rolling around in a garret, having 20 lovers and menage a trois experiences every other weekend. But behind closed doors? James and Nora were filthy!! They were open, sexy, dirty, sharing fantasies, Nora sent him her underwear thru the mail - you know, your basic stuff. But to look at them? You'd never guess. Joyce could never have been a husband to a woman who judged that side of him, the dirty-minded side. And who knows, maybe Nora did find him nuts on some level ... and found his fantasies boring or tiresome. But she played along. She did not get snippety, prissy, or judge-y about what he wanted in the sack. I can't imagine Joyce being able to deal with a neat ladylike little lady, domesticated in her DNA. Nope. Nora was a bit wild. And really, you never can guess about another human being. You would probably be wrong. In the same way we have been wrong about Bloom.
Joyce is the ultimate humanist.
Here's an excerpt. This is from the beginning of the incredibly long encounter between Bloom and Bella (or Bello - she is known as both). Bella sets out to dominate him, break him down. He transforms from male to female, from human to animal ... Under her spell. Bloom - Leopold Bloom - the man we feel we know - is suddenly female, and submissive - like he's the narrator in Story of O or something. Or he's Sleeping Beauty in Anne Rice's erotic trilogy - a slave on display, sexually, in the middle of the market square. It's wild! Also: there's the sense that he - Bloom - is on trial (Bello says to him, at one point, referencing Blazes Boylan: "He's no eunuch." Ouch!). This is an ongoing theme through the chapter: Bloom's guilt and shame about all kinds of things - coming to the surface - and being put before the world in a court of law. So human, I have felt that way myself. Oh, and look for the pig references.
Oh and notice the random reference to the "secondbest bed" - a wonderful looping back to the theme of Shakespeare, Hamlet, and fatherlessness - which is, in reality, the TRUE driving force of this scene. Bloom has come to the brothel to save Stephen from being taken advantage of. And Bloom gets caught in Circe's (Bella's) spell ... and his catharsis is enormous, the debasement and humiliation he has felt all day pouring forth in a sexual fantasy which is really quite gross ... but it's his ... and it serves his purpose ... And Stephen, drunk, is confronted by the ghost of his mother ... and goes so apeshit that he is thrown out of the brothel. Bloom follows. He is a guardian angel. He is the father to the son. He assumes that role - as he becomes fully Man again.
Wild stuff.
Ack, sorry - one last thing: The Circe episode - which is almost 200 pages long - is the last episode in the Odyssey section of the book (see breakdown above). After this, we are in the Nostos ("return") section - the mirror-image of the Telemachia at the beginning ... The Nostos is also 3 episodes long, and involves Bloom's return home. Finally.
But it isn't until Bloom has turned himself inside out in the hallucinatory world of the brothel ... that he is ready to head home to his wife, to his life, to himself. He must "go there" first, before he can return.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Circe episode
(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked. Bloom, stifflegged ageing, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers draws out and in her laces.)
(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in mid-brow. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)
(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming dead with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.)
(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)
(He twists her arm. Bloom squeaks, turning turtle.)
(The brothel cook, Mrs Keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men's grey and green socks and brogues, flour-smeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)
(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Eooloohoom. Poldy Hock, Bootlaces a penny, cassidy's hag, blind stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other the... )
(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.)
(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)
(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)
(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her bluescab in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)
(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowie knife between his teeth.)
(He bites his thumb.)
(He weeps tearlessly.)
(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, 0. Mastiansky, the Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the recreant Bloom.)
(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oak frame a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown art colours, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews, stands over Bloom.)
January 18, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Oxen of the Sun episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Gotta be honest. The Oxen of the Sun episode is the only episode in the chapter that I actually don't feel qualified to read. It seems beyond me. Like much of Finnegans Wake is beyond me, just because I am not a (cunning) linguist - and I do not know the derivations of words (or, not ALL of them anyway!) ... and I feel like if I DID, maybe I would "see" more. The Oxen of the Sun is tough. It is hard. I had to force myself to keep going. Eventually, a vague "plot" emerged - but the language itself was such a barrier, for me ... to even see what was going on on the simplest level. (Naturally, that is Joyce's whole point - which I'll get to in a minute) Very early on in Oxen of the Sun, I realized: Nope. 98% of this is going over my head. No idea. My dad gave me some clues as to what Joyce was up to (which, again, I'll talk about it a minute) ... and, to me, knowing what Joyce was up to has NEVER been more crucial than with Oxen of the Sun. But still: I still didn't feel "qualified" ... I knew that most of Joyce's cleverness was way over my head on this one.
I'll just tell the bare bones of the plot of this chapter - because seriously, the plot is the least important thing going on in Oxen of the Sun.
Leopold Bloom has thought, a couple times through his day, about Mina Purefoy - the wife of a friend, who has been in labor at the National Maternity Hospital for three days. Bloom is concerned about her, wonders how on earth she is bearing it, amazed at the ferocity and animal-like endurance of women. It's now about 10 o'clock at night ... Bloom has finished his walk on the beach, and now heads back to the center of town. He plans on stopping by the hospital - where he knows his friend will be - to see how he (and she, of course) are doing. When he arrives, he sees that he was not the only one with that idea, and the waiting room is full of many of the characters we have seen throughout the day. And: Stephen Dedalus is one of them. At last: the two are in the same space. Dedalus has been out drinking with his buddies, and they are all rowdy, and loud - making jokes about everything, puns, whatever - being kind of annoying, actually. Bloom realizes, somehow, that Dedalus is a bit lost - there's a recognition thing that goes on for Bloom here, even though he does not really know Stephen (his eavesdropping on Stephen's "lecture" about Shakespeare in the library notwithstanding). He thinks Stephen's hanging out with the wrong crowd, basically - and needs some guidance. He decides to join Stephen's group - in order to keep an eye on him. A very fatherly thing to do. And Bloom would know, since he knows Simon Dedalus (Stephen's father) - as well as having overheard Stephen's discourse on Hamlet, the fatherless prince of Denmark - that Stephen really needs a father. Mulligan and Stephen get into some kind of scuffle - and Stephen hurts his hand. The baby is born. All is well. Bloom and Dedalus walk out onto the street (all of Stephen's friends have headed off to "Nighttown" - the red light district of Dublin ... and there's a thunderstorm. Stephen literally cowers in fear. (Joyce was immobilized by thunderstorms, hiding, trembling - they completely undid him.) Stephen, who made a big show of not believing in God earlier in the book - seems to suddenly fear the wrath of God (Stephen, too, throughout the book, is haunted by the fact that he refused to pray at his dying mother's bedside. He would not get on his knees before a God he did not believe. But that choice haunts him. Mulligan teases him about it. It's obviously something Stephen cannot forgive himself for.)
Okay. So that's what happens. But man, the FORM Joyce chooses is the most challenging in the book. More than any other episode, it predicts where he will go in Finnegans Wake.
Let's look at it.
Because it takes place in a maternity hospital (and Dublin, at that time, had awesome facilities for women giving birth ... for such a poor country, their maternity hospitals were excellent): we can probably guess what bodily function correlates to this episode. So because of that: he has structured the episode in nine sections. You can feel how the language changes from section to section. The nine months of gestation for a human baby. The development of the fetus into a baby. Things fusing, merging, separating ... that whole speeded-up film you saw in Health class of development: that's what Joyce is doing in the language here. It begins on the simplest level and grows more and more complex (naturally. This makes sense.) So keep that in mind when you read the episode. Even if you're like: "DUDE. This is gibberish!" It's actually not.
But the OTHER thing Joyce is doing ... (since the development of the baby moves it from unthinking tiny amoeba to a being with consciousness and the potential for great complex thinking ... ) is - along with the 9 months of human pregnancy - moving us through the 9 phases/developments of the English language. Another kind of gestation. Joyce was obsessed with language (obviously). You have to be able to make it through the kind of Beowulf-ish sections ... and then suddenly segue into a Gothic melodrama language ... It's tough going. Just saying. And because I am not familiar with how the English language developed - I mean, I basically know: Chaucer! Shakespeare! ... I could only guess at what he was doing half the time. The beginning of the episode is written in what almost sounds like Latin. It's English, but it doesn't sound like English. Then there's Old English. And language imitating John Bunyan. Language imitating Charles Lamb (who wrote essays about childhood: so Joyce uses him as the model for Bloom's going back into the past, thinking about his childhood, and other things). Again, you'd have to even know who the hell Charles Lamb WAS to get what Joyce is up to. (I looked all this up as I read the chapter. And thankfully, my own personal library is extensive enough - with poetry going back to medieval times, that I could look stuff up if I needed to. And, uhm, yeah. I did.) And then ... moving on thru the episode ... we go through an Arthurian section, a sort of Guinevere and Lancelot-type language - courtly, formal, we see knights and forests, etc. (But we're always still in the Maternity hospital - let's not forget that. Joyce turns Bloom into a knight, basically ... showing up on a courtly visit. Etc.) Once the baby is born, we move into sentimental cooing language, reminiscent of some of Dickens. The mother and babe, idealized, perfect, happy (unrealistic), etc. So we're getting at least closer to our own age, the language is getting a bit more recognizable. No more of this Beowulf Everyman shit!! Joyce is making fun of the idealized view of women and childbirth - he knew it was a lot of work, and blood, and howling, and sometimes horror. So the "oh, the baby coos at the mother's breast" language of the 1800s is his way of making fun of it. Then, later, we move into the 19th century Gothic melodrama style - Mulligan telling the story of Haines and the black panther (which will be a recurring image for Joyce - it shows up again in Finnegans Wake. As Mulligan talks - listen to the language: "Which of us did not feel his flesh creep?" "In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope ... Ah! Destruction! The black panther!" Melodrama. Late 19th century - moving towards the 20th century now. And the episode ends - with all the men heading off to Nighttown - and the language at the end of the episode is all Dublin slang, nearly incomprehensible. Like Cockney slang. It is English, but it is another language entirely. The modern day: with its fracturing, its messiness ... the grand sweep of the history of the English language being lost in the shuffle. Joyce was obsessed with derivations. Tracing puns/jokes/words back into antiquity - trying to dig deeper meaning out of everything. You know ... when you know that the word "disaster" has, as its Latin derivation, the two words: "dis" meaning "separation from" and "aster" meaning "stars" ... it gives you a whole new understanding of what disaster really means. Joyce took stuff like that to a whole other level, twisting and turning himself down into the ground, looking for more, grubbing around for more meaning, tracing slang back to Beowulf. What is this English language? What is it? The slang at the end of Oxen of the Sun, in a way, is prophetic. The breakdown of culture and language that has continued apace through the 20th century. The connection to the past severed, leaving the Dublin youths rambling around, talking in ugly slang.
Anyway, it's a rigorous episode. Don't give up.
Just know that Joyce is doing three things:
1. Describing Bloom and Dedalus' meeting, at last.
2. Taking us thru the 9 months of pregnancy
3. Taking us thru the 9 phases of development in the English language - past to present
Oh, and actually: he's doing 4 things. Because he's also making connections, of course, with The Odyssey. In The Oxen of the Sun episode in The Odyssey - Odysseus' men kill the cattle of the sun god Helios. (The first couple paragraphs of "Oxen of the Sun" calls upon the sun god, in numerous puns. Look for them.) Helios is pissed and kills them all, except for Odysseus. In Ulysses we know (because lots of people have been talking about it all day) - that the cattle in Ireland are suffering from foot and mouth disease. The cows are going to be slaughtered in England. Lots of brou-haha about this.
On even another level (sorry, it's just endless): Joyce uses this episode to contemplate life and death. Birth. The process of birth. The forming of life. The episode takes place in a hospital, a sterile environment. Dedalus and his buddies make ribald jokes about sex, which Bloom does not appreciate. Buck Mulligan, especially, seems to trumpet the joys of sex without love, or commitment. Casual sex, I guess you'd say. Joyce didn't "believe" in birth control - he didn't think you should get in the way of life. So Mulligan's joking is seen as in poor taste (Joyce has been gunning for Mulligan from the beginning) - and there are tons of jokes/puns about condoms (look for all of them! Even in the Beowulf sections! Condoms are everywhere in this chapter about birth. And let's not forget: Ireland is a Catholic country. Birth control is a huge hot-topic there - and continues to be so.) Preventing life was against nature, Joyce thought. He had complex feelings about masturbation, too - which we saw in the last episode - and it comes up again here. Bloom "wasted" his seed on himself ... seen as (also) a big no-no. Jesus, you can't please any of these people, can you.
Nobody's the lead in Oxen of the Sun. There is no "point of view" - we aren't with Bloom, or with Stephen. We are somewhere else. We follow the development in the womb, and we also follow the development of the English language - from something simple and rough to something overwrought and complex - to something fracturing apart into slang.
And that's what's happening here. It's rigorous, make no mistake. And most of it, like I said, I wasn't even qualified to understand. Brilliant, though - you can feel the brilliance. Joyce is so far beyond any of his contemporaries in what he is attempting here ... it is not wholly successful, but that matters not at all. Because the attempt is STILL so far beyond what anyone has ever accomplished before or since. It's breathtaking. It's like listening to The Goldberg Variations. At first the theme is clear, you can hear it. Then it disappears ... but no, it doesn't. It is still there. Just in reverse. Or a third down. Or in the left hand. Until finally ... it re-emerges as what we recognize from the start. It has gone through a morphing process - and only a very very good ear (one who knows what to look for) could hear it, as it changes. "Oh ... that's the theme ... there it is. It sounds nothing like it did in the beginning ... but that's it."
Joyce is on that level here.
Okay, so here's an excerpt. I'm gonna choose an excerpt that starts in Joyce's Old English - and we can watch as it morphs into the chivalrous medieval English.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Oxen of the Sun episode
Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with wholesome food reposeful cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her thereto to lie in, her term up.
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers they there walk, white sisters in ward sleepless. Smarts they still sickness soothing: in twelve moons thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding wariest ward.
In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mild-hearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin! Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne's house.
Loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine year had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes his word winning.
As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O'Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.
Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.
The man that was come into the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed. The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman's birth. Then she set it forth all to him that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a young face for any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.
And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learning knight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should go into that castle for to make merry with them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtle. Also the lady was of his avis and reproved the learning knight though she trowed well that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But the learning knight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers lands and sometimes venery.
And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white flames that they fix in the horns of buffalos and stags that there abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath that he blares into them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olive press. And also it was marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of fecund wheat kidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits that they do into it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a brewage like to mead.
And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his neighbour wist not of his wile. And he sat down in that castle with them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.
This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege lord to leave their wassailing for there was above one quick with child a gentle dame, whose time hied fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long. And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both's health for he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars' hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman's woe with wonder pondering.
January 17, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Nausicaa episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
It's now a couple of hours after the Cyclops episode. Mr. Bloom has gone to dinner with the Dignam family (who are grieving the loss of Paddy, buried just that day), and afterwards he goes for a walk on the beach. To clear his mind, to shake off the gloom of the Dignams as well as the bad memory of the run-in with The Citizen (the Cyclops). Not to mention the fact that he still is hesitant to go home to his wife. Molly had her rendesvous with Blazes Boylan a couple hours earlier ... and Bloom just can't face it, the obvious-ness of the adultery ... He wanders around, avoiding the return home. He is on the same beach where Stephen went for a walk in The Proteus Episode. So there's a mirror-image thing going on here ... Bloom walking in Stephen's footprints, basically. Which I think is important because it will be in the next episode - the encyclopedic and sometimes very confusing Oxen of the Sun episode - that Stephen and Bloom finally meet, and merge. After Oxen of the Sun, Bloom and Stephen are together for the rest of the night. But in this episode, the Nausicaa episode, Bloom is still isolated, alone.
As he walks on the beach, he sees a couple of young women - who have younger siblings with them, babies and toddlers. One of the women (she's really just a girl - in her late teens) in particular catches his eye. Her name is Gerty. It's now almost dusk, and Roman candles are fizzing through the air (kind of an orgasmic type of motion ... which goes with the theme of the chapter - as a matter of fact, there's all kinds of big arcs that show up in Nausicaa ... meaning: the actual shape of arcs - have fun finding them all! There are a ton - those arcs are there to reflect what is going on physiologically with Bloom). So anyway, Bloom hangs back, and observes Gerty, drinking her in with his eyes. Gerty eventually realizes she is being watched, and begins to toy with him. Pulling her skirt up a bit to reveal her stocking, etc. She is an innocent Irish woman, a good girl ... but wise in the ways of men. Up until now, Molly (unseen, and feared, and gossiped about everywhere) is really the only female of any import in the book. And we haven't met her yet. But we judge her, we have feelings about her, we have preconceived notions, etc. Gerty, in her way, predicts the last episode - with Molly's run-on sentence, as she lies in bed, thinking and waiting for her husband to return. We have been wrong, oh so wrong, about Molly ... even though she is no saint. Joyce was not a typical madonna/whore type guy ... and certainly quite untraditional in his relationship with Nora (his wife). His understanding of women came from Nora, and Nora alone (he admitted this himself). And Nora, like all women, like all people really - but we're concerned with women here - is a mixed bag: sinner, saint, fallible, human. Not an IMAGE in a NICHE in a church - but a living breathing person with a will of her own. In Ulysses women are the unknowable "Other" - almost like a foreign race of beings to the men who want to fuck them ... they are not real, they are not three-dimensional, they do not have thoughts and logic and reality - in the way men do. They are images. Let's not forget that Ireland is a Catholic country, where Mary is revered often more than Christ is. All women become versions of the Virgin Mary (which happens at the end of the 4th chapter in Portrait as well). Joyce was very well aware of the contradictions women faced, which was one of the reasons why he couldn't live in Ireland with Nora, where the rules were too strict. He didn't care about housekeeping, gentility, the way things "should" be, traditional gender roles - any of that. But they couldn't live that way in Ireland. After all, they lived together without getting married for - what - 20 years? They had 2 kids together. They eventually got married - but that was in the 1930s - long after the beginning of their relationship, in 1904. He could not accept the rules of the game, and Nora was a willing partner in this. A rough Galway girl, she said later in her life, "You can't imagine what it was like for me to be thrown into the life of this man." I want to be clear: Joyce was not particularly more enlightened than anybody else, and Nora - throughout their lives together - still remained a kind of mystery to him. There was something about women he could never understand, or get inside ... who WAS Nora? He wrote a letter to her early on, something like, "I want to know your most secret thoughts ..." He wanted to inhabit her. Not just because he loved her, which he obviously did - but because it was good for his art. He stole from her, repeatedly. She was the only woman he ever could write about. And because he did not keep her at arms length - because they did not have a "traditional" relationship (read their sexy letters and you'll see what I mean. It's an early 20th century version of phone sex) - Joyce had no illusions about women being a different species than men. He knew Nora masturbated, he knew she had times of the month when she was "in heat", etc. etc. Women were still entirely mysterious ... and Joyce was all about getting inside of other people's heads, and experiences. But women were not on a pedestal ... he did not judge their sex drives, their desires ... It sometimes might have intimidated him ... but he was more curious about it, than threatened.
So Gerty's purity (represented by the church bells ringing, and the almost spiritual nature of her beauty), on the one hand, is real. It's not a put-on, or an act. But - and this is very important - Gerty's wise-woman showing-her-stockings-to-Bloom is ALSO real. Both things - the madonna and the whore - can exist in the same person. Gerty pre-figures Molly, Gerty prepares us for Molly. There are men, to this day, who must separate out the madonna and the whore. Life can be a torment for them (and Joyce shows the torment of the men in his books who suffer from such a thing). Bloom does, in a way. Dedalus certainly does. In a country where a VIRGIN is the most revered woman in the land ... you're gonna have those problems.
The Nausicaa episode is in two parts, basically. The first part is Gerty's alone. We are not even aware that Bloom is hiding behind a rock, spying on her. But we learn, later, that what we see - is Bloom's perception of her. The first part is written in the florid over-emotional almost trembling on the verge of parody - prose of a sentimental novel. Maybe Bloom had peeked into Sweets of Sin, the book he was bringing home to Molly ... and that was what inspired him. It's a worked-up prose, it over-explains everything: the colors, Gerty's outfit, the sights and sounds of the dusk .. all of it in an overwrought kind of writing. It's hysterical - to see Joyce, big serious writer man, parody that type of fiction. Harlequin Romance stuff. But, as always, Joyce is onto something. When we are "in love" - or struck dumb by someone's beauty ... often our experience is exactly like a Harlequin. Bloom sees Gerty as a vision (again: the female is not quite real) ... and when she lifts up her stocking? That is the equivalent of a girl showing her breasts to the crowd at Mardi Gras. It is shocking, and completely overt ... takes Bloom totally by surprise (because we slowly become aware of him ... as Gerty realizes she is being watched). Gerty sees a man over there ... watching her ... and he has his hands in his pockets, and she knows why. Instead of tittering with fright and coy pleasure, the way a female stereotype would - she instead, slowly lifts up her skirt to the knee ... to show him her translucent calf. She knows what will happen next, and she stands there - like a statue - holding up her skirt, watching the Roman candles go off (I mean, come on, that's as obvious as the train careening into the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest). What all of this signifies is that Bloom, peeking out from behind the dunes or whereever he is hiding - masturbates, finally. He had been holding it in all day, a day full of anxiety, and sexual worry. He stares at Gerty's calf and masturbates. Gerty knows that that is what he is doing, even though she is a virgin, like all good Irish girls should be ... and she is not grossed out, or freaked out. She stands there, in the pose, until she senses he is done. And then she - and her sister - and her younger siblings - move on. And out of our story forever.
Pretty extraordinary.
Joyce thought Irish women were the most beautiful fascinating women in the world. He did not like sophistication, he did not like intellectuals (especially women) ... he liked girls like Gerty. Like Nora. Like Molly. (all the same person, basically). He had many "dirty" thoughts, which - being who he was - tormented him. The old Catholic upbringing won't disappear overnight. He had gone to prostitutes. He was disturbed, in general, by masturbation. He did it, but he didn't feel GOOD about it. And he needed a woman who could understand that about him. Who could be kind and forgiving about his "dirtiness". And, boy, did he find it in Nora, huh??
Second part of the episode has Mr. Bloom, post-orgasm, sitting in the sand on the beach, and we are inside his head ... and follow his thoughts, here and there. He's tired, spent ... there's obviously a correlation between "spilling his seed" and the fact that his son had died ... should that seed be saved to perpetuate his race? Isn't it a crime, then, to masturbate? A selfish act? Bloom finds his mind wandering. He thinks of women he has known ... he remembers, yet again, making love to Molly on the hills at Howth, with the rhododendrons ... he remembers the beauty of love fulfilled. Of man and woman together. But now, of course, his memories are tinged with sadness because all of that has changed, and it seems like he has lost it forever.
The episode ends with the church bell ringing across the water. The bell goes "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" A mocking reminder of Bloom's cuckolded state.
Oh, and parallels to The Odyssey: Odysseus's ship is washed ashore in the kingdom of the Phaeacians - and Princess Nausicaa comes down to the shore with a gaggle of girlfriends, to wash their clothes - and comes across Odysseus sleeping there. She throws a ball at him, to wake him up. Nausicaa is a dream-type of woman: obviously domestic, because she's a princess, but she's doing her own laundry, basically ... and she also treats Odysseus, who is naked, with kindness and friendliness - bringing him up to the palace (or whatever) to get food, clothes, etc. She's HELPFUL.
Just like Gerty ... is HELPFUL to Bloom in this episode.
It's all wonderfully naughty. This chapter was probably one of the reasons why the book was banned for years. It's fine if we see men being naughty. But to have a woman - who is, at times, compared to the Virgin Mary - be naughty ... and be un-conflicted about it, un-worried ... to show her understanding of sex, and how okay she is with it ... Oh no no no, that totally breaks the rules. It's always when we get to the topic of Womanhood that things get tricky. So thank you, Joyce. For shattering some of that nonsense. It is the WORLD who has put women in the position of Madonna or whore ... and Joyce lets women be both. At the same time. Revolutionary.
Here's an excerpt. This is when Gerty becomes aware that Bloom is staring at her. Notice the lush language, the over-explanation of everything ... and also the mix of the sensual and the religious - they are side by side. Oh, and if you feel like it: look for the arc-shape. It shows up here, repeatedly.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Nausicaa episode
Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. And careworn hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many who had erred and wandered, their eyes wet with contrition but for all that bright with hope for the reverend father Hughes had told them what the great saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the most pious Virgin's intercessory power that it was not recorded in any age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned by her.
The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy played with baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word, didn't the little chap enjoy that! And then she told him to say papa.
-- Say papa, baby. Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa.
And baby did his level best to say it for he was very intelligent for eleven months everyone said and big for his age and the picture of health, a perfect little bunch of love, and he would certainly turn out to be something great, they said.
-- Hajajajahaja.
Cissy wiped his little mouth with the dribbling bib and wanted him to sit up properly, and say pa pa pa but when she undid the strap she cried out, holy saint Denis, that he was possing wet and to double the half blanket the other way under him. Of course his infant majesty was most obstreperous at such toilet formalities and he let everyone know it:
-- Habaa baaaahabaaa baaaa.
And two great big lovely big tears coursing down his cheeks. It was all no use soothering him with no, nono, baby, no and telling him about the geegee and where was the puffpuff but Ciss, always readywitted, gave him in his mouth the teat of the suckingbottle and the young heathen was quickly appeased.
Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out of that and not get on her nerves no hour to be out and the little brats of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went pitapat. Yes, it was her he was looking at and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. She could see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matinée idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she wasn't stagestruck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always dress the same on account of a play but she could not see whether he had an aquiline nose or a slightly retroussé from where he was sitting. He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what it was. He was looking up so intently, so still and he saw her kick the ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles of her shoes if she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down. She was glad that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a womanly woman not like other flighty girls, unfeminine, he had known, those cyclists showing off what they hadn't got and she just yearned to know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her, make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie, for herself alone.
Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. Ora pro nobis. Well has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced her own heart. Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue banners of the blessed Virgin's sodality and Father Conroy was helping Canon O'Hanlon at the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes cast down. He looked almost a saint and his confession-box was so quiet and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to the convent for the novena of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when she told him about that in confession crimsoning up to the roots of her hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the voice of nature and we were all subject to nature s laws, he said, in this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of woman instituted by God, he said, and that Our Blessed Lady herself said to the archangel Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word. He was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and thought could she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral design for him as a present or a clock but they had a clock she noticed on the mantelpiece white and gold with a canary bird that came out of a little house to tell the time the day she went there about the flowers for the forty hours' adoration because it was hard to know what sort of a present to give or perhaps an album of illuminated views of Dublin or some place.
The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little monkeys common as ditchwater. Someone ought to take them and give them a good hiding for themselves to keep them in their places, the both of them. And Cissy and Edy shouted after them to come back because they were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned.
-- Jacky! Tommy!
Not they! What a great notion they had! So Cissy said it was the very last time she'd ever bring them out. She jumped up and called them and she ran down the slope past him, tossing her hair behind her which had a good enough colour if there had been more of it but with all the thingamerry she was always rubbing into it she couldn't get it to grow long because it wasn't natural so she could just go and throw her hat at it. She ran with long gandery strides it was a wonder she didn't rip up her skirt at the side that was too tight on her because there was a lot of the tomboy about Cissy Caffrey and she was a forward piece whenever she thought she had a good opportunity to show off and just because she was a good runner she ran like that so that he could see all the end of her petticoat running and her skinny shanks up as far as possible. It would have served her just right if she had tripped up over something accidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to make her look tall and got a fine tumble. Tableau! That would have been a very charming exposé for a gentleman like that to witness.
Queen of angels, queen of patriarchs, queen of prophets, of all saints, they prayed, queen of the most holy rosary and then Father Conroy handed the thurible to Canon O'Hanlon and he put in the incense and censed the Blessed Sacrament and Cissy Caffrey caught the two twins and she was itching to give them a ringing good clip on the ear but she didn't because she thought he might be watching but she never made a bigger mistake in all her life because Gerty could see without looking that he never took his eyes off of her and then Canon O'Hanlon handed the thurible back to Father Conroy and knelt down looking up at the Blessed Sacrament and the choir began to sing Tantum ergo and she just swung her foot in and out in time as the music rose and fell to the Tantumer gosa cramen tum. Three and eleven she paid for those stockings in Sparrow's of George's street on the Tuesday, no the Monday before Easter and there wasn't a brack on them and that was what he was looking at, transparent, and not at her insignificant ones that had neither shape nor form (the cheek of her!) because he had eyes in his head to see the difference for himself.
Cissy came up along the strand with the two twins and their ball with her hat anyhow on her to one side after her run and she did look a streel tugging the two kids along with the flimsy blouse she bought only a fortnight before like a rag on her back and bit of her petticoat hanging like a caricature. Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to settle her hair and a prettier, a daintier head of nutbrown tresses was never seen on a girl's shoulders, a radiant little vision, in sooth, almost maddening in its sweetness. You would have to travel many a long mile before you found a head of hair the like of that. She could almost see the swift answering flush of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eyeing her as a snake eyes its prey. Her woman's instinct told her that she had raised the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose.
January 16, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Cyclops episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
The action moves now to a tavern - it's around 5 p.m. I found this entire chapter opaque, until - again - my dad came to the rescue.
Suddenly, we have a brand-new narrator - and he is speaking in the first-person - and he is not Leopold Bloom, and he is not Stephen Dedalus - and he appears to be regaling a group of his friends with a tale of what had happened in the Tavern earlier that day. Totally confusing - who is this new speaker? He's telling a story about a man referred to as "The Citizen", an angry loquacious bombastic Irish patriot. Our brand-new chatty Kathy narrator tells his friends the story about a run-in between The Citizen and Leopold Bloom, who has stopped by for a drink. Things get ugly. It's anti-Semitic. Openly so - that which has been beneath the surface in many of the episodes is now out in the open. Not to mention the fact, that Bloom knows that everyone knows he is a cuckold. That knowledge is out in the open, too. So he is scorned and ridiculed - and The Citizen tells him he doesn't think he's Irish at all (even though Bloom was born in Ireland, and is also a 'citizen'). This is a highly political chapter.
However: the whole thing is told in the voice of someone else - saying to his friends at the pub later that night: "So let me told you what I saw today!!" He has a very distinctive voice, too - one of his phrases is "says I" - whenever he has spoken. Because he was part of the conversation with The Citizen and Bloom, he uses "says I" in almost every line of his story.
The writing of this episode is actually totally clear - it's in a slang vernacular, Irish, but also very everyday language - not "literary". So it wasn't that I didn't understand what was happening ... it's that I didn't know what Joyce was DOING. Why the new voice? What was its purpose?
I didn't get it at ALL. So I held the book out to my dad and said, "What the HELL is going on here?"
He took one look at the page and said, "It's the Cyclops episode."
Er ... my dad didn't even have a chance to read any of it - he didn't have time, he just glanced at the page. So I said, "How do you know that?" (Or perhaps I should say, "says I")
Dad held the book out to me and said, "Look at how many times the word 'I' appears on every page."
I looked at the page - and suddenly all I saw was the letter "I". Little vertical slash marks all across the pages ... I I I I I I I I I (eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye) Cyclops' eye is built into the text itself. (And remember: it is not labeled in the actual book as "Cyclops episode". You know it's a new section because of how the text breaks up, and the change in style ... but you have to figure out where you are in Homer's epic - and there are guides and "keys" you can use ... which could be quite helpful. Or you could just call my dad. Or me, now, too.) But when I saw the plethora of "I"s across the page, I got goosebumps.
It all unfolded before me. Sense came. I got the music, I got the sense of it.
The episode is the parallel to the monstrous CYCLOPS episode. And so - the episode in Joyce's book is filled with 'I'. Also: that's the reason it's written in the first-person.
"says I, says I, says I..."
And it is true: once you know the sense, the reasoning - you can tell just by looking at the page which episode you are in.
There are also, interspersed with our first-person tale, long discourses on old medieval and earlier knights, warriors, gladiators ... an obvious connection between the patriots of old, and the patriots of today.
The Citizen - old windbag - hostile - is the Cyclops. He's a broken old patriot, living on the glories from the past - No one can tell him anything, he brooks no opposition, he is always right. Out of this Irish patriotic vibe comes his sudden verbal attack on Leopold Bloom, sitting nearby. Bloom insists that although he is a Jew, his country is Ireland, because he was born here. The Citizen is based upon Michael Cusack, an Irish nationalist who was behind the big Gaelic sports movement in Ireland during the Irish Revival - as a way to separate itself from England. We already know how Joyce feels about such things, and he pours all of that into the characterization of The Citizen (as seen through our new narrator's eyes). In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his men are trapped in a cave by the Cyclops - a giant cannibal from Greek myth. The pub in this episode becomes the cave. And Bloom (who is there with a bunch of other characters from earlier - at the funeral - Martin Cunningham and others) becomes Odysseus - trapped in the evil gaze of this Irish patriot who refuses to believe that this Jew is also Irish. What does a JEW know about nationhood? In The Odyssey - Odysseus and the men escape. Odysseus got the Cyclops drunk - and then blinded him by shoving a hot stake through the Cyclops' one eye. The long hot stake is important to remember (and also it might be helpful to read Ulysses with a Cliff Notes version of The Odyssey nearby - or hell, the whole damn thing if you can deal with it ... but I sat there with the Cliff Notes version. As I moved through Ulysses, and would get to a new episode - I'd go to my Cliff Notes, and see what the next episode in Homer's epic was. I'd read the brief description of the events - and then read the brief listing of all the themes and leitmotifs and symbols in each episode ... and then keep all that in mind when I went back to Ulysses. There are so many connections to be made that I am sure I only got one or two levels - and Greek scholars would obviously see so much more. But still: it is helpful. Because - if you read the Cyclops episode - you will see the overwhelming number of references to long thin objects (which, obviously, is the stake Odysseus used against the Cyclops). Joyce, naturally, is not LITERALLY putting Bloom with a LITERAL Cyclops. No. But he weaves it into the writing. We hear of telescopes, and cigars, and erections - a ton more ... If you haven't read the book, and you want to - have fun with finding all of the connections, because there are a million. The stake used to blind the Cyclops is in the text, hidden - but there. Marvelous. And at the end of the episode in The Odyssey - the Cyclops, enraged, throws a boulder after Odysseus and his men as they run away. At the end of the episode in Ulysses, the Patriot, enraged at Bloom having the gall to just get up and walk away - who does he think he is?? - throws a biscuit tin after him, narrowly missing him.
Joyce is a genius. I love his genius - because he seemed to have a lot of fun with it. He's not a morbid guy, or a self-involved guy - not a navel-gazer at all - even though he is one of the most personal writers who has ever lived. He has FUN with his own talent for writing. You can really see that in the Cyclops episode. The long thin hard objects which make up the bulk of the chapter are also, of course, phallic ... because Bloom's cuckolded state is well-known ... and very much on his mind.
Now to the levels of the Cyclops himself: It is no accident that Joyce has made the Cyclops a raging Fenian. Such people, such politicized people, have blinders on - and can only see, so to speak, with one eye. There is ONE way, ONE way to think ... The Citizen is "blind" to any other opinions. He also hates England so much that it blinds him to his own hypocrisy. The Citizen is intellectually and spiritually blind. Joyce hated people like that. The Citizen's response to Leopold Bloom is grotesque. It's blatant bigotry. It is as though if you only have one eye ... all you can see is the stereotype. I'm reading a book about Stalin now - and the "Kulaks" were Enemy #1 for a while - they must be destroyed (even though economically - there really were no such thing as "kulaks".) The kulaks were so demonized that they were not even thought of as people. Even the children. They were referred to as "vermin". To have the potential to see other human beings in such a distorted light is one of the ugliest parts of human nature. I see it with many people in politics - example is those who refer to "the left" with contempt and disgust ... their rhetoric is full of strawmen and dehumanizing generalizations - that I honestly don't know WHO these people are referring to. It's identity politics at its worst: a group made to seem not human. Enemies. And it doesn't have to be acted upon - that's the thing with dehumanization. It's in the language itself. So The Citizen cannot even see, first of all, that Leopold Bloom is a human being. He is just a stereotype - in The Citizen's one-eye. Bloom: a Jew. The Jews piggyback on other nations ... they wander and have no home of their own. They push in where they are not wanted. The Irish are a homogenous people. What the hell is HE doing here? Bloom, at first, tries to be polite and ignore the attack - but eventually, he cannot. And he asserts himself in the argument, standing up to The Citizen, who - in the end - even with all his big rhetoric about Irish Renaissances - is just a bigot. That's all. (Reminds me of the guy who wrote to me so amazed that I was a woman - since I wrote so well!! He couldn't believe it! As far as he was concerned, all women writers were shit. He used the phrase "Fried Green Tomatoes" a lot, as though that is the book all women writers should be judged by. Not Jane Eyre. Not Middlemarch. Not Wuthering Heights. Not Pride and Prejudice. Fried Green Tomatoes. He said to me, and it was amazing - because he was so OPENLY a douche-bag, which was awesome - since he walked right into my trap: "You must think I'm a Neanderthal! haha" I wrote back, "Nah. Just a good old-fashioned bigot." Then I gave him a reading list. Funny: I never heard from him again. But that guy had dehumanized women to such a degree that he couldn't even SEE how wrong he was, on every count, how his own bigotry kept him from living in the light of truth ... women were THIS, he had decided.)
The Cyclops episode has a feeling of gloom and violence in it. It takes place in a bar - just like the Sirens episode - but the Sirens episode, with its airy language, and its 'bronzegold' imagery ... makes the bar seem like a sunny lively place - quite a different environment from the dark cave-like pub of The Cyclops episode, where it is clear that people are, basically, raging alcoholics, first of all ... People are not just drinking and singing in a jolly manner. They are on a binge. Bloom walks into this atmosphere, mild-mannered Bloom - and the contrast is great between him and the others. Bloom tries to temper some of the conversation - with his more humanistic outlook. Like The Citizen going off on the English treatment of her sailors, and how cruel it all is. Bloom says that navy discipline is the same everywhere. Ahhhh, it reminds me of comments I used to make on blogs - before I got the rules of the game. There was one time on one particular site when everyone was going OFF on The Vagina Monologues - just ranting and raving about the downfall of society, and blah blah-dee-blah. I'm not into the downfall of society viewpoint anyway, I think it's deeply stupid and ahistorical. I'm also not wacky about The Vagina Monologues myself, but I know they have helped a lot of people (I read one of Eve Ensler's books) - so I made the huge mistake of saying (in a totally polite way - not an attack): "I read this one anecdote from a woman who saw the Vagina Monologues ... and her life had changed ... " or whatever. Not trying to be contrary - but it's a blog I read regularly (or, I don't anymore, not after the treatment I got on that day) - and the response was VICIOUS, almost animalistic: as in: that which is different must not just be shunned, but killed. Especially from this one fucking bitch - who made her comment into a personal attack on me and any sexuality that wasn't identical to hers. No compassion with those who have struggled in ways that she has not. Zero. It's pathetic, when you think about it - her response to a different opinion was an attack of that nature? What a weird little world she lives in! Fragile, actually. A house of cards. Especially because this was about sexuality. I have my opinions on politics, but when it comes to sex? I know in my heart it is all personal, and I can only speak for myself. I know that her behavior is typical (at least I know it now) - and most blogs have a homogenous readership, and everyone complains about the same things, in the same tone ... and they are all "safe" from outside opinion that might not be in lockstep with theirs. And I made my comment in a really moderate tone. Just a, "Yeah, what you say might be true ... but there is another side to it ..." I was a semi-regular on that blog. It wasn't a 'driveby' comment. What I did not realize was that to these people there is only ONE side. Cyclops-es, every last one of them.
So Bloom's mild-mannered comment about discipline being the same everywhere, and England being no worse than other nations in that regard - is seen as treachery, plain and simple. Especially since it's from the JEW. But Bloom - when attacked (the Cyclops starts grilling him about "nationhood" - "Do you know what a nation is?", etc.) finally fights back. He is Irish AND he is Jewish. He stands his ground. You want to cheer for him (especially because he has seemed so passive thru the other chapters). The issue of "race" is involved - as it usually is in Europe (especially) - when speaking of nationhood. And Bloom, for really the first time, trumpets his Jewishness, and the persecution of the Jews thru the centuries - and yes, he is a part of that race. And, as is obvious, from the exchange he is having at "this very instant" - the persecution continues.
Go, Bloom!!!
Here's an excerpt.
Oh, and The Cyclops episode is also famous for its almost two-page list of names ... every Bloomsday celebration I've ever gone to has had SOMEONE read that out ... and it is surprising how hilarious it is, when you hear it all together. I describe one such Bloomsday celebration here.
The episode is hard to excerpt - since it's so much of a whole ... but I'll start with when we first meet the citizen. Notice how he is rubbing his eye in our first glimpse of him. And also, look for all the "I"s.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Cyclops episode
So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there sure enough was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink.
There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.
The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog. I'm told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a licence.
-- Stand and deliver, says he.
-- That's all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.
-- Pass, friends, says he.
Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:
-- What's your opinion of the times?
Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to the occasion.
-- I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his fork.
So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:
-- Foreign wars is the cause of it.
And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:
-- It's the Russians wish to tyrannise.
-- Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I, I've a thirst on me I wouldn't sell for half a crown.
-- Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.
-- Wine of the country, says he.
-- What's yours? says Joe.
-- Ditto MacAnaspey, says I...
-- Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says he.
-- Never better, a chara, says he. What Garry? Are we going to win? Eh?
And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded wide-mouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the field-lark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.
He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by a girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beast. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the Ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal Mac-Mahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castille, the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo, Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. A couched spear of acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquillising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone.
So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid. O, as true as I'm telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.
-- And there's more where that came from, says he.
-- Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? says I.
-- Sweat of my brow, says Joe. 'Twas the prudent member gave me the wheeze.
-- I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish.
Who comes through Michan's land, bedight in sable armour? O'Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of the prudent soul.
-- For the old woman of Prince's street, says the citizen, the subsidised organ. The pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this blasted rag, says he. Look at this, says he. The Irish Independent, if you please, founded by Parnell to be the workingman's friend. Listen to the births and deaths in the Irish all for Ireland Independent and I'll thank you and the marriages.
And he starts reading them out:
-- Gordon, Barnfield Crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's on Sea, the wife of William T. Redmayne, of a son. How's that, eh? Wright and Flint, Vincent and Gillett to Rotha Marion daughter of Rosa and the late George Alfred Gillett, 179 Clapham Road, Stockwell, Playwood and Ridsdale at Saint Jude's Kensington by the very reverend Dr Forrest, Dean of Worcester, eh? Deaths. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr, Stoke Newington, of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat house, Chepstow.
-- I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.
-- Cockburn. Dimsey, wife of Davie Dimsey, late of the admiralty: Miller, Tottenham, aged eightyfive: Welsh, June 12, at 35 Canning Street, Liverpool, Isabella Helen. How's that for a national press, eh, my brown son? How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?
-- Ah, well, says Joe, handing round the boose. Thanks be to God they had the start of us. Drink that, citizen.
-- I will, says he, honourable person.
-- Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.
Ah! Owl! Don't be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.
January 15, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Sirens episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Awesome chapter - one of my favorites to read (once I figured out what was going on. Of course.)
So now we're at about 3:30 pm on June 16, 1904 ... each episode represents (roughly) an hour of time. At 3:30 the Ormond Hotel bar opens (which is where much of the action takes place). This is the hour of Blazes Boylans' rendesvous with Molly Bloom. Leopold, tormented by this thought, walks through Dublin, carrying the smutty book Sweets of Sin that he bought in the last chapter - to bring home to his wife - an irony that is too painful to even acknowledge. As an act of defiance, perhaps, Bloom stops off at a stationary store and buys a card - he plans on writing to Martha (the woman he is considering having an affair with).
First of all: there is the obvious connection with the Homeric epic: the sirens, as most people know, were mermaids - whose beautiful alluring songs would drive sailors to smash their ships onto the rocks ... in order to get closer to the music. The sirens: beautiful. Deadly. Odysseus makes his men put wax in their ears, but he feels he must hear the song. So he has his men tie him up and order them to totally ignore anything he says as he listens to the music.
There are multiple connections with this in Joyce's chapter - and I'm sure I'm only getting one or two levels. But here's my take: First of all: this is the hour of Blazes Boylans' rendesvous with Molly Bloom - a siren herself, luring not only Boylan but also Bloom, into danger. The danger and threat of sex and females, in general (which is so interesting to me - considering how the book ends ... with Molly, and Molly alone). We have heard so much about her, she has grown in stature and grotesquerie in our minds ... and then, we get to hang out with her ... alone, and private ... and who she is is not at all who she is thought to be. But I am getting ahead of myself.
But there are more sirens in this chapter. Bloom walks by the Ormond Hotel - a place with a bar and a singing room (like most Irish establishments in those days). The two barmaids chatter away, and call out to Bloom as he walks by. They are sirens, too. Bloom, after going to the stationary store, sees a poster of a mermaid (duh) and then catches a glimpse of Blazes Boylan ... and decides to follow him. Boylan goes into the Ormond Hotel, his love-hour with Molly Bloom completed. Bloom follows him inside. Bloom sits in the dining room area, and listens to the singing and joking going on at the bar - and he is acutely isolated from all of that. People sing - Bloom hears snippets of the lyrics - which all, of course, correspond to what is happening in his life. Joyce is never explicit - you have to figure it out - but the songs sung in that bar are VERY interesting, in terms of their history and meaning in Irish life. And how they connect to Joyce's book. I'll get to that in a minute. Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father, is there - drunk, and singing.
One of the things I think it is important to interject here, which I realize I haven't said yet: all of this, the way I am describing it, perhaps makes Bloom sound like a wet noodle type of guy. A self-pitying passive drip. There is that element to him - he feels impotent, and helpless, indeed. He doesn't know what to do. But he also balances that out (or Joyce does) with Bloom's decency as a human being, his common sense approach to things (we see this in many of his encounters) - and also his utter lack of black-and-white thinking. Which is partly why he got into this mess. A black-and-white fellow would NEVER go through what Bloom went through on June 16 ... he wouldn't allow it. His idea of how life should go would NEVER include grappling with the issues Bloom grapples with on that day: what it means to be a father, a husband, a lover ... what it means to be a Jew ... etc. Bloom, though, cannot help but see the other side of every argument. This is his main appeal as a human being, and also his main "flaw" (although it's not a flaw - it's just that many of his problems arise from his balanced way of looking at things). This becomes totally clear in the scary Cyclops chapter, when Bloom has the run-in with "The Citizen" - an Irish type which is totally familiar to anyone who knows anything about Ireland: the loud "patriot", unwilling to compromise, a social bore, who lives in a world where there is only ONE way to look at things, and anyone who deviates is to be crushed. Bloom avoids that kind of thing like the plague. Irish politics are vicious, in general (I guess like politics most everywhere) - and the hot-button issues require complete agreement or disagreement. So. I'm just saying that all of the episodes - with Bloom walking around, basically waiting for his wife to sleep with Blazes Boylan so that he can eventually go home ... may give the impression that Bloom is not a sympathetic character, that he is weak. But that's not right. He is certainly troubled. He has lost his son. His father committed suicide. He is losing his wife. He is trying to stay afloat financially (the whole "Keyes" advertisement thing shows that). He is doing the best he can with the cards he has been dealt. You kind of love him, even though there are times when you want him to challenge Blazes Boylan to a duel or something. But Bloom is under no obligation to behave in the way we want him to behave. If we judge him, then perhaps - like Shaw said - we should look in the mirror, rather than pointing the finger at Bloom's inadequacies. Often, strong anti-reactions like that come from recognition, and a refusal to even admit that it is recognition, and there is no place for such thought processes while reading Ulysses. Now, that is a very human thing - we all do it. We all want to be thought well of, we all want to be perceived that we are good, and moral and whatever. So to have that threatened, or to have someone (Joyce) suggest that possibly we are not looking deeply enough ... that possibly there is more of Bloom in us than we want to admit ... can be quite disorienting. If you're willing to let that stuff duke it out inside of you as you read the book, then I can guarantee you will get more out of it. That was my experience anyway. I kept getting frustrated with Bloom, as I read the book the first time. Like: DUDE. Just TELL Molly you love her - punch Boylan in the nose - and go home and fuck Molly like you've never fucked her before - she's DYING for it - what is your problem??? But as the book went on, I realized what I was reacting to - was my own proclivity for passivity, or fatalistic thinking ... my own feelings of defeat in the face of emotional challenges ... my own desire to avoid a big fat fight and also - my almost pathological need to never be hurt again. No. I will NEVER be hurt again. (I know this is illogical - But humans aren't always logical. The book brought all of that to the forefront for me, as I wandered around with Bloom ... he was pushing these buttons, and at first I blamed HIM - but slowly - since the book is so long - I started to recognize myself more and more, the parts of myself I do not love, the parts of myself I am ashamed of - and do not like to share ... They're ALL there in Bloom. And once I made that kind of uncomfortable adjustment ... the book was so much more rewarding, and also extremely redemptive. Almost spiritual in nature - because it connects all of us - in our shared humanity. Nobody is exempt. Nobody.)
Back to the episode. Bloom has a bit of dinner - as the rowdy singing continues in the other room - and he tries to write a letter to Martha ... but he doesn't sign it. As the lyrics of the songs emanate out towards him, he goes into a trance almost (sirens) ... and begins to realize that Molly is the only woman he will ever love. Come hell or high water, Blazes Boylan or no.
The episode ends with Bloom taking a walk and he passes by an antique store - where the words of the martyred Irish patriot Robert Emmet are seen in the window. Bloom reads the words, and as he reads them, he farts. Satisfyingly. That is the end of the episode. Hysterical. But of course Joyce was working on multiple levels here. The glorious Irish martyrs are for the idealistic, the black-and-white people of the world. Bloom cannot "go there" - and because of that, because he farts as he reads the martyred man's words, he is basically the hope for all of humanity. hahaha But seriously. Joyce was highly suspicious of political rhetoric - it seemed to him quite empty ... and a symbol of all that was dangerous and stuck in Ireland national life. Those who resist the call of martyrdom, who do not swoon into a daze at the thought of Irish blood being shed for the cause ... represent hope for ALL of us.
Now let me talk a bit about the style of the chapter. Because we're in the 'sirens' episode - there is music mixed with speech - and it's seamless. Joyce does not narrate anything here ... it is a completely aural chapter. That's why it seems daunting at first, because it doesn't even seem to be written in English. And, strictly, it's not. It's written in SOUND ... the way music seems when it is heard from another room - the way the chattering barmaids' conversation ebbs and flows in your (Bloom's) consciousness ... There is a blind beggar who shows up, and the tapping of his cane is omnipresent through the entire chapter. Tap. Tap. Tap. The episode reads like a musical score. It is how sounds ACTUALLY occur to us when we are in a busy social environment ... The music heard is woven into the other sounds ... and all blend together into a whole, a symphony, with many instruments. Joyce treats the entire episode like a piece of music, introducing a ton of aural themes in the first two pages ... themes which recur throughout the episode, sometimes the tap - tap- tapping takes precedence over other sounds - sometimes Simon Dedalus singing surges into the foreground - sometimes the barmaids chattering are the main theme ... So it's best to read this episode as though it is a piece of music.
Oh, and it's worth mentioning - that one of the songs sung by Simon Dedalus is "Tis the Last Rose of Summer" - a song I grew up with myself. One of those sad "four green fields" type of songs - so typical to the Irish. The tragic tales of domination, war, martyrdom, romantic yearning for the past, etc. Another song sung is "The Croppy Boy" - an Irish ballad commemorating the 1798 rebellion against the British. Joyce doesn't ever hit the nail on the head - and I suppose you would have to know the history of these songs - to get Joyce's deeper meaning, but that's part of the fun of it. Joyce is, in a way, setting the stage for the Cyclops episode - when Irish politics move fiercely to the forefront, in a most terrifying way. But here he does it subtly - and breaks it up into fragments ... so the songs just seem to be sounds, fragments of sounds Bloom hears from the other room ... sounds he takes personally (for various reasons) - since he is in that contemplative state when the entire world seems to be reflecting your own personal experience. But on a higher level, yet again Joyce is making his points about the STUCK nature of Irish cultural life, the always looking backwards (1798? Come on now ... let's look forwards, please), and the glorification of death and martyrdom ... something which Joyce, with his fierce love of life, could never get behind.
I think that's enough. That's mainly the chapter. Which, as you will see below, is written in a language that is not entirely English. This is the opening of the excerpt. And believe it or not, once you succumb to the style, it becomes quite easy actually (it's easier to read and comprehend than the Scylla and Charybdis episode - and also some of the later episodes) ... watch how the aural themes are introduced here - all at once. Then, once Joyce has established them, he pulls back - and lets the actual TUNE begin. Peppering the rest of the episode with the themes he has already set up.
Brilliant.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Sirens episode
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: I dolores.
Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
Horn. Hawhorn.
When first he saw. Alas!
Full tup. Full throb.
Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.
Martha! Come!
Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod henev erheard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlight nightcall: far: far.
I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.
Listen!
The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each and for other plash and silent roar.
Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.
You don't?
Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.
Black.
Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.
Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.
But wait!
Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.
Naminedamine. All gone. All fallen.
Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.
Amen! He gnashed in fury.
Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.
Bronzelydia by Minagold.
By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.
One rapped, one tapped with a carra, with a cock.
Pray for him! Pray, good people!
His gouty fingers nakkering.
Big Benaben. Big Benben.
Last rose Castille of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone. Pwee! Little wind piped wee.
True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your tschink with tschunk.
Fff! Oo!
Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?
Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.
Then, not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.
Done.
Begin!
Bronze by gold, Miss Douce's head by Miss Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel.
-- Is that her? asked Miss Kennedy.
Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and eau de Nil.
-- Exquisite contrast, Miss Kennedy said.
When all agog Miss Douce said eagerly:
-- Look at the fellow in the tall silk.
-- Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.
-- In the second carriage, Miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the sun. He's looking. Mind till I see.
She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against the pane in a halo of hurried breath.
Her wet lips tittered:
-- He's killed looking back.
She laughed:
-- O wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?
With sadness.
Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.
-- It's them has the fine times, sadly then she said.
A man.
Bloowho went by by Moulang's pipes, bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine's antiques in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll's dusky battered plate, for Raoul.
The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china. And
-- There's your teas, he said.
Miss Kennedy with manners transposed the teatray down to an upturned lithia crate, safe from eyes, low.
-- What is it? loud boots unmannerly asked.
-- Find out, Miss Douce retorted, leaving her spyingpoint.
-- Your beau, is it?
A haughty bronze replied:
-- I'll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your impertinent insolence.
-- I mperthnthn thnthnthn, bootsnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as she threatened as he had come.
Bloom.
On her flower frowning Miss Douce said:
-- Most aggravating that young brat is. If he doesn't conduct himself I'll wring his ear for him a yard long.
Ladylike in exquisite contrast.
-- Take no notice, Miss Kennedy rejoined.
She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned, waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and two and seven.
Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.
-- Am I awfully sunburnt?
Miss Bronze unbloused her neck.
-- No, said Miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with the cherry laurel water?
Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their midst a shell.
-- And leave it to my hands, she said.
-- Try it with the glycerine, Miss Kennedy advised.
Bidding her neck and hands adieu Miss Douce
-- Those things only bring out a rash, replied, reseated. I asked that old fogey in Boyd's for something for my skin.
Miss Kennedy, pouring now fulldrawn tea, grimaced and prayed:
-- O, don't remind me of him for mercy'sake!
-- But wait till I tell you, Miss Douce entreated.
Sweet tea Miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears with little fingers.
-- No, don't, she cried.
-- I won't listen, she cried.
But Bloom?
Miss Douce grunted in snuffy fogey's tone:
-- For your what? says he.
Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak: but said, but prayed again:
-- Don't let me think of him or I'll expire. The hideous old wretch! That night in the Antient Concert Rooms.
She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped sweet tea.
-- Here he was, Miss Douce said, cocking her bronze head three quarters, ruffling her nosewings. Hufa! Hufa!
Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from Miss Kennedy's throat. Miss Douce huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like a shout in quest.
-- O! shrieking, Miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget bis goggle eye?
Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting:
-- And your other eye!
Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner's name. Why do I always think Figather? Gathering figs I think. And Prosper Loré's huguenot name. By Bassi's blessed virgins Bloom's dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white under, come to me. God they believe she is: or goddess. Those today. I could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus' son. He might be Mulligan. All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of fellows in: her white.
By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.
Of sin.
In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each Other, high piercing notes.
Ah, panting, sighing. Sighing, ah, fordone their mirth died down.
Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and giggle-giggled. Miss Douce, bending again over the teatray, ruffled again her nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again Kennygiggles, stooping her fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed, spluttered out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter, coughing with choking, crying:
-- O greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that, she cried. With his bit of beard!
Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman, delight, joy, indignation.
-- Married to the greasy nose! she yelled.
Shrill, with deep laughter, after bronze in gold, they urged each other to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter: And then laughed more. Greasy I knows. Exhausted, breathless their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!), panting, sweating (O!), all breathless.
Married to Bloom, to greaseaseabloom.
-- O saints above! Miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I wished I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet.
-- O, Miss Douce! Miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing!
And flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly.
January 14, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Wandering Rocks episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
This one, again, was a tough one to get into ... until I figured out what Joyce is doing. The Wandering Rocks episode is Joyce at his "trickiest". We have just passed "Scylla and Charybdis" - which is the halfway mark of the book (see the tricky structure there, too? Scylla and Charybdis is one of the most challenging episodes in Ulysses - which reflects the challenge that Odysseus himself must face - in order to continue on his journey. So the structure of the book actually reflects the phases of the journey itself.) So now that we have passed the halfway mark (there are 18 episodes in the book - we are now on episode 10) ... Joyce employs all the tricks in the book, to keep us uneasy, to make us feel that we actually DON'T know what's going on ... even though we, the reader, may be so proud of ourselves for having "made it" through Scylla and Charybdis. Joyce is like: "Not so fast."
Wandering Rocks is like a panorama shot of Dublin. We do a slow pan through the streets. We follow the paths of many different Dubliners - and it may be confusing at first, because the episode opens with the meanderings of a certain Father Conmee - he suddenly seems like he's the "star" - who the hell is he? But after 2 pages - his episode stops (for the time being) - and someone else comes to the forefront. There are people we have met before: Buck Mulligan, the Dedalus family - but there are others: a one-legged sailor, Blazes Boylan, Patrick Dignam (the son of the deceased Paddy Dignam) ... and way more. It appears that all of the denizens of Dublin are out and about ... and Joyce swoops in with his camera onto one group, follows them for a bit, pulls back and then hones in on another group. It's a panorama AND a montage. It is also one of the chapters which obsessively details the streets of Dublin. Joyce wrote this chapter with a map of Dublin before him. You can tell. I read in some online critical essay that one especially insane Bloomsday celebrator - followed the path of the one-legged sailor in the episode - and he even gave himself a limp, so it would be realistic - and apparently, the timing of the sailor's episode (when he reached the corner, when he got to the shop, how long it took to cross the street) was spot-on. Joyce was autistic that way.
Characters we met before in Portrait of the Artist as well as Dubliners show up in this episode. Father Conmee was a priest at Clongowes, where Dedalus went to school as a young boy. He is now, if not defrocked - then definitely out of the priesthood.
I remember first reading this chapter and feeling like it was an enormous puzzle. Or some kind of tricky word game that I was trying to figure out. It feels like Joyce is throwing down clues ... but more often than not, he leads you in the wrong direction on purpose (an obvious comment on his feelings about life in Ireland). For example, we keep running into the same guys - who are wearing "sandwich boards", advertising a pub or something like that. And just the way Joyce writes about them - make them seem mysterious, and like the letters on the sandwich board mean something else ... there are clues to be had there. I'm not remembering exactly what it all MEANS ... but the feeling of the chapter is one of movement (which makes sense - given the title of the episode) and unfinished events. We don't stay long enough with one person to get any resolution.
And Bloom and Dedalus are omnipresent. We see members of Dedalus' family - his sister, I think ... trying to sell Stephen's books to a pawn shop, because the family is in such dire straits. The mother is dead, the father is a drunk. We also see Blazes Boylan - Molly Bloom's lover - he is getting ready for his rendesvous with Molly. There are solicitors, blind people, secretaries ... Bloom himself is in the episode, and he is going to "rent" a book to bring home to Molly - it's called Sweets of Sin - it's obviously a steamy romance novel (this becomes important later - in The Nausikaa episode and elsewhere) ... but the implications are clear (at least we think they are). Bloom, being cuckolded almost as we speak, is getting a book called Sweets of Sin for his adulterous wife ... meanwhile, we get to know Blazes Boylan a bit in this chapter, as he banters with his secretary. Like I said, the episode is, uhm, episodic ... and yet the over-arching feel of it is a panorama: DUBLIN.
There are many more enigmas here I'm probably not getting ... some of the clues are in the source-material, The Odyssey: Odysseus was told that in order to get home he either had to navigate through "the wandering rocks" (especially treacherous - and thought, as well, to be an optical illusion) - or navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus, as we remember, chooses Scylla and Charybdis (the episode we just passed through). So ... what are we doing in The Wandering Rocks then?? It is as though Joyce is laughing at us, because he knows what he is doing - and we are trying to guess. The "whirlpool" of the former chapter - with its complex navigations through Stephen's thoughts about Hamlet - has now been passed. The Wandering Rocks, with its placement in the book, is a "pause" - an interlude ... before plunging into the last 9 episodes. It's fractured: we don't follow just Bloom anymore ... we, at alternate moments, are inside everyone in Dublin. And Joyce, being the great humanist that he was, judges no one - although many of the people he writes about are buffoons, or egomaniacs ... But he seems to accept them as they are. There is no "ideal world" for Joyce, no utopia. Dublin is what it is. Here it is.
By starting the episode with the wanderings of Father Conmee - Joyce is obviously bookending the episode with his feeling that the Roman Catholic Church is everything that is wrong with Dublin. It has held its citizens in thrall, keeping them in place, like good passive little sheep. And the episode ends (brilliantly) with the Earl of Dudley driving through Dublin in his carriage, passing by everyone we just saw - only now they come to him, in a blur ... because he is moving faster. So Joyce's other bookend is the English. Ireland has two problems: the church and the English.
Navigating through Dublin is no easy matter - like navigating through the Wandering Rocks themselves. Joyce appears to topload this episode with false leads, incorrect information, fragmentary clues that we think we understand - only to realize we have been wrong. It's all part of the journey. If one becomes over-confident in a journey, then we know that things will not go well for them. Time and time again, through history, we have seen this. Legends, myths ... about hubris, etc. So yay, we have made it halfway through the book. We even made it through the long long Scylla and Charybdis chapter - which challenged our minds, made us squint with thought, made us pick up Shakespeare alongside Ulysses to double-check some of Stephen's theories ... we have worked HARD. In "The Wandering Rocks", Joyce tells us: Good for you. But don't be over-confident. You still have a long way to go.
Joyce fractures his narrative - and now shares it with all of Dublin. We follow one path, we join another, sometimes the paths merge for a bit, before separating, we look up at windows, then we are inside the room, then we are down on the street again, navigating, cruising this way, that way ... meeting (and getting inside) every person we meet.
Here's an excerpt. Oh, and even this clunky description I've just written could probably give you a good idea about what part/function of the human body we are now "in".
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Wandering Rocks episode
Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle's Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.
He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.
-- That I had, he said, pushing it by.
The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.
-- Them are two good ones, he said.
Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.
On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.
Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.
He opened it. Thought so.
A woman's voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen: The man.
No: she wouldn't like that much. Got her it once.
He read the other title: Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.
He read where his finger opened.
-- All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!
Yes. This. Here. Try.
-- Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her déshabillé.
Yes. Take this. The end.
-- You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eyeing her with a suspicious glare. The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.
Mr Bloom read again: The beautiful woman.
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him! For Raoul!). Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!). Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulphur dung of lions!
Young! Young!
An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor's court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.
Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy curtains. The shopman's uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, spat phlegm on the floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.
Mr Bloom beheld it.
Mastering his troubled breath, he said:
-- I'll take this one.
The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
-- Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That's a good one.
**
The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.
Dilly Dedalus, listening by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.
The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
-- Barang!
Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College Library.
Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams's row. He halted near his daughter.
-- It's time for you, she said.
-- Stand up straight for the love of the Lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said. Are you trying to imitate your uncle John the cornetplayer, head upon shoulders? Melancholy God!
Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them and held them back.
-- Stand up straight, girl, he said. You'll get curvature of the spine. Do you know what you look like?
He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulders and dropping his underjaw.
-- Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.
Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.
-- Did you get any money? Dilly asked.
-- Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is no-one in Dublin would lend me fourpence.
-- You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.
-- How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.
Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James's street.
-- I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?
-- I was not then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns taught you to be so saucy? Here.
He handed her a shilling.
-- See if you can do anything with that, he said.
-- I suppose you got five, Dilly said. Give me more than that.
-- Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You're like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died. But wait awhile. You'll all get a short shrift and a long day from me. Low blackguardism! I'm going to get rid of you. Wouldn't care if I was stretched out stiff. He's dead. The man upstairs is dead.
He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.
-- Well, what is it? he said, stopping.
The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.
-- Barang!
-- Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.
The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell but feebly:
-- Bang!
Mr Dedalus stared at him.
-- Watch him, he said. It's instructive. I wonder will he allow us to talk.
-- You got more than that, father, Dilly said.
-- I'm going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave you all where Jesus left the jews. Look, that's all I have. I got two shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the funeral.
He drew forth a handful of copper coins nervously.
-- Can't you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.
Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.
-- I will, he said gravely. I looked all along the gutter in O'Connell street. I'll try this one now.
-- You're very funny, Dilly said, grinning.
-- Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk for yourself and a bun or a something. I'll be home shortly.
He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.
The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of Parkgate.
-- I'm sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.
The lacquey banged loudly.
Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a pursing mincing mouth:
-- The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn't do anything! O, sure they wouldn't really! Is it little sister Monica!
January 13, 2008
The Books: "Ulysses" - the Scylla and Charybdis episode (James Joyce)
Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Ulysses - by James Joyce.
So here's where we are at so far:
1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode
2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
I'm scared to talk about this episode. I don't feel learned enough. All I can say is: it is a FEAST for the mind. Not so much the soul ... but the mind. It is a rigorous intellectual chapter - with theoretical arguments about aesthetics, Shakespeare, the Irish Literary Revival, poetry, and on and on. I can't even begin to scratch the surface of what is going on here - I've read it once, and I still feel like I barely got it - although this chapter, above all chapters, is COVERED in my notes and underlines. It's barely readable anymore.
Here are some of my notes in the margins, maybe they'll interest you:
-- John Eglinton, AE: experts, pundits
-- rock: stable life in Stratford
-- whirlpool: Plato, mysticism, London
-- Shakespeare lost his 11 year old son Hamnet. Bloom's son Rudy died at 11 days.
-- Stephen is the spiritual son of Bloom and Shakespeare
-- Stephen looking for an older woman - like Anne H. - to initiate him. "And my turn? When? Come!"
-- Stephen not included in list of Irish literary hopefuls. Usurped by others.
-- Entelechy (Aristotle) - "having the end within itself" - like Ellen Burstyn: "The entelechy of an acorn is a giant oak"
-- Stephen tries to show them he's an intellectual. He is obviously insecure. They are all easily distracted.
I think if a reader did not know any of Shakespeare's plays - then this chapter would feel as though it were written in Sanskrit or something. You really do need to get the references to Hamlet, Richard III, King Lear ... and at least be able to call up some image of what those plays were about. It seems like none of this would be at ALL clear without a rudimentary grasp of all of that.
It's a long chapter, and it took me a while to get what was going on. I mean, I knew what was going on: Stephen Dedalus sits in the National Library with a bunch of his friends, and they argue about Shakespeare, and Stephen puts forth his theory of Hamlet, and also Shakespeare himself. That's the "plot". Leopold Bloom makes an appearance - he has come to the Library to look up the image of the two crossed keys, mentioned in the Aeolus Episode. This is the first time Bloom and Dedalus are in the same space. At first, Bloom is just referred to ... he was seen looking at a statue in the lobby, and peeking to see if it had an anus. Poor Bloom. He's a local clown (at least that's how he is treated). And then, at the end of the chapter - as Dedalus leaves the library - he realizes someone is behind him, and it is Bloom. They still do not meet. But Stephen's discourses on Shakespeare and Hamlet throughout the chapter - and that he feels that one of Shakespeare's main themes is "fatherlessness" ... clues us in to what is really going on here. Stephen's real father is no father. Stephen has left the church - so that spiritual father is no more for him, either. He reflects upon his name - Dedalus (just like he does in Portrait of the Artist) ... and he even uses the words "fabulous artificer" - like he does in Portrait. Dedalus and Icarus, father and son ... should he take his father's wings and fly? That means he risks burning up, falling to his death. The father stays behind. But it is the father who is the artist.
Anyway, I'm writing about all of this in a clunky way which does NOT do the genius of this chapter justice. This is our first glimpse of Stephen since early in the day (the three episodes that make up the Telemachia, the beginning of the book). Since then, we have been strictly in Bloom's world, although there is some overlap (not coincidentally - with Stephen's father Simon). It is now that Stephen truly ENTERS. He makes an impression - and that is his whole point. He sees his discourse on Shakespeare as a performance. He sits with 5 contemporaries - including Buck Mulligan (from the first chapter) - 5 men who are writers, critics, librarians - people with whom Stephen, as a budding artist, is in competition. But they don't even consider him a worthy competitor - they do not consider him at all. For example, there's going to be a gathering that night - of many of the new poets. Stephen is not even invited.
The early years of the 20th century in Ireland - the years of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory and others - were a time of great upheaval and growth in Irish literature. It was a "revival". Perhaps Ireland, at least in its literature, was removing the yoke of English dominance. This is why folks like Yeats and Synge focused on the 'west' of Ireland (I go into that a bit in my post on 'The Dead'). Yeats advised Synge, a young playwright, to go out to the Aran Islands, in the Atlantic - off the west coast of Ireland - to see the 'real' Irish. Not the city people, but the rough peasants who still spoke Irish, and who were (presumably) "untouched". It was a romantic movement - like most such movements are. And many people in Ireland were uninterested in the West - they wanted to be modern, to join the damn world ... and they did not buy the whole movement. The response to Synge's play Playboy of the Western World shows that clearly. The audience rioted. It's now known as "The Playboy Riots" (wrote about it here). Joyce didn't go for all that stuff, and although Yeats had been an important patron of Joyce's early on (very important) ... it was "continental" folks and ex-pats - like Ezra Pound - who really became his champion, when it mattered. He thought the Irish Revival was hogwash. I don't want to put words in his mouth - but the fact that he left Ireland, and never returned ... and wrote his books in "exile" ... shows his feelings about the possibility of creating great literature in Ireland. Now of course, Joyce did not go live on the continent - and write books about Paris, and Berlin, and Rome. He wrote about Ireland. It was his obsession. He could write of nothing else. But he was decidedly NOT part of the "Irish Revival" which, in 1904 - the year that Ulysses takes place - was in full swing.
All of this is discussed in the Scylla and Charybdis episode - who are the poets who matter, who is the "voice" of the Irish. John Eglinton (a real person in real life) is one of the people talking with Stephen and he says, in regards to Irish literature (this is early on in the episode):
-- Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
This is on the 2nd page of the episode. So Shakespeare makes his entrance early in the episode. (And in the first episode of the Telemachia, Buck Mulligan says something to Stephen like: "I know you've been working a lot on Shakespeare - you'll have to tell me your theories on him someday." So it is in this chapter that Dedalus takes up that challenge.)
And then there is a long conversation between the 5 men (Stephen doesn't contribute) about the future of Irish poetry. Now, it is so obvious that Stephen - known to be a writer already - is not included in the list. He's not even invited to the gathering that night. He is, just like Bloom, an outsider. An exile in his own country. It is not that his friends are mean to him. It is just that he is not considered a "playa". For example, the conversation about Irish poets goes like this:
Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.
Stephen, who already considers himself an artist, is noticeably left out of all of this. Nobody turns to him and says, "You - Dedalus - are a contender to write 'our national epic'." So his impromptu lecture in this chapter is one way that he asserts himself, sets himself apart from the pack, and makes his voice heard. I'm not even sure he believes all that he says - it is a performance-art piece, basically. He has their attention - even though much of the commentary thrown back at him is either joking, mocking, or argumentative.
Oh, and to the Odyssey correlation: It's probably the most famous episode of Homer's epic, and "Scylla and Charybdis" has entered the layman's lexicon. Between a rock and a hard place, etc. Scylla is a 6-headed monster (quick note: Stephen and his 5 friends in the Library ... they make up the hydra??) and Charybdis is a whirlpool. Odysseus must pass between the two. Not an easy task. The connections are apparent, once you look at the chapter in light of Homer's episode: Stephen is against the grain of the "whirlpool" of Irish literary thought. It is a vast sucking space, and all must participate in it - or be forever thought of as an outsider. A.E. (one of the guys in the library) is the main advocate of the other position - he IS the whirlpool. His real-life counterpart (and most of Joyce's characters have real-life counterparts - the guy names names - he's the Eminem of his day. ha) is George Russell - a poet who was into the mystical Irish thing, which translated into nationalism. That was the whole thing. Succumbing to the poetry of the west, and its untouched peasantry, their language, their ways ... was the way to "be Irish". Joyce thought that was bollocks, obviously. Why romanticize that which is backwards? Let's look forwards: to the new. Let's look beyond nationalism, for God's sake. The irony, of course, is that Joyce is now so associated with Irish-ness that he's on their currency. I wonder how he would feel about that. It's not that he hated Ireland. Oh, no. It's all he wrote about. It had broken his heart. It was his home. He thought much of the culture was backwards, rigid, and anti-human. He hated the dominance of the priests. But in a way ... his pleas for the future, and for progress, predicts the Ireland of today. Anyway, back to the episode. A.E. is a Platonist, as well. Stephen resists the pull of that, and thinks Aristotle is the way to go. The sharp intellectual mind, the argumentative reasoning, the way he deals with his opponents.
The main thrust of the chapter, however, is Stephen's theories on Shakespeare. Anyone trying to plumb the depths of Shakespeare would do well to read this chapter. It's a goldmine. A.E. objects to any biographical questioning of Shakespeare - his private life should remain private - and only his plays should be considered. Stephen disagrees. Shakespeare had a son who died. His name was Hamnet. In the first production of Hamlet, Shakespeare, an actor as well, played the ghost of Hamlet's father. And famous actor Richard Burbage played Hamlet, to Shakespeare's ghost. So ... in a twisted Freudian sense ... Shakespeare played himself. The father speaking to his dead son ... speaking of his wife's faithlessness (Stephen takes this idea and runs with it). If Shakespeare was Hamlet's father (and Stephen believes he was - with the Hamnet/Hamlet connection) ... then Gertrude, and her treachery, must be Anne Hathaway. It's a leap - but no worse than other leaps made by other scholars (and it is definitely borne out in the plot of Hamlet. It makes sense.) The fatherlessness of Hamlet is the main drive of the play. He must have revenge. Stephen looks into this, considering the question of Anne - Shakespeare's mysterious wife - to whom Shakespeare famously left his "second-best bed" in his will. Why his "second-best bed"? Books have been written about it. Scholars have spent their entire lives trying to figure that out. Was it some kind of dis? An insult from beyond the grave? Especially since it was a "bed" - where sex and marriage take place. Stephen thinks it was a "dis" - as many other scholars do (although Emily Byrd Starr, in Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Emily series" takes a more optimistic view: Perhaps that was the bed that Anne liked best). Stephen thinks Anne, an older woman, had betrayed Shakespeare ... or cheated on him ... in their long separations, while Shakespeare was in London and she back in Stratford. This is not idle sallacious thinking: many others have trod that path. This idea of woman's treachery loops us back to Leopold Bloom, and his fear that his wife Molly is being unfaithful. In fact, someone snickers, "Cuckold! Cuckold!" in this chapter - which Bloom, hiding behind a column eavesdropping, might take personally. We don't know if he takes it personally, but given the fact that he thinks all of Dublin is laughing at him behind his back - it's not a stretch. Shakespeare is a mystery, very little is known of his life ... we are left with bare bones ... and so we project onto him, we read into things, we are tormented by what we do NOT know ... even though, my God, do we even need to know? After all, look at the plays - not to mention the sonnets! That is the point of one of Stephen's adversaries: who CARES about Anne Hathaway? Knowing the truth about Shakespeare's life does nothing towards analysis. Stephen, at least in his performance in the episode, disagrees. Stephen's theories are borne up in the texts of the plays (of course, opposing theories are as well - that's what's so brilliant about Shakespeare. Ultimately, he resists being nailed down.)
Stephen sets up his thesis in typical Jesuit manner (described by St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits). Loyola thought that novices to the faith should be required to "picture" the actual physical reality of the famous spiritual scenes - what the Virgin Mary was wearing, etc. He makes you enter that world ... there is no other way to look at it. All else is just fantasy, ego, theory. Faith must be grounded in what is real. Stephen uses this form of lecture in his discourse on Shakespeare. It is one of the most living-breathing analyses of the man that I have ever read (and I'm not alone. Stephen Greenblatt, in his marvelous book Will in the World says, of this chapter: "Women he won to him," says Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce's alter ego in Ulysses, in one of the greatest meditations on Shakespeare's marriage, "tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justice, bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frightened of the narrow grave and unforgiven.") Holy shite, is all I have to say. And this goes on for pages on end.
It will make you want to pick up Hamlet immediately, and read it with "Scylla and Charybdis" in mind.
Someone in the crowd mentions a mistake Shakespeare made in one of his plays.
Stephen responds with one of the most famous lines in the entirety of Ulysses:
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
I am not saying I am a genius ... but I will say that often in my life, when I have been "stuck", especially artistically ... I have thought of that line. To be a perfectionist is detrimental to the pursuit of art, in many ways. To be so afraid to make a mistake can paralyze one. If I can see my "mistakes" as not mistakes at all ... but possible "portals of discovery" ... God, what freedom there is in that!
As usual, I haven't even scratched the surface of all of the connections here. The chapter, as far as I'm concerned, is a mini-masterpiece. It can stand alone, while many of the other chapters cannot.
Joyce saw Ulysses as the story of two men, yes - Bloom and Dedalus. And, through them, it was also the story of two races: Jewish and Irish.
But he also saw the movement of the book as a journey through the human body. Each episode has its parallel in human physiology. It's not all that difficult to figure out: Joyce leaves tons of clues. (SPOILER ALERT: If you are planning on reading Ulysses, and you would prefer to figure the structure and physiological symbols out on your own - like I did - then skip this next paragraph. But if you want a mini-guide through the dark forest, and are okay with knowing some of the secrets, feel free to read on - It won't ruin the fun, there are still clues I haven't found ... it's a deep complex book, and there is always more to discover about it ... So, it's up to you:) The Calypso Episode is the kidneys. All you need to do is look at the breakfast Bloom eats, and it's right there in front of you. The first paragraph ends with the line: "Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." Mmkay. Sentences like that are why Virginia Woolf was grossed out by him. HOWEVER. If you get past the grossness: the function of the kidneys, of course, is to reprocess stuff ... which eventually becomes urine. I'm not a doctor, but I know that that's basically what they do. So the "urine" reference there is quite deliberate. On a deeper analogical level, the "reprocessing" that has to occur in order to keep the body balanced ... is reflected in much of the action of Joyce's episode. Bloom has a long day ahead of him. And he is clogged up with worry about his wife. A good breakfast must be had. And a nice bowel movement as well. Ready to meet the day. The Lotus Eaters episode is obviously the genitals - the last image of the chapter has Bloom submerged in a bath, staring down at his limp penis: "the limp father of thousands". It is here that we get to understand Bloom's sexual anxiety about his wife. In The Hades episode - we move to the heart. The carriages move through Dublin to the graveyard -- crossing over 4 rivers (which have their counterparts in The Odyssey as well) - but it's also the 4 atriums/ventricles of the heart. The carriages - with all the men inside... travel through "the heart" of Dublin. And etc. You see what's going on. And Hades is the chapter about death. The heart stops when you die. So the heart is the main indicator of life itself. The Aeolus episode - with its connection in The Odyssey to the bag of winds ... is the lungs. Wheezing, pumping (like the printing presses in the newspaper office) ... the lungs, with their power of breath, allow us to speak. Therefore everyone in that episode is a big ol' windbag. The Lestrygonians episode is obvious (well, all of them are - if you know what you're looking for - it's actually kind of fun to find all the bread crumbs he leaves for us, the reader, through the forest). It's a chapter full of swallowing. Everyone is eating, sucking, swallowing, chewing ... so we have moved into the esophagus in Lestrygonians. Bloom is disgusted by all that he sees - the chewing, swallowing, gulping, of the Dublin masses. And then there's a line (but all the chapters are full of tricky little puns like these - the connections go to the core): "Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't swallow it all however." The clues are all there. It's fun to find them. And if you THINK it's a pun, it probably is. And if you think it's NOT a pun, then it means you haven't worked it out yet. I had a great Shakespeare acting teacher, who said the same thing to the class, about Shakespeare's bawdiness: "If you think a line isn't bawdy - it's because you haven't worked it out yet." So now we come to Scylla and Charybdis: with its long intellectual discussion. It is, obviously, the brain (which is why it is so potentially ridiculous that poor Bloom was seen peeking at the anus of a statue - as Stephen intellectually whips his opponents) Stephen is the brainiac. Bloom is earth-bound completely. How will these two connect? It seems they would be in total opposition. Bloom is concerned by earthly things. He would never enter into a discussion on Shakespeare and the Irish literary revival. He is too worried about his wife cheating on him.
But the "fatherlessness" that Stephen harps on - when it comes to Shakespeare and Hamnet/Hamlet ... is the deepest theme of the entire book.
Wow. I'm going to stop writing now.
Here's an excerpt. Buck Mulligan is a late arrival to the group. He sees Bloom lurking the Library. The conversation about Shakespeare is already in full swing. So he has to get caught up. But as is obvious, he really doesn't take much seriously. There is a question, too, about his sexuality - which is rather intriguing. Again, papers have been written on such things. So I won't cover that here.
Naturally, because it's a discussion of Shakespeare's plays - parts of the episode are written like a script.
And I love the jujitsu move of Dedalus at the very end of his lengthy discourse.
It's classic Joyce.
EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Scylla and Charybdis episode
-- Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
-- Which Will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
-- The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's widow, is the will to die.
-- Requiescat! Stephen prayed.
What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago...
-- She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motor car is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus had twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
-- History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy supping with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
-- A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons.
Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.
Are you condemned to do this?
-- They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The sun unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
-- What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut. Am I father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
-- Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But Flatter.
-- Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play's the thing! Let me parturiate!
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
-- As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.
-- The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
(Laughter.)
Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy...
(Laughter.)
Both satisfied. I too.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
Read the skies. Autontimerumenos. Bonus Stephanoumenos. Where's your configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D.: sua donna. Già: di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amar. S. D.
-- What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a celestial phenomenon?
-- A star by night, Stephen said, a pillar of the cloud by day.
What more's to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
Stephanos, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
-- You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.
Mr Best's eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
-- That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know, we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third brother that marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.
Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
-- I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand you to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps I am anticipating?
He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called:
-- Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...
-- O! Father Dineen! Directly.
Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
-- Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn't you?
-- In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
On.
-- You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others? Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
-- That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. Que voulez-vous? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.
-- Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and d