The Sheila Variations

Bloomsday 2010

Therese and I arrived, books in hand, at the pub where the Bloomsday celebration was being held. Colum McCann was the emcee, and we both were a bit starstruck, although both of us have met him before, on separate occasions. He just won the National Book Award, which is very exciting. He has been emceeing this particular event for 7 years (I was at the very first one!), and he pulls out the big guns, and gets great people to participate in the readings. This was the first year without Frank McCourt attending, so the entire event started with everyone raising a glass to McCourt. The pub has two entrances, a front and a back, and the back entrance goes out into a winding cobblestone alley, with picnic tables placed. It doesn't feel like New York. It feels like Europe. It was threatening to rain all day, and there were times when a great wind came galloping down that concrete canyon, but not a drop fell. We stayed outside the whole time. Therese and I were there early enough that we were alone at our picnic table (although that wouldn't last long.) There was complementary gorgonzola and burgundy (naturally). I recognized a lot of people from other Bloomsday celebrations, most notably the Symphony Space one I went to a couple years back. We had about an hour before the readings started, so we just enjoyed ourselves, and compared our different copies of Ulysses. Everyone who was there had a book on the table in front of them. There were a couple of guys in straw boaters.

Then, at one point, suddenly Colum McCann was at our table, holding a notebook, and said, "Do you girls want to read?" (Meaning: participate in the readings. The way it works is each person gets up and reads a section - most of them are no longer than 5 minutes long). But McCann had obviously got the literati out in force, so we were shocked and befuddled when he asked us, and we stuttered and stammered and looked at each other, but what: we're gonna say No to such a request? We're gonna turn down Colum McCann? We said "Yes, sure, yes ..." And he asked for our names, writing them down, and said, "Pick out a short section - just not Molly, okay?" "Okay." And he left us in a whirlwind of panic and adrenaline, as we flipped feverishly through our books looking for something we wanted to read. "What have we gotten ourselves into ..." I murmured. I immediately turned to the Ithaca section, one of my favorites in the book, thinking of the long water monologue (which is actually included in that excerpt) and which I find hilarious. I thought I could make something funny of it. Okay, fine. I'll do that. I skimmed it like a madwoman, looking for words I might not know, things I might trip over. Oh, and I forgot, before Colum McCann left our table, he said to us, "Make sure you read good now!" You got it, Mr. McCann. No pressure or anything.

Suddenly I saw an old friend, Aedin Moloney, who always reads sections of the Molly monologue throughout the celebration, and the entire thing ends with her reading the last 4 pages of the book. She's an actress, a musician, a great person, and I haven't seen her in years. We have many mutual friends, and I keep missing her, like ships in the night. We did a show together years ago, we played Irish sisters, and it was a crazy and great experience. We were two peas in a pod. I saw her arrive, and then we saw each other, it was great to finally re-connect.

Meanwhile, the place was filling up. An elderly gentleman named Bob sat at our table with us, he had a hardcover copy of Ulysses, and by the end of the day, we were all fast friends. He was terrific. Really interesting, friendly, funny, and loved James Joyce. It was great luck that he sat with us.

There was a microphone and podium set up, under a couple of giant umbrellas (which were eventually removed), and Colum McCann started off with a speech, and then read the opening couple of pages of the book. People were following along in their own copies, or just listening. There was a festive atmosphere. It is strange: to hear voices booming out through the financial district: "Stately plump Buck Mulligan ..." Like some sort of weird political rally.

McCann would introduce each reader, and it appeared that it was up to that person to choose whatever section they liked. There was a great mix. McCann and another guy read a bit from the Circe episode, which of course is written like a play. Once you hear this stuff read out loud, by witty people, it becomes totally apparent how hysterical this book is, something that might be missed if you get bogged down in the language. It is absurd, it is breathlessly ridiculous, it is a big showoffy book, it is filled, end to end, with jokes. What a delight. I should have written down everyone's names, so I could properly attribute their readings, but I was too involved in the moment.

Readings heard:

-- a guy named Seamus read the whole "cat" section of the Calypso episode, and at the "Meow" sections, the entire audience started Meow-ing back.

-- Eilin O'Dea, just off the plane from Ireland to go to Symphony Space, dropped by and did a bit of Molly's monologue (a bit? How about 7 or 8 pages) by heart. She was amazing.

-- Larry Kirwan (from Black 47) was there, beer in hand, and I can't remember which episode he read from [Update: I remember, it was from the Nausicaa episode], and it had to do with religion and sex, and he said beforehand, "This is for all the Catholics present." A cheer went up and down the alley. When he finished the reading, which was quite sexy, as much of Ulysses is, a white-haired woman in the front row (obviously a friend of Larry's) got up and whispered something to him and he then said into the microphone, "She just told me that that reading was better than her vibrator." I am sure she loved having what she whispered to him privately BROADCAST into a microphone through the financial district. Everyone burst into laughter (including the white-haired woman), and people cheered. Let's all cheer for vibrators and James Joyce. It's only 3 o'clock in the afternoon, why not.

-- Two guys got up - one Irish and one from Lancashire - and read from the Ithaca episode (not MY part, though), and it was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. Seriously: that episode can seem so ponderous, because of all of the lists and scientific vocabulary - but that's the joke of it. The answers so outweigh the questions (which usually are prosaic like, "Where?" and "What next?") that the entire thing becomes an exercise in absurdity. Hilarious.

-- A guy got up who was one of Colum McCann's writing students. McCann gave him a glowing introduction: "It's rare that you find a writer who can assert his voice in only three words." He's a writer and a Marine, who said before he started reading (from the Proteus episode), that he took Ulysses with him to Iraq and would read the Proteus episode over and over again, he said it helped give him a perspective on mind and body that he felt he needed while in the middle of a war zone.

-- One guy got up and read from Judge Woolsey's decision, declaring Ulysses NOT obscene and admitting it into the United States in 1934. I know I'm with my own kind when the name "Judge Woolsey" arouses spontaneous applause.

-- An Irish guy named Ned (ubiquitous at this function and others, I've seen him around) sat behind us. He also did a reading, and judging from his commentary behind me, knows most of the book by heart. He arrived a bit late, and sat down, just as one of the readers said the famous line, "The snot green sea. The scrotum tightening sea." and Ned called out, "Ah, snotgreen, it's a luvely color." This is not a crowd where you stand on ceremony. There's a lot of talk-back. It's awesome.

-- One gentleman (so sorry I do not remember his name) wearing a floppy little fishing hat got up and read a long hilarious section of Leopold Bloom's innermost thoughts, and it had to be over 10 pages long, and he had it memorized. I think he glanced at the page once. This was not a rote performance, he wasn't rattling off words he had just memorized - he knew it, he performed it, he embodied it. He was so funny, so great.

-- Tragedy struck. A woman got up and read the section from Ithaca I had been planning to read. PANIC. I barely listened to her reading, unfortunately, because I was frantically pawing through the book looking for another reading. Never count on Plan A. So far, no one had read from the Scylla and Charybdis episode (the one where Stephen discourses on Hamlet in the library), so I chose a brief section from that, hoping no one else would steal my thunder in the meantime. FEAR. PANIC.

-- Overheard: A young hot guy in a hoodie with an Irish accent, holding a Guinness, and saying into his cellphone, "I've been down here for hours. I'm wasted."

-- One of the things that surprised me was that no one read the list of names, which is usually a huge crowd-pleaser. Therese knew exactly what I was talking about, and we both forgot which episode it was from (and I have now forgotten it again) but we flipped through our books looking for it. It is one of those things that is immediately recognizable just from the LOOK of it, because it is a page consisting entirely of a list of names, so it's peppered with capital letters. We were laughing at ourselves as we looked for it, since we both knew what we were looking for, and how fun it was to be with a person who knew what the "list of names" was.

-- Finally, Colum came over to our table and said, "You two are up next - you can go and stand off to the side." We obeyed. Despite our nerves. We stood off to the side, and the wind at that point was huge, whipping the Irish flag off to the side. Rain seemed imminent. As I stood there, looking out at the huge listening rapt crowd, faces of all ages, I suddenly felt very happy to be myself, and to be exactly where I was at that moment in time. Ulysses, as I mentioned, is all tied up with my father, and I miss him very much, and I felt him with me right then. I felt happy that I am in my tradition, that I have embraced it, that I have taken his cues in my own insane way. I wished he had been there.

-- Therese read from the Hades section, the ending of it, and it has one of my favorite bits, chilling and simple:

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time.

It sure does.

-- I loved looking out at all the faces, watching, and listening, books open to the section Therese was reading. I was weirdly proud of the two of us for saying, despite our fear and sense of pressure, "Yes" to Colum McCann. It was such a treat!

-- While Therese was reading, Colum came over to me and said he was afraid it was going to start raining so if I could read something short, that would be great. I showed him what I wanted to read, and then said, "How about if I just do this paragraph?" and he said, "That would be great." He was keeping things moving, man. NOT an easy task. He had to get all of the readings done before the Happy Hour proper commenced, and he had to make sure to leave enough time for the big finale, which was Aedin's reading of the last 4 pages of the book.

-- I was pleased, because mine was the only reading the whole day from Scylla and Charybdis. Every other episode was represented, so I was happy to fill out the day. It is a chapter I love.

-- My turn. Stepped up to the microphone and said, "Let's talk about Shakespeare, shall we?" and I heard a couple of cheers from people who knew where I was going. I love geeks. I chose a section where Stephen talks about adultery in Shakespeare, and betrayal, to bolster up his theory that everyone in every play that Shakespeare wrote is Shakespeare himself. As he says later, "The boy of act one is the mature man of act five." It was so strange and funny and singular, to speak into that mike, and hear my voice booming through the concrete canyons. I felt like Hal Phillip Walker for a moment. I read:

-- 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 drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

A beautiful and thought-provoking section, but best part is the last line (the last phrase of the last line, I should say). Stephen is going on and on with his theories, browbeating his friends into submission, and he hasn't even read all of the plays - yet he KNOWS that his theory is true, even in the "other plays which I have not read." I haven't acted in a long time. I got a laugh on the last line, a big laugh, and you will forgive me if I admit that it thrilled and satisfied me, remembering the unbelievable feeling you get when you are onstage, and there's that sudden two-way current of communication open: You communicate, the response comes back loud and clear. Nothing like that feeling on earth. I don't take all the credit, naturally. Joyce wrote the damn thing. That's a funny line. But I suppose a personal moment, of remembering that feeling, that feeling of being in command onstage, was a beautiful rush for me. Thanks, Jimmy.

-- Perhaps my favorite moment of the day was as I walked back to my seat, a red-faced drunken Irishman held his hand out to me and shouted, "WELL DONE."

-- Therese and I, now drinking Guinness, had a private happy moment of self-congratulation for getting through it, for saying Yes, and for being a part of the entire celebration. "That was so cool - wasn't that so cool???"

-- Aedin had been reading parts of Molly's section throughout the day, at intervals, leaving the best for last. Her voice is eloquent, in and of itself, her accent thick and beautiful. Her sense of humor is undeniable, she knows where all the jokes are, and she is able to ride the waves of Molly's stream-of-consciousness with total ease, you never feel her jerking from one section to the next. But it was her reading of the last 4 pages that blew the top of the roof off of this event. There was so much emotion floating around that alley, for me, and for others, and I imagine that it was different for everyone. We all have associations, baggage we bring - to this book. Maybe it's our families, maybe it's memories of childhood, maybe it's about living in America now and missing Ireland ... who knows. It's a big book, it can take all of those associations. Aedin, in that intuitive way she has, spoke right into that space, the vast space of people's own associations ... and clicked into it in a way that was primal and, as one man said afterwards, tears in his eyes, "Transcendent." She started off the last section with a personal story. She plucked the book off the shelf when she was 10 years old and read it straight through. She found it easy and fun. She didn't know what it was, or that it was important, and kind of just fell into it. "I think you should start reading Ulysses when you're young, because a child can absorb so much, you have no idea how much." The next time she read it she was 14 years old, and the Molly section "exploded in my head". Why? "It was my mother. It was myself. It was all women. I recognized it all. This isn't just a woman - this is an Irish woman." And then she began. The last four pages of the book are a slow build, with a million tangents. Molly tries to fall asleep, but her mind keeps wandering. Sometimes it's funny and irrelevant, sometimes it's full of longing, a sudden sharp memory of burying her son, and reliving her relationship with her husband up to that point. And then, about a page and a half before the end, the thing takes a turn. The "Yes" refrain begins, and while what is happening is sexual, obviously, seen in the context of the rest of it, it becomes tragic, beautiful, loving, longing, a cry of pain in a world that has moved on, a cry of bliss in the face of disconnection, a re-imagining of herself as a wife, going back into the past, pushing herself into the future ... Even just describing it doesn't do what goes on in those pages justice. Aedin's performance was so insistent, so moving, so controlled, and so perfect that by the last "paragraph" people had started to spontaneously cry in the audience. Myself included. She pulled it out of us. She didn't emote. She just connected, and there was a groundswell of emotion charging through that alley that had a FEEL, it had a TASTE, it had SUBSTANCE. I glanced around wildly at one point, and saw a little old man holding his hat over his face, his shoulders shaking with sobs. He was embarrassed about crying. No need, sir. You were not alone. That is what Molly's monologue is all about, ultimately. None of us are alone. Even alone in our beds, trying to connect, to ourselves, to our husbands, to our sexual fantasies, even, none of us are alone. It is the most human of passages in the 20th century, and listening to Aedin's phenomenal reading, I had this strange disoriented thought: "Someone wrote this??" (Here's a clip of Aedin reading it at another function.) I've read the thing a million times. But at that moment, it was like I first really heard it. It should be heard rather than read to get its true power.

When she finished, the alley ERUPTED. People stood, screaming, and roaring, clapping, and crying. Again, the noise had a feel, a substance to it, you could feel your ear drums contracting.

We had been there for hours, most of us. The celebration ended on a clarion call for affirmation, for love, for acceptance (of oneself and others), for forgiveness (of oneself and others), and for saying, always, for saying YES.

Rejoyce. It's Bloomsday.

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 did not know who 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. No longer isolated. 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.

Richard Ellmann, in his biography on James Joyce, a highwater mark for biographies in the 20th century:

Several aspects of Joyce's life converge upon June 16, 1904, the day he afterwards chose for the action of Ulysses. It was on that day, or at least during the month of June, that he began to work out his theory that Shakespeare was not prince Hamlet but Hamlet's father, betrayed by his queen with his brother as Shakespeare was -- Joyce thought -- betrayed by Anne Hathaway with his brother. Joyce was at his search for distinguished victims -- Parnell, Christ, himself. Instead of making the artist Shakespeare an avenging hero, he preferred to think of him as a cuckold. Joyce developed the theory with excitement ... He was not yet living at the famous Martello tower at Sandycove, as Ulysses would suggest. On June 15 the McKernans, with whom he had his room, encouraged him to leave until he could pay his rent, and he went to his friends James and Gretta Cousins and asked them to take him in. They hospitably turned over the spare room in their tiny house on the sea's edge at Ballsbridge. After dinner on June 15 the Espositos came to call. Michele Esposito was an accomplished teacher of music who had brought his family, including his two attractive daughters Vera and Bianca, to Ireland several years before. Vera noted in her diary later that Joyce was very quiet and scarcely opened his mouth except to sing, to his own piano accompaniment, Henry VIII's 'Pastime with good companee, I love, and shall until I dee,' and the ballad of 'Turpin Hero'. These he followed with two sentimental songs, 'Love, could I only tell thee' and 'It is not mine to sing the stately grace.' The Esposito girls also sang. They and their father were impressed by Joyce and suggested he call on them. But for two reasons this visit never took place. One was that he offended the Esposito girls, the other that he began to fall in love.

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."

Here are my long posts on each chapter in Ulysses, which, if you haven't read the book, are a good guide. It's good to have a guide, although you don't need one.

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. He excludes nothing. It does not illuminate for us the subtext of a giant world war, or revolution, it is not political. It is a "day in the life" and that's pretty much it.

Something 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 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 love music.
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?

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. 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). 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 epic 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 in his narration 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 it. I got caught up in looking for the meaning in an intellectual way. 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 the page itself, 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

"I" meaning "eye" meaning "Cyclops".

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.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

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 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", and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was 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. The Cyclops chapter, as I mentioned) is the "eye" chapter. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely. So if you are looking for literal eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. 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.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably 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. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written, and that can be annoying if you don't like cleverness. But I think the whole thing is a hoot. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up traveling by horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. A valid response to a crazy world. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce 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 wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

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. We must take his words with a grain of salt (because, remember, he also said: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." Ha!), but I think it is important to keep his words in mind, and 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 any other "hard" book, if you try to read Ulysses in the same way, it will become impenetrable. It will refuse to unlock its secrets.

My advice to those who want to take it on: Just pick it up and start. Don't look for meaning. The book is not about its meaning. It is about the WORDS.

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) - and 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, masturbate, chat ... It has NO point. It is not meant to have a point.

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. 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 death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he 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.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.

Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, the daughter of a pastor, 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. In WWII, when the Nazis invaded Paris, Sylvia Beach had refused to leave, against all advice, because she couldn't abandon her library. Now you see why I love this woman. She hid the library away just in time, and then was captured by the Nazis and put in an internment camp. Most of the people in that camp were eventually sent to Auschwitz. Beach was released, and returned to her bookshop. When Hemingway himself came to liberate Paris, the first place he chose to "liberate" was Shakespeare & Co. There is a photo of him, in his military uniform, standing on a chair in the bookshop, the conquering hero. Shakespeare & Co. never re-opened. The economy was shattered, and Beach couldn't keep things running anymore. But the memory of that place remains to this day.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (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. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. 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.) 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. Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable.) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "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?" There is such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. It has been going on for 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. 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."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?") If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

Joyce does 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 (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. 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.

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. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. He was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, totally bourgeois, 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 showing her knickers. He was rather conventional. That's the shocker.

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. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) 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 image 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. Sound before vision.

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. 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, making him seem all top-heavy and serious, and that is all well and good, I am personally pleased that Joyce was not a "forgotten genius", or that his work suffered in obscurity until some academic rescued it in the 1950s, but that top-heaviness is really not appropriate for who the man actually was. The man loved life, he loved white wine, he loved his wife and kids, he loved music (he had almost gone on to a singing career), he even loved Ireland. He was not nihilistic in his outlook at all. He was not depressed. He is one of the great humanists of our age. So, here's Molly Bloom, 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.

Read it out loud. It becomes apparent what she is doing immediately. While there may be a prurient aspect to this, and it was certainly seen that way by the censors, in another light it can be seen as this: Sex is the ultimate in connection. Even when we have sex with ourselves. Sex is not dirty, sex is nothing to be ashamed of. One of the reasons Joyce felt he could not live in Ireland with Nora was that the attitudes towards sex were so prudish, the country was so priest-ridden, that the people couldn't "touch one another". It was a lonely place. Here, he shows his cards, here, in Molly's monologue, he tips his hand for us and shows us what he is really about. And, fascinatingly, he puts it in the mouth of the woman, the female character everyone has been talking about for the entire book, whom we have not met yet. Here she is, in bed, yearning for her husband, and going off into fantasy. This is not dirty. This is the stuff that makes the world go round, that makes life, which can be a bit of a drag, worth living.

Brings me to tears every time.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

... at the gym.

And here is Exhibit B, a T-shirt worn by my brother:

Here is my brother's post on Ulysses.

Someone had suggested that Marilyn Monroe work on Molly Bloom's section of the book as a monologue, perhaps at the Actors Studio. I love this photo, because, while it may be posed, she is clearly reading the end of the book, Molly Bloom's part of it. And Molly, with her earthy sexiness and romantic nature, would have been very interesting for Monroe to tackle.

The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. It was this project everyone was waiting for, but everyone also had a sense that it would cause lots of problems, in terms of censorship. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. The controversy had begun 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. She wrote to her sister in 1921:

"‘Ulysses’ is going to make my place famous."

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 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 John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and 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. It's long, but don't let that fool you. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it is 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

Joyce heard of the decision and replied:

Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders. The other half will follow ... And Ireland 1,000 years hence.

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.

The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

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."

The great Stefan Zweig on meeting Joyce, and the "meteor" of Ulysses:

"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."

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?"

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.

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.

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.

Edmund 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 rather extraordinary 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!"

Friend Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote of Joyce's earlier years:

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 gocerned 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.

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"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."

Henry Miller wrote:

Endowed with a Rableaisian ability for word invention, embittered by the domination of a church for which his intellect had no use, harassed by the lack of understanding on the part of family and friends, obsessed by theparental image against which he vainly rebels, Joyce has been seeking escape in the erection of a fortress composed of meaningless verbiage. His language is a ferocious masturbation carried on in fourteen tongues.

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..."

Wyndham Lewis wrote:

But on the purely personal side, Joyce possesses a good deal of the intolerant arrogance of the dominie, veiled with an elaborate decency beneath the formal calm of the Jesuit, left over as a handy property from his early years of catholic romance -- of that Irish variety that is so English that it seems stranger to a continental almost than its English protestant counterpart.

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."

Frank McCourt wrote:

Look! Ulysses is more than a book. It's an event -- and that upsets purists, but who's stopping them from retiring to quiet places for an orgy of textual analysis?... Joyce's work has liberated many an artist while his life stands as a lesson for all of us. He suffered greatly: the growing failure of his eyes, the growing madness of his daughter. All his days he skirmished for pennies and fought pitched battles for his art. He was a family man, fiercely tribal, and we must not forget he was driven by love.

Did he love Ireland? As the squirrel loves the nut.

Did he love Catholicism? Imagine his work without it.

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."

Edna O'Brien wrote:

To call this man angry is too temperate a word, he was volcanic.

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".

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.

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, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

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.

According to Eva Joyce, James Joyce's sister:

His last words were, 'Does nobody understand?' -- and I'm afraid that's what none of us did -- understand him.

Maybe we can try now.

Joyce wrote:

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.

And lastly, Nora, Joyce's lifetime companion and wife, said:

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.

"‘Ulysses’ is going to make my place famous." - Sylvia Beach, 1921

And indeed it did.

I'm in heaven these days due to the recent publication of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which I have not read yet, but it means that Sylvia Beach is all over the place right now. It's wonderful! It's wonderful to see her name everywhere. Naturally this means that Joyce's name is everywhere, too, so consider me thrilled.

Here is a review of the letters, which makes me drool to get my hands on a copy. This is all well-trod ground for me, having read many biographies of Joyce (and other literary giants of the day), where she plays a prominent role. But there's something about reading someone's letters ... the un-cleaned-up un-edited thought process and syntax revealed. Relationships made clear, without an editorial voice inserting itself. For example:

More and better literary gossip is spilled in Beach’s 1959 memoir, but these letters have tart moments on nearly every page. Beach introduced Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Joyce, and knew everyone. She describes a reading in her bookstore, given by Hemingway and Stephen Spender, during which beer and whiskey were “displayed on the table in front of the boys, of which they were partaking freely.” The sight of this made Joyce stand up and leave. It “made him too thirsty,” she writes, “to stand it any longer.” Beach, a popular giver of dinner parties and a bohemian cult hero, was unpretentious. Inviting the writer Bryher to a reception, she wrote: “You know it won’t be at all formal, never is in our house, and people don’t dress up here. I never wear an evening gown no matter what they invite me too — haint got none.”

Go read the whole thing.

"because no voice can hold out over the brutalities of life without breaking"

Awesome: Djuna Barnes's profile of James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922. It's a PDF file. Ulysses was published in February, 1922, and was already running into trouble with censorship. It would be over 10 years before the United States (Judge Woolsey presiding) deemed the book to be "not obscene" and would allow Ulysses to come to America. But Barnes's profile is before that long long fight, although the harbingers of it were already present. This is fascinating stuff. It's a "portrait of the artist" just on the cusp of the typhoon he had unleashed. It is in this interview that he says one of my favorite quotes from him about Ulysses, and it's a quote that many people seem to have a problem with, or they assume he is being disingenuous with it:

The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book - or worse they may take it some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

It's my view that he is exaggerating to make a point. He is not lying. He is not being mock-naive. He is on the level. It is my view that while Ulysses obviously has some serious moments and takes on serious themes (infidelity, Irish history, Shakespeare, sex, life itself) - it is not at all a "serious" book. It has no ulterior motives. It does not want to SCHOOL you. It really does have no moral. It is not like any other book. Joyce wrote it because he was obsessed by it, and it was the only book he could write at that particular time. He said that again and again. It took him 7 years to write it. There were many moments during that time when he felt like he was drowning, being pulled down by his own book. He said:

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!

So I believe what he says to Barnes. I knew of that quote when I read Ulysses for the first time and it (along with my Dad) helped keep me on track. It took the edge off of this book with the giant reputation. Yes, it has a giant reputation. So does Hamlet. But when you sit down to actually read the thing, you start to feel the nuts and bolts of it, how it works, and instead of being serious and solemn and "important", it feels, actually, rather ridiculous. In a good way. The whole book is ridiculous. Looking for "what it means" certainly diminishes the book. There is no meaning. If you tell the plot: a young Irishman and a middle-aged cuckolded Jew wander the streets of Dublin for 800 pages, and only meet near the end, and they get drunk and go to a brothel, and then walk home, taking time to stop and urinate in the garden ... Oh, and it all takes place on one day ... it sounds like nothing. And it IS nothing. The book is not about anything: its story, its narrative, its "events". It's about the language. And through the sometimes difficult language (but remember, Joyce said: "with me, the thought is always simple" - and this is 100% true. He is not an abstract man in the SLIGHTEST. He's Irish. Abstraction is not one of their strong suits), you get the characters, you get the setting, you get the "problems" each one has ... but if you see the language as a "barrier" to the "meaning", you are going to have a problem. As Samuel Beckett wrote about Finnegans Wake (and it applies to Ulysses as well):

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.

Joyce was not concerned with story. He did not create characters. He wrote the people he knew. His protagonist is his alter ego (Stephen Dedalus), and he only wrote books that took place in Ireland. He didn't INVENT anything. He got the "plot" of Ulysses from the "plot" of Homer's epic. His concerns were elsewhere. He wanted to attempt to "describe" (not explain, but describe) what it felt like to live. All the sensations, feelings, urges (hunger, bodily functions, sex) - palpitating and pulsing through a human being, at all times, at strange times. You walk down the street on a bright morning and suddenly, out of nowhere, you are dying to fuck someone. The urge passes (unless you have no impulse control), and then you go into a bookstore to browse, and then suddenly, your stomach growls, and you realize, "Huh. Time for a snack." This is prosaic stuff, people, but nobody had attempted to describe life at this level. Because why would they want to, some critics would ask. That's a valid point. But it's somewhat irrelevant. JOYCE wanted to. And as a writer, he only did what he wanted to do. He wished, often, that he could write other types of books - and his wife, looking at one of the pages of Finnegans Wake lying on his desk, asked him, "Why can't you write books that people would want to read?" Of course, they did want to read them, but her point is also valid. Accessibility is not what Joyce was ever about. Not because he was obnoxious (although he could be that as well, from time to time), and wanted to be "cleverer than you" - but because he only wrote what he felt like writing. And Ulysses was what he felt like writing at the time. Then, 17 years later, came his next book, Finnegans Wake, nothing from him at all in the in-between years. This was a man who followed his own star. It was a lonely existence, certainly, although he found his lifelong companion, and always had his kids around him - but he wasn't the type of writer who hung out with other writers, reveling in competition and comparing notes. He was solitary.

I loved his comment on Oscar Wilde:

[Oscar Wilde] studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.

Recently we had a conversation here about whether or not Joyce had any opinions on Oscar Wilde. As so often happens, the second I start wondering about things, suddenly answers start coming - answers that were there all along, I just wasn't looking for them. Like learning a new word and suddenly you start hearing it everywhere.

Djuna Barnes is, of course, a marvelous writer herself, and the piece is not to be missed.

“Already the publicity is beginning, and swarms of people visit the shop on hearing the news." - Letter from Sylvia Beach to her sister

("the news" being the publication of Ulysses.)

Recently it was Sylvia Beach's birthday, and this coming month will see the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which should be a bit of a treasure-trove, considering the people she interacted with daily (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce ... you know, minor figures like those guys). Naturally, Sylvia Beach is most known for her publication of Ulysses (through the auspices of her bookstore/publishing company Shakespeare & Co.) - which turned her into a notorious world-famous woman. The journey of Ulysses (the book, I mean) is well-known, and Beach was at the forefront of that important battle, concerning censorship and free speech. Relations with Joyce eventually broke down, and Beach, who was, essentially, running a very small-time operation, could not keep up with the demands.

James Campbell reviews the Letters of Sylvia Beach for the TLS, and seems frustrated with the editing thereof, the sketchy shorthand footnotes, the blanks not filled in for the lay reader. The events of Sylvia Beach's life are fascinating in and of themselves (who WAS this woman??), and I mainly know her through her intersections with the literary giants of the day. I love that Campbell calls her the "midwife of Modernism". I look forward to hearing her voice in these letters.

Here is a really interesting anecdote (which gives you some background of just ONE aspect of her life - and, of course, of course, James Joyce is peripherally involved):

When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches” all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odéon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “high-ranking German officer” entered her shop one day and, “speaking perfect English”, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.

A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.” “All right.” He drove off.

Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz.

I loved this, too: Recently, long-time commenter Bryan and I had a conversation about Joyce (in the comments section here). It had to do with Joyce's poetry and influences. Bryan (clearly) knows a lot about this subject, and I wondered if there was any known connection between Joyce and Oscar Wilde? Did Joyce say anything about Wilde? Refer to him at all? Bryan came up with a couple of great examples (again, see that old post). So I was thrilled to read that Sylvia Beach wrote of her first meeting with James Joyce in her memoirs - he walked into her bookshop (Shakespeare & Co.) in Paris. She describes his behavior thus:

He stepped into my bookshop . . . he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.

Marvelous. I wonder what he was thinking.

Look forward to reading her letters. The midwife of Modernism, indeed!

A guide through June 16, 1904

A companion piece, I suppose, to my recent post about my Ulysses playing cards:

I find posts like this to be very gratifying. Blogger Deepan Joshi calls me his "guide" for Joyce's Ulysses and writes, after reading all of my posts about it:

My guide has encouraged me with her simple explanation and after years I have finally mustered the courage to get past ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…’ and hopefully would reach the 40-page run-on sentence of Molly Bloom, lying in bed.

My work here is done. When I wrote all of those essays about each chapter in Ulysses, I did it for myself, certainly, because I enjoy talking about the book, and thinking about the book. I also, obviously, like to share what I'm thinking about things (hence: the blog). But I also hoped that my writing may remove some of the mystique surrounding Ulysses (critics can be quite annoying about the book, making it seem like it is only for specialists, and that could not be farther from the truth), and might encourage someone to pick up the book and give it a go.

It can be opaque. Yes. I had a guide. My father. And Anthony Burgess, too, but mostly my father. I could call him up and say, "Dad. WTF?" and I would read him a passage and he would start explaining it. My favorite example is how my dad, in one comment, cracked open the Cyclops episode for me. I could understand the LANGUAGE of the damn episode just fine (which is more than I can say for the Oxen of the Sun episode), but I didn't know WHY. I didn't know what was going on, who was the new narrator, why why why why. Remember what Joyce said: "With me, the thought is always simple." But sometimes to get to that thought is a bit of a journey (which is part of the fun of the book).

I loved reading Joshi's thoughts about Ulysses, and so thrilled that my posts would have traveled out there into cyberspace, and encouraged someone to continue on.

With a book like Ulysses, it is worth it. Believe me. No other book like it.

Ulysses playing cards

I bought these a while back, and find great pleasure in flipping through them, from time to time. Ulysses playing cards. They're quite beautiful and evocative, and pry open the famous episodes of the book. The back of each card is black with white lettering, and a collage of words found in Joyce's book. The other side are typical playing cards, nothing out of the ordinary, the suits are the same, the amount of cards - you could play Solitaire with these - but each card is different, each card represents a theme/object/character in Ulysses.

If you're familiar with the book, then you will have a response to such words as "kidneys", "ashplant", "rhododendrons" - these are all here. And I love the two Joker cards as well. Of course it would be those two on those two cards. Remember Joyce's statement about Ulysses: "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."

"Falling as in the silence falleth now / Dusk from the air."

James Joyce's poem "Tutto è Sciolto" appeared in the May, 1917 issue of Poetry.

Beautiful. That line I excerpted calls to mind the final four paragraphs of The Dead.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The word "falling" appears 7 times there. On the face of it, it seems like that would be WAY too much. It breaks all the rules. But that's why it is so brilliant.

And there it is again in the poem. Falling. Falleth.

Today in history: March 14, 1887

Sylvia Beach, who is responsible for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would touch it, was born on this day, in 1887.

Here is a photo of Sylvia and Jimmy:

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 (which I haven't read - my dad said it's okay, not great, but okay) - and is widely revered for her courageous independent move to publish Ulysses - the book that T.S. Eliot said "destroyed the 19th century".

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.

Finnegans Wake corrected

I can't believe I am only hearing of this now, but a new "corrected" version of Finnegans Wake is set to be published next week. The Irish Times has the story. Hmmmm. Isn't the syntactical oddness of the language actually the point? Is this akin bossy editors who take it upon themselves to either modernize Shakespeare, or make his punctuation intelligible to a modern audience (adding things like exclamation points, which Shakespeare rarely wrote). A nervousness about the chaos of the work, and a need to "correct" that which is actually genius, in all its chaos? I know that Joyce labored over Finnegans Wake for 17 years. There is a story told by a friend of his who watched Joyce, maybe 16 years into the thing, laboring over a draft of Finnegans Wake which had come back from the publishers. Joyce huddled over the mass of pages, working on it, and his friend, baffled, asked him what on earth he could possibly be correcting. Joyce replied, "I'm adding commas."

The "correction" listed in The Irish Times is basically one word that is removed: "and". And while I applaud geekery in any form, I am not sure that here you can top Joyce, and top how deeply JOYCE thought about all of these things. I will probably have to buy the corrected Finnegans Wake, because I will not be able to help myself, but sometimes I think that the sheer difficulty of a certain work, its scope, power, and accomplishment, can end up baffling critics unnecessarily - they are looking for SENSE, perhaps, where there is none. The "there" is already THERE, but because we are only mortal, and prone to things like envy and confusion, we want to try to wrestle the work into a form that WE can understand. This is certainly true of some of the editions of Shakespeare which, if you compare it to the text in the First Folio, you realize just how much "correcting" was done. In the First Folio (considered closer to what Shakespeare actually wrote, although that is still up for debate), when Hamlet dies, he ends with, "The rest is silence" - and then, in the Folio, it says that Hamlet says, "O - o - o - o" and then "He dyes." Fascinating. You don't find those "O-groans" in any modern version of Hamlet, and it is (of course) still not clear if Shakespeare wrote those "O"s, or if it was someone else, or if it was a memory of what a certain actor did when performing the role of Hamlet - Perhaps he said the last line, and then died beautifully - with big declamatory "O-groans" all the way down. Who knows. But to edit them out seems a bit sketchy (editors are, in general, embarrassed by the "O-groans" that show up in Shakespeare - perhaps it is a pesky reminder to these scholars that the work they so adore is actually a piece of entertainment - a SCRIPT - meant to be PLAYED - by actors - who, everyone knows, are barely better than prostitutes - so out with the "O groans" because they are flat out embarrassing - to ME, personally! - thinks the scholar). Additionally, here's another element to all of this: The mere fact that Hamlet's last words are "The rest is silence" - and THEN - this most indecisive of characters in all of Western literature - refuses to follow his own observation - and does not remain silent - but groans as he dies. It's just so Hamlet, if you look at it in that way. He makes a declarative statement of certainty for almost the first time: "The rest is silence" - and then, uh-oh, Hamlet isn't done, he is NOT silent - even in death, he is waffling back and forth. Anyway, that's MY interpretation of it - and I'm not coming down on one side or the other - because the "O-groans" are controversial, and I get that - but I still think it's interesting to at least acknowledge their presence, to not edit them out entirely because they are embarrassing to YOU, the scholar in his dusty office, who thinks theatre is probably a bit distasteful, and actors even worse ... Like: who cares what YOU think? I think it's kind of funny and totally in character that Hamlet, in his second to last breath, declares, "The rest is silence" - and then dies - in the loudest least-silent way possible. I don't know. I like contemplating the possibilities in that.

Joyce's wife, Nora, who claimed to never have read any of her husband's work (hahaha), said to interviewers after Joyce's death, ""What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

I have always tended to agree with that, and I also believe that Finnegans Wake is actually MORE accessible than Ulysses. It is certainly less intricate in structure, although the language can be daunting. Joyce certainly believed that everyone, uneducated or not, could read Finnegans Wake, and coming as he does from Ireland, with its long history of oral storytelling, Finnegans Wake seems to me to be meant to be read out loud. That's how I read it (thanks, Dad, for the tip), and once you read it out loud, the language is not difficult at all. Not in the slightest. It's way easier to "get" than Ulysses, which demands your commitment in a way that no other book really does. Finnegans Wake, I suppose, demands your submission as well, but once you do submit, the entire text cracks open. It's like being in a dream. The logic of dreams is rock-solid, everyone understands their own dreams, and the text of Finnegans Wake is an extended subconsciously-driven monologue of someone falling in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams.

Samuel Beckett said, perceptively, 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.

So I am curious to see what is going on here with the corrections to Finnegans Wake, and what the editors and scholars felt needed correcting. I do know that the book was finally published, with Joyce racing after his own manuscript, still tweaking it. He was never done. Shall we call him OCD? There is a level of that here. Writing, and editing, was, in a way, a beautiful torment to him, as the overlay of meaning, the collapsing structure expanding and contracting, was ALIVE to James Joyce. I am sure it went to the printer with Joyce's ink still drying on the pages.

Here are some thoughts of mine on Finnegans Wake - and, as always, I miss the one I really want to talk to about all of this.

Groucho Marx to Peter Lorre

(speaking of James Joyce...):

October 5, 1961

Dear Peter:

It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce's "Ulysses". All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years' difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.

You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.

Best to you both.

Regards,
Groucho

"This may sound odd, but I have found Ulysses to be my easiest translation thus far! The most demanding and yet the easiest."

A FASCINATING interview with Finnish translator Leevi Lehto on translating James Joyce's Ulysses into Finnish. A couple of translations had already been done in Finland, the main one done by Pennti Saarikoski in 1964, but Lehto found them unsatisfactory for various reasons (which he goes into in the interview). My favorite comment from him about the Saarikoski translation revealed him to me as a kindred spirit, and made me want to send this to my father so badly.

Saarikoski’s translation is also clearly influenced by certain basic aesthetics of Finnish modernist prose, and its particular concept of realism. The leading theoretician of Finnish modernism, Tuomas Anhava (1927–2001), was one of the cursory readers of Saarikoski’s translation, and, as I like to say, the result is what Joyce’s Ulysses might have become if Joyce had let Ezra Pound have his way with it.

Hahahaha. Dad would love that. So, Mr. Lehto decided to give it a go himself. He explains a moment he had translating the Sirens episode, just as an experiment:

Having worked as a professional translator for 15 years, I was naturally intrigued by the translation aspects. It was also around that time that, as a poet, I was becoming increasingly fascinated in the sound and phonetics of language (today one of the areas of poetry identified with me is sound poetry): therefore the ‘Sirens’ episode, balancing – as it does – on the boundary between language and music, became the focal point of my study of the translation. After reaching Molly’s final “yes” I put down my Saarikoski, located my Joyce, and sat down to translate the ‘Sirens’. After about ten pages I showed it to my wife. “It’s a new text altogether,” said she, having read her Saarikoski years ago, and added: “Why don’t you translate the whole book?” I remember how strange the notion seemed to me at the time. I was rather thinking that my translating days were behind me, and that it was (finally) time for me to concentrate on doing “something of my own”. The idea stuck, however, and by the next New Year I found myself making finishing touches on the ‘Sirens’. In January and February of 2003 I made first drafts of episodes 1-3 and sent all the four episodes to Gaudeamus publishing house to be looked over by Tuomas Seppä. Tuomas sent them to Professor Hannu K. Riikonen, who gave his support to the enterprise. The process of a new translation of Ulysses had begun.

The Sirens episode is all sound (naturally. Why? Because it's the SIRENS EPISODE, got it? What do Sirens do? They call to sailors, with their voices, causing them to crash. Therefore, the Sirens episode is all sound, sound upon sound - Joyce trying to capture what it sounds like in a crowded bar with chattering waitresses and conversing patrons.) Here's the excerpt I posted a while back - and it seems, basically, untranslateable, right? Because it's barely in English, right? Leevi Lehto went at it another way, and his conversation about this and other episodes (I was particularly interested in his story of translating the 'Circe' episode - and also the Oxen of the Sun episode) is deep and fascinating stuff. It reminds me of Seamus Heaney deciding to start off his translation of Beowulf with the conversational word, "So." I remember my dad talking about that, how exciting he found it. In the NY Times on March 29, 2000, there was an interview with Heaney. Here is what he had to say about that "So" (and, by the way, his recording of the translation is not to be missed!):

A breakthrough came with his discovery of the verb "thole" in the text. Anglo-Saxon for suffering, it was a word that he had heard in his childhood in Northern Ireland. That offered him a bridge between cultures and centuries. Searching for an equivalent oral tradition, he remembered his father's cousin Peter Scullion, a man who had "a large voice and a very stately method of speech." As Mr. Heaney said, "That's how I got started on 'Beowulf', with those voices from my country past."

The first problem was the first word, hwaet in Old English, which had been translated as lo, hark, behold, attend and listen. By choosing the more conversational "so", Mr. Heaney called for attention and plunged the reader into the middle of the story.

I wonder if I had read a version in high school that started with "so", as opposed to "hark", I might have responded better to Beowulf. Translation can be KEY. There is always something lost in the transfer. I am fluent enough in French to at least be able to read it, and Moliere reads so different in the original than in translation. Moliere translations can be clunky, due to the rhyming couplet nature of so many of his plays, which rollick along in French, but sometimes feel amateurish in English. Same with Little Prince. Perhaps the most famous line in Le Petit Prince is: "Here is my secret: Only with the heart can one see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye." Now that is quite nice. The meaning is nice, but it sounds nice too. I couldn't improve upon it. But here it is in French: Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple : on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. I know enough of French to know that the translation is not exact - it can't be. Two different languages.

I remember my French teacher in high school saying once, when a student asked him, "So 'c'est' is 'It is' ... right?" and he replied, "No. It is 'c'est'." He wanted us to get away from English entirely and stop trying to find the correlation in our own language. Only then will you become actually fluent. You won't be translating it all in your head before you open your mouth.

Now that I'm older, and feel pretty comfortable with my ability to handle difficult language, I actually prefer the Constance Garnett translations of Russian literature, even though she is a bit out of favor now, and new translations are out, with more of a modern feel to the language. For Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I prefer the more stately formal translations of Garnett, having tried the other ones, and not liking them. Contrarily, the new Paul Schmidt translation of Chekhov's plays (I wrote a little bit about it here) are fantastic, and I prefer them so much more to the translations I grew up with. Maybe it's different with plays. Chekhov's works are emotional and personal, and the standard translations I read (and performed) in college and beyond were really difficult to get your mouth around. They FELT foreign. Paul Schmidt's translations breathe and pulse with life. Constance Garnett's translation of Sonya's big confession to Yelena in Act 3 (and this is a scene done in acting classes across the land - and this was the translation most often used):

No, when a woman is ugly they always say she has beautiful hair or eyes. I have loved him now for six years, I have loved him more than one loves one’s mother. I seem to hear him beside me every moment of the day. I feel the pressure of his hand on mine. If I look up, I seem to see him coming, and as you see, I run to you to talk of him. He is here every day now, but he never looks at me, he does not notice my presence. It is agony. I have absolutely no hope, no, no hope. Oh, my God! Give me strength to endure. I prayed all last night. I often go up to him and speak to him and look into his eyes. My pride is gone. I am not mistress of myself. Yesterday I told Uncle Vanya I couldn’t control myself, and all the servants know it. Every one knows that I love him.

Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking even in its rather overblown formality of language. This is how Chekhov writes. It would be a mistake to lessen the impact of that language - you need that "Oh my God" in there, for example. But take a look at Paul Schmidt's translation of the same monologue. It feels more speak-able, to this English-speaking woman:

That's what people always say to an ugly woman; they say: "Oh, you have beautiful eyes. Oh, you have beautiful hair." I've been in love with him for six years now; I love him more than my own mother. All I can hear is the sound of his voice, feel the touch of his hands. I keep watching the door, I always think it's him coming. And now look, I keep coming to you so I can talk about him. He's here every day now, but he never looks at me, he doesn't even see me ... It hurts so much! And it's all so hopeless, it's completely hopeless! Oh, my God, I don't know where I'll get the strength ... I lie in bed all night long, just praying ... And I have no shame anymore - I hang around talking to him, I keep looking him right in the eyes... I just can't help myself anymore! Yesterday I told Uncle Vanya I was in love with him ... And the servants know, they all know.

Bravo, Mr. Schmidt.

I couldn't even begin to translate a work of literature from one to another language, and writing about this right now makes me a bit lonely, because this is the kind of stuff I want to talk about with my father, who loved this stuff as well. He was particularly interested in an essay I found by Jim Di, who translated Ulysses into Chinese (I posted it here.) Marvelous stuff. "The woman word." Translation cannot be a one-to-one correspondence because languages don't work that way. If you want to get across the feel of Molly Bloom's monologue, and how it feels to us in English, to a Chinese audience, then you have to think deeply about the language, and find appropriate correspondences. Interviews with translators help me to think more deeply about works such as Ulysses - they grapple with the text in a way I never could, because their purposes are different.

Joyce's language is its own thing. He was a linguist. He loved puns. He loved making connections, with sound and the look of words. This works in English, but it wouldn't in, say, Finnish, because the base is different. So Leevi Lehto, especially in the Oxen of the Sun episode, really wrestled with this.

The Oxen of the Sun episode (basically, the "maternity ward" episode) is difficult for English readers - especially those of modern-day audiences who, as a whole, are not as well read as the regular readers back in Joyce's day. In the Oxen of the Sun episode, a baby is being born (the literal "story" of the episode). Joyce writes the chapter in a way that it takes you through the entire history of the English language - the English language being "born". I write about that here. If you don't know the references (and Joyce doesn't give them to you, you just have to recognize them on your own), then you will be baffled. As I said, that chapter is one of the ones where I can actually sense how unqualified I am to "get" it. No matter. I struggle on through it.

However, Mr. Lehto comes up against a big problem with translating this episode. Listen to what he has to say. The question is: In episode 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, you have decided to translate the ‘embryonic development’ of English prose by going through the history of Finnish prose style instead of, for example, alluding to those English writers Joyce parodies. Why is this? Lehto answers:

Interesting question! This decision is an example of how there is no one single correct way to convey the how-aspect of translation (cf. 2.3. above). In the ’Oxen of the Sun’ my technique is, so to say, categorical domestication, whereas in other parts of the novel I categorically refuse to domesticate – for the most part I don’t translate Irish/Dubliner idioms into their Finnish/Helsinkiner correspondents, because I consider Joyce has meant his idioms to be foreign to an average English reader. (My rule of thumb has been to abstain from domesticating if Gifford & Seidman consider it necessary to add an explanation to their English readers.) In the ’Oxen of the Sun’, in my view, Joyce’s aim is slightly different: Instead of alienation he is striving for, shall we say, maximum recognition: the exact way they wrote in such and such time at a given part of the British Empire (presuming a reader with maximum of education and imagination, as Joyce always happily and shamelessly presumes). In this exact way aspect Joyce is not, in fact, content with imitation – ’Oxen of the Sun’ has more direct quotation and plagiarism than pastiche and parody. One proof of this is that Joyce’s “parodies” stop at the point of history, in which copyright laws become a factor (on this, cf. Paul Saint-Amour’s excellent book The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination, Cornell University Press 2003). Again, I aimed to “do what Joyce did”: where he had his manuals of English prose style, I had Paavo Pulkkinen’s book on the development of modern Finnish language (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1972), with its excellent text appendices.

Amazing, and I am sure will be controversial to some, but to me Lehto's tactic here is a way of bringing the text alive in another context, a Finnish context. I love love his thoughts on it. I am not sure that Joyce would agree that all good literature is local (I am thinking of Thomas Hardy's praise and dedication to "provincialism" in literature) - and although he didn't live in Ireland at all after a certain point, it certainly was the wellspring of his creativity, and his rage. It is a local concern. He is a writer in exile from his home. Like Ulysses, his journey is always about going home. So Lehto sees the universal concern in that (it is something anyone from any culture anywhere can relate to), and works on the idioms and symbols and clues from a Finnish context. I was just so fascinated to hear his thought process on it.

There is more good stuff in the interview (read the whole thing here) - and I have to admit, I feel a strange connection with Joyce and Finland - because, for some reason, my post on Finnegans Wake is linked on the Finnish Wikipedia page for that book. I am strangely proud of that. So go Finland with your Joycean adventures!! And thanks for including me, in some sideways kind of way.

Today in history: February 2 (1882, and 1922)

Two things happened on today in history:

February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.

February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Co.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

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 the significance she had in his life. Without her, he would not have been a man. 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. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely, and instead makes the entire chapter into a first-person diatribe, and the person telling the story says, over and over as he relates the tale he needs to tell, "says I." The overall effect is that when you look at the page, all you can see is the letter "I". Says I, says I, says I. So if you are looking for eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. But it's in the language and the LOOK of it, one of the pieces of writing that is immediately identifiable just by looking at it. My father taught me that. And how brilliant is it to have the "eye" chapter not involve eyes, or vision, openly - but to have the meaning of the symbolism in the language to such a degree that you can recognize it at a glance. From, of course, your eyes. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. 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.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably 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. Or actually, maybe he was. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up with horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce 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 wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

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 with which to concern yourself. 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. 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 death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he 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.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

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.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (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. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. 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.) 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!" Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people just shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable ...) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction. A reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "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 a constant refrain from certain corners.. 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."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Progress, forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?" Infidelity, drug addiction, love triangles - all of these things are nothing new. How can one presume to say anything new about them? You really can't. All you can do, if you are an artist, is try to understand "what it is REALLY like" and try to portray that.) If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

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 (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. 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.

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. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. 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. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) 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 image 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. Sound before vision.

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.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

Ahem.

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 John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and 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

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. 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 rather extraordinary 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 about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"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".

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.

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, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

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. Here is my brother's post on Ulysses, which gives me goosebumps. We are, apparently, a family of Joycean T-shirts, as evidenced by my T-shirt above. And here is Exhibit B from my brother:

Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece. The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

Today in history: February 2 (1882, and 1922)

Two things happened on today in history:

February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.

February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Co.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

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 the significance she had in his life. Without her, he would not have been a man. 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. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely, and instead makes the entire chapter into a first-person diatribe, and the person telling the story says, over and over as he relates the tale he needs to tell, "says I." The overall effect is that when you look at the page, all you can see is the letter "I". Says I, says I, says I. So if you are looking for eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. But it's in the language and the LOOK of it, one of the pieces of writing that is immediately identifiable just by looking at it. My father taught me that. And how brilliant is it to have the "eye" chapter not involve eyes, or vision, openly - but to have the meaning of the symbolism in the language to such a degree that you can recognize it at a glance. From, of course, your eyes. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. 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.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably 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. Or actually, maybe he was. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up with horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce 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 wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

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 with which to concern yourself. 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. 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 death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he 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.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

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.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (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. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. 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.) 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!" Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people just shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable ...) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction. A reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "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 a constant refrain from certain corners.. 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."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Progress, forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?" Infidelity, drug addiction, love triangles - all of these things are nothing new. How can one presume to say anything new about them? You really can't. All you can do, if you are an artist, is try to understand "what it is REALLY like" and try to portray that.) If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

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 (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. 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.

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. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. 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. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) 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 image 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. Sound before vision.

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.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

Ahem.

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 John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and 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

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. 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 rather extraordinary 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 about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"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".

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.

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, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

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. Here is my brother's post on Ulysses, which gives me goosebumps. We are, apparently, a family of Joycean T-shirts, as evidenced by my T-shirt above. And here is Exhibit B from my brother:

Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece. The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

"all fecund with its nuttiness"

An hysterical short film by Bórd Scannán na hEireann of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett playing pitch 'n putt and ... waiting ... for ... someone. Joyce is in a perpetual rage. Beckett is impenetrable. I laughed the whole way through. I love these actors. Like, Joyce: chill OUT. "all blood-red something ..." Non-stop rageful improvisation.

Thanks to Carrie for the link.

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. The book had originally been published by Shakespeare & Co in Paris in 1922 by the courageous Sylvia Beach. Since its publication in 1922, the book had been near impossible to get. A frenzy ensued. There was an obscenity trial. Copies were confiscated by customs officials around the world. Entire shipments of books were burned. There was a time when literally the only place you could buy a copy of the famous book was at the little bookshop in Paris.

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.

You go, Jimmy.

Last year 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.

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.

But it is Judge Woolsey's decision and its eloquence (and courage) that I would like to celebrate today.

So this day is a very big day, one of those moments when free speech triumphed, when good itself triumphed. These fights will continue to come up, as long as there are those who want to control what others read, look at, even think - because it offends THEM. Whether or not Ulysses is your taste is irrelevant. Different people have different tolerance levels for things such as smut, dirty words, frank sexual talk, and bathroom humor. The finger-waggers want their tolerance level to be the default. This is a fight I take very seriously. I respect that some people don't like certain things. But I'll be damned if I let those people corral MY tolerance level. You would have to pay me to watch NASCAR races, I don't like gambling, and I think Nicholas Sparks is a hack. Doesn't mean I have any desire to stop those who love those things from having access to them. Therein lies the difference.

We can only hope there are more Judge Woolseys out there.

Thank you, sir!

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

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.

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 was published by Shakespeare & Co.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

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.

Happy birthday to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist - in 1914, 15 (speaking of Ezra Pound) - but yesterday was the day it was published as a whole, in 1916.

Dubliners had already been published - and very controversial were those stories - not embraced by his own country of course (they hit too close to home). Joyce had known what the reaction would be. He had found much more acceptance "on the Continent" than in his native land.

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 which changed everything. According to TS Eliot, Joyce "killed the 19th century" with that book.

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. The structure may be complex, and it usually is with Joyce - but "the thought is always simple". Literature was old, tired, and language itself had no meaning in and of itself.

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 tuckoo

His 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:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

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.

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, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

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 out (the first volume of what promises to be a giant work) and I am looking forward to reading it.

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.

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.

Here is my essay on the greatest short story ever written.

"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, James Joyce

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 and Antonin Artaud (Artaud? I need you to CHILLAX, okay? You're freaking me out. Just CHILLAX) and Finnegans Wake. If it wasn't rigorous, it didn't hold my interest at that time. Finnegans Wake was not a book I carried around with me, reading while I was in line at the bank. It didn't seem to lend itself to that kind of behavior, so typical for me with other books. I couldn't just pick it up and put it down again. I needed to clear a space for it, intellectually, and I did so every morning for about half an hour at a time.

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" is a story I go back to time and time again (I consider it to be that rarity: a truly perfect thing) - (excerpt and essay about it here) ... not to mention certain sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (excerpt and essay here) - and my reading experience of Ulysses, one summer, under the tutelage of my dad, is one of the most memorable and exciting reading experiences I have ever had, rivaled only by my first re-reading of Moby-Dick, 15 years after I had first read it (and hated it) in high school.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

"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.

Full interview here.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.)

BLOOM (Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Mansfield's was my love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn in Paris. THE HOOF Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight. BLOOM (Crosslacing.) Too tight? THE HOOF If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you. BLOOM Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar dance. Bad luck. Nook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned. That night she met... Now!

(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.)

BLOOM (Mumbles.) Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen. BELLO (With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of dishonour! BLOOM (Infatuated.) Empress! BELLO (His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump! BLOOM (Plaintively.) Hugeness! BELLO Dungdevourer! BLOOM (With sinews semiflexed.) Magnificence. BELLO Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down! BLOOM (Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing.) Truffles!

(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.)

BELLO (With bobbed hair purple gills, fat moustache rings round his shaven mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moor cock's feather, his hands stuck deep in his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in.) Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot's glorious heels, so glistening in their proud erectness. BLOOM (Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey. BELLO (Laughs loudly.) Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for you. I'm the tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym costume.

(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)

ZOE (Widening her slip to screen her.) She's not here. BLOOM (Closing her eyes.) She's not here. FLORRY (Hiding her with her gown.) She didn't mean it, Mr Bello. She'll be good, sir. KITTY Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir. BELLO (Coaxingly.) Come, ducky dear. I want a word with you, darling, just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety. (Bloom puts out her timid head.) There's a good girly now. (Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward.) I only want to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready. BLOOM (Fainting.) Don't tear my. BELLO (Savagely.) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You're in for it this time. I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.) I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat ham rashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter. (He belches.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice Of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you.

(He twists her arm. Bloom squeaks, turning turtle.)

BLOOM Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't! BELLO (Twisting.) Another! BLOOM (Screams.) O, it's hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches like mad! BELLO (Shouts.) Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn you. (He slaps her face.) BLOOM (Whimpers.) You're after hitting me. I'll tell... BELLO Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him. ZOE Yes. Walk on him! I will. FLORRY I will. Don't be greedy. KITTY No, me. Lend him to me.

(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.)

MRS KEOGH (Ferociously.) Can I help? (They hold and pinion Bloom.) BELLO (Squats, with a grunt, on Bloom's upturned face, puffing cigar-smoke, nursing a fat leg.) I see Keating Clay is elected chairman of the Richmond Asylum and bytheby Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen three quarters. Curse me for a fool that I didn't buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty to one. (He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear.) Where's that Goddamned cursed ashtray? BLOOM (Goaded, buttocksmothered.) O! O! Monsters! Cruel one! BELLO Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg, pray for it as you never prayed before. (He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar.) Here, kiss that. Both. Kiss. (He throws a leg astride and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls in a hard voice.) Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I'll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. (He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting.) Ho! off we pop! I'll nurse you in proper fashion. (He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the saddle.) The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop. FLORRY (Pulls at Bello.) Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked before you. ZOE (Pulling at Florry.) Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress? BLOOM (Stifling.) Can't. BELLO Well, I'm not. Wait. (He holds in his breath.) Curse it. Here. This bung's about burst. (He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting his features, farts loudly.) Take that! (He recorks himself) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. BLOOM (A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.) Woman. BELLO (Stands up.) No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and shoulders and quickly too. BLOOM (Shrinks.) Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I tip-touch it with my nails? BELLO (Points to his whores.) As they are now, so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille, with whalebone busk, to the diamond trimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you... BLOOM (A chafing soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and lace male hands and nose, leering mouth.) I tried her things on only once, a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hardup I washed them to save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift. BELLO (Jeers.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh! and showed off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind close-drawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders, in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! Ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and short trunk leg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne Hotel, eh? BLOOM Miriam, Black. Demimondaine. BELLO (Guffaws.) Christ Almighty, it's too tickling, this! You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade, about to be violated by Lieutenant Smythe Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell, M.P., Signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henry Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Cr&Aelig;sus, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. (He guffaws again.) Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh? BLOOM (Her hands and features working.) It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister's stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful. BELLO (With wicked glee.) Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn throne. BLOOM Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.) And really it's better the position... because often I used to wet. BELLO (Sternly.) No insubordination. The sawdust is there in the corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it standing, sir! I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds. THE SINS OF THE PAST (In a medley of voices.) He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black Church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in d'Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order? BELLO (Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out. Be candid for once.

(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... )

BLOOM Don't ask me. Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath... BELLO (Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing. Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good-ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr... ! BLOOM (Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant... BELLO (Imperiously.) O get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak when you're spoken to. BLOOM (Bows.) Master! Mistress! Mantamer!

(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.)

BELLO (Satirically.) By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes, also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be nice? (He places a ruby ring on her finger.) And there now! With this ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress. BLOOM Thank you, mistress. BELLO You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one. Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping hot. Hop! you will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night your wellcreamed braceleted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives. (He chuckles.) My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heels. First, I'll have a go at you myself. A man I know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? (He points.) For that lot trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva.) There's fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder's face.) Here, wet the deck and wipe it round! A BIDDER A florin!

(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)

A VOICE One and eightpence too much. THE LACQUEY Barang! CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean. BELLO (Gives a rap with his gavel.) Two bar. Rockbottom figure and cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points. Handle him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day. A pure stock getter, due to lay within the hour. His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa, my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! (He brands his initial Con Bloom's croup.) So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen? A DARKVISAGED MAN (In disguised accent.) Hoondert punt sterlink. VOICES (Subdued.) For the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid. BELLO (Gaily.) Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts of the blasé man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices. BLOOM (Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) O, I know what you're hinting at now. BELLO What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suetfolds of Bloom's haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man's job? BLOOM Eccles Street. BELLO (Sarcastically.) I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon! BLOOM I was indecently treated, I... inform the police. Hundred pounds. Unmentionable. I. BELLO Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want, not your drizzle. BLOOM To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll!... We... Still... BELLO (Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return and see.

(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)

SLEEPY HOLLOW Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle! BLOOM (In tattered moccasins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tip toeing, fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes, cries out.) I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he. BELLO (Laughs mockingly.) That's your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar student.

(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.)

MILLY My! It's Papli! But. O Papli, how old you've grown! BELLO Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writing table where we never wrote, Aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and his men friends are living there in clover. The Cuckoos' Rest! Why not? How many women had you, say? Following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts. What, you male prostitute? Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander, O. BLOOM They... I... BELLO (Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art's sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's. BLOOM Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return. I will prove... A VOICE Swear!

(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowie knife between his teeth.)

BELLO As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You are down and out and don't you forget it, old bean. BLOOM Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody... ?

(He bites his thumb.)

BELLO Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have. If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury you in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, what ever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cess pool. (He explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh.) We'll manure you, Mr Flower! (He pipes scoffingly.) Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli! BLOOM (Clasps his head.) My will power! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff...

(He weeps tearlessly.)

BELLO (Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears!

(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.)

THE CIRCUMCISED (In a dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, no flowers.) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. VOICES (Sighing.) So he's gone. Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah, yes.

(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.)

THE YEWS (Their leaves whispering.) Sister. Our sister. Ssh. THE NYMPH (Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest! BLOOM (Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with dignity.) This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

STEPHEN He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in the works of sweet William. MAGEEGLINJOHN Names! What's in a name? BEST That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.

(Laughter.)

BUCK MULLIGAN (Piano, diminuendo.)

Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy...

STEPHEN In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles' names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark. BEST I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name.

(Laughter.)

QUAKERLYSTER (A tempo.) But he that filches from me my good name... STEPHEN (Stringendo.) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John O'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat of arms he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.

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 drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage. Judge Eglinton summed up.

-- The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all.

-- He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

-- Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

-- And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

-- Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet pére and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

-- Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's desk.

-- May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

-- Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

-- You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?

-- No, Stephen said promptly.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Lestrygonians 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

In The Odyssey the Lestrygonians are a tribe of cannibals who gobble up many of Odysseus' crew. Joyce (as I mentioned somewhere before) had concentric circles of meaning woven into his book - each "episode" is completely different in style, tone, structure - than the others. The content fits the form, and vice versa. Each episode has a corresponding color, body part, and other elements ... you can find these "keys" online if you're interested in reading the book that way. You don't NEED them, but sometimes it does help. I think I said this before - but the thing about Ulysses is this: Yes. Its reputation precedes it. It is daunting. You even look at the pages and it seems incomprehensible. You don't see normal sentences and paragraph breaks. It seems like a big cloudy mystery and only YEARS of study will help you enjoy it. This is one of the problems with being a "big important book". Other huge important authors suffer from the same thing, only never so much as Joyce. People feel they need to be "ready" to tackle Ulysses. I know I felt that way.

But then one day, I just picked it up and started. I did no research beforehand (although I'd read Dubliners, Portrait - and had also read Ellmann's biography of Joyce - but I didn't go online and read essays about the book, and how to read it, and what it "means") ... I just struggled through, and occasionally called my dad for some enlightenment. "What the HELL is he talking about here??" I'd read him a passage. The book is 800 pages long. My dad would immediately recognize the passage and say, "Oh. Okay. You're in the Hades episode. Everything is about death." The light would break over me. "Ohhh. Okay. Got it." The book does not reveal itself in one reading, obviously - I have only read it once, and I do want to read it again, because I am sure I will be much more relaxed the second time ... not so concerned about what it "means". But again, I did no research, or preliminary studying - I just started. There were times when Joyce's intent was opaque to me - I couldn't get to it ... but I knew that it was ME that was the problem, not him. I mean, you can just sense that. It reminds me of Faulkner's quote about Ulysses - and how you should approach it as an illiterate Baptist minister approaches the Old Testament - with faith. Now lots of people have resentment about this kind of thing, and get all uppity and defensive about Joyce, and other "hard" authors. Those people used to show up on my site all the time, and make whiny defensive comments ... It's almost like they resented that someone else had decided that this book was "great" - and NO they weren't going to read it, and WHY does a book have to be so hard? A book doesn't have to be HARD to be GOOD ... and this is just another example of the snotty Northeast elite telling the rest of us what we SHOULD do ...(you see how those conversations always went. I can't believe I had so many regulars who would show up and say shit like that - like: dude, do you realize what blog you're reading? Don't bring your "ain't much for fancy book-learning'" resentment on this site! Look at what I write about! And I'm not writing about it because The New Yorker tells me that this book is good. Don't insult me. I'm writing about Joyce because I love him. Go away.) Joyce can, indeed, be rather annoying - and many of his contemporaries were like: Bro. We're all writers. Chillax with your OCD self. Katherine Mansfield was baffled by him - by all of his symbols and meanings and secret stuff ... She didn't like that. Virginia Woolf was very unimpressed. She was grossed out by him, too. Joyce is not an "intellectual' writer, believe it or not, although he was a genius. He was obsessed with the body. Nothing should be left out. Woolf was disgusted. George Bernard Shaw was disgusted ... and yet he also felt that maybe he was disgusted because he felt recognized. Perhaps he shouldn't judge Joyce. Perhaps he should look in the mirror. Henry Miller, believe it or not, with his books full of "cunts" and "pricks", was grossed out and called the book "masturbation". But then Hemingway wrote, "Joyce has written a goddamn wonderful book." The responses to it goes across the board.

So Joyce has always prompted fierce debates. The early 20th century was a great time for literature - the old forms breaking apart, new forms arising - many people were already moving away from the typical 19th century structure of novels ... it's just that Joyce went so much further, and his results were so much better that all the other writers around him were gobsmacked. He, Mr. Blind Irishman, was working on THAT? Gertrude Stein was openly envious, and announced that SHE had done what Joyce did - only twenty years before. Yeah but Gertie, if nobody READ the thing, then it doesn't matter! Anyway, the debates themselves are fascinating - and I love them. It's like Joyce threw down the gauntlet. So whatever happened afterwards HAD to include him. Ulysses was that kind of book.

So all of this surrounds the book to this day, and can make you afraid to pick it up. If I don't know all that ... will I be totally confused??

One of the things I think is important is to remember Joyce's funny comment: "on my honour as a gentleman, there is not one serious word in it."

I think he was exaggerating just a bit - but there is a lot of truth to what he says.

I think it would be wonderful if someone reading my blog decided to pick up Ulysses because of these posts. That's one of the reasons I'm spending so much time on it. Not to be evangelical about it ... but it's obviously a book I love very much ... and I was also afraid of it, and intimidated ... but once I started it was a romp like no other.

Let's go back to Lestrygonians. A complex chapter. There's a lot going on here - and a lot of information is imparted that will be quite important later on. The writing itself, though, is ... impressionistic, almost. There is no outside eye, it is Bloom's detailing of his moment-to-moment experience ... It is how the world seems to him. So thoughts are fragmented, there are very few full sentences ... snatches of conversation are overheard ... and they obviously mean much to Bloom ... but can we decipher it? Can we successfully enter into Bloom's mind so that we know what is happening with him? Joyce doesn't ever write about big dramatic cathartic moments ... I can't think of one in any of his books. Catharsis, yes - or, shall we say, realizations ... gaining deeper understandings ... or losing faith entirely. Those moments, yes. But Joyce was way more fascinated by the everyday. You can look at a bar of soap and remember your entire life. You can hear snippets of conversation all around you on a busy street - and if you're in a certain mood - it can seem like it is all about you. Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother Stanislaus:

Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don't mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.

"The significance of trivial things."

That is what Joyce is ALL ABOUT.

Bare bones of this episode: It's around 1 p.m. (remember - the whole book takes place in one 24-hour period). Bloom has finished up at the newspaper offices. It's time for some lunch (remember: cannibals). Because the "Lestrygonians episode" in The Odyssey is so disgusting ... so, too, is this episode. It's all about consumption, digestion, bodily functions, chewing, dribbling, masticating, swallowing ... etc. Bloom refuses to go into one pub because he glances in and everyone there seems so slobbish and gross, they are chowing down, and they look disgusting to Bloom. He then finds a quiet "moral pub" where he can have a glass of wine and a cheese sandwich in peace. But Bloom gets no peace at all on this particular day. Mainly because he is haunted by the thought that his wife Molly is cheating on him ... and the hour of her suspected rendesvous with Blazes Boylan, her lover, is approaching. Bloom tries not to think about it. But he can't help it.

We get more information about their marriage in this chapter. 10 years before, their son Rudy had died. And since then the marriage has not been the same. They have not had sex (at least not completely) since Rudy died. Bloom has been pulling out - which kind of torments him. He knows he has not been satisfying Molly ... but the fear of childbirth is also there (another element in this chapter is that a friend's wife has been in labor for 3 days ... this will come up later...) So ... there's an interrupted-intimacy thing going on between Bloom and his wife ... he feels like they have totally lost touch with one another. And he doesn't know what to do about it. In this chapter, he does reminisce about the good and beautiful times they once had (which will then be echoed in the famous final passage of the book, Molly's "yes I said yes I will yes", etc.) Bloom knew that Molly had had lovers before him. And that was never really an issue (another example of Bloom's humanistic approach to life, his decency) - but now it is an issue - because they have grown apart, and he really fears losing her. But he feels impotent and helpless. This is why he imagines that everyone on the street is talking about him. He hears some priest talking about "Blood of the Lamb" - and at the first syllable: "Bloo ...." Bloom assumes that HE is being discussed. Bloom is paranoid and miserable, aware of his outsider status, and watching the clock compulsively, imagining what is going on with his wife in that moment.

There's a lot more in the chapter - a ton more - but that's the gist of it. The main images are one of digestion and swallowing. The disgusting nature of the human body. Flesh un-redeemed.

Here's an excerpt. Just go with it. Maybe read it out loud - sometimes that helped me. The sense is often in the SOUND. A strange concept, but that's what Joyce was all about. This chapter predicts the entirety of Finnegans Wake, in its language. Oh, and notice how - as Bloom has his glass of wine ... it mellows him out, softens him ... gives him that particular wine-buzz that can be so wonderful if you don't overdo it. Joyce reflects that experience (he was a wine-drinker) in his writing. He never spells it out. You get it thru the sound, the images, the sensory elements. And this episode has, for me, the saddest line in the book:

Me. And me now.

Ouch.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Lestrygonians Episode

Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can. Six, six. Time will be gone then. She...

Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins, sardines, gaudy lobsters' claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing in a thousand years. If you didn't know risky putting anything into your mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good. Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit. Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters? Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it? No. Yes, or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course, aristocrats. Then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour. Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in the sea to keep up the price. Cheap. No one would buy. Caviare. Do the grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The élite. Crème de la crème. They want special dishes to pretend they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon. High sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls' kitchen area. Whitehatted chef like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage à la duchesse de Parme. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you can know what you've eaten too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup. Geese stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive: Do ptake some ptarmigan. Wouldn't mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress, halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney I remember. Du, de la, French. Still it's the same fish, perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped the guts out of making money, hand over fist, finger in fishes' gills, can't write his name on a cheque, think he was painting the landscape with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha. Ignorant as a kish of brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.

Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs In the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky grumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman s breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Stuck, the flies buzzed.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Aeolus 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

A complicated (on its surface) chapter. Thank God I had my dad as a tutor. I said, "Okay, so what is going on here?" He looked at the page - and could tell, just by the LOOK of it - what chapter I was in (Joyce is one of the few writers you can do that with). He said, "Okay, so that's the Aeolus chapter. It's in the newspaper office - and that's why the text is full of headlines. It's also about wind. So everyone's a windbag." The Aeolus episode in The Odyssey involves Odysseus being given a bag full of any wind that might push him in the wrong direction. He is in sight of his home ... so the danger of returning is great. But his men (of course) are curious and open up the bag. Winds burst forth and they are blown off course. So once you know that, and once you know that Joyce is writing the entire chapter in the style of a newspaper - then you can settle in, and just enjoy. But before then? What the heck?? But like I keep quoting, Joyce said, "With me, the thought is always simple." I have read all of Joyce's stuff, even Finnegans Wake, and I can say that he is right on the money. The structure is complex, the analogies and layers and connections go deep into the core - some of which you, the reader, will NEVER get (this is why people spend their lives studying this writer) ... but the thought itself is always simple. So once you "find your way in" - (and, from my experience, each episode in Ulysses requires a bit of work from me - as a reader - to do that) it's not just easy-going, but fun, and interesting.

The Aeolus episode is all talk talk talk talk talk ... to embody all of that wind in The Odyssey. Much of this has to do with very specific moments in Irish history - so you might have to do a bit of Wikipedia-ing, just to know what they're talking about. Because even though Joyce changes some of the names, all of these are real people. The Italian who was on the city council - like Bloom, an outsider ... yet he had assimilated to a degree that he was politically powerful. Joyce calls the Italian "Nanetti" - but his real name was Joseph Patrick. There is also much talk about the famous Phoenix Park murders - as well as a speech given the night before about Ireland - a speech that all the men mock. This is all based on real events.

But let me just talk about the plot of the episode. It's about noon. Dignam's funeral, from the last episode, is over. All of the men are dropped off in the heart of Dublin. Bloom has an errand to run. He sells advertisements, for a living - so he stops off at the offices of The Weekly Freeman and National Press . The Evening Telegraph is in the same building - so we have to wonder if this is the episode where Stephen and Leopold will finally meet - because, if we remember, in the Nestor episode - Mr. Deasy, the headmaster of the school where Stephen works, asks Stephen if he could drop off some of his writing at the newspaper when he goes into Dublin. And Stephen mentions The Evening Telegraph. But this episode is not where they meet. Bloom stands in the newspaper office - and over the course of the chapter - the overwhelming feeling we get is his isolation from the others. Joyce pulls no punches about his countrymen in this chapter. Everyone is living in the past, first of all - obsessing about the Phoenix Park murders which had happened 20 years before - and also getting all the facts wrong (this, again, you'd have to know the facts to get the misinformation that everyone is spreading) - and those who "run" the country are gasbags, plain and simple. Gasbags who live in the past. Bloom, a decent man, trying to do his best - is seen as the only person in the room with any integrity - yet he is roundly ignored, and also mocked. When he leaves, a couple kids follow him, imitating his walk - and one of the dudes in the newspaper office pretends to play a mazurka as Bloom exits. He is a total outsider. He is not treated with respect. The entire chapter involves a controversy with the ad he is trying to place, the "Keyes advertisment". Nanetti says fine, cool - but it has to run for 3 months. Bloom mentions that Keyes wants the image changed - to two crossed-keys - an image that Keyes had seen in a Kilkenny paper or something. Bloom says he will go to the National Library to track the image down (this will be the famous Scylla and Charybdis character - when Stephen and Leopold are finally in the same place at the same time - although they still do not meet). Bloom tries to call Keyes from the telegraph office, to see if the 3-month run would be okay by him. The guys from the funeral (Simon Dedalus, Lenehan, and all the others) are there - and it's crowded - and Bloom gets pushed around, hit by the door, etc. It is as though he is not actually there. The men do not perceive him as taking up space (the ultimate in disrespect). Again, there seems to be a joshing mocking hard-edged tone to the banter of the Irish (which is certainly true) - and Bloom doesn't have that sensibility at all. He is much more literal. And also - I don't know - sensitive. We never get inside Bloom's head here - when you read the excerpt below - you'll see how it is written - it's all huge newspaper headlines, and the constant chatter in the offices. You have to really listen carefully to see what is going on.

But Joyce's deeper point is made. Bloom (or Odysseus) is in sight of his home, obviously - but he cannot go back ... his wife is having a rendesvous with her lover Blazes Boylan ... at least this is what he suspects ... and so he must stay away. But the winds have been let out of the bag. All the guys in the office - talking, talking, talking ... act as a windy force, pushing Bloom backwards.

There are two separate and complete parts of this chapter (perhaps like our two lungs?): Bloom in the newspaper office - and then all of the gentlemen from the funeral, sitting in a pub, talking. The two parts are irrevocably connected - one informs the other, one contradicts the other ... we go back and forth, back and forth, and everyone's talking, fast and furious, and we just have to keep up.

Bloom is treated like a buffoon (even though, as we get to know him, we realize he is anything but). He gets Keyes on the phone. Keyes says he will renew for 2 months, not 3. The editor treats Bloom like shit. To his face. The gloves coming off - the hostility underneath the Irish hospitality coming out.

The speech all the Irishmen reference - was one given by John Taylor - and it was about the revival of the Irish language. The Irish men mock the speech, with its romanticizing of Ireland ... not realizing that they are part of the problem. They are just as caught in the past as Taylor is. Joyce, naturally, is making larger points throughout all of this. Ireland is not a free country. It is oppressed by England - and most of its problems can be traced back to that. The Irish language issue - which is such a hot topic (to some people to this day) was one that Joyce was interested in - and he wrote a lot about it. His obsession with language was such that he ended up creating his own - in Finnegans Wake. Some of the men say that Ireland needs a Messiah - someone to lead them to the Promised Land (a reference to the exodus, which is totally ironic - since they are dissing the one Jew in their midst) ... Bloom, a true hope for the future of the nation (in his decency, his detachment from the past, his intelligence) ... is completely ignored and mocked. The Irish wouldn't know the Messiah if it came up and bit them on the arse. This is Joyce's view.

Okay, so I think I've talked enough. I'm a windy gasbag myself! There's a ton in this chapter I still do not understand - you feel like you need an encylopedia right by you, or a volume of Irish history - in order to get all the references, but that's part of the fun.

Oh, and a bit of symbolism: Bloom is trying to get an advertisement placed for "Keyes", a tea merchant. Keyes wants to have an image of two crossed keys on his ad - this is what Bloom goes off to the National Library later, to find. The two crossed keys: Stephen and Leopold? Crossing paths? Also, the symbolism itself of a key: it will open locked doors, it will let you in ... Stephen (we know this from the Telemachia) and Bloom are both outside the regular grind and bustle of Irish life. They do not fit. They are exiled - internally. What is the "key", for both of them? Is it each other?

Now remember: the episode takes place in a newspaper office. And it's about wind (talk). So that's the style in which Joyce wrote it. Are you ready? Here we go!

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Aeolus episode

WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE DISSOLUTION OF A MOST RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS

Hynes here too: account of the funeral probably. Thumping thump. This morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.

HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT

Mr Bloom halted behind the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy crown.

Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country. Member for College green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth. It's the ads ad side features sell a weekly not the stale news in the official gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the year one thousand and. Demesne situate in the townland of Rosenallis, barony of Tinnachinch. To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to statute showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina. Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle' Toby's page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin's queries. Dear Mr Editor, what is a good cure for flatulence? I'd like that part. Learn a lot teaching others. The personal note M.A. P. Mainly all pictures. Shapely bathers on golden strand. World's biggest balloon. Double marriage of sisters celebrated. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at each other. Cuprani too, printer. More Irish than the Irish.

The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thurap. Now if he got paralysed there and no one knew how to stop them they'd clank on and on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the whole thing. Want a cool head.

-- Well, get it into the evening edition, councillor, Hynes said.

Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Long John is backing him they say.

The foreman, without answering, scribbled press on a corner of the sheet and made a sign to a typesetter. He handed the sheet silently over the dirty glass screen.

-- Right: thanks, Hynes said moving off.

Mr Bloom stood in his way.

-- If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said, pointing backward with his thumb.

-- Did you? Hynes asked.

-- Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you'll catch him.

-- Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I'll tap him too.

He hurried on eagerly towards the Freeman's Journal.

Three bob I lent him in Meagher's. Three weeks. Third hint.

WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK

Mr Bloom laid his cutting on Mr Nannetti's desk.

-- Excuse me, councillor, he said. This ad, you see. Keyes, you remember.

Mr Nannetti considered the cutting a while and nodded.

-- He wants it in for July, Mr Bloom said.

He doesn't hear it. Nannan. Iron nerves.

The foreman moved his pencil towards it.

-- But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants two keys at the top.

Hell of a racket they make. Maybe he understands what I.

The foreman turned round to hear patiently and, lifting an elbow, began to scratch slowly in the armpit of his alpaca jacket.

-- Like that, Mr Bloom said, crossing his forefingers at the top.

Let him take that in first.

Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the cross he had made, saw the foreman's sallow face, think he has a touch of jaundice, and beyond the obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles of it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels: various uses, thousand and one things.

Slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the clanking he drew swiftly on the scarred-woodwork.

HOUSE OF KEY(E)S

-- Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. So on.

Better not teach him his own business.

-- You know yourself, councillor, just what he wants. Then round the top in leaded: the house of keys. You see? Do you think that's a good idea?

The foreman moved his scratching hand to his lower ribs and scratched there quietly.

-- The idea, Mr Bloom said, is the house of keys. You know, councillor, the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the isle of Man. Catches the eye, you see. Can you do that?

I could ask him perhaps about how to pronounce that voglio. But then if he didn't know only make it awkward for him. Better not.

-- We can do that, the foreman said. Have you the design?

-- I can get it, Mr Bloom said. It was in a Kilkenny paper. He has a house there too. I'll just run out and ask him. Well, you can do that and just a little par calling attention. You know the usual. High class licensed premises. Longfelt want. So on.

The foreman thought for an instant.

-- We can do that, he said. Let him give us a three months' renewal.

A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching the silent typesetters at their cases.

ORTHOGRAPHICAL

Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry.

I could have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought to have said something about an old hat or something. No, I could have said. Looks as good as new now. See his phizthen.

Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forwards its flyboard with slit the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too slit creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Hades 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

It's around 11 a.m. Local Dublin men gather in carriages, to go to Paddy Dignam's funeral. They go to mass, and then to the gravesite. Or, in Odyssey terms: they enter Hades, and then leave it again. The stink of death permeates the entire chapter (so even if you DIDN'T know it was 'the Hades episode' - and none of the episodes are labeled) you probably would be able to figure it out. There's so much going on here that I can't even begin to break it all down - but here, off the top of my head - are some of the major themes and concepts:

-- Bloom travels in a carriage with a group of other men - one of whom is Simon Dedalus (Stephen's father). So the paths of Stephen and Leopold are ALMOST meeting here. Dedalus seems like a rather dry and ... uninspiring sort of person.

-- Joyce begins to really pound home Bloom's isolation from the others here. Is it because he is a Jew? That's part of it. It's not so much open anti-Semitism that keeps the men from dealing with him as an equal. It's more that ... the entire culture and mindset is different ... there is a gap that cannot be crossed. They make blunder after blunder - because they do not take him into consideration. LIke one of the guys makes a statement about suicide and how it is the worst thing to have in a family. It is only later that the guy realizes what a faux pas that was - Bloom's father committed suicide. Bloom is, indeed, kind of a nonentity here (to the men, and also - we think - to his wife). He is ANTI-matter. It is easy to forget he is there. There are jokes made about Blazes Boylan - the guy Bloom suspects is having an affair with his wife. The Jewish thing is definitely a barrier - but there's more going on than that. Joyce always felt that the culture/emotional makeup of the Jewish people and the Irish people were similar, nearly identical. But here - in this scene - it's like they are different species.

-- Bloom's view of death is different from theirs. He makes a comment that Dignam's type of death (sudden) can be seen as a blessing. All the other men - Catholics - are horrified, and barely understand what he's saying. To die suddenly, if you are a Roman Catholic, when you do not have a chance to make your last confession - is the WORST possible kind of death. You could die in a state of unforgiven mortal sin!! What the hell is Bloom talking about??

-- But let me also say: the men do not treat Bloom with suspicion, or anti-Semitism (like "the Citizen" does in the later Cyclops chapter - who makes no bones about it: You - JEW - do not belong here.) The men are kind, good-natured - they don't MEAN to make blunders around Bloom ... it's just that it's easy to forget he's there, and it's easy to forget that he is not, actually, one of them. Identity politics, and all that. They mutter to each other behind his back, "How could I have said that thing about suicide? I didn't mean it!" They mean well. Ireland is (or was) a homogenous society. So stuff like that is bound to happen.

-- Connections with Hades are everywhere. The carriages cross 4 rivers to get to the graveyard (Dodder, Grand Canal, Liffey, Royal Canal). A direct parallel to the four rivers of the Greek Hades. Oh, and the priest who does the funeral mass is compared to a dog - so, you know, Cerberus. I am sure there are more. Greek scholars would pick up on a reference every other sentence, I am sure - but I'm no expert. Those are just the major things that pop out. And when they leave the graveyard, in their carriages, the line is:

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place.

Time to return from the underworld.

There's lots of conversation in this episode - the men in the carriage, chatting, on the trip to the graveyard. At the same time, we are also inside of Leopold Bloom, staring out the window ... taking note of all the things he sees as they pass by. Like I said earlier, images of death abound in this chapter. Gloom, decay, etc. It's death without resurrection, I can tell you that! Bloom thinks of the body as a series of organs. He references the heart as a "pump", I think - somewhere in this chapter. He is part of the group - because he lives in Ireland and always has. But his sort of secular humanist mindset is something they do not understand. They treat him kindly, like I said ... but he is definitely a different sort of animal, as far as they are concerned.

Here's an excerpt. Watch how we're inside Bloom here, taking note of everything that passes by.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Hades episode

-- Dunphy's, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.

Dunphy's corner. Mourning coaches drawn up drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.

But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in the knocking about? He would and he wouldn't, I suppose. Depends on where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It would be better to bury them in red: a dark red.

In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse trotted by, coming from the cemetery: looks relieved.

Crossguns bridge: the royal canal.

Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his dropping barge between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a slacktethered horse. Aboard of the Bugabu.

Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of reeds, over slime, mud-choked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar, Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at the auction but a lady's. Developing waterways. James M'Cann's hobby to row me o'er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats. Camping out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without writing. Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down, lock by lock to Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his brown strawhat, saluting Paddy Dignam.

They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.

-- I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.

-- Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.

-- How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping I suppose.

-- Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary the sexton's an old tramp sat, grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown yawning boot. After life's journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by, one by one: gloomy houses.

Mr Power pointed.

-- That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

-- So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.

-- The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.

-- Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham said. That's the maxim of the law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

They looked. Murderer's ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder. The murderer's image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about it. Man's head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large. Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.

Cramped in this carriage. She mightn't like me to come that way without letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once with their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.

The high railings of Prospects rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Lotus Eaters 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

We are now at Episode 4 (the Lotus-eaters episode). In The Odyssey Homer and his men come to the land of the lotus-eaters. The lotus-eaters offer the men food (flowers) that somehow causes them to forget the journey they are on. Kinda like the poppy field in Wizard of Oz. Some of the men do eat the flowers and have to be dragged off by Odysseus and others who resist. It's like you eat the flower and boom - you are deep in a dream-state, stoned out of your mind, no ambition or drive or direction left.

So it's interesting that here - in this chapter - we first see (at least in this book, it shows up quite a bit in Dubliners) Joyce's obsessive chronicling of the streets of Dublin. He walked here, took a left, went in the store there, walked across the street to THAT store ... all totally accurate, a map of Dublin encapsulated in his words. This is why on Bloomsday people can wander around Dublin, holding copies of Ulysses in their hands, following in Leopold Bloom's footsteps. Anyway, it's interesting that the thrust of the chapter is ... movement, direction, a journey ... because the lotus-eaters, in their kindness and helpfulness, try to stop the journey of the men. Not out of any malevolent impulse - but because they have these awesome flowers, they taste good, they make you feel good ... try them, try them!! The journey Leopold Bloom takes, in this chapter, has a circuitous feel to it. He is, actually, going somewhere - but it feels like he is on a treadmill. He has some errands to do - he is going to go to the public baths - and eventually he is going to Dignam's funeral. But Joyce, obviously, felt like Ireland was a trap ... Ireland itself was the land of the lotus-eaters. If you have a journey to go on, Ireland will make it her business to keep you at home. By any means necessary. Guilt, or ... by hospitality - which Ireland has in spades. It's known for its hospitality (that becomes a big thing in "The Dead"). The lotus-eaters, to Joyce, were the Catholic Church - which had basically put the entire nation under a spell. And of course - sex ... which could not be expressed in an open or a natural way in such a rigid country. So Irish people are slaves to sex, and the repression thereof ... and all of that makes them go into a collective coma. Not trained (by their church, by education) to question things, or rebel ... they circle the streets of Dublin in a trance.

Hence - the dreamy clip-clop almost surreal prose of this particular chapter. It's dizzying. You can't keep track of where Leopold Bloom is going ... you hear what he hears - snippets, fragments of conversation on the street - which, taken out of context, lose their meaning ... You get fragments of his thought process - he is worried about his wife, and jealous ... he thinks about their daughter Milly - but at the same time, he can't complete a thought. It's all broken up. This is what Ireland (land of the lotus-eaters) does to its sons.

The last image in the episode is of Leopold Bloom submerging himself under the water in the public baths:

his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

As always, in this book, there are multiple levels of meaning here. Obviously, he's staring down at his "limp" penis - and that gives an image of impotence, passivity. He's fearful of his wife cuckolding him. He feels like he cannot satisfy her. (None of this in the text explicitly - it's all in the image - that image at the end of the chapter tells us all we need to know). Also, his penis being "the limp father of thousands" calls up the ancient history of the Jews, the chosen people, the exodus ... additionally, the "flower" itself has multiple meanings, and I'm only scratching the surface here. Most obviously, is the lotus-eaters who try to offer Odysseus and his men flowers that will make them forget their journey. In the chapter he goes to a chemist's to pick up some lotion for Molly and is bewildered and bedazzled by the array of products (most of which have flower-like components, or began as some sort of plant form). He is dazed. This is Bloom's version of the Lotus-eaters episode ... the soap he sniffs, the chloroform he looks at ... these are all the lotus-eater flowers being offered to him.

The chapter is so deep and detailed I know I'm not getting most of it - and some of it isn't coming back to me. Bloom also references (in his head) Hamlet - which prefigures Stephen's long discourse on Hamlet in the Scylla and Charybdis Episode - far in the future. Bloom already has Hamlet (with his themes of passivity, frustration, impotence, powerlessness, and fatherlessness) on his brain. Bloom's father committed suicide.

Bloom's main wish is to escape. Escape the responsibilities of being a husband ... he is considering having an affair himself (with a woman named Martha - Biblical connotations up the wazoo there, figure it out for yourself) - but that, too, is too much responsibility. He wants oblivion. The fact that he contemplates the gelded horses in the streets - and wonders if perhaps they are not happier that way ... his ruminations on Hamlet (that Hamlet might have been a woman) ... his thoughts about eunuchs in the Catholic Church ...

All roads lead to sex.

Sometimes it's best not to talk about Joyce too much. It all starts to sound academic and pretentious. When the reading itself could not be further from that! The reading launches you into the REAL world ... of smells, and impulses, and fragments of thoughts, and what we overheard, what we see, our sex drive, our losses ... life, basically.

Here's an excerpt. There's no narrator here. We clip-clop along inside Bloom's head, the world jostling before us through his eyeballs. We see what he sees, hear what he hears - nothing less, nothing more.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Lotus-eaters Episode

He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then, walking slowly forward, he read the letter again, murmuring here and there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his sidepocket.

Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder did she write it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me, respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the rosary. Thank you: not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running round corners. Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of-words, of course. Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.

Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it. Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere: pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses without thorns.

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the Coombe, linked together in the rain.

O, Mary lost the pin of her drawers.
She didn't know what to do
To keep it up
To keep it up.

It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your wife use? Now could you make out a thing like that?

To keep it up.

Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious. Also the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.

To keep it up.

Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there: quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been, strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper: fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of the well stonecold like the hole in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.

Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter then all sank.

Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart, eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter. One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions of barrels of porter.

What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.

An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach. Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside. The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.

He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the porch he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work M'Coy for a pass to Mullingar.

Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S. J. on saint Peter Claver and the African mission. Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for them. Prayers for the conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The protestants the same. Convert Dr. William J. Walsh D. D. to the true religion. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks? Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguished looking. Sorry I didn't work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn't. They're taught that. He's not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.

The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps, pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Calypso episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

So here's where we are at so far:

TELEMACHIA
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode

Those three episodes make up the "telemachia", or Part 1 or Ulysses. It is our introduction to Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904. It takes him from around 8 a.m. to around 11 a.m. on that fateful day.

Now we move into Part 2 of the book - which is the "odyssey" itself. And we now switch main characters. Now Leopold Bloom is our guide. Stephen Dedalus will disappear for chapters on end, seen only in glimpses at times, or overheard talking from behind a column ... it is not until much later that these two actually meet.

The episode here, the Calypso episode, also takes place at 8 a.m. on that day - at the same moment that Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan chat in their round tower outside Dublin. The episode is beyond simple: Leopold Bloom has breakfast (which is now famous, and which is re-created by Joycean freaks every Bloomsday). He has a busy day ahead of him. After breakfast, he takes a dump. Which Joyce describes. Way to launch us right into the tale, Jimmy. But, naturally, that was what Joyce was after. The baseness of humanity - not to mention the fact that we ALL do that. Even Anna Karenina does that. It's perhaps a very immature attitude (you know: "Does the Queen of England fart too?" "Napoleon had a crack in his ass too! tee hee") But Joyce was pretty immature, when it came to bathroom humor - he was obsessed with it (read some of his sexy letters to his wife and you'll know what I mean). But more than just shock value, Joyce is obviously up to something more here, when he takes us into Bloom's bathroom with him. It's an attention-getter, sure, but you get a couple of clues that more is going on here than meets the eye. He's worried that Molly (his wife) is cheating on him. The thought torments him. He goes upstairs - and she's lying in bed. We don't quite meet her yet - she grunts from the bed - they have a brief exchange, but she is never fully revealed. It is not time for Molly yet. We won't be ready for her until the end of the book. Bloom gets ready to go to a funeral of a friend. Molly is waiting for him to leave, basically, so that she can go meet up with her lover (whose name is, famously, Blazes Boylan. He's a tenor.) This is a strange chapter - new characters, completely new prose style from the stream-of-conscious dream-prose of the chapter before. It's pragmatic, gross, base, and it leaves nothing out. It's all about the innards of things. What people eat, what people excrete ... it's body without any redeeming soul.

Here are some of the notes I wrote in the margins, I don't know - I find them kind of interesting:

-- Calypso (kidney, economics, orange, nymph, narrative)
-- Contrast with Stephen's metaphors. Bloom only sees what is there. Also sees he is not a tower (giant)
-- Orange clues. Orange = Protestant. Home Rule for Ireland.
-- metempsychosis = "met him pike hoses" (rendesvous with Blazes)
-- Bloom may have Masonic connections (has an edge over other Jews in Ireland) - parallel for Athena's protection of Ulysses.

Yeah. Whatever that means. But it also does bring a lot back. As I've mentioned in other posts, Joyce worked a system of symbols into the book which is there - but not there. As in, it's not obvious - and if you DON'T pick up on it, much will be lost ... it's almost like you read certain sections squinting at them, as though the meaning is hidden on the actual page, and if you just looked hard enough, you could see it. You can FEEL the greatness of it all ... but something eludes. I guess this is why people (ahem, me) become obsessed with the book. The system of symbols has been talked about ad nauseum and much of it really does help.

For example: every episode has a color woven through it. It may be so subtle at times that you would not even notice it. Joyce thought a lot about colors - they had much meaning for him (I imagine part of that had to do with his terrible eyesight ... what did colors actually LOOK like to someone who really couldn't see?) And so knowing Joyce's "key", so to speak, is quite helpful. You see brown? Even if it's just a character's raincoat? That's death. NOTHING is accidental in this book. NOTHING. "Orange" is the color of the Calypso episode - which, of course, in Ireland, what with the flag, and the Orangemen in the North, and all kinds of things ... has negative connotations. Violent. Political. It's exclusionary. Leopold Bloom is a Jew in Ireland. Even the Irish feel, at times, outside of their own country ... but Bloom is even more of an outsider.

Anyway, here's an excerpt.

Notice the voice - which is a voice we have not heard. It's not first-person, but it's something even closer. We get the running stream of Bloom's thoughts - but you'll see, again, how distinct it sounds from the same type of thing in the Proteus episode. Bloom is not searching, striving, looking for beauty, he does not see the world in terms of aesthetics. He is worried. He feels he is losing his wife. He likes his cat. He likes his breakfast. He is troubled. We move with him through all of these shifts.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Calypso Episode

He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages, polonies, black and white. Fifty multiplied by. The figures whitened in his mind unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links packed with forcemeat fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pig's blood.

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand. Chapped: washing soda. And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldfish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack.

The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there like a stallfed heifer.

He took up a page from the pile of cut sheets. The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting: read it nearer, the blurred cropping cattle, the page rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket the beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging whack by whack by whack.

The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime sausages and made a red grimace.

-- Now, my miss, he said.

She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.

-- Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you, please?

Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways. The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For another a constable off duty cuddled her in Eccles Lane. They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the wood.

-- Threepence, please.

His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket. Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and laid them on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid, disc by disc, into the till.

-- Thank you, sir. Another time.

A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze after an instant. No: better not: another time.

-- Good morning, he said, moving away.

-- Good morning, sir.

No sign. Gone. What matter?

He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim: planter's company. To purchase vast sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15.

Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.

He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silvered powdered olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning ripening. Olives are packed in jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still alive in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron's basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times. Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them in soiled dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn't see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that Norwegian captain's. Wonder if I'll meet him today. Watering cart. To provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.

A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far.

No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's clutching a noggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned into Eccles Street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. On the hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that? Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.

Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Proteus episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my other two posts about Ulysses (here and here):is that the first four books of the Odyssey (called "The Telemachia") have been debated over for centuries. Same author? Artistic merit? Should it be included in the whole? WTF?

Joyce has broken his book up into 3 title-less parts - and within each part are numerous chapters, etc. And the first three "chapters" or "episodes", which are included in part 1, are his version of the Telemachia - which is meant to establish Odysseus as a character (his role, his importance,) - BEFORE he sets out on his journey. This is what we're doing now - because we're about to leave Stephen Dedalus and join Leopold Bloom. Dedalus is about to go on his long "odyssey" through one day (June 16, 1904) ... but before he sets out, we need to get to know his status, his thoughts, his life, etc. That's what these first three chapters are about. Then we get into Part II - which is the "Odyssey" section of the book - and there, we are mainly with Leopold Bloom - through chapter after chapter - although Stephen's path intersects with him on occasion. Then comes part III of Joyce's book - which has as its correspondence in The Odyssey "The Nostos" - or "the return". Odysseus has been on his journey ... and now it is time to come home to Penelope. The final three chapters of Joyce's Ulysses brings Leopold Bloom back to his house after his wandering, ready to join Molly - his wife - in bed.

So just wanted to make clear that with these first three chapters, we aren't in The Odyssey proper yet - we are still in the Telemachia.

Chapter III is known as The Proteus episode (but again, none of this is labeled in the book itself - it's not even numbered as a chapter - you can just tell, by the spacing, that a new section has begun. So Joyce makes you figure it all out on your own.) It's 11 am. Stephen goes for a walk on the beach. He is blind, his glasses have broken. The style makes a radical shift in this section and it may be completely baffling if you don't let go - and just go with it. If you also don't understand what Joyce is doing. Let's remember: Stephen has broken his glasses. We are now completely inside his head, inside his experience ... And so, because he can't see, all impressions come to him through sounds, all colors blur together ... which is a perfect reflection of his own state of mind. He has not yet broken free yet, he has not yet separated himself from his inspirations, his tradition, his world. It's very Hamlet-esque - which makes sense, because Stephen (and Joyce) were obsessed with Hamlet.

In the Odyssey, Ulysses must leave Calypso - the female, the nymph. He travels, he visits with the Phaenicians - he tells them all the long tale of his travels, his misfortunes, etc. They transport him back to Ithaca. Back home. That's the arc of the book (so simplistic!!) But simplicity is good. It helped me out, in reading Ulysses to remember that fact: It's just a journey. It's the journey of two men through one day.

Their paths start out as separate. And eventually they converge.

The Proteus episode is an inner monologue.

It is also very interesting because it is from the point of view of Stephen, who, Joyce tells us ONCE in the 800 page book, has broken his glasses. Joyce doesn't remind us: "Stephen broke his glasses". The clues are all there in the language - but it's not literal language, because when we are inside our own minds, we are not literal to ourselves. What does life FEEL like? That's what Joyce is after.

So from inside Stephen's world, everything is blurry and introspective, because he cannot see clearly. God forbid that Joyce would ever remind us of this or give us clues, or just flat out say, "What with having a pair of broken glasses, Stephen squints down the shoreline". Of course, if he gave us bone-headed clues like that, it wouldn't be considered a great book in the first place.

And so -- You are left in this blurry subjective world. You don't know why it's blurry - or, if you miss the clue that Stephen's glasses are broken - you have no idea why the entire thing is written overwhelmingly using SOUND cues. There are no visibles. It's all about the SOUND. Of course. Because if you can't SEE, then the sense of hearing will take over. For example, there's one sentence in this section:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

Sound approaches him and then recedes. It is the dog's BARK that is active ... not the dog itself ... because Stephen cannot SEE the dog.

This is what people mean when they call Joyce a "genius".

The first paragraph of the Proteus section is rightfully famous. I will lead off with it below. And if you read carefully: Joyce is telling us what to expect in the chapter - "modality of the visible" ... "thought through my eyes" ... What does that mean? Stephen struggles. He feels very passive here to me (I mean, the dog's bark runs towards him and then recedes ... Stephen passively receives sensations) ... In order to become active, something must happen, shift. We end up (much later) realizing that it is the meeting of Leopold Bloom, with all its connotations of father-figure, and eternal return ... that makes Stephen become, at last, ACTIVE. A participant in his own life.

But here he is not there yet.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Proteus episode

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, Frauenzimmer: and down the shelving shore flabbily their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.

Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.

I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile. Yes, I must.

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Aunt Sara's or not? My consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si? O weeping God, the things I married into. De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers. And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less. Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Nestor episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

2nd episode in the book. Its equivalent in The Odyssey is the "Nestor" episode. The episode itself is quite simple: Stephen teaches in a school. After class, he has a long conversation with Mr. Deasy, the headmaster - who is, basically, the wise Nestor in "The Odyssey". Their conversation is about history. Irish history. Deasy asks Dedalus if he could drop off a couple of things he had written at 2 Irish newspapers. They walk and talk.

Here are some of the notes I scribbled in my margins during this episode:

-- NESTOR (history, brown, horse, catechism)
-- predicts the chaos of Circe
-- Mr Deasy - a wise Nestor and a prattling Polonius

Which brings us to yet another level of correspondence within the book - and that is to Hamlet. Joyce doesn't do a "reveal" until the Scylla and Charybdis chapter - which takes place in the National Library - where Stephen regales his friends with his theory of Hamlet. Needless to say, Hamlet is a fatherless tormented soul. He has been robbed of guidance by an older man. He seeks revenge. Dedalus' fatherless state is similar - although Simon Dedalus (the father) is still very much alive. But he's useless as a "father figure". Dedalus needs to look elsewhere. Leopold Bloom, hiding behind a column in the library, overhearing Stephen's impromptu lecture on Hamlet, doesn't respond or reveal himself. The father figure remains hidden.

The Nestor "chapter" contains perhaps the most famous line in all the book:

-- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Mr Deasy has the silly pomposity of Polonius - yet he also makes a great deal of sense. It's just that Stephen does not agree. Mr Deasy represents the "old". The old Ireland. "I remember the famine" he says. Stephen doesn't care about the blasted famine. We must not live in the past. History is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Look to the future. Look to the new. In a conformist society such as Ireland at that time, this was seen as incredibly threatening- shades of Stephen Dedalus refusing to get involved in Irish politics in Portrait. Who is HE to go against the grain?? In Ireland if you go against the grain, you pay. And big. This is Stephen's dilemma. How can he not be Irish? How can you change what you are? All he knows is: he will NOT be like Mr Deasy.

Because this is Joyce we're talking about though - all of this is implied. Never stated outright. In order to get all the levels, we need to understand that they are even THERE ... like Faulkner said, we must treat Ulysses like an itinerant illiterate Baptist preacher treats the Old Testament: with faith. Joyce, through all of his books so far, has used the color "brown" as a signifier of decay and death. I wrote about it before in my posts on Dubliners. Any brown anywhere should give you a clue. Joyce's colors of hope and life are blue, green ... but brown? Death. The Nestor chapter is full of brown. If you did not know what that signalled, you would miss the clue (and again, there are tons of websites and a couple of books out there that can give you guideposts such as this one - you are not alone!!) The brown here is indicating the utter decay of the society in which Dedalus lives. A society where the "new" is run out of town on a rail. Where history weighs on its people like a 1000-ton weight. It is a society of death. It has no hope. Of course Joyce never WRITES this clearly and unambiguously. But he fills the chapter with the color brown, and that is all we need to know.

We must never forget that we are inside Stephen Dedalus. He is our guide - and sometimes he is unreliable, and sometimes he doesn't let us in on what he is thinking ... because, in general, we as human beings, do not explain ourselves to ourselves. This is why Ulysses is a challenge to read. But like i said in an earlier post, if you just give up on YOUR wishes for a reliable narrator who interjects himself into the action in an explanatory way ... then Ullysses makes more sense than any other book you've ever read in your life.

Oh, and the anti-Semitism that will become important later rears its head here.

We haven't even met Leopold Bloom yet, the Jew in Ireland, but the ground is already being set for his appearance.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - from the Nestor episode

-- Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.

He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.

-- I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions on the matter.

May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.

-- I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.

Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus. Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Mürzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a fair trial, Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns.

-- I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with the department. Now I'm going to try publicity. I am surrounded by difficulties, by... intrigues, by... backstairs influence, by...

He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.

-- Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength. I have seen it Coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying.

He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.

-- Dying, he said, if not dead by now.

The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding sheet.

His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted.

-- A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?

-- They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabbles of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

-- Who has not? Stephen said.

-- What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.

-- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

-- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

-- That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

-- What? Mr Deasy asked.

-- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Mr Deasy looked down and held for a while the wings of his nose tweaked between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.

-- I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman O'Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will fight for the right till the end.

For Ulster will fight
And Ulster will be right.

Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.

-- Well, sir, he began.

-- I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.

-- A learner rather, Stephen said.

And here what will you learn more?

Mr Deasy shook his head.

-- Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Stephen rustled the sheets again.

-- As regards these, he began.

-- Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them published at once.

Telegraph. Irish Homestead.

-- I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two editors slightly.

That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field, M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders' association today at the City Arms Hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?

-- The Evening Telegraph...

-- That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to answer that letter from my cousin.

-- Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket. Thank you.

-- Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I like to break a lance with you, old as I am.

-- Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.

The Books: "Ulysses" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

"[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!"

So said James Joyce of his massive book which - according to TS Eliot - effectively "killed the 19th century."

Edmund Wilson had this to say about the book:

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 ... 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 was so worked up and disturbed by the book that he wrote Joyce a long letter (wonderful to read) - and he said, in part: "It's a miserable ritual, a magical procedure. . . a homunculus of the consciousness of the new world -- our world passed away and a new world has arisen."

Nora Tully wrote, "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.'"

And they're still chattering away today.

The story of the publication of Ulysses is almost as interesting as the book itself. It was banned everywhere. You couldn't get a copy of it. People all over the world were sending orders to the small bookshop in Paris where it had been published - I've seen some of the orders - the panicked plea from Peggy Guggenheim to PLEASE send her one copy, etc. Ulysses had arrived. But it could not be read. You could be arrested if you brought it into the country. It pushed the boundaries of decency - and what it was felt you "could" say ... It was one of those landmark moments in literature that come along once or twice a century. A book that made writers question their own talent (poor TS Eliot couldn't get over the book, Faulkner bowed before it, Yeats hated it at first and then a week later realized: Holy shit, that book is going to change everything ... The responses of writers to Ulysses are awesome, I love to hear about them). Finally - over 10 years after its original publication - Judge Woolsey, a judge in the US District Court, ruled on the "obscenity" of the book - a groundbreaking ruling, we are much in his debt. Read the entirety of the decision here. Not only is it a landmark court ruling, but it's an insightful analysis of the book itself. My favorite sentence of the ruling is: " 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."

The funniest thing about all this brou-haha is Joyce's comment which seems, to me, quintessentially Irish:

"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 honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it."

hahahaha But he also made that famous remark: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

Which was quite prophetic. However, I think the first remark is also getting at the heart of the thing. Joyce never felt he was writing about "the extraordiary" - he didn't believe writers/novelists should focus on that - "that is for the journalist". He wanted to focus on "the significance of trivial things" - thoughts, stream-of-consciousness, sensory reality, dream-spaces, the way the world looks through a particular set of eyeballs ... to be INSIDE the character rather than outside. This is why much of Ulysses can be quite challenging to read. There is no narrator. No one interjects himself and tells you, "Here is what is happening here." It is a purely subjective book - and we are inside Stephen Dedalus and we are inside Leopold Bloom. We see and hear only what they see and hear.

But once you get that, once you stop looking for an objective voice ... the whole thing is not only quite easy, but a ton of fun. To treat it like a big serious tome is to completely miss the point of the book - which is rather silly, most of the time ... and has to do with what people eat, and how they chew, and what it's like in a brothel, and the people you meet on any given day: windbags, sirens, patriotic nimrods, pious righteous folks, old tired teachers ... whatever. It's a cornucopia of personality. And I think Joyce was onto something when he said there's not a serious line in it. I didn't experience the book as a serious book at ALL. It's an important book - yes. Its place in literary history and the history of the 20th century is pre-eminent. Nobody tops him. But the book itself is a rollicking jaunt through one day - June 16, 1904 - Joyce wrote it as a tribute to his wife Nora. They had gone on their first "date" (a walk thru Dublin - with probably a sexual encounter in a back alley) on June 16, 1904. He wrote to her later that on that day she "made him a man". And so Ulysses was a tribute to her. And to that first day they shared together. Damn. Imagine someone writing a tribute to you and then having it turn out to be the greatest book of the 20th century. The funniest thing of all is that Nora said she never read it. hahahahaha Anyway. Like I said, the story of the book Ulysses is almost as fascinating as the book itself.

But now let's get to the book. I'm going to excerpt a bit from each "chapter" - even though they are not labeled as chapters - which is another challenge. You have to figure it out. It helps if you have The Iliad and the Odyssey nearby. And there are also books that help you know the structure Joyce was working on ... so you know the "episodes". There are sites out there that give you that. There are so many levels of meaning in Joyce (each chapter has a color, a body part, and other elements that correspond to it ...) The structure goes down to its very core, and then emanates up in concentric circles. You don't need to know all that stuff, but it sure helps. For example, in the "lungs" chapter - which also takes place at the newspaper office - everyone chatters like a bunch of windbags ... lungs ... and it's such a drastic difference from the chapter before that it might seem confusing until you know what Joyce is doing. In his journey through the human body, we are now at the "lungs" - so the printing presses wheeze, and it's all talk talk talk - because of the air being drawn into the lungs ... etc. Each chapter has a correspondence like that.

However, let's not forget. The story of Ulysses could not be simpler. Stephen Dedalus, our hero from Portrait is now a college student. His father is kind of useless. So he, unconsciously, is looking for a father figure. Leopold Bloom, a Jew in Ireland, married to Molly - who is having an affair - is at a loss how to keep his wife happy. He feels Irish, but he's also Jewish ... which makes things complicated. Through the long meandering course of one day - Dedalus and Bloom keep missing each other through the streets of Ireland ... but you get the sense that they need to meet. Leopold Bloom will be the father figure for Stephen. Finally, near the end of the day, they meet. They go to a brothel. They go out for a meal late at night. They walk home to Bloom's house. They talk. Dedalus staggers home. Bloom wonders if his wife upstairs is awake. The book ends (of course) with the 40 page run-on sentence of Molly Bloom, lying in bed. All roads lead to the female. The female ends the book.

What I just described in that paragraph can barely be called a "plot" - and Joyce obviously wasn't interested in plot at all.

Keep in mind that the book is simple - and Joyce said, "With me, the thought is always simple." The structure is complex, but the thought behind it is simple.

Here's an excerpt from the first "episode". The "Telemachus" episode ... it is early morning, June 16, 8 am.

We start off with the character of Stephen Dedalus - who was also the lead character in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses doesn't quite pick up the strand from where that book left off - but it's close enough.

Stephen is rooming with a couple of friends in an old round square tower ("stately plump Buck Mulligan, et al). He awakens. He has broken his glasses. It is June 16. He starts off for work.

This is the opening of the book. One other clue as to what Joyce is doing: Buck Mulligan, his roommate, is shaving. He picks up the razor, stares at himself in the mirror, and says something in Latin. Those words are said at the beginning of the Catholic mass. Mass has begun. Joyce had turned his back on religion, and worshiped art. To him, "the mass" = "the book you are about to read". Joyce didn't really have a small ego, as should be obvious - although his last words before he died always tear at my heart: "Does nobody understand?"

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

-- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

-- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

-- Back to barracks, he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

-- For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

-- Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

-- The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily half way and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.

-- My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

-- Will he come? The jejune jesuit.

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

-- Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

-- Yes, my love?

-- How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

-- God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus; you have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.

He shaved warily over his chin.

-- He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?

-- A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

-- I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

-- Scutter, he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket, said:

-- Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

-- The bard's noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you?

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.

-- God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown.

-- Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face.

-- The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you.

-- Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

-- You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you.

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

-- But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all.

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

-- Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

-- They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

-- The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you're dressed.

-- Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.

-- He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

-- That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane.

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.

-- Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard.

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

-- I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plain-looking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.

-- The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you.

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

-- It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

-- It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them.

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steelpen.

The Books: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce. Now I'll excerpt from Chapter 5 - the last chapter.

Stephen is at university now. His family is poverty-struck and really struggling. Life is squalid and bleak. But Stephen's life of the mind is now taking off (taking flight). Fascinating stuff - there are long sections of this chapter that are conversation - a dialogue ... between Stephen and various others ... this is also something new, in terms of the style of the book. Stephen has been a child, and then a young man - mainly concerned with his interior life ... but now in Chapter 5, we start to see him emerge as a social being. Someone separated from the pack, yet of the pack. It is no mistake that Joyce brings in Irish politics in the last chapter. Stephen has successfully disengaged from religion, from familiy - in order to follow his own star. Now comes the biggie - separation from country. The university is in a fever of Irish politics, his Irish friends (and even the faculty) trying to get everyone involved in the cause. Stephen resists. He gets a lot of flak for this. Is he not Irish? Why does he not join up? In a final break, Stephen drops out of his Irish language class. Now because this is Joyce we're talking about, things are not quite that simple. The chapter is a swirl of activity and conversation. Stephen, having left the religious discipline he had set for himself, now turns his mind to thoughts of beauty and art. He talks with a friend about Aristotle and Aquinas - one of the longest sections of the chapter. What did both of these men have to say about aesthetics. It is Stephen's version of a sermon - the mirror-image of the sermon in Chapter 3. And on the flipside of Stephen's disenchantment with Irish nationalism (and nationalism in general) and anything political - anything that requires you to sign a petition, and join the ranks ... on the flipside of all of that is Stephen's realization that English, the language, is a borrowed speech for him ... Irish is not his speech either, regardless of the fact that his ancestors spoke it. But English is not "his". This is shown in the most famous episode of the book, that I have referenced before - I call it "the tundish scene" - and that will be my excerpt - although all of Stephen's thoughts on Aristotle and Aquinas are so awesome that I yearned to post that one as well. But you'll just have to read the book to see the whole thing put together.

In this, the last chapter, Stephen begins to separate himself from the pack, in every way possible. He thinks poets - because that is what he now believes he is - should not be of this world. They certainly can't waste their time taking Irish language classes and signing petitions. They need to turn their attention to other things, like aesthetics, what is truth, beauty ... In order to do that, the ties that bind them - language, culture, religion, family - must be sundered. However (and I think this is important) - you never get the sense that Stephen Dedalus is a loner. Or a gloomy weirdo. His conversations with his friends here are lively, topic-driven ... Socratic in nature. His friends treat him with fondness, as though he is a little bit wacko, but they certainly want to know his thoughts on things. Dedalus IS a part of the community - at the university, in his family, in Dublin - and we get that sense in Chapter 5 more so than in any other chapter. It's alive with dialogue, conversation, back and forth. But Stephen's thought process becomes more and more introspective - he is truly wrestling with himself, here. And other things - the pull of conformity, the pull of meaningless pursuits (Irish language) ... Stephen tells a friend that he feels his new motto might have to be "I will not serve". He will not serve anything that is imposed on him from the outside. Irish politics, Irish language, Catholic Church, even now his education (especially with the scene below, where the dean of students reveals his lack of knowledge about something that is pretty much self-evident) - Stephen will not serve. He begins to realize that he is going to have to drop out of the university, in order to pursue his art. He's really breaking free (Joyce's relentless picture of how conformist and rigid Dublin is is really important to remember any time you read Joyce). A friend teases him about his lack of religious faith. Stephen doesn't want to go to Easter mass, and his mother is all upset about it. Stephen doesn't believe anymore. He's done with all that. And yet having broken free from that leaves him with a sense of emptiness, and loneliness that is quite profound.

By the end of the chapter - the writing changes completely - and we get a series of Stephen's journal entries. No more outside narrator. We now hear Stephen's voice. He's spent the entire chapter pondering other voices: Aristotle, Aquinas - there's a lot of Yeats too - he's searching for something, looking for himself in their words ... as all artists do ... but by the end of the book, he is now ready to write in his own voice. It's clunky. The journal entries are kind of jagged, unfinished, you're not sure what's going on ... it's a TOTAL BREAK with the feeling of the rest of the ENTIRE BOOK ... it feels amateurish ... and it is. But that's Joyce's point. We all have to start somewhere. And Stephen is starting. He, like his namesake, is building his wings to get out. It is through language - borrowed or not - that he will get out. And it is all well and good to while away the days pondering Aquinas and aesthetics ... but the point really is to just START. And so he does.

The book ends in an unfinished manner ... we don't know what will happen ... we know Stephen is gearing up for exile, he mentions it ... but the journal entries now stand for an entire life. The narrator is gone. We are now inside a human being.

The perfect launching-pad for Ulysses which takes, as its main journey, what it is actually like, moment to moment to moment, to be alive ... how the soul looks out through the eyes, and what it sees, and what it experiences.

But first: below is "the tundish scene". Stephen keeps trying to talk to the dean in a larger context, metaphorical. But the dean is earthbound ... and stays connected to material things - a disappointment, because he is a Jesuit. Stephen basically here begins to 'coach' the dean in how to think, and how to talk about esthetics. The dean isn't really getting it, though - Stephen has to chide him. "I'm talking about another kind of lamp, sir." Could it be that he had ever looked to the priesthood as a vocation? How could he have? There is no glory to God here. Stephen is still enough of a Catholic (you never really leave that church) to be upset about that. He truly does try to engage the dean in a spiritual conversation - only not about God, but about art and beauty. The dean is not up to it.

And then comes "the tundish" moment. The dean is an "English convert". He has never heard the word "tundish". He acts astonished by the word. Stephen, an Irishman - even though he has refused to sign the petitions, and refuses to get all heated up in politics - is filled with a revelation. He thinks: "-- The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."

Ouch. But what a revelation to make.

It's really "the tundish" that starts it all. Not the event of the conversation with the priest - but the word itself.

EXCERPT FROM A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce - Chapter 5

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. He crossed the hall and took the corridor to the left which led to the physics theatre. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley's time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the jesuit house extra-territorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly and approached the fireplace.

-- Good morning, sir! Can I help you?

The priest looked up quickly and said:

-- One moment now, Mr Dedalus, and you will see. There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.

-- I will try to learn it, said Stephen.

-- Not too much coal, said the dean, working briskly at his task, that is one of the secrets.

He produced four candle-butts from the side-pockets of his soutane and placed them deftly among the coals and twisted papers. Stephen watched him in silence. Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and busied with the disposition of his wisps of paper and candle-butts he seemed more than ever a humble server making ready the place of sacrifice in an empty temple, a levite of the Lord. Like a levite's robe of plain linen the faded worn soutane draped the kneeling figure of one whom the canonicals or the bell-bordered ephod would irk and trouble. His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lord - in tending the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden - and yet had remained ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty. Nay, his very soul had waxed old in that service without growing towards light and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity - a mortified will no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than was to the thrill of love or combat his ageing body, spare and sinewy, greyed with a silver-pointed down.

The dean rested back on his hunkers and watched the sticks catch. Stephen, to fill the silence, said:

-- I am sure I could not light a fire.

-- You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty.

-- Can you solve that question now? he asked.

-- Aquinas, answered Stephen, says pulcra sunt quae visa placent.

-- This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will it therefore be beautiful?

-- In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell, however, it is an evil.

-- Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head.

He rose nimbly and went towards the door, set it ajar and said:

-- A draught is said to be a help in these matters.

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius's enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. Similiter atque senis baculus, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man's hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady's nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

-- When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

-- From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

-- These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

-- If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws.

-- Ha!

-- For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.

-- I see. I quite see your point.

-- I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.

-- Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by. You know Epictetus?

-- An old gentleman, said Stephen coarsely, who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.

-- He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the character of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp next day instead of the iron lamp.

A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean's candle butts and fused itself in Stephen's consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest's voice, too, had a hard jingling tone. Stephen's mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest's face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?

-- I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.

-- Undoubtedly, said the dean.

-- One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.

-- Not in the least, said the dean politely.

-- No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean --

-- Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: detain.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.

-- 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. Thefunnel.

-- 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.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all but given through - a late-comer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden in winding up to the end like a reel of cotton some fine-spun line of reasoning upon insufflation on the imposition of hands or the procession of the Holy Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zinc-roofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence?

The dean repeated the word yet again.

-- Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!

-- The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth, said Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

-- The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

-- And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean added, to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts. These are some interesting points we might take up.

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean's firm, dry tone, was silent; and through the silence a distant noise of many boots and confused voices came up the staircase.

-- In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is, however, the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking. It may be uphill pedalling at first. Take Mr Moonan. He was a long time before he got to the top. But he got there.

-- I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.

-- You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in us. I most certainly should not be despondent. Per aspera ad astra.

He left the hearth quickly and went towards the landing to oversee the arrival of the first arts' class.

Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet briskly and impartially every Student of the class and could almost see the frank smiles of the coarser students. A desolating pity began to fall like dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful serving-man of the knightly Loyola, for this half-brother of the clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he would never call his ghostly father; and he thought how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during all their history, at the bar of God's justice for the souls of the lax and the lukewarm and the prudent.

The Books: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce. Now I'll excerpt from Chapter 4.

I'm making this book seem episodic - with the way I'm excerpting - and it's totally not. Oh, well. Stephen, in Chapter 4, imposes on himself a rigorous religious discipline to atone for all his sins. He devotes every day to prayer, he carries rosary beads, he avoids women, he is disgusted by anything bodily - and yet he's very big on mortification, in the true sense of the word - so he smells things that are disgusting, as penance. He struggles. It's hard to be a teenage boy and be a puritanical priest-like personality - but he tries.

But now let's talk about Joyce. Through the early chapters, true childhood, Joyce's writing is lush, sensual, it's all colors and sounds and sensations. In Chapter 3, when Stephen goes on the retreat which gives him the revelation that he is in a state of sin - all of that changes. Chapter 3 is mainly just the priest talking - with no narrative response from Stephen - until the end when he is in a panic at night, and goes to confession. But most of Chapter 3 is a monologue. In Chapter 4 everything has changed. We are now back in Stephen's psyche, but the lush prose of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 is totally gone. Things are dry - and almost spare. We hear what Stephen DOES, long lists of his actions. Joyce is moving us here out of the body and into the spirit - but not true spirit yet, which can also be lush and sensual ... It's more intellectual. A self-willed growth spurt. Stephen is conscious now - but let's say he's not AWARE. The writing reflects that. This is one of the reasons why the book is such a tour de force, despite its coming-of-age plot which has been done to death. The writing itself morphs, as Stephen develops. And here: Stephen tries to become a saint. His sins are so beyond the pale that nothing less than absolute perfection will wipe the slate clean. And so the writing is now abstract, as Stephen abstracts himself out of all recognition. A priest at his school says he thinks the priesthood would be good for Stephen. We begin to realize, though, that the religious ecstacy and agony Stephen puts himself through ... it's not that it's fake, it's not at all - it's totally real ... but has it helped Stephen? What does the soul need? What is Stephen's "calling"? Now we're getting to it, the real heart of the matter: we all have a calling. Or maybe Joyce doesn't feel we all have a calling ... but Stephen does. And what is it? The priesthood sounds attractive ... but is it the right thing? Who am I? What am I here for? "I have amended my life, have I not?" Stephen asks himself at one point - but you can hear the uncertainty even in that sentence. He's not sure. And: is he waiting for a reward? You amend your life and then you get a cookie? What is the cookie? The priesthood? Stephen is attracted to the priesthood because of the images it puts into his mind - the rituals, being in charge of them, being seen as the holiest of men. It's a strangely distant image - he sees himself from the outside (always a clue that something is not quite right). After the conversation with the priest, he walks home, deep in thought - and he passes a statue of the Virgin Mary and is almost cold to her. Something is definitely not quite right.

As always, lots is going on here. Joyce saw his art as a calling akin to the priesthood. It required sacrifice, devotion, and an almost religious sense of HAVING to do it. But it also required discipline and work. It was not an emotional thing, not only anyway. It had to do with the mind, and what the mind can do. An artistic calling also gives the promise of eternal life - with the art that one creates. This is the birth of Stephen as an artist. Or at least his consciousness that this is what he must do. I mention this because it's important. A priest, who has followed his true calling, blends soul and spirit and mind in a way that seems organic and right. Stephen Dedalus is having a hard time with the whole blending thing. He can put himself through his paces, he can set religious tasks for himself every day ... and he does ... but does that make him a better person? Or closer to a state of grace? Joyce never asks these questions, at least not directly - but this is what Stephen struggles with, and you can see - or infer - that he is definitely not in a state of grace. More like an anxious OCD episode. But I judge. The point here is not to judge. The point is to follow Stephen's development.

Eventually, Stephen does realize that the priesthood is not for him. But that he, like a priest, must dedicate himself to gaining wisdom - but not in a cloister, and not separated from the world. He must be out in the world, with all the "snares" it implies.

An important thing to mention, something I haven't even touched on, is Stephen's name. Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus was the dude who built the wings for his son Icarus. Dedalus and Icarus are imprisoned. Dedalus is a renowned artisan, and so he thinks he can find them a way out. Icarus, naturally, fucks that all up when he flies too high ... but Stephen is not named Stephen ICARUS. Stephen is named Stephen DEDALUS. The last sentence of the book, with its fabulous phrase, "old artificer", references Dedalus, the "artificer" who built the wings. Stephen has never considered his name before - but his friends, in this chapter, tease him, and call him by the Greek version of his name. Okay. So, as always with Joyce, more is going on here than meets the eye. Stephen has been on a religious journey, looking for what he needs in the Catholic Church. As he slowly realizes that the priesthood is not for him, and that he needs to be in the world ... he stops looking to the Church as the be-all and end-all of existence - and begins to hearken back to mythology, pre-Christian times, for inspiration. Again, this doesn't happen in as obvious or episodic way as I'm making it seem here. It's slower, more contemplative. Greek mythology was obviously hugely important to Joyce (uhm, Ulysses) - eclipsing the Catholic Church's influence on his psyche. This, to Joyce, was the hugest break of all. The most necessary. Stephen HAD to be in thrall to the Church, it was an important part of his development - but he also HAD to break free, in order to truly become. Chapter 4 is about that break. Dedalus is an artist. So, too, then, will Stephen become an artist. He has no choice. It takes on the feeling of a prophecy.

I'm going to excerpt the end of the chapter - where Stephen makes his realization. Because nobody does "realization" like Joyce.

Watch how - when Stephen's buddies start to call out his name in ever-more-ridiculous Greek-sounding words - everything changes. It is as though they are keys - to another level, another plane. Out of the priest-ridden present into the mythological past. They act as passwords for Stephen's soul, which is waiting to break free from the ties that bind. Wings that the artificer have made for him. His true calling.

Soul separated from body is a dry ascetic thing. But to merge the two? How glorious, how truly holy that could be ... And watch for a couple of things in this excerpt: watch how the prose shifts, again, into something more far-flung and transcendent. The senses are back - only this time not to degrade him and mortify him - but to glorify his spirit. Also, he catches sight of a girl on the beach. She is a picture of beauty - from out of a book almost. Venus on the halfshell. Something symbolic and to yearn for. His disgust for women has dissolved. He is about to join the human race. But more than that, more than that: he is about to transcend. Being an artist is not about "joining" anything - Stephen's isolation here from his peers shows that. There will always be those who want you to conform, be more like them, just knock it off with all that stuff - and be like us! To be an artist, you must be the essence of nonconformity. You must follow your own path.

it's amazing to me, in reading this, how clear Joyce is. He tells us in no uncertain terms what is happening. Courage. To write like that.

EXCERPT FROM A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce.- Chapter 4.

-- Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephenoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped City. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

—One! Two! Look out!

—Oh, Cripes, I'm drownded!

—One! Two! Three and away!

—The next! The next!

—One! UK!

—Stephaneforos!

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

—Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without—cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.

Inca few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he?

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

2007 Year in Pictures

Bloomsday, June 16 2007

The Books: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce. Now I'll excerpt from Chapter 3.

Chapter 3 was tough to get through my first time reading it. It felt endless. But in my re-readings, it was not so tough - and it's actually one of my favorite chapters. The linchpin of the novel. It's also the mid-point. We have two chapters to go after this - so Stephen Dedalus (and his soul and his conscience - which is the main focus of this chapter) hangs in the balance. Chapter 2 ends with the kiss from the prostitute. We can only assume (and we learn later) that the kiss leads to other things eventually. Joyce frequented prostitutes in Dublin as a young man, before he met Nora. And he was wracked with guilt about it, and also furious that he should feel any guilt at all. Was not lust a bodily function? Why should shame be attached to it? But there was shame, and so he led that dual life for a while - forced upon many young men of that time, who had no possibility for any other outlets. Stephen Dedalus, in Chapter 3, is in high school. Chapter 2 was the development of the body, the "lower" self - and in Chapter 3, he deals with the repercussions. A weekend retreat is announced at the school. The majority of the chapter is the priest's sermon at the retreat. That's what feels endless. You get none of what Stephen is thinking, sitting in the pew - at least not at first - you just get the sermon. It is a frightful sermon, eloquent and terrifying. It is about hell. And the mortal sins we must be aware of. The priest knows he is talking to a bunch of teenage boys, so his focus is on lust. How there is nothing worse than a lost soul. How far away from God, from redemption. The sermon goes on for 20 pages at least. Once I got into the rhythm of the thing, and stopped looking for narration or plot (that's one of the main struggles with reading Joyce ... you just have to keep giving UP ... surrender, surrender ... stop waiting for him to go where YOU want him to go ... go where HE wants you to go ...) the whole thing becomes hypnotic. I've been on weekend retreats. Post-Vatican II weekend retreats, it is true ... but there are similarities between my experience and Stephen's. It is a time when all you are required to do is pay attention to your soul. And to the afterlife, and to what God has in store for you. It's not a particularly angry fiery sermon - he's not an evangelistic Bible-thumper - it has a definite Catholic vibe to it, intellectual, and rigorous. Jesuit in nature. He pleads with the boys to think about what they are doing. To resist temptation, etc. etc. Stephen is finally allowed to go home, and the horror awakens in him. It is the birth of his conscience - one of the most essential parts of being a human being, not to mention an artist. Conscience equals consciousness in this case. Once you become conscious of what you are doing, conscience is not long to follow. Stephen is, of course, afraid of hell. The Church still holds great sway over him. It is not until a later chapter - when Stephen gives his own sermon, of a sorts, about "beauty" - that he really escapes the ties that bind. "Beauty" is his religion. Beauty. Art. Aesthetics. It is a great shift in thinking, and to Joyce - getting out from under the shadow of the Church was as important a step as being born. It is hard to understand how oppressive religion can be here in this country, which is (thankfully) secular. There is no state religion. In Ireland that was not the case. I can't remember who used the term "priest-ridden" in regards to Ireland - it might have been Joyce himself - but it's definitely true. It was one of the reasons Joyce felt like he could not breathe in Ireland. His relationship to Catholicism was always a complex one - I suppose that's true of most thinking Catholics - and while there was great rage, there was also great love and respect. Both things going on at the same time. He writes about being a Catholic in a way that I completely understand. He was a true believer. Only a former true believer, who has since strayed from the faith, can write the way he does. True believers are usually terrible advocates for their own faith. They're dogmatic, certain, completely unquestioning, close-minded, unambiguous, and in general - if you DON'T believe what they believe - they come off looking like lunatics who have checked their brain at the door. But those who have questioned, grappled, wrestled, left the faith - for good reasons ... often are the best expressers of what the faith is really all about. Nobody writes about a Catholic mass like Joyce. That's what the excerpt below is about. After the retreat, Stephen comes home, in what can be only described as a state of hysteria. He has sinned. He has slept with prostitutes. He masturbates. He cannot live with himself. His soul is on the rack. And that's what confession is for, mate.

Stephen is developing. The fluidity of the earlier chapters does not exist here. The main thrust of the entire chapter is somebody else's words - the priest. The body, slowly, is being left behind. At one point, he loses awareness of where he even is - in space and place. He is going into the realms of the mind. Not an altogether pleasant sensation, especially when one is convinced one is in a state of mortal sin.

EXCERPT FROM A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce - Chapter 3.

When evening had fallen he left the house and the first touch of the damp dark air and the noise of the door as it closed behind him made ache again his conscience, lulled by prayer and tears. Confess! Confess! It was not enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a prayer. He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell over his hidden sins truly and repentantly. Before he heard again the footboard of the housedoor trail over the threshold as it opened to let him in, before he saw again the table in the kitchen set for supper he would have knelt and confessed. It was quite simple.

The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the dark streets. There were so many flagstones on the footpath of that street and so many streets in that city and so many cities in the world. Yet eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin. Even once was a mortal sin. It could happen in an instant. But how so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see the thing, without having wished first to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field. It must understand when it desires in one instant and then prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully. It feels and understands and desires. What a horrible thing! Who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul than his soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was that so? O why?

He cowered in the shadow of the thought, abashing himself in the awe of God Who had made all things and all men. Madness. Who could think such a thought? And, cowering in darkness and abject, he prayed mutely to his angel guardian to drive away with his sword the demon that was whispering to his brain.

The whisper ceased and he knew then clearly that his own soul had sinned in thought and word and deed wilfully through his own body. Confess! He had to confess every sin. How could he utter in words to the priest what he had done? Must, must. Or how could he explain without dying of shame? Or how could he have done such things without shame? A madman, a loathsome madman! Confess! O he would indeed to be free and sinless again! Perhaps the priest would know. O dear God!

He walked on and on through illlit streets, fearing to stand still for a moment lest it might seem that he held back from what awaited him, fearing to arrive at that towards which he still turned with longing. How beautiful must be a soul in the state of grace when God looked upon it with love!

Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets. Their dark hair hung trailed over their brows. They were not beautiful to see as they crouched in the mire. But their souls were seen by God; and if their souls were in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God loved them, seeing them.

A wasting breath of humiliation blew bleakly over his soul to think of how he had fallen, to feel that those souls were dearer to God than his. The wind blew over him and passed on to the myriads and myriads of other souls on whom God's favour shone now more and now less, stars now brighter and now dimmer, sustained and failing. And the glimmering souls passed away, sustained and failing, merged in a moving breath. One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost. The end: black cold void waste.

Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time unlit, unfelt, unlived. The squalid scene composed itself around him; the common accents, the burning gasjets in the shops, odours of fish and spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women. An old woman was about to cross the street, an oilcan in her hand. He bent down and asked her was there a chapel near.

-- A chapel, sir? Yes, sir. Church Street chapel.

-- Church?

She shifted the can to her other hand and directed him: and, as she held out her reeking withered right hand under its fringe of shawl, he bent lower towards her, saddened and soothed by her voice.

-- Thank you.

-- You are quite welcome, sir.

The candles on the high altar had been extinguished but the fragrance of incense still floated down the dim nave. Bearded workmen with pious faces were guiding a canopy out through a sidedoor, the sacristan aiding them with quiet gestures and words. A few of the faithful still lingered, praying before one of the sidealtars or kneeling in the benches near the confessionals. He approached timidly and knelt at the last bench in the body, thankful for the peace and silence and fragrant shadow of the church. The board on which he knelt was narrow and worn and those who knelt near him were humble followers of Jesus. Jesus too had been born in poverty and had worked in the shop of a carpenter, cutting boards and planing them, and had first spoken of the kingdom of God to poor fishermen, teaching all men to be meek and humble of heart.

He bowed his head upon his hands, bidding his heart to be meek and humble that he might be like those who knelt beside him and his prayer as acceptable as theirs. He prayed beside them but it was hard. His soul was foul with sin and he dared not ask forgiveness with the simple trust of those whom Jesus, in the mysterious ways of God, had called first to His side, the carpenters, the fishermen, poor and simple people following a lowly trade, handling and shaping the wood of trees, mending their nets with patience.

A tall figure came down the aisle and the penitents stirred: and at the last moment, glancing up swiftly, he saw a long grey beard and the brown habit of a capuchin. The priest entered the box and was hidden. Two penitents rose and entered the confessional at either side. The wooden slide was drawn back and the faint murmur of a voice troubled the silence.

His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of men. They stirred, waking from sleep, troubled by the heated air.

Speaking of "Portrait of the Artist":

Today is also the book's birthday!! That's a picture of Joyce as a college student, an "artist as a young man". Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man had been serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist - in 1914, 15 - but today is the day it was published as a whole, in 1916.

April 27 Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

The Dubliners had already been published - and very controversial they were - not embraced by his own country of course (it hit too close to home) - I don't think they were even published in Ireland, come to think of it - but it was Portrait of the Artist which really firmed up his reputation as a writer. Then, naturally, 1922 brought the world Ulysses which changed everything - with that book Joyce, according to TS Eliot, "killed the 19th century". 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 - one can appreciate Marlowe fully, even when he's standing next to Shakespeare - but everyone else just wilts and becomes about half an inch tall). 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 Frank Sinatra: "Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?" 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 or Finnegans Wake - 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 a genius, after all. His mind didn't work like everyone else's.

Here is an excerpt from the masterful 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 dreamatic 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 one of Joyce's main contributions to literature as we know it. No other writer even comes close to accomplishing what he did - although everyone imitates him. 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 break with the past, or because he thought the past was worthless. 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 its true in the "gibberish" of Finnegans Wake. The structure may be complex, and it usually is with Joyce - but "the thought is always simple". Literature was old, tired, and language itself had no meaning. Joyce got in there WITH the language - and made it do what he needed it to do. 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. 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, basically. Huge simplification - but that was what he was working on there. Making a language that would express him. Making a language that was natural for him.) Language ITSELF needed an overhaul. Again - you can count the writers on one hand who actually have this sense - and who are actually genius enough to pull it off. Joyce, being a genius, rebelled. He rebelled against that tradition. He didn't rebel against it by ignoring Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, or 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. But he never forgot that English was NOT, in fact, his "native" language.

This is most clearly defined in the famous "tundish" scene from Portrait - which again, I'll get to in my excerpts.

In the meantime: here's a taste of the famous scene:

-- 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.

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.

Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce, old father, old artificer, we are forever in your debt.

The Books: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce. Now I'll excerpt from Chapter 2.

The movement of Chapter 2 is one of upheaval, change. Young boyhood is now a distant memory - Stephen is in his early teens. He is no longer at Clongowes. His family has sold their property - and have moved to Dublin. Stephen is dismayed at Dublin. He finds it gloomy, and a restlessness overcomes him. He takes long walks ("wanderings") - where he tries to either shake off his uneasiness, or try to get to the heart of what is wrong. The unconsciousness of being a child is gone. Stephen looks back on his life, and feels the gap between then and now. He is in another school - a much more rowdy school than Clongowes, although still Jesuit-run. He has a group of friends and rivals. Girls suddenly come into the picture. Stephen becomes obsessed with one girl. This is the awakening of the "beast" - meaning: lust.

Joyce was tormented by lust, and he writes about it with feverish accuracy. The other boys tease him about his crush, and Stephen is baffled by this. He doesn't find there to be anything funny at all about girls, and the feelings they arouse in him. The chapter ends with him, on one of his wanderings, encountering a prostitute, who comes over to him and kisses him on the cheek. It seems almost like Ireland is hellbent on separating its citizens from their natural impulses. Perhaps civilization in general is hellbent on such a thing - but Joyce has a big problem with that. He doesn't like hypocrisy, and he hates piety and self-righteousness. He wants to be able to just BE with other people. Stephen does, too. Dublin alienates him completely.

Stephen has moments during his walks when he looks back over his life ... seeing it as a whole ... the years at Clongowes, the death of Parnell, the geometry lessons ... and now that he has made the break with boyhood, he trembles on the edge of a precipice.

There's a marvelous scene with his father - the two of them have taken a trip back out into the country, not sure why - but it's just the two of them, Simon and Stephen Dedalus. Simon reminisces about something to Stephen, telling him a long story - and he almost begins to weep at the end of it. Stephen, listening to his dad, suddenly has an eerie detached sensation - like he has pulled back from everything, and is looking DOWN - on himself, on life, on all of humanity. It is the birth of awareness. It's a profound moment. Stephen keeps saying to himself: "I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking with my father Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork." Just listing of facts. "Names". It is like the very prosaic nature of life suddenly seems distinct, amazing, singular. Stephen is becoming himself.

The amniotic-fluid prose of the first chapter is no more. But we are still in a vast stream-of-consciousness narrative.

Stephen is involved in a school play - and during the play he begins to go back over some memories - and we are catapulted back in time, to his first year at the new school - and then brought back to the present - and then back into memories ... It's how life is, sometimes. You can be walking down the street, but your mind is back in the 2nd grade. Stephen is starting to be able to connect the dots of his life. He still is under the power of his parents and the church and his teachers - but he is beginning to disengage. This is the birth of the artist.

I chose the excerpt below because it has to do with writing. Stephen writes an essay for school, which causes a great controversy. Joyce said, much later in his life, something along the lines of, "I have discovered that I cannot write without offending people." Joyce was a controversial man from the very beginning. He had unorthodox ideas. He had unorthodox literary idols. He broke from the pack. Ireland is a very conformist country - perhaps something about being an island nation ... but also because of its very culture - the Catholic Church and the manner of education ... Joyce never fit in with all of that. I'm not sure he even tried. Stephen worked hard on his essay. It meant a lot to him. And suddenly, he is put in the position of having to defend it - to the teachers as well as to his fellow classmates, who sniff out the difference in Dedalus, and try to crush it. It reminds me a bit of the character of Edmund in Long Day's Journey, who spends all his time reading modern authors, mostly French - people his father degrades as atheists and terrible poets. According to James Tyrone, Shakespeare is the only true author. He truly fears for his son's soul, that it will be corrupted by reading such "filth". The same vibe is true here in Portrait, when the literary canon was much more set than it is now. There is an orthodoxy. Stephen bucks up against it. He loses some of the battles - because he doesn't realize the rules yet ... but this sort of assertion of self, of opinion, of TASTE ... is one of the most important developments of any serious artist. What you LIKE reveals who you ARE. And if someone tries to take that away from you, that person is attacking your identity, your very self. These are not "just" books and authors to Joyce. They are the breath of life. Stephen has found himself connected, emotionally, to Byron - he writes poems for his crush in the style of Byron ... To Stephen, Byron is a genius. Byron, however, was not "approved" of in the canon. So you'll see what happens below.

Like I said in my other post: Joyce is not re-inventing the wheel with this book. It is a coming-of-age story. I Am the Cheese, Catcher in the Rye, The Pigman - all of these books are in the Portrait of the Artist continuum. But it is in the manner of the writing that Joyce makes his mark. And not just the writing ... he's not just a beautiful prose writer ... it's the IDEAS he makes the reader confront that truly elevates him. He's an intellectual novelist. We'll get to that later in Ulysses - one of my favorite chapters in Ulysses is the long "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter - when Stephen Dedalus and his friends sit in the National Library, talking about Shakespeare, arguing about Hamlet and Prospero. When I recently read Will of the World, the author references this chapter in Ulysses repeatedly. It makes you take another look at Shakespeare, it really does. And any author who can do that - without ruining his story, or turning it into a pamphlet, or somehow academic - has my highest regard!

We are back in a memory here. Stephen is thinking back on his "heretical" essay and the argument with his friends. So at the end, we come back to the present.

Okay - so here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce.

It was towards the close of his first term in the college when he was in number six. His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.

The essay was for him the chief labour of his week and every Tuesday, as he marched home to the school, he read his fate in the incidents of the way, pitting himself against some figure ahead of him and quickening his pace to outstrip it before a certain goal was reached or planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath and telling himself that he would be first and not first in the weekly essay.

On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:

-- This fellow has heresy in his essay.

A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his hand between his crossed thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about his neck and wrists. Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.

A short loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease.

-- Perhaps you didn't know that, he said.

-- Where? asked Stephen.

Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.

-- Here. It's about the Creator and the soul. Rrm ... rrm ... rrm ... Ah! without a possibility of ever approaching nearer. That's heresy.

Stephen murmured:

-- I meant without a possibility of ever reaching.

It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and passed it across to him, saying:

-- O ... Ah! ever reaching. That's another story.

But the class was not so soon appeased. Though nobody spoke to him of the affair after class he could feel about him a vague general malignant joy.

A few nights after this public chiding he was walking with a letter along the Drumcondra Road when he heard a voice cry:

-- Halt!

He turned and saw three boys of his own class coming towards him in the dusk. It was Heron who had called out and, as he marched forward between his two attendants, he cleft the air before him with a thin cane, in time to their steps. Boland, his friend, marched beside him, a large grin on his face, while Nash came on a few steps behind, blowing from the pace and wagging his great red head.

As soon as the boys had turned into Clonliffe Road together they began to speak about books and writers, saying what books they were reading and how many books there were in their fathers' bookcases at home. Stephen listened to them in some wonderment for Boland was the dunce and Nash the idler of the class. In fact after some talk about their favourite writers Nash declared for Captain Marryat who, he said, was the greatest writer.

-- Fudge! said Heron. Ask Dedlaus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus.

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

-- Of prose do you mean?

-- Yes.

-- Newman, I think.

-- Is it Cardinal Newman? asked Boland.

-- Yes, answered Stephen.

The grin broadened on Nash's freckled face as he turned to Stephen and said:

-- And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus?

-- O, many say that Newman has the best prose style, Heron said to the other two in explanation. Of course he's not a poet.

-- And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland.

-- Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron.

-- O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a book.

At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out:

-- Tennyson a poet! Why, he's only a rhymester!

-- O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet.

-- And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbour.

-- Byron, of course, answered Stephen.

Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh.

-- What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.

-- You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated people.

-- He must be a fine poet! said Boland.

-- You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, turning on him boldly. All you know about poetry is what you wrote up on the slates in the yard and were going to be sent to the loft for.

Boland, in fact, was said to have written on the slates in the yard a couplet about a classmate of his who often rode home from the college on a pony:

As Tyson was riding into Jerusalem
He fell and hurt his Alex Kafoozelum.

This thrust put the two lieutenants to silence but Heron went on:

-- In any cae Byron was a heretic and immoral too.

-- I don't care what he was, cried Stephen hotly.

-- You don't care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash.

-- What do you know about it? shouted Stephen. You never read a line of anything in your life except a trans or Boland either.

-- I know that Byron was a bad man, said Boland.

-- Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out.

In a moment Stephen was a prisoner.

-- Tate made you buck up the other day, Heron went on, about the heresy in your essay.

-- I'll tell him tomorrow, said Boland.

-- Will you? said Stephen. You'd be afraid to open your lips.

-- Afraid?

-- Ay. Afraid of your life.

-- Behave yourself! cried Heron, cutting at Stephen's legs with his cane.

It was the signal for their onset. Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence.

-- Admit that Byron was no good.

-- No.

-- Admit.

-- No.

-- Admit.

-- No. No.

At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His tormentors set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, torn and flushed and panting, stumbled after them half blinded with tears, clenching his fists madly and sobbing.

While he was still repeating the Confiteor amid the indulgent laughter of his hearers and while the scenes of that malignant episode were still passing sharply and swiftly before his mind he wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. All the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that suddenwoven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel.

The Books: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce

Joyce's first novel. A book in 5 chapters. I'll excerpt from each of the chapters - since the parts are all so important to the whole. It's interesting that he called this "Portrait" - when it seems like "Journey" would be more applicable - there is a very clear sense of movement in the book, even in the long so-called stagnant sections, like the Jesuit retreat. What Joyce is showing is how one becomes an artist. Where it comes from. What steps along the way have brought Stephen Dedalus to the incredible last sentence: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and in ever good stead"? Stephen Dedalus is headed for exile. He is obviously James Joyce's alter ego. And he is also the "star" of Ulysses which takes up (give or take a couple months) where Portrait left off. Stephen Dedalus is a young Irish boy, and the "portrait" we get of him is multi-faceted, and subjective. There is no one way to become an artist. This is what happened to Stephen, this is HIS way.

One of the things that was so arresting about this book when it first came out was its stream-of-conscious narration, and its faithful rendering of what the world seems like from the inside. Meaning: from the inside of Stephen Dedalus. It is not so much his literal experience that we are getting. It is his experience, and experience mainly comes to us through the five senses. Marcel Proust also went at his narration in this manner. It is not literal. The point is not to describe. The point is to render into words life's subjective journey, from the perspective of one particular individual. We are not outside of Stephen Dedalus looking in. Joyce is behind the eyeballs of his narrator. What he gets, we get. If it's beyond comprehension to Dedalus, then it is beyond comprehension to us.

The first chapter is Dedalus' journey as a young boy, a small child. So the language is simple and kind of incantatory ... not an adult's perspective at all. Things happen that are beyond his comprehension, things in the adult world. We see them, but we only get snippets - we don't get the whole picture. If it were a film, it would be filmed from Dedalus' perspective as a 3 foot tall child, staring at the knees of the adults, overhearing fragments, going off into his dream world, trying to understand. The first sentence of the book launches us into Dedalus' childhood mind:

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 tuckoo ...

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

Blunt language, things seen not literally but figuratively. Or perhaps that's wrong. Perhaps what Joyce is getting at is just how literal chidren are. They do not interpret. They do not deal in subtleties. His father "looked at him through a glass" - glasses? Yes, but Stephen does not have a word for glasses. He just has the sensation, the image of his father looking "at him through a glass".

The thing about Joyce is: he is so imitated now, he is such a reference point - that sometimes it is difficult to see just how influential all of this really was. Stream-of-conscious stuff is almost cliche now. It's funny, though: you read his imitators, even the good ones - and then you go back and read Portrait and you once again realize that nobody can touch Joyce. Still.

Joyce said (and I think this quote is awesome, and goes a long way towards explaining Joyce's attitude, and his "way in" to writing): "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?"

His work does not delve into the unconscious. He is interested in "the mystery of the conscious" - what it is like, what it is actually like, to be alive.

Samuel Beckett said, of Joyce: "Joyce's work is not about the thing, it is the thing itself."

The majority of writers write "about the thing". No slam on them. Writing that is "about the thing" is very often fantastic, and it is what we are accustomed to. But to read Joyce is to burrow down into the very heart of what language actually is. And you no longer feel that a book has to be ABOUT anything ... Joyce's books ARE "the thing itself". He was always a nutcase about language anyway - I suppose anyone who lives in a country whose language was stomped out of existence by an outside force has that relationship to language. (Derek Walcott, West Indian poet, is eloquent on this matter ... but there are countless examples). Joyce 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."

These are explosive issues.

Language becomes a political tool, language becomes a weapon, a symbol ... all of that postmodern Edward Said stuff ... Why can't you just write in English, bub? Isn't English good enough for you? There were morons who took that approach to him then, and there are morons who look at him in that way now, too. Well, no, English was NOT good enough for Joyce - and that attitude eventually brought him to Finnegans Wake, a book that took him 17 years to write, a book written in ... well, it's certainly not English (although if you read it out loud, it's amazing how much sense it really makes). Joyce created his own language, one that was more appropriate to what he wanted to express. English had been imposed on him (or - on Ireland), let's not forget. It was not HIS. If the Irish had been left alone, who knows what their language would have developed into. These are issues that make up academia today, the voices of those who had been colonized - even if it had been generations before. What was done to language - especially languages that had been wiped out - affects not just how we speak, but how we see things. It is difficult for an English-speaker, one who grew up in, say, England, to understand the issues here. When Joyce writes in English, he is writing in "the language of the oppressor" (it is hard to write about all of this without using the obnoxious lingo. Joyce could do it - but I can't!!) It happens whether he is conscious of it or not. He cannot write in English without "enclosing" himself "in a tradition". Is this the tradition of his choice? Nope. It was imposed from the outside. Long before Joyce was born, but obviously - he has inherited those battles. Joyce was not really a political kind of guy, but in this case, he was as political as they come. He wrote, "To me, an Irish safety pin is more important than an English epic." Can't get more unambiguous than that.

The scene in Portrait where Stephen talks to the English professor about the word "tundish" lays it all out. It may be invisible to modern-day eyes and ears, or maybe it's just invisible (at first) to those of us who speak English as a native, and never have had to grapple with nationalistic cultural issues merely from the language we have grown up with. The "tundish" scene, taken in and of itself, and seen in the right context, can explain the terrorism of the North. It's that big a deal. (And please don't misunderstand: I did not say "EXCUSE" the terrorism of the North. I said "explain". Thanks for working on your reading comprehension.) What happens to a people when their language is destroyed. Systematically.

Like I said before, Joyce didn't write pamphlets and his books are not propaganda. He is writing from within. If you're not looking for the clues, then the subtlety of the "tundish" scene might go over your head. But it is very very important: not just to Ireland as a whole, but (more essentially) to Stephen Dedalus' development as an artist. - Joyce is doing two things at once there. In order to be an artist, you must speak with your own voice. Everybody knows that. But if the language you speak was imposed on you, and not just imposed - but if there is a history of violence and death behind that imposed language - then where does that leave you as an artist? Seamus Heaney writes about this, lots of people write about this.

The "tundish" scene is, rightly, the most famous of all of the famous parts of this story. It is where Joyce (without really indicating that that is what he is doing) takes the gloves off. But his interest in it is personal, and that is what elevates it from propaganda, or a Joycean version of "Brits go home". 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." Ouch. Joyce said it himself ... that he would like a language that is above all languages. He dreamt of it. He worked on it. He filled notebooks with symbols and so-called gibberish. He was trying to imagine his way into the most proper expression of his thoughts, his soul, his experience. And in order to do so, he had to shed his mind of English. English was not HIS language.

An example of this is the following anecdote: Joyce tutored two young women in English, while living in Zurich. He read to them from Ulysses. He did this to demonstrate to the girls that English was also inadequate at times.

The girls asked him: "Aren't there enough words in English?"

Joyce replied: "Yes, there are enough, but they aren't the right ones."

So basically, Joyce was a genius. I mean, that's obvious. But within the man were multiple contradictions, and it is this that elevates his art to something transcendent, consistently mysterious and challenging. Frank McCourt wrote:

Joyce's work has liberated many an artist while his life stands as a lesson for all of us. He suffered greatly: the growing failure of his eyes, the growing madness of his daughter. All his days he skirmished for pennies and fought pitched battles for his art. He was a family man, fiercely tribal, and we must not forget he was driven by love.

Did he love Ireland? As the squirrel loves the nut.

Did he love Catholicism? Imagine his work without it.

"We must not forget he was driven by love." Amen.

Okay, so let's get back to Portrait.

In the book it is clear that in order to become an artist, Stephen Dedalus must shed the influences of family, religion, and culture (in this case, Irish-ness). There's an episodic feel to the book - because life often feels that way. We don't look back over our life's journey and see a linear narrative. We jump around in time. Events rise up from the depths, fully three-dimensional - only to be submerged again. We are 6 years old, and then next thing we know we are 9 years old. This is the structure of the book. Joyce is interested in the development of Stephen Dedalus' soul.

Stephen, at the beginning of the book, is a small child - at the mercy of adult events. There is a sense of victimization almost - how things happen that a child cannot comprehend. How a child has no power. Suddenly, you find yourself in a boarding school. Because the adults in your life have chosen that school, and so that is where you must go. But the memory of being in the bosom of your family is still warm and fresh. Where did that go? Oh well, it's gone now ... here I am, in the present moment, dealing with the sensations and experiences of my new environs ... A child doesn't often stop to question these things. Perhaps they throw tantrums, a true sign that they are aware of their own powerlessness, aware of the fact that they have NO agency ... choices are made FOR them.

In the beginning of the book - Stephen Dedalus is still in thrall to his family. To Ireland. To the Catholic Church. He has inherited his tradition, without choosing it or questioning it. As the book moves on, and as Dedalus grows up, he begins to question things, and examine the influences that have made up his life. Is the Catholic Church the one true religion? How do I feel about my family? How do I feel about Ireland? How do I feel about the way I am educated? Who am I REALLY? Joyce is not inventing the wheel, in terms of plot. It's a typical coming-of-age story. Nothing new there. But it is in the manner of expression that Joyce breaks all the rules, and makes other books and writers seem pale, insubstantial.

Another thing that is so amazing about this book is its autobiographical thrust. Joyce was not "creating" anything. He was expressing what it was like for him. He was imagining himself back into his past selves, on a journey of discovery. So Joyce, although a master already, was also learning. It was always about process for Joyce, which is why his publishers and powerful writer friends were often driven to distraction - by the delays, and how long it took for him to write anything. He was not on a schedule. Finnegans Wake took him 17 years and he was still working on it right up to publication (the poor publishers. They'd send him a draft copy and it would come back covered in corrections. MINUTE corrections. A comma could change everything.) To someone who is not a genius, this kind of meticulous insanity looked, well, insane and annoying. Why do you agonize over commas, Jimmy? Well, because he was James Joyce, that's why, and not some run-of-the-mill writer who was a good boy and played by the rules, played well with others. He followed his own star. Such people are often misunderstood by those who are not geniuses.

There is nothing about Joyce's work that is not deeply personal. Every sentence that is in each book needs to be there. He worked and worked and worked at these things. He didn't go off into a Kerouac-ian trance, spouting out gibberish that he felt came from the music of the spheres, or whatever. He wasn't spontaneous at all. He was a craftsman. He was OCD probably. He was obsessive. Everything he did was pored over, agonized about - worked on. The fact that the books are so damn powerful is a testament to his gift as a writer.

You definitely feel the artist at work - Joyce himself never takes a back seat. He's a showoff, a showman. He glories in language, in the fact that he can do this. But all of it has a purpose. All of it is intentional.

The scope and impact of the books are astonishing, to this day. T.S. Eliot, after reading Ulysses, stated, "He has killed the 19th century." Indeed he did. He didn't do so out of a contempt for all those who went before. He wasn't like that. It was just that he was trying to encompass ALL of experience into his work, and he did so in a way that was new, and startling. He is still new and startling. I'll never be done with him. Never.

Richard Ellmann, in his magesterial biography of James Joyce, writes about Portrait:

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.

As always, Joyce works on multiple interwoven levels - the metaphoric, the literal events that change the course, the imagery changes - the beginning of the book is all dark and liquidy - with dark greens and reds, the water of Ireland, a womblike place. Stephen is not developed. And by the end - we no longer have an outside narratory - we just read Stephen's diary, and he is preparing his exile. He is Icarus. Putting on his wings. He has shed the ties that bind - the ties of family, Ireland, and Catholicism. He is now free. Free to create. To write. The ending of the book is a launch-pad. Stephen propelling himself up, up, up ... into Ulysses, the next book. Stephen (Joyce) could never have written Ulysses if he had not openly grappled with who he was, his soul's journey and structure, and how such immutable things as family/God/education/culture ... have limited him, defined him. Gone, gone, gone, begone ... Stephen has become an artist.

Ellmann writes:

The book moves from rudimentary meanings to more complex ones, as in the conception 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 complete. 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 waiting 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 lowr existence, to be born.

So here's an excerpt from the first chapter of Portrait. Stephen is away at Clongowes, a Jesuit-run boarding school. He cannot really understand what is happening to him. He is a small child. He becomes sick and goes to the infirmary. And it is there that he hears the sudden wails outside. Parnell is dead. As a child, Stephen cannot understand the implications - although he knows the name Parnell - having heard it round the supper table. But the vision he gets - of overwhelming grief and loss - is precocious. The sensitivity of children to outside events. Parnell comes up later (as he always does in Joyce's work - excerpt here) - and a huge argument about him takes place at the supper table - with pros and cons, and patriots and skeptics - accusations, loyalty questioned, etc ... Joyce lays it all out. The issues of the Irish people. Marvelous. If you want to understand the history of Ireland, you cannot leave Joyce out of the picture. You would do well to read history books, too, but Joyce writes about history from the inside.

Here's the excerpt. The reference to "Dante" is interesting: "Dante" is the name of Stephen's aunt - who becomes important later, in reference to Parnell. The associations here are primitive - Parnell = Dante, in Stephen's childlike mind. I also find it interesting that names like "Dedalus" and "Dante" abound here. They are not "Fitzpatrick" and "O'Flaherty". Joyce is reaching back - to antiquity, to the middle ages ... for his important names ... resisting enclosing himself in that "tradition" that is meaningless to him. The names are always clues with Joyce. Also: look for the clue of impending exile - it's already there - the desire to leave, to get away, to travel ... even though the boy does not yet understand his own soul's wishes.

Needless to say, since Stephen Dedalus here is feverish and sick - the prose is feverish and sick as well. Weak impressions, the mind unhinged - wandering from place to place - the way things ARE when you have a fever. Again: Joyce does not describe. He inhabits.

His writing is not "about the thing" - it is the thing itself.

EXCERPT FROM A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce

That was the infirmary. He was sick then. Had they written home to tell his mother and father? But it would be quicker for one of the priests to go himself to tell them. Or he would write a letter for the priest to bring.

Dear Mother
I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me home. I am in the infirmary.
Your fond son,
Stephen

How far away they were! There was cold sunlight outside the window. He wondered if he would die. You could die just the same on a sunny day. He might die before his mother came. Then he would have a dead mass in the chapel like the way the fellows had told him it was when Little had died. All the fellows would be at the mass, dressed in black, all with sad faces. Wells too would be there but no fellow would look at him. The rector would be there in a cope of black and gold and there would be tall yellow candles on the altar and round the catafalque. And they would carry the coffin out of the chapel slowly and he would be buried in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. And Wells would be sorry then for what he had done. And the bell would toll slowly.

He could hear the tolling. He said over to himself the song that Brigid had taught him.

Dingdong! The castle bell!
Farewell, my mother!
Bury me in the old churchyard
Beside my eldest brother.
My coffin shall be black,
Six angels at my back,
Two to sing and two to pray
And two to carry my soul away.

How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old churchyard! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!

The cold sunlight was weaker and Brother Michael was standing at his bedside with a bowl of beeftea. He was glad for his mouth was hot and dry. He could hear them playing on the playgrounds. And the day was going on in the college just as if he were there.

Then Brother Michael was going away and the fellow out of third of grammar told him to be sure and come back and tell him all the news in the paper. He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of the paper they got every day up in the castle. There was every kind of news in the paper: accidents, shipwrecks, sports and politics.

-- Now it is all about politics in the paper, he said. Do your people talk about that too?

-- Yes, Stephen said.

-- Mine too, he said.

Then he thought for a moment and said:

-- You have a queer name, Dedalus, and I have a queer name too, Athy. My name is the name of a town. Your name is like Latin.

Then he asked:

-- Are you good at riddles?

Stephen answered:

-- Not very good.

Then he said:

-- Can you answer me this one? Why is the county Kildare like the leg of a fellow's breeches?

Stephen thought what could be the answer and then said:

-- I give it up.

-- Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke? Athy is the town in the county Kildare and a thigh is the other thigh.

-- O, I see, Stephen said.

-- That's an old riddle, he said.

After a moment he said:

-- I say!

-- What? asked Stephen.

-- You know, he said, you can ask that riddle another way?

-- Can you? said Stephen.

-- The same riddle, he said. Do you know the other way to ask it?

-- No, said Stephen.

-- Can you not think of the other way? he said.

He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back on the pillow and said:

-- There is another way but I won't tell you what it is.

Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Roche's father. He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys' fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them? But his father had told him that he would be no stranger there because his granduncle had presented an address to the liberator there fifty years before. You could know the people of that time by their old dress. It seemed to him a solemn time: and he wondered if that was the time when the fellows in Clowngoes wore blue coats with brass buttons and yellow waistcoats and caps of rabbit-skin and drank beer like grownup people and kept greyhounds of their own to course the hares with.

He looked at the window and saw that the daylight had grown weaker. There would be cloudy grey light over the playgrounds. There was no noise on the playgrounds. The class must be doing the themes or perhaps Father Arnall was reading a legend out of the book.

It was queer that they had not given him any medicine. Perhaps Brother Michael would bring it back when he came. They said you got stinking stuff to drink when you were in the infirmary. But he felt better now than before. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.

He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under the moonless night. A tiny light twinkled at the pierhead where the ship was entering: and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the waters' edge to see the ship that was entering the harbour. A tall man stood on the deck, looking out towards the flat dark land: and by the light at the pierhead he saw his face, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.

He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters:

-- He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catalfaque.

A wail of sorrow went up from the people.

-- Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!

They fell upon their knees, moaning in sorrow.

And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders walking proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the water's edge.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'The Dead' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the final story in the collection: "The Dead".

Still from John Huston's film adaptation of "The Dead", the snow is general all over Ireland

The story never loses its power. To describe the plot of it doesn't do it justice, and I also agonized over an excerpt - because it's the ENDING that packs the punch - but the punch wouldn't exist without all that came before. It's important, too, to look at "The Dead" in context of the rest of the collection - which is also marvelous - but "The Dead" feels like a symphony and makes the other stories seem like practice runs, a pianist doing scales. "The Dead" can also be seen (since it is the last story) as the launching pad into the novels. Joyce wrote 3 novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake - and while Dubliners is marvelous, it doesn't prepare you at all for the ground-breaking quality of the novels - except for "The Dead". "The Dead" is where you know, okay - this Joyce fellow is somethin' ELSE. The fact that he was so young when he wrote the thing is astonishing in and of itself - and that's another part of "The Dead" that interests me: where Joyce was at in his development when he wrote it. He wanted to stick it to Ireland, that is true. He wanted to rub his fellow countrymen's noses in it. "The Dead" is different, though. It's like he draws back the veil over his own heart, and love pours out of it. It's not a pleasant process, because along with that love comes grief, and loss ... but the collection would not have the same power if "The Dead" were not in it. Bitchy gossipy observations are all well and good, and many a novelist has made use of such things to great success. Joyce could have been one of them. But no, he had other things in mind. It's like a quick-flash jujitsu move at the end of the book. It's like Bob Dylan going electric. If you think you know him, if you think you have him pinned down, if you think you have classified and labeled him correctly: you are wrong wrong wrong. Because look at THIS. Joyce was conscious of this, highly conscious. At some point, during the writing of the collection, he felt that maybe he was being too harsh on Ireland - that maybe the harshness, taken as a whole, did not serve the book - and also did not truly express what was in his heart. He wrote, in a letter:

I have often confessed to you surprise that there should be anything exceptional in my writing and it is only at moments when I leave down somebody else's book that it seems to me not so unlikely after all. Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty: for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria, or Italy. And yet I know how useless these reflections are. For were I to rewrite the book as G.R. suggests 'in another sense' (where the hell does he get the meaningless phrases he uses) I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Ghost sitting in the ink-bottle and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen. And after all Two Gallants - with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare Street and Lenehan - is an Irish landscape.

Another element of "The Dead" is Joyce's relationship to his wife, Nora. Nora was a Galway girl (just like Mrs Conroy in "The Dead") - and had had a love affair back in her youth - where a young man stood outside her window in the rain, and then died of pneumonia later. Joyce knew about this event - and it always kind of haunted him, because it somehow made it seem like he, Joyce, was indistinct to Nora. It made him jealous to think that Nora could still be moved by what had happened in her past, with another man. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Joyce, devotes an entire chapter to "The Dead" - and the background thereof, how all of these different strands came together to make Joyce write it the way he did. Joyce said, much later in life, that every woman in his stories was Nora - he didn't know any other women, basically - and could only write about her. She fascinated him, and he stole from her, her lack of punctuation in her letters (think of Molly's run-on sentence - 40 pages worth - at the end of Ulysses) - her Galways roughness, her tone of voice, how she was ... all of that was pilfered from his wife, and you see it come up time and time again. James and Nora were in Rome for about 6 months - in 1906, 1907 .. and Joyce's experience of Rome - with its ancient ruins abutting up against modern buildings - also became another strand that would make up "The Dead" - how one can be dead at the same time that one is alive. How consciousness of mortality can change what it feels to actually be alive: it is possible to be in both states at once (as Gabriel experiences so devastatingly at the end of "The Dead"). Gabriel, up until the revelatory last 2 pages of the story, has been - for all intents and purposes - a good man, a good husband - a bit stuffy, perhaps - self-conscious - but he tries to do the right thing. He carves the goose gallantly, he dances with Miss Ivors - he works hard on his speech that he wants to give at the party ... he's not a buffoon or an idiot. We don't get the sense that something is MISSING in Gabriel Conroy - until the end. Then we realize that what he was missing was consciousness. Now he has it. The story of his wife's failed love back in Galway (same story as Nora's) - has launched him into life. And at the very same moment he is acutely aware of his own life, he becomes even more aware of how death approaches - as death approaches us all. We are all becoming "shades". His consciousness becomes telescopic - and moves over the snowy Irish landscape - moving 'westward' - he sees the fields, he sees the "mutinous Shannon waves" (meaning: west) - he sees the country cemetery where his wife's lover is buried ... Gabriel, in his sense of loss in regards to his wife, has - for the first time - become connected to all of mankind. He is now in connection with others. What we all share is that we will all die. And for the first time Gabriel really feels the pain of that. He feels the pain of his wife, lying asleep in bed - tears in his eyes - for the love that she once lost.

One of the other things going on in this story - which may be a bit too local for American readers (or anyone not Irish, I suppose): the feeling of west vs. east in that country, which still exists, on some level, today. The west represents rural life, the east is the rush and bustle of Dublin. At the time of Joyce's writing of the story, the Irish Revival was in full swing - and the Irish began to look "west" to see who they really were. It seemed that the rural folk had been lost in the shuffle, the rural folk still spoke Irish - they were untouched by British oppression, there was something that still survived out there in the west that those in Dublin have lost. So people like Yeats and Synge wrote about the west. It was almost political in nature. A reverting to a time before the British. Irish language schools started popping up, and people started traveling out to the Aran Islands, and Galway, etc. - as a way to reclaim a bit of their lost history. Synge - the playwright - took Yeats's advice to "go west, young man" - and lived out on the Aran Islands (wrote a wonderful memoir about it too) - and from that experience of the untouched peasantry of Ireland - began to write his plays that would make his name. And cause riots in Dublin. Story here.

So what does that have to do with "The Dead". Joyce was never big on the Irish Revival. He didn't go for that stuff. His whole thing was to get AWAY from Ireland. (Gabriel, in the story, has that, too - instead of vacationing in Ireland, he takes cycling tours through Germany, etc. He has no interest in exploring his own country. Which is amazing, later - when Gabriel's imagination breaks free and begins to float over Ireland - seeing the snow falling on hill, dale, monuments, cemeteries, waves ... Internally, he is now "visiting" his country - for the very first time.) Joyce places a character at the party - a Miss Ivors. She represent the Irish nationalists. She chides Conroy for publishing his book reviews in a non-Irish magazine. He thinks literature should not be political. She couldn't disagree more, and calls him a "West Briton". This discombobbles him completely. She asks him if he wants to come out to Aran with a group of friends ... he says no, he prefers to vacation "on the continent". Miss Ivors can't let it go. "What - your own country isn't good enough for you?" She's rude. Gabriel has a hard time dealing with her - he feels attacked and humiliated ... like no matter what he says she will never accept it. She leaves the party early - and says goodbye to the crowd in Irish ... Beannacht libh! she cries, and then she's off. The Irish language, in that context, is a weapon. A way to shame the others. Miss Ivors is basically saying, I am more Irish than any of you ... why aren't YOU all speaking in Irish??

Joyce had contempt for such provincial issues - and felt that Irish people's dedication to their own country was just another way to keep themselves down. The point was not to go west, and romanticize their own peasantry - who lived in poverty - and spoke a dead language ... The point was to get the hell OUT so you could have a chance.

But! But. Joyce never stops there. In "The Dead" he presents all of those issues - it's all there - Gabriel feels a bit superior to the rest of the party, and wonders if he should re-word his speech so that everyone will 'get' it. He chooses a Robert Browning quote to start it all off and questions this choice. He wonders if he should choose another quote. (Notice that he doesn't choose an Irish poet to start things off. Gabriel sees himself as continental - he takes pride in that - which is what Miss Ivors senses, and sets about to pierce through that pride) Despite the fact that his wife is actually FROM the "west" of Ireland - they have never gone back to visit Galway together. Gabriel just has no interest in 'seeing' the countryside, and having some Irish Renaissance experience out there. It seems silly to him.

But by the end of the story, what has happened to Gabriel is nothing short of a complete transformation. In a matter of moments, he sees it all. He sees that his wife never really loved him. He sees that he has never loved anyone as much as Michael Furey loved his wife when she was a young girl - Michael Furey who died for love of her by standing out in the rain all night beneath her window. Gabriel sees his own pomposity, and silliness - and avoids looking at himself in the mirror, for shame. He realizes that his tenderness and lust towards his wife, through the end of the party - was misguided. He felt that her attitude and soft manner were to do with him - when what it really was was that she was catapulted back into the past, with Michael Furey. He, for the first time, feels his own isolation from his fellow man. But again, Joyce does not stop there. In the last 3 or 4 paragraphs of the story, Gabriel - by realizing his own alone-ness, his own failures as a man - joins the human race for the first time. He is connected to all. To Michael Furey, to his sweet Aunt Julia, to his sleeping wife - Instead of feeling jealous about her old affair, he looks down on her sleeping form, and finds himself in tears - imagining what it must have been like for her. But again, Joyce does not stop there. He then launches us up - up - into the atmosphere - and Gabriel looks down on all. As though he is already a 'shade'. And where does Gabriel go? Where does he HAVE to go? "Westward". There is no other direction. "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward." What a sentence. What a mysterious sentence. It is as though Gabriel had had this date from the beginning - only he had no awareness of it. But now he knows. It is "westward" he must go. And so, in the truly stunning last paragraph of the story, he floats out west - through the snow - which is "general all over Ireland" - looking down on the landscape - the fields and waves and dales of the west he had always scorned. And what does he feel? But love. A "swoon" of it.

For me, that last paragraph feels like a swoon - with its uncanny repetition of words ("falling") - it takes on the tone of a prayer, a mantra.

Ellmann writes in his biography of Joyce:

In its lyrical, melancholy acceptance of all that life and death offer, 'The Dead' is a linchpin in Joyce's work. There is that basic situation of cuckoldry, real or putative, which is to be found throughout. There is the special Joycean collation of specific detail raised to rhythmical intensity. The final purport of the story, the mutual dependency of living and dead, is something that he meditated a good deal from his early youth. He had expressed it first in his essay on Mangan in 1902, when he spoke already of the union in the great memory of death along with life; even then he had begun to learn like Gabriel that we are all Romes, our new edifices reared beside, and even joined with, ancient monuments. In Dubliners he developed this idea. The interrelationship of dead and living is the theme of the first story in Dubliners [excerpt here] as well as of the last; it is also the theme of 'A Painful Case' [excerpt here], but an even closer parallel to 'The Dead' is the story, 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' [excerpt here]. This was in one sense an answer to his university friends who mocked his remark that death is the most beautiful form of life by saying that absence is the highest form of presence. Joyce did not think either idea absurd. What binds 'Ivy Day' to 'The Dead' is that in both stories the central agitation derives from a character who never appears, who is dead, absence. Joyce wrote Stanislaus that Anatole France had given the idea for both stories. There may be other sources in France's works, but a possible one is 'The Procurator of Judaea'. In it Pontius Pilate reminisces with a friend about the days when he was procurator in Judaea, and describes the events of his time with Roman reason, calm, and elegance. Never once does he, or his friend, mention the person we expect him to discuss, the founder of Christianity, until at the end the friend asks if Pontius Pilate happens to remember someone of the name of Jesus, from Nazareth, and the veteran administrator replies, "Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind." The story is overshadowed by the person whom Pilate does not recall; without him the story would not exist. Joyce uses a similar method in 'Ivy Day' with Parnell and in 'The Dead' with Michael Furey.

...

That Joyce at the age of twenty-five and -six should have written this story ought not to seem odd. Young writers reach their greatest eloquence in dwelling upon the horror of middle age and what follows it. But beyond this proclivity which he shared with others, Joyce had a special reason for writing the story of 'The Dead' in 1906 and 1907. In his own mind he had thoroughly justified his flight from Ireland; but he had not decided the question of where he would fly to. In Trieste and Rome he had learned what he had unlearned in Dublin, to be a Dubliner. As he had written his brother from Rome with some astonishment, he felt humiliated when anyone attacked his "impoverished country". 'The Dead' is his first song of exile.

I agonized over what to excerpt. I feel the ending of the story is somewhat sacred - and although very famous I didn't feel right in excerpting it separated from the whole. I thought then that I would excerpt the moment when the party starts to break up. It's gone well. Gabriel puts on his overcoat. He and his wife are staying in a nearby hotel. Snow is falling - "newspapers say snow is general all over Ireland". Which is already odd, somewhat uncanny. Ireland is not known as a snow-bound nation. It brings a feeling of cold and paralysis to the scene. Gabriel looks up the stairs and sees his wife standing there, in silhouette. She appears frozen. She is listening to something. Someone is playing the piano in an upper room and it has caught her attention. Gabriel is suddenly struck by the vision of his wife. They have two kids together, they've been married a long time ... and suddenly: he SEES her. The devastation that comes later, when he realizes that what she was thinking about in that moment had nothing to do with him ... has not arisen yet. Gabriel stares up at his wife. Watch, too, how Gabriel - an intellectual, a book-reviewer, turns his wife into an inanimate object - he immediately begins to see her as a work of art - and wishes he could paint her - capture her. Meanwhile (we find this out later) - Gabriel's wife is struck dumb by the playing of an old Irish song ... which reminds her of her dead lover. She stands, frozen ... and from that moment on, the past has got her. Gabriel does not perceive this. He feels that she is suddenly in the present. He cannot wait to be alone with her, to touch her, make love. It is Gabriel's tragedy that they have actually never been further apart than in that moment when he sees her at the top of the stairs.

And that's the end of my posts on Dubliners. I will be sorry to move on.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "The Dead".

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. 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. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hir against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

The hall-door was closed, and Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane came down the hall, still laughing.

-- Well, isn't Freddy terrible? said Mary Jane. He's really terrible.

Gabriel said nothing but pointed up the stairs to where his wife was standing. Now that the hall-door was closed the voice and the piano could be heard more clearly. Gabriel held up his hand for them to be silent. The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer's hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief:

O, the rain falls on my heavy locks
And the dew wets my skin,
My babe lies cold ...

-- O, exclaimed Mary Jane. It's Bartell D'Arcy singing and he wouldn't sing all the night. O, I'll get him to sing a song before he goes.

-- O do, Mary Jane, said Aunt Kate.

Mary Jane brushed past the others and ran to the staircase but before she reached it the singing stopped and the piano was closed abruptly.

-- O, what a pity! she cried. Is he coming down, Gretta?

Gabriel heard his wife answer yes and saw her come down towards them. A few steps behind her were Mr Bartell D'Arcy and Miss O'Callaghan.

-- O, Mr D'Arcy, cried Mary Jane, it's downright mean of you to break off like that when we were all in raptures listening to you.

-- I have been at him all the evening, said Miss O'Callaghan, and Mrs Conroy too and he told us he had a dreadful cold and couldn't sing.

-- O, Mr D'Arcy, said Aunt Kate, now that was a great fib to tell.

-- Can't you see that I'm as hoarse as a crow? said Mr D'Arcy roughly.

He went into the pantry hastily and put on his overcoat. The others, taken aback by his rude speech, could find nothing to say. Aunt Kate wrinkled her brows and made signs to the others to drop the subject. Mr D'Arcy stood swathing his neck carefully and frowning.

-- It's the weather, said Aunt Julia, after a pause.

-- Yes, everybody has colds, said Aunt Kate readily, everybody.

-- They say, said Mary Jane, we haven't had snow like it for thirty years; and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland.

-- I love the look of snow, said Aunt Julia sadly.

-- So do I, said Miss O'Callaghan. I think Christmas is never really Christmas unless we have the snow on the ground.

-- But poor Mr D'Arcy doesn't like the snow, said Aunt Kate, smiling.

Mr D'Arcy came from the pantry, fully swathed and buttoned, and in a repentant tone told them the history of his cold. Everyone gave him advice and said it was a great pity and urged him to be very careful of his throat in the night air. Gabriel watched his wife who did not join in the conversation. She was standing right under the dusty fanlight and the flame of the gas lit up the rich bronze of her hair which he had seen her drying at the fire a few days before. She was in the same attitude and seemed unaware of the talk about her. At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart.

-- Mr D'Arcy, she said, what is the name of that song you were singing?

-- It's called The Lass of Aughrim, said Mr D'Arcy, but I couldn't remember it properly. Why? Do you know it?

-- The Lass of Aughrim, she repeated. I couldn't think of the name.

EXCERPTS FROM 'DUBLINERS'

The Sisters
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the Race
Two Gallants
The Boarding House
A Little Cloud
Counterparts
Clay
A Painful Case
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
A Mother
Grace

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Grace' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the second to last story in the collection: "Grace".

"Grace" ends with the words: "I will set right my accounts". And that launches us into the majestic last story of the collection - a true setting-right of accounts - "The Dead". "Grace" is (except for "The Dead") the longest story in Dubliners - and it feels like the most complex (but again, we haven't gotten to "The Dead" yet.) Once you realize what Joyce is doing in "Grace", the title of the story becomes of highest importance. Grace? You have got to be kidding me. With these idiots? They mean well, but they're ignorant. Joyce's anger at the Catholic Church is behind all of this - but, like the master he already is (at 23 years of age) - he doesn't ever state his anger outright. It's implied. In some sense, you would need to know Catholic dogma to get some of the points made in this story - it certainly would help. Again, there are online glossaries that could help anyone make his way through the story. Misinformation passed on, things misquoted, totally untrue stories passed on as true ... The thing with Joyce is, and this is key: take NOTHING at face value. You'll miss the whole point. Not only will you miss the whole point, but you might even be lulled into making the mistake of thinking: "There's nothing going on in this story at all." I had a Shakespeare teacher say to the class once, "If you think a line isn't bawdy, it's because you haven't worked it out yet." Same with Joyce.

In "Grace" - a drunk man falls down the stairs outside a pub. He cuts his mouth open, and a big brou-haha ensues. A constable is called. Who is this man? Who is he with? Eventually, a gentleman appears who knows the man - and he escorts the man home. The man is Mr. Kernan - he's a salesman who truly believes in the dignity of his profession. (The fact that he is such a true believer in business - and not in the Catholic creed - says it all). He has a wife and kids. He was a Protestant but he converted to Catholicism at his marriage. His wife is long-suffering. He is a drinker. He spends no time at home. He wastes all their money. And at this point, he's been drinking non-stop for 3 or 4 days.

A group of Mr. Kernan's colleagues - who want to help him out - come up with a little plan ... and they spring it on him one day, when they all visit his sick-room, where he is recovering from his fall down the stairs. There's going to be a Catholic retreat for businessmen - how to live in the world, but not be worldly ... and they're all going to go ... Mr. Kernan should come too! They know his skepticism and his anger towards the church (totally justified, in Joyce's mind) - but they think it would be good for him. Mrs. Kernan is in on this little intervention. She's not hugely religious - but she certainly believes. The main part of "Grace" takes place around Mr. Kernan's sick-bed. The men sit, and drink whiskey, and chat ... the talk turns to religion. They try to convince Mr. Kernan that he should come to the retreat - they're all going - he should come too! But they all tread carefully - not wanting to scare him away or make it seem like an intervention. Mr. Kernan is scornful.

But eventually he agrees to come to the retreat. He likes the priest - a big red-faced man who is "worldly". He relates. The story ends with all of the men in the church, Mr. Kernan included, listening to Father Purdon give a sermon on how Jesus must have felt about businessmen, and how to live your life out in the corrupt world - and what Jesus would have wanted.

You don't have to be a Catholic to see what a bastardization of Scriptures this is - and that Father Purdon is "worldly" indeed. The flock sits there, passive and submissive, listening to the dreck from the pulpit -

Joyce is doing mutiple things at once here. It's a complicated story - and I was quite edified by the end-notes I have in my copy, and also reading some online analyses of the story. According to Joyce, the Catholic Church in Ireland is the root of all the problems that country has (well, that and the British - and the little problem of the Irish language). The Catholic Church places submission at a premium (the men sitting Mr. Kernan's room discuss the tale of the two bishops who went against "papal infallibility" - one of them was an Irishman - who refused to believe in the infallibility of the pope - and then, at the last minute, stood up and shouted "Credo!") Okay. So. The men in the story relate this as a GOOD story, a story of how wonderful the Irish bishop was - to submit so readily and so suddenly - it was a mark of his great faith. And the greatness of the Irish priesthood in general. Joyce does not slide any snark into this - you don't feel his editorial hand at all, you just need to get the symbolism behind all of this, and know that Joyce thinks all of this is BOLLOCKS. The Irish priest who resisted papal infallibility was RIGHT - and everything that is wrong in Ireland can be traced back to an entire populace forced to say "Credo!" over and over. That's how bitter Joyce is. Joyce had great respect for the Jesuits (as becomes apparent even more in Portrait) - and knew the creed inside and out. It was what it did to people he did not like. The hypocrisy. The priests talking-down to the populace - the priests "dumbing down" Jesus in order to make him seem relevant to a bunch of worldly businessmen ... Joyce has nothing but contempt for all of that.

And his contempt is in the story - it's just hidden so well. His contempt is in the title. Grace. To be found at such a cynical retreat as that one? Not likely.

There's more going on here than I am even discussing - and probably a ton that I can't even see, because I don't have the right context. But "Grace" is a mini-novel. It does not have just one thruline - we get multiple perspectives - it's intellectual, emotional, spiritual - and it poses questions - like all great books do. Joyce has his opinions on the answers ... but he just poses the question. If you are seeking "grace", the last place you will find it is in the Catholic Church. Ireland hated him for this. He was not forgiven.

It is time to "set right" his accounts. This is the deep breath before we go into "The Dead"

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Grace".

The gentlemen drank from their glasses, set the glasses again on the table and paused. Then Mr Cunningham turned towards Mr Power and said casually:

-- On Thursday night, you said, Jack?

-- Thursday, yes, said Mr Power.

-- Righto! said Mr Cunningham promptly.

-- We can meet in M'Auley's, said Mr M'Coy. That'll be the most convenient place.

-- But we mustn't be late, said Mr Power earnestly, because it is sure to be crammed to the doors.

-- We can meet at half-seven, said Mr M'Coy.

-- Righto! said Mr Cunningham.

-- Half-seven at M'Auley's be it!

There was a short silence. Mr Kernan waited to see whether he would be taken into his friends' confidence. Then he asked:

-- What's in the wind?

-- O, it's nothing, said Mr Cunningham. It's only a little matter that we're arranging about for Thursday.

-- The opera, is it? said Mr Kernan.

-- No, no, said Mr Cunningham in an evasive tone, it's just a little ... spiritual matter.

-- O, said Mr Kernan.

There was silence again. Then Mr Power said, pointblank:

-- To tell you the truth, Tom, we're going to make a retreat.

-- Yes, that's it, said Mr Cunningham. Jack and I and M'Coy here - we're all going to wash the pot.

He uttered the metaphor with a certain homely energy and, encouraged by his own voice, proceeded:

-- You see, we may as well all admit we're a nice collection of scoundrels, one and all. I say, one and all, he added with gruff charity and turning to Mr Power, Own up now!

-- I own up, said Mr Power.

-- And I own up, said Mr M'Coy.

-- So we're going to wash the pot together, said Mr Cunningham.

A thought seemed to strike him. He turned suddenly to the invalid and said:

-- Do you know what, Tom, has just occurred to me? You might join in and we'd have a four-handed reel.

-- Good idea, said Mr Power. The four of us together.

Mr Kernan was silent. The proposal conveyed very little meaning in his mind but, understanding that some spiritual agencies were about to concern themselves on his behalf, he thought he owed it to his dignity to show a stiff neck. He took no part in the conversation for a long while but listened, with an air of calm enmity, while his friends discussed the Jesuits.

-- I haven't such a bad opinion of the Jesuits, he said, intervening at length. They're an educated order. I believe they mean well too.

-- They're the grandest order in the Church, Tom, said Mr Cunningham, with enthusiasm. The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope.

-- There's no mistake about it, said Mr M'Coy, if you want a thing well done and no flies about it you go to a Jesuit. They're the boyos have influence. I'll tell you a case in point ...

-- The Jesuits are a fine body of men, said Mr Power.

-- It's a curious thing, said Mr Cunningham, about the Jesuit Order. Every other order of the Church had to be reformed at some time or other but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.

-- Is that so? asked Mr M'Coy.

-- That's a fact, said Mr Cunningham. That's history.

-- Look at their church, too, said Mr Power. Look at the congregation they have.

-- The Jesuits cater for the upper classes, said Mr M'Coy.

-- Of course, said Mr Power.

-- Yes, said Mr Kernan. That's why I have a feeling for them. It's some of those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious -

-- They're all good men, said Mr Cunningham, each in his own way. The Irish priesthood is honoured all the world over.

-- O yes, said Mr Power.

-- Not like some of the other priesthoods on the continent, said Mr M'Coy, unworthy of the name.

-- Perhaps you're right, said Mr Kernan, relenting.

-- Of course I'm right, said Mr Cunningham. I haven't been in the world all this time and seen most sides of it without being a judge of character.

The gentlemen drank again, one following another's example. Mr Kernan seemed to be weighing something in his mind. He was impressed. He had a high opinion of Mr Cunningham as a judge of character and as a reader of faces. He asked for particulars.

-- O, it's just a retreat, you know, said Mr Cunningham. Father Purdon is giving it. It's for business men, you know.

-- He won't be too hard on us, Tom, said Mr Power persuasively.

-- Father Purdon? Father Purdon? said the invalid.

-- O, you must know him, Tom, said Mr Cunningham, stoutly. Fine jolly fellow! He's a man of the world like ourselves.

-- Ah ... yes. I think I know him. Rather red face; tall.

-- That's the man.

-- And tell me, Martin ... is he a good preacher?

-- Mmmno ... It's not exactly a sermon, you know. It's just a kind of a friendly talk, you know, in a common-sense way.

Mr Kernan deliberated. Mr M'Coy said:

-- Father Tom Burke, that was the boy!

-- O, Father Tom Burke, said Mr Cunningham, that was a born orator. Did you ever hear him, Tom?

-- Did I ever hear him! said the invalid, nettled. Rather! I heard him ....

-- And yet they say he wasn't much of a theologian, said Mr Cunningham.

-- Is that so? said Mr M'Coy.

-- O, of course, nothing wrong, you know. Only sometimes, they say, he didn't preach what was quite orthodox.

-- Ah! ... he was a splendid man, said Mr M'Coy.

-- I heard him once, Mr Kernan continued. I forget the subject of his discourse now. Crofton and I were in the back of the ... pit, you know ... the -

-- The body, said Mr Cunningham.

-- Yes, in the back near the door. I forget now what ... O yes, it was on the Pope, the late Pope. I remember it well. Upon my word it was magnificent, the style of the oratory. And his voice! God! hadn't he a voice! The Prisoner of the Vatican, he called him. I remember Crofton saying to me when we came out -

-- But he's an Orangeman, Crofton, isn't he? said Mr Power.

-- 'Course he is, said Mr Kernan, and a damned decent Orangeman too. We went into Butler's in Moore Street - faith, I was genuinely moved, tell you the God's truth - and I remember well his very words. Kernan, he said, we worship at different altars, he said, but our belief is the same. Struck me as very well put.

-- There's a good deal in that, said Mr Power. There used always be crowds of Protestants in the chapel when Father Tom was preaching.

-- There's not much difference between us, said Mr M'Coy. We both believe in -

He hesitated for a moment.

-- ... in the Redeemer. Only they don't believe in the Pope and in the mother of God.

-- But, of course, said Mr Cunningham quietly and effectively, our religion is the religion, the old, original faith.

-- Not a doubt of it, said Mr Kernan warmly.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'A Mother' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the thirteenth story in the collection: "A Mother". I have heard this story referred to as "comic relief" - there are two stories left to go in Dubliners - after this one - as serious as they come - so perhaps to balance it out, Joyce put in "A Mother", a domestic on-the-surface tale of a woman pushed to the edges of rage at being treated unfairly. I don't know if I would call "A Mother" "comic relief" - but it certainly does act like a breather, a bit of a break, shall we say - in the tragedy - before plunging into the depths in the last two stories. "A Mother" can be read without any glossary nearby. You need no perspective, no context in order to understand it. It could be published in The New Yorker today, no problem. What you see is what you get in this particular case - and that's rarely true with Joyce.

Mrs. Kearney is a woman of great accomplishments (for a woman of her day and age, I mean - and for a woman in Ireland). She makes things happen. She heads up committees, she knows how to get people to do things for her, to get things done. She was an excellent student as a young girl - kind of icy in her manners - so it was thought that she would never get married. But she did - to a man older than she - and from the way Joyce paints the picture, it is a good match. She is a good wife. They have a daughter, Kathleen - who, at the time of the story, is 18 years old. Mrs. Kearney makes sure her daughter has a good education, and music lessons ... and also (and this is interesting) the Irish Revival is going on (the first time Joyce mentions such a thing) - and Irish language classes start popping up, Irish cultural festivals - people start to put Irish words into their speech - In its way, it is a small (and probably meaningless) act of rebellion. The Irish language had been destroyed (Ahem) - and so the Irish Revival movement (which went on when Joyce was a young man), even though it was cultural in nature - had political overtones. Language is ALWAYS political - and Joyce understood that better than anyone. The most famous scene in Portait is Stephen's encounter with the professor in the empty classroom - where they discuss the word "tundish". I'll get to that later. But language is political. By saying goodbye to one another in Irish, by peppering Irish words into their speech - the Irish were asserting the freedom of their souls, their own culture ... Whether or not it had any effect is not the realm of "A Mother". Mrs. Kearney is wrapped up in the Irish Revival. Kathleen, her daughter, is made to take Irish language classes, as well as all of her other classes. You get the sense that Mrs. Kearney - an obviously intelligent woman of great organizational skills - could have been a Chairperson of the Board in another time, a CEO, a headmistress - something. But in her time, in her place ... those skills are kind of at odds with what is expected of her. So she is an organizational fiend in the Irish Revival movement. There's a lot of thwarted energy in Mrs. Kearney.

Things come to a head when a series of four concerts is planned, and she engages her daughter Kathleen to be the accompanist. Joyce was a tenor - and he performed in many of these concerts in Dublin before de-camping to Europe. He apparently had a beautiful voice. The scenes in the concert hall ring so true because Joyce had lived them. Kathleen Kearney is a nonentity in this story - her mother completely runs her life - and she signs a contract with the organizer of the concerts, that Kathleen will be paid such and such a fee for the four concerts. Mrs. Kearney helps organize the whole thing - she helps put together the programs, she helps with the order of each night - who sings first, who recites next ... she understands that such nights need a balance. She is highly involved.

I'm not sure if Joyce was, in his way, criticizing the Irish Revival movement, but he certainly is saying something here about it. The concerts do not go well. Nobody shows up the first night. Mrs. Kearney, hovering backstage, begins to feel uneasy. It is not going to be the glittering night of success she had imagined. Things are dingy. The few audience members are unruly, grubby. The organizers of the concert decide to cancel the next night - and move all of the performers to the big Saturday night concert. This is when Mrs. Kearney goes over the edge. Her daughter had signed a contract for four concerts. She will be paid for four concerts - even if only two concerts occur.

She begins to lose her shit. She tries to track down who is in charge of payment. But she gets the run-around. People do not treat her well. She feels she should be given more consideration, seeing as she was so helpful in organizing everything. Where would they be without her?? But she cannot get a straight answer out of anyone, in regards to her daughter's contract.

You suddenly realize that Dublin is an amateur town. In Berlin, her daughter would be paid properly! Do you think London would treat their artistes in such a horrible way? Nobody else seems to care ... Mrs. Kearney is blazingly alone in her disappointment and rage. Everyone around her seems apathetic.

Things come to a climax at the Saturday night performance. The first act happens. There's a packed house. Finally, one of the organizers comes up to Mrs. Kearney backstage and hands her some money for her daughter - telling her she will be paid the rest after the show. But it's already short. They are short-changing her daughter. Mrs. Kearney, who has been slowly building up to a huge rage (you really feel for this woman, even though she is kind of silly and you want to shout at her, "CHILLAX!") suddenly pulls her daughter from the second act. Her daughter will not play for the artistes in the second act until she is paid in full. This causes an enormous embarrassing brou-haha - the audience gets restless, the singers stand around backstage, waiting ... and you get the sense that Mrs. Kearney, in one night, loses her social standing in Dublin. For good. You get her point - she is being treated unfairly - but she is also over-reacting, to some degree. This goes back to the whole "Dublin is a town of amateurs" critique. Mrs. Kearney, to truly be who she is, needs to not be in Dublin, where her great powers of organization cannot be appreciated. Instead, she is suddenly seen as a loony-tunes. Kathleen is mortified. The organizer of the concert has finally had it with Mrs. Kearney and says, "Fine - Kathleen will NOT play for the second act - we consider her contract broken - and we have someone else who can play for the second act ..." A second accompanist goes onstage, and Mrs. Kearney hears the piano start up - and that is the end for her. She has been replaced. Her daughter is dispensable. The way Joyce describes Mrs. Kearney's disintegration over the course of the story is devastating. She begins it as a calm cool collected woman, sure of her place in the world, confident. At the end, she is a ragged mess, full of such rage that other people become afraid of her.

Although I have just described the plot, there is another level to all of this. Joyce felt that Dublin paralyzed its occupants. There is no room to maneuver. Anyone who has any excellence, or eccentricities ... is doomed. One becomes paralyzed. Joyce felt that he couldn't love Nora properly - in Ireland. They had to leave. He felt that people couldn't "touch each other" in Ireland. Not just sexually, although that was a huge issue for him. He meant souls touching ... he meant communion of souls. Mrs. Kearney had thought all along that she was fine, that her world suited her ... and in a matter of 4 days everything falls apart for her. The lie she has been living is revealed.

Here's an excerpt. (Interesting coincidence that Mrs Kearney respects her husband "as she respected the General Post Office" - considering what was to come in 1916.)

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "A Mother".

The concert on Thursday night was better attended but Mrs Kearney saw at once that the house was filled with paper. The audience behaved indecorously as if the concert were an informal dress rehearsal. Mr Fitzpatrick seemed to enjoy himself; he was quite unconscious that Mrs Kearney was taking angry note of his conduct. He stood at the edge of the screen, from time to time jutting out his head and exchanging a laugh with two friends in the corner of the balcony. In the course of the evening Mrs Kearney learned that the Friday concert was to be abandoned and that the Committee was going to move heaven and earth to secure a bumper house on Saturday night. When she heard this she sought out Mr Holohan. She buttonholed him as he was limping out quickly with a glass of lemonade for a young lady and asked him was it true. Yes, it was true.

-- But, of course, that doesn't alter the contract, she said. The contract was for four concerts.

Mr Holohan seemed to be in a hurry; he advised her to speak to Mr Fitzpatrick. Mrs Kearney was now beginning to be alarmed. She called Mr Fitzpatrick away from his screen and told him that her daughter had signed for four concerts and that, of course, according to the terms of the contract, she should receive the sum originally stipulated for whether the society gave the four concerts or not. Mr Fitzpatrick, who did not catch the point at issue very quickly, seemed unable to resolve the difficulty and said that he would bring the matter before the Committee. Mrs Kearney's anger began to flutter in her cheek and she had all she could do to keep from asking:

-- And who is the Cometty, pray?

But she knew that it would not be ladylike to do that: so she was silent.

Little boys were sent out into the principal streets of Dublin early on Friday morning with bundles of handbills. Special puffs appeared in all the evening papers reminding the music-loving public of the treat which was in store for it on the following evening. Mrs Kearney was somewhat reassured but she thought well to tell her husband part of her suspicions. He listened carefully and said that perhaps it would be better if he went with her on Saturday night. She agreed. She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male. She was glad that he had suggested coming with her. She thought her plans over.

The night of the grand concert came. Mrs Kearney, with her husband and daughter, arrived at the Antient Concert Rooms three-quarters of an hour before the time at which the concert was to begin. By ill luck it was a rainy evening. Mrs Kearney placed her daughter's clothes and music in charge of her husband and went all over the building looking for Mr Holohan or Mr Fitzpatrick. She could find neither. She asked the stewards was any member of the Committee in the hall and, after a great deal of trouble, a steward brought out a little woman named Miss Beirne to whom Mrs Kearney explained that she wanted to see one of the secretaries. Miss Beirne expected them any minute and asked could she do anything. Mrs Kearney looked searchingly at the oldish face which was screwed into an expression of trustfulness and enthusiasm and answered:

-- No, thank you!

The little woman hoped they would have a good house. She looked out at the rain until the melancholy of the wet street effaced all the trustfulness and enthusiasm from her twisted features. Then she gave a little sigh and said:

-- Ah, well! We did our best, the dear knows.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Ivy Day In the Committee Room' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the twelfth story in the collection: "Ivy Day In the Committee Room".

A story made up almost entirely of dialogue, this one is a toughie. Just go with it. Assume that you don't need to know everything ... you'll get enough of it to understand it. It's about local Irish politics - and because we are dependent on the characters for explication, much of it is in shorthand - and you can easily get lost. A glossary does help - and you can find such things online on insane Joyce sites.

A couple things are clear: a group of men gather in "The Committee Room" on a rainy day. Municipal elections are coming up. A couple of them are canvassing for votes for Richard Tierney (an odd coincidence: he is referred to as "Tricky Dick" throughout). You don't get the sense that the canvassers are totally in love with what they are doing - they are not true believers for Tierney. A couple guys show up who are not enamored at all with Tierney - and it is suspected that they might be spies for the other side - a guy named Crogan. The conversation comes fast and furious - lots of Irish slang. People are called "shoneens", "Mushas", "Wishas" - you get the idea of such terms, but it does help to know what they are. Again, if you google "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" you will find more information than you probably ever wanted. Discussions occur. Arguments. Should they be gratified or not that Edward ("the German monarch" of England) plans on coming to Ireland? When Queen Victoria never set foot on the place? Or should they take an attitude like, "Feck HIM."? What does Tierney say about it? Doesn't he run on a nationalist campaign? One of the things about Joyce that I love is that here we are - with, at times, a 6-way conversation - many of times you don't get the information of who said what ... but if you pay attention, you know who is speaking. They all have different voices. You also can get the speaker due to their political views - their impatience with certain ideals, etc. But make no mistake: this is a rigorous read. It demands a lot. Probably not from Irish people, since all of this is an intimate part of their own history - but for Americans certainly. It's a local political skirmish. With no narrative, no narrator. We are eavesdropping. These guys are gossips. You get the sense of the small-mindedness and almost boredom in the room ... even though politics are important and who is in charge is important. The second someone leaves the room, everybody starts to talk about him - and it's never flattering. Father Keon shows up - a kind of sad sack of a guy, whose priestly collar is hidden under the collar of his coat ... he's gossiped about - is he a real priest? Nobody thinks so. They think he just walks around wearing the outfit.

To add to all of this - it is Ivy Day. Which, again, might not mean anything to us. It probably doesn't. But all of the men, regardless of political affiliation or attitude, is wearing a little ivy-leaf pin on their lapel. It's mentioned again and again. "Ivy Day" is the day commemorating Charles Stewart Parnell's death. People apparently flocked to Parnell's funeral, wearing sprigs of ivy on their lapels. Parnell: the great martyred hero to the Irish (or, one of the many great martyred heroes). A very important man to Joyce - you will see this come up in Portrait of the Artist very clearly. Parnell was the head of the Irish Nationalists, and became, himself, a symbol of the need and desire for Irish independence. He fought for Home Rule. He lost power, though, because of a sex scandal - he was having an affair with a married woman. And so Parnell - the great white hope of Irish independence - was driven out of office on a rail, basically. Joyce never forgave his countrymen for that. And with Parnell's absence, Irish independence was pushed back decades. At least that's how many people saw it. Parnell is still a compelling and contradictory character to the Irish - he haunts the imagination still. He is a symbol of all of the "what ifs" in the Irish national conversation. He is idealized, for sure - but that's part of the point of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room". Here are all of these guys, gossiping and bitching about the upcoming election - with two uninspiring characters running for office ... and they're all wearing ivy-pins on their lapels ... a memory of days gone by when leaders were exciting, inspiring, important. (Again: NONE of this is said in the narrative - it's all implied.) The canvassers hide out from the rain in the Committee Room, and basically bitch about when they are going to get paid for their work for the election. Would they have worked for Parnell for free? You get the sense that something died in Ireland when Parnell died. (That's what comes up again in Portrait.) Parnell, and the loss of him, was a national tragedy. And now all they had were mediocrities running for office - guys who are excited to GREET the stupid English king when he comes ... kow-towing to the British ... would Parnell have done such a thing? These are unanswerable questions, and you can see folks still arguing about it in the excerpt below - Parnell was not, in any way shape or form , universally loved. But he dominated the landscape. He was a true "leader" in that respect. You had to set yourself up either in opposition or align yourself with him ... because he controlled the conversation. In "Ivy Day" you can see how the nationalists and conservatives are far more willing to compromise their beliefs - because they would rather win than not win. The definition of mediocrity. I suppose the point is we just don't know what Parnell "would have done" had he lived on. But the spectre of him looms over any Irish political conversation. He haunts this story.

The real fight here seems to be between the nationalists (those interested in Irish independence) and the conservatives (those in favor of maintaining connections with the British) ... but none of the men seem to have energy for it. They talk about the working man, and fenians - arguing over this and that, the Irish talking-points ... showing apathy more than anything else ... but the gleaming ivy-leaf pins they all wear tells a different story.

To understand Joyce, you must understand Parnell. The story ends with one of the men reciting a poem he had written for Parnell. He recites it in honor of Ivy Day. The irony is probably not lost on any of the men present: the leaders of days gone by had a greatness that Tricky Dick can't even aspire to. It was a question of character, of hope, of moral fiber. Where has all that gone in Ireland? The men sit and listen to the poem - and many of them are much moved.

A story written in the true vernacular of Dublin, Joyce catapults us into the middle of the action. He keeps it local, provincial. But it makes me think of Thomas Hardy's wonderful comment (and he, too, often had critics who said he was "provincial" or too local): "A certain provincialism is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up on that crude enthusiams without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done."

This was Joyce's own favorite story in the collection (which is telling).

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Ivy Day In the Committee Room".

-- Hello, Crofton! said Mr Henchy to the fat man. Talk of the devil ...

-- Where did the boose come from? asked the young man. Did the cows calve?

-- O, of course, Lyons spots the drink first thing! said Mr O'Connor, laughing.

-- Is that that way you chaps canvass, said Mr Lyons, and Crofton and I out in the cold and rain looking for votes?

-- Why, blast your soul, said Mr Henchy, I'd get more votes in five minutes than you two'd get in a week.

-- Open two bottles of stout, Jack, said Mr O'Connor.

-- How can I? said the old man, when there's no corkscrew?

-- Wait now, wait now! said Mr Henchy, getting up quickly. Did you ever see this little trick?

He took two bottles from the table and, carrying them to the fire, put them on the hob. Then he sat down again by the fire and took another drink from his bottle. Mr Lyons sat on the edge of the table, pushed his hat towards the nape of his neck and began to swing his legs.

-- Which is my bottle? he asked.

-- This lad, said Mr Henchy.

Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob. He was silent for two reasons. The first reason, sufficient in itself, was that he had nothing to say; the second reason was that he considered his companions beneath him. He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr Tierney.

In a few minutes an apologetic Pok! was heard as the cork flew out of Mr Lyons' bottle. Mr Lyons jumped off the table, went to the fire, took his bottle and carried it back to the table.

-- I was just telling them, Crofton, said Mr Henchy, that we got a good few votes to-day.

-- Who did you get? asked Mr Lyons.

-- Well, I got Parkes for one, and I got Atkinson for two, and I got Ward of Dawson Street. Fine old chap he is, too - regular old toff, old Conservative. But isn't your candidate a Nationalist? said he. He's a respectable man, said I. He's in favour of whatever will benefit this country. He's a big ratepayer, I said. He has extensive house property in the city and three places of business and isn't it to his own advantage to keep down the rates? He's a prominent and respected citizen, said I, and a Poor Law Guardian, and he doesn't belong to any party, good, bad, or indifferent. That's the way to talk to 'em.

-- And what about the address to the King? said Mr Lyons, after drinking and smacking his lips.

-- Listen to me, said Mr Henchy. What we want in this country, as I said to old Ward, is capital. The King's coming here will mean an influx of money into this country. The citizens of Dublin will benefit by it. Look at all the factories down by the quays there, idle! Look at all the money there is in the country if we only worked the old industries, the mills, the shipbuilding yards and factories. It's capital we want.

-- But look here, John, said Mr O'Connor. Why should we welcome the King of England? Didn't Parnell himself ...

-- Parnell, said Mr Henchy, is dead. Now, here's the way I look at it. here's this chap come to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He's a man of the world, and he means well by us. He's a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself: The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By Christ, I'll go myself and see what they're like. And are we going to insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? Eh? Isn't that right, Crofton?

Mr Crofton nodded his head.

-- But after all now, said Mr Lyons argumentatively, King Edward's life, you know, is not the very ...

-- Let bygones be bygones, said Mr Henchy. I admire the man personally. He's just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He's fond of his glass of grog and he's a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he's a good sportsman. Damn it, can't we Irish play fair?

-- That's all very fine, said Mr Lyons. But look at the case of Parnell now.

-- In the name of God, said Mr Henchy, where's the analogy between the two cases?

-- What I mean, said Mr Lyons, is we have our ideals. Why, now, would we welcome a man like that? Do you think now after what he did Parnell was a fit man to lead us? And why, then, would we do it for Edward the Seventh?

-- This is Parnell's anniversary, said Mr O'Connor, and don't let us stir up any bad blood. We all respect him, now that he's dead and gone - even the Conservatives, he added, turning to Mr Crofton.

Pok! The tardy cork flew out of Mr Crofton's bottle. Mr Crofton got up from his box and went to the fire. As he returned with his capture he said in a deep voice:

-- Our side of the house respects him because he was a gentleman.

-- Right you are, Crofton! said Mr Henchy fiercely. He was the only man that could keep that bag of cats in order. Down, ye dogs! Lie down, ye curs! That's the way he treated them. Come in, Joe! Come in! he called out, catching sight of Mr Hynes in the doorway.

Mr Hynes came in slowly.

-- Open another bottle of stout, Jack, said Mr Henchy. O, I forgot, there's no corkscrew! Here, show me one here and I'll put it at the fire.

The old man handed him another bottle and he placed it on the hob.

-- Sit down, Joe, said Mr O'Connor, we're just talking about the Chief.

-- Ay, ay! said Mr Henchy.

Mr Hynes sat on the side of the table near Mr Lyons but said nothing.

-- There's one of them, anyhow, said Mr Henchy, that didn't renege him. By God, I'll say for you, Joe! No, by God, you stuck to him like a man!

EXCERPTS FROM 'DUBLINERS'
The Sisters
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the Race
Two Gallants
The Boarding House
A Little Cloud
Counterparts
Clay
A Painful Case

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'A Painful Case' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the eleventh story in the collection: "A Painful Case".

We're more than halfway through Dubliners now, and in this story - In reading "A Painful Case", I can feel the approach of "The Dead" for the first time, from the other end of the collection. We're moving towards it. The stories get more and more sophisticated - as we get deeper in. "A Painful Case" is just that - painful - to me, it's the most painful so far of the collection. (But again, we haven't gotten to The Dead yet - but it's like Joyce is working up to it. I can feel it.) The spectre of loneliness that becomes so acute, so transcendent and universal in "The Dead" is begun here. Well, it was begun earlier in the collection too - I'm thinking of "Eveline", in particular - maybe "Araby". These are also stories of isolation, thwarted desire ... but again, with "A Painful Case", Joyce slices deeper, he opens his meaning wider - to a more universal place. He's beginning to make himself clear (actually, he's been clear all along ... it's just that he has concealed it from us, luring us into the maze of Dublin further and further - until he thinks we're ready for what will be revealed in "The Dead"). That's the seductive thing about Dubliners - and why it's important (for the first time) to read the stories in order. You read "Eveline" (excerpt here), and it's a story of a girl who has a chance to get out of Ireland, to be married, to grow up, to be free. To see the world, see new things, strike out on an adventure ... never to return. And she refuses the opportunity. You get the sense (in a muted way - Joyce doesn't hit the nail right on the head like he does in "A Painful Case") that in turning her back on this particular love - Frank - who wants her to marry him and move to Argentina- in saying "No" to him - she is choosing the course of the rest of her life. There will not be 100 other opportunities to get married. Hope is low. She knows she is choosing alone-ness by refusing him. The story would be quite different if you felt that, oh well - that one didn't work out - but surely she'll be a happily married woman sooner rather than later! Joyce doesn't let us off the hook. In "A Painful Case", he is even more overt than in "Eveline".

Mr. James Duffy is a clerk in a bank. He lives in a suburb of Dublin - one he has chosen on purpose because it is not as grubby and mean as other suburbs. He lives an orderly life of solitude. Joyce goes to great pains to tell us how his room is set up - its neatness, its spareness. He has a bookshelf where the books are organized by weight (I would have such a hard time with that, seeing as I have 5000 books - how would I find anything??) He has a full collection of Wordsworth's poems on the bottom shelf (heaviest book) - and he has the Maynooth Catechism on the top shelf (lightest book). I can't back up my theory but, hmmm, literature is the heaviest (meaning: most substantial) and the catechism is so light it has to be on the top shelf? Joyce is tricky. In 2 pages, Joyce sets up Mr. Duffy's life - so that the transformation by the end is devastating. He, like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist moves out of unknowingness, unconsciousness - into consciousness - and it is not always a pleasant rite of passage. It is like, in the tragedy, Mr. Duffy becomes alive - for the first time - but being alive means being aware of your own loneliness. If only one could stay unconscious! Joyce doesn't just indict Ireland here - but the whole human race. The lives of quiet desperation. Why must life be so damn sad. (It's quite Irish of him to think that way.)

Mr. Duffy does the same thing every day. Goes to work. Has lunch at a pub. Comes home. Goes for long walks on the outskirts of the city (he seems to think Dublin is a pit of vice ... wants to avoid temptation.) He has no friends. His family lives a ways out of Dublin, and he visits them on holidays or when one of them dies. Occasionally he goes to the opera - and that is his only "vice". You don't get the sense (like in 'A Little Cloud' - excerpt here) that Mr. Duffy pulses with unhappiness of thwarted longings. You don't feel like Mr. Duffy aches to escape, like so many of the other Dubliners Joyce has introduced us to. Mr. Duffy moves through life, doing what is most comfortable - living life on a narrow path, never questioning or yearning for more.

Then he meets Mrs. Sinico. She is a married woman with a nearly grown daughter. Her husband is a sea captain who is never home. They meet at the Rotunda - and Mrs. Sinico strikes up a conversation with Mr. Duffy, spontaneously. Duffy finds himself chatting with her, and noticing, in particular, her eyes - how the iris is, their color, the movement of them, the expression. Joyce never says "He is attracted to Mrs. Sinico" (yeah, because he's a good writer, Sheila, okay??) - but he doesn't have to spell it out. He is drawn to this woman. He runs into her again. He asks if she would like to go for a walk. They start to meet up, on occasion, and go for long walks together. Her husband doesn't mind - in fact he endorses these meetings, thinking that Mr. Duffy is interested in asking his daughter's hand for marriage. The long walks which stand in for dates is reminiscent of Joyce's own courtship of Nora Barnacle in 1904. Dublin back then was similar to, oh, Saudi Arabia. Men and women did not meet out. There was no culture of dating. In order to be alone with Nora, Joyce had to walk with her - and so that's what they did. For 4 months until, one day, they decided to run away together. Which they did, to Europe ... and they were pretty much (with only a couple months here and there) never apart from one another ever again. But it all began with long meandering (mostly silent) walks through Dublin.

One day, Mrs. Sinico invites him to her house. Her husband is off on one of his frequent journeys. They sit by the fire. Mr. Duffy begins to feel things bubbling up ... not just lust, but a sense that he is with a kindred spirit. A woman he could share himself with, a woman who would admire him, revere him ... someone he could read to, share intellectual things with ... a whole soul-connection thing happens as they sit there together. Joyce is brilliant here - he tells us just what we need to know - while leaving much unsaid). Like "Clay" (excerpt here), the narration is from Mr. Duffy's point of view - we only know what he knows ... yet Joyce also employs some distance from Mr. Duffy - it's third-person, but limited. We do not know what Mrs. Sinico thinks or feels. She is a married woman. What is she doing? Who is she? We don't know because Mr. Duffy does not know. But suddenly, as they sit there by the fire, she impulsively reaches out, grabs his hand, and presses it against her cheek.

This is such an openly passionate gesture that Mr. Duffy is shocked, and recoils. Is this a Madonna/Whore thing? Maybe partly. As long as she can be his fantasy companion, the perfect listener and partner ... he can love her. But the second she becomes a real woman with real needs, he shies away. Mr. Duffy escapes - and avoids her for a week. He is disturbed. Finally, he asks to meet with her - and he breaks things off. She seems to take it fine - but then when he walks her to the train she starts trembling so violently that he thinks she might pass out. He sees her off.

Then come the chilling words: 'Four years passed.'

Joyce is making sure of things here. He is digging the grave. Mr. Duffy's life is changeless - there is something in him that cannot be touched (at least not at this point). We're moving towards an image of death here ... and once mortality enters the picture - hers and his - everything changes. This story is not so much about Ireland - as about all of us. There have been times of my life when - if a biographer was writing a book about me - he would have to say, "Two years passed." Times when nothing of any importance happens. But ... if we were always aware of the approach of death ... wouldn't we behave differently? Wouldn't we NEVER give a biographer an opportunity to write, "Four years passed"?? That is the human dilemma. The human condition.

Oh, and just a bit of Joycean internal symbolism here: colors are very important to Joyce. They mean everything. He brings this to full fruition in Ulysses - where every section can be categorized according to color (if you know what you're looking for). To Joyce, green always means one thing. Blue always has the same meaning. And to Joyce - brown is the color of death. Decay. Any time anything is brown in Joyce - prick up your ears. Look for death. It's THERE. For example, in 'Clay' - where Maria unknowingly picks clay during a Halloween game, signifying her impending death - Maria goes out to the party - and her raincoat is brown. She is happy for it, because the rain is coming down ... but the fact that it is brown should be important to any serious reader. If it were a green raincoat, there would be some hope perhaps. Or a blue one. But brown? No way. Anyway, 'A Painful Case' is full of brown. Brown is everywhere. In his room - his beer he drinks - his face is even brown.

So. 4 years pass. And one day, during his lunch, Mr. Duffy is reading the newspaper and he comes across an article about an inquest that just went on at the coroner's office in Dublin. A woman had been hit and killed by a train. Had she jumped in front of it on purpose? Was the train at fault? How fast was the train going? Etc. Joyce employs a brilliant device - harking back to the letter-writing novels of the 19th century ... and also predicting the post-modern style of books: we read the whole newspaper article. We don't get Mr. Duffy's response to it - not at first ... we know he has read something upsetting, we can tell in his behavior ... and then we read the whole article. An investigation has gone on about the woman who died. She is, of course, Mrs. Sinico. It is apparent, although no ruling was made, that it was a suicide. In the last 2 years, her behavior had become "intemperate", causing much concern to her family. She would go out at night in search of drink. Her daughter was much worried about her, and what would happen to her.

Mr. Duffy reads this sad sad tale - and basically his whole life falls apart. He goes through every response imaginable. He is stunned. Then comes anger and disgust - that he had considered giving his heart to such a ridiculous woman, a drunkard, a loser. Had he thought she worthy of him? Thank GOD he had the presence of mind to turn her away! But then, of course, other things start to happen to him. He begins to feel sad for her, how sad she must have been, how difficult her life must have been - long separations from her husband ... Once he realizes how lonely SHE must have been - he, for the first time, realizes his own loneliness. His suffering is acute. Because he knows, now, he will be alone forever. That was his chance. For human connection, for souls meeting. It's over. It will never return.

It's a devastating story, truly sophisticated in its structure - a mini-masterpiece.

Here's an excerpt. Normally I avoid posting an excerpt which is either the climax or the ending of a story/book. But in this case, I'm going to make an exception - because it's so important to understand the development of Joyce as a writer and creator. What he is doing here - as he describes Mr. Duffy's thought process in the wake of reading the newspaper article - is predicting the genius sweep of Ulysses. The germ of it is here. The sureness of his prose, the freedom with which he follows Mr. Duffy's ups and downs, the precise observations about the human soul ... it's all here. Joyce was 23, 24 years old when he wrote this. How is that possible?

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "A Painful Case".

Mr. Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul's companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.

As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He put on his overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six working-men in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman's estate in County Kildare. They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. his life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory - if anyone remembered him.

It was after nine o'clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. he stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from love's feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

EXCERPTS FROM 'DUBLINERS'
The Sisters
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
After the Race
Two Gallants
The Boarding House
A Little Cloud
Counterparts
Clay

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Clay' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the tenth story in the collection: "Clay".

A wee story, 5 pages long - deceptively simple and light. I remember not getting it at all the first time I read it. It's called "Clay". Where's the clay?? Well, the clay is there all right - but in typical Joycean style, he doesn't name it, and - because he doesn't name it - it becomes omnipresent. At least it did for me - once I knew what Joyce was up to. It's not even that opaque - but the story does require work from the reader - in the way that the other stories, up until this part in the collection, do not. It's like Ulysses. Once you know his structure, once you know what Joyce is DOING ... the book is perfectly clear. And not only clear, but fun!

On the surface, 'Clay' is the story of a woman who goes to a party on Halloween. She seems like a lovely woman, with a great spirit - although life is difficult for her. She laughs a lot - and Joyce continuously mentions that the tip of her nose almost touches the tip of her chin when she laughs. It's a bit heartbreaking, that image. She is excited for the party. She has a hard life - she was a nursemaid, and now she works in a laundry in Dublin. Most of the other women who work at the laundry are alcoholics and prostitutes. Maria (our heroine) is very religious - and was at first frightened to work in the laundry because it's a Protestant-run establishment ... but it turns out that the Protestants aren't so bad after all. Maria has no family. But she has kept in touch with Joe - a man whom she took care of when he was a little boy. Joe invites her out to his house for special occasions - he has kids, a nice wife ... and Maria loves to be included in the family circle. It makes her feel sad that Joe is no longer on speaking terms with Alphy - his brother, whom Maria also took care of. But life is not perfect. On this particular Halloween Eve, Maria finishes up her work at the laundry - she got the night off, so she can go spend it with Joe and his family. She is so excited she almost forgets that there is an early mass the next morning. She goes out shopping to buy nuts and plum-cake for the kids. She gets on the tram, and has an interaction with a "colonel-looking gentleman" (again, with the British presence in these stories) - which baffles her so much that she leaves the plum-cake on the train. It's not that anything weird happens - it's that he's so nice to her, gives up his seat, chats with her - that she gets disoriented. She arrives at Joe's. It's a nice warm family scene. Maria is included. She is very upset about losing the cake on the train - but Joe assures her it's all right. They have some wine. They play Irish games with the kids, for Halloween. One of the games involves someone being blindfolded and brought up to a table where she has to choose an object blindly - and each object has significance, in traditional Irish games. There's water, a ring, a prayer-book ... and then a lump of clay (but again: the clay is never named, or even mentioned). I imagine if you choose the ring then that means you will be married soon, if you choose the prayer-book it means you will enter the priesthood/convent within the year ... choosing water means long life, and choosing clay means impending death. (I only know all this because I Googled traditional Halloween games in Ireland, mkay? If you DON'T know these things, you could probably guess - but Joyce does, indeed, make you guess. There's an internal symbolism going on here that does not reach the surface).

Maria, though, does not seem to get it. She doesn't understand the game. She reaches out, blindfolded, and feels her fingers touch something wet. She doesn't know what it is - and Joyce doesn't help us out by saying, "she touched something ... it was clay ... but Maria didn't realize it ..." or some other such narrative aid. The narration of this story is totally Maria's - we only know what she knows. It's not first-person - it's third-person - but with no omniscence. So if Maria doesn't know it, we don't either. Joyce, in showing Maria's lack of knowledge of things, is criticizing the education system in Ireland - which seemed to have a vested interest in keeping the populace ignorant. He was big on that. Maria is a Catholic, of course - and the church runs her life - another thing that Joyce despised about his home country. Everything is about mass, and Protestants vs. Catholics - and setting the alarm for the Holy Day of Obligation the next day - Joyce doesn't overtly judge - because, of course, the story is from Maria's point of view. But that's part of his strategy. Once you see what he is doing, it's ALL you can see. Maria, on the tram, is intimidated by the "colonel-looking gentleman" who is kind to her - she is so discombobbled by it that she leaves a package behind on the train. This is what the oppressor does to the oppressed ... and the oppressor, in this case, has Maria's consent! Maria doesn't even KNOW she is oppressed - and to Joyce, that is the worst thing about it.

Maria chooses clay during the game. She is blindfolded. Nobody says anything when she touches the clay. She wonders what it is. Joe's wife says something to the young girls - like "get rid of that - put it back in the garden ..." She's "cross". It's like Death has just entered. A breath of mortality. The clay (which is never named) is taken away - and Maria is given the prayer-book instead. Maria doesn't seem to realize what has happened. Death is imminent. She clings to the prayer-book instead.

A vicious story, when you get the symbolism.

Oh yes - and the story ends with Joe asking Maria to sing a song, just like she used to do when he was little. She does. She is so nervous she sings the first verse twice - but nobody seems to mind. The song she sings is an aria from Bohemian Girl - an opera - popular at the time ... and back in the story 'Eveline' (excerpt here) - it is mentioned that Frank, Eveline's lover, takes her to see Bohemian Girl on a date. Nothing is accidental with Joyce - there are no coincidences. If you think there is a connection - there probably is. And there are probably way more levels of connection than you can even discern. He's not a "to the naked eye" kind of writer. The first thing I see is that the very title of the opera - Bohemian Girl - is a comment on the dead-end life Ireland offers its young people. Not just men (although Joyce is primarily concerned with men) but women. You couldn't be a Bohemian Girl in Ireland. There are no options for freedom, or an unconventional life. It is a church-bound priest-ridden nation, supersititious and small-minded ... and in order to escape the ties that bind, you must leave. Joyce makes it seem impossible to even live freely within your OWN mind ... People like Little Chandler, in 'A Little Cloud' (excerpt here) - tries to escape through poetry ... but it's not good enough. Reality is too stifling. So Eveline, in 'Eveline', dreams of Argentina - and being a free and married woman there, away from the ties of family and culture. But at the last minute, she can't leave. She can't. It has too great a hold on her. So now - some stories later - we encounter Maria, a woman who works in a laundry, is unmarried, and dependent on kindly friends to open their homes to her on holidays. Is Joyce perhaps saying (by connecting the two stories with "Bohemian Girl") that Eveline - a young vibrant person at the time of the story - in choosing to stay in Ireland - eventually will become Maria? That that will be her only option? I wouldn't put it past Joyce to make such a comparison.

Why does Maria sing an aria from "Bohemian Girl" and not a hymn or something religious? Joyce is suggesting something deeper here, something more haunting and terrible.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Clay".

But wasn't Maria glad when the women had finished their tea and the cook and the dummy had begun to clear away the tea-things! She went into her little bedroom and, remembering that the next morning was a mass morning, changed the hand of the alarm from seven to six. Then she took off her working skirt and her house-boots and laid her best skirt out on the bed and her tiny dress-boots beside the foot of the bed. She changed her blouse too and, as she stood before the mirror, she thought of how she used to dress for mass on Sunday morning when she was a young girl; and she looked with quaint affection at the diminutive body which she had so often adorned. In spite of its years she found it a nice tidy little body.

When she got outside the streets were shining with rain and she was glad of her old brown raincloak. The tram was full and she had to sit on the little stool at the end of the car, facing all the people, with her toes barely touching the floor. She arranged in her mind all she was going to do and thought how much better it was to be independent and to have your own money in your pocket. She hoped they would have a nice evening. She was sure they would but she could not help thinking what a pity it was Alphy and Joe were not speaking. They were always falling out now but when they were boys together they used to be the best of friends: but such was life.

She got out of her tram at the Pillar and ferreted her way quickly among the crowds. She went into Downes's cakeshop but the shop was so full of people that it was a long time before she could get herself attended to. She bought a dozen of mixed penny cakes, and at last came out of the shop laden with a big bag. Then she thought what else she would buy: she wanted to buy something really nice. They would be sure to have plenty of apples and nuts. It was hard to know what to buy and all she could think of was cake. She decided to buy some plumcake but Downes's plumcake had not enough almond icing on top of it so she went over to a shop in Henry Street. Here she was a long time in suiting herself and the stylish young lady behind the counter, who was evidently a little annoyed by her, asked her was it wedding-cake she wanted to buy. That made Maria blush and smile at the young lady, but the young lady took it all very seriously and finally cut a thick slice of plumcake, parcelled it up and said:

-- Two-and-four, please.

She thought she would have to stand in the Drumcondra tram because none of the young men seemed to notice her but an elderly gentleman made room for her. He was a stout gentleman and he wore a brown hard hat; he had a square red face and a greyish moustache. Maria thought he was a colonel-looking gentleman and she reflected how much more polite he was than the young men who simply stared straight before them. The gentleman began to chat with her about Hallow Eve and the rainy weather. He supposed the bag was full of good things for the little ones and said it was only right that the youngsters should enjoy themselves while they were young. Maria agreed with him and favoured him with demure nods and hems. He was very nice with her, and when she was getting out at the Canal Bridge she thanked him and bowed, and he bowed to her and raised his hat and smiled agreeably; and while she was going up along the terrace, bending her tiny head under the rain, she thought how easy it was to know a gentleman even when he has a drop taken.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Counterparts' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the ninth story in the collection: "Counterparts".

Wow, this story makes me uncomfortable to read. The part of me that hates the thought that I am in "trouble", that I have made a mistake, that someone doesn't like me ... all of that is stirred up when I read "Counterparts". Farrington, the lead character, is not at all sympathetic - and the story ends with him beating his child, who screams in fear - so no, I don't like Farrington ... but still, his predicament, his problem is one that is quite human, one we all share. He has been blunted down by the disappointmens of life - which put him into a state of nearly-constant smouldering rage ... and also, there's the drink. Joyce is sooooo good at suggesting Farrington's need for alcohol. Farrington's "thirst". It's not just something Farrington likes to do, or wants to do. It's something he cannot resist. And things go wrong because of it ... he is messing up ROYALLY because of his "thirst" ... but still, the thirst remains. Also where Joyce is wonderful is in suggesting that Farrington has turned drinking into this romantic undertaking - that has very little to do with reality. It's like Farrington thinks of a drink - and he sees a warm pub, and loud voices, the clink of glasses, camaraderie ... THAT is what he yearns for the most. Perhaps we could call it connection with his fellow man. But every time he does go and get an ACTUAL drink in the story - it is never like what he sees in his imagination. He has no money. He has already tapped out the bartenders, who have very little patience for him. And so he is perpetually disappointed in his search. He keeps looking for something ... that glow, that warm glow he remembers ... not realizing that it's already gone too far for him to find that glow ever again.

Farrington works as a clerk, copying out documents. He is bad at his job. The story opens with him being in trouble with the boss. Farrington cannot set his nose to any task ... because the spectre of that night's drinking binge looms in his head, a fantastic and beckoning castle ... and so he can never concentrate properly. You can tell that this is a theme, because everyone is already angry with him when the story begins.

He has to finish a certain document by 5. He only has an hour until 5 ... but the need for a drink becomes so acute that he pops out of the office to the pub and has a quick drink. Which, naturally, doesn't help at all - and only makes him even more behind in his work.

He goes out with a bunch of men after work - they drink - Farrington has money issues - he pawned his watch in order to have enough for drinks that night ... there's drunkenness ... there's an arm-wrestling match that Farrington loses, and he can't let it go ...

Farrington is a beaten dog. A growling beaten dog. He goes home to an empty cold house. Where is his wife? She stepped out to church. His son goes to warm up some dinner for him - and Farrington - already in a rage about EVERYTHING - goes after his son with his belt. The story ends with the son pleading with his father not to beat him, and that he will say a "Hail Mary" if only his father won't beat him ...

A violent and bleak story. Unlike the other stories leading up to this one, there is no possibility of escape for Farrington. He doesn't dream of Argentina or America or London. He can't. He can barely get through the day. His escape is in the bottle.

One other thing I noticed: All of the names of the people in the office - Farrington's boss and higher-ups - Crosby, Higgins, Miss Parker - are all distinctly British. Farrington goes out to a pub, and a very fashionable lady whom he had been admiring from afar, brushes by his chair, and says "Pardon" in a noticeably "London" accent. Farrington's drinking buddies - O'Halloran, Nosey Flynn, etc. - are almost caricatures of Irish names. As Farrington staggers drunkenly through Dublin, he passes by the British army barracks in the middle of the city. Joyce does not pull his punches - although the clues may be subtle, and noticeable only to those who are looking for them. Ireland, in this story, feels like an occupied country. Farrington's boss is British. The lady he admires in the pub is British. The British are everywhere. Again, Joyce doesn't ever made a big obvious deal over this. It's all in the NAMES. Joyce puts the blame firmly on the shoulders of the British - of what has happened to Ireland and Irish men.

And let's not forget the Catholic Church either which certainly does not escape the condemnation of James Joyce. Farrington comes home, drunk, angry. His wife is out at church. He beats his son, who offers up a Hail Mary in order to get the beating to stop. Joyce sure isn't parroting the line, "Oh, look what a solace our faith is to us." Faith is useless to that little boy. The church is useless to its people, who suffer under occupation, and have no way out. Joyce left the faith, obviously (and one of the ways Nora threatened him - when it seemed like he would never return to her in Trieste - was to tell him she was going to baptise their son Giorgio. Joyce came home right-quick. Don't you DARE baptise our son!) - and Portrait of the Artist goes into this in a much more detailed manner - where Stephen Dedalus must shed the influences of country, religion, language, family - in order to become an artist. The whole Catholic chapter is one of my favorites in that extraordinary book, but I'll get to that later.

Here's an excerpt. I wanted to choose an excerpt that showed Farrington's yearning for a drink and how Joyce writes about that. Here it is.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Counterparts".

The man returned to the lower office and sat down again at his desk. He stared intently at the incomplete phrase: In no case shall the said Bernard Bodley be ... and thought how strange it was that the last three words began with the same letter. The chief clerk began to hurry Miss Parker, saying she would never have the letters typed in time for post. The man listened to the clicking of the machine for a few minutes and then set to work to finish his copy. But his head was not clear and his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle of the public-house. It was a night for hot punches. He struggled on with his copy, but when the clock struck five he had still fourteen pages to write. Blast it! He couldn't finish it in time. He longed to execrate aloud, to bring his fist down on something violently. He was so enraged that he wrote Bernard Bernard instead of Bernard Bodley and had to begin again on a clean sheet.

He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office singlehanded. His body ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. All the indignities of his life enraged him ... Could he ask the cashier privately for an advance? No, the cashier was no good, no damn good: he wouldn't give an advance ... He knew where he would meet the boys: Leonard and O'Halloran and Nosey Flynn. The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

His imagination had so abstracted him that his name was called twice before he answered Mr. Alleyn and Miss Delacour were standing outside the counter and all the clerks had turned round in anticipation of something. The man got up from his desk. Mr. Alleyne began a tirade of abuse, saying that two letters were missing. The man answered that he knew nothing about them, that he had made a faithful copy. The tirade continued.. It was so bitter and violent that the man could hardly restrain his fist from descending upon the head of the manikin before him.

-- I know nothing about any other two letters, he said stupidly.

-- You -- know -- nothing. Of course you know nothing, said Mr. Alleyne. Tell me, he added, glancing first for approval to the lady beside him, do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool?

The man glanced from the lady's face to the little egg-shaped head and back again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous moment:

-- I don't think, sir, he said, that that's a fair question to put to me.

There was a pause in the very breathing of the clerks. Everyone was astounded (the author of the witticism no less than his neighbours) and Miss Delacour, who was a stout amiable person, began to smile broadly. Mr. Alleyne flushed to the hue of a wild rose and his mouth twitched with a dwarf's passion. He shook his fist in the man's face till it seemed to vibrate like the knob of some electric machine:

-- You impertinent ruffian! You impertinent ruffian! I'll make short work of you! Wait till you see! You'll apologise to me for your impertinence or you'll quit the office instanter! You'll quit this, I'm telling you, or you'll apologise to me!

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'A Little Cloud' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the eighth story in the collection: "A Little Cloud".

One of the most suffocating and overtly miserable stories in the collection. Even I, the reader, feels suffocated - because Little Chandler, the "hero" of this story is kind of a pathetic chap, you can immediately see he's full of illusions (delusions) that have no basis in reality - and it's hard to get behind him, and root for him. Because you know it's hopeless. Not just because Dublin offers nothing to its people - and Chandler can't have the life he wants THERE, he would have to leave. But because Little Chandler himself is a timid unimaginative kind of silly man ... and having a life of greatness and interest and romance is not in the cards for him. Even if he lived in Paris and went to the Moulin Rouge every night. His constitution, his emotional makeup - is that of a deeply conventional fearful cautious person. That's the deal, Chandler. You are never going to frolic with dancers in Berlin, you are never going to publish a book of poetry that will get mild critical acclaim. Nope. Not because you are not worthy ... but because you don't have it in you. You just don't.

So reading the story is kind of unpleasant. It has some of my favorite writing in it, in the collection.

Little Chandler is 32. He lives in Dublin with his wife and baby. He is an uptight rigid conservative guy - who also has a dreamy streak, or maybe it would be best to call it a rebellious streak. He bucks against the limitations of his life and wonders if there is anything more. Who is he? Does he have anything to offer the world? He loves poetry. His wife doesn't like it. So he reads poetry by himself. He wonders if he could ever write a poem? But he's so bound by convention he can't see himself out of the dead end.

An old friend, Gallaher, had gone to London 8 years before - had fled Ireland under shady monetary circumstances. But now he has returned for a visit, all flushed with success. He's a journalist, and comes back - all BMOC. Little Chandler meets up with him at a bar - the kind of bar frequented by the elite of Dublin, a place Little Chandler feels intimidated. Chandler is a bit of a priss, much is made (by Joyce) about his neatness, his little teeth, his neat fingernails, his combed mustache ... He doesn't drink all that much. He is easily shocked by things. He meets up with Gallaher - who is doing a big show of how great it is to be back, but also bragging about the fleshpots of Europe, and bragging about Paris, etc. He seems to echo Little Chandler's nagging suspicion that in order to do anything with your life you must leave Ireland.

However - in this story - unlike the stories preceding it, where leaving Ireland is seen in a purely romantic (and also necessary) way - 'A Little Cloud', for the first time in the collection, raises the possibility that maybe leaving Ireland is NOT the only answer. Or - maybe when you leave Ireland, life is NOT automatically better and happier and more successful. Because Gallaher does seem happier and freer - but he's also rude, and braggadocious, and ... completely unlikable. So ... leaving Ireland did not transform him into some elegant gentleman - the way Chandler would imagine ... The bad qualities of Gallaher which were already apparent 8 years before have just intensified in his exile. Joyce is starting to move away from the earlier stories of the collection - where the outlook is mainly from a child/adolescent narrator - who looks at the ships in the quays and automatically assumes that everyone on them is happier than those in Ireland - because they don't live there, they get to leave. Places like America and Norway are suffused with romance and glow in the earlier stories ... but now, here, in 'A Little Cloud' - we are in adulthood, we are now faced with the fact that having such illusions (delusions) about leaving Ireland is babyish. What seems to matter, in the end, for all of us - is character. Do you have it, or do you not? What do you want? How do you make something of your life, regardless of where you live?

Chandler leaves his encounter with Gallaher, all worked up and nervous. He feels trapped. He goes home, and takes care of his crying baby while his wife steps out - and he's all twisted up in his head. He tries to recite some Byron, but the wailing baby interrupts his mood. Then, for the first time, we feel rage coming up in Chandler. He wonders why he married his wife - a prim little prissy woman (very much like himself). He thinks about the slutty women Gallaher bragged about - the German women, Jewish women - and wonders why he chose such a rigid little lady. (Dude, you couldn't handle a free-spirited woman if you tried!) His wife comes home, and sees the crying baby - and immediately blames her husband for it. "What did you do?" She scoops up the baby - completely cutting him out of the picture ... and Chandler is perceptive enough to have seen the hatred in her eyes, in that small moment. He is ashamed, remorseful, full of longing, sadness ... and that is how the story ends.

Good times, good times.

There's an echo here of what happened in 'After the Race' (excerpt here - where Jimmy gets swindled at a card game by a bunch of sophisticated Europeans. Jimmy is out of his league. He wants to be sophisticated, he feels better about himself because he is hanging out with Europeans as opposed to Irishmen - he thinks that makes him better than others. But we can see, as readers, that just because these folks are European - they aren't necessarily "better". They're more jaded, perhaps more carefree ... but not being from Ireland is not necessarily the be-all end-all of existence. Joyce begins to hint in that story that the problem might NOT be Ireland itself, but something else - something more individual, personal.

He brings that to fruition in 'A Little Cloud'. Gallaher is an asshole. It doesn't matter that he's lived abroad. And Little Chandler is a prude who has to walk the straight and narrow, and sadly - dreams of being a poetic romantic soul. Never gonna happen, Chandler. Doesn't matter if you change your geographical setting. You're still gonna be a little bore. It ain't IRELAND holding you down, bub.

Oh, and naturally: Joyce writes about Chandler with insight and compassion. He doesn't have contempt for him. He SEES him.

Here's an excerpt. Chandler is walking thru Dublin to meet Gallaher. Thoughts begin to emerge ... things bubbling up.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "A Little Cloud".

Little Chandler quickened his pace. For the first time in his life he felt himself superior to the people he passed. For the first time his soul revolted against the dull inelegance of Capel Street. There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin. As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night to bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. He wondered whether he could write a poem to express his idea. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some London paper for him. Could he write something original? He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.

Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old - thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get. Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse ... A wistful sadness pervades these poems ... The Celtic note. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking. Perhaps it would be better to insert his mother's name before the surname: Thomas Malone Chandler, or better still. T. Malone Chandler. He would speak to Gallaher about it.

He pursued his revery so ardently that he passed his street and had to turn back. As he came near Corless's his former agitation began to overmaster him and he halted before the door in indecision. Finally he opened the door and entered.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'The Boarding House' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the seventh story in the collection: "The Boarding House". Another story that highlights the suffocation of Dublin, the rigid morality that Joyce found so oppressive, the gossip, the hypocrisy. A simple tale: Mrs. Mooney runs a boarding house in Dublin. She had been married to a guy who basically went to the dogs the minute Mrs. Mooney's father died. He took to drink, and one night he got violent with her. So Mrs. Mooney left, got permission from her priest to get a separation - and custody of the kids -and set herself up in business. She's a practical woman. Joyce describes her face as "florid" which has all kinds of connotations, none of them good. Being practical is fine - but in the context of this story it is not. She runs a boarding house - and you can tell it's kind of a free and easy place, filled with bachelors and artists. She has two children - one of whom is a daughter, about 17 years of age. It's not really an appropriate atmosphere for children - but somehow Joyce suggests that Mrs. Mooney doesn't mind that, and she also - let's just say this: Polly, her daughter, hangs out with the men who live there - and Mrs. Mooney looks the other way, thinking that maybe one of them will step up to the plate, and take Polly off her hands. So ... morality is a relative concept to Mrs. Mooney. Her daughter begins an affair with Mr. Dolan, one of the men in the house. Everyone knows about it. Dublin is a small gossipy place, you can't hide anything. Mrs. Mooney, who sees all, does not intervene. At least not at first. She is setting a trap for Mr. Dolan. Mrs. Mooney knows that Mr. Dolan has no intention of marrying her daughter (the Mooneys don't have the best reputation - due to the drunkard of a father, etc.) - but she waits, waits ... until she senses that the affair between the two has grown physical. She doesn't intervene BEFORE then, with her teenaged daughter - as you might think she would ... she waits until it has already happened. And THEN makes her move. Reparations must be made. Mr. Dolan must marry Polly. He has sullied Polly's honor, and he must marry her.

Mrs. Mooney scares me. She's written in almost a grotesque way. Mrs. Mooney SELLS Polly to Mr. Dolan - who really doesn't want her, although he has enjoyed their affair. But he, on some level, is embarrassed by Polly - her bad grammar, and also her kind of shady family. What will his friends say? His family?

Mr. Dolan is no match for Mrs. Mooney.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Dubliners - by James Joyce - "The Boarding House".

It was not altogether his fault that it had happened. He remembered well, with the curious patient memory of the celibate, the first casual caresses her dress, her breath, her fingers had given him. Then late one night as he was undressing for bed she had tapped at his door, timidly. She wanted to relight her candle at his for hers had been blown out by a gust. It was her bath night. She wore a loose open combing-jacket of printed flannel. Her white instep shone in the opening of her furry slippers and the blood glowed warmly behind her perfumed skin. From her hands and wrists too as she lit and steadied her candle a faint perfume arose.

On nights when he came in very late it was she who warmed up his dinner. He scarcely knew what he was eating, feeling her beside him alone, at night, in the sleeping house. And her thoughtfulness! If the night was anyway cold or wet or windy there was sure to be a little tumbler of punch ready for him. Perhaps they could be happy together ...

They used to go upstairs together on tiptoe, each with a candle, and on the third landing exchange reluctant good-nights. They used to kiss. He remembered well her eyes, the touch of her hand and his delirium ...

But delirium passes. He echoed her phrase, applying it to himself: What am I to do? The instinct of the celibate warned him to hold back. But the sin was there; even his sense of honour told him that reparation must be made for such a sin.

While he was sitting with her on the side of the bed Mary came to the door a nd said that the missus wanted to see him in the parlour. He stood up to put on his coat and waistcoat, more helpless than ever. When he was dressed he went over to her to comfort her. It would be all right, never fear. He left her crying on the bed and moaning softly: O my God!

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Two Gallants' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the sixth story in the collection: "Two Gallants". Another story where nothing much really happens ... yet worlds are suggested within worlds. It's a bit dizzying, too - in true Joyce fashion - a style he will use again and again, most notably in Ulysses - where characters wander the streets of Dublin, and the place names and streets come at you fast and furious - you could seriously track every character's progress, you could walk through Dublin, with the book open - and follow it like a road map. Dubliners is full of place names and streets - never more so than in "Two Gallants". He walked down the block, took a left, crossed Grafton Street, etc. etc. It's obsessive. It calls attention to itself. What is Joyce doing here? Why is he so insistent on that level of specificity? Of something so mundane? It seems to me that it was one of the ways he tried to make his stories seem real. It also was, in a twisted way, an homage to Dublin - there was that one comment he made, I think about Ulysses, that if Dublin burned to the ground, he would hope it could be resurrected exactly as it was - merely from the information in his books. Something like that. Well, you sure could do that with "Two Gallants" - a 6 page story with a circuitous route in it. You notice that Lenehan - the moocher, the guy with nowhere to go - pretty much ends up where he started. If you know Dublin (even a bit, like i do - I can picture a lot of these places in my head - the corner of St. Stephen's Green, etc.) - then you can get a sense of where he's going - and it's a big circle. Lenehan ain't going nowhere. But that's the structure of a lot of these stories - "After the Race", "Eveline" ... it appears that a journey is being taken, and ground is being covered, but the characters always end up where they started. Dublin as maze? Dublin as dead end.

I wonder if "gallants" is ironic. To me, "gallant" connotes a kind of grace, and social ease. But these two guys do not have that. So I wonder if "gallant" had a different connotation back then, or if Joyce is joking about it ... like: this is the best that Ireland can produce, in the way of "gallants". It seems rather Joycean to have a bit of wordplay, even in the title, but I'm not sure. Corley and Lenehan - two "gallants" - stroll around Dublin on a Sunday twilight. Corley is in the midst of telling a story to Lenehan - about how he picked up this girl, and he's been "seeing" her. It's clear, though, from the details given - that she is a prostitute - who also works as a housekeeper (a "slavey"). There are even discussions of birth control - Corley was afraid "she'd get in the family way" - but apparently there are no worries on that score - "she's up to the dodge." Pretty bold stuff for early 1900s Catholic Ireland. Corley bitches about other girls he's seen - and how he has to take them out, and buy them chocolates, and what does he get for it? Nothing! Might as well just pay for sex, because you'd be paying women ANYway, might as well get something out of it. Corley talks about some of those other girls - how only got "something" out of one of them! Lenehan refuses to believe this - Corley says casually that there had been other men before him, he wasn't her first. Lenehan now knows Corley is lying! Etc. Etc. The two gallants wander a circular path, talking in this manner - I can't believe it's a coincidence either that all of this is taking place on a Sunday. Knowing Joyce's feelings about the Catholic Church, it would be like him to make this lecherous sexual conversation occur on a holy day.

Corley is going to meet his girl. It becomes clear that he is up to something - and Lenehan is in on it. Some kind of scam - Lenehan wonders if the girl is up for it? I remember thinking, when I first read the story, that it seemed like Corley was going to "share" his girl with Lenehan - and all it would take would be for Corley to arrange it. That's what I thought was going on. Lenehan - kind of a bum, a wanderer, a mooch - has lonely visions in his head of one day having a home, and a fire to sit by, and maybe a woman there, too. He's 31 years old. Will that ever happen? From what we see of his personality, the odds of that are pretty slim.

Corley meets up with his girl, outside the house where she is a servant. Lenehan watches from across the street, and then follows them, shadily, as they walk away. Corley and Lenehan have a plan to meet up at 10 on a certain street corner. Lenehan, once he loses track of the two, is on his own. You can feel how adrift he is. He stops by a shop and has some peas and a ginger beer. He wanders, this way, that - until the appointed meeting time. (The street where they have chosen to meet up, by the way, is a dead end. Ha ha. Joyce knew what he was doing.)

Corley appears again, with the girl - he drops her off at the house where she works. She goes inside via the basement door - and reappears at the front door a bit later, and hands something to Corley - before going back inside. Corley goes to meet Lenehan with a weird little smile on his face, Lenehan eagerly asks if it all came off, their little plot - and Corley opens his hand, to show a gleaming gold coin. She obviously had stolen it from the house where she works.

Kind of a depressing little story, and all the people are rather nasty. There's a beautiful moment, during their wanderings, where they pass by a harp player - on the street, playing an Irish tune. The harp - a symbol of Ireland - it's on their 5 cent coins - it's everywhere. And most of the places Corley and Lenehan pass by (except for the harpist) are symbols of Protestant Dublin - like Trinity College, and other places. Bastions of the ruling power. This is all done really subtly - and you'd have to know the symbolism to get that level of the story, you'd have to know what Trinity College means and has meant to Ireland - its huge walls, sitting smack in the middle of the city - filled with Protestants. Anyway, it seems to me that Joyce here is being bitchy and QUITE clear about what he thinks has gone wrong, and what IS wrong. The harp player, lonely, begging for money on the street, etc.

Corley is the son of a police chief. Yet here he is canoodling with prostitutes, and engaging in petty crime. And why? It seems just for the hell of it. Corley isn't really wanting for money.

Dublin: nowhere to go, nowhere to be ... young men, "gallants", just wandering around, on a Sunday evening ... with nothing to do but get in trouble. The women are up to no good either.

"Two Gallants", seen in the day and age in which it was written, is a shocking story. And the obsessive naming of streets and corners and landmarks adds to what was probably shocking about it. It feels like it could be from a newspaper story. It's giving details, evidence ... saying: "This really happened". Joyce doesn't let anyone off the hook.

Here's an excerpt from the conversation between the "two gallants".

Excerpt from Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Two Gallants"

Lenehan offered his friend a cigarette. As the two young men walked on through the crowd Corley occasionally turned to smile at some of the passing girls but Lenehan's gaze was fixed on the large faint moon circled with a double halo. He watched earnestly the passing of the grey web of twilight across its face. At length he said:

-- Well ... tell me, Corley, I suppose you'll be able to pull it off all right, eh?

Corley closed one eye expressively as an answer.

-- Is she game for that? asked Lenehan dubiously. You can never know women.

-- She's all right, said Corley. I know the way to get around her, man. She's a bit gone on me.

-- You're what I call a gay Lothario, said Lenehan. And the proper kind of a Lothario, too!

A shade of mockery relieved the servility of his manner. To save himself he had the habit of leaving his flattery open to the interpretation of raillery. But Corley had not a subtle mind.

-- There's nothing to touch a good slavey, he affirmed. Take my tip for it.

-- By one who has tried them all, said Lenehan.

-- First I tried to go with girls, you know, said Corley, unbosoming; girls off the South Circular. I used to take them out, man, on the tram somewhere and pay the tram or take them to a band or a play at the theatre or buy them chocolates and sweets or something that way. I used to spend money on them right enough, he added, in a convincing tone, as if he were conscious of being disbelieved.

But Lenehan could well believe it; he nodded gravely.

-- I know that game, he said, and it's a mug's game.

-- And damn the thing I ever got out of it, said Corley.

-- Ditto here, said Lenehan.

-- Only off of one of them, said Corley.

He moistened his upper lip by running his tongue along it. The recollection brightened his eyes. He too gazed at the pale disc of the moon, now nearly veiled, and seemed to meditate.

-- She was ... a bit of all right, he said regretfully.

He was silent again. Then he added:

-- She's on the turf now. I saw her driving down Earl Street one night with two fellows with her on a car.

-- I suppose that's your doing, said Lenehan.

-- There was others at her before me, said Corley philosophically.

This time Lenehan was inclined to disbelieve. He shook his head to and fro and smiled.

-- You know you can't kid me, Corley, he said.

-- Honest to God! said Corley. Didn't she tell me herself?

Lenehan made a tragic gesture.

-- Base betrayer! he said.

As they passed along the railings of Trinity College, Lenehan skipped out into the road and peered up at the clock.

-- Twenty after, he said.

-- Time enough, said Corley. She'll be there all right. I always let her wait a bit.

Lenehan laughed quietly.

-- Ecod! Corley, you know how to take them, he said.

-- I'm up to all their little tricks, Corley confessed.

-- But tell me, said Lenehan again, are you sure you can bring it off all right? You know it's a ticklish job. They're damn close on that point. Eh? ... What?

His bright, small eyes searched his companion's face for reassurance. Corley swung his head to and fro as if to toss aside an insistent insect, and his brows gathered.

-- I'll put it off, he said. Leave it to me, can't you?

Lenehan said no more. He did not wish to ruffle his friend's temper, to be sent to the devil and told that his advice was not wanted. A little tact was necessary. But Corley's brow was soon smooth again. His thoughts were running another way.

-- She's a fine decent tart, he said, with appreciation; that's what she is.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'After the Race' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the fifth story in the collection: "After the Race". With this story, Joyce moves the collection out of the realm of childhood and adolescence - and moves into young adulthood. If I'm not mistaken, there is an unbroken progression in this manner right up to the elegiac last story, with the wings of death beating over it. I would imagine that it is this type of story ("After the Race", I mean) that would have so disturbed George Bernard Shaw when he read it. The picture of what Ireland has to offer its young men is not a pretty one. And Shaw knew, personally, the aimlessness of most young men in Dublin - nothing to do but get into trouble, pretty much. And this in a Catholic country! It would be hard to look at "After the Race" now and be truly shocked by it, so much has changed - adolescence lasts longer, we expect young people to make mistakes now - etc. etc. But back then, it was as though James Joyce was telling a family secret, with stories such as this one. How dare he?? He didn't go along with the Irish Renaissance of the time, either - which romanticized certain aspects of Irish life, the whole Celtic twilight thing. Joyce was like fuck THAT. But then - of course - with 'The Dead' - the last story in the collection - he turns all of this around, a mirror image of all the rest. With its closing telescopic vision of the snow falling over the countryside ... and its haunting never really explained line "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward." Multiple layers of meaning there. Moving towards death, sure - but there was also, at the time, a romanticization of the west of Ireland, its supposedly untouched peasantry, the Irish language, the purity of the life out there (Synge went out to live on the Aran Islands, to get closer to the "real" Irish) - and to some degree that romanticization still exists today, although I would say that most Irish folks nowadays don't worry about it too much or think about it too much. You know, they're a modern country, they have other issues, whatever - like all nations. But in Joyce's time, in Irish literature - it was allll about "the west". Look to "the west" to see who we REALLY are. If you want to write authentically about Ireland, you have to write about "the west", etc. etc. Joyce never wrote about "the west" - and this book is obviously called "The Dubliners" for a reason. He's a city boy. He writes about the meanderings of urban people, not peasants or country folk. In "The Dead" - something else starts to happen. Gabriel's wife (based on Joyce's own love - Nora Barnacle, from Galway - a Western Irish girl if ever there was one) is from the "west" - she had fled to Dublin to get away from the memories, etc. But the end of the story reverses time a bit ... and it is as though we are high above the land, looking down upon it, the snow covering the fields ... and we are moving west ... at last. Ah, it's glorious. Such a glorious story.

In "After the Race" - we see what sorts of entertainment are available to young men in Dublin. There's a motor-car race - that starts in the country and comes into Dublin. One of the cars - owned by a couple of Frenchmen - is the one we are concerned with. There are 4 passengers in this motorcar - the 2 Frenchmen (and because they come from Europe - or, let's just say - NOT Ireland) - are suffused with mystic importance, as though they know something that the ordinary Irishman can never know. There's a serious inferiority complex at work here, that makes my heart ache. I want to tell Jimmy to not do that to himself, or his countrymen ... to not feel LESS THAN just because he's Irish ... but he can't help it. For generations, Irish people looked at their homeland as something they needed to get away from. For opportunities, etc. If you were from somewhere ELSE, you obviously had a leg-up on the regular old Irishman. Okay, and then there are 2 other people in the car - a Hungarian (great character, hysterical) - and Jimmy, the lone Irishman. These four have become connected through various channels - they're friends, of a sort - and about to become business partners. Jimmy's father is proud of Jimmy, and they have invested in the motor-car business of the Frenchmen ... But somehow the effect of reading the story is that all of this is rather tenuous. Jimmy isn't confident of himself - he's all puffed up with vanity because he's seen hanging around with the Frenchmen - he enjoys the envious (so he thinks) gazes of his fellow Dubliners ... The whole point for him is to elevate himself above the masses. Since there's a drunken conversation about politics at the end of the story - I imagine that there are nationalistic issues at play here as well. It's not just that Jimmy is insecure and wants his new friends to like him. It's that he's IRISH, and he feels better about himself when he's hanging out with "continentals" than with his own peeps. This is not a stretch, I don't think - I think that's part of what Joyce is writing about here, and why the story is a mini-tragedy. Not a sweeping elegiac tragedy - like "The Dead" - but a small portrait of a nation's inferiority complex ... and how Jimmy, in trying to keep up with his European friends, loses big.

Here's an excerpt.

Excerpt from Dubliners - by James Joyce - "After the Race".

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy's excitement. He had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals. At the control Segouin had presented him to one of the French competitors and, in answer to his confused murmur of compliment, the swarthy face of the driver had disclosed a line of shining white teeth. It was pleasant after that honour to return to the profane world of spectators amid nudges and significant looks. Then as to money - he really had a great sum under his control. Segouin, perhaps, would not think it a great sum but Jimmy who, in spite of temporary errors, was at heart the inheritor of solid instincts knew well with what difficulty it had been got together. This knowledge had previously kept his bills within the limits of reasonable recklessness and, if he had been so conscious of the labour latent in money when there had been question merely of some freak of the higher intelligence, how much more so now when he was about to stake the greater part of his substance! It was a serious thing for him.

Of course, the investment was a good one and Segouin had managed to give the impression that it was by a favour of friendship the mite of Irish money was to be included in the capital of the concern. Jimmy had a respect for his father's shrewdness in business matters and in this case it had been his father who had first suggested the investment; money to be made in the motor business, pots of money. Moreover Segouin had the unmistakeable air of wealth. Jimmy set out to translate into days' work that lordly car in which he sat. How smoothly it ran. In what style they had come careering along the country roads! The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses of the swift blue animal.

They drove down Dame Street. The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the Bank Segouin drew up and Jimmy and his friend alighted. A little knot of people collected on the footpath to pay homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that evening in Segouin's hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers. They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Eveline' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the fourth story in the collection: "Eveline".

Another story in the collection that has exile as its theme. The only way to be happy, apparently, and free - is to leave Ireland. But as is apparent in "Eveline" - leaving is not an easy choice. As Eveline is a young woman - who is planning to run off to Buenos Aires with a young man, a sailor - whose name is Frank. There is nothing really keeping her in Ireland - except the ties of family and culture - her mother is dead (and on her deathbed she said to Eveline: "Keep the family together ...") - her two brothers are grown-up and gone - and her father ... well. She's kind of afraid of her father. She's too old now to be beaten by him, and he never did hit her that much - he saved THAT brand of love for his sons ... but she is still afraid of him. He dominates her choices, tells her to never see that Frank sailor person again, etc. She sits at her window - for the majority of the story (which is only 4 pages long) .... and the boat is sailing that afternoon ... and she goes over her choices, her mind going this way, that way ... On the brink of leaving Ireland, she suddenly sees her life in a different light, a more forgiving light ... her life isn't THAT bad here, etc. It's not that she's waffling. It is that this is truly a difficult choice. At that time, if you move to Argentina from Ireland - you'll probably never go home again. You can't leap on a flight and go home once a year, visit the old soil, etc. It's over. Say goodbye. You will never see this place again. Eveline grapples. It also doesn't sound like her love for Frank is of the sweeping soulmate variety. He represents escape and adult womanhood ... it's not like she's so in love with him it hurts, or that she loves him so much she MUST be with him ... It's that her life in Ireland is made up of doing for others, and drudgery, and dull colors, and "odour of ashpits" - and for her whole life she's been dying for a way out. Frank represents that. Joyce makes Ireland seem pretty bleak ... that's one of the reasons why Irish publishers and Irish people in general balked at the book. They got their backs up. Joyce's reply to all that was: "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."

Until the last moment of the story, you think she will get on that boat with Frank. But she can't. She just can't. Ties of home and Ireland are too strong.

And - as with all of these stories - the last sentence packs a huge punch. Frank stands calling to her from the ship, devastated that she won't come. She stares up at him and her face "gave no sign of love or farewell or recognition."

Shivers. That's some cold shite right there. It's almost like once she decides to stay (even though it feels like the decision is made FOR her, it comes from a primal place - not in the intellect) - it's apparent that she never meant to leave anyway. The whole Frank thing, the whole grappling thing ... it's as though it never happened. Snap. Done.

Here's an excerpt - the opening of the story. You can feel the sense of impending change from the very beginning: new houses going up at the end of the street, where she used to play ... brick houses ... different ...

Excerpt from Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Eveline".

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last home passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people's children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it - not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field - the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grownup. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

-- He is in Melbourne now.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'Araby' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the third story in the collection: "Araby". I read this story in high school - and I remember (weird what sticks in your brain) that during my first semester in college I had to write a paper for English about a short story I had already read - and I chose 'Araby' - Not sure why, but I did. And I also remember (I'm sure because I wrote about it in my journal at the time - that's the only way I remember things) staying up all night in the fluorescent-lit common room of my horrible all-girls dorm and writing my paper. I remember it was one of the first times in my academic paper-writing experience where I felt that I actually had an IDEA, my own idea about the story - and I could back it up with textual proof. And the idea itself actually interested me - and so I felt that I could write about it interestingly. You know how so often in college you're writing papers about something just because you have to? And there's a kind of drudgery to that kind of writing - but I had some kind of breakthrough with my 'Araby' paper. It's not that it wrote itself - but I felt like I was articulating something about the story that meant something to me ... and I was able to do so without just rambling on aimlessly - because Mr. Crothers, my 10th grade English teacher, had taught me how to write a paper. I knew how to set it up. Anyway, I got an A on the paper - my first "A" in a college setting, and I remember being really proud of that.

My idea was all about blindness, and light and dark - as I recall - the main symbolic themes of the story. The theme of blindness comes up again and again - it's even in the first sentence: "North Richmond Street, being blind ..." But of course Joyce is referring to another kind of blindness.

One of my things with Araby, though, is that I so FEEL for that little kid (I was just talking with my dad about this yesterday) - you WANT him to succeed, and get to the fair, and buy a gift for the girl and all to be well. You don't get the sense that he's a little puff-puff snot, or an obnoxious vain personality ... He seems kind of sweet and sensitive. So the last sentence of the story - with its rage and self-hatred - is almost painful for me to read. Like; no no no don't feel bad about YOURSELF because you couldn't get to the fair on time! I want to save that little boy from years of trouble!! No need to hate yourSELF! Maybe I'm thinking about Cashel hating himself, seeing Cashel in that setting - I don't know - it's just painful to think of that little kid in Araby turning his sights on himself with such contempt.

But I know I did such things as a child myself.

And events in childhood do have an effect, and sometimes leaves a groove that lasts forever. We are forever marked. It may not make much sense to the adult world ... what we see as little problems, or things that should pass ... are tremendously important to children. Like this story. I have to say - when I look back on that event, one of the things I remember is "white-hot shame" coursing through my veins. I felt duped, I felt that I had been stupid and naive. I was 9 years old. I did not forgive myself for being duped. I stuffed that shame far far down and pretended everything was okay - and I never looked back (until deciding to write about it a bazillion years later). I blamed mySELF for that failed "flying up" ceremony. I didn't sit there philosophically and think, "Well, nobody told me we wouldn't get real wings ... it's an honest mistake ... no need to freak ..." I internalized it ALL, and I looked around - and saw that nobody ELSE was disappointed, nobody else had thought the wings would be real - only I did - stupid little dope Sheila. Childhood is intense, man. Woah.

'Araby' is another 5 page story - simple, direct, powerful. A little boy lives with his aunt and uncle in Dublin. He has a good friend - another little boy - who has an older sister. She's probably 15, 16 - and our narrator is always SUPER aware of her. Perhaps he's not a little boy, maybe he's on the verge of adolescence himself ... it's not made clear. Anyway, she walks by his house - and he goes to the window to watch (and enjoy) her movements. Does he have a crush? Maybe. It's not made clear. It's all in the senses - nothing intellectual or cerebral. Like he has an encounter with her on the stairway at the friend's house - and all he is aware of is her bracelets, and her ankles, and the softness of her - She seems like the most beautiful creature who has ever lived.

There's a fair in Dublin - or maybe it's more a bazaar - it's made to sound rather mystical and mysterious - it's referred to as "Araby" - and narrator says to girl, casually, "I'll bring you something from Araby."

The casual tone he takes belies the fact that this is not an empty promise to him - it is his entire reason for living. It is the most important thing ever, like a sacrament. He will bring her something from Araby. I am just seeing, in my head right now, someone Cashel's age making such a promise - and how important promises are to children. Adults promise things all the time, and never follow through. Children learn NOT to believe when someone says "I promise ..." So it's intense, it's meaningful.

Then - through a series of mishaps and ... well, basically realizing that his uncle didn't MEAN it when he said, "I promise I'll take you down to Araby after such and such ..." and it gets too late, and his uncle hasn't shown up - and there's a quiet desperation here ... He SAID he would bring her something from Araby! What if he doesnt succeed??

I'm writing about this haunting story very badly (where is that A paper from college??) - all I can say is, it's amazing - one of the best parts of the collection. Painful. Symbolically rich. Gives the reader a feeling of being a helpless observer.

Oh, a funny thing from my conversation with my dad about Dubliners - we were chatting about the different stories (dad just re-read it last year) - and talking about how good it all is, how precise, and perfect each story is - the order of the stories, how one goes to the other, etc. How good Joyce is. But then, as dad said, you get to 'The Dead' - the last story in the collection - and it makes all the rest seem almost like bad stories. Like: where the hell did THAT come from?

That's why I say: read the collection in order, if you want to pick it up and haven't encountered it yet.

Okay, so here's an excerpt from the painful perfect little story 'Araby':

Excerpt from Dubliners - by James Joyce - "Araby".

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gantlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan's sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan's steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung and she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Doovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'An Encounter' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce - excerpt from the second story in the collection: "An Encounter".

A creepy little story that follows on the heels of the death-theme in 'The Sisters', the story before it. Only this one has to do with spiritual death. Although I suppose you can say that the priest in 'The Sisters' - who loses it (mentally) after breaking a chalice - also has to do with spiritual death. In 'An Encounter', we start to see Joyce's feelings about Ireland - and what it has to offer to its young sons. The only opportunities are outside of Ireland. There's that one letter Joyce wrote to Nora - before they de-camped forever - something about "nobody can touch each other here" ... He didn't just mean sexually, although that was part of his meaning. He felt that the rigidity of the morality in Ireland caused love and intimacy to become twisted and sick. And I suppose if you look at 'An Encounter' in that light (which I couldn't help but doing - that letter Joyce wrote to Nora came into my mind immediately when I re-read the story last night) - it's quite a tragic story. Because what are we here for, on this planet, except to love one another? The encounter that the two young boys playing hookie have in this story is incredibly creepy, and I suppose acts as some kind of warning to our young narrator. The man they meet in the field, his yellow teeth, his creepy monotonous voice, his twisted sexuality ... perhaps it says to the young narrator: "One day, this could be you!"

The story begins with a game of wild Indians. Our narrator, a schoolboy, loves these games, but more than that - he loves what they signify. (Excerpt below).

But there's a vague dissatisfaction in all of this - because he knows he will never have such adventures at home. You can feel the stifling atmosphere in the story. Not just of his house, or of Dublin - but of the whole damn country. He and a friend end up playing hookey one day - they want to cross the Liffey in a ferryboat, and go off to some destination where they can have an Indian war, and be completely wild. So. They meet up one morning and off they go. Along the quays, the narrator is struck by the boats lined up ... one is a Norwegian vessel, which really strikes his fancy. (Let's remember Joyce's obsession with Ibsen.) He stares at the markings on the ship, and also scans the faces of all the sailors - looking for blue eyes, which somehow seems to mean something to him. However, he doesn't see any blue eyes. Perhaps because the sailors, as is true with most ships, were of a multicultural variety ... but our narrator doesn't know that. He's looking for true-blood "Norwegians" ... who knows what they might have to tell him? Even just getting a glimpse of someone who came from so far away seems like it might be good luck ... or it might change HIS life somehow.

The boys never reach their planned destination - and lie in a field, just lolling about. A man walks by. Then he turns, and walks by again. Finally, the man sits down with them. He starts to talk to them. The boys don't really like him - he's quizzing them about what books they have read - Have you read Thomas Moore? Lord Lytton? He tells them about his book collection (like the boys care) - and then starts to ask them if they have "sweethearts". Our narrator says no - kind of surprised by the "liberalism" of the question - and the man says it is very important for boys to have at least one sweetheart. He then launches into a monologue about women, and their soft hair and skin - and how lovely they are - and blah blah - the way Joyce describes his voice and his manner of speaking makes you think that maybe he is trying to hypnotize the boys, lull them into a sleepy sort of state. He uses repetition, keeps saying the word "soft", keeps circling back to the same images ... Reading it, I want to say to him, "Get LOST, perv!" The man then says something about needing to be excused for a minute - and he walks off a little ways away. They're in a field - where is the man going? Narrator's friend Mahony exclaims, "Look what he's doing!" We never see what "he's doing" - but I assume he's masturbating. The man comes back, sits down, and then starts to talk about how boys should be whipped - and he goes off rhapsodically into a monologue about the importance of whipping boys if they are bad ... and you get the sense that he is more aroused by the thought of whipping little boys than he is by the thought of women's soft hair and skin.

Thankfully, narrator and Mahony escape - without anything terrible happening ... and they go off towards home again. Never having had their Indian war.

I don't think it's accidental, too, that Joyce makes a big deal about how the man has these green eyes - eyes that make you want to look away. Unlike the "blue eyes" of the Norwegian sailors that the narrator dreams about. Green to me signifies Ireland, emerald isle ... so there's an indictment of his country and its ignorant rigidity and superstition in the man they encounter in the field.

In order to live a full and free life, one MUST leave Ireland. That seems to be what the story is saying. I'll excerpt from the beginning of the story - where the themes are set up. It's almost like this predicts the ending of Portrait of the Artist ... with the eventual exile, the necessary exile.

'An Encounter' is another step on the journey to maturity and adulthood - which is the trajectory of The Dubliners. The narrator in 'The Sisters' was a young boy, still suffocated by the world of adults around him. Here, we begin to see him (although he is a different boy) breaking away. Looking forward, outward. Also inward, too, I guess - since this IS Joyce we're talking about!

Excerpt from Dubliners - by James Joyce "An Encounter".

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo the idler held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon's war dance of victory. His parents went to eight o'clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:

-- Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. Oe day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel.

-- This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! Hardly had the day ... Go on! What day? Hardly had the day dawned ... Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?

Everyone's heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.

-- What is this rubbish? he said. The Apache Chief? Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched scribbler that writes these things for a drink. I'm surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were ... National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or ...

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The Books: "Dubliners" - 'The Sisters' (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Dubliners - by James Joyce

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."

Dubliners is James Joyce's first book - a collection of short stories. It was finally published (after much brou-haha) in 1914. Publishers balked (especially in Ireland) at the frank portrait of Dublin - with its prostitutes, its fake piety, its aimless wandering young men ... I mean, all of that, yes - was very shocking at the time. But I think there was more to the reaction than just rigidity and prudery. Obviously, Joyce touched a nerve. Joyce was telling the truth, as he saw it, about his own country. I think it might have been seen as a betrayal in some circles. Not like he was LYING, no - quite the opposite. They were mad at him for telling the truth. It made them look bad. It was not, shall we say, a flattering portrait. Of course I have my own opinion about that. James Joyce's feelings about Ireland were complex and contradictory. He loved it, it was his homeland - he could never write about anything else - even when he had been living in exile for 20 years - it was to Ireland his mind constantly went in his work. But he could never live there. It was the most suffocating place for him imaginable. So he was not forgiven for choosing to de-camp. Not at that time. I love that Joyce is so honored now, and that Ireland has decided to be proud of their wayward son - but they ran him out of town on a rail back in the early years of the 20th century. He aired the dirty laundry of the "family" out in public. They hated him for it. It's like the reaction today when any African American dares to say that maybe (just maybe) the problems of their community SOMETIMES start from WITHIN the community. Maybe not EVERYTHING can be blamed on slavery. Maybe they need to look WITHIN. Now a white person can never say these things - but watch the reaction when a black person says something like that. These people are pilloried. Shrieking ravens of outrage fly up into the air, blacking out the sun. I see it as a similar reaction to Joyce's writing from the Irish back then, it's not a: "Hey you, stop LYING" reaction. It's a "Hey you, stop telling the TRUTH and making us look bad to outsiders!" reaction. It's understandable, I'm not sayiing I don't understand the reaction. There's a sense that a persecuted group needs to stick together, remain united You can see it in the gay community too sometimes - a need for uniformity. Women, too. Etc. There is nothing new under the sun. There have been identity politics at every time in history - it's just now that we have more official names for it. Groups need to stick together, the rank and file all must agree on the rules, and nobody can break the rules. Well, James Joyce broke the rules. He aired the Irish dirty laundry (literally) in public. George Bernard Shaw said, after reading Ulysses - which shocked and disgusted him, "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."

Well. Obviously that is a rare response. Most people - when shown a mirror and told, "You suck" - will fight back. And that's what happened to Joyce. He told the truth, and, as per usual with truthtellers, was not congratulated for it.

He left Ireland in 1904 - fleeing with his lover, Nora - leaving scandal and debt behind him. They settled down eventually in Trieste. Joyce had been publishing things here and there, he already had powerful allies like Yeats - who helped him out, thought there really was something special in his writing. But publishers still balked. If you read Dubliners all the way through - and try to put yourself back in 1908, 1909 - and imagine reading it then - put it in the context of its time - you can see what a shocking book it must have been. I have more to say about that, but I'll do it later. Anyway, Dubliners finally was published in 1914.

Harry Levin, the editor of my Portable James Joyce, writes in his introduction:

He left too early for the Revolution; he arrived too late for the Renaissance. His undergraduate idol, the subject of his first published article, was not Yeats but Ibsen. He greeted the Irish Literary Theatre with a polemic against folksy estheticism. He outraged his college debating society by expounding the iconoclasms of European drama. On several visits home from the Continent, between the ages of twenty and thirty, he considered whether some journalistic or pedagogical niche existed for him in the cultural life of his native city. In his single play, Exiles, as in actuality, he pushed this problem toward a negative conclusion. In his short stories, Dubliners, the recurrent situation is entrapment. Their timid protagonists are trapped into marriage ("The Boarding House"), kept from eloping ("Eveline"), wistfully envious of colleagues who get away ("A Little Cloud"). In "Counterparts" a father makes his son the victim of his own frustrations. The plight suggested in "The Dead" is that of a mill-horse harnessed to a carriage, pulling it round and round a public statue.

Escaping from the treadmill of Dublin, Joyce spent the rest of his life brooding upon it and writing about it. His insistence on calling its denizens by their names, and pointing out its local landmarks, held up the publication of Dubliners for several years.

It was too private. Too spot-on. It revealed too much. It felt like an accusation - which, indeed, it was. Who is HE to accuse US? Ireland, at that time, was a deeply conventional society (in many ways, it still is). Joyce bucked convention. He looked towards Europe for inspiration. And yet (as I said before) - his creative consciousness always went back to Ireland. In all his stories and books, it is Ireland that comes to life. An incredible thing. I find it very moving. People, in general, do not like complexity. They find it threatening, and somehow hostile. They want things to be either or or. Not both at the same time. They cannot hold two opposing thoughts in their head at the same time, they always feel the need to make a choice. And so. It is very difficult for such people to understand that Joyce hated Ireland, and Joyce would kill for Ireland. Joyce could never live in Ireland, but Joyce yearned for it in his heart, in his words, every day of his life. He was Irish. He loved his country. Only something you love can break your heart. Ireland broke Joyce's heart. But simplistic folks only hear the criticism. They are not careful readers. They set themselves up in opposition. They come to it with their biases hard and firm, nothing can get through. You can't read Joyce that way. He demands engagement, he demands that you look within, that your SOUL is with him - not just your intellect.

Here's Levin again, in his introduction:

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce sensed the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of esthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry, is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after "an instant of all but union." By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

Amen. That's what I meant earlier when I said that if you only see the criticism - then you are only going halfway there. If your sense of threat is so strong that you must fight back without letting anything in, if you are closed to the possibility of being changed ... then you will miss that part of Joyce. You will miss the love.Dubliners is a very insightful book, very revealing - and most of the stories are, to use a terrible word, bitchy. He is gossiping, passing on dirty stories, revealing truths beneath the convention. He does not pull his punches. But ... but ... the collection ends with 'The Dead'. And in 'The Dead' - Joyce pulls his vision back - goes from microscopic to telescopic - and reveals a world of love and loss and grief and humanity ... that only come from the deepest places in his heart.

That is why I say to people who have not read Joyce and who want to know where to start (because, yes, he can be daunting) - I tell them to read Dubliners. Each story is about 5 or 6 pages long - on average (except for "The Dead") - so you can take it in small chunks - easily digestible - and I also tell them, and I tell you now: to read the stories in order. Read them in order! At least your first time through. I dip in and out Dubliners all the time now, picking up this or that story ... but my first time through, I read them in order, first to last. Joyce was very careful about where each story went in the collection - there was, as always, a method to his madness - and so much of his genius (not yet in full flower) is there, in the slow methodical progression - from 'The Sisters' - the first story in the collection - to 'The Dead' - the majestic last story in the collection, and the greatest short story ever written. In 'The Sisters' - a priest is dead, and he lies in a coffin in an upstairs room, and everyone (all women, except for our narrator - obviously a young boy, unused to death) sits in the sitting room downstairs and chats and gossips about the priest upstairs. Death hovers over 'The Sisters'. And so 'The Dead', the last story - in all its tragedy and scope - is a bookend, a counterpart to 'The Sisters'. Joyce did this deliberately. So I'm just saying this as a suggestion to those who want to give Joyce a try. Read Dubliners story by story, going in order. You'll start to see what Joyce was about then. Because in most of these stories, not much happens. There are no big revealing endings - nothing BIG happens - and so the book is all about the cumulative effect. I won't speak about 'The Dead' yet, and its place in the collection - I'll save that for when I get to it. Suffice it to say, that I don't believe that Dubliners would have HALF the reputation it has now if 'The Dead' were not included. It is 'The Dead' that elevates the book into something divine (I mean that quite literally), something transcendent and universal. But again, I'll get to that later.

'The Sisters', the first story in Dubliners is a simple gossipy little story. It feels like you are eavesdropping, your ear pressed up to the door. Many of the stories in Dubliners have that feel. The narrator of the story is a young boy - young enough to still get angry when he is referred to as a child. He appears to live with his aunt and uncle, no parents are mentioned. And Father Flynn - a pretty much fallen priest (he appears to have gone mad) who was his good friend - has had a stroke, and after a couple of days of vigil he passes away. This sparks in the narrator an unfurling stream of memories about Father Flynn, and who he was to him, etc.

That's the excerpt below.

Oh, and one last quote from Harry Levin, who has a way of saying things that I can't - so I'll just pass the mike to him. He's talking at first about the challenges of getting the collection published, and what the official problem with the book was. But then he goes on to talk about what Joyce was DOING in these stories, and why they were so amazing at the time ... something that you might miss today. It's almost like the influence of Marlon Brando in the late 40s and early 50s. What he did was so completely revolutionary - he changed our expectations of actors with one performance ... and now, everyone lives in the wake of his influence. That's just the fact. Of course it was in the zeitgeist of the time, Laurette Taylor, Montgomery Clift, the Group Theatre - the way playwrights were writing changed - opening a way for this new kind of acting, etc. It's just that Marlon Brando, with Stanley Kowalski, gets the credit. It's hard to remember how influential he was - since he changed things so completely that young actors today STILL want to be Marlon Brando. But to go back and see him in Streetcar - to watch that original performance ... it's like trying to get at the source of it. It was so influential. It remains influential today. But sometimes it's hard to remember that since now everyone "acts" like that. The old style of acting is gone forever. So there is no comparison.

So. Back to Joyce. The reason I want to post this next quote from Harry Levin is because - I was rereading 'The Sisters' last night, in preparation for today - and it occurred to me that the semi-stream-of-conscious voice is the voice of most short stories today. We follow an internal journey, we go with the narrator up, down, around ... we understand that events have internal causes as well as external. Remember, Joyce was living in the beginning of the "Freudian century" Freud was, naturally, already at work - and the debate on whether or not Freud was correct on this or that topic, or the question whether or not Freud has had TOO much influence (an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree) - is irrelevant to this discussion right now. The revolution at the time was: there are things within our hearts and minds that cannot be seen in broad daylight. Childhood contains sparks of events, seen mainly through the 5 senses, that continue to influence us in adulthood. The surface is NOT everything. Joyce was trying to not just write ABOUT that, but to reflect that knowledge IN his writing. That's his whole thing - to get INSIDE that experience.

Now, of course, today, that is how short stories are written, that is the accepted style, no one finds it odd or intrusive to move so closely with another soul, to succumb to a subconscious rendering of events. That's how it's done now, shall we say. But back then it was a revelation. The Russians were doing it ... but the Irish most certainly were not.

Okay, I'll finally let Harry Levin take over now:

Most of Dubliners was written, from earlier notes jotted down on the spot, during Joyce's first year in Trieste, 1905. The manuscript was accepted the following year by the English publisher, Grant Richards, but was not brought out until 1914 because of objections raised by his printers. Meanwhile Joyce had added three more stories to the original twelve and sent them all to the Dublin firm of Maunsel and Company, which printed them, then changed its mind, and destroyed the sheets. When Joyce's insistence finally triumphed over the long delay, the published text included the exceptionable matter; the repetition of "bloody," the innuendo against Edward VII, and - what was most offensive to the Irish publisher and most intrinsic to Joyce's method - the specific mention of local establishments and personalities. The book is not a systematic canvass like Ulysses; nor is it integrated, like the Portrait, by one intense point of view; but it comprises, as Joyce explained, a series of chapters in the moral history of his community; and the episodes are arranged in careful progression from childhood to maturity, broadening from private to public scope. The older technique of short-story writing, with Maupassant and O. Henry, attempted to make daily life more eventful by unscrupulous manipulation of surprises and coincidences. Joyce - with Chekhov - discarded such contrivances, introducing a genre which has been so widely imitated that nowadays its originality is not readily detected. The open structure, which casually adapts itself to the flow of experience, and the close texture, which gives precise notation to sensitive observation, are characteristic of Joycean narrative. The fact that so little happens, apart from expected routines, connects form with theme: the paralyzed uneventfulness to which the modern city reduces the lives of its citizens.

Now. Onto the excerpt from 'The Sisters' - the first story in the collection.

Excerpt from Dubliners - by James Joyce: 'The Sisters'

The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery. The drapery consisted mainly of children's bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. A crape bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon. Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

July 1st, 1895
The Rev. James Flynn (formerly of S. Catherine's Church, Meath Street), aged sixty-five years,
R.I.P.

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quiet inefficacious.

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I or nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip - a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.

"the troublesome word..."

Grant Richards writes to Joyce with his problems about The Dubliners manuscript. Damn.

The correspondence between Richards and Joyce is contentious. Joyce had signed a contract with Richards - but, as the letter above indicates, things went south pretty quick - and Joyce ended up refusing to make the changes suggested. You can see why Joyce would, too. He would not delete a "troublesome word" just to satisfy the prudes of Dublin. Upsetting the prudes of Dublin - shoving their faces up against the lookingglass as it were - was his whole point. (Quote about that from him here) Once Ezra Pound got on Joyce's side as a powerful ally - Richards eventually did publish The Dubliners, in 1914.

All in one letter?

T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, and James Joyce? All together? I've read it 5 times now, and I am still in love with it. It's prosaic, basic information ... but worlds are within it. The letter is dated 1922 (so think about what Lawrence was up to then, and had been up to!!) and Joyce is described in the letter as "He's the yet-unfollowed master of what will be the next school" ...

anyway: fascinating.

Bloomsday on Broadway

At Symphony Space, on 95th and Broadway. Organized and run by Isaiah Sheffer - this was their 26th year.

Holee shite, don't even know where to begin. Yesterday was exhilarating, hysterical, interesting, sometimes boring, fun, challenging, and at times revelatory. It was also an awesome escape. So needed. I am so glad I did it. It was like we were all in this Outward Bound project together, or something. It was a test of endurance at times. Other times, it was so fun you were like, "Did 3 hours just pass? It felt like 20 minutes." Those of us who had all-day tickets got to know each other by sight, and we would smile encouragingly at each other, as we got another beer, or stepped outside to make a phone call, or stood up to stretch our legs. There were many who came and went ... You could buy tickets for part of the day, for one section, for two sections - whatever worked for you. The newbies would be ushered in at the breaks between sections. And as people flooded down the aisles, other people flooded UP the aisles - a constant flow. The theatre was the most packed in the late afternoon. I stood in the back then, because I needed to stretch my legs, and have a bite. But other times I was in the front row. Or the 5th row center. Or the 8th row aisle. Or in the balcony. It was general seating, so if you got up to go get a bite to eat, or go to the bathroom, you gave up your seat. But that was no big deal, there were always seats to be had.

Over to the side of the lobby is a small backstage corridor where they had a cafe set up - with food going on all day, which was a godsend. It was Bloomsday-inspired food, with pears (in honor of Molly), and gorgonzola, and Irish soda bread, and Irish stew, tea - and also beer. Thank God. To paraphrase Jo at the beginning of Little Women: "Bloomsday wouldn't be Bloomsday without a bit of alcohol!"

There were people there - Irish luminaries - Frank McCourt, Frank Delaney, Fiona Walsh, Colum MacCann (who organized my favorite Bloomsday celebration I ever went to - I had forgotten about the random Wall Street dude, who wandered in to what he thought was a normal Happy Hour - only to find a bunch of drunk people singing the entire score to Oliver - we had been drinking all day, and the Bloomsday festivities had wound down ... anyway, I had forgotten about that dude, and his beautiful response to what we were all doing. I'm laughing out loud!! Ha!) Anyway - Colum MacCann was there yesterday, he read Buck Mulligan in the first chapter - and Stephen Bloom in a couple others. There was a rotating cast. David Marguiles was there - he read Bloom, he also read the unnamed narrator in the Cyclops section ("says I, says I, says I ...") - just wonderful!! He just took huge BITES off the language - terrific.

Joe Grifasi was there - he apparently has participated in Bloomsday on Broadway for years. I befriended him. Or he befriended me. I recognized him instantly - but didn't know his name, and now obviously I will never forget it. I laughed, as we shook hands - "I totally know your face - but what's your name now??" Very nice man. We had a long conversation about Ullysses, and also New Jersey, and also regional theatre (focusing on Trinity - since I grew up going to Trinity - we actually had some people in common, small world) - and Richard Jenkins - and lots of other things. He loved my name. I kept running into him at the bar. "Hello again ..." "Hi, Joe!" "Hey, Sheila, how's it going ..." Then, 25 minutes later, I'd see him up onstage, reading Mr. Power, or Martin Cunningham. He also played "The Citizen" in The Cyclops episode. The event had that kind of casual energy to it - it was lovely. How often does THAT happen?

After the Eumeus episode - there was a break in the Ulysses action. This was at around 7 or 8 pm. Two more episodes to go - Ithaka, and then of course - Penelope, with Fionnula Flanagan reading the entirety of Molly Bloom's monologue. There were still hours to go. But there was a break - and many letters of James Joyce's were read. Actually - letters to and from Joyce. We heard from Nora, we heard from Ezra Pound - we heard from Yeats - and there is also that fantastic letter by George Bernard Shaw - not to Joyce, but to someone else ... and one gentleman - I'll have to look up his name because he was goosebump-worthy - my GOD - he read all of Joyce's jealous sexy letters to Nora, in 1909. Joyce was back in Ireland, and became convinced that Giorgio was not his son, and that Nora had been a whore. The letters are crazy. But so beautiful, too. Absolute raw passion. These jealous letters led to the infamous "dirty" letters - which are basically an early 20th century version of phone sex. Nora wrote Jim sexy letters - he wrote sexy letters back - Nora, I think, wanted to keep him from going to whores, while he was away from her - so she sent him panties thru the mail, stuff like that ... But leading up to that are these letters of a tormented Joyce, thinking that he was getting "the leavings" of other men, with Nora. (This was all pretty much unfounded). His love for her, his need for her - is palpable when you read these letters - it's almost painful - and this actor - what was his name?? My God, he just WENT there. It took my breath away. There's a point during one of these letters when Jim starts to tell Nora how much he loves her, and he starts to cry as he writes - he says, "I am sobbing now as I write this ..." This actor, whoever he was, had so followed Joyce's emotional thruline of the letter - without seeming manufactured, or actor-y - he was just embodying what Joyce had written - and at that point, as Joyce said, "I am sobbing now as I write this ..." this man just filled up with emotion. It was heart-wrenching. I have tears in my eyes now remembering. I was in the 9th or 10th row - and I felt his emotion grasp through my skin. He was a gentleman in his 50s, white hair, a suit, glasses ... It was marvelous. One of my favorite parts of the whole day. His imagination so flexible and fluid he could just flow into Joyce's point of view ... he let himself "go there" and I was moved to tears. He finished that letter - and we all spontaneously burst into applause and cheers.

I am not sure what time Fionnula Flanagan took the stage. She was supposed to go on at 9 - but I think it was more like 11. It takes her 3 hours to read Molly Bloom's monologue - and I got out of there at 2 a.m. Those of us left in the theatre were the true die-hards. There were maybe 40 of us there, sitting scattered throughout the Symphony Space. Up in the balconies, over on the sides, the middle. A man was snoring behind me - which was so hilarious because Molly Bloom's whole monologue takes place with Leopold snoring at her feet. So it was perfect. I nodded off at a couple points - not due to boredom, but due to sheer exhaustion - and then I would wake up, and it would still be going on - and I would dip into it, like a river. Doze off ... her voice in my ears ... wake up ... her voice ... laughter ... It was quite a profound experience, and I havent' figured out how to talk about it yet. It has something to do with the subconscious. People weren't sitting there politely, and academically by that point. We were lying all over the seats. We leaned forward. People had their shoes off, and were lolling their legs over the seats in front of them. And Fionnula - with her thick thick shining shock of white hair ... and her deep navy blue gown with the spangles ... sat in a big armchair on the dark stage, with her feet up - bare feet - a bottle of water beside her - the script in loose pages in her hand (she would drop the pages off to the side of the chair when she was done with each one) ... and a microphone bent gently to her mouth ... It was one of the most riveting three-dimensional performances - embodiments - I have ever seen. She was with us - she was talking to us - and yet she was also completely private. You felt the darkness of her bedroom, the chamber pot, the soiled sheets, the snoring husband ... Molly ruminates on her breasts for a while - "what are these lines here ..." and how she thinks Leopold might have forever shaped her breasts from how hard he sucked on them ... Fionnula, in a tired meandering way, just like you would when you were alone - ran her fingers over her breasts, staring down at them, shrugging, confiding in us, feeling herself up again, like: really doing it. That's privacy. No shame, no embarrassment ... because why would you be ashamed when you were alone in your bedroom? The part about farting was hilarious - she has some rhyme about letting your "wind go free" - but Molly is afraid of waking up her husband with it ... and Fionnula had what I think of as the quintessential Molly Bloom energy - humorous, exhausted, a bit disheartened, lonely, and with a deep private pain. Something that she normally laughs or fucks away. When Fionnula said, "It's 11 years to the day ..." and you know what she's referring to - the look that flashed acros her face, the grief, the loss that is still sharp and fresh .... I didn't know what time it was, I forgot my exhaustion, or - no, that's not it. I was exhausted, but I was still PRESENT- a strange energy that comes with intense tiredness, a vivid-ness of perception - yet with blurry edges - things coming quick and sharp and strong, like a dream ... Yet you're not sure what the sequence is, or where you are in time and space ... What time is it ... 12:30? 1:00? Doesn't matter. We were in Molly's time and space. A space with no punctuation, or light - except that which is in her memory.

And when she said the line, "and the sun shines for you he said" - I felt a rush ... I knew where we were in that 40 page run-on sentence ... I knew we were a page from the end ... and all of my remaining shreds of attention poured into this moment, into her - on stage - shining in white hair and blue sparkles. Don't miss it. Don't miss it. This is why you're here. This is the moment you've been waiting for.

And Fionnula Flanagan - through that last page - yes rhododendrons Gibraltar flower of the mountain yes Yes yes yes ... was divine. Not a dry eye in the house. I was a wreck.

She ended it on a whisper. The words clear, open, alive ... so so alive ... Her head thrown back in abandon, staring up ...

Then - silence. The moment passed ... the monologue was done - and we all stood - cheering and screaming - the little old lady next to me was weeping, and screaming, "BRAVA" - and Fionnula - stood up on that stage with the white light beaming down on her - bowing - smiling - making eye contact with us - because we were right there ... and there were so few of us left. Bowing, humbly, smiling - thankful ... we all were in that moment together, in the wee wee hours of the morning.

Some photos below.

The day began. 11:30 a.m.

I emerged at the end of the event. It was the next day. 2 a.m. (And eventually I'll have to tell about my cab ride back to Jersey - which was a splurge. It was another one of THOSE rides that I always seem to have, where I form a deep personal bond with the cab driver. This one was from Bangladesh originally although he is an American citizen now. As I got out of the cab, he actually said to me, "I miss you already." Ha!! But it was true! I missed him already, too! How does this happen? It had something to do with it being way past my bedtime - so I was open, not at all guarded - but I do seem to always have these cabbie moments - like the Armenian cab driver actually hugging me when he dropped me off at Alex's - I love it.)

The empty stage.

Cheat sheet in the back of my book.

Bloomsday playing cards ... decorating the stage.

Audience - start of the day.

Came out at around 1 or 2, to stretch my legs, make a phone call, buy some water, etc. The blaring sun of morning was long-gone. Clouds lowered, thunder rumbled ... I felt like I had been hovering in some alternate universe.

A papier-mache James Joyce bust out on the sidewalk - it was there all day, and every photo I took of it made me laugh. Hey Jim, what's up.

More photos here.

Isaiah Sheffer: THANK YOU.

Bloomsday, 2007

Note from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, on June 15, 1904. She was a waitress. He had asked her "out" - which, in Dublin, in those days, just meant going for a walk. She had blown him off. He sent her this follow-up 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. Years later, Joyce would pay tribute to this moment in his life by setting the entire plot of "Ulysses" on one day: June 16 1904. He told Nora later that on that day, he became a man. They fled Ireland together, an unmarried couple, a couple of months later, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind them. They lived "abroad" for the rest of their lives together, and were rarely parted from one another, ever.

"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."

-- James Joyce

You had best believe that I am well prepared for the all-day celebration I am going to today. I've got the essential Bloomsday prop.

Geek.

[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!

-- James Joyce

"I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it... Joyce has single-handedly killed the 19th century."

-- T.S. Eliot

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 (publisher of "Ulysses" - shown in the photo above, standing in the doorway of her bookstore in Paris with Joyce)

That's James and Nora - on their wedding day in 1931, when they finally decided, after decades of life together, after 2 children, etc., to make it official.

"Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."

-- Nora, after Joyce's death, when asked what writers she liked.

Nora Barnacle, Galway girl - Joyce loved the symbolism inherent in her name. Barnacle, the creature clinging to the rock. And Nora - the heroine of the play by Ibsen - who was James Joyce's main inspiration as a writer.

Joyce said he wanted to end the book with "the most positive word in the English language". He also had always noted that when Nora wrote him letters, she never used punctuation. Every year, at whatever Bloomsday fiesta I attend, there are vast swathes of people who know this section by heart. My heart is full!

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.

God bless James Joyce!

This, as always, is mainly for my father. Which is appropriate since Father's Day is nigh. My father helped me through Ulysses - it's one of my favorite memories of our relationship - reading that book, and calling him up with questions - beautiful - and he has always loved my Bloomsday posts, sending me notes or small corrections - or commenting on the posts himself. Most of what I do, in this regard, is for him. So Dad ... whenever you get to read this ... thank you. And this is for you.

My post about the plot of the book is below. I post it every year and I've received letters from random strangers - telling me that they used it as a guide. Which is kind of scary, yet also totally flattering. And then there's coming across things like this. You know. The universal Joyce family. So here, again, are my notes on the journey of this great book.

And happy happy Bloomsday.

THE PLOT.

Chapter I "Telemachus" episode ... it is early morning, June 16, 8 am.

We start off with the character of Stephen Dedalus - who was also the lead character in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses doesn't quite pick up the strand from where that book left off - but it's close enough.

Stephen is rooming with a couple of friends in an old round square tower ("stately plump Buck Mulligan, et al). He awakens. He has broken his glasses. It is June 16. He starts off for work.

Chapter II "Nestor" episode ... it is now 10 a.m.

Stephen teaches in a school. After class, he has a long conversation with Mr. Deasy, the headmaster - who is, basically, the wise Nestor in "The Odyssey". Their conversation is about history. Irish history. Deasy asks Dedalus if he could drop off a couple of things he had written at 2 Irish newspapers.

Deasy says to Dedalus at one point:

-- You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things....I have rebel blood in me too ... On the spindle side. But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are all Irish, all kings' sons.

-- Alas, Stephen said.

The generational difference. A major propelling force in Dedalus, who must strike out on his own. Must fight against artifice.

Chapter III "Proteus" episode ... This is around 11 am, it takes place on the Strand - I've quoted from it already here and here .

Stephen goes for a walk on the beach. He is blind, his glasses have broken. And so all impressions come to him through sounds, all colors blur together ... which is a perfect reflection of his own state of mind. He has not yet broken free yet, he has not yet separated himself from his inspirations, his tradition, his world. It's very Hamlet-esque - which makes sense, because Stephen (and Joyce) were obsessed with Hamlet.

Quote from this section:

Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.

And the Proteus episode ends the "Telemachia". After the "Telemachia", the actual "Odyssey" begins. And we now enter the world of Leopold Bloom.

In the Odyssey, Ulysses must leave Calypso - the female, the nymph. He travels, he visist with the Phaenicians - he tells them all the long tale of his travels, his misfortunes, etc. They transport him back to Ithaca. Back home. That's the arc of the book (so simplistic!!) But simplicity is good. It helped me out, in reading Ulysses to remember that fact: It's just a journey. It's the journey of two men through one day.

Their paths start out as separate. And eventually they converge.

Part II of Ulysses is the section of the actual Odyssey.

Chapter IV The "Calypso Episode" - This takes place in Leopold Bloom's house - at 8 a.m. - the very same moment that Stephen Dedalus is waking up across town in his Tower

Leopold Bloom has breakfast. Then he takes a dump. That is basically the "plot" of the section. However: you get a couple of clues. He's worried that Molly (his wife) is cheating on him. The thought torments him. He goes upstairs - and she's lying in bed. Bloom gets ready to go to a funeral of a friend. Molly is waiting for him to leave, basically, so that she can go meet up with her lover. This is a strange chapter - it's all about the innards of things. What people eat, what people excrete ... it's body without any redeeming soul.

Chapter V "The Lotuseater" episode

Leopold Bloom leaves his house ... it's around 10 am. He wanders the streets of Dublin, window-shopping. He goes to the post office. He turns left, he turns right, he walks a block, he stops, he turns left, he turns right ... This is one of those chapters where you could re-construct a map of Dublin from the prose.

I am sure there are people right now, in Dublin, walking around, holding Ulysses up in front of them - following the commands of this chapter. The chapter ends with Leopold Bloom visiting the baths, lying down in the water.

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Obviously, Bloom is a troubled man.

Chapter VI "The Hades" episode

This is where Bloom attends the funeral - an obvious parallel to the journey through Hades. Stephen Dedalus is at the same funeral - but their paths do not cross yet. Not really. Bloom is in the same carriage as Dedalus' kinda deadbeat father - as well as some other people. It is 11 a.m. The mourners all crowd into carriages, and travel to the graveyard. They stare out the windows, and talk about what they see - another microscopic glimpse of the world of Dublin. It's a gossipy chapter, filled with different and conflicting voices.

They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.

-- I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.

-- Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.

-- How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping I suppose.

-- Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary the sexton's an old tramp sat, grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown yawning boot. After life's journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by, one by one: gloomy houses.

After the graveside service, they pile back into carriages again. They leave Hades.

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time.

Chapter VII "The Eolus" episode

This is when Stephen Dedalus goes to the newspaper office to drop off Mr. Deasy's letters, and Leopold Bloom is there to sell advertisements. Their paths almost cross here ... but they just miss each other.

I was completely BAFFLED by this chapter until I got what Joyce was doing - and then had to go back and read it again. The entire episode, which Joyce wanted to be symbolic of lungs, air, rhetoric - a lot of "windbags", actually - is all talk talk talk talk - and because it takes place in a newspaper office, the text is interspersed with wacko headlines.

It was a lot of fun to read, once I got the structure. It made perfect sense.

Like Joyce said himself, "With me, the thought is always simple."

The form may be complex, convoluted - but the thought never is.

Everyone's full of a lot of hot air in this chapter. Yak yak yak yak

LOST CAUSES NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED

-- We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus! Lord Salisbury. A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek!

See what I mean? Yak yak yak.

Chapter VIII "The Lestrygonians" episode

This has as its parallel the episode with Ulysses and the cannibals. In this episode, Leopold Bloom goes to get lunch. And again - we're back with the old disgust at the body, disgust at what it must do - how it must chew, how it must digest ... How can anyone ever rise above that and find anything spiritual or refined?

Leopold Bloom's anxiety increases ... as he gets closer and closer to the time he suspects Molly will be meeting with her lover. He becomes consumed by thoughts of her - as he sits and has his lunch. He imagines everyone talking about him, he is paranoid.

The chapter is a cornucopia of grossness. Images of childbirth splitting someone open, of a throat clogged, of the nastiness of food in general ...

Men, men, men.

Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't! O! A bone! That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't swallow it all however.

Ha!

Chapter IX "The Scylla and Charybdis" episode

Okay. Love this chapter. This is the chapter where Joyce basically sounds off about all of the things he has been thinking about - putting them in the mouth of his alter-ego Stephen Dedalus.

It is 2 pm, and Leopold Bloom, after having his lunch, comes to the library. He basically hides behind a statue, and eavesdrops on a long conversation between Stephen Dedalus and his friends. In it, Dedalus talks about his theory of Hamlet, and his ideas about Shakespeare.

To me, this chapter is FOOD FOR MY BRAIN.

There's also the brilliance of the parallel: the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis - the whirlpool in between ... Dedalus caught - between traditions, geography, trying to navigate his way through.

The entire chapter is a vibrant literary discussion. Eventually, they see Leopold Bloom sneaking away from them ... and they gossip about him, about his wife's obvious infidelities. This chapter, too, is Dedalus (who eventually - we know - because he is Joyce - will get the hell OUT of Ireland) emerging from un-knowingness - and from the pre-language ramblings of the Proteus episode - into articulation. He speaks. And speaks, and speaks.

The birth of the writer.

It is in this chapter that Stephen says the famous line: "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

Chapter X "The Wandering Rocks" episode

Joyce now takes us out of the interiors (the library, the pub, the baths, the carriages) - and out into the raucous streets of Dublin. It's a melee - a mish-mosh - a montage - We see everyone, snippets, bits, pieces, behavior, incomprehensible and comprehensible ... exactly as one does on city streets anywhere. You get glimpses of other passersby - you see things - you move on - everyone walking in their own direction, passing each other by.

Joyce saw this chapter as moving away from the obvious BRAIN of the chapter before, and into the blood-stream.

Everyone is circulating in this chapter, Dublin is on the move.

This section, actually, is missing from Homer's account of the Odyssey. But Joyce wasn't just copying the structure, he was transforming it, melding it, molding it ... and he couldn't leave out the Wandering Rocks.

Because it, to him, was the perfect opportunity to SHOW us Dublin, and Dubliners. When they don't know that anyone is watching them.

There's some kind of parade going on - or a motorcade or something. And that is the structure that Joyce uses, to take us through the blood-stream (or the "wandering rocks") of Dublin. The motorcade passes this, it passes that ... all of the citizens of Dublin are the rocks through which the motorcade passes.

In the last section, it's like the car speeds up - and we see everyone we have just met - in increasing speed - just glimpses - like you would get from out of the window of a car.

Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are not seen. And by this point, I wondered: Hm. Where the hell are those two?

Chapter XI "The Sirens" episode

It is 4 pm, by this point. 4 pm is the time of Molly's rendesvous with her lover. Leopold stops by a hotel bar/concert hall to have a drink, and to listen to the singers.

Two barmaids stand there, chattering.

Because the parallel of this is the Sirens episode in the Odyssey - which is all about SOUND - we get none of Leopold's inner thoughts. We just hear what he hears. And because of his increasing anxiety and paranoia - it all comes to him as meaningless jibber-jabber.

It's a brilliant device.

Again, once I knew what Joyce was up to - it became great fun. Here's an excerpt - it is going to read like gibberish, and it's supposed to. It's the way other people's jabbering conversations may sound to you - when your mind is elsewhere, when you are deep in thought.

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.

Of course they're alluring. They're the sirens.

Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.

Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.

Her ear too is a shell [Ed: He's thinking about Molly now], the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside. Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream first make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn't forget. Fever near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over: shell with seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks their mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet, a yashmak. Find the way in. A cave. No admittance except on business.

The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood is it. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands.

Chapter XII "The Cyclops" 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.

It is a run-in. A run-in by a windbag old Irish radical referred to as "the Citizen" - and Leopold Bloom, who has stopped by for a drink. Things get ugly. It's anti-Semitic. It's nasty. Bloom knows that everyone knows he is a cuckold.

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!!"

I didn't get it at ALL. 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 - I said, "How do you know that?"

Dad held the book out to me and said, "Look at how many times the word 'I' appears on every page."

And then ... it all unfolded. 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'. hence - 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.

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.

You can smell the hostility in the room, you can feel the contempt all have for Bloom - not just because he is Jewish, but because his wife is blatantly cheating on him, sleeping with her lover at that very moment.

Everyone laughs at Bloom. Poor guy.

Chapter XIII "The Nausikaa" episode

An extremely creepy and bizarre chapter. It takes place on the rocks, down by the beach, at about 8 pm. Leopold Bloom is avoiding going home to his adulterous wife. He sits on the rocks, brooding. He sees 2 young women, also on the beach. He hides behind the rocks and masturbates.

This all sounds very simple - but the weird thing is is that the entire chapter is written in the overblown overly romantic turgid prose of a bad romance novel.

Joyce chose this for ... well, I can guess why: Leopold Bloom, in that moment, in that moment of avoiding going home, and in the moment of sunset-time, looking at the fresh young women on the beach ... is filled with the yearning of a romance novel. He is almost adolescent in his praise of their purity, their beauty.

Ironically, their beauty is what makes him masturbate in a frenzy. Filled with shame and loathing. It's quite tragic, actually.

How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked ...

For Gerty had her dreams that no-one knew of.

The chapter ends with a bell chiming in the distance:

Cuckoo
Cuckoo
Cuckoo

An obvious and taunting reminder to Bloom of his marital condition. He is cuckoo, a cuckold.

Chapter XIV "The Oxen of Sun" episode

It's now 10 o'clock at night. It appears that none of the men in Dublin want to go home, and are wandering about. (Having been to Dublin many times, I can say that that is still the case.)

All the men converge on a maternity hospital - where a friend's wife has just had a baby.

And here - at last - Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom meet.

It makes perfect sense. Childbirth, something transforming, something coming to life ... in a rather sterile and white atmosphere, actually. But what was once an embryo is now a full human life.

Paths converge.

The writing in this chapter is a precursor (I would say) of Finnegans Wake. A non-stop onslaught, a constant repeating of themes, a constant embellishment on the themes of the chapter (wombs, medicine, embryos, life)...The prose is like the development of a child inside a woman. Fingers developing, toes coming out, head forming itself, organs forming ... a constant process of transformation, repetition, and growth.

Once you know that that's what's going on - it becomes quite easy to get through, actually.

Also: that it takes place in the waiting room of a maternity ward. A bunch of men, sitting around, aimlessly, in the world of women.

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 ny man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.

The men sit, in the waiting room, and talk about all of this. Dedalus and Bloom recognize one another. Not just "Oh hey, I know your face" - but as kindred souls.

Dedalus is looking for a father. A spiritual father, a real father. Bloom appears.

Chapter XV "The Circe" episode

Dedalus and Bloom visit the red-light district in Dublin, known as Night Town.

This chapter is a psychedelic ride, I'll tell ya. It's all written like a script, with stage directions. It is completely unrealistic. People change shapes, shift into horrible visions -

Bella (the Madame of Night Town) is "Circe" - and she indulges Bloom in what we have seen, thoughout the day, in his masochistic fantasies. He is reduced to a snivelling snorting little piglet, licking her boot-soles.

Dedalus is suddenly tormented by the ghost of his dead mother - etc. All females represented to him as the death of this one important female.

It's midnight. The whole thing takes on the feel of one mass hallucination.

There's so much in this chapter, it's immensely long - it's about death, sex, Ireland, women, the search for meaning, life, fear, love of pain, patriotism ...

Like I said, it's quite a ride.

And the Circe episode ends Part II of this book. The journey out has ended - now it's time to go back in.

Part III of Ulysses is the "Nostos" - the return.

Ulysses, in the Nostos, reveals himself to his son. They slaughter the suitors together, and he returns to his kingdom as a hero - to regain his country and also to regain Penelope.

In Part III of Joyce's book, Bloom has to go home again. He has to go and face his "Penelope" - lying in bed now, waiting for him.

Chapter XVI "The Eumeus" episode

It's now 1 a.m., and Dedalus and Bloom have escaped from the madhouse of the brothel, with their sanity barely intact. They still don't want to go home. So they stop off at a midnight cafeteria where the carriage-drivers of the city hang out off-duty - to have a cup of soup.

The parallel here is:

The Eumeus, in the Odyssey, is all about the navigation home, the sailors, the sea. Joyce's chapter does the same thing. The men in the cabbie shelter become the sailors, the ones bearing Dedalus and Bloom towards home.

The men are also referred to as "wrecks" - They also become the shipwrecks out on the sea, the danger facing Dedalus and Bloom on this journey home.

They're not out of the woods yet.

They all sit, it's 1 a.m., and they discuss many things. Of course, they all start to discuss Ireland.

Stephen is exhausted. Testy. He says:

-- We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.

Love that line.

Dedalus, Bloom, and the sailors - huddled over their midnight snack - discuss women and marriage, too. Bloom worries, tormentedly:

Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in the case, exist between married folk?

It is throughout this episode that intimacy grows, unspoken, between Stephen Dedalus and Bloom. They realize the parallels in their lives, they have both had identical June 16ths ...

Bloom thinks at one point:

Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought.

Chapter XVII "Ithaca" episode

Bloom and Dedalus leave the homeless shelter - it's now 2 a.m. They walk, exhausted, and yet also invigorated by discovering one another - they walk through the dark Dublin streets, talking. Endlessly. Bloom invites Dedalus into his house when they arrive - for a cup of tea.

Molly is asleep upstairs. Bloom approaching -- we have been hearing about this woman all day -- and now she is right up the stairs.

This chapter is written in extremely impersonal prose. Joyce saw this chapter or episode as a "skeleton". It was meant to be, literally, bare bones.

It is the kind of raw and open and absolutely honest conversation that one can only have at 2 o'clock in the morning. Do you know what I mean?

It is TRUTH.

But it's not messy or emotional - they're too tired for that. It's a cut to the chase thing, an intellectual and philosophical and "what is the meaning of life" conversation that, again, could only happen when half the planet is asleep.

It's done in a series of questions and answers.

To me, it is the most brilliant thing in the book. We get distance now. It is as though we are far far back, and studying Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from the perspective of centuries of distance.

It's like a lecture series on Bloom and Dedalus. And people in the class ask questions about these 2 characters, and the professor answers. It goes on and on and on - and I cannot tell you how riveting it is, and moving it is - once you have read the entire book.

There's scope. There's galaxies of distance. Human beings are so small, so unimportant ... and yet also so miraculous, and so beautiful. Connection is still possible. Even though usually galaxies separate us.

That's what the "Ithaca" section makes me think of.

Here's an example of how the entire chapter goes:

Was there one point on which their view were equal and negative?

The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees.

Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in the past?

In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield Avenue.

It's encyclopedic. We have been inside the story with Bloom and Dedalus, and now we are way out.

One other example (but truly, the chapter is cumulative ... it's so powerful when you read it all the way through):

What was Stephen's auditive sensation?

He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.

What was Bloom's visual sensation?

He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.

James Joyce, in the end, believes that it IS possible for human beings to connect. Even those as different from one another as Bloom and Dedalus.

The two of these nocturnal creatures sit in Bloom's kitchen, where the Odyssey began, and talk long into the night. Molly is upstairs, in bed. Bloom offers Stephen a bed for the night (still putting off going up the stairs) - Stephen declines, and leaves.

Now there's no more putting off.

By the end of the Ithaca chapter, we are ready to join Molly.

Chapter XVIII "Penelope" episode

In bed with Molly. Her interior monologue. A female. Inside the mind of the female. Her boredom, her horniness, her body betraying itself, her love for Leopold, her humor, her menstruation, her boredom with her lover, she re-lives an erotic moment with Leopold, she masturbates, but ... truly ... to try to sum it up is RIDICULOUS. It's a 40 page run-on sentence.

Joyce always said that he wanted to end his book on "the most positive word in the English language".

And so he did.

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.

The end.

Speaking of Bloomsday:

I'm all trembly right now. I have always wanted to go to the all-day Bloomsday celebration - created by Isaiah Sheffer - held at the Symphony Space - I've been hearing about it for years. Frank McCourt describes the vibe there. Another excerpt, describing the excitement. One of the things I am MOST excited about is to hear Fionnula Flanagan read Molly Bloom's monologue - she does it every year, it closes the entire event - and apparently it takes her 3 hours to get through it. I'M SO EXCITED THAT I AM GOING TO BE THERE TO ... PARTICIPATE AND EXPERIENCE IT. (Mental Multivitamin discusses seeing a video of Flanagan doing the Molly monologue here ... goosebumps.) Flanagan talks a bit about her connections with Joyce here. The Bloomsday celebration at Symphony Space is a yearly event - and I am sooo excited that I stopped the "oh, someday I'll go to that" and just bought a ticket. Duh. It was 30 bucks. I'm going to be there from noon until midnight.

I feel voraciously excited about this!! I'm almost nervous. Something I have ALWAYS wanted to do. I'll be there - at 11 am (it's general seating ... so dammit I want to get a good seat!) - with book in hand. Ready for the long LONG day ahead - but what a group event, what communal spirit - what insane geekery!

Can't wait!

Joyce geekery ahead

Anyone who follows Joyce knows the copyright issues (byzantine, tangled, at times psychotic) - and also it is well-known the issues that pretty much every Joycean scholar has had with Joyce's grandson who holds the estate. There was a great article in The New Yorker last year which details Stephen Joyce's aggressive defense of the works of his grandfather (sometimes justified, other times completely insane, Type A bullshit that makes life freakin' difficult for Joyce lovers) - so aggressive that he's made enemies all over da damn place. It's almost like Joyce scholars need support groups and therapy sessions, to swap war stories about dealing with this dude.

This is a similar situation (until very recently) to any biographer who wanted to write about Sylvia Plath. Ted Hughes held the estate to her works - and that estate was watched over zealously (and, some would say, pathologically) by Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister - who never liked Sylvia. It was an antagonistic estate ... and yet it took on personal overtones that drove Plath scholars mad. They didn't just want to control the use of Plath's words - they wanted to control the interpretation of Plath that was allowed (examples of this are legion.) Biographers had to submit manuscripts to the Hughes' (which is par for the course) - but when the edits would come back, that's when things would start to get really complicated. It was not about "please don't quote that poem in its entirety" ... it was "please do not ever suggest that Plath was bisexual - remove that paragraph". (Actual example.) There are many interesting issues to discuss here - what is a biography? What is objectivity?

Janet Malcolm, journalist (love her) - wrote an entire book about the difficulty of writing a book about Sylvia Plath - due to, first of all, the myths around her, and the fact that many of the folks who knew her when she was alive are emotionally invested in making sure that THEIR version of the myth (she was a bitch! She was a victim! She was a lover! She was a fighter! - whatever) is the one that sticks. So there's THAT. But Olwyn Hughes' managing of the Plath estate was the other difficult aspect. She was a Sphinx. A Cerberus. A fire-breathing dragon standing in front of the cave of Plathian goodies. Choose your metaphor. She was revered and feared - and any book that was published had to go through Olwyn - and she had to okay it. (Janet Malcolm's book goes into all of this - each writer's experience, the specific edits Olwyn asked to make - the boundaries set) ... In a way, the Hughes estate made it nearly impossible to write a biography with a point of view. All biographies have a point of view. (This is another of Janet Malcolm's pet themes, if you look at the rest of her books. To pretend that you are "objective" means you're a liar and you're probably not a good writer. Be up front about your point of view, be up front about your ambivalence - do not misrepresent yourself - that was her main issue with Joe McGinniss, which touched off a war of words in op-ed columns throughout the US - and became the subject of another one of Malcolm's books) Anyway, I digress.

Back to Joyce. Stephen Joyce is the bogeyman to Joyce scholars - and things have come to a head yet again over the recent book about Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's mentally ill daughter. (I wrote - perhaps I should say bitched - about that book here.)

The LA Times has a full rundown of what is going on now, and all of the complicated copyright issues. Stephen Joyce often claims ownership over things the Joyce estate actually does not own.

From the New Yorker article:

In 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, Stephen threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit if it staged any Bloomsday readings; the readings were cancelled. He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather�s manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce�s play �Exiles,� and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorized a portion of �Finnegans Wake� in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely �already infringed� on the estate�s copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance.

Way to totally antagonize the fanatics about your grandfather's work, bro. As a committed Bloomsday participant through the years (just one example), I can only think:

What the HELL is your problem? Going after Bloomsday??

Dude, you seriously must chill.

Also, I'm surprised he hasn't come after me, seeing as I go insane every June 16, and am looking forward to this year - especially since it's a Saturday so I can spend the entire DAY in the company of drunk Joyceans, all of us shouting "YES I SAID YES I WILL YES" through the summery air. He would prefer to STOP that gathering and to stop us from shouting out lines from his grandfather;s novel that we love and that we have memorized.

I mean, gimme a break.

And the fight goes on. The fight over James Joyce goes on.

Commonplace

Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual; all of it is myself.

-- James Joyce, letter to Nora, Sept. 7 1909

Commonplace

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 Joyce, letter to Jimmy, 1940

Happy Birthday to Sylvia Beach

... who is responsible for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would touch it. Here is a photo of Sylvia and Jimmy:

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."

(As far as I'm concerned - 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.

I've seen a photograph of Peggy Guggenheim's letter to Sylvia Beach: "Please send me a copy of Ulysses!!!" Urgent exclamation marks.

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 (which I haven't read - my dad said it's okay, not great, but okay) - and is widely revered for her courageous independent move to publish Ulysses - the book that T.S. Eliot said "destroyed the 19th century".

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.

Yes i said yes I will Yes

Hours of fun can be had with the Ulysses concordance (thank you, Mimi Smartypants for linking to it).

I kinda can't stop playing around with it. I mean, obviously it is an awesome tool for scholars ... but I just like surfing thru it, randomly.

Obsession? (I thought I would start off with an appropriate word, seeing as the concordance itself is the most obsessive - and beautiful - thing I have ever seen) 2 occurrences:

foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed (from Aeolus)

disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian (from Ithaca)

Crimson 9 occurrences.

Bastard 8 occurrences

Pillow 10 occurrences

Nonsense 4 occurrences

Bathroom (of course - had to go there) 1 occurrence

Shakespeare 38 occurrences

I find this strangely relaxing.

rhododendrons 7 occurrences

Whoever created this deserves a big fat kiss. And also a quizzical look, like: "Uhm ... why?" Both would be acceptable. But I would give the kiss first.

Kiss 46 occurrences

Yesterday 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:

Gives me shivers. I must admit. It LOOKS important.

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.

See Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety here.

Let freedom ring!

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

Before we begin with today's celebration ...

Read the below.

I hate to do this, but experience has told me that I must.

If you don't like Joyce, don't comment today.

If you think I'm nuts for liking Joyce and spending so much time on him, don't comment today.

If you think I'm an "elitist" for liking Joyce (yup - I got that one last year), don't comment today. As a matter of fact, don't ever comment. You suck.

I'm not here to explain Joyce to people who already have a negative opinion of him. I'm not here to defend why I love him. I'm not here to reassure you that it's okay that you don't "get" Joyce. That's not why I blog. I blog for me - to share my enthusiasms and passions.

If you're not into what I'm into - then that's fine - I'm not an evangelist. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I am in this for ME. I am in this for the people who send me emails in February, or even last October - saying, "Just so you know: I make sure to stop by your blog every June 16!"

THOSE are the people this is for.

If you haven't read Joyce but you're open to all of this, and find this fun to read about, etc. ... then have fun! There's a lot of good stuff here.

Sorry - I hate to do posts like this - but it happens every year and I figured I'd just let you know that this is a celebration that I enjoy - and that's what it's all about.

It's also for my father - who introduced me to Joyce. It's Father's Day coming up and it was just my dad's birthday.

All of this is for him.

Rejoyce!

A cornucopia below ... in honor of one of my favorite days of the year.

Bloomsday: The plot thickens!

Okay, so here is the plot of Ulysses.

Joyce used, as the structure, the "Odyssey" - and each section of the book has its corresponding section in The Odyssey. Knowing the Odyssey is extremely useful to understanding Joyce's book. Because Joyce doesn't label any of his chapters, as clues. The episode known as the "Proteus episode" is not labeled as such in Ulysses, you have to put it together yourself. Or you have to ask your father. And he will tell you.

"Oh, that's the Cyclops episode." Etc.

The first three chapters make up Part I of the book, known to Joyce freaks as the "Telemachia". In The Odyssey, Telemachus is awakened to manhood by Athena. James Joyce believed that, on June 16, 1904 (the day the entirety of Ulysses takes place) he became a man. Introspection ended, or at least transformed - and he started to come out into the world. This is the entire driving force of the book.

Chapter I "Telemachus" episode ... it is early morning, 8 am.

We start off with the character of Stephen Dedalus - who was also the lead character in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses doesn't quite pick up the strand from where that book left off - but it's close enough.

Stephen is rooming with a couple of friends in an old round square tower. He awakens. He has broken his glasses. It is June 16. He starts off for work.

Chapter II "Nestor" episode ... it is now 10 a.m.

Stephen teaches in a school. After class, he has a long conversation with Mr. Deasy, the headmaster - who is, basically, the wise Nestor in "The Odyssey". Their conversation is about history. Irish history. Deasy asks Dedalus if he could drop off a couple of things he had written at 2 Irish newspapers.

Deasy says to Dedalus at one point:

-- You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things....I have rebel blood in me too ... On the spindle side. But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are all Irish, all kings' sons.

-- Alas, Stephen said.

The generational difference. A major propelling force in Dedalus, who must strike out on his own. Must fight against artifice.

Chapter III "Proteus" episode ... This is around 11 am, it takes place on the Strand - I've quoted from it already here and here .

Stephen goes for a walk on the beach. He is blind, his glasses have broken. And so all impressions come to him through sounds, all colors blur together ... which is a perfect reflection of his own state of mind. He has not yet broken free yet, he has not yet separated himself from his inspirations, his tradition, his world. It's very Hamlet-esque - which makes sense, because Stephen (and Joyce) were obsessed with Hamlet.

Quote from this section:

Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.

And the Proteus episode ends the "Telemachia". After the "Telemachia", the actual "Odyssey" begins. And we now enter the world of Leopold Bloom.

In the Odyssey, Ulysses must leave Calypso - the female, the nymph. He travels, he visist with the Phaenicians - he tells them all the long tale of his travels, his misfortunes, etc. They transport him back to Ithaca. Back home. That's the arc of the book (so simplistic!!) But simplicity is good. It helped me out, in reading Ulysses to remember that fact: It's just a journey. It's the journey of two men through one day.

Their paths start out as separate. And eventually they converge.

Part II of Ulysses is the section of the actual Odyssey.

Chapter IV The "Calypso Episode" - This takes place in Leopold Bloom's house - at 8 a.m. - the very same moment that Stephen Dedalus is waking up across town in his Tower

Leopold Bloom has breakfast. Then he takes a dump. That is basically the "plot" of the section. However: you get a couple of clues. He's worried that Molly (his wife) is cheating on him. The thought torments him. He goes upstairs - and she's lying in bed. Bloom gets ready to go to a funeral of a friend. Molly is waiting for him to leave, basically, so that she can go meet up with her lover. This is a strange chapter - it's all about the innards of things. What people eat, what people excrete ... it's body without any redeeming soul.

Chapter V "The Lotuseater" episode

Leopold Bloom leaves his house ... it's around 10 am. He wanders the streets of Dublin, window-shopping. He goes to the post office. He turns left, he turns right, he walks a block, he stops, he turns left, he turns right ... This is one of those chapters where you could re-construct a map of Dublin from the prose.

I am sure there are people right now, in Dublin, walking around, holding Ulysses up in front of them - following the commands of this chapter. The chapter ends with Leopold Bloom visiting the baths, lying down in the water.

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Obviously, Bloom is a troubled man.

Chapter VI "The Hades" episode

This is where Bloom attends the funeral - an obvious parallel to the journey through Hades. Stephen Dedalus is at the same funeral - but their paths do not cross yet. Not really. Bloom is in the same carriage as Dedalus' kinda deadbeat father - as well as some other people. It is 11 a.m. The mourners all crowd into carriages, and travel to the graveyard. They stare out the windows, and talk about what they see - another microscopic glimpse of the world of Dublin. It's a gossipy chapter, filled with different and conflicting voices.

They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.

-- I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.

-- Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.

-- How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping I suppose.

-- Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary the sexton's an old tramp sat, grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown yawning boot. After life's journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by, one by one: gloomy houses.

After the graveside service, they pile back into carriages again. They leave Hades.

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time.

Chapter VII "The Eolus" episode

This is when Stephen Dedalus goes to the newspaper office to drop off Mr. Deasy's letters, and Leopold Bloom is there to sell advertisements. Their paths almost cross here ... but they just miss each other.

I was completely BAFFLED by this chapter until I got what Joyce was doing - and then had to go back and read it again. The entire episode, which Joyce wanted to be symbolic of lungs, air, rhetoric - a lot of "windbags", actually - is all talk talk talk talk - and because it takes place in a newspaper office, the text is interspersed with wacko headlines.

It was a lot of fun to read, once I got the structure. It made perfect sense.

Like Joyce said himself, "With me, the thought is always simple."

The form may be complex, convoluted - but the thought never is.

Everyone's full of a lot of hot air in this chapter. Yak yak yak yak

LOST CAUSES NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED

-- We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus! Lord Salisbury. A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek!

See what I mean? Yak yak yak.

Chapter VIII "The Lestrygonians" episode

This has as its parallel the episode with Ulysses and the cannibals. In this episode, Leopold Bloom goes to get lunch. And again - we're back with the old disgust at the body, disgust at what it must do - how it must chew, how it must digest ... How can anyone ever rise above that and find anything spiritual or refined?

Leopold Bloom's anxiety increases ... as he gets closer and closer to the time he suspects Molly will be meeting with her lover. He becomes consumed by thoughts of her - as he sits and has his lunch. He imagines everyone talking about him, he is paranoid.

The chapter is a cornucopia of grossness. Images of childbirth splitting someone open, of a throat clogged, of the nastiness of food in general ...

Men, men, men.

Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't! O! A bone! That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't swallow it all however.

Ha!

Chapter IX "The Scylla and Charybdis" episode

Okay. Love this chapter. This is the chapter where Joyce basically sounds off about all of the things he has been thinking about - putting them in the mouth of his alter-ego Stephen Dedalus.

It is 2 pm, and Leopold Bloom, after having his lunch, comes to the library. He basically hides behind a statue, and eavesdrops on a long conversation between Stephen Dedalus and his friends. In it, Dedalus talks about his theory of Hamlet, and his ideas about Shakespeare.

To me, this chapter is FOOD FOR MY BRAIN.

There's also the brilliance of the parallel: the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis - the whirlpool in between ... Dedalus caught - between traditions, geography, trying to navigate his way through.

The entire chapter is a vibrant literary discussion. Eventually, they see Leopold Bloom sneaking away from them ... and they gossip about him, about his wife's obvious infidelities. This chapter, too, is Dedalus (who eventually - we know - because he is Joyce - will get the hell OUT of Ireland) emerging from un-knowingness - and from the pre-language ramblings of the Proteus episode - into articulation. He speaks. And speaks, and speaks.

The birth of the writer.

It is in this chapter that Stephen says the famous line: "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

Chapter X "The Wandering Rocks" episode

Joyce now takes us out of the interiors (the library, the pub, the baths, the carriages) - and out into the raucous streets of Dublin. It's a melee - a mish-mosh - a montage - We see everyone, snippets, bits, pieces, behavior, incomprehensible and comprehensible ... exactly as one does on city streets anywhere. You get glimpses of other passersby - you see things - you move on - everyone walking in their own direction, passing each other by.

Joyce saw this chapter as moving away from the obvious BRAIN of the chapter before, and into the blood-stream.

Everyone is circulating in this chapter, Dublin is on the move.

This section, actually, is missing from Homer's account of the Odyssey. But Joyce wasn't just copying the structure, he was transforming it, melding it, molding it ... and he couldn't leave out the Wandering Rocks.

Because it, to him, was the perfect opportunity to SHOW us Dublin, and Dubliners. When they don't know that anyone is watching them.

There's some kind of parade going on - or a motorcade or something. And that is the structure that Joyce uses, to take us through the blood-stream (or the "wandering rocks") of Dublin. The motorcade passes this, it passes that ... all of the citizens of Dublin are the rocks through which the motorcade passes.

In the last section, it's like the car speeds up - and we see everyone we have just met - in increasing speed - just glimpses - like you would get from out of the window of a car.

Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are not seen. And by this point, I wondered: Hm. Where the hell are those two?

Chapter XI "The Sirens" episode

It is 4 pm, by this point. 4 pm is the time of Molly's rendesvous with her lover. Leopold stops by a hotel bar/concert hall to have a drink, and to listen to the singers.

Two barmaids stand there, chattering.

Because the parallel of this is the Sirens episode in the Odyssey - which is all about SOUND - we get none of Leopold's inner thoughts. We just hear what he hears. And because of his increasing anxiety and paranoia - it all comes to him as meaningless jibber-jabber.

It's a brilliant device.

Again, once I knew what Joyce was up to - it became great fun. Here's an excerpt - it is going to read like gibberish, and it's supposed to. It's the way other people's jabbering conversations may sound to you - when your mind is elsewhere, when you are deep in thought.

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.

Of course they're alluring. They're the sirens.

Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.

Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.

Her ear too is a shell [Ed: He's thinking about Molly now], the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside. Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream first make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn't forget. Fever near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over: shell with seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks their mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet, a yashmak. Find the way in. A cave. No admittance except on business.

The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood is it. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands.

Chapter XII "The Cyclops" 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.

It is a run-in. A run-in by a windbag old Irish radical referred to as "the Citizen" - and Leopold Bloom, who has stopped by for a drink. Things get ugly. It's anti-Semitic. It's nasty. Bloom knows that everyone knows he is a cuckold.

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!!"

I didn't get it at ALL. 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 - I said, "How do you know that?"

Dad held the book out to me and said, "Look at how many times the word 'I' appears on every page."

And then ... it all unfolded. 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'. hence - 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.

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.

You can smell the hostility in the room, you can feel the contempt all have for Bloom - not just because he is Jewish, but because his wife is blatantly cheating on him, sleeping with her lover at that very moment.

Everyone laughs at Bloom. Poor guy.

Chapter XIII "The Nausikaa" episode

An extremely creepy and bizarre chapter. It takes place on the rocks, down by the beach, at about 8 pm. Leopold Bloom is avoiding going home to his adulterous wife. He sits on the rocks, brooding. He sees 2 young women, also on the beach. He hides behind the rocks and masturbates.

This all sounds very simple - but the weird thing is is that the entire chapter is written in the overblown overly romantic turgid prose of a bad romance novel.

Joyce chose this for ... well, I can guess why: Leopold Bloom, in that moment, in that moment of avoiding going home, and in the moment of sunset-time, looking at the fresh young women on the beach ... is filled with the yearning of a romance novel. He is almost adolescent in his praise of their purity, their beauty.

Ironically, their beauty is what makes him masturbate in a frenzy. Filled with shame and loathing. It's quite tragic, actually.

How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked ...

For Gerty had her dreams that no-one knew of.

The chapter ends with a bell chiming in the distance:

Cuckoo
Cuckoo
Cuckoo

An obvious and taunting reminder to Bloom of his marital condition. He is cuckoo, a cuckold.

Chapter XIV "The Oxen of Sun" episode

It's now 10 o'clock at night. It appears that none of the men in Dublin want to go home, and are wandering about. (Having been to Dublin many times, I can say that that is still the case.)

All the men converge on a maternity hospital - where a friend's wife has just had a baby.

And here - at last - Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom meet.

It makes perfect sense. Childbirth, something transforming, something coming to life ... in a rather sterile and white atmosphere, actually. But what was once an embryo is now a full human life.

Paths converge.

The writing in this chapter is a precursor (I would say) of Finnegans Wake. A non-stop onslaught, a constant repeating of themes, a constant embellishment on the themes of the chapter (wombs, medicine, embryos, life)...The prose is like the development of a child inside a woman. Fingers developing, toes coming out, head forming itself, organs forming ... a constant process of transformation, repetition, and growth.

Once you know that that's what's going on - it becomes quite easy to get through, actually.

Also: that it takes place in the waiting room of a maternity ward. A bunch of men, sitting around, aimlessly, in the world of women.

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 ny man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.

The men sit, in the waiting room, and talk about all of this. Dedalus and Bloom recognize one another. Not just "Oh hey, I know your face" - but as kindred souls.

Dedalus is looking for a father. A spiritual father, a real father. Bloom appears.

Chapter XV "The Circe" episode

Dedalus and Bloom visit the red-light district in Dublin, known as Night Town.

This chapter is a psychedelic ride, I'll tell ya. It's all written like a script, with stage directions. It is completely unrealistic. People change shapes, shift into horrible visions -

Bella (the Madame of Night Town) is "Circe" - and she indulges Bloom in what we have seen, thoughout the day, in his masochistic fantasies. He is reduced to a snivelling snorting little piglet, licking her boot-soles.

Dedalus is suddenly tormented by the ghost of his dead mother - etc. All females represented to him as the death of this one important female.

It's midnight. The whole thing takes on the feel of one mass hallucination.

There's so much in this chapter, it's immensely long - it's about death, sex, Ireland, women, the search for meaning, life, fear, love of pain, patriotism ...

Like I said, it's quite a ride.

And the Circe episode ends Part II of this book. The journey out has ended - now it's time to go back in.

Part III of Ulysses is the "Nostos" - the return.

Ulysses, in the Nostos, reveals himself to his son. They slaughter the suitors together, and he returns to his kingdom as a hero - to regain his country and also to regain Penelope.

In Part III of Joyce's book, Bloom has to go home again. He has to go and face his "Penelope" - lying in bed now, waiting for him.

Chapter XVI "The Eumeus" episode

It's now 1 a.m., and Dedalus and Bloom have escaped from the madhouse of the brothel, with their sanity barely intact. They still don't want to go home. So they stop off at a midnight cafeteria where the carriage-drivers of the city hang out off-duty - to have a cup of soup.

The parallel here is:

The Eumeus, in the Odyssey, is all about the navigation home, the sailors, the sea. Joyce's chapter does the same thing. The men in the cabbie shelter become the sailors, the ones bearing Dedalus and Bloom towards home.

The men are also referred to as "wrecks" - They also become the shipwrecks out on the sea, the danger facing Dedalus and Bloom on this journey home.

They're not out of the woods yet.

They all sit, it's 1 a.m., and they discuss many things. Of course, they all start to discuss Ireland.

Stephen is exhausted. Testy. He says:

-- We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.

Love that line.

Dedalus, Bloom, and the sailors - huddled over their midnight snack - discuss women and marriage, too. Bloom worries, tormentedly:

Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in the case, exist between married folk?

It is throughout this episode that intimacy grows, unspoken, between Stephen Dedalus and Bloom. They realize the parallels in their lives, they have both had identical June 16ths ...

Bloom thinks at one point:

Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought.

Chapter XVII "Ithaca" episode

Bloom and Dedalus leave the homeless shelter - it's now 2 a.m. They walk, exhausted, and yet also invigorated by discovering one another - they walk through the dark Dublin streets, talking. Endlessly. Bloom invites Dedalus into his house when they arrive - for a cup of tea.

Molly is asleep upstairs. Bloom approaching -- we have been hearing about this woman all day -- and now she is right up the stairs.

This chapter is written in extremely impersonal prose. Joyce saw this chapter or episode as a "skeleton". It was meant to be, literally, bare bones.

It is the kind of raw and open and absolutely honest conversation that one can only have at 2 o'clock in the morning. Do you know what I mean?

It is TRUTH.

But it's not messy or emotional - they're too tired for that. It's a cut to the chase thing, an intellectual and philosophical and "what is the meaning of life" conversation that, again, could only happen when half the planet is asleep.

It's done in a series of questions and answers.

To me, it is the most brilliant thing in the book. We get distance now. It is as though we are far far back, and studying Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from the perspective of centuries of distance.

It's like a lecture series on Bloom and Dedalus. And people in the class ask questions about these 2 characters, and the professor answers. It goes on and on and on - and I cannot tell you how riveting it is, and moving it is - once you have read the entire book.

There's scope. There's galaxies of distance. Human beings are so small, so unimportant ... and yet also so miraculous, and so beautiful. Connection is still possible. Even though usually galaxies separate us.

That's what the "Ithaca" section makes me think of.

Here's an example of how the entire chapter goes:

Was there one point on which their view were equal and negative?

The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees.

Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in the past?

In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield Avenue.

It's encyclopedic. We have been inside the story with Bloom and Dedalus, and now we are way out.

One other example (but truly, the chapter is cumulative ... it's so powerful when you read it all the way through):

What was Stephen's auditive sensation?

He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.

What was Bloom's visual sensation?

He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.

James Joyce, in the end, believes that it IS possible for human beings to connect. Even those as different from one another as Bloom and Dedalus.

The two of these nocturnal creatures sit in Bloom's kitchen, where the Odyssey began, and talk long into the night. Molly is upstairs, in bed. Bloom offers Stephen a bed for the night (still putting off going up the stairs) - Stephen declines, and leaves.

Now there's no more putting off.

By the end of the Ithaca chapter, we are ready to join Molly.

Chapter XVIII "Penelope" episode

In bed with Molly. Her interior monologue. A female. Inside the mind of the female. Her boredom, her horniness, her body betraying itself, her love for Leopold, her humor, her menstruation, her boredom with her lover, she re-lives an erotic moment with Leopold, she masturbates, but ... truly ... to try to sum it up is RIDICULOUS. It's a 40 page run-on sentence.

Joyce always said that he wanted to end his book on "the most positive word in the English language".

And so he did.

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.

The end.

Bloomsday:

What is Bloomsday?

On June 16, 1904, James Joyce first went walking, in Dublin, with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

Years later, Ulysses was published. Ulysses, of course, an 800 page book, takes place all in one day. And what day does it take place on? June 16. Clearly, Joyce saw meeting Nora as a turning point in his life. A graduation from boy to man. I'm not sure if it has been nailed down, without a shadow of a doubt, what happened on that day. But everyone (all biographers, I mean) agrees that something sexual happened on June 16, 1904. You can tell from how Joyce talked about that day later.

At that time, of course, there was nowhere to go in Dublin, for a "date". You didn't "date". It was a rigid Catholic country, with rigid separations of the sexes. James Joyce wanted freedom, yearned for a free and open life - where men and women could live together and actually "touch one another" - He meant more than sex.

He considered it one of the greatest blessings in his life that he ran into Nora one day on the streets of Dublin.

Nora was basically running away from her Galway past (and the boy she had loved who had died - Joyce used that as his plot for the exquisite The Dead). Nora was working as a waitress in Finn's Hotel.

Joyce met Nora on the street, on June 10, and asked if he could meet her.

Eventually, after a blow-off or two, Nora agreed. The two of them walked through the streets of Dublin, on June 16, 1904.

And 3 months later, in September of 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled Ireland. Forever.

They fled Ireland without getting married, leaving a wake of scandal (and debt) behind them. Poor Stanislaus Joyce, Jim's loyal brother, was left behind to smooth over the mess.

And except for one or two visits, they never returned to Ireland.

They lived in Trieste, and had two children - Giorgio and Lucia.

They got hitched, officially, in 1931.

They remained steadfastly devoted (albeit in a stormy Irish-passion kind of way) to one another for the rest of their lives.

Ulysses - considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century - is James Joyce's tribute to Nora Barnacle, the wild Galway girl who took a risk on this nearly-blind always-broke writer, the Galway girl who threw away respectability to take on a life with him.

In a way, she saved him. She also cemented his chance for immortality. He would not have written Ulysses without her.

She was the catalyst, the inspiration. He said often that he could only write about one woman. He only knew one woman - and that was Nora. Nora, to him, represented the mystery of ALL women - and through studying her character, and stealing the experiences from her own life, and how she would express them - he was able to delve into the relationship between the sexes in a grandly universal way.

I don't want to say that Nora is the REASON for Joyce's genius, because I don't believe that at all. Joyce was a genius, regardless.

But she ended up being the galvanizing force, the illuminating candle in the darkness - from which he would begin to write his best and his most personal work.

Without Nora confessing to him her old and painful love affair with the boy who had died (after standing beneath her window in the rain) - James Joyce never would have written The Dead - which I believe is the greatest short story ever written.

The Dubliners is a very interesting book - because in it, you can see Joyce's development as a writer. The Dubliners is a series of short stories, all taking place (duh) in Dublin. It was considered very scandalous at the time. The book told the truth about Ireland, about Dublin - about the kind of life it offered its people (its young men, in particular). I've read it tons of times, but the most interesting way to read the book is to read it from start to finish - first story to last story. Don't skip around.

The Dead is the last story.

The rest of the book is filled with great snippets of writing, interesting images, Irish humor - but it's kind of bitchy, it's a book of gossip - it is a book meant to HURT. Joyce wanted to hurt Ireland - he wanted to force them to look in the mirror, and see themselves. This is his motivation with 95% of the stories in Dubliners. And that's cool, a lot of the best books in the world have been written out of rage, out of a desire for revenge, as an "I'll show them"...

Most of the book has that tone.

And then in The Dead ... suddenly ... in one motion - Joyce draws back the curtain, and there you see what is behind all the bitchiness. You see ineffable tenderness, unbearable loss, and a sweet sweet (bittersweet) love. Oh, how he loved Dublin, oh how he loved Ireland, and Dubliners ... how he loved it all ... and yet ... he could not live there, he could not live in Ireland without experiencing a kind of soul-death.

However - he never could write about anything else. All of his books are about Ireland, and he wrote not one of them on his native soil.

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."

John Banville wrote: "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.'

Bloomsday: the events of June 16, 1904

From Richard Ellmann's biography James Joyce:

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.

Bloomsday: "a language which is above all languages"

"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."

-- James Joyce...

The man of the day

Bloomsday: "yes I said yes I will Yes"

The ending of the book Ulysses:

(And here's just a small story: a couple of years ago I went to a Bloomsday celebration at a bar in the financial district called, appropriately, Ulysses. During the day-long celebration, my friend Aedin read the last 2 pages of Molly's 40-page run-on sentence monologue that closes the book. And as she approached the end - which I have printed below - many of those in the crowd there listening - started reciting along with her - many of them without looking down at their books. And of course - the last triumphant phrase is memorized by all - and we all just SHOUTED it up into the canyons of Wall Street. One of my most memorable New York memories. Joyce is NOT solemn. Joyce is NOT abstract. That is how Joyce is meant to be read.)

Without further ado, here's Molly (for those of you who haven't read the book - if you read this out loud - it will become immediately apparent what is going on):

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.

Bloomsday: "It is an entirely new thing"

Yeats read a chapter or two of Ulysses, which had been serialized in the Little Review from Paris.

His first comment was: "A mad book!"

But then later, not much later, he 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."

Bloomsday; hahahahaha

Gertrude Stein had this to say:

"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."

Bloomsday: "the last chapter"

"How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

-- TS Eliot...

Bloomsday: the "meteor" of Ulysses

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."

Bloomsday: "dammed up sources of collective speech"

Carlos Fuentes:

"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 dammed 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."

Bloomsday: the hotel porter

James Joyce:

"A German lady called to see me today. She is a writer and wanted me to give an opinion on her work, but she told me she had already shown it to the porter of the hotel where she stays. So I said to her, 'What did your hotel porter think of your work?' She said, 'He objected to a scene in my novel where my hero goes out into the forest, finds a locket of the girl he loves, picks it up and kisses it passionately.' 'But,' I said, 'that seems to me to be a very pleasing and touching incident. What did your hotel porter find wrong with it?' And then she tells me he said, 'It's all right for the hero to find the locket and to pick it up and kiss it, but before he kissed it you should have made him wipe the dirt off it with his coat sleeve.' And I told this [German lady], and I meant it too, to go back to that hotel porter and always to take his advice. 'That man,' I said, 'is a critical genius. There is nothing I can tell you that he can't tell you.' "

Bloomsday: "the woman word" in Chinese

YES I SAID: TRANSLATING ULYSSES INTO CHINESE
by Jim Di
Poets and Writers, November/December 2002

Joyce's deliberately repeated use of yes, as what he called "the woman word", in the final episode to characterize Molly's mentality is at odds with the genius of the Chinese language, which requires lexical adjustments to express the multitude of ideas carried by the English yes. There is not one Chinese term, much less the standard "counterpart" -- shi-de -- that can in a Chinese version of the novel more or less consistently replace yes. This contrasts with such European language counterparts as si, oui, ja, and so on, in their versions. If I followed Joyce's lead and repeated one Chinese term in all the eighty-odd occasions in the chapter where yes is found in the original, I would most certainly ruin the end text with expressions that would sound idiotic to most Chinese readers. Joyce's demand for emphatic repetition runs headon into a conflict with the genius of the Chinese language.

After a long and careful study I decided that a large number of Mollys' yeses do not serve as much more than a kind of emphatic affirmation of the speaker's own sincerity. There is hardly any other substantive content to those yeses, so it is possible to choose a Chinese term of affirmation that sounds natural on such occasions. This decision meant fewer repetitions of Joyce's yes, but enough to produce an impression of a habitual locution in someone's mouth, as "the woman word" must do.

The repeatable term of emphatic affirmation I chose is zhen-de -- "really" -- which is a kind of habitual locution with some speakers of Chinese. It is repeated dozens of times in my translation of the last episode, and like Joyce's yes, it does stand both at the beginning and the end of it, conspicuously but quite naturally. At the same time, the other yeses are rendered flexibly, each in a way that suits its particular context. Some of the yeses in the final passage of the episode, for instance, involve the very serious matter of accepting a marriage proposal, for which neither shi-de nor zhen-de will suffice. My rendering for that is yuan-yi, a formal term that means "I will".

Yet in its Chinese form the pronoun I is understood, and the ending of the novel becomes "yuan-yi wo yuan-yi zhen-de." I believe this carries the same emphasis as Joyce's original yes I will Yes. -- which in fact happens to be its only back-translation.

Bloomsday: "Yo, Bloom, Happy Bloomsday!"

Aaron Beall - co-founder of New York City�s International Fringe Festival - said:

Last year on Bloomsday, I dressed in my theatre as Bloom, in a black mourning suit, black bowler and portmanteau before jumping on the No. 1 train to head uptown to Symphony Space. I was a celebrity. On the train people would come up to me and ask shyly, "You're Bloom, aren't you?" and I would nod "yes". Everyone was delighted to see me, they were looking for me, their literary pop star, and out on the street, they called to me, "Yo, Bloom, Happy Bloomsday," waving their copies of Ulysses, from out of whose pages I'd stepped.

Bloomsday: "an egomaniacal Irishman"

Caraid O'Brien said, in regards to Bloomsday celebrations:

On Bloomsday, we are Joyce's puppets as we willingly surrender ourselves to his world. Only from the mind of an egomaniacal Irishman could such a holiday be created.

Bloomsday: "nothing comes of it, and yet ..."

Carl Jung, who was obsessed with the book, wrote:

The incredible multifariousness of Joyce's style has a monotonous and hypnotic effect. Nothing comes to the reader; everything turns away from him and leaves him to gape after it. The book is always up and away; it is not at peace with itself but is at once ironic, sarcastic, poisonous, disdainful, sad, despairing, and bitter.

He also wrote:

I had an old uncle whose thinking was always to the point. One day he stopped me on the street and asked, "Do you know how the devil tortures the souls in hell?" When I said no, he declared, "He keeps them waiting." And with that he walked away. This remark occurred to me when I was ploughing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer. Then bit by bit, again to your horror, it dawns upon you that in all truth you have hit the nail on the head. It is actual fact that nothing happens and nothing comes of it, and yet a secret expectation at war with hopeless resignation drags the reader from page to page.

Bloomsday: "pure reverie"

Emeric Fischer:

Ulysses can be read with passion without intellectually understanding the text. In this case, we identify ourselves completely with the character, our imagination lays hold of his sensation, his pleasure, his remiscences, and we live with him, we dream with him. The prolonging of the interior monolgue in our imagination will provoke pure reverie ... Because the interior monologue in its fragmentary incoherence includes, as we have seen before, all the logical structure and grammatical armature of thought.

Bloomsday: "Ulysses and Telemachus"

Ezra Pound - one of Joyce's greatest champions and supporters:

The action takes place in one day ... in a single place, Dublin. Telemachus wanders beside the shore of the loud and roaring sea; he sees the midwives with their professional bags. Ulysses breakfasts, circulates; mass, funeral, bath house, race tracktalk; the other characters circulate; the soap circulates; he hunts for advertising, the "ad" of the House of Keyes, he visits the national library to verify an anatomical detail of mythology, he comes to the isle of Aeolus (a newspaper office), all the noises burst forth, tramways, trucks, post office wagons, etc.; Nausicaa appears, they dine at the hospital; the meeting of Ulysses and Telemachus, the brothel, the brawl, the return to Bloom's, and then the author presents Penelope, symbol of the earth, whose night thoughts end the story as counterweight to the ingenuities of the male.

Bloomsday: submit

Philippe Soupault:

Joyce extracts from his reader an effort which cannot be dispersed. He first imposes on him his tone, his color, his style. The imagination is never allowed free rein. From the first word, he who dares to begin reading is as though seized, and cost what it may, he must submit himself to the will of the author. It is a test of strength.

Bloomsday: the epic of two races

James Joyce:

[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!

Bloomsday: a wish

"I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it."

-- T.S. Eliot

Bloomsday: "the damned Irish"

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..."

Here's Joyce and his family - the "celtic crew":

Bloomsday: "an exceedingly hard nut"

Here is the letter Carl Jung wrote to Joyce, after he finished Ulysses:

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, very proud that he had won Jung's boredom and admiration, that he had made Jung curse him. Joyce read it out loud to a group of people, Nora included. Joyce finished reading the letter, and Nora turned to someone beside her and said flatly, "Jim knows nothing at all about women."