Ineluctable 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.