Ulysses Recovered

This cover of a new edition of Ulysses, designed by Peter Mendelsund, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best book covers of 2013.

Ulysses in Popular Culture

This reference to Ulysses in Orange is the New Black just made me laugh.

Our Final Meeting

I took this photo of the lovely group of people assembled for today's final meeting.

Today we had our final meeting, hosted by Doc JPK at his 120-year-old manse. It was a delightful occasion. Joining us were representatives from the student group that also read the book over the summer. 

Adam T. said of the book's ending that he got the sense that both Leopold and Molly had come to a new perspective on their marriage, and that each was headed in a better direction. He said that he was glad to have gotten to know them, and glad that he could be happy for them.

Adam's sentiments are related to one of the key ideas I'll take from today's discussion—the notion of Joyce's novel as, ultimately, an illustration of Stephen's belief in "the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature," a point of disagreement between him and Bloom. Though Bloom may not care all that much about literature (beyond his own modest poetic efforts and his passing interest in smut), Ulysses itself becomes an affirmation of Bloom (after all, it ends with Molly saying Yes to him) and his quotidian, human existence.

Bill's Notes from Our Third Meeting

Bill G. returns to the four contrasts in these notes that draw partly on issues discussed at our third meeting, held this past Saturday afternoon at Rob H.'s house.

Decay versus Growth

When Bloom buys the kidney from the Jewish butcher, we get introduced to Agendath Netiam, the Jewish dream of growing fruits on plots of desert, blooming the sand of Palestine. In Bloom's name we have indications of Joyce's notion of his hero. When Bloom is not fruitful he is at his most impotent. In his non-sexual relationship with Molly, his epistolary romance with Martha, and his spilling of his seed on the sands of Sandymount Strand, Bloom is not blooming. At these moments Bloom is more a character of decay (decadent) than a chacter of growth. Stephen shares this decadence when he is at his most arid. Stephen's monologue in Chapter 3 occurs while Stephen walks alons the sands from Sandy Cove, the site of the tower to Sandymount. Sand becomes an image of the intellectual aridity that demonstrates Stephen's brilliance and his isolation and lack of blooming.

The Oxen of the Sun develops this topic because it takes place at the maternity hospital and because Joyce uses the chapter to demonstrate the growth (and decay?) of the English language by narrating in developing English.

Romance versus Reality

How can Bloom be a hero like Odysseus?

He can't because he is real, not a mythic romantic hero like Odysseus. Bloom defecates, masturbates, farts. His reality makes him more the hero than any imaginary romance figure. In his best moments—when Bloom defends himself and all outcasts—he earns our admiration as a real hero.

Awareness versus Blindness

When he fantasizes about Gerty, he shows he wishes he were a romantic hero whom someone like Gerty would find interesting. His blindness is a flaw that is all too real, for which of us does not allow ourselves such moments? Bloom, however, elevates himself above the others in the pub whose blindness is less pitiful. Doran's drunkenness, the Citizen's patriotism, Conmee's smugness, the anti-Semitism of almost all the characters blind them in a way that that Joyce mocks rather than pities.

Community vs Isolation

The potential good of the pub dwellers' community decays into an exclusivity that excludes Bloom.

The isolation of Stephen comes from what? His brilliance? His arrogance? Stephen is capable of empathy with the struggling student in his classroom at Deasy's school and some empathy for Dilly in Chapter Five of Portrait. His brilliance is something that the disciples in the library give to him freely.

Anchors for Understanding Stephen

Bill G. writes:

When I read the Stephen chapters that are most difficult I rely upon the anchor of the four contrasts that Joyce explores in all of his fiction:  

isolation versus community

Here Stephen finds himself among a community as he does occasionally. Like the little boy in Portrait, he remembers himself as one who moves from the margins of society to a central heroic figure. In Portrait the boy challenges the injustice of being pandied for not having his glasses and ends up on the shoulders of the older boys for taking on the jesuits, particularly Fr. Conmee, the same jesuit who wanders in the next chapter of U. In Ulysses,  Stephen holds forth in the National Library like one of  his parallel selves, Christ teaching in the temple, a metempsychosis that posits Stephen's vision as god-like. Like Stephen, Bloom ,moves about on the margins of his society for various reasons, Mulligan's mockery of Bloom's jewishness is a cause for Bloom's being an outsider. But Bloom's cuckoldry, humility, curiosity and decency are other reasons. When Bloom is observed examining Venus's mesial groove, he becomes fodder for the wit and anti-Semitism of Mulligan and others. Stephen also is elevated above the elders in the library because of his other parallel self, Shakespeare. Bloom shares in this parallel because of his cuckoldry.

Another community is one that transcends time and space--parallax

Molly Bloom and Gertrude, Queen of Denmark and Penelope, Queen of Ithaca--waiting for their men or not to return from war

Stephen's fathers: Simon, Conmee, both of whom Stephen resists and Hamlet who like Stephen is his own father creator and Bloom, Stephen's father-rival to be.

Understanding, Vision versus Ignorance, Blindness

His notion of himself as Shakespeare of he age, the one who in writing Ulysses is writing the epic of his people and as Christ the victim (notions that JJ shares).  Is Bloom a parallel to Stephen because Bloom's marginality and curiosity give him an understanding denied the smug insiders like Conmee, Powers.

Growth versus Decay

In all other instances, Stephen movement among others is followed by a descent that clarifies that any triumphs of the god-like Daedalus end up in the depths of the ocean as Icarus does in Portrait 4, as Gabriel Conroy does when he moves from the carver of the goose and master of ceremonies in The Dead to the cuckolded, humbled Gabriel when he learns of Michael Furey. Does a similar descent occur in Ulysses? Does Simon Dedalus, Stephen blood father, have more bearing on Stephen's future than all the other fathers that Stephen imagines for himself in U?

Romance versus Reality

Joyce and Stephen seek to find in the world of the actual that which exists in the imagination. All things are grist for their mills.  Stephen is an Aristotelian, not a Platonist--or is he?

Photos of Dublin

Bill G. offers some photos of Dublin:

The Anna Livia fountain that once sat near the GPO. Steve Missey is sitting on the edge of the pool. The fountain was so often fouled, it was replaced by the Millennium Spike in 2000.

Davy Byrnes' Moral Pub

Lower Hatch Street

The Liffey at dusk.

Dublin Castle Yard

Buskers on Grafton Street

Artwork Inspired by Joyce

Click here to look through a collection of images from this show of visual works inspired by the writing of James Joyce, including many inspired by Ulysses.

Our Second Meeting

We had our second meeting yesterday. Ten of us convened to talk about our next section of Ulysses, the first five chapters of Part II. This time we met in a private room at Cafe Ventana. As John K. noted, our previous meeting in a noisy, crowded brewery was fitting, given Joyce’s bustling Dublin street scenes in this novel. Perhaps our location yesterday is more akin to the conversation in the library in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter (the first chapter of our reading assignment for next time). Though at times the silence of the room could be intimidating as we struggled to help each other understand this puzzling, even enraging book, overall the space was a success: each person at the table could hear everyone else, and each person contributed to the conversation.

Tom K. started us off with a story from his own recent experience, along with a passage from the novel that stood out for him in connection with that experience. On a trip with students to Camden, N.J., Tom and some other members of the group went in to Philadelphia to get a Philly cheese steak. The sandwich shop they went to, a highly recommended spot in the middle of a neighborhood largely populated by immigrants, had a sign in it that said, “This is America. Place your order in English.” Tom thought of that unwelcoming message when he read this statement, from page 598 in the Eumaeus chapter, spoken by Leopold Bloom:

It’s a patent absurdity to hate people because they live around the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak.

We admired Bloom’s humanity, his enjoyment of the bodily and the sensual, his social gracefulness, skill in the everyday sorts of rhetorical situations that he finds himself in as he wanders the sidewalks and pubs of Dublin, his tenderness in his thoughts about his children. But do these things make him heroic? Barbara and Jeane again raised the question of whether or not Bloom can truly be considered a hero, an Odysseus figure.

Terry Q. pointed out that the book is not called Odysseus, but Ulysses, pointing to the ways in which the character of Odysseus has itself been constantly reinterpreted over the centuries. In calling his book Ulysses, Terry suggested, Joyce asks us to consider how this mythological figure can help us to understand what heroism might look like in our time—or to consider how someone like Bloom might be both like and unlike a classic hero of yore.

John K. brought with him a book called Odyssey of the Psyche, whose author, Jean Kimball, has this take on the question (emphasis added):

Ulysses is a book without a hero, but with two protagonists who are together its subject. It is a critical truism that Stephen and Bloom are opposites, but together ... they represent Joyce’s vision of the artist as a divided self working toward integration.

***

Frank K. brought up a line he read one time in an essay by Arthur Miller: “Whatever is not turned into art disappears forever.” It seems that this notion has something to do with Joyce’s encyclopedic project in Ulysses. He’s trying to preserve his home town, his homeland, with all of its effluvia and detritus, political debates and interpersonal resentments, in this monumental work of art whose complexity (he hoped) would give it immortality akin to that of The Odyssey or the Divine Comedy. In its experiments and osbcurity, it’s art that doesn’t always give us what we expect—like many modernist works of music or painting, as Jeane pointed out.

In some ways the book is Biblical, in its heft and occasional tedium. Bloom, though he may not be especially devout as either a Jew or a convert to Catholicism, nevertheless has a religious imagination, Rob G. noted—a view of the world as charged with significance and meaning, a lens on reality that is inflected by the language of ritual (“This is my body” (83), he thinks as he soaks in the bathhouse.). And so does Joyce, though he may have rejected the traditional Catholicism that he was raised in. (On the back cover of Odyssey of the Psyche is a blurb for another academic tome, James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition, by Robert Boyle, S.J.)

The real journey of Ulysses, Chris K. asserted, is an internal, linguistic journey. The novel is about how human beings think, how the human mind uses language to make sense of the world and of the self. What does the stream of consciousness look like for someone who has never had access to language? Chris K. brought up the following fascinating quotation from Helen Keller to suggest an answer to that question:

Before my teacher came, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was no world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.

Language, it seems, focuses our humanity, gives structure to our minds and shapes our experience of the world. Not only does Ulysses seeks to represent a human mind at work during the course of a particular day in a particular time and place, but in its more abstruse experiments it seeks to investigate language itself and play with this elastic, transformative, and mysterious human invention.

Bill on Hades

Breughel's Aeneas and the Sybil in Hades

In Hades, Bloom descends into Hell like his heroic counterparts—Aeneas, Odysseus, Christ. Here in the city of the Dead—Glasnevin Cemetery for the Catholics of Dublin—Bloom and others visit their nationalistic heroes such as Charles Stuart Parnell, the uncrowned king of Ireland to whom as a boy JJ wrote an elegiac poem. The net of patriotism is something the older JJ evades and satirizes and something Bloom, by virtue of his marginality in Ireland or his intelligence or both,  is not interested in. Bloom carries the comedy of this chapter as his efficiency-expert self speculates on the possibility of burying people feet down to economize on space; and Bloom carries the seriousness of the chapter in his thoughts about his son and his father and other ghosts like those Hamlet must confront to become the heroic self he seems destined to be. Macintosh is perhaps a metonym for these ghosts as he stands watching the goings on of these particular mourners.  Bloom's ghosts are personal—Rudy, his dead son and Bloom' father, who committed suicide. Bloom's father's letter to his son Bloom echoes  the letters from Martha and to Molly from Boylan and to Bloom from Milly. The letters range from dead letters (how many times is dead referred to in this chapter—dead letter office, dead right, etc.—in both Bloom's musings and the narrator's language—Karen Lawrence's book—Ulysses, an Odyssey of Style—notes that the language of each narrator is reflected in the content of the chapter—and death palls the language of this chapter certainly—

The triumph of the chapter comes when Bloom chooses life over death. Later we'll see that this triumph is not without its lapses, but the sweep of the chapter allows us to observe Bloom, an outsider whose Jewishness in a callously anti-Semitic culture is one of the reason for his feelings of impotence. Even the kind hearted Martin Cunningham, a parallel to Shakespeare in LB's mind,  is ignorantly anti-Semitic. Stephen's father blames Gogarty from Stephen's demise—how far from the truth can that analysis be. Powers, another like Cunningham who appears in "Grace" is like the others in the carriage and Menton afterwards dismissive of Bloom as not of their ilk. They lack the negative capability of a Bloom whose empathy for all is constantly in evidence. For example, he remembers Mrs. Sinico, the ignored romantic from "A Painful Case" and all the other dead. This trait threatens to pull him into a morbidity like that of Stephen, who, we are reminded, is wearing mourning colors for his mother, but Bloom is not Stephen in so many ways. As he emerges from the underworld he notes, he prefers this world—"Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm being near you. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds; warm fullbodied life.

—Bill G.

An Update from Bill

Bill G., one of our group's veteran Irish scholars, offers this report from his reading of Ulysses:

I've picked up on the Ulysses reading the last few days.  I just read Lotus Eaters, one of my favorite chapters. Bloom is so distraught by his own impotence in his wanderings he cannot go five minutes without hearing or thinking about the diffculty of getting it up and keeping it up. In Calypso, though his Odyssean namesake is one whom Calypso desires, who desires him?, in Dublin he can only speculate about that letter that Molly is hiding not that well beneath her pillow and wonder about Milly's blooming about which he can do nothing but hope for the best.  His own attempts at blooming as Henry Flower, while it keeps his sexual life alive, is so less real, fleshy and satisfying. To Martha, he is a mere "boy."  His sexual life has been reduced to masturbatory fantasies in the bathhouse.  Why is this interesting, sensual man so reduced to voyeurism and epistulatory seduction that is hardly heroic? Is it merely that Molly prefers Blazes Boylan? Is it because that at 41 Bloom is physically declining? The Hades chapter will provide more answers to this quesiton. I can't wait to read it today.