Ulysses on Film

Discussing a new film version of his novel Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie comments upon whether or not some books are unfilmable:

Everyone was telling us that you can’t film this book. And we just said, “The hell with that; yes you can.” You can film anything. There have been some pretty good attempts at “War and Peace.” Joseph Strick’s film of “Ulysses” is a pretty respectable try.

The film was issued on DVD in 2000.

If you want to judge for yourself, here's a link to Strick's 1967 film of Joyce's novel, available in its entirety on YouTube. 

Milo O'Shea and Barbara Jefford as Leopold and Molly Bloom.

Lives of James Joyce

In this blog post, Ted Gioia compares Richard Ellmann's famous biography of James Joyce with the more recent (2012) one by Gordon Bowker. It's an interesting piece that provides a host of details about Joyce.

Here Gioia discusses the unrelentingly biographical nature of Joyce's writing:

In truth, Joyce never stopped writing his life story. Stephen Dedalus, his fictional alter ego, reappears in Ulysses, a book that is, among many other things, a continuation of the narrative of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce downplayed the autobiographical elements in Finnegans Wake, his final and most daunting book, but even here he could not resist filling the text with elements, large and small, from his day-to-day life. In truth, Joyce knew no other manner of writing. Many have puzzled over his strange admission to Harriet Weaver: "I fear I have little imagination"—a remarkable statement coming from one of the most illustrious storytellers of modern times. Yet his quirky process of writing bears out the claim. The building blocks of Joyce’s books were the details of his day, and he constantly jotted down what he had seen and heard, later reworking this raw material into the stuff of his fiction. The kind of wholesale invention of a Balzac or Tolstoy was foreign to his temperament, and it was all too revealing that when he did aim for epic grandeur in rewriting the myth of Ulysses, he had to set the story in his hometown and make himself one of characters. If Joyce had written War and Peace, it would have probably revolved around a brawl in a favorite Dublin pub.

And here Gioia quotes from a paper that Joyce himself presented at University College in 1900, in which he lays out what seems to be a key aesthetic principle guiding Ulysses:

"Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living," Joyce insisted, "may play a part in the great drama….Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery."

Hugh Kenner on Joyce's Strange Book

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)

From literary scholar Hugh Kenner's book on Ulysses, a passage that may alleviate some anxiety for first-time readers of the novel as well as excite them about the novel's possibilities:

Joyce's strange book has no stranger aspect than this, that no one comprehensive reading is thinkable. A book—certainly, a novel—normally presupposes that ideal attention will reap it at one traverse; if we need, as we frequently do, repeated readings, that is because our attention is plagued by lapses, or perhaps because the writing is faulty. But Ulysses is so designed that new readers, given, even, what cannot be postulated, ideal immunity to attention overload, cannot possibly grasp certain elements because of a warp in the order of presentation, and veteran readers will perceive after twenty years new lights going on as a consequence of a question they have only just thought to ask....

Joyce's aesthetic of delay, producing the simplest facts by parallax, one element now, one later, and leaving large orders of fact to be assembled late or another time or never, in solving the problem of novels that go flat after we know "how it comes out" also provides what fiction has never before really provided, an experience comparable to that of experiencing the haphazardly evidential quality of life; and, moreover, what art is supposed to offer that life can not, a permanence to be revisited at will but not exhausted.

I'm glad that we'll all be reading and puzzling over this book together.

Stephen and Telemachus

Telemachus and Mentor

Having finished the first three chapters of Ulysses, our first reading assignment for this project, I thought I’d take some time to write out a few thoughts, keeping in mind a quotation that one of my old professors recommended we write at the beginning of our journals for his class: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”

These first three chapters are sometimes referred to as the Telemachiad, since in the scheme of parallels to Homer’s Odyssey they represent the first four books of Homer’s epic, which focus not on Odysseus but on his son, Telemachus. In teaching the Odyssey to freshmen, I find these four chapters useful because I can draw parallels between Telemachus and my students. Like embattled incoming high school freshmen, Telemachus is facing a series of challenges: an absent father whom he has never known; a chaotic, ungoverned island home; a mother wracked by grief and increasingly at wits’ end; and a household swarming with uncouth suitors to his mother’s hand who party endlessly on his family’s bounty. In the first episode of the story, the goddess Athena comes down from Olympus and visits Telemachus, inspiring him with a plan for how he might stop clinging to his boyhood and become a man. He must call an assembly on Ithaca, publicly denounce the suitors, then travel to Pylos and Sparta to meet with his father’s old war comrades and ask if they know anything of his whereabouts. In the remainder of the opening four books of the epic, Telemachus follows her instructions, gaining experience out in the world, testing his mettle in rhetorical situations, learning from the example of a peer named Pisistratus, and, ultimately, accomplishing his goal by learning that his father is alive.

What does Joyce accomplish by comparing Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus? Most immediately, he puts Stephen in his place. For all of Stephen’s intellectual gymnastics and self-dramatizing internal monologues, he is still young and immature, like Telemachus. And like Telemachus, this story in which he appears is not named for him. In the notes to the first chapter, Jeri Johnson quotes an idea from the literary critic Hugh Kenner that I found helpful: “Stephen thinks he is in a book called Hamlet and never discovers that it’s really called Ulysses and that he is a supporting actor, not the lead” (772). Stephen may think he is a tragic hero, the Prince of Denmark, as he walks along Sandymount Strand, brooding over mortality, epistemology, and other intellectual problems, but in this novel he is perhaps more like the young prince of Ithaca despairing on the beach after his assembly ends in discord and recriminations from the suitors. On the beach in Ithaca, divine inspiration and encouragement come to Telemachus in the guise of Mentor, a family friend. For Stephen, no gods appear to rescue him from the tangle of his thoughts. In fact, Stephen is not so sure that there is any divine presence out there. When his towermate Haines asks him whether he believes in the “idea of a personal God,” Stephen tells him that “You behold in me ... a horrible example of free thought” (20). Just as Telemachus has his moments of doubt in the gods, though, Stephen’s rejection of religious belief seems to waver at times. He tells Haines that one of the two master he serves is the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church, and Buck Mulligan tells him that “you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way” (8). Stephen’s personality has been inflected by his Jesuit education despite his free-thinking. He uses literature as a kind of sacred scripture, examines his consciousness to the point of omphalos-gazing, and seems to prefer spiritual exercises to physical ones. Looking at the water while walking along the strand he acknowledges “I am not a strong swimmer” (45).

Like Telemachus, Stephen has a troubled relationship with his mother (or had; on her deathbed, Stephen refused to kneel down and pray as she requested him to do). His frenemy Buck Mulligan mockingly calls him “Japhet in search of a father” (18), drawing another parallel with Telemachus (and signalling a key theme in the novel, according to a footnote at the top of page 773). Stephen’s Ireland is just as troubled an island, probably more so, than Ithaca. In these first three chapters of the novel, his encounters with others are less fruitful or at least more complicated than those of Telemachus. Buck Mulligan and Haines clearly do not provide Stephen with the support and positive example that Pisistratus offers Telemachus; nor does the anti-Semitic Mr. Deasy encourage Stephen as Nestor and Menelaus do the young prince. No wonder that Stephen is left to wrestle Proteus alone in the third chapter. His attempts to connect with other human beings have so far been “a disappointed bridge” (25), to quote his witty definition of a pier, a quip which itself fails to connect with the students to whom Stephen makes it.

“You were not born to be a teacher,” Mr. Deasy tells Stephen, who replies, “A learner, rather” (35). So perhaps Stephen understands who he is after all: a searcher like Telemachus rather than a master like Odysseus.

Frank K.

Stephen at the Battlements

The Martello Tower in Dublin where James Joyce lived briefly in 1904. Now a Joyce museum.

Chapter One begins on the roof of the Martello Tower in Sandycove at the battlements because Stephen Dedalus is in a battle to protect himself, his identity, from those who would usurp it. Like Hamlet, SD's father is dead. Much of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the process of SD's separating from the father, rejecting his maudlin nationalism and his mindless honoring of the Jesuits. Like Hamlet, however, the ghost of his father exists in other fathers whom he must do battle with: Yeats, whose poem "Who goes With Fergus" recurs when SD contemplates loves bitter mystery, and Wilde, whose puce and yellow garb are so different from SD's ratty clothes, but whose witticisms are so like SD's proclamations such as Irish history is the cracked looking glass of a servant. As a servant to England, he speaks the master's language; as a servant of Rome, his mind is filled with the rituals and obligations of the Catholic church. Mulligan can reject these masters through mockery—his parody of the mass that begins the novel with Buck as priest and SD as his servant boy and through bullying Haines, the Sassenach (Irish for Englishman)—but SD cannot so easily use Mulligan's methods. SD agonizes over these battles. He feels the sting of Mulligan's mockery and the remorse over having to reject his mother's attempt to appeal to his love of her to participate in a religious ritual in which he does not believe. SD may seem like such a brooding, egocentric adolescent to Joyce here that Joyce and Mulligan are allied in their mockery of SD, but I wonder why Joyce changes the circumstance of SD's denial of his mother in Ulysses. In Portrait, SD refuses to do his Easter duty. In Ulysses, he refuses merely to kneel and pray at her deathbed, something that would take so little of SD's self to do that Joyce is either mocking SD more or showing just how seriously SD takes his need to be an isolate to become the artist he pledges to be in Chapter IV when his espies the bird girl who inspires him to create in a way that demands complete and utter fealty to the self, the Ubermench that is Lucifer-like in Portrait.  In Portrait SD rejects the power of the keys the jesuit offers him should he join the order and call God down upon the altar in a convoluted Lucifer-like battle with God. Here in Ulysses, SD tries to hang onto the key to the tower but does relinquish it (and its power, even though he pays the rent) to Mulligan, the primary usurper of Chapter One, who is, because he speaks for SD's mother in her deathbed disagreement with her son, a suitor, whom SD must overcome if he is to be more than "a young man." That Hamlet's mother accepts a suitor that upsets Hamlet continues the parallel with Hamlet just as the titillating riddle that SD and Buck use to undercut Haines. To become men, SD and Telemachus and Hamlet must resist the suitor-usurpers of their stories. The reference to Bloom's daughter as a "sweet young thing" that one of Mulligan's brothers is tasting in Westmeath and Mulligan's climbing naked into the bed of the mother-sea at the clothes-optional swimming hole known as Forty Foot, just down a bit from the tower in Sandycove, suggest the sexual path to adulthood that Mulligan would have taken with Ursula and that Joyce's recent biographers tell us Joyce is celebrating on June 16, 1904, when Nora Barnacle reached into JJ's pants to make a man of him. Mulligan's likeness to Wilde may be JJ's inclusion of another resistance that SD is aware of (at least subconsciously): homosexuality, which is such a mystery in Portrait to the young boys who discuss smugging in Chapter One that it needs no resistance. In Ulysses, however, SD, consciously rejects Mulligan, whose reference to SD as kinch (knife) may be BM's acknowedgement of his interest in SD's sexual tool and weapon. If a knife is merely a knife, must BM beware SD. If a knife is more phallic than a literal knife, is BM another aspect of love's bitter mystery that has led SD to reject EC in Portrait and his mother in Portrait and Ulysses and the Usurper Mulligan (like Cranley in Portrait, both of whom link arms with SD to tempt him). Mulligan's Hellenism, like Haines’ anti-Semitism, afloat in the scrotum-tightening sea, surround SD, but he rejects them both.

Bill G.