A Book of Silences

From Hugh Kenner's Ulysses, an interesting observation about the "Calypso" chapter:

There is much that the Blooms do not say to each other, much also that the book does not offer to say to us. Pondering such instances, we may learn how largely Ulysses is a book of silences despite its din of specifying, and may notice how eloquent is the Blooms’ rhetoric of avoidance and also the author’s. Some of the most moving things the book has to say are things never said.

7 Eccles Street, the Blooms' home.

A Blooming Physicality

At our June meeting, some of us discussed Joyce’s choice to devote most of Ulysses to Leopold Bloom instead of Stephen, his alter-ego. We speculated that Joyce recognized the limitations of his youthful self-absorption and intellectualism and developed Bloom’s character in order to represent human existence more broadly and deeply.

Contemplating Joyce's intentions for the character of Bloom it may be helpful to consider an idea from a writer Joyce read in college¹, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche makes the following pronouncement in his book The Will to Power:

Art reminds us of states of animal vigor; it is on the one hand an excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the world of images and desires; on the other, an excitation of animal functions through the images and desires of intensified life—an enhancement of the feeling of life, a stimulant to it.

These words, in conjunction with a brief passage from the “Hades” chapter, suggest the artistic significance of Leopold Bloom in the novel.

       

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). German philosopher and cultural critic.

In the “Hades” chapter, as Bloom’s carriage reaches the graveyard (on page 97), Bloom watches the “toiling plodding tread” of the horses conveying the coffin and attunes himself closely to the animal vigor of these beasts. He sees one of the horses looking back at the coffin with his “Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing on a blood vessel or something.” Bloom identifies with these animals so fully that he can even imagine their minor pains. His sympathy does not stay on the level of animal sensation, however. In fact, his thoughts about the horses lead naturally into an intensified reflection about death. He wonders if the horses have any idea of what they pull, then thinks that there must be twenty or thirty funerals held every day. This comment on the pervasiveness of death then evolves into a remarkable realization of the varied communities who must deal with their dead. Bloom, a Jew at a Catholic funeral, thinks “Then Mount Jerome for the Protestants. Funerals all over the world every minute.” The physical world of the pained horses has bloomed into his internal world and heightened his awareness of the situation, allowing him to universalize the gloom of the graveyard and to sympathize with people all over the world who bury their dead.

Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Setting for the "Hades" episode of Ulysses.

Bloom, the amateur artist, takes his raw materials from the external world around him, in this case from the animal suffering of horses pulling a coffin. “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring,” a character will later assert, in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of Ulysses (177). How deep is Bloom’s life? We need only look at the results of Bloom’s musings for the answer. Bloom imagines gravediggers everywhere “Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.” His observation of the physical world leads him to a remarkably deep sense of pathos, a brief but tender realization of the human cost of the deaths that occur all day every day.

As Nietzsche notes, the influence of the physical on the internal world of images and desires works in reverse, as well. Sharpened internal thoughts enhance our perception of the external world. Thus, in the next paragraph, Bloom progresses from a reflection on death in the aggregate to a keen observation of the sadness of a grieving woman and girl. He sees their pain in the “leanjawed” face of the woman with her “bonnet awry,” and in the girl’s face, “stained with dirt and tears . . . looking up at her for a sign to cry.” He has moved from the particular to the general and then back again, thus stimulating the emotions of the reader, enhancing and stimulating the reader’s feeling of life, a la Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s note goes on to contemplate “the artist’s victorious energy which has become master of ... ugliness and awfulness.” Bloom brings this victorious energy into Joyce’s novel, taking the ugliness and the awfulness of a gloomy graveyard scene and imbuing it with the rich human emotions of empathy and grief.     

¹According to Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, cited in Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses.


Frank K.

Heroes: Bloom and Odysseus

Milo O'Shea as Leopold Bloom

In calling his novel Ulysses, James Joyce asks us to compare Leopold Bloom, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century middle-aged Irishman, with Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns,” hero of the Trojan War, king of Ithaca, favorite of the goddess Athena, the master tactician and brave warrior who dispatches over 100 suitors to reclaim his throne and his marriage bed. On the surface of it, we might think that the comparison can only be to Bloom’s detriment, that the novel must be a satire on the weakness of modern man and how pathetically he has fallen from the heroes of our venerable myths.

Louis Menand, however, suggests that Joyce may have had something else in mind:

He thought that, from some vast superhuman distance, the people in Ulysses are just like the people in Homer. They are tracing the same patterns, walking through the same roles, struggling to work out the same sets of relations. . . .

I think this idea offers an interesting interpretive window into the novel: a way to view Bloom as a hero instead of a butt of a joke (even though he does become the butt of jokes multiple times in the novel itself). Bloom’s feats clearly don’t measure up to those of Odysseus, who endures shipwrecks and travels to the underworld, survives bouts with six-headed monsters and malevolent witches, and speaks eloquently and strategically with princesses and kings. Bloom’s adventures so far have been much more humble: moving his bowels, burning his breakfast, buying some soap, carrying on an epistolary affair, attending a funeral, chatting up an acquaintance in the street.

But Menand’s point makes me think that Joyce wants us to see Bloom as a hero despite the quotidian (and literally pedestrian) nature of his exploits.

The back cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey describes the poem as “literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey through life,” a formulation which has always seemed wrong to me. Odysseus is everyman? He’s a king, endowed with extraordinary talents, beloved by some gods and hated by others—but a special person regardless, someone whose life is debated on Olympus. And yet, from another perspective, Odysseus is not a very good guy: he sacks cities, killing men and stealing their wives and riches; he is such an inveterate liar that even when he is reunited with his own father he can’t help but dissemble one last time and “cut him to the core”; he brutally slaughters over 100 men and orders the execution of the serving women who have been their lovers. Yet it’s clear throughout the Odyssey that Homer wants us to side with his eponymous hero and to admire his endurance, his craftiness, his devotion to his kin, his skill with language.

Similarly, Joyce, in his own grand evocation of an ordinary man’s journey through one day of life, clearly wants us to side with Bloom, despite his foibles. Bloom’s attentiveness to the details of the world, his joy in physical sensation, his empathy with the creatures and people around him, his thoughtfulness—all of these qualities make Bloom, like Odysseus, more than simply a man like every other, but instead an embodiment of the values Joyce embraced just as Odysseus embodies the values Homer embraced. Why else would Joyce devote an epic (and a considerable portion of his own time and energy) to the stream of this particular man’s consciousness, if not to suggest that it is to such a human, modern consciousness that we must look for the heroism, inspiration, and cultural meaning that Homer’s listeners once found in his tale?  

Frank K.

Our First Meeting

We met today to discuss the first three chapters of Ulysses. Thirteen people participated altogether, representing four different SLUH departments and five different schools.

Questions we discussed included: Is this a novel? Is this book unbearably pretentious and show-offy? Why begin with Stephen? Is he a tragic hero? A version of Joyce himself? In what ways is this a post-colonial novel? Does the novel's stream-of-consciousness style offer a uniquely vivid portrait of its characters, or is it artificial and false? 

We compared Stephen to Quentin Compson, from Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, and reflected on the ways that Ireland, like Faulkner's South, was a "Christ-haunted" land—but may no longer be so, unlike the American South. 

Those of us who have read the novel in its entirety talked about the differences between Bloom and Stephen, and pondered the implications of Joyce's decision to focus his book primarily on Bloom instead of the alter-ego whose character he had already spent an entire book exploring. We explored the significance of Joyce's setting this novel on the very day of his first romantic interlude with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. 

Having a single discussion about this book at a long table with thirteen people was challenging; we tended to split off into two groups. Sitting in the middle of the table, I was able to jump promiscuously from one to the other. I had a great time and am very much looking forward to the next meeting. 

Thanks, everybody! Feel free to chime in with any other ideas or perspectives you took away from the meeting.

Here are some photos of the discussion, held at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood.

Frank K.