Cosmopoetica

In Joyce’s story “Clay,” Maria is the clay—completely molded by events outside herself. None of Maria’s emotions originate from within herself… each is a reaction to the needs or emotion of someone else: she’d rather not take a gift, but she does; she’s sorry she mentions matters; she is summoned to resolve disputes without being involved in any disputes herself; she’s summoned to sing when she’d rather not; after just a page or two her thought to herself that it was “so much better to be independent” is laughable. And sad. The clay (presumably) she touches during the first “wrong” round of the game is fitting… being consigned to a Joycean convent a very close second place.

Eveline and Maria: what a strange pair. Eveline, too, is lifeless, but by virtue of being numbed to the world around her. Maria is reactive, but in no ultimately meaningful way, a life of minutiae and trivia that she elevates to an anesthetized substitute for passion.

I had to search for “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” to try to figure out the “mistake” Maria made singing it. It turns out to be a telling one: Maria sings the first verse twice, one in which the speaker exists in a state of already existing love, riches and remarkable ancestry, foregoing the second in which she would be singing of ‘”suitors that sought her hand” and active vows of love and faith—a state in which she would not only be wanted, but in which she would have to be an active participant in her own life, something she, like Eveline before her, will never be.

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Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” is structurally interesting— consider Little Chandler and Gallaher as parallel to Corley and Lenehan—and were I back in school writing post-structuralist criticism of the kind understandable only to a small inner-circle of other students of post-structuralist criticism, I could write a good 20 pages on the title alone.

I suspect most readers will find Little Chandler more than a little pathetic. I do too… in part. Chandler’s full of excuses for his failure to follow his ambitions. In the course of the story we can see his own rationalizations for that failure evolve as he tries to temper his jealousy of, and admiration for, Gallaher.

But where this story resonated with me was how much of myself I saw in the character of Little Chandler. I’ve wondered and doubted my poetic aspirations in ways very similar to Chandler:

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.

[...]

There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried 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.

I had children when I was young. It’s not an excuse for my lack of accomplishment, but it is a very relevant part of the context of my own failures. I could wholly identify with the “burden” of obligations entailed by family and children. When Chandler reaches the peak of frustration, I thought to myself “I’ve been there.”

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger

To my enduring shame, I’ve lashed out at my own children in just this way. But I’ve tried to do different. I’ve tried to do better.

Chandler’s internal monologue caused me to think of one of my favorite essays, “Fires” by Ray Carver, where we can see (in retrospect) the existence of a different path, a path that Chandler might still be able to walk. A path that might redeem his pathos. In the essay Carver tells the story of trying to do laundry at a laundromat with his children. He’s waiting and waiting for a dryer to become available, he’s already late, and when one finally does a woman swoops in and takes it. Carver goes on:

…I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing—and brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere as close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.

I’m talking about real influence now. I’m talking about the moon and the tide. But like that it came to me. Like a sharp breeze when the window is thrown open. Up to that point in my life I’d gone along thinking, what exactly, I don’t know, but that things would work out somehow—that everything in my life I’d hoped for or wanted to do, was possible. But at that moment, in the laundromat, I realized that this simply was not true. I realized—what had I been thinking before?—that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through. At that moment I felt—I knew—that the life I was in was vastly different from the lives of the writers I most admired.

The difference between a Chandler and a Carver comes finally in what they do with the voice(s) in their head telling them what they cannot do and what they cannot be. I don’t think Chandler is irredeemable. I sense that he has, obscured by frustration and envy and weariness, the heart of an artist, not just the pretention of being one. When Chandler thinks about his books of poetry, he does so in a way that shows a real love of poetry… and some understanding of one of the most intimate acts possible between two people, directly sharing a work of art one loves:

He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

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They call Mrs. Mooney, rather ambiguously, “The Madam.” A term of respect for making something of her shambolic circumstances, but also a none-too-subtle allusion to the fact that she is essentially prostituting her daughter. Polly wants a new life through marriage but is likely actively choosing the same kind of stultifying, empty existence that Eveline chooses through inaction. Unless she is as vapid as Joyce hints at toward the end of story, whether naturally or through being the subject of her mother’s manipulation for so long that she just doesn’t know how to think for herself.

The kind of love at the heart of “Araby” is nowhere in evidence here. Mr. Doran doesn’t seem a bad person, just one who can’t rationalize an enduring affection for Polly, for whom even his physical desire is already waning.

What a bleak picture Joyce has so far painted of relationships of every kind…

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“Two Gallants” didn’t do much for me… feels like a series of symbols in search of a story. So here’s a metrically challenged limerick (seemed like the appropriate form) in honor of the “The Two Gallants” and the two gallants:

In Dublin there wandered two gents
Who’d do anything for a few cents.
With the heat of their loins
They procured a few coins…
Let the symbolic readings commence

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There are a few things that strike me about this story, but I’m going to talk about just two.

First, the punny title. Yes, there’s a race. But isn’t Joyce also commenting on the Irish people and how they always seem to come in last?

Second, money, money, money… and all that comes from having, or more importantly not having, it. The myopia when it comes to your own potential. The constant tension of possible humiliation in the simplest transactions. The envy. The risks that come with the simplest activities that no one else sees.

I’m reminded of the scene in the generally horrible movie The Pursuit of Happyness when the rich CEO, in a hurry and without any cash on his person, asks the main character to borrow $5. To the CEO it’s a simple courtesy. To the person he’s borrowing from it’s his last $5. And more than that, the lender giving up the $5 knows it’s such a trivial sum to the CEO that he’ll likely never think to actually pay it back. So not only does he lose the $5 he desperately needs, but faces the humiliation of having to ask for repayment.

I’m reminded of an editorial I once read (I’m composing this offline so can’t find a link, but Google should reveal all) that was composed entirely in the form of a litany in the form of “being poor is” statements. Things like:

Being poor is hoping your toothache just goes away

Being poor is making excuses to go to the bathroom so your friends won’t hear you ask for the free lunch… or might not notice you aren’t eating at all

Being poor is being angry at your kids when they ask for all the things they see on TV

Being poor is having sheets for curtains

I can add one: being poor is feeling that moment of panic every time you go to the parking lot and for a moment don’t remember where you parked your car… because you know what it’s like to have your car repossessed and even many years later and for no rational reason you fear it’s happened again every single time.

The strain of living with the fear and constantly wearing a disguise lights a fire in some people, spurring them to greater achievement (the romantic and cinematic view), but it breaks most.

This is Jimmy’s existence. Living a life of pretense. Literally gambling away everything he had saved to make even a feeble attempt to break through the barriers of class and poverty… to the very group he wants so desperately to be part of.

At the end of the story: daybreak! But one whose light will reveal, once again and harshly, very different lives for the (foreign) well-to-do and poor, Irish Jimmy.

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A “creature” “burning with anguish and anger.” Wearing a straitjacket. “Passive, like a helpless animal.” Paralysis.

Eveline looks to God for an answer to what shouldn’t be any kind of dilemma but finds none. No surprise, this being Joyce. In fact, religious faith, often characterized by those who possess it as a distinction that elevates man as more than beast, has quite the opposite effect on Eveline:

“She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”

Faith is the ultimate lever-and-pellet system: be faithful and receive the ultimate reward. Eventually. Eveline’s frantic pressing of the lever provides nothing except, perhaps, the hope that she’ll go to that reward someday.

Eveline is disappearing. She’s buried herself. Even when she’s trying to make this once-in-a-lifetime decision she wonders if she can turn back “despite all that Frank’s done for her.” Eveline doesn’t frame the question as one of what she can or should do for herself because she exists increasingly only in the eyes of others and in the work she does for them.

We possess an endless ability to rationalize decisions like Eveline’s. We stay together for the sake of the children. We bury ourselves in smothering relationships because we “made a commitment,” regardless of changes in context and ourselves. We accept financial stability over emotional health and rationalize the sacrifice of ourselves and our potential as a kind of mundane martyrdom. We make decisions in service of the fictions that are our lives, telling our story, which should be the most important story we make, as if it belongs to someone else, as if we are bit players. Until we disappear, ghosts haunting our own ongoing lives. Wraiths.

I don’t know how many opportunities like Eveline’s we get. More often we are left the even harder work of creating such opportunities for ourselves… if we dare. How many times have we passed on these opportunities, perhaps in less dramatic fashion (that’s part of Joyce’s genius, bringing forth the drama of the interior of the mind making this kind choice), perhaps less obvious even to ourselves?

Eveline. The diminutive of Eve. The evil she is tempted by is one of self-erasure and rationalization. Enabling her abusive father and passing the same traits on to her children. Stunted fruit from a withered tree.

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The language! On his deathbed, Jack Spicer’s last words were “My vocabulary did this to me!” I think Spicer meant vocabulary in the broadest sense, the way that those who possess (and obsess) over language are inhabited by it, the way it makes us radiant and burns us, the way language is always incommensurate with our ability to wholly make sense of the whole enterprise of experiencing and creating it. Language is the world… we make it and it does us in.

The third paragraph of “Araby” is a perfect exemplar of what I love about Joyce’s facility with the language (and one of the best paragraphs of any short story ever written):

“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 gauntlet 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 as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.”

This paragraph has it all—the poetry, the elegance, the burgeoning impact of each bodily sense—heightened all the more in contrasts with the bleak opening paragraph with the “brown imperturbable faces” on the “blind” street. I would sacrifice just about anything to be capable of paragraphs like that… and that’s a truth that fills me with excitement and despair.

Joyce writes “…her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” Is this any less true of language for devoted readers and writers?

***

“Araby” is a prototypical story of epiphany, an adolescent boy experiencing the sharp and blunt edges of love and, through that experience, the same qualities of “the world.” I feel this story. I’ve bled this story. Hasn’t everyone, at least when it comes to experiencing love? We each live our stories most keenly… one-upsmanship of experience is a fool’s game. But I wonder if someone who’s never experienced serious poverty can appreciate the awe and humiliation that the boy in “Araby” feels to quite the same degree as someone who has?

I ask because, to me, the epiphany here isn’t as much one of the feelings and reality of love, but that the outside world—even where its representatives are capable of understanding– really doesn’t care. It’s the narrator’s first significant experience of the phenomenon that he and his inner world are just a tiny—mostly un- or mis-perceived by others—part of the world in which he must find his way. It’s heartbreaking to discover this in the form of misunderstood or unrequited or impossible love, but it adds a whole new dimension to the experience when its wrapped up with the degradation and humiliation of poverty.

***

Religious symbolism (and confusion) run through this story like a spreading cancer. The boy lives in the house where Father Flynn died, a house still musty and littered with the priest’s papers.  Mangan’s Sister and the object of the boy’s intense affections is in a convent and thus essentially belongs to God. The boy desires the girl in suitably physical way, but he also feels adoration for her that is the thing of religious adulation and angels.

And, of course, the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the crusade or the quest, as manifested in another dream sequence, trying to safely convey a chalice through “a throng of foes,” which fits in perfectly with the title and theme of “Araby,” a name evoking a romantic land of myth. The boy’s attempt to find a suitable gift is itself a quest that is nearly stymied by religion when his attempt to get to the bazaar is nearly thwarted by the necessities of “this night of our Lord.”

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Joyce apparently said many times that Dubliners is meant to be more like a novel than a collection of individual stories. At the same time, he also spoke to the process of writing Dubliners as one of gnomon, which Wikipedia summarizes as “the whole of a person revealed by a single part” but which also refers to a parallelogram with two segments (aka a corner) removed. A curious conflict given that the former is about representation and the latter, arguably, about erasure, or what is held back.

This feels different to me than deliberate (or otherwise) ambiguity, even if the resulting effect on trying to “interpret” such stories is very similar. There’s a very clear instance of this erasure in “The Encounter” when the older man walks away after their initial meeting:

“… I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

–I say! Look at what he’s doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes, Mahony exclaimed again:

–I say… He’s a queer old josser!

I don’t need previous experience reading Ulysses to guess that the erasure here is the older man masturbating. This is not just a prudent elision given the time and context of publication, but also leaves open to question the narrator’s understanding. Does he know what’s happening and chooses to ignore it, is he simply otherwise preoccupied, or is he in some way protecting himself because of past experience?

As one part of a larger puzzle, “An Encounter” is significantly more complex than it might be in another context. We have to consider not just the events of the story, but how the story fits into the larger picture Joyce is painting. The most salient question: should we allow the obvious perversion of the older man in the story to color our interpretation of “The Sisters?” There’s ample potential evidence of a story of molestation in the first story, but too many ways to view how it might (or might not) be connected to the second. Joyce could be painting any of a variety of pictures, signaling to the reader to reconsider the first story or making it clear that he can very easily convey such events clearly if he wishes to.

If anything, the boy’s lack of reaction to the man in “An Encounter” makes me think that retrospectively assigning sinister meaning to the first story is a mistake…

***

Joyce gets into the darker heart of obsession and monomania. The way the man spoke as if “magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind … slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.” This is a condition I know. I’ve felt it. Anyone who suffers from chronic depression or bi-polar disorder certainly has.

Such obsessions can focus on many things. In this case, the older man is supremely creepy. The simple line “every boy has a little sweetheart” made me shiver. But there were two moments in “An Encounter” that really shook me, and one of them is tied to the man’s erotic preoccupation. It comes when Joyce so clearly lays out the older man’s obsession:

“… He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world…”

Chilling… yet the “unfolding of an elaborate” mystery precisely describes some of my most important experiences and engagements with the things that matter most to me.

***

The other shivery moment is the end of the story. Regardless of how much experience or knowledge of pedophilia we attribute to the narrator, he knows something is very, very wrong with the older man. The boy may not be mature enough to be a analytical about the aspects of Mahony he dislikes (in the weird world of Joycean narration, in which sometimes the characters sound like themselves and sometimes like some vastly older and more mature version of themselves—and this isn’t in any way limited to just the central character(s) we take to be representative of Joyce himself), but there’s no question in my mind that he not only feels the temptation to abandon Mahony, but actually does. Only belatedly calling out to him.

It’s a kind of immature (I assume, for most people, but not for me) attempt to both do a relatively wicked thing and absolve oneself of responsibility at nearly the same time. He doesn’t wholly leave Mahony to the older man, but neither does he go to him and escape the situation directly either. He leaves Mahony’s fate, for a few minutes at least, in the hands of fate… and than savors the feelings of penitence when fate is, apparently, on the same side as he:

“And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.”

***

I know almost nothing about Joyce as a person. Which is a distinct weakness when conversation turns—as it naturally does with a collection like Dubliners—to questions about autobiographical elements. Lanny raises some interesting questions about Joyce’s own personality, such as how Joyce’s own “bookishness” might have contributed to an anger at institutions that allowed, if not condoned, negative behavior toward him.

This is perfectly reasonable. The problem is I have no idea how autobiographical Dubliners is meant to be, nor which particular elements might be more so than others. Fresh Air broadcast an interesting interview with Woody Allen last year in which he talked about his childhood. Turns out Allen was, in fact, quite an athlete in multiple sports (track & field and baseball), was pretty happy at school, and was usually among the first picked for games. What is commonly attributed as autobiographical, his nerdy bookishness (and his sexual compensation, but that’s another thread altogether) and being such an outsider, isn’t true after all. Or at least not as reliably and predictably as it is usually treated.

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I have to remind myself that Dubliners was intended, as I understand it, to be closer to a novel than a collection of individual stories. It was certainly written to be read as a whole, which can make it problematic to discuss any single story in isolation. Not a lot happens in “The Sisters” in the same way not a lot happens when you hold a key in your hand… but it’s a necessary start to unlocking a door (or a treasure chest) and sometimes a key has interest in and of itself.

***

“The Sisters” isn’t just a setting of the stage, establishing the theme of paralysis, but one of the effects of paralysis: incompleteness. The boy’s education is incomplete as is most of the conversation between old Mr. Cotter and the boy’s uncle… not to mention that as a boy he is himself necessarily incomplete. Reverend Flynn’s faith is incomplete (and insufficient). The sisters’ lives, without the Reverend to take care of, are incomplete.

***

Barbara notes that an early draft of “The Sisters” was actually a poem. I didn’t know that. But the simple clarity and beauty of Joyce’s language—when he chooses to employ it that way!—is one of the aspects of his writing I enjoy most. Listen to Barbara’s reading of the first paragraph. Do you hear the muscular music of Joyce’s prose? Even with the mundane parenthetical aside (“it was vacation time”), the whole paragraph sings, but the latter third is most striking:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

This kind of music is hard to explain. I run into the same kind of trouble I find myself in when trying to explain Jack Gilbert’s poetry, and often end up just thinking (and sometimes saying): I guess you either hear it or you don’t. Or, as Dick Hugo liked to put it, “I’m just lucky I guess.”

***

Joyce is a wellspring from which a wide variety of writers drink. You can trace Joyce’s stylistic DNA through writers as diverse as Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Carver.

***

What to make of the religious aspects of the story? As a representative of the Catholic church—of which Joyce was, to put it kindly, not a big fan—Reverend Flynn figures in the story mostly as a grotesque figure in his habits, in his possibly syphilitic demise, and finally in the form of his body, the morbid centerpiece of the story (despite the title).

Mr. Cotter insinuates there might have been more wrong with the Reverend than a simple nervous breakdown or even a loss of faith, but it’s never made clear what wrongs Cotter has in mind. I tend to think it’s merely the suspicions and cynicism of an old man when confronted by the precocious and preternaturally studious and serious young man, a common character for Joyce… but it’s easy to make a case otherwise considering the vision the boy has of Flynn attempting a kind of confession to him and the image of Flynn’s tongue lying on his lower lip. And once going down that path all kinds of hay can be made with things like the ambiguous story of the broken chalice (“…it was the beginning of it … it was the boy’s fault”), the fact that the boy is quite young yet the priest seems to have spent some time schooling him in minutiae of operations of the church and various kinds of sin, and Freudian objects like the “velvet curtains” and “swinging lamps.”

***

Am I the only one who figures Joyce’s opening line to be purposefully allusive to Dante’s Inferno (“Abandon hope ye who enter here”). On the other hand, perhaps speculation about potential priestly pederasty has started to warp my perception.

***

“No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

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[CC licensed image by reillyandrew] 

Today begins a motley reading of James Joyce’s Dubliners by a shaggy collective connective group network. Its easy for to join in the fun if you’d like!

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[image by FlickrJunkie]

I think I may have lost my companions on the voyage through Ulysses, a loss I am feeling most keenly after reading this and the previous sections… I would love to know what they make of them.

Episode 15 is loooong, by far the longest of the book. And it reads, to me, as one long Freudian meander in the minds of Leopold and Stephen. The episode is a long, intermingled series of drunken hallucinations by Bloom, Stephen and an fictional other whose presence allows each to reflect on scenes and words they couldn’t have seen. The impossibility of the perspective– from a logical perspective– is mirrored in the impossibility of the play itself as one that could be staged, being rife with stage directions that couldn’t be implemented and descriptions that the staging and dialogue could never convey to the audience… when they aren’t novelistic rather than dramatic.

A few examples:

(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)

(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)

ZOE: Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.

(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)

THE MALE BRUTES: (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro) Good!

Parallels with the Circe section of The Odyssey aren’t particularly clear to me beyond the hallucinations being like the enchantment of Circe. The hallucinations and dream-episodes are heavily Freudian– Bloom’s hallucinatory episodes are largely full of sexual guilt, the most significant of which finds him transformed into a female pig, dominated by “Bello”– a male version of Bella, mistress of a brothel; Stephen’s work darkly around his torment regarding God. At first the division between Bloom and Stephen’s hallucinations is clear, but it becomes more difficult to tell the two apart, each having in their own dreams ideas and thoughts of the other as well as scenes and images they weren’t privy to. This points to, I think, that these may in part be a kind of hallucinatory dream of Ulysses the novel itself, as an attempt to represent as wholly as possible an entity.

It’s a bit hard to tell what “really” happens in this episode. Bloom follows Stephen and Lynch, temporarily loses them when he steps off at the wrong stop, and stops to buy a snack (pork, which he feels guilty about purchasing at all, much less eating) that he feeds to a dog before wandering to the brothel, where Stephen’s presence is confirmed by a prostitute named Zoe.  Stephen, who is already there, is drunk and gives Bello more money than is needed even for he and Bloom, before dancing drunkenly and finally smashing the chandelier with his walking stick in an attempt to fend off his mother’s ghost. Bello calls the police and tries to charge Stephen too much, at which Bloom intervenes. When the police arrive Stephen is physically accosted at which point Bloom again tries to help him, getting knocked unconscious.

The point of recapitulating the material plot is to show how it reinforces a central theme: Bloom becoming closer and closer to Stephen, seeing in him his lost son, and trying to protect him while Stephen is only partially aware of the gravity of Bloom’s feelings, being too consumed with thoughts of his mother and his spiritual difficulties. Bloom saves Stephen twice, more or less, only to end up on the floor, his wits knocked out of him, dreaming of his lost infant son.

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[image by occhiovivo]

OK, so this is section that broke my back the first time I “read” (and the depth of my engagement that time demands the scare quotes) Ulysses, and it very nearly did so again this time. With this section the usefulness of the annotations hit an all-time high. The stylistic changes of the prose– the progression from early- to late-style English– are obvious, but the specifics of those styles largely alluded to me. As I have them noted from the annotations, the sequence is writing in the style of:

• Early Roman (“Arval”) incantation
• Romans Sallust and Tacitus (in the mode of literal translation)
• Medieval Latin prose chronicles (in the mode of literal translation)
• Angle-Saxon e.g. Aelfric
• Middle English, ala Everyman
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (John of Burgundy or John with the Beard)
• Thomas Malory e.g. Morte d’Arthur
• Elizabethan prose chronicles
• John Bunyan e.g. Pligrim’s Progress
• 17th century diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys
• Daniel Defoe
• Jonathan Swift e.g. A Tale of a Tub
• Joseph Addison and Richard Steele e.g. essays in the Tatler and the Spectator
• Laurence Sterne e.g. Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Edmund Burke (and possibly Dr. Johnson and the earl of Chesterfield)
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan
• Junius
• Edward Gibbon
• Horace Walpole e.g. The Caste of Otranto
• Charles Lamb
• Thomas De Quincey e.g. The English Mail Coach
• Walter Savage Landor e.g. Imaginary Conversations
• Thomas Babington Macaulay
• T. H. Huxley
• Charles Dickens e.g. David Copperfield
• Walter Pater e.g. The Child in the House
• John Ruskin
• Thomas Carlyle
• Dialect, slang (Joyce described it in a letter as “a frightful jumble of pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel”)

The changes in style were easy to spot, but the only specifics I guessed while reading were Lamb, Huxley and Dickens. I had a good idea about Ruskin, but couldn’t come up with the name on my own.

I’m not so sure what the point of this stylistic progression is. The basic topic of the chapter is birth, though as the different styles of the writers are affected, each goes off on a tangent that would be suitable to them: Huxley makes a scientific examination, Lamb and Dickens paint sentimental portraits, etc. I suppose the progression of the language from the earliest, stilted literal translation to the chaotic human musical of contemporary slang and dialect is itself a kind of conception and birth of language.

In The Odyssey this is the episode in which Ulysses remaining men disobey his orders and feast on oxen belonging to the Sun god Helios, an act for which all but Ulysses– who is asleep when it happens– are slain by Zeus. There is recurring cattle imagery in this section of Ulysses (including the news that the diseased cattle referred to by Deasy in his letter and discussion with Stephen earlier, are going to be slaughtered and Buck’s story of eating the meat of unborn cattle), but the more important symbolic parallel is sacrilege. As Ulysses’ men perform a sacrilegious act in killing and eating the cattle, so does the crowd gathered at the hospital– including Bloom and Stephen Dedalus– speak in a sacrilegious manner about conception, pregnancy and birth. The isolation and torment of both Leopold and Stephen are made obvious here– neither fit well with the conversation, both are frustrated by thoughts of their sometime nemeses, Molly and Buck Mulligan.

By the end of the section, Bloom clearly feels some kinship with fellow outsider Stephen and explicitly attempts to rescue him from the boorish group, but Stephen is drunk and doesn’t respond to his overtures. The occasion of Mina Purefoy’s birth has become an occasion for crossed connections: Bloom thinking of his lost son and developing an attachment to Stephen while Stephen is drunk with both spirits and thoughts of his lost mother… a role Bloom can never satisfactorily take on.

Various tidbits throughout the chapter were interesting enough to underline because of the language and/or the discrete sentiment, such as the prose inspired by the possibly opium-inspired De Quincey:

“Twilight phantoms are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa.”

which is made all the more skin-crawling by the associated annotation, which describe the upupa, “or hoopoe” as:

“…a bird that lives on the flesh of corpses and lines its nest with human excrement.”

Interestingly in the same section Joyce presages, though in a different way, a modern scientific phrase, the “cold interstellar wind.”

Elsewhere, Joyce notes, continuing the thread of Theosophy, that:

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”

Only to change-up abruptly into Huxley-style scientific description that leads to a most direct form of determinism:

“It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.

[...]

An ingenious suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.”

Until the section finally ends with a slang-filled, minstrel-style call to spiritual awakening after a chapter filled largely with profane conjecture:

“Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that’s my name, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok. The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.”

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[image from litmuse; created by Jonathan Day]

Ah, the infamous Gerty MacDowell. This is one section of Ulysses that has remained in my mind from the first reading and even before I had started considering the Homeric parallels, thinking instead of Gerty in light of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, an analogy that I still can’t carry much further than the idea that– at times– Gerty is seen as a potentially corrupting force in Bloom’s life.

But I’m beginning to recognize the brilliance of Joyce’s technique here, particularly in resisting the temptation (as I imagine it) to represent this crucial episode through the stream of consciousness of either character. This allows Joyce to at once erase any doubt about what is actually physically happening in the chapter while at the same time retain the essential ambiguity, indecision, and inconsistency that is human nature as Ulysses portrays it. I remember a long argument about Proteus erupting as to whether, in that section, also on the beach, Stephen was actually masturbating (this comes up altogether too much in discussions of the book, though not for good reason) when his “release” was at least represented as urination. There is no doubt in this chapter what Bloom is doing, entranced at the sight of young Gerty. But in adopting the “marmalady” style of the worst kind of romance novel, Joyce couldn’t have made the potentially titillating any less so. And with literal fireworks lighting up the sky at the climax of Stephen’s not-so-hidden activity, I couldn’t help but think of sappy pop songs invoking fireworks and “afternoon delights.”

And this episode is bulging with symbolism, textual parallels and allusions. As ornate and overly-written as the prose is at time, Joyce equals it by hanging layer after layer of reference on it as well. Gerty is Nausicaa, of course, in small detail as well as her function in the plot. Gerty, like Nausicaa, is particularly beautiful, with notably fine hair, and shares duties washing clothes. Bloom, as Ulysses, is in desperate need of comfort– rather than being shipwrecked, Bloom is described by Gerty as “soulwrecked”– and stumble across the beautiful maiden who rescues him.

At the same time, Gerty is clearly a Mary-like figure, again subtly and not so subtly presented as such: she wears a “Child of Mary” badge and as Bloom gazes upon her and masturbates the members of the church are praying to the statue of Mary for comfort. She even wears blue garments– the color Mary is traditionally depicted in. This parallel adds to the recurring tension in this section (and in the book) between the beauty and sustenance of sexual relationships and the notion of sex as being dirty or degrading… what could be worse than masturbating to an image of the Virgin Mary?

What struck me most about the depiction of Gerty this time around, though, was her physical lameness. Of all the characteristics of Bloom that have– or should have– bothered me, his reaction upon seeing Gerty’s lame gait felt the worst:

Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy, to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because—because Gerty MacDowell was…

Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O!

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That’s why she’s left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses.

The recapitulation of the orgasmic ‘O’ and Stephen’s assessment transformed him for a moment in my estimation into something completely foreign and distasteful, much like I imagine the effect of crying out an unintentional racial epithet while making love to someone of that race.

What came to my mind when her limp was revealed was Cocteau’s famous– and most apt– formulation that “beauty limps.”

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[photo by Walt Jabsco]

A strange, strange section of Ulysses (I should get my terminology straight– these aren’t properly books, but section doesn’t accurately represent the degree to which each is different from one another. Part? Episode?). There are two Cyclops represented: the unknown first-person narrator (the “I” or the “eye”– get it?) and the real brute, called only Citizen (also the name of one of the prominent Dublin newspapers). 

Citizen is an oafish, somewhat terrifying figure, viciously anti-Semitic and rabidly pro-Home Rule. Bloom– a Jewish non-drinker who refuses to pitch into the one-sided discussion without examining other viewpoints– is the odd-man out in pretty much every way. At the same time, various imagery and vocabulary invokes Bloom as a Christian figure, even Christ himself.

No interior monologue remains in this section. The narrator, obviously unreliable, presents one viewpoint, the Citizen another. Interspersed throughout the section are at least 25 sections parodying various styles from tales of Irish myth to newspaper editorials, from court proceedings to heavy-handed fiction. Joyce doesn’t stop with manipulating the style– the content of the parodies aren’t the material of the direct narrative, but different events altogether– a courtroom trial, a hanging– depicted in a manner ranging from the fanciful to the outright absurd. Most of the parody sections were pretty tough going… overwritten and often including a litany of names and references that came in such a flood I finally gave up on even tracking them superficially in the annotations. The only relief was when humor intervened, as in a section documenting the lead-up to an execution(!):

he delegation, present in full force, consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed doyen of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi, Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi, Senor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps, Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, Borus Hupinkoff, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli, Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocent -generalhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein. All the delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which they had been called upon to witness. An animated altercation (in which all took part) ensued among the F. O. T. E. I. as to whether the eighth or the ninth of March was the correct date of the birth of Ireland’s patron saint. In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged. The baby policeman, Constable MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending parties. The readywitted ninefooter’s suggestion at once appealed to all and was unanimously accepted.

[...]

Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the scaffold in faultless morning dress and wearing his favourite flower, the Gladiolus Cruentus. He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate—short, painstaking yet withal so characteristic of the man. The arrival of the worldrenowned headsman was greeted by a roar of acclamation from the huge concourse, the viceregal ladies waving their handkerchiefs in their excitement while the even more excitable foreign delegates cheered vociferously in a medley of cries, hoch, banzai, eljen, zivio, chinchin, polla kronia, hiphip, vive, Allah, amid which the ringing evviva of the delegate of the land of song (a high double F recalling those piercingly lovely notes with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured our greatgreatgrandmothers) was easily distinguishable. It was exactly seventeen o’clock.

There’s clearly something happening here with the evolution of Bloom’s character– besides the allusions making him a kind of Christ-like figure he also wins a 20-1 (Ulysses was gone for 20 years) bet on a horse called “Throwaway” which echoes Ulysses’ escape from the Cyclops by punning that his name is actually “No Man.” I’m just not sure what that something is.

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[art by mikem1115]

This is a late update; I finished the “Sirens” section of Ulysses almost three weeks ago and have finished two more section since. As a result, I have only my marginal notes and poor memory to work from and what sticks in my mind most is the style and structure.

In “Sirens” the internal monologue and stream-of-consciousness remain only as artifacts– stylistic tics. There are strange interjections of various kinds: Stephen Dedalus’ internal thoughts appear out of nowhere, as do other, unknown, semi-objective viewpoints that bring to question any accuracy of portrayal or description.

But it’s the structure of this book that is most fascinating even in my relative ignorance. The section opens with 60+ fragments, all(?) of which recur in context later. Some recur in a slightly modified form, as in the first line:

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Which shows up later split into two different pieces:

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.

[...]

—Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootssnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as she threatened as he had come.

The annotations indicate that this chapter has as its structural foundation the “Fuga per canone” or “A fugue according to rule,” which:

…has three classes of subject: 1) Andamenti, a complete melody, beautiful in itself; 2) Soggetti, a short passage with a characteristic interval; and 3) Attaco, a short figure, usually staccato.  In the opening section of the fugue the subject is presented together with the answer and a repetition of the subject in a different key (if there is to be a countersubject it is introduced in this section).  The next section, the exposition, is a complete statement of the subject(s) and/or answer(s) by all the voices.  This is followed by the “free” middle section; the climax then presents the subject in its most exciting aspect; and the coda concludes the fugue with the “desire for home.”

I get, then, that the opening lines are presented and then repeated later in a different key. But the rest really eludes me. In fact, I find the explanation quoted to be a bit problematic in itself!

Other aspects of the musical motif, reflecting the music of the sirens, did make themselves known. The section is heavy on musical voices: trilling, giggling, jingling, bells, singing, bells, drumming. Joyce even goes so far as to inject stage directions in the vein of musical direction:

She laughed:

—O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots?

With sadness.

The symbol of the Sirens has gotten a bad rap in our culture, where they are usually represented as women luring men to their doom with a carnal song. In fact, though, what the Sirens tempt those who pass with is actually knowledge– the ultimate knowledge of all things that have been and will be. The moldering bones beneath them aren’t victims who’ve been used up by the Sirens and cast away, but the remains of those who gave in and were given exactly what they wished for and rotted away, entranced, as people would starve to death in front of the television consuming the Infinite Jest in David Foster Wallace’s book. This allure is much more significant and troublesome than mere physical beauty.

In this section of Ulysses, the Sirens are indeed beautiful barmaids who are watched closely by the patrons who come near, but as their profession warrants they are privy to many secrets and thus possessors of many different kinds of knowledge. Miss Douce practically erntrances Bloom; Miss Kennedy plugs and unplugs her ears in a clear echo of Ulysses’ actions. But Cowley and Dollard and the rest are Sirens as well, who– despite their being old and used up and disenchanted– beguile everyone in the bar with their love songs, making Bloom wish for more whenever they stop. It isn’t the beauty of the songs or the singing, but the promise of knowledge of true love that is enchanting. Ultimately Bloom has to escape from each of these siren songs, watching Miss Douce for a measure too long before escaping form the bar altogether.

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[photo by Jamelah]

This relatively straightforwardly written section of Ulysses was quite a changeup from the complex “Scylla and Charybdis” book just before. In The Odyssey Ulysses chooses to sacrifice 6 of his men rather than risk the Wandering Rocks, which only Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts) was ever able to navigate, thanks to some helpful enchantment. Joyce, though, steams right through with 19 atemporal sections that tie together in various ways that are probably much more complex than I picked up on. There are enough links that I could probably sit down and recreate the true chronology of the events, but I’m not that ambitious.

What the section does do, in fits and starts, is elaborate on some important characters and motifs at the center of the novel.

Molly makes an appearance, first hanging a sign looking for a tenant, then tossing a coin to a beggar, a war hero, who is singing a song glorifying the British! Blazes Boylan is portrayed as a dedicated womanizer, flirting with the bookstore clerk. Poor Leopold Bloom buys a book for Molly (while hiding from Boylan) with a rather ironic title: The Sweets of Sin.

Simon Dedalus’ daughters appear, destitute, unsuccessfully trying to pawn some of Stephen’s books so they can buy something to eat. Simon appears with a strange cheerfulness that is obviously borne of drunkenness and gives them a couple of small coins. One of the sisters– Dilly– has spent some of the money that should go toward food to buy a French language primer, hoping to escape Ireland (as Stephen did). Not only is Stephen heartbroken and his family destitute, but Mulligan is concluding that Stephen will never amount to much of a poet.

Priests get a bit of a rough time. Father Cowley has been stripped of his collar for some kind of bad behavior and who appears none too smart. Father Conmee, meanwhile, dreams of going to Africa and converting heathens en masse.

I’m sure there’s much more to the issues of politics and religion than the few tidbits found in these rather obvious notes, but they are mostly beyond my ken!

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[photo by Bikkhu]

Finished Book 9 (Scylla and Charybdis) of Ulysses. I found Book 9 fiendishly difficult, not because the writing style was impenetrable, but because I found it continually difficult to get a good grasp of the two main points of the section (as I read it): Stephen’s argument w/r/t Shakespeare and the relationship between all the men who are gathered (or who come in and out of) the library.

Without the annotations I might have caught 1/10 of the allusions and understood about 1/3 of Stephens’ argument, which is all about Shakespeare’s biography, his relationship with his wife, and how much all of that was (or was not) written into Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It doesn’t seem that Stephen makes his argument out of a deep sense of analytical conviction regarding Shakespeare’s biography– when asked toward the end if even he believes his own theories, he flatly responds “no”– but out of a more vital kind of empathy with Shakespeare as a poet and with the emotional relationship between father and son. The “consubstantiality” motif left me dizzy, but the Shakespearean inspired parallels between Ulysses and The Odyssey are pretty clear: Ann Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife) is at once Athena and Gertrude; Molly is clearly Penelope; and Bloom is Shakespeare and Hamlet’s father both while Stephen is Hamlet.

I don’t have enough knowledge to take sides about Shakespeare’s life and personality (who does, really?), but some of the ideas that come out in the course of the conversation came away from this book more determined than ever to read a couple of the books about Shakespeare soon, as well as go back and read/re-read a number of his plays.

In The Odyssey, Scylla is a six-headed, man-eating monster and Charybdis a treacherous, ship-destroying whirlpool between which Odysseus must navigate. There are many such straits that Stephen is navigating in this section: literary society and the stifling nature of the critical establishment, the artistic, creative spirit and the the academy, the relationship between father and son, and not least the characters of Buck Mulligan and Leopold Bloom. Stephen is brash– and I might be reading my own emotions into this– but his brashness is in part a mask for his confusion and insecurities despite his bookish erudition. He wants to be accepted by the literary elite but at the same time can’t mask his resentment and scorn toward them in the form of Russell and Eglinton.

The important theme here is Stephen’s artistic and emotional consternation– what does he believe? Can he escape “Sireland?” The momentary appearance of Bloom– who is roundly mocked by even the most marginal characters in the library– comes at just the right (or precisely the wrong) time, just as Stephen is really feeling the “Seas between” he and Buck Mulligan.

Words Destined for Wordie

• sinkapace, twicreakingly, rufous, canvasclimbers, cerecloth, caudlectures, softcreakfooted, groatsworth, caubine, creecries, brineblinded, pampooties, suspired, myriadminded, gorbellied, Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare, parturiate, paunchbrow, birthaiding, honorificabilitudinitatibus, meacock, seabedabbled, fingerponder

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Quotes

(more…)

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[image by maxf]

Just finished Episode 8, The Laestrygonians. Random, likely incoherent thoughts that’ve crossed my mind over the last 60 pages or so:

• There’s something interesting and tricky going on with the voice and perspective of Bloom’s monologue… a multitude of tiny moments where the text notes things said and seen that Bloom couldn’t possibly have said or seen. The most blatant occurs just after he leaves Davy Byrne’s pub and we hear the group of men there talking about Bloom after he’s gone. But once I started noticing it I see that it happens a lot. I think this is another, subtler part of the artifice that makes the "stream of consciousness" work, trying to artfully portray what goes on in a person’s mind rather than re-creating it.
• Why is Joyce’s strongest prose inevitably found in the moments of wretchedness, nausea and disgust?
• The number of references to wind– directly and tengentially– in the Aeolus section (7) became a bit absurd.
• What’s with Stephen Dedalus’ parable (or is it a not-very-funny joke)? I get the broad outlines of the bawdy joke, "seed" being "spit" from the phallic tower by the infertile, or at least childless, old women.
• Poor Bloom– not only a cuckold, but basically ostracized as well…
• I should’ve read all the major Shakespeare plays along with The Odyssey before I started reading Ulysses. But having at least recently read the latter, some of the parallels Joyce draws just seem so obvious and overt. Maybe too much so, between the wind, the "cannibalism" and the Hades chapters.
• The funniest moment of the book so far comes when Bloom, having helped the blind boy across the street, thinks what a "queery idea of Dublin" the boy must have… this coming from the man who bounces between helplessly between thoughts of cannibalism (real and metaphorical) and sex, prompted by everything he sees and who was only moments before trying to resist checking to see if the statuary– which aroused him– had an anus or not.
• I don’t know the origin of the word "meh" but was still surprised to see it here!

Some other words and phrases that caught my attention:

• quopped, monkeydoodle, topers, gumjelly lips,  slowlier walking, heartscalded, aureoling, corpse of milk, sick knuckly cud, suetfaced

Notable quotables:

"A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped his wreath against a corner: the brother-in-law his on a lump. The gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates, walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing. Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord."

"I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts you couldn’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don’t know what poetry is even."

"Why we think a deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say."

"wine that "Seems like a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered."

"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."

"Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt 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 sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt."

"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: gums: 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!"

"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 sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy."

"no one is anything"

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Ulysses Annotated is a great resource when tackling Joyce’s densely allusive novel, but in some ways it is almost as unwieldy as Ulysses itself! If you make it through the lengthy, but immensely useful introduction– which is generally concerned with providing adequate context of Ireland in general and Dublin in particular in 1904 but delves deep into some useful minutiae including monetary values– you are then confronted with more than 600 packed pages of detailed annotations. In addition to providing, for each section, information from that section of The Odyssey and quite detailed information about the scene in that section, you also get notes about the technique, predominant color, symbols, and character and place correspondences both directly and those that are not specifically specified (did I say that?) but present according to the Linati schema.

The introduction explains that the authors tried to avoid "common" definitions, things that are expected to be understood by the average reader, unnecessary detail, and interpretation… but these are subjective elements.

For instance, the last line of the third book:

Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

Is explained with typically high detail and noted as a biblical allusion:

The schooner Rosevean, announced in "Shipping News," Freeman’s Journal, 16 June 1904, as "from Bridgewater with bricks"; see 10.1098-99 and 16.450-51. Bridgewater is just west of Bristol in southwestern England; it was well known for its manufacture of Bath bricks (scouring bricks used to clean knives and polish metal). The three "crosstrees" recall Calvary Hill, where Jesus was crucified: "Then were two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left" (Matthew 27:38).

Which is fascinating, but probably unnecessary detail in the first part and a bit of a stretch in the second. There are any number of uses of the word "three" and any number of historical references that they could be alluding to. Unless Joyce is more explicit or explains it somewhere else, annotations like this are a bit far afield.

Likewise, this fragment:

The warmth of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the tea

Is annotated:

In The Odyssey, as Hermes approaches Calypso’s cave: "Upon her hearthstone a great fire blazing / scented the farthest shores with cedar smoke / and smoke of thyme, and singing high and low / in her sweet voice, before her loom a-weaving"

Which is a reasonable link but not one that I’m sure is sure enough to warrant inclusion, the only literal connection being scent, but not the same scent (one is Molly Bloom’s body and her tea, the other is Calypso’s fire).

In the main, I appreciate this level of detail. It’s amazing to see how many pretty coarse details of plot and person I missed the first time around! But as a consequence I’m only now– about 100 pages into Ulysses– starting to get into a rhythm for using the annotations without killing the reading experience. Trying to pay attention to, and absorb, every annotation is too much. I’ve settled into a routine of skimming a few pages of annotations, then reading those pages, making notes of areas of confusion, to which I return before skimming the next section. On the one hand, this takes away some of the thrill of actually recognizing a reference or allusion or other detail on my own (it becomes hard to be sure if I’d have recognized some of the allusions that seem quite familiar), but it does seem to be the least intrusive in terms of just enjoying the musicality and inventiveness of Joyce’s prose.

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Some segments from Chapter 1 with a musicality that particularly appealed to my ear, even if they are sometimes unpleasant:

If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

[...]

His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.

Shouts rang shrill from the boys’ playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother’s darling who seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

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