What would Dolores/Lolita be like today? Would she be a brassy, hyper-sexualized doyenne? A dolorous, quiet victim of years of Freudian psychotherapy? Would she have a Lolita of her own? The careful reader knows this is fiction on top of fiction, as Dolores, a.k.a. Lolita, a.k.a. “Mrs. Richard F. Schiller,” died giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952… not even a month after Humbert Humbert died in prison. How twisted is that fiction squared, the child giving birth to a dead girl child of her own and dying in the process? Emptiness come of emptiness.
Like many American men my age, my first experience with Lolita was as a young teen hoping for sex scenes that would justify the deeply forbidden atmosphere surrounding the book. I smuggled it out of the library and waited impatiently until everyone in the house was asleep before daring to retrieve the book from my book bag. My disappointment was immediate.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
What? I searched in vain for the keywords that had proved so rewarding in my worn copy of Clan of the Cave Bear. Nothing. Sure, Humbert recounts his first tryst with a girlfriend when he was young, but even– or perhaps especially– then, phrases like “I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion” resulted in disappointment. Whatever Lolita was, it wasn’t pornography.
Of course I returned to it years later, as many do. I’ve read it twice. Each time in awe at Nabokov’s ability to get inside the head of Humber Humbert, the creepy, conflicted, all-too-human narrator I always thought of as an old man was only 36 or 37– as of a few days ago younger than I am now! Exquisitely creepy, I tried to maintain the rational critical distance but couldn’t help but wonder about Nabokov. He must have thought about– and as– Humbert for a long, long time. How much of himself was in there? How much must writing that novel have twisted him?
Humbert Humbert, never tried but emphatically convicted. Victim of giving in to the fantasies we would label lurid but for that they are the stuff of everyman’s mind, recognized by and projected onto our culture but rarely admitted, much less discussed. The reality is, Humbert raises the spectre of guilty thoughts many men share to varying degrees. Had Lolita been a close relative, the disgust and dismissal would be easy. But the statutory dividing line of sexual legitimacy is a legal fiction not a biological or emotional reality. I’m not arguing against the idea of pedophilia, only pointing out that social mores change over time and the line that we draw has a Dolores Haze-y fringe.
Nabokov wisely made Lolita 12 years old, a child enough to provoke disgust but still at the higher end of the 10-13 year old age of consent that was the norm in Western countries as late as the mid-1800s. But even considering the reality of adult attraction to teens is verboten, the stuff of pornography sites none-too-subtle advertising. We are instead given to believe that recognizing the sexual attraction of an 18 year old is unwise, but recognizing that of the same girl a day before her 18th birthday is both unwise and unlawful. One day you would be a pedophile, the next day just an average consumer. Nabokov doesn’t need to be explicit in his descriptions; he doesn’t need to paint Humbert as an evil man… it is enough just to raise the queasy questions at all.
And as young as she is, Lolita is no “innocent.” She’s ultimately an empty set of acquired gestures, as much a victim of her mother’s jealousy as Humbert’s effete violence. She embodies the cruel attention coupled with a blithe lack of awareness that makes child beauty pageants a modern grotesque and demands that we irrationally attempt to legislate desire. Humbert isn’t just speaking of Lolita as a player, but as a woman, when he watches her play tennis:
Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality.
The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis–without any utilitarian results.
Is it any surprise that nothing in the brief lives of either Lolita or Humbert are destined to turn out well?
Yet in the end, the importance and power of Lolita is located beyond all of this, in a palace of super-charged, precise, fantastic language. As Humbert must admit:
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Lolita the novel is important, not Lolita the character or symbol or moral lesson. It’s philosophically and psychologically interesting to see how Nabokov predicted the contemporary fetishization of adolescent girls but the continued relevance of the novel extends well past such contemporary concerns, Humbert’s obsession with “Lolita”– which is just a word– mirroring Nabokov’s obsession with words, delving deep into the heart of language at its most refined as aped by a human animal at its most primitive.
“Look,” he said. “This landscape of clouds and sky. At first glance you might think that the depths are there where where it is darkest; but then you realize that the darkness and softness are only the clouds and that the depths of the universe begin only at the fringes and fjords of this mountain range of clouds– solemn an supreme symbols of clarity and orderliness. The depths and mysteries of the universe lie not where the clouds and blackness are; the depths are to be found in the spaces of clarity and serenity.
“I think that Hayden’s idea of a livable life is a life that has affection in it– a life, to give it the fullest scope of his art, in which the things you love are properly praised and properly mourned. What I most value Hayden for and most thank him for (in this age of deniability, when the merest public honesty is made doctrinally tentative) is his wholehearted, unabashed, unapologetic affection: affection for women and men, for neighbors, friends, other poets, jazz musicians, wild creatures, beloved places, the weather. If you know his work, you know you can find dislike in it and anger too. Even so, he is a poet of affection. If he dislikes, that is because he likes. If he is angry, that is because of damage to what he loves. His affection is capacious and generous; everything worthy is at home in it. As he knows, everything worthy is fragile and under threat, is prey to time and invisible to power, and yet affection keeps the accounting in the black. Worthy things, invested with affection, pass into “the now / which is eternal.” I don’t know how this can be, and I don’t think Hayden knows. And yet I believe that it is so; I believe that Hayden believes that it is so.”
The Mac ads quickly started making me clench my teeth, but John Hodgman is brilliant. The Areas of My Expertise is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read and I have high hopes for More Information Than You Require. This video from TED captures him in full-on storytelling mode, the way I first discovered him…
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!
While browsing Brian’s trove of links, a pointer to an Esquire article caught my eye. It tells the story of the discovery, attempt at authentication, and subsequent wrangling over the ownership and authenticity of what might be a new photo of Robert Johnson. It’s a fascinating article that not only prompted me to listen to Johnson’s Complete Recordingsfor the millionth time, but reminded me of a couple of good books I’ve read about (or that involved) Johnson.
The best book I’ve come across so far is Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Johnson. It’s short, readable, and covers pretty much all the facts available at that point about Johnson with very little mythologizing. Not coincidentally, I greatly enjoyed two of Guralnick’s other books on music and musicians: Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ‘n Roll (includes pieces on Skip James, Muddy Waters and Johny Shines, the latter of whom figures into the Esquire article as well) and Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, which focuses on roots music including pieces about Bobby Bland, Big Joe Turner, Hank Williams and Storey Edwards. Guralnick’s work is personal rather than academic, so no footnotes and he’s unafraid of conjecturing beyond the known facts… which is why his writing is interesting even when it involves musicians I’m not otherwise dedicated to.
Gayle Wardlow’s Chasin’ That Devil Music has some interesting bits, including Wardlow’s search for Robert Johnson’s birth certificate, and many interesting short essays/articles on Delta Blues– and only Delta Blues– history.
Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is a drier, more academic book that attempts to sort the myth from the “objective” facts in service of examining the cultural symbol that Johnson has, in many ways, become. I enjoyed it, but I’ve been soundly indoctrinated into the academic tradition.
If you read any of the above, you can stay away from the very recent Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, which adds nothing new, though it is readable enough. It’s clear that many discoveries have been made in the last few years… unfortunately this book doesn’t include them.
Here’s my brief review: horrible. The block on the lower right looks like a joke that no one was willing to call a joke, a kind of Sokal Hoax of type design. Ugh.
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.
David Foster Wallace’s passing has spurred a lot of conversations that in one way or another invoke the idea of irony and his work’s relationship to it. Some of the arguments to be found in and around those discussions– and some of the hostility that DFW’s work drew from the beginning (not to mention a veritable murder of prescriptivists descending upon Alanis Morrissette like tweedy, elbow-patched crows on a field of green ESL learners)– comes from clear dissonance regarding what irony actually is and then proceeding to speak as if everyone involved is talking about the same thing at the same time.
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."
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.
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.
Ulysses– at least through the first chapter– has more humor than I remembered. Perhaps because I was overwhelmed the first time around, I didn’t put catch it as often as I should. And Joyce tends to immediately follow the funniest bits with something of real import. For instance, the Jewish Haines and Stephen discussing Buck Mulligan’s profane song:
Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said:
–We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn’t it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?
–The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.
–O, Haines said, you have heard it before?
–Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.
–You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.
–There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.
And some of it is clearly farce. Mr. Deasy is nearly a wholly ridiculous character, the old boss blowhard:
–Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.
He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.
–I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It’s about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions on the matter.
May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.
–I don’t mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked
Setting aside the description of Cassandra as "a woman who was no better than she should be" which I don’t quite get and whichDeasy also uses to describe Helen of Troy, I love the changing register of Stephen’s thoughts as he is confronted by this insufferable anti-semite who he has to humor for financial reasons, a modern mythical beast who instead of literally eating people instead consumes them through the modern lifeblood of money:
–Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand. These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.
He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.
–Three twelve, he said. I think you’ll find that’s right.
–Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.
–No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.
Stephen’s hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed and misery.
–Don’t carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You’ll pull it out somewhere and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You’ll find them very handy.
Answer something.
–Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.
The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant if I will.
–Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.
–Iago, Stephen murmured.
He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man’s stare.
–He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?
The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.
–That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.
–Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.
–I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way.
Good man, good man.
And then Joyce throws a solid combination, capping high farce with one of the most important lines in the book so far:
–I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five weeks’ board. The lump I have is useless.
–For the moment, no, Stephen answered.
Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.
–I knew you couldn’t, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it. We are a generous people but we must also be just.
–I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy
Reading the first section of Ulysses, I was– like Scott– struck by the sound of the words tumbling around inside Stephen Dedalus’ head. There are many passages which read like (deeply allusive and heavily referential) prose poems. For instance:
Alo! Bonjour. Welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan’s hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.
Or his description of the sea including primitive sound-sense:
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
Incidentally, both of these passages are on the same page. Talk about packing the words in!
It strikes me that the way– as Scott puts it– the sense follows the sound is critical to the success of the "stream of consciousness" mode because it is unnatural/artificial. I liken it to creating effective fictional dialogue. Good dialogue succeeds not by capturing speech completely and in great detail, but through careful artifice that captures the essentials while leaving enough space for the mind to fill in the gaps. The result is "authentic" and "realistic" even though close examination reveals it to be anything but.
In the same way, I don’t think Stephen’s interior monologue is particularly realistic in terms of how people think the world to themselves, but Joyce has made a clever choice, letting the interplay of sound represent the kind of apparently random or vaguely connected association that we engage in and which can’t really be represented directly (as far as I can tell) because so much of it is visual, symbolic and maybe in a proto-language that can’t be separated from our cognitive processes. So the sound creates the space in which sense can emerge– in both (ahem) senses of the word.
Monday morning I Twittered that I was digging into Ulysses, a book I read once and too-quickly many years ago, and before I knew it a few friends were joining in. We have formed some kind of rule-free, schedule-less reading group I’ve dubbed The Club of Uncertain Genius. I’m excited to have company and plan to blog my thoughts on the book as a fewothers are.
I’ve been planning the storming of Ulysses for a while, spending some time re-reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology,The Odyssey and a passel of Yeats’ poetry as part of my preparation. I was going to read Hamlet again too, but was derailed by the stunning news of David Foster Wallace’s death. I’m still not ready to say anything more about that tragedy directly, but it did spur me a bit… what better way to honor my favorite writer than to dive into a lengthy, revolutionary novel full of allusion and literary pyrotechnics?
Incidentally, in a fortifying coincidence, I was reading an article about Wallace in The News-Gazette (where news of his death is filed as a "local" story) and saw this tonight:
Sally Foster Wallace remembers how she and her son would rise at 5 a.m. each day to read a chapter of "Ulysses" together.
There are (at least) two different issues at play here: the Atlantic cover and the manipulated images on Greeberg’s web site. First about the ‘doctored’ image in the cover:
The Atlantic opted not to use the distorted McCain shot on its cover, selecting instead a more straightforward portrait. ‘We stand by the picture we are running on our cover," said Atlantic editor James Bennet. ‘We feel it’s a respectful portrait. We hope we’ll be judged by that picture.’
But Bennet was appalled by Greenberg saying she tried to portray McCain in an unflattering way.
1b) In fact, the problem (if there is one) can only come from the fact that it wasn’t doctored after being taken. The lighting was manipulated to get the, for lack of a better term, the Greenberg-ian effect and then left that way. I saw the photo on the newsstand and immediately knew it was Greenberg, but it didn’t stand out as being flattering or unflattering. To me it looks like most of her pictures of people, which is to say in some way unreal. More importantly, it passed through the hands of all the editors at Atlantic who saw no problem with it. Are they all partisan? Or:
1c) Is the real problem here psychological and ideological? It doesn’t appear that a significant number of people had any problem with the photo until Greenberg’s other satirical photos came out. What was just an artsy-looking photo suddenly became cast as the product of partisan tampering. And:
1d) Admitting that Greenberg is a partisan, shouldn’t the photograph be assessed on its own? What does her partisanship ultimately have to do with it and the sudden change in perception of the McCain photo?
2) When was the last time anyone venting about this complained about the doctoring of a magazine cover? They are, practically speaking, all manipulated and retouched. Or is it only a problem when someone is made to look bad. Or is it only a problem when the manipulation doesn’t lean with our bias? Who, of those upset by this photo, are speaking out against the obvious air-brushing and retouching on the cover photos of Sarah Palin and McCain and Palin together? Or anyone else for that matter? For the record, I thought the Left’s outrage at the Obama New Yorker cover was also misguided.
3) Where is all the outrage with the unquestionably more damaging and constant media manipulation when it comes to representation of women in the media? Look at any magazine rack and you will see 10 times more crass, sexual misrepresentation of sex and body image than anything remotely political.
As far as the images on Greenberg’s site go, they are a decidedly mixed bag as art or propaganda. A few are more or less standard representatives of political satire; a few are simply tasteless. Greenberg is a fine photographer, but the McCain manipulations are juvenile and not reflective of her skill and talent, including those expressing political positions I agree with. However, as far as I’m concerned, Greenberg can do whatever she wants to on her site with the photos she takes and has rights to, agreeable or not. We are fortunate to live in a country where the State doesn’t deem what is appropriate art and what is not, as was the case in the U.S.S.R and still the sad case in places like Cuba and Taliban-governed areas through the Middle East. As fervently as some of Greenberg’s detractors might wish they could erase her photos from the world, I imagine they would hope and/or pray with equal fervor that someone like me not be allowed to make similar decisions for them.
I can’t even begin to explain who dfw is- was- to me. The deep humanity that powered his writing that so many missed. Reading Infinite Jest was the discovery of a new element two empty columns over and two empty rows down. It was finding something so new and alien but somehow thoroughly human that the shock of it could only be the truth. Like traveling light years through space and finding humans. Or a familiar knock on the door you can’t quite place that opens and you are standing there on both sides.
I have to say or do something but there’s nothing to do and nothing that can be said. I’ve been so close but I’ve never understood it. There are no words. Maybe that was it.
November 3, 2008
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