Ulysses: The Back Half
Here’s the schedule for the final four sections of Ulysses. If you’ve fallen off, jump back in! All sessions start a 1 pm Pacific/4 pm Eastern. Note that we’re doing a Saturday and two Sundays.
- ***Saturday***, January 10th – Ch 15 Circe
- January 25 – Ch 16 Eumaeus and Ch 17 Ithaca
- February 8 – Ch 18 Penelope and wrap-up
Milesians & then some charming family lore re: Nausicaa
I was trying to track down some different allusions and came across this analysis of Joyce’s relationship to Orientalism/ Irish pre-history: https://www.bloomsandbarnacles.com/blog/james-joyce-and-phoenicia
While I have a more sympathetic take on the Book of Invasions (I would argue it is folklore serving as historical record) and I don’t think the author has a strong grasp of the early Irish monastic relationship to writing and Irish folklore, I like some of the conclusions about Joyce’s project re: the constant allusions to Irish prehistory (Fir Bolgs, Mananaan Mac Lir, Milesians, etc.).
“Joyce’s embrace of the Phoenician hypothesis is particularly fascinating since he uses it to not only decouple Ireland’s history from Britain, but also from the supremacy of the Catholic Church.”
And, “Joyce’s embrace of the Phoenician hypothesis set him apart from the Celtic Revivalists in one more key way – it allowed him to imagine an Ireland with diverse inhabitants. A current of racial purity underlies the mythic Ireland of Revivalist literature, which conjures a “true” Irish culture unadulterated by foreigners. Descent from ancient Phoenicians eliminates the possibility of a racially pure Ireland. Joyce, in drawing parallels between Ireland and the Orient, was able, in his mind, to reject “the old pap of racial hatred.” Joyce certainly plays into racial and ethnic stereotypes in Ulysses, but he also envisions a modern Ireland that has room for people like Leopold and Molly who are undeniably Irish, but also just foreign enough for their Irishness to be questioned or qualified by their peers, even by one another.”
Okay, now for some charming family lore. My grandfather, William Bonaventure Taaffe, met my grandmother, Jenny O’Toole, walking on the Dun Laoghaire pier (Kingstown, in the parlance of the novel—roughly halfway between Sandymount and the Martello Tower in Sandycove/Dalkey), a common Sunday afternoon thing to do after the family dinner. He was smitten, but his friends tried to warn him off of her because she only had the one arm because of a factory accident when she was 16. She had a wooden prosthetic and probably would have been wearing gloves for the Sunday promenade, so he wouldn’t have been able to tell. Romantic that he was, W.B. was undeterred and they were wed. Jenny proved to be a fierce woman: when she was particularly mad at my father, who was full of devilment, she would take off the wooden arm to give him a wallop with it. How this scene—poor Irish mother taking off her arm to spank her son—has never made it into a film is beyond me.
Which is to say, I have quite the soft spot in my heart for poor aul’ Gerty.
Another Close reading passage (Sirens)
Mother Machree but it took me forever to get through the Sirens chapter; thank Jaysus that I know that the Cyclops chapter goes much much faster. Anyhow, here’s the passage I’ve picked out for discussion, if we want to do a close reading. It is much, much easier than many of the passages in the book, but it’s still hard enough:
The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord, longdrawn, expectant, drew a voice away.
— When first I saw that form endearing…
Richie turned.
— Si Dedalus’ voice, he said.
Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.
— Sorrow from me seemed to depart.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw, lost Richie Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn’t expect it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.
Love that is singing: love’s old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. Love’s old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.
— Full of hope and all delighted…
Alas, I could not find, not even on YouTube!, a rendition of the song that Simon Dedalus is singing in this passage, “When First I Saw That Form Endearing.” (However, some wiseguy in 2015 titled their tuneless blast of electronica this and put it on YouTube.). There is a playlist of the “Songs from Joyce’s Ulysses” that does not include it either. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAb-DC4VICv4bhP39LRUUfFc6nZ1fObL9 ). Possibly Joyce invented it? (Hugh Kenner gives a list of the songs played in this episode but does not say whether it is a real song.). In any case, we will all have to imagine it.
On to Cyclops!
Old School Close Reading: Passages from last week’s reading
As I said last week, although I’ve enjoyed our big-picture conversations about ULYSSES, I do miss the fun of old-school close readings together. At least since 1953, the year of the English translation of Erich Auerbach’s MIMESIS, it became almost an article of faith that the Great works of literature repaid and rewarded a close reading, perhaps with a specific purpose in mind (“What can passages from Homer to Virginia Woolf teach us about the Representation of Reality in Western Literature”), or perhaps the close reading of a passage chosen almost at random would generate its own thematics and purpose. So I’ve picked a passage, almost but not entirely at random, from chapters 8,9, and 10 of our novel, to see what we can learn about Joyce’s project.
I cut and pasted these passages from The Joyce Project, and the various commentaries on bits in it might have carried on to Heteronomy too, for all I know; but I really enjoyed most of the mini-essays on that web site, and I recommend looking at what is said about bits and pieces of these passages.
From ch 8, Laestrygonians (pp.174-5 in my edition, (171) to (172) in the parenthetical page numeration from the first edition):
Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I’m not thirsty. Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o’clock I can. Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She…
Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins: sardines, gaudy lobsters’ claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing in a thousand years. If you didn’t know risky putting anything into your mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good. Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit. Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red Bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table perhaps he young flesh in bed no June has no ar no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it no yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course aristocrats, then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour. Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in the sea to keep up the price. Cheap no-one would buy. Caviare. Do the grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The élite. Crème de la crème. They want special dishes to pretend they’re. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls’ kitchen area. Whitehatted chef like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage à la duchesse de Parme. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you can know what you’ve eaten. Too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards’ desiccated soup. Geese stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan. Wouldn’t mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress, halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney, I remember. Du, de, la, French. Still it’s the same fish perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped the guts out of making money hand over fist, finger in fishes’ gills, can’t write his name on a cheque, think he was painting the landscape with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha ignorant as a kish of brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.
Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
From ch. 9, Scylla and Carybdis (pp206-8 in my edition, (203) to (204) in the parentheses markin the first edition):
— She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches and The most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
— History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man’s worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there’s a gentleman to see you. Me? Says he’s your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
— A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.
Are you condemned to do this?
— They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male: his growth is his father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
— What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
From ch. 10, Wandering Rocks, pp.248-49 in my edition ( (243) to (245) in the marginal numeration from the first edition)
***
As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his Panama to Haines:
— Parnell’s brother. There in the corner.
They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man whose beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.
— Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.
— Yes, Mulligan said. That’s John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.
John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw went up again to his forehead whereat it rested.
An instant after, under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell once more upon a working corner.
— I’ll take a mélange, Haines said to the waitress.
— Two mélanges, Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and butter and some cakes as well.
When she had gone he said, laughing:
— We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet.
Haines opened his newbought book.
— I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.
The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street:
Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.
— You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Aengus I call him.
— I am sure he has an idée fixe, Haines said, pinching his chin thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it would be likely to be. Such persons always have.
Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.
— They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet. The joy of creation…
— Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It’s rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an interesting point out of that.
Buck Mulligan’s watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to unload her tray.
— He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does he write anything for your movement?
He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.
— Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something in ten years.
— Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon. Still, I shouldn’t wonder if he did after all.
He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.
— This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don’t want to be imposed on.
Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks.
* * *
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love
I enjoy Andreas’s Dedalusian rants against Ulysses; they force me to ask myself what I am getting out of this effort. I am also very lazy, and appreciate when others tee up a suitable answer. The critic Merve Emre did me a solid with her centenary observation in the New Yorker that “[l]ove, soppy as it may seem, is the novel’s great subject.” Within you’ll find love considered in all its Joycean felt and spelled forms, even as the motor behind Stephen’s swirling sophism in the National Library. I highly recommend it, especially if you are wondering how a moral force could be embodied in these dense and sense-shaking paragraphs.
What I’m liking about reading Joyce
I’ve been thinking more about Andreas’s query in Sunday’s discussion, which was, more or less, “what value is there in this book? What enjoyment are you crazy people getting from Joyce?”
To be clear, there are a lot of pleasures that Ulysses does not offer: this is not a book that offers me insight into my own experience or relationships, it does not offer emotional investment or catharsis, nor does it offer any insight into the historical/ political moment in Dublin, my reading of Shakespeare or Homer, or about a hundred other things. What it does offer is a jaw-dropping mastery of language. For me, it feels a bit like David Foster Wallace’s experience of watching Roger Federer, this “rare, preternatural athlete who appears to be exempt from certain natural laws.” Like, it’s a little incredible that the human brain is capable of creating something like this. Also, the sense of jousting with the author to figure out what the fuck is going on is intermittently enjoyable (but also quite frustrating sometimes).
Good preparation, bad company
At our second session I mentioned that my impression so far of reading Ulysses was that it was good preparation for reading Ulysses. I seem to be in good (bad?) company here:
What about Derrida? What did the most postmodern of all the postmodernists say about Joyce?
Not much: ‘I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this ‘not having begun to read’ Joyce is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with Joyce. This is why I’ve never dared to write on Joyce.’
From James Joyce and postmodernism: A conflicted catechism, a Jim Ruland blog post reprinted in the Los Angeles Times in 2009, which I stumbled upon by searching “postmodern criticism of James Joyce,” about more which as thoughts develop (thinking here about the overweening life and presence of the author in the text)
What does Joyce expect of the reader?
I’ve been wondering about this a lot as I read: what does Joyce expect of us?
One) I think he clearly expects that we will be reading backwards and forwards, that a lot of the book will only make sense with multiple readings.
Two) I don’t think he expects the reader to get all of the allusions, especially without the annotations and guides available to modern readers. He could expect that a well-educated reader would pick up on the major things—the Homeric and Shakespearean overlays, Aristotle, Milton, etc.—but it would be completely unreasonable to think that any one readers would get everything. There’s just too much. As much as anything, he’s writing to amuse himself.
Small potatoes. Here’s a big potato: are we meant to take what the characters in the book say, especially Dedalus, as representative of what Joyce thinks? I mean, why else would he write the book if he didn’t believe in at least some of what he is saying? But I also think he gives us some explicit warnings about drawing too straight of a line. Way back in Nestor, Deasy quotes Shakespeare as saying “put but money in thy purse”—but this is actually a line from Iago, as Stephen immediately points out. Clearly, a student of Shakespeare is not going to put Iago’s lines forward as the voice of the author and I think this is Joyce warning us not to feel overly certain about what he’s trying to say.
This is underlined by the constant lexical uncertainty. One small example, from midway through Lestrygonians: Bloom is thinking about the happier days of youth and says, “I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twenty-eight I was. She twentythree when we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy.” The various guides to the book are very clear in knowing that this means Bloom couldn’t get it up after Rudy’s death, but I think this construction is incredibly and purposefully vague—it could be equally Molly or Leopold who could never like it again after Rudy.
Part of this has to do with the nature of Hiberno-English, generally agreed to be a mixture of Irish language grammar that has seeped into English expression (a lot of things in Irish come out a bit backwards in English) and the encoded double-speak of the colonized. One of my best examples of this is when I was interviewing Tommy Peoples (total baller of a fiddler) and I started things off with a soft ball along the lines of “So, when you moved to Dublin—is that when you started playing with Matt Molloy?” Now, I knew the answer was yes and Tommy knew that I knew that the answer was yes, but his actual answer was “I would have done.” Which is really non-committal.
I think Joyce’s uncertainty is more purposeful than that, though. A commentary on the modern condition, on the ultimate un-knowability of another person’s experience, or of our own? I’m not sure where I land on that.
What’s your M.O.?
That’s short for modus operandi, which is Latin, which Joyce employs liberally without translation throughout Ulysses, which readers have been known to read with the assistance of various published guides. I have settled into a three-handed approach. Before I start, I review what I most recently read in The New Bloomsday Book (thanks Brandon), which gestures at the parallels in the Odyssey, summarizes the action, and lightly connects some of the powerful the themes and references ex read the text first with my phone nearby. I try to then get a good head of steam up in my Gabler edition, but if I waver, I keep my phone nearby with a tab open to The Joyce Project, an old-school hypertext effort with different color links for annotations referring to Dublin geography, definitions and artistic or literary references.
I got Ulysses annotated out of the library too, but it’s a fair bit denser than I can peruse and still progress.
There are a few more options recommended here, including a podcast. Anyone else got a stick to lean on?
It’s Irony all the way down
Thanks everyone who could make it to today’s conversation about the first three chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m going to put some elaborations and afterthoughts here on the Weblog. Here’s the first one:
I gave a rough and ready definition of irony as “saying the opposite of what you mean,” and Brendan chimed in, wittily and in my experience accurately, “that’s not irony, that’s Irish –everyone in Ireland talks that way.” He hypothesized that it might have something to do with colonialism, where subject peoples get in trouble if they say what they really think in front of the powerful, and I said that in Afro-American culture signifyin’ or doing the dozens is also considered colonial speech. (I could have reminded those of us who read Percival Everett’s James how essential that idea is to Everett’s rewriting of Huckleberry Finn.)
This definition of irony leans into a tradition of rhetorical criticism associated with the conservative Aristotelian school, exemplified by Wayne Booth’s two books The Rhetoric of Fiction (1964) and The Rhetoric of Irony (1975). In the 1975 book, the example Booth chews over at greatest length is the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: “”It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Of course Jane Austen means a kind of opposite of what she is saying: In the universe of mothers with marriageable daughters, the mothers will all behave as if, etc., even though you, dear reader, know that the rich single men in question don’t at all necessarily think that they are “in want of a wife.” When you can read past the surface meaning of the sentence to get at the real meaning (as we do pretty much instantly with sarcasm), we’re in the presence of “stable irony.”
But what if you “can’t tell if Joyce is being ironic”? And –and now we move into Booth’s other label, of “unstable irony”: what if the speaker themself can’t tell if they’re being ironic? In his book on irony Booth very reluctantly admits the existence of unstable irony, saving it for a last chapter. Well, this is more or less the point of departure for all of those très Français schools that were hitting the US academy in 1975: all those death-of-the-author types like Barthes and Derrida, even the Bakhtin-à-la-français of the heteroglossia essays: what if you don’t speak language, but rather language speaks you? what if situations pop up, and you find yourself saying what the situation requires even if you feel the need to instantly disavow it? What if your inner monologue is just a tissue of quotations from your education and what you heard earlier in the morning or just a few seconds ago from somebody else? How do you negotiate your desires and your fears and your observations in a world full of that kind of cacophony between your ears? And what if everyone is more or less like that, not just the intellectuals?
This is irony on a linguistic (and also psychological) level; I haven’t thought through how it relates to the other kind of irony we were talking about, where Dublin 1904 stands in an ironic relation to the great myths of civilizations, primarily but not limited to the story of a son’s search for a lost father, followed by a tale of a father wandering over the whole universe, including the underworld, and then a homecoming and a reckoning with the suitors who tried to usurp the place of the father. But I had to make this somewhat long-winded point right away, for fear that I would wake up in the middle of the night with the ghosts of Flaubert and Mikhail Bakhtin at my bedstead–
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