Reading Ulysses

I feel awful. I got stuck half way and don’t think I am going re-start any time real soon. I blame @fncll - he sent me Neal Stephenson’s “Anathema” - I mean crikey, what a temptation!

I cut out early from a very enjoyable dinner with @brlamb last night, in part to use some of my precious time away from home to do some more reading. Finished off the “Hades” episode and made it most of the way through “Aeolus,” where the scene relocates to the newspaper office.

For me this was the first section that didn’t work as well. Sure, it’s clever enough, but it is the first chapter which, by my reckoning, the style is influenced more by the external setting and less by the internal “stream” of the charatcers, and as I had been getting so much into that, I felt the loss. Still, as comic interlude from the fairly heavy “Hades” section it works “o.k.”  Nothing more profound than that to report (as I am writing this during another not-so-great session at OpenEd and don’t have my text handy).

You can get these yourself at wikipedia at either http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linati_schema_for_Ulysses and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses, but in case you want a handy reference you can print out, I combined Joyce’s two schemas into this single table on http://www.edtechpost.ca/readingulysses/schemas/

Calum’s rugby practice this morning afforded me the joy of a full hour and a half’s reading. I find I cannot open Ulysses unless I know I have at least 30 minutes straight to immerse myself in it, so this was particularly welcome.

Reading the Bloom sections, I quickly remembered why as a younger reader I had seen Bloom to be a character of some ridicule; the Calypso and Lotus Eater sections have a number of bits where he fantasizes about different women and it was easy to read this as somehow a flaw and Joyce as somehow critical. Similarly, his awkwardness in a few of the exchanges (especially his fumbled anti-semetic joke in the carriag, p.99) are easy to take as his short-comings.

What a difference 15 years and a lot of living makes, and the things my own life experience now help me notice. I think I had previously clued in that Molly and Bloom had lost a son together (Rudy), but having lost a child of my own, I understand now what a character shaping event that can be. I can now understand his reflections on his lost son in the Hades episode as not just another blip in his stream of consciousness. And again I was shocked by a massive detail of Bloom’s life I had previously elided in my reading - his father had (or at least was suspected of having) killed himself (p.101).

It is easy to miss these details (as I had) as they are inserted into other more mundane observations of his surroundings. And yet, having now noticed them, I find my ability to believe in Bloom as a full existential character, not simply the amalgam of symbols or the construct of style I once saw him as, is thoroughly stengthened. Once again, the style and difficulty of the text is falling away for me and what remains is the visceral existences of these characters.

And if I had any doubt that Joyce has sympathy for Bloom, it is erased in the one line comment about eunuchs (p. 86 in my Minerva 1992 text):

“Who knows? Eunuchs. One way out of it.”

On the one hand, this is laugh-out-loud funny. But it also shows Bloom as not at all oblivious to his own skirt-chasing behaviour, nor the deeper sadness and emptiness that this tries (failingly) to fill.

Maybe I should rename this blog to “Discovering Scott Leslie.”

(First off, a short note - I kept referring to “Chapter 1″ in earlier posts when I mean “Section 1″ - there are no official “chapter” headings, only the Episode Guide, aligned with the trials of Odysseus, that is contained at the front of the book. I have edited the last posts accordingly.)

I am well into the second section now, but just wanted to remark on the stunning sensation in the opening parts of this section - right away, you feel like you are in a different part of town, that the weather is different, that the angle of the sun strikes you differently. Joyce portrays the two consciousnesses SO well that I literally had the physical sensation of walking not just through a different part of town, but a town that was different because of the perspective. Gone are the grey clouds of the opening chapter (does he write that they are there? I doubt it. But sensed them nevertheless) replaced by an altogether sunnier (if albeit seemingly hornier) perspective. I swear, at one point as Bloom walks through the street I actually felt the dust in the air that June 14 morning in 1904 settle on my present day shoulder. Stunning.

That’s a line from my favourite undergrad philosophy prof (who I know got it from somewhere, he used to say Lewis Carroll but I don’t think I can find the reference) and I want to dig into it a little bit to follow up on the issue of the density and complexity of the stream-of-consciousness references.

Calum and I were walking to the grocery store on Saturday. Somehow we got on the topic of visiting Uncle Liam on the land, and Calum was recalling his last visit there, when he fell into some “pins and needles.” I chuckled and told him he meant “nettles” but then chuckled some more and complimented him for showing off one of the marvelous tricks our minds use for words, “storing” them “beside” each other based not always on the meaning but because of how they sound. You know this is so; think of the “tip of the tongue” phenomenom which is closely related.

Reading the opening episodes last night, I was struck by how often Joyce uses the sounds of words to connect different thoughts in the stream of consciousness. This is NOT to say there also aren’t tons of symbolic/semantic references going on, but that sometimes it is also the sounds leading us along, and that it can be enough to simply listen along. This little realization (which I know is not a new one for me) was another thing that helped me not get hung up the meaning of every reference but instead go “through” them to, ironically, stay on the surface of the stream. Anyways, just an observation, on to Bloom!

So instead of going to bed at 2am last night after I finished that last post, I stayed up and read the end of chapter 1. I am so glad I did. Being that tired with one eye open is the perfect way to appreciate the 20 or so pages of interior monologue as Stephen walks along the beach after the school. I am SO glad to have read it WITHOUT the aid of any annotations or other reference - instead of focusing on all the specifics of the references, I was able to pay more attention to the flow of the interior monologue, something I’ve always been distracted from in the past. There are maybe 4 or 5 spots in the entire thing where for a sentence or two the references get so deep, so obscure, that you run the risk of loosing the train of thought, otherwise it is just the most perfect, most intimate look inside Stephen’s head. This is what I had not realized before; how gently Joyce portrays Stephen, and how damaged he actually is. The scene with the washed up corpse shows a man struggling with finding his place and with existential dread (and his lost mother):

“If I had land under my feet I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of the horror of his death. I…With him together down…I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.”

And later (after I think espying Bloom, though we don’t know it yet):

“Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O touch me soon, now. What is the word know to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.”

I had always gotten tangled up in the verbal pyrotechnics and references and had failed to see this, the truly affectionate picture of a tortured artist Joyce portrays in this opening scene. Or maybe I am just in a place to empathize, finally.

I took off for the concert early tonight so I could get some time to myself to read, so I made it a good way through the first chapter. In my Minerva 1992 edition, I love it on page 30 when Stephen thinks, in relation to his student

“Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends behind me.”

And then later on page 36 the more famous exchange with the headmaster, that itself seems like it can serve as a bit of a metaphor for the whole undertaking:

“His underjam fell sideways uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.

   - History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if the nightmare gave you a back kick?

   - The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr. Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the mainfestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

   - That is God.”

Martello Tower

Mulligan calls Martello Tower the “omphalos.” Why is it the “navel” - is it because it is where the story is born? (each chapter has a corresponding body part - is the book the corpse?) But omphalos also connotes “centre” - why is Martello Tower a ‘centre’ - simply because it is ‘home’?

“Stately plump Buck Mulligan…”

I shivered when I read the opening line. Actually, it was weirder than that - I remembered the opening line as I was opening the book to turn to it, and shivered when it was right. Already, just in the first few pages, I am appreciating the humour so much more than I did when I was younger. Mulligan fairly takes the piss out of Stephen right from the get go.

But it definitely is not “easy” reading. 10-20 pages a day is going to be a challege, and that that rate it’s still taking a few months to finish it. Nevertheless, it has begun.