Really Real Realism

How great is the opening to Part II, our introduction to Leopold Bloom?:

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

Hungry yet? I love it. Total honesty here, Bloom’s mind laid bare. Part II proceeds and you soon realize that you are living entirely in Leo’s head, hearing his every thought, desire, action, and instinct. And nothing is left out. Nothing. As a result, we watch, among so many other things, Bloom salivate over the glands and organs of animals, lust after a woman while at the butcher’s shop, consider the sexual activities of his daughter, and finally take a long, well-considered dump in the “jakes” out behind the house. And Joyce actually makes art out of this stuff. Really, he does.

One thing I like considering are different movements in the arts, especially transitions, like when late 19th century literary Realism gave way to early 20th century literary Modernism. Why is the new way new? What makes it different? Or, maybe as importantly, what make it the same? Part of what’s great about this book of course is that it “made” Modernism, it realized the entire movement and gave it legs. It was pretty much THE seminal work. No one had done anything quite like it before, which, in the world of art, is pretty much impossible.

What’s kind of cool is putting both movements side by side, comparing them so as to understand them better. One thing that immediately sticks out is that both movements are really after the same thing, that is, attempting to present to the reader “real life”, in all its ragged complexity, attempting to place reality on a page. What’s great is that they both succeed so well, but in completely different ways. Consider the opening lines to Eliot’s Middlemarch (I did I mention that I love this book yet?) as compared to the opening passage of Ulysses Part II, quoted above:

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.”

So much…nicer, eh, but accomplishing the exact same thing. What a contrast, but interestingly, both styles, in their own beautiful way, capture the reality of the world perfectly, creating imagery that is so strong, complex, and real that it transports the reader entirely.