Episode 17, Ithaca

So I finished Episode 17, Ithaca. This episode mirrors the part in the Odyssey where Telemachus and Ulysses, like a classical, crime-fighting, father/son superhero duo, corner the evil suitors vying for Penelope and slaughter them, to the man, with Ulysses’ god-powered, magical bow. So, needless to say, I had high hopes for this episode (so much so in fact that I decided to read it “cold,” i.e., without first reading the plot summaries or any annotations, so as not to spoil anything). However, the counterpart in Joyce’s Ulysses, although dealing with the same scenario, is most notably not dramatic and exaggeratedly anti-climatic. Basically, Bloom and Dedalus (a.k.a. Ulysses and Telemachus) return to Bloom’s house after a long night and the reader, having been told numerous times throughout the book that Molly, Bloom’s wife, is unfaithful , expects Bloom and Dedalus to catch her in the act and reenact the climactic moment in the Odyssey. This is not to be in Joyce’s version. The suitor in Joyce’s version is long gone and Bloom only reflects on the world, in his typical way, before crawling into bed and literally kissing his wife’s right butt cheek (seriously). No big finale here. No grand confrontation. At first I was disappointed, but after mulling it over, I’m convinced that this was the only way to go, that a big Hollywood ending would have been totally out of place. Joyce wants to show us what really happens, the mundane detail, the subtlety, the notable lack of drama. And life is like that, flowing by like a lazy river, with only a few rough, whitewater stretches popping up occasionally. To put it simply, we spend more time clipping our toenails (as Bloom does in Episode 17) then fighting back evil, wife-stealing suitors. Or at least I do. It reminds me of something I heard an old man say one time, reflecting on the meaning of life. “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” he said. “What may seem big at the moment really isn’t and, when it’s all said and done, you most likely will be able to count all of the truly big moments in your life on one hand, or maybe two if you are lucky.” There is good truth here and Joyce seems to know it and show it in Episode 17, which, in retrospect, is probably my favorite in the book.

A Troubling Obsession?

I am pretty much thinking about this book all the time now. It colors my reality at multiple points throughout the day, popping up in relation to real life. You know, moments like "Wow, this or that is just like the part in the book where..." Is this an interesting byproduct of a great piece of literature or just a troubling obsession?

Verbose Verbosity

So far, the writing style in Episode 16 is quite verbose. For example, the following sentence (I am making this up) “Smith walked drunkenly down the street” would become (I am also making this up):

“In so far as his leaden, inebriated legs would oblige and given the circumstances of the hour, aut viam inveniam aut faciam, Smith directed his meanderings and diversions in as much as was reasonable given the jocularity of the relations he had endeavored to cultivate as related to and borne up from the ivre mort celebrations of the day, and given the mode of transport available in that most late of hours.”

Scary thing is, I am kind of digging it. God, I am such a loser.

Ulysses and Freud

One of the cool things about Episode 15, now that I have had a chance to digest it a bit, is the way in which it serves as a psychological study of the two main characters, Bloom and Dedalus. The “bubbling up” of the subconscious in these two characters throughout the episode really highlights, in the most significant way so far, the influence Freud and his theories of psychoanalysis had on this book. All the crazy dream sequences and drunken hallucinations, the repressed memories and feelings of the characters, laid bare by the literary process. It’s one big fictional account of the whole Freudian thing, Freud as applied to literature. Modernism.

Episode 15, Circe

So I just finished Episode 15, Circe, and let me tell you, it’s all over the place. A bit of a mess really. Written in play script format, with stage directions and such, it is basically one long dream sequence, with very little “real time” content (a quick side note: Circe is the longest episode in the book and, as such, made for quite a long read). Honestly, it was a chore to get through it with all the jumping about. As far as the content of the episode goes, it was easily the most salacious and scandalous episode so far, and it is no wonder that this thing was banned upon its initial release (I found it pretty racy even by today’s standards). So, I have determined that we need to add another theme to the pile: human sexuality (yes, I am suggesting that this is an entirely separate theme from the aforementioned theme of Love). This episode is chock full of all sorts of subtle sexual innuendo, overt sexuality, sexual relations, and full-on descriptions of sex acts. Yipee! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, seeing how it mostly takes place in a brothel and all.

Themes in Ulysses

One of the things I was reading the other day was an article on the main thematic points of the book. The article basically narrows it down to four main areas: 1) Late 18th and early 19th century Irish politics, especially in relation to the question of Home Rule 2) Catholicism and the Catholic church 3) Isolationism and 4) Love. It’s interesting to think about how these overlap and intertwine in the book and, since reading this article, I have been consciously “on the lookout” for items related to these four meta-themes. References to these themes are everywhere (this is not surprising of course, these are what themes “do” after all), and are both obvious and obscure. Personally, I would add a few (Commerce and Money, for example) but I think that these four are definitely solid choices, especially the theme if isolationism. I was thinking about how this theme is played out via Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness writing style. If this particular writing technique does anything, it supports the theme of isolationism. Following the inner workings of the consciousness, the inner thoughts and desires of the individual, pretty much embodies the very idea of individual isolationism. These moments are wholly and completely our own, and even our best efforts at articulating them to others cannot make them anything more than secondhand. We are, for better of for worse, isolated in this way, we are our own islands of thought, and Joyce works through this idea in a really interesting way via his stream-of-consciousness style.

Party Time in the Maternity Hospital

Episode 14 takes place in a maternity hospital, but not where you may think (i.e., in the maternity ward). It actually takes place outside the ward, amongst a group of drunken medical students discussing all sorts of off-color, bawdy topics while a woman who has been in labor for three days attempts to give birth. This just strikes me as odd, setting a party in a maternity hospital. Obviously there is much more going on here than drunken revelry and births.

Stylistic Transformations and a Fateful Meeting?

There is a meticulous artistry to Episode 14 that I found pretty interesting. Basically Joyce rolls through the entire history of the English language, stylistically, starting with Old English and ending with an almost incomprehensible flood of 20th century American slang. I liked certain parts and found other parts utterly baffling, which pretty much sums up the entire experience so far. Another remarkable element to Episode 14 is that this is the episode in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally directly meet. In this meeting, Bloom plays a sort of father figure role, “protecting” Dedalus (or kind of thinking about protecting him?) from his increasingly drunken friends and maybe even from himself. It should be interesting to see how this relationship plays out.