The End

Well kids, I finished the thing last night. Proud of me. The final episode, Penelope, was great. Quintessential stream of consciousness. Molly Bloom ponders it all and every main theme and idea presented earlier in the book is reiterated perfectly. Joyce ends the book with a bang and if I ever reread any parts of this book (God forbid!), I’ll probably start with this episode.

I can’t believe I just mentioned “re-read.” I’m so ready to move on, but not before a few final thoughts:

1) This has easily been the most difficult and rewarding piece of fiction I have ever read and I won’t lie to you: many times I contemplated bailing out, or at least taking a break. I didn’t though and I am immensely glad of it.

2) Don Gifford’s book of Ulysses annotations was essential. Thanks Don! You made understanding this book possible.

3) To say James Joyce is a genius is an understatement. There should be a new word created, just for him, that means “beyond genius.” I can’t imagine being able to create something so complex: the depth of the characters and the exactness of their movements, the thematic development, the volume and scope of all the references, the prose itself and the different styles of writing, and on and on. This book is simply one of the most profound examples of human creativity that I have ever encountered.

4) Just a quick note on old Leopold Bloom (“Poldy” for those of you in the know). What a great anti-hero. I’m pretty sure I would never hang out with the guy - in some respects he’s pretty much just a strange, boring, and annoying dude with a proclivity towards a number of bizarre sexual perversions. A freak for sure. But I love the idea of the anti-hero and this book does it right. It has got to be one of the best examples of this in all of literature.

5) Reading is, by its very nature, a solitary and isolationist thing. Reading Ulysses is even more so; it is by far the loneliest book I have ever read. It is not possible to talk in detail with anyone about the book while reading it because no one else is reading it. So, in this respect, this blog was immensely helpful, even if it was for the most part just a conversation with myself. This blog forced me to think about the book, after putting it down, which enabled me to connect with it, outside of the actual process of consuming it. This was a very good thing.

So there it is. I guess this blog is done, unless I have some sort of great epiphany or idea related to the book that drives me to post further (unlikely). Besides, like I already mentioned, I’m ready to move on. I can’t imagine my all-but-nonexistent audience will mind. So bon voyage and junk! Proud of me, proud of you, and especially proud of James Joyce.

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.

Full Circle

It’s interesting to note (or maybe just interesting for me to note to myself) that I have come full circle on my approach to reading this book. At first, I was determined to try and let the thing stand on its own and was consulting very little, if any, outside resources. Now I find myself seeking out and reading anything I can get my hands on, before, during, and after I read each episode. This has been working well in that, as I probably stated earlier, understanding this book without some such support is, in my humble opinion, impossible. If I were to recommend anything to anyone trying to read this thing I would tell them this.

Thumbs Up for Episode 13

So far, Episode 13 is my favorite. I liked the characterizations, style, and structure and really began to feel like I was finally “getting” it. And yes, this episode is totally prurient and salacious like they said it would be but, as is the case with all good writing, it isn’t “obscene” in an sensational way but rather in a way that forwards the themes and ideas of the book. The section starts with a group of young people hanging out on the beach, with the thoughts and desires of Gerty MacDowell front and center. The prose is styled as “Romantic” (think Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen) and in the third person (as such, is easy to follow and I did not find myself referring to the annotations much in this episode, which was a nice break). There is a nice flow and progression to this episode, even when the narrative switches later to a more typical, stream-of-consciousness style found earlier in the book (this time, Leopold Bloom’s thoughts). I don’t know, I guess I don’t have much to report here except for the fact the Episode 13 is great.

Weblog Inventor Guy

So, the web resource I cited on Monday the 19th is discovered to be, after some Wikipedia reading, the weblog of none other than Jorn Barger, the guy who pretty much invented blogging. Small world, eh? Seems he's a huge Joyce expert. So there it is.

Joyce Quote

"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."

-James Joyce

Episone 13, Nausicaa

I am a few pages into Episone 13, Nausicaa. Apparently this was the episode that caused the serializations to stop because the censors found it so offensive. For readability, it is very straightforward so far, being a direct, percise, and somewhat over-written (on purpose) account of a few young women contemplating their lives.

In other, related news, I found a really great web resource. I will be referring to the site often for help as it appears to cover pretty much everything related to the book. I like the little "things you should know about Ulysses" list on the site:

• It takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday).
• The main characters-- Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus-- correspond to Homer's Odysseus (aka Ulysses), Penelope, and Telemachus.
• Joyce first thought of the idea in 1906 as a story for Dubliners.
• He quickly realised it should be the sequel to his autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero (which he rewrote with this in mind, as A Portrait).
• Each of the 18 chapters corresponds to one of Odysseus's (or Telemachus's) adventures.
• Each chapter is written in a different style, with symbolism appropriate to the corresponding adventure. These patterns were hinted by Joyce in privately-circulated schemata.
• Joyce included hundreds of puzzles that can only be understood by very careful reconstruction of exactly what each character is thinking and doing.
• Because the book was so complex, no one has ever managed to create an authoritative 'corrected' edition.
• The most useful companion-volume is Gifford's Ulysses Annotated.
• Harold Nicolson claimed that Joyce pronounced it 'oolissays'.

Hey, I knew that part about the Gifford annotations!

Listening to Long Lists

Joyce includes some really long lists in Episode 12, such as names of people, or places, or things. Interestingly, I sometimes find myself reading these lists out loud so as to feel their rhythm. It seems to work in that it makes the words more real somehow. I’m not sure what the greater meaning of including such long lists in the text is, but I think my instinct here is good. What is the role of the reader and how are they expected to participate? Is this book meant to be heard? Perhaps. It is true that one of the more popular activities on Bloomsday is to participate in a live reading of the book. Maybe I’ll check it out.

Conversational Prose

I am now in the middle of Episode 12, Cyclops. Now this is more my speed. A bunch of guys in a bar shooting the shit. Now this I can get. Actually, I am enjoying this section quite a bit. There is some really great prose in here. Like this: “Hard by the block stood the grim figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered furiously.” Actually, there is a whole bunch of fine, descriptive prose in this episode, like the passage above, stories told between the pubgoers. And I like the way it is presented. Joyce tells the reader what is going on in a sort of after-the-fact, third-person narrative. Like this: “So Joe starts telling the citizen about the foot and mouth disease…” or “So Bob Doran comes lurching around asking Bloom to tell Mrs. Dignam he was sorry for her trouble…” And so on. It’s like listening in on a conversation. He captures the casual, back-and-fourth socializing we all do, between ourselves, all day, everyday. It’s how it is.

Orpheus and Eurydice

There were a number of cool references to a really great Greek myth in Episode 11 that I forgot about, namely the one about Orpheus and Eurydice. Remember this one? Orpheus, the celebrated poet-musician, heads down into Hades to retrieve his dead wife. He almost succeeds, being told that he can bring her back to life but that if he turns around to look while leading her out of Hades she will disappear back into the depths of the underworld. He gets right to the edge, right on the boundary, and has to look back of course, which ruins everything. What I forgot about this piece of Greek lore is what happened to old Orpheus afterwards. Apparently he was so grief-stricken by this second loss that he began to treat the Thracian women with contempt which really doesn’t work out so well for the guy. According to my annotations, the Thracians are so angered by his behavior that “they revenged themselves by tearing him to pieces in a Bacchanalian orgy.” And so it goes.

Onomatopoeia

Episode 11. Sirens. Just finished it. Not a big fan. This one is just really hard to follow. One of my main complaints is the theme of the episode (or “Art,” according to Joyce’s Linati schema) and the way Joyce tries to honor that theme, namely by attempting to “record” sounds on the page. He appears to be trying to capture sound in written words and it just comes across as totally intelligible. I appreciate the effort but most all words (except onomatopoeia) are words, not sounds.

The Wandering Rocks

So, Episode 10, The Wandering Rocks, an episode in Ulysses that does not actually happen in The Odyssey (it is only discussed and referenced, secondhand, in the Greek version). The episode is composed of nineteen short sections that overlap and interlace, in character, place, and theme. The stories in this section are like little snapshots of life, small pieces, often mundane and ordinary, of the everyday. In the annotations, the scenes are said to be “temporally simultaneous but spatially remote,” a stop-start, herky-jerky narrative that, ironically, is simultaneously concurrent in time. The main job of the reader, it seems, is to weed through these nineteen pieces and weave together a coherence for themselves, a whole from the parts. I like the little visions of life here that Joyce provides us, so descriptive and poignant, but I must admit that it is a struggle at times to tie it all together in order to understand the central action.

A Shakespeare story

The characters in the episode Scylla and Charybdis discuss a funny and apparently singular account concerning Shakespeare that I though was amusing. It is found in the diary of John Manningham (March 3rd, 1601). It is the only third person account that mentions Shakespeare ever found anywhere and, as such, becomes by default a major piece of evidence on the man’s life. It is basically a story linking the most famous actor of the day (Richard Burbage) to Shakespeare. The text in the diary goes like this:

“Upon a tyme when Burbridge played Rich.3 there was a Citizen greue soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbridge came. Then message returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich. the 3. Shakespeare's name William.”

Such ribaldry!