Episode 18 - Penelope

Molly IS Penelope, and she has the final say in this lengthy classic. In her famous eight sentence-long soliloquy (when it was written, one sentence was the longest in the English language with over 4,000 words), Molly has run-on, unpunctuataed thoughts about her love life as a young girl in Gibraltar, about her love affair then with another suitor, then with Bloom, then their 10 year sexually fallow period following Rudy's death, and - despite what Bloom thinks - her affair with her one and only sexual partner in those bleak 10 years: Boylan. Her final sentence is exquisite and ecstatic and is pure poetry. It ends with the words "yes I said yes I will Yes" and is almost worth the slog through the rest of the book to get to it. Just as Penelope was reunited with Odysseus, Molly sees hope for her marriage with Bloom.

Through her soliloquy, she is revealed to be an uneducated and lusty woman, but it is Bloom who has sinned far more against her with his own sexual wanderings. For these and other reasons, I certainly did not care for the quirky Bloom, and I formed no attachments to any of the other characters in "Ulysses," not really liking any of them very much, but Molly's final soliloquy gives her a special place in my literary heart.

My overall impression? The book itself was, I think, a seven year writing experiment for Joyce, who worked on it in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, from 1914 - 1921. It is certainly not a classically constructed novel and has very little in the way of a plot or forward motion of any kind. Perhaps it was written as a response to the concurrent development of modern art - the breaking up or deconstruction of classic images. Every chapter is written in a different and usually puzzlingly elliptical style. There is so much stream of consciousness that it is hard to find complete sentences that track as sentences. An entire book of this is simply exhausting and really meant for graduate students, who can spend a semester or two parsing the meaning of every historical, liturgical, Biblical, linguistic, classic and sexual reference, not to mention mapping out the tiny shops in Dublin, who owned what, who the street sweeper was in 1904, and so on. The detail is mind-boggling. Joyce is some kind of genius, but this is not a book to read and enjoy, unless the reader is simply caught up in the language and the vision.

However, I am done with "Ulysses," and, at my age, will never feel compelled to read it again. I will sleep well tonight, having completed my goal of reading it for the first time, but I suspect I'll dream of James Joyce, laughing at me from his grave.

Next blog for me? I don't know yet. But judging from the non-response to this one, it will have to follow a totally different course. If there is anyone out there in the Blogosphere who is reading this, so long and happy reading. I'll try to post something on this blog about my next one, when I have it figured out.

Episode 16 - "Eumaeus"

The time is one a.m., on the day after Bloomsday - so, June 17, 1904. Bloom helps Dedalus walk to a cab shelter, a kind of canteen for those out late at night, where he tries to sober Dedalus up, buying him nearly undrinkable coffee and a hard roll. Bloom also starts to feel like a father to the young man. The shabby, talkative sailor and cabbies who share the shelter with them lend some color to the episode, along with the caretaker of the shelter, Skin-of-the-Goat (rumored to be involved in a famous robbery), but mostly it is Bloom's thoughts about Stephen which dominate. Bloom finds him to be smart, well-educated (remarking several times on his B.A.), handsome, well-spoken, and with another most important quality - a very fine tenor singing voice and the knowledge of many songs in different languages. At one point,in the shelter, Bloom reads a newspaper account of the funeral he attended, only to find his name misspelled, along with other errors. He is constantly insulted in the course of the book, as is Stephen for that matter. They are together in their "outsiderness." Bloom shows Dedalus and the occupants of the shelter a photo of his hefty wife, dressed in a gown with a very low neckline, commenting on his views of feminine pulchritude, of which he has many. He is such a randy fellow! However, he is brought up short by his recollection of the Boylan/Molly affair in his own bed today, but then he quickly returns to fathering Dedalus and guiding him back to the Bloom house, to sleep off his very serious case of drunkeness. Bloom also lectures Dedalus on getting rid of his false friends - Mulligan and his medical school pals. At the end of the episode, Dedalus sings a German song in a thrilling tenor voice, and the two men walk toward the Bloom residence like a couple of close friends, observed by one of the denizens of the night - the driver of a street-sweeping horse cart. The classical allusion in this episode - its parallel to the The Odyssey poem, which James Joyce was following so closely - is the return of Odysseus to his home and his reunion with his son, Telemachus. As Joyce intended, Stephen Dedalus was Telemachus; Molly was Penelope, and Bloom, Odysseus. In this episode, Skin-the-Goat is supposed to represent Eumaeus, who was the swineherd who is most loyal to Odysseus. This is what my Wikipedia guide says, anyway. I don't know enough about The Odyssey to have come up with that one. I'm just delighted that this episode made some sense...and that we are near the end. Two episodes to go...

Episode 15 - "Circe" - Men Behaving Badly

This almost 200-page section is written as if it were the script for a play. It is midnight, and the group of drunken young men, including Stephen Dedalus, head for Nighttown - Joyce's name for Dublin's Red Light District. Bloom follows, to try to keep Dedalus out of trouble in the brothel they choose. There is very little real action here - rather, almost everything is LSD-like hallucinations, mostly Bloom's, but several belong to Dedalus. No reason is given for Bloom's hallucinations, in which every sort of depravity is visited upon him (he even changes sexes and gives birth to eight babies.) Following this comes a hallucination in which Bloom is hailed as the leader of Bloomusalem. More craziness ensues in the brothel where Bloom hunts for Dedulus, and then one of the prostitutes takes Bloom to see him. The young man is very drunk and he gets himself in trouble with two soldiers, who knock him out. Bloom tends to him, safeguards his money and possessions and keeps him from being "written up" by the police. At the very end of this lengthy and mind-bending episode, Stephen lies in the street, much the worse for drink and the assault by the soldiers, when suddenly Bloom's dead son, Rudy, appears to him in another apparition. We are told in the sparknotes and wikipedia entry that this "underlines the parental feelings Leopold has built up toward the younger Stephen." Clearly, there is a father-son feeling toward Stephen in Bloom's mind.

There is a good deal of really raw sexual language in this episode, but the essence of the writing is easier to grasp than the previous episode, which was nearly impossible for a layman to figure out, without the help of on-line guides.

The classical allusion "Circe" is to the pigs which Odysseus' men were changed into by Circe. I must say, the men in this episode - no, in the entire book - do act like pigs, and this episode is the zenith or the nadir of that behavior. Circe is said to correspond to the madam of the brothel - Bella, who figures prominently in Bloom's hallucinations.

There are only three episodes left, totalling 173 pages. The end is in sight! I know that Molly's final speech - the last words in the book - are wonderful, so I am looking forward to that, but it's been a long and difficult haul to get to them.

I haven't really heard any comments from readers for weeks, and for my next project, I'll need to figure out a better way to blog on classic books, which reaches more people. I seem to be fairly invisible in the blogosphere, but the blog has kept me reading this massive and difficult work for the first time in my life, so I count that as a success.