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.

Episode Fourteen, "Oxen of the Sun"

This one was a doozy. If I hadn't been writing this blog, I would have thrown in the towel, but I am, so onward, I trudged. I also had three reference guides to help me along, but, even with them, this was no fun.

Basically, Bloom goes to a maternity hospital, to visit Mina Purefoy, who has been trying to give birth to her 8th living child for the past three days. The hour is 10 p.m., and Stephen Dedalus and some of his rambunctious friends, including two fledgling doctors, are drinking and yakking about sex, childbirth and other topics in a room in the hospital, while the poor woman labors away. Bloom is shocked by the turn of conversation. Both he & Dedalus appear to be outsiders in the episode, Bloom moreso. The action moves on to a bar after it is announced that Mrs. Purefoy has finally had a baby boy. Bloom stays behind and leaves his respects for the new mother

That is it, action-wise, but the total impression of this long and bewildering episode is overwhelmingly of its difficult language - more appropriate for reading by a language scholar or a Ph.D. student of language and literature. Every few paragraphs, the tone and style change completely, supposedly the progression of the English language, starting with Latinate, then Middle English, then progressing to modern slangy (probably American) ad-talk. There are also sections which were written in the style of famous English writers, and the only one of those which gave me any understanding of what was being said was the Dickens bit. I only know about the language development and the different styles belonging to famous authors from reading the www.sparknotes site on the episode, as well as the Wikipedia entry and the entry in my "Annotated Ulysses." Otherwise, I would have been in the dark. I am hoping that my enjoyment level picks up on the next episode. Once again, I was picturing James Joyce, laughing in his grave at all of us, trying to make sense of his wordplay and oblique references.

By the way, the non-oblique reference to the "Oxen of the Sun" (and these titles are not used in the acutal book, but in my guides, based on James Joyce's instsructions) is to the sacred cattle belonging to Helios, which Odysseus' men slaughter for food after he has warned them not to. Odysseus is punished for this - having killed the sacred cows, so to speak - and the idea of profaning the sacred is seen in Episode 14 when the young men discuss pregnancy and birth in such a ribald fashion.

The men in "Ulysses"never go home, and almost no one does any kind of work. They drink; they talk; they carry on about women; the move to the next bar or meeting point. Bloom is avoiding Molly, because he assumes that she has had an assignation with Boylan while he has been walking around the city, musing and making people cranky with his fussy opinions. He just seems to drift from place to place, having done a tiny spot of work in the morning.

I've peeked ahead and see that, in the next episode, Bloom and Dedalus will be drawn together rather dramatically. Hope springs eternal that things will "come together" a bit better for me.

Episode Thirteen, "Nausicaa, pp.346-381

Based on an episode in "The Odyssey" in which Odysseus in awakend by Princess Nausicaa and her ladies-in-waiting at the mouth of a river, where they are doing the palace laundry (not a very high-class palace, if that is the case), this bit takes place at 8 p.m. on the beach at Sandymount, near a Catholic church where there is a temperance meeting going on. Three young women and their babysitting charges are on the beach, and the lusty Bloom watches them - especially Gert, who looks lovely to him and who knowingly arouses his lust. Bloom's emotional turmoil reaches a natural climax (aided by his own hand), just as a fireworks display bursts forth (obvious symbolism - very Hitchcock), causing the young women and the children to scamper off and leaving Bloom with a damp shirt. He has been obsessing about the probable affair conducted by Boylan and Molly, and he finds that his watch must have stopped at what he presumes is the exact time of the assignation. When Gert walks away, knowing that by revealing her legs and her hair that she has aroused passion in this foreign- and sad-looking man, we see that she is lame, and Bloom says some not so nice things about this. I must say, he is hardly admirable in any way at this point, but there are still 300 pages to go, so he may change in my eyes. Again, I googled "Spark Notes, Ulysses" and followed the action there, before and after reading the actual text. The notes helped to explain the very coy and arch writing style of the beginning of this episode - a parody of popular women's literature of the time. We are meant to see Gert's feverish brain through the lens of this silly language, as she contemplates a Perfect Mate, a Perfect Little Home, a Perfect Marriage, and then, the Stranger. Then, Bloom takes over the narative, and we can follow his thoughts about Molly and Boylan and about the lovely, but lame, Gert. He is a fellow with much free time on his hands, lolling on the beach at 8 p.m. But, I guess that if he did nothing but work, we wouldn't have anything like the minute-by-minute minutae of "Ulysses."

Episode 12, "The Cyclops"

It is 5 p.m., and Bloom joins a group of men who are drinking in Barney Kiernan's pub. This blathering claque includes an unnamed narrator and someone named "the citizen," who, supposedly helped revive Irish sports (based on the historical character Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association), but who proves to be a bigot, who soon picks on Bloom for being Jewish and a big talker. The entire group also comes to mistakenly believe that Bloom has given a winning tip on the day's big horse race and has also won lots of money for himself, although he neither drinks nor buys rounds of drinks for these miserable lay-abouts, who resent Bloom for both things. Bloom has dropped by the bar to meet Martin Cunningham, to discuss Dignam's insurance, which seems to have been squandered on drink., leaving his widow and children penniless. Bloom takes much abuse from the fellows at the bar - especially the citizen - who ends up throwing a biscuitbox at the car bearing Bloom and Cunningham (who saves him from a rapidly escalating threat of violence) and two other men away from the bar. And while in the bar, Bloom seemed oblivious to the growling, resentful response the group gave him when he expressed his long-winded opinions. The men's resentment quickly built up to anti-Semitic slurs and attempts at violence. We are meant to see Bloom as the Messiah or Elijah, but instead he seems totally hapless to me. The bit of the ongoing myth which we are meant to see as the basis of this episode was Odysseus' escape from the one-eyed monster, the Cyclops. Interspersed with the dialogue between the characters are long paragraphs of mock-heroic or mock-journalistic prose, which do nothing to move the story forward, as they are based on extraneous characters and useless historical trivia. We are now on page 346, out of a total of 783 in the book, and we are about to start episode 13, out of a total of 18. I am reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" at the same time, and I must say it is much more fun than "Ulysses," but it does have its challenging moments too - keeping the long list of Vanger relatives straight, for instance. But, I digress...

A Link to a Wonderful Newspaper Article

My friend, George, just sent me a link to a piece by this year's National Book Award-winning author, Colum McCann ("Let the Great World Spin") which pretty much sums up why any of us struggle to understand "Ulysses" or any other finely observed piece of fiction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opinion/16mccann.html

The piece was published in the New York Times on this year's Bloomsday - July 16 - the day in 1904 when James Joyce set the action of his novel and the day which Joyce lovers all over the world re-celebrate his confounding, but magnificent, work.

As I count down the pages until I am finished with "Ulysses," reading this article gave me a correction to my mean-spirited approach. Newly inspired, I read on.