Finnegans Wake 1.3

Hopefully, after the move, I’ll average more than one chapter a week.

The wading got a bit deep in this section, but it resolved into one of my favorite passages so far. There is a reference to television early on, which was a bit of a surprise as Mr. Farnsworth’s invention came into this world contemporaneously with the composition of this book. There’s also a joke in this section about “Sid Arthar”, a reference to The Buddha and a joke I’ve heard Eddie Izzard tell. I’m afraid one of the effects of reading so much Joyce is beginning to learn where a lot of jokes I’ve heard before came from! Joyce was a brilliant comedian. A bit of a Mozart.

There is also, in this section, a reference to Oscar Wilde. I think the introduction mentioned that this is one motif in the book. I would imagine the theme of older to younger sexual disgrace which would be familiar to Joyce’s contemporaries. But I also hear that there was a strange book released as Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake which was some occultist conjuring the words of Oscar Wilde from beyond the grave. One of the things the undead Wilde saw fit to comment on was the work of James Joyce, which he was not in favor of. Joyce seems to have been familiar with this book and this may have been the catalyst to the inclusion of this motif! Stranger and stranger.

In this dream state, the rumor mongers all come to a bad end while Humphrey is also assaulted at his home by them, or attempted assaulted possibly. The angry mob is at once dying over time and actively lynching, much like how Finnegan is dying as HCE is doing whatever HCE did.

Language plays a daunting role in this text. While Joyce runs roughshod over English, he also does not hesitate to employ quite a few other languages. Latin, French, Gaelic, but especially in this section Italian. Laurie and I were discussing Joyce on the phone on my lunchbreak the other day (or, rather, I was raving about Joyce while she may have been listening) and I mentioned that I don’t know a lot about Joyce as a person (this because I’m excited to purchase a collection of his essays and opinion pieces). Then I began to think and realized that I do know more than I thought I had. Irish, never entirely recovered from his Catholic upbringing, ended on a religious sour note with his mother, stepped out with Nora first on June 16th 1904, the famously salacious love letters, lifelong poverty, loans, patrons, moved around a lot, obscenity trials (even in countries that are supposed to have free speech), daughter-a magnificent giant of a modern dancer who became schizophrenic, son-an alcoholic, drinking with Hemingway and making him finish fights for him, scared of dogs and thunder, went blind and wrote a good deal of this book in huge letters on a chalkboard as Nora copied it down, died of an ulcer or something and his last words were begging them to call his wife. But I still don’t know what he was like as a person really and I find myself increasingly… well, a Joycean. I find myself fascinated by this author and keen to learn more.

I also know that he spoke Italian and seemed to have preferred to do so at home. I don’t know Italian. Or Gaelic. And my Latin’s pretty rusty.

There’s a long section in the middle that I found to be obscure, but I think was an elaboration on the theme of lecherous older men preying on young women OR the story of another particular lecherous older man preying on the same young girl(s?) involved in the HCE incident. And this may have been a courtroom testimony.

We have the first reference to HCE’s wife’s (ALP) letter in his defense. I also know enough about this book that the contents of this letter close the book and are striking. The letter may or may not turn into a coffin in this section.

Right, all of which, believe it or not, I’ve made less confusing here than it is in the text. But then there is a German man who either barges in as an uninvited guest to HCE’s home OR HCE has suddenly become the bartender at a pub and has cut him off. There follows a list of insults that the German hurls at HCE. They are Joycean insults. The list goes on for a few pages. I’ve underlined my favorites and plan to start using them as insults in life:

1. Old Fruit

2. Wheatears

3. Bogside Beauty

4. York’s Porker

5. Cainandabler

6. Moonface the Murderer

7. Acoustic Disturbance

8. Thinks He’s Gobblast the Good Dook of Ourguile

9. Burnham and Bailey

10. Artist

11. Unworthy of the Homely Protestant Religion

12. Lobsterpot Lardling

13. Leathertogs Donald

14. Luck Before Wedlock

15. Twelve Months Aristocrat

16. Lycanthrope

17. Stodge Arschmann

18. Sleeps with Feathers end Ropes

19. Wants a Wife and Forty of Them

20. Plowp Goes his Whastle

21. Sower Rapes

22. Sickfish Bellyup

23. Edomite

24. Bad Humborg

25. Woolworth’s Worst

26. Fast in the Barrel

Near the end of this section, in keeping with the “too much to drink” skit, there is a reference to Dog-an-Doras. I had an excited moment where I thought “Hey! I get that reference!”

I got it because, when I was in high school, I inherited a record collection which included some records by Sir Harry Lauder, the famous turn of the century Scottish music hall singer (other kids were into Nirvana. This is what I was doing). I’ve sang this song for nearly 20 years:

I love the musicality of this book. I love that I’ve read three chapters and had a song to associate with each response so far.

The book is peppered throughout with little references like this. I’m noticing myself, in writing about this and, indeed, in reacting to this book, reflected heavily on my personal experiences and thought-life. I don’t think this is entirely inappropriate. I seem to remember reading someone in preparation for this book, which would make Hercules run back into the horse stalls, say that the real hero of Finnegans Wake is the reader. I think there is truth to this. While the book does have an obscured plot, I feel like the complex machinery is aimed at providing the reader with a crowbar to take to one’s own subconscious. Or maybe I could put it like this: The beautiful thing about a book is that one, as a reader, can have a conversation with the author. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce does not just record a dreamlike environment, rather he builds a dreamscape. It is Joyce’s dreamscape, his subconscious, but the book allows the reader to enter with their own mind and interact. Thus, indeed, elevating the act of reading to a heroic act.

One theory less than 1/6th of the way through, but there you go.

More soon.

 

Finnegans Wake 1.2

One erratum from last week’s post: HCE is not the Dublin common man. He, rather, seems to be one of the elite (at least in this section), sort of a Pere Ubu type of character, some sort of dignified figure. He also seems to be in the rotund side as we shall see anon. I have a great appreciation of Joyce’s tendency to shy away from conventional lead actors. I mean, think about it. Channing Tatum and Jennifer Lawrence as Leopold and Molly Bloom? No, Joyce has a Fellini-esque realism and this, I assume, is why Virginia Woolf found him vulgar. Well… that and the swears and Onanism I guess.

First, I would like to say a few words about having pierced the membrane of the first 29 pages. I am finding that, in a way, it worked! What I mean to say is, everything I’ve said previously about the book (the important of help material, the crucial “plot” outline) stands, but I am finding myself having a much easier time with it. Custom hath made it in me a property of easiness. Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement actually, but I am finding the comparison of learning how to read this book to learning a new language apt. Right now I feel a bit like I did watching Run, Lola, Run right after my first year of German. I could kind of sometimes not look at the subtitles!

In this section we are finally introduced to HCE (I’ll use the initials for the sake of clarity as his name seems to shift, but the initials stay the same). He encounters a common man who seems to be accusing him of a sexual indiscretion (the nature of which also shifts. In the dreamscape of Wake, I sense that the indiscretion amounts to general sexual guilt and HCE’s claimed innocence seems like it might indicate the sense of sexual guilt when one hasn’t actually done anything wrong).

The man is first identified as a “quidam.” This took me back to my teenage years when my older brother worked in the ticket booth of a Cirque du Soliel show of that name. I remember him telling me about an affluent man who came to the ticket booth and sneeringly asked, “What’s Quidam supposed to mean?”

My brother said, “You know that guy walking down the street who you don’t know and who you don’t care if he lives or if he dies? That’s ‘Quidam!'”

Not a story that Joyce would have known, but I feel that this sort of free association is not out of line in response to this text.

HCE is accused of the indiscretion by the quidam (another moment where I audibly laughed was when, for simplicity, Joyce suggests we call him “Abdullah Gamellaxarsky.” And then proceeds to never call him by that name again). HCE denies it, and goes on his way. The rest of the chapter is an account of the rumor spreading. It comes to the ear of a priest. We hear a stutterer commenting on it. We see it pass through a pub (the wonderful term “alcoherently” is coined) of hunters, ladies, ne’er-do-wells, professionals, and thence to a group of waggish parody song writers. They take it upon themselves to write a satirical ballad.

 

One of the beautiful tools of this modern age is Youtube. Whenever you approach a piece of literature that includes music, you can rest assured that one of the billions of users on Earth have attempted to record the song. Usually you’ll have your choice of versions. While I have a bare-bones enough music education to sight read, my imagination is not so great as to fill in what a song sounds like just by looking at the notations. I like this performance, although I’m not so crazy about his commentary. He says this song is an outline of the plot of the book and I don’t think it is. Also, he’s settled on one version of HCE’s indiscretion and I don’t think the book does that. However, bravo for performing the whole droning thing in front of a live audience! So I’d recommend starting the video when the music starts at 1:07.

More soon.

Finnegans Wake 1.1

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

Yes, it is a dense work. Yes, it is slow reading. Yes, it does not make conventional sense nor is it in conventional English. But about ten pages in, as I was struggling with the text in the way I’m sure everyone struggles with the text, I thought to myself, “Yes, but am I enjoying it?”

And I found that I was. Much like Ulysses, in spite of the overly reported difficulty of the book it also strikes me as a highly joyful book. The wordplay is sweeping, cosmic, immense, sublime. The comparison I imagined was Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, another overly reported difficult work. If one were to buy a ticket to that opera, one finds one’s self in the opera house for around five hours observing a piece that is famously both minimalistic and abstracted. People have made all sorts of accusations against the work of Philip Glass, some of which I can intellectually understand where they are coming from, but I’ve never been able to shake the fact that I simply enjoy his sound. When one realizes this, one can settle back into enjoying the next five hours or six hundred pages.

Well, I guess that remains to be seen.

As I predicted, the Oxford World’s Classics edition has proved invaluable. There is one passage early on:

“This is camelry, this is floodens, this is solphereens in action, this is their mobbly, this is panickburns. Almeidagad! Arthiz too loose! This is Wellingdone cry. Brum! Brum! Cumbrum!”

What on Earth is Joyce on about? Well, in the introduction there is a Chapter by Chapter Outline of the, as it were, plot. In regards to this section “Finnegan’s ‘mild indiscretion’ projected onto the battle of Waterloo”. These sections, these plot fragments, flow not nearly so neatly as they are delineated in the introduction, but, having read this and knowing it was coming, at one point I realized “Oh! The Duke of Wellington!”

YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS! You cannot travel this land without a Virgil! I am convinced of it and I think Joyce meant for it to be. I think he meant to open a deep deep mine and throw the reader into it, leaving it up to the reader to find the tools to mine anything from it or even a lantern. I think I read someone somewhere compare the first 29 pages to learning a new language. It is daunting, but I am assured that it’s also rewarding. I’ve also heard it compared to a dream, the night-twin of the day of Ulysses. Considering the intersections between the lives of Joyce and Jung, this interpretation has a rather startling edge to me.

Also, onomatopoeia is one of Joyce’s chief playthings in this work. Famously, at the beginning, he makes a joke about The Fall of Man:

“The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!)”

The “word” in parenthesis is, perhaps, the thunderclap of God’s wrath over Adam’s sin or, an option that made me chuckle when I read it, the written sound of someone falling down a flight of stairs. The book is brimming with this kind of “joke.”

This book does require a great deal more digging than Ulysses required. Indeed, people can spend a lot of time and energy… well, I suppose a better way to put it might be to say that what one gets out of it depends upon what one puts into it, much like life (and, as Tom Lehrer observed, a sewer). I discovered that someone actually put this moment to music:

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/45858399″>Thunderclap for Six Kinetic Light Drums + Finale</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/jennfigg”>Jenn Figg</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

People have devoted a lot of time and energy to this book. I am thankful for so many civic minded individuals who have traveled this path and left landmarks.

And speaking of music, it is helpful to know the song from which the work takes its title. In the first 29 pages, I think the lyrics of the song have cropped up nearly a dozen times:

The Fall of Man seems to be a motif. Since this is Joyce, it is transposed over a common Irishman with a problematic relationship with religion whose sin is succumbing to sexual urges. In this we see both an indictment of and an attraction to the baser instincts, which reflects the nature of Original Sin, that is to say the inclinations towards impurity. Also since this is Joyce, these themes are going to go into the high speed blender. As form meets content, we are warned of this. The first lines seem to reference the beginning of Tristan und Isolde and we who read the introduction know that the daughter of the… I suppose we should call him the title character although Finnegan morphs into a man named HCE for most of the book (I think), anyway the daughter is named Isolde. Also knowing that Joyce’s daughter Lucia, upon whom he doted, was descending into schizophrenia as he was writing this, we are prepared to see this theme of Original Sin in this form permeate every human in the story like sunlight through glass.

And looking back on the sentences I just wrote makes me keenly aware of how difficult it is going to be to talk about this.

I suppose one of the hotly debated, polarizing questions surrounding this book is whether a work of literature should demand this much of a reader. I would hazard a guess that out of nine billion people, only a thousand some people on Earth have read it at any given time. I have six hundred daunting pages to go still and I’m wary of making any hubristic statements at this point (picturing myself as Stephen Icarus), but I think that this is a fine use of the form. If I wanted everything presented to me on a silver platter, Western Civilization is chock full of entertainment outlets happy to provide for a fee. Should a book be difficult as this? Sure! Should a book be simple as Hemingway? Sure!

Am I going to make it through this book?

Am I going to make it through this book?

Anyone?

Virgil?

Is this thing on?

Approaching Finnegans Wake

By reputation of all that I’ve read, one of the most difficult books in the (disputably) English language. As far as I know, no one I know in real life has made it through the book.

I had planned for this to be the year in which I finally read The Russians, but it’s turned into the year in which I read James Joyce. Ulysses and Portrait were so brilliant, some of my favorite reading experiences of all time. In spite of what I’ve heard from people who have taken a stab at this book, I simply can’t believe that the man who wrote those two books then went on to spend 16 years writing utter jibberish.

While waiting for Finnegans Wake to arrive, I picked up a Samuel Beckett anthology that’s been sitting on my shelf for years. I noticed a piece titled Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (the periods seem to indicate centuries between the authors named). It turned out to be an essay about Finnegans Wake and turned out to be quite helpful… I think. Beckett gave me two expectations which I think will serve as valuable tools: 1) that most literature divorces form and content, but Joyce is attempting to make form and content inseparable. In this book, form is content, which rather reminded me of a photo I saw recently of Marshall McLuhan’s marked up copy of the book. That’s pretty much McLuhan’s thing in a nutshell, innit? 2) Joyce has, in this book, created a Purgatory (like Dante), but rather than it ascending to Paradise, it is cyclical, never-ending, a “return of same” situation (like Vico. Which I know by way of Spengler).

I bought the Oxford World’s Classics edition. In my experience, they are excellent in highly helpful supplementary material. Again, as synchronicity would have it, they were the edition that helped me to read Dante for the first time, as well as the works of St. Anselm. It has become one of my favorite imprints and if they had an option to subscribe to their publications, a book of the month sort of situation, I would be all about it. Their edition of Finnegans Wake has about 50 pages of introductory material. The long introduction was written by a Wakehead who unpacks some key points (describes the shifting characters, defines the symbols, give an overview of the “story”). There is a chapter by chapter, sometimes line by line summary of what is happening. There is also a timeline of the life of James Joyce. This might seem like a point of general interest, but I also have this suspicion that Joyce’s daughter Lucia might be a key to the book. I doubt Joyce would appreciate me analyzing him like that.

So, did all of this prep work prepare me? Well, I’m four pages in now and my step-daughter just asked me what I think of it so far.

“Um… Well… It’s very dense. You really have to dwell on every word and phrase. You have to read things out loud and sometimes you’re laughing at things that don’t make sense. But I have the sense that it really is brilliant.”

Laurie came in from the other room and said, “Promise me something. If you find you’re just reading this to prove a point, please stop.”

“I’m not just reading this to prove a point. I really think there’s something here. I think there’s a lot here actually. I believe in Joyce. He’s earned it.”

But while Laurie has grave doubts about the mental health of James Joyce, I feel that anyone can understand the music of Johann Strauss, but you have to work to mine appreciation from Arnold Schoenberg (my two year old grandson danced immediately to the former, left the room over the latter). Everyone understands a cheeseburger, but some people have to work to acquire some tastes for, say, sushi or Vegemite. I don’t think it is invalid to have to work for something (nor am I saying that the immediately understandable is “low brow.” I think both have their place in a rich human life). One of the introductions I read (I forget which) compared the book to a complex machine, like a nuclear reactor, which takes some time to learn how to operate, but which is highly useful once you do. They seem to suggest that the usefulness lays in the unique variety of perception afforded to those wading in the seas with St. Tristam.

There is also this thought by Harold Bloom (about whom my feelings are about as mixed as they come):

“Devote an inordinate part of your lifetime to “Finnegans Wake”, and it will reward your labors; that is its design.”

I have one more book planned for this year. If I read anything else, I’ll consider it a bonus.

Also, probably needless to say, I plan to liveblog the experience of reading this book. So stay tuned for that.

 

Ulysses, by James Joyce: Conclusion

We get the Good Samaritan comparison out of the way right off the bat.

Bloom and Stephen walk through Dublin late at night, reflecting on the violence of the town and how the police are only there to protect the affluent, to a cabman shelter (seems to be a bit like an all-night diner). Stephen is still a bit delirious. In the course of things, we and Bloom come to find out that he has not eaten in almost 48 hours. As is increasingly the case and as is so often the case in the wee hours of the night, their reflections take on a larger scope: God, existence, order. That latter is a strong point for Bloom and a point of almost complete ambivalence for Stephen, illustrating one common gap between young adulthood and middle age. Bloom tries to get Stephen to eat. Bloom believes that prostitutes ought to be monitored by the government and medical professionals. Bloom has opinions on the police and local government. Bloom has economic views, and views on gainful employment, which promote individual responsibility in the “each according to his ability” camp. Stephen only engages when the topics drift from the earthly.

There is a scene with a sailor boasting of his exploits at sea. Bloom seems to doubt the veracity of the mariner’s claims. As we get towards the end (not to get ahead of myself) I believe that there is a morality, or at least a metric of judgment, being promoted by Joyce. We are being led to feel certain ways about certain people, although there is a modern sensibility of the “gray” about many of the characters. This was most evident earlier in the citizen. Bloom’s motivations become a bit mixed in the scene that follows Skin-The-Goat as he speculates on the potential financial gains to be had on the quality of Stephen’s tenor voice. Therefore we no longer see Bloom as the purely compassionate surrogate father figure, but with a twinge of self-interest muddying the waters. Bloom adores Stephen regardless of Bloom’s now slightly soiled image, but this is so true of so much of human altruism. People are inclined to rewrite or apologize in retrospect, but there is so little purity in human behavior. More on this in a moment when we get to what I think is the closest passage to moralism: Molly Bloom.

We also see this in the next section as Bloom considers the concept of the perfectibility of humankind on its own steam. He internally concedes a list of factors that would prevent humans from ever achieving perfection and the list, humorously, is long. Also, in the next section, as Bloom’s reflections grow increasingly universal, the void of the infinite suggests to him that, even if there was life at other points in space, the nature of mortal existence is that of vanity. The allusion to Ecclesiastes reminds us of Buck Mulligan’s early Nietzschean worldview. Indeed, this is one of the points in which Existentialism and Judeo-Christianity harmonize. A little later, biographical information colors in our view of Bloom as a man who rejected the faith of his father and embraces the progressive ideas of his time, fancying himself a man of science. We will see by the end that faith and faithfulness seems to be a major point of the novel, albeit perhaps not viewed through a traditional lens.

I was reminded of the newspaper report about Paddy Dignam’s funeral which misrepresents who was in attendance (at least two who were not actually there and one whose identity remains a mystery). Bloom is denied the posterity of his name being accurately recorded among the mourners. His irritation is also vanity.

Joyce plays with this veiled vestigial recognition of the twinges of truth of Catholicism by making the next section narrated in the form of catechism. A question is: who is talking here? Who is showing us these things? Who is asking and answering these questions? One online friend of mine believed that it is Joyce himself inserted into the book “behind the curtain” as it were. I am inclined to agree, but I still believe that Stephen is Joyce. I also feel that there is a bit of trickery in the title in that Stephen is the true protagonist of the book. Bloom is not our hero. Stephen = Hero.

Bloom wants Stephen to stay as he does not see where Stephen could go at this hour and on this side of town. He begins to fantasize about a sort of “rent payed in tutoring” situation, having an live-in intellectual force. Stephen, the character who seems to have self- confidence and a form of self-control not dictated by the expectations of common civilization, declines. We have a wonderfully symbolic transition as Bloom’s mind turns to the moon, water, flowers, and women, all of which are external forces that Bloom seems to be at the mercy of. Before we move on, some of these judgments on the buffoonery of humankind are driven home as, in the face of reflection on the sublime, Bloom knocks his head against a beam in his house.

Bloom also toys with the idea of running away from his life, disappearing in favor of a life of wandering. He rejects this fancy due to the lateness of the hour, the attractiveness of his bed, and the attractiveness of a statue of Narcissus on the dining room table (puts a fine point on it, I’d say). Bloom also thinks back on his day as the story of scripture (specifically the Old Testament, but with himself as a messianic figure at the end in his act of trying to help Stephen). Certain points do correspond, but we readers know that Bloom has the wrong book of antiquity in mind.

And now we come to Molly. Before I dive in here, I have to say that I feel as if having read so many other authors who are in debt to or derivative of Joyce (Vonnegut, Burroughs, R.A. Wilson, etc.) possibly prepared me to read this book by searing the nerve endings over the more scatological material. This book was tried for obscenity in my country, in which we are supposed to enjoy free speech and press, and this book was burned at one point by the United States government (as were many other books in this too too sullied nation’s history). I was a little surprised to learn that the passage specifically offending the censors was the highly cloaked passage describing Bloom’s self-abuse. I wonder if the censors of the 1920s didn’t make it far enough to Molly’s not-ready-for-prime-time language.

Molly’s lack of education, earlier hinted at by comments dropped by Bloom, is highlighted in her stream of consciousness. We’ve just had 700+ pages that couldn’t go a half dozen paragraphs without dropping a line of Shakespeare, an allusion to scripture, a poetic turn of phrase, the deep dark reaches of philosophy, or the otherwise collected wisdom of humankind. Molly thinks nearly exclusively about people and how she judges them. Her only cultural touchpoints seem to be lyrics of popular song. She thinks of her affair (with one of the more despicable characters in the book) and has the usual justification of the adulterous (if Bloom had only been a better husband). She considers seducing Stephen. She also thinks often of bodily functions and her language is decidedly “of the people.”

This tells us a few things about Bloom as well, some of which we may have suspected by now:

1) he married for looks and is inclined towards objectifying other people.

2) he lacks wisdom. We doubt he’ll ever have is dream garden estate as he’s broken even on the money of the day.

But what keeps these two together? In spite of her connubial dissatisfaction, she is defensive of Bloom at times and her episode culminates is a fond reminiscence of love. I think their common uniting factor is that they are two faithless or unfaithful people. Their totem of Narcissus in the other room as they lay foot to head, a yin to a yang, represents their worship of the body with their own on the throne. Stephen, by contrast, and although the familiar words of the father figure Polonius is one of the only bits of Hamlet not quoted in the book, is to his own self true. When Stephen left the narrative some 50 pages ago, we, like Bloom, have no idea where he’s going to go for the rest of the night. Is he going to be alright? Is he going to sleep or eat? Stephen is as one who considers the lilies of the field.

I’ve said it loud and often elsewhere, but for the sake of my own vain posterity I’ll say it here: I believe this to be one of the most perfect books in the English language. I feel a little sad that I will never again have the opportunity to read it for the first time. I was on the phone with my wife at lunch the other day as I walked the bike trail by Little Chico Creek and I was talking about this book. June 16th, 1904 did not seem, on some levels, to be a particularly momentous day in the lives of these characters. While some remarkable and memorable events occurred, the day might well blur into the haze of personal history. I was talking about Bloom’s super-objective of filling the son-shaped hole in his life with Stephen in these latter scenes and remarked on my uncertainty over Stephen’s super-objectives. Then I remarked on how, in the course of a common day, super-objectives are not always clear. The super-objective of the average day often seems to be “to get through it.” Alexander Woollcott once said,

“There is no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day.”

The quotidian adds up. What we do in our daily lives ends up the sum of our lives. Bloom, Molly, and Stephen’s actions in the day are informed by their values, where they put their faith, if you will. Ours is not to place our faith in imagined future paradises, but rather to bring who we are to the present feast of human history.

Thank you for reading.

Ulysses, by James Joyce: Part 6

I was incorrect in the next 50 pages being Bloom’s stream of consciousness. Rather, Bloom wallows a bit in self-cultivational guilt before drifting into other thought tributaries as he continues his odyssey, unclean until evening, as time and distraction so often numb guilt (the wages of sin is death?). Bloom winds up in a pub where Stephen, Mulligan, and several other established characters are carrying on typical pub talk/activities save for two unusual elements. One is that someone is having a baby seemingly within earshot. The other is that the language of the narrative turns into a sort of Thomas Malory style. At first I felt as if this might suggest that, for all intents and purposes, humankind has not evolved much past the medieval and that childbirth is a fine example of this. While I don’t think this interpretation was invalid, as the scene progresses, the narrative language style progresses through the history of the written English language.

Why this and why here? I do feel that universality of the human experience, regardless of the fixed temporal point, is intentional. The discussion of the nature of time and language recur frequently throughout the book. One of the theses of the Modernist is a rejection of the linear, pat, orderly arrangement of time and language as demanded in the fictional narrative of the previous century. Time is not experienced like a parade; perception is infinitely more complex. Language is not a fixed star, but a wandering comet (Melmoth? Ahasver perhaps?).

Nothing like a barroom full of men talking about childbirth, what? And, as usual, it gets a bit brutal and, again, the topic of the cuckold returns (I suddenly am reminded of the earlier proclamation, in the library, that Falstaff is Shakespeare’s greatest creation. Certainly what’s about to come brings to mind the knight in horns tormented by the fae. Also Stephen’s Oedipal/daddy issues. More on that very soon). Man’s inhumanity to man is a necessary theme in any great urban modern piece I think. Again, Bloom is denigrated by his peers. Loneliness in a teeming metropolis is also a necessary theme and Bloom embodies this fairly well.

At the end of this section, I simply wrote in the margin “I have no idea.” Likely another bit of modern commentary, when the language evolves to the current, it is incomprehensible. Stephen and, indeed, Joyce may very well be sounding the lament of the Classicist.

We then enter the Circe section. I knew this without looking it up because people (including Bloom) keep turning into swine and they seem to be in the presence of bewitching women. What is actually going on is obscure for, oh about 100 pages I would say, which sounds dense but this section is all written in stage dialogue and, therefore, reads remarkably quickly. In another illustration of the unreliability of time, the reader goes from halfway through the book to about 150 pages from the end in a single afternoon.

I imagine someone somewhere has written a thesis on “Women in Joyce’s Ulysses.” I also imagine someone somewhere has written a thesis on “Men’s Bodily Functions in Joyce’s Ulysses.”

I was reminded, as we move out of the hallucinogenic haze, of a long ago conversation with a friend of mine who was a creative writing professor at CUNY. He was talking about the two film interpretations (to that date) of Hunter Thompson: Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He said that the latter was the successful of the two because it showed what was going on inside the head of Thompson whereas the former showed how he looked in consensus reality. I was reminded of this because Bloom seeing a parade of women he has lusted after, turning into the Jewish Messiah of Ireland at first adored and then tried (seeds of Kafka!) and lynched, turning into a female and then to a pig is far more compelling than, “Bloom, Lynch, and Stephen sat in the lobby of a brothel drinking absinthe and staring off into space.” The hanging motif reminded me that both William Burroughs and Samuel Beckett undoubtedly read Joyce. Again, so many owe so much to this work. I would add that this is why it’s good to always go to the source, the classics, the early material. You can then discern from whence later figures are deriving (or paying homage or, in some cases, plagiarizing.)

In spite of these harrowing apparitions surrounding Bloom, the most fearsome is the final spectre: Stephen’s dead mother. She says “Beware! God’s Hand!” Which the dead mother seems to be saying to Stephen/Joyce/all of us. The guilt and terror grip Stephen, as does his resolve to his chosen path. Stephen is deeply shaken, but entirely unrepentant. The message of the story demands the triumph of his will just as much as it demands the utter personal devastation in the face of that resolve against the cold universe, against God, against the fragmented couple that gave him life, against nations, against humankind. Bloom, Lynch, and Stephen spill out into the street where British soldiers take exception to an oath of Stephen’s regarding the King (and the brutishness of nationalism rears its ugly head once again. It seems that Joyce’s villains are either nationalistic or canine).

A curious thing: the morally ambiguous Bloom steps into an actual savior role (the next section takes great care to immediately get the Good Samaritan comparison out of the way). He assumes a surrogate father role, which seems like it is an inevitability for both of the characters. Bloom has the keen ache of the loss of a son and Stephen the loss of both of his parents in their own way. When Bloom cares for the beaten Stephen, it is one of the most beautiful moments in the book in my opinion. Perhaps I am putting too much of myself into this interpretation, but it is a small moment that resolves some major existential angst for the type of person likely to have made it this far in reading this book: the longing for salvation by/frustration over the failings of compiled human civilization that came before us. No less true for a turn of the century Dubliner looking at his parent’s generation than it is for a turn of the following century man looking at the destruction that the Baby Boomers have left in their wake.

But, again, maybe that’s just me.

Weighty stuff in the street outside of a Dublin brothel.

More soon. Possibly a conclusion soon!

Ulysses, by James Joyce: Part 5

I’ve just finished two important parts (chapters?) of the book.

The citizen is, while an extremely well written character, likely the most despicable character in the novel so far. In fact, I made a chart ranking my opinion of some of the major characters I’ve encountered so far, ranking them from  how despicable I find them to how likeable I find them:

A couple of notes on this: Buck Mulligan is the character I find most likeable, but the sections about Stephen Dedalus are my favorite. Simon is unpleasant, but his tragedy does a lot to temper that. Bloom seems to land right in the middle, but certainly not in a neutral way. He seems to be a bit of both. However, the reasons the other characters dislike him are by no means the things about him that we dislike!

And this section is the perfect example. The citizen is a monstrous man and this section is a monstrous section. Almost everything out of the mouth of everyone in the pub, except for Bloom, is brutal, ethnocentric, and mean, but the citizen is the worst. He is nationalistic, he hates foreigners, he has a vile dog (I looked up James Joyce and dogs. Apparently Joyce had a severe fear of dogs, so this, for him, was a shorthand to evil). I couldn’t help but think “‘Twas ever thus.” The citizen reminds me of people I have known: older, xenophobic, with a sort of petulantly rigid and narrow form of patriotism. Like the mistreated dog, Freud might suggest that such people are actually built nearly entirely upon fear and cowardice.

The section with the citizen is peppered with interruptions by humorous vignettes. When the citizen talks about the foreigners clear-cutting the woodlands of Ireland we are treated to a wedding announcement of people with tree related names. I was struck, again, by this book’s influence on comedy. So many owe so much to Joyce. This gives a sense that, while the citizen and his court are entirely lugubrious, we don’t take them too seriously and they do, in fact, prove impotent. Near the beginning there is one while these brute meditate on the death of Dignam which takes us through the higher levels of enlightenment by way of a variety of other religions than Catholicism.

Bloom is trying to educate this bunch on the topics that arise, but learning is lost on this bunch. Bloom is constantly disrespected by his peers and, in spite of his shortcomings, you really want to stand up for him. But in this case, it culminates in rampant anti-semitism. The citizen, if I understand the heresy correctly, seems to suggest that he is a British Israelist. He certainly hates actual Jews and sojourners. Bloom finally “stabs him in the eye” at the end of the scene by reminding him that Christ was a Jew and by introducing the word that these men cannot abide: love. As we progress through the scene, I noticed an increasing “sight” motif. This puts us in mind of the cyclops, of Homer, and, indeed and probably unintentionally, of Joyce’s own later blindness. I’m tempted to try to shoehorn Milton in there somehow, but I should probably leave well enough alone.

For all of the citizen’s brutality, he seems to be “Mr. Ireland.” I wonder how this is meant to reflect on Joyce’s view of Ireland, but I suppose I might be inclined to go in a similar direction if called upon to describe Mr. America.

As an aside, the Hamlet references continue to gallop apace. I begin to feel as if Hamlet was to Joyce what Beethoven’s symphonies were to Brahms. I want to say to them “The things you are going to create will be just as magnificent in their own way.” Where the comparison breaks down, I don’t think Joyce is crippled by his awe over Hamlet.

We then shift to one of the first real immersion in female characters. Gerty is a dreamer, a romantic young woman. She shifts seamlessly between sweet innocence and holiness to hating children and desiring the love of a mysterious stranger, the caprice of youth. When she sees the man, looking so sad and intense, she imagines a heroine-complex narrative around him. Her companions are two women with children (rather spoiled children, I thought). There is a cute aside about one of the women’s madcap character exemplified in her once donning men’s clothing and walking down the street smoking a cigarette. Scandalous!

The stranger is, of course, Bloom and the intensity of detail committed to Gerty’s appearance, the fireworks, his hands in his pockets, and rising pitch seem to suggest a return to the motif of Onan. Placed next to the sound of the church service, this seems to suggest a blending of the sacred and profane. Indeed, both parties, Bloom and Gerty, leave with their internal fantasies intact (albiet Bloom slides immediately into guilt).

What follows is another 50ish pages of stream of consciouness, which I am still reading so we’ll pause here for now.

More soon.

Ulysses by James Joyce, Part 4

Preparations for my wife’s birthday party and a subsequent chest cold have dramatically slowed my progress. I expected this to be a thing I read in January but it looks like it’s going to be a thing I read for 2/12ths of 2014.

This next section, again, put me in mind of Whitman. Sort of an “I Hear Dublin Singing” section. The priest makes his way through town and we are treated to a number of vignettes of the Dublin denizens. We like the priest because the priest likes the people. He likes “cheerful decorum,” a lovely reflection of the belief in a God of grace and order. The priest runs across a constable, each nod at the other on their lonely beats. We see the Dedalus kids scouting out food, a one-legged mad sailor beggar who I couldn’t help but cast in my head as Tom Waits, men watching women, bitter foreigners, barflys. I think my favorite, or at least one of Joyce’s wonderful language plays was the gentleman who has caught a cold and periodically punctuates his conversation with “Chow!” Around the second or third time it hits you that Joyce is recording the sound of the sneeze, much like he describes how the pigeons “roocoocooed.”

One image that recurs in this section had me thinking of Gatsby (that other “greatest novel in the English language”) and how keenly aware these two 1920s books were of billboard advertising. At once modern and archaic, these men were on the cusp of that one thing that we are now entirely soaked in. And they had the good sense to make it a symbol of their time.

Bloom makes only a passing appearance in this section. We see that his sensuality also extends to his literary taste. Again, do we choose to see this as a man dazzled by the deep headiness of all things lusty, or just kind of a creepy lech?

The high point of this section was, for me, Buck Mulligan. He is full of life and I want to be more like him. He and Haines are talking about a number of things including Stephen’s recent brilliant Shakespeare rant (to which Haines replies “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.” I might do well to make that a plaque to post over my front door), and Mulligan’s theory on why the Irish have no concept of Hell.

A procession of titled nobles seems to pass in a section that reads like what I always thought this whole book would read like:

“Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.

Martha! Come!

Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.

Goodgod henev erheard inall.

Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.

A moonlight nightcall: far: far.”

This goes on for about a page or two and then we are in a barroom scene with Simon Dedalus, Poldy Bloom, et al. They flirt with the women. They sing beautifully (and I was reminded of the Sirens). We reenter the stream of Bloom’s consciousness and he thinks on what he is experiencing, returning often to the concept of death, no doubt due to the manner in which he started his day.

I peeked ahead and, in the section to come, I would be surprised of someone doesn’t get a spear jammed into their eye.

More soon.

Ulysses by James Joyce- Part 2

I suddenly realized that the book is not divvied up into chapters 1,2,3, etc., each starting with a letter that fills a whole page. Along with this realization came the realization that I actually had no idea where the chapter breaks were or which chapter I was reading. There are breaks in the narrative and there are sudden shifts to entirely different forms of prose (I finally decided to end my reading for this section when it shifts to newspaper headlines), but I became aware that my updates on this book would have to be in sections of my own devising, rather than chapter by chapter. I suppose I could go look up where people, in the past 90 years, have decided where they put the chapter breaks, but I’m trying to avoid looking up too much in this reading. And I dread confirming my suspicion that there are long arguments by scholars about this.

Leopold Bloom arrives in our narrative and is instantly identified as a dreamboat. That is, if you are the kind who love men who love to eat the gnarliest innards of animals. If not, in his favor, he is also a cat lover. So much of the text, and a large part of why it is one of the most perfect novels in the English language, is its euphony. So much of it is composed for the tongue. “Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.” Read that line aloud slowly, over-enunciating, and enjoy the mouthfeel.

Like Dedalus and, indeed, Hamlet, Bloom is starting his day in mourning colors because he has a funeral to go to. But before he gets that far, we have a lot of sensuality to experience through his mind’s eye. He is imaginative, but also a bit vice-ridden and perhaps less educated than Dedalus. The 7 Deadlies are strong with this one. Observing Bloom in this manner began to grate against me and I began to second guess my perceptions. Was this just my crypto-puritanism rearing its ugly head? Are his attributes in this decidedly Modern piece intended more towards the lusty and sensual manly? This would be more in line with the character conjured by the title.

That Bloom is also unkosher is one of his earliest noted attributes; we’ve already been trained to take note when a character struggles with the religion of their fathers.

Oh, by the way, one thing I did look up: turns out you can cross Dublin without passing a pub.

I think one of the emerging impressions of the book is the importance of a seemingly unimportant day. How many thoughts we have. How much we do. How much changes with every action. Multiply that by the number of people we encounter and the people they encounter and so forth. There is something of the Great Web of Life in it. And it is true.

It’s also a much funnier book than anyone had ever told me. Here Bloom thinks good reasons why the cat ought not eat pieces of the kidney, but after burning it gives the burnt bit to the cat. I was a little surprised to find that Woody Allen stole a joke from Joyce. The “Lazarus, Come Forth!” joke appears in a slightly modified form in Love and Death. Although, I guess that shouldn’t be the most problematic thing I find with Woody Allen. As a complete rabbit-trail, he’s been on my mind lately what with the Golden Globe kerfuffle and I was struck by remembering his joke about how he can’t listen to Wagner because it makes him want to invade Poland. Fortunately, his own fans (of which I am as wary a one as I am of Wagner) did not follow suit with his own work and the artist’s own personal horribleness.

But we were talking about James Joyce. One thing that sticks in my mind is a letter of Virginia Woolf’s which I read years ago in which she said in passing words to the effect of being determined to finish that book by that horrible little man. The little man was Joyce and the book was this. Thinking on it now reminded me of my rather mild reaction to some of the more fervent critiques of this book and I think some of it has to do with the fact that I read William Burroughs extensively in high school. First of all, I am unphased by many pages of stream of consciousness or obscure narrative. Second, compared to the obscenity of Burroughs, Joyce seems quite normal and reasonable. Third, as is so often the case upon reading the classics, I find that the original groundbreaker is far superior to those who came later. And, it might get me in trouble in some quarters to say so, but the flaws in Joyce’s personal character are nothing compared to the horrible little men of the Beat Generation. But, again, I am firmly of the camp that art can separate from the artist. If you insist on all of your art coming from people whose lives were entirely unimpeachable, you will never enjoy art.

Bloom poops. Which is a thing people do in the morning. I did notice that twice in the early morning Bloom takes pieces of writing he appreciates on some level and condemns them to destruction. This struck me as a twinge Dadaist.

So after this man has pooped, eaten of the cloven hoof, lusted unabashedly in his heart, and entertained the notion of reincarnation, he goes to a Catholic funeral. In the dissolving of the communion wafer, Bloom reflects on the swallowing of religion by its adherents rather than chewing, as well as the palliative of the works-based dispensation of grace. Bloom’s view of religion seems to be more confident than Stephen’s, more confidently suspicious of it. He thinks, “Those old popes were keen on music, on art and statues and pictures of all kinds.” Which is a commentary on the post-Constantinian privilege. He does recognize what everyone seems to recognize about Catholicism: “Wonderful organization certainly, goes like clockwork.” Mirroring a sort of nature’s God order of the universe, a sort of Deistic “as above, so below” in the church unawares. Bloom strikes at the core of the problem of religion near the end of the service when he thinks “He had his answer pat for everything.”

Oh, there is so much here that I would like to write about. The procession to the burial and graveside is, I don’t think I am being overly superlative in saying, one of the finest pieces of writing in the English language. Joyce paints the inside of the head of one at a funeral: the inappropriate humor, the superstition, the grim, bleak existentialism, the wandering mind and the self-reprimanding at the wandering mind, the invariable odd moments (someone no one knows shows up, an acquaintance requests that you add their name to the list of people present).

Some stand-out moments before I cease what has become a much longer post than I intended:

*Bloom recalls Julius Caesar in defining the best sort of death, once again revealing our dependence upon antiquity while at the same time suggesting their inability to do us any practical good (the best death is the sudden, unexpected death).

*I think I will forever remember the line “Out of the frying pan of life, into the fire of purgatory.”

*Joyce agrees: Shakespeare’s Hamlet owns funerals.

*Where ever you go, whatever you’re doing, no matter how much fun you’re having, remember: people are dying somewhere right now.

*Bloom reflects on the manner of how the dead are disposed of and, while he doesn’t say this specifically, how funerals and burials are for the living. This is why I want my body to be donated to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s CSI decomposition study program. However, deferring to, as I’ve stated, the wisdom that funerals and burials are for the living because the dead don’t care, if Laurie survives me, I doubt she will be comfortable with doing that and so I want her to do with my remains whatever will make her feel best.

What a perfect way to start the morning! There is wisdom in the house of mourning! I wonder what’s next!

Not really because I’m actually halfway through the next chapter. Next Bloom takes us into a newspaper. A newspaper is a thing that used to be published daily full of news items and advertisements. You may have read about them in history class.

More soon.

Ulysses: Chapter 1

 

I suppose it would be the pinnacle of cliche and the zenith of obviousness to state how deeply I identify, specifically myself when I was a young man, with Stephen Dedalus. The poverty, the bohemian crowd, the waves of human civilization washing over me. Dedalus lives with a stately plump, rather flamboyant Nietzschean/classicist, and an Englishman.

Before I misstep too far into “explaining what’s going on” (what a horrible mistake to try to put it into worse words), I should probably take a moment to offer the obligatory praise to Joyce’s prose-poetry. From the first half dozen words we are being trained on the importance of euphony in this book. Buck Mulligan offers a dash of exposition, commentating in the process on his and Stephen’s names, a moment in which we are also being trained by Joyce to watch for moments when Joyce winks at us.

Stephen Dedalus has a problem. It’s a religious problem as well as a major family problem (as his parents appear to be quite dead). On page 5, Joyce has a paragraph which informs us that this is going to be a work of absolute genius:

“Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of the bay and skyling held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.”

Buck Mulligan indicates that Dedalus’ mother had requested with her dying words that he pray for her, and Dedalus had refused.

I would hasten to note that this book was written while Freud still walked the Earth. We, the modern anti-heroes that crawl around the rockface, have parent issues that project into God issues. We are also confronted fairly early on that this is a book which will not shy away from going through an obscenity trial if necessary in the course of the telling. It’s a passing comment on the elderly milkmaid and the… difference evoked in the minds of the young men.

Which reminds me that I wanted to comment on the oft overstated difficulty of the text. I think this a bit of an anachronism as we, the modern well-read, are well accustomed to shifting narratives, stream of consciousness, and any other number of Modernist literary devices. I want to go around grabbing people by their collars and shouting in their face to not be afraid of this book! If anything, what is striking me so much about this book is how well it’s done. Joyce once claimed that he estimated 20,000 hours went into writing Ulysses. Certainly he could not have known of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, but the point is well taken that this book is double that rule.

The chapter is full of great lines and moments. Irish art as the cracked lookingglass of a servant. Hellenising Ireland. History as a nightmare from which one is trying to awake. The sort of things that will stick with you for the rest of your life and pepper your thought-life and, likely, your conversation.

The language of Ireland is dead and/or dying and the Irishman Dedalus is torn between his two nationalities, English and Italian, a sentiment forged in the firey shifts between Stuart and Tudor, that time when how high to place the liturgy led to decades of bloodshed, a war which, for all intents and purposes, is still going on.

There is also Hamlet (as well as Whitman, Swinburne, Lady Macbeth, Swift, the early church fathers, and probably several dozen I missed) infused throughout. The ghost father, Dedalus’ grim mourning attire next to his celebratory companions, Pyrrhus in the classroom, the cloud like a whale, the dog on the beach reenacting the Yorick scene, and so forth.

I assume the antisemitism of the elder generations in the first chapter will somehow play into the following of our Odysseus who has not yet made his first appearance.

Joyce captures a classroom of young boys in all of their vivid beastliness so well. As he does with the interaction between Dedalus and the elder generation in the form of Mr. Deasy, the horrid conservative who venerates Iago on the subject of money. And haven’t we all had that conversation with a person of the previous generation or two at some point, really? ‘Twas ever thus. There is hardly a more palpable nightmare from which we should like to wake than the generation immediately preceding us, what?

We end the chapter with Dedalus on the beach (I think) and some of the best stream of consciousness I’ve ever read.

There is so much to digest here and I feel like I’ve only just skimmed the surface. Once again, I’ve set before myself a Herculean task in writing about each chapter.

Micro-blogging, my eye!