Ulysses vs The Absentee

I've left Ulysses behind for a couple of months now. I'll be giving a paper about the popularity of Maria Edgeworth, an early 19th century Anglo-Irish writer, so I've been focusing on her writing and her popularity compared to near contemporary, Jane Austen. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) is referred to as the Irish Jane Austen and the female Sir Walter Scott. Unfortunately for Maria, the reverse is true--Jane was the English Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott was the male Maria Edgeworth--both of the writers were great fans of Maria. In fact, Scott noted that he could never have written his Waverly novels except for the writing influence of Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee, and her treatment of the Irish customs and language in Castle Rackrent. Maria Edgeworth is considered the first English novelist to write Big House novels, to use the vernacular, to create an unreliable narrator, to have a mixed marriage in the story (though later removed), and to write historical fiction in the English language.

My paper, Why Jane and Not Maria: the Reverse Popularity of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, will be presented at the American Conference on Irish Studies--Western Region October 1-3, 2010. Sooooo, Ulysses is sitting in the background until I have Maria settled.

I just read a literary blog about command of voice (mentioned in Nathan Bransford's literary blog). The example used, "Call me Ishmael." How much more commanding can those first words be in a novel? The voice has control of the writer and the writer has control of the story. Call me Ishmael. The blogger goes on to name examples of great voice--Tim O'Brien (at least in The Things They Carried), Cormac McCarthy, and more.

Perhaps, that's one unspoken problem with Ulysses. The voice is not commanding--"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead..." If truth be told (and I no longer believe truth is being told about Ulysses), that is a pretty weak beginning compared to "Call me Ishmael." Or, John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, "The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all." Or, The Dead--to me, James Joyce's masterpiece--, "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

Section 3 of Ulysses, Proteus: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that is no more, thought through my eyes..."

The second truth here today--I could not, simply could not, plow through Proteus. Acccording to Ellman, a single process "binds the two parts of the episode," birth and death. This is not growth but corruption. Stephen sees all created things in process of decay, every day dying a little, as if death were a concurrent process. Then he has many examples in his head. Ellman goes on to say that besides generation and corruption, another element is hinted at (buried in?): The beginning of the episode begins with his reading and ends with his writing a poem. The poem is of revulsion, but in rhythm and rhyme. Joyce continues this in Stephen's urinating into Cock lake--the sound 'verbalized in wave-speech.'"

I truly appreciate any story that brings together growth and corruption, the process of decay, how little parts of us die every day, and, I appreciate Joyce's disgust at the corruption of not only the Irish Catholic church but of the Irish government--going back to the unforgiveable treatment of Charles Parnell. However, I keep returning to my original impression--how can we discuss these issues, feel these emotions, unless an artist/writer communicates them to us. That is their job--their reason for being--okay, I know that present-day American writing is all about the writer, not the communication of universal themes, but in Proteus, these issues are not communicated at all. Let's all channel--"Call me Ishmael."

What does he mean?

I've been away from this blog for several months. First, my Irish Studies course took up my life for 8 weeks--was amazingly academic and rigorous, but I got me A and I actually learned quite a bit. Then I got distracted by Maria Edgeworth and wondered why Jane Austen is so famous both in pop culture and in academic culture, so I started reading all of Jane's books, collecting articles about Maria Edgeworth (which are only academic), collecting academic and pop articles about Jane Austen and finished reading nearly all of Maria's stories. Now I'm really curious as to why Jane and not Maria is a mainstay of our pop culture. Maria (a contemporary of Jane) was very famous during the beginning of the 19th century and her National Biography entries far out-weighed Jane's. Then something happened at the turn of the 19th century and the trend reversed. Stay tuned to find out why--I'm still looking myself.

I gave up on Ulysses during those months. I felt that I simply do not have enough hours left in my life to complete this book. The third section is a bear to read. I'm plowing through it but geez, why make it so hard. (Because James Joyce was Irish and he knew he could confuse everyone and they'd spend a century decifering his gobbledegook.) Here is what he means in the Proteus (3) section (1st page):

Ineluctable modality: impossible to avoid or evade:"inescapable conclusion"; "an ineluctable destiny"; "an unavoidable accident." and Theology? Church teaching? I'm too stupid to get it.

maestro di color che sanno: Dante on Aristotle: "the master of the men who know."
Diaphane--transparent silk--or cells? Which one. Stephen sees color in them. Can he go through them?
adiaphane--The opposite--he tries to "shut his eyes and see" as he walks--through a door, a gate? A very short space of time through very short times of space (great phrase)
nacheinander/nebeneinander: "one after another/successively”; “next to one another/adjacent.”
Los Demiurgos: Beats me--Los could be an article for Demiurgos; or it could refer to Blakes poetry, or just a pun to make us all look stupid for looking it up. All I know is that Demiurge refers to a diety.
Sandymount--ahhhh--a beachy strand on Dublin Bay--I've been there!
am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strang? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them... The teacher from the second section...knows all the wild sea shells that might bring money.
catalectic tetrameter of iambs--works for me.
And that is just the first page!!

Can I continue reading? Maybe I'll try--After my own walk along the streets of suburan Colorado; no crush, crack or crick, crick. Just a silent walk, clean sidewalks, no wind, eyes open, past budding tulips, blue sky and happy thoughts of motherhood--no trailing navelcord, hushed in ruggy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh.
Okay, all you Joyce scholars--admit you were clueless until you looked this all up phrase by phrase over the early years of your career....

Saw Flogging Molly last night...fun, fun, fun.

James Joyce's Ulysses--Episode 2

Here is what Frank O'Connor (my hero) wrote about Ulysses: "Take Ulysses, which is twenty-four hours, and I maintain it's a long short story. And it was wirtten as a short story, don't forget that. It was orginally entitled 'Mr. Hunter's Day.' And it's still 'Mr. Hunter's Day' and it still is thirty pages. It's all development sideways. That's really what I was talking about: the difference between the novel, which is not a novel, which is an extension sideways. It doesn't lead forward, it doesn't lead your mind forward... 'So now boys, having finished with this brief moment of our novel, we'll go backward for a while.' And all the time they're just going out like that because they're afraid to go forward." (Paris Review 1957)

I'm beginning to believe that Frank O'Connor was right--Ulysses is a short story that goes ashort way forward, then a long way sideways, then backwards a bit, then a bit or two forward. I'm trying to read it like a story, and the story IS quite exceptional, but James keeps distracting me with the sideways to the Church, to Greek allusions, and the contemporary Irish history and politics.

You can pick up a synopsis of episode 2 in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULysses_(novel) but there are some interesting insights into Stephen Dedalus and the Irish soul in the 2nd episode: For one, I think Stephen is humiliated by Deasy's stupid joke about Jews in Ireland--Irish (at least Irish-Americans) don't like to be butts of stupid jokes, or taken in by a ignorant joker like Deasy.

The episode also continues a blasphemous tone, for which the book is famous.

I love the internal monologues--When he's helping the young Sargent with his homework: Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes... These are the same terms he had used in the previous episode in thinking of his own mother.

The genius in Ulysses is in these internal musings--however far sideways they may take the reader. Too, James often uses the cadence or rhythm of a prayer or the rhythm of ancient Irish poems--brightness which brightness--mien and movement--As it was in the beginning, is now--riddle me, riddle me--History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake...

I have to keep reminding myself that I'm reading Ulysses as a story and not as a piece of scholarhip. However, James is with me throughout the story--I can't seem to shake him from my shoulder as I read his work.

The Story Starts This Way...

The story starts with three young men in a tower—Buck Milligan, Stephen Dedalus and Haines. I know it is a tower-like structure because according to my “companion” Robert Ellmann, Joyce lived in the Martello tower in Sandycove when he was about twenty-one, right after his mother had died and during the time he had returned to Dublin from Trieste. The tower was one of seventy-four which the British had hastily put up along the English and Irish coasts in 1804 in fear of a French invasion.

Oliver St. John Gogarty, another Dublin writer and a kind-of friend of Joyce’s, leased the tower, which he called Omphalos (naval structure). The third renter or guest in the tower was Samuel Chenevix Trnch, the model for the Haines character.

Here is the story behind this opening scene, according to Ellmann: On the night of September 14, Trench had a nightmare about a black panther, and began to shoot at it with a gun. Gogarty got the gun away and added a barrage of his own, aimed at the pots and pans above Joyce’s bed. Upon this action, Joyce dressed, left, ended the friendship with Gogarty (which was on the rocks, anyway, since Joyce had recently written a pamphlet ridiculing most of the Dublin writers, Gorgarty included), as well as his relationship with Ireland.

The incident is significant for two reasons—Joyce early on had decided to have this be the opening scene for his great book Ulysses, and he determined that night to be done once and for all with Ireland.

Stephen Dedalus is a sympathetic character—moody, very Irish, wears hand-me-downs from Mulligan, broods about the tower, and is subservient or, at least differential to the other two. Mulligan is also Irish, probably more Anglo-Irish—he’s self-assured, dismissive of Dedalus’ brooding and quite confident; in the end, he demands the key to the tower, though Stephen Dedalus pays the rent.

The theme of the 1st episode is the conflict within Stephen about his recently-deceased mother and how he had not granted her last wish—to kneel and pray with him. The guilt is shown in a brilliantly relayed dream, which Milligan dismisses. Milligan senses that Stephen has a problem with him. Stephen finally admits that Milligan had insulted Stephen when he had dismissed the death of his mother with an off-hand remark. “Don’t mope over it all day, he [Mulligan] said. I’m inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding.”

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twinning stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twinning chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark cords. Her door was open; she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed.

Scholars read an immense amount of symbolism, mythology, imagery and literature into every word of Ulysses, but these two paragraphs, as well as Stephen Dedalus’ brooding manner, his sharply written memories and insight; the characters of Mulligan and Haines are really why James Joyce’s Ulysses should be read as a story not a piece of scholarship. By the end of this first episode, Joyce has created real characters in a real world with a real story.

The remaining parts of the episode are full of Shakespeare, Homer, Zarathustra, discussions about the Church and free thinkers, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and the imperial British State.

From a writers point of view (as opposed to the Joyce scholar), these topics are all legitimate topics for three young, educated and literate Irishmen to discuss on a freewheeling morning. Joycean scholars read each of these topics as Joyce predicted that they would—tediously trying to figure out what he meant.

Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael’s host, who defends her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.
Hear, hear. Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu!
--Of course I’m a Britisher, Haines’ voice said, and I feel as one…”

The above is just one example throughout the first episode of the smooth transition from Stephen Dedalus’ inner monologue (his famous stream of consciousness) to the world of acquaintances swirling about him.

Again, scholars dissect every word of this beginning episode. However the story is there, the characters are developed, the technique is art and the dialog is real. A real story with real people in a real world—that should be the joy of this odyssey.

A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.
Usurper.

In the end, as the three young men part down near the sea, Mulligan demands the key to the tower even though Stephen pays the rent—the word Usurper enters Stephen’s head as he leaves them.

Perhaps you need to be Irish Catholic to appreciate this scene and the dialog; perhaps you need to have lived or spent time in Dublin; perhaps you need to be a Joycean--in any case--so far this story works for me.

I see now, too, Homer is going to have to be one of my "companions" during this year and a day.

I'll be posting as I read the story---comment as you wish. However, all you Joyce scholars--remember I'm reading Ulysses as a story not a tome.

A Year and a Day Married to James Joyce's Ulysses

“… In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring…” Section III of The Monumental Decision of the United States District Court Rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey Lifting the Ban on “Ulysses.”

James’ Joyce’s Ulysses always makes it to the top 100 best novels in the world, forever and ever, often making # 1. That’s like the Academy Award for the best movie ever made; the best Grammy in the history of the world, the Tony for every play ever produced on Broadway, the Booker Prize for life everlasting.

On New Year’s Eve, I asked numerous seriously-educated friends if they had ever read Ulysses—
“Half, maybe…”
“I tried, but we didn’t get along…”
“I’ve always been meaning to…”
I mean this is considered THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN!

Me? I have read half of Ulysses three times in my life—once when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley; once when I was a history graduate student in Colorado; and another as I commuted daily on the bus to and from University of Washington for yet another graduate degree. Each time I crawled my way to the halfway mark and simply could not go any further. I was worn out. I could never make it to the end--my Odyssey ended in the middle of the ocean. I gave up.

“Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand.” So said our Hon. John M. Woolsey when he had to plow through it for his rendered opinion. “The study of Ulysses is, therefore, a heavy task.”

This time, I’m going to finish James Joyce’s masterpiece—I am…I am...I am.

Like James Joyce in his loyalty to technique and who went about honestly attempting to tell fully what his characters think about, I will not funk my duty to read him fully, to think about what his characters are thinking about, and understand who they are and why they do what they do that one day in June in Dublin. I intend to read Ulysses as a piece of literature not a piece of scholarship. I want to read a story not a dissertation.

The Story: In a nutshell (again, thanks to the Hon. John Woolsey’s record-making opinion) … In Ulysses, Joyce takes persons of lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the City bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Woolsey also believed that you can’t understand the book unless you have some companion studies. I’m armed with mine—Wikipedia (however, I’ve read the first episode of Ulysses and I’m already beyond the Wikipedia analysis); Ulysses on the Liffey by Richard Ellmanm, 1971 (me thinks he overanalyzes what Joyce enjoyed doing—interspersing bits from Homer, Shakespeare, and Mother Church), and A Lonely Voice by Frank O’Connor, 1961 (O'Connor preferred The Dubliners over Ulysses).

As I go along, I’ll pick up more “companion” pieces—this time around, we'll all get it right.

I’m armed…I’m ready and I’ve got myself a year and a day.

Oh--why Handfasting Ulysses as the title for this blog? Handfasting is an ancient Celtic marriage ceremony where the couple has a year and a day to decide if they want to stay in a marraige. I'm kind of feeling like I need such a commitment on this project.