More Joycean perambulations

1. Bloom as a cuckold. The traditional story of the cuckold is typified by "The Miller's Tale" by Chaucer or Nabokov's parody of the genre in Laughter in the Dark. It is about an older man who, in his vanity, takes a younger wife and is fooled by his wife and her lover. This may well be the plot of Sweets of Sin. (This book is not by Paul de Kock, the author Molly asks for, therefore Bloom is defying her wish somewhat, or showing that he knows her taste better than she knows her own - or he simply doesn't see a book by Paul de Kock. Paul de Kock is a joke in two ways, one obvious, the other less so. This is the name of a nineteenth century French novelist who wrote stories of French middle-class life, sort of the equivalent of Anthony Trollope or something.) Bloom, who has a touch of the artist about him, does not fit this image. In fact, he knows about Boylan and may, in some sense, accept the situation. This is one of the mysteries of the book, anyway. When Boylan fails to leave the Hotel Ormond on time, Bloom briefly hopes that he has forgotten his assignation with Molly. One reading is that Bloom knows his own failings and tolerates Molly's infidelities and Boylan's usurpation because he essentially knows that things will change as soon as he regains his own personal and sexual potency.

2. World War II and Joyce's "neutrality": Critical party line holds that modernists who never left their home countries supported the allied powers in World War II. They were the "neo-modernists." The expatriots who left their home countries, formerly the most celebrated modernists - James, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway - are said to have supported the axis powers, including the Fascists. All this, of course, is well after the '20s when "The Waste Land" and Ulysses were published. Eliot supported the allies, however, and Joyce moved to Switzerland - declaring himself neutral.

Many writers of the '30s and '40s, especially British, were Leftists: W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, etc. What makes them Leftists? They were not Liberals (or believers in Democratic society with rights for individuals). They were not even socialists in the usual sense. These authors, with the exception of Orwell, turned to Stalin because of the violence he was directing at the middle class and recalcitrant religious elements. Right wing figures like Pound and Eliot supported Mussolini or Hitler - at least until both recanted (I guess being incarcerated in an insane asylum near D.C. helped Pound change his mind). Either way, due to the desire we discussed before to give birth to a new social order, these writers, unlike today's somewhat more sentimental pundits or theorists on the left and right, were in favor of violence. Pound, for a time, could not decide between Communism and Fascism, but eventually picked Fascism, due to its greater focus on the state. When asked why, he said, he did it for The Cantos, his book-length epic - i.e., for his poetry. The revival of art sought by Eliot and Joyce was more important than the dangerous political reality of Fascism. Same with the Stalinists of the '30s; they were untroubled by Stalin's violence. Stephen Spender praised Stalin's ruthlessness, and Andre Gide complained that Stalin was not brutal enough on the middle class. It almost did not matter which extremist path one took. Arnold Schoenberg, the revolutionary modernist composer, said: "the only path that does not lead to heaven is the middle path."

How does this relate to Joyce? He was fundamentally different from other modernists, I would argue, through his instinctive dislike of extremism and his elevation of moderation. He wanted nothing to do with "enthusiasm," which, as I said in class, is an old, pejorative word for religious fanaticism. He would have classified political extremists (like the Irish nationalists who come in for such a severe drubbing in Ulysses) as little different than the false prophets of religion (like John Alexander Dowie, or Elijah, the self-styled American prophet in the book). Joyce - and perhaps the great James - is fundamentally different in some way from other modernists. I would venture to say that many are closer to the Platonist (or idealist, spiritual) side, where Joyce is closer to the scientific or Aristotelian persuasion. Again, I am using these terms in their colloquial sense - not a strict sense. Therefore, when the fractious second war occurred - which still defines our morality and politics to a great extent - Joyce did not take sides. (One could argue that he should have taken a stand with the Allied forces.)

4. Getting the songs straight. I myself have trouble with all the musical references in the book, and I'm not going to catalog them all here. Just the songs.

a. "Love's Old Sweet Song": frequently mentioned, this is a constant reminder of Molly's infidelity. She is going to be singing it as part of her musical program produced (or "gotten up") by Blazes Boylan. These are the lyrics. Note the similarity of the composer's name to a minor character in the book.
b. "Seaside Girls": the most frequently mentioned song in the book, it is (wrongly) ascribed to Blazes Boylan as the composer (by Milly). Here are the lyrics; note the somewhat odd references to time and clocks.
c. "Blumenlied": Bloom buys the sheet music for this song for Milly when she is taking piano lessons. It is also known as "The Flower Song," connecting it to Bloom's pseudonym Henry Flower. There are no lyrics, but you can listen to it here.
d. "Silent, O Moyle": Thomas Moore's melody referred to in "Scylla and Charybdis."
e. "M'appari" or "Martha" is from an opera of the same name. It is sung by the "prick" Simon Dedalus in the Ormond Bar in "Sirens." It connects, of course, to the name of Bloom's correspondent. Here it is in English and Italian. Another obviously sad song, with a theme of absence and return.
f. "The Croppy Boy": This sentimental ballad plays on Irish nationalism with its themes of betrayal. It appears in "Sirens," of course, and reappears afterward. Here are the lyrics.
e. Don Giovanni. This is one of the most important musical themes in the book, although it's not a song, per se, but a duet in Mozart's great opera. I'm linking the lyrics and an youtube video of this beautiful piece. It relates, of course, to themes of usurpation and duplicitous love.

5. M'intosh. Here are the passages in which the mysterious fellow, the eternal Watcher, one might say, appears. Did he murder the man in the river? Is he a character from "A Painful Case" or "Eveline" (both contain someone similarly attired - like that's so unusual in rainy Ireland)? Is he a godlike or a spiritual figure? Hmmm.

"Hades"
Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

end of "Wandering Rocks"
In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

in "Eumeus"
-- This morning (Hynes put it in, of course) the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise, after a brief illness, came as great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out by (certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge from Corny) Messrs. H.J. O'Neill & Son, 164 North Strand Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr., Martin Cunningham, John Power .)eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad) Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus, B.A., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius Kelleher, Joseph M'C. Hynes, L. Boom, C.P. M'Coy,-- M'Intosh, and several others.

in Ithaca, the question-and-answer chapter, Joyce primes speculation by asking and answering the question himself. Unfortunately, he answers it with a restatement of the question.

Who was M'Intosh?

What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?

Incomplete thoughts on Ulysses

1. Eliot characterized Ulysses as a "modern epic." The epic itself is a forerunner of the novel, which has often been described as an epic for the middle class. But the classical epic is about the whole of society, while the novel tends to be about a struggle between an individual and society. The novel is driven by an inciting problem, which generally worsens or complicates but is resolved in the end. Usually there is a death. The central plot questions involving Bloom & Molly, Blazes Boylan, Bloom & Stephen - are not satisfactorily resolved by the book. It is a "portrait" of society like George Eliot's great Middlemarch, but even that book is driven by a series of parallel plots, like the stories that comprise the life of a town over the period of time. Ulysses has no full stories. It is not merely the portrait of a town, but closer, in its goals, to the Odyssey itself.

2. Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) faces struggles which typify or define heroism, but not only physical heroism, the subject of the Iliad. They define the qualities that describe humanity at its best. The themes that structure every chapter in Joyce's Ulysses similarly describe the dangers or challenges that face the modern, would-be hero, quite similar to the seven deadly sins (it suddenly occurs to me): lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, envy, sloth, pride. It may not fit the book precisely, but pretty well - Bloom faces all of these, and Stephen is troubled by the worst sin of all hubris or pride. It would be wrong to reduce the book to a guide to behavior, a depiction of how the most ordinary of men can partake of some of the heroism of the heroic age, but Joyce's book is epic in this sense. It grapples with the fundamental problem of being human, not the problem of love, not the movement from immaturity to maturity, not some pedestrian escape from danger. The metaphor of the mirror is appropriate, because the book's job is to hold a mirror up to existence, revealing experience as moderns see it: interior and exterior. That is why Joyce does not follow the linear time of the novel, but makes his book a catalog of different types of discourse. In a sense, yes, he is having fun, but he is also practicing what Aristotle named as the ultimate purpose of poetry: mimesis or imitation. Showing what is.

3. There is nothing "organic" about Joyce's structure. An organic structure would seem to follow a "natural" path of trouble, intensification, complication, resolution. This is the "romantic" pattern in the sense of old stories that developed in the Latin or "Roman" world: Roman = romance = roman (fr. "novel"). There are great divisions critics have drawn in literature: romantic vs. classical (Joyce is on the classical side), Apollonian vs. Dionysian (Joyce is Apollonian - with a touch of the Dionysian?), Hellenic vs. Hebraic (Joyce is on the Hebraic, or more disciplined and moral side). An organic plot would have the sense cycles of rising and falling that echoes nature itself. Here's another division: Platonic vs. Aristotelian. Joyce is an Aristotelian, and organizes his novel in categories. It is an obviously "contrived" structure, completely anti-intuitive, which is part of what makes the book difficult. Finnegan's Wake, oddly, is a bit more organic or cyclic.

4. Joyce's contrived structure is built around i) themes associated with the perfectibility of man, or the dangers that lie in the way of that perfectibility; and ii) language, which lies between us and reality. Therefore, the novel has two concerns: heroism and epistemology (or: "how can we know things?"). Joyce's playful use of different kinds of language points up the distance between language and reality; we see things a certain way according to the based on the way we describe those things. And in different cultural contexts, the novel, the newspaper, the Q&A, the history of the language itself, the dramatic.

5. Speaking of drama, Joyce enjoyed Eliot's description of Ulysses as more an epic than a novel. Joyce called it an epic of return. Like The Odyssey, it is an epic of return from battlefield to bedroom. The book is about an attempt at return. Let's think about this for a moment in relationship to the politics of the book. Where Hegel, Nietzsche, Eliot, Yeats, and Marx saw history as a cycle that was ready for its next stage... they were expectant of something new, Joyce sees it as a cycle that is complete. His book is a story of return, a return to the heroic values of another time. That means the cycle of history has already completed itself, making the book a search for beginnings, not endings. This may explain why so much of its "plot" remains unresolved. It may also explain why the book has a blatantly calculated or contrived structure, rather than a natural one. The natural cycles are over, and now, in the teens and twenties, it's time to take a scientific look at who we are to locate our humanness.

6. A question for later: did Joyce's descendants carry on this vision, or did they discard it?