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?