The Lestrygonians

In the Odyssey the man of twists and turns lands his fleet at the island of the Laestrygonians, a race of giants. He sends three messengers to the palace to see if the king is hospitable, but the king promptly rips one of the men to shreds and eats him. The fleet is attacked and only Odysseus's ship escapes. Though it takes up just a couple of pages of Homer's text, this misadventure is the inspiration for an entire episode in Ulysses.

It is lunchtime in Dublin, and food is very much on Leopold Bloom's mind. Despite the tempting opening—"Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch, a sugarsticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother"—the theme of food is not a happy, comforting one; Bloom is feeling negative and out of sorts from hunger, and throughout the episode food is associated with gorging, surfeit and indigestion. We see—either in reality or in Bloom's imagination—policemen red-faced and sweating after their meal, force-fed geese, vomiting dogs, and rats drowning in porter. We see a cheap restaurant whose gobbling, swilling patrons turn Bloom's stomach. There are even hints of the cannibalism in Homer; children eat their parents out of house and home, a woman with many children is described as "a good layer" as though she were a hen, and Bloom thinks of the tasting of flesh in lovemaking. There is also a parallel drawn to industry and the necessity of earning one's daily bread, with each person feeding off of another. Perhaps the most telling passage is in the dead center of the episode; Bloom has been thinking about the funeral and also of a female acquaintance who has been in labor for three days, and the circle of life suddenly seems to him a horrible, mechanical, meaningless march:

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets the notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.

Like the dangers that meet Odysseus on his travels, the Lestrygonians is a trial for Bloom. On the outside it is a banal problem we all face every day—what to do for lunch?—but Joyce adds thoughts and associations until it stands for something larger. The danger Bloom faces is a losing of heart, a feeling that the necessity of eating—that life devours itself—is something mindless and awful, with permanence only found in the dead wreckage of sand and stone. "No one is anything."

After a cheese sandwich and a glass of wine Bloom feels more himself and charity returns: he helps a blind boy across the street.

Meanwhile, we are once again reminded of the tension between the English and the Irish. Bloom recalls an incident in which he happened to be at the scene of a political demonstration and only narrowly escaped a charging mounted policeman.

Aeolus

Odysseus visits Aeolus and is given a remarkable gift to speed him homeward: a bag in which all the unfavorable winds are trapped. There are a few windbags in the corresponding episode in Ulysses as well.

Wind is everywhere in Joyce's Aeolus: doors blow open, newspaper floats in the air, the characters smoke cigarette after cigarette, and there is even a kite and a modest belch. Wind as a metaphor for communication is ubiquitous, and discussed in the episode are newspapermen, lawyers, oratory and diplomacy.

This is also the episode that delineates one of the key metaphors within the book, the parallel drawn between Greece–Rome and Ireland–England. In each case—from Joyce's point of view—a smaller and more beautiful culture was swallowed up by a larger, vulgar one. Of the Romans:

—What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow, but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehova. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.

Of the British:

I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality?

Note, by the way, that the title of the book is not Odysseus but Ulysses, for Joyce speaks the tongue of the conqueror, the English, and the Roman conqueror's name for the Greek hero was "Ulysses."

Later on the character who voiced those thoughts, Professor MacHugh, declares himself to be loyal to "the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar." In other words, he regrets the fact that Napoleon lost. I had never fully taken in the force of that sentiment before, nor did I really absorb the fact that the monument that is mentioned later in the episode is that of the admiral who won that battle. It was in the heart of Dublin, a statue of a British war hero, and the characters must pass beneath it at the end of the episode. As they walk in its shadow, Stephen relates a cryptic parable in which two elderly and virtuous Irish women save up their pennies and bring a picnic of head cheese, fancy bread and plums to the top of the pillar. Exhausted by the climb, however, they have no strength to look up at Nelson or down at Dublin, and so they just eat their plums and spit the pits over the railing.

In my previous readings I had never quite realized just how bitter and pervasive the anti-British sentiment is in Ulysses.

The monument was blown up by the IRA in 1966.

Hades

It's interesting to think that perhaps in some earlier version of the Odyssey, as it was passed down from generation to generation in its oral tradition, the story told to the Phaeacians by Odysseus was intended to be understood as a tall tale, a fabulous lie invented by a gifted liar to charm his host and hostess. After all, aside from his various contacts with goddesses, all of Odysseus's most fantastic adventures take place within this story-within-a-story. Not the least fantastic is his voyage to the land of the dead and his communion with the shades who live there.

Bloom too visits the land of the dead; after his bath he attends the funeral and interment of Patrick Dignam at Glasnevin Cemetery. As we walk with the mourners to the grave site we follow in Bloom's mind a long meditation on the many aspects of death. His perspective is interesting, in that it is largely a practical one; Bloom does not brood about his own dissolution or agonize over what lies beyond the barrier, but rather his thoughts are of a detached and practical nature. Why not a special funeral tram instead of a parade of horse-drawn carriages? Does the caretaker ever think about his own grave? One passage in particular made me chuckle: "We are now praying for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell."

This episode exemplifies my idea of what Ulysses is when it's at its best, which is a poem of the everyman.* Now there's something tricky about that statement (besides the fact that it makes me sound like a freshman in English Lit 101), because one has to ask: is Leopold Bloom really an everyman? After all, he's far too specific a man to be an everyman; he's a half-Jewish Irishman, with a wife from Gibraltar, a suicide father and dead son. In some ways he's an unusual man, an outsider who is on occasion the subject of mockery, and he is also a man of a peculiar intellect; like Odysseus, he is a man of many twists and turns, in that he has an uncanny ability to see any given subject from all possible angles. Because of this, he is a man of remarkable sympathy and forbearance; if one were to go to extremes, he could be called a kind of Christ, though not so much a Christ of infinite love but rather a Christ of infinite understanding.

So, it is not so much that we see all of mankind in Leopold Bloom, but rather through him. He is a prism through which humanity is refracted in all its many colors. Or perhaps his is just the shoulder on which the angel James Joyce is perched. I think when reading we must keep a similar angelic detachment; despite the exhaustive details, Ulysses is not just about Leopold Bloom.


*The ghost of James Joyce is whispering to me. "The everyman Irishman, if you please, sir."

The Lotus-eaters

In the story he tells to the Phaeacians, Odysseus recounts his visit to the land of the Lotus-eaters. As translated by Robert Fagles:

Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,
grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever.

As Bloom wanders about Dublin his thoughts make the rounds of the idle pleasures that fill up our lives, that palliate and distract us: the opposite sex, the theater, alcohol, religion, medicine, sport. There is an idle, dreamlike quality to the prose, and at one point Bloom imagines scenes of the far East:

Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flower meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far neinte. Not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feels most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt.

But we see the dangers of idle pleasures in the form of two horses with their feed bags on:

He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. To full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they look. Still the neigh can be very irritating.

It cracks me up that a paragraph that starts out with poetry like "a crunching of gilded oats" and "the sweet oaten reek" ends with "Still the neigh can be very irritating." The episode finishes with some more high-and-low poetry, again on the theme of idleness, ease and the sensual. Bloom imagines himself in the bath he's about to take:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Also in the episode we see hints and glimpses of Bloom's past and present, many of which we won't fully understand until later. When writing about the book there's a temptation to reel off all the little thoughts, occurrences, clues and allusions; one almost feels obligated to, since so much of it is encoded in the text and must be teased out and explicated. These little puzzles are not what makes Joyce worth reading, though, and I think it's a mistake to get too caught up in trying to figure out which shop is on which street and who was M'Intosh.

Calypso

The first episode of part II is a short, almostkindasorta straightforward one. Stephen is gone for the moment, we have rewound the clock a few hours, and we now see a Mr. Leopold Bloom about his morning routine: feeding the cat, cooking breakfast for the wife, nipping round to the butcher's for a nice tasty mutton kidney for himself. As in the early Stephen episodes, we see flashes of inner monologue, and, like Stephen, Bloom's thoughts spring from one subject to the next, each association giving birth to another and so on. The picture is confusing and kaledoscopic at times, as we see thin slices of thoughts juxtaposed, the important cheek-by-jowl with the banal. Some of what we read is enigmatic, only becoming clear later on; other items that are seemingly trifling will echo throughout the day, accumulating meaning with each iteration.

When we are first introduced to Odysseus in Homer, the man of many twists and turns is the captive of the goddess Calypso; an unwilling lover and mate, he longs to be home with his real wife, Penelope. In Ulysses we are introduced to Leopold Bloom, and we see him within the context of his domestic life. He serves his wife food, picks her clothes up off the bed, explains the meaning of a word from a book she's reading, et cetera. We only get a very sketchy picture of Molly at this point; at times she is almost like a disembodied voice emanating from the bedclothes. Bloom also reads a letter from his fifteen-year-old daughter, Milly. Molly receives a letter too, which she quickly hides from Leopold.

In this episode Mr. Bloom seems surrounded by women, under their power, almost beset by them. He even worries that the lady next door will see him ducking into the outhouse. A long day's wandering lies before him, however.

Proteus

Whereas in the episodes Telemachus and Nestor we only saw intermittent flashes of Stephen's internal monologue—the famous "stream of consciousness"—in Proteus almost the entire episode is seen through the filter of Stephen's mind, the text a chaotic jumble of thoughts, memories and sensory perception. Though short, it is one of the more difficult episodes in the book, dense and abstruse, with many intra- and extra-textual references.

Stephen is wandering aimlessly on a beach, his thoughts circling around the idea of change and transformation in the physical world around him—birth, death, tides and metamorphosis. He thinks of Aristotle and Aquinas, and imagines his shadow being cast backwards through the endless reaches of space. He also thinks back on his own recent history, specifically his time spent in Paris; the ending of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man saw him leaving Ireland to study abroad, and now we learn that he returned early because of his mother's imminent death. He thinks back with bitter distaste on his own pretentiousness at that time, and thinks also of his acquaintance in Paris with an Irish revolutionary named Kevin Egan.

What does the episode mean to the book as a whole, aside from the repetition and expansion of motifs? At the simplest level, it is an addition of more brush strokes to the picture of Stephen as one who is unhappy, aimless, and artistically alienated. Though a genius, he is also a young man who needs direction.

There is also the underlying theme of Stephen's—and therefore Joyce's—own artistic development. Here on the beach Stephen is able to embrace his long-sought freedom, but after stripping away the conventions of society he is left on a shifting, rootless landscape with only the riot of his own swarming thoughts to guide him. Perhaps this is not an entirely bad thing, however, for out of the freedom/chaos comes creation; towards the end of the episode Stephen has a flash of inspiration and is able to jot down a piece of writing.

One question that struck me this time through was why Joyce chose to include the reminisces about the older expatriate, Kevin Egan. It is difficult to read into this passage to figure out how Stephen views this would-be father figure who haunts cafés and plays with fuses, but there is in the characterization a sense of oldness and tragic obsolescence. There is also an echo of the political theme of the betrayal of Ireland in the depiction of this aged freedom fighter left idle and alone.

This episode is not patterned after anything that happens in the main action of the Odyssey, but rather its themes are inspired by one element of a story within the story. When visiting Menelaus as Nestor suggested, Menelaus tells the young man the story of his return from Troy. In part of that story, the king finds himself stranded on an deserted island, where he is visited by the goddess Eidothea. Willing to help, she tells him how to subdue her father Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, who on release will give him instructions on how to return home. She tells Menelaus that he must take hold of the god while he is sleeping and not let go, even if he changes from form to form when he tries to escape. On capture Proteus does exactly this, transforming from a lion to a serpent to a panther to a boar to a torrent of water to a tree.

In creating, has Stephen also conquered? Has he conquered the chaos of the physical world, the "ineluctable modality of the visible"?

One could also draw a parallel between the meeting between Telemachus and Menelaus and the meeting between Stephen and Kevin Egan. Again, this may be an ironic parallel, since Stephen seems no less lost and unhappy after meeting the revolutionary than he was before.

The final thing I'll say is that I discovered something neat this time around, which is Joyce's transformation of an ordinary dog into a protean, shape-shifting monster:

The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal.

It's funny that in the end this fantastical creature is sniffing "like a dog."

Incidentally, if you noticed that "one great goal" echoes the passage about history that I quoted in the previous post, multiply that by tens of thousands of words and you'll get an idea of how densely interwoven the text of Ulysses is.

Nestor

In the Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Pylos, the kingdom of Nestor, to see if Nestor has any news of his lost father. Nestor shows the young man great hospitality, but he has no information for him. Nestor tells Telemachus of the death of his father's comrade-at-arms Agamemnon at the hands of his disloyal wife's lover, and he suggests that Telemachus go to see king Menelaus.

In Ulysses we find Stephen teaching history to schoolchildren, after which he goes to the office of the schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, to get paid. Though not unkind, Mr. Deasy is not likely to be seen as a role model or wise adviser by Stephen, as he is a Protestant loyal to the British. He is also an anti-Semite, which Stephen is not.

The main concern of the episode is history. Stephen mulls over the subject in the abstract as he teaches, and on later hearing the children playing field hockey outside, their sounds become those of a raging battle in his imagination:

Shouts rang shrill from the boy's playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. [...] Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men's bloodied guts.

Stephen also has an interesting interchange on the subject of history with Mr. Deasy. Stephen calls history "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." This remark is very much in keeping with Stephen's character; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not a tender childhood memoir of a young Irish laddie, as some insist on seeing it, but rather the story of Stephen's systematic ripping away of all that he sees as external artificialities—family, religion, social convention—so that he can free the artist within. He views Deasy's antisemitism as one more suffocating prejudice to be shaken off like a bad dream.

The conversation continues on:

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

—That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

—What? Mr Deasy asked.

—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

This last remark is open to interpretation, but to me it has two probable meanings, and perhaps is intended to encompass both. Stephen could be saying that history does not move toward "one great goal, the manifestation of God," because each ephemeral moment, each shout of a child, is already God's manifestation. Alternatively, if the cry of schoolchildren is meant to be taken as a symbol for strife and battle, then Stephen could be saying that history is not a progression to a goal but is instead the human conception of the necessary natural law of struggle, victory, and eternal change, and that with God's apparent sanction.

Other motifs within the chapter include coins as a symbol of history and power, the betrayal of leaders and of Ireland herself by those who should have been loyal, and that of a drowned man, a motif which continues from the first episode and which will be seen again several more times.

The episode ends with a beautiful if ironic image of the Protestant Mr. Deasy wearing history's mantle for the victor:

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.