Eumaneus

Reading the Odyssey greatly improved my understanding of the Eumaneus episode in Ulysses. In Homer, Odysseus finally returns to his native land, but he feels that it might be prudent to conceal his identity at first and take in the situation incognito. In disguise he goes to the hut of his faithful swineherd Eumaneus; there he meets his son, but does not initially reveal his identity.

The ideas of return and hidden identity are recurring themes throughout Eumaneus. Bloom and Stephen stop to collect themselves at a cabman's shelter, which is sort of like an all-night greasy spoon for cab drivers. Therein they meet a sailor who could be Odysseus himself; he has been on the seas for many years and is finally returning to his wife and son. He is also a teller of tall tales, just as Odysseus is, and it is possible that he has given a false name to his assembled listeners. Another possible incognito is the owner of the shelter, who is rumored to once have been an infamous Irish revolutionary of the 1880s. Politics comes to the fore again when the sailor suggests that the hero Parnell is not dead at all, but rather that a weighted coffin was buried and the man has assumed another identity and is waiting for the right moment to reappear in triumph. Bloom has his doubts. As an aside we learn that Bloom happened to be present at a pivotal moment in Parnell's life.

Strangely, though, neither Bloom nor Stephen is strongly partisan. Stephen objects to the British rule, but he is more concerned with his own artistic freedom; in fact, the young man is so vehemently solipsistic that he declares that he is not there to help Ireland, but rather "Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." Bloom, meanwhile, deplores conflict, and to the shelter owner's insistence that Ireland will one day rise up and destroy England, he instead imagines a future in which both countries are equals.

Meanwhile Bloom finds himself drawn to the younger man, a parallel to Odysseus's one-sided reunion with his son Telemachus.

The style of the episode is supposedly a parody of men's literature, a kind of counterpart to the style seen in the first half of Nausicaa, and it is filled with cliches, dry humor, manly understatement and matter-of-fact meanderings. As usual, Joyce takes the joke a bit too far; sentences wind on and on with no end in sight, digression digressing from digression.

One other thing I found interesting is Bloom's discovery of the evening edition of the paper, which includes the obituary of Patrick Dignam. The dead man is mentioned quite often in the book, something I never really noticed before; he is practically a full-fledged character, though we do not know much about him besides the fact that he is dead. The effect is that we see death as a part of the life within the book, though not a negative type of death, existence replaced by nothingness, but rather a change to a different state. This is even the case in the Hades episode, as Bloom does not brood on ceasing to be but instead thinks about the dead man as if he is still part of the world, in a way.

Circe

The story of Circe is an interesting one; Odysseus as usual is trying to get home and not making much headway; he stops off at an unknown island, sees smoke rising from the trees and sends out an advance party to see what sort of people are about. They encounter the goddess Circe, and she waves her magic wand and turns the men to pigs. One sailor escapes, however, and he informs Odysseus of what has happened. Soon after, the god Hermes tells Odysseus how to defeat Circe's magic and get her under his power; he does so and has his men restored to human form.

At this point you would think that Odysseus would beat feet and get the hell away from the sorceress with the wand, but somehow they all forgive and forget and Odysseus becomes Circe's lover for a year. Wait, a year? Really? Yep. What are we to make of this? At every other moment in the book the wanderer is eating his heart out for his lost hearth and home, but after getting another goddess in the sack he figures that that whole problem can be put on hold for a month or twelve. We are never told straight out that he has been enchanted, but one might make a guess; interestingly, Circe is known for her skill at weaving, just like a spider.

Joyce's Circe is far and away the most bizarre section of Ulysses; Bloom has gone chasing after Stephen in the red light district, as he is concerned for the young man's welfare, and the carnival-sideshow, animal-like nature of the people he finds there echoes the transformation in Homer. A series of loopy hallucinations are depicted, some comical, some horrible, some quite shocking; there are nine main ones:

1. Bloom sees or imagines Mrs. Denis Breen, née Josie Powell, first seen in The Lotus Eaters and a friend of Molly's in their youth. They flirt and reminisce about the old days.

2. Bloom is questioned by the watchmen after he feeds a stray dog, and this becomes an absurd dream of persecution which ends in an imaginary court trial for malfeasance and perversion.

3. The dream of persecution changes to one of vindication and adoration. Bloom is handed the keys to the city and many ladies of high standing faint in his presence.

4. Bloom eventually finds the bordello that Stephen has gone into; once inside, he encounters his grandfather Virag, whose pragmatic character is somewhat similar to Bloom's, but who also is a strange chimeric monster who walks on stilts and changes into various animals. It is bizarre, to say the least.

5. When the madame, Bella, enters, there is a gender reversal in which Bella/Bello and Bloom/Ruby enter into a twisted sadomasochistic relationship, with Bloom becoming the woman and having his manhood questioned and derided.

6. Bloom is then visited by the nymph from the picture that hangs over his bed; she upbraids him for his many crimes against goodness and nature, but he eventually breaks free and shows her to be a hypocrite.

7. Stephen then has a hallucination of his dead mother, resulting in a climax in which he swings his walking stick at the phantom and knocks the lights out.

8. Out in the street again, there is an altercation with two British soldiers during which Stephen is punched in the face and knocked to the ground. Interestingly, this final crisis is partly a political one, since Stephen mentions the king in the course of talking about his non serviam philosophy and this incenses the officers. During the row we see imaginary partisans cheering on the champions for England or Ireland.

9. Bloom sees the image of his dead son, Rudy.

In addition to this we see many or most of the incidental characters from the book popping in to echo their words of earlier in the day, even if the two primary characters were not there to hear them at that time; it is almost as if the book itself is dreaming.

It is a crisis for both men, Stephen in his self-destructiveness and Bloom in his broken self-image following his wife's infidelity. In the end, however, Bloom takes charge and saves Stephen with the help of Corny Kelleher, the undertaker from the Hades episode.

The overall effect is a dizzying one; it is outrageous and all-encompassing, with everything collapsing in on itself; the various conflicts with night watches, bordello owners and rowdy soldiers take on a colossal scale. It is a bit overlong, though, and is a test of the reader as well as its two characters.

Oxen of the Sun

Going back home to the Oxen of the Sun
Out in back of Palmdale where the turkey farmers run

While on his way home, the wind dies and Odysseus is stranded on Thrinacia Island, where live the immortal cattle of the sun god Helios. Odysseus was warned by Circe that he must not harm the kine or bad things will happen, but his crew is starving, and when the hero falls asleep they cook a feast. On awaking Odysseus smells cooked meat and knows that a delicious outrage has been committed:

As soon as I reached our ship at the water's edge
I took the men to task, upbraiding each in turn,
but how to set things right? We couldn't find a way.
The cattle were dead already...
and the gods soon showed us all some fateful signs—
the hides began to crawl, the meat, both raw and roasted,
bellowed out on the spits, and we heard a noise
like the moan of lowing oxen.

When the ship finally leaves the island the ship and all hands are lost in a storm, with Odysseus left clinging to the broken keel.

In Ulysses the sacrilegious sailors of Homer become a bunch of drunken young Irishmen. Bloom goes to a maternity hospital to see if there is any change in the condition of Mina Purefoy, a lady acquaintance who has been in labor for three entire days; once there he discovers an impromptu party taking place among the medical students and their friends, and despite the gravity of Mrs. Purefoy's situation there is rough and disrespectful talk about the women and blasphemous jesting in general. Among the boozing boasters is the son of one of Bloom's friends–Stephen Dedalus, of course—and Bloom is saddened by the fact that a young man of such good qualities has fallen in with a questionable crowd.

Ulysses is a difficult book, and Oxen of the Sun may well be the most difficult chapter therein. The style is meant to convey the idea of the gestation of the English language, and so a good deal of the text is written using archaic vocabulary and grammatical forms. Various writers are imitated, not only in terms of language but also in terms of the writers' perspectives, so we see the action through a series of warped lenses, ranging from medieval romance to religious moralizing to allegory to bizarre mysticism. At the end of the episode the language becomes an incomprehensible babbling transcript of slang, jokes and puns as the students rush from the hospital to hit the bars.

In the past I would have said that the episode was my least favorite in the book, as the length and difficulty made it a painful slog, but for some reason it I enjoyed myself this time around and breezed right through it. I can't say I understood every word, but I definitely felt like it was easier to decipher what was going on in the "real" world behind the style. Perhaps this was so because I had taken notes on previous readings and these smoothed over some of the snags and speed bumps, or perhaps it was because I was remembering the stuff I had figured out previously without consciously realizing it.

It's interesting that we have an episode about birth directly following one with themes of youth, attraction and coupling and in which there is a sexual act of sorts. The hidden Mina Purefoy struggling through her outrageous labors becomes symbolic of all motherhood, and it is as if the spirit-child that Bloom conceived in Nausicaa is now being born. This is also the chapter in which Bloom first speaks to Stephen Dedalus, and so we see the beginnings of the father-son relationship that will develop at the end of the novel.

For me, the "birth of language" idea doesn't work but it does. I don't get a strong sense of linguistic evolution; it seems just to bounce around from style to style without any direction. On the other hand, the curious remove of the text from what is happening beneath it, so to speak, somehow suits what is going on and gets across the sense of metempsychosis, the cosmic that lies behind the particulars. We see the action through a cracked glass, looking at it through many different angles, and it almost has a cubist quality to it.

Of course, I'm sure that there's all manner of stuff that's going over my head, but one can't dwell on that too much. For example, what does all this birth stuff have to do with cattle? Beats me.

(translation of the Odyssey by Robert Fagles)

Nausicaa

In the Odyssey Odysseus finds himself stranded and naked on a beach in a strange country; with winning words he appeals to a young princess who happens to be doing her laundry, and she brings him to her parents' house. Bloom too is walking on the beach, and he has an encounter of sorts as well.

There is something a bit cruel about this episode; we meet the beautiful Gerty MacDowell, but there is a deep disconnect between tone and actuality. The writing style in the first half—the half seen through Gerty's eyes—is romantic and syrupy-sweet, with Gerty as the plucky young heroine of refined taste, good character and sincere heart. However, if we read between the lines, we see someone who is somewhat peevish and petty, strangely superstitious, and painfully self-deluded. We also see Bloom in a very undignified moment, to say the least, though it is a sort of magical moment as well.

One interesting thing that I noticed—though again I don't quite know what to make of it—is that during all the carryings-on there are interpolations of a mass being held in a nearby church for a temperance retreat. Why? Is this more cutting irony, the sad reality in place of Gerty's dreams of a wedding? Or is it another echo of the general theme of young women, these pleas for the intercession of the virgin? Perhaps the latter, for that kind of mixing of the human and the divine is typical of the novel.

The Cyclops

The working day is over now, and the Dubliners are hitting the bars.

The Cyclops is an entertaining episode, but it is also a puzzling one. We have a new narrator, and his vision is indeed limited, because everything he looks at he sees in the worst light possible. His recollections of the characters show them all at their most unflattering moments, and his interpretations of others' actions are always unkind. Here we see Bloom's unusually sympathetic mind as a weakness of character, the sign of one who is neither "fish nor flesh." The problem is that it's all a bit too convincing—Bloom really does come off as a bit of a fool. Was this what Joyce intended, or did the author just have a little too much fun sketching out the anti-Bloom?

We also meet the Citizen, a fierce nationalist. He too only sees issues from one side, so is he meant to be a mockery of partisan politics? At one time I assumed so, but now, after having noticed the large amount of political subtext in the book, I'm not so sure. Likely there are subtle clues to Joyce's attitude towards the Citizen that I am missing due to my unfamiliarity with the politics being discussed. Regardless, he is not a sympathetic character by any means; he is an anti-Semite, and we see that what really sparks him to action and physical protest is when he thinks that Bloom has won money at the racetrack and is refusing to buy a round of drinks.

The Cyclops also contains one of my favorite passages in the book:

—How's Willy Murray those times, Alf?

—I don't know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel Street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that...

—You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

—With Dignam, says Alf.

—Is it Paddy? says Joe.

—Yes, says Alf. Why?

—Don't you know he's dead? says Joe.

—Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf.

—Ay, says Joe.

—Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.

—Who's dead? says Bob Doran.

—You saw his ghost, then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

—What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five...What?...and Willie Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's...What? Dignam dead?

—What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about...?

—Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are.

—Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.

Sirens

I've been reading faster than I've been able to blog, so I have to do some quick catch-up.

Sirens finds us at the Ormond Hotel, where Bloom goes to eat his dinner. There are two fetching barmaids, but the siren songs actually come from men, namely Father Cowley, Simon Dedalus and Ben Dollard, who play and sing at the bar's piano. In the Odyssey the songs of the sirens are so beautiful that sailors are lured to their deaths; in Ulysses the danger would seem to be sentimentality. Bloom hears and succumbs to feelings of sadness, particularly because he knows that Blazes Boylan is on his way to a liaison with his wife, Molly. In the end he is able to shake himself free, or at least partly, and he moves on as best he can.

What is interesting is that just at the moment that Boylan is approaching Bloom's house—we are given glimpses of his jingling carriage, though not the assignation itself—the song that is being sung is a song not about love but one with a political subtext. In "The Croppy Boy" a young Irish rebel goes to confess his sins and asks for the priest, but he is tricked and unknowingly confesses to a disguised British soldier. This is arranged by a "false priest's servant"—another betrayal.

It's also interesting that the episode returns to Bloom's correspondence with Martha Clifford (first mentioned in The Lotus Eaters), which is a kind of infidelity as well; it is as if Leopold and Molly are traveling on parallel paths. It's all a bit mysterious and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Bloom seems a bit equivocal about it as well; he mentions feeling bored by it, and yet he writes a reply anyway.

More than anything else the focus of the episode is on the style, which mimics musical composition with repetitions, rhythms, overtures and transpositions. Though difficult to follow at times, it is one of the most striking and memorable sections of the novel.

Must Be a Bethel Thing

I was over at the Sycamore getting a cheeseburger with everything and the woman whose name I forget decided to make some conversation.

"So, you gonna get towed up this weekend?"

I wasn't sure if I had heard her right. "Sorry?"

"Towed up."

"'Towed up?'"

"You know...cocktails? Beer?"

"Ohhhhh...."

I had to confess that I did not know if I was going to get towed up this weekend. I am, however, very excited about having this new phrase at my disposal, and I am going to bandy it around as much as possible and see what kind of reaction I get.

The Wandering Rocks

The themes of unity, metempsychosis and "all in all in all" in Scylla and Charybdis explode into multiplicity in The Wandering Rocks. We are presented with nineteen fragments in which we see a multitude of people going about their day in Dublin. The primary characters within those fragments are:

1. Reverend John Conmee, S.J., first seen in The Lotus Eaters
2. Corny Kelleher, the undertaker from Hades
3. a onelegged mendicant sailor
4. Katey, Boody and Maggy Dedalus, sisters of Stephen
5. Blazes Boylan
6. Almidano Artifoni and Stephen Dedalus
7. Miss Dunne, Blazes Boylan's secretary
8. Ned Lambert, J.J. O'Molloy and the Reverend Hugh C. Love
9. Tom Rochford, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and Lenehan
10. Bloom
11. Dilly and Simon Dedalus
12. Tom Kernan
13. Stephen and Dilly Dedalus
14. Simon Dedalus, Father Cowley and Ben Dollard, a trio who will also appear in the following episode
15. Martin Cunningham, John Power, first seen in Hades, John Wyse Nolan, Jimmy Henry and Long John Fanning
16. Buck Mulligan and Haines, first seen in Telemachus
17. Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, previously seen in The Lotus Eaters
18. Patrick Aloysius Dignam, the son of Paddy Dignam, buried in Hades.
19. William Humble Ward, Earl of Dudley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, with entourage

In addition there are a number of other individuals and objects that appear and reappear, for example the blind stripling that Bloom helped across the street, an old woman who entertains herself at the courts of law, and the crumpled-up piece of paper that Bloom threw off a bridge in The Lestrygonians.

The fragments are bookended by the travels of the Jesuit Conmee and the British governor of Ireland; both of these fragments stand out from the others in that they have a more formal, blow-by-blow reportage-type style to them. These two are also the most formal of the wanderers; the Lord Lieutenant parades through the city in his viceregal carriage, and Conmee carries himself with good-natured dignity and "cheerful decorum." By contrast the other Dubliners seem small, flawed, and preoccupied with worries and conceits.

The formality of both Conmee and the carriage are juxtaposed with that of another wanderer, a certain Denis J. Maginni, dancing instructor of grave deportment and gay apparrel. There is something in this, I think, some sly comment about their characters. Father Conmee also seems to be concerned with appearances; we are shown his silk hat and kid gloves, and we are informed that he has cleaned his teeth. Meanwhile his imagination betrays a perhaps excessively romantic view of the past:

Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble, were impalmed by don John Conmee.

The carriage of the Lord Lieutenant is also noted for its old-fashioned grandeur, with its frock-coated outriders and cream sunshades. It's hard not to imagine that there is not some kind of meaning in all this.

Maginni is also seen in Bloom's fragment—not surprisingly, the central fragment, 10 of 19—but this time in a stark contrast, for Bloom is still in grave apparel from the funeral.

James Joyce famously plotted out these various peregrinations and connections with exacting care and precise timing; they intersect like the gears of a giant clock, and a reader inclined to puzzle-solving could plot out all the routes and minute-by-minute whereabouts of the multitude of Dubliners. In fact, the episode begins with the setting of a watch.

What does it all mean, though? Scylla and Charybdis and The Wandering Rocks are episodes nine and ten of eighteen, and so the two central chapters of the novel. If we view them as a pair, we see a contrast: the idea of the spiritual unity of all men is replaced by division and multiplicity, the holy trinity is replaced by the "ten thousand things" of the Tao Te Ching, symbolic of the material world. One could also consider the two episodes to correspond to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, specifically the idea of the Platonic forms versus Aristotle's examination of real-world examples.

We also get to see many of the incidental characters in a bit more detail, in particular Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father. Throughout the novel he is shown as an intelligent and witty man, if a somewhat acerbic one, but in The Wandering Rocks we also see him as a man in decline, sending his children out to the pawnbrokers and borrowing money from friends. We also get our first direct view of Blazes Boylan; previously in the novel he is only glimpsed from afar.

The political tone is not absent here, either. One fragment takes place at the site of St. Mary's Abbey and makes reference to the rebellion of Thomas Fitzgerald against the English crown in 1534.

Scylla and Charybdis

Scylla and Charybdis is one of the two central episodes of Ulysses in terms of chapter count, and it is also one of the most heady and difficult parts of the novel. It is a "Stephen episode," and so instead of Bloom's wandering but down-to-earth stream of consciousness we are chasing Stephen's cryptic trains of thought. In the past this seemed to me an unwelcome digression from our travels with Bloom, but now I come to it with a new understanding. As I said earlier, Ulysses is not solely about Bloom; in fact, one could make the case that it is more a continuation of the semiautobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but a kind of prismatic split-image autobiography, because Joyce 's life was passing faster than he could record it, and so we have young and old together in the same fictional moment, Stephen and Bloom.

It is exactly this world of multiple identities and comingling of fact and fiction that is the theme of Scylla and Charybdis. It is like a dazzling nexus where different strands come together and different layers are superimposed upon each other. Stephen is in the National Library discussing Shakespeare with A. E. and John Eglinton, two contemporary Irish literary figures; he argues that Shakespeare wrote himself into Hamlet as the ghost of the king, and that he identified himself with that role because Ann Hathaway had been an adulterous wife. This father-son-unfaithful wife triad in Hamlet echoes the triads of Bloom-Molly-Stephen and Odysseus-Telemachus-Penelope (though Penelope was not unfaithful, even if she was besieged), and also perhaps God-Christ-Holy Ghost. Other father-son relationships are touched on in the course of the literary discussion: Plato and Aristotle, and author and creation.

Far from being a digression, this episode focuses on one of the central concepts of the entire work, which is that each individual is all things at once. In his fatherhood Bloom shares a kind of spiritual unity with all fathers throughout the ages, from Odysseus to God himself.

When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson, who by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Later:

Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are [...] is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

Note that there is a nascent postmodern tone here as well, for of course Joyce is thinking of his own paternity in authorship, and so all at once he is Stephen, Bloom, and the father of Stephen and Bloom...and so in this way he is father to himself, even while Stephen is father to Joyce in the way that the child is father to the man.

Over and over we see the motif of father, son, and unfaithful wife. They are like a musical triad that ring through a symphony, slightly altered and in different keys, but always recognizable.

Unfortunately for the reader, the episode is a very difficult one. It is full of puns, euphemisms, innuendos, ellipses, hintings, references and every way of saying something without coming straight out and saying it.