So, Ulysses

I first started reading Ulysses as a senior in college, though I didn't make it all the way through; I restarted and finished in 1993, then read it again in the winter of '94–'95. In the years following I picked it up and re-read certain episodes on their own, in addition to reading Ellmann's biography of Joyce. It was something that fascinated me and it was something I admired; it felt good to revisit it and reconnect with where I had been before.

This time through I felt like I saw so much more in the book, and yet at the same time I felt like I saw its weaknesses too; that Joyce was a genius and one of the greatest writers of his time is beyond question, and yet with great genius can come great excesses. There is a feeling of a novel being crushed under its own weight; Joyce continued adding to it practically up until the moment of printing, and we are left with a book which is so thick with tropes and cross-references that a first-time reader will often have no hope of knowing what is going on. There is also an overwhelming feeling of self-absorption and solipsism, not only in the author's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, but in the author himself; "I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." In addition, the artifice at times becomes artificiality, and the stylistic ideas that Joyce imposes distract and derail us and seem to only serve to draw attention to themselves.

Most of all, Ulysses is often a cruel book; the secondary characters are pushed onto the stage and then undercut like effigies, the pompous, the pathetic, the drunken, the deranged, the self-deceiving, the hopeless, the corrupt, the empty, the falling and lost. Bloom himself is ridiculed and abased in the eyes of others, despite all his good qualities, sometimes ridiculed and abased by the book itself. Is the novel a positive thing, taking the minutiae of the everyman and elevating it to something timeless and universal, or is it negative, taking the timeless and universal and dragging it down into the jakes? The answer, I suppose, is both.

This book, so inward drawn, so obsessive of one place and moment, so obsessive of itself, there is something sad about it—not pathetic, for it is also a grand construction, something huge, a work of magnificence, but in a lot of ways it is the opposite of the Odyssey, for the Odyssey has been carried forward through time, it still has meaning and life, we can still read it and feel all of humanity through it, whereas Ulysses is always turning away, looking backwards, inwards, receding, becoming more and more distant with every moment that we move farther away from June 16, 1904.

Penelope

Odysseus's reunion with his wife Penelope takes up a good portion of the end of the Odyssey; she is satisfied that the man before her is indeed her husband when he reveals his knowledge of the unusual history of their marriage bed—one of the posts was a living tree that is still rooted in the ground. In Ulysses we have Molly Bloom's internal monologue from her bed; the parallel to the Odyssey is an ironic one, for, unlike Penelope, Molly's bed is secondhand and has had another man in it.

Molly Bloom is a well-drawn, complex and memorable character, and what is remarkable is that Joyce is able to present an unapologetic adulteress who is not simply a villain or the cliché of a woman swept away by her emotions. She recognizes her husband's good points, but she wants another man, and what is interesting is that she has no illusions about Boylan either; though he excites her, he is just a man, and so just as thickheaded and selfish as any other of his gender.

What was interesting reading the episode this time through is that I realized that in the past I had seen things that weren't really there; I had assumed that at heart Molly loved Bloom and that Boylan was a passing fling, but now I don't think that this is really the case. There is no remorse or impending reconciliation; Bloom exasperates her, Boylan is her lover, and there is nothing to suggest that that situation will change. There seems to be a hint of a reconciliation at the very end when she is carried away by the memory of Bloom's proposal of marriage, lying beneath the rhododendrons on the Hill of Howth, overcome by his words and by nature, until we learn that at the deciding moment she thought "as well him as another." It is a bit shocking that the book ends on such a cutting note, and yet it is their moment of union regardless, a sacred moment, "and yes I said yes I will yes."

Incidentally, the ambiguous passage from Ithaca that I mentioned previously is more or less explained in Penelope; the list of men that Bloom reels off were not infatuations of Molly's but rather her "suitors," men who were attracted to her.

Ithaca

One thing that surprised me when I read the Odyssey is that the famous fantastical exploits at sea actually only take up a small portion of the epic; much more of the story is devoted to the homecoming itself—that is, what Odysseus does when he reaches his native land and how he gets rid of the villainous suitors. The ending can be summarized quickly, though: the hero enters his own house in his beggar disguise, gets a weapon in his hands, and then kills all the suitors with the help of his son and two faithful servants—no easy feat, as there are over a hundred of them.

Did contemporary readers of Ulysses think that Bloom might go home and murder Blazes Boylan, if not with bow and arrow then perhaps with handy shillelagh? Well, he doesn't, if for no other reason than that Boylan has already quit the scene. Instead Bloom brings Stephen home to 7 Eccles Street, and the first part of the episode is taken up with Bloom's apparent rapport with the young man. The two talk about a large number of things, in particular—and most important in terms of the book's themes—the similarities between the Irish and the Jews, in terms of both language (Hebrew and Gaelic) and history (the Irish oppressed at the hands of the English, the Jews oppressed in Egypt and elsewhere). Stephen sings Bloom a folk song about a boy who breaks a Jew's window with a ball, after which the Jew's daughter lures the boy inside and kills him. True to character, Stephen interprets the song in an abstract and reflective way, perhaps drawing a parallel to his adventures earlier that night, whereas of course Bloom is put off by the song. Regardless, Bloom fantasizes of a close friendship with Stephen—his thoughts even touch on the possibility of Stephen marrying his daughter—but at heart I think he knows that it will not be. Stephen, always aloof, declines to stay the night. On his leaving the pair micturate together and gaze up at the stars; as they shake hands they hear the tolling of a bell: 4 o'clock. By coincidence, the bell makes both men think of death: still brooding over his mother, Stephen hears a traditional prayer associated with the last rites, while Bloom hears "heigho, heigho, heigho, heigho," the same words he heard at the ringing of the bells in the episode Hades.

Bloom returns alone. He finds evidence of Blazes Boylan's presence in the house and a mysterious stain on an armchair. Ultimately, however, he accepts the situation. His attitude towards Molly at this moment is interesting: separate, equivocal—he idly considers leaving her or confronting her—but also confident, appreciative, pragmatic, and still attracted. Strangely, there is an ambiguous passage which might suggest that Molly has had many lovers, suitors and/or infatuations in the past. Bloom chuckles to think that each man no doubt thought himself of great importance at that moment, when in fact they were just one term in a series.

There is another subtle parallel to Homer when Bloom opens a drawer filled with mementos of his deceased father, as this echoes Odysseus visiting his own father after the killing of the suitors. We also learn a fair amount of new information about Bloom's history at this point: his father converted from Judaism to Protestantism, and Bloom himself converted to Catholicism when he married Molly. Bloom then thinks back on the day, has idle fantasies about the future, suddenly figures out the answer to a riddle that he had heard thirty years ago ("Where was Moses when the lights when out?"), goes to bed, gives his wife an affectionate kiss on the bum, recounts his day for her when she wakes (with some omissions and fabrications), and falls asleep.

The episode's style is a parody of scientific question and answer, with overblown vocabulary and matter-of-fact tone throughout. It is sometimes hilarious, sometimes aggravating, and sometimes poetic, but the overall effect is that it sets us at a remove from what's going on, as if the hero is fading off into the distance. There is even something melancholy or death-like about the end of the episode; Bloom thinks about his past and about his child; we find out that he has a life insurance policy and that he has already paid for a plot in a cemetery; in the course of becoming drowsy he pictures a heavenly idyllic house in the country, imagines himself wandering among the stars, rises above daily cares, and, in the final moments, becomes like a child again himself.

What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.

Of course there is one last political tidbit here too; as a child Bloom, "in support of his political convictions, had climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 February 1888) into the capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20,000, divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2,000 torches in escort of the marquess of Ripon and John Morley." February 2 is also the birthday of one James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, author of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.