I read Ulysses two years ago when my family spent the summer in Korea, and last night reading the Pericles Lewis book on modernism--which treats prose fiction by placing Ulysses as the center of the modern universe, and explaining how everything else radiates out from there-- I was again struck by the beauty and the power of the book. I wanted to post here my notes from two summers ago on Ulysses-- nothing conclusive or particularly scholarly or earthshaking, but helpful to me in my attempts to uderstand a little more about Joyce's vision.
Reading Notes
Ulysses
07/07/08/ updated 6/13/08; Updated 07/24/08
I want to take a few notes on Ulysses
as I attempt my multi-modal reading/understanding of it this summer. I am listening to it via my I-Pod (I actually checked Ulysses Audio CD's out of the library, but there are several places you can find the Audio book online). and I have been looking at notes from online sources, and I will watch the 2004 film Bloom. Probably, I will find a critical source as well before this odyssey is complete. Blooms Day is fast approaching, and I will be close to a third of the way through this initial reading by then. I will begin with some overall impressions and a note on each of the main three characters.The book has been amazing in its ability to get into my head, and to give me the impression that the rhythms of speech and the thought patterns of the characters relate in some ways to my own.
Stephen Dedalus
The book begins with Stephen, who is also the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. Stephen is thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent, and is hanging around with Buck Mulligan, a boisterous medical student, and another young student from England. Stephen’s thoughts are those of a young man, and I find that I relate less to them now than I might have a few years ago. A lot of focus on Hamlet and the death of the father. Stephen’s mother has died recently, and he has strange guilt about it. This seems to stem largely from the fact that he refused to pray with his mother while she was on her deathbed.I am now at the part in the novel when, after being saved from the police (after being attacked by an English sailor) by Bloom, and then after having spent time together in a sort of cab man’s shed, Leopold and Stephen go to Bloom’s home. It is a very interesting moment when just before Stephen takes leave of Bloom they urinate together. So much of this novel seems to me explainable by talking about voice. Perhaps it is bigger than that, but I don’t know how else to describe the sections that seem so clearly and easily identifiable as being attached to either Bloom or Stephen, or some of the other characters, such as Mr. Deasy the anti-Semitic school master, or the anti-Semitic Cyclops, who throws a goblet at Bloom, or Buck Mulligan. There are, of course structural things going on: the question and answer format of the section I am currently reading; the advertisement like sections nearer the beginning; the hallucinations that seem to go on forever in the brothel (particularly the first and second watch, and Bloom being systematically humiliated by several people).
Leopold Bloom
This interior space (that of Mr Bloom’s head) is really haunting, in that I find myself the last week feeling like his voice is so similar to my own thought patterns. Joyce really brings you into this rhythmic pattern that allows you to feel that you are the thinker thinking these thoughts. Brilliant! Bloom is aware that his wife has a lover it seems and so spends the day away, presumably to give her time to go through with her tryst. The day of Bloom and the way it is written from inside reminds me of Virginia Woolf, especially Mrs. Dalloway. It is beautifully banal and full of the day, time, thoughts of the moment, that somehow seem universal to mankind. Bloom is a character who is so easy for me to relate to. He is intelligent, but not confident. He has lost his relationship with his wife, or at least it is not what it once was. He also is still disturbed by the loss of his infant son, who would be 11 years old if he had lived. One recent online resource I checked discusses Bloom as being an everyman hero and as dealing with two major crises (the death of his father/ and Son Rudy as one crisis- break of his male family line; the infidelity of his wife, which seems to stem from the death of their son eleven years before). The online source used the phrase “cosmically lonely”, which is interesting in the sense of not knowing one’s place in the world, which is a very modern sort of condition, even for people who don’t have infidelity and a broken male family line.
At the moment when Bloom and Stephen part, Bloom looks up to see two remaining stars in the early morning (near dawn) sky and hear the church bells tolling. There is maybe a sense of Bloom’s ‘cosmic loneliness’, and also a very strong contrast with Stephen. It seems to me that Stephen is thinking more deeply on every subject, as their thoughts are compared. When the bell tolls, for example, we are told Stephen thinks of Latin phrases corresponding with the chime, whereas Mr. Bloom simply mimics the sounds in his head (ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, ding, dong... or something like that).
At the same time, I don’t feel that Joyce is treating either character in any privileged way. I suppose he may like Stephen more, since it is in many ways him, but he seems to treat Bloom with affection and not straight satire, though Bloom would be easy to satirize in much the same way that a writer like Sinclair Lewis satirizes a character like Babbitt. Bloom is complex, and maybe all people are, and it seems that Joyce wants to look unflinchingly, not judgmentally, at the man. Maybe Bloom is a representation of a modern man attempting to find meaning. Somewhere I read that Bloom is an artist that never became an artist, and that Stephen, or course, is the Artist as a Young Man. There is some common ground between the two men, and there is of course the father son possibility. Stephen is somewhat estranged from his father, and Bloom lost his son in infancy.
Molly Bloom
I finished this first read of this amazing book last night, and, so now, I have a somewhat clearer picture of Molly, since most of what I read yesterday and last night was the section of the book in which Leopold encounters his wife in bed (after his 10 year day), thinks about her and their relationship, goes through envy of Boylan, jealousy, and finally kisses her bottom and tells her about (most of) his day. Molly’s section is amazing. No punctuation, just a rambling, but easy to follow line of her thoughts. Again, talk about voice! I wonder how a feminist criticism of this section would read. She is completely sensual in her approach to the world. Her attempts after pleasure and away from pain are perhaps more base than Bloom’s or Stephen’s, but are they any less valid, acceptable, appropriate in the face of what Molly calls a “vale of tears”—this life. She says at one point, when thinking of her dead infant son Rudy, “I won’t think myself into sadness" or something to that effect. She is surviving in the 20th century, and I don’t see her as any less lonely than Bloom or Stephen, maybe more so. It may be true that she doesn’t have the refinement or education to express her own cosmic loneliness, but, by god, she expresses it all the same through the impact of this section of the book. I see her as really alone, really! She seems lost, distracted, mentally lazy, in the pursuit of pleasure, because it is only in sensual pleasure (food, sex, and the resultant need to remove food and the remains of sex from the body) that she feels alive. I feel like so many ‘modern’ people are so much like Molly. She is a poster child of modernity’s gifts to the human race, and so many today (most people, at least in my experience) are not living the postmodern/ postcolonial hybrid life advocated by some thinkers (which is necessary if we are to escape the past and turn our society into something beyond war, devastation of the natural environment, and domination by one group of another, with nothing but greed and the profit motive driving us). Most people I see are living a life of lonely consumption—in need of things to make us complete. Isn’t Molly essentially empty, and doesn’t she go about filling the “hole” inside her as her primary purpose in life.
The Story
Is there a story? This all takes place in one day (June 16th 1904?) (which may have been the day James Joyce first went out with (or met) his wife). The hook line on the movie preview for Bloom gives some clue as to what Ulysses is “all about”. It says, “All of life in one day”, or something like that, and now halfway through the book, I think that is appropriate. There is a normalcy, a sameness, a day in and day out feeling about this book, and yet it seems so important, so dramatic in some ways. Life lulls us with its normalcy and its day in and day outness, and then we forget what a wonderous thing it is just to have life. I say wonderous in that it is a real mix of good, bad, and indifferent. It is hard to be awake, to pay attention, to love life.
I find it really interesting that we are with Bloom while he is defecating (two times so far), masturbating, eating, drinking, etc. We really see a day in his life. And in the meantime his wife is fornicating, urinating, and menstruating. It is such a strange book and I don’t pretend to have a handle on it, but I do feel something—a throbbing life force inside the pages. It is homely and it is eternal and lovely in places.
It is interesting to compare Joyce’s tale to Homer’s tale, from which the book borrows its name. Ulysses was trying to get home from the Trojan wars to his wife. When he does get home, after ten years and many adventures, he has to fight off (and kill) the men hanging around the house trying to get to Penelope, his wife. In the end, they “live happily ever after”. For Leopold the suitors after his wife have already had her, but still Leopold will have to find acceptance from his wife, and they will find a place together that is tenable, leading up to Molly’s famous “Yes”, of which I believe she is saying yes to her existence, as it is, which, for me, includes Leopold. I’m not sure of the significance because it seems that she is saying yes to staying with Leopold, but probably not as a faithful wife. So, does this just mean that everyone works out a new logic, a new order, a new contract in order to remain alive, and engaged in doing what humans do? It seems as though Leopold has done so. He has worked something out to allow him to live though his wife is unfaithful and his son Rudy has died, and his father has committed suicide.
Links:
I like this link about Leopold:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/ulysses/terms/charanal_1.html
This link is really helpful in understanding what is actually happening in the physical realm of the novel (since most of the action seems to be in the heads of the characters).
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/summary.html
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