I have a confession.  For all this talk of Joyce is a genius, language is amazing, well worth the effort, blah-blah-blah, ultimately I didn’t really love this book.  I appreciate it in the way you appreciate Thanksgiving dinner: you definitely don’t want to eat it every day, and to be honest, pizza delivery might have been tastier after all.  The pomp and consequence of Ulysses is something to behold; the elevation of the everyday to mythological quest status changed the novel forever; this book is awesome when you think about it.  The problem for me arises in that it is just too darn long. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man uses some of the same stylistic tricks, but it’s around 600 pages shorter.  In small doses, the style is interesting, enjoyable even.  But in a work this long, it just wears a person out (especially when she’s trying to read 50 book in 50 weeks).  I *get* Ulysses, but I don’t love it, at least not in the way I read it.  Yeah, it took me over a month to finish it, but even that wasn’t a slow enough pace.  If you are going to read it, I would suggest doing it in small chunks and plan to spend a year of weekends on it.  As I said in the other posts, it is worth putting effort into, and there are parts that are transcendentally good and for those parts it is worth reading.  But just like your day and my day, the depicted day of June 16, 1904 is constructed with pockets of tedium, annoyance and desperation.  Be prepared to experience it along with the characters.

Leopold Bloom is the Odysseus figure in Ulysses.  However, he functions almost as a refutation of the Homeric hero who survives by his wits and strength! who overcomes all adversaries with might! who destroys them utterly!  In The Odyssey, Bloom would have discovered his wife’s affair with Blazes Boylan and murdered him summarily.  In Ulysses, Bloom quietly comes home to his unfaithful wife whom he loves without bothering himself with any “masculine pride”.  

Ulysses is an epic celebrating the mundane, the heroic in the ordinary man, an outsider, who accepts his life and gleans from it the happiness he has in his reach.  The invisible striver is the antagonist in this story, the man who skulks around town seducing women and picking up what he can while giving the least of himself possible.  This is Blazes Boylan, Molly’s suitor.  

Even though Leopold Bloom has a skewed idea of his wife Molly, of what she wants and who she is, he thinks of her constantly.  Their intimacy is limited, but he loves her with a tenderness characteristic of a hero who is the antithesis of the warrior archetype.  Joyce seems to hint that there is a ravine between husband and wife that can never be fully bridged, but that this does not diminish the love between them.

Bloom is a sympathetic character, despite his lascivious fantasies and his strange inner rantings.  Part of this is because Joyce has made him a figure of tragic loneliness.  At one point Bloom thinks, “A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life.”  This is key to his roamings.  He misses his daughter Milly, off pursuing her education and career; he has a longing for his dead son, for whom he allows Dedalus to be a stand-in. But most of all, he feels the distance between himself and Molly.  As I said when I started this book, Ulysses is partly about how you can never fully know someone else.  But it is also about how we interact with and forgive flawed people precisely because we know on some level that we have several forgiveness-worthy flaws as well.

Bloom indulges in a funk, he feels his role as outsider – alienation from the church, in his career, in Irish society which is dominated by Catholicism.  Just before lunch, he laments, “This is the very worst hour of the day.  Vitality.  Dull, gloomy: hate this hour.  Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.”  He steps into a diner and out again after a vivid description of his disgust at people eating like animals.  ”Out.  I hate dirty eaters…Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail.  Gulp.  Grub.  Gulp.  Gobstuff….Eat or be eaten,  Kill!  Kill!” This illustrates yet another allusion to his complete difference from the Homeric hero.

It is worth mentioning that the scene at the end of Ulysses feels almost like the climax of Romeo and Juliet. Instead of a double suicide, the star-crossed lovers engage in separate, silent prayers, a kind of double-resolution of their loyalties and loves.  Bloom comes home to a sleeping wife, kisses her bottom, and silently goes to sleep.  Molly wakes and finds him asleep, thinks on her love for him, offering a conquest that Bloom may never realize he has over her.  This is not the conquest of the Odyssey, but is a quiet, dignified conquest, the conquest that two people have over one another in love and mutual adoration.

When all is said and done, Ulysses is a simple love story. 

Ulysses is based on the Odyssey.  It’s worth taking a small look at the source material to get a firmer grip on the novel.  The Odyssey was intended to be sung, and so it is necessarily a work concerned with the rhythms of language.  Clearly, Joyce used this concept to craft Ulysses.  The Odyssey has a non-linear plot which depicts the cleverness and arrogant beauty of Odysseus, but also highlights the smart choices of women and outsiders rather than focusing solely on the fighting men of the dominant class. Odysseus is out of the picture for ten years while Penelope and her son Telemachus fend off suitors who assume her husband is dead in the great war.  Meanwhile, Telemachus struggles to keep control of his household by will and wit until his father returns; Penelope remains faithful and wards off all comers with her tricks and schemes.  

Telemachus is supposed to be Stephen Dedalus. The only connection I can see in that (correct me if I’m wrong) is in Bloom’s longing for his dead son and his use of Stephen as a kind of replacement, made apparent in a scene in Book III in which Bloom rescues a drunken Stephen and eventually offers him his daughter’s hand in marriage.  

If Odysseus is Leopold Bloom and Penelope is Molly, this contrasts with Ulysses in that the husband is gone for a mere 24 hours and Molly has a lover in for the afternoon.  Where there is contrast to a work that a subsequent work is based on, we should pay attention.  The other major contrast is in the reaction of the hero to the usurper.  In the Odyssey, Odysseus slaughters all of the men who were found attempting to woo his wife; it’s a bloodbath.  In Ulysses, Bloom returns quietly to the wife he loves despite her foolishness and betrayal.  And in the end, she transforms into the loyal Penelope with her famous soliloquy.  

The point of these differences is that Bloom, too, is a hero.  He does not engage in fits of rage or vengeance; instead he maintains.  He decides what is most important to him and allows what *is* to *be* and he continues as if it does not affect his world.  Who of us could do that in Bloom’s situation?  

Leopold Bloom is Joycean hero, at an ideal level of transcendence without conscious effort at transcendence.  We have Stephen Dedalus to contrast him with: Stephen the striver, the failure, his genius used as entertainment for his friends rather than enlightenment of the world.  Stephen Dedalus, who is the protagonist of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is based in that novel on the mythical figure Daedalus, designer of the Minotaur’s unnavigable labyrinth, an artist in the classic sense.  He is also Icarus, who builds wings to escape the maze, the transcendental artist who ultimately causes his own ruin.  Portrait was conceived, written and published before Ulysses, and one reason I have felt so connected to Stephen Dedalus is because in Ulysses, we see that this is what he has become: a failure at his artistic pursuits, still trying to retain his youthful grasp on the transcendental with one foot mired in his day job and his poverty. Ulysses is partly an extension of the tragedy of Stephen Dedalus. Contrast Bloom’s quiet acquiescence to the ebb and flow of the universe, and his knowledge that it is not up to him to change the world but to be in it; this contentment appears to be the primary trait of Joyce’s version of the archetypal hero.

I once took an upper level lit course where the professor required us to discuss “the question of art” in every novel we read.  Oddly enough, a unified theory of the meaning of art could be found in all of the 15 or so novels we read that semester.  Ulysses is no exception.

 Joyce devotes an entire chapter in Book II to Dedalus and friends discussing Shakespeare as Hamlet.  Someone namedrops Mallarme, which caught my attention because I remember from my college lit days that Stephen Mallarme is the French dude who moved to Paris to become a poet, eventually hosting artist salons attended by Proust!  And Andre Gide! However, he was criticized by some of his contemporaries for his dense literary theories.  One of these was that a “purified language” (complete with alternate and precisely nuanced meanings for words we thought we knew) provides a purer meaning for the piece, which we can see may be a theory shared by James Joyce.

The kind of conversation which occurs in the chapter would occur in Mallarme’s salons, and this chapter functions as a dissection of art.  Joyce concludes: “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring,” which is almost a statement of purpose for the novel in its entirety.  The Odyssey is inspiration for Ulysses, and Ireland’s “epic” lies in its daily rhythms, which Joyce illustrates in elevated language fitting for the epic masterpiece.  It’s a day in Dublin, frozen in time.  Style is key to this novel’s meaning, in that it forces the reader to slow down, think more thoroughly, pay attention to details and make connections that might be overlooked if it was written in a style one could skim at times.  This demands the reader’s complete attention, and possibly even study aids. But the payoff is well worth the effort.

Spring has finally come to Milwaukee.  Yesterday on a sunny a.m. constitutional, I found myself thinking about the unabating stream of consciousness, river of consciousness, tidal wave of consciousness more like, that constantly erodes my peaceful emptiness.  Who am I kidding? There is no such thing as emptiness in me, or in any of us.  We’re always thinking, whether we’re paying attention to what we’re thinking or not. Even in meditation, if you accidentally start thinking something (you inevitably do), you let the thought flow and pass instead of dwelling on it. Even Buddhists understand that you can’t empty yourself completely.

Reading Ulysses has made me more aware of the constant chatter in my mind.  I now think about what I’m thinking about. Meta-thinking.  Also, I am keenly aware that you can never know someone as well as you think you do.  

Leopold Bloom?  Perfectly respectable, right? In his head he’s a despicable lecher.  His brain thinks mostly in terms of sex – with a bit of misogyny, racism and irreligious scorn thrown in for good measure.  But, mostly sex.  At one point he’s in church thinking about the eunuch choir and he mentally blurts, “Eunuch.  One way out of it.” And in the next moment he’s thinking about how it would be nice to feel up a willing lovely in the pew behind their prayer books.  He seems contemptible on the interior, but the thing is, the reader doesn’t have much of a chance to judge him for it because there are moments of perfect tenderness in his head too.  Bloom worries about his daughter and regrets the frailty of his fatherly relationship with her.  When thinking of her, he suddenly floods with a long paragraph of sweet, bittersweet, melancholy memories.  Bloom makes vague plans for his home, like we all do at times, plans he never intends to bring to fruition, with an offhand excuse: “Still gardens have their drawbacks.”  Sometimes his irreverence is hilarious, as when he’s thinking of what would happen if the priests used Guinness in the mass rather than wine: (a bunch of drunk congregationalists, obviously, partaking of the blood of Christ on a far more constant basis due to their devotion and piety, right.  Right?).  

There’s also some beauty in Bloom: a kind of poem running through his head when he thinks of mass during a funeral, which you feel like you should whisper (and say it fast): “Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears. Husband learns to his surprise. God’s little joke. Then out she comes. Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes…”

Like an impressionist painting, you get a fuzzy picture from the memory (or imagining) that Bloom is narrating to himself. You can smell the incense, cloying and smoky, and see the candles flickering in the dim church as Bloom envisions himself sitting in a pew unbeknownst to his wife Molly, unpreparedly hearing most of the indiscretions she has confessed to her priest. And this passage, more than anything else, gives us a reason to feel something other than disdain for Leopold Bloom. The fact that before the funeral he was dwelling on Molly in echoes of the famous ending adds another layer of complexity to his character.  He thinks of his infidel wife with longing: “Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes. Yes.”  

People lead strange, sad, wonderful lives; and the punctuation marks of joy are the moments that somehow get us from one day to the next. We’re all despicable at times, but at other times we are also transcendent, effulgent with glory. Our psychic dichotomy is a lovely distraction.

I’m still coasting through this, enjoying every second.  The language trips you up a little, not in the sense that you can’t “get” it, but in the sense that it makes you read slower, which forces you to take in all the nuance of the action, to think about what’s unsaid as well as what’s on the page.  Joyce uses a structure that we aren’t used to for paragraphs, dialogue and segue between scenes.  Joyce makes up words from combinations of familiar words so that we think more about what those two familiar words mean rather than just skimming over them because we assume that we understand their meaning here.  He quotes from ancient texts, local songs, newspaper ads.  He writes paragraphs of half-thoughts when Dedalus is paying half-attention to a letter or a boring conversationalist.  He uses phonetical spellings of words he wants us to pay better attention to, repetition of words for comic or philosophical effect (repetition of “ineluctable” in an early passage serves both purposes).  He includes flashback dialogue in basic french, which indicates the fact that Dedalus is a visitor in the conversation he’s remembering.  He uses onomatopoeia in a way that sometimes at first you look at the phrase and think: what the!?  But then you read it phonetically and you get it.  For example, when Dedalus is walking along the beach, Joyce writes: “Listen: a four-worded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos.”  Read it like it sounds, with long hisses and vowels, and you find yourself making ocean noises.  Joyce is writing in the fractured way we think; as a result, we have the feeling of a more intimate knowledge of the characters than is often the case.  Sullen Dedalus, in conflict with his religion, his culture and his family, is the Artist.  He’s not someone we would like well if we knew him, but he is fascinating when we think along with him as he’s listening, reading, people-watching, daydreaming… This is what I mean when I say any effort you put into a book like this is completely worth it. 

I feel like something is wrong.  I understand what’s going on in Ulysses.  I don’t get distracted by the language.  I can see each scene clearly as I read it. Effortlessly, I can tell when dialogue ends and exposition begins.  Shouldn’t it be dense? Shouldn’t it be “unreadable”?  Shouldn’t I be struggling?  B. points out that I have read a lot since high school: different styles, different genres, and that I’ve written my own stories  since then too.  I’ve traversed Ireland, so maybe it’s a matter of developing an ear for the cadence of the way the Irish speak English.  So maybe it’s just that in high school I was a child and at 32 I’ve lived a little.  But still.  When does this melt from pleasure to me reading with a concordance in one hand and the book in the other?  I think it won’t.  If you are intimidated by the critics’ assertion that Joyce is unreadable, try again.  It’s totally worth it.