Ulysses Update

October 11, 2008

first-edition-first-copy
[photo by Bikkhu]

Finished Book 9 (Scylla and Charybdis) of Ulysses. I found Book 9 fiendishly difficult, not because the writing style was impenetrable, but because I found it continually difficult to get a good grasp of the two main points of the section (as I read it): Stephen’s argument w/r/t Shakespeare and the relationship between all the men who are gathered (or who come in and out of) the library.

Without the annotations I might have caught 1/10 of the allusions and understood about 1/3 of Stephens’ argument, which is all about Shakespeare’s biography, his relationship with his wife, and how much all of that was (or was not) written into Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It doesn’t seem that Stephen makes his argument out of a deep sense of analytical conviction regarding Shakespeare’s biography– when asked toward the end if even he believes his own theories, he flatly responds “no”– but out of a more vital kind of empathy with Shakespeare as a poet and with the emotional relationship between father and son. The “consubstantiality” motif left me dizzy, but the Shakespearean inspired parallels between Ulysses and The Odyssey are pretty clear: Ann Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife) is at once Athena and Gertrude; Molly is clearly Penelope; and Bloom is Shakespeare and Hamlet’s father both while Stephen is Hamlet.

I don’t have enough knowledge to take sides about Shakespeare’s life and personality (who does, really?), but some of the ideas that come out in the course of the conversation came away from this book more determined than ever to read a couple of the books about Shakespeare soon, as well as go back and read/re-read a number of his plays.

In The Odyssey, Scylla is a six-headed, man-eating monster and Charybdis a treacherous, ship-destroying whirlpool between which Odysseus must navigate. There are many such straits that Stephen is navigating in this section: literary society and the stifling nature of the critical establishment, the artistic, creative spirit and the the academy, the relationship between father and son, and not least the characters of Buck Mulligan and Leopold Bloom. Stephen is brash– and I might be reading my own emotions into this– but his brashness is in part a mask for his confusion and insecurities despite his bookish erudition. He wants to be accepted by the literary elite but at the same time can’t mask his resentment and scorn toward them in the form of Russell and Eglinton.

The important theme here is Stephen’s artistic and emotional consternation– what does he believe? Can he escape “Sireland?” The momentary appearance of Bloom– who is roundly mocked by even the most marginal characters in the library– comes at just the right (or precisely the wrong) time, just as Stephen is really feeling the “Seas between” he and Buck Mulligan.

Words Destined for Wordie

sinkapace, twicreakingly, rufous, canvasclimbers, cerecloth, caudlectures, softcreakfooted, groatsworth, caubine, creecries, brineblinded, pampooties, suspired, myriadminded, gorbellied, Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare, parturiate, paunchbrow, birthaiding, honorificabilitudinitatibus, meacock, seabedabbled, fingerponder

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Quotes

Stephen quotes Dante, leaving the last line untranslated:

Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
Tears such as angels weep.
Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

Which is funny, because the last line translates as something like:

Of his rear he made a trumpet

§§

I’m clearly a Romantic at heart, only my protective veneer of irony hiding my affection for Russell’s description of art:

“All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.”

This also brings to mind another Scylla and Charybdis allusion, the tension between the ordered, taxonomized “objective” Aristotelian view of art and the Platonic one.

Stephen’s response:

“Aristotle was once Plato’s schoolboy.”

Is cutting but, it seems to me, deeply ambivalent as well, particularly since I don’t believe that Stephen really falls on the Aristotelian side, but is in reality better fit to the description provided by “the Quaker librarian”:

“The beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts.”

§§

There are multiple layers of irony in the warning that comes from Russell’s “auric egg,” who warns that:

“People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be”

and goes on to speak of the French “corruption”:

“The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phaeacians.”

Given that the Phaecians, as a reward for transporting Ulysses home, are punished rather severely by Poseidon.

§§

Why does it seem so strange to think of Joyce reading Whitman, despite multiple allusions to his work, including the direct quote in this section?

§§

I feel like a ghost sometimes, as Stephen puts it:

“What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.”

§§

But that is balanced by the too occasional feeling of being uniquely alive:

“In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.”

§§

I had no idea that Joyce inspired Laurel and Hardy:

“…But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

–Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.

–Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.

–Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.

– The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s widow, is the will to die.”

§§

“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 whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, 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.”

§§

“The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town.”

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