James Joyce’s Ulysses is an epic journey into the heart of language
What’s that very Irish phrase that crops up in Ulysses? ‘With a great future behind him…’ This masterpiece centred around one June day is one of the greatest treasure-troves of language.
When life is threatened by war or pestilence — and there are few distractions by way of the pub or the pictures — we turn to the great demanding books we have always meant to read or re-read.
Tuesday was Bloomsday, when we celebrate the greatest piece of fiction written in English in the 20th century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. This extraordinary work, which exhibits a constantly varying mishmash of styles, is the great poetic innovation of what sometimes gets called the high modernist period.
The most brilliant of Joyce’s interpreters, Canadian critic Hugh Kenner, said Ulysses wasn’t a novel. And I remember Salman Rushdie saying once: “Ulysses has stories in it but the basic impulse is not narrative.”
Then what’s the story, if there is one?
Leopold Bloom is a mundane middle aged bloke whose wife Molly Bloom is having an affair with a character called Blazes Boylan who is full of himself. Bloom is not a rocket scientist but something greater. As one of the innumerable barflies in the book said: ‘He’s a cultured allround man, Bloom is.’ He’s one reason the book is called Ulysses because Bloom is a bit like a reincarnation of Odysseus, the great journeyer, the wise guy, the myriad minded man.
That’s one of the jokes at the back of Ulysses but it’s a deep one and maybe it derives from that most poetic and fleet footed of philosophers, Plato, who presents Odysseus finding that he is to be reborn as an ordinary man and discovering that nothing could be finer.
Joyce certainly contrived a Homeric framework for his Bloomsday book but the story goes that he told the young Nabokov at a Paris party that this had been ‘A terrible mistake, an advertisement for the book.’
Still, the advertisements are planted all over this weird epic of one day in Dublin on June 16, 1904. There’s a reference at one point to ‘the most beautiful book that has come out of Ireland in my time. One thinks of Homer’.
According to the schema of parallels to the work by the great Greek bard which Joyce effectively co-wrote with Stuart Gilbert (the man who would go on to translate Camus) the son-figure Telemachus is played in the modern re-run by Stephen who we’ve come across before as the hero of Joyce’s shortish very accessible novel A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Stephen is blatantly a portrait of Joyce himself.
Not surprisingly, Stephen in Ulysses is a brilliant young fellow, if a bit of a futile one. What’s that very Irish phrase that crops up in Ulysses? “With a great future behind him…”
We listen, enraptured — and so do a group of his literary elders in the library chapter — as the manifest young genius spins his theory about another of the all time greats of literature, Shakespeare: ‘So through the ghost of the unquiet father,’ Stephen says with rhapsodic eloquence, ‘the image of the unliving son looks forth.’
He improvises on the legend that Shakespeare played the ghost in Hamlet just as he plays on Christian theology and the mystery of the Trinity.
‘He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the sun consubstantial with the father.’
Ultimately Bloom takes Stephen who is drunk off his head to Eccles Street where Molly is half awake in bed and suggests he stay the night.
‘Was the proposal of asylum accepted? Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully, it was declined.’
You can tell from this short quotation that the language of Ulysses is going every which way.
This is from the penultimate chapter of the book which is known as the ‘Ithaca’ chapter (though all the chapter titles were finally suppressed from the first edition except for the overall one) and it reads like a mad ceremonious form of Catholic catechism in Q&A form.
None of which is to deny that in its lame ugly duckling way the language has an extraordinary beauty and power which is highlighted, not diminished, by the stilted ghostliness of its arrangement. Has anyone ever written a stranger, a more poetic couple of sentences than this?
‘What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden? The heaventree of stars hung with humid night blue fruit.’
The beauty is in the lameness, the depth of humanity is in the awkwardness of the language. Joyce is fascinated throughout Ulysses with the way language trips over itself, the way it gets shop-soiled by use, the way it works for all its imprecision.
As Jim Hackett once said on Yes, Minister, we all use cliches till the cows come home. Part of Joyce’s genius is to see this operating at every level of human communication from the most flash to the most mundane.
In fact, the one character in Ulysses who is allowed an absolutely untrammelled expressiveness is Molly who ends the book with a sort of massively musical significance.
Here are the very last words of Ulysses, which thrill every kid who encounters them because they are the climax of the sustained and wild, ‘dirty’ bit of Ulysses, which can have a rollicking and stirring effect even in an age when people swear and talk about sex in every second sentence.
‘Then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes will Yes.’
The notorious stream of consciousness in Molly’s monologue is the most famous unpunctuated passage in English literature but every phrase of it is clear once you get used to it and listen to it.
To say that Molly has a wonderful lyrical lushness that matches her raunchiness is to indicate the great surging sea of what she slides and sings with. She talks of a man with intellectual pretensions as ‘a professor of John Jameson’s’, meaning the whisky.
She describes a drinker’s face with its broken blood vessels as looking ‘like a well-whipped child’s botty’. And part of what makes Molly irresistible is that she can say anything that pops into her head –– that’s what makes her like the muse Homer invokes at the beginning of the Odyssey: ‘Sing in me, Muse’ as the Greek epic has it. It also gives her a sort of eloquence which we might think of as verbal grandeur, except that you know it’s the voice of someone who’s never heard of artifice. And that, in turn, is why Molly’s voice can sound like Shakespeare. She sounds just a bit like one of his comical heroines — Rosalind in As You Like It, say — rabbiting on in a great cascade of colourful language that she comes out with primarily to amuse herself, to entertain herself, to find some equanimity in a world that has its full share of sadness and seriousness, its recollection of hard times and its measured sense of the limits of life.
One reason Molly is off with Blazes is that Bloom has not made love to her since the death of their baby son, Rudy. Bloom desires Molly to meet Stephen because they’re made for each other, even if this is only an implication in Ulysses.
Stephen is in fact the arrogant, brilliant young no-hoper of the book’s action, who refused to kneel down and pray at his devout mother’s deathbed, and who is haunted by the preposterousness of this arrogant self-assertion. Still, he says, ‘Let me be mother and let me live.’
He also broods about ‘love… the word which is known to all men’ and ‘amor matis’ which he says is ‘subjective and objective, genitive.’ In other words it can mean both a mother’s love and the love of a mother.
Joyce – writer and man –– is pretty intimately known from Richard Ellman’s great biography. He was the original of Stephen Dedalus and he proceeded to marry a woman just like Molly Bloom. In fact his wife Nora was the model for Molly and Ulysses is set on June 16, 1904 because that was the day Joyce and Nora first walked out together.
One of the very greatest literary critics RP Blackmur of Princeton said once that the logic of Ulysses is that Stephen needs to become Bloom whereas Bloom doesn’t need to become anyone else at all –– not if the world should fall on him.
That’s why he’s Ulysses, the man who knows and has suffered and endured, and the reason why Stephen is Telemachus, the son. And if any of this sounds fancy and seems to be opening discussion of Ulysses up to a world it cannot, by definition, contain, that shouldn’t matter because it is such a rich book, such a funny book, which at the same time encompasses all the sadness in the world.
Joyce was a very great shaper of language and part of what made him so great was that he was always alive to both the pratfalls of language and the way common garden words work.
In one chapter of Ulysses, a baby is born, while Stephen gets drunker and crazier and the progress of the birth is expressed through the most overtly parodying section of the book --though they work as parody to a greater or lesser extent –– like The Simpsons does. And Joyce makes the development of the English language into his drawn out cartoon, though sometimes weirdly, contradictorily, he’ll get strange effects of beauty out of the send up.
Here he is imitating the man he considered the greatest stylist in the English language, John Henry Newman, who started the Oxford Movement and wrote Apologia Pro Vita Sua and The Idea of The University: ‘There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories…’
Ulysses is not strong on sin but it is full of the sense of remembering that can go wrong. It can contain wonderful impressionistic evocations of the music of the world.
‘It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness..’
This is a tour de force imitating the effect of music and don’t be intimidated by it because it’s almost all in the sound.
Joyce can also show Bloom pleasuring himself over a young girl displaying her knickers for his benefit. He reflects on this ruefully: ‘My fireworks. Up like a rocket, down like a stick.’
There’s also the wonderful mundane moment of courage when the Jewish Bloom confronts the old ruffian of a citizen, anti-Semitic to his growling back teeth, and defines a nation as ‘the same people living in the same place’ and goes on to talk about ‘Love… I mean the opposite of hatred.’
The belief in something like that — albeit in a humdrum world where nothing goes right — shines and shines through this strange many-gabled book full of every of gargoyle of language which is one of the greatest treasure-houses we have of what can be done with words because Joyce has such an amused and reverent sense of what speech ––your speech, my speech, the speech of the lady over there who barely went to school –– can actually do when it gets going.
Peter Craven is a cultural critic
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