Bear with me. I am tired. Yesterday was Bloomsday. I am
still recovering.
“Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O
jumping Jupiter! Ye gods and little fishes! Still, she's a dear girl. Soon be
a woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too.
Life, life.” James Joyce, Ulysses
2 lives, Molly and Milly, Mother and Daughter. Leopold Bloom’s
thoughts, as he sits crowded in with others in a horse drawn carriage on the
way to a funeral. In the scheme of the novel, this tiny snippet occurs in the
chapter that reimagines the visit Odysseus (Ulysses) makes to Hades. In Homer’s
epic, Odysseus must give blood to the dead in order to hear them speak. For
some critics, this part of the poem is the oldest and is the omphalos (the
center, the navel) from which the rest of poem extends outward -- in both
directions-forward and past (Ezra Pound started his own epic The Cantos with a translation of a early
Latin translation of this part of the poem). While Homer’s scene is dramatic,
we too give blood to the dead. The blood we give are our efforts to enter into
the minds of others and ourselves in order to give them words. Humans are, as a
recent book title puts it, storytelling animals.
It is through words, stories, that we give life to the dead.
It is the one path the Greeks knew that would grant immortality. The heroes in Homer are obsessed with Kleos,
glory, that will live in the words of epics and permit the heroes to live on as
bards chant the dactylic hexameters over hundreds of years. It is only through
glory, great acts, which are then recorded and repeated, that we survive our
lives. An epic is, as Mallarme said, the tale of the tribe. For hundreds of
years Homer’s words were not just a thrilling narrative of acts; they also
served as the source of education, religion, and history.
Then Plato came along. In his Republic he famously called for purging passages from Homer because
they undermined the way people should live justly. At the end of his work Plato,
through the character of Socrates, recounts the myth of Er. (This place became,
for Christian thinkers, the source of much of what heaven and hell were to
become). Plato, among other things, retells the story of Odysseus/Ulysses. Instead
of a hero who gets ahead by deception, he makes him a regular guy who lives a
simple life. 2500 years later Joyce decided to take Plato at his word and
created his own Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. And in doing so he recreated the epic for the
modern world. For those who take the time to read it, they will learn history, religion,
and most important, the way words work. It is a guide for writing, for reading,
for understanding.
Unlike Homer’s hero Bloom is an Irish Jew, a man who is
never quite welcome among the Catholics around him. He sells ads, rather than
saves lives. He spends the entire novel wandering around Dublin in scenes that
echo each chapter of Homer’s poem. Joyce’s book is an attempt to make the
oldest western epic speak to the modern world. But whereas Homer’s epic unfolds
over decades, Joyce's epic takes place on just one day: June 16th. (He
picked the date as that was the first time he was with his future wife Nora).
In Dublin yesterday there were readings of the book from end to end. And in
other cities too. I spent the day reading favorite chapters and sentences and
scenes (it’s too long for me to get through in a day).
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| Bloomsday performers in Dublin |
Joyce knew that
Ulysses is famed for being ‘polytropos' (many minded). Ulysses can see things; he can see them in his mind and bring
them into the world. In this he is a man of action. Bloom too is many minded.
His mind flits and moves and thinks and feels while he whiles the day away
filling up time. At one point Bloom thinks about his and others’ place in “the stream
of life”. For Joyce part of his genius was taking this stream and turning it
into consciousness. After him, writing would never be the same. Part of what
got me thinking about this is a piece by the great novelistTom McCarthy. He examines some of the seemingly infinite
ways Joyce has changed anyone writer who has come after:
“How do you write after Ulysses? It isn’t just that Joyce
writes better than anyone else (although he does), it’s the sense that Ulysses’
publication represents a kind of rapture of literature. an event that’s both
ecstatic and catastrophic. A certain naïve realism is no longer possible after
it, and every alternative, every avant-garde manoeuvre imaginable has been
anticipated and exhausted by it too. As though that weren’t enough, Joyce
returns to the scene of his own crime, arriving not incognito (in the manner of
his shady non-character Macintosh), but brazenly assuming the role of principal
mourner.” London Review of Books, Thursday, June 19th, 2014.
McCarthy goes on to demonstrate some of the ways the book is
organized by tropes of accounting—of money and souls. It is also a hack, a way
of getting into files that are the character’s heads. But it is also what
McCarthy calls in a wonderful phrase “a zombie eucharist”. It is in other words
both a sacred rite that is not longer sacred, with dead sous wandering around
as pale shades.
All of which brings me back to my little quote. Even so
small a thing can lead a reader out to endless paths. Molly to Milly is a bit
of a loss. Molly, the Penelope figure, will be replaced by the less than star
quality Milly. Joyce again and again underscores the movement down from what
the Greeks called the Golden Age to the age of Brass. Things are diminished and
so perhaps are people. Milly has tomboy oaths but they are no replacement for
Rudy, the real son Bloom had who dies shortly after his birth. Her oaths to Jupiter
are neither holy nor blasphemous, just alliterative nothings. And yet she does
invoke the gods and the little fishes that call to mind the fish that appear in
the New Testament miracle and the fish that comes to represent a savior but
again in a diminished form. Milly is still a dear girl, but soon to be a woman,
like Penelope.
But Penelope/Molly, on June 16th, will be in her
bedroom having sex with Blazes Boylan and Bloom knows this. The arrival to
womanhood may be anything but a blessing to Bloom. In Homer, Penelope held out
for many years against the suitors who came when Ulysses was off fighting the
Trojan War or trying to return home on his Odyssey. Molly does not have that
heroic power any more than Bloom has the power to slay the suitor upon his
return. Instead, he tries to help Stephen Daedalus, the Joyce doppelgänger and
the stand in for Telemachus, the true son of Ulysses. Stephen is doing his best
to play Hamlet instead of Telemachus, mourning the death of his mother and coming
up with arcane readings of Hamlet to sell so he can pay off a bit of his debt.
Mullingar, the city where Joyce’s own father, a near do well
Irishman who sang songs well, had a job counting people. Another counter of
souls. Another accounting. Joyce evokes the father here because Bloom, on his
way to the funeral, thinks of the death of his son, and the death of his
father—by suicide.
But then there are the two yeses. Anyone who knows Ulysses, (the book),
will know these yeses look forward to Molly's famous interior monologue with
which the book ends. The final word an affirmative. The yes yes is an affirmation
then echoed in the life life with which this passage ends. Molly, Milly. Yes, yes.
Life, life. Joyce creates the boundaries of a man’s span in the world. In this
he echoes Bede’s famous story of what life is. In winter and at night, a sparrow
flies into the hall of a great King and then departs out through the other
side. And it’s also a nod to Hamlet too, the sparrow whose death must come or
will come and must be accepted with the words “Let Be.” Bloom lets be his wife’s
infidelity. He lives instead as a wandering soul through the words and streets
of Dublin.
Why this exegesis? I don’t pretend to have the seemingly
total recall of McCarthy or Hugh Kenner or others who know the book from
beginning to end. But I do know that within this book the history of English
and the key to writing well is there for anyone to discover. There is even a
chapter “Oxen of the Sun", which begins
in Old English and moves through the metamorphic changes English has taken until
the fateful June day.
When people ask me for books to read to learn about writing
they often expect a manual of style or a set of examples or something with
strict rules. Joyce’s book, if read closely, will teach anyone more about
writing than any of these. But it takes effort, slow reading, and a willingness
to reread and relearn. I found this out yesterday when this passage struck me.
In my tattered copy of Ulysses I had not even underlined it. I missed what I
think now may be of important ways of ordering and forming my reading of the
text. Tomorrow I might find another such passage. Or a hundred more. Ulysses
is, to steal Borges' title, garden of forking paths. They lead to endless mazes
and endless epiphanies and endless beautiful passages of prose. Each of has our own Ulysses.
Ulysses could serve as a great education for the postmodern
age. Disparate voices exist in the huge and endless stream of life on
social media. But for Joyce, the words are crafted into a whole, whereas the
maze we live in with our media does not have anything so infinite yet simple or
so complex yet rigidly ordered as an epic/anti-epic.
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