Ulysses Read online

  For Joyce, everything changed even as it remained itself, and so the differences gave the repetitions point and purpose, allowing him to redefine heroism as the capacity to endure rather than inflict suffering. Unlike Odysseus who slaughtered rivals for the favour of his wife, Bloom took no physical vengeance on the man who cuckolded him. Like Stephen’s, his victories are purely mental, which may have occasioned Yeats’s comment that Joyce had ‘an heroic mind’. Yeats, in his later years, came increasingly to question soldierly bravery and to suggest that a man may show as great a courage in ‘entering the abyss of himself’. If Ulysses is the epic of the body, its interior monologues and pacifist politics make it even more urgently an epic of the mind. History may well be a nightmare of self-perpetuating violence, but at least some Dubliners have, by the power of the contemplative mind, broken free of that cycle. For all that, the cycles pervade; and in re-enacting the roles of Telemachus and Odysseus, these characters remind us of what peoples have in common across the ages, thereby achieving one of the basic purposes of art, making man feel less alone. In their many similarities to ancient analogues, they manage to suggest that, if things are not getting very much better, then at least they are not becoming very much worse.

  Despite all this, many early interpreters of Ulysses proceeded in the conviction that Joyce invoked the grandeur of the ancient hero in order to belittle the timid bourgeois; just as many can still be found to assert that, in The Waste Land, Eliot evoked the splendour of classical Greece and Elizabethan England to mock the hollow men of the modern metropolis. In fact, the traffic between primitive myth and current reality always ran along a two-way street. In Eliot’s eyes, the rapists of twentieth-century London were no better and no worse than the barbarous Greek king who violated his sister-in-law Philomel:

  And still she cried, and still the world pursues …

  The veiled use of the sonnet form in the poem has been interpreted as an attempt to play off the exalted sentiments of amour courtois against the dreary copulation of a typist and her ‘young man carbuncular’; but Eliot’s real concern is with the similarity of both situations. A form that once celebrated the illicit couplings of aristocrats now records the passionless coupling of nonentities, in either case dignifying the mechanics of lust. Cleanth Brooks offered an astute description of this technique:

  The poet works in terms of surface parallelisms which in reality make ironical contrasts, and in terms of surface contrasts which in reality constitute parallelisms. The two aspects taken together give the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the realistic surface of experience is faithfully retained.

  That account can still be applied, with no strain, to Ulysses. Indeed, Eliot’s seminal essay on ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, published in The Dial in 1923, reads like a nervous apology for his own poem and an implicit denial that he has simply imitated the method of Joyce:

  In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein, in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations.

  For Eliot, the method of Ulysses had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’, and so he boldly declared that ‘instead of narrative method we may now use the mythical method’. Its attraction lay in the fact that it was ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary life’. Of course, the order and control thus achieved were purely technical. At the centre of the past lay the same nightmare and futility which had led these writers, in brief hope, to evoke it.

  For these reasons, Joyce’s and Eliot’s use of myth may be called ironic and even playful. Such a treatment contrasts with that in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, whose central characters try knowingly and deliberately to relive the myth of Isis and Osiris. Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, never for a moment suspects his likeness to Odysseus, but that very lack of pretension adds not only to the poignancy but also to the final likeness. Joyce implies that real heroism, like true saintliness, is never conscious of itself as such.

  The sophisticated modern artist’s yearning for the primitive may explain why so many chose to base masterpieces on an ancient legend. Their cultivation of the naive was accompanied by a mocking dismissal of nineteenth-century realism. Perhaps the claim to depict reality seemed increasingly futile to artists who could never hope to compete with a camera or a voice-recorder, and who opted, by way of compensation, to build a self-sufficient work of art. Hence their admiration for the work of the ancients, so patently artificial and not a mere rendition of actual surfaces, so clearly evoking a world of its own and not a botched version of the real world. Art was art because it was not nature. That aphorism of Goethe has the full support of Bloom. He contrasts the photograph of his wife (which ‘did not do justice to her figure’) with the superb Greek statues of the female form in the National Museum: ‘Marble could give the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry … whereas no photo could, because it simply wasn’t art in a word.’ Farewell Zola, goodbye Flaubert.

  It is in this context that the autocriticism of Joyce may be understood as an aspect of his claim for the final self-sufficiency of his art. All those references by Ulysses to itself are not facile tricks, but genuine attempts to assist the reader’s understanding of the book. The penultimate chapter opens with Stephen’s view of literature as ‘the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man’, as if offering a premonitory gloss on Molly’s monologue which begins with a ‘yes’. Or to take another type of example: while Stephen muses in the National Library on 16 June 1904, he decides that ‘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.’ It is therefore quite legitimate to see the pacifism of Bloom or Dedalus in 1904 as informed by Joyce’s own recoil from carnage many years later. The most complex difficulties in ‘decoding’ the book are often described and resolved somewhere in the text.

  Such sudden stoppages, to incorporate the author’s commentary on his or her own work, would have seemed distinctly ill-bred to a nineteenth-century novelist like Jane Austen. She would doubtless have endorsed Elizabeth Bennett’s remark, while dancing with Mr Darcy at Netherfield Ball, that ‘I must not decide upon my own performance.’ Eighteenth-century novelists were not so circumspect, of course, and generations of readers have been amused by Henry Fielding’s ‘digressions’ on the art of the novel in Tom Jones. These, however, are quite different from the critical interjections of Joyce in Ulysses. Fielding’s digressive chapters are separate essays in their own right, designed to introduce a relatively new genre to its audience but quite independent of the narrative in which they occur. Joyce’s interventions form an organic part of Ulysses, which is unthinkable without them. They initiate an autocritical tradition of the Irish novel, further developed by Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien (the latter in At Swim-Two-Birds offers the reader three possible openings and has his narrator remark that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity).

  These gestures may seem affected or, even, arrogant in upstaging the literary critic, but, more often than not, they are truly humble, arising out of a defensive fear of what an aggressive reviewer or philistine critic will make of the text. (The same fear may account for Joyce’s autocritical contributions to Stuart Gilbert’s book). The effect of such interventions is to break the tyrannical hold of the all-powerful author over the credulous reader. The novel has always been an artefact and, in that sense, a sham, but now it is self-evidently so; and the novelist is pleased to point to the nuts and bolts in the contraption, rather than ‘use art to conceal art’ as in the past. The workings of this trick may now be shared with a sophisticated audience, as interested in know-how as in know-why. By putting
itself, along with its central characters, in inverted commas, Ulysses is being humble, democratic, even self-deprecatory. Not that it disbelieves what it is saying. Rather, by reducing the vast claims made for art by the Romantics, it asks us to take the now-modified claim of Joyce with some seriousness.

  Moreover, the autocritical structure may be seen as congruent with the book’s anti-authoritarian politics. The critic Frank Kermode has contended that it is the self-criticism and self-deflation of modern art which saves much of it from the excesses of romanticism and fascism. In The Sense of an Ending, he proposes a distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘fiction’, explaining that ‘fictions can degenerate into myths, whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense, anti-semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth, and King Lear is a fiction.’ By extension, it could be said that Ulysses is a fiction built on the structures of a myth. Joyce’s attempt to submit that myth to the vicissitudes of everyday life results in a healthy comic deflation, of both book and myth. As if defending it against the charge of being over-plotted, Kermode insists that Ulysses ‘asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot’. Joyce is most interested, of course, in those aspects of life which prove recalcitrant and resistant to mythic transformation; and so it is the deviations from the myth, as much as the knowing references to the Odyssey, which secure the book’s status as a self-critical fiction. The randomness of its details, and the sheer number of threads left hanging, are Joyce’s wry critique of the neatness of a resolved ancient tale.

  What all this proves is clear enough: the best literature is an act of profound criticism, and the finest criticism is literature in the highest sense. Far from sterilizing the creative act, a self-reflexive mind like Joyce’s enriches and illuminates it. After Joyce, criticism has grown more and more solemn, even as literature has learned increasingly to laugh at itself. In consequence, Ulysses is one of the few works to survive the transition from modern to post-modern without diminishment. Modernism asserted the magnificent self-sufficiency of art, and so does Ulysses by its comprehensive self-criticism; but postmodernism asserts the liberating insignificance of art, and so does Ulysses by its comprehensive self-mockery.

  THE LANGUAGE

  That mockery extends even to the notion of the written word itself. ‘Who ever anywhere will read these written words?’ asks Stephen Dedalus, in what may be one of the few lines written by Joyce with a completely straight face. He foresaw that the written word was doomed to decline in an age of electronic communications (which he himself had helped to usher in by opening one of the first cinemas in Dublin). This was yet another reason why he chose to base his work on a Greek legend which was told in oral narrative long before it was committed to writing. It was the fact that the words had to be written which bothered Joyce, who fretted over all that was lost in the transition from ether to paper. He himself would have preferred a musical to a literary career, and his works all gain greatly from being read aloud. For example, in the Nausicaa chapter, Bloom’s ecstasy at the sight of Gerty MacDowelFs legs is captured by a rising crescendo of ‘O’ sounds, after which she walks away, prompting him to ponder:

  Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O!

  The seemingly endless, repeated ‘O’ sound of the preceding passage is now a curt echo, as if in hollow mockery of Bloom’s earlier excitement; and it is fitting that the very line which describes his recognition of her lameness should itself limp along, with stops and starts after each word or two, as if to re-enact the difficulty of Gerty MacDowel’s movements. (Here the ever-cryptic Bloom needs only half a line to utter four sentences, in contrast with his wife who will later consume an entire chapter with just eight.) And, two pages later, the innocent, open sound of ‘O’ is again repeated, once in mockery, to record Boylan’s gasp of pleasure with Bloom’s wife, when indeed it is over-ridden by the more knowing, self-satisfied grunt of ‘Ah!’

  O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.

  Ah!

  That ‘Ah!’ may also be taken as the wistful sigh of a momentarily dejected man. The meaning of that musical passage is clear – the blushing beauty is lame, the fallen woman unsatisfied, her husband even more frustrated than ever. The epic of the body is, necessarily, by that very token, an epic of bodily frustration. Yet, in his pained recognition of the woman’s defect, Bloom has unwittingly created a line of pure poetry. Such effects abound throughout the book and they prove the major structuring device of the Sirens chapter. A child of Pater and the 1890s, Joyce created an art which aspired to the musical condition in which style and subject fuse.

  Ulysses, therefore, pronounces itself dissatisfied with previous writerly styles, offering pastiches of many, especially in the Oxen of the Sun chapter, in order to clear the way for a return to oral tradition with Molly Bloom. (This is one possible meaning of the massive full-stop at the close of the penultimate chapter.) By incorporating within its self-critical structure a sense of its possible obsolescence in a post-literate world, Ulysses is at once the consummation and the death-knell of the age of print. In that respect, too, it is very much of its time. When a concerned friend told Picasso that the cut-price canvas on which he worked would be rotting fifty years later, the artist simply shrugged and said that by then the paintings would have ceased to matter. The post-modern novel is now conceding, if not its absurdity, then its limited durability. If nervous authorial interventions marked the novel’s beginnings as a literary form, they may also signal its end.

  Joyce’s distrust of written English might have been predicted of a man who grew up in an essentially oral culture, but it had its source in his sense of trauma at the loss, in most parts of Ireland through the nineteenth century, of the native language. The fate of a sullen peasantry left floundering between two languages haunts the famous diary entry by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

  John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic papers please copy. He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English …

  Here, Joyce would seem to have been mocking the widespread hopes of a language revival, of opening the lines of communication to a Gaelic past; but it is also obvious from A Portrait that he was not fully happy about the English-speaking Ireland of the present. Though the old man might struggle to recall a few phrases of Irish for the student’s notebook, the truth, as Joyce saw it, was that English did not provide a comprehensive expressive ensemble for Irish people either. That is part of the tragicomedy of non-communication pondered by Stephen during a conversation with the Englishman who is dean of studies at his university:

  The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

  The death of language takes many forms besides fatigued cliche, and one of them was the loss of Irish. That passage posits an harassment of the Irish student’s emotional nature by the Englishman’s intellectual culture; on the subject of language, Joyce was resolutely conservative. He would have endorsed Daniel Corkery’s contention that the colonial education system offered most Irish children an alien medium through which to view their native land. This explains Stephen’s ‘unrest of spirit’, as he goes on to complain to a Gaelic Leaguer: ‘My ancestors threw off their language and took another … They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them.’ The hatred in that sentence is not for the Irish language but for the fact of its humiliation and repression. Shreds of Irish would turn up repeatedly in Ulysses – they are glossed in the footnotes here – and, again in Finnegans Wake, alongside many other languages. The artist in Joyce
was dissatisfied with aspects of the English language, despite its formidable expressive powers and despite the skill with which he realized its genius.

  Indeed, that dissatisfaction was a measure of the Joycean skill, for in extending the range of English, the artist inevitably found himself probing its limits. Living, like other Irish writers, at a certain angle to the English literary tradition, he could use it without superstition, irreverently, even insolently.

  The interior monologues of Ulysses permitted Joyce to contrast the richness of a man’s imaginative life with the poverty of his social intercourse. Compared with the tour deforce monologues, the recorded conversations are mostly unsatisfactory, a bleak illustration of Oscar Wilde’s witticism that everybody is good until they learn how to talk. Words in Ulysses are spoken as often to conceal as to reveal. The deepest feelings are seldom shared, and usually experienced by isolates. Bloom never does forgive his wife’s infidelity in an exchange of words, as he has already forgiven her in his mind.

  Similarly, the drinkers in Barney Kiernan’s pub never publicly confront Bloom with their private suspicions that he has won money on the Gold Cup and is meanly refusing to stand a round of drinks. The gap which they feel between themselves and the Jewish ad-canvasser prevents a formal complaint; and he is too naïve to catch the drift of their snide hints. Likewise, in the newspaper office, the conversation moves to its clichéd climax, each hoary anecdote aborted by another, each speaker interrupted by a rival performer, as Mr O’Madden Burke’s wordy anecdote is lost to men who would never have listened to it anyway. In such set-piece scenes, Joyce critically explores the quality of conversation among Irish men in groups, finding them fluent but all too seldom articulate. It goes without saying that they go without saying what is truly on their minds. They are as inarticulate in the face of Bloom as he will later be in the presence of Stephen and Molly. Only in solitude does Bloom scale poetic heights.