The Trojan Horse
Last night I finished my major summer reading: on my third attempt in as many decades, I finally finished Ulysses. How do I feel? Well, I keep asking myself that question. I guess I feel relieved to be done and proud of myself for actually finishing it, bu mostly I feel rather exhausted, somewhat annoyed, somewhat amused. In some ways I still don't know what to make of it. Perhaps that's what Joyce intended, and perhaps that's part of what makes it a great book: the fact that you are never really done with it, and it's never really done with you.
My longtime blog friend Loren (In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See) also finished the book last night, and he's written some initial thoughts here. Lorianne (Hoarded Ordinaries) is in the middle of it, and she made some good points in the comments over there. Earlier this summer several online friends and I decided to tackle the book; we figured that, as with exercise, we'd be more likely to stick to it if we had company, and that proved to be true.
Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops cave by hiding under a ram
Like Loren, I also read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; I should have started with it but actually read it as a kind of detour when I found myself in danger of completely losing both my way and my desire to finish Ulysses itself. That was a good idea; Portrait really helped to contextualize Ulysses, and to place Joyce (through his character Stephen Daedalus) in his own narrative. It was also interesting to enter the Catholic-steeped, "priest-ridden" (to use Joyce's own words) Irish culture not long after the death of Parnall, and compare it with what I have learned about Quebec, where I now live, another formerly-priest-ridden culture filled with nationalist sentiment and many problems that are circularly debated to this day, trapping the society in a provincial, insecure mindset that still keeps it from truly looking outward.
In the famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait, Joyce describes a family fight over Catholicism and Nationalism, about loyalty to the Church vs loyalty to the nationist cause, that degenerates into hopelessness about the future. Daedalus/Joyce observes this as a boy; it is the first Christmas where he has been allowed to eat dinner with the adults, only to see the eagerly-anticipated event devolve into a complete disaster, with the family members at each other's throats. Later on in the book, people speak of their hopes for Daedalus, a young man of bright intelligence; he flirts with religious devotion, and is even vetted for the priesthood. But no, he says to a friend eventually, I hope to fly by all those nets. He want to escape becoming ensnared in Catholicism, in politics, even in academia. At the end of Portrait, we still don't see how. Ulysses is Joyce's answer.
Odysseus kills the suitors who want his wife and kingdom.
--
As an intellectual and literary monument Ulysses is fraught with “oughts”: I ought to read it, I ought to understand it, I ought to like it, I ought to say it is great. Frankly I think a lot of literary intellectuals lie about Ulysses: very few have actually read it all the way through. I did my own informal poll, and even people I was certain would have read it -- Oxford-educated literary clergy among them -- admitted they had not. And there are good reasons for that. After adeceptive start, the prose becomes as dense as a rain forest and you, the already-soaked and miserable reader, have neither machete nor macintosh; what you do have is the path behind you, you can turn around and go home, and most of us do. I certainly did, twice before. The verbal pyrotechnics can be extremely annoying; I don't want to have to read a book with a concordance in order to "get" everything, and I don't want to sit and listen to sophomoric male sparring: I had enough of that in college to last me a lifetime.
As for the structure of the book, I'm quite familiar with the Odyssey, but my copy of Ulysses didn't include the later notes and chapter headings, written by scholars arguing for the book's acceptance and legal publication, explaining the parallel scenes in Joyce's book and Homer's epic. I struggled to try orient myself in the two narratives, only getting the big picture after finishing, when I read the Wikipedia notes. As I quipped to a friend, part way through, "I think I prefer the original."
But actually none of this intellectual density ended up mattering to me. Once I had read Portrait, I was able to cut Stephen Daedalus a break because now I knew where he was coming from and what he was reacting against. I read several essays about the reaction to the book, when it was written, which helped me to understand the larger cultural context into which Ulysses exploded, and why what Joyce was doing was so revolutionary and shocking at the time. I read a good deal about Virginia Woolf's struggles with the book, and her friend T.S. Eliot's unmitigated praise for it.
I made a decision that it was OK not to read every word; and when pages became, for instance, simply a long list of names, I treated it the same way I once treated Deuteronomy; I got the gist of it and skimmed until I could find a footing again. Reading Ulysses became a lot like being immersed in a swiftly-moving streams: smooth, slower stretches alternated with rapids, where sometimes there was a footing, and sometimes one needed to just let go and be carried along by the sheer volume of words, feeling underneath with one's bare feet for a rock, trusting that there would eventually be a secure place to rest, get one's breath, look around, and start up again.
That stream could also be a description of the inside of our heads, and certainly this is one of the book's main points. As a longtime meditator, I'm aware of watching the stream of thoughts, experiencing the calmer places where one can rest, as well as the disorienting babble of the uncontrolled, unleashed, drifting mind. One of Modernism's goals was to explore the emerging awareness of human psychology in literature, and so we got various versions of this stream-of-consciousness writing: Joyce's, Faulkner's, Woolf's, Beckett's.
By her loom, Penelope and her son Telemachus await Odysseus's return
But there is also a meta aspect to Ulysses, I think. With words, Joyce is describing the minds of his characters as they go through their day in Dublin. But as the reader, you are also invited not only to examine your own thoughts, your own consciousness (both self- and sub-) in general, ("yes, I'm like Bloom, or Stephen, or Molly, I've thought like that too"), but to look back on the reading experience itself and say, wait a minute, this is what I've been doing as I read. I've had moments of clarity, periods of inattention and boredom, moments when I "got" the world depicted and moments when I was totally lost, periods when all I wanted to do was eat, or think about clothes, get up and go to the bathroom, make love.
Joyce knew what he was doing: he said that he'd given the professors enough material that they'd be occupied for the next hundred years trying to figure out what it all meant. On the surface that sounds like more of Stephen Daedalus's arrogance, but I wonder if Joyce -- entirely familiar with academia and literary critics -- wasn't simply pointing a wry finger at his own well-constructed smokescreen, knowing most of them wouldn't, and couldn't, see past it. The real brilliance of the book, I suspect, is not its erudition, verbal alacrity, or monumental pile of obscure references, but what it tells us about simple humanity; what it says about who we all are underneath our chosen veneers: human minds in physical bodies, and beautiful for it -- in spite of all our sins, excesses, failings, weaknesses and posturings.
After all, Ulysses - Odysseus in the Greek original - was a trickster. Known for his intelligence but most of all for his guile and cunning, he was relied upon by Agamemnon and all the Greeks. A major aspect of the Iliad is the way in which Achilles' physical prowess as a warrior, fired by anger, jealousy, and self-righteousness, is pitted against Odysseus' cooly rational intelligence and cunning. In the end, the Greek victory after nine years of fighting is not due to Achilles, for the Trojans had their extraordinary warriors too, but because of Odysseus, who devised the most famous battle strategem of all time, the Trojan Horse. The enemy, concealed and unsuspected, was lauded and wheeled right into the heart of the city.
Odysseus and Nausicaa; her father wanted him to remain and marry her, but Odysseus chose to return to his family.
Joyce's Ulysses is definitely a journey of homecoming, but I think the author has embedded his own brilliant ruse within it. You think it is this, he says to the academics and critics, and gives them, as Homer did, an adventure filled with monsters and seductresses, dangers and surprises, and enough complications, details and symbols to keep them busy forever. Wheeled into the heart of academic and literary tradition, the Trojan Horse opens, and shatters what had existed.
Meanwhile, like Odysseus, who alone of the Greeks came safely home, Joyce himself "flies by all those nets." He show us a possibility of finding our true home, beyond any concept of institution, nation, or family expectation. It's no mere coincidence that Homer titled the penultimate chapter of the Odyssey, "The Great Rooted Bed," and its final chapter, "Peace."
Well done reading "Ulysses" - I never managed to. "Finnegan's Wake" next, Beth!
Posted by: Vivien | August 28, 2012 at 03:07 PM
Thank you for this beautiful musing, Beth. I'm chagrined to discover that while I read Ulysses with great enjoyment one summer during college, I don't seem to have the stamina to stick with it now. Maybe it helped that I was backpacking and it was the only English-language book in my backpack! Today there are just too many competing pulls on my time. Alas.
But I love your point that The real brilliance of the book, I suspect, is not its erudition, verbal alacrity, or monumental pile of obscure references, but what it tells us about simple humanity; what it says about who we all are underneath our chosen veneers: human minds in physical bodies, and beautiful for it -- in spite of all our sins, excesses, failings, weaknesses and posturings. That's a lovely insight.
Posted by: Rachel Barenblat | August 28, 2012 at 03:39 PM
Beth, you hit the nail squarely on the head with this sentence: But as the reader, you are also invited not only to examine your own thoughts, your own consciousness (both self- and sub-) in general, ("yes, I'm like Bloom, or Stephen, or Molly, I've thought like that too"), but to look back on the reading experience itself and say, wait a minute, this is what I've been doing as I read.
Yes, yes, yes. That's it exactly, and not just regarding Joyce, but other challenging books, too. Reading Ulysses is only partly "about" Ulysses: it's also about reading, and what it means to follow someone's stream-of-consciousness while wading/surfing/drowning in one's own "stream."
I'm still determined to finish it, although I've been reading other, less-demanding stuff in the meantime. I think you were smart to go back and re-read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I read that so many years ago that I don't remember much of it, other than I don't think I liked it. (Dedalus is a tough character to like, I think, perhaps because he seems to be so overwrought and absorbed in himself.)
Posted by: Lorianne | August 28, 2012 at 03:53 PM
Well I think you've done Ulysses proud.
If I say it's my favourite novel (read it three or four times, can't remember which) that must be set against the many failures in my pygmy literary life: The Brothers K (Five goes, the last one fading into inanition round about page 300), Conrad (not a word other than the The Secret Agent which is surely atypical), Lawrence (only - to my acute shame - Lady C), Tristram Shandy (Uh-uh, first page only), Don Quixote (Completed but without a scintilla of pleasure).
In saying one has read U one must be prepared for the extreme lack of interest this achievement engenders in others. As a result I have never recommended it to anyone although I have, in a minor way, helped those have made a genuine stab. The key is the crib, in my case Anthony Burgess's ReJoyce. There is no way I would have worked out which chapter in U represented which passage in the O
without it - more particularly Why? Also one needs the guidance of someone who is demonstrably not posing and AB, so egocentric in many other ways, made that first important connection - a sympathy for Bloom that eventually becomes a form of love, as the reader looks deeper and deeper into the mirror and sees him/herself shockingly naked.
I should also add another important influence: Edmund Wilson's essay about U in Axel's Castle. Clear and calm, yet a voyage of mounting excitement.
Again I find myself envying you (first the choir, now this) in being able to write about the first homecoming. You have touched on far more than I could ever manage and your scholarship does you enormous credit. I can only usefully tell you my reactions on completing the third (or fourth) reading. I was astonished how much remains impenetrable. I simply do not have the formal education to pick up the allusions (often extremely windy) in the Dedalus sections. I try and tell myself I should be making a better shift at this and there are tiny new enlightenments. But the further discovery is that whereas these passages are important and must be gone through (I treat them as difficult poetry, another area of literary failure for me) not understanding them is perfectly admissible; as you have pointed out, one cannot escape the conviction that there are parts which many of us will simply not get. "Word music" as GBS says, referring sneeringly to Shakespeare, but which seems to fill the bill here.
I do hope you read it again. You have recorded your impressions mightily, so there will be no obligation the next time.
And when, and if, you can find time, persuade someone who cares to buy the Naxos 22-CD audio set of the complete text (the result of a private passion of Naxos's founder) which is marvellously well read (Nay - Sung!) and which will cause further tons of scale to fall away. Welcome home!
Posted by: Lorenzo da Ponte | August 29, 2012 at 02:41 AM
Thank you, Beth, and well done. I have read the Portrait, Dubliners and Ulysses, but not yet Finnegans Wake (no apostrophe). Surely the closing few pages of "The Dead" are amongst the most exquisite ever written? The thing that struck me, as a Dubliner, about Ulysses was how helpful a knowledge of the city was to its reading. In fact, I found myself continuously wondering how the book appeared to that vast majority of readers lacking such local knowledge. (Joyce playing with me, no doubt...). Needless to say, a familiarity with the city is quite irrelevant, and the last thing that Joyce wanted anyway was a book that remained provincial/parochial. If there's anything he was after, it was transcendence, and he got it. To add to Lorenzo's suggestions, I would recommend Ellmann's Joyce, which tells the wonderful story of Nora, Trieste, Paris and Joyce's love-hate relationship with Ireland -- the sow that eats her own farrow, as he memorably put it.
Posted by: Robert | August 29, 2012 at 10:26 AM
Wonderful to read this, Beth, the careful writings of a careful reader... I think you have it spot on about the Trojan Horse.
Posted by: Pica | August 29, 2012 at 10:40 AM
Not sure I totally understand everything here but for sure know lots more about Joyce's book Ulysses without having to actually read it.Thanks for falling on the grenade so to speak on this.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was on the list for an English course at the U. long,long ago and I managed to pass without having to read it then as well.I recall reading about Sylvia Beach who published Joyce in Paris in the 20's,at I think, some risk to herself and finding Joyce to be a difficult individual.Difficult individual,difficult book, I'll pass.
Posted by: john | August 30, 2012 at 12:34 AM
You're making me laugh with the grenade remarks, John! It definitely felt like that sometimes. It's OK, you don't have to read it! Thanks for writing.
Posted by: Beth | August 30, 2012 at 09:20 AM
Thanks for sharing your reading impressions / reflections. i started to read Ulysses twice, and reading your lines made me a) remember a story that i wrote at the start of the second read (which i just recovered from files and moved back to a story page in fictionaut: "A monkey puzzle rocket burst" - http://fictionaut.com/stories/dorothee-lang/a-monkey-puzzle-rocket-burst --- and b) give the impulse to look for that Ulysses copy that must be somewhere.. not planning to read it all, but to dip into it.
Posted by: Dorothee | August 30, 2012 at 12:21 PM
Dorothee, your story is fantastic and I hope everyone who comes here to this post goes and reads it, whether or not they've read Ulysses (and it doesn't matter if they have.) Thanks so much for remembering, and sharing the link here.
Posted by: Beth | August 31, 2012 at 01:30 PM
Beth, glad you enjoyed the Monkey Puzzle. And i now found that Ulysses copy, and read some passages - and then did a quick calculation: reading it at a pace of a page a day would make it a 3-year-read. which just shows how much is in it. i guess i will keep dipping into it on random for now.
Posted by: Dorothee | August 31, 2012 at 04:41 PM
I love your comments here. From what you say, I agree that the "smokescreen" of erudition in Joyce's work is the MacGuffin, to use Hitchcock's concept. I didn't have too much trouble reading Ulysses, but I couldn't make it through Finnegan's Wake. And Joyce is not one of my favorite writers.
Yet I spent an an entire dissertation and many papers unravelling Nabokovian games of a similar sort.
Posted by: Robbi Nester | September 01, 2012 at 10:00 AM
From today's Irish Times, poet Paul Muldoon on Joyce: “The thing about Joyce and many great writers who had such a particular style is that you can only go down that road a certain distance. There was a particular poem I wrote, Cows, which has a lot of what one might call Joycean linguistic play in it, and I realised, more or less as I was writing it, that this was not a route I could go down any farther. You just turn into a half-baked version of Joyce, which for some people is sort of what he turned into anyway himself. Take Finnegans Wake. Startling though it is in some respects, it’s like a huge pile of stuff at the end of a road . . . It’s a dead end. There is no future in that.”
Posted by: Robert | September 03, 2012 at 06:14 AM
Sorry it took me so long to get to this, but I've been without internet access for a little over a week. Just now getting caught up on the blog entries I've missed.
I went back one more step and read Joyce's The Dubliners and it added even more light to Ulyssess as it handles many of the same theme in a very succinct style. Hard to believe the two were written by the same author.
Since I tend to read for "ideas," i.e. themes, your insights gave me a different way of viewing the novel, though it's unlikely that at this stage of my life I'm going to change my reading preferences. I'm definitley not going to read Finnegan's Wake, but reading Ulysses inspired me to order four books on William Blake. I figured that if I could devote this much effort to reading someone whose work I really didn't like I could certainly expend the same energy on a poet whose works I always wished I understood better.
Posted by: loren | September 10, 2012 at 11:24 PM
I remember reading this but same as your reaction, I also can't understand most of the things discussed in it. I even had to ask a friend who was so good in literature to explain to me some parts of the book which, no matter what I do, I couldn't understand. Good thing, my friend was patient enough to explain it to me. After hearing her explanation, I found the piece amazing and a work of art that should be read by every single individual living in this world.
Posted by: writing dissertation | September 11, 2012 at 12:31 AM