Ulysses: a
synopsis
Considered one of the most difficult works of modern
literature to penetrate, we here provide a simplified synopsis of the narrative
and point of James Joyce’s day-in-the-life-of-Dublin, Ulysses.
The novel can be understood in terms of two halves, split in
the middle by the tenth episode, named after an event in the ancient Greek myth
of Jason and the Argonauts. The other seventeen episodes are named (by critics—and
Joyce in his code-sheets or “schema”) after the Homeric epic, the Odyssey, in
which Odysseus—hero of the Trojan war, inventor of the Trojan horse—makes his
way home after ten years of war, only to encounter another harried ten years
getting home.
In general, we might describe the “plot” or narrative thread
as the tale of son in search of a consubstantial father, as a young man comes
under the wings of an older one; or, more in keeping with the Homeric parallel,
as the father’s search for a surrogate son and a lasting legacy. But, that
would over-look the real hero of this epic…even though she is only really heard
from in the final episode. Ulysses
tells the story of a transformation and Molly is the moly, the god’s nectar,
that binds the two ends of that process.
The first three episodes chronicle the return of Joyce’s proto-typical
artist, Stephen, from A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. He returned from Paris—where he was to create a new
science of aesthetic—nearly a year ago…to attend his mother’s funeral. A slave
to his artistic principles, Stephen would not even knee to pray at his mother’s
deathbed—her dying request.
As that morning ends, he collects his pay at the Dalkey
school and begins his quest—to be recognized by Dublin’s intellectual elite.
Ostensibly, in “Scylla and Charybdis,” he will try to get paid for the promise
to prepare a paper on his “Shakespeare Theory” for Eglinton’s literary
magazine. More to the point, he is trying to get an invitation to the party
that night celebrating Ireland’s new young artists. He won’t get one.
Instead, beginning early in the afternoon (“Aeolus”), he will
squander nearly half his week’s pay trying to keep an entourage of “friends”
around him by spending his money on alcohol. He would have spent more, had he not encountered an older gentleman, Leopold Bloom, who begins to look after the drunken
would-be artist like a surrogate father.
The next three episodes introduce us to this Bloom—the real
hero of this epic, a wily mock-Odysseus trying not to get home—at least not too early. His wife will consummate an
affair this afternoon with Bloom’s nemesis, Blazes Boylan. He knows; but, he
doesn't want to stop it. Some may think that this demonstrates Bloom’s impotence
and cowardice; however, in “Nausicaa,” where the dirty old man masturbates on
the beach, and in “Cyclops,” where he stands toe to toe with this Odyssey’s
giant, The Citizen, we readers clearly see that he is neither.
“Calypso” briefly introduces Bloom’s wife, Molly. But, her tour de force is the final episode, “Penelope.”
The next episode, “Lotus-Eaters” tells us that Bloom is having his own affair—but
a purely paper one—with a pen-pal named Martha (not coincidentally the name of
Stephen’s mother). And, in “Hades,” Bloom buries a friend of his, Paddy Dignam,
leading Bloom to contemplate his own legacy and the death of his only male
child—a Jewish father’s hope of siring the Messiah and the metaphorical statement
that Joyce’s Dublin is suffering from a barrenness—both in terms of the drought
plaguing Ireland as well as in terms of the spirit and freedom of the people,
constrained under the shackles of a Roman Church and a British language and
currency.
The next three episodes, “Aeolus,” “Lestrygonians,” and “Scylla
and Charybdis,” allow the two protagonists to share the narrative and actually
cross paths. Bloom opens the sequence entering the local newspaper office from
the lower level and rising to the editor’s office, where he begins his
fruitless struggle to earn his living (trying to an ad placed for his employer,
Alexander Keyes). Then, after Bloom has left, we re-encounter Stephen as he
enters the editor’s office (trying to get his boss’s hoof-and-mouth editorial
printed) and walks them down and out to a bar.
The next episode is Bloom’s as he makes a “moral” choice to
avoid the animalistic men in The Burton, preferring to go the extra effort and
walk to Davy Byrne’s pub. This sets our hero on his path, by a twist of fate,
to where he will rejoin Stephen in Episode Fourteen, and brings together the
theme of the next male heir. Bloom, no longer able to move forward on his work
mission, takes up the quest of helping provide for Dignam’s young son. Along
the way he encounters an old girlfriend, asks a question, is misunderstood,
and, through her reply to the wrong question, Bloom learns that another old
friend is on the verge of giving birth, Mina Purefoy. He will meet Stephen
later in the afternoon as he stops by to visit the pregnant woman.
Finally, in this group, we find Stephen at the National
Library, trying to impress the local intellectuals—including the guy who
publishes that literary magazine. He explains his “Hamlet Theory,” which comes
down to a disingenuous attempt to provide a “genetic” basis for Shakespeare’s
genius, in short, that the Bard is a wounded cuckold—as evidenced by his will
in which he gives his wife the “second-best bed”—creating his female characters
out of spite.
Obviously, Joyce is taking a shot at his own method here. He
was known to stick so close to actual events and situations, he was once
supposed to have said to a friend that one could rebuild Dublin from his prose
if it were ever lost. The rhetorical device he employs is called verisimilitude—making
the reader think that what is described actually exists (or, existed). He uses
this technique in a very straight-forward way in the first half of the novel—what
we've just been through. For instance, employing what has been called “interior
monologue.” This style works because it closely imitates the way we think—giving
the reader the impression we are actually inside the mind of the one who the
writer describes as thinking.
In the second half of the novel, Joyce pushes this technique to the extremes to make fun of one of the prevailing aesthetic systems of his day,
naturalism, such as was popularized by Émile Zola. From Episode Ten to the end,
each episode takes on one of Aristotle’s paradigms of art, either “proper” or “improper.”
Joyce doesn't do this to show how flexible he can be; he’s trying to make
explicit the “work of the artist,” or what Stephen had called the “personality
of the artist” in Portrait (p. 202).
In “The Wandering Rocks,” Joyce throws to the winds Aristotle’s
insistence upon a “unity of time and place” in a work of art. Little vignettes,
what Joyce called “epiphanies,” trace key players as the narrative skips and
dances all over Dublin, demonstrating a general condition of malaise as the
various characters go about their selfish or vain enterprises.
The next seven episodes as a group demonstrate Aristotle’s
distinction between “proper,” or “static,” and “improper,” or “kinetic” art. In
short: “proper” art engages the mind; “improper” art engages the mind and body.
The first three, “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” and “Nausicaa,” detail the “improper” form through Joyce’s narrative portrayal of song, oratory, and erotic fiction. The
next four, “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” “Eumaeus,” and “Ithaca,” portray four “proper”
or “static” forms: literature, drama, story-telling (the art of the homeridae),
and dialectic.
“Sirens” expresses in
the rhythm of images an emotional aesthetic where—rather than concentrating on
a “scene” or “location”—Joyce focuses purely on the sounds of our life. The
episode opens with a list of key “themes” that will play out in the narrative.
These themes amount to the episode’s “notes,” the opening list to a musical
piece’s “sheet-music,” and the rest of the episode to a fugue’s performance.
“Cyclops” shows how emotions and fancy speech can sway an
argument in such a way that—even though all the writer is doing is describing—the
“truth” behind any tale becomes submerged behind a wall of prejudice. The “style”
actually pits two narrators against each other in this episode to see who can
best describe Bloom’s encounter with the fervent nationalist called only The
Citizen, actually a hobbled bigot who makes his throne upon a bar-stool. While
the one voice, whom we name “Narrator” with a capitol “N,” describes the scene
in a naturalistic voice, the answering narrator is actually Joyce making fun of
the daily press by re-casting each of “Narrator’s” descriptions in the typical
forms of reporting language.
“Nausicaa,” too, has two narrators—sort of. The first half
of the episode is narrated by the internal monologue of Bloom-as-Gerty,
imagining what he wants her to think in her most private thoughts of him as he
leers at her, while he does the deed with his hand in his pocket. Then, the
second half is back to Bloom-as-Bloom, which is Joyce writing what he wants us
to think of as Bloom’s most private thoughts.
“Oxen of the Sun” compares two chronologies, the ontogeny of
English literature and the ontogeny of Mina Purefoy's new child. “Circe”
provides a script for a play that cannot be staged. And, “Eumaeus” pits various
story-tellers against each other—all trying to get their own point across—but
all being judged more by their appearance than the content of their tales.
Finally, in this group, “Ithaca” presents a narrative stripped down to its bare
minimum. The narrator here is at best an interviewer picking the questions and
arranging their order to best tell the story; the narrative becomes a list and litany
of responses.
After the reader has been through this mill, there is one
last episode to master—arguably one of the finest pieces of “story-telling”
ever written. Joyce once again pushes verisimilitude to the extreme; but, now,
there is no narrator. As we trusted the first half of “Nausicaa” as Gerty, we
now trust these as the true, inner-most thoughts of Molly—but, we do so without
any narrator’s help telling us readers whose kiss she truly preferred, etc.
There is no “world,” per
se; no artificial Dublin that the writer has to recreate. No scene that
supports and surrounds the narrative; we hear what Molly hears as she hears it and feel what she feels. She doesn’t even bother to punctuate her thoughts. We don’t
do that in our own thoughts, do we? So why should there be any punctuation
here?
But, we do note that at least two formal aspects
of narrative text remain. There are eight paragraphs and two periods, one in the middle and one at the end. The reader can imagine what he or she
wants to about this odd structural arrangement of text; regardless, the
paragraphs tell a clear story. Molly first regresses in her mind through four
ages, mother, wife, lover, girl, from her husband’s returning to bed that night
to her earliest memories as a child in Gibraltar. Then, her memories retrace
the stages of her life, from youth to this night again.
What has changed in the double coursing of her life? What
has changed from the way we learned of her through the eyes of the citizens of
Joyce’s Dublin, as the harlot, mother, and witch of the first seventeen
episodes? We might think that Molly has changed the most of the characters—having
explored her own adventure this day; but, at the conclusion of what amounts to
a 1609-line-long Shakespearean soliloquy, where the actor turns to the audience
and speaks truth, we realize that Molly has changed very little. What has
changed is the way we see her.
Was all this madness worth it? As we said in the beginning
the novel is a story of transformation. In character, narrative, and plot,
Joyce described the process as a metaphor for artistic creation. In short, he
asks how is it possible to mature from a frustrated young man—desirous to
create artistically, but as yet un-tested and incomplete as a person, and
therefore incapable of creating—into a calm, clever, older man, who manages to
lose his wife and win her back again—all in the same day. (Why, you can figure
out.)
The point of the book is—in the words of Joyce’s biographer,
Richard Ellmann—an epithalamium, a nuptial ode, to the day he first walked out
with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. That was Bloomsday, June 16, 1904. And,
until that moment—as Joyce has Stephen express in narrative—he, the writer, had
felt so isolated and alone since the passing of his mother, that it was as if his spirit were in a prison, or chained to a rock. As Stephen must
learn to sever the guilt that chains him as a boy to his mother, so Joyce had
to engage into a mature relationship with a woman before
he could truly understand creation.
So, what is the point of Ulysses?
Joyce is telling us that an artist’s creation has to be as pure and truthful—and
still as beautiful—as a child. Or, in other words, as an imitation of the way
in which God created us, an artist must learn to create his or her art in a metaphorical
parallel with procreation. That aesthetic principle will be put to the test in Finnegans Wake…a test which we will
discuss in our next synopsis….
…on Finnegans Wake
