Friday, January 16, 2015

Added footnotes and references to my "Joyce and Dante: Is Bloom Satan?" presentation on my YouTube Channel:


Please check them out and add comments ("like" if they appeal to you).

Thanks!

Here are the individual links:

Part 8 (Handouts): <http://youtu.be/BQmaREZwl_U>

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

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
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a synopsis

In his youth James Joyce wrote a lecture entitled “A Portrait of the Artist,” in which he begins to outline his own theory of aesthetics before Dublin’s artistic community. As he matured, he began to present the search for and development of this “new science of aesthetic” in terms of a semi-autobiographical novel to be called Stephen Hero.

That novel’s hero, Stephen Daedalus—a closer approximation of the mythological Greek inventor’s name than we find in the final form—works on just such a paper that he will present to the Dublin Literary and Historical Society. While this version never made it to print in Joyce’s day, it has since appeared, and in its pages we can see Joyce working on and maturing the aesthetic theory he will have Stephen Dedalus declare in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea….The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson, Viking Press, New York, 1968, p. 202.]

Through the other novels we will see what Joyce’s Stephen means by the “personality of the artist”; and, how one refines it out of existence. And, we will see why Joyce compares the artist to the God of Creation—but, his version “indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
First, though, in this novel—considered Joyce’s most intelligible work—Joyce will describe in a naturalistic voice the birth of the literary hero in five stages:

  • Chapter I, Pandy Bat Hero: “Justice” vs. “Authority”; Stephen challenges Father Dolan’s error.
  • Chapter II, Insubstantial Father: “Wolf pack” or “Steppenwolf”; from running like a pack animal to disguising his father’s tremors, Stephen comes of age; but, “he’s not his father’s son” (p. 85).
  • Chapter III, Serving Heaven or among the heavens: “Percival in sight of the Grail”; Stephen witnesses the ciborium come to him (p. 136), aping sermons of Italian Jesuit Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti; but, the chapter ends with a “prostitute’s lingual kiss.”[1]
  • Chapter IV, Bous Stephaneforos (Greek, ευφορος, “fertile”): “Son of Daedalus”; and his “soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable” (p. 159). Stephen, the sacrificial bull, exclaims “Where is boyhood now?” At this “Beatrice” moment,[2] beauty arrests his aesthetic spirit (p. 160).
  • Chapter V, Moses, the Pisgah Scion: “First flight of the Phoenix”; the longest chapter opens with a weary Stephen calling on women to bring water (Moses, the frustrated scion who almost got into the Promised Land). His own father calls him a bitch, Simon playing Pharaoh. Stephen will struggle for his artistic voice, and, in the struggle will meet a yellow-swearing Lynch (Vincent Cosgrave, Nora’s “rival”[3]) on Page 189, and then a fig-chewing Cranly on Page 213 reading a text called Diseases of the Ox…a name that will impale Stephen as the “failed protagonist” when we next meet him….

in Ulysses





[1] REllmann (a), p. 298.
[2] After Dante Aligheri’s first sight of his poetic muse, Beatrice Portinari, who would guide him between Purgatorio and Paradiso. Ellmann says Joyce had his own in 1898, (a) p. 442.
[3] REllmann (a), p. 160.
I believe that James Joyce set out to accomplish the revolution that he has his young protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, declare in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea….The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing his fingernails.” [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson, Viking Press, New York, 1968, p. 202.]

He did this in twenty-four stages each of which represents a chapter, episode, or book in his body of narrative fiction, as follows:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.................. 5 Chapters
Ulysses....................................................................... 18 Episodes
Finnegans Wake........................................................ 1 loop in 4 books,

or…

…the 24th hour of the Joycean Opus Day