The Great Bloomsday Tortoise

Team Ulysses finally made it to the summit and have every reason to be proud of themselves. This was essentially a year-long online book group devoted to reading the world's second most unreadable English-language novel (actually the first, if you consider Finnegans Wake to be multi-lingual) at sixty pages a month, beginning on Bloomsday '09, ending a week last Wednesday, and hosted and led by the oft-linked-to dovegreyreader.

I left a partly encouraging, slightly patronising comment on the initial post, bestowing a handful of brief impressions of my own, as I'd begun Ulysses in December '08. I'd been working up to it for some time, having read The Odyssey in the Fagles translation at the beginning of the year, and then Dubliners and A Portrait. I was also dipping into Anthony Burgess's Here Comes Everybody, picked up second-hand a few years before, which is typically fluid, intelligent, enthusiastic.

By the time Team Ulysses began I had read around 200 pages. I toyed with the notion of taking part, but I had already been a member of a book group, and the joint-reading thing just doesn't ring my bell. (Anyway, I was well ahead of them.) Real life and other interests intervened, and when I got round to hefting Ulysses again, nearly a year had gone by. The hare had slept too long.

I have now completed 300 pages. It has gone back on the shelf. It won't be taken down again for a while. I have some sympathy with Roddy Doyle's invective against Ulysses, still more with his criticism of what he terms 'the Joyce industry', but most of all with something I heard him say in interview in 1996: at some point one has to accept that there are some books one is probably never going to read. He was talking about War and Peace (which he did in fact read, very quickly, when he was in his teens), but for me the most likely candidate is Ulysses. At some point I'll have a go at the final chapter, the famous Molly monologue, but I make no promises regarding the rest of it.

Now this is interesting, because that makes three key modernist novels I've been unable to finish: Ulysses, The Good Soldier, and That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. Perhaps I'm too bound to narrative, skewered by time's arrow, but in my more frustrated moments it seems as though modernism is simply a licence for the writer not to bother telling a story - and Al Alvarez, who if I recall correctly thinks it was the last great movement in European literature and possibly its high point, can go suck a runny egg.

From Here Comes Everybody [1965]:

[Ulysses] is, in many ways, a precursor of the new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopedia - something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator. The 'Wandering Rocks' episode of Ulysses is a reminder that the whole book has a spatial scheme in which time has been divested of its bullying hurry-along authority, and this is reinforced by the knowledge that the final image is of a human body, presented piecemeal in its various organs. Time is the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it. Time has to be put in its place.

On the other hand, one only has so much of it, particularly when one sees the chapters getting longer and longer, and Joyce's accretive writing method becoming more in need of a fierce edit. The two most attractive words in the quoted section above are 'partly read'. I accept that this is close to a contradiction of a recent post on the virtues of browsing, but whaddaya know? I am legion - I mean to say, I contain multitudes.

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I find one thing to say without equivocation in defence of Ulysses, and have said it before: one does get to know Bloom to a degree that one simply doesn't and can't with the characters in Dubliners. (Dubliners, I should say, is one of the very few books which I think demonstrates art in prose, as opposed to craft, and which I would urge other people to read without feeling I was being an unjustified nuisance.) Orwell says something of the same in his essay on Dickens:

You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Pierre Bezukhov. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine yourself talking to - Bloom, for instance [...]

Just so, and this is down to the space that a novel affords, and to the terrific expansion in technique beyond the standard tropes of realism which Joyce made use of in Dubliners, the famous 'stream-of-consciousness' which has been very interesting to see at work.

The more Bloom is exposed, the more one sees of his various aspects (or inspects, as so much of what we read is internal mumblings, half-finished thoughts and reflections, flashes of desire and surges of memory), the more one appreciates him. Among other things, he is much more sympathetic than any of the Dubliners: kind, tolerant, humble, fallible - in fact, the complete opposite to his Homeric counterpart, who is cunning, proud, violent, resourceful, respected - a king, not an advertising canvasser - and of course fiercely protective of his wife's virtue, whereas Bloom is a cuckold perfectly aware and accepting of his position.

According to the introduction by Jeri Johnson in the OWC edition of Ulysses, Joyce saw that the ancient heroic attributes could not be applied to modern urban life, and sought to present an everyman heroic in his ordinariness, his life being lived internally rather than through action. It's an interesting notion, particularly in the light of a criticism by Gore Vidal:

Until the last century the mainline of imaginative literature had always been stories of the gods, heroes, kings of a people. From Aeschylus to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoi, what went on in the palaces or on Olympus provided the main line of narrative in verse, prose, drama. [What about The Beggar's Opera? Tom Jones? Simplicissimus? But perhaps these are stops on a branch line.] I think it a pity that, as a character in Saul Bellow's Herzog remarks, somewhere around 1840 the novel fell into the quotidian, to which Professor Herzog irritably asks, So where was it standing before it fell? The answer was in myth or history or whatever narrative is back of us.

[From the introduction to Creation.]

I'm not convinced by either argument, but I see the merits of both. It is of course Joyce's right to rework the ancient myths for modernity (and Modernism), but with considerable relief I'm going back to Richard III.

Modern myth-making

From the introduction by Declan Kiberd to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses:

The human need to make myths is very deep-rooted, since myths are symbolic projections of the cultural and moral values of a society, figurings of its psychic state. The French Revolution, which purported to put an end to all myth-making, instituted the myth of modernity, the notion of perpetual renewal which animated spirits as diverse as those of Ezra Pound ('make it new') and Leon Trotsky ('permanent revolution').

Standing on the verge of modernity in 1800, Schlegel [...] foretold the emergence of a new mythology, which would be less a radical act of creation than a 'collaboration' between old and new. Ancient myths embodied people's immediate response to their physical experience and were not seen as fictive by their adherents; but the new mythology would be abstract and aware of its own fictive status.

There is much more in Prof Kiberd's introduction which I find both interesting and useful (and some which I find simply baffling), but this part struck me as an excellent description of Alan Garner's work in Strandloper and Thursbitch. Strandloper even has what seems to me to be a self-referential line where one of the characters foretells the writing of the book, with an oblique nod to Garner himself.

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I don't feel the reading of Ulysses is going too badly - seven chapters out of the way, though that only comes to about 150 pages. The more I read of it, and around it, the more I think I'm getting out of it; nevertheless, it feels less that one is reading it, more that one has engaged with it - or that it's moved in. I feel a little like Deep Thought - irrevocably committed to thinking about the ultimate question and unable to deal with anything else until the answer's been found. I am certainly finding that it changes the way you think and perceive, though I'm not sure I can articulate in what way. A Joycean way, I suppose. Whatever else, it's certainly an excellent whetting stone for the faculties - I'm reading Bleak House for light relief and finding that an absolute doddle by comparison.

Admittedly Martin Amis poses a good question - who on earth reads Ulysses? Not researches it, studies it, consults it - who actually curls up with it in bed?

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Ulysses came top of the 1998 Random House Modern Library board's list for the 100 best novels published since 1900. A little pointy-headed, you might say, and I'd agree, but still preferable to the readers' choice of Atlas Shrugged. And if that gars ye grue, the non-fiction list is positively frightening. That's your argument in defence of pointy-heads and gatekeepers right there.

Room at the Bottom

We all know the joys of degradation. Perhaps I should rephrase that: We must all have lived through times when we discover it was pleasurable, even relaxing, to run ourselves down. […] Then we find ourselves in a place where we can wallow blissfully in our existence, our smell, our filth, our habits, the place where we can abandon all hope of self-improvement and stop trying to nurture optimistic thoughts about other human beings. This resting place is so comfortable that we cannot help feeling grateful for the anger and selfishness that has brought us to this moment of freedom and solitude.

From Chapter 36, ‘Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: the Joys of Degradation’, in Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk:

A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought his steps to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.
- That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

From Chapter 2 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.