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.

*

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.

*

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?

*

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.

Shakespeare Satori

The most intensive period of study in my life - so far - was for my A-Levels. For English Literature I suppose we studied about 6-8 key texts, one of which was Hamlet, so the damn thing is in there for good. From time to time I find myself thinking about it or drawing on it, and today it came to me that Hamlet's very last line, "The rest is silence", which can be taken to mean that Hamlet is saying, 'here is the end of my life and there is nothing more to be said - everything has been acted out - make of it what you will', can be heard as "Th' arrest is silence"; in other words, death is the end of speech.

This obviously resonates with the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and it struck me that although Hamlet is a play very much taken up with and informed by ideas of death, most of what Hamlet does is talk, an activity solely the preserve of the living. At the end of the play, when he's confronted with the actuality of what he's so far considered exclusively in theory, he finds, ironically, there is nothing to say.

I've always had a problem, as I suppose many people have, with Hamlet's inactivity. Four or four-and-a-half acts of doing bugger-all, and then he finally gets it together. Laertes, by contrast, learns of his father's death and immediately sets out with sword in hand. But the whole revenge and retribution thing is really only what George Saunders calls the Apparent Narrative Device, and what he calls the dirt, the thing the writer loves to do and which the reader only gradually realises is the thing that s/he actually came for, is this exploration of Hamlet's character; this growing-to-awareness is actually what the play's about.

If this seems obvious to the point of scarcely worth mentioning, I can only apologise and cop to being a bear of little brain, but it did solve for me a problem I've had for twenty years. I may have been able to articulate the above argument before now, and for all I know I have done, but I think this is the first time I've had a solid gut feeling about it.

I doubt if I'd have come to it if it hadn't been for reading Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence, wherein she says something along the lines of, we write because not to do so is to give in to death, and to those who would control our lives through our silence. (I paraphrase greatly.)

Incidently, if you haven't read Saunder's essay on Huckleberry Finn in The Brain-Dead Megaphone, I commend it highly. I admit to not having read any of the rest of the book, so can't say what it's like overall.

*

Having read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man last year, and holding firmly onto Uncle Anthony's hand, I have begun Ulysses. On the advice of Marvin Exobrain, I started at Chapter 4, the Calypso episode, and have so far managed two and a half chapters. So far, it doesn't strike me as being beyond the capacity of the average reader, but by God you have to apply yourself to it, with full attention; also, I am gently tending toward the opinion of those who believe that Dubliners marked the high point of Joyce's achievement, with each subsequent book being more self-regarding and reader-unfriendly. I don't, so far, see anything which Joyce didn't tell us about ordinary lives in Dubliners, the advance (if one can call it that) being in technique. But I admit this is very early days and I am perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise.

*

I first came across Joyce in a conversation being held (appropriately enough) in the toilets of the student theatre during my first year at university: I remember the name Stephen Daedalus being knocked back and forth, and someone saying that Joyce believed (or possibly that Joyce demonstrated) there was no such thing as a boring person, someone whose life wasn't worth examining. It was a pocket-sized idea which I carried away, though most of the discussion was completely lost on me, and eighteen years later, reading Dubliners, it seemed to me to be entirely justified.