Ulysses, Chapter Eighteen: Penelope

[Link to previous chapters here]

With "Ithaca," Joyce achieved such breadth of language, so infinite, so microscopic, that you'd be forgiven for thinking the book was over. Where else can he go? It is at that point that the author addresses the one missing link, the one area not covered in his melting pot of language, perspective and dimension and the one that, if deleted, would render Ulysses the most broken and incomplete: the input of a woman.

I read "Penelope" one sentence at a time, to which some might say, "Yes, well done, Jake. Hope you didn't get any headaches." But do please keep in mind that there are eight sentences in this chapter. The chapter is 42 pages long. There are no periods, and my edition only has paragraph breaks in-between the 8 sentences because some kind soul followed the schema and inserted them later. Otherwise, I'd be left with nothing but un-punctuated block text for 42 pages. You'd be amazed how appreciative a person can be for 8 presses of the tab button.

Ulysses, Chapter Seventeen: Ithaca

[Link to previous chapters here]

In a way, "Ithaca," the penultimate chapter yet the proper summation of Ulysses' "plot," is as gorgeous and revealing as its final entry. Joyce's own favorite of the 18 episodes, "Ithaca" is one of the most profound things I've ever read, despite (and in many ways because) of the banality at the heart of it. It achieves a simultaneous microscopic and macroscopic view, soaring above the characters yet summarizing and concluding their quirks, beliefs, attitudes and fleeting connection with such precision that, were the prose not such a challenge that only those who've endured the strongest passages of the novel to this point not prepared to handle it, this chapter might serve as a study guide for the rest of Ulysses.

It's a towering achievement, but in a specific respect. After building and building for nigh on 700 pages, Ulysses damn well better deliver on Bloom's return home to handle Stephen's indirection and his wife's affair. Yet Joyce quickly makes it clear that the humanly observed reality of his characters will not, can not, suddenly give way to the fantastical resolution of complex human issues. This is not an explosive end to the book's story; it is a monumental summary of the book's use of language.

Ulysses, Chapter Sixteen: Eumaeus

[Link to previous chapters here]

Once again, Joyce gives the audience a breather, following up the sexual nightmares conjured by M.C. Escher and Franz Kafka in the previous chapter with straightforward prose that suggests Joyce really could have written a lucid, charming novel if he'd cared to, one that might even have put some money into his vacant, cobwebbed bank account. Then, just to shut everyone up, he sets about sabotaging this structure and pointing out its weaknesses.

For after spending nearly 600 pages entrenched with the foibles, perspectives, fantasies, observations and patterns of Stephen and Bloom, Joyce suddenly acquiesces to all those who would complain of its complexity and pulls back into language that's easily understood. But it lacks the intimacy of the reader's connection to these two characters. Where we used to get the barest flicker of pure reaction to another character or situation, now we get broader strokes. Granted, it's a hell of a lot easier to get a feel for the painting when you see the whole thing and not extreme close-ups of the preliminary pencil sketches, but who would pass up the opportunity to see Picasso revealing his process in minutiae in order to just see the finished product?

Ulysses, Chapter Fifteen: Circe

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Did someone tear out what was meant to be the Circe chapter and paste in the screenplay for Bitter Moon hoping I wouldn't notice? Having read some of Joyce's more erotic letters to his wife Nora, I knew he could be astonishingly forthright about sex, but nothing in this book -- not even the graphic description of Bloom's cum-soaked shirt post-masturbation in the Nausicaa episode -- truly prepared me for the explosion of sexual desire contained within this chapter.

In The Odyssey, Circe traps Odysseus and his men when she turns the remaining crew into pigs, which is actually a step up from the usual fate to befall Odysseus' men, which is agonizing death in the name of their commander's quest for welcome-home sex. Odysseus receives an herb from Hermes that helps him avoid this curse, but he still falls under Circe's spell, staying with her for a year and becoming her lover.

A similar spell of sex and drug-induced haze falls over this chapter, which Joyce formats as if a play but structures in any way but a typical drama. This could almost have been written by Hunter S. Thompson after a particularly wild night even by his standards. As Bloom follows Stephen into "Nighttown," the area choked with brothels and whores, he begins having fantastical visions, all of them dovetailing into his warped sexual frustrations and desires. As Joyce moves deeper into the nightmarish (yet darkly funny) vision of sexual excess and the liberated id, he once again casts aside everything we think we know about this man.

Ulysses, Chapter Fourteen: Oxen of the Sun

[Link to previous chapters here]

Let me me briefly summarize how I've gotten through Ulysses to this point. After constantly checking endnotes as I read through the first two or three chapters, I decided to try my best to simply power through each episode, note what confused me, then look up those things afterward. When I get a bit lost in the plot (which happens multiple times per chapter, save the more straightforward Nausicaa episode), I will -- and I refuse to be ashamed about this -- turn to Sparknotes. More recently, I've found meticulously outlined plot summaries here that have proved incredibly helpful. I read the explanatory notes for each chapter and occasionally branch out even further for information about what it all means, usually to Sheila O'Malley's posts on the book, since it was her enthusiasm for Joyce that finally motivated me to take the plunge into the author's work. Her writing on the chapters is, from what I've seen so far, insightful but conversational, perfectly capturing what I think Joyce did with his book: finding a human way to get across its big ideas. Whenever I get well and truly stuck, I immediately defer to her.

I did not make it one full page into the Oxen of the Sun chapter without running to all my little safehouses looking for clues, answers, ANYTHING to help me. What in the Sam Hill was going on? Even when I sorted out some basic facts, such as the chapter being set in a hospital and revolving around the idea of birth in physical and lingual terms, I still could not proceed. This is by leaps and bounds the hardest chapter of the book yet, and I pray it gets no harder from here. I don't mean to make Sheila out to be the be-all, end-all expert on Joyce, but when she opened her own post on the chapter with an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the chapter, I wondered what hope I had. Hell, Joyce himself acknowledged this was the hardest chapter to read. I am not even remotely surprised that it follows what was certainly the easiest episode to that point, one so intuitive and straightforward I never had to look at notes to figure out what was going on.

I don't want to give off the impression that anything I've written on Ulysses to this point is definitive or even all that confident. I've relied so much on other readings because it's so hard to pick up exactly what's going on that I don't even consider my Ulysses posts reviews (hence why I referred to my plans to chart my trip through the book as a "reading diary"). But I've at least tried to pick up on what Joyce is doing and make sense of it through my own set of references and outlooks. Here, I just need to try to sort it out.

Ulysses, Chapter Thirteen: Nausicaa

[Link to previous chapters here]

Note to self: stop thinking I have Leopold Bloom pegged down. James Joyce delights in confounding expectations and shaking up his book every time he intuits the reader has found even a sliver of understanding. After pulling back to show Bloom's frustrating weaknesses, Joyce finally gave the man a moment to shine and stand up for himself, only to sink to a new low here.

Not that this is evident at first. The novel, as ever displaying a self-awareness and a humanistic desire to get other perspectives, no matter how flawed, once more dips into someone else's POV, and the style shifts accordingly. The first half of the Nausicaa chapter owes to, of all things in this game-shifting tome, cheesy Harlequin Romance. It's hilarious: James Joyce, King Glot of Everything, casting aside Shakespeare, Latin and Homer for the sort of book Bloom is bringing home for Molly, a flowery, flushed-cheek bit of fluff.

Ulysses, Chapter Twelve: Cyclops

[Link to previous chapters here]

Nothing makes me as simultaneously amused and infuriated as a bad (good?) pun. Joyce highlights the fact that the 12th episode of Ulysses corresponds to the Cyclops encounter in The Odyssey by placing the perspective in that of an anonymous first-person narrator, necessitating the frequent use of "I," the homophone for "eye." It's as easy as that. Or so it seems, anyway. Soon, Joyce delves into deeper interpretations of men with one eye, specifically their metaphorical lack of depth perception in their opinions. Windbags have floated around this novel like zeppelins, but here at last Joyce truly sinks his teeth into the self-righteous posturing of the roving bands of Irish drunkards crowding every pub in mid-afternoon.

I thought Joyce's prodding of Bloom in the previous chapter bordered on the cruel, unstoppable visions of Boylan heading off to take his wife. I had not seen anything yet. Those reminders of Bloom's impending cuckolding served mainly as vain motivation to get Leo off his ass and into action. Here, however, we at last see something of genuine contempt in Joyce's humanistic and tempered worldview.

Ulysses, Chapter Eleven: Sirens

Sometimes Joyce can be so literal I almost don't notice what he's doing. The Sirens chapter is based, of course, on the golden-voiced bird-women who lured sailors to their deaths on craggy rocks with their irresistible song. Because of this, Joyce uses musical imagery: the whole of the first two pages contains nothing but snippets of thoughts and sentences, and it's not until about halfway through this passage that it becomes clear Joyce is "warming up" as if tuning an orchestra. At the end of the segment, he announces to the reader that he's ready to go with a riotous "Begin!"

I took the fewest notes on this chapter as I have any of the other 10. That is not because I somehow had this whole thing "figured out" but because I got so entranced by the rhythm of the prose. In that sense, the writing itself embodies the mythic sirens, lulling me into following it until I finally snapped out of it and said, "Oh crap, important things are happening!"

Ulysses, Chapter Ten: The Wandering Rocks

Odysseus never travels through the Wandering Rocks in The Odyssey. Given the choice between the rocks, which pose such hazards that not even birds can make it out the other side, Odysseus opts to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis instead. Joyce, however, demarcates the first half of his book from the second with the Wandering Rocks episode. What gives? And what's with all these characters? A guy breaks out all sorts of addenda and summarizing notes to get through Stephen's absurdly complicated Shakespeare theory, ends up learning a great deal about Stephen in the process, and now suddenly the overriding question on my mind is "Who the hell is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell?" And is that even one person or does Joyce just not care about commas?

Comprising 18 vignettes and a coda, the Wandering Rocks chapter shatters the narrative of Stephen and Leopold to follow numerous other characters, some of whom we know already (either from this novel or Joyce's other work), others who just sort of pop up. Each wanders the streets of Dublin as the cavalcade containing the Earl of Dudley, his wife and several other members of the nobility works its way through town. With 19 strands in just over 30 pages, Joyce does not give himself much room to develop any one story, and each mini-episode ends just as a narrative seems to be forming.

Ulysses, Chapter Nine: Scylla and Charybdis

The Scylla and Charybdis episode marks a turning point in Ulysses: though it once again only teases the reader with the near-miss of Stephen and Bloom, it at last expounds upon Stephen's much-touted theory on Shakespeare, a convoluted, witty explication de texte that would stand as the magnum opus of any critic. However, insecure, self-conscious thoughts nag at him throughout his attempts to convince librarians and intellectuals of his talent, and the chapter ultimately reveals as much about Stephen as anything in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Naturally, Joyce drops us in the thick of it, as Stephen lays on the complexities of his theory on Hamlet and Shakespeare's corpus at large. Sitting in the director's office in the National Public Library, Stephen gives an example of his theory -- the full idea of which we have not heard, by saying that Shakespeare "plays" the ghost father in Hamlet, thus making the titular character the Bard's dead son Hamnet and Gertrude Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway.

Ulysses, Chapter Eight: Lestrygonians

Having already established Leopold Bloom as a sympathetic character, even something of a role model, Joyce frees the poor man from the dismissive gaze of his self-absorbed colleagues in the "Lestrygonians" episode. With the exception of the previous chapter's bombastic, self-reflexive structure, all of Bloom's episodes thus far have placed the perspective in Bloom's head, but that's always a bustling place. Only when Bloom went out to the outhouse for a moment to himself in the "Calypso" chapter was the audience allowed to focus fully on the man's ruminations and not the clutter of conversation and keen but broken observation.

The organs and symbols of the chapter relate to digestion and food, and the schema for the chapter lists the technique as peristaltic, again digestive. I found two broad interpretations of Linati's vague use of the term "peristaltic prose": either it has something to do with recurring lines with minor variations and modifications, or, truer to its digestive nature, it shows words and ideas being broken down. Whether either (or both) these readings are accurate, this chapter certainly contains passages that support both interpretations.

Ulysses, Chapter Seven: Aeolus

"Talk, talk, it's all talk
Too much talk, small talk
Talk that trash"
-- King Crimson, "Elephant Talk

Steeped in obscure Irish history that not even the copious endnotes try to fully explain, the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses makes for the toughest reading yet. However, the ideas it communicates are some of the most clearly stated in the book so far, and as I have learned to just let go at this point and stop trying to "figure this novel out," I enjoyed the chapter immensely.

Ulysses, Chapter Six: Hades

Sometimes, despite my best effort to get as close a reading as possible, I find myself zipping through a book, so caught up in its narrative and/or style that I find myself so engrossed that I either lose fine detail for barreling through the story or, and this is really weird, I focus so intently on the construction that I sidestep the narrative entirely. (Austen does this to me a lot; I'll be both marveling and laughing at the way she sets up a joke and then go, "Wait, where did Darcy come from? Oh right, this was mentioned in the last three pages I blew through because I wanted to get to the punchline.)

The Hades chapter of Ulysses is the first time I can recall speeding up my reading simply because the thought of spending any more time in its hellish grip. Homer's stanzas in Hades do not communicate actual suffering: Odysseus, wisely wishing not to descend into the realm and further test his sour relationship with the gods, calls up the shades of heroes and relatives to meet him. Tears are shed and horrors related, but so much of it feels like a reunion, a sad one perhaps, but still a meeting of old friends and loved ones. Besides, the dead barge into Odysseus' life so much that one starts to feel as if he really is at a family reunion with "Uncle Agamemnon" reminding him that Odysseus' wife is probably cheating on him or whatever because his wife did. Meanwhile Odysseus probably still smells like ambrosia from hanging with Calypso for seven years.

Ulysses, Chapter Five: The Lotus Eaters

Well, dear readers, we move from the waste management system to the playground. Yes, where the digestive system formed the anatomical reference of the Calypso chapter, Joyce now swivels round the pelvis to focus on the genitals. Funny, considering that the organs would actually correspond with their Odyssey counterparts better if swapped, the the kidney for the Lotus Eaters and the genitalia for Calypso.

The Calypso episode of Homer's epic reset the narrative to introduce Odysseus, who'd spent seven years as the lover of the demigod Calypso (meanwhile Penelope hasn't stopped crying for 20 years; women through the ages have probably, and so rightly, referred to this as "a crock of shit"). Joyce's Leopold does not set out from his lover to return to his loyal wife. Rather, he fears her infidelity but does not say anything, too nervous to broach the subject. Already, the link between cunning, strong Odysseus and meek Bloom seems ironic. Yet both have the power of observation, though where Odysseus uses his ability to read people and situations to serve him well, Bloom still cannot apply his sensual connection to the world to any change. He's more active than Stephen Dedalus but just as unable to get where he wants with his more direct approach to life.

Ulysses, Chapter Four: Calypso

Each chapter of Ulysses comes with its own corresponding color for the imagery, and the "Calypso" episode filters its descriptions through orange. A hue with deep cultural ties to Ireland, orange is a somewhat controversial choice for Joyce. For, in Ireland, orange represents protestantism and unionism. In Joyce's time, it symbolized the conservative sect within Irish society demanding to remain under the crown. Today, it reminds everyone of the horrifying sectarian violence that made Ireland and North Ireland a war zone for the latter half of the 20th century. By this stage in the book, or even just this stage in Joyce's career, it must be taken for granted that the writer knows exactly what he is doing, and by incorporating orange into his descriptions he highlights a rift in the book.

Yet the color scheme for this chapter could just as easily been black and white, which Joyce references several times (the cat, the various sausages of the butcher shop). It makes sense, for the Calypso chapter announces a sharp break from the preceding chapters, one that not only shifts focus to an entirely new character but makes that character markedly different from Stephen Dedalus.

Ulysses, Chapter Three: Proteus

Oh, how quickly I run into trouble with Ulysses. Already delayed an unforgivable amount of time by piled-up schoolwork, I returned to the "Proteus" episode ready and rarin' to go, only to find that the book I could slip into with surprising ease and live inside suddenly warped into a phantasmagorical mash-up of sound and image that read like the novelization of a Godard film. All I could think was "No, no, no. Not this early. Please tell me I'm not going to be confused this early. I'm not even out of the Telemachia yet!" (#whitepeopleproblems)

Even the notes included for the chapter clearly speculate where earlier they offered confident pointers for the uninitiated, helpful clues to guide us through Joyce's Dublin. But when I looked at the vague summary given for the Proteus chapter, I saw a question mark employed. Damn, even the scholars had to guess.

Then, I went and looked at the notes of the only Joyce expert I know -- though she might object to that term; and maybe there can never be an expert on such a man. Well, save perhaps Richard Ellmann (oh my God, Jake, focus) -- Sheila O'Malley. When I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to read the book, Sheila advised me to go with its flow, something I could do with the first two chapters but failed to here, doubling back to the annotations time and time again to make heads or tails of passages. When I looked up her post on this chapter, I saw that line again, and also a helpful tip that Stephen broke his glasses (something apparently mentioned only once and at a later time). With that in mind, I went back and just read through, not even looking up the translations. To my delight, it worked much better.

Ulysses, Chapter Two: Nestor

The Nestor episode of Ulysses instantly changes up the novel from its first chapter, altering setting, structure, symbolism and thematic exploration. If the Telemachus chapter contained hints of thoughts haunting Stephen that mar an otherwise neutral beginning, the second episode gets steeped in misery. Stephen, our beloved anti-Establishment outsider, has returned to Ireland with his aesthetic ideals honed, only to find himself working as a substitute teacher in a boy's school, lecturing uninterested, ignorant teens on Milton and history. Cut to once idealistic English teachers solemnly nodding in empathy.

Reflecting Stephen's (and Joyce's) continuing difficulty at truly leaving the Church, Chapter Two is structured as a catechism, the call-and-response style used to educate a congregation in Catholic doctrine. The chapter begins with Stephen asking questions of the students, who respond by rote and without passion. But Stephen is amiable, despite his intellectual self-absorption, and he amuses himself by asking questions to catch the lads off-guard. When he dismisses the boys and speaks to the headmaster, Mr. Deasy, Stephen does not ask questions so much as speak tersely as Deasy carries on in block paragraphs of vacuous speech which Stephen transcribes to a letter.

The sense of gloom that pours out of the pages in this chapter is untraceable unless someone clues you in on where to look. The key color of the chapter is brown, though nothing is every simply described as such. Instead, Joyce mentions objects one knows to be brown, letting the audience envision their color. Leather, wood, old books, all of them evoking the color without Joyce outright saying it. Elsewhere, Joyce has proven a master of vivid description, poring over each image from afar and up close; here, however, he demonstrates what a great journalist he would have made: without many adjectives, he conjures immaculate portraits in the mind. But why does brown connote such misery in Joyce's writing? It's a drab color, to be sure, but not depressing.

Then I learned that, for Joyce, brown signified death, which only raised more questions. Why would he equate the two? Isn't black the more obvious choice? At last, it slid into place: "History," Stephen famously intones, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." As a European, Dedalus is caged in by history, the stifling weight of nearly two millennia of accumulated history restricting movement. Eddie Izzard jokes about this whenever he speaks of America, about how people in this country are amazed of anything that lasts 50 years, whereas, in Europe, anything that doesn't last that long must be one giant POS. History suffocates. But it also liberates in the worst way, allowing people to attribute ills to history and not seek to move beyond them. In the first chapter, Haines expressed some guilt for England's treatment of Ireland, only to absolve himself by placing atrocity in the past. The students Stephen lectures have no true concept of what Ireland still is because they view it through a historical lens: "For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop."

History is coated in brown. It's bound in leather-bound books, stacked on wooden shelves and debated in old halls. Stephen, who wants to live for the present, to glory in the new, is weighed down by the the immovable block of history that stands between mankind and progress. Even Irish nationalism is too rooted in centuries-old debate to be fresh enough for Stephen, and to identify with any nation would be to tighten the leash that binds him. Ironically, Stephen has a better command of history than anyone he talks to, versed in both literary classics and world history. He even meshes the two, interpreting Julius Caesar at least partially through Shakespeare. His immense knowledge of both kinds of history, fictive and real, allows him to speculate on alternate versions of events. Joyce pours everything into his writing, every perspective, every anticipated outcome, so of course he wonders what might have happened if Caesar had not been betrayed or Pyrrhus had not fallen. The what-ifs turn history into narrative, and no narrative can exist without excluding all but one story. Unless you're James Joyce, of course, in which case you can just flood the damn thing.

In The Odyssey, Telemachus visits Nestor, a kind-to-a-fault old man whose perceived wisdom belies a frustrating gap in awareness of the one piece of information Telemachus needs from him. Like Nestor, Deasy is ingratiating to the point of irritation with Telemcaus/Stephen, Nestor lavishing hospitality onto the man looking for his father, Deasy forcing Stephen to put up with his rambling nonsense to get a meager pay. And just as Nestor's speeches contain lofty, drawn-out claims that lead nowhere, so too are Deasy's proclamations void of any useful information to Stephen, who tempers his own disagreement with Deasy's simple-minded opinions of English loyalism, thrift and the supposed evil of Jews. Only the smallest protests are spoken, but Stephen understands that any attempt to engage this moron will only prolong his torture, so he copies down Deasy's halting thoughts -- the statements are so short, empty of analysis and direct that each period almost sounds like a telegraph stop -- and promises to pass them along to acquaintances at some newspapers.

Nestor was a tamer of horses, and the image of "vanished horses" dots the walls of Deasy's office. Whatever verve and authority the man might once have commanded are long gone by the time he pours out his crotchety old "Abe Simpson" rants, his transparent ignorance not remotely masked by the quantity of his words nor the fleeting stabs at verbosity nestled within them. Deasy is only just smart enough to see how bored Stephen has become with his situation (though he believes it's the school constricting him, not Deasy as well) and wisely notes that Stephen will not remain at the school long. "You were not born to be a teacher, I think," Deasy says. "A learner, rather," Stephen replies. Stephen looks at Deasy and sees the end result of becoming complacent with knowledge: unless he is always seeking more, the knowledge he has will atrophy until it becomes useless and toxic, infecting young minds with hollow thoughts disguised with big words, big words Stephen claims to fear despite his own use of quite a few of them. He knows that big words too are made through inflation and contain nothing but air inside them.

Just as the structure of the novel shifts from straight narrative to catechism, the subject being deconstructed moves from theology to history. Yet Joyce cannot tackle one, particularly when dealing with Irish history, without discussing the other, and religion factors into Stephen's thoughts and discussions. Deasy too brings God into it, his antisemitism springing from religious indoctrination passed down through history condemning Jews and his misogynist screeds rooted in the concept of original sin. Stephen continues to have none of it, proving his does not align with Deasy's Tory beliefs just as he rejected Davin's radical leftist leanings in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The Nestor episode is short, sweet and direct, yet the level of detail it conjures using mere back-and-forth dialogue and blunt but evocative description builds upon the jumbled but vivid first chapter even as it drastically alters the direction. Ulysses may be a seemingly aimless drift around Dublin, but the manner in which Joyce deepens and links his pseudo-narrative makes the sudden shifts in style coherent.

Ulysses, Chapter One: Telemachus

The first chapter of Joyce's Ulysses is both inviting and lightly bewildering, providing almost no background information on characters, setting, or narrative yet putting forth so much wordplay and so many possible meanings that the 20 pages burst at the seams. I realize instantly the folly of charting my thoughts of this book as I read it, as I can only faintly guess at what's happening

Joyce structured Ulysses as an intimate version of The Odyssey, exchanging the turbulent, monster-laden Mediterranean with Dublin. Consequently, the first chapter lines up with the first part of Homer's epic, focusing on Telemachus, here represented by our dear friend Stephen Dedalus. Having left Ireland for France at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen returns home in 1904 to be with his dying mother, and by the time we join him on the morning of June 16, she has already passed. Stephen, who renounced religion with his national identity at the end of Joyce's previous novel, could not bring himself to pray over his mother's deathbed, an act that haunts him even at the start. Joyce's Telemachus therefore displays a more Catholic hangup in grieving for a lost mother, but, as the annotations included with my texts note, the same religious denunciation that prevented Stephen from praying for his mother also creates a hole in him where a spiritual father should be (as far as I know right now, Stephen's actual father, Simon, should still be alive).

This quest for a replacement for the Almighty Father is an understanding reading of the text, given the overwhelming amount of Catholic imagery present. The first dialogue of the film, courtesy of Stephen's sort-of friend Buck Mulligan is "Introibo ad altare Dei," meaning "I will go in the altar of God." It is the start of a Mass, and Mulligan's ironic tone speaks to the tongue-in-cheek manner in which Joyce uses religion. By opening his book with an impromptu Mass, he not only ties his novel further to The Odyssey (which opens with a prayer to the gods for inspiration) but also establishes Ulysses as his attempt to set down a new path for spiritual fulfillment after leaving the Church through Stephen. That the writing is still so based in Catholic writing demonstrates the difficulty of trying to extricate oneself from a religion that defined the social codes of conduct. You can take the Irishman out of the Church...

Joyce wastes no time piling on the puns and inventive lingual exercises, contracting hyphenated words into garish wholes, many of which connote some body part or fluid not normally mentioned in "masterpiece literature." Mulligan boisterously speaks of "the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea" and the rambling narration (neither 1st person nor fully 3rd person) discussing the milk poured by the old maid before clarifying any possible misconception with a hastily added "not hers. Old shrunken paps." Alliteration abounds, as does lewd innuendo: "Is she up the pole?" asks Stephen in response to news of a woman seeing a mutual acquaintance of his and Buck's, and the idiomatic suggestion of intoxication was not the first mental image I arrived at with these choice of words.

What struck me most about the chapter, however, was not potential meanings or even the mastery of Joyce's prose but the manner in which he defines these characters' voices in an instant without so much as a "Once upon a time" to give the audience some basic information. I immediately envisioned Mulligan as the pompous student he is, speaking in a voice that is too loud and too enunciated, his dips into offensive humor the outpourings of the educated asshole. Haines, meanwhile, is the new guy, innocently asking questions of Buck and Stephen's worldviews that the two are tired of hashing out with each other and do not want to share with another until one triumphs over the other. And Stephen, well, Stephen is Stephen. He continues to sound in my head like the most humanist character Dostoevsky never wrote, an intellectual rejecting normalcy in an attempt to find some social outlook that accounts for his genius, albeit without the darker element that runs through the Russian master's work. Stephen may be cocky, but he's lovable, and that's all the more apparent now that Joyce juxtaposes him against another wunderkind who revels in his intellect instead of seeking constantly to expand it.

While the structure of this first chapter deliberately leaves a number of connecting details that make not only the big picture but even smaller details vague and unknowable, I still found the Telemachus episode eminently readable and flowing. The flecks of outright silliness made for an unexpected bounce and even the most esoteric references do not bog down the story. I am sure I will continue to go through the annotations and look up various analyses as I work through the book, but even from the outset I can see the other side of reading Ulysses, the one that accepts it as a damn fun read despite the complexity. As I continue to move through the book, I shall strive to recall two key quotes on the importance of Ulysses. The first comes from Joseph Collins, a noted American neurologist who sent in a rave of the book to the New York Times upon its release in 1922 (and a decade before it could be legally distributed in the United States). Among the many brilliant and tantalizing things he had to say about the book was this nugget:

That he has a message there can be no doubt.

Then there was Joyce himself, who offered up what sounds like a most Catholic response:

The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

Joyce layers his story even at the start, but I'm almost inclined to believe him here: for all the references to Ancient Greece, the Church, imperial Britain, Shakespeare and parental loss, Ulysses truly bounds out of the gate on the strength of its style, which is arresting and incomparable even after nearly a century. Overall, the Telemachus episode confirmed and dispelled my fears over tackling the novel, presenting me with a host of allusions and double, even triple entendres but also sublimating all that into a unified style, even if the style changes throughout the novel. But I'm just repeating myself at this point: I'm sure it will get harder to process later, but for now, I can't wait to keep moving forward through Dublin.

Upcoming Series: Ulysses Reading Diary

*Update: I've placed links at the top of the post so readers don't have to scroll down to find them. Each post focuses on a chapter at a time.

Reading Log
Chapter One: Telemachus
Chapter Two: Nestor
Chapter Three: Proteus
Chapter Four: Calypso
Chapter Five: The Lotus Eaters
Chapter Six: Hades
Chapter Seven: Aeolus
Chapter Eight: Lestrygonians
Chapter Nine: Scylla and Charybdis
Chapter Ten: The Wandering Rocks
Chapter Eleven: Sirens
Chapter Twelve: Cyclops
Chapter Thirteen: Nausicaa
Chapter Fourteen: Oxen of the Sun
Chapter Fifteen: Circe
Chapter Sixteen: Eumaeus

Chapter Seventeen: Ithaca
Chapter Eighteen: Penelope

Hello, all,

I apologize for the severely slowed output as of late, but schoolwork has reared its ugly head (or heads, for, like the Hydra, every time I kill one assignment three more spring in its place) and I've been too busy to focus on reviewing. I should have two new posts by the end of the weekend, one on a film, another a continuation of my "Stuff I Like" series, where I spotlight an artist from any medium who has had an impact on me. For now, however, I still have some work to do.

Though I have not had time to sit down and digest a film in one go, I have been spackling the narrow cracks in my schedule with reading, and I've been both returning to old favorites and finally tackling classics that previously daunted me. The greatest blind spot in my literary awareness must be Ulysses by James Joyce, almost universally considered the crowning literary achievement of the 20th century. Joyce himself was foreign to me, considering I'd only ever read brief excerpts of his work with minimal explication.

I just completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, however, and the wonderful time I had with it made the fears I had over tackling Joyce's titanic novel all the more transparently unnecessary. However, when my copy of a reprinting of the original 1922 text of the novel arrived in the mail, I turned to the back to check the annotations and found nearly 300 pages of notes explaining Joyce's esoteric, highly advanced and multilingual wordplay, in addition to notes delving into the novel's connection with Homer's Odyssey. So, some apprehension remains.

Therefore, I've decided to handle the book differently than my usual style, which is to just read like the wind because I can never stop myself. Instead, I will keep a running log here of my trek through Dublin, a post for each of the novel's 18 chapters. I should say that this will almost certainly not be a book review, insofar as analysis may be scant in favor of simply spilling out how I've processed the text and the notes. I hope it shall amount to more than a running list of characters, motifs and happenings like some second-rate SparkNotes, but we shall see how it goes. I do at least hope, in deference to Professor Nabokov, to put forward some idea of who the man in the brown mackintosh is. A catalog of the posts will be collected here for easier access once I'm finished.

See you at the top of the Martello tower in Sandycove, everyone.