So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.
But first he drank cognac by the ocean With his back to all he travelled north to face. His head was swimming free as the troikas
Of Tyumin,…
Maybe every artist has been there: when the world is full of suffering and violence, isn’t the leisurely activity of producing art an insult to the butchery most of humanity faces, what has afflicted most of humanity for most of history? Fiddling while Rome burns, as they say? Heaney in an essay posed the problem as Song versus Suffering, where the poet is a child of both.
Maybe it’s even harder for Chekhov, age 30, travelling now by steamboat to the far east of Russia, to the Sakhalin penal colony. “His debt to medicine,” doctors are supposed to be healers. This bit of reporting he wants to do is like a debt owed for writing frivolous stories and plays, or a down payment to justify more creative writing down the line.
And Heaney has his own fair share of violence. Not only the world wars and what they did to English verse, but of course the Irish troubles, the bombings, the repression, the hunger strikes, and the decisions he had to make for himself and his family. But much of his work in this collection does not face these events directly, but like Chekhov, his back is turned “to all he traveled north to face.” Chekhov enjoys a glass of cognac, Heaney writes a great little poem about sloe gin.
That far north, Siberia was south. Should it have been an ulcer in the mouth, The cognac that the Moscow literati Packed off with him to a penal colony —
Him, born, you may say, under the counter? At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor
In full throat by the iconostasis
Got holier joy than he got from that glass
A little more guilt. The rhyming couplets help the make the connection. His guilt and hypocrisy manifests itself for him as an “ulcer in the mouth.” And there are sound echoes on the front and end of the middle two lines of the first quatrain, “cognac” and “pack,” “mouth” and “Moscow.” But at least he knows its worth, because he was born “under the counter,” a shopkeeper’s son.
Some sexy visions: the glass sparkling like diamonds on a lady’s bosom, but the coldness of the place he has come to brings him back. He chucks the glass onto the rocks (how decadent!) and the sound “rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains.” “It rang on like the burden of his freedom.”
The poem tracks him on the cusp of turning from the Moscow high life to the solemn duty of the writer as a witness. Leftist writers know the feeling too: are you really living your principles if you’re here honing your craft when you could be participating in an armed struggle movement, be it Spain or Rojava?
The last two sentences:
In the months to come It rang on like the burden of his freedom
To try for the right tone — not tract, not thesis —
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave’s blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.
“To try for the right tone — not tract, not thesis –” SAKHALIN OBLAST isn’t completely a sociological tract, it’s a literary artifact too. Which speaks to the larger issue, which is that Song vs. Suffering, or Poetry vs. Protest, is beside the point. The debate assumes that poetry is somehow outside of history. No need, then, to put every poem on trial to gauge its usefulness to historical development. It’s Chekhov’s and Heaney’s freedom to try for the right tone, and (continuing the medical imagery in the poem) to squeeze their slave’s blood out. Chekhov came from a family of serfs, but in Heaney’s case I take it to mean the writer’s first responsibility is to her body, her body as a circuit of the common property of language, to shape that language in the ways her body will permit.
And it happens that in the case of Heaney’s body it was a refusal, but never a full retreat, from acknowledging the political violence in Ireland head on. History is there, but like the music of his language, the artful assonance chains in his 10-syllable lines, it isn’t quite manifest. He’s content to look at quiet objects. Restraint. Taste. Language makes ugly things beautiful. That’s art, boy, William H. Gass would say.
Penelope Unravelling her Web by Lamp-Light, Joseph Wright, 1785
Why re-read the mighty ULYSSES this year, when the centennial Bloomsday was back in 2004, or when we could wait til the anniversary of the book’s publication in 2022? It was because I’m Stephen Dedalus’s age this year. I’d like to go again when I’m 38, but I dunno, I don’t like Bloom all that much. Still too much of a nobody.
I resisted posting about it. There’s so much official commentary and unofficial posting already (a river of secondary text to match the sacred flow of language). God knows I was reading most of that shit (the CRITICAL ESSAYS edited by Clive Hart, Burgess’s REJOYCE, Ellmann’s ULYSSES ON THE LIFFEY, various anthologies and monographs) in order to put off the forbidding novel, but at least I didn’t dare think the commentary could supplement the actual work.
If anything we should be more like Beckett, stripping away the superfluous critical language (with more language, though?).
After the Meal, Nestor Lit the King’s Cigar, Deborah Bermingham, 1995
This time around I thought the Homeric parallels were overplayed. They’re not any more or less salient than the other systems at work: the organs of the human body, the rhetorical techniques, the color symbolism. Ulysses was not an uncommon name for boys in the 19th century, and every Ulysses of historical note gets mentioned in the book (like Ulysses S. Grant). So even that name is in a context of everydayness.
When I went into an MFA program I actually kept these lines from Stephen’s consciousness in chapter 2 on my phone for motivation:
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?
So elegant to make fable a verb (but it has been a verb since the Renaissance, the etymology dictionary tells me). Stephen is teaching Roman history to some well-heeled boys in the brutal call-on for comprehension way, and catches one staring out the window. But of course history is a fabulation. And Joyce’s hero Blake, the outsider artist with so much insight into the 19th century, on which Joyce’s book is the capstone. (There’s still some time left for another encyclopedic novel to appear and capture the 20th century with Lovecraft as a lodestar of sorts.) “The ruin of all space.” An apocalyptic tone is laid down, which I had taken to be a lament for the loss of rational coherence, but is also linked by Joycean scholars to the political violence of the 19th century. Liberation struggle and mysticism mix together for Joyce as it does for Yeats.
Proteus, Cy Twombly, 1984
I first heard about ULYSSES from the Modern Library’s top 100 list. I didn’t like high culture of any sort in my tweens and early teens. It was pretty much all comic books and anime, which still included great stuff like AKIRA or FROM HELL. It’s likely that those books, owing to the timing, when the window of purity was still open, will remain the biggest influences on me.
And sure enough it was the Modern Library’s edition I took at the public library, with the portrait of the author with the eyepatch, which was cool, and the big S which leads to “Stately, plump…” I didn’t know anything about modernism except that it was interesting. I got excited just by running my eyes over the text because it looked different. The emdashes for speech, the ornate sentences with their alliteration and iambs and vowel rhymes — sometimes it was really gaudy, deliberately so.
And I still tilt my head like a happy dog when I see a novel that simply looks different, like Burroughs or Barnes or Bernhard.
But back then I was one pretentious, socially absurd dickhead. I could only sort of parse out the first half of ULYSSES, when the second half, if more difficult, is way more interesting. I was monomaniacal and had a hard time talking about things other than my interests. I sunk at least a couple of years into Joyce’s transformation of Dublin.
Calypso’s Sacred Grove, Romare Bearden, 1977
What other literature was I reading at the time? Hemingway, sort of. No Vonnegut at all, unlike my friends — I wish I had read him instead of Joyce like a well-adjusted teen. I was peeking through anthologies rather than novels or collections, so I had a big dose of realist short fiction by white Americans, some of whom, like Faulkner, were close in time to Joyce and admired him.
The only naysayers (who I gave a shit about) were Woolf and Stein, who I couldn’t read back then but love to read now.
Other Yellow, Perdo De Leon, 2007
My Penguin Modern Classics version is what I bought for myself, just for the cover. Molly Bloom’s monologue down to the final Yes. Why don’t more books put the last page on the front cover?
It has a long introduction that’s probably very interesting, but otherwise I don’t recommend it. The print is large, which means this edition has like 200 more pages than the Modern Library version, which I think uses the same ’60/’61 version, which makes my Penguin version pretty useless since no one’s going by its pagination.
Ten 1990 Autographs No 1: Hell, Dahong Liu 1990
Other than a handful of phrases cut out and some extra attributions popped in, I couldn’t notice any major differences between my copy and the Irish radio broadcast in 1982. Did they use the Gabler edition? Perhaps the differences come from the production, which happens sometimes. But I read along as I heard it, and really enjoyed it. The sound effects and music were tasteful. There’s a huge cast of narrators, one for every character (I thought some voices were doing double or triple parts, but apparently not!), and a reverb effect is put on interior speech, which helps sort out a prose that seems undifferentiated on the page.
Juno Asking Aeolus to Release the Winds, Francois Boucher 1769
My arbitrary start-date for “modern art” is 1750.
Carnivorous Love, Frank Moore, 1993
Bloom’s streams of consciousness do feel like pointilism, as an Italian fascist critic once complained. Quite paratactic. Is the book sticking a net into a pre-existing torrent of atomized thoughts, or is it more like how Auerbach describes the narration style of the Odyssey in that other major text I read last month MIMESIS, where all the narrative elements are given a uniform externality above all other effects, like suspense or psychological realism.
He knows he will be cuckolded today. And lord who would have guessed the cuckoo meme would make a comeback thanks to the alt-right? Now you only have to think women are human beings and that philosopher kings and a CEO of America is a bad idea to be a cuck.
Bloom’s streams keep coming back to this sore point like a blister on the gum line but he keeps repressing.
When it comes down to it. Totally inaccessible and publishing poison, forced to self-publish with the help of two (inadequately celebrated) lesbians, thought to be a madman, and still cursed to this day. No one really wants to be James Joyce, living in borderline poverty with an insane daughter and a layabout son, quietly changing the world but very rarely, if at all, acknowledged for it. So completely out on the frontier his books were confiscated and destroyed by multiple governments.
No one’s made a pendulum swing like Joyce. From true avant-garde to the academic bureaucratic canon. Gass is right: vanguard art lives a short life, whatever its fate, be it recognition or obscurity. I once heard Stephen Wright, while reflecting on Melville’s poor fate, dying in the gutter when he had composed America’s gospel, that Thomas Pynchon had to be the luckiest writer alive. “To write books at his level and have the success he’s had…” But if your surreal door-stop masterpieces get published by Penguin Randomhouse, are they still avant-garde?
I used to get annoyed like the snob I am when writers like Ian McEwan get what I think is undue postmodernist cred. But even more annoying, now that I’m trying to be a writer, is every time an author or journal promises to be a bold experimentalist and it ends up being a posture. Everyone wants to play it safe while keeping up radical appearances. Literary fiction is more ossified a genre than epic fantasy. It’s not allowed to do much beyond entertain people with college educations. So perhaps the most artistically successful of the bunch are those without the delusions.
Wandering Rocks, Tony Smith, 1967
An entire entertaining realist bourgeois novel could be written in the style of chapter 10.
That’s how it is. Some great artists go broad, and some go deep. You have your Ozus, who in their late period seem to make the same film over and over, but it’s really more like each film is a slice of a metanarrative told with recurring stylistic motifs with incredible rigor. Or Bernhard, whose short novels could amount to a larger totalizing project.
But there’s also Weather Report: where every studio record seems to be exploring a new direction, and a later band could carve a career-long aesthetic out of one of them. And so too with Joyce’s stylistic exercises in each chapter. (Look what Beckett and Wallace did with chapter 16.)
Sirens, Judith Linhares, 1997
Bloom lets out a fart while reading the last words of Ireland’s great martyr Emmet (the croppy boy of the song in the Sirens chapter).
Political blasphemy? The Joyceans say he read Bakunin and Proudhon with interest. He was anti-British and anti-nationalist. I’d call him an anarcho-pacifist, like Tolstoy but non-religious.
But Joyce is also about the modern, and one of the big crises of the modern, which Sterne also observed, is that without God, everything dissolves into sentiment. There’s a danger in repeating the ballad of the croppy boy so that only sentiment remains; not that useful for anti-colonial struggle.
But there are arguments to be had that the artist shouldn’t participate in that kind of stuff. Propaganda is fun to make, but can be awkward when you’re trying to do something poetic.
The Cyclops in Hotel Botanico, Franz Ackermann, 2001
You may have heard the observation that Stephen represents Joyce’s fate had he chosen to stay in Dublin rather than exile. Dublin, provincial, bigoted, colonized Dublin.
And Stephen is depressed, snippy, a bit of a shit. But cut him some slack: he hasn’t eaten in like two days. He blows his wad on alcohol, including two absinthes, which is insane considering how empty his tummy is.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST is a bildungsroman, the purpose of which is to guide a boy’s way to bourgeois liberal subjecthood with a nationalist consciousness, which would be extra complicated for an Irishman. The bitter discussions with Haines who dreams of black panthers in chapter 1 reflects on this.
I cheered silently for Bloom as he tells off the anti-Semitic Citizen as he rides away. “Jesus was a Jew! Marx was a Jew!” A hooker yells out to him that his fly is down. Ireland and Israel will meet soon.
This chapter has long lists of names which devolve into absurdity, and it’s definitely worth hearing it read aloud in the radio play. There are also a lot of Wagner’s imagery and sensibility in this chapter, and everywhere in the novel.
Odysseus and Nausicaa, Friedrich Preiler the Younger, 1868
How did the novel get attacked so much? Did people actually read it? How did they know there was shit and jizz as it happened? Was it rumors that got people outraged?
It’s not Bloom jacking off after getting an upskirt from young Gerty, very unseemly, that would offend the Duke University sensibility, but the incredible detail of lingering semen stains sticking his dick to his pants and messing with the foreskin. I also liked how exhausted he is afterward. Ah to be growing old.
Earth Birth (from the Birth Project), Judy Chicago, 1983
Oxen of the Sun. Still far and away the hardest level. The audio was a big help here.
A latin invocation of the sun (“quickening and wombfruit!”), a midwife bounces a newborn boy (“Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!”), then a survey of English through time — it was good to read Auerbach concurrently or the actual writers being spoofed here would escape me.
Circe, Frederick Stuart Church, 1910
Bloom has an incredibly self-loathing fantasy:
BOYLAN (bumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear. ) Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom up yet?
BLOOM (In a flunkey’s plum plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig.) I’m afraid not, sir, the last articles…
BOYLAN (Tosses him sixpence.) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom’s antlered head.) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife. You understand?
BLOOM Thank you, sir. Yes, sir, Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.
MARION He ought to feel himself highly honoured. (She plops splashing out of the water.) Raoul, darling, come and dry me. I’m in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge.
BOYLAN (A merry twinkle in his eye.) Topping!
BELLA What? What is it?
(Zoe whispers to her.)
MARION Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I’ll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt.
BELLA (Laughing.) Ho ho ho ho.
BOYLAN (To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
BLOOM Thank you, sir, I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower?… Lukewarm water?…
This is so funny and heart-breaking.
Stephen has an ashplant walking stick. How does a 22 year old carry a walking stick without looking like a douchebag?
In Bella’s house he uses his cane to smash up the chandelier, which in his absinth trip becomes the ghost of his mother. He screams “Nothung!” (Sounds like “no tongue.”) That’s the name of Siegfried’s sword in Wagner’s RING, which was buried for a long time under –you guessed it — an ash tree. (And the “ruin of all space” line gets a play back.)
It’s like being high on books.
The Mariner, Paul Cezanne, 1905
I love this painting, and think it’d be a good choice for a cover for ULYSSES. That or Simon MacLeod’s “Sandymount Strand.”
Father and son united at last. But Bloom has a hard time connecting with Stephen, and like the narrator of this chapter, overworks himself to come off well. He’s as wrong about Stephen’s politics as he is about Shakespeare (all free-verse, he thought in chapter 8).
Night Sky #5, Vija Celmins, 1992
My favorite chapter. I love the slyness of the catechism format, the references to astronomy and geology.
Return to Ithaca is a useful metaphor for realist fiction. Reassuring foundation. Obstacles are overcome. The world is understood, and the hero understands himself. Joyce mounts up these ridiculous inventories of the Bloom residence, like a realist novel’s narration turned to 11. Of course, if you want to write realistically you need a good instinct for which details are pertinent to your story. Georges Perec did not have such an instinct, and was content to be exhaustive in his sociological listing — no wonder Joyce was such an inspiration for him, if not a revelation.
ULYSSES kills the 19th century, and in its heart of hearts it’s still in that realist vein. And so are the other great modernists of this period: Proust, Woolf, Mann and Musil.
Father and son sneak in, talk about culture, share old rhymes from their old languages. Joyce is at pains to avoid sentiment in this and the previous chapter, but all the same, it’s very sweet.
They look at the “heaventree of stars.” And they part.
Infinity Dots, Yayoi Kusama, 1996
And with Chapter 17 the novel ends. “Penelope” is not an ending but a slice of an infinite space which might actually envelope the rest of the novel we traversed.
I’m a little sad to put the book back on the shelf. And it’s very hard to read anything else, which sucks since I have a growing pile of books. It’s not necessarily that Joyce’s novel is so amazing (honestly, I’m over that guy at this point), but I had only just begun to get into its logic, and now anything else is too hard for me to comprehend.
I value how novels and paintings don’t have an instrumental value; I’m skeptical they even have an intrinsic value. And while I never got on board with Stephen’s notion of literature “affirming the spirit of man” or whatever, I do feel larger after this odyssey somehow. How grand we are this morning…
this is the kind of book and bookmark combo i live for.
the TRILOGY has lived up to the hype. i can see its influence on Wallace and maybe Saramago, but there’s really nothing else like this. it’s chock full of allusions without the pyrotechnics of encyclopedic narrative, laugh out loud funny, and has simply been one of those kinds of great moments in my reading life, like Dara’s LOST SCRAPBOOK, when the door seems to have opened just a little wider and all these possibilities for prose without drama make an appearance.
Now that we know where we’re going, let’s go there. It’s so nice to know where you’re going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.
we first meet Molloy in his mom’s room, and then he goes on a journey to find his mom. like those great English 18th c. novels of old, this novel is a manuscript written by the character, though it becomes way more problematic here. Molloy is aware, obsessed even, by his being a construct of language. he has a difficult relationship with his mom, resentful for the horrible crime:
of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.
[on the opposite page:]
And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly. For before you say Mag you say ma, inevitably. And da, in my part of the world, means father. Besides for me the question did not arise, at the period I’m worming into now, I mean the question of whether to call her Ma, Mag or the Countess Caca…
Mag being one of two other women in Molloy’s life, on which he cant help but project his mother. (Molloy’s sex life is hilarious. “Toiled and moiled” til he came or gave up trying, he cant remember.) giving birth and taking a shit amounts to the same thing for Molloy — he’s like a post-Schopenhauer anti-natalist: bringing more human souls into this shit hole of a world without their consent is an ethical catastrophe. perhaps its for the best that voices like Molloy’s are left out of the abortion rights discourse. but it’s all so wonderfully blasphemous.
you cant say Mag without ma, and you cant say Molloy without mol, which im told is the suffix meaning “to soften, liquify,” like in mollify. Molloy’s name melts into Mollose by Moran, a detective or agent sent to track down Molloy in the second part. Vagina and ass hole melt together. it’s possible that Molloy and Moran are the same self, that the two equal parts of MOLLOY are presented in reverse order and show the narrative of one man whose body steadily breaks down.
i havent even talked about the sucking stones. actually there are several amazing set-pieces like it, which work like parodies of those awful math problem sets in grade school. the exact sciences dont appear to be so exact. language is in the way of everything. on the plus side, when understanding is blocked off, the way opens to something else, not understanding, but other.
i admit i found the opening Molloy section hard going, but Moran, despite being a misogynist scumbag, was better company because he’s ridiculous. If part one was about the mother, part two is a story about fatherhood. you can tell because for one thing, the second part has dicks everywhere. my favorite occurrence is late in the novel, when Moran is on the road to find Molloy (the most leisurely thriller plot ever). he encounters a stranger with a face
which I regret to say vaguely resembled my own, less the refinement of course, same little abortive moustache, same little ferrety eyes, same paraphimosis of the nose, and a thin red mouth that looked as if it was raw from trying to shit its tongue.
paraphimosis being a condition of an uncircumsized penis stuck in a particular way. and noses (like Laurence Sterne?) are not the only things that melt with the dingus: Malone in the middle book sees an eye between his legs, sensible enough, given how much he likes to jerk off onto himself.
you could view them as foils. Molloy keeps sucking stones (or rather suckling stones), Moran keeps a ring of all the keys to his house (mastery, penetration). there are sixteen stones to be distributed in Molloy’s four pockets, Moran puts down sixteen funny theology questions.
the novel’s framed by two circular journeys, to find mother Molloy and Molloy himself. their telos is also the origin. but instead of continuity, the circle feels more like a trap. there is only impotence, and human reproduction is abhorrent (have the queer theorists worked on these books yet?). not to mention that the next novel puts incest on the table.
ive already picked up some author hagiography (and Deirdre Bair’s life of him has rocketed to top-priority reading), how Beckett witnessed so many broken bodies from the First War, that Molloy’s consciousness reflects the rise of eugenics, fascism, as well as birth control. Beckett was deeply committed to political engagement, a hero of the Resistance, but in his work everything becomes wrenched at least a quarter of the way, so we could call them “apolitical” if we didn’t know better. but the TRILOGY contains all sorts of intellectual history that was in the air, like the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis — i havent done a long excerpt like this in a while, but see what you can identify in it.
[CN: male privilege, nice guy misogyny, male entitlement, patriarchal discourse, spoilers to Vertigo]
1. This novel was something like an anti-Ulysses. Whoa, an Irish avant garde text that’s approachable and short? In Ulysses a single day in Edwardian Dublin is fictionalized in what is seen as a totalizing representation, capturing everything, even the nonsense, and enveloping the grandiose and epic through the banalities of Mr. Bloom’s ordinary and unassuming life. The Dalkey Archive centers on a seaside Dublin suburb that seems so old-fashioned it’s like WWII never happened, and we follow one man who seems to be doing nothing but make one appointment after another in one pub after another (and across several days). But his ultimate goal in these quotidian movements involves saving the wooooooorrrrld!
Ba Jin 