No More Learning

In these poems of the mature Joyce we espy a deliberate limitation, and if we think about this we allow the old gloomy and indigestible questions about the nature of poetry to rise up again-questions which it is better not to ask. For it is the two big publications of '922 - Ulysses and The Waste Land-which show how far the poetic and the non-poetic can interpenetrate, and how little significance terms like 'verse' and 'prose' really possess. How are we to classify the following? -
. . . If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one. ) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face. It's them pills I took to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George. ) The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. . . .
The first passage is, of course, from The Waste Land and the second is from Ulysses. There is no doubt as to which contains the more poetic intensity. But The Waste Land remains a poem and Ulysses a novel. Eliot's passage of flat colloquial is a deliberately adminis- tered glass of cold water to wash away the rich fruit-cake taste of the preceding Keatsian section; it also prepares our palates for a different, tarter, richness to COme. The Ulysses passage is pure Stephen Dedalus interior monologue: we snaIl be all the readier for Leopold Bloom's grilled kidney when we have read it. The total structure is all.
That complexity and suggestiveness of language that we call poetical flourishes in Joyce not in the isolated lyric but in the enclosed lyric passage-he needs the flat setting for his flights just as Eliot needs the intense setting for his flatness (in The Waste Land, anyway). And, in general, it would be true to say that Joyce is most sure of himself in all the non-novelistic branches of litera- ture he wished to practise when he is safely encastled in a great prose structure. The dramatic skill of Ulysses maddens adaptors into drag- ging pieces of it on to the stage; the 'Nighttown' episode is one of the great closet-dramas of all time; but Joyce as a playwright for the theatre is as little a success as Henry James.
It was inevitable that, having chosen Ibsen as his liberating saint,
Joyce should early on have se~n himself as a poet-dramatist. His first play, A Brilliant Career, has been remembered, however, only for the arrogance of its dedication (to the author's own soul) and for the interest that William Archer showed in it. The more mature effort, Exiles, belongs to the a1Z1ZUS mirabilis 1914, when A Portrait had been completed and Ulysses was about to be started and when the first tendrils of recognition and help were putting forth. Exiles was published in '9'S. It has been much read but little acted. Its interest is less artistic than biographical: we tend to approach it with the wrong motives.
Exiles does, in fact, illuminate a phase ofJoyce's personal develop- ment and, since it is set in Dublin, 1912, this phase is far closer to the actual time of writing than is usual with him-except, of course, for the epiphanies of Stephen Hero. In other words, Joyce seems concerned with making a final declaration about his relationship with the world of his own past before getting down to the task of creating two huge myths out of that worId. This is the last important bit of clearing up before the beginning of the real exile. Not that Exiles is all autobiography. Joyce returned to Ireland in '9'2, just
75
74
. . . Wombed in sin darkness I was too,
Made not begotten.
By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a Ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.
They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages He willed me
And now may not will me away or ever.
A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then
The divine substance wherein
Father and Son are consubstantial?
? ? The Stones
'You Poor Poet, YouI'
o~ human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, RIchard? Have you the courage? Even if it shatters to atoms the friend- s. hip between us, even if! t breaks up for ever the last illusion in your own hfe? There was an etermty before we were born: another will come after we are de~d. ! ~e blindin~ instant of passion alone-passion, free, un- asharn. ed, IrreSlstIble-that IS th~ only gate by which we can escape from the mIsery of what slaves call hfe. Is not this the language of your own yp~th that I heard so often from you in this very place where we are sittmg now?
This sounds like highly dramatic language, but dramatically it does not come off at all. This is partly because nobody, not even Stephen Dedalus, speaks like that; it is also because Robert Hand, for all the careful blocking in of his background, for all his high feeling and epigrams, never comes to life-in his own right: he is merely an aspect of Richard. Bertha, with her '0, my strange wild lover, come back to me again! ', sparks into occasional life because a sort ofIbsen-heroin: intensity is, when Joyce-Richard can spare the tIme from gestlculatmg at hIS other self, deliberately imposed on her; but the whole play resolves itself into a very static portrait of the wounded artist liking, rather than licking, his wounds. Bertha very sensibly asks him: 'In what way are you wounded! ' And Richard talks of the deep, deep wound of doubt in his sou! . Bertha could well say that, with his perverse desire for betrayal, he has brought the wound on to himself. And so he has, but he still seems to want pity
. and a kind of foetal cosseting. Bertha really comes out of it very well: we gain a fleeting glimpse of Nora Joyce as one of the great heroines of our time.
This is by no means an ill-constructed, amateurish play. It is very well put together, but it is a piece of pure morphology. It is the classic example of what a close student of Ibsen can do if he lacks talent for the stage. For much of the time we have the strange sensation that we are reading a rather stilted translation of Ibsen- there is a great lack of colloquial raciness, of even the normal con- tractions that we expect in everyday speech. Yet the stiffness and grandiloquence do not suggest poetry. The language is as special as the language of Finnegans Wake, but it is not rooted in actuality: it seems to be a grotesque attempt to make something dramatically viable out of the dead pedantic COrrectness of the hack translator.
Of all the plays of Ibsen which find echoes in Exiles, perhaps one of Ibsen's least successful- When We Dead Awaken-sounds out the strongest: it has a wounded artist and his wife who are contrasted, in neat symmetry, with a couple whose temperaments are less intense
77
like his writer-hero Richard Rowan. Buck Mulligan in Ulysses talks about 'hellenising' the island; Richard, eight years later, wonders whether he should accept a professorship of Romance languages at his old university and leaven dull doughy Dublin with the quick spirit of Europe. It is his friend Robert Hand who brings the offer of the appointment from the Vice-Chancellor, saying that his past 'act of folly' will be forgotten: Dublin is ready to do him honour as 'a scholar, as a literary personality'. The 'act of folly' was Joyce's own, only it is sharpened here into something like melodrama:
ROBERT: . . . Here is how the matter stands, Richard. Everyone knows th~t y o u r a n a w a y y e a r s a g o w i t h a y o u n g g i r l . . . H o w s h a l l I p u t i t ? . . . WIth a young girl not exactly your equal. (Kindly)Excuse me, Richard, that is not my opinion nor my language. I am simply using the language of people whose opinions I don't share.
RICHARD: Writing one of your leading articles, in fact.
It is in this connection ofa wife who is too desirable to be thought of as a lady and the husband's masterful yet masochistic attitude to her that the play, starting as near-autobiography, takes off into very interesting but very non-dramatic regions. All this business of the wounded artist will do very well for a self-portrait ofJoyce in 1912 ('You have that fierce indignation', says Robert, 'which lacerated the heart of Swife). But the triangular torments which give the play what action it has have little to do with Joyce and Nora Joyce and anybody else: Joyce is soaring into the fantasy zone which, more comically, Bloom is to reach in the nightmares of the brothel episode of Ulysses. He is here indulging a delicious dream of cuckoldry.
Robert says he loves Bertha, Richard's wife. At the peak of the second act Richard confesses how one part of his mind has longed for betrayal by the two people who mean most to him-his wife and his best friend: ' . . . in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her-in the dark, in the night-secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be . . . to be for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame. ' Robert also has his big moment of eloquence. He wants a sort of duel between himself and Richard:
A battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world. A battle ofyour soul against the spectre offidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship. All life is a conquest, the victory
76
? ? The Stones
'You Poor Poet, You! '
(as Richard is contrasted with Robert, so Bertha-the awakened won:an-is. set against the mild virgin Beatrice Justice, Robert's cousm). The young Joyce wrote an article on When We Dead Awaken-his first published prose-and, going back to his other early wntmg~ on drama, one is able to toy with the notion of Joyce as a proleptlcally :ery sound drama critic, one who needed the experi- ence of creatmg even a bad play to qualify him for the making of Ju. dgen:ents on other men's works. But it went the other way round wIth hIm: after the essays 'Drama and Life' (not to be confused with the identically titled paper read in Stephen Hero), 'Ibsen's New Drama' (both written in 1900) and 'The Day of the Rabblement' (190. 1) the great dramaturgical act was 10:1g in coming, and Joyce perSIsted most of his life in considering Exiles a play well worthy of performance. He could be very obstinate about his own work.
Joyce practised dramatic and literary criticism in a somewhat dis- tracted manner for most of his life, but we cannot regard his critical wr. itir:gs as 'professional'- he is not a critic in his own right as, say) ElIot IS. The Sacred Wood helps us to understand the poetic aspira- tIOns of the author of Gerontioll) but if Eliot had never written a line of verse he would still take his place among the great twentieth- century critics. When we read Mason and EHmann's edition of Joyce's reviews and lectures and letters of protest (The Critical Writings ofJames Joyce, Faber and Faber, 1959) we do so not to learn about the authors Joyce deals with but to understand better this particular author. Thus the essay on James Clarence Mangan (1902) IS ,:oncerned with blue-printing an aesthetic theory (the one delIvered m the Stephen Hero paper 'Drama and Life') and in stating what kind of poet is needed by renascent Ireland-one not merely romantIcally mournful but also precise, Augustan, even joyful. The paper on William Blake-originally given as the second of two evening lectures in Trieste in 1912, delivered in Italian and called 'Ver~smo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese'-points a powerful affimty between the creator of the Giant Albion and the creator of Finnegan. The superficial resemblances between Blake and Joyce begm WIth theIr both marrying women of inferior education but
blessed with the 'lineaments of gratified desire' and continue with
the working ofthe details ofdaily life into eternal myth-the soldiers who were so rough with Blake become giant symbols ofevil; the civil servants who annoyed Joyce ended up as the rough soldiers who disrupt Nighttown. The deeper resemblances are only to be seen
78
long after the giving of the Blake lecture, but Joyce must have had
hIS own great organic visions in mind when he said:
Eternity, which had appeared to the beloved disciple and to St Augustine as a ~eavenly. city, and to A1i~hieri ~s a heavenly rose, appeared to the ~wedls~mystic [Sweden. b0rg] In the lIkeness ofaheavenly man, animated In all hIS hmbs by a flUId angelic life that forever leaves and re-enters systole and diastole of love and wisdom . . . Armed with this two-edged ~ord, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of expenence and natural WIsdom and by minimizing s~ace and ~ime. and denying the existence of memory an'd the senses, he trIed to pamt his works on the void of the divine bosom.
Ulysses is full of references to Blake, but it is also itself a sort of Blakean Prophetic Book, b. . ed on the Swedenborgian revelation of realIty as a heavenly man which Blake was the first to turn into art Joyce being the second and last. Finnegans Wake is even closer t~ poems like Jerusalem and Milton, very much a work that minimises space and time and is painted on the void of the divine bosom.
AI; Eliot has written of theology and the music-hall as well as of literature, so Joyce has written of Bruno (,the Nolan') 'and of Home Rule and even (1912) of'Politics and Cattle Disease'-an essay which leads us straight to the 'bullockbefriending bard' of Ulysses. Unlike ElIot, though, he has been less willing to speak directly of his own work than we could wish. His methods of easing our way into the labYrInth were always oblique-it was a matter of suggesting to other men (Stuart Gilbert, for instance) that they might possibly write this or that about his books and might conceivably take this or that approach and regard such and such a book as perhaps capable of ~hrowing light on this or that problem. But, in an article published m The New Statesman and Nation and (in America) Hound and Horn
in '932, Joyce went some way towards making the technique of Finnegans Wake seem human, amiable, and approachable.
The article is called 'From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer' and it takes up the cause of the Irish-French tenor John Sullivan who, Joyce was convinced, had received less than his due from the world of musical promotion. Sullivan's voice was, on the singer's own admission, past his best at this time, but Joyce heard, in his stubborn way, only its primal vigour and phenomenal range. This piece of writing, being part of a general programme of advocacy, is not obscure: its virtue as propaganda lies in its freshness, humour and ingenuity. It did little good, but it presents an unbuttoned and generous Joyce, and it is the best introduction to the linguistic difficulties of Finnegans Wake that we possess:
79
? ? The Stones
Just out of kerryosity howlike is a Sullivan? It has the fortefaccia of a Markus Brutas, the wingthud of a spreadeagle, the body uniformed of a metropoliceman with the brass feet of a collared grand. It cresces up in Aquilone but diminuends austrowards. It was last seen and heard of by some macgillicuddies above a lonely valley of their reeks, duskening the greylight as it flew, its cry echechohoing among the anfractuosities: pour fa derniere luis. The black-hulled ones, stampeding, drew in their horns, all appailed and much upset, which explaints the guttermilk on their
overcoats.
That is the second paragraph. Its difficulties are rather less than
those of 'Jabberwocky', most of the portmanteau-words being se1f- explanatory-it is clear, for instance, that Sullivan comes from Kerry, land of the mountains known as MacsiUicuddy's Reeks, that he is not only physically big (he could be a policeman; his feet are like those ofa Collard grand piano) but big in voice, fit for the Metro- politan Opera. Some of the other references are more abstruse- the quotation from the French version of William Tell, for instance, in which Arnold's last visit home is paralleled by Sullivan's last visit (recent when the article was written) to Ireland. One cannot under- stand all at a first reading, and one is not meant to: as with Finnegans Wake, the general picture is filled out by experience, by chance dis- covery rather than deliberate study. Thus, it is enough at first that 'Aquilone' should suggest the north wind; later we may learn that Sullivan's nose was aquiline and that Mount Eagle is in the west of Kerry. But the first impression is always a valid one, and the image of a great-bodied, broad-chested, big-booted, vast-voiced hero comes through at once.
We find Joyce the poet and Joyce the dramatist at their most
impressive and original in the two great novels. The same can be
said of Joyce the critic. One of the great events of Bloomsday is Stephen's presentation of a new theory of Hamlet in the National Library. While describing the meeting of Bloom and Stephen, first in the newspaper office and later in the maternity hospital, Joyce gives us, as free gifts, a history of newspaper prose and of headlines, a critical textbook on rhetoric, and a parodic survey of English literature. Finnegans Wake completes the work begun in A Portrait- the work of demonstrating that literature is not just a commentary on life but an integra! part of it. The poor poet, the indifferent dramatist and the casual critic take on greatness in the context of life, which is the context of the novel.
80
PART TWO
THE LABYRINTH
? ? I: Ways into the Labyrinth
THE ODYSSEY OF Ulysses MAKES VERY PAINFUL READING. AFTER the seven-year labour of writing the book-poverty, eye-disease, the disruption of a European war-came the hell of trying to get it into print. (Even, for that matter) into typescript: much of the 'Circe' episode was burned by the disgusted husband of a volunteer typist. ) When, printed at last in France and published by a Paris bookshop, all the regular British and American channels having turned it down. Ulysses appeared in its handsome colours of the Greek flag and full of misprints (on Joyce's birthday, 1922), it began an unbelievable career of suppression, vilification, adulation, piracy, public and private burning, smuggling. (As a schoolboy I sneaked the two- volume Odyssey Press edition into England, cut up into sections and distributed all ove1 my body. ) When, in 1933, Judge Woolsey pro- nounced in the United States District Court that Ulysses was not obscene and might legally be bought and sold in America, Enghnd still had to wait three years for its own edition. It had taken a long time, all too long, for the legal recognition of a ffilsterpiece. Now we are past being shocked by Ulysses. We can take it calmly from the shelves of the school or public library and marvel at other things than dirty words and descriptions of bodily functions. There are a lot of things to marvel at but, first, a lot of questions to ask. M03t of these questions are assumed in one fundamental question: Why did Joyce write the book at all?
Ulysses is a big book (933 pages in the 1960 Bodley Head edition), and its bigness is one answer. Every novelist wishes to prove to himself and to others that he can tackle a large canvas. The great novels of the past-Don Quixote, Tom Jones, War and Peace, for example-have all been very long, and it is only in great length that novelists can fulfil their blasphemous urge to rival God. To create a few human beings in a segmentary context of life is well enough for the minor artist, but the major writer wants a whole cosmos and the
83
? ? ? The Labyrinth
Ways into the Labyrinth
whole of mankind. He cannot really have all this-Joyce, like Blake, was only able to achieve it by making one character play many parts- but he can at least create a big human community which is a sort of reduced image of the cosmos.
Starting with this vague and general and traditional intention,
Joyce then (or simultaneously, or before) conceived another ambi-
tion-to make a modern novel not merely rival classical achievement but contain it. Classical epic was expansive; classical drama was contractive. Homer covers heaven, earth, the sea and a great slab of time; Sophocles stays in one small place and confines the time of his action to twenty-four hours. And so Joyce stays in Dublin on
June 16th, 1904, but also uses delirium and imagination to encom- pass a great deal of human history and even the End of the World. Greek epic and Greek drama are both contained within the frame- work of a modern bourgeois nove1.
Epic length and the strictures of dramatic form can be reconciled not merely by imaginative 'loops' but by a more detailed examination of the characters' acts and motives than traditional novelists thought either necessary or decent. Bloom must not only eat but defecate; Molly Bloom must meditate not only on her lovers but also on what her lovers are like in bed. With so large a canvas, no human detail may be left out. But the traditional techniques for expressing ,un- spoken thoughts are bound to be insufficient. Hence the 'stream of consciousness' or the 'interior monologue'-an endless commentarv from the main characters on the data thrown at them by life, b~t unspoken, often chaotic, sometimes reaching the thresholds of the unconscious mind. This device had been used before-by Dickens and Samuel Butler, even by that great primitive Jane Austen?
-but never on the scale or to the limits employed by Joyce. Joyce, after all, lived in the psycho-analytic era: he liked to joke about his name's having the same etymology as Freud's.
There are two artistic problems raised by the extensive use of interior monologue. The first is concerned with characterisation: how does one make one person's interior monologue sound different from another's, so that we instantly recognise which character is thinking without tiresome mechanical pointers like 'Stephen thought' or 'Bloom thought'? Part of the problem here lies in the fact that the 'stream of consciousness' is essentially pre-verbal: we do not say to ourselves: 'Where's light-switch? Very dark in here. Must be careful. Chair over there, I know. Damn. Barked shin on it'-rather we react without words to stimuli and memories, and any attempt to set
84
down such a process in words is highly conventional. Joyce solves the problem by assigning a characteristic rhythm to the thought- stream of each of his' three main personages. Stephen's is lyrical, subtle somewhat clotted, and, since Stephen is a poet, his interior monol~gueis much more aware of words-not words as conventional signs for images but words as data for meditation-than that of either Bloom or his wife. Bloom's own rhythm is quick, jaunty, jerky, darting, clipped-appropriate for a man more given to pub- talk than to aesthetic disquisitions, expressive of the very soul of an
intell~gent, but not over-educated, advertising canvasser. As for Molly Bloom's rhythm, it somehow combines the practical and the poetical, short words organised into long flowing phrases which- as we are made to take her mind all in one piece, not in instalments- coalesce into a single mammoth sentence which makes up the last chapter of the book.
The other problem is concerned with what the characters shall think about. The mind naturally strays and wanders, holding to nothing very long, coming back frequently to the same point again and again but rarely staying there. A naturalistic representation of the human mind monologuising to itself may be of scientific interest, but it has nothing to do with art. Themes must be imposed on the three main minds of the novel, and these themes must move in towards each other, suggesting purposeful movement and the unity
proper to a work of literature. The main subject of the book-the
creative relationship between spiritual father, spiritual son, and non- spiritual mother-wife-will clamp the consciousness of each mex:nber of the main trio down, preventing over-much free flight, b~t-m so spacious a book-more than that is needed. We have to consIder not only the theme of the book but its structure.
We are back to Joyce's epic intention. He is not only emulating Homer but taking him over. The title Ulysses is no mere ironical reference to the decline of the heroic as exemplified in the emergence of the bourgeois novel from the original epic form: the title is the key to the structure. Bloom is Ulysses having his little adventures in Dublin; Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus in se~rchofa father; Molly Bloom is both the beguiling Calypso and the faithful Penelope. These
identifications would be merely fanciful if there were not a more solid parallel with the Odyssey built into the structure of the work itself: a little study shows the parallel to be both profound and detailed. Each episode of Ulysses corresponds to an episode of the Odyssey, and the correspondence proliferates in a mass of subtle references.
85
? ? The Labyrinth
Ways into the Labyrinth
When, for instance, Bloom strolls by Sir John Rogerson's Q,lay in glonous summer-morning weather, he is re-enacting the lotus-eating e~isode of the Odyssey. Everything-the warmth, the thought of a leIsurely bath, the communicants in the church he visits, the odours of a chemist's shop, conduce to a mood of 'letting go', and the chapter ends with a vision of Bloom in the bath, lapped in a 'womb
of warmth'. This motif controls the direction of Bloom's loose
meditations, gives them form, shapes them to art. It even conditions
the vocabulary which provides the symbols for his interior mono- logue: if we look carefully we see that this vocabulary is a true an- thology, a mass of flower-references. It also modifies the rhythm of the monologue to something more relaxed and passive than we are normally to associate with Bloom.
But the Homeric parallel is only the beginning. Shape and direc- tion are primarily imposed on each chapter by means ofan Odyssean reference, but that reference suggests related references, sub- references, and these have much to do with not only the direction and subject-matter of the interior monologue but the action itself, and even the technique used to present that action. Thus, a Dublin newspaper-office is a reasonable parallel to the cave of lEolus-the god of the winds whose enmity Ulysses earned-and, so that the scriptures may be fulfilled, Bloom goes to the office of the Freeman's
Journal and National Press. It is appropriate that the scene should be wind-swept, galleys flying about the place, but also appropriate that wind should suggest the lungs, the windiness of newspaper rhetoric, the art of rhetoric itself, the wind-swift transmission of news, the history of the art of the presentation of news (expressed in headlines which punctuate the text) and the technique through which the action, talk, and thought are presented. We end up with a formidable battery of clamps- the scene, the art, the presiding physi- cal organ, the technique. Above everything puffs and blows the wind-god himself-the Editor. If we look deepest of all we shall find
that the episode even has a predominant colour-red. Red is right for
the art of inflaming passions through words and the journalistic cult of the sensational.
What applies in this chapter applies nearly everywhere in the
book: to the Homeric parallel we add a presiding organ, art, colour, symbol, and an appropriate technique. The characters cannot think what they want to think nor do what they want to do: they are bound in a lex eterna, disciplined to the making of a work of art, and yet- such is the author's silence and cunning-they appear to have free-
86
will. By the time we have finished the book they have presented us not only with a serio-comic re-telling of the Odyssey but also with a complete conspectus of the arts and sciences, a working model of the human body, a spectrum, and a textbook of literary techniques. These are gifts which we can accept or ignore, just as we wish: they are primarily there in the service of a story. As Joyce himself said, they make a bridge for the marching across of his eighteen chapters; when the chapters have achieved their passage the bridge can be blown sky-high. But the bridge is an astonishing piece of pontifical architecture in its own right.
So far we have answered the question about Joyce's purpose in
writing Ulysses purely in terms of a kind of technical ambition. There is always the danger that, bemused by the sheer skill of the book, we may ignore what the book is about. It is difficult in any work of art to fillet subject-matter from the presentation of subject- matter, and we may find in Joyce's attempt to make a sort of encyclo- paedia with a heart, as well as a rainbow, a sufficient artistic, as opposed to technical, intention. The fundamental purpose of any work of art is to impose order on the chaos of life as it comes to us; in imparting a vision of order the artist is doing what the religious teacher also does (this is One of the senses in which truth and beauty are the same thing). But the religious teacher's revelation is less a creation than a discovery, whereas the artist feels that-God rather than God's servant-he is the author of order. I have already said that the creation of a human community in fiction is the ? closest the novelist can get to the creation of a cosmos, but Joyce is ambitious enough to want to create a human body (chapter by chapter, organ by organ) which is a sort of configuration (as in Blake or Sweden- borg) ofthe ultimate celestial order. This is perhaps less blasphemous than it looks: it may even be taken as a gesture of piety. It may cer- t. linly be taken as Joyce's attempt to build for himself an order which is a substitute for the order he abandoned when he abandoned the Church.
But we must not forget that Joyce is, as well as a cosmic poet and apocalyptical epiphanist, a writer ofstorics. Ulysses is a story, and a simple story at that. It is a story about the need of people for each other, and Joyce regards this theme as so important that he has to borrow an epic form in which to tell it. The invocation of the Odyssey may reduce Ulysses to Bloom, but it also exalts Bloom to Ulysses. It is time to look at the nature of this invocation.
? ? 2: Taking over Homer
'ULYSSES' AND 'ULIXES' ARE, AS EVERY SCHOOLBOY USED TO KNOW, Latin forms of the Greek 'Odysseus', Odysseus was, even quite early in life, Joyce's favourite epic hero, and, knowing something of Joyce's temperament, one can see why. Most primitive poetry is about fighting, and the ancient epic naturally extols fighting quali- ties, making its heroes out of heavyweights gifted with blind courage, brute strength, and a garnishing of conventional virtue. Physical violence was repugnant to Joyce-there is very little of it in his books-but he responded readily enough to more intelligent ways of overcoming an enemy-organisation, coolness, tact, cunning. These qualities are all to be found in Odysseus, and to them we can add
various endearing imperfections of character. He longs to get home to his wife, but he is not averse to fornication with nymphs and god- desses. This wife is a second-best to Helen, whose hand he failed to win, and it is good loser's decency on his part to persuade all the suitors to join him in swearing an oath to'protect Helen from violence. Yet when Helen is carried off to Troy he tries to evade his obligations by pretending to be mad. Still, once launched on the expedition he proves wise and cunning in counsel and prudently brave in war. He is more likeable than Achilles and Ajax and JEneas; he is more human, more Bloom-like. The Iliad gives us a sharp picture of him.
Odysseus's qualities call for celebration in a separate epic poem,
and the Odyssey is devoted entirely to his adventures after the fall of Troy. It covers the ten years between his demobilisation and his arrival home in Ithaca to wrest the little island kingdom from the suitors of his presumed widow Penelope. Most of the' adventures which fin the ten years are related in retrospect, the actual events of the poem taking about six weeks. Before we meet Odysseus we meet his son Telemachus (this opening section of the poem is called the Telemachia). Telemachus, like Hamlet, is sick at heart. Various
88
island princes are seeking the hand of his mother, but she has-with a cunning perhaps learned from her husband-been putting them off by promising to come to a decision when she has finished weaving a winding-sheet for Laertes, Odysseus's father. What she weaves during the day she unravels at night, but, at the opening of the poem, this trick has been discovered: she must choose her husband now. It becomes urgent for Telemachus to get news of his father. He faces the prospect of having a stepfather whom he hates (he hates all the suitors, but Antinous, the candidate with the shortest odds, is the worst of them all); moreover, these insolent princelings are wasting the substance of the little kingdom of Ithaca very fast. Telemachus goes off to consult Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus and his wife Helen at Sparta: they may have news of his father. Meanwhile, the suitors prepare an ambush against his return.
We come now to the Odyssey proper. Odysseus has been living for seven years on the island of Ogygia, detained there by the goddess Calypso. He wants to go home, but she will not let him. But Zeus, father of the gods, steps in and orders his release, and Odys- seus builds himself a raft. He sails on it for seventeen days and comes within sight of Scheria, where the Phaeacians live, but then Poseidon, the sea-god, blows up a storm and destroys the raft. Odysseus, as we shall hear, put out the one eye of Poseidon's giant son Polyphemus, and he will not be allowed to forget it. Odysseus floats for two days on the sea, buoyed up by a scarf which Ino, sea- goddess, has given him, and at length he is cast ashore on the coast of Scheria. Nausicaa, daughter of the king Alcinous, finds him and looks after him. In the palace the bard Democodus sings to him about his own exploits-including that of the Trojan Horse-and Odysseus, who has up to that moment concealed his name, now tells the Phaeacians who he is and recounts his perilous story.
He tells of the raid on the Cicones at Ismarus, then of the land of the Lotus-Eaters, where so many of his men succumbed to the will- destroying, home-forgetting fruit. After that we hear about the one- eyed giant cannibals called Cyclopes and how Odysseus put out the eye of one of them - Polyphemus-with a red-hot stake. Then comes the account of his stay with the wind-god JEolus, who gave him the adverse winds tied up in a bag as a farewell present; his men, think- ing that the bag contained treasure, released the winds, doing them- selves and their leader little good. After that, the Laestrygones, another giant race of cannibals, destroyed eleven of his twelve ships and ate their crews. The forlorn remainder reached iEaea, where the
89
Taking over Homer
? ? The Labyrinth
Taking over Home1
witch-goddess Circe turned them all into swine-except, of course,
Odysseus, who was protected from enchantment by the herb moly, a gift from Hermes. After a year with Circe (during which he begot a son on her, Telegonus, who was eventually to destroy his father unwittingly) he left-his men having been restored to human shape- to consult the seer Tiresias in Hades about his prospects ofreturning to Ithaca. In Hades he saw the ghosts ofmany dead heroes and their womenfolk and talked with his own mother, Anticlea. Back on the sea again, he resisted the lethal song of the Sirens (himself tied to the mast, his men with wax in their ears) and steered between Scylla- a mariner-eating monster in a cave-and the whirlpool Charybdis. After so many lucky or cunning escapes, his men now did for them- selves by killing the cattle ofthe Sun-god Helios on Thrinacia: such
sacrilege earned them a thunderbolt, though Odysseus-who had
warned them against their crime-escaped on the wreckage of the
ship to Ogygia and the arms of Calypso.
Now comes the homecoming or Nostos. The Phaeacians take
Odysseus back to Ithaca (for their pains their ship is turned, by
Poseidon, into a rock on its return) and now the crafty Odysseus has
to encompass the destruction of the suitors. The goddess Athene disguises him as a beggar, and the faithful swineheard Eumaeus tells him of the behaviour of the suitors. He shows himself to Tele- machus (who escapes the suitors' ambush) and together they plan a massacre. Meanwhile, two others learn that this beggar is Odysseus- his nurse Eurycleia and his dog Argus. After insults from the suitors and a fight with the beggar lrus, our hero learns that Penelope is to marry the man who can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads. Needless to say, only Odysseus can bend the bow and shoot the arrow, and now he stands revealed in his glory and all the suitors quake-with justice, as it turns out, for Odysseus, Telemachus and Eumaeus kill them all, starting with Antinous, and even hang their women. Penelope knows that this must be her husband, since he can tell her what their bedstead looks like, and so all ends, though bloodily, happily. That is how Homer
tells the story.
Joyce tells it rather differently. He has eighteen chapters to
Homer's twenty-four books; he misses out some of Homer's material but inserts an adventure of the Argonauts-that of the Symplegades, or clashing rocks, expanding a reference to the Planktai, or wander- ing rocks, in the twelfth book (line 61) of the Odyssey. Also, he changes the order of Odysseus's exploits and presents them all in
dramatic immediacy, not in epic narration-within-a-narration. The
Joycean Odyssey runs as follows:
Telemachus, like Hamlet, is sick at heart. His mother is dead, and
he feels guilty about her; he has left his father's house to dwell with
two companions. One of these is a foreigner, member of a race that
has usurped the kingdom of his people; the other is a fellow-country- man who perpetually mocks him, demands money from him and even the key of the tower where they live together. He is dis- possessed, bitter at the presence of the usurper. From Nestor-a sage, garrulous and reminiscent prince-he can learn nothing that wi]] lead him back to lawful possession of his rights. He-not Mene- laus-consults the sea-god Proteus, but this god changes his form perpetually, slipping out of the grasp ofTelemachus. Oracular hints have been flashed at him about his need for a spiritual, as opposed to a biological, father, but he cannot formulate this need to himself. Now, after this Telemachia of three episodes, we are ready for Odysseus. Joyce's hero is both an exile and at home. He has his dwelling in the west, but his heart is tugged by ancestral memories of the east, wherefrom his people have wandered. Thus his wife Penelope can take on the properties of a goddess who has seduced him into staying in exile: this is her kingdom, and her name is Calypso. Odysseusgoes forth, having fed her with ambrosia and nectar, and at once finds himself among the Lotus-Eaters. He passes safely through their land and proceeds, with his companions, to
Hades, where he meets the ghosts of the fabled dead. Next he makes
windy contact with . lEolus and nearly meets Telemachus, in whom- his own son being dead - he sees the lineaments of another son. He wanders next among the Laestrygonians, filthy gorgers all, but is himself uneaten.
On the way to Scylla and Charybdis, a necessary passage of his
journey, he espies Antinous, whom he knows to be a suitor of his
wife Penelope. He does not offer fight: he is solitary; he has no son to help him. But now he sees Telemachus himself taking on with courage the perilous passage between the monster's cave and the whirlpool. Telemachus, steering through, sees this sonless father in his turn, and recalls a dream in which such a man seemed to visit him. And now both pseudo-father and pseudo-son have to face new perils: they become Argonauts and venture among the clashing rocks which hide one from the other. Then we are with Odysseus alone once more, and he is not lured by the Sirens' song away from his
purpose-to do the work the gods have set him to do and, at length, 90 91
? ? ? The Labyrinth
return safely to Ithaca. But he ventures into territory where the
Cyclops Polyphemus lurks, and Polyphemus attacks him. Odysseus
gets away, but the giant hurls a heavy missile after him. It is time to
seek brief shelter from the hostile world before continuing the journey. He rests in sight of the sea.
On the seashore the king's daughter Nausicaa is playing with her companions. She falls in love with the mature and weary stranger and, in a dream of abandon, gives herself to him. In a dream Odys- seus takes her, but, in the convalescence of after-love, he comes to
the realisation that, while he is thus dallying away from home, the suitor Antinous has prevailed in Ithaca. It is a bitter moment. Still, ever more mindful of others than himself, he sails to the island where the Oxen of the Sun-god bellow their song of fertility: the island is full of women in labour, and he knows that the wife of a companion is soon to give birth. He lands on the island, enquires about her, and is told that the hour is at hand. He sees that the young Telemachus is there, revelling with drunken companions, and Odysseus is shocked to hear blasphemy spoken against the divine gift of concep- tion: is not this a symbolic slaughtering of the holy oxen? But Zeus hears and, as a warning, launches terrifying thunder.
Odysseus sees that Telemachus has drunk too much wine; what dangers worse than blasphemy may not befall him? He appoints himself the young man's protector and follows him to the island of Circe, where men are turned by magic into swine. The prudent Odysseus is in no danger himself, for the god Hermes has given him the protective herb moly. He sails through terrifYing apparitions and phantasmagorias unscathed. As for the young hero towards whom his attitude grows ever more paternal, he too resists gross transfor- mation and is only in danger of attack from rough men whom lust and drunkenness have turned into beasts. He is struck in the face and falls. And now it is Odysseus's duty to take this new-found son back to Ithaca, to heal him, give him opportunity to recover, and offer him the freedom-as to a true son-of his palace.
But the return to the kingdom must be made with caution. They rest awhile, taking food and drink, in the rude shelter of Eumaeus. Then they take courage and walk to the Palace, imbibing there a sacramental cup of nectar, a pledge of paternality and filiality. The young man leaves, no stranger now. Odysseus seeks his couch-he is weary; he has travelled far-and his wife Penelope finds in him a masterfulness she has not known before. The suitors may have tasted of her body, but they have not prevailed as Odysseus has prevailed:
92
they cannot draw his long bow of cunning and knowledge of the world and the deathless gods that govern the world. And Odysseus has brought her a son to replace the ttue son they lost long ago to the gods of the underworld. This son, not being of her body, stands in the potential relationship of messiah and lover. She sleeps, well content.
That, briefly, is Joyce's own version of the Odyssey. All we have
to do now is to dress these characters in modern clothes and make
them live through their adventures in a modern city, expanding these adventures to epic length but imposing on them the tight rules ofunity found in the classical drama. Let us go back to the beginning again but this time take it more slowly.
Taking over Homer
93
? ? 3: Telemachus
DAZZLED BY THE MOST GLITTERING ASPECT OF Ulysses - ITS display of literary techniques and its ingenuities of symbolism-we find it easy to regard each chapter as a separable item to be marvelled
at, the whole book as a loose collocation of tableaux like an exhibi- . '
tlon, and to forget that its fundamental concern is with the telling of a story. A plain summary of this story is not very enlightening, but the theme on which the story is based is potent, suggestive, and compelhng. It is the mystery of the relationship between non- begetting father and unbegotten son.
What sounds like nonsense or, at best, a paradox becomes clear
only in a context of theology. At the end of A Portrait we are puzzled by an identification which we did not expect. Stephen Dedalus has been seeing himself as the fabulous inventor of human flight and creator of the Labyrinth. But in his last diary entry he invokes Daedalus as a father. 'Brightness falls from the air' and 'Non serviam' are for Lucifer but also for Icarus, the son of Daedalus whose wings failed him. Stephen is both Daedalus and Icarus, both father and son. How can this mystery be resolved? Only in the
mystical terms of Christian theology, in which Father and Son are, though separate Persons, really aspects ofeach other.
And so the branch oflearning (art or science) which presides over the first chapter of Ulysses is theology. This justifies the liturgical opening, with Buck Mulligan intoning the beginning of the Mass- Introibo ad altare Dei-and carrying a lather-bowl on which a cross is made by a razor and mirror. The scene is that Martello Tower on the Dublin coast where Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty (the original of Buck Mulligan) lived for a short time (it is now a Joyce
museum), and the hour is eight o'clock on the morning ofJune 16th, 1904. We enter the story without difficulty. The technique is a straightforward narrative onc in which all the characters save one are young. Suddenly, though, the interior monologue of Stephen
94
Dedalus begins. Mulligan's teeth glisten with gold fillings and the detach~dword 'Chrysostomos' is thrown at us. It mean; 'golden ~? uth. and It refers us back to a Saint John so called. The reference IS lforucally apt when we remember that Mulligan is Oliver St John Go? arty. Here th~ worrie~ that accompany us when we read Joyce's major books begm-worne~ about real-life references which, pro- perly, should have no place m the readmg of a work of fiction. Time and time again obscurities only become clear when we consult the biographical background of Ulysses.