17
THE ULYSSES THEME
...
Of the harvests through the years - by Sophocles, Dante, Monteverdi,
Tennyson and many others - one from the present century beyond all doubt
takes its place with the greatest of them: James Joyce's novel Ulysses,
published in 1922. 'Novel', however, seems hardly the right word - 'pantechnicon'
might be more appropriate. It is a book that sometimes seems more joked
about than read. In 1968 Cilia Black said of it: 'It cost me thirty-five
shillings, and I got stuck on the first page. I think that's disgusting,
don't you? No, not the contents, I mean writing a book so that people can't
understand it.' It has, on the other hand, been seen as the founding work
of modern literature. In his review in The Dial in 1923 T. S. Eliot wrote:
Mr Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey . . . has the importance of a scientific
discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before:
it has never been necessary. . . . Instead of the narrative method, we
may use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward
making the modern world possible for art. Joyce was himself aware of the
awesomeness of his undertaking: 'The most beautiful, all-embracing theme
is that of the Odyssey,' he once said to a pupil in Zurich. 'It is greater,
more human, than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust . . .' He went
on 'I am almost afraid to treat such a theme; it's overwhelming.' Ulysses
is a big book, but its 'hero' - again hardly the right word - is a little
man, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising agent who lives in Dublin with
a wife of doubtful virtue. Yet seasoned travellers will still recognise
Odysseus, even though he is in heavy disguise. One of Bloom's acquaintances
says of him: He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is ... He's not one of
your common or garden . . . you know . . . There's a touch of the artist
about old Bloom. James Joyce himself sketched his 'hero' Leopold Bloom
in 1920, while he was writing Ulysses. He has also written out the first
line of the Odyssey in Creek.
119 DOUBLING MALEIA
THE ONE-EYED GIANT IN DUBLIN
The expanded horizons of the twentieth century have broadened the locations
for the wanderings of Odysseus in his various modern guises. The Greek
poet Nikos Kazantzakis, in his monumental poem The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel,
takes his hero through Crete, Egypt and Africa to Antarctica. The voyagers
of Arthur C. Clarke's 2002 A Space Odyssey are sent deep into the unexplored
reaches of the solar system.
Paradoxically, the most creative modern conception contracts the wanderings
to a rough square mile of Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904. Leopold
Bloom, a 38-year-old advertising salesman, visits a public bath, a cemetery,
a newspaper office, a library, a public house, a maternity hospital and
a brothel. When Ulysses was originally published serially in The Little
Review, Joyce headed each episode with the title of its Homeric parallel,
Sirens, Nausicaa and so on. But these do not appear in the book, and the
relationship of Ulysses with its prototype has always been an issue.
There has been an especially lively debate on whether the contracted
stage on which Joyce places his dramatis personae, above all his Odysseus,
implies reduced stature. Ezra Pound, for example, argued that
Joyce was merely using Homer to give some shape to a relatively plotless
work; others have seen Bloom as representative of the littleness of modern
life in contrast with the heroic past. But, while the correspondences with
the Odyssey vary enormously - and are often very witty - Joyce's use of
Homer was far more integral to his work than some kind of academic game.
(The links are close, but Henri Matisse went too far. When asked why his
illustrations for a special edition had so little bearing on Joyce's Ulysses,
he replied: 'Je ne I'ai pas lu'. He had illustrated Homer!)
Joyce studied the Odyssey with care and attempted a Homeric fusion
of reality and myth. He also drew on his wide-ranging secondary reading.
For example, he was attracted by an etymology of the name Odysseus that
alleged that it came from Outis-Zeus a combination of Noman and the king
of the gods. His Ulysses was to be a god and a nobody. Berard's theory
about the Semitic origins of the Odyssey provided a synthesis for this
growing conception. As Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, observed: 'Joyce
needed to find a pagan hero whom he could set loose in a Catholic city
to make Ulysses a Dubliner.'
His Ulysses would be a Jew. As his name Leopold Bloom suggests, he
would be the archetype of the insignificant immigrant, yet nonetheless
possessing characteristics that overlapped with those of Odysseus. 'Look
at them/ Joyce commented to Frank Budgen, 'they are better husbands than
we are, better fathers and better sons.' But he could also represent the
wider emblem of the Wandering Jew - an alternative manifestation of Odysseus.
While entirely believable and lovable, Bloom is a composite reflection
of Joyce's phenomenal memory and eclectic reading: 'He's an allroundman,
Bloom is . . .'
As Odysseus, and more than Odysseus, his encounter with the
120
Dublin Cyclops - as terrifying in his own way as Polyphemus -brings
out and tests the more godlike aspect of this 'nobody'. It is four o'clock,
and Bloom has agreed to meet two friends outside the Green Street Courthouse.
When they do not appear he pops into Barney Kiernan's pub in Little Britain
Street. There sits the unnamed 'citizen', drinking round after round of
Guinness with the various regulars. He is described in 'epic' language:
From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his
rock-like mountainous knees were covered . . . with a strong growth of
tawny prickly hair. . . . The widewinged nostrils . . .were of such capaciousness
that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged
her nest.
These proportions reflect-his need to dominate the company, in keeping
with his other Cyclopean characteristic, narrow vision. The citizen is
an Irish Nationalist whose fanaticism leads him to appropriate Patrick
W. Shakespeare, Thomas Cook and Son and the Queen of Sheba to his cause.
In the discussion that follows, Bloom stands up to his one-eyed adversary
by insisting upon seeing every question from both sides.
121 DOUBLING MALETA
When the others praise Gaelic sports for 'building up a nation again',
Bloom speaks out in favour of a more gentle game: 'What I meant about tennis,
for example, is the agility and training the eye.' References to eyes and
blindness accumulate ('The Nelson Policy', for example) as the citizen's
nationalism is exposed as thin cover for his xenophobia:
Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to
Ireland filling the country with bugs.. . . Swindling the peasants, says
the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our
house.
As a pacifist, Bloom stands up to the citizen with words. While he is speaking
he almost burns himself on his smouldering cigar butt, a sort of reversal
of Odysseus preparing to blind Polyphemus. Still, his bravery in the face
of brute force ennobles the scene, and another allusion to Odysseus' olive-wood
stake associates him with an even more exalted personage: 'Some people
can see the mote in others eyes but they can't see the beam in their own/
His blinding defiance of the citizen has similar undertones:
-But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that.
That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows
that it's the very opposite of that that is really life^
- What? says Alf.
Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now.
As his friends hurry him out, the citizen jeers 'three cheers for Israel!'.
Odysseus with his Noman trick is in danger of losing his name. Bloom's
name (already caricatured as Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft) is in
fact a kind of concealment: when he came to Ireland from Hungary his father
changed it from Viraj - the Hungarian for flower. As he makes his escape
Viraj/Odysseus now risks everything by declaring himself:
- Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza.
And the saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.
- He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.
- Whose God? says the citizen.
- Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was
a jew like me.
Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
- By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy
name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.
The sun is in the citizen's eyes ('Where is he till I murder him?') and
the Jacob's biscuit tin - Polyphemus' rock- misses its target. The episode
culminates with the epic carriage ascending to heaven. Yet its last word
brings the apotheosised Noman down to earth:
122 AN ODYSSEY ROUND ODYSSEUS
And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds
c: angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty fivi
degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off i shovel.
As an exile from the earth of Dublin and of Ireland, Joyce took immense
pains to create an accurate picture of the place at a specific time in
1904. He used maps, timetables and books; he told Budgen: '1 want to give
a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day disappeared from
the earth it could be reconstructed out of my
123 DOUBLING MALEIA
book! There is, for example, a precise topical reference when the citizen
provocatively invokes 'Sinn Fein!'. This was the official title of the
patriotic movement when it became a political party the following year
in 1905. Some of Joyce's locations have, however, felt the effect of Irish
Republicanism more than Joyce could ever have foreseen. The Green Street
Courthouse is now the Special Criminal Court, where many IRA suspects have
been tried. The IRA may well also have been responsible for the bomb which
expertly removed the top half of Nelson's Pillar - a central Dublin landmark
- in 1966. Barney Kiernan's pub is now a unisex hair salon called As You
Like It. And the town planners have gone further in defacing Joyce's Dublin:
7 Eccles Street was demolished to make way for a private hospital in 1982
- though individual bricks and other relics are scattered throughout the
literate world.
Yet, untouched by two world wars, the city remains largely unchanged;
and every bookshop sells annotated itineraries to help tourists trace,
step by step and hour by hour, the journey of Leopold Bloom. At the same
time, Joyce's Odyssey is far more than a paper itinerary, as it is more
than Thorn's Official Directory which he constantly consulted.
156 AN ODYSSEY ROUND ODYSSEUS
MOLLY'S MELONS
James Joyce was an exile, too. The last words printed on the last page
of Ulysses are
'Trieste-Zurich-Paris' 1914-1921
The homecomings of this book are characteristically multiple, though underlying
their complexities is the fundamental polarity of man and woman.
The penultimate section of the book, which was originally labelled
Ithaca, takes the form of a question and answer catechism. It covers Bloom's
return to 7 Eccles Street in the small hours of the morning {17 June 1904).
Immediately he is faced with a problem, because he has left his key in
another pair of trousers. He has to climb over the railings and get in
through the scullery door - not unlike Odysseus' furtive return as a beggar.
As with Odysseus, there have been other men in his house: on the piano
is 'Love's Old Sweet Song' which Molly has been practising with her current
suitor, Blazes Boylan.
Bloom is with Stephen Dedalus, a young intellectual, and the hero of
Joyce's earlier, semi-autobiographical work Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. For this night Bloom has looked after Stephen, as if he were
his son, some compensation for the loss of his own Rudy, who would have
been his future. The substitute Telemachus departs after a cup of Epp's
Soluble Cocoa, declining the offer of a bed for the night. Stephen is soon
to set off on his travels. His itinerary has been a favourite subject of
dispute among Joyceans. One suggestion is that he goes out of 7 Eccles
Street to leave Dublin and to create Ulysses ~ Bloom's Phemius?
Bloom, left alone, imagines doing a bunk himself and embarking on great
wanderings:
What tributes his?
Honour and gifts of strangers, the friends of Everyman.
A nymph immortal, beauty, the bride of Noman.
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever would he wander, self compelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary
orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets,
astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing
from land to land, among peoples amid events.
He must somehow be recalled, however, and somehow:
. . . return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on
malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources
(by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.
This pan-galactic Odysseus comes characteristically back down to earth.
He prefers to be reconciled with his lot rather than to play the hero,
and he soon thinks of reasons for staying put:
157 HAPPY THE MAN
The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory: the obscurity
of the night, rendering invisible: the uncertainty of thoroughfares, rendering
perilous: the necessity for repose, obviating movement: the proximity of
an occupied bed, obviating research: the anticipation of warmth (human).
. .
So Leopold Bloom settles for the 'occupied bed'.
Far from being an immutable olive-rooted bed, unused for twenty years,
this bed has come 'all the way from Gibraltar' where Molly's father bought
it off 'old Cohen'. Victor Berard in his reconstruction of Odysseus' voyages
had located Calypso on an island off Gibraltar, so Molly's birthplace becomes
part of Joyce's fusion of Penelope and Calypso. The bed has followed the
couple around a succession of abodes, and has welcomed a succession of
Molly's lovers. Now Bloom climbs in:
How?
With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode (his own
or not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress
being old, the brass quoits and pendant viper radii loose and tremulous
under stress and strain: prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of lust
or adders: lightly the less to disturb: reverently, the bed of conception
and of birth, of consummation o| marriage and of breach of marriage, of
sleep and of death.
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter? New clean bedlinen,
additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint
of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat,
recooked, which he removed.
Boylan has been enjoying Plumtree's Potted Meat in this 'abode of bliss'.
Yet Bloom prefers equanimity to jealousy, and rejects Odyssean vengeance.
It is characteristic of him to prefer compromise; this, in a sense, is
his triumph.
What retribution, if any?
Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right.
Dual by combat, no. Divorce, not now. . .
He justifies these sentiments to himself by reflecting on:
the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity
of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the
stars.
Equanimity is Bloom's version of stringing and shooting the bow - a kind
of victory over the vigorous insensitivity of the likes of Boylan. So he
kisses the 'yellow smellow melons' of Molly's rump, half-answers her sleepy
questions, and curling up, head to tail, drifts off to sleep. 'He rests.
He has travelled.' Yet the chapter does not end there but with a question:
Where?
158 AN ODYSSEY ROUND ODYSSEUS
THE OTHER HALF OF THE BED
Ulysses does not end with the man but with the woman, with a flow of
words that Joyce entitled Penelope. The Odyssey, despite Samuel Butler's
theories about its authorship, is a male poem with a predominantly male
perspective. Suzanne Vega asks what it was like for Calypso after Odysseus
had gone. Hers is a proud but not a happy song. Penelope does not take
part at all in the closing scenes of the Odyssey; and Joyce's ending may
be interpreted as in some ways more sympathetic to the female perspective.
Penelope consists of the thoughts that go through Molly's dozing mind
- 25,000 words without one single mark of punctuation other than the initial
asterisk and the final full stop. It begins with a thought about her husband:
*Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his
breakfast in bed. .
[The finale of Monteverdi's opera II Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria. 'Si
si vita! Si, si core, si si!']
159 HAPPY THE MAN
But she muses, as her thoughts progress, on Boylan and many other lovers.
Of all of Joyce's calculated departures from the Odyssey, the greatest
is the repeated infidelity of his Penelope. Molly is not inclined to abandon
Bloom, but she has no intention of becoming faithful to him either:
Ill just give him one more chance 111 get up early in the morning
Im sick of Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to
see all the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds
of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the
ist man Id meet. . .
But, as we reach the last page of this 'epic', Molly's mind returns to
the first time that she and Bloom made love out on Howth Head:
it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that
long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain
yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he
said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked
him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could
always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him
on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out
over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know
of. . .
This Penelope is not only the equal of her husband's subtlety - she knows
that she can get round him at any time. Molly also arrives at a kind of
compromise: even in the last lines she is still merging the 'he' of Bloom
with other past lovers. Yet her husband is her last thought:
. . . and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall
I wear a red yes and how he kissed me und
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