Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, June 6th.

I have been re-reading Ulysses. For the third time. Third time in its entirety, I mean. I have dipped into it on innumerable occasions, but read it fully four times now, from page 1, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…” to p. 900 and odd, “…yes I said yes I will yes”.  And every time I read it, it stuns me. The achievement of it. The scope of it. The humanity of it. I don’t know if it’s my favourite novel, since it defies the classification, but it is certainly my favourite prose work of any kind. Second only to the Bard himself, in all literature. IMHO.

            It is not an easy book to read; that I will concede. Especially for the first time. There is so much going on – externally and internally – and so many characters, so many styles, so much of the immeasurable variety of life, that the first time reader can find it well nigh incomprehensible. Nor does Joyce do the reader many favours. If you want to read his book, you read it on his terms.

            Which is why so many people have given it a try and given it up after a while. They don’t understand it. They can’t see the point of it. If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it? Some – even educated and literate people, some of them – sneer at it as a monstrous practical joke. It’s not that. It is extremely funny in places. But it is not a joke.

            What it is, is a work of art. A consciously, perhaps self-sonsciously, wrought work of art, by a writer who had just that aim in mind when he wrote: to create art. To forge the uncreated conscience of his race,  as he almost wrote. Ulysses is not a Whodunnit, not a Mills and Boon romance, not a formulaic or genre novel of any kind. It is, as I have said, unique. And uniquity is one of the attributes of a work of art. Another writer I admire tremendously, a different writer, a living and female writer, Jeanette Winterson wrote about literary art:

"There are plenty of entertaining reads that are part of the enjoyment of life. That doesn't make them literature. There is a simple test: "Does this writer's capacity for language expand my capacity to think and to feel?""

Using this criteria alone, Joyce is a supreme literary artist and, in my opinion, Ulysses is his finest work.

           

I like the humour of it:

- Dead! Says Alf. He is no more dead than you are.

- Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.  (Cyclops)

- Agonising Christ, wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse?  (Aeolus)

So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of the lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and  racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all of that. And of course Bloom had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That's a straw. Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.  (Cyclops)

My uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying passing the corner of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didn’t make me blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle in a sweepingbrush  (Penelope)

I like the humanity of it, especially the gentle, considerate humanity of the hero, Bloom. He is all too human and therefore fallible, but his compassionate wisdom singles him out in a city of characters.

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.  (Cyclops)

Joyce has an ear for language and its music that few other writers can even approximate. The book teems with examples, but I will pick one very simple one:

Mr. Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. (Nausicaa)

That word ‘vexed’ is precisely right, both in terms of its denotation and of the onomatopeia of its two primary consonants. Some writers could fill a book the size of a phone directory with words and never be able to do something like that.

            But what I like most about Ulysses is the fact that you can open it, especially in the central chapters – from Lotus-Eaters to Sirens – and be walking along the streets of Dublin in 1904 with Bloom. Seeing what he sees, hearing and smelling what he hears and smells, and privy to his every passing thought:

In Westland Row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend, finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom Kernan. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning. (Lotus-Eaters)

I’ve never understood what readers find difficult about that. What is third person narrative and what is internal monologue is blindingly obvious. The two happen simultaneously in life – Joyce just does it in art.

            Of course, the stream of consciousness, the interior monolgue, is what Ulysses is mainly famous for nowadays. But Joyce wasn’t the first to do it. Edouard Dujardin in Les Lauriers sont Coupés, and Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage, did it before him. Virginia Woolf, for that matter, was doing it at the same time as him. But nobody did it as well as Joyce does it. And each person’s interior monologue is exactly right for that character, and different from anyone else’s.

             So. There it is. The Book of Books. Set on Thursday June 16^th, 1904 in Dublin. It used to be thought that Joyce picked that date because it was on that day that he first met Nora, the woman who shared the rest of his life with him. We now know he met her a few days before the 16^th.  But on the 16^th itself, they walked out together and she, in a quiet grove  … well, gave him manual satisfaction, shall we say. And the date is immortal now in literary history.

            Musta been some wank.

Till next we meet again, a chara.