The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (the Rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the bookhunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte in Bernard Kiernan's premises (holocaust): a blank period of time including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking (wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering): the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone street, lower, and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street (Armageddon): nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge (atonement).
I did it. I read Ulysses. I carried it on the train, where I read from it, impressing many. I understood, on the level of mere plot-and-character understanding, perhaps half of it. I was in delighted, frustrated, amused, and bored, in about equal measure. Now I will try to review it, which is probably only a little bit less sensible than having written it in the first place.
First: Actually having read The Odyssey helps immensely. Joyce takes the pattern of the epic quite seriously, but applies it with clever humor: the cyclops becomes a bigot who throws, not a giant boulder, but a biscuit tin; Nausicaa, the beautiful young maiden Odysseus flirts with and cannot have, is a woman on the sea shore who provides the pretext for Leopold Bloom's afternoon masturbation session. (Like Nausicaa, Gerty has "white arms," which is especially ironic because Bloom fails to notice her legs, which are "lame.") The suitors are, alternately, one college asshole who wants to crash at Stephen Dedalus' place, and a series of adulterous lovers that Bloom knows his wife is having. The pattern is used to elevate the tawdriness, the ordinariness, of everyday life, to collapse the difference between high myth and the life of normal people. It's inseparable from the stream-of-consciousness methods that track the inner lives of Stephen, Bloom, and most famously, Bloom's wife Molly. Life is in your head, Joyce says, and that's as meaningful as any grand narrative that's ever existed.
Like The Odyssey, Ulysses is a story about anxious relationships between parents and children. Telemachus is unable to become a man until his father returns to Ithaca and validates his power. Stephen Dedalus' relationship to Bloom, a kind of would-be paternal surrogate, is an ironic version of this. Unlike Telemachus, Stephen is pretty ambivalent about being "adopted" by Bloom, though they spend an evening drinking and carousing together, and their relationship doesn't seem to provide meaning, power, legitimacy, anything. Both part with their own anxieties about their parenthood intact: Stephen's depressed by the recent loss of his mother; Bloom has never gotten over his father's suicide or his young son's death. Stephen, in a speech at the National Library, calls the entire idea of fatherhood into question:
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mythical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
Fathers, Stephen says, don't have the same relationship to their children that mothers do. You once had a physical connection to your mother, quite literally, but what is the real nature of your relationship to your father? It is "a mythical estate, an apostolic sucession"; it's nothing at all. It's this thought that makes his mother's death especially painful. It also connects to the old themes of sex and adultery. What does Bloom lose, exactly, when Blazes Boylan sneaks into Molly's bed in the middle of the day (as he well knows)? What is it exactly he desires when he masturbates to the vision of Gerty on the strand? What's lost in what Joyce calls the "Rite of Onan?" One of the thing that undermines Ulysses' claims to universality is its singular obsession with the male sex drive and masturbation, though Molly famously gets her own account of her sex drive in the final chapter. But all of it, Joyce contends, is "founded... on the void," and the way we connect sex and generational succession is really a con that distracts us from the meaninglessness of our own sexual desires. I don't think Ulysses is actually very pessimistic, but I do think, for Joyce, the pattern of myth supplies something that traditional marriage, sex, and family, fails to supply.
Okay, but is it any good? There's that old joke about the local weather, that gets told everywhere but San Diego: If you don't like it, wait ten minutes. Ulysses is a little like that. Each of its eighteen chapters is stylistically discrete and distinct, presenting some different gimmick or satire. And while the story itself is unwieldy, the chapters break it down helpfully. Some of my favorites are: chapter three, "Proteus," in which Stephen expounds his theories on Hamlet (and fatherhood) to some friends at the National Library; "Cyclops," the mock-heroic that tells the story of Bloom's encounter with the anti-Semitic bigot and the biscuit tin through the language of world myth; and "Circe," which is formatted like a play. "Circe" especially seems like the missing link between Faust and Beckett; it's an extended drunken vision where Bloom is accosted by the mental images of his dead father, is put on trial, becomes a woman. A bar of soap reads a little poem. ("We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. / He polishes the earth. I brighten the sky.") You know, stuff like that. "Ithaca" takes the form of a traditional question-and-answer catechism, "Penelope" is the famous single sentence stream-of-consciousness inside Molly Bloom's head as she drifts off to sleep. (Who knew that would be one of the easiest chapters to read!)
But I didn't love all of it. I was particularly frustrated by the chapter "Eumaeus," which was evidently Joyce's attempt at bad, circuitous, ponderous writing. "Aeolus," done in the language of the contemporary news, is too far from my conception of that style to really make much sense. And while I enjoyed sussing out the different parodies in "Oxen of the Sun," which I'm told is meant to mimic the development of the entire English language, I couldn't tell you what happened in it. I think someone had a baby.
Is Ulysses the best book ever written? Well, it certainly is the most book ever written. Not that it's the longest, though it might feel that way, but that it has a totality to it, a breadth that nothing else can touch. As much as it meets its reputation for stylistic difficulty, it's beauty is in the sheer capaciousness it has for language, and the way it contains multitudes. I never want to read it again.
