Something in me rebels at this debasement of Gudrun. I prefer to remember her dancing like a maenad in front of the horned cattle and frightening them away.
CHAPTER 35
Ulysses (1922)
JAMES JOYCE
THE MAJOR NOVELS of the twentieth century are Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which was published in sections from 1913 to 1927, Proust himself dying in 1922 at the age of fifty-one, and the Ulysses of James Joyce, composed between 1917 and 1922. Joyce died in 1941, not quite fifty-nine. I do not believe that Proust ever read Joyce, though they met at one Parisian dinner, and complained to each other about their mutual bad health. Joyce read Swann’s Way (1913) and thought it was quite ordinary, but nevertheless attended Proust’s funeral.
I can think of only one peer of Proust and Ulysses, and that has to be Finnegans Wake, published by Joyce in 1939 after seventeen years of extraordinary labor. If forced to choose between Proust, Ulysses, and the Wake, I would be very unhappy. Emotionally, I am more turned inside out by In Search of Lost Time, but the Wake is hilarious, once you have read it a few times, and Ulysses has a richness that all but rivals Dante and Shakespeare. Readers are likelier to absorb Proust and Ulysses than to accommodate the Wake. I hope to reread all of Finnegans Wake at least once more ere I depart, but I reread Proust and Ulysses several times a year.
There are many ways to read through Joyce’s Ulysses. It depicts the day of June 16, 1904, with Leopold Bloom, aged thirty-eight, as its protagonist. In the world’s literary calendar this is known as Bloomsday, and was also the day of the first date between Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, who left Dublin together for the Continent, remained partners, and had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. Giorgio attempted a career as a professional singer but wisely fell in love with an American heiress and was able to treat singing as an avocation. Lucia was schizophrenic and had to be permanently institutionalized. Rather reluctantly, Nora and Joyce were formally married in 1931.
Leopold Bloom had a Hungarian Jewish father, Rudolf Virag, who changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and converted to Protestantism when he married Ellen Higgins. Leopold or Poldy, as we will join Joyce in calling him, was raised a Protestant and therefore was uncircumcised. Poldy converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Molly Tweedy, the astonishing Molly Bloom of the novel. Rudolph Bloom died by his own hand. Molly and Poldy have a daughter, Milly, but their son, Rudy, died only eleven days old.
Poldy, since both his mother and grandmother were Christian, would not be considered Jewish by the Talmud. This becomes a rather complex matter. Though he has been both an unbelieving Protestant and a faithless Catholic, Poldy considers himself to be Jewish, and all of Dublin regards him as such. Why did James Joyce want some kind of Jewish identity for his Ulysses?
The possible answer, as most critics agree, is that James Joyce left Ireland for the European continent in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, and lived abroad until his death in 1941. Most of his life was spent in voluntary exile from Dublin. Yet all of his writing centers on Dublin and its citizens. Joyce frequently thought of himself as the new Dante, and the bitterness of Dante’s forced exile from Florence became the model for his life and work, except that James Joyce refused to yield to bitterness. Poldy Bloom feels at home in Dublin, yet his fellow citizens consider him alien, a Wandering Jew.
By abandoning Dublin, Joyce also renounced the Roman Catholicism into which he had been born and baptized. He had even less use for Protestantism and in no way can be regarded as religious, either in temperament or in conviction. Joyce emulated William Blake in casting out both priest and king, but Blake always regarded himself as a Christian even if he was in a sect of one. Poldy knows almost nothing about his ancestral Jewish tradition. He is as secular as James Joyce and William Shakespeare. At the deepest level of Ulysses, Poldy is Shakespeare and Joyce. This is Joyce’s design. Though he admired writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe and Gustave Flaubert, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joyce consciously staged an agon with Dante and with Shakespeare. His aspirations were indeed Homeric; he desired to make a third with Dante and Shakespeare or even to surpass them.
I cannot think of another writer that ambitious, with the likely exceptions of Milton and of Tolstoy. Figures as grand as Goethe, Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Manzoni, Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, George Eliot, Proust, Kafka, and Yeats judiciously held back from too direct an emulation of Dante or of Shakespeare.
To rival Dante and Shakespeare, you have to remake language and change modes of representation. I am hardly competent to judge whether James Joyce so fulfilled his own project as to join Dante and Shakespeare on the final heights. But if not Joyce, then who? Once you have fully enjoyed the reading of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, even Finnegans Wake, you can begin to consider the larger contexts of Joyce’s literary desires.
There are three very good discussions of Joyce’s relation to Dante. The first is Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination by Mary T. Reynolds (1981). I have the happiest memories of many teas shared with Mary Reynolds and Mary Ellmann during the years they were at Yale. Both were witty, kind, brilliant women considerably older than I, and I was glad to sit in their company and learn. Mary Reynolds’s study of Joyce and Dante meditates upon the paternal figures of the Commedia and their resurrection in the panoply of Joycean works. Joyce found precedent for his own rebellion against Catholicism in Dante’s own independence of thought and of figuration. Another vivid treatise is Lucia Boldrini’s Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (2001), which studies Dante’s influence on Finnegans Wake. More recently, there is James Robinson’s Joyce’s Dante (2016), which traces the unorthodox Dante bequeathed to Joyce by the nineteenth-century tradition that moves from Shelley and Byron to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Anglo-American Dante scholarship of the last few generations tends to give us a theological Dante, a poet more intent on Aquinas and Augustine than on his own literary agon with Brunetto Latini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guido Guinizelli. The latter was the inventor of the lyrical “sweet new style” that Dante acknowledged as one starting point. Cavalcanti was Dante’s best friend and a strong influence upon him; Brunetto Latini was his teacher and the author of the Tesoretto or Tesoro, which served Dante as an example for the Commedia.
Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated into English in 1953, was my own starting point in reading Dante as a poet and not as a theologian. Beatrice is granted by Dante a high place in the Catholic scheme of salvation. She will ultimately inspire not only Dante but all Roman Catholic believers to take the true path. So great was Dante’s achievement that in time the Church was glad to subsume him. Still, as Curtius insists, the glorification of Beatrice is either heresy or myth. The question is: of what kind? Curtius answers that this glorification is clearly related to Gnosticism, perhaps not in origin but certainly as a scheme or construction.
James Joyce, whose rebellion against the Church was permanent, evidently found in Dante a difference from orthodoxy that could aid the young Irish writer in his quest toward identity with the culminating poet of the Latin tradition.
Dante had a necessarily distorted sense of Virgil’s place in that tradition. The poet of the Commedia had never heard of Lucretius, whose Epicurean masterpiece, De rerum natura, is an overwhelming influence upon Virgil’s Aeneid. It was not until 1417 that a complete Lucretius was rediscovered in a German monastery. As a lover of both poems, I cannot reread the Aeneid without the sensation that Virgil had a copy of Lucretius in front of him, confirming his Epicurean stance toward human suffering. Dante’s Virgil is Christianized into a seeker after grace, but in Dante’s scheme the historical Virgil belongs in the Inferno, side by side with the great Farinata, who stands upright in his flaming tomb, as if of hell he had a great disdain.
Lucretius has a way of contaminating later writers, from Marlowe and Shake
speare on through Shelley and Tennyson and culminating in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Poldy has not read Lucretius, but his stance toward suffering and death is Epicurean and seems to be consonant with that of James Joyce. No labels will work, for either Ulysses or the Wake. You cannot even describe Poldy’s epic as Homeric despite its scaffolding. Perhaps the only word that will work is “completeness.” Leopold Bloom, like Odysseus, is the complete man and, like his Dublin, he is comic rather than tragic, except that he appears to be the most humane individual in his world.
When I was very young, I read and was impressed by Aldous Huxley’s essay “Tragedy and the Whole Truth” (1931). I have not reread it for more than half a century, but I remember the essential point: in the Odyssey, after losing a number of their shipmates to various hazards, Odysseus and the other survivors mourn briefly, and then turn to their meat and wine and subsequent sleep. In Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy, this wholeness would not work. James Joyce in Ulysses desires to give us common truths for uncommon readers. He remarked to Frank Budgen that, however rich the language of Ulysses and the Wake became, what he meant to convey was quite simple. There is some truth in that, particularly in Ulysses, but in the Wake the disproportion between the extraordinary language and the simple actions may be a permanent impediment to a wider readership.
I intend to say something that may be helpful about the Wake later in this chapter, but here I return to Ulysses. Many who love the novel set highest the “Circe,” the midnight hallucinatory vision of the Nighttown whorehouse, or the “Penelope,” the internal monologue of Molly Bloom in the small hours. I would not quarrel with such judgments, but I care most for the opening “Telemachus,” set at 8:00 a.m. in the Martello Tower, for which Stephen Dedalus has paid the rent, while the egregious Malachi (Buck) Mulligan secures the key and so dispossesses Stephen. Buck Mulligan has given a dubious immortality to Oliver St. John Gogarty, who is now remembered only for Joyce’s exuberant portrait of his former friend and drinking companion. Gogarty died in New York City in 1957, aged seventy-nine. When he abandoned Ireland, embittered by lost lawsuits and the burning of his house by the IRA, he went to London, but then on to the United States, leaving his family behind him.
Until his various debacles, Gogarty enjoyed a remarkable career in Ireland, as a literary figure, a politician, a surgeon, and an athlete. He was close to W. B. Yeats and George Moore, as well as to Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, important figures in the Irish struggle against England. When civil war ignited Ireland, Gogarty became an Irish Free State senator and had to endure the death of Griffith and the assassination of Michael Collins. In 1922, the year Ulysses was published, the IRA kidnapped Gogarty with the intent of murdering him. By wit and stamina, he escaped, leaped into the River Liffey, and, being a champion swimmer, had no trouble getting to safety. Famously, he promised the Liffey two swans and kept his word.
I met Gogarty only once, in about 1955, at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, where I enjoyed his somewhat intoxicated eloquence and recitations. And yet I could see in him, even in his seventies, the traits of the immortal Buck Mulligan. He was fierce, ribald, unctuous, yet somehow disquieting. I had read some of his poems, none of them impressive, and the rollicking As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, a fictionalized memoir in which Yeats, Joyce, and other Irish literary and political notables are caricatured. The book eventually ruined Gogarty financially, as he was sued by one of the Sinclair brothers, Dublin art dealers who were Jewish. The case was decided against him, since clearly he had slandered them in some rather bad anti-Semitic verses, not worth quoting here. A charming element in the trial was the testimony of the young Samuel Beckett, one of whose aunts had been married to a Sinclair brother. A lawyer for Gogarty referred to Beckett as “the bawd and blasphemer from Paris.” As someone privileged to have met Beckett, just twice and briefly, in Paris and in New York City, I have to be charmed by the description. Beckett was gentle, kind, sadly noble, and had been a hero of the French Resistance against the Nazis.
I come at last to the beautiful opening of Ulysses, leading off the “Telemachus” section:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.
—Back to barracks! he said sternly.
He added in a preacher’s tone:
—For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.
—Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?
He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
—The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!
He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.
(Ulysses, Everyman’s Library Edition)
To describe the splendor of “Telemachus” is for me a difficult critical task. I purchased my first copy of Ulysses in the Cornell bookstore in September 1947. At once I fell in love with the words “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” rolling them over and over on my tongue. They felt and still feel delicious. Even in this opening passage, Joyce conveys an amiable distaste for the Buck. The tone, however, flows smoothly as the contrast between Stephen and Mulligan is vividly etched. One hears in the Buck a condescending affection mixed with a wary respect for Dedalus. In Stephen’s silence we hear the exile and cunning he will come to embrace.
—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
—Yes, my love?
—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
—God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.
He shaved warily over his chin.
—He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?
—A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
—I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to
himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.
“Kinch” is a Scottish word for a loop or noose of a rope. Presumably, Mulligan associates “noose” and “knife-blade,” again intimating a certain fear of Stephen’s capacities. Gogarty had saved four men from drowning, but Joyce was as peaceful as his Poldy and avoided violence. Stephen has nowhere to go but chooses departure anyway, distrustful of Mulligan’s professed friendship:
—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
—I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plain-looking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.
—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you.
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.
Oscar Wilde, in the preface to his The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), had remarked: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” Joyce and Wilde both admired Walter Pater, who gave Joyce the idea of “epiphanies,” sudden moments in which the commonplace flamed into visionary perception. Proust took his epiphanies from the example of John Ruskin, whom Pater, in an agonistic spirit, resented. Joyce surmounts even Oscar in his splendidly bitter: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.” But, then, James Joyce was the master agonist, daring to contend even against Dante and Shakespeare for the foremost place.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 34