This is the main theme: Bloom and Fate.
Each chapter is written in a different style, or rather with a different style predominating. There is no special reason why this should be—why one chapter should be told straight, another through a stream-of-consciousness gurgle, a third through the prism of a parody. There is no special reason, but it may be argued that this constant shift of the viewpoint conveys a more varied knowledge, fresh vivid glimpses from this or that side. If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees, with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light. Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when you look at them upside down. They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their feet from the glue of gravitation, without losing their dignity. Well, this trick of changing the vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be compared to Joyce's new literary technique, to the kind of new twist through which you see a greener grass, a fresher world.
The characters are constantly brought together during their peregrinations through a Dublin day. Joyce never loses control over them. Indeed, they come and go and meet and separate, and meet again as the live parts of a careful composition in a kind of slow dance of fate. The recurrence of a number of themes is one of the most striking features of the book. These themes are much more clear-cut, much more deliberately followed, than the themes we pick up in Tolstoy or in Kafka. The whole of Ulysses, as we shall gradually realize, is a deliberate pattern of recurrent themes and synchronization of trivial events.
Joyce writes in three main styles:
1. The original Joyce: straightforward, lucid and logical and leisurely. This is the backbone of chapter 1 of the first part and of chapters 1 and 3 of the second part; and lucid, logical, and leisurely parts occur in other chapters.
2. Incomplete, rapid, broken wording rendering the so-called stream of consciousness, or better say the stepping stones of consciousness. Samples may be found in most chapters, though ordinarily associated only with major characters. A discussion of this device will be found in connection with its most famous example, Molly's final soliloquy, part three, chapter 3; but one can comment here that it exaggerates the verbal side of thought. Man thinks not always in words but also in images, whereas the stream of consciousness presupposes a flow of words that can be notated: it is difficult, however, to believe that Bloom was continuously talking to himself.
3. Parodies of various nonnovelistic forms: newspaper headlines (part two, chapter 4), music (part two, chapter 8), mystical and slapstick drama (part two, chapter 12), examination questions and answers in a catechistic pattern (part three, chapter 2). Also, parodies of literary styles and authors: the burlesque narrator of part two, chapter 9, the lady's magazine type of author in part two, chapter 10, a series of specific authors and literary periods in part two, chapter 11, and elegant journalese in part three, chapter 1.
At any moment, in switching his styles, or within a given category,Joyce may intensify a mood by introducing a musical lyrical strain, with alliterations and lilting devices, generally to render wistful emotions. A poetic style is often associated with Stephen, but an example from Bloom occurs, for instance, when he disposes of the envelope of the letter from Martha Clifford: "Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly to shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter then all sank." Or, a few sentences later, the end of the vision of a huge flood of spilled beer "winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth." At any other moment, however, Joyce can turn to all sorts of verbal tricks, to puns, transposition of words, verbal echoes, monstrous twinning of verbs, or the imitation of sounds. In these, as in the overweight of local allusions and foreign expressions, a needless obscurity can be produced by details not brought out with sufficient clarity but only suggested for the knowledgeable.
The opening pages of Nabokov's teaching copy of Ulysses
PART ONE, CHAPTER 1
Time: Around eight in the morning, 16 June 1904, a Thursday.
Place: In Dublin Bay, Sandy cove, Martello Tower—an actually existing structure not unlike a squat chess rook—one of a number of towers built against French invasion in the first decade of the nineteenth century. William Pitt, the statesman, the younger Pitt, had these towers built, says Buck Mulligan, "when the French were on the sea." (A snatch from the song goes, "Oh the French are on the sea says [it continues in Irish] the poor old woman," that is, Ireland), but Martello Tower, Mulligan continues, is the omphalos among towers, the navel, the center of the body, the starting point and center of the book; and also the seat of the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece. Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, and the Englishman Haines lodge in this omphalos.
Characters: Stephen Dedalus, a young Dubliner, aged twenty-two, a student, philosopher, and poet. He has recently in the beginning of the year 1904 returned to Dublin from Paris where he had spent about a year. He has now been teaching school (Dingy's School) for three months, getting paid on the day following mid-month, a monthly salary of £3-12, at contemporaneous rates less than twenty dollars. He had been recalled from Paris by a telegram from his father, "—Mother dying come home father," to find that she was dying of cancer. When she asked him to kneel down at the recitation of the prayer for the dying, he refused, a refusal that is the clue to Stephen's dark brooding grief throughout the book. He had placed his newfound spiritual freedom above his mother's last request, last comfort. Stephen has renounced the Roman Catholic church, in the bosom of which he had been brought up, and has turned to art and philosophy in a desperate quest for something that would fill the empty chambers vacated by faith in the God of Christians.
The two other male characters who appear in this first chapter are Buck Mulligan ("Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls ... with a Hellenic ring"), a medical student, and Haines, an Englishman, an Oxford student visiting Dublin and collecting folklore. Renting the tower costs twelve pounds per year (sixty dollars in those days), as we learn, and it is Stephen who has paid it so far, Buck Mulligan being the gay parasite and usurper. He is, in a sense, Stephen's parody and grotesque shadow, for if Stephen is the type of the serious young man with a tortured soul, one for whom loss or change of faith is a tragedy, Mulligan on the other hand is the happy, robust, blasphemous vulgarian, a phony Greek pagan, with a wonderful memory, a lover of purple patches. At the opening of the chapter he comes from the stairhead bearing his shaving bowl with mirror and razor crossed, and chanting in a mockery of the Mass, the ceremony commemorating in the Catholic church the sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. "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."
Mulligan's nickname for Stephen is Kinch, dialect for "knife blade." His presence, everything about him, is oppressive and repulsive to Stephen, who in the course of the chapter tells him what he has against him. "Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:
—Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's death?
Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
—What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?
—You were making tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.
—Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.
—You said, Stephen answered, O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead.
A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek.
—Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?
He shook his constraint fro
m him nervously.
—And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed j^suit strain in you, only it's injected the wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.
He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
—I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.
—Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked.
—Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.
—O, an impossible person! he exclaimed."
Buck Mulligan not only [paralyzes] Stephen's omphalos, he also has a friend of his own lodging there, Haines, the English literary tourist. There is nothing especially wrong with Haines, bur for Stephen he is both a representative of the hated usurper England and a friend of the private usurper Buck whose brogues Stephen is wearing and whose breeches fit him second-leg and who will annex that tower.
The action: The action of the chapter starts with Buck Mulligan shaving—and borrowing Stephen's snotgreen dirty handkerchief to wipe his razor. As Mulligan shaves, Stephen protests against Haines staying in the tower. Haines has raved in his .dream about shooting a black panther, and Stephen is afraid of him. "If he stays on here I am off." There are allusions to the sea, to Ireland, to Stephen's mother again, to the £3.12 Stephen will be paid by the school. Then Haines, Mulligan, and Stephen have breakfast in a most appetizing scene. An old milkwoman brings the milk and there is a delightful exchange of remarks. All three set out for the beach. Mulligan goes at once for a swim. Haines will plunge presently after his breakfast has settled, but Stephen, who hates water as much as Bloom loves it, does not bathe. Presently Stephen leaves his two companions and makes his way to the school, not far off, where he teaches.
The style: Chapters 1 and 2 of part one are composed in what I shall call normal style*, that is, in the style of normal narration, lucid and logical Joyce. True, here and there the flow of narrative prose is interrupted briefly by the inner monologue technique which in other chapters of the book blurs and breaks so much the author's diction; but here the logical flow predominates. A brief example of the stream of consciousness comes on the first page when Mulligan is about to shave. "He peered sideways up and gave a long low 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." Here is a typical Joycean device which will be repeated and greatly developed throughout the book. Chrysostomos, "gold mouth," is of course John, patriarch of Constantinople, fourth century. But why does the name crop up? Quite simple: it is Stephen's stream of thought interrupting the description. Stephen sees and hears Buck whistling down to Haines to wake him—then pausing in rapt attention—Stephen sees Buck's gold-stopped teeth gleaming in the sun—gold, gold mouth, Mulligan the oracle, the eloquent speaker—and a brief image of the church father flits across Stephen's mind, after which the narrative is immediately resumed with Haines whistling in answer. This is pronounced a miracle by Buck who now tells God to switch off the current.
This is simple, and there are other simple examples in the chapter, but soon we find a more enigmatic interruption of the tale by Stephen's stream of thought. Stephen has just flashed one of his marvelous aphorisms which so fascinate Mulligan. Pointing at Buck's broken little shaving mirror which he has lifted from a maid's room, Stephen bitterly says: "—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant." Mulligan suggests that Stephen sell this aphorism to "the oxy chap" Haines for a guinea, and adds that he, Mulligan, together with Stephen, whose arm he clasps confidentially, should hellenize Ireland with bright crisp thought.
Now comes the stream of Stephen's thought: "Cranly's arm. His arm." A first reading of Ulysses will hardly help here, but at a second reading we will know who Cranly is, since he is alluded to later, a false friend of Stephen's boyhood who used to take Stephen to the races—"led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners ... amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches" as Mulligan is now suggesting they get rich quick by selling bright sayings: "Even money Fair Rebel: ten to one the field. Dicers and thimble riggers we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange." This dame is a first cousin of Marion Bloom, a fore-glimpse of that carnal lady.
Another good example of Stephen's stream in this easy first chapter occurs when Stephen, Mulligan, and Haines are finishing their breakfast. Mulligan turned to Stephen and said: "—Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.
—That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your national library today.
—Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.
He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:
—Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?
Then he said to Haines:
—The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.
—All Ireland is washed by the gulf stream, Stephen said as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf.
Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:
—I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.
Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here's a spot.
—That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good."
Stephen's thought runs as follows: he is speaking to me—the Englishman. Englishmen tub and scrub because of their bad conscience in regard to the countries they oppress, and he remembers Lady Macbeth and her bad conscience—yet here's a spot of blood which she cannot wash off. Agenbite of in wit is Middle English for the French remords de conscience, the bite of conscience, remorse. (It is the title of a religious tract of the fourteenth century.)
The technique of this stream of thought has, of course, the advantage of brevity. It is a series of brief messages jotted down by the brain. But it does demand from the reader more attention and sympathy than an ordinary description such as: Stephen realized Haines was speaking to him. Yes, he thought, the English wash a good deal, trying perhaps to scrub away the spot on their conscience which old Northgate called agenbite of inwit, etc.
Inner thoughts rising to the surface and prompted to do so by an outside impression lead to significant word connections, verbal links, in the mind of the thinker. For instance, look at the way the notion of the sea leads to the most hidden thoughts within Stephen's tortured soul. As he is shaving Mulligan gazes out over Dublin Bay and remarks quietly. "God....Isn't the sea what Algy [that is, Algernon Swinburne, an English postromantic minor poet] calls it: a grey sweet mother?" (Mark the word sweet.) Our great sweet mother, he adds, improving as it were on the grey by adding the t. —Our mighty mother, he goes on, polishing up a nice alliteration. Then he refers to Stephen's mother, to Stephen's sinister sin. My aunt thinks you killed your mother, he says. —But what a lovely mummer (that is, mime) you are, he murmurs (look at the coils of the alliterating dragging up sense after sense: mighty mother, mummer, murmur). And Stephen listens to the well-fed voice; and mother and murmuring mighty sweet bitter sea merge, as
it were, and there are other mergings. "The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid." This is inwardly transposed by Stephen's thought into the "bowl of white china [that] had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting." The sweet mother becomes the bitter mother, bitter bile, bitter remorse. Then Buck Mulligan wipes his razor blade on Stephen's handkerchief: "—Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags." This links up the snotgreen sea with Stephen's filthy handkerchief and the green bile in the bowl; and the bowl of bile and the shaving bowl and the bowl of the sea, bitter tears and salty mucous, all fuse for a second into one image. This is Joyce at his best.
Notice, by the way, the term poor dogsbody. The symbol of a forlorn dog will be attached to Stephen through the book, just as the symbol of a soft-bodied cat, a padded-footed pard will be attached to Bloom. And this leads me to my next point: Haines's nightmare of the black panther somehow foreshadows for Stephen the image of Bloom, whom he has not yet met, but who will pad silently after him, a black catlike soft shadow. You will also note that Stephen had a troubled dream that night—saw an Oriental offer him a woman while Bloom too had an Oriental dream of Molly in Turkish garb among the trappings of the slave market.
PART ONE, CHAPTER 2
Time: Between nine and ten of the same day. It being Thursday, a half holiday, school stops at ten, with hockey to follow immediately.
Action: Stephen is teaching a high school class in ancient history.
"—You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
—Tarentum, sir.
—Very good. Well?
—There was a battle, sir.
Lectures on Literature Page 37