The main character in Hamsun’s next novel was just as removed from his history as the I of Hunger, and quite as alien to his surroundings, but did possess in contrast a name. Yet the name, Nagel, signified no particular place of belonging, neither in terms of class nor geography, and was perhaps first and foremost an anagram – certainly it would seem reasonable to take it to be a play on the Norwegian galen, mad. Whereas Emma Bovary’s fate consists of her confusing the romantic and the real, Nagel’s is that he sees through the romantic, sees through art, sees through the circus of small-town life and the drama of the wider world: everything is pretense, this is his insight. Including death, into which it all propels him; it too has an element of performance about it, not in the form of tragedy, more like a farce. The notion that nothing can be taken seriously is an infrequent starting point for a novel, which presumably on some level has to take itself seriously in order to be written. Mysteries is perhaps not the most successful of novels, yet it does contain some quite unrivaled passages in which Hamsun ventures still further into the now and describe the almost completely unattached stirrings of a human mind at any given moment. Of all that goes on in Nagel’s mind, little may be traced back to a particular self, or rather it would seem hard to say what this self in actual fact consists of, not least because so much of what runs through it comes from outside, in the first instance by the fact of being language, which is the same for everyone, and in the second by being made up of fragments of general culture, and what reveals itself then, perhaps for the first time, for never before have I seen a stream of consciousness so rendered with all it contains of high and low, important and unimportant, is how the world flows through the individual to such a remarkable extent that one has to wonder if anything like individuality even exists, and, if it does, in what ways it might manifest itself. And if it does not exist, what does a name then represent?
“Names! What’s in a name?” Joyce asks in the ninth chapter of his Ulysses, the part that takes place in the national library in Dublin, where Stephen Dedalus, the young man with the rather less than realistic-sounding name, discusses Hamlet and Shakespeare with some intellectual acquaintances. This question of the name was originally posed by Shakespeare. Shakespeare, says Stephen, was not Hamlet, but Hamlet’s father, the dead king who appeared as a ghost before his son. Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, was then Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, who according to Stephen was unfaithful, while Hamlet himself was Hamnet Shakespeare, dead son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Underlying this discussion is the fact that the novel opens by describing a conversation between two young men in a tower, one being Stephen, who has just lost his mother. The other, Buck Mulligan, says to him, “The aunt thinks you killed your mother,” to which Stephen replies, “Someone killed her.” The tower is the castle at Elsinore, Dublin Bay the strait between Denmark and Sweden, and Stephen is Hamlet. But Stephen is also Telemachus journeying in search of his father, Odysseus, which is to say Leopold Bloom, the Jew. And Leopold Bloom is besides Odysseus also Virgil when in the night he walks side by side with Stephen, which is to say Dante, through the streets of Dublin, which is to say Hell, and he is the writer Henry Flowers, who sends audacious letters on the sly to a woman whose acquaintance he has made by way of an advertisement. But he is moreover the father of a son who died, which in this universe makes him Shakespeare, father of Hamnet. And his wife is not only Penelope, who is besieged by men in Odysseus’s absence, but also Anne Hathaway, which is to say Queen Gertrude, since just after four o’clock that day she is in bed with her impresario, making a cuckold of Bloom. Ulysses is a novel about change, but also a novel about everything always being the same, and the dimension with which it is most concerned, the mystery it grapples with so unrelentingly, is time. The action takes place during the course of a single day in Dublin, and the now is a kind of gateway standing open to the past, which rises and falls imperceptibly in everything, and to the future, which is slung through it. “Hold on to the now,” Stephen tells himself in the library, “the here, through which all future plunges to the past,” words that contain at once a philosophy of life and a poetics. In the discussion of Plato and Aristotle there, Stephen suggests that Aristotle would have considered Hamlet’s musings on death, this “improbable, insignificant, and undramatic monologue,” to be quite as shallow as Plato’s. The apotheosis of ideas, the heaven of shapeless spirit, is anathema to Stephen; what he believes in is the material world in all its abundance, and what Joyce does in Ulysses is to investigate how ideas and the immaterial manifest themselves in the material, proceeding from the idea that they are found only there, in the now, in the bodies and objects that exist here at this moment. If life is a journey forward through time, the past is its phantom. “What is a ghost?” Stephen asks. “One who has faded into impalpability, through death, through absence, through change of manners.” That such a transition occurs through death is the normal understanding, through absence a logical extension, but in the last phrase, “through change of manners,” we leave the individual death and enter the collective: a ghost is that which time has abandoned. This is Joyce’s overarching theme, treated first in the small and, compared to Ulysses, relatively intimate format of the short story “The Dead,” toward the very end of which he uses the same expression as he would later have Stephen think: “His own identity was fading out into a gray impalpable world.” The gray impalpable world into which his own self vanished was that of the dead. The palpable world the dead had once built up and inhabited, dissolved and disappeared. In Ulysses that thought is launched into the world, we might say, transplanted from the framed confines of the closet drama into teeming, ordinary life, on an ordinary day in an ordinary city, in which it is active on all levels and in every context, though without dominating any, since with the action taking place during the course of a day, and the text unyieldingly in the moment, nothing is overriding and everything is dissolved in the now. This is true of history, it is true of mythology, true of the dead, true of philosophy, true of religion, and especially, perhaps primarily, true of identity. None of these categories is splintered or dissolved, but simply viewed through the prism of the moment, which can only handle little bits at a time. A glimpse of the dead mother here, the smell of the room in which she lay, a thought from Thomas Aquinas there, a sparkle of sun on a pane, the rush of the waves, a brewery horse on its way down the street, a sentence in a newspaper, a snippet of an aria, a fawning librarian, the books on the shelves thought of as coffins. This is what it is to exist in the world. To understand it or think about it, you have to step back from it. So too with Ulysses. All the little bits, all the structures dissolved in the now, come together in bigger bits, which is Joyce’s answer to the question: What does it mean to be human? The novel has three main characters: Stephen Dedalus, the young man on his way up; all his energy is spent on wrenching himself free of what holds him down, his father, a drunken charmer, his mother, whose death weighs on his mind and racks him with guilt, his friends, against whom he competes, and his education, which is familiarity with the thoughts of others – his adventurous suggestion of Hamlet’s mediocrity is a way of elevating himself in what we refer to, with some measure of resignation, as youthful arrogance, in actual fact but a necessary vigor; Leopold Bloom, the middle-aged man (who in our day would be considered relatively young, would wear sneakers and regularly shave his head; he is thirty-eight years old), in the middle of life, an advertising agent with no upward trajectory, an ordinary man doing the best he can; and Molly Bloom, singer, some years younger than her husband, spending most of her time in bed and merely referred to, until concluding the novel in her own voice, a long inner monologue completely unlike everything that has gone before. Leopold Bloom is in many respects Stephen Dedalus’s opposite; whereas the younger man is introduced at the top of a tower, high above the world, hooked up with Hamlet, Ancient Greece, and Christianity, the reader meets Bloom right in the middle of his everyday life, in a kitchen, associated closel
y from the start with the mortal world and bodily pleasures; first the faint smell of urine from fried kidneys, then the pleasing waft of his excrement after moving his bowels. When later in the day he visits a museum and looks at the statues there, it is Aphrodite that captures his attention, for reasons quite apart from the noble and artistic. Leopold Bloom’s mind too is filled with fragments of immaterial reality, though in its lowest form, as it appears in newspapers and advertisements, signs and leaflets, he misconstrues and is often naïve, but in contrast to Stephen he is a whole human being, a complete human being, a true human being, so when finally they meet and go through the city together at night he is indeed Virgil to Stephen Dedalus’s Dante. That Molly Bloom should be lying above them with her head full of thoughts as they seat themselves in the kitchen is something of which both are unaware, just as they are oblivious to her superiority over them, in the sense that she sees her husband so much more clearly than he sees her, and sees Stephen as a diligent schoolboy, the son of his father.
Few characters in the history of literature are depicted with as much complexity as these three. Yet the novel could not have carried any of their names as its title; it could not have been called Leopold Bloom, as Flaubert’s novel was called Madame Bovary or Shakespeare’s play was called Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, for the novel is greater than them, which is to say that the characters are not the principal focus of its theme. Everyone knows Madame Bovary’s conflict, Hamlet’s conflict, Don Quixote’s conflict, it is what we think about when we hear the names, but who knows Stephen Dedalus’s conflict? He is more intelligent than Hamlet, finds Hamlet’s ruminations about death shallow, and his field of reference is broader, he too has lost one of his parents and feels guilty about it, yet the fact remains that as a literary character he is not in Hamlet’s league. Is that because Elizabethan England had a different view of greatness from that of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century? Joyce strives to portray the lives of quite ordinary people, and the contrast to the greatness from Odysseus and Hamlet is a continual point; if the same thing happens in Ulysses, it happens on a smaller scale. Prometheus’s impressive and wild transformations are represented in Dublin by a dog and Stephen’s imagination, as Olof Lagercrantz observed. The modest life, meaning the ordinary and down to earth, is the foundation of Ulysses, and through such life the novel’s great characters and themes wander ghostlike. Of course, it is far from unusual for an ordinary person, one deemed by others to be insignificant, to make a great character in a novel; Emma Bovary is no princess or duchess but the jilted wife of a country doctor. The difference is that Madame Bovary, Don Quixote, and Hamlet reside in history, whereas in the case of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus the opposite holds and history resides in them. The new in Joyce and modernist literature is in the weakening of the boundary between the self and the outside world, so radical that the relationship becomes near osmotic. People get bigger in a way, embracing both history and the stream of events of contemporary existence, but they also get smaller insofar as what is unique and unexampled about them, collected in the name, the person they are, becomes dissolved in it.
Yet while Joyce achieved these insights, and they were achieved simultaneously in many other fields of culture, they have never been for everyone, the way the Odyssey, for instance, once was for everyone, as one must assume it was, something children and adults alike, women and men, poor and rich listened to. Ulysses has only ever been read by the few, a fate it shares with many other trailblazing works of modernism, not just in literature but also in philosophy and psychology, the work of Husserl and Freud to mention but two, because although many of their ideas have spread and been accorded universal validity, the exactness on which they depend and which only direct reading can provide, has been lost along the way. Ulysses has become the myth of the difficult book, eight hundred pages about a single day, Freud is associated with the subconscious, with stretching out on a couch and talking about your childhood, and with jokes about cigars and trains going through tunnels, Husserl is Heidegger’s forerunner, Heidegger himself a Nazi. The fact that Joyce writes about this, the way culture’s every expression is broken down to live among us only barely understood, as misconstruals, assumptions, half-truths, myths and surmisals, bits of this and fragments of that, as if to show that culture is this, the human and living is that, God but a shout in the street, is perhaps ironic in view of he himself becoming the very epitome of literary elitism and obliviousness to the world, though quite understandable given the fact that in order to get there, in order to penetrate into this, he had to shun that same quotidian culture’s ways of communicating.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 47