| CARVIEW |
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I was beginning to argue that every form of love is rendered vacant by Joyce. I am now however needing to get to bed after having lost a key portion of text to this maddening digital destroyer.
I will outline here and return when I can
romance is sexualized
divine love is gone forever
sexual intimacy has been lost in present and is remembered but contrasts with the present loveless condition of Leopold and Molly–other characters are nothing but grasping sex jokers and flirts
compassion is nearly non existent – ok Bloom feeds the cat and the gulls and walks the blind piano tuner across street but those are a few items in 1000 pages, mostly Bloom just feels and thinks of things about other people but doesn’t do a goddam thing to touch them or express his fedlings
is anyone really good friends with anyone? Do they show loyalty joy faith or comfort, more than just joking around over beer? I don’t think so …
familial love – what is that? Hardness, betrayal, shame, and loss are the dominant family topics
love songs – they are one and all cited as empty lyrics with no feeling or sentiment attached or any connection to the lived reality of anyone in the book
romance novels pilloried and parodied
so yeah, no… not feeling the love.
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Surely however “soppy” gives the game away–Ulysses is the least sentimental or emotional book I’ve ever read.
Choose whatever form or expression of love you like-they are one and all emptied, travestied, seen with impotent nostalgia, or just plain dead in Ulysses.
]]>I think one has to focus on and enjoy the sheer artistry of sentence- and word craft in this book. Language and fucking with it is the only thing Joyce really cares about.
I’d say the “theme” of Ulysses is randomness, scatteredness, disconnection, and the ruination of church, politics, and human connection–and I think Josh Malbin frames Joyce’s posture with pith and absolute precision–nobody’s life or love or family or insight or struggle or body or pleasure means a goddam thing–only the “gift” of Joyce’s artistry means anything, and that is for you to receive as a worshipper and a student and a devotee, no other response is possible or desired, you are forced to either surrender to this master and admire his unprecedented Art, or fuck right off. Naive readers who desire stupid shit like stories, characters, themes, meaningful human interactions need not bother to crack this book.
what Malbin sharply defines as Joyce’s arrogance seems to me to predominate and resonate on every page of this book: no character exists within a vertical mile of Joyce’s authorial Position, the Artist as Olympian–nothing like Homer’s vivid and gripping Odysseus. Compare Homer’s Sirens story with its immortal imagery of clever and curious Odysseus widening his experience to hear a song no man has heard and lived to speak about before with Joyce’s image of great nosed Bloom mocked by flirtatious barmaids and isolating himself with steak and kidney pie.
Homer cares about Odysseys’ action and character but Joyce’s entire episode is meant to fool around with rendering musical patterns in novelistic prose. There is not one word or act or musical performance by any character that has any significance or beauty or poignancy in itself–it is entirely subject to being gussied up by dazzling verbal experiments by the Author, including his empty and pretentious riffing on motifs from Homer with none of Homer’s mythic themes or love of character or love of real things in the world. What image from Joyce comes anywhere close to Odysseus tied to the mast? I found myself humming the Steely Dan song: “well the danger on the rocks is surely past, still I remained tied to the mast … could it be that I have found my home at last?”
That US pop song does infinitely more to connect with Homer than Joyce’s entire arrogant show offy chapter, because it focuses on the drama of a human soul not the fireworks and tricks of a verbal showman
]]>Except of course he isn’t. He knows there is no way any reader will know all the things he is alluding to. Maybe some of them will know all the lyrics to that song, but then there will be many other things they don’t know. The only way to read his book and understand it is to become a scholar of it, or to read a concordance like the one so many of us are using.
I find this whole approach of Joyce’s to be either intolerably arrogant or a cheap grift. In the first scenario, he is expecting the reader to do extra work to understand his, refusing to make simple gestures like putting the goddamn lyrics of a song in italics. He feels he is justified in doing so because his work is so important it doesn’t need to serve the reader; the reader should serve it. This interpretation goes along with Andreas’s frustration that the book refuses to engage in real-world politics: it doesn’t need to deliver that kind of understanding because its mere existence in the world is Joyce’s gift to humanity. His book should be studied like the Talmud, where you can’t approach the text without the gloss on the text.
In the other scenario he is attempting to make readers more invested by forcing them to do extra work of interpretation, much as Q devotees were drawn in by the deliberately cryptic nature of those dispatches.
I am finding it harder and harder to tolerate either possibility. You all know I have no inherent problem with difficult books. But there is a reason no other author takes this attitude toward his readers.
]]>“I think Joyce’s uncertainty is more purposeful than that, though. A commentary on the modern condition, on the ultimate un-knowability of another person’s experience, or of our own? I’m not sure where I land on that.”
I often feel like this is where the novel takes us: to a world where no one really connects with anyone else.
Bloom feels very different from Stephen to be sure , but are they both in some way existing at a remove from life and society–I sense a great and pervasive coldness in Joyce’s prose, like it is not just God that is dead but our ability to communicate and commune with other people. Bloom can remember moments of sex and affection w Molly but only remember them as something lost and Molly’s cosmic yes is also a memory. Is there anywhere in the novel where a relationship is PRESENT AND POWERFUL
I’d would welcome the chance to explore this question with a close reading of a particular passage from the upcoming chapters.
]]>As to aids for reading the book: I have returned to one of my favorites, Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses (1980/87 –he updated all the page references to go with the revised 1984 edition). Each chapter is so short and efficient, and keyed to big-picture topics like myth, Joyce’s idea of a hero, and irony, but it’s also very helpful on a few specific points, such as: Why does Leopold Bloom carry a potato around in his pocket? What things does Bloom associate with the first time he met Molly? Answers below!
(Bloom uses the potato as a sort of memory of his mother, on the pseudo-scientific idea that a potato helps absorb the “diseases of the air”; most of these ideas aren’t expended on until the Circe chapter. Bloom met Molly for the first time at a garden party thrown by a Mat Dilon when she was 16 and he was 21; there were lilac trees and he beat John Henry Menton at bowls, which according to Bloom might be the reason Menton still bears a grudge at him in the present of Paddy Dignam’s funeral (or, y’know, anti-Semitism); at the party back then Molly sang and he turned the pages. You get the first main paragraph when Bloom sees Menton, ch. 6; the next will be tucked into the Sirens chapter 11; and, in the Oxen of the Sun ch. 14, we discover that Stehen himself was there!, as a child of five, peeking over a fence witht he help of two other girls while his mother watches on; and this is all confirmed in one of the catechism q and a’s in Ithaca, ch. 17. Hugh Kenner gets it all right, then: “They were all there together in Eden then, Bloom and a not yet unfaithful Molly, Stephen and a not yet spectral mother… but Ulysses abounds in coincidental alignments to such an extent that that no one of them is especially crucial.”
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