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James
Joyce's obsession with the figure of Ulysses (the Romanised form
of the Greek Odysseus) went back a long way. He told the Italian
critic Carlo Linati that Ulysses had fascinated him ever since
boyhood. When a fairly standard essay topic, "My Favourite Hero",
was assigned to the boys in Belvedere College around 1895, Joyce
chose Ulysses in preference to more macho figures such as Achilles
or Hector.
In
Rome in 1906, he thought of writing an extra story for Dubliners,
to be called "Ulysses". This was to be about a Dubliner called
Alfred H. Hunter, who lived on Clonliffe Road and whose wife was
rumoured to be unfaithful. Although, as he regretfully wrote to
his brother Stanislaus in early 1907, " "Ulysses" never got any
forrader than its title", it is clear that he was already thinking
about a story where the fortunes of the hero would develop in
ironic parallel with those of the hero of Homer's epic, The Odyssey.
There
may have been a particular reason for Joyce's interest in Hunter,
apart from his rumoured cuckoldry and alleged Jewishness. Hunter
may have rescued and taken care of Joyce after the future novelist
suffered a painful encounter with the partner of a woman whom
he had accosted in St Stephen's Green, soon after he met Nora
in June 1904. Although the story is shrouded in uncertainty, this
obscure Dubliner did in any case provide the catalyst for the
greatest novel of the twentieth century.
Later,
while the book was being written, Joyce told his friend Frank
Budgen of the basis for his admiration for Ulysses: he saw the
hero of Homer's epic as a complete, all-round man, using both
brain and brawn in a manner very unlike those born bruisers, Achilles
and Hector. Ulysses was reluctant to go to war, he was concerned
about his son, he was a master tactician, he had many wiles, he
was a wanderer, he was fond of music: all traits that Joyce's
"Ulysses", Leopold Bloom, will echo. Bloom is a modern epic hero,
showing the qualities that a modern Ulysses would require.
However,
Joyce's interest in The Odyssey is not confined to the figure
of Odysseus/Ulysses. His novel is patterned, in an astonishingly
creative way, on the whole of Homer's epic. Each episode of Ulysses
re-creates an incident in The Odyssey, sometimes a full scene,
sometimes a few lines, and not necessarily following the original's
chronology. There are 18 episodes, each of which was at one stage
given a name derived from The Odyssey ("Sirens", "Cyclops" etc.).
Later, Joyce dropped these names, but they still provide a guiding
template, under which the main characters -- Bloom, Stephen, (who
is Telemachus, Odysseus's son), Molly, (Penelope, his wife) --
pursue their lives, unaware of the mythical patterns they are
re-enacting.
The
importance of the Homeric parallels is made clear by the fact
that the book owes its very title to them; but a reader or listener
coming first time to the work will be most immediately struck
by its direct rendering of the characters' consciousness -- the
famous "stream of consciousness" technique. We feel we know these
people from the inside out, in a manner virtually unprecedented
in literature. The effect is achieved by dispensing with the normal
"he thought", "he mused", "he said to himself" and rendering the
characters' inner worlds directly. When Bloom swallows a mouthful
of wine, the listener hears: "Seems to a secret touch telling
me memory." In a more conventional novel, this might read: "The
wine, he thought, was acting like a secret touch, calling up his
memories." Joyce drastically condenses it, giving the sentiment
a far greater degree of immediacy. Particularly striking in that
example is the omission of a word after "to", probably a word
such as "be" or "act like". The text is mimicking the rapid-fire
action of Bloom's registration of his inner experience.
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Bloom's,
Stephen's and Molly's are the main consciousnesses explored in
this way, but one of the most impressive things about Ulysses
is that the technique can be, and occasionally is, applied to
any consciousness: a priest: "Just nice time to walk to Artane";
a typist reflecting on a book she is reading: "Too much mystery
business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion?"; a boy whose
father has recently died: "Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father
is dead." And of course the stream of consciousness technique
receives its finest, fullest expression in rendering the flow
of Molly Bloom's mind in her magnificent monologue at the close
of the work: "wasnt she the downright villain to go and do a thing
like that".
Introducing
a major innovation like the stream of consciousness technique
might seem like the achievement of a lifetime for most novelists;
but the extraordinary truth is that this is only one aspect of
what James Joyce undertakes. His ambitions in Ulysses are much
greater.
Perhaps
the best way to obtain a sense of the projected scope of the work
is to cite a letter Joyce wrote in Italian to Carlo Linati in
1920, when the book was nearing completion. Ulysses, he said,
"is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time
the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day
(life).. It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not
only to render the myth [of Ulysses] sub specie temporis nostri
[in the mode of our time] but also to allow each adventure (that
is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and
interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition
and even to create its own technique. Each adventure is so to
speak one person -- as Aquinas relates of the heavenly hosts.
"Ulysses
is then a complete prose epic; to regard it merely as a novel
is too limiting. The episodes are individual units, almost self-contained.
They are immensely varied; the reader or listener has to get used
to a different technique almost per episode. Thus, most episodes
have their own organ of the body attached to them: in the case
of the funeral episode, "Hades", it is the heart; in the case
of the newspaper episode, "Aeolus", it is the lungs. Similarly,
most episodes have their own colour: in the episode in which Bloom
first appears, "Calypso", it is orange; in the schoolroom episode,
"Nestor", it is brown.
As
the episodes go on, they become longer and more complex; Bloom
and Stephen, the main characters, can seem to get submerged in
the stylistic flood while elaborate textual games are being played
with the reader. It can seem as if the book is setting off on
several tangents at once, literally "losing the plot". This is
not the case; it only looks as like it as damn it, as Finnegans
Wake puts it at one point.
The
most difficult thing for a reader to grasp, perhaps, is this notion
of total form, that such an abstract entity as an episode of this
book can dominate and determine the characters in it. But Joyce
is insistent that each episode possesses a life of its own; he
is interested in larger units than those of individual novelistic
characters. And ultimately, the various episodes are meant to
add up to something greater than the sum of their parts: a whole
body, a whole life. The book's horizons constantly expand: by
the end, as Joyce put it to Frank Budgen, Bloom and Stephen "become
heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze".
This, though, is before the book's full-blooded return to earth
in the person of Molly.
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What
also keeps Ulysses rooted to earth is the omnipresence of Dublin.
Stephen and Bloom don't just gaze on the stars from anywhere:
they gaze on them from the back garden of Bloom's house at Number
7, Eccles Street. The book's total form may transcend its characters,
but it does not transcend Dublin, the ground and soil for all
its imaginative leaps. The total form of Ulysses is the total
form of the city with which it deals, and which it never even
wants to escape.
Dublin's
felt life -- its history, its characters, its politicians, its
newspapers, its advertisements, its street life -- crowds the
pages, lending authenticity and robustness to the inner worlds
with which the book is so concerned. It is true that not all the
city gets into Ulysses -- there is a whole underworld of slum
life which is barely glanced at, and the life of the upper echelons
too scarcely features -- but what is given to us, unforgettably,
is an imaginative reconstruction of a lost world. Joyce's Dublin
-- the Dublin of Joyce, the Dublin that Joyce experienced -- is
preserved for ever. At one stage Stephen says to Bloom: "I suspect
. that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." He
isn't joking. Neither is Joyce.
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