holysses, ulysses what I mean

this page is gonna take a while to make.

Ulysses took Joyce 7 years to write. It is connected, intimately, to both his previous books, but it still stands alone as a caring testiment to Making Sense Of Modern Life. Its plot is mundane: a son without a father and a father without a son cross paths on a long day at the end of spring. They are Telemachus and Odysseus reborn through circumstance, they are art and science fragmented by modernity seeing in each other their missing pieces, they are Ireland and Israel sharing their exile together, they are Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom getting in and out of trouble. And it is a most ordinary day.

Its plot is only half the point. Its form is the Novel shaking loose of the shackles of Habit and Assumption. Go about your life thinking novels have to be a certain way, and Ulysses will quake your bones in a thunder and do so with a tradition far longer than your own. You cannot run from the truth, from the sheer love that humanity holds for everything under the sun.

..let me try that one again. The book's form is the fun part. There are eighteen chapters (or "episodes"), split across three Parts. Each chapter rigorously fits into intertwining symbolic systems. I have not included all of them in the following list. As the book starts, the style takes the maturity of the end of A Portrait as a base and gradually expands into a playful thing. There is an omniscient narrator-- it is The Text Itself-- and there are frequent glimpses into the thoughts of whoever the focal character is at the moment. Many chapters change genre altogether, drastically so. About halfway through the book (say, the Sirens chapter), the Text has sufficiently warmed up and everything from then on is pure density.

And if you have tried reading Ulysses but found Stephen's chapters to be a brick wall, I highly recommend you try skipping to Part II, or Chapter 4 (Calypso!), the start of Leopold Bloom's day. This is the main narrative and the bulk of the book.




————–

I: THE TELEMACHIAD

(8 AM - Noon in three episodes)

Episode 1: Telemachus
8 AM, N/A, Theology
Stephen Dedalus contested at living quarters, breakfast, departure.

Episode 2: Nestor
10 AM, N/A, History
Stephen at work as temporary teacher, pay day, headmaster wants favour.

Episode 3: Proteus
11 AM, N/A, Philology
Stephen about to enter Dublin, lost in thought on beach, seeking primal truth.

————–

II: THE ODYSSEY

(8 AM - Midnight in twelve episodes)

Episode 4: Calypso
8 AM, Kidney, Economics
Leopold Bloom starting his day, purchasing and cooking and serving breakfast, mail from daughter, mail from wife’s suitor, newspaper and taking a shit.

Episode 5: Lotus Eaters
10 AM, Genitals, Chemistry
Bloom dodging the unpleasant or inconvenient, new mail from naughty pen pal Martha, possibility of running away from domestic life, instead hygiene.

Episode 6: Hades
11 AM, Heart, Religion
Bloom taking funereal carriage with three others (including Stephen’s father Simon), attending funeral of old friend Paddy Dignam. 

Episode 7: Aeolus
Noon, Lungs, Rhetoric
Bloom at work, canvassing advertisements for clients at newspaper office, mixed success.
Stephen doing headmaster’s favour, delivering letter to newspaper office, taking people out to pub.
Dubliners of newspaper office debate effect of speeches.
With regular rhetorical interjections by the text.

Episode 8: Lestrygonians
1 PM, Esophagus, Architecture
Bloom out to lunch, feeding animals, observing peristalsis of culture, seeking hygienic pub for meal, dodging wife’s suitor.

Episode 9: Scylla & Charybdis
2 PM, Brain, Literature
Stephen debating at library, seeking balance between dogma and mysticism, Aristotle and Plato, Stratford and London.
Bloom at work, canvassing advertisements for clients at library.

Episode 10: Wandering Rocks
3 PM, Blood, Mechanics
“Entr'acte” of 19 mini-episodes: Dubliners going about their business in polite frustration, their boundaries marked by the church and the state.
(includes Bloom buying books. Stephen buying books, seeing friends, family.)

Episode 11: Sirens
4 PM, Ear, Music
Bloom secretly following wife’s suitor, leads to Bloom’s having dinner with Stephen’s uncle as Simon and friends give live music.
The hour of Bloom’s wife’s infidelity.
With continuous fugue by the text.

Episode 12: Cyclops
5 PM, Muscle, Politics
Unnamed “I” going to pub, tolerating presence of unnamed nationalist “Citizen,” shooting the breeze with the news.
Bloom waiting at pub for friend to initiate work, gets chatting, mixed results.
With regular gigantist interjections by the text.

Episode 13: Nausicaa
8 PM, Eye/Nose, Painting
Gerty MacDowell on the beach, sensitive to how she’s perceived, enjoying the sights and enjoying being perceived.
Bloom near the beach, perceiving Gerty, masturbating, napping before further work.

Episode 14: Oxen of the Sun
10 PM, Womb, Medicine
Bloom, after work, visiting friend Mina Purefoy in hospital, waiting in midwife chamber with gathering of medical students for birth of new boy.
Stephen, drunk, engaging in long involved discourse with the medical students, observed by Bloom.
With continuous historical language by text, pastiches of developing English in chronological order.
And then they all get even more drunk, text included, and chaos ensues.

Episode 15: Circe
11 PM, Locomotor Apparatus, Magic
Stephen, abandoned by friends except one, seeks comfort in brothel. Then abandoned by that one friend too, haunted by ghosts from the past, has mental breakdown and provokes violence from the military.
Bloom, with little conscious idea why he’s doing any of this, follows Stephen, resists temptation, supervises, protects.
With continuous transformative interjections by the text, now a stage play.

———–

III: THE NOSTOS

(1 AM - 4 AM in three episodes)

Episode 16: Eumaeus
1 AM, Nerves, Navigation
Bloom taking Stephen home with him, stopping for food first.

Episode 17: Ithaca
2 AM, Skeleton, Science
Bloom and Stephen at home. Then just Bloom, returning to bed, answering wife’s questions, asking for breakfast in bed tomorrow.

Episode 18: Penelope
3 AM, Flesh, Earth
Molly Bloom in bed, thinking of her own day, her own life, her own needs, and of her strange husband, and of love.

———–




NOW LET'S TALK ABOUT LEOPOLD BLOOM

I probably find this way cooler than it really is, but look, James Joyce doodled Leopold Bloom at some point!!! He wrote next to it in the original Greek, “Tell me, Muse, of that manyminded man, who wandered far and wide.”

I’ll also take this time to share some stuff about Bloom. For purposes of relative convenience: The “present day” in Ulysses is June 16/17, 1904.

General Bloom Information:

  • His father was Rudolf Virag, Jewish, from Szombathely, Hungary. Virag had spent the 1850s/60s migrating westward and finally settled in Dublin shortly before his son’s birth. Leopold’s earliest memory of his father is of hearing the story of this migration, following the path on a map. Vienna, Budapest, Milan, Florence, London, Dublin. give or take. (Rudolf’s father was Lipoti Virag– Leopold’s namesake.)
  • His mother was Ellen Higgins, Irish Protestant, daughter of another Hungarian Jew by the name of Julius Karoly who migrated to Dublin and married Irish– Fanny Hegarty was the name of Leopold’s maternal grandmother. they took on the name Higgins in lieu of the more foreign-sounding Karoly, and speaking of…
  • Shortly after Rudolf Virag married Ellen, he changed his name to Rudolph Bloom. “Virag” means “flower,” that’s where the name came from. He also converted to Protestantism, though there’s some heavy implications that the Society for Converting Jews had coerced him with food. And it’s around this point that his son was born.

Leopold’s Life:

  • Full name Leopold Paula Bloom. Born in Clanbrassil Street, Portobello, Dublin, in 1866.
  • Leopold attended the Erasmus Smith High School until he was 16, where he got an interest in the sciences and developed his distaste with the Protestant Church (who funded the high school). He also dressed as a woman for a school play, and that may have sparked a long-standing deep affinity in him wherein he imagines what it’s like to be a woman, in contentment.
  • He spent some years working for the family business as a commercial traveller, walking about with orderbook. I couldn’t tell you specifically what it is they sold, though I feel like that information is in the book somewhere. At some point, the family also had some sort of significant ownership of a hotel.
  • Mother Ellen died of illness in 1886, and father Rudolph poisoned himself out of heartbreak a week later in the hotel, leaving a letter for his just-barely-adult son.
  • Leopold met Spanish-Irish singer Marion “Molly” Tweedy at… a place and time I honestly can’t tell you right this minute (but is probably in the book somewhere). At the time, Molly was big on the poetry of Lord Byron, and she thought Leopold bore a striking resemblance to the poet. He tried writing a poem for her, it was really silly and not very good. But they remained in each other’s social circles, Leopold charmed the hell out of her, they fell in love and got married in 1888.
  • Their first child, daughter Millicent (”Milly”), was born in 1889. On June 16, 1904, she is fifteen years old and away at Mullingar to study and work in the photography business.
  • Their second child, son Rudolph (”Rudy”), was born in December 1893, and died eleven days later in January 1894. Leopold and Molly ceased having sexual intercourse after this, indicative of a powerful grief which, by the “present day,” has lasted ten and a half years.
  • With Molly, Leopold has lived in a few spots across Dublin. During 1893-94, they stayed in the City Arms Hotel, as it was nearby to the cattlemarket, where Leopold worked for a Mr. Joseph Cuffe as a clerk (until he was fired because he kept giving opinions on civic development, whereupon he sent Molly to go and try and seduce him to get the job back. that did not work). The cattlemarket job comes up a lot in Bloom’s thoughts. It had a slaughterhouse on-site, which he detested.
  • At.. some point (???) after this, the family moved into the middle-class neighbourhood of Eccles Street, into house number 7. It is there that they remain by the “present day.”
  • Bloom has a library of something like 23 books at home (none of which I, Jordan, have read). They range from travelogues (In the Track of the Sun: Readings from the Diary of a Globe Trotter) to history books (History of the Russo-Turkish War) to practical (Thom’s Dublin Post Office Directory, 1886) to trite (Physical Strength and How to Obtain It) and scientific (A Handbook of Astronomy).
  • His wife, on the other hand, reads steamy sexy romance stories and pulp fiction, which Bloom frequently picks up for her on the cheap. With titles like Ruby: the Pride of the Ring, Fair Tyrants, and The Sweets of Sin, Molly flips through these within a couple days and judges them based on whether or not there’s any smut in it. The Sweets of Sin, in particular, is one name to keep track of if you decide to read Ulysses.
  • But most of Leopold’s critical reading comes with the newspaper– he has an eye for advertisements and Opinions about how good or bad different ads are (Potted meat? Advertised just above the list of deaths? How tasteless!). By the time of the “present,” he’s got a job working for the Freeman’s Journal and National Press as an ad canvasser, so he needs to work with clients in representing their businesses with good ad design.
  • The household is economically secure for its time. Bloom has enough in savings. (This one is meant to be figured out by the reader, but uh, price inflation and changing of currencies and living standards has fogged it a bit.)
  • In the “present day,” Bloom is 39 years old, and five foot nine, and of slightly above-average physical build (even if he doesn’t think it).

I’ve been contemplating what else, exactly, to include here ever since I started making this. There’s really many entries I could make. But I think a lot of them fall closer to legit Themes which the book deals with, and I think I’ll leave this post general. There are details about Leopold, after all, which are better off uncovered by the reader more gradually, allowed to evolve in a contrapuntal puzzling tension, allowed to be Figured Out. The Plots and Subplots, you could say.

But Bloom. Bloom endures. He is a character I cannot forget. Not everything about him is given to us; his life story is “spotty” in parts if you try to put it all down in black-and-white, but what is there is given with such precision and integrated with such… structure that I do think is comparable with ancient epic poetry.

..and, hey, if you do read Ulysses and don’t want to have to rely on my own spotty commentary, this website can help you with context.




OTHER POINTS

S-M-P

SO HERE'S A FUN THING THE BOOK DOES. It's split into three main Parts, yeah? And if you look at the very first letters of the first sentences of the first chapters in each Part:

  1. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
    (Telemachus)
  2. Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
    (Calypso)
  3. Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed.
    (Eumaeus)

You get "SMP." For one thing, these correspond to the person each Part is most deeply about: Stephen, Molly, and Poldy (Leopold). But more functionally, it's Subject-Middle-Predicate, the most traditionally accepted form of syllogism (mainly codified in the Middle Ages, taking after Aristotle). Now, not all arguments need follow the same syllogic structure, but this opening-letter arrangement indicates that Ulysses can be seen as a structured argument. Part I is its Subject, Part II is its Middle, and Part III is its Predicate.

What all this means is up to you, if you even believe in it, but I take from it that Ulysses is about something Stephen spends Part I seeking for: the ability to navigate and command the shifting mental seas of change. Part II develops an argument through showing us Bloom successfully doing just that, and Part III softly hints at a stable future that would come from following Bloom's example.

Anyway. That's just a bit of fun.



wrap-up

also there's a Ulysses movie which is kinda fun? but if I can make Sonic Hamlet I will replace that outright.