Great Big Book Club - James Joyce's "Ulysses"

I'm glad to be here I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to speak about Joyce my favorite subject as some of you already have indicated as yours uh is a great a great moment for me I retired from uh teaching full time seven years ago uh in order to devote myself fulltime to writing about Joyce and I have produced two books on Joyce's early stories this one came out four years ago on a book a whole book study of um a painful case one of his lesser stories uh last week my second book on uh another fulllength books study of a single story uh came out from years of Florida press um I'm a careful reader it took me four years to write this uh this second book and it's on a five-page story uh which is a sort of microcosm of the point is that Joyce from the very beginning of his career is doing things like Ulisses even though he's writing tiny little stories and I'm using sort of ues as a sort of vantage point to understand the the enormous uh uh expansive imagination that this man has from the beginning um much underestimated uh in his early years and his early works are underestimated but we know from the later works what kind of mind we have here so what I'm going to do is introduce you to uh ulyses encourage those who are halfway through are those who were starting to uh persist uh this is of course one of the Masterworks of West Wern uh culture and literature and U it happen to be produced in our language which makes it um accessible by contrast with with Dante or Homer or whatever and now what I'm going to say I have um arranged here to to um to to cover five topics of about 10 minutes each Joyce's biography and the relevance of that to the to this work uh something about the the um the ideas in ulyses and where is is placed in in Irish culture literary history how he is an Irish writer then the next question will be how is he a European how is he a modernist how is he an internationalist how does ulyses exemplify that and then ulyses um its techniques which is of course uh its great joy but also its um challenge um because it's an original uh book and a sumita of book at the same time so I'll take those topics up uh and also in the course of the presentation I will have two brief pauses to look at two little passages uh to so to show like why we're going to all this Grand uh wind up you know what what does it look like on the on the page level and I'm I'm consider myself a bit of an expert on that because I've mentioned the books I've written on similar little passages that are enormously uh deeply rought and and profoundly imaginative uh first his biography he was born in 1882 died in 1941 he was from Irish middle middle class Catholic Family educated by the Jesuits from primary school he went to school age six um to kangos Wood uh eventually ending up at the University in Dublin where he majored in Italian and U and French um and uh again his teachers were were Jesuits he um he graduated 192 and um attempted various uh careers uh he thought about medicine he thought about uh singing he has talents in each those directions he taught about uh journalism um and uh he he tried various things also was a writer he tried he's writing poetry in the beginning imitating Yates he wrote a play for the Irish uh Theater which none of which are are are successful and then he was asked by Yates uh since he was looking for work and was was out out of money recommended by Yates and then um asked by AE publisher of a of a newspaper if I'll give you a guinea if you write me a short story about life as you under seee it around you and Joyce wrote him three little stories and then the editor publisher said no more please people don't know what the hell you're writing about and Joyce of course was already in his own world and were able to write for the the common uh reader um at that point he uh left Ireland this was 1900 and he went to Paris first to try medicine and uh abandoned after a couple of lectures came back to Ireland in 193 when his mother was dying and he stayed there for a year uh his mother having died he stay he stayed around until Midsummer 194 at which time he met Nora Barnacle uh his future wife and they eloped together to Europe uh and he lived in triest at first then Zurich and finally also Rome briefly and ended up his life in Paris uh during the second war he went to Zurich during the first war wrote most of ulyses there but by then this is and I'm skipping on now 1904 he went off to Europe with a manuscript of portra of the art artist in his pocket he developed that um into a full length novel revised it um in the meantime writing the little Dubliner stories while working as an English teacher and also as a banker none of which he was very good at nor did he like but he he uh eventually he was recognized for the genius he was by Ezra pound who secured uh uh money for him through an American benefactor who gave Harriet Weaver who gave him um an annual stien from about 1916 on for the rest of his life and Joyce was receiving this stien every year for at least 20 years before he found out where who was giving it to him and uh that kept him then as a full-time writer from then on he lived a Bourgeois life once he got established uh of course his his great work is is ulyses uh it took him seven years to write it and it appeared in 1922 on his 40th birthday which is the date upon which a man becomes a man according to the Roman Calendar it was his Coming of Age it was I have now invented myself um as a fullscale uh writer and the book is about that as you as we'll see uh then between then 1922 and 1939 he wrote his his third book his last book finans wake which is uiss turn inside out it's the night uh the night version of of this and that that's his great his his most ambitious work and uh he died shortly after finish he finished it in 39 on the verge of the war went to Zurich during the war intending to write another book uh a simple book he said about the sea uh his Paradiso he's modeled his life on Dante and he was going to write his his his but he never he didn't live to to do that um what else is important about him well his graphy is I've just mentioned outlined the thing now he he had enormous gifts and it was recognized from his childhood that he had them uh especially musical gifts and linguistic gifts uh he he had several languages of course he learned uh he learned Latin and um French and Italian he was very fluent in all Lang in all those languages we have essays by him in in in in F in um in U French and uh Latin from school poems from his school uh days um and he also taught himself Doo nor Norwegian when he by by himself entirely in order to read ibson in the original language he was an airer of ibson who was in his last years we're talking about 1880 889 18 188 98 to 100 uh ibson died in 19 in 1899 uh Joyce a freshman at the University wrote him a letter in Dana Norwegian saying you are at the end of your career you can die in peace because your torch has been handed on to me uh uh and it was astonished to discover that this young man would have the tarity to write to him in his own language uh a language which moreover he taught himself he could also uh read and speak German um and several dialects thank you of of Italian um and uh would practice The Language by going to bars with um with with with Sailors and uh Travelers and pick up languages bits and pieces of languages later in his life uh when rting finans awake he would stand on the platform of the train station in Zurich and listening to all the passengers coming and going in and out of the trains picking up uh words from all the languages he would hear he was only fluent in five or six but he he knew over 20 slightly so in finan Wake we find word lists from ranian and Swahili and uh Icelandic and all that because he was a had an enormous uh energy and ability to collect words he's um to Joyce words are as real as uh Coca-Cola you know their their objects that as as as real as the things which they which they represent that's important about I mean he's writing about languages as he is as much about uh things or actions or or or persons uh he had considerable musical ability as I mentioned and so his head is full of Music Opera especially uh light music uh musical stuff Irish balladry um anything oral he's not much into orchestral or chamber music or uh what you hear on waa that that's not classical music to him it's Opera and U song um and if he liked an opera he would go five or six nights in a row till he knew the Opera backwards and forwards he could he could sing any part of it uh he knew Dante inside out he could recite whole kantos um you mentioned it and he could recite the whole Kanto from me he had an extraordinary memory he had a he had a total recall of um of almost anything he read uh Yates would only have his volumes out and Joyce could recite the the whole volume at parties the next day you know he had an just extraordinary ability and of course reading ulyses you recognize the effect of that uh uh turn to Artistic uh purposes um his his great model is is Dante he studied Dante in college had a good Italian teacher and Dante is his model because Dante writes according to the gold standard uh at four levels all at once the personal the historical the allegorical and the anagogical he's writing about experience representative experience mythologized experience and transcendental it's transcendental equivalent bant is a Christian so what happening in this world has res has re reverberations above we are emanations of a divine order that's the fundamental understanding that dant has of the world and his work represents that it's it's a work of ideas as well as of and of Grace the world of Grace as it is of the world of action okay and to Joyce that's the highest standard of of uh creativity and joy his life his work is modeled on that um although he's not a Christian in this same same sense as Dante is of course but Dante is 600 years before Joyce is is is is is a modern we'll come to that um so uh those are some of the general points ibson Dante shakar of course Homer although he didn't read Greek he always regretted that he tried to learn Greek later in his life and learned to do a bit we have his notebooks his his grammar books he he he tempted as an adult to do so and he has Greek he has some but he he couldn't read it ulyses he wrote Dubliners first as a collection of short stories about the ways in which one can fail in life it's a collection of of um 18 stories that represent the ways in 15 Stories the ways in which uh you can fail in life they're portraits of of failures portrait of the artist is a portrait of a success somebody who escapes from the traps of conventional life uh that's his autobiographical novel if you like it's vastly over re re re overheated or not overheated re reformed it's not autobiographical strictly and you can't rely on it as autobiography but of course it's it's based on his own life as as everything we write would would would be so uh he had he then turned to to this work which is the relationship between the the youth and age or Youth and middle age because the Steven is the way Joyce was when he started ulyses the way he imagined himself as a young man at the end of portrait of the artist but beginning his life he's age 22 and leop Paul Bloom is 38 he's a man who's been through through life's knocks he's he's suffered some setbacks but he's lived a real life he's a father he's a husband he's a businessman he's a citizen he's a uh an odd man out in a in the city but he's a a whole person he has suffered he has triumphed he has he's a leopo bloom is a man who has um faced life's difficulties and he's not celebrated by anyone he's not a hero but he's a hero of Joyce's book because he's he's like one of us who has survived um so it's a it's a on the first level it's about maturing it's about Joyce's contrast of his own middle age early middle age with his Youth and it's the dialogue therefore between his past and his present he he's finishing ulyses when he's 38 when he's 39 when he's 40 so it it's about mature about growing up it's about taking the measure of Life uh that's one aspect of it it's the relationship between Youth and maturity it's also the relationship between Father and Son of course all of us as we grow up out grow our parents we need role models other than them and we have to find them somewhere and Steven is looking for a a a father figure because his own has is an alcoholic dis has has disappeared out of his life and his mother has died so he's having an existential crisis and he is setting out into life with a lot of potential and he needs to find a father figure to uh become a man okay broadly that's what the book is about too um it's it's also about the relationship between mind and body between Steven who's the intellect without much experience vastly read and Bloom who's a man of experience a man of not what learning he's primary school education is all he has but he's he's a he's he's a modern man who's aware of the world he's a scientific minded man like most of us are in this scientific age and he looks at things objectively right he's not he's very he's not religious he's not Irish he's not English he's theoretically Jewish although he's not Jewish either but people think he is Jewish and he uh thinks he is but he isn't really he doesn't he doesn't meet the the the requirements U of uh for for various reason but Joyce has created him as a Jew in order in order to make him a sort of a a unique person in Ireland there are very few Jews in Ireland they're more now than they were then but uh they weren't u u recognizable citizens they weren't typical at all and Joyce only knew one or two very slightly they weren't a bit like bloom so Joyce picks um a a man who has sort of made it on his own who can't be typ cast as an Irish man he's not Patty O'Brien not somebody you can say oh he's Irish so Jos doesn't allow the Irish to claim him doesn't allow the Jews to claim him either although they do uh they have no reason to claim him the Irish do because Bloom is a is an international figure he's he's uh he's a man without it without a a TP he can't typ cast him as a part as one of a particular tribe that's important point of course he's unique in a partic in in in in all kinds of of of ways although typical in all kinds of other ways um uh another uh way in which I should finish that point U Bloom is represents the intelligent sensual man the man who is who's who's rational practical uh generous thoughtful uh um uh wrong about almost everything I mean all his ideas are are slightly off or are wrong but he he's he he's right in the main I mean he's got the generally the right idea but he's got all the facts wrong or not all the facts but every time he he theorizes about anything all the scientific information he has is all slightly garbled as you know if you know the whatever he talks about you'll find he's a very inquiring mind but he doesn't he's only half educated so he's got he's got all the all the theory slightly off which is the way most of us are about most things you just have to read the letters to the post or whatever and you recognize that most people haven't a bloody idea about what anything is about they just know vaguely what it's about right democracy no hardly anybody could Define it for you but they believe in it for example and Joyce knew that perfectly well and Joyce was quite was quite amused at the fact that most people subscribed to things they didn't really understand uh so Bloom but Bloom is a good person uh and he's a good person without being a religious person which is also a point that Jo wants to to to make uh Bloom therefore represents sort of the the the UN unformed mind uh but primarily he's he's a he's a sensuous person he's aware of the world through his feelings he he's a man of of of objective reality he isn't overburdened with theories they don't they don't burden him in the way in which Steven's mind is burdened with theories so Steven has to break out of that idealization of life in order to come to terms with it and Bloom is theoretically the answer right so they represent sort of uh they represent uh sensu sensuousness and intellect mly Bloom on the other third hand represents the body the the the fleshly world uh the word the real one the one that bears children Bloom's daughter she's the Unseen presence in the book we don't see her till the end which is on everybody's mind so we have youth maturity father son Mind Body uh sensuality uh another major idea in it of course is Joyce is writing a democratic book he's writing a book that's celebrating any one of us uh we don't uh Joyce is very suspicious taught by nature of who whom he admired uh not not to admire the heroes uh that the that history is made up of the millions of stories of unknown people like leopo Bloom and their virtues are ones that are relevant to us not the virtues of of of uh Jesus or Moses you know these are these are so above the rest of us that we can just just gaze at them in awe but they're they they they are Bloom is somebody who whom we who who's like us or we could be like him and he survives in a generous way and he's admirable because of his the richness of his personality when you finish this book you'll know Bloom probably better than you know yourself he's the most realized character in all of literature and Joyce of course uh had had that very much in mind when he set about writing this character uh who is not like him at all uh Joy self-portrait would be Steven but he imagined Bloom out of out of whole cloth um he's anti as anti-heroic and he's therefore celebrating also Democratic Values Bloom has the values that that we uh recognize in the average responsible citizen um he's also an urban citizen that's an important point about him as well he he appeals to us because we're urbanites we live in a we live in an industrial Urban secular scientific minded culture and Bloom is like us Bloom also lives by selling ads which is again something we know all about because we're bombarded with them every every minute of the day if we turn on the media we we're in a world of advertising and Bloom is already Joy saw this coming and makes Bloom an advertising salesman um and because uh you know Impressions and marketing uh uh are are are all the uh are the devices by which capitalist M functions uh another um major theme of the book is the relationship between uh religious belief and uh unbelief Bloom is a is a is a non-practicing Jew he's a secular Jew he has some Jewish memories of course because and and he he dreams of buying land in Palestine the beginning of the Zionist movement as you know had just occurred in the 1890s and there was enthusiasm for purchasing land Bloom dreams of that although not realistically but he it's part of his of his his dream of a fulfilled life um it's it's not going to happen but he he thinks that way uh he identifies himself and other people call him Jewish but he's um he's not he's not burdened by any crisis of Faith uh in the CI episode his his grandfather does accuse him of having abandoned uh Judaism but it's not an issue for Bloom personally whereas for Ste even the crisis of faith is real his mother has just died and uh her whether she's praying for him as she says she will in the next life uh is something that Steven can't get rid of the idea that her ghost is following him uh and in the course of the novel he does confront that that Cris that existential crisis he has which is the relationship between the the Christian fate that he inherited from her like Joyce himself and his own skepticism about it because he's a modern intellectual who finds the claims of Christianity to be rather of doubtful credibility however laudable the ideas may be they're not sound uh he he he thinks and therefore he's trying to break clear of the guilt that's laid upon Him by that abandoned Faith so that's an issue in the novel of course in at several different levels uh as you would appreciate the novel uh presence of Dante in the novel The Presence of Dante injoys his life presents him with similar relationship between his own modernity and his model who is a great the great Christian poet uh another important issue in the novel is of course the fact that we all live in in a real place we live in um Tacoma Park or Springfield and that's as real a place as any place else as Athens or Rome or uh Paris or New York you may read the New Yorker but you you're not any less credible as a person you have you don't have anything less authentic a life but the fact that you don't live there although you might envy people who live there but you you have an authentic life be confident right in your own experience Dublin is just fine thank you very much right and so that's that's a center which always wants to make it the center of the world display London and Rome the two Irish capitals right the old joke that Ireland is the only country in the world with two capitals neither is in it Rome and London right Joyce is doing his version of freeing Ireland from the Imperia of Rome and of uh of London um and but seriously though uh all knowledge begins as Aristotle says through experience we get it through the experience of our lives through our failures and our our hung ERS and our our our our sins and our triumphs and so on and our our objective experience that's how we learn and we put this together that's the Aristotelian notion as in contrast with Plato who proposes the opposite that we begin with innate ideas and then fill in the blanks uh through um through through experience that's a fundamental issue in the novel by the way they tension between IDE platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism that's a a constant tension in the structure of the novel and in its devices um uh that is Joyce sets it in Dublin on June 16 194 the day he met Nora Barnacle the day she well not the day he met her the day she said yes to him because that changed his life that that yes that she said to him made him confident that he could be loved his mother having died he was Loveless in the world and he needed a replacement for it and he had consulted with prostitutes and had various other women friends but um none of them was satisfactory in any real sense until Nora showed up when she said yes to him that she would go with him and be his wife this book is his wedding ring to her they had no wedding cermony they didn't get married but this book he gave the first copy signed it and handed it to her this is my this is our wedding he said to her she sold it and so he uh because she had to feed the children uh he wasn't were concerned about about that Joyce would would would put uh his own artistic needs before his families I must say he was not particularly generous about that he would go to the Opera and the children would be hungry because it was important for him to see it and he had a piano always he always rented one or had one even though they were hungry because he had to have music he wasn't he wasn't he wasn't a soft arted generous person in any way way in which he he was he was very selfish and very extremely self-confident and used other people no question about it uh but he says they'll all be grateful for having done so and they are um he had real confidence in his own genius and and he had good reason to do so um and he was nichan enough not to be soft-hearted or to to be pity I feel pity for anybody who who might have felt grieved by his abuse uh he uh uh he's writing then about real time and real place so that the the the the action in ulyses is absolutely true to the events of the Day Joyce has has uh got the newspapers and the maps and the uh uh the the records of the day he had the uh property records for the city so he knew who lived at every property of the city and he knew the length of every street and he knew the he knew the what was printed on the Sellar flap uh on the um on the sidewalks and where the signboards were everything like that he has and he if he doesn't remember it he checks it out he has somebody he didn't he didn't live in Dublin when he wrote This Book of course he he was out a distance from it so he had to reconstruct it from memory and with the help of innumerable AIDS uh this is a reprint of the original 1922 it looked like this with the Greek blue cover on it when it came out but it's a celebrating Dublin as as a center of the a new myth the myth of of of Ireland and this is the Irish epic the corresponding one to Virgil for Rome or Homer for Greece seriously that's what he's doing he's writing a national epic but in modern terms he's attempting to write something on an epic level uh and I'll talk about that in a few minutes again so I was pointing out that it's real that it's uh uh this is an important point about it it only occurred to me recently uh one of uh when Joyce was a young man his his crisis of Faith was produced not by his counter with prostitutes is what you might think from portrait that's one ways which is not autobiographical in my view it's when he discovered uh that the gospels weren't reliable that they didn't all agree with one another we he he came across a uh what do you call a collated edition of the gospels and found that they had serious disagreements then he realized that well they're only approximate on the historical level then you may then you youve you can't believe them on the basis of their historicity of course we know that now we long past that shock that he encountered then but uh by Dam when he was writing his book it was going to be better than Matthew Mark Luke and John he was going to get the facts right you know they don't agree on how Jesus was born they don't all agree on the number of people who are fed at a certain point etc etc etc there all kinds H right uh we can get by that I have anyway but he said no I'm going to do the thing from the bottom everything's going to be reliable from the bottom up from the ground level up to the super structure so um you you can you can cross check it there are people have found some mistakes but there are very very few uh they're based on his sources not on his uh not on himself another point I I I've mentioned then five or six a major is in it another one is uh this is something that you probably already know about because it's he publicized it himself to start at the point a little that it's parallel to the Odyssey right it's called ulyses H so there every each chapter each of the 18 chapters corresponds to a chapter in The Odyssey and a number of a lot of details then are are mimicked out of out of Homer's epic yes that's true uh Joyce and he calls it jiss and he wanted to have it printed as I said with the blue Greek cover on it each each of the chapters does have correspondences with the homeric uh episodes and he selected them to fit his schema uh the general point being that this is a modern hero uh and in general this is a epic an Irish epic modeled on the great model for all Western culture the the the the Odyssey and uh adicus is is the allround man he's a husband and leader and uh um military man and and lover and and and uh uh survivor of the W from the Wilds of various women who try to trap him and so on he's he's an all round uh man and Bloom is an all round man too but not a man of violence of course there a major difference Bloom is a pacifist Bloom is a man who believes that you should uh that the that violence is not uh the the manly virtue that heroic literature makes it out to be uh an issue that my students always asked about why didn't Bloom go home and punch out uh bl's boil and that's what Jerry Springer would advise him to do or or you know tonight at 9 o00 that but Bloom doesn't do that uh Bloom um is is is going to work it out with her and um he he's he's um uh he's he's he's resilient and he's able he recognizes that he's partially responsible for the problem that it's it's partly his responsibility that Molly is so um is Unfaithful uh um so and and um so his his solution to problems are Pacific and civilized and Humane Bloom is a Humane person he loves cats and animals feeds the Galls and he's kind and thoughtful he's helping to raise money to to to help out the Widow the dignam's Widow and so on he does charitable Works gets no credit for it uh oh contr yet he does it out of friendship to his to another citizen he's a responsible Man Without expecting any Eternal reward for it because he's not a he's not doesn't believe in the afterlife or anything like that he does it be because he's because he's a good human being so Joyce is has there is a moral in it in that sense but it's a um it's it's it's not an obviously moralistic book uh now uh maybe I should take a a a passage just to relieve the uh monotone here uh I look at one of the passages that I've uh chosen uh this is U the first one the grainy sand had gone from under his feet let me just play it from the RTE recording I have it set up here this is The Ensemble one that was done um and um so is this the produce SE as the produce yes okay so so in in the scaer Edition gabbler Edition is Page 34 and in the modern library or vintage Edition it should be around 40 41 it's 4041 right I hope I this correct now play one feels that one is at one with one who wants the grainy sand had gone from under his feet his boots trod again a damp crackling Mast Razer shells squeezing pebos that on the unnumbered pebos Beats W SED by the shipworm lost Armada un wholesome sand Flats waited to suck his treading Souls breathing upward sewage breath he coasted them walking rarily a porter bottle stood up stom to its waist in the cakey sand dough a sentinel I of dreadful thirst broken Hoops on the shore at the land a maze of dark cunning Nets farther away chalk scrolled back doors and on the higher Beach a drying line with two crucified shirts Rings end wigwams of Brown steersmen and master Mariners human shells he Haled okay I was 12 years of age when I countered this passage I'd been reading Agatha Christie and Enid bighton and uh Robert Louis Stevenson when I read this like yourself my life changed because I realized there's the this is a 600 page book written like this you know I suddenly I realized that uh the world was much large world of literature much larger than I'd ever imagined I just look at this passage just briefly um with you uh Stephen is walking along the beach and he's he's very depressed for reasons we know and he's he's thinking about how life's forms are continuously shifting and changing and nothing is fixed at all and can you be certain of anything in this world is the is the from it and he's meditating on that as he walks along the beach uh I'll just gloss this passage very quickly uh you see that the sand is is metomic here the sand had gone he doesn't say he walked along the sand the as if the sand itself were moving right um um Steven is um is also uh detached from his feet he's looking at his feet so his feet are like dis embodied uh others other parts of himself which isn't isn't himself but something else there this this is an inference of the the the feet at the end of the sentence his boots Tau again a damp CR again as if the boots were themselves meton ised or or personified or at least animated a damp crackling mask this is a a a u a piece of flatsome these are the the razor shells squeaking Pebbles that on the unnumbered Pebbles beats now you noticed in the reading that the voice changed there because the narrator the concealed narrator is the one who's narrating the passage and we're getting interpolations interruptions from Steven's voice which we get that on the unnumbered Pebbles beats this is Steven thinking about what the narrator is telling us he's doing and uh now that's a quotation from uh from from King uh leer um uh the um that the Steven's head is full of literary quotations and texts and they're always intervening between him and his his real experience which is one of the things that makes him an idealist or intellectual the the uh the grammar of the thing of course already suggests that is that is an interruption um and it and when you look at the speech in King Le from which this comes you'll recognize that LE is in a similar situation are thinking about the the the beach over which he's looking in the crisis at the climax of that play anytime Joyce Joyce is supremely responsible there's no nothing absolutely nothing in Joyce is throwaway there's no accidents this is not a chaotic book everything is managed uh this is managed in the way in which God managed the world everything has already been considered by the Creator and Joyce is responsible in that way so everything has an explanation everything uh and if it if it isn't obvious then you've got to think again uh uh wood sied by the shipworm lost ourada that's Steven of course thinking about the uh the the the The Spar that's on the that's on the the the uh uh Beach and it's been eaten by the shipworm by the woodworm huh and marvelous uh marvelous line that's thrilled me the minute I heard it when I was a child would Sie by the shipworm because it it works two ways of course because the little worm uh cved ate it and and passed it through its body and turned it into sawdust uh but but by drilling it made it turned it into a Civ too so the word Civ Works two ways right wood Civ by the shipworm and they they repeated S's and eyes there almost gives you the sound of the little the teeth of the little worm eating the eating the wood no that's the kind of guy we got here and of course ship all right lost Armada well the Spanish Armada was wrecked on the Irish Coast in 1588 and it could have liberated Ireland but it didn't it was a failure a disappointment to us uh which is of course part of the deflation uh deflationary theme of the of the the the the the passage here un wholesome sand Flats waited to suck trading treading Souls breathing upward sewage break this is the again personified protein Beach suck you you see notice the the relationship the metaphors here of of drinking and eating um hel helosis uh Proteus has has bad breath um at that time there was no uh Central um uh sewage system in Ireland just the raw sewage went into the went into the ocean and was washed drop on these beaches um and it was just at the time ulyses is being written the action is occurring they are actually putting in the the the sewage system which we still have in Dublin uh and but at that time uh sewage breath was everywhere uh and it's a it's a it's a it's a function it's a feature of the of Joyce's objectivity uh Joyce is not somebody who uh euphemize anything uh you this is the first book in which a a character takes uh takes a and we watch him do it and that has never occurred before but that we do it all the time but we don't talk about it and it wasn't a fit subject for for literature and uh when Joy sent this book to his aunt who was a very sweet person uh she she said this book isn't fit to read and joy said well if that's so life isn't fit to be led and of course he's he's right he writes about life as he sees it in all its with all its problems and embarrassments and Joys a pocket of seaweed I I better skip on he coasted them I'm got to watch the time here he coasted them walking weily not the rhythm of that uh the rhythm of those uh lines Echoes the rhythm of the walking the the the uh double dle a portra bottle stood up to stug to its waist in the cakey sand D again the the rhythm of that sentence slows down as the uh as its sense does because we're talking about something getting stuck in the sand the word star of course is a joic in neologism he creat creates these words all the time parenthetically I should note that ulyses has something like 90,000 different words in it the average novel has no more than that entirely in it so it's a it's a a language challenge to read it sted is an original word like Shakespeare he makes them up and but he can um he he uh you don't need uh to be lexicographer to see what that Stog is a combination of stock and bog for sted and of course we understand immediately what he's saying there they a bottle stuck in the in the sand notice the relationship between drink and and uh food there uh bottle and Cakey right uh right a sentinal aisle of dreadful thirst as if it were a uh as if it were a lighthouse um or somebody watching The Ocean Isle of dreadful thirst is of course Ireland um alcoholism bottle all right but I of dreadful thst is a quotation from the from the Bible from the uh Isaiah I think the valley of dry bones uh he's picking again that's uh that's Steven of course thinking there uh broken Hoops of the shore at the land a maze of dark cunning Nets he's passing by a fishing Village and he sees the Broken Barrel Hoops they made barrels out of wood then and with with Hoops to hold them together the broken Hoops of broken circles uh symbol of of uh uh of of alcohol again but also of uh the broken Circle I mean the image of of imperfection and emptiness uh a maze of dark cunning a great joyan line that that the Nets are are made by the fishermen to trap the fish like socialization is set up to trap us to being good citizens and being obedient uh children Etc um farther away chalk scraw back doors and on the higher Beach a drying line with two crucified shirts he's looking at the at the at the backs of the houses the fronts are turned towards the street and he's looking at the uh the ugly sight of life um uh drying line with two crucified church not the two crucified the third one is missing Jesus isn't there we have the two thieves we have like the broken hoop you have suffering and sin without Redemption I presume that that but two crucified are a brilliant image of course because that's the way the shirts were hung out to dry and uh crucified is a wonderful image it picks up other images back through the passage the relationship then between crucifixion and uh and the last supper if you like or redemption or failure of it is is an under theme of the passage ringen wigwams of brown steersmen and master Mariners this is Steven of course thinking um ring Zen is the name of the village actually it is but it fits with the broken Hoops image because a ring and ring Ring's End and the broken hoop fit uh Joyce is wonderful at finding ways in which geographical and linguistic uh plays can work with one another to give a a complex metop plasmic effect he's absolutely a master of that kind of of thing uh and he's looking then of course at the at the boats the fishing boats tied up wigwams that's the image of the the the wrapped um sails wrapped around the uh uh the Mast as they're in the in when they're at anchor or uh pulled up on the shore uh but they are we think of the Indians crossing the plains in pursuit of the Buffalo like the S Sailors fishermen crossing the oceans after the fish an elaborate parallel of displaced people like the Irish displaced from their land all immigrants and so on and so on and so on so Joyce is able to immediately to create a a complex set of analogies between the Irish the Indians and the fishermen uh you know uh human shells the the empty um aspirations uh but the the the the uh the flatsome and emptied uh uh lives emptied of spiritual energy you can see where Elliot's Westland is coming from when you read this because this came first and this has to do with this passage that you first read when you you did and you it just knocked you out but you couldn't unpack this oh no no but it was I think of this in relation to our reading and discussing this book because we're not going to be discussing each passage in each chapter over the you know over the next the many times we meet um so I don't know if it's possible to say um what is you know what was it it's just that feeling that there was just such a richness here and then as time went on you sort of you you it takes study and um and so I think what I'm maybe getting at is that we're going to have to be content with um 10th knowledge quarter of knowledge and over the next number of weeks is to choose passages and this is where it's going to depend on all of us and maybe using our thread yes that we can then look at them we have a guide we'll have a sense of how the chapters are moving um and U in a sense we we I think over our discussion is that we're going to be learning to read this book and not be um afraid of it in a sense because there's so many different narrative structures there so many different things going on right I mean exactly you could read on different levels obviously as a child I didn't but the Poetry is thrilling I mean would SI by the ship wor lost time I it was just thrilling uh nobody writes like that uh but this's a real poet writing you don't have to necess understand it but even if you have feeling for language immediately are are are thrilled because this is original this is nothing derivative about this uh where is derivative is derivative in a very sophisticated way he's already unnumbered Pebbles beats he's he's pulled something out of out of out of Shakespeare and if you go back to Shakespeare you see that it's it's not just pulled out because it sounds nice it actually fits the parallel scene with one we have here similarly with the citation from Isaiah it fits here too uh you know uh he has he he has he has a there's nothing cheap about him there absolutely nothing at all it's all highly responsible and highly intelligent and always pointed and somebody said to him once Mr Joyce some of your lines are so uh trivial the connections you're making he says yes some are trivial and more are quadal every um he had a wonderful sense of humor of course that's one of the great things about him he's not pompous at all um now um I move on to talk about the modernity of this uh and then uh we look at another passage an easier one a bloom passage for contrast okay this is this is the course the Locust classicus of mod modernism modernism in literature is the movement between uh between 1900 and 1940 in the art in all the Arts music painting literature and Joyce's ulyses is is the The Benchmark here here a modernism has passed we're into postmodernism now uh and uh and some uh writers who have never heard of either uh they're still writing as if Dickens was the last word most popular writers are like that because it's univocal world uh everything is just the way it looks uh you can write bestsellers that way but you can't write anything serious that way uh Joyce changes the game and these are the ways in which he does one um he's a he he he's skeptical about traditional religious uh and aesthetic inheritances so he he's creating a work based upon Mythic structures on multiple Mythic structures not just the homeric one but also the biblical one the book is also structured on the relationship between the New and Old Testaments because Bloom is to Moses as Jesus as as Steven is to Jesus and it's about the relationship between Father and Son between uh Jews and Christians at another level I mean it's it's an allegory of the relationship between Old and New Testaments and therefore of the other main pillar of Western Civilization the biblical one Greek one being the rational one he has he takes both very seriously and they're both represented in very serious substantial ways here um therefore his pointing out to us that it has homeric parallels is just not meant to be a definitive answer to the the structural question I'm mentioning here but to be an incentive to search for for others because there are many in it there there are multiple structures going on Parallel to one another in the book not just the Greek and and biblical uh um the book is highly ironic uh it's very funny and there's nothing is pompus or uh preachy in it he's not telling us how to live you can learn to live from it but he's not telling you that you have to figure it out for yourself like you do in life itself the book is very much like life in that it doesn't give you answers there's no Sermon on the Mount there's no uh Declaration of Independence there's no statement of human rights in it you have to uh you have to make judgments all the time this is very important in the book the book is highly complex in its devices it is it it's dialogic that is there's always several voices going on sometimes several all at once the little passive you just read has two voices the narrators and Stevens for example and Steven takes himself very seriously and the narrator um is is a is not necessarily a definitive voice either because the narrator is uh sometimes uh lapses I I'll come back to that narrative question in a few minutes but the the narrative voice which shifts from chapter to chapter by the way is is an issue and also in many chapters there are uh two two voices or three or four all competing with one another and it's very difficult to to know you know how to which of them to take seriously or which of them the book takes seriously the answer is that the book as a whole is has meaning has coherence has order like the universe we believe but you have a lot of ways to interpret that you can interpret it creationist way or or an evolutionary way or some other way you don't have to take it any particular way and there's evidence supporting all of these that's true in ulyses also the ulyses is supremely smart that way and is ironic and detached in its presentation of a vast complexity of material that we have to make sense of ourselves now we can't we we make sense of life in ordinary Ways by judgment we judge people we judge the weather we judge the stock market we judge the uh whether our car will get us there or not we making judgments all the time and those are practical judgments based on experience now in ulyses the experience that will enable you to read this book is none of those it's literary experience you have to have literary taste to make sense of it because it require the moral judgments that you make depend upon the L your ability to make literary judgments about what's in bad taste and what's in Good Taste and and how it works you have to yourself if you haven't read Shakespeare you can't for example make sense of that particular citation it'll mean nothing to you well the more you know the better you're able to judge you still can get pleasure out of it without us understanding it but the more you know the more you've read the better your literary taste the more you can make sense out of this okay therefore one of the inferences that I make from that is that it's also fastly easy to misread and critics disagree there's whole shelves of books on it I've added to a couple of them because I have my own view of it uh of how you judge these things and I realize it comes out of a whole lot of complexity of historical cultural linguistic and uh cultural presumptions uh but Joyce is coming out of some too but he's he's trying to transcend them by giving us a universal book it's highly complex therefore it's ambiguous always you never know what exactly happens or what exactly how how this problem is resolved there's nothing resolved easily like they might be on a Jerry Springer Show where there a punch out and one L the other wins it's not like that it it has to be done through uh uh threading their way through the ambiguities um it's of course by the same token elitist and learned you know if you haven't read anything you can't read it it's why one of the reasons I gave up teaching it in to undergraduates at at George Mason about 15 years ago because the students just couldn't do it they didn't have enough they got so intimidated dated by that they stopped after five or six chapters they didn't know enough they didn't know who John the Baptist was they didn't know who Moses was they didn't know who Pascal was never heard of them well if they don't have that they can't read it or they're going to have to do an awful lot of quick reading fast and they weren't willing to do it you know uh you know it's part of the the decline of civilization as I understand it this book depends upon civilized traditions and if you haven't inherited them if something has come between you and those which unfortunately it has through electronic culture although it should be the opposite students just unwilling to make the effort that this book requires but that's true of anything serious uh and I don't know where the future is but this book is is the book of the 20th century whether it will be in the 21st or not is a matter that most of us around here won't have to worry about uh sorry but uh I I feel very fatalistic about it I'm afraid uh it's an internationalist book it is produced during the Irish cult literary Revival when Ireland is be trying to break out of the British Empire and it did it did in the two weeks before this book was published The Irish delegation signed the treaty with Britain liberating us from those unspeakable people those English this this book is Joyce's contribution to Irish Freedom that's he seriously means that he's liberating us not from British imperialism but from ignorance and from complacent he he wants to raise the literary standards in the world as a whole while everybody else is involved in getting the Brits out and he's not going to do it that he's not going to get involved in that although Bloom is obviously interested in it but he's not a Rabbid nationalist as we know he wants human Freedom not new Flags he's not a hater of the being English but Joyce isn't either but he he recognizes the problem this is an international book he wants to make Ireland European that's his object not just to get free of the British but to become World citizens which is of course what's happened Ireland has become part of the European Union and Britain is no longer the issue so this book is now being appreciated in Ireland in a way in which one would never have thought 50 60 years ago when the conflict with Britain was more was more in people's minds it's a book of the it's it's an internationalist book in the obvious sense that it's citing literature from all over the world I mean it's a book of universal signific if an uh Joyce is not waving any nationalist flag here uh he one of the things that's important to know about Joyce uh is that he's he's very very guarded and opposed uh to any mass movement whether it's Catholicism or Irish nationalism or any ISM at all Marxism or feminism he will nothing to do with any one of these movements they all try to claim them but he he doesn't really he will not pull ideological baggage for anybody he's his own man so he's very critical and skeptical about the claims of Imperium of course the claims of nationalism the claims of Catholicism the claims of Judaism whatever they are he's he's skeptical about them they they draon people into following some ritual or some simplified version of the truth which is only representable in this this is a serious challenge in other words to the Bible and he's writing a book which is as complex as the Bible and as significant he seriously has that in mind to write a book which will challenge the holy book okay uh and he's he's uh serious enough to uh now of course the book at the same time has no plot interest or hardly any what you normally expect in a novel or story you're not getting so you could summarize the plot in in one paragraph right uh there's not much there and in fact that plot we have resol doesn't resolve it I won't spoiler forly but if you don't get a clear answer does blo and do blman Steven become friends for here forever after uh do uh Molly and Bloom resume sex uh does do they what's what's going to happen with with Millie uh you know there there's a lot of unknowns in the thing it's it like our own lives you know uh we have a lot of unresolved issues today we we won't resolve them necessarily today and when we have crisis in life we don't resolve them and quickly change uh some things go on forever and they just barely get resolved before death if then you know we we we don't change we don't convert overnight Nobody Does anybody who says to do is probably Coda or themselves Joyce is very skeptical about conversion stories and about changes of heart and all that sort of thing and this book is about the slow processes of daily life and the issue is how we barely begin to chip away at the problems we have we make some progress and slip back and others and so on and it's about that and of course it's it's uh it's um it's Universal in in that in that sense uh now uh technically uh this is the the great uh what Joyce's great innovation of course Jo Joyce is first vastly read Joyce's experience in life is very narrow much narrower than mine which isn't great when me he didn't travel half as much as I have uh for example or you I'm sure he's he's he did very little he um he he never like Hemingway hunted Lions he didn't like to be reminded to that by the way uh Hemingway bolstered about it he was a friend of Hemingway an admired of Hemingway but he didn't do anything like that he never went to sports meets or uh he never bet on anything he didn't play cards and he didn't uh he went to bars yeah uh and uh but he spent his time reading he's vastly R they made a movie of his uh of uh called Norah a few years ago his wife and it an hour and a half long it's beautiful it's beautiful film about her life it shows him all the way through it but he's only seen uh looking at a book for about 25 seconds what a movie this guy spent his life reading and writing and we only get 25 seconds in an hour and a half the guys person have a notion of what we're dealing with a writer we're not dealing with a man of the streets we're not dealing with a sportsman we're dealing a man of ideas Joyce is hugely red and I've made it my business in the writing these books I have about the early stories to have read everything that Joyce had read at the time he wrote them which is a fair lot of reading but I'm I'm 70 years of age but he wrote These when he was 20 so uh it's not much of a boast but I I did make sure to have read everything to make including the newspapers and then I can see what he's doing because uh uh and it is a lifetime work to do that and it has taken a lifetime um now um technically Joyce is a master he's WR everything that matters uh all the literature that uh he has his hands on in many Lang angues he read them so he he's very sophisticated uh uh technically and you can get a great deal of satisfaction out of appreciating what those technical skills are I'll mention them quickly and then we look at a passage uh one of course most obvious thing is a stream of Consciousness right you're you're seeing the way a mind works the way your own mind works the way you you most of your life is live privately but you're thinking uh what you're dreaming what you're thinking as you're speaking to somebody you're saying one thing but you're thinking something something else what a bastard while you're being very nice you know for Bloom is doing that and we we know we see that all the time we you know uh Joyce gives a delicious sense of the difference between the way we appear and the way we are or whatever you know um shim also uh interior monologue that is when a person is talking to themselves Bloom particularly is a rich interior mon very funny person you know after a while how he's going to think full of new ideas full of fresh observations and all that uh uh the the a very important aspect of of of of of of Joyce's technique is what his use of what we call free indirect discourse I will pick that up in a minute we'll look at a passage and I'll show you an example free and directec discourse is the voice of the narrator which without telling you is quoting the character that they're writing about without making it obvious so that you have slipped into the mind of the character without knowing it and back out again Joyce is a master of this very subtle narrative technique he does it from Dublin oron but he's doing it here at a very high level he's also writing like Dante everything he writes operates on several levels all at once uh the literal historical anagogical Etc so uh for example uh the the book uh the book is called ulyses but he also calls this a useless book I mean he he he's capable of bad puns like that it's a work of art it has no value it has no it has no practical value it might be a door stop but it has no value in any kind of practical way it's it's a useless book it's a book of uh sui uh self-justifying right um his book observes the classical unities time in place it all occurs within 24 hours in the same place with the same small cas characters and all the action is arises out of the characters established he he's he's he's he's a strict classical uh uh disciplinarian that way it's highly intertextual it's it it's citing hundreds of books that he's read so uh intertextuality what we mean by that he's quoting everybody else so it's it's a it's a book of quotations as some somebody said about it it's it's all sure enough it's it's almost every word in it is a quotation of something else uh but that's what civilization is we're recycling previous experiences previous uh observations we elected a pope today and uh we there was a lot of other ones before him it's it's a repeating ourselves that'll come up in a minute a Jesuit this time not not called Francis what do you think about that it's um it's also metaleptic it's full of metaphors and and and double metaphors like pyramids you'll find one reference here and one reference here and then they have references within themselves to refer to other references sometimes goes up to three levels it's called metalepsis a double a double metaphor he's he's a master of that kind of of thing too uh I won't have time to illustrate that here but I'll I'll uh I maybe come back to it if you have time another uh feature of his work is what What's called the arranger uh I I should point this I should back off for a second on this there's 18 chapters in the in the novel three um uh 312 and three first three last three and then 12 in the middle and uh so it's balanced that way and the middle chapter is also itself a microcosm of of the book as a whole it's highly chastic or Joyce kiasmos is Joyce's favorite uh rhetorical Trope in other everything is balanced like a like a greek temple you know there's um he loves sentences which begin and end on the same word with a an a one in the middle like the like the peak on the roof that's classical classical sense of balance and Order he has that all through his work in everything he does in portra of the artist for example uh it's it's it's about um it's about Nation family and and uh and church and um if you go to the middle page of the of that book although it doesn't look like the the the words family nation and church occur the middle of the hire sermon for example but he does this all over the place and you'll find that there in Ulisses for example the the first chapter and the 18th chapter match in certain ways the second and the 17th the third and the 16th and so on all the way to the middle and the middle then itself made up of 19 Parts all of which correspond to one another into the middle of that you know he's high it's like a like a tree all the wings on the tree you know it's highly disciplined in ways that aren't apparent to the reader going right through from beginning to end it's not just a straight narrative it's built by a master tactician uh of of design it's profoundly designed you know like like nature itself it's there's there are deep orders in we don't see we're only learning them um he's seriously making an effort to imitate the Divine creator of the of the world uh pride is his sin if he's not in heaven it's on that account not on account of having wasted his talents um the book for those who are beginning uh it it the first two chapters are some of the toughest chapter four on it's much easier we're going to look at a section now from uh we have to move on it uh from Bloom things e thing eases up a little but then when you get to the last few chapters it gets really tough when he he gets into full stride and by the time he's done he has produced what he he we we we call an encyclopedia of literary procedures every way in which you can describe anything he's done it in this book all the ways in which people have done it before he's he's already done it here and done it better he's he's summarizing all the ways in which you can describe anything so the novel is finished once he's finished with this you can't write novels in your without going back uh to first grade because he already graduated right so when you read your choice if you're a serious writer you have choices to make and ignore them which a lot of people do or try to improve on them some have attempted and some have moderately succeeded in some ways uh but you can't ignore them and you're naive if you think you can be a writer without having read Joys you're just living in another age or something um so he will either move you if you got the talent or discourage you if you haven't uh uh let me just I look at another little passage because i' I I've I've said almost everything I wanted to I wanted to look at a little passage because it's it's so beautiful and it it illustrates something of the spirit of of Bloom uh this is this is lonians this is the uh the eating chapter Bloom is um is walking by the uh along the liy and he sees the seagulls play if you gra a turkey say on Chestnut me it tastes like that eat pig white be but then why is it the so for fish s how is that his eyes s answer from the river and saw a Rob rocket anchor the treat swells laser its plased board Kos 11 Shillings trousers good idea that wonder if he pays rent to the corporation how can you own water really it's always flowing in the Stream never the same which in the Stream of life we Trace because life is a stream all kind of places are good for RS that qu doctor for the clap used to be stuck up in all the green houses never see it now strictly confidential Dr High F didn't cost him a rent like mcin the dancing master self advertisement got fell us to stick them up or stick them up himself that matter on the QT running in to loosen a button fly by night just the place to post no bills post 110 pills some check with a dose burning it you're introduced here to Bloom's wonderful uh resilient humorous uh interior monologue and we see him uh feeding the gulls and umce his Humane feelings he he bought a penny of of cake and uh is feeding the goals and he's he's concerned with uh as a responsible citizen with u with possible epidemics they spread poof and M foot and mouth when you read ulyses you recognize Steven has a lot of issues on his mind and then when we meet bloom bloom has has a lot of different issues on his mind he's a different personality yet in all kinds of important ways they're thinking about the same things but SL in quite different ways for example in this case uh foot and mouth uh disease he's thinking about U there has been there was an epidemic of foot and mouth disease in the animals in Ireland and in Britain and was concern at the time for the Agriculture and it's in the news so he's thinking about it he's wondering if the he's wondering if the seagulls bring it which is not likely but he's he's worried all the same but Steven earlier in the novel has offered to bring u a letter for Mr Dey to the newspaper about foot on mouth disease so they have you know it's on each of their minds like like that's what it means to be citizens we all have the same things to talk about the the the elections or the or the sequestering or whatever uh and he he wonders about um about um if you cram turkey say our chest be to taste like that eat pig like Pig you recognize that that's a uh it's a a fact of cooking you you can uh uh you you season something and it tastes a bit like the seasoning uh are are are pigs just pigs or are they parts of other things I mean step has been thinking about that earlier with Proteus right how things blend into one another uh we're not pigs aren't discret animals they're they're part of the universe and we're part of them and then he he says why is it that saltwater fish are not salty now there's a scientific question right and there is an answer scientific answer to that question um that you you can look up on on Joy's head but so he has Bloom asking it here how was that uh his eyes sought answered now he's a scientist but he's also an Advertiser and his eyes sought answer from the river um notice that it's his eyes that do it Bloom is not really thinking about the question he's just he's just distracted Bloom is does isn't a isn't a systematic thinker to put it mildly he saw robot's rocket anchor on the treely swells lazily as plastered board now there's an example of free and direct discourse how the narrator has by by sympathizing with blooms looking at the water has lost his syntactic control of the sentence and given us a sentence which wanders off its subject that's an example of free and direct discourse now uh of course Bloom's lack of of uh mental discipline is implied also in the in the syntax of that sentence Kino's 11 Shillings trousers now he's reading that plard on a boat which uh which the Kos the the the uh the gentleman's Outfitters has they re they rented this boat and they they they're it's in the middle of the river and have a tide on both sides so that the the ads are on both sides of the boat and Bloom notices it and as an Advertiser he's always looking for opportunities or ideas about advertising things things and um good idea that the the good idea to bloom is that this uh sales on on on on gentleman's pants is on I wonder if he pays rent to the corporation Bloom is a practical man and he wonders you know who owns the river and of course that raises very big questions about right but but uh but you could easily go by that without noticing and you should at least in the second read of ulyses noticed that several things one that um ER that bloom has left his key behind him because he switched pants he he's wearing black pants because he's going to the funeral and he left the key uh to his his Hall door in the pocket of the other pants so now he's he's locked out of his own house he has no key similarly Steven has left the uh marello Tower Mulligan has taken the key so so they're both neither of them has a key to their homes no keys right and they're both keyless citizens therefore and therefore they're wandering around looking for one another right and they're going to meet the the two keys are symbolically going to cross before the end of the day they haven't yet met but they're going to and that's of course one of the big questions in the book will sun meet father will Bloom find a son will Steven find a father question uh uh 11 Shillings trousers um and of course the 11 Shillings is um is is the sign for 11 Shillings is made up of two parallel lines which don't meet um and and um the uh the 11th letter is K and um we now now we have an image of two parallel lines which never meet and two lines which cross which of course the parallel lines which never meet uh means that there's no meaning in the universe we're all traveling out forever into eternity will never be redeemed from our wanderings but whereas the Covenant the Old Testament the Star of David or the new one the Cross Keys which we saw on today's news symbolizes the papacy and the agreement between God and between Jesus and Peter to um to to establish a a New Covenant is the symbol of redemption in the Christian sense of the term Bloom by the way same token of course is is soliciting an ad for uh the the Kenny uh uh company he's working for and he's looking for the Cross Keys which is a symbol of of their business so that Cross Keys thing works in several different ways now you see it has to do with metaphysics has to do with theology it has to do with um uh parallelism and of course again the boat in the river if you looked at it from above the sequel can do that look down on it you'll see that it itself is parallel to the two banks of the river right with the two with the ropes holding it crossing the river holding it as in an image of crossed rope so that image is very richly woven into the text now Bloom doesn't see it he just sees the Practical side of it but the reader should because the reader has been already given the information that can allow the reader to see this uh boat in the river um representing a lot of different ideas uh materialism parallelism uh success uh the trousers of course itself too has two parallel lines in it that meet uh in the generative place and so on I mean you can you can at which point do you stop well Joyce sets it up so that you can that you can you can uh so the so at the end of the novel I'm I'm not joking because at the end of the novel I partly am but Bloom and Steven do stand in Bloom's backyard urinating in parallel with one another against the wall so that the two uh the two keys are exposed in parallel with one another looking off into the Stars uh into the night stars and you know so it's it's I'm not sort of just being funny here I'm saying that I am but but it's also the way in which Joyce makes sense out of the world he he sets you up in all kinds of little ways like this which when you read the novel over and over you have to read it many times before you read it then you begin to see how it all works uh you know okay let me uh quickly finish up here how can you on water uh flowing like a stream now this is of course what Stephen has been thinking about earlier on the beach the parallel between the protein Beach and the flowing river are obvious and uh it flowing in a stream never the same which is the stream of life we Trace that's a quotation that has that has a bloom has has picked up uh because life is a stream that's a little bit of a cliche right all kinds of places are good for ads he he doesn't Bloom is not a poet in the in the way in which Steven is least he's sort of minor poet any advertising man has to be he has to have some funny ideas that will grab people time he is on a on a sort of Mercantile level Joyce says somewhere language is used in two ways the language of the marketplace or the language as authorized by the literary tradition the language of the marketplace Ploom or the language of the literary tradition me uh Stephen right and both languages are operating here in beautiful consonant with one another their differences and their similarities Joyce is not let me say having said that Steven says that in portrait of the artist but Joyce has more respect for ordinary people and ordinary language than that Joyce doesn't look down on vulgar songs Joyce loves U musicall songs he thought those those were the Poetry of the working class and he respected that they weren't verie or Vagner Jo Joyce loved Vagner more than anyone and he had vogner's operas complete all annotated he paid close attention to Serious artists of his caliber but he wasn't uh he still respected uh the art of the poor the art of the illiterate because he recognized that they had the same conflicts as everyone else so Joyce is a profound Democrat in that sense although he's really very very smart and very difficult in his life he wasn't he didn't tolerate fools uh at all uh he didn't insult people but he he was he would be he would cut somebody off he thought they weren't able to keep up with them uh that's true but but and he was chauvinistic yes and he was um uh intolerant yes but of major questions he didn't he didn't discuss religion or politics at all with anyone he kept it all for his books but he was he was also uh very he was very Democratic in the sense that he recognized that everybody body is human and everybody has the Dignity of their suffering and of their loves and that they had their own way of putting it and some people put it more more sophisticated way than others but they're all equally dignified human beings he had he's a profound Democrat in that way so this novel is about that among other things so Bloom's sort of uh knock about um street wisness is one thing and Steven's bookishness is another and they're both respected in different ways and you see that here and you see Bloom's resilience uh Bloom of course is worried about public health he's worried about VD uh he worried he's worries that he might get it from Molly now because if Molly had sex with with um Mullan and Mulligan uh has VD which he might there was a serious worry at the time they didn't have cures for it and Joyce himself might have had it we think he did uh it was a worry all the time uh for for people who'd had uh uh free sex when they were younger uh so that comes up all the time and Bloom worries about though Bloom himself is not proplate bloom is worried is worried a little bit about that um about that uh so that that shows up here and and he's but he also humorously thinks about it uh in respect to ads ads are Ben's urinals and where we where you see uh men uh men uh interfere with one another's graffiti so the the novel is full of of of all kinds of language from graffiti to uh vulgar uh ads to to the highest level of uh intellectual discourse uh and and that's one of the things that makes us such a wonderful wonderful uh book uh so um it it's it's it's it's it's not chaotic it's not cynical it's it's it's not a leg pull it's it's a deadly serious work but it's very uh the funniest book in the world uh I've read it a hundred times and some parts of it I've memorized because I've taught it so many times and I have those at recording of the Irish and I've listened to that 20 30 times and I get my students to uh to begin that way with reading ulyses but what I've been saying here today is sort of a summary of a lot of stuff people to be talking about and of course it's there's a hundred books written about it and um it it's all highly debated uh uh in in in in in in the joy journals there's three Joy journals fulltime dealing with his work and books coming out every week or two on him um because he's he's he's such a an encyclopedic uh writer uh and he uh so we have an infin um what I end up by saying another thing about him that's that he he he promised us he said um that he's put he's put as many puzzles in this book that will keep the professors busy for centuries and it is true that there are puzzles of all kinds in it little ones like the one I just mentioned with the Kino's 11 Shillings trousers that's a little puzzle and I've I've answered it here U I'll just give you an example but there are hundreds like that in the book it also does something that nobody else has done it also uh is significant in what it leaves out as long as the book is two two very significant scenes that any um any pot boiling novelist would put in there aren't there uh the convers ation between Bloom and Molly before he leaves in the morning is left out and the conversation between them uh after he returns that night is left out and several other scenes are also Joyce resists them leave Lees leaves them up to us to fill them in he does this in some of the earlier stories too uh he he leaves out uh the easy Parts the easy things to write the the the melodramatic scenes and you you you fill it in yourself uh uh he says um I've just written a book on before Daybreak where I argue that the the central figure in the story isn't in at all uh it's it's done by it's done by camouflage God if he exists uh is here through his absence because we don't see him it means he's here the most significant things in life we don't see put it another way so Joyce leaves out that which is fundamental to the whole system that's an important point in Joyce he has a he has that from the beginning of his work that uh the the final mystery of why we exist is unknown to us and we can we can we can fill in that Gap with God or we can take the view that uh it's unknowable we can take the agnostic view now Joyce himself his work is poised on that knife edge and you can decide for yourself whether you think the empty spaces there's nothing there or that there is something there and you fill it in yourself so that's why I think the joy is a seriously religious writer he's raising the fundamental questions the religious writers have from the beginning of time raised and he leaves it he puts it in modern terms and you can decide whether to believe or not to believe but you're going to have to do it by yourself and ulyses can be a simulus to that or or it can encourage you to remain uh potentially a a a a deep skeptic like Bloom I will end the last thing I'll say then is this that bloom is not many people think this and I think they're dead wrong Bloom is not Joyce's answer to the question Bloom is part of the dialogue the dialogism between Bloom and Steven the key question is the spiritual of the novel what's what what's that the the concealed narrator the overall Spirit of the book is is something other than Steven Bloom or Molly that arranger or organizer of the thing is the equivalent to God so that you can't simply quote Bloom any more than you quote Colonius and say that's Shakespeare a lot of people do it even professors do it because it's an easy solution to a complex problem you have to make judgments as we do in life between what the prophet said and whether you believe him or not whether you find them credible or not and this is a modern one and I'd leave it with that I think it's you know because it's it's a great great book and it brings us in contact with the all the fundamental questions that we serious people worry about in and but Joyce has put them in a way that nobody has matched thank you if this if you want to ask questions that are willing to stay I'm I'm happy to do it this I've been carrying around image of my mind as you've been speaking about Joyce as this great architect and I and I wonder if among his papers did he leave any kind of sort of formal designs or architecture like expositions of how this book is organized and laid out he did yeah he did the uh lenati schema just I think your husband passed around yeah I'm passing I'm passing it around now yeah this G he uh yes he 18 episodes yes he did he did he had several he had a schema uh an outline uh he didn't follow it though I mean he only used it very it's not vastly useful because he departed from it once he got going like like so many uh he also had a map of Dublin and and he moved uh pins around on it he had thumb tags moving around where all the characters were uh and he knew exactly where every character was at all times that kind of thing he he even measured the speed of the river you knew the speed of the river and the speed at which clouds blew through the sky so that clouds would pass over particular characters at different times and he had it all worked out one chapter in particular he has he had a schema for every minute of the hour where every character was and where they would be on the street whether they meet one another and whether seagull flying over a could be seen by SE half a block away that kind of thing he he'd done that you know um yes had he had schemas yes uh we we have we have some of his drafts of some of this stuff but not a lot of it is gone but we have some of the schas yeah sir I hate to be the one to say the emperor has no clothes here but I have to ask the question you know sometimes I'm reading this and just thinking you know he's up there laughing at all of us in other words it's there's so much there's so much pretention there's so many puzzles there's so many references that it loses the ability to be the moving no novel it could be that it's too academic yes and so I wonder what you would say to that that I mean it's it's yeah sure it's a lot of fun and I have The annotation and I'm reading it and it's like reading Sanskrit you know I've got 10,000 dictionaries but am I really reading a novel I feel like sometimes it's a it's more of a crossword puzzle yeah many people have have taken the view that it is a giant leg pull and that it's a huge huge uh joke and it is just his Brilliance and fundamental skepticism and despair are thrown into this and that's that's what TS Elliott said something like though though TS Elliot had more positive things than that to say he felt that that that it was the best portrait of the futility of Modern Life where uh the mind of the modern Joy says it himself in another way that the modern mind is able to contain so much information that it can't possibly make sense ense of it all and that uh all we are reduced to to doing is futile pursuit of immediacies like paying our bills and uh and enjoying a glass of wine in the evenings but that there's no coherence to it all uh I I take the other view uh but I I agree a lot of people feel that that particularly in the later chapters that he loses um he challenges the the the pedant and the academic he brings out that more and more a lot of people feel that and some serious critics whose judgments are far superior to mine think that portrait of the artist is his great work and that this is not this has gone over the top and fining his wake even further because finan if you don't if you think this is a problem finigan wake is has has it goes uh uh is this uh cubed you know uh where language has taken over altogether and it's it's uh however there there's that's where most of the work being n and joy today is of course these are people who are making their living out of academic work so that isn't necessarily trustworthy right because they're getting paid for it so I mean you guys are reading it for the love of it and for the value that it might have personally to you and there's nobody paying you or anything for it uh and I I I have great admiration for you doing that I mean there's uh um but it is exercising your sense of humor and your mind but whether it'll replace uh wor or prayer or uh fishing I I don't know that's up to you or Dickens or Dickens yes it's not a novel in that sense yeah it's parodying it's it's parodying Dickens and so many others of course you you recognize that it's it's taking the Mickey out of as we say out of uh people who expect conventional satisfactions from novels yes it's not a novel in that sense that's true yes sir well I'm in a bit of shock because I'm realizing that my first time I read it was over half a century ago which is closer to when he wrote it than it is today but uh you know you remark about the uh the 21st century and joy I was wondering and you probably heard this too that uh everyone's heard this the fact that he's so intertextual that he's almost the perfect writer for the internet and for this new world in that sense that he's a bit of a profit of the way you know and and that there are Parts at least of the elect which welcome in or you know there's a renewed interest because of that yes there's a factitious side to that and a substantive one that is that a lot of the citations that Joyce is making and he there's Myriad of them he has read the books in question but I mean he's read all of Dickens for example so anytime he quotes Dickens he knows what he's talking about he he's read Bleak House and he's read Copperfield so on but a lot of others he hasn't when he get particular when he gets to the wake he gets people to read books for him and report so that he can be encyclopedic Way Beyond his own his own actual reading experience we have plenty of evidence of that he would uh he would read lists of books and pull out uh he'd go through a gazeteer of Australia and pull out all the river names and plunk them all into the thing he he did he did Force the the the thing that way uh that that's true in the Wake now not here uh this was all done from memory uh and he checked a lot of it over and he uh um he he got assistance with it he he he corresponded we have we have some of his letters where he looked up he had people look up things for him where he couldn't remember exactly but his his he had an astonishing memory and he himself claimed uh a point that's worth making I think um that he had an astonishing memory everybody of course agree on that but he didn't think he had imagination in the way in which in way in which Blake or Yates or Shelly does it's it's it's it's all built up out of to in bits and pieces it's not it's it's not a flash of of inspiration like St Paul on the road to to Mascus you know he doesn't he doesn't have that he and he knows he doesn't but he's he's he's he's built it up out of sheer experience of life and literature not out of um flashes of of inspiration does he admit that himself or is that something people he he admits that Yates has in ination that he doesn't he did he did yeah uh he he I mean he can be generous he was very stinging in his of in his credit of other people uh he said off Hemingway the highest CR highest praise he gave of everybody of anyone was of that little story a clean well-lighted place I'm sure you know it he said I couldn't have written that which is as as generous as choice would be with anyone he never praised Yates but he he recited them indicated he did he was very careful not to he was very jealous and competitive sing he had a lot of respect for and uh he was a great rival he was afraid that Singh was going to have a greater reputation than he and Singh of course died very young and didn't complete his his uh his creative uh life uh Joyce felt threatened by him a bit with good reason others he was competing with George Moore particularly when he was young he realized he had Spirit gifts to more he didn't worry about him but he worried he he he felt threatened by PR and he felt threatened by Kafka because he felt that some people told him Kafka was the new was the new thing uh the 30s and he he he kept away from he didn't even read them but he he felt that K uh you know people were feeling that that that Kafka was the next wave and he was he was finished uh H so he was um he he had good reason to be self-confident but he also respected the difference that other other writers had from his he did meet PR once but they they only said yes and no to one another that's all they conversed about nothing they both feel thre felt threatened sir you had a question yes this book was Notorious before it was famous and of course he couldn't have been naive about the uh sexual frankness particularly that comes up toward the end with Molly Bloom yes I think people would have been more offended if they had really grasped the the connection he was making between her sexual frankness and the way that it emerges with our largest understanding mystical understanding of the universe at least in my my interpretation of the book so I'm trying to put that together or with you're a very effective reading of Dante and the sense of morality from Dante isn't the the basic rule for Dante that it's what could be spoken in Beatrice's presence was what was moral um and I'm just thinking about his putting female sexuality together in such a graphic way that we got this book banned first you know uh we can talk further about that I don't necessarily have to go down that road but I'm I'm putting together that radical connection between sexual frankness and this Cosmic vision of the world world and the fact that the book is moral and immoral at the same time well the people who criticized it or censored the book uh the the gentleman makes the point that the book was banned uh in America uh however it wasn't because of Molly it was because of a previous chapter which appeared in a journal called a little review in New York in 199 1919 it was the chapter it was the N NOA chapter somebody was reading NOA that's the one that got him into trouble where Bloom masturbates uh that it that was banned expressly and that caused the book to be now the the it was banned though partially uh for for for the reasons you site of course uh but the people who banned it had no idea what what you were speaking they were just banned by its sexual frankness and uh from Joyce's point of view it was not pornographic and of course eventually it was it was liberated here and in 1932 uh for um it it uh it was judged not to be pornographic that the that the descriptions of sexuality in it were not were not an incitement to sexual activity but but but a a humorous and uh in some respects pathetic representation of it right blooms for example uh but Joyce felt that um life should be U depicted objectively and uh humanely and um and in um and he also made an important distinction which a lot of people don't recognize which is very important to to Joyce and to me uh most of the time um the word the word appears in this but Joyce never said it in his own life at all he might have in he never did in anybody's presence that anybody reports he was very careful he was very gentlemanly in all of his conversation he would he wouldn't he would leave the room if somebody said a blashe something Blasphemous for example or said something salacious or said something sexually offensive he would outed there he was a very he was much very much of a gentleman with respect to his social behavior however there's a big difference between that and what one can do in private and in the privacy of One's Own study by reading this book so Joyce's um uh Jo there a firm line there between the private and the public which I think is an important one from a point of view of social um sanity and social uh um morality so I there are people therefore who who uh banned the book or mve to have it banned weren't weren't um weren't interested or able to make any the connection you're making which is which is sophisticated one they were simply saying we we can't have four-letter words in print available on the public market um until somebody until the judge wisey came along and said um it's um it's the context that's important and that therefore it's not it's not an issue uh so the book was banned in the United States it was never banned in land and uh um partially because it never reached the notice of the censors so the book was smuggled in here the early early printings of it were smuggled into the United States so it was 12 years in print before it got into the United States in the meantime pirated additions of it were on sale here uh Joyce couldn't get anything for them there was a problem with that uh but it is a benchmark uh book in that respect in the opening up of uh of the field of literature uh the subject to previously uh taboo sub uh topics uh but Joyce felt of course quite as as we would all accept today that uh sexuality and violence and U and alcoholism and and uh uh defecation are all part of life and need to be are they're all part of our daily experience and uh we have to make make sense of them in some in some way and he's trying to do that uh and we uh in his early work he identifies with Fran vion the French poet who saw himself as a as a uh es scatological uh CR critic of uh stuffed shorts particularly ecclesiastical ones stuffed Chaz maybe and Joyce sees himself somewhat similar I I I having said that I will also say that for Joyce the model of the artist is the priest Joyce text Joyce thought about becoming of JHU himself as you probably know and he was invited to and declined but but he always help the IDE the idea of what the priest does in the sacrament to be the sort of um mysterious uh equivalent no Joyce's work is the aesthetic equivalent of that mystery of the conversion of bread into uh into uh a mystical body and joy takes that idea very seriously as as the highest expression in human culture of mystery and he sees his work as an emulation of that he he I mean he because he sees that and he sees the idea of Grace the Christian idea he's called James Augustine Joyce and he takes his name seriously he read augustin's confessions and took August Augustine's great contribution to western theology is the idea of of Grace not the idea of original sin both uh but Grace uh he's the doctrin of Grace and Joyce takes the idea of Grace very seriously people don't seem to understand that and he sees his work as being a work of extraordinary of equivalent of of of Grace a divinely empowered book he yeah long answer to a question but really all right thank you you been a great audience

Channel: Takoma Park City TV

Views: 109,362

Keywords: James Joyce's Ulysses Great Big Book Club, friends of the takoma park library, Ulysses (Book), James Joyce (Author)

Id: o-Syod76Gvo

Length: 105min 39sec (6339 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 24 2014