With a Bloomsday trip to Dublin in the offing next month, what better time to tackle James Joyce's twentieth century masterpiece, Ulysses? This is one of those books I've always meant to read, but despite an abortive attempt in my early 20s (I got about a third of the way through) I've never made the time. I figured I would get around to it one day, but who knew when that day would come?
Funnily enough, I am hugely familiar with the story -- and of Joyce's life story, too. I can even quote lines from the novel without having read it -- "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead", and that bit about "walking into eternity" -- and every time I go to Dublin I'm very much aware of the references, or elusions, to certain scenes from the novel, so it kind of feels like I know Ulysses very well despite not getting further than about page 200 some 20 years ago!
Last month I did a lot of Joycean things while I was in Dublin -- I visited the museum at Sandycove, I called in at Sweney's Pharmacy, I photographed the James Joyce statue in North Earl Street, and had a pint in Davy Byrne's pub, where the fictional Leopold Bloom orders a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy. So, I know the references, I've just never read the book in its entirety.
But all that is about to change.
Initial impressions
On Saturday afternoon, out came my Penguin Modern Classics edition (I also have the Oxford University Press 1922 text edition, but prefer the font in the Penguin book -- call me fickle) and the Ulysses reading guide by Sean Sheehan that I bought last year in preparation for a MA course (which I ended up deferring). I knuckled down and read three chapters. I loved them! It made sense. The language, at times, was convoluted, but it was never impenetrable. Indeed, it was almost playful.
Sunday morning and it was more of the same. Three more chapters down. It went by so quickly. It flowed. I enjoyed it. I felt as if I was walking those same streets. I was surprised by the humour. I laughed quite a bit. I especially found myself tittering at Bloom's suggestion, en-route to a funeral in a horse-drawn carriage, that a tramline be built specifically to take hearses right to the cemetery gate.
—Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn't it be more decent than galloping two abreast?
—Well, there's something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.
—And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn't have scenes like that when the hearse capsized round Dunphy's and upset the coffin on the road.
—That was terrible, Mr Power's shocked face said, and the corpse fell about the road. Terrible!
What I like most is that there is a narrative thread I can follow. But there's also a lot of high modernism, little flights of fancy, where Joyce uses the language in new and unfamiliar ways. It's a bit like those French impressionists, say Monet or Renoir, using paint in new ways to record fleeting bits of light, to record an "impression" of what they see. Joyce does something similar with words. It's stream of consciousness, but somehow it seems an honest account of how the mind works, of how one thought leads to another, or how our thoughts jump about, seemingly willy-nilly, in response to the things we see around us -- someone walking a dog, the tide coming in, the threat of rain in the sky above.
Summary of narrative
As a narrative, the first six chapters have been easy to follow.
Stephen Dedalus, an art student (and the narrator in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), lives in a martello tower on the coast at Sandycove with a medical student, Buck Mulligan, and an Englishman from Oxford called Haines.
This (pictured above) is a recreation of the room in the actual martello tower, which is where Joyce himself once stayed and which is now the James Joyce Museum at Sandycove.
Buck has a shave, the trio have breakfast (and buy milk from the milkmaid), and then wander down to Sandycove for a swim.
Stephen then goes to the school in Dalkey, a mile south of Sandycove, to take the class he teaches at Mr Deasey's school. He collects his wages and agrees to take a letter Mr Deasey has written (about the treatment of foot and mouth disease) to a newspaper editor he knows for publication.
He then walks along Sandymount Strand, which is closer to central Dublin, and ruminates on all kinds of things. Although this is possibly the most difficult of the six chapters I've read so far -- much of it is stream of consciousness -- there are some beautiful, lucid, moments, too:
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
Meanwhile, Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old married Jewish man, who lives at 7 Eccles Street in the centre of town, decides to fix himself breakfast. He hankers for a kidney and makes a quick trip to the local butchers to buy one.
On his return, he collects the post that has been delivered on his doorstep and takes it upstairs to his wife Molly, a singer, who is still in bed. The post comprises a letter from their 15-year-old daughter, Milly, who is apprenticed to a photographer, and another (private) letter to Molly from Blazes Boylan.
Bloom serves Molly a breakfast of bread and butter, with a cup of tea, before heading back downstairs to finish cooking his kidney, which has been slightly burnt in his absence.
After visiting the outhouse -- yes, we get the full description, including what he uses for toilet paper -- he heads out, making his way to a friend's funeral.
By lorries along Sir John Rogerson's Quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher's, the postal telegraph office.
En route he collects another letter from a post office, which turns out to be from a woman with whom he is having an "epistolary affair". But before he can read it he is interrupted by a friend, C.P. M'Coy, who asks him to "put his name down at the funeral" if he doesn't turn up.
For some unfathomable reason Bloom then wanders into a Catholic Church, midway through mass, and sits and observes it for a bit. (Remember he is Jewish -- "it would be more interesting if you understood what it was all about".)
He then heads to Sweney's Pharmacy to buy Molly some skin lotion. He places his order, to be collected later, and purchases a bar of lemon soap, which he takes with him to the baths down the road. On his way to the baths, he bumps into another friend (Dublin is a small place, and even a Jewish outsider like Bloom appears to know a lot of people in this community), who wants to know about the runners in the Ascot Gold Cup horse race being staged later in the day.
The story then switches to Bloom sitting in a horse-drawn carriage as part of Paddy Dignam's funeral procession. He's accompanied by three acquaintances, one of whom is the father of Stephen Dedalus. The journey is relatively slow and hampered by traffic incidents.
At the graveside, Bloom notices a familiar face -- John Henry Menton -- a solicitor with whom he once had a run in over something as trivial as a game of bowls. It turns out that Benton took a "rooted dislike" to Bloom -- "hate at first sight" -- which is why Bloom probably can't resist the following little dig:
—Excuse me, sir, Mr Bloom said beside them.
They stopped.
—Your hat is a little crushed, Mr Bloom said, pointing.
John Henry Menton stared at him for an instant without moving.
—There, Martin Cunningham helped, pointing also.
John Henry Menton took off his hat, bulged out the dinge and smoothed the nap with care on his coatsleeve. He clapped the hat on his head again.
—It's all right now, Martin Cunningham said.
John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgement.
—Thank-you, he said, shortly.
A brief note on other meanings
Of course my simplified summary of the narrative so far fails to acknowledge other interpretations of the text, namely that Ulysses mirrors the odyssey that Homer makes in Greek mythology. But having never read Homer it would be ludicrous (and foolish) of me to attempt to draw comparisons, when clearly I wouldn't know what I am talking about.
I only mention it, because my notes are nothing more than the notes of an amateur, reading Ulysses as a straightforward text rather than trying to analyse it in any formal literary manner. In any case, there are plenty of literary interpretations and critical analyses out there if you wish to dig deeper. Indeed, countless people have made academic careers out of studying Joyce's work.
Over the next couple of weeks, assuming I don't run out of momentum, I'll attempt to read Ulysses and record my initial impressions on this blog as I go along. Feel free to read along if you so wish...
Non-fiction - paperback; Penguin; 288 pages; 2011.
Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 512 pages; 2011. Translated from the Danish by Lisa Hartford. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.
Non-fiction - paperback; Lilliput Press; 244 pages; 2010.
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