欧宝娱乐

THIRD AND FINAL PART OF THE BIG FAT ULYSSES REVIEW

(moved here because 欧宝娱乐 is removing "creative writing" from September).

(First part is here

/review/show...

and second part is here

/review/show...)

**
Note : Each chapter is rated out of ten for Difficulty, Obscenity, General Mindblowing Brilliance and Beauty of Language.

13. Nausicaa

Difficulty : 2
Obscenity: 8 (see below for details)
General mindblowing brilliance : 9
Beauty of language : 7

Via another discombobulating jump-cut, we are now apparently reading some horribly sentimental magazine story:

The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine 鈥� None of your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsy sort, was Cissy Caffrey. A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme

Yes, we're still in parodyland and will be remaining here, deliriously, on and off, for more or less the rest of the book. This particular parody is utterly delicious but the way JJ uses it makes it a model of how to skewer a few chastening points brilliantly into the reader's brain. JJ intertwines three things together 鈥� the most serious and self-regarding of these three girls (who are looking after a baby and two toddlers on Sandymount strand) is Gerty McDowell, she believes everything she's read, and as we read the ridiculous uberromantic description of this banal evening her thoughts begin to emerge and blend in and out of the lush descriptions, and then, both her thoughts and the lush descriptions keep being capsized by the demands of looking after the kids

The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy played with baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word, didn't the little chap enjoy that!

Then gradually through Gerty's thoughts we perceive that a man is leaning against some nearby rocks watching them, but particularly looking at Gerty herself. Joyce now begins an exquisite entwining of various strands 鈥� Gerty thinks immediately he's a tall dark stranger and that he's enraptured by her beauty; the other girls collect the kids and go off to see a firework show they've just noticed is happening at a nearby bazaar; Gerty stays behind, as does the mysterious stranger. There then follows an extrordinary episode of exhibitionism in which JJ fuses the fireworks Gerty is seeing with what can only be the pocket rocket that the mysterious gentleman is playing with... how very distasteful indeed! And 鈥� oh no! the gentleman turns out to be none other than Mr Leopold Bloom! I have hardly ever come across a book which fuses such sadness and such humour together as in this chapter of Ulysses, which is nearly my favourite chapter, in which the hero of the book masturbates whilst looking at the undergarments of a disabled woman.

**

14. Oxen of the Sun

Difficulty : 10
Obscenity: 0
General mindblowing brilliance : 10
Beauty of language : 1

In the Cyclops chapter Joyce is writing a chatty, funny account of encounters and arguments in a Dublin pub when suddenly the smooth flowing surface of the prose is exploded by eruptions of weird deadpan parodies of various types of writing. And they're hilarious. Much fun is had. Thighs are slapped. In Oxen of the Sun the entire thing is a series of pastiches of prose styles, and indeed, the subject matter is not that far from Cyclops 鈥� booze-fuelled jollity and debate 鈥� but this chapter is excruciatingly painful to read. Indeed, I will give a crisp ten pound note to anyone who can prove they have read all of this chapter without skipping, sighing deeply, moaning aloud and fixing to hurl Ulysses at the wall (before horrifiedly realising what you were about to do!). As you all know Oxen of the Sun is Joyce at his most rarified, pastiching the following in some mad analogy between the development of the English language and the development of the unborn child. He's playing to the gallery here 鈥� but there are only four people in the gallery, all applauding and nodding, and all professors. Everyone else has left.

Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness
or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, _effectu secuto_, or peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses Maimonides.

Well, I have got an English degree and I have read Mort D'Arthur and Bunyan and so on, but I wasn't in the gallery Joyce is playing to in this chapter. It's kind of fun but also it kind of isn't.

**

15. Circe

Difficulty : 9
Obscenity: 7
General mindblowing brilliance : 8
Beauty of language : 5

According to Ulysses Annotated, there are direct sources for the amazing phantasmagoria we now confront in this chapter :

The Temptations of Saint Anthony by Flaubert
Faust by Goethe (especially the Walpurgisnacht section)
The Assumption of Hannele by Hauptmann
The plays of Ibsen and Strindberg
Venus in Furs by von Sacher-Masoch
Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing

So Bloom, Stephen and the medical students betake themselves to the red light area of Dublin, Nighttown. But forget any notion of "story". This is a 150-page (by far the longest chapter) psycho-skelter through everybody's subconscious mind, Bloom's, Stephen's, yours, mine (well, yours anyway, I never think like this!). The whole thing is in the form of a surreal play, and everything speaks, and everything turns into everything else. Like an acid trip. Yeah, like that.

This can be bewildering and, frankly, tiresome, but there are many Joycean bursts of ridiculous humour 鈥� crazy elephantine lists sprout up at the drop of a hat. It's fun, bring your own bottle of psychology.

**

16 Eumaeus.

Difficulty : 9
Obscenity: 0
General mindblowing brilliance : 3
Beauty of language : 0

Strange scores for this chapter but it is one of the strangest.

In the beginning novels were written in the first person (Robinson Crusoe, 1719) or a number of first persons, as in the epistolatory novels like Clarissa, 1748, or in the omniscient third person narrator manner which became the default in fiction. In Tom Jones (1749) Fielding, (we should probably say "Fielding") the author, breaks into his own narrative and talks directly to the reader, musing on what has happened to his characters and tweaking the reader's expectations about what should happen next, and what would be the most entertaining sort of thing to read about. When novelists did the same thing two hundred years later, such as in the French Lieutenant's Woman or The Crimson Petal and the White, or in B S Johnson's novels, modern readers got a post-modern jolt this fourth wall breakage because novelists had been striving to make their narrative seamless and believable, all that baked in goodness. Just like in the movies, where you just don't want to see the actors suddenly start bitching about the poor script, you don't want to see the mike boom, they cut all that stuff out.

The audience's willingness 鈥� need 鈥� to suspend disbelief is however nearly limitless 鈥�

QUINCE

Then, there is another thing: we must have a wall in the great chamber; for Pyramus and Thisby says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall.

SNOUT

You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?

BOTTOM

Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper.

Novels are just pretend for grownups. But in Ulysses you get massive disruption, Joyce throws hand grenades all over the place, there is nothing seamless about it, it's the opposite, it's a hectic babble of voices of all kinds, there is no overall narrative authority. In Cyclops the chapter is narrated by an unnamed character in the pub, you never find out who he is. Circe as we know is laid out like a play with insane stage directions. And so on. The story, such as it is, has to be glimpsed between these clashing registers. But at the same time, Joyce crams in a dozen bits of Dublin verisimilitude in every line, and he's writing with maps and stopwatches, so at the same time as making this novel the least realistic, he's also making it the most realistic.

In Eumaeus we have a new narrator, and it's the worst of the lot. This new voice comes across like a character itself, but it isn't, it's a version of the omniscient narrator, or should I say it's a sub-version, because the voice is wind-baggy, bumbling, rambling, incoherent, irrelevant, trails away into vagueness, is awkwardness personified. E,g.

Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran as follows: Tarjeta Postal. Se帽or A. Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago, Chile. There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice. Though not an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the eggsniping transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the Lazarillo-Don Cesar de Bazan incident depicted in Maritana on which occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat), having detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides, nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest.

Forty pages of this stuff and you are like to hang yourself. This is the omniscient narrator as the garrulous bore you got stuck next to on a long flight once going on about stuff you have zero interest in - for hours. The memory of it still can make you shudder. Suddenly, Ulysses, a book many people don't read because they think it will be longwinded and tiresome, is longwinded and tiresome. Of course it's appropriate, it's one in the morning and Poldy and Stephen are fagged out after their Nighttown exertions, no one is on tip-top form. Including the novel. In the words of Blur, this is a low.

**


17 Ithaca.


Difficulty : 8
Obscenity: 3 (some quasi-scientific talk of ejaculating semen in the natural female organ, and also note Bloom kisses Molly's bottom, see below)
General mindblowing brilliance : 9
Beauty of language : 6


The previous chapter's voice was exhausted; this chapter's voice is exhaustive. By the time you've finished you'll be wrung out and gasping and Bloom will be filleted, cross-indexed, financially, erotically and intestinally investigated, we will have crawled all over Bloom, peered in every orifice, itemised every cupboard and drawer in 7 Eccles Street, we will have autopsied his dreams and schemes and calculated to the nth degree every tear he has shed and for what reason and on what day, Bloom will be smashed, pulverised, atomised, his dust weighed, sent off for analysis, and results shown in the table below; and all of this will be done by some giant Joycean impersonal completely insane multivac computer voice.

All the commentaries will tell you that the technique in this chapter is "impersonal catechism" which mirrors the "personal catechism" in the 2nd chapter, Nestor. But there are many passages which resist this simple explanation and which I find incomprehensible as if Joyce is smuggling in a lot of gibberish behind his sleight-of-hand scientific method-acting. And there are many quite insane riffs which suddenly boil up and make the slog through this chapter suddenly delightful :

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen was 6.16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom's present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C.

**
18. Penelope

Difficulty : 7 (it really is completely unpunctuated)
Obscenity: 10 (in the context of the times 鈥� lots of penis talk, "that trememdous big red brute of a thing", ejaculation into handkerchiefs, contemplating a different use for a banana, etc etc)
General mindblowing brilliance : 7
Beauty of language : 7

Joyce :

the final amplitudinously curvilinear episode...

The last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope. This is the indispensible countersign to Bloom's passport to eternity....

Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent.

The men go out into the world (Bloom, Stephen) and do their stuff (mainly, it seems, drinking and yammering). They finally return home (or try to). The women stay at home 鈥� Molly does, in Ulysses, and enjoys the company of a man who has left his home and visited hers. Joyce's novel is very male in its peregrinations & so ends with 70 pages inside the head of Mrs Bloom. The male chapters have been increasingly rigidly structured, ending in the pan-galactic encyclopedia of Ithaca with its facts and figures and firm absolute knowledge of all things & so now we get this unpunctuated flow splurge torrent cataract of thought feeling emotion observation sex memory argument churning on & on to the final yes.

Critic PJ Smith describes Molly as

garrulous, ignorant and damnably annoying. The only thing in her favor is that she is never for a moment dull

and she is a huge feat of ventroloquism, Joyce's presuming that he can speak 鈥� think 鈥� for a woman on such intimate levels as this and I'm not sure I can say if it works or not. What I take to be its verisimilitude pretty much convinces me, I can say that. And it's a great sad compassionate way to end the day.


And that's it.