18. Penelope and Ulysses as a whole

[Thomas]

Patrice wrote: "It sure isn't resolution the way it is in the Odyssey. That was a "tidy" resolution! Suitors dead, Odysseus home, the family reunited.
"

Molly seems so capricious to me that she could go either way, so the onus falls on Bloom. Is he going to take the reins? I like to think that his breakfast request, and Molly's acceptance of it -- and her final rhapsody of yeses -- is an indication that he is doing just that and a new day is dawning for them as the book closes. But who knows? As always, Joyce loves the power of suggestion and its ambiguity.

Looking back at the book and thinking about what Joyce would attempt to do next, I'm also reminded of Tennyson's Ulysses, which we read here a few years back. It's hard to see Bloom as this kind of Ulysses, but it speaks to Joyce and his relentless literary exploration quite well. In the larger picture, Joyce was as much a Ulysses as his biggest character.

(Our discussion from 2010 -- I can't believe it was that long ago... https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... )

[Thomas]

Patrice wrote: "It's ironic since, as you have pointed out, the "solution' is love, not force of power. The ending of the Odyssey is one of love. Here...not so sure. "

But it's such subtle "power"... Bloom has given her every inch of freedom that she could want, and she appears at the end to give it back to him. I tend to think of that as love rather than power politics, and even though it is uncertain (as human emotions always are) I find it satisfying enough.

[Everyman]

Thomas wrote: "But it's such subtle "power"... Bloom has given her every inch of freedom that she could want, and she appears at the end to give it back to him. "

Yes.

He is like a rider who gets the most benefit from his horse by using a loose rein. He gives her the freedom to stray, and as a result she realizes that straying isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that what she has is pretty good after all.

[Zippy]

Patrice wrote: "lol Comparing Molly to a horse that Bloom is riding isn't helping me see this differently. That's ok, we all have our own take on this book!"

LOL - But it's so apt! Hilarious analogy, Eman.

[Hilary]

... and Molly has given him the freedom to stray ... I know different times and all that ...

[Lily]

Thomas wrote: "Molly seems so capricious to me that she could go either way, so the onus falls on Bloom. Is he going to take the reins?..."

I'm with Patrice on this one. Sounds an unnecessarily gender stereotypical presumption of an appropriate way to relationship? Can/doesn't love have other options? And, yes, Bloom may indeed need to set his own boundaries and place his requests for his needs and wants.

[Kyle]

I wonder if we could see the breakfast request as a tacit forgiveness - or perhaps acceptance is a better word. Bloom has come home to a house that is literally rearranged as well as figuratively in disarray, but this is how he signals that the beat will go on regardless. Somehow I don't see him shooting an arrow through anything, let alone 12 axes...

[Hilary]

Patrice, I'm inclined to agree with you about the breakfast request. It would be quite depressing otherwise: if at the end we were to see a false resolution where Molly is seen as the only guilty party.

That link to the Stoppard plays looks great. I'm only a mile or two in the wrong direction, but I hope that you get a chance to see it. :-)

[Kathy]

Susan wrote: "Post-modern to me is a self-conscious exploration of the role of language and consciousness in communicating experience. Every example I know resoundingly demonstrates a failure to capture, replicate, or portray events accurately. All efforts result in a new fiction, a fabrication or shadow of past events rather than the "reality". "

Yes, well said, Susan! I guess I didn't mean that post-modern writers are actually attempting to recreate reality in their work and failing at it. The whole point is that it can't be done. But I remember a conversation with a writer friend who was very invested in playing with language in a sort of post-modern way and who seemed distraught by the fact that it couldn't capture "reality," and it really struck me as kind of funny, honestly, because who would ever imagine that language *could* replicate reality? Every attempt to do so is by definition artificial. I guess that makes me post-modern! :) In any case, I'm not sure I would go so far as to argue that Joyce isn't interested in how we communicate. The Cyclops chapters in particular seemed to me to cross over a line into something more self-conscious than a simple attempt to create a fictional world using different forms of language.

[Kathy]

Patrice wrote: "The request reminds Molly of their days as newlyweds, so that's one way to read it. It could theoretically signal a return to their beginnings.

I'd like to think of it that way."

Me, too. As to the question of resolution, I'd have to say I don't feel it until the very last page, but then Joyce piles on the "yes"es, and I can only read that as hopeful and optimistic. He chooses to leave us with that image of the young Leopold and Molly at the moment they agree to marry, and the word for that agreement is "yes." It's almost a corny ending!

[Thomas]

Kathy wrote: "But I remember a conversation with a writer friend who was very invested in playing with language in a sort of post-modern way and who seemed distraught by the fact that it couldn't capture "reality," and it really struck me as kind of funny, honestly, because who would ever imagine that language *could* replicate reality?"

The one aspect of Joyce's writing that seems unchanging throughout his career of experimentation with language is his utilization of suggestion. The early stories are very traditional stylistically, but they never speak directly; they only suggest, though the suggestion is sometimes quite strong.

I see this as an admission that language cannot replicate reality, but it can strongly suggest it. As he went on to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake he grew less interested in the reality and more interested in the suggestion, language and the psyche itself, until in FW he finally became abstracted from reality altogether.

[Suzann]

Kathy wrote: "who would ever imagine that language *could* replicate reality? Every attempt to do so is by definition artificial. I guess that makes me post-modern! :) In any case, I'm not sure I would go so far as to argue that Joyce isn't interested in how we communicate...."

Many post-modern authors focus on biography and history, which many readers believe to be "true". Their point is that historians and biographers use the same techniques as fiction writers to fill in the gaps and create a narrative that "makes sense". In Herzog the main character says, "history is biography, biography is fiction." I agree that Joyce is interested in how we communicate, and writing as art. Although Joyce seems to be intuitively exploring the fringes of post-modern ideas, I don't think he self-consciously gets to the common themes. Joyce and post-modernists both use humor successfully.

[Kathy]

Interesting, the intuitive vs. self-conscious and how we might flag the difference...

[Suzann]

Kathy wrote: "Interesting, the intuitive vs. self-conscious and how we might flag the difference..."

Have you read Julian Barnes A Sense of An Ending? Four friends are trying to agree on their common experience--to replicate their common reality. They try to get to the facts by many methods, but find them illusive. There is a book by Frank Kermode by the same name on the theories of fiction--no coincidence in my mind. In the Golden Notebooks Doris Lessing tells the same story from 4 points of view, but she's not exploring why the stories differ. For me, she is intuitively exploring the theme that has been articulated by the post-moderns. How do we know? What is the nature of consciousness and memory that creates the difference in perspective? Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot is a hysterical take on biography as fiction. Joyce isn't concerned with these questions although his experimental style seemed to invite a comparison to the post-moderns.

[[deleted user]]

Having enjoyed Barnes' A Sense of an Ending Susan's comment caught my attention. You intrepid readers who completed the journey through Ulysses may find this article from the New York Review of Books interesting. It speaks to Susan's point about the revolutionary implications of the book's afterlife.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

[Kathy]

Thanks to both of you for reminding me of Barnes, whom I have been meaning to read for awhile!

And thanks, Zeke, for this great piece. Having given it a quick read, here's its take on the question of whether language can replicate reality, for anyone else who's still hanging around (!). I'm afraid I may be a little bit too much of a pessimist to totally buy it, but it's tempting:

"For something strange happens to language in Ulysses. In it, Joyce achieved verbal replicas of joyful brilliance—not just the ordinary prose effects of precise verbs (cattle “slouching by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony croups”), but rhythmic reproductions (“A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles”), and audio imitations (“Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos.”)

And while such replicas might at first sight seem to be ways of foregrounding the artifice of writing, I think the intention was really the reverse. “His writing is not about something,” Samuel Beckett would famously write, “it is that something itself.” Joyce tried to make language become what it describes. He wanted to make it as literal as possible. “When the sense is sleep,” added Beckett, “the words go to sleep…. When the sense is dancing, the words dance.” Beckett was talking about Finnegans Wake, but the project is already visible in Ulysses. When the sense is trotting, the words trot; when the sense is water, the words deliquesce. For what could be more realistic, after all, than a sentence where the word becomes the thing it described?"

[Thomas]

"And while such replicas might at first sight seem to be ways of foregrounding the artifice of writing, I think the intention was really the reverse. “His writing is not about something,” Samuel Beckett would famously write, “it is that something itself.” "

Anthony Burgess makes a similar observation in Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. One of the most interesting essays, "Signs on Paper," focuses on the visual aspect of Joyce's writing. Why the oversized initial letters S, M, and P that begin the parts of Ulysses? (One interpretation is that they represent the Subject, Middle, and Predicate of a syllogism.) Do we need the score for the song about little Harry Hughes in Ithaca? Why can't the cat just say "meow" like other cats?

Mr. Bloom's cat cries "Mkgnao!" then "Mrkgnao!" and then, at her intensest, "Mrkrgnao!" Given milk, she runs to lap it with a "Gurrhr!" S.J. Perelman, in one of his humorous essays, describes a cat that goes "mrkgnao!" but adds that it had obviously read Ulysses.

Burgess concludes that "Joyce's pleasure in the fracting of language and the notation of noise is an aspect of his fascination with what seems to him to be the magic of the whole semiological process. He considers the act of signalling rather more important than the message it attempts to convey."

[Kathy]

"He considers the act of signalling rather more important than the message it attempts to convey."

Ah, excellent! I could play with this some more--obviously this whole thread hits home for me, as a writing teacher. But as I am probably the last person left here and not doing the next reading, I'll bid you adieu, Thomas, and thank you again for the rich discussion!

[Kyle]

The non-tradional spellings of "meow" are a favorite of mine. For me, Joyce's spellings are true phonetic representations of the various sounds a cat makes. Cats have many different pronunciations and inflections of "meow"! I can hear my own cats begging for food - and grunting with pleasure when they get it - when I read that passage. It's a small point, but it shows a great attention to detail & absolutely captures reality on the page.

[Lily]

Kathy wrote: "But as I am probably the last person left here and not doing the next reading, I'll bid you adieu, Thomas, and thank you again for the rich discussion! ..."

Please don't leave us, Kathy! I think you might be surprised by PP, at least I hope to be.

[Theresa]

Finished this about a month ago, didn't want to interfere with the other readings by bringing it back to discussion.

Anyway, just before we get started on Eliot, wanted to say I found the last episode fascinating.

I have a mental image in my mind of the 'Blooms' entwined in their bed in that twisted head to foot fashion that is utterly brilliant and puts a whole new 'spin' on the marital bed theme that we see in the end of Homer's Odyssey.
the marriage of Molly and Leopold Bloom's is twisted and gnarled but they are bound together inextricably for all eternity.

I will post a bit later on some of the comments above re Joyce's ability to portray women. Both works from Homer and Joyce have interesting things to say about marital partnerships, both from the point of view of men, but that doesn't mean there is nothing women can learn from it.

[Thomas]

Theresa wrote: "I have a mental image in my mind of the 'Blooms' entwined in their bed in that twisted head to foot fashion that is utterly brilliant and puts a whole new 'spin' on the marital bed theme that we see in the end of Homer's Odyssey."

That is a nice image, and I agree that it is a comment on Homer. Dear dirty Dublin is quite a contrast to the shining nobility of Homer's heroic age.

[Lily]

Thomas wrote: "...Dear dirty Dublin is quite a contrast to the shining nobility of Homer's heroic age...."

Still think I would prefer it to daughters (e.g., Iphigenia) sacrificed to win wars. Not but what we don't continue to have our variants on the theme.

[Suzann]

In the Dusklands by Coetzee the narrator talks about his feelings for his unfaithful wife Marilyn. Sounds a lot like something Bloom might feel but never said: "I am plainly addicted to my marriage, and addiction is in the end a surer bond than love. If Marilyn is unfaithful she is so much the dearer to me, for if strangers prize her she must be valuable, and I am reassured....I can't believe the pleasure Marilyn gets from other men is real...." Lots of pity was expressed for Bloom, but I think he can't give up the relationship with Molly and might justify that choice in a script similar to this one in Dusklands. Funny how famous literary characters echo throughout literature.

[Thomas]

Susan wrote: "In the Dusklands by Coetzee the narrator talks about his feelings for his unfaithful wife Marilyn. Sounds a lot like something Bloom might feel but never said: "I am plainly addicted to my marriag..."

Joyce loves an ambiguous conclusion, in part to raise questions like this. There are multiple readings and interpretations, but I don't see Bloom as an addict exactly, simply because he is willing to give Molly up. Of course he does this knowing that Boylan will be insufficient. The whole affair is a kind of confidence trick. Bloom might have some similarities with the Coetzee character insofar as masochism is concerned, but I don't think he's looking for reassurance exactly.

[Thomas]

Lily wrote: "Thomas wrote: "...Dear dirty Dublin is quite a contrast to the shining nobility of Homer's heroic age...."

Still think I would prefer it to daughters (e.g., Iphigenia) sacrificed to win wars. Not..."

I think it's a difference of perspective more than one of historical change. I'm sure Penelope had a few wrinkles that Homer never tells us about, and as you mention, we still sacrifice our children for "higher causes".

[Suzann]

Thomas wrote: "I don't think he's (Bloom) looking for reassurance exactly. ..."

I wonder what his internal monologue would sound like?

[Thomas]

Susan wrote: "Thomas wrote: "I don't think he's (Bloom) looking for reassurance exactly. ..."

I wonder what his internal monologue would sound like?"

Ha! What's funny -- and brilliant -- is that despite this we are never completely sure what Bloom is thinking... I think this ambiguity is what makes the book live, and what makes Joyce a genius.

[Theresa]

I don't know whether to think of Leopold's relationship with Molly as an addiction or not. I see their relationships as being so tangled. It is complicated not just by their sexuality and their mind games, but also by the loss of their child. It is if they are bound together in a tangled mess and that they will continue to live and grow in that position.

Perhaps addictions are a bit like relationships. I'll have to think on this a little more. They do both seem to be hard to get out of sometimes.

Also, I'm not sure if the Bloom family is mired in a dysfunctional relationship or not. Is it really so bad? Or is it just the reality of modern life, shared by two 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering" things (to quote T.S. Eliot's Preludes)?

I often thought about that poem while reading this book.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

[Theresa]

msg 95 Theresa wrote: "Not quite finished yet"....

ha! looking at my comment on march 28, I was still soldiering through episode 17 and said I would be back 'next week' when I was finished the book. Episode 17 bored me to tears. I put the book down and almost gave up. Almost gave up reading altogether because I thought if I got into some other book I'd never come back and finish this. Eventually I managed to finish that episode by sheer doggedness. Since this thread is about the whole book, I'll say that episode 17 was the worst and most annoying and kind of idiotic.

[Theresa]

Patrice wrote: "Zippy owes you a certificate. We all got one for having finished the book!"

hahaha! Can't wait to see what THAT says :) I know he found it quite an ordeal :)

[Mark]

Thomas wrote: "It's easy to criticize Molly after this episode, but below the surface of her monologue is a great deal of suffering. The ugliness of her monologue seems to spring from this suffering, and I think ..."
Excellent observations and summary: "love's bitter mystery".

[Dave]

Thomas, I just wanted to drop you a quick note to show my appreciation for your excellent commentaries. They certainly helped to clear some of the fog that descended on my brain over the past month or so as I made my way through Ulysses.

I’d tried reading the book once before in my early 20s, but fell off my horse early in chapter 3, so it was these excellent group discussions and the RTE audiobook (which kept me going during some long car commutes) that I had to thank for helping me navigate to the end this time.

Hopefully we’ll get the chance to re-read it as a group one day under your guidance. It certainly seems a book that rewards close reading, and I was particularly in awe of the Oxen in the Sun and Ithaca episodes. Knowing that Frank Delaney is yet to cover both these chapters in his Re Joyce podcast (http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce) was one of my happiest discoveries over the past weekend.

[Thomas]

Glad the summaries were helpful to you, Dave. Maybe next time we can get Frank to lead the discussion... unlikely, but what fun that would be! His podcast is a real gem. I really can't imagine what he will do with Oxen, but it is bound to be enlightening.