The Whole Long Plod

Today is my 63rd birthday and I’m up to page 561 of James Joyce’s Ulysses. (I‘m reading the Penguin Modern Classics’ edition, with the text at 933 pages.) This, in itself, is an accomplishment. Many of Joyce’s contemporaries didn’t get as far along as I have. Virginia Woolf abandoned it around page 200, and of all of his contemporaries, Woolf was Joyce’s most serious competition as a novelist.(1) They were both committed to a style of writing that became known as “stream of consciousness” - finding a means with which to capture a conscious being’s moment to moment life in the world. Joyce actually left Woolf behind in the dust by adopting his own “stream of life” style. I just finished reading the scene that records the words spoken in a pub by unnumbered people present. Every nonsensical word. 

Woolf was also put off by Joyce’s concentration on what George Orwell called the “dirty handkerchief side of life” and by his fearless portrayal of what Woolf doubtless regarded as the bestial level of human behavior. I don’t know if she got as far as the passage, for example, in which a character describes how hanged men are found to have full erections: 

-There’s one thing it hasn’t a deterrent effect on, says Alf. 

-What’s that ? says Joe. 

-The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged, says Alf. 

-That so? Says Joe. 

-God’s truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. 

-Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said. 

-That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It’s only a natural phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the ... 

Trying to imagine Woolf’s immediate reaction to this passage is . . . hard. Or, indeed, to be a fly on the wall as Woolf was reading Molly Bloom’s closing monologue. 

But it has been 99 years since the publication of Ulysses in Paris, and such objections are by now out of date. The book is so much more than just a giant curiosity, an “omnium gatherum” of random thoughts and sensations during the passing of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. And the average reader needn’t be afraid of missing every obscure allusion that Joyce makes. There are annotated versions, but you don’t need to consult any of them to get the point that Joyce was making – repeatedly. After all of the references and divagations and metaphors are tallied, the reader may hope there is a cumulative effect. But why? It’s just as philistine a hope as to expect all of the story’s loose ends to be neatly tied up by the final chapter. While reading it, I kept thinking that after a few paragraphs have passed and a different character enters the scene, that there had also been a time shift, an ellipsis moving me forward in time. Instead I am constantly reminded that the whole narrative is following the burial of Paddy Dignam, following the course of characters introduced in the funeral procession to the cemetery as the day passes minute by minute. I was reminded of a moment in David Lynch’s beautiful film, The Straight Story in which we see Alvin Straight driving his riding mower down an Iowa highway. The camera cranes away from him moving slowly down the highway and pans up to the sky. But after a moment, the camera pans back down to show us the mower only a few yards farther away from us. It was Lynch’s way of telling us to adjust to his slower paced narrative. 

After reading the novel, T. S. Eliot asked “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?” But I have a few hundred pages to go before I reach the last chapter. So far my favorite passage is the one at the seaside with Bloom watching Gerty MacDowell in the waning light and she letting him watch until she gets up to follow the other two girls home: 

It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because Gerty MacDowell was ... 

Tight boots ? No. she's lame! O! 

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! 

And she leaves Bloom alone to get a long way around to his first meeting Molly and his lost youth: So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. That Bloom is Ulysses and Gerty Nausicaa requires an effort for the reader that Joyce intended to be difficult. The Heroic Age has been replaced by the glorious sordidness of modern life. 

One last fact about Joyce’s Ulysses. He uses the n-word (the ultimate verboten in the present era of virtue signaling and cancel culture) seven times. An Evelyn Waugh novel I read a few months ago uses the word quite casually. It’s currency has long since expired for writers that aren’t themselves black. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has been variously condemned, removed from school reading lists, from library shelves, and even been rewritten replacing the word with something harmless, like “slave.” Ulysses was banned before – for its purported obscenities. Before it was burned and then banned in England, Ireland, and Canada, it was banned in the U.S. nearly two years before its first appearance in book form. The ban was lifted in 1933 by Judge John Woolsey, who took a month away from his duties to read the text. He concluded that: 

"I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes ‘Ulysses’ is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive though normal person to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses of the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” 

I hope to be finished with my own long plod across Dublin before the end of May. 

(1) Joyce and Woolf were almost exact contemporaries. She was born just eight days before him in 1882 and she drowned herself in the River Ouse two months after he died in Zurich in 1941.