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Always wanted to read Ulysses, but too daunted? Joycean Bob Williams provides a layman's guide to one of the best, and most challenging books of all time.
by Bob Williams
Although there are precedents for authors that do not explain themselves (Jane Austen's characters frequently converse in a vacuum), no author has made more out of not explaining than James Joyce. Present in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, failure to explain becomes a grave problem in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The first time reader of either book tends to spend more time with a guide than
with the work itself. I write this guide in the hope that it will be sufficient and neither a barrier nor a distraction.
In the background of Ulysses are the elements that Joyce used to tie the book together. Generally Homeric, they are also Shakespearean and involve distinctive colors, bodily organs and differing narrative strategies. In general Ulysses is transparent to these elements and the reader can very comfortably read the book without knowing that they exist. Because the search in The Odyssey of Telemachus for Odysseus is
so important, it has been long assumed that Stephen searches for Bloom as for a father but there is nothing of this in the narrative. In the
penultimate chapter, in fact, Joyce turns his back on the theme as it appears in The Odyssey and the result is ironic comedy.
The action of Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904 and a few hours of the next day. Action is continuous in the sense that one incident follows another but there are intervals between chapters and events occur in these intervals. Mostly we learn of these in a very indirect and often not altogether clear manner. Joyce is concerned about the haracters' need to know, not about the reader's.
Joyce does not tell us, for example, that the opening section takes place on a tower. The reader has to piece this together from various
sections of the text and this will be Joyce's standard practice throughout the book. There are three young men involved in this opening
chapter and they are at odds with each other in various ways. Stephen Dedalus is touchy and moody but his companions have grave faults of
their own and the relationship is obviously doomed. Their interaction is prickly as Mulligan shaves and alternately baits and patronizes Stephen. They join the Englishman Haines for breakfast and Stephen walks with Haines as they accompany Mulligan to the swimming place. They talk as Mulligan clowns and much of their talk is about Mulligan. When Stephen leaves, he reluctantly gives up the key to the tower at Mulligan's request.
Although the focus has been on Stephen, we have no reason to suppose that the second chapter will be about him rather than about Mulligan or Haines. But that the second chapter shows Stephen at the school where he is teaching comes as no surprise. He is not a very good teacher and no disciplinarian. He receives his wages from Mr. Deasy, the headmaster, and the latter speaks expansively and for the most part incorrectly
about historical matters. He gives Stephen a letter that he wants printed in various newspapers. So far we have seen Stephen in relation to others. Here in the third chapter we see him by himself as he walks along the shore and is lost in meditation. Our first glimpse into his mind showed him to be suffering extreme guilt because he refused his mother's request to pray at her deathbed. Here his mind ranges free over questions of theology and metaphysics with occasional memories of his life in Paris. But even on this beach there are others: a mid-wife and her companion, cockle pickers with their dog. Stephen's thoughts are not happy and much of
their complexity hide a desperate young man that has yet to accomplish anything that justifies his sense of or need for self-distinction. He picks his nose and looks about himself to see if he has been observed. But all that he sees is a three-masted schooner drawing along silently
behind him.
By now we have seen much about Stephen and we are surprised when, with the beginning of the next part (the second of the three unequal sections into which Ulysses is divided), we find ourselves in the company of an entirely different person. This is Mr. Leopold Bloom. He is puttering
about the kitchen in his home and thinking unimaginatively about breakfast, his cat and his wife. He leaves the house to shop at the pork
butcher's. He picks up an advertisement about farming in the Holy Land and deduces that the pork butcher is a Jew. Bloom himself has Jewish
ties and is generally looked upon, and looked down upon, as a Jew by his Dublin acquaintances but is not technically a Jew. His Jewishness kicks
in and out as a psychological need under various circumstances. On the way home he has a moment of depression and it is clear that the same cloud that accompanies this depression was the same one that had the same effect on Stephen in the first chapter. At home he picks up the mail. There is letter for him and a card and a letter for his wife. The letter to his wife, a noted singer, is from Blazes Boylan, her impresario, and the play with the letter between Bloom and Molly indicates its importance but why it is important we will only discover later. He and Molly talk about the book she is reading and he defines metempsychosis, correctly at first but he botches it when he tries to improve on his definition. He goes to the outdoor privy, reads a
meretricious story, which he admires, defecates and wipes himself with the story.
The wealth of incident in the chapters involving Bloom is no accident. It indicates the true focus of Joyce's interest. There is something a
little perfunctory about the opening chapters that involve Stephen. They are chapters that received relatively little revision; significant in an author like Joyce to whom rewriting and expansion of text was second nature.
In this chapter Bloom is on the streets where he will spend a great part of the day. He is idling away an hour until it is time for him to attend the funeral for Paddy Dignam, an acquaintance. His first act is to enter a postal station and, under a false identity (Henry Flower), collect a letter from Martha Clifford with whom he has been exchanging tepidly erotic letters. Before he can read it, McCoy accosts him and they chat. Bloom thinks very little of McCoy, perhaps because they
resemble each other so greatly and neither are high in the esteem of their acquaintances. Rid of McCoy, he reads his letter and its contents,
foolish enough and grammatically weak, will occupy his thoughts off and on all day. With time still to kill, he wanders into a church to hear
the end of a mass. His thoughts on the ceremony are very funny in their uninformed but realistic way. He goes to the chemist where he orders
lotion for Molly and a bar of soap for himself so that he can take a bath before the funeral. Outside he encounters Bantam Lyons who wants to see Bloom's newspaper. Bloom tries to give it to him and tells him that he was about to throw it away. Bantam hears this as a racing tip on
Throwaway, a misinterpretation that will plague Bloom later and is seldom far below the surface of the narrative.
One of Joyce's gifts is the ability to stage-manage large groups of characters. In this chapter, the funeral of Paddy Dignam, the order in which the characters enter the funeral carriage indicate the pecking order of these men. Bloom, of course, enters the carriage last. The route of the cortege involves the city of Dublin as a character in its
own right. Various pedestrians appear: Stephen, who provokes the anger of his father, one of the passengers in the carriage; Blazes Boylan, to
the great consternation of Bloom and we begin to realize from Bloom's consternation that his appointment with Molly for that afternoon is not
just for rehearsal; and Reuben J. Dodd, the moneylender. Dodd is presented as Jewish although he, one of the many real persons in
Ulysses, was not and, in fact, if one may make a decision based on other references in Joyce, most of the Dublin moneylenders were gentiles. At
the cemetery Bloom again thinks pragmatically funny thoughts about the religious ritual. He has an easy conversation with Mr. Kernan who, an
unenthusiastic convert to Catholicism, expects Bloom to be a sympathetic listener. Mr. Dedalus, conscious of the proximity of his wife's grave,
breaks down and is comforted by one of his companions. Bloom's thoughts are fixed on his father, a suicide, and his son Rudy who died in infancy eleven years ago. At the grave he sees a stranger, the man in the macintosh, who will become a sub-theme of some importance. Bloom tries to perform a friendly service for another mourner but he has an inveterate dislike of Bloom and responds with rude coldness.
In the next chapter Bloom enters, departs and returns. Stephen enters after he has left and Bloom notices Stephen on his return but there is
no contact. The Homeric associations of this chapter are amusing enough to be worth noticing. The scene is almost entirely in a newspaper office
and the office is filled with idlers and hangers-on who have nothing to do except to talk and the talk is sufficiently without content to justify its equivalence to the wind provided by Aeolus in The Odyssey. Presumably Joyce provides an example, in some cases several examples, of
all the rhetorical devices. Exact knowledge of this is more curious than useful. The headings that introduce each segment are usually described
as headlines but they seem in many cases to function better as ironic captions.
Bloom sees two employees about an ad for Keyes. Both are real persons. The first is Joyce's uncle and the second is a figure prominent in
Dublin life. Bloom goes to Crawford's office to use the phone and finds a group of idlers, some of whom were at Paddy Dignam's funeral. They are
reading and commenting on a verbose and silly piece of rhetoric. Mr. Daedalus and Ned Lambert leave to get a drink and Crawford, emerging
from his inner office, determines to join them but gets caught up in a discussion of famous speeches. Stephen and Mr. O'Madden Burke enter to give Deasy's letter about sickness among cattle to Crawford. After more speeches, they adjourn at Stephen's suggestion to a nearby pub. On the way Stephen tells a story, the Parable of the Plums, to an unappreciative audience. The story is sophisticated in form but lacking in affect. It makes, perhaps by design on Stephen's part, a poor impression. In the next chapter we are back inside Bloom's mind as he travels about the Dublin streets. He accepts a throwaway about a religious revival, crumples it and throws it into the Liffey, curious to see if the gulls will pay it any attention. They do not and he buys two buns and feeds them. He has a professional interest in ads and considers the various ways in which ads can be displayed. His thoughts about ads posted by a quack doctor bring him to a sharp consideration about the possibility that Boylan might infect Molly with a sexually transmitted disease. He meets a former girl friend. They chat while she waits for her husband, an absurd man who is seeking legal redress for an anonymous and insulting postcard. Another even more eccentric man passes by as they talk. This is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, known in Dublin, although not in Ulysses, more simply as Endymion. Bloom continues his ramble and thinks about Mrs. Purefoy, a woman in labor, that Mrs. Breen had mentioned in their conversation. Molly and Boylan's assignation constitutes a crisis in Bloom's life and he now directs his thoughts to the past, his political activism as a young man. He
considers the poor results of such efforts as he contemplates today's Ireland and its police spy system of enforcing colonialism and conformity. He has mixed feelings about the past. Either he or Molly gave up normal sexual activity after Rudy's death and he can't decide if a return to the past would be good or not. A display of sumptuous cloths and ribbons awakens the voluptuary in him and, somewhat restored, he
decides to eat lunch. The first restaurant is full and the sight of the eaters gorging without restraint repels him. To cover his disgust he
pretends to be looking unsuccessfully for someone and leaves. He eats at another pub in the company of Nosey Flynn of whom he has a low opinion. Nosey, on the other hand, appreciates many of Bloom's qualities. Another
person - McCoy - for whom Bloom also has little regard will later stick up for Bloom. While Bloom goes to relieve himself the narrative point of
view remains, very unusually, with Nosey and the newcomers to the pub. One of them is Bantam Lyons and he tells his companions that Bloom gave him the tip on today's race. Once more outside Bloom helps a young blind man across the street. He once more sees Boylan and to avoid him he pretends interest in the ad that he had picked up at the pork butcher's and makes his escape into the National Library. And the National Library is the scene of the next chapter but the emphasis on Bloom is very small. Stephen is in the library office to give his thoughts about Shakespeare to a group of men who pay small
attention, denigrate or trivialize his efforts and are in and out of the office as their duties or inclination require. Joyce as in the funeral
chapter or that in the newspaper office does a superlative job of managing his actors. Stephen has hardly begun before George Russell
dismisses his theories and leaves the office altogether. To the gathering at George Moore's that evening, Mulligan is invited but not
Stephen. It is the faintly absurd Lyster who rescues Stephen from silence and sets him once more to his theme. The theme concerns sexual
betrayal, psychic hurts and considerations of paternity. Beneath the level of his discourse Stephen considers the facts of his own life and
his thoughts about his own situation converge with his discourse on Shakespeare. Stephen dismisses paternity as a fiction. Mulligan appears
and indulges in his compulsive and irreverent clowning. Stephen seems to find his levity refreshing and appears more human and attractive than elsewhere. He and Mulligan leave together and encounter Bloom as they do
so. Mulligan makes Bloom the object of racial slurs and joins the group of anti-Semitic Dubliners that Joyce scores off in this novel. To Joyce anti-Semitism was the badge of fools and Mulligan is now in the ranks of Deasy and Haines.
We have now reached the tenth of the eighteen chapters that make up Ulysses but we have not reached the midpoint of the book. This results
from the unusual brevity of the first three chapters and the great length of the fifteenth chapter, a nightmare in the form of a play. The
tenth chapter is also an announcement. This chapter and all subsequent chapters will be different from everything that has gone before and none of them will be like each other. Each chapter will have a different and ingenious narrative strategy. Joyce divides this chapter into eighteen parts (the same number as the number of chapters in Ulysses) and a coda.
In all of the parts except the very last ones there are interruptions in the form of emerging fragments from events of one part into another. The conception is basically cinematographic. But not all fragments are from other chapter parts: the fate of the crumpled throwaway down the Liffey, for example, surfaces in appropriate contexts. The chapter introduces characters that have appeared or will appear later. Each interruption is capable of explanation, some of them of great ingenuity. Along with all this - already complex enough - Joyce has set traps for the reader. Some of these consist in verbal quibbles but others are more esoteric. As
with most Joyce-created difficulties the text remains transparent and the reader can ignore much of the complexity so long as the reader
remains alert and receptive. This chapter does not drive the book along although it fleshes it out and is a masterpiece of comedy. Scholars have
performed all the actions described with stopwatch in hand and have found that Joyce was accurate in all his circumstances. Critical opinion has divided sharply over the next chapter, which Joyce described as a fuga per canonem. He insisted on its musicality with the fragments that open the chapter functioning as an overture. In the face of opposition Joyce characteristically took extreme (and often foolish) positions. Words collide and fuse into new identities in ways that are truly musical but it anticipates rather than realizes the more purely musical later writing of Finnegans Wake. The scene is the Ormond Hotel and the nearby streets. As the hour nears of Boylan and Molly's assignation (how Bloom learned that it was to be at four o'clock we never learn), Bloom reverses his policy of avoiding Boylan and they are both at the Ormond restaurant. Boylan with Lenehan flirts with the barmaid. Bloom sits in the restaurant part with Richie Goulding, Stephen's uncle, and Mr Dedalus with several friends is in the music room where the piano has been freshly tuned by, in fact, the blind youth that Bloom had earlier helped cross the street. The group in the music room performs and entertains those within hearing. It distracts Bloom from his suffering over Molly and Boylan. Mr. Dedalus sings a
sentimental aria and another singer sings a patriotic song. Joyce assigns a sound to Boylan's trap and we hear it as it draws ever nearer
to Molly at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom uses the opportunity after he has eaten to write a brief letter to Martha Clifford. Bloom leaves and,
suffering from flatulence, breaks wind noisily while a passing tram makes a covering noise of its own. He reads the final words of Robert
Emmet while he does this and Joyce implies that this is simply another form of wind.
The next chapter moves to another portion of Dublin. We are several blocks northwest of the Ormond and near the courthouse. The narrator is
nameless, a play on the namelessness of dysseus in the Cyclops episode of The Odyssey. The man is a vicious gossip and we should feel guilty about laughing at the sparkling vitriol of his conversation but he is funny. He meets Joe Hynes by chance and Joe invites him to join him at
Barney Kiernan's pub where Joe wants to talk to the Citizen, an extreme nationalist. As they stroll towards the pub, a voice breaks into the
narrative. The tone is pompous and in the style of an epic but flattened to the commonplace by frequent lame choices of words. Many of the
interruptions will be of this sort but there will also be snatches of occult literature, newspaper reporting and children's literature. The eruptions of these extravaganzas comments ironically on the commonplace, even common, events at the pub. Inside we find the Citizen with a dog
Garryowen and Terry the barkeep. Bloom appears outside as he waits for Martin Cunningham and other mourners of Paddy Dignam who have agreed to meet to plan relief for the widow and her children. Bob Doran is asleep at one of the tables and Alf Bergan, laughing over the joke played on Denis Breen, enters as Mrs. Breen and her loony husband pass by. Bob Doran wakes from his stupor and bewails the death of Paddy Dignam whose name he gets wrong and whom he clearly does not know. Bloom enters, warily because of the surly dog. Joe reads a letter (provided by Alf) from a hangman applying for a job. Bloom refuses a drink but reluctantly accepts a cigar. The narrator and the Citizen dislike Bloom and Bloom is here uncharacteristically very assertive and talks too much, both of which fire their irritation even more. Bob Doran drivels on about poor Willy (Paddy) Dignam and then staggers out. The narrator is shocked not because Bob is drunk but because he is drunk so early in the day. Boylan
is more than impresario for concert singers and when his name comes up for the part he played in a recent boxing match, Bloom really begins to
chatter in an effort to divert the conversation. Ned Lambert (he was at the funeral) and O'Molloy (he was in Crawford's office trying to borrow money) come in. All join in a renewed discussion of Denis Breen and his lawsuit when Breen himself, his wife and Corny Kelleher, the undertaker who may also be a police spy, pass by. The Citizen, well on in his drinking, begins to turn mean and Bloom is his intended victim but Bloom shuts him out and talks to Joe Hynes. Lenehan and John Wyse Nolan come in. Lenehan announces that Throwaway won the race at twenty to one. The Citizen speaks at length of the natural resources of Ireland and how
England has ruined Ireland. But the narrator tells us that the Citizen has seized the holding of an evicted tenant and dare not venture into the country for fear of reprisal. Bloom, goaded by the animosities around him, identifies himself as a Jew and rises to simple but real eloquence: "But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that.
That's not life for men and women. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.""What?" says Alf.
"Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred." And Bloom leaves. The conversation goes on but Lenehan gives it a dangerous turn for Bloom when he announces that Bloom has gone off to collect the money that he was supposed to have won by his bet on Throwaway. Martin Cunningham and two companions enter. The discussion of Bloom continues and Cunningham does nothing to allay the ill feeling against him. He returns and the Citizen is now aggressively hostile and Cunningham whisks him out of the pub and into the carriage that he and his friends had arrived in. But not before the Citizen's insults fire Bloom to an angry response. The Citizen hurls a biscuit tin after the departing Bloom and sets Garryowen on him. The prose interruption that closes the chapter transforms Bloom into Elijah being taken up into heaven. This is a detailed description of what takes place on the level of reality and needs to be detailed to keep the reader firmly anchored in the text which otherwise tends to escape into the fantasies that erupt continually. Although some of these are perfect in their way as vignettes, they can distract and confuse.
There are few such distractions in the following chapter, a little over half of which is in a lady's magazine style that is not very different from what one can still read today. Gerty MacDowell sits a little apart from her companions, Edy Boardman and Cissy Caffrey. These two girls
care for a baby and two young boy twins. The point of view is that of Gerty and she feels superior to Edy and Cissy and finds the children a
nuisance. Gerty has little originality although she has hostile feelings about her companions that break through the marshmallowy prose in which
her thoughts are expressed. Cissy and Edy resent her detachment and make constant efforts to break her composure. But by easy stages Gerty
fixates on another figure on the beach, a stranger in black. He is, she decides, the man for whom she was destined and she builds around him an elaborate fantasy which grows warmer and warmer as she continues. As the fireworks of the Miraz bazaar begin she leans backward and exposes herself to him. We will later learn that he was masturbating to her actions and it seems very possible that she experienced orgasm also. Alone on the beach, Bloom - for it is he - thinks about many things in a tired fashion and at last falls into a doze as night falls. In a coda-like conclusion we hear for the first time what is probably Gerty's natural voice and a pronouncement on Bloom as a cuckold from the cuckoo clock of the priest whose evening services have been a background to Gerty and Bloom's thoughts and actions. The style of the chapter after Gerty leaves the beach is familiar to us. It is the style of Bloom as we saw it in the earlier chapters.
The ornate passages of burlesque that erupted in Barney Kiernan's pub were loops that burst from the text but in the chapter at the maternity
hospital the extravagant stylistic variations are united with the narrative. There is a program behind what Joyce does in this chapter. Unfortunately the program requires the first two pages or so and these are misconceived and, frankly, quite boring. But it gets better and
stays at a high level throughout. There are broadly speaking twenty seven stylistic blocks (9, the months of human pregnancy, times 3, the
trimesters of human pregnancy, equals 27.) The styles more or less follow the chronological development of English prose. There are one or
two occasions when the styles get in the way of the story and events appear as real that cannot be so. The surface of the story is simple. Bloom, not anxious to return home, calls at the maternity hospital to inquire about his friend Mrs. Purefoy. (Bloom's reluctance to return home stands in deliberate and ironic contrast to Odysseus' wishes about the same subject: a caution against straining Homeric parallels too strongly.) Dr. Dixon insists that he join the group in the dining hall. Stephen is already there along with Lenehan, Stephen's friend Lynch, and some medical students. Mulligan will join them after the gathering at Moore's - the gathering to which Stephen was not invited - breaks up. The group has been eating and drinking, mostly the latter. The conversation is irreverent and profane. The text, through its stylistic pastiches (sometimes parodies), has a life of its own and opens topics in ways that straightforward narrative strategies could not accomplish. The first topic concerns the difficult matter of deciding between the life of the mother and that of the child in those deliveries where one or the other must die. The consensus favors the survival of the mother
but Stephen, the apostate who would not kneel and pray for his dying mother, upholds the teachings of the Church and says that the mother
must die. He refills everyone's glass and flourishes what is left of his wages - money, he claims, received for the sale of a poem. Dixon teases him about his sexual depravity and Stephen responds with blasphemous wit. But the thunder sounds and he identifies this as the voice of God and is fearful. Bloom attempts to soothe him with a scientific explanation of thunder. Stephen's habit of erotic roistering produces a
funny parody of Bunyan. Lenehan brings up the subject of the Deasy letter about cattle disease and this reference turns into a Swiftian parable about the abuse of Ireland at the hands of the English conquerors. Mulligan and Alec Bannon arrive. Bannon is the young man who has been seeing Bloom's daughter in Mullingar where she works in a photographer's studio. Bannon is unaware that Bloom is her father. A chance remark of Bloom's provokes a ribald discussion of Mrs. Purefoy's pregnancy by her somewhat aged husband. A passage in the style of Junius
attacks Bloom for the unwholesome nature of his sexual relations with Molly. Mrs. Purefoy delivers and the text grows more illusive and, while it does little to advance anything like a story, it probes deeply into the nature of reality. The variations in style allow different lights to
flash on timeless topics as well as those more particular matters of personal reminiscences. Bloom thinks of the dead son and asks about the
causes of infant mortality. To Stephen the matter is bitterly simple: God is an eater of corpses. After a passage in the style of Carlyle, the
reality of the events therein being questionable, the recessional begins. This is an explosion of demotic as the liberated gathering disperses to a pub and goes on to deeper and deeper dissipation. The details are difficult to understand clearly but at the very end a poster of an evangelist comes to life to address the sinners in Yankee slang. Joyce here anticipates the animation of the inanimate, a process which
will be a commonplace in the extraordinary chapter to follow.
The new chapter is in the form of a play. Joyce carefully establishes that the events in this chapter do not take place in the real world.
Dubliners knew the brothel area of Dublin as Monto. It is highly significant that Joyce renames it. It is Nighttown, the scene of fantastic associations found only in the dreaming state. Later in Finnegans Wake he will learn to place the reader within the dream itself but here it is a conscious reader that watches the dream. Although it is a dream, it has a trail of connections with the real world. In the previous chapter we read of the plans to go to Nighttown and during the course of the events there Bloom takes custody of Stephen's money and returns it to him later after the Nighttown chapter is over.
Bloom has followed Stephen to protect him against the consequences of his own dissipation. What are Bloom's motivations? This Odysseus simply doesn't want to go home. After Molly's adultery home has no attractions and he snatches at every excuse to delay his return. The opening text is loose compared to the rest of the book where closely packed significances create incredible density. There are surprises. Cissy Caffery, Edy Boardman, Gerty MacDowell, the twins and Bertha Supple, characters from another chapter, are all in Nighttown. The
reality of their presence or the reality of most things is constantly in question. The reader should bear in mind that the chapter consists of a
brief and uneasy prelude and closes with a troubled conflict. In between are Bloom's dreams of glory and the scenes in the brothel. If the
particular details are troublesome and confusing, the overall design is simple.
The chapter falls into four parts of more or less equal length: Part One: Various characters accost Bloom, especially the various masterful women about whom he has had masochistic fantasies. He is brought to trial for his offenses and is sentenced to death but the whole menace evaporates and he continues in his search for Stephen. Part Two: Bloom meets Zoe, one of Bella Cohen's whores, and has a fantasy of rising to great power and fame. He falls and is burned by the Inquisition. Inside the brothel he encounters his grandfather and they have a ludicrous conversation. Part Three: The brothel scene continues but there is a transition that focuses briefly on Stephen and the conclusion of the fantasy between Bloom and his grandfather. The sadistic brothel owner, now transformed
into a man dominates Bloom, transformed into a woman. After ingenious humiliations Bloom dies and his obsequies take place but,like H. C.
Earwicker of Finnegans Wake, he is not all that dead and he revives.
Part Four: Bloom recovers his identity as a man and shakes off the domination of the madam but the apparent realism of the scene is a bare
ripple over the unstable elements of the chapter. These elements erupt constantly up to the end. The brothel scene concludes with in a hallucination. Stephen's mother, risen from the grave - a vengeful, insane ghost - appears to him. He denies her, flourishes his ashplant walking stick, damaging a lampshade as he does so, and runs into the street. There he offends a drunken English soldier, who, despite Bloom's efforts to pacify him, knocks Stephen down. The police appear and they are more willing to arrest the fallen Irishman than to arrest the English soldier. Bloom intervenes but it is the sudden appearance of Corny Kelleher that saves Stephen. (Corny is popularly supposed to be a police spy.) As Bloom waits for Stephen to revive he sees an apparition,
his dead son Rudy as he would be had he lived, a moment combining - a truly Joycean trait - heartbreaking poignancy with a description so
overdone as to be comic.
Such a brief account does little justice to an ingenious chapter, a chapter that forms a link with so many motifs throughout the novel. The
damaged lampshade, for example, recalls Stephen's earlier meditations at the opening of the second chapter. If the chapter has a fault, it is its length and, despite Joyce's ingenuity in devising variations, the sameness of much of the material in it.
This witches' sabbath concludes the longest, the middle part of the novel. The last three chapters concern the homecoming of our hero and
formally track, more or less, with the structural characteristics of the first three chapters. In the opening chapter of this last section a fatigued and not very sober Stephen, supported by Bloom, makes his way through the streets of nighttime Dublin. Joyce uses a flaccid style. Some critical ingenuity has been wasted to explain this choice: it is appropriate to the nighttime, it is the kind of thing that Bloom would write if he were to try, etc. More probably it was simply another prose
style that Joyce felt that he must exhaust.
Bloom has no definite plan regarding Stephen. He takes him to a cab shelter south of Nighttown for coffee and something to eat in an effort at counteracting Stephen's intoxication. On the way they note but avoid the presence of a night watchman, a friend of Mr Dedalus fallen on bad
times, and encounter an impecunious and importuning friend of Stephen's. Bloom gives Stephen fatherly advice and in particular warns him against Mulligan with whom Stephen appears to have had a row of some kind at one of the tram stations prior to Nighttown. The proprietor of the cab shelter is reputed to be Skin-the-Goat, a minor member of a terrorist group responsible for an assassination in 1882. There is also a sailor, or so he claims, at the shelter. Bloom considers that he is more probably a recently freed ex-convict. Much of what happens and the
narrator's reflections on it are as uncertain as the style and the reader begins, as Joyce intended, to wonder about the veracity of the
narrative. Stephen cannot drink the coffee or eat the roll but the rest in the shelter has revived him. He and Bloom make their way to Bloom's
home at 7 Eccles Street. They talk about music and Stephen sings. A street cleaner and his horse watch the ill sorted pair continue their journey.
The next chapter falls into three unequal parts. In the first and very short part they continue to approach Bloom's home. The method of this
chapter is catechismal; a method that permits directed exploration of material unavailable by any other method. Not all of the catechism
involves responses to questions since a few of the heads are statements. Bloom cannot get in. He has forgotten his key. (Joyce went out of his
way to name Bloom's client Keyes and keys are important in all the contexts in which they occur.) He climbs the railing and drops into the kitchen area, enters the kitchen, goes to the front door and lets Stephen in. They return to the kitchen where Bloom prepares cocoa for them both. They talk for a long time and agree to meet again so that Stephen can give Molly lessons in Italian. Bloom fantasizes that Stephen has a great career ahead of him as a singer. Bloom invites him to spend the night but Stephen refuses politely. They leave the house. The deliberately dry style of the catechism gives way to a burst of poetry:
"What spectacle confronted them . . . ? The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." Stephen leaves and the last part involves
Bloom, first by himself and then with Molly. In the yard he is relieved to see the light from her window. One of his fears was that she might
have left him for Boylan. Inside he putters about in the parlor and the catechism examines his thoughts about Molly, his hopes and the contents
of his locked drawer, contents which we will later learn are as well known to Molly as they are to him. In bed with Molly, awakened by his
getting into bed, he gives her a carefully edited and not altogether truthful version of his day. He dwells especially on Stephen whom he describes as a young professor. He falls asleep.
But - last chapter - Molly does not. This last chapter is the only purely stream of consciousness writing in the entire book. It is eight sections of uninterrupted and unpunctuated musings by a woman of great unschooled intelligence and few inhibitions. She is not consistent and some of her recollections and observations are situational. Opinions
differ on the accuracy of Joyce's conception of Molly. Much depends on the often shocking material that passes through her mind and which she entertains but it is all within the bounds of probability and carries with it a force that is convincing. It also provides a corrective to
much of the gossip about her and Bloom himself exaggerates her infidelities. Joyce claimed that he was presenting the great earth mother but she is not. She is a totally convincing woman and Joyce shows in his depiction of her his spectacular ability to defeat his general
intentions with smashing local successes.
Her opening word is "yes" and it will also be her - and the novel's - last word. She understands that Bloom asked for breakfast in bed. Since we were present when Bloom fell asleep and he had not asked for breakfast in bed before he fell asleep, Molly may have misunderstood his sleepy murmurs about the Roc's egg. Like Bloom she reminisces about earlier and happier times - before the death of Rudy - but she also darts forward to more recent events like the beginning of her affair with Boylan. She recalls the latter's performance and the three or four times that they had had intercourse. The thunder that so frightened Stephen in the parlor of the maternity hospital woke them up so Bloom had good reason to stay away if his aim was to avoid a scene.
Next we learn that, except for a bit of heavy petting with a Lieutenant Gardiner, dead of a fever in the Boer War, she has been faithful to
Bloom until today. She schemes to extract gifts from Boylan and to continue her affair with him. The circumstances favor her plan. They will be on tour together while Bloom visits the grave of his father, the anniversary of his death coinciding with the Belfast tour. The hot weather turns her thought to the scenes of her childhood in Gibraltar. She feels constrained by the lack of amorous opportunities in Dublin and pines for the experiences she had - or could have had - in
Gibraltar. But she concludes that she, a woman with a body and a voice, has not done badly with a lover like Boylan and a daughter to be proud
of. But Molly was not very comfortable with her daughter and, although she suspects that Bloom found her the job in Mullingar to keep her from
knowledge of the love affair of Molly and Boylan, he had sufficient reasons other than that. Her period begins to her great disgust and she
slides carefully from bed to use the chamber pot. Bloom once brought home a stray dog and she made him turn it out. She thinks now about the
latest "stray dog" that he has brought to their home. She is favorably - and erotically - disposed to favor a close association with Stephen. She worries about juggling Boylan and Stephen but dismisses Boylan as "right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke." Many of her thoughts involve her dead son. She never names him. This is a great contrast to Bloom who thinks of him often and always as Rudy. But all of her feelings focus on Bloom and the day that they made love on Howth. The intensity of her feelings elevates her - and Bloom with her - above herself and endows her with grandeur as she speaks the last words of the book: "yes I said yes I will Yes." For those who look for religious parallels in Joyce it is useful to observe that these are Seven Last
Words.
All truly great works have one thing in common: they are all unique. But a unique contemporary work can elude or offend the critical sensibilities of readers and Ulysses also often makes its first contact with potential readers in an academic environment. These are two dangers - the Scylla and Charybdis - of the Joycean experience. Its true status can be seen in the possessive attitude of the present copyright holder. It is and has been a moneymaker, a popular book ever since it was first published. As severely tested as Joyce was in his lifetime by the restrictions of the governing class and by his own high demands, it
seems that he has skipped the judgment of posterity and gone straight to join the other classics.
For more information on Ulysses, or to purchase a copy, click here --> Ulysses
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His writings, two books and a number of short articles on Joyce, can be accessed at:
http://fracman.home.mchsi.com/
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