Parallax

The great modernists did not share postmodernists’ suspicion of science. Leopold Bloom, for example, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, has physics concepts banging around in his head that reflect Joyce’s genuine curiosity about new discoveries in astronomy and other fields. In the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, Bloom points out constellations in the night sky, a “heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,” and reflects on the startling revelation, new at the time, that all stars are in motion. He speaks of “the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.” (Ulysses, p. 573) Parallax is a word that appears repeatedly in Bloom’s thoughts throughout the day of June 16, 1904 as he himself wanders like a star around Dublin, and in Joyce’s hands parallax becomes a poetical trope—perhaps theorganizing trope in that novel.

Parallax means a perceived difference in the location or direction of an object depending on your particular vantage point. You can see an example of parallax just by holding up your finger and closing one eye and then the other—the finger appears to move relative to a more distant background. If you hold the finger really close to your face, you actually see different sides of the finger with each eye. Joyce employs a sort of literary parallax when he attempts to see a single event, place, or person through the eyes of one character and then through another; we see Stephen Dedalus’s introspective view of himself and Leopold Bloom’s view of him from without. The effect is a multidimensional kind of seeing, a simultaneous apprehension of multiple facets of one thing that reveals reality in more detail, just as the integration of the different viewpoints of our two eyes allows us to see reality more clearly, in three dimensions.

Since William Faulkner considered James Joyce “the father of modern literature” (Inge ed., p. 79), it seems likely Faulkner was following Joyce’s example in his poetical uses of parallax. But Faulkner goes even farther with it than Joyce. The Sound and the Furyretells the same events from three different perspectives and then from an omniscient authorial perspective. In As I Lay Dying, there are 15 different narrators who reflect on the same principal events and characters from their differing points of view. Furthermore, Faulkner sometimes likes to flip his lenses as quick as an optometrist. For example, Dewey Dell Bundren sees Vernon Tull as she rides by in a wagon:

We turn into Tull’s lane. We pass the barn and go on, the wheels whispering in the mud, passing the green rows of cotton in the wild earth, and Vernon little across the field behind the plow. He lifts his hand as we pass and stands there looking after us for a long while. As I Lay Dying, p. 122

And the next moment, in a literal parallax that comes just three sentences on, we see the wagon in which Dewey Dell sits from inside Vernon: “After they passed I taken the mule out and looped up the trace chains and followed. They was setting in the wagon at the end of the levee.” (As I Lay Dying, p. 123) A quick-fire parallax also occurs on pps. 248-250. In a chapter written from a druggist’s perspective, the druggist asks the young boy Vardaman, “You want something?” Then comes a chapter from Vardaman’s perspective; in it, the boy hears the exact same words: “You want something?” Notice that the effect of the literary parallax is not to call into question what was actually said, but to see different sides of one objective fact.

Vernon Tull never mentions parallax by name, nor ponders the latest astronomy, but like Leopold Bloom he takes a direct interest in the concept of parallax, thinking on it with a seriousness that’s partly obscured by his country speech. When he crosses the river with the Bundrens, leaving his mule on the other side, he imagines his former viewpoint, holding the two parallactic positions in mind together:

I looked back and saw the other bank and saw my mule standing there where I used to be…. When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it…. p. 138

It’s Darl Bundren, however, who’s the master of imagining other perspectives. He gets more chapters than any other character in As I Lay Dying; like an author, he describes vividly certain scenes at which he wasn’t present; and his interior monologue hews closely to that “labyrinthine-poetic” mode which is the hallmark of Faulkner’s style across all his books. Vernon Tull says that Darl looks at you “like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes.” (p. 125)

Darl and William Faulkner, masters of parallax.

Lieuvain: Madame Bovary Part I

In 2006 David Foster Wallace wrote in the New York Times Magazine that you can appreciate tennis great Roger Federer even more “if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do.” I feel that way about Gustave Flaubert. It’s possible that you have to have worked as a fiction writer yourself to fully appreciate the finesse with which Flaubert shifts viewpoints and narrative speeds. That’s partly because he would prefer the reader didn’t detect his artistry. In accordance with his famous credo (quoted below), he intends that his characters and events appear to have been found in nature, not created by an author, and Madame Bovary pulls it off like no other book. In an almost supernatural way, it lives up to Flaubert’s principle of artistic invisibility, a principle that deeply inspired the young James Joyce:

L’artiste doit être dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la création, invisible et tout-puissant, qu’on le sente partout, mais qu’on ne le voit pas.

The artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and almighty, felt everywhere but seen nowhere. –Flaubert, letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857

There is a hardcore realist devotion to Platonic Truth in this aesthetic (to which Flaubert directly attests in his correspondence) and that devotion carries over into Madame Bovary’s themes, which circumscribe a tight circle around Truth’s foremost enemy—human vanity.

Like Cervantes, Flaubert objects to romantic, idealistic lies in the service of human vanity and depicts a protagonist, Emma Bovary, whose temptation to indulge such self-deceits leads to her ruin. But where Don Quixote satirizes vain romances, the reality-fueled engine of Flaubert’s novel leaves no air for fantasy at all. There are elements of satire in Madame Bovary, to be sure, but mainly Flaubert applies an assiduously realist scalpel to his characters to depict and dissect the vanity afflicting them just as though vanity were a disease to be understood and resected.

I am tempted to turn to the original French text in order to investigate Flaubert’s complex idea of vanity. I say that not because I’ve read Madame Bovary in the original French but because I want to make it look like I have. You see? “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

But the translation of at least one character’s name from French into English does, I think, help to explicate the nature of vanity in Madame Bovary in a quick and capsular way. The character, named “Lieuvain,” is a minor state official who comes to the muddy provincial town of Yonville to speak at Yonville’s ridiculous “Agricultural Show.” Town officials use the show to tout Yonville’s distinction and modernity, though it doesn’t have much. Flaubert emphasizes the contrast between the attendees’ pretentions and their earthbound vocations in cows and fertilizer.

Lieuvain’s appearance in the context of the pompous fertilizer trade show is no accident but rather derives from Flaubert’s “name game,” as North Texas State University prof Lloyd Parks put it in 1971. I’ll go out on a limb and assume that you haven’t read the 1971 winter bulletin of the South Central Modern Languages Association. In it, Parks notes that character names are one facet of Madame Bovary where Flaubert loosens his orthodox naturalism to make a subtle point:

Names and place names are used throughout Madame Bovary to extend its dimension and support its theme. To this end Flaubert exercised the greatest care in his choice of names … but so ingeniously that their meaning becomes apparent only after the closest examination.

Parks quotes, for instance, Flaubert’s explanation of how he settled on the name Monsieur Homais for his pharmacist, possibly the most pretentious character of all in Madame Bovary: “Homais comes from homo = homme.” Homo and homme of course mean “man.” If Monsieur Homais represents humanity, then Flaubert suggests our species is defined not by wisdom but by bullshit—Carolus Linnaeus, meet homo vanitatis. Flaubert gives other strivers names that suggest a lowly, bovine materiality in direct contradiction of their vain aspirations—Yonville’s mayor, for example, is named Tuvache, which literally means “you cow.” Parks also points out that the name of the chateau where Madame Bovary sees her first mirage of ‘the beautiful people,’ Vaubyessard, is a phonetic anagram of Bovary, the family name of her bovine husband Charles.

But Lieuvain is perhaps the most interesting name of all, and Parks notices the lieu part, but curiously ignores the vain part. Lieuvain looks like a sort of hieroglyph composed of two root words, lieu and vain, meaning “place” and “vain.” The insignificant Lieuvain speaks pompously (and inaudibly) through the lowing of the cows at the Agricultural Show, unaware that Flaubert has put a hieroglyph over his head saying PLACE-VAIN. He has come as the inadequate substitute for, that is in lieu of, a more important personage, but PLACE-VAIN means more than that to Madame Bovary when one considers the strength of the connection in the novel between geography and vanity.

From her days as a schoolgirl, Madame Bovary despises her own world and she daydreams of living the glamorous lives she’s glimpsed in her excessive reading of romantic novels. As the novel progresses, Emma Bovary’s catastrophic daydreams continue to unfold in connection with faraway, romantic places free from the angst of her real life:

She felt that certain places on the earth must produce happiness, just as a plant that languishes everywhere else thrives only in special soil. Why couldn’t she be leaning her elbow on the balcony of a Swiss chalet or indulging her moods in a Scottish cottage with a husband dressed in a black velvet suit with long coattails, soft boots, a pointed hat, and elegant cuffs! Madame Bovary, Signet Classic edition, Mildred Marmur trans., p. 60

Her pedestrian husband Charles, whose “conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, with everyone’s ideas walking through it in ordinary dress, arousing neither emotion, nor laughter, nor dreams” p. 60, cannot transport Emma to such idyllic realms as the ones she’s read about in books. Charles in turn does not understand his wife’s unhappiness. He too thinks that a change of venue will cure her depression and, with his typical imperceptiveness, moves his depressed wife from one provincial town to another that’s just the same. His mother bans Madame Bovary from reading any more romance novels!

It’s as though none of the Bovarys have heard of psychology! The problem with Madame Bovary lies not in her reading habits, not in a book or a place, but within. And her tragedy develops from her inability to look within, and to see what she’s looking at.

More on blindness, Madame Bovary’s “fog in the head,” and the invasion of dreams in Part II.

The Little Prince

It was a magnetic Israeli poet-warrior who, during my second visit to Israel, thrust The Little Prince into my hands. He declared it his favorite book with an absolute conviction that, it must be said, characterized a large number of his statements. On the other hand the book obviously spoke to him personally and individually—so much so that he’d asked all his troops to read it, exhorting them to model their leadership skills after the example of Saint-Exupéry’s humble king. This Israeli soldier, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War and many other conflicts, a man with a metal plate in his head and a knife scar on his back, told me he often thought of The Little Prince on desert nights after a mission, when the stars seemed to echo with a beautiful loneliness.

Beautiful loneliness saturates every page of Saint-Exupéry’s tale, which was written and published during the two years Saint-Exupéry lived in New York. The story’s loneliness flies before it like a banner, though the reasons for that loneliness remain obscure, in keeping with Saint-Exupéry’s declaration at the end of chapter VII: “It is such a secret place, the land of tears.” He constructs his land of tears and solitude from poetry, fantasy, and fable: A small boy lives by himself on an asteroid ten or twenty paces in circumference—he has only to move his chair to see a sunset. It’s as if he never had parents, and except for a talking rose with whom the prince has a thorny and abstract love-affair, he has on his asteroid no one to converse with at all. The prince visits others whose barren asteroids and desolate solipsism isolate them even more deeply. On Earth, a certain doom haunts the prince’s encounters with a snake, then a fox, and with the stranded pilot who narrates the tale. Each relationship accordingly succumbs like a tragic hero to a prophecy. T.V.F. Cuffe, Saint-Exupéry’s Penguin translator, says of the narrator-airman: “Like everyone else in his story, the narrator is alone, marooned in the solitude of the desert, and in the desert of his solitude.”

And yet: another person, the prince, disturbs the narrator’s solitude, and it’s this temporary suspension of solitude that becomes the story’s focus. The prince likewise tells of glancing contacts that resemble proverbial ships passing in the night. So Saint-Exupéry fashions the loneliness of his tale not only from solitude but from specific absences. The lonely people in The Little Prince remember visits, seek out whatever new encounters emerge from the screen of nothingness, and even court real relationships before continuing on in their solitary orbits. This flirtation between absence and presence befits James Joyce’s paradox, “Absence is the highest form of presence,” which reflects the heavy footprint that absent people leave in the minds of those who miss them.

Something like Joyce’s theorem seems to underlie the surface movements of The Little Prince, and Saint-Exupéry was as poetic as Joyce on the subject of absence. In Saint-Exupéry’s essay “Letter to a Hostage,” he writes of families who continue to set a dinner place for a loved one who has died. He criticizes such mourners: “They make the dead into missing persons for eternity, into guests who will forever be late.” Of course, precisely this sense of unstable absence—absence that might have been presence, and still may become presence—pervades The Little Prince. One wonders if it came from Saint-Exupéry’s personal experience since he lost his father at the impressionable age of four. Did that imprint him with a sense of the inevitable failure of love and relationship? Did it prepare him not only for a troubled marriage and a life roaming empty African skies in a solo cockpit, but also for writing The Little Prince?

And did it prevent redemption from finding a way into his tale of desolation? Redemption was of course not Saint-Exupéry’s aim. Like other French writers of the 1940s, he saw the end of France as he knew it, the Destruction of the Temple, which seems to have given that generation a certain license to indulge in despair. My Israeli soldier, however, doesn’t see The Little Prince as entirely bleak. That it speaks to him so much and has consoled him in the loneliness of the desert is its own form of redemption. It evidently speaks to many people in this way; Cuffe tells us that The Little Prince has been translated more than any other French title in history. In his loneliness, Saint-Exupéry seems ironically to have united many lonely souls in mutual identification with his lonely airman and his little prince.

Novels of Early Childhood

I will be blogging this week about my new novel In the Land of the Living, just released by Little Brown. Here is an excerpt of the second blog, which appears on the website of the Jewish Book Council:

Some academics have observed that young Jewish writers do not mine their personal lives for material in the same way that Jewish writers did a generation ago. In my own case, this is and isn't true. My first novel, The Jump Artist, was based on someone else’s life and took place in lands and days disparate from my own. My second novel, In the Land of the Living, draws on my own personal experiences and on events in the history of my own family. It’s first and foremost about loss at a tender age, and finding your way out from under the pall of grief, back to the land of the living, and to all that makes life worth living. (Why am I not on Oprah’s book list?)....

To read the rest, follow this link.

Peloothered

Intoxerated by Paul Dickson


Ah, the holidays. The end of the year. When you celebrate by a cozy fire with the shiver of time in your fillings. When you cozy up to those you love best and those who therefore make you crazy. In other words, time to drink.

Melville House Books's "Definitive Drinker's Dictionary," Intoxerated, a fun compendium of annotated synonyms for the word drunk, provides the literary drinker with a smidgeon of words to go with his smahan of whiskey. (Smeahán being Irish, according to the OED, for a drop of whiskey; see James Joyce's wonderfully woeful drinking story, "Counterparts.")

Herman Melville himself, however, took a somewhat dryer approach when he launched American literature "on the high seas" (one of many sailing metaphors for drunk according to Paul Dickson's book). Having adopted some of the abstemious spirit of old Nantucket, perhaps, Melville introduces alcohol in chapter 3 of Moby Dick with a barkeep named Jonah who "dearly sells the sailors delirium and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison." One sailor there in the Spouter Inn abstains from drink, and when the sailor (named Bulkington) reappears in chapter 23, "The Lee Shore," it's as the type who eschews the false comforts of shore for the raw, cold, hard truths of the ocean. Under the terms of the allegory that spans chapters 3 and 23 of Moby Dick, alcohol counts among the false comforts.

Certainly, alcohol blunts reality, not least the reality of one's own self; isn't that why people need it? The many euphemisms for drunkenness are a further evasion. But as much as drinking is an honorable literary pastime, the many euphemisms for it appear relatively uncommon in literary works, perhaps because such works deal in undiluted truths, and in novels and stories alcohol is either the antidote to realities too acutely perceived or the disinhibiting solvent that liberates a character from his blinding fear.

Ernest Hemingway's hard-drinking characters in The Sun Also Rises seem to chase from bar to bar partly in flight and partly in search of liberation from self-deceptions much deeper than mere intoxication. Drinking in that novel is like a portal through which a tortured soul might claw back some semblance of pleasure, aggression, instinct, sincerity. Perhaps as a consequence, Hemingway relies mainly on the self-sufficient term "drunk," which is like onomatopoeia for the sound of the soul denting its rear fender on the telephone pole of life. There's one exception in the dialogue toward the beginning of part II: when Jake judges Bill much drunker than he is and calls him "pie-eyed" (p. 78).

Euphemisms for drunkenness are equally scarce in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A multi-faceted Shame has driven the mental patients in that book into the unhealthy safety of Nurse Ratched's psych ward, and alcohol enters as a sort of holy reprieve from Shame. Drunkenness sets up a cataclysmic change in Chief Bromden that ultimately emancipates him from fear:

As I walked after them it came to me as a kind of sudden surprise that I was drunk, actually drunk, glowing and grinning and staggering drunk for the first time since the Army, drunk along with half a dozen other guys and a couple of girls--right on the Big Nurse's ward! p. 260.

Daisy Buchanan appears “drunk as a monkey” on p. 70 of The Great Gatsby, and the phrase is duly noted in Dickson’s Intoxerated, but otherwise F. Scott Fitzgerald too treats inebriation with a certain sobriety. Alcohol flows through his novel’s pages as through a human bloodstream. It’s the medium through which the characters think, a disorienting twilight between dream and reality. Of note, neither Daisy nor Gatsby are heavy drinkers (see pp. 71 and 91). They are not content to live in dreamy drunken twilight, but strive to escape into a hypothetical place where dreams turn solid and come true.

In Joyce’s story “Counterparts” and in others in Dubliners, alcohol seems to purify the element of self-destruction in characters, but the penultimate story, “Grace,” celebrates a bit of drinking, even to excess. In a spirit of self-sympathy rather than self-destruction, Joyce makes use of one of those funny synonyms for drunk: Mr Cunningham calls Tom Kernan "peloothered" (Dubliners Viking Critical Library edition, p. 160; Dickson may want to add this one, as he has "plootered" but not "peloothered" on p. 134!). Kernan was so peloothered that he fell down the steps to the lavatory and bit the end of his tongue off. The funny euphemism seems to handle Mr Kernan’s indignity with a certain care and gentleness—perhaps because Kernan and his friends have already made their peace with instinct. "Glasses were rinsed and five small measures of whisky were poured out,” Joyce writes on p. 167. “The new influence enlivened the conversation." And on p. 169 comes one of my favorite lines on drinking: "The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude." “Grace” is a wonderful story about moderation, and it very consciously applies the principle of moderation to moderation itself. In other words, to be perfectly moderate, and not too abstemious, you must also be immoderate now and again.

When I arrived in Connecticut for Christmas, my brother-in-law had a nice bottle of sipping tequila, a Centenario añejo, waiting for me. It stood me in good stead through four and a half hours of assembly of a “wired control robotic arm kit” for my older son, and through other minor holiday travails. So let’s raise a glass and face the New Year ah-wat-si (“crazy-brave,” according to the Blackfeet Indians, Dickson p. 16), if not completely jugged, lock-legged, and shot in the mouth. :*)

Epiphany in Dubliners

Dubliners: Text and Criticism by James Joyce


Dubliners was James Joyce's first book, and it's his most accessible, and possibly his most influential. The critic A. Walton Litz called Dubliners “a turning point in the development of English fiction.” Marc Wollaeger, editor of the Oxford Casebook on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, writes that “Dubliners … virtually invented the modern short story.”

I don't know if Joyce invented the modern short story, but I can see pretty much everywhere in contemporary fiction the influence of Dubliners, of its Shakespearean / Chekhovian trope of self-discovery affixed with a technique of beautiful naturalistic symbolism--the blend of ancient artistic modes which Joyce called "epiphany." Joyce's writing style in Dubliners has more in common with Hemingway than it does with Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner (and Hemingway's best short stories clearly reflect Joyce's influence), but the characters in Dubliners are generally somewhat warmer and more vulnerable than Hemingway characters and Joyce depicts men and women with equal grace.

Brewster Ghiselin said in 1956 that the stories are organized according to the seven Christian virtues and the seven deadly sins, with each of the first fourteen stories assigned to a virtue or sin and the fifteenth story, the masterpiece "The Dead," thrown in for a delicious baker's dozen of tales of inner torment. I think it's obvious that Joyce did use that structure, though he turns vice and virtue on its head in the manner of Henrik Ibsen as he attacks the damaging institutions of psychological paralysis and self-mortification.

"The Sisters," the first story in this collection and the one that formally introduces the topic of psychological paralysis, is my personal favorite, but the two most famous stories, "Araby" and "The Dead," deserve all the praise they get.

I like the Viking Critical Library edition, at least the one that was published in 1976; the essays in the back are unusually helpful.

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Leopold Bloom's Open-Closed Marriage

Last week one of Newt Gingrich’s several wives told ABC news that in 1999 he asked her for an open marriage. Evidently, she didn’t possess the amphibian flexibility required for marriage to newts or salamanders, because she declined, and they divorced.

Newt Gingrich isn’t the first organism to propose an innovative mating arrangement. Banana slugs, for example, are hermaphrodites that prefer sex with another slug, but when times are dry or they’re very busy, they can self-fertilize, that is, literally “fuck themselves.” Perhaps Newt Gingrich ought to consider this.

Of course, I mention Newt Gingrich only in part because of an interest in cold-blooded invertebrates. His affection for “open marriage” also calls to mind a question raised by the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In Ulysses Molly Bloom cuckolds her husband Leopold with Blazes Boylan, a concert manager. Bloom knows about the affair, but when he lies down that night in the same space where Boylan lay with Molly earlier, he doesn’t confront his wife. She in turn suspects he gratified himself that day, which he did, having surreptitiously masturbated while looking at a girl at a seaside fireworks display. Bloom also conducts a flirtatious correspondence with another woman under the pen name Henry Flower.

But these extramarital activities don’t drive Leopold and Molly apart. Molly’s thoughts in the end return to Bloom and the day of their engagement, and Bloom is satisfied to lie in bed beside her the wrong way round, with her head at one end and his at the other, and in fact he kisses “the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump.” I understood this wrong-way embrace to celebrate the imperfect, homely, and polymorphous realities over the sort of polarized conscience-driven ideals that Newt Gingrich inflicts on everything but his own banana. The realistic couple turned askew in bed specifically revises Homer’s mythic image of Odysseus returned to the bed of Penelope after years of wandering in Book XXIII of The Odyssey. As Odysseus himself pompously explains, he built his marital bed on the immovable stump of a big olive tree with its roots deep in the earth and used his conscientious carpenter’s tools to straighten the curved wood. (Read your Kant, Odie: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”) Penelope in turn breathlessly reassures him that “no human being has ever seen [our bed] but you and I and a single maid servant.”

Molly is no waiting Penelope knitting a shroud for her father-in-law—and she’s better for it. But was Joyce really endorsing “open marriage,” and is that the best we can hope for? It still seems to me the least we mortals can expect from life is loyalty from ourselves and from each other, honest though we may be about the polymorphous infidelities in our hearts.

Two touching biographical details show the value Joyce placed on constancy in the marital bed, which is not only a place for sex but for love and caretaking: when Nora had surgery in 1928, he insisted that he sleep beside her in her hospital room. And when he was himself dying from a perforated duodenal ulcer in 1941, he asked that Nora come to sleep beside him. Alas, she couldn’t get there in time and he died alone. (Ellmann, James Joyce, pp. 607, 741)

In aspiring to write a “complete all-round” character like Odysseus, Joyce always touted Bloom’s status as family man. He told Frank Budgen that Jesus Christ was not so complete: “He was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.” (Ellmann, p. 435)

Ulysses is an epithalamium (i.e., song in celebration of conjugal love) as Joyce biographer Ellmann says (p. 379), but one that aspires to fidelity in the context of relentless human desires, imperfections, anxieties, and even grief. It doesn’t depict an open marriage so much as it does an imperfect and real one torn by grief and anxiety and convalescing towards closure. While the text buries references to the Blooms’ despair—like Molly’s glancing thought “our 1st death too it was we were never the same since”—it provides indisputable evidence of grief’s influence on their marriage.

In the penultimate “Ithaca” chapter, structured in questions and answers like a catechism, Joyce writes that Molly and Leopold did not have “complete carnal intercourse” for a period of 10 years, 5 months, and 18 days. It also says they last had “complete carnal intercourse” on November 27 1893—while Molly was pregnant with their first child. Their son Rudy was born shortly after and then died at 11 days old. Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated instructs that the ten year fallow period is an allusion to the ten years Odysseus spent wandering apart from his wife after the fall of Troy, and to the beginning of Canto XXXII of Dante’s Purgatorio, where Dante says he hasn’t seen Beatrice in ten years. But more importantly, if you add 10 years 5 months and 18 days to November 27 1893, you find that Molly and Leopold broke their fallow streak on May 14, 1904, about a month before the day on which the novel’s action takes place. It suggests that the adultery belonged to a troubled, grief-stricken period that is drawing to a close rather than to Molly and Leopold’s future. And this makes Molly’s climactic reaffirmation of her marital vows yes I will yes all the more meaningful.

I have the sense that Joyce’s high reputation is partly based on the admiration of those who don’t really appreciate what’s great about him, but only assume anything so confusing must be profound. His profundity lies not in his abstruseness but in his naturalism, his parody of primitive myth, and his insistence that even in so imperfect a world, the center can hold, and not everything falls apart. Joyce was imperfect, for sure, but he was no amphibian.

World's Fair

World's Fair: a Novel by E.L. Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was asked by Moment Magazine to write about a book by a Jewish writer who had influenced me, and I chose Doctorow's charming and cunningly straightforward World's Fair, which won the National Book Award in 1986.  Click here to read the article.


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Non Serviam

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On June 15, 1917, a U.S. marshal and 12 New York City policemen entered the Lower East Side offices of the radical magazine Mother Earth and placed its editor under arrest.  The U.S. was mobilizing to enter World War I, and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft in violation of the Selective Service Act passed earlier that year.  She brought with her to the jailhouse, according to Vivian Gornick, only two things: "a small toilet case" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.


Joyce's novel was a rare object at that time (though, admittedly, not so rare as Emma Goldman's toilet case).  At the time Goldman was arrested, Portrait had been in print for little more than six months in an edition of less than a thousand.  Yet it’s fitting, even if surprising, that she had a copy and attached such importance to it, since Joyce wrote the quintessential book against "the spirit of unquestioning obedience" that Goldman deplored.


While Goldman rebelled publicly against governments, armies, corporations, and churches in order to even the scales of justice, Joyce ignored a political bagatelle such as World War I.  He wrote not of the struggle to liberate a people but of the individual’s struggle to liberate himself—if need be, from his people.  In his book on the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus—the best book ever written on male adolescence, I think—Stephen liberates himself above all from his own twisted conscience.  And that is hard enough.  To overthrow a government of the people is not so hard, perhaps, as to overthrow the government of the heart.


Plato confused conscience with reason, but Freud, the ultimate analyst of corrupt conscience (a.k.a. neurosis), did not.  He knew that for some it could be a catalogue of hysteric, childish dangers with sometimes pitiless, bullying, and sophistical methods for enforcing its prohibitions.


Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus rebels against such irrational conscience, conscience that rules not by reason but by incantations and scare tactics, a sovereign conscience that “force hath made supreme / Above his equals” as Satan says of God in Paradise Lost Book I, ll 248-249.  At times Stephen shares the apostate angel’s “unconquerable will” and “courage never to submit or yield,” as Milton puts it.  When the priest names the cardinal Satanic sin—“non serviam: I will not serve” (Portrait p 117)—and says you burn in Hell for it, Stephen cowers and chastens himself.  But reason, courage, and self-sympathy prevails; in the novel’s last pages Stephen twice echoes Satan’s famous line, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” (PL I, l 263); he tells his friend Cranly “I will not serve” on p 239 and “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church” on p 247.  Dedalus soars over Hell with self-made wings, over the Irish Sea to Europe, hoping “to fly by those nets” of church and homeland (p 203) which are the aliases by which demonic conscience makes itself known.


This inner conflict, which shapes Portrait, in turn takes its shape from the family conflict in which its template was cast.  Just like in Paradise Lost, where the many crises of conscience turn on relations between God the Father and his curious, jealous children, Portrait is all about fathers and sons.  Patrick Parrinder, author of a great essay on the novel called “A Portrait of the Artist,” says of Stephen Dedalus: “his father’s voice plays a crucial part in the novel.  Portrait begins (as we have seen) with his father’s words and ends with a cry addressed to an imaginary father.”  It’s battle and rapprochement between father and son, rebellion and submission, resentment and idolization, and a vacillation between these two positions, conducted wholly in the realm of language.  While writing my college thesis on Portrait I counted instances of the word ‘father’ and came up with 193 (including ‘governor’ three times and ‘Papa’ once) in 253 pages.  (Since this was before the internet and e-books, I counted by circling ‘father’ whenever I came across it and then I went back and tallied them up on notebook paper with hash marks in sets of five!)


There’s a beautiful triangle form inside of Portrait, with sin at one end of its base and piety at the other, and a conciliation between the two at its glorious flying vertex.  Only Joyce could inscribe this abstract form onto a novel of such incomparable specificity and naturalism.  He does it with three motivic lines on Stephen’s approach to reality.


First:


"It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin." p 103


Then:


"In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality." p 159


And then:


"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." p 253


There at the windy vertex Stephen throws off the yoke of oppressive conscience by replacing it with a conscience he made himself en route to maturity.  That is self-governance, no?  That is autonomy, and it enables "detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old," as Freud says in “The Transformations of Puberty,” the third of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.


I’ll soon be forty years old.  I’ve been done with puberty for months.  Now, if I could just move past this nasty, moody adolescence.  Well, here I go with my wax wings on, to set sail over the abyss, muttering to myself, “ ‘Indigestibly byronic’?  I find that incontestably mo-ronic, Mr. Kenner….”  Shit, it’s a long way down there.



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Another Day in June

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mrs. Dalloway may take a back seat to To the Lighthouse (to which I'm partial, for one), but it probably doesn't take a back seat to anything else in English prose fiction.  Like Ulysses, it takes place on a single day in June and it enters the thoughts of various Londoners (as opposed to Dubliners) on that day, often compelling different characters to reflect on one event, one object, one person from their many different vantages.  It's striking how often those different viewpoints agree, as opposed to disagree.  With an omniscience that hovers over all of London and thrusts itself confidently into any heart it wishes, Woolf creates a very firm sense of a fixed reality outside her diverse characters' minds, one that commands their attention and thought whether they like it or not.  This is both a departure from the relativism of the postmoderns (Woolf's characters have in no sense 'created' their own reality) and a feat of writerly verisimilitude.  I hate to compare this book to Ulysses, since I've been under Joyce's spell since I was 19 and still worship him, but there is something leaner, more elegant, more coldly beautiful--like a Bernini sculpture--something more profound even, in Woolf's affirmation of life.  For one thing, the alternative to that affirmation is made plainer in Woolf than in Joyce; in Woolf that alternative in self-destruction and despair is as real to her suicidally-depressed characters as it was to the author herself.  The dialectic between the despairing Septimus Warren Smith and the life-embracing Clarissa Dalloway makes Woolf's June book somehow more necessary than Joyce's.  The stakes are higher.  The narration is more stout-hearted as it insists on visualizing the grimmest coordinates on the map of human emotion.  Joyce pays the price in his art, perhaps, for having it a little bit easier in his life.


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The Day of the Rabblement

The Critical Writings of James Joyce by Ellsworth Mason

Joyce begins his essay "The Day of the Rabblement," written when he was 19: “No man, said the Nolan [Giordano Bruno of Nola], can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude….  [I]t is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabblement.”

Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for asserting that the sun was a star like any other.  Just the sort of man Joyce was likely to admire, as he never met anybody's terms but his own--whether at 19 when Father Henry Browne rejected his essay from a literary magazine at University College Dublin (he self-published it with his buddy Francis Skeffington), or in his mid-50s, at the height of his fame, when he was paid little for the manuscript of Finnegans Wake, which took him 20 years to write.  He cared less about pay and more about commas, omissions of which were among many errata Joyce discovered in Viking's edition of the Wake.  He caused them to publish a pamphlet listing every last correction down to the comma and kerning of the letters.

This collection of expository prose, mostly written when Joyce was himself the young man he portrayed in his first novel, is not for the casual reader of Joyce.  But there's much here of interest for those with a serious interest in Joyce's art, his aesthetics, and his biography.

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A Postcard from Nietzsche's Haus

My blog this week, on Nietzsche, savagery, self-destruction, Lake Sils, Anne Frank, and stones in umbrellas, appears here, at writershouses.com.  This is one of my best essays, on one of the best essayists of all time.

James Joyce's Martello Tower

In September 1904, James Joyce lived in an old demilitarized tower on the coast south of Dublin.  After his roommate nearly shot him in the middle of the night, he left the tower and Ireland forever.  Joyce later set the memorable first chapter of Ulysses in the tower.  It remains my favorite chapter of Ulysses (the rest is also not bad), and I visited the Martello Tower on my honeymoon, which was not quite before the advent of the internet, but definitely before the advent of Goodreads.  More on the tower and the relation between fiction and reality in Ulysses plus a picture of me looking fairly bloated from a steady diet of tea scones on top of the tower in my blog, which guest stars this week at www.writershouses.com.

This link will take you there.

Walter Pater and the Modernists

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Good, empathic, sensitive, wise and true Walter Pater, secular prophet to a generation of modernists.

Pater’s aesthetics favor the neo-classicism and “Greek sensuousness” of the Renaissance, which he says “does not fever the conscience” in the way that medieval “Christian asceticism” does.  He abjured the latter philosophy as one which discredits “the slightest touch of sense.”  (However, he sees the roots of the Renaissance in the middle age, as far back as Abelard.)  Major modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Yeats drew inspiration from Pater and created an art continuous with the Renaissance in its focus on individual, worldly experience.  This is what makes Adam Phillips's introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition so execrable: he tries to appropriate Pater into a postmodern tradition of “terrible skepticism” that has very little to do with him and much more to do with the world-denying medieval philosophies Pater rejected--what Oscar Wilde, Pater's student at Oxford, referred to as "the maladies of medievalism".

With a line from the Bible, Pater encapsulates his idea of Christian asceticism as the antithesis of “artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness”: I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and lo!  I must die.

The speaker of this line, from 1 Samuel, is Jonathan, whose father Saul is one of the great nutcases of the Bible.  Saul has declared a religious fast, enforceable by death, to thank God for delivering the Philistines into the hands of the Israelites.  But Jonathan didn’t hear the decree, was hungry, and ate some honey (is that a euphemism?—eating honey off the end of his “rod,” which was “in his hand”? Hmm.).  At any rate, when Saul hears Jonathan’s words, he responds with characteristic paternal feeling, “God do so and more also: for thou shalt surely die, Jonathan.”  Saul, like Abraham before him who brought his son Isaac up a hill to kill him for his God, is prisoner to a conscience of irrational extremes.  It’s up to people who think more sensibly about conscience to rescue Jonathan, and they do, declaring to Saul: “God forbid: as the LORD liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground.”

That’s the kind of lawyer I’ll need in Purgatory, me and the great and decent Walter Pater.

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James Joyce's "Grace": Temperance of Conscience

The psychoanalyst Eugene Mahon in 2006 published a wonderful paper in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child entitled “The Invention of Purgatory: A Note on the Historical Pedigree of the Superego.”  He writes of Purgatory as a kind of “third way” in the history of imaginings of the afterlife:

“If Heaven and Hell sound absolute in their depiction of total damnation or total eternal salvation, Purgatory seems to represent a yearning for continued communication with the afterlife in an attempt to modify the imagined sufferings of departed ‘souls.’ ”

Mahon then poses the fascinating question: “Is the psychology that led to the concept of Purgatory a possible forerunner of the later Freudian concept of the superego, which, at its most mature, rejects splitting and magical absolutism in favor of a more reasoned assessment of guilt and pleasure?”

The question caused me to turn back to “Grace,” the penultimate short story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, in which Tom Kernan drunkenly falls down some pub stairs on the way to the bathroom and bites off the end of his tongue.  The memory or idea of this incident seems to have had some importance for Joyce, as it reappears in Ulysses in the interior monologue of Molly Bloom: “Tom Kernan that drunken little barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk in some place or other…”  Joyce’s brother Stanislaus informs us that “Grace” treats the Kernan fall as an allegory: “Mr Kernan’s fall down the steps of the lavatory,” Stanislaus writes in My Brother’s Keeper, “is his descent into hell, the sickroom is purgatory, and the Church in which he and his friends listen to the sermon is paradise at last.”

Most of “Grace” takes place in that Purgatorial “sickroom,” where Kernan’s friends sit and talk with him while he recuperates; eventually, they make plans to atone, as inhabitants of Purgatory are meant to do.  The word “grace” is in fact one intimately connected with Purgatory in the Christian faith.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that Christian Purgatory is “the state in which those who have died in grace expiate their sins….”

Whether Joyce would agree with Mahon’s interpretation of Purgatory I don’t know, but Joyce clearly had Purgatory on his mind in the writing of “Grace,” a story I never much liked because it seemed to ridicule its own graceless characters in a simplistic and unsympathetic way.  But rereading the story with Mahon’s insights in mind, I think Joyce may have been using the idea of Purgatory in a more sympathetic way than I first understood.  While the characters certainly look foolish in their slapstick discussion of theology (Mr. Cunningham tells a ludicrous story about an Irish priest they all know who supposedly argued with the Pope over papal infallibility only to be overruled on the question by infallible papal verdict)—but while they’re foolish, they’re also wiser than I first guessed—especially the hero, Tom Kernan, with the bitten-off tongue.

Of the fourteen stories in Dubliners based on a Christian vice or virtue (that is, all the stories except “The Dead”), “Grace” occupies the anchoring fourteenth position.  The virtue Joyce assigned to this story is clearly temperance, as Kernan and friends seek to temper their drinking.  But more importantly, they exhibit a healthy temperance when it comes to the conscience that damns sinners to eternal Hell.  As such, “Grace” is not only deep, but a sort of antidote to the damning syndrome of psychological paralysis introduced in the collection’s first story, “The Sisters.”

Kernan’s friends’ discussion of sin and atonement is warm-hearted, jovial, and hilariously funny, nothing like the grave treatment of sin in that opening story.  There are no bottled-up, paralyzed, tortured figures here.  Kernan amiably goes along with the plan to confess in church, but he knows the limits of his conscience.  When Mr. Cunningham tells him he has to stand up with a lighted candle and renew his baptismal vows, he balks.  Joyce writes:

“No, damn it all,” said Mr. Kernan sensibly, “I draw the line there. I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the retreat business and confession, and... all that business. But... no candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!”

Shortly thereafter Kernan rephrases his objection to the candle ceremony in a wonderful and telling way: “I bar the magic-lantern business!” he cries.  It’s as though Mr. Kernan, in waving off “the magic-lantern business,” is renouncing precisely that “magical absolutism” of conscience that Mahon describes as the animating force in the Manichean system of Heaven and Hell.  Kernan’s conscience “sensibly” makes a Purgatorial compromise wherein he’ll renounce Satan but not himself, who he stands up for with his sense of humor intact: “I’ll just tell him my little tale of woe.  I’m not such a bad fellow—” he tells his wife.

This jolly, kindly, self-tolerant, all-together-now group of friends may drink too much, but it appears they’ve achieved a higher form of grace in Joyce’s eyes: temperance of conscience.  This hilarious story of self-forgiveness has now become a favorite of mine.  Another indication of its importance to Joyce is its prefiguration of Leopold Bloom, the amiable, self-tolerant protagonist of Ulysses; one of Kernan’s friends, Mr. M’Coy, is an advertising canvasser married to a soprano (like Bloom—and when Molly thinks of Tom Kernan in Ulysses she also has some unflattering words for Mrs. M’Coy’s singing).  “Grace” also contains very funny mention of a banker named Mr. Harford, an Irish Jew like Bloom.  Joyce writes that “his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate, and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest through the person of his idiot son.  At other times they remembered his good points.”

Mr. Harford the Jew is not only saved, comically, from damnation but, in Joyce’s created conscience, granted an apotheosis—into the stardom of Leopold Bloom.

The Bible as Literature

The Book of Genesis by R. Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom says that Freud learned all his psychology from Shakespeare. Would it be radical to suggest that Shakespeare learned half of his psychology from the Romans and the other half from the Hebrew Bible?

Robert Alter says of the Bible’s authors, "[T]he Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of ... lifelike characters and actions, and so they created an unexhausted source of delight for a hundred generations of readers." The Bible is generally more realist in style and more concerned with the minute details and subtle intricacies of mental life than say, Homeric epic, or the plays of Aeschylus, where emotions certainly occupy a central position but are seen at a longer psychic distance and are represented in more abstract ways.

When Cain is snubbed by God, who heeds Abel’s offering but not the older brother's, I can put myself in Cain’s shoes (sandals) more readily than I can in those of say, Menelaus, after Paris absconds with his wife. I understand Menelaus on a more intellectual level. When Cain is snubbed, the Bible says “his face fell” and that God asked him, “Why is your face fallen?” The narration and the figures in the stories themselves are remarkably attendant to the inner life, to discrepancies between the outward manifestations of thought and feeling and the inner facts, to discrepancies between intention and action, even between inner ideas and deeper levels of consciousness (i.e., the Bible depicts lies told to oneself; i.e., denial ain’t just the river where Moses turned up in an ark of bulrushes). Noah’s ostracism of his son and grandson and Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar are entirely modern-feeling accounts of guilt and jealousy and the way such emotions are handled in the psyche.

R. Crumb’s recently published illustrations of the Book of Genesis amplify this psychological pathos in a wonderful way without diminishing the Bible's subtlety. Crumb shows Cain sweating under the weight of his offering to God juxtaposed with the tiny lightweight lamb that Abel brings. You see how unfair and hurtful it was for Cain and understand what came next.

Some of the Crumb illustrations are funny and implicitly ask subversive questions about God, particularly in the earlier chapters, where God enters the story as a kind of lunatic artisan who likes to make things for reasons unknown to anyone, including, apparently, himself and who gets furiously dissatisfied with his creations and takes out all his frustrations on his children like the put-upon alcoholic Farrington in James Joyce’s story “Counterparts.” The things God yells about seem not to make any sense as in a real human temper tantrum. The opening passages of Genesis may lose some of their gravitas in this version, but the familial dysfunction at the heart of so many of the Bible stories is thrown into bold relief. Furthermore, the satire in these early parts lends a certain existential irony to the stories, which I appreciate, and which it might be argued is not even foreign to the biblical writers. Alter sees the Bible’s main agenda as the depiction of human character in all its variety and consistency, and that character's interrelation with forces beyond human control—fate, destiny, chance (or God, if you prefer)—to create what we call history. Sometimes the biblical heroes themselves don’t understand God’s designs, and sometimes laughter is the result, as when Sarah laughs at God’s annunciation of her pregnancy in old age and this laughter is commemorated in Isaac’s name, which means “he who laughs.” Sometimes the heroes object to God's designs, as when Abraham bargains for Lot’s life. Sometimes God seems like a personification of the sort of natural disaster that just befell Haiti as when God wantonly destroys Babel. It might be argued that the biblical writers purposely made God at times cruel and outrageous because fate is cruel and outrageous. And inasmuch as the Bible writers rationalized natural disasters as punishments for bad behavior (as Pat Robertson does even today) or otherwise rationalized them as in any way useful or necessary or morally ordained—well, then this benighted and primitive element of their worldview deserves satire.

On the whole, however, what’s so remarkable about the ancient writers of the Bible is not what's primitive about them, but what is modern. They have honored the complexity and majesty of the real world with the most meticulous artistry and have not only bequeathed their wise and beautiful stories to later readers but their techniques to later writers and artists.

I reread Genesis in Crumb’s illustrated edition (which uses Robert Alter’s translation, a major upgrade from any I’ve read, sensitive as it is the artistic aims of the original Hebrew) and afterward I read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, a masterpiece of literary criticism and a highly accessible one at that. If you want a pair of excellent guides to one of the great artistic creations in the history of humankind, I commend to you the Roberts Alter and Crumb.

Addendum: On Bloom’s notion that Freud got everything from Shakespeare; this is surely “the anxiety of influence” in action—a wonderful concept Bloom invented with a little help from Freud. (As that immortal rock band The Bettelheims said, “I get by with a little help from my Freud....”)


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Ulysses is a Modern Novel, Not a Postmodern Novel

Somewhere, in the last ten or twenty years or so, Dale Peck wrote that the development of the novel in English took a wrong turn somewhere in the middle of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His attack was really on post-modernism, and all literature that appears complex and self-referential and obscurantist. Apparently Peck blames James Joyce for this development in literature, and his attack has produced much bluster on the internet, most of it in defense of post-modernism. I have no wish to defend post-modernism, but I would like to defend Ulysses, which in my view deserves a throne among modern novels for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the obscurantist literature that came after it.

Post-modernism is primarily concerned with skepticism, with what is false, with what we cannot know, with what makes us confused; the modernism that preceded it was above all else concerned with knowing reality in more depth than ever before, with depicting both the physical world and inner psychological experience with an unprecedented level of realism. A.D. Nuttall noted the profound engagement with reality in modern art when he observed, “Joyce, the disciple of Homer, listened to real Dubliners and Cézanne, the disciple of Poussin, stared at apples till they rotted on the cloth….” Joyce's naturalism is his real triumph. You see, hear, feel, smell, and taste Dublin on those pages. As Joyce's brother Stanislaus said, "Dublin lies stretched out before the reader, the minute living incidents start out of the pages. Anybody who reads can hear the people talk and feel himself among them." You see deep into the memory and the psychology of its three main characters.

In that sense I can't think of two more dissimilar writers than Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce (to whom Pynchon is sometimes compared). Both are hard to understand, but trying to understand Pynchon is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of most of the pieces; he once told his friend Jules Siegel that "I was so fucked up while I was writing it [Gravity's Rainbow], that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant." Joyce's complexity, by contrast, rewards study and persistence, it illuminates new vistas of reality. W.B. Yeats at first dismissed Ulysses as "a mad book!" but on closer examination he recanted: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence." Joyce's allusions are meaningful. The equivocations in his work honor the real fact of psychological ambivalence and the real nuance and complexity of reality itself. That is nothing so very new, in fact. Walter Pater noted this respect for the nuance of reality, which Francis Bacon called "subtilitas naturae," in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Post-modern equivocation and obscurantism rests on the thesis that reality is not knowable in the first place, that paradox and blindness is the order of the day. That's a million miles away from James Joyce, who considered himself, according to his biographer Richard Ellmann, to be in hot pursuit of a classical ideal of truth and beauty as articulated by Thomas Aquinas.

Don't be daunted by Ulysses. Don't be ashamed to skip a lot of it either. Joyce had acrobatic powers as a writer and he couldn't resist showing them off in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Some of what he did can be appreciated by dipping into it without doing a years-long archaeological dig to unearth everything that's there. The parts of Ulysses I love and remember best are lucid descriptions of Bloom's kitchen, and Molly's memories of singing by the piano, Stephen's apprehensions about the future mixed with his sensations of the sea and the sand as he walks along the beach, that sort of thing. While Yeats came to appreciate the book's coherence and genius, he also admitted later that he never finished it. Neither did George Bernard Shaw. So if you skip some healthy chunks of it, you'll be in good company.