HEADLINES! (AND MORE HEADLINES!)
Congratulations! you are now more than a third of the way through Ulysses (at least episode wise). You've survived the underworld of "Hades" and have now entered the land of windy "Aeolus" where you are greeted by more Dublin denizens and... HEADLINES! Apropos considering the environs in which the episode is situated, don't you think? That Joyce is one clever cat I'll tell you what. Clam dever!
KNOWN KNOWNS
Putting aside Joyce's cleverness for the moment, I am wondering a couple of things: one, is it possible to know or even construct a theory about what Ulysses is about at this point in the book? and two, given what Joyce has given us, can we begin to make meaning of the text?
Okay, what do we know so far, or as our friend "Rummy" would say, what are our known knowns? Well, we know that Ulysses is, on the surface, the story of two guys meeting. We know that those two guys are Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. And we know that Ulysses is structured upon Homer's Odyssey, and that episode names in Ulysses have symbolic correspondences with their Homeric namesakes.
Of course, we also know other things, specific information such as the fact that Bloom is married to Mrs. Marion (Molly) Bloom née Tweedy, and that Stephen currently resides in the Martello Tower with Malachi (Buck) Mulligan. We could go on listing what we know, but we need not revisit all the minutiae. The point is, we now have lots of information but are still in no position to really know what we are reading about. We are a short novels length into Ulysses yet the story is still veiled in obscurity.
WE MUSN'T BE LED AWAY BY WORDS
There are many reasons why Ulysses remains so mysterious this far into the narrative. Hundreds of obscure allusions and non apparent symbolism (known unknowns), and constantly changing narrative voices contribute are major contributors to this mystery. But I would like add another culprit to this list: disjunction. One of the stylistic elements Joyce seems to employ is the disjointed narrative where the story appears to be ever shifting from episode to episode. One minute we're in a tower, the next we're in a school, then we're walking along the beach, suddenly there's a new guy we never even heard of and we're at his beautiful house, with his beautiful wife, and then we ask ourselves, well, how did we get here?!*
*(Sorry about that, Talking Heads was playing in the background and "Once in a Lifetime" got stuck in my head.)
The point is, we feel we can never quite get our bearings, through theses changes. There doesn't seem to be any flow to the story.
But I submit that the disjointed narrative of Ulysses is more imaginary than real, and "Aeolus" is the perfect exemplar of this disguised disjunction. Diced into a series of short newspaper articles set apart by bold type headlines, you might think that a couple dozen different miniature narratives are taking place... and you'd be wrong*. Beneath the visual surface of the text, i.e. the divisions by headline, is a continuous storyline. The headlines seem to mean very little in actuality. The style serves to obscure the reality of the content, misdirecting the eye, and thereby the psyche, away from the actual consistency of the text. In this same way the stylistic shifts that make up the surface of Ulysses can misdirect us from the consistency of the story taking place before our eyes.
*Pericles Lewis of Yale University points out that there are actually five stories going on in this episode, but those are subtextual and won't concern us here. We are just trying to get through the text at this point.
LOYAL TO LOST CAUSES
Having said that, it doesn't change the fact that we still don't know what Ulysses is about at this point, and that can lead to some frustration. The fact is we can't really "know" the story of Ulysses until we've read Ulysses (unknown unknown?). This realization can cause some readers to feel like they've gone from being lost in the text to believing that the text is a lost cause. And it doesn't help when smart people write stupid articles like this one that appeared in Slate magazine.
Well, it's a free country and I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinion (even if it's wrongheaded...). So I will just say that the mark of being an adult is that you make up your own mind and don't delegate the responsibility to "experts" who think they know your mind better than you. And really, the idea that you could read only a single episode of Ulysses and have it be a worthwhile experience, as though it were a soundbite, denigrates the novel and underestimates your intelligence. Let me tell you how you should feel about that. You should feel insulted! Yeah! That's how you should feel!
Now run along and go play! But only after you've finished your reading.
RAW NOTES
Immediately we are confronted with a completely new style
Comparison of narrative flow between "normal" stories and Ulysses: as I began reading Aeolus it immediately occurred to me that this story doesn't flow like other stories. It seems to be constantly disjuncting, if I can make up a word. This becomes very apparent during "Aeolus" because the text of the episode is divided up into a bunch of little morsels that makes the particular episode feel disjointed. I think about Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (another of my favorite books) and how that story is so fluid and easy to follow. The characters go through a logical progression in both their exposition and the issues that confront them. The general issue of the story -- the trials and tribulations of the marriageability of the sisters Bennett -- is made plain to the reader early enough to anticipate (roughly) what one might expect. Or at least enough to keep the reader focused on what the resolution might be. Austen creates a great deal of mystery as to how things will resolve, so there is much the reader doesn't know. But, at least the reader knows what the story is. It is a continuously progressive narrative that the reader can easily follow, with more than enough signs to keep the reader safely on the road. Between style shifts and shifts between the stories of Bloom and Stephen, not to mention the constant issues of navigating the narrative voice shifts, the story of Ulysses seems to lack continuity. The first ride is a bumpy ride. Very bumpy. I have to remind myself of this because now, after so many readings and so much investigation the story reads to me like a regular narrative.
When you think about it every story is a mystery. A man is found dead in an ally; who is the murderer? Mrs. Bennett is desperate to marry off her eldest daughters before they become old maids; will they marry, and to whom? The mystery of most stories is how the story will resolve. A story is an interesting means of asking questions, presenting mysteries, or creating dilemmas to be solved or resolved. But typically, the story itself is not the dilemma. But Ulysses presents us with the additional burden of solving the mystery of the story itself, and part of this mystery is created through disjunction, that is, the surface text seems to shift from episode to episode. So, just when you feel like you're into some kind of narrative groove, the scene changes, or the characters change, or the style changes.
I recently read Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and it took me, what, maybe twenty or thirty pages to figure out what the story was about. I have little doubt that there is more to the story than what the surface text reveals, but the surface text makes for a compelling story in it's own right. This holds true for other great books as well: 1984, Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, blah, blah, blah... You can figure out what the story is with little effort (the author makes sure of that), and the story is a compelling one. But with Ulysses the story becomes part of the mystery. And this is true for both the surface story of 'two guys meeting' and doubly (more like decuply) for the myriad sub-stories. Joyce subtracts plot from the narrative, shrouding it in mystery, leaving only prose and style, and the style of "Aeolus" is decidedly disjunctive. At least at first glance. As you get into the main prose of the episode it becomes pretty clear that the narrative is pretty continuous and reads fairly straightforward if you don't take those headlines too seriously.
So what do those headlines mean? How should we interpret them? Answers: not sure, and don't. The truth is I haven't taken much time to investigate this particular aspect of Ulysses (although you can bet that I will now). The fact of the matter is that you don't need to worry about those headlines during your first reading. They don't interfere with your ability to read or understand the text in any significant way so... who cares? I've always felt they were some sort of red herring, although I'm fairly sure they are not. But that's how I have treated them up to this point in my Ulysses education. I'm confident that once I ferret out a reliable, or at least plausible, explanation of the headlines, I will be slapping my forehead for missing their symbolic significance.
Is it possible to derive any meaning from Ulysses at this point?
Is it possible to know what Ulysses is about by episode seven?
• "Ireland my country. "
• "Two crossed keys..."
• "I could go home still: tram: something I forgot. Just to see: before: dressing. No. Here. No."
• "The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the dusty windowpane"
• "Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply. —Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an accent on the whose."
• "He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his jacket, jingling his keys in his back pocket."-- not Bloom...
• "Madam Bloom... The vocal muse. Dublin's prime favourite. Lenehan gave a loud cough."
• "I want you to write something for me, he (Myles Crawford) said. Something with a bite in it... Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy."
• "Child, man, effigy."
• "... he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day"
• "Where are those blasted keys?"
• "Wonder is that young Dedalus the moving spirit."
• "But it makes them giddy to look so they pull up their skirts..."
No comments:
Post a Comment