Nymph O’Mania

Post Twenty-four

In his schema Joyce labels ‘chapter 4’ Calypso and Homer tells us that Calypso was a nymph. A nymph that held Odysseus captive on her island for seven years of sexually frenzied hard labour. Poor guy. Yet he never lost sight of his goal Ithaca and return to family and so like Heinrich Tannhauser to Venus he pleaded ‘Göttin, lass' mich ziehn!’, Goddess, let me go! After all, there’s only so much orgiastic frenzy an Ithacan pilgrim can take.

Cajoled by Zeus via his messenger Hermes, Calypso relents and Odysseus is allowed on his way. And so in our book Bloom too is released from some sort of imprisonment to commence his Wanderings of Ulysses. Joyce takes liberties with the Homeric chronology but as he calls the chapter Calypso, we are bound to ask some questions for instance:

·        Who is our nymph?

·        What trap?

·        Where is Ithaca?

 Who is our nymph? The island of Gibraltar was originally known as Calpe’s island. That Molly is Gibraltarian must raise red flag alert that she might be Calypso and indeed there is much supporting evidence. She has her husband running around after her, making her breakfast, clearing the clothes, fetching the book etc. etc. Like Calypso, Molly is into sex; the smutty taste in literature and of course the likely infidelity that afternoon with Boylan. Even the hiding of the incriminatory letter beneath the pillow smacks of Calypso who was known as ‘the concealer’. Maybe she and Bloom have been bonking like mad these last seven years and so it all fits. We’ll see. He Bloom, certainly thinks erotic thoughts as we know from his lusty reverie concerning next door’s maid.

But there’s another contender. Midway through the chapter we learn that a framed picture ‘the Bath of the Nymph’ hangs above the marital bed. She reminds Bloom a bit of a younger Molly: “Tea before you put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer.”  So which is it? Or is it both?

It may be helpful to park this while we consider the other issues. 

Trap? What trap? Bloom is a free man; he ambles to the butcher and returns to his house; still apparently unfettered. Thus far, we have gleaned that he’s a decent man who makes his wife breakfast in bed and speaks empathetically with the cat. He’s a little lustful as he ogles the next door maid but inside our heads who among us isn’t?  It’s not one might think, a morning of powerful emotions. Pleasant warmth, even this early. Yet “Grey horror seared his flesh” and “He felt the flowing qualm spread over him.” This not a man without a care in the world, no matter how benign the morning.

The two phrases relate to different but related concerns and as it transpires, point I feel to the same trap. The searing of his flesh occurred amidst reading the Zionist flier and just as a cloud cast him in shadow. The Promised Land in that instant morphing from overflowing milk and honey to a desolate barren volcanic dust-bowl. The uncomfortable qualm oozes down his spine is as he reads Milly’s letter; in particular her reference to Boylan. She turned 15 the previous day and not only is she on the verge of sexual activity and now resident in Mullingar, miles from her father’s protection but she’s on the radar of Blazes Boylan. We know that Bloom suspects him of taking sexual liberties with Molly but oh my god, is this sexual predator also after his daughter Milly? Little wonder the qualm spread down his spine as he read her letter.

The trap though is sexual bondage of a broader nature. Molly’s likely infidelity and Bloom’s lusty reverie in the butcher both stem from the broken sexual chemistry between husband and wife. We don’t yet know details but throw in that their poor son Rudy died aged only eleven days and we are sensing something is amiss between the sheets. Sure enough we will ascertain in due course that it’s really been derailed since Rudy died eleven years ago.

Bloom’s Promised Land, his Zion, his Ithaca is not an Israel to be (see my post 3: The Promised Land is No Place Like Home), it’s in bed with Molly, performing the beast with two backs. He’s (indeed both of them) caught in the trap of a marriage that is sexually off the boil and he doesn’t know how to get it going again. Despite his wife telling him to scald the teapot. See my post 4: Poldy, Scald the Teapot! .

So let’s return to just who has him trapped. I’m sure Molly is quite wrapped up in it but am an insufficient amateur psychologist to explain why. I’m on sturdier ground with the nymph whose picture hangs above the bed, the ancient but younger Molly. Bloom we shall discover, believes the Jewish apocryphal tale that the baby’s health comes from the father. So blames himself for Rudy’s tragically early demise. Sex with Molly risks more babies, more death. Bloom cannot take that chance. Imagined sex with the nymph above the bed and as we shall see, similar sordid but safe encounters are a poor substitute but at least no-one is getting pregnant.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Put A Pin In That Chap

Post Twenty-Three

Among the many interesting lines in Proteus, the sentence “Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you?” is I should say, up there with the best of them. But what is Stephen and Joyce getting at? Some possibilities are considered below.

The most obvious in the chapter that Joyce later suggested might be known as Proteus, concerns the sea god Proteus himself. He lurked around the Nile delta, where sailors were stranded unless Proteus provided wind and waves. Menelaus was stuck there on the rocky island Pharos, just as Stephen will be stranded on a rock on the beach as the serpentine tongues of waves lap about him. Eidothea, daughter of Proteus takes pity on Menelaus. She explains why he’s stranded and that his only chance is to capture Proteus when he comes ashore with his herd of seals for noon slumbers. But that’s easier said than done for Proteus is a shape-shifter and will wriggle, shake and alter for all he's worth to escape. But pin him down and he’ll help.

So there’s our first interpretation: put a pin in Proteus to hold him down, just as Menelaus is equally pinned to the rocky island.

Our second and also pretty obvious, is that in this chapter of change and creativity, Stephen is trying to create. One might in a way, consider his musing as a sort of practical, testing out his theorems on aesthetics; all that very tricky theoretical stuff that Stephen tried to explain to Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen is trying to compose a poem and it concerns a vampire and virgin blood.

We have the line:

“He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.”

A vampire, a spirit residing in a no-man’s-land between human and animal, often a bat and able to change from one to the other. Killed or pinned down only by the plunging of a wooden stake through its heart. So that’s two.

The third is practical and runs from that lovely Joyce-created word, ‘almosting’. Stephen used it just earlier in the context of trying to grab hold of a dream before it disappeared up the flue of dawning consciousness. Here he needs to scrawl that vampire line on a bit of paper before he forgets it. He finds Deasy’s letter (yes, Nestor was of help in unintended ways) and tears off the blank end on which he can pin it down.

I think though my favourite gloss on the words relates to his erotic reverie. Ever since he imagines that the female cockle-picker gives him a sideways glance, he has uncharitably designated her a gypsy prostitute who can’t wait to get her lustful hands on him, her body he assumes in his poetic and vampiric reverie, being controlled by the moon and free of guilty restraint. He describes his sinful thoughts as ‘Morose delectation’ and fully expects the punishment which Thomas Aquinas says will surely follow. Not to mention that he fears going blind which may well be attributable to the same cause. These Jesuits have much to answer for and poor kid, he’s already on the look-out for vengeful thunderclouds which shall strike him dead. With sex on his mind, one may only imagine what’s going on in his trousers, “Alo! Bonjour, welcome as the flowers in May.”, he thinks, as his lust and his guilt vie for control. So, with his hand grenade in danger of exploding in his underpants, he’d better regain control by putting the pin back in it.

Whether he manages to do so or whether like Bloom in a few hours’ time (on this very rock?), he ejaculates into his trousers, is moot.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Hello Harvey

Post Twenty-two

Harvey, one of our North London Ulysses brethren asked the far from original but nonetheless worthy question: just what is the point of chapter three, Proteus? After plodding through two readings we were approaching half way through and like Harvey, some of us felt about as ‘stogged’ as that empty bottle of porter in the sand. Some passages do seem like an unfathomable mess of words and it is very tempting to just skip it and run to the sunny uplands of the joyous and far more fathomable Leopold Bloom.

So for Harvey and no doubt several others who thought but did not express the same question, I shall try to plead the case for Proteus and justify why it’s worth hanging in there. I don’t mean this to be a guide to the chapter, I can heartily recommend my book if you want that (!). This is not so much a what’s going on as a why is it going on.

By way of background, Stephen walks along the beach at Sandymount Strand. He engages no one and simply thinks to himself. Which means that its pages of dialogue are either memories (e.g. time spent in Paris with Kevin Egan and Patrice Egan) or imagined (e.g. the visit to his Aunt Sara in Strasbourg Terrace and his various discussions with his younger self).  It is probably also relevant in a structural sense that it is the last ‘chapter’ of the three chapter Telemachiad which may indicate a parallel both to Penelope being the last chapter of the bookending three chapter Homecoming and also to Hades, chapter three of the middle section, which occurs at the same time.

Significantly and obviously Proteus helps to establish Stephen’s character. There is no understanding of the book without understanding the three protagonists and so we can’t simply skip knowing Stephen, especially if we have not read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even if we have. The initial two chapters hinted of certain themes and characteristics; his guilt regarding his mother, his disdain for his father, his rejection of religion but this is a modernist book and so character will not be gift wrapped in narrative, rather it must be teased out as we walk half a mile in Stephen’s shoes - or rather Buck Mulligan’s cast-off boots. This chapter completes our stream of consciousness training. Telemachus was some initial prep in a chapter of significant dialogue before we limbered up in Nestor. To hazard a guess, I’d say Proteus is 10% narrative, 90% interior monologue and zero % dialogue; we really dwell under his skin and need to glean what we can.

He's a man in turmoil. Invaded by various demons and they work in mischievous concert. Let’s start with his lack of self-confidence. We saw this in Nestor with his envy of schoolboys whom he expects, are for all their tender years, at comparative ease with sex; already in imagined relationships whereas his younger self sat alone atop of a bus screaming ‘naked women’. His disdainful accusations directed at his younger self punctuate Proteus. The books he was to write but never did, the embarrassing play acting in front of his bedroom mirror.

His notion of self and self-worth is to my mind revealing. As he looked in the cracked mirror in Telemachus (and amateur psychologists will have a field day with that image, Wilde readers or not), he said:

“As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me?”

I hope I’m not alone in relating to this confused notion of self. I sometimes look in the mirror and wonder who is this face I see? Or occasionally if I catch myself in ugly profile (as Bloom will refer several chapters hence) I marvel at the strangeness of the person that is apparently me. I rather hope we all do this and that it is not just Stephen and I! What is self? We need the Proteus chapter not to tell us who we are but at least to remind our several selves to pose the question.

Proteus the sea-god was/is a shape-shifter and could become all manner of different beings, different personas. It’s almost impossible to pin him down; “Put a pin in that chap, will you?” Same with us and certainly the same with Stephen. For a while I was perplexed by his thought re the alibi bus ticket :

“Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

‘Other fellow did it: other me. ‘ points I think, to his paranoia at being comprised of various selves and was so unsure of the real Stephen that he needs evidential proof in terms of the punched ticket. The notion that one of his personae is capable of murder feeds into the imagined killing of the post office official and his inability to save a drowning man, both a little further on in the chapter.

I have previously blogged [Fathoming Fathoms] on the molecule changing ‘barnacle goose’ reference in this chapter and also on similar [The Milky Way ] in chapter nine with AE;IOU; both are of the many references to Stephen’s confused and arguably schizoid notion of ‘self’ which will also be replicated by Bloom in Circe and elsewhere. Little wonder he’s confused in this chapter of confused notion of reality. If we cannot trust the ineluctable modality of the visible, audible, tactile etc., that is, if we cannot trust what we perceive to be the reality around us, how can we trust our notion of self within it? And where does that leave self-worth? Aristotle’s answer was to move on and create some sort of reliable framework otherwise we all just go mad.

Having considered Stephen’s notion of self-worth, or lack of, let us ponder another essential characteristic evolved in this chapter, his bitterness. He feels alone and embittered. Resentful of the colonising Brits, he’s also mistrustful of the Fenian bombers such as Kevin Egan and equally of their political comrade, Arthur Griffith and his newly formed Sinn Fein. He feels usurped by the Catholic middle class in the guise of Buck Mulligan that accommodates the Brits and which has left him literally but more importantly spiritually homeless and of the simoniac Church (dringadring and jackpriests) which banishment from his life leaves a spiritual void. It is though perhaps in Art for that defines him, that the bitterness bites to the core. He is bitter that he didn’t write those intended books, that his self-proclaimed genius remains unrecognised (we’ll see that AE has not included him in the compendium of Ireland’s new young poets) and that he must create his art in English, the conqueror’s tongue. But those words, linguist though he may be, are the only tools available. Per A Portrait  

“His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”

These were all nets that he, a soul born in Ireland, was supposed to fly high to escape. But he failed. The blue telegram ‘curiosity to show’, called him back from bohemian Paris to his dying mother. The mother who even in the advance stages of cancer and despite their impoverishment, sent him postal orders to cash in Paris which must only enhance his guilt at the role he played in her death. Mulligan of course constantly touches this nerve, as if Stephen could possibly forget it.

The Proteus chapter also sheds light on Stephen’s opinion of his father Simon. Hawkman whose name he bears and whom in consubstantial terms he fears he will replicate; this talented witty man, now a well-liked (outside of his family) but impoverished drunk well known, too well known around the Dublin pubs. Stephen sees this father/son ambivalence not simply in Oedipal terms but before him in bar MacMahon with Kevin and Patrice Egan, in a wider sense in Daedalus and Icarus, Prince and King Hamlet, in Shakespeare and his father (and son) and in Jesus and God.

For me, the most significant characteristic is Stephen’s sense of insulation. He operates like too many of us, in a silo. Most comfortable alone with his own pretty destructive thoughts but when in company, especially if he tries to express such thoughts, is taken to be inadequate, aloof, arrogant bordering on aggressive and simply strange.

If Harvey, we take some of this from Proteus, then when we meet Bloom, we can better understand how he might help Stephen, despite having plenty of problems of his own. I have no doubt that this links to 16th June 1904, a day of huge significance for the 22 year old James Joyce for it is the day he first dated Nora Barnacle. Of what that date comprised depends on who one believes but at any rate it was the day on which for Joyce, the silo started to crumble ‘shattered glass and toppling masonry’ and that there was another human with whom he could relate. Not only this, that his art would be better expressed and enriched by a life shared with others; shared in the true sense.

Stephen recoils at both the live dog and the carcass of the dead dog but will perhaps unknowingly at this point, have registered the empathy that the live dog has for his dead brother and one never knows, by the early hours of 17th June, Stephen’s ‘other me’ may have improved for the better.

Stick with it Harvey.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

The Milky Way

Post Twenty One

I refer neither to our planet’s little corner of the universe nor to that petite chocolate bar that I used to scoff as a kid and which I see is still going strong. They used to say and maybe still do, that it was the snack one could eat between meals which technically is undeniable. But I am not interested in confectionery here and in fairness, I doubt the protectors of that brand are especially interested in what I have to say nor the product I wish to explore.

We take a break this week at North London Ulysses but on our return to the Proteus episode, shall meet Patrice Egan in a Parisian bar as he laps his warm milk. We are not sure what Stephen drinks, perhaps he sups from the same churn which would link to the milk delivered to the Martello tower and the Nestor cows that Mr. Deasy is so keen to save. But it’s a bit odd going to a bar and ordering milk. What’s going on? Apologies to the lovely folk at North London Ulysses but spoiler alert: it’s not milk.

What it is, is revealed a little later when we meet Patrice’s father Kevin and the reference to ‘froggreen wormwood’ before conclusively, we get the phrase:

“Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white.”

You guessed it, we’re talking Absinthe. The green fairy created from the flowers and leaves of the grand wormwood plant, though Joyce being Joyce it’s just as likely that ‘wormwood’ points to its reputation as to what the fang of the green fairy might do to one’s brain. But is it’s bark worse than it’s bite? The reputation for inducing psychedelic episodes may be why it was so popular among the Bohemians of fin de siècle Paris or it may be that it was this very radical popularity that so scared the Parisienne establishment. Thus the hype as well as the bans emerged. Whether the reputation is overblown and whether psychedelic or not, what is undeniable is it’s indecently high alcohol content which even in today’s over-regulated world lurks between 45 and 75% proof, UK. That’s 90-148 proof US; Wiki says. So if you have it with your morning cornflakes you really should seek professional help.

Which brings us back to milk. Absinthe is naturally green and the diehards like Kevin drink it neat but many including his son Patrice, add a little water and that’s when the magic happens. The chemists call it ‘precipitation’ and I failed my chemistry ‘O’ level so I know what I’m talking about. If you add water to whiskey it just looks like whiskey whereas with absinthe it goes milky-cloudy and unlike oil mixed with water and most other substances, it doesn’t separate again. It just stays milky and this apparently is very rare indeed.

It's a weird molecular thing which would appeal to Stephen who will muse in two hours how our molecular structure constantly renews so that over a five month period we are entirely new. Does that make us different people? Stephen will wonder, only half joking, if he still owes AE (George Russell) that guinea on the basis that the debt is down to Old Stephen but reflecting that he probably does, smiles again as he thinks: ae,iou.

Bloom will also contemplate our molecular structure and as the book progresses, we might think that Blephen or indeed Stoom could be the product of two souls Absinthe and water, that when mixed together refuse to obey the normal rules and do not separate again, they stay cloudy. A little swirly, mixed up and quite possibly unstable as together they slide by the Delta of Cassiopeia and into The Milky Way.

Some say alcohol is mother’s milk for the soul. That’s probably a pretty dangerous message but hey, as Patrice Egan says as he laps it up....schluss.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

The Year of the Big Wind

Post Twenty

It’s a bit breezy today in the UK. We don’t often get Amber warnings but today they are big and Red! Storm Dudley came and went and we barely noticed but his sister Eunice younger by a few days, means to ensure we sit up and pay attention. We famously underestimated a storm in 1987 when we were assured all would be well only to awaken that morning to the sight of forests flattened. Let’s hope this is not on that scale.

In Telemachus, Buck Mulligan having just expectorated a very rude rhyme concerning the ablutionary habits of Old Mother Grogan and Mrs. Cahill suggested:

“— That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.”

Haines you see was the English chap over from Oxford seeking quaint Irish stories to be promulgated as a collection in a book. In the quote above we see Mulligan in the act of trying to sell him a good story but unable to resist the back-hand insult with the barb that he’ll write five lines of text followed by ten pages of explanatory notes. He then sets the scene with Dundrum and weird sisters and big winds. One assumes that this one of Joyce’s many digs at WB Yeats. His sisters established the Dun Emer Guild at Dundrum around this time which promoted Irish legend arts and crafts and so chimed with much of Yeats’ poetry and the more general Gaelic revival. To call them weird is pretty insulting but is no doubt how Mulligan viewed the more spiritual end of the arts. It also brings to mind the witches in Macbeth so hardly flattering.

The year of the big wind refers to a storm that occurred 6th January 1839 in which hundreds died. It quite devastated the west of Ireland where literacy levels then and for much of the nineteenth century were nothing to write home about (bad pun – sorry) and so then and for subsequent decades time was marked at least apocryphally in the Grogan, the Cahill and many other households by reference to the year of the big wind.

Eunice is very likely an equal opportunity storm and so will no doubt hit Ireland as well as southern Britain and let’s hope that we all remain safe and that 2022 does not follow 1987 or heaven forbid 1839, into folklore.

For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Maladroit Deshil; the Right Write

Post Nineteen

From Nestor:

“On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.”

This passage has troubled me. It comes hot on the heels of Deasy’s tirade against the Jews and whilst Stephen puts up some resistance, in his mind he pictures this scene from his recent experience in Paris. The goldskinned men are strange to him. Exotica. Context pins them as Jews as Stephen so assumes. The Paris stock exchange, a grand building was also known as the temple, based as it was architecturally on the Temple of Vespasian and Titus in Rome and one naturally has in mind the money-lenders expelled by Jesus from the temple in Jerusalem. So this is not a flattering image and tends to dilute Stephen’s resistance to Deasy’s antisemitism. Yet if that’s his recollection then so be it.

These men spoke not in French or Stephen would have understood. The gabble of a strange tongue. They schemed, living on their wits to make money. Thickplotting. We shall be reminded of them shortly and throughout Ulysses as our ‘Jew’ Leopold Bloom shall plot various money-making schemes. These are strangers in a strange French land, like Kevin Egan, though not on the run after blowing up buildings, these fled for their lives after pogroms, grateful to leave with the gems on their fingers but little else to build a new life in whatever sanctuary they landed. Their brethren would have been Virags from Szombathely and my own maternal grandparents from Odessa to the docks of London’s east end.

Sanctuary? In the Paris of February 1904, the Dreyfus storm still raged and France was no sanctuary for Jews. They knew the rancours massed about them and sensed and Stephen sensed, that ‘time surely would scatter all.’ Too right. A mere 18 years after publication of Ulysses, nearly a quarter of all French Jewry would be rounded up and murdered by the Nazis along with the Roma and others. No great sanctuary in Ireland either as the Jews of Limerick found to their cost at ‘this very moment, this very instant’ as Bloom would remark later that day. All of which is fitting to remember in this week of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Maladroit. It’s a very particular choice of word and Joyce was nothing if not particular. Maladroit, not straight, not right. No ‘per vias rectus’ for the likes of these. No straight road to heaven, for as Mr. Deasy tells us, they (we) sinned against the light or to put it less charitably, they (we) killed Jesus and for this they (we) must take the left-hand path which goes way below.

It puts me in mind of a phrase we’ll see at 10.30 that evening and the opening words of Oxen of the Sun episode, set in the Holles Street maternity hospital.

               ‘Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus’

A mix of three words starting according to Gifford, with a corruption of ‘deashil’, an Irish word meaning to go to the right. Turn right for the maternity hospital, right is good, left is bad, bad luck. Left is no start for a new baby. Deasil; is it just me or is that worryingly close to ‘Deasy’? Skip forward those eighteen years or so from ‘22 and standing in the line to the right or the left had wholly different and sinister connotations.

It must be a comfort in life to have certainty. To know that this way is right and that way is wrong. The Jews it seemed are destined to wander; not just Jews, this is the perennial lot of the immigrant and refugee and it is only idiots such as Garrett Deasy that consider this as a negative. Immigrants add to the soul of society. Exotica is the spice of life. As an exhausted but still practical Bloom puts it much later that night:

               “Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History—would you be surprised to learn?—proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian who, in other respects, has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are proved to be so.”

And even later, a belter of a line by Bloom especially for 1 o’clock in the morning as a barb to Little Irishers:

               “The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles, your God was a jew, because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhere about in the county Sligo.”

Who’s to say what god is or from where god hails but the county Sligo which I’m sure is otherwise lovely in every respect, seems for this purpose a little.. well, maladroit.

For more Ulysses idle thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Coming of Age: Virus and Vico

Post Eighteen

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Jim and Ulysses, happy birthday to you!

As January peters out, we are merely hours from the 2nd February centenary, sorry I should say #Ulysses100 if I want to get noticed. To say celebrations may be to over-egg a touch but certainly all over the world Joyce fans and scholars are marking the occasion. Even non-Joyceans will do well not to notice the event. Here in our little corner of north London, North London Ulysses will be heading to the Clissold Arms pub in Fortis Green, better known for its Kinks connections than Joycean (but we’re on that case), to chat, to read and to partake of Guinness’s porter and Jameson’s whiskey (other beverages also available).

Turnout may be a little muted for part of our lovely group remains uncomfortable in public gatherings. Vaccined and boosted though the vast majority of us may be in the UK, a jig in a pub remains a little scarry for some and understandably so. This virus is not to be scoffed at. North London Ulysses started reading in mid-January; for some in the pub, for others on zoom and if on the centenary our party allows for the usual reading, we shall finish Nestor. In Ulysses Joyce was prescient in a number of ways; Irish independence, the rise of fascism and even possibly the holocaust, an Irish nod towards Europe but we can’t say that he foresaw Covid. And yet. And yet his reference in Nestor to a virus is indeed noted and not simply because the word appears, that would be silly and trite; bear with while I try to make something of substance.

It is, ironically, the headmaster Mr.Deasy, who draws our attention. Yet not ironic because it is via his ignorance and xenophobic, misogynous myopia that he imparts significant life lessons; for example that Stephen might do better learning than teaching. Deasy is concerned with the foot and mouth disease that is blighting Irish cattle and he has drafted a cliché-ridden letter that he would like Stephen with his newspaper connections, to help get published. Nestor is a chapter in which we wonder what it is to teach, to inspire the next generation and the pressure that imposes upon teachers. The episode opens with Stephen teaching history and so we contemplate how we view history. It’s all too easy and obvious to accept the conventional, ‘this follows that follows this follows that’ as Deasy’s religious orthodoxy would have us believe. It might be something more imaginative as a William Blake or a Kurt Vonnegut may ponder. A history in which an ancient Greek Ulysses might turn up in 1904 as a Leopold Bloom. Mark the phrase ‘Akasic records’ for future reference.

A mind expanding view of history requires glancing at a Neapolitan chap called Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Contrary to Mr. Deasy’s opinion, history says Vico isn’t a linear path leading inexorably into the manifestation of God’s light but rather a circular repetitive spiral starting with the voice of god (whatever that may be) and finishing in the same place. Meantime we trot through autocracy aristocracy, democracy and a descent into chaos before a huge cataclysm returns us to the wrath of god and the cycle repeats. For James Joyce the first world war must have been that cataclysm. I mean, what else? For us inhabiting this part of the twenty-first century (at least those outside of Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Uyghur) the Covid pandemic carries cataclysmic characteristics.  For Deasy the pandemic affected only cattle, which was devastating for farmers but only a matter of time before it percolated through the Irish economy and riddled a meat dependent wider society like marbles of fat on a nice rib-eye.

How is this significant for our book Ulysses? After all this is only episode two and there is maybe one further reference in episode twelve to a meeting to discuss the cattle crisis at the City Arms Hotel. Generally despite Bloom’s empathy, we are not so bothered with the poor cows as we plunder through the book. Until that is episode fourteen Oxen of the Sun, which in some important ways is the key episode. Homeric resonance reminds that Odysseus (Ulysses) is warned not to touch the cattle on the island belonging to Helios, the Sun God. Obviously they do and bad shit happens. In 1904 Ireland the cattle are diseased and the sun is imposing a vengeful drought upon Ireland. In episode fourteen there is a cataclysmic thunderclap bringing torrential fertilizing rain. The cycle resets. It must be significant that this occurs in the episode of the virus-ridden oxen. No spoiler but in significant ways this is a pivotal point in the book.

Joyce is a clever fella but he’s no Cassandra; he did not predict coronavirus. But he did visualise a viral pandemic generating the Vicoan thunderclap, so let’s indulge him credit for that. He is after all, the birthday boy.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Fathoming Fathoms

Post Seventeen

In Ulysses there are at least two references to five fathoms; so one suspects it to be significant and as I’ve never been comfortable with what that significance is, it’s time to get to grips or at least try. A decent starting point is to ascertain just what is a fathom. It transpires that it is an old fashioned measurement of about 6 foot depth of water and generally has been superseded by the metric system. So when in Telemachus the boatman informs the businessman that it’s five fathoms deep out there to the north of the bay, he means a depth of around 30 feet so, more than sufficient for a drowning.

This conversation is overheard by Stephen as he sat with Haines near the forty foot (one assumes over six fathoms) and he recalls it in Proteus where it plays into his fear of drowning.

“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now. 

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue.”

Being from Proteus one could create a blog from every line but lets try and pick over the most significant bones and the first bone, the one on which I shall concentrate in this short blog is the extract from Ariel’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

“Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

                                             Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.”

This quite early in the book is already our second reference to The Tempest with Mulligan earlier accusing Stephen of having the rage of Caliban. Here, Ariel suggests that Ferdinand’s father has drowned which is an immediate link to the conversation at the forty-foot and to Stephen’s Icarus-like fear of drowning as he has expressed earlier in the episode and as Mulligan earlier mocked him for washing only once a month. Which actually turns out to be a gross under-exaggeration.

But it’s what happens after death that resonates for us. He changes, he metamorphoses. His bones become coral, his eyes become pearls. Nothing fades it just changes, he undergoes a sea-change; a phrase I also associate with Sirens and greaseabloom though I note it is not actually mentioned there. What happens after death is a question real and raw for Stephen, still reeling from the death of his mother. Moreover, drowning is the phrase he uses in Wandering Rocks to metaphorically describe the fate of his surviving family.

The phrase

               “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain”

is alone worthy of far deeper analysis than this little blog permits and we’ll do it some injustice shortly but first let’s consider other fathom or drowning occurrences.

In Nestor one boy must recite a piece of Milton’s poem Lycidas. It concerned his friend Edward King who had drowned or so Milton heard because the body wasn’t recovered. In Proteus, as well as the God becomes man line above, the sea (triggered by the Swinburn poem quoted in Telemachus) is the mighty mother drawing us back to the womb and when in Paris it was Stephen’s mother’s money that kept head above water, it was also her terminal illness that sucked him back beneath the waves. And Stephen is not good down there, not like Mulligan who saved a drowning man.

Further on; in Hades drowning is considered a pleasant way to go, in Scylla the whirlpool Charybdis will metaphorically suck us to our deaths, In Wandering Rocks Stephen considers his family to be drowning in poverty and in Oxen we have a torrent of rain.

Back to Proteus and god becoming man etc. This smacks of John 1:1:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

and moving to the word becoming flesh in John 1:14 and dwelling among us and then dying, and rising again. The phrase morphing from the resurrection miracle of the believer to the evolution of the non-believer with fish being eaten by geese and all living things eventually becoming part of the landscape. In this case the Featherbeds, hills in the Dublin milieu. And please note, not just any geese but Nora Barnacle geese and further wheels spin in episode eighteen with Bloom on the featherbed mattress with Molly, his Nora. Death it seems is no barrier to life going on, in some way shape or form. And don’t think we didn’t spot that quiver of minnows ejaculating sperm-like from the drowned man’s trouserfly.

Not so different to Ferdinand’s father becoming the coral reef nor to Bloom’s thoughts in Hades and Lestrygonians.

Its all reinforcement of a theme if not the central theme, that the soul can’t be contained by death. The body just morphs into something else and the soul moves on. John Milton believes he will yet see his friend in heaven because he’s a believer. Rational Bloom, we think a non-believer, will feel and arguably see again the soul of Rudi. Stephen a confirmed non-believer, nevertheless wonders just where his mother has gone.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Dusk and the Light Behind Her

Post Sixteen

The latest edition of Blooms & Barnacles, Episode 84 was as ever informative and fun in equal measure. But preoccupied as Kelly and Dermot were with ecclesiastical witticisms - Iron Nails Ran In, the miracle of moving statues (I can’t help but think of that Derry Girls episode) and the assassination by the Invincibles of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, that they skirted over one of my favourite lines in the book.

Honestly I chuckle just to think of it. Its mildly sexist but that’s the least of this book’s issues.

This is the passage in question from Lotus Eaters as Bloom sits in church to pass some time and casually observes the proceedings:

“He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn't know what to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion every morning. This very church. Peter Carey. No, Peter Claver I am thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers, now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking about them. They're not straight men of business either. O, no, she's not here: the flower: no, no. By the way, did I tear up that envelope? Yes: under the bridge.”

It starts with him observing the priest’s back and pondering over the meaning of the embroidered letters IHS (it is in fact the Jesuit inscription the Humble Society of Jesus and not the more colloquial interpretations Bloom gives) and ends with his musing on James Carey (he can’t quite recall the name) who lived nearby and attended mass here while contemplating two sins; ratting on his mates (turned queen’s evidence) and murder.

I though am more interested in randy Mr.Bloom. When his mind turns to his clandestine pen pal Martha Clifford (he doubts this is her real name) who authors semi-pornographic letters and who wishes to meet him in church one Sunday after mass. Bloom surveys the women in the room, generally nuns and wonders if she might be one of them. Now, I have never tried Tinder (Mrs.R watches me like a hawk) and suspect all that swiping would confuse me but I expect one of its many occupational hazards to be that “the Date”, once revealed in her or his glorious reality doesn’t live up to the photo. Or in Bloom’s case, his imagination.

The line ‘Dusk and the light behind her’ is from the song “When I Good Friends was Called to the Bar” from the 1875 Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Trial by Jury. In a nutshell, the young barrister is struggling to get briefs when he is given some advice from an unscrupulous experienced lawyer who recalls his own big break many years before:

So I fell in love with a rich attorney's
Elderly, ugly daughter.
Chorus.
………

The rich attorney, he jumped for joy,
And replied to my fond professions:
"You shall reap the reward of your pluck, my boy,
At the Bailey and Middlesex Sessions.
You'll soon get used to her looks," said he,
"And a very nice girl you'll find her!
She may very well pass for forty-three
In the dusk, with a light behind her!"

Oh Mr. Bloom! Naughty, cynical Mr.Bloom! He’s concerned to meet Martha Clifford because he suspects she’ll turn up veiled in poor light but when revealed will disappoint. As I said, a little sexist but pretty funny. Well, it tickles me anyway.

Kelly and Dermot of the B&B podcast revealed that they are soon leaving the US for Ireland and I do hope I shall have opportunity to hop over from London to meet them. I am though getting on in years so might try arriving at dusk with the light behind me.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Chapeau and Hats Off!

Post Fifteen

To call Bloom an ad-man, a Maddison Avenue mad man, is to stretch a point. He’s no Don Draper. He sells a bit of newspaper space to local businesses keen to persuade Dubliners to part with hard earned cash. Yet he thinks like an ad-man, he appraises adverts as he goes through the day and significantly he’s cottoned onto the fact that sex sells, so he may yet have a career in the business; despite Molly’s pleas that he get a steady job. He would no doubt have approved of the natty strapline, If You Want To Get Ahead, Get A Hat, which apparently first appeared in the 1940s and has been rolled out on a regular basis ever since.

Bloom of course wears a hat. It might be a bowler we are not sure. At least not as sure as Joseph Strick was for the 1967 movie in which Milo O’Shea models a fine specimen. For at least early on in Calypso and Lotus Eaters we know it simply as a generic hat. As well as protecting Bloom from weather, clement and inclement, it is also a very useful secret repository for hidden notes and business cards.

Stephen’s headgear is rather more illuminated. Mulligan describes it as his ‘Latin quarter hat’ as he flings it to him in Telemachus. In Proteus Stephen thinks of it as his ‘Hamlet hat’ towards which the passing cockle-picker shoots a glance. We assume it to be black with a widish brim that may be manipulated as bohemian style dictates. Buck Mulligan sports a Panama, de rigour summer wear and indicating a more superior style altogether. Dapper too, like Blazes Boylan’s straw boater which in common with Bloom’s hails from John Plasto hatter, of number one, Brunswick Street.

Martin Cunningham and other mourners appropriately adorn silk, heresiarchs flee St. Michael, mitres awry and there’s an interesting phantasmagorical chap in Nighttown, mysterious in his sombrero. But enough of this, its 1904 Dublin, blokes wore hats. No big deal. Emphasis on blokes because this is the male version of the Ulysses Hat Blog; female and androgynous versions remain in gestation.

What might be of interest is what occurs when hats leave heads and I offer a mere four examples for your delectation

1.      Mr. Leopold Bloom wanders into the maternity hospital in Holles Street to enquire of the wellbeing of Mrs. Purefoy now in her third day of labour. Bloom enters; respectful, full of ruth, greets Nurse Callan, also full of ruth. Two decent sympathetic beings. Bloom naturally removes his hat. If we are to believe what Jimmy Joyce wrote in his explanatory letter of this unfathomable Oxen of the Sun episode (and it’s his book so why wouldn’t we?), the hospital is the womb and Bloom entering it represents the ejaculate so he removing his hat allows the sperm unfettered access to do its business. Just why Joyce considered the hospital to be the womb and Bloom the spermatozoon is the whole point of the Oxen of the Sun episode but that explanation with only a sideways glance to hats, is not for now.

2.      Mr. John Henry Menton holds his silk hat inside the gate of Glasnevin cemetery after paying last respects to the buried Paddy Dignam whom he employed in his solicitors office; until he sacked him. The Hades episode has already given us the measure of this nasty bitter man and we are intrigued as Bloom approaches. He points out that he has a crease in his hat probably having sat on it during the service. Some say that this is Bloom asserting some superiority by pointing out this chink in Menton’s armour. I don’t think so, rather Bloom is doing what comes naturally to him, the decent thing though it is accompanied by mischievous thought.

3.      Mr. Stephen Dedalus is punched to the ground by Private Carr. Bloom comes to his aid which includes retrieving Stephen’s Latin quarter/Hamlet hat as it rolls towards the wall. There Bloom sees an eleven year old boy and you know who he is. If you don’t, read the book, you’re in for a treat.

4.      Mr. Charles Stuart Parnell, uncrowned King of Ireland until he wasn’t, also loses his hat. It is knocked off in a scuffle at the offices of the United Ireland newspaper. Again it is Bloom, retriever Bloom, to the rescue and is rewarded with a ‘thank you’ just as some fifteen years later in 1904, Menton squeezes same words through gritted teeth. Parnell’s gratitude is it seems heartfelt, though we only have Bloom’s recollection as evidence of that and decent chap though he may be, he is prone to a little fantasy.

There we have it. No mind-blowing hat busting conclusions but no taking the pith helmet either, just some tall tales for tall hats.

Chapeau.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Post Fourteen

So says Juliet in the famous balcony scene. Stephen and Bloom were hardly lovers; the book is controversial (and that would have been 1904 dynamite) but this is one direction it does not overtly head, though it does covertly. Buck Mulligan is the gay betrayer but not in that sense, at least as I say, not overtly.

Nevertheless, Bloom and Stephen have common ground, something momentous has passed between them during the brief sojourn in Eccles Street and to misquote, they may well be the two people the aftercourse of whose lives were determined by the striking of that Aeolean match. Whether or not friends they are at some level, soulmates. Dante has found his Virgil and one or both of them have found their Beatrice. So when near the end of the book they part, we might expect after all we have gone through, such parting to be a portentous act. A fateful moment in which they look deep into each other’s eyes and convey serious concluding words. After all, this is the final parting of the two main protagonists of the novel of the century.

The moment is captured in Ithaca:

How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.

There we have it. They stood opposite one another and raised arms in vague attempt at a handshake that may or may not reach fulfilment. And last words? Bloom has gestured and said something concerning the awoken Molly whose paraffin lamp casts a nightly glow in the second floor rear window. We don’t know what he said but its characteristics were of subdued affection, admiration and suggestion. They then urinate out there in the rear yard before Stephen departs via the back alley, into the night and out of our story. Twenty-first century obsession with hygiene may make us grateful for no definitive handshake after their urination but one doubts that to be the reason. The sterile accuracy of Ithaca keeps us guessing as to what occurred. It is certainly not the grand denouement for which we may have hoped. The general nods in Molly’s direction paves the way for all manner of conjecture but very little solid ground.

There are times in life when we must part from those important to us and whose absence will leave a gaping hole. Do not waste such occasions with a bit of a nod and a gesture. If there is something on your mind or in your heart, for goodness sake let them know, otherwise they’ll always be guessing. Just as we do regarding 17th June and beyond.  

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Locke is the Key?

Post Eleven

In Episode 18 of his Re: Joyce podcast the late Frank Delaney pointed to a phrase that he claimed to be the most important in the entire book. It appears early in in the first episode Telemachus and so that is quite a claim. I hazard a guess that he goes on to accord such honour to words later in the book as to be fair to him, there are many significant phrases. This though, would be right up there so what is the phrase?

Stephen is trying to take Mulligan to task over a recent insult to him. The nature of the insult, though significant for the book is immaterial to the point here.

Mulligan cannot remember specifics because so he says,

“I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?”

Mention of ideas and sensations says Delaney, resonates with the philosopher John Locke who reasoned that we only learn from experience, direct sensory perception as opposed to having innate knowledge as per the hitherto dominant Cartesian (from Rene Descartes – I think therefore I am) school of thought. All above my pay grade but I can see how this anticipates Stephen’s Platonic/Berkeleyan ruminations along Sandymount Strand and the Plato/Aristotle contrast to be explored in Scylla. All of which feed into deeper understanding of the book.

Joyce famously boasted that a destroyed Dublin could be rebuilt from his book yet he describes very little in detail. It’s all touchy-feely as he frees our minds to create impressions of people, buildings etc. from the vague hints he ferments. Ideas and sensations.

And I join the much missed Frank in his amazement that Joyce casually drops this into an easily overlooked conversation in episode one.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023