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

Maria Ewing meets West Ham United

Post Thirteen

Not names one naturally associates with a James Joyce Ulysses blog but bear with me.

I was very sad to hear the news on Tuesday morning that Maria Ewing the opera soprano had died aged only 71. I have not followed her career intently and really only know her for her 1986 performance of Salome in the opera of the same name. The Richard Strauss opera is a highly charged one act piece of devastating power; dealing with incest, cruelty, rape, murder, necrophilia antisemitism and blasphemy to name several aspects and may possibly be my favourite opera. The libretto by Oscar Wilde naturally helps.

It pivots on the dance of the seven veils which Salome performs for her step-father King Herod. It’s obviously allegorical for incestual sex and pretty close to non-consensual. I have three versions of the opera and each in its own way exceptional. In two of them (and in all other versions so far as I know) the soprano’s blushes are spared notwithstanding the removal of the veils. Not so for Maria Ewing, she goes full frontal nudity whilst dancing and having dominated every scene thus far with her wonderful singing and acting. Because for her, the part and so the Art demanded it. A cynic might say it was a gimmick to which others did not need to resort or that it was the Director and she simply did what she was told. I don’t buy that though I will say that the other versions I have are just as wonderful despite an undergarment beneath the last veil. But Maria went for it. She strove!

Just as did Icarus. He felt the need to fly higher than his father and too close to the sun. We don’t know why but like Maria and other great artists he felt compelled to put himself out there. To go further. To strive. Here I link Stephen Dedalus. By making him the son of a Dedalus he becomes Icarus and he sets out in A Portrait his strict conditions for good art. But in Ulysses he like Icarus, gets his wings clipped and is told at the end of Scylla to cease to strive. He need not soar so high to achieve greatness; Lapwings are also entitled to a life. Bloom will guide.

We need both Lapwings and Eagles. Artists like Maria who were willing to push the boundaries not for a gimmick but simply to see where that took them.

My football team West Ham United are brilliant and wonderful. Not because they tend to win, though bizarrely at present we are flying high whereas for most of my life my team has been a source of almost constant disappointment. But there it is, we supporters stick by the team through thick and thin. ‘Tis our lot. West Ham’s song sings of bubbles that fly so high, they nearly reach the sky but like our dreams, they fade and die. Yet we still forever blow bubbles. Ultimately Bloom guides us that we need to be practical because life is real and carries real responsibility. But there is a place for Art. Dirty, disrespectful dangerous Art. Where the likes of Icarus, Maria and a braver version of Stephen Dedalus would go that extra mile without caring if they fall off of the edge or who might get a peep of a bit of skin.

Thanks Maria. I am sad but proud to mark your passing and if you see Bobby Moore, give him my best.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Love: Secrets and Lies

Post Twelve

North London Ulysses launches this week. It’s the second cycle of the book for six of us but this time around we are some 60 strong. With these numbers, it will be a mix of in person and on zoom and I feel such interest indicates the insatiable appetite people have to grapple with and get through Ulysses. The surprise that I hope will be in store for people is that instead of the book being a grind it will be an absolute pleasure. I’ve thought long and hard as to how I would introduce our first meeting this Wednesday. How does one introduce to new readers arguably the greatest novel of the last century?

I’m going with the theme of Love. Because when all’s said and done, I’d say we are dealing with a love story. Molly and Bloom love one another or at least they did several years ago and this notwithstanding the shotgun nature of the marriage back in 1888. But now it is flawed and the story before us, for all its intellectual and aesthetic undercurrents is at its heart, the story of two people trying to rediscover the spark in their relationship in the hope that the love that they once had for each other can be re-kindled. So also a mystery; we are on the hunt for Love.

The rot set in eleven years earlier when their son Rudy died aged only eleven days. Since when the intimacy has evaporated from their marriage and for these last nine months even meaningful conversation has ceased. Yet we know from their inner thoughts the fondness they retain for each other but still the flame barely flickers. As Bloom reminisces in Davy Byrne’s pub: ‘Me. And me now.’ How did it come to this?

Relationships. They are not easy and the Blooms’ is not untypical of a 16 year old marriage. Routine becomes routine and what excitement they enjoy is experienced individually not shared. What I mean by that is that they have secrets from each other. This is not unique; all couples, indeed all human beings one suspects, need private space. A dark corner, a quiet corner that is all one’s own and to which even the dearest lover is not allowed access. Yet if this is allowed to fester, if it contains secrets that one cannot share with a life partner one has to ask, why that would be? There should be very little, save serious criminality that a life partner could not understand and forgive and if that is not the case, one might wonder if the relationship is healthy in the long term.

Honesty begins at home and real honesty is facing up to the fact that if one feels one has to keep secrets from a partner, this is not a partner in the true sense. No doubt this is how it is for many couples and they make it work but it’s a sort of half relationship. Our book seeks more and if you think this is an unrealistic expectation, I think it reflects the frankness of Joyce’s relationship with Nora Barnacle. We may be surprised at and even a little disgusted by the brazenness of some of the letters that passed between them (well, Joyce to Nora, we don’t so far as I know, have the benefit of vice versa) but I think they exemplify the laying bare of their devotion. One may to cast doubt, point to Joyce’s infatuation with Marthe Fleischmann but that was later in the relationship, if it starts going wrong after only 5 years (Rudy dies in 1893) it doesn’t bode well.

Leopold and Molly have allowed mistrust to germinate and take hold in their marriage. She with reason, suspects him of seeing prostitutes and loose women and confidently muses that his jacket does not have enough pockets to hide from her, the condoms among the other secrets. Bloom we discover in Ithaca suspects, wrongly as it transpires, that Molly has been unfaithful for years and with half of Dublin. If they cannot bring themselves to bare souls to one another, the marriage is doomed for a relationship built on manipulated trust has no long term future.

Against such a disheartening backdrop is there hope for Molly and Bloom?? Is our quest for Love forlorn? The loss of a baby is cataclysmic and will test the strongest resolve and devotion. We do not really get to know Molly until the end but it’s our knowledge of Bloom and our understanding of his character that drives the novel and this is so uplifting and compelling, that we are in his and so their corner from the off. There will be downs as well as ups and all told, Bloom will have a torrid day but we shall be optimistic. We hunt for Love in the firm belief that we shall find it, that it shall find us and that Molly and Bloom shall once more find each other. Yes.

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

Just Falling With Style

Post Ten

Oh Woody! Why’d you have to go and break the spell? Buzz was sure he was flying.

The flying to falling to flying theme undulates through Ulysses (and underpins Finnegans Wake) arguably stemming from Icarus flying too close to the sun on Daedalian wings before crashing to a watery death. He didn’t rise again unless through metempsychosis, so let’s focus on the Fall.

From the moment in Lotus Eaters when Bloom struggles to recall that the speed of a falling body is 32 feet per second, per second, Joyce conflates falling with Original Sin as represented by the number 32. In A Portrait, Stephen resisted the call of Holy Orders as he intuits his to be a different path:

“The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard, and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.”

Let’s consider some of the many examples of falling in Ulysses. The first three explode in expectoration. The plum stones spat from atop Nelson’s Pillar, the graceful arced jet of hay juice as spat by Corny Kelleher, the Red Bank oyster of phlegm expelled to connote racist contempt by the citizen. The financial: a coin dropped from Molly’s outstretched hand from her bedroom window, for the beggar. The cloacal: five urinations - in Proteus, Cyclops and Ithaca (observed), in Lestrygonians and Scylla (unobserved), the faecal plops of Calypso and (currants) Lestrygonians and the menstrual gush of Penelope. The crashing of a shot-putted biscuit tin (another graceful arc) and Stephen’s body semi-conscious onto the hard road outside of Bella Cohen’s.

Flying not falling; the swooping gulls of Lestrygonians, to feed on the fallen manna from Bloom heaven.

Too many for a short blog so let’s focus on where and how a select few falling bodies land because as they teach you in Judo 101, landing well is half way to rising again.

Plum stones and hay juice both seeds of future creation land on the pavement. A harsh barren artificial surface upon which a natural substance will struggle to find any agent to fertilize. The plum stones represent Irish political hopes and dreams and so Stephen’s parable is pessimistic though maybe people need to understand the depths of the problem in order to work on a solution. The hay juice doesn’t fall directly, rather in a graceful arc. Bloom suspects Kelleher to be a police informer which many consider a sin but perhaps the line of travel indicates a more nuanced picture or perhaps insufficient evidence to convict. In any event it too lies lifeless on the stone ground.

I like Molly’s donation for the beggar that she allows to fall from the bedroom window. It plummets straight down as if to confirm both the sin she’s about to commit and its desperation to leave the scene of the crime. Yet while it too falls on barren pavement it is rescued by a passing schoolboy and placed in its intended womb, the beggar’s floor-dwelling cap. What do we make of that? Molly will commit adultery which depending on one’s religious convictions, is at worst a mortal sin and at best not very nice. Yet it helps the beggar so is not all bad just as we may think, Molly’s adultery has its place in a bigger brighter future of the Bloom marriage. Just as Stephen’s fall is precursor to Rudy’s resurrection.

Usually perhaps inevitably, the Fall is part of the Rise which is a cheery thought or as Woody observes, if Buzz cannot actually fly, he does at least fall with style.

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