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

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