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

Bloom’s Bum Steer to the Nolan

Post Eight

An amusing part of the book takes place in Lestrygonians where Bloom is sat in Davy Byrne’s ‘moral’ pub eating his cheese and mustard sandwich and where his glass of burgundy will provide some respite for his troubled mind. With wine kindling some fire in his veins he recalls the day some sixteen years earlier on which he proposed to and first made love with Molly on Howth Head. Molly as those with even cursory knowledge of the book will know, shall recall the same incident some hours later.

But two flies stuck in drying paint makes him ponder how far he has fallen from that romantic high and in less romantic and quite depressed mindset, Bloom considers the pointlessness of not just humanity but of all essence, even the solar system. All just digestion machines consuming, multiplying, defecating dying and re-kindling to start all over again. He wonders: are the gods any different? The food of the gods he has read is Ambrosia. Do they defecate? Bloom is a logical man and from his discourse on religion and the afterlife we do not expect he believes in Greek gods, unlike Odysseus his former self. But in his depressed state he is reaching blindly for some hope. That somewhere, somehow there is a higher purpose and we are not all just food processors en-route to being another processor’s food.

So he thinks, he’ll check the statues of Juno and Athena at the National Library to see if they have anuses. He’s got to go there anyway. It’s all a bit farfetched and just Bloom on an idle frolic but this is not just some joke about Greek god’s bums; Joyce has him frolicking for a very serious purpose.

Mesial groove is the phrase Mulligan, the medical student, uses in the next episode when he reports seeing Bloom sniffing around the backsides of the statues, staring at their mesial groove. This is a dental term meaning the indented line running through the middle of a tooth and we can imagine what he means in the context of buttocks. Its all very smutty and amusing. All a bit Frankie Howerd and ooh er Mrs. but the serious business is this; as Stephen will waiver between various choices, between Scylla and Charybdis, Bloom is his guide to the middle way. Philosophy students may note the guiding hand of Giordano Bruno of Nola and the coinciding of polar extremes. Bloom is Stephen’s medium to the medium.

So, not just a joke about bums.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

A Rock and a Hard Place

Post One

I have been catching up on the excellent U22 The Centenary Ulysses Podcast (u22pod.com) recently as we build up to the 2nd February 2022 centenary. The latest was on ‘chapter’ Nine, Scylla & Charybdis. This difficult episode set in the National Library, is against the Homeric context of the fleet sailing through a very narrow passage that we now know as the Straits of Messina, where it must pass either by the cliff of Scylla on one side and the small rock of Charybdis on the other. This rock is marked by a single fig tree. Should they hug the cliff or veer close to the small rock? High up in the cliff lives Scylla the dragon. She has six long necks each topped with a head of nasty razor teeth. Sail too close and she will swoop to kill six of the crew. She cannot as Odysseus foolishly thinks, be beaten. Better avoid and go for the fig tree. Well that’s no plain sailing either. For underneath lurks a whirlpool and that will destroy the entire fleet. So no good choices.

An entertaining aspect of the U22 Podcast is to hear the views of students and others fairly new to Ulysses. This provides fresh energy and fascinating insight. But they considered both options to be terrible, leading to certain death. On this basis there is no choice as one naturally would opt for Scylla, the lesser of two evils and hope to lose only six. I don’t think this is quite right. The whirlpool Charybdis is not a constant. Rather it occurs three times a day and so there is a prospect of passing by it entirely unscathed. Now we have real choice. Definite loss of six against potential loss of all but possible loss of none. That brings in appraisal of risk and calculation of odds.

It’s a really tricky chapter and as if we don’t have enough to grapple with, we wonder why a genteel discussion of literature in the National Library is paralleled with Homeric Scylla and Charybdis which is red in tooth and claw. But understanding this real choice illuminates the various lifestyle and artistic choices facing Stephen and which lurk subliminally within the text and suddenly it makes a lot (or at least a bit) more sense. I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to consider the chapter but I believe it provides a reasonable framework and significantly leads to Bloom’s vital contribution (by his checking the backsides of statues!) which enables our understanding of the chapter as well as facilitates Stephen’s choice analysis.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021 -2023