David Matthews

I cannot say exactly what possessed me to take up Ulysses as the fall project. It would be too easy to claim simply that this is a book I feel I should read, or would like to have read, at any rate, though there is something to that. Maybe foolish pride and inner need push me to such books as a way to cling to the belief that I continue to pursue the intellectual adventure and life of the spirit, however much circumstances may suggest that is just another illusion with which I stubbornly refuse to part.

I have picked up Ulysses on a number of occasions, several anyway, over the years without ever making much headway, invariably finding myself soon lost, appreciative of this soaring passage or that bon mot, but too often unsure who said what, or where, or what exactly is happening here, there, or when, in what must be the longest day in the history of the world. The impulse to take another crack at Joyce’s grand work was just that, impulse, whim, and perhaps symptomatic of a trend to aimlessness and lack of focus that marks the past few years, a kind of entropy of intellect and spirit.

The curiosity that served me in good stead from my first discovery of books and reading is still with me. The discipline to follow through is what has eroded. Thus my reading bounces from a bit of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to fascinating chapters about Proudhon the anarchist and John Stuart Mill in Alexander Herzen’s great memoir My Past and Thoughts to yet another perfunctory stab at Hegel for maybe no better reason than because he’s there and I’ve made little more headway with him than with Joyce, all of this highfalutin fare punctuated by a slew of contemporary novels, among them The Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell, The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Tragedy of Arthur and Prague by Arthur Phillips. Sylvia loaned the Mankell. The redoubtable Neil Anderson’s recommendation of The Tragedy of Arthur led to Phillips. I happened on The Club Dumas while searching for vacation reading, having previously enjoyed several other Pérez-Reverte novels. This is typical of how one comes on books: recommendations, reviews, one book leads to another, all well and good, except another among my illusions is that I might yet make something of my life, late in the day as it is for that, and that calls for a bit more discipline, a bit less of being easily diverted from serious projects by books and escapades even when they offer their own rewards.

That Ulysses has its rewards is evident from the beginning in Joyce’s wonderful capacity to describe the most ordinary things and everyday events with grace, elegance, and assurance, even at his most wildly, wordmadly inventive, in language that is never, ever pedestrian, however commonplace that which is being described. The novel’s opening—”Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air”—may not be up there with “Call me Ishmael”; “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; or “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never go there alone”; but there is something of it caught in my mind on first reading and remains.

Harold Bloom avers that “Ulysses is a pleasure, difficult but available, for the common reader of intelligence and goodwill.” I buy that it is available for the reader of intelligence and goodwill but balk at the unalloyed claim to pleasure. There are moments of pleasure, to be sure, passing at times almost to sublimity, when after a long slog one comes to a passage that is just special, as when old Leo Bloom waxes rhapsodic on the topic of Gerty McDowell’s undergarments espied from a distance as she, provocatively posed, leans back for a better view of fireworks, full aware of the view on offer, her face “suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. . . .” Such wonders are worth hacking through the wordy undergrowth for, half lost half the time, more than half, fighting the impulse to skim whole pages for a passage that might tender intimations of some sublime, even settle for lower pleasures but pleasures still, born of Joyce’s genius to let fly great tsunamis of words that in lesser hands would soon degenerate into sophomoric excess, show-offy twaddle to no good end.

The experience of reading Ulysses is akin to that of reading poems such as Keats’ “The Fall of Hyperion” or Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” where the challenge is to focus through lengthy stretches that may not enchant in and of themselves but are nonetheless integral to the whole, for a good poem’s meaning comes to more than just those special passages that lift us up out of ourselves and linger in our minds even when we do not formally commit them to memory. At present, barely halfway through Ulysses, I face the prospect of giving myself an incomplete if I do not go at it like a fury for the next few weeks. Yet there is the daunting but undeniable conviction that I would do well to go back to page one and begin anew with stately, plump Buck Milligan making the scene, yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, sustained gently behind him by the morning air, and take it up again with all the patience I can muster, enriched by the experience of what was absorbed on the first go around, having learned for instance that for me Joyce is best read aloud, at least moving my lips as I read, and in this sense too Ulysses is akin to those poems that mean most to me. This is where I stand with it for the nonce, with more, much more, to come.

David :: Dec.03.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

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