Poetry

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

In the first three episodes of Ulysses, I found several striking things that speak to Stephen Dedalus’s sense of himself as an artist. To suggest that Joyce was concerned with such matter is hardly a stretch. He whittled a much longer work down into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for the purpose of having that shorter work operate as a sort of preface to Ulysses. Or so I understand it. There is much in these early episodes pertaining to art and artists that I missed (e.g. Buck Mulligan wanting to ride Stephen’s coattails and somehow create in Ireland a Hellenic center of the arts), and it took the annotations at UlyssesSeen to make them apparent to me. Armed with the perspective that site provided, I reread the first three episodes and found other things I hadn’t noticed before. I am no doubt scratching just the surface of the surface here, but the examples that most resonated with me follow.

On page 11, Stephen thinks back to some memories and to a dream he had of his mother. As the UlyssesSeen folk point out (see the panel here), there are some nice crisp details in his recollection. It’s pretty easy to imagine this burst of detail as the work of a poetic mind in action, the artist chewing over details of a hard event (emotion recollected in tranquility, anyone?), maybe even preparing them for insertion into his next poem. Then we have the line “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!” and what appears to be an answer to it: “No mother. Let me be and let me live.” I take the ghoul exclamation to be a projection of Stephen’s of what he figures his mother might say if she knew he were noodling over the facts of her death with his art in mind. I may think this simply because I had a very similar experience when trying to write my way through my own mother’s death a few years ago. I wanted to capture the attendant details and emotions, but I felt like a buzzard picking at her corpose for something I might one day polish up and send in to a magazine for publication. This all brings up the interesting question of where the boundary (if there is one) lies between personal, private expression and consumable, public art.

On page 15, Stephen winces at the sting of the milk woman’s awe of Buck Mulligan. She listens to the man who could take care of her worthless living body and slights the man who could lend her immortality. Self-important much?

As the first episode closes, Stephen is noodling around with the Latin prayer that came to mind as he was thinking about his mother before, and he actually edits it, converting it into verses complete with eye-rhyme. He has to carve out a couple of phrases to make it work. The best I can tell, his rendering changes “May the glittering throng of confessors, bright as lilies, gather about you. May the glorious choir of virgins receive you” to something like the following:

bright as lilies
gather around you
glorious virgins

He basically removes the holy and keeps the earthly, retains the image fit for poetry. I’m reminded here, as often, of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” That the prayer Stephen is editing appears previously in a section in which I take him to be considering images from the memory of his mother’s life and awful death for use in his art seems to me to tie that section to this and to confirm my suspicion that the ghoul comment pertains to his mining her death for his poems.

Catalectic meter is poetic meter that’s missing a syllable in the last foot. Chances are very good that if you’re reading Ulysses, you’ll remember from high school literature (at least) what a poetic foot is. But just in case: it’s a grouping of syllables. An iamb is an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. A trochee is the reverse. A spondee is two stressed syllables. A dactyl is one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. So to take Joyce’s example here (and really forcing the recitation of the stresses in the line), we have “WON’T you COME to SANdy MOUNT” — it’s three trochees followed by an orphaned stressed syllable. This is a line of catalectic tetrameter (tetra = 4 feet). Why Stephen talks of iambs I’m not sure. Maybe the lines in question come to mind and register to him as catalectic but he’s searching for (or seeking to write) catalectic iambic tetrameter. At any rate, this is a very self-conscious intrusion of Stephen’s consideration of poetic technique into the text.

About ten pages later (47), he recites (presumably in his head) an old song composed of lines of catalectic trochaic tetrameter. Repeating a fragment of one of the lines, he then follows it with a rhyming sentence that scans more or less with the same meter: “Language no whit worse than his.” It’s not quite right because you don’t in natural speech hit the “no” quite as hard as a stressed syllable demands, and you hit the “whit” a bit harder (but not quite fully stressed). Still, it’s hard not to hear poetry in the resulting implied couplet:

And thy quarrons dainty is.
Language no whit worse than his.

But then go on and read the next two sentences, which I’ll present as an unrhymed couplet:

Monkwords, marybeads jabber on their girdles:
roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets

There’s all kinds of stuff going on here. First, there’s the internal eye-rhyme of “words.” Then there are these weird compound words that Hopkins would have been jealous of. Each line ends on a trochaic utilitarian piece of attire, so while there’s not a phonemic rhyme, there’s a sort of rhyme of category and of rhythm. You have alliteration in “patter in their pockets,” a sort of visual rhyme of double letters in “jabber,” “nuggets” and “patter,” assonance in the adjacent “tough” and “nuggets,” more mid-line assonance in “jabber” and “patter.” There’s even something very nearly onomatopoeic about the beads jabbering on the girdles. But wait, there’s more. These two lines are almost identical rhythmically; take a liberty with the stress on “nuggets” and it’s exact. Finish all that off with the figurative language — “marybeads” for a rosary, “nuggets” for coins — and you’ve got basically a beginner’s guide to prosody and poetics here.

The last example I’ll pull out appears on page 40, and it’s another that resonates very much with my own experience. A brief quote:

Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .”

The ellipsis is Joyce’s and not mine. I take this to be a funny little jab at the self-absorbed young writer’s tendency to try to sound lofty. I would have real trouble counting the number of pages of journals I kept years ago on which I attempted this sort of syntactic jugglery in order to distance myself in a way from what I was writing. The idea is that you want to write as if, looking back once you’re famous (which is what Stephen is imagining here — the thems of his sentence are the books he fancies himself having written in the future), you had an inkling that you might wind up being famous one day. And yet you want to do so in a sort of modest or off-hand way. So you throw in goofy references and uncited quotes that betoken the breadth and depth of your knowledge of literature and then you write as if looking back on your youthful writing with sort of a wink and a nod. It’s all very silly. Stephen is attempting such a thing here, and he gets tripped up on his distancing techniques and loses his trail. It’s very funny, if my reading of it fits at all.

The Odyssey

Daryl L. L. Houston15 Comments

Contrary to Judd’s advice, I’m reading The Odyssey in tandem with Ulysses (well, partially contrary to Judd’s advice — he suggests familiarity but also figures that a simplified version suffices). I’m vaguely familiar with a lot of the stories and have read quite a bit of Greek mythology to my daughter in the last year (this is a great book to read with little kids, by the way), but I’ve never read The Odyssey through from start to finish. Ten or eleven years ago, I think I checked it out of the library to read on an airplane, but I got distracted and never finished. It’s high time I read the thing, and what better timing could there be?

I’ve already documented how I’ve found Ulysses so far to be anything but transparent. To augment my reading, I worked my way through both the illustrations and the annotations for the UlyssesSeen project, and it was all very illuminating. The fine folk over there note that Joyce is very money-conscious throughout the book, and they bring to the foreground how Mulligan is leaning on Dedalus for money — a striking fact given that Mulligan has more elevated social status than Dedalus, so that you’d think he’d have more money too. Mulligan shamelessly pumps him for rent, for milk money, and for booze money, and he finally asks for the very key to the lodging. Mulligan is quite simply a parasite.

Parasitism turns out to be a major theme of the first two books of The Odyssey. I wonder, in fact, if a simplified or child’s version such as what Judd suggests would highlight the theme. The basic storyline for the opening of the poem is that Odysseus has been away from home (fighting the long battle of Troy and then waylaid on his home journey) for ages. His son, Telemachus, was a youngster when he left but is now coming into adulthood. Penelope (Mom) has been fighting off suitors for several years now. They all figure that Odysseus is dead, and Penelope is apparently pretty hot stuff. What I had never thought of before reading the epic is that it’s not as if the suitors are swinging by one at a time to take her out to The Olive Garden and have her home by midnight. No, all these guys are lounging about drinking Odysseus’s wine, killing and eating his animals, and generally wreaking havoc and making themselves at home on Odysseus’s/Telemachus’s dime. For years and years. After a helpful visit from Athena, Telemachus decides he’s not going to take it anymore, and he tries to give the suitors the boot. Several times he mentions how they’re mooching off of him (this is emerging as a rhetorical device in the epic, by the way, the repetition — often in the same words — of an anecdote or notion) and how he wants them gone.

It takes the visit from Athena to give Telemachus a kick in the pants. Similarly, maybe it takes a visit from the milk woman (credit to UlyssesSeen for the idea) to give Dedalus a kick. The counting out of money must serve as a bitter reminder to Dedalus of what a moocher Mulligan has been. And the first episode of Ulysses ends, apparently, with Dedalus effectively wiping his hands of the tower and of Mulligan.

All this to say that so far, I’m finding a parallel reading of The Odyssey to be of more value than I might have expected given Judd’s comments. It’s certainly not indispensable companion reading, but I’m finding it interesting. It also happens to be pretty entertaining and sort of anthropologically fascinating on its own.

An Interview with Robert Berry, of Ulysses “Seen”

Judd3 Comments

It’s been a busy year for Ulysses-fans, with the book getting a lot of attention on the internet through reading groups like our own, Twitter members posting quotes and page summaries, but especially through the ambitious adaptation being undertaken at Ulysses “Seen,” which has received a bonanza of media attention due to a recent controversy with Apple over the iPad version. Robert Berry, the artist heading the Ulysses “Seen” team, was gracious enough to take some time away from the drawing board to answer a few questions about his project.

Berry’s portrait of a “Disapproving Joyce”:

JS: Let’s start with some general stuff (I realize you’ve discussed this elsewhere, including on your own blog at the site, but it’s worth rehashing for people who might not know about your project): Why Ulysses? Is there something about this novel in particular that you think lends itself to the kind of adaptation you’re doing? 

RB: Some years back, while first noodling around with the idea of working in comics and graphic novels, another cartoonist and I attended a BloomsDay reading here in Philadelphia. I’d read the novel before then of course, so I was there more as a celebrant than a novice, but this was first time I’d been to something like this.  Hearing passages from novel read aloud, particularly to a crowd, is a completely different experience than tackling it on your own. When it’s good, when the reader is really getting it, you can see it on the faces of everyone in the crowd and you can see that they’re getting it too. It’s like theatre and everyone’s just standing around in the twisting turning halls of Joyce’s language and wit.

But it’s not theatre, of course. It’s novel, an intentionally very complex novel, with a very bad reputation as being “difficult”. Unlike theatre, novels have a very one-on-one relationship with the reader; they’re something you can carry with you, pause to think about and unravel at your own pace. Something to stage in your own imagination.

I wanted to make a comic that could give people that same kind of one-on-one relationship with the text but could also give them that same kind of stage direction you get out of the theatre combined with an easy reference guide to what’s going on. A way to “see” the novel as you’re reading or hearing it.

 JS: Speaking of which: Why a comic book? (Is that the term we’re using?: certainly Joyce considered his work a “comedy,” in the old, Dantean sense of the word, but what you’re doing isn’t exactly a book, is it?) And why publish online, panel-by-panel?

RB: Over a few pints of Guinness at the pub on that same BloomsDay, my friend and I got into a discussion of how comics was the only media that could do a faithful adaptation of Joyce’s novel. Theatre and film don’t work because they happen in the real time of the audience. The reading experience works in a completely different way with comics and text. Comics have a linear flow, one image following another, but that line has more freedom, more plasticity, in how it relates to time.

Comics on-line, or on the iPad, have an even greater plasticity than they do in print. What we’re able to do on-line is use a comic panel to freeze a moment in reading Ulysses and allow the reader to jump “behind the page” to look at annotations from the novel or ask questions about what is going on and who some of the characters are. The comic itself serves as a kind of guide for all the external materials, discussions and concepts one might get from reading the novel in a classroom environment.

And Joyce is just waaaay funnier than Dante was.

JS: I don’t know, I bet the Inferno was pretty friggin’ hilarious when it first came out…

RB: It definitely raised more than a few laughs at the time, but it’s a bit more of a “had to be there” kinda humor I think…

JS: Tell me a little bit about your process: how do you go about deciding what a given “page” is going to look like, and then how do you achieve your vision? What’s the timeframe like: how long does a given page take, start-to-finish?

RB: The process is pretty unique in that I’ve never encountered anyone working on something like this, so we sort of took a little time to figure out the method. It all begins with the novel, of course. I have a replica of the 1922 edition, our sole source for the text, that I’ve color-coded with about six different highlighter markers to indicate the differences between action, spoken dialogue, internal monologue, etc.

The first page of Berry’s working copy of Ulysses:

Since each episode (or chapter) of Joyce’s novel presents new viewpoints and narrative styles, my four partners and I get together and talk over beers about the episode we’re doing next. Right now, that’s “Calypso”. This helps give me a set of guidelines to follow, a kind of a plan of what other people look for in a specific chapter. After that, I step away from the group for a while and make a set of storyboards, a rough comic, that includes all the original text. The goal at this stage is to pace and stage the flow of words as a director of a film might, looking for the beats implied by the language and giving just enough information so that readers can see who’s speaking as well as their relationship in space. This is a particularly complex stage, particularly when dealing with work as complex as Ulysses, so I tend to do this part on my own and don’t let anyone see it until I know I’ve made the right choices. It’s the guts of the comic.

After that is done, the storyboards go back to my partners for edits and a bit more discussion. It’s often surprising to see how differently each of us view the novel once it’s been drawn and there are occasional important changes that occur during this stage. From here, the work goes back to myself and our production designer Josh Levitas. Josh hand-letters and sets up the page files into what we call “floorplans”. This allows me to make drawings on hand-lettered pages around the text in accordance with my original storyboards. I think it keeps a freshness and a liveliness to the drawing that was lost in earlier versions in which we lettered with the computer over existing drawings. For the next chapter Josh is doing a lot of the set design as well, making drawings of objects in Mr Bloom’s house that we’ll see again much later in the novel.

In the meantime Mike Barsanti, our resident Joycehead, starts working on the Readers’ Guide entries for each page. He explains some of the major themes and issues in the novel, gives some Joycean anecdotes and tries to show links to other related topics and discussions. It’s an area of the project that I have very little to do with but am probably most proud of.

The goal here in all of our work is open up the world of the novel using comics and the internet, to make it a bit less daunting and to show how it connects to today’s readers as something more than just an English Literature merit badge. It’s a complex novel, certainly, but that complexity, once they’ve started to crack it, brings readers back again and again. It’s what makes it the most difficult book you’ll want to read many times.

JS: I see you’re doing the “Calypso” episode second, rather than “Nestor”: that makes sense to me, but would you care to comment on the decision?

RB: I decided pretty early on that I wanted to go chronologically through the first six episodes of the novel. They’ll still be sorted and numbered according to their original order, so “Calypso”, though it appears next, will still be called episode number 4. I made the decision when I was first thinking about how the web and the iPad are much more flexible platforms for annotation. It seems to me that the comparison between these two chapters is a useful learning guide for first time readers so we wanted to step up that process just a bit. But the main reason for it is that I’m going to do “Nestor” and “Lotus Eaters” simultaneously next year, shuffling their pages together to show the chronological relationship between Stephen’s day and Mr Bloom’s. I’ve already laid that chronology out and, believe me, it’s a great example of comics is such a good format for adapting Joyce.

Plus, I was a bit anxious to get to draw Bloom. If I’d have gone with the strict order of the novel that wouldn’t be happening for another year or two.

A sample of the forthcoming adaptation of “Calypso”:

JS:  Are there any moments/panels that gave you particular trouble, in terms of interpretation/adaptation? 

RB: All of the internal monologue presents problems when you start it. As an illustrator you need to separate out a certain voice for each character and how they see the world. Mr Bloom’s inner mind can’t rely on the same visual devices as Stephen’s does and both have to be distinctly separate from the voice of the omniscient narrator. I could’ve cheated a bit, used different font styles to represent this, but I think that’s kind of a cheap parlor trick in comics and, with so many distinct voices in Ulysses, bound to be confusing later.

But establishing an order for how to slip into the imagination of each character is probably the hardest bit. I think you’ll notice it quite a bit in “Calypso” that Bloom doesn’t dream about the world in the same hard imagery and weight of words that Stephen does.

 JS: What are you looking forward to most, in terms of the coming chapters? Is there any particular moment/line that you can’t wait to illustrate?

RB: Off the top of my head it’s that scene in “Lestrygonians” when Bloom has the memory of the seedcake being passed into his mouth and notices the two flies, buzzing, stuck on the window. To me, that’s a very poetic combination of imagery and text, all of what comics can do better than most other narrative mediums.

JS: Wow… that’s pretty much my favorite moment in the whole book.

A big thank you to Rob and his collaborators at Ulysses “Seen.” Rob will be joining us on our reading, and will post his thoughts about the episodes that he has adapted so far in the coming weeks.

Ulysses on the Web

Judd5 Comments

In my last post I discussed many of the “old-fashioned” (e.g. print) resources that are available for the struggling reader of Ulysses (and we’re all struggling readers when it comes to Joyce). But these resources have largely been supplanted in the Internet Age– the web has proven to be a very hospitable place for Joyce-studies. The man who is credited with inventing the term “weblog” was a Joyce-fanatic, to give you some idea (more on that in a moment).

I’ve referred you here before, but I think it’s a good place to start so I’ll mention it again: the Joyce page at the Modern Word has a lot of great background information and introductory essays (their Pynchon page is excellent as well, FYI). Here is their page introducing Ulysses in particular. They also have a page of links, but many of them are broken: the site does not appear to have been updated since 2004. (If anyone out there knows what happened to the site, I’d love to hear: I tried contacting them, but their email is out of service as well.)

A couple of commenters have mentioned Jorn Barger (the aforementioned coiner of the term “weblog”) and his incredible Robot Wisdom site. This is an incredibly extensive resource, but it is sometimes daunting: Barger is a lifelong Joycean, and his readings are often intricate and polemical. So, proceed with caution. (But do proceed!) The site is no longer being updated, but you can keep up with Jorn here.

More useful for the first-time reader are Michael Groden’s notes. Created to aid his students, Groden provides extensive background and though-provoking analysis of each episode (navigating the site takes some getting used to, though). It’s sort of like really smart Cliff’s Notes.

One of the most captivating (and distracting) sites is JoyceImages, which collects period images for all sorts of references throughout Ulysses. It is truly amazing, and was praised by Rob Berry at Ulysses “Seen” as “my favorite, most inspirational and most commonly used Joyce site. For a visual understanding of the world ULYSSES works in this is as seminal a text as Gifford’s.”

And, oh yeah, there’s also Ulysses “Seen” and their amazing Reader’s Guide. A work in progress, this site will get you through the first chapter, and leave you wanting more. (And more about that will be forthcoming, here, soon). 

These are the sites I’ve found most useful, but there are many, many more: not to mention the fact that people are writing about Joyce on blogs and Twitter every day (here’s a nice post from the past Bloomsday). Feel free to post links in the comments to any relevant sites I’ve failed to mention: I’m always looking for new distractions.

From Hell’s Heart He Stabs at—What, Exactly?

Jeff Anderson5 Comments

“The ‘elusiveness’ of Kafkaesque terror … is maybe the supersaturation of every possible line of allegorical reading (you can’t isolate what is everywhere).”

John Holbo.

(I know Kafka’s a long stretch from Moby-Dick, but he’s not why I used the quotation; I aim to connect the extract and the point below.)

We finally meet the White Whale! And he’s just as vicious as we’ve been led to expect: rocketing up out of the depths of the ocean to chomp an occupied boat in half, swatting at other boats with his tail as if they were flies, pulling a remarkable Three Stooges maneuver with two harpoon lines to smash their boats against each other, single-headedly staving an entire ship so that its whole crew (but one) drowns in a maelstrom. But then, after three chapters of mayhem, there’s a short epilogue and the book is over. That’s it, nothing more to see.

It seems an odd kind of book whose title character only appears in the final pages to kill practically every other character and then vanish. It all happens quickly, but I agree with Paul that it doesn’t feel rushed. Instead it just feels very final, and brutal. Speaking for myself, there’s something about the mystery of Moby Dick and the compactness of his “on-screen” presence in the book that I find irresistibly suggestive. There’s too much weight placed on him through the course of the narration to be borne by that tiny role, so I find myself again saying it must mean something.

It’s not just me, though: Many of the characters, and I would imagine much of the criticism, look to Moby Dick as a symbol of something. For Ahab, he’s an agent or principal of supernatural malice, an implacable nemesis. Starbuck seems to think he is a devil and expresses concern that they’ll get dragged to Hell if they harpoon him. (I don’t know how literally he means it.) Ishmael goes everybody one better and devotes an entire chapter to projecting his own meanings onto the empty canvas of the whiteness of the whale.

As far as that whiteness goes, Melville practically invites us to write our own interpretations onto the blank page that is the whale’s skin. It’s certainly easy enough to grope toward reading Ahab and Moby Dick’s contest as humanity vs. nature, or humanity vs. the greater powers, or will vs. matter, or (at least poetically comprehensibly) even past vs. progress, and probably any number of other allegories. The resonance and capaciousness and complexity of Melville’s writing give us lots of pitons to rope a reading through, and seem to support a great variety of interpretations. The book brandishes an enormous amount of knowledge about whales, and brings to bear on the plot and its giant albino a huge range of human discourses, including economics, biology, anatomy, physiology, oceanography, literature, psychology, and theology. Of course we can make him mean something!

But this is where the quotation I began with enters the picture: allegorical supersaturation. Moby Dick can mean all those things, at least tolerably well; which is too many meanings. The confusion of every possible meaning that can be attached to him cancels out to a nullity—you can’t isolate any one of them, because the others all impinge too much upon it. Consider: After all we’ve read, outside of his great savagery we know nothing significant about Moby Dick except for a probabilistic idea of where he’s more and less likely to be at a given season. He’s visible from a mile or two out, and we know less about him than about the electron. To steal a phrase from Daniel, we still don’t know dick about Moby Dick. He spends the vast majority of the book hidden both figuratively and literally below the surface; for all the psychological effect he has on the characters (and, I admit, this reader) before he appears, he remains wholly unknowable. We can squeeze him into any interpretation we want, but it will teach us no more about the whale and we will have made the same mistake as Ahab and Starbuck and who knows who else: We will have ignored the irreducible fact of the whale in favor of converting him to an interpretive object.

That’s what I find the most compelling about Moby Dick. He comes out of nowhere, without warning (dare I say “like a thief in the night”?), does whatever he is going to do, then vanishes. There is no taming him or managing your encounters with him or even understanding him. He’s almost like a Lovecraftian monster in his assault on the idea that human beings can master or even comprehend the world. He is purely sublime, and although he will bear a great number of interpretations, none of them will encompass him. For someone as intellectual and Enlightenment-infatuated as I am, it’s an exhilarating thing to read such a stimulating book and then get my face slammed right up against the wall of human understanding. I look forward to it every time.

How much “other stuff” do I have to read in order to understand Ulysses?

Judd9 Comments

The short answer to this question is: none. No ancillary reading is necessary to enjoy Ulysses, and I tend to tell first-time readers to actually avoid all the guides and reference books: I think it’s best to just let Joyce’s prose carry you along, and enjoy the ride. You can try to figure out “what it all means” later.

However, I do recognize that this approach isn’t satisfying to everyone, and some people prefer to have some of the more difficult aspects of the text cleared up for them as they go. (This seems an appropriate thing to acknowledge in the light of Daryl’s post earlier today). So here are some of the things that you might like to take a look at, as we read.

1. In addition to a good dictionary, the one indispensible resource is Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated. This hefty tome will elucidate the vast majority of Joyce’s references, from literary allusions to local Dublin “street furniture.” Some people like to read with this open alongside, checking out Gifford’s commentary as they go. I did this, in fact, my second time through: it’s enlightening, but as you might imagine it really slows down the reading, and takes a lot away from the rhythm of Joyce’s writing, so I’m not crazy about it as an approach. Instead, I’d suggest marking words and passages you are curious about as you read, and then after you finish a chapter go to Gifford and look them up. But everyone reads differently, and you’ll have to find a method that works for you.

2. There are any number of guides to Ulysses, which provide plot summary and explain various allusions and parallels. There are two that are particularly worth mentioning. One was written by Joyce’s friend Stuart Gilbert, with Joyce’s guidance, and so it has the authorial imprimatur: it’s sort of the “official” guide to Ulysses. It is an excellent book. It’s rather heavy on the summary and quotation of the novel, but when you consider that it was published while Ulysses was still banned in most of the English-speaking world, that makes a lot of sense. Gilbert spends a lot of time on the Homeric parallels, cementing that mode of reading for a generation of Joyceans. His introduction to the book is fascinating (and almost as dense as Ulysses itself, at times), so I’d suggest looking at that at some point (preferably after you’ve finished your first reading of the novel), even if you don’t want read his summary/analysis of each individual chapter.

More recent than Gilbert, and rather more popular among contemporary readers, is Harry Blamires’ The Bloomsday Book. This is a lot less inflated than Gilbert’s book, and provides a sort of walk-through of the text, pointing out various connections that might escape the casual reader. It’s very helpful, but I often find myself questioning his conclusions. (I believe I’ve spotted a few outright errors, in fact.) But really, I think my problem is that I just find his reading a little too cut-and-dried, whereas I find Ulysses is more ambiguous.     

Then there is a more recent guide, which I’ve heard was actually a best-seller in Ireland (though I have not confirmed this to be true): Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. As the title suggests, this is less a guide to the plot of the book or exegesis of its literary depths than a discussion of what the book has to tell us about being human. In that regard, it’s maybe a little touchy-feely for some, but it’s really quite good, and it’s interesting to see how Ulysses is regarded “today.” (Well, last year, anyway.)

3. Moving up the scale from “notes” to “guides” to “studies,” there are any number of great introductions to Ulysses that take a more whole-cloth approach, rather than walking the reader from chapter to chapter. One I particularly like is by Hugh Kenner, probably the greatest modernist scholar of his generation, and just a really good stylist in his own right. His book on Ulysses  is brief, but full of interesting observations. There are others, but this is my favorite.

4. Then there’s the literature that Joyce was drawing on for background. I don’t think reading the Odyssey is very important for understanding Ulysses: a grasp of its basic plot (a hero trying to get home, a son trying to reunite with his father) and major characters and mythological monsters (Cyclops, Sirens, etc.) is sufficient, and can be gained from reading a children’s “stories from the Odyssey” (which is, I believe, essentially what Joyce was drawing on). But if you have the time, of course, there’s no harm in reading the Great Poem of the Western Tradition (I like the Fagles translation). 

The other big canonical text referred to throughout Ulysses is Hamlet. I’d imagine everyone reading this has read Hamlet at some point, but if you have a free couple hours, it’s worth revisiting it: there’s a whole chapter (the ninth) that centers on it, so it’s good to have it fresh in your mind. But not necessary, by any means. (As a matter of fact, the discussion of Hamlet in the book strays pretty far from the play itself, looking more towards Shakespeare’s life for material. But you’ll see.)

The most important precursor to Ulysses is Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This you probably should read before you start. Ulysses picks up the story of Stephen Dedalus where Portrait left off, and a number of other characters carry over as well. Again, you’ll totally be able to get into Ulysses without it, but it provides useful context. There are also a number of characters from Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories, that crop up, but it’s not necessary to have read that one first either.

5. And of course, like all his books, Joyce drew much of Ulysses from his own life, so Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography provides a lot of useful background.

Of course, there’s also a lot of stuff online (for example, the annotations at Ulysses “Seen”): my next post will explore Ulysses on the web. And I’d like to invite comments on secondary sources from you, as well: I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t mention, and probably people have their own ideas on how to best approach the book: please share.

Ultimately I’d like to reiterate, even though I’ve listed a semester’s-worth of reading here, absolutely none of it is necessary, and I strongly encourage first-time readers to just jump into the book without all this excess baggage holding you down. The book more than stands on its own.

It All Comes Back to Me

Daryl L. L. Houston21 Comments

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve started and stopped Ulysses a number of times. The first was maybe a decade ago, when I checked it out from the library, read a few pages, and decided it wasn’t for me. Several years ago, I decided to buy my own copy of the book, and I’ve tried to start a couple of times since. I think I once got maybe 100 pages in before deciding it wasn’t for me. The experience is similar to my experience with Gravity’s Rainbow, another one I started who knows how many times before finishing. I think I once got some 300 pages into that one before being distracted by a shiny object and putting it down. I did finish GR at last a few years ago, and I was left feeling like it was a great book but not so terribly enjoyable a book on the whole. It was a bit like taking medicine.

Having started (and restarted, and restarted) Ulysses again, I begin to feel history repeating itself. I’ve read the first ten pages three or four times in the last few days. I’ve gotten only so far partially because it’s a busy time for me and I can’t ever seem to find more than a few minutes to read. And even then, I’m reading a page (or a part of a page) at a time before being interrupted. So I can’t place all blame on the text for my slow start so far.

But I think I am going to blame the text some. Or I am going to blame Modernism, which I now remember, not having read much from that camp in the last decade, I fucking hate. Before it occurred to me to affix that dread label to Ulysses this morning, I found myself trying to enumerate the reasons I was having difficulty slipping into the book. The best I could come up with was that it is obnoxiously allusive and meandering. Some meandering I’m ok with. I suppose I like meandering that is entertaining. But in the opening of Ulysses, I find little so far that entertains (or engages) me. There are words I don’t know and references that apparently even the scholars can’t agree upon the referents for. There are still others that I simply can’t make sense of (a gardener masked with Matthew Arnold’s face?). There are phrases in at least two foreign languages I don’t understand. And there’s stagnation. So far, a fop and a wet blanket are standing on a tower shaving and talking briefly but ornately about things as varied as death and money and clothes and dreams. There’s nothing so far to really hold my interest. I’m not dazzled by the prose, and I’m actually a bit put off by the allusiveness and meandering.

These seem to be the hallmarks of Modernism, at least as I understand it. Take “The Wasteland.” Take Pound. (Please!) One of the problems I have with this sort of literature is that it often seems like a big in-joke. Modernists seem to be intentionally obscure and to wink at and nudge one another about their smartness. It’s not an inviting sort of literature. It makes me feel not only like I’m not one of the cool kids but also like I’m not even one of the smart kids.

I don’t expect (or want) a book to be easy. Most of the books I read, I read because they have reputations as hard, worthwhile books. I enjoy working to grok a book. Sometimes, I even enjoy working hard to grok how to grok a book (I’m thinking in particular of Gaddis’s JR). But boy am I worried about my ability to hang on for this one. I will. I will, even if I just stare at every word on every page without really getting what Joyce is saying. But if the opening — which I must have read a dozen times in my life by now — is any indication, this is going to be a slog and a half.

More to Think About

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

Moby-Dick is such a rich book with so much going on that I’ve left just tons of things by the wayside that I would love to have picked up and run with. Some things you might think about as you digest the book:

  • The tension between land/grass/prairie and the sea. The book is just brimming with these contrasts. Does Melville draw this contrast so starkly (and almost systematically) merely for effect or is there some more significant reason for it?
  • Moby-Dick is published in the decade prior to the Civil War with slavery as a backdrop. The fear of mutiny makes an appearance several times in the book (not least of all in one of the longest chapters, “The Town Ho’s Story”). Melville also wrote about conscription and mutiny in other works (Billy Budd comes to mind). To what extent and to what effect is Melville writing here about freedom of will and, by extension, about slavery?
  • Was Melville gay? Lots of historians have suggested that he may have been (some even that he may have made a sort of pass at his good buddy Hawthorne, effecting something of an estrangement). How much of Moby-Dick is it reasonable to read with homosexuality as a focus?
  • I’ve written already about the two Moby-Dicks, but I think it would be fascinating to trace the idea further and to see how much water that theory really holds.
  • Is there any use in considering the almost total absence of women in Moby-Dick? Or do we just figure that whaling was a predominately male-run industry and move on to another topic? (Or do we suggest that, as women are largely absent from Melville’s work as a whole, he was perhaps uncomfortable writing about women? And if so, do we add this supposition to the gay question?)
  • There are a lot of interesting — and potentially significant — names in Moby-Dick. George Stewart examines some of these in his article about the two Moby-Dicks in an effort to understand the different modes of composition (ie, does using particularly symbolically significant names suggest a higher style, and do significant names devoid of any traceable symbolism suggest a lower style, and the two styles a shift in mode of composition?). Stewart’s project aside, I think it’d be fun to do a detailed analysis of all the major names, their historical significance, and how they bear on the character (or ship) they’re attached to.
  • In flipping through the edition of Moby-Dick I used during college (I used a different edition this time around), I found a bunch of places where I had marked poetic scansion, typically scanning roughly as iambic pentameter. This isn’t really a terribly uncommon meter even in natural, spoken English (a professor once cited the example “a footlong hot dog all the way to go”), but I still perk up when I’m reading along and find a line that just stops me in my tracks with its sudden unmissable meter. A careful examination of the meter of Moby-Dick would be painstaking but fascinating.
  • Those who have done film or stage adaptations of Moby-Dick have mined it for drama. But I’ve never done a systematic survey of all of the book’s dramatic elements. Might be fun. (By the way, I had lined up an interview with a member of the Dallas opera’s production of Moby-Dick, but it seems to have fallen through.)
  • If you’re like me, you finally wind up just getting tired of looking up all the references to historical or mythological people or events you don’t know much about (I’m looking at you, Xerxes). Powermobydick glosses most (if not all) of these, but I crave a proper and thorough index complete with discussion of the particular relevance of these references to the text.
  • Melville writes a lot about darkness and light. No doubt some enterprising Master’s student has written a thesis on this.
  • Hawthorne and Melville were good buddies during much of the composition of Moby-Dick. Their friendship has been considered at some length in various places, but I never made much of it here. And what about Transcendentalism (or anti-) as an influence on Moby-Dick?
  • I have a bad habit of romanticizing the past. People sat around talking philosophy and reading all day long and were generally just a whole lot smarter and more widely-read than we are now, I tend to think. But consider this: Fewer than 2500 copies of Moby-Dick were sold in the three years following its publication in America, and over a period of 35 years, it sold 3,215 copies (roughly 27 copies a year). Did people merely loan books to one another a lot more than we do now, or was there really that little interest? I know Moby-Dick did not sell well, but was it vastly atypical? What kind of sales did Hawthorne (a very popular author) have, I wonder? Did he sell 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 copies of his popular books? What would the answers to some of these questions say about the true state of reading and of the intelligentsia of Melville’s time compared to now?
  • Life after Moby-Dick for Melville was really sad. He was something of a drinker and wound up going on speaking tours at the events of which he mumbled through his speeches. Under the right circumstances in private life, he was an animated speaker, though. One of his sons committed suicide, and though Melville seems to have been affected by that, he was by some accounts not a terribly kind man to live with. The tenderness that appears through much of Moby-Dick makes this all hard to swallow. He died more or less forgotten.
  • Delbanco writes of Melville as something of a precursor to the postmodern writers (I’ve touched on this before). It’s not something I had ever thought about prior to this read (having really encountered postmodern literature some time after my first few encounters with Moby-Dick). A survey of some of the ways in which he anticipates less conventional modes of writing has no doubt been done and would make an interesting read.
  • Who is the hero of Moby-Dick? Matt Bucher asked a question along these lines at the beginning. Paul (either here or at his own blog) saw a glimmer of the heroic figure in Queequeg, and George Stewart suggests that Queequeg may have been a the hero in Melville’s early conception of the novel, but he fades into the background. Ishmael can hardly be called the hero, and Ahab — though possessed of the tragic elements of a tragic hero — probably lacks the heroic elements of a hero. Is there a main character or hero in Moby-Dick? Who? Why?

Thanks for reading along over the past few weeks. I’ve really enjoyed having an excuse to read the book (and related matter) with some care, and I’ve found a lot of the reactions to Moby-Dick (e.g., that it’s full of humor) to be very gratifying. I suspect there’ll be a few more straggling posts about Moby-Dick (I know that artist Matt Kish has a few more planned), but this post probably marks my last on the book. I’m mentally composing a post about my first beef with Ulysses already.

Illustrating ‘Moby-Dick’ – Captain Ahab

mattkish871 Comment

Ahab was a monster.

I was afraid of him the instant I started this project. Even more so than with the white whale itself, I knew that whatever choices I made in depicting Ahab would loom large over the entire series. I was quite literally terrified, and I lived in dread of illustrating him. I knew the day would come, but the less I had to think about it the better. The pressure was staggering.

Perhaps that was because I knew Ahab came with expectations. Many are familiar with Gregory Peck’s turn playing the role. Less, perhaps, know Rockwell Kent’s Ahab specifically, but enough have seen it in various editions that I knew I had to battle against that as well. Beyond those two examples, books and movies and comics and paintings and prints and all sorts of other ephemera, whether they cluttered the pop culture landscape or filled the drawers of museums and archives, bore Ahab’s image and like a kaleidoscope filled the world of the novel with a fragmented panorama of monomaniacs.

As always, I began with the details. Delightfully, Melville doesn’t skim with these regarding his lunatic captain. After pages and pages of whispered rumors and half-myths, Ahab finally appears in the flesh in chapter 28, after this incredible line of text…

Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

That possessive touch, “his quarter-deck,” is a brilliant touch foreshadowing just how much control Ahab now has over his sailors’ lives. And deaths.

Melville continues…

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.

There was enough, indeed more than enough, in that one passage for me to begin. And in spite of my terror, I did have my own ideas. There was some madness there, yes, but above all, there is a great unknown quality about Ahab. He appears strong, robust, “made of solid bronze” and yet he looks “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.” A paradox. Ahab is both brutally vibrant yet curiously and almost invisibly wasted and desiccated.

Continuing to explore my own visual vocabulary of imagining these whalemen as ship like constructs themselves, I saw Ahab as some kind of an avatar. The ideal, perfect whaleman. Even here, nearing his own unknown and unexpected death, consumed by hatred and vengeance, he was shrouded in power and glory. His image had to reflect that might and the drawing itself had to show fealty to the man. I knew I would need to spend much much more time than usual, but I felt immediately that an ornate border needed to decorate the drawing, creating the feeling of an icon. In a bit of visual foreshadowing, I decorated the corners of the border with a blood-red quarter circle enclosing the shape of a fleeing white whale-tail presaging Ahab’s deadly pursuit of the unreachable and unconquerable Moby Dick. Also, in keeping with the grotesquely baroque designs of his ship the Pequod, Ahab was decked out like a barbarian king with a great belt, a massive spiked belt buckle depicting (again) the white whale, and a great coat swirling with the colors of the sea. A thick and brutal harpoon jutted from his right shoulder, seemingly encased in his body and ready to be fired forth as if from the cannon of his chest. Finally, Ahab’s great head sat on his body like a turret. I felt that I absolutely had to push the curious and slightly disturbing image of that “lividly whitish” scar to the fore as an outward, obvious symbol of Ahab’s inner maiming…

This first image of Ahab was grand, as suits the man. All perfect lines and curves delicately shaded and lavished with care. But I knew Ahab himself would undergo a drastic transition throughout the novel and once I had settled on how to depict him, I relished the thought of showing his deepening madness and steady unraveling. This I would show in the choice of media and the fury of the brushstrokes delineating him. First, and almost immediately after appearing on “his quarter-deck,” Ahab savagely rebukes Stubb, advancing on him with “overbearing terrors in his aspect.”

Next, one of the most definitive lines from the novel, Ahab’s cry of “I am madness maddened.” I began to experiment with subtle and not-so-subtle changes in Ahab. His head, somehow, in my mind had become a great scale-armored helmet. The eye, once so perfectly and geometrically rendered now grew and bulged and leered. The head was now riven from above, not by a simple scar but by a great bolt of divine lightning. His unmoored, maddened head seemed to float, sprouting wires and circuits and pipes rather than veins and sinews and blood.

Here, Ahab in an almost reflective moment, scrutinizing his charts and maps, obsessed with the hunt for Moby Dick while the lone lamp in his cabin swings and sways over his head.

Finally, what has come to be not only my favorite image of Ahab, but my favorite of the series of illustrations this far. Ahab, at the gam with the Goney (or Albatross) looking over the side of the ship at schools of small fish which had suddenly darted away from the Pequod and arranged themselves near the Goney. The line illustrated here is “’Swim away from me, do ye?’ murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.” This is perhaps the only instance in the novel where Ahab’s madness and hateful thirst for vengeance gives way and reveals the agony and pain he labors under. Ahab is heartsick, dying inside, forever removed from joy and numb to any feelings of warmth and kindness. Some part of Ahab truly is aware of his own sickness, of the death inside of him, and at this moment, with this one line and this longing look at the fish fleeing from him, Ahab shows that “deep helpless sadness.”

Jonah

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

Jonah makes, by name, 85 appearances in Moby-Dick.  There are no doubt other references that recall him obliquely without using his name. And of course some characters in Moby-Dick bear certain resemblances to Jonah, bringing the total reference count up yet further. In chapter 82, Melville puts Jonah together with the likes of St. George, Vishnu, Perseus, and Hercules, and suggests that as the Hebrew texts predated the Greek, so Jonah must be source material for the Hercules myth (if Hercules, why not also Perseus? Melville doesn’t answer). That first whaler (as Melville would have him) shows up by name in the extracts and eight chapters, generally at ten-to-twenty-chapter intervals. Ishmael aside, Jonah is probably the most consistent presence in the text from beginning to end.

Delbanco points to speculation that the chapter containing Father Mapple’s sermon (all about Jonah, recall) was a late addition to the text. If so, then such an addition would seem to suggest that Jonah serves a more important role in the text than merely that of a convenient Biblical reference. The lesson of Father Mapple’s sermon is fairly simple, if eloquently illuminated by that dramatic man. It is “a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.” But that’s the story and not the lesson; the lesson is that willful disobedience of God’s command simply will not do. In addition to declining to obey God, Jonah had the gall to try to flee bodily from that omnipresent, omniscient deity.

Yet in the end, after his sojourn in the belly of the whale, Jonah repents of his hubris. So too, Mapple says, may people repent. “Sin not,” he says, “but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.”

Now, let’s stand Jonah up for a moment next to Ahab. Both are prone to hubris. Both would meddle with a thing greater than themselves. They both sleep (surprisingly) through calamitous storms. Melville writes at more length than seems necessary about lamps in the cabins of both men. Shipmates come very near to ousting both, though each ultimately ousts himself (Ahab insisting that Starbuck stay aboard the ship; I see this as an echo of Jonah’s allowing himself to be cast away in order to spare the lives of the men he has shipped with). Melville highlights the Biblical detail of weeds wrapped around Jonah’s head, and he kills off Ahab by lashing him to Moby Dick by the hempen line. The ever-present contrast between land and ocean in Moby-Dick is present in the short book of Jonah as well.

But where Jonah flees the infinite, Ahab pursues it. As Jonah (in Father Mapple’s telling) sleeps in his cabin, the whale that will swallow him makes its way toward the ship, while Ahab, in his cabin, plots a course willfully in line with the course of the whale he pursues. Jonah flees his destiny, while Ahab strives to force his destiny.

Is this the lesson of Moby-Dick? That you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t? Melville surely writes a great deal about fate and predestination, not least of all at the end of the chapter entitled “The Symphony,” worth quoting at length:

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths

Note how the beginning of Ahab’s speech echoes the sense of part of Father Mapple’s sermon:

As with all sinners among men, the sin of [Jonah] was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God — never
mind now what that command was, or how conveyed — which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do — remember that — and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

It is disobedience to yourself that’s hard. Ahab knows not what drives him so. Jonah knows what drives him but disobeys it so that he can be obedient to himself. Both men meet a whale; only the one who repents comes back alive.

It’s interesting to me that Father Mapple leaves off the second half of Jonah’s story. I suppose it’s not especially nautical. Having landed at last in Nineveh, Jonah goes to preach God’s wrath and promise of destruction to the inhabitants of that vile land. To his surprise, they repent. When God decides to spare them, Jonah goes a bit emo and declares that in a world in which God can repent of the evil he had promised, he (Jonah) would rather die than live. He then goes off to pout in the sun. God makes a plant grow to give him shade. Then God sends a worm to kill the plant so that Jonah is miserable again. Jonah once again wants to die. The lesson God seems to want to teach Jonah here is that just as he (Jonah) pitied a plant that grew overnight and was killed (I figured he was just angry because God took away his shade), so God pitied the people (and the cattle) of Nineveh.

Consider this brief passage, as Starbuck seems to be on the verge of convincing Ahab to turn the ship around in “The Symphony”:

But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

Like Jonah’s tree, Ahab — on the cusp of a sort of redemption — is blighted at last. The long passage I quote above in which Ahab waxes philosophical on self-knowledge (ahem, apples) and fate immediately follows this simile, just one more entanglement with the story of Jonah.

Melville points out time after time that people are bound together as members in something like a joint-stock company. Even when you think you’re merely following your own nose, you’re so wrapped up within the warp and weave of the fabric of society that you can’t avoid either being touched or touching the lives of others. Trying to run from God? Maybe you’ll get your ship’s crew wrecked. Planning a monomaniacal chase and revenge killing of a storied and apparently malicious whale? Might want to think for a moment about how it’ll affect those who ship with you. Or: Want to enact Manifest Destiny by fighting a war with Mexico? Maybe you should consider the thousands who’ll die in the conquest. (Of the Mexican-American War, Emerson said “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Melville, Delbanco tells us, harbored similar thoughts.) Or: Figuring on passing a law that would allow slave owners to hunt men down like prey and drag them home? Well, you get the point.