ROBBERS, GIANTS, GHOSTS

ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE

Let’s start easy. Taking our clue from the most notoriously difficult novel of the 20th century, ULYSSES (1922) by James Joyce, with its eminently comprehensible opening paragraph:

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. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

The novel opens on Stephen Dedalus’s frenemy and soon-to-be-ex-roommate Buck Mulligan who is plump and stately, a rich robust relief, a goading contrapunct, of emaciated and pauperish Stephen who is deadbroke and hungry.

I guess we do run into our first difficulty: the latin at the end of the passage. But those are just the first words of the latin mass. Buck is doing a fake mass as a joke.

The whole opening chapter is basically boisterous Buck fucking around with grim moody funereal Stephen.

Buck’s talking about how he needs to give Stephen more clothes (brokeass Stephen is already wearing his pants) and he says he has a grey pair to toss him, and Stephen says that he can’t wear them if they are grey. And Buck goes,

—He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.

The reason twentytwoyearold Stephen is in such a bleak mood is because his mother is in fact dead: Buck says he killed her because while she was on her death bed, she asked Stephen to kneel down and pray with her and he refused.

Though Stephen believes in the integrity of not kneeling kowtow to a God he don’t believe in, the moment haunts him,

Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes… A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

I want you to remember that line: pain, that was not yet the pain of love.

Is it too early to say that Stephen is Hamlet? Ok, Stephen is Hamlet. But we won’t fixate on that now. Basically though, he is griefstricken, grieffrozen.

Buck says,

—The fellow I was with last night says you suffer from g.p.i… general paralysis of the insane.

Like Hamlet, the immensity of death has made him incomprehensible inward inscrutable in a way that looks like insanity.

Does it matter to you that Stephen Dedalus is the same age that James Joyce was on June 16, 1904, that he had lost his own mother to a sudden bout of cancer in the same way Stephen lost his, that he was out in Paris, dawdling around the library with his literary aspirations, under the guise of going to medical school (though his french was not nearly good enough to understand the technical lectures) not eating for 30 hours at a time due to emptypockets, writing harried letters home begging for money from his financially desultory family, making his mother weep so worried for her son until her and his father would scrape and scrounge a few bucks that the spendthrift Joyce would immediately blow, until the real Joyce, the fake Stephen, was yanked out of this Parisian fantasy back to Dublin to sit at his mother’s bedside while she endured a brutal illness and end and sent his convivial wastrel of a father off the pitiable deep end and plunged the robust Joyce clan (it seems like he had about 100 sisters) into ruin?

Joyce gives us a very loving (love in the form of careful attention), if true-to-his-detriment, portrait of his father in this book.

Stephen’s sister Dilly Dedalus is standing on the curb listening to an auctioneer sell off lovely cosy curtains she yearns for and her dad, Simon, pulls up on her,

—Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr. Dedalus said. Are you trying to imitate your uncle John the cornetplayer, head upon shoulders? Melancholy God!

Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr. Dedalus placed his hands on them and held them back.

—Stand up straight, girl, he said. You’ll get curvature of the spine. Do you know what you look like?

He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulder and dropping his underjaw.

—Give it up father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.

Mr. Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.

—Did you get any money? Dilly asked.

—Where would I get any money? Mr. Dedalus said. There is no one in Dublin who would lend me fourpence.

—You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.

After making fun of his daughter in a scene I find extremely charming, Dilly turns it on Simon: she knows that he got some money because he’s drunk, she can tell he’s drunk, once again he drank away the family money.

He’s humiliated by her recognition and snaps,

You’re like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died… Wouldn’t care if I was stretched out stiff. He’s dead. The man upstairs is dead.

Are you surprised to find a scene like this in a towering work of Difficult Modernism?

I read this scene to Gaby in my effort to prove that ULYSSES is actually easy and for everybody. She found it likewise charming, but her reaction was also like, So? Can’t you just get something like this in a contemporary novel?

That’s a very good point. And as Pound tells us in his ABCs of Reading, you can’t fall in love with anachronism in an old work: i.e. you can’t be impressed by a word just cause it’s old, or by a scene just cause it’s recognizable of life 100 years later.

Still, this scene is exquisitely perceptive, and is Tolstoyan in its realism (Joyce adored Tolstoy). It culminates a few pages later when Stephen sees her, “Dilly’s high shoulders and shabby dress” and she’s holding a book in her hand, a French primer. Stephen told her about Paris and now she wants to learn French.

—What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

—Here, Stephen said. It’s all right. Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.

—Some, Dilly said. We had to.

She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

We.

Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite.

Misery! Misery!

Stephen feels bad for his family, for his sisters, but he also has a calling to be a great artist, and if he’s gonna do what he’s gotta do, he can’t let Dilly drown him, and he can’t succumb to his mother’s request that he pray with her.

Ok, there is a weird word in what I just quoted: Agenbite. We were easing into it, but let’s escalate a little bit now. “Agenbite of inwit” is a phrase that Stephen thinks very early on and it becomes (like many, many things) a motif thru-out the book.

Basically it’s an anglosaxon word that means conscience or guilt, and it’s important to Joyce’s project because of how the meaning of the word is expressed in the word itself: inwit is obviously your inner wit, right? and the agenbite: it’s biting at you again and again. The word is what it is; as Samuel Beckett would say about Finnegans Wake (the culmination of Joyce’s project with language):

Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics.

Ok, let’s pick up a thread I put down.

Why read Joyce’s work autobiographically?

Well, I think when you’re talking about a musty book fusting on our shelves unused, it’s good to dust it off, remind people that this book didn’t spring out of the ether a codified classic; it’s a product of a real dude who was really out here, devoting his life to writing these big goofy books, in exile from his home city nearly his entire life, married (Joyce once said facetiously that he couldn’t really admire Jesus Christ b/c he never did the hardest thing a man could do: Live with a woman), raising two children while almost constantly broke, bouncing around from city to city: and these books cost him, besides his sweat and labor, fucking TROUBLE.

People were literally getting arrested for printing excerpts of ULYSSES (from what you’ve read so far, you’re probably like why? but be patient), nobody wanted to publish this shit, —sometimes you hear, Nobody would wanna publish a book like ULYSSES now, Nobody wanted to publish it fucking THEN!, —until he serendipitously ran into Sylvia Beach (the owner of Shakespeare & Co.) at a party, and she was so impressed by him, that she who had never published a book, decided to put it out.

REAL ART CREATES REAL CHALLENGES to the artist (and his family and friends), to the public, to institutions.

That’s why it’s too much to ask of everybody writing novels or doing whatever else they’re doing to make REAL ART. It just costs too much. But if you ninnyminded critics out here think you would be able to recognize ULYSSES when you seen it, without the benefit of piled years, you are mightily mistaken.

James Joyce used and sacrificed his whole life to write ULYSSES and FINNEGANS WAKE. To the extreme detriment of everyone around him. By the time he finished FINNEGANS WAKE (which took him 17! years) he was blind, his daughter was in an asylum, and everyone thought his life’s work fucking sucked, the Nazis invaded Paris, he fled to Zurich and he died, not even 60 years old.

But he was OUT HERE.

Living a real life, in multiple cities all over Europe, scraping for his and his family’s livelihood, following Whitman’s essential command for the artist (which he surely knew intimately),

Who troubles himself about his ornaments or his fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your labor and income to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.

And I just feel like sometimes we have a bad idea of what a book is made out of. There is a knowledge that really living a life grants you. I think it’s easy to think of say, THE DIVINE COMEDY as a block of marble created by some desk-bound Oldster. But Dante fought in war, his wife betrayed him, he spent the twenty years of that poem’s composition literally banned from returning to his home city under threat of death. THE DIVINE COMEDY was not written by a guy solely chained to his desk reading Aquinas (though also, that was a big component of it).

What I’m saying is that the problem with some contemporary books, —if you see a problem with them, —is that even besides the small amount of learning underlying them, there is also an absent bedrock of lived experience.

The books that interest me most are the ones borne out of an extraordinary amount of learning and life.

The other reason to read Joyce in reference to his biography is because he wants us to!

In the 9th chapter of this 18 chapter book, —so the architectural if not the actual midpoint of the book, —Stephen is drunk as a skunk at the library with the Dublin literary crowd, and he gives a disquisition on HAMLET.

He sets the scene, a player comes onto the stage,

It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the days of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre…

Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit

bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in Stratford that his namesake may live forever… Is it possible that Shakespeare speaking his own words to his own son’s name, is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway.

Basically, Stephen argues that while Shakespeare was in London for 20 years dallying there

between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scrotatory love and its foul pleasures

(it’s hard to get a real definition on scrotatory but it definitely means whorehouse activity; and I think Stephen believes, like many, that Shakespeare’s early demise was due to syphilis), his wife Ann Hathaway was cheating on him with his brothers Richard and Edmund (who Shakespeare makes villains in his plays by way of revenge); so HAMLET (whose main character is named after his dead son Hamnet) is his act of cuckold revenge against his wife: Shakespeare is the ghost and he counsels Hamlet into murdering everyone in the play on behalf of his shame.

And here is Stephen’s grand statement on why fiction is unfictional:

If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The rest is silence, Hamlet says dyingly. What’s silence? João Guimarães Rosa tells us in Grande Sertão: It’s us ourselves too much. Hamlet suffers from an overabundance of self and a poignant lack of two important things: 1) LOVE and 2) WISE COUNSEL.

There’s a reason that the architectural midpoint of this novel contains a disquisition on HAMLET, it’s because ULYSSES is, —(it’s also many many many other things but), —a rewriting of HAMLET focusing on those two outsized absences.

Before I go in on that (and I fear insanity is brewing), let me tell you what Stephen thinks about fatherhood:

—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil… Fatherhood in the sense of conscious begetting is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not the madonna… the church is founded and founded irrevocably because founded, like the world, macro- and micro-, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris… may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

This is the reason that being a cuckold is such a big problem: theoretically, it delegitimizes the whole program of fatherhood. But also, Stephen doesn’t believe in fatherhood because he’s had bad fathers. His own, Simon, is a pitiable lout. God the father and his famous son are proscribing deathmongers. And Shakespeare, with his miserly vindictiveness is also a bad father.

Now why is this book called ULYSSES?

The professorial rabble will tell you that it is because the novel corresponds to the ODYSSEY. And this is a facet of modernism, making the mundane drama of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (who we haven’t even gotten to yet and he’s the true hero of the book) mythic by corresponding their nonadventures to the mythic adventures of polytropic Odysseus.

But why then, is it not called ODYSSEUS?

Again, the professorial rabble will tell you it is because when Joyce was a boy, he read about Odysseus via his latin name, Ulysses.

But Joyce was obsessed with Dante. Dante never read Homer because he didn’t know Greek and there were no translations into Latin. So when he puts Ulysses in hell, he is inventing his own character just based on what he’s heard. Ulysses is deep in hell for the sin of fraudulent counsel, —the same sin that we might charge Satan with in his serpentine guise.

In Canto 26, a voice emerges from a flame and tells Dante,

not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty

toward my agéd father, nor the love I owed

Penelope that would have made her glad,

could overcome the fervor that was mine

to gain experience of the world

and learn about man’s vices and his worth.

After finally returning from the travails of the Odyssey, Ulysses sets out again to challenge the boundary point of the known world; he whips his shipmates into a frenzy and passes the pillars of Hercules and sees Mount Purgatory, but gets caught in a whirlpool and drowns because his mission is unholy.

Ok, hold that in mind.

The hero of our ULYSSES is Leopold Bloom. He shares a lot in common with the portrait of Shakespeare that Stephen painted. He had a son who died at eleven days old (Hamnet died at 11 years old) in 1893, 11 years before the date the novel takes place and a dead father (who poisoned himself after his wife died because he couldn’t stand being alive without her; the ghost of his father is probably the Man in the Mackintosh that people in town see lurking around but can’t identify) and a cheating wife.

There is one big difference: he is kind! and forgiving!

Leopold Bloom’s real predecessor is Uncle Toby from TRISTRAM SHANDY which is I think the secret central text to Joyce’s entire project. Leopold Bloom is Uncle Toby Walking Around; except he is much more human, he shits, he leers, he works, he jacks off, he picks his nose, does basically everything a thirtyeightyearold fellow might do over the course of a day.

So basically the whole plot of the book which I realize I neglected to describe is that Leopold Bloom’s wife is gonna have sex with another guy, so he makes himself scarce for the day and walks around the city; Stephen is also walking around the city, and occasionally their paths converge, but then they really converge when Leopold (for timekilling and benevolent and possiblyprurient purposes) goes to the hospital to check on this woman who is having her ninth baby and he runs into Stephen who is drunk as fuck partying with his buddies who are in medical school and Leopold notices that they are not treating him very well and decides to keep a watchful eye on him; he follows them to Nighttown (the red-light district) and Stephen gets beat up by a couple of British officers, his friends ditch him, and Leopold picks him up, takes the little money he has left for safekeeping, they go get some food, and then he brings him over to his house and makes him some hot chocolate and offers him a place to stay before Stephen scampers off for the night.

Stephen is a young Joyce incapable of writing the book we’re reading. Leopold Bloom shows him agape (charitable love) and the possibility of wise counsel, of good fatherhood; and most importantly, the attitude sorely missing from both the Catholic Church and Shakespeare: the ability to forgive Eve.

You know Eve, of course. It is my contention that the Catholic Church is built on the foundation of not-having-forgiven Eve. I think it is very easy to read Eve’s crime as one of a nearly sexual nature in her dealings with the devil, in her eating of the apple. If not that, it is at least a crime of having an unfettered mind. She acts in a way outside of Adam and God’s control and it leads to the fall of paradise. Eve is not foolish. She is testing boundaries in the way of Ulysses.

The reason for Jesus Christ, I don’t know if you know this, is because until his advent, we were barred from our heavenly paradise thanks to our foolish first parents. We need a proper sacrifice to atone for their sins. Jesus is Adam’s substitute. His death absolves Adam. The virgin Mary is supposed to be Eve’s substitute. Jesus is fully man, like Adam. But Mary ain’t fully woman like Eve. She obeys everything everyone says, allows herself to be a vessel for God’s demands. And most importantly of all to the ideology: she is a VIRGIN. It’s easy to forgive a woman who ain’t never fucked nobody.

The only way we would ever get a proper substitute is if a whore like Mary Magdalene was venerated in place of our pristine Maria.

So thusly the church is founded on an insubstantial sacrifice, Eve was never forgiven, and the ethical consequences of that are deeply rooted in our culture. It’s not just a mythical game, the Catholic Church lays the foundation for so much of our culture and ethics, and not forgiving Eve was a lasting error.

I think Joyce believes this.

Creation and the Fall of Man is the cornerstone of his two great works. And we can prove this by looking at the exact middle pages of both ULYSSES & FINNEGANS WAKE. Joyce is an extraordinarily esoteric and meticulous designer. There’s a good reason he named his stand-in Dedalus after the designer of the labyrinth.

On Page 391.5 of 783 pages of my Vintage edition of ULYSSES, Stephen says, (and this chapter mimics the gestation of the english language so the styles are OD),

our mighty mother and mother most venerable… she is the second Eve and she won us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are linked up by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all, seed, breed, and generation, for a penny pippin.

And if we look on page 314 of FINNEGANS WAKE we find,

ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash subtittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitz call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd.

Believe it or not, I don’t quite know what this whole passage of the Wake is getting at. But “eve her sins” seems to me clearly to be sounding the note of “ease her sins” i.e. forgiveness.

And in both these passages we hear this “pip” this “pippin” which means apple but is also derived from the Old French “pepino” which in Spanish is cucumber. Joyce certainly knew that, and he was certainly interested in making a dick pun wherever he could find one. And so it seems clear to me that Joyce is tying Eve’s sin to one of wanton sexuality.

Why does ULYSSES take place on June 16, 1904? Well, that was the day he had his first date with Nora Barnacle, and she took him into the park and jacked him off; it was the day of his first sexual experience that wasn’t mired in the guilt of brothels, this was a sin that sunlit original sin’s long shadow: shame in sex.

ULYSSES is a celebration of Nora Joyce.

The troubadour tradition was all about exulting the regular woman to a divine status. Dante capped this off with his Beatrice. He blasphemously allowed her to give him the ultimate revelation. But still, all these women are purified in their exaltation. Beatrice don’t fart: if you know what I’m saying.

Joyce conceived of ULYSSES as the fourth testament (after the Old, the New, and Dante’s Comedy), and he ends the book with Leopold’s wife, Molly’s monologue (there’s no punctuation, a stylistic tic that Joyce took from Nora’s letters).

It is obscene and scandalous,

he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big… like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is

By this point in the book we are wholeheartedly rooting for Leopold so it’s wonderful to hear that he has a much bigger cumshot than Molly’s lover Blazes Boylan.

Molly wants to have sex with Leopold. She asks him to bring her an erotic book by author Paul de Kock, but what she really wants is Poldy Cock.

its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part

But the enterprise bums him out too much now. It seems like possibly the last time they had sex, or at least the last time he finished inside of her was 11 years ago, after their son Rudy died.

Leopold still has very fond memories of their love though; he sees two flies stuck together (mating) and he thinks of an early date of theirs,

Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky… O wonder! Ravished over her I lay, full lips, full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes… Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me, I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. Me. And me now.

If it’s not clear now, Joyce can write stunningly in almost any style, and he puts almost every style in this book.

An underrated chapter is, —after the almost 200 page phantasmagorical play where a bunch of crazy shit happens including the imagined trial of Leopold Bloom getting MeToo’d for being a pervert, a chapter which includes Stephen arguing with the ghost of his mother and culminates in Bloom seeing a vision of the ghost of his son Rudy and calling out to him and getting no response, —the first one in Part Three which is written as if Leopold wrote it himself, in a bad genteel style that I find extremely amusing,

Mr. Bloom being handicapped by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had, to vary the timehounoured adage, gone the way of all buttons, though, entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he historically made light of the mischance.

Whatever I’m quoting in this essay is a paltry glimpse of how well Joyce can write. He writes some throwaway sentences that most writers couldn’t even dream of writing. Here is from the end of a stage direction in that play chapter:

They are in grey gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.

Read that outloud, check that euphony.

And the variety too. I quoted Bloom’s interior monologue about Molly, but later on in chapter 17 we get a chapter that’s framed as question and answer in a scientific style, and we get this beautiful passage, again Bloom thinking about Molly:

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

The biggest difference, I think, between ULYSSES and HAMLET, though, is that HAMLET is a militantly anti-natalist lifedenying work. ULYSSES is a pacifistically natalist life-affirming work. When Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to a nunnery, he’s not doing it because he’s punning on the fact that nunnery is a whorehouse or whatever the fuck some people suggest; he’s doing because he’s terrified at her ability to bring children into the world and he thinks that she should avoid doing it at all costs.

In ULYSSES there’s a chapter where Leopold Bloom is on the beach looking at Gerty McDowell, a young woman in her twenties, and he’s jerking off and she’s kinda showing him some leg, and he jizzes in concordance with fireworks on the beach,

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

Can you tell it’s lurid? This is the chapter that got the publishers of the Little Review in our fine country, arrested for obscenity. And it’s remarkable for being the chapter that gives us the meanest turn of Leopold’s thoughts. Gerty gets up and walks away and,

No. She’s lame! O!

Mr. Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know that when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same.

In the very next chapter, when he goes to the maternity hospital, God thrusts a thunderstorm on them in punishment for his onanism. Stephen (like Joyce) is terrified of thunder and so Bloom comforts him,

for it thundered long rumblingly over all the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the braggart’s side, spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.

There’s a story about Joyce that a young writer went to visit him, and he had just gotten news that his own son Giorgio (whose birthday June 27th, the day of Leopold Bloom’s father’s death) had a child. He was now a grandfather. And he told the young writer that that was the most important thing in the world. And the doltish writer said, “having another Joyce?”

Joyce was quiet and surly for the rest of the visit because the young writer didn’t get it. The important thing is propagation: the continuance of life.

Even though we can look up at the sky and see,

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

and know that,

of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a paranthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

This is a worthwhile meaninglessness, something Hamlet absolutely doesn’t believe.

Bloom goes home. He offers Stephen succor and respite; he’s kind to him in the way that nobody all day has been. They drink a hot chocolate together and go their separate ways. Leopold reflects on his wife’s infidelity with abnegation and equanimity and thinks it’s,

As not so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king’s enemies, impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated murder.

He is content with his life, with his wife, with his one child who is alive (his daughter Milly). And he slides into bed and he kisses his wife’s big fat ass and he goes to sleep.

ULYSSES is a carnivalistic celebration of life in all its shitting eating farting walking taking deathhurtling concupiscent perverse joyful hilarious exuberant meaningless tremendouslyimportant glory.

And we end, apropos of this classical comedy, with a marriage proposal, Molly remembering when Bloom asked her,

I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

If you care about literature, dip into it, there’s something for you. If you’re a writer, this is a gift. It’s the best work we have in English.

We gotta bask in it, sustain it, and write in its wake.