Wanderers Three

James Joyce, Ulysses. On a June morning in 1904 in Dublin Leopold Bloom brings his wife Molly breakfast in bed and then goes out to wander about Dublin all day and into the night. Sometimes we understand what he is up to, but often we don’t.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. On a June morning 20 years later in London Clarissa Dalloway leaves her house and goes out to buy flowers for her party. Her passage through the city is more purposeful than Blooms, but also admits of the unexpected.

Richard Russo,  Nobody’s Fool. On a Thanksgiving morning some 60 years after that in Bath, New York, Donald Sullivan (“Sully”) hobbles down the stairs on his bad knee, uses a stolen snow blower to clear the sidewalk and goes out to look for breakfast at Hattie’s, followed by an off-the-books sheetrocking job. Later he encounters his ex-wife and other family members. It proves to be a long day.

Literature expands our view of the world by letting us spend a minute or day or hour in another person’s head, experiencing life as he or she sees it. These three books gave this reader three very different experiences.

I loved Sully. I’m not sure why and probably would not if I met him, but I loved how he takes  life as it comes, mostly calmly and with good humor, but not always. He travels his day aware of the demands on him and choosing which ones to take seriously.

Maybe sheetrocking wasn’t one of Sully’s favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you care to look, and once you found this rhythm it’d get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years – that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through.

Sully does the work, but he is a person, not the work. I enjoy experiencing that with him.

I go back and reread Mrs. Dalloway every ten years or so because I always find it has something new to offer me. The first time around – when I was much younger – I wrote her off as a society woman, shallow, concerned only with surfaces. But what surfaces!

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she though herself clever, or much out of the ordinary…. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now… and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this….

Here is a woman who lives in her moment and other people’s moments and lets me share them with her. It is not surprising that she mentions recovering from a serious illness. Illness will do that for you: make clear the preciousness and wonder of an ordinary life, not a clever one.

James Joyce puts us into and out of the consciousness of Leopold Bloom (and Stephen Dedalus) on the June day in Dublin, but I am never in their lives as I am with Sully and Clarissa. I experience a tangle of words in which I don’t always know whose consciousness I am in, nor can I distinguish between thought fragments and perception fragments. Sometimes I receive a simple sensory report, sometimes conclusion or comparison, sometimes a memory, at other times a description of external events. All have approximately equal weight – it is up to me to sort them out.

You can regard this as very clever, but I react to it as Joyce toying with the reader. Look how I can make you uncomfortable with an absence of boundaries. Look how I creatively expose you to 18 different styles in 18 different sections. Look how clever I am! I finished the book, something I challenged myself to do. Now I need to let it settle. Maybe in a few years I’ll go back, maybe I’ll see it differently then.

Circe, by Homer, by Joyce

When Odysseus landed on the Aeaean Island he was unsure how dangerous the inhabitants would be. He sent half the crew to check it out, and they were turned by the goddess Circe into swine – with the exception of one man who escaped and returned to tell Odysseus. Circe is attractive:

…But still
they paused at her doors, the nymph with lovely braids

Circe—and deep inside they heard her singing, lifting
her spellbinding voice as she glided back and forth
at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web
a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave.

The Odyssey, Book 10, Robert Fagles Translation

With the help of the god Hermes, Odysseus resists Circe’s drugged wine and gets her to free his crew from their animal forms. Then there is bathing and feasting and going to bed and the goal of Ithaca is forgotten for a year. When Circe sends him on his way, she instructs him to visit Hades to consult the seer Tiresias.

I am reading/struggling through James Joyce’s Ulysses and wonder what the long Circe section there has to do with Homer’s Circe. Joyce has written in dramatic form, with indicated speakers and with stage directions, so the externals of who is saying this or doing that are clearer than in some of the preceding sections. Yet it reads like an extended dream sequence in which all the themes take their turn on the stage.

I am looking for Circe and find an assortment of prostitutes, as well as references to all the women previously encountered. My candidate is Bella/Bello who does indeed work changes in form, both on herself and on Leopold Bloom. Bella becomes Bello and assumes the masculine pronoun. Bloom remains Bloom but is now a female, doing Bello’s bidding. Blamires’ comment:

Thus, before the powerful figure of Bella, the latent femininity and submissiveness of Bloom emerge…. Bloom, with dulling eyes and thickening nose, becomes a humble infatuated creature, while Bella fully takes over the masculine role, becomes ‘Bello’, and orders Bloom down on all fours.

Joyce performs a switch on Homer’s story. Ulysses here, rather than avoiding enchantment and taking control of the situation, is overwhelmed and transformed in ways (feminine) that Joyce perceives as negative. Is that what powerful women do? They make you into the female they no longer are, submissive, groveling, animal like.

More, the entire Circe section is one transformation after another as characters ranging from Milly Bloom to King Edward come and go in Bloom’s disordered mind. What I do not find here is the gift of the Odyssey — the knowledge that enchantment has pleasures but also dangers. Joyce’s Ulysses experiences the dangers, but where is the joy?

Getting into James Joyce’s Ulysses

By one measure I am halfway through, having read 9 of the 18 sections of Joyce’s novel about a day in Dublin. By another measure, I have a long way to go, as I am now on page 218 of the 704 pages of this edition. So why am I plodding on if I have to count pages to encourage myself?

To prepare myself. Dr. Mark Schenker of Yale gives lectures in various Fairfield County libraries and senior centers. It was because of his series on the literature of war that I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried. In November he is going to speak on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a literary classic I have avoided until now. I am somewhat prepared, having read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the past and, more recently Homer’s Odyssey, on which Ulysses is based.

I have a guide as I follow Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin’s busy streets in 1904. The Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires provides an explanation of people, places and allusions. After I read each section in Blamires, I read the corresponding episode in Ulysses, with much less bewilderment than I would otherwise have. Yet something just is not clicking for me. Joyce is a clever writer and this is a clever book. I enjoy the wordplay, the weaving of past and present in the minds of Stephen and Leopold. I see them, I hear them, but I just don’t care about them much.

I want to care. I didn’t expect to care about the fate of Homer’s Odysseus, that self-confident ruler of Ithaca who left his wife to deal with things for 20 years, but I was enchanted with the Odyssey. Odysseus dodged and fought and lied his way around the Mediterranean and a great time was had by all, including this reader. The travels of Dedalus and Bloom about Dublin are much less compelling. Maybe they will avoid Scylla and Charybdis and maybe not; if not, too bad.

Maybe my shift in attitude reflects a shift in expectation. We expect Odysseus to be a sexist warrior but hope for something better from 20th century Dubliners. Joyce  is, if anything, more sexist than Homer. Homer brings us Penelope and Nausicaa with delight in their beauty and dignity and also some sense of their feelings. Joyce trivializes women with slighting names: Molly, Milly, Dilly, Boody. Stephen knows he is arrogantly entitled to his own education and opinions, but when his sister buys a book,

He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.

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

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

But he is surprised by this evidence of female intellectual aspirations.

Better incidents surely like ahead, but at this half-way point I want to record an honest reaction to Ulysses: it is clever but irritating at times.

Ernle Bradford, Ulysses Found

During World War II, a young British sailor who served in the Mediterranean carried a copy of The Odyssey in his kit bag. He returned after the war to sail the Mediterranean on his own. He no longer saw the sea and the islands from the deck of a naval cruiser, but from a small, open boat like the one in which Odysseus journeyed.

Was it real, that Odyssey? Ernle Bradford believes that it was: not a trip to fantasyland but a description of the sea as the early Greeks came to know it. Adventure by adventure, he traces Odysseus’ voyage. He knows the positions of the stars in ancient times. He knows currents and wind directions and how fast you can travel with 12 men at the oars. More, he knows that Homer was chanting his poem to an audience who also knew these things.

Bradford has his feet on the ground with regard to men and affairs. In an early chapter he considers Odysseus’ family. Odysseus was a liar, with an eye for the main chance, and he came by these qualities honestly.

Laertes [father of Odysseus] had taken part in the greatest voyage of adventure and discovery then known, and could claim to be one of the pioneer sailors of the ancient world. It seems right that the should have had Ulysses for a son. It is for this reason that I ignore the slander of ancient commentators who have found Laertes’ wife Anticlea guilty of having palmed off on Laertes, as his own, her bastard son by Sisyphus. Ulysses traditionally had seafaring and royal blood on his father’s side, and a violent and somewhat crooked strain (even if reputedly of divine origin) on his mother’s.

But the real joy of the book is seeing the maritime world as Odysseus must have seen it. Can we make the harbor? Do we have water? Do we even know where we are going? Bradford takes us where Odysseus went; for example, when he left Calyso by raft and the raft was destroyed, he swam ashore:

Naturally he swam with the current, and after an unspecified length of time he found himself near the mouth of a small river. The river is one of the easiest things to find in the whole Odyssey. It is easy because small rivers or even streams are so rare in this part of the world…. The steam has ‘never-failing pools’, and it enters the sea at a point where there is an attractive beach…. …At the head of this bay the Ermones flows out into the Ionian Sea…. It is one of the most enchanting and idyllic places in the Mediterranean and it is the only place in Corfu which could correspond with the Homeric description…. Olive trees abound…. The basins into which the river Ermones plunger were used in comparatively recent times for wtermills, but they must always have been used by women for the family washing….

Odysseus has traveled almost 3,000 years to reach us, and he does reach us in Ulysses Found. Bradford shows us Odysseus’ sea, his islands, and creates for us a journey home that was a very real trip.

My Odyssey

I have just completed Homer’s Odyssey in a prose translation by Rieu and Rieu. How could I reach such an advanced age without having read it? Yes, I did know the story, but that’s not the same thing at all. Like knowing the plot of Hamlet without ever reading or seeing the play. About 30 years ago I stumbled through the Iliad. I didn’t like the Iliad very much: too many gods, too much blood and mayhem, too many petty quarrels over booty. There’s plenty of blood and booty in the Odyssey also, with many appearances by Athena of the bright eyes in various guises, but the feeling I have for it is entirely different.

Odysseus is a true Greek hero, brave but full of flaws. He looks for more booty instead of going straight home to wife and child. He enters the Cyclops cave without an invitation and eats his cheese, no less. Not satisfied to get away after losing several of his men, he has to taunt the blinded giant who is then almost able to sink his boat. We constantly hear that Odysseus is resourceful, clever, cunning. He is all these things, but he is also curious, hot headed and more than a little greedy. Again, while sitting in disguise among the riotous suiters of his wife Penelope, he almost blows the whole thing by provoking a fight. He is no gentle soul. When the old nurse recognizes him, he grips her by the throat:

I am indeed home after twenty years of grief and touble. But, since a god has revealed it to you, keep your moth shut and let not a soul in the house learn the truth. Otherwise I tell you plainly — and you know I make no idle threats — that if the gods deliver these fine Suitors into my hands I won’t spare you, though you’re my own nurse, on the day when I put the rest of the maids in my palace to death.

In the Odyssey, we travel in a different time, a time recorded by Homer over 2500 years ago but set in  an even earlier age. Men are violent, seeking food, women and treasure. They also seek adventure. They want to see the world. They know they are not perfect, yet they glory in such strength as they have and fear death. They are us, or we are them, but the focus shifts slightly, sometimes clear and sometimes fuzzy. Still, I think we can imagine them more clearly than they could have imagined us.