Okay, people. We’ve seen this before. Our poor first-timer Michael is foundering in the wild seas of the novel’s changes in perspective. Help him out. He’s getting quite a lot of the best jokes but the connections are eluding him. he’ll never make it through “Wandering Rocks” without some fundamental grounding and a course to set. C’mon! “Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.”

Here’s some stuff that might help;

-You’re avoiding other background material, Michael, which is noble but hazardous. The novel was, after all, written by a very smart man who spoke multiple languages and lived in a number of very cosmopolitan cities quite some time ago. There are numerous allusions that such a man of that age might have found entertaining to catch fragments of, but today’s first reader won’t have a clue about. There’s something truly, irrevocably “pop art” about Joyce in that he captures a moment in public consciousness and both glorifies it and disparages it in the same breath. His sense of condemnation is, often, linked to an understanding of history and literature that most of today’s readers cannot hope to follow without a guidebook.

-The “Lestrygonians” that give this chapter (episode) it’s popular name were giant cannibals who lured Odysseus and his crew into a seemingly safe harbor. The chapter is a peek-beneath-the-veneer of Dublin cityfolk in a way that’s really meant to hit them where they live; on the streets and in the public eating houses. Bloom is introduced to us chapters ago as a man who “relishes the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” By the time he gets to see, really see, the behavior of people around him, he decides to become a vegetarian and just have a gorgonzola sandwich.

-Most of the chapter, even in its first wanderings, deals with food and the sensual quality of taste. Almost every descriptive passage and memory has food or the sense of taste attached to it. For the purposes of this chapter “we are what we eat” and, midway through, what we are repulses Bloom more than a little. He’s heroic for even seeming to notice.

-We will never know the full details of Stephen’s life in the same way we’re going to come to know Bloom’s, but even that is going to take the duration of the novel. No story worth telling, or so Joyce seems to say, is worth knowing before the end. There’s endless new wrinkles in the information provided and the idea is, this crazy idea of parallax being driven into a seemingly familiar story, the idea is that you might always learn more. The simplest seeming and most ordinary man on the street has more complexity than the characters we normally encounter in fiction of Joyce’s day. Stephen’s sisters are a great puzzle in understanding what a selfish bastard he can be. Much more on them later.

Okay. That’s a start. I’m off to rally the troops. if you’re sitting out there reading this (yes, you!) and you’re not responding to Michael’s questions you’re missing out on a great opportunity to help someone really enjoy the novel. He’s foundering. Should we just watch him go down like so many first time readers before him, or is this the chance to get in there and help a blind stripling across the street?
-Rob

See, that’s what I love about this book. There’s always something new in there.

Thanks, Stevie, I’d forgotten about the “corpse of milk” passage in relationship to this. Very cool considering Bloom’s thoughts about the milk from Molly’s breast in his morning’s tea. So the gorgonzola is the fetid husk of her sweet flowing bosom? Hmmn. That’ll be fun to draw.
-Rob

I just had a chance to check out your blogsite, Lisa. Great stuff going on there, folks, with a more in-depth description of what’s happening in each chapter. Now that you and Michael seem to be running up to the same point in the book, we’ll try to link to your site a bit more with questions.

It’s a hard, hard book, people, but its so very worth it when we can help others to see how it all plays out.
-Rob

I completely agree on the idea of reading the original text itself, Michael, and being distrustful of work of art that requires professional explanation to qualify its worth.

But in the case of some works of art, particularly one’s which draw upon cultural idioms of their day, knowing the context is important to understanding the work.

ULYSSES is very much a work made up of the context of its day; the urban environment of a modern city at the start of the last century. The portrait it gives us of this environment relies on some of the allusions being familiar to the reader but the world has changed very much since then. My wife often compares it to WAYNE’S WORLD; the movie is hilarious, but if you didn’t grow up in the late ’70′s or early ’80′s in America then most of the jokes won’t make sense.

I don’t think you, or any first time reader, should go so deep into research as to consult major rabbis like Gifford and his annotated guide or even need a Sparknotes assessment of each chapter. My own work in doing the comic is aimed that idea of seeing the events of the novel “acted out” so readers might better understand the movements of characters and the shifts in narration and viewpoint. But the hard work of novel is understanding the world of Joyce’s day, the pop culture that he’s referencing, and that’s really hard for readers living ninety years later. Very few people today are going to get a joke about misquoting Don Giovanni.

Fortunately, we’ve got Mike Barsanti for that kind of stuff.
-Rob

Oh, I think there’s plenty of “something else” in ULYSSES, Michael, and that it isn’t too hard to find. The language is certainly beautiful enough that if all your looking for is the attractiveness of well-crafted words you’ll find it on nearly every one of these 700 pages.

But this makes for a tricky argument because it merges notions of beauty and attraction to an audience into the discussion of “what makes it art?”. The comment “if it speaks to us now- it IS modern art” is loaded with many of the problems found in separating or qualifying art through a set of specific and contemporary (or current) standards;
-”How many people must it speak to?”
-”Is there an elite group of deciders on art or is it popular opinion?”
-”If it spoke to one generation or group, but fails to reach another is it no longer art?”
-”Or is it no longer Modern?”

These are the kind of questions of the nature, purpose and effectiveness of art and it’s ability to connect to living society that made the precepts of “Modernism” tumble like a house-of-cards and Joyce, there at the start of it all, raised them himself within the pages of this novel.

I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that the puzzles nor the lushness of language are enough. As a fan of paintings, I’m seldom overwhelmed by the art of how unusually shaped a canvas is nor the smoothness of the paints application because, as a painter, I know that neither of these things is enough. It’s not enough to be clever or skillful in art, to out-think your audience or to stun them with the things you can do that they cannot. That’s the work of academics and sports figure and it’s only occasionally that that kind of work is art in itself.

Art, like the kind that we find in Joyce, art that exceeds it’s own cleverness and skill to give new readers fresh challenges and wake up their thinking, often endures beyond its timeliness. But there’s so much more it can give us when time is taken to see it in it’s original context.

Oh. And Fred Allen is ALWAYS funny enough to make those old-time references worth looking into.
-Rob