Ulysses

I've finished Ulysses. Conquered the beast in less than a year, which I consider pretty good, since nine months of school interrupted the initial reading with the final sprint to the end.

I'd like to tell you that things are clearer for me now, that I understand the world on a different level, that there are things I know now, things you need to know. But I'm as confused as when I started.

While doing some very minor research, I found a short summary of each of the chapters on Wikipedia. And truly, in eighteen short paragraphs they were able to tell me just what the fuck I'd been reading about for 783 pages. The only thing I really take from reading Ulysses is that James Joyce was a genius.

For example, episode 14 takes place in a maternity hospital where the character Mina Purefoy is giving birth. So here's what Joyce did:

"Joyce organized this chapter as three sections divided into nine total subsections, representing the trimesters and months of gestation.

This extremely complex chapter can be further broken down structurally. It consists of sixty paragraphs. The first ten paragraphs are parodies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon language, the two major predecessors to the English language, and can be seen as intercourse and conception. The next forty paragraphs, representing the 40 weeks of gestation in human embryonic development, begin with Middle English satires, the earliest form of English; they move chronologically forward through the various styles mentioned above. At the end of the fiftieth paragraph, the baby in the maternity hospital is born, and the final ten paragraphs are the child, combining all the different forms of slang and street English that were spoken in Dublin in the early part of the 20th century" (Wikipedia).

Joyce was a master of languages, fluent in (at least) English, French, Italian, and Latin. My guess is he probably knew Irish, German, and Greek as well, amongst others. His final novel, Finnegans Wake, which will be my next major undertaking as a reader, supposedly combines over 100 different languages in various forms. When asked the point of Finnegans Wake, Joyce responded by saying, "It's supposed to make you laugh." The same can easily be said for Ulysses, which, if nothing else, is wretchedly amusing on a strictly language level.

But why is that significant, the language? Novels are supposed to have plot, a beginning, middle, and end that makes sense, that leaves us with a feeling of some kind of change, whether physically or emotionally. Right?

Remember, while Ulysses is considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time, it is also considered "one of the most important works of Modernist literature" (Wikipedia, emphasis added). One of the major tenets of Modernism was that language is an insufficient form of communication. Language would never get us closer to a higher truth; in fact, it might even take us further away from it.

Ulysses can be seen as the prose equivalent of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, an incredibly beautiful, and almost as incomprehensible poem. When I studied The Waste Land in American Literature, I learned that Eliot wrote the poem almost as a challenge to people who felt that language could communicate truth. Every section is Eliot saying, "This is how I feel. Can you understand that? Of course not. But I'll try again." It is the use of precise imagery and figurative language to show that, while those things might produce a relatively specific image, they give you no insight into the nature of truth, whether that truth be universal, or personal. We can never understand another's emotions, no matter how similar our life experiences are; neither can we understand the universe, if there is anything to understand.

What Joyce does is slightly different. While arguably as well-educated as Eliot, Joyce wasn't quite the snob that Eliot was. When he looked at the insufficiency of language, he didn't despair, he laughed. And why shouldn't he? Just think of how many languages exist in this world. None are any closer to the truth than others, and for something that is supposed to bring people together, language, on a global scale, actually serves to separate people of different cultures. It's absurd. And since there's nothing we can do about it, we might as well laugh about it.

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," (1946) George Orwell talks about how convoluted language has become:

"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

Joyce does this same kind of thing in Ulysses. Here's how he describes Leopold Bloom undressing:

"He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hair extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae, thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete."

Language is supposed to be specific, and this passage is very specific. Yet specificity is supposed to bring clear meaning to an idea, and this passage is rendered nearly incomprehensible by its specificity. As an English major, and simply as someone who enjoys the complexities of language, I can appreciate the irony. For Joyce, who knew so much about so many languages, it's easy to see why he had so much fun lampooning this kind of specificity and complexity.

After reading the summary on Wikipedia, I said, "Joyce was a genius." Laura was with me, and asked, "But is it really genius if nobody can understand it?" I'd say that's a pretty good question, but the answer is simple: of course.

Vincent Van Gogh is considered by pretty much everyone to be an artistic genius. Yet in his lifetime he never sold a single painting. Nobody understood him either, but Laura had to admit that yes, he was a genius. Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man, yet I don't know enough math or theory to understand anything that he's talking about. The difference with Van Gogh and Stephen Hawking, though, is that most people know what they were/are trying to do with their art (yes, theoretical astrophysics - and all mathematics - is an art). With Joyce, or with language in general, people don't consider the art behind it. Not everybody can paint, nor can everybody understand the kind of math Hawking does, but everybody understands some kind of language. Because of this, language is dismissed as an art form.

That's why the only people who love Ulysses are scholars and critics and writers like me. That's why the bestseller lists are filled with books by James Patterson and Dean Koontz and David Baldacci. Books driven by plot. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, the end. Events. Occurrences. Those are what matter to people, while language takes a backseat.

Yet for me and my fellow writing students, Language is part of the triumvirate of a good story, the other two branches being Plot and Theme. And just like a three-legged stool, a good story cannot stand without all three legs. But, apparently, a story does not have to stand in order to sell.

Ulysses has all three legs. There is a plot, no matter how complicated it seems, and there is a theme, no matter how dubious or ambivalent it may be. But the real thrill of Ulysses, the reason it is still in print, is still the unbending idol of incredible literature, is because it takes language on its own unbelievable odyssey. That's a trip everybody should be willing to take at least once in their lives. Like I said before, everybody speaks a language. Therefore, in some way, we are all artists. While we may not be able to paint a still-life, or solve complex equations, we can all take ideas floating around inside our head and condense them into words. Every single day, with every word we speak, we are creating an image. Every time I say "tree,' I'm drawing you a picture. But common language, i.e. communication, is nothing more than drawing upon the pool of images that have a universal resonance. But the words "tree," or "cup," or "panther," are just monotonous whispers compared to the shouts that good language is able to accomplish. And Ulysses is the longest, loudest scream I've ever heard. It's difficult, almost painful, but god is it refreshing; like jumping in a lake in winter, it turns your insides to glass, stops your heart, and lets you know the pleasing shock of something you've never felt before.