Doubly Gifted : A Thanksgiving Odyssey

A Thanksgiving Odyssey

Susan W. Hales

Modern British Fiction, EH 571

Dr. Jean McIver

December 2, 2003

A Thanksgiving Holiday Odyssey

All I can say is I did it. I read Ulysses. There is much more I will say, but it is true that the one thing I can say with any authority or certainty is that I did in fact read it. All of it. Straight through? No. I stopped, read some guidebooks, went back and started over, or nearly so. I declined well-meaning advice to skip the first 740 pages and go straight to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and this advice created a certain heightened anticipation of Molly Bloom’s section of the book, which was not borne out in fact.

I finished the book wondering if I had missed something, which I attribute to my well-conditioned expectations of the contemporary novel form. Ulysses is a novel only because it is closer to that than to any other form – yet it is as near to a novel as a Jackson Pollack painting is to a Norman Rockwell. In the sense that a novel has a clear beginning, middle, and end, Ulysses fails even this simple test, as it has been pointed out that everything that happens in the novel could have happened at any other time or in any sequence without any loss to the overall – what- storyline? There is no story line. It’s just a day in June 1904 in Dublin, where nothing much of any significance happens. Yet, it is one of the most remarkable pieces of literature ever created.

Joyce’s genius was in the exploration of our language and thus our intellect, not in any particular moral purpose, but just because he could. He had conceived of Ulysses while writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and although he began work on it immediately after the publication of that first work, he worked on it for the next seven years, and only then was he forced to complete it to meet the deadline of publication by his 40^th birthday. Ulysses is of course patterned after the Odyssey, yet for this reader that was no help, as what little I remember of that epic has given me no assistance in the reading of Ulysses, and while I may yet go back and read the Odyssey, it’s not likely that it will aid my understanding of this novel much, if at all.

First, some initial reactions to the actual reading of Ulysses. At times I found myself thinking, “When will I ever get through this book?” and at other times was absorbed enough to forget where I was. The early effort was plodding and painstaking because I thought I was supposed to understand something of what I read. I stopped and read from two different books which are intended to help “translate” each section for the reader, and then I read a small part of Carl Jung’s assessment of Joyce’s work. It was then that I realized I could get through this enormous task I had set for myself. When Jung admitted that he fell asleep twice in the first two hundred pages and said that it was in many ways similar to the psychobabble he is accustomed to hearing as a consequence of his profession, I was somewhat relieved. When he went on to praise the work I was hooked, and determined to read it straight through without any further aids.

This I could not fully do, however. There were times when I simply had to pick up The Bloomsday Book or Bernard Mackenna’s book and seek help, to see if I had missed something, or just get my bearings. The text seemed to be so aimless, meandering and so encyclopedic in places that I was sure I just wasn’t “getting” it. And indeed there were references and allusions that a more literary scholar could have picked up on, and there were definitely things that a Dubliner could have hung their hat on here or there, yet in the final analysis these things are not a requirement to the enjoyment of Ulysses. Nothing other than the love of language and a sense of humor are required, plus stamina and plenty of free time on your hands.The edition I had been reading was the Modern Library Edition which had been printed in 1946 as nearly as I can tell, and which included in the front pages a copy of the 1933 District Court Decision by Justice Woolsey and another foreword by Morris. S. Ernst, who was one of the attorneys representing Random House against the “censors.” In his decision, Justice Woolsey says “Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand […] in writing (it) Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. Joyce has attempted, it seems to me with astounding success, to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing”(x).

The story begins with Stephen Deadalus and Buck Mulligan, who was immediately repulsive to me, both for his behavior toward Stephen and his general insensitivity. It is speculated Mulligan’s character was modeled after a fellow with whom Joyce roomed, and with whom Joyce had a serious disagreement, which culminated in Joyce’s leaving Ireland for good.

Stephen and Buck are beginning their morning with a shave and an exchange, which is one of the more complex parts of the text. Fortunately, Mulligan’s role diminishes early on and the three central characters become Stephen, (who we know from A Portrait represents the young Joyce), and Leopold and Molly Bloom.

This novel, “ suffused with Irish political, religious and social preoccupations, and prejudices” focuses on the main character of Leopold Bloom, a Jew by heritage but not by practice, and his experience reflects a larger backdrop of anti-semitism that was sweeping the world at the time Joyce was writing the novel. It should be noted that Joyce was not only sympathetic to the Jewish plight but actively aided the escape of a number of Jews (Hyman 108), and the novel is full of real Jews or references to Jews who can be identified by Dublin historical records.

The novel in addition to being set at a crossroads in world history, is also set in a “confluence of two orders of literary time: dramatic time and epic time.” According to Aristotle: “Tragedy (drama) endeavors to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun…whereas the Epic action has no limits of time (Butcher in Gifford p. 2) and Ulysses in fact does imitate the events of a single day – from 8 am June 16, 1904, to sometime pre-dawn June 17. But in the same story also is the epic of “Bloom’s homecoming, Stephen’s coming of age, and Molly’s affirmation of her husband.” The connection to the Homerian Odyssey is, of course, the hero’s homecoming from Troy, together with Penelope’s faithful waiting and Telemachus coming of age” (2).

To return to Justice Woolsey for a moment, his description of the novel seems as apt as anything I have read thus far. He said: “What he (Joyce) seeks is not unlike a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on film which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees”(xi).

He further goes on to call Ulysses an amazing “tour de force, when one considers the success which has been in the main achieved with such a difficult objective as Joyce set for himself”(xii). And Bernard Benstock said, in his introducton to Critical Essays on James Joyces’s Ulysses, that “nothing rivals the experience of reading James Joyce’s Ulysses except for the series of experiences in rereading it” (1). In spite of Carl Jung’s insistence that the design of Ulysses was “utter chaos” there have been armies of critics since then who have posited or proclaimed intricate patterns of design in this same book (4). Jung does credit Joyce with having written “one single, immensely long and excessively complicated […] pronouncement upon the essence of human life”(9). And he goes on to note that in all those seven hundred and thirty five pages (there are) no obvious repetitions, not a single blessed island where the long suffering reader may come to rest, no place where he can seat himself, drunk with memories and contemplate with satisfaction the stretch of road he has covered” (9). He notes, accurately, that the reader is roused to expect something to happen with each sentence and nothing ever happens. “You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read”(10). Jung compares the book in its various segments as a “tapeworm, rippling, peristaltic, monotonous because of its endless, proglottic proliferation” (12). Yet he comes round to this: “in all the book there is nothing pleasing, nothing refreshing , nothing hopeful, but only things that are gray, grisly, gruesome, or pathetic, tragic, ironic, all from the seamy side of life, and so chaotic that you have to look for the thematic connections with a magnifying glass. And yet they are there, first of all in the form of unavowed resentments of a highly personal nature, the wreckage of a violently amputated boyhood, then as flotsam from the whole history of thought exhibited in pitiful nakedness to the staring crowd” (12).

Perhaps it’s the difference in the decades since Jung wrote that observation, but I found Ulysses much more realistic in terms of today’s cultural fabric, especially post September 11, 2001. Indeed, it seems much of the world has regressed since the days of Joyce’s Dublin, and of course, Joyce wasn’t writing from the aftermath of the second world war, but rather in the midst of the first one. The shadow of religious dogmatism and fanaticism has covered much of the world for a very long time, and yet I found myself feeling after reading Ulysses that there is the possibility even yet of hope in spite of the endless indications to the contrary. For if there’s one thing that Ulysses represents, it is the reality that there is no one answer, no one set of rules, no playbook or handbook, or religious dogma that in fact lives up to its claims for humanity. The only thing knowable and embraceable is humanity itself.

Somewhere in Jung’s description can be found perhaps my initial aversion to this book. The first chapter consists of Mulligan’s mockery of the sacraments of the church along with various unpleasant descriptions such as “the snot-green sea.” This alone would have made me turn away from the book in disgust, as my father’s cherished thoughts of his beloved church and his beckoning sea have a central place in my heart. Fortunately, this part of the tale ends quickly, but not before Joyce shares with us Stephen’s act of “picking his nose and laying the results on a rock” followed by his vision of a three-masted schooner on the horizon, which is designed to forecast crucifixion. With that, the Odyssey begins.

Fortunately for this reader, the next part opens with a somewhat more appealing scene in which Leopold Bloom is up fixing breakfast for his wife, Molly, who is still in bed. His tenderness towards her and to the cat are in direct contrast to the unpleasant beginnings to Stephen Deadlus’s day. Bloom will take us through the rest of this book up until the last forty pages, when Molly in an unpunctuated mental monologue shares with us the earth mother’s view of the entire story.

From this point on in the novel the reader is able to enjoy – without any of the many aids to understanding that abound – the text in its beauty. The lyrical, poetic, alliterative, rhythmic patterning of the prose is a work of genius. There is humor and despair, social observation and political intrigue, and in all its glory it well deserves the title of masterpiece. Yet it cries out almost immediately for a rereading, as the reader already knows there is much that has been missed on the first attempt.

Joyce was meticulous and methodical in his plan for this novel. From the moment he determined to base it on the Odyssey, he had a system of notes, graphs, maps, research and interviews that would aid him for the next seven-plus years, and these have been reviewed, some published, all analyzed with sophisticated data analysis tools and controversial comparison techniques that make the many versions all vie for the claim of the “authentic” version. Add to that the number of pirated copies snuck into the United States, not to mention the ones seized and destroyed, and you have a mini-industry surrounding one book. There are as well as literary experts who wish to share with you their view of Joyce, plenty of Dubliners willing to take you to the many places still existing that are depicted in the book. Joyce based it all on real people and places, and much of it reflects himself, more so than any other individual. Yet even that is fraught with controversy. In my reading, I have seen claims that Stephen represented Joyce, that Bloom was Joyce’s father, that Bloom was neither, that Bloom represented the mature Joyce – but of course, you’ll have to decide for yourself which of these, if any, are correct.

As a matter of fact, this is a book in which nothing is definitive. Everything is left as we found it, except of course the reader. In the end the real transformation is in the readers’ world-view, rather than in either Stephen’s, Molly’s or Bloom’s.

It is the epic of two races (Israel – Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie tempus nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique (Brown 65).

The description of Ulysses as being encyclopedic is misleading, however, as no encyclopedia I’ve ever seen arranges its topics in such arbitrary order. Sometimes, Joyce’s order depends on sound, other times meaning, and still other times it’s hard to know what the association is, as though he’s just including things for the joy of it. For instance, in describing a “figure seated on a large boulder” wearing a “loose kilt bound about by a girdle of plaited straw and rushes” from which hung a “row of seastones which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes, and heroines of antiquity” (291). Here Joyce gives us one of his ever present lists, but what in blazes is Christopher Columbus, Charlemagne, the Last of the Mochicans, the Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, the Woman who Didn’t, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Michaelangelo, or Muhammad, not to mention Adam and Eve and the rest, doing on a list of Irish heroes of antiquity?

This is what Harry Blamires, author of the New Bloomsday Book, calls an interpolation, and this chapter of Ulysses is full of them. The chapter is referred to in later editions of Ulysses by its Homerian designation, “Cyclops,” and it is particularly noted for these events of “gigantism […] narrated by a nameless narrator, in vastly different styles, each style an inflated caricature of the legal, scientific, journalistic, and so on (Blamires 112) – and intended to show Bloom “in lonely isolation to a barbaric, bigoted, and aggressive nationalist – and likewise to place Bloom’s mildness and commonsense in lonely isolation within a world given over to vast excesses” (112). Blamires goes on to note that the fact that the reader, “as well as Ulysses-Bloom, feels swamped by it all, is appropriate and of course intentional.”

This is Joyce at his best, making the reader feel the difference between the “Citizen” with his one-sided all-or-nothing opinions, and Bloom, who always sees both sides of everything, even his wife’s infidelity. “Joyce’s peculiar quality as an artist is that he rejected all one-eyed outlooks […] He will never totally surrender himself or the reader to a single mood or style: the tragic or comic moods exist side by side; poetic and vulgar styles are intertwined” (112-113). Blamires clarifies it for us with this explanation: “An interpolation in mock-epic style of farcical extravagance builds up a picture of the citizen, gigantic in stature. His nationalistic fanatacism is laughed at in a riotous list of ‘Irish’ heroes and heroines that eventually incorporates Charlemagne, Napoleon, and William Tell along with Buddha, Lady Godiva, and Dick Turpin. The one-eyed fanatic knows no restraint in the claims he makes for his cause” (113-114).

Perhaps it is these elements of Joyce’s masterpiece that made Robert Scholes say in 1972 that “though we have been learning to read him, he (Joyce) may speak more clearly and more powerfully to our children” (Scholes 244). Scholes asserts that Joyce saw clearly that the Nazism taking hold was deeply rooted in the nationalistic character “leading naturally (to racism, genocide, and even ecocide)” and that Joyce envisioned a “nation that is to come which would be a kind of global village” in which individuals cybernetically related through the “wires of the world.” If that is what the underlying message of Ulysses is, then this world, today’s world, is in dire need of that lesson.

Scholes takes a structuralist view of Ulysses, and his writings were one of the most hopeful and refreshing of any I read. And Ulysses is one text for which a structuralist reading is particularly helpful. Scholes is also kind enough to give his readers some assistance in understanding structuralism, and makes “a distinction between synchronic and diachronic views of language, and a further distinction between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of any particular utterance” (249). Thus he helps us to see that in Ulysses, Joyce has taken advantage of the opportunities that these linguistic structures are offering him. He gives an excellent example for those of us who are in need of “visual” aids – by pointing out that “fiction is defined by its emphasis of the syntagmatic or linear dimension of linguistic possibilities, whereas poetry is less concerned with syntagmatic progression and more inclined to play with paradigmatic possibilities” (250).

Scholes finds many examples of this in “Cyclops,” and asserts that these lists “tend to follow some basic comic laws which depend on syntagmatic expectation.” His example is the list of ladies attending the ”wedding of the grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs. Barbara Lovebirch…” and yet notes that while we begin to get the basic idea of these lists, they may easily take a turn into a more complicated progression, and often refer to other segments of the novel, reminding us of what Joyce is trying to illustrate. Blamires notes that this interpolation has the style of a society wedding write up, “in which the forest theme repeats itself in the names of the guests and the descriptions of the dresses, finally establishes the bride and bridegroom on a quiet honeymoon where they can settle down to the task of reforesting their country” (122). In earlier episodes there have been references that correspond to the images which Joyce conjures up in this absurdity of “a land covered with upstanding tree trunks, flourishing and fruitful,” which, according to Blamires, “carries an implicit contrast to the theme of dead wooden stakes sharpened destructively and of male organs erect in death, enlarged by disease, or mutilated by circumcision” (122). The “Cyclops” chapter opened with many such references.

The major strength of this chapter, however, is the way Joyce sets the reasonable and thoughtful Bloom, who is also the outcast Jew in the Irish society, against the mindless raving and ranting of the “Citizen” and his listeners in the pub. No matter what considered offerings Bloom makes, the others are quick to sum it up as rubbish, offer a dozen concrete examples, all black and white, with no shades of gray. This citizen, not unlike our own day, is not merely ignorant or uneducated, but as Louis Hyman has pointed out, representative of the wave of anti-Semitism, the spread of which has abated but not by any means ended to this day. In fact, he points out that “all the figures in the Cyclops episode are anti-Semitic, with the partial exception of John Wyse […] in real life John Wyse Power […] (who) lectured on “The Jews of Ireland in the Middle Ages” to the Jewish Literary and Social Club” in Dublin in 1909 (Hyman 113). In the scene where Bloom, Martin Cunningham and others are leaving the bar to visit Paddy Dingham’s widow, the Citizen follows him out and shouts anti-Semitic insults. Bloom’s response is to point out that “Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew…Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me” (Blamires 126). Hyman goes on to note an extensive list of actual Jews living in Dublin who are in some way or another included in the book. Joyce’s determined sympathy towards the Jewish plight may be one more reason why the book was banned in the US, since the anti-semitic fevor was high even here, as the Leo Frank Lynching in 1915 illustrates[i].

Hyman concludes, “Throughout the long day, Bloom, though nominally a Catholic, still has the exilic yearnings of a Jew for his ancient homeland. He thinks of the sun traversing the sky from morning to evening: ‘Fading gold sky. A mother watches from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language’” (118). And Bloom recalls his father reading the hagada book, and thinks “Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage allelulia [..] then the twelve brothers, Jacob’s sons. And then the butcher and then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everybody else. That’s what life is after all” (Hyman 118).

These exchanges between the Citizen and Bloom culminate in an exchange where Bloom and his party are departing for their visit to Paddy Dighams widow, an obvious Christian act of compassion, and the Citizen is in a rage running after him saying: ”By Jesus…I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here” (336). And in front of many witnesses (noted by yet another interpolation) he hurls the biscuitbox at the departing horse-drawn car and its occupants. The mocking description of the resulting “catastrophe” sets up another interpolation, which results in a new religious holiday being declared on the basis of the “violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character.” Joyce concludes his Cyclops chapter with this “last interpolation, in the style of the English Bible, tranfigure(ing) Bloom, and jaunting car too, into Elijah and his chariot, which ascend to heaven amid clouds of angels at the call of the divine voice” (Blamires 127).

The actual text is one of the interpolations that is easiest for a non-Irish native to understand:

"When lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel” (339).

I’ll turn from these dizzying interpolations in Cyclops to the chapter considered by many to be the “painterly” chapter, and shown by others to have various layers that offer us other ways to consider our hero and his Odyssey. This chapter is called Nausicaa, and it is the one that relates the experience of a weary Bloom who, at twilight, comes upon the maid, Gerty, and they each contemplate in their own minds an unspoken attraction to one another. Joyce’s version relates clearly to the Homerian scene of “a certain godlike wanderer […] sleeping, snug in fallen leaves like a seed of fire within black embers.” My version of Ulysses begins this chapter with these words:

“The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore, and last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea” (341).

I wish I could say that I was immediately suspicious, but like most readers, I’d guess, I was lulled into exactly the kind of false comfort that Joyce meant for his readers to catch themselves in, for he is surely here mocking the general style of contemporary literature. Blaumires puts it this way: “Here Joyce adopts a sentimental, woman’s magazinish-style which, viewed as literary burlesque, is devastating. Yet the farcical, satirical strain does not wholly determine the temper of the passage, for the vulgar idiom of the novelette, when exploited to articulate a young uneducated girl’s thoughts and dreams, becomes peculiarly touching by virtue of its sheer aptness to her adolescent self-dramatization” (128).

Nausicaa deals, according to Frank Budgen, a contemporary and friend of Joyce, with the way of a man with a maid, more particularly the way of a middle-ageing married man with a maid. Budgen quotes a letter that Joyce wrote to him that the chapter is “written in a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy style with effects of incense, Mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chitchat, circomlocution, etc. etc” (Budgen 161). It would seem that, in addition to subtly mocking the literary world he is also commenting on the artistic world in general, decrying the pretty representational paintings in favor of the more modernist cubist or avant garde artwork that was beginning to emerge.

Budgen says “Nausicaa is the one pictoral episode in Ulysses. It is pre-eminently the episode of sensibility in both the emotional and physical sense. Sight is the sense most in evidence, but nose, ear and touch reinforce the true organ of vision […] If there is a parallel in the art of painting for Joyce’s swift, instantaneous shots of life it is in the art of Matisse, or, when Joyce’s vision is graphic rather than pictoral, the art of the draughtsman, Rodin, watching, ready pencil in hand, the model doing whatever it pleased in his studio” (165). One of the best examples that Budgen gives is the two sentence imitation of Molly Bloom earlier in the text: “His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.” Here, “sound aids the illusion of space” as it does in a description of fireworks observed by Bloom: “A long candle wandered up the sky..and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster of violet but one white stars. They floated, fell: they faded. The shepherd’s hour: the hour of holding: hour of tryst” (166). Budgen notes that these things “form part of the momentary life of the person or persons present […] and seem to be instantaneously photographed or drawn with the object on the move.”

Yet while this chapter depicts a flirtation, it is a flirtation so evident to the characters that it results in Blooms masturbation. This too, has an important role in the overall story, as Stanley Sultan notes: “The masturbation at the enter of the chapter is not merely a pathetic and sordid act but a representation, on every level of meaning, of Bloom’s self-defeat and self-destruction.” Bloom’s thoughts indicate that he feels “depressed, resigned, and spiritually broken. His thoughts follow a now familiar pattern: they revert again and again from the immediate subject, in this case the girl whose name he never learns, to Molly and her affair with Boylan” (Sultan 168).

As with all things Joycean, however, this chapter is not just about Bloom and art, but to the readers of Joyce’s day, is also a parody of a highly successful novel called The Lamplighter which Sultan describes as extremely popular, and the first work of a highly successful American writer, Maria S. Cummins. His evidence for the claim is an exact prototype of Gerty and the style of writing (and thinking) she represents:

"It was a stormy evening. Gerty was standing at the window, watching for True’s return from his lamplighting. She was neatly and comfortably dressed, her hair smooth, her face and hands clean" (174).

Sultan points to the fact that a “very large number of people had sufficiently poor taste and poor judgement to embrace both its prose and its treatment of reality. By showing the insidious quality of sentimentalism in a parody of that book rather than in a general parody of the style of its genre, Joyce has made more pointed his statement (that) Gerty MacDowell is the ultimate popular development of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, the product of the degeneration of romantic idealism into sentimental wish-fulfillment and self-delusion” (174). He adds that Joyce is not only criticizing the individuals here, but “their principal institution as well.” Finally, he observes that Joyce is also

attacking the popular cult of the Virgin. He sees it as that seeking after indulgence of weakness, after feminine, which is to say amoral, intercession with the masculine Godhead, which most of its critics say is behind the development into the second object of worship in the Roman Catholic faith of a figure mentioned three times in the Gospels. The charge leveled is sentimentalism. The supplication of the Virgin is most insistently associated with Gerty by the repeated blending in one passage, in the same cloying narrative, of the church service and the action involving Gerty (who is a ‘daughter of Mary’) (175).

Her figure was slight and graceful...the waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivory-like purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine cupid’s bow, greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers” (342). Dressed in “a neat blouse of electric blue,” the color of the virgin’s color, and “yet and yet! That strained look on her face. A gnawing sorrow is there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a good cry” (345). And if Gerty is the Virgin, then Bloom is here the Christlike figure yet again, as she decribes him: “He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what it was….Here was that of which she had often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else…If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not….there were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm” (352).

And if we still don’t get the idea, Joyce gives us another chance in the next paragraph, which begins: “Refuge of sinners. Comfortess of the afflicted…well has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy can never be lost or cast away: Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue banners of the blessed Virgin’s sodality…” and here Gerty is lost in a reverie about a particularly painful confession in which she begins to menstruate, and the resulting absurdity of the confessional as well as the worship of the Virgin is not lost on this reader.

It seems in retrospect that there is much more to be discovered in Ulysses than I had found on a first or even a second reading, and it is likely that I will reread it many times. I would like to use an illustration of my own for how that second or third reading experience can be for the reader by first referring to the description that Justice Woolsey made, and to which I referred in the beginning of this paper. He said, speaking of Joyce, that what he seeks to get “is not unlike the result of a double, or if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film.” Perhaps in 1933 it would not have seemed altogether possible, but I have an example of a multiple exposure of an entire roll of film from a trip I took to a Nuclear Power plant in 1995. I began with photos of the steam towers as we were leaving the plant, and in my haste to load the film that day, it didn’t properly engage, so that the entire roll, all thirty-six images, exposed one on top of another. The rest of the film was shot on a particularly rare sight of a large female grasshopper laying her eggs on a stem of some type of flower – and in the resulting photograph you can barely make out the flowers and the steam towers in the background. As the image is manipulated, however, in a similar manner to the way Joyce has manipulated his depiction of Bloom’s very ordinary day, you can begin to make out different items within the image, and in each one, a different sense is depicted, a different mood and message can be ascertained. In none of them can you ever actually see the grasshopper, but like Ulysses, you know that she is there, somewhere, and you continue to search for the discovery, fully enjoying yourself along the way.

[i] This writer has a particular interest in the US anti-Semitism of this period after having created the website exposing the lynchers of Leo Frank. See http://www.leofranklynchers.com.