At 8 a.m. on the morning of 16 June 1904, two men woke up. One shaved for class and breakfasted with his usurper and an anti-Semite. The other, a Jew, purchased a pork kidney and serves it to his wife in the same bed in which she cuckolded him. He left to pick up a letter from his secret sweetheart and chatted with the people he met on his way to the baths. Once clean, he attended a funeral and saw a mysterious man.
After the funeral, he tried to place an advertisement in a local newspaper but decided more research was required, so he scooted off to the library where, unbeknown to him, the first of our two men was disquisiting on Shakespeare.
Many people walked around, including our Jew, who decided to follow his morning kidney with an afternoon liver. He ogled the barmaids and thought about his wife who, if his suspicions were correct, would soon be cuckholding him again. So he exited the bar with the pretty reminders of his pain and entered another full of anti-Semites. Fists and cans were thrown.
Troubled by thoughts of wife and ancient grievances, he wandered seaside way and publicly co-masturbated with a cripple. He later attended the birth of a child and the English language before following our first man into the red-light district. He caught up with him, himself, himself-in-drag, his dead grandfather, Nobodaddy, a giant green crab, a talking hat-stand and ducked out when the police arrived. Chastened, the two men entered a dive and met a drunken sailor. They absconded to the home of the Jew and bonded while urinating under the stars.
As 16 June 1904 came to a close, the Jew returned to his troubled marital bed and asked his wife to serve him breakfast in it tomorrow.
She considered his request but never decided one way or the other.
(Happy Bloomsday. Sorry about the spoilers.)
59 comments
June 16, 2008 at 11:56 am
The Modesto Kid
(grin)
June 16, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Greg
So THATS what the damn thing is about if I get past page 100, or so.
June 16, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Vance Maverick
Happy Bloomsday to all. And there’s a tenuous connection from Joyce to the American West — he got the name of the protagonist of “The Dead”, and the snow at the end of the story, from Bret Harte’s novel Gabriel Conroy, based loosely on the story of the Donner Party.
June 16, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Ben Alpers
A version for the more visually oriented.
June 16, 2008 at 12:15 pm
SEK
So THATS what the damn thing is about if I get past page 100, or so.
I wrote the perfect summary for you then, as I sacrificed most of the first 100 pages to the smooth transition from anti-Semite to Jew to pork.
But yes, if you want the opinion of someone whose presented papers about Ulysses in Trieste, the core of the novel — like that of “The Dead” — is profoundly, but movingly, sentimental. It is a book about what a man will do to avoid the dread knowledge what his wife is doing. That’s he so often unsuccessful is what makes the damn thing poignant.
June 16, 2008 at 12:28 pm
urbino
And yes, I thought, yes, yes, that is the best summary I’ve read, yes.
June 16, 2008 at 1:34 pm
SEK
And yes
,I thought,yes,yes,that is the best summary I’ve read,yes.June 16, 2008 at 1:57 pm
andrew
[shouts heard from the street]
June 16, 2008 at 2:13 pm
urbino
I do love it when the other kids play along.
June 16, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Cala
I’ve never read Ulysses. I suppose I should.
June 16, 2008 at 5:03 pm
matt w
I tried, and that time I got past “ineluctable modality of the visible,” but boy is that a difficult book. Weirdly enough, the one that’s written in all kinds of different styles that everyone says is impossible was the only one that I really could follow.
I’ve noticed that the antepenultimate chapter seems like it might be written in kind of normal narrative, and I fantasize that if you get there Joyce explains what’s going on.
June 16, 2008 at 5:05 pm
urbino
I dunno. SEK just saved you a lot of time.
June 16, 2008 at 5:06 pm
urbino
That was for Cala @4:57.
June 16, 2008 at 5:09 pm
andrew
To be honest, I finished it thinking I was glad I read it, but wouldn’t have been missing out had I not read it. But I wouldn’t have felt like I wouldn’t have been missing out had I not read it. So.
I really liked the midday multiple stories sort of simultaneously section. And the catechismistic one.
June 16, 2008 at 5:28 pm
urbino
Before I forget it again, nice job combining the historical with the literarical, SEK. More, please.
June 16, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Vance Maverick
I’m not sure what’s up with you people who haven’t read the book, or who read it and didn’t like it. It’s great, and self-evidently so. And I’m only somewhat kidding about this. I first read it long before I was prepared for it (in whatever sense one can be), and loved it immediately. (No, I don’t have much to say beyond ULYSSES F*** YEAH, but the preponderance of nay-sayers and meh-sayers was starting to get to me.)
Part of the joke of Scott’s post is that this book is even less reducible to its plot elements than most (which is saying something). I’ll charitably assume that urbino@5:05 is just redoubling the joke.
June 16, 2008 at 5:52 pm
urbino
That was the idea, at least.
June 16, 2008 at 6:09 pm
andrew
I would just like to note that I’m more of a meh-sayer than a nay-sayer. And a big fan of “The Dead”* and most of Portrait, for what it’s worth.
*I read the rest of Dubliners but don’t remember the other stories well-enough to have an opinion.
June 16, 2008 at 6:33 pm
urbino
Dubliners is one of my favorite books, and “The Dead” my favorite short story. (Which made Vance’s comment re Bret Harte very interesting to me.)
I can’t say I enjoyed Ulysses, exactly, but I readily recognized its genius as a literary product. In my experience, those two things are not exclusive.
June 16, 2008 at 6:35 pm
andrew
I agree with that. But I’m okay with missing out on genius literary products every now and then.
June 16, 2008 at 6:35 pm
andrew
that = the second paragraph
June 16, 2008 at 6:55 pm
colin roald
So, I’d like to ask a serious question. Those people who love this book — and there are obviously enough of them to support a minor industry in Dublin, and apparently some of them live here — so, what do you get out of this book? Hardly anything I have ever read about this book has made it sound interesting or worthwhile. Usually it just comes across as some kind of crazy abstract verbal puzzle; I dunno, maybe that *is* what y’all get out of it, and my brain just isn’t wired up right for it. I suck at scrabble and can’t write a rhyme to save my life, either.
But SEK@12:15 hints at maybe there is an actual story. Is there more? A whole novel about a man trying to avoid his life still doesn’t sound very compelling.
June 16, 2008 at 6:58 pm
The Modesto Kid
Portrait
What’s up with Portrait? I read it when I was a young man and little exposed to the fruits of the Western canon (13 years old IIRC) and it seemed to me like the greatest thing I had ever read. I reread it later on, like in my early 20’s (after my first attempt or two at Ulysses), and I just couldn’t see what had attracted me to it — it seemed sort of lame and obvious. Maybe if I went back to it now it would be back to the greatest thing ever.
I say neither “nay” nor “meh”. Ulysses seems just great to me. The caveat is that I have never been able to get a handle on the book as a novel, just enjoyed it in bits and pieces here and there, and without really relating those bits and pieces to one another as much as a more competent reader would.
June 16, 2008 at 7:15 pm
The Modesto Kid
(Dante calls Ulysses “Ulixe” (presumably because that is the standard way of spelling the name in Italian — I don’t mean to suggest that this is a pet name of Dante’s or anything) and right now for some reason I find myself wanting to say “Oo-licks-ay” instead of “You-liss-eez”.)
June 16, 2008 at 7:17 pm
SEK
Before I forget it again, nice job combining the historical with the literarical, SEK. More, please.
I actually thought about that this afternoon, but the truth is, it’d be an incredibly difficult thing to do with books not obviously on a particular day. I mean, a quick search for dates in Google Books reveals the unending chore it would be to figure out what day fictional events happened on. I suppose I could do a “This Day in Gravity’s Rainbow,” since that’s pretty much plotted out — and I’m sure some of my co-bloggers wouldn’t mind it much — but big web projects based on Pynchon novels are so 2005.
June 16, 2008 at 7:24 pm
matt w
I really liked the midday multiple stories sort of simultaneously section.
If you mean the “Wandering Rocks” section, yeah, that was awesome, although it also made me sad because I had only read The Odyssey a couple of years before, and I still had no idea what the Wandering Rocks were. Which I guess is because they don’t actually show up, Circe just tells Odysseus not to sail by them and to go by Scylla and Charybdis instead. But then I was sure Gertie Macdowell was going to be the Sirens, and she turned out to be Nausicaa instead, and I had no memory of Nausicaa either. Anyway, cool chapter.
I have read that the courses traced by the characters at the beginning and end trace an X on the map of Dublin, but the Joyce police deny this; OTOH it’s not like they provide evidence.
BTW I’ve been reading a cool YA series based on all this Greek myth stuff, although the last book doesn’t seem to come out for another year.
June 16, 2008 at 7:29 pm
SEK
But SEK@12:15 hints at maybe there is an actual story. Is there more? A whole novel about a man trying to avoid his life still doesn’t sound very compelling.
The lengths to which Bloom goes to avoid thinking about his wife’s affair are what make the novel compelling — not, mind you, that I’m saying the formal properties of the novel are meant to mimic Bloom’s distractions. More like they’re meant to keep us from recognizing all the culture that can be brought to bear on what is, when you think about, nothing more than a commonplace betrayal.
The different narrative strands — the talk of Bloom’s father’s suicide, the death of Bloom’s infant son, &c. — intruding upon Bloom’s day are highly stylized, certainly, but unlike the Wake, the style is related to the content of the text. If you want pure puzzle — puns stretching four languages, two of which are dead — go for the Wake. But if you want a book in which the style fits the substance, Ulysses may be your bag.
For example, the chapter where Bloom co-masturbates with Gerty by the shore is written in the impassioned style of romance novels, whereas the chapter in the maternity ward begins as an unintelligible mess, moves into Anglo-Saxon, then Old English, &c. in nine stages, each representing a month in the child’s gestation and a moment in the language’s development … and there’s a reason Joyce wants to link the two. He’s playing off Stephen’s discussion of Shakespearean language and contemporary debates about the value of traditional rhetoric vs. the filth all these kids who WON’T GET OFF MY LAWN spew. Joyce belongs to the latter club — largely because he’s Irish, so his relation to the English language is troubled.
In short — and believe you me, I could go very, very long — Ulysses is something like a Rubik Cube which, upon the successful alignment of a row, reveals some gut-wrenching truth. Of course, this is my take on the novel, and many eminent folks disagree with it … but when I teach it, this is how I will.
June 16, 2008 at 7:32 pm
SEK
I have read that the courses traced by the characters at the beginning and end trace an X on the map of Dublin, but the Joyce police deny this
It’s an Irish x rendered after last call, and looks something like this … but an x nonetheless.
June 16, 2008 at 7:39 pm
The Modesto Kid
I had no memory of Nausicaa either
Huh — I loved the movie but did not realize the main character’s name was a reference to Odysseus. But yes, indeed.
June 16, 2008 at 7:40 pm
SEK
(Dante calls Ulysses “Ulixe” (presumably because that is the standard way of spelling the name in Italian — I don’t mean to suggest that this is a pet name of Dante’s or anything) and right now for some reason I find myself wanting to say “Oo-licks-ay” instead of “You-liss-eez”.)
“Ulixe” would a medieval Spanish, not Italian, rendition of the name. My Italian edition has “Ulisse.” (And yes, I’m being wolfsonian … but only because Ulysses and the Commedia are the only two texts in which I can claim some semblance of expertise and don’t involve dogs, cavemen or monkeys.)
June 16, 2008 at 7:48 pm
The Modesto Kid
Hm, right you are, “Ulisse”. Wonder where I got the “Ulixe” idea from, I’ve been reading Inferno on and off over the last few weeks, but no mediæval Spanish to speak of.
June 16, 2008 at 7:52 pm
The Modesto Kid
(BTW when I read your words “big web projects based on Pynchon”, I thought to myself Ooh — I wonder if Scott has seen the illustrated GR!)
June 16, 2008 at 7:58 pm
SEK
Not to dominate my own comments, but …
What’s up with Portrait?
First, I recommend reading the edition like this one, since it’ll remind you of the bloke to which the title refers.
Second, try reading it alongside Stephen Hero. Rarely do we have the opportunity to watch the great ones edit, collate and expunge, so you takes what you can gets.
Third, remember that hellfire and brimstone wouldn’t burn quite so cruel or bright — bless you, Mr. Cohen — were it not for Joyce capturing the last flickers of Catholic revivalism in the print. (When the potatoes wept for poor Parnell, some institution had to pick up the slack.)
Finally, come on, you love moo cows, you know your place in the world, and you know what it’s like to be momentarily but monumentally under the sway of the last philosopher you read, whoever he may be. (Now it’s always Nietzsche, but back then you could slipped a Church Father in no questions asked.)
June 16, 2008 at 8:03 pm
SEK
I wonder if Scott has seen the illustrated GR!
Thanks this, I actually have dibs on one of the illustrations once they’re no longer being displayed. (I’m also on his personal mailing list, so I’ve learned about all about alternative pornography. I knew what Suicide Girls were before Dr. B. started writing for them! That makes me, um, never-you-mind. Nothing to see here … )
June 16, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Vance Maverick
Colin, I’ll trust your question is asked in good faith. Scott highlights an important strength of the narrative, but there’s also
– a vivid image of what it’s like to live in a city
– a set of surprising and ultimately affecting characters
– language not only beautiful but rewardingly diverse
and all not only “good of their kind” but distinctive.
June 16, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Vance Maverick
Wayne Booth argues that long stretches of the Portrait can be taken as ironic — perhaps a send-up of the self-serious Stephen. Scott, does anyone still take this line? Speaking personally, I find that the least interesting of the canonical books — Dubliners though formal & composed, almost cool to the touch, has grown on me.
June 16, 2008 at 8:56 pm
jim
Actually on 16th June 1904 quite a lot of men woke up, but not the two you mention. I’ve never quite understood why Joyceans on Bloomsday emulate those Baker Street Irregulars who pretend that Irene Adler (the woman) actually existed.
June 16, 2008 at 9:04 pm
ari
Killjoy.
June 16, 2008 at 9:41 pm
jim
Not intended as killjoy, though. I think it’s a genuinely interesting question. Bloomsday is fannish behaviour. It’s the same sort of thing as a Star Trek convention. Most authors don’t attract a fandom. There are exceptions: Conan Doyle and Jane Austen come to mind. But Ulysses? True, it’s a limited fandom — I don’t think anyone’s ever written Ulysses fanfic — but it’s a genuine fandom, and I’d like to know what there is about Joyce or Ulysses that permits it.
June 16, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Vance Maverick
TMK/SEK, here’s a version of the Commedia where Ulysses appears as Ulixe. I’m no Dante scholar, but I think the issue is that most printings of the Commedia are in regularized, modern spelling, rather like Shakespeare. Italian has been more regular, for longer, than English, but still I suspect the orthography of the trecento was an adventure. I believe “Ulixe” is how it’s spelled in Latin, which would have been Dante’s source.
June 16, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Vance Maverick
Jim, I don’t think any of us here is really into the reenactments (except of course of the Civil War), so this is speculation — but the extreme fullness of plausible, vivid mundane detail in U is an invitation to treat the book as a world. Joyce himself said (probably not quite seriously) that Dublin could be reconstructed from it “brick by brick”.
June 16, 2008 at 9:58 pm
andrew
probably not quite seriously
I hope not. I found that whatever sense of the city I could get from Ulysses was obscured by all the language play. Except for the Wandering Rocks chapter.
June 16, 2008 at 10:52 pm
grackle
What’s up with Portrait?
Here’s another thing:
I go now for the millionth time to experience the reality of existence, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old Father, Old Artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
Dublin 1904
Trieste 1914
From memory- not too sure of the punctuation but it’s a reasonable fascimile. One of the all time great concluding paragraphs in English. The book is worth it for that alone.
June 17, 2008 at 6:17 am
jim
Vance,
Re-enactment isn’t necessary for fandom. I don’t think it’s something prompted by detail either. Conan Doyle tells us very little about Sherlock Holmes (and even less about Dr. Watson) but there is a distinct Holmes fandom. On the other hand, you could probably conduct a whale hunt using Moby-Dick as a guide, but I know of no society, “The Shipmates of the Pequod.”
Fandom is a stance towards a text, a double stance, really. The fan recognizes the text to be fiction, but it pleases him or her to maintain the conceit, a conceit shared with other fans, that it is something other.
June 17, 2008 at 6:32 am
The Modesto Kid
Hey, here’s something possibly worthy of a “today in history” note: on Bloomsday, 1933, FDR signed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Not sure he had read Joyce though; he might have been unaware of the coincidence of dates.
June 17, 2008 at 9:16 am
Vance Maverick
Jim, maybe you should find some people who exhibit the attitude toward Ulysses that you’re concerned with, and ask them.
June 17, 2008 at 9:41 am
silbey
I was born on a Bloomsday which was also a Father’s Day. What that means I have to live up to, I’m not sure.
June 17, 2008 at 9:43 am
eric
Happy birthday, Father Bloom.
June 17, 2008 at 9:45 am
Vance Maverick
What Eric said — but I would not advise Silbey to read the coincidence as meaningful. (Bloom’s only son died young.)
June 17, 2008 at 10:16 am
silbey
(Bloom’s only son died young.)
Eek. Right, that’s it. My daughter’s going to live in a pressurized bubble from now on.
June 17, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Doug
The course I always wanted to teach, positing of course a career as a professor in the appropriate discipline (and leaving comments about inappropriate discipline by the wayside) was Modern Odysseys: Joyce, Kazantzakis, Walcott.
June 17, 2008 at 1:20 pm
matt w
Joyce, Kazantzakis, Walcott.
…and the Coen Brothers.
Actually I think Walcott’s Omeros is much more of an Iliad. Or, well, a lot of it is sort of like the Odyssey, but it seems to be mostly based on the Hector and Achilles and Helen characters.
June 17, 2008 at 5:39 pm
kid bitzer
on the name, i seem to recall that greek “odysseus” was transformed into latin “ulysses” primarily through the mediation of etruscan.
no, i’m not shitting you. i mean, there’s a good chance i’m wrong, of course, but i’m at least sincere.
as i recall, etruscan quite regularly represented greek d-sounds by etruscan l-sounds, and this is just another instance. and then the latins just got it from the etruscans.
June 17, 2008 at 6:46 pm
urbino
Silly Etruscans. Why can’t everybody just speak English, like everybody else?
June 17, 2008 at 7:04 pm
andrew
I think you mean: Silly Etruscans, Ulixe is for kids.
June 18, 2008 at 10:48 am
Martin G.
You’re forgetting (I think – I didn’t real all the comments) the reason that Joyce chose that particular day for Bloomsday. Apparently, he and his wife Nora had their first date on that date.
(Also, some claim that she gave him, um, manual relief, that day, which is why Bloom comasturbates in the Sirens. Actually, that’s false, the infamous handjob was in August.)
(Man, I knew that liberal arts education would come in handy someday.)
Also worth reading: their love letters. Well, really more a slow kind of phone sex. They’re online.
June 20, 2008 at 10:07 am
Ray Davis
Regarding Bloom as father: it’s true that son Rudy died young, but daughter Milly is alive, well, loving, and headed for trouble.
June 24, 2008 at 5:11 pm
bob mcmanus
Way late to this thread, but I can’t resist
1) I am pretty sure Joyce has a one-paragraph summary of Ulysses in Ulysses. Around fifty words. I though it was in Aeolus, but can’t find it
2) Hugh Kenner proved to my satisfaction that the affair with Boylan was not consummated e.g. Bloom colliding with the furniture.
3) To say Ulysses is about Bloom’s fear or acceptance of cuckoldry, except as metaphor for what Joyce feared academics would do to his book, is to completely miss the point. The narrative is not what the book is about. Very much like saying Les Demoiselle d’Avignon is a portrait of of five prostitutes. Philistine.
August 7, 2008 at 7:03 pm
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