A Portrait of the Artist with ADD

JOURNEY #25: TO THE WANDERING MIND

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."

— James Joyce's Ulysses

Paying my respects at James Joyce's grave in Zurich

In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom spends a single day — June 16, 1904 — wandering through Dublin. His mind spends that day wandering everywhere.

Which raises the question: Did Leopold Bloom have ADD?

The term ADD wasn’t coined until 1980. Before that, people like Bloom might simply have been called distracted. Dreamers. Their minds would lock onto something interesting and follow it anywhere — to places nobody expected, least of all themselves. People with ADD lose things. They tend to drive people around them crazy. But they also notice things that few others notice.

Consider Hades, the funeral episode, where Bloom accompanies the body of his friend Paddy Dignam to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Of course, attending a funeral demands stillness. Gravity. Respect for the dead. But Bloom's mind has other ideas.

Bloom spots a rat moving among the graves and that’s all it takes. The priest is still speaking. Everyone is sombre. Yet this is what happens next inside Bloom’s head:

“An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes…One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it.”

His mind ricochets from rat to bones to meat to cheese to Chinese travellers to white men to cremation to priests. Eight moves. Five sentences. Each one abandoning the last. And his mind keeps on spinning. For pages and pages. What you've just read is a fraction of where Bloom’s mind goes before the funeral ends. 

And this is just one episode. Bloom keeps it up throughout the entire novel. Every chapter he's in. Every hour of the day. 

But Bloom isn’t everyman. He’s a very specific kind of man: a man with ADD.

Which raises the question: How did Joyce get it so right?

Italo Svevo

Joyce’s closest friend in Trieste was Italo Svevo — born Ettore Schmitz, a novelist and industrialist twenty years Joyce’s senior. Joyce taught him English at the Berlitz School. Svevo taught Joyce something more valuable: what it felt like to be a Jewish outsider in a city that tolerated you without quite accepting you. Stanislaus Joyce later recorded that Svevo once complained: “Tell me some secrets about Irishmen. Your brother has been asking so many questions about Jews that I want to get my own back.” 

When Joyce finally left Trieste to finish Ulysses in Zurich, he kept a photograph of Svevo on his desk. Nobody knows exactly why. But Svevo was the man who had shown him what it felt like to be a Jewish outsider — curious, gentle, perpetually distracted. Perhaps he needed that close.

Svevo’s own novel, Zeno’s Conscience, published the year after Ulysses, shows you exactly what Joyce was absorbing. Zeno is the narrator, a prosperous businessman from Trieste who can’t stop explaining himself, can’t stay in the present, and can’t finish a thought without starting three others. His mind moves the way Bloom’s mind moves: by association, by digression, by accident. When you read it, you understand where Bloom came from.

If you know someone with ADD and want to understand what goes on inside their head, read Ulysses and Zeno’s Conscience. They are the most accurate portraits of the ADD mind ever put on a page.  

James Joyce, AI and Behavioural Economics

JOURNEY #24: TO THE FIRST CHATBOT AND THE FIRST NUDGE

"Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"

― James Joyce's Ulysses

I came back to Ulysses recently, reading it as a behavioural scientist, and was struck by how much James Joyce got right about the world that would follow.

One chapter in particular kept pulling me back.

For a long time, the Ithaca chapter stood out as one of the strangest episodes in Ulysses, written as a catechism — composed entirely of questions and answers.

Joyce once called it the "ugly duckling" of Ulysses --unloved by many readers, yet his favourite episode. While many found the chapter dry or inhuman, Joyce found precise and mechanical. 

Today, the Ithaca chapter feels eerily familiar. Seen through a modern lens, it resembles a prolonged interaction with ChatGPT.

To see how this works, consider the opening passage of this chapter:

"What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?" 

"Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertance as far as the farther corner of Temple street..."  

The exchange continues: prompt, reply, prompt, reply, and on and on. The responses are exact, dull and free of emotion, and could easily have been generated by AI. 

Read today, Joyce nailed how we talk to machines a century later.

Joyce develops the first nudge 

In Ithaca, Joyce does more than experiment with form. He articulates a principle that behavioural economics would formalize a hundred years later: the nudge. 

It centres on the way Bloom convinces his wife, Molly, to carry an umbrella, even though she dislikes them.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte (1884)

Bloom wants her to carry one not because it’s practical, but simply because he likes the image of a woman carrying an umbrella. Molly actively resists the idea. She dislikes carrying one and has no reason to change her mind. Rather than argue with her, Bloom sets things up so that carrying the umbrella makes sense to her. By buying her a new hat on a rainy day, he gives her a reason to carry the umbrella: she doesn’t want the new hat to get wet. What looks like her decision is, in fact, the result of a carefully arranged intervention that makes the desired behaviour feel natural.

Joyce names the mechanism himself: “indirect suggestion implicating self-interest.” It's hard to imagine a cleaner early description of what behavioural economists would later call a nudge. The insight is precise and modern. Behaviour changes more easily when context is reshaped than when people are reasoned with. 

Long before behavioural economics had a language for it, Joyce had already seen it—and written it into an ordinary domestic moment.

Why People Interested in Behavioural Economics should read James Joyce

I often suggest that people interested in behavioural science read James Joyce. Not only because Ulysses is extraordinary literature, but because it shows how people actually think, choose, and act. Long before behavioural economics or nudge theory Joyce was already mapping attention, desire, habit, and influence in everyday life. For anyone working in behavioural science, Ulysses isn’t an escape from the discipline — it’s a reminder of where its deepest insights began.

Joyce's character Stephen once asked: "Who ever anywhere will read these written words"? A century later the answer includes behavioural economists studying influence, those building conversational AI, and anyone trying to understand how people actually think and choose. 

Obviously, Joyce didn’t borrow from AI or behavioural economics. Both caught up to him.

The Father, Son and Hamlet’s Ghost

JOURNEY #23: TO THE OTHER SIDE

"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

               — James Joyce, Ulysses 

Patrick Swayze reaches back from the other side in Ghost

I’ve always liked a good ghost story. Not the haunted-house kind, but the emotional one you find in the movie Ghost, where Patrick Swayze reaches across from the other side to find a connection with a loved one.  

So when I went to see Hamnet, I thought I’d be spending the night focusing on the life of William Shakespeare. But, to my surprise, I found myself thinking about James Joyce, who first proposed a remarkable theory about the relationship between Shakespeare, his son and a ghost.

For centuries, many readers have assumed that Shakespeare was, in a sense, speaking through Prince Hamlet, and the character functioned as a kind of stand-in for the playwright himself.  

In Ulysses, Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus challenges that assumption, and offers a different take. 

Stephen argues that Shakespeare expressed his grief for his dead eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, not through Prince Hamlet, but through the Ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Stephen presents his theory to a group of scholars in the Irish National Library, building up the argument brick by brick, like a courtroom lawyer making his closing arguments.

He points out that when Hamlet first premiered at the Globe Theatre in London, Shakespeare was the actor who portrayed the role of the Ghost on stage.

He explains how the names Hamlet and Hamnet are almost interchangeable, and he proposes that Shakespeare could only have chosen the name of the play to keep the memory of his son alive forever.

Stephen goes on to imagine the emotions that Shakespeare must have felt, as a grief stricken father, dressing up like a ghost at every performance of Hamlet, crying out the name of his dead son. 

Stephen argues that when Shakespeare said “Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit” he was speaking to two separate sons:

• "To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet…”

• … and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live forever."

Yet there’s a rub…as a living person on stage, Shakespeare calls out to his dead son, Hamnet  — while as a character in the play Hamlet, the dead father speaks to his living son from the other side.

Wow, talk about emotional resonance! I get chills just thinking about it.

It reminds me of that line from the movie Ghost: “The love inside, you take it with you.”  In Shakespeare’s case, he didn’t just take it with him, he put it on the stage so it could live forever. 

A brief note for readers who plan to see the film, Hamnet: the following reflects on the film’s emotional and thematic shape rather than its plot.

Chloé Zhao — who directed the movie Hamnet and co-wrote the screenplay with Maggie O’Farrell, based on her 2020 book of the same name — takes Stephen’s theory and breathes life into it.  

The movie arrives at this same emotional truth without ever naming it. It doesn’t mention Joyce. It doesn’t pursue theory. It simply shows a family marked by loss, and then lets Hamlet form in the background as the natural artistic shape that sorrow naturally takes. The shift in the play makes emotional sense when you hear the grieving father speaking to his son from beyond.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the film, Hamnet, wins a few Oscars. It’s that strong a film.

In a recent interview, O'Farrell confirmed the special link between Stephen Dedalus and Hamnet and Hamlet. What’s more, O’Farrell said that even before Zhao was involved, she always envisioned Paul Mescal as the ideal actor to play Shakespeare. Tellingly, this insight came to her while watching Mescal portray Stephen Dedalus in a play based on Ulysses at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. 

In retrospect, it makes sense that Joyce’s theory on Hamlet was well known to O’Farrell. After all, she was born in Northern Ireland, studied English literature, and once said that if she were to be washed up on a desert island, the book she’d want with her is Ulysses. 

So this journey comes full circle. Joyce’s quote at the top of this post suggests we walk through our days only to meet ghosts, old men, young women and ourselves. Decades ago O’Farrell read Ulysses which likely sparked an idea for her book about Shakespeare. Years ago O’Farrell went to a play based on Ulysses and ran into the actor playing Stephen who would later play her Shakespeare. More recently I went to a movie based on O’Farrell’s book, and I ran into the ghost of James Joyce. 

You never know who you’ll run into and how they’ll impact your life. It turns out that Stephen wasn’t just talking to a group of scholars in 1904, he was setting the stage for a film a century later.  

The Promised Land

JOURNEY #22: TO THE HOLY LAND

"Three Cheers for Israel!"
                                               -- James Joyce, Ulysses 
                         

Last Bloomsday, I took a break from writing this blog, not knowing when I'd start again.

Big surprise. The urge to blog came in the most unusual of places: on my vacation to Israel. 

En route to Israel I started reading Ari Shavit's new book "My Promised Land" about Israel's "Triumph and Tragedy." In it, Shavit writes about how, a century ago, the people of modern-day Israel farmed "dunams" of land and exported Jaffa oranges to Europe, gingerly wrapping each fruit in tissue paper and packing them in wooden crates.  

Any Joyce aficionado would immediately recognize these words -- they seem to come straight out the pages of Ulysses. 

In the chapter known as Calypso, Leopold Bloom journeys to the butcher shop and pockets a page from a prospectus  advertising shares in an agriculture company in the Holy Land. The ad reads:

"The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias...To purchase vast sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees...You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons."

As we travelled to Tiberius and Kinneret, we saw plenty of eucalyptus trees, orange groves and olive trees.  For a guy who's never been to Israel, Joyce nailed the Golan Heights. 

This illustrates one of the marvels of Ulysses: it provides a European man's view of the Holy Land in 1904 -- a time when the land was a part of the Ottoman Empire -- years before the British Mandate.

Bloom then turns his mind to the Dead Sea, which we visited a few days ago. I read this passage from Ulysses as we sat on flimsy lawn chairs by the coast of the famous salty sea:

"A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race...The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere."

A quick word about Joyce's other references to Israel in Ulysses.  

In the Aeolus chapter, J.J. O'Molloy tells a story of an Egyptian's highpriest's speech to Moses, spelling out the reasons not to take the Israelites out of Egypt; but in the end, he makes it clear that the rewards of making it to the promised land were far greater.  You can hear an actual audio recording of Joyce reading this section here. 

http://youtu.be/ZhW0TrzWGmI

Finally, the city of Jerusalem plays a big role in Ulysses.  In his drunken stupor, Bloom imagines himself to be the leader of a utopian society he calls "new Bloomsalem" while the song "The Holy City" (about Jerusalem) spews out from a gramophone, located of all places, in the brothel.

Nobody mixes the sacred with the sinful quite like Joyce. 

The Perils of Quoting James Joyce

JOURNEY #21: TO COIN A PHRASE

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery"

―  Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses

A €10 coin featuring a quote from Ulysses that contains an error

Quoting James Joyce can be a risky business.

The Central Bank of Ireland issued a series of 10,000 commemorative coins featuring a likeness of James Joyce and a quote from Ulysses. Yet, just prior to the coin's release, the Bank sheepishly announced that the €10 coin contained an error - it misquoted Ulysses.  

Whoops!

Here's what Joyce wrote in the opening passage of the third episode of Ulysses:

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read."

The coin included an extra word "that" in the second sentence. The Bank apologized for misquoting Joyce and explained that the design was meant to be an artistic representation of the author and the text "and was not intended as a literal representation."

In defence of the artist who created the design -- and it is a lovely design -- it shouldn't come as a total surprise that someone could misquote Joyce. Unlike other authors who write "quotable" quotes which could fit neatly into fortune cookies, Joyce wasn't known to write snappy soundbites. Joyce's writing often transcended the rules of grammar: he created new words, morphed existing words into portmanteaus and defied the rules of punctuation.

One thing's for sure, whoever selected the coin's text wasn't searching for a quote that would appeal to the masses. While the quote is iconic and brilliant, it's also recognized as one of the most difficult lines in the novel (In a previous post I examined the quote's complex meaning). In fairness, only someone familiar with Aristotelean philosophy could be expected to understand the quote at first glance.

If, perhaps, the designers of the coin had chosen a more accessible quote from Ulysses, the results might have been better. If it were up to me, I would have suggested the mint use the following quote:

"By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile."

- James Joyce, Ulysses

In the end, the Bank decided to issue the coins, error and all. The 10,000 coins sold out in a few days and it seems the purchasers made themselves a good investment. The flawed coins, which sold for €46, started turning up on eBay selling for more than triple their original cost. 

James Joyce on Management

JOURNEY #20: TO BIZ SCHOOL

"—Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

—Iago, Stephen murmured"

-- James Joyce's Ulysses

Episode 2: Nestor

Irony of Ironies:  Incorrigible borrower James Joyce appears on the 10 pound note as a symbol of Irish commerce

Several years ago a spate of business books hit the bookstore shelves offering advice culled from the life and works of great writers like Shakespeare.   The idea was simple: if you examine the words of great writers, you'll surely distill some valuable management gems and business secrets that will help solve real life problems.

At least, that's the theory.

A series of other books were soon published on the application of management principles drawn from the lives and works of Sun Tzu, Winnie the Pooh and Jesus.

Knowing of my interest in Joyce, a friend, who teaches at one of Canada's leading MBA schools, once tried to persuade me to write a business book about Joyce's business and leadership secrets.  He suggested I call the book "James Joyce on Management" and he assured me that I'd have a runaway bestseller on my hands. 

After I stopped laughing, I gently broke the news to him that Joyce was one of the lousiest businessmen in literary history.   Despite my utmost respect and admiration for Joyce, I'd sooner take business advice from Piglet.  

For most of his life, Joyce was hopelessly in debt.  He was constantly scrounging money from friends, family and colleagues.  When he did have money in his pocket, he'd invariably splurge lavishly: eating at fine restaurants, drinking expensive Swiss wine and ordering rounds of drinks for his friends and anyone else fortunate to be around the bar when Joyce was flush.  Quite often, after a night of eating, drinking and revelry, he'd leave the restaurant in a drunken stupor with nothing left to pay his rent. 

There's a famous photograph of Joyce standing outdoors with a quixotic look on his face.  When asked what he was thinking about while being photographed, Joyce said "I was wondering would he lend me five shillings."

This is not to say Joyce didn't have an entrepreneurial spark.  He had several clever business ideas, yet  he was incapable of successfully implementing them.  He concocted a scheme to sell Irish Tweed in Trieste, that never got off the ground.  In late 1909 he spearheaded a project to open the first movie theatre in Dublin. However, the cinema, named the Volta, offered an eclectic selection of foreign language movies that didn't appeal to the English-speaking Dubliners.  After several months, Joyce sold his interest in the Volta for a loss.

So how did Joyce support himself and his family?

When Joyce first settled in Trieste, he began working as an English teacher at the Berlitz school.   Joyce's heart wasn't into his lessons, and he spent much of his time peppering his students with questions that would encourage answers he could use as fodder to support his writing.  Still, Joyce's services were in demand - and he befriended many of his students (and, naturally, regularly sponged money from them).

When money got extremely tight,  Joyce wrote to his younger brother Stanislaus in Dublin and summoned him to come live in Trieste.  Stanislaus idolized his older brother, appreciated his talents, and found it difficult to refuse his requests.  He arrived in Trieste in 1905 and started working as an English teacher at the Berlitz School alongside his brother.  Soon after, a large share of "Stannie's" salary was used to support his older brother's lifestyle.   

Another way that Joyce supported himself was through the generosity of his patrons.   In one of my earlier posts I wrote extensively on the generous patronage of Harriette Shaw Weaver, who is estimated to have given Joyce well over a million and a half dollars throughout his lifetime.   

Another quirk about Joyce was that he was notoriously litigious.  He steadfastly defended his intellectual property rights to prevent an American interloper from illegally selling a pirated copy of Ulysses in The United States.  In his later years he engaged in an almost comical lawsuit against a Canadian named Henry Carr, who worked in the local consulate office.  While living in Zurich Joyce received a gift of money from a patron and decided to organize an English theatre group that would perform Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Ernest." In a decision he would soon regret, Joyce recruited Carr to be the male lead in his play.  Joyce and Carr soon got into a nasty dispute about theatre tickets and who should pay for the pants Carr wore in a theatrical performance.  Joyce refused to pay and Carr called him a "cad" and a "swindler."  Joyce sued for libel and Carr countersued.  In the end, it was a split decision, yet Joyce's losses were greater than his earnings.  Author Tom Stoppard wrote a wonderful play called "Travesties" that premiered in 1974 that featured the dispute between Joyce and Carr. 

Notably, Joyce had a vengeful streak.  He ultimately exacted revenge against Carr by naming one of the most unsavoury characters in Ulysses after him (the boorish Private Carr in the Circe episode).  While Carr may have tied the legal battle against Joyce, he lost the war, and his name will go down in infamy, eternally associated with a foul-mouthed violent bully.

* * * * *  

Now back to the central question of this blog: Can a reader garner any business advice from fiction?

Conveniently, Joyce deals with this very point in Ulysses, and effectively illustrates the pitfalls of blindly quoting Shakespeare to make a point.

In the second episode of Ulysses, Garrett Deasy, the bigoted schoolmaster, tries to persuade Stephen Dedalus to save some money from his salary by quoting dialogue from Shakespeare (see quote at the outset of this post).  However, the message goes lost on Dedalus, who adeptly realizes that Deasy is quoting from Iago, one of the most inhuman, evil characters in literature.

Come to think of it, countless cheapskates over the years have failed to help a person in need by quoting Shakespeare's famous line: "neither a borrower nor a lender be," likely unaware it's a quote from the blustering busy-body Polonius, who Hamlet calls a "tedious old fool."

It goes to show you...when someone tries to punctuate an argument by quoting Shakespeare, check out the source and the context.  If the advice comes from one of Shakespeare's notorious villans, run.

* * * * *

In the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom questions whether reading Shakespeare's works, not for pleasure but as a mode of instruction, would provide solutions to difficult problems in real life.

Joyce summed up Bloom's experiment with the following:

"In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages, aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text, the answers not bearing in all points."

So here's a tautology:  by reading Ulysses you learn that you won't find the answers to your problems by reading literature.       

* * * * *

While I wouldn't recommend holding up Joyce as a business guru, I would contend that a great deal of insight into marketing and advertising can be gleaned by reading the words and thoughts of the main character in Ulysses: Leo Bloom.

Bloom is an experienced and talented advertising canvasser - and over the years he's developed a finely-tuned head for analyzing and assessing the effectiveness of ads.

Perhaps in my next post I'll take a closer look at advertising from the perspective of Bloom: literature's quintessential "Ad Man".

Leo Bloom personified the term "Ad Man" a generation before Don Draper was born
(granted, they're both fictional -- but you get the point)

The Departing Wayfarer

JOURNEY #19: TO BLOOM'S HOUSE

"—I'm going round the corner. Be back in a minute. 

And when he had heard his voice say it he added: 

—You don't want anything for breakfast? 

A sleepy soft grunt answered:

—Mn.

No. She didn't want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer, as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled. Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar."

-- Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses

Episode 4: Calypso

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: "The Bed"

Continuing my odyssey to illustrate select episodes of Ulysses using famous works of art, this post addresses the 4th episode of the novel, Calypso, where we first meet Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly.

It's about 8 a.m., and the couple are in their house at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin. Bloom is in the kitchen preparing breakfast for himself and Molly; she remains upstairs asleep in their bed.

Bloom decides to take a short walk around the corner to buy a pork kidney for breakfast. Before he leaves, he stands in the hallway and gingerly asks Molly if she wants anything.  She responds with a plaintive "Mn." Nope, nothing.

Toulouse-Lautrec's painting "The Bed" does a lovely job of illustrating the bedroom scene in Calypso. You can almost sense Molly's "Mn" and hear the jingling of the bedsprings as she turns about.

Coincidentally, the painting's colour palette reflects the mood that Joyce likely intended for this chapter.  To assist his friends in understanding Ulysses, Joyce created two guides (known as schemas) summarizing the structure of each episode. In each schema, he indicates the title of each episode, the time it takes place, the predominant colour of the chapter, and various other bits of information. While these guides are not identical, each schema indicates that the predominant colour of the Calypso episode is orange.

Here are links to the Linati and Gilbert schemas.

Next, Bloom leaves his home and sets out on his first journey of the day. The painting below, "Red Virginia Creeper" by Edvard Munch, portrays an image of a man leaving a house. I particularly like the slightly bewildered expression on the character's face as he begins his trek for the day. In the Linati schema, Joyce identifies the meaning of the Calypso episode as "a departing wayfarer" -- and Munch's Bloom-like character in the forefront of Munch's painting fits the bill.

Edvard Munch's "Red Virginia Creeper"

We get full access to Bloom's interior monologue as he takes a short walk on Eccles Street to Lower Dorset Street.  He greets a friend, sizes up the economics of the street, and makes his way to Dlugacz's butcher shop to buy a pork kidney. Ironically, Dlugacz (the person selling the pork) and Bloom (the person buying the pork) are both of Jewish origin. The incongruity of two Jews transacting pork was not lost on Joyce.  So much for keeping kosher. 

Below is a painting by Vincent van Gogh called "A Pork-Butcher's Shop Seen from a Window" which presents an image that fits beautifully with this episode (the shop is even painted orange - the colour alluded to in Joyce's schema). 

Vincent van Gogh's "A Pork-Butcher's Shop Seen from a Window"

Like the writing style of Calypso, each of the three paintings in this post depict relatively clear imagery -- they are not abstract.  Similarly, the Calypso episode is one of the easiest chapters in Ulysses to understand, and the writing style contains enough narrative commentary to provide context to guide the reader through the events.  While the episode does contain a fair amount of interior monologue (to use a phrase from my previous post, the Joyce-o-scope is "in full bloom") -- Bloom's thoughts are far easier to understand than the complex thoughts of the philosopher-poet Stephen. 

After buying the kidney, Bloom returns home and picks up the mail on his doorstep.  He finds a letter from his daughter Milly, and a letter for his wife from Blazes Boylan, the organizer of an upcoming concert tour featuring Molly.  In a subsequent chapter we learn that Boylan clandestinely returns to 7 Eccles Street later that afternoon to engage in a sexual affair with Molly (but we'll save that tryst for another post). 

Upon his return, Bloom heads up to the bedroom and gives Boylan's letter to Molly, who surreptitiously slips it under her pillow.  Bloom and Molly begin to chat, but their discussion is cut short when Molly smells Bloom's kidney burning. After running downstairs to save the kidney, Bloom sits down to eat his breakfast, reads Milly's letter and retires to his outhouse to scan an Irish magazine called "Titbits" (in an extreme, yet unintended, act of literary criticism, he ultimately tears off a page of the journal to use it as toilet paper).

All in all, Calypso is a very accessible and readable chapter.  Most readers who have made it through the turbulent complexity of the first three chapters find it a welcome respite.   

----

Shut Your Eyes and See

JOURNEY #18: TO THE BEACH

"He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.  Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.  No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss."

-- Stephen Dedalus writing a poem in James Joyce's Ulysses
Episode 3: Proteus

Pablo Picasso's "Figures at the Seaside"

Since many of the readers of this blog are art lovers, I thought I'd once again feature works of art as visual aids to demonstrate the various writing styles and narrative approaches used by James Joyce in Ulysses. 

Let's start with episode 3: Proteus -- one of the most challenging and dense chapters in Ulysses. 

In Proteus, the brilliant aspiring poet, Stephen Dedalus, walks on the beach at Sandymount strand in southeast Dublin and every thought that flickers through his over-educated brain makes it into this chapter.

Some refer to the technique used in the episode as "stream-of-conciousness," yet Joyce derided the term, saying whenever he heard the phrase he thought of a stream of urine.  A good way to explain this episode's technique is to imagine that someone has invented a machine that could read a person's thoughts and automatically translate them into words on a page (let's call this machine a "Joyce-o-scope").   In Proteus, the Joyce-o-scope is turned on full-force and gives us a remarkable window into the inner workings of Stephen's complex, yet troubled, brain. 

Stephen's mind is packed full of philosophy, languages, paternity, family, relationships, remorse, todo lists, and on and on.  He has flashbacks, picks his nose, gets frightened by a dog, and begins writing a poem (which I've included as the quote at the outset of this blog).  In short, his brain is an intellectual and emotional three-ring-circus; and we have a ring-side seat. 

Don't expect too much in the way of context to frame Stephen's interior monologue.  It is what it is.

Joyce shows exactly how Stephen thinks, and he purposely doesn't make it easy going.  When you begin reading this chapter, don't even try to understand everything Stephen is thinking; just fasten your seatbelt, hold on tight, and enjoy the opportunity to view the unfiltered thoughts of a talented, creative, yet somewhat tormented, artist.

The episode begins with the words:

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read..."

This refers to the Aristotelean idea that when we look at something -- say, a horse -- we don't actually see the object in front of us; rather, our minds perceive an image of a horse that we've each built up over the years.  Stephen recognizes that we use mental shortcuts to immediately recognize and categorize forms; we perceive the concept of an object, rather than seeing what actually lies before us.

We learn much later in Ulysses that Stephen had broken his eyeglasses the previous day, so his vision is blurred and he must rely more upon his other senses, particularly sound, to perceive the world around him.  As such, in this episode, Stephen becomes obsessed with the changing face of reality, and struggles to understand how humans conceptualize the world around them using visual and audible clues.

To me, the work of art that best encapsulates Joyce's writing style in this episode is Picasso's "Bathers on the Beach."  

Picasso's "Bathers on the Beach"

As in Joyce's Proteus episode, the scene in Picasso's painting takes place at the seaside and reality is morphed and transformed. Things aren't as they appear -- yet our minds still draw conclusions based on scanty evidence.  The forms in Picasso's paintings have grotesque and misshapen heads, their bodies are mostly absent, yet we somehow see them as humans, expressing emotions and relating to each other. In Proteus, Stephen uses a cane to navigate the seaside, and tries to unlock a series of metaphysical and philosophical problems; and in the painting, one of Picasso's characters wields a key and a cane.  Like the characters in Ulysses and Picasso's painting, we try to unlock and read signatures around us, and discover that reality and our concept of reality are not always the same.  

The Rage of Caliban

JOURNEY #17: TO THE CRACKED LOOKING-GLASS

"Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.
—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you!
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant."

-- Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses

Picasso's Girl before a Mirror

I'm delighted by how many people have told me they've recently picked up a copy of Ulysses and started reading. 

Yet some new readers have told me that they're finding it daunting to grasp everything that's happening in the novel, and they're thinking about giving up after a couple of chapters.  Rest assured, if you're feeling confused after embarking upon Ulysses, you're not alone.  

To those who find themselves stumped by Ulysses, my advice is simple: "Read on...and stop trying to understand everything that's happening. It's impossible to follow every element of the plot on first reading -- don't even try."  

As I've discussed in earlier posts, Ulysses moves away from traditional literary techniques and conventions.  Reading Ulysses is similar to viewing a cubist painting -- it's like you're looking at a reflection through a cracked looking-glass. Take, for example, Man with Guitar by Pablo Picasso:

Picasso's Man with Guitar

Here, Picasso breaks up the image of a guitar player into its constituent elements, and then reassembles the parts into a form that includes a variety of perspectives.  This cubist image has no single point of view.  While there are some identifiable images (like an ear, a nose, a collar, etc.), the entire picture is, on the whole, an abstraction.

Hypothetically, you could try to reconstruct this image back into a traditional perspective and figure out what the guitar player really looks like.  You'd end up with a photographic-like image of a man playing guitar -- but you'd lack the creativity and emotion of Picasso's cubist painting.  

Similarly, Joyce intentionally wrote Ulysses from various perspectives and points of view.  It should be no surprise that the reader would feel some confusion and discomfort. Ulysses isn't meant to be read like a traditional novel; rather, it's meant to be reread....and reread.  After each reading you gain more context, find new links and better understand how the pieces fit together.  If you're seeking to grasp every element of the plot of Ulysses in one reading, you're in for a rough ride.  

* * * * *

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that context isn't important in Ulysses.  The book becomes infinitely richer as you fill in the blanks and understand how everything fits together.  What I'm saying is that reading Ulysses is a process that entails looking first at the broad canvas and then, ultimately, bearing down and appreciating the fine brush strokes.

Here's an example of how context reinforces the power of Ulysses: in the first chapter, Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus have this conversation:

Laughing again, [Mulligan] brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.

—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you!

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

Joyce assumes the reader is familiar with Caliban: the slave in Shakespeare's The Tempest whose name is synonymous with "monstrous" or "beastly."   Joyce also assumes that the reader is familiar with Oscar Wilde, as the Caliban quote comes directly from the Preface of Wilde's book The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Here's an excerpt from Dorian Gray that puts the Mulligan comment in context:

"The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde's quote, in isolation, is a clever comment on how art reflects the spectator as much as it reflects the subject.  Yet, once you consider the other references in Ulysses, you see that Stephen's comment has bite.  Stephen says that the Irish look at themselves through a distorted mirror -- and are really a Caliban-like race that serves the British.

That's powerful stuff for a book written almost a century ago!

But you don't get the reference unless you understand the context.

Bottom line: at first, it's okay not to understand every plot twist in Ulysses; at the outset you can let go of the details and concentrate on the big picture.  But, ultimately, the revolutionary power and pleasure of Ulysses intensifies as you gain insight and attain context -- and that takes time.