Leo for a Day

 JOURNEY #9: TO THE MATERNITY WARD

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not” 

 ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Portrait of James Joyce as a young man

If you've read my previous posts, there's probably no need for me to tell you what the novel Ulysses is all about.  I'm sure by now you're murmuring to yourself: "Yeah, yeah...I know...Ulysses isn't about ancient Greeks...it's about a 38-year-old Jewish marketing guy named Leo Bloom who walks around Dublin for a day." 

You probably also recall that Leo Bloom has been characterized as the most complete personification of a human being in all literature. Almost every thought that floats through his head spills onto the page -- and the reader attains an unmatched level of insight into the mind of this common, yet oddly heroic, fictional character.

Yet the incredible spotlight James Joyce shines into the thoughts of his characters isn't the only marvel of Ulysses - the genius of Joyce expands exponentially once you appreciate the remarkably creative writing styles he introduces in each chapter.

For example, there's a chapter in Ulysses called Oxen of the Sun which takes place in a maternity ward.  A woman named Mina Purefoy has been in labour for three days, and Leo Bloom visits her in the hospital.  After he arrives, he mingles with a group of others who have congregated in an office.   Some are concerned about the expectant mother and child - others just want to hang around and drink.

Oxen in the Sun is one of the most ambitious and creative chapters in Ulysses -- and that's saying a lot.  

In it, Joyce sprinkles his pixie-dust by parodying 20 different writing styles in the chapter -- one following another in chronological order -- in a manner that parallels the gestation and evolution of the English language.  

If it sounds complicated...it is. 

It's also breathtakingly brilliant...once you figure out what he's doing.

At the outset of the chapter, it's almost impossible to follow the narration -- but don't worry, it's meant to be indecipherable. 

Joyce then shifts to writing in an early Latinite prose (which you're also not expected to understand) - then moves to a medieval prose using an ancient pallete of words and phrases. As the chapter progresses so does his writing style -- on and on. He evolves by leaps and by generations as he nimbly moves through the writing styles of writers like Daniel Defoe, Oliver Goldsmith and Charles Dickens, and every couple of paragraphs he shifts gears again and again - upwards and onwards. 

If you're not familiar with the evolution of the English language this gymnastic feat will undoubtedly go right over your head.  But if you're an English Lit major your jaw will drop in utter amazement.

What's also astonishing is the way Joyce links the evolution of the English language with the gestation of an unborn child (remember, he's in a maternity ward).*  

And when you consider the chapter is based loosely on an episode from Homer's Odyssey -- you add layer upon layer of additional complexity.   (You can read more about how Ulysses links to The Odyssey in one of my earlier posts).

After reading this chapter you'll almost want to put the book down and stare off to space in sheer amazement and exhaustion.   It's almost as if Joyce wanted to give readers the feeling that they just gave birth to a newborn after three days of agonizing labour.   

It's an awe-inspiring feat.  It's daring, brilliant and so, so original.

Now you might be thinking "wait a minute..this blog is supposed to be all about your journey with James Joyce -- what does all this have to do with you?"

Well, I'm glad you asked...

My wife gave birth to our third child just over nine years ago.  When a child is born in the Jewish faith, it's customary for some Jews to name their baby after a recently departed relative and thereby honour the memory of a loved one. 

So we needed a name for our son.   

Years before me were married, my wife's grandfather passed away and his name was...wait for it...wait for it...: Leo!

So, after our son was born, my wife earnestly looked up at me from her hospital bed and told me she favoured the name "Leo" for our son.  How about that?  She wants to give him the same name as my favourite fictional character: Leo Bloom. 

This is terrific, I thought as the chorus from Ode to Joy ricocheted through my head, we're going to name our son after Bloom.   

So I looked lovingly and reassuringly at my wife (who couldn't care less about Joyce) and said:

"If you really want to name our son 'Leo' - fine with me."

And we named our son Leo.

That night, my wife and I both went to sleep with the warm realization that we'd each named our child after someone we admired and respected.

Only one was dead - the other fictional.

The next day I returned to the maternity ward.  While outside my wife's hospital room, I bumped into an old law school buddy of mine, Geoff, who's wife also just had a baby.  After we congratulated each other, he told me his newborn son's name was "Christian Andrew" -- a solid and impressive name that evoked images of a fine, respectable man, perhaps destined to be a judge, or mayor or a surgeon. 

I told Geoff that we named our son "Leo Sherman" -- and as the name slipped past my lips, I could only imagine my son growing up to look like Len Lesser, the obnoxious Uncle Leo in Seinfeld. 

Jerry Seinfeld and Len Lesser (Uncle Leo)

The tone of my voice must have conveyed a sense of discomfort as my son's new name rolled off my tongue the wrong way.  As I stepped back inside my wife's hospital room, she was shaking her head back and forth.

"I heard," she said. "We need a new name for the kid."

I pulled out my blackberry and we rifled through a list of names we were considering - and when we came to the name "Jonathan" - she paused and shouted: "Stop!"

Although Jonathan wasn't my first choice - I admitted to her that the moment our son was born I thought to myself "Jonathan's here," and I wasn't kidding.  

That was it - we renamed our son Jonathan - and today, the name fits him like a glove.  But even though he's a perfect Jonathan, he still loves the story about how he was named Leo -- at least for a day.

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ADDENDUM:

Nine years have passed since Jonathan was named and renamed.  Today, he's got and effervescent personality that lights up a room and a wicked sense of humour -- we've often said he'd make a great comedian someday.  Come to think about it...perhaps he would have made a great "Leo" after all.   What do you think?

Leo for a day

Len Lesser as Uncle Leo 

Sadly, the wonderful actor Len Lesser passed away almost two years ago at the age of 88.  Rest in peace, Len, and I hope that your family honours you by naming future generations after you.  MS

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*  Just as the fertilized eggs start off as an indistinct cell that rapidly multiplies - the first words in the chapter don't make any sense - but they repeat themselves.  Just as an embryo begins to develop, the language in the chapter starts to morph and take on a semi-familiar shape.  As the foetus grows you can almost start to make out limbs and features - just like the language in the middle of the chapter takes on somewhat better defined features.  As the foetus matures - the language starts to make sense - and ultimately, as the child is ready to be born, things turn stressful and traumatic. As Mina Purefoy's birthing process progresses, the action, dialogue and writing style of the chapter turns utterly chaotic. After the baby is born the characters burst euphorically out of hospital onto the street in an explosion of hyperactivity and euphoria.

A Pause by the Wayside

JOURNEY #8: TO REST FOR A SPACE   

“A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.

'James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?'

Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. 'Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?'

'How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued.

Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.'

'Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.'

'Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!”

― Stephen King

James Joyce

I began this blog on December 21, 2012, thinking it might be a fun project for the holidays. Since then, I've written 7 posts (this is my 8th), and I've had over 1,800 hits on my blog.  Thanks to everyone who's visited the blog and read its posts -- as you can see, it's a work-in-progress, but I didn't think we'd get this far this fast.   

As James Joyce once said: "Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives."   Still, I've enjoyed the process of generating ideas, formulating topics, spinning them into posts, and then starting over the next day in Sisyphus-like style.   

So now that the calendar has flipped over to 2013, I thought I'd change gears a bit and write a post about what I've learned since I first embarked on this blogging journey.  

Targeting the right audience: At first, I wasn't sure which audience I should target: new readers of Joyce's work or sophisticated Joyceans.  Ultimately, by deciding to focus my blog on my journey to understand Ulysses, I settled on a middle ground:  starting each post with a question or challenge that I faced when I first began reading Ulysses, sharing how I worked my way through it, and telling the story about what I learned along the way.  I hope this approach appeals to both the newcomers and the experts (I think of it like a Pixar movie that primarily targets kids, but has enough inside jokes and retro music to keep the adults entertained too).  

How long should a post be?  I'm thankful for all the positive feedback I've received on my posts so far -- yet one reader mentioned that my posts have been a bit too long.  It's sometimes hard to keep them short, as I try to tell a story and take reader through a journey of discovery.  Perhaps I'll mix it up in the future and experiment with posts of different lengths (like this one).

Setting the context:   By now, my thesis should be relatively clear.  I believe that Joyce's writing is brilliant and remarkable, but it's intensely more satisfying once the reader gets some context: whether it's by visiting Dublin, reading Joyce's other works, listening to the songs in Ulysses, reading Homer's Odyssey and on and on.   Without this context, it's like a home that's incomplete -- with it, it's an abode of bliss.  (By the way, the last sentence is an example of my "Pixar" approach to writing)

Blogging into the abyss: Sometimes you write a post, press the "publish" button, and it just disappears out there into the abyss.  You never know who's reading your blog and what they think.  Feedback is so important ...so if you're reading this and you find something that you like -- or even something you don't like -- please let me know.  Send me a tweet, an email or just leave a comment. It changes the monologue into a dialogue.  

Ways to provide feedback: I've added a mini-poll to get your thoughts on what should be next.  Please click on the poll or send me a note.  Also, I was thinking of writing a blog about the funniest parts of Ulysses...so if there's a particular section of Ulysses that makes you laugh and you'd like me to include it in a future blog, just let me know.

Thanks and Acknowledgements:   I'd like to thank the following people for the help they've given me in getting this blog off the ground:

- Thank you Sylvie Hill for sending me my first words of encouragement from the twittersphere (your message was much appreciated)

- It was an honour to receive my first correction from Sailpix (who prodded me to change Sandymount to Sandycove).  I also greatly appreciated Sailpix's clever reply to my "thank you note" in both Latin and Gaelic!   

- Thanks to the editor of liberateulysses.com for posting the very first comments on my blog.  You can visit this great site by clicking this.

- The Wise Serpent sent me a nice tweet introducing me to her blog.  It's terrific, and I encourage you to check it out  here.

- Thanks to blogger extraordinaire, Eden Spodek, who gave me some helpful tips on blogging (including telling me to include a blogroll)

- Thanks to @2lysses for forwarding my tweet to so many of you.  

- and a very special thanks to my sister Cindy for her insight, support and marketing panache -- she's been my Sancho Panza on this wild journey.  

I hope everyone has a healthy and happy New Year and I look forward to sharing more journeys with you in 2013.

Dear Dublin

JOURNEY #7: TO DUBLIN   

"When I die Dublin will be written in my heart."

-- James Joyce

Dublin

A few years had passed since I'd first picked up a copy of Ulysses, and I was becoming familiar with Joyce's writing style.  He wrote as if the reader instinctively knew the Dublin of 1904.  Every street and building he wrote about was real, or rather, was as real as it had been on June 16, 1904.

There are so many references to Dublin's streets and buildings in the pages of Ulysses that Joyce once joked that if Dublin were to be destroyed by some catastrophe, it could be rebuilt brick by brick, using his novel.

Joyce wrote about Dublin the same way an author would write about New York City or Paris today.  If a character visited the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, there would be no need to describe the appearance of these landmarks.  Most people would automatically conjure an image of them in their minds.  It's the same thing with Joyce's Dublin: he didn't feel it necessary to describe Dublin -- he just put it all out there.

At first I found Joyce's approach to writing about Dublin unsettling -- particularly since I had virtually no mental image of Dublin.  So I dug up an old atlas of the British Empire that included a Dublin street map, and tried to figure out where the action was taking place.  After reading Ulysses a few times, I was starting to develop a fairly detailed two-dimensional map of Dublin in my mind, and I was eager to travel to Dublin and see what the city really looked like.

In 2006 my wife and I took an eight-day holiday in Ireland.  We spent our first three days in Dublin, and after that, drove in a semi-circular path around Ireland's southern coast, spending nights in Dunmore, Cork, Kenmare and Galway, and returned to Dublin on our last day to catch our plane home to Canada.

On our first day we arrived at a hotel in the Temple Bar area of Dublin, and I was excited to finally get a chance to experience the pages of Ulysses in 3D.

There was only one problem....while I was planning to devote three days in Dublin to seeing the streets and buildings I'd read about in Ulysses, my wife just wanted to tour Dublin's sites and do some shopping; she had no interest in James Joyce whatsoever.

The first day, she humoured me.  We went to the James Joyce Centre on North Great George Street, and toured the wonderful museum.  We saw original door from 7 Eccles Street, the house that the Bloom's lived in, portraits of the Joyce family and a copy of Joyce's death mask.  It was terrific.

A copy of Joyce's death mask

After that, we walked to 7 Eccles Street to see where Bloom lived.  Big mistake!  Eccles Street is a tiny, unexceptional street with a few townhouses on it.  I tried to make it sound historic and profound, but even I had to admit, it wasn't much to see.  By then, my wife had enough with James Joyce.  She wanted to do some real sightseeing and shopping.

"OK, I've had enough James Joycey stuff," she said. "Now let's tour the city." 

Fortunately, things worked out for the both of us.  My wife absolutely adores exploring new cities and taking long walks -- so I suggested we stroll over to the pedestrian shopping district and visit the museum. 

We walked over the O'Connell Bridge and took Westmoreland Street to the Grafton Street pedestrian shopping district.  After that we turned on to Duke Street and stopped by Davy Byrnes for lunch (She knew something was up when I ordered a Gorgonzola cheese sandwich for lunch, but by then she was enjoying the walk and didn't care that we were following Bloom's steps in the Lestrygonians chapter).  After that we took Molesworth Street to Kildare Street and toured the National Museum.  

The next day, we took some fascinating long walks around Dublin, including a beautiful stroll on Sir Rogerson's Quay, down Lime Street to Hanover Street, via Lombard Street to Westland Row, where I ducked into Sweny's drug store to buy some lemon soap.  As long as I didn't talk about James Joyce, and the path was interesting, she was happy to walk anywhere in Dublin.  

Over the course of our three days, we walked through most of Dublin's downtown.  We visited Trinity University, saw the remarkable Book of Kells, visited the National Library, and took tours of memorable sites like Dublin Castle, the Guinness factory and Kilmainham jail.  

James Joyce and me in Dublin

One thing we didn't do in our first three days was visit the Martello tower mentioned in the first chapter of Ulysses. However, when we returned to Dublin after touring the south of Ireland, we had just enough time to take a quick DART trip to Sandycove and see tower.  My wife was reluctant to go after she heard the name of the tower (The James Joyce Tower), but ultimately, we both enjoyed our walk around Sandycove.

All in all, we had a fantastic time in Ireland.  We experienced a truly beautiful city, met extraordinarily friendly people, ate outstanding meals, saw fascinating sites, and in the end, walked on a few well trodden paths from the pages of Ulysses.

Beginning Ulysses: Stephen‘s Past Sins

JOURNEY #6: TO WHERE IT ALL BEGAN   

—It is a curious thing...how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. 

-- James Joyce 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

Sure, I'd heard all the hype about Ulysses: it's a modernist masterpiece -- it's the greatest novel of the 20th century; so when I first started reading it, I approached the beginning with a mix of anticipation and trepidation.  The first lines read:

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.”

I didn't know what a "stairhead" was, I wasn't sure what a "dressinggown" was (sounded like a bathrobe?) and I couldn't understand the Latin.  I assumed Mulligan was the main character in the book (and later discovered how wrong I was about that).

By the first paragraph, I was already lost.

I later learned that the opening scene takes place early in the morning of June 16, 1904 in Sandycove, a coastal suburb in southeast Dublin.  Mulligan and Stephen are standing on top of an abandoned military building -- known as a Martello tower -- which Stephen rented for a few nights from the British War Office.  Although the term "tower" evokes an image of an expansive building, in reality, the tower is surprisingly tiny; it resembles a squat brick rook in a chess game. The previous night, Stephen and Mulligan had slept in the tower, along with an English student from Oxford named Haines.

James Joyce Tower, Sandycove, Dublin

At the outset of the book, Mulligan starts up a conversation with Stephen, who remains peculiarly silent.  Mulligan speaks eight times before Stephen says a single word.

At first, I struggled to decipher some nuggets of wisdom from Mulligan's comments.  He's a medical student, who seems to be performing some religious rites. Surely there must be some depth to what he says.  Yet it wasn't until much later that I realized not to take anything Mulligan says too seriously -- he's a minor character and a jerk.

To give some perspective, if I were to cast an actor to play Mulligan in a movie, I'd probably go with a young Jack Black.  Just imagine Black acting goofy, spontaneously breaking out into song, reciting some obscure lyric with an intense look on his face, and plotting ways to borrow money to get high (or in Mulligan's case, to get drunk).

Stately, plump Jack Black

This pretty much sums up my view of Mulligan.

The truly consequential character in the first chapter is Stephen -- but it's hard to draw that conclusion by just reading the chapter.

In the first chapter of Ulysses, we learn that Stephen's mother recently died, and he keeps having these jarring dreams and jolting flashbacks of his dying (or dead) mother's body.  In Joyce-like style these neurotic images spill into the text without warning or introduction -- one moment he's listening to Mulligan, the next his head is haunted with ghoulish visions.

We learn that Stephen was taught by Jesuits, but has since renounced religion.  When his mother was on her deathbed, she asked Stephen to pray for her eternal soul, but shockingly, he refused.  Now he's grappling with his conscience for denying her last request.

We also learn that Stephen is recognized as being brilliant and has developed some profound theories on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Overall, not much happens in the first chapter of Ulysses.  After Mulligan finishes shaving, he and Stephen enter the body of the tower to have breakfast with Haines.  During breakfast, an elderly Irish woman drops by to deliver some fresh milk, and Haines shows his interest in Irish culture.  After breakfast, the three of them leave the tower and walk to the harbour so Mulligan can take a swim.  On the way, Haines tries unsuccessfully to get Stephen to talk about his theories on Hamlet, and expresses some anti-semitic views. After Mulligan jumps in the water, Stephen walks away, thinking about how he will not sleep in the tower again, and how he will not return home, wherever that might be.

Stephen's approach to dealing with others can be summed up in the following three words: silence (he starts the chapter without saying a word  to Mulligan); exile (he decides not to return home, and not to sleep in the tower again) and cunning (he tries to pinch money from Haines in exchange for telling him his theory on Hamlet).

So what's the story behind Stephen?

As I later learned, to get the background on Stephen, you need to leave the pages of Ulysses, and read Joyce's first novel: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

Joyce wrote the semi-autobiographical story of Stephen as a youth, beginning with Stephen's earliest memories and following through until he decides to rebel against the Catholic church and leave Ireland to pursue his ambition as an artist.  Ulysses takes place several years after Portrait concludes.

While I won't fully summarize Portrait in this blog post -- suffice to say it's a stunning novel.  Joyce used a remarkable technique in which the book's narrator is always the same age as the main character.  When Stephen is a toddler, so too is narrator -- and by the end of the book the narrator is as sophisticated as the grown man.  In Portrait we learn about Stephen's formative years in Catholic school, and how he later engaged in "sinful" behaviour (i.e., visiting prostitutes).  In the third chapter -- one of the most remarkable in literature -- a preacher gives a long sermon about the consequences of sin, drawing graphic and visceral images of hell which must have of scared the bejesus out of the children listening.  In the end, Stephen's analytical-self triumphs over his religious-self, and he rejects an offer to become a Jesuit priest -- ultimately leaving the church entirely.

At one point in Portrait, Cranly asks Stephen if he would do everything he could to save his mother from suffering, and Stephen said he would if it would "cost [him] very little":

In many ways, this question is a preamble to the first chapter of Ulysses, where we learn Stephen did indeed have the opportunity to ease his mother's suffering by merely praying for her soul, but wouldn't.   In Portrait, Stephen gives a hint as to why he wouldn't do it:

— I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

After I read this, I could, at least, begin to understand the rationale behind Stephen's refusal to consent to his mother's request.   Without this context, the first chapter of Ulysses would be a puzzle.

This is just one example of how Portrait provides the context and background necessary to understand Ulysses.  Without the earlier work, it would be like trying to fully appreciate the Godfather II movie without seeing Godfather I.  

I also learned that, in any journey to understand James Joyce's work, you'll need to read everything he wrote.  It's all connected.

Music in Ulysses: Part 1

JOURNEY #5: TO THE OPERA   

"So they turned on to chatting about music, a form of art for which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love..."

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

James Joyce plays guitar in Trieste

I grew up in a house filled with music and musical instruments.  My father was a professional musician who played woodwinds.  He was a regular in the pit orchestra at Toronto's premier theatre, the Royal Alexandra, where Broadway-style plays would invariably land after successful runs in New York.  He typically worked nights, and a good part of his days were spent practicing scales, exercises and tunes on his menagerie of saxophones, clarinets and flutes.  When he wasn't practicing, there was a good chance my sister would be playing her flute.  She became a professional flutist (she eschews the pompous term "flautist") and leaned toward classical music.  I pitched in, playing saxophone and keyboards.  Between the three of us, our house was overflowing with music of almost every sort -- except, perhaps, opera.  There wasn't much of that.

James Joyce came from a musical family too.  He had a fine tenor voice and played several musical instruments, including piano and guitar.  His father had a well-regarded tenor voice and his mother played piano -- music always played a dominant role at Joyce family gatherings.  If Joyce hadn't become a writer, he could have been a professional musician.

Joyce created a musical household for the central characters in Ulysses: Leo Bloom and his wife Molly. We first meet the couple in the fourth chapter (known as the Calypso episode), where we learn Molly,  a professional singer, is planning a concert tour north of Dublin.  She tells Bloom that she'll be singing two songs on her tour, one of which is La Ci Darem La Mano (I'll discuss the other song, Love's Old Sweet Song, in a future post).  No doubt, Molly spent plenty of time practicing this song because it reverberates in Bloom's head for most of the day.

In my earlier blog, I wrote about how Joyce included his characters' unfiltered thoughts in the text of Ulysses; he held nothing back.  If characters had songs resonating in their minds, no doubt the lyrics and melodies would pop up in the text, usually haphazardly.

Later that morning, as Bloom walks through the streets of Dublin, he starts humming:

       "La ci darem la mano
       La la lala la la."

To someone who isn't familiar with the Don Giovanni aria, or who doesn't speak Italian, this passage must be a mystery.  Yet after you hear Luciano Pavrotti and Sheryl Crow (!) sing the aria, it comes alive:

Right after Molly tells Bloom she'll be singing La Ci Darem, Bloom's mind starts swirling with questions about whether she'll get the lyrics right; he thinks:

    "Voglio e non vorrei. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio."

Ironically, Bloom gets the lyrics wrong. When you click on the video above, you'll hear Sheryl Crow sing the lyrics correctly:

      "Vorrei e non vorrei"

Bloom's error was clearly intentional on Joyce's part.  Joyce was fluent in Italian and there's no way he'd ever get it wrong.  Later in the book, Bloom realizes the word "voglio" is wrong, but the word sticks in his head for the rest of the book.  This is another example of Joyce's commitment to absolute realism: people are always messing up song lyrics, so why shouldn't fictional characters make mistakes too? Similarly, real people have catchy songs running through their heads all the time, so why shouldn't characters in literature get ear-worms as well?

Other songs from Don Giovanni find their way into Bloom's mind.  He spends time during his lunch trying to figure out the words from the final scene of Don Giovanni ("Don Giovanni, a cenar teco"), and gets stumped on the meaning of the word "teco."  The song rolls around in his head, he does his best to translate it (although he's not quite successful), and eventually, the song fades away.

La Ci Darem La Mano is just one song in a symphony of music contained in the pages of Ulysses.  The Sirens episode is dedicated almost entirely to sound and music.  In it, a slightly drunk Bloom eats lunch in a crowded pub in the Ormond Hotel near the River Liffey, while a group of singers and musicians fill the room with a musical haze.  It's almost impossible for anyone to decipher what's happening in this episode without first listening to its music (which I will address in a later post).

Not too long after reading Ulysses, I purchased a CD of Mozart's light opera, Don Giovanni, and enjoyed it immensely.  It was probably the first time I'd ever listened to an opera.  Over the years, my wife and I started attending opera (including a wonderful performance of the Magic Flute in Prague), and now I appreciate the beauty and emotional impact of operatic music.  I owe my new fondness for opera to my catalyst: James Joyce's Ulysses.

Bloom's Odyssey: More than Meets the Eye

JOURNEY #4: TO HOMER'S ODYSSEY   

"Never know whose thoughts you're chewing." 

― James Joyce, Ulysses

A classic movie poster for Homer's Odyssey

Now we get to one of the cleverest aspects of James Joyce's Ulysses.  

In my earlier posts, I wrote that Ulysses wasn't about Ancient Greeks -- and that's certainly true -- to a point.   

At face value, Ulysses is about a Jewish adman named Leo Bloom who journeys through the streets of Dublin on a single day: June 16, 1904; but there are deeper dimensions to the novel.     

Behind the scenes, Joyce based Bloom's comings and goings on the structure of the epic Greek poem, The Odyssey by Homer.  Each chapter in Ulysses corresponds to a chapter in Homer's Odyssey, and most characters in Ulysses are based on parallel characters in the epic poem.

If you're like me, you grew up remotely familiar with Homer's Odyssey, but never actually read it.

  

I came to learn that The Odyssey was written by Homer in the 8th century B.C. and tells the story of King Odysseus's ten-year journey back to his kingdom of Ithaca after his success in the Trojan War.  On the way home, Odysseus encounters a series of adventures with a variety of gods, giants and monsters, and uses his skills and cunning to return to his queen, Penelope.  Back in Ithaca, a rowdy mob of suitors sense that Odysseus isn't coming home, and they gather at Penelope's palace to court her.  The restless suitors pillage the palace, eat Penelope's food, and demand she choose one of them to be her new king.  In the end, Odysseus makes his way back to Ithaca, disguises himself as a beggar and meets up with his son Telemachus -- together, they defeat the suitors, and Odysseus successfully returns home to Penelope's bed.

What's brilliant about Joyce's approach is that he takes this epic hero's ten-year journey in The Odyssey and uses it as a guide to write about the adventures of a common man during a single day.

Bloom is, of course, the modern-day Odysseus, who travels throughout Dublin.  Bloom's wife Molly is Penelope, who spends the day at home (and has an affair with a suitor named Blazes Boylan).  Stephen Dedalus corresponds to Telemachus, and by the end of the book, we see how Stephen and Bloom form a quasi-father-and-son relationship.  In both books -- Ulysses and the Odyssey -- the first three chapters focus on the Stephen/Telemachus characters, and the Bloom/Odysseus characters don't enter the picture until the fourth chapter.

I can just imagine how Joyce created the structure.  He must have made a list of the 18 episodes in The Odyssey, and used it as a guide to figure out what Bloom could be doing during each hour of the day. 

Here are a couple examples of how Joyce draws parallels with Homer:

Cyclops: In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is held prisoner in a cave by a monstrous Cyclops.  When the Cyclops gets drunk and falls asleep, Odysseus takes a spear and pokes out his eye.  Odysseus escapes, and the furious -- and now blind -- Cyclops grabs a boulder and throws it at Odysseus, narrowly missing him.  In the corresponding chapter in Ulysses, Bloom gets into an argument in a pub with a bigoted Irish National, known only as "the Citizen".  The Citizen wears an eyepatch, making him a modern day cyclops.  When the Citizen questions Bloom's loyalty to Ireland, Bloom holds his cigar to his face in spear-like fashion, almost poking him in the eye - but in the end, Bloom punctures the anti-semite's arguments with his sharp comebacks.  As Bloom escapes, the angry Citizen heaves a biscuit box at him, once again, narrowly missing.

Hades: In the Hades chapter, Odysseus travels to the depths of the land of the underworld to receive a prophecy from a blind seer.  In the corresponding chapter in Ulysses, Bloom travels to a cemetery in traditional Irish style (a horse drawn carriage); at his friend's funeral, Bloom's thoughts are on death, burial and what lies beyond.

This hidden structure is similar to scaffolding used to erect a building, which is later removed without a trace once the building is complete.  Except for the name of the book, there's little actual evidence in the pages of Ulysses that this scaffold ever existed (if you're wondering why Joyce's book is called Ulysses, the Roman name for King Odysseus is...you guessed it...Ulysses).

So, if you're setting out to understand what Ulysses is all about, it's almost inevitable that, early on, you'll start reading Homer's Odyssey.  It's one of the first stops of any journey with James Joyce -- and one that will bring you a great deal of joy.

The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Robert Fagles

I started off by reading Robert Fagles' translation of The Odyssey, and it's exquisitely written.  In the oral tradition of the ancient Greeks, Homer's poem is best when spoken aloud.  So, after reading the book once, I read it aloud to my oldest son (who was then about 9 or 10 years old).  He grasped the story easily, loved the characters; we both looked forward to our nightly readings of this ancient tale.  To this day my son still clearly remembers the stories, and (unlike his Dad) has the benefit of knowing one of Western literature's greatest stories from an early age.

One more thing: not too long ago I picked up an audio version of The Odyssey performed by Ian McKellen, the great Shakespearean actor, better known as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings.  His voice is unbelievable, and he does great justice to Homer.  You can't go wrong buying a copy of the audio book, and maybe you'll discover a few correspondences to Ulysses along the way.

The Troublesome Anti-Semitism in Ulysses

 “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”

― James Joyce, Ulysses

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses

It's hard to overstate the rewards of reading Ulysses.  It's pure genius, insightful, immensely creative, brilliantly written and laugh-out-loud funny.

Yet, what about the problematic anti-semitic passages in Joyce's epic work?

In earlier posts, we saw that Joyce was NOT an anti-semite.  He had a high regard for the Jewish people, enjoyed their company, studied Hebrew and the Talmud, had a Jewish daughter-in-law, and became romantically involved with a Jewish woman (as recounted in his short story "Giacomo Joyce").    

So the next destination in my journey with James Joyce is to examine why a "philo-semite" like Joyce would include such bitter anti-semitic rhetoric in his book. 

The first taste of anti-semitism in Ulysses comes in the first chapter, when Haines, a bigoted English student on leave from Oxford, says that Jews are England's "national problem."   The comment seems totally out of context, and goes unanswered by the other characters. 

In the second chapter, the anti-semitic fireworks fly.   Garret Deasy, the school headmaster and an outright anti-semite, spews venom about Jews being the "national problem."  He echoes Haines' earlier statement about England being in the hands of the Jews.  When Stephen Dedalus mildly challenges these racist views, Deasy responds:

-- They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.

At this point, Stephen's thoughts swirl into cartoonish images of goldskinned men with gems on their fingers quoting prices on the steps of the Paris stock exchange like a gabble of geese.   What's going on here?  Where do these images come from?

This brings us to one of the most important reasons to read Joyce.  He was devoted to absolute realism -- he wanted to show the world as it truly was. His characters were almost always based on someone he knew in real life; his characters would never say or think anything that their real-life doppleganger wouldn't say or think.

The reason that anti-semitism was included in Ulysses is because anti-semitism was in the words and minds of the people who lived in Dublin in 1904.  Joyce chose to display the true nature of human beings -- their pimples, blemishes and barnacles. He would never candycoat someone's innermost thoughts -- just put them out there, exactly as they are.

To understand how Joyce writes, think of an alien coming to Earth with a machine that reads people's thoughts.  As the words and images flowed into people's minds, they'd be immediately transcribed into print.

Yet what would these thoughts look like in print?  They might appear in complete sentences and neat paragraphs -- but I'll bet that rarely happens.  Mostly thoughts would arrive in bursts of shorthand words, random phrases, unfinished sentences, incomplete ideas, flashes of imagery and reflections on the words and acts of others... just the way Joyce expresses them in Ulysses. 

That's why Stephen, after hearing Deasy's monstrous blathering, gets a head filled with a blast of stereotypically racist images.  Listening to trashy ideas is likely to fill your head with trashy imagery -- conversely, reflecting on noble ideas should have the opposite effect.

That's the magic of Ulysses.  When Bloom -- the Jewish ad canvasser -- enters the scene in Chapter 4, we learn every thought that goes through his head on June 16, 1904.  He's a kind, intelligent, inquisitive man -- yet he's got his share of hangups, which Joyce doesn't flinch at exposing like laundry on a backyard clothesline.  During that day Bloom experiences jealousies, remorse, lust, hunger and almost every other craving a man can have in a typical day.  He has flashbacks, thinks about ads, gets drunk, masturbates, gets into an argument, visits a brothel, breaks up a fight, carries out various bodily functions, and on and on...and we get to read his mind as he experiences them.

So if you've ever wondered what other people are actually thinking when they walk down the street, when they pray at a funeral, when they engage in a conversation with someone on the street or when they take a crap -- Joyce gives you the unvarnished truth.  Quite often, it isn't a pretty picture -- but it springs from life.

Just wait until we get to the stream-of-consciousness that emanates from the sultry Molly Bloom's head in the final chapter of Ulysses. I'll get to that in another post (yes I said yes I will Yes).  

Springtime for Leo Bloom

JOURNEY #2: TO THE MOVIES   

“I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce, but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair. Enter Gene Wilder.”

― Mel Brooks  

Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in The Producers 

The first stop on my journey with James Joyce took place long before I ever picked up a copy of Ulysses.   It started with a movie.

Growing up, my favourite movie was Mel Brooks' hilarious 1968 comedy The Producers.  I adored the timid accountant, Leo Bloom, played by Gene Wilder, who was swept up in Max Bialystock's crooked scheme to get rich by producing a Broadway flop.   

Little did I know that Mel Brooks "borrowed" the name "Leo Bloom" from the main character in Ulysses.  Brooks must have read and loved Ulysses prior to writing The Producers, because, as I later learned, his screenplay was chock full of references to Joyce's book.*    

When I first started reading Ulysses, I was surprised to come across the book's main character in the fourth chapter: a 38-year-old Jewish ad canvasser, with the same name as the Producer's character, Leo Bloom.  

Wait a minute...this bears repeating...the book I originally thought was about Ancient Greeks -- the greatest novel of the 20th century -- turned out to be a book about a Jewish marketing guy walking around Dublin with the same name as a character in my favourite movie.    

And to make things more intriguing -- similar to a Seinfeld episode -- Ulysses chronicles a day in Dublin where nothing much happens.  

Over the years, I've learned much more about Bloom.   Never mind he isn't technically Jewish.  His mother wasn't Jewish, his father converted to Christianity (twice), and he isn't circumcised.  But to everyone in Dublin, he's all too Jewish.

Bloom has been called the most complete representation of a human in literature; almost everything that Bloom says, does and thinks on a single day is included in the book.  It begins first thing in the morning on June 16, 1904, and ends late at night when an exhausted Bloom crawls into bed with his wife Molly, lying with his feet by her head and his head by her feet. 

So how did James Joyce, a Dubliner who had virtually no opportunity to interact with Jews in his youth, come to be one of the world's experts on the inner thoughts and desires of a secular Jew?     

He certainly didn't learn about Jews in Ireland.  When Joyce was six he was sent off to a boarding school in County Kildare called Clongowes Wood to be taught by Jesuits, and after that, moved to Belvedere College, another Catholic School in Dublin.  It wasn't until completing university he set off on a self-imposed exile to Trieste and Pula, where he found himself in the company of Jews, and discovered a strong affinity to them.  He became an English teacher at the Berlitz School where many of his students were Jews; he befriended them, drank with them, laughed with them and learned about them.  Years later his son, Giorgio, married a Jewish woman, Helen Fleischmann Kastor, and Joyce was overjoyed with the intermingling of the Jewish and Irish races.   

Yet while it is clear that Joyce was certainly NOT an anti-semite, many of the characters in Ulysses are blatant anti-semites.  We'll get to that in my next blog.

For now, let me return to The Producers.   Ironically, it wasn't Gene Wilder who came to personify the popular image of the Bloom character from Ulysses.     Rather, it was his co-star from The Producers, Zero Mostel.   Years prior to The Producers, Mostel starred in a Broadway play called Ulysses in Nighttown based on the Circe episode from Ulysses.   Today, when most people imagine what Bloom looks like, they think of a young Zero Mostel in a bowler.

After a long and successful run as Leo Bloom on Broadway, I wonder how Mostel must have felt playing opposite another Bloom in The Producers. 

As for current image of Bloom...put a bowler and a mustache on Sasha Baron Cohen, and "Bam!" you've got a modern day Bloom.  

*  Phrases in The Producers such as "Touch me...Touch me" come straight from the pages of Ulysses.   There's a character in The Producers called "Roger de Bris" who is a takeoff on a salacious author in Ulysses called "Paul de Kock" (Bloom's wife Molly was quite fond of his name). At one point in The Producers, an exasperated Gene Wilder asks: "when will it be Bloom's Day?" -- and a calendar on the wall of Bialystock's office showed it was June 16th (the actual Bloomsday).