It makes sense to end this Nabokov series with Ulysses, because it’s probably the greatest fictional fireworks display ever put on in the English language. Nabokov ranked this book as one of the four greatest prose works of the 20th century, along with The Metamorphosis, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (another extraordinary display of urban linguistic fireworks, but in Russian), and the first half of that Proust thing. He called Ulysses “a splendid and permanent structure.”
This is a book that has provided me with more opportunities for creative reading than the usual novel. For one thing, ever since I discovered the RTE audiobook that was produced in Joyce anniversary year 1982, I’ve believed that this multi-vocalic, sound-effect-spiced production is the best way to experience the wacky polyphony of Joyce’s writing. On the old blog, I wrote about my alcoholic romp through this audiobook; kicking back with a cold (craft) brew while following the action in the Hibernian metropolis turned out to be a colorful if somewhat risky experience. Later, in the spirit of “you don’t even know what’s in your own backyard,” I posted a surprising bit of local history related to Ulysses.
One way to approach Ulysses involves bearing in mind Joyce’s own comments on the book. He said that “there is not one serious line in it.” He also stated, in a comment that I can’t currently track down, that one of his goals was to put everything he knew into it. He notoriously said that “the demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works”; and as if that weren’t enough, “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.” If we put these comments together, we should expect a book characterized by both humor and compendiousness, and propelled by a spirit of egomania (or even megalomania). I think that’s a justifiable way to look at it.
Nabokov’s approach is, well, very Nabokovian. First, he largely ignores what Joyce himself said about the book. As everyone knows, it’s supposedly based on the Odyssey. To Nabokov, this is irrelevant to any enjoyment of the book:
I must especially warn against seeing in Leopold Bloom’s humdrum wanderings and minor adventures on a summer day in Dublin a close parody of the Odyssey, with the adman Bloom acting the part of Odysseus, otherwise Ulysses, man of many devices…There is nothing more tedious than a protracted and sustained allegory based on a well-worn myth.
That raises a few questions. What if Joyce had never said that Ulysses was based on the Odyssey? What if he had called the book Bloomsday, and never given the chapters1 those suggestive titles that he later withdrew (“Calypso,” “Cyclops,” and so on)? Would anyone have noticed that Joyce was “updating Homer,” or “engaging in dialogue with the classics,” or “exploiting an ironic contrast between the quotidian bourgeois world and the heroism of the Bronze Age”?
My own suspicion is that nobody would have noticed, until perhaps, some years later, a scholar who happened to know both texts well might have pointed to some curious parallels between the two works. Be that as it may, I think Nabokov was right to reject the notion that you need to know anything about the Odyssey to appreciate Joyce’s work. While these parallels may add a rather vague and abstract level of meaning, they remain far from the world of the book, which is extraordinarily detailed, tactile, specific, and cluttered.
Faced with such a capacious and complicated book, Nabokov sums it up thematically in a less-is-more fashion, reducing it to three words (“Bloom and Fate”). Personally, I like Martin Seymour-Smith’s take (“a celebration of, a monument to, the life of ordinary, ‘vulgar’ people”), which resembles the view stated by the notable Ulysses-ologist Patrick Hastings (“celebrates the strength of spirit required to endure the trials of everyday life”). Take your pick, or lots of other picks. Figuring out a central subject or focus of Ulysses is pointless. The book is about all the things that it’s about: religion, nationality, history, literature, sex (and) the city, the workings of the human mind; this list is not exhaustive. (Some commentators reduce it all to “love,” beating even Nabokov’s concision.) But if you asked me what it’s really about, I would say it’s about the three main characters, whose thoughts are plumbed and recorded in a way that went far beyond what previous novels had been able to achieve.
Having dispensed with the mythological basis of Ulysses, Nabokov spends this very large lecture (85 pages) digging into what he really cares about. He helpfully boils down Joyce’s polystylistic approach to three basic strands:
“The original Joyce: straightforward, lucid and logical and leisurely”;
“Incomplete, rapid, broken wording rendering the so-called stream of consciousness, or better say the stepping stones of consciousness”;
“Parodies of various nonnovelistic forms… also, parodies of literary styles and authors.”
This last, parodic form corresponds to the strand designated as “The Arranger” in Patrick Hastings’ useful and comprehensive UlyssesGuide.com (now available in book form!). Hastings describes this voice as “express[ing] a reader-like awareness of every word in the book and an omniscient attention to every character’s whereabouts at all times. Indeed, the Arranger might be most simply described as the witty and omniscient mind of the book itself.”2
Nabokov doesn’t state it quite this way, but a lot of Ulysses consists of Joyce showing off, often with merely a murky relation to the core elements of the story. The plot didn’t require Joyce to write a section that mimics the structure of a piece of music (Chapter 11). The notorious “Oxen of the Sun” (Chapter 14) is a long, dense and baroque piece of writing that parodies English prose styles in chronological order, beginning in Anglo-Saxon times. I can see some MFA instructor writing in the margins: “This does nothing to advance the story – agents will reject the whole book when they see this part.” The penultimate Chapter 17 is a catechism that out-catechisms any catechism I have ever seen. If you’re a fan of psychological interpretations, you can see this as Joyce getting revenge on his Jesuit educators (“‘I’ll show them a catechism they’ll never forget,’ said Jim with grim determination, gripping the pen firmly”). Or maybe he was just having fun. However, the overall point here is that all of these episodes, and a number of others, represent the Arranger at work.
Nabokov doesn’t object to Joyce’s propensity to show off, perhaps because Nabokov himself enjoyed showing off in his writing. He was a fan of puzzles, hidden patterns, and wordplay. One of his more notorious achievements in that regard is the concluding paragraph in his short story “The Vane Sisters,” in which the first letters of each word form an acrostic. I wouldn’t have picked up on this if the author hadn’t mentioned it in a footnote: “This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction. Whether it has come off is another question.”
He devotes a lot of space to following the various threads that Joyce weaves throughout the story. These include such things as the fate of a bar of soap (“a cake of Barrington’s lemon-flavored soap which costs fourpence and smells of sweet lemony wax”), and the Ascot Gold Cup horse race, a real event that took place on the fictional Bloomsday. These and many other examples slot into Joyce’s plan of synchronization: “Throughout the book people keep running into each other – paths meet, diverge, and meet again.” Nabokov also plays urban geographer and real estate agent, describing the construction and layout of Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street (“Their house is narrow, with two front windows in each of its three front stories,” etc.), and once again adding graphics to his presentation, in the form of a hand-drawn map of Dublin, showing the wanderings of the main characters.
There are a number of very Nabokovian moments when he picks up on something that nobody has previously noticed (or claims to have done so). Of Chapter 15 (the extended dream play, sometimes called “Circe”) he says:
I do not know of any commentator who has correctly understood this chapter. The psychoanalytical interpretation I, of course, dismiss completely and absolutely… I propose to regard this chapter [15] as an hallucination on the author’s part, an amusing distortion of his various themes. The book is itself dreaming and having visions; this chapter is merely an exaggeration, a nightmare evolution of its characters, objects, and themes.
“The book is itself dreaming and having visions” obviously overlaps with Hastings’ comment about “the witty and omniscient mind of the book itself.” Meanwhile, I do not know of any commentator who has put so much stress on the recurring figure whom Nabokov calls “the Man in the Brown Macintosh.” This man “is alluded to in one way or another eleven times in the course of the book but is never named. Commentators have, as far as I know, not understood his identity. Let us see if we can identify him.” Nabokov goes on for several pages, tracing the Man’s appearances in various parts of the book, and finally, via a reference to Shakespeare, concludes that the Man is none other than James Joyce:
The Man in the Brown Macintosh who passes through the dream of the book is no other than the author himself. Bloom glimpses his maker!
Nabokov gives only brief mentions of some of my own favorite scenes in Ulysses, but that’s understandable, as it would take forever to appreciate the book in sufficient detail. One such scene is in Chapter 8, when Bloom enters Burton’s Restaurant in search of lunch (it begins with the words “Men, men, men”). It’s an amazingly gooey and odoriferous evocation of a cheap joint serving stick-to-the-ribs fare, with the eaters resembling animals rooting around in a trough:
Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches… Smells of men. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarettesmoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment.
It’s one of my three favorite literary eating scenes, along with the scene in the Munich beer hall in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and the feast for the Emperor of Ethiopia in Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England.3 In another famous comment, Joyce said: “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” It’s easy to think he was referring to the streets and buildings, but as this scene shows, the sights, sounds and smells are also included in the package.
Summary. Not surprisingly, Nabokov ranks Ulysses very highly, as one of the greatest literary works of the century. Characteristically, he is not interested in the book as an expression of ideas (in fact, he believes it has been “slightly overrated” by critics more interested in ideas than in aesthetics). Nor does he really care about it as a retelling of the Odyssey, or as anything much beyond the book itself. Instead, he focuses on the details of characterization, storytelling, and use of language. Anyone who is new to this work, and who wants to approach it without a lot of preconceptions, would probably enjoy this lecture.
Apparently, true Ulysses-heads prefer the term “episodes” to “chapters.” My edition (the famous 1980s “Corrected Text”) doesn’t use either word, just numbers. Nabokov calls them “chapters,” but arranges them in a three-part scheme that might confuse some readers (Bloom is introduced in “Part II, Chapter 1,” otherwise known as “Chapter 4”).
Hastings credits two previous scholars (Hugh Kenner and David Hayman) with inventing this term.
At some point, I may do an in-depth comparison of these three scenes.