Posted on 01/13/2021 9:51:51 AM PST by Borges
This year marks 80 years since the death of the great Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941). His most famous novel, Ulysses (1922), is one of those books, like Moby Dick or Infinite Jest, that more people begin than finish. The tome is widely believed to be a stream of consciousness novel and you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that if, like many, you only made it 100 pages or so in.
I often advise against starting at the beginning of the novel. In the case of Ulysses, you are thrown headfirst into the difficult stream of consciousness of Stephen Dedalus, a precocious 22-year-old writer. The fourth chapter, instead, is a much more accessible opening. It too offers a stream of consciousness but an easier sort belonging to the novel’s other main character, Leopold Bloom, a hapless but loveable 38-year-old advertising canvasser. On the day the novel is set, 16 June 1904, Stephen and Bloom strike up an unlikely friendship in Dublin. To read Bloom’s thoughts is to be taken into a stream of sensations, trivia, and wonder.
However, venture further and you’ll discover that Ulysses morphs, becoming instead a great anti-stream of consciousness novel.
Bergson’s stream of consciousness For French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), our stream of consciousness is our continuous sense of time, in which past, present and future merge. It is the fluid life at the heart of our identity. According to Bergson, these streams are at the centre of every object and every person.
Bergson believed we can either “analyse” or “intuit” things or people. When we “analyse” something, we remain outside its stream. We superimpose on its fluid life our own static symbols, like language. Using words means “we do not see the actual things themselves” just “the labels attached to them”.
Another example is numbers. We impose minutes and hours on fluid life. For instance, you can “analyse” a day, breaking it into 24 hours. But to “intuit” it, to see it from within the stream, is to see that time is not so rigid or easily quantifiable – it moves slower when you’re bored or faster when you’re having fun.
In our workaday lives, “analysis” is a necessary shortcut. We need words and numbers, labels and time, to get things done. Artists, according to Bergson, however, have the gift of intuition.
For example, authors’ imaginative use of language makes words a gateway to the streams at the heart of life, rather than distracting labels imposed upon it. Borrowing such ideas, literary critics posited that the stream of consciousness novelist is one who can “intuit” the stream of consciousness of characters and so become them.
Joyce tries for a moment, becomes his characters but soon gets bored with Stephen and Bloom’s streams of consciousness. By the seventh chapter, he begins a long firework display of other styles. Here on, Stephen and Bloom’s streams of consciousness are elbowed out of the way by newspaper headlines, expressionist drama and even romantic fiction. Or they’re shushed by a scientific manual or an encyclopedia of English prose styles.
Joyce fails to find the stream
So Ulysses is a much less consistent stream of consciousness novel than many. But it’s also an anti-stream of consciousness novel as Joyce comically demonstrates his and his characters’ failure to intuit streams.
Joyce enjoys showing us that people are mechanically absent-minded, often because language itself is a mechanism which gets in the way of our efforts to intuit fluid reality.
Painting of James Joyce holding a cigarette while leaning against a table.
For example, Stephen, though a creative writer, isn’t at all intuitive. All he can see is the labels attached to things, albeit highly literary labels. When he sees a dog on the beach, his love of words conjures a horse, a hare, a calf, a bear, a wolf, a leopard, a panther and a stag. He can’t focus on the dog.
Bloom’s mechanical behaviour is less literary (words) and more scientific (numbers). True, he is better at intuiting his cat than Stephen is the dog: “Wonder what I look like to her?” he muses, trying to intuit himself into her stream of consciousness. But soon his mind turns to numbers: “Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.” Here he reverts to analysis as he strains to make sense of their difference in height using his human scale, not the cat’s.
Just as Joyce’s characters can’t intuit streams of consciousness, nor can he. He knows that static literary words can’t account for the fluidity of our interiors. Every time he reaches for a new style, in each new chapter, he acknowledges these failures and moves on with glee to the next.
A stream of consciousness does dominate the last chapter. Here we tune into Bloom’s wife Molly’s stream and hear about her afternoon of sex with a colleague. Is this the stream we have been waiting for? Yes and no.
Molly’s thoughts do flow through past, present and future, uninterrupted and unpunctuated. But the Molly we get to know, while charismatic, is something of a static symbol herself, the stock character of the sexually frustrated wife. As we reflect on 80 years since Joyce’s death, Ulysses reminds us that consciousness will always elude the novel but, really, that’s where the fun lies.
Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are both easy to read, but beautiful in their imagery, and especially depth of feeling.
exactly like a highly skilled, but experimental musician, I agree that with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce departs from conventional writing and delves into his own mind and psychology. At various points you think “can you return to the melody again, please?”
“Hey, Kurt, can you read lips...”
As for James Joyce, I too have tried twice to read Ulysses. To me, it is pretentious drivel. Perhaps that's because I'm not sophisticated enough.
I'm not sophisticated enough to enjoy John Coltrane's sax work either, but I do know he's the real thing. I can't say that about James Joyce.
Let’s see “A’s” across the board
A+ gets you a free trip to the Bahamas
Applauding your namesake, I always found that Jorge Luis Borges and even Henri Bergson were a lot more fascinating to read and ponder than James Joyce or even Proust.
We've become the "terror of trifles" - Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac.
Shake it up baby!
Twist and shout!
I haven’t read it but your description makes me want to give it a try.
And a bottle of Bushmill’s...
I read that almost 50 years ago. I thought it was okay, and it’s probably his best; but it is still a mediocrity compared to, say, Jack London’s works. Hell, even Steinbeck’s stuff is superior. And Joyce can’t even begin to approach the genius of Mark Twain. As for Irish writers, I thought Liam O’Flaherty was better than Joyce. Different style, obviously; but O’Flaherty was a better story teller.
“Virginia Woolf right behind them?”
Oh, God. I took a course on Virginia Woolf in college, because a girl I was seeing at the time was into her, and she wanted me to take the class with her. I was, literally, the only guy in the class. And did I get some evil looks!
“Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are both easy to read.”
Dubliners was okay, but Portrait was too...J.D. Salingerish.
“Portrait” is a coming of age story. Or rather a “coming of aesthetic sensibility” story. Look at this prose...
“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
“Look at this prose...’Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.’
That theme was much better expressed in Mark Twain’s short story, “The Five Boons of Life.” Perhaps Joyce had read it, and tried to dress it in gaudy finery.
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