How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Proteus Chapter of Ulysses

Before I get into this post, oh my friends, I must apologize ahead of time. I'm currently reading three different books: Ulysses, Ulysses Annotated (a book of annotations on the text of Ulysses), and Ulysses and Us (a book discussing why and how Ulysses is intended for the common man, instead of intellectual highbrows) I blame this on my friends who have organized Jousting With Joyce this month. But I'm having a LOT of fun. I read the book a few years ago, and I will not link to the review - it was so awful that it's the only review I've ever actually gone back and deleted content from. But I'm understanding it much better the second time. So, the short of it is: for the next month and a half, much of this channel will be devoted to Ulysses. Which I know makes some of us cringe in terror or hatred. So, I'm sorry.

But that's just the way it is.

So, before we began the book, Jill over at Fizzy Thoughts mentioned something interesting about chapter 3 of Ulysses, a chapter which Joyce titled, after the fact, Proteus - namely that this is the chapter that most people turn away at and never finish the book. And I will confess now, the first time I read Ulysses, this chapter took me, I kid you not, a month and a half. For fifteen pages. And I didn't understand a thing in it.

Well, that's not really true. I did understand something: I understood that the chapter was in stream of consciousness, and that the consciousness being streamed was confusing and... eh... just a little obnoxious. Pretentious, snotty, and a little full of itself.  Declan Kiberd in Ulysses and Us admits this up front:

Many readers drop Ulysses at this point, finding themselves unable to keep up with Stephen's remorseless and obscure pedantry...

Yeah, that pretty much gives my initial feeling of the chapter. It's what he says afterwards that really captures how I felt reading it the second time:

...but the truth is that Joyce is laughing at the pitiful pretentiousness of the youth he once was. Nobody could understand all that Stephen says or thinks. Nobody could take all of his ideas with utter seriousness. 

No, seriously. The closing words of the chapter, dramatic and stirring:

Behind. Perhaps there is someone. He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

The 'behind, perhaps there is someone'? It's because Stephen just picked his nose and wiped it on a rock because he doesn't have a handkerchief, and he's afraid someone may have caught him at it.  So, he looks over his shoulder, to see the great silent ship, deep and powerful symbol of the child Telemachus waiting for a father to come home who he has never met, silent and forboding, is all because he didn't want someone to catch him picking his nose.

This may seem facetious, or pretentious in and of itself, to write some grand sweeping complex chapter that is essentially about a stupid college kid wandering along the beach and killing time for an hour. Maybe it is, but I don't think so. It would have been much easier to just write a snarky satire of a chapter, talking about how stupid college kids are. The power of James Joyce is that he doesn't do this - instead he simply records what it feels like to be that person. There are parts of the mind that just find this bewildering, or course, let me address that first. In some sense, like Kiberd said, it is meant to be confusing. Part of Stephen's problem is his education. If you took this chapter apart, probably half of it would be a quote, an allusion, a lampoon, or a paraphrase of the words of someone else, and Joyce argues (in a different way in the previous chapter) that education, sometimes, aims for htis goal: to make people who are good at spouting at the correct bit of information at the correct time. It's a problem that is different now from Joyce's time, where rote learning was a huge measure of academic prowess, but it is a bigger problem now, perhaps, in our time when education's purpose has been narrowed to the point where it's largely presented as nothing more than a way to ensure you get a good job someday. Even so, though, part of the problem is, I would argue, intrinsic to this sort of free association thought. Some of the things in Stephen's mind are not academic esoterica: there's lyrics to pub ditties and popular songs, there's references to Hamlet in plenty, which isn't exactly obscure, there's references to the CAtholic Mass, which most of the people around Stephen would have been intimately familiar with. The problem is, anytime you enter someone else's mind, you will find that there are places foreign to you. This is perhaps amplified by the difference in time and space between Stephen and us, and by the differences in our respective educations. But at the same time I think it's partly simply the uncrossable chasm between two souls, the fact that we can peek inside someone else's head, but never truly climb in.

Apart from the bewildering nature of Stephen's head, though, there is the pretentiousness of it. And make no mistake, it is a chapter, stuffed to the gills, with pretentious. It is very easy to dislike Stephen, here. But at the same time, I don't think that is Joyce's point - in fact, I think it says a lot about us as readers, willing to seek out clues about whether to like or dislike a person so easily. Every person is a person at some level. Stephen is  young, he makes mistakes, he can be annoying, but he's a person, and in the midst of all his wandering, there are some real, powerful, and beautiful emotions. The problem is that he does not how to pick them out of the mire. He doesn't realize that as much of the beauty comes in the 'low' as the 'high' parts of his thought, that his work scribbling a poem is far less powerful and human than his yearning for someone to love him as he thinks about the shopgirl he saw the day before, or the brooding loneliness he feels as he watches the dog running along the beach. Stephen is, simply, who he is. One may dislike him, but to hate him, that takes a special force. It is easy for me to hate some characters, because there are characters. I would present that authors construct them so that they can be hated or loved, as often as not. But Stephen is not a character in the same sense - to hate him is to hate a human - a ficitonal one, yes, but we do not have the luxury in Ulysses of having simlpy a hateable side of a person before us. If we are to love or hate anyone in Ulysses, we must hate them the way we would hate another person - which reflects and teaches the reader something about how it is that they really DO love and hate, teaches them where the line lies for them.

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Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

(NOTE: There is really only one 'spoiler' I imagine in Mrs Dalloway, but really, the spoilers in my opinion aren't the point. Said spoiler will be referred to throughout this review)
(NOTE 2: I'm not an expert on Virginia Woolf, so I quite possibly have no idea what I'm talking about.)
(NOTE 3: I use the word God in this review as a genderless word, neither male nor female)

A woman wakes up and prepares for a party. A man meets with his old friends. A former soldier struggles with (what we would now call, I imagine) PTSD. Much walking about the streets of London ensues. The woman's party goes off well. The man learns, more or less, absolutely nothing despite having the opportunity to do so. The soldier kills himself.

That's about it, that's the lump sum plot of Mrs Dalloway (OK, there's a few other small plots as well). The narrative voice maintains the same quiet distance from each of these threads of narrative, calmly switching between flowers and suicidal thoughts, between old memories and morning traffic.

If this sounds boring, or trite, please try the book anyway. If, like me, you don't 'get it' the first time you read it, try it again. If you persist in not understanding or missing the point, wait a few years, read lots of other books, and try it again. Reading Mrs Dalloway and having it 'click' for you is a transcendant, holy literary experience.

---

Septimus half rose from his chair... and with legions of men prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner, receives for one moment on his face the whole... The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. HE would turn round, he would tell them in a few moments, only a few moments more, of this relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation--

---

With most authors who write deeply, humanly charactered books, one senses the author hiding just behind at least one of the many masks scattered across the pages. In Hemingway, you feel him just behind the lead male, in pretty much every book. James Joyce is autobiographical to a fault. Dickens lies in the voice of his narrator - no matter who said narrator might be (even in Great Expectations where Pip really doesn't seem much like Charles Dickens, you still feel Charles inside Pip's first person narration).

In fact, Joyce is a particularly powerful comparison, because this is the powerful myopia of his work, for me - I wrote about this, in fact, a little bit in my review of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man last year, how one is so intimately engaged inside the narrator's skin that one feels in it the contours of one's own skin, one sees clearly things about themselves, without the protective displacement that fiction usually gives. Virginia Woolf, in a sense, is just the opposite: In a Virginia Woolf novel, one feels the author dissolve from the book, and the world - as small and 'petty' as that world might be - blooms into an existence with no lifelines, no points of reference, no escape into the author's life. Virginia Woolf does not write her soul into her characters because, with the true godlike power of the creator, she creates souls, free and independent of her own, then lets them into a world to live (and die) in.

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Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be hungry. IT was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table next theml then, when a lady and a child sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes... She had wanted that cake -- the pink one. The pleasure of eating was almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in that!

---

This was disorienting the first time I read the book, this dizzying feeling of continuously moving from one soul to another, from one internal world to another. You feel a sort of motion sickness, like you want to find that 'one character', the soul that is the voice of the book. Only there isn't one. Like life itself, the book exists without a central thread. It's messy, powerfully messy, and unresolvable. This is not an immediately gratifying experience - for me, it was easy to feel a certain... coldness I guess, the first time I read a Woolf novel, a certain sense that there is a God here, but the God simply does not care a straw what happens to her children.

I began to unravel this when I first read Eliot's 'Middlemarch', which Woolf famously described as the first book ever written for grownup people. At first blush I simply took this as a bit of snobbery (honestly, I imagine there IS a BIT of snobbery to the comment. Virginia was never a PERFECT person). But there is a certain truth behind the snobbery, because Eliot, in some ways, does this same thing - she creates a world, and populates with souls, whole, free souls, and then draws them out through simple mundanities to an inconclusive point of finishing.

And that's it to me. Reading, say, Wives and Daughters - a beautiful novel mind you, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing - one feels as if Mrs Gaskell is trying to teach us and help us, to guide us to her truth. Like a mother. Like we are her children, and she is teaching us. Dickens is this to the Nth degree - I love the guy, but he's a wee bit paternal...

Woolf is not. Woolf speaks to us as an equal. I think this is why I found her so intimidating, because she refuses to speak down to me, even though I'm not at her level. She simply tells the truth, the messy, nonsensical, irritating truth. Then, she steps back, and lets me build my own faiths inside of her truth. More than any other I've read, and in spite of the fact that I don't deserve it, I feel that Ms Woolf trusts me with her book. She allows me to make it what I will, not what she will.

---

The clock was striking -- one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the lock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs Filmer waving her apron... seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast... Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been through the War. Of her memories, most were happy. She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields -- where could it have been? -- on to some hill, somewhere near the sea...

---

And so, I am not obliged to love or unlove, to hope or despair. I am simply given souls, and left withe only one instruction: to decide what I think of them. This is powerful for me in a very simple way - that because the author does not exist in the story, she does not obscure it. Dalloway is almost like journalism, only more perfect. It is like being able to, for a short time, see much more clearly than I am normally capable of. So, the characters shine with a vividity and clarity that few authors ever approach. The quote about Miss Kilman above typifies this for me, for example.

On the other hand, for me (and this, I suppose, may be my attempts to build a faith inside of the truth), because I am not told to be any certain soul as I read, but instead must be each soul, in turn, I feel, in a very sacred way, a soul not of any certain soul, but of a community. Where reading Joyce is a walk as deep into one's self as one can go, reading Woolf is a walk as far out of one's self as one can go, until you enter a sort of Nirvana, where you can, for just tiny glimpses of moments, feel what it is to be a world of souls. And, for me, it is there that I finally DO meet Virginia Woolf, the great creator, who stands above her creations with the cold, loving heart of a god.

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Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce

Reviewing Finnegan's Wake is an impossible thing. Well, that's going too far, I could review it. I could even write a somewhat funny review. But I could not write a review that would actually be useful. The only information in a review that would be useful would be more easily picked up in a Wikipedia article. The rest of the review would be about me, not about Finnegan's Wake.

So, I am not going to review Finnegan's Wake. I am not going to give it a star rating, I'm not going to tell you that I loved it or hated it, or suggest whether or not you should read it. Instead, let me tell you what I felt, reading this very strange book, because Finnegan's Wake, in a way that no other I've read can approximate, is an experience far more than it is a book.

On Tuesday, I was reading the book as I walked across the breezeway at work (this isn't uncommon for me. I also type while walking. Yes, I know, I'm a geek). It's pretty common for someone to comment on this. Usually, this leads them to asking what I'm reading.

The woman who asked me was a small woman, with a very, very quiet voice, with red, greying hair, and birdish nose and eyes. I'd done a ticket for her once before. She smiled and told me it was nice to see someone reading, and asked what it was. I showed her the spine, and she was very excited.

This was a unique reaction. I've been reading Finnegan for about four months, and it's not the first time someone has noticed it. Most people don't know what it is. But, I work for a publisher, there are many who do. Most who do out and out laugh at me. Some of them ask me why I'd ever read it. Once in a while someone tries to impress me with their knowledge of Joyce. Sometimes someone purports their superiority over the book. I make this sound bad, it really isn't. People find the idea of the book either ridiculous or threatening. I can sympathize: I have in many parts of the book found it to be ridiculous or threatening.

The tiny Irishwoman who I was speaking to now did neither. Instead, in an animated whispery voice, she started to tell me all about James Joyce, about what happens to her when she reads, about the ways it feels like home, and life, and people she knew. The details are interesting, but not really pertinent, here. It was the feeling that mattered to me, a feeling as if I could, indeed, mean what I was doing.

I guess it sounds silly, but the experience of reading Finnegan is actually a really threatening one, and not because of the book. Finnegan's Wake is sort of the Abortion Issue of books. Some people feel like it is deeply important, others like it is an abomination, written to destroy literary culture. Others simply think it's trash. The problem is, none one of these camps is a comfortable one to interact with while actually reading the book. The camp who considers it trash is fine, and the best of the three, they're simply somewhat uninterested. The camp that thinks it an abomination is obviously uncomfortable. It is the third camp that surprised me. I'm not a huge scholar, I never really interacted with academia, and I do not know how common this is generally, but in terms of people talking about Finnegan's Wake, there is this terrible, unwelcoming, and very, very lonely feeling of self importance. It's hard to put a finger on, and I don't think it's always conscious. But talking about Finnegan's Wake seems to always end up being a conversation about the cleverness one exhibits in knowing and being able to talk intelligently about Finnegan's Wake. Which, when one has not read Finnegan's Wake, and feels patently unclever about what one has read, is discouraging and unhelpful.

The book I picked up in conjunction with this has been helpful in this effort: Joseph Campbell, of Hero of 1000 Faces fame, wrote I think the first comprehensive guide to Finnegan's Wake in 1944. The book is now, apparently, pretty outdated, many of his suppositions being 'disproved', some of his scholarship incomplete, etc. I'm sure all this is true, honestly. But it didn't matter, because Joseph Campbell really, really seems to love Finnegan's Wake: Finnegan's Wake, after all, is the book that invented the term 'monomyth'. And, reading Joseph Campbell's retelling of the book (because that is more or less what it ends up being) was a beautiful experience, sort of a slightly disconnected experience of watching someone see themselves in someone else's piece of paper. I did not read the same story Campbell did, when I read Finnegan's Wake. But, then, I don't think that's because his story isn't there.

That's the strange thing about Finnegan's Wake. It's an alive sort of book, as stupid as that sounds. It's very vagueness seems to wrap itself around whatever guideposts are already inside your brain. When it was Guy Fawkes Day, and I was learning about the background I ended up reading this line:

...ony twenny minnies moe, Bully his Ballade Imaginaire which was to be dubbed Wine, Woman and Waterclocks, or How a Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty...

When I was thinking of my poem about Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, I read my line about trying to infuse poetry into my own bones:

I'd take the bones,
And plant them deep
like tulip bulbs
Perhaps to sprout -
Perhaps to bud - and then
Like necromancy - bloom and seed
"A Lazarus show" in
An "unlocked rose"

Then, read this line from Finnegan:

...appropriately, this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body...

Frustrated with my children one day, I read:

The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.

And realized I sounded as ugly as the speaker in my grouching. I would find references, it felt like, to computer coding, to current events, to the feeling of being in an old, broken down Chevrolet, a thousand tiny things that are impossible for Joyce to have considered while writing the book, but were strikingly, presently real. Because, that's the thing about the text. It leads you along for pages and pages of things you don't understand, and then there will be one line, one image, one little snatch that seems stupid when you quote it (as above, sorry!) but feels absolutely, irrevocably real in the moment.

And after hundreds of hundreds of pages of slow, steady confrontation with your own ignorance, and then these short bursts of unnatural light, illuminating sometimes very unattractive corners of your own psyche, you become very, very exhausted. The book, unwillingly, became a sort of piece of me, a "dream of favours, a favourable dream. They know how they believe that they believe that they know. Wherefore they wail."

And so I hated the book, in a very odd way, a way I hadn't hated any other book, in a sort of possessive, preserving kind of hate, the sort of hate that feels more like self-loathing.

So, when I could have someone speak to me about it, and feel a bubbling sort of vision, a reflection of bright eyes that had already been down the pages of the book, it was liberating and comforting in a strange, powerful way:

Ah dew! Ah dew! It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep no with them. O! O! O! Par la Pluie!

Perhaps that's why the end of the book touched me so deeply. In the end, the main female protagonist (such as there is one) who is also a river, is flowing out to the sea, even as another she is being reborn from the river springs, in the eternal unending life-death of a river. She thinks back on when she was what she somewhere faroff in the mountains is at that very moment: a pure, lonely little rivulet running by at a quick, pretty pace. And even as she thinks of that, she, now the dirty, mother, all loving all accepting end of the river, oozes muddily out to sea. And when I felt that river, the river that I know wraps all through the book but which I so seldom could even consciously sense was there, losing itself in the great ocean, I almost cried, today, sitting at my little desk doing nothing important that will ever, ever matter at a little job in an enormous company I don't believe in. Suddenly, I realized that outside of all the hatred, boredom, confusion, disgust, and everything else, there was a little something alive in this book, and perhaps in myself, that I loved:

I'll wait. And I'll wait. And then if all goes. What will be is. Is is... Sometime then, somewhere there, I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard they voice... in peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come... They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it... make me seasily saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

(Image from Mlle Mathilde, inspired by the lines just after the last quote: "Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me.All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of.")

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