James Joyce 10

Ah.

His hand fell again to his side.

Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas, then solid, then world, then cold, then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. I believe there is.

He went on by la Maison Claire.

Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly there is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview moon. She was humming : The young May moon she's beaming, love. He other side of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm's la-amp is gleaming love. Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.

1pm, Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin to find some food, gazing around the city, thinking. His imagination is of course unnaturally rich, because it is really Joyce's stream of images that is entering Bloom's mind at this moment.

"Gassballs" is a striking image that can mean passers-by and/or matter in universe at its creation. And the "moon." Moon plays a critical role in tying the various moments of Bloom's life together in this short excerpt. As an image of a woman, (and also a rabbit, for Japanese people,) the moon evokes the memory of his girlfriend. But what's actually evoked is described with minimal use of words.

A lot is left to the reader's imagination in this passage.

James Joyce 9

In order to understand Joyce's influence on subsequent cultures, I picked up Mr. Adams' nicely-titled book Afterjoyce. Before plunging into his main point, Adams points out some of the challenges of reading and understanding Joyce's works. And at one decisive moment, Adams talks about the very value of trying to read such a difficult work of literature.

Reading [Joyce's works] is thus a superhuman task. It involves not only reading the printed text and understanding its encyclopedic complexities, but tracing development through the pre-texts, and disentangling the accidental from the significant. The laziness and complacency of readers is commonly and often rightly blamed when inventive and original literary work fails to its effect. Good writers know that what is absorbed without effort is effortlessly forgotten, and they build deliberate difficulties into their work. From the author's point of view, when one writes under the aspect of eternity, as Joyce evidently did, it matters relatively little if five or ten generations of readers, after wrestling with the text, give up on it (with rare exceptions) in frustration, if not despair. This means only that the audience has not grown up to the author's conceptions. But the practical consequences of having an unread and almost unreadable book as the supreme achievement of the most talented prose writer of his day are bound to be complex. A first, primitive reaction is, of course, to deny in varying degrees that Joyce was a great writer at all, the usual formula being that he had great talents but misused them. (The distinction between "use" and "misuse" tacitly but perceptibly assumes the standards of contemporary society as a norm —whereas it is exactly from the sleep of contemporary society that Joyce asks us to wake that we may put on the dimensions of all the buried Finnegans within us.) There is no logical way of refuting this position, except, to point out that its pragmatic Gladstone prudence imposes on the visionary artist an impossibly contradictory set of demands. Joyce's art is the art of seeing through, of going beyond. He looks past ideologies, conventions, and intentions, beyond morals, manners, character, and individuality, to the visionary substructure of human life: by which I mean the primitive instinctual patterns and tropisms by which life is and always has been controlled. To ask that such a vision be conveyed in conventional literary forms, tailored to the measure of semi-conscious minds in search of diversion, is like asking for the universal solvent to be delivered in a plastic teacup.

That is long, but Adams needed to lay out that context in order to make his point, which is basically this: in order to convey a message or a kind of "human predicament" that will last for eternity, writers cannot afford so easily to suck up to the norms of their particular societies —instead, writers must risk being ridiculed, ignored, complicated, in so far as all the complexities of their writing hold a definite place in the whole world of their novels.

I've never read such a well-said vindication of Joyce's four novels.

Of course, there is the art of simplicity and vivacity. Kafka and Dostoyevsky are the two leaders in telling vivid and simple stories that are nonetheless rich and elevating. Both writers have the exceptional talent of telling the exactly right details of their characters' lives, in order to construct an entertaining read that lasts forever. It's not wholly true that "what is absorbed without effort is effortlessly forgotten." But it's true in so many cases. Especially in repetition. By repeating conversations, acts, mechanically and unconsciously, those moments in life lose their proper place in memory. That phenomenon is familiar. Even Kafka's memorable story, the Metamorphosis, can grow mundane as you ponder on it every night for a month (I guess nobody would do such a thing, but hey.)

Joyce's stories indeed wake the readers up from any slumbers in repetition. Whenever you hear someone complain, "my life is meaningless" or "my life is repetitive," buy them a book of Joyce. A new perspective on the world never hurts, especially if those points of view come from some Irish fellow who loathed the idea of mundane, impersonal, repetitive acts. Adams' insight —"what is absorbed without effort is effortlessly forgotten" —is another great proverb that I was able to encounter today. Lucky.

James Joyce 8

ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA

— The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the dusty windowpane.

Mr. Dedalus, staring from the empty fireplace at Ned Lambert's quizzing face, asked of it sourly :

— Agonising Christ, wouldn't it give you a heartburn on your arse ?

Net Lambert, seated on the table, read on :

— Or again, note the meandering of some purling rill as it babbles on its way, fanned by gentlest zephyrs tho' quarelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling waters of Neptune's blue domain, mid mossy banks, played on by the glorious sunlight or 'neath the shadows cast o'er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest. What about that, Simon? he asked over the fringe of his newspaper. How's that for high ?

— Changing his drink, Mr. Dedalus said.

Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper on his knees, repeating :

— The pensive bosom and the overarsing leafage. O boys ! O boys !

— And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr. Dedalus said, looking again on the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea.

— That will do, professor MacHugh cried out from the window. I don't want to hear any more of the stuff.

On the surface, this excerpt is just making fun (with bad humour) of Gaelic and Greek art. In this section of the Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is in his workplace as a journalist, typing up newspaper articles while thinking about other things. His thoughts constitute the bulk of this section. Obviously, Bloom is very much distracted from work.

Unless I understand all the allusions here, I can't reach at the meaning of the text. "ERIN ... SEA" refers to Cuisle Mo Chroidhe by Curran. "Ghost walks..." is to Hamlet. "Xenophon... sea" is to Byron's The Isles of Greece.

In addition to the allusions, Joyce is also making fun of the English and Irish press of his time. That is why the section has "headings" in bold characters, followed by a brief "article." In this sense, the text at this moment is highly local, which means that I must also know something about 20th century Ireland in order to fully understand what Joyce is getting at.

Gosh, so much to learn just to decipher this particular excerpt! Maybe that is one of Joyce's messages — that everyday messages always presuppose a richer background context, and that that context cannot be deciphered unless I am prepared to devote a whole lot of time to study and learn seemingly trivial things. Again, a very realistic message, realistic to the point where it is almost impossible to live up to. Backs up the proverb: ignorance is bliss.

James Joyce 7

Mr. Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's heart and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time. All soul's day. Twentyseventh I'll be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death's door. Who passed away. Who departed his life. As if they did it of their own accord.

At the end of his friend's funeral, Leopold Bloom walks in his grove and thinks the above thoughts. This section of the Ulysses corresponds to the Hades section in Homer's Odyssey. The imagery of the old man clipping weeds at the graveyard is strikingly vivid.

The world of the Ulysses is already very empty, but this scene is particularly so. Here, death is an inconvenience for the living. Death must be taken care of, and the living chooses the most economical way: cram all dead souls on one day, the "Twentyseventh," and gather on that day only, while paying an old gardener to take care of the rest. Taking care of a graveyard is just the same as baking bread, sewing clothes, building houses, paving roads, etc... Just another way of making a living. If people truly remembered the dead, then they would probably put the tombstone close to their houses and go everyday personally to take care. The Japanese do that. But in Joyce's empty Ireland, apparently that custom didn't exist.

Also, Bloom's thoughts on the attitude of the people towards the dead tells their attitude towards the living as well. "Plant him and have done with him" — like a seed, that is, like something that is totally boring in itself at present and that exists only for the purpose of some future plan. Once I get bored of the daily routine of cooking, eating, washing, running, writing, strumming, and sleeping, I see a mirror of my own boredom in other people's eyes as well, and this collective boredom eventually leads to a massive disillusionment which Joyce captures in Bloom's internal monologue. No value in the present. How sad, but that's the reality for Bloom, and Joyce is a realist without an ideal who just paints the most accurate picture possible of that emptiness.

Hopefully, after the Hades section is over, things would brighten up a little more in this long novel. Fingers crossed.

James Joyce 6

Reading the Ulysses, I cannot help but notice how Joyce weaves madness with myth in order to create a narrative simultaneously fragmented and unified. If literature is the art of expressing the two sides of an extreme contradiction, then the Ulysses is a form of perfection of modern madness.

But I can't wholeheartedly support Joyce for doing this. Sure, Ulysses is real. Real, in the sense that our increase in "intelligence" triggers a corresponding degree of madness. But the Ulysses doesn't offer a way out of this crazy situation. Instead, the novel asserts the whole thing with a capitalized "Yes" at the very end. Joyce, in the Ulysses, is thus a realist without an ideal: he fails to improve the situation he so aptly describes.

I think that deep down humans intuitively know what the most fulfilling life is, and that is the life in nature. Eating good food, drinking good water, breathing fresh air, working hard under the open sky, bath in natural water, and perhaps carve, write, sing, or strum when opportunity presents itself. The problem since Plato is that reality is so far away from the ideal that "mature people" rightly abandon all hope of living the natural life.

Novels, I think, must give strength to those who are at the borderline of abandoning their ideals. Fiction should be a way of asserting a better future even if that future seems impossible. And Joyce doesn't do that. Joyce says that the here and now is all we have, and we either have the choice of affirming it or denying it. He doesn't see the fact that lives can change in good or bad ways depending on whether or not life heads towards a higher ideal or a lower situation.

Many writers don't bother writing about childish ideals. But that's not because they somehow devalue them. Rather, (and this is just my intuition,) writers have read so many stories that praise courage, honour, love, friendship, etc. that they are no longer able to consciously assert the value of these human qualities. It is so ironic. Reading more good stories making a human less good. Joyce probably experienced this sense of detachment from the good more than most other writers. And that's what makes Joyce's stories unappealing.

James Joyce 5

Joyce brought story-telling to actualize in its most extreme possibility. Finnegans Wake binds the entire history of human culture. All philosophical moves, all scientific paradigms, all modes of story-telling, have been tried out and exhausted in the Wake. After Joyce, novelists are no longer able to tell another naive fiction. The artistic value of such aesthetic repetition is close to zero in the face of Joyce's accomplishment. In other words, if one wants escape or spiritual development or creativity, one only needs to consult Joyce's four novels and nothing else.

Given this situation, the question arises for fiction writers: what role must a newly written novel play?

It's common sense knowledge that the rise of multimedia products dethroned the novel-form as the dominant way to entertainment. This is thanks to the development of electronics and cybernetics. Nowadays, the novel is hopelessly incompetent in the face of movies such as Iron Man.

Joyce was already facing this situation during the early 20th century. His solution was to sharpen his psychological descriptions. That which is "inner" and "hidden from view" is the only aspect of human culture which the novel form has privileged access. The other aspect which Joyce took interest in is time. Our sense of time is essentially non-linear, that is, we go to the future and return to the past all the time in our daily lives. Not physically, but that doesn't mean that we are always only alive in the present. And this complex collage of different moments in history is most vividly described in the novel form. No movie, no painting, no music has ever reached the peak at which the Wake weaves together the different moments of history.

With "psyche" and "time," Joyce found a way to write a valuable novel in the 20th century. But the same cannot hold for the 21st century. A mere repetition is thoughtless, boring, uninteresting, shameful. However, as far as I know no author has demonstrated a new vision for current novelists. Ryu Murakami came closest when trying to define the task of the novel form in the 21st century. Murakami said that the novel form must be viewed as a "strategic device" for conveying the appropriate information in the appropriate context. This view is super-pragmatic. It makes the novel form subordinate to a higher, non-artistic goal. While Murakami's statement is compelling and convincing, it doesn't quite vindicate the novel form in the way Joyce did.

Reading Joyce in bed at night, after I finish another section of the Ulysses, I stayed awake past 2am, wondering what is left for a novelist to do if not nothing.

James Joyce 4

On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes bellied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonour of their flesh

...

—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Near the end of the section of the Ulysses the above quote appears. I have to say that the Ulysses, when approached as a "novel," is poorly written. But that's because Ulysses is more like a collection of awesome quotes than just a unified story. And the above quote holds in good stead on its own independently of the storyline of the whole novel.

I particularly like the expression "thickplotting." It captures the rich, dense layers that people in power create through discourse and images. These millionaires, however, own none of what they make use of. Hence, "[n]ot theirs." "Time surely would scatter all" excellently captures the phenomenon here expressed. I just stared at the page and chewed this sentence in my mouth and went "mmmm....." due to the impressiveness of this line. The thickplotted layers of words are fragile, susceptible to collapse, surely would collapse in time. Why? Because the words don't belong to anybody. Homeless words, wandering around in mid-air. The essence of the emptiness of the city.

The above is an insight unique to a smart person like Joyce who is no longer fooled or entertained by the play of homeless words. Stephen's last utterance in the above quote is thus Joyce's ethical question. What is the antithesis to history? And for Joyce, religion is also just as thickplotted as any other form of collective institution. So where would a smart person like him find homage?

James Joyce 3

If June was music month, then July is going to be Joyce month. Naturally, my thoughts on Joyce would evolve at a slower pace compared to my thoughts on various musicians (this is by virtue of the fact that music only takes a couple of minutes to listen, whereas in order to understand a novel, it takes days, even weeks.)

Joyce's Portrait ends with the following words:

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

And the Ulysses opens in the following way:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Buck Mulligan is a roommate of Stephen Dedalus who is now no longer an innocent young man in the Ulysses. In the Portrait, Stephen struggled to come to terms with Christian faith, and eventually renounces the Jesuit canon and forms his own views on beauty, truth, and the good through his own interpretations of Aristotle and Aquinas. Stephen takes his own flight into life with the last words left behind on his notebook (the words quoted above.)

Mulligan's place is the starting point of Stephen's new life as an artist. At this point in his life, Stephen no longer cares enough for the Jesuit cliches, and instead takes delight in inventing his own meanings for the surrounding environment and events. As such, the Ulysses is satirical and human-centered as ever. The entrance of Mulligan in the above quoted line is already a satirization of the Christian ritual of bringing the bowl and towel to the priest.

But this doesn't mean that Joyce somehow disrespects Christianity in the Ulysses. Rather, by depicting it with humour, Joyce is trying to show that humans don't have to confirm unconditionally to one dominant belief. Ulysses is essentially a book of polytheism. Which is very close to how Japanese people view the world. So I am not too shaken by Joyce's satire compared to some English reviewers back in Joyce's time (who called the novel "pornographic.")

This big fat book, 732 pages long, is written in rhythmical English. It's an English that is difficult to read but fun to read aloud and easy to memorize its sounds. That doesn't mean that I actually read it aloud in my room or in a cafe, but the notes ring naturally in my mind as the story progresses. Looking forward to discovering the evolution of Joyce's style and ideas.