Eternal emerald that cuts like diamond

Charles A. Watson
EDUC 327
Journal 5
March 22, 2014

JOURNAL 5: on JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Over the past week that started with a St. Patrick’s Day buildup, my reading for independent study covered Chapter 14 entitled “Oxen of the Sun.”  Like others from this novel, Oxen’s place in Homer’s Odyssey represents the one in which he and his men go to the island of the sun where oxen were held sacred.  Odysseus’ men slaughter and eat them, but of course not without punishment.  In Chapter 14, fertility is sacred as is our collective English language. More than anything, “Oxen” is about the evolution of the English language, as Dubliners might have known it in 1904.  Because Joyce’s life experience was rich with literary, religious, and commercial influences, he wrote a convincing passage comparing our beautiful and complicated language to that of childbirth from Anglo-Saxon and Latin parents.

The chapter takes place at a national hospital and maternity ward where Mina Purefoy will give birth while some characters, or removed voices, wax on philosophically and metaphorically in a nearby room through ancient language.

The arduous labor occurs throughout the narrative.  While this isn’t critical to my understanding the Joyce novel, it significantly directs the study of this chapter.  There are Aristotilian and Aquinas references and the two primary subjects of the novel meet for the first time in this chapter while absinthe has been served in some kind of celebration—that emerald green beverage.  Joyce shifts writing styles, parodying the prose methods of a who’s who in British literature throughout this chapter to illustrate this evolution of language with parodies of Mallory, Milton, Bunyon, Swift, Addison, Steele, Sheridan, Gold, and Dickens.  Clever is an understatement.

What voice was Joyce after?  Only a few authors mimicked in this chapter are actually Irish: Swift, Stern, and Burke.  The Irish voices chosen are an imitated Anglo-Irish of Middle Chaucerian English; hence the knight and Sir Leopold Bloom (from Mallory).  Just as the connection to Odyssey is obscured, my notes are somehow also not my own, for the study of this chapter is vast.  The linguist in me wants to digest it once more.

The birth in one room. Med students, Bloom stops to check … Bloom does not drink the absinthe … Stephen is hammered … Bloom pours the absinthe into a plant … the narrator is removed … the author bounces with eloquent consistency between changes of styles … the voice is alienated from the plot and characters.  What we have here are a few med students (Stephen’s housemates but Stephen is not a med student) enjoying an afterwork concoction, discussing the day’s scientific questions in rich metaphor that reads like a foreign language.  What of the hallucinogenic qualities of the absinthe ingested?

Stephen is treated more like an outsider by the end of the chapter.  Bloom comes in as an outsider and leaves more of an insider.  Bloom is not really fertile in a way that he won’t have procreative sex with his wife, as mourning the loss of his only son is quietly central to the grief of this story.  It’s not ironic that Bloom is the one who notices the sacredness of fertility in this scene surrounding the birth ward.

Think of this snapshot of lines one through six in Latin with its Catholic triplicates in a ritualistic rhythm of whimsy and celebration, like a baptism:

*Deshi Holles Eamus.  Deshi Holles Eamus.  Deshi Holles Eamus.  Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and womfruit.  Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and womfruit.  Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and womfruit.  Hoops a Boyaboy hoopsa!  Hoops a Boyaboy hoopsa!  Hoops a Boyaboy hoops! (14:1–6)

What language was that?  It was tribal and evolutionary.  It was Anglo-Saxon.

The outsider is significant to this chapter.  Throughout the book, the reader’s connection of characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom comes with empathy and concern through the descriptive lens of events and sub-characters.  We watch them, reading closely of their thoughts and spoken phrases for they are central to this tale.  They are both outsiders in Dublin.  Stephen is a young, post Jesuit educated man eager to become a writer.  Bloom represents a dream deferred, a Semite in a green Catholic land, a father who has lost his only son, a husband who has lost his heartfelt connection to his wife:

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there knighed them a mickel noise as of many that sat there at meat.  And there came against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon.  And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. (14:127)

The scene occurs later in the evening, a conveyance of strangers with unbeknownst similarities meeting through the birth of language and the on this day of mourning.  As Joyce had alluded to the other sacraments throughout this novel, the reader should expect a baptismal reference in this chapter regarding birth.  The only sacred reference was to the chrism as healing power applied to a forehead at Baptism and Anointing of the Sick—birth and death.  In an ironic twist, the primary reference to a feast in this chapter is delivered by the stranger, a Scotsman, in this parody of Laurence Sterne, an 18^th Century Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican clergyman[1]:

Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by a questioning poise of the head (a whole century of polite breeding had not achieved so nice a gesture) to which was united an equivalent but contrary balance of the bottle asked the narrator as plainly as was ever done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it.  Mais bien sûr, noble stranger, said he cheerily, et mille compliments.  That you may and very opportunely.  There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my felicity.  But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet and a cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and find it in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to the powers above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good things.  With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a complacent draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his bosom, out popped a locket that hung form a silk riband, that very picture which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein.  (14:738–755)

My study of this novel is to draw comparisons to religious symbolisms as they fit into the frame borrowed from the Odyssey.  The author Joyce uses many devices, voices, and disguises to administer these throughout the story.  But they pop up in scenes from each chapter, in ever-creative ways.  I think he wants us to know through these examples of this chapter, “Oxen of the Sun” that periodically, we will encounter new friends from faraway places that appeal to our sense of wonder—or wander—like the nomad, the stranger, a prophet beggar philosopher.  The chapter’s closing lines spill it out through temptation and guilt-laying on this magnificent day when he is born and he is mourned, the language in 1904 Dublin, the word on the street shouted from someone who can read, decode, and send a message condensed to a drunken utterance like advertising copy or a rap, with a hint of Dr. McGillicuddy breathing through:  “He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus.  You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the almighty God.  Pflaaaap!  Not half.  He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket.  Just you try it on.” (14:1587–1591)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne

For my friend Robert who once lived on South Swift: 

Creationism.  The birth of language.  The death of language.  The bottle.  Mumbling our hallucinations in the night.  Divine.  Emerald.  Lucid.  Your mind and mine, taking it down, past the foam, all the way with Elijah.  We puke, we waste away.  This vile potion the devil hath made, dothmaken, besprecken underneath our sober conquest we need sleep, surrender to the headache asunder, the spell we were under.  Christ, it’s no wonder.   Miss you, mate.  God rests your soul.

The journey starts here

Charles A. Watson
EDUC327
Journal 4
March 15, 2014

JOURNAL 4: on JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Part of the value of this study is the introduction to characters within the story, even random names of actual citizens mentioned throughout the text.  These names were based on observations and readings of the author Joyce; fascinating in that there seem to be countless names throughout the novel’s structure.  As I ponder this from the instinct of a writer and a teacher of writing—all the classmates, teachers, and students—their names, and all that unique history—past, present, and future perfect.  All the names from my childhood:  teachers, neighbors, friends, bullies (never enemies).  All this is in my personal history, all of this in God’s plan for me, all of this in my intelligent design.

If I were required to develop an honest and fictional story based on people from my past, the words would flow.  The story would roll.  There is so much music; it only needs time, a muse, or a careful and interested editor.  We all have a story to tell, a novel with metaphor: children, churches, drunken feasts, and fights.  And we are only half through.

All of this, if placed in a cube, tiny little twelve-sided dice, each one with its unique code, thousands of them, all shook about, reminds me that it takes a village to raise a child, for many villages pop up like fairy tales for each and every one of us.  How many villages do we encounter individually throughout a lifetime?  I recently reminded my youngest daughter of this notion to which she argued, “No it doesn’t, it takes a mom and a dad.”  And this is entirely untrue—today, yesterday, and tomorrow.  Of course I returned the argument.

Ulysses.  Observe.  The writer observes and reflects.  He knows and cares because he has seen it before—the metaphor, the people at the bar.  For you and me, it’s not different; the people in the chairs, at desks, tables, and cubicles.  The writer has seen and he weaves the tale, the same old one in his epic.

Frozen, a gel, a liquid.  “Name a liquid that is thicker than water,” I asked the same child a couple of hours later.  “Molasses,” she replied, paused, and thought… “And lava.”  Brilliant, I say as I drive the car to the shopping mall, finding joy in this trip to a place I don’t want to be.  Brilliant that an eleven-year-old mind would serve two heavy liquids while my mental answer is blood or love or … oil?  But oil floats on the surface.  Is oil a liquid?  A solid?  No, it is oil.   Did Socrates know viscosity?

While subbing at a high school the other day, during a prep hour I picked up a paperback version of The Odyssey in prose from the library.  What an interesting, brief read I had, to see the story in its abridged light and my wanting to delve into the symbolisms.  Nausicaä.  It’s about a daughter—someone’s daughter in the course of the novel, the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom and the funeral of a friend.  I didn’t have time to feed my curiosity because I have other reading pertinent to the course.  But now I want to go back—go back and trace the symbolisms that influenced this beautiful novel by Joyce and my curiosity towards this grandest of epics.  I could drive myself crazy with this load of mystical information, this life trilogy.

Checking in: Something’s gone afoul in the Port o’ Dublin

Charles Watson
Independent Study
Ulysses: Journal 3
Thursday, March 13, 2014

Of Things Large and Small: Ulysses’ Chapters 12 and 13

In Cyclops, and, well, Nausicaä, Joyce employs a parodying and sentimental style of writing with the notion of this fictional beast transcending through time and literature in euphemistic ways that invoke Sigmund Freud.  A reader can consider a castle to represent more than just a castle just as a pub is more than pub, and ponder if a tower is more than a tower.  Consider that Jonathon Swift, the dean of St. Pat’s cathedral in Dublin, influenced Joyce’s Irish approach to satire.  With his gift of satire, Swift adopted personae and wrote in distinct relevant voices.  Joyce borrows many different voices from Dublin two century turns ago throughout the narrative of Ulysses.  Not hallucinatory, these were major, thoughts, reflections, and events in this single day of many characters’ lives, including Leopold Bloom.

The most political chapter of the novel, ‘Cyclops’, defines individual and national Irish identity through its dense, complex satire.  The first-person narrator for Chapter 12 might be Stephen Dedalus’ father, or Joyce’s actual father, or some other dark thinker, a shapeshifter with different voices like thought bubbles from Bablyon.  Fittingly, he is unpleasant, for we know from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that Stephen’s father was not a nice guy.

Unlike our modern and generally defined loving relationships, ethnicity, religion or the absence of any of these, the socially marginal characterization of Leopold Bloom represents a non-Socratic figure.  Through beautiful splashes of irony and reflection, the imagery in this novel by Joyce casts Bloom as a character pushed to define his complex and undefined Jewish self in 1904 Dublin.

In Chapter 12, religion plays a larger role, symbolically, with the text of the Odyssey.  The interplay of Cycloptic intercourse of the Homer epic, the patrons in a pub, the events of a Catholic ritual, and innuendo surrounding love, both lost and found build this into one of significant revelation beyond the funeral of the day.  This portion includes global history and Ireland’s place in time, like twelve apostles in a court setting deliberating on an estate in Ireland, the twelve tribes in this surreal court scene represent the twelve Apostles or the twelve tribes of Israel:

“…and whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the halls of law.  Two judges, Courtenay and Andrews, pondered the claim of the estate of the late Halliday vs. Vintnor… And there sat with him (sir Frederick the Falconer) the high sinhedrim, but one man of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe (Patrick, Hugh, Owen, Conn, Oscar, Fergus, Finn, Dermot, Corma, Kevin, Caolte, Ossian) there being in all twelve good men and true.  And he conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their sovereign lord the kin and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book.  (12:1112-1140)

In speaking with Joe, Bloom reminds him that he need not worry about the matter for now but that he would speak with Mr. Crawford.  Joe swears “high and holy that he’d do the devil and all.”

The citizen appears to hold the secrets in these passages as if he is telling the story of the Passion.           “Because you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have repetition.  That’s the whole secret.”   (12:1147)  This statement is wholly political and central to the story of the Odyssey and the selling of products, each other, ideas, the legend, and the Passion.  For Bloom and his turmoil of love and grieving, this is how Joyce reinforces the human nature and how we as individuals believe our own tales to either sink or swim.  “Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland.  We want no more strangers in our house. … The strangers.  Our own fault.  We let them come in. We brought them in.  The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here.”  (1150–1158)

The citizen, with his politically myopic and narrow worldview, hates the English, the Irish, he’s anti-Semitic, and a generally horribly unpleasant person.  But Bloom is brave to him.  His voice seems pivotal to the novel.  Who are the condemned people they are discussing?  No man, every man, the nomad, any man.

At the bar, Lenehan raises a toast:  “He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strength hands the medher dark strong foamy ale… tribal slogan lamb dearg abu, drank to the undoing of his foes, race of valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sits on his thrones of alabaster silent as the deathless gods.”  (12:1210)  This description, a reminder of both brutish Father Coffey and the mythic creature described at this chapter’s intro, signals impending trouble and ties together the Apostles, the Cyclops, and the magnitude of politics contained in this chapter.  Joyce’s Cyclops character appeared, for the first time, as a “broadshouldered, deep chested… sinew armed hero seated on a boulder at the foot of a round tower: beastly.  A powerful current of warm breath… rhythmic resonance, thundered rumblingly… the loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.”  (12:152)  “Wearing a kilt… at his girdle he wore a row of seastones, jangled, representing Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity.” (12:169)

This description signals battle.  We find out, at the end of the chapter, that things are not what they seem in this novel, that perhaps we are at the end of time or at least begging for renewal.  There is much more at stake than mourning the death of a good friend:  The politics of ancestry, our collective connection to the spirit, and labeling those that the majority wants cast out.

This is the thought process of the dark first person narrative of the chapter on the Cyclops, a break from the first person of Leopold Bloom and his observations.  The parody isn’t completely removed from Bloom as it is cynical and poignant—but this grotesque parody of the Catholic Profession of Faith, the prayer that occurs just before communion, is a routine reminder of the politics of the crucifixion and that people fully believe in their savior, for he sits at the right hand of the father, not the left.

But who sits at the left—the British Navy of Olde?  The citizen says “That’s your glorious British navy … the fellows that never will be slaves.”  The British Empire, the only hereditary chamber on the face of God’s earth and their land, infusing its military, politics, language, in the name of religion:

“They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.”  (1345-1359)

“Three cheers for Israel… Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ’ sake… turn the porter sour in your guts.”  Bloom.  (12:1792) (The politics of Jesus Christ?)

The fitting ending to a representation on the legend of a one-eyed mythical being signals possibly the end of time or a new beginning with chariots chasing across the sky in the glory of brightness, “fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him.  Him.  And he answered Elijah!  Elijah!  Abba! Adonai! (Adonus)  And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of 45 degrees over Donohoe’s in little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.” (1910–1914)

What does Nausicaä mean?

In Book Six of the Odyssey, Odysseus is shipwrecked on the coast of the island of Scheria. Nausicaä and her handmaidens go to the sea-shore to wash clothes. Awoken by their games, Odysseus emerges from the forest completely naked, scaring the servants away, and begs Nausicaä for aid. Nausicaä gives Odysseus some of the laundry to wear, and takes him to the edge of the town. Realizing that rumors might arise if Odysseus is seen with her, she and the servants go ahead into town. But first she advises Odysseus to go directly to Alcinous’ house and make his case to Nausicaä’s mother, Arete. Arete is known as wiser even than Alcinous, and Alcinous trusts her judgments. Odysseus approaches Arete, wins her approval, and is received as a guest by Alcinous.[2]

During his stay, Odysseus recounts his adventures to Alcinous and his court. This recounting forms a substantial portion of the Odyssey. Alcinous then generously provides Odysseus with the ships that finally bring him home to Ithaca.

Nausicaä is young and very pretty; Odysseus says that she resembled a goddess, particularly Artemis. Nausicaä is known to have several brothers. According to Aristotle and Dictys of Crete, Nausicaä later married Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, and had a son named Perseptolis or Ptoliporthus.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaa)

Hyper-sensory in its details, this fittingly beautiful chapter reverts back to the narrative voice before the Cyclops.  As a reader, we gain an appreciation for Bloom’s world and trials of his psyche.  There is deep reflection in Chapter 13, Nausicaä, with its dreamy quality beginning at the rocks on the beach.  Its narrative style differs greatly from the Cyclops.  It is realistic and holistic; but is it innocent?  “The narrative highlights their own secrets as God made them he matched them.  Through destiny, falling in love with their own secrets, they marry in May and repent in December.” (13:950)

We get a sense of Joyce’s treatment of Bloom as the creative type, the journalist, as he reflects some on the “The Mystery Man on the Beach, a Prize Tidbit story by Leopold Bloom.”  This character, perhaps inspired by the fellow in the brown macintosh at the gravesite earlier in the day, might bring him one guinea (payment) per column.  (13:1060)  We begin to understand that Bloom has grown weary of the repetition of the advertisement.

We see Bloom as a younger man, or at least his observance of young people at the beach, a post funeral event triggering memories of his youth.  There are young women, one with children playing at the seashore.  There is magnetism with his wristwatch, and a reflection on the pulling from the earth. (13:983-986)

“And just now at Edy’s words as telltale flush, delicate to faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of surety God’s fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.”  (13:119)  The narrative contains youthful awakening that Bloom has lost, especially on this mournful and lonely day.

“Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to settle her hair and a prettier, daintier head of nutbrowntresses was never seen on a girl’s shoulders.. radiant, almost maddening in its sequence… the admiration in his eyes, like a snake eyes its prey… til the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose.”  (13:509)

Besides the traditional use of events both seen and unseen as foreshadowing elements, Joyce consistently invites through this flowing narrative. Of course each scene in Nausicaä would have poetic delivery, generating a specific sensory experience.

As in Chapter 11 (Sirens), there is music again, this time with an angelic pitch.  “And then there came upon the air the sound of voices and the pealing anthem of the organ.  It was men’s temperance retreat conducted by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S.J., rosary, sermon and benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament.  They were gathered together without distinction of social class (an edifying spectacle) in that simple fane beside the waves, after the storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of the immaculate, reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto, beseeching her to intercede for them, the old familiar words, holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins.  How sad to poor Gerty’s ears.”  (13:281–290)

“Gerty MacDowell had lost her father to the bottle.  And after all the set up of Catholic rites of service—communion scent.  Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted and with it the fragrant names (the litany) of her who was conceived without stain of original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. (13:371–374)

The incantation, the repetition, the continual reinforcement of new beginnings for the living and the deceased—even when Bloom is away from the mourning of his friend and all the social gathering that did follow—he can’t escape and reflect at this moment on the innocence of such celebration, for the scents that represent this passing also open a moment of communal prayer and that mystical rose of virgin innocence.

Bloom tunes into a bat flying about the church bell free.  It’s certainly not a swallow.  Some believed in metempsychosis and that they could be changed to a tree following grief, like a weeping willow.  “Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity.  Bell scared him out, I suppose.  Mass seems to be over.  Could hear them all at it.  Pray for us.  Pray for us.  Good idea the repetition.  Same thing with ads.  Buy from us. And buy from us.  (13:1117-1120)

At this moment, Bloom is very much the outsider, excluded from this Catholic ceremony on the basis of his Jewish faith, yet he knew of the situation behind Mr. MacDowell’s death and in his heart was praying for his daughter, Gerty.  It is also part of Bloom’s central core in his grieving:  the repetition, the incantation, the bell tolling, the advertising.  The selling out of everything that is pure, including Mary and the British Empire.  I often feel a cynical voice coming through from Bloom’s outsider personae, the man on the fringe.  He doesn’t belong; he doesn’t know how to belong.  This reflection on heartache and pain, but all the while so beautifully captured through incantation.  Lines 687-740 encapsulate a lovely episode beyond the metaphor of white-hot roman candles.  All this sensory information feeds Bloom’s despair and jealousy that his heart contains for his estranged wife, Molly.  His obsession with these memories trigger pain by the mere scent of incense from the church.  He wants his partnership with her to be pure, but knows that the split of their hearts is deep.

More jealousy, in an ironic twist from the turpentine in the paint he smelled, a hint of violet, Bloom thinks more of her perfume—heliotrope, hyacinth, roses, sweet and cheap, soon sour.  Why Molly likes opopanax with a little Jessamine mixed.  Sensory  illusions and allusions for Leopold Bloom.  The spice islands, the Cingbalese.  “Tell you what it is. It’s like a fine veil of web they have all over skin, like a gossamer… like rainbow colours, always spinning it out… clings to everything she takes off.  Vamp of her stockings… the cat likes to sniff in her shift on the bed… strawberries and cream, bathwater… where is it?  The armpits, under the neck… Hyacinth perfume of oil or ether… muskrat”  (987–1028)

All this leads up to the finale of Chapter 12, Nausicaä, the girl at the rocks, line 1295 and the bat flying hither at 9:00 on that June evening; the church bell chiming in the distance as the priests talked while taking tea and eating sodabread with butter and fried mutton chops with catsup, talking about, while the cuckoo clock released its little canary bird from out of its little house and Gerty MacDowell, she noticed from the beach at the Sandymount shore at once that that foreign gentleman that was waiting on the rocks looking was cuckoo.