I started reading James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” in 1974, and finished in 2018. I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what it means.
Like any great novel, “Ulysses” has many levels of meaning. The level I’m interested in at present is what I call the spiritual level. Back in 1974, the opening chapters of “Ulysses” were my introduction to the existence of the spirit world. You might well ask, since I had long before read Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and Coleridge’s “Rime,” and had grown up in the northern Rio Grande Valley, a landscape that is pure spirit, why did it take me so long to apprehend the existence of the spirit world? Well, here’s your answer: I was a callow youth. There, you are answered.
What, in the case of “Ulysses,” do I mean by the spirit world? I mean communion with the dead. I mean the landscape of wish and memory which we all inhabit. I mean the things we can’t talk about.
James Joyce’s father, John Joyce, was a man of strength of character. He possessed remarkable courage, spine, and fortitude. But he was not a person of the spirit. (John Joyce’s personality can be glimpsed in the character of Simon Daedalus in “Ulysses;” Simon Daedalus, Stephen’s father, is a cold, querulous man, but wonder of wonders, he possesses a God-given talent: he can sing.) John Joyce did not bequeath to his son a capacity for spirituality or song; instead, he provided to his son an excellent education. And so it is through education that Joyce, the novelist, and Stephen Daedalus, his fictional avatar, find their way to the spirit world. So it is that at the beginning of “Ulysses,” Stephen, having lost a breakfast-table debate with his friend Buck Mulligan, wanders alone out along Dublin Beach, amid the smelly searocks and kelp, the dim horizon and his own solitude. He feels the urge to pass a bowel movement. As he squats down to perform this mundane act (which also simultaneously begins the morning of his opposite number and spiritual father in the novel, Leopold Bloom), Stephen senses in the air above him a Presence. He turns around and beholds, in majestic silence, the spars of an oceangoing transport ship, just then passing close by, huge, towering, and silent as death itself.
Behold: the spirit world.
So in 1974 I learned from Joyce that the spirit world is all around us. Just as importantly, it pervades literature. It’s everywhere in literature, hiding in plain sight. So, in that year, James Joyce changed my way of reading. I went back to A. C. Bradley’s “Shakespearean Tragedy” and re-read it with new eyes. I suddenly saw why Bradley esteems “Antony and Cleopatra” so highly. More broadly, I suddenly understood what so many authors and composers and artists are trying so hard to teach us — about the things that really matter, about the things that make us wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning, wide-eyed and scared, about the things we will be thinking about when we are about to be shot.
The Nighttown episode is the core of “Ulysses.” I hate to say that. Everyone hates to say that. Because nobody likes the Nighttown episode and nobody understands it. It’s the long episode (well over a hundred pages) at the close of the novel where Stephen and Bloom meet in a brothel and become friends. In the Nighttown episode, the novel’s prose abruptly changes from narrative to drama. Having mused about Shakespeare all day long, Bloom and Stephen suddenly find themselves IN a play. They dally and duel over money with crazy whores in a depraved parody of sexual love, while in the hospital down the street, a child is being born. Meanwhile, Bloom realizes that because Stephen is Simon Daedalus’s son, Stephen can sing. Music beckons, and a friendship is born.
Everyone who reads this famous episode is mystified and tantalized. What is Joyce trying to tell us? Why does he switch to the dramatic form? [In the Odyssey, Odysseus makes two visits to Hades, one in narrative, the other in dialogue.] But the very ugliness of the Nighttown episode forces us to confront the defeat of Stephen and Bloom as participants in the carnal world. They will find no victory in the flesh, and neither will we.
After the Nighttown episode, Ulysses comes home with his Telemachus. This time, Penelope is NOT faithfully waiting for her long-lost husband. In this telling, Ulysses has no physical strength. He does not defeat the suitors. Instead, he sneaks into his own house late at night and crawls into bed next to his adulterous wife, amid the breadcrumbs and semen of her afternoon dalliance with Antinoos. Bloom has no victory in the physical world; indeed, the last thing he sees before he crawls into his wife’s polluted bed is his late father’s suicide note, which Bloom finds resting in a drawer. But just in that is Bloom’s achievement of meaning. Unlike Ulysses, Bloom’s victory is not physical. If Bloom triumphs at all (and this is the Question) it can only be in the spiritual realm. While the rest of Dublin is triumphantly carnal, Bloom has spent his day and night commmuning with the dead. Both he and Stephen have come full circle, from the apprehension of death to the only Answer, the answer of art.