Kurt Lindblom's blog

A Literal Loss of Vision

Kurt Lindblom — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:03:04 +0000

You learn something new everyday, or so they tell me. Or, as my dad is fond of saying, "I just learned something I didn't know before."

I'm still trudging through page 37. During my online research, I came across this Sheila Variations website post.

That post pointed out that James Joyce makes exactly one reference to a fact about Stephen that might be crucial to understanding this chapter: It turns out that Stephen broke his glasses the day before.

In the chapter where Stephen and Leopold Bloom are in the brothel, Joyce gives Stephen these lines:

STEPHEN: (Brings the match near his eye)
Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them
yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance.
The eye sees all flat. (He draws the
match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks.
Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the
visible. (He frowns mysteriously) Hm.
Sphinx. The beast that has twobacks at
midnight. Married.

Ah, that makes sense. This goes a long way in explaining why Stephen happens to be thinking about the "ineluctable modality of the visible." After all, he's having trouble seeing. And, instead of interpreting this as Stephen's questioning of reality, maybe it's just Stephen is trying to find another way to experience reality (since he can't rely on his eyes).

That post also goes on to note that much of Stephen's descriptions in this early chapter center around sounds (since he's having trouble seeing), and many of the visual descriptions are fuzzy.

I'll have to keep an eye on that.

So, while this and subsequent discussion of Stephen alienation is still relevant, it's nice to know that there's also a literal component to this passage.

How to Read the Proteus Chapter of Ulysses

Kurt Lindblom — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:16:29 +0000

For the last couple of day, I've said that the Proteus chapter of Ulysses is not easy. But Joyce probably meant it to be hard to read. He's put us into the mind of a tortured (or at least clinically depressed) young man. How can that be an easy read?

You can't read this chapter like you would most books. It doesn't offer a conventional story with compelling characters and surprising plot twists. For the first couple of chapters, this might have been possible. But that comes to a screeching halt with the words: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes."

With this chapter, the reader is thrown into Stephen's "stream of consciousness" and left to sink or swim. That in itself is disorienting; but add on all of the literary and historical references, and it's all but impossible to get a handle on this material in the first or second read.

This chapter forces the reader to slow down and pay more attention (or simply skim over the whole thing, hoping it will become more interesting later...but I'm not gonna do that). Not just slow down, but really . . . slow . . . down . . . and . . . read . . . every . . . sentence . . . and . . . every . . . word.

Consider reading this chapter as you would a poem. Read it once closely (maybe looking up the occasional word in the dictionary), then read it out loud to yourself, and then read it more closely for meaning.

It will take me at least another day to finish annotating this page, and I'm sure none of the other pages will go any more quickly. But if you come to this site and find that no new pages have been added, I encourage you to re-read the page that is posted. If nothing else, the pace of my annotating will force any visitors following along to read the pages more slowly and carefully.

(By the way, does anyone come back to this site more than once?)

Robert Berry of the excellent UlyssesSeen mentioned during a recent Twitter exchange: "The Proteus chapter is hard. Best estimates claim this one sentence as the major hole in the floor most readers fall through."

I couldn't agree more.

Don't be another Ulysses casualty. Remember that Joyce is doing this on purpose, and nobody is meant to understand all of this. But it's worth struggling with this stuff. Besides, we're reading this together, right? And once we make it through this chapter, we will find our reward:

Leopold Bloom!

Joseph Campbell on the Ineluctable Modality of the Visible

Kurt Lindblom — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:29:28 +0000

I came across the following explanation of the opening line of the Proteus section. It's from the Joseph Campbell book, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce. He makes it much simplier than my explanation.

I didn't realize that Campbell was such a big fan of the book. I recognized Carl Jung in many of his ideas, but only now do I see the Joyce influences.

The story goes that he was living in Paris and came across an early copy of Ulysses. What he read pissed him off, and he went to the publisher to complain. But the book's editor set him staight and explained how the book works.

He was converted and spent much of his early life studying and lecturing on James Joyce and his work.

I plan to order a copy of this book and recommend that you think of buying it (from Amazon, if you're interest).

Anyway, here's the quote:

Ineluctable modality of the visible:…Ineluctable
means you can’t get away from it; modality refers
to the formal aspect of experience, to forms that are
visible and mobile, not to the substantiality which
cannot be penetrated by our eyes. The ineluctable
modality of the visible is what we behold.

…at least that if no more,…Stephen is trying to identify
the things that one can be sure of. This is the visible
world. What’s the substance behind this modality?
Who knows? There may or may not be a metaphysical
problem defining it. It’s ineluctable. What Stephen
knows about this modality of the visible is:

…thought through my eyes. The thought has come to
Stephen through his eyes. They are open and see only
these modalities.

-- James Joyce, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, page 66

This Chapter Is Hard

Kurt Lindblom — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 02:23:29 +0000

I'm still plugging away with page 37. I'm almost done with the first paragraph. (Oh, boy!)

Joyce is starting to convince me that he's being purposely obscure in this chapter. I'm thinking that this section is so dense with allusions not so much because Joyce wants to impress with his learning, but because he wants to demonstrate precisely how trapped Stephen is by his own thoughts, his own learning.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen bloviates at length about the true nature of beauty and art. He is enraptured by is own vision of art. The book end with him going out into the world to create art:

"Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race." (from the end of Portrait)

Now, a couple of years later he's back in Dublin, his mother has died, and he's miserable. And all of his intellectual gymnastics don't mean anything.

At least in the first page (and throughout the rest of the chapter?) Stephen is pondering reality. Like I said yesterday, "What if you're all a figment of my imagination?" For instance, he wonders to himself whether the world (or at least the visual world) ceases to exist when he closes his eyes.

But more and more I'm thinking that the interesting things is not all of the allusions that Joyce can pack in a single paragraph; what's interesting is that Stephen seems incapable of an original thought. Think about it for a moment: as readers, we struggle through these words, but nowhere do we get the impression that Stephen is doing much more than spouting things he learned elsewhere.

He's reached an intellectual deadend.

So, no, it is not an easy chapter, nor is it meant to be easy. But this entry might help.

Fumbling and Stumbling with Proteus

Kurt Lindblom — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:10:37 +0000

Page 37 has been posted.

This is the start of Chapter 3, sometimes called Proteus, named after the creature that Menelaus struggled with when he was marooned near Egypt on his way home from Troy.

Proteus was a sea god (by some accounts second only to Poseidon, and by other accounts as a more ancient god) that could shift its shape at will.

It's an appropriate image for this chapter because, like Proteus, the words following the shifting thoughts of Stephen's "stream of consciousness" as he wanders the beach outside Dublin.

This is an especially "difficult" chapter, and I've hardly made a dent in annotating it. Where to start?

On my first approach, I tried to decipher "Ineluctable modality of the visible." But it's too tightly bound to the rest of the page to make much sense on its own.

My second approach was to start by translating all the foreign phrases. But I got bogged down by parsing the difference between "nacheinander" and "nebeneinander."

In both approaches, it seems like the reader is thrown in the middle of a philosophical arguement that Stephen is having with himself. Some people might be clued into the various points of view, but I'm lost. It will take a good bit of extracurricular reading to understand this stuff better.

However, one name comes through clear: Aristotle. It's a name that has cropped up earlier in the book, but now Joyce seems to assume greater familiarity with the man's work. Ugh.

Any suggestions on which work of Aristotle's to start first? Could any of it be considered Summer Reading?

Harpo Marx's Family Rules

Kurt Lindblom — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:35:01 +0000

I just finished reading Harpo Marx's autobiography, Harpo Speaks!. For the most part, it was an entertaining read, told in a conversational style that allowed Harpo to tell whatever stories came to his mind.

I particularly liked the stories of the early days, when they started as a very poor family that only rose in the ranks of vaudeville through the single-minded devotion of their mother, Minnie.

Later, after the Marx Brothers start gaining success on Broadway, Harpo's attention moves from the brothers and to his circle of friends. Maybe some readers might be interested in the Algonquin Round Table, but I was really only interested in the the Marx Brothers. Whenever Harpo moved away from that, I started losing interest. And by the time the Marx Brothers were making movies, Harpo's attention seemed to shift completely away from that.

Still, I'd recommend it. (Here is the link to buy the book from Amazon.com) Sometimes authors become more than narrators; in cases like this, the reader feels they are in the presence of a friend who can tell a good story.

Harpo married late in life and then adopted 4 children. While the other Marx Brothers were "marriage challenged," Harpo stayed married to Susan until the end of his life.

Late in the book, when Harpo is talking about being a father, we lists the rules of the house. I've listed them below.

Harpo Marx's Family Rules

Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won't enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.
You can work at whatever you want to as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you're at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.
Respect what the others do. Respect Dad's harp, Mom's paints, Billy's piano, Alex's set of tools, Jimmy's designs, and Minnie's menagerie.
If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight too.
If anything strikes you as funny, out with that too. Let's all the rest of us have a laugh.
If you have an impulse to do something you're not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don't you'll regret it--unless you break the rules about mealtime and bedtime, in which case you'll sure as hell regret it.
If it's a question of whether to do what's fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt by whichever you do, always do what's fun.
If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.
Don't worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.
Anybody who misteats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a month's pay.

The End of Chapter 2 (Nestor)

Kurt Lindblom — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:20:59 +0000

We've just finished Chapter 2 of Ulysses (that is, finished with page 34 and completed page 35 and page 36).

If you are visiting for the first time, this is a good time to get caught up. In the next couple of days we will start on Chapter 3, which is one of the more difficult chapters of this book. Whenever people say they quite reading this book very early, they are often talking about this chapter.

It is basically Stephen walking alone and letting his mind wander. Stream of consciousness.

On one hand, it makes good reading if you take your time and accept it for what it is; but it can also be deadly dull. But when you get bored, just think of it this way: if we can make it through this chapter, we can make it through anything.

Goodbye Mr. Deasy

With the end of this chapter, we can say good bye to Mr. Deasy. And not a moment too soon. We've talked about how his anti-Semitism, but in these last pages he also proves himself a misogynist.

Here is our last image of him:

"A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air."

By the time Stephen leaves the school, we are as relieved as he is.

Some Housekeeping

We're still trying to handle all of the spammer that visit this site. If any of you have Drupal experience, please let me know if there is a good module for filtering out spam.

In the meantime, we've added a step in the sign up process. When you sign up, you just have to wait until we have the chance to grant access. Many of these spammers seem to be automatic, and adding this step has greatly reduced the spam.

I'll change it back as soon as I find another option.

Thanks.

More Historic Nightmare Talk

Kurt Lindblom — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:34:33 +0000

As an Allusion to French Poetry

The phrase "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" is a nice phrase. But maybe the idea of history as a nightmare isn't especially original.

According to Gifford, this phrase has its source in Jules Laforgue (1860-87). The original quote that Gifford cites is, "la vie est trop triste, trop sale. L'histoire est un vieux cauchemar bariolé qui ne se doute pas que les meilleures plaisanteries sont les plus courtes."

Yahoo Babelfish translates this phase as:

"The life is too sad, too dirty. L' history is an old multi-coloured nightmare which does not suspect that the best jokes are shortest."

Are there any French speakers out there who can give me a better translation?

As Joyce Copying Joyce

In Ulysses it can become too easy to find allusions in everything. It's almost like a conspiracy theory, where you don't know what the source is but it has to be in there somewhere.

Another options is that, surprise, maybe Joyce thought of some of these things himself.

In reading about this phrase, I came across a book that suggested another source of the quote: James Joyce himself.

On page 98 of James Joyce and the Language of History, Robert E. Spoo, the author, quotes a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It happens at the end of Chapter 3:

"Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past."

It's an interesting comparison between the younger Stephen and the older Stephen. The younger character found at least a brief respite in religion; the older character has grown and learned that the dream was actually a nightmare, and he hopes to wake from it.

It's nice to see a character develop from one book to the next.

History Is A Nightmare and . . .

Kurt Lindblom — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:27:10 +0000

We're still on page 34 of Ulysses.

Now I remember why I stopped posting on Ulysses for a while. I'd annotated about half that page and then lost all of the changes. Not the end of the world or anything, but school work came in and distracted me.

Ah, well. We're back, aren't we?

History is a nightmare

Here is perhaps the most famous line from the book: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." But I really like the whole section:

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

"From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring
whistle: Goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back
kick?

"—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy
said. All human history moves towards one great goal,
the manifestation of God.

"Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

"—That is God.

"Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

"—What? Mr Deasy asked.

"—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging
his shoulders."

After a full morning of listening to Brits bloviate about the inevitability of history, Stephen finally finds his retort.

I've been meaning to take a closer look at these contrasting perspectives on history: history as a straight line toward progress, and history as a cycle of recurring themes. But it became too intimidating, and I wasn't in the mood to spend time with Hegel, so we'll just pass on by, appreciate this passage, and move on.

This Is God?

That "history is a nightmare" line gets all of the attention, but the lines following it made me really like Stephen. Maybe for the first time.

Deasey talks about history inevitably leading to the manifestation of god, and Stephen comes back with the observation is, "That is God," referring to the sound of children playing outside and "a shout in the street."

Heck, it's almost a Zen-like response. If you were to say "That is God" in a normal conversation, there probably would be a moment of stunned silence before the other person would think to ask, "what is God?"

The answer would be everything that happened after you'd finished talking and before the other person started talking. Every sound, Every sensation. Every thought. It would all be God--everything and nothing.

Yeah, Stephen gets respect from me for that bit of snark.

History's March Forward

A few weeks ago, my brother reminded me of this appropriate quote from President Obama:

"In retrospect, America's march forward seems inevitable. But time and time again, it's only made possible by generations that are willing to work and sacrifice and invest in plans to make tomorrow better than today. That's the vision we can't afford to lose sight of. That's the challenge that's fallen to this generation. And that's the challenge we meet."

King Lear Ends: Our Present Business Is General Woe

Kurt Lindblom — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:05:33 +0000

The final act of King Lear (Act 5) has been posted.

That was a downer. Sure, I remembered that everyone died at the end of this play, but it's still a downer. Cordelia dies off stage, and King Lear dies of a broken heart. "General woe" pretty much covers it.

Anyway, I did not have the chance to see the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of King Lear. It ended before I could shake myself loose from schoolwork. So, now I can look forward to the next production.

The next production is The Taming of the Shrew. They're calling it the Free For All, and it will be playing for free downtown for about a month. That's right, it's playing for free (as in "free beer"), so there can be no excuse for not going--especially since school is over.

Did you hear that? I said that school is over. After two years, I'm a Master. And suddenly I will have open nights and freetime again. What does that mean?

For this site, it means that I'm going back to Ulysses. Finally!

We start again tomorrow. See you then.