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Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Stephen Sicari
That the old woman ignores Stephen and fawns over Mulligan is enough to explain the last word of "Telemachus," usurper. The naturalism of a Mulligan has triumphed over the symbolism of the 90s. My point thus far is that the opening episodes establish what Karen Lawrence calls a "narrative norm" (35), which it is the task of the later episodes to work on. As interesting, funny, touching, and incredibly lucid as these opening episodes are, they are inadequate to carry on Joyce's larger purpose, to establish an ideal of behavior. Ricardo Quinones is the best commentator on this aspect of modernism, as a response to the triumph of mechanistic science in the nineteenth century: "what had been a highly effective and inspiring code had reached a state of exhaustion by the end of the nineteenth century" (65). The science of the Mulligans, which fails to see anything beyond the material, is the dead end that the opening episodes of Ulysses reflect and parallel. Jeffrey Perl quotes Nietzsche to make a point about modern drama that is useful to my argument: Nietzsche entertains the
wish that science - or the theoretical Weltanschauung - be "at last pushed to its limits and, faced with those limits [be] forced to renounce its claim to universal validity." In the new drama, science and symbolism will embrace with the fierceness of enemies who have fallen in love. (119)
It seems fair to say that the opening six episodes of Ulysses are naturalism "pushed to its limits" - that is, they are an epitome of naturalistic prose. What we must see is that such prose is exhausted and so must be challenged and supplemented by something higher. It has done what it could do; it has exposed what needs to be exposed, and now needs to be confronted with and reconciled to the demands of symbolism.
That Bloom's adventures begin with "Calypso" suggests that Bloom is captive as his day begins. Bloom is held captive not only by Molly but also by the style of the episode; that is, he is caught within a narrative that presents only the literal level of human existence and can offer no possibility of an imaginative escape from time and space. We as readers are held bound by the narrative style to remain within Bloom's consciousness, seeing only what he sees, hearing only what he hears, thinking only what he thinks. Bloom tends toward gloominess this morning, as is only natural on a day on which he is to attend a funeral and confront, internally at any rate, the prospect of Molly's infidelity. And as he tries to escape from time and place by constructing fantasies (about the Near East especially), it is his own gravity that punctures the illusions he sets up as comforts: "Probably not a bit like it really" (4.99). After a brief indulgence in a fantasy of idleness in "the garden of the world," Bloom remembers the formula for the law of falling bodies: "Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth" (4.44-46). He needs no Buck Mulligan, "the apostle of gravity," to puncture easy and indulgent flights of fancy. Held within a naturalistic depiction of consciousness, Bloom has no hope for escape and is a prisoner to time and space. Nothing will be able to get off the ground and stay there as long as this kind of narrative is in place. (Let's recall here Joyce's famous letter about "Ithaca" to which I will refer again later in this paper: "not only will the reader know every,thing and know it in the coldest baldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze" [Letters, I, 159-60]. What will enable them to defy gravity in "Ithaca" is the way the reader learns about events.)
