Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce

Bloom's first three episodes are designed to give us a clear depiction of this central character, but also to show us the limit of naturalism, that naturalism is becoming exhausted. In "Calypso" Bloom is a prisoner, to his wife and to the style; in "Lotus Eaters" he is confronted by various "narcotics" used by most Dubliners to escape reality; in "Hades" he confronts death. We applaud his resilience but note that his achievements in these episodes are negative. He is able to avoid a tendency to depression in the first, temptations to lethargy in the second, and despair in the third; but he achieves nothing positively. It will take "Wandering Rocks," the 10th episode, to expose for us the absolute limit of the naturalistic method. For in this episode, written apparently entirely in the "initial style," Bloom and Stephen are made to look no bigger; no more important, no more special than anyone else in the novel. This is the verge of naturalism's devotion to realistic depiction, for what could be more realistic than to acknowledge that Bloom and Stephen are just two more Dubliners barely getting through their daily business. Within naturalism, we are learning, no flight above the maze of Dublin can be sustained, no ideal able to withstand the slings and arrows of reductive irony can be constructed.(6)

FROM NATURALISM TO ABSTRACTION

With "Aeolus" Joyce begins his gradual loosening of the naturalistic narration's hold on character and plot. I will look briefly at this episode to pursue the following point, that by defying the standards of naturalistic prose Joyce is defying the traditional novelistic concern for representation in a way parallel to the defiance of representation by modem abstract painters.

While there is little to suggest that Joyce was reading T. E. Hulme's work, it would not be surprising if he had, given Joyce's close association with Hulme's champion, Ezra Pound. But I am less interested in tracing a line of influence than in assigning a certain context for Joyce's experiments in abstraction that commence with "Aeolus." For Hulme's writing on modern abstract art provides us with a keen perspective from which to view Ulysses. In the essay "Humanism," Hulme sees the tendency toward abstraction as a way to break away from the grip of humanism and to establish a higher set of permanent or absolute values:

The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a perfection and rigidity which vital things can never have, lead here to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical. Man is subordinate to certain absolute values: There is no delight in the human form, leading to its natural reproduction; it is always distorted to fit into the more abstract forms which convey an intense religious emotion. (53)

We must be careful in transposing what Hulme says about abstract visual art to Joyce's novel. For instance, to say that there is a "disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes" in Ulysses would be to miss the great joy of getting to know Bloom "from the inside."(7) But I want to argue that Joyce does react against the traditional representations of the "human" and "vital" and "natural" that he provides in the opening episodes, distorting these to "fit more abstract forms which convey an intense religious emotion." The Bloom from the early episodes is worked upon until he has become "abstract" - that is, abstracted from time and space - standing for values that are permanent and absolute.