Wallace Gray is a proffessor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. For over 40 years he has distinguished himself as an instructor in the Huimanities course required of all freshman at that institution. The influence of this course on undergraduate education in America has been well documented. Below is his lecture on Joyce's Ulysses.
Ulysses
JOYCEANS occupy opposing camps in defense of their interpretations of Ulysses. Those in the camp flying pessimistic black flags think that nothing of import happens to Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, that Leopold and Stephen will never find release from their isolation and despair, and that the novel is completely devoid of the qualities of friendship, love, and magnanimity. There are many well-known generals in this camp, including some who have opined that Stephen has a predictable future as just another drunken Dublin character, and that it is not imaginable that he will awake from his nightmare. To these readers, nothing happens in Ulysses.
A revised edition of the novel was published in 1984, and the more than five thousand errors occurring in the book have been corrected--errors caused by Joyce's friends, who took many liberties in typing the final manuscript, and by French typesetters who did not understand English. With the publication of the new edition, some Joyceans have announced that they will consider deserting to the opposing camp, the camp flying the joyful multicolored pennants of a novel in which the last word is "Yes." This camp has always believed that Stephen is speaking for Joyce when he argues for the "eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature," and that the experiences of Leopold, Stephen, and Molly on that significant re-birth-day will markedly change their lives. To these readers, everything happens.
This is the camp whose trenches were first dug in the 1920s by my Columbia teacher, colleague, and friend, the late William York Tindall, who returned to the United States in that decade with a banned copy of Ulysses, purchased from Sylvia Beach at her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, the original publisher. Tindall taught the first course on Joyce in this country, and the students had to stand in line in the university library for their hour with this outlawed book that Tindall bound in lumber and chained to a reading table.
Let us take an aerial view of both camps.
In the camp where nothing happens, Stephen, who begins the day in the seaside tower rented from the government, is badgered by his roommate, Buck Mulligan, into turning over the key to the tower. He then teaches his students history and poetry in what is apparently a mediocre school, one that he doesn't intend to teach in after this day. Following this abbreviated schoolday--it is a Thursday--Stephen goes for a walk along the Dublin beach, where he meditates on Irish nationalism, Roman Catholic heretics, his abortive escape to Paris, and the clutching fingers of his family.
The scene then shifts to Leopold Bloom preparing breakfast for his wife, a frowsy woman who has let herself go, but who is preparing for one of her numerous infidelities, which will commence at four o'clock that afternoon. Through suggestive hints she lets the passive, henpecked Bloom know this, and he acquiesces by announcing that he plans to have dinner out and go to the theater.
Following this, Bloom wanders aimlessly about the streets of Dublin, rests in a church, goes to a public bath, attends the funeral of an acquaintance, stops in the newspaper office to check on an advertisement (Bloom's current profession is that of advertising solicitor), and has lunch.
We leave Bloom for a while and return to Stephen, who has also been at the newspaper office and then gone out with some of the writers for drinks. Stephen is now in the National Library talking to the librarian and various literary lights; he is somewhat drunk, and the "literary" conversation has mainly to do with Shakespeare. Following this, in the Wandering Rocks episode, the author gives a kaleidoscopic view of many characters in the book as they wander the streets of Dublin.
We return to Bloom, who has a meal in the Ormond Street Hotel, where he is subjected to the humiliation of hearing Blazes Boylan in the adjoining bar having a drink before going off to his four-o'clock assignation with Bloom's wife. He next goes to a tavern, where he gets into a verbal and almost physical fight with the anti-Jewish nationalistic Citizen, who chases the weakwilled Bloom out of the bar. He then wanders along the strand, masturbates in his pants while watching a crippled girl, and goes to a maternity hospital to check on the progress of a woman who is really no more than an acquaintance, where he runs into the drunken Stephen. He follows Stephen to the redlight district, rescues him from a fight, takes him to an all-night cafe to recuperate, and then to the kitchen of his house, from which Stephen departs into the night--neither he nor Bloom any wiser for the day each has spent.
The book concludes with the lascivious Molly pleasurably recalling her afternoon in bed and her anticipated further assignations with Blazes Boylan, as well as her numerous preceding sexual affairs.
Such is the view of the pessimist generals and their followers. Now let us look at the camp where everything happens, the one the detractors refer to as the "goody-goody" camp.
The foundation of this camp lies just beneath the surface, and, though sometimes barely visible, it is solidly based; this foundation was laid by Homer and it goes by the name of the Odyssey. T. S. Eliot, writing about Ulysses a year after the book appeared, called Joyce's invention of a "mythical method" at step "toward making the modern world possible for art," toward "order and form.. . . " The myth of Homer's text is the meaning of Joyce's text, and the Odyssey is a work about atonement, at-one-ment, of father and son, of husband and wife; it sings of nostos--homecoming and a new beginning. The Odyssey gives meaning, as well as "order and form," to Ulysses, rather than serving as a lofty contrast to a degraded present (the pessimistic view).
The novel begins with Stephen, the modern-day Telemachos who has been dispossessed not just by his roommate but by the English, the Irish Catholic Church, and the demands of his family, symbolically handing over the key to his home to Buck Mulligan. The nets of family, religion, and nationalism that he failed to escape in his abortive flight to Paris at the end of A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are going to be ripped to shreds during the course of this positive and affirmative day. Teaching the school lessons is another reminder to Stephen of what he was and what he will be unless he fights for his freedom as an artist. Determined to give up his ties to Ireland, he walks along the beach, and in the course of his meditation he firmly rejects family, religion, and nationalism as he abandons the temptation to visit relatives, thinks of Catholic heretics, and recalls the futility of the Irish nationalists he met while in Paris. Throughout all of the first three episodes Stephen is oppressed by the guilt he has felt since he refused his mother's dying request that he kneel and pray by her bedside. By the end of this long day that guilt will be exorcised.
The scene now shifts to the generous, kind, and gentle Leopold Bloom, lovingly preparing breakfast for his beautiful and musically gifted wife, Molly. On this day Molly will finally become unfaithful after ten years of incomplete sexual intercourse, as Bloom, who guiltily feels responsible for the death of their infant son, Rudy, ten years ago, cannot bear the idea of completed intercourse and the subsequent creation of fragile life. By the end of this mythical and mystical day Molly is determined to change his mind on this matter and Bloom finds himself considering having another child.
As we follow Bloom around through the remainder of his morning's activities, we find that he is friendly, kind, courteous, and considerate toward everyone he meets, and that he is deeply pained by what he knows Molly and Blazes will be doing at four o'clock that afternoon. But Bloom, like his counterpart and model, Odysseus, has great fortitude, ultimately accepts the reality of experience--even when that reality is mysterious and strange and cruel--and is determined to survive. There are no accidents in either Homer or Joyce--every word serves a purpose. Thus, the word "perhaps" is of utmost importance in Bloom's thoughts in the Sirens episode as he begins to question his guilt and consider fatherhood: "I too. Last my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?" [emphasis mine].
Stephen, in the newspaper office, escapes another trap when he resists the suggestion that he become a journalist--to do so would turn him into Gabriel in Joyce's story from Dubliners, "The Dead."
But it is in the scene in the library that Stephen moves toward a complete acceptance of self, a step that does not become final until his atonement with his spiritual father, Leopold Bloom. In the conversation about Shakespeare, Stephen repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the artistic use of his own experiences as the subject matter for his art. Stephen has already progressed a long way since the morning walk on the beach when he wrote that perfectly awful poem about the vampire's kiss, a piece of Irish mystical verse worthy of the worst Irish Celtic-twilight poetical nonsense. "Ten years," Buck Mulligan says, speaking about Stephen in the Wandering Rocks episode. "He is going to write something in ten years." And we know that he will, not only because we observe the observing young artist in the library as he thinks to himself about these Dubliners: "Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past," and a few pages later: "Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone. See this. Remember."
The 1984 critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses provides the answer to the question Stephen poses to his dead mother in the Circe episode: "Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men." Three crucial and significant sentences Joyce wrote in another part of his manuscript were inadvertently left out of the first edition and consequently all subsequent ones until the edition of 1984, In the scene in the National Library we now find Stephen thinking to himself: "Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men."
Before the revised edition many commentators assumed that the implied answer to the question Stephen asks his mother is the word "death." This is puzzling, as many readers since William York Tindall have known that the answer had to be "love." This has always been evident from the Cyclops episode, when Bloom says "everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life," and Joyce continues with the definition of life: "Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred."
These words, when considered along with "Stephen's views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature" in the Ithaca episode, and Molly's resounding "Yes" as the final word of the book, make it even more puzzling why some critics had to wait for a 1984 edition to spell it out for them that this is a book of affirmative Love, and not negative Death.
Stephen-Telemachos and Bloom-Odysseus do not actually come together until the Oxen of the Sun episode (in the maternity hospital), but they have been drawing closer and closer to each other as the day progresses. Bloom first sighted Stephen at around eleven o'clock that morning when he saw, from the funeral carriage, Stephen walking on the beach. In the next episode Bloom sees Stephen in the street, and on the front steps of the library Stephen and Buck watch Bloom exiting between them.
After Stephen leaves the library, he visits a bookstall, among other places, in the Wandering Rocks episode. There he makes the most painful rejection of family yet when he encounters his sister, Dilly. The Dedalus family is poverty-stricken, but Dilly must certainly share Stephen's love of books and learning, as she has just bought, for a penny, a French primer. After finding out from Dilly that the family has pawned his books, he responds inwardly with great sympathy for his sister: "She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite." Stephen has a good deal of money in his pocket, as he was paid that morning by Mr. Deasy at the school, but he dare not give money to his sister, as helping her would be allowing the net to entrap him: "She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Saltgreen death." Stephen passes on, his eyes on the life of the artist that lies before him.
In the Sirens episode, which takes place in the Ormond Street Hotel dining room and bar at four o'clock that afternoon, we return to Leopold Bloom. Bloom must reach the bottom before he can rise again, and Joyce takes him there as Bloom is forced to listen to the crass and vulgar Blazes Boylan in the adjoining bar having the drink that will make him late for his visit to Molly Bloom. This is the only episode in the novel where Bloom is truly downcast and sad--as he has every right to be: "Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. jingling. He's gone. jingle. Hear." And a few minutes later: "Yes: all is lost."
Bloom has plunged to the bottom; he is Odysseus battered by the storm, clinging to the last remaining log of the destroyed raft. And just as the salt-caked Odysseus will come ashore to be rejuvenated by his Nausicaa, a few hours later Bloom will find Gerty McDowell, his own Nausicaa in the episode of that name, when, instead of treating her like a princess and thus showing his own nobility, as Odysseus does, our dear Poldy will secretly pump his hand in his pocket and masturbate over her. But not so secretly that she isn't fully aware of what he is doing.
Beginning with the scene in the hotel, Bloom becomes more and more assertive; it is only a few minutes after Blazes leaves the bar that Bloom thinks: "Well, my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?" And upon exiting from the hotel, Bloom lets out a resounding fart, "Pprrpffrrppffff," directed toward the sentimental Dubliners gathered around the piano singing traditional Irish ballads.
From the hotel Bloom goes to a tavern, where he incurs the enmity of the nameless Citizen. The Citizen primarily attacks Bloom's religion, and in this he is as incorrect as most readers of the book: Bloom is not Jewish, as, although his father was, his mother was Irish Catholic, and Bloom himself has been baptized three times: first in an Episcopal church, second in some kind of schoolboy prank, and finally in the Catholic church of the Three Patrons. Bloom is a Judeo-Christian Everyman. Joyce makes another spiritual connection between father and son by having bloom and Stephen baptized in the same Catholic church by the same priest--not, of course, at the same time. To complete the complicated religious affiliations of these characters, it should be noted that Molly is actually Jewish, as her mother was a Spanish Jew and her father an Irish Catholic; Molly's primary religious function, however, seems to be that of simultaneous earth mother and Everywoman.
In the argument with the Citizen, Bloom continues his growing assertiveness: the unnamed narrator tells us Bloom was so excited that he "near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar." (This is, of course, the episode called Cyclops: Bloom is Odysseus with the flaming beam of olivewood he used to put out the eye of Polyphemos.) It is here Bloom argues that force, hatred, and living in the past are "not life for men and women . . . everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life." When Alf asks him what that opposite is, Bloom replies firmly and simply: "Love ... I mean the opposite of hatred."
Poldy loves Molly, his daughter, Milly, and his dead son, Rudy--note how Joyce connects the family through the name endings, and has Molly include him in the family when she calls him "Jamesy" in her soliloquy--and Stephen loves literature and Ireland. Yes. Stephen/Joyce does love Ireland: at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he exiles himself from his country to become the "conscience of his race."
I leave the Nausicaa episode to your own pleasurable reading: it contains the only passages in literature where it is necessary to speak about tumescent and detumescent prose rhythms, as well as orgasmic ejaculatory plosive phonemes. But I strongly contend that Poldy's brazen masturbation is intended by Joyce to be a further indication of Poldy's onward and upward behavior following his descent in the Sirens episode.
At the maternity hospital, where Bloom has gone to inquire after the difficult labor of Mrs. Purefoy, he discovers Stephen drinking in the interns' lounge with some medical students and young doctors. Stephen by this time is quite drunk, and when he leads them out to a pub across the street, Bloom, concerned about the son of his acquaintance, Simon Dedalus, follows him. What Bloom does not consciously realize is that Stephen has become his son, Rudy, for him. The metempsychosis (transmigration of souls)--a word that haunts the book from Molly's first mention of it--has been accomplished.
The Circe episode, which follows, is the longest section of the book, and it was among the last to be written and revised--a necessary step on Joyce's part, as the Circe episode is self-reflective in that it echoes and mirrors the entire novel.
Stephen enters Bella Cohen's house of prostitution singing the introit for the paschal (resurrection) mass: Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro-I saw a stream of water coming from the temple. Stephen is "flourishing" his walking stick: he has been resurrected himself in his own act of climactic assertion, a climactic scene that has been omitted from the book by Joyce and one that must be resurrected and reconstructed from teasing snatches of comments by Stephen and Bloom in this episode and the next. Apparently, Stephen went to the Westland Row station at ten past eleven to meet Buck Mulligan for the last tram to the tower section (it is in the Oxen of the Sun episode that Buck suggests this). Buck and Haines attempted to elude Stephen--Buck had the key--and Stephen chased after Buck and punched him in the face with his fist. We can deduce this only from Stephen's remark to Bloom later in Circe that he has hurt his hand somehow, and Bloom's reminder to Stephen in Eumaeus that, after what happened at Westland Row station, Stephen won't be able to sleep in the tower that evening. Stephen has assertively and positively broken one of his compelling chains to Ireland: a place to live.
Then, in anticipation and foreshadowing of Stephen's climactic act of freedom from guilt over his mother, Stephen sings triumphantly Salvifacti sunt--they are made whole--and "flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light over the world." Note that he shatters the image of the lamp in his imagination, not the lamp itself: that will not happen until almost the end of the episode.
The reader of the Circe episode is frequently confused about what is reality and what is imagination because the scenes flow seamlessly from the interior world of Bloom and Stephen to the external world of the house of prostitution. Most of the writing about Ulysses refers to the interior scenes in Circe as hallucinations; they are no such thing, as they are beyond the reach of Bloom and Stephen, consisting, as many of them do, of information in the book they could not possibly have-ideas that have occurred, for instance, only in the minds of other characters. The character hallucinating in the Circe episode is the book itself and it is having a grand old fantastic time with its own creations as it participates in fantasizing its own hero-validating trip to Hades.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus' travels through the magic worlds of Circe and Kalypso and the islands of other strange creatures were a journey through the interior landscape of his soul, where he met monsters of wrath and lust with which he had to come to terms in purging himself of the war spirit before he could return to Ithaka. In the Circe episode Joyce presents us with the fantastic purgatorial landscapes of the souls of Bloom and Stephen.
The scenes with Bloom present distorted reflections of his daily life which graphically illustrate his guilty feelings of responsibility for the death of Rudy, his masochism and desire for punishment, the voyeuristic and fetishistic nature of his sexual substitutes for intercourse, his androgyny ("O, I so want to be a mother"), and, oddly enough-for they have been only slightly suggested in his experiences that day--his delusions of grandeur, his conception of himself as Emperor, President, King, Christ, and Moses. If dreams, fantasies, and journeys through the wicked landscape of the spirit serve to purge the mind of harmful garbage, then both Bloom and Odysseus succeed in this fruitful task.
We see in both Greek epic and Greek tragedy the purging process of so many characters: Achilleus of his wrath, Odysseus of his war spirit, early Greek society of its reliance on blood-vengeance instead of civil justice (the Orestia), and Oedipus of his guilty feeling of responsibility for murder and incest. Homer's Circe turned men into pigs; Joyce's Circe turns Bloom from pig into man when, following his horrendous purging journey into Nighttown, he has the celestial vision of his son, Rudy, as a twelve-year-old schoolboy, unconsciously equates him with Stephen--his spiritual son--and then reaches down with love and compassion to lift Stephen up out of his squalor.
For Stephen, having gone through his own purging experience in Nighttown, is now ready for renewal and dedication to literature instead of to the bottle and the brothel. Stephen's vision of the ghost of his mother is the only true hallucination in the Circe episode: he is drunk, physically weary, and has been without food for almost twenty-four hours--all conditions making him ripe for hallucinations. Stephen's experience is unlike Bloom's: when we are presented with Bloom's violent interior experiences, there is no evidence from other characters that he is behaving in any unusual way; indeed, at times only a split second has passed during the course of one of Bloom's thirty-page interior journeys. But everyone in the room notices Stephen's strange behavior, his conversation with his--to them--invisible mother, and his smashing of the lamp that represents his guilt.
After Bloom has rescued Stephen from the fight with the two English soldiers, he takes him to the cabman's shelter, where there is always food, drink, and alcohol available. Stephen, however, in refusing to eat the hard roll, is rejecting the mass of salvation being offered by Leopold Paula Bloom. (Paula: "light to the gentiles.") The mass cannot be consummated here; it can only take place when the n6stos, homecoming, is complete and Bloom and Stephen have reached the Ithaca episode and are at home in Bloom's kitchen with Molly, the spirit of the Holy Ghost, hovering above them in her bedroom.
It is two o'clock in the morning when Bloom and Stephen arrive at Number Seven Eccles Street, and we find that Bloom had forgotten his key that morning, making the two men a "keyless couple." Thus, not only does Bloom have difficulty getting into his own house but, when he later enters the parlor, he bumps into furniture in the dark, as Molly and Blazes have, sometime during that long afternoon and evening, rearranged the living-room furniture. The parallel to the Odyssey is amusing: both Odysseus and Bloom return to homes that have been "rearranged" by suitors. But the parallel is also profound, in that Penelope's final test of Odysseus is her lie to him about the moving of the bed. Molly tests and challenges Poldy by "moving" his bed, and he has spent the day coming to terms with this reality.
The word "host," applied to Bloom, sounds again and again in this episode as Bloom, in his role as Christ figure and priest, prepares and offers the mass to Stephen. The wine for this "jocoserious" mass is Epps's cocoa, which is produced in mass quantities and thus is a "massproduct," and Bloom serves the cream in a cup "ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion (Molly)." In other words, Stephen is symbolically offered Molly's milk. Of this offer of cocoa and milk:
Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of hospitality?
His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps's massproduct, the creature cocoa.
Both the mass and the novel are "jocoserious," and Stephen still has one last temptation to resist before he is home free, and that is the offer by Bloom that Stephen come make his home with Leopold and Molly. Bloom has been more of a father that day than Stephen's own father ever was, and we know later from Molly's soliloquy that she eagerly approves of the idea. But Stephen firmly rejects the offer, as the mass of salvation has taken effect, and he and Bloom go out in the garden, where they simultaneously urinate against the same tree (a male bonding and a comic purifying ritual), and Stephen goes off into the night, accompanied by strains of music from a "jew's harp."
Stephen has made the exit from his own guilt-ridden hell of Dublin, and Bloom has escaped his punishing guilt. Joyce firmly tells us this when he quotes a biblical passage about the escape of the Israelites from the bondage of Egypt as Stephen and Bloom leave the kitchen and go out into Bloom's garden. The first "spectacle" the two men witness is "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." Joyce makes reference here to the exit of Dante and Virgil from the confines of Hell when he echoes the words "Heaven" and "stars" from the final two lines of the Inferno. "Stars," which also occurs as the final word in both the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, is perhaps the most remembered image in the Divine Comedy. Joyce seems to be suggesting future realms of existence for his two "heroes."
Stephen and Poldy do not exit from this book into Heaven, but they do exit from their own hells, and both enter a Purgatory where they will refine themselves into new men. The fire that refines in both cases will be woman: for Bloom, Molly, and for Joyce, Nora, a hotel maid who had "sauntered" over to Joyce and, on June 16, 1904, the day of Joyce's salvation memorialized in this novel, "took me in her arms and made me a man."
In the time sequence Joyce outlined for his book, he assigned no specific time to Molly's episode, Penelope, thus suggesting that it takes place outside of time, in eternity, and that it actually has its existence outside the novel altogether. That is the meaning of the small solid black circle that Joyce placed at the end of the Ithaca episode just before Molly's soliloquy: this symbol was the traditional nineteenth-century typesetter's mark indicating the end of a book. Joyce may have had in mind the belief of some ancient commentators that the twenty-fourth book of the Odyssey was a later addition, that the poem ended when Odysseus and Penelope went to bed in Book 23. They were puzzled by the events in Book 24, and by the absence of Penelope. Molly, the Penelope of Ulysses, is an overwhelming presence in the final episode of this mock-epic.
Molly's stream of consciousness consists of eight unpunctuated sentences: her birthday is September 8. As this is also the traditional birth date celebrated as that of the Virgin Mary, and eight is associated with her--as well as the color blue--then there is no question but that Joyce intends Molly to be not only the bedroom Holy Ghost, earth mother, and Everywoman brooding above Poldy and Stephen in the kitchen below, but the third member of the human trinity of God the Father, Poldy; God the Son, Stephen; and God the Holy Ghost and "jocoserious" Virgin Mary, Molly Bloom.
Molly's section differs markedly from the rest of the book: there is clarity and directness in the writing, and Molly herself outdoes her husband in forthrightness, honesty, and sense of humor. Although the form--eight sentences--symbolizes the Virgin Mary and is at the same time a realistic imitation of Nora Joyce's epistolary style, Molly's musings are not burdened with symbolic content. She is the archetypal realist, and God knows this is necessary as a corrective balance to her fantasy-laden husband, Poldy. Although both Poldy and Stephen can be guilty of phony pseudo-intellectuality as well as philosophical hogwash, Molly is guilty of neither of these things. Why? Because Molly accepts: she lives in the world and accepts the world as it is. She does not try to account for what happens, she accepts herself and others without explaining, justifying, rationalizing, or excusing. She feels no guilt or remorse for her infidelity that afternoon: only surprise and relief in the fact that God didn't strike her dead with the lightning bolts He sent across the skies of Dublin as she and Blazes were having their numerous orgasms. God probably didn't, she decides, because of the Hail Mary she was saying at the time. Molly unites the spiritual and the sensual in a marvelous fashion. Joyce is, of course, wittily and ironically referring to the Olympian-sent thunder and lightning that precipitated the sexual union of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid.
Molly, like Zeus, Aphrodite, Athena, and Demeter--her Greek earth-mother counterpart--is beyond good and evil, even more so than they, because she does not place herself or any other human being in the category of either good or evil. Molly is not only the eternal feminine spirit formulated by Goethe and Jung, she is the undying jocoserious spirit of endless human hope:
... I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had ...
Molly's poetry differs from that of Stephen and Poldy: it is simple and pastoral, especially when she links the world of nature and flowers and roses, her favorite flower, with the world of love and sexuality.
Molly seems not to know the words "if " and "until" and "unless": she dictates no limitations or restrictions to others, but accepts them as they are. She is a living embodiment of the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Ono, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken ...
Molly knows everything about Bloom: the "smutty" photographs in his unlocked desk drawer, the letters from his female pen pal, his unorthodox sexual substitutions for intercourse, and his love and devotion to her. She recalls her painful swollen breasts, full of milk after the death of Rudy:
... I had to get him to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember the i half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes ...
All of her yeses, including the final ones, are for Poldy. Within the space of only a few dozen words in thinking about Blazes, she uses forms of the negative nine times; Joyce knows what he is telling us with that repetition. After her renewed discovery that afternoon of the pleasures of completed sexual intercourse, an activity she has been denied for ten years, Molly is determined to seduce her husband, and from the detailed description she gives of how she is going to go about doing it she knows Bloom and how to excite him--there is no question but that she will succeed, especially since we have heard Bloom earlier in the day considering it himself.
The defenders of the pessimistic camp are incorrect: June 17 is not going to be a repeat of June 16 for Poldy and Molly and Stephen. For all three this has been a day of momentous symbolic rebirth. Ulysses, we have seen, is certainly not completely devoid of the qualities of love, friendship, and magnanimity, virtues some Joyceans find that the novel totally lacks. The love Molly and Poldy have for each other combines all three of the Greek roots we looked at in connection with the Greek epic: those of eros, sexual love, philia, friendly love, and agape, spiritual love; the friendship between Poldy and Stephen, brief though it is, is warm with the tenderness and care of comradeship, 'and the results will last their lifetimes.
Magnanimity, indeed, is the greatest feature of this novel, and the simplest dictionary definition expresses this great quality shared by Molly and Poldy and Stephen: "loftiness of spirit enabling one to bear trouble calmly, to disdain meanness and revenge, and to make sacrifices for worthy ends."
I have made no pretense of being even-handed in this presentation of an aerial view of the opposing camps of Joycean criticism, as I have provided a far more complete inspection and verification of the optimistic camp than I have of that in the pessimistic camp. But then, the pessimists have tended never to go into much textual detail in revealing the exact nature of their offensive system. What it comes down to is that the doomsday Bloomsday readers are giving the book a realistic reading, whereas Tindall and his followers are giving it both a realistic and a symbolic one.
Joyce's book demands that it be read as a dynamically charged presentation of redemption and salvation; the very title itself, Ullysses, emblazes the word YES, and the presence of the subtext of the Odyssey further encourages this interpretation. The structure of the text announces its mystical nature: the three episodes (trinity) of the first section, the Telemachy; the twelve episodes (apostles) of the Wanderings; and the final three episodes (again, the trinity) of the Nostos.
The very first sentence contains the word "cross," as well as lather-soap for cleansing. Stephen himself has not had a bath for nine months, the period of gestation, and he is going to be reborn in this work. Bloom carries around a bar of lemon soap in his pocket the entire day, as well as the potato symbolizing Ireland that his Irish Catholic mother gave him years ago. The sweatband inside his hat reads "Plasto's High Grade Ha" as the T--the cross--has been worn away by Poldy/Christ's sweat: he is badly in need of resurrection from the life in which he is crucifying himself. Stephen and Poldy and Joyce are inscribing upon their own bodies in blood the novel Ulysses, the text that becomes the working out of their own salvation.
In reading the book, we are overwhelmed (Middle English: turn over, drown--oh, do not ask the "overwhelming question," Prufrock advises; and he drowns) by the images of water and drowning: the book opens with Stephen's view of the sea and it closes with Molly's remembrance of the sea. In between, there are numerous jokes about urinating as well as actual urinations, particularly the final symbolic ones of Poldy and Stephen together and Molly alone on her chamber pot with the sleeping Bloom above her on the bed.
Though Joyce has chosen to leave lambs out of the book--he only uses what would be widely available in the streets of Dublin--his other major New Testament image is that of Christ as water or bread. The bread images begin to gather together in force as Joyce approaches the symbolic mass. The following is from the opening pages of the Eumaeus episode:
... the smell of James Rourke's city bakery, situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, 0 tell me where is fancy bread, at Rourke's the baker's it is said.
Some of the most subtle uses of connected symbolic imagery are in that episode and in the Proteus episode. At the conclusion of Proteus, Stephen looks over his shoulder and sees a threemasted schooner: his vision would thus be (t T t ), nothing less than the scene of the crucifixion itself, with Christ on the central cross flanked by the two thieves. In the Eumaeus episode, when Bloom is urging Stephen to eat a piece of bread, and the redhaired skipper of the three-masted schooner is in the room, Bloom says that the rolls are as hard as the skipper's bricks--the cargo inside the three-masted schooner, which has thus brought to Stephen the primary symbol of redemption.
In Finnegans Wake Joyce refers to that book as a "crossmess parzel," a crossword puzzle, a cross and a mess and a mass and a parcel of land and a Christmas present. What the Christmas present of Ulysses contains is the modernist's displacement of illusion with at-one-ment through the acceptance and affirmation of what Joyce saw as the "lovely nothingness" of everyday life In "Sweeney Agonistes," Eliot's Mr. Sweeney finds that life is no more than "birth, copulation, and death." Ulysses is an exultation of the commonplace, what Joyce, writing in Italian to his son in America, calls "un bellissimo niente."
Continuing a tradition that we have seen in all the writers examined in these essays, Joyce celebrates the creativity of the family, the joys and sorrows of life, the at-one-ment of author and reader through the shared imaginative re-creation afforded by great literature, and the courage and dignity of which the human spirit is capable.