Telemachus
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driver far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he did not save his comrades, for all his desire, for through their own blind folly they perished — fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios Hyperion whereupon he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where you will, tell us in your turn.
— The Odyssey Book 1
Ulysses again appears, if not foreign to me, then new. My familiarity with the text, especially in consideration of the purposes of this reading, has elucidated elements of the text that slipped my notice, made less pronounced, too, those elements that once seemed the most important. A flag, if it could be observed in a single instant, so that its outward crests and involute removes remained in stasis, is like one reading of a book. Another reading produces a second instant. Between the two, the mind can fill in the negative space and conceive, from the disparate instants, how the flag moves one instant to the next. What at first, while not lifeless, did appear static suddenly takes wind. The text of Ulysses is a flag of such magnitude that my fourth or fifth reading, as these notes are to evidence, still does not completely allow for the free animation of its elements. It is rather as if the self must first be animated by the work before the entirety will resonate. To discover those elements of self of which I am largely unaware is the reason certain works are read in perpetuity.
From the notes in the margin, now six years old, I know that Schubert’s Quintet in C-major was playing when I first commenced the ongoing project of reading Ulysses. That I was in the living room of the family home in Illinois after returning from Detroit is also recorded there. The sun on the pages and filling that room, like the notes I scribbled, were not instilled with an awareness of the bleaker course awaiting me. The maturer capacity, akin to divination, whereby the writer records subtleties merely sensed, such that the words gain permanence, is not detectable in my notes. At the time, it appears my exclusive preoccupation limited my observations to the physical characteristics depicted, to vanities, whenever the description in the refined literature called to mind my own unrefined person. When Buck Mulligan’s hair is described as “grained and hued like pale oak,” I compared my face to birch in the margin. I described a cold toe and my Levis at the bottom of the second page, presumably in response to Buck Mulligan’s yellow dressinggown, described how my hair is not at all tree-like when Buck Mulligan’s hair is described again. I recalled honey I stole from my own roommates when they had their tea with milk and do not pay the milkmaid in full. I denoted when the movements of the Quintet began, until, when Stephen’s mention of atheism reveals a stunning example of free though, I regretted that my thoughts do not feel free despite this similarity. What was excised form the text by the preoccupation of these notes is of far greater interest.
These left out the more cerebral topics this latest reading has discovered, which having discovered, it is to treat. My primrose first hours with the book took little notice of the scheme. When they talk of trousers, nothing evinces a connection between Stephen’s refusal to wear grey and his mourning, nor of Buck Mulligan’s white lather, white and gold evocation of the Eucharist and sacramental wares, or the yellow dressinggown. Outside the scheme, an identification with their penury, their revels in drunkenness, and the prurient interest in redheads, all of which I have felt at one time or another, appears lacking in my notes. The tension between the achievement of the Joyce’s schema and the idea of Ulysses as a novel at its essence looms over critical interpretations, an ongoing argument exemplified by Eliot’s and Pound’s positions on the book, respectively. The two constitute the foundational equilibrium of modernist mimesis.
-Russell Block
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