In treating of Joycean mimesis, the question of how and to what extent parallels are to be drawn between Homer, the source of Joyce’s schema, and Ulysses is a primary concern for any philological reading. The parallels are not entire, and the elements of Homer Joyce omitted are of as much salience as what is made plain. Familiarity with Homeric mimesis is of considerable help in discerning where the parallels are made cognate in the fashion unique to Ulysses. Familiarity with Joyce’s biography, or, if thought of somewhat more cynically, familiarity with Joyce’s hagiography, can also facilitate the reader’s undertaking; although if this essay was to delve into the portrait of the artist as a person, the conclusions it draws would feel unearned. Joyce’s canonization is a motivation for all would be novelists when they first approach the book, but that motivation is youthful, the text itself the more sagacious interest.
Our ancient testaments have always been negotiated with by those that would author new material. This is true of the writer who, being faced with the crisis of new realities, finds the monumental works of the past instruct but do not encompass the experience of the present. It is no less true of justices, or academics, although the consequences of their interpretations can become far more damning. Joyce is, or course, influenced by more tributaries than his titular predecessor, Blake, Aristotle, Aquinas among these, that some level of erudition is inevitably lacking. Joyce would have failed if, in the end, the entirety of his thought about literary tradition was not made integral, one, a whole composed of parts rather than a patchwork of influences more restated than rematerialized. All of Ireland, Dublin, and Joyce’s understanding of the flow of literature from Greece in the southeast of Europe to Ireland in the Northwestern isles, is made whole in Ulysses. The mechanisms begun in Telemachus, later playing out in abundant variety and by as abundant subtleties, should be noted here, such that Joyce’s success in making a whole greater than the sum of its parts can be appreciated.
Harkening the progenitor of literary culture and leaving behind his immediate stylistic antecedent, 19th century realism, Joyce embarks on representations of thought’s velocities, representing through these technical means thought’s very substance. Buck Mulligan’’s dumbshow is not merely what is occurring but what Buck Mulligan makes manifest. The action already commenced, this hallucincantation allows for the mundane to promulgate when flights of the more sublime subside, allows too for the sublime to shine through the mundane again in its turn. The characters access Joyce’s scheme and, albeit often ignorant of its salience, prove themselves in possession of mysterious wisdom. In mystery, literature resides.
As it is with the question of how much to make of parallels, the reader is left with the task of making as many connections through inference as sense will sustain. The notes section and lookup function on an iPhone can be of use, a development in man’s hermeneutical capacity that is, in most cases, deleterious, but which, in the right hands, can become more than the shortest channel of the blood to terminate at facebook. A robust and well-written commentary allows for levels of appreciation that would all but surely escape the reader without it. Are we to make anything, for example, from the matter of fact that the lines, recounted by Daedalus in imagining his mother’s youth, I am the boy/That can enjoy/Invisibility. is from the pantomime Turko the Terrible which features a character named Fairy Rose? When a few paragraphs later the latin prayer for the dying that references a lilied throng is recounted, I think the progression from rose to lily becomes more than trivia. Moreover, the implicit distinction between youth and death and popular art and prayer, as it is a thought of Daedalus’, allows for the delicate constitution of character, which Bloom’s wandering thought will burnish.
We observe how Buck Mulligan’s outward show is extended through Stephen Daedalus’ interior signification. Allowing for one of the book’s least desirable, albeit inexorable, influence to enter, they can be viewed like the cathedral and the catechism. The swerves away from Homer, and the narrow way through the archipelagos of influence in general, that define Ulysses come to be started in Telemachus. As a matter of inquiry, what happens when Mentor is demanded by the scheme but the scheme disallows the divine? IF Mentor must have a role, but Athena cannot occupy that form and likeness, what philosophy coheres Joyce’s hetrocosm with Homer’s religious purpose? It is the literary art. It is that literary art that utilizes Nietzschean metempsychosis and the rapidity of association to approximate the divine in all but the immovable essence of a religious divine. “Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, perhaps a messenger,” the book, and presumably Daedalus, relates, identifying the milkman as Athena in the guise of Mentor. The milkman though does not instruct this Odyssey by way of godly wisdom all can perceive, but rather by way of her station, especially apropos Ireland. Ironically, her capacity as the book’s Mentor is born out through her disinterest in the bardic, her lack of fertility, and her superstition and her plainness.
Not only characters, but objects, too, take after Homer through their ritualistic significance. In discussing the cracked lookingglass of a servant, we are presented a reflection of text, and a reflection on the past — Cranly’s arm. His arm. This kicks off the first of many immediacies, this one an imagination of a hazing committed at Oxford, the alma mater of Haines, the Englishman, replete with castration and the concatenation of the Anglican and the ox. Hats and attires contribute to the transmogrifications of characters, Bloom especially, as they are variously described. Objects are receptacle of the scheme. They are invested with immediacy by signifiers, as it is with the snotrag in Telemachus. We see it, in itself perhaps, accumulate Mulligans lather and snot, a green and a white, before Daedalus remarks he must get a new one. With this, he leaves behind the tower and his compatriots, and symbolically does away with memories of his mother’s infirmity, an infirmity made manifest by way of a white china bowl and bile.
-Russell Block
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