Riassunto esame Lingua e letteratura inglese, Prof. Terrinoni Enrico, libro consigliato Ulysses, James Joyce

Ulysses: L’Odissea del moderno

Bloomsday e la celebrazione di Joyce

16 June: Bloomsday. Was Joyce trying to set a date on which to celebrate a feast? He would probably be happy to see how many people celebrate Bloomsday today, but he may also notice the attempt by Dubliners to reassert a lost sense of community. Joyce used interior monologue to show how lovable, complex and affirmative was the mind of ordinary citizens; Ulysses gives such persons the sort of ceremonial treatment once reserved for aristocrats (Kiberd).

Critiche a Ulysses

Sir Shane Leslie on Ulysses: “in this work the spiritually offensive and the physically unclean are united. He defines the book as “an assault upon Divine Decency as well as on human intelligence” and as “literary Bolshevism”, experimental, anti-conventional, anti-Christian, chaotic, totally unmoral.

Personaggi principali

• Molly: Protagonist, but almost never present!
• According to Declan Kiberd, Bloom is merely an example of androgyny of the fully developed person, the new womanly man. This androgyny gives him a unique insight into womanhood that other men lack. Their masculinity is an effect of social conditioning, to the effect that men are considered in all things the opposite to women, rather than an expressive ensemble of the whole person.

They constitute a working majority in the Dublin of 1904, so they can pass for normal and denounce Bloom as eccentric; but he can never see either as freakish, since when he contemplates the bodies of women, he is looking at a fuller embodiment of an aspect of himself!

Origini e significato di Ulysses

Ulysses was born in Rome; Joyce said in Letters II that Romans reminded him of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmothers’ corpse. Joyce’s exile from Dublin was a flight from the “net” of church-state ideology; his work always remained preoccupied with the problem of how to escape from that most ideological of instrument: language itself, in particular English.

Struttura e personaggi di Ulysses

Ulysses is an open text!! Little plot, few main characters, little happens. 3 main characters:

1. Stephen Dedalus – A young, frustrated intellectual, whose mother has just passed away. He lives with friends who reveal not to be so, and enjoys the company of intellectuals that are not so. He thinks a lot, about great theories and literatures. He likes to drink and spend money in brothels. He escapes from home (family).
2. Leopold Bloom – Of Jewish origins in Catholic Ireland, he always feels an outsider. They all mistreat him. His job is to sell ads to newspapers, and he likes to come up with inventions. He thinks a lot, about the smallest details of everyday life. His wife cheats on him and he knows. He has a virtual affair with a lady from whom he receives only letters, to which he responds signing as Henry Flowers. His name in Hungarian means flower. He tries to rescue Stephen (from what?)
3. Molly Bloom – An operetta singer. English father, Spanish mother; she likes men and she flirts with many of them. She has a lover, Boylan, who will pay a visit to the Blooms house in the afternoon. She only really appears at the end of the book, in bed, thinking a lot about the past, the present, future, men, husbands.

Le azioni dei protagonisti

Action 1: Stephen has breakfast in the tower, introduces his theory of Shakespeare to an Englishman living there with his friend/enemy Buck Mulligan. He then teaches a class in school and argues with the headmaster about history. He walks on the beach and has several complex interior monologues. He talks and drinks with journalists and explains to intellectuals his Shakespeare theory, then he goes to the brothel, gets drunk, and is hit by British soldiers. Then he meets Bloom, who has come to rescue him…

Action 2: Bloom cooks breakfast for Molly. Then he goes to church to rest, picks up the letter from his lover, goes to a funeral, then to a couple of pubs, he’s insulted by nationalists for being a Jew, he masturbates on the beach and then follows drunk Stephen. He rescues him after the fight, takes him to a coffee place and then to his home, considering the possibility of an affair between the young man and his wife.

Action 3: Molly eats her breakfast and asks Bloom to explain her a difficult word in a book she is reading. Then her arm is seen throwing a coin to a pauper. She has sex with her lover (although we don’t witness the scene) and she reflects in bed on how men treat her; she has few fond thoughts also for her husband. She considers having an affair with Stephen.

Open text: definizione e interpretazione

What is an open text? It is a paramount instance of a syntactic-semantic-pragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is part of its generative process. According to Eco, when writing an open text, the author is taking into account the relative freedom of his readers, a freedom that is limited but also encouraged by the text’s intentions and by the author’s intention to produce an open text. It allows a great number of interpretations, but not infinite.

An open reading is therefore relatively free, just as free as the intention of the author to produce an open text. A text’s ambiguity is intentional, and helps understand the nature of the text itself, its structures and strictures, as well as the reading strategies it allows. Ambiguity can be indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several different things, the possibility that one, the other or two things at the same time has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings (Empson, 1930).

Intentions of the text

Text intentions: Eco states that “to recognize the intentio operis is to recognize a semiotic strategy”; intentio operis, the intention of the work, plays an important role, as a source of meaning which, while not being reducible to the pre-textual intentio auctoris, nonetheless operates as a constraint upon the free play of the intentio lectoris.

Ulysses come epopea nazionale

Ulysses was supposed to be the national epic poem, but it is instead a novel based on the epic poem. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake represent the celebration of a language to be reinvented, so they have a historical mission. Joyce, in Ulysses, acted in order to create many alternative figures in the carpet, without deciding how many they can be and which of them are the best ones (Eco).

Il significato del giorno scelto

The book might be seen as a sort of ‘anniversary gift’, but there is another explanation for the choice of this particular day for the story: a similar incident happened to Joyce, in that same day. Ulysses is a book obsessed with missed or insufficiently developed encounters; it is a revisionist text.

Telemachus

Occam’s Razor: also called law of economy/parsimony, according to which plurality should not be posited without necessity; of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”.

What do we make of this theory in terms of interpretation? → Stately, plump Buck Mulligan Stephen, Bloom, Molly. BM > B…m > Bloom > MB (inverted initials of Molly Bloom??)

BM : Black Mass (catholic ritual inverted) - Stately : noun and/or adverb? st - Plump Buck : Shakespeare, Henry IV, 1 part - Falstaff : banish plump Jack and banish all the words!

Proving the text’s intentions: in Scylla and Charybdis “Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt head…” Mulligan (plump Buck) is a jester and has a wellkempt head. But was Falstaff a jester? Did he have a wellkempt head?

Riferimenti e personaggi

Wellkempt > Will Kempe? Comedian working for Burbage’s company who impersonated Falstaff. This is what Joyce was hiding… The book starts with Buck Mulligan who takes a bath, and an epithet, “usurper”, which apparently doesn’t have a referent. Mulligan’s character is based on Oliver St John Gogarty, a friend and rival of Joyce, but in the book, he serves as a mouthpiece for Shakespeare, one of the main competitors of the author.

Mulligan is always in a good mood and very vivacious (characteristic of the Irish), the opposite of Stephen; however, he treats his friend with great respect, almost considering himself as intellectually inferior. In the Odyssey, the usurper is Antinoo, who wants to marry Penelope, but here Mulligan doesn’t have any particular interest in Molly; it’s not clear why Joyce is using the correspondences.

Mulligan’s first name tells us something: Malachi (“announcing” in Hebrew), alluding to Malachia, the prophet of popes and Rome’s destruction. So what is he announcing? Maybe the coming of a new man? We find out in chapter 15 that this man is Bloom.

Another usurper of the first chapter is the English Haines, who is passionate about the Gaelic culture and language to the point that he can speak the language more than his two Irish friends. We see from the very beginning, then, a theory that represents the relationship that Ireland has with its own culture in constant disagreement with its opposite, the English tradition.

Tematiche principali

We can see from the very beginning another theme of the whole book, the fight against the Church: rituality is, in fact, inverted (shaving as a morning rite instead of mass, breakfast instead of the Holy communion), and there is an overlapping of the divine, human and animal, signalled by the term “dogsbody”, present in the whole book.

Very often in Ulysses the real meaning is to be caught by reading backwards: the opposite of everything is also true. In addition to the religious setting, there is a spiritualistic type of narration (the appearance of Stephen’s mother, almost as a demon): the living and the dead share a common space, and they influence each other!

Stephen is a symbol of cultural and personal fragmentation: he finds himself between the colonizer (Haines) and the colonized (Mulligan). The most important literary presence is that of Shakespeare, not only because Stephen is also a bard, like him, but also because he represents in a way Hamlet, since his thoughts correspond mostly with Shakespearean considerations. He may be considered as an anti-Hamlet, the ghost of his own father.

Stephen’s father (like Joyce’s father) wasn’t able to provide for his family: a family without an adequate father is an analogy for an occupied Ireland without effective leaders! Stephen, then, will have to find a true father in another, in himself (like Nietzsche said!). His major problem is that he is haunted by the ghost of his mother, who died recently: he feels remorse, for not having prayed on her death bed, but at the same time he is proud to have rejected a religion in which he does not believe, and is determined to escape from the ghost. He associates the green sea of Dublin to the bowl into which his mother spat green bile when she was sick. His response to her request had been art rather than a prayer (he sang a lyric by Yeats), coming from a different room (because he never confronts his emotions).

Dialoghi e simboli

In this episode, much of the conversation is conducted between three men who can hear but not always see one another, as if they were shy; this shyness is especially notable in Stephen, who will always say either too little or too much. What is repressed by day, must always be confronted by night: and Stephen’s mother haunts his dreams, but his response is the opposite of Hamlet’s!! He refuses to be taken to another world by a recently dead beloved one (as the folk belief says).

There is another female in this episode, the old milkwoman who comes with the morning supply: she represents Mother Ireland, and he realizes that she prefers her conqueror (the English Haines) or her betrayer (Mulligan), rather than him. Moreover, when they speak Irish to her, she mistakes it for French, she can’t even recognize her ancestral tongue! Stephen will also be the bard who rewrites the epic for the community at home! Although there are many temptations and traps along the way.

The episode closes with a single word, “Usurper”, capturing not only the usurpation of the tower (for which Stephen paid rent) by Mulligan and Haines, but also the denial of Mother Ireland by their use of militarist images to describe the life of the ‘messmates’ in the tower. Mulligan uses a homo-erotic tone with Stephen, ‘my love’, ‘loveliest mummer’, ‘you look damn well when you’re dressed’, which suggests a degraded caricature of the feminine.

Haines tries to give the blame for Ireland’s past to an impersonal force called ‘history’, which Stephen hates: ‘I am the servant of two masters, an English and an Italian. And a third there is who wants me for odd jobs’. In blaming history, Haines provides one of the major themes of Ulysses, the dead, denying power of the past from which the main characters try to liberate themselves.

If everything Mulligan says is easily decipherable, Stephen prefers to be uninterpretable, like Joyce’s book! By focusing on a single day from his young manhood, the mature Joyce shows the reader how the hours may be wasted, and how they may be redeemed. By recording the hour by hour variations in individuals, he can show their selves in transformation.

The men in the tower eat their food with energy, but with a certain resentment, as if it cannot fully satisfy them: they ‘fumble’ at the fried eggs, ‘slapped out’ on the plates, and Mulligan has his bread ‘buttered on both sides’ (which suggests that he enjoys both male and female bodies). The way in which they eat is an indication of their attitude.

The episode is filmic, with jump-cuts and skips, Joyce tries to show how chronological time doesn’t need to be strictly followed. Sometimes, single words (like ‘Chrysostomos’) describe a passing thought of Stephen; interior monologue is introduced, but sparingly.

Nestor

History is the nightmare of this second episode, personal, national and military history. Stephen is a history teacher, but he is frustrated, since he is part of an education system that belongs to the colonial tradition, based on imitation rather than critical thinking. This can be seen when the students sneak-read the answers to the questions from their textbook: this system produces mimic-men, but not people prepared for life. Even Stephen encourages them in these evasive strategies (“I don’t see anything”). In the class, the discussion is about words, not about concepts: Stephen proposes impossible riddles and puns, and he is not interested in the students’ needs at all. For him, they are only an audience to be teased, not smart enough to understand his wit. While he is inattentively lecturing to his inattentive class, his thoughts remain fixated on the subject that occupied him in "Telemachus," the reason why he has vowed to wear black for a year: his mother's ghastly death.

Stephen then has a conversation with Mr Deasy, the headmaster, a manipulator who keeps giving inaccurate versions of history. To him, Stephen will pronounce the famous sentence “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. Stephen is obsessed with undeveloped events, and always asks himself “what if?”. His meeting with Leopold Bloom will provide a “corrected” version of Stephen’s unsatisfactory conversation with Mr Deasy.

In terms of the Odyssey, Mr. Deasy represents Nestor, the aged Greek soldier and rhetorician who helped to keep order among the military principals during the ten-year siege of Troy (described in the Iliad and who was the first friend of Odysseus that Telemachus visited after he left Ithaca in search of information about his father). In this chapter, several parallels between the two men are found. Nestor, though often useful at Troy, is frequently satirized by Homer because of his ponderous verbiage; and it is significant that Telemachus does not gain any valuable information about him. Mr. Deasy, too, may have some sense of national and civic pride, as seen in his concern for sick cattle, but his virtue is outweighed by his militant anti-Semitism, his veneration of money, and his bland interpretation of the place of Protestantism in Irish history. The contemporary Nestor restores order on a hockey field, not on a battleground, and his men are children; although he is old (an explicit parallel with Nestor of the Odyssey), Deasy assures Stephen that he occasionally likes "to break a lance" (argue jestingly) with him.

Mr Deasy tells Stephen that he wasn’t ‘born to be a teacher’, to which he responds, ‘A learner rather’. Deasy is all about external form; he collects shells, coins and spoons, and has turned his school into a museum, rather than a place of spiritual transformation. He is an imperialist, and believes that history is already at an end. But he in deeply insecure, and he surrounds himself with valuable objects to compensate for an inner emptiness.

One of Stephen’s students, Sargent, had a face ‘only a mother could love’, and Stephen is haunted by amor matris when he watches him. History is also intended as creativity in this episode. Joyce bases his “stories” on a type of History that goes in circle; history is the nightmare of contemporaneity, and it is impossible not to read references to present times (1917, year of composition), to the destruction of WWI. Besides the history to be taught, there is another type of history: that of a country yet to be created. Deasy, on the contrary, takes a Protestant view of history, seeing it as a straight line running towards a single destination, the manifestation of god. Stephen is not bold enough to object this model.

Stephen recognises the good teacher’s need to see each child as that child’s mother first did; the fact that he doesn’t fully understand what he’s teaching seems to be part of the point. The forms of knowledge emerge only gradually, and are not always completely mastered, even by their bearers; therefore, a person of limited intellect may teach wisdom to students more intelligent than himself (as Bloom will do later with him!).

Deasy provides a version of history that blames women for everything (Eve, Helen of Troy, Kitty O’Shea); but the greatest mistake he makes is denouncing the Jews, claiming that their merchants are destroying England.