Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book

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This is the LRB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. This year, as part of the LRB's close readings podcast strand, Tom McCarthy and I have been looking at a series of novels with an eye to the systems and mechanisms underlying them. So far, we've talked about Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and Middlemarch. The latest episode is on James Joyce's Ulysses, and what you're about to hear is an extended extract from that.

The full episode is available to close reading subscribers. Hello, and welcome to the 4th episode of the man behind the curtain, a close readings podcast series from the London Review of Books. I'm Thomas Jones, a senior editor at the LRP. And for this series, I'm joined by the novelist and artist Tom McCarthy to explore some of the mechanisms and systems underlying a series of novels from Don Quixote to Gravity's Rainbow, and the ways that the novel emerges as a form when those mechanisms begin to poke through and expose themselves to scrutiny by the novel itself. Hello, Tom.

Hi, Tom. Nice to be here.

And today, we're talking about a novel that's positively bursting, erupting even with such poking through and exposures. A novel that Tom writing in the LRB in 2014 described as a heavy book, a book full of 8, a fallen book, a properly obscene book, and a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself, and a book for which people should desist once and for all from using the term interior monologue to describe the novel's novel's outbreaks of unassigned 1st person narrative. This is not interior monologue. It's exterior consciousness embodies or incorpced consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax. And so what else but Ulysses by James Joyce.

In the last couple of episodes, I've tried to begin with a brief plot summary or narrative outline of the novel under discussion, which is just about manageable with Frankenstein. It was a tall order of the middle march and impossible, Perhaps with Uddessey, certainly for me. But anyway, here goes. So the novel was published in Paris, which is quite important on the 02/02/1922, Joyce's 40th birthday. And it's set nearly 18 years earlier in Dublin on a single day, which we shall refrain from referring to as Bloomsday, I think, Tom.

Yeah. 16th of June 19 o 4.

Yeah. So a Thursday. And it's a date significant to Joyce because it was the day he 1st walked out with Nora Barnacle, who he would later marry. But significant to the rest of us because it's the day on which stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. The novel is divided into 18 episodes.

Joyce referred to each of them by the name of a character or episode or motif from Homer's Odyssey, though they're untitled in the 1st and most subsequent editions of the novel, which has a vexed and, in fact, well, fascinating publication tech and textual history that I think we don't have time or perhaps expertise to get into today. But hopeless enough to say that there isn't and perhaps can't be a definitive text of Ulysses. And those 18 episodes are divided into 3 parts of 3 12 and 3 episodes. They're only numbered in the 1st edition, though they are known as the Telemachia Odyssey and Nostos, which loosely follows the structure of Homer's Odyssey. They're weighted differently.

There are 3 main characters, Stephen Daedalus, the Telemachus figure last seen in Joyce's 1st novel, a portrait of the artist as a young man, now living with stately plump Buck Mulligan, a medical student in a Martello tower in Sandy Cove having returned to Dublin from Continental Europe because his mother was dying. She is now dead. Short of money, he has a job as a school teacher, and he walks on the beach. He goes to the library, talks about Hamlet. He goes to maternity hospital to meet Buck Mulligan, where...

And by now, we're in episode 14, though only about halfway through in terms of pages, he meets Leopold Bloom. And Bloom, the Odysseus figure, has also had a full day by the time he he meets Stephen. He's been out to buy kidneys for his breakfast. He's had a shit. He's bought, but forgotten to pay for a bar of lemon scented soap.

He's read a letter from his daughter. He sent a letter to his mistress, although their relationship is slightly mysterious. He's had a bath. He's been to a funeral. He's done some work placing adverts in newspapers.

He's had some lunch. He's been subjected to antisemitic abuse by an Irish nationalist that Bloom's father was Jewish. He's watched some girls on the beach. He's had a wank. He's gone to the maternity hospital where a woman he knows is having a baby.

Bloom then follows Stephen to a Brussels where both men have a series of hallucinations of seeing his mother rise from the dead. Stephen breaks the chandelier with his walking stick and runs off. Bloom pays for the damage, follows him. Stephen gets punched by an English soldier, and while looking after him, Bloom has a last hallucination about his dead son, Rudy, who would be 11 by now. Bloom takes Steven to a cabin shelter and then back to his house.

They have some cocoa. They have a piss. Steven leaves, and Bloom goes to bed, reunited with his wife, Molly, who he left in bed at the beginning of the day. And then Molly Bloom, the Penelope figure, is the 3rd main character. She's a singer.

She's about to go on a tour organized by a man called Blazes Boylan, who she's just begun an affair with. And the final episode is all hers, an extended stream of unpunctuated exterior consciousness. So that's some of what happens in this enormous book, but that kind of bold summary tells us essentially nothing about the novel, does it?

I I was really interested in how you were gonna summarize this because I think trying to summarize Ulysses... Well, it's kind of ridiculous, and and it... But it raises a a question that's central to the book itself, which is, you know, what happens? Nothing happens. You know?

As you said, 2 guys walk around town, 1st separately, then together. A woman menstruates. There's a horse race in the background. There's a funeral, lots of drinking, lots of chatting. Scrap paper floats down the canal.

Oh, yeah. And someone smears a bit of snot on a rock. And various... You know, we could go into more and more trivial non events. You know, think of I.

M. Foster who famously says, you know, yes, oh dear, yes, a novel has to tell a story. And I love Foster, but he is so, so wrong. He's spectacularly wrong there. I mean, of course, the novel has a relation to narrative, but that relation is never smooth, it's never natural, it's never holistic.

It's usually or often fragmented or interrupted. You know, we saw this when we looked at Don Quixote, and this is very much the case here. And and maybe, you know, yet again, Don Quixote is is the place to start. I mean, as with as with every book that we've looked at so far, Don Quixote pops up again.

I mean, are are Stephen and Bloom like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?

No. No. The characters that correspond to them... Well, George Moore and Edward Martin, these 2 kind of Irish revivalist writers, are explicitly compared by somebody to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in in the 9th chapter, whereupon another character observes our national epic has yet to be written. And I think, you know, as with Don Quixote, there's an epic outside.

Right? I mean, that this is... It has... It shares that in common with Don Quixote. There's a there's a quotidian inside and an epic outside.

But whereas Don Quixote thinks he's a modus of Gaul, and everyone else knows he's not, and that's kind of where where the money is in terms of the kind of affect of the book. Leopold Bloom doesn't think he's Odysseus. He hasn't he hasn't read Homer. But nonetheless, there is a a similar to Don Quixote, a kind of very complex relationship between between this epic outside and this kind of banal inside, which is managed by a set of distortions and refractions and inversions and and correspondences.

The... I mean, Bloom doesn't think he's Odysseus, but does the novel by its title and some elements of his structure does make the claim that he is. I mean, he's not Odysseus, but he is as worthy a central figure of an enormous work of literature.

Yes. But there's there's a huge amount of irony and of and of bathos in that. So, you know, I mean, the correspondences... The the way that I I I think there's at least kind of 3 or 4 ways in which Joyce sets up these correspondences. I mean, 1 is structural.

So as you mentioned, you know, every... So Joyce told his friends what each chapter's unofficial title was. And as a student, the 1st thing you do when you read Ulysses is you write in over... You write Telemachus over chapter 1...

Or you make a list that you print out with page numbers going on 1 to interestingly,

he he didn't want that to be to be printed. But you kind of know that, you know... So in chapter 16, the events there kind of correspond to the episode in the Odyssey where Eumaeus, this kindly swineherd, kind of takes care of a destitute Odysseus, Asbloom takes care of a destitute Steven. You kind of know that chapter 8, which is all about eating and gristle and fat and chewing, takes place at lunchtime in Dublin. That it kind of corresponds to the Lestragonians episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus and his Odysseus and his men are light on an island of cannibals, and, you know, chapter 3, which is all about the shifting contours of the beach and of thought, which Stephen is trying to pin down, corresponds to the episode in the Odyssey with Proteus, this shape shifting god who has to be interrogated.

So there's that kind of that level of correspondence. And then there's a more kind of micro channel of correspondence that just consists in little details. So for example, Buck Mulligan's face is described as equine, and his hair is grained and hued like pale oak, which evokes the wooden horse of Troy just as the race horses in chapter 2 on the school teacher DC's walls kind of associate him with Nestor, prince of charioteers. In fact, 1 of the horses is the Prix de Paris, the priors of Paris, which evokes Helen and so on. So there's that kind of level.

I mean, the 3rd channel of correspondence is set up just through kind of throwaway lines or figures of speech. So Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, is called a Penelope's stay at home. Right? And Dan Dawson, the politician, is called an inflated wind bag. And in the same episode, which is the 1 that corresponds to Aeolus, the the maker of the keeper of the winds, gives Odysseus and his crew this bag of wind.

Miles Crawford, the newspaper editor, who has set in the newspaper office, complains that there's a hurricane blowing every time the doors open. And then you get this subtitle, raising the wind. I mean, it's very unsubtle in in many ways. And then I'd say, you know, maybe the the the 4th channel on which correspondences kind of are transmitted are are in actions, you know? So in chapter 13, Bloom intercepts a children's ball on a beach just as Odysseus does in Faesha.

Or in the wonderful Sirens episode, you get the 2 bar girls, miss Kennedy. Well, miss Kennedy plugs her ears when she doesn't wanna hear someone talking, and then miss Deuce has just come back from holiday where she was lying on the Strand all day, and they talk about Bloom being on the rocks, I. E. Broke, but on the rocks. And Bloom is tying a string around his fork as he listens like Odysseus tied to the mask.

And all these men are singing while women lurk behind, you know, these splashes of beer froth on a... On the reef of a counter. So, you know, there's all these kind of... But the point is lots of them are pathetic. I mean, they're comic.

They're kind of ridiculous.

And when the citizen who he's who is the sort of Cyclops figure, he throws a biscuit tin at Bloom. It's not as as he escapes. They're like the Cyclops throwing rocks at Odysseus.

Yeah. It's a little Jacob's biscuit.

Yeah. Yeah. Throwing a biscuit tin.

And he almost gets his eye poked out by a a chimney sweets brush, and then someone else has a cigar, which kinda corresponds to the red hot poker or the EEOLINE harp becomes a piece of dental floss. The music of the spheres becomes a fart. There's a huge of degradatory process going on. So so I I think there's a, you know, there's a huge amount of humor and and and irony. But on...

But even that is kind of serious because, I mean, it's setting up this general symbolism that maintains the epic as a kind of inside outside. It's an outside on the inside or an inside, you know, it's brought in and expelled in the same movement. It's a kind of negative inclusion. So it's it's kind of exerting influence on a situation even when it's not in the situation. It's kinda governing it like a like a force field.

And I think the whole book operates according to that logic. So even the bits of the book that are in the book exert force across distance on other parts that they're not actually connected to in in in a scene. It's a very complex architecture of control and correspondence.

Yeah. I mean, that question of architecture and so on, I mean, are... I suppose you could say, without too much exaggeration, there are infinite schemata for thinking about or trying or failing to contain or circumscribe or map out Ulysses. And as Joyce himself put it, there are so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant. And 1 of the novel's recurring motifs is keys.

What is the key to Ulysses? Because there isn't a single key. Some of the maps you can use to help navigate Ulysses or different ways through it include Homer's Odyssey as you've been talking about. There's also the geography of Dublin. There's Irish politics.

Tram timetable is actually a quite Yeah. Illuminating way through it. But today, we're going to be using, well, I say our own schema. Your... The the 5 m's that we've been talking about throughout this series.

Which are, Tom, the 5 m's?

Money, matter, machinery, mediation, and metaphor as they join battle against the big other m, metaphysics.

Yeah. And gonna take them in reverse order today.

Yes. Let's move through them backwards. Metaphor. We start with metaphor. Right?

I mean, metaphor is really simple. It's just 1 thing transforming into another. So with Don Quixote, he's he's the barber's basin, and he says, this is Mambrino's helmet. And he believes it is Mambrino's helmet. In Michael Craig Martin's piece of art with the glass of water on a shelf, the glass of water becomes an oak tree when you contemplate it and and kind of will yourself to believe.

It's an oak tree. Ulysses opens with exactly such a kind of transformation or transubstantiation. We have we have the the parody of the Catholic Eucharist. I mean, the Catholic Eucharist is already a perfect kind of metaphor. This wine becomes the blood of Christ.

Well, it's both at once, isn't it? That it is the it is the blood and the wine, and it's both at once. And the metaphor is the relationship between the 2.

1 thing Yeah. Standing for the other, or if you're a proper Catholic, it's it's becoming. I mean, it literally is is Christ's is Christ's blood. As you consume it... But here it's it's served up in a very parodic way.

So it's shaving interestingly as with Don Quixote, shaving again. So Buck Mulligan has shaved. He's holding up the shaving bowl and the mirror and the shaver as as the priest holds up the veil and the burse and the wine. He says, in troiibo, in Troy, that's another correspondence, in troiibo adultare dei, I go into the altar, I enter the altar of God. But he immediately piles on the degradation.

He starts looking at it and saying, oh, look at these white corpuscular blood. Then he starts singing this absolutely blasphemous song. I mean, you know, in 1922, he starts singing as Christ. The 2nd verse goes, if anyone thinks that I amn't divine, he'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine, but have to drink water and wish it were plain that I make when the wine becomes water again. So again, all about transformation, 1 thing into another, but very...

It's very self conscious.

Yeah. And that water water becomes wine, which becomes piss. Is that... Yes.

Exactly. But, you know, 2 chapters later, we get Pico de la Mirandola mentioned as Steven wanders the beach and his argument that, you know, every object in the world is an analog, a symbol, a counterpart to some kind of higher reality. And this is, again, even though Steven kind of mocks himself for having believed that he was a kind of latter day Pico de la Mirandola, he kind of is. I mean, object on the beach is understood in terms of something else. So the gum whale of a boat sunk in stand prompts this association with Louis Vuilleaux calling fear filled Gautier's prose, a coach trapped in sand.

You know, the languidly writhing seaweed evokes these girls highsing up their petticoats from a bawdy song. 2 chapters previously, everything signatures of all things I'm here to read, you know, snot green, blue silver, rust, colored signs. The whole scene is a kind of mise en scene of linguistic shape shifting and transformation. Steven thinks these heavy sands are language, tide and wind have silted here. So, you know, you've got you've got the world as language, as this kind of semiotic overload of symbols being kind of borne towards Stephen, carried to him as colored signs for him to read.

I mean, that way that language... I mean, a sense language is the ultimate metaphor. Right? Because you you have the words and you have the objects, and the words are the objects, but they're also not.

Yep. And there's a kind of transposition or a or a transportation involved. I mean, I love, you know, 1 of the many wonderful things about going to Athens is that you see the word metaphoria written on every single truck.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

And that's literally what they are. They carry things from 1 place to another. So it is here. I mean, objects, signs, context are constantly being transported or transposed, or they themselves are these kind of vehicles or networks of relay operating in these long associative chains, what Stephen calls strand entwining cables, kinda connecting to each other like parts of some giant electrical circuit board. So what...

So our task makes me think of Tintin when he... In the Black Island, he he he trips across a wire and then he starts, you know, seeing where it leaves and he pulls it up and it leads to the next, and it's in a triangle and he realizes corresponds to a note he found which which, you know, so he maps he maps the network and then he realizes it corresponds to this system of... And we have to kind of be liked

into that. We do... But it was also which maps out where the counterfeiters dropped their bags of money. Absolutely. Absolutely.

But this this is what we have to do here.

We have to kind of just follow the trains, the the the circuits of association. So for example, just to take just 2 of them. I mean, there are scores and scores in the book, they're all kind of cross wide across each other. But for example, you know, in chapter 2, the school teacher DC hands Stephen a letter he's written that he wants to get printed in the newspaper about foot and mouth disease and what we should do about it. We follow this chain of association from there to Stephen's poem in the next chapter written on a torn off strip of that very letter.

His poem about a vampire, which he composes amidst a whole bunch of associations about bleeding and this reprise of Buck Mulligan's phrase, o no pa pointon from Homer, the wine dark sea, and visions of bride bed, child bed, bed of death. And this kind of modulates as he free associates through the phrase mouth to her mouth kiss and then mouth to her moon and oom and all wooming tomb. And then we get the poem itself 6 chapters later. It's a reworking of a Douglas Hyde poem. On swift sail flaming from storm and south, he comes pale vampire, mouth to my mouth.

So we follow it onwards from there to this scene replayed twice in the book by different characters and people where the seed cake passes from Molly Bloom's mouth into Leopold Bloom's mouth. And we follow it onwards to Bloom and the blood filled Molly lying foot to mouth and mouth to foot in bed at the end, then to Molly bleeding in the bride's bed above which this dead child, its specter hovers, bleeding like the sea. So, you know, once we've we've followed around the whole circuit, it opens up into this kind of blood bathed vision of of a kind of universal cycle of of life and death. Or to take another circuit, if we take this ad, this incredibly annoying silly ad that keeps popping up, what is home without plum trees potted meat? Incomplete.

With it, an abode of bliss. Follow the strands of association from there to the Piscale Paragal of the Plums, which Stephen kind of is trying to... He tries out on various listeners. It tells the story that he's imagined of 2 old biddies going up Nelson's Column in Dublin, looking down like Moses from Mount Pisgah on the promised land that they'll never enter, eating plums, throwing down the shriveled husks of the stones. And then we follow that onwards to Bloom and his reflections on the promised land, Zion, which he associates with fruit initially, but also with withered promise.

It's actually occasioned by a Zionist handout in a Jewish butcher's, so back to meat, potted meat. Onwards to Bloom's incomplete mastery of his own home because his rival, Boylan, is potting his meat in molly and even eating Plumtree's potted meat in in Bloom's bed as he does so. And onwards to the kind of incomplete project Irish home rule and then at a more base level to the potted meat of the corpse of Paddy Dignam being, you know, lowered into a grave. Then to kind of nicely complete the whole circuit, the ad for plum trees potted meat goes right up to the death notices in the in the days paper. So those are just 2 kind of...

You know, we could we could talk about kind of 10 more and we'd be here all day. But the point is, you know, signs are being transported around the book context, transplanted onto other contexts. They're kinda cross fertilizing them in this great metaphorical or metonymic relay.

Yeah. And I was... I mean, there's also... I mean, that chain... I mean, you talked quite a lot about bathos and so on, but in that way, and the water and the wine and the piss and the...

I mean, digestion is so fundamental to this book, isn't it? And in a way that the the passage, the digestive tract, and the the transformations that happen in the in the digestive tract, both metaphorical and not, are...

Bloom is reading the reader's digest as he as he poops. So much of of the... Yeah. I mean, the whole kind of rhetorical mode of chapter 10 is Joyce described as peristaltic. It's about information and and and life just moving through the Canal Of Dublin and of the world being kind of digested and transformed.

And and eventually, I mean, we'll talk about this later, but there's a huge excretatory kind of base material register in the book as as well.

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Well, I mean, you know, we'll get to matter later, but as you can't get away from matter. I mean, that's 1 of the 1 of the lessons, I guess, of the book. But, you know, another of your m's, your next m or your previous m, going backwards, is mediation. So how does... Mean, mediation is metaphor.

Right? I mean, how is... Is a form of metaphor. So how does... How do they differ?

Well, let's think of the figure of Bloom. He literally carries signs around Dublin. He's an ad man. He goes around hustling. You know, he's placing ads in in papers.

He's selling... He's canvassing advertising space. He's a... He's an agent of these of these transpositions. And besides being someone who kind of works with media and connects it all together, he has a profound understanding.

I can't think of anyone who has a better understanding of how media works. To use the kind of McLuhanite. So in fact, McLuhan's working title for the Gutenberg Galaxy was The Road to Finnegan's Wake. He he was a he was a big fan of Joyce. But you know, Bloom understands advertising.

Right? He has these these very good ideas for ads. He has a plan. He used to work for the stationer, Wisdom Healy's, and he wanted to have this this kind of giant bottle with a giant like a kind of Claus Ollenberger sculpture with a giant pen inside a giant spill of ink. Well, with an ink stain on the...

And these 2, you know, attractive women sitting on a float as it was drawn around town. His final thoughts of every day is is he dreams up the perfect ad each day. 1 sole unique advertisement to cause passes to stop in wonder, a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision, and congress with the velocity of modern life. You know, he's a kind of Moses of advertising. He's even kind of started dreaming up a new whole language, a new alphabet or script for advertising by tapping into what Joyce calls the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed in triliteral mono ideal symbols vertically of maximum visibility defined horizontally of maximum legibility deciphered and of magnetizing efficacy to arrest involuntary attention to interest to convince, to decide.

Oh, and he understands that Plumtree's Bonded Me is a really, really

bad ad. And how... I mean, clearly, there is a correspondence between Stephen's poems and Bloom's ads, and Bloom's perfect ad and Stephen's perfect poem that he wants to write. And there's no sense in the novel that Stephen's poetry is superior to Bloom's advertising, is there? Or is there?

No. It's not. It's it's a little dissy. I mean, it it... It's a metonym as well for the larger project of of writing Ulysses.

But no, they they double each other in many, many ways. I mean, Steven rips off the top. We must talk about ripping later, but Steven tears off the top of DC's letter to write the poem. Bloom rips off the top of tidbits, this Reader's Digest in order to wipe his ass while he sits on the toilet. There's a wonderful scene towards the end actually when they when they're hanging out drinking cocoa.

Loom tells Stephen about his never realized ad of the 2 women on the, you know, with the writing that I've just described. And Stephen counters with this kind of rather absurdist melodrama of a... It reminds me of The Shining. Actually. There's just someone...

A coach draws up outside a hotel and someone rushes in and finds someone else in the hotel typing over and over, just Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel. But they, you know, they're both kind of, if you like, scenes of of writing. 1 is a kind of avant garde poem, and the other is a... Is an ad. Yeah.

I mean, Bloom Bloom also... It's not just advertising. I mean, he he understands newspapers very intimately. He spends all day working for 1. But there's a wonderful detail when...

And towards the end, they're at the Cabman Shelter. They're looking at the evening telegraph. And Bloom not only notices a bit of bad type, but he understands why it's there. It says it's reporting on Paddy Dignham's funeral and who was there. And it says, Martin Cunningham, John Power, dot,closeparenthesis,e@on1slasheight, adore...

Dora, Dora, Dora, Dora, Dora must be where he called Monks the day father about Key's ad. In other words, that's when he phoned earlier and interrupted the day father, the kind of print supervisor. So there's a very intimate kind of micro level understanding of of how font and media and typography works.

And, of course, Ulysses itself is Is full of mistakes. Full of mistakes for the typos about which Joyce wrote brilliantly. They are not misprints, but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of, which to be used whenever anyone spots a mistake in the NRB. Again, so then we have the newspaper, and that brings us to the telephone.

Derrida has a wonderful essay, Ulysses Gramophone, in which he he points out that the line in Aeolus, Bloom is at the telephone. Doesn't... We should understand it not just to mean what it obviously means, which is, you know, Bloom's on the line. Bloom is calling. But it mean...

It... More profoundly, it means that Bloom's Bloom's kind of being in the world is a being at the telephone. Right? It's a being within the kind of vectors and switch workery of of medial network. So, you know, even when in the hallucinatory Circe chapter, get Bloom has become this great statesman and kind of emperor of all the world.

As he prepares to give a to give a great speech, wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set up, a set for reception of message. But it's not just him. Know, Steven... I mean, the the telephone is a big part of his imaginary. So he reasons on the beach that since the strand entwining cables of all everyone's navel cords, eventually, if you track it backwards, it must lead back to a single a single woman.

He imagines calling Eve up from his own tummy button. He's going, hello, Kinch here. But that's his nickname or Buck Mulligan's nickname for him, Kinch. Hello, Kinch here. Put me onto Edenville.

Aleph. Aleph naught naught 1. And later in Circe, we get this trunk line carrying the voice of Elijah. But there's, you know, there's there's gramophones, there's, in general, letters racing around the book, post offices, mailboats, postcards whose medial status is is debated and even litigated by the characters, photographs, you know, Molly and and Leopold Bloom's daughter, Millie, is a photo girl. She's working in a in a photoshop.

They have a photo of this nymph in in a bath above their bed. Bloom has in his drawer a pornographic photo. There are records being played. A pianola in the brothel. It's not a piano.

It's a pianola, an automated punch card.

Feet, isn't it? The pianola, isn't that when you pump it with the pedals or is

that Yeah. But it's running on on, like, the, like, the, you know, jacquard looms on this kind of punch card pattern. I mean, even books, they're understood as as media objects. I mean, they're they're they're framed in terms of their prints, their binding, their cover. Buck Mulligan at the beginning is making fun of the Dun Ema press, was run by Yeats' sister, but he really focuses on the silliness of the kind of the color scheme they use and the way the books are bound and so on.

So, you know, as I was saying, this this is kind of, you know, McClellan, Friedrich Kittler, Wilhelm Flusser level of of sophisticated, you know, understanding of media history from from the characters. So, you know, in chapter 17, they actually discuss what Joyce describes as the increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets, and the anticipation of modern stenography and telegraphic code, and the cuneiform inscriptions, Semitic, and the vergular quinquescostate ogham writing, Celtic.

There's also a megaphone at some point. So, you know, there's no kind of phone absent from the book. And the gramophone, Becca, obviously, was a student of Joyce's in in every sense. But that... The bit about sort of...

Is it Bloom imagines the gramophones and everyone, you can listen to your grandfather's voice on the gramophone. Yeah. And that sort of... That's Crap's last tape, right, comes out of that.

Very much. But this was actually Edison's original idea. This was part of his advertising pitch for his invention. It's when when your when your grandfather dies, you'll be able to keep his voice going. But but Bloom actually imagines putting a gramophone into the grave.

He said, no. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday, put on poor old grandfather. Hello. Hello.

Hello. I'm awfully glad. Awfully glad. See you again. Hello.

Hello. I'm off... Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face. But he also imagines putting a telephone in in case of premature...

Yeah. You're still alive in the grave. Yeah. Need to...

So this is... Yeah. There's this link made between media and and practices of, yeah, death and mourning and so on, which runs through the book.

I mean, you mentioned earlier that Healy's stationary that... His plan. But there there is a Healy's advert wandering through the novel that these people, which you have the the letters h e l

y y s.

And apostrophe s as the final 1. I think that's your... He's referred to as apostrophe s. At some

And he lags behind. He sees he's stuffing a sandwich in his mouth. Even the letters of the book, eat and crap, you know, he gets out of sync with the others. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I mentioned the trams earlier. But it is a a form of communication. The trams...

And they have ads on their sides. They are they are metaphors. They are moving around town carrying carrying signs. So I think, you know, the high the high kind of point in the novel of of this kind of media drama is is the Aeolus chapter, which is set in the Freeman's Journal and Evening Telegraph, they're 2 kind of sister papers. It's set in their editorial offices and and print room.

And the chapter starts with trams starting out to all the different parts of Dublin, and all the names have been called out. But also paper boys carrying papers around shouting out the headlines just as the tram conductors shout out the the destinations. You know, we see Paddy Dignham's death notice being typeset, so the letters are backwards. And Bloom sees this and recalls the way his Jewish father would read the Haggadah, which is also written backwards. Later, Rudy will be shown the ghost of Rudy reading backwards.

We also see him later. His reversed alphabetic cryptogram, he's written to his... This mistress that you mentioned, his kind of pen pal mistress who may or may not actually exist, Martha. So again, these similarly associative lines go out from just from that little detail to all parts of of the novel. And in that chapter, 1 of the wonderful things about it that wasn't in the 1st printing, but Joyce liked it so much, he dropped them in for the 2nd or 3rd printing, is that all these headlines are interspersed.

So in in block... In Trumpian block capitals. So how a great daily organ is turned out or o harp aeolian as someone gets out the dental floss or as Stephen tells, the story I mentioned about the the bitties eating plums and throwing down the stones from Nelson's column. We get dames donate, Dublin sit, speed pills, velocities, arrow lifts, belief. Sophists wallow haughty Helen Square on proboscis.

Spartans, gnash molars. Ithakon's vow pen is champ. So, you know, it's a vision of the world as a as a medial space, But it's all brilliantly rendered kind of very haptically in the actual physical setting of the press room and and the print room. These machines just, you know, thumping and pressing and putting out. There's a wonderful sequence that kind of tracking Bloom's thoughts, but it's beyond them.

It just says, sult, the sound of the machine. Sult. The nethermost deck of the 1st machine jogged forward its flyboard with sult, the 1st batch of choir folded papers. Sult, almost human the way it's sult to call attention, doing its level best to speak. That door too, sult creaking, asking to be shut.

Everything speaks in its own way. It's great.

And of course, the novel itself is printed on. Not quite the same kind of machine that a newspaper is printed on, but it's still... But similar enough with reading about how the book itself is made.

It's a physical media artifact full of typos.

Yeah. Yeah. And that machine...

Is the middle m. Well, yeah. Sure. The the printing press is is a machine. I mean, the book starts straight away after the the mass parody.

Buck Mulligan lets out 2 shrill whistles from the Martello Tower over the Dublin Bay and almost immediately, these 2 shrill whistles come back from the mail boat. So either it's a coincidence or more probably he knows that at exactly that moment every morning. So he whistles out twice, the 2 whistles come back. And then he says, thanks old chap. That will do nicely.

Switch off the current, will you? In other words, you know, the universe is a machine and he's the operator or or he's directing the operator. This is very man behind curtain.

Or he's pretend... Or he's

pretending to He's faking it. Yeah. He's pretending to be a man.

He's conducting the orchestra that's not paying any attention to it.

Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, machines, I I I just... I love this kind of machinic vision of of of the universe. And again, it's it's a joke.

It's it's silly, but but but it's very serious too. I mean, is exactly the the vision that's being kind of promoted through through the book. And and we get a couple of chapters later, Stephen is by the the powerhouse, the pigeon house, this electricity generating station on the beach at Sandymount, which sets off a whole chain of associations about God as a pigeon impregnating Mary, and Patrice Egan giving him Taxiels La Vie de Jesus in Paris. His father is a revolutionary and a printer. We should talk about him later, actually.

And then... But but this is a kind of an adumbration, a foreshadowing of of this of this other scene where he stands next to this massive, massive electrical generating station in in Fleet Street in chapter 10, and we get this wonderful passage that just like the Douglas Hyde 1 is is kind of semi plagiarized. It's it's lifted from James Lane Allen's The Metal of the Pasture, but but really reworked. And Joyce writes, the whir of flapping leaven bands and of dynamos from the powerhouse urge Stephen to be on, beingless beings. Stop.

Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between 2 roaring worlds where they swirl.

Shatter them 1 and both, but stun myself too in the blow. It's the roar and the kind of capacity of the capacitators that's really focusing or channeling here Stephen's whole poetic and kind of ontological ambitions of what he wants to do in the universe, stun himself in the blow, bringing roaring worlds into into contact. Daedalus, of course, is the the 1st engineer. Right? But the whole of, you know, that chapter that appears in chapter 10, the wandering rocks, which is very machinic in its structure.

And in fact, Joyce also, 1 of the other schemers governing Ulysses was that each chapter had a kind of skill set attached to it and the and the the kind of... Or craft. And the craft for chapter 10, Joyce let be known, was mechanics. But so we get all these different episodes that are not connected to each other. They're taking place in different parts of Dublin, but they're kind of interpolated.

So we get bits from 1 episode kind of inserted into another 1, like kind of gear teeth or something to be to be locked onto. So we get this kind of white arm throwing a coin jumping across from 1 episode before it's actually played out into an earlier 1, and we get the Healy sandwich men kinda wandering around, or this throwaway floating down the river.

That episode, the episode 10, The Wandering Rocks, is divided into... Is it 19 mini episodes? So it's that... And you begin with this father father economy exactly.

Adjusting his watch.

Adjusting his watch. And there's like, you know, that Richard I Mason's 1st movie, Slackers, which begins with him sitting in the back of the taxi cab and then talking, and then the cab goes around the corner and someone crosses the road and the camera moves to follow them. And so that sort of jumping between these different people as they make their ways through Dublin. Almost like the whole novel in miniature.

Mean,

almost is like the novel in miniature. I mean, Joyce's friend, Frank Budgen, said to see Joyce at work on the wandering rocks was to see an engineer at work with compass and slide rule, a surveyor with theodolite and measuring chain. But in a way, he could have said that about the whole book. I mean, as you say, this is how the whole book works. It's this giant...

I think we talked about orreries in relation to Middlemarch in our last session. In fact, in Ulysses, 1 of Bloom's many unrealized projects is making miniature orreries for kids to learn about the stars in kindergarten. But the book is really works like like an orrery, this big kind of mechanical contraption full of not so much direct lines as elliptical bands and parts working and acting on other parts at distance. So so we get all these kind of... Like in The Wandering Rocks, these interpolations, these moments of precognition.

So Stephen, the night before, has had a dream about Haroun Al Rashid and the Street Of Harlots, and he doesn't really understand where it came from, but there are elements in it, like this melon that also corresponds with all kind of gear tooth interlocks with Bloom's dream and all this Sinbad stuff. And then some of Stephen's free associative lines on the beach, like, in sleep, the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. That kind of almost precognitively interlocks with Molly's later menstruating when she's drawn from sleep by the wet sign from bed. Know, we get throughout the book, there's interspersed the jingle jangle or the jingle of of Molly's bed coits, which signals her her adultery with with her blazes boiling and and it fires off a whole other set of associations to tram lines and all kinds of things. I mean, Bloom has a vision of clock hands bringing bodies, their bodies, you know, Molly and and Blazes' body together.

But but in a way, the whole the whole book is is this. Right? It's this kind of...

But made with with bodies on it. I mean, it's a very fleshy oratory. It's not it's not brass and...

No. No. These are these are these are bodies. These are definitely these are these are definitely bodies. I mean, Joyce is...

He's a materialist. Right?

I'm eager to get to the bodies, clearly. But but before we get to the bodies, it's... I mean, I suppose the thing that's also that is quite important about the the mechanics of it is that if you actually had the gears made of flesh, they wouldn't work.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I think you you said last... In our last session that without Middlemarch Ulysses would not have been possible, which I think is very true. But another book without which it would have been even more impossible is is Stern's Tristram Shandy. And at 1 point, in 1 of the many self reflexive moments in in that book, Stern compares his own text to a contraption with adventitious parts that have intersections so involved 1 will within another that the machinery of my work becomes a species by itself.

2 contradictory motions are introduced into it and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive and it is progressive too. And Joyce pretty much explicitly invokes that passage when he has Bloom contemplate how events are all connected to each other. So he he remembers a riot a few years back, and he thinks, oh, that's how it was in that riot I got to know that that medical guy Dixon who who later dressed this bee sting I got, but he's now in Hollis Street where missus Purefoy is having her baby, who I just bumped into. He says, wheels within wheels.

It's all wheels within wheels. I think all this kind of mechanistic vision really culminates in Ithaca in chapter 17 where Bloom takes Stephen back for Coco to his house and we get this very... I mean, the whole thing is described as in terms of trajectories, weights, and so on. So the 2 men geometrically cross the circus by George's church. Diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

And then because Bloom is keyless, you know, bunch of associations to the house of keys ad and so on and so on. He falls by his body's known weight of 11 stone and 4 pound in avoir du pois measure as certified by the graduated machine for periodical self weight in the premises of Francis Frodemann, pharmaceutical chemist. Then he lights a fire and we get... We're told where the coal is from, what shapes the bricks are, how much each 1 cost, what is the chemical process of ignition, how hard hydrogen and carbon and so on react together. We get this detail of the Lucifer match, which fires off all these associations to Macham's masterpiece, the title of the story that Bloom read in tidbits earlier and this Luciferian nonserviam that Stephen has shouted in the brothel earlier.

And then we we move on to Stephen's mental associations of fires being kindled to him. He almost... He remembers... He lists every... Or or the text lists every fire that has been kindled for him from early childhood.

You know, they are humans. They are... But they are caught up in this giant machinery.

I mean, going back a moment to Tristram Shandy, there's that wonderful... 1 of the many wonderful moments in Tristram Shandy where he kind of says, I'm never gonna be able to finish this book because, you know, I've started writing it however long ago, and it's meant to be a story of my life, but more time has elapsed in life than I have managed to cover in the story. So life proceeds faster than writing can keep up with. And to try and contain all life in writing is sort of this impossible task and it's endlessly life is sort of expanding faster than writing can keep up with it. And is that...

And in a way, you know, these things that you've been describing in Ulysses sound like this similar sort of... This attempt to get this association, this association, and how do we get them all into the book, but it can't can't contain everything? Or does Ulysses somehow manage to get it all in? Well, this

is a really interesting question because, you know, we come back to what what happens in Ulysses. I mean, nothing. It's a really banal day. Very, very little happens. What makes it all meaningful is is the gigantic mechanism of, you know, orrery of associations that that Joyce works it up into.

I mean, if we take that away and kind of say, well, what's what's it actually about? You know, it's not an uplifting story. It's a rather sad story actually. No 1 really connects to each other. This couple who haven't had proper sex for 10 years, they've got a dead son kind of hovering in the bed between them in which they sleep, foot to mouth, in which she's just had sex with someone else who's been eating plum trees, potted meat, and so on and so on.

There's not much to tell. But the fact that this becomes this, I mean, cosmic monumentally giant affirmation, you know, the biggest silent word in English literature, yes, is entirely down to the writing really, is an interesting... And then which begs the question, well, at what scale can we read this then? How are we to understand... On which kind of scalar plane does this event of Ulysses actually actually take place?

It's a famously difficult book, but it is much... Actually, many ways, much less difficult than its reputation. There are many ways to read it. And it is... You know, no one's gonna get 100th or 1000th of the many references without the help of, you know, 1 of the many books which have been written to help people find their way through it.

But you can you can read it for fun. I mean, it may sound ridiculous, but it really isn't. You can just sit down and you can read Ulysses for fun. It's really funny. You know, a keyword is relish.

Right? That mister Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, and that...

What does that mean? Does that mean he puts relish on his...

Ketchup could on his kidneys, or that he ate them with great, you know, gusto and enjoyment. But it comes up again and again in the novel, and that is... It's so important, I think, that Ulysses... You're as right, I mean, there is a great sadness at the heart of it in some ways, but it also takes such relish in food and in sex, in city life, in human life, in human bodies, and, you know, above all, in language, really. You know, it's a book to be read with relish.

You know, you should read it the way that Bloom, you know, liked his thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hen cod rose. Right? The words feel good in your mouth the way the food would.

Alain Robreier, the the the French kind of nouveau ravencier writer, he said provocatively, but interestingly, he said, you know, the novels of Dickens, Baussack, you don't actually need to read them because they do all the readers' work. It comes like ready read for you. Whereas my own work, Rob Grier, but even more so actually the work of Joyce, I think, really needs an active active of reading. I mean, that's the labor. That that's the scale.

That's the the site in which the meaning of the book is happening. It's it's it's not in the text, it's in it's in the reader and and I think what the text does to a large extent is dramatize and problematize the the possibility of reading anything. There are so many unreadable letters, deliberately unreadable sequences. I mean, in chapter 14 at 1 point where it's tracked the development of the English language from Anglo Saxon through Dickens and Smallet and so on. I mean, by the end, it's almost kind of LLM spew.

I mean, unreadable. But... And even within that, if you read it very, very carefully, there's all this stuff about steaming open telegrams and can we get secret information if we grammarize an envelope and cryptograms and and and so on. We get these... Like I said, we get these these blank postcards and cryptic postcards and hidden messages.

And and this is a kind of mise en abeam. This is a miniature of of the whole book. The drama is reading it and and in so doing, reading. I mean, I I really think, you know, another Bloom, Harold Bloom's claimed that Kafka's work was not just a literary, it was a sacred event. He said this is a sacred event in the history of of the of the Jewish people.

And I think the same claim could be made about Ulysses. It's a monumental event in the development of human consciousness. It's, you know, to go Hegelian as we did last week with Middlemarch, it's a moment at which this kind of self reflective double consciousness becomes apparent. And through that act, we we kind of are able to read the becoming human of the of the human in it.

To listen to the rest of this episode, the other episodes in the man behind the curtain, and all the LRB's other close reading series from this and previous years, subscribe to close readings now by going to lrb.me/audio, or just follow the link in the description.

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