monologue and philology

Ulysses, episode 3, Proteus

There was no new Ulysses update last week. This episode took me a minute to read, which I felt really guilty about because before I had been confidently cooking. I’d start in the evening and think “oh I’m not getting this, better to try in the morning” and then pick up where I left off in the morning, but realize I didn’t remember what was going on and have to start all over. Some reading guide I read suggested reading all three of the first episodes in one sitting. I guess you could do that? But they are all so different from each other in their form, I’ve liked having one rattling around in my head at a time. I’ve just had trouble getting to the “end” of episode 3.

But then I read the Ulysses Guide page for it and the second sentence is “Dense and difficult to follow, ‘Proteus’ is where most first time readers of Ulysses throw in the towel.” At least my frustration is not unique. Instead, it links me to the probably thousands of other people who have started and struggled to get past episode 3.¹ Reading the guide did help me get over the hump. For whatever reason², I’ve been reticent to use tools that I view as aids (annotations, guides, listening to it on audiobook) on the first pass at reading the episodes. I’m not exactly doing a “does reading that is anything other than intaking graphemes on a page ‘count’” take here, but there are reasons I wanted to try for it to be just me and the written words at first.

With Modernism, where the form of the art is such a concern for the artist, there is value in the struggle that that form creates. Parsing the language of Joyce (or Woolf, or Faulkner) can be substantially easier when a narrator has already made choices about tone, emphasis and rhythm. This is especially true when the language of the passage is deeply linked with the characters’ interiority and voice like it is in episode 3. In the Gilbert schema, Joyce gives this episode the “technic” of “monologue” and in the Linati schema, the associated science/art is “philology.”³ Even more than the two previous episodes, this one announces a focus on parsing meaning from language, including spoken-aloud language.

I’m not arguing that hearing it instead of looking at the words makes it not “count” as reading,⁴ but it does outsource some of the work of reading that I am interested in doing. And of course, a monologue has a wide range of choices to be made! If not initially exposed to the audio version, I can land differently on my conclusion. See the video below of actors doing Cher’s debate class monologue from Clueless (to me, there is one winner here and it is not Andrew Garfield.)

What actually shifted my metacognition about my use of audiobooks significantly was the audiobook for my favorite romance novel, Lord of Scoundrels. When Jessica is telling her grandmother about how much she wanted to kiss Dain, she says “Oh Genevieve. He was so adorable. I wanted to kiss him. Right on his big, beautiful nose.” (Embedded below). The narrator, Kate Reading, puts a lot of whiny mustard on that adorable. When I first heard it, I was struck—that was never how I had read the line before. Even in a genre book where I’m significantly more concerned with what happens than the form that information takes, the audiobook representing a narrowing of interpretation. And now I have I really a hard time hearing/reading it any other way in my head. This is not bad/lazy/immoral/not reading! But it is different. And I have to think about when I am reading if I want to give over those line reading choices to someone else when I know I’ll struggle to get back my own once I hear their choice.

Thinking about this process and having anxiety about it during “Proteus” felt appropriate, since Stephen opens his “monologue” considering how his senses work, starting the “ineluctable modality of the visible” and parsing the colors of the Sandymount Strand and the information he is intaking visually, with the “ineluctable modality of the audible” that only becomes his primary sense when he experiments with sensing the world with his eyes closed.

So I hit my head against the wall a few times and it took two weeks to have my reading attention align with the 6000 words. I also broke down and bought a hard copy of Don Gifford’s annotations—I know this about myself when I read things in Italian: the more materials I have in front of me that keep me from “just looking it up” on the computer, the more fluid my reading experience. So far what I’m doing is just checking the Gifford as I am interested in something to see if he has anything to say, rather than trying to read all the annotations.⁵

The most affecting section of this episode for me is when Stephen works himself into a tizzy over a dead dog on the beach and a live dog investigating the dead one. This fear comes from Joyce himself and he gives his own phobia to his protagonist. But this anxiety transitions to thinking about his frenemy Buck Mulligan saving people from drowning and wondering if he, Stephen, could do the same—despite an additional fear of water and not being a very strong swimmer.

Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden’s rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t see! Who’s behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I... With him together down... I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

The meditation on the hypothetical becomes real regret when Stephen thinks of “her,” his mother, whose death he feels deep guilt about.

I’m biased as an aquaphobic person⁶ myself, but the fear of being in water has to be one of the most acute and poetic phobias because the thing you do to overcome it (exposure to being in water, putting your face in water, practicing swimming) simulates the experience of having a panic attack, with quick breathes, a racing heart, losing bodily sensations because of your weightlessness, even if you aren’t panicking yet. My most irrational thoughts happen when I am swimming in a pool, specifically that someone or something is going to pull me down (“Can’t see! Who’s behind me?”).

So far, water has been a preoccupation in Ulysses. This makes sense—it takes place in a coastal city on an island. The sea is called their (Ireland’s) mother and Stephen is scared of facing it and he’s lost his actual mother and feels all-consuming guilt at his role in not saving her. The thought of drowning returns near the very end of the episode, though this drowning is now landbound: his father in in a Dublin bar and Stephen’s own debt.

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise landward. There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

Stephen then picks his nose,⁷ gets anxious about anyone seeing him do so and turns around, though to my surprise, he turns around to look at the sea. I’ve reread this last 1/3 of the episode a few times now and I can’t quite figure out when he is looking at the sea and when he turns away. But “he turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.” Pretty clearly, his back has been to the sea and when he checks to see if anyone is behind him, he sees a ship going into Dublin’s port.

So I’m still not listening to any audio of the chapters, but I am letting myself poke around annotations and any number of “guides” during the first re-reads throughs, mostly to keep flow going and to keep my mind from wandering when I get frustrated. I think listening to the book with a narrator with an Irish accent might be a treat for when I am “finished.”⁸ Here is what I’ve been using so far.

Ulysses Annotated Revised and Expanded by Don Gifford—I got a used copy on eBay! All the internet resources I’ve come across cite to these annotations and it is nice to have a hard copy of something while I read, to avoid the temptation to open my phone (there be dragons) to check something.

The Ulysses Guide: Before “Proteus” I read these episode guides after my first run through of each of the episodes, before I went back to read the episodes a second time. I think I’ll still try to get through episodes once before I try the guide, but I’m going to be less rigid about it.

Blooms and Barnacles’ “Decoding Dedalus” series: Now that is the good stuff. Very very close reading of specific passages from Ulysses. I turned to it a few times when I got in “Proteus” and am looking forward to going back (ha) and reading the entries about passages from “Telemachus” and “Nestor.”

Next episode is the beginning of part II, which means I get to meet Leopold Bloom.

recommendations

These are all things that make me have poetic feelings about my deep-seated fear of water and drowning.

I love Titanic (dir. James Cameron) (big romance! big history! frame narrative! Victor Garber!), but the ship itself is one of my number nightmare fuels—if I think about one image of the lights flickering out while the stern keels too close to my bedtime, I won’t be able to sleep. But I’ve rewatched the whole movie twice in the past year and realized, for all of Cameron’s prowess at scale, quite a few of the ocean scenes I was comfortably able to think “oh they filmed this in a big pool.” Also, fun fact about me: when I did my first triathlon (something I challenged myself to do because I was so embarrassed of not being able to swim without panicking), I carried a picture of Ioan Gruffudd who plays Officer Harold Lowe—the guy in the lifeboat who comes to get Rose.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was the modernist one-day-two-people novel that I attached to as a teen (possibly an upcoming Ulysses update will explore this more), but To the River by Olivia Laing is a memoir of the author’s relationship to Woolf and to the River Ouse (and a history of the river), where Woolf drowned herself. The whole thing is very poetic and moving to someone who imprinted on Woolf and has a great fear of both drowning and my own mind.

Obviously, the best Beach Boy is Brian, but my favorite is Dennis. Dennis drowned in Marina del Ray when he was 39. I love his voice on their cover of “Do You Wanna Dance?” but my recommendation is his solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, which I first listened to after Karina Longworth recommended it on the Charles Manson season of You Must Remember This?, one of the great seasons of podcasting ever.

The big one of course is Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a previous winter big read. I once recommended it to a law school friend over dinner at law school and another law student chimed in, seconding the recommendation. My friend asked “it’s about whales?” and I said “I mean, yes, but also it is about God” and the second recommender said “well, it’s about power.” He turned out to be a litigator and I did not! So.

1. I wonder when people are most likely to balk on War and Peace. The hardest part for me to get through was the second epilogue, where Tolstoy tries to Figure Out All Of History like he is Casaubon or something. But I wasn’t going to give up after going so far! Stephen Dedalus is a little bit like if Fred Vincy tried to be Casaubon.

2. I know the reason: an inflated sense of self!

3. From Merriam-Webster “1: the study of literature and of disciplines relevant to literature or to language as used in literature

2a: linguistics especially : historical and comparative linguistics

b: the study of human speech especially as the vehicle of literature and as a field of study that sheds light on cultural history”

4. Ultimately I think this is the boring verb to use here. Why are we “counting” reading? If the question is “can we discuss this book together?” than the answer is mostly yes if one person has read it via audiobook and one person has read words on a page. But just like how the person who has read the words won’t have an opinion about the performances of the narrators, the person who listened to the audiobook may have less developed thoughts about the parsing of lines. The different forms may lead to different pacing experiences.

I think of it more like the difference between reading something in the original language and something translation—I’ve read L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend) in Italian, my second language, but when I am trying to talk about it, it is more useful to think about it my reading of it in English. One required way more work on my part but was the “original.” I also don’t fault someone for reading it only in English and readily admit that transformation of the form makes it more accessible to me. But there is stuff about how Ferrante writes in Italian that is lost in English because of the nature of the two languages!

5. I like when Joyce quotes or references Dante. I did not realize that he was an Italian weeb when I first started the book. He named his children Lucia and Giorgio!

6. I almost drowned as a kid and the phobia got consistently worse until in my mid 20s, when I learned how to swim again. I still struggle with water stuff in movies mostly and the worst is trailers: in a movie, a drowning/underwater scene will be telegraphed a little bit, but the quick shots of a trailer, which will certainly include a dramatic set piece if they filmed one, make me jump and wince.

7. My Kristeva abject alarm bells are going off.

8. I’m seeing now how nobody is ever really finished with Ulysses.