Playing Rough

Here are some thoughts organized more fully than they were written last time.

Of his literary masterpiece Ulysses, James Joyce said, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries”.  Indeed, for nearly a century this novel has kept both professors and students hard at work digging through every nuance of language Joyce has buried within its pages.  Joyce’s work is easily categorized as modernist in style.  This work leaves no doubt that his intentions were to write something completely unique.  Beyond that initial categorization, a precise definition of this type of writing is difficult to pin down.  Every version of this book that I am aware of has been published in the form of a novel.  Most place this work squarely in the category of fictional prose.  However, because this work contains a vast array of poetic elements, I submit that an edition of Ulysses should be published in a poetic format.  In fact, reading the work as poetry is key in deciphering many of the treasures within the text.

This concept may come across as unorthodox to those who know the work.  Joyce himself did not write the work as verse and there are many portions of the book that read nothing like poetry.  Addressing these concerns is fundamental before going any further into the reasons for a poetic version of Ulysses.  Examining the writings of poets contemporary with Joyce helps refute these dilemmas.  T.S. Eliot’s immortal modernist poem The Waste Land typifies a poem that uses the same the stream-of-consciousness style that Joyce employs in his book.  Both mix conversational language with more poetic forms of speech; lacking generally accepted sentence structure.  It should be pointed out that there are moments in Waste Land that read nothing like poetry either.  Still, it does not fully explain why Joyce decided not to publish a poetic text himself.  Perhaps this is the crowning enigma.  Perhaps this is the biggest puzzle of them all which Joyce desired those professors to put together.  He himself would not publish it in its true form, but leave subtle hints throughout the text helping pedagogues to unravel and knit together the work’s true form.

The clues are numerous.  First, the work containing the title character from which Ulysses takes its name: Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic poem.  Knowing this work is key to understanding many of the literary illusions in Ulysses including the episodes and the main characters.  Although the counterparts of The Odyssey’s highly idealized characters in Ulysses do not exactly live up to the standards one would expect of them.  Joyce parodies the grandiose stories of the Greeks by focusing on the drab, everyday life of the Irish through modernist verse. 

The title of the book itself is a parody and a contradiction.  Joyce frequently compares the Irish to the Greeks, but Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus.  Rome, in Ulysses, is constantly equated with the British Empire.  In addition to that, the Ulysses of Joyce’s novel is neither Greek nor Roman, British nor Irish, but a Jew.  The contradictions continue to pile up and all these contradictions culminate in the idea that the novel itself is a contradiction and is not intended to be a novel at all, but a modernist’s epic poem.

What’s missing from the book provides just as much evidence for this argument.  The fact that an entire episode is devoid of punctuation (would this not be much easier to read in stanza form?).  The fact that Joyce uses many words that cannot be found in any English dictionary just for their sound.  The fact of the unconventional grammar (sometimes lacking in both subjects and predicates).  Joyce’s descriptions of setting and landscape can be both beautiful and haunting, but other times he is so vague that one cannot be sure whose thoughts one is reading or where the action is taking place.  Once these thoughts are recognized as poetry, these ambiguities diminish in importance and the underlying metaphors, illusions, and tone grow more discernable. 

The thoughts of Stephan Dedalus heavily emanate the fragrant odor of poetry.  For example “You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time.  A very short space of time through very short times of space.  Five, six: the nabeneinander ineluctably!  I am getting on nicely in the dark.  My sword hangs at my side.  Tap with it: they do.  My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander.  Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick.  Wild Sea money.  Dominie Deasy kens them a’. Won’t you come to Sandymount Madeline the mare?”  The imagery, the conveyance of ideas, the structure, and the grammar all loudly proclaim this to be poetic verse.