Girl Detective

Welcome back, you few, you happy few, who are still brave enough to continue with Joyce’s oh-so-challenging Ulysses. This week finds us in the mucky middle of book 15, Circe. Oh, what a long, strange trip it is.

I picked the section that begins with Zoe saying “Talk away till you’re black in the face,” which is an interesting twist on the “blue” we’re more accustomed to. Blue indicates lack of oxygen, while black points to death. Bloom has a short interlude of lucidity with Zoe, but he goes in and out of fantasy. I could tell what was fantasy and what not mostly but not always by when the “real” people in the room spoke, rather than the objects, such as Lynch’s cap, Zoe’s buckles and Bella’s fan; or imaginary people, such as Virag (Bloom’s grandfather), and others.

An extended and jaw-dropping (and likely censor-enraging) dream sequence begins when the madame, Bella Cohen enters and says “My word, I’m all of a mucksweat.” Everything from there till when she asks “Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul?” is Bloom’s imagination, his subconscious and secret thoughts dragged out of the dark and brought to life.

To briefly summarize, Bloom and Bella switch roles. She becomes a man named Bello, he a woman referred to still as Bloom but with feminine pronouns. Bello, like Circe did to Odysseus’ men, makes Bloom piglike and alludes to many porcine things. In an inversion of the play Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, many of the things Bello as a man does to Bloom as a woman echo those that Wanda does to Severin. I was fortunate to see a modern retelling, Venus in Fur, a few years ago, so I recognize the references.

Bello rides Bloom as a horse, which the other prostitutes clamor to do also. Bello puts out a lit cigar on her ear, and auctions her off to other men, after this: “[Bello] bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.”

For the record, Joyce got his words mixed up. Vulva refers to all of woman’s external genitalia such as the labiae and the clitoris, south of the pubic bone. North of it, with the hair, is the mons. The reproductive canal is the vagina, which is what Bello plunges his arm into up to the elbow. This is not, as schmoop notes in its summary of 15: Circe, the same as “Bello elbows Bloom in the vulva.”

The above terminology, and the importance of using it correctly, is from one of my new favorite books, which I’ve found not surprisingly often relevant to this reading of Ulysses, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski. The subtitle of the book is probably more for getting attention. I find the website’s description a better one: “An essential exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works–based on groundbreaking research and brain science.” Poldy and Molly could really have used this book. So could Joyce. Here’s Matisse’s take on the anatomy in Chapter 15, Circe:

Back to Ulysses. Bloom gradually returns to a state of masculinity and Bello to Bella. Reality is again broached when Bella asks about the piano.

You can visit the summary at Schmoop.com and the analysis if that helps. Again, they’re not precise, but I do find them broadly helpful.

Did anyone else see Venus in Fur when it was in Minneapolis? Excerpt video here, and review here.

What did you think of this part of chapter 15?

Let’s meet here next Monday 5/18/15 to discuss the last part of chapter 15, and the chapter as a whole.

Apologies for this week’s late post. I visited my parents this weekend with my sister to help them clear out the house while they’re still alive and well, which I wrote about here. I highly recommend doing this, both getting together with the nuclear family, and going through things before one has to. We’ve all been influenced by one of my other recent favorite books, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Too see a video where she helps a woman sort her books, go to this link at Boing Boing.

Blogging about it on Monday was perhaps an ambitious goal. I’ll adjust the schedule to Wednesday, I think, when we read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer.

Future schedule and past posts:

5/18/15 discuss and tweet 3475-end, and all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14
Week 12: book 15 part 1/3

My two sisters and I visited my parents to help them clear out decades of stuff. Before you ask: No one died. They’re not moving. This visit was prompted after I got my mom one of my new favorite books, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

After reading it, my parents started to sort through the basement and attic, but soon realized they’d need to ask each of us if we wanted this or that thing that belonged to this or that relative. Our solution was to go, without partners or kids, to my parents’ house for the weekend, identify what sparked joy, and move out what didn’t.

We spent the weekend going through bags and boxes. We laughed, we cried, we recoiled in horror. And we had the great good fortune to spend a whole weekend with each other, our nuclear family, as adults.

My mother was the most reluctant participant. She has trouble letting things go. When she and had a few hours to tackle her books, we weeded four shelves, plus one cabinet (not pictured). We filled five banker boxes to donate, and by the end she was getting the hang of it.

Before:

What you can’t see is that the four shelves are actually double stacked, with books behind and in front. Both in front and behind, many were stacked horizontally, not vertically, so Mom could pack more in.

After:

There are no longer books hidden behind; all books are visible. Almost all the books are stored upright, with extra space on each shelf.

I think the biggest challenge my mom had was with books she’d bought in the past, fully intended to read, still wanted to, or felt she ’should’, but hadn’t.

I had the same problem when I went through out books. What helped me was to ask, do I feel excited to read this book? Is it something I could read now, if time and too many book groups allowed? Or, is it something I feel I ’should’ read because I bought it, or it was given to me, or I wanted to really read at one point and didn’t get around to. Giving the latter books away was a huge relief to me, and really opened up my shelves to show me the books I really wanted to read.

Have any of the rest of you tried the KonMari method?

“Even the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.” 15.111-12

So says Stephen Dedalus, having an anti-feminist moment on his way to visit prostitutes. In Ulysses Annotated, Gifford links the line to the above work of art, “Phyllis and Aristotle” by Hans Baldung, from the Louvre.

After the dense and thorny chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun, we are given a breather, in both white space on the page, and humor. Alas, I’m feeling rather glum and beaten down by Ulysses. Unlike the many other recent readalongs I’ve done–Bleak House, David Copperfield, Moby Dick, Sandman, and Odyssey–Ulysses continues to confound. With other books, I’ve thought, wow, there’s a lot of great stuff in here, and it’s not as intimidating as I’d feared.

I’m not sure if I’ve disclosed this before, but in literature, I’m basically self educated. I had a typical low-quality US education through high school, required to read not that many classics, and skiving off reading several of those. I was immature and my teachers gave me As because I was clever and they were easily fooled, and I was more interested in the works of Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, and Kathleen Woodiwiss at the time.

In college I majored in marketing, and took one English class in which we read (and I actually DID read) only 3 books: The Iliad, War and Peace, and Hemingway’s In Our Time. After having my soul sucked from working in marketing for several years, I went to graduate school in religion, and finagled a Shakespeare class out of that but not much more in literature. So I am far from an expert in literature, just a very curious amateur.

Ulysses is at least as intimidating as I’d feared, not least because Joyce was being wilfully abstruse and trying to push the envelope of the novel. While I can admire the ambition, and agree that he succeeded, this doesn’t make the novel much of a pleasure to read at least on this first time through.

In my attempts as moderator of this readalong, I’ve explored different things to try to better understand this book. I’m reading the notes in the exhaustive and exhausting Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford. I am reading Schmoop.com’s summaries and analyses of the chapters. I have gotten both the original and updated version of Harry Blamires’ Bloomsday Book from the library. A work by Joseph Campbell looked promising, but was only mine for a few weeks in which I was too busy to appreciate it.

When I came across a title called Virgin and Veteran readings of Ulysses by Margaret Norris I was excited, because I had begun to wish for notes and references geared to me as a first-time reader. Alas, this is not that book. It is written in what I refer to as high academ-ese, and is a book about the pedagogy of Ulysses and how to teach it. As I tried to wade through the introduction, though, two things caught my notice.

Ulysses can arguably be “read” by a first-time or virgin reader, but can be fully “understood” only by a veteran reader who brings knowledge of the whole work, including the ending, to any part of it. (p2)

Norris notes that many guides to Ulysses, in explaining certain passages, give spoilers from the veteran readers. For example, most notes talk about Bloom’s Jewishness before it is made explicit or even implicit in the text.

The most notable example for me was when schmoop noted that Poldy and Molly hadn’t had sex for ten years. Yet the text only said something that alluded to this, which is gradually explained over the rest of the book.

Which raises (NB, does not “beg,” which is so often misused) the questions: do the notes “spoil” in multiple meanings of the word, the experience of reading this book for the first time? Is reading Ulysses the first time rather like having sex for the first time: awkward, bewildering, embarrassing, sometimes painful, fleetingly delightful, but seriously, it gets GREAT the more you do it? Is there a point to reading Ulysses one time only?

On that cheerful note, let’s talk about the first part of 15: Circe. Overall, 15 is a hallucinatory play that alternates between fantasy and reality. I was reminded both of Kafka and of A Christmas Story. Then I watched last night’s Mad Men; that series is full of imaginary episodes comes to life, sometimes with no clear mark of what is read and what is not. Schmoop mentions Mel Brooks movies, and I’m sure there are loads more works of art we can think of that alternate and blur fantasy and reality. The stopping point I chose, at about line 1955, is just as Bloom is coming out of an imagined Alleluia chorus and brought into reality by Zoe, a prostitute, (I will not use “whore” to refer to these women as the notes often do. Prostitute is a job; whore is a suitcase of value judgments.) who comments:

“Talk away till You’re black in the face.”

The gist of it, though, and I’m trying to stick to just the facts, ma’am, and not include any spoiler-y notes, is that Bloom is following Stephen and Lynch into Mabbot Street and nighttown, a bad area. Bloom wants to get Stephen before he spends his money and body and inner self with prostitutes. Bloom’s stream of consciousness comes to life, though, and we see his ego and insecurities played out, as well as some of his past.

The lemon soap gets its own line, the shriveled potato is mistaken for a sign of STD, and Bloom seems to have a very confused, or defiant, sense of what is kosher. Camels make an appearance, and they’re not kosher, as they have cloven hooves.

What did everyone else think? Stay with me; we can get through this. I will climb out of my slough of despond.

Your assignment for next week, should you choose to accept it, is to read to this line, which signals another shift from dream to reality:

“(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)”

It’s on page 554 of my edition, the Vintage. In the online Columbia, it’s 15.3474

We’ll meet here next week to chat about the middle of chapter 15 to that point. The schedule for the rest:

5/11/15 discuss and tweet on 15, lines 1956 to 3474
5/18/15 discuss and tweet 3475-end, and all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14