Context

What does one do with a book like Ulysses? Let’s imagine "good faith" readers willing to read page after page, refusing to stop on page 31, page 152, or page 314. Imagine these readers’ receptivity to Stephen’s, and then Bloom’s, interior monologues; picture the wonder at the realization that these monologues are inflecting the continuous, silent commentary of their thoughts. Register these intelligent readers’ boredom at passages that seem lengthily unconventional or excessively detailed, and do not overlook the frustration and annoyance that the book has been so highly rated, an irritation only partly soothed by an awareness that the book’s most difficult idioms are those of the street rather than the written page. Such readers feel alternately manipulated and dazzled by Joyce’s technique; they are often critical of, although sometimes inexplicably moved by, the flow of language and feelings through a single day in 1904. Now take these readers to "Ithaca," and make it apparent that no clearly demonstrable change takes place in the relation between Leopold and Molly, or Stephen and Leopold. Endure their rage when 565 pages later Stephen insults Bloom’s solicitude by singing an anti-Semitic song to him and refusing his offer of asylum for the night; explain why the book ends without a confrontation between Bloom and Molly on the subject of her adultery. Accent the lonely beauty of Bloom’s audition of "the double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the double vibration of a jew’s harp in the resonant lane," and insist that Bloom’s ruminative hesitancy is preferable to the rash words or violent actions so often deemed heroic: "Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now." Face these readers who feel cheated by having invested so much time and energy in a book apparently devoid of the exaggerated—perhaps miraculous—transformations we collectively call entertainment.

Why does Ulysses refuse its readers the gratification they crave? Why do its characters seem to defer the acquisition of a radically new understanding, while seeming to offer hope that such understanding is still possible, perhaps tomorrow? Why does it end with a restless, hungry soliloquy that revolves without pause through opposed, even incompatible, desires and positions? Why must it leave exhausted and exhilarated readers so unsatisfied? If Ulysses doesn’t scare off its readers through the unexpectedness of the reading process, it will madden them instead with the furies of desire.

Ulysses refuses to grant its readers the consolation of definitive conclusions because its ultimate focus is not on the characters but on the possibility of change in readers. The characters are ink figures designed partly to reflect readers, and partly to provoke them into a reassessment of their willingness to entertain new possibilities of relation—to the world, to the text, to ideas, and to other people. Joyce’s characters challenge his readers’ desire to identify readily (and therefore thoughtlessly) with them; his language, too, resists easy assimilation. It is only when the process of identification or automatic understanding is interrupted that a space opens for self-reflection, a space that can also be used to revile the author and his work. Joyce began developing such a technique of stimulating or frustrating readers into adopting fresh perspectives as early as Dubliners, when he used a technique he called epiclesis to punctuate the conclusion of his stories. Epiclesis, he argued, was a Greek Orthodox term for a moment of accusation that could trigger a possible transformation. Again and again in Dubliners, Joyce freezes his characters at the point where they reach the limits of their conscious understanding, handing that still life, or nature morte, picture to his readers without explicit commentary. The point of the technique is not to encourage condescension toward the characters, but to stimulate new life in readers through a startling insight into the ways we, like the characters, have become dead through habit. Joyce’s strategy works differently on experienced readers than on those who are "yung and easily freudened," but whether the readers are young or old, the text serves as a means for bringing their life sentence up for parole (a conditional freedom that, as the French derivation of the word suggests, is associated with human speech).

In the "Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses, Stephen suggests that the relation between characters and reader may, like the relation between body and soul, be an unexpectedly contrary one. Perhaps we are paradoxically soothed into quiescence when we watch characters refuse to relinquish their desires; as they fight, we find it easier to surrender our parallel struggles. Conversely, when a character fails to understand something crucial, perhaps that failure stimulates the reader to complete that partial understanding. Stephen suggests such a possibility when he invokes the literary-theological argument that disappointments in the material world produce triumphs of the spirit. After filling the empty cups of the revelers in the maternity hospital, he delivers a Blakean-Yeatsian pronouncement in the style of Elizabethan prose chronicles:

Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. Omnis caro ad te veniet.

Stephen is presenting a theory of how language is related to physical gestation and birth, which he has grafted onto a literary and Christian account of the relation between mortal and eternal life. He presents earth and heaven, flesh and spirit, as both opposite and parallel; they are counterparts that engender each other by turns. The word (or spirit) is made flesh in the body of a woman but as that mortal body ages the dying flesh newly augments the eternal word. A theory of reciprocity between flesh and word is equally applicable to the unspoken, changing dialogue between author and reader mediated by a written, material text. The author fleshes out his words in the making of a book, but the readers act as second (or post-) creators by translating the passing experience of reading into something that permanently changes their understanding of life. According to Stephen, the process of development is a rhythmic and interactive one in which death in one realm produces life in the next and vice versa, so that characters who fail to amend their lives may prod frustrated readers to achieve that elusive transformation.

Joyce’s words become "flesh" in the body of the text, but that imperfect flesh may engender something more complete in the spirit of the reader. When Stephen speaks of time’s ruins as building eternity’s mansions, he is alluding to a letter by William Blake, which recounts Blake’s daily spiritual conversations with a brother who has been dead for thirteen years. Blake’s letter concludes, "every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity." For Blake, eternity trumps time; spiritual mansions are built out of and outlast temporal ruin. For Joyce, however, as for his countryman Yeats, the spirit and the flesh are separate but equal forces that are necessarily both parallel and opposed. Art and life are similarly inverted mirror images, which is why Joyce is wary of having his characters master their problems too easily. If an inverse relation governs text and reader, would the characters’ gains be the reader’s loss? Conversely, might the characters’ failures build bridges in the reader’s imagination? In Joyce’s fictional world, the text is the thorn or cross, upon which new realities impossibly flower. In order to learn or change, authors and readers alike must be "in honour bound to the cross of your own cruelfiction." This is neither a masochistic nor a sadistic ethos, because authors and readers alike are already bound to many cruel fictions; the question is whether momentary, periodic liberation (parole) is possible, and if so, how. Can the fiction that binds us—if experienced more selfconsciously as a crossroads—be the means of renewed life?

The Christian framework for Joyce’s technique is illuminating if we focus on Christianity’s foundational moments, but in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century a Christian perspective hardly constitutes a crossroads; it is closer to a highway, although fraught with historically conditioned denominational differences. Because the Christian perspective was so dominant, it was crucial to balance the Christian emphasis on spiritual realities with an attentiveness to physical life, which Joyce associates with Judaism. Stephen must be crossed (opposed and connected) with Bloom, producing "Blephen. Stoom." William Butler Yeats, in his poem "To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time" that Stephen mentions in the passage from "Oxen of the Sun," also layers other meanings upon and against the Christian one: the rose upon the cross represents not only Jesus crucified and resurrected, but also Ireland impaled and renewed by its violent history, and eternal beauty as it is destroyed and reembodied in time. The rose Yeats celebrates crosses the Christian tradition as well as underscoring it: she is female rather than male, signifying the heart, bound to a mortal body, that flowers through its powerful commitment to things that vanish. According to Stephen, a thorntree blasted by the wind of desire grows into such a rose upon the rood of time; if the reader withstands the force of desire, even the bleakness of ignorance may bloom.

If we change the context slightly, applying the thorns and rose to a narrative better suited to the dream of Finnegans Wake than to Ulysses, readers become another kind of briar rose, confined by different spindles and thorns: they become sleeping beauties, whom the text sedates and awakens by turns. Periodically, sleeping is a duty: Anna Livia Plurabelle, in her final monologue spoken amid the matutinal awakening of Finnegans Wake, refers to sleeping beauties as "sleeping duties" that she is reluctant to disturb. Like Briar Rose, readers are tempted and tempting sleepers, lissome listeners; Joyce describes the "temptive lissomer" or listener as a "slipping beauty," apt to fall. Readers’ most comprehensive duty, then, is to sleep and to awaken, by turns; to be a sleeping beauty who is alternately pricked and caressed, unaware and then exquisitely conscious of the dream-cum-nightmare of life. The reader, like a text, is "a slip": written upon and asleep, but also capable of awakening others and susceptible to revision. Such new life is most apt to be engendered when this reader is "crossed," touched and opposed, by another sleeper or text, by a character that "slips" rather than one that succeeds. Samuel Beckett more explicitly illustrates this aspect of reading at the end of Waiting for Godot, when Vladimir looks at his friend Estragon, who is beginning to doze, and asks, "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?" Concentrating on his sleeping partner, he then reflects, "At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on." This is the moment of self-conscious questioning that all Joyce’s fiction strains to provoke: the realization that we are most awake when we contemplate ourselves as unaware, as unfeeling. Like Estragon, Joyce’s characters try vainly to pull off the "boots" that pain them, but they end up falling asleep, waiting for a salvation that does not yield to habit. They express their yearning, their boredom, their impatience, their despair, but it is up to the reader to say with Vladimir, "at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!"

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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