The omphalos, navel of the world—the birth of my blogs. This seems a proper place if any to begin discussing Ulysses. The early imagery and setting of Telemachus (within the tower) establishes a finite origin to the infinite blossomings (Bloomings) of the telemachiad. Though the discussion focuses on Stephen’s self-absorption-- his call to mulligan to “remember” the incident where Mulligan says, “O, it’s only Daedalus whose mother is beastly dead”—transports us to a very fundamental zenith of the novel. We are birthed into this world which is immediately and inherently self-obsessed. Stephen’s thoughts are introspective, his relation to the outside world comes out by first returning within. Stephen’s interaction with mulligan is reactionary
He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
--I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.
--Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.
--Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.
His relationship with is mother is as well. He is not, as we might have assumed, pained by her death out of compassion, rather pained that it is haunting Him.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down…
Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No, mother! Let me be and let me live.
I do not intend these passages to illustrate Stephen’s callousness, instead to enunciate the intrinsic tethers (the umbilical cords) by which Stephen—and us all—are bound. As in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen is attempting to fly by the nets of nationality, religion, and politics. Yet, as his mythical namesake entails, he shall fall. In Portrait, Stephen is chided for this contradiction in that for someone who so vehemently rejects things like the church, he is so deeply immersed in it.
Despite his attempts to divorce himself from his dead mother, the memory will continue to plague him. He shall constantly ‘try to awake from the nightmare that is his history’. This contradiction is a conjoinment of polarizing issues that Richard Ellemann in Ulysses on the Liffey will discuss.
To note: the closing of these loops is entirely central to what I am attempting to do with this course. Though I am fully aware that the ‘philosophy’ of this is-- as Borges points out—“a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”
Mulligan through his crass humor also draws upon a binary system that exists out of its polarity.
--if anyone thinks that I amn’t divine
He’ll get no free drinks when I’m the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.
All things that are seemingly opposite, are in fact the simultaneous creator and destroyer of their counterparts.
Ellmann expands this in Ulysses on the Liffey drawing upon Giordano Bruno, “Ultimatley, said Bruno, all contraries are coincident. Hot is opposite to cold, but they are both aspects of a single principle of heat, and their kinship can be seen in the fact that they are united at their minima…the deepest night is the beginning of dawn…For Joyce this was no finespun theory, but an axiom which he saw everywhere confirmed.” (43)
He goes on to discuss Bloom’s musing on food into feces back into food. Virtually everywhere this plurotic and kenotic rhythm reverberate. What is so ethereal about the novel as a whole, is that these complexities can be found inward as with Mulligan’s water into wine song, but they can be structurally expounded outward. Ellman states, “Each of the first three chapters is a half circle, to be completed by its parallel chapter in the second triad. Mulligan’s transubstantaion of God into flesh in Telemachus is completed by Bloom’s transubstantiation of flesh into feces (Calypso). “ (43). These revelations go on and on, ceaselessly.
They are perhaps best surmised by two quotes by Bruno and Yeats (respectively)
“Who does not see, that there is a single principle for corruption and generation.”
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
I have difficulty organizing these in a linear matter, for by nature they attempt to spiral off into infinite obscurity. This will be the ultimate challenge of this paper I suppose.
