Skinny-dipping in the Snotgreen Sea

Ulysses and Hearts Going Pitapat

The opening sentence of James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of those lines of literature that gets riffed on even by people who haven’t finished the book. It goes, as you may have heard, like this:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

A fitting introduction to the novel in more than one way. Daring to open with two adjectives when one would hold us over for at least a while; the visceral mundanity of the bowl of lather; the cryptic comedy of crossing the mirror and razor. All of these moves will recur throughout Ulysses. Most importantly of all, perhaps, is the ambiguity. Is “stately” ironic? Are we laughing at Buck Mulligan? Who’s telling us to laugh? What, exactly, is going on?

Not long after the opening, stately, plump Buck Mulligan describes the sea:

Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

Then Mulligan goes on a riff about the Greeks. Who’s Algy? Is the sea around Dublin really “snotgreen”? As will be the case throughout Ulysses, we have nearly as many things to ask as we have sentences to ask them about.

If you want to resolve these questions for yourself, in some final way, Ulysses probably isn’t the book for you. A few things I learned while reading it with a tutorial partner this semester:

1) Ulysses habitually resists attempts to nail down such trifling things as i) tone ii) action iii) where the language is coming from. (Though, in the latter case, if you’re stumped about whose words these are, ‘Joyce’s irritatingly omniscient and brilliant disembodied narratorial deity’ is probably a good bet.) It resists plenty of other ordinary readerly demands as well, and at times, almost every demand except that it be printed on paper and take the form of letters arranged in order. This is not a book that wants to be nailed down, and even with a thousand nails and a steady hammer, you will not succeed in doing so in a way that will hold up to the novel’s jerking and thrashing.

2) Any claim you make about Ulysses is likely to be true in some sense and wrong in another sense. It’s both a grimily jokey picaresque about two drunken maroons and the solemnly great epic of the whole of literary modernism. It’s both rollicking entertainment and impenetrable tome. It’s both mathematically precise and shoddily rambling. It’s both good and bad. Again, not for nailing down.

3) For all its forbidding, confusing irreducibility, Ulysses is still the product of a writer. By which I mean, Joyce’s insecurities, peccadillos, and sympathies are on display as much as his genius.

I found myself constantly asking questions about insecurity while reading Ulysses. At what points, if any, does Joyce seem desperate to charm the reader? There are times when Ulysses feels almost conventional. Not for long, but for long enough to fasten onto, which is all you can ask of this novel on a first read.

I have a muddled theory about Ulysses. It’s something about Joyce and craft conventions. I can’t exactly articulate it yet. In the next couple of weeks, I need to turn this non-hypothesis into an essay. For now, it’s more an intuition than something I can rigorously argue, so forgive me. It’s late at night and stately, plump Buck Mulligan has been leading me astray.

In lieu of a tangled paragraph I wrote and then deleted, here’s Gerty MacDowell:

Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home
out of that and not get on her nerves, no hour to be out, and the little brats
of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings
that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such
a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds
coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to hear the music like that
and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a kind of 41o waft. And while she gazed her heart went pitapat. Yes, it was her he was
looking at, and there was meaning in his look.

Once again we gaze at the sea. The sea was Odysseus’s medium in the Odyssey, and it bounds Joyce’s Dublin like the edges of a page. Gerty MacDowell is trying to have a nice time on the beach while Leopold Bloom watches. His voyeurism takes a grim turn (he masturbates to her), but for now, from her point of view, we are having a moment. Things aren’t perfect—squalling babies, ambivalent lovers hovering in the distance, the failings of bodies and imaginations. But we can achieve brief significance by looking at one another, as we steal glances at the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

The Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, in which Gerty appears, is no easier to disentangle than any other part of Joyce’s novel. What I want to suggest here is that, for all that there may be irony and comedy in this scene, there’s something disarmingly conventional in Joyce’s tender portrayal of Gerty. All of Joyce’s characters are figures of fun and targets of critique, and Gerty MacDowell is no exception. She nonetheless gets the ornate dignity of reflecting on the coloured chalks of her childhood while her heart goes pitapat. That’s both surprisingly conventional and unsurprisingly touching. Joyce could be a big softy, for all the hard-edged heft of his magnum opus.

Of course, I may be misreading this chapter. I need to go back and reread it before I do a more involved essay. To interpret Ulysses is to undercut yourself, something Joyce did constantly. The only thing I can say for certain is that stately, plump Buck Mulligan would’ve gotten his drinking money if he had asked me.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

We are feeling sluggish:

Sometimes, Calvin and Hobbes gets philosophical, sometimes deceptively so for a comic strip allegedly aimed at kids. In previous iterations, for instance, this newsletter has analyzed the ways in which Calvin’s concept of liberty gets at the some of the basic entanglements of American political thought. At other times, Calvin and Hobbes loves a straightforward gimmick.

Or does it? I initially planned to analyze this as a simple gag. That’s how I first read it: Calvin is a slug, because he’s sluggishly getting out of bed. His mom even calls him “sluggish.” Get it?

Then I thought about it a little longer and realized that this is a riff on Kafka’s Metamorphosis: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” As Calvin awoke one morning from lethargic dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a layabout slug. It’s not a nightmare, because Calvin is participating in it; it’s more of a fantasy.

As so often for Calvin, all it takes to puncture the fantasy is getting yelled at by his mom. There’s a lesson in there.

A poem

Charles Simic learns chess