Impressionistic Notes on Ulysses

1. Notes on Stephen Dedalus 

Poets are, after all, ordinary people. Rimbaud ended his life as a merchant and "bourgeois trafficker"; one suspects that Keats and Shelley, had they not died young, would have ended up much the same. Art is always being intruded upon by gross, indecent life. The need to pay the bills, to eat and expel, to gratify our base sexual urges, inevitably crowds out whatever momentary epiphanies we have had; in the long run it threatens to swallow them up whole. This does not have to result in a spiritual (or literal) suicide, though often enough and tragically it does. What it does manifest as is perpetual despair. When we first meet Stephen, he is in the throes of this: guilt-ridden, destitute, locked out of his home. His mind teems with philosophic and poetic ideas, but these invariably run into dead-ends. He is frustrated for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most prominently the immaturity of his abilities. It is not yet the moment for his success; he needs to nurture his art. In the meantime, and to bide his time, he needs to develop himself in a different way.

2. Notes on Leopold Bloom

The failed and frustrated poet finds a second life as an everyman-scholar. He is an expert at nothing but knows a bit about everything. He has "a bit of the artist" in him, but he lacks, has abandoned, the grandeur and unity of vision that one tends to find in great poetry. In compensation he has gained tolerance, patience, compassion - a humanistic outlook. He has learned to live comfortably (more or less) with the rhythms of his body; his appetites are more modest, he finds them less disgusting, in fact he even takes some pleasure in the vulgarity of human life. The myriad distractions he encounters are no longer obstacles, but opportunities - he finds his purpose in wandering, and as a wanderer being a helper and friend. This is the life that is modeled for Stephen by Bloom, one that temporarily saves him. But it is clear that Bloom is not entirely happy either. Flashes of discontentment pass through his mind. The proximate cause is his wife's infidelity, but the ultimate cause is, I think, something else: a general condition of paralysis or aporia. He has gotten so adept at navigating the labyrinth that he has forgotten that he is called upon to escape it.

3. Notes on the general structure of Ulysses

Suicide is the subterranean theme of Ulysses, the shadow lurking in its labyrinthine prose. Neither Stephen nor Bloom directly consider it (I don't think), but neither is it a subject that is very far from either of their minds - for Stephen, in his fixation on Hamlet, and Hamlet's father's ghost; for Bloom, in the repeated recollections of his own father's suicide. What the recurrence of this subject suggests is a nagging hopelessness, a despair that both men feel at unrealized ambitions, at alienation from their peers, at an inability to, of their own accord, pull themselves out of their respective stagnations. Each man possesses what the other needs to accomplish this: Kinch (Stephen), the knife of his art, a light to simultaneously cut through and pull together the fragments of Bloom's accumulated experience; Bloom, the scope of understanding to give Stephen a frame, a structure into which his art can expand and bring life. And yet they search blindly for each other, the one barely aware of the other's existence. What is needed is a means to bring them together.

4. Notes on the novel's ending and resolution

As Hamlet is a play about Hamlet by Hamlet, so too is Ulysses a novel by its protagonist about himself. The scheme is laid out clearly in chapter seven, in which Stephen "proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father." Just so with Ulysses: the novel is written by Stephen (Stephen's surname Dedalus coupled with the book's structure gives this away), projecting Bloom as his future into his past - as Hamlet does with the ghost of his father. It is this act of projection that allows the two men to meet and discover in the other what he needs for himself. In their communion - rendered in the second-to-last chapter as something akin to Dante's Paradiso, in which disembodied beings considering paradoxical questions together is the closest that one can come to God - each man comes to realize (though possibly with some reluctance from Stephen) that he is a manifestation of the other. He can integrate the other into himself. Having realized this, Bloom finds a resolution to his domestic problems; Molly's soliloquy is the apex and affirmation of his being. And for Stephen, though his immediate fate is left ambiguous, it is clear that he has gotten what he needs to carry on with his aesthetic purpose: to dramatize the unity of self required to create his art, and thereby will that unity and the subsequent artwork into existence.