Himself the Ghost of His Own Father
A special Bloomsday/Fathers Day edition. On Ulysses, synchronicities, and Bass Pale Ale.
As many of you know, June 16th is Bloomsday—a celebration of Ulysses, which was set on that date in 1904. This year, the date also falls on Fathers Day—a fact that anyone who has read the book would appreciate.
The book is strongly on my mind lately, as I began this year by rereading it. January and February were a deep immersion in Joyce, and I consumed a lot of biographical material about him along the way. Turning glutton, I also read about 120 pages of Finnegans Wake before realizing things had gotten out of hand. As anyone who has waded too deeply knows, Joyce takes control of your imagination, and unless you want to become a disciple, you have to get out for a while (see the case of Samuel Beckett).
And yet, regardless of my stepping free, Ulysses will probably always remain the most significant book in my life. And the reason for this goes quite deep—and like the book itself, it has to do with fathers.
The Shelf is a Portal
When I was a kid, maybe 12 years old, the 1961 Vintage edition of Ulysses made an uncanny and lasting impression on me—and this was before I could even read it. It was a total oddity on the family book shelf. My parents were readers, but they were not into stuff like Joyce. Prior to that point, I’d never picked up a book and found it almost totally incomprehensible. It was like going back to a time before literacy.
I made no real effort to read it then. But two deeply personal facts emerged from my incomprehension that cast an aura around the book: 1) this was the first book I’d seen in which the name Haines appeared (a character goes by that name alone, no first name1), and 2) my own father’s name appeared in ink on the inside cover, but written there in a form I’d never seen before or since: “RS Haines”—the form I’d later take in publishing (I did not make this link until much later). I assumed he’d read it, but later learned he had not. Regardless, the book was “his.” The fact that a central character also shares my father’s name, Stephen/Steven, made this all the more “dad-coded.” But this did not mean I could connect to him through the book—in fact, the closer I got to figuring out the mystery of Ulysses, the more I separated myself from him. And yet there was something deeper in this communing-via-separation—and this something was part of the secret of writing itself. Ultimately, this early experience was when the idea of “literature” first arrived to me, however inchoate: it was a signal of massive, alluring confusion tied up with the idea of lineage and with feeling alienated from my own name by seeing it in a book. Myself and yet not.
And yes, it is almost embarrassing how psychoanalytical this all is. But then, so is Ulysses. Fortunately for you, my aim here is not to psychoanalyze myself—and certainly not to exalt “the father principle” (that way lies all the horrors and errors, as Ulysses knows). But before I leave this “Day of the Fathers” stuff behind and move onto something more fun, I have to share one more personal detail to round this scenario out and explode it.
Because my link to the book was about my father’s father too—a man I never knew. He died ten years before I was born, when a massive cardiac arrest got him at age 49. In my dad’s indelible words, “The old man just up and dropped dead.” I don’t know much about him, but I know enough to make some guesses about where parts of my own personality come from. Among the few details I know, one is that he came home one evening in an excited state: he had a copy of Ulysses and was convinced it was an important work of genius that he had to read. As I understand it, this was quite out of character, as my grandfather was not an aficionado of literature, let alone of something like Joyce. Regardless, the evening’s excitement passed and, in my dad’s words, “That was the last we heard about it.” My best guess is that my grandfather had read a profile of the book in TIME magazine or something, and it somehow spoke to him. He went out and got a copy, and then once he dug into it, he was totally baffled and gave it up. Or maybe not: maybe he fell in love with it. I’ll never know. My dad doesn’t know, and everyone else is gone. But the image of the Ghostly Father who had a secret to tell me about Ulysses…well, it only intensified the book’s aura in my mind.
As you might imagine, I could never escape Ulysses until I’d read it and read it and read it. I felt like that was what I was here for—that there was something in it I needed. And even now, quite at home in its pages, I know the book maintains a hold on me. It is the point at which my past and origins converge and open onto something that exceeds and estranges me from them: namely, my desire to create with the written word—to make a book in my own name. I’ll leave it to others to make out whether that desire has been for good or not, but it’s the way I’ve moved through the world for a while now, and I’m too far gone to change.
The “A” in Parallax
Funnily enough, all of that was just preamble. When I sat down to write this, I mostly wanted to share a favorite passage from the book. But I got carried away as I am wont to do.
The passage I’m talking about comes from “Oxen of the Sun,” and if you don’t know the chapter, it’s one of the most stylistically fucked, nearly unreadable at times. This makes it easy to miss what’s going on in this moment. The scene occurs at a “lying-in hospital,” a kind of maternity ward. Bloom arrives to check in on a woman he knows who is experiencing a long and difficult labor. From one angle, we see the selfless, attentive Bloom; from the other, we see him continuing to avoid going home, where he assumes (correctly) that his wife is sleeping with another man—also, we find he is eager to flirt with one of the nurses at the ward. At the same time, a group of young medical students—known for their debauchery—have gathered in the dining area of the ward. At their head is Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s one-time alter-ego. Bloom has a special interest in Stephen—one which is just as complex as the one that brings him to the ward—and seeing that Stephen is extremely drunk and throwing around freshly earned money he cannot afford to lose, Bloom decides to stick around and watch out for the younger man.
Throughout the episode, drunk Deadalus and the boys are essentially inventing the podcast format: each tries to outdo the other in comedic conversation, mixed with blasphemy and a crude interest in reproductive anatomy. It is not to Bloom’s taste, and his mind wanders as he waits to see how it goes with Dedalus, or until the woman’s labor is ended—anything to justify not going home. The narrator in this chapter takes extreme liberties with tone, style, and reality, exaggerating and morphing things while recycling the entire history of English prose style. And in this specific moment, while Bloom's mind wanders during their carrying on, the narrator launches him into a quasi-hallucination of “infinite space,” in which “silently, the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.” He moves through a grey wasteland of “twilight phantoms” until “the ghosts of beasts” emerge, goaded on by “Parallax.” These beasts then reveal themselves to be the creatures of the zodiac. They journey to drink at the “dead sea,” and then a goddess emerges in the sign of Virgo, fusing vague thoughts of his daughter, Milly, and his adulterous penpal, Martha. This Virgoan queen transforms “on currents of cold stellar wind…writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus.”
Stylistically, the passage borrows numerous cliches and inserts various ironies, so that we aren’t supposed to fully embrace this imagery. It is in part a parody of a period style in English literature, and yet there is a power there all the same—especially in the way it cuts away from and contrasts the extreme repression, apprehension, and dissatisfaction of Bloom’s circumstance. Here, this eruption of imagery at first confirms his despair—images of phantoms moving across a wasteland—before culminating in an image of deliverance in the goddess and her sign: the written A, the Alpha. Its exact significance is ambiguous, but we can note that the A, or Aleph, historically originated in a glyph representing an Ox, which Joyce rhymes with the sign of Taurus (the bull). Cool enough, so far as that kind of stuff goes. But if that were all, it would not be worthy of Joyce.
Joyce doesn’t truly unfold the significance of this image until three pages later, after an interruption that nearly erases our memory of its having happened. And there we read that, while the boys worked on their podcast voices in increasingly crude ways for the “four minutes or thereabouts” that had elapsed during and/or since the zodiac vision, Bloom “had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass . . . which was certainly calculated to attract anyone’s remark on account of it’s scarlet appearance.” In this typically opaque language—which is open to a couple interpretations at least—we might lose track of what’s going on precisely. The full quote is even more tedious and seemingly to no point. But skipping over it is a mistake. What this moment tells us is that the zodiac vision, which ascended into Virgo and came down in a Taurean, ruby triangle, was centered upon the “scarlet” logo of a bottle of Bass:
The red triangle is a “jocoserious” image of deliverance, at once serious and ludic. While we can see what it signifies for Bloom—an image of grace and love emerging out of his darkest fears—for us readers the significance is not about what the sign means: it’s about the mode of its appearance—the layering of registers, the complexity and irony of this vision that nevertheless aims to affirm. The red triangle is given to us in “parallax”: from one angle it is a cosmic symbol in Taurus, culminating a visionary fugue; from another angle, it’s a mass produced label on a bottle “calculated to attract” the eye by the Bass boys, looking for profit at the expense of others’ wallets and livers. And this convergence of registers, seemingly disposing of itself as a mere joke, is in fact a crucial Joycean principle: the soul is multiple. You don’t get to prefer one mode over the other: you get both, and more, and also the fugitive totality in which they all belong together—what seems like contradiction may in fact be a rhyme. You take the whole mess and love it, or you are saying NO to the life of imagination. In this image of the Cosmic Bottle of Bass, we see the imagination living via interfusion: the quotidian becomes cosmic and then returns to its smallness again, and yet that smallness makes the cosmos live. And these exchanges of imaginative scale bring us into vital contact w/the world. It displaces and defers, but it also returns and reveals.
Here and elsewhere, the signature Joycean poetic is beautiful and ugly, quotidian and cosmic, all at once. It is as serious as the world itself, and yet it has the structure of a joke or riddle. And while it is capable of an extraordinarily delicate, melodic beauty, it regularly engages the foul, crass, and coarse. In this passage, it is the goddess arriving via the mind of advertising, product placement, and consumption—via a table of scattered, empty bottles, spillage, and adolescent crudity. It is eternity hinging on an accident, and the accident entering an eternal space. Ultimately, it is beautiful because it loves those things we pass over as boring, meaningless, ugly, garbage—trash is in the totality too, or else you have just built another wall and reinvented hell. Everything makes it into the picture in Ulysses—even the noise and refuse gets to live.
Yes.
I could go on. And on. But I’ll close this down for now. It’s June 16th forever again, and I’ll be taking a piss beneath the Pleaides.
Happy Bloomsday.
I’m not even going to unpack the fact that Haines is a villain in the book: a patronizing and naive Brit among the Irish, collecting material for a Celtic poetry anthology. Stephen Dedalus is afraid of him, as he fired a pistol indoors one night while raving in his sleep in the tower where they resided together. Haines is portrayed as a man beset by nightmares and terrors, babbling while unconscious. As a long time sleep-talker and sufferer of nightmares, I shamefacedly relate to this. But unlike the fictional Haines, I would never betray Dedalus. On my honor.
... as an Anthropologist, this is thrilling. thank you. 🖤