What’s The Journey Or Quest In James Joyce’s Ulysses?
This is my take away from what I read and learned about James Joyce’s Ulysses so far (with feminist influences).
The book Ulysses by James Joyce first captured my attention in the major motion film “The Good Sheppard” with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. Its symbols characterize the themes found in federally created bureaucracy and the brotherhood of secret societies. Mother, father, son, birth, death, God, country, and home all comprise motifs in Joyce’s novel Ulysses.
The story of Ulysses is preoccupied with the archetypes of maternity (femininity), paternity (masculinity), offspring (son), security of the self (authorship) and comprises one of the oldest and most familiar stories in humanity; the journey to be successful and to dominate, as gifts bestowed upon the young. During the course of the story the main character, becoming mature, sees himself for the first time, discovering the father and thereby becoming capable of fatherhood. Stephen Dedalus is Joyce himself. Is this how we are to perceive Joyce? Yes it is. Is it any wonder one of the book’s key symbols are crossed keys, both of which symbolize Fatherhood and Security? The enigmatic search for “the father” and “the son” turns into “the man within the boy who becomes a man capable of fatherhood”.
I found myself asking, “What image could stand in place of words meaning instability, change, flux and worse destruction and annihilation?” Through reading the themed images of chapter three Proteus and based upon my psychoanalytic readings, I came up with FAULTLINES. As in Nancy Chodorow’s “Achilles Complex” and the faultlines of masculinity. I am reminded how many young men, and women don’t achieve their potential or are used as tools for the success of nations or for others in maligned ways. In the erudite musings of madmen, the themed chapter Proteus might mean Wars as I am reminded by the passage, “Stephen closed his eyes to hear the his boots crush crackling wrack and shells.” The pursuit of Proteus suggests Stephen’s attempt to “fix flux by form” which philosophy imposes and art composes …” form of forms, the Achilles Complex, the final form the actor imposes in extreme acts of terrorism and attempts ownership over another human being. Of course, the main character is “moral” in his pursuit rejecting Church and commending charity and Ulysses theme is a “moral” one. Yet morality has its limits. It must. Must it not? To ensure dignity and respectability even the continuation of the human race? I ask, “How can a brothel transform the young boy into a man? How can a brothel salvage a marriage and transform the man?” Unless you know deep inside yourself what it is you want transformed or it has already secretly ended by some fault like a marriage surely ending. It can, however, become the avenue in which you are granted the last word in your quest to avenge a wrong; revenge. For example, as you confront the usurper of your identity after you become aware of his/her inevitable demise. It is bound in the logic, “I have become a man through a rigorous metaphorical “fucking” or loss of fidelity.” This being the belief behind some parents on how to properly “grow” children through inflicting loss forgetting what excessive loss can create in the mind. And here I think of the military.
On another note, Bloom’s potato, which he carries with him and gives to others to hold until its all shriveled, is another surprising symbol for profound themes of Sex, Love, and Everyday Empathy which may be more closely related to the moral theme of Ulysses; Charity.
In Ulysses, Stephen focuses on authorship as a mystical fatherhood which is completely Freudian in thought as an author becomes creator of his own work. In like vein, his theory of Hamlet, Shakespeare as the ghostly father, King Hamlet. Even though the ghost is insubstantial, Shakespeare’s authorship makes him the father of all his race. Thus, borrowing (perhaps even stealing) from the great Mother, the right many envy but rightfully just deserve; progeny and authorship.
Of course, this is my primary interpretation of Group (Gang) Stalking with electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture. Is it not an act of usurpation to steal the identity of another through clandestine sabatoge and inhumane torture?
Artwork: Frido Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (1932), Surrealism.
What does the above artwork invoke from a feminine perspective? Comparing Joyce’s casual reference, what would the different feminine and masculine perspectives imply in misbirth?
Other themed imagery of birth is represented as death or a miscarriaged fetus from chapter three in Ulysses, “Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of [us] all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh … will you be as gods?” Here Joyce may have perceived his own greatness, as I also think of the birth of the United States of America in all its greatness and glory and how the death of some are bound to another’s glory as weakness and dominance influence outcomes.
In chapter two, Nestor, the art and theme of the chapter is history and it is appropriately fitting as Stephen is trying to escape his history of his late mother’s passing. History he calls a “nightmare” from which it may be assumed, we all, at one time or another, wish we could awake from.
William York Tindall said it well when he wrote:
“The art of this chapter is history, the “nightmare” from which Stephen is “trying to awake.” To him the past is intolerable, its shape arbitrary, its material fictive and uncertain, “fabled,” as Blake says, “by the daughters of memory” or the Muses. Confined to time and space, history is impermanent and unreliable: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.” No more than “an actuality of the possible,” as Aristotle says, history limits infinite possibilities.” As insubstantial as it is impermanent and limiting, history is woven of wind by wind. “As it was in the beginning, is now,” says Stephen; for history, as tiresome and unreliable, is more of the same thing.”
It is ironic that we are all shaped and conditioned by our past and history, through time and space and eon, continually repeats itself. But the perspective, the “fictive material” that is intolerable or arbitrary. A man may not feel as though any child has been born out of a miscarriage. This is the “fable”. But a woman will feel it has, even though not alive. Thus the perspectives are different.
Women become the masters over their own birthing process just as men are masters over their own work creations and technological innovations. Although dominance and striving are what are thought of when we think of success, the truth is, not all will be as the “Gods”. The misbirth shouldn’t be thought of as failure as this is what seemed to be implied in Joyce’s work and this is the symbol it is supposed to imply, I thunk. But rather it should be thought of as something different and apart that will impart meaning as well. Even unfinished or “failed” artwork provide meaning.
Artwork: Squash Blossoms, watercolor on paper
