Ulysses Diary

 I'll finish Ulysses this weekend once the crossword and the racing's over with. It hasn't taken long considering what a colossal thing I thought it was but it's like in bike racing, once you've ridden a few 12 Hour events, you don't think so much about 100 miles and having seen off Proust, not much seems like a big book anymore. I have read two books, though, previewing each of Joyce's sections with the very useful summary by Harry Blamires.

I don't think there's any shame in that. One gets far more out of it with a bit of clear and intrepretative summary and Blamires is exemplary at that. Ulysses is 'modern art', maybe cubist as much as anything with its various ways of showing, whereas Proust is still figurative, like the culmination of where the C19th novel was leading. It's more of an exercise in contrast than comparison, with their different ironic distances but their major themes of Jewishness and the self-deprecating characters of Bloom and Marcel give them some common ground. Whereas Marcel is the emerging, self-doubting writer in Proust, Stephen is the poet with an inflated idea of his own importance in Ulysses. If Proust explores the snobberies and finely-graded social rivalries of Parisian high society, Joyce's characters in Dublin are less aristocratic. Joyce is also more explicitly concerned with bodily functions of all kinds that Proust is more demure about. The pages of Ulysses sometimes seem redolent of the liver and kidneys and thus the fluid that passes from them.

Ulysses has both a Shakesperean thread and one of horse racing running through it. As well as its structure being loosely based on The Odyssey, it has a similarly associative set of parallels with Hamlet, the Modernist tendency to make a collage from previous literature, as in The Waste Land, never being far from Joyce's strategy. The Ascot Gold Cup theme provides more Joycean humour than one might expect with its series of misinterpretations and misreadings but the highly-informed, academic reader can find allusions in most things even where none might have been intended. Religion has already shamelessly co-opted symbolism and significance wherever it has been able as one religion, say Christianity, adopts anything and everything it can find use for from paganism to the old Jewish religion. Thus, while the Ascot Gold Cup is indeed a chalice, it's possibly only significant as such because Catholicism was such an integral part of the culture it made it seem so. It's difficult to keep thinking, reading Ulysses now, that in 1904, the king of England was the king of Ireland, too. Other Irishmen, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin, have published wonderful books of close readings of poems that find poetry echoing previous poetry in a seemingly endless way. The language, and an awareness of so much past literature, almost does that automatically. Once you set Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon echoing, it's hard to stop it. 

And that is probably why it says somewhere that scholars have devoted their lives to Ulysses, because Joyce's genius is like a lottery win, which was 1 in 14 million before they added a few more numbers. And that's before one even thinks about Finnegans Wake, which I will have to think about because I don't like avoiding the issue.

Meanwhile, taking some time in calmer waters, the next little exercise will be to sit down and read Larkin, the poems, because one reads a lot of other things and then realizes that one hasn't read one's favourites for some years. It's tempting to think that one knows it so well, one doesn't need to but it's not always quite as you remembered it when you look again. Any poetry worth having will give you a bit more each time and even if it doesn't, like an old raincoat, it never lets you down.

While there's any amount of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and plenty more Dickens to fill the long days (which never turn out to be anywhere near as long as you thought they'd be), there is also more Zola and more Balzac. I loved what Balzac I read, once, and since I can't remember much about it, I might as well re-read Old Goriot and whatever else is upstairs rather than buy any more just yet. It's not as if I'm going to run out of things to do. It's what to write rather than what to read is the question. 

It looks like the genuine powers-that-be in Thom Gunn Studies are finally gathering their forces and that means I don't have to offer my lesser offering. I could still do it and still might but I could amuse myself with something else. The likes of David Hepworth and Stuart Maconie have occupied the ground in relation to mapping old pop music but each person's version of events, and their shifting prejudices, are different from everybody else's and nobody's told it how it really happened for me. My disadvantage is that I never met a Beatle, Bowie, Marc Bolan or anybody from Tamla Motown. I met Steel Pulse, Roger McGough (who got to number 1 in the Hit Parade) and Rod Clements from Lindisfarne. But I reckon I could make it intersting. We'll see.