“Ulysses” will not be James Joyce’s most troublesome novel. That distinction must go to “Finnegans Wake,” a e book that has been described as unreadable even by its most fervent admirers. However “Ulysses,” the modernist novel that modified the course of twentieth century literature, is notoriously demanding.
The e book bested me after I first gave it a go in my pupil days. I anticipated to dash by means of “Ulysses” in a few weeks however discovered myself operating uphill in a race I feared would possibly by no means finish. I lastly did make it to the end line, panting and red-faced. However I knew Joyce and I must have one other rendezvous after I wasn’t in such a rush to examine a canonical field.
It took greater than 35 years for that reunion to occur. The e book got here again on my radar as a result of Elevator Restore Service, the offbeat New York efficiency troupe greatest recognized for “Gatz,” a marathon rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” was coming to city with its stage model of “Ulysses.” (The manufacturing, introduced by Heart for the Artwork of Efficiency, had a short run final weekend at UCLA Little Theater.)
However one thing else was drawing me again to Joyce, a have to breathe purer air. I may spend my free time doomscrolling, or I may problem myself to a better pleasure.
This time round I imposed no deadline. I’d learn “Ulysses” for the sheer pleasure of studying. It didn’t take lengthy to be reminded that pleasure isn’t essentially pain-free. I struggled previous the roadblocks, cursing at what I took to be Joyce’s willful obscurity as I consulted Terence Killeen’s “Ulysses Unbound,” a user-friendly reader’s information, in addition to myriad on-line assets, together with Google Translate to deal with the polyglot creator’s staggering vary.
I extemporized a program of studying a chapter alone after which listening to it by way of the wonderful RTÉ recordings of “Ulysses” (accessible as a podcast) that convey to life the novel’s symphony of voices. The exhilaration I got here to expertise entailed a good quantity of exasperation. The exertion that was required appeared to belong to a pre-internet age.
Into this complicated scheme, Joyce incorporates all types of radical literary experiments. Crucial of those is the stream of consciousness approach that’s developed in ways in which had by no means been tried earlier than. Joyce tunes into the inside musings of his characters as simply as he samples the collective consciousness, previous and current. The novel, Edmund Wilson writes in his super-lucid chapter on Joyce in “Axel’s Castle,” strikes from the ripest naturalism, awash in bodily secretions and pungent smells, to essentially the most feverish symbolism, the place dream logic liquefies goal actuality.
What I derived from the novel in my late 50s is just not what I took away in my 20s. I used to be amused at what I had underlined as an overeager pupil, at all times looking out for the explanatory phrase. However I’m positive in time my newest markings within the e book, like photographs of an previous coiffure, will even elicit a watch roll. A literary work as dense as “Ulysses” can’t assist however function a mirror of 1’s psychological life.
Stephanie Weeks and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson in ERS’ stage model of “Ulysses.”
(Jason Williams)
My expertise of this ERS manufacturing is exclusive to the second of my encounter. Had I not simply cohabited with “Ulysses” for the final month, I little question would have spent the intermission studying chapter summaries on my cellphone to get a deeper understanding of the story.
I used to be relieved that this model of “Ulysses” wasn’t an eight-hour affair like “Gatz,” which provided the whole textual content of “The Great Gatsby.” (Joyce’s novel would take at the least 24 hours to learn aloud, or all of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the creator.) The novel’s 18 chapters are served cafeteria-style, a bit from this part, a bit from that, to offer an summary of the primary motion.
The main focus is on Bloom’s wanderings by means of Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day his spouse, Molly, a famous singer, begins an affair with knowledgeable colleague named Blazes Boylan. Subsidiary however no much less integral is Stephen’s crisscrossing path by means of the town. When these displaced, grief-laden males lingeringly intersect late within the novel, nothing actually modifications by way of the plot however all the pieces modifications by way of the e book’s religious design.
Within the intimate confines of Macgowan Corridor’s Little Theater, seven actors took their seats at convention tables lined up for what appeared like a panel dialogue. An institutional clock saved observe of the fictional time of day. Scott Shepherd, an ERS mainstay who was not solely a part of the ensemble but additionally co-directed with John Collins and served as dramaturg, launched the proceedings in an impishly folksy method paying homage to the Stage Supervisor in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
He defined that the textual content can be fast-forwarded usually. When this occurred, the sound of a screeching tape catapulted the corporate to a different passage within the e book. Joyce’s phrases rang out mellifluously firstly of the manufacturing, however as the primary characters emerged from the studying, among the musicality of the writing was misplaced.
ERS doesn’t visitors in emotional realism or literal re-creation. The corporate’s aesthetic mode is wayward, indirect, unfastened and jocular. In “Gatz,” the novel’s narrative texture was conveyed by means of zany approximation — the troupe discovering Fitzgerald not by effacing itself however by embracing its eccentric distinction.
The identical ultimately occurred right here, however I needed to resign myself to what was lacking.
What I discover irresistible about “Ulysses” is the readability with which the inside lives of Stephen and Bloom come into sight. Amid all of the rhetorical puzzles and literary pyrotechnics, these characters disclose to us their longings and insecurities, their preoccupations and rationalizations, their alienation and sociability — briefly, their souls or, as Bloom extra scientifically defines this mystical human substance, “gray matter.”
Hamlet-figures wearing inky black, they’re each processing loss. Bloom, whose day’s journey takes him to the funeral of a buddy, continues to be mourning his son, Rudy, who died shortly after delivery. Stephen, known as again from Paris as his mom was dying, is tormented a yr later by his refusal to hope over her as she urged him to do.
Estranged in numerous methods — Bloom as a Jew (with a spouse with a unfastened fame) and Stephen as a freethinking younger artist in Catholic Eire — they’ve complementary wants. Bloom to like and to move on a few of what he has discovered, Stephen to change into safe and secure sufficient to comprehend his monumental potential.
On stage, Stephen (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), sporting the go well with jacket and quick trousers of a schoolboy prince of Denmark, was a unusually recessive presence. Stevenson appeared to intentionally deflect consideration from Stephen’s phrases, mumbling traces as if they had been the character’s non-public property and never meant to be spoken aloud. (A defensible literary interpretation however a theatrically deadening one.) Stevenson truly created a extra vivid impression in his temporary look as Bloom’s cat.
Vin Knight was extra dynamic as Bloom, the difference’s clear protagonist. Costume designer Enver Chakartash dressed the character, described at one level within the e book as a “new womanly man,” in a mourning jacket and sophisticated skirt, with inexperienced socks including a fey accent to the gender-fluid ensemble. Knight discovered the gravity of the pragmatic, rational Bloom whereas preserving his important nimbleness.
The surrogate father-son flirtation between Stephen and Bloom gathered energy extra by means of the staging than by means of appearing. Scenically, the narrative constructed because it proceeded. The convention tables had been imaginatively reconfigured by the design collective dots for the surreal brothel scene, and the lighting of Marika Kent made wild magic with out disrupting the minimalist scheme.
Maggie Hoffman in Elevator Restore Service’s “Ulysses.”
(Jason Williams)
The manufacturing was considerably more proficient in telling than displaying. (Stephanie Weeks, Dee Beasnael and Kate Benson, along with taking part in quite a few supporting characters, helped hold the narration easily on observe.)
I want everybody had Shepherd’s command of the corporate’s home fashion. His cameos as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging throughout the stage with the self-satisfied air of a rustic rake, weren’t simply enlivening however renewing, capturing the character in a brand new idiom.
Maggie Hoffman delivered Molly’s stream of erotic consciousness that ends the novel with simply the appropriate contact of unabashed earthiness. If I hadn’t not too long ago listened to the good rendition of Pegg Monahan within the RTÉ Broadcast, I may not have missed the ferocious Irish lilt that animates the animal lusts and petty grievances of Joyce’s character.
I ought to confess that I turned to the novel as an escape from my disgust with our political scenario. However politics runs by means of the e book. Eire is beneath brutal colonial rule, and partisan battle is as inescapable as non secular strife.
However Stephen and Bloom don’t wish to be dominated by ideology. Stephen resists having his mental freedom ensnared by patriotic sanctimony: “Let my country die for me,” he drunkenly tells a British soldier.
Bloom contends that “Force, hatred, history, all that” are “not life for men and women, insult and hatred.” It’s the other of this stuff “that is really life,” by which he means “love.”
Joyce offers us this perception in a e book that understands that it’s no extra potential to dismiss politics than it’s to eliminate the calls for of the physique. We exist in concentric realms, and our multifarious lives can solely be lived. The identical is true for artwork. There are issues I wished from this stage manufacturing that I didn’t get. However there have been surprising rewards, and my view of “Ulysses” expanded.
We should make room on the mattress of life and say, as Molly does within the e book’s final phrase: “Yes.”
