I’ve been re-reading Ulysses in preparation for Bloomsday (my first re-read in almost twenty years), and all sorts of new ideas are occurring to me as I read it again after my study of Finnegans Wake.

Topics that I may write about in the future linking the two novels include the idea of debt — Stephen’s telegram to Buck Mulligan reads, “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.”

Given Finnegans Wake‘s exploration of the idea of debt — which I discuss here, among other places — this seems like an important topic.

I’m also eagerly awaiting a scene in the “Ithaca” episode where Bloom and Stephen together look upon a picture of Molly — a moment that is echoed by Shem and Shaun being united in ALP/HCE.

Ideas that particularly fascinate me on this read are Stephen’s reflections on the inevitability of history, history as a nightmare (along with the nightmares of Haines and Denis Breen — connecting to the very conceit of Finnegans Wake itself as a dream), and the flux of reality (“Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound” — here, Stephen is reflecting on a debt he himself owes and doesn’t pay back, and one of his excuses is that he is an “Other I” than he was when he received the money, due to the fact that all molecules in his body have changed position…he’ll forgive himself the debt on these grounds but won’t forgive Mulligan….).

Consider Stephen’s discussion of Shakespeare:

—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth.

Stephen seems to make the flux of existence (the universe weaving and unweaving our bodies, as our molecules all change position) correspond to the father and the appearance of continuity (the mole remaining on his body in the same spot, even though all of the molecules comprising it are different) correspond to the son.

As Stephen explains in his Shakespeare theory, Hamlet depicts an absent father speaking to the son — but in William Shakespeare’s life, his son was absent through death and Shakespeare was alive, even though he was absent through the symbolic deaths of displacement and cuckoldry.

Stephen’s Shakespeare theory echoes Stephen’s own life, Leopold Bloom’s life, and James Joyce’s experience in writing Ulysses (and creating both of their sets of experiences after his own).

Perhaps all of them are bound together by the idea of (symbolic) death having both negative connotations (emotional pain, loss) and positive connotations (an embrace of the flux of existence, and a corresponding artistic power, or at least an ability to live life joyously).

In the terms I’ve been sketching out in my discussion of Finnegans Wake on this blog, the flux corresponds to riverrun/selflessness/No-thing/the realization that one can narrate one’s story differently. Yet, in order for the universe to create experience in the first place, consciousness has to feel and fall — it has to form for itself the idea of a discrete “self,” which corresponds to various narratives of the self, which Finnegans Wake symbolizes as articles of clothing. It is easy to become caught in one of these narratives and take it for an essence. These narratives correspond to what Stephen refers to with the mole, patterns within the flux. Sometimes this concept is called in spiritual traditions “the ego.” These narratives too have positive and negative aspects. They provide a guard against the threat of dissolution in flux, but such a guard only has a benefit from the point of view of that little bounded self (which it works to protect and preserve), that one particular narrative that takes itself to be absolute and essential.

Stephen seems to grasp that there is great power in accepting the flux, despite its threat to the ego; that there is incredible power in opening ourselves to it, fully feeling the feelings of loss and despair and decay and sadness — as in Bloom’s “I am so lonely” in “Sirens” — because on the other side is the glory of the universe, which is itself a kind of figurative artistic creation and which, when fully accepted, can enrich our art:

In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

I’m still not sure how well Stephen “gets” the importance of embracing flux. Perhaps he understands it intellectually but not emotionally. I need to finish the novel because I think his encounter with his mother’s ghost in “Circe” and then his encounter with his “spiritual father,” Bloom, will help him to undergo an acceptance of fluctuating reality. And in that acceptance, when Stephen Dedalus finally comes to write Ulysses, the past (James Joyce as Stephen Dedalus) and the future (James Joyce as Leopold Bloom) will unite in the Moment of artistic composition, which is equivalent to the Moment in which we readers experience that art.

If it sounds like I’m babbling incoherently, it’s because the selfless experience Joyce points to in Finnegans Wake disrupts our typical sense of chronology and renders history not a linear nightmare in which the self is trapped by the past — “Are you condemned to do this?” Stephen asks himself — but a Moment of glorious creation, when all of time is visible at once, “one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history” (FW, I.7).

It’s interesting that Stephen refers to the flux as a process of weaving — bringing us back to the Odyssey and Penelope’s weaving and unweaving, as well as figuring this process as being done by a mother figure — but it’s especially interesting that the agency is unclear: is it “we” who weave and unweave our bodies or the goddess of the universe? In our fallen state, believing ourselves to be discrete individuals defined by history, taking a certain story of ourselves to be an essence, we have no agency. We are trapped by causality. We are condemned to act as we do, bereft of free will. But if we can shift our eyes toward existence, we can enter a redeemed state in which we become participants in the mother goddess’ continual creation of the universe: we become co-creators of the flux of existence, co-creators of ourselves (by narrating our story differently), and co-creators of our own works of art. The father and the son are joined by the mother. Maybe that’s what Stephen has to accept as well.

Plenty to think about here. Happy Bloomsday! Eat some kidney, liver, and gorgonzola, and enjoy being alive!