In rereading Ulysses, I recently reviewed the passage where Mr. Bloom helps a “blind stripling” cross the street, and Bloom’s reflections remind me how central sense perception is to Joyce’s work.

In this post, I look at a few places where sense perception is important to Ulysses before turning to Joyce’s treatment of the senses in Finnegans Wake.

Bloom thinks of the blind stripling, “Queer idea of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones,” and as I read that, I smiled at the thought that someone must have written a dissertation about Ulysses called “Queer Idea of Dublin.” If not, someone should get on that — the title is waiting for you right there!

Joyce famously said that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be reconstructed, brick by brick, from his works. And indeed, Joyce’s literary texts “map” Dublin in various ways. In the “blind stripling” scene, he acknowledges that different people have different mental maps, and that those maps are a product of sense perception as well as thought, which differ wildly from person to person (most dramatically in cases where a person is missing a sense).

Some of Bloom’s other reflections about the blind man before that sentence:

How on earth did he know that van was there? Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense of volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap.

This idea of feeling a gap speaks to the general idea of loss in Joyce’s works, going all the way back to the word gnomon in the opening paragraph of Dubliners. A gnomon is a shape formed by removing from the corner of a parallelogram a similar kind of parallelogram. It is formed by creating a gap, so it’s an image of loss, or even symbolic castration. It is associated in the opening paragraph with the word paralysis (Joyce’s word for the stasis of the social positions and spiritual lives of most Dubliners) and the word simony (the commodification or profaning of things that ought to be sacred).

Loss is at the heart of Ulysses, since Stephen is grieving for his mother and is searching for a (spiritual) father, and Bloom is grieving for his relationship with his wife (and his dead son) and is searching for a (spiritual) son.

Different people have different ways of sensing and responding to losses of different kinds. The blind stripling’s loss of vision (“Poor young fellow!” thinks Bloom) perhaps gives him a different way of sensing the world, which entails feeling and relating to other kinds of losses or gaps. And it perhaps comes with a kind of recompense, since the blind can “Read with their fingers” (a callback to Bloom thinking something similar about a printer in Chapter 7: occupations, like disabilities, might give people different skills and abilities to navigate and relate to the world, forming different mental maps).

Bloom goes on to think about other recompenses:

Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring, the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his mind’s eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair, for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black. Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of white.

Just as “Everything speaks with its own language” (as Bloom thought in Chapter 7), everything has its own smell, taste, sound, temperature. The senses produce a “form in his mind’s eye,” even if the physical eye cannot see.

I’m reminded that even those of us who can see with our physical eyes still form mental images and impressions of everything, and often those mental images diverge from what those things actually are like. I recall a passage in Nietzsche where he compares this mental mapping to the process of reading: just as our eyes scan a page and form an approximation of what is there (since we don’t read by looking at each letter one by one), so too do our senses take in the world around us and form an approximation of that world. The way that we read, incidentally, explains why we are able to understand a written passage even if there are typos or if many of the letters are scrambled, as in this famous example. We don’t carefully attend to details. We hastily generalize, we add things to our sense impressions, we bring our own baggage and storytelling to bear on our understanding of the world. As Nietzsche puts it, “one is much more of an artist than one knows” (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 192).

As such, we all “inhabit” different mental models of the world, models influenced by our habits of storytelling, of narrating our experience to ourselves. The habits of storytelling, in turn, are influenced by the losses we all have suffered (whether the loss of vision, the loss of family members, the loss of possibilities we imagined for ourselves, or all of the various hardships, disappointments, and afflictions that we can undergo). These stories — and our attachment to some of those stories — are the causes of our suffering, but they can also be the vehicles of our liberation from suffering, as I have discussed here, here, and here among other places.

Stephen Dedalus also reflects on eyesight in Chapter 3, “Proteus,” though his mind is full of far more abstruse reflections than the more down-to-earth Bloom.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

[…]

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

What’s striking about the beginning of “Proteus” is how dominated it is by discursive thought and not by an attention to the other senses, which is what Bloom emphasizes in his musings. If all of us have mental maps of the world shaped both by sense experience and by discursive thought (storytelling), Stephen exhibits a mind so ruled by the narrating function that it is largely unable to attend to the senses.

One gets the impression that even with his eyes open, Stephen isn’t really paying attention to his senses so much as he is to the stories he’s telling himself about his experience. We should recall here that Stephen’s eyesight, like Joyce’s, was very poor (plus, Stephen broke his glasses the day before the one on which Ulysses takes place).

Stephen and Bloom are two sides of the same person. In one sense, they are young James Joyce and older James Joyce. In another sense, they are anticipations of Shem and Shaun, respectively, in Finnegans Wake: one brother represents the sense of hearing, the characteristics of introversion and inspiration, and the art of poetry; the other brother represents the sense of sight, the characteristics of extroversion and instrumental but myopic reason, and the arts of politics (in the broad sense of relating well to others) and advertising.

In Finnegans Wake I.5, in a description of ALP’s Letter, which is a symbol for Finnegans Wake itself (and, more generally, all of literature), there is a paragraph that lists many of the features of the text. One of these features is a mark “indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired,” and a parenthetical note reads,

here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again

The reader should be keen (eager) to ken (understand) the text — a process that involves struggle and grief and coming to terms with our own losses (associated with the sound of “keening” at funerals) through a process described by “soundsense and sensesound.” “Sound” would be Shem, while “sense” would be Shaun. “Soundsense and sensesound” are ways of linking the brothers together, back into a new HCE (Tristan). Each brother has a different mode of understanding literature and history and Finnegans Wake itself. By fusing them together, the reader can resurrect HCE in bringing the modes of the brothers’ activity into alignment. “Soundsense” puts Shem first, but it is a Shaunian concept: having sense (reasonableness) that is sound (reliable and sensible). “Sensesound” puts Shaun first, but it is a Shemish concept: sensing sound, by hearing. The two contain each other, being contrary forces.

In Chapter III.3, during the interrogation of Yawn, one of the questions of one of the Four Old Men contains these sentences:

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. 

The “book of kills” is the Book of Kells, whose Tunc page was said to have been inspired by ALP’s Letter. Since the book/letter is literature (and more specifically, Finnegans Wake), this passage is suggesting that the figure of the Poet discovered the reading/interpretation of the book, which describes and is bound up in the violence of the fallen world (the “raiding”). The cure for someone sick of fate — the nightmare of history, all of that violent raiding — is the similar-sounding word faith (mediated by the similar-sounding word reading): as I have noted previously, I see no reason that “faith” needs to denote acceptance of unsubstantiated, supernatural propositions. I see no reason that faith could not be simple confidence in one’s self and abilities, a confidence rooted in evidence.

The final sentence indicates the ways that sight and hearing need to work together to understand Finnegans Wake, all of literature, and (I would suggest) reality. It is a way of making soundsense and sensesound kin again, recognizing the interdependence of the contraries and their operation through all of us, raising us to a perception of the impermanence of the flux of riverrun.

One way of reading the sentence is that the decoding happens when the ear takes hold of the things that the eye can’t even guess from looking at the page. That happens again and again in Finnegans Wake. For example, I once found myself turning over Hosty’s ballad from I.2 in my head during the day. I was mystified by the name “Olafa Crumple,” to whom HCE is compared. I looked at the annotations, but there was nothing there. I tried searching for the words but just got the snowman from Frozen.

So then I started saying it out loud. Sounds like Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet…the Alpha part of God’s Alpha and Omega. The alphabet, the confusion of languages at the Fall (Crumple). I kept saying it here and there and then, suddenly, I heard it: Oliver Cromwell. You can’t see it. You have to hear it, like much in the book. An ear (the poetic faculty, Shem) has to seize/see where the eye (I, ego, Shaun) can’t. We can also take the sentence to mean that the decoding happens if ever I seize what no I (no past self of mine) before grieved for. That is, when I become wiser than my past selves and see (and seize) those things that I had never before even thought that I was missing: if I become aware of the kinds of loss in my life (gnomon) and the ways they’ve shaped my storytelling — but also the recompense of those losses.

In other places, the appearance of words, not their sounds, unlocks meanings that would not be apparent from just hearing the passage read aloud. Throughout the Wake, there are puns that only become clear when the spelling of the word, not its sound, denotes a word that has been mixed with another. In some places, the appearance of words and letters carries a symbolic meaning — not only the sigla that represent characters in the book but the presence, absence, and positioning of letters. For example, when night falls on the Phoenix Park Zoo in II.2, the passage begins, “It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world.” In this phenomenal world, where we animals have our fun, the darkening is accompanied by a ringing bell, rendered “tinct, tint.” The loss of the c from the word represents the loss of the ability to “see” in the darkness (and a reliance on the sense of hearing) as the world “tints.” Later in the passage, animals offer prayers, and the word “ii” appears. This word — the lowercase letter I repeated — represents two birds sitting together, offering their prayers to the sky.

Overall, full(er) comprehension becomes possible when the contrary forces work together, when the extroverted and introverted parts of the self — the one part, thoughtfully listening and receiving inspiration, the other part, reasoning and maintaining relationships to others — work together to navigate reality, in an analogy to how hearing and seeing have to work together to decode literature and especially the Wake. This is alluded to when the brothers fuse back into HCE in II.3: “let bodley chow the fatt of his anger and badley bide the toil of his tubb.”

It is also an analogy to how the Bloomian/Shaunish emphasis on the senses over storytelling and the Stephenian/Shemian emphasis on storytelling over the senses need to be brought into dynamic balance. As I’ve described previously, one must let go of certain stories and discursive narratives (especially the belief in Platonic essences), but one must also overcome mere absorption in the senses (which can tempt us to forget about storytelling entirely) on the path to learning to narrate stories in new ways. One must let go of debilitating schoolboy solipsism (Shem/Stephen), but one must also refine a naive materialism (Shaun/Bloom). [See this post for a brief discussion of materialism]

The worst aspects of both extremes can variously be attributed to Shem or Shaun, Stephen or Bloom. The contraries need to be balanced, such that one does not take precedence over the other, but also such that they do not resign and cease their conflict. As William Blake indicated, it takes productive conflict between the contraries to fuel creative work: “Without Contraries, there is no progression.”

It is a never-ending process: as the first chapter’s Mute and Jute say, when they appear in the final chapter as Muta and Juva:

Muta: So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?

Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high.

That reason which descends or “daysends” calls to mind the rising sun that will awaken the dreamer — and also the setting sun of the day’s ends, which will beckon him back to sleep (the Fall and Redemption being identified with each other throughout Finnegans Wake). Here, I think “reason” is not the myopic reason of Shaun, which creates post hoc justifications that excuse harmful actions and maintain resentment and grudges. It is reason in its highest sense, the faculty that enables people to discern truth from fantasy, that enables epiphanies to occur.

The sun — and the sight that it enables — is crucial to the final episode in Finnegans Wake, where St. Patrick defeats the Druid. There, St. Patrick represents a naive materialism that (at the end of the dream, right before the appearance of the waking world) defeats the mystical, solipsistic idealism of the Druid, whose non-self night logic dominated the novel.

This complex scene distills many of the points of conflict between the sides of HCE (the sides of the dreamer, HCE and the Cad), between Shaun and Shem, between Bloom and Stephen — and once again, a reader is struck by the implication that each has half the key to the kingdom, that uniting them without obscuring their differences — balancing them so that their productive conflict can continue — enables the Redemption (which, in turn, can only be expressed as a Fall).

More on that scene in a future post.