This post looks at the phrase “apathy of the stars” in Ulysses and its relationship to Finnegans Wake.

Near the end of Ulysses Chapter 17, after Leopold Bloom climbs into bed with Molly, he thinks about possible “retribution” he could take against Blazes Boylan and her for the adultery. The answers, by the way, are very funny, like many of the answers in this chapter [“Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses), not yet”]. While Bloom will not use violence against Boylan, or even confront him, he does not rule out exposure, blackmail, or even a divorce or lawsuit. He also imagines getting his revenge by outdoing Boylan in business or turning Molly’s affections away from Boylan to Stephen Dedalus, a “successful rival agent of intimacy.”

The next question is “By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?” This “void of incertitude” recalls the phrase I discuss at length in this post.

The answer is interesting, pertaining to subjects as diverse as biological facts, grammar (including a joke about the word “fuck”), and the “futility of triumph or protest or vindication.” Bloom turns the heroism of the ancient Greek epics on their heads: he is not a triumphant hero, an Odysseus who slays the suitors upon returning home. He sees the futility of triumphant violence; if he (symbolically) “slays” Molly’s lovers (both Boylan and the imagined [and almost certainly incorrect] long list of her lovers), he does so by not really getting that worked up by it. The final “reflection” of this answer is the “apathy of the stars.”

Now, Bloom of course is worked up by Molly’s adultery, and he tries all day to repress his reaction and distract himself from it. So is this almost final bit of Bloom’s final chapter yet another repression/denial, or does he glimpse something profound in the perspective of the stars? I’d like to think it’s a little of both.

The stars don’t care about us. Some people believe that the positions of stars have all sorts of effects on our personalities and lives, but they don’t. At least, there’s no reason to think that they do: there is no mechanism by which the apparent positions of stars in the sky could influence the events on earth. As Bloom puts it in Chapter 8, thinking about celestial bodies, “Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock.”

The fact is, the universe is indifferent to the events of human life. That fact can either be supremely depressing or supremely liberating. Bloom seems to subscribe to a depressing interpretation in Chapter 8, but that’s at least partially because he’s hungry and in a low mood at that part of the day. What’s liberating about the indifference/apathy of the stars is the sense of perspective it can give us on everyday setbacks and disappointments. If, as Buddhism teaches, suffering is caused by excessive attachment to certain things/outcomes, then the perspective of the stars — total indifference to our human affairs — gives us a glimpse of the enlightenment of freeing ourselves from such mental hang ups.

To me, the idea that there is some cosmic plan — the idea that the stars/gods aren’t apathetic, but care deeply about humans, have goals for them, and influence their lives — is nothing short of horrifying. It means that every terrible evil in human history was caused deliberately by some superhuman conscious force that intended the evil to happen. Almost as bad (or at least absurd) is the idea that our everyday inconveniences are also deliberate. That would mean that when I forget my keys, it’s not simply because I’m a forgetful oaf sometimes: it’s because the stars, in all of their cosmic wisdom, caused me to forget those keys, and/or they really care if I find them again. There’s something so small, petty, pathetic, and laughable about the idea of such a universe. But if the universe is utterly indifferent to humanity, then there’s no intention behind our tragedies and inconveniences. There’s nothing deliberate there. It’s just the way the world shakes out. It’s an enormous cosmic accident that we’re here to begin with. Why not more accidents? Perhaps instead of the question “Why are there bad things?” we should instead marvel at the question “Why is there so much joy and pleasure to be had?” Luck of the draw.

And in fact, so much of what we spend our time worrying about is trivial when seen from the perspective of the stars: we spend so much of our energy concerned with things like what others think of us, whether we’ll get the promotion, whether we can afford a new car, whether we’ll do well at bat in the big game, whatever. In the end, the wise person is as indifferent to the outcomes of those things as the stars are: if it works out, great; but if not, it’s all just small details among the zillions of amazing coincidences that have produced this fragile but potentially joyful mortal life.

I know the above can sound deflating, as if I’m saying, “you’re not that important” but…you’re not. We’re not. No human is. We’re bags of chemicals on a rock spinning around one gasball out of billions and billions of gasballs. That’s not a depressing view of the world: that’s a view of a world full of majesty and grandeur, a world inconceivably large in which our lives are a tiny but necessary part of its intricate workings. Okay, your wife cuckolds you. And? What’s that worth in the scheme of the 13 billion years of the universe so far? Sure, you feel sad. But should you ruminate on it extensively? Is it worth getting bent out of shape over? Why not shrug like the stars do?

I’m not saying “don’t ever be sad,” but…when you get sad, it can help to put your setbacks into context. You’re a walking, talking, thinking miracle made out of stardust. Every breath, every sensation that passes through your consciousness is an almost impossibly unlikely event, and yet you’re here.

Seen from a cosmic perspective, how can our so-called problems seem anything more than miniscule blips on the radar? Your sadness, too — which, by the way, is completely valid and as much a part of the universe as anything else and which you must feel fully — is also such a blip. It too shall pass, as everything does. It’s the trying to hold onto things that causes suffering. Be like the stars, and let everything go with a shrug. “Let her rain now if she likes,” ALP says at the end of Finnegans Wake, resigned to the way of things.

I’m going on too long about this, like some kind of dollar-store Marcus Aurelius. I’d like to think that Bloom’s reflections of “equanimity” about the affair in Chapter 17 are more than just his attempts to avoid his emotions — and even if that’s all they are, his reflections still contain some good advice.

It’s instructive, in this context, to think about Bloom’s thoughts about gambling contrasted with Boylan’s. In Chapter 18, Molly recalls how Boylan reacted to losing his bet on the horse Scepter. He loses his shit, as the kids say:

he was like a perfect devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stoppress tearing up the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits 

The outsider horse Throwaway — who, incidentally, represents the dark horse Bloom — ultimately defeats the phallic Scepter (representing Boylan). Boylan loses money, but Bloom loses nothing because he wagered nothing. And he is as cool as a cucumber. Equanimity.

When Bloom thinks about the coincidence that he had inadvertently predicated the winning horse to Bantam Lyons in Chapter 5 by saying that the was going to “throw away” the paper, his “perturbations” are “allayed” by the following “considerations”:

The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding originally from a successful interpretation.

One way to summarize this is to say that (1) it is hard to interpret anything because we never know the significance of an event until after the fact and (2) it’s hard to figure out what you might have lost in a wager, owing to the fact that the total amount of possible losses is unknown.

In this situation, there was no way for Bloom to have known that he was predicting a winner of the race, and even if he had known that there was a horse coincidentally named after his utterance, he would have no way of knowing what he could conceivably have lost on the race by betting on it, if the outcome had gone the other way. He also had no way of knowing how the coincidence would affect his day (and partially precipitate the fight in Chapter 12).

But this incertitude also applies to any event whatsoever, including Molly’s adultery. There’s no way to know its full significance until after the fact (we could speculate that it might cause Bloom to begin to be more assertive in his relationship, starting with asking for his breakfast in bed), and there’s no telling what he might have lost by confronting Boylan. As ever, we face the incertitude of the void.

Bloom’s mood is reported thus: “He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied.”

And in answer to the question “What satisfied him?” we are told,

To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others. Light to the gentiles.

The phrase “Light to the gentiles” — ironically used to describe his inadvertent tip to Lyons — anticipates the word “Light” in Finnegans Wake.

By refusing to risk unnecessarily and instead adopting the perspective of the “apathy of the stars,” Bloom brings light to others. Thus, the “inner light” of things that Finnegans Wake encourages us to identify with (which you can read about here and here) might be a result of embodying the apathy of the stars. Note that the Norwegian Captain gives his version of the Prankquean’s “Am liking it” as the phrase “Ild luck to it”: the inner fire (ild in Danish) is the light of random chance (luck, lux, unlikelihood) underlying all things, the incertitude in which we live and move and have our being/becoming.

In other places, though, Bloom seems to read a personal significance into the stars, including a passage in Chapter 17 where, just before urinating with Stephen in his garden under the “heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,” he thinks about the appearance of certain stars at birth of himself, Stephen, Shakespeare, and his dead son Rudy, linking them all together as father/son figures. Maybe the temptation to read personal importance into the stars, to hope that they are not totally indifferent to the affairs of humanity, is too great, and the sky becomes a mirror for our own hopes and fears. There’s also a passage in Chapter 14 about the constellations that I had difficulty parsing on my latest read and that I’ll have to return to at another time.

Finnegans Wake refers to the stars a number of times. HCE is called in II.2 the “original sun” under which the “more and more almightily expanding universe” exists. And his son/replacement Yawn/Shaun in III.3 is described in cosmic terms, sprawled out drunkenly sleeping:

The meteor pulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel. Aggala!!!! His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel. Paloola!!!!!! And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members. Ooridiminy!!!!!!! His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt.

One of the more significant references to stars comes in I.3, exploring the world after HCE’s scandal. After a paragraph describing how the scene of HCE’s fall repeats itself again and again, the narrator describes how a “Traveller” would find food — the feast at Finnegan’s Wake, the feast prduced by HCE’s fall, the experience of life itself — as he looks at the stars of the “zooteac”/zodiac:

Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Traveller remote, unfriended, from van Demon’s Land, some lazy skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wildbroom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally quasi-begin to presquesm’ile to queasithin’ (Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)

The list beginning of the fourth line of that quote are descriptions of astrological signs. Someone better versed in astrology than I am can figure out which signs are missing and what the significance of that might be (one would expect all 12 signs, to reflect the 12 jurors/hours/customers, etc.). Maybe the other signs are elsewhere on the page?

The word “presque” is French for “almost,” so in the final lines, the Traveller (HCE) begins to almost smile: at his queasiness? At his questioning? Perhaps it is his nervous smile before the questioning of the Cad? Compare this to the earlier “Great Schoolmaster’s. (I tell you no story.) Smile!” in I.3 (page 55). In that earlier scene, HCE seems to be giving another version of his defense before the Cad in the form of a radio advertisement. He lifts his hat to induce an “adulescence” to do the same (a form of the Cad from I.2), and he stands before a Great Schoolmaster (a form of the king from I.2). So I interpret the “Great Schoolmaster” paragraph as compressing the stories of I.2 (expressing the dreamer’s anxieties about the past and the future) into a single moment of anxiety (His parenthetical “I tell you no story” both proclaims that he’s being truthful and notes that this paragraph refuses to spin this anxiety into two separate “stories”).

In the face of the feast of life, with all of its pleasure and queasiness both, with the stars of the zodiac/zooteac above, his world like a zoo (“he’s the crux of the catalogue / Of our antediluvial zoo,” sings Hosty, I.2), he starts to smile. Maybe we all should, inhabiting the perspective of the apathy of the stars.

That phrase appears as the “irony of the stars” in a passage in I.6. Immediately after the Professor (a form of Shaun) recites “The Mookse and the Gripes,” he declares “symbathos for my ever devoted friend and halfaloafonwashed, Gnaccus Gnoccovitch.”

I take Gnaccus Gnoccovitch to be one of the Professor’s rivals against which he is arguing. In other words, Gnoccovitch is a form of Shem: the parable has awakened in the Professor/Shaun some sympathy for his brother, even though the Professor continues to condemn him:

He ought to go away for a change of ideas and he’d have a world of things to look back on. Do, sweet Daniel! If I weren’t a jones in myself I’d elect myself to be his dolphin in the wildsbillow because he is such a barefooted rubber with my supersocks pulled over his face which I publicked in my bestback garden for the laetification of siderodromites and to the irony of the stars. You will say it is most unenglish and I shall hope to hear that you will not be wrong about it. But I further, feeling a bit husky in my truths.

Hm. It sounds like he’s saying he wrote a publication that deals with or accords with the irony/apathy of the stars (perhaps a work like Ulysses: “You will say it is most unenglish”; the “bestback garden” might even be an allusion to Bloom’s back garden). If his brother is a robber/rubber, then maybe he’s accusing Shem of taking credit for it.

Campbell and Robinson translate these lines as follows: “If I weren’t the man I am, I’d elect myself to give him his sendoff. He is a barefaced robber, plagiarizing my publications!”

Elsewhere in the book, Shaun (in the form of Kevin) finds ALP’s letter (written down by Shem) and claims it to be his own. Shaun is the extroverted side of the dreamer that lacks his introverted brother’s poetic talent. Feeling inferior, he tries to pass off his brother’s work as his own.

So maybe the above passage in I.6 is an example of Shaun projecting his own plagiarist crime onto his brother, angrily accusing the brother while being unable to see the beam of wood in his own eye (much as Justius ends his speech in I.7 by calling Shem “mad” (crazy) when it is actually Shaun/Justius himself who is mad (angry)).

If Shem is the Joycean artist who creates a novel like Ulysses by peeping into the secrets of humanity (Here Comes Everybody) and exposing them, Shaun is here the inferior artist who copies real artists and then ironically accuses them of being derivative.

Maybe, in this context, changing to the phrase to the “irony of the stars” shows how Shaunish types don’t actually “get it.” They can’t fully grasp the apathy of the stars because they insist that there must be “reasons” behind everything and have difficulty imagining a universe completely indifferent to them.