Harry Potter Books, Ranked

Compared to my marked indifference to the films, the Harry Potter books continue to charm me long after I move beyond YA fiction. The endless exposition does get to me at times, but there's a reason these books caught on: the relatable characters, the engaging plot and the element of surprise that remains in these works after numerous rereads and a general understanding of its wholesale ripoff of classical hero archetypes. I've cheered on Neville or been smitten by Hermione as much as I've been affected by any characters in fiction. So, to offset the light cynicism of my film post, allow me to take a more pleasant stroll down Memory Lane with Rowling's novels.

7. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Rowling's second book has wild tonal inconsistencies between more gosh-gee whimsy and sudden dips into darkness without any kind of balance or transition. The added characters, such as Colin Creevy and Ginny, are largely pointless and suck ridiculous amounts of time from the rich cast of characters already introduced and interesting enough to warrant further analysis. Gilderoy Lockhart makes for a great buffoon, his fame-hungry attention seeking a key counterpoint to Harry's humility, something called into question by so many in the later books. Overfilled with exposition, lacking almost entirely in solid character growth and erratic in tone and thrust, Chamber of Secrets is by far the most frustrating of the novels.

6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

It's a shame that the most thematically interesting novel of the series is also the most cumbersome and unfocused. The main plot, dealing with an arch-conservative, isolationist propaganda war designed to silence news of Voldemort's return, offers heady social commentary for youth fiction, and the couching of this plot in the loathsome toad Dolores Umbridge, who is terrifying for all the reasons one wouldn't expect, is genius. But Rowling burdens this story with wayward hormones, which she has to spruce up with magic and possession, an attempt to link these asides with the overarching importance of Voldemort's return that ultimately leads only to absurdly OTT and blithely selfish outbursts from a Harry who has never been more unlikable. Tack on the interminable sideplots and what might have been a vicious take on government's unending, counterproductive desperation to never let on that something has gone horribly wrong instead feels like a distended, scattershot rant on puberty.

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I've read this book four times and I still don't remotely understand the arbitrary creation and subsequent all-importance of the rules of wand ownership. It's such a random way to handle the climactic duel that I just assume Rowling pointed a wand at her ass and yelled "Accio resolution!" Having only introduced the concept of Horcruxes in the previous book, Rowling leaves most of the object hunting to this entry, leading to awkward plot jerks between hiding out in the woods away from detection and constantly coming into conflict with enemies to destroy Voldemort's soul fragments. Like all concluding entries, Deathly Hallows has to tie up a lot of loose ends, but there is a perfunctory feel to many character returns and subplot payoffs, thrown in just to get a cheer rather than as a narratively justified insertion. Nevertheless, it's a thrilling read when elements fall into place, and the utter disappointment of the convoluted finale cannot undermine a overriding feeling of relief at this poor boy's ordeal finally ending. And it made me care about Dobby, which is kind of like making me mourn Jar-Jar Binks.

4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Granted, even by Rowling's standards, this trades mood for exposition, but then this is obviously the most child-oriented of the series. Besides, its giddiness is infectious; from the moment Hagrid arrives to remove Harry from his Dickensian trappings, Philosopher's Stone is whimsical, charming and wondrous. It manages to cordon off allies and enemies quickly while giving sufficient reasons why those lines will more or less maintain over the whole of the series. Even the climax, with its multi-stage progression to the final confrontation, is more exhilarating than dark. Not a "great" novel, per se, but certainly the most delightful of the books. It's no wonder this captured so many imaginations, and continues to do so.

3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

It was obvious in Chamber that Rowling wished to go to less savory realms with this saga, but the pall that hangs over Prisoner of Azkaban is still surprisingly unsettling. The mystery of Sirius Black drives much of this atmosphere, but even in retrospect this book feels dirty and ominous. When the most helpful and gentle character is as rough-looking as Remus, you know you're not in for a sunny year at Hogwarts. Dementor attacks, disappearances, the feeling of always being watched and threatened, Prisoner of Azkaban markedly splits the series from children's lit into the more demanding levels of YA fiction, the rapidity of maturation reflected in the choices Harry himself must suddenly make. While the falling action of time travel and abetting criminals is thrilling, it is the climax in the Shrieking Shack that proves not only the most intense moment of the book but of the whole saga, forcing moral choices of not only Harry but Ron and Hermione that show how adult they really are.

2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Where Azkaban went full-tilt into darkness, Goblet eased back and bit and offered the best balance between the light-hearted wonder of the early books and the darkness to come. The best-paced of Rowling's books, Goblet even manages to go off on its tangents—Rita Skeeter's tabloid hack, the unwelcome return of Dobby—without disrupting the flow, and in many cases she only enriches the book. For example, Krum is an extraneous character, but he serves to bring out the tension in Ron and Hermione's relationship for the first time, or at least to clarify the edge they always had as a show of mutual affection. Furthermore, this is the one book that shifts tones with smooth, natural transition, moving from glee to bombast to creeping menace to full-on horror without flagging. It doesn't get across as much character as the two books to either side of it in my rankings, but the exceptional plotting more than makes up for the relative lack of growth.

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

With the exception of the random repositioning of Ginny, the least developed major character of the series, as Harry's sudden love interest, Half-Blood Prince is a nearly perfect character study, incredible given how late in the series it arrives. The dips into Voldemort's past not only elucidate his character but add more depth to Harry, Dumbledore and the relationship they have. Ron and Hermione dig into their tension so fully that its continuation into the final installment frankly feels a step too far because they have nowhere else to go as a will-they-won't-they couple. Though the final book flat-out dives into Nazi imagery, I find Half-Blood Prince, with its sinisterly scribbled textbook, uncomfortably humanizing and literally de-humanizing progression through Voldemort's life, and the horrific ordeal in the cave and ambush at Hogwarts, to be the darker work. And yet, it also weaves a thread of genuine wistfulness into the pages, taking stock of the home Harry and his friends will have to leave behind in the coming war, and it's remarkable how poignant such scenes feel. None of the books is perfect, but the combination of tonal sophistication and meaningful character insight makes this by some degree my favorite installment in the saga.

Robert Conquest — The Great Terror

After reading some of Sheila O'Malley's posts on a book called The Great Terror, I found myself sufficiently interested to order a copy and set about reading Robert Conquest's painstakingly researched survey of Stalin's Terror.

It took me about a month of dedicated reading to finish. Unlike, say, Ulysses, this wasn't because the book was complex or obscure. It was simply too much to handle. The Great Terror is a catalog of death, with enough names listed to fill a war monument. In fact, that's how I began to think of the book at some point, akin to going through each name on the Vietnam Wall, albeit with the added horror of knowing how nearly each of them died. And like the conflict in Vietnam, the Terror was so senseless, so base, so cynical on the highest level that coming to grips with it is such an awful prospect it seems better to simply act as if it never happened.

But of course, nothing ever gets solved that way, and Conquest's book is a necessary slog through Hell to find some meaning, some motive, some psychological tear that explains the system of fear and torture that took over a society supposedly founded on collectivism and the common good. I shouldn't even say "supposedly:" as Conquest reveals, the horrid, mad genius of Stalin's reign was in the dictator's use of such ideals to convince everyone that every arrest, no matter how transparently absurd and fabricated, truly was for the good of the U.S.S.R.

No one was spared. Peasants filled prisons hundredfold past the buildings' limits. Fearing potential coups from the Army, Stalin went ahead and took out their command. The intelligentsia suffered almost total casualties, to the point that Stalin effectively set Russia on a path backwards by killing or imprisoning all the well-qualified people in the union. Even Old Bolsheviks were brought down through slander and accusation until the very architects of the Revolution were recast as spies and saboteurs all along. And the artists, the artists who actually believed in Communism and set to work glorying it, were only censored if they were extremely lucky; the rest suffered harsher fates.

But imprisoning, torturing and killing was never enough. The most insidious, troubling aspect of the Terror were the confessions. It's a brilliant strategy, of course; no matter how many times we hear of coerced confessions, people seem to accept a defendant's admission of guilt as the be-all, end-all of a trial. But how anyone could have bought into that during the Purges is insane: defendants would arrive in court, reject the confession they'd been made to sign, offer evidence to the contrary, then be shouted down and coerced further until a retraction of the retraction was made that same day. The Russian court system was its own satire, and some of the accounts Conquest lists would be funny had they not actually happened and had they not entailed a full physical, moral and psychological breakdown.

The book rarely deals directly with Stalin, because Stalin found so many ways to avoid direct culpability. He'd assign tasks to an upper echelon and let orders filter down further from there, but no one, either out of crazed ignorance or sheer obedience, ever seemed to trace it back to him. Even when Stalin would clear out the ranks of those closest to him, some poor saps who must have known Stalin signed their death warrants (there were hardly any intermediaries between them and the big man) sent letters to him begging for help.

Stalin's genius—and for all his prosaic, anti-intelligentsia qualities, he was in some respects outrageously brilliant—lie in his patience and consideration. By not being the head inquisitor, by not overtly ordering police around but secretly slipping orders through the chain of command, he could always misplace resentment and blame, occasionally giving the people a light morale boost by persecuting the old Secret Police chief for following brutal orders as told. And the sick games he played: more than once, Conquest relates a story of an arrested man being set free, given a phone call by Josef personally, assuring the man that everything will be fine. Then, a few days, weeks, months, even years later, the other shoe dropped, usually on the condemned's skull.

To call Stalin's complete takeover of society goes beyond a cult of personality, something Conquest himself argues. Never noted as a philosopher with the rest of the high-ranking Old Bolsheviks, Stalin so terrified his people into subservience that he soon became hailed as one of the foremost thinkers of the era, offering responses to Hegel and elucidations of Aristotle that never seemed to make their into the record. He could literally rewrite history with a single sentence, forcing historians and anthropologists to flat-out lie because he believed one people descended from a completely unrelated region or civilization. He might have destroyed a country to completely control it, but he somehow knew that his actions would lead to this result, of total thought control. Conquest occasionally returns to the notion that those who felt Stalin was either conducting his purges for the good of the State or was in fact barely involved with them at all "did not understand [him] yet." But it's damn near to understand him even now. Oh, his reasoning, sure, but not the pathology, not the super-sanity of his crazy decisions, all of which led to ruin but succeeded in that they solidified the dictator as complete lord over the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I quaked, cried and heaved reading The Great Terror. It is not merely a demonstration of an authoritarian's capacity for cruelty but of a shared culpability engendered in a society based on fear that perpetuates the cycle. Stalin trots out a few show ponies with confessions in-hand, sparks a web of informants and narks in which people rat out neighbors, friends, even relatives to avoid being arrested for lack of diligence, then get sent to the prisons themselves. If everyone has either been broken into confessing to horrible crimes and made to denounce others, who can claim the moral high ground and oppose the regime? Descriptions of this subtly woven trap tore me apart the way reading about the Holocaust for the first time did. How does one ever come to terms with this? How does any human being have the audacity to claim dominion of this planet when this is what we do with that "authority"?

Conquest's accounts are all the more devastatingly felt for having been culled from the testimonies of those who suffered. Initially, all he had to go on were the bits and pieces of memory and official document the Soviet government had not sufficiently suppressed, and the sheer size of the Terror Conquest nevertheless could capture reveals how massive an undertaking it really was.

His judiciously structured book frames the Terror not as a series of purges but as a mounting attack on the Soviet people, one long crescendo that always traced back to Stalin's first grabs for ultimate power, in this case the orchestrated murder of his rival, the rising star Kirov. From that moment, everyone remotely in a position of status could never simply stand trial for any one crime. Every general, artist and Party member was in some way complicit with either the Kirov murder or, later, the Bukharin "plot" to undermine the U.S.S.R. At some point, even the believers accepted that their fellow cellmates were as innocent as they were.

Importantly, Conquest does not frame The Great Terror as simply a reflection of Stalin. This was not a system turned bad by a rotten apple; this was a poorly-conceived, inherently autocratic society tailor-made for Stalin by those who eventually got an undeserved romantic reputation for breaking with him. Lenin and Trotsky conducted their own Purges, executions and farcical trials, and to look to them as beacons of what might have been is simply reductive. They simply lacked Stalin's talent for institutionalizing these acts; as anti-intellectual as he was, Stalin was oddly correct in noting that the intelligentsia thought too hard in terms of logic when politics was a game of image and suggestion, which he proved hundreds of times over with his sham trials.

The version of the book I read, and the only one currently in print, is of a revised edition published after the fall of the Soviet Union gave Conquest access to buried documents. In almost every case, Conquest's estimations and extrapolations from oral histories and fragments of official accounts were either right or actually too conservative. This is important to note because, upon the book's original publication in 1968, leftists the world over savaged him for what they considered slander. France, in particular, undergoing the May '68 brouhaha, wanted nothing to do with it, with intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre refusing to even consider the possibility of such a damning account of the moral failure of Communism.

But in their rejection was proof of what Conquest attempted to show: that a sense of denial spurred by belief in a cause could lead to absolving the murderers and shunning the innocent. On one level, I can sympathize with this denial, because I can see it more innocently reflected in those Stalin purged: the sheer level of atrocity is so difficult to fathom that the first response is disbelief. After all, Stalin was so...indiscriminate. What might be dismissed as a consolidation of power must be confronted as a crackdown of an entirely different kind. This wasn't even something as transparent as the Reichstag fire or as focused (however huge) as the Shoah; Stalin broke every member of the Soviet Union into submitting to him completely, and he preyed on the humanity of others to cover up his true intentions, which are still incredibly hard to suss out, regardless of how openly he admits his willingness to kill millions.

On the other hand, of course, ignoring, even writing apologia for, Stalin's crimes solely to protect one's rosy view of a political system that has yet to work is pathetic. I'm fairly ensconced in the liberal camp—I do think that the state should control certain enterprises that should not exist simply to make money, such as healthcare, basic public transportation and local/national security. But Communism always struck me as nothing more than the unfavorable opposite of Ayn Rand's absurd vision of Utopia: neither system truly favors the industrious or talented (not even Rand's, which uses all the wrong markers of success to measure moral worth), and both leave huge spaces for an inhuman mind to fill. After not-so-subtly suggesting how and for what duration his critics could go fuck themselves in his updated epilogue, Conquest summarizes the memory of Stalin and the successors who could never fully break out of the system he established by saying, "The world, whatever its other problems, is a better place without them." It is no surprise that Conquest's statement is true; it is disheartening, though, that so many disagree with him solely on blind ideology.

The main lesson of The Great Terror is not that Stalin was inhuman: it's that he was just human enough to recognize how to manipulate others. Conquest never tries to write off Stalin, never takes the simple route of explaining away Stalin's psychology, always keeping focus on how his bad wiring managed to short out the moral fuses in so many subordinates. The descriptions of rapes, beatings, psychological torture made me shake uncontrollably at times; this was a society that put so many people in jail that the only ones left outside were the actual criminals. Petty grudges could land entire families in gulags based on a poison-pen letter without substance from some loon. Children came of age expecting to inform on their parents, leading to what nearly amounted to a feral generation of amoral, vicious teenagers who make the sneering punks hanging around S.E.X. in the '70s seem even more tame and harmless.

How could this have happened? I apologize for the circularity, but I cannot get off this question. How could Stalin permit this, whatever amorality drove him? How could anyone allow it to continue when they could see Russia sliding backwards in front of their eyes? But then, if I was tortured physically and mentally, if my family were threatened with the same horror, and if I knew I would go to prison anyway, wouldn't I confess to make it stop, no matter if I knew the pain would keep coming? It is necessary to approach the Terror as one does the Holocaust: not as the result of one man's insanity but of one collective's willingness to go along with transparent atrocity.

This is a devastating book, a Herculean effort on Conquest's part (he had to piece together the narrative from scattered anecdotes, records and testimonies decades before he could confirm everything), and one of the more damning accounts of man's inhumanity. But I said earlier that it was necessary, and I stand by it. It's no good running away from these horrors, and Conquest's meticulous research helps put the puzzle together and explain how evil seeped into every nook and cranny of an already-flawed system. It's a harrowing read, but also one I have no choice but to recommend. Beyond that, even; it's one of the most important books of the last hundred years.

Ulysses, Chapter Eighteen: Penelope

[Link to previous chapters here]

With "Ithaca," Joyce achieved such breadth of language, so infinite, so microscopic, that you'd be forgiven for thinking the book was over. Where else can he go? It is at that point that the author addresses the one missing link, the one area not covered in his melting pot of language, perspective and dimension and the one that, if deleted, would render Ulysses the most broken and incomplete: the input of a woman.

I read "Penelope" one sentence at a time, to which some might say, "Yes, well done, Jake. Hope you didn't get any headaches." But do please keep in mind that there are eight sentences in this chapter. The chapter is 42 pages long. There are no periods, and my edition only has paragraph breaks in-between the 8 sentences because some kind soul followed the schema and inserted them later. Otherwise, I'd be left with nothing but un-punctuated block text for 42 pages. You'd be amazed how appreciative a person can be for 8 presses of the tab button.

So, after building up Molly to be a sort of mythic figure, hanging over the novel and Bloom's entire trek around Dublin, Joyce finally lets her have a say. And dear Lord, does she have a lot on her mind. If "Ithaca" pulled back into objectivity to capture the scenario with clarity and scientific precision, "Penelope" is all about emotional truth. It's about the full-on churning whirlpool of feelings, private thoughts and trivial concerns that goes on within each of us, but Molly's thoughts bear the added weight of having been dammed up so long, not only by Joyce but Bloom himself.

In short order, she slices our vision of Leopold to ribbons. Even if you've noted the inconsistencies in his fretting over his wife's infidelity as he sends naughty letters to Martha Clifford or reminisces about prostitutes, it's difficult to prepare for the force of Molly's demolition of the double standard. Where Bloom forgives Molly for her affair, she simply disregards his flirtations with bitterness. Just as Poldy figured out Boylan's intrusion from her hidden letters, so too did she figure out Bloom was trading post with another woman, though she assumes the lady wants Bloom's money; "no fool like an old fool," she thinks. Molly notes that men can get away will gallivanting all night with impunity but women get hounded at every step by the same men who demand their freedom to go and do as they please.

She's suffered for her husband. Molly too had to contend with the death of her child (and we learn that she, like Leopold, never wanted to conceive again because of the pain of that loss), but he cannot break from it and therefore prevents her from recovering as well. Bloom comes off as feminine in his walk around Dublin, what with his passivity and calm response to the drinking of the Irish Catholics around him -- Molly shares in Joyce's disgust of them, by the way; "they call that friendship killing and then burying one another," she practically spits inside her skull. But now we see how classically masculine and manipulative so much of his thinking and behavior has been and how he's as patriarchal as anyone else.

Mingled in with these big feminine thoughts are simpler stream-of-consciousness rants. In her rambling monologue are farts, menstruation concerns and a graphic comparison of size, performance and...um, payload of her husband and her lover. In-between grandiose ruminations on men and gender roles, she gets annoyed that she can't pass wind because her husband sleeps with his head by her feet, which in turn makes her worry that he'll have a spasm in the night and kick out all her teeth. This all just drops into the prose, never broken up by so much as a comma.

But as dark and forceful as her gales of repressed feelings can be, Molly also finds her own grace. She reflects approvingly on Bloom's kindness and generosity, as well as noting that Boylan is rude and tactless in comparison and cares only for sex. She cannot find someone who can give her balance, Bloom's consideration and Boylan's physical care. In this sense, her frustration and anger is understandable, but it gives way to moments of quieter sadness that are quite affecting.

After the scientific minutiae of the previous chapter, Joyce uses what might technically be his simplest language yet -- in terms of construction, at least. But if the words aren't as heady, what the language conveys is as complex as anything yet demonstrated even in the novel's most difficult sections.

It is important at this point to note the influence of Joyce's wife Nora on this. For a great collection of starter information on their relationship and how it affected Ulysses, check out Sheila O'Malley's piece on this chapter (and by the way, HUGE props to Sheila for helping me through this book, not only with her chapter-by-chapter pieces with background info and wonderfully guiding analysis but a bunch of Twitter chat that made reading this all the more enjoyable and rewarding). Joyce set the book on the day of their first "date," which, thanks Jimmy, way to make anniversaries impossible for the rest of us. All those post-WWII American ex-pats must have hated every anniversary. "Oh Zelda, what did Scott get you? A feather boa? Oh, that's cool. Me? Not much, just the dedication of the towering literary achievement of the 20th century. Bu seriously, that boa is sick."

Nora wasn't anything like Joyce. She wasn't particularly well-read, didn't delight in his intellectual analysis of language and, like Bloom did Stephen, wondered why her husband couldn't use his incredible singing voice to get money and do his little tomes on the side. Their poverty, transience and the developing schizophrenia of their daughter strained their relationship, but they stayed together until Joyce's death. Supposedly some of Nora's private letters to her sister reveal brutal assessments of her husband and his talent, but she never strayed from the equally dedicated Jimmy.

You see that in Molly. She's a simple lass: she doesn't even like the sultry romance novels Bloom brings her because they're too fantastical and lofty. Some of her thoughts are literal to the point of hilarity: she muses on how breasts drive a man wild but comments upon the grotesque nature of the penis and that it's no wonder Classical art displays bared breasts but covers male genitalia with leaves. But simple doesn't inherently mean stupid, and Joyce's humanism finds its zenith in the expression of her unfiltered fantasies and ruminations. He's knocked every other pedestal down, and the feminine is the highest of them all. By bringing it down, he gets to experience the full power of the unsuppressed woman.

At times this chapter can be scary. It's almost as if Molly has read the previous 17 chapters and has seen what her husband has been able to get away with by hoodwinking the audience. She also responds to the typing of the Madonna in Nausicaa and the whore in Circe. Complicated as those characters were once studied, they pale in comparison to Molly, who is the only one of the three to truly have her story told. She's so incensed that even her more supportive thoughts of her husband and his endearing quirks carry an acidic edge. It's up to her to provide a well-rounded woman that does not fit into a type, and those frightening bursts of loathing -- she thinks near the end how easily she could humiliate her husband with open acknowledgment of her affair -- are a means of chaotically reestablishing balance. In the Scylla and Charybdis episode, Stephen takes note of a mother's love being perhaps the only true constant in this world and how telling it was that the Church built its foundation upon the vague and controlling bedrock of patriarchy. But the book too has confined its vision to Bloom's paternal views, and here at last is the maternal voice.

That side of Molly is reflected in Joyce's repeated use of the word "yes." It's positive, an affirmation instead of a denial or resignation. If read in a certain light, the entire chapter comes off as the slow buildup to an orgasm. This becomes unmistakably clear in the final run, in which Molly flashes back in thoughts to Bloom proposing to her and the language builds with such passion, beauty and quick, panting repetition of thought that the handful of recorded readings I've listened to all make obvious that she's masturbating and climaxing not to one of her many fantasies or the thought of Boylan and his huge package but her husband's loving, respectful and romantically intoxicated request for her hand. It's a shattering moment of coital literature as erotic as anything in Sweets of Sin, I'd wager and the final, hopeful touch that proves both husband and wife, for all their issues, really do have that connection they always did. If Bloom's humanistic acceptance of the situation seemed the mature, collected approach, Molly's wild session could provide the force needed to get this marriage going again if she only knew how much Bloom still loves her.

So where, in the end, do I stand with Ulysses? It's awkward to even offer my own opinion, given how much I've relied on the efforts who have spent years (in some cases, decades) parsing out the mysteries and language of the book. I don't know that I had any one entirely original thought with this book; I had to rely so much on those other sources to figure out what as going on that even my fleeting bits of interpretation were all built off someone else's point. But I really do feel changed by this book. Once it seeped into my system, I couldn't stop. It took me three months to read this, but if I'd not been so busy when I first started and could have gotten deeper into the book than I did before hiatuses set in, I think I could have read it all in only a few weeks. It's that addicting. It challenged my approach to characters, my preferences for prose style and, frankly, my patience. Furthermore, I think the fact that I had to consult so many others taught me a lesson in humility: I'm so used to trying to analyze movies and albums and such that I forget that sometimes, you need a helping hand, and it's better to admit that and continue with something that can change you than to quietly slip out the back and pretend you never started tackling something.

For a book that required me to read as much about every chapter as the chapters themselves, Ulysses gutted me, and the relief I thought I'd feel for finishing it was instead supplanted by a mild regret that it's over and a mind buzzing with questions over what happened to the characters. I'd actually begun to enjoy cross-referencing my own confusion with plot summaries and analytical readings, finding whole new ways to read the book that altered everything I thought I'd figured out about the style of a chapter or the meaning of a particularly dense passage. I'm done now, but I want to follow these characters some more, and that's the best praise I can offer for a book that already devoted 732 pages to what is essentially one long dick and fart joke.

Ulysses, Chapter Seventeen: Ithaca

[Link to previous chapters here]

In a way, "Ithaca," the penultimate chapter yet the proper summation of Ulysses' "plot," is as gorgeous and revealing as its final entry. Joyce's own favorite of the 18 episodes, "Ithaca" is one of the most profound things I've ever read, despite (and in many ways because) of the banality at the heart of it. It achieves a simultaneous microscopic and macroscopic view, soaring above the characters yet summarizing and concluding their quirks, beliefs, attitudes and fleeting connection with such precision that, were the prose not such a challenge that only those who've endured the strongest passages of the novel to this point not prepared to handle it, this chapter might serve as a study guide for the rest of Ulysses.

It's a towering achievement, but in a specific respect. After building and building for nigh on 700 pages, Ulysses damn well better deliver on Bloom's return home to handle Stephen's indirection and his wife's affair. Yet Joyce quickly makes it clear that the humanly observed reality of his characters will not, can not, suddenly give way to the fantastical resolution of complex human issues. This is not an explosive end to the book's story; it is a monumental summary of the book's use of language.

Structured as a Catholic catechism — a call-and-response chanting designed to teach doctrine — "Ithaca" is typified by a brief, objective question and an equally brief yet intricately detailed response. Joyce doesn't simply say that Bloom, who forgot his key, climbs his wall and opens the door from the inside; he describes Bloom's height and the slight jump down on the other side with the sort of precision normally reserved for the documentation of an experiment for publication in a research journal. Amusingly, as Bloom and Stephen struggle to find a common perspective between Leopold's scientific view and Stephen's spiritual connection to art, Joyce finds it for them, but he does not share this wisdom.

This chapter was both easier and harder than what came before. It proved difficult in the sheer level of detail put into the most casual observation, scientifically breaking down a boiling kettle of water and also inventing number games with the age disparity between the two men. In effect, he not only captures the present in its minutiae but rebounds off the past and even future. Yet the episode is also more legible than, say, "Oxen of the Sun" or even an early chapter like "Proteus" because it knows how far we've come with these two and rewards us for our diligence.

Joyce pulls the perspective back into a tone of voice that goes beyond third-person omniscience into the voice of the Lord Himself. The questions start simply, in broad terms to prepare the reader: What did Bloom and Stephen do after leaving the shelter? What did they discuss? But with each pass the viewer gets closer and closer, drawing out details until Joyce begins breaking down particles, particles of personal connection and of the atomic properties of objects.

If you can keep up, Joyce actually manages to dig into these characters further, and in his objective, clinical observation, he actually reflects the subjective perspectives of both characters: inside, Bloom goes to make a cup of tea, and Joyce describes what Stephen and Bloom see in the kitchen. Stephen, a guest in the house and an observer of aesthetics, notes with precision the layout of the room and the specifics of each object (what it's made of, how it's arranged, etc.). Bloom, who is of course familiar with his own house and more pragmatic than Stephen, sees a saucepan and a kettle.

(That amusing bluntness characterizes the humor of the chapter, which sometimes plays on our previous knowledge of Bloom and Stephen to make double meanings out of literal descriptions. The narrator asks of Bloom, "Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind?" The response: "What to do with our wives.")

Similarities and differences between Stephen and Leopold manifest fully now that both clear their heads enough to talk in complete sentences. They share their halting knowledge in their ethnic languages, Stephen going over basic Gaelic letters and phrases and Bloom doing the same for Hebrew. The parallels between the Irish and Israelites strengthen. The differences, so alienating in the previous chapter, are now surmountable through Bloom's acceptance of varying views, a tolerance exacerbated by the long-shot perspective of the chapter.

That's another thing: as much as "Ithaca" summarizes the book and how Stephen and Bloom relate to each other, it also refines Bloom's humanism to its purest point. From his vantage point, Joyce can fully illustrate the range of contradictions in Bloom and how he overcomes them. He knows that the plans he and Stephen make at 2 in the morning for future meetings will likely not come to fruition, but he still feels centered in Stephen's presence. He steps outside everything (with the narrator) and contextualizes his situation. He and Stephen may not forge a bond to heal both their wounds, but this banal exchange of pleasantries over cocoa should not be discarded. Bloom does not even feel that Stephen fills a hole left by Molly's affair because he sees no hole. He is described as satisfied, and when the catechist asks what satisified him, you can almost hear a note of incredulity in the neutral voice. "To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others. Light to the gentiles." He has helped Stephen in some small way, and however insignificant the act may be, it looks equally major in the all-encompassing intimacy of the prose.

Bloom notes the poorly hidden signs of the affair all around him, but he does not mind. The strain in his relationship with Molly has been expounded upon in fleeting moments of reflection, but here we get the full impact of their troubles in the blunt prose. The narration says it has been 10 years, 5 months and 18 days since Bloom last had full intercourse with his wife, and admitting this aloud to himself seems to hammer home how much Bloom has neglected her. We've seen, we've felt, his overriding love for Molly, but loving someone has never ensured not harming her. Bloom finally seems to reflect on how he's failed her, not how he's failed himself.

The Odyssey culminates in a vicious slaughter of the suitors, but the most Bloom can do is fleetingly and sarcastically think of dueling Boylan. But is Odysses' rampage all that heroic? He spends seven years being the lover of a demigoddess, then another year in Circe's sway, but he gets to come home and be all high and mighty about men horning in on his wife after two decades? Instead, Bloom thinks of all the harms and ills in society that are worse than adultery, running through a long list that dissipates his threatened masculinity. At last, and contrary to that old saying, he does something human, not godlike: he forgives her.

"Ithaca" is beautiful. Never mind its ostensible remove: in a book ironically about finding one's position relative to others while containing an account of a city so accurate people can still walk around Dublin today using Ulysses as a map, this vast yet humble conclusion perfectly summarizes Joyce's novel. And in one of Joyce's inimitable moments of humanity and humor, he finishes the chapter, and Bloom's story as he sees fit, with a sort of "You are here" period marking Bloom's, and the audience's, place in all this.

Ulysses, Chapter Sixteen: Eumaeus

[Link to previous chapters here]

Once again, Joyce gives the audience a breather, following up the sexual nightmares conjured by M.C. Escher and Franz Kafka in the previous chapter with straightforward prose that suggests Joyce really could have written a lucid, charming novel if he'd cared to, one that might even have put some money into his vacant, cobwebbed bank account. Then, just to shut everyone up, he sets about sabotaging this structure and pointing out its weaknesses.

For after spending nearly 600 pages entrenched with the foibles, perspectives, fantasies, observations and patterns of Stephen and Bloom, Joyce suddenly acquiesces to all those who would complain of its complexity and pulls back into language that's easily understood. But it lacks the intimacy of the reader's connection to these two characters. Where we used to get the barest flicker of pure reaction to another character or situation, now we get broader strokes. Granted, it's a hell of a lot easier to get a feel for the painting when you see the whole thing and not extreme close-ups of the preliminary pencil sketches, but who would pass up the opportunity to see Picasso revealing his process in minutiae in order to just see the finished product?

And so, ironically, this most readable of chapters probably reveals the least about Stephen and Bloom. This is even funnier given that this is the first chapter in which they are well and truly united. The odyssey is done; now it is time to wind down and return home. First, though, they stop at a cabman's shelter to straighten out a little bit. Can you blame them? Stephen's wasted on absinthe and Bloom just walked out of a sadomasochistic fever vision.

So as they relax for a bit in this shelter, Bloom starts chatting with Stephen, and whatever hopes that these two would find comfort and strength in each other soon flies out the window. Bloom, seeking to impress Stephen, tries to talk politics and pretentiously attempts to hold court on art he does not understand (if he's heard of it at all). Stephen, drunken and cynical, barely listens to the man, and he always seems to pick up on the worst thing. Mistaking Stephen for a politically active young man, Bloom touts his own socialist beliefs, which rub Stephen the wrong way because of the restrictive role of artists in such a utopia.

Earlier, in the Cyclops episode, I couldn't quite tell if Bloom's objections to the others at the Ormond seemed so rude simply because A) he reacted to the complete unctuousness of the nationalists and B) the biased, anti-Semitic narrator skewed Bloom's tone. It would seem there was some truth to the manner that narrator presented Bloom: he seems less a paternal guidance for Stephen than a patronizing git who can moralize against Stephen for squandering money on prostitutes and wasting his potential when he can't even bring himself to go home to his wife.

He also reveals less noble reasons for wishing to aid young Dedalus that go beyond moral consideration. Bloom thinks he might be able to glean intelligence from the genius, and when he convinces Stephen to come to his house at the chapter's end he has all sorts of ludicrously ambitious ideas for what to do when they get there -- write journalism and literature, sing Italian duets, you name it. When he learns Stephen can sing beautifully (something he shares with Joyce himself), Bloom imagines managing Stephen in a successful singing career that would leave plenty of time for buying books, as he condescendingly thinks to himself.

On some level, Bloom sees this as a way to prove himself to Molly and to show up Boylan, who is managing Molly's tour. But it also ignores who Stephen is, who we know him to be from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and from his chapters here. He doesn't care about money, and he would rather stay poor developing the ideas that consume him than make a fortune and pursue his life's passion as some trifling hobby. One cannot entirely deny Bloom's reasonable position: his plan for Stephen would let the man practice two forms of art and never have to worry about his financial future, but it also demonstrates the major split between art and science that demarcate Bloom and Dedalus.

Joyce reflects the communicative gulf between the two in the aesthetic distance of the chapter's structure. These two men do not truly know each other, and the removed descriptions of gestures and whole thoughts shows how little they realize about the frantic fragments bouncing around in each other. Bloom, like the cliché-ridden text (compared to Joyce's embodying allusions and citations, the quotations here are more straightforward, less obscure and more present simply to be recognized), tries too hard to impress, but when you strip away everything, you see that he only has the SparkNotes on Stephen, not the full story and the way that story unfolds for Stephen. Bloom thus serves as a stand-in for the overconfident reader here: he thinks he has the other figured out and plays to that, only to make a fool of himself when that carpet Joyce convinces the reader to keep standing on gets whipped away yet once more.

By shattering the illusion of Bloom's capacity to guide Stephen to some epiphany, Joyce forced me at last to reckon with the last scrap within me that looked to Bloom as a hero. Here at last, Joyce makes inescapably clear that Odysseus does not exist in the real world; there's just a nervous guy with a good heart and an occasionally rotten head. Compare his banality to Murphy, the sailor who loudly brags about his lifelong exploits on the seven seas. At first glance, he seems to be the Odysseus-like hero Bloom isn't, a confident adventurer with brave journeys that kept him from home instead of a fear of more pain and renewed commitment. But Bloom slowly catches Murphy out in tall tales, noting a different name on a postcard the sailor passes around and knowing that the man couldn't possibly have visited all the places he's claimed to and not remember the Rock of Gibraltar since vessels at that time would have had to sail past it to get to half these locales. It's tempting to shift attention to Murphy as Bloom immediately starts stumbling in conversation with Stephen, but soon we see him for the fraud he is and realize that Bloom must be our beacon: he may be flawed, but that makes him all the more relatable.

Of course, Bloom tries to envision himself as a hero to offset some of his recent downturns. When the other patrons get on the subject of Parnell, Bloom jumps from a memory of handing the politician his dropped hat at a rally to trying to imagine himself as the crusading nationalist and womanizer. Though Joyce never settles on politics as the answer for anything, both Portrait and Ulysses owe a great deal of their overall tones from the void left by Parnell and what he represented. Here, however, Bloom primarily fixates on the sordid love triangle between Parnell, his mistress Katherine O'Shea and her husband. Perhaps still clouded from his preceding trip into the depths of his masochistic sexual hangups, Bloom wonders why Parnell couldn't have been allowed to get away with his infidelity and keep O'Shea (whose Spanish blood ties her more explicitly to Molly). He seems to be resigning himself to his role, that of the cuckolded husband who stayed with O'Shea. Eventually, she denounced Parnell and went back to the captain, and Bloom seems to suggest the best way forward in his own life is to forgive Molly. It's still a warped solution, but it shows how badly he wants to keep her.

And if Bloom's symbolic equations and ill-thought-out solutions don't make a lot of sense, what does at 1 in the morning after a long, exhausting day? The threads of conversation and thought in this chapter always start with strength and conviction but no one can muster up any fierce debate. It's at that magic hour when you start to say ridiculous things and the only thing others can do is yawn and say, "Yeah." Seriously, if someone went up to the head of the ADL at this time of night and told him that the Holocaust was a Zionist conspiracy," Robert Sugarman would just drearily nod his head and say, "Later. We'll talk about this later."

There are glaring contradictions in character: Bloom even-handedly wonders why there's no female equivalent of The Odyssey, in which a woman gets to gallivant around for years while the husband must mourn and stay chaste, only to turn to vicious misogyny in his denunciation of prostitutes (a rant brought on by the sight of the first whore he ever slept with). Later, and after all the grief he's suffered for his own ethnicity, he makes stereotypical comments about Italians. But there are counters even to these counters, and the drifting, collapsing patterns suggest that even the novel is wearing itself out. We'll be home at 7 Eccles Street soon, but now that Joyce has scattered the last thought that Bloom is Odysseus, can we hold out any hope he will expel the suitor?

Ulysses, Chapter Fifteen: Circe

[Link to previous chapters here]

Did someone tear out what was meant to be the Circe chapter and paste in the screenplay for Bitter Moon hoping I wouldn't notice? Having read some of Joyce's more erotic letters to his wife Nora, I knew he could be astonishingly forthright about sex, but nothing in this book -- not even the graphic description of Bloom's cum-soaked shirt post-masturbation in the Nausicaa episode -- truly prepared me for the explosion of sexual desire contained within this chapter.

In The Odyssey, Circe traps Odysseus and his men when she turns the remaining crew into pigs, which is actually a step up from the usual fate to befall Odysseus' men, which is agonizing death in the name of their commander's quest for welcome-home sex. Odysseus receives an herb from Hermes that helps him avoid this curse, but he still falls under Circe's spell, staying with her for a year and becoming her lover.

A similar spell of sex and drug-induced haze falls over this chapter, which Joyce formats as if a play but structures in any way but a typical drama. This could almost have been written by Hunter S. Thompson after a particularly wild night even by his standards. As Bloom follows Stephen into "Nighttown," the area choked with brothels and whores, he begins having fantastical visions, all of them dovetailing into his warped sexual frustrations and desires. As Joyce moves deeper into the nightmarish (yet darkly funny) vision of sexual excess and the liberated id, he once again casts aside everything we think we know about this man.

Bloom has been slowly falling apart all day over his wife's affair, and the very last place he should be going right now (round about midnight) is to the red-light district. He knows this, and he wonders why he even feels the need to look out for Stephen. It's not like the lad is any worse off than his friends, all of whom are just as young and just as squalid. His paranoia over Molly heightens as his desires are enticed by the prostitutes around him, and soon he starts having vivid hallucinations.

He imagines himself arrested for being a nuisance, only to wind up in a Kafkaesque trial in which women from his past materialize from thin air to accuse him of lechery. Some even mock him as a cuckold. J.J. Molloy shows up to act as defense, and he provides an understatement for the ages when he tells this dream court "If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers a book." Jesus, you're telling me. Not all the accusers are so outraged, however; Gerty shows up and initially condemns Bloom for looking up her skirt but adds, "I love you for doing that to me." Bloom's not the only one who's looked with lust upon another.

Bloom manages to imagine himself out of that scenario and enjoys a brief respite where he becomes the vision of Ireland's grace Joyce set him up to be at the start of the novel before kicking over that pedestal and making sure everyone was on the same level. He cheekily rises through the social ranks as adoring mobs swarm him, at last becoming new king for Ireland, one so beloved that even the anti-Semitic citizen comes to sing his praises. Then, amusingly, Bloom lays out a plan to unite the country among races and creeds, which cannot penetrate the Catholic skulls even of invented specters, and the crowd turns on him.

Eventually, Bloom staggers his way to the brothel, and all hell breaks loose. Bloom got himself out of his warped "trial" by summoning Paddy Dignam's ghost to clear his name. Before Dignam dissipates, he says he must " satisfy an animal need" and expel some disagreeable buttermilk. Satisfying an animal need also applies to having sex, and Joyce rips the veil off both the romanticized and repressed visions of sex that dominate the social view of intercourse. Joyce explores sexual fantasies, but not in the lilting, harlequin romance way or even the erotic novel way; he pores over every nook and cranny of a dark thought to see what it is that really excites people, what primitive wants come out in the animalistic act of sex.

And my God does Bloom have a lot of pent-up feelings. Before he can do anything for Stephen, he must first navigate his own hangups, forced to confront them by Bella Cohen, the mountainous madam of the brothel who proves so domineering that the two switch gender roles. Bella becomes Bello as "ma'amsir" (as one of the other prostitutes calls her) begins stomping and humiliating Bloom, who acts as a pig for a brief time (remember Circe?). It's a madhouse, but one not designed to be viewed as a freak show. This is what happens when a society is crippled sexually. Bloom, who cannot have full intercourse with Molly, is messed up by it, just as Stephen, who grew up with such religiously strict views of women that he ironically avoids the issue of being unable to find someone pure enough for him by corrupting himself with prostitutes.

We can see the guilt eating at them here. A vision of Molly teases Bloom, and Bella/Bello makes Bloom think of Boylan taking his wife. At one point, an apparition of Boylan arrives and Bloom takes on the role of lackey as he obsequiously bows to the man's demands for taking Molly; Leopold even asks if he can bring some friends to watch Blazes having sex with her. Poldy's dead father laments his son's corruption, but he ends up consumed with ideas of sex himself, specifically how sex relates to Christ and the idea of virgin birth.

Poor Stephen has it even worse when Joyce briefly tracks the lad's hallucinations. His father appears, as drunken and stupid in imagination as he is in life, and Stephen wards him away. But his mother later arrives, and Stephen falls to pieces. He lapses into apoplectic insensibility and smashes a chandelier in fear and guilt, for which Bloom pays. It's a horrifying, heartbreaking moment, and Bloom gets to prove his paternal instinct when he smooths everything over, something that proves trickier when Stephen runs outside and finds himself in a fight with two guards who take him to be anti-British and froth at the mouth at insults to the King (Joyce actually starts putting "fuck" and "cunt" into the text as the mood turns more hostile). One constable has enough and lays Stephen out with a punch, and Bloom can't help but pity this well-learned but wasteful young man as he lies mumbling on the pavement. Just then, Bloom has a vision of his son Rudy, now 11, standing there with them. The father calls out to his dead child, but Rudy pays no heed.

This is not the first time Joyce has transitioned from funny to sad, but normally the two moods mingle; here, he leaps extremities, moving from twisted black comedy to these terrible glimpses into the full horror nagging at Bloom and Stephen. To place them in the chapter going into the dark heart of sex only shows how everything is connected, and to wall off certain human feelings and acts disrupts the unity of the whole. And it's not like Joyce was a mad womanizer: he stayed committed to Nora from the moment he met her. Hell, June 16, 1904, the setting of this novel, is the day the two had their first date. He's not trying to justify Dionysian lifestyles, only to address the hangups and fetishes he had and knew existed in others. Scary and rending as their final visions are, Bloom and Stephen reach a catharsis precisely through confronting their full desires, though it remains to be seen if they learn anything from it.

Ulysses, Chapter Fourteen: Oxen of the Sun

[Link to previous chapters here]

Let me me briefly summarize how I've gotten through Ulysses to this point. After constantly checking endnotes as I read through the first two or three chapters, I decided to try my best to simply power through each episode, note what confused me, then look up those things afterward. When I get a bit lost in the plot (which happens multiple times per chapter, save the more straightforward Nausicaa episode), I will -- and I refuse to be ashamed about this -- turn to Sparknotes. More recently, I've found meticulously outlined plot summaries here that have proved incredibly helpful. I read the explanatory notes for each chapter and occasionally branch out even further for information about what it all means, usually to Sheila O'Malley's posts on the book, since it was her enthusiasm for Joyce that finally motivated me to take the plunge into the author's work. Her writing on the chapters is, from what I've seen so far, insightful but conversational, perfectly capturing what I think Joyce did with his book: finding a human way to get across its big ideas. Whenever I get well and truly stuck, I immediately defer to her.

I did not make it one full page into the Oxen of the Sun chapter without running to all my little safehouses looking for clues, answers, ANYTHING to help me. What in the Sam Hill was going on? Even when I sorted out some basic facts, such as the chapter being set in a hospital and revolving around the idea of birth in physical and lingual terms, I still could not proceed. This is by leaps and bounds the hardest chapter of the book yet, and I pray it gets no harder from here. I don't mean to make Sheila out to be the be-all, end-all expert on Joyce, but when she opened her own post on the chapter with an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the chapter, I wondered what hope I had. Hell, Joyce himself acknowledged this was the hardest chapter to read. I am not even remotely surprised that it follows what was certainly the easiest episode to that point, one so intuitive and straightforward I never had to look at notes to figure out what was going on.

I don't want to give off the impression that anything I've written on Ulysses to this point is definitive or even all that confident. I've relied so much on other readings because it's so hard to pick up exactly what's going on that I don't even consider my Ulysses posts reviews (hence why I referred to my plans to chart my trip through the book as a "reading diary"). But I've at least tried to pick up on what Joyce is doing and make sense of it through my own set of references and outlooks. Here, I just need to try to sort it out.

So, basically, what Joyce is doing here is presenting a condensed history of the English language. Framed like the nine months of a pregnancy, the book moves through stylistic shifts across paragraph breaks. First, it's a literal translation of Latin, then it moves into old English and alliterative Anglo-Saxon, then slowly up the chain until it becomes more legible. But Joyce never takes the easy route. He's already expounded upon Shakespeare, so we don't get any passages that slip into the Bard's style, nor do we tackle the older English through Beowulf or Chaucer. In some cases, even when I read notes and summaries I didn't get a full picture. I distinctly remember asking "Who the hell is Charles Lamb?" to no one in particular as I drifted over to Wikipedia for the eighth time.

If I can offer one piece of advice to anyone else reading this chapter for the first time, it's this: read as much of it as you can out loud. I'd read several people who noted that all Joyce's work can be read aloud (apparently it's the only way you can even begin to power through Finnegans Wake), and when I got bogged down so soon here, I gave it a shot. Now, I stumbled and skipped words entirely, but this helped immeasurably. I still don't even begin to get a handle on the prose until about halfway in, but reading it let me capture the flow and keep moving. That is the most important thing I've learned about reading this book: don't stop.

So Joyce starts with the immediate formation of the egg, presenting just enough variations from the Latin to suggest a minor shift in genetic makeup before moving up the developmental chain through fragments of emerging origins and etymological roots until at last it gets into more modern styles like Romanticism and the text feels full, like the belly of a woman on the cusp of giving birth. Joyce sets this against a real birth, the arduous delivery of Mrs. Purefoy, mentioned earlier to a concerned Bloom. Joyce occasionally parodies the celebratory view of birth among men who don't have to experience the pain, pain that wracks women no matter how good the facilities she goes to are (and Joyce devotes a paragraph to praising the National Maternity Hospital with sincerity). We've all had to watch those horrifying videos of women giving birth that dispel any romantic qualities about what is a messy, bloody act that killed numerous women. Joyce mocks the men in the waiting room drinking and reveling as a a woman truly fights for her life and that of another, but he does find some humor in comparing this fitful, dangerous process as analogous to the development of language.

Oh, by the way, Stephen and Leopold meet in this chapter. That is honestly how Joyce structures it. Finally, goddamn finally, the two meet, but Joyce is so busy, you know, summarizing the entire English language that he casually mentions them being in the same room and interacting. Imagine if Odysseus and Telemachus just kind of met and chatted about sport. Imagine if, instead of that timeless reveal of Harry Lime in The Third Man, Carol Reed just cut from the lead-up to Welles and Cotton conversing. It may be the funniest joke yet in the book, a deflated climax that reminds us that this is all just a snapshot of life, not the epic journey upon which it is based with tongue firmly in cheek.

However, Joyce wastes no time showing how the two view each other. Bloom looks upon Stephen with affection, and when his thoughts turn to his dead son Rudy, he counters that depression with consideration for Stephen's own free-fall without even realizing what he's doing. Stephen, plastered with ale and, later, absinthe, argues with the other men in attendance over birth matters. They argue about whether to save the mother or the child in the event of complications (the prose describing this appropriately being from archaic and barbaric times) and Stephen attacks the convoluted teachings of the Church for introducing these warped moral questions, something that clearly aligns him with Bloom, who by and large sits in the corner quietly as the full-blood Irish Catholics carry on with their drinking and shouting. But Stephen betrays his lingering ties to the Church when he fears that a thunderclap is God's warning for his blasphemy, and it's up to Bloom to pacify him.

Slowly, and without much in the way of direct conversation between the two, Bloom and Stephen move away from the others and unify. Joyce emphasizes not only the age difference but the ethnic split that keeps Bloom away from the young men: as Stephen hands out another round of drinks, the ale becomes a sort of Communion, and Bloom's sobriety doubles as his inability to partake in the sacrament as a Jew. But Stephen is struggling against the bonds he can't break, and Bloom starts to undo a few of the knots for him. He wants to help Stephen, wants him to stop wasting money on drink and whores. Bloom looks at the others with disdain, and Joyce's contempt for the feckless, loutish Irishmen comes to the fore. Bloom and Stephen think of Mrs. Purefoy's pain and the issues of birth, but the others just make jokes and display a wanton disregard for propriety as they joke about casual sex and prophylactics (I counted six condom jokes and I'm told there are some in the early sections I couldn't comprehend).

It is around this time that Joyce slams on the brakes and goes after Bloom for this hypocrisy, as if he's not really writing the character and cannot believe what the man just revealed. The narration shifts to brutal satire abruptly as it calls out Bloom for morally chastising the young men for joking about sex not for procreation when he hasn't come inside his wife in 10 years, when he only just woke up from a nap from jacking off to a teenager in public. Where does he get the nerve?

That's Joyce for you: he never lets a character get away with himself for long, and he will not let the reader forget that, however good a force in Stephen's life Bloom may be, the man is still just a man and is subject to the same flaws, manipulative streaks and self-blindness as the rest of us. When he decides to tag along with Stephen and Lynch to the red-light district at the end to keep an eye on the lad, it's not entirely clear if he might not pick up a prostitute as well.

I did not understand whole swaths of this chapter, but what I at least know what Joyce was doing in general terms and I think it's genius. After the initial slog of obscure lingual roots, the chapter becomes clearer, then comes the end and the whole thing devolves into pidgin English and slang. Sheila compared this chapter to Bach's Goldberg Variations, which is a brilliantly lucid way to look at it: a language has common themes, but the more it adds on, the more it incorporates from other languages and deconstructs/reconstructs existing ideas, the less the original theme can be heard. But it's still there, in some form or fashion, even when it's moved so far away from the starting ideas it's practically another composition. I'm reminded of an interview Jonathan Ross did with Stephen Fry (one of the great lovers of language of our time) wherein the host complained about text-message speak and slang, only for Fry, that most stereotypically bright and proper chap, calmly pointed out that all language uses portmanteau and simplification and that commonly accepted words like "meld" are itself a combination of other words. Joyce is showing that even the most broken, common form of English, spoken by those supposedly desecrating the language by carving it up, are still locked in to all the styles that came before it. Even a genius like Joyce has a fondness for the most ridiculous slang. It's all language, and it's all wonderful.

Ulysses, Chapter Thirteen: Nausicaa

[Link to previous chapters here]

Note to self: stop thinking I have Leopold Bloom pegged down. James Joyce delights in confounding expectations and shaking up his book every time he intuits the reader has found even a sliver of understanding. After pulling back to show Bloom's frustrating weaknesses, Joyce finally gave the man a moment to shine and stand up for himself, only to sink to a new low here.

Not that this is evident at first. The novel, as ever displaying a self-awareness and a humanistic desire to get other perspectives, no matter how flawed, once more dips into someone else's POV, and the style shifts accordingly. The first half of the Nausicaa chapter owes to, of all things in this game-shifting tome, cheesy Harlequin Romance. It's hilarious: James Joyce, King Glot of Everything, casting aside Shakespeare, Latin and Homer for the sort of book Bloom is bringing home for Molly, a flowery, flushed-cheek bit of fluff.

The narration focuses on a girl, Gerty MacDowell, as she sits on the beach with her two friends and the children they're babysitting. The narration describes her with such effusive paeans to her beauty that I almost suspected the conceited, Irish-loving narrator from the previous chapter had left the pub and decided to start beatifying an Irish lass to cool off from his murderous thoughts about Bloom. With church bells tolling in the distance, the vision of Gerty's purity is so syrupy and sentimental it's damn near impossible not to laugh.

But beneath her "ivorylike" skin and rosy cheeks lies a far more complicated creature. The tone of the narration does not shift, but slowly she lets on a sexually active imagination, one splintered by intruding religious thoughts. Joyce may not give us Gerty's actual inner monologues and subjective view as he does the men, but even in the distant, treacly prose he uses for Gerty's romanticized self-image, he delves into the Madonna-whore complex that rigidly defines women in the deeply Catholic Ireland. Joyce filled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with this complex, which crippled Stephen by twisting his perception of women until they could only fit one or the other. Joyce knows that even the most virginal girl -- and Gerty is just that, still a teenager -- can entertain the same thoughts that drive men wild.

Pining for a boyfriend that neglects her, Gerty turns her attention to a gentleman watching her from behind a rock. The man, whom we later learn is Bloom, stares at her, and she begins to construct a tragic, romantic life story around this man and the face that is "the saddest she had ever seen." Her fabricated narrative for Bloom fills her own loneliness and desire. I'm reminded of a moment in The Fisher King when the homeless madman Parry finally gets his date with the woman he loves; she expresses embarrassment for working to publish "trashy" romance novels, to which Parry says, "There's nothing trashy about romance. In romance is passion. There's imagination. There's beauty."

But there's a darker side to this, one that reveals a sadness in both Bloom and Gerty. She notices his stare and hikes up her skirt to tease Bloom. At a certain point, enough clues are dropped that we realize Bloom is masturbating; he's actually been reduced to staring at a teenager and getting out his stress in plain view of people. And what of Gerty, revealed to be more world-wise than the ornate, saintly prose would let on? Is she getting out her own sexual repression? I found her skin-showing to be oddly sympathetic, a recognition of someone else's own dissatisfaction as she sits among children she finds noisy and friends she finds common.

At last, Bloom climaxes as a Roman candle launches fireworks overhead. (Alfred Hitchcock must have read this chapter as a lad and thought, "Shoulders of giants, Hitch. Shoulders of giants.) The act finished, the narration shifts back to Bloom's internal monologue as he watches Gerty leave, filled with shame. But just as Gerty felt some degree of pity for Bloom, so too does he feel for her; he notices the limp she glossed over in her lofty self-portrait and feels bad for her.

Bloom goes on to meditate on women and sexuality. Because he is a man who, despite his Jewish heritage, has been influenced by the Church's social order (and Jewish scripture does not offer up any progressive views on women either), Bloom's first thoughts convey a casual misogyny he does not even realize. "A defect is ten times worse in a woman," he says upon realizing her condition. "But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show.” We've stepped outside Bloom's head for a few chapters now to see the world cutting him down, making the already sympathetic portrait of the man all the more appealing to our hopes that he might overcome his fears and hangups and go back to Molly. Yet the first thoughts we hear upon returning that skull of his are abhorrent.

The second half is despairing and grimy. Bloom tucks his semen-soaked shirt back into his pants and his wet penis sticks uncomfortably to the inside of his trousers. He notes that his watched stopped at 4:30 and wonders if that's when Boylan and Molly had sex, which in turn makes him think of Molly having sex. He also notes past encounters with prostitutes, which begs the question: "Before or after marriage?" When he wonders about his daughter Milly's sexual development, uncomfortable parallels appear between her and the girl to whom he just masturbated. More than ever, Joyce defies us to press on and accept everything about the people in his books. Just as Gerty's flirtatious purity mixes reductive roles for women, so too does Joyce mix heroic qualities with vile ones.

But I'm suggesting that Joyce deals in dualities. Not so; he recognizes the multitude of contradictions inside each one of us, discrepancies and warring perspectives that expand further with joined with those of other people. Bloom may have reductive views on women, but he also displays a curiosity and sympathy for them. "There ought to be women priests," he thinks as he ponders women forced to go confess their urges to men, and, aware of the relief he enjoys from an orgasm, sympathizes with women who cannot come. At the end of the chapter, Bloom takes a stick and draws "I AM A" in the sand but leaves the sentence unfinished, giving the audience the freedom to put in the word that best describes him. But after this chapter, anyone who might have had a single-word summary of the man can no longer have so simplistic a view of the man. Anything can go after that phrase, and that's exactly the point.

In his post-ejaculation sleepiness, Bloom's thoughts turn to matters around him, such as questions of whether fish get seasick. Since Joyce nibbled at the Church's two-dimensional view of women, Bloom gets in more shots at religion. He outrageously blasphemes when he thinks that our body odor comes from sex and that women are thus attracted to celibate priests for having different scents, and he also compares the repetition in a Mass to that of an advertisement. Repetition makes the message stick in the mind more, helping pack simplistic slogans and jingles into a head until a potential customer blindly buys the product.

But the politics don't matter as much as the humanism here. Bloom's attention to smells comes on when he gets a whiff of Gerty's perfume, which in turn triggers scent memories of Molly's fragrances. As he goes deeper into his memory via olfactory recognition (smell being the strongest link to memory), he wonders why he never stopped and truly considered his wife's scent until now, now that he might be losing here. It's the first time Bloom has broached the issue of guilt at Molly cheating on him instead of despairing that the wife he loves (and he clearly does love her) no longer cares for him. It's the first step to accepting complexity in how things are going down and could lead him to do something about it. Of course, he's just shot his wad and needs a little nap first. One step forward...

Ulysses, Chapter Twelve: Cyclops

[Link to previous chapters here]

Nothing makes me as simultaneously amused and infuriated as a bad (good?) pun. Joyce highlights the fact that the 12th episode of Ulysses corresponds to the Cyclops encounter in The Odyssey by placing the perspective in that of an anonymous first-person narrator, necessitating the frequent use of "I," the homophone for "eye." It's as easy as that. Or so it seems, anyway. Soon, Joyce delves into deeper interpretations of men with one eye, specifically their metaphorical lack of depth perception in their opinions. Windbags have floated around this novel like zeppelins, but here at last Joyce truly sinks his teeth into the self-righteous posturing of the roving bands of Irish drunkards crowding every pub in mid-afternoon.

I thought Joyce's prodding of Bloom in the previous chapter bordered on the cruel, unstoppable visions of Boylan heading off to take his wife. I had not seen anything yet. Those reminders of Bloom's impending cuckolding served mainly as vain motivation to get Leo off his ass and into action. Here, however, we at last see something of genuine contempt in Joyce's humanistic and tempered worldview.

The narrator, a debt collector, mingles with Irish nationalists in a pub around 5 p.m. The most prominent member among the crew of drinkers is another anonymous man, known as the Citizen. The Citizen spends the entire chapter espousing racist, nationalistic views to the simpering morons nodding and harrumph-ing in agreement. The narrator clearly agrees with the Citizen, his admiration of the man pouring off his account of the man and his words.

These are the sort of men with whom you don't ever want to start a political discussion. Not because they're as intellectual and well-researched as they believe but because they stick so dogmatically to their narrow viewpoints. Just yesterday, I had a nice, long chat with a friend about politics in which I kept trying to stress -- while apologizing for monopolizing the discussion as she politely said it was fine -- that as much of a committed liberal as I am, I honestly do try to see where people are coming from. It's difficult sometimes, and especially now, as the gulf between two parties grows so wide that genuinely centered individuals are few and far between, but then opinions must have been bitterly partisan in Dublin in 1904 and these men still seem like assholes.

Joyce pulls no punches. Their view of Ireland is so rosy, so absurd compared to the banal realism of the author's portrait of Dublin that the 1st-person suddenly shatters and the prose becomes hilariously pompous and Romantic, combining Irish lore with medieval legend and Greek mythology to capture the supposedly unspeakable beauty of an idiotically dressed citizen or the ordering of another round of bitter. Their focus on politics leads to an incessant listing of names, glorifying Ireland and cursing her sworn enemy, England. An account of the execution of Emmet, the Irish nationalist who led a failed rebellion against the Crown, stretches across pages and lauds the man and his Romanticized relationship with his fiancée in devastatingly overwrought terms.

Of course, the thing about nationalists is that, at some point, they have to come up against something or someone from another country. In that case, the more committed bigots find some way to claim those objects and people, and the funniest part of the chapter comes in the form of a page or so list of names touted as Irish heroes. Among them: Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Buddha. It reminds me of my initial confusion over Joyce's nationality before I ever read anything by him, thinking he was American as if that was somehow the default nationality of an artist. I also recall a documentary Louis Theroux did for the BBC in which he profiled black nationalists in America: in one of his more memorable interviews, he spoke with a council of black leaders who insisted noteworthy, white historical figures were actually black, their racial pride preventing them from acknowledging anyone they could not see as one of their own. But just as the most tenuous connection can be used to claim another, so too can the tiniest trace of foreign blood in the veins of an Irishman preclude him from acceptability in the eyes of the Citizen. He uses anti-Semitic remarks to describe Bloom and anti-Italian stereotypes to slam an Irish politician with Italian heritage.

Bloom enters early in the chapter, waiting on Cunningham to square Dignam's debts, and the mood around him turns so intensely hostile that the paranoia Bloom has felt so far seems justified. The Citizen starts making loud comments about immigrants sapping the life out of Ireland, such comments directed at least partially at the Jewish Bloom despite him being a natural-born Irish citizen. But it's this insufferable windbag who reserves the right to call himself "citizen" at the expense of all others who are different, and Bloom becomes a convenient target for the rest.

The level of vitriol flowing out of the men is terrifying. Every time the mild-mannered Bloom speaks on issues with a moderate, holistic view, the narrator views his opinions as interruptions and disrespectful sidetracks of the "worthy" statements of the Citizen and other pub denizens. News from the horse race comes in, and it turns out the dark horse with 20-1 odds won, screwing over betters like Boylan and his lady friend (Molly?). When Bloom momentarily leaves to run an errand, one of the men mumbles something about him probably going to collect his winnings, and by the time Bloom returns, everyone else is convinced that he's won huge yet hides his winnings to collect free drinks off them, completely ignoring the fact that Bloom has turned down drinks. And earlier, they were mocking him for not partaking! It's insane. At one point, the narrator thinks that murdering Bloom would be completely justifiable in a court of law.

It's easy to get caught up in the bile and miss just how consistently reasonable Bloom is being with these people. They rant about the floggings in the English navy, but Leopold points out that all navies have strict discipline. He responds to their hatred of seemingly all other nations by pointing out that hate leads to persecution, something that, as a Jew, he knows all about. He counters their racial identification of nationality -- something intrinsic to the European view of nations -- with the more modern interpretation of a group of disparate people working together for a common goal. Instead of looking to the past and bloodlines, he finds that a nation should be people creating their future. But he phrases himself poorly and receives another round of condescension for his troubles.

Something happens in this chapter that surprised me: Bloom finally stands up for himself. He at first tries to let the Citizen's anti-Semitic comments pass, but he slowly emboldens himself to speak up as their insipid, one-eyed views of the world crowd out all rational discussion. However, he never sinks to their level; he could easily claim moral superiority to these louts, these sadsacks acting as if they're representing the proud spirit of Ireland as they sit in a bar getting loaded at 5 o'clock (so really, for all their stereotyping of others, they're the ones that best fit cultural jokes). Instead, he calmly debates them on their rhetoric, seeking calmer responses to issues that even Bloom concedes concern him as well. Even at the end, when Bloom at last stands up in his cart and shouts back at the Citizen -- a moment brought back to Joycean levels of realism and wit when a prostitute tells Bloom his fly is open -- he offers a reasonable, incontrovertible retort that sends the Citizen into a sputtering frenzy because he has nothing to say back to the Jew that plagues him. The best he can do is try to kill Bloom in an impotent display of rage that reveals him for the pathetic sot he really is.

No matter; the men still close upon him like a pack of wolves looking to tear him apart, and they blind themselves to the goodness he has to offer. The Citizen sardonically refers to Bloom as "the new Messiah of Ireland," but that's more or less what Joyce has set him up to be. Bloom recognizes the uselessness of getting drunk all day and devolving into bigotry in response to the genuine hardships Ireland has suffered at the hands of others. Unwittingly, the men reveal how much they have in common with the Jews they lambaste: one of the parodic segments, regaling the reader with a court case, posits the 12-member jury as representatives of the 12 Tribes of Israel, and the Citizen himself makes reference to the lost tribes of Irishmen scattered in the nation's own diaspora. If they could just open their other eye and get some perspective, they could see how much they share with Bloom. But then they wouldn't be Cyclopes.

Joyce makes the interesting decision to end the chapter with one final parody, this time of Biblical passages as he presents a vision of the cart carrying Bloom suddenly ascending into Heaven with Elijah. Joyce just hammers the Christ allegory home: Boom's final assertion to the Citizen was a reminder that Jesus and, in a way, God were both Jewish, and for his humanistic views Christ the Jew was murdered by the mob he'd been sent to save. But Joyce gives him a Jewish ascent at the end, letting him simply leave this world and walk with the Lord. This amusing but moving coda says everything you need to know about how much Joyce, however harshly he may view Bloom at times, loves the man and sees him so above his thick-headed racial brethren. It's a stand and cheer moment if ever there was one, proof of Bloom's quietly devastating defeat of these frothing men. Or, considering Joyce's love of fart jokes, perhaps it's better to call Leo's style "silent but deadly."

Ulysses, Chapter Eleven: Sirens

Sometimes Joyce can be so literal I almost don't notice what he's doing. The Sirens chapter is based, of course, on the golden-voiced bird-women who lured sailors to their deaths on craggy rocks with their irresistible song. Because of this, Joyce uses musical imagery: the whole of the first two pages contains nothing but snippets of thoughts and sentences, and it's not until about halfway through this passage that it becomes clear Joyce is "warming up" as if tuning an orchestra. At the end of the segment, he announces to the reader that he's ready to go with a riotous "Begin!"

I took the fewest notes on this chapter as I have any of the other 10. That is not because I somehow had this whole thing "figured out" but because I got so entranced by the rhythm of the prose. In that sense, the writing itself embodies the mythic sirens, lulling me into following it until I finally snapped out of it and said, "Oh crap, important things are happening!"

It's 4 p.m. Bloom continues to walk around Dublin and finds himself drawn into the Ormond Hotel, a pub with a singing room, by two loudly chatting barmaids whose voices draw him in. Still paranoid with anxiety, he assumes their mocking of a grease-nosed man is directed at him, and he drifts closer until he continues his walk, returning once more when he spots Boylan headed to the hotel.

For the remainder of the chapter, Bloom loses himself in fretful thoughts as characters carouse and sing in the pub. Simon Dedalus enters with friends and sets about scoring himself a drink. Boylan flirts with the barmaids, leaving just as he practically convinces one of the barmaids to sleep with him. Why he's leaving is clear, but Joyce nearly mocks poor Bloom, the "jingle" of the suspension of Boylan's wagon reminding him of the creaks of his bed springs, thus making him think of Boylan riding off to sleep with Molly.

Joyce doesn't stop there. As Bloom remains in the bar -- WHY, Leo?! Go the hell home and stop this! -- Joyce breaks up Bloom's subjective listening experience with harsh, omniscient peeks at Boylan riding to 7 Eccles St. Not only that, Joyce hammers home what's about to happen with brutal wit: he depicts images of Boylan whipping his mare's rear to get it to Molly's house faster, the double meaning of him wearing out that ass (as it were) hopefully lost on no one.

Oh, I should mention, this chapter is thick with innuendo. Dedalus and his rowdy crew, aided by their social lubricant, make bawdy jokes about everything, including one gag about a burst eardrum that suggests Joyce also finds the idea of aural sex amusing. Bloom, horny little toad that he is, does not fail to note the buxom maids and even delays the exit he should have made well before one of the bar songs threatens to make him emotional so he can watch one of them rest her hand on the phallic beer tap.

To this point, Bloom has been an incredibly sympathetic figure. We pity him being cuckolded, pity how alienated he is from others, pity how inconsequential he seems despite his decency. Here, however, as the man sits in a pub, Joyce lets that lull give space and pacing to our perception of Bloom, and certain issues arise. He knows where Boylan is going but says nothing, preferring to stay and wallow in self-pity instead of going home and stopping this mess. What's more, he writes to his flirtatious pen pal, thus making him a cheat as well. This is the weak, craven side of Bloom, and it can be hard to stomach.

But I loved what Sheila O'Malley had to say about this:

I kept getting frustrated with Bloom, as I read the book the first time. Like: DUDE. Just TELL Molly you love her – punch Boylan in the nose – and go home and fuck Molly like you’ve never fucked her before – she’s DYING for it – what is your problem??? But as the book went on, I realized what I was reacting to – was my own proclivity for passivity, or fatalistic thinking … my own feelings of defeat in the face of emotional challenges … my own desire to avoid a big fat fight and also – my almost pathological need to never be hurt again.

She also notes how much shit Bloom has endured: he lost a child to sickness and a father to suicide. Even within the frame of the novel, he's been ignored and mocked to his face and behind his back. That has an effect on people, and if we can no longer fully pity Leopold, we also cannot completely condemn him.

That moral gray area fits Bloom's own outlook. Most of his thoughts to this point have been gentle, fatherly. Here, he finally gives into the darkness for a bit. He has fun with the disabilities and looks of some and the boorish behavior of others, but he tempers his more haughty thoughts with fair considerations of why people behave or look the way he do. He cannot go too hard on Simon because of the man's recent loss, and he eases off his rough appraisal of his friend Goulding's appearance because of the man's hobbling back pain. Everyone else in this book speaks with verve, often unjustified. The drunken Irish crowd that shuffles around our main characters bloviate about their insipid lives; even the songs they sing in this chapter have those treacly sentiments of past glory to them, songs all the more ironic as Joyce wrote this chapter around the time of Ireland's split from England. Other men drunkenly insist upon the superiority of certain tenors, of events and songs centuries old. Even Stephen, revealed to be directionless in his philosophizing, at least speaks with polemical conviction.

Coming off the Wandering Rocks chapter and its macrocosmic view of Dublin and its inhabitants, Bloom's relativism and humanistic maturity demonstrates why Joyce finds him so superior to all these sots emptily pontificating and avoiding work even though so many seem to be in debt. But Joyce also shows how being different holds Bloom back, prevents him from getting a handle on his own life. It's possible that these men aren't just blinding themselves to life but are finding a way to cope with it. Bloom has not yet found that respite. If he is meant to help Stephen find himself, Bloom also needs guidance of his own, and getting sidelined from returning home is not helping him. It's almost unsurprising that Joyce ends the chapter by letting Bloom relieving some kind of pressure by letting out a great big fart.

Ulysses, Chapter Ten: The Wandering Rocks

Odysseus never travels through the Wandering Rocks in The Odyssey. Given the choice between the rocks, which pose such hazards that not even birds can make it out the other side, Odysseus opts to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis instead. Joyce, however, demarcates the first half of his book from the second with the Wandering Rocks episode. What gives? And what's with all these characters? A guy breaks out all sorts of addenda and summarizing notes to get through Stephen's absurdly complicated Shakespeare theory, ends up learning a great deal about Stephen in the process, and now suddenly the overriding question on my mind is "Who the hell is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell?" And is that even one person or does Joyce just not care about commas?

Comprising 18 vignettes and a coda, the Wandering Rocks chapter shatters the narrative of Stephen and Leopold to follow numerous other characters, some of whom we know already (either from this novel or Joyce's other work), others who just sort of pop up. Each wanders the streets of Dublin as the cavalcade containing the Earl of Dudley, his wife and several other members of the nobility works its way through town. With 19 strands in just over 30 pages, Joyce does not give himself much room to develop any one story, and each mini-episode ends just as a narrative seems to be forming.

There's an almost arbitrary selection to what he puts on paper: some characters get to be alone in their thoughts, receiving as much care for their observation as Stephen and Bloom have gotten. Others only seem to shuffle between one location and another, chatting about banalities before the scene shifts to another character. It's disorienting, and even though Joyce backs off the overwhelming prose a bit and makes sure to actually use names most of the time instead of his splintered, dangling pronouns, navigating the labyrinth of his Altmanesque view of Dublin can be as tricky as following Stephen's logic in his theorizing.

But therein lies the brilliance of this episode. Odysseus did not take the path to the Wandering Rocks because he got a glimpse of how insurmountable it would be. Joyce, whose prose throughout has always given the indication he could guess the exact moment a reader was about to revolt and track the blind son of a bitch down and beat him to death, pulls back to make a point. He's dived so deep into two characters that we not only know what and how they think, we come to think that way too in order to make sense of it all. After finding the personal resonance underneath Stephen's arch intellectualism, there's a sense of victory over this book. "Aha, now I've got it."

That's precisely the moment Joyce rips the rug from underneath you and shows the whole city, as if to say, "Think you've had it rough? You've only had to figure out two people. Two. On a planet with six billion people." Just as Odysseus got a glimpse of the path not taken, so too does the Wandering Rocks episode show what Ulysses might have been like if he'd focused on others. Stephen and Bloom feel important because Joyce assigned importance to them by making them protagonists. But he has also belabored their banality, their ordinariness, throughout. Even Stephen, philosophical polyglot aesthete that he is, is not any truly titanic figure. By splitting up the narrative 19 ways in 30 pages, Joyce proves his point: each episode is so frustrating because it ends as it begins. I should have been thinking "Jaysus, Jimmy, get back to the novel, please," but instead I kept thinking, "But what happened to Paddy Jr.? Where's Boylan going before meeting Molly?"

I get the feeling Joyce had a ball with this chapter, as he intentionally makes everything seem important and foreboding. Those sandwich-board men return with their mysterious "H.E.L.Y.S." signs. When those first popped up, I kept wondering if that was some sly take on "Hellas," meaning Greece (this being based on Homer 'n all) or maybe even the French "Hélas, meaning "Alas," the perfect word for the sense of doom hanging over Bloom's Dublin. He gets at that gloom here, as the two dominant images of the chapter, and the book-ending ones, are of the Church and England. Father Conmee, who implanted fears of hell in Stephen as a lad, now seems directionless and disaffected, lazily blessing a young couple he catches behind a hedgerow. But still he thinks about missionary work and other religious matters, showing how even a disillusioned priest is trapped by his own order. The English, of course, are represented by the earl making his way through town, forcing these people to stop and salute a person speeding by them so quickly that, as we can see at the end, they all melt into a blur.

But even with all these asides, false starts and half-interpolations, Joyce still makes Stephen and Bloom the dominant focus. They appear in several of the vignettes and even interact with people, but Joyce does not make them the dominant focus. Stephen chats with his voice teacher in Italian, thus structuring the conversation around the immigrant's perception, and the "camera" (this is a blatantly cinematic episode) follows the teacher when they part. Bloom peruses a bookstore, but most of the imagery concerns the boorish owner who phlegmatically coughs and spits about the place.

Joyce places them in the background so other characters can interpret them instead of feeding us Bloom's and Stephen's subjective appraisals of each situation. Mulligan speaks of Stephen with a friend, who thinks Dedalus must be half-mad. Mulligan comments that Stephen's religious upbringing instilled too many thoughts of hell to make a poet of the lad. The loathsome Lenehan once more brags about fondling Molly, while others react to Leo's generous donation to Dignam's orphaned children by chuckling at the "irony" of a generous Jew. We at last see some of the leads' fears put into words: Mulligan really is condescending to Stephen's talent (his barbs all the more piercing because he clearly knows the boy), while Bloom's colleagues really are anti-Semitic. The funniest visualization of the presence Stephen and Bloom cast over the chapter, however, is in the crumpled paper ball Bloom threw in the river two chapters ago floating through the chapter with the same constant flow as the cavalcade.

And as ever, Joyce builds on the strands of plot cast out to this point. Stephen's father is fully revealed as a destitute alcoholic borrowing money to spend it down the pub, humiliating the family and leaving Stephen wondering whether to try to save his favored sister from the rest or to run away entirely. In that bookstore, Bloom buys an erotic novel for Molly, his flushed mood suggesting he understands how ironic it is to be buying a racy novel for his cuckolding wife. But perhaps that flush is the result of his own arousal that he does not get out with Molly.

I sound like a broken record at this point, but damn am I loving this book. I understand that it's frustrating to have to turn to multiple sources just to figure out what the hell is happening, and Lord knows I've struggled with this book. But if you just keep going, more and more pieces fall into place. It's like push-starting a car: it's a bitch getting the thing running, but once it's got momentum, it's easy. This chapter might infuriate people, but I found it hilarious that Joyce played a trick to put things in perspective. Everything has a purpose in this book, and even Joyce's little game keeps deepening things and connecting threads.