【In-depth interpretation】
Author: Chen Li (Professor, School of English, University of Foreign Chinese, Beijing, Deputy Director of the Irish Research Center)
The Irish novelist James Joyce had a huge influence on the world literary scene. His masterpiece Ulysses is not only a well-deserved literary classic of the 20th century, but also created a literary festival - Bloomges. Every year on June 16, Joyce lovers around the globe celebrate this special holiday in a variety of ways.
The wandering of Bloom, the protagonist of the novel "Ulysses", first resonates with the ancient Greek hero Odysseus's journey home, and is similar to Baudelaire's leisurely literati wandering the streets of the city, and at the same time echoes Joyce's own self-exile and the wandering on the eve of the Irish independence, forming an extremely complex multiple meanings.
Picture of the first edition of Ulysses Book Cover
I. Origin of Bloomges
Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. Ireland was still under British colonial rule at the time, and Joyce grew up through a growing movement for national independence. Educated in a Jesuit school, he briefly considered a clergy and entered University College Dublin in Ireland in 1898 and began a career in literature. On June 16, 1904, at the age of 22, Joyce had his first official date with Nora Barnacker from Galway County in the west, and four months later the two left Ireland for Italy, and then emigrated around Europe in an attempt to escape the "net" of ethnicity, language, and religion that Joyce called in Portrait of a Young Artist. Although Joyce rarely returned to his hometown, Dublin reappeared in his pen again and again, becoming the eternal protagonist of Joyce's literary creation. Joyce even told a friend that he wanted to paint the whole of Dublin in his work, "even if one day the city suddenly disappears from the earth, people can rebuild it according to my book."
Ulysses, published in 1922, gave excellent use to this literary ideal. Using the day of his first date with Nora and the real Dublin as the space, Joyce fictionalizes Bloom's entire day of roaming the streets of Dublin. Joyce referenced the map of Dublin extensively when writing, and was extremely obsessed with the accuracy of literary drawings, not only giving the names of specific streets and buildings, but also considering the precise routes, paces, and distances of the characters. Contemporary scholars can even map according to their written descriptions, most notably cliff Hart and Ian Gunn's 1975 book Ulysses' Guide to Dublin's Landscape. The book draws more than a hundred maps based on place names and routes that appear in the novel, providing later readers with informative cartographic materials to intuitively understand Joyce's work.
The informative temporal and spatial positioning of Ulysses greatly facilitated the formation of "Bloomges". The Dublin celebration on 16 June 1954 is the earliest "Bloomges" with video and written records. On that day, Irish artists and representatives of Joyce's family gathered to retrace the walking route of Bloom in the book. Since then, "Bloomges" has gradually developed into an important festival celebrated every year, and its influence has gradually extended beyond the borders of Ireland. Especially after Joyce's works entered the public edition field at the end of 2011, Bloomges around the world celebrated that they no longer cared about copyright issues, and the ways of celebrating were more diverse. More common ways to celebrate include re-walking Bloom's roaming route, reading Ulysses en masse, re-dressing parties that recreate the style of clothing (round glasses and flat-topped straw hats are classic props), and enjoying the "Bloom Breakfast" (in which Bloom eats fried pork loins).
John William Waterhouse's famous painting Penelope and the Suitor file picture
II. Anti-Epic Hero Bloom
Ulysses begins at 8 a.m. on June 16, 1904, when the young scholar Stephen Didalus leaves his residence to attend the boys' school where he works. Around the same time, Bloom woke up in his home at 7 Eccles Street and began to cook breakfast, during which time his wife received a letter from her lover that he would visit in the afternoon. Bloom solves problems in the outdoor toilet in the garden after dinner, then leaves the house and begins a long day of roaming. He walked or rode in a horse-drawn carriage and tram, 18 miles a day, to church services, to bathhouses, to cemeteries for funerals, to visit newspaper offices, to have lunch at bars, to the National Library, and then to Sandymont Beach for a walk. In the evening he went to the hospital to inquire about the wife of a friend who had a difficult birth, where he met a drunken Stephen. The two travel together and eventually return to Bloom's house together. Stephen woke up after drinking hot cocoa and left. Bloom goes upstairs to fall asleep after a brief conversation with his wife, Molly, who has trouble sleeping, and ends with a large stream of consciousness by Molly.
However, it is extremely dangerous to reduce this 265,000-word novel to such a simple plot line. Space plays a more important role in fiction than time. The large sections of stream-of-consciousness are laid out, loosely juxtaposing what Bloom sees, hears and thinks on his way, greatly deepening the novel's tolerance, making it an all-encompassing, multifaceted and complex text that allows for multifaceted interpretation.
First, Ulysses can be interpreted as a modern parody of Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey. The novel has a correspondence with "Odyssey" in terms of chapter structure, characters and plot settings. The Odyssey depicts the homecoming journey of the Greek mythological hero Odysseus ("Ulysses" in Latin). The resourceful Odysseus made many achievements in the Trojan War, and after the war led his companions back to his hometown, defeated the Cyclops, the Siren Siren, the Witch Carulk, etc., and successfully returned to his hometown of Itaka after 10 years, killing the suitors who pestered his wife Penelope, and reuniting the family. Bloom's day of wandering condensed the 10 years of Odysseus's difficult journey, the same home, the same desire to return home. The tension between homelessness and homecoming forms a modern allegory of homelessness and homecoming with universal significance.
However, Bloom, as the counterpart of Odysseus, subverts the reader's reading expectations. He was not a hero, but a trivial, cowardly ordinary man. Odysseus kills all the suitors who pestered his wife, but Bloom, knowing that his wife and lover are secretly meeting, deliberately wanders outside to avoid breaking it. While Odysseus's fame comes from war and conquest, Bloom's days are filled with trivial details of eating and drinking Lazarus. The novel depicts these most mundane details of life, such as Bloom's process of going to the toilet after breakfast, in large sections, producing a shocking artistic effect. These topics of privacy were previously considered too vulgar and difficult to honor, and have long been excluded from literary material. Joyce, on the other hand, allows them to appear in the text of the novel. Many Joyce readers, especially early readers, find this difficult to accept. The American poet Ezra Pound called Joyce's "sewer fascination," or fascination with vulgar things. However, this "sewer aesthetic" became a major feature of Joyce's work and had a huge influence on the subsequent creation of Western literature. By doing so, Joyce rejects not only the noble beauty that has always been promoted by the Western classical cultural tradition represented by ancient Greek and Roman culture, but also the definition of heroes in classical culture and the assumption that classical culture has eternal applicability. It's a gesture of rebellion against tradition. Thus, the ancient hero Odysseus became the modern little man Bloom. This parody and rebellion also challenges the classical masculinity and heroism represented by Odysseus, heralding the shining debut of modern values. By connecting modern little people with epic heroes, Joyce recognizes the value of modern life, acknowledging that it also has an epic tragic depth.
James Joyce profile picture
III. Bloom the Urban Rover
Urban wanderers, as a cultural feature of modernity, first appeared in the works of the French modernist poet Baudelaire. Paris underwent a renaissance from a medieval city to a modern metropolis in the second half of the 19th century. In Baudelaire's pen, the artist transforms into an urban wanderer, wandering the streets of the city as a spectator, looking east and west among the crowd, experiencing and examining the summons and temptations of urban modernity and commodification, while maintaining an aesthetic distance from the crowd. This sense of distance allows the artist to escape the anesthesia and enslavement of commodities, and to explore the deep meaning behind various commodities with a sober attitude of staying out of the matter. Baudelaire represents the aesthetic and philosophical perspective of the literati who criticized modernity.
Dublin in the early 20th century, where Bloom is located, is certainly not as prosperous as Paris, but it is the largest city on the island of Ireland and a bridgehead for all kinds of consumer goods and luxury goods to land in Ireland. Bloom's role as an advertising salesman has made him inextricably linked to the consumption of goods and modern urban life. In the process of his wandering, advertising often appeared in his mind, becoming a key to understanding the modern landscape of Dublin, and also making the monotonous and dull scenes of daily life have a certain commercial artistic atmosphere. Bloom's view of Dublin is not only an Irish city with an inherent image of Catholic churches, colonial architecture, nationalists, drunken cup-greedy people, etc., it is also a modern city that stands on the threshold of modernity, full of consumer desire and gold worship.
Joyce highlights this modernity in terms of art form. His wanderings in Bloom are more devoted to the portrayal of routes, giving place names accurately, but not to the detailed environmental depictions of traditional realist novels. The space seems to be reduced to points on a map, making the character's walking path more prominent. As the narrative jumps back and forth between the third-person narrative and Bloom's inner monologue, it's easy for the reader to sense that Bloom is absent-minded about his route. And this is easy for readers to understand: Bloom, a native Dubliner, doesn't need to pay too much attention to the streetscapes and signs that he's already so familiar with.
This spatial writing technique creates a fictional sense of belonging or exclusivity, and familiarity with Dublin's streetscape has become the standard that distinguishes locals from tourists, insiders from outsiders. Joyce's focus is not on the travel experience of newcomers, but on the urban experience of local residents living in Dublin. This, in turn, led to bloom's association with Baudelaire's urban wanderers. Baudelaire is also concerned with the emotional experience of the artist as an insider of the city. He did not come to admire the streetscape as a tourist, but as an insider, looking for the "shocking" experience of art in a familiar scene. In the sonnet "To a Woman Who Crossed Arms," Baudelaire describes the poet's instant love for a woman who passes him in the crowd as he strolls through the streets. This kind of glimpse of love is to express the psychological impact of a momentary "shock" experience in a familiar scene on modern people, projecting psychological extremely close and far (lovers relative to strangers) to the extremely close ("cross-arm") and extremely far away in the spatial distance ("in the future, we are unknown to each other"), vividly expressing the characteristics of modern life, such as momentariness, variability, and contingency.
Coincidentally, Bloom's wandering the streets of Dublin also depicts the shocking experience of an insider looking for a moment in a familiar scene. In the fifth chapter of Ulysses, Bloom and McCoy stand on the side of the road greeting each other after a chance encounter, and a man and a man across the road are leaving the hotel to board the carriage. Bloom was preoccupied, verbally responding to McCoy, silently commenting on his words and deeds, while also carefully looking at the lady opposite. His observations of the lady are in line with Baudelaire's poem "To a Woman Who Crosses Arms." Both observers noticed a great deal of physical detail, using the senses of the facial features to convey the fleeting senses of shock conveyed by the city to the individual. What binds them together, however, is a spiritual distance, a deep sense of division between the observer and the observed, and the observer does not desire to establish an intimate connection with the observed, but only to derive satisfaction from his own observation. Joyce's advertisers on the streets of Dublin in the early 20th century and Baudelaire's laid-back literati on the streets of Paris in the mid-19th century found a brief spiritual commonality here.
Joyce's spatial writing characteristics of merely mentioning place names but not describing them influenced important writers of the early 20th century, such as Virginia Woolf and Alfred Deblin, and became a universal modernist style of writing that expressed spatial experience, "modernists do not describe streets, they only mention names." Some scholars even believe that the place names in many modernist novels are not intended to tell the reader the geographical orientation of the characters; rather, their function is to portray the feeling that the characters have lost their direction, which is the core theme of modernism. The sheer number of place names that follows creates a sense of panic, frustration, and overwhelmed loss for the reader, especially those unfamiliar with them. The wandering of the streets produces both the thrill of adventure and the fear of being lost. We turn a blind eye to a streetscape we are all too familiar with; only when we get lost and familiar scenes become unfamiliar, we look up at signs, signs, pedestrians, and iconic buildings. This sudden loss of defamiliarization in a familiar streetscape is exactly the same "shocking" experience Baudelaire must seek to spawn the flower of art in his dull everyday life. This "defamiliarization" technique and experience breaks our assumption of familiar street scenes, forcing us to experience the confusion and wandering of insiders. It is in this sense that Ulysses's portrayal of Bloom's modern urban wandering experience is universal. By changing the place name, Dublin's experience can be applied to any city.
IV. Brink Irishman Bloom
Bloom's national character is also an important aspect of shaping his artistic appeal. Bloom is a native of Dublin, but his national character is not precarious. His father was a Jew from Hungary and his mother was a native of Ireland. Because of this mestizo relationship, Bloom is often referred to as a "Jew" rather than an "Irishman." In chapter XII, the ultra-nationalist "citizens" lash out at Bloom for this very reason. However, Bloom's Jewish identity is also atypical, and he has no connection to the local Jewish community other than his father's Jewish ancestry. In other words, he was caught between the identities of The Irish and the Jewish, a marginal man caught between the two identities. Bloom's wandering, on this level, is the process by which marginalized people search for his identity and social identity.
Joyce first spoke of the idea of Ulysses in 1906, initially as a short story, which he gradually expanded. The book was first serialized in the American journal Small Review between 1918 and 1920, and then published in Paris in 1922. Ireland was undergoing rapid change at this time, especially in politics. The Easter Rising of 1916, which declared the independence of the Republic of Ireland from Britain, lasted only a few days, but the subsequent process of Irish nationalism was unstoppable, and eventually developed into the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1921. Bloom's quest for irish identity is closely linked to the collective wandering of the Irish people about national identity on the eve of independence, and also reflects Joyce's reflections on self-identity during self-exile on the European continent. Bloom became a representative figure of the national zeitgeist.
In Baudelaire's pen, the wanderer is a carefree and carefree literati, but Bloom does not have the baudelaire-style leisure and autonomy. He was caught in the social and cultural contradictions of Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century, oppressed and monitored by multiple forces such as politics, religion, and culture, unable to see his true appearance and situation, and fell into a state of physical and mental paralysis that Joyce called. Bloom was an Irishman who was marginalized in every sense: he was not a radical nationalist, nor was he a proper Catholic, he could not speak Irish, he was not an alcoholic, he was not even a macho husband, yet his connection to Ireland could not be denied. Joyce used this Irishman, who was completely out of line with the Irish self-imagination, as a scrutinizer of the national spirit, and he examined the city and culture of Dublin from a certain distance with his calm and detached observation eyes, and overlaid a map of the Irish people's own homeland on top of the colonists' map.
Thus we see a deeply alienated Bloom wandering around Dublin idly, looking at the colonial city of Dublin from an alienated, overall, decolonized perspective. In Bloom's wanderings, Dublin's landmarks symbolizing imperial power continue to appear in his vision, while at the same time quietly dismantling authority by various free associations and juxtapositions. For example, the seventh chapter of the novel begins near Nelson's Column, which symbolizes the british conquest by force, but the title of the subsection is "In the Center of the Capital of Hebonia". The emphasis on the old name of the pre-colonial era in The Old Name of Hebnia, the Latin name of Ireland, contrasts sharply with the presence of Nelson's Column, both mocking the nominality of this "Capital of Hebonia" and undermining the solid presence of Nelson's Column. The opposition of power/powerlessness, colonization/colonization, conquest/independence, is displayed through the reproduction of two-sided juxtaposition of texts, which not only points out the oppressive presence of colonial power, but also suggests the possibility of disintegration and subversion. And this picture of the city, full of tension and change, is the real Dublin that Joyce hopes to preserve through his drawing pen.
Bloom uses water imagery—"fresh, cold, eternal, and ever-changing water" to express his appeal to identity. Water is not only in harmony with the flowing life, but also vividly depicts the changing Dublin scenery and living space in his eyes, which in his view has the characteristics of "universality", "democratic equality" and "the essence of self-equalization". Bloom transcends his aspirations for any narrow identity as a Hungarian, Jewish, or Irish, neither of which, nor is it inclusive. In response to the demands of the narrow nationalists represented by "citizens" for pure-bred Irish, Joyce recognized the inherent mixture of nationality itself.
Guangming Daily (2021-06-17, 13th edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily