Literary ordeals: thoughts on finishing James Joyce's Ulysses

Irish author James Joyce, 1882-1941

Sometimes I enjoy a challenge, like setting a goal and working through it. The goal might be something physical, like a marathon or trail run, or something like trying to learn a language or a musical instrument (one of each in my case).

Some of these challenges are literary, like reading War and Peace and such. Lately I completed a literary endurance run, to wit James Joyce's long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness rewrite of the Odyssey, titled Ulysses. 

(I think the unreadable French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was right in this at least: a myth includes all its variants, as in Freud's ideas are as much a part of the Oedipus myth as Sophocles' tragedy. Ditto Joyce and Homer.)

I thought about it for a long time, but every time a picked up a copy and flipped through it my head began to swim. I also wasn't a big fan of his earlier work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young  Man, which introduces the aspiring author Stephen Daedalus, who is also a kind of self portrait of the author. 

To be honest, when I read that early book, I sometimes wanted to reach out and shake the narrator, especially the parts where he was too precious to attend Easter mass with his mother. I mean, would that have killed him?

Daedalus shows up in Ulysses as a stand in for Odysseus' son Telemachus. The main protagonist of Odysseus of the story is Leopold Bloom, a non-practicing Jewish resident of Dublin who sells newspaper advertising for the living. He's a married to Molly, from whom he has been physically estranged for ten years since the death of their infant son. She's the unfaithful counterpart to Odysseus' steadfast wife Penelope, although the ten year thing might have something to do with that. The whole action of the book takes place in one day and night in 1904, with most of the Dublin action reflecting some episode of the Odyssey.

It was pretty exhausting, all in all. I don't think I would have made it through by reading it, but was fortunately (maybe) able to listen to all 30+ hours of it on my smart phone thanks to the local library. I'm also glad that I'm fairly up on literature, philosophy, mythology and such, since the book is ate up with all the above. Otherwise I would have been totally lost. I still relied on a commentary to get through it.

My final verdict (not that I'm a judge): it really was quite an achievement, packing all the references and ideas he did into an imagined 24 hour period. His stream of consciousness style of writing does a pretty good job of capturing what Buddhists call our "monkey mind," which skips from object to object like the critter moving from branch to branch.

The term "stream of consciousness" can be traced back to William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, who wrote about "the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life." His style influenced many later writers from William Faulkner to Jack Kerouac.

So there's that, anyway. As the saying goes, it was real and it was fun, but I can't say it was real fun.

I guess I'm glad I did it. It was kind of like completing a difficult and long trail run in the summer: I enjoy having done it more than the actual process of doing it.

But next time I revisit the Odyssey story, it'll probably be Homer's original.

Pushing through it

Readers of this blog will recall that El Cabrero, aside from being someone who would never refer to himself in third person, is into endurance sports and martial arts, even though he is not very good at either. But one thing they can teach is the importance of hanging on even in difficult situations. 

Like the one that prevails in WV these days...

Recently, I came across this quote by one of my favorite philosophers and psychologists, the great American pragmatist William James:

The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us in the phenomenon of ‘second wind.’ Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked ‘enough,’ and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast.

But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth ‘wind’ may supervene.

Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.

This reminds me of something Shorin Ryu karate master Minoru Higa said after an exhausting training session in Naha, Okinawa. During his session, we performed thousands of repetitions of basic techniques in a very short time. Then, through a translator, he explained that if one trains beyond the point of fatigue, extraneous thoughts and wasted motion fall away and correct technique is achieved.

In other words, just deal.

The faculty of effort

Here's a little Monday advice from William James, American philosopher, pragmatist and psychologist:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in the little unnecessary points. Do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when your hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

JUST ONE LINK TODAY and the honor goes to Paul Krugman.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JAMES' SQUIRREL

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope has been a series of musings on the ideas of determinism and its opposite, which is usually called free will. I prefer indeterminsm.

If this is your first visit, you are fated by eternal laws of causality to click on the earlier posts. Or maybe not.

One characteristic of philosophical debates about issues like this is that it kind of depends on how you look at it.

The late great American philosopher William James recounted the story of one such debate in his Pragmatism:

SOME YEARS AGO, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel - a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel?

James was asked to settle the dispute, which he did as follows:

“Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

There was method to his madness:

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material or spiritual? – here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.

According to James, pragmatically speaking, accepting the idea of free will means "novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past." It means that improvements are at least possible. In James' words, it is a "theory of promise."

The other option is in effect to reduce humans to the status of objects that bounce off the walls of the universe with the predictability of billiard balls. I'm not convinced people are that kind of objects.

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure objects are that kind of objects...

THE LATEST ON THE MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here are three items from the Gazette. At a meeting in Logan last night convened by AFSC attended by around 35 people, participants pledged to hold local law enforcement and prosecutors accountable, express support for the victim and her family, and work to bring the community together to respond in a positive way.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHIP. President Bush is currently waging a preemptive war on the Children's Health Insurance Program. Here's a critique of his claims that the program undermines private health coverage.

NEW FIG TREE NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE TRAIL OF THE HUMAN SERPENT

Caption: This is him.

This week, in addition to whatever else comes up, El Cabrero has been pondering how people make sense of the world and the uncertainty of our knowledge. If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier entries.

Professor James Hall of the University of Richmond comes up with quite a list of the different ways we try to gain knowledge of the world in his Teaching Company course "Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World through Experience and Reason."

His list includes experience, memory, association, pattern recognition, reason, invention, and experimentation. None of these are infallible or completely reliable ways of getting at The Truth, although in combination they might get us closer to it.

One reason it's hard to get there is that we can't step outside of ourselves. We're creatures not only of reason but of passion and interest and we see the world as we are rather than as it is. As William James put it, "The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything."

There are two extreme schools of thought on the subject of truth these days. One is that of the post-modernists, who are sometimes kind of irritating. They hold that there is no truth, only different perspectives and narratives.

The other school is that of the authoritarians, who are sometimes kind of homicidal. They think Truth is their sole possession.

I try to compromise. My theory is that there may well be such a thing as Truth but we can't quite get to it from here, though we may get closer. Final truths are elusive. This may be just as well--we probably couldn't handle it.

WEST VIRGINIA RANT. Here's the lead of a rant I posted yesterday in WV Blue:

Is anyone else out there as tired as El Cabrero and the critters at Goat Rope Farm re of the ceaseless barrage of commercials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about what a terrible legal climate we have here?

They love to harp on a survey of the corporation-backed American Tort Reform Association that claims to show that WV is a "judicial hellhole." Most likely, they surveyed members, corporate defendants and their attorneys.

Scientifically, methinks it's almost as good as asking eighth graders whether algebra sucks and using the results as a basis to evaluate that branch of mathematics. Here's an evaluation of the "judicial hellhole" rankings from The Center for Justice and Democracy.

The rest is here.

DYING TO WORK. The AFLCIO recently released the latest edition of Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, which covers deaths and injuries in the workplace for 2005 (the latest year for which full data is available). The good news is that the number of deaths declined. In 2005, 5,734 workers died from workplace injuries, compared with 5,764 in 2004. However, the number of injuries went up, as did fatalities among Hispanic and foreign-born workers.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ASH WEDNESDAY, A REAL FIGHT, PRAGMATISM, AND MORE

Caption: Goats are the ultimate pragmatists.

Today is Ash Wednesday and El Cabrero will get his annual dose of cranial carbon if all goes according to plan.

In a couple previous Lents, I actually gave up beer and wine for all 40 days (46 if you count the weekends, as I found out to my dismay) until I discovered that this caused me to lose all interest in religion...

I'm thinking about giving up something I don't do. Maybe something like mime, mud wrestling or pursuing an interest in accounting. But then you never know when the urge to mud wrestle will strike.

PHILOSOPHY BREAK

This blog has several patron saints. Among them are Aristotle, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Montaigne, Albert Camus, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Walter Reuther and psychologist, philosopher and pragmatist William James. (This list is not conclusive.) If there's a common thread, none of them were fanatics.

If you haven't read it (or even if you have), James' Varieties of Religious Experience is well worth the effort. The same is true of his Pragmatism
and many of his essays.

Here's a take home message from his essay "The Will to Believe:" faith can create facts. Let me explain. At times, the belief that something can be done, whether it's climbing Everest or challenging an unjust law, can lead us to try things that can succeed against all odds. In other words, that kind of faith can change and create reality.

El Cabrero was again reminded of James by a review of the book William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Jackson Lears in The Nation.

Here's a quote from James that rings true to me:

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight--as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

So again and again and again, let us fight the good fight.

SPEAKING OF REAL FIGHTS, here's a little more about the effort to get the legislature of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia to pass a resolution opposing escalation of the war in Iraq.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN: GOOD BOOK ALERT

Caption: These guys look a little devilish. And not very gentlemanly.

El Cabrero is a little out of it these days and is trying to lick his post-surgical wounds, but, as usual, can't reach them.

"Thanks!" to all who sent kind words and wishes.

I have discovered that here's nothing like a good book to get you through times like these. By luck I stumbled on to one which I will pass on today in lieu of snarky comments on the state of the world.

(Except maybe for this brief one regarding the President's "new" Iraq plan: the consistency of the flow of bad ideas over the last 6 years is amazing to me and seems to violate my very limited understanding of the laws of probability.)

The book in question is The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe by J. C. Hallman.

The title caught my eye but the format clinched the deal. In addition to describing his experiences among Druids, Wiccans, Christian pro wrestlers, Scientologists, Satanists, UFO cultists, etc., the book dwells at length on the life and work of one of Goat Rope's patron saints, philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) exponent of pragmatism and author of the classic Varieties of Religious Experience.

El Cabrero is all about pragmatism.

The book alternates contemporary experiences outside the religious mainstream with sections dealing with James' life and thought and the combination works well.

Speaking of animals, which we weren't, there's even a section on the dog-training monks of New Skete.

James, by the way, has a famous passage that compares the role of humans in the cosmos to that of the animals in our homes:

I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to the curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

To my knowledge, he makes no similar comments on goats and peacocks...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED