March 19: Episode 2

Narrative Summary:

The episode opens in a private boys’ school. Dedalus (the teacher!) is asking his class questions about the battle of Asculum. Daedalus is giving part of his attention to the boys, but his internal monologue continues, usually in reaction to what is being said or done by the boys. The boys enjoy making each other laugh, and some of the bolder ones are a bit cheeky. Dedalus reflects that the laughter and flip attitude spring from the boys’ knowledge that Dedalus is not a strict teacher, and that their families pay for them to be there.

Dedalus turns to another topic by lifting a different book and asking the boys where to start. It’s poetry, Milton’s Lycidas, and while one of the boys reads we learn, through Dedalus’ thoughts, that he studied in Paris. The boys go to play hockey, but one stays back to ask Dedalus for help on some math problems that another teacher has given up on explaining. Dedalus reflects that even this weak-eyed boy’s mother loved him and protected him from harm when he was a baby, and that prompts him to think about his own mother. Dedalus helps the boy understand the math, and sends him off to hockey.

Dedalus goes to Mr. Deasy’s (the head of the school) office to wait for him, and Mr. Deasy arrives and pays him. We learn from their conversation that Deasy is conservative, believes in God, is in favor of Ireland staying part of England, and is anti-Semitic. While talking with Dedalus, Deasy finishes a letter to the editor he has written on preventing foot and mouth disease, and tells Dedalus to take the letter to people Dedalus knows at the local newspapers and have them publish it. Dedalus tries to demur but Deasy is insistent that Dedalus get the letter published. After Dedalus leaves Deasy’s office, Deasy follows him to tell him a joke about Jews.

Thoughts and Impressions:
There is so much going on here! It’s hard for me to know what to include in the narrative summary and what to leave out. I found myself writing sentences about Dedalus’ thoughts, and the particulars of what is going on, but then taking them out because it was too much — too long, too detailed, too bogged down. I guess that’s because the narrative isn’t the point. And I feel dumb just writing that — good literature is not about the story, it’s about what the reader feels and thinks and learns in response to the how the writer frames the story. It’s hard to separate the narrative from the thoughts and impressions in Ulysses because Joyce is so good at uniting them!

Maybe I shouldn’t try to separate narrative from thoughts and impressions here? I want the blog to have a bit of structure, to give myself parameters within which to write. Otherwise the task seems too overwhelming. Without some structure I can see this becoming my own stream of consciousness in response to Joyce’s.

And this raises another thought  — maybe what I am trying to do, summarize Ulysses, is antithetical to Ulysses? It has already occurred to me that my attempt to digest it and it spit out on a scheduled daily basis is somewhat disrespectful of what Joyce has created. The mere act of writing about it reduces it.

Yet I am enjoying this process! Although I’ve only been doing this for a couple of days, I know that the writing part — blogging about it — is what motivates me to try to understand it better, in a way that would not happen if I was simply reading the book. My default, I think, is to do what is easy. If I were reading Ulysses and not blogging about it, I would begin to let things I don’t understand slide, without trying to figure them out. I would understand less and get increasingly less from it. Even if I did finish the book, reading it would not be a good experience. Which, so far, it is (!). Blogging forces me to engage with Ulysses in a way that would not happen without the blog.  (Insert red-faced emoji here).

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This Episode is only twelve pages long, but discussing it could easily take three or four times that amount of space. It is relatively more understandable than Episode 1. Parts that stood out for me:

• realizing that Dedalus is a teacher (aha!)
  
• not understanding what is going on when Dedlaus asks a boy to recite Lycidas from memory and the boy tries to hide that he reading from a book instead; Dedalus says “turn the page” when the boy starts to repeat himself, but I didn’t get it.  I had to check an annotation.
• Dedalus’ thought, when working on math, that the boy’s mother had loved him: “Was that then real?  The only true thing in life?” 
• When Dedalus waits in Deasy’s office, Dedalus views various knickknacks that Deasy has in a case, and it’s hard to figure out exactly what he’s looking at.  But while the description is hard to understand, it is also beautifully evocative, and I know that if it was clearer that would not be true.

What most resonated with me was when Dedalus reflects on the nature of time and possibility — how one extinguishes the other, the passage of time reducing many possibilities to just one reality.

Deasy made me grind my teeth.  He is religious, pompous, antisimetic— he considers himself an Englishman rather than Irish, and opines that the proudest thing one can say is that he never owed anyone money. Dedalus then mentally lists all the people he owes money to. While Dedalus believes that “history is a nightmare” from which he is trying to wake, Deasy states that “history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.” — A God Dedalus does not believe in.  They are on opposite sides of almost everything.  The mundane-ness of Deasy’s letter to the newspapers throws Dedalus’ questioning of life’s meaning into high relief.