Stanier’s Non-Destabilization Argument for Penelope

Stanier, Michael. “The Void Awaits Surely All Them That Weave The Wind: ‘Penelope’ and ‘Sirens’ in Ulysses. Twentieth Century Literature. 1995. Jstor. Web. 17 November 2009. <w ww.jstor.org>.

Michael Stanier attempts in this article to determine to what extent Molly’s language in Penelope is “subversive and deconstructive to the whole,” the whole being Ulysses.  Because the author is eager to link the flowing style of Molly’s narrative to water, he begins by exploring the other main character’s varied relationships with water.  He begins with Stephen’s fear and discomfort with water as contrasted by Buck and Haines’ comfort with it, and then moves onto Bloom (who will be Leopold, not Molly, for the sake of this writing).  Stanier explains then complexities of Blooms’ relationship with water as well, confirming that water is not a single faceted symbol in the novel.  As Stanier sees it, water functions as both life-giver and taker, source of fear (for Stephen) and destiny (for Bloom).  This sets up his analysis of the style of Penelope, which takes on the apparently common assertion that Molly’s internal monologue is flowing and therefore destabilizing of a phallocentric narrative in the rest of Ulysses.  This I think is where Stanier runs into problems with his argument.  He chooses a few critics to help explain his thinking, most notably Derek Attridge, who argues that Molly’s language is not in fact one of flow because if we put the punctuation back in, her sentences are actually fairly short and conventional syntactically.  Unfortunately, the rest of Stanier’s argument rests on this premise, which is necessarily invalid precisely because the punctuation isn’t there.  This is exactly the way Joyce turns Molly’s language into a flowing narrative.  To put it another way, if Joyce had made her narrative one of flow by putting in punctuation but creating run-on sentences, Attridge’s argument would be that if we break up the run-on sentences into their logical independent clauses, they’re not run-on.  This is discounting Joyce’s intentional influence on the narrative, however: we cannot throw away choices made in the style of Ulysses simply because it fits a particular interpretation.  As for the rest of Stanier’s article, that it rests on Attridge’s faulty reasoning dooms it, but if we are to take the latter critic’s arguments as true then the rest of Stanier’s analysis makes good sense.  He finishes up his argument in Penelope by stating that since the language is not one of flow, it cannot be destabilizing, and then moves onto Sirens which I won’t address since we’re talking about Penelope on Wednesday. 

To wrap up, I think Stanier’s article falls prey to the usual temptation of Joyce critics to address twenty different things at once simply because there’s so much to talk about, but he retains focus well enough and for long enough that (discounting Attridge’s reasoning) he creates a convincing and well-thought out argument.

Penelope’s (lack of) Questions

Okay so the Penelope piece of this update is pretty obvious, because there are no questions in the episode!  Well, there might have been one or two, but without question marks I’m not counting them.  As for what this indicates, since this is the first (and last) purely female perspective we’ve had in the novel, there are two ways to treat it.  The first is this lack of questions being representative of women in general, which would denote a surety lacking among the men of Ulysses.  If Molly is to be the representative for her sex in this regard, we can say with a degree of certainty (and as usual with Joyce it’s a small degree) that the lack of questions for the only female in the book gives women a stronger presence than the surface misogyny that some read in Ulysses implies.  If Molly is only representative of herself, however, we can read the lack of questions as another piece in the puzzle of her relationship with Bloom.  Molly is sure of what she wants, and has little pondering to do; she has by and large figured herself out.  The issue is that Bloom is so full of questions and uncertainty that he is the one hurting the marriage, and if he were to rise to Molly’s level of confidence their relationship would be in better shape.  This being Ulysses, I’m going to take the middle ground on this one and say that the lack of questions probably represents both of the ideas I’ve discussed, and furthermore that it probably has many more implications than the ones I’ve addressed.

As for questions as a whole in Ulysses now that we’ve finished the novel, I suppose I’ll sum up my thoughts on questions even though it’ll be a bit repetitious from the last time I did this (since Ithaca was the real climax of my obsession).  Questions begin as useless, having no direct answers and giving no information.  They then shift in the middle of the book to getting answered, but information is still lacking.  By Ithaca of course, we have an overload of information that we have to swim through to get any real meaning.  And then there’s Penelope, with no questions and yet a fully functional narrative.  Taken altogether then (I’m going to assume an authoritative voice here despite the inherent lack of certainty when dealing with Ulysses), Joyce is discounting the “common sense” conception of questions as dealing with information.  Instead, questions in Ulysses function by turns as greetings and formalities, rhetorical devices to further one’s own argument, meaningless time-consumers, and when finally they do serve the traditional role of information givers they do so in an overwrought manner that makes it difficult to obtain real meaning.  Joyce thus echoes the theme he has been pursuing throughout the novel, that being an ongoing mission to undermine tradition.  Questions are meant to equalize the playing field among people by equalizing the amount of information available to everyone, but Joyce demonstrates in Ulysses that questions are more often than not devices used to establish power relationships, whether between characters or between novel and reader.

Unanswered Questions in Eumaeus and Ithaca

For today I’m going to shift my focus a little bit and write about a theme I’ve yet to explore, and that is unanswered questions. The three instances in particular I want to talk about are the exchange between Bloom and Molly in Ithaca, unanswered questions in Eumaeus as a whole, and in a broader sense unanswered questions for the reader.

First of all Professor Simpson pointed out in class that the only question in Ithaca that isn’t asked is the one that’s been weighing on Bloom’s mind all day, and that is “What have you done today Molly?” Of course it makes sense that he doesn’t answer in one way because he’s been avoiding the subject of Boylan the entire novel. However, between the rearranged furniture, the betting tickets, the potted meat and all that, one would think that Boylan would be on the surface of Bloom’s mind. If we take this as a given (and it’s not a very hard premise to accept), then what we’re seeing here is an immense show of willpower by Bloom to not ask the one expected question. We also should ask, why? He considers all of the possibilities of retribution on 603, but rejects all of them in favor of coping with the jealousy and humiliation – Bloom appears to value his relationship with Molly almost too much, such that he’s willing to accept it in a severely damaged form. The other half of Bloom’s interaction with Molly must be noted, and that is Molly’s question to Bloom of what he did that day. As we are all aware, he leaves out significant portions of his day and even manipulates his story some (calling Stephen a professor and author). Between this and his non-question to Molly, their marriage is in many respects nothing but living a lie.

As for Eumaeus, we said most of it in class, but questions here are by and large evaded and given half-answers and lies by omission. In particular the sailor’s evasion of questions comes to mind, which we covered pretty thoroughly in class. So, I’ll address here what it means in the larger context of how questions have been functioning so far. Strange as this notion might be, an unanswered question can be another avenue in establishing the higher ground in a social situation. The way this can happen is demonstrated by the cunning manner of the sailor, whose dodges of embarrassing questions that could lead to a revelation of his homosexuality allow him to continue to keep his audience rapt.

Finally there are the unanswered questions that the reader has, countered by the overload of questions in Ithaca. Throughout the novel, the reader is left wanting two things: answers to his or her own questions regarding plot and characters, and for questions posed in the text itself to be answered. As for the first, we get plenty of answers in Ithaca but few that reveal questions likely on the reader’s mind (unless in a highly specific coincidence the reader wanted to know about the workings of a faucet), and are in this way kept in a lower position of power relative through the book. Much like the sailor retains his audience by not giving everything away, the book ensures that we cannot reach the same level as it by leaving questions open-ended. As for answers to questions explicitly in the text, we get those too but not in the way we were hoping. Information is certainly there, but it is presented in a typical Joycean fashion, which is something that we have to unravel. In depth answers are found in the text in Ithaca, but the information they give explicitly does little for us, and it is really only the implicit ties to other ongoing themes of Ulysses that gives us any sort of satisfaction.

Questions in Eumaeus and Ithaca

I want to start off with a particular question that I thought was great, and then we’ll move into broader themes. In Eumaeus, page 516 line 695, “– And what’s the number for? Loafer number two queried,” which works absolutely perfectly with the theme of the episode, which as I understand it is wasted words and poor writing. It shows that the narrator has a self-awareness and is perhaps even criticizing his/her own writing, or that the characters have a sense of the writing (I’m thinking the latter is less likely). This flows nicely into my next point – the use of this question as something more than just establishing a power relationship points to the upcoming shift in the role of questions.

In Eumaeus, I cheered because I noticed the questions were starting to get directly answered, and with pretty detailed informative responses too. As a reminder, at the beginning of the book questions were rarely answered at all, then at the middle they were answered but substantively, and now finally we’re starting to get information from questions, as it should be. Eumaeus, however was just a light preview of Ithaca and the total shift in the role of questions to not only functioning as information-gatherers, but also to propelling the plot along as well.

Although this is a significant change, there is some bit of (what I supposed to be) Joyce’s commentary on the use of questions in the earlier episodes. That takes the form of the numerous questions that only function to obtain truly useless information. So even though I had originally thought that questions were now being used “properly,” it turns out that Joyce is sticking to a theme here, and seems to saying that even when questions are used to obtain information, a lot of that will be totally useless. To sum up my thoughts so far – the primary function of questions is in fact to establish power relationships, and when they are used to gain information one usually has to sift through a lot of excess to get at the heart of the answer.

Consolidation of Questions in Circe

Before I get to the main body of the post, there’s a quick moment of a specific question that was striking to me on page 394 at the bottom.  Bloom references the Charge of the Light Brigade, and all follows according to how the poem (and I believe history) actually goes with the charge failing, but then with the question “Do we yield?  No!” the reality shifts and Bloom proclaims at the end the brigade “sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.”  A question, in this case, has caused a revision of poetry and history, which is the kind of role a question has yet to fill.

There’s a whole lot questions do here, this really is the payoff (or at least one of them) for my obsession.  As I alluded to previously, power relations dominate Circe in terms of the function of questions, so let’s get right down to all the examples.

– Bloom has his power as king when he answers all the questions from his “subjects,” and fittingly his power is stripped from him right after a question “what about mixed bathing?” p. 400

– Next onto Bello vs. Bloom, the best example here being “What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime?” p. 438.  Not that Bloom wasn’t under Bello’s control before (have to avoid pronouns here…), but this really cows him

– Next up is the Nymph vs. Bloom, where first the Nymph establishes control over Bloom with her questions about what Bloom did in the woods, and then on 451 we get a shift of power, again with Bloom asserting his dominance with the question “If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an ass pissing” (p. 451).

– Boylan vs. Bloom now, Boylan establishes his position with his opening question that can’t possibly be answered “I have a little private business with your wife, you understand” (p. 461).  I got a little flustered when Bloom then asks a question on the following page, “Vaseline, sir?  Orangeflower…? Lukewarm water…? (p. 462) but I was relieved to see that there was not even an acknowledgment of the question.

– During Stephen’s confrontation with his Mother, her questions (p. 474) all about how many things she’s done for him puts her on the higher ground and reduces Stephen to shambles

– Bloom tries to establish himself over Bella in the issue of the broken lamp through questions, but he doesn’t get a chance to win the battle as he’s called away by the row in the street.  I just noticed, a row in the street, a shout in the street, he’s called away by God maybe…

– Finally Kelleher taking control of the situation with Firstwatch and Secondwatch (after they themselves took control with questions) around page 492.  

So now I’ve listed for us all these situations with questions determining power, so the question is now what does it all do for us?  With the exception of the very first instance the asker is the one who dominates every situation, and we even see a shift in power denoted by questions with Stephen and the Nymph so it’s a fairly certain thing.  Another question, what does this do for us in the larger context of Ulysses?  From what I can tell, questions in earlier chapters didn’t do a whole lot of anything, though we began to see hints of power relations I believe as early as Hades.  The theme of questions establishing power has slowly snowballed and seems to have come to a head in Circe (though I’m sure I’ll have to revise that statement come chapter 17).  I noted in some earlier post that questions don’t take on their normal role (or at least normal in the sense that that’s how they should operate) of giving and receiving information.  By Circe we see pretty clearly that they serve an important function, and that is defining relationships between characters, it’s just that Joyce has been consistent as far as I can tell about not letting questions do any work in the exchange of information.  This fits in nicely with the ongoing, very large theme that Joyce wants us to reconsider traditional roles, be they gender, race, nationality, narratorial, and even language in regards to style and now questions.

 

Questions in Circe

Quick notes, more to come for Wednesday…

At the beginning we see Lynch and Stephen exchanging questions and (lo!) clear, direct answers.  This quickly shifts into Bloom posing rhetorical question after rhetorical question to himself.  I think the proximity and sharp contrast between these two sections of questioning does a couple of things for Circe.  First, it gives us an idea of how the episode will be focused on Bloom’s internal dealing with issues via hallucinations, while Stephen’s role will be about his interactions with other people (smashing a chandelier, or getting punched out, for example) or in the case of his hallucinations those will, as sparknotes nicely points out, “emerge out of elements of his day, such as the interview with Deasy.” 

I also took a peek at the second half of the episode, and I think some interesting things happen with power relations and questions.  Bello establishing dominance over Bloom, Bloom’s shifting relationship with the Nymph (he starts to ask more questions as he gains the higher ground), and I think Carr over Stephen.

John Gordon’s “Obeying The Boss in ‘Oxen of the Sun’”

Gordon, John. “Obeying The Boss In “Oxen of the Sun”.” ELH. 1991. Jstor. Web. 27 October 2009. <w ww.jstor.org>.

I’m going to focus on section I of III because it is most pertinent to our discussions of Oxen, and because II and III are more opaque than Joyce.  Gordon’s examination of Oxen of the Sun revolves around refuting the common claim that style dictates the action in this chapter, in favor of his own interpretation that “events generate style” (4). 

            Gordon goes through section by section and dissects the action, at each turn trying to prove that the action is the reason for the style, and not vice versa.  While he does in fact prove very convincingly in all of his studies of the lines that action and style and action are in fact tightly linked, he fails to show causality one way or another.  One of Gordon’s arguments centers around Bloom’s awakening (from just having fallen asleep in the last chapter, also mirroring how a fetus comes into sharper relief as a baby and out of the womb).  Gordon’s claim as usual is that Bloom’s awakening is the reason for the murky language and confused references to objects (“is that beer?”).  However, though he presents a compelling account of how action and style in this case are related, Gordon provides no reason as to why action is dictating style and not the other way around. 

            Similarly, Gordon’s description of the gothic Walpole scene does a very good job of describing how the action and style are related, but not how they interact with one another.  Gordon’s entire argument consists of this: he first describes that Mulligan was describing how Haines appeared at a party and spooked everyone with talk of the black panther of his nightmares.  Gordon begins the next sentence after this description by stating, “Hence, the ‘Walpole’ voice,” and leaves his analysis at that.  His claim that Buck’s description begs a gothic voice is made, but not at all justified.

            Gordon continues in this way for the rest of the article, but although he fails in his original purpose of disproving the belief that the style generates the action, he does incidentally provide a very good scene-by-scene breakdown of what happens and why.  As such, this article should be read not for the argument, but as a companion to Oxen of the Sun if the reader needs help understanding what’s going and the link between style and action.  Even if the reader were familiar with the episode and how style functions in it, Gordon’s in-depth look at Oxen would probably provide a few new insights and deepen one’s understanding of one of the more difficult episodes in Ulysses.

 

A couple of Questions

For this post I’m going to do something a little different than I have been doing, and focus on the nature and importance of a couple of questions in particular instead of searching out patterns by episode.

The first question (or really series of questions) I want to consider is the set we discussed in class a little bit on Monday, which was the series of questions regarding nationality.  If we take Bloom’s definition of what a nation is, “the same people living in the same place,” then it is natural that he would define anyone living long-term in Ireland as Irish, including himself.  Bloom’s logic cannot accept the reasoning that makes all the other characters see him as Jewish nationality-wise, since there isn’t exactly a real concentration of Jews anywhere.  There may be small communities in various countries around Europe, but there is no nation where the tying “sameness” is Judaism.  This brings up the interesting question (asked by me, not in Ulysses); where then does Bloom’s Judaism fit in his identity if not in nationality?  The answer is that Bloom’s Irishness and Jewishness are, respectively, a national identity and a racial identity.  Nationality is something that is self-defined for Bloom, but racially he must be Jewish simply by the fact that his mother was Jewish. 

Though this will turn into a bit of a digression, I also want to briefly talk about another split within Bloom past the Irish/Jewish split.  Within the Jewish piece of Bloom’s identity, he is religiously almost certainly not Jewish, but racially he is immutably so.  This may be a difficult distinction to make for some, because of Bloom’s non-observance of kosher laws (he eats pork) and the fact that up to this point we’ve seen him enter only churches and never synagogues.  However, religious identity for each Jew is a very personal thing, since there is no Church as in Catholicism that dictates current interpretations of the Bible (or Torah), and so each Jew individually generally has their own sense about the appropriateness of observing Jewish law.  This individuality means that Bloom’s practice of Judaism as a religion has no bearing on his self-identification as a Jew overall, which explains why his response to the citizen is so sharp.  Though we as readers may not see Bloom as a Jew because of his laxness in following Jewish law and tradition, he cannot see himself otherwise.

The other question I want to talk about is also in Cyclops, and it is the citizen’s question of “Whose God?” after Bloom says “And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God” (12.1805-10).  The thing that struck me about the citizen’s question was that it might be mistaken for “Who’s God” when spoken aloud, transforming the question into “Who Is God?”  I really don’t have an answer for this one, only that it is interesting that Bloom seems to answer the “alternate” question first, by saying “Well, his uncle was a jew,” and only after that saying “Your God was a jew” in response to the citizen’s real question.  I tried looking into whether William Shakespeare had any uncles that were Jews, or if he had any brothers that converted to Judaism (so that Hamnet’s uncle would be a Jew), or if Joyce had any uncles that were Jews, but no such information was to be found.  The only other explanation I can think of is the probable over-reach of “Well” missing an “I” (this is in Cyclops after all) to turn it into Will (William Shakespeare), continuing the running theme of William Shakespeare / Joyce as God.

Scylla and Charybdis and Wandering Rocks, a little bit of Sirens and Cyclops

I’m going to focus on Scylla and Charybdis and Wandering Rocks for the sake of depth and catching up, and take a smaller crack at Sirens and Cyclops until Wednesday’s update.

Scylla and Charybdis

As I worked my through all the questions, I noticed a pattern peculiar to this episode.  When a character asks a question in Scylla and Charybdis, there is never an answer.  Literally, no questions posed by characters aloud are answered by anyone else, with a single exception that seems too Joycean to have been a coincidence: Stephen squarely answers “No” when asked if he believes his own theory.  Throughout the entire episode we get the sense, by the fact that no questions are answered at all, that no one quite knows what to make of Shakespeare or any theories proposed about him.  It mirrors the debate perfectly, in that the questions are endless and the answers are nowhere to be found.  So when Stephen answers a question head on for the only time in the episode, it is incredibly entertaining that his answer confirms only that he doesn’t have any answers (in regards to Shakespeare).  It’s like that old saying, the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything. 

Wandering Rocks

There’s a marked change in this episode, where we’re starting to get real, direct answers to questions, if not in depth revealing answers yet.  With a few exceptions, we see most of the questions posed by characters answered in a direct fashion I honestly wasn’t expecting or used to from the other episodes.  The conversations between Katy and Boody, and between Blazes and the flower girl for example are loaded with questions with direct meaningful answers.  This would seem to go hand-in-hand with the theme of parallax explored in Wandering Rocks, as you need clarity from each angle to get clarity from the fuller picture.  In the other episodes, where narration is taken care of from a single perspective, the lack of clear responses to questions echoes the sentiment that a single perspective does not grant much insight.  In Wandering Rocks, however, when we finally get multiple perspectives, each one is sharp (as indicated by the clear answers in the episode) and thus allows us to get a better idea of the whole picture.  The other smaller theme I want to address in Wandering Rocks is people asking how things are to other people, and getting no actual response to the question (Father Comnee and the MPs wife, Dilly and Stephen, Father Cowley and Simon Dedalus).  This could easily be a small comment by Joyce about the nature of such greetings, that we rarely if ever think about what’s being asked and take it for granted that it’s a nominal greeting, and not a sincere inquiry into how things are going.  I would be interested to see if later on in Ulysses someone asks how things are going and the answer to the question would be important to the plot, but the question still isn’t answered properly; it would be like the boy who cried wolf.

Sirens and Cyclops

Some quick notes until Wednesday, since I’m already at almost two pages of writing.  In Sirens, we see, for what I believe is the first time, questions posed aloud by characters being answered by the external narrative.  This is the first suggestion of narrative interference (though Spark Notes and Wikipedia claim the first hints of it come in Cyclops), and begins to plant the idea in the reader’s head that the narrative presence is more than just perfunctory. As for Cyclops, the narrator begins by answering a couple questions with “Ay,” only to reinforce the numerous Cyclops references.  Then, the dialogue is propelled very quickly with a deluge of questions between the characters, but it is interesting to note the non-intellectualism we see in the conversation (when there was so much, for example, in Scylla and Charybdis).  Two particular questions I will try to expound upon next time: the citizen’s question of what nation Bloom is, and the citizen’s “Whose God?” question.

Hamnet Shakespeare

Key lines to look at: 9.164-180, 9.882, and Blamires’ summary is extremely helpful.

It takes a great deal of explanation to get to Hamnet Shakespeare, and it is almost certain I will get some of this wrong. Essentially, understanding who Hamnet is, and the timeline of William Shakespeare’s own life is integral to understanding Stephen’s argument that Hamlet is his own father. This explains why I wasn’t able to follow the argument before.

First, Hamnet Shakespeare was William Shakespeare’s only son, who died in 1596 at the age of 11 of unknown causes, and Hamlet was written after Hamnet’s death, which is important for the purposes of Dedalus’ argument. Also, William Shakespeare’s own father had died at the time of his writing Hamlet. More background is that Stephen states at one point that William Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet’s father in his own production of the play. Now, forward to Stephen’s theory. Stephen argues that Hamlet in the play is at once both Hamnet and William. While it’s pretty clear that Hamnet can be Hamlet just by the names, the latter is the less obvious, but Stephen’s theory rests on the fact that William is at the time of writing the play a fatherless son. So, with Stephen having established Hamlet as both Hamnet and William, we see the first way in which Hamlet is his own father. Then, there is the point that Stephen brings up that William plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father in a production of the play, and since William put himself into the character of Hamlet, Hamlet is once again his own father by way of the transitive property. Additionally, William as creator of the play itself takes on the role of Creator, which means he is a Father (in a Christian sense as well) to all the characters in the play, including Hamlet and the ghost. Finally, when William’s father died, William took up the role of Father to all the generations of his family past and to come (thus Shakespeare is his own father as well). Key to this last very confusing part is the question: if a father with no son cannot be a father (by definition), is a son without a father (Hamlet, William after their respective father’s deaths) truly a son? William is in limbo when he writes Hamlet – he is neither father (Hamnet is dead) nor son (his own father is dead), and so he assumes the role of father to his whole lineage. So confusing, no wonder even Dedalus doesn’t believe in his own argument.