The Fourteenth Blackbird

A happy phone call with Rajeev who perennially encourages me to blog more frequently and fearlessly (and hankers, for some reason, for my grad schooly stuff)--

This may be a one-off affair or maybe I will try to contemplate my work a little better and be a better baby critic. I finished Ulysses, a labor of love certainly to be labored over for years to come, and was asked to respond to a little bit of criticism in a public forum. So below is the response which is heartfelt if dilettante. Hi to Joyce! Ask me again in a few years and maybe I'll know more.

In 1959, a UVA student asked Faulkner about Absalom, Absalom! in the language of Stevens: “it is more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?” The circuitous, palimpsestic body of Ulysses makes me ask the same. Cixous says that Joyce is “writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles,” each of which wears its own “garment of writing” such that “the code and the message, the surface and the depths, are confused with one another." The shrine/opera of “Sirens,” the catalogue/Generals Exam of “Oxen of the Sun,” the catechism/epitaph of “Ithaca” all aspire towards their own point of view, the summation of which should be a “total manifestation of reality through language” and the work itself a “Multilanguage." But the heterogeneity of styles—garment after garment after garment, the removing, the putting on—is not only wearisome, but eventually becomes non-productive, homogenous “equivalent matter” (an exhaustion acknowledged by “Eumaeus”). The key to comprehensibility, Cixous tells us, entails a situation wherein the artist must “exile himself from the created sphere...to survey the universe from the outside; to escape from time, space, and immediacy." Such an exile would be perspectival clarity from the outside, or, as Faulkner answered, one’s “own fourteenth image of that blackbird which I would like to think is the truth.” Exile, Cixous draws from Portrait, is the place where language finally presses meaning out of “the gross earth” of experiences, showing instead “an image of beauty." Though Molly is not much different than Stephen or Bloom in many ways (she, too, has a lot of “gross earth” to her), “Penelope” does suffice as narrative exile, and does “press out” beauty in the exhale that is the final pages. Perhaps, though, the exile of “Penelope” has nothing to do with Molly and everything to do with Joyce’s having achieved a total saturation of styles, of multilanguage, where nothing more can be explored: thusly exiled from Ulysses, the precipitate is something like truth.

In getting at what Ulysses is about—or, as is perhaps easier, what Bloom is about—there are two ways of knowing. Through Bloom’s/Joyce’s subjective, imaginative stylings, the “noble accents/ And lucid, inescapable rhythms,” we get one level of understanding, and through the objectivities of Bloom’s/Ulysses’ reality we get another: “the blackbird is involved/ In what I know” as well. Ulysses before “Penelope” is an “enlarged, totalitarian epiphany that includes space and all moments” and synthesizes chaos “by wrapping it in a ‘verbal clothing’." It is a fleshy-fluxy “epiphany-as-cosmos” where “objects are drawn into the epiphany;” a string of Blooming chaos is anchored in Dublin in June exclusively by the objects of his observation. Objects are “certain focal points... isolated from reality and set in context which it illumined and which caused its soul to show forth clearly." Insofar as they are narrative anchors and insofar as they have the supreme capacity to mold and guide consciousness out of time, objects are supremely important to our understanding of Bloom. Not only is each chain of his thought tethered (however obliquely) to a totem (potato, soap, sideboard) but there is a “speech of objects” themselves: the Zeusian crack of the table in “Ithaca” is “one sharp warning noise from the unconscious is sufficient to set in motion all the mechanisms of memory."

But, as Cixous reminds us of Ephesus’s river, the flow/flux/flesh of life cannot be the same on either side of any given grounded moment. As we wondered with “Circe” and “Oxen of the Sun”—is there stable content to be had that exists outside of the style? What just happened amidst the play of language? Sure, there is comprehensible forward motion of the narrative when Stephen swats the chandelier at Bello’s, and this type of moment grounds the imaginative in the possible. However, the ashplant does not emerge unchanged after having swatted the chandelier, and our perception of Stephen evolves irreversibly as well. The verbal clothing of the moment always changes even the solidest objects, and any solidity that has built up as an understanding of who Bloom is or what Ulysses is saying is easily felled when the next parallax view comes: “The river is moving./ The blackbird must be flying.” Kristeva agrees that instabilities of writing and of content contribute to the quicksand underneath: “there coagulates an unstable image, on the point of toppling over into flesh and signifier." The flesh and the signifier—Joyce’s multiplicity of styles, the various “language garments” being worn, as well as the practicalities of June 16^th and its soaps and trotters—are all equally unstable as images. There is no “right way;” no episode or train of thought emerges as singularly truthful. These are the many blackbirds, presented, to our chagrin, without a verdict.

To the even greater chagrin of, Cixous smirks, the “not sufficiently familiar” reader (but who could possibly be sufficiently fit to read Ulysses?) the “reassuring space of the traditionally built novel is not given here as objective, but is reconstituted by an inner gaze which at once makes it subjective." The allusive soap bar and the pocket potato that have enraged, grounded, and befuddled us as we have followed Bloom are of no importance to Molly. Boylan’s betting tickets that weigh so heavily upon her husband, Milly’s cup that suspends him diachronically, and all the other “phenomena of senescence” that illuminate him brightly, if briefly, in “Ithaca” likely would have no conversation or “interchanges of looks” with Molly.

Furthermore, Kristeva describes the flexibility—and subsequent difficulty—of identity, saying Joyce presents a “liquidation, liquefaction, of both feminine and masculine, in the flow of a style, halting at no one identity—whether personal, ideological, or sexual—but knowing them all." Like style and objects, identity, too, is split up into fragments, into “being and non-being”, into “movement, kinesis, metabolism." Though Cixous does qualify the possibilities of narrative saying that Ulysses is a “limited polycentricity, rather than an unlimited formless multiplicity,” I have my doubts. I do not think Molly is special in or for providing perspective: the “exile” could have been from any character who is not Bloom and not Stephen. Nor do I think it is integral that the final perspective be a woman’s. In the course of Ulysses we have seen a “plastic, polymorphic, polyphonic” multiplicity of identification and identity, beginning with Stephen in Bloom and Bloom in Stephen (“Stoom,” “Blephen?”). We have seen, as in “Circe,” Bloom as woman, Bloom as man, as ancient, modern, animal, vegetable, and mineral, all of these identities imminently reversible and simultaneous (which is what makes them, much to the dramatist’s delight, so perturbingly, fascinatingly unfit to stage). The key to its “exile” effect is simply that Molly’s chapter exists slightly afield from this schema of identifications, and rather than having the same interlocking, reversible potentiality of identities, her chapter seems to exist to be just another, tighter way of looking at the blackbird of Bloom. As Kristeva says, “it concerns the male-artist who is stated with a final appropriation-identification." Molly’s Einfühlung makes Bloom surface as newly tender, but also more real than he has been since 10:00AM: contextualized, effective, and stable. The river of Bloom is never going to be the same from one June 16^th to the next, but Molly’s look shows it to be, at the very least, mappable and navigable. “The assimilation, in the final monologue, of the character of Molly by the narrator” solves some of the reversibilities of Bloom as well (kind/unkind, dull/smart, male/female, embodied/unembodied, for example). While Joyce, through the novel, “does not imagine himself to be or to contain the world,” and neither, of course, do Bloom or Molly (though Stephen might), he does assemble it. And the fourteenth image of the blackbird, or the perspective of exile—a tender, slumbering, fixed Bloom, ultimately knowable—only comes by virtue of the thirteen other blackbirds, the time before exile, the remarkable assembly.

You can listen to Faulkner tell the truth here.