Given
other thoughts on his mind, his grief for his father and lost son, the imminent
loss of his wife, are his habits of thought escapist, or realistic, or
something else? (FDG) Maybe it’s a bit of both, escapism and realism; Bloom
being philosophical about life and mortality and how infused they are. (Sian)
Joyce demonstrates a truth we never stop to think about, which is that our
minds never stop. We live with our minds and all the neural activities our
minds are heir to. How we regulate the mind, how much the mind is
self-regulating, how much is habit or not habit, these daily and lifetime
realities absorb Joyce’s interest. He wishes to set out patterns of these on
the page in an original and creative way. Thus understood, it is less easy to
say where Bloom stops being realist and starts being escapist, or anything
else. His mind is stimulated, he responds to the stimulus, his thoughts go in
places that finish up distant from the original stimulus. Just like you and me.
His mind tries to pay attention to the present moment, but is digressive, is
capable of knowing the past and imagining the future, all at once. Just like
us. At the same time, certain preoccupations keep forcing themselves into his
thoughts, thereby colouring the mood and altering the logic of what he was
thinking. Grief and loss are close to the surface, but Bloom doesn’t call them
grief and loss, they are the affective agent of his thought patterns, as likely
to be comic as anything we might call sad or tragic. Then also, thought is
private. This means he can have any number of thoughts, including otherwise
prohibited thoughts that will not be spoken. Like us, he can understand the
opposite point of view, without necessarily agreeing with it. He contains
multitudes of contradictions, most of which he would see are contradictory, if
only he had time to think.
While
I question that one person could have that many connected and collected
thoughts at one funeral, Bloom’s interior monologue is an astonishing ramble of
all the sorts of thoughts we might have pushed back when thinking about death.
Are these monologues anything more than an extended humour-buoyant version of
the soliloquy ‘She should have died hereafter’? It makes me ask just how much
Joyce owes to Shakespeare’s soliloquys, themselves a complete breakthrough in
English psychological expression. An argument could be mounted that Bloom’s
thoughts are not all literally happening as reported by the scribe. The impetus
to treat what we read as literally the case must be kept in check. Sometimes the
interior track of his thought could be treated more as the sorts of thoughts
that lead to those other thoughts, if you are someone like Bloom. Joyce has the
task of giving us an excess of them. We understand most of the time where Bloom
is going in his thoughts, which should be telling us something about our own
mind patterns.
Are
his jokes, some of them ‘dad jokes’, genuinely funny or is Joyce engaging in
tastelessness? (FDG) I don’t imagine that being ‘tasteful’ is ever part of
Joyce’s aim, except to expose its inherent hypocrisy. I can relate to Bloom’s
imagination: childlike, honest, and wonderfully comic. (LB) This episode really
gets the comic elements in the novel. (SL) I do not think Joyce is indulging in
tastelessness, rather he is breaking the taboo about death that virtually
forbade any talk of death in Edwardian society, tasteful or otherwise. It is
Joycean to succeed by excess. Like Molly when it comes to sex, Bloom’s thoughts
on death once activated cannot stop. Allied to this is the dictum, tastefulness
does not make art, anymore than propriety will always speak the truth.
I
am aweary, aweary of the view that puns are ‘dad jokes’. Puns are here to stay
as a form of shared intelligence, language learning, and poetic play. They were
since Adam, whose name itself is a pun. Ulysses punters ought to be aware of
puns on every page, the good, the bad, and the very very profound, the shallow
and the puny. Ulysses reverberates with them. Anti-punsters should abandon all
hope who enter the gates of Finnegans Wake, a novel that would not exist
without the pun.
Who
knew that Bloom was a serial live-streamer, with thoughts about the dead that
really don’t bear articulating in civil society? (FDG) Involuntary, perhaps.
(FDG) The dead are social distancing. Just saying. (HM) Why is Bloom so happy?
(TG) Because he’s not the one they’re burying perhaps. (Steve)
That
phrase ‘As you are now, so once were we’ is presumably addressed to the living
by the dead. ‘Faithful departed’, which precedes it, is different: to the dead
by the living. A good example of Joyce turning adroitly on a sixpence. (FDG)
‘As you are now, so once were we’ is a late medieval memento mori, a form of
painting in which an aged person looks at and speaks to a young person, perhaps
even their youthful self. Bloom does indeed seem to be taking it to an extreme,
or just getting it wrong (surprise, surprise!) by the dead looking at the
living. Still, Bloom is a living example of genuine empathy.
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