(Cross-posted from Infinite Zombies.)
Howdy, Zombies! My mother (neither beastly nor dead) came ’round, and my time she flew by. But I’m honor-bound to make it all up, and while it would make sense to jump aboard where the boat is now, I feel I must backfill. That is, what I have to say on “Aeolus” and “Scylla and Charybdis” echoes forward, and I can’t hark back to what I haven’t said.
(I wasn’t kidding about how reading affects my writing.)
To begin, I admit I’m a sucker for scenes behind the scenes in publishing. It’s what I do, and it amuses me. So I enjoyed Bloom at work in “Aeolus,” and felt fondly for Nannetti in his reading closet. But I also think a place where texts are made is a fertile literary setting; events and meanings seem to bloom and multiply. (Paging Adso of Melk.) That’s certainly the case here in Ulysses—indeed, texts themselves start overgrowing their espaliers and covering the style we’ve learned how to read in the first six episodes.
Judd mentions David Hayman’s idea of the Arranger, which I’m not familiar with but sounds right on. Stipulating the Arranger’s existence, then (and the fact that I’m talking out of my hat; any ridiculousness here is my lookout, not Hayman’s), what I’m specifically sniffing after is the way It takes textual models and mashes them down onto the story of this day in Dublin, sometimes pressing so hard that the “original” material gets squeezed into some odd configurations to make room.
In “Aelous,” the arranging is largely a matter of editing and editorializing. It takes work to learn how to sort through Stephen’s and Bloom’s thoughts, and then just as we’ve had three episodes of each to grow accustomed to their styles, Bloom’s newspaper suddenly grabs hold and starts to run away with the book. It’s funny, for sure (“K. M. R. I. A.”), but the heds also create this peculiar space between the narrative and itself, so that what had seemed disorienting but still reasonably straightforward is now doubled and deeply suspicious. The prose that had perhaps pretended to psychological transparency is now making hay of its printedness (and the Arranger is making fun of the characters, at least some of the time). Most striking, I think, is that the arranging here doesn’t clarify anything. Whatever the Arranger’s goals, they do not appear to include simplifying. Instead, It unfolds a whole new broadsheet of meanings and structures between us and what we had taken to be the pages we were reading.
Outside of maybe the Dickensianly vigorous grotesquerie of all the eating, my hobbyhorse here hops right across “Lestrygonians,” but it strikes down hard in the Strait of Messina where dwell “Scylla and Charybdis.” We lay our scene in a library—a book hoard!—and people it with very many texts: Wilhelm Meister, Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Lovesongs of Connacht, King Lear, and so on, plus all the songs and snippets I won’t look up because one of the Ulysses guidebook writers must already have done. Stephen performs an absorbing (if, in my eyes, wrongheaded) demonstration of the biographical fallacy to prove that Shakespeare was in fact one of his own characters; he even hauls in Will’s will’s second-best bed. The Arranger grows impatient with him, and lets Its attention wander: First It reproduces a snippet of notated Gregorian chant, then at line 684 It takes short inspiration from the Shakespearean subject and versifies the matter. Ideas appear to flit across the Arranger’s awareness, sometimes momentarily sticking together to produce name changes like “Mr. Secondbest Best,” “Eglintonus Chronolologos,” and “Sonmulligan.” (Quick leafing shows only “Puck Mulligan” repeated.) It goes all in, formatting just over a page as a play, gives up again, and finally ends with (almost) the end of Cymbeline.
I know I said the Arranger isn’t interested in clarity, but it’s notable that It isn’t blotting out the story It’s interfering with. There’s enough left recognizable that we can even in some sense distinguish what it might have been like “before” the Arranger got Its mitts on. (I know this is a fraught way of thinking.) Post hoc, it seems inevitable that a newspaper office and a library would inspire such shenanigans, but I think that’s only because we begin to discern the Arranger’s concerns through the bizarre palimpsests It makes of these episodes. Now of course we ask the questions that all start with “why,” but I shall take the Arranger’s own authority and defer: Sufficient for the day is the post therof.
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