Ulysses: Book II, Episodes 13-15

I am now in the homestretch. I have slogged my way through fifteen episodes--roughly 600 pages--of Ulysses, James Joyce’s behemoth of a masterpiece. I found Books I and II frustrating, as they are rife with unrecognizable allusions, confusing shifts in points of view, and a sometimes hard to follow stream of consciousness narrative.

However, Ulysses, at least thus far, is not without its merits. For example, I admire Joyce’s wordplay and sense of adventure a great deal. Perhaps more so than any other author (with the possible exception of William Faulkner), Joyce challenged both the conventions of modern narrative and the sensibilities of his readers. With episodes 13-15, the frustration and admiration continued. Unfortunately, frustration got the upper hand once again.

Episode 13 is notable for two main reasons. First, it is written in a more conventional prose style–or at least as conventional as it gets in regards to Joyce. Second, this episode contains the now famous (or perhaps infamous) “masturbation scene,” which takes place midway through the episode.

The first half of Episode 13 is told through the viewpoint of Gerty MacDowell, a seemingly sexually frustrated young woman who longs to fall in love. Gerty, along with her friends Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, and Cissy’s little brothers Jack and Tommy, have come to Sandymount Strand to enjoy an afternoon on the beach and to watch a fireworks display put on by a church retreat group.

Flushed by the amorous flirtations of Canon O’Hanlon, a member of the church group, and daydreaming of love, Gerty makes her way to the fireworks show as the first blooms appear in the night sky. Off to the side, she sees a dark figure leaning against a rock. Though she does not know him, this mystery man is Leopold Bloom. A stranger dressed in black, Bloom embodies the sort of dark and enigmatic man Gerty has fantasized of meeting.

Intent on asking this stranger for the time, an excuse to break away from her group, Gerty approaches Bloom to find him with one hand in his pocket, masturbating. Seeing “whitehot passion” in Bloom’s face, Gerty succumbs to a sudden urge to assist him in his pursuit of self-pleasure. Pretending to gain a better view of the fireworks above, she leans far back. In doing so, she raises and clasps one knee for support, a move that exposes to Bloom her “graceful beautifully shaped” legs.

The fireworks display coincides with and symbolizes Bloom’s masturbation:

"And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!"

I will leave it to my readers to work out the symbolism behind the Roman candle and the “stream of rain gold hair threads” for themselves. No doubt, this scene played a major role in the book being banned by federal law.

In Episode 14, the focus is back on Leo Bloom as he visits the hospital in which Mina Purefoy is giving birth. After several near encounters, Bloom finally meets Stephen Dedalus, whom he finds drinking with Buck Mulligan. Together, they all continue drinking at a pub, resulting in the hallucinatory nature of Episode 15.

At first, I wasn’t sure what this episode contributes to the plot of the novel. The character of Bloom is developed a bit more as he is shown to be haunted by the memory of the son he lost soon after birth. Also, it appears he begins to see Dedalus as a young man who may be able to somehow fill some of that void. Other than that, this episode does little to move the story along.

However, after a quick consult with Wikipedia, which I have used merely as a roadmap on my quest to complete this novel, I learned that the beauty of this episode lies in its structure. Joyce carefully arranged this episode into three sections of three subsections each, or nine subsections overall. This is intended to symbolize the nine month gestation period. Moreover, the episode is divided into sixty paragraphs. Of these sixty, the first ten parody the Latin and Anglo-Saxon languages, the two major predecessors to the English language. In keeping with the theme of human reproduction, these paragraphs are intended to symbolize intercourse and conception. The next forty paragraphs begin with Middle English satires and represent the forty weeks of the human gestation period. Finally, the last ten paragraphs symbolize birth and the baby. Combined, they represent the mosaic of English that was spoken in Dublin at the time Ulysses was written.

“I am a man misunderstood,” Bloom announces in Episode 15, and certainly this episode does attempt to peel back yet another layer of Bloom’s character, this time exposing his extramarital affairs. In Episode 5, Bloom’s infidelity was merely hinted at as he read a love letter sent to him by a young woman named Martha. Earlier on, I believed Bloom was merely a cuckolded husband desperately seeking an affair of his own, but afraid (or too lazy) to consummate one. This episode, however, reveals that Bloom has, in fact, had several affairs, beginning with a girl named Lotty Clarke.

Largely a collection of hallucinations experienced by the drunken Bloom, this episode is written in the form of a script, complete with stage directions. Reading this section, I couldn’t help but think that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to stage this play-within-a-novel as Joyce envisioned, for it features a mango picking camel, a talking soap cake, a talking dog, split-second wardrobe changes and a myriad of other mind-bending elements.

After shaking off these visions, Bloom and Dedalus visit a brothel, after which Dedalus becomes enraged and is punched out by a policeman. Bloom then helps the young man to his feet and together they make their way to the cabman's shelter. Which brings us to Book III, and the conclusion of Ulysses.