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By Root 5328 0

failure, lack of purpose, the trivialised world of the rootless ego divorced from love or any sense of meaning. He is a man frozen in immaturity, incapable of development. And nowhere is this more vividly underlined than at the end of the novel, which becomes a completely inverted caricature of the conclusion of the Odyssey. Odysseus's story comes to its final resolution in the moment when, having returned home and slain the suitors, he and his wife fall into the gold-inlaid bed he had carved years earlier from a single olive tree, to commingle in perfect love, before turning to `the fresh delights of talk', as they happily wile away much of the rest of the night recalling all that has happened to them since they were last together. Whereas the beaten, exhausted Bloom, after resignedly noting the imprint left on the mattress by his wife's lover earlier in the day, crawls into his corner of the marital bed, to sink, in the pose of an unborn child, into solitary sleep, leaving the unhappy Molly to muse forlornly through the 50-page internal stream of consciousness on which the story ends, fantasising about her past lovers and culminating, as she nostalgically masturbates, in a final climactic shout of `Yes'.

What Ulysses illustrates, as vividly as any story, is how once the feminine components of the overall psychic equation go missing, the values of heart and soul, all that is left are their masculine counterparts, the physical world of the body and the ordering function of the human mind. Few stories have been more selfconsciously `ordered' than Ulysses, with its eighteen `sections, each written in its own style or `technique, with its own related colour, symbol, organ of the body and supposed correspondence to some episode in the Odyssey. As Joyce put in a letter, `every hour, every organ, every art' is thus `connected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole'. He explains how Molly's final monologue, consisting of eight enormous, rambling, unpunctuated sentences, supposedly corresponds to the four `cardinal points' of womanhood, these `being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt'. But compared with the organic complexity of the Odyssey, in which each tiny detail grows out of the living whole (e.g., the way those twelve axeheads through which the hero shoots his bow fleeting reflect his twelve ordeals earlier in the story), the structuring of Ulysses is like a parody of the ordering principle of the human brain, when it lacks that `feminine' power of intuition which can bring it alive and connect it up to meaning. Its endless irresolutions make up a fine example of what D. H. Lawrence called, in a different context, `masturbating consciousness'. And the sense this gives us of a mind churning away out of contact with meaning is equally reflected in the way the consciousness of the characters wanders on through the book, full of disjointed snippets of knowledge, silly puns, compulsive word-play, bits of quotations, empty lists and pseudointellectual speculations. As Joyce again put it in a letter:

`my head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up `most everywhere. The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view ... that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone's mental balance.'

All this helps to present Joyce's characters as each lost and isolated in their own little ego-world, without understanding. And if this were all there is to Ulysses, the book might more appropriately have been discussed in our last chapter. Its characters are just as surely `going nowhere' as those in Chekhov (Bloom's `day, 16 June 1904, was set, as it happens, just two weeks before Chekhov died); and it is not irrelevant that, in his later years, Joyce employed Samuel Beckett as his secretary. The inconsequential badinage of the two tramps in Waiting For Godot clearly echoes the style of Ulysses. In his admiration for Joyce, Beckett simply carried this over onto the stage. But what prompted both the US and British authorities