He sets down every thought that comes into consciousness. Decency, propriety, pertinency are not considered. He does not seek to give them orderliness, sequence, or conclusiveness. His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud's contentions. The majority of writers, practically all, transfer their conscious, deliberate thought to paper. Mr. Joyce transfers the product of his unconscious mind to paper without submitting it to the conscious mind, or if he submits it, it is to receive approval and encouragement, perhaps even praise. He holds with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the real man, the man of Nature, and the conscious mind the artificed man, the man of convention, of expediency, the slave of Mrs. Grundy, the sycophant of the Church, the plastic puppet of Society and State. For him the movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. “Peasant's heart” psychologically is the unconscious mind. When a master technician of words and phrases set himself the task of revealing the product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect, who can neither be taught by experience nor lessoned by example, as Mr. Joyce did in drawing the picture of Leopold Bloom, he undoubtedly knew full well what he was undertaking, how unacceptable the vile contents of that unconscious mind would be to ninety-nine out of a hundred readers, and how incensed they would be at having the disgusting product thrown in their faces. But that has nothing to do with the question: has the job been done well; is it a work of art? The answer is in the affirmative.
The proceedings of the council of the gods, with which the book opens, are tame. Stephen Dædalus, the Telemachus of this Odyssey, is seen chafing beneath his sin—refusal to kneel down at the bedside of his dying mother and pray for her—while having an al fresco breakfast in a semi-abandoned turret with his friend Buck Mulligan (now an esteemed physician of Dublin), and a ponderous Saxon from Oxford whose father “made his tin by selling jalap to the Zulus,” who applauds Stephen's sarcasms and witticisms. Stephen has a grouch because Buck Mulligan has referred to him, “O, it's only Dædalus whose mother is beastly dead.” This Stephen construes to be an offense to him, not to his mother. Persecutory ideas are dear to Stephen Dædalus. In his moody brooding this is how he welds words:
“Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harp-strings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.”
Meanwhile his sin pursues him as “the Russian gentleman of a particular kind” pursued Ivan Karamazov when delirium began to overtake him. He recalls his mother, her secrets, her illness, her last appeals. While breakfasting Buck and Stephen plan a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids, with the latter's wage of schoolmaster which he will receive that day. Later Buck goes in the sea while Stephen animadverts on Ireland's two masters, the Pope of Rome and the King of England, and recites blasphemous poetry.
Stephen spends the forenoon in school, then takes leave of the pedantic proprietor, who gives him his salary and a paper on foot and mouth disease. Telemachus embarks on his voyage, and the goddess who sails with him communes with him as follows:
“Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”
This is the first specimen of the saltatory, flitting, fugitive, on-the-surface purposeless thought that Stephen produces as he walks Sandymount Strand. From this point the book teems with it and with Bloom's autistic thoughts. It is quite impossible to give a synopsis or summary of them. It must suffice to say that in the fifteen pages Mr. Joyce devotes to the first leg of the voyage that will give him news of Ulysses, an hour's duration, a film picture has been thrown on the screen of his visual cortex for which he writes legends as fast as the machine reels them off. It is Mr. Joyce's life that is thus remembered: his thoughts, ambitions, aspirations, failures, and disappointments; the record of his contacts and their engenderment—what was and what might have been. On casual examination, such record transformed into print looks like gibberish, and is meaningless. So does shorthand. It is full of meaning for anyone who knows how to read it.
The next fifty pages are devoted to displaying the reel of Mr. Leopold Bloom's mind, the workings of his psycho-physical machinery, autonomic and heteronomic, the idle and purposeful thoughts of the most obnoxious wretch of all mankind, as Eolus called the real Ulysses. While he forages for his wife's breakfast, prepares and serves it, his thoughts and reflections are answers to the question “Digman, how camest thou into the realms of darkness?” for no burial honours yet had Irish Elpenor received.
Then follows a picture of Dublin before the revolution, its newspapers, and the men who made them, with comment and characterisation by Stephen Dædalus, interpolations and solicitations by Leopold Bloom. Naturally the reader who knew or knew of William Brayden, Esquire, of Oakland, Sandymount, Mr. J. J. Smolley whose speech reminds of Edmund Burke's writings, or Mr. Myles Crawford whose witticisms are founded on Pietro Aretino, would find this chapter more illuminating, though not more entertaining, than one who had heard of Dublin for the first time in 1914. Nor does it facilitate understanding of the conversation there to know the geography of an isle afloat where lived the son of Hippotas, his six daughters, and six blooming sons.
Bloom continues his apparently purposeless and obviously purposeful thoughts after the Irish Læstrygonians had stoned him, for another fifty pages. Everything he sees and everyone he encounters generate them. They are connected, yet they are disparate. I choose one of the simplest and easiest to quote: