Bleak Expectation by Mark Evans

Being the sort of person who loves parodies, particularly parodies of Victorian novels, I was eagerly looking forward to reading this. I also enjoyed The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff (although I think it might’ve been a little bit too niche). It didn’t disappoint, I really enjoyed it and kept getting asked what I was laughing at by work colleagues. It captures all the silliness of the worst excesses of Victorian fiction – the crazy names (loved Mr. Gently Benevolent, Mr. Skinflint Parsimonius and the Hardthrasher family), the weaving plots, the standard characters that appear (Flora Dies-Early the brainless beauty) but uses other techniques such as footnotes and made-up historical facts. Unlike some parodies that only exist to lampoon their original materiel, it’s funny in a surrealist way as well. Ridiculous and brilliant. Hoping for a sequel and will try and check out the radio broadcast too. 

Dear Pip Bin,

In the end I did go and join the army. I wish I hadn't. It is awful. For starters, it turns out I have a terrible fear of the colour read, which is not ideal, what with the uniform, all the blood and the rations being mostly tomato soup. And they made me kill two men. With my bare feet. Which was horrid.

Yours ever,

Harry

P.S. I did see a funny pigeon though. Hilarious!

(p283 Bleak Expectations)

Brain Exercise!

Chapter 14, 'Oxen of the Sun' opens in a maternity hospital with something akin to religious chanting. This was another chapter where it was necessary to refer to copious amounts of notes and often, to re-read passages to attempt to get the 'jist' of what was going on. Here, we begin to see Ulysses as not only an odyssey in the traditional sense, but also as an odyssey through literature itself, beginning with Roman historians of around 80 B.C. Woolf quoted Eliot as saying '...It showed up the futility of all English styles' (Ulysses, p907, OUP 1998). There are nine different episodes corresponding to periods of gestation, but also two other episodes which are like the afterbirth. The periods of gestation move through the different periods of literature which are written in a way that parodies them, but also provides the plot of a group of men visiting a hospital then getting drunk and arguing (which seems to be a frequent theme of the book, I have noticed). 

This is a hard chapter to read, and I admit, not my favourite, even though I did admire Joyce's ability to parody all these different styles and to fit this around the plot and the characters, who became constantly shifting heroes from different periods of literature. I think the problem that I had here was the sense that this was a book written by a man for men, that this group of men standing around getting very drunk talking about women in a rather callous way - the inevitable whores n' sluts, their oh-so-intellectual discussion about the Catholic theory of saving the child rather than the woman, Stephen's great list of women being impregnated by 'fabulous' means and Buck's great idea about hiring himself out as a stud left me rather cold. I don't think of myself as being some sort of radical feminist (although I am also trying to to be a feminist apologist here), but I got a bit annoyed with Joyce's odyssey through the literature of male authors as well. Perhaps it was down to the mood I was in when I read it.

I found myself wondering what Woolf made of it, I know that there are reports that she felt rather ambivalent to say the least. According to a Yale article I'm reading, it looks as if she admired the stylistic innovations, but didn't enjoy reading the book, preferring Proust. I am glad to read Woolf's rather amusing disparaging comments about it, however, I can't say that this article has illuminated the feminism question for me; it seems that she was more concerned with indecency and her idea of Joyce as a pimply-faced bootboy!

Ito has analysed anti-semitism and anti-feminism in Giacomo Joyce, another work by Joyce. Ito describes how Joyce was inspired to write Ulysses by Otto Weininger who was somewhat of a anti-semitic anti-feminist. Ito considers Giacomo Joyce to have underlying elements of this, but he considered that the inspiration Joyce had for Ulysses was merely the ideas of the 'self-hating Jew' and the 'Jew as a womanly man'.

I think that I am going to give Ulysses the benefit of the doubt at the moment, but return to the question at a later date. 

Other than the grand tour through literature, Bloom and Stephen meet for the first time and Bloom is somewhat impressed by him. Stephen retains his flippancy about religion, veering towards blasphemy by parodying Jesus at the last supper. There are plays on words with fertility/futility and ideas about childbirth and creation, with Stephen comparing childbirth to posterity gained through writing, or 'postcreation' as he calls it. Joyce refers back to his source material in the anecdote about the bull of Ireland, a marvellous worshiped bull, and Mulligan's idea of giving something back to humanity by living on a island offering his stud service to woman who want children. 

Overall, if I ignored the vague sense of annoyance I felt reading it, this was a very clever chapter, and I'm sure other people enjoy it. I am ready to finish it, however. I know that the next episode is massive, but I want to push forward as much as I can to get the finishing line.

A Romantic Interlude...

Amazingly, another readable chapter of Ulysses. Okay, so it's readable because Joyce is writing a parody of certain types of sentimental romance, but it's still nice to move a little away from something that requires the utmost concentration. I think it's also the bit of The Odyssey I remember the most (aside from the Cyclops incident). 


The episode opens with an idyllic seaside excursion and our very own Nausicaa, Gerty MacDowell. I wondered if Gerty was another Hamlet reference. The episode parodies The Lamplighter, by an American author called Maria Susanna Cummings. The novel's heroine, Gerty, has to overcome adversity using her own inner resources to ultimately find happiness. I suppose you could call it a feminist novel as it was intended to instruct as well as entertain young women on becoming self-reliant (although not in a shunning men kind of a way presumably).

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Rather than use first person narrative or the ol' stream-of-consciousness malarkey, Joyce uses the third person, so Gerty doesn't really get a 'voice' as such, however, the narrative style suits her perfectly; a mixture of romantic fiction and women's magazines. It's a beautiful description, almost tender, yet at the same time reminding us of Gerty's frailties. Some of the lurid prose reminded me somewhat of Lady Chatterly's Lover, but not in a bad way, although I think perhaps Lawrence wouldn't have found that a compliment!  

Gerty spots Bloom on the beach and reacts to him in a completely different way to the other characters' disdain and downright antipathy toward him. She thinks that he looks like a film star in morning and perhaps fancies him because he looks different. She doesn't consider his Jewishness which is obvious to the other people bloom has encountered so far. Gerty sees herself as some sort of combination of the traditional Catholic ideas of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene; innocent, motherly and a temptress all at the same time. Sex mingling with religion. This is further complicated with blood as Gerty feels her period starting. 

The 'shocking' bit was tame by today's standards, but I suppose I can see why it might be considered obscene by the standards of the day, where masturbation was considered at the very least to be something to be discouraged. I guess there is also everything that this chapter represents - an older man spying on a younger woman (who is showing off her legs to him) and becoming sexually aroused accompanied to the sounds of fireworks going off. I suppose that at the time the fireworks were a bit more of a nice touch rather than the romantic fiction then parody film cliche they've become. 

Anyway, Bloom finishes off, having almost been discovered in the act by Cissy asking him the time, then Gerty limps off, leaving Bloom to discover her lameness, much to his surprise. I did love the way that Bloom's final image of her was as someone imperfect that he felt sorry for, somehow it made her much more real as a character. After Gerty's flowery third person musings on love it's an abrupt shock to return to Bloom's matter-of-fact, darting stream-of-consciousness.

As for Gerty as a female character in a book populated by men? I suppose you could see her a cliche for her idea of herself as the virgin/whore, and disparage Joyce both for his parody of books that are popular to women and his portrayal of Gerty as being rather self-obsessed, but I have to say I was fine with his portrayal and thought it fitted in well with the Nausicaa of The Odyssey. I also liked the humour of the episode, with Gerty's delight about her underwear, I think we are meant to view her as being a little bit young and silly rather than representing all women.  

Poor Willy Dignam and the Dog

Finally, an episode I enjoyed. 'Cyclops' is set in a pub, and is 'narrated' by an unnamed person. I say 'narrated' as, according to the notes, it's not as straightfoward as that (as usual), apparenlty it is meant to be written down. I noticed as I started reading it that the tense had changed from the previous episodes, this time it was in past tense rather than present tense, as if it was told by someone telling a long, rambling and utterly pointless annecdote about an evening in the pub with a group of random people. Even though I found quite a lot of the colloquial language somewhat impenetrable, with plenty of cryptic references to contemporary events and people, I did enjoy the humour of the episode, for example, Bod Doran calling Christ 'a ruffian' and Alf's "Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character".


 I was also amused and simultanously dazzled by the thirty three parodies of a variety of different styles of writing such as court proceedings, Irish myths and legends and even a newspaper report about dogs reciting poetry. The parodic interludes serve a variety of functions including linking devices to the next part of the narrative, or sometimes as part of the narrative itself. Often, they provide a strong contrast between quite hyperbolic, formal language written in a highly stylised way and the colloquial quick patter and wordplay of the 'narrator' and the other people in the pub. If the action in the pub is getting too serious, the parody will again make an appearence adding humour to the situation with interludes such as Paddy Dignam's seance (written in a Theosophic style) after someone mistakingly thinks they've seen Paddy, and the society event attended by a group of trees when 'the citizen' starts spouting off about the English. 

Some elements of the parody reminded me of a parody of the Homeric style, which inevitably made me think of Pope's The Rape of the Lock. It is not clear if the narrator is supposed to be inserting these passages, I think instead that this is Joyce playing with the reader and the narrator himself. The blend of the comic and the serious in the chapter has come to be called 'jocoserious'.  

I can see why this is the cyclops episode. As well as the polymorphic voices in the pub, with their continual gossiping about different people, there is also the one-eyed one-sided views of the Citizen, an anti-semitic Fenian. 

Again, this chapter engages with the view other characters have of Bloom. Aside from the Citizen's obvious distaste for Bloom, the narrator himself finds Bloom annoying at the very least. Bloom alienates himself not only through his Jewishness but also through appearing too opinionated  and too mean to buy drinks to the men in the pub. Nevetheless, the Catholics hardly get off lightly either, with Joyce satirising the hypocrisy of the attitude to Bloom and the annecdote about the man having sex with a prostitute then apppearing with his wife at Mass the next morning. Though this is a humorous interlude, there is still an undercurrent of unplesantness with the way that Bloom is treated; the contrast of the opinions toward Irish persecution and the persecution of the Jews.  

Taken from The Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand site.

Bloom leaves having defended himself but antagonised the Citizen to the extent that he tries to throw a biscuit box at him. All is not lost, however, as he ascends to heaven like Elijah in a chariot in the final parody of the chapter.

On to the next chapter, Nausicaa, or Joyce has a brush with obsenity.