Suspicious to the Core (5 / three)

Lear learns what he needs (2.4.264). He also learns to cast aside what he does not need. His temperance matures as the tempest of “filial ingratitude” (3.4.14), once ravaging his heart, recedes. So long as Gonerill knows what she does (2.4.228), as Regan points out, there is potential for recuperation. Lear knows it. Lear learns. That knowledge seems to be reaching him in the ways as mysterious as the flow that redeems Gloucester’s unrequited heed. Edgar’s words of encouragement and comfort, “Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80), are constitutive of the anchor that provides stability and solidity of the attitude, as it is being established. Lear learns:”No, I will be the pattern of all patience. / I will say nothing” (3.2.35-36).

Strangely, as Kent informs, “[t] hings that love night” (3.2.40) withdraw before the “darkness” of the night from which Lear speaks. The power of the night like that exudes an air of animosity toward the thickness of obscurity. It creates a chemistry of negative valences. It procures Lear the basis for the oppositional attitude. It provides him with knowledge -- the knowledge of resistance, that weird source of vigor. The power of “NO.”

Lear learns the virtue of noble rebellion, so Kent’s temptations, “Sir, where is the patience now / That you so oft have boasted to retain?” (3.6.15-16), can be refuted and, accordingly, discarded. Again, what is clouded by the harshness of Lear’s verbal spitting surfaces through the kind, appeasing words of Edgar’s:”My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting” (3.6.18-19). That falling mask, as it were, is the adhesive tissue of the soothing power of filial gentleness. It epitomizes the credibility of Lear’s attitude reflected in fiercely challenging hard-heartedness (3.6.34-35).

It re-shifts erratically channeled passion. It reconfirms the vibrancy of resistance. It reconstitutes the sound response to bewilderment and oppression: the cleansing power of the capacity to discern and sustain distinctions. It reanimates the basis for the reasoning that highlights the difference between the nourishing restraint and abusive, manipulative, oppressive distortions of that bliss.

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So spoke Lear when he could not cry. Similarly, the cornucopia of speech ignited by Bloom’s magical act in the encounter with the faucet--revamping the waters of words flowing from the earlier chapters such as “Nestor,” “Hades,” and “Nausicaa” like tributaries leaking into the main flow and apexing in Molly’s soliloquy in the “Penelope” chapter--seems to deafen and overshadow unlikely tears of repentance. In Vladimir Nabokov’s ambiguously ironic, provocatively elusive opinion, “James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts (Strong Opinions 30). Perhaps. Or, rather, as Stephen ruminates, “Nes. Yo” (Ulysses 430). One would like to know.

The flow released by lifting the valve from the jet pouring out of the faucet reveals all the water-words meandering throughout the novel as a maplike delta comfortably protected by the sea hybridizing all the streams, yet somehow preserving their distinctiveness. Fluid, yet distinguishable. Fluctuating, yet steady. Elusive, yet strangely fathomable. Such is the mighty flow anchoring the storyline in this stunning novel of Joyce’s. Like language, those narratives reiterate the concept of power and what it means to be constitutive of it.

As if unified by the “Aeolus” chapter, the episodes immersed in the imagery of water offer a symbolic in the key of versatile fluidity. As if an overarching, hub trope were that of “gaseous vertebrate” (Ulysses 162) that spans the trajectory of the whole vastness of the story, persisting in providing the much needed connective, sustaining the consistency of its yarns, subtlety of its threads. Like the omnipresent imagery safeguarding the coherence of that giant narrative by the very virtue of its own mutability, the metaphor, while creating a sense of an impalpable presence is also invoking the awareness of the communication between quirky spatiality and capricious chronology. The perseverance of that presence through time epitomizes the idea of the historicizable ahistorical: undoubtedly situated within a particular moment, and yet, reflecting other timeframes, other spatio-temporalities.

Like the characterization, defying cronos’s empire, and yet not detaching itself from the bitter-sweet romance with history: “probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he is now” (Ulysses 609). Like the young surgeon in the episode “Oxen of the Sun” challenging the perception of age. Like the symbolic of  “childman,” its inverted version of “manchild” (Ulysses 606), and the communication between them. What is the age of that historicizable ahistorical character? One would like to know.

Just as there is something about the characterization owing its eccentricity to the communication channel saturated with static, so is it to a high degree suggestive of resilience that allows the fluidity to deliver a solid, yet not rigid, message. Thus severed by the battle between corrosive noise and the signal persisting those temporary threats of distortion, it is a transient communicational tunnel that acquires characteristics of the communication channel as a momentary corruption of the communication content is dissolving, and the flow is being re-established. Those are the loops reverberating with the themes of labyrinthine seductiveness of entrapment by potion, distraction by unlikely tones, and bewilderment by facelessness, as portrayed in the episodes such as “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” and/or “Circe.”

Molly, in possession of the most prominent vocal of all the characters in the novel, articulates profound comments cacophonous in tone, polyphonous in thematic. Ranging from sometimes charmingly lascivious, at times nearly vulgarly blatant explorations of the realm of the carnal, her internally verbalized thought addresses the issue of the body finding questionable satisfaction in copious fornication not infrequently associated with clerical context. At the same time, evoking bodily sensations semidetached from inner dynamic, her speech-flow reinstates random encounters and elusiveness, unreliability, and suspicion pertinent to their irredeemably aloof nature, to their aura echoing irrecoverable alienation, incorrigible insularity.

Partly, her brooding thoughts reflect a perception of another being as afflicted, fragmented, disjoined. Partly, they voice an agonizing sense of longing. Those aspects of her soliloquy portray the experience of the other as the utter unknown, just as the whole world appears to be observed from that angle: “he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesn’t know what it is to have one” (Ulysses 611).  Here, Joyce sketches the crux--the key knot--of the narrative presenting the world populated by disconnectedness, void, and vapidness. Simultaneously, he offers a hint for disentangling those static drenched nodes within the web constitutive of and constituted by the communication between and among fellow humans.

Where frustration by hindered communication mirrors dissatisfaction with human interaction, simplicity, instead of being a manifestation of purity, is rather sought as a haven for comprehension starved minds. Likewise, unfathomable information is understood to be a result of the perplexities imposed by the style and demanding level of complexity of the communication input:“he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand” (Ulysses 620). Where compromises are uneasy choices brining a sense of insipid indifference, human relationships merely reflect a worryingly uninspiring, unfulfilling experience of oneself:“hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do” (Ulysses 613). Friction inducing mutuality, rather than soothing reciprocity, is indicative of the prevalent offcolor lenses that render the perception of the world painfully alien:“and he knows that too at the bottom of his heart” (Ulysses 613).

And yet, there is noise within noise. Within that disheartening confession, “there is a flower that bloometh” (Ulysses 625), as Joyce puts it so well. Within those supposedly comforting, while, in fact, saddening crumbs of disillusionment, a bud of genuine solace is hidden. Waiting to be recuperated and its alleviating power resumed, waiting for its vibrancy to resurface --recovered. He knows it. Just as she does: “theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you” (Ulysses 610). The passion engrained in the power of that knowledge ensures discerning and sustaining distinctions such as the one between the flower in question and other types of flora. It safeguards from a threat of “ignoramus that doesn’t know poetry from a cabbage” (Ulysses 638). The oneiric of poetry undoing nightmares of history. Such is the mighty flow of the anchorage, the quirky disenchantment with that what eludes even the elusiveness of language.