We didn't read all of James Joyce's Ulysses (1920) but we read the key "Wandering Rocks" episode because of the way it not only maps the city of Dublin, but it maps the cultural and social interconnectedness of the characters and the city they inhabit.
I noted that it is bookended with the journey of Father Conmee at the start and the cavalcade at the end. Both of these journeys come into contact with the most people present in the episode's vignettes. It was nice to have the Harry Blamires confirm that this is intentional in his A Guide through 'Ulysses'! So, bonus points for me! It was also fascinating that the seminar presentation for the class discussion also brought up that the bookends of Conmee and the cavalcade are representative of the Church and State power dynamics that were at play during the time of the novel. This was not an interpretation that I even remotely picked up on, so bonus points for the presenter!
I'm not a huge James Joyce fan, nor I have I read the entirety of Ulysses, so I don't have as much to comment about this partial text as I have the others. Most of what I could think about when reading the excerpt was how confusing it was, who all the characters were and why I felt like I needed to get out a map and try and follow where Father Conmee was going. Luckily, when more characters were introduced I was glad I didn't do that. Way too complicated.
I think it was in the Blamires article that is was written: "In the Odyssey Circe warns Ulysses to avoid the wandering rocks, which are a menace to navigation, and he does so". This is a neat piece of information considering that all the characters in the "Wandering Rocks" episode of the text are inter-connected in one way or another. Some don't get distracted and can keep on their paths well enough, but others do get hung up by one another, or one character consistently manages to interrupt the paths of many others.
As part of the readings for the week we discussed Joyce, we read an article by J.B. Harley called "Deconstructing the Map" that covered topics about the power/knowledge and the process of evaluating maps and using Foucault and Derrida's theories. These are a couple of quotes from the article that stuck out to me:
"A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.'" (Beryl Markham, 1983)
We have brought it up a few times in class that maps are way-finding tools and many of the characters that we are encountering in the texts are lost, wandering, don't know where they are going per se. So the above quote really piqued my interest in that it is relating to that thread of thought that keeps emerging.
This next quote is Harley's expansion on the ideas of H.G. Blocker's Philosophy and Art in the context of maps:
"Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the map – 'in the margins of the text' – and through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image. We begin to learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific cultural perspective. We start to understand how maps, like art, far from being 'a transparent opening to the world', are but 'a particular human way...of looking at the world'."
This particular quote is what got me thinking on my current train of thought and ideas that I've got swirling in my head about my Utopia seminar paper. I'm thinking about the "specific cultural perspectives" that are tied to More's woodcut maps of Utopia that were created to be published with the novels. This might be the basis for my seminar paper argument...
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I've researched and written quite a bit of my Utopia since I drafted this post, and, let's just say, I'm happy with how its coming along. Can't wait to present it on Feb 6th! After that its on to some poetry involving maps that or are like maps in the way they're written before we move on to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996) in mid-March. Exciting things ahead!
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