Who Talks Like That?

Philip Kitcher calls the third episode the first of three places in Ulysses where readers are tempted to throw the book down. It opens with "Ineluctable modality of the visible," and Kitcher's first question is the right one: who talks like that. Stephen Dedalus does. We are inside his mind, and where most of us would think "I can't choose what I see," Stephen says it his own way, citing all sorts of people most readers have never heard of for a page and a half. Kitcher's advice is that you are entirely justified in wondering what is going on. Stephen's education is James Joyce's own education on steroids, and Stephen also knows things about himself that no reader can know.

Then it lightens. Stephen is on Sandymount Strand, among sand and shingle and seaweed, barely noticing any of it. He wonders whether to visit his aunt and finds, a little later, that it seems he isn't going to Aunt Sara's. He heads toward a building and doesn't get there either. Kitcher reads this as a portrait of a young man with no agency at all, prodded along by moods and thoughts that come at him in a chaotic way.

The film closes on the episode's last sentence and the word Kitcher thinks carries it: a ship in the sea, homing. Stephen has no home. He isn't going anywhere; he's going away.

Transcript

Welcome back. And now for something much more difficult. The third episode is the first of what I take to be three places at which readers are really tempted to give up, to throw the book down and say, "This is just impossible. What on earth does this string of words mean?"

The chapter begins in a very daunting way. "Ineluctable modality of the visible." Who talks like that? Well, Stephen Dedalus talks like that. We are inside his mind, and instead of saying, "I can't choose what I see. It gets forced upon me from somewhere outside," he says, "Ineluctable modality of the visible." And he goes on like that, citing all sorts of people who most people have never heard of and very few people have ever read, for a page and a half, two pages. And you are entirely justified in wondering what is going on.

Modern readers have nothing like the education that Joyce had and the education that Stephen had, which is, I like to think of it as Joyce's own education on steroids. Stephen is chock-a-block with esoteric information, and when he thinks, he likes to play with that information. And to make it worse, there are all sorts of things no reader can know about him that Stephen knows about himself that he can slide into his internal monologues. So it's all very difficult and very complex.

But in a while, it lightens up a bit. Stephen is on a beach. There's sand, there's shingle, there's seaweed around him. He doesn't pay much attention to his environment. What he's mainly doing is thinking, and he's prodded by moods and thoughts that come to him in a kind of chaotic way. But at some points, he does touch on his environment. He notices that he's close to the house of his aunt, and he wonders whether he will go and visit her. And then sometime later, he says, "Oh, it seems I'm not going to Aunt Sara's." It's as if he isn't in control at all. There's no agency here. He's just wandering along a beach.

The beach is Sandymount Strand in Dublin, and Stephen is wandering. He isn't going anywhere. He's going away. And as he goes, he thinks, and we get fragments and bits and pieces of his life. And as we go on, we get more and more about his mood and his frustrations. He doesn't know what to do. At one point, he thinks he's going to take a particular direction. He's going to go off towards a building. And then it turns out that it seems he's not going there either.

At the end, after scribbling something on a piece of paper and then leaving it under a rock where it would be found later in the novel, Stephen wanders off. And before he goes, he turns round, and he sees in the sea a ship homing. That's a crucial word there. Stephen doesn't have a home. He is just directionless, going away. And that last sentence, in its contrast, is amazingly sad.