Ulysses

Well, OK, it's taken over 40 years to get through my first reading of Ulysses, and my first take is: I read it, but I don't get it. I don't mean that I didn't understand the writing, although there was a lot of tough sledding in some of the sections. What I really don't understand is why so many people wax eloquently about its being the greatest novel ever written. I'm going to assume that the fault lies not in the book but in myself, so really, I feel the need to start reading it all over again, at least with some idea of what lies ahead. Only, maybe I'll wait a bit first, maybe revisiting Dubliners and Portrait first.

I decided early on to just tackle the book on its own terms and just plow ahead without a whole lot of scaffolding. I bought a copy of "Ulysses Annotated" to help elucidate some of the more obscure allusions and references, but it just slowed me down, and I decided that I could decipher enough of them to get by. Likewise, I decided to eschew any online help until I had finished the book. One major prop that I used was an audio reading of the book by Jim Norton, so I listened to the book while reading the text. I found out early that I could not listen without reading, but the listening certainly enriched the reading. Things really picked up for me when we purchased an iPad this summer, and I kept the book cued up with both text and audio on the same device. Unfortunately, the electronic version of the text wasn't all that great, however, and it was a bit irritating when the audio and the text weren't saying the same thing. I'll stick with print the next time around, although I do have to say that I thought that the audio version was a fairly masterful reading, especially Molly Bloom's soliloquy by Marcella Riordan.

So, just some initial reactions here. You may not wish to proceed any further if you have plans on reading the book and want to approach it with a fresh outlook. And if you have read the book, you'll probably wonder how I can be so dense.

First, and most obviously, it took me quite a while to catch on that Leopold was a Jew. Put this in the doh! category. Did I ever feel foolish when it finally dawned on me. Like when "The Citizen" decides to sic his dog on Poldy. And then it took me quite a bit of time to realize that Molly was getting banged by Blazes Boylan. That very day. Another big doh! And then that led to this whole question of whether Bloom was really pimping Molly to Blazes. I'm still not quite so sure about that. I do think that he stayed away from their apartment all day  to avoid a confrontation with Molly and Boylan. He would have had to make a stink about it, and Boylan was bankrolling the musical tour featuring Molly. So maybe Bloom was whoring her all along.

But then Leopold has thoughts, fantasies really, of lawsuits, revenge, divorce, and murder just before dropping off to sleep, and he implies that Boylan is just the latest in a long, rather long, string of inamoratti that Molly has taken over the past few years. At the same time, Molly implies that Leopold has pushed her into the affair with Boylan and has talked of her posing for nude photos in the past. She also intimates that poor old Poldy is pretty much a ne'er do well who can't keep a decent job, perhaps because he has been something of a political agitator. But Molly is pretty much out of her depths in trying to understand Bloom. As he with her. She says that he could no longer get it up with her since the death of their newborn son some years ago, and she's ready to move on with her life. So then I'm wondering whether Joyce is really just parodying the mistrust and misunderstanding between all married couples, or even between all people. Is that running commentary really the voice that runs below all relationships?

When you get right down to it, Leopold and Molly are a couple of middle-class, middle-aged gits. Their concerns are so banal and their wants are conventional and predictable: "Every summer we can rent a cottage/In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear." Bloom's chasing around for the Keyes ad was demeaning, not to mention the little money making schemes he was continually cooking up in his head, and his comments with Stephen in the cab stand as well as his own kitchen were commonplace. Molly struck me repeatedly as a mindless, if somewhat horny, twit. But maybe we are all banal, mindless, horny twits with conventional and predictable wants (gfree says from his own little cottage in the mountains).

Then I wonder, geez, is there anybody admirable in the book? I mean, there are times that Stephen seems like an entitled little bastard, although he hasn't got anywhere to turn. He got his nose bent out of joint at Buck Mulligan and Haines and managed to kick himself out of his own lodgings, and then he pretty much spends most of his salary on whoring and boozing that night before being "rescued" by Bloom. And he certainly can't go back to Simon Dedalus' house, who doesn't seem to have the money or the gumption to provide a decent meal for his two younger daughters. Others in the book are either contemptible, like "the citizen" or Deasy, or relatively minor.

But there is the language. Has anyone described taking a shit as well as Joyce? Or trying to hold back farts, like Molly, so as to not wake Bloom? I did have to do a double take when I realized that Bloom got his rocks off when getting a sneak peek at Gerty's bloomers. Many of Stephen's musings were dense and packed with so many allusions juxtaposed next to each other that they were difficult to puzzle out. So many styles, so many voices. I found some to be entirely tedious, like the succession of newspaper headlines describing the action in the offices of the Freeman, and some I just had to let wash over me, hoping for some clues about what was happening, like the dream/nightmare/hallucination sequence just outside the entrance to nighttown. It friggin' went on for 170 pages.

So, yes, obviously I've missed something, and I need to plunge into the book yet again. But at least I'll do so with some idea of what to expect. But for my understanding of the novel right now, after the initial foray, is that it is nowhere near the stature of "Grapes of Wrath" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls", or "To the Lighthouse," but I'll withhold making any further judgment until I give it another shot.

Author: Joyce, James

Date Published: 1922

Length: 783 pp & 27 hr 19 min

print, electronic print, and audio

Narrators: Norton, Jim and Riordan, Marchella

Human

Why do we act, think, and feel the way that we do? That's what Michael  Gazzaniga sets out to explain in "Human," using the latest research in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. But it's one thing to look at the evolution of structures in our brains, or at antecedents of our behavior in ape behavior, or even at the activation of neurons during different aspects of our consciousness, but Gazzaniga wants to elucidate what it is that makes human beings unique and to do so without any reference to ego or soul or psyche or supernatural agency. And its kinda interesting that he kind of ends on a concept of "left brain interpreter" that sounds suspiciously like it could be any of those.

Gazzaniga comes with some major bona fides as the head of a cognitive science institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he has done some major research on the cognition of people with split brains. The roster of people he has worked with is something of a who's who of neuroscience, people like Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Dennett. He cites the big guns in the field, so much of the important reseach going on in cognition and neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

So why is it that I'm being talked down to with this book? It's like Gazzaniga decided to write a book on neuroscience for a popular audience and felt like he had to adopt a popular voice and make a number of cutesy asides in order to reach his audience. This was a book that I enjoyed a lot more in retrospect when I was able to look over my highlights and see past that voice. It does have a lot of good information that I was able to pull together better through reflection than on first reading.

Gazzaniga begins by looking at evolutionary antecedents for different stuctures in the brain, making a number of comparisons with ape brain and behavior. He presents evidence that the brain is continuing to evolve, with major growth spurts occurring as recently as 40,000 years ago coinciding with the development of speech and culture or even 6,000 years ago with the rise of urbanization and agriculture. (So where would that leave a climatolgical explanation of the domestication of emmer or eincorn wheat as advanced by someone like Jared Diamond?)  Perhaps as importantly as growth, however, has been a number of structural changes such as hemispheric differentiation, allowing more specialization and automation of certain brain functions, or the growth of particular areas of the pre-frontal cortex, especially those involved with memory, planning, abstract thinking, and cognitive flexibility.

Part of the "relentless progression of increasing relative brain size during the evolution of hominids," came about as "an adaptation to the complexities of social living." Groups became larger and more complex, and the cognitive demand for living in these groups "drove brain size expansion." I think that this gets at the heart of a lot of what Gazzaniga has to say: "what the human brain does best, what it seems built to do: think socially." Our ability to live in large, complex groups really depends on what seems to be a uniquely human characteristic, the "Theory of Mind," or our ability to accurately predict another person's moods, intentions, states of mind. Theory of Mind now seems pretty dependent on the existence of "mirror neurons" in our brain that are specifically attuned to others, especially allowing us to mimic them, perhaps the root of language and learning. 

Language facilitates social reciprocity with larger numbers of individuals (it's a whole lot easier and more efficient to talk with people than spend an inordinate amount of time picking lice from their fur), increasing the odds of survival, but also introducing the ability to lie and cheat. Protecting the validity of social reciprocity underlies what Gazzaniga and others (like Jonathan Haidt) call "universal moral modules," built on feelings of guilt or shame to prevent our own cheating, or on rage and anger to deter cheating in others. Patricia Churchland calls this "constraint satisfaction" in her new book, and it leads to a whole discussion about how much of our morality is biological and how much is rule-based, how much of our moral thinking is based on the kinship based hunter-gather groups that dominates so much of the human past, and how germane that past is to living in large multi-ethic urban environments.

For if we are left with biological constraint satisfaction for basing our morality, we also have to deal with the fact that we are hardwired for nonreflective beliefs and a bias toward negativity in our preconscious apprehension of new things and novel stimuli. First off, we have a "hot" emotional system that responds quickly and automatically to fear, anger, rage, and disgust. It operates directly through the amygdala, bypassing the "cooler," more reflective circuit operating primarily in the hippocampus and frontal lobes. But even then, most of the information that reaches consciousness has already been processed, classified, stored as a memory, and compared to other memories  prior to its emergence into our awareness. Most of our beliefs about the world have already been formed before we even know that they exist. "Nonreflective beliefs are the default mode of our thinking." Not only that, but they control most of our reflective thinking, since "the better  a reflective belief merges with a nonreflective belief, the more plausible it seems, the more intuitive and easier to learn or accept." We look for these plausible explanations, then, even if our information isn't all that accurate, making any approach to analytical, non-intuitive thinking extremely difficult, and in Gazzaniga's eyes, extremely rare. I guess that Nietzsche was right all along. We continually seek bad reasons for confirming what we already know.

If Gazzaniga seems to confirm Nietzsche on the one hand, he perhaps confirms Kant on the other. For what sounds kind of like "a priori" thinking to me comes from the idea that a major part of our nonreflective belief system is built on the concept of essentialism: we are hardwired to believe that things have inherent properties and characteristics, "a thing perceivable to the senses can have an embodied unobservable essence that is real," a quality that develops in our thinking by about the age of four or five. We also seem to attribute consciousness to animate objects investing them with "theory of mind" much like our own. We naturally assume that they have agency and purpose. Gazzaniga is saying that while we endow our pets with personalities, it just ain't necessarily so. We do the same with nature, a trait that Richard Dawkins calls  our HADD, Hyperactive Agent Detection Device: "we hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent." (Dawkins, The God Delusion) We are Idealists and Cartesians before we are even aware of it.

One of the major essences that we buy into is the idea of ourselves, that which I feel makes me, me and you feel makes you, you (Spinoza called  it the conatus.) We each of us believe first of all in our own essences, which Gazzaniga says comes from specific processes in the brain. But then he gets a bit vague about these processes. When we take in information and store it as a memory, we first try to make sense of it. We fit it in with what we already know and use this knowledge to construct scenarios and give meaning to things and events. Gazzaniga says that we have a "left hemispheric interpreter" that forms hypotheses about all sensory inputs and processes going on, continually constructing meaning and narrative: "the left hemispheric interpreter constructs theories to assimilate perceived information into a comprehensible whole," even if the information turns out to be faulty and the theory demonstrably false. That's just  a part of who we are. And one of these theories is the sense of self: "I submit that it is the left-brain interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative, and the self-image, taking the information from various inputs, from the “neuronal workspace,” and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input."

But this left brain interpreter is a theoretical construct on Gazzaniga's part. There is no specific part of the brain, other than left hemisphere, where it might reside. It seems to be an "emergent property" that comes from "distributed processes throughout the brain." So, really, you could call it ego, or psyche, or soul, or whatever, and it would have as much validity as "left brain interpreter."

So, yes, Gazzaniga's book has a lot of good information, so much more than I've touched on here. But I guess I'm still left with a number of questions about its significance. Do I not have any say in the way that I think and the way that I feel? If I've already made up my mind before I make up my mind, then where does that leave the ideas of free will and responsibility? I feel like I've made a lot of important decisions, both good and bad, that have determined the directions my life has taken, and done so after a lot of careful thought and deliberation, at least sometimes. I guess that I need at least the illusion that I have some control over my life. It might be one of those demonstrably false theories developed by my left brain interpreter, but it does give me a reason to keep on keepin' on.

Author: Gazzaniga, Michael S.

Date Published: 2008

Length: 464 pp

electronic print