It is a truth universally acknowledged …
Source for photos: here and here
No longer dressed in cuirass and helmets, current heroes and heroines pertain to the terrain of the ordinary. As eyes linger on the first page of Philip K.Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” Henry James or Jane Austen come to mind with their quarry of common universalities about the human being and the immanent substract that lies behind certain types of writing: “the novel should hold up a mirror to life” (Henry James) or Jane Austen’s famous beginning “it is a truth universally acknowledged…” Equally, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in “Ulysses” comes to mind with a forceful visionary similitude that has drawn me to establish comparisons between these two writers which are in opposite sides of the imaginary and literary divide: ennui, ordinary heroes or anti-heroes, socially marginal employees, dreams to be fulfilled, amorous apathy, uncontrived or contrived memories ...
No matter whether it is Dublin, 16th of June 1904, or a New York of the future in which people live in conapts, look forward to wearing “gill-outfits,” commute in hover-cars through traffic runnels and whose brains are fiddled with to get fake memories implanted….both main characters, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and Douglas Quail in Dick’s short story, strive out of the dullness and ennui of their average lives through the turmoil of their brains.
Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses has been described as “a socially marginal middle-class ad salesman” (click here for source), and Douglas Quail in Philip K.Dick’s short story describes himself as “A miserable little salaried employee.” Another curious convergence, the title of Philip K.Dick as Cándido has stated is evocative of an ad’s catchy phrase “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” which Bloom himself could have sketched in a paralell reality so to speak. The aquatic nature of Calypso that bears the title of Chapter 4 in Ulysses extends tendrils to the dreams of Kirsten in Philip K.Dick’s short story: her escapism drives her to the ocean rather than to her husband’s desires to go to Mars: “The bottom of the ocean –our ocean is much more, an infinite of times more beautiful. You know that, everybody knows that”
Let us compare the beginning of both narratives, “Calypso” (chapter 4 from “Ulysses” by James Joyce) and Philip K.Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale.”
“The fifth book of the Odyssey finds the hero marooned on an island called Ogygia, desperately unhappy and longing to return to Ithaca. Bloom's narrative begins at home, for quite necessary realistic reasons: that is where he begins every day, and Joyce's novel is devoted to representing the course of a single day” (source here). At the beginning of chapter 4, Leopold Bloom -- click here to access annotated chapter –prepares breakfast for his wife, Molly; he feeds the cat, wonders how the cat will see him and he holds a dialogue / monologue with his wife who drowsily and disdainfully answers his requests from her bed upstairs with some inaudible utterances. Leopold dreams of offal, relishes “the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart …” and he, indeed, goes round the corner to get some sausages. Bloom is marooned in Dublin and dreams of offal. His daily routine blends with his stream of consciousness: he recalls his wife’s origins, Gibraltar; his wife’s father “Major Brian Cooper Tweedy;” the talisman that his mother gave him, a “Potato” to remind him of the famine; the Russo-Turco war in his reference to Plevna… Dressed in black, Bloom does not know whether black reflects or refracts light. He braces through the day full of thoughts of the past, present and future, no matter whether the future is a petty thing such as buying a lemon soap bar at Sweeney’s Pharmacy.
Similarly, Douglas Quail is marooned in Earth in his conapt with a "nagging" wife and full of apathy with only one dream in his mind “to go to Mars.” “HE AWOKE-and wanted Mars,” he measures his dream against his pettiness “A clerk like himself? Not likely.” As he has breakfast, he is determined to escape his tedium and fulfill his dream, even if it is through the vicarious experience that REKALL INCORPORATED offers by installing fake dreams in his memory with the promise of not knowing them false, and offering him an apparatus of memento that will be even better than memory itself, second best, but
“You’re not accepting second-best. The actual memory, with all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions” (page 4).
Quail starts his journey from home as Leopold Bloom. It is not siren voices, nor Calypso, the nymph, but a “shifting-color neon sign” which makes him halt, and, consequently, his destiny gets twisted in as many runnels as the cityscape he contemplates. His desire to acquire memories of a journey he believes he has never done, prompts other memories that had been erased of a journey that maybe has already embarked on and ended. Paradox ensues.
Here you have a possible comparative grid of both these mornings, and the possible similar meanings that these customarily routines may suggest across the divide of history and genre:
Has this comparison triggered your curiosity to read “Ulysses”? I encourage you to read it!
