The Palm of Beauty

I have been slowly working my way through Ulysses. It is a tiring job to read Joyce's words. The difficulty stems from Joyce's vast sources of material. I am constantly looking up new and interesting information. After finding what I ant to read, it is herculean task to bring myself back to Joyce and not to follow some new line of research and thoughts. From reading Joyce, my brain just goes into overdrive and I can't seem to hold onto my thoughts long enough to blog about all of them. I feel like a am drowning in sea of stories with Joyce being my only lifeline. 

There is one section that reminded me of Autumn's poem. I cannot get these words out of my mind but I also cannot seem to understand what they mean.

"away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.

Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich."

Since I cannot seem to fathom what these words mean by myself, I decided that the best way to understand them was to write about them. So bear with me as I answer my current call to adventure and try to find the meaning of Joyce's beautiful words.

When I search "Palm of Beauty", the first thing that appears on my feed is an article about Yeats and Rilke. Now as I am sure most of us have, I have studied Yeats some during my time at MSU but I can't seem to place Rilke. After exploring both of these authors, I found that the best way to understand what Joyce meant here was to go back to the origins of my quest and the origins of his story. So in other words go back and re-read Ulysses and the Odyssey. 

Now it is quite obvious that Penelope refers to Odysseus' wife. But in Joyce's work I found a new name that I had not heard before: Antisthenes. Antistenes was a philosopher who was mentored by Socrates. He is most known for his writings on ethics in various dialogues. Very few of these dialogues still survive but the ones that do center around his opinions of virtue and pleasures of life. His teachings show how wise men (or women!) realize that virtue will bring them to the closest thing that is true happiness. All actions must stem from virtue for one to be considered wise. To Anisthenes pleasure that comes from sensual or material happiness is not true pleasure but in fact evil. However, he believed that pleasure that comes from the soul is indeed the only kind of pleasure that can create happiness as it must come from virtue. 

I think that virtue is what is the point of the palm of beauty. It is often said that Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world. But she most definitely was not the most virtuous. She was in fact one of the causes of the Battle of Troy. To me, this indicates a lack of virtue and thus an absence of happiness in her life. By Joyce "speaking" the words "away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope. Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich", he is signaling that the virtue of Penelope is the true cause of her happiness. Penelope is able to create happiness from her virtue as the object of her happiness is not sensual or material gratification but stems from the soul. 

 "Jove's daughter Helen would never have yielded herself to a man from a foreign country, if she had known that the sons of Achaeans would come after her and bring her back. Heaven put it in her heart to do wrong, and she gave no thought to that sin, which has been the source of all our sorrows."

Penelope The Odyssey Boox XXIII

As you can see, even Penelope realized that lack of virtue was the true cause of all sorrow. 

At this point, I can only guess how virtue will in the end lead to the happiness or unhappiness in James Joyce's Ulysses. But this one single tangent demonstrates how fantastically mythological Leopold Bloom's life is. Every single page is saturated with the world's mythologies. In just four sentences, we have traveled the mythological world of Leopold Bloom, Penelope, Helen of Troy, Odysseus, and Antisthenes.