Prose off, Bloomsday edition: The beginning of James Joyce's Ulysses, commonly touted as the best novel ever, v. "Fitty"/the beginning of Fleming's There Is No Doubt: Story Girls

Tuesday 6/16/26

Sorry, Jimmy J., hate to do this to you again--nothing personal, just making a point. Today is Bloomsday, with June 16 being the date on which the events of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, take place.

We did that earlier prose off pitting the end of Joyce's short story, "The Dead," which is frequently touted as the best prose in the English language, against an excerpt from "Dead Thomas," part of There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, and what a beat down we had there.

Now we're going to take the opening of Ulysses, which is frequently touted as the best novel in the English language, and pit it against the opening to "Fitty" as it stands here on the morning of June 16, 2026 and which begins There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, a book of stories that is more novelistic than any novel ever written, and is it's own form of art in need of a different term.

This is the start of Ulysses by James Joyce:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

—Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher’s tone:

—For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

—Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

—The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself.

Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on.

—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

—Will he come? The jejune jesuit!

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

—Yes, my love?

—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

—God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.

He shaved warily over his chin.

—He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?

—A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

—I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

—Scutter! he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen’s upper pocket, said:

—Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

—The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can’t you?

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.

—God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown.

—Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.

—The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

—Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you....

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

—But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

—Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

—They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

—The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You’ll look spiffing in them. I’m not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you’re dressed.

—Thanks, Stephen said. I can’t wear them if they are grey.

—He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

We've had the Joyce, now here's the Fleming:

Carlene found it difficult to stop herself from fixating on the clink-click of metal against ceramic, an aqueous variant of a bullet locking into a chamber.

Dr. Pettigran had a way of stirring his coffee with his pen as if nursing a fancy that his writing utensil was one of those candy-flavored swizzle sticks and its eventual dissolution would enhance his powers of psychiatric perception. Soluble carbohydrates as cerebration fuel.

“You were saying,” Dr. Pettigran resumed.

“I was saying that if you’re in an elevator, and you have a mug and a bottle of liquid, call it your favorite drink, and someone cuts the cord at the top, like in some action film, and on the way down you try and pour yourself a last toast to your life, the liquid won’t come out of the bottle. Because of gravity.”

“Is that true?”

“I haven’t tested it, but I think so, yes.”

“Is the drink in the elevator like the stairs we talk about? With the voice of the child who isn’t there that you hear in the room upstairs?”

“I don’t know. It’s a little like them. I hadn’t thought of it. Probably.”

Carlene knew that Dr. Pettigran was going to ask what this meant to her, so she carried on as if he already had.

“Have you ever lost something, even a common household item, and you really need to find it, or think you really need to find it, and so much depends on that finding, but you know you might not, which makes you fear that you’ll never find other important things? You’ve lost your locating ability. Finding that one thing can feel like it means everything. It’ll stabilize you. Give you a grip again.

“I miss that expression. People don’t say it much these days. ‘Get a grip.’ Easy-to-understand metaphor you can put to practical use. Rock solid advice. Metaphors don’t work if you can’t turn them back into real life. But it’s usually taken as a rebuke. It ought to be eminently doable—the mental version of clasping your fingers around something. A piton. And getting your body under control. The performing of simple tasks. Walk to there. Sit down here. Not ‘run a forty-yard dash this fast’ or ‘pole-vault this lofty bar’ or ‘attain the summit.’

“Except you start bargaining in your head when you’re gripless. Hard to be rational then. Everything whipping past you. I’m baffled by parachuters and their nerve. I’d pull the string too fast and it’d get caught in the plane and what a death that’d be. Dragged over the horizon into the beyond.

“So you keep upping what you’ll give. What’s it gonna take? Calm down is another way to put get a grip. It’s a timeout. Just breathe. Down the stairs rather than up. Always easier. In the grand scheme of life. And just with plain old stairs. Be for now and you’ll fix the real meat of what needs fixing after because that’s how fixing works. But you have to get there first. Then it can take care of itself, almost. Amazingly. Because you got there.

“The opposite usually happens, though. Your hands may as well dissolve into liquid skin gunk or disappear because you feel like you lack gripping implements anyway. Can’t use your teeth. Bite, bite, bite. A snapping turtle could, hanging by its mouth, but not you. Those turtles don’t mind that at all. I bet they’re proud of themselves when they’re suspended in the air because they won’t relinquish their hold on the handle of the shovel you tried to drive them away with because they kept coming further into your yard and you were worried about the dog.

Maybe you say, ‘Okay, if I find this right away, I’ll trade that for a year of my life.’ For just that once. You won’t propose such a trade again.

“But in the here and now? You need this. It isn’t about one item that you can’t find. It means something about you. An overall ability. Viability. The preservation of future chances. Of being able to have them. And lack less. Be more. In the end. But not just the end. As in the last day of your life. Ugh. You know what I mean.

“Sometimes I imagine that when I say these words, trying to make the exchange, I’ll immediately be struck dead. And that’ll be fair play. Me getting what I asked for without realizing I asked for it.

“You read about these people who turn in money they found, and rather than it landing back in the hands of an elderly woman on a fixed income who’s able to get a special treat or two at the grocery store instead of only the bare minimum to keep herself alive—after she makes sure what’s on sale, of course—it reverts to this heinous corporation that makes lives worse, and the bank slaps a service fee on the returner for rectifying the matter when they could have kept the money or done something to help someone but it’s too late now.

“Maybe I didn’t have the year to give, and then it’s like overdrawing your bank account, you go negative. Your statement is this depressing, maddening mess with overdraft charges and you’re finding out too late that you assumed too much, hoped too much, pretended it wasn’t that bad too much, could somehow be okay too much, looked away from too much because you couldn’t cope. Like if you wait to look you’ll have a solution by the time you do.  

“When I hear the voice of the child crying in the room at the top of the stairs, I could go up there, but that’ll mean losing the time off my life.”

“And you stay downstairs?” Dr. Pettigran asked.

“I stay downstairs. I have to decide. Kids eventually stop crying, right? Cry themselves to sleep. Which you conclude is likely barbaric after you’ve first considered this as a possible technique for yourself when you have kids of your own. Because why wouldn’t more parents take that approach? Instead, they go to the child. Including lots of bad people. It’s kind of crazy how much good and bad people can have in common. They pick her up. Rock her. To provide comfort. So she’s not scared.

“The parents don’t want her to have this experience she isn’t going to remember regardless because fear in the moment is something happening to us that’ll always be something that happened. Same as a first love. Your birth. Your death. That evening you thought you were out of your favorite snack you wanted for that movie you were looking forward to after a terrible day that makes you say ‘terrible life is more like it’ and then you found a box after all.

“They all have the same standing, if not the same importance. But who can assess their significance anyway? That thing is as real as anything because its realness isn’t based on anything else. It is, whether we are or aren’t. We are, whether it is or isn’t. It’s what we see and think that changes. Comfort first, then sleep. I don’t have the years to give. I know I’m all out. But at the same time…”

Carlene had been house sitting, but also not house sitting because she only came by at night which to her was more like house-checking and she didn’t want undue credit. The mental task of correctly establishing for the latest time how long had passed since the event felt like trying to pull solid objects from out of a haze. There was no formal instruction that this should be the official terminology, but “event” got used.

“It’s actually enscorcelling,” Carlene continued.

“What is?”

Dr. Pettigran was amused by Carlene’s vocabulary. Sometimes he jotted down these words that were new to him on his pad. His pen, now divested of its ceramic holdings, had a knack for sounding like a feather of olden times. Parchment and plumes. Carlene understood these particular dry scratches were unlikely related to her care. He just liked to learn the words. Her green hair struck him as a whimsically elfin choice for a twenty-eight-year-old high school English teacher. Dr. Pettigran was fond of Carlene.

“The voice of the child,” she continued. “Enchanting. It feels like it exists for me to hear it, or that’s why I exist, though I know, rationally, that no one is up there. I feed the cats. When the crying stops, I go upstairs. Just once. It’s permitted in the silence. I’m not overdrawn. But never when I hear the crying. The upstairs hallway light has a timer. At nine o’clock, it goes off. I don’t go into her room. Fia’s room. But I check the others, the hallway closet, then I leave.”

“You’re calling her Fia again.”

“I mean Fitty. Of course.”

“Mmmhhhm. What was that other word the other day? To accompany somebody?”

“Enjoin.”

“Right. That was it.” He scratched his pad again. “You don’t feel like you should go in there while—"

“No.”

Carlene’s voice was usually soft. Fitty called it pillowous, though that wasn’t a real word. It had puffy edges, filled with temperate breath. But sometimes, it could sound that if there were a way to strike the notes it made with a piece of flint, a spark would be drawn.

“It’s not my place,” Carlene said.

You know what this prose off wasn't? Same thing that none of them ever are. Whether we're talking George Saunders/Joshua Cohen/Yiyun Li garbage or something better from the likes of James Joyce.

And that's close at all.

These two excerpts are well suited for a prose off because both are oriented around dialogue, with, ironically, the excerpt from "Fitty" have more of an internal monologue, modernistic quality, while being far more accessible and immersive. Stairs are central to both as well.

That opening to "Fitty" goes a long way in helping to set up what is the biggest emotional pay off in all of art come the end of this story that the people of the publishing system of incestuous evil will not allow you to see because of how good it is and that it was created by someone unlike them who can do what they cannot. All of the things they cannot.

Etiquette is etiquette? Okay. Same as proof is proof.