Brief Ulysses Update

[image by maxf]

Just finished Episode 8, The Laestrygonians. Random, likely incoherent thoughts that’ve crossed my mind over the last 60 pages or so:

• There’s something interesting and tricky going on with the voice and perspective of Bloom’s monologue… a multitude of tiny moments where the text notes things said and seen that Bloom couldn’t possibly have said or seen. The most blatant occurs just after he leaves Davy Byrne’s pub and we hear the group of men there talking about Bloom after he’s gone. But once I started noticing it I see that it happens a lot. I think this is another, subtler part of the artifice that makes the "stream of consciousness" work, trying to artfully portray what goes on in a person’s mind rather than re-creating it.
• Why is Joyce’s strongest prose inevitably found in the moments of wretchedness, nausea and disgust?
• The number of references to wind– directly and tengentially– in the Aeolus section (7) became a bit absurd.
• What’s with Stephen Dedalus’ parable (or is it a not-very-funny joke)? I get the broad outlines of the bawdy joke, "seed" being "spit" from the phallic tower by the infertile, or at least childless, old women.
• Poor Bloom– not only a cuckold, but basically ostracized as well…
• I should’ve read all the major Shakespeare plays along with The Odyssey before I started reading Ulysses. But having at least recently read the latter, some of the parallels Joyce draws just seem so obvious and overt. Maybe too much so, between the wind, the "cannibalism" and the Hades chapters.
• The funniest moment of the book so far comes when Bloom, having helped the blind boy across the street, thinks what a "queery idea of Dublin" the boy must have… this coming from the man who bounces between helplessly between thoughts of cannibalism (real and metaphorical) and sex, prompted by everything he sees and who was only moments before trying to resist checking to see if the statuary– which aroused him– had an anus or not.
• I don’t know the origin of the word "meh" but was still surprised to see it here!

Some other words and phrases that caught my attention:

• quopped, monkeydoodle, topers, gumjelly lips,  slowlier walking, heartscalded, aureoling, corpse of milk, sick knuckly cud, suetfaced

Notable quotables:

"A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped his wreath against a corner: the brother-in-law his on a lump. The gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates, walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing. Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord."

"I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts you couldn’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don’t know what poetry is even."

"Why we think a deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say."

"wine that "Seems like a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered."

"Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in."

"Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt."

"Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser’s eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don’t! O! A bone!"

"Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy."

"no one is anything"