#ulyssesin80

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80 : Day4

Chapter 3 - Proteus

In the Homeric correspondence, Telemachus visits Menelaus who had pinned down the ever-changing Proteus and managed to get news of Odysseus and his travels.

In this chapter the style completely changes into Stephen's stream of consciousness while he is walking on Sandymount Beach.

The beginning shows why Ulysses is challenging to read:

Ineluctable modality of the visible at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. 

As Professor James Hefferman explains in The Great Courses:

For many readers of Ulysses, Chapter 3 is the worst sand trap ever put into words. Joyce himself seems to have foreseen that we might get stuck here with Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount Strand or sink into this chapter like quicksand and never get out.

But he urges us to persevere:

It’s a very cerebral walk, a philosophic walk taken by a highly intellectual young man. It’s also our fullest introduction to his mind and imagination. It shows us his imagination at work on all kinds of things ranging from midwives to minnows, from dogs to deadbeat uncles, from old revolutionaries to bloated corpses. So, don’t be shy. Take off those shoes. Get your feet in the sand. Come along with me in the track of Stephen.

My favourite passage of description is of the visceral image bloated corpse:

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, he leprous nosehole snorting to the sun.

My favourite sentences:

Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody's body.

[jnkay]

"The sky showed him a flock of small white clouds going slowly down the wind. Moutonner, the French said. A just and homely word."

22/80

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80: Days 5 and 6

Chapter 4 - Calypso

The Homeric correspondence is with Odysseus/Leopold Bloom who has been held captive by his lover Calypso/his wife Molly until the gods order her to release him.

The introduction of Bloom quickly indicates that he is a man of physical appetites, and probably also humour:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowl. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust-crumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

This chapter is also a stream of consciousness. In contrast to Stephen, Bloom is far less philosophical and intellectual - but far more sensual, especially noticing odours of places, food and women.

The pub Larry O'Rourkes is described as having a bar that

squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush.

In the butcher's:

The shiny links packed with forcemeat fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pig's blood.

and Molly:

The warmth of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the tea she poured.

My favourite sentence:

Those mornings in the cattlemarket the beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands.

I imagine it is one of the first time in literature that we get a detailed description of someone sitting on the toilet.

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80 : Days 9 to 10

Chapter 6 - Hades

Bloom's attendance at Dignam’s funeral corresponds in Homer to Odysseus’ descent to Hades.

Much of the chapter revolves Bloom's thoughts about "warm fullblooded life" and death. He poignantly remembers Rudy, his baby son who died after just 11 days, and his father who committed suicide:

Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window, watching the two dogs at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins. Got big then.

This theme is repeated, as is the image of Molly by the window:

In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of frilled beefsteaks to the starving gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway. 

Again, Joyce can conjure up the characters in the funeral in just a line:

The whitesmocked priest came after him tidying his stole with one hand, balancing with the other a little book against his toad's belly.

My favourite sentences:

Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he'd wake.

Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white turnips.

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80 : Days 14-17

Episode 8 - Lestrygonians

In Homer the Lestrygonians, who are cannibals, endanger the lives of the followers of Odysseus. So this chapter revolves around food - as can be seen in the first sentence :

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch.

Patrick Hastings' The guide to James Joyce's Ulysses explains that this chapter has a "two-to-one ratio of inner monologue to narration", and so can be seen as Bloom's version of "Proteus", which featured Stephen's stream of consciousness. In contrast to Proteus, this chapter is much easier to read, so you relate more to Bloom.

Hastings writes:

The schema lists "peristaltic prose" as the technique of this episode, referring to the way intestinal muscles alternately contract and relax as they push food along in digestion; "Lestrygonians" mimics peristalsis as Bloom moves in starts and stops through the belly of downtown Dublin.

Again, Bloom shows his physical appetite for food and for Molly:

High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home and houses, silk webs, silver, rich fruits, spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim. Wealth of the world. A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed.With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.

When Bloom enters a restaurant, The Burton, he is disgusted by the smell, the dirt and the way the men are eating. Joyce's vivid description of the smells and sights of the scene made me feel as disgusted as Bloom:

Stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slop of greens. See the animals feed. Men, men, men. 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: 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?

And then the genius of the philosophical question at the end. Bloom leaves and goes to Davy Byrne's "moral pub", which is much cleaner and where he can eat. The wine reminds him of the past with Molly, and in contrast to the disgust evoked by the restaurant, this time Joyce evokes such tenderness:

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 sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eye. Pebbles fell. She lay still.

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80: Days 11-13

Chapter 7 - A Bag of Winds

In Homer, Aeolus/Crawford gives Odysseus/Bloom all unfavourable winds tied in a bag, but the crew open the bag within sight of home and the ship is driven off course. Odysseus returns to Aeolus and is rudely sent away.

Stephe and Bloom briefly come together in the offices of a newspaper, the Evening Telegraph.

Joyce has put newspaper headlines into the chapter, and Professor James Hefferman explains in The Great Courses that they break the flow of the narrative, and show the how arbitrary they can be. For example:

Hello there, Central! At various points along the eight lines tramcars with motionless trolleys stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines, Rathfarnham, Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Sandymount Green, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Donnybrook, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines, all still, becalmed in short circuit. Hackney cars, cabs, delivery waggons, mail-vans, private broughams, aerated mineral water floats with rattling crates of bottles, rattled, rolled, horsedrawn, rapidly.

My favourite sentences:

Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's stores.

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80: Days 7 to 8

Chapter 5 - Lotus Eaters

The Homeric correspondence is to the land of the lotus-eaters, where Odysseus' men, when they eat the lotus, forget their responsibilities and want only to remain where they are and have to be forced back aboard their ship.

My favourite passage is at the end of this chapter when Bloom imagines himself in the Turkish Baths - the languid tone of the whole chapter is a perfect match for feeling of the lotus eaters being high.

The final passage shows Bloom's physicality versus Stephen's intellectualism. Also shows the details that Joyces uses to describe ordinary scenes, which are elevated into art by his use of language:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. 

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80: Day 3

Chapter 2 - Nestor

In the Homeric correspondence Telemachus/Stephen goes to Nestor/Deasy for news of his father and is told of the siege of Troy.

There are many references to Ireland being financially exploited by Britain:

For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.

And an evocative description of Daedalus studying in Paris in the library of Sainte Genevieve:

Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, can-descent: form of forms.

More examples of Joyce conjuring up the incidental characters in a few lines, such as schoolboy Cyril Sargent, who seems to evoke feelings about Stephen's dead mother and her amor matris:

Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled under foot and had gone, scarcely having been.

My favourite sentences in this chapter are a description of a horserace which captures the spectacle in very few words:

Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.

and Stephen being self-deprecating:

Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.

[shannybasar]

@Ulyssesin80 - Days 1 and 2

Following an online bookclub for reading James Joyce's Ulysses in 80 days, starting June 1st 2024" : @Ulyssesin80

Find it useful to also listen to RTÉ's full dramatised production, which was originally broadcast in 1982 to celebrate the centenary of Joyce's birth.

Chapter 1 - Telemachus

In the Homeric correspondence, Telemachus, in the absence of his father Odysseus, sees his wealth being usurped by others just as Mulligan and Haines are taking over the Tower from Stephen.

Struck by the references to the colour of the sea, an Irish echo of Homer's description in The Odyssey, "upon the wine-coloured sea"

"A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen"

and

"The snotgreen sea. The scrotum-tightening sea."

Makes it really hit home when Stephen Daedalus remembers his mother's death:

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.

My favourite sentence in this section:

Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

I also love the descriptions of the incidental characters, in which Joyce manages to use just a sentence to conjure them up so vividly:

A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

and an elderly man:

He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.

[jnkay]

Penelope, Ulysses, James Joyce

77-80/80

[jnkay]

"In what state of rest or motion?

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space."

76/80

[jnkay]

"What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman."

74-75/80

[jnkay]

"What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?

A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo."

72-73/80

[jnkay]

"What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

71/80

[jnkay]

"Was the proposal of asylum accepted?

Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined."

70/80