| America’s Poet?
From the July 5 / July 12, 2004 issue: Bob Dylan’s achievement.
by Christopher Hitchens 07/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 41
Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks Ecco, 528 pp., $26.95 “Not all great poets–like Wallace Stevens –are great singers,” Bob Dylan once suggested. “But a great singer–like Billie Holiday–is always a great poet.” It would be an enterprise in itself to disentangle the many ways in which this brief statement is dead wrong. The antithesis, if it is meant as an antithesis, between poet and singer, is false to begin with. The “not all” is based on a nonexpectation: How many poets have been singers at all? Certainly not Dylan Thomas, the Welsh boozer and bawler from whom Bob Dylan–a Jewish loner from Hibbing, Minnesota, who was born as Robert Zimmerman–annexed his nom de chanteur. Other cryptic or pretentious observations, made by Bob Dylan down the years, have licensed the suspicion that he’s been putting people on and starting wild-goose chases for arcane or esoteric readings that aren’t there. There are also those who maintain that Dylan can’t really sing. (This latter group has recently been reluctantly increasing.) Of his ability as a poet, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. I used to play two subliterary games with Salman Rushdie. The first, not that you asked, was to re-title Shakespeare plays as if they had been written by Robert Ludlum. (Rushdie, who invented the game, came up with The Elsinore Vacillation, The Dunsinane Reforestation, The Kerchief Implication, and The Rialto Sanction.) The second was to recite Bob Dylan songs in a deadpan voice as though they were blank verse. In addition to the risk of the ridiculous, it can become quite hypnotic. Try it yourself with “Mr. Tambourine Man”: It works so well, you hardly care that a tambourine man can’t really be playing a song. “Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Desolation Row” all have the same feeling. But as a guide to Dylan’s poetic moments, do we really need help from Christopher Ricks, author of Keats and Embarrassment, editor of T.S. Eliot’s juvenilia, instructor on the funny side of Tristram Shandy, and all-around literary mandarin? Need him or not, we now have Ricks–who, in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, performs over five-hundred pages of literary criticism on the lyrics. Reading Dylan as the bard of guilt and redemption, Ricks takes his stand on the recurrence in the songs of the seven deadly sins, only just balanced as they are by the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues (or heavenly graces: faith, hope, and charity). It’s Ricks’s own potentially deadly virtues that bother me. What temptation should one avoid above all, if one is a former professor of English at Cambridge? The temptation to be matey, or hip, or cool–especially if one is essaying the medium of popular music. But Ricks begins his book like this: “All I really want to do is–what, exactly? Be friends with you? Assuredly I don’t want to do you in, or select you or dissect you or inspect you or reject you.” The toe-curling embarrassment of this is intensified when one appreciates that Ricks is addressing his subject, not his reader. Why did he leave out other verbs Dylan had in that song: simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you? And surely, he’s already at least “selected” him? Then, accused by one of his usually admiring rivals in Dylanology, Alex Ross of the New Yorker, of “fetishizing the details of a recording,” the prof resorts to unbearable archness. (“What me? All the world knows that it is women’s shoes that I am into.”) Some of Ricks’s jokey attempts at making puns work (“cut to the chaste”), but “interluckitor” is a representative failure. This last is coined to deal with a claim by Dylan, made in 1965, that every song of his “tails off with–’Good Luck–I hope you make it.’” Such a claim, if taken seriously, would in any case vitiate most of Dylan’s claims to profundity. Having said that distinguished academics ought not to try and be ingratiating with the young, I pull myself up a bit and realize that true Dylan fans are probably well into their fifties by now. It must have been in 1965 that I first heard what Philip Larkin called, in a quasi-respectful review of Highway 61 Revisited, his “cawing, derisive voice.” And it will be with me until my last hour. Some of this is context. The “sixties” didn’t really begin until after the Kennedy assassination (or “Nineteen Sixty-Three,” as Larkin had it in another reference), and Bob Dylan was as good a handbook for what was supposedly happening as Joseph Heller. Much of it of course also had to do with the sappiness, in both “sap” senses, of adolescence. Yet even at the time, I was somehow aware that Dylan wasn’t all that young,
and didn’t take “youth” at its face value. A good number of his best songs were actually urging you to grow up, or at any rate to get real. Dylan respected his elders, most notably Woody Guthrie. And he was braced for disillusionment. How does it feel? Don’t think twice, it’s all right. It’s all over now, baby blue. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.Ricks essentially wants to argue that Dylan has always been swayed by the elders and that his verses consistently defer to the authorities. How else to explain, for example, the many latent affinities between “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and the Book of Ezekiel? The kings of Tyre, the dying music, the futility of earthly possessions. . . . That’s Covetousness taken care of, with Pride (or at any rate hubris) given a passing whack into the bargain. Six sins to go. Ricks has no success with Greed (as he admits) and not much with Sloth, either. There is a good deal of anomie and fatalism in Dylan; a fair amount of shrugging and dismissal and an abiding sense of waste and, equally often, of loss. It’s pervasive but nonspecific in “Time Passes Slowly,” which Ricks interrogates without any great profit. So I pushed on to “Lust,” and was taken aback. “Lay, Lady, Lay” is one of the great sexual entreaties, and it has in common with “I Want You” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” a highly ethical reliance on the force of gentle persuasion. There is no blackmail, moral or otherwise, and no hint of a threat or even a scene in the event of nonconsummation. But nor is there any doubt of what the minstrel wants: His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean. / And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen. Of this false modesty and abject flattery, Ricks astonishingly says that “his hands are clean because he is innocent, free of sin: no lust, for all the honest desire, and no guile.” Had Dylan written “his clothes are dirty but his mind is clean,” this might have been believable. And is there no guile in the succeeding stanza? Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile Why wait any longer for the world to begin? You can have your cake and eat it too. Why wait any longer for the one you love When he’s standing in front of you? Ricks then moves to a laborious comparison with Donne’s “On His Mistress Going To Bed,” at which point I thought, well, as soon as I turn the page he’ll stop clearing his throat and make the obvious metaphysical connection to Andrew Marvell and “To His Coy Mistress.” But no. And here’s the clue to Ricks’s method. The words “bed,” “show,” “see,” “man,” “hands,” “world” he says all appear in both Donne and Dylan, while the words “unclothed” and “lighteth” appear in Donne, balanced by “clothes” and “light” in Dylan. Shall we agree that all the words just specified are in somewhat common use today, and were in equally ordinary employment in the seventeenth century? Whereas, if you care to glance again at the Dylan lines I just cited, not only do you think at once of Marvell’s Had we but world enough and time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime (which gets “lady” in there, right enough, and in delicious apposition to “world” at that), but you also find yourself grappling with Marvell’s gentle but urgent sense of delay and frustration. Dylan further beseeches the lady to stay while the night is still ahead and to have [her] cake and eat it too: Metaphysically speaking this is not so remote from Marvell’s reminder that the darkness of death will last an awfully long time, while in the grave the worms may dine long and well. This is something different from Donne’s poem, which swiftly becomes a near-raunchy celebration of achieved carnal knowledge of someone familiar to him. Finally, Marvell speaks beautifully and seductively about keeping the sun in motion since there’s no chance of making it stand still, and Dylan longs to see his beloved “in the morning light,” having banished the night in the only way that lies open to him. I hope I don’t boast about my own poor exegesis, but Ricks’s procedure is more like that of the people who pore over Bible codes or kabbalistic crossword puzzles. DYLAN’S VERSION OF ANGER is sardonic and bitter: an exemplary match for the “cawing, derisive” tones noted by Larkin. In “Masters of War,” “Only a Pawn In Their Game,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” he said to the military-industrial complex and the racists, in effect, “You win. For now. But for now you also have to live with your shame. And judgment will follow, and is coming.” (I have always hoped, for this reason, that Joan Baez was wrong in claiming that Dylan wrote “When The Ship Comes In”–his most Jeremiad and vengeful poem–in response to bad service at some hotel.) “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” was based on a real event in 1963: the lethal beating of Hattie Carroll by William Zanzinger in a Baltimore hotel. Zanzinger’s lenient treatment by the courts fired Dylan into a hot rage, yet producing his most glacial and most measured poem of outrage and contempt. He simply relates the story, with deadly counterpoint as between the rich and careless white man and the dispensable black servitor. The song never uses the words “black” or “white,” as Ricks points out, but just: He owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres, while she emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level. Thus is the plantation relationship re-cast and, as Ricks rightly says, “it’s a terrible thing that you know this [their respective colors] from the story.” But then again, as Ricks also emphasizes, Dylan’s affecting line And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger is a sort of clue. I have always thought that this was Dylan ventriloquizing, without condescension, the “Black English” demotic comment on the affair. Ricks improves on my intuition by giving the example of James Baldwin in The Amen Corner: “He hadn’t never done nothing to nobody.” Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle , in Dylan’s haunting phrase, Zanzinger slew Hattie Carroll with a cane that he twirled around his diamond-ring finger, and who would pass up the chance to recall the first murderer, Cain, in this context? Not Ricks, who also calls attention to the words lay slain by a cane and to the triple repetition of the word “table,” which closes three consecutive lines. “Does this -able” he inquires, “prepare for the word that soon follows, ‘cane’? Cain and Abel, masculine and feminine endings?” Well, no, I shouldn’t think so. Whatever the song is about, it most decidedly isn’t about fratricide. And Cain and Abel–scarcely unique metaphors where murder is concerned–appear in other Dylan songs under their own names. Ricksian hermeneutics has its limits.I could, nonetheless, have used some more counsel from Ricks about the title. In what way was Hattie Carroll’s death “lonesome”? There is an unmistakable sentimentality in this word; a tear-jerking note that is wondrously absent from the song itself. Insufficient guidance is forthcoming: Ricks proposes without much brio that Dylan “perhaps” wanted the word to evoke a contrast between Hattie’s death and the crowded hotel. But with or without that “perhaps,” ultimately, everybody dies alone. Ricks’s closing thought is superior. He argues that T.S. Eliot understood the difference between writing religious poetry and writing poetry religiously, and that Dylan with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” has written politically rather than merely writing a political song. That seems to be a distinction well worth observing, most especially at a time like the present with its ephemeral garbage of pseudo-protest. (“We’ve suffered for our music–now it’s your turn.”) The finest fury is the most controlled. One still feels a generous anger when listening to the song–incidentally, William Zanzinger turned up again a few years ago in the Baltimore courts, for leasing black people squalid, waterless cabins that he didn’t even own–and the pairing of generosity with anger (annexed from Orwell out of Dickens) might license some interpenetration of sin and virtue, or even sin with grace. It’s back to hermeneutics in Ricks’s study of “Love Minus Zero / No Limit,” which occurs in the chapter on “Temperance.” As you will recall, the song begins My love she speaks like silence / Without ideals or violence, while in a succeeding verse: In the dime stores and bus stations People talk of situations Read books, repeat quotations Draw conclusions on the wall. For Ricks, this is Belshazzar’s feast in the fifth chapter of Daniel: “In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace. And this is the writing that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.” Building upon this, Ricks insists that the biblical “candlestick” furnishes Dylan not only with his song’s reference to candles and matchsticks, but the biblical word “numbered” may have a relation to the “Minus Zero” in Dylan’s title. This same chapter of Daniel has the words “people,” “tremble,” “wise men,” and “gifts”–and also “spake,” “said,” and “that night.” What more could one want as proof of the direct influence of the prophet Daniel upon the song? Something more, as it happens. The words of the prophets are written on the subway wall, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were to say in “The Sounds of Silence,” and it was as obvious to me the first time I heard “Love Minus Zero / No Limit” as it is today that Dylan was alluding to graffiti: a special emphasis in that time and place. If you really want to connect Babylon to Dylan, you might have better luck with “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”: The cabaret was silent–except for the drilling in the wall. AT THE SAME TIME I was digesting all this in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, I noticed that Ricks deals with an obvious contradiction in his account (the king being “reduced” to the pawn) in the following evasive manner: “‘Even the pawn must hold a grudge.’ Even the king? Even Dylan, whom I ungrudgingly admire?” This is ingratiation raised to the level of unction. I remember the first time that I ever felt a qualm about Dylan’s claims. It was early on as well: He said that he had written “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” at the time of the Cuban missile crisis–and he had been in such an apocalyptic hurry that every line could be the first line of another song. Even in my early teens, I knew that that was bravado. Oddly, perhaps, Ricks spends almost no time on the influences that Dylan actually does affirm or the influences that we know about. “Blowin’ In the Wind” borrows from an old slave spiritual called “No More Auction Block,” with its haunting words about “many thousands gone.” Dylan was actually sued by Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan, for plagiarizing not only the tune but the concept of “The Patriot Game” for his “With God on Our Side.” More recently, his song about a Japanese yakuza was tracked down to an obscure but identifiable source, while the deft Daniel Radosh has blogged a near-perfect match between Dylan’s “Cross the Green Mountain” (written for Ron Maxwell’s movie Gods and Generals) and Walt Whitman’s “Come up from the Fields, Father.” If I had to surmise another influence, it would be William Blake, not just for the speculative reasons given by Ricks but because, as Blake phrased it: “A Last Judgment is Necessary because Fools flourish.” Even secularists often find themselves thinking things like that, and there is a store of words in the Bible that springs ready-made, as it were. Thus, Ricks could well be correct in thinking that Dylan’s “how many times” is an echo both of “How long, oh Lord, how long?” and of Christ’s injunction in Matthew on the number of times that it might be needful to turn the other cheek. (He may also be right, though coming down-market more than he likes, in discerning a vague sacred/profane overlap between “I Believe in You” and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”) But Christianity as a religion of peace and tolerance and forgiveness is not, superficially at least, compatible with ringing phrases about judgment and the sword: In order to believe in the apparently kindly and reassuring verses about taking no thought for the morrow, one had better have a lively sense of the second coming. This was the line that Dylan actually did take in his born-again period, where he spoke of “spiritual warfare” as well as his “precious angel,” and warned that there would be no hiding place on the day. But this, which produced some of his most beautiful writing (and singing) would appear to have been as lightly affected as the gritty dustbowl socialism which the Old Left was already denouncing him for abandoning as far back as 1964. Dylan dropped it and kept moving on. Indeed, I am sure I remember Ricks welcoming him “back,” as it were, when he came up with “Most of the Time” about fifteen years ago. But here, and in his discussion of this superbly apt and lovely and troubling song, I began to write heavy notes in the book’s margin: “Most of the time,” Ricks writes, “‘Most of the Time’ consists of repeating the words, ‘most of the time.’” [Marginal note: Oh no it doesn't.] Unbelievably, Ricks manages to go on for a half-dozen pages about this song, without ever achieving the realization that it is one of the most vertiginous, knife-edge accounts of a post-love trauma ever penned. You should only listen to the song if you are not currently trying to persuade yourself that “it” is all over and that you are all over “it.” Ricks wraps up blandly: “It is only most of the time that the man in this long black song succeeds in being not disturbed. But he is halfways there. On the other hand, ‘She’s that far behind.’ One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind, to be exact.” [In the margin: To be inexact, you mean, you fool. She's right behind him and in front of him and all around him, all of the time. His attempted banishment of her is a hopeless failure! What have you got in your veins--tapwater?] There follows a lengthy Ricksian contrast between the words of Dylan’s song “Not Dark Yet” and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Not, you understand, that our author wants to be taken too seriously. “I don’t believe that Keats’s poem is alluded to in Dylan’s song. That is, called into play, so that you’d be failing to respond to something crucial to the song unless you were familiar with, and could call up, Keats’s poem.” [In the margin: Oh no, of course, not that.] After all, the deep connection between Keats’s My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains and Dylan’s Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain is transparent neither in sense nor rhythm. It is true that the words “dark,” “shadow,” and “day”–together with “sleep” and “time,” or their cognates–are to be found in both sets of verses. I am quite ready to believe that Dylan had a subliminal memory of being taught the poem in school. But Renata Adler did much better than this, during the 1968 Republican convention that nominated Nixon in Miami. Surveying the sea of placards with their jaunty slogan “Now More Than Ever,” she suddenly recognized that it came from verse six of the “Nightingale” ode: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.I think that might have afforded Dylan a smile, and possibly Ricks too. But only one of them has an attitude to sin that is in any sense original.
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Filed under: Literature | Tags: James Joyce, John Fitzgerald, Literature, Ulysses
“Yes,” said Joyce. “No-age Faust isn’t a man. But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist*. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall.”
“Among other things,” he said, “my book is the epic of the human body. The only man I know who has attempted the same thing is Phineas Fletcher. But then his Purple Island is purely descriptive, a kind of coloured anatomical chart of the human body. In my book the body lives in and moves through space and is the home of a full human personality. The words I write are adapted to express first one of its functions then another. In Lestrygonians the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the peristaltic movement.”
“But the minds, the thoughts of the characters,” I began.
“If they had no body they would have no mind,” said Joyce. “It’s all one. Walking towards his lunch my hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of his wife, and says to himself, ‘Molly’s legs are out of plumb.’ At another time of day he might have expressed the same thought without any underthought of food. But I want the reader to understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement.”
—Telemachus is a 20-year-old man wondering who his father is (he knows the name but not a lot else – he has never seen him) and whether he will ever return
—As Odysseus’ son, Telemachus is the only heir to the island and kingdom of Ithaca. But he feels (and is) extremely vulnerable and insecure about his position, especially with 100 suitors hanging around waiting for Penelope to acknowledge that Odysseus isn’t coming back and to choose one of them as her new husband and as the new king of Ithaca.
Telemachus focusses on his absent father. In Ulysses it is Stephen’s mother who has recently died. What are the implications of this change? When Haines and Stephen talk about Ireland and England, Haines says, “We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame” (lines 1:648-49). What do you think Haines means by this last statement? What does it seem to mean to Stephen? Can you find any connections between the style of the narration in “Telemachus” (for example, “he said sternly” at 1:19, “he cried briskly” at 1:28, even the opening word “Stately”) and Buck Mulligan’s non-stop joking and wisecracking? Ulysses is a book in which every word, even every mark of punctuation, can be important. (This is why it is important to read the text in an accurate edition.) Consider the importance of a small word and a comma in these two examples:
—Early printings of the book say that Mulligan “went over the parapet” instead of “went over to the parapet” (1:35, p. 4).
—In early printings, Stephen thinks, “No mother. Let me be and let me live” instead of “No, mother! Let . . . “(1:279, p. 9)
Note Haines’s anti-Semitism at 1:666-68 (p. 18). Stephen thinks of words from the Latin Prayer for the Dying at the end of the chapter (1:736-38, p. 19 – a continuation of words he thought of at 1:276-77, p. 9 – the words translate as “May the glorious choir of virgins receive you”). He will associate these words with his mother at other times during the day.
Colour- White, Gold
Symbol- Heir
Technic- Narrative (young)
Liliata rutilantium
I am another now and yet the same
Key
He proves by algebra that hamlets grandson….
Cranley’s arm. His arm.
Colour- Brown
Symbol- Horse
Technic- Catechism (personal)
Colour- Green
Symbol- Tide
Technic- Monologue (male)
He comes, pale vampire, . . . (3:397-98)
What is that word known to all men? (3:435)
When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. (3:324-25; see A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 1)
—the pattern of men coming to Dublin from small country towns and becoming successful pub owners (4:104-28)
—his idea that cattle could be moved to boats going out to sea via special tram lines (4:108-10)
Bloom’s thoughts often move in a fairly identifiable train of associations. For example, in the paragraph starting at 4:201, he thinks about olive trees (from the Agendath Netaim ad he has just read), and that leads him to olives stored in jars and to Molly eating olives. Then he thinks about oranges (again from the ad), which leads to lemons (citrons), which leads to thoughts about a high school friend of his named Citron. This leads to other friends and to Molly with those friends.
—Note how often Bloom’s thoughts, no matter where they start, end up focused on Molly.
A cloud covers the sky while Bloom walks home from the butcher’s (4:218-31). Note how the grey sky affects Bloom’s mood. A cloud, maybe the same one, covered the sky in “Telemachus” as well (1:248 – p. 8 – Joyce’s schema tells us that both “Telemachus” and “Calypso” start at 8:00 AM). Compare Stephen’s reaction with Bloom’s.
A nearby church bell chimes to indicate 8:45, and its sound (“Heigho! Heigho!”) registers in Bloom’s mind (4:546-48). Throughout the day Bloom will associate this sound with his acquaintance who has died, Paddy Dignam, and with Dignam’s funeral. Remember the phrase that went through Stephen’s mind at the end of “Telemachus” (“Liliata rutilantium”), also associated with death (1:736-38 – p. 19)
Colour- Orange
Symbol- nymph
Technic- mature (compare telemachus)
Bloom’s hat: “Plasto’s high grade ha” (4:70)
Bloom’s latchkey (4:72)
his potato (4:73)
his idea for a tramline to carry cattle (4:109-10)
the songs that are mentioned:
“Met him” (Molly’s attempt to pronounce “metempsychosis”) and her exclamation “O rocks!” (4:336, 343)
Colour- none
Symbol- eucharist
Technic- narcissism
—her threat to punish Bloom (5:244, 251)
—asking about Molly’s perfume (5:258 + 5:500)
the soap that Bloom buys (5:510)
Bloom to Bantam Lyons: “I was just going to throw it away” (inadvertant tip for national winner throwaway) (5:534)
Characters from Dubliners: M’Coy (5:82; see “Grace” in Dubliners)
Hoppy Holohan (5:96; see “A Mother” in Dubliners)
Bantam Lyons (5:523; see “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” in Dubliners)
This episode is one of the cleverest and funniest in terms of its parallels with The Odyssey. Look for such details as equivalents for the figures Odysseus meets in the underworld and for the rivers he crosses to get there. Note how Martin Cunningham relates to Sisyphus.Bloom thinks about Boylan and then has the misfortune to see him (6:190-97). As before, he then gets asked about the concert tour (6:212-24). Note the tone of the men’s questions.You can get a sense of the other men’s attitudes toward Bloom from the way they act when he starts to tell his story about Reuben J. Dodd (6:264-91) and from their talk about Molly when he is too far away to hear (6:690-706).Remember Martin Cunningham from “Grace,” and compare how he is presented here. Note how he reacts when the men start to talk about suicide (6:335-42 and 6:526-32). Look at how the men talk about people’s “hearts,” and compare Bloom’s reaction (6:672-82).Note how Bloom reacts to the cemetery as he leaves it (6:995-96 and 6:1001-5).
Colour: white, black
Symbol: caretaker
Technic: incubism
Cerberus: Father Coffey
Hades: Caretaker
Hercules: Daniel O’Connell
Elpenor: Dignam
Agamemnon: Parnell
Ajax: Menton
Boylan’s straw hat (6:199)
Keys: like Keyes’ ad. (6:740-41)
the man in the macintosh (6:805, 825, 891-98)
Bloom’s conversation with the reporter Hynes (6:878-98)
Mr Power (6:2; Jack Power: see “Grace” in Dubliners)
Simon (6:4; Simon Dedalus: see A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)my patience are exhausted (6:170; see 5:255)
Plasto’s (6:191; see 4:68-70, 5:23-24)
tramline from the parkgate to the quays (6:400-1; see 4:109-10)
Mr Kernan (6:503; Tom Kernan: see “Grace” in Dubliners)
John O’Connell’s keys (6:716; see 1:721-22, 4:72-73)
Joe Hynes (6:719; see “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” in Dubliners)
seaside girls (6:784-85; see 4:437-43)
Mrs Sinico’s funeral (6:997; see “A Painful Case” in Dubliners)
Using a bag of winds given to him by Aeolus, Odysseus almost gets back home to Ithaca. He gets close enough to be able to see the island, but his men look in the bag, and they are all blown back to Aeolus’ island. Look for ways in which getting near the goal but not reaching it figures in the episode. The newspaper headlines or captions have their own movement through the episode. Notice how they proceed from the beginning to the end of the episode.Bloom and Stephen are both without keys, and Bloom is now trying to place an ad for a tea, wine, and spirit merchant named Alexander Keyes. Note the way that Keyes wants his ad to appear (7:141-51).
Look at the 3 formal speeches that are quoted in the episode: by Dan Dawson (7:243-49, 295, 320-28), Seymour Bushe (7:768-71), and John F. Taylor (7:814-69). Are there any similarities among these speeches?The editor Myles Crawford tells how Ignatius Gallaher (Little Chandler’s friend who visits Dublin from London in “A Little Cloud” in Dubliners) cabled the escape route of an assassin’s car to a New York newspaper (7:626-77). Can you figure out how Gallaher did it? Does this method have any relevance to Ulysses itself? Stephen tells sort of a story at the end (7:915-1062, with interruptions). Is it like a story from Dubliners?
colour: red
Symbol: editor
Technic: enythmemic
Floating Island: Press
O’Madden Burke (7:505; see “Grace” in Dubliners)
Whose mother is beastly dead. (7:583-83; see 1:198-99)
Ignatius Gallaher (7:626-77; see “A Little Cloud” in Dubliners)
Nightmare from which you will never awake. (7:678; see 2:377)
The Homeric parallel for “Lestrygonians” basically involves cannibalism. The Ulysseschapter is full of eating and food. Note, for example, the opening lines, the gulls that Bloom feeds (8:73ff), and the two pubs he goes into–the Burton and Davy Byrne’s–in order to have some lunch. An extension of the eating motif is indicated in Joyce’s term for the episode’s technic: peristaltic–that is, peristaltic movement, the movement of food down the esophagus–and, by further extension, the entire digestive process. How do details like these relate to peristalsis and digestion: the men wearing the letters H.E.L.Y.’S (8:126ff), Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (8:295-303), the birds whose thoughts Bloom imagines (8:401-5), the statues in the museum (8:929-32)? And note how food and digestion filter into the chapter’s language and imagery: 8:495, 8:508, 8:619-20, 8:637-39, 8:666-67, 8:717-18, 8:742. Bloom has many thoughts about Molly during this episode, as at 8:170-74, 8:198-201, 8:587-92, 8:608-13, 8:896-918. Are there any similarities in some or all of these thoughts? Note, also, how often he thinks of the passing of time during the day (it’s now between 1:00 and 2:00) and of the impending visit by Boylan: 8:101-9, 8:587-92, 8:633, 8:789-91, 8:852-53, 8:1063, 8:1167-93. At 8:101: “POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS.” The ads might be considered to be “pills” (as in “Lotus Eaters”). But how does the first phrase become the second? What is going on at 8:101-9? Bloom thinks “Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” (8:111-12). What do “parallel” and “parallax” mean, and how are they thematically relevant to Ulysses?
Colour: none
Symbol: constables
Technic: peristaltic
Lestrygonians: Teeth
postcard with U.P. (or maybe U.P.: up) on it (8:257-58)
Mina Purefoy three days overdue at the Holles St. maternity hospital (8:277-82)
the Mirus Bazaar (8:1162)
Iron Nails Ran In. (8:20; see 5:374)
Met him pike hoses. (8:112 + 8:1148; see 4:336)
Plumtree’s Potted Meat. (8:138-39 + 8:742-45; see 5:144 47)
Wanted, smart lady typist . . . (8:326-27; Bloom’s ad that resulted in the letter from Martha Clifford)
Nosey Flynn (8:737; see “Counterparts” in Dubliners)
Paddy Leonard (8:989; see “Counterparts” in Dubliners)
aria from Don Giovanni (8:1039-40; see 4:314)
Reuben J. (8:1158-59; see 6:264-91)
Straw hat. (8:1168; see 6:199)
Agendath Netaim. (8:1184; see 4:191-99)
Can you account for the odd things that happen in the narration in this episode? Examples: “Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off” (9:99), “–A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly” (9:232), “Mr Secondbest Best said finely” (9:714-15) Can you account for the odd excursions into musical notation (between 9:499 and 500), blank verse (9:684-706), and dramatic form (9:893-934)?
How do the men in the room (most of them were actual Dubliners: AE–the pseudonym used by George Russell, John Eglinton–the pseudonym used by W.K. Magee, Richard Best, the librarian Thomas Lyster) respond to Stephen? Note Stephen’s thoughts about time, and about relationships between the present, the past, and the future: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past” (9:89); “Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves . . .” (9:1044-45) Note Stephen’s various themes in relation to other aspects of Ulysses: sundering and reconciliation (9:334-35 and 397-98), adultery and betrayal (9:450-64), brothers (9:663-82), fatherhood (9:828-44 and 862-71).Note how many times Stephen’s thoughts as he speaks betray his self-doubts: “Are you condemned to do this?” (9:849), “Don’t tell him he was nine years old when it was quenched” (9:936), “Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? . . . Lapwing. Icarus.” (9:952-54), “He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage” (9:1016), “–Do you believe your own theory? / –No, Stephen said promptly” (9:1067)Note John Eglinton’s comment and its relation to Ulysses: “That was Will’s way. . . .We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. . . . He [Shakespeare] puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.” (9:993-96) See Bloom’s brief appearances and Mulligan’s comment (9:585, 607-17, 1203-11). Note Mulligan’s play in response to Stephen’s theory (9:1171-89).
Colour: none
Symbol: Stratford, London
Technic: dialectic
Ulysses: Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare
the street of harlots and creamfruit melon (9:1207-8; also back at 3:365-69)
Possibilities of the possible as possible. (9:349-50; see 2:67)
And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. (9:353-54; see 7:838)
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (9:1115-16; see 8:302)
“Father” Cowley, Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, John Wyse Nolan, Jimmy Henry, Haines, Buck Mulligan, Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Patrick Dignam
(Paddy’s son), William Humble (Earl of Dudley), the man in the machintosh etc etc
19 vignettes of different city folk going about their day. End with Viceroy’s procession. “Wandering Rocks” is the one episode of Ulysses without a direct Homeric parallel. Odysseus is told that he must face one of two dangerous routes–by Scylla and Charybdis or by the Wandering Rocks–and he chooses the first option. So the odd developments in content and technique in the episode don’t have Homeric equivalents.The episode begins with a representative of the church (Father John Conmee, S.J.–he is the priest who believed Stephen about breaking his glasses at the end of Chapter 1 of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man)–and ends with a representative of the state in the Viceregal Cavalcade. The priest and the cavalcade move across large stretches of Dublin, but they never pass or cross each other. Critics have noticed how often the citizens of Dublin feel that they have just missed an opportunity. See, for instance, Tom Kernan at 10:797 or Paddy Dignam’s son at 10:1138-39. How would you account for the odd interpolations that turn up in the sections? for example, Denis J. Maginni in the first section (10:56-60) or Father Conmee in the second (10:213-14). Note the full date, which appears for the first time in Ulysses, at 10:376. Molly Bloom makes a brief, partial appearance in this episode at 10:249-53 (confirmed by the address at 10:541-42). Lenehan and M’Coy talk about Bloom at 10:517-83. Note what they say in addition to the usual disdainful remarks about Bloom and the comments about Molly. Then, look at what books Bloom is perusing in the next section, and note what is said about Bloom at 10:973-78. Paralleling this, look at what Mulligan says to Haines about Stephen at 10:1089-93.
Colour: none
Symbol: citizens
Technic: labyrinth
Asiatic bank: Conmee
Symplegades [Wandering Rocks]: Groups of citizens
the phrases Bloom reads from Sweets of Sin (10:608-17)
Ben Dollard and the song “The Croppy Boy” (10:791-93)
Corny Kelleher (10:97 and 10:207-25; see 6;504 etc.)
Katey and Boody Dedalus (10:258; see A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter V)
stiff crumpled throwaway. Elijah is coming. (10:294-95 and 10:1096-99; see 8:6 and 8:57-60)
H.E.L.Y.’S (10:310; see 8:126)
J.J. O’Molloy (10:434; see 7:282 etc.)
Richie Goulding (10:471; see 3:61-98)
Nosey Flynn (10:479; see 8:737 etc.)
Lenehan (10:484; see 7:300 and 7:387 etc.)
M’Coy (10:487; see 5:82-177)
Tom Kernan (10:718 etc.; see 6:654 etc.)
Denis Breen (10:778; see 8:827 etc.)
John Henry Menton (10:778-79; see 6:690-707 and 6:1007-33)
Agenbite of inwit. (10:875-80; see 1:481, 9:196 and 9:809)
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (10:921; see 8:302 and 9:1115)
Martin Cunningham (10:956; see 6.1 etc.)
As 4:30 approaches, note how often Bloom thinks about the time and about Molly: 11:305, 11:352, 11:392, 11:912-14, 11:1066-69, plus many other places. The songs that are sung, or their titles, are thematically relevant. Examples are “Goodbye Sweetheart Goodbye” (11:320-425), “All is lost now” (11:629), the aria from the opera Martha (11:665-751), “The Croppy Boy” (11:1021-1122). Note the counterpoint between what Bloom says to Richie Goulding and what he writes to Martha Clifford at 11:888-94.
Colour: none
Symbol: barmaids
Technic: fuga per canonem
for Raoul (11:88; see 10:609) (also Sweets of Sin at 11:156-57)Jingle (11:245 etc.; see 4:303)
God’s curse (11:285; see 10:1119-20)
Boylan with impatience (11:289 and 436; se 10:486)
(hold that fellow with the: hold him now) (11:450-51; see 10:904-5)
Richie Goulding (11:358 and 521 etc.; see 3:61-98 and 10:471)
Ben Howth, the rhododendrons (11:582; see 8:911)
Crosseyed Walter (11:648; see 3:67)
Love’s old sweet song (11:681; see 4:314)
Hands felt for the opulent (11:692; see 10:611-12)
Symmetry under a cemetery wall (11:833; see 7:165-70)
(her heaving embon) (11:1106; see 10:616)
Robert Emmet (11:1275; see 6:967-68 and 10:764)
In The Odyssey Odysseus encounters the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, who eats several of his men. Note how the idea of one eye gets used in this episode, both metaphorically (lack of a two-eyed perspective, whether bigotry and one-eyed nationalism or wide-eyed optimism, as in many of the interpolations) and in the chapter’s language (see, for example, 12:3 and 12:6). “Sirens” took place in a world dominated by women, and this episode is a world of men. Note how this pattern continues in the next two episodes. The men in Barney Kiernan’s pub think, mistakenly, that Bloom has won money on Throwaway’s surprise victory in the Gold Cup horse race (see 12:1218-28 and 12:1552-58). Ulysses has carefully shown how this mistake has come about, but the details are easy to miss. Look back at these passages: 5:519-48, 8:1006-23, and 10:506-19.
a) Note also that the handout announcing Alexander J. Dowie’s “Elijah is coming” lecture is called a “throwaway”: 8:6, 8:57-60, 10:294-95, and 10:1096-99.
b) And note the horses’ names and their possible relevance to Ulysses: the favorite Sceptre was beaten by the 20-to-1 outsider Throwaway. (actual result of the race on June 16, 1904.)
When you get to the list of Irish heroes (12:176-99), resist the temptation to skip to the end and, instead, read the list through. Apart from the humor, do you see any point being made? Note Bloom’s Freudian slip at 12:767-69. The chapter’s persistent anti-Semitism and xenophobia are obvious, but note how easily the anger and hatred spread to almost any named group or any person. Note the relation of the language to the ongoing story–is anything changing in Ulysses? See, for example, the passage after the narrator says that Bloom would put a “soft hand under a hen” (12:845), the report of John Wyse Nolan’s wedding after he declares that Ireland will become “treeless” (12:1258), or the passage following Bloom’s statement about love (12:1493).
Colour: none
Symbol: fenian
Technic: gigantism
Challenge: apotheosis
Virag, the Bloom family’s original name (12:1639)
Bob Doran and the “little sleepwalking bitch he married, Mooney” (12:398; see “The Boarding House” in Dubliners)
dishonoured wife (12:1163-64; see 2:390 and 9:256-60)
Throwaway (12:1218-28 and 1552-58; see question in Thoughts and Questions)
the man in the Macintosh (12:1497-98; see 6:805, 6:894 95, and 10:1271)
Crofton (12:1589; see “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” in Dubliners)
Bloom the dentist (12:1638; see 10:1115)
8At the end of the episode, Bloom starts to write something in the sand but then stops. He writes “I. / AM. A.” (13:1256-65). What do you think he is writing?
Colour: grey, blue
Symbol: virgin
Technic: tumescence, detumescence
lieutenant Mulvey (13:889)
the mantelpiece clock that says Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuckoo (13:1289-1306)
Felt for the curves inside her deshabille. (13:796; see 10:611-12)
O, Mairy lost the pin of her. (13:803; see 5:281)
Mary, Martha. (13:805-6; see 5:289)
To aid gentleman in literary (13:835; see 8:326-27)
Bold hand: Mrs Marion. (13:843; see 4:244-45)
Chap in the Burton today. (13:876; see 8:653-67)
After Glencree dinner that was (13:891; see 10:536 etc.)
Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls. (13:906 and 942; see 4:437-43)
Mullingar. . . . Young student. (13:927-28; see 4:250 and 406)
that frump today. A.E. Rumpled stockings. (13:930-31; see 8:523-48)
Beef to the heel. (13:931-32; see 4:403)
Mrs Beaufoy, Purefoy (13:959; see 4:502-3, 8:276-77, and ahead in episode 14)
Lemons it is. Ah no, that’s the soap. (13:1042-43; see 5:5091-8, 6:494-96)
fellow today at the graveside in the brown Macintosh (13:061-62; see 6:805 and 891-98, 10:1271-72, 12:1497-98)
Howth (13:1097-1110; see 8:897-916)
Care of P.O. Dolphin’s Barn. Are you not happy in your? Naughty darling. (13:1105-8; see 5:241-56, 11:897-900)
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. (13:1110-11; see 9:1041-46)
Metempsychosis. (13:1118; see 4:336-43)
Gabriel Conroy’s brother (13:1126; see “The Dead”)
Mirus Bazaar (13:1166-67; see 8:1162-63, 10:1268-69)
Gold Cup (13:1174-75; see 5:532, 7:388, 8:814, 8:1008, 12:1217)
Dearest Papli (13:1198; see 4:397)
U.p.: up. (13:1239; see 8:277-78, 12:258, 12:1031)
Dreamt last night? (13:1240-41; see 3:365-69)
Almost every phrase in 13:1279-85 has appeared before.
–In “Oxen” each paragraph relates the ongoing story in a different style, and note how each style affects not only how the story is told but what is told. Look, for example, at
14:264-76: would the Bloom we have seen in the earlier episodes use the phrase “so dark is destiny” to describe Rudy’s death?
–Other examples are at 14:429-54, 14:529-650, or 14:1407-39.
The episode begins before the formation of English as a language system, and so the first long paragraph (14:7-32) is unable to work itself into grammatically complete sentences. At the end (from 14:1391 on), the doors open and the men enter the streets headed for Burke’s pub (just as baby Purefoy enters the world), and the language breaks down into all kinds of drunken slang.
–From 14:70 to 14:1390, there are 40 paragraphs, corresponding to the 40 weeks of pregnancy.The Homeric parallel is the sin against fertility when Odysseus’s men murder the oxen of Helios, the sun god. Look at the many different ways in which the drunken men “sin” against fertility in the episode. Examples: 14:225-26, 318-19, 1002-3.
Note the way Bloom is described at 14:859-65, 928-30, 1038-77, and 1163-67.
–And Stephen at 14:1123-25 and 1294-95.
–And Bloom, within all the verbiage, first pays direct attention to Stephen in this episode (14:271-76) and remembers meeting him years earlier (14:1357-78).
The paragraph at 14:1344-55 is often taken as a comment on the next episode, “Circe.” Note 14:1537-38: Mulligan and another one of the men seem to have deserted Stephen and the others.
How’s that for high?”
Colour: white
Symbol: mothers
Technic: embryonic development
Helios: Horne
Oxen: Fertility
Crime: Fraud
Lenehan’s Expecting each moment to be her next. (14:178; see 12:1650)
the kindest hand that ever laid husbandly hand under hen (14:183-84; see 12:845)
Lynch (14:190, 410 etc.; see A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter V)
by potency of vampires mouth to mouth (14:243-44; see 7:525)
Joseph the joiner (14:315; see 1:586)
hast thou sinned against my light (14:370 and 1576; see 2:361)
adiaphane (14:385; see 3:8)
clasp, sunder . . . Edenville (14:393,398; see 3:39, 47)
Alec. Bannon . . . a skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel (14:497, 502-3; see 1:684-85, 4:403, 407-8)
he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll . . . (14:508-9; see 13:1240-41)
The black panther! (14:1025; see 1:57)
The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father. (14:1033-34; see 1:555-57)
Agendath . . . Netaim (14:1086-87; see 4:191-92)
Parallax (14:1089; see 8:110)
who met us as we left the field. Conmee himself! (14:1154; see 10:199-202)
pluterperfect imperturbability (14:1288; see 2:328)
Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time. (14:1456-57; see 9:1164)
Opera he’d like? Rose of Castile. Rows of cast. (14:1510-11; see 7:514, 591)
Bloo? Cadges ads. Photo’s papli (14:1535-36; see 4:397)
whatten tunket’s yon guy in the mackintosh? (14:1546: see 6:805 and 891-98, 10:1271-72, 12:1497-98, 13:1061-62)
Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy (14:1578-79; see 908-9)
Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the lamb. . . . Alexander J Christ Dowie (14:1580, 1584; see 8:9-14)
The Homeric parallels are getting thinner and thinner. In The Odyssey Circe has the power to transform men into swine, and transformation pervades the episode. Bloom’s identity and appearance change regularly, and so do most other details. But would you describe the episode as primarily involving transformation? Or would you describe it in some other way?
–Note the dog and its changing species: see, among other places, 15:247, 356, 532, 659, 663, 667, 672, 706, etc. etc.
2) On a psychological level, Bloom and Stephen each “experience” six “visions” or “fantasies” or “hallucinations” or “nightmares.” (But it isn’t at all certain that they actually experience these scenes on any conscious level.) These are:
Bloom:
1) accusations: father, Molly, Mrs Breen (15:212-576)
2) masochism: more accusations, trial (15:676-1278)
3) political career (15:1355-1956)
4) Lipoti Virag (grandfather) (15:2299-2639)
5) Bella/Bello, nymph (15:2750-3479)
6) Boylan (15:3726-3863)
Stephen:
1) end of the world (15:2139-2278)
2) Artifoni and Philip Drunk/Sober (15:2501-39)
3) Simon Cardinal Dedalus (15:2654-92)
4) race (Deasy), Maginni and dance, mother (15:3942-4245)
5) street: Biddy the Clap and Cunty Kate (15:4438-4564)
6) Black Mass (15:4661-4718)
+ Bloom’s final “vision” of Stephen at the end (15:4955-67)
These visions apparently occur within an instant of “real” time. See Zoe’s words to Bloom, interrupted for the reader by 17 pages of Bloom’s vision: “Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.” (15:1353) and “Talk away till you’re black in the face.” (15:1958).
In light of “Circe” as an episode turning the characters’ psyches inside out, look back at the “Oxen of the Sun” paragraph at 14:1344-55.Odysseus was protected by an herb called “moly.” What might be Bloom’s equivalent here that protects him against the dangers of Nighttown? But “Circe” involves more than the characters’ psyches. Several details come only from the previous narration, a level of the text not available to the characters. See, for example, the “Cyclops” “I”-narrator at 15:1143-49, Black Liz the rooster at 15:3709-11 (previously in “Cyclops” at 12:846-49), John Wyse Nolan in a forester’s uniform (15:3304-6, earlier in “Cyclops” at 12:1258-68 etc.).
–And, what about Edy Boardman and Cissy Caffrey in this episode? Are they “really” there? Were they “really” there in “Nausicaa”? See 15:41 etc., 88 etc,, 4380 etc. and compare “Nausicaa” 13:12-13 etc. and 13:270-80.
Everything talks in “Circe”: bells (15:180), Stephen’s cap (15:2096-2113), a gasjet (15:2279), a doorhandle (15:2693), etc. Hugh Kenner once wrote, “As Ulysses is The Odyssey transposed and rearranged, ‘Circe’ is Ulysses transposed and rearranged” (in Clive Hart and David Hayman, ed., James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: Critical Essays, p. 356).
Some events apparently “really” did happen: some kind of incident happened at Westland Row Station, and Mulligan deserted Stephen and Lynch (15:636); Bloom decided to follow Stephen into the red-light district (15:639-40); Bloom goes into Bella Cohen’s brothel (15:2029 etc.); Stephen and Lynch are already in the brothel (15:2071); Stephen raises his ashplant (a walking stick) and damages a chandelier (15:4243-45); Bloom pays Bella Cohen for the damages (15:4267-91); back on the street, Stephen insults a soldier by seeming to speak disrespectfully of the English King (15:4436-37, 4596-98, 4644-46), and the soldier knocks him down (15:4747-50); Bloom, with Corny Kelleher’s help, gets rid of the police who stop to see what has happened (15:4807 etc.) and is left alone with Stephen (15:4924 etc.).
Another summary of Bloom’s day (or, rather, of the 12 episodes in the middle section of Ulysses) appears at 15:1941-52.
Bloom hears Stephen mumble “Fergus” and thinks he might be referring to someone named Ferguson, maybe a girlfriend (15:4929-51). But look back to 1:239-41.
Colour: none
Symbol: whore
Technic: hallucination
Note the number of different ways that Bloom and Stephen fail to connect, despite Bloom’s efforts. Examples are the conversation they hear in Italian (16:314-19) or their attempt to discuss music (16:1733-69; but see Bloom’s response to Stephen’s voice when Stephen starts to sing: 16:1820 etc.). See the summary of their attempts to communicate at 16:774-76.
–Late in the episode, though, Bloom is explicitly described as “like his father” (16:1567-69), and a different explanation is given for this apparent inability to communicate (16:1579-81).
–Finally, almost at the end, Stephen asks a direct question, and Bloom is able to answer it (16:1708-13).
–And their topics of conversation at the end include “sirens” and “usurpers” (16:1889-91).
Note Bloom’s direct offer to Stephen at 16:1621-23 and the plans that start to run through his head (16:1652-61). And note Stephen’s impression as he links arms with Bloom (16:1721-24).
Bloom and Stephen encounter D.B. Murphy (who arrived in Dublin on the ship Stephen saw at the end of Proteus; 3:502-5). He is a sailor full of boasts and lies, including knowing Simon Dedalus in the circus (16:411-12)–a false returner to Dublin / Ithaca. Bloom tells Stephen about the incident with the Citizen in “Cyclops” and says that he knows he isn’t technically Jewish (16:1081-87). Note Bloom’s increasingly passionate statements and Stephen’s reactions (16:1081-1171). Bloom sees the late edition of the Evening Telegraph, which includes the newspaper report of Paddy Dignam’s funeral (16:1248-61; see 6:880-906). Note the people who are named who weren’t there (M’Coy, even Stephen) and that the mysterious mourner now has a name: M’Intosh. And look at what has happened to Bloom’s name in the article. The paper also includes the details of the Gold Cup horse race, with Throwaway’s surprise victory (16:1274-94).
Appropriate to the Odyssey episode about Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, Bloom thinks about a return after twenty years (the length of time of Odysseus’s absence) (16:1307 etc.). Earlier, he thought about D.B. Murphy’s return after seven years (16:422-40). Somewhat indirectly, Bloom confronts his own marital situation at 16:1379-86. He goes on, though (contradiction?), to show Stephen a photo of Molly (16:1425-39). He also thinks about adultery at 16:1529-52.
Colour: none
Symbol: sailors
Technic: narrative (old) [compare "Telemachus" and "Calypso"]
Mulligan’s “rescue of that man from certain drowning” (16:292; see 3:317-20)
the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris, the Invincible (16:323-24; see 7:640-42)
lend me your valise and I’ll post you the ticket (16:523-24; see 5:149)
many phrases from Sweets of Sin and Molly’s morning conversation in 16:1465-75; see 10:608-17, 4:326 and 336)
pump Stephen about Miss Ferguson (16:1559-60; see 15:4929-51 and 1:239-41)
that mongrel in Barney Kiernan’s (16:1790-91; see 12:119 20 and 704-55, 13:232-33)
In this supposedly objective chapter, note the details that are missing in Bloom’s budget (17:1456-78) and in Bloom’s account of his day to Molly (17:2250-70).Bloom is “home” when “he kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her [Molly's] rump” (17:2241). Look back at the dream Stephen had, which is recounted twice (3:364-69, 9:1206-8). In other details, Stephen’s dream has been connected to one of Bloom’s (see 13:1240-41).
Joyce wanted the episode’s last question–”Where?” (17:2331, p. 607)–to be answered by a fairly large dot. He wrote to his French printer: “La réponse à la dernière demande est un point.” When the mark wasn’t big enough to please him, he wrote, “Comme réponse un point bien visible” and again “Ce point doit être plus visible.” He got his point in the first edition, although no one has ever been certain about just how big Joyce wanted it to be. But subsequent editions have repeatedly messed up the point–proofreaders and printers keep thinking the dot is a smudge and take it out. Some printings of the Gabler edition are missing this dot/point/mark. If your copy of Ulysses lacks one, put one in as an act of textual restoration.
Colour: none
Symbol: comets
Technic: catechism (impersonal) [compare "Nestor"]
Penelope has slept through and is unaware of the slaughter. Odysseus’s approach to Penelope is extraordinarily circumspect, not only remain when he is in disguise and wants to remain unknown to her (Book 19) but also when he reveals himself to her in Book 23. She in her turn is painfully slow to accept the ragged, blood- begrimed “beggar” as her husband.
Molly Bloom
in Molly’s thoughts: Leopold Bloom, Mulvey, Lt. Gardner & many other people from Gibraltar and Dublin
Joyce called “Penelope” the “indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity” .This would mean that both this episode and “Ithaca” make up the ending of Ulysses. In The Odyssey Penelope held off her suitors by telling them she would choose one of them when she finished weaving a burial robe for Odysseus’s father, and then unraveling each night what she wove during the day. Does Penelope’s strategy find an equivalent in Joyce’s episode?
Joyce described the episode as being like the earth spinning and Molly’s monologue keeps circling around and around various topics. For example, follow her many uses of “yes” in the episode, and especially her uses of both “no” and “yes” in the last of the episode’s eight “sentences” (18:1368-1609; pp. 638-44). Or follow her use of “he”–especially the many times where the pronoun might refer to more than one particular man. The episode’s style–eight long paragraphs without any punctuation (except for two periods)–is both famous and notorious.
Joyce never visited Gibraltar, and his depiction of Molly’s memories of growing up there is built up entirely from guidebooks and other printed sources. It is the only time he tried to describe in detail a place he had never seen. Notice how many times Molly’s thoughts support information that we already have from Bloom, but also how many times her perspective contradicts his. And sometimes she does both.
Molly has always been a controversial character. In the early days some readers were horrified at such a fully sexualized female character. More recently, readers and critics have paid more attention to how Joyce presented his one fully realized female character, especially in comparison with his presentation of the many male characters in the book.
The last words of Ulysses are famous, but what is Molly saying “yes” to? In what tone of voice is she saying “yes I said yes I will Yes”?Schema: Art: none
Organ: flesh
Colour: none
Symbol: earth
Technic: monologue (female) [compare "Proteus"]
