The Ulysses Experiment

Week 4 is a relief from week 3 and nicely comprehensible. We meet Leopold Bloom for the first time. He’s eating his offal breakfast, which sounds rather gross and tasty at the same time. He feeds his cat, which in my head is Lars. (btw my neighbour’s looking for a home for 1 or 2 of her cats if you’re interested B & C). We also know there is a lady asleep upstairs, although we’re not sure who she is. Bloom goes out to buy some kidney meat. Joyce goes off on a Bloom thought ramble about the places he’s walking by, the people he meets, etc. In the shop Bloom tries to get served quickly so he can follow a young lady with sexy hips ‘hams’, but she’s gone by the time he is served. He gets back and the woman is his wife Molly – some singer or performer. We also learn they have a daughter Milly who is a 15 year old music student living away from home for the first time. Bloom seems to have some sexual desires for his daughter he tries and fails to stop.  Bloom, or ‘Poldy’ as Molly calls him, makes Molly’s tea. You get the impression Bloom is very affectionate and doting toward Molly, but that she is also quite a strong tough lady – the trouser wearer perhaps. Someone called Dignam has his funeral today. Bloom burns the kidney, eats it, and goes out to take a dump.  Bloom might be a writer or journalist but I am not sure.

Before when reading Ulysses I kept finding myself wandering off in my mind, and losing track of the text. I thought it was because of my own lack of concentration. But actually now I think it’s partly the book itself that causes you to drift off and get lost. There will be something in the text that will prompt a related thought, and by the time you’ve stopped thinking of it – perhaps only a few seconds – the text has jumped to something else and you lose the connection. It’s like the jumpy thought patterns of the text cause jumpy thought patterns in the reader. Or maybe it IS just lack of concentration. mmm

Well on top of being rather later this week (technically last week), I don’t have much to say. I must admit, this section was a bit too oblique for me, and it was only with the help of my fellow experimenters that I understood some parts. And even then knowing what I was supposed to be looking out for, and following Ben’s advise reading the last 4 pages, I stil hardly noticed it e.g. the wank scene. I also misunderstood, thinking he had visited an uncle. Again thanks to fellow experimenters for putting me straight on that. I suppose the thing I find most frustrating is the number of words I don’t understand (perhaps Israel has it a bit worse and i shouldn’t complain.) and the number cultural / historical references I know nothing about. I feel like I should be sitting with a dictionary and Encyclopedia Britanica or something. But I have to say after reading Israel’s post, I’m going to approach how to read this in from different angle and try not get bogged down in what I don’t understand. Rather enjoy what I do, and try to just flow along in what I don’t. So thanks to my fellow experimenters once again. Sorry for not adding much this week and for only really talking about myself I just realised. Oh well, I’m sure I’ve broken another rule now

A “paja mental” is a spanish expression that I think it fits with the pages we read this time. Literary means a “mental jerk” which is what I think Stephen suffers in his brain before having a real one. The author tries to put on words every single thought Stephen has while having a stroll in the beach. So any attempt to find a meaning is useless (unless you are Freud or an argentinian…) I did read once that this is what made Joyce´s book so relevant at the time. It supposed a revolution in the rule of writing, basically becouse he does not follow any. The sense of being lost in translation when reading the story can make you throwing the towel and stop reading it… till you realize that you need to change the traditional way of reading a story in order to enjoy the book. Here there is not an structure, just strokes without an aparent conection. In this sense it is like an abstract painting, you cannot approach it as realist picture where you can identify the pictures and the landscape but like a mass of colours put in such a way that can provoke a strong feeling in you without knowing the reason why. This is the success of the Ulysses, you like it but you dont know why.

I agree with Sasha, this section was particularly difficult to follow.

What’s more difficult to follow though may be my notes- e.g. “a man, a woman, a dog, paranoia” and “placed a booger on a ledge”- valuable stuff. “Diaphane?” “Elsinore’s tempting flood.” “Danevikings.”

The basic summary goes like this:

Stephen leaves the school, and considers a visit to his Aunt’s house while walking on the beach. A man, a woman, a dog, and apparently some paranoia, walk by, while Stephen is almost entirely preoccupied by his own thoughts. He thinks back to his time in Paris, where he learned that his mother was dying.

Done.

So simple.  Except for that part where he worries that his ashplant will float away.  Because that’s the part of the story where Stephen rubs one out to the memory of a passing foot belonging to a young French lass.

Now, I must admit to cheating. First I looked up both the words “ineluctable” and “diaphane”. Second, I re-read a lot. A lot a lot. I’ve re-read the last 4 pages about five times now, and you should too. The words made no sense whatsoever, and I found myself completely lost from sentence to sentence, so I kept going back.

Just as the man can shroud the act of completing math exercises in a few mystifyingly esoteric sentences, here we receive four monstrous pages, gridlocked with words, all to describe a single session of public masturbation.  Insane, really.

“Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.”

That is apparently Joycian for “my penis is in my hand.”

There are other parts to the passage, and they’re probably quite important. Stephen tears the end of the headmaster’s letter off to make a note for himself, I have no idea what it is or why he writes it.  He’s also losing his teeth.  He puts his nose pickings carefully on a rock ledge.  The end.

as sasha has noted its getting a bit denser…… i had to re-read many sentences and paragraphs, though in the end, scarcely anything in the way of action happens in this section. stephen walks along the shore and he thinks. he thinks of the history of his country and the land he walks and of the history of himself—of his father (who is maybe dead? or at least estranged) and his mother and his aunt and uncle (who he thinks about visiting but in the end does not) and his brother and of Paris and of a woman. [he also sees a dead dog and thinks about that drowned man. some other people are walking along the shore and their dog finds the dead dog and then digs something up and the much beloved  fox burying his grandmother riddle makes an encore.] eventually he tears off a piece of the headmaster’s letter and he sits down and writes a bit. then he jerks off, using language and morbidity to get off—’in a quivering of minnows’. awesome. also awesome: ‘oomb, all-wombing tomb’. [i hope to do drawings on these eventually but if i don't in the end at least know i meant to.] he has no handkerchief—-mulligan took it?—so he leaves his seed where it has fallen and leaves some snot on a rock.

i also wanted to say that i like how joyce uses these very tangible items like the letter and the handkerchief to carry what action there is through these heady sections.

I don’t have much to say, nor a drawing to post.  The passage from p. 28 to 45 was short and essentially dull, save a paragraph that I totally cannot decipher:

“Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes.”

That much I think I get, but then-

“Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors.  Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.”

No clue.  Maybe a fancy dance of words for math or script.

Other things anew: a disappointed bridge- while clever, is also useless, lost on his audience… again the mention of the proof- Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather- I think Stephen feels bad about being an integral part of others’ drunken amusement, the witty clown.

We found out Stephen is a debter, owing to Mulligan and a dozen others, which is why Buck gets to keep the key.  9 pounds to Buck, which is maybe 3 weeks pay?  2 weeks?  a month? 3.12 & the pain of a lecture.

Oh yeah, and I really can’t think of a reason why jewish people would be FOR hoof and mouth disease, so Stephen’s headmaster must be a fucking dolt.

ADDENDUM:

After some research, a bit more on the paragraph-  the Moors are generally attributed with the invention of Algebra.

So the first two sentences describe the student’s math (not writing or script) exercises- maybe some quadratic equations.  The hats of squares and cubes are like I first thought, superscript 2’s and 3’s.  “Give hands” is likely the operations, +-*/, “Traverse, bow to partner” refers to the order of operations, parenthesis, multiplication, and division going before addition and subtraction.  So in the course of solving, the various operands bow to the ones that must go first.  All the numbers having started as little imps for the Moors to play with.

Averroes and Moses Maimonides are two of the three great thinkers of the Middle Ages, Aquinas (Catholic) is omitted.  All three were castigated by their respective religious authorities and communities, despite later being recognized as among the greatest thinkers in history.  Mien is manner or conduct, for the record.

So I think Joyce might just be mocking authority (and the authority of knowledge?).  Calling their collective efforts a darkness because that’s how their work was regarded by their contemporaries.  Calling those contemporaries the brightness because that is how they perceived themselves- bright, correct.  Meanwhile the brightness is blind to the truth and greatness that sits in its midst.  The flashing mirrors could be mirrors used to communicate with code, their flashing code analogous to mathematics and its code of numbers, which may very well describe the soul of the world.  Isn’t math often regarded as one of the only absolute truths of the world? (Interesting read.) Or maybe the flashes refers to the bits of realization by authorities of the Middle Ages that these men could be correct in their thinking, and upset the status quo.

With respect to the where and how of this paragraph, it sounds to me like Stephen might be comparing himself to great thinkers of the world, and feels like he’s surrounded by a bunch of people who don’t understand what he understands, and who are going to mistake the next giant leap forward in knowledge and understanding as another form of blasphemy, repeating the mistakes of the Middle Ages.  In the very next scene, Stephen is confronted by that very problem, the headmaster who thinks it’s foolish to think of God as a shout on the street, who blames the Jews for hoof and mouth disease, but who considers himself to be an enlightened and noble educator.  Quite the paragraph.