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.
Gosh golly I missed most of that. Cheers B and C. Will definitely have to go back and reread those last pages as you suggest. Skimming it on a noisy plane was not sufficient.
btw on that sentence you picked out: “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name.” Oscar Wilde was famously gay ‘love that dare not speak it’s name’, he even went to prison for it. I don’t know how this relates to Stephen and the story.
Oh and what does ‘Ineluctable’ and ‘diaphane’ mean? And ‘ashplant’?
Sasha is a CHEATER!
Ineluctable – undeniable or inescapable
Diaphane – this one is slightly difficult, it usually refers to a property of minerals, specifically their transparency. the opposite property is the mineral’s opacity (Adiaphane in the text), so I think clarity or translucence are rough substitutes.
Ashplant is a walking stick. Catie found some reference online about the shape of the stick having some significance, but without that knowledge it can still be gleaned that it’s his sword/staff/walking stick from the context.
Where’s your post?!