Puffing and Blowing; the citizen, Reduced
Is the common image of the citizen wrong?
Post Five
Don’t know about you but the citizen struck me as a large powerful chap with not only a stroppy mouth but the muscle to back it up. Perhaps such view was influenced by the man largely regarded as the character’s inspiration, Michael Cusack. He was a champion shot-putter, broad and musclebound if not over tall. Then there’s the parodist’s description of the ‘figure seated on the large boulder’ and we would be forgiven for expecting a gigantic dangerous rogue, prone to violence and of whom Bloom should rightly be scared. He certainly talks a good game.
But Joyce through Gilbert tells us that the episode technic is Gigantism so we are wary of reality being artificially inflated for effect.
It’s therefore a surprise but not a huge one to hear our narrator describe the citizen chasing after Bloom…”getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy..” not to mention Gerty MacDowell adding further grist to this mill next episode.
We may need to recalibrate our view of the citizen.
For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com
© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023
Poldy, scald the Teapot!
Does Bloom scald that teapot as instructed? A lot may turn on it.
Post four
Molly shouts down the stairs to Bloom to remember to scald the teapot. We will learn that whilst Bloom likes to do as he’s told especially by Molly, he also gets a bit of a thrill in the disobeying. A bit like that mouse being toyed with by the cat; ‘Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.’
So it will be an interesting incite into his character and the marriage dynamic if he in fact does scald the teapot. I can’t claim to be an expert in teapot temperature regulation but I note that whilst he does indeed scald the teapot, he then rinses it, which I doubt is going to help. Things look bleak as the teapot is left while he reads Milly’s letter and starts to fry the kidney. Gloomier still when upon presentation of breakfast in bed, we note that Molly holds her cup ‘nothandle’ indicating tepid at best and confirmed by her swallowing not sipping.
Oh Leopold you naughty boy, have you just sealed your fate and did you do it on purpose?
For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com
© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023
The Promised Land is no Place Like Home
Stephen thinking Sion is less about Kevin Egan and more about Leopold Bloom
Post Three
Zion. It’s become an emotionally charged word. It’s mentioned over 150 times in the bible (I love the internet) and six times in Ulysses. Strictly it is the hill on which the City of David (Jerusalem) was first built around 900 BCE but its broader meaning has (at some point in the last three millennia) come to refer to causes and for our purposes, its first reference is in Proteus in the context of Kevin Egan in Paris.
‘Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.’
The steady hands that once lit Fenian fuse wire now weak and wasted, shake to light his cigarette. Stranded in Paris like the beached whales we shortly encounter, he yearns to be reunited with the cause that no longer needs him. For to continue the psalm playing in Stephen’s head, how can he sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
That Stephen thinks ‘Sion’ is in addition to whatever else it might be, one of Stephen’s many subconscious premonitions of Bloom, a man he doesn’t know. For Egan’s Zion, his Promised Land, should not be ridding Ireland of the British; at least not just that. Like Bloom, he needs to worry more about issues much closer to home. His wife has thrown him out, his son mocks him and his life is a daily crusade of failing to find a willing audience on his regular pub crawl. He doesn’t even vary the pubs.
Next chapter, Bloom’s mood undulates as he contemplates a Jewish homeland in then Turkish Palestine. But he needs to realise (and he subliminally does) that his Promised Land is not in the Levant but rather around the corner in the jingly bed in 7 Eccles Street. I succumb to temptation to mention enormous melons. Bloom and Egan need to worry more about the problems at the end of their noses and less of far flung causes, of whatever worth.
So there you have it. Stephen thinking Sion, might be as much (though he doesn’t know it) about Bloom as Egan or futile causes generally. Moreover it’s not simply semantics, he reveals that Egan has fallen into the trap that may also endanger Bloom; misreading the grid reference location of one’s Promised Land.
Well, it could be anyway. The beauty of Ulysses is that there are very few wrong answers when one allows one’s mind to expand.
For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com
© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023
You Say Tomatoes, She say Met Him Pike Hoses
Post Two
Joyce in a letter to Harriet Shaw-Weaver revealed a certain scepticism for books with ‘goahead plot’. He felt it dispensable. Drama he said elsewhere, was for the journalists. So with Ulysses, ignoring phantasmagorical earthquakes, flying chariots and whatnot, not a great deal happens. Such plot as exists is largely driven by Bloom’s suspicion/expectation that Molly will be unfaithful to him that afternoon. But why does he think this?
The main clue is the letter from the would-be lover impresario Blazes Boylan, that arrives in that morning’s post. This is no great mystery, for in Calypso Molly tells Bloom that the letter is from Boylan and that he’s informing her firstly of the programme for next week’s tour of Ulster and secondly that he’ll be dropping in at 4pm that afternoon to discuss it further. We will know many episodes later that he signs off with the business-like ‘Yours ever, Hugh Boylan’ but otherwise, we do not know what else the letter says.
Bloom’s background information, for example the walk along the river Tolka and him observing Molly and Boylan’s secret hand signals (or so Bloom suspects), will seep through in subsequent episodes and he may well be suspicious of Boylan’s true agenda. This is compounded by him seeing Molly hide the letter under her pillow for more private reading. So it may not be entirely business-like.
But there is something else, something more subtle and if not quite a smoking gun then enough to challenge common claims that we must await episode 18 to discover what goes on with Molly and Boylan.
Calypso contains the very famous metempsychosis conversation with Molly asking Bloom what the word means. He explains it’s a Greek derived word meaning reincarnation, the transmigration of souls which is of course one of the book’s essential themes. She then retorts with ‘met him pike hoses’. This isn’t quoted in Calypso but we find out in Lestrygonians that that is what she said in the course of conversation either then or at least before Bloom leaves for Westland Row at about 9.30 a.m. Bloom later thinks of Molly’s endearing habit whereby she corrupts words into others more familiar to her. So metempsychosis which she doesn’t understand converts to met him pike hoses which to her at any rate, means something.
So what does it mean and what does it reveal?
Molly is pretty straightforward. That is established at the very start. So why not give Met Him its ordinary meaning. That she has met or will be meeting someone. And as the word ‘metempsychosis’ featured in the smutty book she was reading, we might give ‘met him’ rather smutty overtones. Pike, we shall return to; let us think about Hoses. Having just read Proteus we might be prepped for words having more than one meaning, that the meaning of words might reincarnate within other words. So hose suggests trousers as well as something long phallic and wriggly. Pike also is a phallic shaped slippery wriggly fish or otherwise something phallic, rigid and hard; either way, it’s lurking inside his trousers.
What with the smut of Paul de Kock’s novel as well as Boylan’s letter, it seems Molly has sex on her mind and it spills out in this corruption of ‘metempsychosis’. No wonder Bloom is concerned!
There is also something else, something psychologically subtle but Joyce is fond of subtleties. Is Molly trying to bare her soul to Bloom? To tell him without telling him? Just as Bloom leaves unlocked the drawer containing Martha Clifford’s letters? We know by episode 18 Penelope, that Molly is determined to be brazen about her infidelity as much to save the marriage as hurt Bloom and I wonder if this is a foreshadowing of that.
Just a thought.
Fore more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com
© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023
A Rock and a Hard Place
Post One
I have been catching up on the excellent U22 The Centenary Ulysses Podcast (u22pod.com) recently as we build up to the 2nd February 2022 centenary. The latest was on ‘chapter’ Nine, Scylla & Charybdis. This difficult episode set in the National Library, is against the Homeric context of the fleet sailing through a very narrow passage that we now know as the Straits of Messina, where it must pass either by the cliff of Scylla on one side and the small rock of Charybdis on the other. This rock is marked by a single fig tree. Should they hug the cliff or veer close to the small rock? High up in the cliff lives Scylla the dragon. She has six long necks each topped with a head of nasty razor teeth. Sail too close and she will swoop to kill six of the crew. She cannot as Odysseus foolishly thinks, be beaten. Better avoid and go for the fig tree. Well that’s no plain sailing either. For underneath lurks a whirlpool and that will destroy the entire fleet. So no good choices.
An entertaining aspect of the U22 Podcast is to hear the views of students and others fairly new to Ulysses. This provides fresh energy and fascinating insight. But they considered both options to be terrible, leading to certain death. On this basis there is no choice as one naturally would opt for Scylla, the lesser of two evils and hope to lose only six. I don’t think this is quite right. The whirlpool Charybdis is not a constant. Rather it occurs three times a day and so there is a prospect of passing by it entirely unscathed. Now we have real choice. Definite loss of six against potential loss of all but possible loss of none. That brings in appraisal of risk and calculation of odds.
It’s a really tricky chapter and as if we don’t have enough to grapple with, we wonder why a genteel discussion of literature in the National Library is paralleled with Homeric Scylla and Charybdis which is red in tooth and claw. But understanding this real choice illuminates the various lifestyle and artistic choices facing Stephen and which lurk subliminally within the text and suddenly it makes a lot (or at least a bit) more sense. I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to consider the chapter but I believe it provides a reasonable framework and significantly leads to Bloom’s vital contribution (by his checking the backsides of statues!) which enables our understanding of the chapter as well as facilitates Stephen’s choice analysis.
For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com
© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021 -2023