Chapeau and Hats Off!

Post Fifteen

To call Bloom an ad-man, a Maddison Avenue mad man, is to stretch a point. He’s no Don Draper. He sells a bit of newspaper space to local businesses keen to persuade Dubliners to part with hard earned cash. Yet he thinks like an ad-man, he appraises adverts as he goes through the day and significantly he’s cottoned onto the fact that sex sells, so he may yet have a career in the business; despite Molly’s pleas that he get a steady job. He would no doubt have approved of the natty strapline, If You Want To Get Ahead, Get A Hat, which apparently first appeared in the 1940s and has been rolled out on a regular basis ever since.

Bloom of course wears a hat. It might be a bowler we are not sure. At least not as sure as Joseph Strick was for the 1967 movie in which Milo O’Shea models a fine specimen. For at least early on in Calypso and Lotus Eaters we know it simply as a generic hat. As well as protecting Bloom from weather, clement and inclement, it is also a very useful secret repository for hidden notes and business cards.

Stephen’s headgear is rather more illuminated. Mulligan describes it as his ‘Latin quarter hat’ as he flings it to him in Telemachus. In Proteus Stephen thinks of it as his ‘Hamlet hat’ towards which the passing cockle-picker shoots a glance. We assume it to be black with a widish brim that may be manipulated as bohemian style dictates. Buck Mulligan sports a Panama, de rigour summer wear and indicating a more superior style altogether. Dapper too, like Blazes Boylan’s straw boater which in common with Bloom’s hails from John Plasto hatter, of number one, Brunswick Street.

Martin Cunningham and other mourners appropriately adorn silk, heresiarchs flee St. Michael, mitres awry and there’s an interesting phantasmagorical chap in Nighttown, mysterious in his sombrero. But enough of this, its 1904 Dublin, blokes wore hats. No big deal. Emphasis on blokes because this is the male version of the Ulysses Hat Blog; female and androgynous versions remain in gestation.

What might be of interest is what occurs when hats leave heads and I offer a mere four examples for your delectation

1.      Mr. Leopold Bloom wanders into the maternity hospital in Holles Street to enquire of the wellbeing of Mrs. Purefoy now in her third day of labour. Bloom enters; respectful, full of ruth, greets Nurse Callan, also full of ruth. Two decent sympathetic beings. Bloom naturally removes his hat. If we are to believe what Jimmy Joyce wrote in his explanatory letter of this unfathomable Oxen of the Sun episode (and it’s his book so why wouldn’t we?), the hospital is the womb and Bloom entering it represents the ejaculate so he removing his hat allows the sperm unfettered access to do its business. Just why Joyce considered the hospital to be the womb and Bloom the spermatozoon is the whole point of the Oxen of the Sun episode but that explanation with only a sideways glance to hats, is not for now.

2.      Mr. John Henry Menton holds his silk hat inside the gate of Glasnevin cemetery after paying last respects to the buried Paddy Dignam whom he employed in his solicitors office; until he sacked him. The Hades episode has already given us the measure of this nasty bitter man and we are intrigued as Bloom approaches. He points out that he has a crease in his hat probably having sat on it during the service. Some say that this is Bloom asserting some superiority by pointing out this chink in Menton’s armour. I don’t think so, rather Bloom is doing what comes naturally to him, the decent thing though it is accompanied by mischievous thought.

3.      Mr. Stephen Dedalus is punched to the ground by Private Carr. Bloom comes to his aid which includes retrieving Stephen’s Latin quarter/Hamlet hat as it rolls towards the wall. There Bloom sees an eleven year old boy and you know who he is. If you don’t, read the book, you’re in for a treat.

4.      Mr. Charles Stuart Parnell, uncrowned King of Ireland until he wasn’t, also loses his hat. It is knocked off in a scuffle at the offices of the United Ireland newspaper. Again it is Bloom, retriever Bloom, to the rescue and is rewarded with a ‘thank you’ just as some fifteen years later in 1904, Menton squeezes same words through gritted teeth. Parnell’s gratitude is it seems heartfelt, though we only have Bloom’s recollection as evidence of that and decent chap though he may be, he is prone to a little fantasy.

There we have it. No mind-blowing hat busting conclusions but no taking the pith helmet either, just some tall tales for tall hats.

Chapeau.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Post Fourteen

So says Juliet in the famous balcony scene. Stephen and Bloom were hardly lovers; the book is controversial (and that would have been 1904 dynamite) but this is one direction it does not overtly head, though it does covertly. Buck Mulligan is the gay betrayer but not in that sense, at least as I say, not overtly.

Nevertheless, Bloom and Stephen have common ground, something momentous has passed between them during the brief sojourn in Eccles Street and to misquote, they may well be the two people the aftercourse of whose lives were determined by the striking of that Aeolean match. Whether or not friends they are at some level, soulmates. Dante has found his Virgil and one or both of them have found their Beatrice. So when near the end of the book they part, we might expect after all we have gone through, such parting to be a portentous act. A fateful moment in which they look deep into each other’s eyes and convey serious concluding words. After all, this is the final parting of the two main protagonists of the novel of the century.

The moment is captured in Ithaca:

How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.

There we have it. They stood opposite one another and raised arms in vague attempt at a handshake that may or may not reach fulfilment. And last words? Bloom has gestured and said something concerning the awoken Molly whose paraffin lamp casts a nightly glow in the second floor rear window. We don’t know what he said but its characteristics were of subdued affection, admiration and suggestion. They then urinate out there in the rear yard before Stephen departs via the back alley, into the night and out of our story. Twenty-first century obsession with hygiene may make us grateful for no definitive handshake after their urination but one doubts that to be the reason. The sterile accuracy of Ithaca keeps us guessing as to what occurred. It is certainly not the grand denouement for which we may have hoped. The general nods in Molly’s direction paves the way for all manner of conjecture but very little solid ground.

There are times in life when we must part from those important to us and whose absence will leave a gaping hole. Do not waste such occasions with a bit of a nod and a gesture. If there is something on your mind or in your heart, for goodness sake let them know, otherwise they’ll always be guessing. Just as we do regarding 17th June and beyond.  

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Maria Ewing meets West Ham United

Post Thirteen

Not names one naturally associates with a James Joyce Ulysses blog but bear with me.

I was very sad to hear the news on Tuesday morning that Maria Ewing the opera soprano had died aged only 71. I have not followed her career intently and really only know her for her 1986 performance of Salome in the opera of the same name. The Richard Strauss opera is a highly charged one act piece of devastating power; dealing with incest, cruelty, rape, murder, necrophilia antisemitism and blasphemy to name several aspects and may possibly be my favourite opera. The libretto by Oscar Wilde naturally helps.

It pivots on the dance of the seven veils which Salome performs for her step-father King Herod. It’s obviously allegorical for incestual sex and pretty close to non-consensual. I have three versions of the opera and each in its own way exceptional. In two of them (and in all other versions so far as I know) the soprano’s blushes are spared notwithstanding the removal of the veils. Not so for Maria Ewing, she goes full frontal nudity whilst dancing and having dominated every scene thus far with her wonderful singing and acting. Because for her, the part and so the Art demanded it. A cynic might say it was a gimmick to which others did not need to resort or that it was the Director and she simply did what she was told. I don’t buy that though I will say that the other versions I have are just as wonderful despite an undergarment beneath the last veil. But Maria went for it. She strove!

Just as did Icarus. He felt the need to fly higher than his father and too close to the sun. We don’t know why but like Maria and other great artists he felt compelled to put himself out there. To go further. To strive. Here I link Stephen Dedalus. By making him the son of a Dedalus he becomes Icarus and he sets out in A Portrait his strict conditions for good art. But in Ulysses he like Icarus, gets his wings clipped and is told at the end of Scylla to cease to strive. He need not soar so high to achieve greatness; Lapwings are also entitled to a life. Bloom will guide.

We need both Lapwings and Eagles. Artists like Maria who were willing to push the boundaries not for a gimmick but simply to see where that took them.

My football team West Ham United are brilliant and wonderful. Not because they tend to win, though bizarrely at present we are flying high whereas for most of my life my team has been a source of almost constant disappointment. But there it is, we supporters stick by the team through thick and thin. ‘Tis our lot. West Ham’s song sings of bubbles that fly so high, they nearly reach the sky but like our dreams, they fade and die. Yet we still forever blow bubbles. Ultimately Bloom guides us that we need to be practical because life is real and carries real responsibility. But there is a place for Art. Dirty, disrespectful dangerous Art. Where the likes of Icarus, Maria and a braver version of Stephen Dedalus would go that extra mile without caring if they fall off of the edge or who might get a peep of a bit of skin.

Thanks Maria. I am sad but proud to mark your passing and if you see Bobby Moore, give him my best.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Love: Secrets and Lies

Post Twelve

North London Ulysses launches this week. It’s the second cycle of the book for six of us but this time around we are some 60 strong. With these numbers, it will be a mix of in person and on zoom and I feel such interest indicates the insatiable appetite people have to grapple with and get through Ulysses. The surprise that I hope will be in store for people is that instead of the book being a grind it will be an absolute pleasure. I’ve thought long and hard as to how I would introduce our first meeting this Wednesday. How does one introduce to new readers arguably the greatest novel of the last century?

I’m going with the theme of Love. Because when all’s said and done, I’d say we are dealing with a love story. Molly and Bloom love one another or at least they did several years ago and this notwithstanding the shotgun nature of the marriage back in 1888. But now it is flawed and the story before us, for all its intellectual and aesthetic undercurrents is at its heart, the story of two people trying to rediscover the spark in their relationship in the hope that the love that they once had for each other can be re-kindled. So also a mystery; we are on the hunt for Love.

The rot set in eleven years earlier when their son Rudy died aged only eleven days. Since when the intimacy has evaporated from their marriage and for these last nine months even meaningful conversation has ceased. Yet we know from their inner thoughts the fondness they retain for each other but still the flame barely flickers. As Bloom reminisces in Davy Byrne’s pub: ‘Me. And me now.’ How did it come to this?

Relationships. They are not easy and the Blooms’ is not untypical of a 16 year old marriage. Routine becomes routine and what excitement they enjoy is experienced individually not shared. What I mean by that is that they have secrets from each other. This is not unique; all couples, indeed all human beings one suspects, need private space. A dark corner, a quiet corner that is all one’s own and to which even the dearest lover is not allowed access. Yet if this is allowed to fester, if it contains secrets that one cannot share with a life partner one has to ask, why that would be? There should be very little, save serious criminality that a life partner could not understand and forgive and if that is not the case, one might wonder if the relationship is healthy in the long term.

Honesty begins at home and real honesty is facing up to the fact that if one feels one has to keep secrets from a partner, this is not a partner in the true sense. No doubt this is how it is for many couples and they make it work but it’s a sort of half relationship. Our book seeks more and if you think this is an unrealistic expectation, I think it reflects the frankness of Joyce’s relationship with Nora Barnacle. We may be surprised at and even a little disgusted by the brazenness of some of the letters that passed between them (well, Joyce to Nora, we don’t so far as I know, have the benefit of vice versa) but I think they exemplify the laying bare of their devotion. One may to cast doubt, point to Joyce’s infatuation with Marthe Fleischmann but that was later in the relationship, if it starts going wrong after only 5 years (Rudy dies in 1893) it doesn’t bode well.

Leopold and Molly have allowed mistrust to germinate and take hold in their marriage. She with reason, suspects him of seeing prostitutes and loose women and confidently muses that his jacket does not have enough pockets to hide from her, the condoms among the other secrets. Bloom we discover in Ithaca suspects, wrongly as it transpires, that Molly has been unfaithful for years and with half of Dublin. If they cannot bring themselves to bare souls to one another, the marriage is doomed for a relationship built on manipulated trust has no long term future.

Against such a disheartening backdrop is there hope for Molly and Bloom?? Is our quest for Love forlorn? The loss of a baby is cataclysmic and will test the strongest resolve and devotion. We do not really get to know Molly until the end but it’s our knowledge of Bloom and our understanding of his character that drives the novel and this is so uplifting and compelling, that we are in his and so their corner from the off. There will be downs as well as ups and all told, Bloom will have a torrid day but we shall be optimistic. We hunt for Love in the firm belief that we shall find it, that it shall find us and that Molly and Bloom shall once more find each other. Yes.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Locke is the Key?

Post Eleven

In Episode 18 of his Re: Joyce podcast the late Frank Delaney pointed to a phrase that he claimed to be the most important in the entire book. It appears early in in the first episode Telemachus and so that is quite a claim. I hazard a guess that he goes on to accord such honour to words later in the book as to be fair to him, there are many significant phrases. This though, would be right up there so what is the phrase?

Stephen is trying to take Mulligan to task over a recent insult to him. The nature of the insult, though significant for the book is immaterial to the point here.

Mulligan cannot remember specifics because so he says,

“I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?”

Mention of ideas and sensations says Delaney, resonates with the philosopher John Locke who reasoned that we only learn from experience, direct sensory perception as opposed to having innate knowledge as per the hitherto dominant Cartesian (from Rene Descartes – I think therefore I am) school of thought. All above my pay grade but I can see how this anticipates Stephen’s Platonic/Berkeleyan ruminations along Sandymount Strand and the Plato/Aristotle contrast to be explored in Scylla. All of which feed into deeper understanding of the book.

Joyce famously boasted that a destroyed Dublin could be rebuilt from his book yet he describes very little in detail. It’s all touchy-feely as he frees our minds to create impressions of people, buildings etc. from the vague hints he ferments. Ideas and sensations.

And I join the much missed Frank in his amazement that Joyce casually drops this into an easily overlooked conversation in episode one.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Just Falling With Style

Post Ten

Oh Woody! Why’d you have to go and break the spell? Buzz was sure he was flying.

The flying to falling to flying theme undulates through Ulysses (and underpins Finnegans Wake) arguably stemming from Icarus flying too close to the sun on Daedalian wings before crashing to a watery death. He didn’t rise again unless through metempsychosis, so let’s focus on the Fall.

From the moment in Lotus Eaters when Bloom struggles to recall that the speed of a falling body is 32 feet per second, per second, Joyce conflates falling with Original Sin as represented by the number 32. In A Portrait, Stephen resisted the call of Holy Orders as he intuits his to be a different path:

“The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard, and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.”

Let’s consider some of the many examples of falling in Ulysses. The first three explode in expectoration. The plum stones spat from atop Nelson’s Pillar, the graceful arced jet of hay juice as spat by Corny Kelleher, the Red Bank oyster of phlegm expelled to connote racist contempt by the citizen. The financial: a coin dropped from Molly’s outstretched hand from her bedroom window, for the beggar. The cloacal: five urinations - in Proteus, Cyclops and Ithaca (observed), in Lestrygonians and Scylla (unobserved), the faecal plops of Calypso and (currants) Lestrygonians and the menstrual gush of Penelope. The crashing of a shot-putted biscuit tin (another graceful arc) and Stephen’s body semi-conscious onto the hard road outside of Bella Cohen’s.

Flying not falling; the swooping gulls of Lestrygonians, to feed on the fallen manna from Bloom heaven.

Too many for a short blog so let’s focus on where and how a select few falling bodies land because as they teach you in Judo 101, landing well is half way to rising again.

Plum stones and hay juice both seeds of future creation land on the pavement. A harsh barren artificial surface upon which a natural substance will struggle to find any agent to fertilize. The plum stones represent Irish political hopes and dreams and so Stephen’s parable is pessimistic though maybe people need to understand the depths of the problem in order to work on a solution. The hay juice doesn’t fall directly, rather in a graceful arc. Bloom suspects Kelleher to be a police informer which many consider a sin but perhaps the line of travel indicates a more nuanced picture or perhaps insufficient evidence to convict. In any event it too lies lifeless on the stone ground.

I like Molly’s donation for the beggar that she allows to fall from the bedroom window. It plummets straight down as if to confirm both the sin she’s about to commit and its desperation to leave the scene of the crime. Yet while it too falls on barren pavement it is rescued by a passing schoolboy and placed in its intended womb, the beggar’s floor-dwelling cap. What do we make of that? Molly will commit adultery which depending on one’s religious convictions, is at worst a mortal sin and at best not very nice. Yet it helps the beggar so is not all bad just as we may think, Molly’s adultery has its place in a bigger brighter future of the Bloom marriage. Just as Stephen’s fall is precursor to Rudy’s resurrection.

Usually perhaps inevitably, the Fall is part of the Rise which is a cheery thought or as Woody observes, if Buzz cannot actually fly, he does at least fall with style.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Shut Your Eyes and See

Post Nine

This, one of the book’s very famous quotes, appears in that atrociously tricky part of Proteus as Stephen, sense testing, walks along the beach at Sandymount Strand, crunching shells as he goes. His eyes shut, he listens as he crunches and crunches to hear. He wonders; does the world disappear when he cannot see it and will it again exist when he opens his eyes? It will; but this is not as silly as it sounds for can an object exist without a subject to perceive it? Stephen is exploring whether our sensory equipment is to be trusted for when we get down to brass tacks, our senses are our only link to a world beyond our skin (even possibly under our skin). 

This part of the book is replete with symbolism as we skirt philosophy, art and natural sciences but I am more interested here in the conduit of the visible or more to the point lack of it, for both Bloom and Stephen will contemplate blindness as they go through the day. As well as Stephen on his beach walk, Bloom will help a blind chap across the road who will then feature in the Sirens episode and no doubt in Circe; which is a safe bet as everyone appears in Circe. The Homeric blinding of Polyphemus plays out in the Cyclops episode with Bloom politically jousting and let’s say defeating the myopic nationalist in Barney Kiernan’s pub. In Lestrygonians after seeing the blind chap on his way Bloom tries to imagine life through the eyes of the blind. For example he feels his stomach and wonders in what colour the blind visualise flesh which is an interesting example and one wonders if it was prompted by the horribly racist Eugene Stratton poster advert that Bloom notices on the way to Glasnevin cemetery. 

I like how Bloom in a very practical way considers the same concepts Stephen grappled with in Proteus in his impossibly obscure style. 

So what do we read into our blind character? Is he Homer’s Tiresias there to predict Bloom’s future? Before we get excited for clues beyond 17th June, Tiresias’ predictions concerned events within our story not after. Essentially, that if Odysseus harms the sun god’s cattle, things will go very bad back home in Ithaca. Well its hardly Bloom’s fault that there’s a foot and mouth* cattle blight but certainly for him, thing’s aren’t great at home. Does our blind friend predict this? Even if he did, it was hardly news as Bloom knew it via the morning post but the tap tap tapping of his white stick in Sirens is in a kind of counterpoint to Boylan’s ‘jingly jaunty got the horny’ cab ride to Molly’s house and his cock carracarracarra cock knocking on the door once he arrived. 

But why? In a book where everything is volitional and a portal of discovery, why the blind character?  

Did we need him simply to facilitate Bloom’s translation of the ineluctable modality of the visible as suggested above? That feels underwhelming. The blind stripling links in Sirens to Robert Emmet, the whereabouts of whose mortal remains are something of a mystery, as we learn in Hades. So maybe the point of the Blind Stripling shall also remain mysterious and is a matter for the professors. Here’s to the many and full explanations that no doubt exist in whatever passes for reality out there. In here, it’s pretty much the blind leading the blind.

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*Apparently Stateside, they say hoof and mouth. Either way, the cows don’t like it.

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Bloom’s Bum Steer to the Nolan

Post Eight

An amusing part of the book takes place in Lestrygonians where Bloom is sat in Davy Byrne’s ‘moral’ pub eating his cheese and mustard sandwich and where his glass of burgundy will provide some respite for his troubled mind. With wine kindling some fire in his veins he recalls the day some sixteen years earlier on which he proposed to and first made love with Molly on Howth Head. Molly as those with even cursory knowledge of the book will know, shall recall the same incident some hours later.

But two flies stuck in drying paint makes him ponder how far he has fallen from that romantic high and in less romantic and quite depressed mindset, Bloom considers the pointlessness of not just humanity but of all essence, even the solar system. All just digestion machines consuming, multiplying, defecating dying and re-kindling to start all over again. He wonders: are the gods any different? The food of the gods he has read is Ambrosia. Do they defecate? Bloom is a logical man and from his discourse on religion and the afterlife we do not expect he believes in Greek gods, unlike Odysseus his former self. But in his depressed state he is reaching blindly for some hope. That somewhere, somehow there is a higher purpose and we are not all just food processors en-route to being another processor’s food.

So he thinks, he’ll check the statues of Juno and Athena at the National Library to see if they have anuses. He’s got to go there anyway. It’s all a bit farfetched and just Bloom on an idle frolic but this is not just some joke about Greek god’s bums; Joyce has him frolicking for a very serious purpose.

Mesial groove is the phrase Mulligan, the medical student, uses in the next episode when he reports seeing Bloom sniffing around the backsides of the statues, staring at their mesial groove. This is a dental term meaning the indented line running through the middle of a tooth and we can imagine what he means in the context of buttocks. Its all very smutty and amusing. All a bit Frankie Howerd and ooh er Mrs. but the serious business is this; as Stephen will waiver between various choices, between Scylla and Charybdis, Bloom is his guide to the middle way. Philosophy students may note the guiding hand of Giordano Bruno of Nola and the coinciding of polar extremes. Bloom is Stephen’s medium to the medium.

So, not just a joke about bums.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Master Patrick Buries his Grandmother

Post Six

The penultimate vignette of Wandering Rocks is a truly heart wrenching part of the book. Patrick Dignam, one of the Dignam children has been sent to town on the afternoon of his father’s funeral. Ostensibly on an errand but more likely because he was bored and becoming irascible among the mourners in the house. We expect he is about twelve years old, though eleven would be more in keeping with the revivalist essence Joyce ascribes to that number.

He reflects on the funeral.

               ‘Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr. Dignam, my father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.’

Paddy Dignam senior is the third lost parent to feature in the book following Rudolph Virag and May Dedalus among several others mentioned in passing such as Ellen Bloom and Lunita Laredo. Bloom’s reflections upon his father permeate throughout but what strikes me here connects more to Stephen.

The riddle in Nestor seemed nonsensical but there were a few strands of interest.

The cock crew,

The sky was blue:

The bells in heaven

Were striking eleven.

'Tis time for this poor soul

To go to heaven.

The answer to which is ‘the fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.’ Cue bewilderment and annoyance among the schoolboys.

Reference to burial at eleven alerts to Dignam’s funeral at this time but perhaps more interesting is Stephen’s subsequent musing while attending to Cyril Sargent:

               ‘A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.’

Its not much of a stretch to expect this fox to resonate with Stephen who has recently buried his mother nor considering Stephen’s guilt, to visualise blood on his hands just as it coagulates in the fox’s fur. The fox scrapes. Why? Surely only to dig up the body. Is she dead? Can she be revived? Sadly for the fox and for Stephen, no. Dead is dead, as Bloom will definitively confirm at Dignam’s funeral.

Which brings us back to Master Patrick. Shortly before young Dignam’s poignant thought he was excited by an advert for a boxing match into which event he thought he might sneak, young though he is. But hope is dashed when he realises the advert is historic and like his father, it’s been and gone. He is drawn to something that seemed so real, so near he can almost touch it, almost be there. So close to a time when his father was alive. It would be so easy to sneak into that fight, so easy for the fox to dig up his grandmother. Except for one minor detail, we haven’t figured out how to turn back time.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Puffing and Blowing; the citizen, Reduced

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.

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Poldy, scald the Teapot!

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?

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© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

The Promised Land is no Place Like Home

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