Tuesday 29 October 2013

Tuesday, 29 October 2013, Pages 753 - 762, Eumaeus, Episode 16

Stopped at "... committed his remains to the grave." 
16.1528 (Gabler), p. 762 (Penguin).

Bloom's internal monologues - and Stephen's silence - continue in the cabman's shelter. Most of the episodes we read today are related to Parnell and his downfall.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stewart_Parnell)

These are triggered by the cabman: "One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read: Return of Parnell", who says that he (Parnell) had simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they brought over was full of stones. ... And so forth and so on. These statements set Bloom to think about the inadvisability of Parnell's return. He wonders: Something evidently riled them in his death, reminding the reader of Parnell's saying, "Don't throw me to the wolves", about which Joyce had commented: "They did not, because they tore him apart themselves." Bloom goes through - in fact not just once but twice on these pages - about Parnell's personality (a born leader of men which undoubtedly he was and a commanding figure, a six footer or at any rate five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet....), how he was betrayed by his own followers, and how he - Bloom - was the person who had handed Parnell his silk hat when it was knocked off his head, and how he - Parnell - had said, "Thank you"! Bloom is as usual mixed up in his thoughts. The first time he thinks of the case of the silk hat, he remembers Parnell telling him, "Thank you!" and the next time he remembers the incidence, it becomes "Thank you, sir!" Thus Bloom does not even remember what exactly the great Parnell said to him! Thinking of the case of Parnell naturally leads to thoughts of Katherine O'Shea, the affair with whom was the cause of Parnell's downfall. He mentions to Stephen, who has been silent all through, that she was Spanish too. Stephen goes off on a tangent, mentioning The king of Spain's daughter, Spanish onions etc. Bloom, naive as he is, takes the fact of Katherine O'Shea being the daughter of the king of Spain seriously. This clue of Spain leads his thoughts to his wife, whose picture showing her opulent curves he produces from his pocket and shows it to Stephen. 

Loose parallels are drawn between Katherine O'Shea's cottonball of a husband and Bloom as well as between Katherine O'Shea and Molly and between Parnell and Boylan (who is just hinted at and remains unmentioned). Thoughts of Molly remind Bloom of that very morning, when he had brought her tea to her bedside and she had asked him about the meaning of met him pike horses

Thus in these pages, we get to have a good peep into Bloom's mind though we have absolutely no idea of what is going in the mind of his companion, Stephen.

Wednesday 23 October 2013

Tuesday, 22 October 2013, Pages 745 - 753, Eumaeus, Episode 16



We read as far as " - Who? the other, whose hand by the way was hurt, said." 16.1296 (Gabler), p. 753 (Penguin).

Still sitting in the cabman's shelter, Bloom is still trying earnestly to engage Stephen in a conversation. Stephen, when he does care to answer, comes up with something  short and crisp, something that Bloom often cannot make head or tail of! For example, when Bloom talks about "what a patent absurdity it is on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular", Stephen responds with "Memorable bloody bridge battle..." Understanding what Stephen refers to this time, Bloom agrees with him thoroughly, and thinks that it was all largely a money question.

Bloom continues to talk of Jews, and how they contributed to the British society when Cromwell allowed them in. From the Jews he moves on to the Turks and thinks of Islam. Next it is the turn of patriotism. Bloom comes up with his understanding of the word -, ending with the statement, "Where you can live well, the sense is, if you work". Not paying any attention to his barrage of words, Stephen hears only the last three words. "Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work." This starts another one of Bloom's discourses, this time on the importance of various kinds of works. According to him, a person who, like Stephen, tries to live by his pen is as important as a peasant. He says, "You both belong to Ireland..." "You suspect, ... that I may be important because I belong to... Ireland". (says Stephen)... "I suspect, Stephen interrupts, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." (In this statement Stephen becomes the altar ego of Joyce.)


Watching the young man beside him, Bloom thinks of the many examples of "... cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves." Bloom is carried away by his own thoughts on various topics, when he notices the pink edition of the Evening Telegraph lying there. His eyes run over many captions till he arrives at a note on Patrick Dignam's funeral. The note that must have been written by Hynes talks about what a genial personality Dignam was, and goes on to list the names of people who attended the funeral that morning (see chapter 6). The list contains many errors. Not only has Bloom become L. Boom it also mentions that Stephen Dedalus B. A. was at the funeral, when actually he was not there. Stephen is interested in finding out whether the letter (see chapter 2), which he brought that morning to the newspaper has been printed. (It has.)  While Stephen reads the letter printed on page two, Bloom reads on page three about the horse race in which Throwaway was the winner and on page four about the Slocum Disaster.



View the entire paper of that day, 16 June 1904 at http://cas.umt.edu/english/joyce/notes/020064newspapers.htm

Again no real conversation takes place between Bloom and Stephen. In fact this section in chapter 16 is dotted with long internal monologues of Bloom. Well, what else can it be, when Bloom has the silent Stephen as companion! And much of it dwells on what are facts, what is truth, and how reliable are reports. When an event has to be rendered somehow and, for this, turned into a particular medium (language, for example), it undergoes changes invariably and can not help losing (or gaining) something on the way.

Tuesday 15 October 2013

Tuesday, 15 October 2013, Pages 737 - 745, Eumaeus, Episode 16

We stopped today at "It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak." 16.1103 (Gabler), p. 745 (Penguin)

Bloom and Stephen are still in the cabman's shelter. The loquacious sailor is still around. Fittingly the language used here often contains many a nautical phrase - for example: to unfurl a reef, p. 738; giving it a wide berth, p. 739., and the talk centers on shipwrecks and accidents at sea. Reticent Stephen is still quiet. The longest sentence he speaks is: "... we have the impetuosity of  Dante, and the isosceles triangle, Miss Portinari, he fell in love with and Leonardo and san Tommaso Mastino."

Though actually not much happens, many different topics are touched upon in these pages: Bloom compares the women of Italy with those in Ireland (to the latter's disadvantage), mentions that he was in the Kildare Street museum earlier in the day (see, chapter 8), where he was impressed by the splendid proportions of hips, bosom. The sailor goes out to have a swig out of the two flasks of rum sticking out of each pocket and to relieve himself, as observed by Bloom, while the other customers of the cabman's shelter talk of ships, ship wrecks, and the sorry state of the Irish shipping industry. This inspires the keeper, Skin-the Goat, (assuming he was he), who has his own axe to grind, to sing the glory of Ireland, and to proclaim that Ireland would be the Achilles Heel of England. His advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.

Bloom clearly does not agree with all this rhetoric.... he was fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel, unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather concealed their strength than the opposite. He tells - recalling the scene with The Citizen in chapter 12 - Stephen how he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo, and how he simply but effectually silenced the offender. He says - in the typical manner in which we have come to know how Bloom speaks, confusing issues - "He called me a jew, and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too, and all his family, like me, though in reality I'm not." (The question of whether Bloom is a Jew or not, discussed in a chapter that seems to keep asking 'what is reality?', is ingenious.)

Remembering this earlier incidence with the Citizen in the tavern, Bloom makes, what is perhaps the most important statement in these pages we have read so far in this chapter. He says: "I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form...It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak."

Tuesday 8 October 2013

Tuesday, 8 October 2013, Pages 729 - 737, Eumaeus, Episode 16


Today we read as far as 
"That's why I asked you if you wrote poetry in Itlaian." 16.881 (Gabler), p. 737 (Penguin).
A streetwalker appears at the Cabman's Shelter (the same one Bloom had tried to avoid being seen by in Sirens, and now tries to avoid again) when its keeper makes a rude sign to take herself off. Bloom continues his efforts to engage Stephen in conversation, rambling on about various subjects (some necessary evils of society, the importance of compulsory medical inspection of brothels, the human brain, the soul), to which Stephen only offers a half-hearted and disinterested response in terms of a scholastic definition of the soul - and at which "Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth" (in plain words, he shuts up and does not have a clue about what Stephen is saying). The two characters seem to operate mentally on a different level. And, although they have finally come together, there has not been anything climactic or grand about it (as there would have been, say, in the meeting of father and son in a classical epic as in the coming home of Odysseus). 

But Bloom, who has not had any kind of intellectual conversation the whole day, is unrelenting in his efforts to win or impress Stephen. He even tries, unsuccessfully, to make him drink coffee (and even attempts to get it ready by stirring the clotted sugar from the bottom) and eat a bun that was like one of the skipper's bricks disguised. At the same time, he remains  wary of other people's tales. While "Sherlockholmesing up" the sailor and considering his tales he whispers to Stephen "Do you think they are genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and lie like old boots" (thereby ironically calling to mind Sherlock Holmes' classic reading of boots: he knows where a certain character has been because he can tell from his boots - which here tell the truth). 

We will probably find a lot more of this hovering between a story's assumed likelihood and unlikelihood (a 'can't be true' and a 'but then it may be true'), as in: Yet still, though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air, life was full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel.

Finally, the Bloom we meet in this chapter is not exactly the Bloom we have encountered so far. Here he is - on one level - inquisitive and bombastic in the use of language. On another level - in his caring attitude towards Stephen, in the various topics he touches upon - he is still the Bloom we know.




Tuesday 1 October 2013

Tuesday, 1 October 2013, Pages 719 - 729, Eumaeus, Episode 16

Today we read as far as "That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the someway in his. Squeezing or...", 16.682 (Gabler), p. 729 (Penguin). 

Last week we left Bloom and Stephen in the cabman's shelter, in the "company" of - among others such - a sailor, who had started spinning stories of his adventure. (We were in fact reminded that Homer's Odysseus was also a sailor, also an adventurous one!)  The sailor in the cabman's shelter continues to spin stories. Apparently, his ship anchored that afternoon but he has not yet been home to meet his little woman, who he says is waiting for me. She's my own true wife I haven't seen for seven years now. He talks of the various countries he has visited, of seeing a crocodile biting the fluke of an anchor, of maneaters from Peru that eat corpses and livers of horses. In proof he produces a picture postcard (which he claims to have been sent by a friend) of a group of savage women. The problem is, though, that the card mentions this is a scene from Bolivia, and it is addressed to a se
ñor a boudin, in Santiago, Chile. Earlier the sailor said that his name is D. B. Murphy. So who is boudin? Here Fritz Senn drew a very interesting parallel between Homer's Odysseus and Joyce's boudin. He said: "In French, Boudin means blood sausage. Homer wrote that on the night when Odysseus returned home to find it full of suitors, he spent the night in his bed tossing and turning like a blood sausage!" 

As the sailor is entertaining the people in the cabman's shelter with stories of his adventures, not many people pay attention to him. Bloom is in his own world, thinking of many things, imagining the scene at the sailor's home when he would finally return, daydreaming how it would be if he could also travel via the sea to London (the furthest he has been so far is Holyhead), and of turning this voyage to an advantage by arranging concert tours with an all Irish caste, (note the 'e' at the end of the last word) with the Tweedy-Flower grand opera company....

As Bloom emerges from his thoughts (and what is rendered here as something like an interior monologue), he finds that the sailor is still talking. About the Chinese, for example, who cook rats in soups, about seeing a man killed by an Italian in Trieste,... To demonstrate how the killing took place, the sailor pulls a clasp knife out of his chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket

At which point, someone in the dark mentions the famous Phoenix Park murders, which according to this person, was done by foreigners on account of them using knives. It is at this remark, passed obviously in the spirit of where ignorance is bliss, that Stephen, who has been silent all through, exchanges meaningful glances with Bloom, both wondering whether the keeper of the cabman's shelter (supposedly Skin-the-Goat) heard what was said.

This part of the episode, which the sailor ends by opening his shirt to scratch himself (there was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater,..) and thereby displaying a tattoo showing three things: the symbol of the mariner's hope and rest (i.e an anchor), the figure 16, and a young man's side face. (Fritz Senn says, if anyone knows what the meaning of the figure 16 on a tattoo is, to please tell him. Interpretations for the figure have been offered but non has proved satisfactory so far.)

Yes, there are lots of stories in these pages. But there is also a good dose of Tennyson, Milton, Longfellow, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare. The chapter centers on the idea of homecoming (though so far nobody seems in a hurry to get there) and it is full of tellings of the typical adventure story. Ample proof is readily produced for it, and yet, we are never quite sure and remain wary of reports, rumours  and of the tales of the soit-disant sailor.