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."
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."
