As an exception, there will be two posts on today's reading. (We finished the chapter Ithaca and started the next, Penelope. To know where exactly we stopped today, please refer to post a.)
Unlike the previous chapter which should have ended, according to Joyce, with a fat full stop, this chapter of Molly's monologue has no full stops at all. It consists of eight sentences with no punctuation, no paragraph spacing. Joyce wrote the following to his friend, Frank Budgen:
Molly also has a lot of "but", "still" etc., i.e. she veers left and right (e.g. from being ruthless in her judgements to taking a more lenient view of the same person, as she does with Mrs Riordan at the opening of the chapter.
The chapter starts with Molly's monologue on Bloom. She dissects his behavior, the acts he comes up with in order to attract female attention (such as that of Mrs. Riordan (who was pious because no man would look at her twice), of the servant Mary they had in Ontario terrace (about whom Bloom had proposed that she could eat at our table on Christmas if you please O no thank you not in my house), the letter she caught him writing when she came into the front room to show him Dignams death in the paper, ... She wonders where he actually was that night, not believing a wee bit his telling her that he had supper at Wynn's Hotel in Lower Abbey Street (Gifford, 18.36-37).
Unlike the previous chapter which should have ended, according to Joyce, with a fat full stop, this chapter of Molly's monologue has no full stops at all. It consists of eight sentences with no punctuation, no paragraph spacing. Joyce wrote the following to his friend, Frank Budgen:
"["Penelope"] begins and ends with the female word yes. It turns like a huge earthballslowlysurelyandevenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all sense bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart), woman, yes. Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib (Scott, 1984, 158)."
and
"... Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. "Ich bin der Fleisch der stets bejaht" (letter from Joyce to Frank Budgen, 16 August 1921)."
There is no real equivalent for this chapter in Homer's Odyssey. But with Penelope, we get an alternative weaving of text (cf. Penelope the weaver and un-weaver in Homer): what she thinks sometimes overlap with, sometimes contradicts what we have read before (e.g. what Bloom thought, what Stephen said), i.e. we have a different sort of text, a parallax view of the text as a whole (an alternative view, a re-writing)
Molly's monologue is fluid, pre-articulation, pre-punctuation; her "because" often explains nothing, her "yes" does not seem to refer to or answer much (pointedly so: the opening - we don't know what she is talking about, we start in the middle of her trains of thought); her syntax is double-faced (e.g.: ... I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur ... > Are the units 'get shut of her dog'? 'her dog smelling my fur'?); Her pronouns are sometimes ambiguous (e.g. shes beaming love because he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool)
Molly also has a lot of "but", "still" etc., i.e. she veers left and right (e.g. from being ruthless in her judgements to taking a more lenient view of the same person, as she does with Mrs Riordan at the opening of the chapter.
