Today we completed reading the last few pages of episode 14.
What an end! Joyce takes us on a real roller coaster ride on these pages. As it is we were exposed to a bewildering style - rather styles - of writing during the entire episode. Tracing parallely the development of a fetus in the womb and the development of English language, paragraphs in this episode are constructed as imitations of various well known writers of English language over many a century. Joyce abandoned this experiment with the rushing out of Stephen & co from the maternity hospital to the pub. The remaining pages of the episode when the characters are gathered in the pub make a highly challenging experience to a general reader. It is not easy to make out who is talking, whether one is talking or simply thinking, let alone what really is being talked about. The mixture of languages that Joyce uses - gipsy slang, pidgin English, English spoken by blacks, Irish slang, cockney, Latin, Irish pronounciation of French, etc to name just a few - adds to the confusion. It is as if these pages evoke the birth of Finnegans Wake!
The friends are still in the pub. They have been drinking through the evening, first in the hospital, now in the pub. The hilarity of the assembly is hinted at the use of various songs and nursery rhymes (of course modified freely) as well as word plays (example: 'Caraway seed to carry away.') the bar tender comes to serve them once again. He is still unpaid. No shiners is acoming. Someone tells Stephen that they all came on his invitation and that it is up to him to pay. (Up to you, matey.) Somebody gets up to leave, bidding buy to the others. (Au reservoir, mossoo.)
Lenehan is going strong, recapitulating his earlier riddle of Rose of Castile, repeating about the betting - and losing - on that day's horse race. ('Had the winner today till I tipped him a dead cert.') Meanwhile people are leaving. Perhaps Stephen too. But whoever should accompany Stephen is not ready yet. He says: ''Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inagurated libation?"
Obviouly Mulligan has vanished with a friend (Haynes?). Stephen, stone drunk, wonders who will provide him with a bed, now that Mulligan is gone taking the key to the tower with him: "Kind Kristyann wil yu help yung man hoose frend tuk bungellow kee to find plais whear tu lay crown of his hed 2 night." (This is a beautiful sentence, the meaning of which will be clear when one reads it aloud!)
Bloom is still there. He is not known to all. For all we can decipher, the unrecognised man in macintosh, who was at Paddy Dignam's funeral (runefal) that morning, appears in the pub. Someone is puking outside the pub. The siren of a fire brigade is heard. Lynch and Stephen (?) move towards Denzill lane, to go to a brothel (bawdyhouse). They see a poster announcing the visit of the preacher, Alexander Dowie. Elijah is coming!
May Allah the Excellent One your soul this night ever tremendously conserve!
(Circe, episode 15, starts on 12 January 2016.)
Note: This post is coming to you from Sils Baselgia. My apologies that there will be no blogpost next week on the 12th January, as I will have to miss the reading that day. If anybody wants to summarize what will be read in Circe and send the same to me, I shall be more than glad to post it here.
What an end! Joyce takes us on a real roller coaster ride on these pages. As it is we were exposed to a bewildering style - rather styles - of writing during the entire episode. Tracing parallely the development of a fetus in the womb and the development of English language, paragraphs in this episode are constructed as imitations of various well known writers of English language over many a century. Joyce abandoned this experiment with the rushing out of Stephen & co from the maternity hospital to the pub. The remaining pages of the episode when the characters are gathered in the pub make a highly challenging experience to a general reader. It is not easy to make out who is talking, whether one is talking or simply thinking, let alone what really is being talked about. The mixture of languages that Joyce uses - gipsy slang, pidgin English, English spoken by blacks, Irish slang, cockney, Latin, Irish pronounciation of French, etc to name just a few - adds to the confusion. It is as if these pages evoke the birth of Finnegans Wake!
The friends are still in the pub. They have been drinking through the evening, first in the hospital, now in the pub. The hilarity of the assembly is hinted at the use of various songs and nursery rhymes (of course modified freely) as well as word plays (example: 'Caraway seed to carry away.') the bar tender comes to serve them once again. He is still unpaid. No shiners is acoming. Someone tells Stephen that they all came on his invitation and that it is up to him to pay. (Up to you, matey.) Somebody gets up to leave, bidding buy to the others. (Au reservoir, mossoo.)
Lenehan is going strong, recapitulating his earlier riddle of Rose of Castile, repeating about the betting - and losing - on that day's horse race. ('Had the winner today till I tipped him a dead cert.') Meanwhile people are leaving. Perhaps Stephen too. But whoever should accompany Stephen is not ready yet. He says: ''Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inagurated libation?"
Obviouly Mulligan has vanished with a friend (Haynes?). Stephen, stone drunk, wonders who will provide him with a bed, now that Mulligan is gone taking the key to the tower with him: "Kind Kristyann wil yu help yung man hoose frend tuk bungellow kee to find plais whear tu lay crown of his hed 2 night." (This is a beautiful sentence, the meaning of which will be clear when one reads it aloud!)
Bloom is still there. He is not known to all. For all we can decipher, the unrecognised man in macintosh, who was at Paddy Dignam's funeral (runefal) that morning, appears in the pub. Someone is puking outside the pub. The siren of a fire brigade is heard. Lynch and Stephen (?) move towards Denzill lane, to go to a brothel (bawdyhouse). They see a poster announcing the visit of the preacher, Alexander Dowie. Elijah is coming!
May Allah the Excellent One your soul this night ever tremendously conserve!
(Circe, episode 15, starts on 12 January 2016.)
Note: This post is coming to you from Sils Baselgia. My apologies that there will be no blogpost next week on the 12th January, as I will have to miss the reading that day. If anybody wants to summarize what will be read in Circe and send the same to me, I shall be more than glad to post it here.
