Tuesday, 27 September 2016, Pages 840 - 850, Ithaca, Episode 17

We stopped at "Dear Madam." (Penguin 350.26), (Gabler (17.1823)

Bloom is still building his colossal castle in the air, thinking of what improvements he might slowly introduce to his grounds (rabbitry, fowlrun, dovecote, sundial, Japanese tinkle gatebell,...). In the guise of Bloom's ambitious musings Joyce builds up this part of the episode to chuckle - good-naturedly of course -  at the English language, at the English society (e.g. at the names of societies by introducing names such as the Industrious Foreign Acclimatized Nationalized Friendly Stateaided Building Society), and at the tendency of human beings to categorize everything they know/come across. The style still follows that of catechism but the answers take off and get a life of their own often forgetting the question that was posed in the first place, the longer they become! As we read on, we also learn to chuckle along with Joyce! It is all quite comical indeed.

Back to Bloom Cottage (a blatant misnomer) or Saint Leopold's (Leopold B, a saint? Really?) or Flowerville. Bloom's thinks of what means he should have to travel to the city and back. He imagines how the Bloom of 7 Eccles street will look and do as Bloom of Flowerville. He considers what kind of intellectual pursuits (hobbies) and recreations both in summer and winter he could pursue. He visualizes the role he could play as Bloom, Leopold P., M.P., P. C., K.P., L.L.D. (Honoris cause)* among the county families and landed gentry. In particular, he would act in such a way as to uphold rectitude (moral goodness). The paragraph 'a course that lay .... connubiality' (Penguin p. 842) that highlights this sums up what is known today as Victorian Values. Examples that prove that Bloom loved rectitude from his earliest youth follow.

Bloom not only dreams of possessing such a fine mansion but also about how much he should pay for it. The list of rapid but insecure means he imagines that will make it possible to purchase the Flowerville immediately is to be read to be enjoyed. It contains, for example, making use of the difference of 25 minutes between Dunsink time and Greenwich time, Dunsink time lagging behind Greenwich time OR unexpectedly discovering a valuable postage stamp or a precious stone dropped from the air by an eagle in flight** or  discovered as remnant of a fire or as flotsam or even on the sea bed due to a sunken ship, OR as a contract in which cash is obtained on delivery starting at one farthing (1/4 penny) and growing in geometrical proportion*** for subsequent deliveries.

Bloom also has a number of practical ideas - some big, some small - which could lead to his amassing wealth. Reclamation of waste, sandy land for cultivation, utilization of waste paper, processing of human excrement that incidentally has great potential owing to the large population (almost 5 million) of Ireland, generation of hydraulic power, building of casinos etc, using dogvan and goatvan to deliver early morning milk, cleaning up of Irish waterways to make them suitable for traffic are just some of the possible schemes. If support of some well known financiers - Sir Julius Blum, Rothschild, Guggenheim, ... Rockefeller - could be obtained, then such schemes could easily be realized.

Why on earth would Bloom think of such things at this early morning hour (it must be past 3 am) after a very long day? Because, he knows that meditating on such topics would help him to sleep. He had learnt that a man who would live for 70 years spends 20 of them sleeping!  Normally his thoughts, consisting of how to come up with a unique advertisement that would make passers to stop in wonder, are more down to earth. He is, after all, a simple canvasser for advertisements.

(Milly's drawing of Bloom)

While busy with thoughts of Flowerville, Bloom unlocks a drawer. Now we get to peep into the contents of the drawer. Among an assortment of things, the drawer holds a copybook which belonged to Milly who had made a drawing of her father, a Christmas card from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, remnants of sealing wax, pennibs, mementoes of his parents, 3 letters from Martha, a pack of a dozen cream laid envelopes and feinruled notepaper (now three are missing from the original pack), two partly uncoiled rubber preservatives as well as two erotic photocards purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, a prospectus of the Wonderworker, the world's greatest remedy for rectal complaints. The prospectus was wrongly addressed to Mrs. L. Bloom, and the enclosed note started with Dear Madam.

* M.P. Member of Parliament / P. C. Privy Councillor / K. P. Knight of the Order of St. Patrick / 
L. L. D. (Honoris cause) Doctor of Law 'for the sake of honor'
** This idea must be taken from the story of the second voyage of Sindbad, the Sailor in what is popularly known as The Arabian Nights
*** This idea is borrowed from the classical example of geometrical proportions, rather exponential growth

Tuesday, 20 September 2016, Pages 830 - 840, Ithaca, Episode 17

We stopped at "... and so on." (Penguin 840.14), (Gabler 17.1566)

Bloom is in the living room. He has just hit his head against a walnut sideboard which had been moved, in his absence, from its original place. He has seen things that bear witness to the recent visit of Boylan. Forgetting the contused tumescence (bump on his head), he takes out from an open box on the table a black diminutive cone (an incense), takes out of his waistcoat a prospectus of Agendath Netaim that he had picked the previous morning at the butcher's, ignites it and lights with it the incense cone, fumigating the room. After killing all the suitors who had settled in his place while he was absent, Odysseus had also throughly purged the hall and the house and the court with fire and sulphur to scourge it of pollution. (Click here to listen to this particular episode, Book 22, in Homer's Odyssey, read by Sir Ian McKellan.)

On the mantelpiece on which Bloom had placed the candlestick, there were three other objects that Bloom and Molly had received from friends as wedding gifts: a marble timepiece (that had not worked for more than 10 years), a dwarf tree and an embalmed owl (symbol of wisdom, embalmed). As Bloom's eyes fall on the reflection of these three objects in the mirror - they also 'observe' one another - he sees himself, a solitary (has no siblings) and mutable (his looks changed as he grew up) man. He also sees reflected in the mirror the books arranged improperly and not in proper order on a book shelf. What follows is a catalogue of Bloom's library. It has a myriad collection of books - poetry, history, literature, astronomy, geometry, philosophy, and physical fitness. (The library at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation has copies of most of these books. Anyone who can get a copy of the book, The hidden life of christ, - author unknown -, will make Fritz Senn, a very happy man, indeed!) 

Bloom is sitting down. He feels happy, seeing on the table a statue of Narcissus that he had purchased at an auction. At the same time, he feels constrained by all the layers of clothes he has been wearing since the morning, and takes them off one by one. As he undresses, he feels the scar of a bee sting below the diaphragm (we had heard of it earlier in episode 14). Odysseus also had a scar, above his knees, caused by a wild boar. That is how his old nurse, Eurycleia, recognizes him. 

He also empties his pockets, and takes out - and puts back - a silver coin he had with him at the funeral of Mrs Emily Sinico (to get to know her, read the story, A Painful Case, in Dubliners). At this point we are presented with Bloom's budget for the previous day. We are not sure whether this list was written already, whether Bloom notes down the items on the list now, whether he just thinks about them. In any case, the list is quite incomplete, having no mention of the four pence he owes for the sweet lemony soap he had bought at Sweny's (episode 5) nor the shilling he had paid to Bella of the Nighttown in lieu of the damages Stephen had caused there (episode 15). 

The soap missing from Bloom's budget for 16 June 1904

The next things to come off are his socks and boots. This was the just the second time he had taken his boots off since the previous morning. The first time would have been when he went to the mosque of the baths to enjoy a bath... clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream (end of episode 5). The smell of a broken piece of a toenail makes him recall other such smells he had experienced as a pupil of Mrs Ellis's juvenile school each night during the nightly prayers, when his thoughts were full of ambitious thoughts. 

Of course Bloom has ambitions. The ultimate ambition would be to be the owner of a very special mansion. Two full pages follow detailing the kind of house he would have, the books that would rest on his bookshelf,  the flowers that would grow in his garden, the names of shops from where he would buy the seeds necessary for the orchard, kitchen garden and vinery, and the various implements he would keep, and so on.

Tuesday, 13 September 2016, Pages 823 - 830, Ithaca, Episode 17

We stopped at "... gradual discolouration." (Penguin 830.20), (Gabler 17.1319)

Bloom - our rational man - concludes, after being confronted with the spectacle of the night sky, that it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. {The use of the word heaventree has been the focus of much discussion. See an example here (original in the library of Zürich James Joyce Foundation).  It is also the subject of a work of the British painter, Richard Hamilton, and has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the British Museum as well as at Tate in London.}

(The heaventree of stars by Richard Hamilton)

Bloom does not believe in any heaven. For him it is rather like an Utopia, the imaginary island of Thomas More. In any case, he says that there is no known method from the known (earth) to the unknown (heaven), and that if the stars represent the past, then it possibly had ceased to exist before we, the spectators, entered our actual present. Is Bloom (Joyce?) referring here to the speed of light and the astronomical distances to the stars that make us conscience of the existence of a star even though it may have ceased to exist long before its light reaches us?

Bloom also does not believe in the influence of these heavenly bodies on the disasters that happen here on earth. But he is quite aware of the esthetic value/beauty of what he and Stephen are observing. Special affinities appear to him to exist between the moon and woman, though almost every aspect mentioned in the list that follows applies basically only to the moon! With, perhaps, the exception of this beautiful sentence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

By then the dim light of a paraffin lamp in the second story of the house attracts their attention. It is a visible splendid sign. Here there are two allusions, the first to the meeting between Cato and Dante and Virgil as they approach the Mount of Purgatory; the second to the ceremony of Sacrament as the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace. Molly as Beatrice? Molly as Mary?

At Stephen's suggestion (he had drunk lots the previous evening), both of them urinate. We are told about the trajectories they reach now, reached as kids and about the problems (Bloom's thoughts in this matter focus on the physical aspects, Stephen's on religious ones, on the circumcision of Jesus, on the divine excrescences as hair and toenails) each thinks of in connection with the other's invisible audible collateral organ.

(Old church of St. George at the end of Eccles Street.
Note that the clocks on the clock tower show different times!)

They see a shooting star. Finally Bloom opens the garden door, they shake hands and Stephen leaves. Right at that moment, the bells of the nearby Church of Saint George chime. The sound makes Stephen think of the prayer recited at his mother's deathbed (Penguin p. 11: Liliata rutilantium te confessorum... / May the crowd of joyful confessors encompass thee...), whereas Bloom hears in the chime, Heigho! Heigho! just as he had heard them that morning when he was leaving home to go to Paddy Dignam's funeral (Penguin p. 85).

Stephen leaves. Out of Bloom's house, out of this novel, and thus out of Bloom's and our lives. Bloom is all alone. Dawn is about to break. Like Stephen, Bloom has been awake the whole night. The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the apparition of a new solar disk make him linger for a while in the garden. He is not eager to go to bed though he is actually not a nocturnal person. The only other time he had witnessed the slow disappearance of night (according to Jewish tradition, if one can see three stars, it is still night), and the spreading of the diffuse light of dawn was in 1887, almost twenty years ago.

Bloom, all alone, feels the cold of the interstellar space! He thinks of many of his comrades who are no more. He crosses the garden, reenters the passage, goes up the stairs. As he goes into the front room, he hits his head against the walnut sideboard, which has been rearranged along with the plume plush sofa, the blue and white checker inlaid majolica topped table, a rectangular rug with upturned fringe, and two chairs - one a squat stuffed easychair, and the other a slender splayfoot one of glossy cane curves. (Naturally the latter signal Boylan and Molly).  There are additional signs in the room of its recent occupants: a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves on a vertical piano, an ashtray with used matches and cigarettes, and music sheets of Love's Old Sweet Song. Bloom experiences different kinds of emotions as he observes the current state of the furniture in the room. The sight of the gradual discolouration of the seat of the easychair, in particular, seems to evoke pleasant thoughts in Bloom.

Finally, the question remains as to why on earth would Molly wear long yellow gloves to practice a song at home with Boylan! Remember the color of her gloves is the same as that of the dressing gown Buck Mulligan wore the previous morning as he ascended the stairs of the Martello tower to shave (Penguin, p.1). The symbolism of the colour yellow depends on culture, religion, etc. According to the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (p.1138, edition: 1996), 'yellow was associated with adultery since the sacred bonds of marriage had been snapped just as Satan had snapped the bonds of divine love.'

Wikipedia writes the following:  'In the Roman Catholic church, yellow symbolizes gold, and the golden key to the Kingdom of Heaven, which Christ gave to Saint Peter... Golden haloes mark the saints in religious paintings. Yellow also has a negative meaning, symbolizing betrayal; Judas Iscariot is usually portrayed wearing a pale yellow toga, and without a halo.'

Tuesday, 6 September 2016, Pages 815 - 823, Ithaca, Episode 17

The reading stopped at "... pallor of human beings." (Penguin 823.2), (Gabler 17.1136)

(First of all, please note that I was not present at the reading on this day. Thus this summary will be of necessity short!)

On being asked by Stephen whether he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, Bloom is on the verge of explaining that he (Bloom) could not be present at the funeral of his (Stephen's) mother, Mary Dedalus (born Goulding) on 26 June 1903, as he was keeping vigil that day. The reason being that the following day was the seventeenth death anniversary of his own father who had taken his life on 27 June 1886.  But Bloom manages to suppress his urge to explain. 

Bloom's offer of a bed to sleep is declined by Stephen promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully. Then Bloom returns to Stephen the money (1-7-0) he had been taking care of since the time he had rescued it from Stephen in the Nighttown. After discussing, among other things, about starting a course of Italian instruction with Stephen as the instructor and Molly as the one to be instructed, they leave the house going into the back garden with Bloom caring a lighted candle in stick and Stephen carrying his diaconal hat on ash plant. This very simple act of going out of the house assumes in the hands of Joyce biblical proportions. Carrying of the lighted candle is compared to the Sunday vespers, the going out itself is compared to the going of the children of Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai under Moses's leadership. Psalms from King James Bible are thought of / recited. (For more details, refer to commentaries 17.1021 to 17.1031 in Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated.) Though, in addition, Dante and Virgil are also part of this grand scenario of going out of the house, Joyce does not lose sight of very ordinary happenings as shown by the following question and answer:

"For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress? For a cat."

Anyway, in the garden the spectacle of the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit confronts them. Here Joyce makes full use of his intention of making this episode, Ithaca, a mathematico- astronomico- physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation. Under the heavenly stars, Bloom is in his elements. He talks of the stars, of the planets and their features, of the constellations, of evolution, of the geographical history of the earth, and so on. He has problems with believing in a redeemer, with redemption. He says: "The minor was proved by the major." In other words (Gifford, 17.1102), redemption was doubtful. The major premise of Bloom's answer: humanoid existence on other planets is possible, but if it exists, it will be human and therefore vain. The minor premise: since vain, redemption would be doubtful. 

Tuesday, 30 August 2016, Pages 806 - 815, Ithaca, Episode 17

We read as far as "... 14 October 1903." (Penguin 815.13), (Gabler 17.948)

Last week we had seen that both Stephen and Bloom had written a couple of characters of the Irish language and Hebrew language respectively on the blank page of the book, Sweets of Sin, that Bloom had bought and carried in his pocket since the previous afternoon. Now Joyce lists various points of contact that existed between these languages and the people. Of course these are not real points of contact, as these two languages belong to different language families - Hebrew belongs to the Afroasiatic family of languages where as classical Irish is an Indo-European language. Fenius Farsaigh mentioned here as the descendent of Noah and as having taught the two languages exactly 242 years after the Great Flood, is in fact a legendary figure. Fritz Senn stresses here that in this episode nothing can be taken at face value, even if things are presented as being factual. It is also necessary to note that scholars have written many books and articles interpreting the questions raised and answers supplied in this episode.

We were also confronted last week with the eternal question: Is Bloom a jew?

As a response to Stephen's singing earlier the ballad, Suil, suil, suil arun, ... Bloom recites the first two lines from of the poem, Hatikvah (The Hope), the poem by the Jewish poet, Naphtali Herz Imber, written in 1878, which later became the national anthem of Israel (listen here):



Bloom does not remember the entire poem though and ends up summarizing the same. Stephen hears the accumulation of the past history/wisdom in his ancient unfamiliar melody. Bloom sees in Stephen the predestination of future (i.e., the divine foreordaining of all that will happen, especially with regard to the salvation of some and not others; Source: New Oxford American Dictionary). Apart from the biblical overtones, it is possible that Bloom, the eternal father, is searching for an eternal son, and has realized his dreams in Stephen.

(Source
 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35120965

(Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Bloom)

Biblical allusions continue. Stephen identifies the figure of Christ in Bloom though Bloom was short in stature (according to the sketch made by Joyce) while Christ was described to be six foot tall.  Bloom sees in Stephen - the joy of - suffering (ecstasy of catastrophe).

Bloom encourages Stephen to sing more. He responds, strangely, with a ballad that is anti-semitic in nature. This ballad, popular in the English speaking world, is based on rumors that led to pogroms. (Read the story here and here. Listen to the song here.). What makes Stephen sing such a song in the house of a person who had cared for him and made for him a hot cup of Epp's soluble cocoa in the early hours of the morning? How does Bloom respond? Does he identify himself with the Jew of the ballad? He feels sad, a victim predestined, a Jew. He is confused. Look at the sentence, ' He wished that a tale of the deed should be told... not be told'. He is still, does not raise any objection. Instead he thinks of the possible factors that could lead to or prevent ritualistic murders.  And he looks at his own kitchen window, that is unbroken.

The image of the jewish girl recalls to Bloom's mind the image of his daughter, Milly. He thinks of her as a child, as a young girl, as a young woman who had written to him a day earlier that she had met a student in Mullingar. He had not only ribboned her blond hair but had also instructed her whenever opportunities arose, and suitable objects (the owl and the clock he had received as gifts at his wedding) were available. His efforts were rewarded. She remembered and she admired.

Joyce establishes walking as the relationship existing among Bloom, a diambulist, Milly, a somnambulist and Stephen, a noctambulist. The diambulist offers the noctambulist a bed to sleep that night. There is a free room in the house now Milly has moved to Mullingar. In making this proposition, Bloom looks for the company of an intelligent person. He thinks that it could also distract Molly from her affair with Boylan, once she gets to know Stephen. She could also learn from him how to pronounce correctly Italian words such as vorrei e non vorrei, and not say voglio instead of vorrei. Finally it could bring Milly and Stephen together. As Bloom is weaving this web of wishes, Stephen rejects his offer with a monosyllabic negative answer. Instead he (Stephen?) asks whether he (Bloom?) had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, who was accidentally killed on 14 October 1903. (Mrs. Sinico is the central figure of the story, A Painful Case, in Dubliners, and she is killed accidentally in November. )