(Note that there are two parts to today's posting.)
Today, we started, Penelope, the final episode of Ulysses, and stopped in the middle of a sentence at "... with his beard a bit grown in the bed...." (Penguin 872.22), (Gabler 18.28)
Stopping in the middle of a sentence will be the norm for the coming weeks as this episode that is about 62 pages long is composed of mere 8 sentences. The printer of Ulysses did not end the previous chapter with a fat full stop, contrary to Joyce's wishes, and Joyce uses just one full stop in this episode, that too at the very end. The style Joyce uses in this episode is how Nora Barnacle used in her letters, with no punctuation marks, no capital letters, nothing even to indicate end/beginning of paragraphs..
Penelope is the most often publicly read, rather performed, episode of Ulysses. As Fritz Senn says, it is the purest form of interior monologue. While Bloom falls asleep, Molly is awake, and is thinking about him, about herself, and myriad other things. Words such as 'yes', 'still' or 'because' signal change in the direction of thoughts.
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 (the famous Dante of A Portrait of the artist as a young man) 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).
Today, we started, Penelope, the final episode of Ulysses, and stopped in the middle of a sentence at "... with his beard a bit grown in the bed...." (Penguin 872.22), (Gabler 18.28)
Stopping in the middle of a sentence will be the norm for the coming weeks as this episode that is about 62 pages long is composed of mere 8 sentences. The printer of Ulysses did not end the previous chapter with a fat full stop, contrary to Joyce's wishes, and Joyce uses just one full stop in this episode, that too at the very end. The style Joyce uses in this episode is how Nora Barnacle used in her letters, with no punctuation marks, no capital letters, nothing even to indicate end/beginning of paragraphs..
Penelope is the most often publicly read, rather performed, episode of Ulysses. As Fritz Senn says, it is the purest form of interior monologue. While Bloom falls asleep, Molly is awake, and is thinking about him, about herself, and myriad other things. Words such as 'yes', 'still' or 'because' signal change in the direction of thoughts.
There is no real equivalent for this chapter in Homer's Odyssey. But with Penelope, we get an alternative weaving of text (similar to the 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 ... Should we read 'get shut of her and her dog' or '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 (the famous Dante of A Portrait of the artist as a young man) at the opening of the chapter.
Read here what Joyce wrote to his friend Frank Budgen about this episode.
