Tuesday, 26 November 2019 (1.558)

The last reading stopped at: “He himself?” (1.558)

Note:
first number (1) = episode 

number after period (558) = line number 

Summary:
Buck Mulligan, who has noticed Stephen is brooding (1.235), wants to know the reason. He asks, "Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me?" (1.161). Stephen replies that when he had visited Mulligan the first time after his (Stephen's) mother had passed away, Mulligan had told his own mother, who had asked who had come, "O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead" (1.198). This utterance of Mulligan's had greatly hurt Stephen as he had found it deeply offensive to himself. When Mulligan realises this, he gives up trying to cheer Stephen up and starts going down the stairs to prepare breakfast, after he tells Stephen, "Look at the sea. What does it care about offences?" (1.231).
Eventually, Stephen follows Mulligan down to the kitchen carrying the bowl of lather that Mulligan had forgotten on the parapet of the tower. He remembers carrying a boat of incense at Clongowes. (Stephen was a student there in The Portrait. Joyce too was a student of Clongowes Wood College.)
Breakfast is bread, butter, honey, fry and black tea. Black because the milkwoman has not yet come. An old woman does appear soon bringing rich white milk (1.397). She reminds Stephen of the allegoric names given to Ireland: Silk of the kine [the most beautiful cattle] and poor old woman (1.403). Haines, the Englishman, starts to talk to her in Irish, which she does not recognise. (I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows (1.433).) Haines brings up the subject of paying her. Mulligan, after much searching his pockets, produces a florin (a two-shilling coin). 
Meanwhile, Mulligan praises Stephen in front of Haines, who is impressed by Stephen's sayings such as all Ireland is washed by the gulfstream (1.476), and wants to collect them if allowed. When Haines asks Stephen about his idea of Hamlet (1.545), Mulligan tells him that he (Stephen) proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father (1.555).
Breakfast is over, and the three young men leave the tower.


One of the special features on these pages are the songs that Joyce has included. They are, (a) W. B. Yeats's Who goes with Fergus? (1.239), (b) a song from Turko the Terrible (1.260), (c) a coronation day song (1.300), and (d) For old Mary Ann, an anonymous Irish song (1.282).

(Summary by Chandra Holm)

Tuesday, 19 November 2019 (1.182)

Another round of reading Ulysses with Fritz Senn began on Tue, 19 November. The reading stopped at: “arms quietly” (1.182)

Note:

The references given in these posts will follow the standard format used for the text edited by Hans Walter Gabler. The first number (here 1) refers to the chapter or episode of the book, the number following the period (here 182) refers to the line number within the episode.

Don't worry if you are using a different edition (Penguin, Wordsworth Classics, etc.), you'll be fine for the readings. You'll simply need to comb through your pages a little more closely if you're using this blog to find references.

Summary:
James Joyce's Ulysses starts with the Stately, plump Buck Mulligan coming up the stair case carrying a bowl of lather, a mirror and a razor. We soon understand that he is a very exuberant person who more often than not jokes about things. He even jokes about the Catholic religion, about the holy mass. He is soon joined by Stephen, who is quite opposite to Mulligan in character. Stephen's dress shows his poverty. Though he is displeased and sleepy (1.13), he comes up and sits down on the edge of the gunrest (1.37).
Mulligan shaves, and pulls out of Stephen's pocket a handkerchief (the bard's noserag, 1.73) to wipe his razor. Perhaps Stephen is displeased because of Haines, a visiting Englishman, who is staying with Mulligan, and who, the previous night in his sleep, was raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther (1.61).


The special features we come across on these pages: reference to other writers (Mulligan quotes from Algernon Charles Swinburne, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde) and  passages of interior monologue, a technique for which this work is famous for.