The joint online reading of Ulysses held on Thursday, 28 January stopped at: “becoming important. It seems.” (9.313)
If you have any questions regarding the online readings, please contact the Zurich James Joyce Foundation: info@joycefoundation.ch
Summary:
Shakespeare and Hamlet, rather Stephen's views of Shakespeare and Hamlet, occupy the centre stage of these pages. These have to be read with utmost care as Stephen's exposition is interspersed with a lot of interior monologue, his thoughts wandering from Shakespeare's fiction to what others such as the 16th century English dramatist Robert Greene have said about the bard, to his own time at Clongowes as portrayed by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to his mother's deathbed, to the money he owes A. E. (George Russell) and so on.
A couple of things in Stephen's argument should be paid special attention: (a) his attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the staging of a Shakespearean play, telling himself to add local colour, work in all you know (9.158), (b) his explanation of a ghost as “one who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners” (9.147), (c) his main argument that the dead king in Hamlet is Shakespeare himself, that Hamlet is none other than his dead son, Hamnet, and that he naturally made his own wife Ann Hathaway the guilty queen, Gertrude. Stephen's painting of what happens when Shakespeare appears to Hamlet as the ghost is really beautiful: “To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever” (9.171).
Stephen's thesis does not attract everybody in the room. He underscores his chain of thoughts with: I, I and I. I (9.212).This should be interpreted this as follows: The full stop between I, I and I and I, that is the first full stop, stands for the changes in the molecules. The comma between I and I and I signifies that something still continues even if the molecules change. (Read Aristotle to understand more!)
I and I. I. is followed by A. E. I. O. U (9.213). Here Joyce has posed a nice puzzle for us. Do these remind Stephen of the five vowels of the English language or is he telling himself: A. E. (George Russell's pen name) I. O. U. (I owe you (the pound)?
(Excerpted from Ulysses for the Uninitiated)
