The reading stopped at " . . wariest ward." (14.78)
Summary:
The name of this episode, Oxen of the Sun, refers to the Homeric episode in which the men of Odysseus committed a grave crime - they killed the sacred oxen - while Odysseus was asleep.
Before he had written the episode, Joyce wrote to his friend Frank Budgen on 20th March 1920 that he intended to compose it in the style that follows the history of English prose, and that he would do it in analogy to the development of an embryo.
Thus this episode goes through the history of the style of English prose. It does so by showing stylistic progression in parallel to that of the embryo. (The episode has 9 parts in analogy to the 9 months of pregnancy.) The language goes from the style of Latin to that of simpler Anglo-Saxon. Note that seeing language as something that could progress in a biological way reflects what was in the air at Joyce's time, when people were very concerned with the discoveries of Darwin and other studies of evolution. When languages were discovered to be related, when, for example, one could speak of “families” of languages, of the new science of etymology - studying word change, vowel shifts etc - they could be seen as evolutionary, something developing in a Darwinian sense. Joyce renders some of this idea in this episode by presenting language as something evolving almost biologically. The imitations of styles can also be seen as a translation of sorts: everything is translated into an earlier period. Ulysses has indeed been described as the book that translates itself.
All this makes this episode quite a challenge to read.
(Excerpted from Ulysses for the Uninitiated)
