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Monday 30 December 2019

Thursday, 19 December 2019, Episode 4 (4.1 - 4.200)

We stopped the reading with "Still an idea behind it." (4.200)

Note:
This is our last meeting in 2019. Our reading continues on Thursday, 9 January, at the regular time.

Summary:

We meet Mr Bloom for the first time in this episode. It is 8 am. Bloom is in his kitchen preparing breakfast. He is also putting her breakfast things on the humpy tray (4.7).
In the very first paragraph we come to know about the kind of food he relishes. (Most of all he like[s] grilled mutton kidneys which [give] to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine; 4.3). A cat is keeping his company, mewing Mkgnao, Mrkgnao, and then Mrkrgnao, asking for milk in the cat's language! After pouring some milk in a saucer for the cat, and watching her shining whiskers as she licks, and wondering whether the whiskers are a kind of feelers, Bloom moves his attention to the breakfast tray he is preparing.
He knows that she [doesn't] like her plate full (4.11). Deciding against ham and eggs, he decides to walk to the butcher, Dlugacz, to buy pork kidney. He calls out softly by the bedroom door whether she wants anything for breakfast. He hears a 'Mn' in answer, and the jingling of the loose brass quoits of the bedstead (4.59).
He steps out after just pulling the door after him, without locking it, as he does not find the latchkey in his pocket. In the sunny morning, he walks in happy warmth, imagining some other place where it would be early morning as described in one of his books, in the track of the sun depicting a sunburst on the title page, then of the headpiece over the Freeman (a newspaper) leader of the homerule sun rising up in the northwest (4.103).
At the butcher's, he has to wait as the nextdoor girl gets served first. When it is his turn, Bloom wants to buy what he wants quickly so that he can catch up and walk behind her . . . , behind her moving hams (4.171). But outside, there is no sign of her. She is gone.
Walking back along Dorset street, he reads the flyer of Agendath Netaim, planters' company, whose offices are at Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W.15.

Tuesday 17 December 2019

Thursday, 12 December 2019, End of episode 3

Today we finished reading the third episode.

Summary:
The two people Stephen sees walking shoreward are a woman and a man (3.331). The dog is their's. As the dog suddenly runs off, the man whistles calling the dog back.  The two are cocklepickers (cocklers gather shellfish (cockles) from the sand at low tide; Oxford Reference Dictionary). They wade into the water, dip their bags in, before lifting them again and wading out.

Stephen is sitting on a stool of rock watching the cocklepickers and their dog. (Joyce's description of their actions and of the dog's (running around, sniffing the carcass, etc., are very picturesque.) His mind is busy with thoughts. Biblical episodes, words from the Bible, from Aristotle, from Oscar Wilde, from Yeats, from Ibsen, from Shakespeare and others are swirling around in his mind. Watching the two people walking on the clammy sand, with the woman following the man, Stephen fantasises about the two, about how her fancyman* [treats] two Royal Dblins in O'Loughlinis of Blackpitts**. These thoughts lead to Adam and Eve and their being banished from the Garden of Eden,  followed by the sun's flaming sword (3.391).

Amidst all these thoughts, Stephen tries to jot down a poem he has been composing. Not having any paper at hand, he tears of a piece from the letter Mr. Deasy had given him to get published in a newspaper. 

The tide comes in. The water reminds Stephen of the drowned man he had heard about that morning. He pictures to himself how the corpse [rises] saltwhite from the undertow, bobbling a pace a pace a porpoise landward (3.472). Imagining how a quiver of minnows (3.476) will be swimming around the corpse, Stephen tells himself God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain (3.477). In this one sentence God, Jesus, the Featherbed Mountain south of Dublin are brought together explaining the name Proteus, Joyce gave to this episode. 

Still thoughts of Mulligan are not far from Stephen's mind. He searches for the handkerchief Mulligan had taken that morning to wipe his razor blade. Not finding it, Stephen places the snot he had picked from his nostril on a rock, and gets ready to move. Because all days make their end. By the way . . . Tuesday will be the longest day*** (3.490).


* a man who lives on the income of a prostitute (Gifford, 3.377)
** apparently an unlicensed bar or public house (Gifford, 3.377)
*** The longest day in Dublin is the 21st June. This day being a Thursday - according to the Schema Joyce had put together - the date of the novel is 16th.

Wednesday 11 December 2019

Thursday, 5 December 2019, Episode 3 (3.146 - 3.331)

Reading was stopped at "Pinned up, I bet." (3.331)

Summary:

Immersed in his own thoughts while walking on Sandymount Strand, Stephen, realises that the grainy sand had gone from under his feet (3.147). The strand there is highly polluted, smelling of sewage. When he understands that he had passed the way to his aunt's house, Stephen turns and walks towards the Pigeonhouse (a power station). The name makes him think of not only the book La Vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil (3.167) in which Joseph asks Mary who put her in that state, and gets the answer, "It was the pigeon, Joseph" (3.162) - after all according to the Ballad of the Joking Jesus, his father was a bird - , but also of Kevin Egan and his son, Patrice as well as of his own days in Paris. Stephen recalls his returning from Paris after getting a telegram from his father that said, Nother dying come home father (3.199). This thought inevitably leads to memories again of his mother's death.

Paris, Rodot's (a patisserie), Kevin Egan sipping his green fairy (absinthe), having food, their conversation, his words ("You're your father's son", 3.229), Irish history, his own thoughts that they have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them (3.263) - all these pictures tumble around in Stephen's mind. Without his realising it, Stephen [has] come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand [slaps] his boots, (3.265). He turns back, climbs over sedge and sits on a stool of rock (3.284). He sees a dog's carcass, a real dog running across the sweep of sand (3.294), then two people walking towards the shore. (Just as Joyce was, Stephen is also scared of dogs but he decides to sit tight.) This sight triggers in his mind pictures of the Norwegian invaders (Lochlanns), of Dubliners running to the strand to hack the green blubbery whalemeat (3.305) in what would have been a time of famine in Ireland . . . Similarly the dog's bark running towards him (3.310) makes him aware of his fear of dogs, when he (Mulligan) saved men from drowning (3.317) and then the thought of the drowned man takes his mind back to his mother's death (I could not save her; 3.329).

Wednesday 4 December 2019

Thursday, 28 November 2019, Episode 3 (3.10 - 3.145)

We read as far as "... at one with one who once." (3.145)

Summary:

Thinking of Aristotle's theory of vision, of bodies and their forms, colours, Stephen closes his eyes and walks a few steps on the Sandymount Strand. He is aware that he is keeping steps one after the other (Nacheinander, 3.13). He is also aware that he is wearing borrowed pants and shoes, giveaways from Mulligan. (My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, 3. 16). He opens his eyes and sees that everything around him is still there, his thoughts echoing Gloria Patri (There all the time without you: and ever shall be. world without end, 3.27).
Stephen sees two women coming down the steps of Leahy's terrace. He imagines that there is a navelcord in the midwife's bag, one of them is carrying. Stephen thinks of navelcords going back to the first of its kind. Could he use it to connect to Edenville (the place of Adam and Eve) by giving the operator the number as aleph, alpha, nought, nought, one (3.39)? There is much of Biblical thinking in this thought, and the ones that follow.
Soon he is close to his aunt Sara's place. Should he go visit her? What would be the reaction of his father if he hears of the visit? Aunt Sara is not rich. Uncle Richie is a clerk. He drafts bills of costs for Goff and Tandy (3.80). It is a far cry from Stephen's boasting that one of his uncles was a judge and an uncle a general in the army (3.106). Houses of decay, mine, his and all (3.105). This awareness of poverty make Stephan recall his dreams when he was young: Books you were going to write with letters for titles (3.139) . . .  Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara (3. 143).