Thursday, 4 September 2025 (8.757)

The last reading stopped at:

— Have you a cheese sandwich?

— Yes, sir.

(8.757)

The numbers in 8.757 refer to the place in the text edited by Hans Walter Gabler (8 = chapter number; 757 = line number).

*  *  *

One of the group's favourite passages was:

“Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.” (8.638)

In his James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Joyce's friend Frank Budgen remembers walking with him “one evening on the Bahnhofstrasse” in Zurich and asking him how his writing was going. Joyce replied, “I have been working hard on it all day”.

     “Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.
     “Two sentences,” said Joyce.
     I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.
     “You have been seeking the mot juste?” I said.
     “No,” said Joyce. “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it.”
     “What are the words?” I asked.
     “I believe I told you,” said Joyce, “that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch. But there is a seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king's daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women's silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are: 'Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.' You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged” (20).

Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Budgen's book is available on the following site: 

https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AMF2PZFZHI2WND8U