Cyclops

This episode is probably the hardest we've read so far. I had a hectic weekend and not too much time to soak in the nuances of Cyclops. But I'll do my best.

Joyce is highly concerned with points of view throughout Ulysses, but in this episode the obsession is more obvious than ever before. In Aeolus Joyce provoked us to distrust the narrative by interrupting the story with newspaper headlines. This chapter takes this technique to a new extreme. The narrator is a character who we have never met - one with a very narrow point of view. And we get interrupted again, this time with whole passages that sometimes span pages. Like the headlines in Aeolus, their relevance to the plot is pretty thin. They demonstrate how the style of the writer is indicative of his point of view. If there is a goal to convey the truth clearly in any of these passages, it is completely undermined - usually because the rhetoric is trying to entertain. Joyce is trying to remind us that journalists and others have allegiances other than the truth.

It seems like everyone except for Bloom is cycloptic - that is, one-eyed and unable to put themselves in other people's shoes. This trait of Blooms is becoming more and more important to the idea of a "modern epic". A few characters that we don't really like that much are called heroes in this chapter. All together Bloom is pushed around by the guy who's giving us the information. I think Joyce is prompting us to respond by noticing Bloom's heroism. He's given tangible adversaries in this episode and Bloom shows some courage (kind of). But what's important is that Bloom is pitted against people who can't consider other perspectives.
This makes Bloom's empathy seem less like a quirk and more like a magic power.

Sirens

This might be my favorite episode so far. Bloom's mind seems exhausted. He's tired from his long day. He's drinking. And most importantly, he's growing more and more anxious as Molly's affair approaches. His thoughts jump from Molly to Keye's advertisement to religious exploitation to Martha and back to Molly.

Where Bloom's curiosity and empathy would normally be idle and wandering, now they seem more cynical and direct. In the Lotus-Eaters and Hades episodes his critique of Catholicism was sometimes jovial or melancholic at the most. But here he condemns Father Cowley as a false prophet. The thought of the rat at the cemetery used to creep him out. But now the rat haunts him as he thinks of his own death and his family line.

Bloom reflects on himself more intensely in this chapter then ever before. He even ponders his own name. The barmaids giggling about some old ugly man might as well be laughing at Bloom. Crippled by his growing inconfidence, Bloom turns to Martha to defend himself against Molly's infidelity. But he knows that such an affair would never materialize. Ultimately Martha is very boring to Bloom. He even wonders if he should feel guilty about Martha - an odd thought considering Molly's much more severe violation of their marriage.

Music finds its way into everything in this episode. It seems to muddy up the whole scene and add to the chaos, yet the emotional plot of Dedalus' song is perfectly synchronous with the Boylan's encounter and climax with Molly. Sounds and songs are strongly connected with sexual organs in this episode. The "throbbing" tuning fork is one of the more blatant phallic images we've seen in the entire book so far. Bloom contemplates musical talent as yet another thing other men have that he doesn't. The jingle jangle of Boylan's car is not just a literary but a musical theme that the entire composition returns to as if it were a chorus.

It looks like Kevin might have been right about associating the playful narrative style I pointed out in Scylla with the omniscient narrator - not Stephen. It appears in the beginning of this episode in Stephen's absence. Mr. Dedalus asks the barmaid to bring him a drink with "alacrity". A ridiculous paragraph ensues where everything thing the barmaid does, from running the tap to reaching for the glass is done with "alacrity". But I do think that the fact that it coincides with Stephen's father and no one else is significant. This may be an inherited sarcasm, if it is not literally in the minds of the Dedalus's.

The Wandering Rocks

Sparknotes suggests that the wandering rocks in this episode appear as literary devices meant to "capsize" the reader. It's hard for me to pin down what exactly are the "rocks" and what is supposed to be the narrow route that I am supposed to navigate. Maybe the sharp shifts in perspective are the rocks and the small connections between these characters are supposed to form a safe path through the episode. On the other hand, the objects that reappear (hats, coins, the poster of Mary Kendare) are meant to distract us from the more relevant milestones in the development of Bloom and Stephen.

I for one was capsized by the thoughts of Stephen as he decided to leave his sister to her own devices. Capsized in so far as I had to get up and pace around until I wasn't as sad. The moment of recognition ("She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her") is a surprising return to the ecstatic revelations that pop up in Portrait of the Artist from a narrative that seems otherwise mundane. It pulls the veil off the "regularness" of the day, revealing the divine aspects of average folk that Joyce is so obsessed with in their naked beauty.

That passage also reminds us of the sharp divide between Stephen and Catholic values (and by an odd but valid extention, between Stephen and Bloom). The moral Christian law would demand that Stephen help his sister. But Stephen takes a consequentialist position. He cannot help his family very much and doing so would undermine all of his goals. He pushes Dilly's troubles back to where they've been this whole time - in the back of his mind. It looks like Joyce is going to do the same. As significant as this brother-sister element seems, I cannot help but presume that it will fade into the background of Stephen's story.

Scylla and Charybdis

In this episode we get a closer look at Stephen's struggle to realize his talent. He spends the whole chapter making an argument that he himself is not convinced by. Like Odysseus, he navigates toward one regret to avoid a much greater one. When Stephen admits his lack of conviction the others chastise him. It's unclear whether he might have published his Hamlet theory had he lied and said he believed it. But that moment of honesty is bound to the disappointment that follows.

Many of Stephen's arguments, which he assumes for the sake of argument, end up revealing truths in himself. As he comments on Shakespeare's self-constructed image, Stephen inwardly contemplates his own appearance to others in the mode of genius poet. Speeches about Shakespeare's wife and lovers remind Stephen and show us that he is in pursuit of love himself - not just as a means for gratification but as a muse. The idea of "meeting oneself" haunts him till the very end ("If Socrates leave his house today, if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctable").

Stephen being a writer, Joyce appoints him as pseudo-narrator for this episode, as he did in the Proteus episode. Stephen's thoughts, often the most jeering and cynical ones, bleed into the narrative - especially in the descriptions of how characters make statements: "Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr. Best said gently". Stephen spitefully ties the statements and arguments of the newsmen around him to their behavior and character. Does he doubt their sincerity? Or does he think they should not be sincere? Does he envy their conviction in what they say? It may be a combination of all three.

Regardless, Stephen has a strong air of resentment for most of this episode. He doesn't seem to like arguing points that he disagrees with as much as he lets on. Towards the end we get a striking lucid moment like when Stephen is "shielding his gaping wounds" in Telemachus: "He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage." In one sense, this brings us back to Stephen's unique manifold of torment. His dead mother haunts him, as does his stunted ambition as a poet and Buck Mulligan's coercion. In another sense, this line brings Stephen closer than he ever has been to Bloom. We're reminded that communicating in academic speeches is not that far from being unable to speak at all. Stephen is spectacled by his peers while Bloom is shouldered. But they both have to fake their dispositions to overcome their social obstacles - Stephen with his seriousness and Bloom with his indifference to Jewishness.

Lestrygonians

In the Odyssey, Odysseus is able to flee what would otherwise be a desperate situation. He owes this good fortune entirely to intuitive suspicion and nearly unconscious foresight. In chapter nine of Ulysses, we see bad omens and bad feelings everywhere. On the first page, as Bloom reads a flyer for an evangelist he either thinks or reads "Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!!" The context is celebratory, but the phrase is panicked. An exclamation point is added each time. It's hard not to connect this line to an image of Odysseus' men fleeing the Lestrygonians. The phrase also foreshadows the advances of a single man: Boylan, who Bloom flees in terror at the end of the chapter. The gulls "pouncing on prey" "from their heights" also resemble this epic attack. The annotations point out that the Lestrygonians "spear men like fish" further linking the birds that Bloom identifies with at first with the cannibals. Mrs. Breen, who is also a candidate for the decoy-daughter of the king in the Odyssey, tells Bloom of about her husband's cryptic encounters. He received a mysterious note that reads "u.p." and has dreams about an "ace of spades" - popularly recognized as a bad omen. Bloom flees the Burton on a bad feeling and revisits a vision-like memory of policemen attacking protesters.

Hades

in Hades, Joyce subjects small and seemingly irrelevant objects to absurd repetition.

Hats, for example, appear throughout the episode, and when they don't their absence is explicitly described. Their significance looses some of its vagueness at the funeral - they are symbols of polite respect for the dead when they are removed. They also seem to be a comforting sort of distraction for Bloom as evidenced by his preoccupation with the engraving on his own hat in the Calypso episode. Bloom's hat seemed to interrupt his tension with and exclusion from his wife. Bloom's exclusion from Menton's memory is somewhat challenged when, at the end of the episode, Bloom points out Menton's dented hat. The hat-as-distraction symbology isn't perfect though. Boylan enters the scene and Bloom's troubled mind with a flash of his "white saucer".

Statues litter the route of the funeral carriage as it makes its way to the cemetery. They serve as landmarks not only for the journey into the underworld but for Blooms' thought, and in some instances, the conversation of the four men in the carriage. They are monuments of dead men, like the shades that approach Odysseus in his journey. There is a lot to uncover here.

The color white also pervades the episode. White horses are demanded by traditional Irish funeral rites. On page 100, "Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shpes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures in the air." Ghosts inhabit this chapter; in the statues, in Bloom's thought of his dead father and son, in Boylan's white hat, and even in the "white" rotting organs of the corpses.

On a somewhat separate note, there is a prevalent theme in this episode of appropriateness versus the opposite of that. The context of a funeral imposes unnatural social restrictions on these characters - especially Bloom. At Bloom's prodding, the four men discuss the shameless behavior of Reuben Dodd until Cunningham cuts their laughter short; reminding them that they should be in mourning. The caretaker tells a joke, and Bloom thinks of the clown-gravediggers in Hamlet as the coffin is lowered. Aside from comedy, Bloom's mind brings other seemingly irreverent things to the death rite. He is preoccupied with practicality and makes comments to himself and others on the engineering of funerals as if they were products or a business. They should use trams instead of carriages to prevent spills. They should bury the dead standing up. Cremation is better. The money for these expensive headstones should be spent on more important things. These thoughts, whether Bloom expresses them to his peers or not, seem to align themselves with his isolation. When he suggests that a sudden death is better than a slow one, the other three immediately see his non-Catholicism. It does not occurred to Bloom that a man who dies suddenly cannot repent for his sins.

Bloom continues to be supernaturally linked to Stephen. Proteus and Hades both begin at 11AM. This allows for the possibility that Stephen's rejection of his father and Bloom's longing for fatherhood occur simultaneously. The same could be said of Stephen's thoughts on "seadeath" and Bloom's silent proposal that drowning is the better way to die.

Calypso

The first Bloom chapter sharply contrasts the elder hero with Stephen. Bloom seems to be much cheerier all around. When we were introduced to Stephen in the first chapter, he was described as "sleepy and displeased". Bloom is introduced with a persistent trait in his character: he "ate with relish". The Proteus episode left Stephen self-consciously unhealthy, whereas the first thing we know about Bloom is that he is well-fed - and is really happy about it.

Of course Bloom is not immune to dark thoughts, but he seems to resist the deepening gloom that consumes Stephen when bad things come up. It's significant that Bloom and Stephen react so differently to their misfortunes because they seem to have similar problems. Both characters are being "usurped". Bloom's husbandry is threatened by Blaze and Stephen's tower is threatened by Mulligan and Haines.

Bloom doesn't get caught up in these things the way Stephen does. When Stephen is "trembling from his soul's cry" as he is assailed by ghastly images of his mother, he needs an external event to break out of it. When Bloom frets over his ancestry, the images of horror are just as intense in his imagination. But he has the will and optimism to escape those thoughts. He resolves to exercise.

Stephen does seem to be more self-aware than Bloom in a certain sense. When he concedes to Mulligan's demands he knows that he is giving something up. When Bloom strangely pampers Molly, the notion that this might fuel his misfortunes only comes up on a sub-conscious level. "Give her too much meat she won't mouse," he thinks - not about his wife, but of his cat. The cat does get the meat though and so does the wife.