Wandering Rocks

"Wandering Rocks" is thrillingly systematic, and its method/logic is both large and small, ranging on a scale from trash in the street to the cosmos. Intpreteting this chapter requires the reader to identify how the smaller and greater mechanics of Ulyssess' universe are at play. Most important I think is to identify agency and influence in the interacting systems that controls this chapter.

There are a number of symbols for this in the chapter.

One is Tom Rochford's invention, a device (I think) for horse races to show what race is on. Its "rising columns of disks" control the disks that are inserted: "He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, woobled a little, ceased, ogling them: six." The vignettes work the same way, including the "woobling", which corresponds to the insertion of lines from later vignettes in the earlier ones. The invention then is a symbol for Joyce's narrative method in 'Wandering Rocks', which is numerical, juxtapositional, all the qualities of the machine.

Another symbol, which has narrative and thematic overtones, is Parnell's brother's game of chess he is playing against an unnamed and unseen "foe"; we are tempted to think it is a symbolic Englishman, though he could be playing against himself. (The scene is in the D.B.C.) He "translates a white bishop": This is clearly an analogue for Conmee, whose movements open the chapter. When Joyce zooms in on that bishop, Conmee seems to retroactively lose all agency. "An instant after, under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell once more upon a working corner". Working corner has a double meaning, of course, on street corner and a corner of the board; with Conmee as a shield, he continues with the workmanlike aspect of the game.

The chess game has complex analogues throughout the chapter. The viceregal entourage can easily be spotted as his "foe's" rook. The tower Ned Lambert shows to the Rev. Love is most likely the white castle. The whitehatted H.E.L.Y.'S men are pawns, whose inane movements mask the true action (though in a sense, the pawn's actions are the true action, and the game can be followed by divining how their movements disguise the more important pieces'; this is another degree of the great and small dynamics that riddle the chapter). The black team is less well defined, though it would include Stephen and Bloom and Dignam's son, all in black for mourning.

The tmost complex system is the geography of the streets and the character's movements along them.

Amanda in her entry mentions the constant referall to the character's names, which makes us aware of the narrator. I agree; I think ultimately, Joyve wants us to question whether he has agency over the sprawling cast, or whether he is part of a larger system.

Chapter 7

Joyce juxtaposes the intense death imagery of the "Hades" episode with the chaos of daily life: the first images in Chapter Seven are of speeding omnibuses. Joyce tightens the focus on the Post Office in the second segment, ending with the image of shoe cleaners. Then in a radical twist in the third episode "Gentelman of the Press", he draws it even closer, to an advertisement. The image is just as life like as the preceding ones, except it is unchanging, as evidenced by the palindromic repetition with which Joyce describes it.

The progression between these segments draw attention to a paramount theme in the chapter, as oratory and the art of convincing others is so prominent here, and in fact in the work in general: representations as they relate to the thing being represented. We've talked in class a little about Ulysesses' realism: that the stream of consciousness is not actually very realistic. I agree, but I don't think it's failure. The work I think is not supposed to invisibly or seamlessly capture reality, but rather, Joyce draws attention time and again to the fact that the novel is an artifice, and so is inherently limited.

In "Clever, Very", in describing/thinking about Myles Crawford's mouth, Dedalus observes/writes "Why did you write than then?" The line confounds an easy explanation, just as it's tough to describe the novel as realistic or constructed (the title of the segment underlines its slippery meta qualities). Moreover, the hard work of decoding this chapter, even at the simple level of recognzining who is speaking, draws further attention to the problem. Most obviously pointing to the artifice of writing and the constructed qualities of writing are the headlines marking each episode

The characters are deepened somewhat, Bloom as a target, pushed aside by the opening door, and harassed because he is actually working; and Stephen as awkard in his abilities (Pisgah Palestine and the Parable of the Plums) and undecided if he wants to join the "press gang". But I think more important here than the character and the progression of the plot is the verbal volleys and an examination of discourse.

Chapter 6

In this episode Joyce presents an inherent problem in narratives, and life: death, or THE END, as the great unknown may render all that comes before it null. Bloom's incredible perceptions are no match for the grave, and his daydreaming about the dead, like the nail catching their flesh (they bleed and they don't) and the telegraph by which they can speak to the living, are ludicrous (& funny). If the consciousness of Bloom and Stephen seem overwhelming, then Joyce's alternative is so very underwhelming: the dead as completely separate, in their own universe so to speak, as to make the protagonists' worlds seem at least vivacious.

There's a lot of Irish in this chapter. Some good old Irish sentiment, i.e., "They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't already broken" (line had me choking up, a bit). And Irish types: Dedalus as the redfaced blowhard, Powers the hypocrite, and Cunningham the Blarney speaking, sensitive but insubstantial lad. Not to mention the sycophantic caretaker and the fascistic John Henry Menton. Having Bloom as the observer gives Joyce a good lens for observing these sons of Erin; his mind is so his own, it helps to see others clearly through him.

The chapter is human, and touching, in Ulysses unique way. There's no flinching from the ugly, but it's not fetishsived. Rather the awful, the offal, and the beautiful are put on the same level, and considered realistically.

Chapter 5

The nuance of Leopold Bloom is a huge artistic accomplishment, and Joyce has a seemingly limitless number of tools at his disposal to refine Bloom's character.

In Chapter Five, when Bloom leaves his house in the morning, there is the sense that he has begun his quest. A tracking shot has Bloom walking past storefronts, Joyce effortlessly breaks into Bloom's conscious ("Could have give that address too") with an aside that won't make sense until Bloom reaches the post office, jarring and alerting the reader, then we're back into the scene. The precision of detail of what is observed, and how it is observed, evokes a bifurcated, but simultaneous, experience which I can only compare to Cubism, if the paintings also took place in time. Maybe the best examples are from Martha's letter, when Bloom reimagines it replacing flowers for nouns (letters glanced over are a running gag), and when he is in the chemist's.

But, what do I mean by Bloom's quest? In Chapter 4, Bloom seemed to be imprisoned. Now as he leaves the house in the morning, he is leaving a certain safety, and encountering the myriad puzzles of turn of the century Dublin. There is a momentous feel to the chapter. Paradoxically, so acute and unflinching are the details, there is nearly a documentary quality to what is observed. Events are both inflated and deflated.

One technique Joyce uses to very good effect in this chapter to create that tone, is the Homeric motif of Lotophagi. Chapter Five corresponds to Book Nine of the Odyssey, and Joyce's Lotus Eaters are well adapted: the British soldiers in the post office ad, the churchgoers, and the horses at their feedbags are all actually frightening images, especially to Bloom (although humorously, because they frighten Bloom, they also seem amusing to the reader). At church, Bloom's naive and nearly humanistic idea of Catholic service is contrasted with the fire and brimstone actuality of it, and the specter of kneeling, slavishly crossing themselves. The horses eat: "No use thinking of it anymore. Nosebag time." And the soldiers are "half baked, hypnotized like".

Against the dangers of advertising and the church, Bloom has some powers (He is, after all, the story's hero). One is sight. "Clearly I can see today," Bloom thinks while staring at a lady. The perception is clearly multifaceted; Bloom can see a lot of things that others can not. Often his perception is in service to another power, his "flower". The lotus-eaters are castrated: the horses are geldings, the church's best singers are castratos, and the soldiers seem to have subsumed their sexuality into national identity. The frisson of a sexual thought keeps Bloom from forgetting.

Consider, the Lotus-eaters had forgotten their homeland completely. Bloom would like to forget that Blaze Boylan has an assignation with his wife; a few time we see the cognitive dissonance at work, when he gets a letter from his Martha, for instance, or when he thinks about confession and what the women confess to ("chachachachachacha"ing). He may disguise his thoughts, but he cannot forget them, he knows what Molly's up to. To "forget his homeland", would be to give up the love, sexual and otherwise, in his marriage.

Calypso

Leopold Bloom is a prisoner, and imprisonment has made him extremely humane. Its a sensitivity directed to the entire Ulyssesian universe and all its contents (it knows no bounds). The opening paragraph of the chapter, which has Bloom as a civilized savage, belies his humanity; Bloom realizes that the "inner organs of beasts and fowls" he consumes are just that, something physical, once alive, still tinged with a "faint scent of urine". On p. 59, at the butcher's, Bloom seees a picture of a heifer in a field in a newspaper. The image fascinates him and he considers it from several angles: "He held the page aslant paitiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest."

These are quotidian objects of his sensitive consciousness; the tragic and truly affecting things in Bloom's life, we might imagine, would cripple him. The death of his son, and more immediately, the clues he gets that his much loved wife Molly (who has him practically serving her on hand and foot), these to Bloom must be truly devastating. But no, Joyce has a far more nuanced character: the tragedies Bloom has suffered have not made him into an obsessive, wringing his hands and cursing his fate, but rather made the world Bloom occupies fecund with meaning: "A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow."

An interesting passage has Bloom looking at Molly's pulp fiction, Ruby, the Pride of the Ring: "Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look away..." From there he goes on to wonder about souls, specifically the deceased Dignam's soul.

Bloom is far and away my favorite character in Ulysses; his perception is so accute, and his feelings are so sensitive. He's on a mission: a mission of love.