MODERNISM – Joyce, ULYSSES
Session 2: Sirens, ithaCa, penelope
MODERNISM - JOYCE
‘Calypso’
• In the Odyssey, Calypso is a nymph who imprisons Odysseus for
seven years (she promised him immortality if he stayed with her; he
refused, wanting to return to his wife)
• Novel is restarted (first three episodes brought us to 11am; now we
start all over again at 8am)
– Although some similarities: breakfast; Bloom imagining himself as ‘[h]eight of
a tower’ (66) from the cat’s point of view; Bloom and Stephen see the same
cloud pass in the sky (described in similar language: pp 9 and 73); house keys
• But how is Bloom introduced? Why does he come into the novel?
And what do we end up knowing about him?
• Why end the episode in the outhouse?
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Introducing Bloom
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast
heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most
of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine
tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen
softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light
and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer
morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Analysis
• Orderly introduction – confident introduction of this character
(which the preceding narrative has not prepared us for)
• Yet ‘a fine tang of faintly scented urine’ – throws off the narration
• Second paragraph overtly signals the shift into consciousness
(‘Kidneys were in his mind’)
• Paragraph ends with Bloom asserting control of the text: ‘Made
him feel a bit peckish’.
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Textuality
• ‘Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn, travel
round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up
for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand,
strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too …
Wander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet
him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques along
the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. …
Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the
track of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. [68]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Bloom – isolation, wanderer
• Relationship to Judaism
• ‘A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far.
• ‘No, not like that. A barren land, a bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those
waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it
raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead
names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the
oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s clutching a
noggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over
all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old
woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world’. [73]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
‘Nausicaa’
• In the Odyssey, Nausicaa is a figure who takes in a shipwrecked
Odysseus, offering him hospitality
• 8pm at Sandymount Strand Beach (where Stephen had been
that morning)
• Gerty as the first introduction of female consciousness in
Ulysses – but is her sexuality ultimately underpinned by the
male gaze? (Bloom’s masturbation)
• Episode effectively split in two (between Gerty and Bloom)
MODERNISM - JOYCE
‘Sirens’ (4pm)
• In the Odyssey – the Sirens bewitch men by their song; Odysseus
stuffs the ears of the crew members with beeswax; he takes it upon
himself to be on the only one that hears their song (by tying himself
to the mast)
• Direct reference: ‘A headland, a ship, a sail upon the billows.
Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the wind upon the
headland, wind around her’. [350]
• Connection to Ulysses: the tempting women, such as barmaids,
Miss Kennedy, Miss Douce, even the prostitute in the street at the
end of the episode
• All of these women could prevent Bloom from getting home – but
he only wants to get back to the alluring song of Molly (an opera
singer), ‘dear too near to home sweet home’ [374]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Narrative style in ‘Sirens’
• Technique: fuga per canone (‘fugue according to the rule’
• The first two pages of ‘Sirens’ puts in play about sixty fragments
that reappear throughout the episode [the opening ‘Bronze by
gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining’ reappars after ‘Begin!’ as
‘Bronze by gold, Miss Douce’s head by Miss Kennedy’s head,
over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs
go by, ringing steel’
– Why is there this kind of repetition?
– How does this influence your reading?
– Is there an actual meaning here, or is Joyce pointing us to a selfreferential text that has no meaning outside of itself?
MODERNISM - JOYCE
‘Blew. Blue bloom … Jingle. Bloo.’
• Bloom as a figure of isolation? (the jangling of the keys, suspicions
of Molly’s infidelity)
• ‘Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he
strode. Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard
and knew and hailed him:
– See the conquering hero comes.
Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom,
unconquered hero.’ [340]
And then cut to Bloom: ‘Sit tight there. See, not be seen.’ [341]
The fragmentation of his language: ‘He saved the situa. Tight trou.
Brilliant ide.’ [346]
Or eating with Goulding, ‘married in silence’ [347]; or the letter he
cannot write [354]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Ithaca
• Penultimate chapter but the last one written (and in many ways
the book’s closing because of the ‘homecoming’ – with Bloom
and Stephen together, drinking cocoa)
• Over 300 questions, their precise/methodical answers
• Technique (question and answer) derived from the catechism
– Does the chapter seem to lack a style?
– Is Joyce trying to be entirely scientific, analytical? What happens with the
literary in this episode?
– Andrew Gibson: ‘“Ithaca” is the storehouse of fact in Ulysses, the
repository of missing knowledge. “Ithaca” is where the reader must go fro
the solution of all the remaining puzzles’.
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Ithaca – Style / technique
• Catalogues – quite a number of catalogues appear in the
episode
• The catalogue as a ‘complete enumeration’ (OED)
• What purpose do these catalogues serve? Relationship to
realism, to parody?
• ‘Ithaca’: anti-mimetic?
– The dry style and the attempt to have a total vision: doesn’t that show us
the limits of representation?
– ‘Ithaca’ is a difficult closing chapter: we are expecting closure, ‘Ithaca’ puts
everything on the table
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Ithaca - interpretation
… he reflected on the pleasures derived from literature of
instruction rather than of amusement as he himself had applied to
the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the solution
of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.
Had he found their solution?
In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical
passages, aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect
conviction from the text, the answers not bearing on all points.
[791-2]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Ithaca – Bloom and the everyday
• The importance accorded to objects, to quotidian reality (the books
surrounding us, waste water, a budget, science)
• Those objects can also betray us (Boylan’s presence earlier in the day
comes out – betting coupons, the impression of a male in bed)
• But also Bloom’s dreams:
What were habitually his final meditations?
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in
wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded,
reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span
of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life. [848]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Penelope
• Molly as a narrator
• She doesn’t leave the house
• She barely moves
• She is not bound by time or space (her watch doesn’t seem to
work – it had been a gift from her husband; her story goes far
into other places – unlike Bloom, who is more directly fettered by
the here and now)
Molly’s thoughts given without any seeming intercession by the
narrator – an extreme subjectivity
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Penelope - opening
• A rebuke to Ithaca? From the ordered catalogue to eight
massive ‘sentences’, lacking in logic, causality, etc.
• But follows on Ithaca, insofar as that episode ends with Bloom
getting into bed, there is a catalogue of sexual relations (MollyLeopold)
• Molly’s direct physicality (as contrasted to Bloom’s more
ambiguous relationship to the body)
• The question of who did what where when? Bloom asking Molly
(‘tell me who is it tell me his name’); a kind of sexual catechism
(answering Ithaca)
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Stream of consciousness, écriture féminine
• Molly breaks down the causal ‘automatisms’ that seem to perpetuate
patriarchal reasoning / syntax
• Molly brings out what is normally suppressed; female sexuality as a
kind of threat to the political and social order
• Ecriture féminine – Hélène Cixous – starting point is that ‘woman must
write herself’ – female sexuality has for too long been repressed
• But consider the opening – no female unity here: ‘God help the world if
all the women were her sort … I suppose she was pious because no
man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her’ [871]
MODERNISM - JOYCE
Molly’s side of the story
• Suspicions of Bloom’s adultery: ‘its some little bitch or other he
got in with somewhere or picked up on the sly if they only knew
him as well as I do yes … all men get a bit like that at his age
especially getting on to forty’ [873]
• But a longing love for Bloom, who opens and closes the episode