Let's Get Through Ulysses Together discussion
Hades
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I'm old enough to know many of the terrible old music-hall songs Joyce celebrates. The barrel organ's "Oh oh Antonio" can be heard here,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVNzbR...
lyrics here,
http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid...
The better known "has anybody here seen Kelly" has several youtube versions.
I love the crumbs. That exchange made me laugh. "What is this? he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?" After re-reading, it sounds like there was sex in the carriage before they entered. Mr. Power comments that someone made a picnic party in the carriage lately, where Simon Dedalus twists his nose and says, "Unless I'm greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?" Martin states the smell has struck him too and Dedalus sighs and says, "After all, it's the most natural thing in the world."
Mr. Bloom's thoughts are interjected in this exchange, and he is thankful he took a bath. Interesting. Mr. Bloom is a self-concerned type A kind of person much?
The first time I read Ulysses, I had the novel in one hand, and Harry Blamires' Bloomsday Book in the other. My eyes flicked from left to right as H Blamires explained what was going on. I recall that at one point he said "and now we need to understand that ..." and introduced a major spoiler. The result was that instead of my understanding unfolding in Joyce's order, it was unfolding in Blamires'. I learnt things from Blamires' book which I'm still not sure how you discover from the novel itself, for example that Mrs Riordan is the Dante of Joyce's Portrait.
Reading it now I can see Joyce himself presenting the story. Bloom's dead son ("If little Rudy had lived ... My son"), his daughter ("her tomboy oaths"), the significance of Boylan. Bloom's distress at hearing the name we see from the way he looks down at his nails, withdrawing into himself. Then, as he explains that he won't be accompanying his wife on the tour, we guess that something is going on between his wife and this man Boylan who is organising it.
But on the way there are lots of puzzles.
"voglio e non vorrei. No: vorrei e non" Bloom has been hearing Molly practicing this. In the aria ("la ci darem" --- lots of versions on youtube) vorrei e non vorrei is correct (I would and I would not), and not voglio e non vorrei (I want to and would not). But how could Bloom have enough Italian to get hold of the wrong version?
The crumbs on the seats inside the funeral carriage. What is the significance of this?
I've also got the Odyssey and have been looking at the "Homeric parallels". There is not, as I used to suppose, a simple correspondence between each chapter of Ulysses and a book in Homer's poem, but each chapter relates some Homeric episode. Hades relates to Odyssey Book 11. Odysseus conjures up the ghosts of the dead with a sacrifice of sheep. Similarly the funeral carriage passes sheep on the way to slaughter.
The chapter is a catalogue of death and dying: Sick children, Stephen "clad in mourning", Bloom's dead son, dead father, Mrs Riordan, the animals for slaughter, the child's coffin, the story of the corpse upset in the road, The Croppy Boy, the story, comic and tragic at the same time, of Reuben J's son's attempted suicide.