Penelope was his wife Molly, Telemachus, Stephen. Thus, Ulysses became Bloom, the wanderer in search of home, wife and son. In his strolls down the beaches of literature he stumbled on the Odyssey, an archaic old bottle but still stout, decided it was just the thing for his 20th Century wine. Joyce first conceived the tale of Leopold Bloom as a short story, only to discover too many possibilities in it. The Ulysses of the Odyssey is a cunning, commonsensible, nervy, not-too-scrupulous man, an opportunist who triumphs at last not so much by virtue as endurance. Why “Ulysses”? Every schoolboy knows the story of the Odyssey, epic-sequel to the Iliad, which recites the ten-year wanderings of the wily Odysseus (Latin-Ulysses) in his long-thwarted attempts to get home to his island kingdom after the siege of Troy. Confusing Ulysses sometimes is, but rather from too much plan than too little. Without a key to its plan this stream-of-consciousness Bible, with its elliptical shorthand, its apparently confused and formless method, may well seem an esoteric work of art. The plainest reader will also see that there is a great deal more to Ulysses than this record of two men’s day in Dublin. Molly lies awake, thinking over what he has told her and what they have not told each other. Bloom goes up to bed, where he makes a drowsy but cautious report of his day’s doings and goes to sleep. When they have had a cup of cocoa in the kitchen, Stephen, now fairly sober, takes his leave. Bloom persuades Stephen to come home with him. After a wildly drunken scene in a brothel and a brawl between Stephen and two soldiers. Bloom takes a liking to Stephen, and when the party breaks up follows him to “nighttown” to take care of him. There he meets Stephen, carousing in the common room with some medical students, and joins the party. In the evening he calls at the Lying-in Hospital to inquire after a friend’s wife who is having a hard delivery. He visits the public baths, attends a funeral, calls at a newspaper office, has lunch at a pub, drops in at the National Library, goes to Sandymount beach to take the air. Leaving her in bed, he goes about his day’s business. Bloom knows all about Molly’s constant infidelities, but is too crafty and too resigned to do anything about them. At about the same hour one Leopold Bloom, middle-aged Jew who makes his living as an advertisement-canvasser, rises from his bed to cook his wife’s breakfast and bring her a letter from her latest paramour. After breakfast Haines and Mulligan walk to the sea and Mulligan bathes while Stephen sets off to his teaching at a boys’ school. embittered, ambitious intellectual Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan, medical student and japer extraordinary a minor character named Haines. Here three young men are living together: Stephen Dedalus. Ulysses opens early on a summer morning (June 16, 1904) on an old tower outside Dublin. At that, however, the main outlines of the story are plain. Lacking the sleuth-nose, the slot-trained paws of scholarship, even an intelligent reader will miss much the first time over the ground. 5, 1931), the plain reader can now literally find out what Ulysses is all about. But thanks to the exploratory works of critics, and notably such an exegetical commentary as Stuard Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses (TIME, Jan. Arrogant Author Joyce gives them no help, lets them sink or swim.
What is it all about? Trusting readers who plunge in hopefully to a smooth beginning soon find themselves floundering in troubled waters. But Ulysses is far from being “just another dirty book.” Judge Woolsey decided that its purpler passages are “emetic,” rather than “aphrodisiac” that the net effect of its 768 big pages is “a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.” But even granting Ulysses a bill of moral health an intelligent adult may well smite his brow and cry: With the exception of medical books and out & out pornography, the only book of modern times that can compare with it for outspokenness in barnyard and backhouse terms is the late D. Is it dirty? To answer the man in the street in his own language, Yes.
0 kommentar(er)
