Ulysses: Important Quotations and Their Analysis, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Ulysses: Important Quotations and Their Analysis e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Important Quotations Explained 1 Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. This quotation, part of Stephen’s inner monologue, appears in Episode Two. Amor matristranslates to “mother love,” a concept that Stephen ponders while giving extra help to his student Sargent. Sargent reminds Stephen of himself at the same age—Stephen was similarly dirty and disheveled, a child only a mother could love. Stephen thinks of “mother love” frequently in Ulysses—he contrasts the concrete, bodily reality of a mother’s love to the disconnected, tension-ridden relation between a father and a child. In Episode Nine, Stephen calls amor matris “the only true thing in life,” and skeptically identifies paternity as “a legal fiction.” The phrase “subjective and objective genitive” refers to the confusion about the translation of amor matris—it can be either a child’s love for a mother or a mother’s love for a child. This touches on Stephen’s difficulties in deciding whether to be an active or a passive being. In Episode Nine, he frames the choice this way: “Act. Be acted on.” In the quotation from Episode Two above, we see Stephen trying to understand the ethics and power relations involved in his teacher-stu-dent relationship with Sargent in terms of the compassion entailed by “mother love.” 2 History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. This quotation appears in Episode Two, during Stephen’s conversation with Mr. Deasy. With Sargent and his class earlier in Episode Two, Stephen was the reluctant teacher, and now Deasy attempts to position him as the pupil. But Stephen blithely maneuvers out of this role by way of a few cryptic statements, such as the one above. Here, Stephen’s version of history as a “nightmare” is an explicit challenge to Deasy’s conception of history as moving toward one goal (the manifestation of God), and an implicit challenge to Haines’s version of history in Episode One as something impersonal and cut off from the present (“It seems history is to blame”). Stephen’s conception of history has several meanings. Stephen sees history, and Irish history in particular, as filled with violence—Deasy’s and Haines’s conceptions of history enable this violence by excluding certain people from history in Deasy’s case (those who do not believe in a Christian God) and by absolving those who perpetrate violence from any blame in Haines’s case. Stephen’s comment also refers to his conception of the tensions between art and history—Stephen sees history as an impossible chaos and art as a way of representing that chaos in an ordered fashion. Finally, Stephen’s statement is also an extremely personal one—his own history is something he is trying to overcome. At the opening of Ulysses, Stephen is feeling particularly hopeless about the possibility of rising above the circumstances of his upbringing. 3 —What is it? says John Wyse. —A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years. This dialogue occurs in Episode Twelve, during the confrontation scene at Barney Kiernan’s pub. Led by the citizen, the men at Barney Kiernan’s explicitly identify Bloom as an outsider, his Jewish-Hungarian roots being incompatible with their essentialist conception of Irishness as a “racial” and Catholic category. Here, Bloom’s conception of a nation may seem excessively loose (especially when he backs up several lines later to qualify, “Or in different places”), but Bloom’s position on nationality as a self-selected category is part of