Riassunto in inglese "Ulysses" James Joyce, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Riassunto in inglese "Ulysses" James Joyce e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Ulysses James Joyce Context James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, into a Catholic middle-class family that would soon become poverty-stricken. Joyce went to Jesuit schools, followed by University College, Dublin, where he began publishing essays. After graduating in 1902, Joyce went to Paris with the intention of attending medical school. Soon afterward, however, he abandoned medical studies and devoted all of his time to writing poetry, stories, and theories of aesthetics. Joyce returned to Dublin the following year when his mother died. He stayed in Dublin for another year, during which time he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle. At this time, Joyce also began work on an autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero. Joyce eventually gave up on Stephen Hero, but reworked much of the material into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which features the same autobiographical protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and tells the story of Joyce’s youth up to his 1902 departure for Paris. Nora and Joyce left Dublin again in 1904, this time for good. They spent most of the next eleven years living in Rome and Trieste, Italy, where Joyce taught English and he and Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. In 1907 Joyce’s first book of poems, Chamber Music, was published in London. He published his book of short stories, Dubliners, in 1914, the same year he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in serial installments in the London journal The Egoist. Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914, and when World War I broke out he moved his family to Zurich, Switzerland, where he continued work on the novel. In Zurich, Joyce’s fortunes finally improved as his talent attracted several wealthy patrons, including Harriet Shaw Weaver. Portrait was published in book form in 1916, and Joyce’s play, Exiles,in 1918. Also in 1918, the first episodes of Ulysses were published in serial form in The Little Review. In 1919, the Joyces moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in book form in 1922. In 1923, with his eyesight quickly diminishing, Joyce began working on what became Finnegans Wake, published in 1939. Joyce died in 1941. Joyce first conceived of Ulysses as a short story to be included in Dubliners, but decided instead to publish it as a long novel, situated as a sort of sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulyssespicks up Stephen Dedalus’s life more than a year after where Portraitleaves off. The novel introduces two new main characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom, and takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Ulysses strives to achieve a kind of realism unlike that of any novel before it by rendering the thoughts and actions of its main characters— both trivial and significant—in a scattered and fragmented form similar to the way thoughts, perceptions, and memories actually appear in our minds. In Dubliners, Joyce had tried to give his stories a heightened sense of realism by incorporating real people and places into them, and he pursues the same strategy on a massive scale in Ulysses. At the same time that Ulysses presents itself as a realistic novel, it also works on a mythic level, by way of a series of parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. Stephen, Bloom, and Molly correspond respectively to Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope, and each of the eighteen episodes of the novel corresponds to an adventure from the Odyssey. Ulysses has become particularly famous for Joyce’s stylistic innovations. In Portrait, Joyce first attempted the technique of interior monologue, or stream- of-consciousness. He also experimented with shifting style—the narrative voice of Portrait changes stylistically as Stephen matures. In Ulysses, Joyce uses interior monologue extensively, and instead of employing one narrative voice, Joyce radically shifts narrative style with each new episode of the novel. Joyce’s early work reveals the stylistic influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Joyce began reading Ibsen as a young man; his first publication was an article about a play of Ibsen’s, which earned him a letter of appreciation from Ibsen himself. Ibsen’s plays provided the young Joyce with a model of the realistic depiction of individuals stifled by conventional moral values. Joyce imitated Ibsen’s naturalistic brand of realism in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially in his play Exiles. Ulyssesmaintains Joyce’s concern with realism but also introduces stylistic innovations similar to those of his Mo-dernist contemporaries. Ulysses’s multivoiced narration, textual self- consciousness, mythic framework, and thematic focus on life in a modern metropolis situate it close to other main texts of the Modernist movement, such as T. S. Eliot’s mythic poem The Waste Land (also published in 1922) or Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Though never working in collaboration, Joyce maintained correspondences with other Modernist writers, including Samuel Beckett, and Ezra Pound, who helped find him a patron and an income. Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, is often seen as bridging the gap between Modernism and postmodernism. A novel only in the loosest sense, Finnegans Wake looks forward to postmodern texts in its playful celebration (rather than lamentation) of the fragmentation of experience and the decentered nature of identity, as well as its attention to the nontransparent qualities of language. Like Eliot and many other Modernist writers, Joyce wrote in self-imposed exile in cosmopolitan Europe. In spite of this fact, all of his work is strongly tied to Irish political and cultural history, and Ulyssesmust also be seen in an Irish context. Joyce’s novel was written during the years of the Irish bid for independence from Britain. After a bloody civil war, the Irish Free State was officially formed—during the same year that Ulysses was published. Even in 1904, Ireland had experienced the failure of several home rule bills that would have granted the island a measure of political independence within Great Britain. The failure of these bills is linked to the downfall of the Irish member of Parliament, Charles Stewart Parnell, who was once referred to as “Ireland’s Uncrowned King,” and was publicly persecuted by the Irish church and people in 1889 for conducting a long-term affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea. Joyce saw this persecution stay the night. Stephen politely refuses. Bloom sees him out and comes back in to find evidence of Boylan’s visit. Still, Bloom is at peace with the world and he climbs into bed, tells Molly of his day and requests breakfast in bed. After Bloom falls asleep, Molly remains awake, surprised by Bloom’s request for breakfast in bed. Her mind wanders to her childhood in Gibraltar, her afternoon of sex with Boylan, her singing career, Stephen Dedalus. Her thoughts of Bloom vary wildly over the course of the monologue, but it ends with a reminiscence of their intimate moment at Howth and a positive affirmation. Character List Leopold Bloom - A thirty-eight-year-old advertising canvasser in Dublin. Bloom was raised in Dublin by his Hungarian Jewish father, Rudolph, and his Irish Catholic mother, Ellen. He enjoys reading and thinking about science and inventions and explaining his knowledge to others. Bloom is compassionate and curious and loves music. He is preoccupied by his estrangement from his wife, Molly. Marion (Molly) Bloom - Leopold Bloom’s wife. Molly Bloom is thirty-three years old, plump with dark coloring, good-looking, and flirtatious. She is not well- educated, but she is nevertheless clever and opinionated. She is a professional singer, raised by her Irish father, Major Brian Tweedy, in Gibraltar. Molly is impatient with Bloom, especially about his refusal to be intimate with her since the death of their son, Rudy, eleven years ago. Stephen Dedalus - An aspiring poet in his early twenties. Stephen is intelligent and extremely well-read, and he likes music. He seems to exist more for himself, in a cerebral way, than as a member of a community or even the group of medical students that he associates with. Stephen was extremely religious as a child, but now he struggles with issues of faith and doubt in the wake of his mother’s death, which occurred less than a year ago. Malachi (Buck) Mulligan - A medical student and a friend of Stephen. Buck Mulligan is plump and well-read, and manages to ridicule nearly everything. He is well-liked by nearly everyone for his bawdy and witty jokes except Stephen, Simon, and Bloom. Haines - A folklore student at Oxford who is particularly interested in studying Irish people and culture. Haines is often unwittingly condescending. He has been staying at the Martello tower where Stephen and Buck live. Hugh (“Blazes”) Boylan - The manager for Molly’s upcoming concert in Belfast. Blazes Boylan is well-known and well-liked around town, though he seems somewhat sleazy, especially toward women. Boylan has become interested in Molly, and they commence an affair during the afternoon of the novel. Leopold Bloom Leopold Bloom functions as a sort of Everyman—a bourgeois Odysseus for the twentieth century. At the same time, the novel’s depiction of his personality is one of the most detailed in all literature. Bloom is a thirty-eight-year-old advertising canvasser. His father was a Hungarian Jew, and Joyce exploits the irony of this fact—that Dublin’s latter-day Odysseus is really a Jew with Hungarian origins—to such an extent that readers often forget Bloom’s Irish mother and multiple baptisms. Bloom’s status as an outsider, combined with his own ability to envision an inclusive state, make him a figure who both suffers from and exposes the insularity of Ireland and Irishness in 1904. Yet the social exclusion of Bloom is not simply one-sided. Bloom is clear-sighted and mostly unsentimental when it comes to his male peers. He does not like to drink often or to gossip, and though he is always friendly, he is not sorry to be excluded from their circles. When Bloom first appears in Episode Four of Ulysses, his character is noteworthy for its differences from Stephen’s character, on which the first three episodes focus. Stephen’s cerebrality makes Bloom’s comfort with the physical world seem more remarkable. This ease accords with his practical mind and scientific curiosity. Whereas Stephen, in Episode Three, shuts himself off from the mat-erial world to ponder the workings of his own perception, Bloom appears in the beginning of Episode Four bending down to his cat, wondering how her senses work. Bloom’s comfort with the physical also manifests itself in his sexuality, a dimension mostly absent from Stephen’s character. We get ample evidence of Bloom’s sexuality—from his penchant for voyeurism and female underclothing to his masturbation and erotic correspondence—while Stephen seems inexperienced and celibate. Other disparities between the two men further define Bloom’s character: where Stephen is depressive and somewhat dramatic, Bloom is mature and even- headed. Bloom possesses the ability to cheer himself up and to pragmatically refuse to think about depressing topics. Yet Bloom and Stephen are similar, too. They are both unrealized artists, if with completely different agendas. As one Dubliner puts it, “There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.” We might say that Bloom’s conception of art is bourgeois, in the sense that he considers art as a way to effect people’s actions and feelings in an immediate way. From his desire to create a newer, better advertisement, to his love poem to Molly, to his reading of Shakespeare for its moral value, Bloom’s version of art does not stray far from real-life situations. Bloom’s sense of culture and his aspiration to be “cultured” also seem to bring him close to Stephen. The two men share a love for music, and Stephen’s companionship is attractive to Bloom, who would love to be an expert, rather than a dabbler, in various subjects. Two emotional crises plague Bloom’s otherwise cheerful demeanor throughout Ulysses—the breakdown of his male family line and the infidelity of his wife, Molly. The untimely deaths of both Bloom’s father (by suicide) and only son, Rudy (days after his birth), lead Bloom to feel cosmically lonely and powerless. Bloom is allowed a brief respite from these emotions during his union with Stephen in the latter part of the novel. We slowly realize over the course of Ulysses that the first crisis of family line is related to the second crisis of marital infidelity: the Blooms’ intimacy and attempts at procreation have broken down since the death of their only son eleven years ago. Bloom’s reaction to Molly’s decision to look elsewhere (to Blazes Boylan) for sex is complex. Bloom enjoys the fact that other men appreciate his wife, and he is generally a passive, accepting person. Bloom is clear-sighted enough to realize, though, that Blazes Boylan is a paltry replacement for himself, and he ultimately cheers himself by recontextualizing the problem. Boylan is only one of many, and it is on Molly that Bloom should concentrate his own energies. In fact, it is this ability to shift perspective by sympathizing with another viewpoint that renders Bloom heroic. His compassion is evident throughout—he is charitable to animals and people in need, his sympathies extend even to a woman in labor. Bloom’s masculinity is frequently called into question by other characters; hence, the second irony of Ulysses is that Bloom as Everyman is also somewhat feminine. And it is precisely his fluid, androgynous capacity to empathize with people and things of all types—and to be both a symbolic father and a mother to Stephen—that makes him the hero of the novel. Molly Bloom Over the course of the novel, we get a very clear picture of Bloom and Stephen because we witness their interactions with many different people and see what they are thinking throughout all of these interactions. For most of the novel we only see Molly Bloom through other people’s eyes, so it may be tempting to Though Stephen plays a part in the final episodes of Ulysses, we see less and less of his thoughts as the novel progresses (and, perhaps not coincidentally, Stephen becomes drunker and drunker). Instead, the circumstances of the novel and the apparent choices that Stephen makes take over our sense of his character. By the novel’s end, we see that Stephen recognizes a break with Buck Mulligan, will quit his job at Deasy’s school, and has accepted, if only temporarily, Bloom’s hospitality. In Bloom’s kitchen, Stephen puts something in his mouth besides alcohol for the first time since Episode One, and has a conversation with Bloom, as opposed to performing as he did earlier in the day. We are thus encouraged to understand that, in the calm of the late-night hours, Stephen has recognized the power of a reciprocal relationship to provide sustenance. Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. THE QUEST FOR PATERNITY At its most basic level, Ulysses is a book about Stephen’s search for a symbolic father and Bloom’s search for a son. In this respect, the plot of Ulysses parallels Telemachus’s search for Odysseus, and vice versa, in The Odyssey. Bloom’s search for a son stems at least in part from his need to reinforce his identity and heritage through progeny. Stephen already has a biological father, Simon Dedalus, but considers him a father only in “flesh.” Stephen feels that his own ability to mature and become a father himself (of art or children) is restricted by Simon’s criticism and lack of understanding. Thus Stephen’s search involves finding a symbolic father who will, in turn, allow Stephen himself to be a father. Both men, in truth, are searching for paternity as a way to reinforce their own identities. Stephen is more conscious of his quest for paternity than Bloom, and he mentally recurs to several important motifs with which to understand paternity. Stephen’s thinking about the Holy Trinity involves, on the one hand, Church doctrines that uphold the unity of the Father and the Son and, on the other hand, the writings of heretics that challenge this doctrine by arguing that God created the rest of the Trinity, concluding that each subsequent creation is inherently different. Stephen’s second motif involves his Hamlet theory, which seeks to prove that Shakespeare represented himself through the ghost-father in Hamlet, but also—through his translation of his life into art—became the father of his own father, of his life, and “of all his race.” The Holy Trinity and Hamlet motifs reinforce our sense of Stephen’s and Bloom’s parallel quests for paternity. These quests seem to end in Bloom’s kitchen, with Bloom recognizing “the future” in Stephen and Stephen recognizing “the past” in Bloom. Though united as father and son in this moment, the men will soon part ways, and their paternity quests will undoubtedly continue, for Ulyssesdemonstrates that the quest for paternity is a search for a lasting manifestation of self. THE REMORSE OF CONSCIENCE The phrase agenbite of inwit, a religious term meaning “remorse of conscience,” comes to Stephen’s mind again and again in Ulysses.Stephen associates the phrase with his guilt over his mother’s death—he suspects that he may have killed her by refusing to kneel and pray at her sickbed when she asked. The theme of remorse runs through Ulysses to address the feelings associated with modern breaks with family and tradition. Bloom, too, has guilty feelings about his father because he no longer observes certain traditions his father observed, such as keeping kosher. Episode Fifteen, “Circe,” dramatizes this remorse as Bloom’s “Sins of the Past” rise up and confront him one by one. Ulysses juxtaposes characters who experience remorse with characters who do not, such as Buck Mulligan, who shamelessly refers to Stephen’s mother as “beastly dead,” and Simon Dedalus, who mourns his late wife but does not regret his treatment of her. Though remorse of conscience can have a repressive, paralyzing effect, as in Stephen’s case, it is also vaguely positive. A self-conscious awareness of the past, even the sins of the past, helps constitute an individual as an ethical being in the present. COMPASSION AS HEROIC In nearly all senses, the notion of Leopold Bloom as an epic hero is laughable— his job, talents, family relations, public relations, and private actions all suggest his utter ordinariness. It is only Bloom’s extraordinary capacity for sympathy and compassion that allows him an unironic heroism in the course of the novel. Bloom’s fluid ability to empathize with such a wide variety of beings—cats, birds, dogs, dead men, vicious men, blind men, old ladies, a woman in labor, the poor, and so on—is the modern-day equivalent to Odysseus’s capacity to adapt to a wide variety of challenges. Bloom’s compassion often dictates the course of his day and the novel, as when he stops at the river Liffey to feed the gulls or at the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy. There is a network of symbols in Ulysses that present Bloom as Ireland’s savior, and his message is, at a basic level, to “love.” He is juxtaposed with Stephen, who would also be Ireland’s savior but is lacking in compassion. Bloom returns home, faces evidence of his cuckold status, and slays his competition—not with arrows, but with a refocused perspective that is available only through his fluid capacity for empathy. PARALLAX, OR THE NEED FOR MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES Parallax is an astronomical term that Bloom encounters in his reading and that arises repeatedly through the course of the novel. It refers to the difference of position of one object when seen from two different vantage points. These differing viewpoints can be collated to better approximate the position of the object. As a novel, Ulyssesuses a similar tactic. Three main characters— Stephen, Bloom, and Molly—and a subset of narrative techniques that affect our perception of events and characters combine to demonstrate the fallibility of one single perspective. Our understanding of particular characters and events must be continually revised as we consider further perspectives. The most obvious example is Molly’s past love life. Though we can construct a judgment of Molly as a loose woman from the testimonies of various characters in the novel— Bloom, Lenehan, Dixon, and so on—this judgment must be revised with the integration of Molly’s own final testimony. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. LIGHTNESS AND DARKNESS The traditional associations of light with good and dark with bad are upended in Ulysses, in which the two protagonists are dressed in mourning black, and the more menacing characters are associated with light and brightness. This reversal arises in part as a reaction to Mr. Deasy’s anti-Semitic judgment that Jews have “sinned against the light.” Deasy himself is associated with the brightness of coins, representing wealth without spirituality. “Blazes” Boylan, Bloom’s nemesis, is associated with brightness through his name and his flashy behavior, again suggesting surface without substance. Bloom’s and Stephen’s dark colors suggest a variety of associations: Jewishness, anarchy, outsider/ wanderer status. Furthermore, Throwaway, the “dark horse,” wins the Gold Cup Horserace. THE HOME USURPED While Odysseus is away from Ithaca in The Odyssey,his household is usurped by would-be suitors of his wife, Penelope. This motif translates directly Episode One: “Telemachus” Summary It is around 8:00 in the morning, and Buck Mulligan, performing a mock mass with his shaving bowl, calls Stephen Dedalus up to the roof of the Martello tower overlooking Dublin bay. Stephen is unresponsive to Buck’s aggressive joking— he is annoyed about Haines, the Englishman whom Buck has invited to stay in the tower. Stephen was awakened during the night by Haines’s moaning about a nightmare involving a black panther. Mulligan and Stephen look out over the sea, which Buck refers to as a great mother. This reminds Mulligan of his aunt’s grudge against Stephen for Stephen’s refusal to pray at his own mother’s deathbed. Stephen, who is still dressed in mourning, looks at the sea and thinks of his mother’s death, as Buck mocks Stephen for his second-hand clothes and dirty appearance. Buck holds out a cracked mirror for Stephen to see himself in. Stephen staves off Buck’s condescension by suggesting that such a “cracked lookingglass of a servant” could serve as a symbol for Irish art. Buck puts a conciliatory arm around Stephen and suggests that together, they could make Ireland as cultured as Greece once was. Buck offers to terrorize Haines if he annoys Stephen further and Stephen remembers Buck’s “ragging” of one of their classmates, Clive Kempthorpe. Buck asks Stephen about his quiet brooding, and Stephen finally admits to his own grudge against Buck—months ago, Stephen overheard Buck referring to his mother as “beastly dead.” Buck tries to defend himself, then gives up and urges Stephen to stop brooding over his own pride. Buck goes down into the tower singing, unknowingly, the song that Stephen sang to his dying mother. Stephen feels as though he is haunted by his dead mother or the memory of her. Buck calls Stephen downstairs for breakfast. He encourages Stephen to ask Haines, who is impressed with Stephen’s Irish wit, for money, but Stephen refuses. Stephen goes down to the kitchen and helps Buck serve breakfast. Haines announces that the milk woman is approaching. Buck makes a joke about “old mother Grogan” making tea and making water (urine), and encourages Haines to use it for a book of Irish folk life. The milk woman enters, and Stephen imagines her as a symbol of Ireland. Stephen is silently bitter that the milk woman respects Buck, a medical student, more than him. Haines speaks Irish to her, but she does not understand and thinks he is speaking French. Buck pays her and she leaves. Haines announces his desire to make a book of Stephen’s sayings, but Stephen asks if he would make money off it. Haines walks outside, and Buck scolds Stephen for being rude and ruining their chances of getting drinking money from Haines. Buck dresses and the three men walk down toward the water. On the way, Stephen explains that he rents the tower from the secretary of state for war. Haines asks Stephen about his Hamlet theory, but Buck insists it wait until they have drinks later. Haines explains that their Martello tower reminds him of Hamlet’s El-sinore. Buck interrupts Haines to run ahead, dancing and singing “The Ballad of Joking Jesus.” Haines and Stephen walk together. As Haines talks, Stephen anticipates that Buck will ask Stephen for the key to the tower— the tower for which Stephen pays the rent. Haines questions Stephen about his religious beliefs. Stephen explains that two masters, England and the Catholic Church, stand in the way of his free-thinking, and a third master, Ireland, wants him for “odd jobs.” Trying to be conciliatory about Irish servitude to the British, Haines weakly offers, “It seems history is to blame.” Haines and Stephen stand overlooking the bay and Stephen remembers a man who recently drowned. Haines and Stephen walk down to the water where Buck is getting undressed, and two others, including a friend of Buck’s, are already swimming. Buck talks to his friend about their mutual friend, Bannon, who is in Westmeath—Bannon apparently has a girlfriend (we learn later she is Milly Bloom). Buck gets in the water, while Haines smokes, digesting. Stephen announces that he is leaving, and Buck demands the tower key and two pence for a pint. Buck tells Stephen to meet him at a pub—The Ship—at 12:30. Stephen walks away, vowing that he will not return to the tower tonight, as Buck, the “Usurper,” has taken it over. Analysis The first three episodes of Ulysses center upon Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s autobiographical protagonist from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.We left Stephen at the end of Portrait, an ambitious and slightly arrogant young poet who was just finishing college and leaving Dublin for Paris in the Spring of 1902. Ulyssespicks up just over two years later. In Paris, Stephen lived a bohemian-intellectual lifestyle after abandoning medical school. Stephen was called back from Paris by his mother’s illness, probably in the summer of 1903. Almost a year later—June 16, 1904—we see Stephen in “Telemachus,” unresigned to life in Ireland and still dressed in mourning for his mother. He is as yet unrealized as an artist. The novel’s epic in medias res (“in the middle of things”) opening begins, however, not with Stephen, but with Buck Mulligan, who appears as a contrast to Stephen. Whereas Stephen is nearly silent and very reserved, Buck is boisterous and physically active. Buck and Stephen’s relationship is fraught: Buck seeks to establish superiority over Stephen through mockery, yet he also trots out his cultural and intellectual knowledge to impress Stephen. Buck is associated with the consumption, recycling, and marketing of art, not the creation of it—he is likened to a medieval patron of arts and encourages Stephen to market his witticisms to Haines. Buck serves to reveal Stephen’s stubborn pride. Buck’s jokes that imply that Stephen is a servant, and Buck’s eventual acquisition of the house key and Stephen’s money lead to Stephen’s final, frustrated thought of the chapter—“Usurper.” An early parallel between Stephen and Hamlet is set up in “Telemachus,” through Stephen’s brooding presence and the Elsinore-like setting of the Martello tower. In the context of this parallel, we can begin to understand Buck’s joking references to Stephen’s supposed madness and Stephen’s resentment of Buck, the “Usurper,” as related to Hamlet’s seething, silent resentment of Claudius. However, no single parallel can be used to match a corresponding character in Ulysses. For example, while Hamlet is famously haunted by the death of his father, Stephen is haunted instead by the death of his mother. The complication of a direct relation between Stephen and Hamlet is also disturbed by the fact that Stephen himself is well aware of this relation—Buck informs us that Stephen has his own “Hamlet theory,” which Haines mistakenly, though not insignificantly, thinks will connect the play to Stephen himself. Episode One introduces us to Stephen’s struggle with the ins and outs of Irish identity. The poet Yeats wrote “Who Goes with Fergus?,” the poem that Buck sings, and that Stephen sang to his dying mother. Yeats is evoked in Episode One as a representative of the Irish Literary Revival, a movement of Irish writers contemporary with the setting of Ulysses who, in part, intended to define an insular sense of Irish identity, with the idea of making Ireland culturally, if not politically, independent from England. Stephen recognizes the milk woman as the type of earthy peasant figure that the Irish Literary Revivalists and other nationalists would idealize as a symbol of Ireland. Yet, for Stephen, the figure she represents is barren. Her submissiveness toward Buck and Haines confirms that she offers no release from Ireland’s servitude. Additionally, the milk woman’s failure to recognize the Irish that Haines speaks works to deflate such an idealized personification of national identity. Stephen, especially through his self- conscious pose as a continental bohemian, emerges in these opening chapters as a figure dismissive of this kind of insular Irish self-definition. Haines’s version of Irishness appears equally unacceptable. In light of his familiarity with Irish culture and history, Haines’s passive and self-absolving “It seems history is to blame” seems particularly irresponsible and is met with disgust by Stephen. Stephen’s remarks about his own servitude to England and Catholicism are meant to point out the power-relations that Haines attempts to complacently ignore. Stephen’s addition of a third master—Ireland—is a somewhat proud attempt to set himself apart from the Irish masses, who take their own nationalism as a given. The theme of Stephen’s perception of himself as a servant will persist throughout Ulysses. As in this discussion with Haines, fluctuations between perceptive recognition of and prideful resistence to various authorities define the progression of Stephen’s day. Episode Two: “Nestor” Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. cryptic. Stephen himself credits Deasy with accuracy when Deasy intuits later in the chapter that Stephen was not born to be a teacher. On the whole, Deasy seems pompous and self-righteous. We are prepared for the didactic nature of Deasy’s conversation with Stephen by our first glimpse of Deasy on the hockey field, yelling at the students without listening to them. Deasy is unperceptive—mistakenly assuming that Stephen is Fenian, he launches into a history lecture. The purpose of this lecture is less to teach than to assert authority, an authority that is undermined by several factual errors that Deasy makes. Like Haines, Deasy (a Unionist from the north) is pro-British as well as anti-Semitic. Just as Haines used history to clear himself of blame in Episode One (“It seems history is to blame”), so Deasy uses history to blame others, notably Jews and women. This prelude of anti-Semitism will be evoked later in the day, as Jewish Leopold Bloom faces similar bigotry. Deasy’s anti-Semitism rests on his sense that the mercantile Jews have brought decay to England. According to Deasy, the Jews have sinned against “the light,” the light being those Christians who understand history as moving toward one goal—the manifestation of God’s plan. But the presentation of Deasy’s character undermines his own convictions. Instead of Christianity and light, Deasy himself deals in coins and material goods. His moralistic color scheme, in which good Christians are light and dangerous Jews are dark, is not to be the color scheme of Ulysses, in which the two heroes, Stephen and Bloom, are dressed in black, and the dangerous characters, such as Buck Mulligan, are associated with brightness. Notably, Stephen challenges only Deasy’s anti-Semitism during the conversation, and not any other of Deasy’s ill-considered comments. Stephen’s overall passivity and politeness toward Deasy seem to have more to do with his unwillingness to participate in a political argument on Deasy’s terms. Stephen’s bohemian-intellectual comment that God is “a shout in the street” is a clear departure from the terms of Deasy’s argument, and it confuses him. Deasy is aggressive and likens their conversation to armed confrontation—breaking lances. Stephen dislikes violence. The subject of his morning history lesson, Pyrrhus, is notable for winning a battle, yet reckoning the cost of the violence too great. During his conversation with Deasy, Stephen is rattled by the noises from the hockey field outside. He envisions the field hockey match as a joust and imagines the boys’ moving bodies as sounds and gestures of bloody battle. Rather than remaining in this atmosphere, prey to Deasy’s aggressive comments, Stephen politely signals the end of the conversation by rustling the sheets of Deasy’s letter. When Deasy runs after Stephen in the driveway to report an anti-Semitic joke, Stephen’s non-participation is palpable. His thoughts are silent; his mind has moved on. Episode Three: “Proteus” Summary Stephen walks on the beach, contemplating the difference between the material world as it exists and as it is registered by his eyes. Stephen closes his eyes and lets his hearing take over—rhythms emerge. Opening his eyes, Stephen notices two midwives, Mrs. Florence MacCabe and another woman. Stephen imagines that one has a miscarried fetus in her bag. He imagines an umbilical cord as a telephone line running back through history through which he could place a call to “Edenville.” Stephen pictures Eve’s navel-less stomach. He considers woman’s original sin, and then his own conception. Stephen contrasts his own conception with that of Christ. According to the Nicene Creed, a part of the Catholic mass, Christ was “begotten, not made,” meaning that he is part of the same essence as God the Father and was not made by God the Father out of nothing. Stephen, in contrast, was “made not begotten,” in that though he has biological parents, his soul was created out of nothing and bears no relation to his father’s. Stephen would like to argue the specifics of divine conception (are the Father and the Son the same being or not?) with heretic-scholars of the past. The sea air blows upon him, and Stephen remembers that he must take Deasy’s letter to the newspaper, then meet Buck at The Ship pub at 12:30. He considers turning off the beach to visit his aunt Sara. He imagines his father’s mocking reaction to such a visit (his father is disgusted by his brother-in-law, Richie, who is Sara’s husband). Stephen imagines the scene if he were to visit: Richie’s son Walter would let him in and uncle Richie, who has back trouble, would greet Stephen from bed. Coming out of his reverie, Stephen remembers feeling ashamed of his family when he was a child. This disgust for his family brings Jonathan Swift to mind— Swift’s disgust for the masses is evidenced in his novel Gulliver’s Travels by the noble Houyhnhnm horses and beastly Yahoo men. He thinks of Swift, with a priestly tonsured head, climbing a pole to escape the masses. Stephen thinks of priests all around the city and of the piety and intellectual pretensions of his youth. Stephen notices he has passed the turnoff for Sara’s. Heading toward the Pigeonhouse, Stephen thinks about pigeons: specifically, the Virgin Mary’s insistence that her pregnancy was caused by a pigeon (as recorded in Léo Taxil’s La Vie de Jesus). He thinks of Patrice Egan, the son of Kevin Egan, a “wild goose” (Irish nationalist in exile) whom Stephen knew in Paris. He remembers himself in Paris as a medical student with little money. He remembers arriving once at the post office too late to cash a money order from his mother. Stephen’s ambitions for his life in Paris were suddenly halted by a telegram from his father, calling Stephen home to his mother’s deathbed. He thinks back to Buck’s aunt’s insistence that Stephen killed his mother by refusing to pray at her deathbed. Stephen remembers the sights and sounds of Paris, and of Kevin Egan’s conversations about nationalism, strange French customs, and his Irish youth. Stephen walks to the edge of the sea and back, scanning the horizon for the Martello tower. He again vows not to sleep there tonight with Buck and Haines. He sits on a rock and notices the carcass of a dog. A live dog runs across the beach, back to two people. Stephen imagines the beach scene when the first Danish Vikings invaded Dublin. The barking dog runs toward Stephen, and Stephen contemplates his fear of the dog. Considering various “Pretenders” to crowns in history, Stephen wonders if he, too, is a pretender. He notices that the two figures with the dog are a man and a woman, cocklepickers. He watches as the dog sniffs at the carcass and is scolded by his master. The dog pisses, then digs in the sand. Stephen remembers his morning riddle about the fox who buried his own grandmother. Stephen tries to remember the dream he was having last night: a man holding a melon was leading Stephen on a red carpet. Watching the woman cocklepicker, Stephen is reminded of a past sexual encounter in Fumbally’s lane. The couple pass Stephen, looking at his hat. Stephen constructs a poem in his head and jots it down on a scrap torn from Deasy’s letter. Stephen wonders who the “she” of his poem would be. He longs for affection. Stephen lies back and contemplates his borrowed boots and small feet that once fit into a woman’s shoes. He pisses. He thinks again of the drowned man’s body. Stephen gets up to leave, picks his nose, then looks over his shoulder to see if anyone has seen. He sees a ship approaching. Analysis There is very little action in Episode Three and only one line of dialogue—the chapter consists almost entirely of Stephen’s thoughts. Joyce’s scant use of punctuation makes it somewhat difficult in Episodes One and Two to distinguish between third-person narrative, interior monologue, and dialogue. In Episode Three, the problem becomes not how to distinguish Stephen’s interior monologue from all else, but how to follow the twists and turns of that monologue itself. Stephen is an extremely educated young man—his thoughts therefore flit over a host of scholarly texts and several different languages. Episode Three also offers a compendium of the symbols we have seen thus far, as Stephen’s mind works in the language of symbols from earlier in the morning. Thus Deasy’s shell collection, the sea as mother from Episode One, and drowned male bodies recur in Episode Three and become motifs. Thus far this morning, we have seen Stephen in his social and professional guises, with smatterings of his private thoughts. The more personal nature of Episode Three allows us to sense an undertone of suffering (expressed through the recurring themes of death, drowning, and decay) in Stephen’s thoughts. The Stephen Dedalus from the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was isolated and full of pride. He had ceased to communicate with those around him, and was cer-ebrally focused on his artistic coming-of-age and Parisian exile. 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 the triumph of Bloom’s compassionate humanism over the violent essentialism of the citizen and others. Ned Lambert’s sarcastic response to Bloom here is an example of another way in which Bloom is repeatedly marked as an outsider—the Dublin men with whom Bloom associates are skilled in using mockery and sarcasm to establish authority over others, while Bloom does not use humor in this way. 4. . . . each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces. This quotation occurs in Episode Seventeen—it is a narrative description of Stephen and Bloom’s wordless interaction in Bloom’s garden just before Stephen leaves. Their meeting is in no sense ideal—a father-son connection is not explicitly made, and Stephen declines to stay the night and probably will not see Bloom again. Yet the narrative of Episode Seventeen manages to convey their union as symbolically meaningful, by tapping various themes. This sentence manages to include an optimistic set of thematic connotations: the “recognition” theme from (disguised) Odysseus and Telemachus’s meeting in The Odyssey; and an idea of the father-son relationship involving versions of the same bodily self (“flesh”). The “reciprocal” aspect of their meeting implies that Stephen has managed to find a medium in the troublesome dynamic of activity-passivity. The “theirhisnothis” narrative play also manages to suggest that the meeting is an ideal balance between a coming-together and a realistic recognition of “otherness.” 5. . . . and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Molly’s final words seem to refer immediately to her memory of accepting Bloom’s proposition of marriage during their day spent on Howth. However, the ambiguity of the many masculine pronouns in Molly’s monologue also exists here—in the same paragraph, she remembers a similar outdoor scene of love with Lt. Mulvey, and the ambiguity of this seeming affirmation of the Blooms’ marriage is typical of Joyce’s endings. However, the looseness of Molly’s language in these final lines also enacts a combination of the immediate realistic level of the text with the idealistic, symbolic level—Molly’s “Yes” here is an unqualified affirmative of natural life and of physical and emotional love.