“Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off,” (4).
This idea of the hero interests me. I feel like Bloom could’ve said the same, at times. “The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father,” (337). The artist’s becoming; he is his own ghost; Telemachus searching for Odysseus, Stephen searching for himself as the mature artist, which is here Bloom to be and in passing, re-passing, and is Joyce; for if Shakespeare played the part of the ghost in the first stagings of Hamlet, then Joyce is the ghost in Ulysses. Bloom’s dead son : Stephen’s dead mother. It’s a book of inversions, where everything tidily collides. Joyce is the ghost of Stephen’s mother, who bore this incarnation from his cerebral womb of himself and his growths; “No, mother! Let me be and let me live,” (9), and so be it; this book releases you.
Ireland the world away, but in a book of inversions the hero’s never left home, his own interiors.
What keeps Ireland stunted?
No comments:
Post a Comment