“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once……” (ln. 145-7). This is the dialectic, the Immortal Soul participated in; it’s a part of the fantasy of who we are, of how we conceive ourselves and ourselves to come; hence, the danger in Episode 2 of false histories. “The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, etc.” (ln. 148). And then the sensuous, zooming in and out from history immediate to the immediacy of the visceral moment.
“The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris,” (ln. 448-50). Ha! Ay, there’s a little Bloom in you yet, boy! Bwa-hahahaha!
“Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted,” (ln. 386); “A side eye at my Hamlet hat…trekking to evening lands,” (ln. 390-3): Is there something between the idea of an unfallen Adam and Odysseus? And Hamlet? An unfallen Adam, perhaps, would be like an Odysseus without an odyssey. Perhaps? A shot in the dark, maybe pushing it a little wide of mark.
1 comment:
When reading Joyce's masterwork one has to hold onto something, and you mostly pick cultural reference points: Stephen's Jesuit education, Catholicism, Ireland. Your responses are a patchwork of quotes and fragmentary notes that might require explication themselves. But the theme of the unfallen and fallen underlies the whole book. It is a fallen world, both personal and social, through which Stephen walks as he tramps on a muddy Irish beach. Later Bloom notices the mud and his boots and the fact that he has boots. He passes Stephen on the way up the stairs to the news office. Ezra Pound said, "Poetry is news that stays news," and part of Stephen's fallen world is the modality of language itself... that is, it's lack of a fixed meaning. Only as an artist can he look into the unfallen world as a source of truth for new mythologies. (Your response also hints at sexual / masochistic likenesses to Bloom. This is related to Irishness for Joyce, a sense that the Irish wallow in their embattled history. Hugh Kenner said it is connected to Bloom's Jewishness as well, in the same way.
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