Class of October 13th: Joyce, Ulysses, part III

LBCL 490 - Class of October 13th
Joyce, Ulysses, part III

(This week lecture, 6pm, a movie about Ulysses & Joyce with Anthony Burgess)

omniscience and omnipotence... a novel that tries to encompass over evrything and paray over itself, reader
usefulness of feeling of omniscience, be all thing to all people...
impulse toward mastery a parody of mastery, all encompassibility?
"tell us in plain english?" - tells one character.
impedence of paray and display of mastery... impossible task. "total art/model"
ridicule, nonsense, further from truth
confront with own impotence, protection from madness of mastery, free ourselve from being mastered... anti-colonialist
partial comprehension
subject is about failure: people not getting to their goal, failing to connect (husband and wifes, father and son)
everything and everyone is kinda frustrated by the end
dedalus and bloom don't connect, bloom goes back to wife and he know's she cheated...
bloom does not torment himself with life: accepts imperfection more than steven dedalus; contemplate divorce, answer "not yet". just goes back to bed, heroism of being a coward.
dedalus suffers because of that same thing: victim
masculine and feminine characteristic not associated along gender lines in this book.
narratives paratechniques and linguistic effects, dissapointed bridge b/w reader and book, frustrated reader as individuals in book are frustrated.
story about homes: desiring home, coming home, ulysses going back... situated in the trivial: buying stuff, doing stuffs, going about there works. call of jobs, homes nations have on us. ombilical cord line. what is the thing that explian us too ourselves, are we created.
fluidity, gender identity, identity itself... blur visitation of flows. end is litteral realisation, anti-metaphore. rejection of everything that is rigid categorisation. Ithaca chapter, last to one.

today: focus on Bloom, most original character. what makes him characteristic, different, original.
jackie: passivity
not anxiety-ridden(acceptance of imperfections), passive, treats everything evenly (except for bar scene, but deflates rapidly): really un-irish, christ-like figure!(that is half-jew)
"karl marx was a jew, spinoza was a jew, and your god was a jew like me''... "how dare he, let's crucify the bastard", clearly christ like.
stephen self-sabotaging - bloom mb of sinn fein, pacific movement, non-violent
avoids violents paths in conversation, unlike odyssea end not in bloodbath.
penis: floathing flower
the scene of kissing molly: its more her kissing him, ensiminating him with a seed.
Bloom "becomes everything" The Savior, mayor of Ireland, etc...
experiences world & body very physically (vs. stephen), embrassing the dirty and impurity (vs. hangup and anxieties of stephen)
turn of century Dublin: bath not even a weekly thing, mortality, and infantile-mortality is rampant, few to none safe water supplies, house are terrible slumbs, picturesque orphans...
Bloom a merchant (vs artistic stephen), not-this-nor-that, fresh perspective, world-councious, able to identify to others, kind and affable
we meet Bloom in his house, passive, about to eat, : bloom is a consuming figure: describe with what he likes to eat, a bit disgusting "man of appetites"
even identifies with cat "wonder what i look like to her"
chapter aligned with calipso section in odyssey, goddess that lives on island where evryday on island is one year, time works differently, interminable.
if wife of bloom is calipso, means he's stuck to him, keeps him from "coming home", stagnation. in fact she's penelope and calipso, she's human: ambivalent, imperfect. not just one thing.
home is not home. fantasies of wanderings. home: life in home with molly before son died. impossibility. something that doesn't flow. would like, knows he can't. can't go home. no home. snif.
odyssey: two-D characters, keeping making same mistakes; in Ulysse its human characteristic into characters, in one day.
ch.9 theories about writting, first one being autobiographical "an other in every phrase always writes about himself". separate counciencessness.
home can also be Sion, palestine, orientalist reveries, pork butcher, pork chops wrapped in ad of model farm in palestine. origin. what is bloom origin: "ireland, i was born here" but also " I belong to a race"... sionism a new thing, a new model of nationalism, sionist a model for nationalists to construct there own national ideals.
economic claim startegy of sionists: buying land into palestine from turks and getting property into jewish hands.
barren land, waste, foggy waters, city of the plains, dead sea dead land.
"origin of the world" painting: sex of a woman.
irish and jews: wandering, famine exile poverty, born everywhere in all sorts of captivities. aligned.
yet is not only a jew: flirting with farrming in palestine, yet mb of sinn fein: flirts with idea of irish independance.
violent independantist: gaelic, 100% irish blood.
stephen and bloom, representation of the mix-community, "impure blood".


(autour page 150... communion a l'église) (p.85, debut bloom)

church, anthropological contemplation, demystified and w/o belief...
promise of return fertility... bloom like abraham...
molly will get period...

bourgeois character: counts spendings, advertising salesman... dreams of nice little house in suburb.

"Cyclope" section of Odyssey: grotesque section... ulysse pops eyes of him while drunk and asleep
equivalent of cyclop is "the citizen" racist xenophobe
about blindness (national, identity)
makes similar statemen: says who he his, a jew
what is history replaced by what is a nation
"a group of people living at the same place
answer he doesn't want to give is "a nation is in your blood"
only place where he gets really excited... soon looses energy... "whats the use?"
a positive or negative definition
(autour p. 510...)

next class read last two chapters.