Reading Ulysses One Page a Day: Pages 21-25



005 ... In which I read James Joyce's Ulysses one page per day, one day at a time, and chronicle my reading by quoting my favorite sentence and favorite word ("f.w.") from each page. Each post chronicles five days of reading.


Day 21; pg 21

For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.

Another "all"-one-word-sentence occurs on this pg.  A general's spear is prominent.  As is Pyrrhus, pier.  Lots of letter "p" wordplay.

f.w. = gorescarred.

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Day 22; pg 22

Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds..

f.w. = Genevieve

I was recently discussing the topics of Time and Ghosts with friends, just the day before, in fact, that I read this page. Check out how pg 22 opens below —

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
—Tell us a story, sir.
—O, do, sir. A ghoststory.

Is it possible Joyce remembered our future conversations before they happened, and so recorded some of our present biography in his past fiction?  Are you metempsychotic enough to believe it?


Day 23; pg 23

His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading.

f.w. = riddling.  Pg 23 is a page riddled with riddles.  Stephen telling a riddle that's not a riddle but a prank for schoolboys; riddles of the Church—pranks for parishioners?  The Holy Catholic Church is wholly a riddle at times.  Fun pg.

Here's an arbitrary, random aside for Joyce fans; especially for aficionados of Finnegans Wake:  Arno Schmidt ~ on Finnegans Wake.

I also mention Arno Schmidt because his long untranslated novel Zettels Traum (1970) is scheduled for a September release this year from Dalkey Archive, translated as "Bottom's Dream".  Like Finnegans Wake, a novel that Zettel's Traum has been compared to, it's been accused of being unreadable, too long, and untranslatable.  And get this—it's twice as long as Finnegans Wake at 1,496 pages!  It will become one of the lengthiest novels ever published in English.  You can already preorder a Dalkey Archive hardcover edition (in one volume) for $53.57!

Who was Arno Schmidt and what is Zettels Traum?

Watch Zettels Traum yourself!

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Day 24; pg 24

Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

More parody of sacred Scripture.  Another appearance, also (a variation I believe), of He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather.  Hamlet plays a role here in Ulysses and also in Infinite Jest; what other famous works (or not so famous works) of modernisticshit does Hamlet appear?

f.w. = askance

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Day 25; pg 25

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

As far as sentences about secrets go, that one is spectacular.

f.w. = laggard

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Reading Ulysses index

Comments

  1. I know it's at the further end of speculative inductive thinking but I remember thinking that Gravity's Rainbow referenced both Ulysses & Hamlet in the opening pages, with the glass falling in the dark referencing the scene where Stephen breaks the glass lamp in the Nightgown sequence and Pirate going up on to the roof and seeing the vapor trail of the V2 as an echo of the scene on the roof of Elsinore Castle.

    So if the V2 is Hamlet's father who are we?

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