| HJS |
| volume 4, issue 2, 2003-4 |
| NOTES 1 It is picked up in "Lestrygonians" when Bloom is handed the Elijah "throwaway" he will later throw into the Liffey; and the incident with Bantam Lyons only becomes clear retrospectively, with the disparaging comments in "Cyclops" and the definitive result of the race in the Evening Telegraph which Bloom reads in "Eumaeus," to be concluded with its exhaustive recapitulation in "Ithaca," which retrospectively gives us the thorough trajectory of the newspaper and of the throwaway theme (U 17:327-41). All references to Ulysses are to Hans Walter Gabler's edition (New York: Vintage, 1984), with episode number plus line number in parenthesis. 2 "What time is the funeral? Better find out in the paper." (4: 542-3) 3 "As he walked he took the folded Freeman from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a baton and tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg." (5: 48-50) 4 "While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting poster with soldiers of all arms on parade: and held the tip of his baton against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper." (5:56-58) 5 "--Wife well, I suppose? M'Coy's changed voice said. O, yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks. He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly: ..." (5:141-3) 6 "What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss." (5:144-7) 7 "He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer." (5:221-2) "He opened the letter within the newspaper." (5:237-8) "Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his sidepocket." (5:266-7) 8 Just after Bantam Lyons thrusts the newspaper sheets on Bloom's arms, "Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap in it, smiling." (5:543-4) 9 "Mr Bloom's glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the deaths: Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne's? no, Sexton, Urbright." (6:157-60) 10 "Change that soap now. Mr Bloom's hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket. He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand still held." (6:494-7) 11 "Mr Bloom stood behind near the font and, when all had knelt, dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. He fitted his black hat gently on his left knee and, holding its brim, bent over piously." (6:585-8) 12 At the end of "Calypso," one may also remember that half of the "Matcham Masterstroke" prize story is recycled as toilet-paper (U 4:537). 13 Cf. "the other business" (11:487). See also the references to clothes in "Penelope," which show Molly easily envisages cutting-up and patching-up operations on her old clothes, and remarks how clothes that seem to be ready to be thrown away may easily come into fashion again. In general, Molly tends to disrupt the traditional hierarchy between trash and new commodities (cf. 18:513-18 about clothes shops). 14 Cf. the "HOUSE OF KEY(E)S" section at the beginning of "Æolus" (7:141-63). 15 "Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." (4:4-5) 16 Cf. "the nextdoor girl" (4:146-190). 17 Cf. 5:98-140. 18 Cf. 15:3756-816. 19 See 15:1046 for an explicit allusion. Also in "Circe," Molly claims she is in her "pelt," meaning both literally that she is naked, and connotatively that she is wearing furs, as in Leopold Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz. For a thorough analysis of the allusions to Sacher-Masoch and masochism in Ulysses, see Frances L. Restuccia, especially "Molly in Furs", in Novel, Vol.18, Nº 2, winter 1985. 20 Not to mention the "trash" novels, or soft porn, like the infamous Sweets of Sin, which Bloom provides for his wife to fuel the complex economics of their relationship. 21 Which I have developed elsewhere: see "Stephen and the Venus of Praxiteles : The Backside of Æsthetics," in Cultural Studies of James Joyce, edited by Brandon Kershner, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi (2003): 59-76. 22 Perhaps this might quickly be explained through an anecdote drawn from art history, one relating to the painters Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet. The anecdote is related in Jean-Jacques Lecercle's The Violence of Language, and used there as a parable with a completely different purpose--to explain his project of describing "the other side of language." I will nevertheless retain Lecercle's narration: "Legend has it that the French painters, Corot and Courbet, used to go on painting expeditions together. Corot, the heir of the Romantic landscape painters, spent hours choosing the place where he would eventually set up his easel: the prospect had to be just right, the landscape must compose itself before he attempted to put it on canvas. When this long and painful process had ended, Courbet, the realist, turned his back on him and started painting whatever was to be seen on the other side." (Jean-Jacques Lecercle's The Violence of Language, London: Routledge, 1990, 52). This U-turn in aesthetics offers a pictorial analogy for what Bloom's reversals of perspective bring in Ulysses: a new kind of realism which, regardless of traditional morals or disgusts, will look at what others tend to discard or throw away, to what otherwise would remain hidden or in the trashcan. This reverse shot at reality may indeed be the idiosyncratic touch of Joycean realism, and Bloom's roundabout way of always looking at the backsides seems to me the best representation of it in Ulysses. 23 Cf. Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (University of California Press, revised edition of 1988, pp. 44-5). 24 If we consider Joyce's choice for his two main male characters, they seem to have been devised in order to allow for the most efficient and thorough recycling, functioning as they are in different fields and using complementary methods. For the picture to be complete, we may add that Molly certainly plays her part in this recycling scheme. On one hand, she certainly complements her husband's practical recycling: the second-hand clothes business for instance, is actually presented--at least when Ben Dollard, Simon Dedalus and Father Cowley mention it in "Sirens"--as belonging to her rather than to her husband. And in "Penelope," we find many allusions to old clothes being patched up or worked on or coming back into fashion again, which shows she tends to have that practical, imaginative trend of recycling in her too. But beyond this, in the cultural and literary field, you could say that Molly's all-encompassing flow of contradictions in "Penelope" is a formidable crucible turning and mixing and blending all the possible archetypes and stereotypes about women (woman as holy virgin and great whore of Babylon, woman as inspiring Muse and as debased animal, etc.), and reprocessing them into a definitely new and unusable product--the very mystifying, mythological Molly Bloom, who has already amply proven she could outlive all the theories and criticisms she has triggered. (See my article, 25 At the Dublin Bloomsday100 conference, during Michael Groden's panel entitled "New Research on Joyce at Work on Ulysses", Philip Herring, while asking a question to the participants, mentioned that his university course on Joyce used to be entitled "Joyce, The Great Recycler." I find it particularly revealing that this should have come up during a panel about genetic criticism. 26 Writing its Own Wrunes For Ever: Essais de Génétique Joycienne / Essays in Joycean Genetics, edited by Daniel Ferrer and Claude Jacquet, Tusson: Du Lérot, 1998, p. 48. 27 Roland McHugh, reviewing The "Finnegans Wake" Notebooks at Buffalo, VI.B.3, VI.B.10, VI.B.29, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2001, A Reader's Guide to the Edition, JJQ, Vol.39, n°1, Fall 2001, p.169-70. Italics mine. 28 Dirk Van Hulle, reviewing Writing its Own Wrunes For Ever: Essais de Génétique Joycienne / Essays in Joycean Genetics, edited by Daniel Ferrer and Claude Jacquet, Tusson: Du Lérot, 1998, in JJQ, Vol. 39, n°1, Fall 2001, p.179. Italics mine. 29 Dirk Van Hulle, "Joyce's Textual Economics: The Encylcopedic Recycling of Wyndham Lewis's Early Joyce Criticism," at the "XXe Colloque James Joyce", entitled "Cashcash carackteriscksticks: Joycean Economics", organised by Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM-CNRS). See also by the same author, "Economie textuelle et recyclage chez Proust, Mann et Joyce", in Genesis (Paris: Vol. 18, 2002). 30 Reviewing the same Finnegans Wake Notebooks edition later in the JJQ volume, Finn Fordham used a similar metaphor, from the metal recycling industry this time: "Reading the notebooks in the Archive was like looking into the linguistic crucible of somebody's brain." Op. cit., p.173. Italics mine. 31 See Daniel Ferrer's article on Joyce's corrections for the "Circe" proofs ("Reflections on a discarded set of proofs"): he explains how corrections that were sent too late could not be included by Darantiere, so that Joyce then decided to include the additions in the episode on which he was working when the printer returned the proofs, modifying them so that they would fit their new context (in Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, David Hayman and Sam Slote ed., Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1995). 32 See Dirk Van Hulle, "Dame Plurabelle: Joyce's Art of Decomposition and Recombination" (forthcoming in a collection of essays from the 18th International James Joyce Symposium at Trieste, by Lilliput Press). 33 "The litter! The letter!" (FW I 93,24), "illiterettes" (FW II 284,15), "litterery" (FW III 422,35), "artis litterarum" (FW III 495,34), "litteringture" (FW III, 570,18), "letter from litter" (FW IV 615,1), etc. 34 "Do you want another? --Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has." (4:357-8) 35 Cf. Roland McHugh, op. cit., p.170. 36 "A sombre Y. M. C. A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon's, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom." (8:5-6) 37 "He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thritytwo feet per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of swells, floated under by the bridgepiers." (8:57-9) 38 "Ithaca," recapitulative as always, also provides an exhaustive summary of the throwaway trajectory, retrospectively explaining the whereabouts of both the newspaper, the leaflet and the tip : "Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him?" In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8,9 and 10 Little Britain street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O'Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F.W. Sweny and Co (Limited) dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman's Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded to the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction." (U 17:327-41) 39 "He had a few bob on Throwaway and he's gone to gather in the shekels. --Is it that whiteeyed kaffir? says the citizen, that never backed a horse in anger in his life? --That's where he's gone, says Lenehan. I met Bantam Lyons going to back that horse only I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the tip. Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on. He's the only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse. --He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe." (12:1550-58). Needless to say, on that bet Lenehan should not put on too much either. 40 Italics mine 41 Italics mine. 42 As Judge Woolsey put it in his decision: "I have not found anything [in Ulysses] that I consider to be dirt for dirt's sake" (in A Centennial Bloomsday at Buffalo, catalogue by Sam Slote (The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, New York, 2004), p. 26. |