A reading of Ulysses´s Joyce
12
May
It may seem complicated for an unsuspecting reader to
read James Joyce’s Ulysses, first its division that claims to have connections with Homer’s Ulysses, so for example Telemachy (part 1, chapters 1 to 3) focuses on characters (Telêmachus was the son of Ulysses) and Odyssey (part II, chapters 4 to 15) is the development of the action that takes place all of it on June 16, 1904, as we already posted after a friends party with Joyce became Bloomsday .
In part I, it’s eight o’clock in the morning at the Hammer Tower, where Stephen (Bloom’s son) lives with Buck Molligan, an Englishman Haines friend of Mulligan is present, they discuss the art, which is the backdrop for their ethical positions. : the tension between the two is because Stephen of an art integrates and that despises the (social) concessions for recognition, while Mulligan sees an art that gives in to social pressure supported by Haines who intends to study the renaissance in Irish Literature and admires the folklore , however it turns out to be anti-Semitic, part of the xenophobia that the Blooms suffer from the origin of their father Leopold Bloom, who is a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant.
Stephen sees Haines as the colonizer as Irish-England unionism dominates the conservative Irish landscape of the early 20th century, while Stephen defends independence although he sees Irish provincialism as small and is also critical of his Catholicism.
Proteus (god of the seas and son of Ocean in Greek mythology) reveals Stephen’s reflection on the visible and the invisible, the objective world as signs that require interpretation (and contextualization), the transformation of everything in time and space, in mind. It develops here subliminally the themes of mother, woman and fertility, Amor Filia.
In Calypso the novel goes to Rua Eccles, n. 7 where Leopold Bloom has his breakfast and prepares it for himself, his wife and the cat, he decides to eat pork kidney and goes to the butcher shop to buy it, on the way he sees a woman who awakens daydreams, returns home collects the mail and sees a letter from daughter Milly, another from Blazes Boylan addressed to Molly.
Blazes had organized a concert tour for Molly and he suspects that the woman is cheating on him with Blazes, eats the roasted kidney, goes to the bathroom and outside the house reads a newspaper. This chapter prepares an incarnation and Odysseus, Stephen’s spiritual father, the inner monologue prevails, but now the daydream goes to the problems of Zionism and eroticism, on the whole, is a space of Eros Love.
Bloom reads a letter addressed to Henry Flower, his pseudonym, the name refers to the flowering of the sexual desire that emerges (the direct correspondence in Homer is with the lotophagous (picture), the people who eat lotus and who are a region of danger in the Odyssey), finally reveals Bloom’s moral strain.
At the end of this topic is Molly in bed, reflecting on her husband, her meeting with Boylan, her past, her hopes, she too suspects a lover of her husband, aspires to a great future, is interrupted twice by the train whistle (a kind of time passing) and another for a start of menstruation, she thinks of the doctor, her children Stephen and the deceased, she remembers the first sex with Bloom.
There are ethical and aesthetic concerns, especially with Stephen in the book, which sets the stage for early 20th century Ireland, but there is an absence of Agape Love, except in Stephen’s conception of art, and this is the connection that James Joyce tries to make. between his Ulysses and Homer’s.
Joyce, J. (1983) Ulysses, Trad. António Houaiss. Portugal: Difel. (pdf)
