Discussion - Week Eight - Ulysses - Episode 17

[Jim]

This discussion covers Episode 17 of Ulysses


Episode 17, Ithaca
Scene: The House
Hour: After midnight
Organ: Skeleton
Art: Science
Symbol: Comets
Technic: Catechism (impersonal)

[Rachel]

I thought that Ithaca was one of the most fun sections of the whole bunch, even though if you had told me 500 pages ago that I would find long lists of the contents of Leopold Bloom's drawers and bookshelves utterly fascinating, I would never have believed you.

I appreciated it as a treasure trove of facts and answers, though its “objective” scientific style is another of the many forms of writing Joyce tries on, sends up and shows to be inadequate, alone, to represent his world.

What do you guys make of the infiniteness of this section?

It contains all time: past, present and many futures; all space: loved that cool section where Joyce soars out into the vastness of the universe: the moon, Sirius, Orion, “parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasureably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity,” then immediately turns and zooms down into the microbial infinity on earth over “eons of geologic periods” -- bugs, microbes, molecules, in smaller divisions forever and ever until “nought nowhere was never reached.”

Bloom on Boylan and Molly: “To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeating to infinity.”

Mirrors reflecting mirrors: Bloom and Stephen, “Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellow faces.

And on and on...to infinity.

I feel like it all relates to the recurring motifs of metempsychosis and parallax: “he proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father,” but don’t have a firm handle on it. Any other insights would be very welcome!