Kyle’s Reviews > Ulysses: The 1922 Text > Status Update

sheesh its over all of it and one has to wonder how much of the seven years labour couldve been curtailed with at least some editorial trimming but now Ill never have to hold this book again once Ive read the appendices and tried to figure out why so many scholars have given over a better part of their careers to straightening out and making sense of a story tossed off on a June afternoon on a stroll with Nora sheesh

Did Joyce randomly write replies with an auto-text generator?
The first thing that is the only way that you could be with your own and the ego that is not only the one you have done for the next week and a week and I have to a couple weeks ago that you are going on the weekend and the next weekend of next weekend and we can set up a time to meet you guys and I have to go back into town and get a few more of the stuff

Don’t be fooled by supposed return to narrative normalcy here, the chapter “Eumaeus” is as poorly plotted and randomly assembled as any of the preceeding ones; more like “You Mar This” or “Huge Mean Ass”- ha, got ya Joyce! Totally nailed it, since he goes out of his way to make the familiar tale into such a misremembered mash, somehow bringing in some sailors just because that sense had sailed long ago.

All the classical erudition Joyce vomits up in this way too long chapter becomes a gross pastiche of Walpurgisnacht (an already overstuffed quasitheatrical text), and the only highlight is the brief reappearance of Gerty limping onto the scene to call Leopold a creepy sexist jerk. So now I can tell what kinky thrills so many of the Bloomsdayians get up to every June 16th and no Philip Sober to throw the book at them?

Of course after a brief half chapter of understandable prose, the next fifty pages take an entire millennium of British literature, puts it in a blender and somehow makes it sound like boastful brogue bros in a bar talking bs. And somehow all of this is emblematic of the birthing process, incensing Woolf even more than the previous chapter as she writes indirect ire at Joyce (by way of Eliot’s praise) for his gall.

So many pages of utter nonsense followed by half a chapter of straightforward storytelling: clear, relatable and personal insight into the dissatisfied Gerty, who will probably not appear anywhere else in this book. Soon an inner monologue from pervy Leo hurls the readers back into the masculine mind of modernist machismo, far from a Charlotte Brontë or Virginia Woolf the former half of this feminine chapter evokes.

I am well beyond the point of even wondering what is going on in the narrative. It is a shell game of a story that works as a rambling account of drunken speech caught at pubs dotted across Dublin. So take that, Patricio Velasquez, Hokopoko Harakiri and Miss Priscilla Elderflower; Joyce sure got your number! Meanwhile, mild-mannered Leopold continues to be the brunt of many off-colour comments; is he really the hero?

Much of this musical chapter relies on odd arrangements of familiar snatches from opera to drinking songs, but the men gathering at Ormond Hotel have something less melodious in mind, a bump and grind with two barmaids and somehow Molly Bloom’s name gets bantered about even with Leopold somewhere in the room, or out for a walk, or who really knows what is going on. I’m barely a third of the way through this book!

Imagine if the story of Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" was being told by a Tamarian (from the classic Next Generation episode 'Darmok') and it somehow would make more sense than the random events jotted down in this chapter. A closer analysis might reveal the antisemitism of Irish clergy or the seediness of bookseller's stalls. Could incidents here impact on later events in this story? "Shaka when the walls fell."

Normally I would enjoy a bit of Shakespearean trivia, sprinkled into a story but here all of it (a century’s worth and being the nineteenth, way too much) spoils the broth. What is actually happening, dare I ask? Are Stephen and colleagues publishing an article on Hamlet, preparing for a symposium, or just shooting the breeze? Whereas I once would have savoured so much erudition, now I rue its toxic taste.