I have been feeling like I don't have enough training in literary theory/history/religion (or at least a dozen other disciplines) to squeeze all the juice out of Ulysses, which has left me feeling intimidated and hesitant to start. But I've decided to set all that aside and just savor it to the best of my ability. We got a copy of Ulysses Annotated (Gifford and Seidman) that's overwhelmingly detailed, and I consulted it cursorily while reading the first episode, but I don't want to lean on it too much; I can be okay with not getting every nuanced historical reference in the interest of having a more fluid reading experience.
While I skimmed the CliffNotes summaries of both sections of these books, it didn't really feel necessary. The commentary is uninspiring. I think it might come more in handy in later, stream-of-consciousness episodes. But they will doubtless be more approachable for the more amateur reader (such as myself) than the overwhelming detail of the annotated guide!
Reading this first Odyssey/Ulysses pairing, one thing that particularly struck me was the rich imagery of the sea. Some examples:
Odyssey:
- pg. 82 "... a man whose white bones lie strewn in the rain somewhere, / rotting away on land or rolling down the ocean's salty swells."
- pg. 104 "Don't go roving over the barren salt sea - "
- pg. 106 "... a stiff following wind / rippling out of the west, ruffling over the wine-dark sea..."
- pg. 106 "... to Athena first of all, / the daughter of Zeus with flashing sea-gray eyes - "
Ulysses:
- pg. 5 (Mulligan): "Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look."
- pg. 5 "(Stephen): Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting."
- pg. 9 (Stephen): "Look at the sea. What does it care about offences?"
- pg. 9 "Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide."
- pg. 9 "...a bowl of bitter waters." Interestingly, the annotated guide says this refers to Numbers 5:11-31, outlining "the trial of a woman suspected of an unproven adultery." Weirdly enough I read about this this very morning in this week's Torah portion(!), and felt uneasy.
- pg. 18 "Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent."
- pg. 21 "The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, salt white. Here I am."
I think I might be expecting the parallels between Ulysses and the Odyssey to be too linear and obvious, and maybe wondering "why's Stephen's mother dead, and what's happening with his father?" is not a fruitful way to approach the text. But there are some connections in these images of the sea - "Epi oinopa pontom" means "wine-dark sea," and "Thalatta" means "sea" (thanks, Ulysses Annotated). The images of Athena's sea-gray eyes come up in Ulysses, too. And both use the color palette of the sea to conjure up a mood: sometimes the sea is white, other times grey, or bile-green. Reading episode 1 of Ulysses, I felt like the sea was its own character, incredibly present in the scenes instead of being a backdrop.
Other images in Ulysses that particularly struck me:
- pg. 10 (Stephen's mother): "Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts."
- pg. 13 (Mulligan) "...showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly."
- pg. 13 "...rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps."
- pg. 15 "Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk."
All that white, and grey, and green - and then the red of the squashed lice! How vivid, and violent, and startling.
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