9. Ithaca & Penelope

These days, Ulysses may seem more eccentric than epoch changing, and it can be difficult to see how Joyce’s novel (how any novel, perhaps) could have been revolutionary

– Kevin Birmingham (224)

Place Ithaca

Ithaca [now this episode will have to end with “I”] is not a place. It’s an Ideal (Archetype – ROMANCE). Joyce’s favourite episode. His “ugly duckling.” Pride of Daedalus in a technical achievement. Cherished like Vulcan’s ember. Or Shelley’s fading coal. A storehouse of facts. A perfect lie. The real ending. The last bit he finished, long after Penelope was scored. Flawless in memory. Like Penelope herself to her husband.

Outline the plan for this chapter

To fuse the Ithaca and Penelope episodes. To make the same purposive misuse of Joyce as he did of Homer. To highlight the calculated nature of Joyce’s practice. As an exemplar. To conflate two climactic episodes in Ulysses into a single chapter (thus showing I have the power at my desk to reduce them in scale). To create an embarkation pier for Gibraltar (post-Ulysses). Ithaca tells the story of rimming the cosmos. Penelope inserts the narrative straight into the flesh like a syringe.

Method?

Deconstruct the catechism [Q&A] format of Ithaca. Cut-up its temporal flow. Insert apparently random events in disorder. It may all become clear over text-time. Note cinematic precedents in Welles (F for Fake, OSW). Insert diary format to complete journey of forms (Ulysses is an odyssey of styles). Intensify the sandstream consciousness of the Penelope episode. She must remain in brackets compared to the concrete form of Ithaca. Her role is examined from Question 30 onwards (employ false numeration). Convert Molly Bloom’s monologue into a weft of voices, like the choir of serving girls strung-up by Telemachus after the slaughter of the suitors. This chapter is ALL MEN then ALL WOMEN. They can’t intersect. This is a symbol of Joyce’s stark gender division. Press towards the style of F(W)ake (loop back to C6). Other Side of the Wind (OSW) is a kind of acronym for ORSON W. Make unreadable. Dodge death just like Sisyphus. TO KILL THE AUTHOR, YOU MUST READ THE BOOK.

List the three greatest artistic figures of the twentieth century

MD, JJ, OW.

What did they have in common?

Unbolted form.

What was your first exposure to Welles?

As a judge on the Gong Show. It seemed perfectly normal to an Australian teenager in the late Seventies for a legendary film maker to work on a popular TV series. I knew nothing about his back story until I read the biography by Barbara Leaming. I thought Chuck Barris was the really famous guy on that show, what with his bumbling persona and exaggerated applause. I feel like I never saw Chuck’s eyes. The Unknown Comic remains a creation of comic genius. He reversed Barris’ mannerisms, resembling a paper bag Ned Kelly. Barris wrote a moving biography of his daughter, who died of a drug overdose. She is a model for (Morg)ANA LAFEI. Barris claimed to have been an assassin for the CIA in the 1960s in his book, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. This turned out to be a fake. There is an odd symmetry with Welles in this subject. Perhaps Barris was inspired by F for Fake. Synonyms for fakery include deceit and cunning, which are qualities associated with Odysseus and his forebears.

What was the lesson from Leaming’s book?

That Welles did whatever it took to keep making movies. This demonstrated a High Romantic commitment to pursuit of a goal regardless of exigencies (see “Alastor,” which means “demon of solitude” in GK). He worked as a writer, director, producer, impresario and actor across multiple fields including movies, theatre, radio, journalism, advertising and even politics. He was considered as a running mate for Roosevelt in 1944. He usually acted the part of himself. Only Shakespearean roles and his own works had the aesthetic majesty to dislocate him into an alternative characterisation.

Rework Joyce’s use of water as an arch symbol in Ithaca to Sydney topography

Joyce tracks the journey of water in Dublin from the reservoir to Bloom’s tap. It is a symbol for the flow of life etcetera. This connects to images of the Liffey. Sandstone is a complementary metaphor for Sydney.

Correct Joyce’s shortcomings in Ithaca

Joyce’s weakness in using water as a life-symbol is that he only treats it lyrically. He should have recognised the commercial value of natural resources (see Polanski, Chinatown). This oversight has been corrected in TMAC (See C5).

Compare their properties as narrative symbols

Sandstone moves slowly under the surface. Water moves fast usually upon. One is almost eternal, the other vitally ephemeral. One has cosmic scope beyond the range of human existence, the other is fast and unpredictable like life.

Apply this element to our heroes

(1) Tom Hallem moves imperceptibly on the surface almost not at all. He has no depth. Other people’s actions dictate his status. There is no apparent flow.

(2) How is Billy’s life like sandstone?

Unlike. Overall, he is methodical even stoical. An aberration occurs in the period directly after this novel. Insert diary entries from West Berlin.

Compare with Stephen Dedalus

No formal intervention by an older male as per LB assists Tom. Billy gets rescued from a predicament by the intervention of the gods (see also ‘decent burgher’ in C1).

Where are they both going?

Back to Australia. For Tom, this is a humiliating backdown (AKA Stephen Dedalus). For Billy, it is a homecoming (AKA Telemachus).

Outline the scale of Sydney Basin Hawkesbury Sandstone (known as “Yellowblock”)

Sandstone escarpments surround Sydney on all sides. They form the spatial boundary of the city. The bed is six kilometres deep. Currents have leached most of the minerals from the sandstone leaving a very poor quality rock with insipid soil. Ironically, the infirmity of its loam has nurtured a highly distinctive selection of flora and thus fauna.

What is the structure of Yellowblock?

Yellowblock is composed of very pure silica grains with a small amount of the iron mineral siderite bound within a clay matrix. It oxidises into a watercolorist’s hue known as BUFF. This tone has become the distinguishing visual swipe of public buildings and walls in Sydney.

Explain its relationship to water (and thus “Telemachus/Ulysses”)

Yellowblock is a highly porous stone which acts like a giant filter. Its distinguishing ripple marks disclose the flow of an ancient river that carried streams of sand grains over 1,000 kilometres from rocks formed 700 million years ago in the vicinity of Broken Hill to the coast, where they were laid down in a 200 m thick bed. Channels carved out grooves. Sand banks around Sydney display characteristic cross-bedding.

Where does Tom Hallem awake in West Berlin after a shock?

I face the workerday dawn on my back in a sandpit underneath a flying-fox noose in a local playground by The Wall. Two-thirds of a bottle of Pernod is wedged upright in the sand. No cap. Must have got it at the duty-free U-Bahn. A Mercedes hood ornament is lying flat on the sand with a wire hook thrusting out of its oiled brass base. My suit is full of silt. LINK TO SANDSTONE. Must have gone harvesting with Peter Johnson last night. He makes belts out of them to sell at the markets. I can’t remember anything at all. Tom Hallem remembers about as much of last night as Stephen Dedalus would the next day in Ulysses. There is no indication as to what time of day SD slept after his riotous night. At noon, Francine was supposed to leave for the clinic so I went home to help pack her stuff. They were already gone. I got the U-bahn to Merringdamm. That’s where I saw them together. Like the Owl and the Pussycat, waiting for a pea green train in the other direction to Charlottenburg. Bill’s satchel slung over her shoulder. It must be full of private items. Intimate things. Plus, mandatory stuff on the photocopied list from the clinic including medical purchases that might be necessary after the procedure. They stood awkwardly, like any device in a holding pattern. A train smasht out of a neat tunnel and flashed in front of them. They’d have to change lines at Wannsee, near the Brucke Museum. I watcht them disappear into the crowd in the front carriage. Siren. Doors shut. Train slowly grating to life. Billy went to the Post Restante after he dropped Francine at the clinic. He backfilled his diary for the first time in weeks. It was a series of cursory entries regathering what he could. INSERT EPISTOLARY FORMAT. Note use of manifold forms (aping Joyce). Tock another box off. He got a letter from his father. It described Don’s re-entry to Sydney. I didn’t recognise him, Bob said. Using the full text of letters is a step too far.

Describe the utilisation of Yellowblock by European settlers

The first European convicts hewed sandstone from surface outcrops to build simple homes. They tunneled to create the Argyle Cut in the Rocks, which linked Miller’s Point with the town. Yellowblock was dumped into mangrove swamps at the head of the Tank Stream to establish the dock that eventually became known as Circular Quay.

What was the major source of local supply?

Fifty quarries operated in the fringe suburb of Pyrmont throughout the nineteenth century. They were the principal source of Yellowblock. Saunders’ Quarry supplied the sandstone to build the University of Sydney. Other quarries later opened in Botany, Randwick, Paddington and Waverley. Steam drilling was introduced in 1880.

Categorise local quarries by reference to their nicknames

Saunders’ three quarries in Pyrmont were known as Paradise, Purgatory and Hellhole. They were named by the Scottish quarrymen who worked them in the 1850s. These names related to the degree of difficulty in working the stone. The best stone was self-evidently located in Paradise. It was a soft rock that was easy to carve and weathered to a warm primrose hue. The Paradise quarry was located near the intersection of present-day Jones Street and Distillery Drive. It left a distinctive escarpment which is now heritage-listed. The site of Purgatory Quarry was Crown Road, Ultimo near Pyrmont Bridge Road. It produced a hard stone with a grey streak that was prone to crack. Hellhole Quarry was situated in Jones Street near Fig Street, overlooking the modern Wentworth Park racetrack. It was named because of its depth and the fact that it filled with water during storms. Jones Street was once an unbroken two-kilometre thoroughfare from Broadway to Jones Bay. This continuity has now been disrupted by urban development, principally elevated cross-roads.

What landmark workplace conditions were negotiated by Pyrmont sandstone workers?

Their trade union was the first in the world to win the eight-hour day in 1855.

Why were they able to achieve this concession?

Quarrymen who worked with sandstone were highly skilled and exercised significant leverage over government and private enterprise due to the preferred construction of major buildings in Sydney with Yellowblock. There was no alternative pool of stonemasons (i.e. scabs) due to Sydney’s great distance from England, some seventeen thousand kilometres. In the 1850s, this voyage still took over eighty days by steamship. This was a reduction of some thirty days since the First Fleet arrived under sail. Demand for Yellowblock surged during the Australian gold rush. Millions of cubic feet of Sydney Basin Hawkesbury Sandstone were excavated on Cockatoo Island to build the Fitzroy Graving Dock, Australia’s first dry dock. It was used on the seawall at Circular Quay. Rock-cuts were used for underground grain storage. From the 1870s, building sites in Sydney had up to 300 masons working each day. There were more masons in Sydney at that time than the whole of Europe combined. In 1928, it was estimated that total production of dressed sandstone from Pyrmont was more than half a million cubic yards (460,000 cubic metres).

What diseases did quarrymen suffer?

Stonecutters were subject to a range of lung diseases including bronchitis, pneumonia and stonemason’s phthisis, which was suspected to be a form of TB.

List major public buildings featuring Sydney Basin Hawkesbury Sandstone

Sydney Town Hall, Queen Victoria Building, St Andrews Cathedral, St Mary’s Cathedral, The Great Synagogue, The Mint, Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney Hospital, University of Sydney (main quadrangle), Central Railway Station, Sydney GPO, Conservatorium of Music, NSW Governor’s Residence, Sydney Observatory, Art Gallery of NSW, State Library, Australian Museum, NSW Treasury, Department of Education, Department of Lands, Sydney Technical College (see lizard statues), Darlinghurst Law Courts, Custom’s House, Strand Arcade. Ten statues of famous explorers in the Lands Department building on Bent Street. Early sandstone buildings that have been demolished included Vickery’s Warehouse, Pitt Street; Robert C. Swan & Company warehouse, Pitt Street; Mason Bros stores, Spring Street; Harrison Jones & Devlin warehouse, Macquarie Place; Mutual Life building, George Street; and The Union Club, Bligh Street. Turn all of the above into hyperlinks.

Are these buildings all cited in Telemachus?

Yes.

Examine the history of remediating heritage sandstone assets in Sydney

Urban encroachment covered the quarries of Pyrmont in the early years of the Twentieth Century. This blocked access to the traditional source of Yellowblock. The natural deterioration of sandstone from exposure to Sydney’s warm, humid climate necessitated major remediation works in the 1990s. Good quality sandstone from the Debden and Pine’s Creek Quarries on the Central Coast was rejected due to unsatisfactory colour-matching. A flirtation with Queensland Capricorn Custom Buff was terminated for the same reason (see Swann). In 1985, the NSW Department of Public Works and Services negotiated an access agreement with the property developers of a new apartment complex on McCaffery’s Hill, enabling the government to extract sandstone for the remediation of Sydney’s heritage buildings. The financial details of this contract remain commercial-in-confidence. Quarrying re-commenced in Pyrmont for the first time in over 50 years. In all, 4,500 cubic metres were extracted. The availability of a large quantity of Yellowblock led to the development of a major heritage conservation and rehabilitation program by the NSW Government.

What was the outcome?

Colour-matching results were disappointing. The mismatched stone is now considered by some critics to have defaced historic architecture.

Why did new Yellowblock cuttings not match the hue of original stone?

See Swann, “Sydney Yellowblock – Is Its Revival a Blessing or a Curse?” Discovering Stone: Issue 13. The critical factor misjudged in stockpiling McCaffrey’s sandstone was its incapacity to retain oxidising potential when exposed to the atmosphere for long periods of time prior to processing.

Explain the oxidisation process of Yellowblock

When freshly quarried, Yellowblock has a pale grey-white colour. As moisture (or ‘quarry-sap’) within the stone moves to the surface, trace elements such as iron, silica and calcium are deposited (at 1–3 mm depth) in the form of iron hydroxide/oxide, silica and calcite. Their oxidisation on reaction with the atmosphere leads to a yellowing of the surface through staining of the intergranular clays within the stone. The presence of siderite within the stone also contributes significantly to yellowing on exposure to the atmosphere. Within a short period of time after quarrying (2–8 weeks), the stone has developed its characteristic colour. If the surface colouration is removed, yellowing will not occur again in lower layers. In short, Yellowblock oxidises once and once only. This is a potent metaphor for lots of stuff, which will be over-egged in the rest of this work. Whilst McCaffrey’s quarry blocks yellowed beautifully on their external faces in stockpile, they retained little or no ability to oxidise further when eventually sawn and processed by masons for matching with extant walls. This rendered the entire program useless and a waste of taxpayer’s dollars, according to the Opposition.

Measure the strength of Yellowblock

Yellowblock’s compressive strength has been measured at 2.57 tons per square inch or 39.9 megapascals (MPa). Some tests put its compressive strength as high as 70 MPa. The crushing strength of ashlar masonry and lintels averages 4,600 pounds per square inch (31.7 Mpa).

What botanical process triggered by Yellowblock results in a distinctive Australian odour?

Yellowblock is the geological foundation for the aroma of Australia’s signature eucalypt trees, due to its paltry nutritional value. When nutrients are scarce, plants cannot afford to lose valuable leaves to herbivores so they release toxins that make their foliage distasteful as food. The resultant eucalypt toxin is recognised as the characteristic smell of the Australian Bush. Note Murray Bail analogue.

Illustrate the significance of smell to human beings

It is the last sense to expire before death. The stench of the battlefield always precedes sight (but not noise). The act of falling in love is largely governed by odour (although initial attraction is a visual phenomenon for men). When I opened the front door of our house after we got back from Shanghai, it smelled like an antique chamber and cabbage. In the now famous T-shirt experiment, it was shown that women preferred the smell of men who have immune systems most different to their own. Olfaction in women is generally better than men. It peaks during ovulation. This may explain why peri-ovulatory women tend to exhibit an increase in sexual activity. Occasionally, my husband brings home a native pig from Quezon City. It lives in our room for a few days. I have to watch the baby. The neighbour’s complain. But when he slaughters the animal and barbeques the carcass, everybody in the street queues to buy pork belly. Body odour is rarely in evidence in China. Don Cane’s body was pungent. It glowed with sweat. Odorant molecules pass into odour receptors. Billy smelt like Xinjiang lamb the first time he came to the sauna. I made him take off his dressing gown and pushed him into the shower cubicle. First (Xian), I made lavender soap froth over his chest until it dried like a crust. Then (rang hou), I took the shower head and blasted his body until it was all gone. Lastly (zui hou), I performed sex. It started to feel different when he came back the third time. Men’s scent gets stronger as they thicken with age. Stock characters in the Commedia dell’Arte wore longnose masks to symbolise phallic endowment, a tradition that lingers in the figures of Punch and Cyrano De Bergerac (see Fliess). Jungian psychology connects odours and sex. Freud believed that suppressing odours was necessary for the maintenance and expansion of civilisation. Ambrose E. Welles liked a clean female body, superbly bathed and lightly perfumed. He was a prude by his own account. He farted – the other side of the wind – when he unleashed his libido. This was the direct product of Oya. Welles always considered overt sex scenes to be a lazy stunt that reduced the power of narrative. Madame Rochas was Joan Crawford’s favourite perfume. The area of the brain that processes smell is part of the limbic system, or sex box. A female moth can release a pheromone that attracts males as far as one mile distant. During sex, we start breathing like dogs. Nasal engorgement causes less air to go directly to the lungs. More pheromones reach the olfactory epithelium. Smell attractors are not universal. Women shave their bodies in Chinese culture because smell and sight are considered unpleasant. Yet Continental European cultures highly prize this odour. A study of 31 males in Chicago assessed the impact on penile engorgement of 30 odours (Hirsh and Gruss, http://www.aanos.org/jrl_an_article.htm).

How do Bloom and Stephen interact in “Ithaca”?

SD is not interested in LB’s politics. Bloom is not interested in SD’s aesthetic reveries. When Stephen is quiet, Bloom presumes he is composing a lyric in his head. He thinks of poetry like advertising slogans. Stephen will not wash. Bloom is clean and carries a fresh cake of soap in his pocket. This revives a motif from Chapter One. Unlike Mulligan, Bloom gives a positive interpretation to Stephen’s hydrophobia. He sees it as ascetic disinterest in bourgeois pretensions to propriety. This is another cliched image of the Artist. It is for these kinds of thoughts that Stephen ultimately rejects Bloom as just another ridiculous Homais. He is insensitive, even crude, in return, especially as he grows more contemptuous of Bloom’s intellectual scope. Stephen sings a song about a Jew’s daughter who murders a child. It is hard to believe this is not a provocation. Bloom ignores it. This doesn’t make Stephen feel more respect. In fact, it hardens his disdain. Stephen often appears to be goading Bloom behind the pretense of drunkenness. Soon, Joyce creates a false dialectic with Bloom as the ‘scientific’ one and Stephen ‘artistic’. Bloom is, of course, pseudo-scientific. He is a crank. He reflects naïve interest in the random inventions and follies of his day. This raises the option that Stephen is being similarly characterised by Joyce as a bogus intellectual. This type of self-mockery of his younger self is not unknown to Joyce. Nonetheless, they find common ground eventually. Joyce emphasises this stance with a Spoonerism: “Stoom and Blephen.” If he had used surnames, it would have been insidious: “Doom and Bledalus.” They go outside to piss in Bloom’s garden. This becomes another caustic motif for Bloom’s condition. Tom Hallem did a dump in The Collector’s swimming pool at a NYE party 1983–84. This explains some of the lingering hostility towards him in the restaurant scene in Chapter Ten. Joyce unloads a lot of star names, facts and astronomical history on the reader before he gets to the end of the Ithaca episode. He links central male characters to their birth constellations to reinforce existing plot facets (see Table).

Explain the Classical Source of Gemini

Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini, were Greek heroes. They were the sons of Leda and Zeus-in-the-guise-of-a-swan. This union resulted in the production of two eggs containing: (1) Helen of Troy and Pollux (immortal twin) and (2) Castor and Clytemnestra (offspring of Tyndareus). Castor (horseman) and Pollux (boxer) were inseparable comrades. They accompanied the Argonauts. They calmed the seas during tempests. They are still present in the form of St Elmo’s Fire. This is one of the 13 constellations of the Zodiac.

Correspondences to “Ulysses”?

LB = Castor; SD = Pollux. This is an ironic, provisional association. Bloom is only a horseman in that he is directing Stephen like a taxi driver. Stephen is an intellectual pugilist. C&P represent the northern tips of Gemini and thus the heads of a co-joined celestial representation. SD&LB are by no means attached similarly.

How long does Stephen Dedalus remain in the text?

He is present for approximately the first half of Ithaca.

How does Stephen exit the novel?

Stephen Dedalus leaves Bloom’s home. He is left wandering into the ice-cube sharp brittle streets of Dublin a solitary figure gone null. He has become a wanderer like the stars at which he stared with Bloom. He is returning to the house of his true father, Simon Dedalus.

Insert equivalent to Bloom in W. Berlin

At last, I confront the Samaritan turning from the steel urinal with soft hands over a breathing zipper. He has a slender, blonde face. His keen clear eyes are glazed by a surface of glass in steel-rimmed spectacles. Hiding ingenuousness maybe. Wise in place. A small grin pumps bright-teeth.

“Thanks, Michel.”

“You’re lucky I’m a medical student.”

Zeppy returns with Becks. I take it with a nod. He exits.

“Want some beer?” I ask.

“Sure.

“You go first. It’s going to taste pretty bad after touching my lips.”

Bloom smiles and tips back the bottle. The silver foil around its peak shines then glows. Froth gathers on the up-ended surface.

“You were talking outside about ‘artisanal’ painting before, Billy. What do you mean?”

“I mean art that betrays labour. All great art must possess an artisanal quality.”

“Like Brueghel?”

“Yairs.”

“A lot of detail then?”

“Not just that. Duchamp’s work possessed this tone as well. LHOOQ was just two strokes of paint on a cheap print but it contains a whole canon inside it.”

“Like Kiefer for us Germans?”

“Yes, sir, like Anselm-fucking-Kiefer!” [DRINKS] “You’ve got to make work that’s dense … like a novel. You need to hold the viewer’s gaze.”

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book. In this work, we see literature, art and music competing with life to make satisfactory meaning out of experience. It is the writer who survives to recount the tale of Tom Hallem.

“And you need a gimmick, of course. It’s the whole working-class thing these days. You know: Jackson Pollock in mechanics overalls and red flannelette shirts, unshaven.”

“What’s your gimmick?”

“I’m no one,” said Billy waving his hand. “I don’t need one.”

“What about your brother?”

“He’s got style. And erudition. And a great big fucking bug up his arse about life.”

“[Grins] Like Nick Cave?”

“[Snarling] Yes sir like fucking-Nick-Cave. He’s been working with the same wet glare, that kind of streaky thickness, a texture of inhabiting an inexplicable station, not really acute within it, but a citizen of it nonetheless, not an interloper, creating out-of-tune elements at the selvedge of the frame, co-opting the tunefulness of other – what Ginsberg would call – Bards, like Rowland S. Howard, to persuade a recognisable work to come forth, with a comprehensible melody, in a received format, which is then re-distorted by other collaborators, people who are otherwise beyond conventional methods, like Blixa Bargeld, so that each story is comprehensible yet not quite right, not real like Realism, not moral like a parable, but not wrong either, rather possessing a psychic truth, through a chronicle of sudden and inexplicable acts, instructive like fable, but in reverse, by opposed rendition, making a parallel world in which characters speak poetically, not prosaically, like in vaudeville or mummery, with a shared bank of recurring images, regardless of ostensible place, be it Alabama or Nhill, which are wholly irrelevant to our own epoch, which deliberately contradict our fixation with pressing political issues like the Cold War or feminism, and thereby impress an other-obsession, an alternative cosmos, a bad place where evil is omnipresent, but not a dystopia really, a reconstruction of those Classical sites in Homer or Sophocles where the Gods bring down unjust terms on mortals and make mortals damage themselves and each other for THRILLS. That is what these two artists share. I don’t know why they both come from Australia. It’s Ultima Thule.

Explain Thule

Thule refers to an actual island that Classical mariners knew well – beyond the north-western tip of Britain – maybe Greenland – or Auden’s Iceland. It’s our galactic edge, Michel. The reason we’re going to inherit SPACE. Every single Australian is coded with that DNA. Even if they’ve come from another place. We’re all like Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Only Australians can understand that movie. Its complacency in creature comforts. Its relentless recourse to anaesthetics. It’s brittle coating of success. It’s anguish. Only Australians can understand a planet without water. Only we can really understand drought. It’s inside our heads. All Nick Cave’s characters are like that. All his landscapes are Australia. All his songs. He’d really like Tom’s stuff.”

“Why don’t you show him your brother’s work? He lives right here in Berlin. He hangs out at Irizico.”

“Why should I go to him? Tom’s more famous. He’s been hung in Paris. His agent wants to show him in New York. Nick Cave should come to him!”

“You are very proud of your brother.”

“You bet, I am. He’s great. Let me buy you a drink. Wait. I’m broke. But it’s still my birthday. Can you shout me another beer?”

Note Billy is drunk. This device enables the narrator to put forth preposterous ideas without ownership. Part of a loosening of style in the final chapters. An aversion to revision. What Kerouac said. The CLOUD is a prison. Don’t upload your spontaneous thoughts there. This passage corresponds to the state of SD at the end of Ulysses. He is still quite inebriated. His ego has been pumped. He is obviously superior intellectually to Bloom. He humours the older man. It enables him to sustain this sensation. Billy is kinder than SD. He took more time to get to the point where he had no time left to waste. He was diverted by the need to live life to the fullest. SD leaves the novel full of fresh momentum to become a writer like Marcel at the end of Le Temps Retrouve. This is precisely the course that James Joyce himself followed after 1904.

Moving from stars, itemise Joyce’s moon/woman correspondences in “Ithaca”

1. Night power

2. Engaging a circle of admirers (satellites)

3. Incandescence

4. Predictability + reliability

5. Artificial yet non-changing appearance (especially to the mind/gaze of others)

6. Evasiveness under interrogation

7. Power over estuarine motions

8. Capacity to induce love, terror, embarrassment, splendour by association with, madness, vandalism

9. Enigmatic features (see Penelope)

10. Awe-like gazing at a sublime landscape

11. Tranquillity

12. Various portents (positive & negative)

13. Dynamic in effect as per luminescence, movement, manifestation

14. Beauty upon entrance into the midst of

15. Desire upon separation from

16. Chthonic endurance.

Relate the quantum above to Joyce’s obsession with numerology

Sixteen is a numeral of cosmic significance in Ithaca. It is considered a kinetic number for introspective people setting out on a spiritual path. This is directly relevant to Stephen Dedalus at the end of Ulysses. Sixteen is one of four numbers associated with karmic debt. In a birth date, it indicates that the owner is dealing with issues from past lives. Joyce lets his interest in matching numbers run wild in this episode. Everything is dates, costs, values. Sixteen sucking stones are selected by Molloy in The Unnameable. This is a direct allusion to Ulysses as well as a sentimental tribute to the foibles of Beckett’s mentor. The Unnameable is Beckett’s version of the future of Stephen Dedalus. The tower is the sixteenth trump in a Tarot deck. It was a noteworthy number in popular culture after WW2 due to its association with teenage sexuality (i.e. Sweet Little Sixteen, You’re Sixteen, Only Sixteen, et al). Later, it became the legal age of consent. Joyce’s karmic number is 23/5. Twenty-three represents the Royal Star of the Lion. It promises success, help from superiors and protection from high places. The life of James Joyce as well as the history of the sponsorship and publication of Ulysses bear this out. People with five in their number have natural charm. They are innately courteous. It is associated with love of movement and travel. It is also linked to earth-magic. People of Five have a natural desire to believe in fairies, elves, magic and mystery. Again, all these qualities are relevant to Joyce. Almost all the people who helped him were women. They have a natural attraction to this karmic number. JJ always used telepathy. LB guesses Gerty is about to menstruate. She guesses he is a cuckold. These are both baseless biases that just happen to be correct.

Detail events of Billy’s twenty-third birthday party

Billy overdosed at X’n’Pop last night. We found him slumpt on the steel bog with bile packing his nostrils, chin presst on chestplate, shiny drool threading its way down hisslap. I was brought back to some semblance of life (albeit grudgingly) by an angel mounted on the uneasy walls of the dim cubicle like some stone gargoyle. Leopold Bloom eased himself onto the concrete floor, pulled back my head by the mop, opened my eyelids with cool slender fingers and shone a lighter in my face. When they slipped shut again, he slapped me hard once across the fates. Out of the conch came comfort’s familiar sounds: agitated voices; the latch cracking (I had given up on existence itself rather than face this complex operation only a few minutes earlier); running water in nearby basin; ripped paper towels; shoes slipping through my waste; hands warming my underarms; my fraille body lifted up to shone shellpearl; head dropping to gaze at my new winklepickers all covered in muck; waterfall feedback; the rush of life; someone in German clucking “cut him some speed, it will help”; gritty grey paper towel on my nose; they said BLOW; I blew; my feeble snort a disgrace to Kleenex; polyps of fleische suckt back; sudden aerate; spit; my head pushed along the laminex plank; five mark note shoved up my nostril; SNORT, they said; I did; grains flush; my eyeballs pop; congealed ball of amphetamine in my throat a little (w)retch but wasted-not-not-want; I’ve got a stomach of steel; clamp my teeth and pop upright grinding my mandibles like wet chalk: I am ALIVE ergo VITAL! In the delicate mirror green smiles were released. You alright, William? “Yes.” Thanks, Zeppy. [Blown windy nose] Sorry. It must happen to any one of us. “Could,” I corrected him. Yar. Whatever you said. This is exactly the type of junk scene that I complained about in C1. Pocket I rummage in unseamly dirt-crispened depths for change. Nix. I so self-righteous back then. I thought I’d ever stoop this low. But what with all bad inputs. Think you could get me a beer? Of course. It’s your birthday. Jus. Cold bristles cross my shudderblades. This was the outermost location on my journey.

What is the role of Penelope in the Odyssey?

Homer cannot separate the plot from Penelope. She imbues Ithaca. It is her domain (DNS). Her name combines the Greek words pene for “weft” and ops meaning “face.” This suggests inscrutability of mannerism. She is the antithesis of a character like Arachne. She is not coarse or boastful. She doesn’t antagonise the Gods. She is careful to manage relations with the suitors. She makes a series of strategic withdrawals to buy time like Chiang Kai Shek. She allows the suitors’ abuse of Xenia to evolve unchecked so they are ripe for retribution, hopefully by Odysseus if he returns. Her only ostensible narrative act is to weave a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, which she then unravels every night. It becomes symbolic of her marriage and life.

How does Joyce deploy this plot device?

The “webbing” technique in Ulysses is conceived from this trope. Molly’s reveries are woven from crossover-stitch tendrils into a continuous narrative by incremental repetition. Language becomes dense like textile. It can be represented as Borromean rings. Her monologue plugs into earlier events in the novel and recasts their meaning. She casts a retrospective lens over other characters’ opinions challenging superficial gender representations.

(30) Insert Shakespeare reference

[equivalent: Ophelia’s daisy chains].

Compare Penelope and Molly using water imagery

Penelope is designed for drought; Molly for refreshment. A still pool versus a swollen creek. A full reservoir against the vital force of the Liffey. Both women endure long periods of absence. For Penelope, it is actual. For Molly, it is sensual. Both test their husbands – Penelope literally and Molly by computation. They measure them practically against alternative suitors. It is said that Penelope exemplifies female fidelity whereas Molly is an adulteress. But sex with Boylan is just Molly’s way of forcing herself to pass judgment on Bloom. Both characters practice deception. Molly offers insights into her personality in her monologue. We get no insight into Penelope’s thinking. O switched on the light in Billy’s apartment and walked into the empty kitchen. A gang of American cockroaches scattered off the sideboard and down the scratched brass drain. She placed a tall can of fumigant on the floor. I will let it off when I leave, she thought. This scene reworks an image in Ithaca. She started to open the cupboards so that the gas could infiltrate every recess. The shelves were gritted with dry mouse pellets. She decided to buy some traps. Elizabeth Archer checked her watch. Tom Hallem was late. Never mind. It gave her more time to prepare herself. Heartburn consumed her throat, sucking the moisture from her chest. She rubbed her belly roughly.

Apply this task to sandstone

Sandstone occurs when the earth’s crust BREATHES in and out, filling with sediment. It is extremely old. Over 300 million years by some calculations. It moved extremely slowly towards the coast by virtue of subterranean forces of nature. Today, it is smashed by the ocean repeatedly, causing erosion. This is a metaphor for the relationship of this work to Joyce (water).

How is Penelope represented in spatial terms?

Like all estimable women in Classical literature, she is fixed at the centre of a field of centripetal forces. They hold her body in place. She is able to direct them in play across her face. But she cannot find physical freedom, even inside her own bed chamber. There are numerous traitors amongst her serving women. She cannot leave the palace. Her allies know of her struggles only by secondary transmission. Stress has made her pallid and gaunt. This is an inwards spatial projection. She presents a very different image to her cousin, Helen, who is apparently blooming back in Sparta. Helen moves freely over the city airing opinions, even overriding her husband, in contravention of Classical convention. Penelope’s dreams oscillate between visions of revenge and utter supplication. Pan was born from one such dream, according to the Ancients.

Link to this work

There are four major female characters who suffer spatial indignity. Elizabeth Archer is contained by financial woes. Her husband’s illness further constrains her. She must remain focused on conception. This is another inward act. She is piling all her resources into a mound to withstand the future. She wants to burrow inside (see Winnie). Penelope Hallem must stay fixed in place to sustain her crumbling family. Her partner is a Fallen Laertes figure. She has precarious employment in sales like Leopold Bloom. Her son appears to be spiraling towards dissipation (AKA Stephen Dedalus). She has always been restricted by convention. She married according to schedule. This is what you did back then. The rest of the plan went awry. She had to bounce off the inside of the system as a non-conforming female in the 1960s. She endured the innuendo of being divorced and a single mother. It was all too much. She remarried and moved across town. She never got the chance to progress freely. Her life has been a slow, dry movement down an underground channel gouged by someone else (Don Cane). Helen Capri is checked by the past. She cannot find peace after all this time even in her bed and dreams, let alone aspire to the freedom she imagined as a teenager. One mistake has dictated the course of her life. Ana Lafei Pepese (ALP) represents a younger prototype of these women. But she will never reach maturity. Her mistake is fatal. She is stuck in a dead-end job and a bad relationship. Her association with Tom Hallem will kill her. The concert is her swansong. She goes down the tunnel and along the Lake towards death.

Compare the trials of Penelope and Odysseus

Penelope endures her own siege in the Odyssey (mirroring that of Troy) transcending attack (the suitors act as a metonymy of the Greek heroes) and employing her own stratagems (weaving and unpicking the shroud) to position her chosen vessel for victory. Odysseus is placed inside the horse in Troy then placed inside his own palace in disguise as another type of subterfuge by Penelope.

How does Odysseus love Penelope best?

In absence. As an ideal. Not necessarily in actuality.

And her?

The same. Certainly, however, it is better to have him back than endure the suitors another day. The best option is for him to get rid of the suitors then leave. This goal is accomplished by Penelope.

Gauge Penelope against Odysseus in a battle of wits

Penelope is more than a match for her husband. She is impassive like Odysseus. She never relaxes her guard. She exhibits no flaws. Yet she is also operating in metaphorical contradiction to him. They are like masters countering each other’s favourite moves on a 3D chess board. In fact, Penelope operates more analytically than her husband in their opening encounter as her construction of the goose dream demonstrates.

Compare Penelope and the Trojans in terms of Odysseus’ stratagems?

Penelope proves to be superior in judgment to the Trojans, who are gulled into complaisance by Sinon’s tale and destroyed.

Are dreams used as a vehicle for truth or deceit by Homer?

There are five significant dreams in his epics:

1. Agamemnon – Troy will fall if attacked immediately (Zeus)

2. Achilles – spirit of dead Patroclus pleading

3. Penelope – reassurance (Athene)

4. Nausicaa – marriage/consummation (Athene)

5. Penelope – eagle killing geese.

Dreams 1 and 4 are deceitful. Item 1 sets off a ludicrous chain reaction. Item 4 initiates events resulting in the destruction of Phaeacian civilisation for assisting Odysseus (inverting the ethics of xenia). Dream 2 provides truth in the form of a prophecy of Achilles’ death. Dream 3 provides succor but not truth. Item 5 is a cunning tale offering divergent channels – one truth of feelings, the other of error.

Why are the gates of our dreams made of ivory and horn?

This is a play on words in Greek: κέρας, horn, and κραίνω, fulfil, as opposed to ἐλέφας, ivory, and ἐλεφαίρομαι, deceive (see Arthur T. Murray). True dreams pass through gates of horn (2 & maybe 3); false dreams through ivory (1 & 4).

What act preceded Penelope recounting her dream in Book 19 of the Odyssey?

She withdrew behind the curtain so that Eurycleia could wash Odysseus’ feet.

Why did Penelope select this act at this specific time?

She selected this moment because she knew it would expose his scar. She trusted that the old nurse would be surprised and make a telling utterance.

What did Penelope overhear?

She heard the gasp of Eurycleia when the old nurse saw the scar. She heard the undertones of Odysseus’ threats against the nurse. This would have confirmed his identity. But his aggression would have chastened Penelope. It was imbued with a ruthlessness that was not apparent in him prior to the war. She thus resolved to test Odysseus with her dream. This would provide more data.

Examine the different levels of meaning, interpretation and truth in Penelope’s dream

A leading analyst, Dr Kelly Bulkeley, has coined the term, “post-critical hermeneutics of dreaming,” for a technique of oneiric interpretation based on Penelope’s dream. In Book 19, Penelope describes a dream to Odysseus-as-beggar in which an eagle swoops down on her flock of twenty pet geese and snaps their necks in turn, killing them. It then perches on the roof and exclaims in a human voice that it is her husband who has just put her lovers to death. Significantly, she notes that the geese are still alive grazing at their trough after she wakes (like the suitors in the palace). Odysseus interprets the dream as a simple prophecy of his revenge. Penelope would certainly understand this self-serving interpretation. A woman of her intellect would not need Odysseus to explain such a dream. Such a construal is obvious. In fact, Odysseus has made a lax, facile reading of the dream, which undersells Penelope’s intellectual capabilities and misreads her emotional locus. This is a bad sign. Penelope actually wants to work out whether her husband’s principal goal is revenge against the suitors or their reunion. Odysseus’ answer – and the haste of his reply – tells Penelope a lot about his mindset, especially his remark that “twist it however you like, / Your dream can only mean one thing.” This is a ‘closing down’ of analytics – a withdrawal from productive interaction – that must have shocked her. For Odysseus was renowned for his inventive mind. She can now see that he comprehends the situation on Ithaca solely through the prism of personal honour. He does not retain any sensitivity or empathy that incorporates her experience. He cannot perceive how she has developed and changed over the last 20 years of utter self-reliance. She is now as wily as Odysseus. In fact, she consistently displays superior cunning to her husband. For Penelope has NOT RECOUNTED A DREAM AT ALL. She has posed a strategic conundrum to test Odysseus. The twenty geese in her dream correspond to the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence. It’s true meaning is that he has slaughtered TIME. He fails the test, despite the fact that it contains obvious inconsistencies to assist him (for example, he knows that there are 108 – not 20 – suitors) and that he possesses information from multiple sources of how Penelope has trenchantly and skillfully resisted the suitors.

How is the ‘dream’ designed to work on Odysseus’ emotions?

The dream is complex. It is a trap. And goad. Penelope uses her dream to inflame Odysseus. His artless interpretation turns it into a spur. It suggests that the gods are supporting him. Yet it is also a gibe at his smug security in her fidelity. For Penelope has said of the geese that she “loved them all.” To him, this means that she has ‘loved’ the suitors literally. In fact, it means that she loves even her lost years.

What would have happened if Odysseus interpreted the dream correctly?

It could have deflated him, leading to failure and death. Perhaps it is providential that he did not analyse the dream accurately.

How does Penelope react to the performance of Odysseus in the ‘dream’ test?

Penelope must have been extremely worried after Odysseus’ performance that he would rush the timing of his revenge. He was clearly not functioning with his typical cognitive prowess. He was thinking in haste, ignoring strategic dimensions. He betrayed panic. This would have left Penelope contemplating the risk of his failure and her subsequent sacrifice to one of the suitors. This was the catalyst for her decision to bring on the challenge with a test where the odds would be stacked in Odysseus’ favour. She announces that she will marry the man who can string Odysseus’ bow. Penelope knew that the suitors were young men, untested in battle and weakened by their indolence and recent revelry, whereas Odysseus had been hardened by his arduous voyage. If no one succeeded, she at least bought more time.

Examine Homer’s use of the motifs in Penelope’s dream elsewhere in the Odyssey?

The other reference to geese and eagles occurs in Book 15, when Telemachus is leaving Sparta to return to Ithaca. An eagle carrying a tame goose in its talons swoops down in front of Menelaus, Helen, Telemachus and Peisistratus to display its prey then flies off. Peisistratus asks Menelaus for his interpretation. Helen interjects to say it is an omen that Odysseus is poised to sweep home and exact revenge on the suitors. As she is not an oracle, she says that the gods must have flashed this thought into her mind. Her interpretation is entirely plausible – and ultimately correct – but it is not the only possible interpretation, especially at this crucial stage in the text, when the reader is seeing Odysseus continuously thwarted in his efforts to return to Ithaca. Certainly, Odysseus can be seen as a noble bird and the suitors as domestic geese. Yet the eagle has not killed the goose. Bulkeley believes that we should only interpret dreams from what is ACTUALLY depicted and not project any extramural meaning. Employing this theory, the reader should conclude analysis at the flight of the eagle and not project the implied/assumed death of the goose. A plausible counter-analysis is that the event represents a successful suitor (Eagle) departing Odysseus’ palace (represented as Menelaus’ palace) to return home with Penelope (Goose) as his bride (Whiteness) after triumphantly displaying his prize to assembled noble families (represented by Menelaus, Nestor, Odysseus). In this regard, the event could be seen as a re-run of the Iliadic plot in which Paris (Eagle) takes Helen (Goose) from Sparta (Sparta) to Troy (Lair). It could even be seen as an invocation to Telemachus to act as an eagle himself by collecting his mother (Goose) and escaping Ithaca (Lair).

What did Helen’s intervention show Classical readers?

Helen’s interjection was improper. She was hasty to give her opinion just like Odysseus in Book 19 (unlike Menelaus and later Penelope). She interrupts her husband. This symbolises lack of respect for male authority. The contrasting behaviour of Homer’s cousins, Helen and Penelope, is patent. Its meaning for women is clear. Penelope carefully recounts her ‘dream’ to Odysseus-in-disguise. She asks the male beggar for an interpretation and awaits his full reading before speaking. She remains composed and respectful. This uses restrictions of female propriety tactically.

What was Penelope’s final word to Odysseus?

Her invocation to Odysseus enabled Penelope to return to a meditative state. For Penelope must put all distractions to one side. She must remain in focus. She needs to be quite still in order to continue work. She cannot abandon her post. She must continue weaving. It is the salvation of Ithaca: her inertia (another correspondence with the protracted battle for Troy). She must internalise her existence so she can shut out the suitors, just like Molly Bloom must internalise radical speech. They cannot be allowed to inhabit space – at least any space they would desire. This totemising centralises Ithaca into her person. For Ithaca without Penelope is as impossible to imagine as Aeaea without Circe, or Ogygia without Calypso. Ithaca has gone on for a long time without Odysseus. It has even survived without Telemachus or Laertes. But not without Penelope. She is the essential enacting presence.

What happens to women in motion?

By contrast, women in motion like Dido and Helen are inevitably fatal to themselves, their lovers and nations. This is a rule that defies personal attributes (Archetype – TRAGEDY). I wanted to put ALL MY FEMALE CHARACTERS IN MOTION. It was Olive Schreiner’s great rebuke to c19 readers with the characterisation of Lyndall in Story of an African Farm. She demonstrated that Victorian culture was no different in its treatment of women to the pagan world. Women needed to be present but fixed. Those places without women are isolated and belated like Eumaeus’ hut or the farm of widower Laertes. Fecund, yes, in an agricultural sense but lacking women, family and therefore human spirit, like Waldo’s farm after Lyndall has gone. Joyce employs the same sense of woman/place in Ulysses (Archetype – IRONY; sub-category – ROMANCE). That much is clear at the end of Ithaca when LB slips into bed beside his wife as man/ghost. While Molly is designed to be a ‘real’ woman – not some feminine icon – she shares the same powers, drives and flaws as goddesses like Aphrodite, Hera and Athene. Elizabeth Archer took Stan Welles into her office and closed the door. Her husband watched them through a wall of glass panels. She leant against an architect’s board which was used to display prints to clients. Leon examined her face. Her mouth became swollen and dark with feeling. Her lips retracted around a broad smile. Molly is deliberately slack. She and Boylan make no effort to disguise their adultery: his betting tickets are arrayed on the kitchen table; the sitting room furniture has been re-arranged so they could sit side-by-side at the piano; his outline is branded on the mattress where LB comes to lie. Penelope Hallem sat on the edge of the bed pulling on her shoes. Dick Stone dried his plump, naked torso. She rose and closed the bathroom door then went to the bedside table and picked up the telephone. Xiao Fang pursed her lips as Shanghai Dog shut the apartment door. A great wave of absence struck her. Alone without a key in a stranger’s home. She girded her loins. She would hold on. Judy had finished her shift at Glamour Bar. The metro slid under the river deep into Pudong. She needed to collect Xiao Nong from Johnny’s mother. It was cramped in their two-bedroom apartment. Her daughter’s name meant “small whisper.” She was not given an English name. I am sick of all that foreign crap, she said to her husband when he suggested the name Joyce. Molly is greater in spirit and scope than any male character in Ulysses. She represents Joyce’s major advance on Homer. He continues the narrative of Ulysses after the Homeric ending by adding her monologue. This is the moment when Bloom and his wife are shown to be best matched – in spiritual reverie – and therefore truly united (this is also an example of metempsychosis as the consciousness of the departing Bloom imbues Molly).

How have Feminist critics approached Molly Bloom’s monologue?

Conflicted. This episode was considered a major event in literary history at the time of publication. This contributed to its banning. It dealt candidly with women’s issues such as beauty, love, marriage, motherhood, sex, fidelity and adultery. It introduced previously taboo subjects like female orgasm, labour, birth and menstruation. It constructed a complex and nuanced female consciousness without resorting to stereotypes of sentimentality or malice. Molly assessed her options and the variables and made informed decisions about her best interests. Some feminists viewed the episode as patriarchy continuing to define female experience. This is fair enough. It shifted the discourse to another battleground. The whole Ithaca episode takes place in bed. Female confinement was a common plot element in Victorian literature. Joyce used it in an extraordinary manner like Walter Pater’s Virgilia. But that work is still oriented towards MEN. The first thing Bloom notices is the impression of Boylan’s body. He gets into bed in a fetal position. Molly becomes his mother.

Briefly address rumours surrounding Joyce’s personal motivation for the content of Molly’s internal monologue?

Molly was based to some extent on Nora Joyce. He suspected adultery when he was courting her. His erstwhile friend, Cosgrave, a competitor for Nora’s affections in 1904, lied outright on this matter in 1909. Joyce was jealous, reproachful, passionate and vulnerable in subsequent correspondence. John Francis Byrne assuaged him in this crisis.

What was Joyce’s objective?

Joyce was projecting himself into Hades. Bloom’s resignation at bed time represents Joyce’s best effort to neutralise his own masculine jealousy. He acknowledges responsibility for lack of sexual intimacy. Molly reconciles the fact of adultery with ongoing feelings of love, affection and desire for her husband. At its highest level, it symbolises the Spiritual versus the Physical. Molly is not a serial adulterer. Bloom is not acting like a cuckold. Likewise, Penelope and Les Hallem are not typical. Their estrangement is due to physical incapacity. Barry Capri is characteristic. He is sentimental about his wife but has at least one long-term lover. Shanghai Dog exhibits hypocrisy.

Compare Molly’s sexual profiling by men with fact?

Molly is represented as a powerfully sexual woman with a bountiful figure, voluptuous skin and sensual face. This image is confirmed by various characters over the course of 16 June 1904. While she appears to be highly sexualised, in fact, she has endured a long period of sexual abstinence with grace. Molly has not had sexual consummation with Bloom since the death of Rudy more than ten years ago. Ulysses is set on the day of her first adultery.

And Bloom?

Bloom, by contrast, has had sex with countless mistresses and prostitutes. He is obsessed with sex. He is a compulsive philanderer (verbal and written formats). Yet he is not a lustful figure. He offers no coarse external commentary, unlike other male characters. Sex becomes almost mundane in his musings. He is vulnerable to risk-taking behaviour like the act of masturbation in public as he observes Gerty McDowell. He is impotent with his wife. His fantasies adhere to the Sacher-Masoch strand. The double penetration scene in C7 is the physical realisation of Bloom’s reverie in Circe. He fancies seeing his wife with other men, including young Stephen. These symptoms can be consolidated into a general diagnosis of Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (CSBD), which has recently been ratified for inclusion in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). The causes of CSBD in Bloom cannot be isolated to the death of his son. A broader range of sources of trauma should be investigated going back to childhood, including the early death of his mother (causing fear of abandonment) and social ostracisation (anti-Semitism). This created a deep sense of otherness. You should look for signs of repressed sexual abuse and check medical records for physical abnormalities, especially at puberty (e.g. girls with excessive facial and body hair, boys growing puffy nipples and breast tissue). The suicide of his father is not relevant due to his age. The ruling personality sign of CSBD is insecurity. Acts of promiscuity classified under CSBD[BD] help the patient temporarily compensate for under-developed self-worth, low self-esteem and self-loathing. The flipside of CSBD is Narcissism. Patients with CSBD often evidence disinhibited behaviour through drunkenness and drug abuse. Stephen Dedalus cannot be diagnosed with CSBD based on his actions in Ulysses. What can appear as arrogance is genuine self-belief. It is not compensatory bravado. His substance abuse is a direct product of guilt about his actions during the death throes of his mother. He does not exhibit other symptoms of CSBD. James Joyce split the full suite of his own CSBD attributes between Stephen and Bloom. Male characters in this work can be assessed against a diagnostic framework for CSBD in ICD-11 with the following results (see Table 12):

NOTE – Q&A style here is designed to displace personal associations with the writer.

What is resolution for L. and M. Bloom?

Continuation. To go on together. Not alone.

When and where?

In thought. Unstated. In bed. Pre-dawn. Like Odysseus and Penelope. Arse about. Head-to-toe. Synchronous.

Next steps?

No confrontation. Will to be transmitted in modified behaviour. Perhaps commencement of awkward intimacy. Maybe proceeding to fumbling sexual encounters. Hopefully deepening with time. Regular setbacks.

What has science discovered that would assist sexual bonding?

The male tongue carries testosterone so the act of kissing increases female arousal. The male brain is hard-wired to repeat orgasm with the same partner. This does not apply if the wire is broken (e.g. adultery, prostitution, etc.).

Insert alignment with Telemachus

Penelope Hallem listened to her unanswered call home until the line clotted. She visualised Les Hallam stuck on the toilet unable to move swiftly. She would try again in a few minutes. Helen Capri focused on the impact of a youthful indiscretion on the course of a good life. She weighed the positive experience of maternity against its causation. She acknowledged her shared history with Barry. There was no gain in any sudden revelation of knowledge about his affair. Using the same measure, Ana reached a different conclusion about Matt Supplejack. Shanghai Dog moved across Shanghai like a snake.

Compare Molly’s monologue with other characters

It is more sustained than anything by Bloom or Stephen (even the Shakespeare theory). She speaks in thematic cycles inching by increment towards conclusion propelling the turbines of Joyce’s gigantic word machine. Revise to employ Joyce’s favoured water imagery (sub. ‘mill’).

(60) Examine Joyce’s style in Penelope

Joyce uses only 8 ‘sentences’ [linguistic units] in the episode. They are demarked by spacing not punctuation. There are only 2 punctuation marks in forty-five pages – one of which closes the text (Sentence 8). The other occurs after the word “ashpit” (Sentence 4), although it is omitted from the Penguin Modern Classics edition. The linguistic units in Penelope are delineated by conventional paragraph markers – each ‘sentence’ beginning on a new line with a slight indentation.

Analyse the significance of the sentence/paragraph markers in Penelope

The episode begins and ends with the word YES. A breakdown follows:

The sentence-breaks above generally relate to sexual activity (LB, HBB, SD, Mulvey) and gender issues (coitus, voyeurism, marriage proposals, menstrual cycle).

Compare subject matter either side of each unit

Molly prevaricates but ultimately accedes to another rendez-vous with Hugh Boylan at the same time as she contemplates reconciling with her husband. This is sound tactics.

Examine the role of breakfast

There is acute symbolism in Bloom’s demand for breakfast in bed. It shows him trying to break the bad habits in his marriage. Molly understands that this statement of apparent mastery is in fact another request to be controlled but differently. Chinese women never eat breakfast. It is a weight-control tactic. Tondo starts chirripping at 5 am. My husband lights up a Marlboro. I dump our baby with my cousin. We wend our way to Herbosa Street. I am mopping floors at a private hospital. My hair is still wet. It helps me stay cool. We walk up to a jeepney at the front of the pack. It can drop my husband at the warehouse. Barry and I usually drive together to work. I run the shop. He works the pit. We still have driveway service. People like a personal touch. Petrol is worth nothing to the business. I wear a bright apron. It keeps the rainbow purls and fumes off my clothes. Les is still in bed when I rise. It takes him a long time to get moving. I make him black coffee and go. He doesn’t like to be made a fuss of. Billy didn’t ask for the red rope again. He could see I was not comfortable. Breakfast in bed I just don’t like, thought O. Crumbs in the sheets are like splinters. I prefer to sit in the kitchen at the table with milk coffee and toast. I like one piece of toast sweet and one savoury. I read the newspaper. Billy knows how to prepare breakfast. It makes him look at me differently. He sidles up behind me to stroke my hair. It is a primal comfort. I don’t have to speak. He squeezes my neck gently. That’s nice. I can keep reading. He needs the idea of home. I like to roam. He does need to wander periodically. It mitigates his angst. But he is like a cat. He knows his way back.

Compare the use of keys in relation to ingress

Both male characters have lost possession of house keys. Stephen by consent. Bloom by inattention. It is a straightforward symbol of phallic emasculation. LB took comfort in the fact that he gained entry to his home without a key (incertitude of the void). The contrast with Stephen Dedalus is noted. “He must wander who has no key,” concluded the prophet. There are perfunctory references to keys throughout Telemachus.

Explain the narrative benefits of the Catechism format in Ithaca?

The Q&A device (309 in total) promotes an objective authoritative voice in Ulysses. It references religion and science and suggests a search for Truth. Modernist technical-speak abounds. This detaches emotion from the text. There is a windfall of information. It takes a full systems approach: physics of Bloom falling, engineering of Dublin waterworks, inventory of LB’s kitchen, bookshelf contents, profit-making schemes, ameliorative activities, indignities of the day and contents of table drawers (x3), daily budget. This device tightens – and further elucidates – JJ’s representation of memories, fantasies and abstract ideas in earlier chapters (e.g. Dignam funeral; LB’s list of female admirers). It should be noted, however, that this episode does have a mechanised tone. It is a clever idea executed expertly. However, it does make for strained reading (note resemblance to this work).

What is the model for this device?

It has been accepted that Joyce’s utilisation of the Q&A format was parodic. The essay, “The Nature of James Joyce’s Parody in ‘Ithaca,’” Modern Language Review 64 (1969) by R.A. Copland and G.W. Turner, proposed that the source was a popular elementary textbook titled Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People, with a Selection of British and General Biography, &c., &c., by Richmal Mangnall. This work was republished with over 100 editions in the nineteenth century. Joyce made three references to Aristotle’s Masterpiece (ArMa) in Ulysses as well as recording thoughts on it in his notes (see Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum). The singularity of Joyce’s model was disputed by Sheon-Joo Chin (1996). Chin cites Tristram Shandy as an alternative model. He also references ArMa. He notes that the format of Ithaca resembles ArMa more than Mangnall with questions and answers being visually distinctive rather than integrated into the line of text. Finally, the comic tone of ArMa is redolent of Ithaca.

Explain the history of “ArMa”?

Its full title was Aristotle’s Masterpiece: Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man. It was also known as The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher. It was a sex manual and midwifery book popular in England up to the 19th century. It was first published in 1684. It became the world’s most widely circulated guide to childbirth and sex. It claimed to be the work of the famous Hellenic philosopher. This was a hoax. As a consequence, the author is now described as a Pseudo-Aristotle. ArMa mixed classical medical writings and 17th-century midwifery treatises with popular folklore. It described sexual anatomy and reproduction as then understood. The tone of writing varied from reverent to bawdy. Banned in Britain until the 1960s, it had a long and clandestine career as a quasi-pornographic book. Grubby copies were produced in back-street print shops, sold in rubber-goods stores and Holywell Street, and passed from hand to hand until they disintegrated. Billy Capri worked in such a warehouse in 1983. It was the type of work that Leopold Bloom would have purchased from ‘beneath the canvas flap’ at a riverside bookstall. Many young boys got their first knowledge of sex from ArMa. It was also sometimes given to women about to get married by their mothers. Penelope and Helen got nothing. It has been cited by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess. The sexological writings of Havelock Ellis are more in the vein on ArMa than continental theorists like Jung and Freud.

Compare and contrast with Ulysses

ArMa juxtaposes images of sexual practices, foetuses, child birth & female bodily functions with examples of mutants and legendary freaks. It debases femaleness by historical citation. The Penelope episode contains an unprejudiced account of female bodily functions and sexuality. Joyce was an activist in employing such antinomian imagery. He always presented the human form positively, regardless of function. Proust undertook the same campaign in his depiction of Charlus, albeit he couched homosexuality in negative terms. There is, however, much pathos in the famous BDSM scene in LTP. Both writers were Naturalists in the true sense of the term. Sometimes Zhu Di came along on my business trips. She didn’t have a passport so she couldn’t travel overseas. It was hard to get a visa anyway, according to my agent. The government liked Chinese people to travel in tour groups. I took her to Xiamen once. It was her first trip on a plane. She tried to act cool but I knew she was nervous by the way she kept pulling herself upright in her seat. After a while, she gazed out the window intently at the clouds, thick and fattened below us, yielding gently to silver scarves of jetstream followed by patches of coastline dun-green and grey. INSERT DESCRIPTION OF VIEW FROM AIR, MOZAMBIQUE DEAL. In aeroplanes, clouds are too close to see all the whorling shapes that make up stories. For that, you need to be a child lying on its back on tough grass in a paddock. See Point 2 (Below) re-Sublime. Also, Maralinga cloud. Also, use Navigation Tool to analyse the 17 uses of the word ‘cloud’ as a thread of symbols in TMAC. Cut all embellishment from the subsequent passage. We went to Hangzhou to visit Ling Yin Temple. Judy liked to go there during Zhong Qiu Jie to pray. We fucked hard on the first night in a suite overlooking Xi Hu. I took her over the desk while she watched the laser show above the lake like the start of Love American Style. We only left our room briefly to eat dinner downstairs in the Shangri-La buffet. She ate a lot more food than usual. Odd stuff that she didn’t normally eat. We slept like shift workers waking each other to fuck aimlessly. Later, I worked out that she must have just started seeing Johnny and this was a kind of farewell tour. In the morning, we went to Starbucks for breakfast in a small shopping mall along the waterfront. She ate like a horse. First, she had glazed donuts with café latte then a Danish pastry with a bowl of hot chocolate. When we had finished, Judy asked to go back to the hotel. I waited in the lobby looking at a souvenir shop. I picked some gifts for my kids and had them sent to our room. Zhu Di had changed into blue jeans, a long-sleeved blouse and a cardigan with a thick neck when she returned. I got the concierge to hail a taxi. We got in the back seat together. It was a long drive around the lake. The road was cut into the side of a hill. There was a long traffic jam near the temple gates. That was OK. After all, it was Golden Week. I started dozing. Suddenly Zhu Di took my hand.

“I got bad news,” she said.

A shudder went through my body. She never had any news at all. She was always totally neutral. She slipped automatically into Mandarin trying to explain. I can’t remember her exact words but she said something like, ‘dui bu qi, Bi Li, dan shi wo …’ then I lost comprehension for a moment as if we were driving at night in a sports car that had just entered a brightly lit tunnel. She used words like ‘shiqing,’ ‘jingqi’ and ‘qian de.’ I don’t know what you mean, Judy, I replied. I tried to get clarification but my word order became tangled. I reverted to an English syntax. Ni de dou zi bu hao song wanfan zuotian ma, I asked first. I meant to say, zuotian wanfan rang ni de dou zi bu hao ma? I repeated my sentence correctly.

“Yes, my stomach is bad,” she said. “But not from food. I am liu xue.”

“What?”

I was perplexed.

“Are you going to study abroad?” I asked.

“No. Not liuxuesheng. I mean, woman’s pain. From eggs.”

“Do you mean morning sickness?” I blurted.

She nodded. My head started spinning. I gripped her hand. It went floppy like a typical Chinese sick person. She never acted like that. I put my arm around her. She nestled into my shoulder. She could hear his heart beating fast. I pressed my palm on his soft breast. The Narrator came back to this passage many times. Sometimes he updated it. Changed the tense. Added new information that clarified the Protagonist’s reaction. These were usually manufactured extras which he subsequently erased. He deleted the whole incident for three years only bringing it back in the last weeks before publication to act as a prolepsis to Molly’s menses in C9. We sat in silence while the taxi squeezed past tour buses and shunted pedestrians off the road. The same bunch of lao bai xing kept catching and passing us repetitively when we got stalled in traffic. They glared at the driver. Then they saw me. So, they glared at the wai guo ren instead. Then they saw Judy. So, they came to the window to glare at her. Eventually, we all arrived at the palace gates simultaneously. They looked excited when I emerged from the vehicle. Maybe they had never seen a foreigner before. This was not unusual back then. I also attracted attention because I was 1.88 m tall, hirsute, unshaven, with wavy chestnut hair. I paid the driver and said bu yong zhao le. It means “no need to look for (the change).” I can’t stand getting back a palm full of shrapnel. They repeated my words appreciatively. An old man gave me thumbs-up. I waved back. He showed a broken fence of nicotine-stained teeth. We walked towards the temple gates at the south wall. Judy was slow to press into the long incline. I bought our tickets while she sat on a stone fence doubled-over holding her belly. Eventually, she struggled to her feet. We entered the temple complex. The crowd diminished as people went towards their favourite place. We circumnavigated a low Spirit Wall that blocked evil ghosts. They can only travel straight. A lot of apartment blocks in China possess holes so spirits can pass through the building without visiting. Judy saw a toilet block and went straight inside. She was gone a long time. I considered my circumstances. I was still married. I had three kids back in Australia. I didn’t want more children. But I had to do the right thing. I couldn’t stop a Chinese woman having a baby. As a single woman, she might go to the hospital for a 12-week check-up and end up locked in the termination ward. I started to focus on finance. I would have to get a divorce. My wife could have the family home in Mosman. I would take the holiday house at Whale Beach. I could sell that and generate enough cash to buy a studio apartment in Cremorne as well as a decent 2-bedroom flat in Gubei. That was a good place to raise children. The streets were wide and new. There was a big Carrefour. Foreign schools. Good doctors and dentists. The international hospital was out that way. It probably had a birth clinic. I didn’t want to live near her parents in Pudong. But then again grandparents are primary carers in China. Maybe our child could live with them. Lots of Chinese people did that. It would make life a lot easier. I actually felt quite buoyant when Judy returned. Perhaps I also loved her.

“Do you want to go back to the hotel?” I asked.

I clasped her arm squeezing the sinews and smiled.

“No. I am OK now,” she said brightly holding up a wad of bloody tissues.

“What happened?” I asked.

She made a chopping motion and grinned. She had heavy, carved teeth set slightly apart which gave her a carnivorous zeal.

“Did you just have a miscarriage?” I asked.

“What?”

“Did you lose our baby?”

I pointed at her belly.

“What baby?”

“Our baby.”

I pointed at the tissues.

“No baby, Billy,” she said laughing. “Every month the same. But this time a little bit early. I am sorry but we can’t have any more sex this holiday.”

“That was your bad news?”

“Yes.”

I took the tissues, crumpled them in my fist and inserted them into a public garbage bin. It was crested with fresh spittle. Some Chinese guys were standing in a pack smoking Mongolian cigarettes. They smiled. I nodded. I went back to Zhu Di. We walked uphill to the temple. She put her left foot first over the wooden beam that marked the entrance to the Mahavira Hall. It was a ritual for menstruating women to go left first. She bought a bouquet of incense sticks and prayed; waving them over smoking urns. I observed the Shakyamuni Buddha. It had been freshly painted. Probably for the forthcoming Olympic Games. Its head-dress was royal-blue. Gold leaf embellished the edges and folds of the Buddha’s robe as well as the lotus blossom on which he sat. He taught a middle way like Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Milk and rice pudding. Sitting under a Bodhi tree. Deng’s walking trail to and from the Xinjian County Tractor Factory. Gautama. Not everyone can get rich at once, he said. Princelings went first. Children of the elite. Later, Judy said she would have just had an abortion if she got pregnant. Much later, I realised this scene was a bit like Boylan and Molly in that Zhu Di was going back to her own people via Johnny.

Itemise the outlook of various human cultures towards menstruation with citations where relevant

— Sacred, powerful, celebrated

— Increased psychic capacity

— Ability to heal the sick

— Power to destroy enemies (Cherokees)

— Herbicidal powers in regard to young lettuces (toxic rot)

— Scares off hailstorms, whirlwinds, lightning (Pliny the Elder)

— Walking naked through a field at this time causes noxious bugs to drop off ears of corn (Pliny the Elder)

— Dangerous to male power

— Magic fluid (African charms: used to both to purify/destroy)

— Punishment of Eve

— Unclean (Leviticus 15:19–30)

— Unable to visit sacred shines, climb consecrated mountains or take devotions etcetera (Mongols, Leviticus, Orthodox, Hindu, Buddhism, Shinto)

— Probable influence on taboo on female clergy

— Intercourse is banned or discouraged during (Koran, Judaism)

— Transformation of fluid into snakes/insects then moon goddess (Mayan)

— Requiring spiritual cleansing – niddah/mikvah (Judaism): see also Ghusl (Islam): Hindu

— Untouchable: isolated: separated (see Dakkini, Kerala architecture): requirement for use of discrete eating implements: barred from pooja room: no singing: no tailoring (Hindu)

— Deceitful because it is concealed by women (Sumba)

— Cause of sexually transmitted disease (Sumba)

— Respect [“women should not be pestered”] (Islam)

— God-given process necessary for human life thus to be treated without
prejudice

— Can visit gurdwara, pray and undertake Seva (Sikh)

— Horror

— Deflection (taken off-screen)

— A blue liquid (Western advertising)

— 59% of American women have expressed interest in not menstruating
(non-contraceptive product under development).

Outline Classical processes for minimising the inconvenience of menstrual flow

• Egypt – use of softened papyrus as tampons

• Greece – lint was wrapped around a small peg

• Rome – pads made of soft wool

• Other – moss, grass and animal skins employed.

Insert timeline of modern product development

Insert text on Francine’s abortion (West Berlin, September 1985).

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“But you said you were infertile,” replied Tom Hallem.

“I got fat.”

“How pregnant?”

“Eight weeks.”

“Is that why you’ve been sick?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Have a termination.”

“How?”

“It’s legal in West Germany.”

“How much does it cost?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you get some money off your mother?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got some money coming soon from a show in Brisbane. I can give you some.”

Frances lit an HB and rolled the match around the ashtray until its head turned into grit among the stale butts. A ribbon of smoke rose. Tom was finishing a fast, black ballpoint drawing on a sheet of A3 paper. He was too poor to buy art products. The EA Times exhibition in Paris was a dud. I did some work on Ken Unsworth’s installation at the Biennale for pin-money, he told me when I got to Berlin.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“I want to.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“Why?”

“Look, I’ve been seeing Billy. It’s probably his—”

“What?”

“Well, I never got pregnant off you but as soon as we started—”

“That’s a nice way out of a jam, Frances. I mean, being pregnant. It makes it really easy to announce that you’ve been fucking Billy.”

“I guess it is convenient, if you choose to look at it like it.”

“That’s exactly how I choose to look at it. Because it could still be mine. We’ve still been fucking.”

“Yes, we have.”

“So, it could still be my … responsibility.”

“It’s not your responsibility. I don’t want you to have any responsibility towards me, Tom. I can’t trust you. Billy accepts his share of responsibility. He’s solid. I trust him.”

“He’s totally fucked-up, Frances. I mean, look at him. He’s either drunk, stoned or hungover. He hasn’t even got a job. He’s living off hand-outs from his parents.”

“He’s emotionally stable.”

“That’s a bit rich coming from you. You know what I’ve just been through with Elizabeth. You know what it means to me. Now, you’ve done exactly the same thing. But maybe I’m not seeing things clearly. Let me try to get it straight. It’s not like you’re just fucking anyone. You’re fucking my own brother. But what I don’t understand – what I really don’t understand – is how he could possibly get involved with you. He ought to hate you.”

“Maybe he hates you.”

“Did he tell you that? Asked Tom Hallem fiercely.

“Ask him.”

“I’m not going to ask him. I’m not going to say anything at all to him. I don’t even want to be here. I need some space.”

“Go and see your girl then.”

“Who?”

“The German.”

“What do you care? It’s not like I’m fucking your sister or something.”

So I walkt out the Spanish doors onto the grimy landing in front of our apartment and was given damp air like illuminating gas. It looked like the walls hadn’t been cleaned since the Russians came. A waterfall of relief smashed over me. I skippt down the ancient staircase. Hate and euphoria grippt my senses. The clinging sheets of a Berlin summer evening full of eastern plant particulates had turned the sky into a Joe Turner slideshow. I decided to stop at Ambrosia for a drink before I went to see Sylvana. We were never close again after that day.

Align with the work of Orson Welles

Every one of his movies starts with a death (C1). They are all about two friends who betray each other (Tom/Billy). TMAC is indebted to the kaleidoscopic anti-form and unfinished brutality of Other Side of the Wind as well as the buoyant trickery of F for Fake [F(W)ake], which in turn owed so much back to Joyce.

Compare the style and form of the Ithaca and Penelope episodes

Ithaca: impersonal, dialectical, rigid order, confident, scientific/factual (pretence only), elemental, universal themes. Penelope: human, personal, internal, dense, minimal punctuation, revisionist (corrects errors of fact in “Ithaca”), bodily, quotidian. Joyce makes the reader endure the emotional deadzone of Ithaca to heighten the power of Penelope. This is an act of genius.

Insert example of the use of catechism in the plot of Ulysses

Bloom made Molly recite a catechism of potential lovers for his erotic satisfaction.

Compare Bloom’s homecoming with that of Odysseus

His pseudo-son (SD) rejects his hearth to wander off alone into the night despite no fixed abode. The suitor (Boylan) has exited safely and arranged his next assignation. His home and bed disclose the fact that his wife has committed adultery. He sleeps upside-down in the foetal position. Odysseus is a beggar who sleeps on the floor of the palace. But he has connected with his son and the suitors are doomed.

List critical reception of “Penelope” in terms of historical periodicity

1920s – Obscenity. 1930–40s – Earth Mother (AKA Goddess). 1950–60s – Amoral Whore [Moll: 1604]. 1970s – Product of Time/Place (gender/history/Marxist theory). 1980s – Feminist (victim of Joyce’s patriarchal assumptions). 1990s – ecriture feminine (Cixous, Kristeva). Note – Critics of each successive generation have claimed factual insight into Joyce’s TRUE intentions that previous analyses failed to identify.

How did Joyce’s canonisation as a Modernist genius affect critical perspectives?

Ironically. Pre-genius [1920–40s]: critics were reticent to attack Molly lest collateral damage was done to Joyce’s reputation (see Deming’s “Odyssey of the sewer”). Post-genius [1950-onwards]: unrestrained belligerence.

Compare Molly with Gaia

Critics idealised Molly as a latter day Gea-Tellus to defend Joyce against accusations of immorality. This also reduced the threat of the sexualised female. Joyce invoked the comparison himself at the end of Ithaca when Molly was presented “cumbersome with seed” in the languid repose of Gea. She possesses x-ray vision, can mimic animals and is also a good literary critic.

Classical Female Referents?

Penelope, Juno, Medb & Morrigan from Tain Bo Cuailgne (“Oxen Raid of Cooley”).

Molly’s literary successor?

Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP). She represents the ‘riverrun’ symbol [see I.8 contra III.3], whose procession opens and closes F(W)ake just as Molly Bloom’s “Yes” opens and closes Penelope. The reader does not learn much about either character through the course of the text; just snippets of prejudice from third parties. Molly gets to unleash a verbal stream after the Homeric superstructure has been played out. See also Beckett’s Molloy/Moran as heir.

Graph Molly’s Exchange/Value System

— Woman: given

— Sex: for trade

— Bloom: soft touch (broken watch penury no coitus unclear relations)

— Boylan: debtor (trip to Belfast gift linen/kimono, etc.).

— In summary, Molly gives physical gifts. In return, she expects bounty.

Insert table with key critical conclusions about Molly Bloom

This interpretation enables Derrida to detach Molly from a single characterisation and let her float freely over the surface of the text like Shelley’s interpenetrative dew. First, she is a sensitive plant. Next, a magic herb like Moly. Finally, he describes her as Pharmakon – sorceress of ritualistic sacrifice. Derrida first employed this term in Plato’s Pharmacy when he wanted to tear open all his options. Pharmakos was polysemous in Ancient Greek. Its meaning flipped in Plato’s dialogues according to his tendencies towards the act of writing. It means both remedy and poison; love potion (‘philtre’) and medicine; charm and recipe (Phaedrus); substance and spell; artificial colour and true paint. In Phaedo, Socrates uses hemlock as a purgative; employing logos to disclose eidos itself. In Phaedrus, it becomes both things. Teuth presents writing as a type of a recipe or food that will enhance and enshrine the memory of King Thamus. In reply, the King rebukes Teuth saying that writing is a poison that will destroy his memory. To write an external supplement to internal memory that modifies memory itself; that is the effect of pharmakos. The pharmakon is thus the space between opponents. Derrida notes that this term becomes so over-determined in Plato’s writing that it is like the concept of Signification itself. Actually, Plato never uses the word pharmakos directly, preferring to keep it outside his discourse as an oppressive atmos [Plato also chose to shield himself behind Socrates]. It looms through and inside related word-products. It becomes a trace element as well as a trademark. Molly Bloom is seen by Derrida as coiled and coded throughout Ulysses until she comes to the fore twisting and spitting like a live wire. She acts as a tool for Boylan for pure physical release. Her proximity to him places Molly within the field of a power that can annihilate her. She is also harmful: a BAD trip. She erases character in a certain type of male. She is an anthropomorphising presence  – metonymised in a foot; representing bounty; synaesthesised in the fragrance of sweat-stained lingerie. She is associated with a popular brand of poison. Yet she is also presented as the opposite of death. In linguistic terms, she is the anaphora which creates anaphoric reactions for other characters and motifs in the text. She inhabits the instant/locus of the flipping point from centrifugal to centripetal force. She is Charybdis. Also Aeolus. She is Styx with Charon accelerated to light speed. She acts as the space/stage where the discrepancies between reader/character (pharmakoi) and author (pharmakon) are represented and resolved. In this role, she does not select the type of victim (slave, criminal, cripple, child, virgin); the type of drug to be used (pharmakeia); the form of sacrifice (burning, stoning, caning, beating with fists, rope torture, piercing with arrows or knives inter alia); or even comprehend the reasons why it is all taking place (famine, plague, earthquake, invasion, unnatural practices don’t matter). She is the atmosphere of violence and purgation – the ceremony upon which the crisis is played out. She becomes clou. A musical hall diva. The star-turn. An actor reprising the monologue which sealed her scandalous reputation. Primed by Boylan all afternoon. Observed by a crowd of chaps as she wades into the ocean. A midnight matinee starring Eleanor Duse.

Why did Joyce abandon drama despite his intense admiration for Ibsen?

See C7. Joyce was driven from drama by the structural, thematic and moral limitations of English theatre in the late nineteenth century (Herr 69). Instead, he turned to prose that was dramatic in tone and form. His characters speak like pantomime figures projecting their voices from stage. Ironically, he made it possible for drama to re-emerge as an innovative form via Samuel Beckett.

Examine Penelope as a precursor to Beckett’s prose

Beckett used this episode as a template for Trilogy, denuded of Joyce’s humanism and the plethora of places, names, devices, neologisms and verbiage that gave energy to Ulysses. Joyce’s huge life canvas (think Ensor, Brueghel or Bosch) was reduced to minimal allusions and references, reductive content, dense narrative flow, apparent asides, comic motes and isolated characters trapped in space that was both extrinsic and intrinsic at the same time (like Bacon or Duchamp). He is not interested in causality. Beckett thus became Joyce’s Antistrophe. If Joyce is like a dead spider then Beckett is the fly caught in his web … surviving but hardly ‘living’ … buzzing persistently … waning into staccato Morse but never going dead on the other end of the line. O les faux beaux jours!

How does Molly characterise her husband?

Leopold Bloom is presented by his wife as a Protean impersonator, imbecile, sex addict, blowhard and fraud.

Compare with Don Cane

Lieutenant Colonel Cane served in the AATTV, Special Forces, Strategic Hamlets program, WHAM, VIS, MATs, Operation Phoenix, Accelerated Pacification Campaign and Vietnamisation. He even did tour time in the National Field Police in 1974. His personal life displayed 60% of the qualities listed in the above classification of Bloom. However, he remains an elusive figure. He resembles John Paul Vann (see Bright Shining Lie).

How does Joyce represent menstruation?

Joyce’s makes numerous puns on women’s periods [INSERT COLON]. Bloodloss. Eggloss. Bloodeggloess. Blogloss. Eggreggrious. Egglessloss. Leggloss. Earthtung. Linguistically, Joyce does away with periods altogether [:;., :;.,- ;.,-:,-:;] inducing textual smooths. He is likely to have been mindful of this irony. A bloody flow is necessary so that Molly can speak freely. Again, this would be a conscious device by Joyce.

Recapitulate the central elements of Molly’s monologue

Ba Gua. Wu Gua. A stage. Molly’s disembodied voice in darkness. A woman always visualised by others makes herself Visible with words. She is never fully ‘seen’ in the whole course of Ulysses. All we see of her body is a hand reaching out the window to throw coins; recollections of her body by various male characters; and her husband contemplating her somnolent form motionless and face-down with her arse on display like a Pierre Bonnard nude. Immediately objectified. She interrogates Bloom. Catechism within catechism. She speaks from her bed, gazing at the ceiling, proclaiming herself a “wronged woman” like Lucrece. Her monologue passes through a sequence of hackneyed stage sets from Romantic tradition – a picnic at Sugarloaf Mountain; ignoring Bloom as he conceals compromising correspondence under a slab of blotting paper; rifling through the chamber maid’s room; walking between her husband and her future lover armthruarum down Sackville Street; warbling “May Moon”; swinging off Nelson’s pillar [they blew the fucker up finally, who could have guessed they would erect a statue of Anna Livia in its place]; placed in her boudoir before the obdurate eye of Don’s upstanding member at first she was bashful till she got used to the rolling sea then up down the little petlet hops he came 3 or 4 times the last time inside. Boylan is aroused by the sight of Helen’s foot in the DBC tea room. Rising from bed, her night garments flutter in the early summer breeze. Chronological scenes of her early life follow in a limited edition of 12 colour prints by renowned illustrator Kate Greenaway:

1. Thunderbolts in Gibraltar

2. By the Moorish wall

3. Promenading with a handsome British officer

4. Passionately entangled with a young man overlooking Howth

5. Aborting Bloom’s first proposal (because he chose the wrong stage set – she was rolling potato cakes in the kitchen at the time)

6. Giggling with Josie uncontrollably

7. Accepting Prince Leopold’s second proposal (Yairs …)

8. At her bath on a fine morning

9. In a costume pink and white as he passed to the door whistling the four note chorus by Jeffers turning the brim of his hat in his fingers

10. Self-cast as the “Wife of Bath”

11. Out by Donnycarney where the bats swing from tree to tree sweet were the words she said

12. Destitute wife leaning out of the upper casement in common Eccles Street … she eloped with that Liverdublian Jew and became a music hall performer now everybody disrespects her despite being an officer’s daughter I have only just begun to bump, bump, bump, just a little bit with a respected impresario after years of career-stalling abstinence.

What moral shibboleths are applied to Molly and critiqued by Joyce?

Victorian obsession with conjugal issues. Popularity of Measure for Measure. A dull play. Even ordinary women are capable of adultery with an officer, cad or gardener. Brain fevers. Vapours. Scarli’s wife. Step forward and make your confession. Of making Semen Dedalus swoon. Admiring Boylan’s prowess. Recollecting Bloom fondly as a flaccid Christopher Sly. A backwards chronicler of romantic adventures. Once engaged to the eldest son of Don Miguel de la Flora. Courted by brave Mulvey latterly dead in the Khurd Kabul Pass with a bullet hole popped through his khaki breast pocket and his testicles stuffed in his lipless mouth. Gardner kissing her goodbye on a canal lock and praising her hue. An Oriental slut. Dressed as a nun in Bloom’s pornographic tableau. An idealised nude. Print of a marble sculpture. Subject to a proposal at Howth’s Head. In Old Madrid, two glancing eyes a lattice hid … two eyes as darkly bright as love’s own star-summer wind murmuring happily but softer its breath was the kiss she gave.

Why did Joyce choose Gibraltar for Molly’s childhood?

Classical and modern analogues. Dante’s Ulysses had to navigate the Pillars of Hercules to pass the point between the known world and extrinsic waters. The Pillars are generally considered to have been located at Gibraltar. Likewise, Gibraltar represented a site of British Imperialism against which Irish colonial subjugation could be set. It was a key naval base that enabled Britain to control the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Its ability to sustain this small outpost in hostile enemy territory displayed Britain’s naval hegemony over Europe – in particular Spain and France. Gibraltar also acted as a centre of British military life. It was a staging post for armies travelling between England and its African, Indian and Asian colonies. Gibraltar was also a racial melting pot where British soldiers and administrators interacted with Spaniards, Africans, Moors, Jews, Arabs, Maltese, Italians, Greeks, Persians and even Russians. Molly represented a specific female identity molded by these colonial, military, ethnic, religious, linguistic and gender inputs.

When does the reader find out that Molly was raised in Gibraltar?

As she hears thunder and feels mnemonic fear (see Vico on the Giganti; also the Bible). INSERT REF to post-Lapsarian thunderclap in the opening of F.Wake (p.1):

Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhouna
wnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk (101 letters)

Modern Gibraltar?

West Berlin 1985. Shanghai 2008.

Explain

Wild places on the edge pivoting on the cusp between old and new.

(92) Link these places to Telemachus

A destination where Tom Hallem and Billy Capri are reunited (see C1). Home of Shanghai Dog (expatriate).

Chronicle Billy’s passage to West Berlin

I bailed out of Oxford after 6 months and went down to London for a while. The band-house in Queens Park was the ground floor of a typical two-up, two-down attached terrace. It had a large front bedroom partitioned to accommodate three people on single bunks plus a smaller bedroom for REDACTED. I split the main characters here like Joyce across different facets of myself. Between the bedrooms and the back half of the house was a secondary corridor leading to a side-path. I squashed a piece of foam into this gap and used piles of books to make a shield against traffic flow along the hall. My bedhead was Tex Perkins’ apparently empty black suitcase. I opened it once but I will not reveal its contents. This would be the type of list-making that Leopold Bloom relished. REDACTED slept on a beige sofa that lined the back wall of the living room. This meant he had to stay up until the alcohol ran out each night. Despite his moderate appearance, he was well-suited to this task. I quickly got a job as an usher at the Rank Odeon Cinema on Kensington High Street. The manager told me to go to the staff room where George would fit me out with my kit. DESCRIBE RASTA. Other employees on my shift were a sour Mancunian and a jovial Scot. I was provided with a neon blue uniform with richly embroidered gold epaulettes, brass buttons and gold braid around my cuffs. A peaked blue hat made me look like some psychedelic chauffeur. It was fortunate that patrons were rare as each cinema was allocated one usher only, who had to control four entrances. I felt like Odysseus aiming up in some existential play. This theatre specialised in dud movies. Maybe it was a tax dodge. Everyone was dealing drugs. The Falcon and the Snowman, Mean Season, Carmen and Cotton Club screened in daily rotation. This is pure fact, not symbolic stuff. I was quickly confronted by the mathematical hopelessness of earning seventy pounds and needing one hundred pounds to survive in London. Besides, it meant working 43 hours per week. I decided to join Tom in Berlin after reading an interview with Nick Cave in the NME. I departed on 12 July 1985. He was staying with Francine on the floor of a painter’s studio in Schoenberg. I got a bunk at a hostel in Kreuzberg until they moved into a room in the squats and the studio floor became vacant. He had been unsettled since Ana’s death. He didn’t know yet about the birth of Rachel. That happened in mid-August. Marion Hackett told him when she arrived. Francine was pregnant by then. End Ithaca now, writes I.

What maritime term is relevant to Tom’s situation?

Becalmed. Odysseus on first approach to Ithaca in Book Four. Scope of his situation still crystallising. Final trial yet to come. Hamlet at start of Act 3. In Berlin, he will encounter the Lotus-eaters, Cyclops and Aeolus in that order.

Compare with Billy

Adrift. But still on some kind of course.

In symbolic terms, why are their entrances into Berlin from Paris and London, respectively?

Tom has gone to the historic centre of Modernism in the visual arts. Billy has gone to the historic heart of the English language. Both are disillusioned by this experience. They try to find new models in W. Berlin (Billy = N. Cave, Tom = Kirchner). Neither provide an immediate breakthrough. Tom eventually gives up art. Billy sustains his core belief that writing represents the utmost human endeavour. But he has a very long voyage ahead (30 years – much longer than Odysseus’ absence).

Describe Billy in Berlin

Debased Telemachiad. Itineracy equivalent to Stephen Dedalus in Dublin.

Summarise Hallem’s outlook

No essential change since C3. Still reactive. If Earth was a human head, he was being pumped from the farthest place back at Time, sailing against history and Empire. This isn’t necessarily a trope that ends heroically. See Oedipus, Heracles, Australia et al.

How is the diary format used in literature?

The diary is by necessity presented as autobiographical and intensely personal. It is seen as an intimate journal. A dialogue with self in progressive, chronological form. Diaries can act like a montage to rush narrative forward (see TEAM AMERICA). They operate like an e-pistol. Diaries are always associated with candour, truth, confessions. It was the favoured mode of Saint Paul. They inject a more realistic representation of life into any text, compared to omniscient or third-person narration. Diaries are highly vulnerable to faking due to human gullibility around this axiom. Rousseau’s Confessions put sex into the diary format as a stock subject. This was wish-fulfilment by a disgusting old man. Logbooks of fucking have been the bane of readers ever since. Mediocre writers fall back on diary entries when they lack requisite narrative skills. Often, diaries chronicle periods of drug abuse. This is always a preface to transcendence. Diaries are associated with place. This is why Pepys is considered the greatest diarist. He became EYES on London. Too much sperm has been spilled in diaries. Baudelaire said the greatest literary adventure of all time would be a diary in which the writer left no facet of humanness, no incident however petty unrecorded. It would include itches, imaginary pains, fake mannerisms, the utter banality of existence and the intellectual limits of its subject, outstripping even Leopold Bloom’s relentless plod. Diaries are vulnerable to false narration. Diary entries can easily be undercut by jumbling chronology, mixing entries between different first-person characters and different POVs, making outrageous claims, lies. Diaries often form part of an epistolary novel, in combination with letters, newspaper clippings, radio broadcasts and, more recently, internet data. Fantasy elements are levied regularly. Tick off another form of literature inserted into this work. One which Joyce did not use in Ulysses. He got it out of his system in PAYM. MAKE A PLACELESS DIARY. This would denude the form of the geographical and cultural substratum that sprouts meaning. Diaries are not really about people. They are about SPACE. The geometry between the eye, pen and paper make a critical triangle or Trinity. Diaries are always written at desks. No diary should be read as a true list of events as they occur over time [i.e. sequenced FACT] without considering narrative intent. Each diary entry in a writerly text must be imbued with symbolism directly relevant to plot, according to Barthes.

How does the author impose a diary format on the reader?

Via an instruction manual with the injunction: “PLACE OVER EYES FOR THREE-DIMENSIONAL VIEWING.”

How is authenticity eroded in diaries?

Sins of omission. Obvious malfunctions. Wilful fabrications. Bloom does not include the cost of the brothel visit in his daily budget at the end of Ithaca, for instance. SEE GO ASK ALICE. This was a fake diary written by a religious fanatic to slap down drug use. It is the model for the life times & death of Ana Lafei Pepese.

Why is the diary section inserted into C9, not C10?

C10 returns the narrative to events on the night in question – 6 November 1984 – including the gripping reunion of father, wife and son. It is already written. Like Joyce, I am writing Ithaca after Penelope is finished. Homer took the reader back in time in Book 6 of the Odyssey to recapitulate events to date. I am going ahead in ‘time.’ Proust did that through occasional comments secreted into the textual flow. It conditioned the reader to future plot developments. It removed suspense from the work, refocusing attention on his aesthetic theorising. It is termed Prolepsis.

Insert headings for extracts from Berlin diaries, prior to commencement of Penelope

1. ENTER TOM & FRANCES (PARIS > W. BERLIN)

2. ANGELA’S STUDIO

3. BILLY’S ARRIVAL (LONDON > W. BERLIN)

4. EAST BERLIN

5. BILLY’S 23RD BIRTHDAY PARTY

6. SOLMSTRASSE

7. FRANCINE’S TERMINATION

8. BILLY’S EXIT

9. TEMPORARY RE-UNION WITH F.H.

Link to Homer/Joyce (Telemachiad)

1. N/A. Mulligan & Haines. Telemachus enters Sparta.

2. Nausicaa. Martello Tower. Polyphemus’ cave (squatters as Cyclops’). Dido.

3. Enter SD.

4. Alcinous’ palace. False sanctuary. Doomed.

5. Circe episode in Ulysses.

6. Aeaea. Ostensible friends as swine.

7. Calypso. Sibling betrayal. Telemachus/Telegonus. Inverse of Holles Street.

8. Telemachus leaves Pylos (Odysseus leaves Phaeacia).

9. Gibraltar.

List difficulties associated with this game of correspondences

There are insufficient female equivalents in Joyce. Homer, however, has multiple relevant females. There should be no direct transfer of tropology anyway as both foundation models are now being actively deconstructed.

Insert select diary entries (ref. pastiche)

July 9, 1985: London. Awake, pack, keep myself together. I call mother reverse charges [SYD 9 pm]. Bob answers phone. They have become strangers over the last nine months. McComb comes over. We have tea in Queens Park [DESCRIBE]. I put my suitcase in the taxi. Hysterical. We have travelled so far but not together to the same place. He goes back to Pylos. I go on alone. The bus fills. Dinner at ferry terminal. Boat leaves 11.30 pm. Ten-hour crossing. I watch movies in the Kino Haus feeling seasick: Performance, Tin Drum, The Mirror, F for Fake, Other Side of the Wind. Each of these films has direct relevance to the plot of this work.

Wed, July 10. Told to meet bus at Deck D, Door 5. Miss bus in bowels. Scour terminal. Find it at exit gates. Almost stranded at Zeebrugge (like Patroclus). Amsterdam 9.30 am. Reach Checkpoint ALPHA at Helmstedt about 2.30 pm. Wait in the car park queue for over an hour. Finally enter the high concrete walls that seal the channel to West Berlin. Stop once at a communist roadhouse so they can fleece us of hard currency for vodka. It takes 3 hours in total to go thru DDR. Billy arrives at 7 pm. Gunter helps organise a hotel [Gotland] in Kreuzberg. His friends drive us there. 60 DM per night. Walk around neighbourhood near Wall [SEE POSTCARD]. Drank vodka in our room.

Thurs, July 11. U-Bahn at Gorlitzer Bnf to Bahnhof Zoo. Get maps and walk to Technical University. Ask random student to translate apartment ads on noticeboard. She happens to be a painter from New Zealand. Later, bump into her again at supermarket. Get her address. Walk to Tiergarden. Look at disappointing Middendorf exhibition (7 paintings, 2 gouaches).

Friday, July 12. Exit Gotland. Student hostel, Meisingerstrasse 10. Taxi costs 16DM. Beds cost 24 DM. Went and did some shopping. Angela offers her studio floor in emergency. Nollenhorf Platz to buy Nick Cave tickets (DEMODOCUS 1). Walk to National Gallerie to see Kirchner’s “Potsdamer Platz.” I don’t want to get suckered into Friedrich’s use of light. Or his techniscope sense of space. It’s novel for Europeans but we’ve seen too much of both these sublimating symbols in Australia. Billy and Frances wander off to look at Dix and Hoch. Kollwitz’ “Mother with Dead Son” makes a huge impression on us all. None of the German museums has Kiefer. Bizarre. Got to go to Stedelijk in A’dam then. Return to hotel. Get drunk on Wisbier. Walk across car roofs and bonnets. A little late for gig (Metropol). Down back of auditorium. Work our way up front outside fake columns. Post-Eternity set. End on Mutiny. Meet English guy, German girl and Jill from Scotland. Francine leaves. Billy soon after.

Sat, 13 July 1985. Artillery blasts when I am standing in the shower. Just my luck, I think, to arrive on the morning the Cold War ends and WWIII starts. Turns out to be Russian planes timing their run to break the sound barrier over West Berlin. Market at Reuter Haus. Walk to Technical University. Almost make it to George Gross Platz. Home listening to BBC World Service: Live Aid Day. This work is a historical arte/fact like ALRDTP.

Mon, 15 July 1985. Move to Angela’s squat at Eisenacherstrasse 103 with our stuff in stolen shopping trolleys. Staying in her studio with a South African refugee named Winston. We roll up our mattresses each morning and need to stay out until nightfall. I sit in Tiergarten and read the newspaper. US helicopters fly circuits over the park using statues as MARKERS. This is a symbol of occupation. Also confines of plot. Walk along Wall. Climb an observation tower. East German guard motions me to back off (see Pte. Carr).

Tues, 16 Jul. Take Billy to East Berlin first time. Easy passage through Customs. Frances gets taken into a side-room, searched and asked questions. Walk up Unter den Linden to the Pergamom Museum over canals (see photographs). Looking for our beloved slum areas. Stop at a supermarket in Rosa Luxembourg Strasse. It is full of one brand of each commodity (1 x pickles, wurst, cheese). Coins are made of shit-metal. Fight with Frances. Billy says he’ll go and calm her down. Last I see of them that day. Go to Alexanderplatz. Catch tram out of city. High-rise apartment blocks with little evidence of life. Visit a statue of Lenin in Leninplatz. Back to Alexanderplatz. I buy a wide-brimmed felt hat, Czech oil pastels, and some East German flags at the main department store. Half a litre of beer costs 1.15EDM. Walk to Brandenberg Gate. Pass monument to victory over fascism. At 10 pm, I return to W. Berlin. Walk to nightclub area and drink. Wasted 136DMs talking to my mother.

Thurs, 18 July. MY BIRTHDAY. Spent PM in Grunewald Forest overlooking the lake drinking beer. Lost Tom and Frances. Mechanical sex on a bed of soft needles in a channel of tall pines deep in the woods. At 4 pm, we all went to Die Brucke Museum and bought Kirchner postcards. Dinner at Trinity. Frances gives Billy a copy of the Odyssee in German. He’s never read Homer, he says. Inside, she has marked a significant passage with a posy of small blue flowers. Fine old time drinking and playing pool. Billy poured wine in my ear then overdosed on the toilet. Vision of Michael Deekeling hopping over the cubicle wall to rescue him. Angela disappears. Tom too. Walk home singing feedtime songs. F.

Link to Stephen/Bloom

Angela + Michael = Bloom. She gives shelter to Tom (Calypso, Nausicaa). He rescues Billy.

What does the symbol “F” mean?

Fuck.

Tues, 23 July. Michael leaves. Angela to follow next weekend.

Wed, 24 Jul. Come home to find Angela in tears over hostility of housemates towards us. Bastards waited until Michael was gone. We’ve got until end of summer vacation to get out. All go to Ex and Pop. Play pool and drink. Come home at 3. F again.

Thurs, 25 July. Go to Steinstucken exclave with Justin and Tim. Billy stays home. S-Bahn Wannsee (end of line) then long walk down forest tracks to B.Beyer-Strasse. Typical tree-lined German avenue. Over 1 km length. Wall both sides. Death strip beyond. Inside island, inside island. W. Berlin. Russian dolls. Note irony of naming. Gunter said turn north at the power box on the dog leg. Pass under rail bridge. End up on Teltowerstrasse. Weird Wall-made dead end. Thick woodlands. You can get right up against the Wall here. Climbed a tree. Took pictures of university. No guards. Go back to Zoo. Billy and Francine meet us at Rowena’s (fantastic bar overgrown with foliage in bombed-out building).

Sat, 27 July. Move into A & M’s room for 3 weeks. East Berlin. Assemble at Wittenberg Platz fountain. U-Bahn to Hallesches Tor. Walk to Checkpoint Charlie. Smuggle cash in shoes (20 DMs = 100 EDMs). Buy lunch on Unter den Linden. Huhn mit pommes frites. Rubber skin like Blixa’s pants. Shitmetal utensils. End up ripping off the casing and eating stringy dry muscle with our hands. OXEN-LIKE. Buy art products on Chausee Allee. Tram to Schonhauser. Walk to Alexanderplatz. Drink beer all afternoon with two East Germans. Billy and Frances go walkabout. Meet at 6 on bridge near Otto Nagel Haus. Go to Fernsehturm (= Nelson’s column). Revolving restaurant (LINK C5, S-E1). Massive menu. But they only have mushroom soup and the blue cocktail available. WE just drink. View West Berlin from afar. There are many vantage points in the East from which to view capitalism. Spit plum seeds off the observatory deck. Walk through Linden, drink coffee and go back to passport control. Drink at Swing and Metropol. Frances gets really drunk. We fight. Smashed window. I sleep in the foyer.

Sun, 28 July. Get up and go straight to Parchimer Allee. Billy doesn’t want to come. Lunch in backyard. Go to Britz via Friedrichstrasse Interflug. Buy 2 bottles of cheap Pernod. Evade West German Customs. Drink with Tim and Pete in various parks. Pete teaches me how to rip Mercedes symbols out of car hoods. F. Next thing I know I wake up in the sandpit next to our squat with a bottle of Pernod. Can’t find lid. Can’t remember anything at all. Get inside. Go to bed.

INSERT NOTE – Excised entries for the next 3 weeks as they yielded no fresh data. The patterns of 28 July are largely repeated. This period represents the profligacy of the suitors in the Odyssey. Also, Dublin 16 June 1904 on a loop. Sometimes, the chronic alcohol abuse inherent in daily life is lost in the sheer scale of Ulysses. It is meant to depict a TYPICAL day in Dublin. The novel is set on a Thursday. So it does not represent a weekend spree. Stephen just happens to be the one with cash to spend on the day in question.

List correspondences between individual daily entries and Homer/Joyce as relevant

9 Jul: Leaving Peisistratus. Note – Stephen Dedalus has NO TRUE FRIENDS in Ulysses. 10 Jul: Scylla & Charybdis. Also suitors trap. 11 Jul: Nausicaa (A. Dwyer, NZ). 12 Jul: Hades (dead art objects). 13 Jul: Siege of Troy – various (squat, W. Berlin). See also next entry. 15 Jul: Odysseus as beggar. 16 Jul: East Berlin = Penelope (she cannot conceive of freedom). 18 Jul: Aeaea. Bella Cohen’s brothel. Molly/Boylan (F). Achilles, Agamemnon and Briseis. East of Eden (Timshel). 24 Jul: Cyclops. 25 Jul: Inside the horse. 27 Jul: Alcinous’ palace. 28 Jul: Bow contest. Bloom/Dedalus pissing. 15 Aug: Frances tells Billy she’s missed her period by 2 weeks. This isn’t a crisis yet. Her menstrual cycle is erratic due to bulimia. 19–26 Aug: various failed Martello’s. Odysseus wandering unable to find a safe harbour. 19 Aug – 1 Sep: Billy trying to nest. 26 Aug: A. Naboul = L. Bloom. Solmsstrasse = Eccles Street. 26 Aug: Odysseus/Penelope spend a single, last night together after the shock and excitement of the violence that day. 29 Aug: Enter Goneril. 31 Aug: Enter Martello. Stephen is trapped inside the horse with Mulligan and Haines in the first chapter of Ulysses. 9 Sep: Tom makes a last effort to create a home and work. 11 Sep: confession (see Foucalt). 9 Jul – 1 Oct: Billy’s Telemachiad. Tom as Alastor. We see different aspects of the possible future of Stephen Dedalus after the end of the novel in the characterisation of the half-brothers.

Mon, 19 Aug. Billy and Francine looked at an apartment at 9 am. Sucks.

Fri, 23 Aug. Billy and Frances find out about a warehouse in Steglitz: sounds too good to be true! Go tomorrow. Walk over to Yorckstrasse, Monumentenstrasse, etc. Ring Mother. Money problems. Call EA. Justin, Tim, me go to Japan Imbiss about 9 pm then KOB. Don’t bother seeing band. Drink beer outside. Home to watch Francine’s Super-8’s of our European adventures.

Sat 24 Aug. Go to Steglitz but it’s too far out and not ready until 6 September. Help Uta move into her new flat. Broke. Borrow 100 DM from Tim and go to Kreuzberg 61. Drink, talk, catch late U-Bahn, drink coffee at Metropol. Avoid F.

Sun 25 August. Angela and Michel return tomorrow. We sleep in their bed for the last time.

Mon 26 Aug. Steglitz in morning. Pack up Angela and Michel’s room. Move things outside. Studio for next couple of nights. Billy on couch. Only hope is Dave moving out of Zeppi’s flat. No money. Go to see Tim at Britz. He packs us off to Hermannplatz into Zeppi’s squalor. Meet Angela and Michel at Kleistpark. On walk home, we are cornered by a Turkish guy with a knife. I tell Frances to run in English. I go the other way. It confuses the guy. We run for our lives. Make love in the studio for the first time in weeks.

Tues, 27 Aug. Final look at Zweite Hund and there it is! Solmsstrasse, 2 bedroom flat for 3 months for 1500 DM per month. Francine contacts A. Naboul, who gives us 15 mins to get over. Clinch the deal. Contact Tim at Bergmannstrasse with news. Go to Anfall. Meet Dave and Zeppy. Ring Tim again, who invites us over for dinner. Arrive at 6.30 pm. Go back to Anfall for more beers. Arrange to meet Zeppy. U-bahn to Eisenacherstrasse. A metaphor for Odysseus’ wanderings. Sneak down to Werner’s bedroom to sleep.

Wed, 28 Aug. Collect combined finances of Frances and Justin for bond: $A1200. Exchange rate now 2:1. Was 4:1 when I left Sydney. Meet A. Naboul at 2 pm. He says, “call me Arkadin.” Sign contract then go out to celebrate. I buy a powder blue suit at Gneisenauestrasse. Visit cemetery. I finally read the Steinbeck novel Francine gave me for my birthday in May. Move onto Anfall. Meet Tom and F. Very drunk.

Thurs, 29 Aug. Finish E of E. Fucking saga. Eat chicken, rice, salad and beer at Japan Imbiss. Marion Hackett arrives at 11 pm, Zoologischer Garten. She can’t wait to tell Tom about Elizabeth’s baby. Wow. Tom and I go out drinking. He’s OK. He said Marion’s installation FALL was really quite good. I expressed surprise after what he wrote about their first encounter. He said, it just goes to show. In fact, her talent was to NOT execute her conceptual framework correctly. In this regard, the text mimics Marcel Proust’s ALRDTP, in which the Narrator’s initial aesthetic verdicts are incessantly updated, overturned or superseded (see La Berma, Bergotte, Venteuil, Elstor, Bloch, Octave et cetera). Home late. Sleep in Barbara’s room.

Fri, 30 Aug. Francine sick (7.5 weeks). Ring Arkadin. 11 am: collect key from Mrs. Naboul. Go to Aldi Markt, buy a poppyseed strudel and drink coffee. Walk to Schiesse record store on Mockernstrasse. Buy 3 Johns (“Death of a European”). Back to Eisenacher. Help Angela and Michel cook dinner. Taxi to Solmsstrasse. Tom turns up at 9.30 pm. We go see Peter and Dave at Anfall. Arrange to meet Angela and Michel at Irizico’s at 11.30 pm. U-Bahn to Yorckstrasse. See Mick Harvey and Anita Lane. Walk home.

Sat 31 Aug. Solmsstrasse. Buy caffeine implements: filter, coffee, milk, sugar. Hang East German flag off balcony (asked to remove it within 30 minutes … comply). Take medicine. Go to Eisenacher. Buy frites at Kreuzbergstrasse and eat them in cemetery at Yorckstrasse. Tom buys couch (Odysseus’ bed). Get shopping trolleys to cart luggage. Drink beer, go for dinner on Gneiseneaustrasse (Lebanese). Sleep in front room for first time on A. Naboul’s mattress.

Sun, 1 Sep. Frances is sick again. Walk to market via Anhalter Bahnhof and Wall. Buy household items: cutlery, plates, pots, bed sheets, toothpaste.

Mon, 9 Sept. Bump into Cushla on Martin Luther Strasse. Exhibition by 65 Australians including Mike Parr and Ken Unsworth. Parr’s installation is a chair at an angle in a dark room with charcoal on the floor, grey light and a single drawing covering one wall. Unsworth offers a group of small fans with flying material suspended from the ceiling. Marion has rebuilt FALL. Tom is right. It’s OK. Go to Pollock’s art shop. Buy 111 DM’s worth of Brera Oils (12 tubes and one huge Rowney Georgian White). I don’t know why. I’m not working. Also buy double-bed sheet, pillow slips, bottle opener. Make spaghetti with eggplant, mushrooms, tuna and steamed vegies. We go to Ambrosia’s and get very drunk. Sylvana. Tom goes off with some German girl. F: 9 weeks. Second time missed. We must tell Tom. Fight. I lie down on the cold ground and refuse to move until she leaves. Entreaties of passers-by. Eventually, a local resident gives me some black coffee and money to get home.

Thurs, 12 Sep. Long walk alone uphill from Bergmanstrasse to Willibald-Alexei Strasse. Sylvana’s flat. She talks to her friend in German on the phone while I tongue-fuck her. Angela and Michel come over for dinner. No sign of Tom. Leave to drink at Ambrosia. Drink at Schlemeels.

AUTHOR’S NOTE – there is a gap of almost two weeks from this point in which the diary is blank. Tom Hallem may have visited Dresden during this period (see below).

Tues, 24 Sep. Francine’s termination (11 weeks).

Thurs, 26 Sep. Frances sick. Pill working. Hang around flat. Tom ignores us. Sylvana comes over. We could hear them in the next room. Marion comes home. She has sold a new series called EUROPEAN to the Berlinische Galerie. It’s a photographic sequence of READ standing stark naked in the middle of a clear summer’s day on a bald sandstone ledge overlooking Jamison Valley. He looks so tiny and vulnerable. His pale torso has no hair. It blares at the sun. His skin is starting to burn. Corkscrew mop falling onto his shoulders, matched by long locks of apricot hair coiling around his shrunken penis. He is standing awkwardly, almost like a soldier at attention. His knees are locked. His arms rest by his sides somewhat stiffly. Marion says these images strip the power of technology from European men. They show us impotent and exposed in the Australian bush. Juxtaposed with Read, she has collected a sequence of early Colonial drawings of First Nations warriors. Their painted bodies gleam and shimmer.

Tues, 1 Oct. Exit Berlin. London. Going home.

Explain the symbolism of these last entries

Marion arrives in Europe and enjoys immediate success, whereas Tom has flatlined. She has a new product, tailored to the global market’s perceptions about European settlement in Australia. She is not just reselling FALL. Billy Capri is to return home. His position on arrival will be similar to those images of Read. Francine’s termination contrasts directly with the birth of Rachel in temporal terms.

Chronicle Billy Capri’s activities during the period when Frances Hackett was disclosing her pregnancy to Tom Hallem

Walk down Potsdamerstrasser through Allied Powers Building to Grunewaldstrasse. Buy Perverted by Language by The Fall. Note irony of title. Weather clearing (first time in weeks: always overcast or night). Catch U-Bahn at Kleistpark to Karl-Marx Strasse, eat Turkish kebab, go back to Solmsstrasse. Tom gone. Don’t remember dinner.

Which sister in Lear does Marion Hackett resemble?

Gonerill. She is the creative catalyst. In comparison, Regan has no genuine ideas of her own. She likes to work out methods to increase the intensity of pain inflicted on her victims by other characters rather than commit the actions which cause that pain herself (see Stalin).

What other correspondences to the sisters in Lear could a superficial analysis yield?

Elizabeth = Goneril. Marion = Regan. Frances = Cordelia. In fact, Ana = youngest sister.

When did Billy and Frances’ affair end?

No formal separation. Billy decided to leave as soon as possible after the termination.

Calculate the emotions of the half-brothers towards W. Berlin in retrospect?

Mixed. See C5, 13. Insert poetical descriptions.

What was the reaction to Tom Hallem’s work in Paris? Trace flow-on impact

Polite sycophancy. Absence of Elizabeth noted. Reverse charges call to Sydney (drunk). Funds for fakes will come with Marion, she said. I can’t risk a wire transfer. I went onto West Berlin with Francine. No contact from Elizabeth. Limited access to my daughter was granted after lengthy court action upon my return to Australia. Tom Hallem remained despondent about this rerun of his own experience of paternity. Also, add the situation with Billy/F. He accepted the impact of his own behaviour. His main grudge was separation from the Hackett fortune. He joked to Billy at the time that “no friend has ever made a greater sacrifice than you just made for me.” Orson Welles also felt betrayed by people all his life. His movies often involve two friends separated by deceit. Their relationship was never close again, although Tom solicited money from his brother during his last months in Melbourne.

Insert examples of Tom’s hubris

Tom Hallem derided Julian Schnabel at a civic reception in Paris while the famous American painter sucked on a fat cigar. “You’re entrenched in your era. And it’s over,” he said. He loathed Schnabel’s Hemingway pose. Yeats quoted James Joyce thus on their first meeting: “presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, ‘I am twenty. How old are you?’ I told him … He said with a sigh, ‘I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old’.” To be helped, he meant.

Describe Hallem’s visit to Dresden

Like Durer visiting Bosch’s village, I made no inquiries after Kirchener’s various residences between 1906 and 1911, nor visited his training institution (Königliche Technische Hochschule), nor viewed Konigstrasse, nor asked the dotards playing dice in the town square for a few lines of oral history about their childhood before WW1. Their defunct mumblings were of no interest to me, who was making Today’s Sound.

What is significant about Kirchner to Hallem?

“Self-portrait as a Soldier” (Berlin, 1915). Its amputated hand is a symbol of Hallem’s subsequent blockage. Kirchner wrote in 1906, “Everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us.” This was an ideal of speed-in-realism to which Hallem adhered. Also, Joyce. However, Tom’s brother was prone to manic adjustments. None of Kirchner’s paintings set in Dresden are located in Dresden today. They were scattered after the Nazis assumed power. Likewise, Tom Hallem (substitute Sydney and Elizabeth, respectively). He relocated to Switzerland in 1917 to kick pill addiction. There is a museum in Davos housing his later works. There is no evidence that Kirchner met Joyce or they knew of each other’s art. They are still perhaps the most famous artists to die in Switzerland, along with Meret Oppenheim, Giacometti and Paul Klee. Kirchner committed suicide in 1938, aged fifty-eight. He shot himself in the right temple. We know that he was right-handed due to “Self-Portrait as Soldier” in which he symbolically amputated his painting hand. He had battled mental health issues for at least 40 years but it was the political situation in Germany that tipped him over the edge (see also V. Woolf). Famous writers who died in Switzerland include Nabokov, Borges, Canetti, Hermann Hesse, Graham Greene, Thomas Mann, Erasmus, and Alistair Maclean. Many stars of the Hollywood silver screen passed peacefully in this neutral realm beginning with the silent era siren, Paulette Godard. Later thespians buried in its moist alpine graves include Charles Chaplin, James Mason, Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Audrey Hepburn and Richard Burton. Many wealthy individuals settled in Switzerland for tax purposes after WWII. If these actors had been available to Joyce in 1917, Exiles may have enjoyed a successful production. INSERT CAST LIST FOR ULYSSES (David Niven as Bloom, Peter Ustinov as Simon Dedalus, Richard Burton as Stephen et cetera).

Outline Tom’s work schedule in Europe?

Occasional oil pastels executed on hotel beds and floors. Seldom use of a desk but when available accepted gratefully. Like Giacometti, I worked small. But I had well and truly stopped by the time we reached Berlin except for some drawings of Frances. She was an exceptional subject. She changed form so many times that in the end I hardly trusted signifiers as a breed. LINK TO PROTEUS.

What information did Hallem receive from Australia during his absence?

Short, formal letters from his mother. Professional correspondence from EA Times Gallery including cheques from official sales. A postcard from Willy (Aug 1985) created out of a B&W photograph of hotels on William Street, Sydney, sealed under bubble wrap. It read: “Dear Bully. Things are crap. It’s a fucking ordeal to carry on. I could tell you a million things but why bother. Hope you are enjoying the same fantasm in that funny familiar forgotten feeling: Europe. Give my love to the inmates. See you in October. Lovey love from Mandurah, WA.” In the event, Willy did not arrive in Berlin until early 1986, after completing a short prison term. Billy Capri did not write to Tom Hallem after his arrival back in Sydney (in October 1985).

What of Frances … was she ‘of’ or ‘through’ the surface as a personality type?

Chimera on the wind not drill-like Oread. Flaming like spewm out of the mouth of Zeus and therefore incapable of heuristic burrowing.

Compare with Rita Hayworth

Barbara Leaming’s intimate biography of the famed auteur contains many poignant remarks by Welles about his second wife. There were “terrible, terrible nights,” he said, “when she’d fly into rages, break all the furniture and drive suicidally into the Hollywood Hills.” This evidence of destructive behavior was affirmed many years later by her daughter with Prince Aly Khan, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. “I just saw this lovely girl destroying herself,” Welles concluded. He couldn’t stand feeling like a failure in their marriage. “I admire Yasmin so much,” were his final words on the subject. Citizen Kane became a mil(l/e)stone around his neck. Rita Hayworth was later recognised as the first high-profile victim of Alzheimer’s disease. Conversely, Frances Hackett achieved equilibrium in the 1990s as the release of funds from a family trust enabled her to purchase a waterfront home in Sydney and start a successful business in the events sector. Her sister became a famous figure in the Australian art world.

In general, how did Tom Hallem feel about his relationship with Frances, upon reflection?

He was inured to its upheavals. Like Joyce, he believed that uproar was essential to creativity. Fighting is still a form of epiphany, albeit debased. Returning to normalcy after violence is the equivalent of sensory exhalation after the sublime. Tom even seemed to crave punishment sometimes, especially after hearing about Ana’s death and Elizabeth’s baby. This propensity became more marked as his aesthetic ingenuity waned.

Insert SUBLIME (adj.) moments

1. One afternoon, Frances beat Tom around the head continuously in a hotel room in Paris (third arrondissement). Finally, there was a knock on the door. Hallem went to open it. In that split second, Frances scuttled under the table so that she appeared like a victim to the concierge and male guests in the doorway. They flung Tom downstairs and onto the pavement. His bag followed. In the instant after their boots ceased contact with his body, he experienced a rush of intense feeling at his utter solitude, meagre possessions, the myriad of people who had passed over this granite gutter in history and the fact it was spring and he was an Australian in Paris.

2. On a visit to Grunewald, lying flat on his back with limbs spread-eagled, and weighted into the autumnal earth by foulest circumstance, Tom Hallem gazed into the sky, recalling the frothing clouds that formed exotic dragons and giants in childhood, then flipped onto his belly on soft pine needles, tasting nature, dirt acting like braille for his mouth, before rising up onto his elbows and arching his back like the subject of Kirchner’s “Liegender Akt vor Spiegel” (1909). Doris Grosse is smoking an opium pipe in Kirchner’s image, which owed much to Velasquez, Goya, Manet, et al. Pierre Bonnard produced a similar composition, SIESTA (1900), now housed in the NGV. Its provenance commences with acquisition by the celebrated art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, after which the painting entered the collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein (1905–07), before being exchanged back to Vollard for a work by Renoir. Vollard subsequently sold it to Sir Kenneth Clark, where it was housed in his Surrey estate from 1914 to 1943. LINK TO CRITIQUE OF ART DEALERS & EXPERTS IN “F FOR FAKE.” ALSO NOTE ‘NO-SIGNATURE’ CHARTRES. His household was the model for D.H. Lawrence’s Reid family in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After Reid’s premature death, the painting ended up at the Lefevre Gallery, London, where it was purchased by the Felton Bequest in 1949. There is no evidence that Kirchner saw Bonnard’s version, which is one of the superlative erotic images of modern art. The German artist in contrast depicts a misshapen, humpy female in gross streaks of green and orange paint delineated by bright blue borders. Only in the reflection of a large rectangular mirror positioned strategically above the bed is the sensuality of Bonnard’s representation reprised.

Describe the end of their relationship

Frances and Tom reunited after Billy left West Berlin. Willy arrived in February 1986. He went to Amsterdam with Tom in spring. It was a good place to be a junky. He stayed in Europe until the early 1990s. Tom went back to Sydney. Eventually, they reunited in Melbourne. This is a good location for a drug addict due to: topography (flat); broad suburban aspect; orderly street grid; low cost of living (compared to Sydney); profusion of high-grade brown heroin from Asia; cultural pre-eminence; and comparatively liberal government policies.

Where was Hallem one year after the events described in this work?

Domiciled in Amsterdam without painting or shelter, scavenging money for hard drugs. When winter started, he got his mother to wire some money and came home.

Outline Billy’s route home?

London – Sydney, early October 1985.

Outline Tom’s travels?

Berlin – Amsterdam – London – Sydney. Relocated to Melbourne 1992. Dead 1998.

Forms of employment?

Hallem was a taxi driver in Sydney. He cleaned offices. He worked as a kitchenhand at Fingers Gourmet to Go! in Martin Place rail station. In Melbourne, he got a job driving a fork-lift in an import-export warehouse on Gipps Street, Collingwood. He did low-level drug dealing out of the Park Hotel, Abbotsford, to supplement his meagre income. He lived in nearby Vere Street. Bob Dylan spanned the entire geography of the USA in a bold straight line between the Great North-West and a fishing boat outside Delacroix Island, Louisiana, in Verse 2 of “Tangled Up in Blue.” In fact, his first-person narrator ends up offshore in Black Bay overshooting the mainland in a clear symbol of his personal trajectory towards suspension in time, loss of chronology and professed intent to get back from the Gulf, like Odysseus returning from Troy. In Australia, Dylan’s song would have spanned the desert from Perth to Sydney.

Five years later?

Tom was still working multiple jobs in Melbourne to save money for legal fees in his custody battle with Elizabeth.

Outline the temporal history of F for Fake

Welles struggled to get this film made. It adhered to NO KNOWN FILMIC MODE. He made commercials for Paul Masson wine and appeared on television variety shows to raise funds. It turned out to be his last completed project. It took him three years to get a limited release in the USA. Nobody was interested in a treatise which exposed the raw spine of its creator to the audience. It wasn’t even a usable length being too long for television and too short for a main feature. This was a deliberate act. Welles himself had moved on by 1973. He was trying to get a new generation of Hollywood directors to help him make Other Side of the Wind. They idolised him. His triumphs, trials and evisceration at the hands of the old-time studios only increased his outlaw chic. But they were never real outsiders. They were all quite happy to revert to situation comedies as required. They could never produce work with the profound sense of self-abasement that Orson Welles put on screen in F for Fake. They could never have spoken so directly into a camera lens to the audience. They could never present themselves dethroned. Lear was the clear model for Welles in F for Fake. He always believed in the innate curiosity of the average onlooker. He never produced work aimed at the lowest common denominator. Orson Welles managed to make F for Fake into a unique anti-product, operating on numerous levels of truth and falseness, authenticity and affectation, cliché and pathos, story and auto-story, self-reference and observation, magic and mundanity, austerity and flamboyance, art and sex. But in the end, it was all about HATE. Welles detested both himself and the American film industry. It was his bête noir. He turned his actual body into a reflection of that … that … thing. Insert fragments from horror movies. Welles spliced together routine documentary footage, historical film stock, apparently irrelevant artefacts and sublime imagery into a bloated parody and self-parody. He employed ground-breaking editing techniques of piled jump cuts to create a breathless sense of abandonment to speed. Only in the dark central space of a screen for a very confined period was such an output possible. This could never been done in text. SHIFT (SUDDEN).

Analyse Molly’s monologue in accordance with the eight-sentence structure of Penelope

Bloom asks for breakfast in bed before going to sleep (Sentence 1). He has not made this request for twenty years. It spurs Molly’s memory. Because making breakfast is his job. The reader has already witnessed his detailed attention to Molly’s petit déjeuner, as he calls it, at the beginning of Chapter Two. He makes a nice breakfast. I stay warm under the sheets. That’s the deal. First, he brings tea. Then food. I like his deportment. He makes a good servant. Boylan would only hold open the door for a lady to get a fistful of her arse. Poldy doesn’t even want my meat and potaters. It’s been years since we fucked. But I can tell he got some tonight from the smell of cheap lemon-water on his collar, although it could just be a recurrence of his hand-washing ritual. He gets anxious like that. When Billy comes home late, I know if he has been to a brothel. He is freshly showered. His hair is damp. He doesn’t smell of beer. Sometimes he goes straight to sleep on the sofa. Or he comes to bed wired. His breath is loose. I hope he hasn’t brought back the clap not that it matters we haven’t done it for years not even orthodox Samaritan style he’s only behaving like most middle-aged men yes it would be an irony I know straight after I’ve finally done the beast with Sir Longercock but that’s life. I am looking forward to fucking with Hugh again (Sentence 3). I am not sure if my husband would be angry or intrigued or both, probably both, he has wanted to prostitute me as a high-class whore for discerning gentlemen for some time always full of money-making schemes it is all his invention I have been a dutiful wife cooped up in this flat while he wanked on my toes, kissed my buttocks, spanked them, disseminated pornographic literature for my enjoyment and edification, sucked on my nipples, used my breast milk to flavour his tea, posed me semi-naked for French postcards, got his eyes down other ladies’ garments compulsively (oh excuse me Mrs Purefoy! you’ve got a mote of dust down your cleavage please allow me the honour of removing it with my lick) and conducted scabrous little affairs while I was out singing. I mean it’s not as if I’m another Wife of Bath with five husbands dead and the latest one choking. I kept my dignity while he went mouthing-off all over Dublin. Hugh knows how to handle himself in bed. He’s a man of action. He dropped twenty pounds today on the Gold Cup. Not that we have much in common. I am better matched with my husband. Poldy was a beautiful young man. End of Sentence 1. A list of my previous relationships is contained in Sentence 2 (see also Sentence 5 for details of Mulvey). There is an unclosed reference to my mother’s identity. Bloom’s incredulity is remarked upon. He is flawed as a narrative figure. The watch he gave Molly doesn’t work. This is a polysemous metaphor invoking: his hapless acts of generosity; ill-conceived struggles with technology; parsimoniousness; failed attempts to impose temporal regularity on Molly; the periodicity of marriage; Molly’s function as a static female as well as her resilience (the watch does not “go” and neither does Molly). I wish he would quit that peripatetic sales job and get something steady in a shop (Penelope/Odysseus allusion). He should also forget all those crazy campaigns for social amelioration (Sentence 3). It might even keep him clear of tramps. “Sparrowfart” was her nickname (See Sentence 5). Molly broke wind as she enunciated the second syllable. Mind-word then deed. That’s a type of Metempsychosis. From text to act. Puncturing a veil. I was born in Gibraltar. My mother is apparently dead. Her name was Lunita Laredo. A Jewish apparition. This is a secret I kept from Bloom. That she, me and Milly are the real Jews not him with his bog Christian mother. Another of Joyce’s games. He knew that Semitism is a matrilineal set-up. Bloom’s mother was the Irish Protestant Ellen Higgins. Her father brought Molly back to Dublin as an adolescent. But she never really mentions him. It’s a surprise given his dominance of her childhood. She believes that her daughter will probably remember her as a listless presence. She complains about only getting a postcard from Milly whereas Poldy got a whole letter (Sentence 4). He is an unsound witness. A train rattles past (Sentences 4 > 5). It becomes a streaming mind symbol for cock-thrust > lust > heat > old Gibraltar. Molly remembers her bodice in bud. Also posting letters to herself full of blank scraps of paper. Such a rich, sad and poignant image of isolation and anxiety by Joyce. The opposite of writing. She stutters over the word “precipitancy.” This is a device used regularly by the author to symbolise both her educational aspirations and limitations. It also suggests that association with the autodidactic Bloom has broadened her intellectual horizons. You can link it back to the frustrated cravings for knowledge of the Dedalus sisters in Wandering Rocks. I don’t know if I will ever make it off this commode what with all the water and blood trickling from my spouts in what do they call them “purls” (Sentence 5) another egg gone their getting tired and poorly made but it’s inconvenient for Hugh after all his rigorous planning to meet me Monday down the Ashpit more cash down the drain from his perspective I assume he won’t want blood all over his pecker but who knows men are strange creatures he might be overjoyed (Poldy would have liked a look down there for sure) maybe all that intercourse today induced it prematurely he ploughed me four or five times in the muck yes I came precipitately and often who would have thought it I didn’t cum at all until I was 22 and that was thanks to dear old Poley we were lying together on the floor in S. Hills with the sun setting across my west window pane as he found the groove with his fingertip and tried and tried until I just gave up it was all too much today the mattress sucked me in until I was glued by the rump so I just let my legs wand open Poldy would have been down on his hands and knees having a good old gander he is the kind of man who always seems to have tweezers handy but he has a delicate touch unlike Boylan it could have been any old slag by the last shot he represents the Physical whereas Poldy is Wit like when he quoted verse and batted his pretty long eyelashes at me like a Spanish beauty (Sentence 7) I could have strapped on a porcelain cock and plundered him with hermeneutical force a ‘body’ being a metonymy for my lack (Sentence 3) of course it’s an item of beauty and a joy forever tra-la-la imagine if I gave young Dedalus a blowjob look up with spunk across my cheeks apostrophising his organ he could drop a cambric kerchief across my eyes like a belly dancer’s veil “sono a posto mi amore” I tell him wiping the embossed sleeve of my apricot faille morning jacket as I rise to leave the boudoir “analizaran beber algo mi copioso el fluido seminal” he replies tenderly it’s a pet name I call him Don Pana I am Poldy’s companion but no longer his flame I am desperate to change this dynamic like Penelope at her loom wishing for a primal YES weaving Leopold’s dark locks into a funeral shroud to lay over my face as he lies in our bed resting his dainty feet against my cheek like Rossetti flowers on Dublin’s hillside shining under sun glare (my glare) 16 years back he asked and I said YES concisely the whole world knows that now because Joyce turned it into the most famous climax in Modernism passing seed cake from my tongue onto his lips like a mother bird it is my GREATEST memory I don’t want to lie here waiting for Billy to come back from Pudong I know he will go straight to Hongkou when he sees I am gone my cell phone will ignite with the picture of a puppy and a song by Rain I will ignore it down the dark disjointed path along the Moorish wall [MULVEY] I know what he will say that they just drank champagne together there was no fun Gu was bleeding I am amazed at his audacity he is very different to a Chinese person we speak readily of errors we fabricate confessions we learn how to calibrate our disclosures but Billy never blinks just LIES I can’t be angry with him about it I look my husband right in the eyes and accept his vow while I squeeze my baby’s arms how do I end this sentence his flesh gives me strength. I told the priest I still love Donny but he is tired of my contrition. The weary tone of his voice betrays his resignation. We both understand I will keep coming back for absolution. I mean it’s not like we’ve fucked. It’s just my love. He instructs me to attend Mass and pray the Stations of the Cross. He gave me a plastic bottle of Holy Water to wash with. I let my husband lie on top. They can hear our mating ritual through the iron partitions. It starts with my hand then my mouth. I encourage him to go quickly. I want another baby fast. Johnny and I have already got our allocated child under the one child policy. I could have had all the babies I wanted with Billy. He would have given me a foreign passport as well but I told him I did not love him this was not a fact but it needed to be said so I did it. He put his head in my lap. I let him touch my raw belly. I was already pregnant, I think. He put his hands under my clothes on the floor. The carpet burned my shoulders. I let him make me cum. But I would not make love. The last time I saw Donny I went back to his house in Pandacan. It was close to his office. The army made it hard to get there after Ninoy’s execution to protect the Caltex depot. But they wouldn’t stop a woman-so-heavy-with-child. I passed into the blockade like a spectre moving through the stone wall of a ghost city. I entered the compound. His maid sneered. I deserve ridicule. I was not nice to her when I had power. Donny was always the same with all people whatever their terms. We drank coffee. I did not want to go back to Tondo. But I could not stay. I took a little money. Just enough to cover the first few weeks after my son’s birth. I made him promise to watch over my child if I died. Then I left. It was hot and wet. He kept paying the rent on my apartment in Hongkou. He left letters in bad pinyin under the door. Johnny would sit on the bed and read them aloud. They made him gleeful. I can understand why. Chinese people endured a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign demons. Billy should have offered more concessions when he still had power. That is the classical code in China. Now I have all the power it is no time for trading. But I don’t want to gloat. You should never drag a wounded animal through the courtyard. The place gets infested with bad spirits. It attracts predators. Penelope’s suitors remain undead. They circle the walls howling. Someone has to drive them off or they will find a way inside eventually. It’s always up to me, thought Penelope. I had to cut Billy fast so I got pregnant. It all happened in one month while he was back in Sydney. I could never leave Shanghai. Billy arrives at my room. He hands me the latest bank statement for my sister’s account in Hong Kong. It is a good sum. We stand next to a sculpture of a giant horse in my gallery. The facts spill out of my mouth like loaded dice. I tell Stan all about Leon’s illness. He listens. It is an askew moment. Finally, he took a cheque book out of his jacket. He placed it on the table. I watched him fill out the value in words. He etched numbers in the RH box, applied a hasty signature, tore the perforation and drew himself up to his full height. His mouth hovered over my eyes. Once, he was taller. Now, he is stooped. “I can’t help Leon,” he said. “This is all I can do.” I drew the leaf from his grip. Not even our fingers touched. I would have liked to take hold of his palm and run my fingertips across the back of his blotched hand. There was sadness in his gaze but it was not about money he had plenty of that no it was time passing it hit him dully and irrevocably like a cold stat. He walked out of my office while I stood dumbly. I will never confront Les with the facts. I don’t need to hurt him. I will see Dick next Monday. He should bring me a small gift. A bronze tripod. Something discreet. Xenia. A silver mixing bowl with a gold-plated rim. He’ll probably grab a meat pack out of the cold room as he hastens from the shop. He wants me to leave Les. I don’t know why. I just need to hold him at bay until he gets bored. We passed the point of fidelity way back. Claymore blew off too much tackle. I didn’t care. There was never a shortage of men. Our love feels bigger since Leon got diagnosed. We both know I need a child. We are working in tandem. In an ideal world everyone would assume it’s his baby. We are unscrupulous. I hold onto Barry with a frozen grip. I will be a pillar like Gertrude. Les protected me. He never slipped. I will never know what Barry thought. Maybe he had misgivings. I recited the whole tale like a mantra. I even knew where to insert pauses. Effective lies are all about a steadfast voice, watery eyes and some sleight of hand ability. Odysseus had Sinon rehearse his story before he was sent to Troy. He interrogated him. Bullied him. They will try to trick you, he said. Some people will never believe you. You just need to engender enough doubt to distract them. They tortured the VC kid in front of headlights. Hooked him up to a lie detector. Truth serum on his nuts. “What if you don’t come,” asked Sinon. “We will be there,” replied Odysseus coldly. That one inch of wood may as well be a wall. The Trojans are testing its guts. They tap tap tap seeking a dull sound that shows it isn’t hollow. Finally, it is wrenched into Athene’s temple (WHAT IRONY). Laocoon makes his futile thrust (TRAGEDY). Cassandra starts wailing (TRAGEDY). Billy Capri has gone home with his father (SITCOM). Tom Hallem is wandering the streets of Darlinghurst alone (ROMANCE QUEST). He fled Leer’s house like Aeneas absconding from Troy. Priam has been decapitated. He was left to rot on the shore like Pompey’s carcass. Head wrenched off its shoulders. Hungry dogs sniffing his trunk. Another nameless corpse unburied. He needs interment so that Charon can bear him to the other side. Just 20 ships escaped at the start of the Aeneid. Shanghai Dog sat in the taxi. It reached the Wangpu tunnel. It will emerge in Pudong facing the towers of the financial district in Lujiazui. He told me about Doctor Gu when he was a customer at the shop. She gets him deals. He puts money into a private account. She books a room at the top of the Pudong Hyatt. They drink French champagne. Sometimes they have sex. I am glad to send him sore to her. She will poison him one day. When I miss Donny, I look at my baby’s face. I am glad to be rid of pain. No more stillbirths. My husband is a good man. We don’t have money. But we are a real family. My son is my cousin’s son’s half-brother, mused Helen. Note cognitio parody in Major Barbara. I took a risk when I left the spa. The money was not so good with Billy. My mother complains. I am sending less home. I said that the old company in Qingpu went broke. Now I work for an Australian business. The salary is lower but there is stuff I can steal and sell. So I will send even more money home soon. I told Billy I needed some cash for my father’s cancer treatment. He understood my strategy. Elizabeth looked at Leon. His cough was worse. He ran his teeth over large white blemishes on his tongue. Billy changed the subject. He gave no formal answer. That was very Chinese of him. I withdrew. I don’t know if I want to hold out. He only comes back to Sydney in the school holidays. We never touch. He sleeps in the study. He claims it’s the time difference. I don’t know how much time I’ve got before he makes the decision for me. We are all waiting on Don’s next move. Lucky Sinbad. Seven times wrecked. Seven times rewarded. The timing is tricky. I’ve got to get rid of Tom as soon as I’m pregnant. Leon could be dead in a year. I met Donny on a pedestrian bridge over Quezon Boulevard in 1978. He was taking pictures of the traffic on Recto Underpass. It just made me laugh to think that a man would take photographs in that place. He smiled back. Took me by the arm. Now I know he was following someone. Did he grasp me like a friend to distract his prey? We went for a walk in Paco Park. We couldn’t go on dates. I worked at a night club. Shanghai Dog sat at the bar until I finished then he would go down to the ground level and wait outside the staff entrance in the car park while I changed out of my uniform. Donny didn’t like to go down to Ermita because he might be recognised. I know he snuck down to Club21. But he never went to places like the Kangaroo Bar. He avoided my boss. Dennis had 50 cops on the payroll. Donny called them Ticks. I danced in the ring at Dennis’ club. Telemachus tightened the wires. Our throats locked. Air was insisted. None came. Truncated birdsong. It was a better job than working as a P40 streetwalker in the hot boxes off M.H. de Pilar. I make ice candy after work. We swap it for barbeque. The rest we sell to neighbours. I make 1 peso per bag. It doesn’t sound like much. But Tondo has 65,000 residents per square kilometre. Donny got us an apartment in Sampaloc when I left. But we couldn’t afford to stay there. So we moved here. Billy is going overseas in two days. I’ve got to get sorted. You can’t argue with facts. I was more useless than my brothers. I took food from their bowls. My mother wanted to transfer my burden. When I turned eighteen, she took me to a farm beyond the industrial limits of Daqing. It was a bare house surrounded by bare fields. I was strong, she said. She pointed at my legs. “Good open; good closed,” she said. The old farmer looked at his marble kitchen floor the whole time. He made no face. His daughter did the talking. She would not pay dowry. I should be free. My mother got angry. She stormed off. I was left standing in front of their television set. A Japanese war series was playing. The daughter waved me away clocking the pavement on high heels. It all stopped when I started sending back money from Shanghai. I went to Manila to help my mother. She got 1 peso for each rice seedling. My father left when I was a kid. I had three brothers with two step-fathers. They all left as well. I became a bar girl. I sent money home. Sometimes I had sex for USD if the sailor was nice. I will surprise them when I come back with Billy. Shanghai Dog will pay a dowry of 88,888 kuai. It’s the luckiest amount. My mother will give back 50 per cent if she is satisfied with him. If she does not like him, she will only give 10 per cent back. That is Chinese tradition. She will want to keep as much money as possible. So, I suspect she will not like Billy very much at the start. Penelope was a single mother ostensibly. I would like to meet Elizabeth, she said. This was many years later after Tom died. I was also a single mother. I understand her instincts. I would like to meet my granddaughter as well. Tom was an only child. She’s the last one left in our line. I would like to tell Rachel all about her father. He was such a talented man. I closed my eyes and our daughter’s adulterated face appears like a tortured rag. Eyes seared open. Frangible. I laid her out in a simple white frock and placed a pretty lace bonnet over her head. It hid her broken form. I stroked sweaty ribbons of black hair from her swollen scalp. A smooth yellow river rock. The priest came. I held her. She struggled. But she was baptised before death. The priest blessed her unfinished body. Arms awkwardly hacked. Wings of a fallen angel. Not clean like Achilles or Hector. No palms to touch or to feel. Her toes scratched at my forearm. She had no air. I wanted to blow life back in her mouth. But I knew that I could not. Donny had seen too much slaughter. He was all closed up. It was the last time we tried to have children. We decided to divorce. We got sick of looking at each other so miserable across the kitchen table. We only shared pain now. She had just eleven days of life. Also Robert Richards, aged three years. Susan Richards, aged two days. Together again. Bloom could not contemplate intercourse with Molly for over ten years (27 November 1893 – 14 May 1904) after the death of Rudy. Beatrice was absent for precisely this period. Penelope waited almost 20 years. Donny is superior to my husband. But my husband is OK. He works. I accept the ghetto. It has always been his home. He hasn’t walked in the jungle. I don’t like external surroundings. They have no meaning. Only my son counts. And church. Penelope never connected with Telemachus. Never had a good word to say about him. She observed his progress with complete detachment. She held him at a safe distance always. She couldn’t solace him. It would have made him a target. She was solely focused on the survival of the State. Tom had to find his own path. She didn’t have time. In a keepsake box, she kept the shrivelled apple found in his pocket at Gallipoli. That was another battle near Troy. The phone was still unanswered. Dringdring. Penelope sat unstitching the day’s work in her bed chamber late into the night mulling over her son’s fate trying not to interfere nor overtly push him closer/away but rather guide him by abeyance in the direction of exiles like Eumaeus and Laertes. Les wasn’t a strong presence. But he wasn’t absent either. Like shade-cloth. He enabled us to live in piety. In the end, I took Johnny. He’s a porter in a four-star hotel at Hongqiao. I am almost thirty. I need a child. I should go back to Shanghai and confront my husband. There’s always a risk in love voyages. My grandmother travelled from the UK to Sydney to get divorced in 1928. She decided to stay here. She came back to get me. Left her fiancée. Uncle John. My grandfather had another child with his mistress while she was travelling back and forth on boats. Leon accepts Tom as the best vessel. He got access to the medical records. Fraught line. But no madness. Johnny wanted to marry my cousin at first. She held him at bay. I never thought about him as an option until I could not wait for Billy any longer. My mother was restless. If Don asks to see his son, I will say YES. I can’t deny him. I want him to see Billy. I am proud. I don’t want him to meet Tom, her cousin answered. He doesn’t deserve it. I can’t stop him, of course. But I can make it difficult for him. Every day, I make progress. Every night, I unstitch it all in restless unrestful sleep. Our bed is uncomfortable. I keep moving it around the chamber. It’s too big and heavy and too tall like it’s still growing. Barry says I’m crazy. That bed base is Penelope’s last challenge. Another way to goad Odysseus. She always resets the bar. Les and I lie in bed together not touching. I put a line of pillows down the middle. He turns his wounded hind to the stars. Bill huddles into my back and puts his arm over my trunk. Sometimes he slips it under my nightgown. We doze. Narrative events are always an anti-climax. Our forms weld together. Les whimpers. Darkness is the worst time during war, he said. The enemy always comes on moonless nights. Les groans at a ghost. I lean over the mound of cushions and grasp his shoulder firmly. It stills him. This is a metaphor for time not healing. Donny and I always slept face to face then he left I was alone and heavy with Tom who came forth swaddled on his back I always kept him in my bed as a baby then he got his own bedroom then eventually there was Les. Most time with Les in the end. I took his surname. Chairman Mao wanted to get rid of all lao bai xin. Give everyone a number. I pick up the receiver to ring home again. Girls in China get simple names like SMALL (Xiao). FANG means fragrant. Daedalus means ‘cunning worker’ in Greek. INSERT ACROSTIC. Nothing is known of him prior to his appearance in the Iliad. He designed Ariadne’s dancing ground. Penelope knits with a ball of Ariadne’s string. My cousin was at the flicks with the other preggos. My parents slept. Don motioned me softly. I went through the back fence. He was waiting in the alcove. He led me to their bedroom. It was unlit like a robber’s cave. Sin/bad the sailor. Her impress still marked the worn mattress. I could never regret bearing his child. Barry does his best. But he isn’t the one. Like Menelaus to Helen. I would have had children with Bob. But we could not. Billy leaned over one side of the bed and I leaned over the other. His copy of Ulysses went bouncing onto the floor spine-upwards pages fanning bookmark disgorged. His course notes spilled over my shoulder bag. Tampons dropped out of my purse. Some nights it feels like a giant limb is growing out of that bed into my spine. I could start spitting vines like Botticelli’s Chloris. Don walked towards the corner of the yard in his thongs. He opened his fly. Urine hit dry kikuyu grass. It spat and swirled. LB and SD observe a shooting star while they piss. LB a longer stream; SD higher. Correspondence by variance. This was Joyce’s special trick. Don was still firm when he returned. He stood tall. He kneeled between my legs, examined my loins (I froze) and lowered his chest. My breasts parted. The heroines of both the Odyssey & Ulysses endure long periods of celibacy. He interrogated my body from a prone position. His orgasm was weak, dry and fast. But it made him less separate. Billy took me on Saturday night. I told him about my period in the taxi on the way to Lingyin Temple. He thought I was pregnant. What a sad joke. Molly has just started bleeding in the interval between Boylan’s exit and Bloom’s return. Both men have merits. Molly walked between them on the street singing a happy song like someone from a Hollywood musical maybe Debbie Reynolds in SintheR. We walked to the Xujiahui di tie zhan in silence. Johnny loitered behind. We said goodbye. Billy kissed me on the cheek toppling. I continued down the escalator. Johnny followed. We joined hands forever. I left Billy standing on the street. We were always happy. But I had to break it off. We had no future. Barry secured one leg to the floor with an L-bracket. Bloody great builder’s spike, he said. He was one of Bernie Hall’s boys sparring with professionals like Sharkey Ramon down the fag end of First Avenue near the Cook’s River. Stripped down to his shirt wog-brown and strong. Broken beak. Orson Welles always wore prosthetic noses. Odd surname. A famous island, he said. As if his name was Fiji or something. His family came to Australia between the wars. Contadini, he said. It’s a cruise line, I think. Mussolini put a stop to all that. Barry was half Australian. Australian born. What’s in an Irishman? Insert Shane McGowan’s teeth into the gob of Jonathan Swift. “With a Higgins for his Mam / And a Hegarty gran / you could hardly ever say he weren’t Irish.” Accordion flourish. Pint slops. Jew to Irish. Irish Jews. Gaebrew. Heblic. My own children are the same mix. O’Connell and Shalom on their maternal side. The latter means ‘peace’ in Hebrew. Bloom’s got more conversions in him than Tony Ward. LB is always defined externally. From Without. Dedalus and Bloom are parallax. Coal lighters careering in circles down the murderous wires where the Jialing Jiang and Chang Jiang merge. Wollongong crashed into the Derwent Bridge. SD is brilliant yet dissipated. LB is solid but limited in intellectual scope. Both live in a state of discontent. Stephen has knowledge but not satisfaction. Bloom achieves survival but not grace. They are separated in four respects, according to Bloom in Ithaca – name, age, race, creed. Joyce does not investigate the long-term sustainability of their father-son proxy. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they would have fallen out quickly if they tried to progress their surrogate union. Butting-heads like Les and Tom. I am going to leave Matt, thought Ana. Helen made one break with convention. It wasn’t a real accident. Donny was worth it. I can see that in retrospect. I am a rebel in my quiet way. I paid the price gladly. It’s like Melbourne Cup day really. Everybody makes a big fuss. They run the race. Then it’s never mentioned again. LB is a quiet man, mildly persecuted. He is a type of female character. The spiritual cosmos in Ulysses revolves around his presence. Without him, there is no narrative drive. Most critics point to his acts as evidence of Joyce’s rationalisation of Odysseus to the level of everyday life. But in many respects Bloom is more like Penelope. His wife could be said to display masculine traits such as venality, callousness and pride. In the end, I just wanted Donny to go. I could cope. Dido pretty much runs her own race by the time Aeneas hits Carthage. I had a mixed business opposite the local school. I kept boarders. There was space for Tom’s pram behind the counter. I just wanted to wash my hands of the whole fiasco with a bar of lemon-fresh Palmolive soap. I could never purge myself completely. Forget. Or forgive. I feared blanking my own spirit. But I keep it suppressed. You’ll see all kinds of things in my compartments. Unused subway platforms loaded with files. A lake that is home to a three-metre eel, according to Scottish legend. Saint James Bell mounted in mid-air simulating the sound of Big Ben. GONG. A telegraphic cable passage runs from the GPO to Newtown. First real graveyard in Sydney. Fragments of the headstone of Elizabeth Steel. Bankstown bunker. Hyrieus’ treasure chamber. The Qi Emperor’s tomb at Xian is only now being exhumed in all its majesty. Dedalus’ labyrinth. Parola Tondo winds alongside the river. You got to move on foot by tweaks through the traffic. It’s like a Rubic’s Cube. Horns gust. Turn off Herbosa Street. There is an abandoned rail line running right down the centre of the street gathering long puddles where the tracks have been stolen for fuel. Manila’s purview. You walk down a side alley weaving through clusters of motor-trikes and pedicabs. Kids play football across your path. Garbage is piled on small abandoned yards guarded by sick dogs. Old men extract nails from timber to get coins. A couple more turns of the maze and Smokey Mountain disappears. You need a guide now. The road keeps narrowing. The hutongs in Beijing got tighter with age. Concrete blocks have been slapped together to make square hovels. They prop-up weaker wooden shacks on all sides. But all these buildings are just the carapace of the real ghetto. It is a tin-capped warren that shoots in all directions like a rhizome. It is always wet-hot in here. Cooking makes it more humid. Nobody is wearing much clothes. All the young girls are pregnant. Everybody has a moist bronze glow except the children. Strokes of slippery filth cover their flesh. The rooms are composed of layers of scraps; heaped. Flip-flops work better than shoes. Our place is down the back of a kind of hall. There are ten rooms in total. Plywood screens give us some privacy. A tall man like Donny would be able to see over the crown of our screen. Prison of a Minotaur. Child of the wooden cow. Pasiphae’s hole. Bloom lowered himself into the gutter under the front stairs clumsily, checked under his garments for wounds, forced open the flimsy basement door, dropped inside, lit a candle, removed his boots and went up to the entrance to get Stephen. Go down Leer’s eight step ladder to the maw. Master’s chamber. Damp seeped through its rough cheek. Tank Stream trickling across gutters of arched sewer pipes dirtied and choked to dead pools. She lit a candle. Voices in the corridor. Glowing Yellowblock vault. Dates from the Triassic period. You can use road headers with certainty across the entire Cumberland Plain. LB went to the sink to fill a battered kettle. Tap water started its journey from Roundwood Reservoir. Bloom extolled the properties of water: its egalitarianism in seeking gravitational equilibrium; its dominance over human form; its buoyancy beneath sea level; its Protean faculties; its utility as a transport artery. Link to Sydney sandstone. It comes all the way from Broken Hill. Time never gets in its way. You can make buildings out of it. Grind it down for spoil. Use it as construction sand. It is a fine product mixed with cement and water. What choked Juanita. Caliban’s rage. It was all over in a split second. Take her to the foundation cut. Heracles’ tasks. Make sure the pour takes place before dawn. Financial exchange with the BLF. Morbid slaughter. Hera’s doppelganger. A contested field. Odysseus gone wild in the palace. ARVN screeching like cockatoos as they pump Charles’ corpse. Waste of good bullets in a man long dead. Makes them feels tough but. Mind always beat form in Joyce. Bloom escapes the Cyclops. He outlasts Boylan. Eventually he evokes uncanny tenderness in Molly. I waited in the recess of Tom’s studio beside the low mattress examining a stack of his art school works. A series of black biro heads. Here was the bedrock of his paintings. A sure draftsman. Hippolyte. Unbridled mare. Nemea. Isabel Archer. Brokenin. She chose to be gulled. I was always on the lookout for impostors after Don. He conditioned my thinking. It was hard for a woman back in those days. I called Leon from the payphone. I’ve got to keep hacking away at the heads. Stan knocked the tip off one of his gold antlers. Met him in the Strand Hotel. Chunky new bracelet on white cotton bed sheets in tattered sunset. Vitamultin. He leant across the bed in a navy robe. Lame in his net. I didn’t want to escape his generosity. A monthly remittance to my personal account. Occasional trips to the Continent. Rendez-vous in Spain. Awful thunderbolts. Hercules smashing through Atlas Telemon. Erytheia. Celestial spheres bulging over his shoulders. Two eggs no hankie. I’ll fetch the apples. Take them back to Eurystheus. Just hold them while I adjust my shoulder pads. Nec Plus Ultra. Dante said that Odysseus soon tired of Ithaca. He raised a fleet to venture beyond the Pillars seeking knowledge of the unknown depths but died in a whirlwind at the mountain of Purgatory (Inferno 26). Sixty degrees in winter. Hackney carriage. Buying old prints at Beanland Malin. Bristol Hotel. Faded Empire. Just fitted hot water pipes. Twin beds. Sunken mattress. Weight right. Stan wanted to move up The Rock. We slept with the balcony doors open framed by thick vines. Standing against the rails under a canvas awning as a ferry passed Tarifa Lighthouse. Crossing the Strait. Molly hears a jagged steam trumpet and farts. When she was a girl, railways circumnavigated the island. Rubber love letters of Lieutenant Mulvey. Alec Bannon boasting in Burke’s pub that he could have had Milly Bloom in Westmeath last week but for no prophylactic. Yes (F.). He plans to buy some condoms during his visit to Dublin. You can’t get them out Mullingar way. It’s a Taig jack-full of mogs and boggers. They don’t like Jackeens. She is only fifteen on the date of the narrative. Bannon suddenly realises that the man standing nearby is her father. Drop a spear on my foot. My period never came. Soon I got morning sickness. I would have done anything to escape. Chiron taking the place of Prometheus. Driven pregnant into dead winter. I felt like hiding in a pot. Barry told me to forget all about it. The world only existed outside our gates. Now Don has put his horse back in the compound. Hit the repeat button. Sydney’s Athenian glow. I dumped my body in surf. Tamarama’s deep-cut swell pulled me this way then that treading water a rip dragging you south towards Bronte. 1972. Last trip to the stables. Clean out my cash deposit box. Get the gallery in shape. My assistant needs to touch up the whitewash. Go get catalogues from the printer. Pick up a floral bouquet. Catering will be delivered at 5PM. I will brief the critics at six. Bronze beaks. Need to hand-feed them eye fillet. Toxic reviews discouraged. Eat poison dung. The band starts at six-thirty. Hephaestus’ rattle. They’re coming to set up their instruments at four. Seven members. Geryon’s cattle. Don whistled merrily as he strode down the corridor in his BVDs. LB slapped Molly’s behind. She laughed but was angry. He opened the back door and ushered me out. He was gone next day. I gave him my girdle lightly. Common labour by night. Hera. A few weeks later, he sent me a note with a Kings Cross postmark. Hiding like Eurystheus in a jar. He was flying to Vietnam tomorrow. Argo. He is still stuck in Hades like overbearing Pirithous. Yellowblock’s fire resistance is superior to hard stone like granite. It has withstood temperatures approaching 800 degrees before being plunged into cold water. Pour a bucket over Vulcan’s hearth. Steaming shroud. Useful contrivance. Juno chucked Vulcan over the edge of Olympus. Atmospheric pressure of 19 tons. Joyce was obsessed with the rate of a falling object. Thirty-two feet per second. The mutant fell for a day and a night before his body crashed in a swamp. Smashed-up leg like Oedipus. It means Swellfoot in Greek. Snatched from the aquacitial floor by Calypso. Raised by monkeys. Exhibited the communicative patterns of apes. See Burroughs. A fetish for earlobes. Pearl-fondling. Jane Porter. Lawrence and Austen. The Sexiest Primate. Directed by Desmond Morris. Tactile pleasures until now unseen by regular cinema-goers! Lord Byron limping along the shore. SHIFT TENSE He found an ember in an abandoned fisherman’s fire on the beach. Shut it up in a clamshell, he did. Blew iron, gold and silver flakes off its surface. Wendy and Hazel stripping sequins off their rumps under stag lights. Vulcan’s slaves. Prometheus at a campfire playing with clay. Enter Neddy with baseball bat. Smash all their icons. Dennis told Donny he would have him executed by a bent cop. But nobody could touch Donny. He was too tight with the crowd at Subic Bay. Helped them get Speed into the Philippines on a glass-bottomed boat. I scored off the bass player in The Gag. I was involved in group sex on occasions. The men shout from the shore: “What-ho! she bumps!” If to one, why not to all? See Adams. Birth of Pan off all my suitors. Donny got me sick in Manila. He could have just left. But he brought penicillin and took me home. Marcos was in his prime. London abortions. A quack knocking you out with Bennies. I was never going to lose Billy that way. We all got Chlamydia. IUD perforations. De-string the bow. I don’t know what would have happened without Barry. There weren’t places that teenage girls could hide in Sydney in those days. They used to lock us up in Catholic institutions. Work them long hours all summer over boiling coppers hoping they’d abort. They were forced to sign adoption papers straight after birth. There were even stories of girls tied to beds and drugged who never saw their babies the nuns came padding insolently down the hall they said it would be easier that way then the footsteps receding first the carpet in my brother’s room then parquetry then boots on a concrete stairwell. Bloom heard the double reverberation of retreating feet (SD) kicking up dirt. Nobody is answering the phone. My son isn’t home. Les isn’t home. I am not home. What kind of ‘home’ is it anyway? I am calling every 20 minutes from the motel room. I am not going back to an empty house. I will go back as soon as someone answers. I don’t want to be there alone. Not tonight. Molly heard him from bed. She dreamed of his young body. Whisper quotes from Sade in his ear. Sin/bad, the Lay/saw. Tom makes love like he’s smashing himself on rocks. It’s hard on an ageing frame. I am sore tonight. Insert Masters and Johnson data. Ten thousand cycles. Three hundred thousand eggheads are produced in the female. Six hundred periods until what is technically known in the trade as ‘Senility.’ I met Billy on Huaihai Zhong Lu. There were sixty girls in the basement each night. We went to the fishbowl in groups of six. The managers mixed different heights, skin tones and shapes. There are six different styles of vagina. I am a butterfly. It is the most coveted. He was my first white client. So much hair made me giggle. This is the 10th day of my cycle. He left me lying on my back with my knees wedged between the garage and the paling fence. Feeble late dew. I lay there gasping for a few seconds. Suffocating. I wanted it done. Entwined in Choko vines and turning from the stars. I felt him pull out urgently. I the host. SD and LB are part of the constellation Gemini. Hung with nightfruit to double-dark obscurity. A thick sticky load slipped down my thigh in a gob. He wiped it off with a crumpled handkerchief. And stood. “Everything’s fine,” he said. His arm moved as a weak antumbra discarding the crumpled rag. I’ve got nothing to apologise for. My husband cheated. I was pregnant. My cousin was a foolish girl. It was a bad time. I’m not going to fall back into Donny’s trap. I never liked him much anyway. You can’t say he was a volatile man because that implies lack of control. He was a solider. Yet he also had a reckless streak. How else could he get into such a mess with Helen. Perhaps it was hubris. He thought nothing could touch him back then. I know he killed coldly. I know he excelled in terms of self-will. I always have one big orgasm then stop. I like to clean-up quickly. Get back to my book. Go to sleep if I can. Otherwise I get up and work. Sometimes it’s too intense and I just can’t cum. My body is excruciated by touch. It used to make Bill angry. He got better later on. Now I suspect it’s just apathy. That’s sad. We have shared LIFE together. But the tenderness left. Like Molly and Bloom, we need to hang on and hope it comes back. Once upon a time, everyone got married forever. There was no such thing as divorce. Married couples had whole decades where they didn’t get along. They just waited it out like snipers. Eventually, another cycle would come. That’s what Vico tells us. It’s the philosophical structure accepted by Joyce. Why did he pick that one? I don’t know. Maybe he was just a typical Renaissance thinker. Maybe he wanted another great epoch for Ireland to come. Water makes cycles. Sandstone is a one-way slot. Nobody dies in Ulysses. Tomorrow never comes. You can churn on the spot without even thinking temporally. But this work is all about progression. Contrast water on sandstone. LOOPOND.

Contrast Bloom and Stephen at closure

There is psychic alignment with Stephen’s dream of meeting an Eastern man (Bloom) bearing a melon (crude sexual reference to Molly) through a street of harlots (Nighttown). But their night’s actually close in counterpoint. Bloom ends the day as a sexual predator. He is reassured about his self-worth by the illicit letter from Martha as well as what he interprets as highly sexualised encounters with Mrs. Breen, Nurse Callan and Gerty. His marriage to Molly cannot achieve true reconciliation while he finds value in this behaviour. But Bloom has started a journey. He really gets HOME when he kisses Molly’s rump at bedtime. It enables him to sleep. Stephen is still awake at this point. Sleep would give him no solace. His nightmare about his mother as a haggard corpse in C1 is the opposite of Bloom’s image of fullness here. Likewise, Stephen sees history as a nightmare whereas Bloom’s past with Molly induces feelings of tenderness. This resolves the events in the novel positively. The physical facts of daily life can now cede to the realm of the Spiritual. The stage is set for the reconciliation of human desires in Penelope. This is also the apogee of Joyce’s technical journey in Ulysses. He has made it through all the different styles and tropes in literature to reach something truly original.

What is the meaning of the last three questions?

“With, when and where” correspond to Bloom’s basic questions of Molly regarding adultery with HB.

Explain “with?” and “when?”?

Bloom’s dream is a childlike recapitulation of variations on the name of the heroic sailor, Sinbad, from BINARY NIGHTS [1,111,101,001 Nights], reworking it in his mind with an infantile joy in language. Sinbad joins other adventurers that Bloom has cited that day including Rip Van Winkle, Enoch Arden and the Wandering Jew. Like Joyce/Bloom, Anonymous/Sinbad was another channel for elements of Homer to be disseminated. The Odyssey was translated into Arabic shortly after 800 AD and many of its stories were reused such as the Cyclops (see Voyage 3). Sinbad appeared in Binary Nights relatively late (say c18). Bloom’s identification with Sinbad becomes a substitute for knowledge of Homer, whom we gather Bloom has never read. Bloom is able to regress from the stark reality of Molly’s adultery to a boy’s world of tall tales and wild fables, aligned with Joyce’s own governing myth for the novel. Some names like Tinbad and Whinbad correspond to a Christmas pantomime produced in Dublin in 1892, which Joyce attended as an eight-year-old child. Perhaps it is also a crew list. Maybe each name corresponds to a character that Bloom has come across that day. They might also relate to different occupations that Bloom has practiced over his lifetime. All this is conjecture. At first, Bloom pairs first letters to make new names out of occupations (i.e. Jinbad the Jailer). These occupations are real (tailor, jailer, whaler). As this technique becomes exhausted, he creates new words for extant trades (nailer/handyman, bailer/farmer-crewman-policeman, mailer/postman). First letters are still paired. Alliteration is still the paramount driver of composition. Finally, the text drifts into rhyming nonsense (e.g. Linbad the Yailer). There appears to be NO PATTERN to the selection of lead consonants: T, J, W, N, F, B, P, M, H, R, D/K, V/Q, L/Y. The cataloguing mania of Ulysses is breaking down. The catechism device starts to elicit absurd responses like a computer printer gone wrong. Words seem compelled to utterance without thought, as if the text is now lodged in Foucault’s confessional. This is a clear segue to the conglomerative neologisms of F(W)ake, which was already absorbing Joyce’s thinking as he neared the end of his Modernist classic. Bloom’s last character name, Finbad the Failer, definitely alludes to the next work. Bloom’s mind is undergoing the journey towards sleep through the last light dreams of consciousness. Some critics argue thus that this is just a simple throwaway with very little meaning. How little such pedagogues know of their ostensible subject! Given Joyce’s extreme care with language and interest in the significance of dreams (including Freud), his commitment to making each sound and syllable inscribed on the page resonate with pure and total meaning, in fact MAXIMUM VARIABLES OF CONNOTATION, as in the finest lyric poetry, it is likely that this passage took a VERY LONG TIME TO CONSTRUCT. It is doubtful that Joyce just threw it off like automatic writing. He would never have ended his masterpiece of characterisation of Leopold Bloom thus. He loved pranks, but not this much. It was a highly deliberat(iv)e passage. Bloom’s bedtime litany is a parody of the religious catechism that underpins Ithaca. It has also been interpreted as a slide from the mental volition of waking to the involuntary rubbish of sleep. This discourages any projection of dense meaning as per Barthes’ Writerly Text. Bloom’s thought patterns still reflect the limitations of his character as revealed over the course of 6 November 1904. He is an average man off-centre, possessing enough outsiderness to countenance radical options but ultimately still constrained by a need for conformity. He is more Sinbad the Porter than S-the-S. He aspires to wordsmithery but possesses only secondary linguistic tools like nursery rhymes and pantomime dumbdowns of classical tropes. He lacks the deep content of sustained scholarship that produces genius. He is a quasi-intellectual as his exchange with Stephen Dedalus so amply revealed. Yes, he is the portal to F(W)ake but that place of dream-pissery and poseurtry gives to each human the centrifugal sweep and prosenchymer of symbols, tangles and neologisms of a GOD. I have no further insight to offer the reader. The question, ‘when,’ too stumps the literatist. I have trawled the hermanyoutickle catalogue for a satisfactory explanation for this bizarre thirty-five-word riposte. Sinbad, that Asiatic Odysseus, comes to the fore again. Perhaps he is a link to Molly’s exotic childhood in Gibraltar. We know that the “dark bed” = Bloom’s resting place although it also alludes to the ocean floor, where drowned sailors rest. Joyce then shifts to a linguistic unit describing a “square round an egg.” This represents Molly (egg = female fertility symbol) lying in a square bed (like Penelope laid down in Odysseus’ olive framed cot). It reprises the imagery of “the quadrature of the circle” cited earlier in Ithaca. This is a direct reference to Dante, who uses a mathematical simile, “like the geometer who fully applies himself / to square the circle,” to characterise the last moment of consciousness before Incarnation. Dante rejects logic at this climactic moment, giving way in abandon to “the Love moving the sun.” The square also refers to a framing device. It is a picture gone inside-out so that the image fits the perimeter of the circle. Here, we have Joyce definitively aligning his work with Dante post-catharsis in resolution – a clear sign that Joyce considered Ulysses ‘complete’ before the start of Penelope. The “Roc’s auk’s egg” alludes to Bloom’s obsession with easy money but also danger. It is a typical fantasy of escape like a lottery ticket. It helps Bloom get to sleep contentedly at night. Likewise, Tom and Billy use alcohol to erase consciousness. In Sinbad 2, a roc transports him to the valley of diamonds where he steals a massive gem. But in S5, his crew break open a roc’s egg for food bringing down devastation upon themselves, another allusion to the Oxen of the Sun incident. Again, this shows that Bloom is aligned with the thinking of the Odyssey and thus Ulysses but via a secondary source within his limited knowledge base. The reference to an ‘auk’ remains a mystery. An auk is a smaller, diving bird. It may be an image designed to create a Russian doll effect with eggs. Its migratory pattern across the Atlantic may appeal to Bloom’s fantasies of travel and escape. It descends into the sea, a clear contrast to Bloom’s repressed landishness. For the sea is always associated with adventure, while land is a continental grind. Joyce now starts to re-run this stream of words in reverse like a palindrome, beginning with the word BED. This is the operative trigger. The sequence of l-units merges into a final, internally balanced and dialectical image at once human and material, personal and immortal, ultimately even religious: Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Like Othello, Sin/bad becomes Darkinbad here. It is a portmanteau word for Boylan-inside-Molly. Against nullity, however, comes the forgiveness of Brightdayler. Dawn will come after sleep. This is a reference to some kind of Jesus. Darkinbad brings light. Adultery has forced Bloom to make a decision. It is a positive one because Bloom is forever an optimist. The resolution of this dialectic is the final synthetic DOT of Ithaca. Critics are split about the end of Ithaca. Some see it as an anti-climax. Others as bigger than the characters. It becomes about language itself. The stilted efforts of Bloom and Stephen to communicate in written Hebrew and Gaelic respectively have already signposted their desire for affiliation, basic disconnect and ultimately the pre-eminence of words. Bloom feels somewhat dejected at the end, suspecting he will be forgotten by Stephen. In fact, this is probably a reasonable conclusion on a basic physical level. Stephen may not remember much about the night given his high level of inebriation. In any case, Joyce’s deconstruction of language, of sequence, of conclusion is a failure by any measure.

Examine the symbol at the end of Ithaca

Joyce wanted the very last question in Ulysses – WHERE? – to be followed by a large dot or magnified period. He wrote to the French printer thus. When the mark wasn’t big enough, he asked for “un point bien visible” and, later reiterated that he wanted, “Ce point doit être plus visible.” Ultimately, he got satisfactory dimensions for the first edition. Subsequent editions have repeatedly changed the scale of the dot or deleted it altogether. There is no doubt that this was an elaborate joke. But Joyce often undercut his use of technical forms in this way to reduce the risk of appearing pretentious. There is equally no question that Joyce was also deploying these marks to annex all the prestige of philosophical and mathematical logic to his fictive cause. Gifford (12) argued that Ulysses was a gigantic syllogism and that the dot represented QED. This has been a controversial remark. QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum (“that which was to be demonstrated”) in Latin. It is a bulbous notation placed at the end of mathematical proofs to mark conclusion. But it wasn’t introduced until 1950 by Paul Halmos. He claimed to have appropriated the idea from popular magazine articles, where it was a pure design feature known as a TOMBSTONE. Chronology thus renders this QED tit-bit of Gifford impossible. There are many times in Ulysses when the formal structures of logic are cited. There are repeated references to syllogistic features – such as Kinos and O, felix culpa – as well as the use of ‘punkt,’ the German equivalent of QED, in Stephen’s Modernist poem of Shakespeare’s will. Gilbert’s scheme claims that Aeolus was syllogistic. Which mentions it was the guiding form of that episode. There are numerous orientation maps supporting Ulysses both internally like W.Rocks and externally as with Linati’s schema. There is a school amongst Homeric critics who believe that the Odyssey ended with reconciliation of the married couple in bed (23.296) and that subsequent chapters were bolted-onto the text later. In this interpretation, Joyce acknowledges the real ending of the Odyssey before adding his own appendix. Some just perceive it as a simple black hole, even a representation of a vagina. Perhaps it is akin to L. Carroll’s rabbit hole in AinW. Maybe Bloom is dropping into a netherland. Perhaps the reader is being presented with a place to jump. At least one critic has argued that Bloom dies at the end of Ithaca. The dot represents his last breath. But this is not the end of him. In Penelope, an act of metempsychosis occurs in which Bloom and Molly are fused. Anybody familiar with Joyce’s attraction to mysticism would consider it feasible that this theory at least forms PART of Joyce’s thinking. He always employed manifold meanings, false leads and dead ends.

How does Joyce definitively break with the Odyssey?

Odysseus’ homecoming is not sustained by Homer. Joyce leaves Bloom asleep in bed at Eccles Street.

Compare the Odyssey and Ulysses at closure

Joyce’s Penelope episode takes place after Bloom and Molly are reunited at the end of Ithaca. They trade words. Cursory details of the day. Enough to transition the narrative to Molly and stimulate her reverie. They turn away from each other ostensibly to rest. It is an ambiguous denouement. This is quite different to the extended exchange of stories between Odysseus and Penelope after their reunification. The reunited couple lie face-to-face until dawn smiling with pride as they recount tales of cunning stratagems and survival. Joyce leaves Bloom and Molly in exactly the opposite pose, head-to-toe, flipped yet together, passaging entropy. Joyce then goes backwards in time outside place to Molly’s reverie of youth. Conversely, the narrative events in the Odyssey continue long after the scene in the bed chamber. Homer goes forward to the next day. In fact, the Odyssey now assumes the quotidian structure of Ulysses. Odysseus and Telemachus travel to Laertes’ farm to prepare for a final confrontation with the families of the suitors. Reconciliation on Ithaca follows. As the final act of the Odyssey, it can be seen as a process of resolution. In Classical terminology, as for Shakespeare, stabilising the social order rated well above romance. We like to believe in both eternal love and never-ending hegemony nowadays. The Odyssey contains only temporary reunion. It is just another stage. But absolute conclusion will never be seen. That is a sacred termination which must occur beyond the reductive rules of narrative. Not that this means Homer was averse to severance. The Odyssey is all about ENDS and LASTS. It sits on a cusp. It presents the belated homecoming of an ageing hero to a fading place in a cosmic tradition that has run out of steam. Its ambience of imminent termination is a progressive revelation of redundancy. For all the myriad texts that succeeded the Odyssey – appropriating Homer’s characters, symbols, style and events – it is ironic that the first great book is all about the expiration of its own genre. Everything afterwards is belated. We know that Odysseus went on. We just don’t know what really happened or even how he died. His future adventures are only insinuated. They will happen in new places across new oceans going west into oblivion / not on a well-known sea going east with a bunch of mates visiting familiar destinations en route to landfall at Troy. Joyce’s selection of Gibraltar as the scene of Molly’s girlhood is symbolic in that it is precisely the other end of the Classical map to Troy. It makes PLACE head-to-toe between Homer and Joyce like the Blooms. Gibraltar also represents the “last place” – just as Odysseus was the “last hero” – where the mythical Pillars of Hercules pinioned the watery border of the known world. Beyond lay that extrinsic space into which Odysseus must sail after the end of the Odyssey to appease Poseidon. It might seem like the perfect hiding place. But it is a never-never. Donny kept spiralling until he found landfall in Manila. S.Dog went back to Hongkou every day. Billy went home. Tom was centrifugal. Virgil tried to kill off Odysseus. Dante also (Inferno, Book 26). Dante has Ulysses taunt Virgil with how he continued exploring to gain knowledge of the Unknown. Joyce, Dante, Virgil – in fact, all subsequent readers – have known that the heroes did not really die at the end of the Classical epoch. They were reprised, reconfigured and renamed throughout time drawing fresh impetus from new add-ons, Protean morphs, mergers and circumscriptions. They got dug up like Pater’s Denys L’Auxerrois or Heine’s Exiles. They were turned to Christian forms. Odysseus had to go somewhere where they’d never seen the sea. That’s inland from Perth on NE setting. Ulysses ends at this point. Bloom must still commence his final voyage towards reconciliation with Molly. Who is Bloom appeasing? Does Molly equal Poseidon? Or is Bloom perhaps struggling with himself in a diffident manner trying to dredge up some anguish out of Molly’s affair with Boylan. But how important is a fuck in itself? Molly has no regrets about copulating with Boylan repeatedly in their marital bed. After all, he presents her with a handsome fruit basket. The reader has seen him staring down the blouse of the shop assistant. But Molly wouldn’t care. She isn’t possessive. Now if Poldy had been caught in a similar posture it would be a different matter entirely. Isn’t that really ‘love’ then? Feeling enough pride to be damaged by indiscretions no matter how bland. The aegis of Athene was suspended over the palace. It emboldened Odysseus. Telemachus waited within. I, his wife, also. I suspected his presence. Soon we would be reunited. Everything else was minor. My eyes looked up from the redundant loom. Athene’s majesty shone into my casement through the vine branches, projecting an anamorphic stamp of Medusa’s scarified face across the marble floor of our bedroom all the way to the thick-coiled olive trunk of our marriage bed. O symbol of Athene shine upon this symbol of Ithaca! Prophetic image: a smashed skull. Holbein’s Ambassadors. INSERT ELIZABETH. The beggar smashed Irus to the floor with one fell blow and propped his body in the doorway. Then he sat amongst the suitors partaking of the capran paunch and loaves. He warned Amphinomus. He was the mildest of the suitors. The son of Nisos of Megara rose and wandered about the room dejectedly. But he did not exit. It was Telemachus who finally slew him. Ironically, it was Amphinomus who stopped the other suitors murdering Telemachus twice. I passed him as I entered the room. He caught my unwashed eye – red inside hollow cheekbones – and resumed his soft seat. Athene had endowed my form to the astonishment of the suitors. Their passion rose. I lambasted Telemachus as a matter of course. I solicited gifts. We removed more jewelry to my apartment. NARRATOR: I did not return. I could only hear the revelry coming from the dining hall. Later, the serving-maids arrived. They had been sent away by the vagrant. Even Melantho came chastened. Women in this chapter crowd the exit of the text. They escape like refugees. It was at this point in Book 18 (p.250) that Ctesippus of Same mocked the authority of Telemachus by hurling a gnawed cow’s foot at Odysseus. The batsman rocked back to evade a steepling bouncer from the fiery Thiakian. This act kickstarted the endgame of the Odyssey. Notably, it is Telemachus who makes the FIRST THREAT, not Odysseus. He threatens Ctesippis. This signals his advent to power over his homeland. Antinous curses their failure not to murder Telemachus at Asteris. Athena beguiles them. They start to laugh hysterically. Tears overflow their eyes. Food goes foul. Theoclymenus forecasts doom. The walls become dank with blood. Ghosts invade the halls. An eclipse douses the sun. Brown mist hovers over the scene. Primordeal Erebus coats the whole scene with dearth. The audience tenses. Thoughts turned to utter desolation. Theoclymenus is the last one to leave. The doors are bolted from outside. The suitors cannot arm the tense bow. Everything is strung as tight as an Aeschylean tragedy. There is no more reverting to a chorus for plotlines. The beggar fires. A target splits. The contest concludes in confusion. Odysseus seizes the stage. This is a metaphor for all kinds of performance. He scattered arrows from his quiver like so much straw. This is the same technique he used against the Trojans. Pick and fire. Poisoned arrows of Philoctetes. Napalm barbs. A rotten foot stomping hard. The mob baulked. Antinous brought the gold cup towards his lips. Stephen’s rage against mean-hearted Mulligan. Willy’s sharps. Link back to Leer’s lounge room (C8). The first arrow shot out of his neck like a bolt. His body stumbled into the sideboard. Air, words, wine and blood spurted from his wounds against the whitewashed wall. Blowhard Eurymachus deprived of all his fine rhetoric by a swift stroke to the chest. It tore between his ribs and opened his liver. He is the equivalent of Hugh Boylan. His mockingbird song could never match my husband. The wood in LB’s desk let out a crack. Kill count rising. Athena made Penelope sleep through it all. I walked to the entrance and lit a cigarette. The gallery was packed with revellers. A whorl of sophistication. My assistant was plying Stanley Welles with champagne in front of a group work called Exquisite Corpse. Tom Hallem had drawn a flayed arm running off Matt Supplejack’s Head of Ana. Stan was listening to a diatribe from Meaghan Morris. His flute began tilting. Wine topped the brim. He straightened alert suddenly. I looked downhill. Tom Hallem was crossing the Burton Street overpass. Bright light on pale concrete. Background, St Vincent’s Hospital. He was about to start the slow ascent up Macdonald Street. I looked away. A shooting star descended over Kings Cross (north). Just a mote made bright briefly. Humanspeckinhistory. LB and SD finished pissing in the backyard. One accepting, the other rejecting this phenomenon as a symbol. Torchlight illuminated the underground station box. Don rolled off Helen McFadden leaving her broad belly exposed. Starscreen pinned onto the sea-top around an overloaded fishing boat. Startrail suddenly gone. Ephemerality as in Ibsen. SD disappeared into darkness in its wake. So many different metaphors crowd this simple act. Joyce probably intended Stephen to pass into the future ambiguously. His exchange with Bloom had served its purpose. He was going to find his father’s latest rental. This was an unstated but defining disjuncture when set against Odysseus reclaiming his palace. There wasn’t much time left in Dublin. Joyce had already met Nora Barnacle on this date: 16 June 1904. They left in October. Tom Hallem mounted the steps. His back crunched. I recognised his swollen gait. He was trying to relieve pressure on his right hip. He got closer. He looked up. Our eyes met. He smiled. It is a hard task to betray him. I look awry. Stan’s cheque is pressed against my breast plate. Safer harbour. The baby will be born before Tom gets back from Paris. If he comes back at all. He might get a show and stay. I have organised a great set of introductions including Daniel Templon, Lavignes-Bastille and Studio Cannaviello in Milan. I want my son to have a more fortunate life. I am already putting money away for his education. I might go overseas to work as a maid. He can live with my mother back on the island. There are many jobs in Singapore. They give you a small room outside the apartment next to the fire stairs. There is no air conditioning. You cook, clean and get the kids from school. Sunday is a holiday. It is not so different to Tondo really. We all start at church. Sacred Heart on Tank Road is supposed to be good. Some women baby-sit to make extra money. Others clean. The rest go to Orchard Road. They eat cheap food in the cellar of Far East Plaza. It’s a magnet for Western men. Don left me pregnant to bursting and my poor cousin in the first trimester. She was seventeen. He would have gone to jail if my uncle had his way. Helen confronted her son’s gaze. He was sitting at the dining table. Barry was making tea. LB made cocoa in a similar situation. O went to the refrigerator. Inside, there was a fresh casserole in a ceramic dish covered with foil. There was a card on top. It was Billy’s hand-writing. “I made stew,” it said. “Please return the dish to mum.” Tom observed Elizabeth’s profile in the sharp spotlight highlighting the gallery nameplate. Heracles catches a glimpse of Hera before she fled. Eminence grise. I took another swig of Tequila. Jupiter fell. Prometheus descended. Tom is like Milton’s Satan. He is still notable in decline. An American friend cycling down Jiangning Road near the Jade Buddha Temple saw Billy embracing a Chinese girl. He must have thought it was safe on the north side of Shanghai. His secret bedpost. I didn’t confront him. I just made my own plans. I had used up my sabbatical. The kids hated China. It was an easy decision to make. I had to move on. Donny didn’t have the ability to make children. He started to talk about Sydney as if it was still a real place. Not some abandoned palace overgrown with vines. A deserted courtyard. Best cattle all consumed. Fields fallow. Odysseus waned in his allegiance to Calypso over time. First it was great. Then it was OK. There were always the kids to consider. Two boys – Nausithous and Nausinous. But, in the end, it was time to go home. In summary, I went out with Billy. He went overseas. I took over the lease on his apartment. We lost touch. I went to Oxford. He was long gone by the time I got there. Nobody recalled him. I came back and got a post at a regional university. He was hanging around Sydney. We saw each other sometimes. He got a government job. He was the world’s best clerk. We got back together. Tom died. We got married. Promotions came quickly. He chased wealth. His logic was sound. If he made a lot of money then he could stop and write. He had a lot of crazy schemes to get rich quick like Leopold Bloom. We went overseas. He was always hustling. But he never quite closed that big deal. He hated this existence. I accepted his latent rage. It was the price he extracted for having a family. They use the word “estranged” to describe our current state. It’s a polite term like “job seeker.” I don’t know if Billy can ever come back to Sydney and settle down again. He might disappear in the end like his father. I just go on like one of those Victorian heroines by Hardy or James who accepts cold penury. We know that Joyce liked to dredge up the vain prospect of reunion at the end of his novels by reaffirming the basic congruence of his mawkish characters. In that he was somewhat influenced by Pater. Ever the optimist. I guess he couldn’t liberate his country without the yin/yang mattress layout of Molly and Bloom at closure like Ulster and Eire sleeping late until the bells pealed eleven and the riddle of Stephen’s mother wafted past their drawn casement into Howth’s litmus sky over peat-blue sea, blotchy green scales peeling off the sandstone bark of the island stretching couchant west to the eastpoint stack of its Martello full-stop like Ithaca-in-a-bottle it was first named for the goddess Eria then the Vikings misnamed it Ey which the locals rebadged with a wink as a pun three-masted memories bearing the cracked looking-glass lens of James Joyce that Galylic Oedipus poisoned with arsenic in his earhole and tripping on wild phosphorous sparklers back in time from kismetkate Hollyhead to Dublins-past past Trieste-Zurich-Paris to the swampy, slate VD pupil of Ireland’s Fucking Eye INSERT BIG ‘O’ HOLE FONT SIZE

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