I am considering writing my lexicon entry on teeth. “Teeth” appears 48 times in the text, and “tooth” appears 13 times. What’s interesting to me about teeth is the way they always seem to be accompanied by adjectives: milkwhite teeth, rotten teeth, rat’s teeth, false teeth, smiling teeth, unwashed teeth, etc.

Teeth seem to play several roles in the text. They are indicators of health and hygine (hence the numerous mentions of washing and brushing teeth, or the lack there of – and Ireland is described by Mulligan as having an abundance of “rotten teeth and rotten guts.” Queen Victoria is “the old hag with the yellow teeth.”)

Teeth are also connected to animality (of both animals and people) – we learn of the cat’s “milkwhite” teeth, and of the champing of a horse’s teeth. We also encounter gnashing, grinding, and growling teeth, as well as bared teeth, but in human mouths.

Finally, there is the connection between teeth and potency/power – the idea of being defanged.

Another words I considered were “heresiarch” and “eleven.”

My obsession is “Numbers and Numerology.” I haven’t yet found an especially compelling instance in which numbers play a clearly symbolic role in the text (that I’m aware of). However, I have been marking down the various instances in which numbers appear in the text. What follows are a few that have stood out to me.

The most obvious role of numbers in the text is the use of bracketed numerals as episode headings. We discussed this a bit last Tuesday, but it is worth revisiting. These headings are on the one hand enigmatic, obscuring the schema which Joyce apparently used to structure the text. On the other hand, one might see the use of numbers as providing a sense of structure of its own – there is no ambiguity about the intended order of the episodes. Additionally, the use of integers provides a sense that each episode is discrete and whole, this further reinforced by the use of brackets. Finally, there is a great deal of symmetry in the way the episodes are organized into larger sections. Sections I and III each contain three episodes, and section II has 12. With these divisions, we get a nice 1:4:1 ratio between beginning, middle, and end. I suspect that when we get further into the text, the reasons for this particular structure will become more apparent.

The first number I encountered within the text proper was on line 41, when Buck says, “My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls.” Given that Joyce was interested in both puns/the morphology of words and (apparently) numerology, which deals partly with the numerical signifigance of names, this strikes me as a potentially interesting detail.

The most common appearance of numbers that I recorded was in passages about money. Starting with the milkwoman’s deft mental arithmetic in Episode 1, and appearing regularly through subsequent episodes, monetary exchange permeates Ulysses. Delving into this could warrant its own blog post and would require deviating away from my more limited focus on the numbers themselves, but it’s worth noting the extent to which pecuniary matters are interspersed through the text.

In Episode 2, the most explicitly mathematical passages occur during Stephen’s attempt at helping poor Cyril Sargent with his math exercises. Stephen muses on Buck’s words from before: “He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather,” (151). And as he gazes at Cyril’s work, “across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, […] wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. […] imps of fancy of the Moors.” Numbers, here, are portrayed as something magical and esoteric. Later in the paragraph, Stephen will think of Averroes and Maimonides, philosphers from Muslim Spain who contributed to mathematics and astronomy among other things, “flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brighness which brighness could not comprehend.” This is in part a play on the dark skin which Stephen ascribes to the two men, but also an unusual reversal of the gnostic or Pythagorean sense in which mathematics are being taken here – usually revelations of the world’s soul are described as light shining in darkness.

Having already written more than I anticipated, I will note one more instance of numbers in the text that strikes me as being relevant. In Episode 4, Bloom muses on the  fact that his daughter Milly turned 15 yesterday on the 15th. Joyce’s aforementioned interest in numerology is probably important here, since apparently birthdays are highly signifigant in numerology. Since the action in Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904, this makes Milly’s birthday June 15, 1889 or 6/15/1889. To actually derive any signifigance from this, however, would reqire having a better understanding of how Joyce understood numerology.

Finally, I have noticed a preponderance of multiples of three, especially threes and sixes. I would need to look into this more carefully to reach any conclusions about it, though.

Last class, one thing that was discussed was how Joyce portrays dialog. Some characters, like the Uncle in Araby, don’t have many directly quoted lines, while in other cases we get a character’s utterances in exacting detail. I thought that Jennifer Levine, speaking as Louisa, uncovered an interesting dimension to this when she described how Ivy Day would function well as a stage play. The narrator almost never dips into the interior thougts of any of the characters, instead merely viewing events as a theater audience might.

This interests me partly because in the other two stories we read, Joyce delves into the thoughts of his characters and meanders through different settings, fantasies, and memories. In Ivy Day, however, we have to piece all this together ourselves – despite peering in to the relatively intimate setting of the committee room, we are excluded from the scene in a way that seems to be unique to this story.

I have an intuitive sense that this fact is closely connected with the explicitly political nature of the story. Gibson’s essay contextualizes it well, and Levine’s characters’ reactions to it explore this connection somewhat, but I suspect there’s more to be said, even though I’m not sure of what exactly that might be. I’m curious about what other people in this seminar made of it.