“Geld” is an extremely interesting word in the context of Ulysses, as it brings together two pertinent domains, castration and, in a Dutch or Germanic context, money. The word first appears in episode 3: “A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat. ” Stephen’s mind produces a menacing image of castrated, animalistic priests, legible in light of his difficulties with religion. Bloom, on the other hand, observes in Episode 5 that the horses he has been admiring are gelding, going on to add, ” Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they look.” This is a very suggestive passage in light of the ways that Bloom is feminized and figuratively castrated, and suggests that the word will have different connotations for the two characters.

I was very interested by the Mullin piece, especially the sections about the content appearing alongside Joyce’s work in its initial serialization. It will be intriguing to see it in its original context; I feel like reading episodes of Ulysses alongside an eclectic mix of advertisements in The Little Review would have a similar effect to reading Portrait in the context of the polemic sex ethics debates in The Egoist. Obviously these are are very different contexts, but the idea that the medium of transmission can subtly pull different things to the surface greatly interests me.

In the opening episode of Ulysses, the state of Irish artmaking is clearly dire. After borrowing Stephen’s handkerchief, Buck Mulligan examines it and derisively says, “The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.” (p4) He then coins the phrase, “The snotgreen sea,” after Homer’s wine dark sea, an allusion that becomes barbed when Mulligan later suggests that he and Stephen should “Hellenize” Ireland. Even more interestingly, Joyce quickly begins to play with the neologism, self-consciously hinting at it while Stephen, possibly influenced by Mulligan’s comment, imagines the sea as a bowl of his mother’s bile: “The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile…” (p5) Stephen himself later makes a more piercing joke, referring to Mulligan’s mirror as, “a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.” (p6) These brief remarks do a great deal to frame the state of Irish art. Irish writers are laboring in shadow of the English and coming up short. Joyce implicates himself as working the shadow of the Greeks as well. The outlook for art as a national project, as something truly Irish, is quite bleak.

It is also worth briefly noting that while Stephen is a writer and Mulligan a medical student, the only verses in the opening episode are from Mulligan’s “ballad of joking Jesus,” another aspect of usurpation.

The theme of women repeatedly deflating Gabriel’s self-image came up briefly at the end of last class and I think it’s quite relevant to some of the points Norris makes in “Dead Again.” Norris identifies this issue as being at least partially linguistic: Gabriel is a purveyor of palaver with a yearning for the lyrical, and he sometimes convinces himself that one is the other. His early encounter with Lily introduces this theme, and he smarts at her comment, possibly because he senses that he belongs among those indicted.

Large sections of the story revolve around Gabriel and his relationship to his own words. He frets constantly about his speech and the speech itself is something of a centerpiece. Gabriel’s anxiety stems in part from uncertainty regarding the adequacy of his performance and the adequacy of his words; the words themselves are implicated in the performance. The performativity of both conversation and language itself is a source of rising tension in the story that culminates in Gretta’s story in the hotel.

Margot writes:
“What terrifies Gabriel in Gretta’s story is his need to confront the possibility of a genuinely lyrical existence, a world of feeling and caring never elevated to self-consciousness or dressed in beautiful language designed to rebound to the greater glory of its producer. What Gabriel hears in Gretta’s story are beautiful words that are not palaver.” (p370)

I tend to agree with Margot’s argument, but it leaves me feeling somewhat wary of Joyce’s ending, in a way similar to one Pecora discusses. To what extent can we trust the beautiful words Joyce uses to end the story? What is performative in “The Dead” and what is not?