Since my obsession is haunting I find it hard to stay away from writing about the events of episode 6, Hades. My blog post is going to be a little different than normal as I try to sort out some big ideas that had begun developing by the end of that section and informed my reading for today.

The characters of Ulysses have been very preoccupied with the cyclical nature of life. See: Stephen mentioning womb and tomb in the same breath (3.402 among others), Hamlet fathering himself (1.556), a fox burying his grandmother (2.115) and so on. Birth, life, and death are a circle that even sometimes get confused with each other – “In the midst of death we are in life” (6.759). This constantly cyclical motion complements Bloom’s preoccupation with the idea of metempsychosis and reincarnation, concepts which recycle soul and energy. (Ooh, and remember how the book begins and ends with the same letter?)

So, what does this have to do with haunting? Ulysses is much less a book about the human life cycle than a book about how that cycle gets disrupted. Death in infancy, suicide, necrophilia, and castration are a few of the fun ways that the natural order of birth-life-and-death gets fiddled with but what I’m most interested in of course is haunting (which by the way Hades lays down pretty specifically three times in a row: “I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after death” (6.1000).)

I wanted to include that in my blog post because it seems important to share the lens that I’ve started to see this book through. Accordingly I also want people to let me know if they disagree with parts (or all…) of my ideas because I want to address that before I try to take them further. Anyway at the risk of having little to discuss about today’s reading here’s a thought:

In episode 7 Bloom is referred to out loud as a “ghost” (237). Obviously this is partially because he is seen as laughably subdued and colorless by the other men in the office, but it is still an interesting word choice. Why else is Bloom a ghost? Usually we regard Rudy as the ghost that haunts Bloom. (I think I’ve heard something about fathers-being-sons-being-fathers before…) Maybe Bloom is a ghost of the man he was before Rudy’s birth-death (and when he still had sex with his wife.) He does do quite a bit of wandering, watching, and repeating. Hmm.

When I searched the text of Ulysses for the word crown I tried to tally its usage by its different definitions. About halfway through I gave up because of the incredible variety of the term’s usage. Crown and its variants (crowns, crowned, crowning) occur 48 times in the text: 39 times as a noun, seven times as an adjective, and twice as a verb. Within the category of ‘noun’ I also tallied the following subcategories: 12 times as currency, 4 times as a brand (Crown Derby china), and 6 times as an entity (“the Crown.”)

I had expected that most of the uses of the word would be in reference to currency, but exactly one fourth of them were. The other uses of crown range from the crown of foam on a glass of beer to the “rawskinned crown” of a shoe sole to the Northern Crown constellation. (Most of the 18 remaining noun usages all represent slightly different usages of the word.)

I thought that crown cropped up unusually often in Ulysses, but I wanted to be sure so I checked some other famous novels of the 1920s for usage of the word. I did a text search for crown in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Mrs. Dalloway – and found that the word is not used a single time in any of the three texts. If I end up looking further into this term, I will definitely check more texts (and try to find some that are comparable to Ulysses in terms of length) but I think its glaring absence in the work of three of Joyce’s most well known contemporaries is proof enough that things worth noting are happening with crown. The sheer variety and frequency with which the term is used has piqued my interest and I look forward to digging deeper into the contexts it appears in.

P.S. I didn’t find any uses of this definition of crown during my cursory survey, but it’s still interesting to note that during childbirth, crowning describes the moment when an infant’s head appears in the birth canal.

I was fascinated by Tuesday’s discussion of the titling/naming/labeling conventions of the edition of Ulysses we have been using in class. To that end, I am most interested in looking at the presentation and labelling of Ulysses within The Little Review. How are the episodes labelled – by number, numeral, name, or some combination thereof? Does the serialization of the novel even adhere to the episode divisions we’re used to? Even a detail as simple as whether the piece is presented/referred to most often as Ulysses or James Joyce’s Ulysses or Ulysses, by James Joyce is interesting to me. I also wonder whether any editor’s notes or subtitles attributed to Heap & Anderson will appear – I really appreciated the way Mullin’s article helped us get to know them a bit.

In its most basic form a haunting is nothing more than a repetition, though often in an inappropriate context that provokes fear or other negative emotion. What struck me most in the first three episodes of Ulysses with attention to my obsession, haunting, was the repetition of certain sensory details and artifacts related to Stephen’s mother’s death. The “odour of wetted ashes” which seems to come from her corpse’s mouth is repeated twice in the first episode and again in the second. In the third episode, the mother is referred to as “a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.” Also repeated are the odour of wax and rosewood and the ghostcandle that illuminates her face. (Smell seems to be especially important here which is appropriate since it is thought to be, developmentally, the oldest sense humans have and uniquely powerful in triggering memories.) These repetitions of vivid sensory detail tend to interrupt the narrative in an unorthodox way, though clearly other topics share this role. There are a lot of other things to say on the topic of haunting especially in relation to the text’s references to Hamlet, which I think are bound up with some Oedipal stuff. I’m going to wait to psychoanalyze until we get deeper into the text though.

In Jennifer Levine’s dialogue, Jock proposes that the last line of “Ivy Day” contains “a report about speech” instead of direct quotation because “this is a way of putting a frame around Crofton’s words and saying to the reader: come over here with me and look at what this fellow just said” (284). I looked around in the other stories for more examples of this style of dialogue. In Araby, the most notable example is the portrayal of the speech of Mangan’s sister. She has only one directly quoted line (“—It’s well for you, she said.”) Everything else she says (which admittedly isn’t much) is reported to us by the narrator. Then, in “The Dead,” much of the party guest’s conversation before the meal is reported instead of directly quoted (though of course Gabriel’s entire speech is reported in exact detail.) What do you make of Joyce’s decisions to use different methods of representing speech in these moments? Another thing that interested me was the way that the more indirect way of reporting speech blurs the lines between narration and dialogue. There are some places in the text where I really wasn’t sure if I was reading something another character said or the narrator’s thoughts regarding that character. Do you think this confusion is part of the intended effect of this technique? What other effects does it have? Do you agree with Jock’s answer as to why it is used in the last line of “Ivy Day”?