1. The most precious metal: characterized by a beautiful yellow colour, non-liability to rust, high specific gravity, and great malleability and ductility. Chemical symbol Au.
2. The metal regarded as a valuable possession or employed as a medium of exchange; hence, cold coin; also in rhetorical use, money in large sums, wealth.
3. fig. With allusion to the brilliancy, beauty, and transcendent preciousness of gold. Often in phr. Of gold = golden adj. heart of gold: a noble-hearted person; a kind and noble heart.
   1. a. the metal as employed for coating a service, or as a pigment; gilding.

4. The metal as used for the ornamentation of textile fabrics; gold thread; in early use often with the place of manufacture specified.
5. The colour of the metal: a bright golden yellow.
6. Archery. The gilt centre or bulls-eye of a target. To make a gold: to hit the bulls-eye.

“Gold” struck me at first because of its frequent use as both a noun and an adjective, and the way those usages seemed to work off one another. As a noun, it’s synonymous with money and wealth; i.e., Dedalus goes to Deasy’s “strongroom for the gold” (29), where he’s lectured (very pompously) on the value of saving money. Likewise it’s used for lyrical, almost pastoral descriptions of the sea and surroundings: the “gold light on the sea” complements the “slender trees” and “lemon houses” Dedalus walks by (42); he thinks of “a girl with gold hair on the wind” (61), “tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry” (42), and “Danevikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold” (45). In each mention, gold’s associated with opulence—the decadence of gold teeth and pastry—or loot, like Deasy’s strongroom or the Danevikings’ plunder. Death seems to float around some of these allusions (gold teeth are false, for example) in an indirect and very creepy way. “It’s all the same,” Bloom thinks on the way to the funeral. “Palbearers, gold reins…pomp of death” (100). The use of the word ‘gold’ seems to gild the concept of death and decay (I’m comparing the descriptions with ‘gold’ to the descriptions with ‘green’, which are a whole lot less lyrical). But the effect is one that heightens rather than eases the narrative’s descriptions of death. “Poetical idea pink, then golden, then grey, then black…Day, then the night,” thinks Bloom (69). Even the idealized “greengoldenly lagoons” Dedalus notices on his walk are therefore indicative of the idealization of decay and sickness that pervades his conception of Ireland.

In both sections of Ulysses—that is, books 1-3 and books 4-6—clothes are indicators of performative personas. There’s a kind of clothing etiquette that clashes with the characters’ observations, desires, and expectations: “He kills his mother but he can’t wear gray trousers,” Buck Mulligan says derisively of Stephen Dedalus in Book 1 (6). Later Dedalus, confused, wishes to “dress the character” in “puce gloves and green boots” (17); his tie is “rebellious” and his outfit a “contradiction” (17). Stephen’s out of sync with the persona he should or wants to convey; for this reason, there’s as sense of powerlessness and almost victimization in his interactions with Buck Mulligan, and of neurotic inadequacy when he’s alone.

Because Buck, Stephen’s foil, is the master of performance. His actions are described in terms of his body parts, as though he’s a puppet master or ventriloquist manipulating himself: “face smiling with delight,” “showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes,” “[speaking] with warmth of tone” (13, 16). His ease with performance and self-manipulation is a demonstration of power and control: Buck controls the self he puts out into the world, and consequently seems to have a kind of self-possession Dedalus envies but can’t himself obtain. “Whom were you trying to walk like?” Dedalus thinks in book 3. “Forget: a dispossessed” (41).

For his own part, Bloom seems plugged into a kind of game of clothed, civilized personas hiding much nastier, viscerally unpleasant truths, noting the “yellow blacknailed fingers” of clean-shaven Bantam Lyons (85) and imagining the “horrid” dead body of Paddy Dignam, “sphincter loose” (98), so different from the prepared, “wash[ed] and shampoo[ed]” body he expects to see. A lot of his inner monologue too has to do with disrobing, and while that’s often sexual, there seems to be the implication that with the disrobing there’s a performative character that’s shed as well: see the “stylish kind of coat” he notes on the “haughty creature” in book 4. The urge to “take the starch” out of the woman connotes a deeper desire to get rid of civilized disguises, echoing his “brutal” character (78): his carnal preoccupation, his love of his own body, his penchant for the “inner organs of beasts” (55). Likewise he contemptuously notes the “large grey bootsole” under the “lace affair” the priest has on, hinting at a workingman-type character hidden behind the man’s “pious fraud”: “Suppose he lost the pin of his,” he thinks, “he wouldn’t know what to do to” (81). The scene echoes the book’s opening, where “stately” Buck Mulligan ascends the tower, bearing his shaving kit.

In fact, the two scenes are almost inverse: in one, the priest hides his rough character beneath a “lace affair” to retain his “aristocratic” bearing (81); in the other, Buck parades in his yellow dressing-robe in overt mockery of the Church while performing what actually seems to be a very serious ritual—the care and maintenance of his face, which, masklike in its manipulative power, is his most bizarrely distinctive feature throughout the books we’ve read so far.

I found Mahaffey’s explanation of Gabler’s edition of Ulysses interesting in that her definition of editing, and what a good edition of a ([n] especially dated) text should do, seemed weirdly synonymous with the organic way she described Joyce’s process–“continu[ing] to write Ulysses in the margins of anywhere from two to nine sets of proof per episode, right up until two days before its ate of publication”( 241). This seemed to align really nicely with the editing process, which seemed equally organic in the way she describes Gabler’s attempt to “encourage a reader to move…forwards and backwards along the axis of diachrony of the work’s total text” in order to make it possible for us to “read backward as well as forward in narrative time” (241). If the job of the editor, as she says, is to make a dated piece accessible, she argues that it’s necessary to make an edition that looks both forward and backwards. With this understanding of the edition we’ve been reading, I’m interested in seeing how the prose and content of the original version could be altered or even obscured by the “grime of history” editing seeks to clear away.

I thought the Pecora reading brought new insight into our discussion because it addressed not only the authenticity or inauthenticity of the text itself, but the difficulty of close reading when interpretation is so subjective and dependent on one’s personal world. I read “The Dead” with pretty much no idea that Joyce might be using irony–caricaturing Michael Furey, needling Gretta’s romanticized obsession with him, making Gabriel a kind of punchline–and since I found the interpretation very dark and unsettling, I thought Pecora’s turn inward to his own life to rationalize the way he came to that particular interpretation a really interesting way to approach literary theory.

The acknowledgement of subjectivity in interpretation seemed to contribute to Pecora’s takeaway at the end, where he proposes Joyce “remained confused and uncertain and wrote an awfully good story about his perplexity” (359). Pecora admits bias and human error in his conclusions about the story, which in turn makes it logical for him to identify the same confusion in the story and Joyce himself. By framing his argument in terms of the author’s “deep and irresolvable ambivalence”, Pecora opens up a dimension of analysis conducive to interpretations that exist more as gray areas than bottom-line statements (“It’s ironic. It’s sincere”).