Ulysses must return.

Pages: 756-783

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: Yes I said yes I will Yes.

It’s over.

I got a courtesy e-mail today from the San Francisco Public Library telling me my book is due tomorrow.  I clicked the link to renew it online and the site politely told me I had renewed it too many times.  My time with Ulysses had to end.  And so, if it had to end, it had to be finished, and now it is.

I just shut the book, less than one minute ago, and I’m still buzzing from the last page and a half. This section is not what you would expect as a conclusion of the book, nor do these final reflections flow logically out of the rest of this section, but they makes everything come together somehow, coalescing into a wave of tragic truth.  This book is just one door opening after another with never enough time to go inside any of the rooms.  Nothing closes and everything that is meant to resolve something else only reveals a new aspect of the situation.  I apologize for my opaqueness, but vagaries are all I can offer right now.

I just want to fix Marion and Leopold’s marriage.  But that’s clearly not even the issue at hand, though I’m sure we wish it were;  the real crux is what we see in the last page and a half, and what’s been hinted at through the whole book, that certain gaps can never be bridged and most things that there are to know in the world—about things, about other people, about ourselves—will not ever be imparted to us, and some cannot, by definition, ever be shared.

Wow.  Maybe I’m just saying this because the book is over and now I don’t need to read it anymore, but I really think this ending did it for me. Joyce has captured something that I’m not going to try to explain, because it can only be expressed with the no more and no fewer than the words he used in these 783 pages of infuriatingly small print.

But I get it.

Sex makes everything more interesting

Pages: 743-755

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: Yes, but I missed yesterday, so really No.

I continue to meander through Marion Bloom’s thoughts.  She’s a highly sexual and not very educated woman, replete with neuroses, kinky fetishes, and a strong if enigmatic love for her husband, Leopold, who now lays beside her and may or may not be talking to her as she excogitates.

This is really, truly, stream-of-consciousness in its original form—not word vomit or free-association, but a real attempt to capture the movements of the mind.  It’s pretty intense.  But most of the stuff is about sex, which makes the whole thing more palatable—Joyce’s proverbial spoonful of sugar.

In bed, at last

Pages: 730-742

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: Yes, +/- 0.0

And I’m onto the last section.

The penultimate section ended with Bloom finally climbing into bed with his wife, who awakens and speaks with him, briefly, although we’re only given an indirect account of their discussion, still told through the funny and interesting but fairly limiting (especially in terms of dialogue) Q&A format.

And the last section, that behemoth of period-less, paragraph-less text, has begun, and it is a frenetic, very sex-centric stream-of-consciousness emerging out of the mind of one Marion Bloom, Leopold’s wife, who now lies next to our hero in bed.  It’s a little dizzying, sentences’ beginnings and ends colliding and slippery pronouns popping up all over, but with a little concentration it makes for a good read.  I’m learning a lot about the various infidelities of both parties in the marriage, including many extremely descriptive and somewhat gross physical details.  It’s a really nice change of pace, though, to be in her head, especially since she’s been a very prominently absent character thus far.  I’m interested to see what will happen in the remaining 40 pages…

To sleep, perchance to dream

Pages: 714-729

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: Yes, +3.5

Stephen is gone and now Bloom is left to reflect by himself, as the Q&A format continues.  Lots of reflections on his life thus far and what it may become in the future.  More dwelling on the suicide of his father, Rudolph, which I’m loving, because JJ has been teasing us with that tidbit for the whole book and now we’re finally learning some of the details of it.

I wrote “good point” in the margin by the following paragraph (it’s a library book, but it was in pencil, don’t worry):

[Context: explaining why Bloom is indulging in drawn-out fantasies of what his life could (but probably will never) be, doing this before bed so his dreams will be influenced by and will extend these thoughts]  As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human life at least 2/7ths, viz., 20 ears passed in sleep.  As a philosopher he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part of any person’s desires had been realized.  As a physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant agencies chiefly operative during somnolence.

The first two points were the ones that got me.

Public urination and alphabetizing books…there’s really nothing I can add to that.

Pages: 702-713

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: No, -0.5

I’ve noticed I haven’t had a comment in quite a few days no, so I’m not going to put much effort into this post.  Plus I’m kinda buzzed.

Brief summary:  Bloom and Stephen piss next to each other, and it is described with the utmost gravity.  Stephen leaves.  Bloom rearranges a bookshelf.  We get a full inventory of everything Bloom has spent that day.  Bloom picks off part of his toenail and smells it.

That’s all I have to say for now.

Ok I don’t have a title

Pages: 686-701

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: Yes, +3.5

Passed the 700 page mark!  I’m really in the home stretch now.  Although, I must admit, I looked ahead, and it appears that the last lap is going to be anything but an easy jog to the finish.  I don’t see a paragraph, or even a period, for the last 50 pages.  But I’m not there yet.  I’ll deal when it’s time.

For now I’m still in the question/response section, which I’m still enjoying.  A lot of these pages were taken up with Bloom’s reflections on Earth and the solar system and stars and universes and the vastness of everything and various cosmological phenomena, but other than that, nothing really Earth-shattering (pun intended) to report from these pages.  For a nice little tidbit, check out Bloom’s thoughts on similarities between women and the moon on p. 702, or on the appearance of new stars coincident with various people’s deaths and births, p. 701.  This whole section is really working to anchor Ulysses in an extremely specific time and place (June 18, 1904, Dublin, if you’re not already aware).

Why is this chapter different from all other chapters?

Pages: 660-685

Completed requisite 12.5 pages: Yes, +13.5

So I finished the section I had been working on, which ended with Bloom finally succeeding in getting Stephen back to his (Bloom’s) place. I liked this section a lot. It felt calming after the craziness of the last chapter, and there was something quietly intimate about spending so much time with just Stephen and Bloom, who have pretty clearly been the protagonists since page one, but who tend to get lost in the welter of peripheral characters and lengthy digressions and stylistic flourishes and stream-of-consciousness prose and puns and Latin and French and made-up words and all that. Also, the last page of the section contains the incredibly gross and evocative phrase “three smoking globes of turds” to describe a horse taking a shit. Brilliant.

And then onto a new section, a new world. This part is basically an extended and religiously unaffiliated version of the Four Questions in the Haggadah. It’s a series of queries posed by an anonymous narrator, which answers serve to progress the plot, provide insight into the two characters, and offer random reflections on other things. It can get dry, going deep into science-y stuff, with questions that provoke long responses involving just how exactly (down to the atomic level) the fire in the stove catches and lights and boils water for Bloom to shave himself, but can also be really hilarious, like the following question-response triplet:

Was [the key] in [Bloom’s] pocket:
It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on the day but one preceding.

Why was he doubly irritated?
Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget.

What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?
To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.

Equally great: the narrator goes into a lovely if strange extended discourse on why Bloom loves and respects water (p. 671); following this, Stephen professes himself a hydrophobe, and Bloom restrains himself from trying to convert Stephen to a waterlover because of his reflecting upon, “the incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.”

There’s an infinitely endearing little mention of a special cup that Bloom’s daughter gave him, which I won’t repeat here but which you can find on p. 677.

And then there’s some funny fiddling with math on p. 679, which I would have found even funnier had I not spent four hours today taking a computer-adaptive standardized test in a gray cubicle in a gray office building, dealing with the ratios and percents very similar to those that Joyce plays with here.

Also, it’s worth noting that I now have less than 100 pages to go!