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Chapter 8 / Lestrygonians -Introduction: The chapter 8 is a beauty! Reading it last night around midnight, I had found so many things to laugh about - for example, 'Silly, fish learn nothing in a thousand years.' ...'What is home without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad!'' Sss. Dth, dth, dth...' etc. I had even thought that now I know why some people say that Ulysses is really a comedy. It could have been the result of a nice glass of wine. Today, when I reread the chapter I was struck with all the different things Joyce has packed into this chapter - philosophy, politics, aesthetics, science, language, poetry, Mozart, Shakespeare, food, vegetarianism, cunningness, sex, life on the Dublin roads, ..... Humour is still there - the above sentences do not disappear - but there is so much more. For example, look at science: Joyce must have been very impressed by the value of g, the acceleration due to gravity, thirty two feet per second per second. He talks of this in another earlier chapter. Here when he crosses the O,Connell bridge, and looks down sees gulls, 'flapping strongly, wheeling between th gaunt quay walls.' And then he 'throws down among them a crumpled paper ball' (which paper??) Whenever he looks at something falling down, he thinks of the value of g. But his thoughts come so fast that he does not have time to think of the correct units - thirty two feet per second, is what he says here. And then there is nice paragraph which I had totally missed last night. Bloom passes the window of Yeates and Son, and thinks of buying new glasses. Just passing that window / seeing the names, starts another chain of thoughts - about Germans' trading practices, sun light, sun spots, eclipse, Greenwich time, parallax, and then this chain of thoughts culminates in the way the universe came into being. "Never know anything about it. Waste of time. gas balls spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas, then solid, then world, then cold, then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock like that pineapple rock. The moon." And suddenly the thoughts shift to Molly. "The full moon was the night we were ..." Of course, Molly is not mentioned by name. I still think he means her. Her thoughts do not leave him for a second even. And very soon follows, what I think is the reason for Molly's 'betrayal'. Bloom thinks, 'She twentythree when we left Lombard street west something changed. could never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time...' I think that you all agree with me that it is time to finish this mail. If there is anybody out there who is reading only these posts and not reading the book, please read the chapter 8. It is great. Chandra The men loaf because only the extraordinary abundance of liesure made life bearable in economically depressed Ireland, that and the cheapness of drink. Lestrygonians is funny. It disturbed Joyce that Nora, having heard much about Irish literary humor, asked her husband if he had any examples for her to read. It never occured to her that Joyce's own book was the best example of what she sought. Bob HOME! |