Saturday, March 1, 2008

Sawdust, Joyce, Mashing, and INRI.

Form very much over function for Joyce, Ulysses. Pensive, too. Only says one simile length of Lestryg.: "His brother used men as pawns," p. 2225. Must mean metaphors are more natural. Not natural to think in "like," in "as." Means rationalization.
Says "sawdust" like T.S. Eliot says sawdust, p. 2229, talk of restaurants and "gobful wolfing" collared men, "... snivelling nosejam on sawdust." And Eliot, "... sawdust restaurants with oyster shells." Earlier too Bloom thinks oysters.
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Enough, though, with this pained imitation of his chopped sentences. I had read Joyce's Portrait of an Artist last fall, sitting under street lights misplaced 'round a city park, and liked it much for its integration of religion, its stress of religion, religious guilt, and college boys talking like Salinger's Catcher - but I don't remember chopped sentences in it. Sometimes in Lestryg. they do well, I think, to catch some poignant image by mashing two words not oft used side-by-side. P. 2227, and "...deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements". Then what may be my favorite sentence from the reading, p. 2221, and "No time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry." It off-rhymes in blank verse, yes, but that "sloppy tea!", the misplaced modifier "sloppy" jammed between "drinking" and "tea" is something really nice and new.
And I can't decide if what makes some of Joyce's stream of consciousness word-smashing pretty is its newness, how it fulfills our longing to hear words we don't often hear, how it relieves us from the formulaic phrasing of words and established-with-authority sentence structuring, or if its pretty disregarding our tiredness and want of new, pretty in itself, because it (might) reflect what we too think, deaf to our rationale, when we walk 'cross town on a lazy afternoon, thinking of Elijah and eateries and infidelity - as if it held a voice recorder to our walks then transcribed those thoughts onto a writing pad.
Lonely walks, too. His Bloom is a man-on-the-town and of-the-town, occupied with advertising, handshaking businesses with other business, but also he holds a sensitive distance from the fellows, the bailiff and "suetfaced young man" (2228), chomping mouth-open with hasty knife and fork at the first pub he ducks into: "Couldn't eat a morsel here" (2228). Loud unrefined men "shovelling gurgling soup down the gullet" (2228) - Bloom's disgust with this is, I think, what makes him likeable, and is what gives his walk and thoughts a sense of protection, of undisclosed feelings and associations, revealed to the reader in Joyce's chops and snippets.
Seems too much like dripping paint from a can and calling it art, Joyce's way of mashing words and letting their mashed pieces fall on the page. Yet as Pollock was an artist, dripping paint from paintcans, so was Joyce and his mashed words. Underlying the random splotches is something, something, something new or something so mirroring our free-associating thoughts that reading Joyce or viewing Pollock is a reflection on, geez, our consciousness, or something, something...
"No time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea..." (2221).

Note: On page 2214 - "Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of the night and see him on the wall, hanging, Pepper's ghost idea. Iron Nails Ran In." That last part, Iron Nails Ran In, is a play on the Latin acronym, IESVS·NAZARENVS·REX·IVDÆORVM: "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews." Those four letters, INRI, were plastered all over Spain, especially on the architecture of Gaudi, and I was confused to them until returning finally to Barcelona and querying an Opera singer Spanish friend of mine - but yes, a play on the Latin phrase.

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