representation of a woman anyone has written in English”. That famous monologue, argued one critic recently, is “the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful. This applied to women too, though perhaps too much so, as some feminists have complained, noting that Molly Bloom, and especially her final silent stream of consciousness – “yes I said yes I will Yes” – is all body, at the expense of mind. It is famously hard to read, and many never finish it.īodies were a central part of Joyce’s argument for ordinariness as a fit subject for serious art. He “pounded language to jelly”, as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it, but also made it sing. In Ulysses, Joyce remade the English language, over and over again (“ The scrotumtightening sea”, for instance). It insists on the mundane – lavatory visits, smelly cheese sandwiches – while being extraordinary in its methods: different styles from different literary periods jostle for control. Ulysses, a novel of ordinary lives, is organised around Homer’s Odyssey – advertising agent Bloom being Odysseus to Molly, his Irish Penelope.
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