Episodes Five and Six, with Help from an Expert

I seem to be doing this by myself, but it is a good discipline. In the absence of any other kind of help, I've broken down and bought the frighteningly thick "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford, and that has actually slowed me down, as I now need to check anything that I don't understand in "Ulysses" with this very detailed guidebook.

However, I am about to pack both my huge copy of "Ulysses" and this even larger, new guidebook in one of the boxes I am shipping back to California from our vacation home in Maine, and this means that I won't be reading either or reporting on my progress for about two weeks. Somehow, I don't think this will be a hardship for anyone, as I don't have a single blog-follower so far.

So...in Episodes Five and Six, also called "The Lotus Eaters" and "Hades" in guidebooks, Bloom opens a letter from his secret love interest, has a bath in a public bath, then joins several men, including Stephen Dedalus' father, Simon, in a small cortege of funeral carriages, on its way to Paddy Dignam's funeral. There is a great deal of detail revealed about Bloom en route, including the fact that his infant son, Rudy, died shortly after birth; that his wife, Molly, was known to the Dublin public 15 years earlier as Madame Marion Tweedy, a noted soprano. We also learn that Bloom's father commited suicide via poison. Bloom's Jewishness and "outsider" status is hinted at, as is his actual profession as a "canvasser of ads." Stephen's father reveals that he greatly mourns the recent death of his wife, Stephen's mother, and we already know that Stephen is haunted by her death. Simon Dedalus also says to the men sharing the funeral carriage with him that he actively dislikes Stephen's room-mate (or tower-mate), Buck Mulligan.

During the burial in the grave-yard, Bloom muses ghoulishly about death and the decomposition of the human body, in keeping with his lusty and almost blood-thristy love of food and life's dramas and passions.

This brings me to Episode Seven, "Aeolus" in the guidebooks. This works out to be approx. page 114 in the original text, page 116 in my Vintage Edition.

That's it for a few weeks. Happy reading along, if you are doing that and have decided to remain silent.