Episode 18 - Penelope

Molly IS Penelope, and she has the final say in this lengthy classic. In her famous eight sentence-long soliloquy (when it was written, one sentence was the longest in the English language with over 4,000 words), Molly has run-on, unpunctuataed thoughts about her love life as a young girl in Gibraltar, about her love affair then with another suitor, then with Bloom, then their 10 year sexually fallow period following Rudy's death, and - despite what Bloom thinks - her affair with her one and only sexual partner in those bleak 10 years: Boylan. Her final sentence is exquisite and ecstatic and is pure poetry. It ends with the words "yes I said yes I will Yes" and is almost worth the slog through the rest of the book to get to it. Just as Penelope was reunited with Odysseus, Molly sees hope for her marriage with Bloom.

Through her soliloquy, she is revealed to be an uneducated and lusty woman, but it is Bloom who has sinned far more against her with his own sexual wanderings. For these and other reasons, I certainly did not care for the quirky Bloom, and I formed no attachments to any of the other characters in "Ulysses," not really liking any of them very much, but Molly's final soliloquy gives her a special place in my literary heart.

My overall impression? The book itself was, I think, a seven year writing experiment for Joyce, who worked on it in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, from 1914 - 1921. It is certainly not a classically constructed novel and has very little in the way of a plot or forward motion of any kind. Perhaps it was written as a response to the concurrent development of modern art - the breaking up or deconstruction of classic images. Every chapter is written in a different and usually puzzlingly elliptical style. There is so much stream of consciousness that it is hard to find complete sentences that track as sentences. An entire book of this is simply exhausting and really meant for graduate students, who can spend a semester or two parsing the meaning of every historical, liturgical, Biblical, linguistic, classic and sexual reference, not to mention mapping out the tiny shops in Dublin, who owned what, who the street sweeper was in 1904, and so on. The detail is mind-boggling. Joyce is some kind of genius, but this is not a book to read and enjoy, unless the reader is simply caught up in the language and the vision.

However, I am done with "Ulysses," and, at my age, will never feel compelled to read it again. I will sleep well tonight, having completed my goal of reading it for the first time, but I suspect I'll dream of James Joyce, laughing at me from his grave.

Next blog for me? I don't know yet. But judging from the non-response to this one, it will have to follow a totally different course. If there is anyone out there in the Blogosphere who is reading this, so long and happy reading. I'll try to post something on this blog about my next one, when I have it figured out.