Riassunto esame Lingua e letteratura inglese, Prof. Terrinoni Enrico, libro consigliato Ulysses, James Joyce

Il ruolo di Bloom come figura profetica in Ulisse

Quando il cittadino continua a provocarlo, Bloom decide finalmente che è un ebreo e aggiunge "Il tuo Dio era un ebreo. Cristo era un ebreo come me". Questa affermazione ha la qualità di un discorso profetico, non di un uomo che cerca una lotta, ma di uno che semplicemente parla la sua verità. Ma ogni volta che la possibilità di questo status profetico era stata sollevata, Bloom era stato veloce a negarlo; l'eroismo, infatti, non può mai essere consapevole di sé come tale. A differenza dei fondatori religiosi, il ruolo di Bloom non è insegnare una grande verità con le parole, ma semplicemente incarnare un modo di essere nel mondo. Il simbolismo di Ciclope utilizza sempre più immagini cristiane per raffigurare Bloom come una figura di Cristo o una figura di Elia, mentre altri cercano di crocifiggerlo o di sacrificarlo come capro espiatorio.

Nausicaa

Il capitolo vietato. The Little Review, una rivista letteraria, pubblicò Nausicaa nell'estate del 1920. L'episodio conteneva una scena di masturbazione. Copie furono inviate per posta a potenziali abbonati; una ragazza di età sconosciuta lo lesse e ne fu scioccata.

and a complaint was made to the Manhattan District Attorney. In September 1920 John S Sumner, Secretary for the New York Society of the Prevention of Vice, made a complaint about the 'Nausicaa' episode published in the July-August 1920 issue. The editors were found guilty after a trial in which one of the judges stated that the novel seemed "like the work of a disordered mind". Ulysses was effectively outlawed in North America until 1933.

Schema Linati:

• Organ: eye/nose
• Sense (meaning): the projected mirage
• Science/art: painting
• Colour: grey

Divided into two parts: Feminine vs Masculine, Climax and Anti-climax: I part is (excessively) sentimental (Gerty) and the II is cynical, more materialistic (Bloom).

In the Odyssey, Princess Nausicaa (to which Gerty MacDowell corresponds) discovers Odysseus naked and asleep on the beach and tends to him. As always, here everything can be read in the opposite way: it is Bloom who tries to see what's under Gerty's

The episode starts with a reference to a catholic church of Sandymount (same spot as ep. 3), dedicated to Mary, where a religious ceremony is happening. Two hours are lost between the previous episode and this one: Bloom and Boylan were visiting lonely women (Bloom to comfort Mrs Dignam, Boylan to take his pleasure with Mrs Bloom).

Women in Nausicaa are defined, in part, by their perceptiveness about who is looking at them and when. Women become sexual beings through their ability to present themselves to be looked at, and Bloom's erotic moments are voyeuristic. Stephen, in Proteus, experimented with closing his eyes and concentrating on his other senses. The second half of Nausicaa reflects a shift of emphasis from the eyes to the nose. Bloom's thoughts hover around smells and smelling. The distinction between the emphasis on senses in the two beach episodes seems to lie in the import of Stephen's and Bloom's musings: Stephen seeks to understand how our senses

Order our relationship to the physical world, while Bloom's thoughts dwell on sight and smelling as ordering relationships between people.

Who is Gerty? It's impossible not to think about Gertrude, mother of Hamlet, lover of his uncle and betrayer of king Hamlet. Gerty is a figure between the sacred and the profane: she compares herself to the Virgin Mary, saying that she feels her "seven pains", but she does everything to seduce Bloom and let him penetrate her mind. She is a contradictory character, a saint and a prostitute at the same time (we will see her in Circe walking through the red lights district and trying to seduce Bloom); but she dreams of finding the right man and starting a family. Bloom, who already has a family, dreams the same thing: he writes a message on the sand that suggests that he wants to be a mother (which he will become in Circe): I. [...] AM. A. "I am a", I am a mother.

The encounter between Gerty and Bloom is free of speech,

yet he says afterwards that it was a ‘kind of language between us’. She opens the episode, and there is a shift from the heroic language of Cyclops to a dainty exercise in the feminine mode. Her monologue insists on the racial quality of her beauty; she follows old Gaelic superstition, as well as the latest advice offered to young women in fashion magazines. Gerty is on the beach with her friends Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, looking after children; just as the men in Sirens were constantly aware of the onlooking barmaids, the young women here are aware of the watching Bloom, so that their behaviour becomes a sort of performance.

Gerty has no desire to become a mother; her father is an alcoholic and her mother is severely ill, and she has considered becoming a nun. Like most of the characters in Ulysses, she is not in full possession of herself. Women at that time could hardly find jobs, so that marriage was often the only option. Perhaps this is the reason why she chooses

blatantly inappropriate men as fantasy objects. Her lack of a partner may be a liberation, even if she feels obliged to maintain an attractive appearance for men.

She is not worried that Bloom might be masturbating, on the contrary she is excited. She holds to the view that anything that is not full penetration is permissible outside of marriage; she is advanced enough to believe that there ought to be women priests who would understand female needs. She works hard to seem like the ideal wife, while not actually being one, while Molly, though not ideal, is actually a wife. Bloom seems to be using this moment as a rehearsal for his eventual return to Molly, as he thinks about her recursively. We realize that Gerty would not be a suitable partner for him, and her friend Cissy, who wears her father's clothes, would be much more compatible with him.

Like Circe, this is a prophetic episode, full of premonitions and signs to interpret, like the beach, interpreted by Stephen at the beginning of

The book as one of the possible access to eternity. Another interesting sign is the presence of a bat, signalled by the word "Ba", another incomplete message: a reference to Ba in ancient Egypt, which is the divine, spiritual part of a person's soul, represented by a bird with a human head.

There is also an important reference to Washington Irvin's Rip van Winkle: Bloom fantasizes about Rip's fate, who gets drunk with some weird black-dressed figures, falls asleep and wakes up 20 years later, finding a completely different America, a dead wife and a married daughter, but still manages to go back to his old life. Rip is another projection of Bloom's Ego, that dreams of living a life far away from confusion, in a decolonized land. Same fate as Odysseus, who reaches the island of Scheria, falls asleep and is awakened by Nausicaa. Rip, that by falling asleep doesn't witness the changes of America, is a great metaphor for how Ulysses is placed in the

of incompletion, wiritng I AM A in the sand, but then erasing the sentence. The episode has been built on apparent contrasts between the two protagonists, that often resolve into an underlying unity: if Gerty blushes under his gaze, under hers he colours like a girl. The entire scene is a rewrite of one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen discovered his artistic vocation. Stephen makes art out of reality, while here reality is created out of art (in this case that of popular magazines).

Bloom engages in some uncharacteristic moments of misogyny (A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite), as if to mask his self-disgust; then he decides that he might still enjoy sex with her. For this womanly man, the female image can be both a desired partner and a version of the desired self: this is why Bloom has fixed his gaze upon Gerty rather than on the more suitable manly woman, Cissy.

14. Oxen of the sun

In this episode Joyce seems to show off his culture,

Making fun of Mandeville, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Steele, Addison, Sterne and many others. It is not a parody of the novel anymore, but the goal seems that of defeating the genre altogether. It is the episode in which the book is finally born. Organ of the episode is the uterus. 15

The style of this episode, one of the most difficult in the novel, consists of imitations of chronological stages in the growth of the English language, beginning with Latinate and Middle English prose up to the chaos of twentieth-century slang. The progression of language is, in turn, meant to correspond to the nine-month gestation period leading to human birth. The imitations of the styles of different time periods and prominent writers seem parodic because the styles are somewhat exaggerated. The ultimate effect is to drive home the point that has been made more subtly in Cyclops and Nausicaa: narrative style contains built-in ideology that effects what is reported and how it is reported. Joyce shows this by allowing

each different style to gravitate toward its normal subject matter. Thus, the moral-allegorical style of John Bunyan explores Stephen's move away from the piety of his youth; Defoe's passage is spent describing the no-gooders Lenehan and Costello; and the sentimental style of Charles Dickens narrates the commendably maternal thoughts of Mina Purefoy. The differing moral judgments expressed by various styles are also highlighted—Bloom's compassion is venerated in the Middle English prose section, while the hypocrisy of Bloom's disapproval (of the young men) is harshly revealed in the satirical prose style of Junius.

This episode corresponds to Odysseus's visit to the island of Helios in the Odyssey. Odysseus warns his men not to touch the cattle that are sacred to Helios, but the men slaughter the cattle for food while Odysseus is asleep. Zeus avenges Helios, only Odysseus lives, and his voyage home to Ithaca is further delayed. Joyce highlights the

Correspondence in part through a host of cattle imagery and mainly through the theme of profaning the sacred.