As I wend my merry way through this ocean of words I find myself pleased with my own ignorance of anything that might happen. You can only read a book for the first time once I think. I’ll never read this again. I’m sorry. I meant I’ll never read this again for the first time. I’ll never be surprised by it in the same way. But hold. I hear you cry “there’s so much more to be discovered!” I don’t doubt it. No. Wait. I do doubt it. But what’s to do? I’ll carry on and we shall see what we shall see.
At last I come to Chapter IV and Mr Leopold Bloom, and even I cannot pretend ignorance of the fact that he is one of the ‘big’ characters of the piece. We get to know Leo by the end of the chapter in rather more intimate detail than perhaps I would ordinarily care for, but at least now I do appreciate why James Bond never (ahem) avails himself of the facilities. Hmm. You can always tell class by the words a person uses to describe the request for such a function. “Where’s the bog?”
Apart from the obsession with food and its eventual expulsion from the body, we are treated to many knowing intimacies – my personal favourite (and should I really be writing this) is the undue haste with which Leopold enacts his transaction with the butcher to leave the shop so that he may ogle the previous customer’s pretty arse as she hurries off down the street and out of his life. Such small moments make life worth living some days – especially of a morning!
Fortunately, for the average reader – and you don’t get much more average than me, chapter iv or Calypso (don’t ask) contains, compared to previous chapters, a veritable wealth of understandable narrative. Good grief! Don’t tell me we may have happened upon an actual story?
Not only do we get Leopold, but later also his wife Molly and later still via a letter their daughter Milly. Not to mention the unmentionable other letter from one Blazes Boylan. If there’s one thing that strikes particularly forcefully about this chapter, especially coming after the previous three, it’s the understanding of character in a very personal and intimate setting. Even if you feel ill-disposed to all the intellectual clap-trap, streaming of consciousness, and unfathomable literary references of one, two and three (ahem – the Telemachiad), at least here you have evidence of someone who can write in a way that not only has intellectual depth, but human warmth also.
The two letters received both have a sexual implication even though one is from his daughter. The one secreted by Molly presumably has something ‘about it’, even though it is openly delivered and asked about by Leo himself. More to come. With the eating, the sleeping (through Molly), the passing sexual thoughts about the butcher’s customer and his daughter (not in that way) and finally the shit! – I feel quite sure, if nothing else, of Leopold’s total connection to my own humanity. He is a human being. Eating. Sleeping. Fucking (at least in the thinking of the action if not the action). And. Shitting. Not necessarily in that order, but a fair and comprehensive description of us all.
Also, being a cat man myself, I found the references to his pussums somewhat realistic and strangely comforting. Mrkrgnao! Seems a perfect spelling.
I don’t know about you, but perhaps you’ll volunteer a thought but on this passage “They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I’m lost in the wood.” I seem to have fallen out of high literary criticism and into a Benny Hill Show rerun on cable. Either that or the whimpering voice of a doomed Dennis Potter character bemoaning some long hidden abuse. A bizarre train of thought, but not unwelcome. Dare I say, that reading this, if like reading anything else at all, then it is most like my experience of reading the epic sanskrit poem the Mahabharata!
So, if I was expecting a long dry white technical essay on style, at least now I have hope for something more meaty, dirty, shitty even. I’m not a fan of clever for it’s own sake. Am I to be disappointed or rewarded?
