Blog
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The Superior, The Very Reverend John Conmee S. J.
“Wandering Rocks”, Ulysses’ tenth episode, opens with “The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.” stepping out of his presbytery on Gardiner St., just around the corner from the Blooms’ home in Eccles St. If you’ve read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you’ll recall Fr. Conmee as the Jesuit priest…
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Ulysses & The Odyssey – Wandering Rocks
The Odyssey – Book XII Circe advises Odysseus on how to sail safely home. She warns him not to attempt sailing through the Wandering Rocks, a stretch of sea so difficult to cross that not even birds can fly over it and live to tell the tale. The only ship to ever pass through safely…
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Lapwing
Near the end of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, Stephen realizes his lecture on Hamlet is rapidly disintegrating before his eyes. Not only are John Eglinton and the rest wholly unconvinced by his arguments, but he also has Buck Mulligan nipping at his heels, undermining him at every opportunity. Stephen looks to the heavens…
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A Shakespearean Ghoststory Part 3: Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund
This is part three of a three part series about searching for real-life “ghosts” by prying into Shakespeare’s personal life. You can read part one here and part two here. Near the end of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, Stephen finally arrives at the rousing conclusion of his Shakespeare theory: not only did Shakespeare…
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Decoding Dedalus: Saint Thomas’ New Viennese School
This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line. The line below comes from “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth episode of Ulysses. It appears on page p. 205-206 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage…
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Decoding Dedalus: He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.
This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line. The line below comes from “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth episode of Ulysses. It appears on page p. 204 – 205 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at…
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The Chap that Writes like Synge
Irish playwright John Millington Synge moves like a phantom through the pages of “Scylla and Charybdis”, Ulysses’ ninth episode. We get an allusion here, a namedrop there, but he never appears in person. Despite this absence, he is not spared the roasting that other Dublin literary types like Æ Russell, Richard Best and John Eglinton…
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An Intimate Portrait of Mr. W. H.
After Buck Mulligan’s raucous entrance in “Scylla and Charybdis”, Ulysses’ ninth episode, Stephen Dedalus struggles to regain composure and continue on with his theory of Hamlet. In the midst of this disorder, Mr. Best chimes in to share one of his favorite Shakespeare-inspired texts: “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” is a short story by Oscar…
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Decoding Dedalus: Ineluctable Modalities
“The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space.” – Stephen Dedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man…