This
year’s online Bloomsday seminar via Facebook was a global conversation in the
privacy of our own screens. Each of the eighteen short films, released online
by Bloomsday in Melbourne at the hour set for each episode, were treated as the
‘papers’ to prompt online discussion. Episode 11 included contributions by Steve
Carey, Sian Cartwright, Carly Ellis, Frances Devlin Glass, Sabia Mac Aodha,
Margaret Newman, and Carol O’Connor, whose initials appear where their thoughts
are represented in these analecta.
In
the beginning, or very soon after, there was a sound poem. We are still
listening to the flow and fragment and feel of that sound poem. These particles
of sentences and words and letters are but the compression of the sound poem
into our present. We hear them in the city, in some crowded space, or anywhere
like a woodland, an iso-bar, and can hardly believe our ears.
Joyce
signals in unusual ways things that will be described more fully later. Buck’s
send-up of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory early in the story heralds the complete
exposition of the theory itself, later in the Library. Inexplicable noises that
we meet at the start of the bar scene at the Great Ormond Hotel are found in
their full context as the full scene unfolds. They are everywhere, expanding
and fluttering through the windows. By the time of the brothel scene and then
Molly’s monologue, this pointed connection of words and sounds works in
retrospect, as we hear the connections again, but from a different vantage point
and with changing tones and inflections.
The
word ‘jingle’ is used in relation to Blazes Boylan earlier in the story. (FDG)
We hear it in Molly’s bedroom scenes. It is one of a number of words in the
novel that are carefully used to signal resonances in the reader and connections
of meaning. The happy word ‘jingle’ connotes anything but happiness for Bloom
at this juncture. Sad song for a ‘jingle’.
The
refrain “Sweetheart, goodbye” picks up on Bloom’s fears of cuckoldry. (Sian)
Song lyric turns that way. What was discovered in bloom as a delight may, by a
simple turn of time, become cause for sorrow, the song now a reminder of that
which is lost.
Every
episode pushes the boundaries of readers’ expectations a bit more, but if we
had to identify where push comes to shove, so to speak, it’s the Great Ormond
Hotel. The author gives no signs, no explanations about what’s happening. It’s
the point where Bloom is really starting to crack, but it’s the most musical
(literally) of moments, full of music. Inexplicable, the sound poem opening
must have surprised in 1922 and even today is both beautiful and somewhat
formidable.
Bloom’s
own response is the word music going around in his head, making him dizzy with
love words and love of words. Oh, the language of love. (CO)
‘Flood
of warm jamjam.’ Bloom’s nostalgic love, resistant. Bloom in musical prose and
syncopation, with singing elements. He never lost for she’s not gone.
Meanwhile, an engagement in hypnotic revelry, rich allusion, and comfort. (MN)
Yes, he never lost for she’s not gone. His love proves resistant to the present
predicament, the immediate sense of loss. For even now, Bloom is already moving
circuitously homeward. Homeward still, for he never lost for she’s not gone.
‘He
smiled at bronze’s teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes.’ The senses pervade,
they swap roles and act as servants for each other, alive in the verisimilitude
that Joyce would have us know as the Great Ormond Hotel.
Musemathematics.
At which point on any given page do we say there is more Joyce than Bloom in
that sentence? One scoffs at the literary critic who calls Bloom uneducated.
There sits Bloom, in a crowded bar, far from the rooms of isolation, musing on
the connections between music and mathematics, even as he absorbs the narcotic
known as music to soften his own pain. Uneducated, indeed.
Musemathematics.
We ponder the connections between music and mathematics, even as we resign
ourselves to being hopeless at both. They are both languages guided by patterns
and rules. (Sian) Music is not just time and rhythm, but understanding that the
possibilities are endless: infinity, imagination, an ever-expanding universe.
(SMA)
Musemathematics.
But then wonder how much is the recorded thoughts in plain English at work in
his mind. How much the passing sign, the glimmer of what goes on in his mind,
made temporarily visible by words alone on the page of the novel. How much is
Joyce’s words of what Joyce wants us to think is Bloom is thinking amid the
sensuality of the present.
Musicians:
a cupboard of instruments and a mad sketchbook of video plans. (CE) Photographers:
a space between and chosen angles that will revisit their undarkening room.
Actors: a closet of use-by finery and a dialogue of loose-fitting closeness.
Writers: a ghost of vocabulary and a whole landscape of incorruptible
syllables. Sculptors: a backyard of unrefused refuse and an installation of
volcanic innuendo. &c.
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