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瞎扯
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Ulysses Chapter I
Summary:
In the morning, Buck Mulligan came out with a bowl, a razor and a mirror and held a religious ceremony. He and Stephen Dedalus lived in a tower at the coast. Stephen recalled his mother’s death, when he didn’t obey her last wished out of his personal beliefs. Then they looked together at the sea.
Reading Response:
Reading Ulysses again
Sorry for not writing much about the passage I read.
I picked up Ulysses again in FDFZ library recently. Before that, about a year earlier, I had finished reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf before I bought Ulysses (English version). I just heard of a writing style: flow-of-consciousness. It sounded appealing to me because I tended to focus on the inside feelings of people, rather than the plot. And I myself am very sentimental and sensitive. For example, I keep analyzing my feelings and thoughts, so I may write a lot of nonsense.
That’s why I was introduced to Ulysses. And picking it up again in the library, I felt younger, when I saw the English words printed in Times New Roman.
I stopped at about chapter 9 long long ago, so I had to start from the beginning. However, I’d like to write about my impressions of the parts I had read now.
James Joyce, the author, is godlike to me.
He filled one ordinary day in Dublin, Ireland, with millions of words and alphabets.
He built up Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and everything, every detail in the city of Dublin. When I want to write about that happens in my mind, I always simply forget it all. My former thoughts just disappear as if I couldn’t remember anything. But Mr. Joyce did it perfectly. He wrote so much without letting the readers feel empty. He is even able to build up the feelings and thinking patterns for different characters. He just lets the language flow.
And in the first chapter we see a joyful Buck and a moody Stephen. Through the language of English the personalities seem even more vivid. It’s possibly very hard to translate this book into Chinese. Buck is joyful but considered vulgar. Stephen is moody and he is a teacher and scholar. The contrast between them is very natural. Liu Cixin described in The Three-body Problem when Luoji created a female character and became charmed by her: “It’s like she is out of your control, and you can only follow her like a peeper, recording her every move.” Joyce is an expert at this.
When I am soaked into Ulysses, I can temporarily be focused and separated from the outside world, living only for myself. One day I can finish reading it, perhaps.
October
1
Ulysses Chapter 4
Summary:
This chapter describes Leopold Bloom’s morning. He went outside to buy some food, made a snack for himself and his wife Molly, and read letters and newspapers. His journey was full of interesting details, like he once passed by a school and heard students spelling words aloud, he explained a difficult word to Molly, and so on.
Reading Response:
This chapter is relatively easier to read compared to the whole book, because the main plots and the expressions are quite simple. It is generally easy to follow Bloom’s footprint as he wanders.
The flow-of-consciousness of Bloom is more than just descriptions of his feelings. It can also reflect his surroundings. For example, Bloom is Jewish. Jewish people are often looked down upon by Europeans. In the book there is a sentence “A mother watches me from her doorway and she calls her children home in their dark language.” Showing a mother’s unwillingness to let her children see a Jew. Antisemitism exists in some characters in this book, and the author is opposed to such narrow and conservative views which occurs in his motherland, Ireland. He seeks freedom and liberation in the historical context of British colonization in Ireland, not only in a political way, but also by revealing the nation’s chronic illnesses in social ideology (which has been affected by bias and prejudiced originating from the UK and the European continent). Bloom, as a Jewish person, shows strong respect and nostalgia for the lost land of his country. He thought, “The cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names, a dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. It bore the oldest, the first race. The oldest people wandered far away all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere.” The Jews miss their country, while Europe doesn’t welcome them. By battering Antisemitism, the author criticizes Ireland’s mental paralysis and the narrow views in Europe. Therefore, Ulysses is not a book only filled with recordings of the characters. It also reflects the author’s seek for liberty and liberation.
From this chapter, when Leopold Bloom first showed up, we can feel that Bloom is just an ordinary citizen. He was busy with eating, entertaining himself and looking after his family members. This made him seem familiar to us. Bloom was not a hero, but I think the deepest secrets of Human lies in our heads: both the primitive, vague feelings and coherent, rational thinking. When asked by Molly about a Greek word (“metempsychosis”), Bloom first recognized its pronunciation, (he said “met him what?”) and then searched his mind for an explanation (he thought, “reincarnation: that’s the word!”). So from the process of thinking, we can reflect on ourselves and enter the realm of consciousness of the characters to touchthe pulse of the era.
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