Bloggery

Sunday 18th Dec 2011

Lucinda Corby

Ulysses: Ultimate 5th December 2011

yes because we never did a thing like that before to finish Ulysses just like we said we would what was it twelve months it mustve been and what a way to finish up with Molly and her stream of consciousness and no punctuation well after all weve been through that was a walk in the park or more appropriately a pew in a pub must remember to thank James and his team at The Salamander who all did such a great job keeping us all fed and watered but youre wondering when is she going to get on to Molly and I am going to because the discussion was great and when Penny suggested that Joyce used the word yes as a feminine word my goodness the floodgates opened and we all chimed in about how even molly was in some ways rebelling against all the traditional womanly roles because of her sexual voracity and the way bloom or poldy as she calls him I guess that is an affectionate name so she must still have some feelings for him or at the very least feels comfortable with him how her poldy does a lot of the traditional female roles in the house and how the kitchen is his domain and how her being a no woman was similar to the role model by which we mean the penelope of the odyssey who refuses all the suitors until her husband returns and then we had an even bigger discussion about whether molly had actually been serially unfaithful to her husband or whether all the various couplings she describes in lots of detail were either just in her head and the sorts of thought and fantasies that go on idly in anyones mind or whether they were all before she met bloom and married him in which case they wouldnt have been adulterous although isnt that exactly the sort of effect joyce was after because now weve got to the end of the book we are all still asking pretty fundamental questions about the characters and how clever he is because we care about the answers he has made us want to see if we can find out from the text what the truth is and goodness if we don’t understand now why some people get to the end of the book and then turn right back to page one and start again and now weve got to the end what will be next we should really decide before the Christmas party because after all that was where it all started and so molly talks mostly about her experiences and life in gibraltar and there is a suggestion that under the sun out there life is more highly sexualised and passionate we all agreed that molly provides one of the most fruity and sexually explicit pieces of literature any of us have ever read but I guess readers of the erotic review might have a few words to say about that.

Nic pops over to toast our last meeting which was nice although he arrived too early to join us in our last ulysses supper proper which was a shame when we tell him about the rather risqué classic literature weve been reading it looked like he was going to sit in i reckon molly is one of literatures best kept secrets none of us had any idea how much of a cosmo woman she would turn out to be and we havent even touched on the relationship between molly and her daughter there is the usual jealousy of young millys youth as her mothers beauty is starting to fade and also the suggestion that molly is jealous of the housemaid bloom employs i must do some housework myself tomorrow youre wondering why this blog is so late the meeting being well over a week ago the honest truth is ive been busy and its honestly the first chance ive had to put anything down good job Ive got a good memory but even if I havent someone will point it out funny how the group didn’t want to leave the pub at the end of the discussion because we all lived with the book for a year and now that were at the end its like saying goodbye to a whole era we really need to think about the next book someone mentioned Proust again need to agree before the christmas party so we can announce it mollys jealousy of blooms little indiscretions is interesting because this married couple both seem to know that the other goes off elsewhere but that they return home in the end which is of course the antithesis of the marriage vows and so again joyces outsiders are living outside the catholic faith i thought that the book was banned primarily for blasphemy but i reckon molly outstrips anything that lawrence got pilloried for several years later we all feel very smug that we went through the whole book but we can all imagine that some people might just turn to mollys section for a bit of a laugh whereas we can put it all into proper context and it was a good finish to the book in some ways but as I said there are still lots of unanswered questions and when someone says we really should decide to read Proust next I said yes I will Yes.