Brain Exercise!

Chapter 14, 'Oxen of the Sun' opens in a maternity hospital with something akin to religious chanting. This was another chapter where it was necessary to refer to copious amounts of notes and often, to re-read passages to attempt to get the 'jist' of what was going on. Here, we begin to see Ulysses as not only an odyssey in the traditional sense, but also as an odyssey through literature itself, beginning with Roman historians of around 80 B.C. Woolf quoted Eliot as saying '...It showed up the futility of all English styles' (Ulysses, p907, OUP 1998). There are nine different episodes corresponding to periods of gestation, but also two other episodes which are like the afterbirth. The periods of gestation move through the different periods of literature which are written in a way that parodies them, but also provides the plot of a group of men visiting a hospital then getting drunk and arguing (which seems to be a frequent theme of the book, I have noticed). 

This is a hard chapter to read, and I admit, not my favourite, even though I did admire Joyce's ability to parody all these different styles and to fit this around the plot and the characters, who became constantly shifting heroes from different periods of literature. I think the problem that I had here was the sense that this was a book written by a man for men, that this group of men standing around getting very drunk talking about women in a rather callous way - the inevitable whores n' sluts, their oh-so-intellectual discussion about the Catholic theory of saving the child rather than the woman, Stephen's great list of women being impregnated by 'fabulous' means and Buck's great idea about hiring himself out as a stud left me rather cold. I don't think of myself as being some sort of radical feminist (although I am also trying to to be a feminist apologist here), but I got a bit annoyed with Joyce's odyssey through the literature of male authors as well. Perhaps it was down to the mood I was in when I read it.

I found myself wondering what Woolf made of it, I know that there are reports that she felt rather ambivalent to say the least. According to a Yale article I'm reading, it looks as if she admired the stylistic innovations, but didn't enjoy reading the book, preferring Proust. I am glad to read Woolf's rather amusing disparaging comments about it, however, I can't say that this article has illuminated the feminism question for me; it seems that she was more concerned with indecency and her idea of Joyce as a pimply-faced bootboy!

Ito has analysed anti-semitism and anti-feminism in Giacomo Joyce, another work by Joyce. Ito describes how Joyce was inspired to write Ulysses by Otto Weininger who was somewhat of a anti-semitic anti-feminist. Ito considers Giacomo Joyce to have underlying elements of this, but he considered that the inspiration Joyce had for Ulysses was merely the ideas of the 'self-hating Jew' and the 'Jew as a womanly man'.

I think that I am going to give Ulysses the benefit of the doubt at the moment, but return to the question at a later date. 

Other than the grand tour through literature, Bloom and Stephen meet for the first time and Bloom is somewhat impressed by him. Stephen retains his flippancy about religion, veering towards blasphemy by parodying Jesus at the last supper. There are plays on words with fertility/futility and ideas about childbirth and creation, with Stephen comparing childbirth to posterity gained through writing, or 'postcreation' as he calls it. Joyce refers back to his source material in the anecdote about the bull of Ireland, a marvellous worshiped bull, and Mulligan's idea of giving something back to humanity by living on a island offering his stud service to woman who want children. 

Overall, if I ignored the vague sense of annoyance I felt reading it, this was a very clever chapter, and I'm sure other people enjoy it. I am ready to finish it, however. I know that the next episode is massive, but I want to push forward as much as I can to get the finishing line.