Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place...

At last, someone who understands!

From another foolish blogger who thought reading this book was a good idea!
 
Finally finished episode 9. Not only have I had trouble reading it, I have had trouble motivating myself to write about it. Not my favourite chapter at all, especially with the amount of referring to notes at the back needed. Joyce indulges his intellectual snobbishness with overblown language, lashings of literary theory, heaped servings of Shakepeare and makes the chapter feel as if you are trying to swim or sail through a storm. Not very easy to navigate, or to tell what's actually going on. I think that hearing it rather than reading it may help, or reading it at a less busy time.


Again, I think I am obsessing too much over the author's intentions here, as if I read Stephen's ravings as Joyce he comes across as being anti-semitic, homophobic and a mysogynist. However, I think I will need to give him the benefit of the doubt by reading the Bloom sections. I think this is more about Stephen 'showing off' and Joyce satirising the literary scene of the time and Stephen himself. Much of the chapter concerns Shakespeare's life story and the way different biographers have interpreted it. 

All this talk of Shakepspeare inevitably leads another of the book's motifs (if you can call it that), the story of Hamlet. Out of all the things I missed, I did pick up on the way that Stephen is supposed to represent Hamlet with his thoeries about paternity and the irrelevance of fatherhood. 

Anyway, I thought I would write more about it, but at the moment, I think I'm done with this episode. Hopefully, the next one will be a bit easier!