Friday, January 29, 2010

Ulysses, Mentally Revised

For some reason, I decided that I needed to know which word Joyce used to describe the nature of Leopold Bloom's fondness for the "tang" of urine in cooked kidneys--"savoured"? "relished"? "liked"?--so I pulled down the Ulysses I used for a grad class on Joyce several years ago. The sentence wasn't where I expected to find it; I could have sworn it was the first line of Ulysses, but in fact the first line is:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 
I'd assumed that people quoted that line so often because they liked the assonance/consonance in the first four words, but it turns out that it's significant for entirely different reasons: it's the one sentence that everyone who has tried to read Ulysses is guaranteed to have finished.

Apparently, I so dislike the character of Stephen Dedalus that I've mentally edited his role down and otherwise minimized his significance to the text. In preferring Leopold, I've mentally inserted Leopold into the book's starting position, so to speak. 

To give my fuzzy memory a little credit, although the tang-of-urine line doesn't begin the book, it does begin Part II ("The Wanderings"); however, I also misremembered the quotation as a single line, rather than as two separate statements in a brief paragraph. The actual sentences are:
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
And:
Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Also, the verbs are more delicate ("ate," "gave to his palate") and the description of the flavour is slightly more graphic than I remembered.

Overrall, the description exhibits a little more warmth than I usually associate with Joyce's renderings of Leopold's consciousness, but I kind of assume that the affection is for the organ meats rather than for Leopold.

2 comments:

  1. This quote is a tad nauseating.

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  2. Well, I think the nauseating details really helped me remember the sentiment of the line, despite my forgetting exactly how the quotation was written.

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