Re: Joyce, Episode 64: Blind Man's Bluff

A boy stays after class, and Joyce toys with both authority and identity.

Comments

[Dan Urbach]

Here's my interpretation:
"date-shaped" and "snail's bed": Sargent has fallen asleep on his paper. He has drooled on it. Thus his cheek has the imprint of the ink on it, in the shape of what was written on the paper: the date. His face is colorless, drained of blood: he looks like a corpse to Stephen, who is obsessed with death and corpses. He imagines Sargent face down on the earth, dead, his face in a "snail's bed." In fact he's been "squashed" into the snail's bed of earth, face-first. The fox now transforms into the fable, the Fox and the Snail. This takes us back to the antagonists Ireland and England. If the snail is Ireland, it has outdone England by taking its language and bettering it. If the snail is England, it has attached itself to Ireland and advanced itself by parasitising Ireland. With the "red reek of rapine," I prefer the interpretation that the fox is England, being a murderous fiend against Ireland. Then the fox can be Hines, or England, scraping up the ground to dig up its victim for yet more ravaging. And this can then be Stephen, with his terrible guilt, his apostasy torturing his mother, even after death. Finally, there's a lot of Hamlet here, given Hamlet's obsessive delving into graves.

[Barbara Stoner]

So - I come to the end of my daily "ReJoyce." I discovered this about 64 or 65 days ago and have been catching up by listening to one a day. Now I have to join all of those for the once a week offering. It's been fun. It will continue to be fun. And it gives me a reason to keep body and mind, if not soul, together until the ripe old age of 90. Twenty-two years from now.

[Barbara Stoner]

that should be, of course, "all of those *for whom* the once a week offering "has had to suffice." Changing wording mid-sentence without rearranging the syntax.