Blooming Puzzled

Bloomsday

Nice to celebrate this day of note with a copy of Ulysses at hand. In this case the copy being the Annotated Student Edition with its excellent notes from Declan Kiberd, one of their excellent qualities being that they by no means explain everything.

Since the notes were there to assist I thought I might as well plunge into one of the knottiest episodes in the novel, one that has come into quite a bit of critical flak over the years. I'm referring to Oxen of the Sun, segments of which seem designed to simply baffle. The notes were mildly helpful, but I remained generally uncertain as to what exactly was happening. However, this wasn't too troubling since I don't think much of note does happen other than most everyone getting roaring drunk in the loudest possible manner. The various prose styles adopted by Joyce admirably convey the necessary sense of clever chaos, it seems to me, so I just went along with how rich it all sounds.

Towards the end of the chapter when the prose seems to break down almost completely we get something close to the world of Finnegans Wake. Take the brief penultimate paragraph as an example: 

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up. Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

Haven't a clue what it means, but gosh it sounds good. Which reminds me that I recently decided that once retirement arrives (if it ever does) I'm going to read the Wake cover to cover as my first project. Not sure why. Just for the heck of it, I suppose.