Oxen of the Sun

Going back home to the Oxen of the Sun
Out in back of Palmdale where the turkey farmers run

While on his way home, the wind dies and Odysseus is stranded on Thrinacia Island, where live the immortal cattle of the sun god Helios. Odysseus was warned by Circe that he must not harm the kine or bad things will happen, but his crew is starving, and when the hero falls asleep they cook a feast. On awaking Odysseus smells cooked meat and knows that a delicious outrage has been committed:

As soon as I reached our ship at the water's edge
I took the men to task, upbraiding each in turn,
but how to set things right? We couldn't find a way.
The cattle were dead already...
and the gods soon showed us all some fateful signs—
the hides began to crawl, the meat, both raw and roasted,
bellowed out on the spits, and we heard a noise
like the moan of lowing oxen.

When the ship finally leaves the island the ship and all hands are lost in a storm, with Odysseus left clinging to the broken keel.

In Ulysses the sacrilegious sailors of Homer become a bunch of drunken young Irishmen. Bloom goes to a maternity hospital to see if there is any change in the condition of Mina Purefoy, a lady acquaintance who has been in labor for three entire days; once there he discovers an impromptu party taking place among the medical students and their friends, and despite the gravity of Mrs. Purefoy's situation there is rough and disrespectful talk about the women and blasphemous jesting in general. Among the boozing boasters is the son of one of Bloom's friends–Stephen Dedalus, of course—and Bloom is saddened by the fact that a young man of such good qualities has fallen in with a questionable crowd.

Ulysses is a difficult book, and Oxen of the Sun may well be the most difficult chapter therein. The style is meant to convey the idea of the gestation of the English language, and so a good deal of the text is written using archaic vocabulary and grammatical forms. Various writers are imitated, not only in terms of language but also in terms of the writers' perspectives, so we see the action through a series of warped lenses, ranging from medieval romance to religious moralizing to allegory to bizarre mysticism. At the end of the episode the language becomes an incomprehensible babbling transcript of slang, jokes and puns as the students rush from the hospital to hit the bars.

In the past I would have said that the episode was my least favorite in the book, as the length and difficulty made it a painful slog, but for some reason it I enjoyed myself this time around and breezed right through it. I can't say I understood every word, but I definitely felt like it was easier to decipher what was going on in the "real" world behind the style. Perhaps this was so because I had taken notes on previous readings and these smoothed over some of the snags and speed bumps, or perhaps it was because I was remembering the stuff I had figured out previously without consciously realizing it.

It's interesting that we have an episode about birth directly following one with themes of youth, attraction and coupling and in which there is a sexual act of sorts. The hidden Mina Purefoy struggling through her outrageous labors becomes symbolic of all motherhood, and it is as if the spirit-child that Bloom conceived in Nausicaa is now being born. This is also the chapter in which Bloom first speaks to Stephen Dedalus, and so we see the beginnings of the father-son relationship that will develop at the end of the novel.

For me, the "birth of language" idea doesn't work but it does. I don't get a strong sense of linguistic evolution; it seems just to bounce around from style to style without any direction. On the other hand, the curious remove of the text from what is happening beneath it, so to speak, somehow suits what is going on and gets across the sense of metempsychosis, the cosmic that lies behind the particulars. We see the action through a cracked glass, looking at it through many different angles, and it almost has a cubist quality to it.

Of course, I'm sure that there's all manner of stuff that's going over my head, but one can't dwell on that too much. For example, what does all this birth stuff have to do with cattle? Beats me.

(translation of the Odyssey by Robert Fagles)