The Wandering Rocks

So, Episode 10, The Wandering Rocks, an episode in Ulysses that does not actually happen in The Odyssey (it is only discussed and referenced, secondhand, in the Greek version). The episode is composed of nineteen short sections that overlap and interlace, in character, place, and theme. The stories in this section are like little snapshots of life, small pieces, often mundane and ordinary, of the everyday. In the annotations, the scenes are said to be “temporally simultaneous but spatially remote,” a stop-start, herky-jerky narrative that, ironically, is simultaneously concurrent in time. The main job of the reader, it seems, is to weed through these nineteen pieces and weave together a coherence for themselves, a whole from the parts. I like the little visions of life here that Joyce provides us, so descriptive and poignant, but I must admit that it is a struggle at times to tie it all together in order to understand the central action.