End(s) of the world/world without end: Coming Events and the Twoheaded Octopus of "Ulysses"

• Autores: Richard Barlow
• Localización: James Joyce quarterly, ISSN 0021-4183, Vol. 58, Nº. 1-2, 2020-2021, págs. 115-130
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses, Bloom overhears a conversation linking the “ends of the world” with a “twoheaded octopus” (U 8.520–21). The apocalyptic mollusk reappears later in Ulysses, resurfacing in the “Circe” episode. This essay examines these passages and thematically linked sections of Joyce’s work within the contexts of censorship, Freemasonry, Theosophy, and the occult. The intertextual relationship between the octopus sections of Ulysses and W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is also studied here, alongside genetic analysis of the “Lestrygonians” section. Joyce’s sea monster is a symbol of sexual intercourse, of the convergence of Stephen and Bloom, and of Ulysses itself. The two octopus passages also undermine the certainties of religious and spiritualist teleologies by linking time with space and coastal geography, and through mixing eschatological language with aquatic, animal, sexual, and cyclical imagery. The two-headed octopus is part of a theme in Joyce’s work that depicts the animal world, and the “end” or purpose of the human world, as essentially unknowable.