Comparing Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of...

Comparing Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock In Episode 8 of Ulysses, Joyce sends Bloom and the reader through a gauntlet of food that enlarges one of the novel ¹s main linguistic strategies, that of gradual digestion. While Episode 10 may seem like a more appropriate choice for a spatial representation of the city, this episode maps digestion out like Bloom wanders the streets of Dublin, with thoughts entering foremost through the body and exiting them. In T.S. Eliot ¹s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the stanzas deescalate the city from skyline to sea-bottom in accordance with the mock-hero ¹s own inability digest thoroughly any complete thought all the way through. Bloom describes the†¦show more content†¦Consider plump, which starts the novel off ambiguously. Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead can be read with plump as an adjective for rotund or as a sudden or abrupt fall or sinking down (OED, 10.2), and eventually comes to stand for another of its 10 meanings prescribed by the OED, cluster, bunch, clump (OED, 1). This kind of word-digestion finds its spatial form in the blind stripling Bloom helps cross the street. The stripling is initially delineated by his relationship to food: Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child ¹s hand, his hand. Like Milly ¹s was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand (148). The stripling ¹s sensitivity to food, his loss of dexterity compensated for by his other senses, makes him more aware of Bloom in other ways: Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched together. Each street different smell (149). The stripling digests places differently; he must cautiously approach each one as if it were new, a piece of meat dangling precariously off his fork he must safeguard. His sense of space is circumscribed visually but takes on a different, imaginative form: See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense of volume. Weight or size of it, something blac ker than the dark. Wonder would he feel it if something was removed.