Sorry Don,

I was just expanding a little on Anthony Stadlen's comment that Humbert alludes to the chapter in Ulysses that was called by both Joyce and one of his earliest assistants and explicators "Aeolus," referring to wind, but also to music. the aeolian harp being an instrument in which the unaided natural wind creates music by blowing through a box-like device strung with string to evoke chordal arrangements. Joyce and Stuart Gilbert contrived a chart or "schema" in which all of the chapters in Ulysses was assigned a guiding theme, generally drawn from classical allusions.

In the Ormonde Hotel chapter, what goes on, beneath a form of writing that Joyce intended to invoke both wind, or winds, and music, are the events I describe. I have just been rereading some Joyce and so this was fresh in my mind, although I am at work right now and don't have any of my Joyce apparatus at hand.

Bloom comes in to have some supper. Blazes Boylan is passing through and stops for a drink of sloe gin. He's drinking this sweet red liquor that day, and carrying a red "bloom," I think  a rose, in his mouth, which he has bought that morning, as well as some gifts to be sent to Molly. Leopold Bloom is sitting in the diningroom at the Ormonde, sharing a table, as it happens, with Stephen Daedalus's (or his father Simon's) cousin, Dennis Breen. Simon Daedalus arrives. This is all at about four in the afternoon.  Bloom is daydreaming and worrying a little about his daughter, 15-year-old Milly, who is away by the seaside at her first job, as assistant to a photographer.

Blazes Boylan and a Dublin bum and racing sport named Lenehan convince one of the two barmaids, one of whom is a blonde and the other a redhead, to snap her garter. This sound Joyce wants as part of a symphony he is creating for his readers. He also wants this erotic pause, or end stop.

Simon Daedalus, has an outstanding tenor voice, though he has made no use of any of his gifts. He's prevailed upon to sing for those gathered in the Hotel (there is music in the hotel everyday at about this time, it seems.  He does so, to great emotion among his friends.

I think this chapter in Uly had a very big influence on Nabokov in writing Lolita. But it would take a note even longer and possibly more tedious than this one to explain why.

It has to do with a number of things taking place simultaneously, and  creating symphonic movements. Remember in Lolita, the passage where Charlotte is killed and how HH or VN describes all the images in a rapid fire way? Also, I think there is much in Lolita that develops in fugue-like, symphonic ways. Again, hard to describe briefly.

Has any of this helped? In my previous post I guess I tried to write in a way that would have rhymed in a very very minor way with Joyce's tone. Don't by any means allow yourself to post it if it doesn't make sense to you.

Andrew