Dismantling the Morning: Part 3: Breakfast on Bloomsday · 10:07am Jun 17th, 2013
happy belated Bloomsday everyone. i was gonna post something about it yesterday, but i was aching for a special happenstance that didn’t come. in case you’re unaware, June 16th is the official-unofficial celebration of Ulysses and James Joyce and all the wacky surrounding thereabouts. that being the case, i thought i’d blather on a bit more about my inherently flawed emulation of Joyce’s masterpieces. i have some stories i’m waiting to post later, but they’re in various states of ‘unfinished’, which is an oddity for me. anyway.
let’s get right into things, shall we?
Breakfast.
omg so deep.
actually, it’s worth noting something here. while i can’t claim to have done this with as much mastery as Joyce did, i’ve tried to mimic the clarity of internal thought akin to the situation a character is in, as well as the surrounding of their circumstance. early in the book, emulating in particular our introduction to Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, i tried to make Twilight’s thoughts plain and materially focused. she’s thinking about breakfast, and the tone of her diction is mostly uninteresting (at least in comparison to later parts of the story). you’ll see that when she begins to pontificate on literature, or, even further past that, mortality, sacrament, divinity, etc., her thoughts mimic the subject matter. or, i tried to make them do that, anyway. moving on.
Good days are unurgent. Go to get up and the world is inside. Cereal and toast on a platter.
there’s that food focus i was talking about, as well as the lazy navigation in emulation of Mr. Bloom. i corrected a typo in the original publishing here – that word ‘unurgent’ is a neologism, but basically means exactly what it says: Twilight likes days spent inside rather than ones where she has to run around doing things. ‘world inside’ is specifically a reference to reading, but can be taken in a number of ways. breakfast food needs no explanation.
Bringing by that rye-bread again. Mrs. Cake makes it sometimes. Too much time to pick up, when it’s talk always on here-nor-there, sending him instead. Little claw marks on the time. Can’t count the change. Otherwise fine.
this is a bit purposefully ambiguous, but not too hard to take apart if you can infer who ‘he’ is – as i mentioned in a previous post, i attempt to omit subjects when the internal narrator’s (Twilight’s) focus is on something they wouldn’t clarify themselves. here, we’re seeing Twilight think about rye-bread made by Mrs. Cake, but lamenting that she doesn’t enjoy picking it up because she finds the necessary small-talk unpalatable. so, she sends Spike instead (him). the only line to really cause confusion here is ‘claw marks on the time’ which has several different sides to it; for one, Spike is subject to the same smalltalk Twilight is, and i imagined him nicking little spots in the plastic wrapping of the bread out of boredom as he waited. it’s also the case that in conventional bakeries (and this one too, why not) that the tags on bread are colour-coded to represent the time of baking; so lets say that Spike left marks on that too. his claw marks are literally denoting his time, the time of the bread, and ‘all’ the time if you substitute the operative section of that sentence, which you may as well. also, he can’t count well.
—Lnnnmmmnuuhhh.
direct homage to chapter four of Ulysses (Calypso) and further to Leopold. i use this a fair bit early in the story, marking sound-effects and vocalized non-words as dialogue. Twilight does it here in the same way Molly did waking from bed, and the cupboard does it later in the way that the cat did. mrkgnao.
Vessels and vestiges opened with Twilight’s daybreak locomotion yawning. The whole world regrew at night, and her in bed with it. She was a purple speckled egg rested in a bed-nestle. Felt like she had sprouted limbs in sleeping. Streeeeeetch.
as always, meaning is compounded with wordplay and prosody, but the ‘vessels’ referred to here are Twilight’s blood vessels — ‘vestiges’ is a little more ambiguous, but it confers a focus on forgotten ideas, on body-parts that feel exhausted, and on Twilight herself, though that’s just her lingering malaise from not getting enough sleep. the paragraph further goes on to clarify that noise you just read was a yawn (‘daybreak locomotion’ is fancy way of saying ‘morning stretch). ‘world regrew at night’ is a favorite line of mine, because it furthers the concept of cyclicism, references specifically the ‘return of the night’ pun/triple-meaning in the previous highlights, and then goes on to describe Twilight’s metaphysical reincarnation on waking up. Horizon pointed out the allusion to extra limbs might have been referencing her future deification, which i have to admit wasn’t intentional (not many of those here), and also that i like it upon reading it into that context. stretch.
You’re shorter in the morning. Where did I read that? An Illustrated no Encyclopedia of no On the Science of no overheard it. Remember Dash saying it. Test for veracity later. Liked smiling when she told me something. Smiles that start anew like cheerful eggs...
honestly not a lot to say here. Twilight remembers hearing something about being shorter in the morning and tries to recall the source. i think this is a good demonstration of why this stream-of-consciousness type of thing can work sometimes; this particular section feels really organic to me, though a bit faster paced than some people might think. eventually Twilight finds the source of the remembrance and makes a note to investigate it later. she remembers Dash’s enthusiasm in sharing it, and then turns her mind to an odd metaphor, which gives us our final section for analysis today:
Eggs. Toast?
breakfast is a hard thing to decide on.
that’s all for now. happy Bloomsday again, and looking forward to maybe getting through this thing at some point in the far future. i’d say i could skip certain parts that are self-explanatory, but i don’t know that there are any large sections that are... so yeah.
also, as a funny aside: since the section i just analyzed takes place at the start of the day, literally the beginning, and it’s the part of the story most directly emulative of early Mr. Leopold’s thoughts and subject focus, you could say this particular section could be shorthanded literally as “Bloom’s Day” through Twilight’s eyes.
i thought it was neat, anyway.
toodles~
Still loving these breakdowns. It's something when I've given the fic itself two read-throughs--first for the big picture, the second with a mind deliberately left open for the wordplay that became apparent in short order--and think I've gleaned an admirable number of thoughts from the way you wrote things out from inside Twi's head...
...and then I read another Dismantling post and realize that even in the first couple of pages, there's other facets that I didn't see, or didn't see quite right those first two times. So many layers, so many subtleties; if only one knows to look, and knows how. You don't see this in many fics.
(Edit for spelling OCD. Bedtime looms.)
Happy belated Bloomsday to you as well, darf.
I'd try to fidget something deep, but I'm a kiddie pool at the moment.
Ponies get shorter when they sleep?
Seconded on appreciating this. I can appreciate a lot of the wordplay but never having read Joyce (I know, I know, shame on me) I'm missing out on all the references. It's also neat unpacking things like the prose structure, from a craft standpoint; those are neat little tricks to carry through into our own writing.
Thirded, I really appreciate it explained. Don't know if I'll ever tried to write that way myself, but you're tempting me.