The Worlds of “Penelope”

Abstract

In her groundbreaking Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes of Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Dorrit Cohn gives “Penelope” a singular place of honor. She writes, “Within the limited corpus of autonomous interior monologues the ‘Penelope’ section of Ulysses may be regarded as a locus classicus, the most famous and most perfectly executed specimen of its species” (217). But she immediately raises several interesting questions, beginning with “Would it be even comprehensible to a reader unfamiliar with the preceding sections of the novel?” I would like to begin my discussion of “Penelope” by turning this question around, and asking what does a hypothetical virgin reader of Ulysses, who has just worked his or her way through seventeen increasingly difficult and stylistic experimental episodes, confront when reading the first lines and pages of “Penelope”? The episode has no title, of course, and as Dorrit Cohn points out, it begins, as it were, in media res (221), without introduction or even identification of the speaker, the place, the time, or other indicators of precisely where we are in the fictional world of the novel. But to an observant virgin reader who has kept track of the details of earlier conversations and events, the orientation comes fairly quickly, although it requires considerable inference. “