Ulysses, The Magician's Accomplice

The Magician's Accomplice was one of those conspiracy books that just spirals out of control.  We have something like 30 people murdered in the space of a few weeks, and yet we're supposed to believe it's a secret conspiracy.

More interestingly, I'm listening to the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses.  Ulysses is probably one of the most-commented-on novels of the 20th century, and this episode in particular draws a lot of commentary because of what it says about Stephen Dedalus's relationship with his father, other poets, Shakespeare, and so on.  But all the commentary that I've seen on-line talks about the external world, so to speak -- what actually happens in the episode, what the conversations say about the characters, etc.

But I think it's important that in the episode the narrator's voice starts to break down.  (The narrator intrudes in "Aeolus" by putting in headlines, but not into the actual flow of the text).  At first, the narrator confines himself to making puns or doublets (the Quaker librarian speaks "quakingly"), but then starts mixing up character's names with each other, sometimes to the point of ludicrousness.  Although Stephen is the controlling point-of-view for this episode, the narrator's games are not the sort of intellectual tricks that Stephen indulges in.

I do think that any description of the section that leaves out this feature of the narration is missing an essential piece; it's as striking as Joyce's use of play format for the "Circe" section.