Madeleine Dunkers discussion
Joyce
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Ulysses Context—Ellmann's Bio
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Hard to believe the bio is not available on Kindle
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His visits home [from boarding school, age 9] for holidays remained warm in his memory. John Joyce was always delighted to see him, and the whole family made much of him. Eileen Vance still lived across the street, and they were inseparable until one Valentine's Day when her father sent Joyce a Valentine purporting to come from her, on which he had written, paraphrasing a rhyme of Samuel Lover, O Jimmie Joyce you are my darling You are my looking glass from night till morning I'd rather have you without one farthing Than Harry Newall and his ass and garden. Harry Newall was an old and disquieting cripple who drove his cart around Bray, so the compliment was not so extravagant as it first appeared. Mrs. Joyce may have intercepted the Valentine, as Stanislaus Joyce says, but James found out about it. Eileen, hearing of the trick that had been played on her, became shy with her playmate and for years blushed at the sound of his name. He in turn faithfully kept the verse in mind and put it into Ulysses.*
*Bloom remembers having sent the Valentine to his daughter Milly. Ulysses (63 [75])
I'm skeptical of Ellmann's remark concerning the heroes: "It is hard to like them, harder to admire them." Hard for who? It seems much more a personal prejudice, than a note of scholarship. IMHO.
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I didn't have a problem with that when I read it, but maybe Ellman is being a tad tendentious, indeed Mark :) Here's anothor Ulysses-relevant passage:
His lack of Greek he was to bemoan all his life, but in the event Italian proved invaluable to him. His best subject remained English; he contrived sometimes to give hints there of his later self. Assigned the topic 'My Favorite Hero,' for instance, he passed over Hector and Achilles and other burly men to choose the wily Ulysses, of whom he had read in Lamb's The Adventures of Ulysses. Lucifer, Parnell, Ulysses—dissimilar as they were, they began to cluster solemnly in his mind. It was not so much that he wanted to become them—he was too proud for that—but he wanted them to become him, or, to put it another way, he wanted an interplay among their images and his own (46-47)
I accept your judgement, W.D. A tad tendentious suits me fine.
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Then, more a vagabond than ever oefore, he stayed a few nights at his Aunt Josephine Murray's, but his Uncle William became annoyed, perhaps because of his unseemly hours, and locked him out. He stayed one night with a medical student named O'Callaghan, and at last, on September 9, ended up with Oliver St. John Gogarty in the strangest residence he was ever to have, the Martello tower at Sandycove. Squat and severe, this tower was one of fifteen built between Dublin and Bray a hundred years before as a defense against Napoleonic invasion. Forty feet high, with eight-foot thick walls, it had the look of a bastion of much earlier date. The entrance was about ten feet from the ground, originally reached only by rope ladder, but latterly by a flight of steps. Ulysses asserts, and a tower inventory confirms, that only one entrance key was furnished. It opens one of two ponderous doors that lead into the tower's living quarters, a round room with a fireplace, lit only by two slanted apertures which Joyce calls grandly 'barbicans.' An interior staircase, in the wall away from the sea, goes down to the powder magazine, now defused as a storage room, to which another key—a huge one made of copper to avoid sparks—gave admission. Further below is a toilet. The staircase also went up to the tower top, enclosed by a stone deck, with a raised emplacement in the center as the only vestige of the swivel gun and two howitzers which once dominated the approaches.
The tower commands one of the finest views on the Irish coast, of Scotsman's Bay which lies directly in front, bounded on the south by the tower's battery and on the north by the Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) harbor. Immediately adjacent is the 'Gentlemen's Bath' or Forty Foot, a diving pool among the rocks. Farther north can be seen the promontory of Howth, which Joyce would claim later as the head of his dead gianthero, Finnegan, 'extensolied over the landscape.' To the south are the Muglins and Dalkey Island, and far beyond them is Bray Head, which according to Ulysses may be seen from the tower on an exceptionally clear day. Gogarty said courteously later that it was Joyce who like Stephen Dedalus rented the tower from the Secretary of State for War, but the records show it was Gogarty who did so and paid the £8 annual rent.
Life in the tower was free and easy and not very wild. But it was pleasant to think of it as a haven of unrespectability in 'priestridden Godforsaken' Ireland; Gogarty liked to call it the omphalos both because it resembled a navel and because it might prove 'the temple of neo-paganism' as important to the world as the navel-stone at Delphi. Rumors of a new cult were allowed to circulate, not entirely in mockery. Nietzsche was the principal prophet, Swinburne the tower laureate. There were many visitors, among them Arthur Griffith, whose Sinn Fein ('Ourselves Alone') movement, as it would soon be called, was just gathering momentum, and young writers such as Joseph Hone and Seamas O'Sullivan.
Besides Joyce there was one other guest in the tower, Samuel Chenevix Trench, a member of an old Anglo-Irish family. Trench, whom Gogarty knew from Oxford, had embraced the Irish revival so passionately, and to Joyce so offensively, that he called himself Dermot Trench and had his new name confirmed by deed poll in 1905.! He was just back from a canoeing trip through the country, and felt that he now knew what Ireland was really like. Gogarty introduced Joyce to him with a rising tone of wonder, 'This is the man who intends to write a novel in fifteen years'
Trench was neurotically insufferable, and Joyce felt less at home than a few months before with Gogarty's blend of savage wit and ambition. He was well aware that Gogarty was saying about town that Joyce was 'mad,' and 'had killed his mother by telling her what he thought.' (The point would be registered by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses and answered by Stephen, 'Cancer did it not I.') For his part, Joyce had refused to speak to Gogarty's mother because she expressed the fear that he was making her son agnostic. As Ulysses phrases it, "Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.' A month and a half before the prospect of living in the tower with Gogarty had seemed pleasant to both. Gogarty had informed his friend Bell of the plan, which was for Joyce to do the housekeeping and to play Watts-Dunton to his Swinburne. But the prospects of the menage had been dubious enough even then, and since that time there had been 'The Holy Office' to alert Gogarty to Joyce's hostility.
[...]
... during the night of September 14 Trench began to scream in his sleep. He was convinced that a black panther was about to spring. Half waking, he snatched his revolver and shot at the fireplace beside which Joyce was sleeping. After having dispatched his prey, he turned back to sleep. While Joyce trembled, Gogarty seized the gun. Then Trench, again ridden by nightmare, screamed and reached again for his revolver.* Gogarty called out, 'Leave him to me,' and shot not the panther but some pans hanging above Joyce's bed, which tumbled down on the recumbent poet. The terrified Joyce considered this fusillade his dismissal; without a word he dressed and left, having—at that hour—to walk all the way to Dublin. When the National Library opened he told Magee, who was on the staff there, what had happened to him. The same day, back in the reluctant bosom of the Murrays', he sent a note to James Starkey asking him to pack his trunk at the tower so it could be picked up on the day following. Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else packing the trunk. The incident solidified Joyce's intention of leaving the 'trolls,' as he continued to call the forces that threatened his integrity. (171-175)
Since I am an English writer unavoidably I will discuss some studies of comparative literature although it is completely irrelevant aspects of our nature publishers.Comparative literature in one word is that from the literatures which were published to find out the difference between different cultures, basically is from bilingual works. In another word people who studies comparative literature must have to be able to realize two different languages or they would not be said to study comparative literature.Due to that I am good at languages of English and Chinese I will choose literatures of these two as comparative literature but not French as it was the theoretically original of comparative literature.
Now I want to start comparative literature with Shakespeare(A.D. 1564-1616) like anybody else, and with Chinese poet Lee (A.D. 701-762) of their poetry. The writing form of poetry mostly stress on the rhythm and using the metaphor such as general for example ' shall I compare thee with summer breeze' and Lee's ' I wonder that if moonlight was the frost on the ground' thus I don't see much difference between English and Chinese poetry.
Thank you, Glory, for the two wonderful examples of metaphor in poetry. I think Lee's comparison of moonlight to frost is quite brilliant! - )
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I find Joyce's life to be rather sad. It reminds me a bit of Beethoven's. An always financially struggling, controversial genius, with a debilitating infirmity. And for Joyce they banned his book.
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No, but I have walked drunkenly with a couple of mates at 4:00 am from the ferry terminal in Dun Laoghrie (sp?) near the tower, the 6 or 7 miles into the city cos there were no cabs waiting at the terminal! :D
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No, but I have walked drunkenly with a couple of mates at 4:00 am from the ferry terminal in Dun Laoghrie (sp?) nea..."
That counts!
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'The most beautiful, all-embracing theme is that of the Odyssey. It is greater, more human, than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust. The rejuvenation of old Faust has an unpleasant effect upon me. Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking at the sun. The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey. I was twelve years old when we took up the Trojan War at school; only the Odyssey stuck in my memory. I want to be frank: at twelve I liked the supernatural ism in Ulysses. When I was writing Dubliners, I intended at first to choose the title Ulysses in Dublin, but gave up the idea. In Rome, when I had finished about half the Portrait, I realized that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.
'Why was I always returning to this theme? Now in mezzo del cammin I find the subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature. Ulysses didn't want to go off to Troy; he knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Hellas, was only a pretext for the Greek merchants, who were seeking new markets. When the recruiting officers arrived, he happened to be plowing. He pretended to be mad. Thereupon they placed his little two-year-old son in the furrow. Observe the beauty of the motifs: the only man in Hellas who is against the war, and the father. Before Troy the heroes shed their lifeblood in vain. They want to raise the siege. Ulysses opposes the idea. [He thinks up] the stratagem of the wooden horse. After Troy there is no further talk of Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon. Only one man is not done with; his heroic career has hardly begun: Ulysses.
'Then the motif of wandering. Scylla and Charybdis—what a splendid parable. Ulysses is also a great musician; he wishes to and must listen; he has himself tied to the mast. The motif of the artist, who will lay down his life rather than renounce his interest. Then the delicious humor of Polyphemus. "Outis is my name." On Naxos, the oldster of fifty, perhaps bald-headed, with Nausicaa, a girl who is barely seventeen. What a fine theme! And the return, how profoundly human! Don't forget the trait of generosity at the interview with Ajax in the nether world, and many other beautiful touches. I am almost afraid to treat such a theme; it's overwhelming.' (Ellmann 417)
Joyce is the porcupine of authors. His heroes are grudged heroes—the impossible young man, the passive adult, the whiskey-drinking graybeard. It is hard to like them, harder to admire them. Joyce prefers it so. Unequivocal sympathy would be romancing. He denudes man of what we are accustomed to respect, then summons us to sympathize. For Joyce, as for Socrates, understanding is a struggle, best when humiliating.