Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Definitely COTD - we managed to cancel it and the fucker came back from the dead!
Ulysses (1922)
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
It occurred to me as I was reading Cyclops how rancorous a portrait Joyce paints of Dubliners, not all Dubliners but the insiders, whether that be the ignorant racist drunks cadging money off Jewish moneylenders and then blaming them for it, or the Theosophists with their windy abstractions demanding fealty to hoary old Irish myths. It's interesting how Ulysses really just extends on Dubliners and a Portrait, but of course stylistically is just in another universe, in part because he opens up the inner thoughts of his Dubliners, granting Stephen great intellectual powers and Bloom an artistic imagination and great stores of compassion and curiosity.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Which bit had theosophists?
When he's in the pub, he's talking about them, I think?
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Scylla and Charybdis is sort of about Stephens need to evade the whirlpool of Theosophy and Nationalism. He clings to "the rock" of Aristotle (dismissed by one of his audience as a mere pupil of Plato, the Idealist Vs the Empiricist). He insists on the importance of Shakespeare the man, while Russell (A.E.) declares that it's impudent and irrelevant to look into the Bard's life.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Bloom (like Shakespeare, in Stephen's version, a cuckold with a dead son) is imaginative father to Stephen, imaginatively umbilically linked — and Bloom is a sort of counterpart to Joyce in middle age, Stephen a clear counterpart to Joyce in youth, and Stephen's desire to escape the chimeras of the theosophists and nationalists et al is to be found in Bloom's down-to-earth, comic, tolerant perspective. And Joyce is father to both and to the whole world as depicted in the book—like Shakespeare, father of the dead father and doomed son in 'Hamlet'.
Stephen's theory has his unspoken need for a father figure lying behind it, but also is important because it affirms that Shakespeare 'lord of language' was a man of flesh, blood, follies, like Stephen/Joyce, who transcended and escaped his origins through the heroic flight of imagination.
Stephen's theory has his unspoken need for a father figure lying behind it, but also is important because it affirms that Shakespeare 'lord of language' was a man of flesh, blood, follies, like Stephen/Joyce, who transcended and escaped his origins through the heroic flight of imagination.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
A fantastic comment and one thing reading Ulysses has made me think about is the use of humour
Humour can be joyous, crackling with imaginative energy, and a handy weapon against windbags, tyrants and twats
But it can also be used as a cudgel by windbags, tyrants and twats, raining down blows on the out-of-line, conformist and constrictive, hollow mockery of high ideals (vs. high mockery of false/hollow ideals)
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
If I was you I'd give up at this point and pick up In Parenthesis by David Jones, it's a riveting read.
