Joyce Quiz (preparation for Bloomsday)

[Guest]

Joyce quiz

You scored 9 out of a possible 13
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery" (Ulysses). Well, if it worked for Joyce...

I got 3, 7, 9 & 12 wrong (that means something to me). I hope no one gets the last one wrong (Irish curses if you do).

Perdita

 

[Guest]

Ulysses is rubbish.

An insult to Homer.

Doh!

 

[Guest]

CV, I hate to say this publically but this is the second witty thing I've read from you in the past 24 hours. I truly fear the end is near.

Perdita

 

[Guest]

You scored 9 out of a possible 13

Me too. I think it's fixed. LOL

 

[Guest]

Can't help it, I love promoting Joyce, though the last story in Dubliners and the first page of Portrait are my fave texts (well, Molly's soliloquy and the beginning/end of The Wake too). - Perdita
---------------

"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."

Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
Education: University College, Dublin
Other jobs: English teacher, bank clerk

Did you know? Joyce established Dublin's first cinema, the Volta, in 1909.

Critical verdict
Joyce's genius was recognised with Portrait, Pound declaring that he "produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English", though the most prominent critical strain was disgust with what HG Wells called his "cloacal obsession". The publisher's reader agreed it was "formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent". By the time of writing Ulysses - which wasn't published in the UK until 1936 and had to be smuggled in in two volumes, so that Anthony Burgess read the second half first - Joyce had a raft of critical and practical support. The admiration wavered into incomprehension with Work in Progress, which became Finnegans Wake, but modernism rallied bravely to understand it. Since then, the expansion of academia and rise of literary theory has proved the master right in his grand declaration that the complexities of his work "would keep professors busy for centuries".

Influences
Joyce said he had read every line of only three writers: Flaubert, Ben Jonson and Ibsen. He also loved Tolstoy and Shelley. As a young man, Ibsen was his hero; he wrote him a fan letter and studied to read him in the original (Exiles shows a strong influence). Joyce ascribed his use of stream of consciousness to Dujardin's 1888 novel Les Lauriers sont Coupés philosophical sources include Aquinas, Vico and Giordano Bruno. He once remarked that "I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast."

Now read on
Much of Flann O'Brien's work has a strong Joycean flavour; The Hard Life is a reluctant homage to Portrait. Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a portrait of Sam as a young man, before his mentor's verbose influence wore off. Tom Stoppard's Travesties puts Joyce and Lenin in a train compartment together, while the bizarre Illuminatus features Joyce as a character, along with much stylistic pastiche (you'll either love it or hate it).

full 'article'

 

[Guest]

Re: Re: Joyce Quiz (preparation for Bloomsday)

Me too. I think it's fixed. LOL

What matters is which answers were wrong, or which were correct without guessing. P.

 

[Guest]

1- Correct answer: It was Joyce's first date with his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle
I knew.


2 - Which playwright did Joyce hero-worship?

Correct answer: Henrik Ibsen
You answered incorrectly
Who the fuck?


3 - Which of the following is not a quote from Joyce?

Correct answer: To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
You answered incorrectly
I didn't pay much attention, anyway


4 - What did Joyce refer to as 'electricity' and 'beefsteak'?

Correct answer: white and red wine
You answered incorrectly
Told you it's rubbish


5 - The framework of Finnegans Wake is based on a cyclical theory of history borrowed from which thinker?

Correct answer: Giambattista Vico
You answered incorrectly
Oh, well...


6 - Joyce is often accused of being verbose and obscure. Yet which work did he claim to have written "in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard"?

Correct answer: Dubliners
Guessed


7 - When was the English ban on Ulysses lifted?

Correct answer: 1936
Guess


8 - Which author admired Joyce so much that he not only worked as his secretary but is said to have crippled his much larger feet by wearing identical shoes?

Correct answer: Samuel Beckett
Joyce's incestuous daughter married him, no?


9 - Which novel did Joyce call 'the English Ulysses'?

Correct answer: Robinson Crusoe
An educated guess


10 - Who was brave or foolhardy enough to edit Finnegans Wake down into an (extremely useful) shorter edition?

Correct answer: Anthony Burgess
Only name I knew of


11 - In the Homeric parallels of Ulysses, which character is Telemachus to Bloom's Ulysses?

Correct answer: Stephen Dedalus
It was either him or the other guy


12 - Joyce died less than two years after publishing his mammoth 'night-language' dream-text, Finnegans Wake. What were his hints about his next project?

Correct answer: That it would be short, simple and a novel of reawakening
Yea, just the sort of thing he would have said


What is the final word in Ulysses?

Correct answer: Yes
I knew this, though I never bothered reading the final chapter of the book. Molly's rumbling. Terrible editting.

 

[Guest]

You t**t, you've given the answers!

Lucia Joyce was schizophrenic and fell in love with Beckett but he rejected her.

Perdita

 

[Svenskaflicka]

*whistles*

I scored so low, I don't dare to tell Perdita!

 

[Guest]

That's Ok, Flicka, I flunked the HP quiz. P.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

My Ignore list got a new member after the HP-thread. Can you believe the nerve of some people???

 

[Guest]

You t**t, you've given the answers!

Lucia Joyce was schizophrenic and fell in love with Beckett but he rejected her.

Perdita

He fucked her though.

Did they have three somes with Daddy? Probably not.

 

[Guest]

Oh, cut it out, CV. Ordinary silliness does not become you. P.

 

[Guest]

Fucking hell, Carl.

Too many riddles!

 

[minsue]

Shame, shame, shame on me....

3 out of 13

I guessed on all, including the last (which I guessed wrong).

- Mindy, hiding in the corner

 

[Xelebes]

Re: Re: Joyce Quiz (preparation for Bloomsday)

Me too. I think it's fixed. LOL

Can't be. I got 0. Might help if I actually read the poem or whatever it was.

<needs to do a bit more reading I guess>

 

[Guest]

The last lines of Ulysses (from Molly Bloom's soliloquy), read it aloud. - Perdita

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

 

[Guest]

Audiobooks mark centenary of Joyce's famed literary walk - Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent, The Guardian, June 7, 2004

You wait a century for a recording of every word of Ulysses and then 54 CDs of James Joyce's masterpiece come along at once.
Rival versions - one on 22 CDs, the other on 32 - of the complete text are launched this month to mark the anniversary of the book acknowledged as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century but also as one of the most started, least finished, books in the world.

A day isn't long enough for either. The Naxos audiobooks version, read by two actors, runs for about 27 hours. The version by RTÉ, Irish state radio, which was originally recorded more than 20 years ago to mark the centenary of Joyce's birth using half the actors in Ireland, lasts for more than 30 hours.

Nicholas Soames, founder publisher at Naxos audiobooks and Anne Marie O'Callaghan, the producer for RTÉ's version, only discovered a few months ago that they would be rivals. Ms O'Callaghan, whose version will retail for €100 (£66.40), said they were so different there should be room for both. Mr Soames, whose set will cost £85, said: "There are things you do to make money, and things you do to ensure your place in heaven. My hope is that when I arrive at the gate I'll say 'I got every word of Ulysses onto CD' and they'll wave me straight in."

Bloomsday, on June 16, marks the centenary of one of the most famous real and fictional dates in literary history.

The actual June 16 1904 was the first date for the young James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Finn's Hotel in Dublin. Soon they would elope and spend the rest of their lives together, quarrelling, making up, exchanging passionately obscene love letters and she would be transmuted into Molly Bloom, his immortal heroine.

Joyce made the date the first Bloomsday, the long day's journey into night which his heroes, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, spend wandering the streets of Dublin crossing and recrossing the tracks of hundreds of other lives which are woven into the text. The date will be celebrated all over the world: in Dublin it will be the hungover highlight of a five-month celebration.

When Jim Norton, the actor who reads the first 25 hours of the Naxos version, and Marcella Riordan, who reads the last hour and a half - Molly Bloom's soliloquy famously written without a single punctuation mark - got the call, both admit to abject terror. Roger Marsh, professor of music at York University, who directed it and has threaded the recording with music, said he never goes out without expecting to be torn limb from limb by Joycean scholars.

All had worked before on Joyce recordings, which have surprised the team by proving among the most popular Naxos audiobooks, but this was the big one.

Norton had actually read the entire book, twice. "When I got my first acting job at 19, I fell among intellectuals who expressed amazement that I hadn't read it so I did, and admitted I found it very hard going. They said ah, you have to read it aloud to make sense of it, so I went away again and did that, walking around my room - it took me weeks, I felt like a complete prat."

Riordan prepared to grapple with Molly Bloom by locking herself up in her London flat and reading all day to her cat. In the end it was recorded in two weeks, in a music studio at York University, starting in the morning and sometimes finishing early the next day.

It took Joyce as long to get the book, which was regarded as both terrifyingly difficult and terrifyingly obscene, published as it had to write it.

The oldest surviving copy, which comes up for auction at Sotheby's this summer, was inscribed by Joyce: "To Stannie Jim Paris 11 February 1922", to his brother Stanislaus.

Two weeks later Stan, who worked most of his adult life to support Joyce, responded: "I suppose 'Circe' will stand as the most horrible thing in literature, unless you have something on chest still worse than this 'Agony in the Kips' ... I wish you would write verse again."

But the very first copy no longer survives.

Joyce inscribed it with a flourish to Nora Barnacle at a celebration dinner party. She never read it.

 

[Guest]

Today's art and money that generates is obscene.

I'm joining the fourth world.

 

[Guest]

I'm joining the fourth world.

Will you be allowed membership?

 

[Guest]

I doubt it.

 

[Guest]

Bangers and machinations

From Riverdance to the Famine - the Disneyfication of Ireland's heritage continues apace. Now it's James Joyce's turn as the centenary of Bloomsday is marked by a mass fry-up in Dublin. Is commercialism killing Irish culture? - Sean O'Hagan, June 13, 2004, The Observer

"Someone in academia has probably already written a research paper on the symbolism of the sausage in James Joyce's Ulysses . The humble banger appears most famously at the start of Chapter Two, as Leopold Bloom prepares breakfast for himself, and his wife Molly, in one of the greatest passages of naturalistic prose ever written on the subject of food, and the fry-up in particular. Bloom is partial to fried offal or, as Joyce memorably puts it, 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls', particularly 'grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine'. A visit to the butcher's in search of a breakfast kidney sets Bloom meditating on sausages - and sex.

'He halted before Dlugaz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages... he stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter... calling the items from a slip in her hand... And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips.' As he orders a pork kidney, Bloom's thoughts remain with the girl and 'her moving hams'. Later still, as he begins his day-long odyssey through Dublin, he muses, 'How did she walk with her sausages?' "
...
Krikey: "Though I am reliably informed that there used to be a Dublin city centre cafe that served both a Beckett burger and a Wilde burger - the first a weight-watchers' offering sans salad, relish or fries, the second a more decadent affair with all of the above in abundance..."
...
"Now, to the horror of many intellectuals, it is James Joyce's turn to be repackaged and mass marketed. That process begins with the aforementioned 'Traditional Denny's Centenary Bloomsday Breakfast', which, despite its tortuously constructed moniker, is neither traditional nor Joycean. Instead, it comprises, not mutton kidneys, but a full Irish fry-up with, as the novelist John Banville witheringly puts it, 'that quintessential Irish accompaniment - hash browns'. In this instance, God - or indeed Joyce - is emphatically not in the details."
...
"It would seem, then, that Joyce's great masterpiece continues to polarise opinion 82 years after its publication, though in a way that could hardly have been predicted by anyone, much less the author himself. Where once it shocked the moral guardians of the old priest-ridden, repressed Ireland, it now seems somehow symbolic of the new Ireland's less traumatic, but still ongoing, attempts to define itself. Its symbolic importance remains undeniable even as it remains largely unread. How many revellers will know, for instance, that Joyce chose 16 June because that was the day, as Maddox explains: 'Nora took Joyce down to Ringsend and, how shall I put it, gave him manual relief. She is present in the day in a subversive and liberated way.'

Perhaps unsurprisingly, amid all the events held in his name on this new democratised, mass-marketed Bloomsday, there is barely a nod towards the erotic in Ulysses , no celebration of Joyce the sexual subversive, the unrepentant pervert. For all its newfound freedoms, the new Ireland remains remarkably similar to the old one in that aspect at least. A century on, we must look, like Leopold Bloom before us, to the humble sausage - 'the shiny links packed with forcemeat' - as the lone and unlikely signifier of Joycean sexual desire. But that, I would hazard a guess, is an irony lost on the marketing men at Denny's."

full article

 

[Guest]

I know at least one person is keeping up with this thread.

Dublin Hosts Monster Fry - Up to Mark 'Bloomsday' By REUTERS, June 13, 2004

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Breakfast was without question the most important meal of the day in Dublin on Sunday as thousands flocked to the city's main thoroughfare for free fry-ups in honor of one of literature's most famous meals.

The cholesterol-fest on Dublin's historic O'Connell Street commemorated the meal enjoyed by Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce's masterpiece "Ulysses,'' before he set off on his epic walk around the city on June 16, 1904.

For logistical reasons the organizers of the "ReJoyce Dublin 2004'' festival decided to hold the big breakfast ahead of the "Bloomsday'' centenary, which will be marked by further celebrations on Wednesday.

Thousands of Joyceans -- academics, writers and tourists -- are descending on Dublin to pay homage to a book which many consider to be the greatest novel in the English language and a landmark in Western art.

On Sunday 10,000 Joyce fans were mainly offered sausages, bacon, blood pudding and tomatoes crammed into large bread rolls -- rather tame compared to the diet of the offal-loving Bloom.

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,'' Joyce wrote. "He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.''

Nutrition expert Margot Brennan said Bloom's diet could have had serious implications for his health. :Good old Leopold would definitely have been an Irish Heart Foundation candidate by the time he was finished, I would think,'' she said.

Bloom kicked off his day enjoying "the toothsome pliant meat'' of fried pork kidneys, which were also on offer on Sunday along with vegetarian alternatives. More than 50 cooks manned frying pans in makeshift canteens along the thoroughfare.

Stilt-walkers, fire-eaters and acrobats roamed the street, while barber-shop quartets serenaded the breakfasting public, many of whom had dressed up in Edwardian garb.

"We came over from England for the weekend and this is definitely the highlight,'' said tourist Veronica Miller. "It's marvellous -- it gives a real sense of what Edwardian Dublin would have been like on a sunny summer morning.''

But what would Joyce, who left his native city at the age of 20 and famously dismissed Dubliners as "the most hopeless and inconsistent race of charlatans I have ever come across,'' have made of the festivities?

"I think he would have been thrilled because he felt unrecognized for so long,'' said renowned Joyce scholar and member of the Irish senate David Norris, sporting full Edwardian costume complete with boater hat.

Dermod Lynskey, dressed as the writer in a black suit and hat and wearing trademark round-lensed Joycean spectacles, said he hoped the event would popularize Bloomsday. "Until now the academics have made Joyce an elitist pursuit,'' he said.

Canadian visitor Keith Wilton confessed he had had trouble with Joyce's daunting prose: "I think I got to around page 60 and then gave up.''

 

[Guest]

NY Times Original Review

May 28, 1922 - James Joyce's Amazing Chronicle by Dr. JOSEPH COLLINS

A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend "Ulysses," James Joyce's new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce's message.

That he has a message there can be no doubt. He seeks to tell the world of the people that he has encountered in the forty years of sentient existence; to describe their conduct and speech and to analyze their motives, and to relate the effect the "world," sordid, turbulent, disorderly, with mephitic atmosphere engendered by alcohol and the dominant ecclesiasticism of his country, had upon him, an emotional Celt, an egocentric genius, whose chief diversion and keenest pleasure is self-analysis and whose lifelong important occupation has been keeping a notebook in which has been recorded incident encountered and speech heard with photographic accuracy and Boswellian fidelity. Moreover, he is determined to tell it in a new way. Not in straightforward, narrative fashion, with a certain sequentiality of idea, fact, occurrence, in sentence, phrase and paragraph that is comprehensible to a person of education and culture, but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions of sacred literature, in carefully metered prose with studied incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the initiated and profoundly versed can understand- in short, by means of every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or even magician, can play with the English language.

Before proceeding with a brief analysis of "Ulysses," and a comment on its construction and content, I wish to characterize it. "Ulysses" is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and "The Brothers Karamazof" Dostoyevsky. It is likely that there is no one writing English today that could parallel Joyce's feat, and it is also likely that few would care to do it if they were capable. That statement requires that it be said at once that Mr. Joyce has seen fit to use words and phrases that the entire world has covenanted and people in general, cultured and uncultured, civilized and savage, believer and heathen, have agreed shall not be used, and which are base, vulgar, vicious and depraved. Mr. Joyce's reply to this is: "This race and this country and this life produced me- I shall express myself as I am."

An endurance test should always be preceded by training. It requires real endurance to finish "Ulysses." The best training for it is careful perusal of "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," the volume published six or seven years ago, which revealed Mr. Joyce's capacity to externalize his consciousness, to set it down in words. It is the story of his own life before he exiled himself from his native land, told with uncommon candor and extraordinary revelation of thought, impulse and action, many an incident of a nature and texture which most persons do not feel free to reveal, or which they do not feel it is decent and proper to confide to the world.

The salient facts of Mr. Joyce's life with which the reader who seeks to comprehend his writings should be familiar are as follows: He was one of many children of South Ireland Catholic parents. In his early childhood his father has not yet dissipated his small fortune and he was sent to Clongowes Woods, a renowned Jesuit college near Dublin, and remained there until it seemed to his parents that he should decide whether or not he had a vocation, that is, whether he felt within himself, in his soul, a desire to join the order. After some religious experiences he lost his faith, then his patriotism, and held up those with whom he formerly worshipped to ridicule, and his country and her aspirations to contempt. He continued his studies in the University of Dublin notwithstanding the sordid poverty of his family. After graduation he decided to study medicine, and in fact he did pursue such studies for two or three years, on of them in the medical school of the University of Paris. Eventually he became convinced that medicine was not his vocation, even though funds were available for him to continue his studies, and he decided to take up singing as a profession, having a phenomenally beautiful tenor voice.

These three novitiate furnished him with all the material he had used in the four volumes he has published. Matrimony, parentage, ill health and a number of other factors put an end to his musical ambitions and for several years previous to the outbreak of the war he gained his daily bread by teaching the Austrians of Trieste English and Italian, having a mastery of the latter language that would flatter a Padovian professor. The war drove him to the haven of the expatriate, Switzerland, and for four years he taught German, Italian, French, English to any one in Berne who had time, ambition and money to acquire a new language. Since the armistice he has lived in Paris, finishing "Ulysses," his magnum opus, which he says and believes represents everything that he has to say and which ill advisedly he attempted to submit to the world through the columns of The Little Review. It is now published "privately for subscribers only."

As a boy Mr. Joyce's favorite hero was Odysseus. He approved of his subterfuge for evading military service, but envied him the companionship of Penelope, all his latent vengeance was vicariously satisfied by reading of the way in which he revenged himself on Palamedes, while the craftiness and resourcefulness of the final artificer of the siege of Troy made him permanently big with admiration and affection. But it was the ten years of his hero's life after he had eaten of the lotus plant that wholly seduced Mr. Joyce, child and man, and appeased his emotional soul. As years went by he identified many of his own experiences with those of the slayer of Polyphemus and the favorite of Pallas-Athene; so, after careful preparation and planning he decided to write a new Odyssey, to whose surge and thunder the whole world would listen. In early life Mr. Joyce had definitely identified himself as Dedalus, the Athenian architect, sculptor and magician, This probably took place about the time that he became convinced he was not the child of his parents but a person of distinction and they his foster parents. A very common occurrence in potential psychopaths and budding geniuses. It is as Stephen Dedalus that Mr. Joyce carries on in "Ulysses." Indeed, the book is the record of his thoughts, antics, vagaries, and more particularly his actions, and of Leopold Bloom, a Hungarian Jew, who has lost his name and his religion, a sensuous rags and tatters Hamlet, and who took to wife one Marion Tweedy, the daughter of a non-commissioned officer stationed in Gibraltar.

Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, brilliant man who has made it a lifelong habit to jot down every thought that he has had, whether he is depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful, hungry or satiated, and likewise to put down what he has seen or heard others do or say. It is not unlikely that every thought that Mr. Joyce has had, every experience he has ever encountered, every person he has ever met, one might almost say everything he has ever read in sacred or profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscurities and in the frankness of "Ulysses." If personality is the sum total of all one's experiences, all one's thoughts and emotions, inhibitions and liberations, acquisitions and inheritances, then it may be truthfully said "Ulysses" comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence. Rousseau's "Confessions," Amiel's "Diary," Bashkirtseff's vaporings and Cassanova's "Memoirs" are first readers compared with it.

He is the only individual that the writer has encountered outside of a madhouse who has let flow from his pen random and purposeful thoughts just as they are produced. He does not seek to give them orderliness, sequence or interdependence. His literary output would seem to substantiate some of Freud's contentions. The majority of writers, practically all, transfer their conscious, deliberate thought to paper. Mr. Joyce transfers the product of his unconscious mind to paper without submitting it to the conscious mind, or, if he submits it, it is to receive encouragement and approval, perhaps even praise. He hold with Freud that the unconscious mind represents the real man, the man of nature, and the conscious mind the artificed man, the man of convention, of expediency, the slave of Mrs. Grundy, the sycophant of the church, the plastic puppet of society and state: For him the movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. "Peasant's heart" psychologically is the unconscious mind. When a master technician of words and phrases sets himself the task of revealing the product of the unconscious mind of a moral monster, a pervert and an invert, an apostate to his race and his religion, the simulacrum of a man who has neither cultural background nor personal self-respect, who can neither be taught by experience nor lessoned by example, as Mr. Joyce has done in drawing the picture of Leopold Bloom, and giving a faithful reproduction of his thoughts, purposeful, vagrant and obsessive, he undoubtedly knew full well what he was undertaking, and how unacceptable the vile contents of that unconscious mind would be to ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and how incensed they would be at having the disgusting product thrown in their faces. But that has nothing to do with that with which I am here concerned, viz., has the job been done well and is it a work of art, to which there can be only an affirmative answer.

It is particularly in one of the strangest chapters of all literature, without title, that Mr. Joyce succeeds in displaying the high-water mark of his art. Dedalus and Bloom have passed in review on a mystic stage, all their intimates and enemies, all their detractors and sycophants, the scum of Dublin and the spawn of the devil. Mr. Joyce resurrects Saint Walpurga, galvanizes her into life after twelve centuries of death intimacy with Beelzebub, and substituting a squalid section of Dublin for Brocken, proceeds to depict a festival, with the devil as host. The guests in the flesh and of the spirit have still many of their distinctive corporeal possessions, but the reactions of life no longer exist. The chapter is replete with wit, humor, philosophy, learning, knowledge of human frailties and human indulgences, especially with the breaks of morality off, and alcohol or congenital deficiency takes them off for most of the characters. It reeks of lust and of filth, but Mr. Joyce says that life does, and the morality that he depicts is the one he knows. In this chapter is compressed all of the author's experiences, all his determinations and unyieldingness, most of the incidents that have given a persecutory twist to his mind, made him an exile from his native land and deprived him of the courage to return to it. He does not hesitate to bring in the ghost of his mother whom he had been accused of killing because he would not kneel down and pray for her when she was dying and to question her of the verity of the accusation. But he does not repent even when she returns from the spirit world. In fact, the capacity for repentance is left out of Mr. Joyce's make-up. It is just as impossible to convince Mr. Joyce that he is wrong about anything on which he has made up his mind as it is to convince a paranoiac of the unreality of his false beliefs, or a jealous woman of the groundlessness of her suspicions. It may be said that this chapter does not represent life, but I venture to say that it represents life with photographic accuracy as Mr. Joyce has seen it and lived it, and that every scene has come within his gaze and that every speech has been heard or said, and every sentiment experienced or thrust upon him. It is a mirror held up to life, which we could sincerely wish and devoutly pray that we were spared.

In another connection Mr. Joyce once said:

My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? No honorable and sincere man has given up his life, his youth and his affections to Ireland from the days of Tome to those of Parnell but the Irish sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

He has been saying that for many years, and tries to make his actions conform with his words. However, every day of his life, if the mails do not fail, he gets a Dublin newspaper and reads it with the dutifulness with which a priest reads his breviary.

Mr. Joyce had the good fortune to be born with a quality which the world calls genius. Nature exacts a penalty, a galling income tax from geniuses, and as a rule she co-endows them with unamenability to law and order. Genius and reverence are antipodal, Galileo being the exception to the rule. Mr. Joyce has no reverence for organized religion, for conventional morality, for literary style or form. He has no conception of the word obedience, and he bends the knee neither to God nor man. It is very interesting, and most important to have the revelations of such a personality, to have them first-hand and not dressed up. Heretofore our only avenues of information of such personalities led through the asylums for the insane, for it was there that such revelations as those of Mr. Joyce were made without reserve. Lest any one should construe this statement to be a subterfuge on my part to impugn the sanity of Mr. Joyce, let me say at once that he is one of the sanest geniuses that I have ever known.

He had the profound misfortune to lose his faith and he cannot rid himself of the obsession that the Jesuits did it for him, and he is trying to get square with them by saying disagreeable things about them and holding their teachings up to scorn and obloquy. He was so unfortunate as to be born without a sense of duty, of service, of conformity to the state, to the community, to society, and he is convinced that he ought to tell about it, just as some who have experienced a surgical operation feel that they must relate minutely all the details of it, particularly at dinner parties and to casual acquaintances.

Finally, I venture a prophecy: Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read "Ulysses" through, and of the ten who succeed in doing so, five of them will do it as a tour de force. I am probably the only person, aside from the author, that has ever read it twice from beginning to end. I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in ten years at the Neurological Institute. There are other angles at which "Ulysses" can be viewed profitably, but they are not many.

Stephen Dedalus in his Parisian tranquility (if the modern Minos has been given the lethal warm bath) will pretend indifference to the publication of a laudatory study of "Ulysses" a hundred years hence, but he is as sure to get it as Dostoyevsky, and surer than Mallarme.

 

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One day to go (in the states)

June 13, 1954 - NY Times

50 Years After Bloomsday By SEAN O'FAOLAIN

James Joyce lived in Dublin from his birth in 1882 until his student days were over in 1902. After a brief period in Paris, he again lived there until 1904, when he left it, as he thought, for good. He actually came back on a last visit in 1912--and never saw the city again. In his first novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," he told his life story up to 1902, his twentieth year. In that novel he seems at first reading, to do no more than describe what it was like to be a schoolboy and a university student in Ireland at the turn of the century, centering the whole thing around the rebellious young intellectual whom he calls Stephen Dedalus.

It soon becomes clear, however, that the book is not so much fiction as autobiography and that what it is really all about is the painful metaphysical struggle or religious revolt that fashioned Joyce's soul in youth and first manhood. The chief actor speaks though his own mask. Its realism, like the "realism" of so many modern authors, is merely a device to lure us into the subjective caverns of his most secret being.

When he was finishing that novel, in 1914, Joyce must have known that his soul was fashioned forever. But when at the end of "A Portrait" Stephen Dedalus took flight from Dublin in rage and arrogant disgust at its provincialism, its hypocrisy and its intellectual inadequacy his creator (and Doppelganger) was not aged 20. He was 32, and a great deal had happened to him, including marriage, in the intervening twelve years. Much of what happened to him in those years was to go into "Ulysses"--much and a great deal more, since that book was not published until he was 40. But it went into "Ulysses" indirectly. He was not being autobiographical now, or not in the straightforward way of a "A Portrait." He had become far more objective and detached, though far from wholly so. Where "A Portrait" remembers "Ulysses" distills. If we want to find the autobiographical inspiration we have to read behind the context. Everything is patent and expressed in "A Portrait." Everything is runic and secreted in "Ulysses."

The reason is simple. It is that in point of date "Ulysses" moves only two years forward from "A Portrait." For however objective and detached Joyce had become between the ages of 20 and 40, however keenly he could now employ irony and self-mockery, he never did manage to free his soul from all that he had abandoned in his search for freedom, least of all from his country and his religion. He was tied to the country that gnawed his vitals. He might declare himself free of it all, he might live in Trieste, Zurich or Paris--the only place and the only years that meant anything to him were Dublin and the bitter years in which he knew it.

So, he compressed his adult experience of life back into one single day in that city of which he could have said with Saint Augustine, Nec tecum nec sine tecum vivere possum. The chosen day was Thursday, June 16, 1904. Only with one character did he come anywhere near to getting free of himself (though even there not completely)--the Jew, Leopold Bloom. Bloom is Ulysses, wandering homeless about his world, which is Dublin, obsessed by thoughts of his wife, his hearth and his son. Wherefore June 16 has ever since become known to all lovers of "Ulysses" as Bloomsday, the feast day of the acknowledged high priest of modern fiction.

Why did Joyce pick on June 16? Nobody knows. It may be that since he wanted to reveal the essence of common, average, undistinguished human nature he chose the most common and uneventful day he could find in the almanacs--a day on which the Dublin newspapers and gossips had nothing of international importance to report--no outbreak of war, no Crippen murder, no assassination, no nothing. We may be sure that if anything of this order had happened on the day previous he would have made it part of the consciousness of his Dubliners. Which may be why he did not choose the 17th June instead of the 16th; because on that day the newspapers would have had to report, and Dubliners have had to note, that the Russian Governor General of Finland had been assassinated in Helsinki, and that the Russian Vladivostok squadron had sunk three Jap transports in the Japan Sea. On the 16th, Dubliners could forget (if they ever much adverted to) the Russo-Japanese War.

He did mention the one startling item of news that the Dublin papers reported that morning: the burning of the pleasure ship General Slocum in the East River, New York, with the loss of over a thousand women and children. The only public event of the 16th which would have been of first-rate interest to Dubliners he not only mentions but mentions eleven times; and makes it a central part of Bloom's misadventures: the fact that Throwaway, a rank outsider, won the Ascot Gold Cup that afternoon at 20 to 1, carrying 9 stone and 7 lbs. It was, in short, a day that had no place in history until he made it history.

Others have suggested that he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, or that his courtship of Nora reached a climax that day. So far this is no more than a guess. All we know is that it meant something to him. In the Eumaeus episode he makes a conundrum out of it when a character named W. B. Murphy from Carrigloe in Queenstown Harbor opens his shirt to show the figure 16 tattooed on his chest above an anchor (symbol of hope) and a young man's sideface "looking frowningly rather." But when somebody asks this man, who is variously referred to as "the mariner," "the sailor," "the soi-disant sailor," "the old sea-dog," "the exhibitor" and "the Skibereen father," what the number stands for, Mr. Murphy smiles an enigmatic Joycean smile and does not reply.

One natural result follows from the fact that it was Nobody's Day. Whatever did happen on it made it Everyman's Day. The death of a friend was not overshadowed by the death of a King-- Paddy Dignam's funeral was as important as anything else in the world on that sunny day of June fifty years ago. The seduction of Marion Bloom by Blazes Boylan was something that had never happened before. The birth of Mina Purefoy's child becomes a primal miracle all over again. When Mr. Deasy writes a letter to the papers about Foot and Mouth Disease public opinion speaks like an oracle.

We have to remind ourselves that all such incidents were invented by Joyce. No Paddy Dignam was buried in Glasnevir that day; no Mr. Deasy wrote to the papers; if an original of Boylan lay with an original of Mrs. Bloom, who could have known of it? Joyce, in inventing and filling out his typical Bloomsday, did what philosophers say all true creators should do--he played about with the accidents of life to reveal its essence, imaginatively. The realism, as usual, is a fake.

Few would have admitted this when "Ulysses" first appeared and not everybody would admit it now. His Bloomsday Book has been read with amusement at its scabrous satire, admiration for its unique technical skill, a fascinated horror at its revelation of male and female grossness; but how many would agree that it is the imaginative essence of anything? How many would not be more ready to insist that the accidentals of life have been allowed to smother the essence of reality? Life they will say is not like that--thinking of the brothel scenes, Mr. Bloom in the outdoor lavatory, Mrs. Bloom in bed, Gertie MacDowell's seduction of Mr. Bloom. Or if such things do happen, surely, they will say, much more happens in life. Where is the nobility of life, its common decency, its idealism, its romance? The answer is to be found by collocating "A Portrait" and "Ulysses." The Stephen of "Ulysses" is the young esthete who has woken up.

At the end of "A Portrait," we remember, Stephen-James-Dedalus-Joyce had fled from Dublin on the wings of pride, a radiant young Lucifer in star-light floating behind him a trailing banner inscribed Non Serviam. (Barring the Non Serviam we may recall that Hemingway took the same airplane from his base, dropped the same ties of place and tradition.) When Stephen-James bought that ticket to Paris at the end of his period of revolt (single ticket, steerage class, Newhaven-Dieppe) all he carried in his satchel was his genius ad his pain. That pain was chiefly the pain of loss and its ache pulses all through "Ulysses"--the agenbite of in- wit, the remorse of conscience whose keen tooth is every man's sense of bleeding sap when once, in anger, he cuts his native roots forever.

Ireland is not a country that any Irishman easily forgets. The loss or denial of his religion leaves in him an ache of emptiness. If anyone wants to feel what that ache meant to Joyce, all he need do is listen to, let us say, the Domine Deus or the Cum Sancto Spiritu of Bach's Mass in B minor and imagine Joyce, hearing that music in after years, feeling: "This is what I do not believe, this is what I have lost." Bloomsday is not only Bloom's day; it is Stephen's dark night of the soul; and I believe that these two are in face a composite character--Stoom; Blephen, as in one place they are called.

"History," says Stephen, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." And does not this mean much the same thing that Albert Camus means in "L'Homme Revolte," when he says that all "artistic creation is both a demand for unity and a refection of the world"? As he says, also, that every individualist--and who was a more total individualist than Joyce?--must deny reality in order to affirm his own existence?

Stephen's radiant revolt in "A Portrait" could only have ended in "Ulysses" in mockery and nostalgia and despair at the realization of how much he had rejected, how much denied, how much lost. Old men die (Paddy Dignam), children are born to replace them (Master Purefoy), wives are unfaithful (Molly Bloom), sons are cruel to their parents (Stephen to his mother), friends betray (Buck Mulligan), and it is all a tremendous sidesplitting joke until the heart breaks and Stephen raises his ash-plant and shatters the chandelier at the sight of his mother rising from the grave. "With me all or not at all!" he shrieks. "Non serviam!"

"Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry."

"Ulysses" is a very funny book. It is a very real portrait of a city. It is also one of the most honest books ever written--and one of the saddest. It is a book without end; that is to say that Bloomsday is outside of history and therefore outside of Time, and therefore a book without mercy. For Time, as Blake said, in one of his most magnificent phrases, is the mercy of eternity.

Mr. O'Faolain, Irish novelist and biographer, recently published "Autumn in Italy."