BS: Any Joyceans out there?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,JTT
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 04:05 AM

Joyce did go 'back there' to found the Volta cinema, for instance. But if I had Joyce's family I'd keep well away from where they were too!

Travel was different then. Very expensive. Joyce mostly sat in Paris and wrote, and dined expensively. He'd escaped a nightmare of poverty and misery, and found a milieu in which he could be happy.

Weelittledrummer, are you conflating the narrative and the dialogue? Your grandparents may not have sounded like the free-flowing narrative, but probably used some of the various varieties of Dublin language Joyce quotes in the dialogue of Ulysses.

That article by James T Farrell is here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/farrell-on-joyce.html

Something funny happened to the clicky.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 12:14 AM

I think you can see as much impatience and anger with the Irish (admittedly worked in with compassion) in his work as anything. Also he didn't go back there all that much, as I remember - though I am willing to stand corrected.

Ulysses, I think, has plenty of difficult passages. My grandparents came from turn of the century Dublin and they sure as hell never sounded much like that. Their words never ate each other!

This isn't to deny the work's greatness - after all you often find yourself in the theatre having listened to a passionately delivered piece of shakespearian dialogue, and you think to yourself - what the hell was that about now!

You know that bit in the Martello tower where the mad English chap who sees panthers in his sleep, says that he thinks many of Ireland's problems are due to England. I always think that's one the great unwritten lines of dialogue. It doesn't require comment - you can just hear the Irishman thinking - dazzling insight there mate!

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 11:55 PM

Hmmm ... "This page cannot be found." Do you want to try another way?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Rapparee
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 11:53 PM

James T. Farrell on James Joyce and nationalism, 1944.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 11:39 PM

That sounds like old Leopold himself, if I'm not mistaken ...

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: paddymac
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 10:07 PM

Here's a fun poem by JJ that we get a great audience response from. It takes a bit of work to capture the rhythm(?) of it, but well worth the effort.

POST ULIXEM SCRIPTUM
A Poem by James Joyce

Man dear, did you never hear of buxom Molly Bloom at all,
As plump an Irish Beauty, Sir, as any Levi-Blumenthal?
If she sat in the viceregal box, Tim Healy'd have no room at all,
But curl up in a corner at a glance from her eye.

The tale of her ups and downs would aisy fill a handybook
That would cover the two worlds at once from Gibralter 'cross to Sandy Hook.
But now that tale is told, ochone, I've lost my daring dandy look:
Since Molly Bloom has left me alone for to cry.

Man dear, I remember when my roving time was troubling me
We picnicked fine in storm or shine in France and Spain and Hungary
And she said I'd be her first and last while the wine I poured went bubbling free
Now every male you meet with has a finger in her pie.
Man dear, I remember with all the heart and brain of me
I arrayed her for the bridal but, O, she proved the bane of me.
With more puppies sniffing round her than the wooers of Penelope.
She's left me on her doorstep like a dog for to die.

My left eye is wake and his neighbor full of water, Man.
I cannot see the lass I limned as Ireland's gamest Daughter, man,
When I hear her lovers tumbling in their thousands for to court her, man.
If I was sure I'd not be seen I'd sit down and cry.
May you live, may you love like this gaily spinning earth of ours,
And every morn a gallant son awake you with new wealth of gold
But if I cling like a child to the clouds that are your petticoats
O Molly, handsome Molly, sure you won't let me die.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 09:35 PM

(Some interesting, thought-provoking stuff there, WLD - keep it coming!)

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 08:43 PM

(That last being a response to Riginslinger's last).

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 08:37 PM

Okay - although I don't see that as quite the same as being 'comfortable' with either the 'conflict' as a whole or, as WLD put it, "with strident anti-Englishness or Irish nationalism as such". Joyce seems to have been skeptical of political movements and organizations generally. Which isn't to say that he was necessarily content with the status quo, but that he didn't see it as his role to take stands and identify with causes. If you take 'comfortable' to mean that he would have had to negotiate some sort of stance in his own mind that he and those around him could live with, then I would agree.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Fergie
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 08:22 PM

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Yeap! that the way I'll be going on Blooms Day, with a belly full of Geniusess is good for you and four quarks fur Muster Marks.

Furges

Now where did I leave my straw boater??????????????? Ahha now I remumber I paked id wid me strame of consciousness Ah! Molly MOlly MOLLy ate yur hart out

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,JTT
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 08:20 PM

I wonder is the Pearse story true? After all, the usual Irish word for thunder, tóirneach, isn't that different from 'thunder' in English. It sounds a bit of a makey-uppy.

As for the supposed difficulty of Ulysses - it's written in achingly nostalgic detail about Joyce's hometown, Dublin; a lot of the dialogue is written in turn-of-the-(20th)century Dublin slang; and it is (it seems to me) an idealised portrait of Joyce's father and himself making their way around the city.

Finnegans Wake is another matter - here, he got comically serious about playing with languages, and you'd need to know as many languages as Joyce, and to have the same love for wordplay as that wordsmith, to read it, understand it and enjoy it - apart from his occasional leaps into lucidity in the course of the story.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Riginslinger
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 08:08 PM

"Care to elaborate, Riginslinger?"

          Only that he was using Ireland as a microcosm of the world, and the conflict was a large part of that. And he was Irish, so it's hard to imagine that he could divorce himself from the conflict.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 06:56 PM

The trouble with lit. crit.s and Ibsen, Eliot and Joyce is that they get bundled together as the modernists.

And people think Ikea furniture, Cubism and Sigmund Freud. Woolly thinking!

If you look at those early collections of Joyce poems - I think its more possible to understand him as being just a few years after Lionel Johnson, Pater and Wilde and all those guys. Words as exotic jewels to be polished and set in poems.

And in some ways - doesn't this attitude persist right to the end - think of all the hours Samuel Beckett and JJ spend agonising over the sequence of words in Finegans Wake, or those damn nearly unreadable passages of Ulysses, where we are told the words are eating each other.

In short, he is a wordspinner of dazzling capability. And when it works - he can convey truths of great complexity.

In a way - that is what real modernism is about in my opinion. You see it in the folkmusic world all the time. People blether on misguidedly about 'the tradition' and it looms very important in some peoples appreciation. But really writers like Leonard Cohen and Ewan MacColl are brother chip - they are both looking for the stunning sequence of words, the apposite metaphor or simile. Wordspinners.

Think of MacColl's phrase about 'the trembling heart of a captive bird', or Leonard Cohen's 'you hair on the pillow like a sleepy golden storm'. They are writing to very similar literary patterns - they are both trying to achieve something similar. they are what Raymond Chandler calls 'playing false with the language' - they are trying to draw attention to the language - rather than meaning.

In a way the true inheritors of the lean style of the Childe ballads are guys like Woody Guthrie, John Lennon and Jarvis Cocker - whose words bristle with an awkward desire to communicate. No doubt subsequent generations of folksingers will polish the works and take away the awkwardness!

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 04:08 PM

Care to elaborate, Riginslinger?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Riginslinger
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 03:59 PM

"'I don't think he was very comfortable with strident anti-Englishness or Irish nationalism as such.'"


                     It's hard to imagine how he could not have been.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 02:17 PM

WLD:

"I'm not calling or abusing you."

Okay - I tend to be a little touchy about my dunderheadedness ...

"He was a complex and clever man"

Very much so.

"and his attitudes are not to be encapsulated in simplistic statements so I won't try."

Okay.

"You must read yourself and form your own opinions."

Have done so. Always open to new input, though.

"If I gave you an opinion - it would only be an opinion, and I love and admire his work, but I am in no way an expert."

Nor I.

"He deserves better people than me to expound on him."

Hmmm ... it's your language too!

"I don't think he was very comfortable with strident anti-Englishness or Irish nationalism as such."

Yes, that's fairly clear in his writing.

"Joyce was very comfortable with drinking."

That's putting mildly, is it not? I'm not sure it's right, though, to equate Stephen D. with Joyce, even though he certainly seems to be based on Joyce.

"He was musing on the etymology of the words and how some of them had different roots.
'ale' I think he saw as English."

Yes - I was just trying to pursue the logic you had been using in relation to the previous couple of sentences. As I saw it.

"I think it had more to do with his sensual approach to language than marking out his turf."

That strikes me as an astute observation - who said he "deserves better people" than you, etc.?

"... we can't really [say] 'his Irish tongue' was at a disadvantage."

Agreed - but I was only giving my rough interpretation of what Stephen Daedalus was saying. I have not said anything about what the mature Joyce may or may not have thought about his own relationship with the English language, nor about what I may feel was Joyce's relationship with the English language.

Thanks for the anecdotes, etc. Enjoy reading them; many years since I read the Ellman bio., and I see I've forgotten a bit.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Captain Ginger
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 01:59 PM

I don;t know how comfortable poor Sam Beckett was with Joyce's drinking though, as he often had to carry the old boy upstairs to his Paris flat after a night on the sauce!
He did leave us "The Brown and The Yellow Ale," however.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 01:34 PM

Joyce was very comfortable with drinking. He was musing on the etymology of the words and how some of them had different roots.
'ale' I think he saw as English.

I think it had more to do with his sensual approach to language than marking out his turf.

In some ways , his entire life's work was a lovesong to Dublin - altough that is to dimisnish it, because what he wrote was not just a picture postcard of the place - it was for all humanity. he was nothing if not ambitious in the scope of his work.

And as he was possibly only just behind Shakespeare as the greatest literary genius to to use as his means of expression the English language - we can't really 'his Irish tongue' was at a disadvantage.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 01:14 PM

Of course he learned many languages - I feel sure he could have mastered one more.

for the Pearse story I quote Richard Ellman(p61) - Joyce (and Wilde's) biographer.

It starts of by talking of his friendship with a student called George Clancy and continues:-

'Clancy was to end as a victim of the Black and Tans, murdered while he was the Mayor or Limerick. His unfortunate death was appropriate in that, even as a young man, Clance subscribed to every aspect of the national movement. He helped form a branch of the Gaelic league at University College, and persuaded his friends, including even Joyce for a time, to take lessons in Irish. Joyce gave them up because Patrick Pearse, the instructor, found it necessary to to Exalt Irish by denigrating English, inparticular denounced the word 'Thunder' - a favourite of Joyce's - as an example of verbal inadequacy.'

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Captain Ginger
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 12:48 PM

I think Joyce was able to transcend nationalism both British and Irish and send it up beautifully in his work - look at the way he has the term 'West Briton' hissed in The Dead, and his handling of the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. I would find it hard to believe that Joyce was unable to learn Irish as he seems to have had a natural ear. Both James and Nora seemed as comfortable conversing in French or Italian as in English during their sojourns in Trieste and Paris, while the Wake reveals an extraordanary love of language and a remarkable vocabulary.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 12:15 PM

Source of the Pearse story, weelittledrummer?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 12:07 PM

I'm not calling or abusing you. He was a complex and clever man and his attitudes are not to be encapsulated in simplistic statements so I won't try. You must read yourself and form your own opinions.

If I gave you an opinion - it would only be an opinion, and I love and admire his work, but I am in no way an expert. He deserves better people than me to expound on him.

I don't think he was very comfortable with strident anti-Englishness or Irish nationalism as such. At one point he went for lessons in the Irish language and Padraig Pearse was the teacher, and apprently they didn't hit it off too well.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 09:12 AM

By the way, the composers of the webpage from which bobad quoted seem to share my flawed understanding. The full of bobad's post is quoted from that page (excepting the 'blue clicky'!), and it is prefaced by the comment that "Joyce nevertheless remained committed to English as his literary language of choice. There is, however, evidence that at first he may have felt uncomfortable writing in the language of Ireland's conqueror. ... " And it is followed by: "Whether or not Joyce had the same reaction Stephen did ... "

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 08:54 AM

WLD: You've lost me - are you saying that the quotation in question really has nothing to do with language and everything to do with priesthood? And if so, what is your point in reference to "Other words such as ale" - that Stephen feels he will never be comfortable drinking?

And your final comment - "one would have thought" - seems to imply that the previous comment - "However, Joyce's love for and committment to, writing in the English language is what his life was primarily about" - necessarily negates the interpretation I have given to (the character) Stephen Daedalus's thoughts, and further seems to imply that only a complete dunderhead would not see that. Well, I'm willing to claim the title of 'complete dunderhead', so would you care to expand?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 01:32 AM

As Bobad says, In Portrait of the Artist, Stephen has the interview towards the end with the 'hangman priest'. The priest is English, and for Stephen - part of him realising that the priesthood would be spiritual death for him comes when the the priest muses over the word 'tundish', the origin one of them which he doesn't recognise. Other words such as ale, Stephen muses will always be an alien tongue.

However, Joyce's love for and committment to, writing in the English language is what his life was primarily about - one would have thought.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 01:07 AM

Since Tom Stoppard took home another Tony this evening, it seems appropriate to borrow a favorite little exchange from his play The Real Thing to add an aside to this discussion:

The playwright Henry is going to be on a popular radio program in which he must name eight favorite music pieces and his favorite book. His wife queries him about his progress with his list:


CHARLOTTE: Are you still doing your list?
HENRY: Mmm.
CHARLOTTE: Have you got a favourite book?
HENRY: Finnegans Wake.
CHARLOTTE: Have you read it?
HENRY: Don't be silly.

:-D

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Rapparee
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 11:58 PM

Leopold Bloom and, especially, his wife.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 08:19 PM

I suppose that would be Buck Mulligan, Blazes Boylan, et al?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Gulliver
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 07:53 PM

Is anyone else going to celebrate Bloomsday?

Yes, joining the usual gang in Dublin.

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 07:25 PM

Thank you, bobad; that is precisely the quotation I was looking for. I wasn't expecting to get it so quickly!

Slainte!

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: Rapparee
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 07:14 PM

Is anyone else going to celebrate Bloomsday?

Subject: RE: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: bobad
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 06:50 PM

In Chapter V of Portrait, Stephen Dedalus, while speaking with one of his college deans, an English priest, thinks, "The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. . . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."

http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/2000/c_n_c/c_10_20th_cent/european_modernist.htm

Subject: BS: Any Joyceans out there?
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 10 Jun 07 - 06:24 PM

Stephen Daedalus somewhere remarks to the effect that while English is his first language (my wording), it remains a foreign language, not as comfortable on his tongue as Irish would have been. Anyone know whether this is from Portrait or from Ullysses? I don't have a copy of either on hand, but I can order one or the other or both from the local library ... I'm just hoping to get a hint of where to start looking.