I became aware of the range of historical characters in Ulysses when working on the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), recently published by Cambridge University Press. Like most staff contributors, I started coming across people who featured in Ulysses , either as themselves or as models for fictional characters. For instance Con Curran, lawyer and writer, appears as himself when Stephen Dedalus remembers that he owes him 10 guineas. Curran was a college friend of Joyce’s, who took the well-known photograph of the becapped Joyce with his hands in his pockets; asked what he was thinking at that moment, Joyce said he was wondering if Con would lend him five shillings.
Showing posts with label james joyce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label james joyce. Show all posts
Sunday, June 13, 2010
ulysses in RL
Super cool Bloomsday article at the Irish Times, thanks to Crooked Timber. Here's a particularly hilarious excerpt (actually I'm not sure why I found this so funny):
Friday, July 10, 2009
writers and their crazy lives
July 4th's Writer's Almanac had a nice story of Joyce and his marriage, which is highly recommended and can be listened to here:
Highlights include:
On Nora's decision to leave Ireland with him: "The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy."
"Nora, for her part, complained that Joyce knew nothing of women. She was utterly apathetic to his writing, and remarked to an admirer of his soon after Ulysses was published: 'I've always told him he should give up writing and take up singing.'"
A somewhat unrelated link, but still in the vein of writers and their interesting lives: did you know Hemingway might have been a Soviet spy in Cuba? http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YTc2NzRkNzVhNGMwNzQ2NTU4MjEwY2MzN2QxZjdjN2U=
My favorite paragraph:
Although there is no evidence that Hemingway did any actual work for the KGB, his brushes with the clandestine world were apparently intoxicating. He remained infatuated with espionage for the next several years. Upon returning to Cuba, he organized a crew of his drinking and fishing pals and former Spanish Civil War veterans to spy on pro-German elements on the island, even obtaining some funds from the American ambassador to pay for the operation. Later derisively named “the Crook Factory” by Gellhorn, this motley crew outfitted a fishing boat with light weapons and trawled offshore looking for U-boats. While it afforded the writer an opportunity to indulge in fantasies that he was a secret operative, J. Edgar Hoover (then supervising American intelligence in Central and South America) was not impressed, telling subordinates that Hemingway was “the last man, in my estimation, to be used in any such capacity.”
(Emphasis mine)
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
James Joyce's Ulysses, the product of a "great, undisciplined talent", is celebrated today, Bloomsday
Happy Bloomsday!
June 16 is the day James Joyce's fictional protagonist Leopold Bloom makes his trip through Dublin in arguably the greatest novel of the 20th century, Ulysses. It is a monumental achievement: the book took Joyce 7 years to write and is extremely difficult to read. It is said Joyce made so many references to histories and cultures that to fully annotate the text and discover all the connections will take scholars decades more of scholarship. It is because of this that many associate Ulysses with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem which has attracted critics with its wide array of references to classical and Middle Age literature such as Dante's Divine Commedy.
In fact, Eliot himself wrote about Ulysses in an article published in The Dial in November 1923 titled, "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Here, he praises the "novel" (though he questions whether you could call it a novel, although the answer to this question is inconsequential in the context of the significance of Joyce's work of art to modern literature) principally for its parallel to The Odyssey, noting that it is the use of myth in modern writing that is of central importance to the task of "controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (177). Essentially, I believe Eliot is saying that we need to borrow stories and symbols from the past to elicit meaning from our current age. So, clearly Eliot sees something of himself in Joyce, which is probably why he praises the novel so highly: "[i]t is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art" (178).
Of course, it is important to note that the construction of parallels between the modern world and those of antiquity which the moderns aim to accomplish does not necessarily imply a continuity in history itself -- or does it? Eliot seems to leave the question unresolved here, because we could interpret history of our own time as symbols from the past with or without implying there is some 1-1 correspondence between our own time and the past. All we are saying is that our own time ought to be represented through symbols.
One passage from the article is a bit confusing to me, so I am presenting it in the hopes of soliciting some responses on what you, the reader, thinks is going through Eliot's head here:
"It is here [in the context of Joyce as an artist] that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary." What does Eliot mean by this last phrase, that it has "never before been necessary"? My only guess is that Eliot recognizes in his time period, the interwar period (which truly was a turbulent time in the history of every major intellectual discipline from art to mathematics to economics), a search for identity or some kind of understanding of what is going on in a world gripped by existential crisis. But, perhaps I'm being overdramatic.
Nevertheless, Joyce's Ulysses certainly does perform the function well, since it draws on so many references in a veritable chronicle of Irish culture and history through the thought processes of a few normal, everyday sorts of people-- including a doctor Malachi Mulligan, a teacher Stephen Dedalus, and of course an advertiser Leopold Bloom, and his wife a singer Molly Bloom. It ends with a long sentence by Molly which can be heard/viewed here (highly recommended): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNTlDesrY3w
I've included some links in this post that will direct you to some of the most interesting resources you can find on the novel and popularizations of it. Enjoy!
In fact, Eliot himself wrote about Ulysses in an article published in The Dial in November 1923 titled, "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Here, he praises the "novel" (though he questions whether you could call it a novel, although the answer to this question is inconsequential in the context of the significance of Joyce's work of art to modern literature) principally for its parallel to The Odyssey, noting that it is the use of myth in modern writing that is of central importance to the task of "controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (177). Essentially, I believe Eliot is saying that we need to borrow stories and symbols from the past to elicit meaning from our current age. So, clearly Eliot sees something of himself in Joyce, which is probably why he praises the novel so highly: "[i]t is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art" (178).
Of course, it is important to note that the construction of parallels between the modern world and those of antiquity which the moderns aim to accomplish does not necessarily imply a continuity in history itself -- or does it? Eliot seems to leave the question unresolved here, because we could interpret history of our own time as symbols from the past with or without implying there is some 1-1 correspondence between our own time and the past. All we are saying is that our own time ought to be represented through symbols.
One passage from the article is a bit confusing to me, so I am presenting it in the hopes of soliciting some responses on what you, the reader, thinks is going through Eliot's head here:
"It is here [in the context of Joyce as an artist] that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary." What does Eliot mean by this last phrase, that it has "never before been necessary"? My only guess is that Eliot recognizes in his time period, the interwar period (which truly was a turbulent time in the history of every major intellectual discipline from art to mathematics to economics), a search for identity or some kind of understanding of what is going on in a world gripped by existential crisis. But, perhaps I'm being overdramatic.
Nevertheless, Joyce's Ulysses certainly does perform the function well, since it draws on so many references in a veritable chronicle of Irish culture and history through the thought processes of a few normal, everyday sorts of people-- including a doctor Malachi Mulligan, a teacher Stephen Dedalus, and of course an advertiser Leopold Bloom, and his wife a singer Molly Bloom. It ends with a long sentence by Molly which can be heard/viewed here (highly recommended): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNTlDesrY3w
I've included some links in this post that will direct you to some of the most interesting resources you can find on the novel and popularizations of it. Enjoy!
Here are some summaries of the journey taken by Mr. Bloom through Dublin, broken down chapter-by-chapter (each chapter corresponds to roughly one hour of the day of June 16):
"Cheat's guide to Joyce's Ulysses" from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3810193.stm
"Hypertextual, self-referential edition" online: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/ulysses/
"Hypertextual, self-referential edition" online: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/ulysses/
A really outstanding comic, done very well -- this is highly recommended: http://www.ulyssesseen.com/comic/us_comic_chapters-page.html
Funny cartoon summary: http://www.dannydries.com/Ullyses/ch1-ulys.html
A more academic resource
Funny cartoon summary: http://www.dannydries.com/Ullyses/ch1-ulys.html
A more academic resource
Bloom: a film adaptation http://www.ulysses.ie/home/default.asp
Pitch n Putt with Joyce n Beckett (very funny): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8
Pitch n Putt with Joyce n Beckett (very funny): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8
And again -- Happy Bloomsday!
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