Week 8: Yeats - Meditations

Iconic, enduring images -> marble, bronze, / cf. change and nature - man's effects on the world

"The Tower" - enduring images
- Dilemma between the contem[plative and the active lives [Scholar / Solider]
- Old age - tied to a dog's tail (tin can - dog runs until death - a joke)
- vocabulary - WW-esque - a concious evocation of Whitman - "a humbler worm" - Whitman in a bad moment...
- "bid the muse go pack" - consolation of philosophy, "deal in abstarct things"

In his 60s, feeling his ages.

Battlements - looking over his life, works

"Making of the soul" - Preparation of life for death.

[Yeats as aristocrat of the imagination]

Ulysses - Man in the Macintosh

He's the 13th mourner at Dignam's funeral, and is mentioned a few more times through the day.
Nabokov thought that it was Joyce inserting himself in his own book, but there are two other possibilities that seem worth mentioning: Mrs Sinico's widower (from "A Painful Case") or James Clarence Mangan. Interesting. I prefer Nabokov's opinion, but there's a distinct possibility (given the source) that it was tongue-in-cheek, or N. was just playing devil's advocate, or provoking someone else who put forth a really odd idea...

The Captain Sinico hypothesis I find rather odd, to be honest - there doesn't seem to be anything in the story itself that would suggest it - not that there's much in Ulysses that gives away who the man is... Perhaps it's the lingering image of a man alone that suggests it.

The Mangan hypothesis is perhaps more convincing, but no more so than the idea of Macintosh being Joyce himself, if not for my suspicion that J wouldn't tarnish the book by putting himself in there, no matter that he'd put everything around him into the book.
Mangan: a poet, translator and essayist, well connected with the Young Ireland movement... Something of a tragic figure, he apparently was "a lonely and difficult man who suffered from mood swings, depression and irrational fears, and became a heavy drinker. His appearance was eccentric, and later in life he was often seen wearing a long cloak, green spectacles and a blond wig." So the long cloak thing was well enough known, and he died fifty or sixty years before Joyce wrote the book, so the timing's right... It'd be interesting to trawl through Joyce's letters and diaries, to see if he mentioned Mangan, and in which circumstances.

Joyce - Ulysses

So - Joyce had apparently been planning the novel for eight years before he started writing it in 1914. With Leopold Bloom as his everyman (equiv. to Ulysses), and Bloom's wife Molly the equivalent to Penelope.

The important thing to me is that while all of these parallels with The Odyssey exist and were no doubt carefully placed in the book, the only obvious thing is the title - Joyce is showing, and not telling. It does, however, set up the whole novel as a play on what has gone before.

Stephen Dedalus is the focus of the first few chapters of the book, appropriate considering his similarities to Telemachus.


Hades chapter:

cf chapter 13 (sentimentalism in excess) - this shows reality (harsh, gritty, etc) in excess. Bloom's meditation on the decomposition of the human body are pretty unsentimental

Here's a great site with schemata of the whole book - basically the important correspondences between Ulysses and The Odyssey.

From that site:

Dodder, Grand and Royal canals, Liffey: The four rivers - Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Pyriphlegethon
Cunningham: Sisyphus
Father Coffey: Cerberus
Caretaker: Hades
Daniel O'Connell: Hercules
Dignam: Elpenor
Parnell: Agamemnon
Mentor: Ajax

The mode of writing: Narration & Dialogues -> theme of incubism

Salient points / themes: the cemetary, the sacred heart, the past, the unknown man, the unconscious, heart trouble, relics, heartbreak.

The caretaker as a lasting symbol...


Also keeping in mind Joyce's fanaticism about details, here's someone who may just have too much time on his hands, determining where in the carriage everyone was sitting, assuming that the four-seater carriage seats two looking forward, two looking back - which seems a safe assumption.


This was a great source:
[Bell, Robert H. "Preparatory to Anything Else:" Introduction to Joyce's "Hades." Journal of Modern Literature XXIV, 3/4 (Summer 2001), pp. 363-499, Indiana University Press, 2002]

Week 7: Joyce's 'The Dead' => Ulysses: "Hades"

The aesthetics of the Joycean epiphany.

"Imaginative Destiny" - feel the mythic

So in Joyce - you get some sense of the everyday, but feel the Homeric parallels as a powerful force. You can appreciate it in more than just the dramatic sense.

Naturalism // Modernism // Symbolism

Luminosity - something transcendent (but still of the ordinary) - not allegory but it clearly points at something else...

"The Dead" - orchestration of consciousness (cf Woolf's Dalloway)
"The Boardinghouse" - cf Puccini's 'La Boheme' - candle and cold hands
-> imaginative participation in both.

The sense of a pattern (but one which is implicit, not contrived)

Flaubert's "mot juste" - the right word
- faithful to its surrounds, also initiates feeling, transcends without being obtrusive

'Portrait' -> imagination as a burning coal - cf "The Windhover"
(image from Shelley)

Joyce "The Classical Temper" - also the title of a great book about Ulysses

Reject Romanticism, reach a classical stasis

//Less didactic: reach an awareness of aesthetic wonder.

[heightened sense of appreciation of wonder]

Week 5: Joyce - The Dead

Apparently the title comes from a poem from Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies, written between 1807 and 1834.

Oh, ye Dead! oh, ye Dead! whom we know by the light you give
From your cold gleaming eyes, though you move like men who live.
Why leave you thus your graves,
In far off fields and waves,
Where the worm and the sea-bird only know your bed,
To haunt this spot where all
Those eyes that wept your fall,
And the hearts that wail'd you, like your own, lie dead?
It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan;
And the fair and the brave whom we lov'd on earth are gone,
But still thus even in death
So sweet the living breath
Of the fields and the flow'rs in our youth we wander9d o9er
That ere, condemn'd, we go
To freeze mid Hecla's snow,
We would taste it awhile, and think we live once more!


There's a basic annotation here. Nothing more than the basics, but I found something similar the first time I studied the story, a few years ago.


As the last story in 'Dubliners' (1914), "The Dead" was apparently written after the collection was complete, in order to uplift the work, which was seen as depressing and sombre. I also noticed that it's significantly longer than the others in the collection, and seems more mature - Joyce is perhaps reaching further with his final story, and trying to do more than just contemplate a single aspect of the "moral history of Ireland". The aspects he was examining were childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life, according to a letter he wrote.

I won't spend too long on the story, considering we covered it quite well in class (and in my first year of English), but it's probably worth picking up in the idea of Gretta (parallels with Nora Barnacle, Joyce's partner), who is from the west of Ireland, the old country. Also, Micheal Furrey is based on Micheal Bodkin (one of Nora's past lovers), who died similarly.
The idea of the old country is a resounding note in the story, I think - just a concept of something more powerful and more meaningful than the quotidian life most people are living. I think the legends and language would have been what attracted both Joyce and Yeats to the idea of the past, although Joyce was probably slightly more self-aware of his obsession, not letting it take him over.

I also found something really interesting here - a reconstruction of the story, but with musical and vocal cues throughout. It's fascinating, considering how the story flicks between conversations, dances and songs.

From that link, on epiphanies: "In his Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen Daedalus describe an epiphany in the following manner, "By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself," and a bit later Stephen concludes, "This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact; finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps up to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany" (Werner, 48). While this description seems to outline three steps in the epiphanic moment, Joyce also emphasizes the sudden and momentary nature of the epiphany--the way the integral and composite nature of the object or emotion is perceived simultaneously. Just as musical counterpoint involves the simultaneous presentation of multiple melodic statements, the literary epiphany involves the simultaneous presentation of multiple hermeneutic perspectives. Furthermore, the recognition that the literary epiphany is both a composite structure and, at the same time, one integral thing is analogous to the way counterpoint is both a combination of autonomous melodic lines and an integrated, or interdependent, whole."

NB: "Werner" refers to [Werner, Craig H. Dubliners: A Student's Companion to the Stories. Boston: Twayne, 1988.]