Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 1996"

"That Word Known to All Men" in Ulysses: A reconsideration

Abstract: I use the word "obvious" advisedly, despite the fact that the allu sion seems not to have been discussed in Joyce scholarship.1 Certainly by the time of the composition of "Proteus"?or even by 16 June 1904?Leaves of Grass in general and in particular "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (or, to use the title of 1860 and 1867, "A Word Out of the Sea") were well known to any student of literature.2 Indeed, the writers of the Revival period had a particular interest in Whitman, seeing in his effort to promote a distinctly American liter ature against the weight of the English tradition a precise parallel to their own situation.3 Moreover, a writer interested in creating a mod ern version of the Odyssey would have been intrigued by the epic di mensions of Whitman's poetry; the future author of the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses would have taken note of Whitman's use of musi cal (especially operatic) devices in Leaves of Grass; and the author of Dubliners would have had particular empathy with the tribulations that Whitman experienced at the hands of moral censors. Joyce's familiarity with Whitman can be traced to as early as 1902. In his essay on James Clarence Mangan, he comments that the "music" of Mangan's poetry "does not attain to the quality of

The Rebirth of Tragedy: Nietzsche and Narcissus in "A Painful Case" and "The Dead"

Abstract: An important motif in James Joyce's Ulysses is the interplay between sound and image, the audible and the visible. In "Proteus," the "[i]neluctable modality of the visible" and the "ineluctable modality of the audible" {U 3.1,13) are central to Ste phen Dedalus's experiments in phenomenology. In "Sirens," Bloom discovers that visual and auditory perceptions generate one another.1 The catechetical narrator of "Ithaca" merges perception and identity when referring to Bloom's and Stephen's "quasi simultaneous volitional qu?sisensations of concealed identities" (17 17.781-82).2 The centrality of the sound-image dichotomy in Joyce's artistic vision does not, however, first appear in Ulysses. Fif teen years earlier, as Joyce was working on his final two stories for Dubliners, "A Painful Case" and "The Dead," he was fleshing out his theory of the interrelationship between image and sound, language and music in both art and life.3 The characters and events in these stories bear a remarkable resemblance to two works with which Joyce was undoubtedly familiar: Ovid's myth of Narcissus and Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, both of which posit the aesthetic and psychological necessity of the antipodal relationship.4 The archetypes of Narcissus and Echo provide a useful model for judging the relationships between James Duffy and Emily S?nico, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. Ovid was the first writer in history to pair the mythic figures of Echo, the nymph who loses the capacity for original speech, and Narcissus, the self-centered and self deceived youth. In a brilliant narrative feat, Ovid creates a complex set of sexual and textual mirrors, in which states of reality and illu sion become difficult to distinguish. Narcissus falls in love with the reflection that he sees in the water, not knowing that it is his own image until a final revelation before his death. Narcissus seeks no company other than his own and spurns the advances of males and females alike, because he is afraid of being possessed by another. He

James Joyce: The Way He Lives Now

Abstract: Over a decade ago, the 1982 revised edition of Richard Ellmann's celebrated biography provided an occasion to think about how the 1959 original, for all its virtues, might have hindered the ongoing process of coming to terms with Joyce. Probably the document that most of us remember from that moment is Hugh Kenner's Times Literary Supplement review, especially Kenner's sarcasm about the way that Ellmann credited some notori ously unreliable "Irish Facts."1 Kenner had a more general point, though, and it still resonates. Ellmann's focus on Joyce and the com monplace ("no one knew," he tells us, "what the commonplace really was until Joyce had written"?JJII 5) so affects his portrait that, for Kenner, Joyce the artist was nowhere to be seen. How, Kenner asks, could a Joyce who (Ellmann implies) "put down little he'd not actu ally seen and heard," whom Ellmann presents as a silly, vain, feck less, impressionable drudge, be respected (1384)? And did not Ellmann, to reinforce his argument, also accept the "cranky" witness of Stanislaus Joyce, whose combination of admiration, resentment, and obtuseness perfectly complemented Ellmann's need to under line Joyce's identity with everyman? Also, once we understand the connection between Ellmann's theme and what evidence he admit

Drinking Ulysses: Joyce, Bass Ale, and the Typography of Cubism

Abstract: In 1912, Pablo Picasso took an oval canvas and framed it with a length of rope. He painted several objects within this "frame"?a glass, a pipe, a lemon slice, a knife, and a piece of newspaper? and he glued some corrugated paper onto the oval canvas to imitate the texture of a cane chair. Still Life with Chair Caning was Picasso's first collage in a series that he created in a kind of cultural dialogue with Georges Braque, a dialogue that came to be known as synthetic cubism. This development out of analytic cubism revolved around a shift in materials that John Berger has said could be found "in any hardware store."1 Picasso and Braque broke with what Berger has called "the oil paint in love with itself" (58). By placing tin, cigarette packages, newspapers, playing cards, dice, calling cards, string, ad vertisements, and labels in their work, according to Berger, Picasso and Braque "challenged the whole bourgeois concept of art as some thing precious, valuable, and to be prized like jewellery" (59). To depict their world, the cubists cut up pieces of the everyday world and placed these raw pieces within frames.2 Hanging in Joyce's apartment in Paris was a picture of the city where his father was born. This portrait of Cork was said to have an unusual frame; when visitors asked about it, Joyce explained, "Oh, that's cork, too."3 Just as Picasso's rope frame on Still Life with Chair Caning was a comment about the collage, Joyce's cork frame com mented on the picture that it surrounded. This kind of punning runs throughout the collages of the cubists. Robert Rosenblum has pointed to the debt that the cubists owed their literary counterparts:

James Joyce's Ulysses: The Obscene Nature of Molly's Soliloquy and Two Spanish Translations

Abstract: It was often not merely a question of finding the mot juste but?a far harder task, as all translators know to their cost?la pJirase juste also. For this one had to be thoroughly familiar with the directive ideas, the ground-plan of each episode, the allusions, Homeric and other, and the cross-correspondences disseminated through the text One had, indeed, to try to get into the mind of the author, surely one of the most intricate, not to say tortuous minds that have ever existed. (LettcrsI 28)

Anticipating Finnegans Wake: The United Irishman and La Belle Iseult

Abstract: Joyce's interweaving of the legends of King Mark, Tristan and Isolde, and other celebrated love triangles in Finnegans Wake may be merely an obvious patterning,1 but it is possible that the use ful connection with Chapelizod and with the parallel Irish ro mance of Finn, Diarmuid, and Grania was first suggested to Joyce by a series of items in Arthur Griffith's nationalist paper, The United Irishman. This series appeared in late 1901 and culminated with the acclaimed first Dublin performance of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde in December of that year. It is a well-known fact that Joyce read the paper regularly, and he is especially likely to have read it during this period because of the ongoing discussion of the Irish Literary Theatre that raij at about the same time that he published his critique of the Theatre in "Day of the Rabblement" (CW 68-72). In fact, as part of that debate, Griffith's paper gives the Joyce/Francis Sheehy Skeffington pamphlet the attention of not one but two review comments and makes it part of a sustained debate on clerical censorship. A notable aspect of The United Irishman's commentary is that it does not at all assume that the connection of Chapelizod with Isolde is common knowledge in Dublin. The Tristan and Isolde discussion begins in late October with a column headed "LA BELLE ISEULT AND 'SEIPEL IOSAID'" that is written by someone using the Irish pseudonym, "Cuguan."2 Cuguan scolds an Irish language group for a bazaar advertisement reading Aonac Seopeil Iosaid, which "was meant to be the Irish rendering of Chapelizod!" (6). The offending Irish term is not translated by the outraged columnist, but Niall ? D?naill equates Iosaid with Oigis?ad, meaning "hogshead" in En glish, so that the advertisement apparently translates as "Bazaar (or Fair) at Hogshead Chapel."3 Remarking that the Irish "reck little ...

The Censor Swings: Joyce's Work and the New Censorship

Abstract: Joyce and censorship? Most Joyceans, if asked, would probably assert that their man had passed that test, decisively, by 1934. Since the Woolsey opinion on Ulysses was sustained by the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals that year, there has never been another serious obscenity case involving Joyce's work. And the Woolsey opinion?prefixed for many years to the trade edition of Ulysses?was important in the history of the battle against censorship. Its immediate effect was felt most keenly by Joyce himself, who at last could be sure that his book would not be pirated by the likes of Samuel Roth; by Joyce's literary contemporaries, who were inspired by the example of the decision as well as by Joyce's work; and by Morris Ernst, Bennett Cerf, and their respective partners, who had the satisfaction of having fought the good fight and won.1 In United States obscenity law, however, the effect of the Woolsey decision was less immediate. A long string of legal cases followed, with some significant defeats for the defenders of freedom of speech. Not until the 1960s, with the cases involving Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and, most notable of all, Fanny Hill, was censorship of the printed word at point of distribution effectively curtailed.2 For Joyce, however, the Woolsey opinion was decisive. Only in certain totalitarian countries, where reading of his work was pro hibited, did official censorship occur. Even in Ireland, where much pulpit oratory was leveled against its author from the beginning of his career, Ulysses was never officially banned, and none of Joyce's work appeared on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Roman Cath olic Church.3 In the list of authors whose work has been censored in some way in the past decade in this country?a list that includes such names as Aristophanes, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Ernest Heming