This
year’s online Bloomsday seminar via Facebook was a global conversation in the
privacy of our own screens. Each of the eighteen short films, released online
by Bloomsday in Melbourne at the hour set for each episode, were treated as the
‘papers’ to prompt online discussion. Episode 2 included contributions by Gloria
Bella, Steve Carey, Sian Cartwright, Frances Devlin Glass, Tony Guyot, Gay
Lynch, Sabia Mac Aodha, Janet Strachan, and Maireid Sullivan, whose initials
appear where their thoughts are represented in these analecta.
The
much-quoted line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Even here, can we be sure Dedalus is talking for himself or about his sleepy
students, having to listen to such stuff? Is he perhaps empathising with his
drowsy charges?
The
historian lives inside the poet, inevitably once language is at stake. The poet
lives inside the historian? Frequently we live to find out that this is wishful
thinking.
The
relationship of teacher to student must resolve the perception of the teacher
seeing himself in the classroom he once occupied as a student. It is not
possible for Dedalus to find that resolution. He must depart school a second
time, this time as a teacher. He resolves to be a learner, though teaching is
to the fore by the time he arrives at the National Library in the middle of the
day.
Each
appearance of Dedalus in a new episode alters the reader’s understanding. He is
a troubled poet, now he is a frustrated teacher, then he’s a wandering sensualist,
later he will be an enraptured philosopher, or a drunken raver, or messed-up
patron of a brothel. This wannabe somebody falls short of achievement in every
episode, an extension of the Dedalus sobriquet given to him by the author so
many years beforehand.
The
students who want to stay inside and read about the battles. The students who
want to go out and battle at hockey, not stay inside, reading.
The
exterior young men develop to deal with the world they grow into; we know about
it. When is the time to be gentle, when is the time not to let that show? (FDG)
When is the best form of offence defence? And vice versa. Who’s to know. Time
to break through and talk. Time to let it show. Sooner rather than later.
Dedalus
a study in compassion, Deasey a staccato big noise. (FDG) We talk about foils,
but unlike theatre the personal confrontations we experience in life are not
about types. They are for real, one of us is not going to go down the way of
denial, or lies, or half-truths. Types emerge in retrospect.
As
writing with sincerity or irony are now counted as the same thing, what chance
this episode will come to the attention of the new thought police? (GB) Unhappily
too true. Dedalus’s dissent hopefully makes the satire plain. (FDG)
“The
one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” (Oscar Wilde) We could hold a
seminar on that (MS), but where to start. We could say ‘Bloom is very much
present’ (JS) and pay attention to Bloom’s whole character as a continuous
rewrite of history. We could look at Joyce’s understanding of pathology and of ‘history
as a series of baleful repetitions”. (FDG) Past, present, and future and how
Joyce explains these states is fertile ground for a whole performance, a
wide-ranging seminar.
I
observe how the pandemic is turning into relief our very relationship with the
past. The future is blocked so we look harder at the past, with less illusions.
We are being asked to post our teenage photographs on Facebook (why?) or
protest worldwide against racism, especially as a basis of imperialism. A world
with a certain future is one more likely to thrive on illusions about its past.
Does
Joyce have extra senses, more than five? (SMA) His ability to connect thought
and body is wonderful and an attack on dualism. He does this by connecting the
senses and showing how they interact and behave together with the mind. He is
fearless in showing how this happens. Furthermore, this is being done not in an
academic dissertation but in a wild novel.
Joyce’s
ability to overview with heightened perception and insight the past, present,
and future. Is this a foreboding? (SMA) Joyce is very concerned about history
and how we live with time. His last book is an obsessive account of how to live
with the spiral, or is that a jigsaw puzzle, or is that a drunken spree, called
history. If we awake from history, what do we see? Dedalus’s saying takes on a
koan-like quality, open to lasting contemplation.
Can
we wake up now please? (TG) Dedalus may well be an avatar of Joyce but he’s on
about something we wish humanity was somewhat more aware of. (TG) At the very
least, this episode alerts us to the need for an historical imagination, to be
aware of what is around us and to identify the signs. Joyce, in a sense, is
waking up the reader to the activity of time. And early in the book.
Dedalus
may be a person in mourning, but he’s certainly not a morning person. (Steve)
Young men with a need for total control cannot show much gentleness. Dedalus
must exert his ego, his ten thousand ideas, upon the world. This can make him difficult
company at breakfast.
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