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 3 included contributions by Lyall
Burton, Frances Devlin Glass, Matt Glen, Rebecca Morton, and Janet Strachan,
whose initials appear where their thoughts are represented in these analecta.
The
sounds of the sea sound like Ulysses: seesoo hrss rsseeiss ooos.
On
Sandymount Strand the mindful words play out, or is that fast forward, Dedalus’s
progress in poetry, what’s going on in his head linguistically. “They are
coming, waves,” he starts, “The whitemaned seahorses, champing,
brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan,” which is nice, but also bad Yeats.
It’s the poetry we meet in Chamber Music, whereas once he starts listening to
his own internal voices they take him in powerful directions that leave the
effete stuff behind. Stephen has various voices, private, public, and poetic:
it’s Joyce in the making.
He
talks a lot about seawrack and seaspawn. Might he be monomaniacally obsessed?
(FDG) Adult readers’ view of Stephen, I find, becomes more quickly fixed than
with others in the story. Critics express the view that Joyce is well and truly
over Stephen by the end of Ulysses. Well, time to cut him some slack. Joyce was
22 on the magical date 16th June 1904 and 22 is not always easy.
Dedalus, at least, is not about to do a bunk and shoot off to the Continent.
Death and Life are explicit capital-letter subjects in the novel, whole
episodes are devoted to them. Is the author monomaniacally obsessed? Grief mingled with guilt enhance the image of
the potential poète maudit, wandering about in his Hamlet hat. Not that he
wants enhancement, it has been given to him. Seawrack is a reminder of his
grief, of his struggle in coming to terms with his mother’s recent death. He is
trying to find a way out of lostness by words alone. Joyce provides the
connecting thoughts that this entails.
Having
just exited his history class, Stephen is made totally conscious of the past as
a natural part of the present. He imagines Vikings and dead Armada sailors
wrecked on this coastline where he now literally treads. (FDG) Yes, and his
ways of hearing the past are onomatopoeic, imitative of the sounds of beach,
birds, wind, water, directly in the present. His thoughts merge different
activities of language so they are transformed into poetry. He hears the words
with eyes shut, eyes open. He makes the links between words, their assonance,
alliteration, difference.
Are
you disturbed by his identification with the violence and lust of his
forebears, the murderous invaders? (FDG) This question is answered here by the
actor who plays Stephen in the film. “I love where Stephen is at in this scene.
He’s having such a good mosey around in his thoughts. A really soft
interrogation of these images. His identification with violence doesn’t disturb
me. His honesty is simple and curious.” (MG)
I
would add, Ulysses is both a textbook about violence and an antidote. Joyce’s
own escape from Ireland is closely tied to his escape from the violence of
Dublin. His identification of the roots of violence in envy, contest, rivalry,
tribalism, nationalism, and other social realities is depicted in places
throughout the novel. Whenever he is not alone, he is in the midst of a competition
for space and attention. It reaches a kind of mimetic apotheosis at the
brothel, where Stephen is saved from himself by Bloom. Bloom, living with the
knowledge of Molly’s infidelity, carries an underlying jealousy all day and
though he has reasons to be angry by this stage, he is not. It is Stephen who
loses the plot, smashes the chandelier, and cops a punch-up. Bloom does the
Samaritan act.
Is
Stephen’s creativity and potential as a poet more convincing in this scene?
(FDG) Yes to this question, also his constant references to Shakespeare. (JS)
Yes, because we have been taken out of the squabble and scrap with his sometimes
friends at Sandy Cove, out of the corner he is in teaching students who don’t
want to learn, out into the open air of Dublin Bay. It is a birth. It is a
discovery tour. He has space to move and energy to burn. The slow blending of
the received poetry that he knows from school and home with the murmuring
sounds he is testing in his iso-walk, are the beginnings of his individuation
as a creative user of language. Furthermore, many of the sounds he is making
are not even English or Irish or Latin or French, they are copies of the sounds
of the natural world.
Says
one seminarian, “Trying to watch live didn’t work even though I am watching the
screen like a hawk.” (LB) Am I walking into eternity as I take an iso-walk
around the block between computer dates? Is that me too, laughing and trying to
refresh the link? (RB) Is there something I am doing wrong? (LB)
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