Skip to main content

Analecta 9 Scylla and Charybdis BLOOMSDAY AFTERTHOUGHTS



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 9 included contributions by Steve Carey, Sian Cartwright, Sue Collins, Frances Devlin Glass, Ben Frayle, Sabia Mac Aodha, and Margaret Newman, whose initials appear where their thoughts are represented in these analecta.

We have plenty of Homer all day, but here is where Shakespeare gets the treatment. The contrast is apt, between an artist who was a community engaged in inventive transmission over generations (Homer) and an artist who emblematises the great solitary genius, reliant on his singular talents (Shakespeare). Our society upholds both these ideals as models of the storyteller-poet, yet they are not mutually exclusive. For example, Joyce is the first progenitor (Shakespeare) of Ulysses, while our multifarious interpretations are the great transmission (Homer). Spinoffs of the novel, online tik toks of the scenes, an intricate poem in an obscure journal: the kinds of version wrap around each other like a double helix.  

If the mode of literary composition of Shakespeare is implied as a direct comparison with the methods of Joyce, who similarly cannibalized his own life, is this Joyce’s most hubristic claim to fame? (FDG) Or is this just the way someone like Stephen might think? Again, to read Ulysses is to live with the person who wrote these pages, his presence is hereabouts in every episode, someone asking questions of himself, and us.

One wonders did Germaine Greer take some inspiration for her ‘Shakespeare’s Wife’ from this episode. (MN) Another wonders about Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Hamnet’ in this context. (Sian) A continuous theme in English literature is an author’s views on Shakespeare. For some readers, it is essential to their understanding of the author in front of them, that author’s understanding and relationship to Shakespeare. In this episode we come face-to-face with Joyce’s candid, but also droll and enigmatic, interface with the aforementioned great man. Hubristic, or just inevitable? Joyce asks by fictional indication: where does one begin when talking about this body of work?  

Maybe he is suggesting that you couldn’t be taken seriously as a literary figure unless you had a crackpot theory about Shakespeare somewhere in your resumé. (BF) Yes, Stephen’s theories walk a fine line. Not the theories themselves, but Joyce’s intentions in putting them all there in the first place. Is he wanting to present some interesting ideas about William Shakespeare, or is he satirising his younger self and his youthful hundred pretensions? Or both? ‘Crackpot’ is more true of Shakespeare interpretation than with any other, because more hangs on it. It’s a fine line between Windbag and Cicero.

Like so much else in Ulysses, we are warned elsewhere in the book not to read too much into it. This is the case when Buck makes fun of Stephen’s theories at the Martello Tower earlier in the day. It is a sign of Joyce’s greatness as a novelist that he sends up a theory at the start which he then sets out grandly in deadly detail halfway through. Joyce himself has endless literary theories, as we learn from reading the tabletalk books, but anything he puts into Ulysses has an artistic purpose. It’s not just there because it sounds good.

Bloomsday: another opportunity to eat goes by the wayside as the day rushes past in a blur of 10,000 things. (Sue) More so if you live in Dublin in 1904, with not much in the pantry anyway.

And what to make of Stephen’s intercession to the founder of the Jesuits? Is many a true word spoken in jest? The Jesuits get mentioned constantly. I’m not sure how much of an influence it was, but in popular Protestant fiction of the age Jesuits were an invisible army of assassins and conspirators trying to subvert the world to their Machiavellian aims. (BF) Aren’t they? I jest. This will always be an issue when trying to understand Joyce, who was learning from them by the magical Ignatian age of seven. (Actually, it’s probably Ignatius quoting Aristotle: ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man’.) Joyce was educated by the Jesuits. He was the youngest student ever to attend Clongowes Wood. He is in many ways one of the most outstanding products of Jesuit education. The very idea of a Homeric framework for the story is Jesuit in its approach and execution.  

It’s a different Stephen we see in this episode. There is the lecturer persona and all the gestural language which goes with that, and of course the mastery of his subject. What would Shakespeareans have made of it, then or now? (FDG) Stephen seems quite wounded and offended by his challenges to his thesis. (Steve) His make-up is multifarious. (SMA) Stephen, and indeed Joyce do a poor job of pretending not to care what anyone else thinks, having the thinnest skin. (Sian) Writers are like other people, all fearless gestures and nervous of reception.   

Meanwhile, armchair experts strive to hold back the changes in letters to the editor, or these days a series of tweets. We keep being taken back, wittily, to the social media interface. (FDG)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1.      He wrote the poem because ...
4 comments
Read more

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year   This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that delibe...
Post a Comment
Read more