In our class discussions we've covered the big picture of Ulysses, but the book rewards multiple rereadings. In fact, it really only comes to life upon the second, third, or fourth reading, because of all the themes in Joyce's novel, language - as a lens that exposes or obscures reality - is paramount. In your paper, I want you to reread the passages of your choosing, closely unraveling Joyce's stylistic experiments, allusions and echoes, puns, wordplay, etc. - and connecting Joyce's language to the larger themes. Unlike the Yeats paper, you do not have to situate your reading in relation to Joyce criticism. The focus of the paper is your reading of Ulysses. Although you should use some criticism, this should not be the source of your reading - just a reference point in conversation with you. Your paper should show your familiarity with the specifics of the novel - not the story and summary but the details. Three options:
1. Detailed reading of a certain section. You should try to have a fresh insight on the chapter, how it may be read, and how it fits into Joyce's scheme for the book. For ideas, look up any chapter and find the scholarly articles on Jstor: "Is Lestrygonians a weak Proteus?" "Penelope as a microcosm of the novel" "Gestation, Literary Paternity, and Death in Oxen of the Sun" I'm just making stuff up to make a point: you should have an interesting take on the chapter, and read the language closely.
2. Reading Joyce through extra-textual sources. This is more literary-critical stuff. It can mean using biographical sources (such as Joyce's letters to his wife, brother, and friends) or literary sources ("Ulysses and Shakespeare's Minor Plays" "Bloom's World as a Mystery Cult" "Joyce and James Frazier's The Golden Bough" "Joyce and Thomas Mann: Stephen's Magic Mountain.") Again, I am making stuff up. Remember, Coleridge said: "No analogy is meant to stand on all four legs." He really liked those furniture metaphors. The virtue of reading the novel through an outside text is that it gives you a specific, and limited, task. Your reading should be more about Joyce than the other text, and should still maintain a focus on Joyce's language, as described above.
3. Exploring a motif in the novel. By a motif I mean something small. But since the novel is so systematic, there are no small subjects. I would discourage theme-based paper ideas, like "Joyce and Music" or "Joyce and Female Sexuality" or "Joyce and Religious Ritual" or "Time in Ulysses." While these are tempting, they would usually be too big to pull off in a 7-10 page paper (it can be longer). The most important thing is how you frame your topic... think of it as a study. So, motifs can be the most unexpected things in Ulysses: hats, the near East or Asia Minor, the Far East, flowers, correspondence, inanimate objects, objects as metaphoric weapons, clothing and color, eye color, minor characters' names, nonsense in Ulysses (this may be a bit big), Being a Borrower or a Lender in Ulysses, accounting, Brilliant Mistakes: Bloom and Science (also a little big), anonymous characters in Ulysses, Metempsychosis as a Literary Style, protean characters, murder in Ulysses, capital punishment in Ulysses, sequence of Homeric parallels, songs in Bloom's interior monologue (rather than "Songs in Ulysses). You get the idea - there could be countless motifs. Avoid obvious ones, like "pins." These motifs are not symbolic in the simple sense, but are still charged with meaning, since everything was conscious in Joyce.
31.3.08
More Joycean perambulations
1. Bloom as a cuckold. The traditional story of the cuckold is typified by "The Miller's Tale" by Chaucer or Nabokov's parody of the genre in Laughter in the Dark. It is about an older man who, in his vanity, takes a younger wife and is fooled by his wife and her lover. This may well be the plot of Sweets of Sin. (This book is not by Paul de Kock, the author Molly asks for, therefore Bloom is defying her wish somewhat, or showing that he knows her taste better than she knows her own - or he simply doesn't see a book by Paul de Kock. Paul de Kock is a joke in two ways, one obvious, the other less so. This is the name of a nineteenth century French novelist who wrote stories of French middle-class life, sort of the equivalent of Anthony Trollope or something.) Bloom, who has a touch of the artist about him, does not fit this image. In fact, he knows about Boylan and may, in some sense, accept the situation. This is one of the mysteries of the book, anyway. When Boylan fails to leave the Hotel Ormond on time, Bloom briefly hopes that he has forgotten his assignation with Molly. One reading is that Bloom knows his own failings and tolerates Molly's infidelities and Boylan's usurpation because he essentially knows that things will change as soon as he regains his own personal and sexual potency.
2. World War II and Joyce's "neutrality": Critical party line holds that modernists who never left their home countries supported the allied powers in World War II. They were the "neo-modernists." The expatriots who left their home countries, formerly the most celebrated modernists - James, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway - are said to have supported the axis powers, including the Fascists. All this, of course, is well after the '20s when "The Waste Land" and Ulysses were published. Eliot supported the allies, however, and Joyce moved to Switzerland - declaring himself neutral.
Many writers of the '30s and '40s, especially British, were Leftists: W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, etc. What makes them Leftists? They were not Liberals (or believers in Democratic society with rights for individuals). They were not even socialists in the usual sense. These authors, with the exception of Orwell, turned to Stalin because of the violence he was directing at the middle class and recalcitrant religious elements. Right wing figures like Pound and Eliot supported Mussolini or Hitler - at least until both recanted (I guess being incarcerated in an insane asylum near D.C. helped Pound change his mind). Either way, due to the desire we discussed before to give birth to a new social order, these writers, unlike today's somewhat more sentimental pundits or theorists on the left and right, were in favor of violence. Pound, for a time, could not decide between Communism and Fascism, but eventually picked Fascism, due to its greater focus on the state. When asked why, he said, he did it for The Cantos, his book-length epic - i.e., for his poetry. The revival of art sought by Eliot and Joyce was more important than the dangerous political reality of Fascism. Same with the Stalinists of the '30s; they were untroubled by Stalin's violence. Stephen Spender praised Stalin's ruthlessness, and Andre Gide complained that Stalin was not brutal enough on the middle class. It almost did not matter which extremist path one took. Arnold Schoenberg, the revolutionary modernist composer, said: "the only path that does not lead to heaven is the middle path."
How does this relate to Joyce? He was fundamentally different from other modernists, I would argue, through his instinctive dislike of extremism and his elevation of moderation. He wanted nothing to do with "enthusiasm," which, as I said in class, is an old, pejorative word for religious fanaticism. He would have classified political extremists (like the Irish nationalists who come in for such a severe drubbing in Ulysses) as little different than the false prophets of religion (like John Alexander Dowie, or Elijah, the self-styled American prophet in the book). Joyce - and perhaps the great James - is fundamentally different in some way from other modernists. I would venture to say that many are closer to the Platonist (or idealist, spiritual) side, where Joyce is closer to the scientific or Aristotelian persuasion. Again, I am using these terms in their colloquial sense - not a strict sense. Therefore, when the fractious second war occurred - which still defines our morality and politics to a great extent - Joyce did not take sides. (One could argue that he should have taken a stand with the Allied forces.)
4. Getting the songs straight. I myself have trouble with all the musical references in the book, and I'm not going to catalog them all here. Just the songs.
a. "Love's Old Sweet Song": frequently mentioned, this is a constant reminder of Molly's infidelity. She is going to be singing it as part of her musical program produced (or "gotten up") by Blazes Boylan. These are the lyrics. Note the similarity of the composer's name to a minor character in the book.
b. "Seaside Girls": the most frequently mentioned song in the book, it is (wrongly) ascribed to Blazes Boylan as the composer (by Milly). Here are the lyrics; note the somewhat odd references to time and clocks.
c. "Blumenlied": Bloom buys the sheet music for this song for Milly when she is taking piano lessons. It is also known as "The Flower Song," connecting it to Bloom's pseudonym Henry Flower. There are no lyrics, but you can listen to it here.
d. "Silent, O Moyle": Thomas Moore's melody referred to in "Scylla and Charybdis."
e. "M'appari" or "Martha" is from an opera of the same name. It is sung by the "prick" Simon Dedalus in the Ormond Bar in "Sirens." It connects, of course, to the name of Bloom's correspondent. Here it is in English and Italian. Another obviously sad song, with a theme of absence and return.
f. "The Croppy Boy": This sentimental ballad plays on Irish nationalism with its themes of betrayal. It appears in "Sirens," of course, and reappears afterward. Here are the lyrics.
e. Don Giovanni. This is one of the most important musical themes in the book, although it's not a song, per se, but a duet in Mozart's great opera. I'm linking the lyrics and an youtube video of this beautiful piece. It relates, of course, to themes of usurpation and duplicitous love.
5. M'intosh. Here are the passages in which the mysterious fellow, the eternal Watcher, one might say, appears. Did he murder the man in the river? Is he a character from "A Painful Case" or "Eveline" (both contain someone similarly attired - like that's so unusual in rainy Ireland)? Is he a godlike or a spiritual figure? Hmmm.
"Hades"
Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.
end of "Wandering Rocks"
In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.
in "Eumeus"
-- This morning (Hynes put it in, of course) the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise, after a brief illness, came as great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out by (certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge from Corny) Messrs. H.J. O'Neill & Son, 164 North Strand Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr., Martin Cunningham, John Power .)eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad) Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus, B.A., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius Kelleher, Joseph M'C. Hynes, L. Boom, C.P. M'Coy,-- M'Intosh, and several others.
in Ithaca, the question-and-answer chapter, Joyce primes speculation by asking and answering the question himself. Unfortunately, he answers it with a restatement of the question.
2. World War II and Joyce's "neutrality": Critical party line holds that modernists who never left their home countries supported the allied powers in World War II. They were the "neo-modernists." The expatriots who left their home countries, formerly the most celebrated modernists - James, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway - are said to have supported the axis powers, including the Fascists. All this, of course, is well after the '20s when "The Waste Land" and Ulysses were published. Eliot supported the allies, however, and Joyce moved to Switzerland - declaring himself neutral.
Many writers of the '30s and '40s, especially British, were Leftists: W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, etc. What makes them Leftists? They were not Liberals (or believers in Democratic society with rights for individuals). They were not even socialists in the usual sense. These authors, with the exception of Orwell, turned to Stalin because of the violence he was directing at the middle class and recalcitrant religious elements. Right wing figures like Pound and Eliot supported Mussolini or Hitler - at least until both recanted (I guess being incarcerated in an insane asylum near D.C. helped Pound change his mind). Either way, due to the desire we discussed before to give birth to a new social order, these writers, unlike today's somewhat more sentimental pundits or theorists on the left and right, were in favor of violence. Pound, for a time, could not decide between Communism and Fascism, but eventually picked Fascism, due to its greater focus on the state. When asked why, he said, he did it for The Cantos, his book-length epic - i.e., for his poetry. The revival of art sought by Eliot and Joyce was more important than the dangerous political reality of Fascism. Same with the Stalinists of the '30s; they were untroubled by Stalin's violence. Stephen Spender praised Stalin's ruthlessness, and Andre Gide complained that Stalin was not brutal enough on the middle class. It almost did not matter which extremist path one took. Arnold Schoenberg, the revolutionary modernist composer, said: "the only path that does not lead to heaven is the middle path."
How does this relate to Joyce? He was fundamentally different from other modernists, I would argue, through his instinctive dislike of extremism and his elevation of moderation. He wanted nothing to do with "enthusiasm," which, as I said in class, is an old, pejorative word for religious fanaticism. He would have classified political extremists (like the Irish nationalists who come in for such a severe drubbing in Ulysses) as little different than the false prophets of religion (like John Alexander Dowie, or Elijah, the self-styled American prophet in the book). Joyce - and perhaps the great James - is fundamentally different in some way from other modernists. I would venture to say that many are closer to the Platonist (or idealist, spiritual) side, where Joyce is closer to the scientific or Aristotelian persuasion. Again, I am using these terms in their colloquial sense - not a strict sense. Therefore, when the fractious second war occurred - which still defines our morality and politics to a great extent - Joyce did not take sides. (One could argue that he should have taken a stand with the Allied forces.)
4. Getting the songs straight. I myself have trouble with all the musical references in the book, and I'm not going to catalog them all here. Just the songs.
a. "Love's Old Sweet Song": frequently mentioned, this is a constant reminder of Molly's infidelity. She is going to be singing it as part of her musical program produced (or "gotten up") by Blazes Boylan. These are the lyrics. Note the similarity of the composer's name to a minor character in the book.
b. "Seaside Girls": the most frequently mentioned song in the book, it is (wrongly) ascribed to Blazes Boylan as the composer (by Milly). Here are the lyrics; note the somewhat odd references to time and clocks.
c. "Blumenlied": Bloom buys the sheet music for this song for Milly when she is taking piano lessons. It is also known as "The Flower Song," connecting it to Bloom's pseudonym Henry Flower. There are no lyrics, but you can listen to it here.
d. "Silent, O Moyle": Thomas Moore's melody referred to in "Scylla and Charybdis."
e. "M'appari" or "Martha" is from an opera of the same name. It is sung by the "prick" Simon Dedalus in the Ormond Bar in "Sirens." It connects, of course, to the name of Bloom's correspondent. Here it is in English and Italian. Another obviously sad song, with a theme of absence and return.
f. "The Croppy Boy": This sentimental ballad plays on Irish nationalism with its themes of betrayal. It appears in "Sirens," of course, and reappears afterward. Here are the lyrics.
e. Don Giovanni. This is one of the most important musical themes in the book, although it's not a song, per se, but a duet in Mozart's great opera. I'm linking the lyrics and an youtube video of this beautiful piece. It relates, of course, to themes of usurpation and duplicitous love.
5. M'intosh. Here are the passages in which the mysterious fellow, the eternal Watcher, one might say, appears. Did he murder the man in the river? Is he a character from "A Painful Case" or "Eveline" (both contain someone similarly attired - like that's so unusual in rainy Ireland)? Is he a godlike or a spiritual figure? Hmmm.
"Hades"
Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.
end of "Wandering Rocks"
In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.
in "Eumeus"
-- This morning (Hynes put it in, of course) the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise, after a brief illness, came as great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out by (certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge from Corny) Messrs. H.J. O'Neill & Son, 164 North Strand Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr., Martin Cunningham, John Power .)eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad) Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus, B.A., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius Kelleher, Joseph M'C. Hynes, L. Boom, C.P. M'Coy,-- M'Intosh, and several others.
in Ithaca, the question-and-answer chapter, Joyce primes speculation by asking and answering the question himself. Unfortunately, he answers it with a restatement of the question.
Who was M'Intosh?
What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?
15.3.08
Incomplete thoughts on Ulysses
1. Eliot characterized Ulysses as a "modern epic." The epic itself is a forerunner of the novel, which has often been described as an epic for the middle class. But the classical epic is about the whole of society, while the novel tends to be about a struggle between an individual and society. The novel is driven by an inciting problem, which generally worsens or complicates but is resolved in the end. Usually there is a death. The central plot questions involving Bloom & Molly, Blazes Boylan, Bloom & Stephen - are not satisfactorily resolved by the book. It is a "portrait" of society like George Eliot's great Middlemarch, but even that book is driven by a series of parallel plots, like the stories that comprise the life of a town over the period of time. Ulysses has no full stories. It is not merely the portrait of a town, but closer, in its goals, to the Odyssey itself.
2. Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) faces struggles which typify or define heroism, but not only physical heroism, the subject of the Iliad. They define the qualities that describe humanity at its best. The themes that structure every chapter in Joyce's Ulysses similarly describe the dangers or challenges that face the modern, would-be hero, quite similar to the seven deadly sins (it suddenly occurs to me): lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, envy, sloth, pride. It may not fit the book precisely, but pretty well - Bloom faces all of these, and Stephen is troubled by the worst sin of all hubris or pride. It would be wrong to reduce the book to a guide to behavior, a depiction of how the most ordinary of men can partake of some of the heroism of the heroic age, but Joyce's book is epic in this sense. It grapples with the fundamental problem of being human, not the problem of love, not the movement from immaturity to maturity, not some pedestrian escape from danger. The metaphor of the mirror is appropriate, because the book's job is to hold a mirror up to existence, revealing experience as moderns see it: interior and exterior. That is why Joyce does not follow the linear time of the novel, but makes his book a catalog of different types of discourse. In a sense, yes, he is having fun, but he is also practicing what Aristotle named as the ultimate purpose of poetry: mimesis or imitation. Showing what is.
3. There is nothing "organic" about Joyce's structure. An organic structure would seem to follow a "natural" path of trouble, intensification, complication, resolution. This is the "romantic" pattern in the sense of old stories that developed in the Latin or "Roman" world: Roman = romance = roman (fr. "novel"). There are great divisions critics have drawn in literature: romantic vs. classical (Joyce is on the classical side), Apollonian vs. Dionysian (Joyce is Apollonian - with a touch of the Dionysian?), Hellenic vs. Hebraic (Joyce is on the Hebraic, or more disciplined and moral side). An organic plot would have the sense cycles of rising and falling that echoes nature itself. Here's another division: Platonic vs. Aristotelian. Joyce is an Aristotelian, and organizes his novel in categories. It is an obviously "contrived" structure, completely anti-intuitive, which is part of what makes the book difficult. Finnegan's Wake, oddly, is a bit more organic or cyclic.
4. Joyce's contrived structure is built around i) themes associated with the perfectibility of man, or the dangers that lie in the way of that perfectibility; and ii) language, which lies between us and reality. Therefore, the novel has two concerns: heroism and epistemology (or: "how can we know things?"). Joyce's playful use of different kinds of language points up the distance between language and reality; we see things a certain way according to the based on the way we describe those things. And in different cultural contexts, the novel, the newspaper, the Q&A, the history of the language itself, the dramatic.
5. Speaking of drama, Joyce enjoyed Eliot's description of Ulysses as more an epic than a novel. Joyce called it an epic of return. Like The Odyssey, it is an epic of return from battlefield to bedroom. The book is about an attempt at return. Let's think about this for a moment in relationship to the politics of the book. Where Hegel, Nietzsche, Eliot, Yeats, and Marx saw history as a cycle that was ready for its next stage... they were expectant of something new, Joyce sees it as a cycle that is complete. His book is a story of return, a return to the heroic values of another time. That means the cycle of history has already completed itself, making the book a search for beginnings, not endings. This may explain why so much of its "plot" remains unresolved. It may also explain why the book has a blatantly calculated or contrived structure, rather than a natural one. The natural cycles are over, and now, in the teens and twenties, it's time to take a scientific look at who we are to locate our humanness.
6. A question for later: did Joyce's descendants carry on this vision, or did they discard it?
2. Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) faces struggles which typify or define heroism, but not only physical heroism, the subject of the Iliad. They define the qualities that describe humanity at its best. The themes that structure every chapter in Joyce's Ulysses similarly describe the dangers or challenges that face the modern, would-be hero, quite similar to the seven deadly sins (it suddenly occurs to me): lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, envy, sloth, pride. It may not fit the book precisely, but pretty well - Bloom faces all of these, and Stephen is troubled by the worst sin of all hubris or pride. It would be wrong to reduce the book to a guide to behavior, a depiction of how the most ordinary of men can partake of some of the heroism of the heroic age, but Joyce's book is epic in this sense. It grapples with the fundamental problem of being human, not the problem of love, not the movement from immaturity to maturity, not some pedestrian escape from danger. The metaphor of the mirror is appropriate, because the book's job is to hold a mirror up to existence, revealing experience as moderns see it: interior and exterior. That is why Joyce does not follow the linear time of the novel, but makes his book a catalog of different types of discourse. In a sense, yes, he is having fun, but he is also practicing what Aristotle named as the ultimate purpose of poetry: mimesis or imitation. Showing what is.
3. There is nothing "organic" about Joyce's structure. An organic structure would seem to follow a "natural" path of trouble, intensification, complication, resolution. This is the "romantic" pattern in the sense of old stories that developed in the Latin or "Roman" world: Roman = romance = roman (fr. "novel"). There are great divisions critics have drawn in literature: romantic vs. classical (Joyce is on the classical side), Apollonian vs. Dionysian (Joyce is Apollonian - with a touch of the Dionysian?), Hellenic vs. Hebraic (Joyce is on the Hebraic, or more disciplined and moral side). An organic plot would have the sense cycles of rising and falling that echoes nature itself. Here's another division: Platonic vs. Aristotelian. Joyce is an Aristotelian, and organizes his novel in categories. It is an obviously "contrived" structure, completely anti-intuitive, which is part of what makes the book difficult. Finnegan's Wake, oddly, is a bit more organic or cyclic.
4. Joyce's contrived structure is built around i) themes associated with the perfectibility of man, or the dangers that lie in the way of that perfectibility; and ii) language, which lies between us and reality. Therefore, the novel has two concerns: heroism and epistemology (or: "how can we know things?"). Joyce's playful use of different kinds of language points up the distance between language and reality; we see things a certain way according to the based on the way we describe those things. And in different cultural contexts, the novel, the newspaper, the Q&A, the history of the language itself, the dramatic.
5. Speaking of drama, Joyce enjoyed Eliot's description of Ulysses as more an epic than a novel. Joyce called it an epic of return. Like The Odyssey, it is an epic of return from battlefield to bedroom. The book is about an attempt at return. Let's think about this for a moment in relationship to the politics of the book. Where Hegel, Nietzsche, Eliot, Yeats, and Marx saw history as a cycle that was ready for its next stage... they were expectant of something new, Joyce sees it as a cycle that is complete. His book is a story of return, a return to the heroic values of another time. That means the cycle of history has already completed itself, making the book a search for beginnings, not endings. This may explain why so much of its "plot" remains unresolved. It may also explain why the book has a blatantly calculated or contrived structure, rather than a natural one. The natural cycles are over, and now, in the teens and twenties, it's time to take a scientific look at who we are to locate our humanness.
6. A question for later: did Joyce's descendants carry on this vision, or did they discard it?
25.2.08
Yeats Papers
Generally, although my comments may seem critical, I was pleased with these ambitious papers. The choice of topics was very interesting - some very serious topics with scholarly potential.
The real challenge is framing the topic correctly. That is, setting out what you want to explore, finding a way that you can reasonably and thoroughly explore it, and - the payoff - emphasizing why this is an addition to the way we think of Yeats. There is a real danger of ending up saying things that most any Yeats reader would already agree with. So, most of your topics need some reframing.
Very few of you "justified" your topic in light of "what people usually say" about Yeats. This sounds hard, because it makes it seem like you have to know all Yeats scholarship, but actually it's nowhere near as hard as you would think. It's part of the literary critical form.
So, if your grade is lower than you expected, it's because I'm trying to motivate you to really learn the literary critical form. Maybe you'll never become a professional literary scholar, but the principle applies to almost any kind of writing you might do. You have to observe certain formalities.
Your revisions are due at the last day of school, May 12 (another discrepancy on the syllabus), so you'd be well advised to work on it in dribs... a little at a time, since you'll be very busy with Ulysses.
Note the revised dates for presentations due to my illness today.
Cheers, Robin.
The real challenge is framing the topic correctly. That is, setting out what you want to explore, finding a way that you can reasonably and thoroughly explore it, and - the payoff - emphasizing why this is an addition to the way we think of Yeats. There is a real danger of ending up saying things that most any Yeats reader would already agree with. So, most of your topics need some reframing.
Very few of you "justified" your topic in light of "what people usually say" about Yeats. This sounds hard, because it makes it seem like you have to know all Yeats scholarship, but actually it's nowhere near as hard as you would think. It's part of the literary critical form.
So, if your grade is lower than you expected, it's because I'm trying to motivate you to really learn the literary critical form. Maybe you'll never become a professional literary scholar, but the principle applies to almost any kind of writing you might do. You have to observe certain formalities.
Your revisions are due at the last day of school, May 12 (another discrepancy on the syllabus), so you'd be well advised to work on it in dribs... a little at a time, since you'll be very busy with Ulysses.
Note the revised dates for presentations due to my illness today.
Cheers, Robin.
19.2.08
WELCOME TO BLOOMSDAY, JUNE 4, 1904
I WILL NOT GIVE SPECIFIC PROMPTS FOR YOUR JOYCE BLOGS. I don't want to direct your reading that much, but you know what to do. Analyze, brainstorm, be specific, make connections, quote, free associate... GRAPPLE with the text as each of these three characters grapples with their internal contradictions.What characters?
Leopold Bloom, half-Hungarian-Jewish, and no one will let him forget it. Deeply in love with a wife he has not touched in ten years. Scarcely orthodox in his habits. Sensual, enjoying the physical body, yet questioning and well-read.
Stephen Daedalus ("the mockery of your name - and ancient Greek!" Mulligan mocks). Aware, as Yeats was, of his destiny, but nowhere near as sure that he will get there. Struggling for freedom from the past, like the two sons he echoes: Telemachus and Icarus. Struggling between art and religion.
Molly Bloom, as sensual in her inner life as her husband. Seemingly so cruel that she wants her husband to see the evidences of her afternoon with her lover. Yet so tender that she thinks lovingly of the first time she made love with him. Craving sexual pleasure fiercely, her mind flits from thing to thing.
Joyce's book was roundly rejected by critics upon its obscure publication. Irish, established figures such as Yeats's friend George Moore implied that Joyce was a fellow of no breeding, who thought dirty words were a substitute for good literature. Ulysses, whose name mocks the author for his lack of knowledge of Greek, was rescued by admiring Americans: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Eliot felt that Joyce had transformed the novel by grounding it in myth. Pound admired Joyce's learning, heaping scorn on anyone who did not see the unknown writer's genius. He helped Joyce publish the book, critics set to unraveling its many puzzles, and today it is the Citizen Kane of novels, regularly topping "best of" lists.
What's that above? It's the Martello Tower at Sandycove where Joyce stayed for a few nights with two friends, one of whom resembled the garrulouos Buck Mulligan, while the other was a well-fed Englishman. Art imitates life as closely as it can in this complex work, like the wine that Jesus turns back into water in Mulligan's humorous and blasphemous rhyme. But that's still to come...
Post with energy and imagination on each section of this masterwork.
10.2.08
for 2/13
Remember to use the revised syllabus. Presentation assignments to the right (scroll down).
Read Eliot's "The Waste Land" in full. Please print it out and bring it to class. Yeats paper due. No additional posts are due today.
8.2.08
for 2/11.
Read the assigned poems and "Yeats: Myth and Philosophy" on Blackboard. Post on the poems, but your post should be the first step towards your paper and may encompass other poems as well. Your paper is a critical study, and therefore, you should do the following things:
1. Establish the necessity for your essay - why are you presuming on the reader's time with this commentary on Yeats
2. Comment on other, similar studies... this will require a little research. How is yours adding something. This isn't as hard as it seems... it's something of a ritual or formality.
3. Pursue your analysis of the poems, connecting your particular approach to a broader view of Yeats's poetics and modernism in general. You don't have to agree with the view I've put forth in this blog or in class, but you should show how a certain aspect of the poet's work may change the way we see him. In this lies the value of a critical study.
4. You don't necessarily have to "prove" some heavy-handed point. Instead, your piece can be an exploration of an aspect of this poet, perhaps seen through the lens of another thinker. You should stick with the subject, but your conclusion may contain questions as well as answers.
5. Avoid obvious, general topics, such as Yeats and the church. Instead, look for an approach that gives you a task, a way of reading Yeats afresh: "Yeats' metaphors for the body"; "'Common' Irish Women versus Heroic Female Figures in Yeats"; "Artificiality and Naturalness in the 'Byzantium' poems"; "Contemporary figures Yeats refers to by name - and those he alludes to obliquely"... Find your own - whatever intrigues you: this is just to give you a sense of the possibilities.
This will require some outside research, and I strongly suggest you work on it this weekend, since it is due Wed. of next week. I also suggest that you e-mail me with your plan - I will e-mail you back with suggestions and comments. If you like, include several ideas. Several people have already done this. I suggest Harold Bloom's book Yeats or Helen Vendler's studies... You may want to use the databases (accessible from my.newschool.edu) to find articles. Again, the criticism is not so much a source of ideas as a background to your own ideas. You should not quote too heavily from the poems... focus on specific lines: indent and single-space quotes. Include a "works cited" page in MLA format. E-mail me with any questions or concerns!
4.2.08
For 2/6
We will have class on 2/19. I didn't realize that this Tuesday has the M/W schedule. I'll give you a revised schedule soon.
Read the assigned poems and the essay. Obviously reflect on Yeats's progress, both as a stylist and as a thinker, and its relationship to his life, the influences Ellmann write of, his advancing age, etc. By now you should be working on a theme in Yeats's poetry which, in your paper, will be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic evolution. You should post with that theme in mind (or several themes, if you're not ready to commit yet).
Paleo-modernism and Oppositions
If Eliot's ideas seem confusing, it's because they are. Eliot, following F.H. Bradley, was a monist. This is one of the most slippery ideas in philosophy. Monists, the original being Spinoza, believed that reality is only composed of a single substance. Distinctions between substances are essentially an illusion. For Spinoza, God was everything, which strangely led contemporaries to call him an atheist.
Nietzsche said that all of Western history had been formed by a single illusion, started by Plato - that of the difference between mind and body. In "Among School Children" Yeats mentions the Platonic idea that we all began as whole but were condemned to division. From the original wholeness, there was division. What divisions?
mind body
Dionysus Apollo
soul body
universal particular
reality imagination
science religion
and many, many more. Nietzsche thought that, history being circular, these divisions would at length be rejoined. And the paleo-modernists made this their project, whether they knew it or not.
Henry James and W.B. Yeats both dealt in these opposites, but had opposite life stories, in a way. James began as a writer of realist fiction and turned into a symbolist writer. His late books, his best work, are also maddeningly obscure. Yeats began as a symbolist poet, then migrated in a realist direction, then transformed himself again.
Realism? Shaw, Flaubert, Frank Norris, Zola... Realism and symbolism, as oppositions, became so absolute that you could divide this paper (if this were a piece of paper) into two columns and list the resulting binaries:
content form
objectivity subjectivity
conscious unconscious
time eternal
immanence transcendence
empirical science epistemology
prose poetry
encyclopedic symbolic
description myth
fact invention
life art
laboratory labyrinth (a classic illustrative pedagogical device)
Get the idea? There is little room for compromise between these divisions, but compromise is not what paleo-modernism is about.
Yeats's early works are romantic: "The Wanderings of Oisin" are sheer myth, journey, Romanticism. But he got involved with the French poet Mallarme in the 1890s. Earlier he had written Romantic poems that delighted the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he became a symbolist poet in the 1890s. Yeats's heroes, like "The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland" and Red Hanrahan, deserted the real world for the world of imagination. But even then, he considered the imagination a mixed blessing. He knew, unlike the European Romantics, that the life of the imagination might mean he would cease to be human, never live at all, become addicted to escapism. The imagination was incompatible with normality and responsibility.
Yeats then became a more realist poet, around 1912. His verse became more definite and hard-edged. He wrote about political themes, used images of rocks and thorns. But at the same time he wrote of Shaw, the leading realist of the Anglo-Irish stage, that he had appeared to him in a dream as a sewing machine that clicked and smiled perpetually. Just as he became a realist, adopting plainness and clarity, he condemned realist optimism in his prose.
Yeats never came to terms with the opposition between the real world and the imagination. He turned to "science": astrology, necromancy, alchemy, theosophy... These were obsolete poetic sciences. He turned to a study of trance states and dream states as Carl Jung did at the same time. These experiments led him to "A Vision," a book written out of dictation that his wife took from spirits.
More about this, Yeats's strangest work, soon.
The four phases of Yeats's career were:
1. The Romantic or Preraphaelite
2. The Symbolist (1890s)
3. The Realist (1912-)
4. The paleo-modernist (1920s and 1930s)
Nietzsche said that all of Western history had been formed by a single illusion, started by Plato - that of the difference between mind and body. In "Among School Children" Yeats mentions the Platonic idea that we all began as whole but were condemned to division. From the original wholeness, there was division. What divisions?
mind body
Dionysus Apollo
soul body
universal particular
reality imagination
science religion
and many, many more. Nietzsche thought that, history being circular, these divisions would at length be rejoined. And the paleo-modernists made this their project, whether they knew it or not.
Henry James and W.B. Yeats both dealt in these opposites, but had opposite life stories, in a way. James began as a writer of realist fiction and turned into a symbolist writer. His late books, his best work, are also maddeningly obscure. Yeats began as a symbolist poet, then migrated in a realist direction, then transformed himself again.
Realism? Shaw, Flaubert, Frank Norris, Zola... Realism and symbolism, as oppositions, became so absolute that you could divide this paper (if this were a piece of paper) into two columns and list the resulting binaries:
content form
objectivity subjectivity
conscious unconscious
time eternal
immanence transcendence
empirical science epistemology
prose poetry
encyclopedic symbolic
description myth
fact invention
life art
laboratory labyrinth (a classic illustrative pedagogical device)
Get the idea? There is little room for compromise between these divisions, but compromise is not what paleo-modernism is about.
Yeats's early works are romantic: "The Wanderings of Oisin" are sheer myth, journey, Romanticism. But he got involved with the French poet Mallarme in the 1890s. Earlier he had written Romantic poems that delighted the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he became a symbolist poet in the 1890s. Yeats's heroes, like "The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland" and Red Hanrahan, deserted the real world for the world of imagination. But even then, he considered the imagination a mixed blessing. He knew, unlike the European Romantics, that the life of the imagination might mean he would cease to be human, never live at all, become addicted to escapism. The imagination was incompatible with normality and responsibility.
Yeats then became a more realist poet, around 1912. His verse became more definite and hard-edged. He wrote about political themes, used images of rocks and thorns. But at the same time he wrote of Shaw, the leading realist of the Anglo-Irish stage, that he had appeared to him in a dream as a sewing machine that clicked and smiled perpetually. Just as he became a realist, adopting plainness and clarity, he condemned realist optimism in his prose.
Yeats never came to terms with the opposition between the real world and the imagination. He turned to "science": astrology, necromancy, alchemy, theosophy... These were obsolete poetic sciences. He turned to a study of trance states and dream states as Carl Jung did at the same time. These experiments led him to "A Vision," a book written out of dictation that his wife took from spirits.
More about this, Yeats's strangest work, soon.
The four phases of Yeats's career were:
1. The Romantic or Preraphaelite
2. The Symbolist (1890s)
3. The Realist (1912-)
4. The paleo-modernist (1920s and 1930s)
3.2.08
Check out the audio track on Ben's blog
Song by Harry McClintock.
This song has a humorous likeness to some of the fantasy or folkloric elements in Yeats's early verse.
This song has a humorous likeness to some of the fantasy or folkloric elements in Yeats's early verse.
30.1.08
Assignment for Februrary 4th
As before, pick several poems for close reading and try to piece out Yeats's developing influences, whether Romantic, Preraphaelite, or an emerging modernism. When looking at The Seven Woods we saw a Yeats who is willing to allow antinomies to remain unresolved, showing the negative capability prized as much by modern critics as by the Romantics who coined the term. Does he display this faculty in these poems? Is the somewhat younger Yeats more effective in any way?
Eliot, Williams, Paleo-Modernism - and magic
Critics of today are fairly hard on classic or "high" modernism - Henry James, Faulkner, Eliot, Yeats. Why? Modernism has come under attack for being cold in its formal concerns (referred to as "inhumanism"), for being politically conservative (but Eliot said that conservatism as a political philosophy was an intellectual vacuum), and even for having associations with fascism. And you can see where this comes from. Eliot converted to Anglicanism late in life. Figures like Eliot and Yeats certainly come across as traditionalists, Pound eventually became nuttily enamoured with Mussolini, in whose defense he gave radio broadcasts in Rome, and the geometric lines of architectural modernism are reminiscent of a kind of rigid, positivistic cast of mind associated with fascism.
But the mark of fascism is a sort of "absolutism" philosophically, a belief in a single, fixed view of reality. This - I submit - is more characteristic of Williams-style neo-modernism than paleo-modernism. The paleo-modernists were relativists of the most extreme stripe.
Williams and the Williams point of view has won, in the long run. Williams' "objectivism" set the pace for contemporary poetry and set the scene for numerous "objectivist" styles - and then the "language"-oriented poets. To say nothing of the dominance of neo-modernism in the other arts.
Williams said: "Take the concepts embodied by T.S. Eliot. They are completely worthless." He associated Eliot with Hellenism or with the Renaissance, a time of slavish imitation of classical models. Eliot, for Williams, disliked new ideas, and refused to break the classic forms. He was backward, not politically, but morally. In the London Times, Eliot's work was referred to as "inhumanism."
But what Williams called "unbound thinking" may have derived from a philosophical absolutism. In an attack on modernist poetics, Williams said that one must draw a strict line between true and false values. He believed there are truths - absolute truths - which are independent of relations with other truths, connotations, interpretations. They're just truths - isolated. He dislikes similes because they make reality dependent on the relationships between things. "It approaches the impossible to arrive at an understanding of a thing." His vocabulary and beliefs are objectivist and absolutist philosophically: things exist objectively and independently. This is a throwback to Platonic realism, the very classicism that Williams scorned.
Eliot? He studied with William James - Henry James's brother. In his Ph.D. dissertation , he said:
For Williams, reality is something we ought to try and approach, and we shouldn't let language get in the way.
Yeats spoke of a "counter-Renaissance" in Ireland. His modernism and perspectivism, along with Eliot's, was starkly opposed to the Platonism of the Renaissance. It didn't entail a belief in things, but rather, given the fact that nothing really exists until language creates it, allowed the poet to play around with this creative power. Much like the magician figure Yeats admired as a kid.
But the mark of fascism is a sort of "absolutism" philosophically, a belief in a single, fixed view of reality. This - I submit - is more characteristic of Williams-style neo-modernism than paleo-modernism. The paleo-modernists were relativists of the most extreme stripe.
Williams and the Williams point of view has won, in the long run. Williams' "objectivism" set the pace for contemporary poetry and set the scene for numerous "objectivist" styles - and then the "language"-oriented poets. To say nothing of the dominance of neo-modernism in the other arts.
Williams said: "Take the concepts embodied by T.S. Eliot. They are completely worthless." He associated Eliot with Hellenism or with the Renaissance, a time of slavish imitation of classical models. Eliot, for Williams, disliked new ideas, and refused to break the classic forms. He was backward, not politically, but morally. In the London Times, Eliot's work was referred to as "inhumanism."
But what Williams called "unbound thinking" may have derived from a philosophical absolutism. In an attack on modernist poetics, Williams said that one must draw a strict line between true and false values. He believed there are truths - absolute truths - which are independent of relations with other truths, connotations, interpretations. They're just truths - isolated. He dislikes similes because they make reality dependent on the relationships between things. "It approaches the impossible to arrive at an understanding of a thing." His vocabulary and beliefs are objectivist and absolutist philosophically: things exist objectively and independently. This is a throwback to Platonic realism, the very classicism that Williams scorned.
Eliot? He studied with William James - Henry James's brother. In his Ph.D. dissertation , he said:
- "culture is human nature; reality is its product" (i.e. reality does not pre-exist culture)
- "reality is a convention"
- "no idea can be wrong"
- is the opposite of Williams' position. Williams hated similes. Eliot liked them.
- "reality is a theory which has succeeded." This summarizes Eliot's philosophy, but still might be a bit confusing. Reality is the product of ideas, even though we're not aware of them.
- Eliot said of Henry James, "He had a mind so fine no idea could enter there." Ordinarily this would sound like an insult; but it was the highest compliment. Posing questions such as "What is there?" was an unnecessary use of ideas. James showed the complexity of many perspectives, free of ideation.
- post-philosophers like Richard Rorty agree: philosophers work is unnecessary. It is better, actually, to live in the world (even though we create this world through our beliefs).
For Williams, reality is something we ought to try and approach, and we shouldn't let language get in the way.
Yeats spoke of a "counter-Renaissance" in Ireland. His modernism and perspectivism, along with Eliot's, was starkly opposed to the Platonism of the Renaissance. It didn't entail a belief in things, but rather, given the fact that nothing really exists until language creates it, allowed the poet to play around with this creative power. Much like the magician figure Yeats admired as a kid.
27.1.08
Assignment for 1/30
Respond in detail to the poems, picking several to read more closely. In class I will ask you to highlight those poems. Remark on Yeats's middle style as a resolution of the polarity discussed in Ellmann's account of the young poet. How did Yeats manage, through poetic style, to "hammer his thoughts into unity," and what sort of unity resulted? What is "modern" about this middle style?
"I will hammer my thoughts into unity"
Yeats was always Yeats. He was always worried about the tragedy of aging, and wrote his first poem about this at the age of 21. He always struggled with the identity of Ireland and his own Irishness, and searched for a foundation for his country. But was it his country? He was Protestant, from the North, and moved in elite British circles for much of his life. Maybe that's why some of his most embattled poems are about violent events in the Irish struggle for independence and self-determination. At bottom, he searched for a basis on a more fundamental level, and this is what makes him a great poet, really. He looked for a mythology that would give structure to life, not just to the politics of day. Like Blake or Shelley, he decided to assemble his own mythology.
And his pet concerns - with beauty, with the godliness of men and women and their frailty, with the pain of unrequited love, the tragedy of lost things - run through his entire history. As a young poet, he set himself the task: "I will hammer my thoughts into unity." He had a vision, even as young man, of his own destiny, and it had something to do with unity. That meant the mystic goal, which he would later pursue with the Theosophists, of unifying the various parts and faculties of the mind and therefore evolving as a human being, it also meant finding a unifying principle for the world. I can't help but admire this ability to set a goal for himself of the highest order - and pursue it relentlessly. This single-mindedness is the mark of many extraordinary achievers.
Unity: Yeats set out to unify or ground Ireland, and then himself, and then the world. He began as a traditional, nationalist poet, then as a Romantic who sought to find the God in himself, and then as a modernist - but an optimistic one - who sought to reconstruct a fractured world. This quest took him to some strange places, and, over the course of looking at his life and influences, we'll have to ask whether he became a visionary - or whether he slipped off the deep end.
And his pet concerns - with beauty, with the godliness of men and women and their frailty, with the pain of unrequited love, the tragedy of lost things - run through his entire history. As a young poet, he set himself the task: "I will hammer my thoughts into unity." He had a vision, even as young man, of his own destiny, and it had something to do with unity. That meant the mystic goal, which he would later pursue with the Theosophists, of unifying the various parts and faculties of the mind and therefore evolving as a human being, it also meant finding a unifying principle for the world. I can't help but admire this ability to set a goal for himself of the highest order - and pursue it relentlessly. This single-mindedness is the mark of many extraordinary achievers.
Unity: Yeats set out to unify or ground Ireland, and then himself, and then the world. He began as a traditional, nationalist poet, then as a Romantic who sought to find the God in himself, and then as a modernist - but an optimistic one - who sought to reconstruct a fractured world. This quest took him to some strange places, and, over the course of looking at his life and influences, we'll have to ask whether he became a visionary - or whether he slipped off the deep end.
21.1.08
How to Set Up Your Blog
1. Register for an account at Blogger.com. If you have a google account, you can use the same password.
2. Please name the URL of your blog as follows: [your first name & last initial].crackedlookingglass.blogspot.com. The only reason for this is so it will be easy for me to link your blog to the this (central) class blog. And, it will be easy for your classmates to find and read your blog.
3. Choose a template. I picked a dignified one 'cause this is all literary and stuff.
4. Do an initial post, or your blog won't be stored.
5. Then post your first assignment, which should be an answer to the question above. Feel free to drift away from the question to other aspects of the text that interst you. Keep it specific (refer to the texts and criticism). Feel free to put in links, html, whatever. And PLEASE look at other people's blogs.
6. End every assigned post with a couple questions about the reading. Skeptical, probing, specific. Talk back to the author. Or express your confusion.
Okay, that's all.
2. Please name the URL of your blog as follows: [your first name & last initial].crackedlookingglass.blogspot.com. The only reason for this is so it will be easy for me to link your blog to the this (central) class blog. And, it will be easy for your classmates to find and read your blog.
3. Choose a template. I picked a dignified one 'cause this is all literary and stuff.
4. Do an initial post, or your blog won't be stored.
5. Then post your first assignment, which should be an answer to the question above. Feel free to drift away from the question to other aspects of the text that interst you. Keep it specific (refer to the texts and criticism). Feel free to put in links, html, whatever. And PLEASE look at other people's blogs.
6. End every assigned post with a couple questions about the reading. Skeptical, probing, specific. Talk back to the author. Or express your confusion.
Okay, that's all.
Assignment for 1/28
When you see this - you guessed it - I'm giving a you an assignment for your post response. The first readings were about Ireland, the Irish background to literature... and a couple early poems by the quintessential Irish Bard, William Butler Yeats. How, in these early poems, do you see Yeats trying to stake out his identity as an Irish poet... and just as a poet? Is there something in his work that reflects the stormy history of Ireland. Review and summarize the readings in your post. Also, bring your blog URL to class for me so I can add a link over to the right.
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