Thank you for being unabashedly in love with the work and unashamedly not for everyone. In particular thank you for #8 (and thank you for not attempting an accent), it often feels an attempt is made to scare people away from or intimidate their potential for understanding so the "scholar" won't be questioned and potentially exposed as not having read the novel. I have only just found your channel and have only just begun to watch them all, but I am impressed with your approach of clearity without dumbing down. Happy Dedalusday!!! (this maybe different than Bloomsday, but I believe a pint is still in order.)
A pint is most certainly in order. I've pondered having one beside me in the Cafe but the words would quickly become garbled under its semi-sacred influence. Ahh, don't get me going on scholars and academia. But then Joyce hands it to them, Haines and McHugh, right in Ulysses. Ponderous, smug, and utterly lacking in inspiration or insight. That's the amazing thing about the book, it's our world, today.
I read a book ages ago about James Joyce (in fact I think it was even called "James Joyce") and there was a quote in there by Joyce in response to a request for a plan (what we now can a schema) of Ulysses to aid in reading and understanding Ulysses. Joyce said something like "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring my immortality" - not an exact quote but pretty close. So I think he did purposefully set out to make Ulysses quote difficult to understand. Of course like everyone else, I sought out guides and scholarly works on Ulysses but gave them up - preferring to just read the darn book. That's what lead to my falling in love with it. Love your videos. Please keep up the good work!
Thanks for that John. That's a quite commonly cited quote, but I actually believe now that Joyce didn't say it with any fondness towards the academic proffessorly set. More and more I think he had contempt in his heart for the kind of soulless analysis school traffics in. By the time he began writing Ulysses he had been through the whole Stephen Hero ordeal, written a thousand pages of his own struggles in straight forward narrative and had them rejected by a dozen or more publishers. In despair he ended up throwing the manuscript on the fire and reworking it into the much shorter, much safer, much neutered A Portrait. I only finally chanced upon a copy of Hero last year, after twenty five odd years reading Joyce and his work and it was a revelation. It's only a fragment of what he had written, but all that wasn't permitted to be published was contained in it, plus a much deeper and sympathetic depiction of Stephen/himself at the crucial age of about twenty or so, which would have been about two years before June 16, 1904. I plan on reading from it for my next video on episode nine, though with other things going on in life it's taking me longer than normal to get done. The point being I think Joyce learned a valuable lesson with Hero and A Portrait, how could he have not? By the time he began the writing of Ulysses he knew full well what he could and couldn't write and how he had to hide or disguise what he truly wanted to say if he ever hoped to get his work out into the world. That should be kept in mind reading his mature works, Ulysses and the Wake. So we have all the puzzles and enigmas, the obfuscations and misdirections, all that Homeric parallel stuff that screens what is really taking place. What could that be? Well, in A Portrait and especially Stephen Hero we see a young artistically inclined Joyce pulling painfully away for the morals, values, customs and habits, physical, intellectual and spiritual, of his age, however, what is there to move towards? Ulysses and his fictional creation Bloom is the answer. And actually episode nine ends with a little vignette of this. Having delivered himself of his theories, theories of which he no longer cares or believes in (he says so himself at the conclusion) he and his old and all but left behind friend Mulligan depart the national library. On the steps a figure passes out the door and, significantly, between them. Stephen immediately recalls a dream he had the night before, one we already caught a glimpse of in episode three, of a dark man, with lemony melon scent, and how he was welcomed and not afraid. That man is Bloom. Mulligan, base as he is, cautions Stephen that Bloom was eyeing him. He was, but not for anything so crass. For Bloom is sympathetic to the plight of a higher sort of soul you might say. He has that inside as well, and is utterly isolated as a result. Anyway, with all the puzzles and enigmas the scholarly set are intent on unravelling, has anyone ever mentioned the fact of Stephen having dreamt of meeting Bloom the night before? That all the events of the day are moving towards that fateful encounter, fateful in the life of our young Hero? Not that I know of. As commonly taught, Stephen is a mere peripheral character, unimportant in the progress of Bloom's day. He's almost dispensable. But why then doesn't anybody ask, Bloom alone, the books makes no sense then? Only a modern day recreation or retelling of the Odyssey? What is the point to that and why should I bother reading it? Oh well, better get on with my day. it's -23 degrees Celsius outside and I have some trucking to do. Ouch.
The book, whose title you correctly remembered, is the biography by Richard Ellmann (p. 521); the quote was of Joyce to his French Ulysses translator, Jacques Benoîst-Méchin (explaining the modification of certain "puzzles," e.g., "U. p: up." which in French becomes slang for "You're fucked"); and, you got the quote almost word-for-word (cherish that memory): “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” And, to that I will add a quote from Brother Stanislaus, regarding Joyce's 1901 essay, “The Day of the Rabblement” (Critical Writings, p. 69), which begins: “No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude” -a quote regarding Giordano Bruno of Nola, Italy-Joyce beguilingly left the “Nolan” unexplained, his brother Stanislaus says (My Brother's Keeper, p. 146), in the hope that “readers of the article should have at first a false impression that he was quoting some little-known Irish writer…so that when they discovered their error, the name Giordano Bruno might perhaps awaken some interest in his life and work. Laymen, he repeated, should be encouraged to think.” So, yeah..."puzzles" => fully intended (Why else did he usurp the Latin name of the Greek hero for his cracked-looking glass image of a day-in-the-life of a hero?)... Oh, and Stephen is at best a "failed-hero," a "Son-Lover," as Carl Jung and Richard Wagner would say...he who would "wrest old images from the burial earth...The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting" (Gabler: 10.815--17), as Adonis was want to say to Mother Aphrodite. Bloom is the hero of this book, as was Satan of Milton's "Paradise Lost"; and, that's why we proudly celebrate Bloomsday, the day Joyce first met his future wife and mother of his children (which is what the book is really about). By the way, Omphalos, have you read your Dante, specifically La vita nuova? The distinction is not properly "art and science" (I would hardly call Leopold a beacon for the sciences), but, rather: spiritual and material. In Peripatetic terms, Stephen is "thought" to Bloom's "body"; Bloom is "audience" to Stephen's "artist." So, laymen (me included), think...and, maybe you, too, will feel like a "professor."
Thank you so much, Nick, for your response. The name Ellmann definitely rings a bell for me and I will get the books to which you refer. I'm also glad I remember the quote, not bad for a 40-odd-year-old memory.
Such a load of words and learning. I don't really have a reply to all that thought and opinion beyond what I expressed in my video 'James Joyce's Ulysses and the Failure of our Educational System.' I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive when I say this, but you and your learning do not belong here at the Omphalos Cafe. I've been forthright about that in several videos, saying and fully meaning: this place is not for everyone. What's going on here, for want of better terms, is on a different plain of experience, a different dimension. It's a case of Apples and Oranges, or much more accurately, Oranges and Golden Apples. I just went in to my compendium of quotes for something apt to the moment here, and while there were a good dozen that might have served I've settled for this simple one which will serve for the intent of my videos and Joyce's work as a whole: "The satori plane can never be reached by the rationalistic plane, however ingeniously it may be handled."- D.T. Suzuki, Living By Zen, pg. 94 All the best, Nick, but please spare the Cafe your opinion in the future.
@@nickswilliamson He ignores what Joyce says when it suits him. I mean, can’t both things be true, couldn’t Joyce have to hide his meaning to get published, and want to confuse the professors.
Thanks for helping people get into the greatest book in English. However, Joyce himself was asked his inspirations for Bloom and why he made Bloom a Jew: Joyce replied, "Because he was" (in Ellmann's biography). A main aspect of the episode cited here on this is "wrong-headedness," and Bloom's statement can have more than one meaning.
My opinion: #10: disagree; "puzzles" => fully intended... #9: (sort of) agree (but, David --> shapes-in-space, Nebeneinander; Fifth --> tones-in-time, Nacheinander)... #8: AGREE! (but, one might also want to consider the comment in the context of Giambattista Vico's verum factum)... #7: agree... #6: agree/disagree (you might want to read Hamlet)/agree... #5: agree (Bloom --> converted to Catholicism to marry Molly, as his father to Protestantism to wed his wife...both are related to Grandpa Virag, a Hungarian Jew probably seeking asylum in Ireland during the 1848 Revolution and pogroms)... #4: disagree... #3: agree/disagree/agree... #2: agree (but it helps)... #1: agree (but it helps, as will Aristotle, Virgil, Dante, Milton, not to mention Valerius Flaccus [Episode Ten...never in The Odyssey], and maybe the Shakespearean author, Vico, Bosanquet, and even a little St. Thomas [but take that last with a heavy does of sarcasm, the saint having recently, in Joyce's schooldays, been named author of Catholic dogma]...and, the more you know the better the read gets...it took me at least five reads before I actually started laughing at the jokes ("U.p: up."..."Dolphin's Barn"..."Throwaway and Sceptre"...come on, this shite's hilarious!)... My take: the book is meant to turn dedicated readers INTO "professors"!
Such a load of words and learning. I don't really have a reply to all that thought and opinion beyond what I expressed in my video 'James Joyce's Ulysses and the Failure of our Educational System.' I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive when I say this, but you and your learning do not belong here at the Omphalos Cafe. I've been forthright about that in several videos, saying and fully meaning: this place is not for everyone. What's going on here, for want of better terms, is on a different plain of experience, a different dimension. It's a case of Apples and Oranges, or much more accurately, Oranges and Golden Apples. I just went in to my compendium of quotes for something apt to the moment here, and while there were a good dozen that might have served I've settled for this simple one which will serve for the intent of my videos and Joyce's work as a whole: "The satori plane can never be reached by the rationalistic plane, however ingeniously it may be handled."- D.T. Suzuki, Living By Zen, pg. 94 All the best, Nick, but please spare the Cafe your opinion in the future.
As there is no satori without kensho, there is no understanding without that upon which one would stand. As the Wise One said, "As Above, so Below." But, so be it; if that's how you feel, I'll go.
@@HalPhillipWalker Still, the choice of that particular place name and the association with Acoetes (Arion) is amusing nonetheless, given the context Joyce uses. So, whether your classically trained mind is giggling at the pissed off boy from Naxos (during Joyce's "Nostos"), ancient literature's original Anthony-who-wished-it-to-the-field-and-it-was-good, or puzzling at the association with the inventor of the dithyramb, claimed by the people of Lesbos, whenever you think about Josie Powell (Bloom's first significant love) you cast Denis Breen in the role of the ignorant (and probably drunk and horny) sailors and his famous missive (U. p: up) with the madness Dionysos brings. Like I said, a joke...if you were forced to read a lot of Greek and Latin in school....Oh, and, of course, I forgot to mention the irony if your classically trained mind happened to know anything about ancient myth and religion, because the "dolphin's barn" is actually a reference to a temple where lovers supposedly go to test the strength of their love (one can only imagine what "tests" took place during Dionysian days in Pelasgyian Greece...and then go wash your mind out with soap).
Um, Kevin, simple question here: I mean, you have a hundred years of scholarship to fall back on, you're toeing the party line, running with the herd, as a great many commenters before you, but WHERE in the book does it say he's Jewish? I know where it says he's been baptized into the Christian faith three times, I know where he himself tells Stephen Dedalus, after relating his taunting of the citizen in the pub that actually he is NOT Jewish, but where does it say he is? Is it because Simon Dedalus or a few of his cronies label him a Jew, or the barroom bigoted blowhard 'the citizen?' Hardly credible sources. Why believe them? And what about the fella in the pub who says he's a Freemason? Should we believe him too? Or the growing number of Dubliners who think he's the only punter in town who bet on the long shot Throwaway? Did Bloom win a mitt full? With all his reminiscences does he recall times spent in a Synagogue? Is he even clear on Jewish ritual? Not at all. Is it because, as another commenter chimed in, Jewishness runs through the mother's blood line, or the father's? By that reckoning we're all African, because our ancestors came out of Africa one or two million years ago. This is the kind of thing I refer to in my video James Joyce's Ulysses and the Failure of Our Academic system. It's universally accepted that he's Jewish, but where in the book does it say so? The point I'm trying to make in these videos, and more and more I find that so-called 'critical' or 'analytical' minded people--the school bred majority-- utterly miss, is that in Ulysses Joyce is giving us two individuals who have moved beyond, have transcended, our collective Judeo-Christian heritage. The older Bloom having transcended the older Jewish faith and the younger Dedalus having transcended the younger Christian. Wow, coincidence? Maybe. That, to me, is what makes Ulysses relevant to us today, and that is what lifts it into the highest ranks of world literature, not to mention preparing the ground for his next monomythic opus, Finnegans Wake. Ahh well, the balls in your court there Kevy-Boy. Bloomsday is for you and the masses. Speak for the herd. Tell me where it says he's Jewish. The mike is yours'. Time to shine.
Kevin Kearney he is of Jewish descent, but he clearly isn’t a follower of the Jewish faith or any religion for that matter, despite being baptised both a Catholic and Protestant.
Good coffee. Yes. Dublin is not Dublin; it’s every city everywhere. The Liffey is not the Liffey; it’s every river that ever winds its way. To find the everyman and the everywoman Joyce mearly had to be himself and know and love Nora Barnacle.
Thanks for that Martin, and oh so well put. But isn't that precisely what Joyce does with his next work, Finnegans Wake? The everyman HCE married to the everywoman ALP, with their pair of boys, Shaun the Mulligan-like extravert and Shem the Dedalus-like poet introvert, plus daughter... but I forget her name! All the best.
Nora was exceptional from what I read. She was born and reared in a small dwelling house in my local town Galway. Her family were Catholic in terms of what that ment in post-treaty Ireland i.e. not part of a Universal body but part of the the exact opposite; a localised institution, pestering, dour, superstitous, and recognising only one occasion of sin Sex. There’s an oft reported cameo wherein her embarrassed and mortified father/uncle deposited a copy of one of Jimmy Joyce’s ‘Dirty Books’ into the flaming peat stove while incanting (with a sure hope that his incantation would reach the ears of the local Parish Priest) as follows “WHILE I’M THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSE NO DIRTY BOOK WHICH OFFENDS OUR TRUE FAITH bla bla bla...”
Of course Norah was the model for Molly, but as I said in my last video on episode seven, probably the model as well for the younger Cissy Caffrey. I've a long way to go before I get to Molly's final chapter riverrun but I do put her up there and probably beyond our two other heroes, Bloom and Stephen. "...God in heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the seas and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and the fine cattle about that would do your heart good to see...." --Molly Bloom. Way beyond good and evil.... to Life! Read and then reread Stephen Hero recently, the unpublishable forerunner to A Portrait. Much more in depth picture of Stephen (and Joyce) in the fateful months leading up to his departure for Europe. But also illuminating in his relationship with the buxom young Irish gal Emma, constrained as she was by ideas of nationalism and the ingrained straightjacket of Catholicism. What it must have meant for the young isolated Joyce to meet the free and nobly uneducated Norah!
Sitting there pontificating like a constipated prelate. Of course Joyce was provocatively difficult. "Daedalus Day is for the few"? You bet it feckin' is.
Yup, I'm as convinced as ever 'Daedulus Day is for the few.' Keep runnin' with the Blooming herd there, Haines, your contributions, and how they are expressed, say a great deal about who you are and what you value.
Great comments, Haines, though I don't know why you bother to watch any of these videos. Have you read any Joseph Campbell? From his biography it is clear he endured a great many comments and criticisms by hard reasoning 'critically' minded people such as yourself. Granted, the two videos you have commented on were the first I produced on the topic of Ulysses, and were I to do them again I would certainly have done them differently, but I am curious to know what you would make of my later one's, such as James Joyce's Ulysses And The Failure Of Our Academic System (which you appear to be a shining example of), and James Joyce's Ulysses, Wake Up You Blockheads. (pretty much my final word on the matter.) Though the truth is I hold out little to no hope for a viewer of your calibre and closedness of mind. All the best, and keep up the high quality of contribution on the subject of Joyce, and pretty much everything else for that matter. Jeff
Thank you for being unabashedly in love with the work and unashamedly not for everyone. In particular thank you for #8 (and thank you for not attempting an accent), it often feels an attempt is made to scare people away from or intimidate their potential for understanding so the "scholar" won't be questioned and potentially exposed as not having read the novel.
I have only just found your channel and have only just begun to watch them all, but I am impressed with your approach of clearity without dumbing down.
Happy Dedalusday!!! (this maybe different than Bloomsday, but I believe a pint is still in order.)
A pint is most certainly in order. I've pondered having one beside me in the Cafe but the words would quickly become garbled under its semi-sacred influence.
Ahh, don't get me going on scholars and academia. But then Joyce hands it to them, Haines and McHugh, right in Ulysses. Ponderous, smug, and utterly lacking in inspiration or insight.
That's the amazing thing about the book, it's our world, today.
I read a book ages ago about James Joyce (in fact I think it was even called "James Joyce") and there was a quote in there by Joyce in response to a request for a plan (what we now can a schema) of Ulysses to aid in reading and understanding Ulysses. Joyce said something like "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring my immortality" - not an exact quote but pretty close. So I think he did purposefully set out to make Ulysses quote difficult to understand. Of course like everyone else, I sought out guides and scholarly works on Ulysses but gave them up - preferring to just read the darn book. That's what lead to my falling in love with it.
Love your videos. Please keep up the good work!
Thanks for that John. That's a quite commonly cited quote, but I actually believe now that Joyce didn't say it with any fondness towards the academic proffessorly set. More and more I think he had contempt in his heart for the kind of soulless analysis school traffics in.
By the time he began writing Ulysses he had been through the whole Stephen Hero ordeal, written a thousand pages of his own struggles in straight forward narrative and had them rejected by a dozen or more publishers. In despair he ended up throwing the manuscript on the fire and reworking it into the much shorter, much safer, much neutered A Portrait.
I only finally chanced upon a copy of Hero last year, after twenty five odd years reading Joyce and his work and it was a revelation. It's only a fragment of what he had written, but all that wasn't permitted to be published was contained in it, plus a much deeper and sympathetic depiction of Stephen/himself at the crucial age of about twenty or so, which would have been about two years before June 16, 1904.
I plan on reading from it for my next video on episode nine, though with other things going on in life it's taking me longer than normal to get done.
The point being I think Joyce learned a valuable lesson with Hero and A Portrait, how could he have not? By the time he began the writing of Ulysses he knew full well what he could and couldn't write and how he had to hide or disguise what he truly wanted to say if he ever hoped to get his work out into the world. That should be kept in mind reading his mature works, Ulysses and the Wake.
So we have all the puzzles and enigmas, the obfuscations and misdirections, all that Homeric parallel stuff that screens what is really taking place.
What could that be? Well, in A Portrait and especially Stephen Hero we see a young artistically inclined Joyce pulling painfully away for the morals, values, customs and habits, physical, intellectual and spiritual, of his age, however, what is there to move towards? Ulysses and his fictional creation Bloom is the answer. And actually episode nine ends with a little vignette of this. Having delivered himself of his theories, theories of which he no longer cares or believes in (he says so himself at the conclusion) he and his old and all but left behind friend Mulligan depart the national library. On the steps a figure passes out the door and, significantly, between them. Stephen immediately recalls a dream he had the night before, one we already caught a glimpse of in episode three, of a dark man, with lemony melon scent, and how he was welcomed and not afraid.
That man is Bloom. Mulligan, base as he is, cautions Stephen that Bloom was eyeing him. He was, but not for anything so crass. For Bloom is sympathetic to the plight of a higher sort of soul you might say. He has that inside as well, and is utterly isolated as a result.
Anyway, with all the puzzles and enigmas the scholarly set are intent on unravelling, has anyone ever mentioned the fact of Stephen having dreamt of meeting Bloom the night before? That all the events of the day are moving towards that fateful encounter, fateful in the life of our young Hero?
Not that I know of. As commonly taught, Stephen is a mere peripheral character, unimportant in the progress of Bloom's day. He's almost dispensable.
But why then doesn't anybody ask, Bloom alone, the books makes no sense then? Only a modern day recreation or retelling of the Odyssey? What is the point to that and why should I bother reading it?
Oh well, better get on with my day. it's -23 degrees Celsius outside and I have some trucking to do.
Ouch.
The book, whose title you correctly remembered, is the biography by Richard Ellmann (p. 521); the quote was of Joyce to his French Ulysses translator, Jacques Benoîst-Méchin (explaining the modification of certain "puzzles," e.g., "U. p: up." which in French becomes slang for "You're fucked"); and, you got the quote almost word-for-word (cherish that memory): “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” And, to that I will add a quote from Brother Stanislaus, regarding Joyce's 1901 essay, “The Day of the Rabblement” (Critical Writings, p. 69), which begins: “No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude” -a quote regarding Giordano Bruno of Nola, Italy-Joyce beguilingly left the “Nolan” unexplained, his brother Stanislaus says (My Brother's Keeper, p. 146), in the hope that “readers of the article should have at first a false impression that he was quoting some little-known Irish writer…so that when they discovered their error, the name Giordano Bruno might perhaps awaken some interest in his life and work. Laymen, he repeated, should be encouraged to think.” So, yeah..."puzzles" => fully intended (Why else did he usurp the Latin name of the Greek hero for his cracked-looking glass image of a day-in-the-life of a hero?)... Oh, and Stephen is at best a "failed-hero," a "Son-Lover," as Carl Jung and Richard Wagner would say...he who would "wrest old images from the burial earth...The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting" (Gabler: 10.815--17), as Adonis was want to say to Mother Aphrodite. Bloom is the hero of this book, as was Satan of Milton's "Paradise Lost"; and, that's why we proudly celebrate Bloomsday, the day Joyce first met his future wife and mother of his children (which is what the book is really about). By the way, Omphalos, have you read your Dante, specifically La vita nuova? The distinction is not properly "art and science" (I would hardly call Leopold a beacon for the sciences), but, rather: spiritual and material. In Peripatetic terms, Stephen is "thought" to Bloom's "body"; Bloom is "audience" to Stephen's "artist." So, laymen (me included), think...and, maybe you, too, will feel like a "professor."
Thank you so much, Nick, for your response. The name Ellmann definitely rings a bell for me and I will get the books to which you refer. I'm also glad I remember the quote, not bad for a 40-odd-year-old memory.
Such a load of words and learning.
I don't really have a reply to all that thought and opinion beyond what I expressed in my video 'James Joyce's Ulysses and the Failure of our Educational System.'
I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive when I say this, but you and your learning do not belong here at the Omphalos Cafe. I've been forthright about that in several videos, saying and fully meaning: this place is not for everyone.
What's going on here, for want of better terms, is on a different plain of experience, a different dimension. It's a case of Apples and Oranges, or much more accurately, Oranges and Golden Apples.
I just went in to my compendium of quotes for something apt to the moment here, and while there were a good dozen that might have served I've settled for this simple one which will serve for the intent of my videos and Joyce's work as a whole:
"The satori plane can never be reached by the rationalistic plane, however ingeniously it may be handled."- D.T. Suzuki, Living By Zen, pg. 94
All the best, Nick, but please spare the Cafe your opinion in the future.
@@nickswilliamson He ignores what Joyce says when it suits him. I mean, can’t both things be true, couldn’t Joyce have to hide his meaning to get published, and want to confuse the professors.
Thanks for helping people get into the greatest book in English. However, Joyce himself was asked his inspirations for Bloom and why he made Bloom a Jew: Joyce replied, "Because he was" (in Ellmann's biography). A main aspect of the episode cited here on this is "wrong-headedness," and Bloom's statement can have more than one meaning.
it is a very rare book in that it can have an unending number of reads and still be fresh, in a decayed kind of way...
В разные годы разные издания Улисса с разного цвета обложками?
My opinion:
#10: disagree; "puzzles" => fully intended...
#9: (sort of) agree (but, David --> shapes-in-space, Nebeneinander; Fifth --> tones-in-time, Nacheinander)...
#8: AGREE! (but, one might also want to consider the comment in the context of Giambattista Vico's verum factum)...
#7: agree...
#6: agree/disagree (you might want to read Hamlet)/agree...
#5: agree (Bloom --> converted to Catholicism to marry Molly, as his father to Protestantism to wed his wife...both are related to Grandpa Virag, a Hungarian Jew probably seeking asylum in Ireland during the 1848 Revolution and pogroms)...
#4: disagree...
#3: agree/disagree/agree...
#2: agree (but it helps)...
#1: agree (but it helps, as will Aristotle, Virgil, Dante, Milton, not to mention Valerius Flaccus [Episode Ten...never in The Odyssey], and maybe the Shakespearean author, Vico, Bosanquet, and even a little St. Thomas [but take that last with a heavy does of sarcasm, the saint having recently, in Joyce's schooldays, been named author of Catholic dogma]...and, the more you know the better the read gets...it took me at least five reads before I actually started laughing at the jokes ("U.p: up."..."Dolphin's Barn"..."Throwaway and Sceptre"...come on, this shite's hilarious!)...
My take: the book is meant to turn dedicated readers INTO "professors"!
Such a load of words and learning.
I don't really have a reply to all that thought and opinion beyond what I expressed in my video 'James Joyce's Ulysses and the Failure of our Educational System.'
I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive when I say this, but you and your learning do not belong here at the Omphalos Cafe. I've been forthright about that in several videos, saying and fully meaning: this place is not for everyone.
What's going on here, for want of better terms, is on a different plain of experience, a different dimension. It's a case of Apples and Oranges, or much more accurately, Oranges and Golden Apples.
I just went in to my compendium of quotes for something apt to the moment here, and while there were a good dozen that might have served I've settled for this simple one which will serve for the intent of my videos and Joyce's work as a whole:
"The satori plane can never be reached by the rationalistic plane, however ingeniously it may be handled."- D.T. Suzuki, Living By Zen, pg. 94
All the best, Nick, but please spare the Cafe your opinion in the future.
As there is no satori without kensho, there is no understanding without that upon which one would stand. As the Wise One said, "As Above, so Below." But, so be it; if that's how you feel, I'll go.
Dolphins Barn isn’t a joke it is an actual place name in Dublin
@@HalPhillipWalker Still, the choice of that particular place name and the association with Acoetes (Arion) is amusing nonetheless, given the context Joyce uses. So, whether your classically trained mind is giggling at the pissed off boy from Naxos (during Joyce's "Nostos"), ancient literature's original Anthony-who-wished-it-to-the-field-and-it-was-good, or puzzling at the association with the inventor of the dithyramb, claimed by the people of Lesbos, whenever you think about Josie Powell (Bloom's first significant love) you cast Denis Breen in the role of the ignorant (and probably drunk and horny) sailors and his famous missive (U. p: up) with the madness Dionysos brings. Like I said, a joke...if you were forced to read a lot of Greek and Latin in school....Oh, and, of course, I forgot to mention the irony if your classically trained mind happened to know anything about ancient myth and religion, because the "dolphin's barn" is actually a reference to a temple where lovers supposedly go to test the strength of their love (one can only imagine what "tests" took place during Dionysian days in Pelasgyian Greece...and then go wash your mind out with soap).
Exactly he even says that the puzzles were fully intended to make the reading hard.
List starts at 4:10
Why do I imagine Leopold to look just like you?lol
You're great and you've taught me tons. Thank you very much.
Thank you! This is a very helpful introduction.
Um, bloom is Jewish... it’s ‘right there in the book’, as you say. The line you refer to just means he isn’t religiously practicing.
Um, Kevin, simple question here: I mean, you have a hundred years of scholarship to fall back on, you're toeing the party line, running with the herd, as a great many commenters before you, but WHERE in the book does it say he's Jewish?
I know where it says he's been baptized into the Christian faith three times, I know where he himself tells Stephen Dedalus, after relating his taunting of the citizen in the pub that actually he is NOT Jewish, but where does it say he is?
Is it because Simon Dedalus or a few of his cronies label him a Jew, or the barroom bigoted blowhard 'the citizen?' Hardly credible sources. Why believe them? And what about the fella in the pub who says he's a Freemason? Should we believe him too? Or the growing number of Dubliners who think he's the only punter in town who bet on the long shot Throwaway? Did Bloom win a mitt full?
With all his reminiscences does he recall times spent in a Synagogue? Is he even clear on Jewish ritual? Not at all.
Is it because, as another commenter chimed in, Jewishness runs through the mother's blood line, or the father's? By that reckoning we're all African, because our ancestors came out of Africa one or two million years ago.
This is the kind of thing I refer to in my video James Joyce's Ulysses and the Failure of Our Academic system. It's universally accepted that he's Jewish, but where in the book does it say so?
The point I'm trying to make in these videos, and more and more I find that so-called 'critical' or 'analytical' minded people--the school bred majority-- utterly miss, is that in Ulysses Joyce is giving us two individuals who have moved beyond, have transcended, our collective Judeo-Christian heritage. The older Bloom having transcended the older Jewish faith and the younger Dedalus having transcended the younger Christian. Wow, coincidence? Maybe.
That, to me, is what makes Ulysses relevant to us today, and that is what lifts it into the highest ranks of world literature, not to mention preparing the ground for his next monomythic opus, Finnegans Wake.
Ahh well, the balls in your court there Kevy-Boy. Bloomsday is for you and the masses. Speak for the herd. Tell me where it says he's Jewish.
The mike is yours'.
Time to shine.
Kevin Kearney he is of Jewish descent, but he clearly isn’t a follower of the Jewish faith or any religion for that matter, despite being baptised both a Catholic and Protestant.
Good coffee.
Yes. Dublin is not Dublin; it’s every city everywhere.
The Liffey is not the Liffey; it’s every river that ever winds its way.
To find the everyman and the everywoman Joyce mearly had to be himself and know and love Nora Barnacle.
Thanks for that Martin, and oh so well put.
But isn't that precisely what Joyce does with his next work, Finnegans Wake? The everyman HCE married to the everywoman ALP, with their pair of boys, Shaun the Mulligan-like extravert and Shem the Dedalus-like poet introvert, plus daughter... but I forget her name!
All the best.
Nora was exceptional from what I read.
She was born and reared in a small dwelling house in my local town Galway.
Her family were Catholic in terms of what that ment in post-treaty Ireland
i.e. not part of a Universal body but part of the the exact opposite; a localised institution, pestering, dour, superstitous, and recognising only one occasion of sin Sex.
There’s an oft reported cameo wherein her embarrassed and mortified father/uncle deposited a copy of one of Jimmy Joyce’s ‘Dirty Books’ into the flaming peat stove while incanting (with a sure hope that his incantation would reach the ears of the local Parish Priest) as follows
“WHILE I’M THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSE NO DIRTY BOOK WHICH OFFENDS OUR TRUE FAITH bla bla bla...”
Of course Norah was the model for Molly, but as I said in my last video on episode seven, probably the model as well for the younger Cissy Caffrey. I've a long way to go before I get to Molly's final chapter riverrun but I do put her up there and probably beyond our two other heroes, Bloom and Stephen.
"...God in heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the seas and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and the fine cattle about that would do your heart good to see...." --Molly Bloom.
Way beyond good and evil.... to Life!
Read and then reread Stephen Hero recently, the unpublishable forerunner to A Portrait. Much more in depth picture of Stephen (and Joyce) in the fateful months leading up to his departure for Europe. But also illuminating in his relationship with the buxom young Irish gal Emma, constrained as she was by ideas of nationalism and the ingrained straightjacket of Catholicism.
What it must have meant for the young isolated Joyce to meet the free and nobly uneducated Norah!
Sitting there pontificating like a constipated prelate. Of course Joyce was provocatively difficult. "Daedalus Day is for the few"? You bet it feckin' is.
These are not comments, they are just bile. Good work there, Haines.
Yup, I'm as convinced as ever 'Daedulus Day is for the few.' Keep runnin' with the Blooming herd there, Haines, your contributions, and how they are expressed, say a great deal about who you are and what you value.
"How long is Haines going to stay in this (ivory) tower?"
Thought provoking stuff!
About as profound as my royal English arse. Ompholos, shmopholos.
Great comments, Haines, though I don't know why you bother to watch any of these videos. Have you read any Joseph Campbell? From his biography it is clear he endured a great many comments and criticisms by hard reasoning 'critically' minded people such as yourself.
Granted, the two videos you have commented on were the first I produced on the topic of Ulysses, and were I to do them again I would certainly have done them differently, but I am curious to know what you would make of my later one's, such as James Joyce's Ulysses And The Failure Of Our Academic System (which you appear to be a shining example of), and James Joyce's Ulysses, Wake Up You Blockheads. (pretty much my final word on the matter.) Though the truth is I hold out little to no hope for a viewer of your calibre and closedness of mind.
All the best, and keep up the high quality of contribution on the subject of Joyce, and pretty much everything else for that matter.
Jeff
Great thanksx