r/jamesjoyce

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For someone whose style leaves stories open to interpretation and who developed a multimeaning style in the wake, Joyce's prose is anything but! No holds are barred.

From Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe-William Blake), Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics).

'Even Oliver Cromwell himself, the Lord Protector of civil liberties, was of Celtic origin, son of a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. So, over six centuries had passed since the Battle of Hastings before the true successor of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty was to ascend to the throne of England. The people who acclaimed the coming of the awkward and taciturn Dutch commander were acclaiming themselves, saluting the human symbol of a true rebirth.

For the first time now the true English spirit begins to appear in literature. Consider how minimal the importance of that spirit was in the earlier times . In Chaucer, a court writer with a polished and comely style, the indigenous spirit can just be discerned as the framework for the adventures of respectable people- meaning Norman clerics and foreign heroes. How is the great English people depicted in the variegated dramas of William Shakespeare, who wrote two hundred years after Chaucer? A boorish peasant, a court jester, a half-mad and half-stupid ragamuffin, a gravedigger. Shakespeare's characters all come from abroad and afar: Othello, a Moorish prince; Shylock, a Venetian Jew; Caesar, a Roman; Hamlet, a Danish prince; Macbeth, a Celtic usurper; Romeo and Juliet, citizens of Verona. Of all the rich gallery, perhaps the only one who can be called English is the fat knight with the monstrous paunch, Sir John Falstaff. In the centuries following the French conquest, English literature was schooled by masters such as Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso and Messer Lodovico. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are a version of the Decameron or the Novellino; Milton's Paradise Lost is a puritanical transcript of the Divine Comedy. Shakespeare with his Titianesque palette, his eloquence, his epileptic passion, and his creative fury, is an Italianized Englishman, while the theatre of the restoration takes its cue from the Spanish stage and the works of Calderon and Lope de Vega. The first English writer to write without copying or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models to instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen, and to manufacture an artistic form for himself that is perhaps without precedent (with an exception of the monographs of Sallust and Plutarch) is Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel.'

Throughout our human history, the creative arts have captured our beauty, dignity, frailty, greatness and our foes: fall, guilt, redemption, and rebirth are common themes across the arts. Few works embody this cyclical human experience as intensely as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Centred on a night of fitful dreaming, the novel transforms one Dublin family’s quiet scandal into a mythic loop of human fallibility, guilt, and renewal. Yet, where traditional art treats these themes as heavy moral lessons, Joyce and the new creators who adapt him find something entirely different within them: raw, uninhibited joy. Alastair White’s new musical adaptation of this historic novel is a modern attempt to bring that endless cycle to life through sound rather than moralising. It offers a new take on an age-old story.

I know that the topic of advice for reading Ulysses has been beaten to death as nauseam, and I’m not here to retread that. I am about 45 pages in, and just wonder 💭 f fellow readers search again and again the meanings of French and German words, as well as other what would be timely metaphors etc, or do you just absorb the novel in one go and let yourself sort of just absorb it. It feels in a sense sort of “David Lynch” aka last season of Twin Peaks or Inland Empire. You could dive deep for meaning later but right now, how does it make you feel etc. Any input would be appreciated.

Scattered in scattered capitals,

solitary and many,

we played at being the first Adam

who gave names to things.

Down the vast slopes of night

that extend into dawn

we searched (I remember it still) for the words

of the moon, of death, of the morning,

and of the other usages of man.

We were imagism, cubism,

the conventicals and sects

that the credulous universities venerate.

We invented the lack of punctuation,

the leaving out of capital letters,

the stanzas in the form of a dove

from the libraries of Alexandria.

Ash, the work of our hands,

and the glowing fire our faith.

You, meanwhile, forged

in the cities of exile

in that exile which was

your loathed and chosen instrument,

the weapon of your art,

you raised your arduous labyrinths,

infinitesimal and infinite,

admirably ignoble,

more populous than history.

We shall have died without having made out

the biform beast or the rose

which are the center of your labyrinth,

but memory holds on to its talismans,

its Virgilian echoes,

and so in the streets of the night

your splendid infernos survive,

your many cadences and metaphors,

the gold glints of your shadow.

What does our cowardice matter if there is on earth

a single valiant man,

what does sadness matter if there was in time

somebody who called himself happy,

what does my lost generation matter,

that vague mirror, if your books justify it.

I am the others. I am all those

whom your obstinate rigor has redeemed.

I am those you do not know and those you continue to save

This is an update on this post.

He (no context for you if you don't read the prequel) has returned with the massive, 3-volume book (and the other). I look at its thin pages and there's a sort of mysterious air about the rather regular characters, since there's still some sort of knowledge of the full extent of them. I know some words, but I don't know most. Rivers, flowing, Adam, some woman (I know she is Eve, but I can't tell from the characters), badabada...something something. It's hard to recognize, but it's almost another experience, staring at letters upon footnotes and gently grasping the concepts. He said he might read it to me (similar to a bedtime story, I guess (quite fitting, I suppose)). That's another thing entirely. Maybe one day I'll have fully learned to read Chinese, and I'll have yet a third experience with (t)his book. Even right now, I can just look at it and appreciate the clearly daunting task of translation. At the very least, I have this wonderful book that has travelled the world, and landed on the top of my bookshelf, which I will reserve for my favorite books.

Oh, and, it's absolutely beautiful. The cover reminds me of a collage.

My problem with this Ulysses movie is the casting. Not a single person is Irish!

I gave up reading Ulysses 3 times in the past few months, currently 2 weeks in, and I just read today the part where Bloom talks about the solar eclipse (Lestrygonians). And there is exactly one today (Europe)!

Ulysses has often been compared with early cinema and its techniques, which is not too far-fetched as Joyce himself was associated with the founding of the Volta Cinema in Dublin in 1909 and was said to have enjoyed early cinema.

Did Joyce ever write on cinema or mention it anywhere (besides FW preferably)? Does anyone know of films he likely watched or enjoyed? Are there any good film adaptations of his work? What kind of films would he have liked?

I find it fascinating that the Spanish translation is so different in its structure. The language is also much simpler and direct. It really baffles me.