tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post6521222655026124929..comments2023-10-21T07:44:20.549-04:00Comments on The Existence Machine: The very notion of wholenessRichardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-17547232085729903452008-08-05T16:05:00.000-04:002008-08-05T16:05:00.000-04:00Jacob, are you saying that Joyce didn't deliberate...Jacob, are you saying that Joyce didn't deliberately impose the two structures that hold Ulysses together (while, yes, allowing him to rip things apart at the seams in each section)? Those two structures being: the life of one day for Leopold Bloom, and the source-book of The Odyssey. Sure, the scholars go haywire, but it was Joyce who led them down the garden path. <BR/><BR/>We do agree that in Svevo there is a new fictive universe.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-20399484795950020282008-08-05T14:18:00.000-04:002008-08-05T14:18:00.000-04:00I take seriously neither Joyce's meta-claims for U...I take seriously neither Joyce's meta-claims for Ulysses and FW, nor these two books (I really wonder if he meant them. I hear the same ironic voice he gives to Stephen in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man <I>forging in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of the race</I>. There's a delicious lightness in Ulysses that's easily missed coming to quickly from a reading of Dubliners... unless you make a point of ending with Ivy Day in the Committee Room--my choice for the best story in the collection. <BR/><BR/>I find the humor unhinges those oh so serious claims, frees the reader from the need to hold Ulysses to any sort of pre-Modernist aesthetic unity.<BR/><BR/>What <I>is</I> pre-Modernist, is the consciousness and lives of the characters and the world they inhabit. This is true. Svevo leaps into a new fictive universe; Joyce persists in representing a world already--like the music referenced--an anachronism. <I>That's</I> what remains 19th Century in sensibility. You can impose, or try to, a grand structure on Ulysses, but only after you've closed the book, outside of the reading. Once immersed in the reading, things don't just fall, they fly apart! Like shots off a shovel!<BR/><BR/>In my mind, the early "guides" and "companions" to Ulysses utterly spoil the reading... like seeing a city from the roof of one of those tour buses, the constant voice-over of a pedantic tour guide droning in your ear.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-14198251704476022008-08-04T20:17:00.000-04:002008-08-04T20:17:00.000-04:00"I think Joyce saw himself (proudly) the way Steve..."I think Joyce saw himself (proudly) the way Steve Michelmore and Josipovici have assessed him: as the last of a tradition."<BR/><BR/>This remark, Lloyd, reminds me of that Tom McCarthy <A HREF="http://believermag.com/issues/200806/?read=interview_mccarthy" REL="nofollow">interview</A> I <A HREF="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2008/06/idea-of-progress-literary-edition.html" REL="nofollow">linked to</A> a while back, where he says:<BR/><BR/>"Here’s the thing, right, <I>Finnegans Wake</I>—Joyce thought it was the last novel. He thought this was the novel in which the destiny of literature would realize itself. It was the event that we have been waiting for all of these years. And he literally thought it would be the last novel. It would be (a) unnecessary and (b) impossible to write a novel, I mean a proper novel, a serious novel, after <I>Finnegans Wake</I>."Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-66203262878850724712008-08-04T18:42:00.000-04:002008-08-04T18:42:00.000-04:00Josipovici is wrong; he has a pedant's-eye view of...Josipovici is wrong; he has a pedant's-eye view of the book. Maybe pedants put him off of it. Certainly he misrepresents it. Ulysses does not rigidly adhere to an idea of "the complete work." It very much addresses, and embodies, the illusory, the fragmentary nature of any attempt to capture truth. Its accumulation of detail is not posited as a good; it is just posited: "here is a world." Yes, Joyce could make one hell of a complete world, even as he acknowledged the impossibility of doing this. His "techniques" precisely show us that no amount of technique brings us closer to truth.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-45654131733095221412008-08-04T16:09:00.000-04:002008-08-04T16:09:00.000-04:00I think Joyce saw himself (proudly) the way Steve ...I think Joyce saw <I>himself</I> (proudly) the way Steve Michelmore and Josipovici have assessed him: as the last of a tradition. The very structure of Ulysses, which hangs everything on two explicit structures, the highly contrived passage of one day, and the (tedious in my mind) analogy with Odysseus, is the sort of big project of which Josipovici speaks: an explicit monument. The fact that chooses to twist it, and also spit on this monument doesn't change the model he is using. Joyce was trying to play in the big leagues of literary tradition, and he still has scholars busy dissecting him. But he is nothing like the breath of fresh air that comes in with writers like Kafka, and Robert Walser (current favorite of mine), and even Joyce's own friend whom he championed, Italo Svevo (<B>Confessions of Zeno</B>). These are modern writers of the imagination, who find content by expanding ordinary consciousness inward, and finding limitless narrative there ... <BR/><BR/>I guess I betray a preference here; but I always found James Joyce insufferable, both trite in structure and (<I>precious</I> in detail. Right from the moment his genius alter-ego hero shows up carrying that pretentiously juxtaposed ashplant.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-25944325854712610782008-08-04T06:28:00.000-04:002008-08-04T06:28:00.000-04:00Thanks, Jacob. I've enjoyed the shorter Joyce. At ...Thanks, Jacob. I've enjoyed the shorter Joyce. At this point, my reading of <I>Ulysses</I> is only a matter of deciding to take the plunge, and when I do so, I don't expect to be consulting "explicators". I like what what you say about <I>Ulysses</I> being "a book of multi-voiced fragments".Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-19986487214842263572008-08-03T23:38:00.000-04:002008-08-03T23:38:00.000-04:00I do love Joyce.. and Ulysses, and have read many ...I do love Joyce.. and Ulysses, and have read many of the "guides to the perplexed" that attempt to comfort the afflicted.<BR/><BR/>My advice is always the same. Imagine a first visit to a strange city. You can't hope to take it all in, so you wonder here and there, absorb what you can, pick up a bit of the language. That's how to read Ulysses.<BR/><BR/>I think I disagree with Josipovici here. Ulysses is the last 19th century novel for critics, academics, pendants... and those too insecure in their own reading to not feel the need to fold their response into some warm authoritative pocket.<BR/><BR/>It may be that Joyce himself wanted to create just that effect. But I think he outdid his intentions. <BR/><BR/>How does anyone grasp the "unity" of a city? It's a trick that maybe fooled even the author... Ulysses has no "unity." The best confirmation is to read and hear it with the music. The real music. Listen to the songs that are mentioned. The best Bloomsday readings make good use of this. There's a book... mind goes blank here... of all the musical references in all of Joyce's work. Lyrics, music. <BR/><BR/>Screw the explicators. Listen to the music... the music of his prose, of his extraordinary ear for the vernacular spoken language... and the real music. <BR/><BR/>From Sea Side Girls to Yorkshire Lass to ... <BR/><BR/>The thing about the music, the musical references... it denies closure. It opens out beyond any possible "unity," turning Ulysses into a book of multi-voiced fragments... exactly what it becomes at those Bloomsday Readings, which are it's truest explication.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com