version

Well-known member
naive of me here but watching this interview I didnt completely grasp how much the fascist angle might have gone in burying his legacy, what with half the artists in the canon -and kenner makes this point- being horrible people.
The charges of treason won't have helped his profile in America either.
 

version

Well-known member
0:37 to 0:40 in that Godot clip is prime GIF material.
Can't seem to make a GIF anywhere without making an account, so this is the best I could do.

Screenshot-from-2021-07-01-20-40-26.png
 

version

Well-known member
He [Beckett] told me - and this was a great surprise, certainly a great disappointment - that Joyce didn't like Swift. Moreover, he added, Joyce had no inclination for satire, contrary to what one might think. "He never rebelled; he was detached; he accepted everything. For him, there was no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf . . ."
 

luka

Well-known member
Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out his wife: now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he doesn't break down. Keep a trot 200 for the avenue. His hands and feet sing too. Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.


Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling. Full it throbbed. That's the chat. Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.

225
Words? Music? No: it's what's behind.


Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.


Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love.
 

luka

Well-known member
… I read to page 135 with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way. The incredible versatility of Joyce’s style has a monoto-nous and hypnotic effect. Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter…”
The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required…This singular and uncanny characteristic of the Joycean mind shows that his work pertains to the class of cold-blooded animals and specifically to the worm family. If worms were gifted with literary powers they would write with the sympathetic nervous system for lack of a brain. I suspect that something of this kind has happened to Joyce, that here we have a case of visceral thinking with severe restrictions of cerebral activity and its confinement to the perceptual processes….

Yes, I admit I feel have been made a fool of. The book would not meet me half way, nothing in it made the least attempt to be agreeable, and that always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority. Obviously, I have so much of the Philistine in my blood that I am naive enough to suppose that a book wants to tell me something, to be understood–a sad case of mythological anthropomorphism projected on to the book!…One should never rub the reader’s nose into his own stupidity, but that is just what “Ulysses” does…All those ungovernable forces that welled up in Nietzsche’s Dionysian exuberance and flooded his intellect have burst forth in undiluted form in modern man. Even the darkest passages in the second part of “Faust”, even “Zarathustra” and, indeed, “Ecce Homo”, try in one way or another to recommend themselves to the public. But it is only modern man who has succeeded in creating an art in reverse, a backside of art that makes no attempt to be ingratating, that tells us just where we get off, speaking with the same rebellious contrariness that had made itself disturbingly felt in those precursors of the moderns (not forgetting Holderlin) who had already started to topple the old ideals…

From the causal point of view Joyce is a victim of Roman Catholic authoritarianism, but considered teleologically he is a reformer who for the present is satisfied with negation, a Protestant nourished by his own protests. Atrophy of feeling is a characteristic of modern man and always shows itself as a reaction when there is too much feeling around, and in particular too much false feeling. From the lack of feeling in “Ulysses” we may infer a hideous sentimentality in the age that produced it. But are we really so sentimental today?…there is a good deal of evidence to show that we actually are involved in a sentimentality hoax of gigantic proportions. Think of the lamentable role of popular sentiment in wartime! Think of our so-called humanitarianism! The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality..

It is therefore quite comprehensible that a prophet should arise to teach our culture a compensatory lack of feeling. Prophets are always disagreeable and usually have bad manners, but it is said they occasionally hit the nail on the head. There are, as we know, major and minor prophets, and history will decide to which of them Joyce belongs. Like every true prophet, the artist is the unwitting mouth-piece of the psychic secrets of his time, and is often as unconscious as a sleep walker…’Ulysses’ is a ‘document humain’ of our time and, what is more, it harbours a secret. It can release the spiritually bound, and its coldness can freeze all sentimentality–and even normal feeling–to the marrow. But these salutary effects do not exhaust its powers…There is life in it, and life is never exclusively evil and destructive…it wants to be an eye of the moon, a consciousness detached from the object, in thrall neither to the gods nor to sensuality, and bound neither by love nor hate, neither by conviction nor by prejudice ‘Ulysses’ does not preach this but practices it–detachment of consciousness is the goal that shimmers through the fog of this book. This, surely, is its real secret, the secret of a new cosmic consciousness..

Ulysses’ is the creator-god in Joyce, a true demiurge who has freed himself from entanglement in the physical and mental world and contemplates them with detached consciousness. He is for Joyce what Faust was for Goethe, or Zarathustra for Nietzsche. He is the higher self who returns to his divine home after blind entanglement in samsara. In the whole book no Ulysses appears; the book itself is Ulysses, a microcosm of James Joyce, the world of the self and the self of the world in one. Ulysses can return home only when he has turned his back on the world of mind and matter. This is surely the message underlying that sixteenth day of June, 1904, the everyday of everyman, on which persons of no importance restlessly do and say things without beginning or aim–a shadowy picture, dreamlike, infernal, sardonic, negative, ugly, devilish, but true. A picture that could give one bad dreams or induce the mood of a cosmic Ash Wednesday, such as the Creator might have felt on August 1, 1914. After the optimism of the seventh day of creation the demiurge must have found it pretty difficult in 1914 to identify himself with his handiwork…

There is so little feeling in ‘Ulysses’ that it must be very pleasing to all aesthetes. But let us assume that the consciousness of ‘Ulysses’ is not a moon but an ego that possesses judgment, understanding, and a feeling heart. Then the long road through the 18 chapters would not only hold no delights but would be a road to Calvary; and the wanderer, overcome by so much suffering and folly, would sink down at nightfall into the arms of the Great Mother who signifies the beginning and end of life. Under the cynicism of ‘Ulysses’ there is hidden a great compassion; he knows the sufferings of a world that is neither
beautiful nor good and, worse still, rolls on without hope through the eternally repeated everyday, dragging with it man’s consciousness in an idiot dance through the hours, months, years. Ulysses has dared to take the step that leads to the detachment of consciousness from the object; he has freed himself from attachment, entanglement, and delusion, and can therefore turn homeward.

“It seems to me now that all that is negative in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blooded, bizarre and banal, grotesque and devilish, is a positive virtue for which it deserves praise. Joyce’s inexpressibly rich and myriad-faceted language unfolds itself in passages that creep along tapeworm fashion, terribly boring and monotonous, but the very boredom and monotony of it attain an epic grandeur that makes the book a ‘Mahabharata’ of the world’s futility and squalour…the truth of Tertullian’s dictum: ‘anima naturaliter christiana’. Ulysses shows himself a conscientious Antichrist and thereby proves that his Catholicism still holds together. He is not only a Christian but–still higher title to fame–a Buddhist, Shivaist, and a Gnostic .

Who is Ulysses? “Doubtless he is a symbol of what makes up the totality, the oneness, of all the single appearances…Mr. Bloom, Stephen, Mrs. Bloom, and the rest, including Mr. Joyce. Try to imagine a being who is not a mere colourless conglomerate soul composed of an indefinite number of ill-assorted and antagonistic individual souls, but consists also of houses, street-processions, churches, the Liffey, several brothels, and a crumpled note on its way to the sea–and yet possesses a perceiving and registering consciousness!. Such a monstrosity drives one to speculation, especially as one can prove nothing anyway and has to fall back on conjecture. I must confess that I suspect Ulysses of being a more comprehensive self who is the subject of all the objects on the glass slide, a being who acts as if he were Mr. Bloom or a printing shop or a crumpled note, but actually is the ‘dark hidden father’ of his specimens.

O Ulysses, you are truly a devotional book for the object-besotted, object-ridden white man! You are a spiritual exercise an ascetic discipline, an agonising ritual, an arcane procedure, eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another, where amid acids, poisonous fumes, and fire and ice, the homunculus of a new, universal consciousness is distilled!…Penelope need no longer weave her never-ending garment; she now takes her ease in the gardens of the earth, for her husband is home again, all his wanderings over. A world has passed away, and is made new.
this is a stunning piece of writing and a stunning piece of perception
 

luka

Well-known member
im reasonably certain this is my mode of apprehending the world

. I suspect that something of this kind has happened to Joyce, that here we have a case of visceral thinking with severe restrictions of cerebral activity and its confinement to the perceptual processes….
 

version

Well-known member
An ignorant postmodern part of me can't help thinking it was all so long ago it must all be outdated and superseded.
Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
 

luka

Well-known member
found this today
for me the achievement of Ulysses is not the conceptual scaffolding but the demonstration of a kind of everyday magic. one we don't always realise we are engaging in. not quite telepathy, it's the clambering inside another life or even object, and experiencing it from within. feeling the energy and range of motion of its body, its aches and pains and constrictions, its self-imposed limits, its habits of mind, the micro-climate of its interior, it warmth and damp, or its cold and aridity.
co-ordinates shift and the perciever becomes the perceived.
its an outflow of sympathy, of fond attention. without love you cant get in.
 

luka

Well-known member
well the strange thing is it's probably me from years ago. but ive never read the book so im not totally sure.
 
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