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Wednesday, June 16, 2004 |
The New Republic reprints its 1922 review of Ulysses, penned by Edmund Wilson:
On the 16th of June, 1904, Stephen
Dedalus and Leopold Bloom were both living in Dublin. Both differed
from the people about them and walked in isolation among them because
each was, according to his capacity, an intellectual
adventurer--Dedalus, the poet and philosopher, with a mind full of
beautiful images and abstruse speculations and Bloom, the advertisement
canvasser, in a more rudimentary fashion. In the evening, Mr. Bloom and
Dedalus became involved in the same drunken party and Dedalus was
knocked unconscious in a quarrel with a British soldier. Then their
kinship was made plain. Bloom felt wistfully that Stephen was all he
would have had his own son be and Stephen, who despised his own
father--an amiable wastrel--found a sort of spiritual father in this
sympathetic Jew, who, mediocre as he was, had at least the dignity of
intelligence. Were they not both outlaws to their environment by reason
of the fact that they thought and imagined?
...Joyce, including all the ignobilities, makes his bourgeois figures
command our sympathy and respect by letting us see in them the throes
of the human mind straining always to perpetuate and perfect itself and
of the body always laboring, and throbbing to throw up some beauty from
its darkness.
2:05:35 PM Permalink
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Am I walking into eternity along Bellingham Bay?
As is widely noted, today's the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day
on which Ulysses was set in 1904. Joyce set it that day in
commemoration of the day he met (and etc.) his wife.
Of course Ulysses has been much with us lately. How many pieces have I
read over the past few months about this or that author declaring it to
be overrated? Or this or that critic thinking he's being clever by
admitting that he never read it? Never mind those guys.
And never mind, too, the Joyceans. Of course I'm only jealous that I
can't be amontg the crowds in Dublin. But if there's a group of people
it's not easy to be enthusiastic about, it's those who worship Joyce.
I'm probably just looking down my nose at my earlier, arrogant self who
maybe read Joyce to prove his own literary prowess, such as it was. But
in all the blather I've heard about the book, I don't hear enough about
its singular quality. Joyce said that he put puzzles in there to keep
the critics busy for centuries, to give himself literary immortality.
Maybe that worked. But what the book means to me, now, is not Stephen
Dedalus and his ineluctable modality of the visible, but the humanity
of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and yes, Stephen. And it's a funny,
funny book.
But what I'm really thinking about this morning is the experience I had
of doing a close reading of the book. It was in the spring of 1975, I
think, when a few of us approached Lawrence Lee, a fantastic teacher
and an excellent person, with an idea of doing a small seminar on
Ulysses. Richard Jones and James Edward Francis McGuire and several
others -- dang, but try as I might I can't remember for sure who they
were now (was Debbie Lowrey there? Debbie Black?) -- would gather twice
a week, and we pretty much went through the book line by line. We had a
lot of camaraderie going on in that little room on Tuesday and Thursday
mornings, and a lot of fun. For reasons of the book, and for reasons of
the friends, I look back on it as maybe the most enjoyable
reading experience of my life.
So those are the people I'm thinking of this morning: Rich and Jim, and
the two Debbies (even if they weren't here), and that guy who joined
the marines (Baldwin?) and maybe Pat Wadsley? And Joan. But mostly
Larry, who taught me so much about close reading.
Hope everyone has a happy Bloomsday...
8:58:16 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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