Thursday 31 July 2014

Tuesday, 29 July 2014, Pages 46 - 52, Proteus, Episode 3

We read as far as, "O, that's all only all right." Penguin (52.6)

Stephen is still walking along the Sandymount Strand. We are still witnessing Stephen's thought process. And they run all over the place!

Last week we had left Stephen, who was thinking of umbilical cords, monks, and wondering whether he can get connected to Eden dialling the number Aleph, alpha, 0, 0, 1. He had referred to Eve as the womb of sin. Now he thinks of himself as having been made not begotten, unlike the Son of God. Is he also the product of God's plans though? Stephen's thoughts turn from Thomas Aquinas, who discoursed about lex eternal (eternal law), to Arius, a third century priest of Alexandria, who did not accept the concept of Trinity, propagating instead a hierarchy amongst God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!

Despite all such thoughts, Stephen is aware of the nipping air and the waves of the sea, waves like the seahorses of the Irish god of sea, Mananaan. He is also aware of Mr. Deasy's letters that are in his pocket. He plans to deliver them before meeting Mulligan at lunch time in the pub, The Ship.

Apparently Stephen's aunt Sara (aka Sally) lives close by. While he asks himself whether he should visit her, uncle Richie, and their son Walter, Stephen imagines what his father Simon Dedalus would comment if he knew of the visit. The images of the aunt's poor house remind Stephen of how he used to boast at Clongowes that he had an uncle who was a judge, and another who was a general in the army. Stephen recalls other typical, unholy, things (praying to the devil for the fussy (plump) woman to lift her clothes a bit higher on the wet street, also crying, 'Naked women! Naked women! from the top of the Howth tram,...) he did in his puberty, in the strictly catholic Ireland. The verdict is clear: "Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint." (This echoes the remark of John Dryden to his distant relative, Jonathan Swift, on reading the first poem the latter wrote: "Cousin Swift,  you will never be a poet.")  He thinks of his plans of writing books with letters for titles.

In the mean time, Stephen has passed the way to aunt Sara's. So he decides not to go to her place after all. The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast,... He has reached what was then perhaps the most polluted part of Dublin Bay, sees the fishermen's nests at Ringsend,  turns and crosses the firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.

The name Pigeon house leads Stephen on to think of Pigeon, of dove, of holy ghost, and of the book La vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil which has an illustration of Joseph asking Mary: "Who has put you in this wretched condition?" and her answer: "it was the pigeon, Joseph."


Stephen then thinks of Patrice, who was the son of one of the aristocrats, referred to as the wild geese, because they had fled Ireland in the 16th century. Patrice, who does not believe in the existence of God, (though his father does), should send him the book, Le vie de Jesus. French, Paris, Quartier Latin, walking in Paris, going to the post office of cash the money order for eight shillings, which his mother had sent him, .. Stephen's thoughts really run all over the place!

Additionally, there is a good bit of Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear) in this pages!

Chandra

Monday 28 July 2014

Tuesday, 22 July 2014, Pages 45 - 46, Proteus, Episode 3

Read till "Womb of Sin." Gabler (3.44), Penguin (46.29)

In this episode, we learn to come to terms with the difficult mode of Joyce's writing, often getting lost but equally often not losing interest in deciphering all that he has offered to us. It is an episode in which we participate in the thinking process of Stephen. It requires two things from us readers: (1) to enter Stephen's mind, his stream of consciousness, (2) to return to reread and to rereread the episode. 

The difficulty of the episode - that starts with one of the most memorable sentences of the book, "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes." -  lies not only with the fact that we are trying to understand what Stephen is thinking but also with the demands made regarding the literary knowledge of us, poor readers. In just two pages (Penguin 45 - 46), we encounter Aristotle, Dante, Blake, Kant, Einstein,  Berkeley, Boehme, Lessing, Dickens, Swinburne, Johnson and Shakespeare. Each sentence/thought of Stephen leads us to one or the other in this list, and perhaps to many others.

Stephen has left his school and Mr. Deasy as well as his lofty words. He is now walking along the Sandymount Strand. 
(Source: "IMG SandymountStrabd1461" by Original uploader was Sarah777 at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Lvova using CommonsHelper.Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMG_SandymountStrabd1461.jpg#mediaviewer/File:IMG_SandymountStrabd1461.jpg)

Stephen observes the things (seaspawn, seawrack) lying around on the beach. He thinks of the unavoidable limitations of seeing (Ineluctable modality of the visible), of Aristotle (who was referred to by Dante as maestro di color che sanno (master of all those who know), walks on while closing his eyes in order to experience the objects without seeing them. He hears his boot crush crackling wrack and shells. He feels how he keeps one step after another (Nacheinander, alluding to Lessing) and knows that his (Stephen's) feet are in his (Mulligan's) boots at the end of his (Mulligan's) trousers (Nebeneinander; again alluding to Lessing).  The fact of his feet in Mulligan's boots and trousers underscore Stephen's poverty.  With eyes closed, Stephen wonders whether he is walking into eternity. The shells cracked under his boots make him think of them as the wild sea money.

Stephen opens his eyes to see things afresh. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall lbe, world without end. There is a world-play here based on the word See/Sea. Stephen opens his eyes and sees. The sea is there all the time. Even when he himself had closed his eyes.

Two midwives coming down the steps make him think of umbilical cords. True to Stephen's thoughts having their own lives, the thought of umbilical cords lead him to think of his own birth, of all the umbilical cords linking back (his umbilical cord having connected to his mother's, hers having connected to her mother's, and so on) to the beginning, to the Garden of Eden, the show-place of the Original Sin. Is that why monks gaze at their navel while sitting in meditation? Would these so linked cords act like a cable connecting him (Stephen) to the Garden of Eden, if he would give to the telephone operator the number: Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one?

Chandra

Note: Click here to read an essay by The Modernism Research Lab at Yale on this episode.

Sunday 27 July 2014

Tuesday, 22 July 2014, Pages 40 - 45, Nestor, Episode 2

We reached the end of chapter 2 (Nestor).

Mr. Deasy is still talking about the letter - on the cattle foot and mouth disease - that he had given to Stephen, who should try to get it published in local newspapers. The conversation between the two turn to jews with Mr. Deasy mouthing typical anti-semitic views that were already prevalent at the time ("England is in the hands of the jews.... And they are the signs of a nation's decay.") and Stephen quietly trying to put things into perspective ("A merchant, ..., is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?") Mr. Deasy's words make Stephen recall seeing some jews on the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange. He thinks of how they were dressed, what their eyes revealed to him: "Their eyes knew the years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh." ( I find this a strange paragraph. How should one classify what Stephen reads in the eyes of these jews? These being his personal thoughts, own interpretations, what should we make out of such thoughts/interpretations?)

Stephen then utters one of the most quoted sentences from the book: "History, ..., is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Mr. Deasy does not obviously follow Stephen's line of thinking, and says, - simply repeating expressions of Victorian faith -  "The ways of the Creator are not out ways... All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God." Precisely at that time, a great Hooray is heard from the sports field. Somebody has made a goal, prompting Stephen to play with the word, "goal", and say, "That is God."

Mr. Deasy has not yet finished putting his foot in his mouth! He makes "grand"statements: "A woman brought sin into the world." Such conversation does not seem to interest Stephen, who tries to move Mr. Deasy's attention back to the letters, telling him that he will approach the editors of Telegraph and Irish Homestead with the letters.

Soon Stephen leaves Mr. Deasy's office. The coins are dancing in his pocket. Passing through the gate, he looks at the lions couchant on the pillars of the gate. Stephen thinks of them as toothless terrors. Just like Mr. Deasy? Still he is going to help his headmaster in his fight against the cattle disease. Even at the cost of being labelled by Mulligan as the bullock befriending bard (alluding to Homer and Stephen's preoccupation with Thomas Aquinas, who was called 'dumb ox' by his fellow students at Cologne. Gifford 2.431)
Mr. Deasy runs after Stephen, wanting to tell him a joke: "Ireland, they say, has the honor of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that?.. Do you know why?... Because she never let them in..."

Mr. Deasy laughs, coughs, laughs. An echo of the coming times. 

Friday 18 July 2014

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

As neither of us bloggers could attend the reading today, it would be of great help if one you write in the 'Comments' section below where the reading stopped today. Just mention the last couple of words, and the page number.
Thank you
Chandra

Wednesday 2 July 2014

Tuesday, 1 July 2014, Pages 28 - 31, Nestor, Episode 2

Please note there will be no reading next Tuesday, 8 July 2014.
Also: no readings at all during the workshop week (4 – 9 August).


We have now read as far as: "A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's looms. Ay" (Gabler 2.87) (Penguin p. 31).

We have started the second chapter (which also goes by the name of Nestor). It opens in the middle of a lesson on Roman history that Stephen is teaching to a class of well to do boys. He is questioning them on Pyrrhus and his doubtful victory (which gave rise to the notion of a pyrrhic victory). "Another victory like that and we are done for" is the phrase attributed to him as one boys remembers it (2.14). However, while he is questioning the boys, Stephen's mind repeatedly wanders off to other thoughts. They seem distracted but not, however, completely disconnected from what has just been going on. They are likely to have been triggered by something — a word, a sound, a concept, a memory. When we notice Stephen's wandering off into his own world, it is often worth asking what was going on before his drifting that might have kicked off his train of thought). For example, we find him thinking about Aristotle's theories (treating notions of actuality, possibility, imagination, the 'might have been' etc.) and Blake's poetry, which speaks of the relation between reported fact and memory (history as "Fabled by the daughters of memory" (2.7)), which are ideas his mind becomes entangled in while he is himself trying to get his pupils to memorize a history lesson. In it, his thoughts often turn to the topic of frustration: Pyrrhus' "victory", a pier as a "disappointed bridge" (a joke that is completely lost on the boys and he is trying to save for Haines later), his envy of the boys' presumed success in amorous adventures.

The lesson turns, rather abruptly, to poetry, Milton's Lycidas on the subject of a drowned friend (remember Stephen had been thinking about a drowning case nearby and imagining the dead body turning up as expected after nine days). Stephen's mind then wanders off to his days in Paris, where he had spent a lot of time at the Geneviève library (here described as a factory of insects, with the students reading busily and avidly under the library lamps) and then to "Him that walked the waves" (2.78), i.e. to Jesus, who still seems to cast a shadow over people today. He remembers particularly Jesus' rather cryptic answer to his questioners about whether it is right to pay Cesar his tribute. The answer "To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's" (2.86) has been riddling church people for a centuries. Indeed, the echo of a riddle that is brought to Stephen's mind and appears in the lines that follow may again have been triggered by what we have just read: Stephen thinks of Jesus' answer as a "riddling sentence" (2.87).

It remains one of the reader's tasks to try and distinguish (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) between what is going on in the classroom, what Stephen's thoughts are, what they might have been triggered by, when a narrating voice is describing something from the outside etc. Perspectives keep shifting and exterior description keeps blending with interior monologue — a feature typical of the book and that is worth staying attuned to.