Joyce loving dopers unite!

[Ilsa_Lund]

Just felt the need to start a thread on Joyce.

Don’t really know what to say (it’s not like there’s any dearth of literature on him).

Favorite Dubliners story? (Araby or Eveline)

Favorite chapter of Ulysses? (Nausicaa or Oxen Of The Sun)

Favorite passages?

@A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

When the agony of shame had passed from him he tried to raise his soul from its abject powerlessness. God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy. But he imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve.

@Ulysses

I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

[Reeder]

And here I thought this thread was about my wife.

Yes her name is Joyce.

[Nightwatch_Trailer]

I’ve only read Portrait and Araby, but I’m a-gonna get going on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake when I get more time.

Favorite passage in Portrait…the attempted description of eternity. Sorry, it’s a bit long:

@A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little rains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, airs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

I’m sure your wife is cool as well, Reeder.

[Ilsa_Lund]

When you say you’ve read Araby, you mean you’ve only read that one story? You must read the rest of Dubliners.

[Larry_Mudd]

I’m rereading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man now. (Only the second time, for some strange reason.)

My favourite stories in Dubliners are A Painful Case and Clay. A Painful Case always blows me away because he devotes so much time establishing Mr. James Duffy as a totally unsympathetic character – and then makes your heart ache for him with those last five words. It’s the attrition of casual (and unconscious) insults to poor Maria in the midst of everyone’s joy that makes Clay work for me.

I can’t say that I have a favourite chapter of Ulysess. Penelope is the most beautiful, Circe is fantastically cryptic, Ithica is comic genius, etc. How can you set one above another?

Favourite passage: Stephen tapping his way with eyes closed on the beach.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the NACHEINANDER. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the NEBENEINANDER ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, NEBENEINANDER. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of LOS DEMIURGOS. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

[Ilsa_Lund]

Counterparts is good, too. APOTAAAYM is my least favorite book by Joyce. It isn’t as breezy as Dubliners or as epic as Ulysses and just seems like it’s lacking something.

[Kel_Varnsen_Latex_Division]

@Reeder

And here I thought this thread was about my wife.

Yes her name is Joyce.

Is thread titled Joyce loving dopers unite, aren’t you just asking for it?

[Ilsa_Lund]

Oh, and what of the argument that H.C.E. is the nightmare of one Leopold Bloom, circa 1:30-6A.M., Friday June 17th 1904?

[Larry_Mudd]

@Kel Varnsen - Latex Division

Is thread titled Joyce loving dopers unite, aren’t you just asking for it?

pops out of clock “Cuckold! Cuckold! Cuckold!”

@Ilsa_Lund

Oh, and what of the argument that H.C.E. is the nightmare of one Leopold Bloom, circa 1:30-6A.M., Friday June 17th 1904?

A nightmare from which he is trying to awake?

[Nightwatch_Trailer]

@Ilsa_Lund

When you say you’ve read Araby, you mean you’ve only read that one story? You must read the rest of Dubliners.

Right - we read it in my senior English class in high schoo (probably took longer than 20 minutes), but unfortunately we spent more time on mediocre things like H.G. Wells and Franny and Zooey.

[Ilsa_Lund]

@Larry Mudd

A nightmare from which he is trying to awake?

Well, I haven’t actually finished the Wake yet (well, in the traditional sense of the word; I realize that no one ever actually finishes the Wake), but I stumbled across the theory in my search for exegesis, and some parts of the book fit it pretty well. Stephen as the cad, revealing Bloom’s shortcomings to a metaphorical Dublin (himself), the twins as the son(s) that Bloom doesn’t have, representing power (another quality he lacks). So on and so on.

[Leaper]

I thought this was gonna be another Buffy thread…

And I’m an English major.

[Ilsa_Lund]

@Nightwatch Trailer

Right - we read it in my senior English class in high schoo (probably took longer than 20 minutes), but unfortunately we spent more time on mediocre things like H.G. Wells and Franny and Zooey.

I’m surprised they chose Araby and not The Dead. Or even the whole book; hell, it’s only like 160 pages.

[Eve]

Me, I’m torn between Alice Joyce and Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

But James? Like wading through molasses to me.

[Ilsa_Lund]

@Ulysses

That is oratory, the professor said, uncontradicted. Gone with the wind. Hosts
at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings.

That struck me when I first read the book. Ulysses was published 15 years prior to Gone With The Wind. Anyone know if this is just a coincidence?

[Larry_Mudd]

“Gone with the wind” was already a common expression. It comes to us by way of the bible:

As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. –Psalm 103:15-17

[Ilsa_Lund]

Watabout “Tara?”

[Larry_Mudd]

Apparently my assumption about the origin of the expression may be misguided. A little digging turns up that the phrase itself is from a poem by Ernest Dowson dating from the late 19th century, titled “Cynara.”

I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously, with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind, But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.

Watabout ‘Tara?’

:smack: Missed that, entirely. I’d say yeah, it’s a coincidence. Joyce was referring to the Psalter of Tara.

[Larry_Mudd]

Uh, here’s a non-crackpot cite for the Psalter of Tara. (Although I suppose that first one is appropriate considering the analogy that Joyce was making.)

[Ilsa_Lund]

So it was a common reference of Joyce and Mitchell to the Psalter of Tara? (The O’Hara’s being Irish and all.)