James Joyce

I've mentioned my love of biographies/autobiographies. They flesh out the subject, bring much of their writings into another focus. I remember knowing only of Shelley from his "Ode to the Western Wind" and imagined a wrinkled old poet stuck up in some musty garret somewhere, bereft of life as I knew it. But in the end, there he was, the Boy George of his own times, gallivanting around the continent, eloping with his love. Joyce I think, his writings, always gain from biographical details.

He was always on the cadge, always short of money. Yet sometimes he displayed a giving heart. Once he was strolling down a Dublin street with a friend when they were accosted by a man asking for a handout. "Can you spare a penny sirs?"

Joyce asked him what he wanted it for and the man said:- "To be honest sir, I'm thirsting for a drink" (obviously alcoholic). Joyce gave him his own last penny.

After the man sped away Joyce said to his friend:- "If he had said he wanted a cup of tea I would have hit him."

But anyway, the more we know of another's life, often the more we can enjoy their words. It is certainly so with Joyce.

Getting back to "Finnegans Wake", there is a review of that book that I wrote for Amazon which is maybe worth sharing. I had downloaded the Penguin edition to my Kindle.

Review:-

[i]Well, first, this particular edition. Begins on the very first page by telling us that Joyce was the oldest often (sic) children. Is this a typo, or are Penguin getting into the spirit of the book? Anyway, whatever, this is certainly the best book I have never read. I have managed the first page or two, but the reality is that I enjoy books ABOUT Finnegans Wake rather than actually attempting to wend my way through it. One book about it informed me that each sentence, even each single word, could be seen as a microcosm of the entire text, so in that context why actually read it all. "riverrun" is enough. Then again, the word play is very enjoyable and the ABC of the book, and a Lexicon, offer endless interest and much humour. Apparently Joyce was heard by his long suffering wife Nora Barnacle late into many a night as he laughed aloud at his own jokes, setting his traps for the future literary critics to decipher, writing yet another un-understandable book that Nora wished was more "understandable" and thus more of a cash cow. But as I grow older I see more clearly that understanding life is a terrible trap - as thoughts, words and beliefs congeal and enclose the mind in circles of self-justification as the inevitable end approaches. But what end? The end of Finnegans Wake (not that I have ever reached it) takes us back to the beginning. As Joyce said about Ulysses as he faced the obscenity trials, "if Ulysses is unfit to read, then life is unfit to live". So life is to be lived rather than "understood". And Molly Bloom, in Ulysses, ends her monologue with a beautiful "Yes". Learning about Finnegans Wake, from various books, does help me to live, hopefully with compassion and not a little gratitude. Not least for the life and writings of James Joyce himself who gave us this last wonderful book using eyes that just might have reduced many others to night and despair. So buy a copy, if not to read it, then to have it on your bookshelf to impress the neighbours.

Absintheminded? Absent, mind drifting? Forgetful? Drunk? Or just a joke, all things, or nothing. Dig deep or skim the surface.[/i]

I remember that I did make it to page 16 of the book. What did I make of it? Gradually, from those few pages, and from all previous reading of his words and the words of others about Joyce's words, I learn and see that he never mocks the mundane, never jeers at any expression of humanity. Joyce tends to observe without judgement, reports it, conjures with it in an essentially egalitarian way, seeking moments that have been called "epiphanies", when the mundane is transported to another plane entirely - for those who see.

"God is a shout in the street" as he writes in Ulysses.

More on James Joyce. I re-visited my blog on Google and reread a few things there on Joyce. So here a bit of a cut and paste, with a little bit of reworking. Reminded again of Samuel Beckett's "Krapps Last Tape" where Mr Krapp (some joke there maybe?) records his thoughts or whatever every ten years or so and when he listens back each time can find little connection. Then the last tape of course, yet if we escape from a totally linear time frame, which was first and which is last?

I've mentioned liking books about "Finnegans Wake", and one I read was "Pervigilium Finneganis" which purports to be the Wake translated into Latin! I [i]think [/i] it is a joke.

It manages the impossible and makes the Wake even more unreadable. Yes, a good joke, and I tend to think that James Joyce would have laughed. Would he have enjoyed it? But a serious point is made (or not) in the introductory essay that proceeds the body of the text, which is well worth the small price of the entire book. A point made in other books on the Wake, including "A Word In Your Ear" by Eric Rosenbloom. That at some point you really do need an ejector seat and stop looking for more and more depth in the various tricks of the text. Don't fall for Joyce's attempt at immortality and become one who lives their life deciphering each and every word, then re-deciphering each word again and again, keeping you busy and away from life itself. I think Sartre had something to say about seeking to immortalise himself in literature and he chose to resist the temptation. Maybe Joyce did not, and Nora Barnacle should have had a quite word in his ear at some point.

But I do love James Joyce. It was as I said before the "Yes" of Molly Bloom that did it. But it is Yes to life, not yes to pouring over a book looking for clues that can then be used to impress the literati.

Nevertheless, in Latin or Wakese, often both are sometmes welcome alternatives to Zen books, which are all seeking to encourage you to leap from the top of a 100 ft pole without a safety net. So leap! Don't let James Joyce have the last laugh.

Well, to finish I will share a few quotes from books [i]about[/i] "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" which I have drawn from on my own often vulnerable and stumbling path through our fragile world.

[i]Bloom (Leopold Bloom of Ulysses) is no perfect hero, but perfection is overrated. Give me a honest human being embracing their mundane humanity any day over a person striving after perfection.

Joyce does not present us with the illusion of a perfect life in this book, a life without pain and sorrow, but in all his honesty Joyce shows us that life as it is and not as we think it should be is worth saying Yes to. The sorrows and difficulties faced in Ulysses are included in Joyce’s affirmation of life, because what good would such an affirmation be if it did not include all of life?

Joyce offers a new litmus test for what we call the hero, not gigantic feats of strength, but small and simple feats of kindness.
[/i]

(Sorry, I failed to put from where this came)

But another quote, this from Joseph Campbell, from his book on Joyce, "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words":-

[i]It’s my feeling that our imagery has been deprived of its affect by our strongly rational tendency in the interpretation of images and by our religious traditions concretizing symbols, so that they refer, not past themselves to symbolic themes, but to historical events—when, for example, we interpret the resurrection of Christ as having been an historical event instead of seeing the resurrection as a psychologically crucial moment of crisis, this deprives the imagery of its affect.[/i]


And finally: -

[i]An epiphany was not a miraculous dispensation from above but, as Joyce defined it, an insight into 'the soul of the commonest object.[/i]

(Kevin Birmingham, from "The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle For James Joyce's Ulysses.")

I never thought I would see an English woman that likes James Joyce 😊

I've read Ulysses a couple times, the first 50 or so pages many times. I can always read Dubliners. Never got far with Finnegans Wake. I had a play produced in college in which the cast had to chant those hundred-letter words for thunder. Boy, were they mad at me!

In the Rodney Dangerfield movie, Back to School (1986), Sally Kellerman does a great reading of part of Molly's soliloquy. So very sexy! As it should be!

@antonioioio Ha ha! Its Sam as in Samuel rather than Samantha. Inspired by Marc Bolan, of T-Rex. (That is the Profile Picture, Marc Bolan)