James Joyce's Ulysses: Episode Ten (Part I), Dublin City Matrix...and Woman.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2024
- What is monumentally misunderstood about Ulysses is that Joyce is relating in fictional form his own personal development from young native Dubliner to world citizen, artist and Shaman.
In this video I describe the efforts of his alter ego Stephen Dedalus to break free from the matrix that is Dublin, to die as young citizen of Dublin if you will, and be reborn as someone beyond its historic pull.
It's really great to see another video from you on Ulysses. I read it for the third time this summer and discovered your videos at the same time. They have been a revelation.
I love Ulysses but have had a hard time over the past five years or so since I first read it, convincing people (especially literature students) that it's not a turgid, boring, difficult work used by professors to torture their first year students.
I worked in a chain of bookshops where there are little cards under some of the books containing mini reviews from the staff. The card under Ulysses read 'Good Luck' which just perpetuates the misconceptions about it, basically saying 'here is a difficult book that you won't understand, don't bother.' It's frustrating and it's become a very personal book to me. You describe eloquently what I have found difficult to. There's so much joy in these pages. You also pick up on some lovely details that enrich my understanding of a novel that I'll hopefully be picking up for the rest of my life.
You'll have to excuse me for my vagueness, I'm not used to commenting on TH-cam, but I just wanted to say, cheers! I would love to see a video from you on the Wake sometime if that's something you'd be interested in.
I'd just like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your comment, Jan.
This task I seem to have taken upon myself, starting with my blog at omphaloscafe.com and morphing into these videos, although joyous is not always easy. Nothing relatively new ever is. As I was saying to a fella I was chatting with in a pub recently, 'it never ceases to amaze me how incurious most people are, and especially the so-called educated bunch.' As you allude to, rather than open people minds and hearts, awaken them to the wonder and beauty in the world and the works of genuine artists, school has precisely the opposite effect.
Dedalusday is a word I coined to encapsulate that reality. And the few? Well, like yourself, they are those who are tackling Ulysses on their own, experiencing it for themselves. And the thing about Ulysses and Joyce's work in general is that they don't unfold before us at the first glance. People chock that up to difficulty. But I tend to think it's because we first embark on them, one, at a tender age when our own experience remains quite limited, and two, we do so with the wrong teachers or guides.
I too slogged through it in my early twenties understanding practically nothing. Leaving it aside for a decade or more the next time I picked it up, having read and you could say even lived widely, or at least wider, things began to take shape. Parts of it I could identify with. The works of so many others I've mentioned in blogs and videos enriched me, and as my experience expanded Ulysses seemed to expand out before it. How many books I've read early on and found impressive have I returned to ten or twenty years later and found stilted! But not the works of Joyce. In fact, the more I delved into say Buddhism and what I can only describe as Life, the more I experienced moments of 'Holy Shite,' that's right here in Ulysses!
Right up to what for me is a sort of culminating revelation. I was aiming at this on my second to last post, which I titled 'Thinking IS the box.' That's another saying I've coined: 'There is no such thing as thinking outside the box, because thinking IS the box.' The notion that language itself, the word bites we use, these words I'm using right now, are stored in our brains as fixed and static entities, much like a computer would store them. Only we're alive and although the words we use as tools and the ideas they facilitate have given us hegemony over the world they continue to blind us to the fact that Life slips through their grasp. Joyce understood this at an earlier age, saying he found language limiting for what he had to say. And he begins experimenting with that in mind in Ulysses, especially in the later stages, late into the evening when the rationalistic faculty has been undermined with fatigue and drink. And also with Molly. For me it begins with her exclamation "Oh, rocks!" She's saying in her own unique way don't give me your static rational definition, with dead inanimate rock-like words, I'm all flow so tell it to me in plain words! And then of course her final chapter cataract, all flow.
So there, thanks for the comment, Jan, and see what it inspires? As far as the Wake goes, to me Joyce is writing it from the perspective of a modern day Buddha. All is flow, all is continuum. He's abandoned rock-like words altogether and is trying to speak the language of Life. Only, to be perfectly honest, as much as I've tried I simply cannot be bothered to read it in its entirety. I have read Joseph Campbell's and Henry Robinson's 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' two or three times though.
Anyway, all the very best, Enjoy.
very enjoyable conversation on a very interesting book and author... thank you.
excellent. with thanks
If my memory serves correctly, The US space shuttle program first conceived of the shuttle beginning its journey to space on a large powerful jet. Once at the appropriate altitude the shuttle had the speed and trajectory needed to complete its lofty mission. The jet and shuttle unlatch. The shuttle goes places it’s never been before. The jet cruises back to the tarmac and prepares for its next experience. For me, you’ve been that jet. You’ve given me the understanding and foresight to make the rest of the journey on my own. Do I wish you would continue your narrative all the way to Episode 18? YES, YES,YES. But I’ll take the lift you’ve given me and see where I can go from here.
You’ve been a great help. Thank you.
Superb
I've enjoyed your analysis. I hope you return to this series!
Thanks for that Alexander, and indeed I am from the West Island of Montreal. Careful with that word 'analysis' though, 'cause that's not the intention whatsoever here.
Been on a little hiatus from video making of late, driving my truck and listening to a Joseph Campbell audiobook on James Joyce titled "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words", pretty much tracing the development through his entire works (minus Stephen Hero). Although of course it contains worlds more erudition it does nothing to change what I am trying to get across in the Cafe, albeit in a much more plebeian, everyday tongue. The notion has occurred to me that even Campbell can get lost in the learning, trapped in the tangled complexities of our mythic heritage and lose sight of the fact that underlying it all is Life, pure and simple. No analysis there, just Life.
Anyway, more will come, eventually. So many ideas occur, so many things I want to add, but not yet the motivation to put them together.
Thanks again. Comments such as your's are a breath of fresh air from the typical blockheaded glibness people leave. Oh well, it's the time we live in.
Sorry, I have more.
How's this, Carl Jung relating struggles he was undergoing almost contemporaneously with Joyce. This could be Stephen speaking:
"The consequences of my resolve, and my involvement with things which neither I nor anyone else could understand, was an extreme loneliness. I was going about laden with thoughts of which I could speak to no one: they would only have been misunderstood. I felt the gulf between the external world and the interior world of images in its most painful form. I could not yet see that interaction of both worlds which I now understand. I saw only an irreconcilable contradiction between inner and outer."
Then: "However, it was clear to me from the start that I could find contact with the outer world and with people only if I succeeded in showing--and this would demand the most intensive effort--that the contents of psychic experience are real, and real not only as my own personal experience, but as collective experience which others also have." --Carl Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections."
That's the plight of the modern artist, the genuine article that is. And that is what Joyce is recounting in Ulysses, his breakthrough!
Chris Reich has a great channel as well, it’s nice to have the contrast in channels. I’m on episode 17 now and kinda bummed to come to the end.
Ahh yes, Mr. Reich.
Quite a difference between what goes on at his place and what goes on here at the Cafe. I've repeatedly summarized it as a Bloomsday/Dedalusday difference, or as I've also put it, the difference between oranges and (Golden) apples.
He never did get back to me on why Joyce would labour seven years on Ulysses and leave his alter ego Stephen, who through Stephen Hero and A Portrait he would stick so closely to his own personal story, dangling and loose as 'failed' artist or intellectual. What's the point of that, I asked?
Crickets.......
Keep it up Jeff !!
Hello there. I like your videos but I'm sorry I have to correct you. I'm Italian and your translation is wrong.
Artifoni: I too had ideas of this kind, when I was young like you. But then I convinced myself that the world is a beast. And that's a pity. Because your voice... would be a source of income, it's understood. Instead, you sacrifice yourself.
Stephen: bloodless sacrifice.
Artifoni: Let's hope so. But, listen to me. Reflect upon it.
Stephen: I will.
A: But, seriously, ah?
[The tram passes and Artifoni glimses it. He has to go.]
A: Here it comes. Come visit me and think about it. Farewell, dear.
S: Goodbye, maestro. And thanks.
The point is that it's Stephen, in Artifoni's opinion, who is sacrifying himself, not the world. And the world is not reflecting them, but Artifoni is trying to persuade Stephen to think about his musical carrer.
I'm sorry but I think you don't understand what kind of character Artifoni is. He's a nice old fellow and a guy that Stephen respects and cares about, but he's not metaphisically oriented at all and maybe not a positive character for the action of the book. He's giving Stephen what he thinks is practical advise, trying to keep Stephen along the rails of the aspirations he had for him, aspirations so deeply felt by the master that one could think that, maybe, Artifoni saw in Stephen a musical talent bigger than his own and can't accept that he's choosing something else instead. Stephen likes him, but doesn't give him importance. He's not thinking at all about what Artifoni is telling him, his decision is already made and the old man has no influence on him. The way one should picture the relationship between the two is like that between a caring grandfather telling a loving but grown-up grandson not to do something he will definitely do.
Hey, first of all thanks for your videos they serve as a good translation to some of the more dense pockets within the text, and for that I am grateful. I wanted to ask if the show will be returning for the remaining chapters and if so that's great
If not I still really enjoyed the videos thanks for you work
Cheers
Thanks for that v. I won't say never but I have grown tired of the episode by episode approach. My intention was never to get too far into detail, but rather to give a broad outline which for some reason or other has been utterly overlooked by the cognoscenti.
The latest, James Joyce's Ulysses, Wake Up You Blockheads! might have been the last of the series, which'll leave me free to move on to other things I want to say.
Joseph Campbell does a great synoptic job in his posthumously published book based on the many years he spent lecturing on the life and work of Joyce: Mythic Worlds, Modern Words.
At bottom, it was never about just James Joyce or Ulysses, but what Joyce was aiming at conveying or expressing and what still needs expression today, perhaps more than ever.
@@theomphaloscafe3501 That makes sense, I understand you want to flag up some of the more slept on ideas and undertones of the book and that's great, and truly its my ambition to form or discover these for myself in the remainder of the book
However early on I was greatly helped by you not only introducing these ideas but adding context to these with respect to JJ in real life, and that was a great help in motivating me to dive further into the meaning of the story and not just the story itself.
Well thanks again and good luck in future.
What I'm really pointing at is the oft told tale of the birth of the artist, and to a lesser but no less important degree, the birth of us all, if we're willing to make the journey.
For me, I first recognized the pattern in others such as Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, even Marcel Proust. Watch one of the versions of The Razor's Edge. They were all depicting the same journey, from different angles you might say. The Hero's Journey, as Joseph Campbell would say. Just watched the TH-cam video 'Finding Joe', based on Campbell's work. Again, it's our journey, if we choose to make the adventure.
It was only later that I realized that Joyce was doing precisely that through his Portrait, Stephen Hero, and Ulysses, and then universalizing it, making of it a 'monomyth', in the Wake. Once a person awakens to that then the book opens up and outward to encompass so much, for ourselves!
But then, where is it all going, I've asked myself? And the answer for me was simple, because of all the reading I have done on pre-history and anthropology and evolution. Therein, for me, was the tie in to all humankind's history, culture, and civilization. Our connection backwards to all of life, our oneness with it all.
At advanced stages of civilization such as we find ourselves, the connection is all but lost, living in artificial urban environments as we do. The connection genuine artist types feel and experience with nature and which they then share with the populous is broken. Then, lacking the guidance of the shaman/artists, city man resorts to ideas and searches endlessly for 'solutions' to problems. That's the age of 'education' and the school. That is our age today. In Ulysses Joyce is depicting his own journey away from all that back to a connection with nature and life, what he calls the 'grave and constant' in our lives.
So with that in mind I feel no obligation to continue with the episode by episode approach. Those following the 'school' path will quickly move on to someone who can give them more concrete ideas in which they feel comfortable with. While those who feel something awakening inside, those who have taken their first steps along the pathway towards their own bliss, their own unique selves, might find something stirring in their own hearts. And maybe even find the courage to undertake their own Hero's Journey.
You're from Montreal?
I thought you sounded Canadian!
Where are you Jeff?
Coming, though maybe not exactly soon. Maybe by summer. All the very best. Jeff
Я кусаю локти из-за того, что нет субтитров на русском языке. Перевод на русский расширил бы аудиторию, что доказал Армен с 1,200 комментариями.
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02:08 резкий жест вверх а кажется что склейка кадров
05:06 склейка кадров!
07:05 Если придираться, то недостаток один: взгляд вниз в пол каждые 1,5 минуты. Этого надо избежать. Прошедший по Вашим богатырским стопам Армен из Белграда глуповато смотрит влево вверх и это зрители прощают. Взгляд вниз создает ощущение будто Вы вините себя за смелость анализа Улисса!
08:11 и склейка и взгляд вниз! Протей!