Professor Dedalus

This section starts out in Stephen's classroom mid class. What struck me most about this portion of the section was how poor of a professor he seemed to be. His students didn't seem to know much, he got lost in thought and changed subjects without completing them. What about the history? one of his students asks, Oh we can get to that later. Then when Sargent comes in with his math work, though he helps him, Stephen also seems to quietly loathe him. The connections between his own awkward childhood and experiences at school, illustrated in Portrait, seem pretty clearly drawn and therefore point to self loathing, but his incompetence as a teacher is curious to me. Maybe the fact that he is working a job that is not artistically fulfilling and is a waste of his intellect causes him to not care enough to put effort into the job? I'm not sure. What do you all think?

The Form and Content of Mulligan (vs. Dedalus).

Though the formal experimentation in Ulysses has long been something I've expected, I was surprised by the style of the content. What I had expected was a surreal form and a hyper-real content, the book after all takes place throughout the course of a day and so because of this, as well as Joyce's stream of consciousness preoccupation which attempts to most accurately portray the human mind in a literary context, I had expected everything to be very realistic content wise. However from the very beginning the character of Buck Mulligan reads like an eccentric clown. He is referenced to as laughing perpetually, he takes Stephen and dances him around the tower, he puts on the religious facade and quotes ancient texts often more humorously than seriously. Particularly interesting is his contrast to the way in which Stephen's character is written. Very morose and dry, but not really to the point of an archetype or paradigm. Why do you think Joyce contrasts the styles in which the characters are written so much? They seem to not exist in the same world at times, still they work very well off of each other. Why is this? Will Joyce continue to do this with other characters/settings or occurrences through out the text? again, what is the purpose?

Yeats poetry is becoming more fleshed out and longer in these later stages, as well as more structured. I like the expression that says that though many modernists came into their own by abstracting their formal style, he ironically came more into his by tightening it. However the formal concerns in these poems certainly give a more self aware feel to them. To start The Tower off with two poems directly about aging was still standard good old Yeats. In the second poem, The Tower the speaker discusses the relationship between his imagination and heart and his physical existence. If he leaves his imagination, his life will no longer seem worth living, and his body will slowly decay, but if he continues to live in his memories he will be unconscious of his final years in his physical state. This is interesting because it (for me) is the first time Yeats addresses the choice of loss.
Loss has been a major motif which I have been thinking about for my paper, and in reviewing many of the losses in the texts, they seem to be inevitable; loss of age (many poems), loss of sanity The Madness of King Goll, Loss of love (many poems), and many more. The fact that there was foresight with this loss seems particularly important, and the stage of his career in which he wrote it seems significant. His loss, or never attained love Maude Gonne as well as his own loss of age, which we discussed was conscious from a very early age reflect his own life, as well as the confusing history of Ireland with constant losses of control, leadership, history, etc. but I wonder where people think this theme comes from?

Ailment of Launguage, Faulkner

When Williams talks about language not being a barrier, it brought to mind a particular passage in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in which Addie describes language as the threads from which to spiders hang on a sing bar, trying desperately to swing toward each other, but the distance is too great, and the strings (or language rather) too inadequate a tool to help them. (still faulkner devoted his life to the use of language.) Reading Yeats, it is a question, the answer of which I keep going back and forth between, whether Yeats is on one side of the debate or the other. Often he seems to allow things to be undefined, or questionable and if not convoluted, then vague. Is this a statement on the inadequacy of language, a simple preference, a blunder or something else all together?

This was particularly interesting in reference to Image from a Past Life in which multiple perspectives are employed. Is he the first to use the technique, or at least as effectively? if so it is as if Yeats has presented the solution to the problem with which Faulkner will create his masterpieces. His most successful and famous texts use this device (to cure languages ailment?) while the novels in which he abandons this technique fall a little flatter.