this from that

The first paragraph of Nausicaa was really strange to read, multiple times I checked either the the cover of the book, or my place in it to make sure I wasn't reading some strange text, because it was so conventional in it's eloquence. After giving into the style of the chapter, I continued to puzzle over what was being accomplished not simply by the this narrative derivative, but again by the style of it. Of course once Bloom enters, and the style takes back its stream of consciousness, internal Bloom dialog, it seemed clear to me that the long drawn out section with the girls was merely something to juxtapose Bloom against. In reading the criticism on the last chapter, I thought that the discussion on Joyce being ever "two eyed" was very interesting. It was mentioned that which we initially see through Stevens eyes as a confused bright and artistic youth, Joyce also shows us that he is arrogant and in many ways ignorant. Blooms narative, while not that different from previous chapters, gives him this sort of filthy, repulsive feel, which comes strictly from the stark contrast we get from the juxtaposition of the girls story in it's style, and its abrupt shift to his story in his style. This was a thought I had a lot during the wandering rocks chapter as well in terms of the amount of characters we meet, their style of narrative, etc. (I basically said all this in class so I wont get back into it) but, Joyce, while he certainly has the talent to tell us things directly, creates part of the appeal by having us learn this from that, insuring that we always keep two eyes open. Theres no question here, I'm just thinking of this as one of the major functions of "style" in Ulysses, maybe theres a paper topic?

Paper topic

I have been reading a lot of modernist literature this semester, and looking at Ulysses through the lens of context, particularly in search of a paper topic. One thing that has been an extremely prominent theme in most of what I've been reading is the role of family in modernist texts. Often families are featured in these texts as extremely dysfunctional, broken, or decaying tableaus of what the "family" has been idealized as in modern culture. However in everything I've read which features families like this there is something beautifully triumphant about them by the end. The family is greater than the sum of it's parts. I guess though what I particularly like about these families is that they don't seem to survive in spite of the fact that they appear to be broken, grotesque or perverted, but rather, because of it. In a strange way at least. All this is a very long winded way of proposing that the role of the family and its power beyond the individual human spirit's is very important in Ulysses. Of course not having finished it, (I think it ends well, right?) and the argument depends pretty heavily on the outcome of the narrative, but I was thinking of writing about Milly and Leopolds relationship, as well as Molly and his. I feel like there might be more to get into, however Stephens family certainly does not serve to prove my point. Can anybody think of other examples from the text up to this point which demonstrate the salvation of Bloom through his family? Slash, does anyone severely disagree with me. Feedback would be extremely appreciated and helpful.

Designed Distraction

In a film class we recently discussed a technique which some filmmakers use (the point of which I'm still not sure) which deliberately does not keep the viewers attention. Fassbinder used this technique in many ways to challenge the attention spans of the viewers of his films. Reading 20 pages of Ulysses took me two hours today and it often wasn't because I didn't understand subject matter, but because I found it very easy to get caught up in my own thoughts. I know this isn't a very analytic post, but it is something I'm curious about, because it's very possible that this is just my own fault, but if it's not, then it has to be deliberate on Joyce's part, in which case, I'm very curious about his motives. What benefit do we get from being in our heads just as much as Leopold's?

Leopold Bloom- Id, Ego, Etc.

So far Leopold Bloom seems to be a really interesting amalgam of the id and the ego. In Waiting for Godot you have obvious character distinctions, so Estragon gets hungry or complains about his feet (things based very much in the physical) while Vladimir's actions and character are based very much in the realm of the intellectual. Each one serves as paradigm a psychological construct. And while it is of course normal for an individual to have traits from both the id and the ego, Leopold Bloom is unique because he seems to be a written as a paradigm of both. He obsesses over food (kidney, sausages, bread and butter, etc.), dotes on a the body female neighbor of his whom he runs into and in the end fully enjoys his bowel movements. Yet he is proved to be an intellectual to some extent with regards to the metapsychosis and a few other moments of intellect in the drivers seat. I'm not sure what question I have that arises from this observation but it will be interesting to see how this plays out through the rest of the novel.

Afterthought:
Am I misreading the amalgam/ does Dedalus stand as the intellectual foil to the physical Leopold? or does Leopold's duality ring true anyway?

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?