ENG 529.002 • Spring 2011
English Department • University of Maine
Dr. Steven R. Evans

Reading James Joyce's Ulysses

Logs for Seminar I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV

Seminar of February 15, 2011 — log in progress; sound file available

Dubliners presentations, cont’d.
[6-1.00:00] Sarah on “Grace” (twelfth composed; fourteenth presented).
[11:40] James on “The Boarding House” (fifth composed; seventh presented).
[29:40] Joe F. on “A Painful Case” (seventh composed; eleventh presented).

[42:00] General discussion. Emily Sinico’s return in Ulysses. Daughter’s demand that her mother conform. The “Ithaca” episode’s tendency to introduce details that incite us to reinterpretation of what’s come before. Contents of Bloom’s pocket. “Every bond, he said, is a bond of sorrow.” Duffy’s parting words, adapted from Stanislaus Joyce’s diary: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” Duffy appears to have “preserved” his bond with Emily precisely by renouncing it; her “commonplace vulgar death” destroys it utterly, finally. Remarks on Stanislaus Joyce, “my brother’s keeper.” The circumstances of Emily’s death. The inserted news item, a writerly task not unlike the mediocre poem commemorating Parnell (“Ivy Day”).

[52:00] Connections between tonight’s stories? Dissipation, descent into alcoholism (Kernan, Sinico). Mrs. Kernan: “After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother.” Captain Sinico: “He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her.” Sexual-economic transactions: “Two Gallants,” “A Boarding House.” The “boarding house” as brothel once removed. A sexual union secures a financial transaction. Deep-structure to Dubliners stories, ala Propp’s analysis of Russian folk tales? The type of action one undertakes when authentic action is foreclosed.  “Grace” as Dante’s Commedia writ small: hell, purgatory, heaven. Experimenting with structural parallel to precedent text. “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses—parallel to an unrealized potential in the “source” text.

—break—

[6.2-00:00] A focus on the “Sirens” episode. Surplus of signifier, encore. Last week’s discussion of the physical palpability of the printed text. Re/citation: “As said before....” Autonomy of printed text, autonomy of the artist. Aside on the motif of “autonomy” in Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde.  Period of composition for Ulysses, 1914-1922, the heyday of the avant-garde. 1922 and 1923 as culmination of first wave avant-gardism and “modernism.” Khlebnikov, Elliot, Toomer, Williams, etc. Trains of thought, strains of practice. Subsequent to 1923 or so, the monumentalization process commences. The materiality of the medium. Collage, montage. Ulysses as a book that is aware of its status as book. Kenner and others on the cross-referencing text.

In “Sirens,” the preponderance of “music.” Continued lesson on phonemes. The “organs” of production. Derek Attridge on “lipspeech.” The palpability of the signifier as a “sound shape” in “Sirens.” Aside on the Homeric parallel—the Sirens. Plugged ears (the many), lashed to mast (the hero). Erotic attraction, exerted on the organ of the ear. The human vocal cords in action. Interchangeability of organs. Wondering what the Sirens sounded like. Music, and the systems of transcription of music. Odysseus at the mast as emblem of art: the aesthetic as the .

Eroticized acoustical phenomena in “Sirens.” As many songs sung in this episode as speeches given in “Aeolus.” Listening to rather than listening through the signifiers. Joyce’s text as graphemic evocation of phonemic, and more broadly acoustic, experience. Bloom’s train of thought: all is music. John Cage, theorist and practitioner of this principle. Everything that strikes the tympanum is music; all “noises” are valid.

The solos of Si Dedalus and Ben Dollard: songs. But plenty of noises, too. The sound—source relationship. “Tap.” “Tap tap.” “Tap tap tap.” Constructing frames that correlate sounds with (often initially “unseen” or unclear) sources.

[20:00] Tap: /t/ + /vowel/ + /p/. Tup, “tap dat ass.”

The opening sixty or so fragments of “Sirens.” What to do with, make of, them? Tuning up or overture? Notes, or advance notice of motifs. Telescoping of entire chapter. Part-to-whole relationship. Prolepsis and analepsis; pre/citation as well as re/citation. Punctuation in the opening fragments analogous to musical notation: colon, exclamation point. 

The widely supposed “consummation” of Blazes and Molly, but where, if at all, is it represented in this chapter? “Done.” “Begin!”

“Imperthnthn thnthnthn.” Eventual construction of frame for decoding this and similar strips of “raw signifier.”

The initial style, which we’ve now mastered—just a warm up. “Sirens” and Finnegans Wake. Nothing not a pun by now.

[32:00] Bloom’s fantasy of Molly and Blazes’ tryst? (l. 706-710). This week’s incidence of Joyce-uissance, “language of love.” The complexity of the erotic games witnessed in Dubliners and Exiles. A caution against underestimating the “perversity” of Joyce-uissance. Bloom does not merely “suffer” this event.

[37:00] Why not slay the suitor? Evocation of the Homeric scene: the floor awash with the suitors’ gore. “Jingle. Bloo” (l.19) and “War! War! The tympanum!” (l.20). Working through the non-encounter at the Ormond Hotel. Segmented space, restaurant and bar. An adjacency, if not a convergence. Bloom seems almost disappointed to see Blazes there at 4pm.

[40:00] The scene of writing to Martha, Bloom’s “pen pal with benefits.” Bidding Martha “come” (l.740 “Consumed. Come. Well sung” (l.753-54). Is Bloom impotent? Capable of ejaculation (we’ll soon see), but hasn’t procreated lately. Displacement of Bloom-Boylan clash into the scene of Bloom eating. The Rotunda.

“Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes...” (l. 760ff.). “Onehandled”—Stephen’s wordplay “re/cited” by Arranger. Bloom wasn’t there for that. The special affinity between the two major interior monologues, Stephen’s and Bloom’s, a textual instance of consubstantiality (some critics say). “As said before just now....” In heat, on the way to rut. “Sonnez la cloche”—Lydia Douce’s garter snapping out the time.

Boylan’s “impatience.” Altogether compatible with feminine jouissance? Molly’s perspective on this question in “Penelope” episode. “Joggled the mare”—connection to the horse racing. Character’s name sounds like a horse’s name.

[49:00] Minor characters. One-legged sailor. “Handling” Lydia Douce; sweet, yes, easy, also. Irma la Douce. Flirts even with inanimate objects (the beer pull, e.g.). Bronze, anear. Just back from holiday, with a sunburn. Prefers Boylan to Lenehan. Lidwell to Bloom. The “wet lips.”

Attridge on “Lipspeech”: “One way of regarding the variously busy lips of ‘Sirens,’ therefore, is as a more literal rendering of human vocal activity than is normally promulgated by the linguistic convention of representing all conscious human behavior as if it were the product of a single, coherent subjectivity and by the ideology that this convention serves and promotes. Joyce’s transgressions of the selectional restrictions of English syntax can be regarded as stratagems that liberate the body from a dictatorial and englobing will and allow its organs their own energies and proclivities” (Peculiar Language 166-67).

Connection to Freud’s concept of “polymorphous perversity.” Prior to the restriction of pleasure to a privileged, genital, point. The entire surface of the body as erotic organ. Settling for mere genital gratification. The Joycean body proliferates sources of pleasure: surfaces, orifices, sphincters. Closing and opening, sucking and spitting, ingestions and expulsions. The “higher order” operations of language depend on more primary processes. Attridge’s Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce, recommended.

The “re/citational” operator: “said” instead of “written.”

[57:30] The scene of writing to Martha (l.820ff). The Arranger’s monosyllabic riffs on “Pat.” “Bloo mur” (l.860ff), bloomer (error, underclothes). The day’s expenditures, so far. “Naught”: nothing; -y. Post-scripts one and two. “How will you pun?” Anxiety about “breach of promise” suit.

[65:00] Bloom, the aspirant writer. On Joyce and popular and/or mass culture. HCE: Here comes everybody. Everyman’s Library, founded 1905. Steve’s impersonation of Pound’s “Cantico del Sole.” Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide.

Seminar of February 8, 2011 — log to come; sound file available

Seminar of February 1, 2011 — sound file available

Introductory remarks. Logistics of the course. Four presentations this evening. Order of composition of Dubliners stories: “After the Race” (Tim), “Clay” (Sadie), “An Encounter” (Corey), “A Little Cloud” (Yvonne). After the break: death, drugs, and rhetoric. Request for submission of course notes by noon on day of seminar.

[04:00] Tim on “After the Race.” Handout.
[21:00] Sadie on “Clay.” Handout.
[36:00] Corey on “An Encounter.” Whiteboard.
[49:00] Yvonne on “A Little Cloud.” Powerpoint, handout.

[65:00] Discussion of presentations. The “disorientation” of the characters in Dubliners. Jimmy’s state at the close of “After the Race.” Lacks of intellectual self-defense skills that Stephen wields. The “dark stupor” as sanctuary. Maria, a simple heart. Upset at forgetting cake on a tram: shame, vexation, disappointment. Emotional breakdown, emotional breakthrough. The dark stupor of alcohol (men), Catholicism (women). Almost every male is almost always drunk. Maria’s view of protestants. Birth control policies of the Catholic church. Little Chandler’s progeny: the child “belittles” the life of the parents. Chandler’s stature. Byron versus baby. “Sentenced to marriage.”

The protagonist of “An Encounter,” not yet definitively trapped. The pedophile’s “shame.” His insistence on “whipping”—as perversion, as threat. “An Encounter” as analepsis of adult narrator. “Nevertheless it was true.” The school as “safe” institutional space? And “miching” as exposure to perversion. The “Wild West” theme in “An Encounter.” The American contrasted to the Irish “west.” Analepsis idea further explored: narrative commentary more mature than character would be capable of. Lord Lytton’s works, off limits to little boys. Concern that the dirty old man will think him illiterate, stupid. Joe’s use of “slang,” his freedom vs. the protagonist’s uptightness.

Back to “Clay”: Maria’s name. Inevitable allusion to Mother Mary. Analogy to Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple.” Stein’s Three Lives. Maria’s physiognomy: tiny, stunted. Her chin meeting her nose. The banal fact of inanition. The gentleman’s manners, even when “he had a drop taken” (hyperbaton).

—break—

[4-2.1:30] Next week’s presentations: Becky on “Counterparts,” Joe M. on “Ivy Day,” Joe F. “A Painful Case,” Wes on “Two Gallants.” Thinking ahead to Portrait presentations. A “scene” can be any meaningful unit of narration equal to or shorter than a “section.”

[4:00] Little lesson on narratology. Still drawing on Genette. Analepsis (flashback), prolepsis (flashforward). Each can be characterized by their “reach” (distance from the present) and “extent” (duration). Imagine Ulysses as an amnesiac staging of June 16, 1904? The Ulysses we read steeped in history, the nightmare from which we have not yet awakened (per Stephen’s remark, 2.1690). History as paralyzing force in Dublin. Inevitability of the “anecdote,” gossip, the prior case. Analepses: via character-specific memories, via “textual” recalls (more on this later). Bloom’s mind as scene of flitting perceptions, thoughts, and memories. Aside on Martello Tower—monument as physical form of analepsis, pointing to the Napoleonic wars. Stephen, quarted there, is as peripheral to Ireland as it’s possible to be.

[10:00] Prospect that the nightmare of history can be woken from. Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. Analogy to events in Cairo at the moment.

[11:00] Aside on M’Intosh (6.5192), the unknown person as intolerable anomaly. The word made flesh—by Hynes’s sloppy journalism.

[12:00] Plot time: episodes one and four duplicate the same rough temporal arc (8am-). With “Hades” the criss-crossing in “real” time commences. Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The mourning hearse in “Hades.” Sustained exposure to Simon Dedalus.

[14:30] Anything we know about any time prior to 8am on June 16, 1904 will be the result of analepsis. Our question is how we know it?

[15:00] Remarks on “the initial style.” Our successful apprenticeship to it by now. Free indirect discourse. Enjoy the reading for seminar five! The first nine episodes, plus the tenth as a sort of virtuosic culmination. From episode eleven forward, conspicuous intrusion of an organizing presence not previously foregrounded. Hayman’s 1970 coinage: “the arranger.” Taken up and extended by Kenner (1980; 1986).

[18:00] “Aeolus”: Little Review version of October 1918 does not include “headlines” or “captions.” The Arranger’s hand responsible for the segmentation and diction. The experience of the physical, material book-in-progress. The mechanics of print—staged in the opening pages of “Aeolus.”

[21:30] This evening’s episodes: drugs (“Lotus-Eaters”), death (“Hades”), rhetoric (“Aeolus”). Staging motif to obsessive degree. Analogy to the pedophile’s consciousness: “magnetized” by his themes. The fetish of words. Episodes in Ulysses as stylistic perversions of this sort? Bloom’s lack of precise terms for rites of Catholic mass (eucharist in ch.5), burial rites (ch.6). In “Aeolus,” everyone’s a windbag—let loose.

[24:30] Homeric parallel: having drawn near to Ithaca, blown already back. Bloom could have returned home to interrupt Molly’s tryst. Gusts of rhetoric drive him off course, hence the five hundred pages more we have to read.

[26:00] Comparing impressions of Bloom. Based on how he’s treated by others. Made fun of by newsboys, for example. Excluded from various kinds of “We” (7.5428). “From the Fathers” (7.6740): our culture, our religion, our language. Bloom’s “almost optimism” (Sadie) going into situations—but finds himself frequently alienated, frustrated.

[30:00] The father’s suicide. Durkheim’s observation that Jewish “insularity” can be protective from suicide. Continental Jewish communities, compared to the situation in British Empire. Bloom: never had to borrow money; sign of inclusion in alternative community?

[31:30] Bloom not particularly close to wife Molly, correspondent Martha. Henry Flower (“lotus” theme). Connected to any living thing beyond his cat?

[32:00] The word “them” in “Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin” (6.4800). Bloom external to “we” and “them.” Bloom is older, less “angsty” than Stephen. A certain air of “acceptance,” perhaps even defeat. Bloom’s lecherous, lasciviousness thoughts—don’t make him unsympathetic (by contrast to “pedophile”). Our reaction to his “dirty old man thoughts” in correspondence with Martha.

Masochistic undertones, overtones, too. The confessional: “Punish me please.” The father’s suicide’s impact on Bloom’s formation? Father (Rudolph) and son (Rudy) dead. Athos (6.4110)—dying wish, parallel to the one in “Eveline.” Powers: “Worst of all is the man who takes his own life” (4426). The Bloom principle: when things look bad, they’ll get worse. Milly’s note quotes Blazes’ song.

[37:30] Bloom’s relation to Martha’s letter. Very cautious—perhaps guilty? Anxious about the physical destruction of it. Aside on Bloom’s consolation: “He has his soap!” The fantasized space of infidelity via writing. The “naughty” letters Joyce and Nora exchanged circa 1909. Martha’s many slips of the pen. Bloom as cuckold, castrate. Meticulous handling of letter (5.3482). “I often think of the beautiful name you have.” Martha’s request to know what kind of perfume Molly wears. “Semi-creepy.” The Martha-Molly spectrum. In creating his character, Henry Flower, Bloom takes care to make him married. An alternative interpretation: “Henry” and “Martha” have already met; the perfume had been scented in an actual liaison. Our sense that Bloom’s consciousness is being “candidly” disclosed to us. Could he be deceiving himself—and us—about this, and other, matters?  

[45:30] The funeral hearse ride: a succession of awkward topics. Bloom’s father, son, wife, etc. Bloom wasn’t born today. Erving Goffman, American sociologist, on the way we “wear” the history of our interactions in our comportment. Pariah, loser. Bloom loses most of his “character contests,” but hasn’t been made bitter, alcoholic, fanatically religious. A little too devoted to half-science. Secular rational stance toward the world. Curious, passionate. Half in, half out. Not just another Dubliner, somehow.

Bloom’s labor of putting the generous construction on things. Compare to Si Dedalus, whose gift is to take the piss out. Parallax. Bloom’s somewhat hapless, castrated condition—living in relation to own limits. Martin Cunningham—whose wife is an insane drunk. Molly a dream compared to that. The messianic fantasies around Bloom.

Deasy’s anti-Semitic punch line: “never let them in” (2.1796). Maybe not being let into Dublin is preferable? Bloom’s makes good, playful use, of his consciousness. Hungarian roots, Ireland born.

[57:00] Quick take, in conclusion, on “Aeolus.” “Mustn't be led away by words” (6165). Massive display of tropes, figures. Headlines as “stage directions.” Looking ahead to “Circe.” The three speeches cited and commented upon, each typifying a major category in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.  Stephen’s “parable,” as a first draft of Dubliners. Stephen in company versus Stephen in his own head. Witless offer to buy a round—not unlike his dad, a few minutes earlier.

Seminar of January 25, 2011 — sound file available upon request

Opening remarks. On the class logs, soundfiles. Impressions of first set of notes. Lexical entries, close analysis of sentences for poetic properties. Sound-shape of the language. Preview of tonight’s Dubliners presentation; the first of a series that will continue over the next few weeks.

Joyce’s letter to Nora (Ellman 169ff). Correction of an unjust remark about state of Stephen’s development circa the “first” exile. Joyce on the eve of his “second”—in Nora’s company. Flight cancelled. Mother love, nominative and genitive. The characterization of “home” in the letter to Nora. “My mind rejects the whole present social order….” What killed his mother? Reading her dead face, that of a victim; “I cursed the system that made her so.” Full disclosure to Nora—I don’t want you to find this out later. The hope of being fellow artificers, on the William/Catherine Blake model. Turns out to be ill-founded. Nora: irreducible otherness of the beloved. Beyond narcissism. 

[12:58] Abigail’s presentation on “Eveline.”

[30:00] Discussion of “Eveline.” Sadie’s remarks on “betrayal,” Eveline as female protagonist, and our “worry” about her.

Joe on the name of the protagonist. Seldom utilized in the manifest text. Free indirect discourse; the third person, external POV is saturated by first person, interior perspective. Would she say her own name? Indistinctly positioned between grammatical third person and psychological first person. Kenner on economy of “interior monolog.” Frank’s hail—“Evvy.” The interpellation from outside of Frank, rival to the father. “Diaphanous.”

Peter on the Pyrrhic victor as example of Abby’s “resolution without resolution.” Film technique of still subject with fast motion all around them. Abby on “cinematic quality” of Dubliners. Steve on Joyce’s stint at the cinema house, ca. 1909.

Little lesson on “anachronies” in story time: analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flash-forward). Examples from “Eveline.” Steve’s strained interpretation of the concluding scene—a fantasized flashforward? First reading (second “pane”=realistic depiction of scene); second reading (second pane=imaginative “working through” of a possibility not yet performed).

Sadie on “surplus of signifiers”: dead/not dead; paralysis. There are many Evvies in Dublin, in exile.

[42:00] The dead and departed of Ireland in the years following the Great Famine. Eveline’s double bind: leave or stay, betrayal is unavoidable. And neither of the projected futures is secured for the better. Why don’t we know more about Frank? Nowhere nearer than Buenos Aires?

[45:00] James on earlier instance of name’s appearance. “Miss Hill” / “Mrs. Hill.” The next generation of Irish woman. Motivation for using her own name.

[47:00] Concluding remarks on “Eveline.” Six pages of manifest text—quite a bit of “story” conjured on that economic basis. The word “maze.” Connection to Portrait. The mother’s life: “commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness.” Surplus of signifier: “Deveraun severaun.” 

[51:00] Aside on digital resources, including on-line access to O.E.D., via library. The Gabler vs. the Orchises facsimile of the Shakespeare & Co. edition of 1922. First decade of furtive circulation. Banned until 1933 in US, 1936 in UK. “This is too boring to be pornography.” In praise of the unannotated margin. Back to on-line resources: Forest of Rhetoric. Our links page.

[55:00] Wes’s brief introduction to the figure of “chiasmus,” supplemented by Hugh Kenner’s book on Ulysses (1980; rev. 1987). The constraint that figure places on the development of Stephen’s consciousness. Lexical chiasmus—a certain preciosity. The philosophical tradition out of Heidegger, including Derrida and J-L Nancy in France. The journal Diacritics in the 1990s. Fairly addicted to chiasmus. Criss-cross pattern. Lexical items, phoneme clusters, larger-order structures. Looking ahead to the proliferation of rhetorical figures in the “Aeolus” chapter.

[59:00] Remarks on “free indirect discourse.” Applied to Joyce’s narrative strategies. Foregrounded and maxed out in Ulysses. “Free” in the sense of not being “tagged” or attributed. He said/she said. Our indecision about what kind of sentence we’re reading: external third person report, first person enunciation. Flaubert’s style. Our moratorium on “stream of consciousness.” Jimmy-leaks: “interior monologue” leaked through Valery Larbaud to the reading public. Getting an unavailable book talked about. The schemata, etc. The economy of rumor. One new concept every six months…. A name to organize the surplus of signifier in a chapter like “Proteus.” Interior monologue: not spoken out. Coexisting with the omniscient third person narrator outside the diegesis, “indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

[1:05:00] Spoiler re: Stephen’s perhaps broken eyeglasses. “Ineluctable modality of the visible.” 

[1:07:00] Diegesis. Contrasted to mimesis in Aristotelian poetics: tell (diegesis) vs. show (mimesis). Verbal vs. visual presentation. More importantly for our purposes, “diegesis” as manifest text. Homodiegetic, continuous and internal to diegesis. Autodiegetic, continuous, internal, and self-telling. Example of Proust’s first person narrator. Example from film semiotics: “score” as heterodiegetic; sound with in-frame source, homodiegetic.

[1:12:00] What Bloom’s cat says. Onomatopoeia as project of “motivating” the arbitrary linguistic sign. Joyce’s exertions in this direction. Converting “symbol” to “icon” in Peirce’s typology. The character upon whom Haines is modeled. His nightmare. His “panther” and Bloom’s kitty.

—break—

[3.2-02:00] Volunteers for Dubliners presentations, seminar IV. Some protocols for the discussion to follow. Questions to start with: Yellow? (Joes F.); the “unfallen Adam” and the “womb of sin” (Wes); the cat’s meow (Corey). Onomatopoeia, G3:456ff—“Listen…”

[07:00] Three classes of signs: iconic (sign resembles things signified), indexical (sign points to thing signified), symbolic (sign. In onomatopoeia, the arbitrary relation of the signifier to the signified is shifted from “arbitrary” to “motivated.” Cratylus.

Marks on a white field (Becky). Can anything in Ulysses by considered a fluke? The cat that creeps across the writing desk: Joyce’s? Free indirect discourse won’t locate the statement in any one mouth. Dark against the lighter field: birds/sky, in augury. The mathematical signs manipulated in chapter 2. “Poor Sargent,” and Stephen’s unexpected identification with him.

[10:00] Sadie on “kinch.” Semantic fields: little kin, noose, lot in life, angle played, knife blade. Anecdote about Gogarty (Mulligan): he gave himself a worse name (Kinch). The mot juste and tensed polysemy. Abigail on “kinching” a horse’s tongue (OED). Children’s “tongue” is controlled by adults, but can subvert it sometimes. “Toothless Kinch the overman.”

[14:30] Significance of all these organs? (Becky). Bloom’s interest in the servant girl’s “hams.” If you’re in the butcher shop—the whole world is charcuterie. Link to the landlady with a “mind like a cleaver” in Dubliners. The “organs” Joyce assigned to most of the episodes (cf. Gilbert, Linati).

[16:00] Yvonne on Roman Catholic education; “womb of sin” and “unfallen Adam” phrases that Wes pointed out. The German word for “sin”? Die Sünde. The cross-linguistic pun involving English “sin” and German “Sinn” (sense, meaning). Making the word flesh: the womb of sense-making.

[18:00] The unfallen Adam (Proteus l.2288). Made not begotten. Constructing Mary’s womb as sinless took a long ideological struggle. The roster of Heresiarchs in Stephen’s mind. “What’s the right answer.” Glance back at Portrait, the question do you kiss/love your mother. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive (9843-44). Stephen’s imagination polarized: virgin~whore. What if Adam hadn’t fallen? What if Adam didn’t fall—the orthodox version of the question, the mystic version. Blake. Man didn’t fall—he was trapped into a story that said he fell. The demiurge.

[23:00] James on Proteus and prophesy. Both are slippery. Book of Revelations. Sadie on adaptation of rhetorical style to subject matter: the “slippery” words of chapter 3. Stephen/Proteus.

[25:30] Chapter three contrasted to first two in terms of style and “orientation.” Stephen’s rehearsal of metaphysical issues. He’s not done being an inheritor of Aristotle, Aquinas. The Heresiarchs as models of creative intellectual power. Those broken eyeglasses. The closed-tight eyes, the scrunch of the shells beneath his feet. What, if anything, does Proteus yield him?

[27:30] The dog that sniffs the dog-corpse.

[27:30] Sarah on Stephen’s mother’s death. Does he feel guilt, remorse? “Our souls, shamewounded….” (2333). Guilt and shame. Peter: Internal vs. external origin. The “bowl of white china” (1.157). Aside on other mothers’ deaths: Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir’s. The bowl as displaced object of attention: vile as it is, easier to look upon than the face of the dead’s mother.

[33:00] Cunt, see quaint. The mother’s death as the death of the principle that brought life. James on Heidegger’s distinction between “the deceased” and the corpse (Verstorbener, Gestorbener).

[35:00] Is Stephen just being morbid, or is there a substantive issue here? Abigail on Eve. The mighty mother, the ocean; the omphalos. The problem of connectedness as Stephen faces it, having severed (kinch-blade like) every bond. Is there a freely-elected form of connectivity he can accept? Freud on “the oceanic feeling.” Kaja Silverman’s Flesh of My Flesh. Who would care if Stephen died at this point? A little speck of pre-corpsed consciousness.

[37:00] Is there a non-fatuous form of “repair” for the divisions and diremptions that govern the world? Recall the peace petition Stephen refused to sign in Portrait.

[38:30] Bloom, Tiresias. The vaginal Bloom in “Circe.” Rudy, who doesn’t persist past his eleventh day. Milly—Molly. The dead and unredeemed son who has brought the home into disrepair.

[40:00] Chris on how to approach chapter three, and the book as a whole. The Odyssey, Gifford’s annotations as “starting points.” “Having read it once—doesn’t help at all.” Pushing back the secondary, surrounding texts: trying to read it fresh.

[43:00] Peter on Joyce’s invitation to future annotators. This book thematizing dis-connectedness requires us to be connected to prior readers. Philosophers, professors. The “University Discourse” that carries Ulysses along. Scenes of reading: the class. Results of reading: theses! A “non-academic” reading of Ulysses?

[45:00] Tradition as relay, hand-off. What if we had grown indifferent to the Odyssey? Hamlet? Joyce’s book reinvents them for a next generation? How is our relation to Ulysses mediated? What work of enculturation would render this “bedtime reading”?

[47:30] Anecdotes of actual scenes of reading, building off of Chris’s description. Corey: with laptop, to write. Jason: what is present on the page is enough. Sarah on an irony—what has all Stephen’s acquaintance with tradition brought him? The unfallen Adam didn’t read anything (though he did insist on naming things). Prelapsarian space before the fall into meaning. Forbidden fruit—in Stephen’s dream, a melon.

[50:00] Joe M.: Ulysses is easier than some things.  The pleasure of devising elaborate annotation strategies, marginalia. Joyce’s fascination with sigla and other symbols. The Wake.

[52:00] On sentences (from responses). A little lesson on prosody. Plus stress, minus stress. From the four-beat to the five-beat line: from popular to literary measures. From blank verse iambic pentameter to prose, not so far to push. Wes’s find: a perfect trochaic tetrameter, in the form of a sentence fragment. Persistence of metrical patterns underlying Joyce’s language.

Joe F. on the dead dog scene. “Stalk”—dog in chapter 3, cat in chapter 4. “Like a dog”? “Ay, very like a dog.” The burial rite as demarcation of animal/human. The fox riddle. In Antigone, two immutable orders converging on the corpse. This dog is just sort of puzzled, not agonized.

Stephen’s is a “disappointed” riddle, as that pier a disappointed bridge.

“Is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty.”

[58:00] Wes on the animal, the organs. Stephen’s ravenous appetites in Portrait. Vision of hell individuated for him—beast. “Stinking bestial malignant…” Looking ahead to Circe’s sty. Convenient that Stephen, insusceptible to “stink,” finds it awaiting him in hell.

Metempsychosis: the soul has many kinds of body at its disposal. The fox as reincarnated human?

“Heavy stuff.”

Seminar of January 20, 2011 | sound recording available by request

Prelude: Birthday cake and fire drill.

Handouts: Dubliners assignments; Entries on “focalization” and “speed” from Gerald Prince’s A Dictionary of Narratology; excerpt from “Interaction Between Text and Reader” by Wolfgang Iser.

Overview: Tonight’s focus: first acquaintance with, impressions of, Portrait, on the way to Ulysses. I: On Narratology, I.A: On the Plot~Story Distinction, I.B: On Focalization, I.C: On Epiphanies, II.A: Initial Discussion of Portrait, II.B: Characters in Portrait, II.C: Lexis in Portrait.

I. | ON NARRATOLOGY

Groundwork in narratology. Review of first seminar. Crises of legibility, readability. The limit case as opportunity to reflect on hermeneutic practices become habitual and thus invisible.

I.A | ON THE PLOT~STORY DISTINCTION

Distinction between manifest text and latent text. Words and worlds. Plot (manifest) and story (latent). The “canonical narrative tempos”: ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, pause. “Scene” as rough equivalence between plot and story; “summary” as condensation of some quantity of story to a smaller quantity of plot. Many conventional narratives alternate principally between summary and scene. From “stretch” to “pause”: Tristram Shandy, Proust. Slow motion. The temporality of the narrating text as it relates to the temporality of narrated world.

A single day in the life of a city: how much of that world can any text represent or make mention of? The manifest text of Ulysses is ample, yet it makes a radically partial textual representation of that world and its inhabitants. Aside on Proust’s brevity: the Search is as short as he could make it. Mimesis and ellipsis: representations leave almost everything out. The “economy” of Dubliners: whole lives contracted to a half dozen pages. The interlocking of these partial views. Ellipsis without narrative bridge. No unifying consciousness in Dubliners. Anecdote of the first commission: “The Sisters.”

[2.1-18:32] Portrait as bildungsroman. The building up of a spirit. James B. on the künstlerroman subgenre. The project of becoming an artist—and how that project differentiates the subject from others. The sole acceptable subject-position, that of “the artist.” Ideology as conferring, even compelling, identity. Stephen’s refusal of all interpellations—including his vehement rejection of the maternal bond. The ellipse between Portrait and Ulysses. Aside on “the alcoholic.” Stephen’s proto-punk hatred of everything and everyone. The “artist” as subject position that might just be good enough for him. Escape hatch.

[2.1-24:15] Analogy to Proust. The “artist” as subject position within modernism/modernity. The secular condition from Nietzsche forward. Analogy to Wallace Stevens. Aside on Exiles, as staging of Nietzsche’s struggle with Wagner. A revised assessment of Exiles, too lukewarmly recommended last time. Transitional figure between Stephen and Bloom: Richard. The mimetic reworking of biographical materials. Asides on Pinter’s staging.

Parenthesis on Beckett’s development in relation to Joyce. The art of subtraction, silence. The virtues of “not doing.”

[2.1-29:50] Return to “narratology.” Tasking seminar members with developing own working definitions of the plot~story distinction and the narrative tempos.

I.B | ON FOCALIZATION

[2.1-30:51] Remarks on focalization, point of view. Author and narrator. The dialectic of disclosure and concealment. Narrators tell and show only some of what they might. Ishmael, the witnessing narrator of Moby Dick. The peripheral standpoint. Imagine if Ahab had been narrator...

[2.1-35:01] Who narrates Portrait? First person / third person? Comparison with Proust: “For a long time I went to bed early”: first person, lyric, narration of epic-scale content. The problem of Swann in Love, events preceding the narrator’s birth. Fundamental implausibility—heroic violation. Portrait is told in third person terms. Exterior view onto a subject, intimations of interiority. The “diaristic” conclusion: transition from third to first person. Foreshadowing “Shem the penman” in the Wake. 

[2.1-38:30] Ellman’s Joyce, Boswell’s Johnson. The work of rendering Joyce readable, discharged with style and artistry. Brenda Maddox’s Nora, valuable supplemental account. The genesis of “Portrait.” Hesitation between essay and story. Analogy to Proust, Tolstoy. How fuse the many facets of imagination—lyrical, critical, satirical, dramatic, hallucinatory? The manuscript of Stephen Hero, partially consigned to the flames. The epiphanies.

[2.1-42:35] The Flaubertian-Joycean approach: less is more. Fewer works, each more intensely “worked.” Wagner compared to Haydn. Joyce’s reputation based on a “mere” four books. A certain logic of escalation and “outdoing.”

[2.1-44:00] Portrait as radically stripped down and rethought version of Stephen Hero. Exclude everything that can be excluded; intensify the semiotic-semantic effects of what remains. The long lecture on hell.

I.C | ON EPIPHANIES

[2.1-45:10] Remarks on epiphanies. The cliché of Joycean analysis. And yet. Forty extant of seventy-one (or so) total. The uses Joyce put to them early in his career. Where they turn up in the Joycean corpus. The author impresses with himself; the author disgusted with others. The gesture that “gives away.” Lyrical versus satirical. The epiphanic labor, 1901-1904. Contemporary, that is, to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. How human subjects betray their secrets in slips of the tongue, pen, memory. Jason M. on “Bloomian slips.”

[2.1-51:10] Transition to discussion. Interests and competencies, curiosities, that individuals bring to the seminar. How does this seminar synch up with ongoing intellectual projects. Initial impressions of reading Portrait. Countering and/or introducing nuance to the overly “strong” interpretation offered on our first night: Portrait as immanent, affective, ideology critique. [54:11]

II.A | INITIAL DISCUSSION OF A PORTRAIT

[2.1-51:10] Transition to discussion. Interests and competencies, curiosities, that individuals bring to the seminar. How does this seminar synch up with ongoing intellectual projects. Initial impressions of reading Portrait. Countering and/or introducing nuance to the overly “strong” interpretation offered on our first night: Portrait as immanent, affective, ideology critique.

[2.2-00:00] Sadie on etymology, classical languages. The dynamic life of languages. Aside on Joyce’s multilingualism: language teacher, Italian as domestic tongue in his and Nora’s household. Testing the hypothesis about “ideological state apparatuses.” Rosmarie Waldrop’s helpful maxim: “Contradict as needed.” Stephen’s decision not to enter the Jesuitical order. “He was destined…wandering among the snares of the world” (162).

Sarah’s question: what’s left once the successive interpellations are peeled away? A body of water that adopts the shape of its next container. The suppression of “orienting” commentary, transitions. Linked to Joyce’s conviction that the epiphanies had to stand alone, no paraphrase or commentary. Forecasts the chapter-by-chapter alteration of styles in Ulysses. From “moo cows” forward. The text trains us to read it—we develop along with the depicted subject—and forces us to reorient. Persistence of frame. Disjunction, discontinuity.

Jason on parataxis. Fairly simple lexicon, fairly simple paratactic structures, early on. The “sermon” as rhetorical display, with more complex hypotactically organized periods. The “glossary” of each chapter changes: for instance, religious terminology. Joyce’s “sermon”: working-through the existential (and rhetorical) possibility forgone.

Abigail’s interest in post-modernism. The dialectic of “immersion” and “disorientation.” “I’m totally in something I’m totally out of.” On Iser’s The Act of Reading. Ulysses as limit case for what can happen to a reader. Jameson’s disorientation in a hotel lobby—plurality of codes, not sure any are “ours,” dis-located. A constant becoming.

Ulysses is modernist; Finnegans Wake is post-modernist. In the latter, often impossible to construe a given printed sentence in any one way. Happens less often in Ulysses—the dayworld. The unchecked becoming—pure unchecked becoming of language—in Wake.

Joe’s background in Irish literature, centered on Yeats. The political, religious, historical context. A first attempt at Portrait at 17. The “heaviness”—the “seriousness”—of it. Reading now, noticing the words about words. Butler on “linguistic vulnerability.” Language’s interpellative powers. The highly and contradictorily “charged” language of Ireland. Steve’s supplementary remarks on Yeats; his early recognition of Joyce. Beckett’s apprenticeship to Joyce.

On Joe’s posted response: Stephen’s aesthetic theory—“arrest.” Stasis (artwork) ~ kinesis (pornography). Aristotle’s categories of “pity” and “terror.” Principal cathartic affects produced by tragic artwork. “Constant and grave….” (183; 176).

Aristotle, despite his importance for church dogma, still a pagan thinker. Getting back before Christianity grips the West. Pound’s Seafarer. Joyce’s affinity for the pagan precedent. Homer, Aristotle. The “sermon” induces terror, no?

Joyce retains and re-purposes elements of liturgical tradition: epiphany, eucharist.  The word made flesh. Joyce-uissance and incipient “pornography.” 

BREAK

II.B | CHARACTERS IN PORTRAIT, ISER ON "WANDERING VIEWPOINT"

Remarks on Iser handout. “In order to spotlight the communication process…” (1677-78). Dubliners presentation. “Gaps, blanks, negations” and “the reader’s wandering viewpoint.” The reader’s changing perspective as we cross boundaries, segments. Manifest text breaks off and we next take it up from another point of view. Characters other than the protagonist.

Stephen’s masculine rivals. Heron, Cranly, Lynch, Davin. The “her” and the competition for her attention/affection. Exiles as staging of more complex rivalry. Ulysses: Bloom and the other men in Molly’s life, esp. Blazes.

Tim takes up theme of “postmodernity.” The maturation of language in Portrait compared to As I Lay Dying. Accentuating the gaps inherent in any totalizing vision. Frame shifts, focus jolts. Portrait’s “economy” compared to Ulysses. Looking ahead to a “bird’s eye” view in certain chapters of Ulysses. 

“The parallax principle.” No single viewpoint, not even a robustly developed one, can suffice. The task of coordinating conflicting perspectives. Nietzschean “perspectivism.” The indifferent external standpoint: the author, like God, “paring his fingernails” anecdote (Portrait).

[2.3-12:00] Characters other than Stephen? Simon, the father. Stephen as “lazy bitch.” Joe F. on the relationship between Stephen, his mother, his father. Stephen last “with” father, scene in Cork; subsequent Stephen’s “split.” Quite the pair—one filthy, the other brutal and hung-over. Continuities~breaks. Joyce on “betrayal”—the intensely felt bond, broken. Simon’s negotiation of Stephen’s entrance into University. The prevalence of such “negotiated” arrangements: objective mechanisms lacking. Lubricants of gossip, alcohol.

Other memorable characters? Wes on Lynch. The scene when Stephen offers him a cigarette. Abigail on Cranly. The conversations just before the journal begins. How much listening Cranly does. Stephen’s credo—“I will not serve…” (246-47) is addressed to Cranly’s ear. The new trinity: silence, exile, cunning.

Jason on the phrase “Cranly’s arm” in “Telemachus.” An inconspicuous pun: “arm(s).” Link to master trope of “confession.” Homosociality, “thrill to the touch.” Wes: Stephen jealous of Cranly for attracting the attention of the unnamed beloved.   

[25:00] Joyce and Nora. The project of “free” union. Contrast to Stephen’s lack of intermediate steps between whore~virgin. The enormity of Joyce and Nora’s wager. Joyce escapes the “Stephen” subject-position. Film version based on Maddox, Nora (dir. Pat Murphy, 2000). Not companionate intellectuals ala William and Catherine Blake. Nora was recalcitrant to being refashioned. Recognizing irreducible difference of the beloved.

Remarks on other female characters in Portrait. Eileen, the protestant girl with whom he commits some unspeakable act meriting de-ocularization. Ellipsis in action: what happened? [30:00] The “retreat” into poetry: converting threat of punishment into artwork, mastering through repetition. The imperative: to apologize, to confess.

Why is Portrait not a Confesssions? An Apology? Adjacent genres available to intellectuals as they develop.

II.C | LEXIS IN PORTRAIT

[31:10] Striking lexical items. Anecdote of Steve’s undergraduate dictionary. Joyce supplemented by Beckett.

Sadie on Stephen’s “pious” phase. Language particular to the church. The opacity of the religious codes and rituals to those not initiated into it. The intense intimacy and familiarity for those who have been. Mulligan’s (black) mass in the opening pages of Ulysses.

Stephen’s “mortification of the senses.” He can be offended by no smell, save perhaps stale urine. Paradox: as you mortify a sense, you cultivate it at the same time. Mortification, gratification.  The saint as Sadeian pervert par excellence. Libertinage masked as sacrifice. Aside on the Catholic Church as theatrical stage and instrument for the extraction of pleasure: hard to rival. Nothing Chaucer didn’t know.

[35:15] Peter on Stephen’s immersion in Catholic ideology and the depth of his later subversion of it. Remarks on apostacy; betraying one’s faith. “You have to have tradition in you to hate it properly.” Stephen holds his own with, and eventually transcends, those who train him. More lucid than his lucid masters. Contempt for one’s betters as liberating sensation. His rejection sticks, because it’s based on immanent experience. Aquinas’s reach—Stephen apparently not impressed, intimidated.

[39:00] The sermon has to sound just so. “My dear little brothers….” qua interpellative strategy. Stephen’s initial sin (in the brothels, end of chapter two, beginning chapter three) is undertaken with insufficient rigor; he’ll have to come up with another scale of sin altogether if he’s going to break with the situation. Parenthesis on religion in Proust, who gives the impression that though it may be important some people, it has become at some level “silly,” vestigial.

[40:00] Corey on the sermon. Shaken up by it, though not raised in any faith. The splendor of that rhetoric, the majesty of the intellectual vision it offers, by contrast to the squalor that is daily-life in Dublin. Unerring sense of the audience’s vulnerability. Sermon as linguistic edifice, cathedral of words.

[41:55] Tim on the smallness of the sin compared to the magnitude of the expiation undertaken. Aside on the prostitute who deflowers Stephen. Opening sentence of chapter three. Stephen as pig in Circe’s sty. Lexical repetition on adjectives, adverbs. “Dull,” e.g. The chiastic structure as evidence of the “poetic” mind, ever arranging and evaluating. Looking ahead to adverbs in Ulysses. Relatively “free” in syntactical terms.

[45:20] Ulysses: Three more Stephen chapters; Bloom’s entrance with fourth chapter. Basic sensuality. The final paragraph of “The Dead.” Lexical and syntactical patterning near to a “prose poem.” Jason on Stephen’s testing of words and rhythms. Scene of the villanelle’s composition in chapter five: rhymes with “rays.” Analogy to Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition.” The poem isn’t great, but the account of its composition is interesting. Scene in Dubliners when Aunt Julia’s singing voice is remarked upon. “Grace notes.” Remarks on genesis of “The Dead,” after Nora and exile. “Michael Fury.” Gabriel as another of Joyce’s avatars or projected subjects.

[52:00] Remarks on transition from Portrait to Ulysses. The elided chapter of Stephen’s life between Portrait and Ulysses. The flight into exile has, apparently, failed. Landed in strange company, bizarre lodgings. Bloom’s entrance. Most readers find him a relief of sorts “after” Stephen. Bloom’s Jewishness: an alternative to the Catholic ideology that suffuses the collective mind we’ve so far encountered. Fusion of the “Hellenistic” and “Hebraic” in one figure: Odysseus-Bloom.

On guidebooks and handbooks. Some tips on sustaining primacy of reading experience  in all its dazzling, disorienting complexity.  

Seminar of January 11, 2011 | no sound recording of this session is available.

Introductory remarks. The overall shape of the course. A relatively straightforward project: to advance our understanding of James Joyce’s Ulysses. “Advance” from whatever starting point individual seminar members are at this evening: first time reader, first time “completer,” re-reader, etc. Our pace: roughly sixty-five pages a week.

The structure of the notes that seminar participants will prepare each week. The focus on words, sentences, characters, and questions derives from values immanent within Joyce's project: le mot juste, the sentence as basal unit of style. The inheritance from Flaubert: economy and overdetermination.

Axiom: the literary artwork proposes and populates a world. Dialectic of the manifest text (the words present before our eyes) and the latent text (the world we are brought to imagine by those words). The hermeneutic circle.  

The dilemma: one does not know how to read Ulysses, but one knows that one must read Ulysses.

Critical theory in the sense of thinking in, and thinking through, a crisis. In our case, the crisis of illegibility that is Ulysses, initially, as opportunity to rethink our hermeneutic—and perhaps ethical and existential—presuppositions. The example of Gerard Genette’s treatise On Narrative, which derives general conclusions through consideration of one startlingly unique “case,” Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time.

The modernist project: not to inherit the readers that already exist, but to call new ones into existence. Radical transformation. “You must change your [reading practices].” Picasso: to put new eyes in the sockets from which those that gazed in obedience to Renaissance perspective have been gouged. The gamble—if not a masterpiece, a monstrosity.

The unpublishability of James Joyce. Anecdote of the Little Review, seized and burned upon arrival on US shores. “Pornography.”

And yet: a work now so revered, so pored over and commented upon, that it rivals the books at the center of the major world religions. Raising the question of the emerging  institutional matrix within which the value(s) and meaning(s) Ulysses were initially contested and eventually established, perhaps even entrenched. Pace Gertrude Stein on the secular miracle by which the “outlaw” becomes the “classic.” The University.   

Ulysses and the Aristotelian unities: of place (Dublin), of time (most of a single day), and of action (Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom make one another’s acquaintance). Remarks on Joyce’s “nightbook,” Finnegans Wake, and the preview of its primary processes in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses.

—BREAK—

Review of theoretical concepts advanced by Gérard Genette, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Remarks on Dubliners and Portrait. The dialectic of “unrest” (enacted by Stephen in Portrait) and “arrest” (staged from multiple standpoints in the stories collected in Dubliners).

Thesis: Portrait adapts the conventions of the bildungsroman to the project of staging an immanent, affective, critique of ideology. Epiphany as the glimpse of freedom from within the confines imposed by (socially manufactured) necessity. 

A little lesson on Althusser’s theory of ideology. The “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs) at work in Portrait: the (patriarchal) family, the (Roman Catholic) church, the (Jesuit) school, the (colonial, Irish) state, the (British, protestant) empire, the (global, capitalist) economy. The interpellative, or hailing, function of ideology: calling subjects into existence, positioning them within a conflictual system. The labyrinth and the escape artist. A key scene: Stephen’s “instinctive” rejection of the priesthood; the emergence of an unexpected alternative, the University. The aesthetics of exile.  A parenthesis on “mother love.”

The “scrupulous meanness” of Dubliners. A series of cell doors slamming shut. Endemic alcoholism ; economic and existential failure as norm. The colonial metropolis: the national center as imperial periphery.       

Rhetoric, reality, and style. The rhetoric of reality, the reality of rhetoric. “Realism” as a rhetorical strategy that effaces its own status as “rhetoric.” The accumulation of detail, “objectively” presented. Contrasted to the “reality” of rhetoric: language in and as action (pace the parade of rhetorical figures in the “Aeolus” chapter). Ulysses stages a sort of hyper-realism, so “realistic” that its rhetoric becomes conspicuous. The glass of water Bloom draws in the “Ithaca” chapter. It simultaneously avails itself of most known modes of figuration.

Joyce’s “scorched-earth policy”: style and aggressivity. Ulysses as sustained attack on the imperial Master’s language. “Each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind a burnt-up field” (letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 20 July 1919). The “other side” of jouissance.

Surplus of signifier (encore). The scale of the commentary generated by Ulysses, fourteen shelves worth at our humble, under-funded library, many more than that in any major research university’s collection. The challenge of authorizing one’s experience in the face of such accumulated verbiage.  

Some sentences selected by seminar members nearly at random from Ulysses. Brief commentary and discussion.

Handout: a schematic overview, “leaked” by Joyce, of Ulysses. The “whole” book in a single glance. The dialectic of part and whole.