Book Discussion #3,4,5
Ms. Haiku
Washington DC Posts: 7,265
Are you ready? FinsburyParkCarrots agreed to lead the discussion in "Ulysses" by James Joyce. However, as noted in Book Discussion #2 he suggested that we read "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by the same author, and "The Odyssey" by Homer first. So, for December 1st and onward for about 3 months we will discuss any of these three books. Discussion is still available for "Mrs. Dalloway." I'm trying to find time to reread it, so I can be more clear on what I want to say.
There is no such thing as leftover pizza. There is now pizza and later pizza. - anonymous
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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how long has this been going on? i love this sort of thing! do you pick volunteers to lead discussions? id be willing to help out sometime... i did major in 20th century lit in college. perhaps catch-22?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Possibly, not too sure. The question is if I'm not around will I still have internet access.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
This is my first book discussion on-line, so who-ever knows the ropes, please fill me in on format.
Thank-you.
I love "Once upon a time and it was a very good time there was.." This is a terrific way to start a novel! Only a few pages into "A portrait", I have smiled, laughed, and loved the brilliant mind of the storyteller.
i read that ages ago, enjoyed it overall. yes, some of the language was difficult...but it was not as difficult as i had imagined/heard at all. now ulysses...don't know about that one...haha.....seems.....daunting. i've never read the oddessey.....hmmmm.
eh, right now i have books piled high to get to......but i am intrigued...may pop in now and again.
Let's just breathe...
I am myself like you somehow
as for the age question... well, Dedulus is out of the nursery and at the big people's table at dinnertime... he's learning his own right from wrong and wonders of politics... he's studying at "college"... and most importantly, at the end of the first chapter he is standing up for himself and his belief in the "justice/punishment" system. i'd have to say these are important formative years.
Now I'm super glad I didn't jump straight into Ulysses. Thanks for the discussion group.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
also... since i'm heading into the fourth of the five chapters, i have a better idea of Stephen's age... at the end of chapter 3 (innocence lost) young Dedalus is 16... chapter two had two years at Belvedere, a summer, and Sept-x-mas with no school ($)... chapter one was waiting for home/x-mas at Clongowes Wood College... so I'm guessing Stephen was age 13 when he developed "moral courage" in adolescence.
"anyone? anyone? Bueller?" (ha ha - thx pit)
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Portrait adheres essentially to this realist form (bar in the last few pages, which are written in diary form in the first person). The novel doesn't use interior monologue in the way that you see in Ulysses; there's isn't multiperspectivalism and the novel is in many regards realist in its concentration on one protagonist. There are moments of realist narrative, such as the argument the child Stephen overhears at Christmas dinner between his father, Mr Casey and Dante. Google Charles Stewart Parnell in Wikipedia to get historical contexts.
The reason why the novel seems stream-of-consciousness is because the language of the narrative is consonant or dialogic with the words that Stephen is likely thinking. The level of focalisation is such that there are occasions when, though Stephen's thoughts are portrayed in the past tense and third person (a realist mode, putatively from an omniscient narratorial perspective), we feel plunged inside Stephen's consciousness. In fact, the absence of obtrusive and ironic narratorial interjection - as you'd see in Jane Austen's novels when the authorial narrator pokes fun at, say, Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey - suggests either self reflexivity between the authorial voice and Stephen, or a silent ironic distancing between a narrator who can portray when Stephen is taking himself far too seriously, and Stephen himself. (I go with the latter suggestion, as we'll discuss later.)
It's likely that if you apply traditional modes of critical analysis to this novel, you're going to be stumped many times in your reading. This is because, though as I say, the text is realist in ways, it's also modernist in its narrative structure. Like a poem, it foregrounds discourse over story. It's a bildungsroman, a novel of education and advancement, but it doesn't have an obvious plot as such like you get in another bildungsroman such as Dickens's David Copperfield or another typical novel of the previous century. The chapters climax with moments of being or epiphanies on Stephen's part.
Do a little research on Ireland and its colonial relationship with Britain between 1882 and 1922 (particularly up to 1904, the setting date for Ulysses) and the Irish education system at the time. Also look up on epiphany, focalisation/focalization (both spellings) and modernist literature.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The link treats the novel as a stream of consciousness, and the novel is such in that we are consistently focalised within the viewpoint of Stephen. The episodic chapters in the text share the characteristic of Stephen's intense subjectivity and the flow or confluence of internal perspective is effected by their concentration on describing the external world from within the often unreliable realm of Stephen's thought, understanding and experience. The novel is a product of scientific uncertainty and epistemological doubt: It rejects the nineteenth century model of an omniscient and obtrusively voiced construction of "the world as it is in reality", even though it still uses some realist narrative devices. It does suggest that the world can only be known from an inevitably interiorised, alienated, detached and limited human scope of being that occasionally is informed by (supernatural?) epiphany outside our conventional understanding.
When you say grounding in the present, you mean there's no temporal achrony: No voicing of the presence of the narrator outside the spatio-temporal (past tense) realm of the story? Hmm. There isn't any obvious achrony. In fact, much of the focalisation inside Stephen's perspective has a kind of tenselessness about it, or of being somehow present and past tense simultaneously the deeper inside his thoughts we go and the more third person pronouns and tense forms are left out of rendering of free indirect (becoming direct) thought. However, I would say that the fact that the novel has an organisational structure, selected around key moments of being in Stephen's advancement, points to the editorial presence of an albeit reticent narrator who makes his achronic distance known through an omniscient ability to choose what moments in Stephen's young life to explore.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Perhaps, the answer is to be found in its heightened consideration of internal experience, of epiphany, of being beyond the dry epistemic structures of quasi-scientific prose discourse; its attempt to say the unsayable in language, the drives of emotion, desire, rejection of external labels of time, space and identity. Time is a theme of the modernist prose poem, it is subjective, it moves back and forth and communes with memory. Symbolism and myth are synchronous with realist descriptions of the everyday, just as you get in a poem but not in a newspaper report of, say, parliamentary proceedings.
"Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhyme and without rhythm, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the prickings of consciousness? "- Baudelaire
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
We're seeing Dante from a child's perspective. She is just a name to him before the argument.
This is important to consider. We see the world through a limited child-episteme that develops yet retains certain quirks and idiosyncrasies as the novel follows it into adulthood. Remember, Dedalus's internal impressions of wetting the bed are pleasant, as wet meant hot rather than impure; Dedalus's maintained distance from external, conventional thinking, in spite of some of his attempts to socialise with conventional "reality", is a key point of this novel.
As for the names, one must remember the poetic and symbolic force of the book. I find this link reiterates some of the points I've made in this post; it discusses symbolic/poetic motifs as organisational features of the novel:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-146,pageNum-34.html
The symbolic force of the name Dedalus will be clear by the end. Think about myth: Who was Dedalus? And what has he to do with art, or rather, crafting ingenious devices?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Joke. :cool:
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
His narration imitates the way he is spoken to, hence Baby Tuckoo and the simple reasoning.
(This goes with the stream of consciousness argument.)
Here's something...
Dedalus: father of Icarus, built the labyrinth and the wings that were his son's demise.
Stephen Dedalus: artist in the making, lives in his own labyrinth, skirts the sun. His growth could parallel the making of the wings that will give him freedom as an adult and an artist.