James Joyce by Richard Ellmann My rating: 4 of 5 stars Biography must be the most traditional, even rigid, of the prose genres, exceeding murder mysteries or romance novels. It marches from birth to death (or from family history to cultural legacy) at the stately pace of the old three-volume Victorian novel and with the … Continue reading Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
Tag: bloomsday
Two years ago, Elaine Showalter suggested that we balance Bloomsday (June 16, the day whereon Joyce's Ulysses is set) with Dallowayday: Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set in a single city on a single day: London on 13 June 1923. But while Bloomsday on 16 June is the occasion of riotous celebrations … Continue reading Against Celebration: Bloomsday vs. Dallowayday
The emergence of a literature which is predominantly concerned with the exploration of both a social reality and individual consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its first clear manifestations date from about the third quarter of the seventeenth century when the collective projection represented by the Christian "worldview" gradually began to break apart. Inevitably, this … Continue reading Bloomsday Notes: Jung on Joyce
The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart... —T. S. Eliot, "Sweeney among the Nightingales" Joyce was an apostate, renegade, heathen, exile, dissident, blasphemer—and so perhaps the most faithful way to celebrate Bloomsday would be to blaspheme Joyce. In his bracing 1988 essay, “Against Ulysses,” Leo Bersani does just that. Despite its venerably … Continue reading Bloomsday Thoughts: Blasphemies, Monuments, Traditions
This follows from an earlier suggestion of mine to celebrate Bloomsday by quoting not only Ulysses, but also the works that Ulysses made possible. One of the more interesting contemporary comments on Ulysses is the poem dedicated to it, in 1922, by the modernist poet and futurist feminist Mina Loy: The Normal Monster sings in … Continue reading Mina Loy’s Bloomsday
theparisreview: “Of all the literary celebrations that might blow up, why Joyce, why Ulysses, and why Bloomsday? The answer lies in the celebrity and cultural capital of the Joyce brand, the result of Joyce’s machinations and the way he’s been taken up in mainstream U.S. culture.” Jonathan Goldman on the history of Bloomsday. And here … Continue reading Joyce and Celebrity
Late in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, his heroine, Oedipa Maas, having stumbled upon the long transatlantic conspiracy of a Tory Anarchist underground postal service founded by a disinherited Spaniard and used by the plotters and by the dispossessed, wanders all night around San Francisco. There she encounters evidence of the postal underground … Continue reading On Bloomsday
