… in honor of Bloomsday:
This is from the Scylla and Charybdis episode in the book. The episode in the library, when Stephen Dedalus finally starts to speak. And out comes a flood of words. The discussion? Hamlet. Interesting. Peter Greenblatt, author of the book Will in the World, about Shakespeare, has mentioned that the “discussion about Hamlet in Ulysses” is beyond compare, and helped him, as a younger man, to deepend his understanding of that play. It’s true. You may think you know Hamlet – but if you think that? If you are sure in your knowledge and you HAVEN’T read Ulysses? Then, sorry – no understanding of Hamlet is anywhere near complete without studying that chapter. People have devoted their entire lives to studying this particular chapter.
In this following excerpt … a chatty librarian talks about an upcoming compilation of poets, and the fact that Ireland has yet to inspire a real epic. heh heh heh That was James Joyce’s big thing. When librarian says: “they say we are to have a literary surprise” I can’t help but think that Joyce is speaking about his own book, Ulysses. A surprise for Ireland, indeed. But he was living in exile – unlike all the other writers mentioned in this excerpt. He had rejected Ireland, he couldn’t bear to live there. Yet it remained his lifelong obsession – to describe it, to hold up a mirror to its face, to immortalize it so well that you could use his books as a literal streetmap through Dublin 100 years hence. (And you kind of can.)
From Ulysses:
–They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumor has it, is gathering together a sheaf of our younger poets’ verses. We are all looking forward anxiously.
Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.
See this. Remember.
Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.
Listen.
Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part. Longworth will give it a good puff in the Express. O, will he? I liked Collum’s Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer thing, genius. Do you think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian vase. Did he? I hope you’ll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it? They remind one of don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.
