Letteratura inglese: Appunti Ulysses James Joyce (Unistrapg), Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Letteratura inglese: Appunti Ulysses James Joyce (Unistrapg) e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE (Università per Stranieri di Perugia) 7-03 Ulysses is a very strange book because it’s described as a novel and an anti-anti-novel at the same time. The right pronounce is YOULISSES because it’s a book about you. Joyce didn’t write this book for fun or to be considered a master writer but he wrote this book to help us see things better. Ulysses is a funny book and it’s written to teach something. Umberto Eco wrote the book “opera aperta” that is a theorisation of the idea that a book has no end. It stays open. Ulysses can be considered as an open book. It’s a book that has no final. Open test is open to interpretations. The sentences “the end of the night is the beginning of the day” means that one thing is two things at the same time. There is a point in which day and night are the same thing. Everything in the world exists because there is the opposite. The opposite of open text is closed text, and so texts that are not opened to interpretations. But there are no texts that we can do read in a one way. Any text can be read in different ways. James Joyce was from Ireland but what’s the opposite of Ireland? Sam Beckett helps James Joyce writing the last book. He was from Ireland, he model in France and he started writing in French translating back to English. French became his language and he said to some journalists the reason why he started writing in French: because he wanted to write without style. It’s strange because every writer belong to a particular style. When journalists said him: are you an English man? He answered: au contraire. The contradiction is the base of the great literature. Great literature is ambitious and it’s impossible judging literature without consider the background. We have to interpret. Oscar Wilde is from Dublin and he said: in art one thing is true only when it’s opposite it’s also true. This is art. Art is when surface and symbols are the same thing. Umberto Eco said that a novel is a text constructed to generate as many meanings as possible. It’s thought by the author but it’s generated to create a lots of meanings. Even meanings that the author doesn’t consider. Open text is a text that escapes the thought of the author. The most difficult thing about Dante’s comedy is to understand not the ideological references but is to understand the real people that he imagines, people that we don’t know who they are, the details of Florence. And so the difficulty of the test is not what the text means, or the intention of the author; the difficulty of the test is to make sense in our present. A text belongs to the readers not only to the author. Wrong interpretations exist but we have our interpretations. It’s hard understand if an interpretation is wrong or right. When we read a text we understand what we want to understand. Interpreting is reading symbols. A symbol is something that stand for something else. The symbols can be interpreted in some different ways. It’s important create a connection between what I read and what I mean. A labyrinth is a place where we can enter but we are not sure to exit. This is quite dangerous for literature because we enter in a book and we can’t exit easily. Labyrinth is created by Daedalus. When James Joyce was young, he wrote some letters and he called himself Steve Daedalus, the same name that he used for the main character in the portrait of a young man. When we read Ulysses we have to be in alert abut the details because there are a lot of informations about the life of the author, not in the surface of the book but under the meaning of the book. Theory: what we have in mind before practise. It’s an invention of some person that by reading a text wants to make a connection with outside, and being theoretical is to take a test from the past and put it on the contemporaneity. It’s create connection between a work on the past and a possible future. A literary theory is a theory about literature, but what’s literature? Criticism: is something that belongs to the text. Literature is the transformation of life into a story. Even our life can be literature because there is a plot and a transformation. Ulysses is an example how life becomes literature. We’re going to read a book that Joyce describes as a novel. Ulysses is set in one day (16 June 1904) and it contains a lot of pages for one single day. It describes a day of life of Leopold Bloom. It’s a realist novel because there is a registration about everything that happens in one single day. Joyce wanted to write life and in many letters he describes himself like an artist and not as a writer. Anybody can be writer but few can be artists. He wants to describe real life, and so he chose a humble character because the real life is not the life of a hero, but the life of normal people that meet difficulties. A novel wants to demonstrate somethings, life doesn’t want to demonstrate anything. Joyce want to create a book that’s the description of life. Life is open to interpretation. The end in Italian means la fine and il fine. When you have a novel test we have a lot of interpretation about the end. The end can be my end or my beginning, something new. Before the novel there were only fantastic stories, full of monsters and dragon. Novel is not the reality but is the impression of reality. Ian Fosters said that novel is like a sponge because it absorbs something that is not on the surface. A novel is not a material production in the mind of the author but it’s a product that ends in our mind. Novel in Italian language is a short story and in fact Ulysses was born as a short story. James Joyce left Ireland when he was young and he went to work in Trieste. It was a part of Austria, not Italy, but he lived in Rome too, in fact he moved to Rome and he became a bank worker. He lived in Rome for 7 months and 7 days. He wrote some letters in Rome about a man that lived in Dublin called mr. Hunter. He was a jew, he had an unfaithful wife. He asked to his brother if he remembered this man because he wanted to write a short story about this man. In fact he wanted to write the last story of Dubliners. Dubliners is a collection of short stories that ends with THE DEATH. A razor symbolises something that can cut, something dangerous. Joyce was a man educated in catholic church, and so this book is full of religious things. In the history of theology there is an object called ockham’s razor. It’s a strategy comes from a theology called William of Ockham. When you have to say many thing a lot of things are implicit and he teaches that to understand a theory we have to think is a simple way. If you have something to be explained and two different solution, you have to use the simple one, without using complicated and unnecessary words. This is the base of art because art is try condense something. This strategy could be necessary to explain a book sometimes. The bow, the razor and the mirror and in particular the disposition like a cross, there are symbols of Mulligan’s distorted rituals. This imagine could be seen like a parody of the catholic rite of the mass. This thing critics would call defamiliarising effect because he uses the language in order to upturn things and not to crate effects that will not expect. It’s hard to understand why the book begins with something related to a mass. Defamiliarising is created something unfamiliar because something that supposed to be familiar become unfamiliar. And so when there is something that you know very well but there is a little thing that changes the effect. The beginning of the book is normally the most important part. From this beginning we can realise that Joyce writes with a strange structure. Stately looks like an adverb but it’s an adjective. It’s strange find an adjective used in the beginning go the sentences followed by a comma and another adjective. The normal sentence would be “buck Mulligan stately and plump”. We have a correspondence between the beginning of a mass and the beginning of the day. But mass in only something of symbolic. The first word, Stately, begins with the same letters of Steve. Maybe stately stands for Steve; plump stands for Leopold Bloom who is called also Poldy and buck mulligan has the same initials of Molly Bloom. These initials are inverted because the black mass. In fact the opposite of the mass is the black mass, and B.M. stands for black mass. In episode 3 of Ulysses we will read that Steven Daedalus has the plan to write a book for letters use like a title (book a, book b, book c). In episode 9 Steve owns some money to a person called A.E. This character is George Russel who founded the Dublin hermetic society. In the text we read only AEIOU that means Steven Daedalus owns money to A.E. Joyce’s mind works in this way. We have said that introibo ad altare Dei is the beginning of the mass. The beginning of the latin mass is introibo ad altare diaboli, and we can find this sentence later. Buck Mulligan is also called Malachi. In the history of theology a man called Sent Malachi was a profet. When Joyce was young he was very fond on occultism, magic and spirituality. In Dublin exists a society called Dublin hermetic society and his friend AE was a member of this society. In this society there was Yates too and his nickname was dedi (deus est diabolus inversus). Dedi is similar to Daedalus too. The last chapter is called Penelope and there is a long stream of consciousness. The last word of the book is “yes” and this word ends with letter S. The book starts with letter S and ends with letter S. This book is like a human body because every episode has a correspondence with a human organ. But there are a lot of correspondence with other things, like for example family, time, colours. The last episode corresponds to the infinite time. The symbol of the infinite is like two S that instead of being vertical they are horizontal and together they become the infinite. After the publication of Ulysses, from 1922 until 2017, there are a lots of articles about Ulysses, and so we can say that this book is the biggest book every written. In the very first episode Steven Daedalus is in a tower and also Joyce lived in this tower until 15 of September. The two characters at the beginning are Buck Mulligan and a man called Kinch. Kinch is the nickname of Steven Daedalus that is also called the knife blade (lama di coltello). This nickname is connected withe the mirror and the razor. Kinch can also be the onomatopoeia of “to cut”. Buck Mulligan calls Kinch fearful jesuit. Fearful means one thing and its opposite, in fact it means frightening and afraid. This is the essence of open text. We can decide which explanation is used by the author. Solemny has the same meaning of stately and Joyce uses this two words to describe both of the characters. But by reading we can Sundstrand that solemnly is not related to Kinch but only to Buck Mulligan. In fact “he” after the adjective solemnly is ambiguous and we cannot immediately Sundstrand if it’s related to Buck or to Kinch. We understand that it’s related to Buck because he “blessed thrice the tower”. Three time because of the father, the son and the holy spirit. He blessed the tower, the surrounding country and the mountains, and so he blessed three things. The mountains are the father, because they are older, then it’s the son, and so the country and finally the holy spirit, and so the tower, because it’s younger than mountains and countries. There is an invention because Joyce put as first the tower, holy spirit, then the country, son, and finally mountains, father. But there are some connection also with the three main characters of the book: Steven Daedalus have some problems with his father because they are not in good relationship; Leopold Bloom has lost a son; and Molly Bloom never appears in the book but we only know her voice and her thoughts. Joyce writes Ulysses as a comic book but it is hard understanding that it’s a comic book if we read only once. We have to read Ulysses at least thrice. The actor, Buck Mulligan, is a strange kind of Christ and instead of elevating the host, a symbol of christ, he elevates something that is the version of the female part of the christ. Christine is not the opposite of the christ but Joyce is playing with this idea. Blood and ouns means “sangue e piaghe” and it’s an old way to say by the blood and the wounds of Christ. White corpuscles means “globuli bianchi” and this expression is a parody of the transustation, the conversion of the body and the blood of christ to bread and wine during the eucharist. Muck is the nickname of Malachi and he says to Steven that he has a strange greek name but he is aware of the fact that even his name is absurd. He says that his name has two dactyls. A dactyl in verse means a foot whit three syllables of which the first is stressed. A foot is the minimal unit. Malachi is jewish means “messenger” but this name also alludes to the prophet Malachi. This book is based on a precise day: 16 of June 1904, the day Joyce meets sexually his future wife and this book is dedicated to his wife. But, why the beginning of the book is focused on a secondary fact and not on the protagonist Daedalus, who is related to the young Joyce? When Joyce lived in the tower he lived with a friend called Oliver St. John Gogarty. St is related to Steven. The reason why Joyce starts the book with another character is because he wants to be more realistic. The universe is infinite and every point is at the same time the centre of the universe. If we want to know ourselves we have to watch in the others. It is hard understanding this book without knowing Joyce’s life. In this book there are no answers but only questions. There are only the coincidences with a thing and its opposite at the same time. We can see this in the adjectives, in the letters, in the structure of the sentence. Joyce wants to teach that we are one thing and the opposite at the same time. A lot of problems are solved if people accept this. There is a third character that lives in the tower and his is an English man, named Haines. Thanks to the biography of Joyce we can know that in the tower there are he, Gogarty and another man called Tranch. Haines is an English man interested in Irish culture and he goes to Ireland to learn Irish culture and Irish language. At the end of the first episode Mulligan says to him that he has to wait until Daedalus talks about Hamlet. The story of Hamlet is reflected in Ulysses in many different ways. A few pages after Haines asks what is his theory about Hamlet and Mulligan says that is theory is that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. This could be totally crazy but there is an explanation: in Hamlet there are two Hamlets, one is called king hamlet, one is called prince hamlet. King hamlet is a ghost and we cannot see him. In the first production of hamlet Shakespeare played the part of the ghost Hamlet. Maybe he wants to recreate the trinity because he is the spirit of his father, and himself, the son. Shakespeare himself is the ghost of his own father. 21-03 Calypso is not just a woman but she is a nymph, a mix of an immortal creature and a mortal woman. Ulysses is divided into three parts, like the divine comedy by Dante. Number three in Joyce is very important. The first part of Ulysses is named Thelemachy which is based around Thelemacus (the first three episode). The last part is called the Nostos which means return (the last three episodes). The episodes from 4 to 15 are in the middle and they creates the bigger part of the book. This part in the middle is called Ulysses. The cat is the reflection of woman and Leopold Bloom is thinking about the cruelty of someone using the pronoun “she”. There is ambiguity because we cannot understand if his though is related to cat or to women, or just a woman and so Molly. The first word of Molly Bloom is “mn”. We can’t understand if she answers yes or no, but after this mn there is the word no. But we have to remember that the last word of the book, and so the last word of Molly Bloom is “yes”. There is de development in Molly from mn to yes. But we can also say that is could be a form of pleasure, “mn yes”, or the beginning of a pleasure or the end of a pleasure. Joyce wrote this book in 7 years, from 1914, to 1921 between Trieste, Zurich and Paris. These years are the years of the first world war. After the world finishing, from 1919 to 1921 there was the independent war in Ireland. This book is all written in time of war and so the war context explains a lot in this book. The war of Troy was caused by Ellen, a woman. Joyce writes that Molly has forgotten any little Spanish she knew and so now we know that she is from Spain. Molly was the daughter of British soldier and her mother is from Spain; her name is Lunita, the little moon. The moon becomes the symbol of woman and of the impossibility to be the same thing. At same stage, after Bloom sees the cloud, his mind stars thinking about the orient and this fact disorients him. Why are you thinking about the orient after the seen of a cloud? He starts thinking of the orient and of the dead see. The mythology about the dead sea is that the oldest man lived there. And he starts thinking of this and to the oldest population that populate the world. (page 54) His mind starts from dead see, a lake, the people that were there, children and he is too old to have child. Then he says “the grey sunken cunt of the world” and finally “desolation”. Leopold Bloom sees two letters in which there is written Mrs Marion Bloom and his heart becomes very slowly because he understands that these letters are from her lover. He understands this because of the name “Mrs Marion Bloom”. In the past, it used to refer to someone's wife with Mrs. Followed by the name of her husband but here, the lover of Mary Bloom calls her by name. This fact underlines the lack of respect for Leopold and the autonomy of his wife. Leopold Bloom let be treated by his wife, he knows everything and he thinks only to himself. He thinks the error comes from himself and he thinks it’s his fault. In episode 17 somebody asks questions to Bloom and he thinks about what it happened in his bed between his wife and his lover. Bloom smiles after being treated because each one that enters in Molly Bloom imagines himself to be the first, the last and the alone to enter. But it’s not truth because he is only a series of man that enters in her. This is the consolation of Bloom. Episode number 4 ends with a parody of literature. Joyce is not interested in literature but only in the possibility to create something new. This episode ends with Bloom that goes to the toilet and while he is defecating he’s reading a short story in the newspaper. After he will use the newspaper to clean himself. (page 60) This episode begins with the voice of the cat and ends with a strange sound of the belt. 28-03 Chaos and cosmos (in greek means order) in Joyce’s mind become the word caosmus, chaos that can be ordered and order that can be disordered. Two things can live, and can coincide in only one thing. Living is the opposite of the dead apparently but in Joyce’s poetry we can see that life and dead coincide. Dead and life can exist at the same time; life can be the dead and the dead can be life. Charles Robert Maturin is the author of “Melmoth the wanderer”, a gothic novel. He is the grand uncle of Oscar Wilde and he is a reverent in the san Patrick’s church in Dublin. After the dead of the princess Charlotte he had to write a sermon and he said: “Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.” In this sentence we have the presence of the opposite: life and dead. Leopold Bloom thinks in this way because Ireland is always described like a mortuary culture, and so a culture where life and dead coincide. In the Irish mixology there was the idea of the after world or of the land of the eternal youth. There is not a clear distinction between the space of the life and the space of the dead. Episode 6: (page 102) the thought of Leopold Bloom is: “How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.” Leopold Bloom lost his father after a suicide, and lost his son after 11 days after birth. He is the son of a death father and the father of a dead son. He’s walking in the cemetery and he’s thinking how many people are there. When people in literature meet dead people they don’t see the real people but only the soul, a shadow, like in Dante, in Odysseus, in Aeneid. But the shadow is connected to the body because it’s impossible thinking the shadow without thinking the body. The Harrowing of Hell is the triumphant descent of Christ into Hell between the time of his Crucifixion and his Resurrection when he brought salvation to all of the righteous who had died since the beginning of the world. After his death, the soul of Jesus descended into the realm of the dead. Someone thinks that Christ is descended in the hell to save the souls. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, there is the coexistence of life and death. It talks about the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on his way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The wedding-guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style. In this poem we have a character calls life in death: “Alas! (thought I, and mi heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears!
 Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres? 
 Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? 
 And is that Woman all her crew? 
 Is that a DEATH? and are there two? 
 Is DEATH that Woman’s mate? 
 Her lips were red, her looks were free. Her locks were yellow as gold:
 Her skin was as white as leprosy,
 The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” Even if in Hamlet we have the soliloquy: “To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.” When you die hopefully you don’t dream. Dream is like sleeping and like dying.The sleep of the dead and the sleep of the living are very similar. 
 We buried the death people to remember. The opposite of remember is forget, but why it’s not dismember? Dismembering is an act of forgetting? When we forger we dismember the member? The dead live in us, in our members. 
 In episode 5 Bloom goes to the church and he sees women with the priest that are doing the communion. But in his mind something going on and he imagines the communion like a sexual act. 
 Episode 6 is called the cemetery episode, in fact Bloom is at the funeral of his friend. In the last part of the episode 5 Bloom is taking a bath. He’s watching his body, pale and old and he describes his member. He uses the words: "father of thousands”. When a man have sex there are a thousands and thousand of sperm and only one become a person. But in theory a man is a father of thousands. This is a reference to Schopenhauer because he said that a woman can have only one child, while a man can have thousands. Soon after this scene we have the cemetery scene. For the first time Leopold Bloom is with other people who supposed to be friends of him. But we understand that Bloom is an outsider because his friends call him by surname and not by his name. 
 Mr. Daedalus, Simon, is the father of Steven Daedalus and he is at the funeral too. 
 During the journey in the cemetery Mr. Bloom starts thinking about his life, and about his dead son, Rudy, death after 11 days. He sees the other guys to be proud of their sons and he thinks that it’s a beautiful think, but only if his son was alive. In the little paragraph in page 79 we have life and dead at the same time. He starts thinking about the alive sons of his friends, then about his death son, and finally about two dogs that having sex. This part show the fractalic structure of the Ulysses: in every little part of this book we have all the rest. There is a concentration of information in a very short part of the text. Joyce doesn’t want to waist time and space and he gives us scene of sex and soon after scene of death. Leopold Bloom thinks about his wife, Molly, and his daughter, Milly.
 In this episode there is the alternation of dialogue and thoughts. Joyce wants to describe how men talk and how men think. He talks about the gran canal, which in the Dublin scene was the place where the prostitute used to work. Dublin is divided in two parts by the river Anna Liffey, the north side where the working class lives, and the north side, where middle class lives. In the North there is the royal canal, and in the south there is the gran canal, the place of the prostitute. But they aren’t prostitute for poor people, in fact they are for rich people. Bloom starts thinking about the grand canal and he remembers the dog of his father, Athos. His father commits a suicide and he leaves his dog to Leopold saying him: “please be god with poor old Athos.” He also says: “thy will be done” from the gospels. 
 At same stage the lover of Molly appears. His name is Blazes Boylan. They all know the story of Molly, Leopold too. Joyce describes Blazes who is wearing a straw hat and in fiction because life is not simple. A novel has a sense, life no. And so we have to separate life and novel. It’s impossible understand what a person has in mind, but we can know what he writes. We read a text not mind. Some novel can tell us the truth: this is the idea of Stephen Daedalus and so according to him we can read life in literature. When we read real name in Joyce’s works we are naturally inclined to think that it’s a kind of biographical prove, but it’s not always true. In fact a text is a text, is always a shadow of the mind. The technique of this chapter is “gorghi”, whirlpool. But what does it mean? The science of this episode is literature, art. Science explains something but we can explains something with literature? Science means wisdom and knowledge. Is literature teaching something? This is a great question. The meaning of this episode according to Linati Schema is “dilemma bitagilente". What’s this? Dilemma means a very complex sort of question and bitagliente is that there aren’t answer in the two part of the question. Something that we can’t really explain from different point of view. Can we really explain and understand things? This a big question. The organ of the body in this episode is brain but what’s the brain symbol of? It’s symbol of knowledge, intelligence, rationality. The brain is just a piece of meat in reality and its function is only to work. In this episode symbols are very important in fact in Linati Schema we have some opposite symbols that create a contrast: London and Stratford (city and countryside), Christ and Socrates, scholasticism and mysticism, Plato and Aristotle (Plato was the master of Aristotle), youth and old age. This episode wants to give an answer about the opposite. Is it possible to think in reality in terms of opposite? Joyce writes to open our eyes but sometimes when we open our eyes we see bad things and so it’s better not to open our eyes. The intent of Joyce is: are you ready to open you eyes? Or do you prefer your life to be simple as possible? In another schema (Gorman) he gives, the technique is no more “gorghi”, but dialettic: dialog between opposite ideas. Two people start from a different idea and start talking to reach a common idea. We’re going to see the first opposite in the Linati Schema: the opposite between countryside and city. City is the idea of possibility, but also chaos. Countryside is the idea of static condition where never changes. ODYSSEY XII BOOK: Cariddi is a whirlpool and Scylla was a monster. Odysseus has to go home and he meets Circe and feels in love with her. Circe says him that he has to go because the gods wants. He has two possibilities: he can cross the wanderings rocks, and it’s very dangerous, or cross the place in where there are Scilla and Cariddi (stretto di Messina). It’s dangerous in both ways but he decides to go through Scilla and Cariddi even if Circe tells him to take the first option. In Ulysses by Joyce we are in the national library of Ireland and the central character is Daedalus. He is a young guy who wish to leave Ireland because of the stagnation. He is confronting his virtual animus and he want to prove that we can read Shakespeare in a biographical way. People in the library are not convinced about this because literature is just literature. There is this centre question and it comes from Shakespeare: what’s in a name? (Romeo and Juliet). The problem between Romeo and Juliet is the name of the family but why it’s a name so important? This question in Shakespeare can be translated “che c’è in un nome?” But what’s the importance of a name if your name is James and you write about James, if your main character is Steven and your nickname is Steven? Entelechy comes from Aristotle, and it’s the complete realisation of final form. The entelechy is the final stage of something. Is the son or the daughter the complete realisation of the parents? Are we the entelechy of our parents? Somebody is the realisations of some potential. We are here because we are the realisation of an idea, of an instinct. We are here because we are the end of something. But the end can be translated with “fine”, “la fine”, o “il fine”. The big dichotomy is: “Am I the centre of my universe or the periphery?” When we read the first chapter we find a lot of difficult answer that are not explained, but we can find later on. We can find a lot of answer like in the episode 1 and 9: what’s the relationship between father and son? How it’s possible to have a father and a son in the trinity? In the trinity we have the same substance (father and son). Much before the dogma of the trinity was accepted, people were against this idea. Arius and Sabellius are two character in chapter 1 that discuss about trinity. According to the first one, father and son cannot have the same substance. Jesus is not god but he is a messenger sent by god. This becomes a heresy. The church not recognised this theory. Sabellius, from Africa, said that the three persons are manifestation of god and it’s a heresy too. This two thoughts are at the base of Steven’s mind: he is against the idea that you can be the father of your self but at the same time and he said that we can see ourselves being the father of ourselves. In literature and in art we realise something that is not real in real life. In literature we can do something that is impossible in life. In theology we can too and so theology is a literature, and so an invention. Between Daedalus and Bloom there is any kind of relationship, but there is the possibility that a son with no a father and a father with no a son can be connected. William Blake said that there is nothing real that is not dreamed before. There is nothing in reality that hasn’t been dreamed before. Dream can be actualised or not. What we do has been taught. In the modern philosophy brain and body are two different thing but Joyce said that brain is only a piece of meat and even the soul is the body. Without the body soul cannot exist. You can be at the same time dream and reality and so there is no difference between opposite. Christ has a father, Joseph, but he’s real father? Yes, and no at the same time. There is no right and wrong. We are not a person, we are this person and the opposite. Whatever we dream at night it something that we haven’t done in the day: in the day we are a thing and in the night we are something else. Ulysses is not telling a story but it’s telling how to be better people. We know that Joyce thought that his father killed his mother: he drunk every day, he had a lot of lovers, a lot of children and he didn’t take care oh his family. He had 10 children and 7 that died, and so he had 17 children in total with some different women. He hated his father but he also said that his father is like him because Ulysses is the portrait of his father. We can say that Ulysses is the opposite of his own father too because Joyce’s father didn’t take care of his wife while in Ulysses we have Bloom who takes care of his wife, an unfaithful wife. Joyce wrote Ulysses in 7 years and Finnegans in 17 years. He wants to tell the story of civilisation. He didn’t live in the circle of commercial and he didn’t care about the marketing. ———————————————————————————————————————— “Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam” (it. tu sei Pietro, e sopra questa pietra edificherò la mia chiesa). Christ said to st. Peter this sentence. We have “Petrus” and “petram” that is a game of words. In Ireland the guy who found catholicism is called Patrick. Peter is the father of the church, Patrick is the father of Ireland church. He pick up a shamrock and he said that it’s the trinity. At the very beginning of Finnegans we have a word: “thuartpeatrick” and the meaning could be “you are Peter and Patrick”. We can also see the words: “art”, “trick”, “peat" (torba, studio prima del carbone, the symbol of Ireland), “rick” (cumulo). Also pat-trick, the trick of the father. In Finnegans we have the explanation of what he wrote in Ulysses: “I am simpliciter arduus" in English it’s: “I am simply difficult”. Joyce wants to say that he’s difficult but in a simple way. In this sentence, written in English and in latin, we can read the words: “licit”, “us”, “iter”, “implicit”, “duus”. But we can also see the trinity: I (1) duus (2) and ter (3). Joyce maybe wants to say: It is licit to imply this journey to understand the trinity?And we can also read like a dialog: - “Are thou duus?” (Are you two?) - I am sim ter! (I am simply three). And we can also find the definition of literature in general: “Iter arduus” (a difficult journey). In fact every text is a journey. ———————————————————————————————————————— 2-05 According to Schwarz the young man Stephen Daedalus is the young Joyce and he became mature only by meeting a woman and Ulysses is the development of a man only with a woman. The interpretation of Schwarz is just an interpretation and it means that there are a lot of interpretation of Ulysses but of books in general. There is no right or wrong in a book the good thing of a book is that every reader can have a different idea of a book. There are a different and coexisting kinds of explanations. When Joyce said that the future is a sister of the past what does it mean? Why sister and not brother? The past is a father Mather figure and the future is a son daughter figure. Brother and sister belong to the same generation and there is a kind of linearity in time between brother and sister. The relationship is that the future and the past are related because they live in the same space. The present is the space when the past is becoming future but not yet. The Biological answer is no, we don’t and in biological term of view we die when our brain is dead and it’s mean that people can’t dream if the brain doesn’t work. But how do we know this? If dead and sleep are so similar where is the confine? Is it possible to think of life as the opposite of dead? In terms of art can we really say that Joyce is dead? Not really because we are not interested in the men, but in the works and if the works reflect the life of the men the life is still there in the world. “-That model schoolboy […] as Plato’s”: he wouldn’t find interesting any speculation of dead like Hamlet done in his soliloquy because his mind is too scientific and he’s only interesting in the matter. In our body if we think that the part of our body that dreams is the brain, and so the matter, we’re talking about only to matter. What’s brain? Piece of meat that contains dreams, feelings and there is no possibility to detached matter from the invisibility because the invisible is part of the matter. There is also a big part of reality which is invisible and we can’t say that everything that is visible coincides to reality. This invisible part is more important than the visible. It’s more important to understand our dreams than our thoughts. In hamlet the ghost of the father appears to his son and in Ulysses the ghost of the mother appears to his son but it’s possible that in his dream Joyce sees the ghost of his mother, died on 31 of August 1903, one year before he starts publishing his works. In the first episode Buck Mulligan said that Stephen has a theory about the ghost of Hamlet: Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and he himself is the ghost of his own father (present, future, past). Stephen will demonstrate that Hamlet is a ghost story but what’s a ghost? According to Stephen a ghost is one who has faded into impalpability through dead, through absence, trough change of manners. The idea of ghost here is bigger than the dead spirit. A ghost can be a ghost by dead, and so you are a spirit, but if you are a ghost by absence you are an invisible presence but what about change of manners? We really never stay the same and we are at the same time past, present and future. It’s very impossible translating our soul in to ink: this is a change of manner. George Russell believed that ghosts exist in fact he had a private diary in which he described the ghosts. Ghosts exist in literature, in religion and in painting and so they exist even if they aren’t exist in life because someone talks about them. So they are real because they exist in the mind, like dreams too: are dreams real? Yes because they exist in the mind. Everything that we can think exist because it’s exist in the mind and it doesn’t matter if they exist in reality. At same stage we have Stephen who is having a monologue by speaking old English about debts (page 169). He trying to explain the theory about change of manners: “molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.” Our body changes so the person who got the pound is another person and so I haven’t to pay back. But it’s true? no, because we are at the same time the person who we are now and the person who were in the past. This is the link between past, present and future. The future is the sister of the past and in the present we have a symbiosis between sister and brother. A.E.I.O.U.: George Russell I own you a pound. This is a change of manners. George Russell becomes A.E. and A.E.I.O.U. are the vowels of the alphabet but are also a message to say I own you a pound. Something becomes something else. The forms of our past will become the forms of our future. The future does not replace the past but it was already alive in the past. The big question is: why Shakespeare when Hamlet is performed for the first time played the role of the ghost? Shakespeare played the role of Hamlet and his son, who is died at the age of 11, was named Hamnet. In Ulysses we have Bloom’s son who died at 11 days. In life Hamnet was baptised on the 2th of February, the birthday of James Joyce, and the born of Ulysses which is born 2 February 1922 (2-2-22) and Joyce was 40 years old. We have the description of Shakespeare: “he goes back […] old sore (page 176). Shakespeare creates this big creation only to hide himself from himself but his lost (Hamnet) is his gain (Hamlet). In the same episode we have a sentence: “The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious” (page 178) and the question is: is he joking? Yes but he’s doing a serious joke. How can a joke be serious? Is Joyce just a mocker? Yes because he’s telling something that is not real reality and not real joke. After the discussion a person asks: “do you believe in your theory? (192) and Stephen answers: no. After his intense and convinced explanation he answers that he doesn’t believe in his theory. People in this episode don’t considered Stephen seriously even if he is serious and so he’s a mocker. 9-05 Episode 13 Nausicaa Nausicaa is a girl, the daughter of a king. In the story of the Ulysses this chapter is crucial because it’s called the banned chapter. Before being published in 1922 this book was published in a journal in Europe and in America and when this chapter was published some people in America considered some scenes pornographic and obscene. The journal decided not to publish Ulysses anymore in America but in France it continues to be published. In America it starts to circulate again after 11 years. Paris was considered the free centre of the world. America was a very puritan place because in those years there were the return of the puritans. There was an economic crises and when there was a crisis the reaction brings problems. Before the crisis Ulysses was ridden by people. In 1933 John M. Woolsey declared that Ulysses is not obscene and he defended James Joyce. This episode contains a masturbation scene but it’s not too clear. According to Linati Schema the organ of this chapter is a double organ: eye and nose. What’s the relationship between eye and nose? Th function is the eye is to see and the function of nose is to smell. We have five senses but we can see that we have a sixth sense: perception. George Barkley is at the very beginning of episode 3 of Ulysses. He was an Irish bishop who said that whatever I perceive is real because I perceive it in the mind. Perception is a material thing that became abstract when I translate it in the mind. And so everything that exists exist in the mind first. Berkley was a christian and according to him if something doesn’t exist in my mind it exists at the same because there is a bigger mind called God, a big mind in with everything exists. The sense according to Linate is the projected mirage (miraggio proiettato) and so something that you see but it’s not there. A mirage is something that doesn’t exist but I can imagine it. We know that the science in the schema is painting but what’s the connection between a projected mirage and painting as a science? Painting is a projection of something in my mind that then becomes real. Projected mirage and art is the same thing because everything are something that before it doesn’t exist and then it starts existing. It’s one thing and its opposite ad the same time, and it’s like something that has no confine, like black and white: grey is the result of black and white, something not clear. We’re talking about a man who has a lot of problems of seen and his view was grey. He couldn’t really distingue things and he cannot see borders. This chapter is divided into two parts: I. Narration in 3th person done by a female (Gerty): a very sentimental narration; II. Narration in the 1st person done by a man (Bloom): a very cynical narration; Two points of view coexisting at the same time but they are opposite. We are in the beach, the Sandymount beach, the same beach in which Stephen Daedalus (chapter 3) has his monologue. Stephen experimented his perception, he closed his eyes and he started walking trying to perceive without seeing. Berkley was a ghost in episode 3 and he said “esse est percepi” (to be is to be perceived). He is the founder of English idealism and he said that if something is not perceived it doesn’t exist. There is nothing outside perception but everything is existing because I’ve perceived it and even if I don’t perceived it exists at the same because there is somebody else that perceive this, and the answer is god. The episode 3 begins with the sentence: “ineluctable modality of the visible” that means it’s impossible to avoid scene. Blind people don’t see but are we sure of it? Blind people see and we cal also see something without using our eyes, like in a dream for example. We can see thing with our eyes shut, in fact Stephen says: “shut your eyes and see”. He closes his eyes and he starts walking. Bloom and Stephen are very similar: Bloom dressing in grey and Stephen dressing in black. They both lost someone: Stephen is lost his mother, Bloom is lost his father, and his son. In this episode Stephen urinates in the sea and we can find the words: "seeso, hrss”. It contains the words “see”, “sound of water”, “ss” (the sound of the snake), “Jesus”. Stephen and Bloom are Hamlet figure. Hamlet has a mother, and the mother of hamlet is getting married with Claudius, the uncle. The name of Hamlet’s mom is Gertrude and the woman in this episode is called Gerty. From this name we can understand that we’re playing again with Hamlet’s story. Gerty will reappears in episode 15, when Stephen and Bloom will meet together. They are in red district in Dublin and there will be Gerty too. We are in the night town, the red light district. The main street of the red light district is Montgomery Street, called Monto. Stephen is drunk and he is with some friend that try to steal his money. Leopold knows that Stephen is drunk and he tries to protect him. We know in the biography of Joyce that he was in a pub and he was hit by a soldier and was rescued by a man called Alfred Hunter. When Joyce moved from Ireland to Rome he decides that he has to write a story about this episode that happens to him. In this episode Bloom realises that Stephen is in risk and Bloom starts following Stephen. Bloom is not drunk but he’s older and he is slower. Stephen is going to spend his money with prostitute. There aren’t real prostitutes but we have voices of prostitutes. We don’t see clearly what it’s happening. We are in the middle of something very strange and a lot of things happen. This poet is too real and detailed and it’s too realistic to be believed. If you see something through a micro-scope you see too many details and the vision is obfuscated. Page 563: Cissy, a friend of Gerty, is in the red light district and maybe she is a prostitute. In this chapter she speaks about Molly, which is Molly Bloom but also Moly, the potion Hermes gives Odysseus. At the end of the episode two soldiers hit Stephen and Bloom rescues him, like in Joyce’s life. They are British soldiers and they are in the red district to enjoy themselves with Irish girls. There is a colonial sub narration. During the day the soldiers play the soldiers and at night they explode. Everything is possible in the mind, everything you can think it is true. Stephen is drunk and he’s talking about his theory about Shakespeare: can we read the life of Shakespeare through the plays of Shakespeare? Lynch is a friend of Stephen and he says “ba” which means bat, simply bah, or it could be related to the Egyptian soul that survive after the dead. Page 568: Tommy and Jacky are the kids in the episode of masturbation and now they are in the prostitute area. There is a form near Bloom and he’s Rudolph, his father who died suicide. He took poison, one of the symbol of the episode. Rudolph is from Hungary and he’s real name is not Bloom but a Hungarian name. He doesn’t speak very well because is not english. Bloom’s father is reproaching him. Page 569: Bloom meets his mother and she treats him like a child. He meets Molly too and she starts speaking in a very strange way. Molly is from Spain and she seems to use magical formulas. There is the strange word “Manager” which means manager but also menage. Bloom is dreaming his wife is a prostitute and that he is his manager. But in real life Molly is a singer and she has a manager who is her lover. It could mean “Manage a trois” (Molly, Bloom and the manager). In dreams we don’t speak our real language but an invented language. We have also a political manifesto (new words for all, new words for old). Words create words. (page 610) Page 614: Bloom becomes a mother with eight children and at same stage he becomes Jesus and performs the miracle. Rip van Winkle is a character of a story: he was drunk and he felt sleep before american revolution and when he woke up the war was finished. At the end of Circe Stephen Daedalus is totally drunk and he is hit by the British soldiers. At the beginning there was the soldiers and also in the end. Stephen says: why are you here? You are British soldiers. And they start hitting him. Bloom saves him and he attacks verbally the soldiers. He defends Stephen like a father even if they don’t know each other. Bloom knows Stephen’s father but not the son. The first thing Stephen says when he sees Bloom wears in black is: Black panther vampire. Stephen had a nightmare in episode 1 and he dreamed a panther. Panther (Panterus) is the name of a roman soldier who has sex with the virgin girls. Stephen starts remembering a poem by W.B. Yeats, a great Irish poet, a friend of Joyce. He belonged to the hermetic order The golden dawn and he was called DEDI. He wrote a poem in which he used words referred to vampires. In episode 3 Stephen draws a vampire in a paper. There is a rumour in the Ulysses that says Bloom is a freemason but it’s not true because freemasons are never jewish. There is a ghost figure called arranger and it means something that stay outside. Rudy appears again in the final of the chapter. There is a theory of name: Rudolph is the father and Rudy is the son. What’s in a name? Why a name is so important? Molly Bloom 16 giugno: Nora ha reso Joyce uomo. Molly è quasi invisibile ma è importante perché è la sua mano che muove il mondo dell’Ulisse. Secondo una teoria l’Ulisse è tutto un sogno di Molly. L’ultimo capitolo inizia con lei sdraiata nel letto e finisce allo stesso modo. Anche se lei non è presente in certi momenti nel monologo parla come se avesse vissuto tutta la giornata. L’ultimo episodio si chiama Penelope. Penelope è l’antagonista di Molly perché è la donna fedele per antonomasia mentre Molly non lo è. Joyce non ha scelto il nome Molly a caso: Molly Malone è il simbolo dell’Irlanda, Molly Bloom non c’entra niente con l’Irlanda perché è di origini spagnole. Molly Malone era una prostituta che urlava “cozze e vongole”, mentre Molly Bloom faceva la cantante e urlava e andava con gli uomini non come prostituta ma gratis. C’è anche il riferimento a Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Nel 1904 Pascoli compone un poema che ci fa pensare all’Ulisse: il nome della ragazza protagonista è Molly. Parla di una famiglia di Caprona, Toscana che era andata a trovare fortuna in America ma la figlia si ammala e tornano in Italia per farla stare meglio. La figlia non sapeva parlare italiano. Pascoli inventa il linguaggio e lo rivoluziona e in questo poema gioca con l’inglese (sweetsweet). La poesia Italy finisce con si, come l’Ulisse di Joyce. Joyce definisce Pascoli come mercante di parole e Stanislaus aveva tradotto la poesia la tovaglia di Pascoli pubblicandola nella rivista irlandese. Petrarca ha avuto un grande influsso in Joyce e infatti Joyce trasporta il canzoniere nel Finnegans. L’assenza di Molly non è un’ assenza, la sua anima c’è come se il libro fosse proprio un viaggio della sua anima con la metempsicosi. Alla fine c’è l’epifania. Durante tutto il libro parla dei tutti i suoi amanti, del marito che non sa se ama, ma alla fine lei dice yes, ricorda quando il marito gli ha fatto la proposta e dice si lo voglio. L’ultimo episodio è organizzato in 8 parti anche se non c’è la punteggiatura si capisce. Sono separati da cambiamenti di pensiero: lei sente un fischio di un treno si distrae e pensa ad altro. Comincia a pensare a tutti i traslochi che ha dovuto fare con suo marito e questo la porta anche a pensare ad altre persone, come Daedalus che non aveva mai incontrato ma fantastica su di lui e su un ipotetico rapporto sessuale. Sa che la mamma di Daedalus è morta e le viene in mente suo figlio, morto a 11 giorni. Ha la sensazione fisica del ciclo e cambia discorso e anche quando si alza dal letto il pensiero di sposta ma continua a pensare. L’unico punto è il punto finale del libro (yes.) che non è un punto del monologo ma il punto di tutto il libro. Joyce non ci vedeva più e c’era uno che scriveva per lui, ad un certo punto entra uno e lui dice avanti e trascrive avanti lasciandolo. Lui lo sa il significato di quell’avanti noi no. Quando Bloom torna a casa ha fame e la moglie pensa che ha avuto un rapporto con qualcuno e inizia a pensare. Lei fa anche paragoni tra Bloom e Boyland, tra i seni femminili belli e i genitali maschili brutti. Torna con la mente nel suo passato, pensa a tutte le persone con la quale è stata e quelle con le quali avrebbe voluto stare. Il pensiero riassuntivo è se deve stare o no con il marito. Le piacerebbe avere dei vestiti costosi ma il marito fa un lavoro umile e quindi o il marito cambia lavoro o lei cambia marito. Pensa ai fiori che Daedalus gli deve portare e dai fiori pensa ai fiori che Bloom le ha portato quando si sono sposati e dice yes. Questo yes va letto come un riconferma di quello yes del matrimonio. C’è una epifania finale che si sviluppa piano piano fino a che lei non arriva alla realizzazione dell’epifania. Molly nella poesia di Pascoli non muore e dice si, come la Molly di Bloom.