This post considers Stephen Dedalus’s notion of “esthetic arrest” from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joseph Campbell’s connection of this idea to the Hindu concept of “maya,” and the development of Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingI’ve recently returned to my re-reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I’m finding the final chapter more interesting than ever before — and funnier! I’ve laughed out loud several times reading it, including one scene that I’ll discuss here in this post, a scene in which a strange character repeats himself. I compare it below to a recurring gag on my favorite television show, The Sopranos, and I reflect on the significance of Joyce repeating a moment from his own life, enshrining it in art in a way reminiscent of what William Wordsworth called a “Spot of Time.”
Close readings of Joyce, reflections on life, and fragments of pop culture — all this and more on today’s post!
Continue readingIn Chapter V of Portrait, Stephen converses with the dean of University College Dublin, who is English, and reflects on their different relationship to the language they speak:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
The passage speaks to Joyce’s relationship with English and with language in general (important for Finnegans Wake, of course), as well as the Celtic Revival movement that, in Joyce’s day, sought to restore the Irish language (a movement with which Joyce largely disagreed).
This post considers the idea that a language can “belong” to a person in this sense, and it tries to grapple with what Joyce is doing to this idea by writing Finnegans Wake. I even discuss the Bad Bunny Superbowl halftime show controversy — which makes this my most topical post yet!
Continue readingI went on a ride on a speedboat over the holiday weekend, and I chose to remove my glasses, lest they fly off my face and into the water (I have lost more than one hat in such a way over the course of my life). As severely nearsighted as I am, I find that removing my glasses and going off somewhere without them makes me feel keenly vulnerable.
I reflected, of course, on James Joyce’s terrible eyesight, and this post will look at Joyce’s speculation in Portrait that his weak eyes gave him more pleasure at prose that reflects the “inner world” than prose that describes the external world. I will consider how Joyce uses that idea in Finnegans Wake.
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The Suspended Sentence 