tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/james-joyce-15309/articlesJames Joyce – The Conversation2023-12-07T19:19:00Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2123432023-12-07T19:19:00Z2023-12-07T19:19:00ZFriday essay: blind people are often exhausted by daily prejudice – but being blind is ‘inherently creative’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562623/original/file-20231130-19-3d37qb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C40%2C6699%2C4396&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Thirdman/Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Andrew Leland was in his thirties when he had to stop driving at night – and then stop driving at all. Next, he had to start using a cane in public. As the cycle of decreasing vision became familiar, each absent sliver of vision required more adjustment to how he navigated the world. </p>
<p>He moves through the same steps in the same sequence each time, but each loss is unique, and uniquely stressful. And he can still see the disdain of sighted people, which makes him long to lose all his vision at once:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I thought about my periodic desire for the eye disease to just get it over with, and take the rest of my sight. I wanted to be relieved of seeing the way people look at blindness: the scorn, the condescension, the entitled, almost sexual leer. Skepticism, pity, revulsion, curiosity. I know I’ve looked at blind people this way too […] But I was a different person then: I didn’t really think of myself as blind.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man with glasses and dark hair, smiling, wearing a polo shirt over a black t-shirt. Leafy branches in background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559008/original/file-20231113-15-y77vl9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Andrew Leland was in his thirties when he started to lose his vision.</span>
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<h2>Blindness, creativity and memoir</h2>
<p>Responding to the idea that James Joyce’s blindness influenced his writing of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-amateurs-age-of-unriddling-finnegans-wake-on-stage-38498">Finnegans Wake</a>, his biographer Richard Ellmann asserted: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The theory that Joyce wrote his book for the ear because he could not see is not only an insult to the creative imagination, but an error of fact. Joyce could see; to be for periods half-blind is not at all the same thing as to be permanently blind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What Ellmann presents as a fact is actually a common myth. 85% of permanently blind people <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health/eye-health/why-do-blind-people-wear-sunglasses">have sight</a>. (I am one of the 15% of blind people who is totally blind, and the even smaller minority born this way.) And the line between blind and sighted is not straightforward. The results of a number of tests, and other factors, are taken into account.</p>
<p>Ellmann sounds like he is uncomfortable with thinking of Joyce as blind, and thinking of blind people as creative.</p>
<p>By contrast, during the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce himself was relaxed about the losses and gains of his situation. Responding to a letter from a friend on this topic, he wrote: “What the eyes bring is nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create, I am losing only one of them.”</p>
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<p><em>Review: The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight – Andrew Leland (Penguin Press), Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness – Selina Mills (Bloomsbury Academic)</em></p>
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<p>These tensions of identity and creativity between those who are sighted and those who are blind existed long before Joyce, and are still prevalent a century later. They are explored with candour and thoughtfulness in two recent memoirs, by <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/life-unseen-9781848856905/">Selina Mills</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-country-of-the-blind-9781984881427">Leland</a>. </p>
<p>Like Joyce, their versions of blindness mean they have sight that gradually decreases over decades. And they are writers – both are journalists. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558971/original/file-20231112-25-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Blind writer Selina Mills explores the tensions of identity and creativity in her memoir.</span>
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<p>While their memoirs are obviously written from personal vantage points, Mills and Leland detail much more than their own stories. Interwoven with their experiences of becoming blind are the experiences of blind writers, performers, teachers, activists, inventors and so on. </p>
<p>Mills, who is from the UK, researched blind women throughout European history. The few famous blind women she mentions are from outside Europe (which demonstrates the need for her research). One of them is American activist and author <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Helen-Keller">Helen Keller</a> (1880-1968). Another is <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/aston-matilda-ann-tilly-5078">Tilly Aston</a> (1873-1947), also known as “Australia’s blind poet.”</p>
<p>As Mills’ own sight decreased, she felt surrounded by sighted people’s stereotypes of blindness. She was compelled to research the real members of her community, for herself and her readers. As she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>so much of our knowledge of blind people has relied on how sighted people have interpreted blindness. […] We fear it, we punish with it, we find it powerful and alluring all at the same moment and have done so for centuries. Principally, we rarely hear the voices of blind people themselves. Why not? Who were these blind people who lived and died, who were not just heroes or burdens of the sighted world?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similarly Leland, who lives in the US, concentrates on the recent and present US blind community in order to encourage both himself and his audience to develop a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be blind:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I met people who said that their blindness meant nothing to them – that it was a mere attribute, like hair color – and others whose blindness utterly defined and upended their lives. […] I sympathized with all of these positions, even as I wondered which attitudes I would adopt for my own life. I tried to understand how blindness was changing my identity as a reader and a writer, as a husband and a father, as a citizen and an otherwise privileged white guy.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-amateurs-age-of-unriddling-finnegans-wake-on-stage-38498">The amateur’s age of unriddling: Finnegans Wake on stage</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What blind people have in common</h2>
<p>I was drawn to both books by their exploration of historical and philosophical questions. But as I read, Leland and Mills’ experiences of being blind with some sight also became compelling for how universal they are. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558981/original/file-20231112-25-gkxftm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>I have talked with many people losing sight as they transition to blindness, and am well aware of the shape of the sight-loss journey. Yet these books emphasised to me the significant number of experiences blind people have in common, regardless of how much sight we have, or where we live, or when we were born.</p>
<p>Mills and Leland have both been losing sight for two decades now. But they began at different levels of sight and the cause was different for each of them. </p>
<p>Leland’s sight loss began as night blindness when he was a teenager. His research on the early internet suggested the cause was <a href="https://www.nei.nih.gov/learn-about-eye-health/eye-conditions-and-diseases/retinitis-pigmentosa#:%7E:text=Retinitis%20pigmentosa%20(RP)%20is%20a,that%20people%20are%20born%20with.">retinitis pigmentosa</a> (RP), a degenerative condition where night blindness is followed by peripheral vision loss, then central vision loss, sometimes ending in total blindness. After his first year of college, he went to an eye clinic where his self-diagnosis was confirmed. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/happy-birthday-braille-how-writing-you-can-touch-is-still-helping-blind-people-to-read-and-learn-89550">Happy birthday, Braille: how writing you can touch is still helping blind people to read and learn</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Leland’s interest in understanding blindness as an identity develops another dimension when he learns his retinitis pigmentosa is part of his Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. He discovers that throughout history, blind people and Jewish people were often denigrated in similar ways. </p>
<p>Medieval literature and disability studies researcher Edward Wheatley points out, for example, that both groups were branded as greedy, lazy, and dishonest. And both groups were said to be responsible for their marginalisation by Christian society – Jewish people for refusing to convert, and blind people for sinfulness.</p>
<p>Significantly, both blind people and Jewish people were early and constant victims of the Nazis. And the threat multiplied if you belonged to both groups. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/disabled-people-were-holocaust-victims-too-they-were-excluded-from-german-society-and-murdered-by-nazi-programs-198298">Disabled people were Holocaust victims, too: they were excluded from German society and murdered by Nazi programs</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The borderlands between blind and sighted</h2>
<p>Mills’ sight began to decrease in her early thirties. However, she was already accustomed to living in the borderlands between blind and sighted: she was born with no sight in one eye. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558980/original/file-20231112-21-psr9xn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Growing up, she attended mainstream schools. Her childhood, though, had many experiences in common with other blind children. Teachers incorrectly assumed that she had learning difficulties when she was six and she got a prosthetic eye when she was ten. She was left to drift rather than being supported throughout her schooling and she finished school without having been taught braille or how to use a cane.</p>
<p>Having only spent time with sighted people, she was used to thinking of herself as similar to them, even though she was often exhausted and they were not. </p>
<p>In her twenties, she became a journalist and travelled throughout Europe. She only sometimes carried a cane, just as a precaution. Mills was in her early thirties when bus numbers and step edges became difficult to see. This prompted her to go to an ophthalmologist, who discovered she had an inoperable cataract.</p>
<h2>Other people’s prejudice</h2>
<p>Mills and Leland have to manage a range of emotions that accompany losing sight, as well as the reactions of their families and friends. But the most difficult aspect of being blind, they discover, is other people’s prejudice. </p>
<p>Echoing the experiences of the blind people whose lives they explore, they are exhausted by the frequency and variety of prejudice they have to manage in their daily lives. </p>
<p>Sometimes it is overt: being denied education or work, being told to not have sex or have children, being refused entry to a venue if not accompanied by a sighted person. Sometimes it is questions disguised as concern – about whether you can cook, or how you are sure you have performed a work task properly, or whether you actually need to learn braille. </p>
<p>It always contains the message that being sighted is superior to being blind, and blind people should feel envious of sighted people and ashamed of who we are.</p>
<p>I suspect it was this prejudice Joyce was reacting to when he said, “What the eyes bring is nothing.” I don’t think he meant he had no use at all for the tiny amount of sight he had. I think he was exasperated by so many people continuing to insist it must be more difficult for him to write as a blind person. Certainly, he felt sight was not a prerequisite for creativity and that blindness had enhanced his writing.</p>
<p>This prejudice even extends to sighted people believing they have the knowledge to distinguish between blind and sighted strangers within seconds of seeing them. And they believe they are entitled to call out anyone they are convinced is faking it. </p>
<p>This happens to Mills at a train ticket barrier when the guard asks her for her ticket, then for her disabled person’s travel card. Like most blind people, she keeps the card in a specific place in her wallet, ready for these occasions. But the guard associates blindness with slowness and incompetence, so takes her organisation as evidence she is faking blindness:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“How did you get that then?” “Get what?” “Your disability travel card? – I mean, you can see all right, can’t you?” Having learnt to be patient with other non-believers, I was calm. “Oh, I know, but I have only got about 20 per cent vision on a good day. The doctors tested me.” Unconvinced, the guard continued: “You think you can get your card, and just get away with it. I saw you walking down the platform, bright and breezy. You are faking it!” He was quite proud of his little diatribe and seemed unkeen to let me through unless I confessed to my high crimes and misdemeanours.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fortunately she has an irrefutable piece of evidence – her prosthetic eye, which she removes and presents to the guard: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“ The queue gasped. I was shaking with fury. You really think I had my real eye plucked out and went through the pain of having a false eye made, just to get a discount on my f*king train ticket?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Blind people are harassed in this way regardless of our level of sight. As a totally blind person, I have many similar anecdotes. However, these experiences can have a particularly devastating effect on someone adjusting to blindness. </p>
<p>Both Mills and Leland discuss how incidents like this make them reluctant to use a cane. "Sometimes I left the cane behind, just to have a day off from the reactions, but the falling over and bashing into lampposts is not always worth it,” writes Mills. “The more I need to use my cane to find curbs and doorways, the more patronizing and intrusive (and sometimes hostile) strangers become,” echoes Leland.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-lawson-and-judith-wright-were-deaf-but-theyre-rarely-acknowledged-as-disabled-writers-why-does-that-matter-208365">Henry Lawson and Judith Wright were deaf – but they’re rarely acknowledged as disabled writers. Why does that matter?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Blind women from history</h2>
<p>Connecting with other blind people helps both Leland and Mills not just accept, but value their blindness. The blind people they encounter show them how to minimise the effect of sighted prejudice on their identity, and to understand that being blind is inherently creative.</p>
<p>Mills connects with blind women from history who deserve to be better known. And it is thrilling to learn about them with her, and to know that details of their lives are finally more publicly accessible. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of Saint Odile, bowing in a gold robe, among greenery" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558972/original/file-20231112-27-sorot6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Saint Odile of Alsace, a blind woman, founded two monasteries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odile_of_Alsace#/media/File:Alsace_Mont_Sainte-Odile_24.JPG">Wikipedia</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>They include <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odile_of_Alsace">Saint Odile of Alsace</a> (an area now occupied by France and Germany), born in 660 AD, who travelled throughout Europe and founded two monasteries. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-Ad%C3%A8le_Husson">Therese-Adele Husson</a>, born in 1803, was a French writer of children’s books and romantic fiction. And <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Theresia_von_Paradis">Maria Theresia von Paradis</a>, born in 1759 in Austria, was a talented pianist from a young age. </p>
<p>As an adult, Maria Theresia’s life was divided between being subjected to one horrific so-called cure after another and performing throughout Europe. She was friends with Haydn, as well as Mozart – who composed a piano concerto for her. She was a composer herself, of more than five operas and more than 30 sonatas, and in Vienna she established one of the first schools for blind musicians. </p>
<p>As Mills points out, “unlike Mozart and Haydn and a few other known women composers, who died penniless or unpublished, she had what few musicians had in the age – a successful profession and an income.”</p>
<h2>Developing a blind identity</h2>
<p>Leland feels connected to a number of 20th-century blind writers, such as James Joyce, and to many current blind writers, as well as advocates, engineers and artists.</p>
<p>Many blind people devoted years of their lives to argue for the rights of all disabled people to have equal access to public spaces, education, employment and more. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, so much technology in everyday use over the last century has been created or enhanced by blind people, from long-play records to internet chat forums. And every step of the way, many blind people generously shared their knowledge to help others who were still developing their skills. </p>
<p>One of the people who shared their knowledge with Leland was American activist and teacher Barbara Loos. Leland met Loos at a blindness convention. She encouraged him to attend the residential training course that later accelerates Leland’s cane skills and confidence. </p>
<p>She then pinpoints the problems with how he’d been taught to read braille. This sets him on the path to reestablishing and reinvigorating his identity as a reader by learning to read braille correctly and obtaining a braille display – a device that connects to a computer and displays the screen one line at a time.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>once I’d finished my last course, I brought it [the braille display] out again, and fell in love. Reading on the braille display was a palliative against my anxiety about going blind. The more facility I gained with it, the more I could imagine a rich life for myself as a blind reader.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reading these books, and the lives and work they explore, I feel extremely proud of my community.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212343/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Tink does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two new memoirs make blind writer Amanda Tink ‘very proud’ of her community – and share the stories of blind writers, performers, teachers, activists and inventors.Amanda Tink, Adjunct Research Fellow, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2180382023-12-01T01:42:43Z2023-12-01T01:42:43ZWith The Pogues, Shane MacGowan perhaps proved himself the most important Irish writer since James Joyce<p>Known for his music with The Pogues, and perhaps the most important Irish writer since James Joyce, the venerated and critically acclaimed Shane MacGowan has died in Dublin at the age of 65. </p>
<p>MacGowan was the primary songwriter and lead singer of the folk-punk band who formed in London in 1982 and became best known for their chart-topping single, Fairytale of New York.</p>
<p>A mordantly comedic ballad sung by MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, this unlikely Christmas favourite – which takes its title from a 1973 novel by the American-Irish writer J.P. Donleavy – is the fourth track on If I Should Fall from Grace with God.</p>
<p>Released to critical and commercial acclaim on January 18 1988, The Pogues’ third album provides us with a helpful means to better appreciate the rich musical and lyrical legacy the complex and notoriously unreliable MacGowan leaves behind. </p>
<p>This album, as with the four others MacGowan recorded with The Pogues, is an intoxicating admixture of the old and new, a heady concoction of the traditional and modern. </p>
<p>The opening song on the record – also called If I Should Fall from Grace with God
– is proof. The track, which rattles along at furious pace and features a typically raspy vocal delivery by MacGowan, takes the traditional Scottish song <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonnie_Banks_o%27_Loch_Lomond">The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond</a> as a primary point of musical reference. </p>
<p>The thematic preoccupations of the lyrics leave little doubt as to MacGowan’s political affinities: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This land was always ours <br>
Was the proud land of our fathers <br>
It belongs to us and them <br>
Not to any of the others. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Accordion player James Fearnley published an excellent <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/James-Fearnley-Here-Comes-Everybody-9780571253975">memoir</a> about his tenure as a member of The Pogues in 2012, and has this to say about the album’s opening number:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The song was as elemental as the best of all Shane’s songs. It had mud and land and rivers and oceans and corpses in it, in a landscape as expansive and ancient and threatening as the melody, bringing to mind the high road and low road, one of which – after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobite_rising_of_1745">Jacobite Rising of 1745</a> – led to death.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All this, it should be added, in under two and a half minutes. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shane-macgowan-a-timeless-voice-for-irelands-diaspora-in-england-197491">Shane MacGowan: a timeless voice for Ireland’s diaspora in England</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A lover of literature</h2>
<p>Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born in Kent, England, on Christmas Day in 1957. His parents were Irish immigrants who moved to England for work. As a child, MacGowan divided his time between the south-east of England and Tipperary, where he first learnt to play and sing Irish music.</p>
<p>A gifted writer, MacGowan won a scholarship to Westminster School in London in 1971, but was expelled for drug possession in his second year. </p>
<p>MacGowan’s passion for reading and writing was evident to his family and teachers. By the age of 12, he was reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean Paul Sartre and D. H. Lawrence.</p>
<p>MacGowan’s love of literature and prowess with language comes to the fore in the songs he wrote while in The Pogues. MacGowan took lyrical inspiration from transgressive and rebellious writers like Jean Genet and Federico García Lorca, both of whom are name-checked on The Pogues’ 1990 album, Hell’s Ditch.</p>
<p>The Irish republican writer and activist Brenden Behan was another enduring literary touchstone for MacGowan. His version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Auld_Triangle">The Auld Triangle</a>, popularised by Behan, can be found on The Pogues first album, Red Roses for Me, from 1984.</p>
<p><a href="https://omnibuspress.com/products/a-furious-devotion-the-life-of-shane-macgowan-published-on-7th-october-2021">With his father</a>, MacGowan read Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s influence on MacGowan and The Pogues was profound and lasting. (He quite literally <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Should_Fall_from_Grace_with_God#/media/File:The_Pogues-If_I_Should_Fall_From_Grace_With_God_(album_cover).jpg">appears</a> on the cover of If I Should Fall from Grace with God.) </p>
<p>The academic <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/761692/pdf">Kevin Farrell</a> reminds us, at the outset of their career, “the band called itself Pogue Mahone, a playful – and Joycean – attempt to slip Irish language vulgarity past the BBC censors”.</p>
<p>The Gaelic phrase <em>póg mo thóin</em> translates as “kiss my arse”, and a variation of the expression can be found in the Aeolus episode of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, Ulysses. While they couldn’t get the reference past the censors, it is a clear indicator of the band’s love of Joyce, who also struggled against the suppression of expression. </p>
<h2>The influence of Joyce</h2>
<p>Joyce’s influence on MacGowan can be felt in the lyrics of The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn. </p>
<p>This song, the first track of 1985’s Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, serves as a lyrical statement of artistic and political intent: it fuses Celtic mythology with anti-fascist action. Here is a representative slice of the lyrics, which MacGowan delivers at a suitably frenzied pace:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne <br>
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone <br>
Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid <br>
And you decked some fucking black shirt who was cursing all the Yids <br>
<br>
At the sick bed of Cúchulainn we’ll kneel and say a prayer <br>
But the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil’s in the chair.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cuchulainn is a central figure in The Ulster Cycle, a key work of Celtic mythology. A renowned fighter, the heroic Cuchulainn is often romanticised and deified. </p>
<p>MacGowan, who sees affinities between the mythological Cuchulainn and historical figures like the Irish republican Frank Ryan, takes a very different, and overtly Joycean tack. </p>
<p>Deftly toggling back and forth across temporalities, MacGowan foregrounds and celebrates the corporeal. And as with Joyce’s everyman hero, Leopold Bloom, MacGowan’s Cuchulainn is, as music critic <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/pogues-rum-sodomy-and-the-lash-9781441136435/">Jeffrey T. Roesgen</a> tells us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>made human, assuming the same misadventures, indulgences, and internal struggles between virtue and vice that consume us. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This also serves, I think, as a fitting description of MacGowan himself. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-why-it-was-banned-for-being-obscene-176086">Ulysses at 100: why it was banned for being obscene</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Correction: this article misstated the name of The Pogues’ third album, it was If I Should Fall from Grace with God.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218038/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The venerated and critically acclaimed Shane MacGowan has died in Dublin at the age of 65.Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2108922023-10-29T19:11:18Z2023-10-29T19:11:18ZGabrielle Carey’s affectionate life of James Joyce is a story of contingency, vulnerability and sadness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554471/original/file-20231018-27-9et1az.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C3964%2C2976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of James Joyce – Jacques-Émile Blanche (1934).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_James_Joyce_P529.jpg">National Gallery of Ireland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Gabrielle Carey cast a distinctive shadow within Australian writing, one you miss acutely only when it is no <a href="https://theconversation.com/gabrielle-carey-was-best-known-for-puberty-blues-but-i-knew-her-as-a-formidable-intellectual-who-mastered-the-art-of-living-well-205123">longer bodily present</a>, even as elements of her essence remain as words on the page. </p>
<p>She was a writer who brought her own life into writing in ways that challenged ordinary assumptions about the nature of autobiography, since she was not only interested in events or things, but also in ideas – ideas that exist as a state of longing or emotion, as much as they exist as intellectual givens or facts. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: James Joyce: A Life – Gabrielle Carey (Arden)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Gabrielle’s way is to cut holes in the fabric of standard forms of literary scholarship that allow her to tunnel through to some otherwise inaccessible idea. Because of this, when one reads her last book, <a href="https://scholarly.info/book/james-joyce-a-life/">James Joyce: A Life</a>, one is conscious that the voice is telling itself as it tells the tale. In doing so, it forces a sharp light through the events and ideas that surround James Joyce like a beam through a thick fog. </p>
<p>The fog of words around Joyce is now so dense it can be difficult to penetrate. Because of this, many readers are too intimidated to approach his works directly. Carey’s response is to have done with justification, or at least the particular kind of circumlocution scholarship requires when it asks us to cite all the others who have trod this ground before. She does away with any and all footnotes, any and all works cited. </p>
<p>This is not to say Carey’s work is not justified by her own scholarship. On the contrary, she is a deeply knowledgeable scholar of Joyce and it is possible to trace all the references she makes by attending closely to the names mentioned throughout. The choice can be justified, as it allows her to trace lines through the material that are profoundly moving and acutely perceptive.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556013/original/file-20231026-23-51ftvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gabrielle Carey’s last book forces a sharp light through the events and ideas that surround James Joyce.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are two such lines that help to us feel the person behind Ulysses,
Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake – some of the great masterpieces of any age of world literature. </p>
<p>The first is the idea of a list that is more than just a list: a list that accumulates and opens out, like the mathematical exercise of long division the schoolboy Stephen Daedalus sees unfolding on a page in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. </p>
<p>The second is the idea of life itself, which is more than “a” life, but rather a collective existence that includes, in particular, those you love and that love
you, as well as the many selves you promote and hide, and those you have influenced and touched, including readers born after the “life” of the physical person has passed. </p>
<p>More than this, the idea of life also includes the life of Gabrielle Carey the reader, who makes us see things that hurt and delight her. She is a shadow that organises the whole, a shadow whose absence one feels everywhere.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/gabrielle-carey-was-best-known-for-puberty-blues-but-i-knew-her-as-a-formidable-intellectual-who-mastered-the-art-of-living-well-205123">Gabrielle Carey was best known for Puberty Blues – but I knew her as a formidable intellectual who mastered the art of living well</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A life in lists</h2>
<p>The book announces itself as a list: </p>
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li><p>“James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 …”</p></li>
<li><p>“When Joyce was five …”</p></li>
<li><p>“At six, being near-sighted …”</p></li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>We are told of Joyce’s love of lists and associations. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>As a mature writer, he continued to have a fondness for lists, some of which go on for pages. A list in Finnegans Wake provides a playful self-portrait:</p>
<p>“the wrong shoulder higher than the right, an artificial tongue with a natural
curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart,
a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, a salmonkelt’s thinskin …” </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554447/original/file-20231018-23-ehfvj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The lists Carey makes, like those of Joyce, accumulate vertically as they proceed, but open out horizontally, with every listed item carrying associations of its own. </p>
<p>Using the list with stylistic canniness, Carey, rather than becoming lost in endless qualifications and explanations, instead works with deep simplicity. That is, most paragraphs lack a tissue that connects them immediately to that which proceeds or follows. They stand alone, each offering new insights and new bits of information, which we connect intuitively. The effect is clearly intended and powerful. It allows Carey to cover an enormous amount of material in a book that runs to just 130 pages.</p>
<p>There is, however, a shift in the lists as one proceeds. The early pages
emphasise the brightness of Joyce’s character as a young boy: “At home his nickname was Sunny Jim because of his happy, easy-going disposition.” In the later chapters, he is wracked by physical pain and emotional despondency. </p>
<p>Joyce’s most famous biographer Richard Ellmann, speaking of the relations between Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who idolised him, wrote that both men “were prone to long silences and their conversations were usually suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself”. But Carey shows us with utter clarity how Joyce moves from joy to sorrow not through self-pity, but an accumulation of troubles, many of which involved his relations to his family and his own declining health.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=954&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1199&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1199&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554472/original/file-20231018-19-vu8oea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1199&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps because a great biography like Ellmann’s tends to emphasise the triumphal
arc that takes someone like Joyce, through his genius, from obscurity to astonishing achievement and influence, one loses sight, somehow, of the person who lived amid the shelter or ruins of that achievement. </p>
<p>Carey’s feat is to allow us to sense the man in all his contingency and awkward vulnerability. Based on a style and a feeling, her own, for the outlines of accumulating events, her story is not so much of a born genius, but someone who was only steps ahead of abject failure for much of his life.</p>
<p>Rather than seeing Joyce the man as cut off from or transcending the world in which he moved, Carey demonstrates how others held him up, carried him the few extra steps he needed to go again and again, to reach something that no one had thought it possible to reach. </p>
<p>She shows how those who held him up were often the women who surrounded him: his mother May, his life’s love Nora Barnacle, his beloved daughter Lucia. </p>
<p>His indefatigable supporter Harriet Shaw Weaver published him and paid him significant sums of money to allow him to write. Dora Marsden, editor of the magazine The Egoist, brought many of his works to the world. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, publishers of the Little Magazine in the United States, were charged with and convicted of obscenity for publishing the “Nausicaa” episode from Ulysses; it ruined them financially. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-wonder-of-joyces-ulysses-79417">Friday essay: the wonder of Joyce's Ulysses</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It was not only women. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus and his loyal friend Paul Léon, among others, are also there and helping. Carey does not let us forget that without them he could not have become James Joyce. At times, even often, these helping hands suffered for their service. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555760/original/file-20231025-26-bda13v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nora Barnacle Joyce, c. 1926 in this photograph by Berenice Abbott.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Barnacle#/media/File:Portrait_of_Nora_Joyce_(Mrs._James_Joyce)_1926%E2%80%931927_(cropped).jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More than this, Carey allows us to glimpse what is perhaps true of everyone – that is, the person we think of as an individual, “James Joyce”, is in fact composed of people who loved him as much as the egoistic self we like to celebrate. One of the many names of the protagonist of Finnegans Wake is “Here Comes Everybody”.</p>
<p>Joyce is also composed not just of those others, but the places of which he wrote, and in which he lived as he wrote, and the worlds they contained. Glimpsing this in no way diminishes the achievement we habitually attach to a self; rather, it allows us to understand how a life accumulates and spreads in many directions.</p>
<h2>From joy to sorrow</h2>
<p>Joyce’s suffering was often self-inflicted. He saw the weaknesses of his father, an alcoholic spendthrift, who frittered away a comfortable life for himself his wife and children, to the point where the family was living in poverty, but he also loved and idolised him. From his father Joyce inherited alcoholism, a jaunty disposition, recklessness, and no practical sense of how to manage a household financially. </p>
<p>His alcoholism was driven by the “green fairy” of absinthe (closer to a hallucinogenic than mere hard liquor), until his common-law wife Nora at last made him swap it for mere wine. He would collapse on the streets of Triese and Rome, sleeping propped against lampposts or in doorways when he didn’t quite make it home to Nora, who was busy scrimping his meagre wages to support them and their two young children.</p>
<p>Carey at one point fails to understand why Joyce did not support his talented
but highly strung daughter Lucia in her desire to become a professional dancer. She shows that Nora also disapproved of this career choice. For Carey, this parental failure opens the way to Lucia’s future madness, which devastates the family and is one of the primary causes of Joyce’s move from joy to sorrow.</p>
<p>Joyce feared his own madness (diverted into creativity) was the source of Lucia’s. He took his daughter from head doctor to head doctor, some as renowned as Carl Jung, others hideous charlatans, like one Dr Vignes, who prescribed injections of seawater. Yet Lucia continued to deteriorate. She would end her life in an English asylum. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/lucia-joyce-on-bloomsday-consider-this-real-life-characters-enduring-and-mysterious-appeal-98020">Lucia Joyce: on Bloomsday, consider this real-life character's enduring and mysterious appeal</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Joyce lived a life with Nora that seemingly mixed profound love with utter disregard for her wellbeing, leaving her to carry the heavy burdens of raising children. And yet despite threatening to leave him (or baptise his children against his wishes) again and again, she never failed him. She fiercely defended him from the Ireland she believed had betrayed him through its neglect and contempt for his work.</p>
<p>Joyce’s life, rather than his works, is the main thread of this book, and that life is extraordinarily flawed. It is filled with poverty and the consequences of poverty. When poverty at last abates, due mostly to the generosity of Harriet Shaw Weaver (even more than the <em>succès de scandale</em> of Ulysses), Joyce’s teeth rot through lack of dental care and his eyesight deteriorates catastrophically. </p>
<p>He endures multiple eye operations, performed without anaesthetic, to the point where he can barely see. Like Milton’s daughters, Lucia reads aloud to her father and takes down his dictation. He suffers abdominal pain for years, which quackish doctors attributed to stress, leading to his death in 1941 at the age of 59 from an perforated ulcer, diagnosed too late. </p>
<p>Through all this, one senses the shadow of Gabrielle Carey, watching with affection, at times sadness, at times even disappointment, but also fiercely loyal to the intense feeling that Joyce has summoned within her through the power of his writing. </p>
<p>The book’s themes, almost unbearably, draw us back to her: the struggle with mental illness, the struggle with day to day life, the shadow of the father, the feeling of having failed others. Mostly though, Carey makes us feel that these human things, as painful as they may be, are part of life and touch all our lives, much as we might wish to turn away from them. She makes us see, as Joyce did, what is sacred in the seemingly profane.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210892/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthony Uhlmann has in the past been funded for research on James Joyce and others by The Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>Gabrielle Carey’s last book, about her beloved James Joyce, also includes her own life as a reader, and makes us see things that hurt and delight her.Anthony Uhlmann, Professor of English, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2051232023-05-06T04:26:29Z2023-05-06T04:26:29ZGabrielle Carey was best known for Puberty Blues – but I knew her as a formidable intellectual who mastered the art of living well<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524716/original/file-20230506-23-68zgts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C1920%2C1072&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jamie Kidston/ANU</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The last time I saw Gabrielle Carey, who died this week, aged 64, was a couple of weeks ago in Sydney. I’d texted that I was coming to Sydney for the weekend, and she texted back to say she was meeting “a couple of Joyceans” for a morning walk in Lavender Bay and would I like to join them? </p>
<p>“Joyceans” was an important code-word for Gabrielle. She is still best known as the coauthor, with Kathy Lette, of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/puberty-blues-9781761045684">Puberty Blues</a> (1979), a book she wrote as a teenager. The novel, a gritty account of the brutally sexist surf culture of Sydney’s southern beaches, was a smash hit, as was the <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/movies/blog/2016/12/12/why-you-should-watch-puberty-blues">film adaptation</a> directed by Bruce Beresford two years later. For Gabrielle, it was an early fame she would never entirely succeed in escaping.</p>
<p>But for many of those who knew Gabrielle later in life, she was, among many other things, a “Joycean”, and more particularly, a “<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-amateurs-age-of-unriddling-finnegans-wake-on-stage-38498">Wakean</a>”. </p>
<p>She was a lifelong scholar of James Joyce, the towering Irish modernist writer whose last book, <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/on-finishing-finnegans-wake/">Finnegans Wake</a> – a 628-page novel written in an invented language mixing the most arcane English vocabulary with more than 60 other languages in an almost unreadable riot of wordplay – is justly notorious as the most fiendishly difficult book ever written. As Gabrielle <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/on-finishing-finnegans-wake/">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wake language is a language of its own. Once you get the hang of it, Wakean words become a kind of code to share. If you’re finding it hard to make a decision, you can say you’re in “twinsome twominds” and your fellow Wakeans will understand. Or if you have some gossip, you can say “I’ve got a seeklet to sell.” Or if you just want to exclaim, you can invert a cliche: “O for a fresh of breath air!” Or if someone asks why you’re doing something, you can respond, “Just for the halibut.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gabrielle was an internationally respected expert on the Wake. She was in regular correspondence with the leading scholars; she was the author of numerous acclaimed essays on Joyce. </p>
<p>She was a performer, along with a number of other Wakean women, in the “Prankqueans”, a musical troupe named after one of the Wake’s characters and dedicated to performing the opera and popular song that is so richly studded throughout Joyce’s writing. And she was the leading light of not one, but two Finnegans Wake reading groups. </p>
<p>Her last book, currently in press, is simply titled <a href="https://scholarly.info/book/james-joyce-a-life/">James Joyce: A Life</a>. But, by contrast with Joyce, her own style was often so modest and accessible and democratic, albeit with a fierce and fearless honesty, that it is easy to underestimate the formidable intellect at work behind her writing.</p>
<h2>Authors were ‘living beings’ for her</h2>
<p>After Puberty Blues, Gabrielle Carey would go on to publish nine other books, spanning fiction, biography and memoir, as well as numerous essays and newspaper pieces. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=889&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=889&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=889&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1117&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1117&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524724/original/file-20230506-17-p9hzmh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1117&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Probably her most distinctive contribution is a series of books that defy categorisation: studies of other writers that combine literary biography and autobiography, archival work and personal memoir, scholarly analysis and deeply personal reflection. </p>
<p>Authors were never abstract presences for her, they were living beings who breathed through their books, and it was possible to have a relationship with them every bit as passionate and dangerous as a relationship with a living human being. </p>
<p>The first of these was <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/moving-among-strangers-randolph-stow-and-my-family">Moving among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my Family</a>, a book which won the Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2013. </p>
<p>Her previous book, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/intimacy-grief-and-a-gift-of-love-20090603-gdtkia.html">Waiting Room</a> (2009), was a searching and fearless memoir of her distant and estranged mother’s terminal illness with a brain tumour, in which she briefly mentioned her mother had been friends with the reclusive Western Australian writer Randolph Stow. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524720/original/file-20230506-28082-qeacvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/mostly-private-letters/">Moving among Strangers</a>, she tells how she had written to Stow during her mother’s last days, and that he, a deeply private man, had not only responded warmly with reminiscences of familiar family stories, but had hinted at a side of her mother’s early life and personality that Gabrielle had never known existed. When she pressed him for more, he fell silent, and within a year, he had died.</p>
<p>Moving among Strangers tells the story of a daughter’s search to find out more about her mother and the younger self her daughter never saw or knew. It’s also a study of an enigmatic writer who was once internationally acclaimed, but who has now almost disappeared from Australian literary history. And it’s a searching meditation on the intense relationships that can form between intensely private people. </p>
<p><a href="https://scholarly.info/book/falling-out-of-love-with-ivan-southall/">Falling out of Love with Ivan Southall</a> (2018), as the title suggests, is a similar combination of literary biography and memoir. I remember, like Gabrielle, devouring Southall’s books as a child. And Southall, like Stow, is a writer who has almost disappeared from literary history. Gabrielle’s book, part literary biography, part personal memoir, recounts how her attempts to find out more about the writer that she fell in love with as a child reveal a person far different from her once-adored hero.</p>
<p>The third of these, <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/only-happiness-here-in-search-of-elizabeth-von-arnim">Only Happiness Here: in Search of Elizabeth von Arnim</a> (2020), was completed during Gabrielle’s fellowship in Canberra. Written in deceptively simple prose, the book deftly layers several different genres and styles and pursues a complex sequence of interlocking arguments. </p>
<p>On one level, it’s a literary biography of another writer who has been unjustly neglected. Born in Kirribilli in 1866 to the distinguished Beauchamp family (Katherine Mansfield was a cousin), Elizabeth married an Austrian count and moved to his family’s landed estate in Nassenheide, where along with raising his children and running his business affairs, she established a famous rose garden. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524721/original/file-20230506-19-gv959u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Her anonymously published book <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/elizabeth-and-her-german-garden-9780241341292">Elizabeth and Her German Garden</a> (1898) was a huge hit, a semi-autobiographical account of the making of her garden as well as a satirical portrait of the deeply conservative and sternly patriarchal Junker aristocratic society. </p>
<p>Von Arnim went on publish more than 20 books, mostly fiction, that were both critically acclaimed and commercially successful enough to support her and her financially incompetent husband in the style appropriate to their milieu. </p>
<p>She was friends with novelists <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/e-m-forster">E.M. Forster</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Walpole">Hugh Walpole</a>, and had an affair with <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-war-of-the-worlds-128453">H.G. Wells</a>. Her second husband was philosopher <a href="https://theconversation.com/bertrand-russell-and-the-case-for-philosophy-for-everyone-58859">Bertrand Russell</a>’s elder brother, and she wrote a witty pseudo-autobiography in the form of a memoir of her favourite dogs, in which her glittery social circle can be glimpsed only in the background.</p>
<p>“Only Happiness Here”, the motto Elizabeth put over the entrance to the Swiss chalet where she entertained her friends, is a funny and moving study of von Arnim’s life and work. But it’s also a kind of treatise on the art of happiness: a topic that, as Gabrielle notes early in the book, presents all sorts of moral and aesthetic perils for the writer, including the risk of being sententious and boring. </p>
<p>From von Arnim’s writing, Gabrielle extracts nine buoyant “Principles of Happiness” that form the running motif of the book and guide its exploration of von Arnim’s troubled life, her enigmatic personality and her unjustly neglected fiction. </p>
<p>Gabrielle also makes the interesting claim that perhaps the reason that the literary history of Modernism has forgotten about von Arnim is that “Modernism didn’t believe in happiness”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-randolph-stows-to-the-islands-28193">The case for Randolph Stow's To the Islands</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘She works for James Joyce’</h2>
<p>Gabrielle’s final book, James Joyce: A Life, is currently in press. As she quipped, it was her “fourth biography and the first about a writer who is still famous”. It’s a brief, deft portrait of a complex subject, focused not just on the irritably narcissistic Joyce, but also on the women who supported him and made his maniacal dedication to his own genius possible. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524722/original/file-20230506-6367-1f57ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">James Joyce.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alex Ehrenzweig</span></span>
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<p>In particular: Nora Barnacle, his partner and later wife; Harriet Shaw Weaver, his admirably patient and deep-pocketed patron; and Sylvia Beach, his courageous and indefatigable publisher. </p>
<p>Two of Gabrielle’s acclaimed essays, <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/714952/pdf">Waking up with James Joyce</a> and <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/breaking-james-joyce/">Breaking up with James Joyce</a>, give an indication of the conflicted relationship she maintained with this writer who inspired and infuriated her throughout her life. </p>
<p>Breaking up with James Joyce, listed as a Notable Essay in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43261017-the-best-american-essays-2019">Best American Essays 2019</a>, tells an anecdote of how, when her nine-year-old son was asked “And what does your mother do?”, he replied without hesitation: “She works for James Joyce.” </p>
<p>In Gabrielle’s typically witty but revelatory style, her essay begins with a letter to “Jim” saying that, after more than 40 years of selfless dedication to his work, she’s had enough: “It’s over”. But a little later she worries she’ll lose her resolve, confessing, “For some reason, I need him”. </p>
<p>Gabrielle’s lifelong love of Joyce was undoubtedly a source of joy as well as anguish, and perhaps the most powerful way she communicated this joy was through her creation of that tiny, unique and irreplaceable institution, the Finnegans Wake reading group. </p>
<p>The Wake became the prompt and the pretext of a very special kind of conversation: a sharing of knowledge, guesswork, imagination, fancy, irreverence and reverence. It is in this way that I and my fellow Wakeans got to know her, and that is how we will remember her.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-amateurs-age-of-unriddling-finnegans-wake-on-stage-38498">The amateur’s age of unriddling: Finnegans Wake on stage</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Reading groups ‘like jam sessions’</h2>
<p>The first of these, based in Sydney, met on the last Sunday of the month, often around Gabrielle’s table, for 17 years: the length of time it took Joyce to write the novel. They would gather over food and wine and take the Wake a page and a line and a word at a time. </p>
<p>Someone would read aloud, and everyone would chip in with suggestions and ideas, deciphering Joyce’s bawdy double entendres and cryptic allusions to everything from nursery rhymes to theological disputes. Each would be encouraged to draw on whatever unique knowledge they could bring to the table, from etymology to entomology (literally; there are passages in the Wake incomprehensible to anyone but a specialist on insects). </p>
<p>If they got really stuck, they’d turn to <a href="http://fweet.org/">Fweet</a>, an online guide to the Wake with more than 90,000 explanatory annotations. It is testament to the magnetic power of Joyce’s text, and Gabrielle’s passion to share the joy of reading it with others, that when they finished it, after a short pause, they turned around and started again – just like the Wake itself, which begins in the middle of a sentence and ends with the first half of that final-first sentence: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the.” </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1654250084958367744"}"></div></p>
<p>The second Finnegans Wake group she set up was in Canberra, in 2019, when she came to the Australian National University as a recipient of the prestigious <a href="https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/writer-gabrielle-carey-is-new-hc-coombs-fellow-in-2019">H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship</a>. </p>
<p>Her Canberra Wakeans formed the “Museyroom Players”, and produced with her a series of events over the next few years combining talks, readings, performances, songs, music and media art we termed a “<a href="https://www.jamesjoycefunferal.com/">Funferal</a>”: a word from the Wake that combines funeral and fun-for-all, with just a hint of the feral.</p>
<p>Gabrielle’s copy of the Wake was a thing to behold: held together by a several loops of pink ribbon, every page was covered in tiny pencilled annotations. If somebody came up with a new insight, she’d painstaking note it in even tinier pencil between the existing marginalia. </p>
<p>Once, in response to some abstruse question, she fished out from its inside cover a letter from Danis Rose, perhaps the world’s foremost scholar on the Wake, and the editor of the astonishing website <a href="https://www.jjda.ie/main/JJDA/JJDAhome.htm">the James Joyce Digital Archive</a>. </p>
<p>But Gabrielle’s scholarship was not that of the peevish disputes over typographical minutiae that characterised the <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/217432">so-called Joyce Wars</a>. Her approach to the Wake was always more about the shared joy of the present moment than the potential for some future authoritative statement. </p>
<p>Indeed, Gabrielle’s “Joyceans” are not just writers and literary scholars, but schoolteachers and musicians, professors of medicine and security guards. She had a genuine belief – and could prove it – that Finnegans Wake is a book for everyone. Her reading groups were more like jam sessions than scholarly seminars.</p>
<h2>The art of living well</h2>
<p>Gabrielle was a teacher of the art of living well. She dressed with consummate style: elegant, understated, interesting fabrics, beautiful tailoring. </p>
<p>When she moved to chilly Canberra (a city which she had the unusual distinction of loving unreservedly) she immediately bought thick stockings and thermal vests so she didn’t have to get around in the shapeless puffer jackets that most Canberrans rely on to stay warm. </p>
<p>She was a connoisseur of “interesting” hotels and restaurants, and in January 2023 conspired to bring her Canberra and Sydney Wakeans together at the Robertson Hotel in the Southern Highlands: three storeys of antiquated grandeur in wood panelling and stained glass and sweeping staircases, surrounded by hydrangea-bordered lawns and creeping mists as dusk set in. </p>
<p>Every evening, no matter where you were, Gabrielle would always step outside for a few minutes to watch the sun set. A keen gardener, she made tiny pots of fabulously precious jam, that she playfully labelled “Jams Joyce”, from rose-petals harvested from her garden. </p>
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<p>I remember her once being delighted by something my daughter had said. When she was four or five, and her grandmother was taking her out to buy shoes, my daughter patiently explained : “Shoes that aren’t glittery hurt my feet”. This was Gabrielle too. </p>
<p>She brought style and charm and beauty and grace to everything she did and everyone she met, though she was quickly discriminating in her judgement about people and places and tasks that she feared would be a drudgery. She knew, with a firm determination, that there is a glorious expenditure of pain in beauty, and that happiness requires a wastefulness that is heedless of saving something for a better day.</p>
<p>A person of diminutive stature and, I think, a shyness beneath her warmth and grace, she was capable of being imposing when she needed to be. Once, trying to read a passage from the Wake in a dimly lit bar, she commanded loudly, without looking up, “Waiter, I can’t read in here! Bring me a torch!”, which the waiter, promptly, did. And if something was not right – if a teapot was not scalded before the tea was made – Gabrielle would send it back, and back again, or go into the kitchen and teach them how to do it properly. </p>
<p>She was also a generous bestower of praise and encouragement, but it was never facile or unearned; she had a gift for recognising in people what was best in them and drawing it out.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524719/original/file-20230506-19-lksda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Wendy Whiteley’s Garden.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sardaka/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>When I met up with Gabrielle and her Joyceans that weekend in Sydney, we went for a walk in <a href="https://www.wendyssecretgarden.org.au/">Wendy’s Secret Garden</a>, the garden that Wendy Whiteley, during a period of intense grieving for her husband, the painter <a href="https://theconversation.com/whiteley-a-seductive-cinematic-portrait-of-a-serious-artist-77312">Brett Whiteley</a>, created on the strip of landfill alongside the railway line below their Milson’s Point house. </p>
<p>When it began to rain, we sat under a shelter at the bottom of the garden, shouting to be heard above the sound of the rain and the clanking of hammers and screeching of angle grinders from the railway work going on a few metres away – but invisible behind the dense foliage. Every now and then the glow of an arc welder would flash through the leaves like lava breaking through rocks. When the rain stopped and we made our way back up the slope to the huge spreading Moreton Bay fig on the terrace overlooking the harbour, Gabrielle made the apology of a hostess: “I’m so sorry about the noise, it’s usually much quieter here”. </p>
<p>The four of us went around the corner to her friend’s place and had a bite to eat and another Joycean treat, a nip of “Aramo di Erbe”, the bitter citrus liqueur made in Trieste, Italy, where Joyce spent much of his writing life. Gabrielle and I then caught the train into the city, exchanging recommendations of books to read and films to see, and when I got off at Wynyard, we embraced briefly, as you must when the train doors are closing.</p>
<p>When I came out of Wynyard Station, Sydney was in full torrential downpour. Instead of going to the Art Gallery of New South Wales as I’d planned, I went to the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay. </p>
<p>There I came across the beautiful, poignant work by Simryn Gill, “Maria’s Garden” (2021), a series of life-sized ink-on-paper transfer prints of each of the plants from her neighbour Maria’s garden, after Maria had died and the garden was going to be demolished by property developers. </p>
<p>I immediately thought “Gabrielle will love this”, and so began to see the work through her eyes, registering details I could talk about with her the next time we met. Her passion for things had that quality of enlarging your experience, making the world a richer and more beautiful place. </p>
<p>In her last year, Gabrielle had been taking classes in the art of bookbinding, a creative outlet to add to gardening and rose-petal jam, not to mention writing. </p>
<p>It was uncannily appropriate, for so much of Gabrielle’s writing had been about exploring how a writer can become bound to – and bound by – the books and writers she loves. </p>
<p>But in addition, her writerly life was also an exploration of how books can bind readers together, bringing them closer to each other in a shared love of the beauty and power and strangeness of words.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205123/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gabrielle Carey was a prolific writer, talented teacher and lifelong James Joyce scholar. Passionate and playful, her work explored how books bind readers together. She made the world richer.Russell Smith, Lecturer in English, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2038532023-04-19T16:28:40Z2023-04-19T16:28:40ZWhy do we find someone reading sexy?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521002/original/file-20230414-26-54a42o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C12%2C1952%2C1585&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Reading is a pleasure. And watching someone else read, too.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbence/548646841/">Paul Bence / Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A few years ago the dating website eHarmony concluded that profiles that included reading in their list of hobbies were more attractive to the opposite sex. Specifically, the data revealed that men who mentioned reading as one of their personal interests received 19% more messages, while for women, those who said they read received only 3% more messages.</p>
<p>So, is reading sexy? The writer <a href="https://www.planetadelibros.com/libro-mujeres-y-libros/196826">Jeanette Winterson thinks so</a>, because, in her opinion, “what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration.”</p>
<h2>Marilyn Monroe reading <em>Ulysses</em></h2>
<p>It should be made clear that Winterson is referring to a specific set of photos: those of Marilyn Monroe reading <em>Ulysses</em> by James Joyce.</p>
<p>One summer day in 1955, Eve Arnold, a star photographer of the time, went to find her model so they could take the agreed-upon series of pictures. When they stopped in a park, Monroe became engrossed in reading <em>Ulysses</em> while Arnold inserted a roll of film into her camera. When ready, she was unable to resist photographing the actress in that trance. Another thought is that the initiative for the photos came from Marilyn herself, who was as attracted to the world of literature and the theatre as she was to the spotlight. Reading was also a useful tool to combat her image as a “dumb blonde”.</p>
<p>It is obvious that Marilyn Monroe – or Paul Newman, for that matter – is sexy with or without reading. However, what Winterson is really talking about is the fascination of the image of a reader, any reader.</p>
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<h2>St. Ambrose reading in silence</h2>
<p>This is what St. Augustine must have experienced when, toward the end of the 4th century, <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110106.htm">he observed</a> St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, reading in silence:</p>
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<p>“But while reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Ofttimes, when we had come (for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of those who came should be announced to him), we saw him thus reading to himself, and never otherwise.” (St. Augustine, “Confessions”, VI, 3)</p>
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<p>It is no wonder that St. Augustine was surprised by the silent exercise of reading, since, at that time, all readings were done aloud. Apart from this fact, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/669669/papyrus-by-irene-vallejo/">Irene Vallejo goes further</a>:</p>
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<p>“Agustine realises that this reader is not at his side despite his great physical proximity, but has escaped to another, freer and more fluid world of his own choosing, is travelling without moving and without revealing to anyone where to find him.”</p>
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<h2>Fascination for readers</h2>
<p>From St. Ambrose to Marilyn Monroe, there have been many portraits or self-portraits of people with a book in their hands. Ourit Ben-Haïm, a Moroccan photographer based in New York, was drawn by the same attraction and set up a project called “Underground New York Public Library” to collect photos of anonymous people reading on platforms or inside New York underground cars.</p>
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<p>“Reading is sexy” continues to be a slogan that tries to draw attention, especially in specific circumstances, but it is not something new. This very expression was created in the image and likeness of the phrase “smart is the new sexy”, which was used by the Newspaper Association of America to promote reading in the United States.</p>
<p>From a psychological point of view, perhaps there is some truth in our fascination with these images. <a href="https://letraslibres.com/revista-espana/por-que-nos-gusta-ver-leer/">Cristian Vázquez tries to justify it</a> in the following manner:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“What we like about a person who reads is to see them immersed in a strange world, which has nothing to do with the environment around them, a world of which we can only get the tiniest hints through their face, their expressions. In other words, a reader’s face is a kind of window into the world created by the book.”</p>
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<h2>The mystery of reading</h2>
<p>It seems that what is so mysterious about such pictures is the fact that reading is the most private and intimate act – “It is the lover’s talk, it is the place of whispers and sighs”, Winterson goes so far as to say – for it is by reading that we become inaccessible and unreachable, while the viewer is left with an infinite sense of helplessness.</p>
<p>A good proposal to contemplate images, portraits and photos of people reading is Bollman’s book titled <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/672761/women-who-read-are-dangerous-by-stefan-bollmann--karen-joy-fowler/9780789212566"><em>Women Who Read Are Dangerous</em></a>, a moving tribute to women readers, which brings together a striking selection of paintings, prints and photographs of women reading by various artists from the Middle Ages to the present day. The last photograph in this gallery is actually the one of Marilyn Monroe reading <em>Ulysses</em>.</p>
<p>It is the perfect time for us to give ourselves the opportunity to lose ourselves in the feelings and fantasies that come from reading. Because, as Emily Dickinson said: “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203853/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Silvia Hurtado González no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.</span></em></p>Reading is “sexy”. Maybe it’s because watching someone read exerts a fascination on the beholder, be it St. Ambrose or Marilyn Monroe.Silvia Hurtado González, Profesora del Departamento de Lengua Española de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de ValladolidLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1760862022-02-01T13:07:27Z2022-02-01T13:07:27ZUlysses at 100: why it was banned for being obscene<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443744/original/file-20220201-23-1ajoi0b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C14%2C1389%2C1184&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/dl%2020th%20century/20th%20century%20collection%20items/instalment-of-ulysses-cup_503_ee_1_front_cover.jpg">British Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>James Joyce’s Ulysses, which turns 100 this February, is now central to the literary canon and features on university literature courses around the world. However, it was not always as revered as it is now. In fact, it was banned as obscene before it was first published as a complete novel, regarded as a work of perversion. </p>
<p>Ulysses was initially published in instalments in the US literary magazine <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181777/little-review-ulysses">The Little Review</a>. The chapter that became known as “<a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/instalment-of-ulysses-episode-xiii-nausicaa-in-the-little-review-april-1920">Nausicaa</a>” features the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom, masturbating on a beach while gazing at a 17-year-old girl called Gerty McDowell. </p>
<p>It was this episode, published in 1920, that caught the attention of the daughter of a New York lawyer, who referred it to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. A prosecution was launched. </p>
<p>The editors of the Little Review were <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/new-york-times-article-reporting-the-prosecution-of-the-publisher-and-editor-of-james-joyces-ulysses">taken to court</a> and fined for publishing an obscene work. The decision meant that US publishers were prohibited from publishing Ulysses. Other countries, including the UK, followed suit. </p>
<p>It was only in <a href="https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6052517">Paris in 1922</a> that Ulysses was finally published as a complete novel through the independent publisher Sylvia Beach. </p>
<h2>Divided views</h2>
<p>The New York decision to ban Ulysses split global opinion. For many readers, as well as Joyce’s literary contemporaries including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, the idea that Joyce’s experimental work had been banned as obscene was absurd. For many legislators, journalists and other readers, the book was pornographic and blasphemous. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-why-joyce-was-so-obsessed-with-the-perfect-blue-cover-175956">Ulysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover</a>
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<p>Ulysses, by the standards of the day, was extremely sexually explicit, showing Bloom being fisted in a brothel and his wife Molly musing on the joys of being “fucked” hard by her lover. As well as being a vast collection of literary and religious quotations and everyday trivia, it is also an encyclopaedia of obscene words. And it was blasphemous, beginning with the character Buck Mulligan mocking the rituals of the Catholic Church. </p>
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<img alt="Big blue book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach the Parisian publishing house in 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)#/media/File:James_Joyce_Ulysses_1st_Edition_1922_GB.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>The book also broke new ground formally. It was radically experimental, which involved new literary techniques, such as that of the interior monologue, and a range of different styles, including a section written as a play script, and another written in the style of a newspaper front page. </p>
<p>Ulysses was not the only modernist novel to combine formal experimentalism and sexually explicit content, and many others books, such as Lawrence’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/why-dh-lawrence-the-rainbow-was-banned/">The Rainbow</a>, were also censored as obscene. The combination of formal and sexual shock-effects has shaped 20th-century literature. </p>
<h2>The freedom to express?</h2>
<p>Even after the US courts lifted the ban on Ulysses in 1934 and the obscenity laws changed in many countries, including in 1959 in the UK, novels continued to fall foul of the law. As such, 20th and 21st century world literature has often involved a combative relationship to the law. The conflation of literary value with iconoclasm has been a tenacious one. </p>
<p>But perhaps less obviously, the free speech arguments made in defence of Ulysses and other censored modernist texts have also shaped subsequent debates about literature’s rights to freedom of expression. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-why-joyce-was-so-obsessed-with-the-perfect-blue-cover-175956">Ulysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover</a>
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<p>One argument made by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25487020">T.S. Eliot</a> at the time was that the censorship of modernist books, including Ulysses, was based on a category mistake. Literature and pornography were mutually exclusive terms. This often rested on strong claims for the book’s specific literary credentials. </p>
<p>Ulysses, they claimed, with its experimentation, parallels with Homer’s Odyssey and playful language, was a highly crafted literary artefact. As an autonomous literary work, it was disconnected from causal effects such as the incitement to sexual stimulation, which was one way of describing the effects of pornography. </p>
<p>A different argument by poet Ezra Pound was to stress that the sexual details in novels formed part of their realism. </p>
<p>Ulysses includes meticulous descriptions of Dublin geography, buildings, conversations and people. Bodily functions, including sexual activities, were features of the ordinary lives of ordinary people on an ordinary day in Ireland in June 1904. If countries including Ireland, the UK and the US wanted to have a meaningful cultural sphere, then novels needed to be able realistically to represent adult themes. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-start-here-if-you-want-to-read-this-modernist-classic-176114">Ulysses at 100 – start here if you want to read this modernist classic</a>
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<p>These arguments in defence of the literary text view its effects on readers differently. One stresses literature’s formal autonomy and downplays its ability to produce direct causal effects in the world. The other attends to literature’s important role in mirroring reality and telling the truth about ordinary life. </p>
<p>Of course, the meanings of literary texts always mutate as they travel through time and space and encounter new readers. The words that once shocked many readers do so no longer, while words that to many at the time seemed innocuous now make readers recoil. </p>
<p>One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses in 1922, the idea of banning it may seem absurd. But with literary texts being <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/sales-maus-soar-tennessee-school-board-ban.html">censored in many parts of the world</a>, arguments in defence of free expression continue to mobilise claims about the particular status and power of literature.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176086/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:rachel.potter@uea.ac.uk">rachel.potter@uea.ac.uk</a> has received funding from the AHRC (the Arts and Humanities Research Council), for a project on the history of the writers' organisation International PEN and its defence of freedom of expression. She is a member of English PEN, which is a charity.
</span></em></p>By the standards of the day, Ulysses was extremely sexually explicit.Rachel Potter, Professor of Modern Literature, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1759562022-02-01T12:21:10Z2022-02-01T12:21:10ZUlysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443450/original/file-20220131-118143-cljnde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C7%2C2620%2C1788&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">James Joyce was particular about the shade of blue that would grace the cover of Ulysses.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)#/media/File:James_Joyce_Ulysses_1st_Edition_1922_GB.jpg">Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On February 2 2022, Ulysses turns 100, James Joyce would have turned 140, and I will turn 30-something.</p>
<p>To celebrate this tripartite birthday I am popping to the chemist to collect some eye drops. Then I’m heading to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to view one of the first editions of Ulysses. I won’t read it. I won’t even venture past its covers. I am interested in seeing the exact shade of blue that Joyce specified for the book’s wrappers. He was so particular about this aesthetic feature that he got his painter friend, <a href="https://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/3862/Nutting/Myron">Myron Nutting</a>, to mix up the precise tint.</p>
<p>This is where the eye drops come in. I have a chronic condition that can make my eyes sore and my vision blurry. And I want to ensure that I can see Ulysses clearly, to properly assess the blueness of its cover. The irony is that Joyce’s eyesight was far worse than mine. He experienced severe eye pain, underwent multiple ocular surgeries and, at times, could barely see at all. Why, then, was he so obsessed with his book being such a specific hue of blue?</p>
<h2>Ulysses Blue</h2>
<p>Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, tells us that the cover of Ulysses was meant to match the blue of the Greek flag, to suggest <a href="https://archive.org/details/jamesjoyce00rich/page/524/mode/2up?q=nutting">the myth of ancient Greece and Homer</a>. We know from his letters that Joyce sent a Greek flag to Nutting for him to colour-match. So, he was aiming for “Greek” blue. </p>
<p>We also know that Homer was a huge influence on Joyce. <a href="https://culturedarm.com/homeric-parallel-ulysses-joyce-nabokov-homer-maps/">The structure of Ulysses parallels the structure of Homer’s Odyssey</a>. So, it makes sense for Joyce to honour his literary hero through a subtle, yet exceedingly specific, decorative detail. But I think there’s more to it. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Statues of Homer against a gloomy sky." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443446/original/file-20220131-13-14aztav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Homer was a great inspiration to James Joyce.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/statue-homer-university-virginia-709661524">Timothy Harding/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I am on a research odyssey to discover the impetus and symbolism behind “Ulysses blue”. I will go to the Bodleian with my eyes wide open, ready to let my visual experience of the famous blue book dictate my avenue of research.</p>
<p>But, given Joyce’s impaired vision, perhaps this isn’t the best approach. To understand Joyce’s perspective, I must shrug off my “<a href="http://artandpopularculture.com/Ocularcentrism">ocularcentrism</a>”.</p>
<h2>Blindness in Joyce’s texts</h2>
<p>In her thoughtful new book, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611683/there-plant-eyes-by-m-leona-godin/">There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness</a>, writer and educator M. Leona Godin devotes several pages to her interactions with Ulysses. She discusses the “<a href="https://drmlgodin.com/2019/10/tap-tap-tap-joyces-blind-stripling-in-honor-of-white-cane-safety-day/">blind stripling</a>” character who taps his way through Dublin, and through Ulysses, using his “slender cane”. </p>
<p>Godin praises Joyce’s ability to capture the musicality of the tapping cane and articulates the complexity of Joyce’s relationship with blindness: “Even if Joyce felt some kinship with the blind stripling, he was still a sight-oriented person who might think […] of the blind as ‘they’.”</p>
<p>Joyce would have loved Godin’s book, as he appears to have had a keen interest in blindness memoirs and advice guides written by blind people, for blind people (and their supporters). Scholars have largely glossed over Joyce’s references to blindness in his <a href="https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000357760/HierarchyTree#page/1/mode/1up">composition notebook</a>. But I’m delving deeper to get to grips with Joyce’s thoughts on visual impairment. </p>
<p>It is fascinating to read Joyce’s depiction of the blind stripling in Ulysses, alongside one of the blindness books mentioned in his notes: <a href="https://archive.org/details/lesaveuglesparun00maur/page/n7/mode/2up"><em>Les Aveugles par un Aveugle</em> (The Blind as Seen through Blind Eyes)</a> (1899), by Maurice de la Sizeranne. </p>
<p>As I outlined in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB8pOCFEp5w">public lecture</a> last Bloomsday, there are several similarities, in terms of content and focus, between the two books. </p>
<p>The observations de la Sizeranne makes about his fellow blind man parallel those made by Ulysses’ protagonist Bloom about the blind stripling. Both Bloom and de la Sizeranne discuss the intriguing relationship between colour perception and touch, in blind experience, and suggest an additional blind sense: a “kind of sense of volume” involving the “nerves of the face” or the “forehead”. In reflecting blind experience onto his blind readers, de la Sizeranne - to borrow a phrase used in Ulysses - urges us to “see ourselves as others see us”.</p>
<p>In Joyce’s notes, the name of a hitherto unidentified “Dr Staub” is scrawled next to the title of de la Sizeranne’s book. Staub was believed to be one of Joyce’s eye doctors. However, I have discovered that he is, in fact, <a href="https://www.sbs.ch/ueber-uns/portraet/geschichte/">Dr Theodor Staub</a>, the blind founder of the Swiss Library for the Blind. </p>
<p>It is unclear why Staub’s name appears next to <em>Les Aveugles par un Aveugle</em>. Whatever the precise connection, in jotting down Staub’s name Joyce, at the very least, demonstrated a desire to engage with the blind community and with books for the blind.</p>
<h2>Blind, blue bards</h2>
<p>In his final book, Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce alludes to Ulysses. He depicts Shem, a partially sighted writer, reading a “usylessly unreadable Blue Book” in a “glaucous den”. </p>
<p>In ancient Greek, the word “glaucous” refers to blueish-green or blueish-grey. It’s also the root word of “<a href="https://www.dovepress.com/the-early-history-of-glaucoma-the-glaucous-eyenbsp800-bc-to-1050-ad-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-OPTH">glaucoma</a>”. Joyce suffered from glaucoma, and, in one of his letters, he writes that Homer “went blind from glaucoma according to one of my doctors”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Blue cover of Ulysses." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443257/original/file-20220129-25-13a0oil.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Could the blue be inspired by the colour that the word ‘glaucous’ denotes?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, perhaps “Ulysses blue” is a homage to glaucoma (via ancient Greece and Homer). By insisting on Greek-flag blue, was Joyce seeking, through rather associative means, to insert himself into a canon of blind writers?</p>
<p>There is no definite answer to this question. But, by recognising Joyce as a disabled writer with a genuine interest in articulating a wide range of bodily and sensory experiences, we open up new possibilities for accessing Ulysses in its centenary year. We should feel empowered to read Joyce’s blue book through our eyes, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/friends-of-shakespeare-and-company-read-ulysses-by/id1605756869">ears</a>, and <a href="https://www.ncbi.ie/shut-your-eyes-and-see-ncbi-and-james-joyce-cultural-centre-collaboration/">fingers</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175956/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cleo Hanaway-Oakley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>An ode to his hero Homer? The act of a man losing his sight? What is the story behind the famous Ulysses blue.Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1722012021-11-25T14:36:05Z2021-11-25T14:36:05ZThe Brontës, the Shelleys, Kingsley and Martin Amis: new research suggests literary relatives share similar writing styles<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433712/original/file-20211124-23-h33ebd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C25%2C4217%2C2796&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bront%C3%AB_family#/media/File:The_Bront%C3%AB_Sisters_by_Patrick_Branwell_Bront%C3%AB_restored.jpg">National Portrait Gallery, London</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From <a href="https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-200-years-on-why-we-still-love-her-heroes-heroines-and-houses-80451">Jane Austen</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-to-be-the-worlds-bestselling-author-75261">James Patterson</a>, every author has their own way of writing. And that writing is often discussed in terms of “style”. Essentially, style refers to “how” something is written – it is more concerned with form than content. So when, for example, someone remarks that they “enjoyed the story” but “didn’t like how it was written”, they are commenting on the style. </p>
<p>If you want to see an example of different styles in action, just compare something like <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-hobbit-by-jrr-tolkien?gclid=CjwKCAiA4veMBhAMEiwAU4XRr7cigsxJpjSWLMLikwn2NxblATlqMVFk_t1WnvPNZqTvN-GgjSuXbxoCjJMQAvD_BwE">The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien</a> to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-ulysses">Ulysses by James Joyce</a>. The Hobbit is written for a general audience, it’s a good old-fashioned story told through clear, accessible language. Ulysses is a more difficult read, full of obscure terms, complex phrasing, and cryptic references to other materials. </p>
<p>Obviously, Joyce still tells a story in Ulysses (and a great one at that), but he isn’t solely concerned with telling his tale. Joyce is also using the novel’s structure and language to experiment with form and challenge established ideas of what literature should look like.</p>
<p>But while style differs across authors, it would seem it doesn’t change so much across writers who are part of the same family. In <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">my recent research</a>, I looked at the literary styles of authors related to each other to see how their writing compared. Most members of the same literary families that I looked at tended to write in similar ways.</p>
<h2>Literary families</h2>
<p>Examining an author’s style based on their tendency to choose particular words is increasingly done with a process called “stylometry”. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wzrem5NkM">Stylometry</a> uses computers to statistically measure the most frequent words in a text. Authors are consistent with the regularity with which they use certain words, so counting words can give an indication as to how a particular author or group of authors tend to write. </p>
<p>Stylometry is most often used for authorship attribution, answering (usually unfounded) questions around who really wrote a particular novel, as has been the case with <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa031">Wuthering Heights</a> and <a href="https://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/70">Go Set A Watchman</a>.</p>
<p>But stylometry isn’t just useful in cases where a text’s authorship is disputed, it can also be used to analyse stylistic similarity more generally. And literary families present a unique opportunity to study why authors write in certain ways because relatives tend to develop within similar social environments. </p>
<p>In my <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">research</a>, I used stylometry to look at the writing styles of the following literary families: Kingsley and Martin Amis (father-son), Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë (sisters), William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley (father-mother-daughter), A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble (sisters), W. Somerset and Robin Maugham (uncle-nephew), John le Carré and Nick Harkaway (father-son). </p>
<p>The results show that relatives involved usually wrote in similar styles. Without exception, each of the authors tested clustered with the other members of their family. This means that the computer was able to tell different families apart, based on their respective writing styles, with 100% accuracy. The next stage would be doing a larger study with more families to see if this trend holds more widely.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101620">This recent experiment</a> was prompted by my previous <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa031">study on the Brontës</a> (perhaps one of the most famous literary families), which shows that, compared with a selection of their peers, the Brontë siblings all share a remarkably similar literary style. This is perhaps unsurprising when you consider the extent to which the Brontës are known to have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1179/1474893215Z.000000000148">collaborated</a>, but this trend also seems consistent across other families. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dendrogram showing stylometric clusters of literary families" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/432991/original/file-20211121-26-ucmwwj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A stylometric analysis of several literary families represented on a ‘dendrogram’. Dendrograms use lines to represent the similarity between whatever is being measured. The shorter the line between authors, the more similar their style.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The creative collaboration seen with families like the Brontës is common practice among relatives who all write. But it’s still significant to see that familial influence is so strong that it can be detected using stylometric techniques. This could indicate that essential characteristics of an author’s voice might be inherently connected to their formative environments and upbringing. </p>
<h2>Nature v nurture</h2>
<p>But such findings also revive the (perhaps tired) debate between nature and nurture. Mary Shelley, who is best known for writing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/13/frankenstein-at-200-why-hasnt-mary-shelley-been-given-the-respect-she-deserves-">Frankenstein</a>, clusters alongside her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>While the stylistic similarity between the other literary families analysed might be attributed to collaboration, Mary Shelley never knew her mother as she died ten days after Mary was born. And yet, they still share similar literary styles. </p>
<p>Her mother’s only novel was published before she began her relationship with Godwin, so it is unlikely that his influence is simply connecting the female members of his family. Again, perhaps Mary Shelley had a similar upbringing to Mary Wollstonecraft. </p>
<p>Or perhaps there is something else beyond nurture, something genetic that simply passed from mother to daughter. While such an explanation seems highly unlikely, what is undeniable is that Mary Shelley, without having known her mother, grew to resemble her literary style. </p>
<p>Perhaps then, being an author is just in one’s blood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172201/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James O'Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>New research shows that literary relatives tend to share a similar writing style.James O'Sullivan, Lecturer in Digital Arts & Humanities, University College CorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1530232021-01-13T12:12:02Z2021-01-13T12:12:02ZJames Joyce’s Ulysses is an anti-stream of consciousness novel<p>This year marks 80 years since the death of the great Irish writer <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/on-the-death-of-james-joyce-from-the-guardian-1941">James Joyce</a> (1882-1941). His most famous novel, Ulysses (1922), is one of those books, like Moby Dick or Infinite Jest, that more people begin than finish. The tome is widely believed to be a stream of consciousness novel and you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that if, like many, you only made it 100 pages or so in.</p>
<p>I often advise against starting at the beginning of the novel. <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap01">In the case of Ulysses</a>, you are thrown headfirst into the difficult stream of consciousness of Stephen Dedalus, a precocious 22-year-old writer. The fourth <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap04">chapter</a>, instead, is a much more accessible opening. It too offers a stream of consciousness but an easier sort belonging to the novel’s other main character, Leopold Bloom, a hapless but loveable 38-year-old advertising canvasser. On the day the novel is set, 16 June 1904, Stephen and Bloom strike up an unlikely friendship in Dublin. To read Bloom’s thoughts is to be taken into a stream of sensations, trivia, and wonder.</p>
<p>However, venture further and you’ll discover that Ulysses morphs, becoming instead a great anti-stream of consciousness novel.</p>
<h2>Bergson’s stream of consciousness</h2>
<p>For French philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/">Henri Bergson</a> (1859-1941), our stream of consciousness is our continuous sense of time, in which past, present and future merge. It is the fluid life at the heart of our identity. According to Bergson, these streams are at the centre of every object and every person.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white photograph of Henri Bergson." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378452/original/file-20210112-15-eo8cj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Philosopher Henri Bergson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson#/media/File:Henri_Bergson_02.jpg">Library of Congress/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Bergson believed we can either <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#MethIntu">“analyse” or “intuit”</a> things or people. When we “analyse” something, we remain outside its stream. We superimpose on its fluid life our own static symbols, like language. Using words means “we do not see the actual things themselves” just “the labels attached to them”. </p>
<p>Another example is numbers. We impose minutes and hours on fluid life. For instance, you can “analyse” a day, breaking it into 24 hours. But to “intuit” it, to see it from within the stream, is to see that time is not so rigid or easily quantifiable – it moves slower when you’re bored or faster when you’re having fun. </p>
<p>In our workaday lives, “analysis” is a necessary shortcut. We need words and numbers, labels and time, to get things done. Artists, according to Bergson, however, have the gift of intuition. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-philosophical-idea-that-can-help-us-understand-why-time-is-moving-slowly-during-the-pandemic-151250">A philosophical idea that can help us understand why time is moving slowly during the pandemic</a>
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<p>For example, authors’ imaginative use of language makes words a gateway to the streams at the heart of life, rather than distracting labels imposed upon it. Borrowing such ideas, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/stream-of-consciousness">literary critics posited</a> that the stream of consciousness novelist is one who can “intuit” the stream of consciousness of characters and so become them.</p>
<p>Joyce tries for a moment, becomes his characters but soon gets bored with Stephen and Bloom’s streams of consciousness. By the <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap07">seventh</a> chapter, he begins a long firework display of other styles. Here on, Stephen and Bloom’s streams of consciousness are elbowed out of the way by <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap07">newspaper headlines</a>, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap15">expressionist drama</a> and even <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap13">romantic fiction</a>. Or they’re shushed by a <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap17">scientific manual</a> or an <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap14">encyclopedia</a> of English prose styles.</p>
<h2>Joyce fails to find the stream</h2>
<p>So Ulysses is a much less consistent stream of consciousness novel than many. But it’s also an anti-stream of consciousness novel as Joyce comically demonstrates his and his characters’ failure to intuit streams.</p>
<p>Joyce enjoys showing us that people are mechanically absent-minded, often because language itself is a mechanism which gets in the way of our efforts to intuit fluid reality.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Painting of James Joyce holding a cigarette while leaning against a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=856&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=856&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=856&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378345/original/file-20210112-19-1wej06p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Joyce, like his characters, fails to enter the streams of conscious.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw03533/James-Joyce?">National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For example, Stephen, though a creative writer, isn’t at all intuitive. All he can see is the labels attached to things, albeit highly literary labels. When he sees a dog on the beach, his love of words conjures a horse, a hare, a calf, a bear, a wolf, a leopard, a panther and a stag. He can’t focus on the dog.</p>
<p>Bloom’s mechanical behaviour is less literary (words) and more scientific (numbers). True, he is better at intuiting his cat than Stephen is the dog: “Wonder what I look like to her?” he muses, trying to intuit himself into her stream of consciousness. But soon his mind turns to numbers: “Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.” Here he reverts to analysis as he strains to make sense of their difference in height using his human scale, not the cat’s.</p>
<p>Just as Joyce’s characters can’t intuit streams of consciousness, nor can he. He knows that static literary words can’t account for the fluidity of our interiors. Every time he reaches for a new style, in each new chapter, he acknowledges these failures and moves on with glee to the next.</p>
<p>A stream of consciousness does dominate the last <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap18">chapter</a>. Here we tune into Bloom’s wife Molly’s stream and hear about her afternoon of sex with a colleague. Is this the stream we have been waiting for? Yes and no. </p>
<p>Molly’s thoughts do flow through past, present and future, uninterrupted and unpunctuated. But the Molly we get to know, while charismatic, is something of a static symbol herself, the stock character of the sexually frustrated wife. As we reflect on 80 years since Joyce’s death, Ulysses reminds us that consciousness will always elude the novel but, really, that’s where the fun lies.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153023/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Scholar received funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). </span></em></p>Get past the first 100 pages and you’ll see that Joyce’s style of writing mostly goes against what philosophers understand of the stream of consciousness.John Scholar, Lecturer in the Department of English Literature, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/980202018-06-15T12:30:58Z2018-06-15T12:30:58ZLucia Joyce: on Bloomsday, consider this real-life character’s enduring and mysterious appeal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223321/original/file-20180615-85834-qkvtgl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C1137%2C760&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Stuart Gilbert Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Univ Texas, Austin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Bloomsday, June 16, when the <a href="http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/bloomsday-2018-programme/">Irish writer James Joyce</a> and his characters Leopold and Molly Bloom are celebrated, we should also think about his daughter Lucia.</p>
<p>Lucia Joyce, who was born in Trieste in 1907 and died in a sanatorium in Northampton in 1982, has enjoyed and endured near constant critical and popular attention over the years. But we don’t really know much about her at all. She danced passionately, taking lessons with the best teachers in Paris and wowing the audience at a 1929 recital at the Bullier Ball (the image above is from that recital). She dated Samuel Beckett, briefly. She underwent therapy with Jung (who had, incidentally, been <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2014/06/carl-jung-writes-a-review-of-joyces-ulysses.html">scathing of her father’s work</a>). She was hospitalised for schizophrenia in the 1930s. And she was a huge influence on her father while he wrote <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/08/a-fire-in-the-brain">Finnegans Wake</a>.</p>
<p>But beyond this, Joyce remains something of a mystery. Very little reliable information about her survives: due to the difficulties her schizophrenia caused within the family, letters both about and by her were deliberately destroyed (in addition, as executor of the Joyce estate, her nephew Stephen Joyce <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/an-end-to-bad-heir-days-the-posthumous-power-of-the-literary-estate-6285277.html">had a record of blocking studies</a> about her). Carol Loeb Shloss’ biography <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/16/biography.features">Lucia Joyce: To Dance to the Wake</a> remains the leading reference work about her, yet its flaws have been identified by scholars including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/books/no-she-said-no.html">Hermione Lee</a>. </p>
<h2>Fact or fiction?</h2>
<p>Where does this leave those of us who want to know more about the woman behind the myth? In the absence of reliable archival materials, one option is to turn to fiction. Back in 1991, Alison Leslie Gold published <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/25515781">The Clairvoyant: A Novel of the Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce</a>. More recently, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/27/dotter-fathers-eyes-talbot-james-joyce">Dotter of her Father’s Eyes</a>, the 2012 graphic novel by Mary and Brian Talbot, compared the upbringings of Lucia and Mary (whose father was the prominent Joyce scholar, James S Atherton). Like many discussions of Joyce, it focuses exclusively on her life prior to her hospitalisation. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223326/original/file-20180615-85822-1ljt0ec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Graphic novel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2015, Annabel Abbs’ <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/12/the-joyce-girl-annabel-abbs-review">The Joyce Girl</a> won the <a href="http://www.impress-books.co.uk/impress-prize/">Impress Prize for New Writing</a> and most recently, in June 2018, Alex Pheby <a href="https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/shop-1/lucia">published Lucia</a>. I expect there will be plenty of reviews to be read over coming weeks.</p>
<p>While these are provocative, fluent and entertaining works, it’s also true that they display some anxiety about representing Joyce through fiction. The Clairvoyant ends with a brief “author’s afterword” in which Gold offers details of Joyce’s real life, as if concerned that her fiction cannot exist without the scaffolding of facts, even sparse ones. Yet Gold’s prefatory note: “The publisher wishes to draw attention to the fact that the language and spelling in this work is deliberately unconventional,” is much more playful than Pheby’s, which betrays something of the perils of writing about Joyce while her nephew continues to exert stifling control over her legacy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Any representations of actual persons are either coincidental, or have been altered for artistic effect.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>His daughter’s father</h2>
<p>The reason for caution transpires early in the novel: like Abbs, Pheby makes incest a central feature of his story. Gossip, hearsay and scandal attached themselves to Joyce throughout her life: do these novels now celebrate her, or her reputation? They attempt to reclaim her, yet without the supporting facts they can at best be imaginative and partial.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223330/original/file-20180615-85854-1i1mxpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marking Bloomsday 2015, in Dublin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William Murphy via Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such works purport to separate her from her father, but as the title of the Talbot’s graphic novel – a line from Finnegans Wake shows – this is hard to achieve. The uncomfortable truth is that, beyond her role in the Paris dance scene of the 1920s or her influence on the Wake, were it not for her father she simply would not be of interest to us now. These fictional works still only see Joyce in her father’s shadow. Her dancing led one reviewer, in 1928, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/books/no-she-said-no.html">to claim</a> that “James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father”. </p>
<p>That day has not come. By contrast, with a swell of works devoted to her in recent years, we may be at risk of a “Lucia industry”, comparable – though on a smaller scale – to the “Joyce industry” that her father precipitated in the academy. The problem is not that we undervalue Joyce, but that we read more into her than is justified.</p>
<p>“No one that has raised up a family has failed utterly in my opinion”, wrote James Joyce to his mother in 1903, in a letter that is, sadly, not available online. Despite the criticisms of the author and his wife Nora Barnacle over their handling of their daughter’s condition, he was devoted to his daughter. Nora, though, never once visited her in hospital. </p>
<p>Neglected by her family, Joyce has nonetheless been extensively attended to by writers. The Clairvoyant ends with an imaginary narrative called: “‘The Story of the Blotting-Paper Girl (Keep them guessing for 300 years)’, A Memoir by Lucia Joyce”. This alludes to her <a href="https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/crlc/research-projects/intertextual-joyce.aspx">father’s quip about Ulysses</a>, that he’d put enough enigmas in it to “keep the professors busy for centuries”. It seems we’re still working out the puzzle of Lucia Joyce.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98020/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Helen Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Little is known, but much is speculated, about James Joyce’s daughter and muse, Lucia.Helen Saunders, PhD candidate, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/874692017-12-20T08:50:10Z2017-12-20T08:50:10ZChristmas nostalgia is something to be wary of, according to literary greats<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199231/original/file-20171214-27597-gzrvme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/closeup-shot-young-woman-sitting-by-735445363?src=YRbKZB0VLRLI8x37DHNP2Q-1-71">kryzhov/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,” starts Henry James’s 1898 novella <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/209/209-h/209-h.htm">The Turn of the Screw</a>. Though an ultimately “gruesome” tale of ghosts, this is “Christmas Eve in an old house”, and everything is as it should be.</p>
<p>Christmas has long been a time for telling tales around the lively warmth of the fireside, as the narrator does in James’s tale. Nowadays James’s and Charles Dickens’s stories are substituted by John Lewis’s vignette of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1Y-zhQURU">Moz the kindly Monster</a> and Vodafone’s love story <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOIb0PeIvQ">all about data packages</a> (no, really). But each of these share at some level a common romanticisation of youth, in which our childhood memories, homes and bedtime stories are restored and revitalised. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jw1Y-zhQURU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But is this misty-eyed view of Christmas past any good for us? Or does nostalgia get in the way of what we should be enjoying in the moment?</p>
<h2>Leaving the past behind</h2>
<p>In James Joyce’s short story <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/">The Dead</a> (1914), protagonist Gabriel Conroy wrestles with such questions. At a Christmas party hosted by his aunts, Conroy rejects the community in Ireland that seeks to revive the Gaelic language long dead and long gone – a language that might, if effective, forge Ireland as a nation independent of Great Britain. </p>
<p>But “Irish is not my own language,” he tells his dance partner, Miss Ivors. “O, to tell you the truth … I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” Conroy reviles this backward-looking, false inventiveness which says that the Irish language is the keystone to a modern Ireland.</p>
<p>For Conroy this nostalgic view is painfully shortsighted. Instead, he tells his family and companions that the past they should be looking to is not mythical, but their parents’ and grandparents’ whose lived-in and real Ireland is rapidly disappearing. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I fear that this new generation … will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The spirit of the season?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/christmas-family-photo-mother-father-girl-763497214?src=JnpQJsrZQ0nmusvOmgFFvw-2-99">Pozynakov/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nostalgia has a complex etymology. The first part stems from <em>nostos</em>, meaning “homecoming” in ancient Greek, which was a heroic quality <a href="http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/%7Elac14/glossary/nostos/index.ghtml">desired by Ulysses</a> in The Odyssey. That epic poem charted Ulysses’ return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. But the second half of the word, <em>algia</em>, means “pain”. The word as a whole implies the “painful homecoming” – the difficult journey – the return home that’s not without trouble.</p>
<p>This pain holds true for Conroy on that Christmas party night. On his journey to his hotel for the night, he learns of his wife Greta’s past when she tells her own story about a former lover who died. Asked by Conroy why the man died, Greta replies simply, “I think he died for me”. This past and its intrusion into Conroy’s present-day Christmas throws him into disarray. He is confused as to why Greta would not tell him everything about her past. Sadly this homecoming proves painful. Neither a backward glance to the mythic Ireland with its Gaelic heritage, nor the reversion to the generation which is dying all around, can soothe Conroy’s Christmas.</p>
<h2>Resisting nostalgia</h2>
<p>To counter the kind of sadness that Conroy feels, today’s stories on the big and small screens focus on memories we cherish from those days when we didn’t know the truth about Father Christmas. The rose-tinted glasses demand ever-sweeter stories of times when Christmas brought our desires home for us. The true meaning of nostalgia, with its necessary pain, has been forgotten in our late capitalist society in which commodities overrule memories.</p>
<p>The 19th century poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, also wondered about nostalgia. In his poem, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses">Ulysses</a> (1833), he questions whether the hero’s return home to Ithaca would have made him happy. In the poem, the raging fireside common to Christmas stories is instead for Ulysses a “still hearth”. To get over the nostalgia he feels (in the strictest sense), he rejects the life spent doling out</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unequal laws unto a savage race</p>
<p>That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ulysses decides to “to sail beyond the sunset” one more time. Why? “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” Ulysses rejects nostalgia in place of living the real life that Conroy also cherished.</p>
<p>Conroy matches the epiphany of Tennyson’s Ulysses. His decision, however, is not to escape, but to engage with the past on its own terms. Joyce writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Other forms were near. [Gabriel’s] soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. … His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gabriel meets the souls of the dead people he’s saluted, and is hospitably welcomed into their community. His nostalgic pain is finally soothed as “his soul swooned” to be part of something larger than himself, to have company on that snowy night.</p>
<p>Perhaps, then, we should no longer resist the painful homecoming that nostalgia truly entails. Instead, that pain we feel as we reminisce about the past – especially round the fireplace at Christmas – provides an opportunity: to strive, to seek and to find a new adventure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87469/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Taylor-Collins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Being misty-eyed about a perfect Christmas past will do you little good.Nick Taylor-Collins, Lecturer in English Literature, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/794172017-06-15T20:06:50Z2017-06-15T20:06:50ZFriday essay: the wonder of Joyce’s Ulysses<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173910/original/file-20170615-10553-cq5b9u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A parade in St Petersburg last year celebrating Bloomsday, the day on which Ulysses is set.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>James Joyce once said to his friend <a href="http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/JoyceColl/JoyceColl-idx?type=header;pview=hide;id=JoyceColl.BudgenUlysses">Frank Budgen</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If there is any difficulty in reading what I write it is because of the material I use. In my case the thought is always simple.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Difficulty” is an understatement for the reader’s experience of the bewildering Ulysses, with its notoriously experimental styles and form, extravagantly wrought language, and approach, in which nothing is “stupidly explained” – a stance that the young Joyce had praised in his idol, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173902/original/file-20170615-14130-7eatrj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1922 portrait of James Joyce.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Declan Kiberd’s book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6509046-ulysses-and-us">Ulysses and us: The art of everyday living</a> explores the somewhat generous proposition that Ulysses is a “book of wisdom” about the everyday world. The key to understanding the genius and richness of Ulysses, I suggest, is Joyce’s inspired “simple” thought of interjecting into this “one day in the life” of a city — its smells and sounds, its sandwichboard men, jingling brass bed quoits, gorgonzola cheese and burgundy, its trams and pubs — an epic apparatus of correspondence that draws us to explore the vast canvas of the work.</p>
<p>By “correspondence”, I mean where one element – say an object, sensation, or cognition – resonates with another, forging a meaningful connection. The most overt form of this is the referencing of Homer’s Odyssey throughout the novel’s 18 episodes. Homer tells the story of Odysseus (the Roman form of this name being “Ulysses”), a guileful Greek warrior, and his epic adventures throughout the Mediterranean region on his way home to Ithaca, to be reunited with his kingdom, his constant wife Penelope (whose virtue is besieged by suitors), and his son Telemachus.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173905/original/file-20170615-13441-ccknq3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">goodreads</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The correspondences between this story and a rather uneventful day in Dublin are by no means self-evident. Odysseus’ counterpart in Ulysses, Leopold (Poldy) Bloom is an advertising salesman who leaves home to go to a funeral, and to work, in the knowledge that his wife Molly (Penelope) intends to have an affair that day with Blazes Boylan. Meanwhile, the young poet and intellectual Stephen Dedalus is living a somewhat bohemian life in the <a href="http://www.joycetower.ie/gallery/joyce-tower-gallery/">Martello Tower</a> with the blasphemous, garrulous, amusing Buck Mulligan. The paths of Dedalus and Bloom cross during the day and night until they meet and have a wide-ranging conversation. Bloom takes care of a now drunken Stephen, and invites him home to stay the night.</p>
<p>The correspondences then, do not necessarily entail finding similarities between everyday life and the epic, but they can evoke connections and comparisons that lead us to reflect. The effect is often comic (Odysseus, participant in the great siege of Troy is reduced to Bloom besieging potential advertisers), in a book of which Joyce said “<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1922/03/james-joyce-djuna-barnes-ulysses">there is not one single serious line in it</a>”, but some correspondences resonate deeply. </p>
<p>For instance, Poldy misses his natural son Rudy, whose death has badly affected his marriage. Stephen (corresponding to the son Telemachus) resembles his literal father rather too much: the verbally inventive, intemperately drinking Simon Dedalus. He could perhaps use the tempering touch of caring, practical-minded Bloom. And even a marriage marred by infidelity is, in Ulysses, something to celebrate. Learning how to read Ulysses also leads us to read human experience in ways that defy conventional expectations. </p>
<h2>Dirt for art’s sake: Ulysses’ reception</h2>
<p>Ulysses’ electrifying novelty polarised opinion from the outset. After it was published by Sylvia Beach in Paris in 1922, T.S. Eliot called it the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many readers were unprepared for the strong language, detailed attention to bodily functions, including female orgasm, and Molly Bloom’s uninhibited discourse. Not only does this modern-day Penelope defy the Homeric virtue of constancy, but she revels in her transgression: (“yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly”). For many, including those who had read the book only partly or not at all, it was chaotic, formless, or as Joseph Brooker notes, a latrine, a “phone book”, a desert “as dry as it is stinking”.</p>
<p>First published by The Little Review, in serial form, it was the subject of an obscenity trial and was banned in the USA, then the UK. In 1933, however, Justice Woolsey’s decision in the US District Court observed that Ulysses was not “dirt for dirt’s sake”. </p>
<p>In Australia, the news that it was obscene, and the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/titillating-titles-20120314-1v46i.html">news that it was not</a>, took longer to break. The Brisbane <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/41953554/2002024">Courier Mail</a> of 19 September 1941 claimed that “after being freely available to the public of Australia for the last 20 years”, Ulysses had been “banned by the Minister for Customs”. The ban was not overturned until Gough Whitlam’s 1972 accession to power. (Gough once gave a copy of the banned book to his wife.)</p>
<h2>A damaged love story</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=654&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=654&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173906/original/file-20170615-21325-n1rueo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=654&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bloomsday in Dublin, 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William Murphy/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of Joyce’s enduring creations is that of a community of people worldwide who meet to read, discuss or dramatise Ulysses each June 16. Ulysses is not only Joyce’s time capsule of Dublin on that day in 1904, but a monument to his beloved partner Nora Barnacle. It was on June 16 1904 that Nora first “walked out” with Joyce, and administered what he described to her in a letter as a sexual “sacrament”. Later that year they eloped in self-proclaimed exile to the Continent. </p>
<p>However, on a rare return trip to Dublin five years later, Joyce’s friend Vincent Cosgrave hinted that he had enjoyed Nora’s favours before Joyce did. Joyce, agonised with doubt, was shattered. Ultimately a good friend, J.F. Byrne, reassured him that the story was untrue. Years later, Joyce assigned Byrne’s address to Bloom: 7 Eccles Street. Joyce’s crisis of faith over Nora’s fidelity had, somewhat masochistically, inspired the central event of Ulysses. And indeed, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10639384-james-joyce">Peter Costello’s</a> thoughtful biography of Joyce suggests that Cosgrave’s boast was not necessarily empty. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173903/original/file-20170615-21325-10opqr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Dublin Martello tower.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Jones/shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="http://www.michaelgroden.com/notes/map.html">“plot” of Joyce’s epic</a> is otherwise just two cartographer’s lines, the intersecting paths of Bloom and Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus believes himself cast out of the Martello tower by flatmate Buck Mulligan, and surrenders the key to him. Bloom forgets his key. Both are symbolically usurped; Dedalus does not know where he will spend the night.</p>
<p>The first six episodes of Ulysses follow firstly Dedalus’ and then Bloom’s mornings, using internal monologue to reveal the protagonists’ thoughts. In later episodes, the structure, language and logic of the writing itself undergo a dizzying series of experiments. These developments constitute Joyce’s own “<a href="http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/JoyceColl/JoyceColl-idx?id=JoyceColl.LawrenceUlysses">Odyssey of Style</a>”, which takes the reader on a wild ride.</p>
<p>The seventh, breakout chapter for instance, “<a href="http://www.michaelgroden.com/notes/open07.html">Aeolus</a>”, is centred on the offices of the Freeman’s Journal and Evening Telegraph. Aeolus is associated with the Greek god of the winds, whom Joyce mischievously associates with the art of rhetoric. This was set out in a <a href="http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/j/Joyce_JA/apx/schema/U_schema.htm">table of correspondences</a> for each episode that he used to explain his design to a mystified public. Aside from the preponderant gossip and banter, in this episode both great oratory and nauseatingly flowery writing receive extended attention — the latter to hilarious effect, as Simon Dedalus and other layabouts damn the purple prose splenitively before, parched by their exertions, inevitably adjourning to the pub.</p>
<p>A panoply of rhetorical devices is employed in the episode, which is punctuated by a series of newspaper-style captions or sub-heads, and incorporates multiple references to air flow, as various blowhards in the offices shoot the breeze or, in the case of declining lawyer J.J. O’Molloy, seek to “raise the wind”: ie, borrow some cash.</p>
<p>But what is most impressive in this episode is how Joyce extracts meaning through adroitly signalled chains of correspondence that, in the political climate of 1904, make pointed connections between Ireland’s history of subjection (symbolised in Nelson’s Pillar and the GPO, from which “His Majesty’s vermilion mailcars” circulate), and her nationalistic aspirations. Chillingly, the episode is set at the time (12 noon) and place of the 1916 Easter Uprising. A gloomy proclamation by editor Myles Crawford, “We’re the fat in the fire” proves prophetic. Indeed, these offices did burn in 1916. Joyce had begun planning this episode in 1917. </p>
<p>Following episodes include a parodic history of English literature (“Oxen of the Sun”) and a phantasmagorical absurdist drama set in seedy Night-Town (“Circe”) where even objects such as gongs, soap and gas jets get speaking parts. Impressively, Joyce even wrings poetry and beauty out of an apparently technical and scientific mock catechism (“Ithaca”), which includes an inventory of seemingly every Bloom possession.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173904/original/file-20170615-26091-k9teoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The last line of Molly’s famous monologue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">greg/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lastly, there is the justly famous tour de force of Molly’s unpunctuated <a href="https://archive.org/stream/MollyBloomMonologEnd/MollyBloomMonologhyEnd_djvu.txt">stream of conscious monologue</a> (“Penelope”), the subject of countless memorable rehearsed readings in Bloomsday activities. “Penelope” is an epic in its own right, in which Molly reviews her day, past lovers, Poldy himself. Molly is accorded the last word.</p>
<h2>Ulysses by correspondence</h2>
<p>Joyce likely derived his principle of correspondence from multiple sources, although he adapted it to his own purposes. His early interest in mystical and hermetic philosophy followed the loss of his fervent Catholic faith. Two early influences on Joyce were the poet <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/william-blake">William Blake</a> and the Swedish philosopher and theologian <a href="http://www.swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/about-life/">Swedenborg</a>. Both were interested in the idea of correspondence between the material and divine realms, and the spiritual principle that earthly conditions reflect higher realms. </p>
<p>Bloom expresses a parallel idea in a passage from the “Calypso” episode, where he visits the pork butcher to buy a kidney for breakfast.</p>
<p>Leaving the shop, Bloom responds to an everyday object:<br></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Watering cart. To provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mysteriously, the very next line records that<br></p>
<blockquote>
<p>A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even mundane experience need not be meaningless. Take for example, the references to meat in “Calypso”. In Homer, <a href="http://www.michaelgroden.com/notes/homer04.html">Calypso</a> is the goddess who detained Odysseus on her island for years for her carnal pleasure. For Bloom, the sight of sausages in the butcher’s window is answered by his desire to perv on the “hams” of the next door girl, whom he in turn associates with a tattered religious garment, a scapular, “defending her both ways”. For Joyce, church and policing are closely linked; both are in the confession business. Bloom now indulges in a memory, or fantasy, of the girl enjoying a cuddle with a policeman in Eccles Lane: “They like them sizeable. Prime sausage.” Later, his disparate musings on meat link us to universal themes of sex, death and advertising. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173914/original/file-20170615-10553-ocwnbo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sausages invoke a reverie on sex, religion and death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a young man, Joyce had read Lamb’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8757807-the-adventures-of-ulysses">The Adventures of Ulysses</a> and was attracted to its supernatural elements. Ulysses is punctuated by curious parallels between Bloom and Dedalus, and various synchronicities: Poldy thinks about Blazes Boylan, who immediately appears; Stephen, who has complained about Ireland’s three masters, in a later scene turns his head back suddenly to see a three-master ship. These are not the contrived coincidences of Dickens but realistic experience, attended to in the spirit of wonder.</p>
<h2>Bloom in wonderland</h2>
<p>Ulysses is a feast of a book. The walls and the streets echo with laughter, song and banter. The life lived in the shops and pubs and workplaces, the décor, the clothes, the advertising signs and appliances, is brought back to life in these pages, filtered through the minds of artistic Stephen and scientific but “wonderstruck” Bloom. “Wonder” is one of Bloom’s favourite words; there is much to wonder at.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173908/original/file-20170615-26091-mneju9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ulysses captures the life of a city.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jaclin/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the first episode, Stephen stands at the stairhead on the tower, haunted by visions of his dead mother:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this mere hallucination, the product of a stressful night, or the continuance of unresolved grief at his mother’s death? And what can we make of Bloom’s parallel experience that same morning?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Since a cloud has just begun to cover the sun, it seems likely that Stephen’s vision occurs at a similar time to Bloom’s. Kiberd’s beautiful suggestion that this is Bloom’s “Homeric vision”, is appealing. Equally, he could be hallucinating his absent daughter Milly, but then how do we explain Stephen’s similar vision? A definitive answer is not necessarily achievable.</p>
<p>Whatever we make of it, Joyce’s epic resembles the “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280730233_Text_and_Meaning_in_Umberto_Eco%27s_The_Open_Work">open work</a>” spoken of by Umberto Eco: one that invites us to explore it for ourselves. The supreme virtue of Ulysses is that it so richly rewards the considerable exertions required of us.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Some relevant resources:</em></p>
<p><em>Which edition of Ulysses?</em></p>
<p><em>Choosing the preferred edition of Ulysses is not a transparent choice, given the vexed publishing history of this book, and the so-called Joyce Wars. Many critics prefer Hans Walter Gabler’s corrected text (1986). Danis Rose’s attempt to find a more definitive text has met with mixed reviews. Jeri Johnson’s introductory essay to the book in the Oxford World’s Classics series is excellent, and this edition also has some very useful notes on each chapter at the back. Take note however that this is a reprint of the original typesetting of 1922 and so is prone to some possible textual errors.</em></p>
<p><em>Audio resource</em></p>
<p><em>An excellent audio recording from an ensemble cast that really brings the book alive. In my view, the best way to approach Ulysses: Free downloadable files at: https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook</em></p>
<p><em>Guides and commentary</em></p>
<p><em>It has been said that one does not read Joyce, one studies Joyce. Certainly there is no shame in taking a guide book with one, when embarking on a reading odyssey. Bear in mind however that guides can be a mixed blessing: they can over-explain and over-interpret, or present us with an overwhelm of information.</em></p>
<p><em>A popular, updated guide to Ulysses:</em></p>
<p><em>Blamires, Harry. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 1996</em>. </p>
<p><em>A reasonably demanding guide to and interpretation of Ulysses, from an influential Joyce critic:</em></p>
<p><em>Ellmann, Richard. Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.</em> </p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79417/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>SF McLaren does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Around the world today, fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses will celebrate Bloomsday. This experimental novel can be bewildering to read, but for those who persist, it is a ‘feast’ of a book.SF McLaren, Author: Reframing A Portrait of the Artist: Joyce and the phenomenological imagination, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/794562017-06-15T10:38:34Z2017-06-15T10:38:34ZJames Joyce the European: celebrating Bloomsday in the age of Brexit<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173983/original/file-20170615-23512-eyaipf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Flapdragon via Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://jamesjoyce.ie/bloomsday/">Bloomsday</a> is an annual celebration of James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses. Many of Joyce’s devotees will be flocking to Dublin, the city in which Ulysses is set, to retrace the steps of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and other Dubliners featured in the encyclopaedic text. </p>
<p>Joyce’s “little story of a day” begins at 8am on June 16 at the Martello Tower in Sandycove, Dublin, home of Stephen Dedalus (and briefly home to Joyce himself, in September 1904) and ends at 2am at 7 Eccles Street (home to Leopold and Molly Bloom). The Irish tourist board will, no doubt, welcome Joycean revellers with open arms – the <a href="http://www.visitdublin.com/bloomsday-style">VisitDublin</a> website provides a one-line synopsis of Ulysses, urging those unfamiliar with the text not to fret, and offers style advice for those wishing to look the part as they explore the city and enjoy readings, street theatre – and an obligatory gorgonzola sandwich. </p>
<p>Without Dublin, there would be no Ulysses. Joyce’s recreation of the city is painstakingly detailed – as he stated, himself, Dublin could be rebuilt “brick by brick” using his novel as a guide.</p>
<h2>European son</h2>
<p>Despite the importance of Ireland’s capital to Joyce’s life and literature, Ulysses was written in continental Europe. Joyce draws attention to this fact by closing his book with the words: “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921”. Joyce was self-consciously European – he studied modern languages and was inspired by writers such as the French novelist <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/gustave-flaubert/">Gustave Flaubert</a> and the Norwegian playwright <a href="http://www.mnc.net/norway/Ibsen.htm">Henrik Ibsen</a>. In Joyce’s posthumously published novel Stephen Hero (1944), Ibsen is described as “the first poet of the Europeans”. </p>
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<span class="caption">Dublin’s favourite son: James Joyce.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Attila Jandi via Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ulysses focuses on Leopold Bloom, a patriotic Irishman with Hungarian Jewish ancestry and a wife born in Gibraltar, and Stephen Dedalus, a native Dubliner with a Greek surname who drinks his tea black in the Parisian style. Joyce mocks unthinking nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. Mr Deasy, a unionist head teacher who exclaims that “England is in the hands of the Jews” is portrayed as nothing more than a classroom bore, while “The Citizen”, a nationalist extremist, is depicted as a narrow-minded cyclops. He asks Bloom what his nation is, to which Bloom replies “I was born here. Ireland”, then aggressively clears “the spit out of his gullet”. </p>
<h2>Freedom and tolerance</h2>
<p>Bloom is painted – in a more positive light – as a peacemaker and mediator; he is in favour of “moderation” and capable of seeing things the “other way round”. He upholds a philosophy of socialist utopianism, advocating for “free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state” for all. </p>
<p>In Ulysses, Joyce throws light on the complexities of national identity and the ways in which our senses of place and ancestral history can become intertwined with our sense of self, often with negative results. Indeed, as Stephen exclaims in response to Mr Deasy’s bigotry: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” </p>
<p>As well as espousing the virtues of tolerance and inclusivity within his text, Joyce brings people of different backgrounds and nationalities together in the real world via their love for his literature. Ulysses has been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese and Korean. Alongside the <a href="https://joycefoundation.osu.edu/">International James Joyce Foundation</a>, there are active Joyce societies in Japan, Spain, Italy, the US, Switzerland and elsewhere.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173979/original/file-20170615-23559-1ltugk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Global appeal: Bloomsday in St Petersburg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Akimov Igor via Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From Dublin to the world</h2>
<p>While Dublin remains a hotspot for Bloomsday activity, the day is now celebrated across the world. There are Bloomsday events this year in nations including Australia, the UK, the US, Canada, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, Croatia, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Lebanon, Georgia and Israel, to name but a few – click here for a <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1hsl00AZw7xKz52ln81kihYSzMo0&ll=5.373116147450531%2C0&z=2">map of this year’s events</a>). My own passion for Joyce has so far taken me to conferences and events in Dublin, Paris, Trieste, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Prague and London. At each event I have made new friends and reconnected with old ones. </p>
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<p>With Brexit looming, the question of what it means to be European – and what it means to be international – is more pertinent than ever. Joyce, with his open outlook, his literature of inclusivity and tolerance, and his ability to unite people across the globe, offers a fruitful way in, and a fitting occasion for us to begin to disentangle and deliberate on this continental conundrum.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79456/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cleo Hanaway-Oakley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The great Irish novelist saw himself as European first, Irish second. There’s a lesson in that for the UK.Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, Knowledge Exchange Facilitator, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/658032016-09-25T19:35:12Z2016-09-25T19:35:12ZGuide to the classics: Christina Stead’s The Beauties and Furies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138736/original/image-20160922-11649-bs5j1h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Carl Rahl's Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1852).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>From the beginning Christina Stead’s fiction divided critical opinion, and reactions to The Beauties and Furies, her second novel, were no exception. Where some saw “garrulous pretentiousness”, Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker found “such streaming imagination, such tireless wit, such intellectual virtuosity” that Stead must be recognised as “the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf”.</p>
<p>What Fadiman discerned is the extraordinary originality of Stead’s modernist experiment, ranking her achievement with that of James Joyce. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/338798.Ulysses?from_search=true">Ulysses</a>, published in 1922, was no longer banned for obscenity in the United States by 1936, when The Beauties and Furies was published. </p>
<p>Of the major novels published in that year, only William Faulkner’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373755.Absalom_Absalom_?ac=1&from_search=true">Absalom, Absalom!</a> and Djuna Barnes’ <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53101.Nightwood?from_search=true">Nightwood</a> rival The Beauties and Furies in its contempt for prevailing realist-narrative expectations. (The big commercial success of 1936 was Margaret Mitchell’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18405.Gone_with_the_Wind?from_search=true">Gone with the Wind</a>, much to Stead’s chagrin.)</p>
<p>Once I would have thought Fadiman’s claim excessive. My introduction to Christina Stead was through the reissue of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/304344.The_Man_Who_Loved_Children?ac=1&from_search=true">The Man Who Loved Children</a> (1940) in 1965, which astounded me. </p>
<p>I was already reading her in earnest in the late 1970s when the Virago republications began, including The Beauties and Furies in 1982. I found it baffling, over-shadowed by its predecessor, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1671759.Seven_Poor_Men_of_Sydney?from_search=true">Seven Poor Men of Sydney</a> (1934), and its successor, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2104160.House_of_All_Nations?from_search=true">House of All Nations</a> (1938) — the latter is Stead’s other Paris novel, based on her experience of working in the private bank where her partner, William Blake, was a financial adviser.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138738/original/image-20160922-11645-1agvwky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christina Stead.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I wasn’t alone. The Beauties and Furies has never been taken up as The Man Who Loved Children and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1437766.For_Love_Alone?from_search=true">For Love Alone</a> (1944) have been. Only in recent years, as I have thought more about Stead’s early writings, has it been borne in on me that it is arguably her most experimental work, disconcerting and disturbing, a searching, sometimes ironic, depiction of a decadent society. It is a quintessential modernist text that heeds Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new”.</p>
<p>Its affinity with Ulysses is marked. In letters back to Sydney after her arrival in London in 1928, Stead called Joyce “the modern Shakespeare, superior to Shakespeare in command of language, equal in music”, acknowledging that Ulysses is “hard work” because it “has to be read with a rhyming dictionary, an encyclopaedia, the grammars of ten languages, and an annotated ‘crib’”.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Joyce by Berenice Abbot.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">alrionun/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Joyce was far from being her only discovery in those heady years. Stead’s fiction from the start displayed the interest in dreams and the unconscious flaunted in The Beauties and Furies, everywhere mixing fantasy and reality in extravagant swoops of tone and register. The influence of surrealism is pervasive, reaching greatest intensity near the end, in the spectacular sequence in the Somnambulists’ Club.</p>
<p>Yet a plot summary could represent the novel as no more than a variant of 1930s lending-library romances: a bored London housewife, Elvira Western, leaves her solid doctor husband, Paul, for a younger lover, Oliver Fenton, a student in Paris. </p>
<p>At every turn, though, the narrative undermines romantic expectations. There is an undertow of incestuous and same-sex attractions among the various heterosexual liaisons, along with daring depiction of casual couplings, and references to prostitutes, venereal disease and abortion. This is not the Paris of romantic love: dreams are nightmarish in a city of night rather than light.</p>
<h2>A ‘middle-class’ novel</h2>
<p>The action takes place in a specific timeframe in 1934, in a moment of political instability due to an economic downturn and the menace of fascism. It begins in March, with Paris still unsettled following an outbreak of violence in February, and ends in the winter of 1934–35. Throughout there are references to contemporary events, including the workers’ rallies in May attended by Oliver.</p>
<p>There is much political rhetoric. Characters’ analyses of such issues as the operation of capital are largely Marxist-Leninist, and to a significant extent are attributable to the input of William Blake. But they are the views of the characters, frequently belied by their actions, and not endorsed by Stead. The weight of this depiction of bad faith rests on Oliver.</p>
<p>Although he supports the workers by attending rallies, he harbours a desire for a career in business rather than academia. His commitment to the labour cause is expedient. The topic of his thesis, on which he works fitfully, is The French Workers’ Movement from the Commune to the Amsterdam Congress of 1904, chosen for easy archival access and exotic appeal to his English university. However, his cynicism rarely finds such epigrammatic expression as in his observation that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to this mocking definition, The Beauties and Furies is very much a middle-class novel, though bourgeois values and behaviour are among its targets. In the rich opening chapter, the first of a sequence of triangles is set up, involving the “runaway wife” (as Elvira is described in the List of Characters), her husband and “her lover, a student”. </p>
<p>The similarity of the names Elvira and Oliver is curious, and they are sometimes described as twins: Elvira’s brother Adam Cinips also enters the emotional equations. Oliver’s affairs with the actress Blanche and the lace artist Coromandel set up further triangles.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138897/original/image-20160922-25473-hjrquo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scene from Parsifal, from the Victola book of the opera (1917).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The idea of Paris as an underworld is spelled out by Annibale Marpurgo, “a lace-buyer”, a manipulative self- made cosmopolitan. His declaration that “Paris is Klingsor’s garden, to me” is typical of the range of allusion that Stead
deploys, here bringing into play Wagner’s opera based on the medieval Grail quest epic Parzival.</p>
<p>An “annotated crib” would tell us that in Wagner’s version, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Parsifal">Parsifal</a>, Klingsor— who has been denied entry to the Temple of the Holy Grail, despite having attempted to do away with his impure thoughts by self-castration — constructs a garden into which questing knights are seduced. The sexual connotations are especially relevant. Similar intertextual references proliferate in the novel, including an explicit invocation of Ulysses when Oliver reads to Elvira as she is lying ill (an episode that tells us a lot about Oliver).</p>
<h2>Lace and capital</h2>
<p>From the first chapter, where Marpurgo trades radical credentials with Oliver, political affiliation is a persistent topic in The Beauties and Furies. Marpurgo declares that they are “Brothermarxists … and brother fantasts”, tossing in mention of the Arabian Nights and Hegel.</p>
<p>Elvira refers to the economic determinism of capitalism, using imagery from lace manufacture to enunciate a tension between romantic dreams and fate: “Life’s a pattern, and we’re just shuttles rushing in and out thinking we are making jerks up and down freely.” The image is potent, playing into the role of the lace industry in the novel as well as signalling that these characters lack agency.</p>
<p>Although the characters articulate insights both about others and themselves, these rarely translate into action, any more than do such histrionic processes of irresolution as this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Elvira sat at home and ate olives and chocolates alternately. She also wound herself, slow, cold, beautifully-diamonded, as a snake, round the problem, and colder and more forbidding grew her brow. She began to smoke, and was presently smoking the chamber full of her resentment, desolation and increasing resolution.</p>
<p>‘What a damned traitor!’ she cried, beside herself with impatience. Her smoke-trails, as she paced about, were like wraiths waiting about the ceiling to topple on Oliver’s much-cursed and oft-coddled black topknot.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Stead took pains to study the practical aspects of lace-making. The industry provides an economic case study of a venerable craft being overtaken by mechanisation. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138743/original/image-20160922-11676-1x9zarc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lace from Lille.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Dictionary of Needlework/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The novel focuses on the businessmen who manage the trade, the Fuseaux brothers (“lace-jobbers”) and their employee Marpurgo: the operatives are not seen. Paradoxically, these economic issues are explored in some of Stead’s most fantastical writing, particularly in the presentation of the Paindebled family, whose members literally live off the past. Both the Paindebled house and shop are repositories of lace as a work of art, exemplified by the prized umbrella cover, a beautiful decorative object entirely lacking utility.</p>
<p>The Paindebled daughter, Coromandel, despite her family context has more agency than any other character in the novel — as demonstrated in a seduction scene that enactsa metaphysical poem like Donne’s “The Good Morrow” (“This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere”).</p>
<p>Later she carries Oliver off on a crazy drive into the countryside. She can operate in the bucolic environment of the farm in Burgundy, beyond the house and shop. Along with Blanche, the characters in the lace storyline are the only Parisians among the dramatis personae: the others are transients.</p>
<p>Stead reaches beyond the immediate setting in the allusion of the title to the Furies of Greek mythology, goddesses of vengeance who brought pestilence and misfortune. Marpurgo says that Paris “has many beauties — and furies”, and the three central beauties, Elvira, Blanche and Coromandel, all become destructive furies.</p>
<p>“Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone send me for you,” says the Machiavellian Marpurgo to Oliver — who he is about to lead into a hypnotic drunken revel. In a welter of allusion, Marpurgo casts himself as Laius, father of Oedipus, and addresses Oliver as Orestes, who was pursued by the Furies for killing his mother.</p>
<p>The classical references reinforce Stead’s alignment with Joyce, which is evident also in the wordplay of Oliver’s poems. Like Ulysses, The Beauties and Furies is concentrated in a particular city at a particular historical juncture, though its action extends beyond a single day to run across a full year. </p>
<p>The novel is shaped by the cycle of the seasons, within which is conducted the minuet of characters meeting and parting, mainly in interiors or nocturnal scenes from which the natural world is largely excluded. The seasonal round offers no promise of anything other than a different version of the same kinds of romantic illusion and delusion that have been delineated with such exhilarating energy over some 350 pages.</p>
<p>The Beauties and Furies is a challenging novel of breathtaking ambition. Surrender to it, and marvel.</p>
<p><em>This is the introduction to the <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-beauties-and-furies">new Text Classic edition</a> of The Beauties and Furies.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65803/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margaret Harris is the literary executor for the estate of Christina Stead.</span></em></p>The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/524702015-12-24T08:22:08Z2015-12-24T08:22:08ZFive dark literary Christmases that don’t involve Ebeneezer Scrooge<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106491/original/image-20151217-8097-107iz8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'On yer bike, Ebeneezer.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When we think of literature with festive themes, many will think first of Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol (1843). Ebeneezer Scrooge’s journey from capitalist miser to lover of humanity, via the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, is as much a part of the festive season as turkey and crackers. </p>
<p>But not all texts involving Christmas are quite as effusive about human redemption and kindness. Here are my top five festive scenes for those that appreciate the darker side of Christmas. </p>
<h2>1. Sylvia Plath: Balloons</h2>
<p>“Since Christmas they have lived with us,” writes Plath of the leftover balloons in <a href="https://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Balloons">this poem</a>. Christmas is not always a time of the year that she cherishes. In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3094683-the-unabridged-journals-of-sylvia-plath">her diary</a>, she refers to one December 25 that left her “overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas”. </p>
<p>In Balloons, Plath is speaking to her daughter. She writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your small</p>
<p>Brother is making<br>
His balloon squeak like a cat. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She describes her son biting the balloon and sitting with “A red/ Shred in his little fist”. Alongside the red symbolism that is <a href="http://chhsadvancedmodc.weebly.com/red.html">so prominent</a> in Plath’s poetry, the gesture feels hauntingly violent.</p>
<p>The poem was written on February 3 1963, six days before Plath <a href="http://www.imitatio.org/mimetic-theory/mark-anspach/sylvia-plaths-suicide-and-the-shadow-of-her-father.html">took her own life</a>, leaving behind those two children to one of the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-10-worst-british-winters-ever-8945584.html">coldest English winters</a> of the century. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Squeak like a cat.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=QiIFgFdYqluyC-sOibEW1Q&searchterm=burst%20red%20balloon&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=224626726">Africa Studio</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights</h2>
<p>Chapter seven of <a href="http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/index.php">Wuthering Heights</a> presents a rural homely Christmas – before all is ruined. The housekeeper-narrator Nelly Dean sets the scene:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[After] putting my cakes in the oven, and making the house and kitchen cheerful with great fires, befitting Christmas Eve, I prepared to sit down and amuse myself by singing carols, all alone … I smelt the rich scent of heating spices; and admired the shining kitchen utensils, the polished clock, decked in holly, the silver mugs ranged on a tray ready to be filled with mulled ale for supper; and above all, the speckless purity of my particular care – the scoured and well-swept floor. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The context is that Hindley Earnshaw, the master of Wuthering Heights, is bent on making his adoptive brother Heathcliff’s life a misery. Heathcliff was taken in as a homeless gypsy boy by Hindley’s father, who grew more fond of him than his son. Now that the father is dead, Hindley is finally able to take revenge. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Oh Heathcliff!’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottliddle/2245557197/in/photolist-4qr4Vp-5avFwa-pRw6u2-6FcyeJ-2LtD49-dcuLf2-dcuMps-6V54dd-LHG6u-6LS6UV-dcuMjN-dcuLjv-dcuMuo-dcuMwY-dcuLFd-dcuKzn-dcuKFx-uT5Dwh-6D7u8W-dcuLDf-dcuLz7-dcuKHx-dcuKLg-dcuLRb-dcuKUT-dcuLwD-9ZbH6a-dcuLQc-6D7Cph-Ez8KL-6D7srG-dcuL8n-6KU5ZA-dcuLS8-4TsLa4-dcuM3E-dcuMFh-6F8ruc-962eRM-a1vgmT-9Zbirx-dcuLN8-dcuLcP-dcuKWT-dcuMdL-dcuKuz-doxnMk-dcuLKB-dcuLH8-dcuMDh">Scott MacLeod Liddle</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hindley’s sister Catherine, with whom Heathcliff is in love, has just returned from five weeks away. After Hindley tells her she may treat him as a servant, she greets him haughtily, identifying how dirty he looks. Nelly fears this has deeply wounded Heathcliff and persuades him to become more presentable. Her efforts are thwarted when Edgar Linton, Catherine’s rich suitor, laughs at Heathcliff’s long hair. Heathcliff seizes “a hot tureen of Apple sauce” and throws it at him, resulting in a sound flogging from Hindley. </p>
<h2>3. James Joyce: The Dead</h2>
<p>Joyce said the short stories in Dubliners were a portrait of his home city as “the centre of paralysis”. The final story, The Dead, features Gabriel Conroy, an aspirational journalist visiting his ageing aunts on a snowy Feast of the Epiphany. It’s a very subtle story that deals with disappointment, betrayal, lost love, social class and Irish nationalism. Here is Joyce’s description of the dinner table:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one with port and the other dark sherry. On the closed piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colour of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Notice how eerily military everything is in this scene, reflecting the status of colonial Ireland in the early 20th century. </p>
<p>By the end of the story, we have a moving account of snow falling across the country, <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/re-joyce-john-brannigan/?k=9780333683828&loc=uk">just as it</a> did during the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.shtml">Great Famine</a> of 1845-52. In many ways, this renders the dinner table even more unreal. Nobody actually eats very much, it seems. </p>
<h2>4. Nikolai Gogol: The Night Before Christmas</h2>
<p>This short story comes from <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195680.Village_Evenings_Near_Dikanka_Mirgorod">Village Evenings Near Dikanka</a>, a Ukrainian-themed collection. It is ostensibly for children, but there is nothing conventionally merry about the narrative. Christmas is very quickly disrupted by the Devil and a witch on a broomstick. </p>
<p>The Devil wants revenge over our lovelorn hero, the devout blacksmith Vakula, for making grotesque portraits of him for the church. He creates a blizzard, so that “the air became white and thick with hurtling snow”. He steals the moon, and hides in a coal sack. </p>
<p>Vakula triumphs in the end, but not before we’ve been taken to St Petersburg in search of Catherine the Great’s slippers, which Oksana, Vakula’s intended, is demanding before she will marry him. When Vakula meets the empress, she agrees to give them to him: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you want shoes like mine, that’s easy to arrange. Right away there, bring him my most expensive pair, the ones with gold embroidery.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lock up your slippers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&searchterm=russia%20devil&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=305940647">volkovslava</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. Thomas Hardy: A Christmas Ghost Story</h2>
<p>This poem, dated Christmas Eve 1899, is an acerbic reflection on the nature of war and the ineffectiveness of Christianity. The speaker is a British soldier, killed in South Africa during the <a href="http://www.angloboerwar.com/boer-war">Boer War</a>. It’s a highly combative poem, featuring a series of accusatory questions, culminating in this devastating statement: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The cause in question is peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Hardy republished the poem during World War I, as a statement of pacifism. Alas, 100 years later, it is a lesson which still goes unheeded.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire has received funding from AHRC. </span></em></p>Dicken’s great anti-hero has monopolised festive literature for too long. Here are the alternative takes on the season of goodwill that you have been missing.Claire Nally, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/384982015-03-10T03:26:31Z2015-03-10T03:26:31ZThe amateur’s age of unriddling: Finnegans Wake on stage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74036/original/image-20150306-3321-1t868u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Olwen Fuoéré performing riverrun, her stage adaptation of James Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Colm Hogan, Adelaide Festival of Arts</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventy five years after publication, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake may finally be starting to make sense. Although unreadable for most, Joyce’s final work is extremely listenable. And this partly explains the extraordinary success of riverrun, Olwen Fouéré’s theatrical version of extracts from Finnegans Wake, which <a href="https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2015/riverrun">opens this week </a> at the Sydney Theatre Company after its <a href="https://theconversation.com/river-of-life-olwen-foueres-riverrun-at-the-adelaide-festival-37841">Australian premiere</a> at the Adelaide Festival.</p>
<p>French-born, Irish-raised Fouéré had the idea for the show while in Sydney in 2011. </p>
<p>On being invited to participate in Bloomsday, June 16, the date on which Joyce’s works are celebrated all over the world, Fouéré volunteered to read from Finnegans Wake. “I could feel this higher frequency all through the room,” she <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/riverrun3a-a-reimagining-of-finnegan27s-wake/6144772">told</a> ABC Radio National, “and I thought, this is my next piece – the voice of the river in Finnegans Wake.”</p>
<p>The title of her show is taken from the first word in the book. “riverrun” is in lower-case because the book begins and ends mid-sentence, the last word leading back to the beginning. Finnegan also suggests circular beginnings and endings – Finn: end, egan: again – as well being a reference to the children’s song Michael Finnegan, about a man whose whiskers grew on his chin until the wind blew them in again, a typically playful and surreal image for this supremely playful text.</p>
<h2>Joyce’s amateurs</h2>
<p>Joyce studies has often been seen as belonging to a handful of eccentric academics but the truth is that many respected “scholars” of Joyce are actually “amateurs”, in the best sense of the word. Fritz Senn, director of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, was a university drop-out. At 86, he is the godfather of international Joyce studies. </p>
<p>American Adaline Glasheen, author of three editions of A Census of Finnegans Wake – a work attempting the hugely difficult task of identifying all the shifting characters in the Wake - described her occupation on the actual US census as “housewife”. </p>
<p>We can now add to that a new generation of net-savvy Joyce aficionados - with no connections to higher education institutions – who are bringing the Wake to new audiences, a wonderful example of what Glasheen describes as “the amatuer’s age of unriddling”.</p>
<p>Adam Harvey, of New Mexico, otherwise known as <a href="joycegeek.com">Joyce Geek</a>, provides previews of his stage show, “Don’t Panic: it’s only Finnegans Wake” as well as mini online-tutorials on how to pronounce the 100-letter “thunderwords” that appear regularly throughout the text. </p>
<p>Rafael Slepon of Israel has created an easy to use <a href="fweet.org">online glossary </a>that he describes as the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury with more than 83,000 elucidations. And if you don’t feel like going it alone, there are 33 <a href="finneganswake.org">Finnegans Wake reading groups </a>worldwide, including three in Australia – Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane.</p>
<h2>Australian Joyce</h2>
<p>As well as being the initial inspiration for the production of riverrun, Australia has also produced one of the most important Wakean scholars: Clive Hart, originally from Western Australia and now retired from the University of Essex. </p>
<p>With Fritz Senn, Hart produced A Wake Newslitter, the first regular newsletter dedicated to Wake studies, originally mimeographed and distributed to the world by post from the University of Sydney. “We would stress that the aim of this Newslitter is to provide a vehicle for the rapid dissemination of knowledge among Joyceans,” the two editors wrote in the first edition of 1962.</p>
<p>A Wake Newslitter was groundbreaking in its non-mainstream, amateur style. “If it had been done in the 1990s or 2000s it would be the academic equivalent of the zine,” says UQ Joyce scholar Tony Thwaites. “It was one of the first major efflorescences of that inseparability of fan culture and scholarship that is so characteristic of Joyce studies.”</p>
<p>riverrun is currently listed under the Best of What’s On in the Qantas Inflight magazine, not a journal I would normally be searching for Joycean references. Perhaps this means that this masterful work, which drew on so much of the popular culture of Joyce’s era, has finally penetrated the popular culture of our own. </p>
<p>And maybe, as in a lecture given to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London last year, the Wake is indeed “a masterwork for contemporary globalising cultures”. If you’re still doubtful, go to page 231. There you will find the word “googling” long before Google was invented. </p>
<p><br>
riverrun will be performed in Sydney at the Sydney Theatre Company until April 11. Details <a href="https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2015/riverrun">here</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38498/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabrielle Carey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Olwen Fuoéré’s extraordinary adaptation of Finnegans Wake for the stage brings a work with a reputation for obscurity back into the realm of popular culture.Gabrielle Carey, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.