Happy Bloomsday everyone

[Fambo Number Mive]

I should probably try and read some Joyce this year, although I struggle to concentrate on reading these days, in my twenties I used to read loads but now I don't.

Apparently his love letters are very dirty. As is the story behind the date of Bloomsday.

[buttgammon]

It's my favourite book and I live in Dublin but I have covid so I've spent the day wallowing in bed unfortunately.

If you want to read some Joyce, I'd recommend starting with Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist first

[Glebe]

100th anniversary of Ulysses this year, innit? I'm Dublin born and bred so I'm rather ashamed to admit that I've never actually read any Joyce.

[kalowski]

Ulysses is magnificent, but I must admit it took me three goes and I still struggle with chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun).

[buttgammon]

Ulysses is magnificent, but I must admit it took me three goes and I still struggle with chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun).

If you're really curious about Oxen, some parts of it have been 'translated' into a more accessible English (most recently in the new Oxford Annotations to Joyce's Ulysses, which unfortunately happens to a massive and very expensive book, albeit also a very good one). With some hard work and annotations covering every page, I've got there in terms of understanding what's going on in the chapter but still struggle to answer the question people often ask of why it's written in that style. Yes, it's a parallel of gestation of a foetus with the development of language and we can reverse-engineer much of it to find Joyce's sources, but why he decided to do this at this point is much more obscure.

[Fambo Number Mive]

You can read parts from James Joyce's very NSFW love letters here: https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nora-barnacle

You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole...

[Glebe]

You can read parts from James Joyce's very NSFW love letters here: https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nora-barnacle

You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole...

[willbo]

did he want those letters seen by the public?

[bgmnts]

Was he mates with Trenter??

[buttgammon]

did he want those letters seen by the public?

When his letters were first published in a three volume collection, the culmination of a long and difficult editorial process, these were omitted, but were then included in a later collection; I'm not sure what changed the editor's mind but Joyce's son Giorgio and his notoriously litigious grandson Stephen were still alive so it was certainly a bold decision.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Yes, it's a parallel of gestation of a foetus with the development of language and we can reverse-engineer much of it to find Joyce's sources, but why he decided to do this at this point is much more obscure.

I've thought about this a lot. Can't believe I missed a chance to go off on one of my favourite topics. I think you have to take the Homer parallels off the table for this one and look at it is as a point where formal considerations start to overwhelm the literary "content" in terms of the book starting to turn its machine of correspondences inward from the outwardly referential - and this seems a crazy thing to say about Oxen, but bear with me. The exhausting amount of literary reference in Oxen is that trademark Joyce obscurity gathering steam, obscuring the fact that the book is now more interested in referencing itself and not pointing outward to other sources. As old conservative commentators used to say, its the point where the book starts to appear to write itself which is an "in" to comprehending Joyce's choice of gestation and why that theme is united with the development of language at exactly this point. I think its important to remember that Joyce would have found the idea of a narrative or linear developmet of language or literature absurd, he mocks that so much in Finnegans Wake. And he considered older writers more complex and developed than contemporary ones. He loves cycles and rediscovery, he's not a fan of whole cosmic evolution thing that was popular at the time. So why is he putting all his eggs in that basket here?

Joyce was obsessed with gestation and pregnancy, apparently he spent a lot of time listening to Nora's womb when she was pregnant. Returning to a fetus was one of his sexual fantasies. Compositionally it makes sense that it would come at that part as its culmination of the formal elaboration of Ulysses - the progression of the musical fugue in Sirens, the interlacing parts of Wandering Rocks and the two voices of Nausicaa.  The important idea is that fetal development is not only a progression but a progression that involves recapitulation to earlier forms, which gives a handle on why the books self-referentiality and reference to other sources getting is knotted up at this point and not earlier. If you think back to Proteus we already have Stephen using gestation as a metaphor for all formal invention in human arts with his gnostic digression, and I think Joyce may have had gestation in mind as a metaphor for his own work much earlier - keeping recapitulation in mind, we've already had form of forms so why not the book as the gestation of gestation in the "the creature of creatures", as the liberation of Bloom and Stephen from their grief. iirc Kiberd marked it as the highest point of emancipation in his old foreword. It makes perfect sense to me in terms of formal placement - and the comedy and irony of it ending up more purely masculine than even Cyclop is maybe intentional, as is the counterpoint to Stephen's vision of the two women on the beach in Proteus. But If I'm badly wrong here there is an biographical explanation - Sirens exhausted Joyce and nearly sent him into a breakdown, and famously his friends hated it and some even hated Cyclops. As the episodic writing motivated the escalating formal experimentation and the books increasing self-reference, there may have been a practical need to bring things to a head at that point. But ultimately to me, asking why Joyce choose pregnancy to unite style and narrative at the moment where Bloom and Stephen first really overlap is a bit like asking why he was obsessed with the Catholic church. It also makes plain his refocusing of excoriation of Dublin bourgeois life from hospitality and generosity to fecundity, which I believe he still had in mind for years afterwards - the celebration of hospitality and the men sharing drinks while a woman gives birth has its parallels in Finnegans Wake where the neglected river is corrupted as Dublin develops its middle class industries. In the idea of fecundity and how its been neglected and abused by both religious and bourgeois societies, Joyce is showing his fascination with how artistic creation and gestation serve as mutual but deeply flawed metaphors for each other - they're like Gerty and Bloom on the beach, sending mixed signals to each from afar, but they don't interpenetrate or reach each other because of their nature. The closer art becomes to being a real creation of life and the more pregnancy is turned into an art (in the sense that includes science) the more they resemble each other but they less contact they have with each other in reality. Stephen's ideas are very ironic echos of his pontification on Shakespeare because there is a total intimacy between life and art but here he is speaking across a vast gulf, mere boy who think of himself as a creator, and the Joycean paradox is that huge gulf is what allows such a profound point of contact.

It surprises me that this as a theme is so overlooked by commentators and annotators. I think more feminists who deplore Joyce's books have noticed it than Joyce scholars, because they read it as an antipathy to all things maternal and matriarchal, and link it to the allegedly matricidal vision of Stephen's mother and sister as undead spirits. Which inverts the theme of fecundity from emancipation through creation to imprisonment. I disagree of course, but the theme is undeniably all over his work, some readers of Finnegans Wake have suggested that sections of that are also modelled on gestation, such as the resurrection of HCE as "Humph" and parts of the seance in the third part. A lot of parts of Finnegans Wake that are attributed to a sleeper or a corpse do pop out a bit more in reading if one imagines them in the voice of a fetus whether this is authorial intention or not. There's also a very suggestive idea that Joyce came around to Plato's principal of anamnesis which is referenced a few times, or just found the idea funny which would have been more than enough for him to dwell on it. As Platonist scum myself, I think the word "anamnesis" describes what Joyce is doing in Oxen perfectly. And it is kind of a reversal of the Last Supper - I think Joyce had more sympathy for Mary losing her son than Jesus being betrayed and crucified, since betrayal was a normal fact of life for him but a mother losing a son is an intense spiritual grief that is too big for the regular world to handle, the shadow of George Joyce is everywhere. Its also a reversal of the Last Supper as the chapter that locks-in Stephen's "destiny" to arrive at the place that Joyce's great betrayal was reversed. If Jesus condemned Judas to betray him by prophesizing a betrayal, here Bloom and Stephen are condemned to redemption in a sense by going back to what is the scene of betrayal in Ulysses but the scene of Joyce's own redemption in reality. But the books redemptive arc and emanicipating arcs mutually entwine and compromise each other as they reach their conclusion, which is in itself a pretty neat redoubling of the pangs in childbirth metaphor.

Unfortunately David Jason never received the letter he sent begging him to play Richard Rowan in Exiles.