Child of Fire, "The Dead"

I was pleasantly surprised by Harry Connolly's Child of Fire.  It's a first novel that a few people had told me was worth taking a look at, and amazon had a sale on it, so I picked it up, despite my misgivings.

I think the publisher does the book a disservice by making it seem more generic than it really is.  For one thing, the cover screams "generic urban fantasy."  The jacket copy reads like another tough-guy urban fantasy.  But the actual book is not so typical.  Ray Lilly, the protagonist, is pretty  is squeamish and vomits when confronted with violence.  In addition, in a genre filled with powerful heroes (Harry Dresden, John Taylor), Ray is just a sidekick, and an expendable one at that.

My major beef with the book is that it constantly alludes to a back story between the two major characters, but leaves it completely opaque.  This is clearly just sequel fodder, which is just annoying.

I was listening to a lecture on literary analysis, and the best thing about reading literary analysis is that it can inspire you to re-read a book, or in this case a short story.  The lecturer was talking about Joyce's use of symbolism in "The Dead," a story that I've talked about before.  My feelings about the story haven't changed particularly, so I won't rehash them (I'm a little less sanguine about Gabriel's chances of changing than I was, but I still think "The Dead" is the most optimistic story in the collection).  But it's interesting to see the craft in Joyce's use of light & dark, snow, and open spaces.  Joyce uses light and darkness to separate Gabriel from his wife, as well as to show Gabriel's isolation from others.

The snow, of course, links everyone together -- Ireland is a metonomy for the world, I think.  This goes without saying, except it gives me a chance to quote the beautiful ending:

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I have changed my idea that the story is told from Gabriel's viewpoint.  The beginning is told from the maid's perspective: "LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."  Gabriel would never make such a solecism as "literally run off her feet."  In the first half of the story we whirl in and out of Gabriel's consciousness.  We have to see from outside sometimes, so that we can have a foretaste of his epiphany when he sees himself in the mirror.

Ulysses -- Penelope

I've been in Israel for the past week, so lots of books to post about, but I wanted to round off the postings of Ulysses first.  "Penelope" is Molly Bloom's chapter, and it's the first time we get to see her properly, instead of second-hand, through other characters' viewpoints.

On the one hand, Molly provides us with a lot of details about Bloom.  The one that most stuck out for me this time is that Bloom in fact can't seem to hold down a job.  We've heard about his problems with convincing Wisdom Healy to use more interesting advertising methods, but I'd been assuming that this disagreement stemmed from Bloom's role as a canvasser for the Freeman's Journal, but it's the other way around -- Healy threw him out when Bloom persisted in arguing with Healy about his advertising methods, and that's why Bloom is now canvassing for the Journal.

It's interesting, because of course through the whole novel, the impression we have of Bloom is the hard-working relatively successful man, but through Molly's eyes we see a man who is occasionally too smart for his own good, who would just as soon hang out around the house all day instead of getting out and working.

It also turns out that Bloom's neuroses that are exposed in "Circe" are not entirely buried in his psyche, but come out in his relationship with Molly.  This isn't really a surprise, though.

Lastly, this chapter tells us that Molly has only been unfaithful once, today, even though we know from "Ithaca" that Bloom suspects it has been pretty frequent.  On the other hand, Molly suspects Bloom of infidelity, and we know that, at least today, she's also incorrect.

Ulysses -- Ithaca

One sentence that jumped out at me was when Joyce parallels each event in the day to a religious event (the service of St. John, simchat torah, etc).  I think this is so interesting, because it shows that the Odyssey parallels are far from the only lens through which to view Ulysses, and Joyce is here lending his imprimatur to those other lenses.  I think that some analyses focus too much on the parallels to the Odyssey, and those are really only a framework on which Joyce was building this novel.  (He also had an organ, a color, and an art form for each section, but we rarely find in-depth discussions of those).

I would argue that, although those parallels are interesting, there's so much more going on that you can miss the forest for the trees by focusing on this one aspect of the novel's scaffolding.

As to the actual substance of the episode; it's probably the densest episode in the book.  We can deduce Stephen and Bloom's ages, the size of Bloom's muscles, the books in his bookshelf, and so on.  It's almost a case study in throwing so much information at readers that relevant details are subsumed.  For example, Molly has not even tried to hide her dalliance with Boylan, leaving his cigarette stubs out in plain view for Bloom.  This is tremendously important (does she despise Bloom?  is she hoping to get a rise out of him?), but it's given as much emphasis as how old Bloom would be in the year 1933.

And Kenner points out that even in all these details, the items left out are important.  When Bloom tallies up his budget for the day, he leaves out Bella Cohen.

This section also shows Stephen at his worst, I think.  When he and Bloom trade songs, Bloom sings "Hatikva," while Stephen sings an anti-semitic song.  At best Stephen is deliberately obtuse, not realizing that the song would hurt Bloom's feelings.  At worst, Stephen wants to upset Bloom.

Ulysses -- Circe and Eumaeus

I'm going to skip over the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, because I find I don't have so much to say about it, except that it's really great, and is probably tied with "Cyclops" for favorite.

With that bit of fanboy gushing out of the way...
This time through Ulysses, I found "Circe" and "Eumaeus" to be the most painful to read/listen to.  "Circe" of course is well-known to be very difficult, but "Eumaeus" is typically considered an easy read.  At the end of Circe, we and Bloom emerge with a sense of triumph.  We readers have conquered a very difficult section of prose, and Bloom has (for now) come to terms with his dead son, his feelings of inadequacy, and so on, and is prepared to move on and extend a helping hand to Stephen.

We readers know that Stephen has been searching for a father-figure, and also that he needs a bit of prodding to put his life on the right path.  Bloom, on the other hand, wants a son and is searching for a connection to someone he can talk to.  Both are outcasts.  Bloom is an intellectual in his way (mostly on the scientific side), while Stephen is an intellectual in a more ivory-tower way, but it seems like they could find some common ground.

Instead, though, we find in "Eumaeus" mis-step after mis-step.  Bloom hears the sailors' Italian and says it's a beautiful language; Stephen tells him they're just haggling over money.  Bloom calls Stephen an orthodox catholic, when he's anything but.  Bloom, trying to find something to talk about, says that Stephen's father is proud of him -- he could hardly pick a worse conversation-starter.  Stephen for his part is drunk, but on top of that is a bit of jerk.

Also, it may just be the narrator of the version I'm listening to, but this time around I really agree with Kenner's suggestion that the voice in "Eumaeus" is Bloom's.  All of his circumlocutions, his infelicities that pop up from time to time in the narrative are brought to the forefront, and we feel a bit embarrassed for him.  Bloom really isn't much of a raconteur, and he tends to wander off the subject, and it's easy to see why others aren't very friendly to him, aside from their anti-semitic tendencies.

Ulysses -- Nausicaa

Most of the analysis of this section that I've read works from the assumption that the point of view of the first half is Gertie McDowell's, but I don't think so, for a couple of reasons.  Instead, I think the POV is Leopold Bloom's, as he imagines what Gertie might be thinking.  There are a couple of giveaways, I think.

First, Gertie gives us a couple of times reasons why she won't run down the strand with the others.  It's only when she stands up that we realize the real reason is because she's lame.  We come to this realization at the same time as Bloom does, because he's watching her.  Second, she reflects that Bloom looks a bit like a movie star.  Since nobody else in the book seems to find him particularly movie-star-like, I submit that he's projecting that thought onto her; he doesn't just want her to think that he's Jewish-looking, rather, he's dark, handsome, and mysterious.

This is important because Bloom makes Gertie complicit in his own "release," and many commentators talk about the way Joyce combines opposites, with the connection of Gertie to Mary, and at the same time her connection to Bloom's issues.  But I think that the opposition is inside Bloom -- we see how conflicted Bloom is in the "Circe" chapter, after all.

Ulysses -- Cyclops

I finished the "Cyclops" chapter, which, as I mentioned earlier is one of my favorites.

It's almost a perfect balance between Joyce's tomfoolery with language and obscurity.  The parody in "Nausicaa" gets old after a while, while the "Sirens" is hard to understand.  But here, Joyce seemingly effortlessly jumps from Dublin dialect to mock-heroic narration to newspaper reportage, each one as funny as the next.

At the same time, the actual events are simpler to follow than "Oxen of the Sun" (at least for me).  Bloom confronts an anti-semite, utters a stinging blow (verbally, of course), and then retreats with the citizen throwing a can at his retreating cab.  Aside from the humor of the mock-heroism, I think Joyce uses it to show that it can take a measure of heroism to confront evil in our own daily lives.  At first, Bloom endures meekly the taunts of the others, but at the end he comes back in to say "Your God was a Jew like me."

Bloom has been spending some time trying to get money for Paddy Dignam's widow and children, for which he is also roundly mocked and criticized.  I think that his continuing in this thankless task is also a heroic action.

Joyce then elevates Bloom to Elijah-like status (some say Christ-figure, but I think it's worth noting that he's riding on a "chariot", which is a thing associated with Elijah).  We could see this as a mockery of Bloom, but I think that Joyce is ennobling him; Bloom is a hero, even if his foes are not obvious bad guys like the cyclops.

Ulysses

I finished one of my least favorite episodes today, "The Sirens", which sits right after one that I've really come to like a lot, "The Wandering Rocks."

In the siren episode, Joyce tries to imitate a piece of music, starting with the warmup, which pre-figures themes to come:

BRONZE BY GOLD HEARD THE HOOFIRONS, STEELYRINING IMPERthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the

Gold pinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.

Trilling, trilling: I dolores.

For me, this is just obscure for the sake of obscurity.  Unlike the other obscurities in the novel, I think that this is one that gives no enjoyment if you're not already in on the joke.  By contrast, the changing literary styles in, say, the "Golden Oxen" episode are fun to read even if you don't get the pregnancy symbolism.  Since starting to write this entry, I've begun the "Cyclops" episode, and the same thing is true -- the mix of literary styles is very funny, even if you don't understand quite why they're there.

By contrast, the "Wandering Rocks" episode seems like an exercise in lucidity.  I understand that that's one of the traps Joyce has laid -- the chapter is not quite as straightforward as it seems, with its tricks like referring to the wrong Bloom -- but it's still a section that's very rewarding even on the most surface reading.  Joyce's portrait of Father Conmee is satirical and affectionate at once; he manages to throw a lot of pathos into the short bit with Stephen's family; and so on.  I can imagine excerpting just this chapter to hand to someone as an independent short story, called "An Hour in the Life of Dublin" or something.

As I mentioned above, I've just started on the "Cyclops", one of my other favorites, and a huge contrast to the clarity of "Wandering Rocks."

Ulysses, The Magician's Accomplice

The Magician's Accomplice was one of those conspiracy books that just spirals out of control.  We have something like 30 people murdered in the space of a few weeks, and yet we're supposed to believe it's a secret conspiracy.

More interestingly, I'm listening to the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses.  Ulysses is probably one of the most-commented-on novels of the 20th century, and this episode in particular draws a lot of commentary because of what it says about Stephen Dedalus's relationship with his father, other poets, Shakespeare, and so on.  But all the commentary that I've seen on-line talks about the external world, so to speak -- what actually happens in the episode, what the conversations say about the characters, etc.

But I think it's important that in the episode the narrator's voice starts to break down.  (The narrator intrudes in "Aeolus" by putting in headlines, but not into the actual flow of the text).  At first, the narrator confines himself to making puns or doublets (the Quaker librarian speaks "quakingly"), but then starts mixing up character's names with each other, sometimes to the point of ludicrousness.  Although Stephen is the controlling point-of-view for this episode, the narrator's games are not the sort of intellectual tricks that Stephen indulges in.

I do think that any description of the section that leaves out this feature of the narration is missing an essential piece; it's as striking as Joyce's use of play format for the "Circe" section.

Ulysses, Matisse Stories, Stalking the Unicorn

I finished Stalking the Unicorn, but it wasn't worth it.  Too many forced jokes, and Resnick doesn't know how a detective story should be structured -- you can't have the big plot revelation 75% of the way into the novel; the rest is waay to anticlimactic at that point.

A.S. Byatt's Matisse Stories was also incredibly disappointing.  In general, I'm a big fan of her writing; I loved Possession, loved her short fiction, and even liked The Biographer's Tale, which was relatively weak.  But the Matisse Stories just didn't have a spark to them.  Part of it was the way things sometimes felt contrived (Gerda Himmelblau's name means "heaven blue", a phrase that is repeated through the story to indicate terror of open spaces).

And I've begun listening to Joyce's Ulysses again.  It's one of those books where new things jump out every time.  In the Telemachus section, we move from the solid outside world, starting with a sentence about Buck Mulligan, rather than Stephen Dedalus.  We gradually move into Stephen's interior world until we get to the solid interiority of the third episode.  Then we go back to the exterior world for the first Bloom episode (although this time we start immediately with Bloom himself).

What I love about Ulysses is the way that it's a sort of showcase for a lot of ways of writing.  The newspaper section is wonderfully impressionistic, as conversations overlap and we read them overlapping, yet it's always clear who's responding to whom.  I must admit that I don't get the point of Stephen's story about the two women, but someday I will...

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man redux

So, I've blogged about each part of Portrait, but how does it stand as a whole?

I think the biggest thing I realized this time through is how disciplined the work is. Portrait always invites comparison to Ulysses, because it seems that Joyce is trying out the techniques that he will present to such great effect in the later work. Also, Stephen is our viewpoint at the beginning of Ulysses, so it seems like Ulysses is picking up where Portrait left off.

But I now think that this comparison is unfortunate and unfair to Portrait, which can stand strongly on its own. Ulysses is the flashier of the two, showing off Joyce's brilliance at every turn Every effect in Ulysses is on a large scale -- where Joyce wants to put some literary effects into a section, he puts in 57. Portrait is much more naturalistic as subtle in its effects. It's easy to read through and not notice the alliterations and other effects, or the change in the narrator's speech patterns, though Joyce clues you in on the first page.

Joyce is a subtle writer, but in Portrait not so fond of puzzles for their own sake, which may be why I found the footnotes here not terribly useful. We can trace the Dedalus family's descent into poverty without needing to know each address they move to -- mentions of twice-watered tea served in jam-pots instead of cups tell us all we need to know. Stephen himself is overly clever, but I think we're not necessarily supposed to understand each of his allusions -- he's just playing intellectual games for their empty sake. When he writes for himself alone (in the diary fragments at the end), he's generally straightforward, although of course fragmentary and cryptic to outsiders.

I suppose anyone writing about Portrait is tempted to think about how much is autobiographical. Stephen lives in many of the same places as Joyce, he has the same preoccupations about the Irish language, he has bad vision, and so on. I discussed in an earlier post the question about whether Stephen's artistic manifesto is really Joyce's -- is he giving us a way to evaluate his work within the work itself?

But on this reading, I've come to think that really it doesn't matter so much. More clearly than any manifesto could, Joyce's writing shows us how the artist transforms the world he sees as a through a glass darkly into glittering words. Of course there's some relationship between the raw material and the finished work, but the work stands on its own. Just as Stephen transforms his raw experience into art (as his namesake Daedalus does), so Joyce has transformed his raw experience into Portrait.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (part 5)

Portrait is a pretty short book, so I was able to polish off part 5 as well today.

In part 5, Stephen outlines his aesthetic theory, which he draws largely from Aquinas. There are some who conflate Stephen's theory with Joyce's, but I think that Joyce intends this section to be something of a joke on Stephen. Stephen spends a lot of time fretting about the fate of the Irish language, which he feels is symbolized by the word "tundish," a word that the English priest doesn't know. But Stephen later realizes that the word actually has English roots, and is not Irish at all. I think that this is a micro version of Stephen's macro struggles to define himself -- he's constantly getting lost in a labyrinth of his own making (like his namesake Daedelus).

He wants to establish an independent aesthetic theory, but ends up drawing on the very Catholic Aquinas (my Penguin edition says that he owes less to Aquinas than to the Duns Scotus, but I think the point is that Stephen thinks that he's drawing heavily from Aquinas, even as he wants to reject Catholicism). Stephen also sets himself up as Satan with his non serviam, but he is also bound by Jesuitical modes of thinking.

In the end, he flees Ireland, but it's hard not to see his ultimate failure that comes in Ulysses, where he returns after a very short stay in France, and to recall Buck Mulligan's claims that Stephen's refusal to take the Eucharist had killed his mother. Even though I think we're not supposed to take Buck seriously (he's Antinous to Stephen's Telemachus), I think that he's addressing a real fear of Stephen's -- that his break with religion has indeed pushed his mother over the edge.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (part 4)

I wanted to set down my thoughts on part 4 of Portrait before I forget them...

Stephen gives up the idea of the priesthood, realizing that it was never a realistic option for him. As soon as he does, we get a beautiful (but somewhat purple) passage:

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds.

I think Joyce is showing us how overwhelmed Stephen suddenly is with the world, and how self-consciously he's poeticizing the world -- he can't even see all these things very well. The purpleness of the prose shows us that Stephen is still an adolescent, over-reacting to everything. From here, Joyce goes us on to throw a bunch of alliterations, compound words, and even 2 chiasmi at us, again showing us Stephen's sudden awakening, but also his immature over-reaction -- he wants to make a metaphor out of everything he sees, turning the girl wading in the sea into a bird, a tidepool into a silver ring, and so on.

Gawain and the Green Knight, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Over the weekend, I read Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight. I have the Tolkien translation, but haven't read it yet, so I don't have anything to compare it against. Having said that, I really enjoyed his translation. Although Armitage took some liberties with the a a | a x alliterative scheme, it seems that the Gawain poet did as well, and Armitage mostly manages to work in three alliterations per line, even if they're not on the first three stresses.

My biggest complaint was the weakness of his bob-and-wheel translations. In these sections, the poet switches to a rhyme and meter prosody that should be ababa, but Armitage often loses one of the a's, and sometimes even two of them. He does keep the rhythm, though, and I liked the way that it feels like a contrast to the longer lines above.

Speaking of alliterative lines, I finished the third part of Portrait, and it seems that Joyce added alliteration to Stephen's arsenal. There are a lot of alliterations, and I think they reflect Stephen's growing sense of the sound of words will become important as he decides to become a poet. In part 4, at least as far as I've read, both the compound words and alliterations have declined, because Stephen is going through a much more plain portion of his life, having renounced worldly pleasures. It'll be interesting to see if they resume as he abandons the priestly life.

Also, a note on the Penguin edition footnotes: they're godawful. There's one on "From the door of Byron's publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel... he had paced," that tells us that Clontarf Chapel is on Clontarf Road. What I want to know is how far that is from Byron's public house (because it might tells us something about Stephen's state of mind), or at least something about the neighborhood. (Or, if those things aren't particularly important, just don't have a footnote!)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I've just started re-reading Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I wanted to jot down something I'm noticing in part 2. Maybe the significance of it will come clear to me later, so I don't want to forget it...

Part 2 uses a lot of "Homeric" compound words, for want of a better word. We have, in a short space, "hollowsounding", "freshfaced", and "suddenrisen". In part 1, there aren't any, so this is a pretty marked change in style -- is it supposed to mark Stephen's sophistication? He's not reading Homer at this point in his education (I think). Although, come to think of it, the beginning of part 1 talks about the "moocow", so maybe this is a pretty direct way to show how Stephen's conceptions are becoming more sophisticated.

Added a bit later: In part 3, there are more compound words, this time focused around Stephen's religious epiphany (judgementseat, lurkingplace, bloodred, etc). Is it now part of the way Stephen looks at the world? The end of the book has Stephen conflating a girl and a bird -- maybe this is a prefiguring of the way he combines disparate concepts. I'll have to see if these words appear much outside of the sermon in this section.

Dubliners

I just finished reading Joyce's Dubliners. I'm not really sure why I've waited this long to read it -- I love Ulysses, and I enjoyed Portrait. Maybe I was worried about being let down -- after all, Joyce matured considerably as a writer between Dubliners and Ulysses.

But I needn't have worried -- Dubliners was fantastic. Joyce is very different here from in Ulysses. In Ulysses, Joyce is largely inward-focused, even, I think, in the most impersonal chapters (the catechism chapter and the Circe section). In most of Dubliners, though, what we get is mostly impersonal. In "Clay", for example, Tom is moved almost to tears at the end of the story, but Joyce doesn't tell us why. Even the first-person narrative stories don't tell us much about what the protagonists are actually feeling.

The exceptions are "Eveline", "The Little Cloud", and "The Dead." I think "Eveline" was one of the weaker stories precisely because it is so inward-focused. It's just so obvious where it's going, and so the epiphany doesn't feel like a true sudden awakening. "The Little Cloud", I think, is starting to move in a different direction from "Eveline". It's true that we see most of the story through the main character's eyes, and we get to see some of his thinking, but it's clear that a lot of what he's seeing isn't necessarily true (for example, he's envious of his friend Gallaher's life, whereas I think the audience is supposed to see Gallaher's lifestyle as meretricious.)

This is a move toward the Joyce of "Portrait", and "The Dead" moves even closer toward the style of that book. "The Dead" is relatively inward-focused -- we largely see things through the protagonist Gabriel's eyes, and get his opinions of people. As in "The Little Cloud," we readers may draw different conclusions from Gabriel's, but "The Dead" is more tight-fisted in giving away non-Gabriel information. Overall, I found "The Dead" exhilirating to read, and the most hopeful story in the book. We see that Gabriel may have the self-awareness and ability to change. Most of the characters attain the self-awareness that they're stuck in a bad place by the end of their stories, but they lack the ability or desire to actually change. Gabriel shows that he's willing to think about his life and others outside of himself. Can he actually make the jump to changing his life?

I've spent most of this post talking about three stories, but what about the others?

It seems to me that in the other stories, Joyce was working with a very flat style of story-telling. He gives us the facts, almost as an impartial observer, and lets us readers decide our relationship to the story. He stacks the deck a bit in his word choice, though. For instance, in one story he uses the word "artistes" several times, till it sticks out like a sort thumb, but he never uses the word elsewhere. Clearly, he's setting up the protagonist as a bit of a poseur, without actually telling us in so many words.

Even though Joyce moved on to other things in Portrait and Ulysses, I think the stories in Dubliners are really wonderful examples of how great a writer Joyce could be, even when not playing with the pyrotechics of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.