JAMES JOYCE QUARTERLY最新文献

• A Sermon by Father Conmee
• Jonathan Morse (bio)

John S. Conmee, S.J. (1847–1910) figures under his nonfictional name and vocation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and was nonfictionally characterized by Joyce as “a bland and courtly humanist.”¹ On 24 February 1900, it was that Father Conmee who could have been spotted slipping in black through the colorful columns on page 4 of the Freeman’s Journal. There, just above the notice of Father Conmee’s impending “Appeal for the Poor,” an exhibition space was advertising some of Jack Yeats’s views of Ireland, and in the column immediately adjacent, the fruiterer J. Thornton of 63 Grafton Street solicited business. On 16 June 1904, Blazes Boylan was to drop by among the “ripe shamefaced peaches,” look approvingly down the counter-girl’s dress, and order something nice for Molly.² As the advertiser who took out a large display might have put it on 24 February 1900, variety like that is the Worcestershire sauce of life.

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In the midst of the same Dublin-bustling life on 4 October 1897, the Journal reported on another charity sermon by Father Conmee, and that item is of specific Joycean interest for two reasons: it was delivered on behalf of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, the setting for “Oxen of the Sun,” and it was published in full. Because it is formatted on the page as a single paragraph, I suppose it may have been set in type by a compositor working mechanically from Father Conmee’s manuscript and making no edits beyond replacing direct quotations in the present tense (“It is my duty to speak to you today”) with a paraphrase in the past tense (“He said it was his duty to speak to them that day”). If that is the case, reversing the editorial changes as we read will deliver into our hands a direct transcript of a voice speaking one of the languages of Joyce’s Dublin—specifically, the language uttered by one of Joyce’s characters just before it was translated into Joyce by Joyce. In that language, it reads like the following inclusions.

JONATHAN MORSE writes about photography and language at jonathanmorse.blog.

NOTES

1. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 29.

2. James Joyce, “Ulysses”: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 10.305–06.

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Abstract:

This essay revisits the difficulty around “musical” interpretations of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. It argues that reading the episode through a looser notion of the fugue than previously suggested can contribute significantly to the understanding of the episode’s texture, narrative mediation, and renderings of affect, without committing to the establishment of formal correspondences between literary and fugal structures that more literal “fugal” readings of the episode tend to require. Furthermore, the essay suggests that the “fugal” quality of the episode is best understood as an extra-diegetic semiosis-through-composition that draws upon, interacts with, and at times perverts the language of diegetic characters, and that Bloom’s journey to the musical world of the Sirens is best understood as modulations in modes of meaning-making throughout the episode that lean into or move away from this second-level, musical semiosis.

Abstract:

Finnegans Wake makes intense demands on its readers’ intellectual energies, and I propose that the text brings our cognitive reasoning capacities to the foreground by putting them to work. In this, the Wake resembles an intelligence test, calling upon abilities of deduction, induction, and visual-spatial perception. Using deduction, readers draw upon existing linguistic paradigms in order to make sense of Joyce’s neologisms, while induction involves identifying patterns created by the text itself. Moreover, “characters” such as HCE are often denoted only by the appearance of these letters, activating pattern-recognition skills. Nevertheless, identifying these references is not the end-point of studying the Wake, since dissecting Joyce’s text into an inventory of allusions would dissolve its artistry. Instead, discerning familiar elements in Joycean innovations is a fluid and ongoing process, where the manifestation of one’s own cognitive processes constitutes an aesthetic effect.

Abstract:

The Ghost in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet appears from the direction of a bright new star, which James Joyce in Ulysses identifies as the New Star of 1572, a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia. In the book, Stephen Dedalus asserts that this celestial outburst occurs about the time of Shakespeare’s birth, but Shakespeare was born eight years earlier. This essay studies this New Star and the three other stellar outbursts for which Ulysses supplies information. It posits that Joyce creates the eight-year discrepancy intentionally and that, suitably parsed, the discrepancy does not exist. Also, it suggests that the assumed coincidence of the apparition of T Coronae Borealis nova on the birthdate of Leopold Bloom matches the seemingly erroneous coincidence of dates of the New Star of 1572 and the birth of Shakespeare, and that the text suggests that Joyce proclaims Shakespeare more intelligent than Bloom. The conclusions reached in this essay are in agreement with Bloom’s relationship to Shakespeare. We suggest that Joyce deliberately picks the star named delta of Cassiopeia over two more suitable choices for locating the direction of the New Star.