The Agenbite Issue 2 by The Agenbite

COVER IMAGE HERE

INSIDE FRONT COVER DESIGN

November 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 5

Editor’s Note Rio Matchett

Joyce the Chef Seamus May

looking for dubliners in a country that would not reJoyce paolo rodriguez

“And Now a Word from James Joyce” Dan Leiser

A 21st Century Molly Blooms: Excerpt from Joyride to Jupider Nuala O’Connor

Joyce in the Age of Trump Alyssa Findlay

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cuck Cody Jarman

On Recreating Finnegans Wake in Audio Graziano Galati

A Fabliaux Carnival: Anticipating Bloomsday Michael Sullivan

The Consciousness Effect Elton Uliana

Review: David Norris Reads from Finnegans Wake Rio Matchett

Editor’s Note

SO HERE IT IS—ISSUE 2! Rio Matchett (Editor in Chief)

ONE OF THE PARTICULAR PLEASURES of compiling this issue has been the emergence of certain themes across the submissions. In line with our ethos, we have kept the submission policy as open as possible, and have deliberately selected works from a range of people, across different nations, age groups and professions. In spite of this, two particular ideas came up again and again - firstly, the urge to use Joyce as a prism, through which we can (attempt!) to better understand a world, which is right now, quite often pretty well beyond comprehension. It can feel at times as though we are surrounded by modern day ‘Citizens’, but it seems for many that within Joyce, we can actually find somewhat of a haven. My hope is that this zine, however small, can be a tiny part of making that community , and we are passionate about making its access and contribution policy as open as we can. I want to take this opportunity to thank two people. Firstly, Alyson Favilla, who once again has put it endless hours to single handedly design, format, and make this look as beautiful as it does. Secondly, I want to thank Alyssa Findley, for her general support, and for doing a whole load of legwork in finding the permissions for our artwork. And yes, I have repeatedly sent 4

one of them an email intended for the other. I digress - there were two emergent themes! The first, as above, is how on earth do we come to grips with the state of the world in 2017, and how Joyce might be able to begin to help us answer that. The second, is the repeated idea that actually, we don’t know Joyce at all - and isn’t that just the joy of him? This in particular resounded with me, as this year I got my first (!) Joyce themed tattoo, a script of the word ‘riverrun’ in a composite of Joyce’s handwriting. For me, this means a lot of cheesy things which I won’t bore you with, but one of the deepest meanings it holds for me is as a reminder of all the things I havn’t done yet. There’s so much more out there for me to do and to experience one of which is finishing the Wake! I quote our contributor Dan Leiser ‘I havn’t read a page And started again, Knowing I never will.’ We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we have enjoyed making it, again. As always, please do feel free to send us your work. Enjoy!

[Note: an updated account of Mr. Bloom’s odyssey in Dublin town, some 110 years later....]

A FABLIAUX CARNIVAL: ANTICIPATING BLOOMSDAY MICHAEL SULLIVAN MR.

LEOPOLD

BLOOM

WAS

VAGUELY AWARE OF A BUZZING SOUND,

PUSHING

HIM

OUT

HIS DREAMWORLD, AND INTO THE REALITY

ANOTHER

DUBLIN

DAY. IT WAS HIS SMART PHONE, STRATEGICALLY PLACED BY HIS BEDSIDE THAT WAS ‘CALLING’ HIM. HE PROPPED HIMSELF UP ON ONE ELBOW, RUBBED THE SLEEPY FROM HIS EYES, AND REACHED FOR THE SOURCE. HE SAW THE TEXT MESSAGE LIGHT, BLINKING AT HIM. HE OPENED IT.

It was from his wife Molly: ‘Tour with Blazes extended.... staying in Cork. Be back Sunday’. Bloom missed her. Her presence, anyway. She had been touring south western Ireland for ten days now. Still, it had been ten days of ‘licensed’ freedom. Married but single. Now, that was a thought. If Molly and Blazes...but he preferred not to go there. He jumped up. Another day single. What to do, what to do? He went to the bathroom to begin the morning ablutions. In there, her perfume seemed to follow him as he performed the stations of early morning familiarity, always in the same ritualistic order. He imagined he could hear her soft, undulating voice sing to him in the shower: “Just a song at twilight...when the lights are low...” He luxuriated in a long shower as he was telecommuting this Bloomsday. All of his advertising accounts were in good shape, so he had the luxury of the best of the day for himself. As the water drizzled down his ‘paunchless by Pentecost’ body, he closed his eyes and made a mental list of the errands of the morning. Order lamb kidneys at the butchers in the supermarket. Pick up books for Molly. She loved those ‘slutty ones’ she called them...what was that author’s name, a favorite of hers? Paul...somebody...Paul De...of course, Paul De Koch. The bookseller always wrapped them in plain brown covers. Still a touch of modesty here and there, if you know where to find it. Paddy Dignan’s funeral was at eleven, so hopefully there would be time to pop in to Ladbroke’s and place a bet on the afternoon races. There was a horse he fancied— Martello Delight, running at 30 to 1. A quick attendance check at Paddy’s purvey, then a pint or two of plain at Phoenix on Grafton Street. For some reason, perhaps that he was wrapped in a cocoon of warm water, metempsychosis flashed into his mind. Molly was adamant about knowing its meaning, one of the qualities he admired about her. Never been the same—the marriage—since Rudy died. Poor little blighter. 6

Hope his incarnation took him to a better place. The weather looked fine through the afternoon, so a trip to Howth and a long walk on the Strand seemed in order. Never know what lonely, gorgeous women would be taking their daily constitutional. Check at the Post Office for letters in the mailbox. Wonder if he would find a letter from Mistress Sasha? He had been bad and he wanted to hear that from her. Very bad. Might be a letter from daughter Molly, now living and working in Mullingar. The evening was a blank slate. Hope John Locke isn’t offended by that... Mr. Bloom finished getting ready for the day, and walked out into the Dublin morning sun, and headed down Eccles Street, ready for the day’s adventures. It was a good day to be alive, and he was about to enjoy it to the fullest. to be continued...and continued...

‘JIMMY’ MICHELLE ROGERS. INK ON PAPER 20 X 14 INCHES.

AND NOW A WORD FROM JAMES JOYCE

Waking Fever dreams band together In brands and sears, Upon waking I realized I haven’t read a page And started again, Knowing I never will.

Damnit James: ReJoyce Abnegahabhor, a door! Ignore open and adore Sprinkle the night in Top with adaydda ushoreinitin Rushing in The wishywushuwatta Washing the shores In and Turning it all about.

poems by Dan Leiser

Discover discoverah, The world at your feet And soon above your head. Breath foul beast the words in, Turn toward the consonants and vowels Pronounce and announce Enunciate, For (if you don’t) your head shall fall off And tongue will wither If you don’t eat your words and Spit out the sun.

And even young Werther could not Re-Attach it again with love or words, purple or not For naught The evahlitioniary Oh no, Not to me, so young So old, Now the witches spell takes Effect, Quickly orange springs into my nose Sawdust I never knew you I fallu fallwe all fall, too to, !Freshyfloorwhoawedowngowe! Adaydda is Dedadeda dead: Discoverah finds worms most illuminating In unceasing night These adayddas.

I Wonder Upon A Moment and then there was the End, When we just got here, Beginning w/ nøthing = Ending w/ the same. Now where do we go? This was how it always would, Nøw = We should go, Come Journey into the day, Nø=døn’t say. This was, okay We’re walking now. Round=round=/=round We go. Rabbit hole - crawls in this snake Deeper. Mephist mefist (...?) Why am I here?

The fall!- bababa.... Thunder down, down we go. & if you idiots will stop w/ fury tell me the Most rare visions, Ballads will sing Next the wit of man. The Crux of Day upon Us, feverish expelled in The sun so high. May I have your ear? Chanting around =/= The Pyre? Ghosts to deceive Where ever thou walk. This journey to an End, the Only=are Left. Spare the love Shadow and days, Of hatred - misery, It’s all an escape For to find the Light so high, We are left w/ An-=-option: Stare & die. For one knows the Way to time ever after -=- the night himself Has been providing the Cast: darkness Nothing Fear Anxiety Peace Stillness Life complete

Time Out Of Touch Discover upon me The likes in eyes of which You have never seen. The world anew in me and time passes through What you call divinity, The gods do too, The unseen, unknown only to but a few. Time in fluttering filters through Mine own eyes the world Hasn’t been able to grasp Whether through the eyes of God my cosmos live I cannot live to tell For years have passed since I’ve felled Towards the earth we see it differently as the Time passes and I swim out through space I turn and look back At you working and a battle on 11/11 Upon my eyes the world crosses and I see Great kings and leaders from Montezuma to Babylon fall, Commodus, Nero, The Caesar himself, I see you bronze worker Careful now there will be steel And yet there always slaves, I see the world through time indifferent And through it all I see you. Man so gentle so humble So cruel so fearful Lash out in anger Love in lust, We the men All of us faltered We have fought=/=love forever But in time we’ve suffered,

How sad we are and now I shall continue my ascent Into the cosmos Where we all will lie I just (un)fortunately have seen it Before I die.

Foretold Forefortoward Fohrforward This world Isabutt only ahtomorrow today, yestereve onto repeat. Is this naught a Life lived before? So Do what you can with what you will But kno only it will be what it will, Land awash flohtaway The mistyry still Remains even today. Bussybousay bumbawsty steal Light in the attic of Wooden spheres. Let me evolute the world Into one still, Clishing clationg Swordbow bullets Tanks we give to the goldenarray Of greedsygrowssoverture No intermission here. Seesew wents alllll done A blink in a still in all a will make a yee Miss it’all

I Don’t Know What to Call It Bibble babble Bablyon, Brought forth the crying Lyfe finekey crooks! Drying in wartor naves As so much so the so little Riveringrunningroundeeroundeeround An’ dew unto ye Ground thinknold All the world around’n’arohound We Go we find the Mandrill inn Two our payayain, Woo wee in the world can we find the Love that we find here? No weey weey no not at all We Cane not For AiRock will Burst onto our heads If we do re so falalafyock.

Wakey Wakey Unliven, unledand unleeded, In two, The sosphorous, Code hidden in too, The pomes and tomes Intoembs I view, Release the vaults And waken at two, How unfaer, Pour view It’s all over, And yet it started Only sectons ago. 11

An Afterthought Novitiate am I, seldom able to grasp the true concept. Conceit in the ideals prevents such men such as my self finding a home in Intelligence.

Beginning - End, Middle Again Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the story of The beginning In the end, Of Shem or Shaun the bastard who Knocked me off a ladder and then ensues Wicked dreams, night terrors, Loves gone awrys,

Worth a Shot So to wryle a fight and To see you through, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll start a fight to make you go true, You cannot read these pages, You poor soul shoo shoo, These phrases escape you Along the lines of Something out of mind. And Oh lord the senescent gazes of Youthful bliss have now gone To see above the lines of something Something out of mind. Nonpareil gone feral ole Dear old gaze of Dead done gone the idea that You could match me Match stick! Match over! Match gone! [sic]. So shall we flutter the aureate pretenses Or admit that What you read here is a dream There, you Phe Fi Pho Gone. 12

We begin in the end in the middle of the dead, How I hate you for killing me son, Is that not clear, in the words in my slurs? You have forced a dream on me to explain Do you not remember Bottom and his dream? James, how does it go? -Is it not clear? Clearly not so. -Then is it up to me to hold yer hands? Dearo, dearo, I guess nono. -enjoy enjoy for what you know can make so little sense to so many so. And how is Lucia, this singsong poem you wrote her? -she laughed the laugh I love I love and now Nora does not hate her so, she is home and he is home and we are home and there is no place no hate misunderstood. Enjoy enjoy for what life little brought, eternal jokes, eternal life, scholars still scratching, in years past and future we see the eve and swatches. For the dream is written, The incident ensued, Shaun is guilty or is it Shems fault HCE fell through?

Through Where ...Eddying troopadoriolissen! Halph atruth Haltaroot Barryed the doe Re-miacupla We go three thrice thrive Servering seven sees Us now to hoem, Alongsaide poem Treetops to see we go... 13

Essay

JOYCE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP Alyssa Findlay

December 29th, I came across an article in The Guardian, written for the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this piece, Ireland’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Mulhall, argues for the continued relevance of Joyce’s work in the context of 2016’s turbulent conversation about nationalism. Prime examples include, but aren’t limited to, the United Kingdom, deeply divided over the Brexit vote last summer, and the United States, which has just elected a man whose xenophobic rhetoric was the defining characteristic of his presidential run. These nationalist upwellings come in the wake of the current refugee crisis and increasing reports of terrorist activity. Joyce described “nets” of “nationality, language and religion” which would hold his soul “back from flight.” Similarly, Joyce confronted nationalism as one of the main threats to Stephen Dedalus (whom we follow in Joyce’s

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses) and his development as an artist. In the opening chapter of Ulysses, Stephen quips that he has “two masters, one English, one Italian” as well as an Irish one, who “wants me for odd jobs” - he refers, in turn, to English rule of Ireland, the vice-like grip of Irish Catholicism, and the stagnant economy of Dublin. As Ulysses continues, though, it becomes clear that Joyce’s frustrations are not limited to external forces acting on Ireland: he recoils from the violent backlash to English rule and the surge of blind national pride, mercilessly satirized in Ulysses. Joyce seems to argue that such a reaction is, in reality, a demonstration of the power his “masters” have over his nation, and what these masters can make it become if left unresisted. In fact, the one person who has the ability to save Stephen, as he fumbles about with intellectual elites and prostitutes, is Leopold Bloom, a self-conscious but unfailingly kind Hungarian Jew. Bloom

transcends national barriers, treating people kindly and attempting to reason with even those who treat him dismissively or discriminate against him. Leopold Bloom’s character resonates deeply in today’s socio-political climate, urging us to be humans before we are flag-bearers, and to see others as the same. In his own life, Joyce sought a pan-European rather than nationalist view of culture. He was devoted to Henrik Ibsen, the legendary Norwegian playwright, and taught himself literary Norwegian in order to attempt to translate Ibsen’s plays. He also learned far past what would have allowed him to function as your average literary scholar in terms of language acquisition: in addition to the traditional Latin, French, and Italian, he also added Japanese and Chinese to his register, among others. The ability to incorporate many voices and perspectives into a uniform text is one of the hallmarks of Joyce, particularly in Ulysses. In the novel, Joyce explores multiple

perspectives and styles of writing, at times delving into lives of priests, at others, prostitutes, choosing varied stylistic methods to inhabit their shifting perspectives. He challenges the reader to imagine differently, and to be conscious of the effects of different filters, based on character perspective and/ or authorial style, on how we interpret characters and situations. With respect to the sociopolitical climate of his day, James Joyce may as well have been writing Ulysses in opposition to a “Make Ireland Great Again” movement, reacting against the extreme supremacist rhetoric pervading Irish nationalist movements. At many key moments in Ulysses, Joyce seems to ask, “Is Ireland great? Why, and for whom?” We might ask these same questions of nationalist movements in the United States. James J. Giltrap, one of the most blatant figures of Irish nationalism in Ulysses, appears in the Cyclops episode of the novel. His Homeric parallel is Polyphemus, the one-eyed monster who traps Odysseus and his companions in a cave. Nicknamed “The Citizen” for his patriotic zeal, he is based on a man Joyce knew, of the same name, who was a law agent in Dublin. In this chapter, Joyce parodies selfinflating nationalist rhetoric. The Citizen rattles off long,

nonsensical lists of great figures with supposed Irish ancestry and the many exports of Ireland (often questionable

WE STOP READING CAREFULLY AS THESE LONG LISTS WIND DOWN THE PAGE, KNOWING WE WON’T GET ANY REAL INFORMATION FROM IT; THE POINT IS SIMPLY “IRELAND IS THE BEST. IRELAND IS GREAT.” or even physically impossible - like “Napoleon Bonaparte”), diluted to the point of meaninglessness.

One thinks of Trump’s “very good brain” and circuitous way of speaking in order to obscure logical and informational fallacies—we stop reading carefully as these long lists wind down the page, knowing we won’t get any real information from it; the point is simply “Ireland is the best. Ireland is great.” Through his satirical sketch, Joyce makes the point that nationalism keeps us from complex, realistic views of our world. The Citizen and narrator don’t worry about the factual accuracy of their claims, instead using any statement which will justify the conclusion of Ireland’s superiority, often contradicting themselves in the process. This disregard is shown to be ridiculous, but also poisonous on a deeper level, culminating in a violent outburst. The Citizen reacts aggressively to Bloom pointing out that Jesus, like Bloom himself, was a Jew (an objectively true statement, but one which pokes holes in the anti-Semitism of a supposed Christian): “I’ll crucify him.” he says, before throwing a biscuit box at Bloom as he drives off. When people rely on illusions of greatness without acknowledging multiple perspectives and the complex nature of reality, they react violently to statements which don’t fit in their absolutist view of the world. Because America can’t not be the 15

greatest country on the face of the Earth, we can’t fully acknowledge the depth of brokenness which pervades our country - the systemic racism of the criminal justice system, income inequality, epidemic-level gun violence. It shuts down dialogue where dialogue is badly needed and makes progress impossible. Joyce’s goal for his epic was inclusivity. This includes what sorts of characters are portrayed as well as how they are portrayed. Bloom, a fairly nondescript man in most ways, is the humanistic savior Ireland needs. Yet he has endured intense personal loss, suffering quietly as many of us do: he lost his son prematurely, his father committed suicide, and his wife is having an affair. Bloom’s strength, and what makes him Joyce’s hero, is his ability to empathize in spite of, or because of, his hardships and his differences from those around him. Who authors’ heroes are say a lot about them. These perspectives and stylistic shifts are vital to Ulysses. Experimenting with all filters to show the shortcomings of each - the impossibility of a clear or full picture when only one perspective is used. By resolving all of these perspectives, of characters who are poor and rich, educated and uneducated, Irish Catholic and Jewish, male and female, we are able to form a more complete view of Dublin on June 16, 1904. Joyce’s goal, 16

after all, was to “give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of [his] book.” To Joyce, Dublin is not Catholic or Jewish, Dublin is not rich or poor. Dublin is a rich cross-section of diverse backgrounds and history. America is the same, though Donald Trump would have us revive an America which is divisive and contingent on the supremacy of white, heterosexual males. Looking forward, maybe we should take the hint from Joyce, and above all, from Leopold Bloom, who recognized that nationalism is inadequate because it fails to account for those deep, universal ties we all share: “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothersin-love, but always meeting ourselves.” Let’s all be humans first, and nations second.

Essay Cody Jarman

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG

CUCK “...THE ‘ALT- TO-WHAT-EXACTLY?-RIGHT’ REVEALS THAT THOSE ‘GLOBALIST LIBERAL ELITES’ GOT AT LEAST ONE THING RIGHT...” I AM PROBABLY jumping onto the cultural zeitgeist a little bit late by writing about the rise of the insult ‘cuck’ in a post-President Trump, post“Steve Bannon calls Jared Kushner a ‘Cuck’ and ‘Globalist’ behind his back” (see The Daily Beast) world. That stated, I do think it reveals something significant about the conflicts of our time. At the very least, the fact that words like ‘cuck’ (meaning cuckold, or a man who is being cheated on, often for his own voyeuristic pleasure) and ‘beta’ (meaning . . . not alpha?) have become the go-to internet insults of the ‘alt- to-what-exactly?-right’ reveals that those ‘globalist liberal elites’ got at least one

thing right: the discourses of colonialism and nationalism that are so fundamental to contemporary constructions of race and national identity are deeply entrenched in an aggressive patriarchal thought. One of history’s greatest ‘globalist liberal elites’ and aspiring cucks, James Joyce, already made this abundantly clear one-hundred years before Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. Ulysses is often referred to as the defining novel of the modern era; however, its application to our own more overtly postmodern era is hard to escape. While the swelling ranks of the internet-troll- fascist-sympathizers imagine ‘cucks’ as the harbingers of apocalypse, the feminized, submissive men of a progressive hellscape built on equal-rights and repre-

sentation for minorities and permeable national borders, Joyce rewrote the defining epic of Western Civilization, The Odyssey, to make a hero of Leopold Bloom, cuckolded by his wife Molly, an immigrant’s son, and Jewish (read ‘globalist’ in the classic world conspiracy style) to boot. This is brilliantly illustrated in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses where Bloom is confronted by the nationalistic locker room banter of the boys down at Kiernan’s, headed up by the larger than life Citizen. This episode draws Irish nationalism up as a masculine enterprise, marked by the over-the-top heroes of Irish myth and day-dreaming about Irish sports. As Bloom’s more passive (‘cuck’) and immigrant (‘globalist’) beliefs come out in the conversation, the group turns on him and chases him out of the bar. As he leaves, Bloom reminds his audience “your Jesus was a Jew”, and his escape is narrated with Joycean panache, with Bloom ascending to heaven in a chariot a là Elijah. Escaping in a flying chariot is a pretty direct way to imply Bloom got the better of the boys down in Kiernan’s. Throughout Ulysses, Joyce 17

imagines the often feminized, frequently othered, and eminently worldly Bloom as a model for the modern man. While he is far from idealized, Bloom is regularly shown as a refreshing alternative to his fellow Dubliners, many of whom seem still quite stuck in the paralysis Joyce first posits in Dubliners. As such, Ulysses takes on a new urgency in our world, a world where the Citizen and his mangy dog Garryowen are quick to growl at anyone so emasculated as to suggest that a nation is “the same people in the same place” rather than the product of a divine fate. In Ulysses Joyce dared to imagine a radically new route for a world on the cusp of a new century. History shows we didn’t take Bloom’s lesson to heart; is it too late to hope this century might be different?

Thoughts

ON RECREATING FINNEGANS WAKE IN AUDIO Graziano Galati

One

can appreciate the written word on the basis of content, context, as a vehicle signifying expression, pointing towards meaning, a reference to some event in history, to some person in time; you can approach the word rhythmically, musically, tracing its form, the echo capturing, the dance shaping, and for me now in my practice, ‘yogaging’ the poetic experience that somehow is my life. However, when you encounter a text like Finnegans Wake, and all of this eludes you at first glance, or wears you down with a second and third glance so that you are lost in the immediate moment in the presence of the text you stumble, you fall through the pages, a dead thing, static, bogged down in your quest to navigate this journey. You research, you analyze, you guess, you call up association, logic, intuition, you fall again, let go, throw up your hands because you cannot fly through the skies of this world that belongs to Joyce and to Joyce alone it seems. Ah, but as an artist, your own artist, you court this text, and marry her with the music you have found in your own heart, and suddenly the voices are born, like little children laughing, whining, spinning, playfully provoking your Shaun, your Shem, your Issy and Anna, your Earwicker, your Jimmy, “Listen, listen! I am doing it!”- -you hear him calling, channeling. His words, your music, and something new emerges, and you capture it in your performance, your recording, in the cacophony of sound and rhythm that you co-create, and it soothes you, nurses you through the agony of each line, joyfully, as the Finnegan wakes in this Finnegans Wake. Yes, you sing the lines with a sense of surrender and again and again you hear his angst, feel his quipping, taste each foible, what’s he hiding, what’s he hiding, personality buried in history but emergent, always emergent. And so, I return to this project over and over again, and listen and experience this text almost on a daily basis. Being far from finished, myself, where once I cursed Joyce for this infernal text, I thank the gods that he had the genius to create it, so dense, so subtle, and so outrageously sophisticated for anyone, or hardly one, to study and through which to somehow measure my life.

Thoughts

JOYCE THE CHEF Seamus May

EVEN FOR THOSE unfamiliar with Ulysses, the phrase “Leopold Bloom ate with relish…” holds such a resonance that it need not be completed. It has seeped into the popular consciousness, perhaps the most famous episode in the book, alongside Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Yet why does James Joyce place such emphasis on food? For one thing, Joyce is an author of Terroir: food represents, for him, a sense of place. This place-sense is demonstrated locally: for Bloom, pork kidney is closely associated with Dlugacz’s. The shop is a place of distinct irony that illustrates the principle of the coincidence of contraries: being a Jewish pork-butchers that takes its name from Moses Dlugacz, an ardent Zionist that Joyce knew in Trieste (a fact which in itself suggest further place politics). Dlugacz’s is one of few wholly invented places in Ulysses, suggesting the deliberate nature of its appearance. Yet Joyce also uses food on a grander, international level. In ‘Lestrygonians’, Bloom enters 20

the Burton restaurant where men are eating traditional Irish fare: “corned and cabbage”, “stouts”, “stew”. He experiences something close to sensual overload, and is revolted, heading instead to the “moral pub” of Davey Byrne’s. Having rejected Irish food, Bloom plumps instead

FOOD, CHYLE, BLOOD, DUNG, EARTH, for Gorgonzola from Milan, Burgundy from France, and longs for some Italian olives. Aside from illustrating Bloom’s sympathetic attitude towards animals after a brief tangent on the subject of vegetarianism, his choice of food reveals a secondary sense of place, that of Bloom’s place in the world. Through

this meal, Bloom positions himself as a European, a man of the world—the universal everyman. Moreover, his lunch reveals Bloom’s sense of place in the life cycle. Merely pages earlier, Bloom paraphrases the philosopher Giordano Bruno when he ponders “food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food”. Cheese, bread and wine, each of the foods that Bloom consumes are fermented, with Bloom seemingly aware that the same bacterial process that produced these foods will one day reduce his own body and make it food for animals and man alike. This cyclical aspect is present in his earlier breakfast, with Peter Francis Mackay illustrating how Bloom “eats organs that his own body puts to use at both the episode’s and the day’s end.” As ever with Joyce, the “universal is in the particular”; Joyce cooks up a clear tie between food and the selfreplicating nature of life. The relationship between Joyce and food has a personal aspect for me. On a recent

trip to Dublin, I made the pilgrimage Davey Byrne’s and ordered the inevitable Gorgonzola sandwich. What arrived was much like Ulysses itself: a gigantic undertaking. Even in its aesthetics, the two dark slices of soda bread, and complex, well veined cheese filling, looked distinctly tomelike. Here, I was pursuing my own sense of place, that is a desire to share a place

with Joyce, and indulge in a literal invocation of Auden’s breaking bread with the dead. To my disappointment, there was no burgundy to be had, so I settled on a half of Guinness. In doing so, I paired the worlds of Burton’s and Byrne’s and unified these contraries, reflecting how Dublin and Ireland has become at once more independent and international since Joyce’s

time. Under the watchful eye of a crude bartop bust of the author, I suspected he would have approved.

UNTITLED LEONIS OGOUR, COLLAGE

Poem

looking for dubliners in a country that would not reJoyce paolo rodriguez

looking for dubliners in a country that would not reJoyce have i been born perhaps, in the wrong time, or place, or space? does nobody understand? all i long for is an audience, the tuckoo, alone eternal, from one edge of nothingness and through a brief hall of warmth, of light, and out to another edge, all to deliver from end to end a speck of sand until an infinite mountain is deconstructed and reconstructed, the tuckoo would be asking for too much, far too much, to admit that what he wants, is a moocow, to call a kindred soul. they say that i have been born far too late, too early. all the same i yearn for Yes to answer my question: â&#x20AC;&#x201D;is there anyone in the world who understands? when the word is uttered, look me in the eye, reflect, ponder, excogitate, reply. i shall be here. i shall hear.

a portrait of the filipino as a postcolonial isub1 cf black ash of corpus christi it sticks upon the palate it sticks upon the soul we eat it and it sticks corpus christi fed to us fed to us from hand to mouth it rolls about the mouth it rolls about the tongue we eat it and it burns corpus christi the pebble says we hear it and we answer amen we answer katawan ni kristo the pebble says and amen we answer borrowed tongue and borrowed soul we are the servant with 2 masters 2 masters & a 3rd diyos we say diyos we consider the final cuff in a chain of borrowings wrecked rusted

fig.1. god was godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name. dieu was the french for god and that was godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name too; and when anyone prayed to god and said dieu then god knew at once that it was a french person that was praying. but though there were different names for god in all the different languages in the world and god understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still god remained the same god and godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s real name was god.

isub2 ie master (1) american he painted parrot in the petri dish we planted trees all over for to let the master (1) for to walk in the shade master (2) italian italy italia italus ie the son who cuckolds his father (and we his sons and cuckolds too) and then the bull that gores the wolf in this case too again the bull the wolf the cuckold or to some 10abootstomping20ahumanface30goto10 master (3) the oddjob master him the best reserve for later all them masters all of them of borrowed tongue ii eg / ae when is an e not an e? ans apparently when it is an a originally (he they call æ: are you a? are you e? i am i i imagine him would say) say eg æther ether or say ægis egis or maybe æsthetic esthetic 1 may conjecture via this relation from syllabus of master (1):

inset α. possibly inset ε. illustrative demonstration of the author’s expected reader reaction per his suggestion cf. fig.2. inset and fig, æptly, also engage in the same relation as the a, the e.

apple → a-pple ; oe æppel ; a=æ=e → epple: e∙pol fig.2. the apple that is not an apple. uncle tommy would hate me but when you look at them look at them really doesn’t a look like e especially when æ? try it flip the page eternally and one and only one comes out of it. 69 is too much love. æ has no love within at all. cf. inset α. or possibly inset ε.

iii &c

master (3) the oddjob master he be

tately, plump*: fig.3. 3 quarks for muster (3), or: ningaskugon. bold. clean. jarringly modern. it was monumental, but after that? the world collapses in all its efforts to carry on traditionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flames and all of a sudden all the efforts reduced to eh.

chrysostomos the oddjob master is sweet his tongue but borrowed all mockery of me all mockery of my tongue my tongue our tongue we speak it and know not what we speak borrowed valor borrowed pride he claims his blood maharlika i chuckle in the chamber of my heart the innermost in the heart left ventricle left ventricle where the chuckle is there no room for america or god there no room be in the heart the borrowed heart borrowed tongue and borrowed heart i chuckle and i chuckle it is a case herr seĂąor doktor herr doctor uliman it is a case of veneration without understanding as all veneration needs must be maybe venerated blood maharlika the blood of a servant the blood of he respected he respected but all the same in chains chrysostomos the oddjob master he goes to swim and sings his songs the borrowed songs he my master he a slave his masters my masters too masters (1) & (2) master (3) a slave and i a slave of slaves bulislis the naked one mastabatoom mastabadtoom for whole the world to see master (3) he calls on to me as i begin to leave asks me for my keys no choice i hand them in i go for the millionth time tonight there be no return master (3) chrysostomos usurper chrysostomos

i go for the millionth time: i: recirculations: met him pike hoses: that’s the word: transmigration: is there a yet more beautiful word?: (I do not like that other world.): age back; recede: recede: see the skin: once yet translucent skin: old veins to fresh roots: red pulsations beneath a sheet of silk: (chrystos: he: exception: no state of seedling: homunculus: cocktail of semen and blood: flesh made bloody mary: and pls pass tabasco here: thanks!): diffuse: or rather: re-fuse: not refuse: that rejects: re-fuse rather: come together into yourself: from many you are one: and then beyond: beyond the fireworks: beyond the O: beyond the time you are a twinkle in the eye of your famil-eye: further: further: more than O: there is One: Ones and O’s make the world: to One recall: through O return: (said a song: before you came into my life, i missed you so bad: brilliant after all? maybe just attuned, if a-tuned?): a way a lone a last a loved a long the: back to the riverrun: into the commodious vicus: from state of One: hurtle back to world of O: it is sweet: ay, sweet are the sweets: sweets of sin: ii: from finn to haroun to shemandshaun: on youtube: a grainy video: 1920s: black and white: a booming voice: all voices boomed in those times: paints the painter, narrates narrator: herr satan in ferocious übercoat: —this small, thin, unathletic man with very bad eyes would start arguments in pubs and then jump behind his big american friend crying: —deal with him, hemingway! deal with him! before the screen: there is me: parted lips & teary eyes & tightened scrotum & arrhythmic heart: i found i: or translating the roman numerals: one found one: and what can i say?: what can i say if not O: i found i: thus:

exhibit a: • • • •

a thirst for poison; needles behind my eyes; toothlessness and brittle bones; an eternal loneliness:

i smile: iii: tell me about anna livia plurabelle:

this i tell: i tell all this to my beloved: i ask: —have i found i?: have i found the i that was i before i was i?: a dark pitiful glance: and then she walks: in the wind in her wake: her words: —O rocks!: i smile: i know: there is after all: a Yes in this world:

Excerpt

A 21ST CENTURY MOLLY BLOOM Nuala O’Connor

a Dub I can’t help loving James Joyce; as a writer too. As a Dub who calls Galway home I can’t help loving Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s wife; as a writer too. What writer could resist the existence of a fiery, loquacious, sensual muse like Nora? My interest in Nora Barnacle began with Brenda Maddox’s superb biography, Nora, published in 1988 when 30

I was eighteen years old. Maddox portrayed Nora as funny, irreverent, earthy, stylish and sexually uninhibited. The year 2000 biopic based on Maddox’s book confirmed all of this – actress Susan Lynch made a smart, exuberant Nora. The film covered her elopement with Joyce, at twenty years of age, to Trieste, then a busy port in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their peripatetic existence for the next ten years or so. Their wander from

Italy to Switzerland to Paris continued until Joyce’s death in 1941. Nora Barnacle was neither highly educated nor literary, but she was garrulous, articulate and passionate, and there was enormous physical attraction between her and Joyce. When Joyce first met Nora on the 10th of June 1904, he was struck by her confident walk and mass of auburn hair. They walked out together on the 16th of June by the River Liffey to Ringsend. Later, Joyce immortalised that auspicious day in Ulysses, the action of which takes place over the course of the 16th of June, Bloomsday. The couple left Dublin in October 1904 and Joyce knew his father, who gave him money to emigrate, would disapprove of his going abroad with Nora, so he kept her a secret. When John Joyce learnt Nora’s surname he allegedly commented, ‘Well, she should certainly cling to him’. Joyce and Nora were together thirtyeight years and were married for the last ten years of their union. Joyce took inspiration from his wife’s humour and history, and Nora, and her manner of speaking, were the model for the tour de force that is Molly Bloom in Ulysses. When the Irish Writers’ Centre approached me to rewrite a chapter of Ulysses for the twenty-first century I naturally had to choose Molly’s voice in the Penelope episode. The commissioning editor

explained that as Joyce once took inspiration from the texts of Homer, she wanted eighteen writers to take a chapter from Ulysses and transport it to contemporary Dublin. The episode could be told through prose, poetry or song and the only rules were that the piece should be 800 words or fewer, and that it should not mention Ulysses, The Odyssey or Joyce, though inspiration from the texts was allowed. Molly Bloom’s monologue sashays from one topic to the next: eggs for breakfast, sex, infidelity, and her regard for her errant husband, Leopold or ‘Poldy’. In my reworking, ‘Penny and Leo and Married Bliss’, we have the voice of Penny, stuck in a Dublin suburb and contemplating an affair with the local priest, while deciding whether or not to make dippy eggs for her hungover husband. Penny’s voice was a joy to invent, using Molly as inspiration and guide. But, with a tight word-count, I could only write so much. For my new short story collection Joyride to Jupiter my editor recommended that I flesh out the story and I happily obliged. There is always a sense of play involved in revisiting a story written some years before and, with fresh eyes, editing and adding to make a more pleasing whole. In her biography, Brenda Maddox says that Nora ‘talked and talked and talked’ and so it is with Molly Bloom and so it is with Penny. For me, my story is a small homage to Joyce, Nora and the joy they

both took in words.

Extract from ‘Penny and Leo and Married Bliss’: Yeah, if you don’t mind he wants breakfast in bed. Eggs. His Mammy always gave him a dippy egg when he was sick. Sick? Man flu is what he has. Have you ever heard of woman flu? You haven’t cos there’s no need for it. He only got sick, he says, cos he helped a wino find a bed for the night, and ended up jawing on Thomas Street with him for hours and it was pissing, of course. Sure when does it do anything else in this godforsaken country? Still, I like that side of Leo, the kind part. He’s decent. Never looks down his snot at the homeless or Travellers or Nigerians. But a wino? Go on out of that, I bet it was some hussy down in Blackhall Place he was ‘helping’. Up against a wall. That man can’t keep himself to himself. Yeah, the other day Leo was on Facebook, on the tablet; I leaned over to see whose timeline he was gawking at and he tilted the thing away from me, the bugger. He had a laptop before but I destroyed it. I knew he was watching that auld porno and I was having none of it. So I got the computer and snapped the screen off the keyboard. I filled the kitchen basin with bleach and put the screen in and glugged a bottle of stout in on top of it and a handful of Daz, just to see what’d

happen. A wogeous smell is what happened firstly. I took the hammer to the keyboard – fwack, fwack, fwack! The whole thing was mangled. Was it satisfying I hear you ask? Did it help me out? It was one of the best days of me life. He’s a man you have to keep an eye on, my Leo. Loads of times I seen him and that Paulina making goo-goo eyes at one another, when she was here to wash my floors and iron my sheets. These ones come over from Poland or wherever with a mad hunger and they eat all before them, including our fellas. He said it was all in me head. ‘Here,’ I says to him, ‘I mightn’t’a’ got me Leaving but I know a feckin slapper when I see one.’ Yeah, Paulina had to go. She was raging when I gave her her notice, yammered at me in Polish or whatever. ‘Doopeck, sookah, hooey,’ she roared. It sounded like a load of me-ankles. Codology, as me ma would say. Doopeck schmoopeck. Anyway, Leo comes across the bed after me that night and he’s all talk. ‘Who’re ya thinking of?’ he says, me knowing he has that Paulina in his head, with her little pixie face and dolly eyes. ‘Who’re ya thinking of?’ he says again. ‘Herman Van Rompuy,’ says I. He groans. ‘Who else?’ he calls, and he’s bucking into me. ‘What’s-his-name,’ I say, trying to think of the dirty Eyetalian. ‘Him. Your man, What’s-hisface.’ 31

‘Jaysus. Who? Who?’ Leo’s losing his rhythm. ‘Oh, that fucker. The Eyetie.’ ‘Pope Francis?!’ ‘No, no, the other fella. Berlusconi, that’s it. Silvio Berlusconi.’

NUALA O’CONNOR’S THIRTEENTH BOOK, A COLLECTION OF STORIES AND FLASH CALLED JOYRIDE TO JUPITER, IS OUT NOW FROM NEW ISLAND BOOKS

Essay

THE CONSCIOUSNESS EFFECT: REPRESENTATION OF SUBJECTIVITY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE AND JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES Elton Uliana

To follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil. —Virginia Woolf A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment – and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect. —Walter Pater The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. —James Wood

THE WORKS OF Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are a landmark in aesthetic history. In the early twentieth century, a moment of rupture and breakdown in cultural order, both writers responded to the changing conditions of the period by proposing a radical overturn of the objective mimetic impulses characteristic of conventional literary representation. In their own idiosyncratic way, each writer indulged freely in communicating a more relativistic, subjectivist version of reality. Woolf ’s and Joyce’s linguistic experimentation epitomizes

the ‘high modernist’ aesthetic system with its emphasis on consciousness rather then character (realism) or temperament (naturalism); its neglect of plot coherence, unity and closure; and its retreat from omniscient narrative strategy.1 This pivotal misrule of literary form notoriously involved a multitude of other innovations like the debunking of syntax, the dislocation of cohesive point of view, and the disinheriting of linear time. If this break with tradition allowed for an 1 Peter Brooker (ed.), Mo d e r n is m / Po st mo d e r n is m (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1922), p. xi.

ironic, if fictitious detachment between object and subject, it also represented a radical shift in the whole category of the subject, which became tantalizingly elusive and selfevident at the same time. These innovations of the modernist project remain remarkably enduring. Even though the writings of Woolf and Joyce may be regarded as diametrically opposites in terms of stylistic and thematic psychology, underlying that there is a preoccupation which inevitably unites them: the recasting of human 33

consciousness, perception and memory beyond realistic conventions. This study will analyze the relationship between consciousness and literary representation as structured in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927) on the one hand and in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) on the other. I shall argue that both Woolf ’s and Joyce’s narrative technique produce, in strikingly distinctive manner, an expansion of subjective boundaries, one which destabilizes the self and makes it permeated by the other and impregnated with elusive, ephemeral impressions of external worldly events. I will focus both on the effects produced by free indirect speech on the representation of consciousness and on the implications that genre, mode and form have on subjectivity. Both Woolf and Joyce use modulations in genre to shape and reproduce the effects of reality on consciousness. Each chapter in Ulysses is constructed in distinctive style, from epic to journalistic, from the dramatic to the catechetic form. In episode seventeen (Ithaca), when Joyce abruptly converts the genre of the preceding chapter from a long-winded prose (which emulates medieval morality tales and Christian parables) to a highly stylized parody of the Catholic catechism, Joyce’s narrator, with all its verbal incontinence, reveals a consciousness ceremoniously invaded by (low and high34

brown) textual paraphernalia: “Similarly? The trajectory of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars : Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vescical pressure.” (Ulysses, p. 655)2 Here (and elsewhere in the novel), there is a collision between the apparent psychological scantiness of the subjects and the verbal opulence with which they are treated. Suitably enough, the experiences of Bloom and Stephen are focalized through Joyce’s avatar in the text according to the conventions of the catechistical form, or in Joyce’s own words, ‘mathematical catechism’.3 By minutely categorizing the verbal details of the text, the trivialities of characters and of the narrator’s mind 2 All quotes from Ulysses will be taken from James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3 Richard Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 156.

and attempting to render the human within this ‘cosmic physical’ frame, Joyce’s writing not only tests the boundaries of genre but also produces a convulsion of subjectivities and data, making the distinction of voices virtually impossible. If the language in the passage with its doctrinal, pedantic (and clichéd) quality does not belong to Bloom (‘irruent’) or is not constituent part of Stephen’s vocabulary (‘sibilant’), it may not be characteristic of the narrator’s diction either.4 In fact, this current of changing impressions goes so far as to produce a feeling in which there seems to be no point of view at all outside the narrative from which the characters and events are observed (and represented), anymore then there seems to remain no concrete reality apart from the one produced in the narrator’s consciousness. In an illuminating study of Joyce, Steven Connor argued that the chapters of the novel seem to form a pattern of stylistic rivalry.5 The scholar suggests that this stylistic competition amongst the chapters often functions not to give expression to a consciousness, but rather, it represents ‘alien threats to or potential distortion of, that 4 Derek Artridge, Joyce Effects: On Langrage, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 94. 5 Steve Connor, Writers and their Work: James Joyce (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 61.

consciousness’.6 If Joyce’s provoking stylistic design represents a discontinuity of consciousness, a debunking of a coherently expressible, obviously organized and consistently established structure of feelings and thoughts, as Connor suggests, it does so by continuously and self-consciously asserting an overarching unifying sensibility, one which authoritatively interpolates the purposelessness, seemingly pointlessness argument and the supreme autonomy of the work: that of the author, of James Joyce himself. In this way, the more the text disseminates this discontinuity of consciousness by its continuous change in style, mode, tone and diction, the more it establishes the (narcissistic) consciousness of its own author, one which is not only asserted, but in my view also performed in the text. To use the words of Terry Eagleton, works of literature assuredly make statements through their narrative function which the author him or herself does not necessarily credit, but to be sure, an author’s personality may appear from behind the persona of his or her narrator and speak for a moment, thoroughly calling into question the very reality of character, narrator and author’s identity.7 6 Ibid.,p. 61. 7 Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p.125.

Extending this point, ‘personality’ is always in tension with ‘impersonality’ in Ulysses.8 According to Joyce, the aesthetic emotion is static and clinical, it arrests the mind and raises it ‘above desire and loathing’.9 T.S. Eliot’s declared in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) that a literary work is ‘not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from it’.10 It becomes plausible to suggest then, expanding on Eliot’s argument, that Joyce’s attempt to evade expressions of a particular consciousness (being it of the characters or of the writer himself) by constantly incorporating new genres into the textual fabric of the novel is, in fact, an assertion of Joyce’s own literary ambition and distinct artistic personality, an assertion which is auspiciously enforced by Joyce’s numerous extra-textual interventions: explanations, exegeses and complementary letters to possible reviewers and clarification for the readers of Ulysses.11 8 For the quest for ‘impersonality’ in literary Modernism see Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 7. 9 Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 21. 10 Tim Armstrong, Themes in 20th Century Literature and Culture: Modernism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 91. 11 Connor (1996), p. 37. See

This critical instance has another nuance. In a cold, ruthless manner the text manages to implement an ironic detachment between itself and the content it presents. Characteristically, to codify even more the semiotic situation in Ulysses, the narrator plunges into libelous subjects (‘the problem of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity.’, p. 665) and reflects dispassionately on the shabbiness of ordinary life (‘both contemplate each other in both mirror of the reciprocal flesh theirhisnothis fellowfaces.’,p. 664) but offers no comment on the material related. Within such a conceptual procedures, the narrator retains, nevertheless, some of Joyce’s own systematic inclination to scholastic, scientific and even theological thought.12 Indeed, the author’s almost prurient captivation by ordinariness is established in the text rather magnificently. Joyce manages to combine the cult of the prosaic with wholehearted affinity with it, intertwining moral and aesthetic vision in inextricable manner. Form and content in To The Lighthouse have a similar vexed relation. However, the narrator’s deliberate (but not also Richard Ellmann (ed.), Joyce: Selected Letters (New York: The Viking Press, 1966). 12 Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 284.

always ironic) detachment from the textual material in Woolf ’s text is never in the depraving, corrupting, unpalatable Joycean sense. The perception of inner processes in the novel, that is, the interior movement of characters’ and narrator’s consciousness, is systematically described (represented) by association, exposition or allusion to exterior reality. Nevertheless, these agents are not necessarily involved in the external occurrences. If the minds of the characters in the novel are momentarily anchored in the reality of the body or of real life, it is never in the same bluntly grocer context as in the passage from Ulysses above; instead, it is more likely to be because it leads to an excursion to some subjective, ethereal realm: “And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsey, raising her eyes to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now,’ she said, thinking that Lily’s charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it, ‘and now stand up, and let me measure your leg,” for they might go to the Lighthouse after all, and she must see if the stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg. (TTL, p. 24)13 13 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Vintage, 1990), p. 24. All quotes from the novel will be taken from this edition and

The balance of this extract shifts from apprehensions of interior worlds (Mrs. Ramsey’s and the narrator’s) to presentations of penetrable objects and impenetrable substances. If the scene reveals a ‘myriad of impressions’ in Mrs. Ramsey’s mind, it also suggests at least two distinct layers of voices.14 Through free indirect speech, Woolf simultaneously opens and bridges a subjective and linguistic gap between character and narrator. This technique enables the reader to see, hear and imagine things through Mrs. Ramsey’s physical eyes (‘and now stand up’), through her mind’s eyes (‘it would take a clever man to see it’) and through the narratorial function (‘for they might go to the Lighthouse after all’); but also through the language of both. In this sense, the novel relegates not only consciousness but also language to relative, temporary state. Thus, the characters’ consciousness in the novel blurs into everything which surrounds them, and as with most modernist novels, To the Lighthouse pushes towards questioning notions of stock character. By continuously pressing the psychological complexity of her characters and narrator, Woolf establishes a kind of abbreviated as above. 14 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 4 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988),vol. IV, p. 160.

ontological indeterminacy where the reader is arguably left with the disorientating impression that the self for Woolf is merely a conglomerate of chance perceptions and sensations. This strategy implies a ‘double flexibility’.15 The narrative operates in a multitude of simultaneous time dimensions (Mrs. Ramsey’s moment with James, the unspecified time of her conjecture on Lily’s attractiveness, the moments of authorial flagging – e.g. ‘she said’) and promenades itself elastically in space; sometimes observing Mrs. Ramsey, sometimes calling on William or on the Lighthouse. In his anthological study of the brown stocking episode in To the Lighthouse, Erich Auerback stresses that the narrative’s elasticity is constructed around interruptions. Indeed, the novel spatial-temporal expansions and contractions are woven in and utilized as frames for inner processes, both of characters present in the scene and for the perspective of characters that are physically absent. In the passage above, Mrs. Ramsey initial comment is continually interrupted by external occurrences and thoughts: first by the image of Bankes and Lily, then by the impressions these two characters have left in 15 Suzanne Raitt, Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 68.

her mind. By the time Mrs. Ramsey finishes her sentence (‘and now let me measure your leg’), the reader is allowed a detailed intrusion in her memory, private thoughts and physical actions. Auerbach suggests that Mrs. Ramsey’s action of measuring the brown stocking against James’ legs dramatizes multiple works of consciousness, but in my view, it also connects the character with subliminal appearances and vibrations and establishes the (fragmented) continuity of the section. The novel embroiders the details at which Mrs. Ramsey is gazing at or focusing on into the activity of her own thoughts. In this way, the text of To the Lighthouse both structures the subjects within these dynamics and is structured by them. In similar vein, time is a subjective process in both novels. The reader is embedded in it and experiences it in different ways. As both novels are concerned with the representation of states of mind, time is also embedded in the consciousness of the characters.16 For Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, the ephemeral moments, if they are saturated with significance, they are as important as if they were ten years for a character 16 Interestingly, Derek Attridge asserts that the function of the term character is that it crystalizes and enforces a number of assumptions about the human subject. See Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.52.

in a realist novel: For she knew that he had turned his head as she turned; he was watching her. She knew that he was thinking, You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful. (TL, p. 115) In this passage and elsewhere in the novel, there are many things occurring in any moment simultaneously. Mrs. Ramsey’s words, feelings and thoughts are filtered through the third person narration. This instance of reported or indirect speech allows the narrator to let the reader know what Mrs. Ramsey is thinking; arguably in her own inflection, without the conventional authorial flagging (‘she though’ or ‘she said to herself ’). It also facilitates the encompassing of unredeemed fragments of time. There is a sense throughout the novel that something meaningful, stable and eternal is at the core of personal experiences, of which we are only able to grasp a fleeting glimpse. Mrs. Ramsey represents one way of approaching experience. Her subjectivity is textually set against Mr. Ramsey’s objectivity.17 Although they each have their moment of vision, Mrs. Ramsey seems to be always trying 17 Gay, Peter, ‘On not Psychoanalyzing Virginia Woolf ’, in The American Scholar, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp.71-75, [Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41213293], accessed on 26 April 2015.

to make from the moment something permanent. Woolf continuously deploys different modes of indirect speech, most frequently free indirect style to slip in and out the character’s consciousness and incidentally give the reader a sense of multiple time frames; lapses of time which can be chronological, cyclical, mythical, subjective and so on.18 The novel’s capacity to depict speech, consciousness and span of time is both mimetic and generative.19 In this way, the characters’ stream of thoughts and their subjective apprehension of time, although seemingly organic and flowing, are actually affects of a meticulously studied narrative technique, one in which Woolf (and Joyce) is a prolific master. If the self in Woolf ’s novel is inextricably linked with its changing experiences, the same can be found in Ulysses. W.B. Yates once remarked that Joyce had a ‘heroic mind’, implying that the events in the lives of Joyce’s protagonists are developed and resolved in purely mental basis.20 With commendable dexterity, Joyce’s protagonists Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom seem to be in commonsensical 18 Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions ( London: Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 9. 19 Angela Frattorola, ‘Developing an Ear for the Modernist Novel: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce’, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Fall 2009), p. 137. 20 Quoted in Declan Kiberd ‘s introduction to Ulysses.

control of their lives and experiences as they promenade purposelessly through the streets of Dublin but in reality the reader is aware that a great deal of what the characters do is attributable to the author’s design for the novel, Joyce’s notorious floor-plan, which . There is a remarkable artistry in the very act of perception in both novels. I have argued that Woolf and Joyce emphasized not only in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses but throughout their careers the urgency of reformulating language and literary representation by diverging radically from modes of realistic aesthetic. In their deliberate effort to produce a different kind of fiction, and extend its

franchise, both writers developed a revolutionary and seminal mode for rendering the flux of experience and its impressions on the mind. The apprehension of the elusive relationship between the mind and reality in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses produces a fictional world which is nevertheless exuberantly embedded in the very elusiveness of the reality they wish to represent. The subjective flow of mental processes is in continuous dialectic with external objective events. If the world in both novels is vivid, radiant and mysteriously meaningful (in Joyce’s case usually profane), it is also somehow dependent on the mind, on the consciousness

of both characters and narrators. Both novels powerfully undercut the idea of a stable, non-fragmented, realistically representable human subject. By deploying a constant interplay between modes of speech and generic conventions and performing continuous shifts in perspective both temporal and spatial, both writers become a kind of cchroniclers of the aesthetic and ontological anxieties of the early twentieth century. Each created an extravagant atmosphere of thought in their works and an unprecedented form of representing states of mind.

REFERENCES Armstrong, Tim, Themes in 20th Century Literature and Culture: Modernism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005) Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Trask, Willard R. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) Bloom, Harold, Novelists and Novels: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Checkmark Books, 2007) Briggs, Julia, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Brooker, Joseph, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) Brooker, Peter (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1922) Childs, Peter, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000) Connor, Steve, Writers and their Work (Plymouth: Northcode House Publishing, 1996) Eagleton, Terry, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) —The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University 38

Press, —Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 2012) Ellman, Richard, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber and Faber, 1974) Ferrer, Daniel, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. by Bennington, Geoffrey and Bowlby, Rachel ( London: Routledge, 1990) Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. by Kibberd, Declan (London: Penguin, 1992) Lathan, Sean (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Levenson, Michael H., A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Pykett, Lyn, Engendering Fictions ( London: Edward Arnold, 1995) Raitt, Suzanne, Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) Reid, Sue (ed.), Contemporary Critical Essays: Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993) Schwarz, Daniel R., Reading Joyce’s Ulysses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Smith, Paul Jordan, A Key to Ulysses of James Joyce (New York: City Lights Edition, 1970) Stevenson, Randall, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Harlow: Longman, 1992) Tobin, Patricia Drechsel, Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) Williams, Raymond, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1985) Whittier-Ferguson, John, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf and Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Wood, James, How Fiction Works (New York: Picador, 2008) Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (London: Vintage, 1990) —ed. by McNeillie, Andrew, Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1988)

Review

DAVID NORRIS READS FROM “FINNEGANS WAKE” A RECORDING OF “ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE” Rio Matchett

THE NOTION THAT the Wake is best experienced as audio is nothing new - Joyce himself recorded reading Anna Livia Plurabelle in 1929, and to hear his voice through the white noise and crackles of a 78rpm vinyl still conveys - for me at least - more of the feeling of the chapter than years of reading and rereading the words on the page. One of the greatest projects in Joyceland’s recent years has been Derek Pyle’s Waywords and Meansigns, which sought (and continues to seek) to collaboratively set the Wake to music, ‘in its Whole Wholume’. It is into this scene that David Norris’ interpretation of ALP arrives, recorded originally for the German broadcasting system Bayerisches Rundfunk. Norris’ credentials speak for themselves, even being cited by Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian as being ‘almost single-handedly responsible for rehabilitating James Joyce in once disapproving Irish eyes’. The assertion is loaded with characteristic journalist’s flair, but nonetheless, Norris’ re40

cording of ALP is a welcome return to scholarship. With trickling plosives and sinuous fricatives a plenty, Norris’ voice undulates through the chapter, evoking a sense of timeworn youth with unmistakable femininity. An accessible and aesthetically pleasing recording, the discrete chapter will be enjoyable both for diehard fans of the wake, and for those dipping their toes in the river for the first time. As a teaching tool in particular, Norris’ CD will do more to evoke the Wake for students in five minutes than forty minutes of discussion could. DAVID NORRIS READS FROM FINNEGANS WAKE IS AVAILABLE TO BUY AT THE JAMES JOYCE CENTRE IN DUBLIN, AND ONLINE FROM THEIR WEBSITE, HTTPS:// DUBLIN-JAMES-JOYCE-CENTRE. MYSHOPIFY.COM FOR €12.00.

Contributors MICHAEL SULLIVAN A Fabliaux Carnival: Anticipating Bloomsday, pg 5 Currently on my third ‘leave of exile’ from the Celtic worlds.. teach philosophy, history at the Uni...blog for amusement under the afflatus of Joyce, Fowles & Golding...currently located on the eastern seaboard of these United States of Amnesia.. MICHELLE ROGERS “Jimmy”, pg 7 James Joyce was a cousin of my grandfather Hugh Murray. When we were kids in the 1970’s my grandfather would tell us about Joyce and that we were related to a great writer. However because my grandfather’s son and daughter were respectively a Priest and a Nun, we were also told to never tell anyone. ALYSSA FINDLEY Joyce in the Age of Trump, pg 14 Ally Findley is a recent graduate of Cornell University, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Now, she is attempting to enter the real world, interning at David R. Godine, Publisher in Boston and doing freelance work. While at Cornell, she did her thesis on Joyce and is hoping to keep the work of

that wonderful, strange man in her life as much as possible. CODY JARMAN A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cuck, pg 17 I am currently a Masters student pursuing a degree in Irish Writing & Film at University College Cork, but I will be starting a PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall. DAN LEISER “And Now a Word From James Joyce”, pg 8 Dan Leiser is from Pennsylvania and went to school at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he received his bachelors. He is planning on going back to pursue his masters and eventually a PhD. He is proud and excited to call The Agenbite his first major publication. Ulysses was his first experience with James Joyce and after the initial shell shock cleared Joyce has slowly been invading the thoughts and words of his stories and poetry. It wasn’t until Finnegans Wake and the aftermath of that experience that the inspiration was enough to warrant a full focus on a series which took form here. GRAZIANO GALATI On Recreating Finnegans

Editor in Chief: Rio Matchett

Wake in Audio, pg 19 Graziano Galati is aka Zendiyogi, an artist who found his voice as a combination of his own spoken word and the musical settings he creates and performs. He has studied spirituality in literature all of his life, and has spent a lifetime teaching literature to teens in high school making it a point to introduce them to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Five years ago at 55, he discovered Yoga through the teachings of Sadie Nardini, and has since developed a personal Ashtanga practice from whence much of his poetry evolves. Poetry and music are a staple of his daily practice for which he has composed settings for the entire two hour sessions. Samples of his work can be viewed on his YouTube channel which currently contains over 120 compositions. SEAMUS MAY Joyce the Chef, pg 20 Seamus May is a current PhD student at the Institute of Irish Studies writing on Giordano Bruno’s Gnomon and James Joyce, having recently completed an MA at the same institution. His research takes momentum from his study of heresy in Joyce at undergraduate level. Seamus first encountered

Layout and Design: Alyson Favilla

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Joyce as a primary school student, when he was criticised for his over-long sentences with the comment “been reading too much Joyce”. His day-job is writing about whisky for FineDrams. LEONIS OGOUR “Untitled”, pg 21 Leonis Ogour is a Parisian artist. Music, video, street art… he juggles freely with many artistic mediums, but it is the collagist we are interested in here. For five years now, Leonis Ogour has exhumed figures of the past, outdated decor and fonts from another time, creating collages as Proustian as surreal. Like the techniques of sampling used in contemporary music, Leonis Ogour mixes eras, codes and types, causing improbable meetings. Creations undermining our collective memory, for better questioning our time. MMLJ “Looking for Dubliners in a country that could not reJoyce”, pg 22 mmlj is currently studying ma anglo-american literature in the university of the philippines. he plans to write his thesis on the potential application of the joycean canon in furthering philippine postcolonial

studies. his lifetime project is investigating why there are no dubliners in his country, why his country would not reJoyce. NUALA O’CONNOR Joyride to Jupider/A 21st Century Molly Bloom, pg 30 Nuala O’Connor. Nuala O’Connor AKA Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin, she lives in East Galway. Her fifth short story collection Joyride to Jupiter was published to critical acclaim by New Island in June 2017. Penguin USA, Penguin Canada and Sandstone (UK) published Nuala’s third novel, Miss Emily, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid. Miss Emily was shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Eason Book Club Novel of the Year 2015 and longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award. Nuala’s fourth novel, Becoming Belle, will be published in 2018. ELTON ULIANA The Consciousness Effect Representation, pg 33 I am Brazilian and have been living in the UK for 18 years. I work as a freelance translator. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Birkbeck College, University of London and am currently completing an MA

in Translation Studies at UCL. My research interests are Literary Theory, Language, Narratology and Multilingual Writing. As a literary critic I have written primarily on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and José Saramago. My current project is a retranslation of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ into Brazilian Portuguese for a contemporary audience. ALYSON FAVILLA Layout and design Alyson Favilla recently completed an completed an M.Phil in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin, and holds a BSc. from Cornell University. If anyone wants to offer them a job in publishing or the arts, they’d love to hear from you.

Contact us at theagenbite@gmail.com. Submissions are warmly encouraged in the form of, but not restricted to: Poetry Thought pieces Essays Interviews Illustration Photo essays Anecdotes The Agenbite is not an academic journal. Although we welcome the academic perspective, we are equally interested in personal and cultural reinterpretations of Joyce, his work, and his legacy. A guideline of 300-500 words is advised, but we understand the length of submissions will be dependent on the format. We accept submissions on a rolling basis, which means you can submit at any time, and if accepted, we will publish your work in one of the next few issues. If you have a proposal, or an questions about submissions, please send us an email.

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2. Fall 2017