If it's any comfort, on Jan 11th, 2001 I stepped into my freezing car in
Northfield, MN, turned on the radio (set to the public radio station run by
St. Olaf College) and the first words I heard were "The Faerie Queene." It
was a recording of the service given that previous Sunday wherein an English
faculty member had lectured the congregation on the moral and ethical
virtues of Book I of FQ. It was humanely done and spellbinding, and though
I requested a copy from the station, I never got it. In any case,
predominantly Lutheran Minnesotan college kids are taking FQ seriously now,
I suspect, as many of our students must be.
Let me renew a call also for someone/company to tape the whole of FQ so we
can all listen to it on the interminable drive to Kalamazoo.
--Tom
Ps. Guilty as charged re the Wake... Thanks, Tom Roche, I apologize...
Although it has shot itself in the foot as far as the general public is
concerned, even in its home country; Ulysses less so but it too is an
intellectually elitist work with universalist pretensions (not the worse for
that!)... Don't forget that Joyce faced the hard and embarrassing childhood
of declining gentility in a city and country of similar circumstances and so
dreamed of past, operatic glory... is that not what "The Dead" is all about?
I was at a play during a Kilkenny arts fest some years ago, called "Black
Box" or something like that, about hunkering down during nuclear war, and
act two opened with an average suburban man reading the lines "Yes I said
yes" and dropping it down and saying "Thank Jaisus that's over"... Much
laughter... By then I assume he had run out of everything else to read in
his library and was forced to confront books from high school. Dublin City
has since built a statue of Joyce adjacent to O'Connell St (nicknamed "the
prat in the hat" by fond locals... busty Molly Malone at the base of Grafton
St. is "the tart with the cart") but gone is the fountainous Anna Livia,
"the floozy in the jacuzzi," she of the continuous wake bubbling up beneath
her, who once lay where Nelson's monument stood on the same street (cf. "A
Pisgah's Sight of Palestine"); a celtic female poke in the eye of empire, I
guess; now a big steel spike stands where she was, a fingernail of the
Celtic tiger. Anna too often became trashy in public and had to be removed.
Adam and Eve's stills stands by the running river, however.
On 10/21/05 8:47 PM, "Kevin Farnham" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The original source of some of my Joyce/Spencer thinking:
>
> "Finnegans Wake, Joyce's masterpiece, presents so many initial
> difficulties that one has to be anxious about its survival. I
> suspect that it will find company in Spenser's great poetic
> romance, The Faerie Queene, and that both books will be read,
> for the rest of time, by only a small band of enthusiastic
> specialists. That is a sadness..."
>
> "[Joyce] does not so much desire Shakespeare's gifts and his
> scope -- Joyce believed that he was equal to Shakespeare in
> those -- but is rightly jealous of Shakespeare's audience. That
> jealousy makes the Wake a tragicomedy rather than the comedy
> that Joyce intended. The reception of the book discouraged the
> dying Joyce, yet how could it have been otherwise."
>
> -- Harold Bloom, "The Western Canon"
>
>
> When I first read Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce almost 30
> years ago (when I was in my early 20s), I felt so sad for Joyce
> -- it seemed that only the period when he was writing Ulysses
> was truly happy. Reading about Joyce's "agon" with Shakespeare
> in Harold Bloom's writings, which make it sound so much like
> Joyce was overwhelmed / swallowed up by Shakespeare, truly
> troubles me. As does walking into book stores and checking how
> many and which Joyce books are still on the shelves, something
> I've done regularly over the past 3 decades...
>
> I did not intend to "put down" Finnegans Wake or Joyce. And I
> don't believe I did that.
>
> The topic of my original message was Spenser, with Joyce and
> Dante as contrasts. But my minimal comments on Joyce were all
> that interested people...
>
> Kevin Farnham
>
> --- "Thomas P Roche ([log in to unmask])"
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I am somewhat saddened by the recent comments on Joyce's
>> Finnegans Wake. It is a difficult but brilliant book--the
>> last gasp of the epic tradition in the 20th century, pushing
>> language as far as it can go. Listen to the old recording of
>> Joyce readng it, and you are suddenly in the world of oeratic
>> song. I first read it fifty years ago in a seminar given by
>> Matthew Hodgart at Pemboke College Cambridge. Among the
>> participants were Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes and a good many
>> otheers who have not attained such fame., but it was fun and
>> delight for a 22 year old beginner. . I have taught it
>> several times in an eic course that began with Virgiland went
>> though Ariosto, Tasso , Spenser , Milton, Blake and Joyce. It
>> was a killer, but no student died from the exposure. The
>> Wake is a masterpiece-- and to me a delight. I do not like it
>> to be put down on this website. tpr
>>
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